Secret_History

352 The Secret History of the World
Spirit, so it was okay for them to collect, arrange and elaborate on the text. It was
still God in charge here.
Well, you’d think the Church would know when it was ahead. But, nope! Simon
was attacked and expelled from his order by his fellow Catholics. Forty refutations
of his work were written by Protestants. Only six copies of his book survived
burning. John Hampden translated one of these, getting himself into pretty hot
water. He, “repudiated the opinions he had held in common with Simon [...] in
1688, probably shortly before his release from the tower”. 250
In the 18th century, three independent scholars were dealing with the problem of
“doublets”, or stories that are told two or more times in the Bible. There are two
different stories of the creation of the world. There are two stories of the covenant
between God and Abraham. There are two stories of the naming of Abraham’s son
Isaac, two stories of Abraham’s claiming to a foreign king that his wife is his
sister, two stories of Isaac’s son Jacob making a journey to Mesopotamia, two
stories of a revelation to Jacob at Beth-El, two stories of God changing Jacob’s
name to Israel, two stories of Moses’ getting water from a rock at Meribah, and on
and on.
Those who simply could not let go of the a priori belief that Moses wrote the
Pentateuch, tried to claim that these doublets were always complimentary, not
repetitive nor contradictory. Sometimes they had to really stretch this idea to say
that they were supposed to “teach” us something by their contradictions that are
“not really contradictions”.
This explanation, however, didn’t hold up against another fact: in most cases
one of the two versions of a doublet would refer to the deity by the divine name,
Yahweh, and the other would refer to the deity simply as “God”, or “El”. What
this meant was that there were two groups of parallel versions of the same stories,
and each group was almost always consistent about the name of the deity it used.
Not only that, there were various other terms and characteristics that regularly
appeared in one or the other line of stories, and what this demonstrated was that
someone had taken two different old source documents and had done a cut and
paste job on them to make a “continuous” narrative.
Well, of course, at first it was thought that one of the two source documents
must be one that Moses had used as a source for the story of creation and the rest
was Moses himself writing! But, it was ultimately to be concluded that both of the
two sources had to be from writers who lived after Moses. By degrees, Moses was
being eliminated almost entirely from the authorship of the Pentateuch!
Simon’s idea that scribes had collected, arranged and elaborated on the textus
receptus was, finally, going in the right direction.
250 Ibid.