05 Chapter V The Interpretation of the Bible The Historical Method Literary Criticism

Chapter V The Interpretation of the Bible The Historical Method Literary Criticism THE basic task of interpretation, as the advocates of this method conceive it, is to establish the literal meaning of the sacred text for its first readers. In their insistence on the primacy of the literal meaning they do not deny or slight the poetic and figurative elements in the Scripture but insist that these elements be identified and interpreted according to the literary standards of the age in which they were produced. They do not deny that the Scriptures can have other values today than they have had in the past, but they see the task of defining these modern values as one transcending the field of historical criticism. The task which they assign to the interpreters of the Bible as their own peculiar task in a special discipline is the determination of the meaning of these documents in the time of their origin. This type of interpretation is essentially an application of the methods of historical study. It strives to be as objective as historical study can be.

It unhesitatingly submits its results to the most searching scholarly examination. It accepts correction and change, for it is supported by no dogma of infallibility. Unlike the modernizing methods described above, it brings no answers to the investigation. It comes with questions and with an eagerness to find the historical evidence which will establish the correct the intended meaning of a passage. It is full of hope, for it looks back upon a history of glorious achievement, but it promises no rush deliveries of adequate interpretations NO DISTINCTIVE TECHNIQUES

But, though it brings no ready-made answers to the study of the Christian literature, it does bring certain convictions as to method and procedure and the significance of evidence convictions which it shares with those who work in other areas of historical investigation. It assumes that Christianity is a movement like other religious movements; it believes that Christianity like all other religions inherited much, borrowed freely, and was constantly changing its primitive elements and as constantly adapting what it adopted. When it finds two very similar phenomena appearing in the same area at approximately the same time, it assumes the existence of some significant relationship between them. It has learned that hostility between religions does not exclude the influence of one upon the other.

It is convinced that the methods and techniques applied to the solution of problems in the Christian literature must not differ from the methods used in the study of similar problems in other literatures.

Take, for example, the problems involved in the miracle stories of the Bible. If the student of the Bible appeals to the general reliability of the biblical writers as guaranty of the accuracy of these stories, he must accept miracle stories from the pagan cults which are related by reliable writers. If the testimony of eyewitnesses is enough to establish the validity of these incidents, pagan miracles attested by eyewitnesses must be accepted also. The position of the conservative Protestant in regard to miracles is singularly indefensible in its limitation of miracles to those recorded in the Scriptures. This would bring the age of miracles to an end about the middle of the second century, but the Christian writers of the second, third, and fourth centuries are entirely unaware that the age of miracles is over and continue to report the miraculous achievements of Christians until modern times changed the basic world-view. The Roman historian Tacitus was a writer of more than average dependability and was decidedly against superstition and extravagance. It is significant, therefore, to find him accepting as fact a story of a double miraculous healing. When Vespasian was in Alexandria, a blind man and a cripple appealed to the emperor for healing. The sufferers were advised to make this supplication by Egyptian deities. Vespasian at first demurred but finally yielded to their importunity and healed them by applying his saliva to the eyes of the blind and stepping on the ankle of the cripple. Tacitus assures his readers that he received the story from eyewitnesses after the dynasty of Vespasian had left the throne, when flattery would not create such stories. The interpreter of Scripture who uses the historical method does not permit himself to use any means of explaining the healing of the blind man at the pool of Bethesda which he cannot use with equal effect to explain the healing by Vespasian in Alexandria. For the sake of emphasis and clarity, let it be said again that there are no methods of biblical study which are not at the same time methods of studying other religious literatures. This is not to deny that a student may need some particular tool in the study of the Christian Bible which he will not need elsewhere (e.g, a knowledge of biblical Aramaic) but only to insist on the general agreement in matters of importance for methodology between biblical scholarship and the scholarship of the humanities in general. The methods employed in the study of Plato and Plutarch, of Chaucer and Corneille, are also employed in the study of Isaiah and Paul.

We have seen in a preceding chapter the essential oneness in methods of textual criticism, whether the text studied be that of Chaucer, the Roman dela rose, or the Bible. In a generation now gone, students of textual criticism in the humanities were under great obligation to two biblical scholars, Westcott and Hort. Today the debt is paid by the work of such eminent scholars as Hunt, Bedier, and Collomp. The methods worked out by Hunt in the study of Greek papyrus texts of the classical authors and by Bedier in the study of the Lai de’T ombre are being applied all too tardily to the study of the biblical text. The plea for some special endowment as a prerequisite for biblical study seems rather out of place in such areas as textual criticism and the study of biblical languages. It is obvious even to the most dogmatic that here an ounce of intelligence is worth a pound of piety. But in the field of interpretation there are many to echo the claim advanced by Roman Catholicism: The Bible is an inspired book; it can be understood only with the help of inspiration. The Protestant often makes the same claim with reference to the inspiration of the individual rather than of the church. The student who uses the historical method of interpreting the Bible relies upon no supernatural aids. What can be known by the conscientious and welltrained student is his objective. This does not include as he will gladly admit the proof or disproof of dogmas whose authority inheres in their promulgation by some cult. Yet, however much his appreciation of the message of some inspired author may be increased by the fact that he has had an analogous religious experience, he refuses to impugn the reliability of human intelligence by assenting to the popular fallacy that the messages of the sainted authors can be understood only by those who have duplicated their experiences. In so far, therefore, as he is a historian, he resolutely rejects all special treatment, all concessions to the cloth; he refuses to use a technique that will not work elsewhere. Yet the number of techniques he calls upon is large. All the resources of literary and historical criticism, the results of philological study, the political, economic, social, and religious background of the books, and the archeologist’s spade all these make their contribution to the understanding of the Scriptures. The techniques which are most familiar to the student in Protestant schools are those which are at home in the field of literary criticism.

LITERARY CRITICISM DEFINED The tasks faced by the student of the biblical literature have been most memorably grouped in a series of six questions: Who? When? Where? To Whom? Why? What? Authorship, date, place of composition, audience, purpose, and content these make convenient subdivisions of that literary criticism of. the Bible which is frequently referred to under the technical term of “introduction,” or, more fully, “introduction to the literature of the Bible.”

Some of these questions move out of the purely literary realm into that of history, but they have usually been treated with an emphasis on the more purely literary questions. For example, the question “What?” brings the content or message of the book into investigation.

But, when we use it under the heading of literary criticism, we turn most naturally to the literary features of its content. Such purely literary questions as, “Is this book poetry or prose?” raise issues of great importance for the interpreter. Hebrew poetry had rules of composition and structure which differ widely from those used in English versification. An ignorance of the nature of parallelism in the poetic part of the Hebrew Scriptures often has disastrous results in the final interpretation of the passage.

One of the common types of Hebrew parallelism is called “synonymous parallelism”; in it the second line repeats the content and thought of the first with no more than minor modification. In Zechariah 9:9, the prophet exhorts Jerusalem in language that is full of this parallelism: “Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion; shout, O daughter of Jerusalem: behold, your king comes unto you; he is just, and having salvation; lowly, and riding upon an ass, even upon a colt, the foal of an ass.” It is plain that the daughter of Zion is identical with the daughter of Jerusalem and that the colt and the ass are one. But, to the author of Matthew’s Gospel, the double mention of the animal implied two animals, and he interprets the fulfilment of the passage with that in mind. Matthew 21:6-7, “And the disciples went and did even as Jesus appointed them, and brought the ass, and the colt, and put on them their garments; and he sat upon them” An ignorance of a literary form led Matthew to ask us to picture Jesus as riding two animals into Jerusalem.

It needs no such example to persuade the seasoned student of any literature that a knowledge of literary forms and their significance is a prerequisite to adequate interpretation. An awareness of the variation in structure between the Shakespearean and the Italian form of the sonnet is essential to the interpretation of an anthology of English sonnets. It is equally true that the interpreter of apocalypses will be amply rewarded for the time spent in mastering the literary pattern of apocalyptic composition. a) DATING OF DOCUMENTS

Less obviously literary, but equally a problem faced in the study of any piece of literature, is the problem of date. There is no difference in methods employed in the task of establishing the date of the Gospel of John and the date of- the Discourses of Epictetus. In both cases the scholar will assemble all the available evidence, evaluate it as carefully as possible, and thus reach his conclusion as to the date of composition. For convenience of handling, the evidence is usually assembled under two categories external and internal. These terms refer to the document itself; that evidence which comes from outside the document is called “external” evidence. Invaluable evidence as to the date of a book is found in quotations from it. The latest possible date for its composition is fixed by the first clear quotation from it in another writing which can be dated. For this evidence to be certain, however, the quotation must be unmistakable, and the date of the document in which the quotation occurs must be established beyond question. Further external evidence for date is to be found in explicit tradition as to the time of composition of a document. There is not much early tradition of this sort as to the date of the books of the Bible. The Christian tradition begins to specify dates for its documents no earlier than the last two decades of the second century.

It is only in the last few years that manuscripts of the Bible have been found which are themselves assigned to dates close enough to the origin of the sacred literature to be of value in the determination of date. In 1935 C. H. Roberts published a fragment of one page of the Fourth Gospel, which he assigned on the basis of its handwriting to the first half of the second century. Several New Testament scholars welcomed the publication of this fragment as evidence that the Fourth Gospel was written before A.D. 100 or at the very latest soon after 100. This conclusion rests on twp assumptions; and, since they are assumptions that are frequently made, they deserve criticism. The first of these assumptions is that the dating of a papyrus document written in a literary hand is accurate within a score of years. One New Testament handbook says of the new John fragment that it was written “about A.D. 130” and then proceeds to argue from the year 130 with as much finality as though this manuscript were actually dated in A.D. 130. In the present state of our knowledge on the paleography of the Greek papyrus book hand, it seems precarious to assign any such document to a period narrower than a century in extent. No undated manuscript of a book can establish the existence of the book before or after a definite year. This fragment of John’s Gospel was found in Middle Egypt. If it was written “about A. 0.130,” the Gospel itself must have been written before 100 if it took the Gospel five years to win prominence in Ephesus and twenty-five years or more to reach Middle Egypt. This argument from the length of time it would take a Christian book to circulate after publication is commonly employed, although there are no objective data available to modern scholarship which would make it possible for us to ascertain the facts. So far as the speed of communication is concerned, no one assumes that it would take a year to move a book from Ephesus to Middle Egypt, or from Alexandria to Rome. Christian travelers made these distances in less than a year, and it is certainly conceivable that they could have carried a book with them. As to the length of time it took any particular book to become known, we have no data. Those who have observed the spread of books in modern times might argue that a book is most widely known right after publication, but arguments from analogy are dangerous; the safest course for the student is to reject all arguments as to date that rest on an appeal to the length of the period essential to the winning of an audience for a book. The internal evidence for the date” of a document may include a definite reference to a date. The mention of the fifteenth year of Tiberius Caesar in Luke 3:1 demands a date later than that for the composition of that Gospel. Isaiah’s first vision (Isaiah 6:1 ff.) his “call to preach,” opens with the invaluable date line, “In the year that King Uzziah died.” Even more valuable are casual or incidental references to events, persons, or things that can be dated. A medieval document that casually referred to a trip in an airplane could not be medieval no matter how explicitly it was dated. Chapter 14 of the Book of Genesis tells of Abraham pursuing Lot’s captors far into the north country “as far as Dan”; this shows that this story in Genesis was written after the events described in chapter 18 of Judges, where the tribe of Dan moves into the north for the first time. The identification of sources that are dated or datable sometimes helps in the dating of a document. The identification of an author whose date is known leads directly to the dating of the composition that came from his pen. The place of the literary work in the history of thought, culture, and social movements is another indication of date. A Jewish document which assumes the control of Palestine by Gentiles cannot be placed in the reign of David. A Christian book which on every occasion prefixes homoousion to the word Christ cannot come from the first century of Christian history. Christian documents which assume the authority of ecumenical councils, or the papacy, or reflect a highly developed monasticism, etc, are not earlier than A.D. 250. The caliber of the language itself will often assist in the dating of a document. The only books in the Hebrew canon which use Aramaic extensively are assigned late dates on the basis of both linguistic and non-linguistic evidence. Old Testament scholars refer to the use of late Hebrew as an indication of the date of various passages. No document written in a form of Greek which had lost the infinitive and the optative and possessed an indeclinable participle would ever be accepted as an original composition of the first Christian centuries. fr) AUTHORSHIP OF DOCUMENTS

Another example of the employment of the techniques of literary criticism can be drawn from the study of authorship. The methods employed by students of the Bible are identical with those employed by students of English literature in the evaluation of the claim that Bacon wrote Shakespeare. The external evidence here is of two kinds: the tradition as to authorship and the light thrown on the authorship by the way in which the document was received by its public. Internal evidence of the most value is derived from a study of the vocabulary and style of the document with reference to other works by the author and the comparison of ideas and content. The most clear-cut decision of a dispute as to the authorship of a biblical book has been won in the case of the Letter to the Hebrews. The question at issue was, “Did the Apostle Paul write this book?” The answer established by several generations of careful scholarly study is an emphatic negative. For purposes of illustration, the arguments and evidence that led to the acceptance pf this answer are briefly summarized here. The external evidence for the Pauline authorship of Hebrews is far from unanimous; in fact, it divides quite cleanly on geographical lines. In the East, as early as Clement of Alexandria, the letter is referred to as Paul’s work; although some later leaders support no more than a mediated Pauline authorship i.e, they think that Paul dictated it to a disciple or that it was the work of some ardent Paulinist. In the West the situation is quite different. Tertullian alludes to it as the work of Barnabas, as though that authorship was unquestioned. No leader of the church in the West accepts it as the work of Paul until the time of Hilary of Poitiers, the second half of the fourth century. From the Muratorian canon to Jerome, the Latin church rejects the Pauline authorship. This is the more striking when it is remembered that it is now generally agreed that the letter was written to Rome, and it is certain that Clement of Rome was the first Christian writer to make use of the letter. Thus the tradition of Pauline authorship does not arise, and only slowly wins acceptance, in the territory where the letter was first known. The internal evidence is overwhelmingly against the theory of Pauline authorship. In language, style, ideas, and situation reflected, it is not Pauline. The contrast of its smooth Greek with the rough style of Pauline letters was noticed by Origen and other Alexandrians. It was this which led them to claim only a mediated Pauline authorship for the letter; they were too much at home in Greek to believe that this could have come from the same pen as the letters of Paul. There are striking differences in vocabulary; even as characteristic a Pauline phrase as “Christ Jesus” does not occur. The essentially Pauline “in Christ,” which occurs even in the one-page letter to Philemon, does not occur in Hebrews. The formulas with which quotations from the Scriptures are introduced consistently differ from Paul’s usage. The differences in ideas and religion are equally striking. There is in Hebrews no justification by faith, no attack on justification by law, no hope for Israel, and no advantage in being an Israelite. No Gentiles concern the author of this letter, and faith is little more than a hope it lacks the robust mysticism of the Apostle to the Gentiles. Here Christ is portrayed as a priest a figure that cannot be adequately paralleled from Paul’s writings. Sanctification, good works, and obedience are the virtues; marriage is praised as a good thing. There is no contrasted spirit and flesh. This is a different apostle from the author of Galatians, Romans, Corinthians, Thessalonians, etc.; and he writes for a different situation. The Christianity to which this letter is addressed is later than that of Paul’s day. The hope of the second coming is faint; many Christians have died, and yet the great day has not dawned. Attendance at the religious services of the Christians is falling off. There is here no claim of apostolic authority, or of any sort of direct contact with the founder of the cult. The clear statement of Hebrews 2:3-4 sets the believers at least one generation farther from Jesus than Paul was: “... How shall we escape if we neglect such a great salvation, which in the beginning was spoken by the Lord [Jesus] and then was confirmed unto us by those who had heard it, to whom God bore witness in signs and wonders and various mighty works and gifts of the Holy Spirit according to his plan.” It is hardly conceivable that the author of Galatians could thus confess that he received the gospel from men.

Evidence of this kind (and much of its detail has not been quoted) has convinced scholars that the Letter to the Hebrews did not come from the pen or the mind of the Apostle Paul. The alternative theories as to authorship have little more to commend them than their ingenuity, and general scholarly opinion supports two conclusions: first, the Apostle Paul did not write Hebrews; second, we do; not know who did.

Decision as to the authorship of other books in the Bible is made in the same way as this decision that Paul was not the author of Hebrews. Equally definite and clear-cut decisions have been reached in regard to many of the other books. This is true, for example, of the book called by the name of Isaiah. It is generally agreed today that chapters 40 ff. are the work of another man than the author of chapters 1-39. The reference to events of the Exile in 40 ff, the differences -in religious ideas, etc, all point to another author. In the case of book after book, similar careful study has led to equally definite conclusions as to authorship, and these conclusions are now part of the common fund of knowledge in the field of biblical study. But it should not be assumed that the study of authorship is a study of accuracy. No scholar assents to the proposition that composition by an apostle or prophet guarantees the historical accuracy of the events related, or that a work written by anonapostolic and nonprophetic author is by that fact made unreliable. The question as to the reliability of the events in the Fourth Gospel is not a question as to whether or not the Apostle John wrote it. The Scriptures themselves testify that at least one apostle was unreliable in three statements, and the claim that all who were not apostles or prophets were unreliable needs only to be stated to be rejected. The importance of identifying the author of these books wherever possible comes from the need of locating them as accurately as we can in place and time. The demonstration that Paul did not write Hebrews does not diminish) the historical validity of the letter, but it does make it possible for us to assign it to a definite situation in Rome at the end of the first century. When the letter is read against that background, it becomes luminous with meaning, and the contribution which it makes to our knowledge of early Christianity is more than doubled. The time and energy spent in the accurate determination of authorship by the scholars are, therefore, to be regarded as a preliminary aid to the accurate interpretation of the book, not as attack on, or defense of, traditions as to authorship.

Authorship by apostle or prophet was of tremendous importance to the Christian church in the period of the formation of the canon, as we saw in chapter i; but it has no analogous importance to the modern historian. For purposes of historical study the canon itself can set no limits. The student cannot assume that what is canonical is accurate and what is apocryphal (noncanonical) is inaccurate. Gospels and Acts that were not in the canon are accepted or rejected by the student on the same bases as those which appear in the canon. Neither apostolic authorship nor canonicity can exempt documents from the most searching investigation of their reliability. c) IDENTIFICATION OF SOURCES A fascinating exercise is the identification of sources in some work of literature. The vogue for source analysis “of the Scriptures seems to be on the wane at the present moment, but it may not be amiss to point out to the student the tenuous nature of some of the “reconstruction” of literary sources. If no source used by the author in question has survived, and the author does not introduce any sources by formal quotation, the identification of sources is an almost hopeless task unless the author copies his various sources rather slavishly. For the difficulty of identifying sources is directly proportionate to the literary ability of the author who used the sources. The more he re-wrote and assimilated what he drew from sources, the harder it is to identify the sources in the finished product. A recent evaluation of Elinor Wylie’s work quoted one of her sources and compared it with the finished product. The forty-four lines of the source were reduced to twenty- two in the finished product; at least eight important details were changed by the novelist, and the style of the finished work was the style of Elinor Wylie. The identification of a source so thoroughly re-written as was this one is impossible unless we possess a copy of the source.

Fortunately for the student of biblical documents, their authors were sometimes less rigorous in the rewriting of source material. In the writing of Hebrew history, for example, the method commonly employed in the use of sources was what has been called a “scissors and paste” method. The author copied one section from one source and the next section from another; re-writing was slight in degree and quantity. Very frequently the author refused to choose between his sources and copied the story first from one and then from another.

One of the clearest examples of this can be found in the story of creation in the opening chapters of Genesis. The reader finds the record of creation complete in Genesis 1:1-31, Genesis 2:1-3. In this section, only thirtyfour verses in length, creation is finished in six days. God creates by divine fiat day and night, sky, sea and land, plants, stars, sun, moon, animals, birds, and human beings, male and female. The seventh day is hallowed as a day of abstinence from labor. Yet in chapter a, verse 4, the process of creation starts all over again with the formation of a man for whose sake plants, animals, and a woman are created. The two stories are equally distinct in idea and style. The first is formal in pattern and exalted in tone. In it the work of creation is divided up by days, and a refrain closes the day’s work. God creates by the spoken word and, as a climax to his creative activity, hallows the Sabbath by resting on it. In the second story there are no day-by-day divisions; God forms man out of earth, plants a garden, etc. In the first story the deity is consistently referred to as God, in the second as Jehovah God. From a study of similar features in duplicate stories, students of the Old Testament have identified several sources of the Pentateuch and made invaluable contributions to our understanding of this literature. A contribution of similar value has been made by a study of the literary sources of the first three gospels. The authors of these gospels wrote much as the authors of Hebrew history wrote. They copied their sources with little re-writing, often in alternate blocks. One of the common sources used by Matthew and Luke was Mark; another was a document (since lost) which probably antedated Mark. The identification of these sources made a sane interpretation of Gospel parallelisms possible and dealt a deathblow to superficial harmonizing of the Gospels. The nature of these parallels can be seen in the following examples:

Matthew 9:14-17 | Mark 2:18-22 | Luke 5:33-39 The comparison of the parallels between the Gospels led also to the discovery that Matthew and Luke relied upon some common source other than Mark. The nature of their agreement against Mark can be seen in their report of the preaching of John the Baptist. In Mark this is briefly summarized as the preaching of a baptism of repentance unto remission of sins; in Matthew and Luke the content of an exhortation is given.

Matthew 3:7-10 But when he saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees, coming to his baptism, he said unto them,

Ye offspring of vipers, who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? 8 Bring forth therefore fruit worthy of repentance: 9 and think not to say within yourselves, We have Abraham to our father, for I say unto you, that God is able of these stones to raise up children unto Abraham. 10 And even now the axe lieth at the root of the trees: every tree therefore that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire.

Luke 3:7-9 He said therefore to the multitudes that went out to be baptised of him

Ye offspring of vipers, who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? 8 Bring forth therefore fruits worthy of repentance, and begin not to say within yourselves, We have Abraham to our father, for I say unto you, that God is able of these stones to raise up children unto Abraham. 9 And even now the axe also lieth at the root of the trees: every tree therefore that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire. From the most minute study of evidence of this sort, invaluable results for the literary criticism of the New Testament have been obtained. It is, indeed, no exaggeration to say that the major achievements made in the early generations of scholarly study of the Bible and the history of Judaism and Christianity were attained by the use of such literary criticism as that which we have briefly discussed and illustrated here. But the significance of this source analysis has sometimes been overemphasized or misinterpreted. Superficial features of the data are seized upon as possessing basic significance. The illustrations given above show that some passages occur in all three of the Synoptic Gospels Matthew, Mark, and Luke. This triplication^ of the story has been called “the triple tradition”; and, since a threefold cord is stronger than one with a single strand, it has been assumed that what was in the triple tradition was historically more reliable than that which appeared in but one of these Gospels. This would be true if the authors had access to accurate sources of information and were concerned primarily with attaining factual accuracy. But their purposes were religious rather than historical, and the quality of their sources undoubtedly varied. It is quite possible that an event related in a single Gospel, any one of the four, might surpass in the accuracy of its detail any story that appeared in three or even all four of the Gospels.

Another example of the perversion of source analysis can be found in the tendency to favor the “oldest” source. From the assumption that the earliest must be the most accurate, Mark’s Gospel has been given an extravagant recognition ever since its priority in date was demonstrated by scholarship. When one of the theories of Gospel origins labeled the non-Markan source common to Matthew and Luke with the name “Q” and claimed that it was probably earlier than Mark, many transferred to it the extravagant loyalty earlier rendered to Mark. But our earliest literary sources leave us all too far from the period of the events described, and the nature of their contents is such as to call for the most rigorous scrutiny. It is worth the student’s notice that in modern courts the testimony of even the most reputable eyewitness is accepted only when it has withstood the most searching examination and has been checked against all available controls. No careless acceptance of all the contents of any particular document or source as the “oldest” source will be possible for the serious student. This is still more evident when the goal of the student of Scripture is the understanding of all primitive Christian experience not that of Jesus alone or the comprehension of all phases of Hebrew religion not that of any “pure” period alone. This more inclusive goal has become the commonly accepted aim of biblical students in our generation. When the purposes of Bible study are so defined, any special source, or particular element in the tradition, loses preeminence; all sources are a priori equally valuable. To the student of the Scriptures in this generation, the literary criticism of the Bible presents a set of sharpened tools which he should use in the attempt to create a full and accurate account of Christian life and Hebrew religion in Bible days. The methods and materials employed in this broad and ultimate task are the subject of the next chapter.

BIBLIOGRAPHY ON LITERARY CRITICISM

GENERAL GOODSPEED, E. J. The Story of the Bible. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1936.

Brief but clear statement of positions generally held by scholars on the questions of literary introduction: date, author, place, etc.

BEWER, J. A. The Literature of the Old Testament in Its Historical Development (rev. ed.). New York: Columbia University Press, 1933. A rather detailed presentation in chronological order, with copious quotations.

SCOTT, E. F. The Literature of the New Testament. New York, Columbia University Press, 1932.

Similar to the work of Goodspeed but a little more detailed in treatment.

BRIGHTMAN, E. S. Sources of the Hexateuch. New York, Cincinnati, etc.: Abingdon Press, 1918.

BURTON, E. D, AND GOODSPEED, E. J. Harmony of the Synoptic Gospels. New York: Scribners, 1917. This book, with the preceding one, will make easily available to the student the evidence on which the study of the sources of the Pentateuch and the first three gospels rests.

JAMES, M. R. The Apro’cryphal New Testament. Oxford: University Press, 1924.

Brief introductions with English translations of a large number of books more or less marginally connected with the New Testament.

. The Lost Apocrypha of the Old Testament, Their Titles and Fragments, Collected, Translated, and Discussed. New York: Macmillan, 1920.

KRUGER, G. History of Early Christian Literature in the First Three Centuries (trans, by C. R. GILLETT). New York: Macmillan, 1897.

OESTERLEY, W. O. E. An Introduction to the Books of the Apocrypha. New York: Macmillan, 1935. A thorough literary introduction to the books of the Old Testament which are accepted as authoritative Scripture in the Catholic but not in the Protestant Church.

OTTLEY, R. R. A Handbook to the Septuagint. London: Methuen & Co, 1920. An introduction to the study of the Greek version of the Old Testament.

STRACK, H. L. Introduction to Talmud and Midrasch. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1931.

Authorized translation from the author’s revision of the fifth German edition.

ADVANCED

OESTERLEY, W. O. E, AND ROBINSON, T. H. An Introduction to the Books of the Old Testament. London: S.P.C.K.; New York, Macmillan, 1934. A fresh and thorough critical manual.

MOFFATT, J. Introduction to the Literature of the New Testament.

New York: Scribners, 1918. A fine piece of work, still the standard, though now in sad need of revision.

GRANT, F. C. The Growth of the Gospels. New York, Cincinnati, etc.: Abingdon Press, 1933. A fine introduction to technical study of the Gospels; good Bibliography.

CHARLES, R. H, et al. The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament in English with Introductions and Critical and Explanatory Notes to the Several Books, Vol. I: Apocrypha; Vol. II: Pseudepigrapha. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1913.

BARDENHEWER, O. Geschichte der altkirchlichen Literatur.. Freiburg imBreisgau: Herder, 1902-32. Vol. I (2d ed.), 1913; Vol. II (2d ed.), 1914; Vol. Ill (ad ed.), 1923; Vol. IV, 1924; Vol. V, 1932. The most up to date of exhaustive histories of early Christian literature.

EPSTEIN, I. (ed.). The Talmud. London: Soncino Press, ’935 This English translation, edited with introductions and notes, is to be completed in about thirty volumes. First set of 8 vols. (Nezikin) published in 1935; second set (Nashim) published in 1936.

CADBURY, H. J. The Style and Literary Method of Luke. (“Harvard Theological Studies,” Vol. VI.) Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1920. A brilliant piece of literary and linguistic criticism which annihilated the “medical language” of Luke.