Who Wrote the Bible? by Washington Gladden (page 4)

conversation with Nicodemus and with the woman at the well.” [Footnote: _Inspiration and the Bible,_ pp. 95-99.]

If such is the relation of the Fourth Gospel to the Synoptics, it follows that it must have been the work of one who was thoroughly familiar with the events recorded. That the narrative bears evidence of having been written by an eyewitness is to my own mind clear. That the writer intends to convey the impression that he is the beloved disciple is also manifest. Either it was written by John the Apostle, or else the writer was a deliberate deceiver. There can be no such explanation of his personation of John as that which satisfies our minds in the case of Daniel and Ecclesiastes; the book is either the work of John, or it is a cunning and conscienceless fraud. And it seems to me that any one who will read the book will find it impossible to believe that it is an imposture. If any book of the ages bears in itself the witness to the truth it is the Fourth Gospel. It shines by its own light. Any of us could tell the difference between the sun in the heavens and a brass disk suspended in the sky reflecting the sun’s rays; and in much the same way the fact is apparent that the book is not a counterfeit gospel.

It is true that historical criticism has raised difficulties about it; the battle of the critics has been raging around it for half a century; but one after another of the positions taken by men like Strauss and Baur have been shown to be untenable; and it can truthfully be said, in the words of Professor Ladd, “that the vigorous and determined attacks upon the genuineness of the Fourth Gospel have greatly increased instead of impairing our confidence in the traditional view.” [Footnote: _What is the Bible?_ p. 327.] And I am ready to go farther with the same brave but reverent scholar, and say, “Having thus grounded in historical and critical researches the genuineness of the Fourth Gospel, we have no hesitation in affirming what position it must take in Sacred Scripture. It is the heart of Jesus Christ with which we here come in contact. Inspiration and reflection uniting upon the choicest and most undoubted material of history, and fusing all the material with the holy characteristics of revelation, are nowhere else so apparent as in the Gospel of the Apostle John.” [Footnote: _Doctrine of Sacred Scripture_, i. 573]

Such, then, is the fourfold biography of Jesus the Christ preserved for us in the New Testament. If this study has removed something of the mystery with which the origin of these writings has been shrouded, it has, I trust, at the same time, made them appear more real and more human; and it has shown the providential oversight by which their artless record, many-sided, manifold, yet simple and clear as the daylight, has been preserved for us. Of these four Gospels we are certainly entitled to say as much as this, that whatever verbal discrepancies may be detected in them, and however difficult it may be satisfactorily to explain all the phenomena of their structure and relations, in one thing they marvelously agree, and that is in the picture which they give us of the life and character of Jesus Christ. In this each one of them is self-consistent, and they are all consistent with one another. And this, if we will reflect upon it, is a marvelous, not to say a miraculous fact. That four such men as these Evangelists incontestably were should have succeeded in giving us four portraitures of the Divine Man, without contradicting themselves, and without contradicting one another,–four distinct views of this wonderful Person, which show us different sides of his character, and which we yet instantly recognize as the same person, is a very great wonder. No such task was ever laid on any other human biographer as that which confronted these men; no character so difficult to comprehend and describe ever existed; for one man to preserve all the unities of art in describing him would be notable; for four men to give us, independently, four narratives, from the simple pages of which the same lineaments shine out, so that no one ever thinks of saying that the Jesus of Matthew is a different person from the Jesus of Mark or Luke or John,– this, I say, is marvelous.

And it is this character, majestic in its simplicity, glorious in its humility, the Ideal of Humanity, the Mystery of Godliness, that these Gospels are meant to show us. If they only bring him clearly before us, make his personality real and familiar and vivid before our eyes, so that we may know him and love him, that is all we want of them. Infallibility in details would be worthless if this were wanting; any small discrepancies are beneath notice if this is here. And this is here. Read for yourselves. From the page of Matthew, illuminated with the words of prophecy that tell of the Messiah’s coming; from the vivid and rapid record of Mark, in which the Wonder-worker displays his power; from the tender story of Luke, speaking the word of grace to those that are lowest down and farthest off; from the mystical Gospel of the beloved disciple opening to us the deep things that only love can see, the same divine form appears, the same divine face shines, the same divine voice is speaking. Behold the man!

CHAPTER X.

NEW TESTAMENT HISTORY AND PROPHECY.

The Acts of the Apostles contains the history of the Christian church from the time of the ascension of our Lord to the end of the second year of Paul’s first imprisonment at Rome. The period covered by the history is therefore only about thirty years. The principal events recorded in it are the great Pentecostal Revival, the Martyrdom of Stephen, the first persecution of the church and the dispersion of the disciples, the conversion and the missionary work of Paul, with the circumstances of his arrest at Jerusalem, his journey as a prisoner to Rome, and a brief account of his residence in that city. In the first part of the book Peter, the leader of the apostolic band, is the central figure; the last part is occupied with the life and work of Paul.

Who is the writer? Irenæus, about 182, names Luke as the author of the book, and speaks as though the fact were undisputed. He calls him “a follower and disciple of apostles,” and declares that “he was inseparable from Paul and was his fellow-helper in the gospel.” This is the earliest distinct reference to the book in any ancient Christian writing. After this, Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, Origen, and Eusebius bear the same testimony. But these are late witnesses. The earliest of them testified a hundred years after the death of Luke. The direct testimony to the existence of this book in the first two cenuries is not, therefore, altogether satisfactory. The indirect testimony is, however, clear and strong.

That the Acts was written by the author of the Third Gospel is scarcely doubted by any critical scholar. The fact of the identity of authorship is stated with the utmost explicitness in the introduction of the Acts. “The former treatise I made, O Theophilus, concerning all that Jesus began both to do and to teach” (Luke i. I, 2). The author of the Acts of the Apostles certainly intends to say that he is the writer of the Third Gospel. If he is not the author of the Third Gospel he is an artful and shameless deceiver. But the whole atmosphere of the book forbids the theory that it is a cunning imposition. And the internal evidence that the two books were written by the same author is ample and convincing. The style and the method of the treatment of the two books are unmistakably identical. Every page bears witness to the fact that the author of the Third Gospel and the author of the Acts are one and the same person. Now we know, beyond all reasonable doubt, that the Gospel of Luke was written certainly as early as the year 80 A. D. And there is as good reason, as we have seen already, for accepting the ancient and universal tradition of the church that Luke was its author. If Luke wrote the two books, the date of both of them is carried back to the last part of the first century. But the concluding portion of the Acts of the Apostles seems to fix the date of that book much more precisely. The author, after narrating Paul’s journey to Rome, his arrival there, and his first unsatisfactory interview with the Jewish leaders, closes his book with this compendious statement:–

“And he abode two whole years in his own hired dwelling, and received all that went in unto him, preaching the kingdom of God, and teaching all things concerning the Lord Jesus Christ with all boldness, none forbidding him.”

This is the last word in the New Testament history respecting the Apostle Paul. Now it is evident that this writer was Paul’s friend and traveling companion. It is true that he keeps himself out of sight in the history. We only know when he joined Paul by the fact that the narrative changes from the third person singular to the first person plural; he ceases to say “he,” and begins to say “we.” Thus we are made aware that he joined Paul at Troas on his second missionary journey, and went with him as far as Philippi; rejoined him at the same place on his third missionary tour, and accompanied him to Jerusalem; was his fellow- voyager on that memorable journey to Rome, and there abode with him for two years. The Epistle to the Colossians and the Epistle to Philemon were written during this imprisonment at Rome, and in both of these Epistles Paul speaks of the fact that Luke is near him. In the second letter to Timothy, which is supposed to have been written during the second imprisonment at Rome, and near the close of his life, he says again, “Only Luke is with me. Take Mark, and bring him unto me, for he is useful to me for ministering.” If the common opinion concerning the date of this letter is correct, then Luke must have remained with Paul at Rome until the close of his life. But the narrative in Luke does not give any account of the closing years of Paul’s life. It breaks off abruptly at the end of his two years’ residence in Rome. Why is this? Evidently because there is no more to tell at this time. The writer continues the history up to the date of his writing and stops there. If he had been writing after the death of Paul, he would certainly have told us of the circumstances of his death. There is no rational explanation of this abrupt ending, except that the book was written at about the time when the story closes. This was certainly about 63 A. D. And if the Book of Acts was written as early as this, the Gospel of Luke, the “former treatise” by the same author, must have been written earlier than this. Thus the Book of Acts not only furnishes strong evidence of its own early date, but helps to establish the early date of the third Gospel.

These conclusions, to my own mind, are irresistible. No theory which consists with the common honesty of the writer can bring these books down to a later date. And I cannot doubt the honesty of the writer. His writings prove him to be a careful, painstaking, veracious historian. In many slight matters this accuracy appears. The political structure of the Roman Empire at this time was somewhat complicated. The provinces were divided between the Emperor and the Senate; those heads of provinces who were directly responsible to the Emperor and the military authorities were called proprætors; those who were under the jurisdiction of the Senate were called proconsuls. In mentioning these officers Luke never makes a mistake; he gets the precise title every time. Once, indeed, the critics thought they had caught him in an error. Sergius Paulus, the Roman ruler of Cyprus, he calls proconsul. “Wrong!” said the critics, “Cyprus was an imperial province; the title of this officer must have been proprætor.” But when the critics studied a little more, they found out that Augustus put this province back under the Senate, so that Luke’s title is exactly right. And to clinch the matter, old coins of this very date have been found in Cyprus, giving to the chief magistrate of the island the title of proconsul. Such evidences of the accuracy of the writer are not wanting. It is needless to insist that he never makes a mistake; doubtless he does, in some small matters, and we have learned to take such a view of the inspiration of the Scriptures that the discovery of some small error does not trouble us in the least; but the admission that he is not infallible is perfectly consistent with the belief that he is an honest, competent, faithful witness. This is all that he claims for himself, this is all that we claim for him, but this we do claim. We do not believe that he was a conscienceless impostor. We do not believe that the man who told the story of Ananias and Sapphira was himself a monumental liar. We believe that he meant to tell the truth, and the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Therefore, we believe that he lived in the times of the apostles, and received from them, as he says that he did, the facts that he recorded in his Gospel; that he was the traveling companion and missionary helper of Paul, as he intimates that he was, and that he has given us a true account of the life and work of that great apostle.

The constant and undesigned coincidences between the Acts of the Apostles and the Epistles of Paul–the many ways in which the personal and historical references of the latter support the statements of the former–are also strong evidence of the genuineness of the Acts. Putting all these indirect and incidental proofs together the historical verity of the Acts seems to me very firmly established. That there are critical difficulties may be admitted; some passages of this ancient writing are not easily explained; there are discrepancies, for example, between the story of the resurrection and ascension of Christ as told in Luke and the same story as related in the Acts; possibly the writer obtained fuller information in the interval between the publication of these two books by which he corrected the earlier narrative. In the different accounts of the conversion of Paul there are also disagreements which we cannot reconcile; nevertheless, in the words of Dr. Donaldson, “Even these very accounts contain evidence in them that they were written by the same writer, and they do not destroy the force of the rest of the evidence.” [Footnote: _Encyc. Brit._, i. 124. ]

The theory of Baur that this book was written in the last part of the second century by a disciple of St. Paul, and that it is mainly a work of fiction, intended to bring about a reconciliation between two bitterly hostile parties in the church, the Pauline and the Petrine sects, need not detain us long. Baur contends that the church in the first two centuries was split in twain, the followers of Peter insisting that no man could become a Christian without first becoming a Jew, the followers of Paul maintaining that the Jewish ritual was abolished, and that the Gentiles ought to have immediate access to the Christian fellowship. Their antagonism was so radical and far-reaching that at the end of the apostolic age the two parties had no dealings with each other. “Then,” in the words of Professor Fisher, who is here summarizing the theory of Baur, “followed attempts to reconcile the difference, and to bridge the gulf that separated Gentile from Jewish, Pauline from Petrine Christianity. To this end various irenical and compromising books were written in the name of the apostles and their helpers. The most important monument of this pacifying effort is the Book of Acts, written in the earlier part of the second century by a Pauline Christian who, by making Paul something of a Judaizer, and then representing Peter as agreeing with him in the recognition of the rights of the Gentiles, hoped, not in vain, to produce a mutual friendliness between the respective partisans of the rival apostles. The Acts is a fiction founded on facts, and written for a specific doctrinal purpose. The narrative of the council or conference of the Apostles, for example (Acts xx.), is pronounced a pure invention of the writer, and such a representation of the condition of things as is inconsistent with Paul’s own statements, and for this and other reasons plainly false. The same ground is taken in respect to the conversion of Cornelius, and the vision of Peter concerning it.” [Footnote: _The Supernatural Origin of Christianity,_ pp. 211,212.]

For this theory there is, of course, some slight historical basis. It is true, as we have seen, that Peter and Paul did have a sharp disagreement on this very question at Antioch. It is also true that both these great apostles behaved quite inconsistently, Peter at Antioch, and Paul afterwards at Jerusalem, when he consented to the propositions of the Judaizers, and burdened himself with certain Jewish observances in a vain attempt to conciliate some of the weaker brethren. That the story of the Acts unflinchingly shows us the weaknesses and errors of the great apostles is good evidence of its veracity. But the notion that it is a work of fiction fabricated for such purposes as are outlined above is utterly incredible. Those Epistles of Paul which Baur admits to be genuine contain abundant disproof of his theory. There never was any such schism as he fancies. Paul spends a good part of his time in his last missionary journey in collecting funds for the relief of those poor “saints,” for so he calls them, at Jerusalem; and every reference that he makes to them is of the most affectionate character. Paul recognizes in the most emphatic way the authority of the other apostles, and the fellowship of labor and suffering by which he is united to them. All this and much more of the same import we find in those epistles which Baur admits to be the genuine writings of Paul. In short, it may be said that after the thorough discussion to which his theory has been subjected for the last twenty-five years, it has scarcely a sound leg left to stand on. It may be admitted to be one of the most brilliant works of the historical imagination which the century has produced. It is supported by vast learning, and it has thrown much light on certain movements of the early church; but, taken as a whole it is unscientific and contradictory; it raises two difficulties, where it disposes of one, and it ignores more facts than it includes.

We return from this excursion through the fields of destructive criticism with a strong conviction that this narrative of the Acts of the Apostles was written by Luke the Evangelist, the companion and fellow-worker of Paul, and that it gives us a veracious history of the earliest years of the Christian church.

The last of the New Testament books does not belong chronologically at the end of the collection. There was a tradition, to which Irenæus gives currency, that it was written during the reign of Domitian, about 97 or 98 A. D. But this tradition is now almost universally discredited. Critics of all classes date the book as early as 75-79 A. D., while the best authorities put it nearly ten years earlier, in the autumn of 68 or the spring of 69. As Archdeacon Farrar suggests, it would be vastly better if these books of the New Testament were arranged in true chronological order; they could be more easily understood. The fact that this weird production stands at the end of the collection has made upon many minds a wrong impression as to its meaning, and has given it a kind of significance to which it is not entitled.

The authorship of the book is quite generally ascribed to John the son of Zebedee, brother of James, and one of the apostles of our Lord. Even the destructive critics agree to this; some among them say that there is less doubt about the date and the authorship of this book than about almost any other New Testament writing. In making this concession they intend, however, to discredit the Johannine authorship of the Fourth Gospel. The more certain we are that John wrote the Revelation, they argue, the more certain are we that he did not write the Gospel which bears his name; for the style of the two writings is so glaringly contrasted that it is simply impossible that both could have come from the same writer. This does not seem nearly so clear to me as it does to some of these learned and perspicacious critics. A great contrast there is, indeed, between the style of the Revelation and that of the Gospel; but this contrast may be explained. It is said, in the first place, that the Greek of the Apocalypse is very bad Greek, full of ungrammatical sentences, abounding in Hebraisms, while that of the Gospel is good Greek, accurate and rhetorical in its structure. But this is by no means an unaccountable phenomenon. The first book was written by the apostle very soon, probably, after his removal to Ephesus. He had never, I suppose, been accustomed to use the Greek familiarly in his own country; had never written in it at all, and it is not strange that he should express himself awkwardly when he first began to write Greek; that the Aramaic idioms should constantly reproduce themselves in his Greek sentences. After he had been living for twenty-five years in the cultivated Greek city of Ephesus, using the Greek language continually, it is probable that he would write it more elegantly.

But it is said that the rhetorical style of the one book differs radically from that of the other. Doubtless. The one book is an apocalypse, the other is a biography. John may not have been a practiced _litterateur,_ but he certainly had literary sense and feeling enough to know how to put a very different color and atmosphere into an apocalyptical writing from that which he would employ in a report of the life and words of Jesus. Without any reflection, indeed, he would instinctively use the apocalyptic imagery; his pages would flare and resound with the lurid symbolism peculiar to the apocalypses. How definite a type of literature this was we shall presently see; no writer, while using it, would clearly manifest his own personality. And if through all this disguise we do discern symptoms of a temper more fervid and a spirit more Judaic than that which finds expression in the Fourth Gospel, let us remember that the ripened wisdom of the old man speaks in the latter, and the intense enthusiasm of conscious strength in the former. This John, let us not forget, was not in his youth a paragon of mildness; it was he and his brother James who earned the sobriquet of Boanerges, “Sons of thunder;” it was they who wanted to call down fire from heaven to consume an inhospitable Samaritan village. Moreover, we shall see as we go on that the times in which this apocalypse was written were times in which the mildest, mannered men would be apt to forget their decorum, and speak with unwonted intensity. A man with any blood in him, who undertook to write in the year 68 of the themes with which the soul of this apostle was then on fire, would be likely to show, no matter in what vehicle of speech his thought might be conveyed, some sign of the tumult then raging within him.

All these circumstances, taken together, enable me to explain the difference between the literary form of the Revelation and that of the Gospel. But when we come to look a little more deeply into the meaning of the two books, we shall find that beneath all this dissimilarity there are some remarkable points of agreement. Quite a number of the leading ideas and conceptions of the one book reappear in the other; the idea of Christ as the _Word_ or _Logos_ of God, the representation of Christ as the Lamb, as the Good Shepherd, as the Light, are peculiar to John; we find them emphasized in the Gospel and in the Revelation. The unity of the two books in fundamental conceptions has been admirably brought out by Dr. Sears, in his volume entitled “The Heart of Christ.” And after weighing the evidence, I find neither historical nor psychological reasons sufficient to overthrow my belief that the Fourth Gospel, as well as the Revelation, was written by John the Apostle.

The Greek name of the book means an uncovering or unveiling, and is fairly interpreted, therefore, by our word Revelation. It belongs to a class of books which were produced in great numbers during the two centuries preceding the birth of Christ and the two centuries following; and no one can understand it or interpret it who does not know something of this species of literature, of the forms of expression peculiar to it, and of the purposes which it was intended to serve.

We have in the Old Testament one Apocalyptic book, that of Daniel, and there are apocalyptical elements in two or three of the prophecies. The fact that the Book of Daniel bears this character is a strong argument for the lateness of its origin; for it was in the last years of the Jewish nationality that this kind of writing became popular. We have six or seven books of this kind, which are written mainly from the standpoint of the old dispensation, part of which appeared just before and part shortly after the beginning of our era; and there are nearly a dozen volumes of Christian apocalypses, all of which employ similar forms of expression, and are directed towards similar ends. Doubtless these are only a few of the great number of apocalyptical books which those ages produced. Their characteristics are well set forth by Dr. Davidson:–

“This branch of later Jewish literature took its rise after the older prophecy had ceased, when Israel suffered sorely from Syrian and Roman oppression. Its object was to encourage and comfort the people by holding forth the speedy restoration of the Davidic Kingdom of Messiah. Attaching itself to the national hope, it proclaimed the impending of a glorious future, in which Israel freed from her enemies should enjoy a peaceful and prosperous life under her long-wished-for deliverer. The old prophets became the vehicle of these utterances. Revelations, sketching the history of Israel and of heathenism, are put into their mouths. The prophecies take the form of symbolical images and marvelous visions…. Working in this fashion upon the basis of well-known writings, imitating their style, and artificially reproducing their substance, the authors naturally adopted the anonymous. The difficulty was increased by their having to paint as future, events actually near, and to fit the manifestation of a personal Messiah into the history of the times. Many apocalyptists employed obscure symbols and mysterious pictures, veiling the meaning that it might not be readily seen. [Footnote: _Encyc. Brit._, i. 174. ]

“Every time,” says Dr. Harnack, “the political situation culminated in a crisis for the people of God, the apocalypses appeared stirring up the believers; in spirit, form, plan, and execution they closely resembled each other…. They all spoke in riddles; that is, by means of images, symbols, mystic numbers, forms of animals, etc., they half concealed what they meant to reveal. The reasons for this procedure are not far to seek: (1.) Clearness and distinctness would have been too profane; only the mysterious appears divine. (2.) It was often dangerous to be too distinct.” [Footnote: _Encyc. Brit._, xx. 496. ]

That these writings appeared in troublous times, and that they dealt with affairs of the present and of the immediate future, must always be borne in mind. Certain symbolical conceptions are common to them; earthquakes denote revolutions; stars falling from heaven typify the downfall of kings and dynasties; a beast is often the emblem of a tyrant; the turning of the sun into darkness and the moon into blood signify carnage and destruction upon the earth. We have these symbolisms in several of the Old Testament writings as well as in many of the apocalyptical books which are not in our canon; and the interpretation of such passages is not at all difficult when we understand the usage of the writers.

Of these apocalyptic books one of the most remarkable is the Book of Enoch, which appears to have been written a century or two before Christ. It purports to be a revelation made to and through the patriarch Enoch; it contains an account of the fall of the angels, and of a progeny of giants that sprung from the union of these exiled celestials with the daughters of men; it takes Enoch on a tour of observation through heaven and earth under the guidance of angels, who explain to him many things supernal and mundane; it deals in astronomical and meteorological mysteries of various sorts, and in a series of symbolical visions seeks to disclose the events of the future. It is a grotesque production; one does not find much spiritual nutriment in it, but Jude makes a quotation from it, in his epistle, as if he considered it Holy Scripture.

“The Fourth Book of Esdras” is another Jewish book of the same kind, which may have been written about the hundredth year of our era. It purports to be the work of Ezra, whom it misplaces, chronologically, putting him in the thirtieth year of the Captivity. The problem of the writer is the restoration of the nation, destroyed and scattered by the Roman power. He makes the ancient scribe and law-giver of Israel his mouthpiece, but he is dealing with the events of his own time. Nevertheless, his allusions are veiled and obscure; he speaks in riddles, yet he speaks to a people who understand his riddles, and know how to take his symbolic visions. This book is in our English Apocrypha, under the title 2 Esdras.

“The Book of Jubilees,” which assumes to be a revelation made to Moses on Mount Sinai, “The Ascension of Moses,” “The Apocalypse of Moses,” and the “Apocalypse of Baruch,” are other similar books of the Jewish literature.

Of apocalyptical Christian writings, I may mention “The Sibylline Books,” “The Apocalypse of Paul,” “The Apocalypse of Peter,” “The Revelation of Bartholomew,” and “The Ascension of Isaiah,” and there is also another “Apocalypse of John,” a feeble imitation of the one with which our canon closes. These books appeared in the second, third, and fourth centuries of our era; they generally look forward to the second coming of Christ, and set forth in various figures and symbols the conflicts and persecutions which his saints must encounter, the destruction of his foes, and the establishment of his kingdom.

It will be seen, therefore, that the Revelation of St. John is not unique; and the inference will not be rash that much light may be thrown upon its dark sayings by a careful study of kindred books.

It may be answered that the writer of this book is inspired, and that nothing can be learned of the meaning of an inspired book by studying uninspired books. I reply that no inspired book can be understood at all without a careful study of uninspired books. The Greek grammar and the Greek lexicon are uninspired books, and no man can understand a single one of the books of the New Testament without carefully studying both of them, or else availing himself of the labor of some one else who has diligently studied them. An inspired writer uses language,–the same language that uninspired writers use; the meaning of language is fixed not by inspiration, but by usage; you must study the grammar and the lexicon to learn about the usage. And the case is precisely similar when an inspired writer uses a peculiar form of literature like the apocalyptical writings. He knows when he uses symbolisms of this class that they will be interpreted according to the common usage; he expects and desires that they shall be so understood; and, therefore, in order to understand them, we must know what the usage is.

When our Lord, speaking of the calamities which were about to fall upon the Jewish people, said, “Immediately after the tribulation of those days, the sun shall be darkened, and the moon shall not give her light, and the stars shall fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens shall be shaken,” he was speaking to people who were perfectly familiar with language of this sort, because the same expressions occur over and over again in their prophets, and are there distinctly declared to mean great political overturnings. He used the apocalyptic phraseology, and he expected them to give it the apocalyptic signification. If we wish to understand the Scripture, we must understand the language of Scripture, and this means not only the grammatical forms, but also the symbolic usages of the language.

We have seen that the apocalypses are apt to appear in times of great calamity, and we have accepted the verdict of later scholarship, that this Apocalypse of St. John appeared about 68 or 69 A.D. Was this a time of trouble in that Eastern world? Verily it was; the most appalling hour perhaps in the world’s history. The unspeakable Nero was either still upon the throne of the Roman Empire, or had just reeled from that eminence to the doom of a craven suicide. The last years of his life were gorged with horror. The murder of his brother, the burning of Rome, probably by his connivance, if not by his command, in order that he might sate his appetite for sensations upon this horrid spectacle; following this the fiendish scheme to charge this incendiarism upon the Christians, and slaughter them by tens of thousands in all the cities of the Empire,–these are only instances of a career which words are too feeble to portray. Those who succeeded him in this supreme power were not much less ferocious; the very name of pity seemed to have been blotted from the Roman speech; the whole Empire reeked with cruelty and perfidy. While such men ruled at Rome it could not be supposed that the imperial representatives in the provinces would be temperate and just. Some of them, at any rate, had learned the lesson of the hour, and were as perfidious, as truculent, as base as their master could have wished. Such a one was that Gessius Floras who was the procurator of Judea, and who seemed to have exhausted the ingenuity of a malignant nature in stirring up the Jews to insurrection. By every species of indignity and cruelty he finally stung the long-suffering people into a perfect fury, and the rebellion which broke out in Palestine in the year 66 was one of the most fearful eruptions of human nature that the world has ever seen. Florus had raised the demon; now the legions of Rome must be called in to exorcise it. It was a terrible struggle. All the energies of Jewish fanaticisms were enlisted; the Zealots, the fiercest party among them, not content with slaughtering their Roman enemies, turned their hands against every man of their own nation who ventured to question the wisdom of their desperate resistance. In Jerusalem itself a reign of terror raged which makes the French Revolution seem in comparison a calm and orderly procedure.

At the beginning of the outbreak Nero had sent one of his trusted generals, Vespasian, and Vespasian’s son Titus, to put down the insurrection. Neither of these soldiers was a sentimentalist; both believed as heartily as did Wentworth in later years that the word of the hour was Thorough. They started with their armies from Antioch in March, 67, resolved on sweeping Palestine with the besom of destruction. Cities and villages, one by one, were besieged, captured, destroyed; men, women, and children were indiscriminately massacred. The Jewish army fought every inch of the ground like tigers; but they were overpowered and beaten in detail, and steadily forced southward. Blackened walls, pools of blood, and putrefying corpses were all that the Romans left in their rear; ruthlessly they drove the doomed people before them toward their stronghold of Jerusalem. In the autumn of that year Vespasian withdrew his army into winter-quarters, and left the Zealots in Jerusalem to their orgy of brigandage and butchery. He could well afford to rest and let them do his deadly work.

In the spring of the following year, the siege of Jerusalem began. The Christians of the city had fled to Pella, east of the Jordan; the remnant of the Jews held their sacred heights with the courage of despair.

It is at this very juncture that this book of the Revelation was written. John testifies that it was written on Patmos, a desolate islet of the Ægean Sea, west of Asia Minor, to which he had either been banished by some tool of Nero, or else had betaken himself for solitude and reflection. To him, in this retreat, the awful tidings had come of the scourge that had fallen on the land of his fathers; added to this, the conflagration at Rome, the Neronian persecution, all the horrors of the past decade were fresh in his memory. May we not say that the time was ripe for an apocalyptic message?

It is in these events, then, that we must find the explanation of much of this symbolical language. Such is the law of the apocalypse, and this apocalypse may be expected to conform to the law. St. John is instructed by the angel to write “the things which thou sawest, and the things which are, and the things which shall come to pass hereafter,”–“the things which must _shortly_ come to pass,” the first verse more explicitly states. It is the past which he has seen, the present, and the immediate future with which his visions are concerned. It is not any attempt to outline the whole course of human history; it is the picture, in mystic symbols, of the present crisis and of the deliverance which is to follow it. There is no room here for a commentary on the Apocalypse; I will only indicate, in a rapid glance, the outline of the book.

The first three chapters are occupied with the epistles to the seven churches which are in Asia, administering reproof, exhortation, comfort, and counsel to the Christians in these churches,–faithful, stirring, persuasive appeals, whose meaning can be easily understood, and whose truth is often sorely needed by the churches of our own time.

Then begins the proper Apocalypse, with the first vision of the throne in heaven, and sitting thereon the Lamb that was slain, who is also the Lion of the tribe of Judah. The book sealed with seven seals is given to him to open, and the opening of each seal discloses a new vision. The first seal opened shows a white horse bearing a rider who carries a bow and wears a crown, and who goes forth conquering and to conquer. This is the emblem of the Messiah whose conquest of the world is represented as beginning. But the Messiah once said, “I came not to bring peace, but a sword,” and the consequences of his coming must often be strife and sorrow because of the malignity of men. And therefore the three seals which are opened next disclose a fiery horse, the symbol of War, a black horse, whose rider is Famine, a pale horse in whose saddle is Death. The opening of the fifth seal shows the martyred multitude before the throne of God. The sixth discloses the desolation and the ruin taking place upon the earth. Thus the mighty panorama passes constantly before our eyes; the confusion, the devastation, the woes, the scourges of mankind through which Messiah’s Kingdom is advancing to its triumph. The seals, the trumpets, the vials bring before us representations of the retributions and calamities which are falling upon mankind. Sometimes we seem to be able to fix upon a historical event which the vision clearly symbolizes; sometimes the meaning to us is vague; perhaps if we had lived in that day the allusion would have been more intelligible.

There is, however, one great central group of these visions round about which the others seem to be arrayed as scenic accessories, whose interpretation the writer has taken great pains to indicate. These are the visions found in chapters xii., xiii., xvi., and xvii. The woman, sun-clad, with the moon under her feet and a crown of twelve stars upon her head (chap, xii.), is beyond all question the ancient Jewish church; the child which is born to the woman is the Christian church; the great red dragon that seeks to devour the child is the Satanic power, the Prince of this world. The Dragon is here on the earth because he has been expelled from heaven. The war of the Dragon against the woman indicates the persecutions of the church; the flight of the woman to the wilderness may symbolize the recent escape of the mother church from Jerusalem to Pella.

The next vision shows a Beast, coming up out of the sea, with seven heads and ten horns, and on his horns ten diadems, and on his heads names of blasphemy. Here we have an instance of that confounding of symbols, the merging of one in another, which is very common in the apocalyptic writings. The beast is, primarily, Nero, or the Roman Empire, as represented by–Nero. The ten horns are the ten chief provinces; the seven heads are seven emperors. “It is a symbol,” says Dr. Farrar, “interchangeably of the Roman Empire and of the Emperor. In fact, to a greater degree than at any period of history, the two were one. Roman history had dwindled down into a personal drama. The Roman Emperor could say with literal truth, _’L’Etat c’est moi’_. And a wild beast was a Jew’s natural symbol either for a Pagan Kingdom or for its autocrat.” [Footnote: _The Early Days of Christianity_, p. 463.] I can do no better than to repeat to you a small part of Dr. Farrar’s further comment upon this vision.

“This wild beast of Heathen Rome has ten horns, which represent the ten main provinces of Imperial Rome. It has the power of the Dragon, that is, it possesses the Satanic dominion of the ‘Prince of the power of the air.’

“On each of its heads is the name of blasphemy. Every one of the seven Kings, however counted, had borne the (to Jewish ears) blasphemous surname of Augustus (Sebastos, one to be adored); had received apotheosis, and been spoken of as _Divine_ after his death; had been crowned with statues, adorned with divine attributes, had been saluted with divine titles, and, in some instances, had been absolutely worshiped, and that in his lifetime….

“The diadems are on the horns, because the Roman _Proconsuls_, as delegates of the Emperor, enjoy no little share of the Cæsarean autocracy and splendor, but the name of blasphemy is only on the heads, because the Emperor alone receives divine honors and alone bears the daring title of Augustus.” [Footnote: _Ibid_., p. 464.]

One of the heads of this Beast was wounded to death, but the deadly wound was healed. It was the universal belief among Pagans and Christians that the world had not yet seen the last of Nero. Either his suicide was feigned and ineffectual, and he was in hiding, or else he would come to life and resume his savage splendors and his gilded villainies. To make it certain that the writer here refers to this expectation, we find, in chapter xvii., another reference to the Beast, which seems at first a riddle, but which is easily interpreted. “The five are fallen, the one is, the other is not yet come”; “The Beast that thou sawest was and is not, and is about to come out of the abyss.” “The Beast that was and is not, even he is an eighth, and is of the seven.” The head and the Beast are here identified. The meaning is that five Roman Emperors are dead, Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, Nero; “one is,”–Galba is now reigning; “the other” (Otho) “is not yet come;” but he must come soon for Galba is an old man and cannot long survive, and “the Beast that was and is not,”–Nero,–who is “about to come out of the abyss,”–to return to life,–“even he is an eighth, and is of the seven.” He is one of the seven, for he was the fifth, and he will be the eighth. It was the universal Christian belief that Nero, raised from the dead, would be the future Antichrist, and it is this belief which the vision reflects. To make the case still clearer the writer gives us, by the current Hebrew Kabbalistic method, the number of the Beast, that is to say, the numerical value of his name. Each letter of the old alphabets has a numerical value. Thus the writer of the Sibyllines points out the Greek name of Jesus–Ιησους,–by saying that its whole number is equivalent to eight units, eight tens, and eight hundreds. This is the exact numerical value of the six Greek letters composing the Saviour’s name, 10+8+200+70+400+200=888. Precisely so John here tells us what is the numerical value of the letters in the name of the Beast. If we tried the Latin or the Greek names of Nero the clue would not be found; but John was writing mainly for Hebrews, and the Hebrew letters of _Kesar Neron_, the name by which every Jew knew this Emperor, amount to exactly 666.

Many other of the features of this veiled description tally perfectly with the character of this infamous ruler; and when the evidence is all brought together it seems as though the apostle could scarcely have made his meaning more obvious if he had written Nero’s name in capital letters.

This is the central vision of the Apocalypse, as I have said; round about this the whole cyclorama revolves; and it has been the standing enigma of the interpreters in all the ages. The early church generally divined its meaning; but in later years the high-soaring exegesis which has spread this Apocalypse all over the centuries and found in it prophetic symbols of almost all the events that have happened in mediæval and modern history, has identified the Beast with countless characters, among them Genseric, King of the Vandals, Benedict, Trajan, Paul V., Calvin, Luther, Mohammed, Napoleon. All this wild guessing arises from ignorance of the essential character and purpose of the apocalyptical writings.

I can follow this enticing theme no further. Let it suffice to call the attention of all who desire to reach some sober conclusions upon the meaning of the book to Archdeacon Farrar’s “Early Days of Christianity,” in which the whole subject is treated with the amplest learning and the soundest literary judgment.

The Book of Revelation has been, as I have intimated, the favorite tramping ground of all the hosts of theological visionaries; men who possessed not the slightest knowledge of the history or the nature of apocalyptic literature, and whose appetite for the mysterious and the monstrous was insatiable, have expatiated here with boundless license. To find in these visions descriptions of events now passing and characters now upon the stage is a sore temptation. To use these hard words, the Beast, the Dragon, the False Prophet, as missiles wherewith to assail those who belong to a school or a party with which you are at variance, is a chance that no properly constituted partisan could willingly fore-go. Thus we have seen this book dragged into the controversies and applied to the events of all the centuries, and the history of its interpretation is, as one of its interpreters confesses, the opprobrium of exegesis. But if one ceases to look among these symbols for a predictive outline of modern history, “a sort of anticipated Gibbon,” and begins to read it in the light of the apocalyptic method, it may have rich and large meanings for him. He will not be able, indeed, to explain it all; to some of these riddles the clue has been lost; but, in the words of Dr. Farrar, “he will find that the Apocalypse is what it professes to be,–an inspired outline of contemporary history, and of the events to which the sixth decade of the first century gave immediate rise. He will read in it the tremendous manifesto of a Christian seer against the blood-stained triumph of imperial heathenism; a pæan and a prophecy over the ashes of the martyrs; the thundering reverberations of a mighty spirit struck by the fierce plectrum of the Neronian persecution, and answering in impassioned music which, like many of David’s Psalms, dies away into the language of rapturous hope.” [Footnote: _Early Days of Christianity_, p. 429. ]

For we must not forget that this is a song of triumph. This seer is no pessimist. The strife is hot, the carnage is fearful, they that rise up against our Lord and his Messiah are many and mighty, but there is no misgiving as to the event. For all these woes there is solace, after all these conflicts peace. Even in the midst of the raging wars and persecutions, the door is opened now and again into the upper realm of endless joy and unfading light. And he “whose name is called The Word of God,” upon whose garment and whose thigh the name is written, “King of Kings and Lord of Lords,” will prevail at last over all his foes. The Beast and the Dragon, and the False Prophet and the Scarlet Woman (the harlot city upon her seven hills whose mystic name is Babylon) will all be cast into the lake of fire; then to the purified earth the New Jerusalem shall come down out of heaven from God. This is the emblem and the prophecy, not of the city beyond the stars, but of the purified society which shall yet exist upon the earth,–the fruition of his work who came, not to judge the world, but to save the world. It is on these plains, along these rivers, by these fair shores that the New Jerusalem is to stand; it is not heaven; it is a city that comes down out of heaven from God. No statement could be more explicit. The glorious visions which fill the last chapters of this wonderful book are the promise of that “All hail Hereafter,” for which every Christian patriot, every lover of mankind, is always looking and longing and fighting and waiting. And he who, by the mouth of this seer, testifieth the words of the prophecy of this book saith, “Yea, I come quickly. Even so, come, Lord Jesus.”

CHAPTER XI.

THE CANON.

We have studied with what care we were able tee historical problem of the origin and authorship of the several books of the Old and New Testament; we now come to a deeply interesting question,–the question of the canon.

This word, as used in this connection, means simply an authoritative list or catalogue. The canon of the Bible is the determined and official table of contents. The settlement of the canon is the process of determining what and how many books the Bible shall contain. In the Old Testament are thirty-nine books, in the New Testament twenty-seven; and it is a fixed principle with Protestants that these books and no others constitute the Sacred Scriptures,–that no more can be added and none taken away.

The popular belief respecting this matter has been largely founded upon the words with which the Book of Revelation concludes:–

“For I testify unto every man that heareth the words of the prophecy of this book, If any man shall add unto them, God shall add unto him the plagues which are written in this book: and if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part from the tree of life, and out of the holy city, which are written in this book.”

The common notion is that the “book” here referred to is the Bible; and that these sentences, therefore, are the divine authorization of the present contents of the Bible, a solemn testimony from the Lord himself to the integrity of the canon. But this is a misapprehension. The book referred to is the Revelation of St. John,–not the Bible, not even the New Testament. When these words were written, says Dr. Barnes in his “Commentary,” “the books that now constitute what we call the Bible were not collected into a single volume. That passage, therefore, should not be adduced as referring to the whole of the Sacred Scriptures.” In fact, when these words of the Revelation were written, several of the books of the New Testament were not yet in existence; for this is by no means the last of the New Testament writings, though it stands at the end of the collection. The Gospel and the Epistles of John were added after this; and we may trust that no plagues were “added” to the beloved disciple for writing them.

Nevertheless, as I said, it is assumed that the contents of the Bible are fixed; that the collection is and for a long time has been complete and perfect; that it admits neither of subtractions nor of additions; that nothing is in the book which ought not to be there, and that there is nothing outside of its covers which ought to be within them; that the canon is settled, inflexibly and infallibly and finally.

The questions now to be considered are these: Who settled it? When was it settled? On what grounds was it determined? Was any question ever raised concerning the sacredness or authority of any of the books now included in the canon? Did any other books, not now included in the canon, ever claim a place in it? If so, why were these rejected and those retained?

This is, as will be seen, a simple question of history. We can trace with tolerable certainty the steps by which this collection of sacred writings was made; we know pretty well who did it, and when and how it was done. And there is nothing profane or irreverent in this inquiry, for the work of collecting these writings and fixing this canon has been done mainly, if not wholly, by men who were not inspired and did not claim to be. There is nothing mysterious or miraculous about their doings any more than there is about the acts of the framers of the Westminster Confession, or the American Constitution. They were dealing with sacred matters, no doubt, when they were trying to determine what books should be received and used as Scriptures, but they were dealing with them in exactly the same way that we do, by using the best lights they had.

As we have learned in previous chapters, the beginning of our canon was made by Ezra the scribe, who, in the fifth century before Christ, newly published and consecrated the Pentateuch, or Five Books of Moses, as the Holy Book of the Jewish people.

After Ezra came Nehemiah, to whom the beginning of the second collection of Jewish Scriptures, called the Prophets, is ascribed in one of the apocryphal books. But this collection was not apparently finished and closed by Nehemiah. The histories of Joshua and Judges, of Samuel and Kings, and the principal books of the Prophets were undoubtedly gathered by him; but it would seem that the collection was left open for future prophecies.

About the same time the third group of the Old Testament Scriptures, “The Hagiographa,” or “Writings,” began to be collected. No book of the Bible contains any information concerning the making of these two later collections, the Prophets and the Hagiographa; and we are obliged to rely wholly upon Jewish tradition, and upon references which we find in Jewish writers. Professor Westcott, who is one of the most conservative of Biblical scholars, says that “the combined evidence of tradition and of the general course of Jewish history leads to the conclusion that the canon in its present shape was formed gradually during a lengthened interval, beginning with Ezra and extending through a part, or even the whole of the Persian period,” or from B.C. 458 to 332. Without adopting this conclusion, we may remark that this last date, 332, was nearly a century after Nehemiah and Malachi, the last of the prophets; so that if the canon was closed at a date so late as this, it must have been closed by men who were certainly not known to have been inspired. If it was forming, through all this period, then it must have been formed in part by men in behalf of whom no claim of inspiration has ever been set up.

According to Jewish tradition the work of collecting, editing, and authorizing the sacred writings was done by a certain “Great Synagogue,” founded by Ezra, presided over by Nehemiah, after him, and continuing in existence down to about the year 200 B.C. This is wholly a tradition, and has been proved to be baseless. There never was such a synagogue; the Scriptures know nothing about it; the apocryphal writers, so numerous and widely dispersed, have never heard of it; Philo and Josephus are ignorant concerning it. None of the Jewish authors of the period who freely discuss the Scriptures and their authority makes mention of this Great Synagogue. The story of its existence is first heard from some Jewish rabbin hundreds of years after Christ.

We have proof enough in the New Testament that the Jews had certain Sacred Scriptures; the New Testament writers often quote them and refer to them; but there is no conclusive proof that they had been gathered at this time into a complete collection. Jesus tells the Jews that they search the Scriptures, but he does not say how many of these Scriptures there were in his day; Paul reminds Timothy that from a child he had known the Holy Scriptures, but he gives no list of their titles. If we found all the books of the Old Testament quoted or referred to by the New Testament writers, then we should know that they possessed the same books that we have. Most of these books are thus referred to; but there are seven Old Testament books whose names the New Testament never quotes, and at least five to which it makes no reference whatever: Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon, Esther, Ezra, and Nehemiah. To Judges, Chronicles, and Ezekiel it refers only in the same way that it refers to a number of the apocryphal books. Some of these omissions appear to be significant. The New Testament gives us therefore no definite information by which we can determine whether the Old Testament canon was closed at the time of Christ, nor does it tell us of what books it was composed.

We have seen already that two different collections of Old Testament writings were in existence, one in Hebrew, and the other a translation into the Greek, made by Jews in Alexandria, and called the Septuagint. The latter collection was the one most used by our Lord and the apostles; much the greater number of quotations from the Old Testament found in the Gospels and the Epistles are taken from the Septuagint. This Greek Bible contained quite a number of books which are not in the Hebrew Bible: they were later in their origin than any of the Old Testament books; most of them were originally written in Greek; and while they were regarded by some of the more conservative of the Jews in Egypt as inferior to the Law and the Prophets, they were generally ranked with the books of the Hagiographa as sacred writings. This is evident from the fact that they were mingled indiscriminately with these books of the older Scriptures. You know that I am speaking now of the apocryphal books which you find in some of your old Bibles, between the Old and New Testaments. These were the later books contained in the Septuagint, and not in the Hebrew Bible. But they were not sorted out by themselves in the Septuagint; they were interspersed through the other books, as of equal value. Thus in the Vatican Bible, of which we shall learn more by and by, Esdras First and Second succeed the Chronicles; Tobit and Judith are between Nehemiah and Esther; the Wisdom of Solomon and Sirach follow Solomon’s Song; Baruch is next to Jeremiah; Daniel is followed by Susanna and Bel and the Dragon, and the collection closes with the three books of Maccabees.

All the old manuscripts of the Bible which we possess–those which are regarded as above all others sacred and authoritative–contain these apocryphal writings thus intermingled with the books of our own canon. It is clear, therefore, that to the Alexandrian Jews these later books were Sacred Scriptures; and it is certain also that our Lord and his apostles used the collection which contained these books. It is said that they do not refer to them, and it is true that they do not mention them by name; but they do use them occasionally. Let me read you a few passages which will illustrate their familiarity with the apocryphal books.

James i.19: “Let every man be swift to hear, slow to speak.” Sirach v. 11; iv. 29: “Be swift to hear.” “Be not hasty in thy tongue.”

Hebrews i. 3: “Who being the effulgence of his glory, and the very image of his substance, and upholding all things by the word of his power.” Wisdom vii. 26: “For she (Wisdom) is the brightness of the everlasting light, the unspotted mirror of the power of God, and the image of his goodness.”

Rom. ix. 21: “Hath not the potter a right over the clay, from the same lump to make one part a vessel unto honor, and another unto dishonor?” Wisdom xv. 7: “For the potter, tempering soft earth, fashioneth every vessel with much labor for our service; yea, of the same clay he maketh both the vessels that serve for clean uses, and likewise also such as serve to the contrary: but what is the use of either sort, the potter himself is the judge.”

I Cor. ii. 10, 11: “The Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God. For who among men knoweth the things of a man, save the spirit of the man, which is in him? even so the things of God none knoweth save the Spirit of God.” Judith viii. 14: “For ye cannot find the depth of the heart of man, neither can ye perceive the things that he thinketh: then how can ye search out God, that hath made all these things, and know his mind, or comprehend his purpose?”

Several similar indications of the familiarity of the New Testament writers with these apocryphal books might be pointed out. These are not express citations, but they are clear appropriations of the thought and the language of the apocryphal writers. We have, then, the most indubitable proof that the apocryphal books were in the hands of the New Testament writers; and so far as New Testament use authenticates an Old Testament writing, several of the apocryphal books stand on much better footing than do five of our Old Testament books.

It is true that the Hebrew or Palestinian canon differed from the Greek or Alexandrian canon; the books which were written in Greek had never been translated into the Hebrew, and could not, of course, be incorporated into the Hebrew canon; and there was undoubtedly a strong feeling among the stricter Jews against recognizing any of these later books as Sacred Scriptures; nevertheless, the Greek Bible, with all its additions, had large currency among the Jews even in Palestine, and the assertion that our Lord and his apostles measured the Alexandrian Bible by the Palestinian canon, and accepted all the books of the latter while declining to recognize any of the additions of the former, is sheer assumption, for which there is not a particle of evidence, and against which the facts already adduced bear convincingly. Paul, in his letter to Timothy, refers to the “Scriptures” as having been in the hands of Timothy from his childhood; and we have every reason to believe that the Scriptures to which he refers was this Greek collection containing the Apocrypha. Whatever Paul says about the inspiration of the Scriptures must be interpreted with this fact in mind. To find in these words of Paul the guarantee of the inspiration and infallibility of the books of the collection which are translated from the Hebrew, and not those which are written in Greek, is a freak of exegesis not more violent than fantastic. We know that Paul read and used some of these apocryphal books, and there are several of the books in our Hebrew Bible that he never quotes or refers to in the remotest way. The attempt which is often made to show that the New Testament writers have established, by their testimony, the Old Testament canon, as containing just those books which are in our Old Testament, and no more, is a most unwarrantable distortion of the facts.

It is true that at the time of Christ the Palestinian Jews had not, for a century or so, added any new books to their collection, and were not inclined to add any more. Their canon was practically closed to this extent, that no new books were likely to get in. But it was not yet settled that some later books, which had been trying to maintain a footing in the canon, should not be put out. Esther, Ecclesiastes, and Solomon’s Song were regarded by some of the Palestinian Jews as sacred books, but their right to this distinction was hotly disputed by others. This question was not settled at the time of our Lord.

“The canon,” says Davidson, “was not considered to be closed in the first century before and the first after Christ. There were doubts about some portions. The Book of Ezekiel gave offense, because some of its statements seemed to contradict the Law. Doubts about some of the others were of a more serious nature–about Ecclesiastes, the Canticles, Esther, and the Proverbs. The first was impugned because it had contradictory passages and a heretical tendency; the second because of its worldly and sensual tone; Esther for its want of religiousness; and Proverbs on account of inconsistencies. This skepticism went far to procure the exclusion of the suspected works from the canon and their relegation to the class of the _genuzim_. But it did not prevail. Hananiah, son of Hezekiah, son of Garon, about 32 B.C., is said to have reconciled the contradictions and allayed the doubts. But these traces of resistance to the fixity of the canon were not the last. They reappeared about 65 A. D., as we learn from the Talmud, when the controversy turned mainly upon the canonicity of Ecclesiastes, which the school of Schammai, which had the majority, opposed; so that that book was probably excluded. The question emerged again at a later synod in Jabneh or Jamnia, when R. Eleaser ben Asaria was chosen patriarch, and Gamaliel the Second, deposed. Here it was decided, not unanimously, however, but by a majority of Hillelites, that Ecclesiastes and the Song of Songs ‘pollute the hands,’ _i. e._, belong properly to the Hagiographa. This was about 90 A. D. Thus the question of the canonicity of certain books was discussed by two synods.” [Footnote: _Encyc. Brit_., v. 3.]

By such a plain tale do we put down the fiction, so widely disseminated, that the canon of the Old Testament was “fixed” long before the time of Christ, and, presumably, by inspired men. It was not “fixed,” even in Palestine, until sixty years after our Lord’s death; several of the books were in dispute during the whole apostolic period, and these are the very books which are not referred to in the New Testament. Whether the men who finally “fixed” it were exceptionally qualified to judge of the ethical and spiritual values of the writings in question may be doubted. They were the kind of men who slew our Lord and persecuted his followers. When we are asked what are our historical reasons for believing that Esther and Ecclesiastes and Solomon’s Song are sacred books and ought to be in the Old Testament canon, let us answer: It is not because any prophet or inspired person adjudged them to be sacred, for no such person had anything to say about them; it is not because our Lord and his apostles indorsed them, for they do not even mention them; it is not because they held a place in a collection of Sacred Scriptures used by our Lord and his apostles, for their position in that collection was in dispute at that time; it is because the chief priests and scribes who rejected Christ pronounced them sacred. The external authority for these books reduces to exactly this. Those who insist that all parts of the Old Testament are of equal value and authority, and that a questioning of the sacredness of one book casts doubts upon the whole collection, ought to look these facts in the face and see on what a slender thread they suspend the Bible which they so highly value. These later books, says one, “have been delivered to us; they have their use and value, which is to be ascertained by a frank and reverent study of the texts themselves; but those who insist on placing them on the same footing of undisputed authority with the Law, the Prophets, and the Psalms, to which our Lord bears direct testimony, and so make the whole doctrine of the canon depend on its weakest part, sacrifice the true strength of the evidence on which the Old Testament is received by Christians.” [Footnote: _The Old Testament in the Jewish Church_, p. 175.]

Such, then, is the statement with respect to the Old Testament canon in the apostolic age. The Palestinian canon, which was identical with our Old Testament, was practically settled at the synod of Jamnia about 90 A. D., though doubts were still entertained by devout Jews concerning Esther. The Alexandrian collection, containing our apocryphal books, was, however, widely circulated; and as it was the Greek version which had been most used by the apostles, so it was the Greek version which the early Christian fathers universally studied and quoted. Very few if any of these Christian fathers of the first two centuries understood the Hebrew; they could not, therefore, use the Palestinian manuscripts; the Greek Bible was their only treasury of inspired truth, and the Greek Bible contained the Apocrypha. Accordingly we find them quoting freely as Sacred Scripture all the apocryphal books. Westcott gives us a table, in Smith’s “Bible Dictionary,” of citations made from these apocryphal books by fifteen of the Greek fathers, beginning with Clement of Rome and ending with Chrysostom, and by eight Latin writers, beginning with Tertullian and ending with Augustine. Every one of these apocryphal books is thus quoted with some such formula as “The Scripture saith,” or “It is written,” by one or more of these writers; the Book of Wisdom is quoted by all of them except Polycarp and Cyril; Baruch and the Additions to Daniel are quoted by the great majority of them; Origen quotes them all, Clement of Alexandria all but one, Cyprian all but two. It will therefore be seen that these books must have had wide acceptance as Sacred Scriptures during the first centuries of the Christian church. In the face of these facts, which may be found in sources as unassailable as Smith’s “Bible Dictionary,” we have such statements as the following, put forth by teachers of the people, and indorsed by eminent theological professors:–

“We may say of the apocryphal books of the Old Testament that, while some who were not Jews and who were unacquainted with Hebrew used them to some extent, yet they never gained wide acceptance, and soon dropped out altogether.”

“Certain apocryphal writings have since been bound up with the Septuagint, but _there is no reason to think that they made any part of it in the days of our Saviour_”!

“These books were not received as canonical by the Christian fathers, but were expressly declared to be apocryphal”!

The last statements are copied from a volume on the Bible, prepared for popular circulation by the president of a theological seminary!

It is true that some of the most inquisitive and critical of the Christian fathers entertained doubts about these apocryphal books; Melito of Sardis traveled to Palestine on purpose to inquire into the matter, and came back, of course, with the Palestinian canon to which, however, he did not adhere. Origen made a similar investigation, and seems to have been convinced that the later books ought to be regarded as uncanonical; nevertheless, he keeps on quoting them; Jerome was the first strenuously to challenge the canonicity of these later Greek books and to maintain a tolerably consistent opposition to them. While, therefore, several of these early fathers were led by their investigations in Palestine to believe that the narrower canon was the more correct one, their opinions had but little weight with the people at large; and even these fathers themselves freely and constantly quoted as Sacred Scripture the questionable writings.

In 393 the African bishops held a council at Hippo, in which the canon was discussed. The list agreed upon includes all the Old Testament Scriptures of our canon, and, in addition to them, Wisdom, Ecclesiasticus, Tobit, Judith, and the two books of Maccabees. In 397 another council at Carthage reaffirmed the list of its predecessor. Augustine was the leader of both councils.

In spite of the protests of Jerome and of other scholars in all the centuries, this list, for substance, was regarded as authoritative, until the Council of Trent, in 1546, when the long debate was finally settled, so far as the Roman Catholic Church is concerned, by the adoption of the Augustinian canon, embracing the apocryphal books, the list concluding with the following anathema. “If any one will not receive as sacred and authoritative the whole books with all their parts, let him be accursed.” This determines the matter for all good Catholics. Since 1546, they have known exactly how many books their Bible contains. And if usage and tradition are and ought to be authoritative, they have the strongest reasons for receiving as sacred the books of their Bible; for it is beyond question that the books which they accept and which we reject have been received and used as Sacred Scriptures in all the ages of the church. Most of us who do not accept usage and tradition as authoritative will continue, no doubt, to think our own thoughts about the matter.

The Council of Trent marks the definite separation of the Roman Catholic Church from the Protestant reformers. Up to this time there had been among the reformers some differences of opinion respecting the Old Testament books; when they were excluded from the Holy Church and were compelled to fall back upon the authority of the Bible, the present limits of the canon at once became an important question. They did not settle it all at once. Luther, in making his German version of the Bible, translated Judith, Wisdom, Tobit, Sirach, Baruch, 1 and 2 Maccabees, the Greek additions to Esther and Daniel, with the Prayer of Manasseh. Each of these books he prefaces with comments of his own. First Maccabees he regards as almost equal to the other books of Holy Scripture, and not unworthy to be reckoned among them. He had doubted long whether Wisdom should not be admitted to the canon, and he truly says of Sirach that it is a right good book, the work of a wise man. Baruch and 2 Maccabees he finds fault with; but of none of these apocryphal books does he speak so severely as of Esther, which he is more than willing to cast out of the canon. The fact that Luther translated these apocryphal books is good evidence that he thought them of value to the church; nevertheless, he considered the books of the Hebrew canon, with the exception of Esther, as occupying a higher plane than those of the Apocrypha. Gradually this opinion gained acceptance among the Protestants; the apocryphal books were separated from the rest, and although by some of the Reformed churches, as by the Anglican church, they were commended to be read “for example of life and instruction of manners,” they ceased to be regarded as authoritative sources of Christian doctrine. Since the sixteenth century, there has been little question among Protestants as to the extent of the canon. The books which now compose our Old Testament, and no others, have been found in the Bible of the Protestants for the past three hundred years. The apocryphal books have sometimes been printed between the Old and the New Testaments, but they have not been used in the churches, [Footnote: The English Church uses some portions of them.] nor have they been regarded as part of the Sacred Scripture.

The history of the New Testament canon is much less obscure, and may be more briefly treated. The Bible of the early Christians was the Old Testament. They relied wholly upon this for religious instruction; they had no thought of any other Sacred Scripture.

I have explained in a former chapter how the Epistles and the Gospels originated; but when these writings first came into the hands of the disciples there was not, it is probable, any conception in their minds that these were sacred writings, to be ranked along with the books of the Old Testament. They read them for instruction and suggestion; they did not at first think of them as holy. But their conviction of the value and sacredness of these writings soon began to strengthen; we find them quoting Gospels and Epistles with the same formula that they apply to the Old Testament books; and thus they began to feel the need of making a collection of this apostolic literature for use in the churches. It is not until the second half of the second century that any such collection comes into view. It consisted at first of two parts, The Gospel and The Apostle; the first part contained the four Gospels, and the second the Acts, thirteen Epistles of Paul, one of Peter, one of John, and the Revelation. It will be seen that this twofold Testament omitted several of our books,–the Epistle to the Hebrews, two of John’s Epistles, one of Peter’s, and the Epistles of James and Jude.

About this time there was also in circulation certain writings which are not now in our canon, but which were sometimes included by the authorities of that time among the apostolic writings, and were quoted as Scripture by the early fathers. There was a book called “The Gospel according to the Egyptians,” and another entitled “The Preaching of Peter,” and another called “The Acts of Paul,” and another called “The Shepherd of Hermas,” and an epistle attributed to Barnabas, and several others, all claiming to be sacred and apostolic writings. It became, therefore, a delicate and important question for these early Christians to decide which of these writings were sacred, and which were not; and they began to make lists of those which they regarded as canonical. The earliest of these lists is a fragmentary anonymous canon, which was made about 170. It mentions all the books in our New Testament but four,– Hebrews, First and Second Peter, and James.

Irenæus, who died about 200, had a canon which included all the books of our New Testament except Hebrews, Jude, James, Second Peter, and Third John. First Peter, Second John, and “The Shepherd of Hermas” he put by themselves in a second class of writings, which he thought excellent but not inspired.

Clement of Alexandria (180) puts into his list most of our canonical books, but regards several of them as of inferior value, among them Hebrews, Second John, and Jude. In the same list of inferior writings he includes “The Shepherd of Hermas,” the “Epistle of Barnabas,” and the “Apocalypse of Peter.”

Tertullian (200) omits entirely James, Second Peter, and Third John, but includes among useful though not inspired books, Hebrews, Jude, “The Shepherd of Hermas,” Second John, and Second Peter.

These are the greatest authorities of the first two centuries. No Christian teachers of that day were better informed or more trustworthy than these, and it will be seen that they were far from agreeing with one another or with our canon; that each one of them received as sacred some books which we do not possess, and rejected some which we receive.

Coming down into the third century, we find Origen (250), one of the great scholars, wrestling with the problem. He seems to have made three classes of the New Testament writings, the authentic, the non-authentic, and the doubtful. The authentic books are the Gospels, the Acts, the thirteen Epistles of Paul, and the Apocalypse; the non-authentic ones are “The Shepherd of Hermas,” “The Epistle of Barnabas,” and several other books not in our canon; and the doubtful ones are James, Jude, Second and Third John, and Second Peter. It will be seen that Origen admits none that are not in our collection, but that he is in doubt respecting some that are in it.

Facts like these are writ large over every page of the history of the early church. And yet we have eminent theological professors asserting that the canon of the New Testament was finally settled “during the first half of the second century, within fifty years after the death of the Apostle John.” A more baseless statement could not be fabricated. It is from teachers of this class that we hear the most vehement outcries against the “Higher Criticism.”

Eusebius, who died in 340, has a list agreeing substantially with that of Origen.

Cyril of Jerusalem (386) includes all of our books except the Apocalypse, and no others.

Athanasius (365) and Augustine (430) have lists identical with ours. This indicates a steady progress toward unanimity, and when the two great councils of Hippo and Carthage confirmed this judgment of the two great fathers last named, the question of the New Testament canon was practically settled. [Footnote: It is noted, however, that the reception of the doubtful books into the canon does not imply a recognition of their equality with the other books. The distinct admission of their inferiority was made by all the ecclesiastical authorities of that period. None of the early fathers believed that all these writings were equally inspired and equally authoritative.] Nevertheless, considerable independent judgment on the subject still seems to have been tolerated, and writings which we do not now receive were long included in the New Testament collection. The three oldest manuscripts of the Bible now in existence are the Sinaitic, the Vatican, and the Alexandrian Bibles, dating from the fourth and the fifth centuries. Of these the Sinaitic and the Alexandrian Bibles both include some of these doubtful books in the New Testament collection; the Sinai Bible has “The Epistle of Barnabas” and “The Shepherd of Hermas;” the Alexandrian Bible the Epistle of Clement and one of Athanasius. These old Bibles are clear witnesses to the fact that the contents of the New Testament were not clearly defined even so late as the fifth century. Indeed, there was always some freedom of opinion concerning this matter until the Reformation era. Then, of course, the Council of Trent fixed the canon of the New Testament as well as of the Old for all good Catholics; and the New Testament of the Catholics, unlike their Old Testament, is identical with our own.

The Protestants of that time were still in doubt about certain of the New Testament books. Luther, as every one knows, was inclined to reject the Epistle of James; he called it “a right strawy epistle.” The letter to the Hebrews was a good book, but not apostolic; he put it in a subordinate class. Jude was a poor transcript of Second Peter, and he assigned that also to a lower place. “The Apocalypse,” says Davidson, “he considered neither apostolic nor prophetic, but put it almost on a level with the Fourth Book of Esdras, which he spoke elsewhere of tossing into the Elbe.” Luther’s principle of judgment in many of these cases was quite too subjective; he carried the Protestant principle of private judgment to an extreme; I only quote his opinions to show with what freedom the strong men of the Reformation handled these questions of Biblical criticism.

Zwingli rejected the Apocalypse. Œcolampadius placed James, Jude, Second Peter, Second and Third John and the Apocalypse along with the Apocryphal books, on a lower level than the other New Testament Scriptures.

The great majority of the Reformers, however, speedily fixed upon that canon which we now receive, and their decision has not been seriously called in question since the sixteenth century.

I have now answered most of the questions proposed at the beginning of this chapter. We have seen that while the great majority of the books in both Testaments have been universally received, questions have been raised at various times concerning the canonicity of several of the books in either Testament; that many good men, from the second century before Christ until the sixteenth century after Christ, have disputed the authority of some of these books. We have seen also that quite a number of other books have at one time and another been regarded as sacred and numbered among the Holy Scriptures; we have seen that the final judgment respecting these doubtful books is different in different branches of the church, the Roman Catholic Church and the Greek Catholic Church admitting into their canons several books that the Reformed churches exclude from theirs.

We have seen that the decision which has been reached by the several branches of the church respecting this matter has been reached as the result of discussion and argument; that the canonicity of the disputed books was freely canvassed by the church fathers in their writings, by the church councils in their assemblies, by the Reformers in their inquiries; that no supernatural methods have been employed to determine the canonicity of these several books; but that the enlightened reason of the church has been the arbiter of the whole matter.

The grounds upon which the Jews acted in admitting or rejecting books into their Scriptures it might be difficult for us to determine. In some cases we know that they were fanciful and absurd. But the grounds on which the Christians proceeded in making up their canon we know pretty well.

The first question respecting each one of the Christian writings seems to have been: “Was it written by an apostle?” If this question could be answered in the affirmative, the book was admitted. And in deciding this question, the Christians of later times made appeal to the opinions of those of earlier times; authority and tradition had much to do in determining it. “Was it the general opinion of the early church that this book was written by an apostle?” they asked. And if this seemed to be the case, they were inclined to admit it. Besides, they compared Scripture with Scripture: certain books were unquestionably written by Paul or Luke or John; other books which were doubted were also ascribed to them; if they found the language of the disputed book corresponding to that of the undisputed book, in style and in forms of expression, they judged that it must have been written by the same man. Upon such grounds of external and internal evidence, it finally came to be believed that all of the New Testament books except four were written by apostles, and that these four, Mark, Luke, The Acts of the Apostles, and the Epistle to the Hebrews, were written by men under the immediate direction of apostles.

But, it may be said, there have been great differences of opinion on this matter through all the ages, down to the sixteenth century; how do we know but that those good and holy men, like Ignatius and Clement and Tertullian and Origen in the early church, and Luther and Zwingli and Œcolampadius in the Reformed church, were right in rejecting some books that we receive and in receiving some that we reject?

If you were a good Catholic, that question would not trouble you. For the fundamental article of your creed would then be, The Holy Catholic Church, when she is represented by her bishops in a general council, can never make a mistake. And the Holy Catholic Church in a general council at Trent, in 1546, said that such and such books belonged to the Bible, and that no others do; and the council of the Vatican, in 1870, said the same thing over again, making it doubly sure; so, that, as a good Catholic, you would have no right to any doubts or questions about it.

But, being a Protestant, you cannot help knowing that all general councils have made grave and terrible mistakes; that no one of them ever was infallible; and so you could not rest satisfied with the decisions of Trent and the Vatican, even if they gave you the same Bible that you now possess, which, of course, they do not. What certainty has the Protestant, then, that his canon is the correct one? He has no absolute certainty. There is no such thing as absolute certainty with respect to historical religious truth. But this discussion has made one or two things plain to the dullest apprehension.

The first is that the books of this Bible are not all of equal rank and sacredness. If there is one truth which all the ages, with all their voices, join to declare, it is that the Bible is made up of many different kinds of books, with very different degrees of sacredness and authority. For one, I do not wish to part with any of them; I find instruction in all of them, though in some of them, as in Esther and Ecclesiastes, it is rather as records of savagery and of skepticism, from which every Christian ought to recoil, that I can see any value in them. As powerful delineations of the kind of sentiments that the Christian ought not to cherish, and the kind of doubts that he cannot entertain without imperilling his soul, they may be useful. It is not, therefore, at all desirable that these ancient records should be torn asunder and portions of them flung away. That process of mutilation none of us is wise enough to attempt. Let the Bible stand; there are good uses for every part of it. But let us remember the lesson which this survey has brought home to us, that these books are not all alike, and that the message of divine wisdom is spoken to us in some of them far more clearly than in others,

Richard Baxter is an authority in religion for whose opinion all conservative people ought to entertain respect. He cannot be suspected of being a “New Departure” man; he was a stanch Presbyterian, and he passed to the “Saints’ Rest” nearly two hundred years ago. With a few words of his upon the question now before us, this chapter may fitly close:–

“And here I must tell you a great and needful truth, which Christians, fearing to confess, by overdoing, tempt men to infidelity. The Scripture is like a man’s body, where some parts are but for the preservation of the rest, and may be maimed without death. The sense is the soul of the Scripture, and the letters but the body or vehicle. The doctrine of the Creed, Lord’s Prayer and Decalogue, Baptism and the Lord’s Supper, is the vital part and Christianity itself. The Old Testament letter (written as we have it about Ezra’s time) is that vehicle which is as imperfect as the revelation of those times was. But as, after Christ’s incarnation and ascension, the Spirit was more abundantly given, and the revelation more perfect and sealed, so the doctrine is more full, and the vehicle or body, that is the words, are less imperfect and more sure to us; so that he which doubteth of the truth of some words in the Old Testament or of some circumstances in the New, hath no reason therefore to doubt of the Christian religion of which these writings are but the vehicle or body, sufficient to ascertain us of the truth of the History and Doctrine.” [Footnote: _The Catechizing of Christian Families_, p. 36.]

CHAPTER XII.

HOW THE BOOKS WERE WRITTEN.

The books of the Old Testament were originally written upon skins of some sort. The Talmud provided that the law might be inscribed on the skins of clean animals, tame or wild, or even of clean birds. These skins were usually cut into strips, the ends of which were neatly joined together, making a continuous belt of parchment or vellum which was rolled upon two sticks and fastened by a thread. They were commonly written on one side only, with an iron pen which was dipped in ink composed of lampblack dissolved in gall juice.

The Hebrew is a language quite unlike our own in form and appearance. Not only do we read it from right to left, instead of from left to right, but the consonants only of the several words are written in distinct characters on the line; the vowels being little dots or dashes standing under the consonants, or within their curves. These vowel points were not used in the original Hebrew; they are a modern invention, originating some centuries after Christ. It is true that it was the belief of the Jews in former times that these vowel points were an original part of the language; their scholars made this claim with great confidence, which shows how little reliance is to be placed on Jewish tradition. The evidence is abundant that the Hebrew was originally written without vowels, precisely as stenographers often write in these days. We know from the testimony of old students and interpreters of the Hebrew that they constantly encountered this difficulty in reading the language. Write a paragraph of our own language without vowels and look at it. Or, better, ask some one else to treat for you in the same way a paragraph with which you are not familiar, and see if you can decipher it. Undoubtedly, you could with some difficulty make out the sense of most passages. It would puzzle you at first, but after you had had some practice in supplying the vowels you would learn to read quite readily. Stenographers, as I have said, have a somewhat similar task. Nevertheless, you would sometimes be in uncertainty as to the words. Suppose you have the three consonants _brd_, how would you know whether the word was bard, or bird, or bread, or board, or brad, or broad, or bride, or braid, or brood, or breed? It might be any one of them. You could usually tell what it was by a glance at the connection, but you could not tell infallibly, for there might be sentences in which more than one of these words would make sense, and it would be impossible to determine which the writer meant to use. Now the old Hebrew as it came from the hands of the original writers was all in this form; while, therefore, the meaning of the writer can generally be gained with sufficient accuracy, you see at a glance that absolute certainty is out of the question; that the Jewish scholars who supplied these vowel points a thousand years or more after the original manuscripts were written may sometimes have got the wrong word.

Jerome gives numerous illustrations of this uncertainty. In Jer. ix. 21, “Death is come up into our windows,” he says that we have for the first word the three Hebrew consonants corresponding to our _dbr_; the word may be _dabar_, signifying death, or _deber_, signifying pestilence; it is impossible to tell which it is. In Habakkuk iii. 5, we have the same consonants, and there the word is written pestilence. Either word will made good sense in either place; and we are perfectly helpless in our choice between them. Again, in Isaiah xxvi. 14, we have a prediction concerning the wicked, “Therefore hast thou visited and destroyed them and made all their memory to perish.” The Hebrew word here translated “memory” consists of three consonants represented by our English _zkr_; it may be the word _zeker_, which signifies memory, or the word _zakar_, which signifies a male person. And Jerome says that it is believed that Saul was deceived, perhaps willingly, by the difference in these words (I Sam. xv.); having been commanded to cut off every _zeker_–memorial or vestige–of Amaiek, he took the word to be _zakar_, instead of zeker, and contented himself with destroying the males of the army and keeping for himself the spoil. Jerome’s conjecture in this case is sufficiently fanciful; nevertheless he illustrates the impossibility of determining the exact meaning of many Hebrew sentences. This impossibility is abundantly demonstrated by the Septuagint, for we find many undoubted errors in that translation from the Hebrew into the Greek, which have arisen from this lack of precision in the Hebrew language.

When, therefore, we know that the Bible was written in such a language– a language without vowels–and that it was not until six hundred years after Christ that the vowel points were invented and the words were written out in full, the theory of the verbal inerrancy of the text as we now have it becomes incredible. Unless the men who supplied the vowel points were gifted with supernatural knowledge they must have made mistakes in spelling out some of these words. I do not believe that these mistakes were serious, or that they affect in any important way the meaning of the Scripture, but the assumption that in this stupendous game of guess-work no wrong guesses were made is in the highest degree gratuitous. The substantial truthfulness of the record is not impeached by this discovery, but the verbal inerrancy of the document can never be maintained by any honest man who knows these facts.

It is unsafe and mischievous to indulge in _a priori_ reasonings about inspiration; we have had too much of that; but the following proposition is unassailable: If the Divine Wisdom had proposed to deliver to man an infallible book, he would not have had it recorded in a language whose written words consist only of consonants, leaving readers a thousand years after to fill in the vowels by conjecture. The very fact that such a language was chosen is the conclusive and unanswerable evidence that God never designed to give us an infallible book.

We are familiar with the fact that the Old Testament writings in general use among the early churches were those of the Septuagint. The Christians from the second to the sixteenth centuries knew very little Hebrew. But during all these ages the Palestinian Jews and their successors in other lands were preserving their own Scriptures; it was they who added at a late day–probably as late as the sixth century–the vowel points, which were invented in Syria; and when, at length, under the impulse of Biblical study which led to the Reformation, Christian scholars began to think of going back to the original Hebrew, they were obliged to obtain from the Jews the copies which they studied. It is somewhat remarkable that the Jews, who were the exclusive custodians of the Hebrew writings up to the sixteenth century, had not been careful to preserve their old manuscripts. After the vowel points had been introduced into the text, they seem to have been willing that copies not written in this manner should pass out of existence. Accordingly we have few Hebrew manuscripts that are even supposed to be more than six or seven hundred years old. There is one copy of the Pentateuch which may have been made as early as 580 A. D., but this is extremely doubtful; aside from this I do not know that there are any Hebrew Bibles which claim to be older than the ninth century. Of these Hebrew manuscripts nearly six hundred are now known to be in existence, but the greater part of these are only fragmentary copies of the Pentateuch or of single books. There are two classes of these–synagogue rolls, prepared for reading in the way that I have described, and manuscripts in the book form, some on parchment and some on paper.

The variations in these manuscripts are few. Compared with the Greek manuscripts of the New Testament, the accuracy of these Hebrew codices is remarkable. It is evident that the care of the Scribes to guard their Scriptures against error has been scrupulous and vigilant. Doubtless this intense devotion to the very letter of the sacred books has been exercised for many centuries. We know that in the earliest days this precision was not sought; for the Septuagint translation, made during the second and third centuries before Christ, gives us indubitable proof, when we compare it with the Hebrew text, that changes, some of them radical and sweeping, have been made in the text of the Hebrew books since that translation was finished. But it is evident that the Scribes at an early day, certainly as early as the beginning of the Christian era, determined to have a uniform and an unchangeable text. For this purpose they chose some manuscript copy of the Scriptures, doubtless the one which seemed to them most accurate, and made that the standard; all the copies made since that time have been religiously conformed to that. Consequently, all the Hebrew manuscripts now in existence are remarkably uniform. The Old Testament contains more than three times as many pages as the New Testament; but while we have more than one hundred and fifty thousand “various readings” in the Greek manuscripts and versions of the New Testament, we have less than ten thousand such variations in those of the Old Testament. It must be remembered, however, that this uniformity has its source in some copy chosen to be the standard hundreds of years after most of the Old Testament books were written; and it does not guarantee the close correspondence between this copy and the autographs of the original writers. [Footnote: For an interesting discussion of the preservation and transmission of the Hebrew text, the reader is referred to Mr. Robertson Smith’s _The Old Testament in the Jewish Church_, Lectures ii. and iii.]

Our chief interest centres, however, in the Greek manuscripts of the Bible preserved and transmitted by Christians, and including both Testaments. All the oldest and most precious documents that we possess belong to this class.

The original New Testament writings which came from the hands of the apostles and their amanuenses we do not possess. These were probably written, not on skins, but upon the papyrus paper commonly used at that day, which was a frail and flimsy fabric, and under ordinary circumstances would soon perish. Fragments of this papyrus have come down to us, but only those which were preserved with exceptional care. Jerome tells us of a library in Cassarea that was partly destroyed, owing to the crumbling of its paper, though it was only a hundred years old. Parchment was sometimes used by the apostles; Paul requests Timothy, in his second letter, to bring with him, when he comes, certain parchments that belong to him. But these materials were costly, and it is not likely that the apostles used them to any extent in the preparation of the books of the New Testament. At any rate the autographic copies of these books disappeared at an early date. This seems strange to us. Placing the estimate that we do upon these writings, we should have taken the greatest care to preserve them. It is clear that the Christians into whose hands they fell did not value them as highly as we do. As Westcott says, “They were given as a heritage to man, and it was some time before men felt the full value of the gift.”

At the close of the second century there were disputes concerning the correct reading of certain passages, but neither party appeals to the apostolic originals,–showing that they must before that time have perished. In after years legends were told about the preservation of these originals, but these are contradictory and incredible.

No manuscript is now in existence which was written during the first three centuries. But we have one or two that date back to the fourth century; and from that time through all the ages to the invention of printing many copies were made of the Sacred Scriptures, in whole or in part, which are still in the hands of scholars. It is from these old Greek manuscripts that our received text of the New Testament is derived; by a comparison of them the scholars of the seventeenth century made up a Greek New Testament which they regarded as approximately accurate, and from that our English version was made.

The number of these old manuscripts is large, and the first general division of them is into “uncials” or “cursives,” as they are called; the uncial manuscripts being written in capital letters, the cursives in small letters more or less connected, as in our written hand. The uncials are the oldest, as they are the fewest; there are only one hundred and twenty-seven of them in all; while of the cursives there are about fifteen hundred.

Yet most of these manuscripts are fragmentary. Some of them contain only the Gospels or portions of them; some of them contain the Acts and the Catholic Epistles; some of them the Epistles of Paul or a single epistle; some are selections from the Gospels or the Epistles, prepared to be read in church, and called lectionaries.

Professor Ezra Abbot gives us a classification of these manuscripts which will be found instructive.

“For the New Testament,…we have manuscripts more or less complete, written in uncial or capital letters, and ranging from the fourth to the tenth century; of the Gospels twenty-seven, besides thirty small fragments; of the Acts and Catholic Epistles ten, besides six small fragments; of the Pauline Epistles eleven, besides nine small fragments, and of the Revelation five. All of these have been most thoroughly collated, and the text of the most important of them has been published. One of these manuscripts, the Sinaitic, containing the whole of the New Testament, and another, the Vatican, containing much the larger part of it, were written probably as early as the middle of the fourth century; two others, the Alexandrian and the Ephraem, belong to about the middle of the fifth, of which date are two more, containing considerable portions of the Gospels. A very remarkable manuscript of the Gospels and Acts–the Cambridge manuscript, or Codex Bezæ–belongs to the sixth century…. I pass by a number of small but valuable fragments of the fifth and sixth centuries. As to the cursive manuscripts ranging from the tenth century to the sixteenth, we have of the Gospels more than six hundred; of the Acts over two hundred; of the Pauline Epistles nearly three hundred; of the Revelation about one hundred,–not reckoning the lectionaries, or manuscripts containing the lessons from the Gospels, Acts, and Epistles, read in the service of the church, of which there are more than four hundred.” [Footnote: _Anglo-American Bible Revision_, p. 95.]

Out of all this vast mass of extant manuscripts, only twenty-seven contain the New Testament entire.

The three oldest and most valuable manuscripts among those named by Professor Abbot, in the passage above, are the Sinaitic, the Vatican, and the Alexandrian manuscripts.

Of these old Bibles perhaps the oldest is the one in the Vatican Library at Rome. It was enrolled in that library as late as the year 1475; what its history was before that time is unknown. By whose hands or at what place it was written, no one can tell. Some have supposed that it was brought from Constantinople to Rome, in the fifteenth century, by John Bessarion, a learned patriarch; some that it was written in Alexandria, when that city was the metropolis of the world’s culture; some that it was produced in Southern Italy when that region was celebrated for its learning. The signs favor the latter theory. The form of the letters is like those found on papyri in Herculaneum; and other manuscripts of the Bible found in southern Italy agree remarkably with this one in many peculiar readings. But this is all guess-work. Nobody knows where the old Bible came from or who brought it to Rome.

Some things, however, the old book plainly tells us about its own history. It bears the unmistakable marks of great antiquity. The scholar who is familiar with old Greek manuscripts can judge by looking at a document something about its probable age. By the form of the letters, by the presence or absence of certain marks of punctuation, by the general style of the manuscript, he can determine within a century or so the date at which it was written.

This old Bible is written in the uncial or capital letters; this would make it tolerably certain that it must be older than the tenth century. We have scarcely any uncial manuscripts later than the tenth century. But other unmistakable marks take it back much farther than this. The words are written continuously, with no breaks or spaces between them; there are no accents, no rough or smooth breathings, no punctuation marks of any sort. These are signs of great age. Another peculiarity is the manner of the division of the books into sections. I cannot stop to describe to you the various methods of division adopted in antiquity. The present separation into chapters and verses was, as you know, a quite modern device. But the divisions of this old Bible follow a method that we know to have been in use at a very early day; and the conclusion of all the scholars is that it must have been written as early as the year 350, possibly as early as 300.

It is not, however, a roll, but a book in form like those we handle every day. Before this date manuscripts were generally prepared in this way. Martial, the Latin poet, who died about 100, mentions as a novelty in his day books with square leaves, bound together at the edges.

The Vatican Bible is a heavy quarto, the covers are red morocco discolored with age, the leaves, of which there are 759, are of fine and delicate vellum. It contains the Septuagint translation of the Old Testament, except the first forty-five chapters in Genesis and a few of the Psalms, which have been torn out and lost. Of the New Testament writings, the last five chapters of Hebrews, First and Second Timothy, Titus, Philemon, and the Apocalypse are wanting. Otherwise both Testaments are complete.

We may recall another fact, to which allusion has been made, that this old Bible contains among the Old Testament books those books which we now call apocryphal, and that these apocryphal books, instead of being divided from the rest in a separate group, are mingled with them, the _order_ of the books being quite unlike that of our Bibles or of the Hebrew canon. The apocryphal First Book of Esdras _precedes_ our Book of Ezra; while our Book of Ezra is united with Nehemiah, forming the Second Book of Esdras. Judith and Tobit follow Esther, and next comes the twelve minor prophets, and so on.

The same thing is true of all these oldest Bibles; they all contain the apocryphal books, and these books are mingled with the other books, either promiscuously, or by some system of classification which accepts them as equal in value with the other Old Testament writings. There is no indication in these old Bibles that the apocryphal books are any less sacred or authoritative than the others.

Another manuscript Bible, scarcely less venerable and no less precious than the Vatican Bible, is the one known as the Sinaitic manuscript This was discovered by Constantine Tischendorf, a German scholar, in an ancient convent at the base of Mount Sinai. The first journey of Tischendorf to the Sinaitic peninsula was undertaken in 1844, for the express purpose of searching in the old monasteries of this neighborhood for ancient copies of the Scriptures that might be preserved in them. The monks of this old convent admitted him to their ancient library,–a place not greatly frequented by them,–and there in the middle of the room he found a waste basket, filled with leaves and torn pieces of old parchment gathered to be burned. In looking them over he discovered one hundred and twenty leaves of a Bible that seemed to him of great antiquity. He asked for these leaves, but when they found that he wanted them, the monks began to suspect their value, and permitted him to take only forty-three of them. In 1853 he returned again, but this time could not find the rest of the precious manuscript. He feared that it had been destroyed long before, but this was not the case. Stimulated by his desire to possess the loose leaves, the monks had made search for the rest of the volume, and, using as samples the leaves they had refused to give him, they had found them all and secreted them. Upon his second visit they did not show him the book, however, nor reveal to him in any way its existence.

Six years later, in 1859, he returned again, this time fortified with a letter from the Emperor of Russia, the head of the Greek Church; and this mighty document made the monks open their treasures for his inspection. He obtained permission, first, to carry the old Bible to Cairo to be copied, and finally, under the imperial influence, the monks surrendered it, and suffered it to be removed to St. Petersburg, where since 1859 it has been sacredly kept.

“The Sinai Bible,” says Dr. F. P. Woodbury, “contains the New Testament, the Epistle of Barnabas, a portion of the Shepherd of Hennas, and twenty-two books of the Old Testament. The whole is written on fine vellum made from antelope skins into the largest pages known in our ancient manuscripts. While most of the oldest manuscripts have only three columns to the page, and the Vatican Bible has three, the Sinai Bible alone shows four. The letters are somewhat larger than those of the Vatican and much more roughly written. The book contains many blunders in copying, and there are a few cases of willful omission. Its remote age is attested by many of the same proofs that have been mentioned in the description of the Vatican Bible.” [Footnote: From an interesting sketch of “Three Old Bibles,” in _Sunday Afternoon_, vol. i pp. 65-71.]

It is known that the Emperor Constantine, in the year 331, authorized the preparation of fifty costly and beautiful copies of the Holy Scriptures under the care of Eusebius of Cæsarea. Tischendorf himself thinks–and his conjecture is accepted by other scholars–that this is one of those fifty Bibles, and that it was sent from Byzantium to the monks of this convent by the Emperor Justinian, who was its founder. At all events, it is incontestably a manuscript of great age, certainly of the fourth century, and probably of the first half of that century.

The other great Bible is the one known as the Alexandrian, which was presented, in 1628, to King Charles I of England by Cyril Lucar, patriarch of Constantinople, who had brought it from Alexandria. It was transferred in 1753 from the king’s private library to the British Museum, where it is now preserved. It is bound in four folio volumes, three of which contain the text of the Old and one of the New Testament. The portion which contains the Old Testament is more perfect than that which contains the New, quite a number of leaves having been lost from the latter. “The material of which this volume is composed is thin vellum, the page being about thirteen inches high by ten broad, containing from fifty to fifty-two lines on each page, each line consisting of about twenty letters. The number of pages is 773, of which 640 are occupied with the text of the Old Testament and 133 with the New. The characters are uncial, but larger than the Vatican manuscript. There are no accents or breathings, no spaces between the letters or words save at the end of a paragraph, and the contractions, which are not numerous, are only such as are found in the oldest manuscripts. The punctuation consists of a point placed at the end of a sentence, usually on a level with the top of the preceding letter.” [Footnote: _Encyc. Brit._, i. p. 496.] The general verdict of scholars is that this manuscript belongs to about the middle of the fifth century.

The contents of this old Bible are curious, and they are curiously arranged. The first volume contains the Pentateuch, Joshua, Judges, Ruth, the two books of Samuel, the two books of Kings, and the two books of Chronicles. The second contains, first, the twelve minor prophets (from Hosea to Malachi), then Isaiah, Jeremiah, _Baruch_, Lamentations, _The Epistle of Jeremiah_, Ezekiel, Daniel, Esther, _Tobit_, _Judith_, _Esdras I._ (the apocryphal Esdras), Esdras II. (including our Nehemiah and part of our Ezra), and _the four books of the Maccabees_. The third volume contains An Epistle of Athanasius to Marcellenus on the Psalms; The Hypothesis of Eusebius on the Psalms; then the Book of the Psalms, of which there are one hundred and fifty-one, and fifteen Hymns; then Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Canticles, Wisdom of Solomon, and Ecclesiasticus, or Sirach. The fourth volume contains the four Gospels, the Acts, the seven Catholic Epistles (one of James, two of Peter, three of John, and one of Jude), fourteen Epistles of Paul (including the one to the Hebrews), The Revelation of John, two Epistles of Clement to the Corinthians, and eight Psalms of Solomon.

This, it will be admitted, is a generous Bible. It contains most of the apocryphal books, and several others that we do not find in the other collections. It is probable that the works of Athanasius and Eusebius on the Psalms were admitted rather as introduction or commentary than as text; but the rest, judging from the positions in which they stand, must have been regarded as Sacred Scriptures.

These, then, are the three oldest, most complete, and most trustworthy copies of the Sacred Scriptures now in existence. By all scholars they are regarded as precious beyond price; and any reading in which they agree would probably be regarded as the right reading, if all the other manuscripts in the world were against them.

I have suggested that these old manuscripts do not always agree. The fact is that no two of them are exactly alike, and that there are a great many slight differences between those which are most closely assimilated. Of these differences Professor Westcott says that “there cannot be less than 120,000,–though of these a very large proportion consists of differences of spelling and isolated aberrations of scribes.” It is not generally difficult for the student on comparing them to tell which is the right reading. A word may be misspelled, for example, in several different ways; the student knows the right way to spell it, and is not in doubt concerning the word. “Probably,” says Mr. Westcott, “there are not more than from sixteen hundred to two thousand places in which the true reading is a matter of uncertainty, even if we include in this questions of order, inflection, and orthography; the doubtful readings by which the sense is in any way affected are very much fewer, and those of dogmatic importance can be easily numbered.”

The ways in which these errors and variations arose are easily explained. The men who copied these manuscripts were careful men, many of them, but all of them were fallible. Sometimes they would mistake a letter for another letter much like it, and change the form of a word in that way; sometimes there would be two clauses of a sentence ending with the same word, and the eye of the copyist, glancing back to the manuscript after writing the first of these words, would alight upon the second one, and go on from that; so that the clause preceding it would be omitted. Sometimes in copying the continuous writing of the uncial manuscripts, mistakes would be made in dividing words. For example, if a number of English words, written in close order, with no spaces between them, were given you to copy, and you found “infancy,” you might make two words of it or one; and if you were a little careless you might write it “in fancy” when it should be “infancy,” or _vice versa_. A case might arise in which it would be difficult for you to tell whether it should be “in fancy” or “infancy.” Such uncertainties the copyists encountered, and such mistakes they sometimes made.

Mistakes of memory they also made in copying, just as I sometimes do when I undertake to copy a passage from Mr. Westcott or Mr. Davidson into one of these chapters. I look upon the book, and take a sentence in my mind, but perhaps while I am writing it down I will change slightly the order of the words, or it may be put a word of my own in the place of another that much resembles it, as “but” for “though,” or “from” for “out of,” or “doubtless” for “without doubt.” I try to copy very exactly, but there are, unquestionably, now and then such slips as these in my quotations. And such mistakes were made by the copyists of the Old Scriptures.

There are some instances of intentional changes. Sometimes a copyist evidently substituted a word that he thought was plainer for one that was more obscure; a more elegant word for one less elegant; a grammatical construction for one that was not grammatical.

Other differences have arisen from the habit of some of the copyists or owners of manuscripts of writing glosses, or brief explanatory notes, on the margin. Some of these marginalia were copied by subsequent scribes into the text, where, in our version, they still remain. Some of them, however, were removed in the late revision.

The great majority of these errors are, however, as I have said, extremely unimportant; and nearly all of them seem to have arisen in the ways I have suggested–through simple carelessness, and not with any intent of corrupting the text.

The translations of the Bible which were made in early days into other languages than our own must be dismissed with the briefest mention. The most important version of the Old Testament was the Septuagint, of which nothing more needs to be said.

You will remember that the Hebrew was a dead language while our Lord was on the earth, the Jews of Palestine speaking the Aramaic. For their use, translations of the Hebrew into the Aramaic, called Targums, were made. There is a great variety of these, and there are many opinions about their age; but it is not likely that the oldest of them was committed to writing before the second century A. D. They are curious specimens of the translator’s work, combining text and commentary in a remarkable manner. Additions and changes are freely made; the simple sentences of the old record are greatly expanded; not only is a spade generally called a useful ligneous and ferruginous agricultural implement, but many things are said concerning the aforesaid spade which Moses or David or Isaiah never dreamed of saying.

For example, in Judges v. 10, the Hebrew is literally translated in our English Bible thus: “Speak, ye that ride on white asses, ye that sit in judgment and walk by the way.” The Targum of Jonathan expatiates thereon as follows: “Those who had interrupted their occupations are riding on asses covered with many colored caparisons, and they ride about freely in all the territory of Israel, and congregate to sit in judgment. They walk in their old ways, and are speaking of the power Thou hast shown in the land of Israel,” etc. This may be pronounced a remarkably free translation; and the Targums generally evince a similar liberality of sentiment and phraseology.

Besides these, the ancient translations of the Bible, which must be mentioned, are the Old Latin, made in the second century, out of which, by many revisions, grew that Latin Vulgate which is now used in the Catholic ritual; an ancient Syriac version of about the same age; two Egyptian versions, in different dialects, made in the third century; the Peshito-Syriac, the Gothic, and the Ethiopic in the fourth, and the Armenian in the fifth; besides several later translations, including the Arabic and the Slavonic. These ancient translations are all of value to modern scholars in helping them to reach more certain conclusions respecting the nature of the Sacred Scriptures and the right reading in disputed passages.

The ages which we have been traversing in this chapter–when the Bible was a manuscript–were ages of great darkness. The copies of the book were few, and the common people could neither possess them nor read them. It is hard for us who have had the book in our hands from our infancy, who have gone to it so freely for light in darkness, for