I have a new friend! Like the vast majority of friends and acquaintances encountered through the internet, we've never met in person, and we may never meet due to living on opposite sides of the country. My new friend is extremely intelligent and a physician, which means we may not have very much in common. However, we have both chosen to focus on our areas of common interests rather than where we might disagree, and in common we share a love of history, a faith in things we cannot see, and an intense desire to seek truth while documenting our efforts via the written word. Several years ago I wrote an article titled "Encouraging My Christian Friends to Think" in which I was touting the scholarship and content of a book called Who Wrote the Bible? That was my mistake, and I apologize. I am afraid I might have led some of my readers astray by citing bad scholarship in regard to the authorship of the first book in the Bible, the book of Genesis. The original theory of authorship regarding the Pentateuch was that Moses wrote those first five books of the Bible. Then the JEPD "documentary hypothesis" from the incredibly long-titled book Conjectures About the Original Memoirs Which It Appeared That Moses Used in Composing the Book of Genesis with Certain Remarks Which Help Clarify These Conjectures, attempted to identify the "real" authors of Genesis through literary analysis. That book was written by Jean Astruc, and his documentary hypothesis was later presented by Rabbi Friedmann in his book Who Wrote the Bible? as an alternate explanation for the … [Read more...]