It’s merely a difference of emphasis, and I stand by both statements. There is no contradiction between them and all are supported by the available facts. There is no evidence of Paleo-Hebrew autographs of the Pentateuch. The assumption of a historical Moses as author of the Pentateuch makes the latter part-biography. This in turn makes the first chapters of Exodus even more puzzling than they already are. Was Moses a young man or already old when he confronted Pharaoh? Was his wife a Midianite or an Ethiopian? Had he fled Egypt or had he remained there as a slave? Was God or was God not known as YHWH by the patriarchs (cf. Exodus 6:3)? Each of these disjuncts either implicitly or explicitly receives a ‘yes’ answer in Exodus in its canonical form. The thesis of Mosaic authorship is simply no longer tenable, no matter how many ad hoc solutions are proposed for this or that problem. A more interesting question is where the idea of Mosaic authorship came from in the first place, given the lack of historical evidence for it, as well as the dearth of evidence for the existence of the Pentateuch as such in the pre-Exilic period. The testimony of the prophetic writings is crucial in this regard.
Here are a video that covers the history and reliability of the Doc Hyp. Why Does Moses Matter to Christians? This is the first in a series dealing with the Exodus.
I think Moses matters. In the Gospel of John Moses is mentioned by name 12 times, and 'the prophet' (which generally also refers to Moses) appears a further 11 times. David is mentioned 1 time. I think in many ways Moses is far more central to Semitic eschatology than David.
Good point. It was Moses and Elias who appeared with Jesus on the Mount of Transfiguration. I recently read an old book by Abp. Arthur M. Ramsey in which the second half reflects on this very theme.
From the video referenced above; the tl;dr version. The Documentary Hypothesis was proposed by Wellhausen in the 1880’s. This was based on work by various authors dating back to the 1600’s. The foundation of the Documentary Hypothesis coming from Astruc and Eichhorn is that use of two names indicates two authors, since one person would not use different names. This assumption had been criticised before the Mt Ebal Curse Tablet was discovered, but the discovery showed definitely that two different names for God could be used by one person in one document.
The first part of the above is purely ad hominem. The second part is a Straw Man (the combined name occurs throughout the J Source), and fails to mention, among others, the medieval commentator Ibn Ezra (whose observations formed a certain precursor to the later DH), as well as the extensive treatment of the subject given by Spinoza in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. The basic ideas and arguments underlying the DH were not a creation of the 19th century: scholars had been talking about them for over 200 years prior to Wellhausen and Gunkel. Anglicans had no problem integrating these insights from an early point. The anti-DH position falls in much the same camp as ‘creationism’: in both cases, if their proponents would bring themselves to actually read scholarly/scientific material on the subject with an open mind, instead of their own propaganda, they would eventually come to realize that the positions they’re criticizing have a far stronger basis in reality than they make them out to be. Read the ‘Introduction to the Pentateuch’ volume in the Cambridge Bible for Colleges and Schools. Read Who Wrote the Bible? or The Exodus by Richard Elliott Friedman. Read The God of Old or (especially) How to Read the Bible by James Kugel. Read the various topical essays on the Pentateuch in the NJPS 2nd edition of The Jewish Study Bible. There are plenty of other examples, but those are the best ones I can think of, off the top of my head. All of them are by excellent, competent scholars, and all present the DH fairly and comprehensively. People interested in the subject ought to be able to base their investigations on the real hypothesis, not motivated and inaccurate fundamentalist caricatures of it.