The Paradigm that Blurs Author and Speaker

I realize that the later books of the Old Testament call the Pentateuch the "books of Moses." I also realize that the New Testament and other Jewish writers reference these books with Moses as the author. It is certainly traditional to consider Moses the author of the Pentateuch.

But I don't think these later ways of referencing the Pentateuch are either the original reasons why people began to talk of Moses as their author nor why so many of us have a tendency to think of them as Moses' writings.

If you think for just a second, the books themselves certainly don't look like what we would expect if Moses were their author. Genesis doesn't mention Moses once and these books nowhere say that Moses is their author even though Moses features prominently in them. You would not naturally think that the account of Moses birth, childhood, and especially his death were written by him. After all, wouldn't we want some comment about how God inspired me, Moses, to see my death before it happened and I'm writing this all down right before I go off to fulfill it? And wouldn't we expect something like "I was born in Egypt" rather than the consistent third person, "Moses did this," "Moses did that"?

In short, in themselves, these books give us every reason to think that they were not written by Moses.

We could mention several other examples of this phenomenon. Some have thought of Joshua as the author of Joshua--but again, Joshua is always told about in these words. John 21 says that the beloved disciple is the one who has borne witness to the things of the gospel and that his words are true. But would the beloved disciple himself write in this way about himself? It sounds like someone writing about this disciple rather than the disciple himself writing.

Then there is the fact that I inevitably have students who put true for the following true/false question in NT survey: "Paul wrote 1 Thessalonians to us from Thessalonica on his second missionary journey." The statement is obviously false... but do you see why?

In matters like these, where some obvious observation is consistently missed by intelligent people, paradigms are at work. The first paradigmatic element I have mentioned over and over again--it is the paradigm of Scripture. The very idea of a Scripture is that the message is somehow important for us. We read Scripture to gain insight about the present, not the past.

Yet these documents were written in and to the past, not to the present. Paul did not write to us from Thessalonica. 1 Thessalonians is Paul's letter to the Thessalonians, written either from Corinth or Athens. It was not written to us or anyone who has been alive for about 1900 years.

But more fascinating to me is the pre-modern paradigm that tends to blur the distinction between inside and outside the biblical text. It places itself, in a sense, inside the text with Moses. Moses in Exodus is now speaking with us there present with him, like we have jumped into the book. Even when he is talking to someone else, we are listening to the words as if they are verbatim quotes and videotape. There is no thought of someone writing about Moses in a book.

The words that frame the story in the text become part of the video, but they cease to be words. It's like a screenplay for a movie. As we watch the movie, we experience "Superman enters from the sky" in the screenplay not as words, but as part of the action. And if it is a good movie, we have joined it, we are there next to the Daily Planet watching him catch the globe that has fallen off the top.

So the pre-modern reading of Moses hears Moses and experiences the narrative setting as action in the drama, not as words. And the result is that we think of Moses as the speaker, as the author, even though it is obvious that someone else has actually written the screenplay.

It is this same dynamic that makes us think of the gospels as the earliest part of the New Testament, because we experience them as drama about Jesus, who is the earliest part of the NT story. But in fact, each gospel is a moment in the late first century church, each with its own concerns and angles. Historically, Paul's writings stand closer to Jesus in time than any of the gospels. So the earliest evidence for the Lord's Supper is not to be found in the gospels, but in 1 Corinthians 11. And the historical question of whether Jesus predicted the destruction of the Jerusalem temple must address why Paul seems completely unaware of any such prophecy.

Fundamentalism was of course the early twentieth century reaction of the startled pre-moderns of that day. Suddenly forced to see the kinds of clear observations we are mentioning here (and forced I might add by a somewhat hostile teacher), they assumed an irrational defensive posture. They rolled up into the fetal position. I hope we are now in a position to recognize that the truth of the text does not stand or fall on how straightforwardly historical it is--this was not the ancient criterion of truth in play. This is the baggage of a debate that happened a 100 years ago. The important questions are not so much about history but about what God was trying to say in the creation of these writings and, even more importantly, what God has led Christians to understand in these writings.

My two cents...