That not Joshua, but Moses himself, wrote this whole chapter, think Josephus (bk. 4, last ch.), Origen (bk. 2 Against Celsus), [and] Abulensis (on ch. 1 of Joshua, quest. 11). “It is not certain,” he says, “whether Ezra [Esdras] wrote that, or Moses while living.” But if you should ask them how [Moses] [went up] into the mountain—
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—[how Moses could] ascend [into the mountain], and, [being] there dead and buried in the valley, could write [it] — they answer [that] he did it by a prophetic spirit. For prophets are wont to use past [tenses] even for future [things]. This is indeed something. But not only this so-frequent placing of past [tenses for] future [things] signifies rather another author, but also that which is said [in] v. 6: “No man has known his sepulchre unto the present day.” For, as Abulensis rightly reasons (q. 3), these words signify [that] Moses’s sepulchre was unknown up to that very time in which that author was living and writing. Therefore he was not Moses himself — who, [being] then both dead and buried, was neither living nor writing — but another. And some suspected this [author] to be Ezra [Esdras]. But that it was Joshua himself, the same Abulensis hands down in the same place, and quest. 4; and it is more probable. Because he succeeded him [Moses] both in prophecy and in the governing of the people, and was both his minister and disciple, so that he deservedly ought to hand down to posterity the most happy — and plainly admirable — end of so great a master, teacher, and prince of his. For who would believe [that] these [matters] were wrapped in silence before Ezra, and illustrated by no light of letters? But there are [those] who judge the whole chapter [was] written by that same Joshua; others [judge] only from v. 5 to the end; others, finally, [judge] only these words from that chapter [to be his]: “And no man has known his sepulchre unto the present day.” The first and the third opinion Abulensis attributes to others; the middle he embraces. And the same is [the opinion] of the Rabbis (ch. 1 [of] Baba Bathra, in the Talmud), and of Isidore Clarius’s scholia (on ch. 1 of Joshua); and it pleases me well enough — but the first [pleases me] more. For, since the writer here acts [as] a historian, his narration seems to be taken historically, not prophetically. And thus all [things] cohere more, and are plainer. Except that from those [words], v. 10 — “And there arose not again a prophet in Israel, like Moses” — a reasoning [must] be instituted about the future times too, in this manner. If Joshua rightly and truly said that, in his times, no prophet equal to Moses had yet arisen, how much less was [one] about to arise afterward? For if not even Joshua himself [was] equal to him, who else — [one] who is indeed a mere man — could ever be equalled to him? Nor otherwise — even if we referred this to Ezra’s times — must [we] reason about the times that followed too. Yet in the comparison of the prophets there is a certain difficulty, about which Lyra and others [treat] at the beginning of the Psalms; Abulensis [on] Num. 12; I [treat it] on Isaiah ch. 1. But whether Joshua himself wrote the book marked with his own name, which now follows, will be said in the second Prolegomenon of that book. Certainly St. Athanasius, at the end of the Letter to Marcellinus (if not the Latin translator, but the Greek text be read), seems to affirm [that] God bade Joshua, now constituted Leader, write Deuteronomy [along with] the Law of Moses. But what proof is there of this? — unless he means what the Rabbis also teach: [that] the king or prince of the people, when he was advanced to the government, had to copy out Deuteronomy for himself alone, even if he already, beforehand, had it copied out [for himself] as a private man.