04 Examination of Objections
Examination of Objections
IT is objected that the fallibility of the translators of the Bible, renders the infallibility of the original text illusory; that the fact of the apostles having availed themselves of the merely human version made by the Seventy, renders their divine inspiration more than questionable. Objections are grounded on the various readings presented by different manuscripts, on the imperfections observed in the reasonings and in the doctrines, and on errors discovered in matters of fact. Objectors tell us that the laws of nature, now better understood than formerly, give the lie to certain representations of the sacred authors. Finally, we are told to look to what objectors are pleased to call the admissions made by St :Paul. To these difficulties we proceed to reply, taking them one after another; and we can afterwards examine some of the theories, by the help of which some have sought to rid themselves of the doctrine of a plenary inspiration.
Section 1. The Translations. The first objection may be stated thus. It is sometimes said to us, You assert that the inspiration of the Scriptures extended to the very words of the original text; but wherefore all this verbal exactness of the Holy Word, seeing that, after all, the greater number of Christians can make use of such versions only as are more or less inexact? Thus, then, the privilege of such an inspiration is lost to the Church of modern times; for you will not venture to say that any translation is inspired. This is a difficulty which, on account of its insignificance, we felt at first averse to noticing; but we cannot avoid doing so, being assured that it has obtained some currency among us, and some credit also. Our first remark on this objection must be, that it is not one at all. It does not bear against the fact of the verbal inspiration of the Scriptures; it only contests the advantages of that inspiration. With regard to the greater number of readers, it says, the benefit of such art intervention on the part of God, would be lost; because, instead of the infallible words of the original, they never can have better than the fallible words of a translation. But no man is entitled to deny a fact, because he does not at first perceive all the use that may be made of it; and no man is entitled to reject a doctrine for no better reason than that he has not perceived its utility. All the expressions, for example, and all the letters of the Ten Commandments were certainly written by the finger of God, from the aleph with which they commence, to the caph with which they end; yet, would any one venture to say that the credibility of this miraculous fact, is weakened by most unlettered readers, at the present day, being under the necessity of reading the Decalogue in some translation? No one would dare to say so. It must be acknowledged, then, that this objection, without directly attacking the dogma which we defend, only questions its advantages: these, it tells us, are lost to us, in the operation of translating from the original, and in that metamorphosis disappear.
We proceed, then, to show how even this assertion, when reduced to these last terms, rests on no good foundation. The divine word which the Bible reveals to us, passes through four successive forms before reaching us in a translation. First, it was from all eternity in the mind of God. Next, it was passed by Him into the mind of man. In the third place, under the operation of the Holy Ghost, and by a mysterious process, it passed from the prophets’ thoughts, into the types and symbols of an articulate language; it took shape in words. Finally, after having undergone this first translation, alike important and inexplicable, men have reproduced and counter-chalked it, by a new translation, in passing it from one human language into another human language. Of these four operations, the three first are divine; the fourth alone is human and fallible. Shall it be said, that because the last is human, the divinity of the three former should be a matter of indifference to us? Mark, however, that between the third and the fourth
— I mean to say, between the first translation of the thought by the sensible signs of a human language, and the second translation of the words by other words — the difference is enormous. Between the doubts that may cleave to us respecting the exactness of the versions, and those with which we should be racked with respect to the correctness of the original text (if not inspired even in its language), the distance is infinite. It is said; of what consequence is it to me that the third operation is effected by the Spirit of God, if the last be accomplished only by the spirit of man? In other words, what avails it to me that the primitive language be inspired, if the translated version be not so? But people forget, in speaking thus, that we are infinitely more assured of the exactness of the translators, than we could be of that of the original text, in the case of all the expressions not being given by God. Of this, however, we may become perfectly convinced, by attending to the five following considerations: —
[1]. The operation by which the sacred writers express with words the mind of the Holy Ghost, is, we have said, itself a rendering not of words by other words, but of divine thoughts by sensible symbols. Now this first translation is an infinitely nicer matter, more mysterious and more liable to error (if God puts not his hand to it) than the operation can be afterwards, by which we should render a Greek word of that primitive text, by its equivalent in another tongue. In order to a man’s expressing exactly the thought of God, it is necessary, if he be not guided in his language from above, that he have thoroughly comprehended it in its just measure, and in the whole extent and depth of its meaning. But this is by no means necessary in the ease of a mere translation. The divine thought being already incarnated, as it were, in the language of the sacred text, what remains to be done in translation is no longer the giving of it a body, but only the changing of its dress, making it say in French what it had already said in Greek, and modestly substituting for each of its words an equivalent word. Such an operation is comparatively very inferior, very immaterial, without mystery, and infinitely less subject to error than the preceding. It even requires so little spirituality, that it may be performed to perfection by a trustworthy pagan who should possess in perfection a knowledge of both languages. The version of an accomplished rationalist who desires to be no more than a translator, I could better trust than that of an orthodox person and a saint, who should paraphrase the text, and undertake to present it to me more complete or more clear in his French than he found it in the Greek or in the Hebrew of the original. And let no one be surprised at this assertion; it is justified by facts. Thus, is not De Wette’s translation, among the Germans, preferred at the present day to that even of the great Luther? At least, is there not greater confidence felt in having the mind of the Holy Ghost in the lines of the Basel professor than in those of the great reformer; because the former has always kept very close to the expressions of his text, as a man of learning subject to the rules of philology alone; while the latter seems at times to have momentarily endeavoured after something more, and sought to make himself interpreter as well as translator? The more, then, one reflects on this first consideration, the more immeasurable ought the difference to appear between these two orders of operations; to wit, between the translation of the divine thoughts into the words of a human language, and the translation of the same thoughts into the equivalent terms of another language. No longer, therefore, be it said, “What avails it to me, if the one be human, that the other is divine?”
[2]. A second character by which we perceive how different these two operations must be, and by which the making of our versions will be seen to be infinitely less subject to the chances of error than the original text (assuming that to be uninspired), is, that while the work required by our translations is done by a great many men of every tongue and country, capable of devoting their whole time and care to it — by men who have from age to age controlled and checked each other, and who have mutually instructed and perfected each other — the original text, on the contrary, behoved to be written at a given moment, and by a single man. With that man there was none but his God to put him right if he made a mistake, and to supply him with better expressions if he had chosen imperfect ones. If God, therefore, did not do this, no one could have done it. And if that man gave a bad rendering of the mind of the Holy Ghost, he had not, like our translators, friends to warn, predecessors to guide, successors to correct, nor months, years, and ages in which to review and consummate his work. It was done by one man, and done once for all. This consideration, then, further shows how much more necessary the intervention of the Holy Ghost was to the sacred authors than to their translators.
[3]. A third consideration, which ought also to lead us to the same conclusion, is, that while all the translators of the Scriptures were literate and laborious persons, and versed in the study of language, the sacred authors, on the contrary, were, for the most part, ignorant men, without literary cultivation, without the habit of writing their own tongue, and liable, from that very circumstance, if they expressed fallibly the divine revelation, to give us an infallible thought in a faulty way.
[4]. A fourth very powerful consideration, which will make one feel still more sensibly the immense difference existing between the sacred writers and their translators, is, that whereas the thought from God passed like a flash of lightning before the soul of the prophet; whereas this thought could, nowhere be found again upon earth, except in the rapid expression which was then given to it by the sacred writer; whereas, if he have expressed it ill, you know not where to go in search of its prototype in order to recover the thought meant to be conveyed by God in its purity; whereas, if he have made a mistake, his blunder is for ever irreparable; it must last longer than heaven and earth, it has blemished the eternal book remedilessly, and nobody on earth can correct it; — it is quite otherwise with translators. These, on the contrary, have always the divine text at hand, so as to be corrected and re-corrected, according to the eternal type, until they have become an exact counterpart of it. The inspired word leaves us not; we need not to go in search of it to the third heaven; it is still upon the earth, just as God himself first dictated it to us. You may thus devote ages to its study, in order that the human process of our translation may be subjected to its immutable truth. You can now, after the lapse of a hundred and thirty years, correct Osterwald and Martin, by means of a closer comparison of them with their infallible standard; after the lapse of three hundred and seventeen years, you can correct the work of Luther; after that, of fourteen hundred and forty years, that of St Jerome. God’s phraseology is still before us, with which to confront our modern versions, as dictated by God himself, in Hebrew or in Greek, on the day of its being revealed; and, with our dictionaries in your hand, you may, age after age, return to the examination of the infallible expression which it has been his good pleasure to give to the divine thought, until you become assured that the language of the modem ones has truly received the counter impression, and given you the most faithful facsimile of it for your own use. Say no more then, What avails it to me, that the one is divine since the other is human? If you would have a bust of Napoleon, would you say to the sculptor, What avails it to me that your model has been moulded at St Helena on the very face of Bonaparte, seeing that, after all, your copy cannot have been so?
[5]. In fine, what further distinguishes the first expression which the mind of God has received in the individual words of the sacred book, from its new expression in one of our translations, is that, if you assume the words of the one to be as little inspired as those of the other, nevertheless, the range of conjectures which you might make on their possible faults would be, as respects the original text, a space without bounds and ever enlarging itself; while that same range, as respects the translations, is a very limited space, which is constantly diminishing the longer you remain in it.
If some friend, returning from the East Indies, where your rather has, at a great distance from you, breathed his last, were to bring you from him a last letter, written with his own hand, or dictated by him, word for word, in Bengalee, would that letter’s being entirely from him be a matter of indifference to you, because you are not acquainted with the Bengalee language, and can read it only in a translation? Don’t you know that you can cause translations of it to be multiplied, until they leave you no more doubt of the original meaning than if you had been a Hindoo? Will you not allow, that after each of these new translations your uncertainties will be always growing less and less, until they cease to be appreciable, as is the ease in arithmetic with those fractionary and convergent progressions, the last terms of which are equivalent to zero; while, on the contrary, if the letter were not from your father himself, but from some stranger, who says he has only reproduced his thoughts, then you would find no limits to possible suppositions; and your uncertainties, transported into spheres new and boundless, would go on increasing the more you allowed your mind to dwell upon them; as is the case in arithmetic with those ascending progressions, the last terms of which represent infinitude. It is the same with the Bible. If I believe that God has dictated the whole of it, my uncertainties with respect to its translations are confined within a very narrow range; and even in this range, in proportion as it is re-translated, the limits of doubt are constantly drawn in more closely. But if left to think, on the contrary, that God has not entirely dictated it, and that human infirmity may have had its share in it, where shall I stop in assuming that there may be errors? I know not. The apostles were ignorant — shall I say, they were illiterate — they were Jews; they had popular prejudices; they judaized; they platonized; … I know not where to stop. I will begin like Locke, and end like Strauss. I will first deny the personality of Satan, as a rabbinical prejudice; I will end with denying that of Jesus Christ, as another prejudice. Between these two terms, in consequence, moreover, of the ignorance, on many points, to which the apostles were subject, I will proceed, as so many others have done, to admit, in spite of the letter of the Bible, and with the Bible in my hand, that there is no corruption in men, no personality in the Holy Ghost, no divinity in Jesus Christ, no expiation in his blood, no resurrection of the body in the grave, no eternity in future punishments, no anger in God, no devil, no miracle, no damned souls, no hell. St Paul was orthodox, shall I say? as others have done; but he misunderstood his Master. Whereas, on the contrary, if all have been dictated by God in the original, and even to the smallest expression, “to the least iota and tittle,” who is the translator that could seduce me, by his labours, into any one of these negations, and make even the least of these truths disappear from my Bible?
Accordingly, who now can fail to perceive the enormous distance interposed by all these considerations between those two texts (that of the Bible and that of the translations), as respects the importance of verbal inspiration? Between the passing of the thoughts of God into human words, and the simple turning of these words into other words, the distance is as wide as from heaven to earth. God was required for the one; mail sufficed for the other. Let it no longer be said, then, What would it avail to us that we have verbal inspiration in the one case, if we have not that inspiration in the other case? for between these two terms, which some would put on an equality, the difference is almost infinite.
Section 2. Use of Septuagint in New Testament.
People insist and say, We agree that the fact of these modern translations does not at all affect the question of the first inspiration of the Scriptures; but we have much more to urge. The sacred authors of the New Testament, when they themselves quote the old Hebrew Scriptures in Greek, employ for that purpose the Greek translation, called that of the Seventy, executed at Alexandria two centuries and a half before Jesus Christ. Now, no one among the moderns will dare to affirm (as was done in former times) that the Alexandrine interpreters were inspired. Would a man any more dare to contend that that version, still human at the time of Jesus Christ, acquired, by the sole fact of the apostolic quotations, a divinity which it did not previously possess? Would not this strange allegation resemble that of the Council of Trent, when it pronounced to be divine apocryphal writings, which the ancient Church rejected from the canon, and which St Jerome called “fables, and a medley of gold and clay;” [119] or when it pronounced that translation by St Jerome to be authentic, which, at first, in the opinion of St Jerome himself, and thereafter in that of the Church for above a thousand years, was no more than a human work, respectable, no doubt, but imperfect? Would it not further resemble the silly infallibility of Sixtus V., who declared his edition of 1590 to be authentic; or that of his successor, Clement VIII., who, finding the edition of Sixtus V. intolerably incorrect, suppressed it in 1592, in order to substitute in its place another very different, and yet still more authentic? [120]
Here we gladly recall this difficulty; because, like many others, when more closely examined, it converts the objections into arguments. No more is required, in fact, than to study the manner in which the apostles employ the Septuagint, in order to see in it a striking sign of the verbal inspiration under which they wrote. Were a prophet to be sent by God in our day to the churches speaking the French tongue, how shall it be thought he would act in quoting the Scriptures? He would do so in French no doubt; but according to what version? As Osterwald and Martin’s are those most extensively circulated, he would probably make his quotations in the words of one or other of them, in all cases where their translation should seem to him sufficiently exact. But also, notwithstanding our habitual practice and his, he would take care to abandon both those versions, and translate in his own way, as often as the thought intended to be conveyed by the original did. not seem to him to be rendered with sufficient fidelity. Nay, he would sometimes even do more. In order to our being enabled to comprehend more fully in what sense he meant to make for us the application of such or such a Scripture, he would paraphrase the passage quoted, and in citing it, follow neither the letter of the original text nor that of the translations. This is precisely what has been done by the sacred writers of the New Testament with respect to the Septuagint.
Although it was the universal practice of the Hellenistic Jews, throughout the whole of the East, to read in their synagogues and to quote in their discussions the Old Testament according to that ancient version, [121] the apostles show us the independence of the Spirit that” guided them, by the three several methods they follow in their quotations.
First, when the Alexandrine translators seem to them correct, they do not hesitate to conform to the recollections of their Hellenist auditors, and to quote the Septuagint version literatim and verbatim .
Secondly, and this often occurs when dissatisfied with the work of the Seventy, they amend it, and make their quotations according to the original Hebrew, translating it more correctly.
Thirdly, in fine, when they would point out more clearly in what sense they adduce such or such a declaration of the holy books, they paraphrase it in quoting it. It is then the Holy Ghost who, by their mouth, quotes himself, modifying at the same time the expressions which he had previously dictated to the prophets of his ancient people. One may compare, for example, Mic 5:2 with Mat 2:6; Mal 3:1 with Mat 11:10, Mark 1:2, and Luk 7:27, &c. &c. The learned Horne, in his “Introduction to the Critical Study of the Bible” (vol. 1, p. 503) has ranged under five distinct classes, relatively to the Septuagint version, the quotations made in the New Testament from the Old. We do not here warrant all his distinctions, nor all his figures; but our readers will comprehend the three of our argument, on our informing them that that learned author reckons eighty-eight verbal quotations that agree with the Alexandrine translations; sixty-four more that are borrowed from them, but with some variations; thirty-seven that adopt the same meaning with them without employing their words; sixteen that differ from them in order to agree more nearly with the Hebrew; and, finally, twenty that differ from both the Hebrew and the Septuagint, but in which the sacred authors have paraphrased the Old Testament, in order that the sense in which they quote it may be better understood.
These numerical data will sufficiently enable the reader to form a just idea of the independence claimed by the Holy Ghost with regard to human versions, when he desired to quote, in the New Testament, that which he had previously caused to be written in the Old. Accordingly, they not only answer the objection — they convert it into a testimony.
Section 3. The Various Readings.
We must give up the translations, then, other opponents will say, and admit that they nowise affect the question of the primary inspiration of the original text. But in that very text there are numerous differences among the ancient manuscripts which our Churches consult, and on which our printed editions are based. Confronted with proofs of such a fact, what becomes of the doctrine of verbal inspiration, and what purpose can it serve?
Here, too, the answer is easy. We might say at once of the various readings of the manuscripts, what we have said of the translations: Why confound two orders of facts that are absolutely distinct: that of the first inspiration of the Scriptures, and that of the present integrity of the copies that have been made of them? If it was God himself that dictated the letter of the sacred oracles, that is a fact past recall; and no more can the copies made of them, than the translations given to us of them, undo that first act. When a fact is once consummated, nothing that happens subsequently can efface it from the history of the past. There are here, then, two questions which we must carefully distinguish. Was the whole of Scripture divinely inspired? — this is the first question; it is that with which we have now to do. Are the copies made of it many centuries afterwards by doctors and monks correct? or are they not correct? — that is the second question. This last can nowise affect the other. Don’t proceed, then, to subject the former, by a strange piece of inattention, to the latter; they are independent of each other. A book is from God, or it is not from God. In the latter case, it were idle for me to transcribe it a thousand times exactly — I should not thereby render it divine; and in the former case, I should in vain take a thousand incorrect copies; — neither folly nor unfaithfulness on my part, can undo the fact of its having been given by God. — The Decalogue, yet once more we repeat it, was entirely written by the finger of Jehovah on two tables of stone; but if the manuscripts that give it to me at the present day present some various readings, this second fact would not prevent the first. The sentences, words, and letters of the Ten Commandments, would not the less have been all engraven by God. Inspiration of the first text, integrity of the subsequent copies — these are two orders of facts absolutely different, and separated from each other by thousands of stadia, and thousands of years. Beware, then, of confounding what logic, time, and space compel you to distinguish. It is by precisely a similar process of reasoning, that we reprove the indiscreet lovers of the apocryphal writings. The ancient oracles of God, we tell them, were committed to the Jewish people, as the new oracles were committed afterwards to the Christian people. If, then, the Book of Maccabees was a merely human book in the days of Jesus Christ, a thousand decrees of the Christian Church could not have any such effect thereafter as that, in 1560, becoming what it had never been till then, it should be transubstantiated into a divine book. Did the prophets write the Bible with the words which human wisdom dictated, or with words given them by God?
— such is our question. But have they been faithfully copied from age to age, from manuscripts into manuscripts? — this as yours, perhaps. It is very important no doubt; but it is entirely different from the first. Do not, then, confound what God has separated.
It is true, no doubt, will people say, that the fidelity of one copy does not make the original divine, when it is not so; and the incorrectness of another copy will not make it human, if it was not so. Accordingly, this is not what we maintain. The fact of the inspiration of the sacred text in the days of Moses, or the days of St John, cannot depend upon the copies which we shall have made of it in Europe and Africa, two or three thousand years after them; but though the second of these facts does not destroy the first, it at least renders it illusory, by depriving it of its whole worth and utility.
Now, then, mark to what the objection is confined. The question is no longer about the inspiration of the original text — the whole attack here is directed against its present integrity. It was first a question of doctrine: “Is it declared in the Bible that the Bible is inspired even in its language?” But it is no more now than a question of history, or of criticism: “Have the copyists copied faithfully? are the manuscripts faithful?” Accordingly, we might say nothing now on a position of which we are not here called upon to undertake the defence; but the answer is easy; I will say more — God has rendered it so triumphant that we will not restrain ourselves from giving it. Besides, the faith of simple minds has been so often disquieted on this subject by a phantasmagoria of learning, that we consider it useful here to expose its hollowness. And, although this objection in some sort withdraws us from the field which we had traced out for our ourselves, we will follow it, for the purpose of answering it. No doubt, had this difficulty been presented to us in the days of Anthony Collins and the Free Thinkers, we should not have been left without reply, but we should have felt perhaps some embarrassment, because full light had not then been thrown upon the facts, and because the field of conjectures, as yet unexplored, remained undefined. We know the perplexities of the excellent Bengel on this question; and we know that these led, first, to his laborious researches on the sacred text, and, next, to his pious wonder and gratitude at the preservation of that text. Of what use, one might have said, is the assurance that the original text was dictated by God eighteen hundred years ago, if I have no longer the certainty that the manuscripts of our libraries still present it to me in its purity, and if it be true (as we are assured) that the various readings of these rolls are at least thirty thousand in number?
Such is the old objection: it was specious; but now-a-days it is known, by all who have studied it, to be a mere illusion. The Rationalists themselves have admitted that it can no longer be made, and must be given up. The Lord has watched miraculously over his Word. This the facts of the case have demonstrated. In constituting as its depositaries, first, the Churches of the Jewish people, and then those of the Christian people, his providence had by this means to see to the faithful transmission of the oracles of God to us. It has done this; and in order to the attainment of this result, it has put different causes in operation, of which we shall have again to speak afterwards. Late learned researches have thrown the dearest light on this great fact. Herculean labours have been bestowed, during the whole of the last century (particularly in its last half) and the first part of this, on the task of bringing together all the various readings that either the detailed examination of the manuscripts of holy Scripture preserved in the different libraries of Europe, or the study of the most ancient versions, or the searching out of the innumerable quotations made from our sacred books in all the writings of the fathers of the Church, could furnish; and this immense toil has ended in a result wonderful by its insignificance, and (shall I say?) imposing by its nullity. As respects the Old Testament, the indefatigable investigations and the four folios of Father Houbigant; the thirty years’ labours of John Henry Michaelis; above all, the great Critical Bible and the tell years’ study of the famous Kennicott (who consulted five hundred and eighty-one Hebrew manuscripts); and, in fine, Professor Rossi’s collection of six hundred and eighty manuscripts; — as respects the New Testament, the no less gigantic investigations of Mill, Bengel, Wetstein, and Griesbach (who consulted three hundred and thirty-five manuscripts for the Gospels alone); the latest researches of Nolan, Matthæi, Lawrence, and Hug; above all, those of Scholz (with his six hundred and seventy-four manuscripts for the Gospels, his two hundred for the Acts, his two hundred and fifty-six for the Epistles of Paul, his ninety-three for the Apocalypse, (without reckoning his fifty-three Lectionaria): all these vast labours have so convincingly established the astonishing preservation of that text, copied nevertheless so many thousands of times (in Hebrew during thirty-three centuries, and in Greek during eighteen hundred years), that the hopes of the enemies of religion, in this quarter, have been subverted, arid as Michaelis has said, “They have ceased henceforth to look for anything from those critical researches which they at first so warmly recommended, because they expected discoveries from them that have never been made.” [122] The learned Rationalist Eichhorn himself also owns that the different readings of the Hebrew manuscripts collected by Kennicott hardly offer sufficient interest to compensate for the trouble they cost! [123] But these very misreckonings, and the absence of those discoveries, have proved a precious discovery for the Church of God. She expected as much; but she is delighted to owe it to the labour of her very adversaries. “In truth,” says a learned man of our day,
“but for those precious negative conclusions that people have come to, the direct result obtained from the consumption of so many men’s lives in these immense researches may seem to amount to nothing; and one may say that in order to come to it, time, talent, and learning have all been foolishly thrown away.” [124] But, as we have said, this result is immense in virtue of its nothingness, and all-powerful in virtue of its insignificance. When one thinks that the Bible has been copied during thirty centuries, as no book of man has ever been, or ever will be; that it was subjected to all the catastrophes and all the captivities of Israel; that it was transported seventy years to Babylon; that it has seen itself so often persecuted, or forgotten, or interdicted, or burnt, from the days of the Philistines to those of the Seleucidæ; — when one thinks that, since the time of Jesus Christ, it has had to traverse the first three centuries of the imperial persecutions, when persons found in possession of the holy books were thrown to the wild beasts; next the 7th, 8th, and 9th centuries, when false books, false legends, and false decretals, were everywhere multiplied; the 10th century, when so few could read, even among princes; the 12th, 13th, and 14th centuries, when the use of the Scriptures in the vulgar tongue was punished with death, and when the books of the ancient fathers were mutilated, when so many ancient traditions were garbled and falsified, even to the very acts of the emperors, and to those of the councils; — then we can perceive how necessary it was that the providence of God should have always put forth its mighty power, in order that, on the one hand, the Church of the Jews should give us, in its integrity, that Word which records its revolts, which predicts its ruin, which describes Jesus Christ; and, on the other, that the Christian Churches (the most powerful of which, and the Roman sect in particular, interdicted the people from reading the sacred books, and substituted in so many ways the traditions of the middle ages for the Word of God) should nevertheless transmit to us, in all their purity, those Scriptures, which condemn all their traditions, their images, their dead languages, their absolutions, their celibacy; which say, that Rome would be the seat of a terrible apostasy, where “the Man of Sin would be seen sitting as God in the temple of God, waging war on the saints, forbidding to marry, and to use meats which God had created;” which say of images, “Thou shall not bow down to them” — of unknown tongues, “Thou shalt not use them” — of the cup, “Drink ye all of it” — of the Virgin, “Woman, what have I to do with thee?” — and of marriage, “It is honourable in all.”
Now, although all the libraries in which ancient copies of the sacred books may be found, have been called upon to give their testimony; although the elucidations given by the fathers of all ages have been studied; although the Arabic, Syriac, Latin, Armenian, and Ethiopian versions have been collated; although all the manuscripts of all countries and ages, from the third to the sixteenth century, have been collected and examined a thousand times over, by countless critics, who have eagerly sought out some new text, as the recompense and the glory of their wearisome watchings; although learned men, not content with the libraries of the West, have visited those of Russia, and carried their researches into the monasteries of Mont Athos, Turkish Asia, and Egypt, there to look for new instruments of the sacred text; — “Nothing has been discovered,” says a learned person, already quoted, “not even a single reading, that could throw doubt on any one of the passages before considered as certain. All the variantes, almost without exception, leave untouched the essential ideas of each phrase, and bear only on points of secondary importance;” such as the insertion or the omission of an article or a conjunction, the position of an adjective before or after its substantive, the greater or less exactness of a grammatical construction. And would we be less rigorous in our demands with respect to the Old Testament?
— the famous Indian manuscript, recently deposited in the Cambridge library, will furnish an example.
It is thirty-three years since the pious and learned Claudius Buchanan, while visiting, in the Indian peninsula, the black Jews of Malabar (who are supposed to be the remains of the first dispersion under Nebuchadnezzar), saw in their possession an immense roll, composed of thirty-seven skins, tinged with red, forty-eight feet long, twenty-two inches wide, and which, in its originally entire state, must have had ninety English feet of development. The Holy Scriptures had been traced on it by different hands. There remained one hundred and seventeen columns of beautiful writing; and there was wanting only Leviticus and part of Deuteronomy. Buchanan succeeded in having this ancient and precious monument, which served for the worship of the synagogue, committed to his care, and. he afterwards deposited it in the Cambridge library. The impossibility of supposing that this roll had been taken from a copy brought by European Jews, was perceived from certain evident marks. Now, Mr Yeates lately submitted it to the most attentive examination; and took the trouble to collate it, word by word, letter by letter, with our Hebrew edition of Van der Hooght. He has published the results of his researches. And what have they been? Why, this: that there do not exist, between the text of India and that of the West, above forty small differences, not one of which is of sufficient importance to lead to even a slight change in the meaning and interpretation of our ancient text; and that these are but the additions or retrenchments of an éor a å, —letters the presence or absence of which, in Hebrew, cannot alter the import of the word. [125]
We know the peculiar character, among the Jews, of those Massorethes, or doctors of tradition, whose whole profession consisted in transcribing the Scriptures, — we know to what a pitch these learned men carried respect for the letter; and when we read the rules that regulated their labours, we can comprehend what use the providence of the Lord, who had “committed his oracles to the Jewish people,” knew to make of their reverential respect, their strictness, and even their superstition. In each of the books they counted the number of verses, of words, of letters: they could have told you, for example, that the letter àappears forty-two thousand three hundred and seventy-seven times in the Bible, the letter áthirty-eight thousand two hundred and eighteen times, and so on: they would have scrupled at changing the position of a single letter evidently displaced; they would only have called your attention to it on the margin, and would have supposed some mystery involved in it; they would have told you the middle letter in the Pentateuch, and that which is in the middle of each of the particular books of which it is composed: they never would permit themselves to retouch their manuscript; and if any mistake had escaped from them, they would have rejected the papyrus or the parchment which it had spoilt, and would have begun anew; for they were equally interdicted from ever correcting any of their blunders, and from preserving for their sacred volume a parchment or skin that had suffered any erasure. This intervention of God’s providence in the preservation of the Old Testament becomes still more striking in our eves, if we compare the astonishing integrity of the original Hebrew (at the close of so many centuries) with the rapid and profound alteration which the Greek version of the Septuagint had undergone in the days of Jesus Christ (after the lapse of only two hundred years). Notwithstanding that that book had acquired throughout the whole East, after the almost universal propagation of the Greek language, a semicanonical authority, first among the Jews and then among the Christians; notwithstanding its being afterwards the only text to which the fathers of the East and of the West (with the exception of Origen and of Jerome) had recourse for what they knew of the Old Testament, the only one that was commented on by the Chrysostoms and the Theodorets the only one whence such men as Athanasius, Basil, and Gregory of Nazianzus drew their arguments; notwithstanding that the Western no more than the Eastern world had any better source of illumination, during so many ages, than that borrowed light (seeing that the ancient Italian Vulgate, which was in universal use, had been translated from the Greek of the Septuagint, and not from the Hebrew of the original); yet hear what the learned tell us of the alteration of that important monument — of the additions, changes, and interpolations to which it had been subjected, first through the doings of the ancient Jews before the days of Jesus Christ, after that by the unbelieving Jews, and later still through the heedlessness of Christian copyists: “The evil was such (mirum in modum),” says Dr Lee, “that in certain books the ancient version could hardly be recognised; and when Origen, in the year 231, had devoted twenty-eight years of his noble life in searching for different manuscripts of it, with the view of doing for that text (in his Tetrapla and his Hexapla) what modern critics have done for that of the Old and New Testaments, not only could he not find any copy that was correct, but he further made matters worse. Through the unskilfulness of the copyists (who neglected the transcriptions of his obelisks, asterisks, and other marks), the greater number of his marginal corrections found their way into the text; so that new errors having spread there, one could no longer, in the time of Jerome, distinguish between his annotations and the primitive text.” [126] We repeat, these facts, placed in contrast with the astonishing preservation of the Hebrew text (older than that of the LXX. by more than twelve hundred years), proclaim loudly enough how necessary it was that the mighty hand of God should intervene in the destinies of the sacred book. So much for the Old Testament. But let it not be thought that the Providence that watched over that sacred book, and which committed it to the Jews (Rom 3:1-2), has done less for the protection of the oracles of the New Testament, committed by it to the new people of God. It has not left to the latter less cogent motives to gratitude and feelings of security.
Here we would appeal, by way of testimony, to the late experience of the authors of a version of the New Testament which has just been published in Switzerland, and in the long labours of which we ourselves had a part. A single trait may enable all classes of readers to understand how very insignificant are the different readings presented by the manuscripts. The translators to whom we refer followed, without the smallest deviation, what is called the received edition, that is to say, the Greek text of Elzevir, 1624, so long adopted by all our Churches; but as, in conformity with the original plan of the work they had undertaken, they had first of all to introduce into their original text the various readings that have been most approved by the criticism of the last century, they very often found themselves embarrassed, from perceiving the impossibility of expressing, even in the most literal French, the new shade of meaning introduced by that correction into their Greek. The French language, in the most scrupulous version, has not flexibility enough to enable it to assume these differences of manner, so as to put them in proper relief; just as the casts taken from the face of a king reproduce in brass his noble features, yet without being capable of marking every vein and wrinkle.
We desire, however, to give such of our readers as are strangers to sacred criticism, two or three other and still more intelligible means of estimating that providence which has for thirty centuries watched over our sacred texts. The first is as follows: We would bid them compare the two Protestant translations by Osterwald and Martin. There are few modern versions that come so close to each other. The old version of the Geneva pastors having been taken as the basis of both — both having been written at nearly the same time and in the same spirit — they differ so little, especially in the New Testament, that our Bible societies distribute them indifferently, and that one finds it hard to say which of the two ought to be preferred. Nevertheless, if you take the trouble to note their differences, taking all things into account, as has been done on comparing our four hundred manuscripts of the New Testament, the one with the other, we affirm beforehand (and rather think that in this we under-state the truth), that these two French texts are three times, and in many chapters ten times, wider from each other than the Greek text of our printed editions is, we will not say only from the least esteemed of the Greek manuscripts of our libraries, but FROM ALL THEIR MANUSCRIPTS PUT TOGETHER. Hence we will venture to say, that were some able and ill-meaning person (such as we may suppose the wretched Voltaire or the too celebrated Anthony Collins to have been in the last century) to study to select at will, out of all the manuscripts of the East and the West, when placed before him, the worst readings and the variations most remote from our received text, with the perfidious intention of composing at pleasure the most faulty text — such a man, we say (even were he to adopt such various readings as should have in their favour no more than ONE SOLE manuscript out of the four or five hundred of our libraries), could not, in spite of all his mischievous inclination, produce a Testament, as the result of his labours, that would be less close to that of our Churches than Martin is to Osterwald. Further, you might send it abroad instead of the true text, with as little inconvenience as you would find in giving French Protestants Martin rather than Osterwald, or Osterwald rather than Martin; and. with far less scruple than you would feel in circulating De Sacy’s version among the followers of the Church of Rome. No doubt these last books are only translations, whereas all the Greek manuscripts profess to be original texts; and it must be admitted that, in this respect, our comparison is very imperfect: but it is not less fitted to re-assure the friends of the Word of God, by enabling them to understand the extreme insignificance of the various readings.
Meanwhile, what follows is something more direct and more precise. In order to give all our readers some measure at once of the number and of the harmlessness of the readings that have been collected together in the manuscripts of our libraries, we proceed to present two specimens of these. It will consist, first, of a schedule containing the first eight verses of the Epistle to the Romans, with ALL THE VARIOUS READINGS relating to these IN ALL THE MANUSCRIPTS of the East and of the West. This will be followed by a schedule of the whole epistle, with ALL THE CORRECTIONS that the celebrated Griesbach, the oracle of modern criticism, thought he ought to introduce into it.
We have taken these passages at random, and declare that we have not been led to make choice of them in preference to others, by any reason bearing upon our argument.
We feel gratified at placing these short documents before the eyes of persons who are not called by their position to follow out, of themselves, the investigations of sacred criticism, and whose minds, nevertheless, may have been somewhat discomposed by the language, at once mysterious and imposing, which the rationalists of the last century have so often employed on the subject. To hear them speak, would you not have said that modern science was about to give us a new Bible, to bring down Jesus Christ from the throne of God, to restore to man, when calumniated by our theology, all his titles to innocence, and to set to rights all the dogmas of our old orthodoxy? As a first term of comparison, our columns will present first of all, in the eight first verses of the Epistle to the Romans, the differences betwixt the one text of Martin (1707) and the one text of Osterwald, (Bagster’s edition), while the following columns, instead of comparing any one sole manuscript with any other sole manuscript whatsoever, will present the differences between our received text and ALL THE MANUSCRIPTS that one has been able to collect down to Griesbach. That learned and indefatigable person, for the Epistle to the Romans, scrutinized first of all seven manuscripts written WITH UNCIAL LETTERS (or Greek capitals), and it is thought, from thirteen to fourteen centuries old, (the Alexandrine, in the British Museum; that of the Vatican, and that of Cardinal Passionei at Rome; that of Ephrem at Paris; that of St Germain, that of Dresden, and that of Cardinal Coislin); and after that, a hundred and ten manuscripts in small letters, and thirty others, brought for the most part from Mount Athos, and consulted by the learned Matthei, who travelled long for that purpose in Russia and the East. For the four Gospels, the same Griesbach had opportunities of consulting as many as three hundred and. thirty-five manuscripts.
Various Readings.
FIRST TABLE.
OSTERWALD’S TEXT Ver. 2. qu’il. promis auparavant.
… 3. de la race.
… 4. et quì selon l’Esprit… a été. a été declare. avec puissance. par sa resurrection. l’Esprit de sainteté, Savoir. J. C. notre Seigneur.
… 5. afin d’amener tousles Gentils a l’obeissance de la foi.
… 6. du nombre desquels vous êtes aussi, vous. qui avez etè appelés.
… 7. appelés et saints. la grace et la paix vous soiènt données de la part de Dieu notre père et de notre Seigneur J. C.
… 8. Avant toutes choses. au sujet de vous tons. est celebre.
MARTIN’S TEXT (1707.) lequel. auparavant promis. de la semence. et qui a été selon, … l’Esprit. a été pleinement declaré. en puissance. par la resurrection. 1 Esprit de sanctification. c’est a dire. notre Seigneur J. C. afin qu’il y ait obeissance de foi parmi tousles Gentils. entre lesquels aussi vous etes, vous qui etes appelés. appelés á etre saints. grace vous soit et paix vous soient données de par Dieu notre père et de par le Seigneur J. C. Premierement. touchant vous tous. est renommée. These differences between the two French texts are sufficiently insignificant; and were one to tell us that, in all these verses, one or other of the two is inspired of God, our faith would receive great aid from this. Now it will be seen that the various readings of the Greek manuscripts are still more insignificant.
Let us now examine, on the same verses, the table containing the received text, compared with all the different readings that could be presented by the hundred and fifty Greek manuscripts collected and consulted for the Epistle to the Romans. Here we shall not point out either the differences presented by the ancient translations, or those that belong only to the punctuation (that element being almost null in the most ancient manuscripts).
We shall translate the first column (that of the received text) according to the old version, which is more literal than Osterwald’s; and we shall also endeavour to render the Greek readings of the second column as exactly as possible.
SECOND TABLE THE RECEIVED TEXT — (THAT OF ELZEVIR, 1624.) Ver. 1. No difference.
… 2. by his prophets.
… 3. who was made.
… 4. and declared.
… 5. No difference.
… 6. No difference.
… 7. that be in Rome, beloved of God, called. from God our Father.
… 8. First. for you all.
VARIOUS READINGS~ COLLECTED FROM AMONG ALL THE GREEK MANUSCRIPTS UNITED. by the prophets.
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Nevertheless, those of our readers who have hitherto been strangers to such researches will not be displeased, we believe, at our offering, in a third table, a fresh method of estimating the harmlessness of the variations, and the nullity of the objection that has been drawn from them. This last table will present the totality of the corrections which, according to the learned Griesbach, the father of sacred criticism, ought to be introduced into the text of the Epistle to the Romans, after the prolonged study of the extant manuscripts to which he had devoted himself, and after all that had been done by his predecessors in the same field of research. No one who has not entered on these researches, can form a just idea of the immensity of those labours.
Before perusing this third table, however, we would have the reader to know —
First, That Griesbach is, in general, charged by the learned (such as Matthæi, Nolan, Lawrence, Scholz, and others) with an excessive eagerness for the admission of new readings into the ancient text. This tendency is explained by the habits of the human heart. The learned Whitby had, before that, charged Dr Mill, not without some foundation, with the same fault, although he had never ventured on so many corrections as Griesbach.
Secondly, Observe, further, that in this table we give not only those corrections which the learned critic was fully persuaded people ought to adopt, but those also which he has said were as yet only doubtful in his eyes, and not to be confidently preferred to the generally received text.
THIRD TABLE GRIESBACH’S CORRECTIONS, EXTENDING TO THE WHOLE OF THE EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS RECEIVED TEXT. — SUBSTANTIALLY OUR ENGLISH VERSION.
NEW TEXT. — CORRECTED BY GRIESBACH. CHAPTER I Ver. 13. that I might have some fruit.
… 16. I am not ashamed.
… — the gospel of Christ.
… 19. for God.
… 21. glorified him not.
… 24. Wherefore God also.
… 27. And likewise.
… 29. with all unrighteousness, fornication, wickedness.
… 31. without natural affection, implacable, unmerciful. that I might have some fruit.
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CHAPTER II Ver. 8. indignation and wrath.
… 13. the hearers of the law. wrath and indignation. the hearers of
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CHAPTER III Ver. 22. unto all and upon all them that believe.
… 25. through the faith.
… 28. Therefore we conclude, that a man is justified by the faith.
… 29. is he not. unto all them who believe. through faith. In fact we conclude, that a man is justified by faith. is he not.
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CHAPTER IV Ver. 1. What shall we then say, that Abraham hath found. Abraham our father.
… 4. as a debt.
… 12. in the circumcision.
… 13. heir of the world.
… 19. And being not weak in faith, he considered not.
What shall we then say, that hath found Abraham. Abraham our ancestor. as debt. in circumcision. heir of the world.
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CHAPTER V Ver. 14. to Moses. to Moses (
CHAPTER VI Ver. 1. Shall we continue.
… 11. yourselves to be dead. through Jesus Christ, our Lord.
… 12. that ye should obey it in the lusts thereof. 16. whether of sin unto death, or of obedience unto righteousness. Shall we continue.
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CHAPTER VII Ver. 6. the law by which … being dead.
… 10. the commandment which.
… 14. carnal.
… 18. I find not. being dead to the law by which, the commandment which.
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I find not.
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CHAPTER VIII Ver. 1. to them which are in Jesus Christ, who walk not after the flesh but after the Spirit.
… 11. by his Spirit that dwelleth in you.
… 26. our infirmities. what we should pray for. maketh intercession for us with groanings.
… 36. For thy sake. To them which are in Christ Jesus.
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… 38. nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come.
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CHAPTER IX Ver. 11. neither good nor evil that the purpose, according to the election of God.
… 15. He saith to Moses.
… 32. as it were by the works of the law. for they stumbled.
… 33. whosoever believeth on him. neither good nor evil that the purpose of God according to the election. (
CHAPTER X Ver. 1. prayer to God for Israel. that they might be saved.
… 5. Moses.
… 15. bring glad tidings.
… 19. Did not Israel know? Moses. prayer to God for them. that they might be saved. (
(
(
Moses.
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CHAPTER XI Ver. 2. against Israel, saying: Lord…
… 3. and they have digged down the altars.
… 6. And if by grace, then it is no more of works; otherwise grace is no more grace. But if it be of works, then it is no more grace; otherwise work is no more work.
… 7. he hath not obtained … 19. The branches were broken off.
… 21. spare not thee.
… 23. And they also.
… 30. and as ye have been yourselves in times past. against Israel : Lord… they have digged down the altars And if by grace, then it is no more of works; otherwise grace is no more grace. he hath not obtained. (
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Ver. 2. And be not conformed, … but be ye transformed. by the renewing of your mind.
… 11. serving the Lord.
… 20. Therefore if thine enemy hunger. And that ye be not conformed, … but that ye be transformed. by the renewing of the mind. serving the occasion.
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CHAPTER XIII Ver. 1. but of God; and the powers that be. are ordained of God.
… 8. but that ye love one another.
… 9. thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not bear false witness, thou shalt not covet. but from God, and those that be. are ordained of God.
(
Thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not covet.
CHAPTER XIV Ver. 9. Christ both died, and rose, and revived that.
… 14. Nothing is unclean of itself.
Christ both died and lived that.
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CHAPTER XV Ver. 1. We then that are strong ought to.
… 2. Let every one of us please.
… 4. For whatsoever things were written aforetime … were written.
… 8. Now I say.
… 19. by the power of the Spirit of God.
… 24. I will come to you whensoever I take my journey into Spain, and I hope that I shall see you.
… 29. in the fulness of the blessing of the gospel of Christ.
(
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Ver. 2. for she hath been a succourer.
… 3. Priscilla.
… 5. Who is the first fruits of Achaia.
… 6. Who bestowed much labour on us.
… 18. serve not our Lord Jesus Christ.
… 20. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you ! Amen.
… 25. Now to him that is of power…
(
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After the copying and recopying of the sacred text, whether in Europe, in Asia, or in Africa, whether in monasteries, or in colleges, or in palaces, or in the houses of the clergy (and this, too, almost without interruption, during the long course of fifteen hundred years); — after that during the three last centuries, and, above all, in the hundred and thirty years that have just elapsed, so many noble characters, so many ingenious minds, so many learned lives have been consumed in labours hitherto unheard of for their extent, admirable for their sagacity, and scrupulous as those of the Massorethes; — after having scrutinized all the Greek manuscripts of the New Testament that are buried in the private, or monastic, or national libraries, of the East and of the West; — after these have been compared, not only with all the old translations, Latin, Armenian, Sahidic, Ethiopic, Arabic, Sclavonian, Persian, Coptic, Syrian, and Gothic, of the Scriptures, but further, with all the ancient fathers of the Church, who have quoted them in their innumerable writings, in Greek and in Latin;
— after so many researches, take this single example, as a specimen of what people have been able to find!
Judge of the matter by this one epistle which you have before you. It is the longest and most important of the epistles of the New Testament, “the golden key of the Scriptures” (as it has been called), “the ocean of Christian doctrine.” It contains four hundred and thirty-three verses, and in these four hundred and thirty-three verses, ninety-six Greek words that are met with nowhere else in the New Testament. And how many (admitting even all the corrections that have been adopted, or only preferred by Griesbach), how many have you found, in these, of readings that go to further, wrhat are these? We shall repeat them; they are as follows: — The first (Rom 7:6) instead of “That in which … being dead,” Griesbach reads, “Being dead to that in which.” And note well that here in the Greek, the difference depends only on the change of a single letter (an o instead of an e); and besides that, the greater number of manuscripts were so much in favour of the old text that, since Griesbach’s time, Mr Tittman, in his edition of 1824, has rejected this correction, and Mr Lachman has done so also, in his edition of 1831 (Scholz, however, has retained it). The second is as follows, Rom 11:6 : —
Instead of, “And if by, grace, then is it no more of works; otherwise grace is no more grace; but if it be of works, then is it no more grace: otherwise work is no more work ,” Griesbach takes away the latter half of this phrase. The third is as follows, Rom 12:11 : —
Instead of, “Serving the Lord,” Griesbach reads, “Serving the occasion.” Note that the correction depends only on the change of two letters in one of the Greek words, and that, moreover, it does not appear to be justified by the number of the manuscripts. Further here, Whitby told Mill that more than thirty manuscripts, that all the ancient translations, that Clement of Alexandria, St Basil, St Jerome, all the scholiasts of the Greeks, and all those of the Latins with the exception of Ambrose, followed the old text; and the two learned men whom we have just named (Lachman and Tittman), the one labouring at Berlin, the other a professor at Leipsic, have restored the old text, in their respective editions of the New Testament. This has been done also by Scholz, in his edition of 1836, which the learned world seems to prefer to all that have preceded it. The fourth is as follows, Rom 6:16 : —
Instead of, “Whether of sin unto death or of righteousness,” Griesbach reads, “Whether of sin or of righteousness;” but he himself puts at the place the simple sign of a feeble probability; and Tittman and Lachman, in their respective editions, have further rejected this correction. Scholz, following their example, has equally rejected it. The fifth is as follows, Rom 16:5 — Instead of, “The first fruits of Achaia,” Griesbach reads, “The first fruits of Asia.” Here we have taken no notice of the words that are taken away from the first paragraph of chapter 8, because we find them again at the 4th verse.
We see, then, the amount of the whole: such is the admirable integrity of the Epistle to the Romans. According to Griesbach five insignificant corrections, in the whole epistle — according to more modern critics ONLY TWO, and these the most insignificant of the five; — and according to Scholz THREE!
We repeat, that we have chosen the Epistle to the Romans, as a specimen, only because of its length and its importance. We have not given ourselves the time to examine whether it presents more or fewer various readings than any other part of the New Testament. We have run over, for example, in Griesbach, while reviewing these last pages, the EPISTLE TO THE GALATIANS, written at the same time and on the same subject with the Epistle to the Romans; and there we have been unable to find more than the three following corrections that can affect the sense, or, to speak more correctly, the form of the sense —
Gal 4:17. “They would exclude us” — say, “They would exclude you.”
Gal 4:26. “She is the mother of us all” — say, “She is the mother of us.”
Gal 5:19. “Adultery, fornication, uncleanness” — say, “Fornication, uncleanness.”
These simple schedules, in our opinion, will speak more loudly to our readers than all our general assertions could do. Of this we ourselves have felt the happy experience. We had read, no doubt, what others before us have been able to say on the insignificance of the different readings presented by the manuscripts; and we had often studied the various readings of Mill and the severe reproaches of his adversary Whitby; [127] we had examined the writings of Wetstein, of Griesbach, of Lachman, and of Tittman; but when, on two occasions, while taking part in the work of a new translation of the New Testament, we have been called upon to correct the French text according to the most esteemed various readings, first to introduce these into it, and afterwards to remove them out of it again, and to replace there in French the sense conveyed by the old reading; then we have had on two occasions, as it were, an intuition of that astonishing preservation of the Scriptures, and we have felt ourselves penetrated with gratitude towards that wonderful providence which has not ceased to watch over the oracles of God, in order to preserve their integrity to this point.
Let its true value be then assigned to the objection that has been made to us.
Let it be shown us, for example, how three or four various readings that we have passed under review in the Epistle to the Romans, and which, in the opinion of the most modern critics, are reduced to two or to three, could render the fact of its original inspiration illusory for us.
:No doubt, in these three or four passages, as well as in those of the other sacred books where the true word of the text might be contested, no doubt there, and there alone, of the two different readings of the manuscripts, one is the inspired word, and not the other; no doubt people must in this small number of cases divide or suspend their confidence between two expressions; but such is the extent that uncertainty reaches; such the point beyond which it must not go.
It is reckoned, that of the seven thousand nine hundred and fifty-nine verses of the New Testament, there hardly exist ten or twelve in which the corrections that have been introduced by the new readings of Griesbach and Scholz, as the result of their immense researches, have any weight at all. Further, in most instances they consist but in the difference of a single word, and sometimes even of a single letter.
We should be doing well, perhaps, to point these out here also, as an addition to those to which we have directed the reader’s attention in the Epistle to the Romans. The twelve or thirteen following have usually been regarded as the most important among the various readings collected by Griesbach, and more recently by Scholz. The four first even have appeared the most serious, only because they strike at the divinity of Jesus Christ.
[1]st, (Acts 20:28.) — Instead of — “Feed the Church of God, which he hath bought with his own blood,” The text of Griesbach bears — “Feed the Church of the Lord, which he hath bought with his own blood.”
Here the difference of the reading preferred by Griesbach consists in A SINGLE LETTER (
[2]d, (1Ti 3:16.) — Instead of — “And without controversy great is the mystery of godliness, God was manifested in the flesh, justified in the Spirit,” …
Some manuscripts bear — “Without controversy, great is the mystery of godliness, which was manifest in the flesh, justified in the Spirit.” But some other manuscripts adopted by Griesbach bear — “Great is the mystery of godliness, he who was manifest in the flesh was justified in the Spirit.” …
Here the difference is still no more than that of a single letter, or even only that of two strokes of a letter (some manuscripts instead of
Here the difference is only in these two letters (
We approve of the adversaries of the divinity of Jesus Christ attaching importance to these three first corrections, in respect of criticism (for every thing is of importance in the Scripture), but in respect of doctrine, we cannot Comprehend how they should do so; inasmuch as, by their own admission, there are many other passages without various readings, in which our Lord is called by the name of God, of true God, of the great God. No manuscript, for example, presents variations on the first verse of the Gospel of St John: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” [128] So, too, no Greek manuscript whatsoever presents a variation in the reading of that verse of the Epistle to Titus (Tit 2:13) — “Looking for the glorious appearance of our great God and Saviour Jesus Christ.” [129]
[4]th, (1Jn 5:7-8.) — Instead of — “There are three that bear witness [in heaven: the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are ONE (‘
Griesbach’s text bears — “There are three that bear witness on the earth: the Spirit, the water, and the blood, and the three agree in that ONE” (
Here, without doubt, there is the most serious variation, and, at the same time, that which is the most justified by the testimony of the manuscripts that have been preserved down to the present day (more than a hundred and forty against three), as well as by the universal silence of the Greek fathers. We should be travelling out of our subject were we to undertake to discuss here the historical testimonies [130] and the grammatical considerations that plead, on the contrary, for retaining the old reading. We shall confine ourselves to these two remarks by Bishop Middleton: —
[1]. Why is the word three, the three, in the masculine in the Greek (
[2]. Wherefore, above all, this word, that one (
Scholz has, like Griesbach, taken away the three heavenly witnesses.
[5]th, (Rev 8:13) — Instead of, “And I beheld and heard an angel flying,” Griesbach’s text and that of Scholz bear, “And I beheld and heard an eagle flying.”
[6]th, (Jas 2:18) — Instead of, “Show me thy faith by works,” Griesbach’s text and that of Scholz bear, “Show me thy faith without works.”
[7]th, (Acts 16:7) — Instead of, “But the Spirit suffered them not,” Griesbach’s text and that of Scholz bear, “But the Spirit of Jesus suffered them not.”
[8]th, (Eph 5:21) — Instead of, “Submitting yourselves one to another in the fear of God,” Griesbach’s text and that of Scholz bear, “Submitting yourselves one to another in the fear of Christ.”
[9]th, (Rev 1:11) — Instead of, “I am Alpha and Omega, the first and the last,” the text of Griesbach suppresses these words, which it has retained, however, at the 8th verse, as well as at Rev 22:13. Scholz has made the same correction.
[10]th, (Mat 19:17) — Instead of, “Why callest thou me good?” Griesbach’s text bears, “Why do you ask me about the good (or about happiness)?” But Scholz does not admit this correction, and retains the old text.
[11]th, (Php 4:13) — Instead of, “I can do all things through Christ strengthening me,” Griesbach’s text and that of Scholz bear, “I can do all things through him who strengtheneth me.’”
[12]th, Finally, (Acts 8:37; Acts 9:5-6; Acts 10:6). Griesbach’s text and that of Scholz suppress the 37th verse and these words, “It is hard for thee to kick against the pricks; and he, trembling and astonished, said, Lord, what wilt thou have me to do?” and, “He shall tell thee what thou oughtest to do.” No doubt, in these passages (I repeat), among the different readings which the manuscripts present, it will not be possible to know infallibly which is the one that ought to be regarded as the primitive text, or the very word given by God; but, as to the meaning of the sentence, our uncertainties will always be circumscribed within a very narrow and very clearly defined field. It is true, that choose I must between one word and another word — between one letter and another letter; but there all my doubts are limited, there they stop: they are not allowed to go any farther. Not only, in fact, have I the assurance that the rest of the text is entirely from God; but I further know, that of the two different readings which the manuscripts present to me, one is certainly the inspired word. Thus you see how it stands: here my uncertainties can bear only on the alternative of two readings, almost always very much alike; while, on the contrary, under the system of partial inspiration, the field of our doubts and of our perplexities will have no bounds. If the language of the sacred books has been so far left to the ever fallible choice of human wisdom — and if divine wisdom, which alone is infallible, have not controlled and guaranteed it — I am exposed incessantly to the temptation of abstracting something from it, modifying something in it, or adding something to it.
Thus, then, have all the efforts of the adversaries of inspiration to shake our faith by attacks on this side, only served, as a last result, to confirm it. They have obliged the Church to follow them in their investigations, and soon thereafter to precede them in these; and what has she found in this pursuit? Why this: that the text is still purer than the most godly men had ventured to hope; that the adversaries of inspiration, and those of the orthodox dogmas, at least in Germany, have been compelled to admit it. After the labours of Erasmus, of Stephanus, and of Mill, they hoped to find, among all the manuscripts of our libraries, readings more favourable to the Socinian doctrines than those adopted by the Bezas and the Elzevirs. Many even thought that the uncertainties would become such, and the differences so serious, that all the positive evangelical doctrines — exclusive, as they call them — would be shaken. But it has not been so. The process has now been brought to a close — the complainants have lost their cause; the trial having been conducted at their demand by modern criticism, all the judges, on the benches of the Rationalists, [131] have with one voice pronounced it a lost case, and that the objectors must go elsewhere to look out for arguments and complaints. When this question, respecting the integrity of the original text, presented itself for the first time to the excellent and learned Bengel, more than a hundred and twenty years ago, he was dismayed at the thought of it; it gave his upright and godly soul profound distress. Then did there commence on his part those labours of sacred criticism, which gave a new direction to that science among the Germans. The English had preceded the Germans in it; but the latter soon got before them. At last, after long researches, Bengel, in 1721, happy and reassured, wrote to his disciple Reus: “Eat simply the bread of the Scriptures as it presents itself to thee; and do not distress thyself at finding here and there a small particle of sand which the millstone may have left in it. Thou mayst, then, dismiss all those doubts which at one time so horribly tormented myself. If the Holy Scriptures — which have been so often copied, and which have passed so often through the faulty hands of ever fallible men — were absolutely without variations, the miracle would be so great, that faith in them would no longer be faith. I am astonished, on the contrary, that the result of all those transcriptions has not been a much greater number of different readings.” The comedies of Terence alone have presented thirty thousand; and yet these are only six in number, [132] and they have been copied a thousand times less often than the New Testament.
How shall we not recognize the mighty intervention of God in this unanimous accord of all the religious societies of the East and of the West! everywhere the same Scriptures! What distances separate Christians from Jews in their worship! And yet, walk into our schools of learning, examine our Hebrew Testaments; then go into their synagogues, ask their rabbis to show you their sacred rolls — you will there find the same books, without the difference of a letter! What distances separate, in their worship, the Reformed Christians from the members of the Roman sect! And yet, pursue your search, you will find in our respective schools the same Greek Testament, without the difference of an iota! We take theirs as they take ours — Erasmus or Beza, Ximenes or Mill, Scholz or Griesbach! What distances, further, separate the Latin Church from the Greek Church — which also calls itself catholic, but orthodox, apostolic daughter of Antioch, and condemning the Romans as rebellious and schismatical sons! And yet, ask both for their sacred texts, no more will you find here any difference; here the various readings will not at all make two schools that distinguish them; here the same manuscripts will be consulted — the priests and. the pope, Munich and Moscow, will make you hear one and the same testimony. The necessary result, then, has been, that we all — Greeks, Latins, and Protestants — should have among us the same sacred book of the New Testament, without the difference of a single iota!
We have said enough on this great fact. We have felt it right merely to glance at it for the purpose of repelling an objection, since it took us away from our subject. What we had undertaken was to prove a doctrine — to wit, the primary inspiration of Holy Scripture; and some have thought they could oppose us by urging, that, even were this doctrine true, it would be deprived of all effect by the alterations which Holy Scripture must have undergone. We behoved to show that these alterations are a vain and harmless phantom. While engaged in establishing a doctrine, we have already said, we have been led to write a history. We would now, then, return to the doctrine. Nevertheless, before returning to it, we must once more conclude, that not only was the Scripture inspired on the day when God caused it to be written, but that we possess this word inspired eighteen hundred years ago; and that we may still, while holding our sacred text in one hand, and in the other all the readings collected by the learned in seven hundred manuscripts, [133] exclaim, with thankfulness, I hold in my hands my Father’s testament, the eternal word of my God!
Section 4. Errors of Reasoning or Doctrine.
We abandon the various readings, other opponents will say; and we own that one may regard the sacred text as the original language of the prophets and the apostles. But this very text, intact as it is, we cannot study without being compelled to recognise in it the part that has been taken in it by human weakness. We find there reasonings ill conducted or ill wound up, quotations ill applied, popular superstitions, prejudices, and other infirmities — all this being the unavoidable tax which the simplicity of the men of God had to pay to the ignorance, on various points, of their times and of their condition. “St Paul,” St Jerome himself has said, [134] “does not know how to develop a hyperbaton, or how to conclude a sentence; and as he had to do with rude, uncultivated persons, he has availed himself of conceptions which (if he had not taken care to let us know beforehand that he spoke after the manner of men) might have given umbrage to persons of good sense.” Such, then, being the marks of human infirmity which we can trace in the Scriptures, it remains an impossibility to recognise in such a book an inspiration that has descended even to the smallest details of their language. To these charges brought against the Scriptures our reply is fourfold.
[1]. First of all, we protest, with the utmost force of our convictions, against such reproaches. We maintain, that a more attentive and a more serious study of the Word of God would reduce them to nothing; and we protest, that they have no foundation but in the errors and the precipitation of those who advance them. This we could demonstrate, by repelling, one by one, all these charges, in each of the cases in which they have been sought to be renewed. It would prove a task more long than difficult, and we cannot find room for it here, for its details would be endless. There is not, in fact, a line of argument — there is not a quotation — there is not a doctrine — which the adversaries of the inspiration of the Scriptures have not at various times made a subject for reproaches; and it is well enough known that the greater part of objections that can be stated clearly in three words, require three pages for a clear refutation. It is necessary, therefore, that in proportion as the men of the world recommence their attacks, the Church should renew her replies; and that, like those respectful and indefatigable servants who, among the Eastern nations, watch day and night near the face of their king, she stand constantly by the side of the Word of her God, to repel those swarms of objections, which are no sooner seen to be driven off than they re-appear by another way, and incessantly return to plant some sting in it anew. Before inquiry — and this the experience of all ages, and in particular that of these last times, has sufficiently shown — before inquiry, those difficulties which some would object to the Scriptures are smoothed away; those obscurities burst into light; and erelong unexpected harmonies, beauties which no human eye had till then suspected, reveal themselves in the Word of God, by means of those very objections. Though today objects of doubt, to-morrow, when better studied, they would become to you motives to faith: to-day, subjects that distract and perplex you; to-morrow they would become proofs to convince and assure you.
[2]. Meanwhile we have no wish to evade any one of these charges brought against the Scriptures by the adversaries of the full inspiration of that sacred book, for it is an advantage which they give us. — Yes, and we are not afraid to say it: on hearing such objections, we feel ourselves at one and the same time under the too opposite impressions of satisfaction and of sadness; of sadness at seeing persons who acknowledge the Bible to be a revelation from God, not afraid, notwithstanding, to bring so hastily the most serious accusations against it; and of satisfaction, from considering with what force such language confirms the doctrine which we defend. In the mouth of a deist, they would be objections, and we behoved to reply; but in that of the Christians who advance them, they involve a flagrant abandonment of their own proper principle, and an admission of all the evil to be found in that abandonment.
Let us not be misunderstood: it is not at the bar of professed infidels that we here maintain the plenary inspiration of the Scriptures; it is before men who say that they hold the Bible to be a revelation from God. Inspiration, we have told them, is a doctrine written down in that sacred book: according to its own testimony, all Scripture is given by inspiration of God; it is perfect, it is pure, it is silver seven times refined. What has been their reply? — They do not reject, they say, such an inspiration except with regard to the language, the forms of discourse and unimportant details; they believe, moreover, that a continual providence directed the minds “of the sacred writers, to preserve them from all serious error. But how do they prove this position? Is it to the language only, is it to the forms of discourse, is it to insignificant details, that they object? — Alas! let us hear their own words: In the doctrines there are superstitions; in the quotations there are things misapprehended; in the reasonings there are weak points! — You see, then, it is thus that, in order to attack the plenary inspiration of the Scriptures, they descend into the ranks of the unbelievers who cast stones at the Word of God; and if they will not venture, like them, to take away God from the Holy Bible, they would fain at least rectify God’s errors in the Holy Bible. Which of these two attempts would be the most outrageous, it were hard to say. We conclude, therefore, that since it is impossible to combat plenary inspiration without charging the Word of God with error, we must necessarily cleave ever more and more to this sentence of Scripture, that “all Scripture is given by inspiration of God.”
[3]. But we have to call attention to a still more serious view of the matter. We ask, Where do they mean to stop in the course they have begun? And by what reasons would they stop those, in their turn, who would fain advance farther than they are willing to go? They make bold to correct one saying of God’s Word; what right, then, have they to censure those who would rectify all the rest? Creatures of a day, during which they fleet through this world, with the everlasting book of God in their hands, they are foolhardy enough to say to him: This, Lord, is worthy of thee, this is not worthy of thee! They make bold of themselves to sift God’s oracles, to assign a share in them to the folly of man, to separate in them from the thought of the divine mind, proofs of ignorance shown by Isaiah and Moses, the prejudices of St Peter and St Jude, the paralogisms of St Paul, the superstitions of St John! Lamentable temerity! We repeat it: Where will they stop in this fatal task? for they proceed to take their seats at the same table where the Socinuses, the Grimaldis, and the Priestleys occupy one side, and the Rousseaus, the Volneys, and the Dupuis the other. Betwixt them and Eichhorn, betwixt them and William Cobbet, betwixt them and Strauss, where will you find the difference? It is in the species, not in the genus. It is in the quantity, and no longer in the quality, of imputations of error and tokens of irreverence. There is a difference in point of hardihood, none at all in point of profanation. Both pretend to have found errors in the Word of God; both take it upon them to rectify it. But will they tell us, is it less absurd on the part of a creature to set about correcting in the works of God the creation of the hyssop that springs from the wall, than that of the cedar that grows on Lebanon; to pretend to rectify the organism of a glow-worm than to send a supply of light to the sun? What right have ministers, who say they see only the language of Jewish prejudices in what the Evangelists relate about the demoniacs and the miracles of Jesus Christ in casting out unclean spirits, — what right have they to think it strange that such or such another person should see in the miracles of the conversion of St Paul, of the resurrection, of the multiplication of the loaves, or of the day of Pentecost, no more than an useful and sage complaisance for the ignorant minds of a people that were fond of the marvellous? What right would a professor, who should deny the inspiration of the reasonings of St Paul, have to blame M. de Wette for rejecting that of the prophecies of the Old Testament, [135] or M. Wirgmann for proceeding to his Divarication of the New Testament , [136] or M. Strauss, for changing into myths the miracles, and even the person of Jesus Christ? Three or four years ago, a young Bernese minister gave us a reading of a manual of theology, which, he said, had been put into his hands in one of the academies of Eastern Switzerland. We have forgotten the name of the author, together with that of his residence: but having at the time taken a note of his principal, arguments against the plenary inspiration of the Scriptures, we can reproduce here the quotations by which he sought to prove that the sacred books, as they contained evident errors, could not be altogether the Word of God. The reader will understand that we cannot stop here to reply to him. All we wish to do is merely to give one an idea of the measure of these temerities.
“St Paul speaks of ‘having delivered an incestuous person over to Satan.’ — (1Co 5:5.) Could this passage (fanatical no doubt) have been inspired?”
“He tells them that ‘we shall judge the angels.’ — (1Co 6:3). A gnostic reverie, no doubt. Could such a passage be inspired?”
“He even goes so far as to tell them that, ‘in consequence of their unworthy communions, many among them are sick, and some are dead.’ — (1Co 11:30.) This passage cannot be inspired!”
“He tells them, further, ‘that in Adam all die.’ — (1Co 15:22.) Juridical superstition! It is impossible that such a passage can be inspired!”
“And when St Paul assures the Thessalonians (1Th 4:15), which St James repeats (Jas 5:8), ‘that the coming of the Lord draweth nigh,’ could so manifest an error be inspired?” [137]
It is thus, then, that men dare to sit in judgment on the eternal Word! We still remain unaware, we have said, if these doctrines, professed in Switzerland ten or twelve years ago, were so professed at Zurich more than elsewhere. But if they were actually in vogue there, then one must excuse, alas! the magistrates of that city, if we would not deal unfairly by them. It was not they who called Strauss into their country, in order to subvert the faith of a whole people there; for Strauss was already in their professors’ chairs, if such teachers delivered their opinions from them. They had seen them with ample scissors in hand, cutting out from the Scriptures the errors of the apostles. What difference could they perceive betwixt such men and the man they called? A little more learning, boldness, consistency, in following out his principles; and in his more practised hand, a longer and sharper instrument; but hardly more heartfelt contempt for the Scriptures of God! Among the judges of the Sanhedrim who smote Jesus on the face we should make little difference as to the number of blows they severally dealt; and when sixty conspirators in the palace of Pompey threw down Cæsar from his throne of gold in the midst of the senate, Cased, who first grazed him with his sword, was no less his murderer than Cassius, who clove his head, or than the sixty conspirators, who on all sides drew their swords on him, and pierced him with twenty-three wounds. Is the doctor, then, who denies the inspiration of an argument or of a doctrine of the Scriptures, less in revolt against the God of the Scriptures than the man who rejects the inspiration of a whole book? We think not.
We conclude, that since the man who denies the plenary inspiration of the Scriptures necessarily enters on the career of daring temerities, and gives the signal, by the first thrust of his sword, for all the revolts that may follow against the Word of God, we must, once more, look more narrowly to that saying of the Holy Ghost: “All Scripture is given by inspiration of God.” But we have one last reflection farther to make.
[4]. You do not, it seems, comprehend the divinity, the propriety, the wisdom, the utility of such or such a passage of the Scriptures; and, on that account, you deny their inspiration! — Is this an argument that can have any real value, we do not say in our eyes, but in yours? Who are you? “Keep thy foot when thou goest into the house of God,” feeble child of man, “and be more ready to hear, than to give the sacrifice of fools: for they consider not the evil that they do. Be not rash with thy mouth: God is in heaven, and thou upon earth.” (Ecc 5:1-2) Who art thou, then, who wouldst judge the oracles of God? Hath not the Scripture itself told us beforehand, that it would be to some a stumbling-block, and to others foolishness; (1Co 1:23) that the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God, and that he cannot even do so, and that they are spiritually discerned? (1Co 2:14) Ought you not, therefore, to expect to feet at first some repugnance in mind, in heart, in conscience, even to its first teachings? Man must first return to his place as a weak, ignorant, and demoralized creature! He cannot comprehend God until he has humbled himself. Let him go and cast himself upon his knees in his closet; let him pray, and he will comprehend what it means! An argument is ill grounded, because you do not seize its scope! a doctrine is a prejudice, because you do not admit it! a quotation is not to the point, because its true meaning has escaped you! What would remain in the world, were God to leave nothing there but what you could explain? The Emperors of Rome, incapable of understanding either the lives or the faith of our martyrs, threw them to the wild beasts in the amphitheatre, and had their bodies dragged to the Tiber. It is thus that people strike their own defective knowledge, like an impure hook, into the Word of God, and drag to the public dunghill whatever they have been unable to understand, and have condemned! While tracing these lines, we are reminded of a teacher of divinity, in other respects an honourable man, but imbued with the wisdom of his own age, who set himself to prove that the reasonings of St Paul are not inspired. Now, how went he about to demonstrate this? Why, he quoted as a convincing example a passage (Gal 3:16) in which St Paul proposes, not to prove (mark this well — the whole solution lies here), not to prove, but to AFFIRM that the promise made by God to Abraham and his posterity, regarded not all his posterities (since it was evident enough that his posterities by Agar, by Keturah, by Esau, were rejected), but one special, elected and personal posterity. And what think you the professor did to establish his thesis on this passage? Why, he palmed on the apostle an argument so puerile, that the merest child among the Galatians might have reproved him for it! St Paul, according to him, instead of doing no more than affirm a fact, meant to argue from the singular of a collective noun that such a word could designate no more than a single person! Absurd as it is for us, said he, this argument might be good for the Jews, or for the gross-minded Gauls of Asia Minor. We give this example; a hundred more of the same value might easily be produced. May the author venture here to refer to his own experience? He recollects, with no less humiliation than gratitude, his earliest and his latest impressions oil the Epistles of St Paul. He was enabled, from his earliest years, to come to the conviction that the Bible is from God; but he did not yet understand the doctrines which it teaches. He wished to respect the apostle’s pages, because he saw, through other marks, that the not-to-be-counterfeited seals of the most high God are suspended there; but in reading them he was agitated with a secret uneasiness, which drove him to other books. St Paul appeared to him to reason wrong — not to go straight to his point; to discourse in a round-about and embarrassed manner; to wind about his subject in long spiral turnings, and to say the things that were attributed to him quite differently from what one himself would have wished to have done. In a word, he felt, in reading them, somewhat of the painful discomfort of a tenderly affectionate son as he waits on a declining parent whose memory is beginning to fail, and who stammers in his attempts to speak. O how anxiously would he conceal from others, and dissemble to himself, that his venerated father totters, and seems no longer to be himself! But no sooner had Divine grace revealed to us that doctrine of the righteousness of faith, which is the burning and shining flame of the Scriptures, than every word became light, harmony, and life; the apostle’s reasonings seemed limpid as the water that flows from the rock; his thoughts profound and practical; all his epistles a power of God unto salvation for those who believe. We saw abundant proofs of divinity shine forth from those very parts of the Scriptures which had long given us such uneasiness; and we could say, with the joy of one who has made a discovery, and with the gratitude of a tender adoration, as we felt inimitable, and until then silent, chords vibrate within us, in unison with the Word of God, “Yes, my God, all the Scriptures are divinely inspired!” … But people insist.
Section 5. Errors in Narratives.
All these just repugnances felt to the reasonings or the doctrines of the sacred writers, will be abandoned, we are told, if it must be so, by admitting, that, on these matters, what is a difficulty for some may be none at all for others. But, if an appeal be now made to facts — if it be shown that there are manifest contradictions in the narratives of the Bible, in its dates, in its allusions to contemporary history, in its scriptural quotations — we might farther, perhaps, reproach those who object on the ground of having seen these, with not being consistent with themselves, and with going farther in this respect than their own thesis will admit. This, however, matters not; these, if facts at all, are facts which cannot be thrown out on any such preliminary plea, and which no reasoning can destroy. Reasoning no more destroys facts than it creates them. If, then, it is added, these contradictions exist, they may, indeed, convict their thesis of not going far enough; but they are three times more relevant against ours, in charging it with error.
First of all, we acknowledge that, were it true that there were, as they tell us, erroneous facts and contradictory narratives in the Holy Scriptures, one must renounce any attempt to maintain their plenary inspiration. But we are not reduced to this: these alleged errors do not exist.
We admit, no doubt, that, among the numerous attacks made on the smallest details of the narratives of our sacred books, there are some which, at first sight, may give some embarrassment; but no sooner do we look at them more closely than these difficulties are cleared up and vanish. We proceed to give some examples of this, and will be careful to select them from among those which the adversaries of a plenary inspiration have seemed to regard as the most insurmountable.
These we shall preface with some observations.
[1]. The Scriptures have in all ages had their adversaries and their defenders — their Celsuses as well as their Origens — their porphyries as well as their Eusebiuses — their Castellios and their Calvins, their Strausses and their Hengstenbergs. It is now sixteen hundred years since Malchus:Porphyry, that learned and spiteful Syrian, who lived in Sicily under the reign of Diocletian, and whom Jerome calls rabidum adversus Christum canem, [138] wrote fifteen books against Christianity. In these fifteen books — the fourth of which was directed against the Pentateuch, the twelfth and the thirteenth against Daniel — there was one (the first) entirely devoted to the bringing together of all the contradictions which, he maintained, he had found in the Scriptures. [139] From Celsus and Porphyry down to the English unbelievers of the 18th century, and from these down to Strauss, who has had hardly more to do than copy them, [140] unceasing endeavours have been made to discover more, by comparing Scripture with Scripture, line with line, word with word, detail with detail. It was easy, therefore, to multiply them, and even to find some that were specious, in a book eminently anecdotic — where narratives of the same events are often repeated under different forms, by different historians, in different circumstances, with manifold objects, and with more or less extensive developments. After this, the reader must see that this fifth objection, which is composed altogether of detached observations, and resolves itself into an infinity of minute details, can only be refuted in detail, and by detached answers. The matter, accordingly, is inexhaustible. Every passage has its objection, and every objection its reply. Our sole general response, then, can only be this — Examine, and the obscurity will vanish.
It is acknowledged, besides, by all parties, that the alleged contradictions, adduced by the adversaries of inspiration have not in themselves any religious importance, and bear only on dates, numbers, and other very minute circumstances. But though incapable of directly affecting Christian doctrine, they would tend, nevertheless, not less directly to subvert the plenary inspiration of the Scriptures. It is necessary, therefore, that they should be met. This is what the friends of religion have done in all ages; and this is what Mr Hengstenberg, at Berlin, has lately accomplished with such honourable success; it is this, too, which has been done, in these last times, by Messrs Barrett, Hales, Gerard, Dick, Home, and others, in England.
[2]. It is very easy to say, in a general manner, and in a peremptory tone, that there are contradictions in the Bible; and it has often happened that unreflecting though, pious Christians have not taken the pains to look narrowly into the matter, and have suffered themselves to be led away into loose maxims on inspiration, before having sufficiently studied, on one hand, the general testimonies of the Scriptures on that doctrine, and, on the other, the nature of the objections that have been opposed to them. Then it is that they have been seen to seek in their own minds, rather than in the Bible, for a mitigated system of inspiration, such as can be reconciled with the alleged existence of some errors in the Word of God. Here, in the sixteenth century, lay the doctrine of Socinus, [141] of Castellio, [142] and some others; but it was then loudly rejected by all pious men. “Hoc non est causam tueri adversus atheos,” said Francis Turretine, [143] “sed illam turpiter prodere.” “Non est eo concedendum, ad ea concilianda, ut dicamus codicem sacrum mendosum,” [144] said the learned and pious Peter Martyr, “the wonder of Italy,’” as Calvin called him. In our days, the estimable Mr Pye Smith, [145] in England, and the worthy bishop of Calcutta, [146] have allowed themselves to run into statements of opinion which we deplore, and which they would probably correct had they to make them again. And at Berlin, the learned rector of the university, M. Twesten, whom, for his labours and reputation in other respects, we honour, has not been afraid to say, in his work on dogmatic theology, [147] that all is not equally inspired in the holy Bible; and that if we refuse to admit that there are errors in the details of the evangelical narratives, we throw ourselves into inextricable difficulties in our endeavours to explain them. And what examples does he give, in passing, in justification of such maxims? Why, he quotes two of the passages which we are about to expound, (the first, that of the blind man of Jericho, the seventh, that of the census taken under Cyrenius). The reader may judge of the ease with which some can abandon the testimony which the Scriptures themselves render to their entire inspiration.
We proceed, then, to give some examples both of the contradictions which objectors have fancied they could oppose to us, and of the causes of the precipitation with which some allow themselves to call certain passages contradictory; which, however, only require a little reflection in order to their being reconciled.
We have said, and we repeat, that as it is out of our power to adduce more than a small number here, we have been at pains to select such as our adversaries have apparently regarded as the most embarrassing.
[In the interval between the first and second edition of this book, several pious persons have blamed us for having resolved difficulties which were not such to them, while we had neglected others which seemed to them of greater weight. Other readers will, no doubt, pass a directly contrary judgment on these relative values. Such appreciations are altogether subjective. None is judge of the importance that may be attached elsewhere to his objections on such matters; so that they present a boundless field. Still, however, we think it right to bring under consideration, in this volume, the new difficulties that have been pointed out to us.]
FIRST CAUSE OF PRECIPITATE JUDGMENT. — The complement of the circumstances of two facts which happened in the East, eighteen hundred years ago, remains unknown, because the sacred historians relate them to us with signal brevity. Some persons, nevertheless, should the narrative not explain to us in what manner some of their traits may be reconciled, are in haste to declare them contradictory. Nothing is more irrational. Suppose (to give an instance not from the Scriptures) that a Hindu pundit happened to read three succinct histories, all three veridical, of the illustrious Napoleon. The first will tell him that the capture of Paris, preceded by much bloodshed at the gates of that capital, compelled him to abdicate; and that an English frigate was commissioned to transport him to an island in the Mediterranean. A second will relate that this great captain, vanquished by the English, who made themselves masters of Paris without opposition, was transported by them to St Helena, whither General Bertrand desired to follow him, and where he breathed his last in the arms of that faithful servant. A third will relate that the fallen emperor was accompanied in his exile by Generals Gourgaud, Bertrand, and Montholon. All these narratives would be true; and yet, how many palpable contradictions in these few words! the learned man of Benares might say. St Helena in the Mediterranean! Who knows not that it rises like a rock in the great ocean? So much for a first contradiction: one of these books must be false; we must reject it. But again: Paris taken without a blow being struck! and Paris taken after a bloody battle at the gates! There is a second. Once more: here we find one general, there three generals! showing a third contradiction.
Now, compare these supposed precipitate judgments with many of the objections that have been started against the narratives of our Gospels!
First example. — Mark (Mark 16:5) relates to us, that the women “saw A YOUNG MAN (only one) sitting on the right side … who said to them, Be not affrighted.. Ye seek Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified: he is risen.” And Luke relates (Luk 24:4), that “TWO MEN stood by them who said to them, Why seek ye the living among the dead? He is not here, but is risen.”
These passages are objected to as irreconcilable with each other; but on what good grounds? No doubt there is a difference; but there is neither contradiction nor disagreement between the two narratives. If they are both true, wherefore would you insist on their being identical? It is enough that they be true, particularly in histories so admirably succinct. Does it not often happen with us, that, without ceasing to be exactly accordant with truth, we tell, twice in succession to different persons, the same adventure in two very different manners? Now, why should the apostles not do as much? Luke relates, that two personages presented themselves to the women; while Mark speaks only of that one of the two who at first had alone rolled away the stone, who sat on the right side of the sepulchre, and who addressed himself to them. It was thus that one of our (supposed) historians of the Life of Bonaparte spoke of three generals; while the other, without ceasing to be true, spoke only of Bertrand. It is thus that Moses, after having spoken of three men as appearing to Abraham at Mamre (Genesis 18), forthwith confines himself to speaking of one (ver. 2, 10, 17), as if he had been alone. It is thus that, twice in succession, and in a different manner, I may relate the same circumstance, without ceasing to be true: “I met three men, who told me the right way. I met a man, who put me on the proper road.” Thus, though there be in the passages adduced a marked difference, still there is not even the semblance of a contradiction.
Second example. — Matthew (Mat 20:30) says that as Jesus “departed from Jericho, a great multitude followed him. And, behold, two blind men, sitting by the way-side, when they heard that Jesus passed by, cried out, saying, have mercy on us!” And Mark (Mark 10:46) tells us that “as Jesus went outer Jericho with his disciples, and a great number of people, blind Bartimeus, the son of Timeus, sat by the highway-side begging. And when he heard that it was Jesus of Nazareth, he began to cry out, and say, Jesus, thou son of David, have mercy on me.”
Luke likewise (Luk 18:35) speaks of one blind man only.
What is there here, we again ask, contradictory or incorrect? Of those two blind men whom Jesus, amid so many other works, healed at Jericho, there was one more remarkable than the other, better known perhaps in the country, and who spoke for both. Mark speaks of him only; he even goes on to tell us his name: he does not assure us that he was alone. Matthew, accordingly, might speak of two. The narratives of the three evangelists are equally true, without being like each other throughout. What, then, is there extraordinary in this?
But, in this same narrative we are told there is a still greater difficulty; let us hear it. This forms a third example. — Matthew and Mark relate that the occurrence took place as Jesus departed from Jericho.
Whereas Luke tells us that it happened as Jesus drew near to Jericho. Here, once more, people have been found to exclaim, What a palpable contradiction!
We must reply, How would you prove this? what know you about it? The details of this fact being unknown to you, how could you possibly demonstrate that they are irreconcilable? While it is very easy, on the contrary, by the simplest supposition, to make them agree?
Luke, as he does so often in every part of his Gospel, has united in his narrative two successive circumstances of the same event. Mark well that he is the only one of the three historians who makes mention of the first question put by Bartimeus; “And hearing the multitude pass by, he asked what it meant .” This question the blind man put before the entrance of Jesus into Jericho. Being then made aware who this great prophet was, whom hitherto he had not known, he followed him, and during our Lord’s repast in the house of Zaccheus, took his place in the crowd that waited for his coming out. It was then that there was announced to him that “Jesus of Nazareth passed by” (these words are in St Luke). He followed him long thus; he was joined by the other blind man; and their cure was performed only when Jesus, on his way to Jerusalem, left Jericho, where he had stopped only for the purpose of being the guest of the happy Zaccheus. This very simple explanation instantly removes the alleged discrepancy of the three texts.
Fourth example. — Matthew (in his 27th chapter verse 5) says that Judas “hanged himself;” St Peter, in the Acts (Acts 1:18), says that “falling headlong, he burst asunder in the midst, and all his bowels gushed out.”
Here, again, we have been told, there is a contradiction.
We remember that once, at a public conference at Geneva, where we defended this same thesis, our much-valued friend, professor Monod, at that time pastor at Lyons, adduced the analogous traits of a lamentable death of which he had almost been witness. An unhappy inhabitant of that city, in order to make the surer of committing suicide, and to give himself a double death, having seated himself outside of a fourth- storey window, fired a pistol into his mouth. The same relater of that sad event, said he might have given three different accounts of it, and all three correct. In the first he might have reported the whole that had happened; in the second, he might have said the man shot himself; and, in the third, he threw himself from a window and was killed.
Such, also, was the self-inflicted punishment by which the unhappy Judas departed into his own place. He hanged himself, and fell headlong; he burst asunder, in the midst, and all his bowels gushed out. One single particular more on the frightful circumstances of one same death, would have showed us the connection. It has not been given to us; but who will venture, on that account, to maintain that here there is a contradiction?
Fifth example. — Here ought to be placed the greater number of those cases where different numerical calculations may seem to disagree, such as that of the talents of gold brought from Ophir to King Solomon (1Ki 9:28; 2Ch 8:18); that of the census taken of the Israelites in the days of David (2Sa 24:9; 1Ch 21:5); that of the children of the patriarch Jacob, transported into Egypt (Gen 46:27; Deu 10:22; Acts 7:14), &c.
One single additional circumstance in these rapid narratives would have instantly furnished the reconciliation required. King Solomon might, in the one ease, reckon his gross revenues; and, in the other, deduct thirty talents for the expenses of the fleet. David’s census might present two results, according, as the ordinary and already numbered militia of the kingdom was included or left out (288,000 men with their officers of all ranks.) — (2Ch 27:1; 2Sa 23:8.) Finally, you might have sixty-six, seventy, or seventy-five persons as the patriarch’s family, according as you reckon in it, or do not reckon, on the one hand, Jacob with Joseph and his two sons; on the other, Er, Onan, and Dinah; or again, the wives of the eleven patriarchs. We enter not into the combination of these details; we need only to point them out.
Sixth example. — St Matthew, in his 27th chapter (Mat 27:9-10), quotes as those of Jeremiah words not to be found in the book of that prophet. “Then,” says he, “was fulfilled that which was spoken by Jeremy the prophet, saying, And they took the thirty pieces of silver, the price of him that was valued, whom they of the children of Israel did value.”
Here, it has been said, what an evident error. — these words are met with only in the book of Zechariah (Zec 11:13).
We do not answer, with Augustine, that as several Greek manuscripts have only these words, “Then was fulfilled that which was spoken by the prophet ,” “one might say that the reference is to one of those who did not bear the name of Jeremiah.” [148]It is true, that even at this day, among the Greek manuscripts of our libraries, there are two which have not the name of that prophet; and that, among the most ancient versions, the Syrian and the Persian have it not. This solution, however, does not appear to us conformable to the ordinary rules of sacred criticism; and Augustine himself candidly admits that it does not satisfy him, seeing that, even in his time, the greater number of Latin copies, and of Greek copies, bore in this sentence the name of Jeremiah.
Some learned men, consequently, presume that this name may have easily slipt into the text by some mistake; and that the copyists, having noticed on the margin the letters
I prefer, therefore, Whitby’s explanation, which is as follows: — “We know,” says he, “from St Jerome, that there was still extant in his time, an apocryphal book of the prophet Jeremiah, in which was found every letter of the words quoted by St Matthew.” [149] We know also that the Second Book of Maccabees (2:1-9) relates many of the actions and words of Jeremiah, which are taken from another book than that of his canonical prophecies. Why, then, might not the words quoted by the evangelist have been pronounced really by Jeremiah, and have remained in the memory of the Church to the days of Zechariah, who might then have again given them a place theopneustically in holy Scripture, (as is the case with the unwritten words of Enoch, quoted in the Epistle of Jude (Jude 1:14-15), or the unwritten words of Jesus Christ, quoted by St Paul in the Book of the Acts?)
(Acts 20:35) What confirms this supposition is, that part only of the words quoted by St Matthew are found in Zechariah. Besides, it is known that this prophet was fond of recalling the words of Jeremiah. (See Zec 1:4, and Jer 18:11; Zec 3:8, and Jer 23:5) The Jews used to say that the spirit of Jeremiah was in Zechariah, and that the two prophets made only one. Mede thought it very probable that the 9th, 10th, and 11th chapters of Zechariah were written in the first instance by Jeremiah. Now, it is in the last of these chapters that we find the words quoted by St Matthew. That evangelist, therefore, could quote them as those of Jeremiah, in like manner as the apostle Jude has quoted as those of Enoch the words of his 14th and 15th verses.
Seventh example. — Many difficulties have been started of late, especially in Germany, on the fourfold narrative given us of our Lords resurrection. For the sake of briefness we shall treat of the whole four accounts at once, taking care to distinguish them, in both objection and reply, by corresponding letters.
A. According to St Luke (it has been said), the women of Galilee, on their return from the sepulchre, had prepared their spices before the Sabbath (Luk 23:56); while according to St Mark (Mark 16:1-2), they bought them only on the Saturday evening, after the expiration of that sacred repose.
B. The reading of St Matthew gives us to understand that these women were Mary of Magdala and the other Mary; while there must have been, besides, Salome, according to Mark (Mark 16:1); and even, according to Luke (Luk 24:10), there must further have been Joanna, and others, with them.
C. According to Mark (Mark 16:2) they went to the sepulchre “at the rising of the sun:” according to John (John 20:1) “it was yet dark.”
D. If (according to St Matthew alone) the Jews had set men to guard the sepulchre, one can hardly comprehend how these women should risk visiting it, and think of opening it.
E. According to Matthew (Mat 28:5) and Mark (Mark 16:5), the women saw only one angel at the sepulchre; they saw two according to St Luke (24:4). F. According to Matthew (Mat 28:8) and Luke (Luk 24:9-10), the women, on departing from the sepulchre, “with fear and great joy,” ran to tell the disciples what they had seen; whereas, according to Mark (Mark 16:8), they fled; “they trembled and were amazed; neither said they anything to any man, for they were afraid.”
G. If, according to the first and the third Gospels, the women informed the disciples of what had passed (Mat 28:8; Luk 24:9), according to the fourth, Simon Peter and John alone were informed.
H. According to the three first Gospels, Mary of Magdala, on reaching the sepulchre, saw two angels, who informed her of the resurrection of Jesus; while according to St John (John 20:2), she had contented herself with saying to the disciples, “They have taken away the Lord out of the sepulchre!” and said nothing either about his resurrection or even about the angels. “We know not where they have laid him!” she adds.
I. According to Luke (Luk 24:12), it would appear that Peter, on being told, ran alone to the sepulchre; according to John, there was with Peter “that other disciple whom the Lord loved.” (John 20:2).
K. If you attend to the three first evangelists only, several women seem to have witnessed the appearance of the angels and the resurrection of Jesus; while from reading St John, you would believe that Mary of Magdala alone was honoured with these revelations.
L. According to Luke (Luk 24:2; Luk 24:9; Luk 24:24), and even according to John (John 20:2), Mary and the women, on returning from the sepulchre, merely told the disciples of the removal of the body of Jesus, and of their having seen the angels; they had not seen the Lord himself; while according to Matthew (Mat 28:9), Jesus had appeared to them “while they were yet in the way.”
Here, then, we are told there are eleven contradictions, which do not, it is true, affect the essence of the sacred narrative, and which ought not by any means to affect our faith, but which rise irresistibly to testify against the alleged fact of an entire divine inspiration.
[This objection, we will avow it, appeared to us too ill-founded, and to have been too often solved already, to find a place in the first edition of this work. Nevertheless it has been reproduced against us, and we have thought proper to make a reply.] The day of the resurrection of Jesus Christ, for the disciples, began with the first dawnings of morning (John 20:1), and was lengthened out to midnight (Luk 24:29; Luk 24:33; Luk 24:36). The sepulchre where their Lord had been laid was not far from where they dwelt, seeing that at this day it is placed within the circuit of modern Jerusalem. Thus the disciples and the women may have repaired thither often, and in various ways, during the course of that incomparable Sunday. But as each of the four evangelists imposed on himself a marvellous brevity in relating that event, it is quite natural that at the first aspect their narratives should present, on the innumerable incidents of the day, an apparent confusion. Each was called upon to relate the truth, and nothing but the truth; but none of them was bound to tell the whole; and owing to this conciseness, you may not at once perceive their perfect agreement. They relate, each for himself; according to one special point of view, and without embarrassing himself about a reconciliation which they knew lay in the reality of the facts. What more would you have? One speaks specially of Mary Magdalene, for to her Jesus desired to make his first appearance; the other of Peter, because Jesus made himself appear to him notwithstanding his crime, and because he was called to occupy a leading place in the Church of God; two others, of the astonishing meeting on the road to Emmaus, because that manifestation was the most significant and the most affecting; three others, in fine, of his appearing to the eleven, because these were to be the foundations and the pillars of the Church.
Moreover, you can perceive in their writings several traits which sufficiently indicate that, in giving an account of certain scenes, they knowingly abstain from mentioning others, the remembrance of which was no less dear to them, but which it was necessary to omit introducing, in order that their Gospels might be divinely short. Let us give some examples.
[1]. You will hear St Paul reminding the Corinthians (1Co 15:5) that Jesus “was seen first by Cephas, and then by the twelve;” — yet, not one of the four evangelists has told us of this appearance of Jesus to Simon Peter. Certainly it is well that it so happens that we read afterwards in St Luke (Luk 24:34) these words, said in passing, “The Lord hath appeared unto Simon.” Without this expression (which occurs only casually in a conversation among the eleven and Cleopas), the adversaries of inspiration would not have failed to say that Paul was mistaken as to this fact, and that he had been a careless reader of his Gospels, seeing that not a word is said of this appearance in their four-fold account of the resurrection.
[2]. It is thus, too, that St Luke, who (at the 12th verse) speaks only of Peter, takes care, however, to make the disciples of Emmaus say afterwards, “Certain of them that were with us went to the sepulchre.”
[3]. It is thus, also, that St Mark, who does not mention either the appearing of Jesus to the women or to Simon Peter, takes care, however, to insert in his account (Mark 16:9) a very few words which give us to understand that there were other manifestations, of which he was not to speak. “Jesus,” says he, “appeared first (first!) to Mary of Magdala.’”
[4]. Finally, it is thus that St John, whose sole purpose it was to complete the preceding Gospels, and who speaks only of Mary Magdalene, informs us, by a simple pronoun, that she, notwithstanding, was not alone: “They have taken away the Lord, and WE KNOW NOT WHERE THEY HAVE LAID HIM.”
Thus, then, in order to establish contradiction among the different parts of the quadruple statement, it were necessary that they should be proved irreconcilable with all the suppositions one must make on the unknown connecting links of the events of the day. But who can do this? On the contrary, it is easy to figure for ourselves the sequence of events in such a manner as that the separate details of the narrative should come to agree with each other. This is what several persons have attempted with success, and in different ways; so far is the problem from being incapable of being solved. All that was necessary for this, was to make different but equally admissible suppositions on the number and the sequence of the visits made to the tomb by Mary, the disciples, and the women. Olshausen, Hess, and Griesbach, reconcile the difficulties by assuming that at daybreak Mary of Magdala, while on the way to the sepulchre, parted from her companions, and arrived first. John Le Clerc figured to himself rather that Mary, coming to the sepulchre a second time, with the two apostles, remained longer than them near the tomb, and that the other disciples went home. Hengstenberg has made other suppositions, more simple perhaps, and not less acceptable.
Such hypotheses, shall we be told, do not necessarily do away with the contradiction — they only show that possibly there may be none. What would we have more? The adversaries of inspiration only in their turn make contrary hypotheses.
Now, then, instead of replying separately to each of the eleven objections above adduced, we will content ourselves with exhibiting the course of events, such as we may conceive it to have been, according to the four accounts taken as a whole. What we give is very nearly the arrangement proposed by John Le Clerc in his “Evangelical Harmony.” [150] Others will prefer, perhaps, that lately proposed by Olshausen, in his “Biblical Commentary,” [151] or that which Hengstenberg more recently still has exhibited in his “Evangelical Gazette.” [152] But it is of no consequence. Our account, it will be seen, dissipates, one after another, the eleven alleged contradictions. (The same letters that distinguish them in the objection, will be re- inserted here before the particulars that correspond with them, and serve to solve them.)
A. Jesus had yielded up the ghost on the cross on Friday evening, at the ninth hour of the day. The Sabbath, which began three hours later, was doubly solemn (being both the weekly and the paschal Sabbath). As it grew late (Mat 27:46; Mat 27:57; Mark 15:34; Mark 15:42), Joseph of Arimathea went to ask from Pilate the body of the crucified one. tie obtained it, and, accompanied by Nicodemus, who saw to there being taken to the sepulchre about a hundred-weight of myrrh and aloes (John 19:39); he bought a pall, had the body of Jesus taken down, wound it in linen clothes with the spices (John 19:40), and wrapped it in a winding-sheet, (Luk 23:53; Mark 15:46; Mat 27:59); then at last, for want of time, he hastened to deposit it in a sepulchre not far from Golgotha. One will see, therefore, that the godly women (who had beheld from a distance these funereal scenes, down to the moment when a huge stone was placed on the entrance to the tomb), had very little time for going home and preparing the perfumes which they had at their disposal. The Sabbath was about to commence; and whatever might be, in their eyes, the sacred nature of their occupations, they ceased from them from the time of sunset; nothing could withdraw them from the repose and silence of that day (
Thus far, then, all is perfectly consistent; and it is by these touching details that Luke and Mark desired, each on his own side, to give prominence to the humble respect of these godly women for the law of the Sabbath; the one (Luk 23:56), by showing how submissively they at once intermitted the most sacred cares; and the other (Mark 16:1), with what scrupulous attention they resumed them only at the hour when they were again at liberty to work.
B. Meanwhile they left their homes to go to the sepulchre. John names Magdalene only, because Jesus Christ had chosen her to be the first witness of the greatest of his miracles, and because she was the essential actor in his narrative. He takes care, however, to make her say, “We know not where they have laid him” (John 20:2)! In general, the evangelists show little anxiety about accumulating testimonies. And if the appearance with which the holy women were favoured had not been the first, it is probable that the sacred historians would not even have mentioned it. This is what we might conclude, by analogy, from Paul’s mode of procedure (1Co 15:5; 1Co 15:8), who speaks only of the apostles, and says not a word about the women. His complete silence sufficiently explains to us the partial silence of the evangelists. [153]C. It was still almost night (John 16:1), when the women left their residence, carrying the spices, to go to the sepulchre (
D. They asked themselves on the way how they should roll away the huge stone that covered the mouth of the sepulchral cave. — (Mark 16:3.) During the repose and the silence of the Sabbath (Luk 23:56), how could they have known that guards had been appointed? — (Mat 27:66.)
E. Meanwhile there had been an earthquake. — (Mat 28:2.) An angel, whose countenance was like lightning, and his raiment white as snow, had come from heaven and rolled away the stone. The guards were overcome with fear, and, after having become as dead men, fled. But what was not the astonishment of the women, when, on reaching the tomb, they found it open and empty! Only one young man, clothed in white, sat in the sepulchre, on the right side. — (Mark 16:5.) Then two men presented themselves in shining raiment (Luk 24:4); these were angels (Mark and Matthew mentioning only the one that had rolled away the stone, and spoken to them).
F. Meanwhile, these holy women, hastening out of the sepulchre, fled, being overcome with feelings at once of terror and joy. — (Mat 28:8; Mark 16:8.) In returning to the city they were careful not to speak to any one of what had happened. Did they dread the wrath of the Sanhedrim? At least, were they not unwilling to pour their emotions into the breasts of any but their brethren? Notwithstanding the early hour, they must have met a great many Israelites in the leading streets and squares of that immense city, where, during festivals, there were reckoned to be no fewer than three millions of inhabitants. The governor Florus, in the year 65, reckoned two hundred and fifty thousand paschal lambs, says Josephus; and this supposes at least two and a half millions of worshippers, without including the sick, unclean persons, and young children. [154]
G. On arriving among the eleven and the other disciples, the women told all that they had seen. — (Mat 28:8; Luk 24:9.) But this recital seemed to them nothing but an idle tale. — (Luk 24:10.) Then Mary of Magdala, addressing herself more particularly to Peter and John, assured them that, at least, if their Master were not risen again, he must have been taken away. — (John 20:2.)
H. According to the account itself of John, Mary must necessarily have said to those two disciples more than what that evangelist relates to us directly; for he adds, that they ran to the sepulchre; and that no sooner had John seen the arrangement of the linen clothes than he believed. But, alas! this language of Mary: “They have taken away the Lord, and I know not where they have laid him!” was but too natural. The fleeting apparition of the angels had not produced so firm a conviction in her mind as not to have been violently shaken by the cold and incredulous reception her tale had met from the apostles. These men, according to whose directions she habitually conformed herself, had doubtless more than once repressed the warmth of her imagination. She saw them treat her heavenly vision as a mere revery. After that, she felt only enough of confidence in herself to attest the ordinary and material part of the fact. At least, says she, the tomb is open, and the body is no longer there.
I. Nevertheless, on hearing these words, and whilst Cleopas went away to Emmaus, Peter rose, Luke tells us (Luk 24:12), and ran to the sepulchre, but he did not run thither alone (24); and John tells us that he was accompanied by that “other disciple whom Jesus loved.” — (John 20:2-3.) John being the younger, arrived first; he did not go in; but stooping down he saw the linen clothes lying on the ground. Peter, stooping also, saw the linen clothes lying (Luk 24:12), and the napkin that was about his head not lying with the linen clothes, but wrapped together in a place by itself. He had the courage to go in, and wondered at what had come to pass (Luk 24:12); hut John did more; he entered in his turn and believed. They then departed unto their own home. — (John 20:10; Luk 24:12.) Still there is nothing inconsistent in all this.
K. Meanwhile, Mary of Magdala, who had followed them, having returned to the sepulchre, remained alone at the spot, weeping and disconsolate at not even being able to find again her Master’s remains. She stooped down to look into the interior of the sepulchre, and then it was that anew two angels clothed in white presented themselves to her sight. They were seated, the one at the head and the other at the foot of the place where the body of Jesus had lain. — (John 20:11; John 20:13.) Soon after, Mary having resumed her position, it was Jesus himself whom she saw behind her. “Go,” said he to her, “to nay brethren, and say unto them, I ascend unto my Father and your Father, and to my God and your God!” Mary hastened to go and tell the disciples that she had seen the Lord, and that he had spoken these things to her (John 20:18); but they believed not. — (Mark 16:10.) Thus, then, was it, as St Mark has said (Mark 16:9), that Jesus appeared first to Mary of Magdala. The whole of this narrative is natural and harmonious; the historians here agree together in a manner which it is easy to comprehend. Only they relate each someone of the great facts of that incomparable day, without considering themselves called upon to relate the whole.
L. The two disciples on their departure from Jerusalem for Emmaus (Luk 24:21; Luk 24:24), were as yet unaware of the events of the day beyond the first report of the women and of the two disciples, the opening of the sepulchre, the removal of the Lord, the appearing of the angels; but they had not yet learned the last news — the appearing of Jesus to Simon — Peter and Mary’s second report. — (John 20:18; Mark 16:10.) Mark, however, what had afterwards happened. Following the Magdalene’s example, who had returned a second time to the sepulchre, after having informed the apostles of her first discoveries, the other women also had betaken themselves thither while Mary was returning to the disciples; they had found the tomb empty; and, as they were returning to give a farther attestation to their brethren that the body of Jesus could not be found there, Jesus himself had condescended to appear to them alive and full of sympathy. They had worshipped him, and he had said to them: “Be not afraid: go tell my brethren, that they go into Galilee, and there shall they see me.” — (Mat 28:9-10.)
Such is the harmony of the sacred narratives. This concatenation seems to us satisfactory. One might, as we have said, propose some other; but this is enough. We must confess that we cannot understand the difficulties that have been found in it, or the noise that has been made about it.
ANOTHER SOURCE OF PRECIPITATE JUDGMENT. — Certain reigns, such as that of Nebuchadnezzar, that of Jehoiachim, and that of Tiberius, had two commencements; and the dates that relate to these are pronounced irreconcilable! The first, previous to mounting the throne, reigned three years with his father; the second reigned ten years with his; the third was assumed by Augustus as his associate in the empire, from the 28th of August, of the 2d year of the Christian era, but succeeded him on the 19th of August, of the year 14. — (Velleius Paterculus, 2: c. 121.)
Some examples. — See, for Jotham, 2Ki 15:33, (he reigned sixteen years alone; but four years also during the lifetime of his father, who was leprous). See for Joash, 2Ki 13:1; 2Ki 13:10, (he must have reigned two or three years with his father, as did Jehoshaphat and his son, 2Ki 8:16.) See 2Ki 24:8; and 2Ch 36:9. See also Dan 1:1; Jer 25:1; 2Ch 36:5-7. See farther, Luk 3:1.
ANOTHER SOURCE OF PRECIPITATE JUDGMENT. — The design of the Holy Ghost in one of the Gospels, is not often the same as his design in another Gospel while relating the same fact; yet some would have them all give the same turn to their narratives; nay, make bold, because of their differences, to declare them irreconcilable, and to assume that they are directly opposed to each other.
Example. — The Holy Spirit, in the genealogy of Jesus Christ, given in St Matthew (Mat 1:16), would show the Jews, that, according to the strict rigour of their law, Jesus Christ is the son and the heir of all the kings of Judah, by a legal descent; while the same Holy Spirit, in the genealogy given by St Luke (Luk 3:23-38), would show the Gentiles that Jesus Christ is the Son of David by a natural descent. And because, with this double object in view, they give us, the one his genealogy according to the law, by Solomon, the son of David, and by Jacob, the father of Joseph, the husband of Mary; and the other, his genealogy according to nature, by Nathan, another son of David, and by Hell, the father of Mary, people have thought, very absurdly, that they could make the one refute the other! [155]
ANOTHER SOURCE OF PRECIPITATE JUDGMENT. — A text mistranslated produces a meaning that is contrary to reason or to history; and forthwith the sacred writer is accused of committing the grossest blunder! People don’t examine whether, in the simplicity of a literal translation, the same passage, better rendered, would not present itself free from every difficulty!
First example (again one of those adduced by M. Twesten). — St Luke, we are told (Luk 2:1), has no sooner spoken of the taxing ordained by a public decree issued by Augustus Cæsar, at the time of the birth of Jesus Christ, than he adds these words at verse 2: “This taxing was first made when Cyrenius was governor of Syria.”
Hence it would follow that St Luke is here caught in flagrant contradiction with contemporary history; for, at the birth of Jesus Christ, Judea was governed by Herod, and Syria either by Saturninus, or rather (from the seventh year of the Christian era) by Quintilius “Varus, who replaced him, and during whose administration the death of Herod the Great took place The Cyrenius (Publius Sulpicius Quirinius), under whom a second census took place, was not sent to the East until eleven or twelve years, at the least, after the birth of Jesus Christ. The historian Josephus [156] tells us in express terms, that this census took place the thirty-seventh year after the defeat of Anthony; and Jesus Christ was born, at the latest, the twenty-sixth year after that great event. Luke, then, must have made a mistake of eleven years, and must have confounded these two epochs and these two censuses.
Before replying to this strange accusation, we would have the reader observe its extreme improbability, even taking St Luke to have been a mere uninspired man. What! Luke, the only one of the evangelists that was a person of erudition — Luke, the physician — Luke, who subsequently resumes the mention of the census of Quirinius, when he recalls that famous revolt of Judas the Galilean, which stirred up all Judea and caused the destruction of a great many people, who perished along with him (Acts 5:37) — Luke, writing for all nations, and in four and twenty pages, an historical work, which he knew would be immortal — Luke could make such a mistake as to place in the days of Herod the Great so very serious an event which had happened within the preceding thirty years! What should we say at the present day of a physician, who, even in a simple conversation, should put the battle of Austerlitz in the days of Catherine II. and of the National Convention? And if this doctor were to publish a short narrative, in which such an absurdity should be found, what reception, think you, would” he find even among his most unlettered contemporaries.?
It is thus, then, that often, when people would make the sacred writers contradict themselves, they scruple not to impute to them such silliness as would be almost miraculous. But let us return to the passage. There is nothing simpler than its translation: it is a parenthesis. According to the accent placed on the first word (
Thus, then, there is nought but what is quite natural and quite correct in St Luke’s narrative. After having spoken in the first verse of a decree from Augustus, which began to be executed under Herod’s reign, he intimates (in the parenthesis of verse 2) that one must not confound what was done then with the too famous census of which all Judea still retained so tragical a recollection. The first census itself, says he, was effected while Cyrenius was Governor off Syria. Such is the plain literal translation of the Greek. [158]
Second example. — St Matthew (Mat 4:5), immediately after the first temptation, says, that “THEN the devil led Jesus into the holy city.” … And when this second temptation was over, he adds (Mat 5:8), in beginning, to relate the third, that “AGAIN the devil taketh him up into an exceeding high mountain,” &c. St Luke, on the contrary (Luk 4:5), immediately after the first temptation, says, that “THEN took him up into an high mountain;” and when this second temptation was ended, he adds, in beginning to tell of the third, “He brought him also to Jerusalem.” …
Here, then, we find two of the evangelists manifestly at variance as to the order in which the three temptations took place. One of the two must of necessity have been mistaken in putting the last before the second. Such is the objection.
You will see this difficulty equally vanish as soon as, instead of following Osterwald’s version or Martin’s, you seek only to give a more faithful rendering to the original text. We might here adduce a good many other passages (chiefly in the Epistles) which these two translators have darkened, by not sufficiently marking the import of the conjunctions and adverbs
Every one knows [159] that St Luke, in writing his Gospel, did not restrain himself to the order of time, and. that he had proposed to himself in his narratives to group together events and lessons rather according to the order of things (
St Matthew, who always follows the chronological order of the facts, takes care to employ very exact adverbs in proportion as he advances in his account of the temptation;
ANOTHER SOURCE OF PRECIPITATE JUDGMENT. — It has not been sufficiently borne in mind, that certain discourses and certain acts were repeated more than once in the course of our Saviour’s ministry. Hence the utmost rashness in concluding that certain detailed accounts given by two evangelists contradict each other, where there has been no more than an incomplete resemblance, and yet where people have imagined that the facts they read of were identically the same.
Examples. — In the double miracle of the multiplication of the loaves, we have a very striking instance of the ease with which one may in this way be led into error. On two occasions Jesus Christ, moved with compassion for the people, fed a famished multitude in the wilderness. Between these two miracles there are numerous and striking points of resemblance. Had it so happened that two of the evangelists had related only the first, and two others only the second, there would have been sure to be a cry that the two were but one, and that there was a contradiction in the statement of their details. What! in the one, five thousand men fed with five loaves; in the other, four thousand men fed with seven loaves! In the one twelve baskets (
See also Mat 12:39; Mat 16:1; Mat 16:4; Luk 8:21; Luk 11:27, and Mat 12:49; Luk 9:1; Luk 10:1, and Mat 10:1. We shall adduce one further example. It does not appear, on close examination, that the sermon called that of the mount (Matthew 5, 6, 7), and that given by St Luke in the latter half of his sixth chapter, were delivered on the same occasion, [161] In fact, first, St Luke omits many of the sentences reported by St Matthew,” [162] and he alone adds some others (Luk 6:24-26); secondly, Matthew lets us know, that the sermon which he reports preceded the healing of the leprous person (Mat 8:3), and Luke that his followed it (Luk 5:12); thirdly, Luke puts Matthew in the number of those whom Jesus called to the apostleship, and who came down with him from the mountain, before he addressed to them his discourse; whereas Matthew himself tells us, that the sermon of which he speaks, long preceded his vocation; fourthly, one of those discourses was delivered on the mountain, while Jesus, who had sat down, had his disciples ranged around him; the other, on the contrary, was delivered on the plain, and with other circumstances attending it. We pause at this remark, in order to reassure such persons as may have heard adduced against the doctrine of inspiration, the alleged contradiction of the sentence in which Matthew (Mat 5:40) makes Jesus say, “If any man will take away thy coat (
Nevertheless, we must not forget, at the same time, to observe, inasmuch as this remark applies to several other objections of the same nature. Even were it true that these two passages were cited as the same fragment of one and the same discourse, still their differing would not have anywise astonished us. We believe that the Holy Ghost, when he quotes the Holy Ghost, is not bound to use the same terms, provided the same meanings be retained. A man of an exact mind, in repeating what he has said before, or in quoting himself, by no means thinks himself bound to carry imitation thus far. And we think, that here our Lord’s whole idea is found equally in the sentences of Luke and Matthew.
ANOTHER SOURCE OF PRECIPITATE JUDGMENT. — One may sometimes pay no attention to a various reading critically respectable, and which resolves a difficulty; and prefer imputing some contradiction to the sacred writer.
Example. — According to the three first evangelists (Mark 15:25; Mark 15:33-34; Mat 27:45-46; Luk 23:44-45), our Saviour was put upon the cross at the third hour of the day (that is to say, at nine o’clock in the morning); the sun was darkened at the sixth hour, and Jesus gave up the ghost at the ninth hour; whereas, if we are to believe St John (John 19:14), the execution did not begin until the sixth hour of the day (at noon). Palpable contradiction! say some objectors.
Before replying to this difficulty, we shall offer a remark, much like that already made on the census of Cyrenius. Was it likely that the apostle John was ignorant of the length of time that his Master’s execution lasted, and could he possibly have made a mistake of three hours out of six — he who had remained beside the cross!
But, if we consult the Greek manuscripts of St John, we shall find four in small letters, and three in uncial letters (among others, Beza’s famous roll, preserved at Cambridge), which have here the third hour instead of the sixth. Numbers, in the Greek manuscripts, are often expressed in numerals; that is to say, in simple Greek letters; and 3 and 6 are expressed by two letters that are very easily confused (the
ANOTHER SOURCE OF PRECIPITATE JUDGMENT. — People fail to seize the meaning of certain particulars in a narrative, and hasten to conclude that the author was mistaken!
First Example. — Jesus in St Matthew (Mat 23:35-36), denounced the most terrible judgments of God on the Jews, on account of the treatment they had given his saints, “in order,” says he, “that upon this race (or this generation,
Here, certainly, we are told, there is an awkward inadvertence, not on the part of Jesus Christ, no doubt, but of the evangelist who reports these words, and whose memory must have failed him. We know, from the Second Book of Chronicles (2Ch 24:21), that this Zacharias, who was stoned to death by the Jews in the holy place (
Here our reply might close; but we shall no doubt, be asked, Who then was the Zechariah spoken of by Jesus Christ? Even although we did not know., this would by no means be a difficulty, and we should content ourselves with replying: It was some just person whom the Jews slew, not only in the court of the temple (
However, there is still a third Zacharias, son of Barachias, (or of Baruch,
Second example. — Mark 11:12-14. — Jesus cursed a fig-tree which had only leaves; for the time for figs was not yet come.
Here, we are told, there is no doubt a mistake: why look for fruit at a time when it could not reasonably be expected?
Yet there is nothing here but what is very simple. Had it been the season for gathering figs, the tree might have been stripped of all its fruit by the hand of man; and, in that case, there was no evidence of its barrenness, But is a tree (we mention the objection in passing) guilty because it bears no fruit? Why punish it? We reply, that in this miracle, which is a type, the tree is as little a sufferer as it is a criminal, nor is its suffering more real than its morality. The one is symbolical, and so also is the other.
ANOTHER SOURCE OF PRECIPITATE JUDGMENT. — In questions of chronology, regard has not been paid to the following rule (which we take pleasure in expressing here in the very words of the great reformer of Italy, the excellent Peter Martyr). [169]
[The great divisions of time in the history of the people of God are pointed out to us by numerical dates of great precision. From the passing of Abraham into Canaan to the entrance of his grandson into Egypt, 215 years; from that to the passage of the Red Sea, 215 years more — hence in all 430 years (Gal 3:17; Exo 12:40); from that, further, to the foundation of the temple, 480 years (1Ki 6:1); and from that, in fine, to the Babylonish captivity, 422 years more. But within these grand divisions of history, the precise and co-ordinate arrangement of all the short intermediate dates, the reconciling of the numbers presented to us by books of an almost monumental conciseness, and of an age contemporary with the siege of Troy (that of Judges, Kings, and Chronicles), respecting the reigns and interregnums, first of the Judges, then of the Kings, especially after the subdivision of the twelve tribes into two distinct kingdoms; this arrangement, we say, presents numerous difficulties, for which we find the elements of an entire solution sometimes wanting.] The following is the rule of Peter Martyr: —
“Although obscure passages occur as to chronology, we must beware of pretending to reconcile them by imputing blunders to the inspired books. Therefore it is, that, should it sometimes happen that we know not how to account for the number of years, we ought simply to confess our ignorance, and consider that the Scriptures express themselves with so much conciseness that it is not always possible for us to discover at what epoch we ought to make such or such a computation commence. It often enough happens, that, in the history of the kings of Judah and of Israel, the respective numbers of their years are not easily reconciled; but these difficulties admit of explanation or adjustment in several ways.
1. The same year commenced by one of two, and finished by the other, is attributed to both.
2. Often the sons have reigned with their fathers during some years, which have been imputed sometimes to the fathers, sometimes to the sons.
3. There were often interregnums, which the Scripture attributes sometimes to the predecessor, sometimes to the successor. Finally, it sometimes happens that certain years, in which oppressive and profane princes have reigned, are not reckoned to them, being imputed to their immediate successor; thus, the twenty last years of Joram to his son Ahaziah. — (2Ki 8:26; 2Ch 22:2.)”
We think that the examples we have thus far adduced, may suffice. We refrain from adducing more. What we have said may give one an idea of the weight to be attached to these difficulties, [170] for (we repeat) we have been careful to adduce those which have been held as the most serious. Warned by these examples, and by so many others, let us learn then, should any embarrassment of the same kind occur to us in future, how to judge as did Origen’s friend, Julius Africanus, sixteen hundred years ago, and as, before and after him, all the men of God have done. “Be that as it may (said he on the occasion of the two genealogies of Jesus Christ, which he had reconciled) be that as it may, the gospel certainly everywhere speaks true!” —
It will be admitted, we have been sometimes told, that the apparent or real contradictions in the dates, quotations, and narratives of the Holy Bible, may possibly be removed by the resources of a more or less laborious exegesis; but there are others which you cannot reconcile: such are all those expressions in which the sacred writers appear in manifest opposition to the now better known laws of nature. Nevertheless (these objectors desire to add), though this argument be irrefragable against the verbal inspiration of the Scriptures, it compromises in nothing the divinity of their doctrines, any more than the great religious facts which they report to us. In inspiring his apostles and his prophets, God desired to make us, not scientific, but holy persons. Thus he could, without danger, allow the writers he employed to speak in ignorance of the phenomena of the material world; and their prejudices on such matters are innocent though incontestable. Do you not often find them expressing themselves as if the earth were immovable and the sun in motion? That star, according to them, rises and falls: “his going forth is from the end of the heaven, and his circuit unto the ends of it” (Psalms 19); the moon and the stars are equally in movement; the sun, at the command of Joshua became immovable in the midst of the heavens, it “stood still upon Gibeon, and the moon in the valley of Ajalon” (Jos 10:12); the earth is “founded on the seas” (Psa 24:2); “drawn from the water, it subsists amid the water” (2Pe 3:5); “God hath laid. its foundations, it shall never be moved” (Psa 104:5) — Can you admit that this is really the language of the Creator of the heavens and of the earth, when addressing his creatures?
We proceed to reply to this objection, and we are delighted to meet it on our path, seeing that the examination of it can only redound to the glory of the Scriptures.
We most fully admit that were there some physical errors, duly ascertained, in the book of the Scriptures, it would not be entirely from God; but we proceed to put it beyond a doubt that there are no such errors; and we will venture to defy our adversaries to produce a single such error in the whole of the Bible. Nay, we will even go much farther; and will show how much latent science, on the contrary, betrays itself there, beneath the simplicity of its language.
We shall begin by saying a few words on Joshua’s miracle, inasmuch as a disposition has often been shown to turn it to account in combating either the plenary inspiration, or even the divine mission of the men of God. Several unbelieving writers have attacked it with that arrogance and irony which too often characterize them. Bat it is easy to reply to them. We have no thoughts of discussing here the methods by which the miracle might have been accomplished; we would only remark, from this example, how lightly people hasten to pronounce, that because certain passages of Scripture are not understood, therefore they must needs be irrational. The sun, on the day of the battle of Beth-boron, stood still in the midst of heaven, we are told in the 10th chapter of Joshua; and there was no day like that before it or after it.
It has been said in Germany — “This phrase, taken in its natural sense, seems to us absurd; it is erroneous, therefore, and altogether human.” Elsewhere it has been pronounced so absurd, that another meaning must be given to it. But both opinions are drawn from false premises. The fact is far from being absurd; it is only miraculous.
We shall give the objection in the very words in which it has been stated: — “The most fearless methodist,” it has been said, “will feel constrained to own that in the system of our globe, were the sun to stop for an instant, or were the earth’s motion to be slackened, belligerent armies, and all that is on the earth’s surface, would be swept away like chaff before the wind!”
Nevertheless, it is this very objection which is an error. In point of fact, if the miracle, instead of stopping the rotation of the globe suddenly, in an indivisible instant, took only the short space of a few seconds to accomplish it, by a supple and continuous action, then you have enough in this feeble circumstance to be assured that such a phenomenon would have had no very sensible effect mechanically beyond that of raising the waters diffused over the surface of the earth, and making them to flow from west to east. A child might tell it you. Let a carriage in rapid motion meet a curbstone — it shatters itself upon it, because the stone is immovable; and all that are in the carriage are projected to a distance, and thrown with violence on the ground. But let it be stopt by a continuous resistance, operating in a successive manner, and consummating itself in three or four seconds: then the smallest children seated in the carriage will remain in their seats; they will not even feel the impulsion which three seconds before was impressed on them by the impetuous movement of the horses, and which, without this precaution, would have sufficed to launch them to a distance. The rotation of the earth is, at the equator, 1426 feet the second; at Jerusalem, 1212 feet. This is the initial speed of a canon ball projected by a charge the fifth part of its own weight. It is capable (abstraction being made of the resistance of the air) of raising that projectile to the extreme height of 24,000 feet; and yet a child, six years old, would destroy, without danger, in two-thirds of a minute, the whole of this force by the continued action of his fingers. Put into his little hands a canon ball of eight pounds weight, and let him hold it against the action of its weight during two- thirds of a minute; during the same time, allow another bullet of quite the same weight to drop freely through the air, and from the height of the summit of the Himalaya range. When forty seconds only have expired, the force of gravitation, after having acted by the same impulsion upon both these projectiles, will not have done more with respect to the first than have fatigued the feeble hands that resist it, while it would have made the other acquire a speed equal to that which the rotation of the earth impressed on the belligerent armies on the hill of Beth-boron. Since, then, a child might destroy, by the continuous effort of his little hands, a force capable (if concentrated on a single instant) of launching a canon bullet to the height of Chimborazo, we can easily conceive that, if God, on the day of the battle of Beth- horon, had employed two-thirds of a minute to arrest, by short and successive resistances, the rotation of our globe, then the projectile impulsions which a mass of eight pounds of iron would have received continually during these forty seconds, would not even have been so strong as that a child might not have destroyed them by the sole effort of his fingers, and without expending more three than he would have to put forth it, sustaining with his hands a weight of eight pounds during the same space of time. And if the mass, instead of having the form of a bullet, had had that of a quoit or a cube, it would not have had enough of that impulsion to make it overcome the resistance of friction, and to change its place on the surface of the ground.
It will be objected, perhaps, that the rotation of the earth at Beth-boron, was twenty-seven times more rapid than that of a steam-carriage on a railway. This is true; but since the retarding force necessary for exhausting a given impulsion is in the inverse ratio of the time employed in it, grant that the miracle took eighteen minutes for its consummation; take eighteen minutes (instead of forty seconds) for the entire stoppage of the movement of the terrestrial globe at the voice of Joshua; and then the belligerent armies, instead of being “swept away as if by a tempest,” would not have felt more from what happened, than do the thousands of travellers that are stopt at each of the stations on a railway.
Other difficulties of a like kind have been started with regard to this miracle of Joshua. Had the earth, it has been said, suspended its motion during ten hours, the attractive force of the sun acting singly upon it, would in that time have made it fall 900 leagues in the direction of the sun’s blazing focus, and the annual conditions of our orbit would have been sensibly troubled. This objection is no less futile than the preceding. The miracle, in fact, does not imply the slightest perturbation in the progressive movement of the earth; it requires it only in its rotation. Now, according to the laws of the celestial mechanism, the rotation of a star upon its axis is entirely independent of the movement impressed on its centre of gravity, and which makes it move onwards in its elliptical course. Experience had attested this before it was demonstrated by calculation. It had long been observed that the speed of the sun (or rather of the earth) in its orbit, ceases not to vary from one end of the year to the other; and yet there does not exist in nature a more uniform movement than that which makes the whole celestial sphere daily revolve to our eyes. We are even assured, from the observations of the movement of the moon, that for more than 2000 years the sidereal day has not varied so much as the hundredth part of a second.
Let there be supposed, then, a double shock impressed upon the earth above and below its centre, and in two contrary and parallel directions, and we shall have explained how its rotation on its axis might have been suspended without any change in its onward movement. But here I check myself. It would be rash, do I say It would be childish to pretend to enter into the details of the prodigy with the view of ascertaining its causes; and my only wish has been to show the futility of the objections. The true one, which people do not state, is that they find the miracle too great for its object. But, for men who believe in the great miracle of redemption by the Son of God, nothing is too great, and all things advance in due proportions, in the divine revelations. Moreover, and I hasten to say it, it would not even be necessary, in order to account for this prodigy, to suppose so sovereign an act of Omnipotence as the suspension of the rotation of our globe. God might have employed for this purpose only one of those numerous means which divert the light from its paths, and produce the innumerable illusions of optics; some one of those refractions, for example, which daily displace to our eyes, in different measures, all the stars of the celestial sphere. Is it not matter of notoriety, that in the polar regions the power of the horizontal refractions makes the sun appear to the inhabitants of those cold countries ten days before he really rises above the horizon? Such might have been the cause of the miracle of Beth-horon. We decide nothing; we do not even venture on a hypothesis. We would only say, that the miracle was duly consummated (whatever the means by which it was produced), provided that the sun, to the eyes of the inhabitants of Palestine, stood still upon Gibeon, and the moon in the valley of Ajalon. [172]
Meanwhile, the Scriptures are reproached with holding a language on the daily phenomena of nature, apparently betokening ignorance, and incompatible with a plenary inspiration. According to the writers of the Bible, the sun rises, the sun sets, the sun stands still, the earth remains unmoved. People will have it that the Creator, in speaking to us in a book inspired by him, would have more clearly shown us that the Spirit, that made the sacred historians speak, knew before we did the rotation of our globe, its periodical revolution, and the respective immobility of the sun.
Let us, then, examine this reproach.
We ask, first of all, of the persons who give utterance to it, if they would have had the Bible to speak like Sir Isaac Newton. Would they dismiss from their minds the consideration that if God, in speaking of the decrees of nature, were to express himself, I do not say only as he sees them, but as the scientific men of future ages will be able to see them, then even the great Newton could have understood nothing of what was said? Moreover, even the most advanced language of science is not yet, and never will be, after all, more than the language of appearances. The visible world, much more than you suppose, is a passing shadow, a scene of illusions and of phantoms. What you call a reality is still in itself but a phenomenon considered in its relation to a more exalted reality, and to an ulterior analysis. In our mortal lips the word reality has nothing absolute; it is a term altogether relative, merely intimating that people think they have added one new step to the deep ladder of our ignorances. The human eye sees objects under only two dimensions, and projects them all as if on the same canvass, until touch and repeated experience have assured us of the reality of a depth, or of a third dimension. Colours are accidents; and it is only by reflection or illusion that they belong to the object which presents them to you. Even the impenetrability of bodies, their solidity, their extension, are no more than an appearance, and present themselves as a reality only until the farther progress of one science shall substitute another for it. Who would venture to say where this analysis ought to stop, and in what terms should we speak of creatures with which we are most familiar, were we but endowed with one more sense, with antennæ, for example, like ants and bees? The expression of appearances, accordingly, provided it be exact, is, among men, philosophically correct, and what it behoved the Scriptures to employ. Would men have the Bible speak to us of the scenes of nature otherwise than we speak of them to one another, in our social or domestic intercourse, otherwise even than they are spoken of among the most enlightened persons? When Sir John Herschel tells his domestics to waken him precisely at midnight, to observe the passage of some star over his meridian telescope, does he feel himself called upon to speak to them about the rotation of the earth, and of the moment when it will have brought their nadir into the plane of its orbit? I should think not; and were you even to hear him converse in Greenwich Observatory with the scientific Airey, you would find, that even in that sanctuary of science, the habitual language of these astronomers is still quite like that of the Scriptures. For them the stars rise, the equinoxes recede, the planets go forward and accelerate their speed, stop and go back. Would you, then, that Moses should speak to all the generations of men in a more scientific language than La Place or Arago? But more than this. Here we would bid the reader notice two general facts, that throw out a deal of light the moment we study them, and which soon betray in the Scriptures the pen of Almighty God. Here, as everywhere else, the objections, when narrowly examined, come back upon you, loudly retract themselves, and become arguments on the other side.
These two facts are analogous to what you might observe in the words of a scientific astronomer conversing with his sons in their boyhood, and pointing out the earth and the heavens to them with his finger. If you follow him into these conversations, where his affection, stooping to their level, presents to their growing intelligence such images and words as it can comprehend, you will soon notice his respect for truth shown under a double character. First, he will never say anything to them that is not true; and, secondly, there will be many intimations in his words that he knows more on the subject than he wishes to tell them. He will make no pretension, it is true, to teach them science; but, on the one hand, nothing in all he says will contradict its principles; and, on the other hand, several of his words will at once reveal that while he restrains himself from speaking about it, still he knows it. Afterwards, when his children, grown up to manhood, come to recall his words, not only will they find them exempt from all error, but they will farther recognize in them such a skilful choice of expression as to put them at once in a pre-established harmony with science, and to present it to them, while not aware of it, in its germ. In proportion to the gradual advance of their own knowledge, they will see with admiration, under the reserve and simplicity of his language, concealed marks of wisdom, instances of a scientific precision, a general phraseology and particular expressions harmonizing with events then unknown to them, but that had long been known to him.
Well, then, such also is the double observation which every attentive reader may make on the phraseology of the Scriptures. They speak poetically, but with precision, the true language of appearances. In them we hear a father condescending to address his youngest sons, yet in such a manner that the oldest can never find there a single sentence contrary to the true condition of the things he has created; and in such a manner also he suffers to escape from him, without affectation, enough to demonstrate to them that all that they have learned of his works during the last tour thousand years, he knew before them and better than they. It is thus that, in the Bible, Eternal Wisdom addresses his children. In proportion as they advance in growth, they see that the Scripture is made for their age, is adapted to their development, appearing to grow with their growth, and always presenting the two facts which we have pointed out: on the one hand, the absence of all error; on the other, indirect yet incontestable indications of a science which preceded all that of man.
First fact. — There is no physical error in the Word of God.
If there were any, we have admitted it, the book would not be from God. “God is not man that he should lie,” nor the son of man that he should be mistaken. He behoves, no doubt, in order to his being understood, to stoop to our weakness, but without in the least partaking in it; and his language will always be found to witness to his condescension, never to his ignorance. This remark is still more serious than one would suppose before having reflected on it. It becomes very striking on a close examination.
Examine all the false theologies of the ancients and moderns; read in Homer or in Hesiod, the religious codes of the Greeks; study those of the Buddhists, those of the Brahmins, those of the Mahommedans; you will not only find in these repulsive systems on the subject of the Godhead, but will meet with the grossest errors on the material world. You will be revolted with their theology no doubt; but their natural philosophy and their astronomy also, ever allied to their religion, will be found to rest on the most absurd notions.
Read in the Chou-king and the Y-king of the Chinese, their fantastic systems on the five elements (wood, fire, earth, metal, and water), and on their omnipotent influences on all divine and human affairs. [173] Read in the Shaster, in the Pouran, in the four books of the Vedham, or law of the Hindus, their revolting cosmogony. The moon is 50,000 leagues higher than the sun; it shines with its own light; it animates our body. Night is caused by the sun’s setting behind the mountain Someyra, situated in the middle of the earth, and several thousand miles high. Our earth is flat and triangular, composed of seven stages, each with its own degree of beauty, its own inhabitants, and its own sea, the first of honey, another of sugar, another of butter, another of wine; in fine, the whole mass is borne on the heads of countless elephants which, in shaking themselves, cause earthquakes in this nether world! [174] In one word, they have placed the whole history of their gods in relations at once the most fantastic and the most necessary with the physical world and all the phenomena of the universe. Thus, the missionaries of India have often repeated that a telescope, silently planted in the midst of the holy city of Benares, or in the ancient Ava, would prove a battery, powerful as lightning, for overturning the whole system of Brahma, and the whole of that of Boudhou.
Read farther the philosophers of Greek and Roman antiquity, Aristotle, Seneca, Pliny, Plutarch, Cicero. How many expressions of opinion will you not find there, any single one of which would be enough to compromise all our doctrines of inspiration, if it could be met with in any book of Holy Scripture! Read Mahomet’s Koran, making mountains to be created “to prevent the earth from moving, and to hold it fast as if with anchors and cables.” What do I say? Read even the cosmogony of Buffon, or some of Voltaire’s sneers on the doctrine of a deluge, or on the fossil animals of a primitive world. We will go much farther. Read again, we do not say the absurd reasonings of the pagans, of Lucretius, of Pliny, or of Plutarch, against the theory of the antipodes, but even the lathers of the Christian Church. Hear the theological indignation of the admirable Augustine, who says that it is opposed to the Scriptures; and the scientific eloquence of Lactantius, who considers it so opposed to common sense: “Num aliquid loquuntur!” he exclaims; “is there any man so silly as to believe that men exist having their feet above their heads, trees with their fruit hanging downwards, rain, snow, and hail falling topsy turvy!” “They would answer you,” he adds, “by maintaining that the earth is a globe! Quid dicam de iis nescio, qui cum semel aberrarerint, constanter in stultitia perseverant, et vanis vana defendunt!” “One knows not what to say of such men, who, when they have once run into error, persist in their folly, and defend one absurdity by another!” [175]
Listen, farther, to the legate Boniface, who brought Virgilius, for his opinion in this matter, as a heretic before the Pope; listen to Pope Zachary treating that unhappy bishop as homo malignus. “If it be proved,” says he, “that Virgilius maintains the existence of other men under this earth, call a council, condemn him, put him out of the Church, depose him from the priesthood!” Listen, at a later period, to the whole clergy of Spain, and especially to the imposing Council of Salamanca, indignant at the geographical system by which Christopher Columbus was led to look for a whole new continent. Listen, at the epoch of Newton’s birth, to the great Galileo, who “ascended,” says Kepler, “the highest ramparts of the universe,” and who justified at once by his genius and by his telescope the disowned and condemned system of Copernicus; behold him groaning, at the age of eighty, in the prisons of Rome, for having discovered the movement of the earth, after having had to pronounce these words, ten years before (28th June 1633), before their Eminences, at the palace of the Holy Office: “I, Galileo, in the seventieth year of nay age, on my knees before your Eminences, having before my eyes, and touching with my own hands, the Holy Scriptures, abjure, curse, and detest, the error of the earth’s movement.”
What might we not have been entitled to say of the Scriptures, had they expressed themselves on the phenomena of nature, as these have been spoken of by all the ancient sages? — had they referred all to four elements, as people did for so long a period? — had they said the stars were of crystal, as did Philoläius of Crotona; and had they, like Empedocles, lighted up the two hemispheres of our world with two suns? — had they taught, like Leucippus, that the fixed stars, set ablaze by the swiftness of their diurnal movement round the earth, feed the sun with their fires? — had they, like Diodorus of Sicily, and all the Egyptian sages, formed the heavens and the earth by the motion of the air and the natural ascent of fire? — or had they thought, like Philoläius, that the sun has only a borrowed light, and is only a mirror, which receives and sends down to us the light of the celestial spheres? — had they, like Anaxagoras, conceived it to be a mass of iron larger than the Peloponnesus, and the earth to be a mountain, whose roots stretched infinitely downwards? — had they imagined the heaven to be a solid sphere, to which the fixed stars are attached, as was done by Aristotle, and almost all the ancients? — had they called the celestial vault a firmamentum, or a
Open now the Bible; study its fifty sacred authors, from that wonderful Moses who held the pen in the wilderness, four hundred years before the war of Troy, down to the fisherman, son of Zebedee, who wrote fifteen hundred years afterwards, in Ephesus and in Patmos, under the reign of Domitian; open the Bible, and try if you can to find anything of this sort there. No. None of those blunders which the science of every successive age discovers in the books of those that preceded it; none of those absurdities, above all, which modern astronomy points out, in such numbers, in the writings of the ancients, in their sacred codes, in their systems of philosophy, and in the finest pages even of the fathers of the Church; no such errors can be found in any of our sacred books; nothing there will ever contradict what, after so many ages, the investigations of the learned world have been able to reveal to us of what is certain in regard to the state of our globe or of that of the heavens. Carefully peruse our Scriptures from one end to the other, in search of such blemishes there; and while engaged in this research, remember that it is a book which speaks of everything, which describes nature, which proclaims its grandeur, which tells the story of its creation, which informs us of the structure of the heavens, of the creation of light, of the waters, of the atmosphere, of the mountains, of animals, and of plants; — it is a book that tells us of the first revolutions of the world, and foretells to us also the last; a book that relates them in circumstantial narratives, exalts them in a sublime poesy, and chants them in strains of fervent psalmody; — it is a book replete with the glow of oriental rapture, elevation, variety, and boldness; it is a book which speaks of the earth and of things visible, at the same time that it speaks of the celestial world and of things invisible; — it is a book to which nearly fifty writers of every degree of mental cultivation, of every rank, of every condition, and separated by fifteen hundred years from each other, have successively put their hand; — it is a book composed first in the centre of Asia, among the sands of Arabia, or in the deserts of Judea, or in the fore-court of the temple of the Jews, or in the rustic schools of the prophets of Bethel and of Jericho, or ill the sumptuous palaces of Babylon, or on the idolatrous banks of Chebar; and afterwards, at the centre of western civilisation, amid the Jews with their manifold ignorance, amid polytheism and its ideas, as well as in the bosom of pantheism and its silly philosophy; — it is a book the first writer of which had been for the space of forty years a pupil of the magicians of Egypt, who looked upon the sun, and the stars, and the elements as endowed with intelligence, as re-acting upon the elements, and as governing the world by continual effluxes; — it is a book the first chapters of which preceded by more than NINE HUNDRED YEARS the most ancient philosphers of ancient Greece and of Asia, the Thaleses, the Pythagorases, the Zaleucuses, the Xenophaneses, the Confuciuses; — it is a book which carries its narratives even into the field of the invisible world, even into the hierarchies of the angels, even into the remotest realms of futurity, and the glorious scenes of the last day; — well then, search through these 50 authors, search through these 66 books, search through these 1189 chapters, and these 81,173 verses search for one single error of those thousands with which ancient and modem books abound, when they speak either of the heaven or of the earth, or of their revolutions, or of their elements; search, but you will search in vain.
There is nothing constrained or reserved in its language; it speaks of all things and in all tones; it is the prototype, it is the unapproachable model; it has been the inspirer of all the most exalted productions of poetry. Ask this of Milton, of the two Racines, of Young, of Klopstock. They will tell you that this divine poesy is of all the most lyrical, the boldest in its flights, and the most sublime: it rises on a cherub and soars on the wings of the wind. And yet never does this book do violence to the facts or to the principles of a sound philosophy of nature. Never will you find it in opposition, in the case of a single sentence, with the correct notions which science has enabled us to reach with regard to the form of our globe, its size, or its geology; on the vacuum and on space; on the inert and obedient materiality of all the stars; on the planets, on their masses, on their courses, on their dimensions, or on their influences; on the suns that people the depths of space, on their number, on their nature, or their immensity. Just as in speaking of the invisible world, and of a subject so new, so unknown, and so delicate, as that of the angels, this book has not one of its authors that, in the course of the 1560 years which it took to write it, has varied in the character of charity, humility, fervour, and purity which belongs to those mysterious beings; just as in speaking of the relations of the celestial world with God, never has one of these fifty writers, either in the Old or in the New Testament, uttered a single word that favours that constant leaning to pantheism which characterises the whole philosophy of the Gentiles; so likewise you will not find one of the authors of the Bible who, in speaking of the visible world, has suffered a single one of those expressions of opinion to escape him, which, in other books, contradict the reality of facts — not one which makes the heaven to be a firmament, as has been done by the Septuagint, St Jerome, and all the Fathers of the Church — not one that makes the world, as Plato did, an intelligent animal — not one that reduces all things here below to the four elements of the physical system of the ancients — not one that holds with the Jews, with the Latins, with the Greeks, with the finest minds of antiquity, with the great Tacitus among the ancients, with the great De Thou among the moderns, with the sceptic Michael Montaigne, that “the stars have domination and power, not only over our lives and the conditions of our fortune, but even over our inclinations, our discourses, our wills; that they govern, impel, and agitate them at the mercy of their influences; and that (according as our reason teaches us and finds it to be) the whole world feels the impulsion of the slightest celestial movements. Facta etenim et vitas hominum suspendit ab astris;” [178] — not one that speaks of the mountains as Mahomet has done, of the cosmogony like Buffon, of the antipodes like Lucretius, like Plutarch, like Pliny, like Lactantius, like St Augustine, like Pope Zachary. — Assuredly, were there to be found in the Bible a single one of those errors that abound among philosophers, as well ancient as modern, our faith in the plenary inspiration of the Scriptures would be more than compromised by it; we should have to acknowledge that there are errors in the Word of God, and that these delusive expressions are those of a fallible writer, not those of the Holy Ghost; for God is not man that he should lie; in him there is no variableness, neither shadow of falsity; and He to whom lying lips are an abomination, could not have been capable of contradicting himself and dictating that which is false.
There is no physical error, then, in the Scriptures; and this great fact, which becomes all the more striking the more narrowly we look into it, is the manifest proof of an inspiration carried into their choice of the smallest expressions they employ. But we have more to say than this, and now come to the second fact. Not only has the Bible not admitted any false statement of opinion or expression; but further, it has often allowed words to escape which enable us to see, beyond all possibility of our being mistaken, the science of the Almighty. His grand aim, no doubt, is to reveal to us the eternal glories of the invisible world, not the barren secrets of that which is doomed to perish. Meanwhile, however, it often happens that his language, when we listen to it with attention, allows a science to be seen which it is not his design to teach, but of which he cannot be ignorant, because it is in him a great deep. Not only will he never teach us anything false, even cursorily; but, further, you will often stumble on words which betray the voice of the Creator of all worlds. Often you will remark in these a wisdom, a forethought, an exactness, of which the ages of antiquity had no idea, and which nothing but the discoveries of the telescope, the calculating processes, and the science of the moderns, have enabled us to appreciate; so that its language will be found to bear, by means of these traits, the evident characters of the most entire inspiration. The discretion and departure from usual practice shown in its expressions, the nature of certain details, the perfect propriety and divine adaptation of which to the facts have remained unrevealed till three thousand years afterwards; the reserve of the language, sometimes its very hardihood, and its strangeness for the time in which it was written: all these signs will enable you to recognize the savant par excellence, the Ancient of days, who addresses himself to his children no doubt, but who speaks as the lather of the family, and who knows the whole of his house. When the Scripture speaks of the form of our earth, it makes it A GLOBE. (Isa 40:22; Job 26:10; Pro 8:27) When it speaks of the position of this globe in the bosom of the universe, it HANGS IT UPON NOTHING (עלבלימה). [179]When it speaks of its age, not only does it place its creation, as well as that of the heavens, IN THE BEGINNING, that is, before ages which it cannot or will not number; but, further, it takes care to place before the disembroilment of chaos and the creation of man, that of angels and archangels, principalities and powers, their probation, the fall of some and their ruin, the perseverance of others and their glory. [180] When it speaks, afterwards, of the origin of our continents, and of the last creation of plants, animals, and men, it then gives to our new world, and to this proud race of ours, so young an age, that men of all times, among all earth’s peoples, and even in our modern schools, have foolishly revolted at it; still it is an age to which they have been compelled to resign themselves since the labours of the De Lucs, the Cuviers, and the Bucklands, have so fully demonstrated that the state of the globe’s surface, as well as the monuments of history and those of science, must compel alike the learned and the vulgar to submit to it. When it speaks of the heavens, it employs, in alluding to them and defining them, the most philosophic and the most beautiful expression; an expression which the Greeks in their Septuagint, the Latins in the Vulgate, and all the Church Fathers in their discourses, have made bold to correct, and which they have perverted from its proper meaning, because it seemed opposed to the science of their times. The heavens, in the Bible, are the EXPANSE, expansum, רקיע; (Gen 1:6; Psa 19:6) that is to say, it is the void, or the ether, or the immensity, and not the firmamentum of St Jerome; nor the
“The mountains arose, O Lord, and the valleys went down unto the place which thou hadst founded for them.” (Psa 104:8; Psa 104:6; Psa 104:9; Gen 2:14; Gen 8:4; Psa 90:2; Pro 8:25; Psa 97:5; Psa 144:6; Zec 14:4; Zec 14:8; Ezekiel 47) When it speaks of the human races of every tribe, of every colour, and of every language, it gives one and the same origin, notwithstanding that the philosophy of all ages would so often have revolted against this truth; which we have seen that of the moderns forced at length to acknowledge. [188] When it speaks of the internal state of our globe, it declares to us two great facts, of which the learned were long ignorant, but now rendered incontestable by their last discoveries; the one relating to its solid crust, and the other to the great waters which it covers. When it speaks of its solid envelope, it informs us, that if its surface gives us bread, underneath (תהתיה) the earth is ON FIRE; [189] that, besides, it is reserved unto fire, and that it will be burnt in the last times, with all the works that are therein. (2Pe 3:7; 2Pe 3:10) And when it speaks of the waters which our globe contains, it alone accounts, at least in this respect, for the immense cataclysms which (according to what we are told by men of science themselves) have completely, and for long periods, submerged it at different epochs. And while the latter tell us of the inconsiderable depth of the seas; while they assure us that a rise of two hundred metres only, or of once-and-a-half the height of the tower of Strasbourg, would suffice for the disappearance of the Baltic, the North Sea, the English and St George’s Channels; and that Mont Blanc, or at least Chimborazo, if thrown into the deepest part of the Pacific Ocean, would be found high enough to form an island; while La Place thought there was ground to conclude, from the size of the tides, that the mean depth of the ocean does not exceed a million of metres (the height of the Saleve or of Hecla); while we have thus demonstrated to us the absolute insufficiency of the seas for these immense submersions which our globe has undergone; … the Scripture teaches us that the earth was taken out of the water, and subsists in the water, (2Pe 3:5) and that its solid crust covers a GREAT DEEP (תהום.), the waters of which were broken up (נבקעו), with surges and violence, (Gen 7:11) at the epoch of the deluge, as at that of chaos and of the countless ages that preceded it. When it speaks of the deluge, it supposes submersions and subversions, which all unbelievers of former times said were too great to be believed, and which at the present day geologists have found too insufficient rather to explain all the subversions which our earth has discovered to them. When it relates the preparatives and the progressive steps of that immense cataclysm, it reveals facts which the science of the moderns may not yet have universally adopted, but neither has it been able to contradict them by other facts: it assumes the existence of an interior fire, which, by raising the temperature of the seas and of the deep waters, must have produced, on the one hand, an enormous evaporation, and impetuous rains, as if the flood-gates of the heavens had been opened; and, on the other, a resistless dilatation, which not only raised the waters from their abysses, broke up the fountains of the GREAT DEEP, and swelled them into mighty waves reaching to the top of the highest mountains, [190] but caused immense stratifications of carbonate of lime, under the double action of an enormous heat and of a pressure equivalent to 80,000 atmospheres. When it describes the state of our globe, in the days which preceded the bringing of order out of chaos, it assumes the existence in it of an internal heat, and of submarine fires, while covering the whole of it with water in a liquid state. (Gen 1:2) When it speaks of the creation of birds and fishes, it assigns them a common origin; and we know that modern naturalists have ascertained, that between those two classes of animals there are deep-seated points of resemblance, which there is nothing to indicate to our eyes, but which are revealed in their anatomy, and even in the microscopic form of the globules of their blood. [191] When it lays an arrest on the sun — that is to say, on the earth’s rotation in the days of Joshua the son of Nun, it takes care, too, to make the moon to stop also, in the same proportion with the sun, and from the same cause; a precaution, as Chaubard has shown, [192] which never would have been thought of by an astronomy that was a stranger to the knowledge of our daily movement; since, after all, nothing more was required for the purposes of this miracle than the prolongation of the day. (Jos 10:12) When it speaks of the Lord’s coming as a flash of lightning, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last day, it once more bears witness to the rotation of the earth, and to the existence of the antipodes; for, at that solemn moment, it says it will be day for one part. of men, and it will be night at the same hour for another part. (Luk 17:31; Luk 17:34; Mat 24:3, &c.) When it describes the past and future riches of the land of Canaan, to which a marvellous force of vegetation is promised for the last times, it speaks of it as rich, not only in springs, but in subterranean waters, [193] and seems to anticipate the perforations by which the moderns have learned to fertilize an arid country, by boring the soil, so as to cause water to gush up. When it speaks of the language of men, it gives it a primitive unity, which a first study of our innumerable idioms seems to contradict, but which comes to be confirmed by a more profound examination. When it describes the deliverance of Noah, it gives to the ark dimensions which we at first sight pronounce to be too small, which we would have made a hundred times greater had we been charged with that narrative, but which a study of the fact has made appear sufficient. When it speaks to us of the number of the stars, instead of supposing them to be a thousand (1022), as in the catalogue of Hipparchus, or as in that of Ptolemy; whilst, in both hemispheres taken together, the most practised eyes are incapable of discovering more than five thousand; whilst, before the invention of the telescope, a man could not see, even in the finest night, more than a thousand, the Scripture calls them INNUMERABLE; it compares them, as Herschel would do, to sand on the sea- shore; it tells us that God has sown them with his hand in the immensity of space like dust, and that, nevertheless, “he calls them all by their name.” When it speaks of that immensity, hark with what a learned and divine wisdom it portrays it to you! how guarded it remains in its noble poesy, and how wise in its sublimity! “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the EXPANSE showeth his handywork. There is no speech nor language; nevertheless we hear their voice.” When it speaks of the relations borne by the stars to this sublunary world, instead of supposing them animated, as the ancients did — instead of ever attributing to them some influence on human affairs, as was fondly imagined for so long a period even by the professedly Christian populations of Italy and France, down to the days of the Reformation, they are composed of inert matter, it tells you, shining, no doubt, but passively acted upon. The heavens, even the heaven of heavens, advance with the order, consistency, and unity of an army which advances to battle. “Lift up your eyes on high, and behold who hath created these things, that bringeth out their host by number; he calleth them all by names; not one faileth. Why sayest thou, O Jacob, My way is hid from the Lord, and my judgment is passed over from my God?” (Isa 40:26-27) When it describes the heavens, it takes care to distinguish three; first, the heaven of the birds, of tempests, of the powers of the air and spiritual wickednesses; next, the heaven of the stars; and, finally, the third heaven, the heaven of heavens. But when it speaks of the God of all this, mark how beautiful its language! The sound of his thunder is in the rotundity of the air, it tells us; (Psa 77:18) but the heavens, and even the heaven of heavens, cannot contain him. (1Ki 8:27) “In what place would you enclose him? and what likeness will ye compare unto him? He hath set his glory above the heavens, and he even humbleth himself when he beholds the heavens! Were you to take the wings of the morning, and fly with the speed of light, whither shouldst thou go from his face, or whither shouldst thou flee from his presence?” (Isa 40:18; Psa 8:1; Psa 113:6; Psa 139:7) But after having deemed that it has said enough of all those visible grandeurs, it tells us that “these are but the skirts of his ways; and how small is the portion that we know of them!” And, finally, when holy Scripture thinks enough has been said of all the grandeurs even of the Creator of these immensities, listen to it farther. “He telleth the number of the stars,” it says to you, “and he healeth the broken in heart, and bindeth up their wounds.” (Psa 147:3-4) “Wonderful in counsel, and magnificent in the means he employs, he putteth thy tears into his bottle; a sparrow falleth not to the ground without his permission; the very hairs of your head are numbered.” (Psa 56:8; Isa 28:29; Mat 10:29-30) “The eternal God is thy refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms.” (Deu 33:26-27) “O my God, how manifold are thy works! and thou hast magnified thy Word above all thy name!” (Psa 138:2) And now, amid all these proofs of greatness … “where shall wisdom be found? and where is the place of understanding? The depth saith, It is not in me; and the sea answers, It is not with me! God alone understandeth the way thereof, and he knoweth the place thereof.... He who looketh unto the ends of the earth, and seeth under the whole heaven; to make the weight for the winds; and he weigheth the waters by measure. When he made a decree for the rain and a way for the lightning of the thunder; then did he see wisdom, and sound it to the bottom; and unto man he said, Behold the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom; and to depart from evil, is understanding!” (Job 28.)
Such, then, is the inspiration of the holy Scriptures; and it is thus we may see there celestial reflections emanating from the very places where people had thought they might detect blemishes. If, with a calm and reverential hand, you uplift the veil of obscurity with which it required, on your account, to shroud its face, you will discover there a majestic brightness; for it comes down, as Moses did, from the holy mountain, and brings to you in its hands the tables of the testimony! At the very place where you had dreaded an obscurity, you find a splendour; at the place where people had noted an objection, God has turned it into a testimony; at the place where there was a doubt, you find an assurance.
We conclude, then, again, that with regard to this seventh objection, the difficulties become proofs; and that, on this head, as well as on so many others, we cannot fail at every page to recognise in the whole of the Bible a communication from God. But let us listen farther to a last objection.
Section 7 The Declarations of Paul Himself
It is idle to dream of disputing the fact of a partial and intermittent inspiration in the Scriptures (we are sometimes told) since the apostle Paul himself has clearly decided the question. Has he not carefully, in point of fact, distinguished what he pronounced by inspiration from what he advanced in his own name only, as a simple believer? And do we not find him, in his First Epistle to the Corinthians, express this distinction in the clearest manner,. And three several times, on the occasion of the several questions that had been addressed to him on the subject of marriage?
First of all, at the 25th verse of chapter 7, when he says in so many terms,
“Now, concerning virgins, I have no commandment of the Lord; yet I give AN ADVICE as one that hath obtained mercy of the Lord to be faithful;”
Next, at the 20th verse, when he writes,
“And unto the married I command (NOT I, BUT THE LORD), Let not the wife depart from her husband, and let not the husband put away his wife;” And finally, at the 12th verse, where he adds,
“But to the rest speak I, not the Lord (I, AND NOT THE LORD), If a brother hath a wife that believeth not, … let him not put her away,” &c.
One sees clearly, then, say the objectors, from these three sentences, that there are in the apostles epistles, passages that are Paul’s, and other passages that are God’s; that is to say, inspired passages and others that are not so. The reply is easy. No sooner do we examine more narrowly into the passages on which the objection is laid, than we perceive that they cannot be legitimately employed against the doctrine of a plenary inspiration. Far from imposing limits on the divinity of the apostolic sayings, these verses, on the contrary, hold a language which the most entire and sovereign inspiration alone could authorize. Paul could not speak thus without putting his epistles, as Peter has done, I was about to say “ON A LEVEL WITH THE OTHER holy Scriptures,” we must say ABOVE them (inasmuch as he gives utterance there to a more recent and more obligatory expression of the Lord’s desires). We proceed to judge how far this is the case. What is it that, in this 7th chapter, the apostle of Jesus Christ does? He treats three cases of conscience. As to one of these cases, God, says he, has neither commanded nor interdicted any thing. “He that marrieth his virgin sinneth not. I am not, therefore, charged with any order; but, in my character as an apostle, it is only an advice that I have to give you on the Lord’s part,” — and he then takes care to add, at the 40th verse, “And I think, also, that I have the Spirit of God.” The Lord, therefore, here desires to leave you free, says the apostle; he would not lay a snare for you; and if you do not think yourselves bound to follow the general advice that is given you, you violate no commandment — you sin not. Only, he who marries does well; he who marries not, does better. As for the other case, on the contrary, beware; FOR THERE IS A. COMMANDMENT OF THE LORD. The Lord has already pronounced his will (Mat 5:31-32; Mal 2:14-15); and I have nothing new to declare unto you: the Old Testament and Jesus Christ have spoken. It is NOT I, therefore, the apostle of Jesus Christ, it is THE LORD who has already made known his will to you: “To such Christians as are married, I command (not I, but the Lord), that the wife depart not from her husband, and that the husband put not away his wife.” — (Verses 10, 11.)
But, as for the third case, that is to say, as respects the brethren who may find themselves united to unbelieving wives, you have a commandment of the Lord’s under the Old Testament; “I have repealed it; and I think that I have the Spirit of God! I abolish, therefore, the old order of things, and am commissioned to put a contrary order in its place. It is not the Lord (5:12), that tells you to keep with you an unbelieving wife; it is I, Paul, the apostle of Jesus Christ, not of men, neither by man, but by God the Father, and. by Jesus Christ, whom he raised from the dead.” (Gal 1:1)
Here, then, we see it as clear as noonday, that the apostle, instead of appealing to the Lord’s utterance of old, repeals it, in order to substitute an opposite order in its place; so that this passage, far from invalidating inspiration, fully confirms it; seeing that it would amount to the most outrageous blasphemy, if the apostle had not felt that in holding this language he was the mouth of God, and had he ventured to say of his own proper authority, “It is not the Lord, IT IS I! I, I say, and not the Lord — if any brother has an unbelieving wife, let him not send her away!” — The Lord had said the very contrary. (Deu 7:3; 1Ki 11:2; Ezr 10:2-3; Ezr 10:11; Ezr 10:19)
We must acknowledge, then, that these verses of St Paul, far from giving their sanction to the supposition of any human mixture in the writings of the New Testament, stand there to attest to us that in their epistles, and in the most familiar details of their epistles, the apostles were the mouth of God, and placed themselves, not only in the same line with Moses and the ancient prophets, but, further, above them; inasmuch as a second expression of God’s will ought to take precedence of that which went before it; and as the New Testament ought to surpass the Old, if not in excellence, at least in authority.
We have heard some persons still further oppose to us, as an admission of the intermittence and imperfection of his inspiration, those words of St Paul, in which, After having told the Corinthians (2Co 12:2-3) of his having been caught up into the third heaven, he adds, “Whether in the body or out of the body, I cannot tell: God knoweth.” “Can it be supposed,” it has been said, “that the Holy Ghost knew not how this miracle was performed? Necessarily, therefore, we must refer such a verse to Paul not to God.”
We reply, that though the Holy Ghost was not ignorant of it, Paul was; and that the Holy Ghost desired that Paul himself should tell us of his ignorance. Can it be forgotten that God has never ceased, in revealing himself to us in the Scriptures, to employ the personality of the sacred writers, and that it is under this form that he has desired almost constantly to instruct his Church? When David, “speaking by the Spirit,” (Mark 12:36; Acts 4:25) exclaims in the Psalms, “that he acknowledges his transgressions, and that his sin is ever before him, and that he was shapen in iniquity,” it is not the Holy Ghost, doubtless, that acknowledges his own transgressions, and that has his own sin before his eyes; but it is the Holy Ghost that put, for our sakes, those expressions of repentance in the heart and on the lips of his humbled prophet. It was in an analogous sense, that, that He could make St Paul say, “Whether in the body, I cannot tell: God knoweth.”
We are not yet done, however, with these objections. There still remain three more, which we have called evasions; because, instead of resting, like the former, on some certain argument, or facts, they are rather systems by which people imagine they can withdraw a part of the Scriptures from the action of the divine inspiration. It remains for us, therefore, to examine these.