06 Chapter VI The Interpretation of the Bible The Historical Method Historical Criticism

Chapter VI The Interpretation of the Bible The Historical Method Historical Criticism historian of pagan antiquity limits himself to no harrow field. He is vitally concerned with political history. He studies governments and international relations; the reigns of kings and emperors attract his attention. But he no longer focuses attention upon this one aspect of life to the exclusion of others. Other more prosaic areas make their contribution to his reconstruction of the past. Geography, for example, is studied in its broadest terms; cities, rivers, climates, crops, roads, etc, all come within the scope of his investigation. The two aspects of life that have been touched on here (political and geographical) do not exhaust the territory that the historian attempts to cover but suggest the diversity of the elements that attract his attention. These elements have not all exercised the same degree of fascination for each historian, or even for each generation of historians. Some scholars have emphasized political phenomena as the dominant factor in the story of the past; others have focused the reader’s attention on economic factors as the primary ones. At the present time an increasing amount of attention is given to social history. The record of the past is no longer presented as incarnate in the biographies of a few distinguished leaders; it is found to the same degree in the story of the masses. This type of history is primarily interested in group life and group movements. It sees political, economic, and religious history as social process. Institutions as it portrays them are not static and stolid but move through a constant change, as new generations, faced with new problems, adapt them to their needs. The ultimate interest of the social historian is to revitalize the past by recapturing the living experiences of the individual in relation to the various groups to which he belonged. He sees literature as a deposit niade by the rich life of the time in which it was produced; he studies it not as an end but as a means. He strives to comprehend it so that he may comprehend the life that produced it. This emphasis has driven the historian to the byways as well as to the highways; it has put a new premium on the nonliterary sources for ancient history. It is clear, for example, that a scholar who is trying to write the economic history of the Roman Empire will find valuable information in the excavation of a store that dealt in agricultural implements as well as in the sonorous description of the charms of rural life by one of the gilded youths of Rome. The recovery of tens of thousands of tax receipts from ancient Egypt on pieces of papyrus and ostraca has made possible the writing of the story of taxation even for separate sections and cities. Sources of this type are made available to the historian by the archeologist, and the study of archeology has become more and more important as the study of the social and economic life of antiquity has gained in empha-t sis. The result is that from numerous expeditions a rich stream of archeological finds has been poured at the historians’ feet. THE SCOPE OF BIBLICAL HISTORY

Historical criticism of the Scriptures is as extensive in scope and diversified in interests as the history of any secular movement. The emphasis on political history which characterized many of the school texts of my childhood has been equally widespread on the pages of sacred history. Most of my devout readers have struggled with lists of the kings of Israel and Judah, or with outlines of evidence for identifying Merneptah or Ramses II as the pharaoh of the Oppression. Nor was this study made in vain. The current emphasis upon other elements in the social complex should not blind us to the real significance of the socalled “political history” of the Bible. It has crowded meaning into the terms “pre-Exilic,” “Exilic,” and “post-Exilic,” and against these backgrounds many an Old Testament book has become more intelligible. The story of the Maccabean rebellion adds meaning to the pages of every Jewish and Christian apocalypse. A knowledge of Roman administration in Palestine under Herod and his sons and successors clarifies much of the gospel story.

Secular interest in geography has been matched in the biblical field. Every detailed modern introduction to the Bible- has included a” discussion of the geography of Palestine, and historical geographies of the Holy Land have filled imposing volumes. If biblical scholars have erred in this area, it is in giving too much attention to miscellaneous geographical data.

These interests in political and geographical history can be matched in a half-dozen other areas. The economic background of the gospels has been made the subject of special study. The perennial interest in the great personalities of the religion still continues to produce biographies of Jesus, Paul, and David. The magnitude of the contribution made by.the individual religious genius is given due recognition, but the major emphases of contemporary study fall in the area of social-historical method.

PRESENT-DAY EMPHASES IN HISTORICAL CRITICISM OF THE BIBLE The development of a widespread interest in social movements and group processes has been noted above with reference to the writing of secular history. This development has had important results for the study of the Bible; its. influence upon the study of Judaism, Christianity, and the Bible has been of epoch-making importance in more than one area.

O) RELIGIONS ARE DEVELOPMENTAL In the first place, the religions themselves are now studied as movements of a vitally developmental character. The older conception of them as static, jlivinejnserts into history has been repudiated. Emphasis is no longer put upon the originality of the message of Jesus and the prophets; modern historical study of the environment of both the Jewish and the Christian religions has patiently accumulated parallel after parallel, antecedent before antecedent, until the word “unique” as applied to the elements of these cults has lost much of its significance. These religions are now seen as the product of social forces directed by individual genius. The historians have shown how extensively they inherit, borrow, adopt, and adapt.

It is now recognized that Judaism and Christianity change naturally, inevitably, and constantly. The old idealization of some one period or the literature of one period as representing the “pure” religion has been seriously modified if not rejected. With it has vanished its corollary, the disparagement of all changes subsequent to the period of “purity” as corruptions, dilutions, perversions, etc, and therefore essentially bad. The religion is seen to change as the believers’ vital religious experience is conditioned by new social situations. Christianity is defined not as a creed, or as the religion of any one individual, group, or period, but as the vital religious life of the successive generations of Christians.

K) LIFE PRECEDES LITERATURE A second result of social historical study is the general recognition of the priority of the religion to the religious literature. It has been one of the shortcomings of Protestantism so to stress the importance and authority of the Bible that many devout Christians have come to believe that Christianity originated in and from the New Testament. The most superficial study, however, will show that Christianity existed for at least a century without a New Testament as a sacred book. Christianity had left Palestine and spread far and wide in the Roman world before the first book of the New Testament was even written, much less published or accepted as authoritative.

Strong Christian communities dotted the shores of the Mediterranean before the Four Gospels were written.

Thus the period of Christian history to which the Protestant has most often pointed as representing “pure” Christianity the first century of the cult’s existence is a period in which there was no New Testament. This indicates a very different evaluation of the role of the New Testament in Christianity on the part of the primitive Christian and the conventional modern Protestant. Exactly the same facts exist in regard to the Old Testament. The important period of Jewish life suggested by the words “exodus,” “conquest,” and “kingdom” knew no sacred literature. Moses, Abraham, Elijah, and David lived their religion without the sacred book. c) EXPERIENCE CREATES LITERATURE In ever widening circles the creative role of the religious experience of the group and individual in regard to the literature is frankly admitted. The significant part played in the production of the literature by social experience is admitted by more scholars today than was the case a generation ago, and the creative function of the religious group is seen at work throughout more and more of the canonical literature. From the moment that the historical method of interpretation was applied to the letters of Paul, it was obvious that the problem situations in the churches founded by Paul had almost as much to do with the contents of Paul’s letters as Paul himself did. This is seen clearly in Galatians, a letter which focuses all the fiery enthusiasm of Paul’s religion on a single issue as sharply as a glass brings the sun’s rays to a single burning point. It can be seen with equal clarity in the complexity of I Corinthians, where the first part of the letter is taken up with Paul’s attempts to straighten out troublesome situations at Corinth that have been reported to him (factions, lawsuits, immorality), and the second part is concerned with the apostle’s answers to half-a-dozen specific questions asked him in a letter from the church at Corinth. In these letters by Paul we can clearly see the Christian trying to work out a pattern of living in a society already crowded with religions. The thorough integration of these pagan cults in the social life of the time caused many of the problems of the Pauline converts.

Butchering had religious implications, political life was religious both locally and imperially recreation was religious, etc. The everyday experiences of devout Christians in this religious fulness of the time determined the table of contents of most of the letters written by Paul. This does not deny the significant contribution made to those letters by the rich religious experience of the apostle himself, yet it must be remembered that that experience was itself in some part social. This has long been recognized by interpreters of the Pauline writings. The situation at Corinth, in Galatia, etc, is now studied along with or before the message written by the apostle. The creative influence of the social environment has been recognized also in the later books of the New Testament and in the Old Testament writings that represent late Judaism. Among Protestant interpreters, it has often been popular to interpret these books as the product of periods of corruption of the pure religion of earlier days. Thus it is claimed that the true vision of God won by the prophets was obscured by the priests and scribes who came after them; that the pure word of God uttered by Jesus was diluted by the incipient Catholicism of the late first and early second centuries. These changes were explained as due to compromise with environment, assimilation of external influences, etc. Hence, in these areas, the recognition of the significant influence of environment upon the creation of the sacred literature was easy for the champions of such views. But the recognition of the similar situation in the Gospels and the Prophets came more slowly. The historical study of literary problems helped to make this possible. The removal of the Fourth Gospel from a close association with the others to.the very end of the first century or the beginning of the second hastened a sane evaluation of the part played by the religious experience of post-resurrection Christianity in the composition of that gospel. The study of the literary sources of the first three gospels led to the identification of “secondary” elements in the gospel tradition, and it was freely admitted that the changing experiences and beliefs of second-generation Christianity had affected the formation of these strands of the tradition. But in some areas a certain insulation of the revealed message is claimed for the earliest layer of the gospel content; this, it is felt, came straight and undiluted from the mind of God. This position has been abandoned by the majority of scholars for two reasons. The first is that the increased knowledge of Judaism has made it plain that Jesus like the prophets before him was himself influenced by the social situation in which he formulated his message. The second is that the increased knowledge of the Christianity of the second generation and of its gentile environment has made it plain that the part played by the church in the creation of the gospels was a major part. Today no one can stop with Mark or “Q” and say “here is the pure gospel.” The Gospels were produced to meet the needs of Christians removed by at least one full generation from the death of Jesus. But the gap is deeper than it is wide, for the gospels were produced to meet the needs of self-conscious, gentile churches, struggling for their existence in the strenuous religious competition of the cities of the Graeco-Roman world. The infant cult needed organization, sanctions for cult practices, information, definition of the distinctively Christian way of life, defense from state and rivals, solution of the problem of its relation to Judaism, etc.

Most of these problems were unknown to Jesus and his followers, or were seen by them in different degrees of intensity and under different aspects.

Most of all, the church needed an adequate definition of Jesus in terms of its own contemporary faith and experience. By the time that Paul’s letters were, written, Jesus is already defined as a divine Lord and Savior as well as the Messiah of Old Testament hopes. Yet Paul can find no validation for his faith in the story of Jesus’ life that has reached him. For him the proof of Jesus’ lordship lies in his own experience of communion with Jesus and salvation through union, with him. The resurrection was the demonstration of Jesus’ divinity; before the resurrection there was nothing but a humble career. The evangelists modify this definition. In Mark the humility of Jesus’ earthly career is lightened by previews of the resurrection. As in Paul, Jesus is not really the Messiah until the resurrection, but occasionally there is a partial revelation of his divine nature. The demons recognize him; their own supernatural nature allows them to identify him. On the mountain top he appears for a moment to the inner circle of his followers as he really is. Yet throughout the major part of Mark, the messiahship of Jesus is a secret, a dark mystery even to his most intimate associates. This frame of definition is part of the evangelist’s contribution to the Gospel story. The distinctive nature of the Markan definition of Jesus can be seen by contrasting it not only with that of Paul but also with that of John. In the Fourth Gospel the Lord of the Christian cult is openly the Messiah, the divine world-savior, from the first scene of the Gospel to the last. He himself teaches this without hesitation and with monotonous repetition. His disciples and his hearers generally (except the Jews) have no difficulty in recognizing him as the divine son of God, the Messiah, the Light of the World, etc. This frame of definition is part of this evangelist’s contribution to the Gospel story.

Later in the second century some unknown Christians wrote gospels which told the story of Jesus’ infancy. These carry the definition of Jesus as being openly a god on earth several steps farther than John had done. In these infancy gospels Jesus knows he is a god when he is a little boy. Moreover, he shows his deity in numerous actions and teachings. His birds made of mud come to life; anyone who injures him in play is slain with a word; teachers are baffled again and again by his wisdom. The boy Jesus is a god in that he possesses supernatural power and supernatural wisdom. This frame of definition is part of these evangelists’ contribution to the Gospel story. d) GROUP INFLUENCE BEFORE THE GOSPELS In the last generation the attention of scholars has been drawn to the study of the Gospel story as it ’ existed in the days before the Gospels were written. It is now generally admitted that in its earliest form y the story existed in separate bits of information about Jesus’ actions or teachings. Sayings were repeated and cherished in a group of Galileans who had followed Jesus, as disciples long before had followed the prophets. Stories of actions performed by Jesus were repeated by other Christians to show what Jesus meant to them. At various times and places and in various ways, these fragments of tradition were grouped, edited, expanded, abbreviated. The interest of the Christians in these items was basically-religious rather than historical; therefore, it was easy for unhistorical elements to enter stories with a basis of fact; it was possible for stories to be generally accepted which had no basis in the facts of Jesus’ life; it was easy for accurate stories of what Jesus had said and done to die for lack of repetition when these accurate stories served no need of the group to which they came.

One of the first and clearest implications of the existence of the Gospel stories in little independent sections (called “pericopes”) is that we owe the time and place sequences in our gospels to the relatively late and unreliable work of the evangelists. Many of these little stories in the gospels are still without any indication of time or place; that many more of them were originally without such indications is a probable assumption. The more frequently a story is repeated, the more specific it becomes. Locations are supplied, anonymous characters are identified,. and the time is given. The “framework” of the gospel v...message is almost entirely the creation of second-generation Christianity. The immature church’s needs were legion. It needed sanctions for its simple ritual. The story of Jesus’ last meal with his followers becomes the story of the institution by Jesus of a ceremony for his followers to observe: at first a memorial service, later a sacramental communion. Jesus sets his own teaching above the Jewish law. Jesus’ authority is invoked to prevent Christians from going to law in non-Christian t courts; the story is told with explicit reference to the existence of Christian church groups. In Palestine in Jesus’ day, his followers were not troubled by table etiquette. The question of obeying or not obeying the Old Testament dietary laws was not a pressing one to them. The Palestinian customs were well established and included prescriptions as to the nature and extent of table fellowship between Jews and Gentiles. But, when Christianity moved outside both Palestine and Judaism and welcomed masses of Gentiles into its communion, questions as to the validity of the Jewish dietary legislation arose frequently and clamored for an answer. We hear the clamor echoing through Paul’s letters. Paul’s own claim that these laws were invalid for Gentile Christians ultimately became the position of the church. But the church was not satisfied with a Pauline authorization of the repudiation of these laws and found in a pronouncement of Jesus himself that revocation of the Old Testament legislation for which it yearned. The saying appears in Mark 7:14-15 and is explained in Mark 7:17-23 (cf. Matthew 15:10-20). Jesus calls the crowd to him and says, “It is not anything from outside of a man entering into him which can defile him, but the things which come forth from the man are the things which defile the man.” After his withdrawal into the house, he explains the saying to the disciples, pointing out that food for the body does not touch the soul, but that vices like envy, adultery, etc, which spring from within, are the real defilement. In the original form of the saying there was here no more than a strong declaration of the superiority of spiritual values to mere ritual conformity. But as Mark tells the story, and he may be accurately reporting the form in which it reached him, this is an emancipation of Jesus’ followers from all food laws. The specific authorization is made by a brief explanatory note in 7:19, “making clean all foods.” This clause directly applies Jesus’ pronouncement to the later Christian controversy over clean and unclean foods. It is interesting to note that Matthew does not follow Mark in this particular application. He omits the explanatory clause, and, by the addition of one brief sentence at the end of the explanation to the disciples, he refers the whole discussion to ritual washings. Thus the same saying of Jesus emancipates Christians from Jewish food laws (in Mark) and from Jewish ritual washings (in Matthew). The last generation has seen the careful study of the content of the first three gospels, section by section, in the attempt to establish the extent of the church’s contribution to the picture of Jesus. In Germany it has been carried on by the champions of a discipline called Formgeschichte (“form criticism” or “form history”), which gets its name from the least important aspect of its work. It has tried to classify the forms in which the separate units of the tradition exist; hence its name. But its contribution in the study of forms has been of minor importance. Much more significant has been its insistence upon the important role of group needs and interests in the formation of Gospel stories. This is not a new discovery of the Formgeschichte school; they share this method and emphasis with the “social historian” and with many a scholar who is still content with the simple title “historian.”

If today the Gospels are approached solely as a source of information about the historical Jesus, the result will be meager in quantity and definitely unsatisfactory in quality to the pious layman. He may find some consolation in the fact that no historian will identify this residue as the total picture of Jesus’ personality or career. The church’s creative role included rejection. Whatever Jesus was, he was certainly more than the fragments which the historian accepts after his rigorous inspection of the tradition.

) NOTHING IS SPURIOUS FOR THE HISTORIAN But the social historian is, in a sense, more rigorous than the general public has yet realized. His interest and curiosity are catholic in scope. He does not approach the Gospels for the sole purpose of finding out what is historical in the stories about Jesus. His purpose is also to find out what can be known about the vital experiences of Jesus’ followers. He rejects none of the Gospel material; the section which tells him nothing about Jesus may be of great value as a source of information on the faith and experience of the mass of unknown Christians in the second generation of Christianity’s history. The student of the Old Testament, for example, in generations past often labeled certain sections of the books as “spurious” and then proceeded to ignore them. This happened all too frequently in the study of the prophets. If Amos 9:8-15 was a later addition to the great prophecy, then the student of Amos ignored it. Unfortunately, no other student picked it up, and no attention at all was given to these “spurious” passages. But today their authenticity as representatives of the age in which they were produced is emphasized, and they are carefully studied for what they can tell us of these later periods.

Partly as a reaction to the tendency of past generations to center attention on the isolated individuals who attained prominence and immortality for their names in the leadership of the cult, the modern historian focuses attention on the anonymous masses, on social movements, on group needs, on the common faith, on the laymen whose contribution to the cult was as significant as that of the leaders. The knowledge of the New Testament is not, therefore, the goal of his study. Once that knowledge is gained, it becomes a tool, a source, to be used in writing the history of the vital religious movements of early Christian history.

/) IMPORTANCE OF ARCHEOLOGY The student of Christianity or Judaism who accepts the emphases of social history turns more and more to the use of the nonliterary sources. He cannot study the movements and experiences of cult groups in a vacuum. The society in which they existed becomes of vital importance to him. He prizes the results attained by the student of the social and economic history of the ancient East and the GraecoRoman world.

These historians have shown the tremendous value of archeological sources for the reconstruction of social life in all its phases. The student who investigates religious societies has turned his own attention in increasing measure to the study of nonliterary sources of information on the religions in which he is interested. But in the study of early Christian history the Protestant historian has used this material last and least.

Part of this tardiness has been due to a narrow sectarian loyalty. Roman Catholic learning had long ago appealed to archeological evidence in support of its doctrines and claims. For example, inscriptions from the Eternal City were used to support the claim that Peter was the founder of the Roman papacy.

Other nonliterary sources established an earlier existence of liturgy and officialdom than fervent Protestants of an extreme type were willing to accept. In the bitterness of the debate they attacked not only the interpretation of archeological evidence but also the entire discipline in so far as it applied to Christian origins. In the more innocuous field of Old Testament history, however, archeological techniques were not only employed but even employed in the very manner in which earlier Roman Catholic scholars had used them in their study of early Christian history. Book after book on “Archeology and the Bible” took as its thesis the defensive assertion that the results of archeological study confirmed or supported the Bible (almost always giving 90percentof the space to the Old Testament) in its statements as to dates, kings’ reigns, geography, etc. This use of archeology was atomistic. Any isolated item that was related to any Old Testament passage was featured as another valuable confirmation of the Bible. The use of archeology which is today making a valuable contribution to the interpretation of the Bible has a very different basis. Its purposes and methods are far removed from those defined in the preceding paragraph. Illumination not confirmation is its goal. It rejoices not in isolated discoveries, no matter how dramatic, but in the patient accumulation of a mass of detailed evidence that will help the historian to reconstruct a vanished culture. To the interpreter of the Bible it is an auxiliary discipline which supplies him with invaluable source material. Archeological evidence on dates is of relatively little importance when compared with the light shed by this discipline on the life of the world in which Judaism and Christianity lived, moved, and had their being.

If we take for granted that the student of the Bible is interested in archeological evidence as to business conditions, etc, in the environment of the cult he studies, we can pass on to a more focal point the light that archeology has shed (and is shedding) on the cults which were predecessors and/or competitors of Judaism and Christianity. For the student of the Old Testament this light has been steadily growing in illuminating power.

There is no need or space here to detail its progress, but the nature of the recent discoveries at Ras Shamra may be summarized as an example of the type of contribution made. Beginning in 1929, excavators working on a little promontory twenty miles south of the mouth of the Orontes River found a large number of tablets inscribed in a “cuneiform alphabet.” They contain cult prescriptions, liturgy, and legends of about the thirteenth century B.C. They supply the student of Semitic languages with a wealth of evidence, hitherto unknown, as to Syro-Phoenician usage at this period. The study of the Ras Shamra myth and cult patterns has already illuminated many a dark spot in the Old Testament literature and has raised anew in challenging fashion the question as to an important genetic relationship between the religion of the Old Testament and the indigenous Canaanite culture. One of the ritual commands of the Ras Shamra tablets is “Boil a kid in the milk”; this is one item in the magical technique for producing early rains. The Old Testament proscriptions of boiling a kid in its mother’s milk (Exodus 23:19; Exodus 34:26; Deuteronomy 14:21) can no longer be explained as nomadic and therefore presumably Mosaic.

It now seems more probable that seething a kid in its mother’s milk was part of the cult technique of the early Hebrews, carrying a function analogous to that which it served at Ras Shamra. The attack on the practice in the Old Testament passages referred to above would be a later modification of a primitive cult practice. Not only in matters of ritual detail but in the broader areas of world-view, of dualism, of hope of life as a religious gift, of messianism, etc, these fruits of the archeologist’s patient labor are making important and often startling contributions to our knowledge. From Graeco-Roman archeology has come an analogous illumination of the field of early Christian history. In this area, also, our knowledge of the competing cults has been greatly increased by the study of archeological sources. This has been noteworthy in the study of those personal salvation cults, the mystery religions, which were so popular in the Graeco-Roman world in the time of the Roman Empire. They present the historian with dismayingly scanty literary remains; the emphasis upon secrecy and “mystery” in the cult discouraged the writing of adequate descriptions by the initiates. For the most part their testimony consists of obscure passwords and mottoes which demand rather than supply illumination. But the archeologist has made up for the meager amount of literary remains, as can be seen, for example, in the case of the cult of Mithras. The volumes in which Franz Cumont has edited the archeological evidence for the worship of the Persian god present the student with a wealth of information. The location of Mithras monuments on a map dots its surface from the Euxine Sea to the mountains of Scotland, and from the banks of the Rhine to the Sahara Desert. Thus the extent of the distribution of the cult is indicated with an accuracy impossible for one who used literary sources alone. The fact that these sources can be dated, at least approximately, adds to their value. Moreover, they give indirect suggestions concerning the cult ritual suggestions which are made the more valuable by the prejudiced nature of the literary references to cult practices. Most of the latter come from Christians engaged in the most bitter competition with the sungod’s cult. With the help of the archeological witnesses, Mr. Willoughby, in his study of regeneration in the pagan world, has given a vivid reconstruction of one of the cave chapels in which the worshipers of Mithras met and presents the rites and beliefs of the cult in an impressive manner. The newcomer in the field of early Christian archeology is constantly stimulated by unexpected elements in the nonliterary tradition. As he leafs through the facsimiles of catacomb paintings, he is astonished to find Jonah and the hippocampus leading all other characters in popularity. Pagan cupids and Orpheus “good shepherds” have an important message to give as to the nature and extent of pagan influence. There is significance in the absence of any crucifixion scene in the early period, as also in the extreme rarity of crosses. That Jesus used a magician’s wand like Circe’s is somewhat surprising. Rather unexpected to the novice is the amount and early date of Christian paintings and the presence of frescoes and mosaics in Jewish synagogues. Nor do the inscriptions fall behind the pictures in the value of the information they impart. On the basis of a study of a collection of Jewish inscriptions, E. R. Goodenough has made several tentative but most stimulating suggestions; e.g, that “normative” Judaism was unknown until after the publication of the Talmud and that Judaism at the time of the formation of the New Testament was borrowing heavily from Hellenism.

Christian inscriptions likewise are a valuable source of information on the life and customs of the early Christians. Dean Case, in writing the story of the place of Christianity in the business life of the ancient world, found in the inscriptions alone adequate information as to the occupations of the early Christians. The French archeologist Le Blant and, after him, Sir William Ramsay found in certain types of names in the Christian inscriptions valuable evidence as to pagan attitudes toward Christianity. The terms of contempt which the pagans applied to the Christians were often accepted by the latter and worn as names. Among these “epithet names” are the following: “gullible/’ “unreasonable,” “criminal,” “trickster,” “insolent,” “churlish,” “pernicious,” “filth,” “evil,” “knavish,” “brute,” “contemptible,” “deserter,” “refuse,” and “dirty.” By accepting these names (according to Le Blant’s theory) the individual Christians made a boast out of slander.

Leclerq has more recently quarreled with Le Blant’s theory and favors the explanation that these names were charms. They would save the bearer from the envy and abuse of the minor supernatural powers; the demons would be misled by these unattractive names and so would tolerate these unfortunates and abstain from attacking them. Whichever explanation finally wins the support of scholarship, the data themselves are evidence of no slight value.

Harnack found in the study of Christian names valuable evidence as to the attitude of the Christians toward the pagans. He has shown that the use of Christian names taken from the Bible does not go back to the first centuries. Until after the middle of the third century, Christians made an almost exclusive use of the old pagan names. Among the names of Christians appearing in inscriptions are the names of pagan deities; e.g, Heraclius, Mercurius, Aphrodisius, Dionysius. “The martyrs perished because they refused to sacrifice to the gods whose names they bore.” This paradox can be explained only by admitting that the general custom of the world in which the Christians were living proved stronger than any reflections of their own. The sense of real inner distinction as a Christian was so strong that it made the name relatively unimportant. But from A.D. 250 on, as the church conforms more and more to the world, the use of distinctively Christian names became first preferable and then normative. More than one force led to this reversal. The changing of names was a common pagan practice, especially after A.D. 212; the growing importance of infant baptism favored the use of Christian names; and, as the world moved into the church, it carried with it a superstitious evaluation of the power of names. Thus a second paradox confronts the first. As the individual Christian came to resemble his pagan neighbor more and more closely, his name proclaimed his Christianity most emphatically. Whereas, in the period when the individual Christian was set off against the pattern of the surrounding demonic culture, his name proclaimed a loyalty to these demonic powers.

Archeological evidence as to the use of Bible names by Christians clearly reflects also the antiJewish sentiment of the church. This is more evident in the West than in the East, but it is New Testament not Old Testament names that are first used Peter and Paul, for example and Old Testament names run a bad third to names of local Christian heroes and saints. If Shakespeare had asked the Christian archeologist “What’s in a name?” the answer would have been “Plenty!” From archeology’s cornucopia a wealth of evidence is poured out before the student of the Bible. Today he includes it with the fruit of other disciplines (literary and historical) as resource material to be used in his attempt to master not the literature of the canon alone, not the literature of the cult alone, but the whole of the religious life whose richness and vigor produced the books and gives them meaning.

BIBLIOGRAPHY ON HISTORICAL CRITICISM

GENERAL BARTON, G. A. Archaeology and the Bible (6th ed.). Philadelphia, Sunday School Union, 1933.

Valuable for its extensive quotation of illuminating parallels; more important for Old Testament than for New Testament.

CASE, S. J. The Social Origins of Christianity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1923.

Chapter i, “The ’New’ New Testament Study,” is especially valuable here.

EDMAN, I. The Mind of Paul. New York: Holt, 1935. A very stimulating and readable interpretation of Paul’s religion.

GRANT, F. C. (trans.). Form Criticism: A New Method of New Testament Research (including “The Study of the Synoptic Gospels,” by RUDOLF BULTMANN, and “Primitive Christianity in the Light of Gospel Research,” by KARL KUNDSIN). Chicago: Willett, Clark & Co, 1934. The simplest introduction to this method by its own exponents.

HERFORD, R. TRAVERS. Judaism in the New Testament Period.

London: Lindsay Press, 1928.

Valuable for its sympathetic appraisal of Pharisaism in the New Testament period.

LIETZMANN, H. The Beginnings of the Christian Church (trans, by B. L. WOOLF). New York: Scribner’s, 1937.

Clear, vivid, scholarly, and yet concise presentation of Christian history to A.D. 1 80.

LOWRIE, WALTER. Monuments of the Early Church. New York, Macmillan, 1901 (reprinted 1923). A good general introduction to Christian archeology, illustrated with 182 figures.

MARUCCHI, ORAZIO. Christian Epigraphy: An Elementary Treatise with a Collection of Ancient Christian Inscriptions Mainly of Roman Origin (trans, by J. A. WILLIS). Cambridge: At the University Press, 1912. A brief, general introduction, followed by a classified collection of Roman inscriptions, illustrated with thirty plates.

MATHEWS, SHAILER. A History of New Testament Times in Palestine (rev. ed.). New York: Macmillan, 1933. A concise but thorough study of the political history of the period.

MATTHEWS, I. G. Old Testament Life and Literature (2d ed.).

New York: Macmillan, 1934.

Life and literature are discussed together in chronological pattern; a useful manual.

RIDDLE, D. W. Early Christian Life as Reflected in Its Literature.

Chicago: Willett, Clark & Co, 1936. This volume uses the literature as a source for the study of early Christian life rather than as an end in itself.

ROBINSON, B. W. The Life of Paul (ad ed.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1928. A useful manual on the events of Paul’s life. This second edition has added a brief chapter on Paul’s religion.

ADVANCED CASE, S. J. The Evolution of Early Christianity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1914.

Significant definition and interpretation of Christianity as a vitally developmental movement. Valuable bibliographies to 1914.

. Jesus: A New Biography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1927. An important study, which uses social-historical method. Good bibliography.

. The Social Triumph of the Ancient Church. New York:

Harper & Bros, 1933. A vivid description of the changes in the church’s attitude toward wealth, social position, learning, and the state.

DEISSMANN, A. St. Paul (new and rev. ed.). London: Hodder &

Stoughton, 1926).

Sympathetic interpretation of St. Paul’s religion.

DIBELIUS, M. From Tradition to Gospel (trans, by B. L. WOOLF).

London: I. Nicholson & Watson, 1934. An exposition of Formgeschichte by one of the masters of the method.

DODD, C. H. The Parables of the Kingdom. New York: Scribner’s, 1936.

Makes use of recent studies and presents valuable interpretation of the parables.

EASTON, B. S. Christ in the Gospels. New York: Scribner’s, 1930.

Thoroughgoing criticism of Formgeschichte and social-historical method, a comprehensive critical survey of recent study of Jesus and the Gospels, written from a conservative viewpoint.

ENSLIN, M. S. The Ethics of Paul. New York: Harpers, 1930. The best of recent studies of Pauline ethics.

FOAKES-JACKSON, F. J, AND LAKE, KiRsopp (eds.). The Beginnings of Christianity, Part I: “The Acts of the Apostles.”

New York: Macmillan. Vol. I (1920), Prolegomena I: Jewish, Gentile, and Christian Backgrounds; Vol. II (1922), Prolegomena II: Criticism; Vol. Ill (1926), The Text of Acts (J. H. ROPES); Vol. IV (1933), English Translation and Commentary (K. LAKE AND H. J. CADBURY); Vol. V (1933), Additional Notes to the Commentary (K. LAKE AND H. J. CADBURY [eds.]). The special studies in the prolegomena and the additional notes give this work a much broader significance than that of the usual commentary on Acts. Valuable bibliography.

GRAHAM, W. C, AND MAY, H. G. Culture and Conscience. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1936.

These collaborators have made valuable use of archeological finds in presenting the religion of the Hebrews in relation to its environment.

GRANT, F. C. The Economic Background of the Gospels. London, Oxford University Press, 1926. A brief presentation of economic data in regard to Palestinian life in gospel times.

HOOKE, S. H. (ed.)- Myth and Ritual: Essays on the Myth and Ritual of the Hebrews in Relation to the Culture Pattern of the Ancient East. By A. M. BLACKMAN AND OTHERS. London, Oxford University Press, 1933.

KLAUSNER, J. Jesus of Nazareth (trans, by H. DANBY). New York: Macmillan, 1926. A scholarly study of Jesus from the Jewish viewpoint.

MOORE, G. F. Judaism in the First Centuries of the Christian Era. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1927-30. A comprehensive study of Judaism, advancing the thesis that Judaism is to be defined in terms of the “normative Judaism” of the Pharisees.

Full of valuable information and stimulating discussion.

OESTERLEY, W. O. E, AND ROBINSON, T. H. A History of Israel, Vol. I: From the Exodus to the Fall of Jerusalem 586 B.C, by Robinson; Vol. II: From the Fall of Jerusalem 586 B.C. to the Bar-Kokhba Revolt A. D. 135, by Oesterley. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932. A standard work.

OTTO, RUDOLF. Reich Gottes und Menschensohn. Munich: C. H.

BECK, 1934. A stimulating religious geschichtliche study, which argues in convincing fashion that Jesus preached a kingdom that had already dawned and thought of himself in terms of the Enochic Son of Man.

WILLOUGHBY, H. R. Pagan Regeneration. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1929. A sympathetic and scholarly study of the experience of religious rebirth in the pagan world of New Testament times.

GENERAL BIBLIOGRAPHY The student’s attention is drawn to the presence of the special bibliographies at the end of the chapters. In those lists will be found introduction to the literature on canon, text, translation, and interpretation. An attempt was made there to include books ’ that would introduce the reader to further literature on the subject. This is supplemented by listing here some of the periodicals, dictionaries, and commentaries that will lead the student into broader areas and make it possible for him to keep abreast of recent developments. Of the special works on bibliography itself, the student will find the following helpful: S. J. Case, J. T. McNeill, W. W.

Sweet, W. Pauck, and M. Spinka, A Bibliographical Guide to the History of Christianity. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1931). The most inclusive listing of current titles is published in the Bibliographisches Beiblatt of the Theologische Literaturzeitung.

Four of the leading periodicals which deal with the study of the Bible are the Journal of Biblical Literature and Exegesis, Revue biblique, Zeitschrift fur die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft, and Zeitschrift fur die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft.

More general in scope of subjects treated, but valuable in the presentation of significant studies of the Bible, are the Journal of Religion, the Anglican Theological Review, the Journal of Theological Studies, the Harvard Theological Review, Church History, and the American Journal of Semitic Languages and Literatures. The book-review sections of the journals listed in this paragraph are of value in keeping the student informed as to new works; this is the especial merit of the Journal of Theological Studies. The Harvard Theological Review has no book-review section but, like most of the others listed here, occasionally published lengthy surveys of recent study in some one area. For current information in the general field of archeology, see the American Journal of Archeology, the Bulletin and Annual of the American Schools of Oriental Research, the Palestine Exploration Fund Quarterly Statement. In the field of dictionaries, two old publications are of great value: the eleventh (twelfth or thirteenth) edition of the Encyclopaedia Eritannica (1912) for solid factual studies as of that date; and the five-volume Dictionary of the Bible (1898-1904) of J. Hastings one-volume edition in 1909. Similar to the Hastings work is the Encyclopaedia biblica edited by T. K. Cheyne and A. S. Black in four volumes (1899-1903). Similar in size and solid value to the Eritannica is the exhaustive study of Christian archeology edited by Cabrol, Dictionnaire a” archeologie chretienne et deliturgie, which is still in process of publication. The student has probably already discovered for himself that the separate volumes of the great commentary series are not of uniform quality. The general evaluations given here are not, therefore, equally applicable to all the works in any series. The outstanding technical series in English is still the International Critical Commentary on the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, edited by Driver, Plummer, and Briggs. At the intermediate level there is little to choose between The New Century Bible, edited by W. F. Adeney for the Oxford University Press, and The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges, edited in the Old Testament by A. F. Kirkpatrick and in the New Testament by R. St. John Parry, for the Cambridge University Press. Both of these have now passed middle age. In German the Handbuch zum Neuen Testament, edited by Lietzmann, and the Handbuch zum Alten Testament, edited by O. Eissfeldt, are the most stimulating and up-to-date series. The MoffatNew Testament Commentary: Based on the New Translation by the Rev. Prof. J. Moffat and under His Editorship is the best of recent popular commentaries, although of very uneven quality; the volume on John is one of the best. Of the three outstanding one- volume commentaries Peake’s, Gore’s, and the Abingdon the Abingdon is the most recent. It was edited for the Abingdon Press by Eiselen, Lewis, and Downey, in 1929.