Arguments for the Mosaic authorship of the books which bear Moses' name are thus supported by historical evidence and the internal witness of the Pentateuchal books themselves. The Pentateuch is ascribed to Israel's great lawgiver and prophet (Deuteronomy 18: 15) by unanimous and unbroken tradition from the days of Moses himself through the entire Old Testament period and onward. The ancient Jewish synagogue, the inspired New Testament writers, and our Lord Himself sanctioned it. Both Jewish and Christian tradition in the Christian era fully support it. The historical evidence is practically unanimous until the documentary theory took its rise in the last two centuries, gaining influential prestige especially in the last seventy-five years.
The internal evidence of the Pentateuchal books agrees with the unanimous historical witness. The books indicated they were written in the desert by an eyewitness, who was thoroughly conversant with Egyptian life, and contain archaisms which point to the antiquity of the text. The elementary character of the doctrinal teachings furnishes additional evidence of early composition, consonant with the Mosaic authorship.
The serious consequences of rejecting the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch in favor of the highly plausible and learnedly developed theory of documentary sources may well cause the Bible-believing critic and student to hesitate before doing so. Not only must he be prepared to abandon all the positive and definite Biblical and extra-Biblical evidence for Mosaic authenticity in favor of a modern brain-child which has no traditional or solid Biblical support, but he must also face the fact that he is making a far-reaching capitulation to the foes of the credibility of the Pentateuch and of religious supernaturalism in general. In addition, he must be assured that he is embracing a view which is essentially incompatible with the high view of the inspiration of the Old Testament as presented in the New and, at the same time, he must realize that he is launching upon a limitless sea of uncertainty and conjecture which offers no guiding course or sure stopping place, and which gives little hope that the view will ever be more than it now is, an unproved and unprovable theory. It is high time for professedly conservative scholarship to realize anew the essential unsoundness of the critical hypothesis and to cease trying to reconcile its potent unbelief with the tenets of historic evangelical Christianity and conservative Judaism.
Introductory Guide to the Old Testament. Merrill F. Unger. Zondervan Pub. House, Grand Rapids, MI. 1951. Pages 223-224, 232-233.