Today, however, most Biblical scholars ascribe to the “documentary theory” for formation of the Book of Moses. This theory was at first rejected by both Protestant and Catholic scholars but gained popularity in the 19th century when it was reformatted and presented by the German Protestant scholars Graf and Wellhausen. These scholars theorized that the Pentateuch was an amalgam of different documents composed and developed from different places and at different times, long after Moses may have lived, perhaps as late as the return from the Babylonian exile in the late 6th century BC. Today this theory, know as the Documentary Hypothesis, theorizes that four documents came together: the Yahwistic source, the Elohistic source, the Priestly source and the Deuteronomic source, which were eventually edited, centuries after they were composed, into one book. A major weakness of this theory is that no two scholars seem to be able to agree as to which passages should be assigned to which of the four document sources. The other major problem is that not a shred of physical evidence exists to support this theory. An ancient document has never been discovered that even hints that any author other than God’s inspired writer, the prophet Moses, wrote the Book of the Law of Moses, nor has any partial text been discovered that would correspond to any separate supposed separate strand, nor does sacred Tradition speak of any orally transmitted separate strand that refers to God by only one name [a basis of the documentary theory based on each separated strand being keyed to different names used for God]. In addition, there is no archeological evidence to support the Documentary Hypothesis. There are no written or oral traditions in existence today that contain less than all of the supposed “four document sources.” If the Book of Moses was not composed by Moses but instead was a clever interweaving of four different oral traditions, the question begs to be asked why none of the four individual strands have survived independently in oral or written form. Instead, source written copies and oral traditions pertaining to the writings of Moses exist in a complete form similar to that of our Bible today, not in fragmented strands. For example, if Genesis chapter I and Genesis chapter II offer two separate creation stories that originate from two separate sources, then why is there no written or oral Jewish tradition of two creation accounts that mention the content of one chapter without mentioning the content of the other? The unification of these two elements in ancient sources supports that they were not separate in origin.
