WinAce

I've seen fundie sites arguing that the JEDP theory was based on the presumed fact that writing didn't exist in Moses' time. This reeks of strawman to me.

As I'm not particularly well-acquinted with the authorship of the Old Testament, what are the prevailing hypotheses? What is the evidence for them? Is the JEDP theory solid, in need of some revision, or crumbling from inside out?

lpetrich

WinAce:
I've seen fundie sites arguing that the JEDP theory was based on the presumed fact that writing didn't exist in Moses' time. This reeks of strawman to me.

Seems like a big fat non sequitur to me. Moses is always referred to in the third person, and the end of Deuteronomy describes his death and funeral and states that there has never been a prophet like him in all the time afterwards.

Also, Numbers 12:3 states that Moses was the humblest person who had ever lived -- and asserting that one is the greatest in anything is not an act of great humility.

As I'm not particularly well-acquinted with the authorship of the Old Testament, what are the prevailing hypotheses? What is the evidence for them? Is the JEDP theory solid, in need of some revision, or crumbling from inside out?

JEDP is still accepted by non-Fundies; here is a nice page on that subject.

Metacrock

There is a lot of evidence to show that the OT was redacted. But the problem with JEDP is that it was the brainchild of the Welhouasen (sp) school, 19th century German theology. It's heavily ideological and basically Hegelian. A lot of modern liberal scholars don't like it. So far no major theory has replaced in American or European theology, but the Israelies don't use it. Israeli archeologists use their own paradigm called setz en Labin ("setting in life"). They go by way the narrative appears culturally and what that suggets about when it was written. For example, are too many chamel mentioned in the stories of Abraham for the time in which it was written? In other words, they search out anachronisms and draw conclusions about redaction form that, rather than basing it upon sentence structure.


link fixed

Is The Bible The Word of God?