Multiple Authorship Theories of Isaiah

I. Period Before Modern Critical Scholarship

1. The first person to question Isaiah's authorship of chapters 40-66 was Moses ibn Gekatilla (2nd century A.D.)
   1. His views were preserved and adopted by a prominent medieval Jewish scholar, Ibn Ezra.

II. Period of Modern Scholarship

1. The German Johann Doederlein (lived in the 1700s)
   1. In 1789 he argued that chapters 40-66 were written during the exile
   2. He made this assertion because he couldn't believe that an eighth century writer could have predicted the fall of Jerusalem (587 B.C.), much less the rise of Cyrus the Great, who restored the exiles in 538 B.C.
2. Ernst Rosenmueller from Leipzig (1768-1835)
   1. He expressed doubts about chapters 13 and 14.
   2. His reasoning was, "If Isaiah could not have written chapters 40-66 because it predicts things he never saw, how could he have written a similar set of predictions in these chapters?"
      1. Rosenmueller began the process of denying Isaiah's authorship of much of chapters 1-39.
3. Bernard Duhm and K. Marti - Rise of Trito-Isaiah Theory

1. Around the turn of the last century--from 1892 to 1900) Bernard Duhm and K. Marti claimed that they had found evidence--from the text of Isaiah itself--that chapters 56-66 were written by Trito-Isaiah (and should be separated from chapters 40-55).
   1. They argued that Trito-Isaiah wrote his material in Jerusalem around the time of Ezra (450 B.C.)
   2. Duhm argued that Jewish writers inserted their own writings throughout the book of Isaiah (as late as the first century B.C.).
   3. In this view the book of Isaiah--far from being the work of one man, was a patchwork quilt of helter-skelter insertions and editings by anonymous Jews.