Sinai; based on a number of Bible verses and rabbinic statements, he therefore suggested that Moses made use of documents authored by the Patriarchs when redacting that book. This view is supported by some rabbinical sources and medieval commentaries which recognize that the Torah incorporates written texts and divine messages from before and after the time of Moses. Christian tradition According to the New Testament, Jesus himself recognised Moses as the author of at least some portions of the Pentateuch (e.g., the Gospel of John, verses ), and the early Christians therefore followed the rabbis. Like them, they addressed those passages which seemed to cast doubt on the Mosaic tradition: Jerome, for example, felt that "unto this day" implied an editor long after the time of Moses, presumably the 5th century BCE sage Ezra, and Martin Luther similarly concluded that the description of Moses' death was written by Joshua – but believed that the question itself was of no great importance. Jerome, Luther and others still believed that the bulk of the Pentateuch was written by Moses, even if a few phrases were not, but in the 17th century scholars began to seriously question its origins, leading Baruch Spinoza to declare that "the Pentateuch was not written by Moses but by someone else." This conclusion had major implications, for as the 18th century Jewish scholar David Levi pointed out to his Christian colleagues, "if any part [of the Torah] is once proved spurious, a door will be opened for another and another without end." As Levi had feared, the questioning of Mosaic authorship led to a profound skepticism towards the very idea of revealed religion, and by the late 19th century scholars almost universally accepted that the Book of Deuteronomy dated not from the time of Moses but from the 7th century BCE, with the Pentateuch as a whole being compiled by unknown editors from various originally distinct source-documents. The Catholic Church initially rejected such a position: a decree of the Pontifical Biblical Commission of 1906, entitled De mosaica authentia Pentateuchi ("On the authenticity of the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch") stating that Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch was not a subject of discussion. This started to change in 1943, when Pope Pius XII issued the encyclical Divino afflante Spiritu encouraging scholars to investigate the sacred texts utilizing such resources as recent discoveries in archaeology, ancient history, linguistics, and other