The Bible has therefore many authors , all inspired by God. This is very obvious in some places, such as the Gospels of Matthew, Mark or the letters of st Paul to the Ephesians, to the colossians..etc. however even the Gospels are much more complicated than being just one person's view on Jesus- They all draw on different sources of information.

For some parts of the Bible it is less obvious who's repsonsible for their writing. We need to remember that the Bible started as a spoken record, kept alive by God's earliest followers, who collected and remembered all of God's Word by sharing it in their communities. This was the usual way of remembering important information. Later on these records were collected, gathered and written down by different people: for example the pentateuch ( first five books of the Bible) brings together the work of many different writers. When we study these books, it appears that there were four main groups of writers: the Elohist, Yahwist and the Deuteronomic and Priestly writers. we know that there were different writers because of the differences between different texts

Seeing that the Bible is inspired by the Holy Spirit and written by men, most Catholics believe it should not be taken literally (word for word true) but it rather be interpreted by other humans as God is completely unlike anything or anyone else, so the language used to describe God will always be limited. The Catechism teaches that 'our human words always fall short of the mystery of God'

It can be helpful to consider what the literary style of writing of a particular Bible passage is ( for example, history or poetry). Understanding the perspective of the Bible's writer can help the reader to interpret the passage in the best way. Catholics believe that they can understand the literal sense of the Bible. The literal sense refers to the meaning of the text that God inspired the writers to communicate.