I feel the same way about most Sunday School lessons.

Alter’s books don’t show that the DH isn’t valid from a literary POV. What Alter shows is the logic of the composition. The DH addresses the sources themselves.

The best quote of the day.

The empirical evidence suggests otherwise. I know people who are suspicious of modern scholarship and not all that curious or interested in higher critical approaches, but yet who study the scriptures quite seriously. My guess is that the folks in this thread who have not shown all that much interest in or curiousity about naive or folk methods of reading the scripture are also probably serious students of scripture. People who are serious students of *anything* using one methodology are more likely, not less likely, to scorn other methodologies. Get to know the Old Adam.

If that bespeaks a healthy curiosity and respect, I’ll eat Pecos Bill’s hat.

Fire up your typewriter and start cranking out your boast paragraphs, because I am about to laugh up my sleeve, or if you prefer and it remains uneaten, Pecos Bill’s sleeve, about your reading comprehension skills yet again.

I never claimed to be a serious student of scripture.

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on the illiteracy stuff, the new Church New Testament videos fit your speculation. We shall see.

I do not know much about higher criticism, though I am at least aware of the E-Y documentary hypothesis in Genesis. Some of Quickmere’s remarks reinforce my superficial impression that it is defined simply by what it is not: Taking sacred texts at face value. That can be a very good thing. It can also be a disaster. The devil is in the details.

I am myself willing to learn more about higher criticism. However, I am not yet ready to pick out colors.

If you continue to deride my reading comprehension skills I will be forced to write several paragraphs outlining my awesome brainpower, listing all my achievements to date as well as any I might accomplish in the future. You will learn about my IQ, which is quite high, as well as the fact that I was in honor courses in jr. high school.

Vader, I don’t really know about percentages, but I’d be surprised if the percentage of illiterates among us isn’t somewhere north of 15%. Sons on missions in Latin America and the Caribbean tell me that most of their investigators can’t read, so the missionaries read aloud to them. As we look to the future, I expect this condition to become more and more acute. It is a vexing problem, with no easy solution. Maybe a kind of books on tape with digital technology or something. Maybe instead of giving new members a triple combination when they are baptized, we’ll start giving them a pre-loaded mp3 player. I imagine there are smart people in the presiding bishop’s office thinking about this right now, in fact.

If there is a new problem I’m aware of, its that our culture is moving away from longform texts that don’t interact.

Regardless, my impression is that the Church has been “doing something” about illiteracy.