Several years ago I saw a book at Barnes & Noble, "Who Wrote the Bible?" and I was compelled to buy it. Sadly, in the years hence I didn't have the same compellation to actually read the book, and it's sat on my bookcase all that time.

I was still intrigued enough by the subject though, that when I stumbled onto a concise analysis of Bible authorship theories in The Straight Dope, I read it.

Ever the king of the short attention span, I found this to be an excellent synopsis of a highly controvertial topic. If you're at all interested in the subject, this will let you learn in an hour what would otherwise take a semester, or at least many nights with a big fat book, to which you can turn if the article sparks more curiosity than it sates.

Note: The link goes to just the first segment of five, dealing with the authorship of the Five Books of Moses. The others address the Histories in the Old Testament, the Prophetic Books in the Old Testament, the New Testament, and a chapter on who decided which books should be included and excluded from the Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish Bibles.

Interesting reading. Oh, and in case anyone's terribly offended, the articles present both the religious and the academic viewpoints, without drawing conclusions.