Richard Simon Asks Who Actually Wrote the Torah and Is Condemned for Asking

Biblical studies applies historical and critical method to the composition of the biblical text, asking when a book was actually written and by whom, testing internal evidence, style, vocabulary, apparent inconsistency, against the book's own traditional attribution rather than assuming that attribution is accurate. The French Catholic priest Richard Simon opened the modern discipline with his Histoire critique du Vieux Testament, published in 1678, which argued from internal textual evidence that the Pentateuch could not have been written entirely by Moses as tradition held, a conclusion that got the book condemned and burned by the French church even as it set the terms historical critical biblical scholarship has worked from ever since.

The question Simon raised, whether a book's traditional attribution matches what the text's own internal evidence supports, is exactly what the atlas needs answered wherever a scripture's authorship or date of composition bears on a claim about its historical reliability or theological development. The atlas relies on the discipline's findings to distinguish a book's traditional attribution from what the documented critical scholarship on its composition actually establishes.