How Brilliant We Bible Scholars Are!

In previous Blogs I pointed out that we must take various attempts to lead us back into ancient Bible times with a grain of salt. That is to say, be very cautious about those folks who claim that they can look at bits of stone, pottery and bones and tell you exactly what was going on. They also study the text of the Bible as it has come down to us and conclude that the stories in the Bible are, for the most part, fabrications by a variety of later writers who had their own agendas. In other words, those later writers wanted to trick their readers into thinking, for instance, that Moses wrote the first five books of the Bible, but he didn't, even though Christians thought so for the past 1,900 years. Here's how these post-modern, enlightened Bible historians think:

We wizards have developed tools especially in the past century by which we've caught those old-time Bible writers in their tricks, lies and deceptions. We are ready now to show you who really wrote the Bible. And you'll be surprised at what we've discovered. 

Wanna know how we do it? Here's a few tricks of our own we've developed.

1. Doublets - there are lots of them, stories about the same thing, but written from a different perspective, like the two creation stories in Genesis, the covenant between God and Abraham and two stories of God changing Jacob's name to Israel. Sometimes we even found triplets of stories. They can't fool us.

2. Two names for God - Ha! That's an even better clue. We knew it all the time. Two different groups had two different names for their God.

3. Terms and characteristics -  Besides these peculiar names for God, these groups had other terms that regularly appeared.

These are some basic tools to get us started into unraveling "what really, really happened." Don't forget that this is what all good historians do, check the sources and get back to "wie es eigentlich gewesen ist." 

 Oh, one more insight. That brilliant philosopher George Wilhelm Hegel (1770-1831) taught us how things happen, how history moves forward. We bow down before his brilliant insights—and remember that he was brilliant, able to shed light through his powerful mental capacities on the very mind of the enveloping, absolute Spirit or God if you will. Anyway, Hegel taught us that there are always, always, always men and/or groups that have a certain thesis, a certain position they wish to maintain. But then along comes another group with an opposing thesis, an antithesis. So they lock horns, as it were and struggle, even fight with one another until along comes a synthesis, a new understanding, a new place to be. That provides a new triad (thesis-antithesis-synthesis) and sets things in motion once again.

Now since this enlightened understanding from the Age of Enlightenment or Age of Reason, has come to us from this enlightened philosopher, we can go back to the Bible with our enlightened knowledge, look at the doublets and triplets and draw some enlightened conclusions. We can work our way through the entire Bible with this presupposition, this brilliant, light-giving philosophy and determine there was a group we'll have to call the Elohists or E group, because they called God Elohim. And there were the Jahwists or J group, because they called God Jehovah or as many today say, Yahweh. The third source document, by far the largest, included most of the legal sections and concentrated on matters having to do with priests. We'll call those who developed these documents the P group. Finally there's the source material found only in the book of Deuteronomy that we'll call the D group.

So there you have it folks, the JEDP source-documentary thesis or Documentary Hypothesis. This model dominates the field of Bible studies in most mainline protestant seminaries and university departments of religion. It appears there are only a relatively few Lutheran groups, like the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod and sister synods around the world, that reject this approach. Another time I'll tell you why we Missourians find it so hard to accept the presuppositions behind this hypothesis.