If Moses Didn't Write Deuteronomy 1:1, is Jesus Still in the Grave?

some thoughts on whether or not these questions even make sense

I was always under the assumption that Moses wrote Genesis 1:1-Deuteronomy 34:12, and this wasn’t just some sort of matter of indifference; instead it was a matter of defending the authority of the Bible and its infallibility.

Now this may seem like a strange thing to stake one’s faith on, but it happens all the time because of our view of what the Bible is and how it works.

In October of 1979, over 200 evangelical leaders got together to hold a conference on Biblical inerrancy and penned “The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy.” Points four and five of the summary of the statement read as follows:

Being wholly and verbally God-given, Scripture is without error or fault in all its teaching, no less in what it states about God’s acts in creation, about the events of world history, and about its own literary origins under God, than in its witness to God’s saving grace in individual lives.

The authority of Scripture is inescapably impaired if this total divine inerrancy is in any way limited or disregarded, or made relative to a view of truth contrary to the Bible’s own; and such lapses bring serious loss to both the individual and the Church.

In other words, if the Bible contains any “error” concerning anything at all, then there is no reason to trust the Bible concerning the events of the life of Jesus, which usually means his death and resurrection.

So, if there was some evidence to suggest that the earth wasn’t created in six literal days, then Jesus wasn’t actually raised from the dead.

If Jonah wasn’t swallowed by a “big fish” and is instead a parable, then Jesus isn’t the King of kings and Lord of lords.

And if Moses didn’t author the Pentateuch (first five books of the Hebrew Scriptures), then Jesus isn’t actually God’s Son, and who knows what we should be up to nowadays.

On August 7, 1897, popular preacher and author within the Churches of Christ named J. W. McGarvey wrote on this issue of the authorship of the Pentateuch.

"Does it make any difference whether Moses did or did not write the Pentateuch?"

Yes; it makes at least this difference; that if he did, the account which the book gives of itself is true; and if he did not, it is false.

"Would there be any loss to the Christian religion should it be proved that Moses was not the author of the Pentateuch?"

Yes; there would first be this loss: that we should have to concede that Jesus and his apostles were mistaken in claiming that Moses was its author. This would lessen our confidence in them as teachers. Second, the alternative being that its real authors were men who lived from six hundred to one thousand years after Moses, who therefore had no correct information, but wrote legends and folklore for history, and falsely ascribed to Moses the enactment of many laws recently enacted, the loss to the Christian religion would be that all of the teaching by Jesus and the apostles based on the Pentateuch would be based on false premises.

[Note: in this essay, McGarvey did concede that there are some passages, like Deuteronomy 34:5-6, which were written by someone other than Moses, but he nobly and humbly declines any knowledge of who. This passage relates the circumstances of Moses’s death and the subsequent mourning. But hopefully you read the title of my post here with the humor that was intended—Daniel]

Recently during my graduate school residency, my hermeneutics professor brought up a story of someone he was talking to who was struggling with their faith because they couldn’t accept that Moses wrote the Pentateuch.

So, again, this is a real issue that affects real people today, not just people in the 1800s.

But why was he so worried? Here’s maybe one passage he remembered:

Then beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them the things about himself in all the scriptures. Luke 24:27

If it wasn’t really Moses, why would Luke say he began with Moses? Shouldn’t he have said, “Then beginning with the redactors and editors who pieced together the Torah in Moses’s name…”

And therein lies the issue.

So let’s talk about these kinds of questions and a creative way to think about the authorship of the Pentateuch.

If [This], Then Jesus Wasn’t Resurrected

Here’s the three theories I posed earlier:

So, if there was some evidence to suggest that the earth wasn’t created in six literal days, then Jesus wasn’t actually raised from the dead.

If Jonah wasn’t swallowed by a “big fish,” then Jesus isn’t the King of kings and Lord of lords.

And if Moses didn’t author the Pentateuch (first five books of the Hebrew Scriptures), then Jesus isn’t actually God’s Son, and who knows what we should be up to nowadays.

If we take inerrancy and infallibility for granted, then at least the first two of these questions still don’t make sense because they rule out the possibility that Genesis or Jonah could be poetry or parable or some other form of literature that wouldn’t demand a literal reading.

So to stake so much on an assumed interpretation of these passages is making this particular worldview bear a lot of weight.

If interpreting Genesis in a specific way is treated as a zero-sum game (it has to be this way or the Bible is false), then it puts young Christians in a really awkward position when they go off to college, read a science textbook, or look at starlight that has traveled millions of years. If this one thing is wrong, they believe, then they have no reason to maintain their faith, so they leave Christianity behind because that’s what they were told they would have to do by Christians whom they respect.

But what if Genesis and Jonah were meant to be taken literally and it can be proved that neither happened in the exact way they were described, does this mean that Jesus wasn’t raised from the dead?

One does not necessitate the other.

It could just mean that Genesis and Jonah and whatever other passage one has in mind simply got it wrong, which would mean that our categories of infallibility and inerrancy are wrong.

But there is another major assumption here.

When the Chicago statement mentioned “Scripture,” we know it to be talking about the Bible.

And what is the Bible?

Is it a single book with one author?

Or is it a library of books with a multitude of voices spanning hundreds of years?

Or is it both?

And if it is both, what percentage is the “one author” and what percentage is the voices?

Or is this not even a good way to talk about inspiration?

We can talk about this in more detail in n video combo I have planned for later. I don’t want to get too far away from the point.

The main point I’m trying to make here is that staking our faith in Jesus on major assumptions about the nature of the Bible and how the Bible works seems like really sandy ground compared to the firm rock that is person and work of Jesus as seen in the Gospel story.

These questions are important, but are they “weightier” than the fact that God is Love?

Because there are actually a lot of Christians who bear the fruit of the Spirit who believe the Bible is inspired by God while doubting some of the assumptions behind these “if [literal interpretation of a passage in the Hebrew Scriptures] isn’t true, then Jesus is still dead” kind of statements.

Moses and the Pentateuch

While my teacher was telling the story about the young man with the questions about Moses and the Pentateuch, a thought came to my head. Read this passage from Exodus where Pharaoh’s daughter gives Moses his name:

When the child grew up, she brought him to Pharaoh’s daughter, and he became her son. She named him Moses, “because,” she said, “I drew him out of the water.” Exodus 2:10

“I drew him out of the water.”

In Genesis 1, water covered the face of the earth, and the Spirit of God hovered over the face of the deep. From these waters of chaos, God drew out the creation through his Word.

In Genesis 6-9, chaotic waters covered the earth again, and God, yet again, drew his people from the waters.

In Exodus 14, the people were fleeing Pharaoh, and God saved them by drawing them from the waters of the Red Sea.

When we say that the first five books of the Bible were written by Moses, what if we meant…

“The first five books of the Hebrew Scriptures are Israel’s story of how, as a nation, they made sense of the chaos in the world as they became more and more familiar with the God of their fathers. It is a story of how they were drawn from the waters of darkness, slavery, and fear and into a covenant with God.”

And isn’t that what the whole Bible is? Stories written by people who encountered God in the midst of the primordial waters of their own life? People who slayed giants, walked on water, and moved mountains when the odds were stacked against them?

I don’t think this is what Jesus meant when he talked about how Moses said this or that. I think it’s more likely that Jesus referred to Moses because Moses did say much of what we have in the first five books of the Bible but also because Jesus wasn’t worried about who put the words to paper; he was more referring to the tradition that was drawn from that man who was drawn from the water and led by the Spirit of God.

What is God drawing you out of? What sort of Moses stories could you tell about your life? What Moses stories have you witnessed in others? I believe these are stories that are worth telling, and they might not make it into the next edition of the Bible, but even Paul thought that these stories are “epistles of Christ” of sorts (2 Corinthians 3:2-3).

The story of how God has drawn you out of the waters of chaos is important to me because it is part of an ongoing story of how God is still at work in the world and making all things new by bringing healing to the nations through the good news of Jesus, a news that is totally compelling on its own merits.

Credits

Special thanks to Corri Johnson and Jordan Winkert for reading and editing what I write and for all of you who pitch in through liking, sharing, and otherwise contributing to the community here.