The Archregimancy wrote:Nationalist State of Knox wrote:Arch, do you happen to have a poll that shows what percentage of Christians/Jews believe in Mosaic authorship?
That's not a wholly straightforward question.
There's two facets to that question - do we try and undertake a reasonably representative poll of each individual Christian, or do we accept the teachings of individual Christian denominations as representative of the views of their members.
I usually go with the latter route, since it's easier for me to quantify, though I understand why some people might object.
In any case, for Catholics we have
paragraph 289 of the Catholic Catechism, compiled by no less a figure than Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, subsequently Pope Benedict XVI, subsequently Pope Emeritus Benedict. This offers a summary of Catholic beliefs and principles.
This reads:
Among all the Scriptural texts about creation, the first three chapters of Genesis occupy a unique place. From a literary standpoint these texts may have had diverse sources. The inspired authors have placed them at the beginning of Scripture to express in their solemn language the truths of creation.
Note the underlined.
The Catholic Church - c. 50% of Christians - therefore openly teaches that the Mosaic books had multiple authors.
There is no standard Orthodox Catechism or single authority we can use to represent the Orthodox Church in the same manner. And here things get messy; because this isn't an issue of Orthodox dogma, you can likely find the full panoply of opinions in Orthodoxy (in fact, I know you can - but my evidence here is personal and anecdotal rather than something easily citable), from full acceptance of Mosaic authorship (on the basis that the Pentateuch says as much), to full and easy acceptance that the Pentateuch had multiple authors.
Anglicans have been applying the principles of historical criticism to the Old Testament since at least the 1860s, so I doubt they're too bothered.
While the above is an incomplete survey, we see that the largest church - representing half of the total of Christians - openly teaches multiple authorship; that the second-largest church encompasses a broad body of not easily quantifiable opinion, but certainly includes a not insignificant number of people who accept multiple authorship; and that the Anglican Church led the charge to apply academic historical criticism to the relevant books of the Bible in the first place.
While I can't offer specific figures, and while this doesn't encompass the totality of Christianity, even if only a purely hypothetical minority of Protestants were to accept multiple authorship, we'd still arrive at a majority of Christians accepting multiple authorship, if only because it forms an open part of the catechism of the group that forms 50% of Christians to begin with.
Posted: Wed Jul 17, 2013 12:10 pm
acceptance of literal authorship ranges from "yes, it's