Moses and the Law in a Century of Criticism Since Graf

Description

The English reader of the Old Testament beginning his King James Version at Genesis is met by the title "The First Book ofMoses Called Genesis". The German reader has it simply as "First Moses" (Erste Mose), and similarly "Second Moses", "Third Moses" and so on for the following books of the Pentateuch. It is likely that it was from Luther that the titles were taken over by the English translators. Luther himself followed the church tradition, which was also that of the Jews, although no such titles occur in the Hebrew Bible. The Jewish tradition of the Mosaic authorship of the first five books of the Bible is extremely old and predates Luther by about two thousand years. It is contained in the Talmud, and in Jewish writers contemporary with the New Testament like Philo and Josephus. It was shared by the New Testament writers, and apparently by our Lord Himself, when He asked "Did not Moses give you the law (Jn 7: 19)"? For most Christians this has seemed conclusive, except where the nagging question of the nature of our Lord's human knowledge made itself heard. Could it have been otherwise, if He shared the human life of His time? What if in His incarnation He had consented not to know what His contemporaries could not know on such matters?