Why so much difficulty? Because the ‘consensus’ of the scientific Biblical Scholars and archaeologist has been like the consensus of climatologists. At first the same personality driven hubris that inspired the research and scholarship translated into all-knowing overblown pronouncements as to how the Scriptures came to be. And once the field was established and the chairs endowed and departments furnished — it was all dogmatic politically empowering assertion of ‘well established’ facts. It was fiercely protective of its ‘intellectual property’ and aggressively shut down or fenced out all competition.
As an establishment, mostly German based, it showed absolute loathing for Jewish traditions as to the provenance of the Scriptures, despite the fact that the narrative and facts per those traditions were and remain highly fidelic, unchanged over thousands of years, and have always shown exacting levels of scholarship and continuity.
These secular, Christian and Catholic scholars developed a consensus history of when the Bible was written down that put it after the Jewish exiles to Babylon. That’s a thousand years after Moses.
It is the huge inertia of the intellectual establishment of Bible Scholarship that has made it difficult to consider challenges to the orthodoxy.
“These secular, Christian and Catholic scholars developed a consensus history of when the Bible was written down that put it after the Jewish exiles to Babylon. That’s a thousand years after Moses.”
That means they’ve devoted themselves to a document they believe is fictional. The Bible itself says when it was written. Must cause them some cognitive dissonance, to say the least.
There is no shortage of left-wing Catholic "scholars" who developed a lot of stupid things. However, it is the historical and traditional opinion of the Catholic Church that the Pentateuch was written by Moses at least in essential parts, -- perhaps the part where Moses's death is described was added later, or assistants helped in some way.