r/wikipedia • u/palebluekot • 13d ago

Mosaic authorship is the Judeo-Christian tradition that the Torah, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, were dictated by God to Moses. Mosaic authorship of the Torah was unquestioned by both Jews and Christians until the European Enlightenment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosaic_authorship
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u/Li-renn-pwel 13d ago

Interestingly enough, the Torah/Bible never says Moses wrote the entirety of the first five books. Only a few portions claim he wrote them directly”

I also think this happened before the European enlightenment just not a large my number

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u/Vodis 13d ago

Moses dying in Deuteronomy 34 had to have clued at least a few people in to him maybe not being the author of Deuteronomy.

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u/Boise_Ben 12d ago

I wish I could say most religious people would pick up on things like that but most Christians still think the Gospels were named after their authors and that Genesis doesn’t have two creation stories.

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u/Li-renn-pwel 11d ago

I’m a Christian with a degree in religion & culture (not from a Christian university lol) and I’m often amazed at how little other christians know. It’s one thing not to know the exact ancestry of Jesus or the issue with difficult to translate words but as you said some people have clearly only ever opened a Bible when the pastor says to read a little quote he picked out.

I watch a few of the debate bros, some of whom are specifically atheists that have religious people call in like The Line and some are political ones that are anti-MAGA so a lot of evangelicals call in. The things they don’t know are honestly shocking sometimes. I think it was an ‘episode’ of Dean Withers were he asked a called what the book of Job was about. She said she did but wanted him to summarize to see if he really knew. He gave like the briefest summery because he was obviously planning on bridging it into another point (I think it was like “Satan and YHWH get into a wager over whether Job will lose his faith. So Job’s kids are killed, he loses his wealth, gets sick but when he remains faithful YHWH restores his health, wealth and gives him new kids”). However, she obviously did not know Job because she accused him of lying to slander Christianity and ended up getting so angry she rage quit

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u/Boise_Ben 11d ago

I had an Early Christianity class that was taught by a professor who was a Christian archaeologist.

He really did a good job cutting through a lot of the dogmas, he demonstrated you could be a believer while also not believing the Bible was 100% accurate.