Beyond Belief

Amy M. Braverman reports in the University of Chicago Magazine

In 2004 two first-years, Sarah Bramsen and Josh Sauerman, approached their HBC [Human Being and Citizen course] teacher and helped spark a wider lesson. When instructor Thomas Bartscherer, AM'97, a doctoral student in the Committee on Social Thought, briefly mentioned the documentary hypothesis--the theory that multiple hands, rather than one, contributed to the five books of Moses--Bramsen and Sauerman asked Bartscherer about it after class. Bramsen, who grew up in Indiana and Illinois attending multiple Christian-denomination churches, had never heard that Moses may not have been the sole author of the Pentateuch.

Perhaps those churches taught he wrote parts of it posthumously.