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Chapter 20 - From the Divine Oracles to the Higher Criticism
Beginnings of Scientific Interpretation
At the base of the vast structure of the older scriptural
interpretation were certain ideas regarding the first five books
of the Old Testament. It was taken for granted that they had been
dictated by the Almighty to Moses about fifteen hundred years
before our era; that some parts of them, indeed, had been written
by the corporeal finger of Jehovah, and that all parts gave not
merely his thoughts but his exact phraseology. It was also held,
virtually by the universal Church, that while every narrative or
statement in these books is a precise statement of historical or
scientific fact, yet that the entire text contains vast hidden
meanings. Such was the rule: the exceptions made by a few
interpreters here and there only confirmed it. Even the
indifference of St. Jerome to the doctrine of Mosaic authorship
did not prevent its ripening into a dogma.
The book of Genesis was universally held to be an account, not
only divinely comprehensive but miraculously exact, of the creation
and of the beginnings of life on the earth; an account to which all
discoveries in every branch of science must, under pains and
penalties, be made to conform. In English-speaking lands this has
lasted until our own time: the most eminent of recent English
biologists has told us how in every path of natural science he has,
at some stage in his career, come across a barrier labelled "No
thoroughfare Moses."
A favourite subject of theological eloquence was the perfection of
the Pentateuch, and especially of Genesis, not only as a record of
the past, but as a revelation of the future.
The culmination of this view in the Protestant Church was the
Pansophia Mosaica of Pfeiffer, a Lutheran general superintendent,
or bishop, in northern Germany, near the beginning of the
seventeenth century. He declared that the text of Genesis "must be
received strictly"; that "it contains all knowledge, human and
divine"; that "twenty-eight articles of the Augsburg Confession are
to be found in it"; that "it is an arsenal of arguments against all
sects and sorts of atheists, pagans, Jews, Turks, Tartars, papists,
Calvinists, Socinians, and Baptists"; "the source of all sciences
and arts, including law, medicine, philosophy, and rhetoric"; "the
source and essence of all histories and of all professions, trades,
and works"; "an exhibition of all virtues and vices"; "the origin
of all consolation."
This utterance resounded through Germany from pulpit to pulpit,
growing in strength and volume, until a century later it was echoed
back by Huet, the eminent bishop and commentator of France. He
cited a hundred authors, sacred and profane, to prove that Moses
wrote the Pentateuch; and not only this, but that from the Jewish
lawgiver came the heathen theology - that Moses was, in fact, nearly
the whole pagan pantheon rolled into one, and really the being
worshipped under such names as Bacchus, Adonis, and Apollo.
About the middle of the twelfth century came, so far as the world
now knows, the first gainsayer of this general theory. Then it was
that Aben Ezra, the greatest biblical scholar of the Middle Ages,
ventured very discreetly to call attention to certain points in the
Pentateuch incompatible with the belief that the whole of it had
been written by Moses and handed down in its original form. His
opinion was based upon the well-known texts which have turned all
really eminent biblical scholars in the nineteenth century from the
old view by showing the Mosaic authorship of the five books in
their present form to be clearly disproved by the books themselves;
and, among these texts, accounts of Moses' own death and burial, as
well as statements based on names, events, and conditions which
only came into being ages after the time of Moses.
But Aben Ezra had evidently no aspirations for martyrdom; he
fathered the idea upon a rabbi of a previous generation, and,
having veiled his statement in an enigma, added the caution, "Let
him who understands hold his tongue."
For about four centuries the learned world followed the prudent
rabbi's advice, and then two noted scholars, one of them a
Protestant, the other a Catholic, revived his idea. The first of
these, Carlstadt, insisted that the authorship of the Pentateuch
was unknown and unknowable; the other, Andreas Maes, expressed his
opinion in terms which would not now offend the most orthodox, that
the Pentateuch had been edited by Ezra, and had received in the
process sundry divinely inspired words and phrases to clear the
meaning. Both these innovators were dealt with promptly: Carlstadt
was, for this and other troublesome ideas, suppressed with the
applause of the Protestant Church; and the book of Maes was placed
by the older Church on the Index.
But as we now look back over the Revival of Learning, the Age of
Discovery, and the Reformation, we can see clearly that powerful as
the older Church then was, and powerful as the Reformed Church was
to be, there was at work something far more mighty than either or
than both; and this was a great law of nature - the law of evolution
through differentiation. Obedient to this law there now began to
arise, both within the Church and without it, a new body of
scholars - not so much theologians as searchers for truth by
scientific methods. Some, like Cusa, were ecclesiastics; some, like
Valla, Erasmus, and the Scaligers, were not such in any real sense;
but whether in holy orders, really, nominally, or not at all, they
were, first of all, literary and scientific investigators.
During the sixteenth century a strong impulse was given to more
thorough research by several very remarkable triumphs of the
critical method as developed by this new class of men, and two of
these ought here to receive attention on account of their influence
upon the whole after course of human thought.
For many centuries the Decretals bearing the great name of Isidore
had been cherished as among the most valued muniments of the
Church. They contained what claimed to be a mass of canons, letters
of popes, decrees of councils, and the like, from the days of the
apostles down to the eighth century - all supporting at important
points the doctrine, the discipline, the ceremonial, and various
high claims of the Church and its hierarchy.
But in the fifteenth century that sturdy German thinker, Cardinal
Nicholas of Cusa, insisted on examining these documents and on
applying to them the same thorough research and patient thought
which led him, even before Copernicus, to detect the error of the
Ptolemaic astronomy.
As a result, he avowed his scepticism regarding this pious
literature; other close thinkers followed him in investigating it,
and it was soon found a tissue of absurd anachronisms, with endless
clashing and confusion of events and persons.
For a time heroic attempts were made by Church authorities to cover
up these facts. Scholars revealing them were frowned upon, even
persecuted, and their works placed upon the Index; scholars
explaining them away - the "apologists" or "reconcilers" of that
day - were rewarded with Church preferment, one of them securing for
a very feeble treatise a cardinal's hat. But all in vain; these
writings were at length acknowledged by all scholars of note, Catholic
and Protestant, to be mainly a mass of devoutly cunning forgeries.
While the eyes of scholars were thus opened as never before to the
skill of early Church zealots in forging documents useful to
ecclesiasticism, another discovery revealed their equal skill in
forging documents useful to theology.
For more than a thousand years great stress had been laid by
theologians upon the writings ascribed to Dionysius the Areopagite,
the Athenian convert of St. Paul. Claiming to come from one so near
the great apostle, they were prized as a most precious supplement
to Holy Writ. A belief was developed that when St. Paul had
returned to earth, after having been "caught up to the third
heaven," he had revealed to Dionysius the things he had seen. Hence
it was that the varied pictures given in these writings of the
heavenly hierarchy and the angelic ministers of the Almighty took
strong hold upon the imagination of the universal Church: their
theological statements sank deeply into the hearts and minds of the
Mystics of the twelfth century and the Platonists of the fifteenth;
and the ten epistles they contained, addressed to St. John, to
Titus, to Polycarp, and others of the earliest period, were
considered treasures of sacred history. An Emperor of the East had
sent these writings to an Emperor of the West as the most precious
of imperial gifts. Scotus Erigena had translated them; St. Thomas
Aquinas had expounded them; Dante had glorified them; Albert the
Great had claimed that they were virtually given by St. Paul and
inspired by the Holy Ghost. Their authenticity was taken for granted
by fathers, doctors, popes, councils, and the universal Church.
But now, in the glow of the Renascence, all this treasure was found
to be but dross. Investigators in the old Church and in the new
joined in proving that the great mass of it was spurious. To say
nothing of other evidences, it failed to stand the simplest of all
tests, for these writings constantly presupposed institutions and
referred to events of much later date than the time of Dionysius;
they were at length acknowledged by all authorities worthy of the
name, Catholic as well as Protestant, to be simply - like the
Isidorian Decretals - pious frauds.
Thus arose an atmosphere of criticism very different from the
atmosphere of literary docility and acquiescence of the "Ages of
Faith"; thus it came that great scholars in all parts of Europe
began to realize, as never before, the part which theological skill
and ecclesiastical zeal had taken in the development of spurious
sacred literature; thus was stimulated a new energy in research
into all ancient documents, no matter what their claims.
To strengthen this feeling and to intensify the stimulating
qualities of this new atmosphere came, as we have seen, the
researches and revelations of Valla regarding the forged Letter of
Christ to Abgarus, the fraudulent Donation of Constantine, and the
late date of the Apostles' Creed; and, to give this feeling
direction toward the Hebrew and Christian sacred books, came the
example of Erasmus.
Naturally, then, in this new atmosphere the bolder scholars of
Europe soon began to push mnore vigorously the researches begun
centuries before by Aben Ezra, and the next efforts of these men
were seen about the middle of the seventeenth century, when Hobbes,
in his Leviathan, and La Pevrere, in his Preadamites, took them up
and developed them still further. The result came speedily. Hobbes,
for this and other sins, was put under the ban, even by the
political party which sorely needed him, and was regarded generally
as an outcast; while La Peyrere, for this and other heresies, was
thrown into prison by the Grand Vicar of Mechlin, and kept there
until he fullv retracted: his book was refuted by seven theologians
within a year after its appearance, and within a generation
thirty-six elaborate answers to it had appeared: the Parliament of
Paris ordered it to be burned by the hangman.
In 1670 came an utterance vastly more important, by a man far
greater than any of these - the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus of
Spinoza. Reverently but firmly he went much more deeply into the
subject. Suggesting new arguments and recasting the old, he summed
up all with judicial fairness, and showed that Moses could not have
been the author of the Pentateuch in the form then existing; that
there had been glosses and revisions; that the biblical books had
grown up as a literature; that, though great truths are to be found
in them, and they are to be regarded as a divine revelation, the
old claims of inerrancy for them can not be maintained; that in
studying them men had been misled by mistaking human conceptions
for divine meanings; that, while prophets have been inspired, the
prophetic faculty has not been the dowry of the Jewish people
alone; that to look for exact knowledge of natural and spiritual
phenomena in the sacred books is an utter mistake; and that the
narratives of the Old and New Testaments, while they surpass those
of profane history, differ among themselves not only in literary
merit, but in the value of the doctrines they inculcate. As to the
authorship of the Pentateuch, he arrived at the conclusion that it
was written long after Moses, but that Moses may have written some
books from which it was compiled - as, for example, those which are
mentioned in the Scriptures, the Book of the Wars of God, the Book
of the Covenant, and the like - and that the many repetitions and
contradictions in the various books show a lack of careful editing
as well as a variety of original sources. Spinoza then went on to
throw light into some other books of the Old and New Testaments,
and added two general statements which have proved exceedingly
serviceable, for they contain the germs of all modern broad
churchmanship; and the first of them gave the formula which was
destined in our own time to save to the Anglican Church a large
number of her noblest sons: this was, that "sacred Scripture
contains the Word of God, and in so far as it contains it is
incorruptible"; the second was, that "error in speculative
doctrine is not impious."
Though published in various editions, the book seemed to produce
little effect upon the world at that time; but its result to
Spinoza himself was none the less serious. Though so deeply
religious that Novalis spoke of him as "a God-intoxicated man," and
Schleiermacher called him a "saint," he had been, for the earlier
expression of some of the opinions it contained, abhorred as a
heretic both by Jews and Christians: from the synagogue he was cut
off by a public curse, and by the Church he was now regarded as in
some sort a forerunner of Antichrist. For all this, he showed no
resentment, but devoted himself quietly to his studies, and to the
simple manual labour by which he supported himself; declined all
proffered honours, among them a professorship at Heidelberg; found
pleasure only in the society of a few friends as gentle and
affectionate as himself; and died contentedly, without seeing any
widespread effect of his doctrine other than the prevailing
abhorrence of himself.
Perhaps in all the seventeenth century there was no man whom Jesus
of Nazareth would have more deeply loved, and no life which he
would have more warmly approved; yet down to a very recent period
this hatred for Spinoza has continued. When, about 1880, it was
proposed to erect a monument to him at Amsterdam, discourses were
given in churches and synagogues prophesying the wrath of Heaven
upon the city for such a profanation; and when the monument was
finished, the police were obliged to exert themselves to prevent
injury to the statue and to the eminent scholars who unveiled it.
But the ideas of Spinoza at last secured recognition. They had sunk
deeply into the hearts and minds of various leaders of thought,
and, most important of all, into the heart and mind of Lessing; he
brought them to bear in his treatise on the Education of the
World, as well as in his drama, Nathan the Wise, and both these
works have spoken with power to every generation since.
In France, also, came the same healthful evolution of thought. For
generations scholars had known that multitudes of errors had crept
into the sacred text. Robert Stephens had found over two thousand
variations in the oldest manuscripts of the Old Testament, and in
1633 Jean Morin, a priest of the Oratory, pointed out clearly many
of the most glaring of these. Seventeen years later, in spite of
the most earnest Protestant efforts to suppress his work, Cappellus
gave forth his Critica Sacra, demonstrating not only that the vowel
pointing of Scripture was not divinely inspired, but that the
Hebrew text itself, from which the modern translations were made,
is full of errors due to the carelessness, ignorance, and doctrinal
zeal of early scribes, and that there had clearly been no miraculous
preservation of the "original autographs" of the sacred books.
While orthodox France was under the uneasiness and alarm thus
caused, appeared a Critical History of the Old Testament by Richard
Simon, a priest of the Oratory. He was a thoroughly religious man
and an acute scholar, whose whole purpose was to develop truths
which he believed healthful to the Church and to mankind. But he
denied that Moses was the author of the Pentateuch, and exhibited
the internal evidence, now so well known, that the books were
composed much later by various persons, and edited later still. He
also showed that other parts of the Old Testament had been compiled
from older sources, and attacked the time-honoured theory that
Hebrew was the primitive language of mankind. The whole character
of his book was such that in these days it would pass, on the
whole, as conservative and orthodox; it had been approved by the
censor in 1678, and printed, when the table of contents and a page
of the preface were shown to Bossuet. The great bishop and
theologian was instantly aroused; he pronounced the work "a mass of
impieties and a bulwark of irreligion"; his biographer tells us
that, although it was Holy Thursday, the bishop, in spite of the
solemnity of the day, hastened at once to the Chancellor Le
Tellier, and secured an order to stop the publication of the book
and to burn the whole edition of it. Fortunately, a few copies
were rescued, and a few years later the work found a new publisher
in Holland; yet not until there had been attached to it, evidently
by some Protestant divine of authority, an essay warning the reader
against its dangerous doctrines. Two years later a translation was
published in England.
This first work of Simon was followed by others, in which he
sought, in the interest of scriptural truth, to throw a new and
purer light upon our sacred literature; but Bossuet proved
implacable. Although unable to suppress all of Simon's works, he
was able to drive him from the Oratory, and to bring him into
disrepute among the very men who ought to have been proud of him as
Frenchmen and thankful to him as Christians.
But other scholars of eminence were now working in this field, and
chief among them Le Clerc. Virtually driven out of Geneva, he took
refuge at Amsterdam, and there published a series of works upon the
Hebrew language, the interpretation of Scripture, and the like. In
these he combated the prevalent idea that Hebrew was the primitive
tongue, expressed the opinion that in the plural form of the word
used in Genesis for God, "Elohim," there is a trace of Chaldean
polytheism, and, in his discussion on the serpent who tempted Eve,
curiously anticipated modern geological and zoological ideas by
quietly confessing his inability to see how depriving the serpent
of feet and compelling him to go on his belly could be
punishment - since all this was natural to the animal. He also
ventured quasi-scientific explanations of the confusion of tongues
at Babel, the destruction of Sodom, the conversion of Lot's wife
into a pillar of salt, and the dividing of the Red Sea. As to the
Pentateuch in general, he completely rejected the idea that it was
written by Moses. But his most permanent gift to the thinking world
was his answer to those who insisted upon the reference by Christ
and his apostles to Moses as the author of the Pentateuch. The
answer became a formula which has proved effective from his day to
ours: "Our Lord and his apostles did not come into this world to
teach criticism to the Jews, and hence spoke according to the
common opinion."
Against all these scholars came a theological storm, but it raged
most pitilessly against Le Clerc. Such renowned theologians as
Carpzov in Germany, Witsius in Holland, and Huet in France berated
him unmercifully and overwhelmed him with assertions which still
fill us with wonder. That of Huet, attributing the origin of pagan
as well as Christian theology to Moses, we have already seen; but
Carpzov showed that Protestantism could not be outdone by
Catholicism when he declared, in the face of all modern knowledge,
that not only the matter but the exact form and words of the Bible
had been divinely transmitted to the modern world free from all error.
At this Le Clerc stood aghast, and finally stammered out a sort of
half recantation.
During the eighteenth century constant additions were made to the
enormous structure of orthodox scriptural interpretation, some of
them gaining the applause of the Christian world then, though
nearly all are utterly discredited now. But in 1753 appeared two
contributions of permanent influence, though differing vastly in
value. In the comparative estimate of these two works the world has
seen a remarkable reversal of public opinion.
The first of these was Bishop Lowth's Prelections upon the Sacred
Poetry of the Hebrews. In this was well brought out that
characteristic of Hebrew poetry to which it owes so much of its
peculiar charm - its parallelism.
The second of these books was Astruc's Conjectures on the Original
Memoirs which Moses used in composing the Book of Genesis. In this
was for the first time clearly revealed the fact that, amid various
fragments of old writings, at least two main narratives enter into
the composition of Genesis; that in the first of these is generally
used as an appellation of the Almighty the word "Elohim," and in
the second the word "Yahveh" (Jehovah); that each narrative has
characteristics of its own, in thought and expression, which
distinguish it from the other; that, by separating these, two clear
and distinct narratives may be obtained, each consistent with
itself, and that thus, and thus alone, can be explained the
repetitions, discrepancies, and contradictions in Genesis which so
long baffled the ingenuity of commentators, especially the two
accounts of the creation, so utterly inconsistent with each other.
Interesting as was Lowth's book, this work by Astruc was, as the
thinking world now acknowledges, infinitely more important; it was,
indeed, the most valuable single contribution ever made to biblical
study. But such was not the judgment of the world then. While
Lowth's book was covered with honour and its author promoted from
the bishopric of St. David's to that of London, and even offered
the primacy, Astruc and his book were covered with reproach.
Though, as an orthodox Catholic, he had mainly desired to reassert
the authorship of Moses against the argument of Spinoza, he
received no thanks on that account. Theologians of all creeds
sneered at him as a doctor of medicine who had blundered beyond his
province; his fellow-Catholics in France bitterly denounced him as
a heretic; and in Germany the great Protestant theologian,
Michaelis, who had edited and exalted Lowth's work, poured contempt
over Astruc as an ignoramus.
The case of Astruc is one of the many which show the wonderful
power of the older theological reasoning to close the strongest
minds against the clearest truths. The fact which he discovered is
now as definitely established as any in the whole range of
literature or science. It has become as clear as the day, and yet
for two thousand years the minds of professional theologians,
Jewish and Christian, were unable to detect it. Not until this
eminent physician applied to the subject a mind trained in making
scientific distinctions was it given to the world.
It was, of course, not possible even for so eminent a scholar as
Michaelis to pooh-pooh down a discovery so pregnant; and, curiously
enough, it was one of Michaelis's own scholars, Eichhorn, who did
the main work in bringing the new truth to bear upon the world. He,
with others, developed out of it the theory that Genesis, and
indeed the Pentateuch, is made up entirely of fragments of old
writings, mainly disjointed. But they did far more than this: they
impressed upon the thinking part of Christendom the fact that the
Bible is not a book, but a literature; that the style is not
supernatural and unique, but simply the Oriental style of the lands
and times in which its various parts were written; and that these
must be studied in the light of the modes of thought and statement
and the literary habits generally of Oriental peoples. From
Eichhorn's time the process which, by historical, philological, and
textual research, brings out the truth regarding this literature
has been known as "the higher criticism."
He was a deeply religious man, and the mainspring of his efforts
was the desire to bring back to the Church the educated classes,
who had been repelled by the stiff Lutheran orthodoxy; but this
only increased hostility to him. Opposition met him in Germany at
every turn; and in England, Lloyd, Regius Professor of Hebrew at
Cambridge, who sought patronage for a translation of Eichhorn's
work, was met generally with contempt and frequently with insult.
Throughout Catholic Germany it was even worse. In 1774 Isenbiehl,
a priest at Mayence who had distinguished himself as a Greek and
Hebrew scholar, happened to question the usual interpretation of
the passage in Isaiah which refers to the virgin-born Immanuel, and
showed then - what every competent critic knows now - that it had
reference to events looked for in older Jewish history. The
censorship and faculty of theology attacked him at once and brought
him before the elector. Luckily, this potentate was one of the old
easy-going prince-bishops, and contented himself with telling the
priest that, though his contention was perhaps true, he "must
remain in the old paths, and avoid everything likely to make trouble."
But at the elector's death, soon afterward, the theologians renewed
the attack, threw Isenbiehl out of his professorship and degraded
him. One insult deserves mention for its ingenuity. It was declared
that he - the successful and brilliant professor - showed by the
obnoxious interpretation that he had not yet rightly learned the
Scriptures; he was therefore sent back to the benches of the
theological school, and made to take his seat among the ingenuous
youth who were conning the rudiments of theology.
At this he made a new statement, so carefully guarded that it
disarmed many of his enemies, and his high scholarship soon won for
him a new professorship of Greek - the condition being that he
should cease writing upon Scripture. But a crafty bookseller having
republished his former book, and having protected himself by
keeping the place and date of publication secret, a new storm fell
upon the author; he was again removed from his professorship and
thrown into prison; his book was forbidden, and all copies of it in
that part of Germany were confiscated.
In 1778, having escaped from prison, he sought refuge with another
of the minor rulers who in blissful unconsciousness were doing
their worst while awaiting the French Revolution, but was at once
delivered up to the Mayence authorities and again thrown into prison.
The Pope, Pius VI, now intervened with a brief on Isenbiehl's book,
declaring it "horrible, false, perverse, destructive, tainted with
heresy," and excommunicating all who should read it. At this,
Isenbiehl, declaring that he had written it in the hope of doing a
service to the Church, recanted, and vegetated in obscurity until
his death in 1818.
But, despite theological faculties, prince-bishops, and even popes,
the new current of thought increased in strength and volume, and
into it at the end of the eighteenth century came important
contributions from two sources widely separated and most dissimilar.
The first of these, which gave a stimulus not yet exhausted, was
the work of Herder. By a remarkable intuition he had anticipated
some of those ideas of an evolutionary process in nature and in
literature which first gained full recognition nearly three
quarters of a century after him; but his greatest service in the
field of biblical study was his work, at once profound and
brilliant, The Spirit of Hebrew Poetry. In this field he eclipsed
Bishop Lowth. Among other things of importance, he showed that the
Psalms were by different authors and of different periods - the
bloom of a great poetic literature. Until his time no one had so
clearly done justice to their sublimity and beauty; but most
striking of all was his discussion of Solomon's Song. For over
twenty centuries it had been customary to attribute to it mystical
meanings. If here and there some man saw the truth, he was careful,
like Aben Ezra, to speak with bated breath.
The penalty for any more honest interpretation was seen, among
Protestants, when Calvin and Beza persecuted Castellio, covered him
with obloquy, and finally drove him to starvation and death, for
throwing light upon the real character of the Song of Songs; and
among Catholics it was seen when Philip II allowed the pious and
gifted Luis de Leon, for a similar offence, to be thrown into a
dungeon of the Inquisition and kept there for five years, until his
health was utterly shattered and his spirit so broken that he
consented to publish a new commentary on the song, "as theological
and obscure as the most orthodox could desire."
Here, too, we have an example of the efficiency of the older
biblical theology in fettering the stronger minds and in stupefying
the weaker. Just as the book of Genesis had to wait over two
thousand years for a physician to reveal the simplest fact
regarding its structure, so the Song of Songs had to wait even
longer for a poet to reveal not only its beauty but its character.
Commentators innumerable had interpreted it; St. Bernard had
preached over eighty sermons on its first two chapters; Palestrina
had set its most erotic parts to sacred music; Jews and Gentiles,
Catholics and Protestants, from Origen to Aben Ezra and from Luther
to Bossuet, had uncovered its deep meanings and had demonstrated it
to be anything and everything save that which it really is. Among
scores of these strange imaginations it was declared to represent
the love of Jehovah for Israel; the love of Christ for the Church;
the praises of the Blessed Virgin; the union of the soul with the
body; sacred history from the Exodus to the Messiah; Church history
from the Crucifixion to the Reformation; and some of the more acute
Protestant divines found in it references even to the religious
wars in Germany and to the Peace of Passau. In these days it seems
hard to imagine how really competent reasoners could thus argue
without laughing in each other's faces, after the manner of
Cicero's augurs. Herder showed Solomon's Song to be what the whole
thinking world now knows it to be - simply an Oriental love-poem.
But his frankness brought him into trouble: he was bitterly
assailed. Neither his noble character nor his genius availed him.
Obliged to flee from one pastorate to another, he at last found a
happy refuge at Weimar in the society of Goethe, Wieland, and Jean
Paul, and thence he exercised a powerful influence in removing
noxious and parasitic growths from religious thought.
It would hardly be possible to imagine a man more different from
Herder than was the other of the two who most influenced biblical
interpretation at the end of the eighteenth century. This was
Alexander Geddes - a Roman Catholic priest and a Scotchman. Having
at an early period attracted much attention by his scholarship, and
having received the very rare distinction, for a Catholic, of a
doctorate from the University of Aberdeen, he began publishing in
1792 a new translation of the Old Testament, and followed this in
1800 with a volume of critical remarks. In these he supported
mainly three views: first, that the Pentateuch in its present form
could not have been written by Moses; secondly, that it was the
work of various hands; and, thirdly, that it could not have been
written before the time of David. Although there was a fringe of
doubtful theories about them, these main conclusions, supported as
they were by deep research and cogent reasoning, are now recognised
as of great value. But such was not the orthodox opinion then.
Though a man of sincere piety, who throughout his entire life
remained firm in the faith of his fathers, he and his work were at
once condemnned: he was suspended by the Catholic authorities as a
misbeliever, denounced by Protestants as an infidel, and taunted by
both as "a would-be corrector of the Holy Ghost." Of course, by
this taunt was meant nothing more than that he dissented from
sundry ideas inherited from less enlightened times by the men who
just then happened to wield ecclesiastical power.
But not all the opposition to him could check the evolution of his
thought. A line of great men followed in these paths opened by
Astruc and Eichhorn, and broadened by Herder and Geddes. Of these
was De Wette, whose various works, especially his Introduction to
the Old Testament, gave a new impulse early in the nineteenth
century to fruitful thought throughout Christendom. In these
writings, while showing how largely myths and legends had entered
into the Hebrew sacred books, he threw especial light into the
books Deuteronomy and Chronicles. The former he showed to be, in
the main, a late priestly summary of law, and the latter a very
late priestly recast of early history. He had, indeed, to pay a
penalty for thus aiding the world in its march toward more truth,
for he was driven out of Germany, and obliged to take refuge in a
Swiss professorship; while Theodore Parker, who published an
English translation of his work, was, for this and similar sins,
virtually rejected by what claimed to be the most liberal of all
Christian bodies in the United States.
But contributions to the new thought continued from quarters whence
least was expected. Gesenius, by his Hebrew Grammar, and Ewald, by
his historical studies, greatly advanced it.
To them and to all like them during the middle years of the
nineteenth century was sturdily opposed the colossus of
orthodoxy - Hengstenberg. In him was combined the haughtiness of a
Prussian drill-sergeant, the zeal of a Spanish inquisitor, and the
flippant brutality of a French orthodox journalist. Behind him
stood the gifted but erratic Frederick William IV - a man admirably
fitted for a professorship of æ sthetics, but whom an inscrutable
fate had made King of Prussia. Both these rulers in the German
Israel arrayed all possible opposition against the great scholars
labouring in the new paths; but this opposition was vain: the
succession of acute and honest scholars contiuued: Vatke, Bleek,
Reuss, Graf, Kayser, Hupfeld, Delitzsch, Kuenen, and others wrought
on in Germany and Holland, steadily developing the new truth.
Especially to be mentioned among these is Hupfeld, who published in
1853 his treatise on The Sources of Genesis. Accepting the
Conjectures which Astruc had published just a hundred years
before, he established what has ever since been recognised by the
leading biblical commentators as the true basis of work upon the
Pentateuch - the fact that three true documents are combined in
Genesis, each with its own characteristics. He, too, had to pay a
price for letting more light upon the world. A determined attempt
was made to punish him. Though deeply religious in his nature and
aspirations, he was denounced in 1865 to the Prussian Government as
guilty of irreverence; but, to the credit of his noble and true
colleagues who trod in the more orthodox paths - men like Tholuck
and Julius Muller - the theological faculty of the University of
Halle protested against this persecuting effort, and it was brought
to naught.
The demonstrations of Hupfeld gave new life to biblical scholarship
in all lands. More and more clear became the evidence that
throughout the Pentateuch, and indeed in other parts of our sacred
books, there had been a fusion of various ideas, a confounding of
various epochs, and a compilation of various documents. Thus was
opened a new field of thought and work: in sifting out this
literature; in rearranging it; and in bringing it into proper
connection with the history of the Jewish race and of humanity.
Astruc and Hupfeld having thus found a key to the true character of
the "Mosaic" Scriptures, a second key was found which opened the
way to the secret of order in all this chaos. For many generations
one thing had especially puzzled commentators and given rise to
masses of futile "reconciliation": this was the patent fact that
such men as Samuel, David, Elijah, Isaiah, and indeed the whole
Jewish people down to the Exile, showed in all their utterances and
actions that they were utterly ignorant of that vast system of
ceremonial law which, according to the accounts attributed to Moses
and other parts of our sacred books, was in full force during their
time and during nearly a thousand years before the Exile. It was
held "always, everywhere, and by all," that in the Old Testament
the chronological order of revelation was: first, the law; secondly,
the Psalms; thirdly, the prophets. This belief continued
unchallenged during more than two thousand years, and until after
the middle of the nineteenth century.
Yet, as far back as 1835, Vatke at Berlin had, in his Religion of
the Old Testament, expressed his conviction that this belief was
unfounded. Reasoning that Jewish thought must have been subject to
the laws of development which govern other systems, he arrived at
the conclusion that the legislation ascribed to Moses, and
especially the elaborate paraphernalia and composite ceremonies of
the ritual, could not have come into being at a period so rude as
that depicted in the "Mosaic" accounts.
Although Vatke wrapped this statement in a mist of Hegelian
metaphysics, a sufficient number of watchmen on the walls of the
Prussian Zion saw its meaning, and an alarm was given. The
chroniclers tell us that "fear of failing in the examinations,
through knowing too much, kept students away from Vatke's
lectures." Naturally, while Hengstenberg and Frederick William IV
were commanding the forces of orthodoxy, Vatke thought it wise to
be silent.
Still, the new idea was in the air; indeed, it had been divined
about a year earlier, on the other side of the Rhine, by a scholar
well known as acute and thoughtful - Reuss, of Strasburg.
Unfortunately, he too was overawed, and he refrained from
publishing his thought during more than forty years. But his ideas
were caught by some of his most gifted scholars; and, of these,
Graf and Kayser developed them and had the courage to publish them.
At the same period this new master key was found and applied by a
greater man than any of these - by Kuenen, of Holland; and thus it
was that three eminent scholars, working in different parts of
Europe and on different lines, in spite of all obstacles, joined in
enforcing upon the thinking world the conviction that the complete
Levitical law had been established not at the beginning, but at the
end, of the Jewish nation - mainly, indeed, after the Jewish nation
as an independent political body had ceased to exist; that this
code had not been revealed in the childhood of Israel, but that it
had come into being in a perfectly natural way during Israel's
final decay - during the period when heroes and prophets had been
succeeded by priests. Thus was the historical and psychological
evolution of Jewish institutions brought into harmony with the
natural development of human thought; elaborate ceremonial
institutions being shown to have come after the ruder beginnings
of religious development instead of before them. Thus came a new
impulse to research, and the fruitage was abundant; the older
theological interpretation, with its insoluble puzzles, yielded on
all sides.
The lead in the new epoch thus opened was taken by Kuenen. Starting
with strong prepossessions in favour of the older thought, and even
with violent utterances against some of the supporters of the new
view, he was borne on by his love of truth, until his great work,
The Religion of Israel, published in 1869, attracted the attention
of thinking scholars throughout the world by its arguments in
favour of the upward movement. From him now came a third master key
to the mystery; for he showed that the true opening point for
research into the history and literature of Israel is to be found
in the utterances of the great prophets of the eighth century
before our era. Starting from these, he opened new paths into the
periods preceding and following them. Recognising the fact that the
religion of Israel was, like other great world religions, a
development of higher ideas out of lower, he led men to bring
deeper thinking and wider research into the great problem. With
ample learning and irresistible logic he proved that Old Testament
history is largely mingled with myth and legend; that not only were
the laws attributed to Moses in the main a far later development,
but that much of their historical setting was an afterthought; also
that Old Testament prophecy was never supernaturally predictive,
and least of all predictive of events recorded in the New
Testament. Thus it was that his genius gave to the thinking world
a new point of view, and a masterly exhibition of the true method
of study. Justly has one of the most eminent divines of the
contemporary Anglican Church indorsed the statement of another
eminent scholar, that "Kuenen stood upon his watch-tower, as it
were the conscience of Old Testament science"; that his work is
characterized "not merely by fine scholarship, critical insight,
historical sense, and a religious nature, but also by an
incorruptible conscientiousness, and a majestic devotion to the
quest of truth."
Thus was established the science of biblical criticism. And now the
question was, whether the Church of northern Germany would accept
this great gift - the fruit of centuries of devoted toil and
self-sacrifice - and take the lead of Christendom in and by it.
The great curse of Theology and Ecclesiasticism has always been
their tendency to sacrifice large interests to small - Charity to
Creed, Unity to Uniformity, Fact to Tradition, Ethics to Dogma.
And now there were symptoms throughout the governing bodies of the
Reformed churches indicating a determination to sacrifice
leadership in this new thought to ease in orthodoxy. Every
revelation of new knowledge encountered outcry, opposition, and
repression; and, what was worse, the ill-judged declarations of
some unwise workers in the critical field were seized upon and used
to discredit all fruitful research. Fortunately, a man now appeared
who both met all this opposition successfully, and put aside all
the half truths or specious untruths urged by minor critics whose
zeal outran their discretion. This was a great constructive
scholar - not a destroyer, but a builder - Wellhausen. Reverently,
but honestly and courageously, with clearness, fulness, and
convicting force, he summed up the conquests of scientific
criticism as bearing on Hebrew history and literature. These
conquests had reduced the vast structures which theologians had
during ages been erecting over the sacred text to shapeless ruin
and rubbish: this rubbish he removed, and brought out from beneath
it the reality. He showed Jewish history as an evolution obedient
to laws at work in all ages, and Jewish literature as a growth out
of individual, tribal, and national life. Thus was our sacred
history and literature given a beauty and high use which had long
been foreign to them. Thereby was a vast service rendered
immediately to Germany, and eventually to all mankind; and this
service was greatest of all in the domain of religion.
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