nukular

For some unknown reason I was looking at the Documentary Hypothesis entry on Wikipedia and got to a section titled "Adherence" which stated that the DH in critical circles is "obsolete". Vaguely remembering a similar discussion some time back on this topic and curious, I decided to check out the reference for that section (at this link).

Although I am just a mere physicist and not a biblical scholar, after reading the article I was left thinking that all of the arguments against the DH listed at the site were quite weak. But the one that really left me pinching my nose was from the section titled "Anti-Supernaturalism". The upshot to that particular section was that the DH required a naturalistic explanation and that excluding a super-naturalistic possibility was not truly being objective. WTF? Do scholars currently working in this area really think that is a valid criticism?

My question is whether this poorly written website really represents the thinking in some modern criticism circles or whether this is just a fundy explanation/site which got inserted into the Wikipedia entry on the Documentary Hypothesis?

Chris Weimer

Wikipedia is wrong, and Documentary Hypothesis is still strong.

EDIT: And I removed the offending passage.

Doug Shaver

Apparently a handful of them do. It is not the majority opinion or even close to it, last I heard.

Chris Weimer

The website quoted leads people on to believe that those scholars accept Mosaic authorship, which is unanimously rejected (see Neusner for a difference in accepting it and rejecting it simultaneously, one as a matter of faith and the other as one grounded in historical scholarship).

VoxRat

Hmmm. That sounds suspiciously like our friend afdave. Is there anyway to trace the history of the wikipedia edit trail?

Dave Hawkins

Hi Voxrat ... wasn't me. Yes, you can track everything at Wiki. If I had the time, I would contribute to that Wiki page. Josh McDowell does an excellent job showing the emptiness of the DH in his Evidence That Demands a Verdict, Vol. 2. Very scholarly work. Highly recommended reading if you want to hear the Biblical conservative side of the story.

coloradoatheist

The only one on the list that had any merit would be the one author suggested by the computer program but even that one is sketchy. How many computer programs have analyzed the five books and said something either way?


Mike

kiwimac

Well apart from folk like McDowell, the majority of scholars accept the DH in some form or another.

exmormon

I'm no expert either, but my understanding is that DH has been refined and modified over the centuries to keep pace with more sophisticated analyses of the evidence. I can see how someone could be fed some distorted version of this fact and thereby become convinced that DH has been discredited (since in a sense the original version of DH is no longer favored).

Basically, whereas original DH posits a handful of different authors, the new, more complex, version goes further and says each of those authors in turn is a combination of diverse ealier sources, including oral traditions for example. Rather than supporting a single author, the "discrediting" of DH only more strongly supports the notion that the Torah is just a hacked and inconsistent conglomeration of various primitive myths and dated political/religious traditions.

nukular

Thanks for the responses everyone. I had read Friedman many years ago and thought his explication of the DH was quite good and it made quite a lot of sense. But since I only browse BC&H and am not involved in biblical scholarship, I was unaware that the DH was becoming "obsolete" as mentioned in the Wikipedia article. The DH seems very strong as presented by Friedman. But knowing a little about the Sokal incident, sometimes I can't be sure what the modern "scholar" in this area accepts since it seems to change with the seasons. Its reassuring to know that a relative few disregard the Documentary Hypothesis and the idea of accepting super-natural explanations.

I would think that the situation is akin to that found by the replacement -- as opposed to abandonment -- of Newtonian Gravitation with General Relativity, since it has been around for some time. The idea being that none of the fundamental observations have changed but rather predictive theory was subsumed under a more powerful explanation.