Historical Moses?

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I’ll check it out, I am sure it will be an interesting read.

But I doubt I will put anymore stock into it than any other scholarly theories - I will probably end up seeing it as a potential, but no more or less worthy of belief than the traditional view.

That’s what I keep driving at here - the traditional view is just as probable as the scholarly theories - there are a plethora of arguments, both for and against, either side.

The tipping point for me is not the internal but rather external evidence. The fact that the Apostles, Saints, Fathers and Doctors believed the traditional view is what makes me lean towards that.

Again, I wouldn’t fault someone holding to the scholarly views allowed by the Church - so long as they don’t fault me for holding the traditional view.
 
Spyridon said:
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Gorgias:
What corroboration for that claim is there?
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The same for the claim that an “Elohist school” wrote anything.
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I think I would disagree. The Documentary Hypothesis is based, at least in part, on source criticism based on the words of the texts themselves. (This, of course, doesn’t prove that their conclusions must be correct… but it does establish a factual basis for their claims.)
I’m not faulting people who take the scholarly theories seriously - my issue is when people act like those are the only reasonable views to hold. They are not. If they were, then 100% of the Doctors of the Church were unreasonable.
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This kind of hyperbole doesn’t help the case you’re trying to make. 😉

I could, more charitably, say simply that the Doctors of the Church weren’t in possession of research techniques or resources that would allow them to apply these techniques in the way that later scholars were able to do. That doesn’t make them ‘unreasonable’.
 
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At the end of the day, your view is just a theory as well since the evidence is simply not in favor of the traditional view. If it were, I’d expect the scholarly literature to be in favor and the standard historical methodology to confirm it. I don’t know what it is you find in the doctors that convinces you of the traditional view since they were theologians, not historians. Theology and history aren’t the same thing.
 
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thephilosopher6 said:
I suggest reading “The Rise of Yahwism : Role of Marginalised Groups”, by Marlene E. Mondriaan. You can find a pdf of it online. It’s very long and detailed, but it’s worth the read.
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The history of the monotheistic religions, and the question of whether or not Judaism was the first of them, is an important subject and Marlene Mondriaan is an academic who carries considerable weight in that field. So far, so good. But the historicity of the Exodus is a separate question – Did the Children of Israel really escape from Egypt under a leader called Moses and did they really settle in Canaan under a leader called Joshua?

Moses is the lawgiver, and that is the point, of course, at which the two questions overlap. I haven’t read anything by Marlene Mondriaan. What does she say about Moses and the historicity (or not) of the Exodus?
 
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I think that both are intrinsically linked though, you can’t separate them at the fundamental level. Any understanding of Israelite Monotheism has to start with the Pentateuch.

As you can see in the summary, she accepts the historicity of a “Moses like figure”; some kind of Midianite prophet who “started” the Yahwehist cult.
 
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thephilosopher6 said:
, she accepts the historicity of a “Moses like figure”; some kind of Midianite prophet who “started” the Yahwehist
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Isn’t that exactly what the Bible says though?

Moses was a Prophet who could be said to be from Midian and revealed the Name of YHWH to the children of Israel.
 
In a sense it could be said to be affirming the basic narrative of the Bible, yes. This is the Kenite hypothesis. As said, it has made a great impression on modern scholars. There is a lot of evidence that YHWH originated as a Midianite deity who later spread into Canaan.
 
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thephilosopher6 said:
As you can see in the summary, she accepts the historicity of a “Moses like figure”; some kind of Midianite prophet who “started” the Yahwehist cult.
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Does she explicitly deny that the Children of Israel escaped from slavery in Egypt, as narrated in the book of Exodus?
 
If I recall correctly (it’s been a while since I read it all), she asserts that bedouins migrating out of Egypt adopted the cult of Yahweh under the influence of Moses or the “Mosiac party” of the Yahwehist cult while in Midian.
 
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In my hypothetical example where someone writes and afterward to an autobiography. does that make the original author any less the author?

When someone writes a new forward to the Lord of the Rings, does it make Tolkien any less the author?

I’m not saying that’s what happened, but it’s a perfectly reasonable assumption; and if it is true, the addition of a small bit of extra narrative after Moses’ death doesn’t demand an astrix on the author’s name.
 
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ProdglArchitect said:
In my hypothetical example where someone writes and afterward to an autobiography. does that make the original author any less the author?

When someone writes a new forward to the Lord of the Rings, does it make Tolkien any less the author?
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Apples and oranges. An ‘afterward’ or a ‘forward’ is, strictly speaking, not part of the text (although we might consider it part of a particular edition of a text).

In this case, you’re making claims about the body of the text, not a forward or afterward by another author.
I’m not saying that’s what happened, but it’s a perfectly reasonable assumption; and if it is true, the addition of a small bit of extra narrative after Moses’ death doesn’t demand an astrix on the author’s name.
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It absolutely does, if the additions are made to the text itself. That makes him an ‘author’. Not an editor, but an actual author.
 
Oh, c’mon, @Cruciferi! You’ve gotta finish the line!

“these fifteen… oy… ten! Ten commandments!”
 
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