Scholars say Genesis weaves together at least two contradictory sources, Moses narrates his own death in Deuteronomy 34, and the Gospels were written decades after Jesus by anonymous authors who never met him. The faithful say it's divinely inspired through human hands. So when you read 'the word of God', whose words are you actually reading? Pick a side.
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Add your commentMoses writing about his own funeral and burial in Deuteronomy 34 is the detail that should make every literalist pause. Either he was a remarkably calm dead narrator or — stay with me — someone else wrote it later. And if someone else wrote THAT part...
Beautiful metaphor, but Beethoven's flaws don't tell you to stone people. When the 'symphony' includes endorsing slavery, the 'it's still divine despite the human medium' line has to explain why God let the barbarism in and not just the beauty.
And they were written 40-70 years after the events, in Greek, far from Galilee, often copying each other (Mark first, then Matthew and Luke build on him). That's not four independent witnesses. It's one source and two heavy remixes plus an outlier.
I actually find that beautiful and I'm not even a believer. The problem is it's not what most pews are taught. They're taught 'God said it, that settles it', not 'a committee of inspired editors negotiated it over 600 years'.
Right — the inerrancy-or-bust framing is a specifically modern, mostly American Protestant trap. Most of religious history was more relaxed about human hands in the text than 20th-century fundamentalists.
Even 'one reciter' had the text compiled and standardized by committees after his death though. Nobody escapes the editors. Editors are how ancient texts survive at all.
Inspired through human hands is the whole point and it's not a dodge. God didn't fax a PDF. He worked through fishermen, kings, and editors, in their voices and limits. That's incarnational — meaning entering the messy human medium, not bypassing it.
You can believe humans wrote every word AND that God inspired it. Beethoven used a flawed human piano and human hands; the symphony is still transcendent. The medium being human doesn't make the music human-sized.
Sure it's 'been addressed' — with 'a different guy wrote it' or 'God magically dictated his own author's death'. Both answers quietly concede the simple 'Moses wrote the five books' story is false. That's the point, not the specific patch.
Traditional answer: Joshua finished it, or it was prophetically dictated. Not a gotcha, it's been addressed since antiquity. You're treating a 2,000-year-old known issue like you discovered it on Reddit.
As a Jew I find the Christian panic about this funny. We've openly studied multiple authorship and redaction for ages. Torah being woven from sources doesn't threaten Judaism because we never claimed God handed it over as a sealed book.
Quran avoids a lot of this because it's attributed to one reciter in one lifetime. The Bible is a library written across a thousand years by dozens of hands. Comparing them as 'books' is a category error — one's a book, one's a whole shelf.
Documentary Hypothesis changed how I read everything. Once you see the two flood accounts spliced together — two of each animal vs seven, 40 days vs 150 — braided into one text, you can't unsee the seams. It reads like an edited document because it IS one.
Whose words am I reading? Men's. Sincere, searching, sometimes brilliant, sometimes barbaric men trying to make sense of suffering and the sky. That's not an insult. It's just more honest than pretending a deity proofread it.
The Gospels being anonymous is the part that floored me leaving the faith. 'Matthew, Mark, Luke, John' are titles assigned LATER. The texts themselves never name their authors. We don't actually know who wrote the four cornerstone accounts of Jesus's life.
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