Richard Elliott Friedman's 1997 account in Who Wrote the Bible? focuses on the first five Old Testament books: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. Friedman looks to biblical and archaeological evidence to discover who authored these immensely important documents and offers the reader a sense of what life was like thousands of years ago.

The six volumes of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire were originally published between 1776 and 1788. In this historical standard, author Edward Gibbon writes a literary-style narrative that begins with the second century A.D. and ends with the Fall of Constantinople in 1453.

The Lost Gospel: The Book of Q and Christian Origins, by Burton L. Mack, is a collection of Jesus' sayings, proverbs, aphorisms, and parables— what many believe to be a "lost gospel" written by one or more of his followers...