Trent,
The article describes fairly accurately the difference between the classic understanding of the authorship of Isaiah and what we might describe as relatively "conservative" critical views on authorship such as those of men like Christopher Seitz and John Goldingay (who follow in the tradition of A.B. Davidson, against whom Allis was writing, and H.H. Rowley, who critiqued Allis' view). It is clear that the author's sympathies lie with the latter.
The fundamental issues are those that I discuss in my opening lecture in my prophets class every semester. On the one hand, we must not adopt a knee-jerk conservatism merely for the sake of it. It is clear that some minor editorial redaction has taken place on the Pentateuch (e.g. the place name of Dan in Genesis 14, and the final chapter which describes the death of Moses and the absence of a prophet like him since then). The same is clearly true for some of the prophets. Ezekiel 1:2-3 clearly explains who the "I" of verse 1 is for an audience unfamiliar with the prophet; likewise, the final chapter of Jeremiah may well have been added by a later hand (perhaps Baruch?), unless the prophet himself lived to an extreme old age in Egypt. We have no problem with "late" authors interpreting the significance of earlier events for a contemporary audience (Chronicles, for example, as well as Genesis being authored hundreds of years later by Moses). We have no problem with scribes recording the material of their teachers or different editions of Biblical books (see Jer. 36:6 for both).
The problem is that critical scholarship goes much further than that. It assumes that prophecies purporting to foretell the future (in anything more than the sense of predicting who is likely to win the AL East next season) are made up after the event. Interestingly, this is not necessarily entailed by late authorship. Moses records the blessing of Jacob in Genesis 48-49, many years after those prophecies have already begun to be fulfilled. The key divergence, however, is our insistence that Jacob actually said these things ahead of time. So too, if later disciples were to be recording the words of Isaiah, we would have to insist that Isaiah had actually said these things earlier, which then removes anything that is gained by positing the work of the later disciples in the first place! This is like the argument that later authors inserted laws into the mouth of Moses in the Pentateuch to give them greater authority.
For all the protestation that predictive prophecy is not really being ruled out, the result is that in practice it is eliminated. John Goldingay's work on Isaiah and Daniel, helpful though it is in many ways, is a case in point. He has remarkably little to say on Isaiah 44:6-8, where the Lord hangs his claim to uniqueness on his ability to foretell the future. It would be easy for any of the idols to make a similar claim, of course. The thing that would really make the Lord's uniqueness clear would be for him to make some very specific predictions and then carry them out... Hence the Lord's insistence in Ezekiel that when the things prophesied come about the people will know that there has a prophet among them.
Perhaps not enough attention has been paid to the rhetorical function of detailed predictions of the distant future on the prophet's immediate audience, however. It is taken as axiomatic that unless a prophecy is to be fulfilled immediately, it is irrelevant to the hearers. This is clearly nonsense, as any good pastor knows. The great ultimate battle of Armageddon between the forces of light and darkness may not happen in our lifetimes (and certainly did not happen during the lifetimes of the original audience of John's hearers) but is it impossible to preach on it profitably in the meantime? So too, the anticipation of the future fulfillment of an extremely detailed prophecy of hope can encourage the faith and hope of an audience who knows that they will not personally live to see it fulfilled. Rhetorically, that has to be the literary function of passages like Daniel 11: Daniel himself can have had little detailed knowledge about how the revelation shown to him would come about, but it taught him at least two very relevant truths: 1) the end is not yet nigh - the seventy years of Israel's exile that were almost at an end in his day would not bring about the end of history; there was much more for God's people to suffer before that day; and 2) God was in control of every minute detail of history - history is not a "trashbag of circumstances blown open in the wind" but a carefully orchestrated story by which God is working his purposes out. That message is as relevant to a 6th century audience looking ahead to these events by faith as it is to a second century audience looking back on the precise fulfillment of them. The same is true of Isaiah's prophecies of a restoration for God's people after the Babylonian catastrophe (which is already anticipated by Isaiah himself in Isaiah 39!): they form a message of hope to the small group of the faithful in the 8th century BC who believed the prophet's words ahead of time.
