<P> Jerome and Luther and others still believed that the bulk of the Pentateuch was by Moses, even if a few phrases were not, but in the 17th century scholars began to seriously question its origins, leading Benedict Spinoza to declare that "the Pentateuch was not written by Moses but by someone else ." This conclusion had major implications, for as the 18th century Jewish scholar David Levi pointed out to his Christian colleagues, "if any part (of the Torah) is once proved spurious, a door will be opened for another and another without end ." </P> <P> By the 19th century scholars almost universally accepted that the Book of Deuteronomy dated not from the time of Moses but from the 7th century BCE, and that the Pentateuch as a whole had been compiled by unknown editors from various originally distinct source - documents . As David Levi had feared, the questioning of Mosaic authorship had led to a profound skepticism towards the very idea of revealed religion . Gradually the various Christian churches came to accept the conclusions of scholarship, and when in the 1940s the Vatican lifted a ban on Catholic scholars investigating the origins of the Pentateuch, it left support for Mosaic authorship limited largely to conservative Evangelical circles . This is tied to the way Evangelicals view the unity and authority of scripture: in the words of the Zondervan Encyclopedia of the Bible, "Faith in Christ and faith in the books of the OT canon stand or fall together (because) Christ and the apostles...took the Pentateuch as Mosaic (and) put their seal on it as Holy Scripture ." Nevertheless, the majority of contemporary Evangelicals, while accepting that some or much of the Pentateuch can be traced to Moses or traditions about him, pay little attention to the question of authorship . </P>

Authors of the first five books of the bible