Jeffrey L Morrow – författare

For much of the history of both Judaism and Christianity, the Pentateuch - the first five books of the Bible - was understood to be the unified work of a single inspired author: Moses. Yet the standard view in modern biblical scholarship contends that the Pentateuch is a composite text made up of fragments from diverse and even discrepant sources that originated centuries after the events it purports to describe.Murmuring against Moses provides a critical narrative of the emergence of modern Pentateuchal studies and challenge the scholarly consensus by highlighting the weaknesses of the modern paradigms and mustering an array of new evidence for the Pentateuch's antiquity. By shedding light on the past history of research and the present developments in the field, Bergsma and Morrow give fresh voice to a growing scholarly dissatisfaction with standard critical approaches and make an important contribution toward charting a more promising future for Pentateuchal studies.

Modern biblical scholarship is often presented as analogous to the hard and natural sciences; its histories present the developmental stages as quasi-scientific discoveries. That image of Bible scholars as neutral scientists in pursuit of truth has persisted for too long.This examination of the lesser known history of the development of modern biblical scholarship in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries seeks partially to fulfill Pope Benedict XVI's request for a thorough critique of modern biblical criticism by exploring the eighteenth and nineteenth century roots of modern biblical scholarship, situating those scholarly developments in their historical, philosophical, theological, and political contexts.Picking up where Scott W. Hahn and Benjamin Wiker's Politicizing the Bible left off, Hahn and Morrow show how biblical scholarship continued along a secularizing trajectory as it found a home in the newly developing Enlightenment universities, where it received government funding. The book makes clear why the discipline of modern biblical studies is often so hostile to religious and faith commitments today.