Evidence for the JEDP theory and the late-dating of the Torah

[Doug Shaver]

With that in mind, do you think that the historicty of William Tell and Christopher Columbus are completely fabricated?

I have no doubt at all about the historicity of Columbus. That was not my point regarding the traditional telling of his story.

And we all know that there was an actual Christopher Columbus who sailed the ocean blue in 1492 expecting to land in the East Indies.

Yeah, "we all know," but that is not why I believe it. Common knowledge is not always real knowledge. I believe Columbus really existed, and really sailed across the Atlantic in 1492 and a few more times in subsequent years, because I am aware of the actual evidence for his existence and for those voyages. That evidence happens to be the reason everybody really does know it.

We'll never know if there really was a true William Tell, but the time, place, and events do hint at historicity, however far removed.

I'm not sure what you mean by "hint at historicity." You seem to be suggesting that because certain details of the story are consistent with certain undisputed facts about Swiss history, the story must have some factual basis in the life of some actual person. I see no reason to think so.

Are all legends based on totally fictional events, or is there a glimmer of truth in all of them?

I do not think that all legends are pure fiction. But neither do I think that all of them must have some connection with actual history. If you mean to suggest that the case must be one or the other, then I suggest that you're proposing a false dichotomy.

Furthermore, is there more of a glimmer in some legends than in others (as in the case of Christopher Columbus)?

Yes, there is a range of factual content, from zero to substantial.

Should all ancient histories be dismissed because there is legendary accretion in some ancient histories?

Obviously not. But, if you refer to a particular story from ancient times as ancient history, you're begging the question of its factual content. Just labeling it as history doesn't make it history. We need some good reason to believe -- some undisputed factual evidence -- that the original author, whoever that might have been, would not have told the story unless it was at least partially true.

[Quantum Weirdness]

Do I really need to convince you that they exist? Any examples I could give would be almost guaranteed to derail this thread. If I say "Tradition such-and-such is false," you could always reply, "No it isn't," and we'd be off on a tangent arguing about that.

But, I'll suggest one example that, as far as I know, has not provoked much controversy. We're all familiar with the story about William Tell, a traditional part of the history of Switzerland. Historians now believe that no such man ever existed.


In the case of William Tell, it seems to be because historians have found no evidence where they thought there ought to be some.

Ok so no evidence has been found where there ought to be some. What kind of evidence would you expect wrt the authorship of the Torah and its date?

In other cases, there is evidence that actually contradicts the tradition. An example of that is the traditional story of Christopher Columbus, according to which (1) all the experts of his time believed the world was flat and (2) his discovery of America proved that they were wrong. In fact, we have plenty of evidence that in Columbus's day, all educated people knew that the world was round. As for (2), it is simply absurd, no matter what the experts might have believed. There is no way that sailing merely across the Atlantic Ocean and back could have proved that the world was round.

Apparently, that sort of thing was invented to make Christians look bad.
http://www.veritas-ucsb.org/library/...FlatEarth.html

[robrecht]

Ok so no evidence has been found where there ought to be some. What kind of evidence would you expect wrt the authorship of the Torah and its date?

There are a variety of things that one might expect, depending upon assumptions and methodology. Most important, would be a single style and worldview. In other words, one would not expect to find two versions of some stories that have been spliced together or recounted separately with contradictory elements or different thematic emphases or stylistic characteristics. Perhaps the story of Noah is the most striking example. However, my favorite example, in part because of greater ambiguity, is the two accounts of the creation of man, which have been woven together more artistically, but still revealing different approaches and probable contradictions. Such evidence will never convince those who bend over backwards to invent or adopt interpretations that have as their goal to eliminate any potential contradictions so this is probably not worth discussing with those who are purposefully attentive to the differences in order to better appreciate the specific art and style of different accounts. Those who only approach the text with axiomatic presuppositions, will merely attack the other proposals as having differing presuppositions, therefore engaging in circular reasoning, and thus not only interpreting evidence in an entirely different matter, but in a logically invalid manner. To some extent, all interpretation of texts, even all human knowledge, is circular to some ways so this can only be meaningfully be discussed by those who are willing to approach 'the text' with an open mind. If you are willing to engage theories of multiple authorship and editorial redaction, the best place to start would be the book I may have mentioned earlier in this thread, Who Wrote the Bible, by Richard Elliott Friedman. He supports his own variation of JEDP but writes for a general audience and writes very well. It is an excellent book for a beginner. While it is dated, it is always best to start with one hypothesis by one scholar and make sure you understand it well before attempting to evaluate the evidence, objections of supporters of competing hypotheses, and the nature of the arguments used.

Apparently, that sort of thing was invented to make Christians look bad.
http://www.veritas-ucsb.org/library/...FlatEarth.html

Thus, even in modern times, popular 'history' can take on nonhistorical legendary elements that correspond with a particular bias or worldview.

[Quantum Weirdness]

What's contradictory between 1 and 2 robrecht?

[robrecht]

What's contradictory between 1 and 2 robrecht?

I don't have time to go into detail at the moment. I suggest you read a good commentary or, if you need a more global and introductory perspective, the book by Friedman I suggested would be a good place to start. And please note that I said potentially contradictory and ambiguous, to highlight methodological differences and also to avoid engaging in needless and pointless dispute with the invincibly ignorant.

[Doug Shaver]

Ok so no evidence has been found where there ought to be some. What kind of evidence would you expect wrt the authorship of the Torah and its date?

In the case of literature as old as the Torah, I would not expect any evidence. It would be quite remarkable if any evidence were discovered. Absence of evidence, though, is not irrelevant just because there is a good reason for the absence.

If you mean to ask what kind of evidence I would consider compelling, it would be the same kind of evidence we have for the date and authorship of Gallic Wars.

Apparently, that sort of thing was invented to make Christians look bad.
http://www.veritas-ucsb.org/library/...FlatEarth.html

That is possible, but your source is himself a bit careless about the facts. He asserts, "No one before the 1830s believed that medieval people thought that the earth was flat." That just isn't so. References or allusions to ecclesiastical belief in a flat earth go back at least to the 18th century and probably earlier.

One cannot deny that people who are uncritically hostile to religion in general, or Christianity in particular, are strongly disposed to believe any story that makes religious people in general, or Christians in particular, look stupid. However, it is invalid to infer anything about the origin of a mistake from the attitudes of people who are most inclined to believe the mistake. Besides, the Columbus version of the flat-earth myth (apparently invented by Washington Irving) has become so entrenched in our culture that it is believed not only by secularists but quite a few Christians as well.

[Quantum Weirdness]

In the case of literature as old as the Torah, I would not expect any evidence. It would be quite remarkable if any evidence were discovered. Absence of evidence, though, is not irrelevant just because there is a good reason for the absence.

If you mean to ask what kind of evidence I would consider compelling, it would be the same kind of evidence we have for the date and authorship of Gallic Wars.


That is possible, but your source is himself a bit careless about the facts. He asserts, "No one before the 1830s believed that medieval people thought that the earth was flat." That just isn't so. References or allusions to ecclesiastical belief in a flat earth go back at least to the 18th century and probably earlier.

One cannot deny that people who are uncritically hostile to religion in general, or Christianity in particular, are strongly disposed to believe any story that makes religious people in general, or Christians in particular, look stupid. However, it is invalid to infer anything about the origin of a mistake from the attitudes of people who are most inclined to believe the mistake. Besides, the Columbus version of the flat-earth myth (apparently invented by Washington Irving) has become so entrenched in our culture that it is believed not only by secularists but quite a few Christians as well.

Ok so do you believe that we have good evidence to think that it is a late document and not authored in any way by/through Moses?

[Doug Shaver]

Ok so do you believe that we have good evidence to think that it is a late document and not authored in any way by/through Moses?

Any evidence for late authorship is automatically evidence against Mosaic authorship.

There is evidence that it is late. I believe it is good evidence.

[Quantum Weirdness]

Can you list some specifically?

I wanna read up more on this stuff (if I can)

[Doug Shaver]

Can you list some specifically?

I wanna read up more on this stuff (if I can)

I wasn't taking notes when I read about it. I'll do some checking to make sure my memory is correct, and then get back to you. Shouldn't take long.

[Doug Shaver]

There is evidence that it is late. I believe it is good evidence.

Can you list some specifically?

I like to begin with some preliminary remarks regarding the nature of evidence.

I use the word "proposition" to refer to any statement, such as "Moses was the author of the Pentateuch," concerning which it makes sense to say that it is either true or false. In any context where the truth of some proposition is in dispute, evidence for the proposition is any fact or set of facts, not itself in dispute, that provides some reason to believe the proposition, i.e. to think the proposition is true. There may also be evidence against the proposition, which would be other facts providing some reason to think the proposition is false. (Thus I disagree with those people, and there are many of them, who insist that evidence cannot exist for a false proposition.)

What do I mean by a "reason to believe"? To oversimplify a bit, I mean that a fact F is evidence for a proposition P if it is unlikely that F would be true if P were false. I must emphasize "unlikely." We're not talking about certainty here, especially not when we're discussing history. Until someone invents a time machine, statements about human history can only be regarded as, at most, very probably true. That includes negative statements. We can never affirm that some event could not possibly have happened, no matter how much evidence against it we might have.

And so as far as I'm concerned, anything is possible. But, a responsible historian concerns himself only with what is probable. Any conclusion we reach could be a mistake, but we have to live with that, because we're human and therefore we're fallible. We especially need to remember this in cases where we have conflicting evidence, some facts supporting a proposition and other facts against it.

Next point: Facts do not speak for themselves. What we can infer from them -- what the evidence should lead us to believe -- depends on the assumptions we bring into our arguments. And we will bring in some assumptions. They are impossible to avoid. But shared assumptions are usually not a problem. Problems arise in a debate when one side assumes something that the other does not. At that point, I suggest, the debate ought to shift to a discussion of whether, or to what degree, it is reasonable to accept the assumption or unreasonable to reject it.

And now to your question. I begin with the dating issue.

Historians who study documents other than the Bible are usually content to establish two dates for the composition of any text, the latest possible and the earliest possible, and they will say it could have been written anytime between those dates. (There are Latin expressions for these dates, but I'll just call them LPD and EPD.) They don't normally pick one or the other, or any year in between, as being the probable date of composition. If, for example, they are sure the EPD is 250 BCE the LPD is 100 BCE, then they will say it was written between 250 BCE and 100 BCE, and they will leave it at that.

So where do we get an LPD? If nowhere else, we get it from the oldest extant manuscript. If the oldest known copy of a document was produced in 150 CE, then the original had to have been written sometime before then. How long before? In the worst case, we just don't know. To push the date of composition back any farther, we need additional evidence.

Here is an example. Without begging any questions about who wrote Plato's dialogues, what do we know about when they were written? Apparently, the oldest known manuscripts were produced around 900 CE. But, we have copies of other documents referring to, and even quoting from, the dialogues, and we have good reason to believe that those documents were written during Hellenistic times predating the Roman empire. They establish an LPD within just two or three centuries of Plato's lifetime. But we can do even better. Aristotle, who died in 322 BCE, mentions the dialogues, and that gives us an LPD pretty close to Plato's own lifetime (427 BCE - 347 BCE). This argument assumes, obviously, that Aristotle actually wrote the books attributed to him, or at least that they were written during Aristotle's lifetime. If that is disputed, then so is the LPD of 322 BCE for Plato's dialogues, but if it is not disputed, then we're good to go.

Of course, if we already have incontrovertible evidence for authorship, then the LPD defaults to whenever the author died. We cannot, however, establish authorship without an EPD within the author's lifetime. If we have good reason to think the document must have been written after 100 BCE, then the author cannot have been someone who died in 200 BCE.

We can almost always get a pretty firm LPD. If there are manuscripts, then the oldest manuscript gives us one if nothing else does. If there are no manuscripts but there are surviving references to the document, then the oldest reference provides an LPD. An EPD can be harder to come by unless authorship can be established independently. One way to get it, though, is by references within the document to events that are independently datable, or to other facts with known dates of discovery. If I'm looking at a document that mentions the Battle of Gettysburg, then no matter what else I think I know about it, I at least know that it could not have been written before July of 1863.

What about the Pentateuch, then? The Dead Sea Scrolls, as best I can gather, give us an LPD perhaps as early as 200 BCE. Anyhow, nobody doubts that by the first century CE, it had already been around for a long time.

But how long? Without some religious doctrinal presuppositions, that's not so easy to say. And, I would submit, Mosaic authorship is a religious doctrinal presupposition. The documents themselves do not say anything about who wrote them. They do include some statements to the effect that Moses wrote down some commandments that he received from God. They do not say, though, that he wrote any of the books in which those commandments were recorded, nor do any of them say anywhere that he wrote anything about the origins and history of the world or the Israelite people.

But there are references to datable events. There is a mention of the city of Dan, which according to the book of Judges (18:27) was not called by that name until the time of the judges. There is a reference (Gen. 26:8) to "Abimelech king of the Philistines," but there was no Philistine kingdom in Palestine until after 1100 BCE.

And then there is a mention of the kings of Israel (Gen. 36:31), and it is manifestly not intended to be prophetic. The most usual estimate I find for the founding of the Israelite kingdom is around 1000 BCE, and so if Genesis had a single author he must have lived after that.

But there is also evidence against single authorship. There are inconsistencies in the narratives, and no one who has done apologetics for any length of time could credibly claim to have never heard about them. They include: the instructions given to Noah regarding how many animals to take aboard the ark; the duration of the flood; the territorial inheritances due to the Levites; and whether anyone before the Exodus knew God by the name of Yahweh. There are also repetitions of stories such as the creation, the flood, and the wife of a patriarch pretending to be his sister (twice for Abraham's wife, once again for Isaac's). Such things strongly suggest that more than one person wrote these things, and someone else later compiled and edited their writings into the books we now have.

I don't claim that these inconsistencies and repetitions are inexplicable under an assumption of single authorship. Just as apologists become familiar with skeptical objections, we skeptics become familiar with apologetic responses. The inconsistencies, we're told, are not real but only apparent, and a single author must have had a good reason for presenting multiple versions of the same story. Likewise the anachronisms can be dismissed as unreal with a suggestion that the author did not mean to say what skeptics think he was saying.

It could be so. These things are all possible. But possibility is not probability. Nothing makes these defenses probable, so far as I can tell, other than a presupposition of scriptural inerrancy. Without any such presupposition, the evidence I have presented gives us good reason to believe that the Pentateuch is a product of several authors' work and that they did their work sometime after the putative founding of the Israelite kingdom.

I wanna read up more on this stuff (if I can)

I wish I knew of a good single source, but I don't. I had to visit several websites in preparation for this response, and not one of them by itself was satisfactory in my judgment. The best advice I can give anyone who cares about responsible criticism of the Bible is to use Google and be prepared to invest a considerable amount of time.

There is one book I can recommend on the interface between biblical and secular history: The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology’s New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts, by Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman. It's already a bit dated, and even when it was new I didn't agree with everything the authors had to say, but it's a good place to start.

[HevenScent]

As I understand it a common view even with people who do not take the Bible literally is that the Torah, with the exception of Dueteronomy, is a literary whole. This view is supported by people like professor Gary Rendsburg at Rutgers. This would eliminate Wellhausen's theory (JEDP) from consideration.

[Doug Shaver]

As I understand it a common view even with people who do not take the Bible literally is that the Torah, with the exception of Dueteronomy, is a literary whole.

That view might be common among people unfamiliar with the relevant scholarship. It is not at all common within the scholarly community. Of course, this could well depend on just what you mean by "literary whole."

This view is supported by people like professor Gary Rendsburg at Rutgers.

He is only one scholar. I could decide that he was right even if the majority of his colleagues disagree with him, but first I'd have to examine his argument.

This would eliminate Wellhausen's theory (JEDP) from consideration.

You don't eliminate any theory just by naming one expert who thinks it's wrong.

I do believe that JEDP, as formulated by Wellhausen, is a gross oversimplification. The scholarly community has learned a great deal, since his day, that Wellhausen didn't know. None of it, though, has provided any support to the traditional viewpoint.










This would eliminate Wellhausen's theory (JEDP) from consideration.[/QUOTE]