Chapter XLVII.—Foreknowledge of Moses.

Then said Peter:  “The law of God was given by Moses, without writing, to seventy wise men, to be handed down, that the government might be carried on by succession.  But after that Moses was taken up, it was written by some one, but not by Moses.  For in the law itself it is written, ‘And Moses died; and they buried him near the house of Phogor,⁹⁸⁹⁹⁸⁹    Deut. xxxiv. 6, LXX. and no one knows his sepulchre till this day.’  But how could Moses write that Moses died?  And whereas in the time after Moses, about 500 years or thereabouts, it is found lying in the temple which was built, and after about 500 years more it is carried away, and being burnt in the time of Nebuchadnezzar it is destroyed; and thus being written after Moses, and often lost, even this shows the foreknowledge of Moses, because he, foreseeing its disappearance, did not write it; but those who wrote it, being convicted of ignorance through their not foreseeing its disappearance, were not prophets.”⁹⁹⁰⁹⁹⁰    [It is curious to find the post-exilian theory of the Pentateuch in this place, put in the mouth of the Apostle Peter.—R.]