Mosaic authorship

[6][7] There, the rabbis noticed and addressed such issues as how Moses had received the divine revelation,[8] how it was curated and transmitted to later generations, and how difficult passages such as the last verses of Deuteronomy, which describe his death, were to be explained.

[10] Mosaic authorship of the Torah was unquestioned by both Jews and Christians until the European Enlightenment, when the systematic study of the five books led the majority of scholars to conclude that they are the product of multiple authors throughout many centuries.

[11] Despite this, the role of Moses is an article of faith in traditional Jewish circles and for some Christian Evangelical scholars, for whom it remains crucial to their understanding of the unity and authority of the Bible.

[1] (The Great Assembly, according to Jewish tradition, was called by Ezra to ensure the accurate transmission of the Torah of Moses, when the Jews returned from exile).

[29] Menachem Mendel Kasher (1895–1983), taking a different approach, accepted the documentary hypothesis and adapted it to the Mosaic tradition, saying certain traditions of the Oral Torah show Moses quoting Genesis prior to the epiphany at Sinai; based on a number of Bible verses and rabbinic statements, and suggesting that Moses made use of documents authored by the Patriarchs when redacting that book.

[30] This view is supported by some rabbinical sources and medieval commentaries which recognize that the Torah incorporates written texts and divine messages from before and after the time of Moses.

"[37] This conclusion had major implications, for as the 18th century Jewish scholar David Levi pointed out to his Christian colleagues, "if any part [of the Torah] is once proved spurious, a door will be opened for another and another without end.

[40] This started to change in 1943, when Pope Pius XII issued the encyclical Divino afflante Spiritu encouraging scholars to investigate the sacred texts utilizing such resources as recent discoveries in archaeology, ancient history, linguistics, and other technical methods.

On January 16, 1948, cardinal Emmanuel Célestin Suhard, secretary of the Pontifical Biblical Commission, responded to a question about the origin of the Pentateuch: There is no one today who doubts the existence of these sources or refuses to admit a progressive development of the Mosaic Laws due to social and religious conditions of later time….

Therefore, we invite Catholic scholars to study these problems, without prepossession, in the light of sound criticism and of the findings of other sciences connected with the subject matter.Christian support for Mosaic authorship is now limited largely to conservative Evangelical circles.