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[Distributed by Way of Life Literature's Fundamental Baptist Information Service. Copyright 1996. These articles cannot be stored on BBS or Internet sites without permission from the author. Any articles which are redistributed by e-mail or print must be left intact and nothing must be removed or changed, including these informational headers. This is a listing for Fundamental Baptists and other fundamentalist, Bible-believing Christians. Our primary purpose is to provide information to assist preachers in the protection of the churches in this apostate hour. If you desire to receive this type of material on a regular basis, e-mail us, tell us who you are and where you are located, and request to be placed on the list. Also include your postal address and the name of the church of which you are a member. Some of these articles are from the "Digging in the Walls" section of O Timothy magazine. David W. Cloud, Editor. O Timothy is a monthly magazine in its 15th year of publication. Subscription is $20/yr. The Way of Life web site is http://www.wayoflife.org/.]
October 4, 1996 (David W. Cloud, Fundamental Baptist Information Service, P.O. Box 610368, Port Huron, MI 48061-0368, fbns@wayoflife.org) - The critical approach to the Old Testament has become prevalent among Bible commentators, even among many who claim to be Evangelicals. They deny, for example, that Moses wrote the Pentateuch, and claim that the first five books of the Bible were not fashioned into their present condition until centuries later the death of Moses. Consider the following example --
"The Old Testament may be described as the literary expression of the religious life of ancient Israel. ... Probably as early as the time of David and Solomon, out of a matrix of myth, legend, and history, there had appeared the earliest written form of the story of the saving acts of God from Creation to the conquest of the Promised Land, an account which later in modified form became a part of Scripture. But it was to be a long time before the idea of Scripture arose and the Old Testament took its present form. ... The process by which the Jews became 'the people of the Book' was gradual, and the development is shrouded in the mists of history and tradition. ... The date of the final compilation of the Pentateuch or Law, which was the first corpus or larger body of literature that came to be regarded by the Jews as authoritative Scripture, is uncertain, although some have conservatively dated it at the time of the Exile in the sixth century" (The New Oxford Annotated Bible RSV, 1973, Edited by Bruce Metzger and Herbert May, "Introduction to the Old Testament").
According to the editors of the New Oxford Annotated Bible, the Pentateuch was formed "out of a matrix of myth, legend, and history" and was not completed until the sixth century before Christ--hundreds of years after Moses. This is a humanistic view of Scripture which denies what it says about itself. For the following three reasons we can be certain that the historical Moses wrote the Pentateuch:
In the face of these plain Scriptures, we reject every Bible teacher who claims that Moses did not write the Pentateuch. Regardless of what label such a teacher wears, whether Evangelical or Baptist or Fundamentalist, we reject him as a false teacher and an apostate. We believe that the exhortation in Jude 3 to "earnestly contend for the faith once delivered to the saints" requires this action.