Posted by Peter Kirby at 3:02 PM | Permalink

An article in Haaretz by Hananel Mack brings attention to the Ashkenaz Hasidim writers of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, particularly as revealed in the writings of Ta-Shema. The jounalist writes that these rabbis "were firm believers in the Torah, and very pious, devoted and observant Jews. But in chapters 19 and 20 of Ta-Shema's book, we discover that this solid faith did not keep them from reaching some bold conclusions on such matters as the writing style and authorship of Judaism's holiest texts. Ta-Shema offers, for example, much evidence of the doubt in their mind about the uniformity of the Book of Psalms and its wholesale attribution to King David. . . . Based on their careful study of the text and familiarity with rabbinic literature, they suggest that certain words, verses or passages were not written by Moses, but by someone who lived in much later times." Apparently some Orthodox were upset at the publication, under the assumption that the Hasid could not have questioned the tradition about the Torah's composition.

But this should not come as a great surprise. Writers have doubted the authorship of these five books by Moses for a long time. For example, Ibn Ezra (who died in 1167) realized that Genesis 36 couldn't have been written any earlier than the rule of Jehoshaphat because it mentions Hadad (cf. Gn 36:35; 1 Ki 11:14). The Reformation writer A. B. Carlstadt (1480–1541) said that the Torah wasn't written by Moses on the basis that the part after his death is written in the same style as what comes before. Spinoza (1670) saw several doublets and contradictions in the Torah, and he concluded that Ezra pieced together several sources, along with writing Deuteronomy, to produce it. The Roman Catholic author Richard Simon (1685) also developed a view that the Torah consisted of multiple sources, and Jean LeClerc (an Armenian) drew the conclusion that they were put together between 722 BCE and the time of Ezra by a Jew residing in Babylon. German scholarship continued to develop these ideas, which came to be known as the "documentary hypothesis," as most famously laid out by Wellhausen. (This information can be found in the New Bible Dictionary, art. "Pentateuch," p. 894.) Despite all this, there is a large swath of the general public that either is not aware of scholarly opinion or who dismiss it off-handedly as being illegitimately skeptical. The same situation exists on a range of New Testament issues, from the authorship of the Pastorals to the presence of legendary material in the Gospels. (On the flip side, there actually are skeptical ideas that won't die in the minds of some even if they've long been left by the way side in scholarship.)

It is a good question when, if ever, this gap will be bridged and a variety of arguments will be considered by the casually interested. In particular, I am interested in what role the Internet will play in bringing the ideas of academia within the grasp of the non-specialist (as well as, perhaps, the concerns of the public to the ears of academics).

My own view is that, while the Internet is surely no panacea, and while printed books and journals are essential for anyone studying the subjects, what the Internet will excel in doing is to expose various viewpoints to many people who might otherwise be unaware of them. For example, I have presented information on discussion boards to a woman who had heard nothing of the denial of authorship of the Torah and to a man whose religious courses had never disclosed doubts about Paul writing the letters to Timothy and Titus. Likewise, I have benefited from feedback to my arguments in discussion, and I have made some use of the research sources that are available on the Internet, particularly the primary material in electronic form.

The failing of the Internet, as I see it now, is the problem of balance and goodwill. Excepting those print materials that have passed out of copyright or were made freely available by the copyright holder, most of the information on the web is produced on a volunteer basis, and most often by amateurs (and I qualify as one as I am still working on my bachelor's). This means that the scope of topics is limited to those ones that a person wishes to spend the time to argue for, without enlarging a C.V. or getting paid. What I am getting at is that there is plenty of polemical debate, religious and anti-religious, apologetics and anapologetics (and, again, I have on occasion contributed to this myself). The atmosphere is nothing like what would find in a university seminar in religious studies, and the tenor of the publications on the web are not usually like what one would find in the Journal of Biblical Literature or Harvard Theological Review. Not that I expect the caliber of the writers who publish on the Internet to go up dramatically, but I do wonder, what can be done or will happen with respect to the atmosphere? I am trying to get some kind of non-confrontational dialogue going with my Gospel of John study, and we will see how that goes. What do the readers of this blog think?