"
This utterance resounded through Germany from pulpit to pulpit,
growing in strength and volume, until a century later it was echoed
back by Huet, the eminent bishop and commentator of France. He
cited a hundred authors, sacred and profane, to prove that Moses
wrote the Pentateuch; and not only this, but that from the Jewish
lawgiver came the heathen theology--that Moses was, in fact, nearly
the whole pagan pantheon rolled into one, and really the being
worshipped under such names as Bacchus, Adonis, and Apollo.[[312]]
About the middle of the twelfth century came, so far as the world
now knows, the first gainsayer of this general theory. Then it was
that Aben Ezra, the greatest biblical scholar of the Middle Ages,
ventured very discreetly to call attention to certain points in the
Pentateuch incompatible with the belief that the whole of it had
been written by Moses and handed down in its original form. His
opinion was based upon the well-known texts which have turned all
really eminent biblical scholars in the nineteenth century from the
old view by showing the Mosaic authorship of the five books in
their present form to be clearly disproved by the books themselves;
and, among these texts, accounts of Moses' own death and burial, as
well as statements based on names, events, and conditions which
only came into being ages after the time of Moses.
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