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  THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE
  by Earnest C. Colwell
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Colwell's guide to the methods and principles of Bible study, providing
practical instruction for serious engagement with Scripture including
historical, literary, and theological approaches.

  Chapters: 9

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  TABLE OF CONTENTS
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    1. 00- The Study of the Bible
    2. 000 Preface
    3. 0000 Introduction
    4. 01 Chapter I The Origin and Growth of the Bible
    5. 02 Chapter II The Transmission of the Bible
    6. 03 Chapter III The Translation of the Bible
    7. 04 Chapter IV The Interpretation of the Bible The Modernizing Method
    8. 05 Chapter V The Interpretation of the Bible The Historical Method Literary Criticism
    9. 06 Chapter VI The Interpretation of the Bible The Historical Method Historical Criticism

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  CHAPTER 1: 00- THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE
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The Study of the Bible THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS, CHICAGO THE BAKER &
TAYLOR COMPANY, NEW YORK; THE CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS, LONDON; THE
MARUZEN-KABUSHIKI-KAISHA, TOKYO, OSAKA, KYOTO, FUKUOKA, SENDAIJ THE COMMERCIAL
PRESS, LIMITED, SHANGHAI The Study of the Bible By ERNEST CADMAN COLWELL The
University of Chicago The University of Chicago Press Chicago, Illinois

COPYRIGHT 1937 BY THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. PUBLISHED
SEPTEMBER I937- COMPOSED AND PRINTED BY THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS,
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS, U.S.A.

Dedicated in love and esteem to my parents ANNA CATHERINE COLWELL and ERNEST
COLWELL Table of Contents

CHAPTER I. THE ORIGIN AND GROWTH OF THE BIBLE II. THE TRANSMISSION OF THE BIBLE
III. THE TRANSLATION OF THE BIBLE IV. THE INTERPRETATION OF THE BIBLE THE
MODERNIZING METHOD V. THE INTERPRETATION OF THE BIBLE THE HISTORICAL METHOD:
LITERARY CRITICISM VI. THE INTERPRETATION OF THE BIBLE THE HISTORICAL METHOD:
HISTORICAL CRITICISM


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  CHAPTER 2: 000 PREFACE
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Preface A VOLUME that travels through as wide a field as the study of the Bible
today soon takes the specialist beyond all the old familiar landmarks out into
strange and bewildering territory. In this situation his only hope lies in
obtaining local guides who will not suffer his feet to stumble into a crevasse
hidden from him by his ignorance. To the many who have tried to keep the
author’s feet upon the straight and narrow path, he here makes grateful
acknowledgment.

Most of all he is indebted to his colleague. Professor William A. Irwin, who
read the manuscript in more than one of its stages and made numerous suggestions
which have greatly increased its value, especially in the Old Testament area. He
did this with characteristic unselfishness at a time when he was heavily
burdened with other work. If the book meets the need it was designed to serve, a
large part of the credit for its success must go to Mr. Irwin.

Thanks are due also to Professor S. J. Case, Dean of the Divinity School, who
read and criticized one of the recensions of the manuscript; to my colleagues in
the New Testament Department Professor H. R. Willoughby, who read the first two
chapters, and Professor. D. W. Riddle, who made valuable suggestions for the
section on interpretation and to Mr. B. LeRoy Burkhart, Fellow in the Divinity
School of the University of Chicago, whose patient, accurate, and stimulating
assistance is deeply appreciated. In the field of linguistic study the author
has long been indebted to Professor J. M. Steadman of Emory University; the
chapter on translation owes much to his teaching. No one of these scholars is to
be held responsible for the positions taken by the author or for any of the
errors in this work. The International Council of Religious Education, owner of
the copyright, kindly gave permission for the use of the American Standard
Version of Matthew 3:7-10; Luke 3:7-9; Matthew 9:14-17; Mark 2:18-22; Luke
5:33-39. This version is published by Thomas Nelson and Sons, New York City.

ERNEST CADMAN COLWELL UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO February 19, 1937


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  CHAPTER 3: 0000 INTRODUCTION
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Introduction book is an introduction to the study of the Bible, and its primary
concern is to prepare the student for his own study of the Bible rather than to
present him with an encyclopedic survey of the factual data that have
accumulated in the critical investigation of the Christian Scriptures. It is
designed to orient the reader in the field of biblical study to give him a sense
of direction, some indication of possible itineraries, a road map with good
roads plainly labeled and dangers clearly marked.

It is not planned to minister to the devotional use of the Bible. The author
believes that the Bible has valuable contributions to make to modern life, but
to define those values here might easily lead to the dogmatic presentation of
the author’s personal opinion or to a long survey of the many positions taken by
others. Neither of these programs falls naturally into the purpose of this book.
It gladly recognizes the existence of these values, the need for their study,
and the validity of the use of the Bible in modern religious life. But the road
it follows leads the student away from these areas toward an intelligent
comprehension of what his own Bible is and an introduction to its study. To this
end it presents the problems faced and the resources used in the study of the
Bible’s origin, transmission, translation, and interpretation. In each of these
areas an attempt is made to define the task that faces the student, to describe
the helps and hindrances, to explain methods, and to suggest the amount of
progress already made. There is no attempt to discuss in comprehensive fashion
all the literary or historical problems involved in the study of each of the
sixty-six books of the Bible. No attempt is made to survey in detail the history
of the canon, or the materials and methods of textual criticism, or to present
in summary all that is known in any area of biblical study. The student who is
anxious to go on from this book to such study will find a bibliography at the
end of each chapter, which is designed to lead him as far in the pursuit of the
subject as his own interest will carry him. The bibliographies group the books
referred to under two headings “General” and “Advanced” and most of the books
listed are briefly characterized. A strenuous effort has been made to include in
each of these divisions the clearest and soundest work of contemporary
scholarship, preference being given to works which themselves contain good
bibliographies and are of recent vintage. A final Bibliography lists
periodicals, dictionaries, encyclopedias, series of commentaries, etc. An
especial emphasis is laid upon the part played by the religious experience of
the group in the creation of the literature and also upon the part played by the
needs of the community in molding the literature into its present form. This is
one of the vital interests of biblical scholarship today; and, as it has only
recently won prominence, many of the older handbooks give it but scant
attention. This book has been planned to serve as an orientation in the study of
the Bible both for those who plan to specialize in the pursuit of biblical lore
and also for those whose interest in the subject is of a more general character.
The work of many a sincere student is fruitless because his attitudes are
basically wrong or his methods unsound. This is often true of the
“nonprofessional” student, the undergraduate in college, or the intelligent
layman. The questions that come from these sources to the specialist’s desk
betray a dismaying vulnerability to the attacks of quackery and fanaticism.
While no one book can equip the beginner with attitudes and methods adequate for
all his needs, this one it is hoped will help him toward that attainment. In so
far as it accomplishes this it will provide the student with some solid ground
on which to stand while he works; it will set up compass marks to prevent his
being lost in the confusion of innumerable details and conflicting methods and
theories.


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  CHAPTER 4: 01 CHAPTER I THE ORIGIN AND GROWTH OF THE BIBLE
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Chapter I The Origin and Growth of the Bible study of the origin, of the Bible
begins with definitions. The Bible, according to a contemporary dictionary, is
the collection of books which Christians accept as divinely inspired and as
possessing divine authority. Of these two elements inspiration and authority it
is authority which is the more distinctive of the Bible. The Bible is Bible as
an authoritative book; any separate book became Bible when its inspiration was
recognized as ’ of such a quality as to give it authority. The study of the
origin and development of the Bible as Bible is therefore limited to the study
of books accepted as / inspired and authoritative.

DISTINCTION BETWEEN LITERATURE AND CANON

It is equally legitimate to study the books of the Bible as books. This study of
the literature tries to answer such questions as: Who was the author of the
book? When was it written? Where was it written?

What sources did the author use? etc. Such questions reach back beyond the
existence of the books as Bible to the time when they existed simply as
religious books. The discussion of this literary criticism of the Bible is
postponed until the origin of the acceptance of the books as authoritative has
been investigated. In technical jargon the study of the literary problems of the
Bible is called “Introduction” short for “Introduction to Biblical Literature”
and the study of the Bible as authoritative is called the “study of the canon.”
It is this canonization of the Scriptures that is studied in this chapter. The
word “canon” is used with a bewildering variety of meanings. It may refer to a
support for bells, a bone in a horse’s foreleg, a cathedral official, an
ecclesiastical law, etc. In terms of Bible study it

V usually indicates the books accepted as authoritative by the church; that is,
it is used as a loose synonym for Bible. But it has other meanings here also. It
is used to mean a list of the sacred books; e.g, the Muratorian canon is a Roman
list of books accepted by the church about A.D. 180. It is used also of a group
of books within the Bible; the manuals speak of “the prophetic canon,” “the
gospel canon,” etc. And in a very broad sense the word “canon” is used to cover
the study of the origin and growth of the Bible as Bible; here it is really
shorthand for canonization.

Before the student is equipped to face the basic problems involved in a study of
how the books of the Bible became sacred, he must assimilate the fact that the
literature existed before it was canonized. The existence of the books as
nonsacred through a period preceding their acceptance by the cult as
authoritative literature has important implications for the study of the canon.
It makes impossible the simple assumption that the Jewish people (or the
Christian church) rushed to read and obey each new volume before the ink was
dry.

We who were born into a church which has reverenced the Scriptures for centuries
find it hard to lay aside this casual acceptance of the Bible and see the
problems that exist. There have been four gospels in the New Testament since we
first saw it but why four? why not three? or five? or, better yet, why not one?
Why two testaments? Why didn’t the Christians expand the Jewish Scriptures
instead of adding a new volume? How could the Christian church exist for a
century without a distinctive Christian canon?

Why do the Roman Catholic and the Protestant Old Testaments differ in contents?
When and why was the Old Testament Apocrypha dropped from the printings of the
English Bible? Has the church ever limited inspiration to the Bible and refused
to recognize it elsewhere? These questions are examples of the basic and
baffling problems that face the student of the canon. They show clearly that the
student must be constantly alert to overcome his familiarity with the Bible, to
recognize problems when he meets them, and to travel back into the past back of
the days when there was a Bible.

Most of the Bible was not written as Bible, nor did its first readers read it as
Bible. When Paul wrote to his churches, he was so far from expecting that his
letters would be accepted as equal in authority to the Jewish Scriptures that he
sometimes despaired of having his wishes carried out. After writing a harsh
letter to the Corinthians, he worries so much over how it will be received that
he cannot rest but starts toward Corinth to meet his messenger as soon as
possible and learn the fate of his letter. When he writes to Philemon about his
slave Onesimus, he bolsters up this appeal by referring to it in a letter to a
church group. The fiery, almost desperate, tone of his letter to the Galatian
churches springs from the hope but not from the certainty of converting them to
his position. These are not the attitudes of a man conscious of writing sacred
scripture and sure of its acceptance as authoritative. No more dramatic
demonstration of the nonsacred character of these writings in their early form
can be found than the story of the book which Jeremiah dictated to Baruch to be
read before all the people. As the story is told in chapter 36 of Jeremiah’s
prophecy, it is plain that some of the leaders of the people were terrified by
what was written in the book; but the king the Lord’s anointed was unmoved by
its message, cut it in pieces, and threw it into the fire. This dramatic
rejection is the more interesting in that the book was a deliberate attempt to
influence the cult group and was written by an individual who held a recognized
position in the life of the cult.

Another instance may be found in the Book of Amos. The only narrative in this
short but vigorous prophecy relates a stormy interview between the royal priest
and the prophet, in which the prophet is ordered out of the country. It is quite
plain from this story that there was no overwhelming desire on the part of king
and priest in Israel to accept the message of Amos as divinely authoritative.
Somewhere between 750 B.C. and 200 (?) B.C, the Book of Amos acquired authority;
and the exact period (if there was any exact period) was certainly closer to the
later than the earlier date. Thus, this book must have existed for more than
four centuries before it was accepted as part of the authoritative religious
literature of the Jewish people. In the case of those sections of the Bible
which had a long preliterary existence, the interval between creation and
canonization was even longer. Much of the older material in the Old Testament
has a remote past as folklore, poetry, story, and song. For example, it is
generally agreed that the major part of the content of the Book of Judges is
much older than the book in which we read it. The author, or editor, who
compiled our book has such a distinctive and repetitious style that it is easy
even for the novice to see the earlier elements within the framework. One of the
oldest and most famous of these sections is the Song of Deborah, which may go
back to the twelfth century B.C. It is a sweeping, partisan, brutal song of war
and victory and exultation over the enemy a true war song. Our Book of Judges
was written toward the end of the fifth century B.C. and was accepted as
scripture by 200 (?) B.C. In the seven hundred years that Deborah’s Song was
sung by Jewish patriots, was it accepted as an authoritative religious guide by
the cult as a cult? To ask the question is to answer it with a negative.

Examples of this sort could be multiplied until the reader was lulled to sleep
by their monotony. There are large areas in the Pentateuch whose composition is
separated from their acceptance by an interval of many centuries. This is true
also of most of the other books of the Old Testament. Sometimes in them we catch
glimpses of the literature before our literature.

There are quotations from, and references to, other books; e.g, the Book of
Jasher is quoted, but no one supposes that Jasher was ever regarded as an
authoritative volume in the sense that Genesis later was.

Even some of the latest books in the Old Testament e.g, Chronicles give evidence
of using ancient volumes as sources. The existence of these ancient books behind
our biblical books shows how long a pre-biblical history much of the Bible had.

It is clear from even this sampling of the literature that the origin of the
canon is not to be found in the study of the origin of the individual books as
books. The process we study here is a secondary one. First, the literature is
produced, used, edited, collected, reedited; then, after a longer or a shorter
interval of time, it is accepted by the cult as sacred and authoritative as
Bible.

WHY HAVE A BIBLE? But why? Why was it ever accepted as Bible? This is the basic
and most baffling problem in the history of the canon. It must not be lightly
assumed that the production and acceptance of a sacred authoritative book is
inevitable in every cult simply because it is a cult. It is easy for a religion
to exist without a book.

Many religions have so existed; some still do. One of the most vigorous
competitors of Christianity in the Roman empire was the cult of the sun god
Mithras. It swept through the legions and spread rapidly to the frontiers of the
empire, yet it was in no sense a book religion. The answer to the question, “Why
have a Bible?” must, therefore, b~e sought in some of the characteristic
features of Jewish religion and life. The remote distance at which the process
of canonization began adds to the difficulty of answering this primal question.
The reason for later developments and for the formation of new canons is
determined with relative ease; for in these later areas we have, as one
influential element in the situation, the presence of the first sacred
collection, and the amount of contemporary evidence as to the process increases
as the story approaches modern times. It is easy to say why Mohammed produced an
authoritative book for his cult, but the activity of pious Jews in the seventh
century B.C. follows no well-known precedent and is shrouded in the obscurity of
antiquity. The movement toward the creation of an authoritative religious
literature rose out of the conception of the nation as the chosen people of a
particular deity. Since this conception was not peculiar to Israel and existed
in other nations before the Exodus, the ultimate source of the canon lies in the
early history of cultures that were old before the Hebrews came to the promised
land. If the nation exists in an intimate reciprocal relationship to the deity,
it naturally follows that the laws of the nation are God’s laws and that the
history of the nation is sacred history. Furthermore, the deity would not be so
thoughtless of his people as to cut them off from the prospect of receiving
additional messages from him as occasion demanded. Throughout the ancient world
prophets appeared who spoke for God, whose words had a degree of sanctity
derived from the source from which they came. It was, therefore, not only
possible but natural that codes of law, books of history, and sermons of the
prophets should attain to some measure of sanctity. A concrete representation of
this is to be seen on.the Susa stele found in A.D. 1901 and written about 2000
B.C. Here the Babylonian king Hammurabi is shown in bas-relief, standing on a
mountain top before his god, who hands him the laws inscribed beneath them.
Several of the precepts of this code are strikingly parallel to items in the
Code of the Covenant (Exodus 20:23; Exodus 23:19); e.g, the demand of an eye for
an eye and the prescriptions as to liability for damages incurred by the owner
of a goring ox. Thus the code of Hammurabi and the covenant code in Exodus alike
possessed some degree of divine authority from the day of their codification at
least. But their early users were still far from regarding them as part of a
Bible.

CANONS ARE ADOPTED IN CRISES

Some light is shed on the origin of the Bible as Bible by the study of certain
characteristics which are common to the various specific situations in which
formal canonization emerges. One of these common elements is the presence of
strife between parties within the cult. At least from the time when the Hebrew
people settled in Canaan, there was conflict between the rigorous religion they
brought with them from the desert which we later call “prophetic” and the softer
cult of the people of the land with their Baalim. The influence of the Canaanite
religion upon that of the Hebrews was ancient, strong, and persistent. One of
the recent archeological discoveries emphasizes the extent of its influence upon
even the early ritual. Our biblical history is written from the prophetic and
priestly viewpoint; thus those kings are good who keep the cult “pure,” and
those are bad who favor and foster Canaanitish elements and practices. One of
the worst kings in this regard was Manasseh, who ruled in the first half of the
seventh century B.C. He restored and enriched the hillside shrines and favored
the Canaanitish elements in the cult. A few years after the death of Manasseh,
the prophetic party greatly influenced his grandson, King Josiah. This influence
culminated in the reforms of 621 B.C, which consisted of the abolition of all
shrines except the temple in Jerusalem and the adoption of a book found in the
temple as a religious authority for the people. This book with its
anti-Canaanitish emphasis was written by some leader of the opposition to
Manasseh in the dark days before Josiah came to the throne. This explains the
rigorous nature of the legislation the destruction of all shrines but one.

Josiah’s acceptance of the teachings of the party opposed to Amon and Manasseh
could not be transferred to the mass of the people as a casual or routine
matter. The ruthless nature of the reversal of policy and the destruction of all
shrines outside Jerusalem must have stirred the people deeply and unsettled
many. In that time of disquiet the change was supported by a new authority the
adoption of a sacred book. Scholars identify this book as the core of the
present Book of Deuteronomy.

Another example of the emergence of formal canonization in situations marked by
strife within the cult can be seen in the story of the New Testament canon in
the second century A.D. In this century the vitality of the new cult was too
exuberant to be stereotyped by the elementary controls that the church possessed
at that time. The result was that division followed division in rapid
succession: Docetism, Gnosticism, the Marcionite schism, Montanism. The second
century has been well called the blossom time of the sects. The strongest of
these sects, or heresies, was that led by Marcion. About the middle of the
century, he attempted to convert the Ephesian and then the Roman church to his
views. When he failed, he organized his followers into Marcionite churches.

He bitterly attacked the Old Testament, claiming that it was not inspired by the
Father of Jesus but by an inferior deity. He claimed to be a true representative
of the apostles, especially of Paul (the only true representative of Jesus); and
he supplied his churches with a New Testament consisting of “Gospel and Apostle”
(Luke and Paul) to replace the Old Testament. Thus he set an ancient authority
(ancient in Christian history) which had already acquired some prestige, over
against the authority of local ecclesiastical officials the bishop and
presbyters of Rome and of other cities. Within a generation of his arrival at
Rome, the Roman church set up a definite list of books which it accepted as
authoritative. This earliest list of New Testament books, called the “Muratorian
canon,” emerges in a situation characterized by strife within the cult.

CANONS ARE ADOPTED UNDER POLITICAL PRESSURE A second element common to the
various situations in which the formal acceptance of the canon takes place is
the presence of pressure upon the cult arising from the association of the cult
with political life. This can be seen both in times of disaster and in times of
triumph. The classic example from days of disaster is the “closing” of the Old
Testament canon in Palestinian Judaism. Jerusalem had been captured by the
Romans in the year 70, and the temple ritual abolished by the destruction of the
temple. This mortal blow to the existence of the Jewish people in the sacred
land raised questions of many kinds in regard to the continuing life of the
cult. The leaders of the synagogue faced the trying situation and put forth
desperate efforts to establish and strengthen the remaining resources of the
cult.

One of the most valuable of these resources was the Sacred Book, which at that
time consisted of three collections of books the Law, the Prophets, and the
other writings. The first two were definite in content and accepted beyond
question; the third group had no sharpness of outline, and about some books the
question of inclusion or omission was a very live one. The weakening of the
religion consequent to the disaster of A.D. 70 made this uncertainty as to the
exact limits of the Bible intolerable; and the rabbis of Palestine began an
intensive discussion of the Bible’s contents which led ultimately to agreement
on its exact limits. In the second century B.C. the strenuous efforts of King
Antiochus Epiphanes of Syria to stamp out the religion of his Jewish subjects
introduced a period of conflict between cult and state of great significance for
the canon. The attack was begun before the days of Antiochus, for the attractive
features of Hellenism had drawn many Jews away from their loyalty to their own
cult. The critical nature of the situation when Antiochus threw the military
power of the state against Judaism cannot be overemphasized. Pious Jews did not
underestimate the danger; under the military leadership of Judas and his family
they repulsed invaders, threw off the Syrian yoke, and attained an approximate
independence. Since the Syrian persecution deliberately singled out the sacred
books of the Jews for destruction, and even forbade the reading of the
Scriptures, it was important to know which books were Scriptures. This situation
made a vital issue of the exact definition of the Bible’s contents. From it, in
all probability, came the impetus to the final definition of the prophetic
canon, the second division of the Jewish Bible.

Although we know little of the details of the action, there can be no doubt that
Jewish leaders found in their military victories a victory for Torah, too. It is
perhaps an oversimplification of the processes to point out that the three great
national disasters of Israel (i) the Babylonian captivity, (a) the Syrian
persecution, and (3) the capture of Jerusalem by the Romans are followed in turn
by the closing of the three divisions of the Jewish Bible (i) the Law (2) the
Prophets, and (3) the Writings. The pressure exerted upon the cult in regard to
the formation of the canon by the association of the cult with political life
was equally strong in days oftriumph. Early in the fourth century A.D,
Christianity won tolerance and favor from the Emperor Constantine; and in A.D.
380 Theodosius I proclaimed Christianity the official religion of the state.
That Constantine’s recognition sprang from a desire to strengthen the unity of
the empire is shown by the strenuous efforts he made to bring the dissident
groups of the church into harmony. Dislike of heresy (that is, of division) in
the dominant cult of the realm has characterized other able rulers since
Constantine; Theodosius’ denial to heretics of the right to make bequests
indicates plainly the value he attached to a united church. That the pressure
toward unification which the state brought to bear upon the church throughout
the fourth century affected canon as well 1 as doctrine is certain, for the
value of canon as a source of doctrine was unquestioned. It is not chance
coincidence that this century which saw the church become the one religion of
the state saw the church agree on one canon. That this agreement was still far
from unanimous is true; it would, perhaps, be more accurate to say that the
degree of agreement here reached its high point. The exaltation of the church at
the right hand of the emperor takes place in the period which sees the Christian
canon formally completed.

WHAT BOOKS ARE TO BE INCLUDED? The question raised above Why a Bible? is partly
answered by the fact that in the crucial situations (like those described above)
there was at hand a body of literature which had already acquired some prestige.
This prestige was in part due to the antiquity of the literature at the time of
its canonization. In the Roman Catholic church today no person is canonized
until at least fifty years after the date of death. In the history of the growth
of the Bible, the interval between the writing of a book and its canonization
was always greater than that or was believed to be so. The first codes of laws
to acquire prestige claim Moses as their author and are written against the
birth of the Hebrew people (the Exodus) as a background. In the Christian
Testament, literature that went back to Jesus and his circle gained prestige
from the tremendous significance of Jesus for the church. From the moment of the
resurrection appearances, Jesus loomed so large on the stage of Christian
history that the Gospels, for example, from the time they were written possessed
importance from the fact that they told about Jesus.

But, in the longer span of Old Testament history especially, the preceding point
does not explain how these books came to be preserved long enough to acquire the
sanctity of antiquity. The origin of the canon is not explained by quoting the
venerable saying about religion’s habit of sanctifying everything more than five
hundred years old, for the puzzling query still remains, “How did these books
acquire enough prestige to attain such an advanced age?” The sanctity ascribed
to a book as Bible was first, and most naturally ascribed to cult prescriptions.
In Exodus, chapter 34, an ancient code describes the covenant made between
Jahweh and Moses and contains a decalogue which is entirely cultic. Its ritual
legislation prescribes the feast of unleavened bread, the offering of first-born
males (except the first-born of an ass or of man), the Sabbath rest, the feast
of weeks, the feast of ingathering at the year’s end, the use of unleavened
bread, and the offering of the first of the crop. It forbids leaving the
sacrifice of the feast of the Passover until the morning and boiling a kid in
its mother’s milk. ’It is easily seen that prescriptions and proscriptions of
this sort would early acquire a sacred authority from the intimacy of their
association with the rites of the cult.

It is no accident that the first code formally accepted by the Jews as Bible
(the Deuteronomic code) ’ included laws controlling the location of the temple,
the observance of the religious festivals, the paying of tithes, etc. This code
itself acquires antiquity and prestige through its ascription to Moses and the
quotation of older laws, beginning with the Ten Commandments. Many of its
prescriptions are much older * than 621 B.C.; Deuteronomy simply transfers the
location of their observance from the country shrines to Jerusalem. The
transference was due to the contemporary crisis; the prescriptions had already
acquired antiquity through the vitality and conservatism of cult practice. But
the services rendered to the cult by religious; books were not all of a
liturgical nature. Other elements than liturgy survive or recur from generation;
to generation. The problems met by one individual in his lifetime are not
entirely and uniquely his own. Some of the righteous are poor and afflicted ih
every generation; so many of the good persist in dying young that they have
created a proverb. Neither false friends nor scolding wives are modern
inventions, nor is the divorce of the wife of one’s youth a new device of the
shyster lawyer of today. Short weights and measures and the exploitation of
labor have ancient precedents. Religious books that championed the good life and
tackled these problems interested more than one generation; the cult found
enough value in them to keep them alive.

Liturgy and personal morality by no means exhaust the areas served through
successive generations by religious books, but these two are significant
examples of the values which won survival for the religious book in its
precanonical days. Thus the first answer given to the question, “What books?”
is, “A book already ancient, already revered from intimate association with the
cult or from the enduring service of recurrent needs, and useful to the dominant
element in the cult in days of crisis.” The question, “What books are to be
included?” has often been answered too simply by saying, “those books which were
read in public worship, whether of synagogue or church.” I say “too simply,” for
there are books in the canon that were not read in the synagogue or the church
service. The books of the Writings, or Hagiographa, the third section of the Old
Testament canon, were not read in the synagogue service. That is to say, in the
formal systems of lections for Sabbath reading throughout the year, no use was
made of the Writings; the use of the five rolls in connection with the festivals
is hardly analogous. The Revelation of John was not read in church service in
early Christian days; the lection aries of the Orthodox church derive no
lections from it. There are Gospel lectionaries and Apostle (Acts and Epistles)
lectionaries, but no Apocalypse lectionaries. Not only are there books in the
canon that were not read in church but there are some books that were read in
synagogue or church only after they were accepted as canonical. Does anyone
imagine that the Deuteronomic code was read in sacred service for a long time
and thus became Bible? Of course not. Throughout the entire history of the
development of the Jewish Bible it is difficult to establish clearly the
chronological order of synagogue reading and canonization.

Moreover, some books were read in church services and probably also in the
synagogue that never became part of the Bible. At an early point in the
development of the liturgy, the stories of the martyrs were read in church
service; they are still being read in the appropriate services of the ancient
communions; but they are not in the Bible. Nor can any clear case be made for
the claim that they ever came near to sanctity. The letter of Clement of Rome to
the Corinthians is another instance of widespread and long-continued church
reading which did not lead to canonization. Eusebius (Church History iii. 16)
makes a strong statement as to this use of I Clement: “It has been read publicly
before the congregation in very many churches from a long time ago, and [is so
read], in our own time.” At least one important book, the Psalter, obtained its
place not because it was read in synagogue or church but because it was sung in
the temple at Jerusalem. This intimate association with the ritual of the cult
gave it a prestige great enough to lead to its inclusion in the Jewish Bible
after the Law and the Prophets were closed. It is quite probable that it was the
importance of the Psalter that kept the Old Testament canon open after the
collection of the Prophets had been completed. It led the way to the forming of
the third group the Writings to be added to the Law and the Prophets. The primal
importance of the Psalms in this area is shown by the way it dominates
references to the Scripture outside the Law and the Prophets in the early
Christian period. In fact, the only New Testament reference to the Old Testament
which mentions the three sections refers to them as “the Law, the Prophets, and
the Psalms.” Whether this be taken as an indication that the Psalter alone had
been added to the Law and Prophets at this time, or it be assumed that a group
of the Writings is referred to under the name of the Psalter, it is clear that
the Psalter holds the leading position in this group.

BOOKS ARE ADOPTED IN GROUPS The selection of books for the Bible proceeded in
waves, in the acceptance of a group of books at a time. Thus the Old Testament
contains three groups: (i) the Law the Pentateuch; (2) the Prophets Joshua,
Judges, Samuel, Kings, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the twelve “minor”
prophets; (3) the Writings Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Job, Esther, Ruth,
Song of Songs, Lamentations, Daniel, Ezra, Nehemiah, Chronicles and often other
books in addition. The New Testament is essentially a twofold canon containing
(i) the Gospel our four; (2) the Apostle the’ rest of the New Testament. But it
must not be assumed that there are five groups within the Christian canon
because the makers of the canon, those responsible for formal adoption, chose
certain groups as groups. The groups did not exist as groups until their
adoption. Each adoption was intended to be final. When the Law was canonized, it
was not canonized as “Part I” of the Bible but as the Bible. The Law became a
section of the Bible a group of books within the Bible only when more books were
added. The Old Testament is no older than the New Testament, for before the New
Testament was canonized, the Old Testament was the Bible. When the prophetic
books were canonized, they were not chosen as a group from various rival groups
of books but rather as a collection of all the books that were worthy of
canonization. Thus each extension of the canon involved a rejection of books not
included, a negative judgment on their value. And the possibility must not be
overlooked that strong dislike of some recent religious writings or oral
effusions may have been one of the immediate causes of the canonization of older
works.

Every group of books accepted acted as a bar to the acceptance of other books of
the same type or date. The acceptance of the Torah meant that no more legal
codes would be accepted as such; and, in fact, Esther and Ezekiel were attacked
because they did not harmonize with the laws of the Pentateuch. The acceptance
of a group of prophetic writings practically closed the door to additional
prophecies. From that moment on, no new prophecy could be accepted as
authoritative. It was the general recognition of the fact that a definite group
of prophecies had been accepted as Bible that led to the formulation of the
dogma that prophecy was dead. This teaching arose from the closing of the second
section of the canon, not from the disappearance of prophets and prophecy in
Israel. The writings of Josephus, the New Testament itself, and the Old
Testament Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha with their frequent references to
prophets and prophecy, all clearly show that prophecy was still vital in Jewish
religion in the first century B.C. and in the first century A.D.

After the closing of the prophetic canon, prophets wrote “prophecies”
(apocalypses) in which the author borrows the mantle of some ancient worthy so
that his book may reach back of the closing of the prophetic canon into a period
when authoritative books of prophecy could still be written. The strong
opposition to the inclusion of Daniel sprang from the fact that it won
importance as a prophecy after the prophetic canon was closed. It was only when
its disguise was accepted at face value that this prophecy was reluctantly
included. That is to say, its claims to being an ancient work could only be
accepted after the date of its appearance was forgotten, and it had to be
accepted as ancient before it was accepted as prophetic. The argument over
whether or not a disputed book of the Writings is “prophetic” is thus seen to
rest on the determination of date. The same thing is true in the use of the term
“apostolic” in New Testament controversy. For better or for worse, the second
century A.D. saw the Christian churches accepting apostolicity as the test of a
book’s right to a place in the canon. But to be apostolic a book had to be
(relatively) old. Thus the Muratorian list (A.D. 180-2,00) rejects the Shepherd
of Hermas, an apocalypse (prophecy). The reasons given are that it was written
quite recently, “in our own times”; that it cannot be included with the
Prophets, whose number is complete, or with the apostolic group since Hermas has
just appeared.

How were groups of books collected, and the collection closed? The collecting
began as a natural, that is, a spontaneous, movement; it ended in some formal
authoritative action. For example, there can be little doubt that the captivity
in Babylon led to a new appreciation of the message of Jeremiah. In a sense the
destruction of Jerusalem and the exile confirmed his preaching. From the reading
of Jeremiah to the reading of other prophets of doom was a natural and easy
step. The collection grew slowly and irregularly from the exile to the second
century B.C, as the Jewish people found inspiration and encouragement in the
writings of these vigorous preachers of righteousness. The closing of this
particular collection is shrouded in obscurity. The explanation often heard that
the dying-out of prophecy finally led to the acceptance of these surviving
prophetic books will not bear careful scrutiny, as we have shown above. A more
probable situation for the formal closing of the prophetic canon existed in the
Maccabean period after Antiochus’ attack on the Scripture had been beaten back.
In the absence of direct evidence it is dangerous to speculate on the action
that closed the prophetic canon. Yet it seems clear that it was closed not only
out of reverence for the old prophets but also out of fear and dislike of the
new ones. The post-Exilic period is one in which the priest and the scribe
attain an ever increasing importance in the cult; they are themselves
officialized and institutionalized the one in connection with the temple; the
other, with the synagogue. That their leaders came to depreciate contemporary
prophecy, always inclining toward independence of established authority, was
natural. That had happened in the days of Amos; it happened in Jesus’ day; it
probably happened in Jerusalem in the Ptolemaic period. The fanatical
extravagance and independence of some “prophets” in the late third century B.C,
or Jin the turbulent days of the Maccabees, was probably part of the cause of
the official closing of the prophetic canon; and the closing was probably made
official by the willing co-operation of the priesthood.

Toward the end of the second century A.D. the Christian church went through a
similar experience. The Montanist movement placed a high value on spirit
guidance and prophecy. These prophets set their direct inspiration over against
the prestige slowly built up by local bishops and by earlier writings. That the
officials of the church in this situation referred to the closed nature of the
prophetic canon was natural; that they used the growing prestige of the apostles
to shut out these books was equally natural; and in the Muratorian canon’s
treatment of the Prophecy of Hermas we have an example of this exelusion in
action. Ultimately, all prophecies but one were excluded from the New Testament;
the inclusion of that one was due to its claim of apostolic authorship. This
ultimate canon was, of course, a canon promulgated by councils and
ecclesiastics. This was true also as we have already noted of the closing of the
canon of the Writings in the Old Testament, closed for Palestinian Jews by the
pronouncements of rabbis. The first canonical book was officially accepted by
the people under the leadership of king and priest. All later books canonized
came to their final acceptance in a closed collection through some official
action. Yet the official action, generally speaking, is no more than the
ratification of a popular choice manifested by the continuing use of the books
in the private devotions of the individual as well as in cult usage. Let this
fact be emphasized as it deserves (and it is the most important validation of
the canon to the modern man), it must still be remembered that the acceptance of
the same list of books by the vast majority of the membership of a cult is
historically incredible without some formal authorization.

WHY DO CANONS VARY? The books chosen were not always the same; in fact, a brief
survey of any elementary introduction to the canon leaves one with the
impression that they were never the same. The amount of this variation may be
indicated by the extreme and yet accurate statement that exactly the same Bible
(as to books included) was never accepted at any one time by all the believers
in the cult. The church member today is aware that there is some sort of
difference in content between Roman Catholic and Protestant Bibles; the student
in college and seminary has a faint and accurate idea that there was an equal
difference in the contents of the Jewish canon as it existed for the Jew of
Palestine and the Jew of Alexandria in A.D. 30. It is not our purpose here to
list all the known differences in Bibles’ contents the lists can be easily found
in the books referred to in the bibliography but rather to raise as sharply as
possible a question as to the reason for this variation and to suggest some of
the possible answers.

Sometimes the difference in canonical lists is due to what may be called
“historical accident.” Under this none-too-satisfactory heading various
incidents and influences may be grouped; the discussion of examples will make
the meaning of the term clearer than a wordy definition could hope to do. The
Samaritans pride themselves on being the true Israel; their Sacred Scripture
contains the Pentateuch and nothing else. The present tense is used in speaking
of them because they still exist (although in dwindling numbers) as a distinct
sect in Palestine. The division between Jews and Samaritans became final and
irreconcilable in the days of Alexander the Great. The Pentateuch had been
formally accepted by the Jewish people about a generation earlier; the
Samaritans, therefore, naturally carried the Scripture with them in their
separation from the Jews of Jerusalem. The propinquity and similarities between
these two rival cults generated such bitterness that any transfer of sacred
books adopted by the Jews after the split was an impossibility. Ill will began
between the groups in Samaritan opposition to Jewish innovations, although the
Jewish leaders regarded their work as reform and return to older patterns. This
conservatism prevented the growth of the Samaritan canon; but, had the schism
been delayed a century and a half, the Samaritan canon would consist of the Law
and the Prophets.

Another example of the influence of “historical accidents” upon the process of
canonization can be seen in the case of the Book of Esther. Esther was read in
connection with the feast of Purim by the Jews of the Dispersion within a short
time of its composition. But the Palestinian Jews celebrated as an important
religious festival Judas Maccabaeus’ victory over Nicanor on the very day on
which the Jews of the Dispersion first celebrated the feast of Purim:
Consequently, this feast (Purim) did not enter Palestine until some centuries
after its establishment. As a secondary consequence, since Esther gained
religious prestige from being read in connection with the observance of Purim,
Esther was accepted as canonical much sooner outside Palestine than inside
Palestine.

But, if Judas had attacked Nicanor a day or a week sooner

Differences in content sprang also from the absence of a critical situation and
consequent formal canonization in one part of the world and its presence in
another section. We have already seen that the Jewish war and the destruction of
Jerusalem in A.D. 70 were influential in leading to the closing of the
scriptural canon in Palestine. But there was in the Dispersion no analogous
crisis involving the Bible, and as a result the canon was not formally closed in
the Dispersion at this time. Hence the extra-Palestinian Bible contained from
eight to a dozen books not in the Scriptures accepted in the Holy Land.

We have seen that the irritating influence of Marcion and his creation of a New
Testament at Rome did much to make the Roman church aware of the need of an
authoritative pronouncement on the Bible. It was in large measure the presence
of this aggressive and capable schismatic that made Rome conservative on the
matter of the contents of the Bible. How would the story of the canon read today
if Marcion had gone to the city of Alexandria instead of to Rome?

There was also a difference in the rate at which books were accepted as
authoritative by the churches in the important cities, on the one hand, and the
churches of the backwoods districts, the hinterland, on the other. The big
cities were often in closer touch with one another than they were with the small
churches scattered through the adjacent rural sections. One could travel easily
and rapidly from city to city especially the cities on or near the Mediterranean
Sea. In the big cities local judgment was easily influenced by the decisions
made in other important churches; thus their canons at least kept within sight
of one another. But in the backwoods the small amount of intercommunication left
the local or sectional church more independent in its choice. As a result, the
churches of these areas either lagged behind the majority in accepting new books
as canon (as was the case in Syria outside Antioch) or continued to accept books
unchecked by outside criticism (as was the case in Ethiopia and, to some extent,
in Armenia).

These facts may be covered by the generalization [ that some areas were more
cautious or conservative I in the matter of canonization than others. The
outlying districts of Syria were more conservative than Antioch; Palestinian
Judaism than the Diaspora; Rome than Alexandria. The conservatism of the Syrian
territory is seen in both Old Testament and New Testament. Its Old Testament did
not include Chronicles; through the fourth century its New Testament included
neither Catholic Epistles nor Apocalypse. But, as Chrysostom’s usage shows, the
city of Antioch had already accepted three of the Catholic letters: James, I
Peter, and I John. This conservatism of Syria was in accord with the
conservatism of Palestine in regard to the Old Testament canon. The canon as
adopted in Palestine toward the end of the first century was identical with that
of the present-day Protestant Old Testament. At that time there was still some
hesitation as to the acceptance of even some of these books Esther,
Ezra-Nehemiah, Chronicles, and the Song of Songs. Jews outside of Palestine were
much freer in their treatment of the canon, which they used in the Greek
translation called the Septuagint. They accepted books more rapidly than the
Palestinians; they amplified some of the books they both accepted; they were
evidently less concerned about the limits of the canon than were their
compatriots in the homeland. Thus we cannot be too confident that every book I
found in a manuscript of the Septuagint was an integral part of the Bible for
Alexandrian Jews. But the evidence is sufficient to indicate a much larger canon
at Alexandria than was accepted in Jerusalem.

Among the books they received are the following, I and II Esdras, Tobit, Judith,
Additions to Esther, Wisdom of Solomon, Wisdom of Jesus the son of Sirach
(Ecclesiasticus), Baruch, Additions to Daniel, Prayer of Manasses, I-II
Maccabees. Of these, only Ecclesiasticus enjoyed any prestige in Palestine.

. In the Christian church of Alexandria an equally liberal view as to the
contents of Scripture was dominant. In the writings of Clement we see the same
inclusive and carefree attitude toward Christian Scripture that we have noticed
in the Jews of Alexandria toward the Old Testament. Clement used half-adozen
gospels; fourteen letters of Paul; six Catholic epistles including Barnabas and
I Clement; three Apocalypses John, Peter, and Hermas the Acts of the Apostles;
the Preaching of Peter; and the Didache. Except for his surplus gospels, most of
these works are either explicitly or implicitly used as Scripture by Clement.
Thus Alexandria was the home of, an extensive Scripture in both Testaments. It
is no accident that it was also the home of allegorical interpretation. The use
of this method of interpretation from pre-Christian times on made it possible
for the Alexandrian to overcome difficulties in regard to canonical books very
easily. In Palestine and Syria a more sedate, more literal and historical
criticism was employed. This goes far toward explaining the variations in canon
in the two sections.

Rome was early forced by Marcion into the definition of the Scriptures. Its New
Testament never knew the exuberance of the Alexandrian, but its Old Testament
grew into practical identity with that of Egypt. In the Christian books the
affinities of Rome are in general with Syria and Asia Minor; in the Jewish
Scriptures it reaches through North Africa to Alexandria and a “full” Old
Testament. The student who faces the problems raised by these variations in the
contents of the Bible can simplify his task by establishing a list of those
books commonly accepted throughout the cult. In the Old Testament these
unquestioned books include the Protestant Old Testament with the exception of
Esther, Ezra-Nehemiah, Chronicles, Daniel, Song of Solomon, and perhaps Job and
Ecclesiastes. In the New Testament the unquestioned books are the Four Gospels,
the Acts, and ten letters of Paul. The books which won their place in the final
official canon only after the dissent of a minority had been overcome are the
crucial points for study in the history of the canonization of individual books.
The pronouncements of councils did more for these “disputed” books than for the
rest of the Bible.

What these councils really ratified for these disputed books was their
authenticity in terms of author and date. It was in the final period of canon
formation that questions as to authorship played their supremely important part.
If the letter to the Hebrews was the work of Paul, then it was apostolic and
deserved a place in the Christian canon. It is doubtful if questions of
authorship have had any vital importance for the Scriptures in any other period.
Nor has any more artificial method of determining authorship been employed than
the majority vote of a council of ecclesiastics. If these councils had made
fewer mistakes, the work of modern scholarship would be much less “negative.”

AFTER THE LAST COUNCIL The minor role played by decisions of councils is shown
by the precarious existence of those books which owed their position in the
canon largely to the favorable verdict of some council. Not all books in the
canon even if they had been formally and officially accredited were received by
the faithful with the same degree of reverence and enthusiasm. The books which
enjoyed the most prestige were those whose canonization was merely a recognition
of general and long-established usage.

Thus, in the Hebrew Scriptures, no later book or books ever attained to the
pre-eminence occupied by the Law. Within the Holy Book, the Law was the Holy of
Holies. Next to it in general esteem came the Prophets, but the Prophets were
definitely below the Law in sanctity. This is most dramatically shown in the
prescriptions for the reading of the Bible in synagogue services. In New
Testament times it was customary to read from the Hebrew in short passages which
were translated at once into Aramaic by the Meturgeman so that the Scripture
might be understood by the congregation that knew no Hebrew. The rule as given
in the Mishna (Megilla iv. 4) follows, “He who reads in the Pentateuch must not
read to the Meturgeman more than one verse, and in the Prophets three verses [at
a time]. If each verse is a paragraph, they are read one by one. He who reads
may skip in the Prophets, but not in the Law.” Equally significant as to the
relative prestige of the various sections of the canon is the fact that the
Writings the third section of the Old Testament was not read at all in synagogue
services.

What Torah was to the Jew, the Gospel was to the Christian. Its pre-eminence is
shown not only by its appearance in every Christian canon but also by the favor
shown it by the members of the cult. This can be seen objectively in the number
of manuscripts of the Greek New Testament in existence today. Manuscripts of the
Four Gospels number more than two thousand; in addition, there are more than a
thousand Gospel lectionary manuscripts. Manuscripts of the Acts and Epistles and
their lectionary are less than half as numerous. There are. less than two
hundred manuscripts of Revelation, aside from fragments. These totals accurately
represent the relative prestige of these volumes in Eastern Christendom down
through the Middle Ages. No decree of a. council could ever give to any
Christian book the prestige enjoyed by the Gospel. No council of rabbis could
ever lift any other volume to the level of Torah. Nor did formal acceptance by
the, leaders of the cult always mean vital acceptance by the mass of the
believers. It is sometimes said that the Jewish canon was closed in Palestine
about A.D. 90 with the acceptance of Esther, Song of Solomon, Daniel,
Ezra-Nehemiah, and Chronicles. Yet the Syriac version dominated by Palestinian
ideals did not include Chronicles. Esther was not accepted by Theodore of
Mopsuestia; by the Nestorians; by the Palestinians whom Melito visited about
A.D. 150; by Athanasius of Alexandria in A.D. 365; by Gregory Nazianzen (fA.D.
389). The Talmud itself contains items that show Esther was not universally
accepted after A.D. 100. The Babylonian Gemara (fol. ja) of the tractate Megi/Ia
tries to meet the difficulties caused by R. Samuel’s statement that Esther was
not canonical. The tractate Sanhedrin (fol. 1000) states that Esther does not
need covers as canonical books do. It was only the association of Esther with
the feast of Purim that gradually increased its prestige. In the Christian
church, in periods of freedom of thought, Esther has once more been under
attack.

Luther, in speaking of II Maccabees, said: “I am so opposed to this book and to
Esther that I wish they did not exist, for they Judaize too much, and have many
heathenish improprieties.” So far is the pious layman today from using his Bible
as equally valuable in all its parts that he is willing to award some badge of
merit to anyone who has read the Bible all the way through; he, himself, very
naturally and justifiably, selects his readings from those areas which he finds
most inspiring.

What we have seen to be true in the case of Esther was equally true in the
experience of the Apocalypse of John in the New Testament canon. It was not
popular in the Eastern half of the Roman world; Constantinople, Antioch, Syria,
and Caesarea were not enthusiastic about it as part of the canon. Yet, under the
wing of Rome, Africa, and Alexandria, it was formally declared canonical at
Hippo and Carthage in councils at the end of the fourth century, by Athanasius
of Alexandria (A.D. 367), by Basil the Great (A.D. 379), and by Gregory of Nyssa
(\ca. A.D. 394), as by many others. In the West it first appeared in the
Muratorian canon (ca. 180) and was an integral part of the canon throughout the
Middle Ages. But in the East its position was never secure.

Two of the four Doctors of the Orthodox church (Chrysostom and Gregory of
Nazianzus) did not accept Revelation as canonical. It was not in the Old Syriac
version or in the Syriac Peshitta (ca. 415). It was not in the original Armenian
version. Theodore of Mopsuestia (fA.o. 428), Amphilochius of Iconium (fA.D.
394), the sixtieth canon of “Laodicea,” the List of the Sixty Canonical Books,
all reject the Apocalypse. Even as late as A.D. 850, it is listed as a
“disputed” book in the Stichometry of Nicephorus. In spite of formal
canonization, the Revelation of John did not win widespread acceptance in the
East.

We have already noticed that in number of manuscripts extant its total is about
one-seventh of that of manuscripts of the Gospels. Moreover, many of these
manuscripts are not part of larger New Testaments but often contain noncanonical
material. Nor did the Orthodox church use the Book of Revelation in its
preparation of lections for use in the liturgy; to this day it is not read
regularly in church services. An unusual example of the lower level of
canonicity enjoyed by the Apocalypse was noted in the study of a
sixteenth-century Greek manuscript containing the Apocalypse and commentary,
translated into conversational Greek of the period. In the comment other books
of the Bible are quoted, but it is the author’s general rule not to translate
them into the conversational idiom they were too sacred! Yet the main purpose of
this work was to translate the Apocalypse into conversational idiom. In the
Western world Luther’s opinion of the Apocalypse is well known; less familiar is
the similar judgment of the Roman Catholic scholar Erasmus (expressed at the end
of his notes on the first edition of the Greek New Testament). He comments on
its vicissitudes in the past with keen discernment, raises questions as to its
authorship, and concludes with an analogy whose accuracy cannot be concealed
even by the decision of an ecumenical council. “Since even among jewels,” he
says, “there is some difference, and some gold is purer and better than other;
in sacred things also one thing is more sacred than another.” This discussion of
the origin and growth of the Bible is designed to open up the field for study.
It raises questions as to the ultimate origin of the canon and tries to indicate
its process of growth. The part played by heresy and council in advancing the
canon has been suggested with no attempt at comprehensive treatment. The
important Council of Trent, for example, has been passed over in silence. For
the pursuit of factual material, and a study of other problems, the student’s
attention is called to the bibliography that follows.

BIBLIOGRAPHY ON CANON

GENERAL LEWIS, F. G. How the Bible Grew. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1924. This volume makes large use of the Bible’s testimony to its own
development.

SLEDD, ANDREW. The Bibles of the Churches. Nashville: Cokesbury Press, 1930. A
stimulating presentation of the main factors in the building of the canon and of
the basic problems with which the student is confronted.

SMYTH, J. PATERSON. The Bible in the Making in the Light of Modern Research. New
York: James Pott & Co, 1914. A very simple treatment of the process of
canonization with a fair statement as to objective data but little recognition
of their implications.

ADVANCED BUHL, F. P. W. Canon and Text of the Old Testament (trans, by J.
MACPHERSON). Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1892. A careful study of the course of
canonization of the Old Testament by, first, the Jews and, then, the Christians.
The greater part of the book is occupied with textual criticism.

RYLE, H. E. The Canon of the Old Testament (2d ed.). New York: Macmillariy 1895.

More popular in form than Buhl and Wildeboer, which it uses critically; but a
scholarly and exhaustive work.

WILDEBOER, G. The Origin of the Canon of the Old Testament (trans, by B. W.
BACON). London: Luzac, 1895. A detailed study of the history of canonization of
the Old Testament with citation and careful discussion of the ancient sources.

ZEITLIN, S. An Historical Study of the Canonization of the Hebrew Scriptures.
(Offprint from the Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research,
1931-1932.} Philadelphia, Jewish Publication Society, 1933. An independent and
stimulating study which makes large use of rabbinic sources and reaches some
conclusions at variance with those generally received.

ENSLIN, MORTON S. “On the Way to a Canon,” Crozer Quarterly, XIV (1937), 127-44.

Brief but stimulating survey of the origin of the New Testament canon, part of
an introduction to the New Testament to be published soon by Harper & Bros.

GOODSPEED, EDGAR J. The Formation of the New Testament.

Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1926. A brief chronological and
geographical outline of the varying contents of the New Testament down to A.D.
400.

HARNACK, ADOLF VON. The Origin of the New Testament (trans, by J. R. WILKINSON).
New York: Macmillan, 1925. The most stimulating definition of the problems
involved in the making of the New Testament canon.

MOORE, E. C. The New Testament in the Christian Church. New York: Macmillan,
1904.

Still valuable for its thoroughgoing discussion of the origin and function of
the Christian Testament in the cult.

WESTCOTT, B. F. A General Survey of the History of the Canon of the New
Testament (7th ed.). New York, Macmillan, 1896. A full presentation of the
relevant data; most of the important sources are quoted in the original
language. Useful as a reference work.


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  CHAPTER 5: 02 CHAPTER II THE TRANSMISSION OF THE BIBLE
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Chapter II The Transmission of the Bible letters Paul wrote have all vanished.
We have none of the autographs, the originals, of the books of the Bible. The
exact transcript as it came from the author’s pen has disappeared. It is
generally believed now that these originals vanished fairly soon after they were
written. The New Testament books probably had a shorter life than those of the
Jewish Scriptures, for they were most probably written on perishable papyrus,
while the books of the Old Covenant may have been written on skins a much more
durable material. In the loss of the original manuscripts, the Bible is on a par
with most of the literary works of antiquity; for very few of them have survived
except in copies. To determine the exact content of the books of the Bible,
therefore, we study copies most of them copies of copies of copies.

It is only since the invention of the printing press, about the middle of the
fifteenth century, that It has been easy to determine the original content of a
book. The printing press first made it possible to have thousands of copies of a
book all exactly alike. Before its invention no two copies of a book were ever
exactly alike. Man has never attained the accuracy of the machine, and his
laborious production of books in the ante-printing-press age was slow and
inevitably erroneous.

If a book was first written before the fifteenth century, therefore, its
original content can be determined only from a study of handwritten copies, or
manuscripts. The contents of the so-called “classical literature” the writings
of ancient Greece and Rome were determined in this fashion; and the contents of
the Bible are determined in the same way. This study of ancient documents in an
attempt to overcome the errors of copyists and editors and establish the exact
wording of the original is a basic discipline in the study of any ancient
literature. It is called “textual criticism” and is often classed with the more
in- offensive areas of biblical study as “lower criticism.” It is lower
criticism in the sense that the foundation of a skyscraper is lower than the
rest of the building which rests upon it. Its technical name, “textual
criticism,” is often misleading to the devout student who thinks of texts only
as points of departure for the Sunday morning sermon. “Text” is used here in the
sense of content. Textual criticism is interested in reconstructing the long
history of the transmission of that content from its origins to our day so that
the original content, or text, may be accurately restored.

It has already been suggested that the study of textual criticism faces the
student of any ancient literature. Students who specialize in English literature
learn its techniques to establish an accurate text of Chaucer’s poems; students
of Cicero, Caesar, Homer, and Vergil are forced to use either the methods or the
results of textual criticism. Its devotees are the pioneers who blaze the trail
for learning to travel back through the centuries to the actual words written
centuries ago by gifted and inspired men. Np matter what book may be the object
of this study, the methods and techniques employed are the same. There may be
particular tools of language or paleography needed in one case and not in
another; but, in general, the methods are the same. Textual criticism of the
Bible is not a thing apart. In a university seminar which attempts to establish
the original wording of Chaucer’s poems, F. J. A. Hort’s exposition of the
methods employed in textual criticism of the New Testament is required reading.
THE MATERIALS OF TEXTUAL CRITICISM This study covers an area which is easily and
naturally divided under the headings f Materials” and “Methods.” The materials
are ultimately manuscripts physical, objective materials. The solidity of
manuscripts and the routine nature of the elementary work in textual criticism
have misled many beginners into the belief that all its methods are objective
and that it is an exact science. Yet, like most other areas in the humanities,
it is at some points subjective. The manuscripts are objective enough, but the
methods by which they are studied and their evidence interpreted cannot be
100percentobjective. a] MANUSCRIPTS IN THE ORIGINAL LANGUAGE The manuscripts
studied in the textual criticism of the Bible are of three sorts: (i)
manuscripts in the language of the original, (2) manuscripts of translations,
and (3) manuscripts of quotations. The study of these materials is more
difficult when a thousand years intervene between the date of writing the
original and the date of our copies; it is less difficult when the gap is
narrower. In the Greek classics the gap stretches approximately a thousand years
wide; in the Latin, it is much narrower, although about three centuries separate
the most favored of the Latins Vergil from the extant manuscripts of his works.
In the case of the Hebrew manuscripts of the Old Testament, the interval is
sometimes as much as seventeen hundred years; in the New Testament, it is
sometimes as little as one hundred and fifty years. But the student should not
rashly conclude that the New Testament text is inevitably ten times as accurate
as the text of the Old Testament. The study of the text in the last fifty years
has shown that the earliest period was the most fruitful in the creation of
variant readings. The last thousand years can be retraced easier than the
hundred that immediately followed the writing of a book. It is unlikely that any
manuscript discoveries will ever carry us all the way back to the original; the
most arduous part of the task of textual criticism must, therefore, be achieved
with the help of translations and quotations and the use of theory theory as
sound as the careful study of all the materials can evolve. b] TRANSLATIONS

Among the materials employed in this study, the manuscripts of translations of
the Bible play an important part. This is especially the case in the Old
Testament area where early translations compensate somewhat for the lack of
early Hebrew manuscripts. The Pentateuch was translated into Greek in Alexandria
soon after 250 B.C. The Palestinian Old Testament was translated into Syriac
about A.D. aoo. The Old Testament was translated into Latin before the great
scholar Jerome in the latter half of the fourth century began the making of the
Latin Vulgate.

Such early witnesses might confidently be regarded as satisfactory substitutes
for the missing Hebrew manuscripts of these periods. But we do not possess the
original manuscripts of the Greek Old Testament, or of the Syriac Old Testament,
or of the Old Latin Old Testament. We have no more than fragments of the Old
Latin; the oldest manuscript of any large part of the Greek Pentateuch is about
five centuries later than the making of the translation; no Syriac manuscript of
the Old Testament comes closer than two and a half centuries to the date given
above for the making of that version. In other words, the work of establishing
the original content of these versions must be carried out before the use of
these versions in establishing the original content of the Hebrew Old Testament
is possible.

Even if we possessed the original content of the various versions of the Bible
which for the most part we do not the difficulty of using them in textual
criticism could hardly be overestimated. Their use requires some mastery of
language as well as of languages. The student must be keenly aware of what is
involved in the making of a translation. He must retranslate the translation
into the original language in the manner of the original translators before the
evidence of the version is available.

C) QUOTATIONS

Valuable assistance in the location of varying forms of the text is given by the
quotations from the Bible found in rabbinical writings, in the writings of the
Church Fathers, in commentaries, etc. The valuable feature of this type of
evidence is that it can usually be dated with some accuracy and located
geographically with some definiteness.

Yet these values cannot be obtained without effort.

We, unfortunately, do not possess the original manuscript of the writings of the
rabbis and the Fathers. Critical editions (i.e, attempts to reconstruct the
original content) of the Christian Fathers are steadily and systematically being
prepared; valuable work is in process on rabbinical literature. But it is not
yet possible to use the writings of all the early believers who quoted the
Bible, with complete confidence as to the accuracy of the printed text on which
you rely.

Even when you have a critical text, your task has only begun.* Quotations from
the Scriptures were often harmonized to contemporary standards by scribes when
the rest of the text was left in its primitive form. Moreover, the value of the
specific quotation for textual criticism depends to some extent upon the
author’s general practice in quotation. If he usually quotes in paraphrastic
fashion, then the quotations from the Scripture must be studied with this in
mind. If he edits as he quotes, unusual items in his quotations can be ascribed
to the Scriptures only when they are supported elsewhere. The nearer the
quotations are in time to the original, the greater is their value. But, as we
have already noticed, it is exactly in the earliest period that the biblical
text is quoted with the greatest freedom. The first great scholar of the
Christian church was Clement of Alexandria, who taught in a Christian school in
that city toward the end of the second century A.D. He quotes Matthew 21:9
{Instructor \. 5) as follows “Plucking branches of olives or palms, the children
went forth to meet the Lord, and cried, saying, ’Hosanna to the Son of David!
Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.’ “ This is unusual in that it
introduces “the children” as the ones who went out to meet Jesus. None of our
biblical manuscripts (all later than Clement) mentions the children in this
scene at all, although their presence inside the temple is commented on in a
later section (Matthew 15:1). Should we change the manuscripts on the basis of
Clement’s quotation?

These “children” are found everywhere in later Christianity. We meet them in an
apocryphal gospel of the fourth century. In the earliest picture of the
Triumphal Entry (fifth to sixth century), they are prominent characters; and
they are frequently encountered in picture, song, and story of medieval and
modern Christendom. Did Clement introduce them to this role in the triumphal
scene, or did he find them in the text of the early manuscript of Matthew he
read? Several details indicate that Clement is responsible for the presence of
the children here. In the first place, he is engaged in an argument in which it
is important for him to find the Scriptures referring to Christians as
“children.” In the second place, he does not make a practice of exact quotation.
In the third place, in the immediate context he quotes Matthew 25:33 as saying,
“Let my lambs stand on my right!” although all other sources read “sheep.” Yet
the whole point of the passage for Clement is the use of “lambs.” The change of
“sheep” to “lambs” in this second passage supports the judgment that Clement
changed “the crowds” to “the children” in the Triumphal Entry story. He
accomplished this by transferring the children from the temple to the road
outside Jerusalem. Therefore, his quotation is not of much value in any attempt
to reconstruct the original form of Matthew 21:9.

UNINTENTIONAL CHANGES In the lives of manuscripts, as of people, the first
hundred years are the hardest. We have already seen that the various books which
make up our Bible today were not accepted as Bible the moment they were written.
The safeguards which sanctity throws around the content of a Bible were not
applied to our books until they were at least a hundred years old. To some
extent in the case of the Old Testament, to a large extent in the New Testament,
the cult itself lacked the organization, the trained individuals, and the
interest necessary to preserve the exact wording of the documents. The New
Testament is one of triplets: It was born at the same time as dogma and
hierarchy. It would be more accurate to say that the doctrine of the importance
of the letter of Scripture evolved with the Scripture and with the
ecclesiastical organization capable of applying it to the careful preservation
of the sacred text. In Old Testament as in New Testament the earliest period of
copying was one in which many careless errors of a scribal nature crept into the
text. This is partly due to the fact that in this period the writings were not
yet canonized. But in part it was due to the lack of educated and trained
scribes in the service of the cult. The Hebrews were not a literary people; the
early Christians came from the lower classes. The general message of a book was
much more important than exactness in matters of detail. The proof of this
generalization can be ’seen in the wealth of variation in Old Testament text
down to A.D. 200 as contrasted with its stereotyped nature since that date. It
can be seen also in the earliest Greek manuscripts of the New Testament. The
Beatty manuscript of Paul’s letters (the oldest manuscript of Paul, written ca.
A.D. 200), which has been published in the last few years, abounds in. careless
errors. Some of these are omissions; e.g, in Romans 12:8, the words “he that
shows mercy, with cheerfulness” are omitted because of the similarity between
the end of this phrase and the preceding phrases. The scribe’s eye passed from
one ending to the other, and a line was omitted by error. Another example of
this very common error can be drawn from the fourth century Greek Bible in the
Vatican library. In John 17:15, most manuscripts read:

... I do not ask that you should take them from the world, but that you should
keep them from the evil. But the scribe of the Vatican codex skipped from “that”
to “that” and wrote:

... I do not ask that you should keep them from the evil. In similar fashion, in
both Greek and Hebrew manuscripts, letters, syllables, phrases, clauses, and
sentences were omitted. Letters and words were misread. Sometimes a slip of the
pen created a new reading. Very common are the errors of hearing the confusion
of. two words pronounced alike. These “ear spellings” occurred not only when the
manuscript was written from dictation but also when a single scribe was copying
directly from the page of the exemplar. Again, if a scribe detected the omission
of a word or phrase after the next word or two was written, he often inserted
the omitted element at once, thus creating a variation in word order. From all
of these causes, unintentional variations entered the textual tradition in large
numbers. The synagogue far surpassed the church in the efficiency of the
controls it devised and employed to preserve the content of the sacred books
unchanged. From early in the Christian era down to the invention of printing,
the Hebrew text varied but slightly from manuscript to manuscript. It must be
understood that this is a relative judgment. Some idea of the amount of
variation can be gained from the following figures. In I Chronicles, chapter n,
one manuscript has twenty-two variations from the printed text, another has
seventeen, a third has eighteen, and a fourth, twenty-eight; the majority of
these are scribal errors. The manuscripts of the Greek New Testament and the
Latin Vulgate present many more variations in a comparable space and have a much
higher proportion of significant variations.

It is possible to explain the success of the synagogue and the failure of the
church by referring to the meticulous checking of the total number of words in
the Hebrew books and to other similar precautions. But these are secondary
phenomena. Why was the Christian church, both Greek and Latin, less interested
in the accurate preservation of every letter of Scripture than the synagogue
was? The answer must lie in the highly centralized authority of the Bible in
Judaism; Torah monopolized religious authority. It had no such rivals in Judaism
as the Christian Bible found in hierarchy and creed. Judaism had no Roman pope,
no ecumenical patriarch, no Nicene Creed, no such councils as those of Carthage
and Chalcedon. The very force that modernized the Jewish Bible rabbinical
interpretation went back (at least formally) to Torah for its base of
operations. Interpreters found the various minute elements of the text of great
significance and, therefore, the more deserving of accurate transmission. In the
Christian church, on the contrary, the clergy and the increasing body of
Christian dogma shared the position of authority with the Bible; with the result
that the exact wording of Scripture was never as important or as carefully
preserved here as it was in Judaism. The scribal errors mentioned above as
characteristic of the earliest period were committed (in slightly less
frequency) throughout the Middle Ages in the Greek and Latin manuscripts. In the
Greek tradition, the last three centuries before the printing press were almost
as bad as- the first three, and the Latin Vulgate reached the press in an
unfortunately corrupt form. Especially in these areas, the student of textual
criticism is faced with the task of setting up a method or methods to overcome
scribal mistakes., STANDARD EDITIONS The carefree attitude toward Scripture
which existed in the earliest period of Christian history and in the religion of
Israel in the pre-Christian period was followed by attempts to control and
purify the text. This often led to the publishing of standard texts, revised
texts, etc, in the manuscript period. These standard editions were prepared from
the highest motives; their makers sought to remove corruptions from the text and
to prevent further deterioration by establishing a standard that could be
carefully preserved. The development of ecclesiastical organization, the
increased efficiency of the controls used by the cult, the growth of culture
especially book culture as the result of the impact of Hellenistic civilization
on Christianity all these supported the creation of purified and standard texts.
The number of such texts is large. In Syriac the early fifth century saw the
Peshitta Version completed. The fourth century saw the making of the Latin
Vulgate. As early as the second century, the Massoretic Hebrew text had been
standardized. By the time of Chrysostom, the Greek text of the New Testament had
been edited in at least two standard editions: one in Alexandria in Egypt, the
other in Syrian Antioch. In so far as these ecclesiastical texts checked the
rate of corruption, they made a positive contribution to the history of the
text. Nor can it be doubted that corruption proceeded more slowly under their
repressive influence than it had in the uncontrolled period that preceded. Yet,
in two ways, the making of these “revisions” makes the task of the student of
the text more difficult today. In the first place, every revision tends to
displace the unrevised earlier text. Second editions replace first editions;
hence the scarcity of first editions. Very often the makers or champions of the
revised edition actively attacked the earlier forms of the text, destroying
earlier manuscripts wherever they could find them. Thus the champions of the
standard Syriac text of the Gospels destroyed manuscripts of the earlier Syriac
Gospel harmony with such enthusiasm that not a single manuscript survived in the
Syriac language. The champions of the Massoretic Hebrew text are at least partly
responsible for the disappearance of all pre-Massoretic manuscripts of the
Hebrew Bible. The difficulty caused by the lack of early manuscripts springs in
part from the making of these standard versions of antiquity. The appearance of
these standard versions complicates the history of the text. In only one case,
that of the Hebrew text, did the standard text dominate the ensuing tradition
universally and continuously. In the Greek, Syriac, Egyptian, and Latin Bibles,
the success of the revision was only partial. Not all older manuscripts were
destroyed; some were corrected. And correction was never 100percentcomplete. The
result is the creation of mixed texts the curse of the manuscript student. One
manuscript was corrected in some variants; another in a different set of
readings. As additional manuscripts of different types were corrected to
standards of varying degrees of mixture, the confusion became worse confounded.
This mixture of revised with prerevised texts makes it very difficult to
establish the text of the revision. The possession of the text of the revision
is, however, an almost indispensable tool for the task of getting back of the
revision to the primitive text.

One of the most scholarly, dramatic, and disastrous of these ancient revisions
was Origen’s (|A.D. 254) revision of that Greek translation of the Old Testament
which is called the Septuagint. His edition is called the Hexapla and was
carried out on the grand scale. Part of his purpose was to show the relation
between the Hebrew text and that of the various Greek translations. He,
therefore, published his work in six columns of parallel material. At the left
was the Hebrew text; next, a transliteration of the Hebrew in Greek letters;
then, four Greek translations, Aquila, Symmachus, the Septuagint, and
Theodotion. This magnificent production had an unfortunate influence on the text
of the Septuagint. To begin with, the Hebrew column established the order of the
contents; the Septuagint material was transposed to parallel the Hebrew.
Moreover, Origen added to the Septuagint any material which it lacked that the
Hebrew of his day contained. He usually marked this additional material by
prefixing an asterisk; and, in some cases where the Greek manuscripts differed,
he chose the reading that was closest to the Hebrew, without indicating the
existence of the variants. Since these manuscripts had undoubtedly suffered some
corruption from the influence of the Hebrew before Origen’s day, the result was
that he frequently preferred the worse reading. The ultimate catastrophe was
that the bulk of his work prevented its mass production; hence the Septuagint
column was copied out alone, in many cases without much effort to reproduce the
asterisks and other diacritical marks. Thus the great difficulty in the study of
the Septuagint text is to get back of Origen’s Hexapla, His work, like a
seven-barred gate, stands across the path that criticism must follow. The
exultation with which the recent discovery of a pre-Hexaplaric manuscript was
received is a by-product of the pernicious results of Origen’s attempt to
improve the text.

INTENTIONAL CHANGES In the making of the standard versions, we have already seen
the deliberate introduction of changes in the biblical text. While it is to be
remembered that these changes were always made with the best intentions as
“corrections” or “restorations” it must not be forgotten that the resultant text
was often inferior to the unrevised text. Many an individual scribe, also,
deliberately changed the text so as to correct its “errors.”

Some of these changes were stylistic and grammatical. The New Testament, for
example, was written in the conversational Greek of the common people. Under the
pressure imposed by the growth of culture in the church (a culture that insisted
on Attic Greek as the one pure dialect), scribes changed the forms of the common
speech into agreement with Attic usage. Sentence structure was sometimes changed
by the scribes’ feeling for style. Mark 4:24 reads, “Take heed what you hear:
with what measure you measure, it shall be measured to you “ In several
manuscripts this is improved to, “Take heed what you hear, for with what measure
you measure...”

Some of these changes were intended to make the parallel accounts of the same
incident agree in details. There are four accounts of Jesus’ baptism. In the
Johannine account the distinctive item is the assertion that the Spirit abode
upon Jesus after the baptism (John 1:31, John 1:33). In many manuscripts the
words “and abode upon him” are added to the accounts of the baptism in the first
three gospels. In some instances the scribes carefully corrected quotations from
the Old Testament in the New Testament so that the New Testament would agree
with the Old Testament. The older sources of Mark 1:2 refer to “Isaiah the
prophet” and precede to quote from Malachi the prophet and then from Isaiah.
Later manuscripts change “Isaiah the prophet” to “the prophets,” thus making the
reference to the Old Testament more accurate.

Occasionally, the Greek manuscripts of the Old Testament were edited to make
them conform more explicitly to Christian faith. The ninety-fifth Psalm
(ninety-six in the Septuagint) was identified as a messianic Psalm, probably
because of the reference to the Lord (God) coming in judgment. The tenth verse
of this Psalm reads, “Say among the nations, the Lord reigns.” Some enthusiastic
Christian scribes have made this a reference to the crucifixion by adding the
words “from the tree” (i.e, the cross) after the verb “reigns.” Not only was
book harmonized with book, but the Scriptures were harmonized also with
liturgical practice. In the Greek church, on the fourth evening of Lent, Matthew
7:7 was read after Mark 11:26. The same combination of passages was read quite
frequently on saints’ days, especially on December 9. As a result of this, some
manuscripts of the Gospels follow Mark 11:26 with Matthew 7:7. The same natural
influence of liturgy upon the text can be seen in the addition of the doxology
to the Lord’s Prayer.

Some intentional changes were purely explanatory in character, intended to clear
up obscurities in the text. They were written on the margin of the manuscript or
between the lines; from these positions some of them crept into the text itself.
They usually are brief additions. A larger number of changes were of a dogmatic
nature. Where the scribe found the sacred text saying something unworthy of
deity, he knew it was wrong and preceded to correct it as well as he could. The
development of paraphrases for the divine name in the Old Testament, the
avoidance of anthropomorphisms in the versions of the Old Testament, etc, are
all examples of this. The Old Testament scribes had the term Tiqqune sopherim
for their deliberate changes made in the interest of dogma or decency. An
interesting example is Habakkuk 1:12, where “you do not die,” said to God was
changed to “we shall not die.” The original form of the verse was, “Are you not
from everlasting, O Yahweh, my God? My Holy One, you do not die.” Another
example is the change in Genesis 18:22 from “The Lord was yet standing before
Abraham” to “Abraham was yet standing before the Lord.” Similar deliberate
changes were made by the scribes who copied the New Testament. Mark 13:22 reads,
“But of that day and that hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels which are in
heaven, neither the Son, but the Father.” Several New Testament manuscripts omit
the words “neither the Son” because of the implication of limitation of Jesus’
knowledge. Not only theological doctrines but also social feeling affected the
text. This was especially true in the earliest period when the transmission was
least controlled. Early Christianity became anti-Semitic before it was one
hundred years old, and the word “anti-Semitic” is used here to mean dominated by
prejudice and passion in general attitudes toward the Jews. In a manuscript of
the Old Syriac version, called the Curetonian manuscript, a striking change is
made in Matthew 1:21 because of this anti-Semitic bias. Most manuscripts read,
“You shall call his name Jesus, for he shall save his people...” but this
manuscript changes “his people” to “the world,” thereby removing one Jewish
element from the gospel. I have called attention elsewhere to the thoroughness
with which the author of the Fourth Gospel has read Jesus out of Judaism. The
early Christian believers were sensitive to -the charge that Jesus was a
criminal because he had been executed by Roman authority in the most shameful
manner possible. They did everything they could to reduce the reproach of the
cross. Luke 23:32 says, “There were also two others, malefactors, led with him
to be executed.” Nothing but the final’s on “others” and the commas save the
reader of the English version from assuming that this implies that Jesus was a
malefactor. The possibility of reading the passage this way in the ancient
languages was even stronger. The vast mass of our earliest New Testament
manuscript text was written without commas, thus the risk of reading that Jesus
was a malefactor was much greater. Some Old Latin manuscripts and the Sinai tic
Syriac manuscript omit the word “other” or “others,” thus removing all
implication that Jesus was a criminal. The Fourth Gospel achieves the same
result by retaining “others” and omitting “malefactors.”

METHODS

How is the student of the text to get back to the original content of the Bible
in spite of the intentional and unintentional changes made during the centuries
of its transmission? Many methods have been suggested, but none is
self-sufficient. Only when the shortcomings of the various techniques are
realized, can their virtues be combined with reasonable success.

There are several 100percentobjective methods, and they are all worthless. One
is to count the number of manuscripts supporting one reading and the number
supporting the rival reading and then to accept the reading supported by the
larger number of manuscripts. There is one drawback to the adoption of this
method. As with people so with manuscripts those with the worst character often
have the most children. One thousand descendants of a very carelessly written
manuscript do not outweigh ten descendants of a carefully written manuscript. In
the last fifty years this method has been repudiated by the world of
scholarship. The statement that “most manuscripts” read “so-and-so” is not
decisive.

Equally objective but even less defensible is the choice of the oldest
manuscript as representing the original text. It would be possible to publish a
Bible whose content was determined solely on the basis of date; that is, the
reading with the most ancient attestation would be chosen. This is never
seriously considered by scholarship but is occasionally attempted by those who
have gulped down one hasty mouthful of manuscript lore. Its repudiation by the
authorities in this field rises from their recognition of two facts: (i) the
period of wildest variation was the earliest period and (a) no one manuscript
(not even the oldest) is entirely correct. The antiquity of a reading is not in
itself a decisive criterion of authenticity. A much more popular and significant
method is called the genealogical method from its attempt to trace the ancestry
of manuscripts. If -manuscripts were all related to one another in the pattern
son father-grandfather-great grandfather, etc, it would be a simple matter to
establish a family tree for each late manuscript and then group the families
into clans and tribes and nations, to identify the “father” of each nation, and
finally to find the parent of these fathers in the original manuscript.
Theoretically, this is accomplished by the genealogical method as applied to
manuscripts. But, actually, the method has not been applied to biblical
manuscripts as manuscripts. The reasons for this are manifold. In the Old
Testament there are so few manuscripts of any antiquity that the family tree
could be held together only by the most extensive use of all the devices of tree
surgery. In the New Testament there are so many manuscripts that the tree would
have to be taller than the sequoias with a tangle of branches suggesting a cross
between the banyan and the crab apple. A beginning has been made by the
identification of a few families (with six to twenty members) and their
tentative grouping in larger units; but the real work on a genealogical scheme
of New Testament manuscripts is still to be done.

More serious obstacles to the employment of the genealogical method exist in the
complex nature of relationships between manuscripts. The mixture of texts that
results from “correction” has already been mentioned. When part of the readings
throughout one manuscript come from one ancestor and part from a very different
ancestor, and when this is the case with scores and hundreds of manuscripts, the
complexity of a chart that would represent ancestry is bewildering and
intimidating. Another type- of mixture springs from the use of two or more
manuscripts in sequence in the making of a manuscript. Matthew may have been
copied from one source, Mark from another, Luke from a third, and John from a
fourth thus one manuscript of the Four Gospels would have four fathers. Nor
would four fathers be an extravagant number, especially in the early period and
(in the New Testament area) the latest period. The early and famous Washington
manuscript of the Gospels not only has different ancestors in different Gospels
but also switches parents within the Gospel of Mark. The Four Gospels of
Karahissar from the late thirteenth century is descended from eight different
“fathers,” and in at least two sections the text was corrected by still other
types.

It is no wonder, therefore, that the genealogical method is more often applied
to variants than to manuscripts. This use will be discussed below, but it should
be noted here that this method has also rendered valuable service in the study
of the broad general areas of manuscript study. Here it has served to take
certain main groups of manuscripts back to the later edge of the primitive
period. This has been done only in a broad, loose, general fashion; and the
genealogical method alone will never carry us over the deep chasm of the
primitive period.

Another valuable method is the internal criticism of readings. Down through the
generations of careful study. of manuscripts, scholars have set forth longer and
shorter lists of “canons” or rules to guide the student in that choice between
alternative readings which is the central task of textual criticism. Some of
these sound paradoxical, and most of them have little practical value. Two of
the most famous are “the more difficult reading is to be preferred” and “the
shorter reading is the older.” The first springs from the assumption that a
scribe would never intentionally make a reading more difficult. But what of
unintentional change? And would readings that seem difficult to us always seem
difficult to all the scribes who have worked on the text? If this rule were
followed rigorously in all cases, the original text would approach
unintelligibility. The second rule ignores the common tendency of scribes to
omit either intentionally (in times of revision or in the primitive period) or
unintentionally. Suppose the student must choose between two readings one long
and one short, and the long one is the more difficult. He must either find
additional rules or fall back on his own judgment of the relative value of these
rules.

Additional rules can be found in the combination of genealogical method with
study of variants. All the variations in one passage are assembled,- the student
then chooses that one which best explains all the others. In other words, he
constructs a family tree of variants. In Mark 1:12-13 some manuscripts read,
“And immediately the Spirit drove him out into the desert. And he was in the
desert forty days. ...” Others read, “... into the desert. And he was there
forty days “ Still others read, “-... into the desert. And he was there in the
desert forty days “ Obviously, the third is the child of the first and the
second. The choice between the other two, so far as this rule is concerned, then
depends on a judgment as to whether “into the desert. And he was in the
desert...” would be changed to “into the desert. And he was there...” or vice
versa. To assist in such difficult decisions the further rule is employed that
that variant is to be chosen which best fits the context which is most at home
in the author’s style, vocabulary, ideas, and purpose. These two rules are the
most practical and valuable for internal study of readings. The last method is
called “^QnJC^uaj__e^nenda.tion.” When the text as preserved in all the
manuscripts does not make sense, it is clear that (i) we are too stupid to
understand it, or (2) the author wrote nonsense, or (3) the original reading has
been lost. Since we usually think too highly of ourselves and the author to
accept (1) or (2), we try to restore the lost reading by conjecture. This is
employed more rarely in the New Testament area than in the Old Testament for
obvious reasons. The greater number and greater antiquity of New Testament
manuscripts makes it less probable that many readings have been lost; this
judgment is objectively supported by the large number of unintelligible passages
in the Hebrew Old Testament and the small number of such passages in the Greek
New Testament.

All students of the biblical text have admitted the legitimacy of conjectural
emendation. Even the sacred name of Hort can be quoted in support of its
application to the New Testament in moderation. In The New Testament: An
American Translation, Professor Goodspeed has translated several conjectural
emendations. One of the most striking is in 2 Pet. 3:19, where he accepts the
suggestion of Rendel Harris that the name of Enoch has dropped from all
manuscripts. The omission would be caused by the similarity of the two lines
ENOK(AI) and ENOCH, which are easily confused in Greek uncial characters. The
sixteenth edition of Nestle’s Greek text of the New Testament records about two
hundred conjectural emendations. These are given in the critical apparatus below
the text; in ninety instances they are accompanied by the name of the scholar
who first suggested them; in a few cases they are marked by Nestle with the
symbol used to designate readings “which, according to widespread opinion, might
be original.” An example is Matthew 2:6, “And you Bethlehem, land of Judah,...”
which by the addition of one letter in the Greek text reads (more sensibly),
“And you Bethlehem of the land of Judah “ A striking conjectural emendation in
the Old Testament is that of Professor Arnold in 1 Samuel 14:18. The Hebrew
reads, “And Saul said to Ahijah, Bring hither the ark of God, for the ark of God
was in that day and the children of Israel.” The Greek version reads, “...
hither the Ephod; for he bore the Ephod in that day before Israel.” The
conjecture is that the Hebrew was deliberately corrupted to hide the fact that
there were many arks in ancient Israel, the Greek version obtaining the same
result by translating “ark” as “Ephod.” If “ark” be substituted for “Ephod” in
the Greek, the original sense of the passage is recovered.

Another emendation of a famous Old Testament passage is made in Isaiah 9:3,
which has been read in three ways. The Massoretic Hebrew text reads (as the King
James Version translates), “Thou hast multiplied the nation, and not increased
the joy; they joy before thee according to the joy in harvest, as men rejoice
when they divide the spoil.” All the rest of the verse argues against the
authenticity of the negative before “increased the joy.” As a recognition of
this, the Revisers read it as, “Thou hast multiplied the nation; thou hast
increased their joy, etc.” This change is made possible by reading to’ as Id.
But this reading has been further improved by attaching this lo’ to the
preceding word, which gives the meaning, “Thou hast multiplied rejoicing; thou
hast increased joy, etc.” A slight change in word division restores the clear
meaning of the original. By conjectural emendation, by genealogical study of
manuscripts and variants, by a careful study of each manuscript’s distinctive
characteristics, by the help of versions and quotations, and by the most
searching scruting of all the variant readings, the text of the Bible is
established. No one method is employed to the exclusion of the others; internal
and external criticism support one another’s hands. In the objective part of the
task the law is accuracy; in the subjective, common sense.

ACHIEVEMENTS By the use of these methods, the corrupt form of the Greek text of
the New Testament which ruled from A.D. 1516 to 1880 has been repudiated. In
A.D. 1516 Erasmus rushed through the press an edition of the Greek New Testament
based on a mere handful of late manuscripts, none earlier than the tenth
century. Except for minor modifications, this text remained the standard Greek
text of the New Testament through the middle of the nineteenth century.

It is this type of text which was translated to make the King James Version. But
throughout this period the manuscript resources were being constantly enriched
by discovery and study, and methods were being improved and refined.
Tischendorf’s discovery of a fourth-century Greek Bible on Mount Siani
dramatized the value of the new resources in effective fashion, and the second
half of the nineteenth century saw the production of new editions of the Greek
Testament based on hundreds of manuscripts, scores of them earlier than the
earliest used by Erasmus. The Massoretic Hebrew text of the Old Testament was at
the same time being revised into greater accuracy, and the versions of the Old
Testament have been used to make significant improvements in the English Bible.
Better methods and new materials have each done their part to carry the content
of our Bible back closer and closer to its original form. Where the King James
Version represented the text of the Bible as it existed from the tenth to the
fifteenth century, the revised versions and to a still higher degree some of the
modern-speech translations go back to the Bible as it existed in the late third
or early fourth century. Finality has not been attained, nor will it be attained
in our lifetime. But the great wealth of second- and third-century manuscripts
discovered in the last decade and the slow but constant increase in our
knowledge of the significance of all the sources will make a still better text
possible for our children.

BIBLIOGRAPHY ON TRANSMISSION

GENERAL

KENYON, FREDERIC. The Story of the Bible: A Popular Account of How It Came to
Us. New York: E. P. Button, 1937. Books and Their Readers in Ancient Greece and
Rome. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932.

These two volumes contain much interesting manuscript lore, some of general
interest, some rather technical, but all written by a master of manuscript study
and textual criticism.

PRICE, I. M. The Ancestry of Our English Bible: An Account of Manuscripts,
Texts, and Versions of the Bible (gth ed.)- New York: Harper & Bros, 1934. The
best elementary treatment of the transmission of the Bible Good bibliographies.

SMYTH, J. PATERSON. How We Got Our Bible. New York: James Pott & Co, 1912. A
good brief treatment of the process, not very penetrating in analysis.

Reprints dated later are unchanged.

ADVANCED a) MANUALS BUHL, F. Canon and Text of the Old Testament (trans, by J.

MACPHERSON). Edinburgh: T. &. T. Clark, 1892. (See chap, i.)

GINSBURG, C. D. An Introduction to the Massoretico-Critical Edition of the
Hebrew Bible. London: Trinitarian Bible Society, 1897. A standard manual on the
textual criticism of the Hebrew Bible.

RAHLFS, A. Verzeichnis der griechischen Handschriften desAlten Testaments.
Berlin: Weidmann, 1914.

Standard catalogue of Greek manuscripts of the Old Tesament.

WEIR, T. H. A Short History of the Hebrew Text of the Old Testament (2d ed.).
London: Williams & Norgate, 1907. A brief but solid introduction to the
transmission of the Hebrew Bible.

COLLOMP, P. La Critique destextes. Paris: Societe d’edition les belles lettres,
1931. On method. Valuable discussion, exposition, and criticism of contemporary
scholarly positions on methods of textual criticism not limited to biblical
text.

GREGORY, C. R. Textkritik desNeuen Testamentes. 3 vols. Leipzig: Hinrichs,
1900-1909. This contains the standard catalogue of New Testament manuscripts,
continued until 1933 in Zeitschrift fur die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft by
von Dobschiitz.

KENYON, FREDERIC G. Handbook to the Textual Criticism of the New Testament (id
ed.). New York: Macmillan, 1912. Fine introductory survey of materials and
theories.

. Recent Developments in the Textual Criticism of the Greek Bible (Schweich
Lectures for 1932). London: Oxford University Press, 1933. Helps to bring the
Handbook up to date.

. The Text of the Greek Bible. London: G. Duckworth, Not as heavy as the
Handbook, more up to date.

LAGRANGE, M. J. Introduction a V etude du Nouveau Testament, Part II: Critique
textuelle; Vol. II: La Critique rationelle.

Paris: J. Gabalda, 1935. A lengthy study, both historical and critical, of the
theory, methods, and achievements of textual criticism of the New Testament. The
discussion of the Armenian and Georgian versions written by S. Lyonnet is the
only adequate and up-to-date treatment in any of the works cited in this
bibliography.

LAKE, K. The Text of the New Testament (6th rev. ed. by SILVA NEW). London:
Christophers, 1928. Brief, concise introduction by a master of the subject.

VAGANAY, L. An Introduction to the Textual Criticism of the New Testament
(trans, by B. V. Miller). London: Sands & Co, 1937. Brief but valuable analysis;
good bibliographies including work up to date. The history of the manuscript
transmission and the discussion of method are exceptionally good. b) CRITICAL
EDITIONS I. NEW TESTAMENT

WESTCOTT, B. F, AND HORT, F. J. A. The New Testament in the Original Greek, Vol.
I: The Text; Vol. II: Introduction and Appendix. New York: Harper & Bros, 1882.
This text has practically become the standard text of the Greek New Testament in
England and, to a lesser degree, in America. The text itself has no critical
apparatus, but the second volume gives a classic discussion of methods and
principles of textual criticism. The lexicon by Hickie, which is often bound in
with the text in Macmillan’s edition, is the worst lexicon of the Greek New
Testament in use today. Student’s who buy the text volume should buy the edition
without the lexicon.

EBERHARD NESTLE’S Novum Testamentum Graece cum apparatu critico curavit (i6th
ed. by ERWIN NESTLE). Stuttgart, Priviligierte Wiirttembergische Bibelanstalt,
1936. This is the best edition for classroom use. It is less expensive than any
of its rivals. It gives variant readings in a critical apparatus which is
constantly revised. This edition contains the evidence of the Beatty papyri and
Codex Koridethi. Cross-references are given in the margins, Old Testament
sources being identified. Verse divisions are plainly indicated. Most of the
equipment of the medieval Greek manuscripts is reproduced. The text is derived
from those of Weiss, Tischendorf, and Hort; it is quite close to that of
Westcott and Hort.

TISCHENDORF, C. Novum Testamentum Graece... editio critica octavo motor.
Leipzig: Heinrich’s, 1869-72. A critical text with a good apparatus, now
antiquated by the discoveries of the last half-century. The text is in general
similar to that of Westcott and Hort.

VON SODEN, H. Die Schriften desNeuen Testaments in ihrer dltesten erreichbaren
Textgetsalt, Vol. I. Berlin: Glaue, 190210. Vol. II: Gottingen: Vandenhoeck &
Ruprecht, 1913. Von Soden’s theory of the history of the text has been severely
criticized and generally repudiated by scholarship. As a result, his text has
not been accepted for scholarly study. But his work is an invaluable
introduction to the study of the medieval manuscripts of the New Testament.

LEGG, S. C. E. Novum Testamentum Graece Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1935.

Only the Gospel of Mark has appeared as yet. The text printed is that of
Westcott and Hort; the critical apparatus claims to bring Tischendorf up to
date, but it is disappointingly inaccurate and incomplete. Expensive.

EBERHARD NESTLE’S Novum Testamentum Latine (6th ed.). Stuttgart: Privilegierte
Wiirttembergischen Bibelanstalt, 1935- The text printed is the official Roman
Catholic text; the apparatus gives all variant readings of the Sixtine edition
of A.D. 1 590 and of the edition of Wordsworth and White, etc.

WORDSWORTH, I. AND WHITE, H. I. Novum Testamentum domini nostri Jesu Christi
Latine. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 191 1. This is now the outstanding critical
edition of the Vulgate; so far the books of the New Testament through Ephesians
have been published. A manual edition without lengthy introductions and
apparatus was published in 191 1 at the Clarendon Press, Oxford.

2. OLD TESTAMENT KITTEL, R. Biblia Hebraica (jd ed.). Stuttgart: Privileg.

Wiirtt. Bibelanstalt, 1929. A sound critical edition of the Hebrew Scriptures,
with brief apparatus. This differs from the second edition in that it includes
the Massorah parva and gives the text of the Leningrad Codex, whereas all
earlier printings have reproduced the text of Jacob ben Chaim of 1525.

RAHLFS, A. Septuaginta. Stuttgart: Privileg. Wiirtt. Bibelanstalt, 1935. This
appears in two forms a two-volume student edition and a onevolume deluxe
edition. The text is based on the three oldest manuscripts as a primary source,
but much additional evidence is given in the apparatus. This edition is cheaper,
more legible, and more up to date than that of Swete.

BROOKE, A. E, AND MCLEAN, N. The Old Testament in Greek according to the Text of
Codex Vaticanus. Cambridge: At the University Press, 1906. This larger Cambridge
edition repeats and improves in details the text made familiar to students for
the last generation in the manual edition of H. B. Swete. In this larger work,
the text is supplemented by the evidence of a valuable selected apparatus, which
includes all the uncials, all early versions, much important patristic evidence,
and a small group of minuscules. The last fasciculus to appear contained I
Esdras, EzraNehemiah (1935).

RAHLFS, A. Septuaginta. Vol. I, Genesis, Stuttgart: Privileg. Wurttembergische
Bibelanstalt, 1926; Vol. X, P salmi cum ’ Odis. Gottingen: Vandenhoeck &
Ruprecht, 1931; Vol. IX, I Maccabaeorum liber I (ed. W. KAPPLER). Gottingen:
Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1936.

These volumes published by the Gottingen LXX Society (Genesis, Ruth, Psalms, and
I Maccabees have appeared to date) are the result of the most thorough study of
the text of the Septuagint. To postpone duplication of the work of the Cambridge
editors, the Germans are now working through the second half of the Old
Testament.

Biblia Sacra iuxta latinam Vulgatam versionem adcodicum fidem,... A. GASQUET,
edita. Rome: Vatican Library, 1926.

Standard edition of Latin Vulgate of the Old Testament. H. Quentin has edited
Vol. I Genesis (1926), Vol. II Exodus & Leviticus (1929), Vol. Ill Numbers &
Deuteronomy (1936).

3. APOCRYPHA AND RELATED WRITINGS

TISCHENDORF, C. Evangelia apocrypha adhibitis plurimis codicibus graecis et
latinis maximum partem nunc primum cohsultis atque ineditorum copia insignibus
(2d ed.). Leipzig: Mendelssohn, 1876.

LIPSIUS, R. A, AND BONNET, M. Acta Apostolorum Apocrypha.

Leipzig: Mendelssohn, 1891-1903.

BIHLMEYER, K. Die apostolischen Vater^ Neubearbeitung der Funkschen Ausgabe>
Vol. I. Tubingen: Mohr, 1924.

Most complete critical apparatus. Vol. II (Hermas) has not yet appeared.

GEBHARDT, O, HARNACK, A, AND ZAHN,T. Patrum apostolicorum opera (6th ed. minor).
Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1920. A very inexpensive Greek text.

GOODSPEED, E. J. Die altesten Apologeten. Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht,
1914. A critical edition of the Greek text of the first Christian apologists
through Tatian.


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  CHAPTER 6: 03 CHAPTER III THE TRANSLATION OF THE BIBLE
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Chapter III The Translation of the Bible WHEN the modern American Christian
reads the sermons of John Wesley, he is reading the sermons of John Wesley; when
he reads the religious essays of G. K. Chesterton, he is reading what Chesterton
wrote. But when he reads the Bible, he is not reading the Bible but a
translation of the Bible into English. He knows the Scriptures only at second
hand; he does not know the Bible itself. Some scholar has come between him and
the original; for the meaning of that original, he is at the mercy of a
translator or a group of translators. He is held at this distance from the
original by his ignorance of Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek the languages in which
the books of his Bible were written.

REASONS FOR TRANSLATING

O) MISSIONARY The rapid expansion of the Christian religion created situations
in which the need of translations of the Scriptures was felt strongly. The
twentieth century Christian can sympathize with his predecessors in their
recognition of this need. The Christian religion has come a long distance in
time and territory from the cities of Corinth, Philippi, and Rome cities in
which Christian churches read the letters that Paul wrote to them in Greek. It
has come still farther away from the background and language of the books of the
Old Testament. This expansion of the cult to groups that did not know the
language of its sacred writings demanded the production of translations. The
work of supplying this need of the expanding cult began long before Christianity
came to Birmingham and Chicago. Before the Christian church was two hundred
years old, its missionaries had gone beyond the limits of the Greek-speaking
centers of the Mediterranean world. This was partly due to a decrease in the use
of Greek and an increase in the use of the old national languages during the
period of the church’s expansion. Christian penetration into the back-country
sections of Africa and Syria called forth translations of the gospels into Latin
and Syriac. Ever since then translation has been a recognized missionary
activity in the Christian church. The great Bible societies of the present day
publish the Scriptures in literally hundreds of languages. b) LINGUISTIC CHANGE

Another element that called forth translations of the Bible was change in
linguistic usage. The only certain thing that can be said about the future of
any language that is being spoken is that it will change. It is equally certain
that they have all changed and that all living languages are in constant process
of change. The changes occur in form, in the mechanics of sentence structure, in
the meaning of words, etc. The changes in the meanings of words are often so
great that they make the tracing of etymologies a fascinating sport. “Sincere”
comes from two Latin words meaning “without wax”; “treacle” (“molasses” in the
United States) goes back to a Greek adjective meaning “pertaining to a wild
beast.” There is little rhyme or reason to some of these changes, but the
student may be able to understand why all words that mean “at once” today will
mean “after a little while” tomorrow. In Shakespeare’s day the word “presently”
meant “at once,” as the following example from Hamlet shows. As Polonius urges
the king and queen out of the way with the words, “I’ll board him presently,”
Hamlet enters and is at once addressed by Polonius (11,2). But when the modern
husband who is asked by his wife to fix the curtain in the dining-room mutters,
“I’ll fix it presently,” she knows and he knows that he has not promised to fix
it “at once.”

Words that refer to odors inevitably come to mean bad odors, no matter how
neutral their origin.

Dry den could speak of “clouds of savory stench” without being humorous, but the
modern poet cannot. That Spenser whose Faerie Queene is so delightful to some
scholars and so boring to the college undergraduate wrote of his bride in the
Epithalamion (1. 148), “Loe, where she comes along with portly pace!” Yet she
was not a large woman, nor did he mean to imply that she was stout. The word
“portly” in. his day meant among other things dignified, stately; today it
always implies stoutness of girth.

Similar changes in the meaning of English words make much of the King James
Version of the Bible obscure today. The obscurity in the following passages is
due to linguistic change in the English language, not to any obscurity in the
original: “My eyes prevent the night watches” (Psalms 119:148); “... a valley
with running water, which is neither; eared nor sown...” (Deuteronomy 21:4).
“Prevent” no longer means “anticipate,” nor does “eared” today mean “plowed.”
When the makers of the King James Version asked, “Who can find a virtuous
woman?” (Proverbs 31:10), they were no more cynical about women than the
Revisers, who said “A worthy woman who can find?” or the maker of the American
Translation, who said, “If one can find a good wife, she is worth far more than
corals.” The word “virtuous” when applied to a woman had a much broader meaning
in the days of King James than it has today. These examples give an indication
of the way in which change in language makes the sacred text obscure. Over
longer periods of time, or in periods of sudden linguistic change, the need for
a new translation is even more manifest. Thus Hebrew became a dead language for
the Jews in the period following the Exile, although its prestige as the
language of the Scriptures gave it a limited existence, especially in Palestine.
But the majority of the people needed a translation, which was supplied in
Palestine in oral translation into Aramaic, the contemporary language; and in
the Dispersion by a translation into Greek. This translation was begun in
Alexandria three centuries before the Christian Era. The Jews of that city were
familiar with Greek as the spoken language of the metropolis; many of them were
bilingual; some probably knew Greek alone. But the Hebrew Bible was
unintelligible to the vast majority of them; they needed a new translation. The
translations into Anglo-Saxon are of no use to the English speaking Christian
today for the same reason; they are written in a dead language. The changes in
the English language especially the changes that occurred from 1525 to 1900 have
been influential in creating new translations: the revised versions and the
modern-speech translations of this century. A student of translations has
observed that the language of a translation ages more rapidly than does the
language of works that are native to the tongue. What in an original composition
is an ornament (the quaintness of language now become archaic, etc.) is a defect
in a translation whose primary function is to convey meaning. Hence no
translation of any classic is ever final, and periodic translation is the
intelligent ideal.

C) COMPETITION AND STRESS

New translations of the Bible spring not only from the missionary needs of the
church and the aging of language but also from the confusion and stress caused
by the presence of rival translations, or by the presence of translations that
clash with contemporary faith. One of the important elements in the situation
that produced the Latin translation of Jerome was the presence of a large number
of varying earlier Latin translations. Sophronius Eusebius Hieronymus (Jerome to
us) may have exaggerated slightly when he insisted that there were as many
different Latin translations of the Bible as there were Latin manuscripts of the
Bible, for it must be remembered that he was the champion of yet another
translation. Yet the support given the undertaking by the pope shows that
official Christianity regarded these contradictory versions as a liability; the
hierarchy was anxious to reduce variety in translation to uniformity. In the
earliest decades of Christian history, Christians and Jews alike used the
Septuagint translation of the Old Testament into Greek as the authoritative
Bible. It was, in fact, from the Jews that the Christians received this version.
The welcome they gave it was too warm to please the Jews; for the rivalry
between the two cults was bitter, and the use of allegorical interpretation made
it possible for the Christian Fathers to baptize the Septuagint itself. Its
language was appealed to in support of Christian doctrine until the pious Jew in
desperation demanded another, more accurate version. In Isaiah 7:14 the
Septuagint prediction that a “virgin” would bear a son was hailed by the
Christian as proof that Jesus was the Messiah; while the Jew cried for a
translation that would more accurately represent the Hebrew word “maiden.” The
second century saw several such translations prepared to meet this need; the
most famous of these is the one attributed to a certain Aquila.- In the middle
of the nineteenth century in the United States there was a strong and sometimes
bitter debate between various Protestant denominations as to the mode of baptism
which was scriptural. Some denominations permitted baptism by immersion, by
sprinkling, or by pouring; others permitted baptism by immersion alone, claiming
that this was the sole scriptural method. The intensity of feeling aroused can
be seen in the following title: Immersionists against the Bible, or the Babel
Builders Confounded, in an Exposition of the Origin, Design, Tactics and
Progress of the New Version Movement of Campbellites and Other Baptists. This
work was published by N. H. Lee at Nashville, Tennessee, in 1856.

Through the verbiage of this polemical title one can clearly see that the
authority of the Scriptures was important to this dispute, and that it was
inevitable that sooner or later a version of the New Testament would appear
which would translate the Greek word “baptize” by “immerse.” A revision of the
King James Version which changed the translation at this point as well as
elsewhere was undertaken by the American Bible Union in 1860; the Gospels
appeared in 1862, the entire New Testament in 1865. In these editions (as also
in the second edition, 1866), not only is the verb baptizo translated “immerse”
but John the Baptizer appears as “John the Immerser” in Matthew 3:1, etc. In
later editions the verb alone is translated with “immerse.” This is the case in
the “edition with immerse,” a revision of the Bible Union Version, published by
the American Baptist Publication Society at Philadelphia in 1885.

It may be that the intensity of the debate weakened in the rank and file of the
believers with the passing of time, for at the same time and place the Baptist
Society published an edition with “baptize” as the translation of the Greek
baptizo. The two editions were otherwise identical; they are distinguished by a
label on the title-page; one is marked “Edition with Immerse,” the other “
[Baptize].” In Elizabethan England the Protestants especially the more zealous
reformers were able to read the Bible at home in one of several translations
made into the English from Greek, Hebrew, and other sources. Preachers read
these vernacular versions in the pulpit and quoted them copiously in their
sermons. In the stress of that era of change, many of these sermons were attacks
on Rome. It is not, therefore, strange that champions of the Roman faith found
this use of the English versions trying. The popularity of these new
translations especially the Geneva Bible among the masses of the people probably
led some of the Roman Catholics to an unauthorized reading for themselves.
Further stress was introduced into the situation by the recent decree of the
Council of Trent (1546), which had established the Latin version of Jerome (the
Vulgate) as the authoritative form of the Roman Catholic Bible. But none of the
English translations in use then was translated from the Vulgate. Under the
pressure of these “heretical” versions (as the translators say in their
Preface), a translation of the New Testament from the Latin Vulgate was made at
Reims, and later the Old Testament was translated at Douai. Thus missionary
activity and natural change in language have been joined by cult needs in times
of competition as causes of new translations of the Bible. THE TASK OF THE
TRANSLATOR The production of a new translation always leads the translator into
difficulties and problems. His first task and not his easiest one is to define
the work he is about to do. Is he going to make a new translation from the best
editions of the Bible in the original languages? Or is he to be content with a
revision, a polishing, of an earlier translation? The latter ideal has
controlled most English translations of the Scriptures, and in most of them the
rule has been not to make as many improvements as possible but rather to make
only those improvements which could not be avoided. But, even if the natural
conservatism of all religions is overcome and a new translation is decided on,
the most difficult problems still await solution.

O) DEFINITION OF THE TASK The most baffling problem of all is: What is
translation? How does it differ from paraphrase? Is it, in any sense,
interpretation? What is an accurate translation? Is a translation literal when
it translates word by word, or phrase by phrase, or sentence by sentence? Must
poetry be translated into poetry? Is it possible to translate the “spirit” or
“feeling” of a work without translating its words? How many words.in one
language are the exact equivalent of similar words in another? What should the
translator do with proper nouns that have lost significance? What should be done
with ancient weights and measures? Can a translation be twice as long as the
original and still be a translation?

It is generally agreed that a translation must be faithful to the original;
agreement vanishes when this fidelity is defined. The sanest ideal is summed up
in the adage: “As literal as possible, as free as is necessary.” Some freedom is
a necessity for idiomatic and intelligible translation; the translation of units
smaller than sentences or independent clauses seldom permits the attainment of
clarity or idiomatic treatment. But the freedom of the translator is intolerable
when it produces “libertine” translations. The twenty-fourth book of the Iliad
ends with the line, “Such was the burial of Hector, master of horses.” Alexander
Pope, master of the heroic couplet in English, translated this as follows:

Such honors Ilion to her hero paid And peaceful slept the mighty Hector’s shade.
Who said anything about Ilion? What has become of the horses? And how does Pope
know that Hector’s shade slept peacefully? This is something more than
translation. The doubling of the quantity in the process of translation is here
seen for the dangerous thing it is. Fidelity in translation includes fidelity to
the amount of the original. The introduction of proper names not in the text is
still another misleading feature of too-free translation. Fortunately, there is
almost no translation of this kind in the English versions of the Bible. The
innate conservatism of the religious has kept the translator closer to the text.
The outstanding fault of translations of the Bible is that they are too close to
the original too literal. The ideal of absolute fidelity may lead the translator
as far astray as too much love of freedom. In Hebrew the pronoun “I” has a
longer and a shorter form, and the verb is frequently omitted in such simple
affirmations as “I (am)’ the king.” The Septuagint translator of some of the
Former Prophets was led by these facts and his desire for fidelity to translate
these two forms of the pronoun consistently in two ways. Where the longer form
occurred, he translated it as “I am”; while he regularly translated the shorter
form with “I.” This causes no difficulty in sentences like “I am thy God” but is
disastrous in “I am said unto him “ Every student of this version has been
exasperated at some time or other by the translator’s refusal to perform his
function: in the substitution of transliteration for translation.
Transliteration may be faithful, but it does not glow with meaning. ’ The
English versions of the Bible have produced literalisms as unintelligible as any
in the Septuagint. The obscurity that results from an unintelligent fidelity to
each word of the original can be seen in the American Revised Version of
Ephesians 1:3-14, where participial phrases alternate with relative clauses
through a sentence of two hundred and sixty-eight words that conveys the minimum
of meaning. But the champion of champions in literalness is the Douai version
(also called the Reims). The translators’ conception of their task is expressed
in the following lines from their Preface:

We presume not to mollify the speeches or phrases, but religiously keep them
word for word, and point for point, for fear of y missing or restraining the
sense of the Holy Ghost to our fancy.

Such a principle applied to the Latin Vulgate produced incredible English. This
translation is much clearer in the Gospels than it is in the rest of the New
Testament; this is due, at least in part, to the greater simplicity of the
original in the gospel section. The following passages from the Epistles give
some idea of the degree of unintelligibility that can be attained by literal
translation. Romans 1:28 f, “God delivered them up into a reprobate sense: to do
those things that are not convenient: replenished with all iniquity, malice,
fornication, avarice, wickedness,... detractours, abominable to God,
contumelious.” Romans 2:11, “... for there is no acception of persons with God.”
Romans 2:14-16, “For when the Gentiles which have not the Law, naturally do
those things which are of the Law: the same not having the Law, themselves are a
law to themselves: who shew the work of the Law written in their hearts, their
conscience giving testimony to them and among themselves mutually their thoughts
accusing, or also defending, in the day when God shall judge the secrets of men
“ Romans 5:14, “... that sinned not after the similitude of the prevarication of
Adam “ Titus 3:1, “Be subject to Princes and Potestates to obey at a word “
Philemon 1:6, “... that the communication of thy faith may be made evident in
the agnition of all good that is in you in Christ Jesus. For I have had great
joy and consolation in thy charitie, because the bowels of the sainctes have
rested by thee, brother. For the which thing having great confidence in Christ
Jesus to command thee that which pertaineth to the purpose, for charitie rather
I beseech, whereas thou art such an one as Paul being old and now prisoner also
of Jesus Christ.” This cannot be read without a Latin lexicon. Even with the
help of such a lexicon, one cannot easily grasp its meaning. The excessive
fidelity of the translators has betrayed the reader. This extreme literalness as
an ideal sometimes holds the translators to a text which makes no sense
whatever, when the use of conjectural emendation or a little more freedom in
translation would solve the difficulties. Note the increase in intelligibility
in the following verse (Psalms 45:5) as it moves from translation to
translation. The Bishops’ Bible: “Thyne arrowes are sharp: a people the king’s
enemies shall submit in heart themselves unto thee.” The King James Bible:
“Thine arrowes are sharp in the heart of the king’s enemies; whereby the people
fall under thee.” The Douai Bible: “Thy sharp arrowes, the peoples underneath
thee shall fal into the hartes of the king’s enemies.” The American Revised:
“Thine arrows are sharp; the peoples fall under thee; they are in the heart of
the king’s enemies.” The American Translation: “May your sharp arrows be in the
midst of the king’s foes! May peoples fall under you!” A passage famous for its
obscurity is Ecclesiastes 12:11. The King James Version loses none of the
obscurity in its rendering: “The words of the wise are as goads, and as nails
fastened by the masters of assemblies, which are given from one shepherd.” The
dangers implicit in obscure or ambiguous translation are very real; naturally,
they are greater for the pastor or layman who must rely on his English version
alone for his understanding of the Scriptures. There is no more dangerous
passage in the so-called “standard versions” (King James, English Revised, and
American Revised) than Matthew 26:27. These versions agree in rendering this
verse, “And he [Jesus] took a cup, and gave thanks, and gave to them saying,
Drink ye all of it “ A recent inspirational article in a denominational weekly
expounds the words “Drink ye all of it’ “ through six columns. The author takes
these words as a command to the disciples to drink all of the wine in the cup.
“If they drank only part of the wine they were only partially consecrated, while
if they drank all of the wine they were completely consecrated. So Jesus said,
’Drink ye all of it!’ “ But the “ye all” of these versions is the ancestor of
our modern southern idiom “you all.” It means “all of you”; there is no
ambiguity whatever in the Greek, which says plainly, “all of you drink of it.”
b) SELECTION OF A TEXT The translator cannot escape the problems of textual
criticism outlined in the preceding chapter.

He must select a text to translate. The best translation in the world best in
fidelity and in idiomatic result will not be satisfactory if it translates a
text repudiated as inaccurate by the world of scholarship. Water from a tainted
reservoir may be delivered through the most modern of distribution systems and
yet not meet the approval of the board of health. The inaccuracy of the Greek
and Hebrew texts behind the King James Version makes it impossible for the
modern student to use that version in any serious study of the Bible. The
fundamental cause of the making of the Revised Version was the increase in the
knowledge of the manuscript tradition of both Testaments, but especially of the
New Testament. The discovery, publication, and study of one ancient manuscript
was followed by that of another throughout the first half of the nineteenth
century. Tischendorf’s discovery of the famous Codex Sinaiticus brought the
attention of the pious public to the progress that was being made in improving
the accuracy of the Greek New Testament. No Greek manuscript behind the King
James Version was older than the eleventh century; the Greek text upon which the
Revisers worked rested on more manuscripts earlier than the eleventh century
than the total number employed in the making of the King James Version. Admirers
of Elizabethan prose will still cherish the King James Version for its English
style; the unintelligent will still regard it as the Bible by which all other
versions are to be evaluated; but the student who wants to know what the Bible
actually says will turn to more modern and accurate translations.

Most of the translations made in the last fifty years rest on texts of
comparable quality. In the New Testament the Greek texts translated are all
fairly close to the edition of Westcott and Hort. This is true of the English
Revised Version, the American Revised Version, the Twentieth Century New
Testament, Weymouth’s New Testament in Modern Speech, Goodspeed’s American
Translation, and others. There are some striking exceptions. A West Coast group
in 1919-24 produced a translation made from the three oldest manuscripts
(Vaticanus, Sinaiticus, and Alexandrinus), translating their agreements as the
“Concordant Version.” We have discussed the futility of such a method of
selecting a text in the preceding chapter; its futility is further indicated by
the discovery of still older manuscripts of the New Testament, notably the
Chester Beatty papyri. *** Another exception is the translation of the New
Testament made by Professor Moffatt, who translated the Greek text of von Soden.
This Greek text is somewhat closer to the old King James type than any other of
recent vintage; von Soden’s faulty method has led gradually to the repudiation
of his Greek text by the world of scholarship, and it is not used for scholarly
purposes today. “*- A third exception is the Westminster Version. This was begun
by Roman Catholic scholars in 1928 as “A New Translation from the Greek and
Hebrew Texts.” It makes no statement as to what text is used as the basis of the
translation, but it differs from Westcott and Hort, e.g, in the inclusion of
Matthew 16:2-3, of the words “Son of God” in Mark 1:1, of the long ending of
Mark, and of the interpolations at the end of Luke. In the Old Testament the
variation between the several modern translations is much higher than is the
case in the New Testament. This is due to two factors, both growing out of the
large number of obscure passages in the extant Hebrew text of the Old Testament.
Translators vary in the positions they take (i) as to the number of conjectural
emendations which should be accepted and translated and (a) as to the extent to
which the evidence of the ancient versions should be used to correct and
illuminate the Hebrew text. The American Revised Version, for example, is quite
close, almost slavishly close, to the Hebrew text. Theological students have
discovered this and use this version as a “help” in translation courses in
Hebrew. Several of the modern-speech translations have used the ancient
versions, notably the Septuagint, in a number of passages where the Hebrew is
meaningless or obviously corrupt. For example, the first edition of the American
Translation of the Old Testament printed at the end of the work a list of
passages in which the reading of the Septuagint had been preferred to that of
the Hebrew. c) DIFFICULTIES IN BIBLE TRANSLATION The scholar who works on the
translation of the Bible has to overcome some difficulties which are not faced
by any and all translators. Thus, in the Old Testament, he faces the special
difficulty of the vowelless character of the Hebrew original. This made mistakes
in translation almost inevitable. Suppose, Gentle Reader, that you were faced
with the task of translating vowelless English into some other language. What,
for example, would you make of the following?

PRSDNTGRFLDSLDNSPPRSSFRRPTDNFRTN This might be “President Garfield sold
newspaper issue for reputed new fortune,” or “pursued, N. T. Ogriflud sailed,
newspapers say, for Europe today on Fauretania.”

It is no wonder that translators of the Old Testament have made mistakes in
translation. Some of these were made as far back as the first translation of the
Old Testament. In the Hebrew of Genesis 47:13 we read, “Jacob leaned back on the
head of his bed.” In the Septuagint translation of this into Greek, we read,
“Jacob bowed upon the head of his staff.” The Hebrew for “the bed” as written
without vowels is Hmmtth; “the staff” is identical, the difference appearing
entirely in the vowels. “The bed” is Hammittah; “the staff” is Hammatteh. The
possibilities of confusion in the translating of the vowelless text are obvious.
Interestingly enough, the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews quotes the
passage with the word “staff,” for he used the Septuagint version and not the
Hebrew. Thus the modern Bible contains both readings of the word: “bed” in
Genesis 47:31 and “staff” in Heb. ii:ai.

Another example of the difficulty caused by the vowelless character of the
Hebrew text is found in Jeremiah 2:23. Our Hebrew text contains a phrase which
is now commonly read as “ [thou art] a swift dromedary traversing her ways.” But
the Septuagint translators, working on the same text, supplied a different set
of vowels, with the result that their version read, “Her voice cried traversing
her ways.”

Since the translator of the Bible is translating an ancient document, he faces
all the problems raised by the translation of a document from a different
culture. Weights and measures, coins, measures of time, the names of days and
months, official titles, and dozens of technical terms face the translator with
the challenge, “Will you translate us or transliterate?”...

Transliteration is the easier and (from one point of view) the more accurate
method; but all will agree that it is not the more luminous solution of the
task. The reader who learns that the water jars at Cana held two or three
metretes apiece has not learned much until someone tells him what a metretes is.
If there is to be any translation of measures, it should certainly be into
contemporaneous measures^ The average American gains little information from the
statement of the American Revised Version that the waterpots held two or three
“firkins” apiece. Since a large part of the significance of the miracle is the
lavish fashion in which the wine was bestowed by Jesus, it is important that the
reader should know that each jar held twenty to thirty gallons. In other of
these areas it is harder to set up a rule. Are the modern equivalents really
equivalent? Does the word “church” adequately represent the Pauline ekklesia?
The translator’s mastery of English idiom should ideally be equal to his
knowledge of Hebrew or Greek idiom. That this is ever the case is doubtful, but
it is not always realized that the deficiency exists as often in knowledge of
English as of the original languages. The translator should see the English
language as objectively as he sees the Greek or Hebrew; he should be able to
estimate accurately the extent to which his English phrases will produce effects
equivalent to the effects produced by the language of the original. For the
ideal of fidelity in translation includes the preservation of those qualities of
the original which determined its effect upon its first readers.

PROGRESS IN TRANSLATION

Although the translators of the Bible face such manifold problems, they have
made significant progress. At times this progress has been made possible by the
discovery of better texts to translate. We have already noted that it was
increased knowledge of the manuscripts that led to the making of the English
Revised Version. The great advantage which the Revised Versions English and
American hold over the King James Version springs from the increased accuracy of
the Hebrew and Greek texts which they translated. The repudiation of the Greek
text of the New Testament which lies behind the King James Version has been
absolute. In the study of the Greek New Testament in our denominational
seminaries and graduate schools, it is nowhere in use today.

Again, the translators of the Bible have been helped from time to time by
increased knowledge of the original languages of the Bible. The Renaissance made
its contribution to the improvement of the English versions by turning the
spotlight on Greek and Hebrew, by developing the study of ancient languages and
manuscripts, and by sending scholars back past the Latin translations made in
the medieval period to the original languages of ancient documents. By A.D.
1516, both the Hebrew text of the Old Testament and the Greek text of the New
Testament had been printed. Translators now turned in increasing numbers to
these languages and away from the Latin Vulgate. The ultimate gain in the
accuracy of the text translated and the quality of the translation cannot be
overemphasized.

Although the centuries that followed A.D. 1516 saw the Greek New Testament
studied as well as translated, they often saw the students bewildered by the
peculiarities of the Greek in which the New Testament was written. It was early
noted that in vocabulary and usage it was a very different language from that in
which the great writers of ancient Greece produced their masterpieces. The new
and strange words bothered the translators; so, also, did the “unusual”
constructions. A study of the sources of New Testament Greek printed as late as
1895 contains a somewhat padded list of five hundred and fifty “biblical” words
words found only in the New Testament or in the Greek Old Testament. These
once-only words, or New-Testament-only words, very naturally baffled the
translators. For, while the highschool Sophomore believes that the way to find
the meaning of a word is to look in a vocabulary or lexicon, the more advanced
student knows that the maker of the lexicon has nothing reliable to put in until
he has a reasonable number of occurrences of the word.

Lack of comparable material is equally embarrassing to the man who writes the
grammar. If a certain preposition always meant “into” when used with a certain
case in the Greek of the fifth century B.C, must it be translated that way in
the New Testament in passages where that meaning seemed unsuitable? In the
earlier Greek, one preposition meant “concerning” when used with the genitive
case; a similar one meant “on behalf of.” Should each occurrence in the New
Testament be translated in accordance with this usage? For users of the
“proof-text” method of Bible study, the doctrine of the atonement hung on the
answer. But the scholar can give a definite answer only on the basis of adequate
contemporary parallels.

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, a German pastor, Adolf Deissmann, read
a publication of some private papers written in Greek in the Roman period and
dug up by archeologists working in Egypt. As he read, he was constantly reminded
of the vocabulary and construction of the Greek Bible, both in the Septuagint
version of the Old Testament and also in the New Testament. With aroused
curiosity and increased interest, he made a serious study of the language of
these papyri (Egyptian papers) to see what light would be thrown upon the idiom
of the Greek Bible. The result has revolutionized the linguistic study of both
Greek Testaments, for he first convinced himself and then the world of
scholarship that the “biblical” Greek was essentially the Greek in which these
nonliterary documents were written. That Greek was a simple language, the
conversational language of ordinary people. In it the farmer’s tax receipt was
written; in it petitions were sent to Roman officials. Its vocabulary supplied
the missing parallels to the long list of New Testament words, until the number
now without parallel has been reduced to considerably less than fifty. Even to
those words that were already known, increased clarity and significance have
come from their appearance in these contemporary documents. The New Testament
exhortation to be reconciled to God gains meaning for the student when he hears
a dissolute youth away from home implore his mother in a letter, “Be reonciled
to me!” The illumination cast by the study of these documents upon the problems
of New Testament grammar has been as helpful as that shed on the meaning of
words. The anomalies, the “exceptions” to classical rules, have become regular
in our increased knowledge of the Greek of the New Testament period. Many a
construction which bafHed the student in the days before Deissmann’s discovery
now became normal and luminous. In view of all this it is not strange that
grammars and lexicons of the Greek New Testament have been remade in a flood of
new editions since 1900.

All this had tremendous significance for the translation of the New Testament
and, indirectly, for that of the Old Testament too. For the first time scholars
knew in what kind of language the original New Testament was written. Now it was
possible to translate it into an English approximately equivalent in cultural
level to the language of the original. Moreover, the translator now knew the
meaning of the original much more clearly than his predecessors had done. The
result has been a flood of modern speech translations, which render the New
Testament in English of a nonliterary level analogous to that of the Greek
original. The vast majority of these are new translations, not revisions of
older translations. Their advance upon earlier translations was made possible by
an increase in linguistic knowledge not by an increase in the accuracy of the
Greek and Hebrew texts such as called forth the revised versions of 1881 and
1901. Their excellencies are greater clarity of language, more contemporary
language, and a more accurate representation of the language of the original. To
compare these translations at least in the New Testament with the stately flow
of the Tudor translations, as though these more recent translators were striving
to match that diction, is a serious error. They must be measured against the
original. That many devout persons would today prefer that the New Testament
should have been written in a literary Greek cannot alter the fact that it was
not. Those whose primary demand upon a version is fidelity will welcome these
attempts to take the English reader back into the very quality of the original
language. This is not to argue that such translations as those of Goodspeed and
Moffatt are the final word in English versions of the New Testament, or that
Moffatt or the makers of the “American Translation” of the Old Testament have
translated the Hebrew Scriptures for the last time. On the contrary, it is to be
hoped that within fifty years all these translations will either be remade or
vanish, so that the path leading to the making of contemporary translations for
our children’s generation may be free from the obstacles raised by emotional
attachments to these present versions.

BIBLIOGRAPHY ON TRANSLATION GENERAL KENNEDY, A. G. Current English. New York:
Ginn, 1935.

MCKNIGHT, G. H. English Words and Their Background. New York: Appleton, 1923.

Either or both of these books will, help the student to become conscious of
linguistic problems in English. Their bibliographies will lead to additional
data.

POSTGATE, J. P. Translation and Translations: Theory and Practice. London: G.
Bell & Sons, 1922..

Copiously illustrated, especially from the classics, this work presents a sane
definition of translation.

GOODSPEED, E. J. The Making of the English New Testament.

Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1925. A history of the making of English
versions of the New Testament from 1525 to 1925.

(ed.). The Translators to the Reader: Preface to the King James Version of 1611
A.D. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1935. The King James translators here
state their own opinion of the King James Version.

PRICE, I. M. The Ancestry of Our English Bible (gth ed.). New York: Harper &
Bros, 1934.

Especially chapters xix-xxvi. Good Bibliography.

SMYTH, J. PATERSON. How We Got Our Bible. New York: James Pott & Co, 1912.

Especially chapters iv-viii. Brief survey of the English translations, somewhat
out of date.

MILLIGAN, G. A. Here and There among the Papyri. London, Hodder & Stoughton,
1922. A readable manual on the nature and content of the papyri in relation to
New Testament studies.

TRANSLATIONS 1 The American Revised Version or American Standard Version. The
title-page reads: The Holy Bible Containing the Old and New Testaments
Translated Out of the Original Tongues, Being the Version Set Forth A.D. 1611,
Compared with the Most Ancient Authorities and Revised A.D. 1881-1885, Newly
Edited by the American Revision Committee A.D. igoi: Standard Edition. New York:
Thomas Nelson 82 Sons, 1901. This is closer to the Greek text of Westcott and
Hort (and the other modern critical editions) than was the English revision of
1881. It is more modern and, consequently, clearer in diction than the English
Revised Version. It is accepted in America as the best of the “standard”
versions.

Yet it remains essentially a revision of the King James Version of 1611; it is
not a new translation.

1 The more popular of the modern translations are listed here.

MOFFATT, JAMES. The Bible: A New Translation. New York, Harper & Bros. The New
Testament was first translated in 1913 from the Greek text of von Soden (see p.
86); the Old Testament in 1925. In some areas Mr. Moffatt has edited as well as
translated; e.g, in rearranging the contents of the Fourth Gospel to suit his
theory of the original order.

SMITH, J. M. P, AND GOODSPEED, EDGAR J. (eds.). The Bible, An American
Translation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. The New Testament was
translated from the Westcott and Hort text by Mr. Goodspeed in 1923; the Old
Testament was translated by A. R. Gordon, T. J. Meek, J. M. Powis Smith, and
Leroy Waterman (ed. by J. M. P. Smith) in 1927.

WEYMOUTH, R. F. The New Testament in Modern Speech (ed. and rev. by E. HAMPDEN
COOK, M.A.). Boston: Pilgrim Press. This was first published in 1903, from a
Greek text very similar to that of Westcott and Hort. The Twentieth Century New
Testament: A Translation into Modern English Made from the Original Greek
(Westcott and Hart’s Text} by a Company of About Twenty Scholars Representing
the Various Sections of the Christian Church. New York, Revell.

First published in three parts: 1898-1901. A revised edition appeared in 1904.

FENTON, FERRAR. The Holy Bible in Modern English. London, Oxford University
Press. In this translation the New Testament was completed in 1895; the Bible in
1900. No statement is given as to texts used other than that the translation was
made from the original Hebrew, Chaldee, and Greek. The Holy Scriptures according
to the Massoretic Text: A New Translation. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication
Society of America, 1917. A scholarly and stimulating version of the Old
Testament.

TRANSLATORS’ TOOLS

TEXTS For Greek and Hebrew texts see bibliography for chap. ii.

GRAMMARS 0) FOR THE BEGINNER

MOULTON, J. H. An Introduction to the Study of New Testament Greek (4th ed.).
London: Epworth Press (J. A. Sharp), 1926. With this is bound “A First Reader in
New Testament Greek.” The best of the introductions.

MACHEN, J. G. New Testament Greek for Beginners. New York, Macmillan, 1923. A
useful book, almost too rigorously limited to the elements.

HARPER, W. R. Elements of Hebrew by an Inductive Method (new rev. ed. by J. M.
Powis SMITH). New York: Scribners, 1921.

. Introductory Hebrew Method and Manual (new rev. ed. by J. M. Powis SMITH). New
York: Scribners, 1921.

DAVIDSON, A. B. An Introductory Hebrew Grammar (23d ed.; rev. by J. E.
MCFADYEN). Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1930. A good introduction, which does not
use the inductive method. b) FOR THE SPECIALIST MOULTON, J. H, AND HOWARD, W. F.
A Grammar of New Testament Greek. Edinburgh: T. &T. Clark, 1908.

Only two volumes have appeared. The first is a general introduction which
rambles over the field in the most stimulating fashion. The second discusses
accidence and word formation. The third will deal with syntax.

Vol. I is the most valuable general discussion of New Testament Greek in print
in English today.

BURTON, E. D. New Testament Moods and Tenses. Chicago, University of Chicago
Press, 1898. A thorough and stimulating study but pre-Deissmann in methods and
materials. Burton relied more heavily on classical patterns than he would today;
his work was not revised after 1 898.

DEBRUNNER, A. Friedrich Blass’ Grammatik desneutestamentlichen Griechisch (6th
ed.). Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1931. The best of the formal grammars
of the Greek New Testament.

RADERMACHER, LUDWIG. Neutestamentliche Grammatik: Das Griechisch desNeuen
Testaments imZusammenhang mit der Folks sprache (2d ed.). Tubingen: J. C. B.
Mohr, 1925. This is not a formal grammar but a most interesting discussion in
essay form, which integrates New Testament usage in the popular language of its
period.

MAYSER, E. Grammatik der griechischen Papyri aus der Ptolemaerzeit mit
Einschluss der gleichzeitigen Ostraka und der in Agypten verfassten Inschriften.
Berlin and Leipzig: Walter deGruyter & Co, 1923-34. In two volumes; the second
volume in three parts. An invaluable work for the student of biblical Greek in
either Testament.

BAUER, HANS, AND LEANDER, PONTUS. Historische Grammatik der Hebraischen Sprache
desAlten Testaments. Halle a.S., Niemeyer, 1922.

BERGSTRASSER, G. Hebrdische Grammatik mit Benutzung der von E. Kautzsch
bearbeiteten 28. Auflage von Wilhelm Gesenius hebrdische Grammatik. I. Teil,
Leipzig: F. C. W. Vogel, 1918; II. Teil, i. Halfte, Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1926; II.
Teil, 2. Halfte, Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1929. This is the twenty-ninth edition of
Gesenius; it is the best of the advanced grammars but, unfortunately, is not yet
complete.

Gesenius’ Hebrew Grammar as Edited and Enlarged by E. Kautzsch (trans, from 25th
German ed. by REV. G. W. COLLINS, the translation revised and adjusted to the
26th ed. by A. E.

COWLEY). Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1898.

Quite old but yet the best advanced grammar in English.

MARTI, K. Kurzgefasste Grammatik der biblisck-aramaischen Sprache (3d ed.).
Berlin: Reuther & Reichard, 1925.

LEXICONS

BROWN, F, DRIVER, S. R, AND BRIGGS, C. A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old
Testament: Edited with Constant Reference to the Thesaurus of Gesenius, as
Completed by E. Rodiger, and with Authorized Use of the Latest German Editions
of Gesenius Handwb’rterbuch. Boston, New York, Chicago: Houghton Mifflin;
Cambridge: Riverside Press, 1906.

GESENIUS, W. Hebraisches und aramdisches Handworterbuch uber das Alte Testament
(i6th ed. by F. BUHL). Leipzig, F. C. W. Vogel, 1915.

KONIG, E. Hebraisches und aramaisches Worterbuch zum Alten Testament mit
Einschaltung und Analyse aller schwer erkennbaren Formen Deutung der Eigennamen
sowie der massoretischen Randbemerkungen und einen deutsch-hebraischen
Wortregister.

Leipzig: Dieterich, 1931.

ABBOTT-SMITH, G. A Manual Greek Lexicon of the New Testament (id ed.). New York:
Macmillan, 1923. Does not make full use of new material.

BAUER, WALTER. Griechisch-deutsches Worterbuch zu den Schriften desNeuen
Testaments und der ubrigen urchristlichen Literatur (3d ed.). Berlin: Topelmann,
1936.

Best of New Testament lexicons.

SOUTER, A. A Pocket Lexicon to the Greek New Testament. Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1916.

Fresh, clear definitions; no helps for locating forms.

MOULTON, J. H, AND MiLLiGAN, G. The Vocabulary of the Greek Testament
Illustrated from the Papyri and other Non-literary Sources. London: Hodder &
Stoughton, 1914-29. A most stimulating work, unsurpassed in its field.

PREISIGKE, F. Worterbuch der griechischen Papyrusurkunden.

... Berlin, 1924-27.

LIDDELL, H. G, AND SCOTT, R. A Greek-English Lexicon: New Edition, Revised and
Augmented by H. S. Jones and R. McKenzie. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925. This
work is made more valuable to the New Testament student than former editions by
inclusion of the nonliterary sources.

PAPYRUS STUDY MITTEIS, L, AND WILCKEN, U. Grundzuge und Chrestomathie der
Papyruskunde. Leipzig and Berlin: Teubner, 1912. The classic introduction to
this area of study.

DEISSMANN, A. Light from the Ancient East: The New Testament Illustrated by
Recently Discovered Texts of the Graeco-Roman World (trans, from 4th German ed.
by L. R. M. STRACHAN).

London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1927. A dramatic and stimulating exposition of the
significance of the new discoveries, valuable illustrations. Not as technical or
inclusive in design as Mitteis and Wilcken.

WINTER, J. G. Life and Letters in the Papyri. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 1933.

More inclusive than Deissmann, presents what has been learned from the papyri in
all fields of knowledge. The bibliography in the footnotes is a valuable feature
of the book for students.

GOODSPEED, E. J, AND COLWELL, E. C. A Greek Papyrus Reader with Vocabulary (ad
printing). Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1936. Has eighty-one
representative texts for class use.

CONCORDANCES MANDELKERN, S. Veteris Testamenti Concordantiae Hebraicae atque
Chaldaicae. Berlin: F. Margolin, 1925.

HATCH, E, AND REDPATH, H. A. A Concordance to the Septuagint and the Other Greek
Versions of the Old Testament Including the Apocryphal Books. Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1897.

MOULTON, W. F, AND GEDEN, A. S. A Concordance to the Greek Testament y according
to the Texts of Westcott and Hort, Tischendorf and the English Revisers. New
York: Scribners, 1897.

GOODSPEED, E. J. Index patristicussive clavis patrum apostolicorum operum.
Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1907.

. Index apologeticussive clavis Justini martyris operum aliorymque apologetarum
pristinorum. Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1912.


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  CHAPTER 7: 04 CHAPTER IV THE INTERPRETATION OF THE BIBLE THE MODERNIZING METHOD
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Chapter IV The Interpretation of the Bible The Modernizing Method THE selection
and collection of books and the making of a careful translation from an accurate
text all of this merely paves the way to the ultimate question, “What does the
Bible mean?” All the minute and tedious studies of language and manuscripts that
enter into the study of any ancient literature look ahead to the illumination of
the content of that literature; their aim is to make it easier for the modern
reader who does not possess technical knowledge to understand the message of
these books written long ago in a strange world. The early Protestant ideal was
often so expressed as to suggest that, if the Bible were placed in the hands of
the layman in a vernacular translation, there would be no further difficulty.
The reader would be his own interpreter. Several centuries of experience have
indicated that the untrained layman is often helpless, or too ingenious, as an
interpreter of Holy Writ. There was something dismaying about the zeal with
which he found the Roman pope indicated by the number “666” in Revelation; and
who that has seen it can ever forget the rapt expression of the interpreter who
found the explanation of the Beast of Revelation in the N.R.A.?

These extravagances of interpretation common as they are no excuse for
withholding the Bible from the people or for prescribing an “orthodox”
interpretation with ecclesiastical sanctions. The solution lies in a clear grasp
of what is involved in interpretation of the Bible. Such a grasp can be attained
by those who are in no sense experts; all that it demands are (i) a study of the
problems and methods I of interpretation and (2) a willingness to accept the
results of the experts’ work in the light of that study. This volume on the
study of the Bible finds its goal in the following discussion of the
interpretation of the Scriptures. This chapter, with the two following chapters,
is primarily concerned with the task of finding out the significance of the
Bible’s content; not that any attempt is made to expound or define all that
content but rather that methods of study are classified, criticized, explained,
and exemplified.

Generally speaking, there are only two methods of interpreting the Bible. They
are the “modernizing” method and the “historical” method. Each of these methods
has numerous modifications and forms, but these two are separated from each
other by a gulf that is so wide that it dwarfs all the minor divisions. The
method which has been called the modernizing method has its feet firmly planted
in the period in which the interpreter lives; it finds the Bible’s basic meaning
with reference to the “modern” period in which the interpreter is, naturally,
most interested. The historical method, on the other hand, finds the Bible’s
basic meaning with reference to the situation in which the Bible was written.
THE MODERNIZING METHOD DEFINED The interpreter who uses this method approaches
the Bible with certain answers already in his possession. His basic assumption
is that what was written by a Hebrew prophet in the eighth century B.C. or by a
Christian missionary in A.D. 50 finds its significance in the interpreter’s day.
The forces that lead to this emphasis upon the interpreter’s own group can be
easily identified and understood. The basis upon which this type of
interpretation rests is the canonization of the Scriptures. As soon as any
scripture is recognized as authoritative in the cult, leaders of the religious
group are forced to come to terms with it. In succeeding generations the appeal
to this authority from the past becomes more difficult. The leaders with new
programs must either repudiate the Bible and set up some substitute or they must
forcefully interpret the Scriptures into agreement with the new program and the
new needs. One can easily understand that, in spite of the number of laws
canonized in the Pentateuch (613 according to one count), the changes that came
with the centuries would inevitably produce problems. No matter how exactly
these laws fitted the situations in which they were produced, there was bound to
be some little strain in applying them to a later situation. Unfortunately, the
doctrine that they were God’s law grew in rigor of definition as time passed. A
modernizing interpretation is an almost inevitable result of the canonization of
the Scriptures as the full and complete revelation of God’s will. The simple
syllogisms employed by the modernizing interpreter are something like this. The
will of God for his people is fully and adequately expressed in , Scripture. We
are God’s people. Therefore, God’s will for us is expressed in the Scriptures.
If the interpreter is a legalist, he reasons as follows: God’s word contains his
divine law for his people; we are his people; therefore, we will find divine law
for our guidance in the Bible. If he is primarily interested in the end of the
world, he arrives at similar conclusions. God would not fail to tell his people
(us) when the world was to end; therefore, we can find in the Bible the date of
the end. This type of interpretation owes most of its worst features to dogmas
about the Bible as the Word of God. ’Since all Scripture is the Word of God,
there can be no contradictions in it. Since all Scripture is the Word of God, it
can have nothing superfluous in it. Since Scripture is the Word of God, it can
contain nothing unworthy of God. Each of these dogmas leads to the perversion
and the modernizing of Scripture. To take up the last one first it plainly means
that the Bible cannot say anything which the interpreter regards as unworthy of
God. But this can be a sound rule for interpretation only if the interpreter’s
ideas as to what is worthy of God coincide identically with all the biblical
author’s ideas or with God’s own thoughts. Unless the student is willing to make
these assumptions, he should avoid interpretations based on this dogma. In
practice the appeal to this dogma gives the interpreter license to edit
Scripture into conformity with his own ideas. The insistence that the Scripture
can have nothing superfluous is another screen for modernizing interpretation.
The perversion is justified by a questionbegging argument. Anything that does
not apply to the interpreter’s own day is labeled superfluous; therefore, it
must be made to apply to the interpreter’s times. To the Gentile Christians of
the first few centuries the food laws of the Pentateuch were superfluous if
taken in their natural meaning. This was enough to convince almost every one of
the early Christian interpreters of the Old Testament that these laws were not
to be taken in their literal meaning. They must have some Christian meaning,
some modern meaning. Thus Barnabas found that the proscription of animals that
do not chew the cud is an exhortation to meditation. Moreover, he felt sure that
this was the primary and original intention of the law. In the fourteenth
chapter of Genesis, the reader is informed that Abraham defeated the invading
kings with an army composed of three hundred and eighteen men born in his own
house. Later interpreters of this passage, both Jewish and Christian, found
little religious inspiration in this statement of fact. They, therefore,
searched for some deeper meaning. The number “318” suggested that a modern
meaning might be found by the use of numerology. Among both Hebrews and Greeks,
letters were used as numbers; that is, all letters had numerical value. From
this fact it was easy to find significance in numbers. A Jewish interpreter of
this passage, seeking diligently for some significance in it, noticed that
Abraham had a servant born in his household named Eliezer (Genesis 15:2-3). The
letters in the word Eliezer when added up as numbers total 318. This shows that
Abraham’s army consisted of Eliezer. The Christian author of the Letter of
Barnabas felt sure that the Old Testament was written for the sake of the
Christians. But what did the Christians care about how many servants Abraham had
who were born in his own household? They were not interested in the number of
his servants. Yet this statement must mean something to them otherwise this line
of Scripture would be superfluous, and the Word of God could not contain
anything superfluous. By the ingenious application of a little numerology,
Barnabas was able to find in this verse a prediction that Jesus was to be
crucified. For it says, “And Abraham circumcised from his household eighteen men
and three hundred.” What then was the knowledge that was given him? Observe that
he first says the eighteen, and after a pause the three hundred. The eighteen is
I, ten, and H, eight; you have Jesus [IHSOUS]. And because the cross was to have
grace in the Tau [Tau, T, equals 300], he says also the three hundred. He
indicates, then, Jesus in the two letters; and in the one, the cross. He who
freely planted his teaching within us knows this. No one has learned a more
excellent lesson from me, but I know that you are worthy [ix. 8-9]. An
implication of this modernizing method of interpretation is that the first
readers of the Scripture could not understand it. When the Scofield Reference
Bible says that the mention of Rosh, Meshek, and Tubal in Ezekiel 38:23 means
Russia, Moscow, and Tbolsk, “in the opinion of all interpreters [!],” it asks us
to believe that the first readers of Ezekiel (and “their successors for a
thousand years) could not possibly understand what Ezekiel was talking about.
One wonders why God was so concerned about the generation which was to read the
Scofield Bible and so little concerned with Ezekiel’s contemporaries. Early
Christian interpreters did not shrink from the implications of this type of
exegesis. Justin Martyr denied that the literal meaning of the Old Testament had
any significance; Barnabas indignantly denies that the Old Testament is the
joint possession of Jew and Christian. He insists that it belongs to the
Christians alone. Since it was written for the Christians, the Jews naturally
could not understand it.

TYPES OF MODERNIZING INTERPRETATION A rich vocabulary has grown up around the
effort to read modern meanings into the Scriptures. Exponents of this school of
interpretation speak of the use of allegory, typology, numerology, tropology,
and the anagogical sense. The distinction between these various systems, or
methods, or senses, is not always clear to the naked eye. As an example of the
lack of definite meaning in these sonorous terms, consider the distinctions made
between the allegorical meaning, the tropological meaning, and the anagogical
meaning of Scripture, as a contemporary manual on the study of the Bible
presents them. By way of preface, we should note that the author insists on the
existence of a literal meaning in addition to these “spiritual” or “mystical”
meanings. The allegorical meaning is the reference of the text to a doctrine of
the faith, especially to Christ and the church. If the text “admits or requires”
this reference, then it possesses an allegorical meaning; e.g, Matthew 12:39
shows that the experience of Jonah with the sea monster refers allegorically to
the resurrection of Jesus. The tropological meaning of a passage is the
application of a passage to moral life. In Genesis 15:6 we read that Abraham
believed, and it was reckoned to him for righteousness. In Romans 4:23 Paul
finds here the meaning that mankind should believe in Christ. The anagogical
meaning of a passage is the application that it allows to the future life. The
familiar story of Noah and the ark in Genesis may be applied also to the
faithful who find salvation in the church (cf. Matthew 24:37; 1 Peter 3:20). The
reader can easily see that there is no distinction of method here; these labels
are used for one method with the results classified according to their subject
matter. Even this classification does not seem very objective to judge from the
author’s own examples; for the definition of the first class would include the
examples of the second and third classes. Allegory, tropology, typology,
anagoge, and their brood are basically one type of interpretation. On the
assumption that there is a deeper meaning in Scripture than has been expressed
by the inspired writer, these interpreters proceed in any devious way, on the
basis of hints which first win their significance in the interpreters’ own eyes.

One of the few “methods” of modernizing the meaning of Scripture which can be
recognized as a distinct pattern of interpretation is numerology. This rests on
the numerical values of the Hebrew and Greek alphabets and makes much of the
fact that it works on the original languages of the Bible. We have already noted
a glowing example of its use in antiquity in Barnabas’ explanation of the number
“318.” Not only does numerology make it possible to find a modern meaning in a
dark passage but it also demonstrates that the Scripture is the Word of God.

Three and seven are good numbers. God made the natural world with its seven
planets, seven tones in the scale, seven colors, etc.; the Bible is full of
sevens; therefore, God wrote the Bible. The number of nouns in certain verses of
Genesis, chapter i, is a multiple of seven. If nouns don’t work out, adjectives,
adverbs, or prepositions will. It is here that the subjective element enters.
The interpreter selects the units to be counted or the words to be translated
into their numerical equivalents. The same methods will prove the inspiration of
any document. I applied it some years ago to the letter of Ignatius to the
Ephesians and unearthed an enormous mass of threes and sevens. A hurried count
of the first paragraph of the popular novel Gone with the Wind showed that the
first sentence had twenty-one words, three y’s; the second, twenty-eight words
or four 7’s. Add these together and you get seven 7’s. The third sentence has
three nouns. The first paragraph has twenty-eight (4X7) nouns, seven proper
adjectives, and nine (3X3) adverbs. Will some numerologist claim inspiration for
this book? No, he will not; for numerology proves the divine origin of the Bible
only to those who knew it in advance.

It might be possible to separate typology, tropology, etc, from allegory if we
were using these terms for the first time today. But they have a long history a
history in which they are often confused with one another. At first, the
interpreters spoke of only one meaning above the literal meaning. This was
usually referred to as a “spiritual” meaning. When skilful exegetes like Origen
found three meanings, they were driven to poetry for labels and definitions of
the extra meanings. Augustine found four meanings in a passage, and the later
ages produced as many as seven meanings from one passage, although the
classification is stretched somewhat thin at spots. In Paul’s interpretation of
Abraham’s family life we have a clear example of a confusion in terminology
which began early and still persists. In Galatians 4:21-31 he presents Sarah and
Hagar, Isaac and Ishmael, as types of Judaism and Christianity. The reader’s
natural inclination is to classify this as typological interpretation; but in
Galatians 4:24 Paul says that these Scripture texts are allegorical. Of all the
titles used for these modernizing methods, allegorical is the most fitting. Its
basic significance of saying one thing and meaning another is at home with these
interpreters.

MODERNIZED BIBLES A sounder classification of the modernizing schools of
interpretation can be based on the messages they read into the Scriptures. Each
of these interpreters brings a certain message to the Bible and reads it into
the sacred text by means of his system of interpretation. But not all of them
bring the same message to the Book. The Jewish rabbis, for example, in the days
after their national glory had departed, brought to the Torah a glorification of
the scribe and his work which the sacred book had not known before. The extent
to which this was done has often been illustrated, but no more forceful example
can be found than the Targum on the Song of Deborah. This is not designed
primarily as interpretation but rather as translation; however, we have seen in
the chapter on translation that the two are not always as distinct as they
should be. Judges 5:8-9 is a strong statement of the lack of soldiers in Israel;
the Targum expands this into a wordy praise of the scribes who interpreted the
Law accurately and patiently in the days of crisis. The Christians of the first
few centuries brought to the Old Testament a belief that Jesus was the Messiah;
this belief they read into almost every line of the Jewish Scriptures. Two of
the great classics in this “interpretation” are The Letter of Barnabas and
Justin’s Dialogue with Trypho.

We have’ already seen the nature of the interpretation in Barnabas, where “318”
predicts the crucifixion of Jesus; Justin is no more restrained. For example, he
quotes (from the Greek Old Testament) Exodus 20:22; Exodus 23:20-21, in which
God tells Moses to announce to the people, “I send my angel before you to guard
you on the way, and to bring you into the land which I have prepared for you.
Hark unto him and obey him, do not resist him; for he will not withhold
[punishment] from you, for my name is upon him.” Who is this guide? asked
Justin. Who else but Jesus (the Greek form of Joshua!) Dialogue Ixxv. i.

Justin finds the cross (Dialogue Ixxxvi) in the “tree” of life planted in
Paradise, in the “rod” with which Moses was sent to free Israel, in the “tree”
cast into the bitter waters of Mara, in the “rods” used by Jacob to win his
uncle’s sheep, in the “staff” with which, as Jacob “boasted,” he had crossed the
Jordan, in the “ladder” of Jacob’s dream upon which he saw God not the Father
“fixed,” in the “rod” of Aaron which blossomed, in the “shoot” from the root of
Jesse which Isaiah predicted, in David’s portrayal of the righteous man as a
“tree” planted by the water courses, in David’s claim that the righteous would
flourish like a palm “tree,” in the “tree” from which God appeared to Abraham
the oak of Mambre in the seventy willow “trees” which the people found when they
crossed over Jordan, in the comforting “rod” and “staff” of the twenty-third
Psalm, in the “tree” [ax handle] which Elisha threw into the Jordan to recover
the lost ax head, in the “staff” which Judah gave Tamar as a pledge for the
payment of her prostitution.

These are selections from only two, albeit a striking two, out of scores of
Christian interpreters who modernized the Jewish Bible into a Christian book.
With a few exceptions, early Christian interpreters ignored the great messages
of the inspired prophets and poets of Israel except where they could be
transformed into messianic texts. Their guiding principles were expressed by
Augustine in a memorable couplet: “The New Testament in the Old is latent; the
Old Testament in the New is patent.” One result of this is the impoverishment of
the Christian tradition, which has slighted the prophets’ burning attacks on
injustice, greed, and exploitation of the poor to concentrate its attention on
fantastic “predictions” of the cross.

Other times, other Bibles. Once the Christianmessianic nature of the Old
Testament was accepted by all but the Jews, the church brought different
messages to be read into the Bible. For example, Clement of Alexandria was
worried by the effeminacy of some of the Christians of his day. One of their
perverted habits was that of shaving. Imagine his horror when he found large
numbers of Christian men shaving off not merely part of the beard (he could have
stood that) but every last whisker! Against this contemporary custom, Clement
invoked the authority of the Scriptures. He couldn’t find a law saying, “Do not
shave”; but in the one hundred and thirty-third Psalm brotherly unity is likened
to “the precious ointment upon the head, that ran down upon the beard, even
Aaron’s beard: that went down to the skirts of his garments.” David wrote this
so that Clement’s contemporaries might not shave.

Each generation often each individual interpreter brought a new message to the
Bible and found it there. In the days of the Reformation, it was Lutheranism, or
Calvinism, or Arminianism. German interpreters wrote learned works showing that
Adam was a Lutheran. Frenchmen proved that not only Paul but also Jesus and
Abraham were faithful to Calvin’s Institutes. In this regard the Roman Catholic
church differs from the others in the degree of explicitness with which it
directs the interpreter to find in the Scriptures the teaching of the church.
Its logic is simple. Since these books have a divine origin, written with the
aid of the Holy Spirit, they can be understood only with the same divine
assistance. But the Holy Spirit cannot be certainly found anywhere except in the
church; therefore, the interpreter must first find out the opinion of the church
and be guided by it. The extent of ecclesiastical control over interpretation is
plainly stated in an encyclical of Pope Leo XIII, “Providentissimus Deus”
(November 18, 1 893). After insisting that it is the place of the church to
judge the true sense of Scripture, he reassures the interpreter as to the
liberty with which he may work. The church in no way hinders the study of the
Bible except as it prevents error, he says; for the individual scholar can
exercise his liberty in two ways. First, his study of passages not yet
officially interpreted by the church may help the church to decide what the
correct interpretation is. Second, his work on passages whose meaning has been
defined by the church may expound that meaning more clearly or defend it better
from hostile attack. The primary object of the Catholic interpreter’s work in
those areas where the judgment of the church has already been pronounced “is to
interpret those passages in that identical sense, and to prove by all the
resources of learning that sound laws of interpretation admit of no other
meaning.” The reader might assume that the Catholic interpreter actually is free
in those areas where judgment has not yet been pronounced, but the encyclical
goes on to point out that legitimate interpretation is bound to produce meanings
in harmony with Catholic doctrines. Any interpretation that finds contradictions
in the Scriptures or finds the Scriptures contradicting the teaching of the
Roman Catholic church is either “foolish or false.” The justification of
ecclesiastical control of interpretation, which is practiced by Protestant
churches as well as by the Roman Catholic, is that it prevents error. The wild
luxuriance of interpretations made possible by the modernizing method have
inevitably embarrassed all cults which rest upon the authority of Scripture. The
presence of a large number of conflicting interpretations of the same passage
always produces a strain in those areas where orthodoxy is prized. The judgment
may be hazarded that uniformity was one of the desires of those who in various
times and places have set up cult control of interpretation.

Examples of this painful extravagance in interpretation can be found in the
meanings found by Christian scholars in Revelation 13:18 “... for it is the
number of a man, and his number is six hundred and sixty-six.” Irenaeus claimed
that the number was Noah’s age at the time of the flood plus the height and
breadth of the image set up by Nebuchadnezzar; he identified “the man” as
Evanthus, or Lateinos, or Titan. For Hippolytus it meant “I deny (my crucified
Savior).” To more modern interpreters, it has meant Mohammed, Pope Benedict IX,
any pope, Martin Luther, Lenin, the N.R.A, etc. Such a rank growth of definition
creates stress within the cult. This pressure was felt in Judaism in the days of
the rabbis. Out of it arose the dictum that no interpretation could be accepted
which went against the Tradition, the oral interpretation. This made the
Tradition rather than the Scripture the norm. Quite analogous is the Roman
Catholic position quoted above although it must be remembered that Judaism has
no monarchical authoritative hierarchy. The Protestant churches have followed
similar practices although to a less degree. The primitive freedom of the
individual interpreter was soon curbed by the formulation of authoritative
confessions of faith, or articles of religion. The doctrines championed in these
confessions are defined as an accurate statement of the meaning of Scripture.
This promulgation limited the freedom of the interpreter who desired to be
orthodox, for it prescribed certain interpretations as the correct
interpretations and anathematized others. Thus both British and Continental
scholars of the Reformation period in their interpretation of the Apocalypse
abstained from the millennial views of earlier scholars whose work they
accepted, for the Augsburg and Helvetic confessions had branded Chiliasmas a
heresy. The situation of the layman whose Scripture is modernized for him by the
church lacks the confusion of freer believers. He often welcomes the increased
surety even when it is purchased at the cost of freedom. The value to the
institutionalists in the cult of admitting only those modernizations which they
favor is unquestioned. But it is the belief of modern scholarship that there is
a better way. The history of the Christian world has failed to convince most
students of history that errors can be avoided in any field of study by the
exercise of ecclesiastical authority. Progress in modern learning has followed
not preceded the emancipation of scholarship from ecclesiastical shackles.

BIBLIOGRAPHY ON INTERPRETATION

GENERAL

BETHUNE-BAKER, J. F. An Introduction to the Early History of Christian Doctrine
to the Time of the Council of Chalcedon (2ded.). London: Methuen, 1916. Chapters
i-viii are especially valuable for this area of our study.

CHARLES, R. H. Studies in the Apocalypse. Edinburgh: T. & T.

Clark, 1913. Chapters I and ii give a history of the interpretation of the Book
of Revelation.

DANA, H. E. Searching the Scriptures: A Handbook of New Testament Hermeneutics.
New Orleans: Bible Institute Memorial Press, 1936. This is written from a
conservative viewpoint.

EAKIN, FRANK. Revaluing Scripture. New York: Macmillan, 1928. This work offers a
revaluation of the scriptures of all religions as a basis for revaluing the
Jewish-Christian Scriptures.

FULLERTON, K. Prophecy and Authority: A Study in the History of the Doctrine and
Interpretation of Scripture. New York, Macmillan, 1919. A very readable and
stimulating treatment of the problems of interpretation.

GILBERT, G. H. Interpretation of the Bible: A Short History.

New York: Macmillan, 1908. The best chronological treatment of interpretation in
English today. Jesus and His Bible. New York: Macmillan, 1926. A careful
investigation of the methods of interpretation employed by Jesus, with an
Appendix on the use of the Old Testament in Paul and Hebrews.

PEAKE, A. S. The Nature of Scripture. London: Hodder &

Stoughton, 1922. This deals with modern criticism, its permanent results, the
enduring value of Old Testament and New Testament, the evangelical faith, and
the modern view of Scripture, etc. A sane and careful study.

ROBINSON, T. H. “The Methods of Higher Criticism,” in The People and the Book,
ed. A. S. PEAKE. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925.

Exposition of these methods as applied to parts of the Old Testament.

SEISENBERGER, MICHAEL. Practical Handbook for the Study of the Bible (new rev.
ed.). New York: Joseph F. Wagner, Inc, 1925. A Roman Catholic manual published
with the imprimatur. It gives English translations of the important papal
decrees relating to Scripture (pp. 159-86). Interpretation is discussed in pages
449 ff.

SMITH, H. P. Essays in Biblical Interpretation. Boston: Marshall Jones Co, 1921.

Stimulating and valuable discussion of interpretation of the Old Testament.

TRATTNER, E. R. Unravelling the Book of Books: being the Story of How the
Puzzles of the Bible Were Solved and Its Documents Unravelled. New York:
Scribner’s, 1929. An interesting and readable approach to the story of biblical
criticism.

ADVANCED KITTEL, G. et al. Theologisches Worterbuch zum Neuen Testament.
Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1932.

Technical studies of important words.

LOOFS, F. Leitfaden zum Studien der Dogmengeschichte (4th ed.).

Halle a.S, Niemeyer, 1906.

REUSS, EDUARD. History of the Sacred Scriptures of the New Testament (trans,
from the 5th German ed. by E. L. HOUGHTON). Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1884.

SMITH, H. Ante-Nicene Exegesis of the Gospels. 6 vols. New York: Macmillan,
1925.

Quotes this material in order of the scriptural passages in English translation.


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  CHAPTER 8: 05 CHAPTER V THE INTERPRETATION OF THE BIBLE THE HISTORICAL METHOD LITERARY CRITICISM
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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.


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  CHAPTER 9: 06 CHAPTER VI THE INTERPRETATION OF THE BIBLE THE HISTORICAL METHOD HISTORICAL CRITICISM
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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.


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