The charge that the Old Testament is ancient myth stitched together long after the fact is really two charges. Dr. Eric Redmond, a professor in the Bible department at Moody Bible Institute, argues that neither holds up. The popular version rests on secondhand impressions and moral discomfort. The academic version rules out the miraculous before the evidence is examined. The documentary hypothesis, the best-known theory that the first five books were pieced together late from separate sources, belongs to the second.
Each charge makes a different claim, so each needs different evidence to test it. This article takes them one at a time. It asks what each would have to show, what Redmond offers in reply, and what his reply settles and leaves open.
What exactly is being claimed?
Calling the Old Testament myth can mean several things. It can mean the events never happened. It can mean the books were written so long afterward that no one involved could know. It can mean the stories are morally ugly and so cannot come from God. These are separate claims. A book can describe something terrible without approving of it, and a book can be old without being false.
Redmond names two sources of the challenge. In popular culture, people say the Scriptures are just myths and that nobody can believe those stories. He adds that many Old Testament stories involve genocide, rape and polygamy, which can look approved or ignored, and many readers decide they cannot trust such a book. In academic culture the challenge is older and more technical. Since the 18th century, he explains, scholars have applied the concepts of scientific investigation to Scripture. If something cannot be explained by naturalism, it cannot be trusted. On that approach, he says, there was no Red Sea crossing, no manna, no floating ax head and no fulfilled prophecy.
Does the popular version survive a close look?
Redmond’s first test is simple. When someone tells him the Old Testament cannot be trusted, he asks, “Have you read through the Old Testament?” He thinks it is a different experience to read it for yourself rather than accept someone’s word that the book is false.
That question is not an argument for the Bible’s truth. It shows what the popular objection usually rests on, which is reputation. A claim that everyone knows a book is myth is a report about what people have heard, not about the book. Redmond does not dismiss the moral difficulty. He names the hard stories himself. His point is that a reader has to meet those passages in context before deciding what they mean.
Context changes what a reader can conclude. Much of the Old Testament is narrative, and narrative often describes what people did without approving it. That distinction cannot answer every hard passage, but it means a passage’s presence in the Bible is not, by itself, proof that the Bible endorses what it reports. Redmond applies a version of this to the conquest of Canaan. He argues that God’s commands there concern judgment on the wickedness of the nations, not their ethnicity, and that God judged Israel for its sins as well. Readers can weigh that argument. They cannot weigh it without reading the texts it depends on.
Is the academic version a neutral method?
The scholarly challenge sounds more rigorous and deserves a more careful reply. Redmond’s reply is about method. “We want it to meet scientific verification, and that’s not its intention,” he says. Later he puts it this way: “Scripture does not claim to be a scientific document. It’s always claimed to be a divine document.”
The logic runs like this. If you begin by assuming no miracle can occur, every miracle account must be legend, and every accurate prophecy must have been written after the fact. That is not a conclusion drawn from evidence. It is a rule applied before the evidence is examined. Redmond’s example is Daniel, which he says foretells the empires that follow Babylon, including the division of Alexander’s kingdom among four generals. Critics respond that the book had to be written after the events. Redmond replies that a God who knows everything can give a prophet accurate knowledge of the future.
That reply answers the assumption, not the date. Scholars who place Daniel late also appeal to the book’s language and to manuscript evidence, and the interview does not present that evidence. So the dating of Daniel stays an open historical question here, and settling it means examining those linguistic and manuscript arguments directly.
The same limit applies more widely. Showing that an argument assumes its conclusion does not prove the miracle happened. It removes one reason for saying it could not have happened. What occurred at the Red Sea is still a historical question. Redmond’s point is that it cannot be answered honestly by a method that excludes one possible answer in advance.
What did ancient readers think they were holding?
The late-assembly theory makes a prediction. If the books were stitched together long after the fact, the communities that kept them might be expected to treat them as a loose and changing collection. Redmond points to evidence that runs the other way.
He reads the New Testament partly as a historical witness to first-century Jewish belief. From it he concludes that Jesus and the Jewish writers of the New Testament “understood that there was a fixed canon of scripture.” They refer to the law, meaning the books of Moses, and to the prophets, and sometimes to a threefold division. In Luke 24:44, Jesus speaks of what was written “in the law of Moses, and in the prophets, and in the psalms” concerning him.
Redmond also traces references inside the Old Testament. Moses is described as writing things down. Joshua and later figures act according to the book of the law. Daniel reads Jeremiah’s prophecy as being fulfilled, and Redmond argues this means they had “collected Jeremiah the prophet and held onto it as something that they considered the word of God.” His summary: “The Hebrew people received it as the word of God.” The earliest church, largely Jewish, received the same collection before any New Testament writing existed.
This evidence needs a careful label. When the Old Testament cites itself, and when the New Testament cites the Old, the witness comes from inside the same tradition. It is not independent corroboration of when each book was written or by whom. What it shows is reception: a community quoting its earlier writings as recognized authorities. That rebuts the picture of an unsettled heap of stories reshaped at will. It does not, on its own, date the composition of any book.
What does the documentary hypothesis actually say?
Redmond explains the theory before he answers it, which is worth copying. The documentary hypothesis, also called the Wellhausen theory after an early promoter, is a form of source criticism. It proposes four kinds of source documents behind Genesis through Deuteronomy.
- J marks material that favors the divine name Yahweh. The letter reflects an older way of rendering that name.
- E marks material that favors El or Elohim. Redmond notes that Elohim looks plural in Hebrew but works as a plural of majesty when it refers to the one God.
- P marks priestly material: ceremonial law, sacrifice, the priesthood and the Levites.
- D marks Deuteronomy, which the theory treats as a different kind of literature from the four books before it.
On the theory’s account, these sources come from different writers in different centuries. Redmond says it dates Deuteronomy to around the seventh century BC, while he holds that the Pentateuch was completed by 1406 BC. Those dates are his summary of each position and should be checked against the scholarship he names. The stakes, as he describes them, go beyond dating. The theory “says that the Pentateuch is a human document only, and it does not show divine witness.”
Where does the evidence actually point?
The observations behind the hypothesis are real, and its strongest arguments go beyond divine names. Source critics point to duplicate narratives: two accounts of creation in Genesis 1 and 2 with different emphases, and similar stories told more than once, such as a patriarch passing off his wife as his sister. They also point to shifts in vocabulary and style that tend to cluster with those doublets. The case is that several features line up together, not that one word changes.
Redmond responds mainly to the names and to the theory’s founding assumption. He argues that its key step is assuming one person could not have varied the names, written Israel’s history, included the priestly material, and recorded Deuteronomy as the second generation’s experience after forty years in the wilderness. He sees no reason to make that assumption at the outset. He points to consistent ideas running through all five books, and to how the books were read: “the ancient Jewish people never considered the Pentateuch to be written or a document of anything but one author, that author being Moses.” He adds, “It’s only when we get to the 18th century do people try to cut and paste the Pentateuch and put it back together.”
The interview does not take up the duplicate narratives one by one. A reader should notice that gap. Defenders of a unified Pentateuch offer explanations for the doublets, such as deliberate literary patterning, but that case is not made in this conversation.
Redmond goes further: “There has been so much scholarship to debunk JEDP, even among those who don’t hold to inerrancy.” The conversation does not walk through that scholarship, so the claim remains his assessment until checked. He names starting points: K. A. Kitchen on the reliability of the Old Testament, Duane Garrett’s book he recalls as Rethinking Genesis, Walter C. Kaiser Jr. on whether the Old Testament documents are reliable, and good commentaries on Genesis and Exodus.
One detail is easy to miss. Holding to Moses as author does not mean denying he used sources. Redmond says Genesis “would have had to have been passed to him by stories, which we know the ancient world did all the time,” with the earliest accounts coming by revelation. So the real dispute is not whether sources existed. It is whether the Pentateuch is a late, purely human patchwork or a work from Moses’s time that draws on older material and carries divine authority. Framed that way, the bare observation that sources were used decides much less.
Does the theory’s origin decide its truth?
Lisa Fields raises a challenge heard often in the Black church: that trusting the Old Testament is a white construct, and that critical theories offer a more liberating view. Redmond answers that the Old Testament speaks well of African peoples, including Cush, Egypt and the Nubians, and asks why biased European editors would have put that material in. He also observes that the early critics were largely German scholars in the 18th century, and argues that undercutting the Hebrew Bible’s divine origin also undercut the claim that God chose the Hebrew people.
That history matters in a debate about who gets to define a liberating approach. Still, origins do not decide whether a theory is true, and Redmond says as much later: the issue is not the ethnicity of the writer but whether the arguments are valid. Fields adds that scholars on both sides, conservative and progressive, draw mostly on white sources because too few Black scholars have yet written in these fields, and both call for more. The source theory has to be judged by its evidence. Accepting it is not a mark of independence, and rejecting it is not a mark of submission.
Don’t conflicting numbers prove the text was patched together?
Apparent contradictions are often offered as fingerprints of late editors. Redmond tests one category, the dating of kings’ reigns. One book says a king did something in his third year, and a parallel account says the fourth. He explains that ancient Near Eastern scribes used different systems: one counted a reign from the day it began, another started a year later. Read that way, the accounts give the same date by different reckonings. “No, not a contradiction. Two different ways of doing dating based on where the writer was geographically,” he says. He adds that some biblical numbers are rounded while others come from exact counts.
His method is the useful part. Before calling two numbers contradictory, ask whether there is “a legitimate, factual, verifiable way of accounting for these differences?” That demand works in both directions. The believer has to show the explanation. The critic has to rule it out before declaring an error.
What the case establishes
Redmond’s argument shows that the popular charge leans on reputation, that the classic academic charge excludes miracles by method rather than by finding, and that ancient readers treated these books as a recognized, authoritative body of writing. It does not, in one interview, prove Mosaic authorship, settle the date of Daniel, or answer every doublet. Those questions require the detailed work he points toward.
What it does accomplish is a shift in the burden of proof. Saying the Old Testament is late myth is a historical claim, not a default. It needs evidence that does not assume its own conclusion: the linguistic case for a late Daniel, the doublets laid side by side, the dating systems of ancient scribes. That is where the argument now has to be tested, by the critic and the believer alike.