The Jєωιѕн tradition concerning the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch was brought in to the Christian Church by Christ Himself and the Apostles. No one will seriously deny the existence and continuance of such a tradition from the patristic period onward; one might indeed be curious about the interval between the time of the Apostles and beginning of the third century. For this period we may appeal to the "Epistle of Barnabas" (x, 1-12; Funk, "Patres apostol.", 2nd ed., Tübingen, 1901, I, p. 66-70; xii, 2-9k; ibid., p. 74-6), to St. Clement of Rome (1 Corinthians 41:1; ibid., p. 152), St. Justin ("Apol. I", 59; P.G., VI, 416; I, 32, 54; ibid., 377, 409; Dialogue with Trypho 29), to the author of "Cohort. Ad Graec." (9, 28, 30, 33, 34; ibid., 257, 293, 296-7, 361), to St. Theophilus ("Ad Autol.", III, 23; ibid., 1156; 11, 30; ibid., 1100), to St. Irenæus (Cont. haer., I, ii, 6; P.G., VII, 715-6), to St. Hippolytus of Rome ("Comment. In Deut.", xxxi, 9, 31, 35; cf. Achelis, "Arabische Fragmente etc.", Leipzig, 1897, I, 118; "Philosophumena", VIII, 8; X, 33; P.G., XVI, 3350, 3448), to Tertullian of Carthage (Adv. Hermog., XIX; P.L., II, 214), to Origen of Alexandria (Contra. Cels., III, 5-6; P.G., XI, 928; etc.), to St. Eustathius of Antioch (De engastrimytha c. Orig., 21; P.G., XVIII, 656); for all these writers, and others might be added, bear witness to the continuance of the Christian tradition that Moses wrote the Pentateuch. A list of the later Fathers who bear witness to the same truth may be found in Mangenot's article in the "Dict. de la Bible" (V, 74 seq.). Hoberg (Moses und der Pentateuch, 72 seq.) has collected the testimony for the existence of the tradition during the Middle Ages and in more recent times.

But Catholic tradition does not necessarily maintain that Moses wrote every letter of the Pentateuch as it is today, and that the work has come down to us in an absolutely unchanged form. This rigid view of the Mosaic authorship began to develop in the eighteenth century, and practically gained the upper hand in the nineteenth. The arbitrary treatment of Scripture on the part of Protestants, and the succession of the various destructive systems advanced by Biblical criticism, caused this change of front in the Catholic camp. In the sixteenth century Card. Bellarmine, who may be considered as a reliable exponent of Catholic tradition, expressed the opinion that Esdras had collected, readjusted, and corrected the scattered parts of the Pentateuch, and had even added the parts necessary for the completion of the Pentateuchal history (De verbo Dei, II, I; cf. III, iv). The views of Génebrard, Pereira, Bonfrere, a Lapide, Masius, Jansenius, and of other notable Biblicists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are equally elastic with regard to the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch. Not that they agree with the contentions of our modern Biblical criticism; but they show that today's Pentateuchal problems were not wholly unknown to Catholic scholars, and that the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch as determined by the Biblical Commission is no concession forced on the Church by unbelieving Bible students.