CHAPTER V MODERN STUDY OF THE BIBLE T is customary in certain quarters to call students of the and to designate the present-day methods of Bible study in general "Higher Criticism," which Higher Criticism is supposed to indicate a dangerous laxity regarding the fundamental tenets of Christianity, if not absolute infidelity. How many who thus use the term have any knowledge of its origin and true meaning, or of the history of the development of the present science (for such it may fairly be called) of Bible study? Who to-day would dispute Le Clerc's statement in his criticism (1685) of Simon's Critical History of the Old Testament, that in writing the history of a book it is not enough to say "when and by whom it was written, what copyists transcribed it, and what faults they committed in transcribing it. It is not sufficient to tell us who translated it, and to call our attention to defects in his version; nor even to teach us who commented upon it, and what there is that is faulty in those comments. We must discover, if that is possible, with what purpose the author composed it, what occasion caused him to take up his pen, and to what opinions or to what events he may make allusion in that work." And yet this is "Higher Criticism." It was Eichhorn, of Göttingen, who first, a little more than a hundred years later, applied to the method of Bible study thus defined by the Dutch scholar the term "Higher Criticism," "a new name," as he says, "to no humanist." Hear how he expounds the value of this Higher Criticism for the interpretation of the Book of Genesis. "The credibility of the book obviously gains by it. The historian is no longer obliged to rely on one reporter in the history of the most distant past; and in the duplicated narratives of the same event he is not obliged to force into harmony the unessential differences in accessory circumstances by artificial devices. He sees in such divergences the marks of independent origin, and finds in their agreement in the main important confirmation. The interpreter, when the Higher Criticism has separated his documents for him, need no longer wrestle with difficulties which are insoluble. He will no longer explain the second chapter of Genesis by the first, or the first by the second, and the world will cease to lay on Moses the burden of the sins of his younger expositors. Finally, when the Higher Criticism has distinguished between the writers, and characterised each of them by his general method, his diction, his favourite expressions, and other peculiarities, her lower sister (textual, or lower criticism), who occupies herself only with words and spies out false readings, lays down her own rules and principles for determining the text, discovering glosses, and detecting interpolations and transpositions." Devout believer in the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch as Eichhorn was, he was as sharply attacked by the traditionalists of his day as the higher critics of the present generation have been by the present-day traditionalists,— which latter, by the way, unknown to themselves, perhaps, stand in general where the "Higher Critic," Eichhorn, stood a hundred and twenty years ago-so that he wrote: "Party spirit will, perhaps, for a couple of decades snort at the Higher Criticism, instead of rewarding it with the thanks which are really due it." But to trace the history of the modern method of Bible study we must go much further back than the times of Eichhorn or Le Clerc. Higher Criticism may fairly be said to have its beginnings in the translation of the Old Testament out of the Hebrew into Greek. The tendency in the sacred literature of all languages is towards the doctrine of literal : inspiration that the very language in which the Sacred Book is written is sacred, and that every word and even every letter of the Sacred Script has value and importance. To-day the orthodox Moslem protests against any translation of the Koran, and whatever his own tongue, and however unintelligible to him the original text of the Koran may be, he persists in the repetition of its words in Arabic only. The same is true in an even more extreme degree of the Veda and Avesta. The Jew, likewise, in all lands reads in the synagogue his Sacred Book in the original Hebrew, and oldfashioned rabbins still claim that Hebrew is the sacred language, given by God to man, and spoken in the Garden of Eden, a view which many Christians held not many decades since. As a curiosity of scholarship, I may mention an American rabbi, born in Hungary, who studied Sanscrit and comparative philology with me under the late Professor Whitney, of Yale, a quarter of a century since. His object in so doing was to obtain the material to prove what he firmly believed that Sanscrit and all other languages were derived from Hebrew, the tongue given of God to men. I have already, in a former chapter, pointed out the result of the translation of the Old Testament into Hebrew in Alexandria. By the fact of that translation the books of the Old Testament were brought into the arena of Greek scientific investigation. The same methods were applied to them which were applied to the study of Homer, the Greek tragedians, philosophers, etc., what we may fairly call the Higher Criticism of that day. An effort was made to determine the authorship of the various books, and they were rearranged on a new scheme, according to their authors and their contents, and supplied with headings accordingly. In spite of the opposition of the orthodox Jews of Palestine, this translation and rearrangement of the books of the Old Testament became the Bible of the Greek-speaking Jews of Egypt, and from them it was adopted by the Christian Church. The early Christians did not hold to literal inspiration in |