You’re gonna love this…

I was reading an article this morning titled “JEDP and Jesus.” It was about Jesus’ possible misuse or misquote of Exodus 20:12 in Mark 7:10. The “JEDP” is a part of the documentary hypothesis put forth by Julius Wellhausen in 1883 in his Prolegomena zur Geschichte Israels (you’ve just got to love that!) in which he argued that the Torah or Pentateuch (the first five books of the Old Testament) came from a compilation of four independent sources (hence, the “J,” the “E,” the “D” and the “P” sources) that dated centuries after Moses (the traditional author of the Pentateuch).

Or, in other words, he argued that Moses didn’t write them but that someone found four different stories on the same topic and blended them all together many, many moons after the fact.

The article went on and on making a big whup-to-do about how the documentary hypothesis did not necessarily prove Jesus wrong or the Bible to be false. 

<Yawn>

Folks, I’ve got advanced degrees in this mess. When you add up all it says, it comes down to this: it don’t mean jack! You have a bunch of grown men trying to play scientific oneupmanship and in the process confusing everyone. No one ever bothers with trying to figure what the text actually says because they are so caught up in the “scholarship.”

I think we find ourselves being so full of ourselves that we have no room to be full of Jesus. The last time I checked, Jesus pulls a bit more weight than Wellhausen and friends.

And that’s all I’m gonna say ’bout that…