Any biblical scholar worth his salt will tell you otherwise, and it's not as if this is a new concept. As early as the 1700s people were noticing that the first books of the bible had numerous authors. Tell that to an elder, though, and you'll be booted for apostasy faster than you can say spanish inquisition. Why does the watchtower doggedly cling to this? The bible itself doesn't even state that Moses wrote them.
Why does the WT insist that the first five books of the bible were written by Moses?
by marmot 16 Replies latest watchtower bible
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RubaDub
Because he was the guy at the book-signings.
Rub a Dub
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Band on the Run
Charlton Heston! I saw him at some restaurants in Manhattan before he had dementia. The place was electric. We did not have to take a vote to have a consensus that he was Charlton Heston. He was more electric and charismatic in person than on the film.
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Doug Mason
Read "Who Wrote the Bible?" by Richard Elliott Friedman.
As a sample from his book: http://www.jwstudies.com/Two_Flood_Stories.pdf
The exodus, Moses, Aaron, and Adam are fictitious creations by religious parties.
Doug
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marmot
Already read that, I'm asking why the Watchtower clings to this tradition. Why does it matter?
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Phizzy
Dear Marmot, I have often wondered why the WT stick to various positions, and make themselves look both ignorant and silly.
Could it be that they are in fact, both ignorant and silly ?
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L3G
The live in their own type of Fundamentalist world. Like so many other things, they cannot accept truth and reality, esp. the GB.
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adamah
Marmot said-
Already read that, I'm asking why the Watchtower clings to this tradition.
You answered your own question: it's called "appeal to tradition", where people cling to the way they've always done it, out of a basic tendency towards conservatism, AKA a fear of change. There's also a potential loss of members who lose their faith, since allowing their believers to learn of the multiple writers of the Torah (i.e. documentary hypothesis) starts the cookie crumbling, and one problematic question only leads to more faith-destroying questions.
Instead, they've come up with a simple narrative of the authorship of the Torah with the explanatory power to satisfy even a child: Moses Dun It!
The GB tells their believers that accepting any other belief is doing outside independent research, and heavily-discourage it, since it leads to apostacy.
They're not looking for followers with critical-thinking skills, but only for sheeple who don't really care too much about the factual-basis of WHAT they believe, but instead are concerned with how the beliefs personally make them FEEL. That's a recipe for trouble...
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J. Hofer
in the german translation of the NWT the first 5 books are called 1. mose, 2. mose, 3. mose, 4. mose, 5. mose (first, second, third, fourth, fifth book of moses).
i don't get it either. deuteronomium describes how moses died. when i asked a zealous young witness how this can be, he researched (insight books...) and came back to me that the last part was written by joshua. so i asked him why joshua didn't write that part in his own book. plus, why does joshua also die in the book that has his name...