Curious logic. . .

I could not resist an article written by a Roman Catholic with the title Who wrote the Bible?      Especially when it promised three perspectives on Biblical authorship.  

The first paragraph:  

Catholics like I often find ourselves defending the authorship and historicity of the New Testament. While professors at my esteemed University, for example, may teach that the Gospel of Mark was anonymously written and later named after the prominent Christian, we point out historical records indicating that Mark is the true author. When atheist college students claim that Jesus Christ never existed, we explain that the Gospels are ancient biographies whose reliability is established by the non-Christian historians Josephus and Tacitus. The instinct to defend authorship and historicity is essential for our defense of the New Testament, but it may lead to a harmful attitude toward the Old Testament. The Old Testament was not, as some believe, authored by a few divinely inspired prophets such as Moses, Solomon, and Isaiah. As this article will discuss, the past two hundred years of scholarship and church teaching have revealed a complex network of authors and oral traditions which developed the Old Testament over the course of centuries.

The conclusion:

Further, it does not secularize the Old Testament to realize that its books were for a large part not written by the names on their covers. In fact, the Old Testament becomes far richer when studied as the collective story of an entire people, guided always by God in Wisdom first to an earthly promised land and finally to the promised land of eternal life. The types of Christ, motifs of God’s love, and narrative unity found throughout the Old Testament become more profound when seen as God’s ever-developing word of love to his people. The story of salvation told itself even as it unfolded.

It is a curious position, to say the least.  On the one hand to presume that if the NT names a writer or a name is attached to a book, then that NT book is written by the person named BUT if the same thing happens in the Old Testament, then it must not be taken literally and the only intellectually honest thing to do is to admit that the OT books are by mostly multiple anonymous authors despite what the books presume or the tradition has claimed.  I cannot say that I have ever found an argument compelling that says believe the Bible when it says this but do not believe the Bible when it says that (remember that the NT presumes these books were authored by the individuals).  In addition to all of this, is the claim of integrity of reason in listening to the so-called clues with the OT books to hidden authors but refusing the same claims when it comes  to NT books.

Finally, there is the claim that the Roman Catholic church has weighed in officially in favor of the documentary hypothesis -- meaning it is not Roman Catholic to believe that Moses did write the Pentateuch! If the papal encyclical Divino Afflante Spiritu (“Inspired by the Holy Spirit”), released in 1943, determines the official Roman Catholic position and requires them not to “neglect [any] of those discoveries, whether in the domain of archaeology or in ancient history or literature, which serve to make better known the mentality of the ancient writers, as well as their manner and art of reasoning, narrating, and writing” (Divino Afflante Spiritu, paragraph 40), then Rome has officially cast doubt on the claims of the NT writers about OT authorship or else it has Jesus and others complicit in a ruse based not on fact.