Hi, I’m listening to Anne Cheng’s podcasts from the College de France on the
history of the Analects, in video version they are also on line in a Chinese
translation: http://www.college-de-france.fr/site/anne-cheng/audio_video.jsp
She thinks that the final composition of the Analects, as the book we know,
was made during the Han dynasty.

I found that this view is also that of John Makeham:
“I argue that it was not until around 150–140 b.c. that the Analects came
into existence as a book and that this book was based on a number of earlier
“collected sayings” of the Master. Briefly, I argue that the principal
source for the book that subsequently became known as Lunyu were the
twenty-one chapters (pian 篇) of collected sayings purportedly discovered in
the wall of Confucius’ house during the reign of Emperor Wu (r. 141–87 b.c.)
and known as the Gu Lun 古論. Originally these twenty-one chapters were
several collections of individual books (pian) recording Confucius’ and his
disciples’ speech and actions and that only subsequent to their discovery
were these collections regarded as a single “book” in the modern sense of
the word. Nor is there any reason to believe that these twenty-one pian
represented the entire corpus of such early collections of the Master’s
sayings or that in pre-Han times they had been privileged as a single
collection or as a group of collections over any other early collection or
collections of the Master’s sayings. The status afforded these pian as
constituting an integral book was a product of their being singled out for
special attention in the Western Han precisely because they had purportedly
been found in the wall of Confucius’ house. Once these twenty-one pian were
regarded as forming a book in their own right and received a name to signal
this status and homogeneity, the process of textual closure was imminent.
Subsequently, the assumption became that these twenty-one “chapters” had
existed as a book since they were first recorded, when actually the “book”
was a Western Han invention. We know neither the date(s) these pian were
compiled in the Warring States period nor the extent to which they were
subsequently edited and arranged after their initial discovery in the early
Western Han.”
http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~asiactr/publications/pdfs/Makeham%20Intro.pdf

I find this to be a plausible idea, but need to read more about the evidence
in favor of it.
Thomas



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