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Who Wrote the Bible?
WHO WROTE THE BIBLE?
BY
WASHINGTON GLADDEN
CONTENTS.
I. A LOOK INTO THE HEBREW BIBLE II. WHAT DID MOSES WRITE? III. SOURCES
OF THE PENTATEUCH IV. THE EARLIER HEBREW HISTORIES V. THE HEBREW
PROPHECIES VI. THE LATER HEBREW HISTORIES VII. THE POETICAL BOOKS
VIII. THE EARLIER NEW TESTAMENT WRITINGS IX. THE ORIGIN OF THE GOSPELS
X. NEW TESTAMENT HISTORY AND PROPHECY XI. THE CANON XII. HOW THE BOOKS
WERE WRITTEN XIII. HOW MUCH IS THE BIBLE WORTH?
WHO WROTE THE BIBLE?
CHAPTER I.
A LOOK INTO THE HEBREW BIBLE.
The aim of this volume is to put into compact and popular form, for
the benefit of intelligent readers, the principal facts upon which
scholars are now generally agreed concerning the literary history of
the Bible. The doctrines taught in the Bible will not be discussed;
its claims to a supernatural origin will not be the principal matter
of inquiry; the book will concern itself chiefly with those purely
natural and human agencies which have been employed in writing,
transcribing, editing, preserving, transmitting, translating, and
publishing the Bible.
The writer of this book has no difficulty in believing that the Bible
contains supernatural elements. He is ready to affirm that other than
natural forces have been employed in producing it. It is to these
superhuman elements in it that reference and appeal are most
frequently made. But the Bible has a natural history also. It is a
book among books. It is a phenomenon among phenomena. Its origin and
growth in this world can be studied as those of any other natural
object can be studied. The old apple-tree growing in my garden is the
witness to me of some transcendent truths, the shrine of mysteries
that I cannot unravel. What the life is that was hidden in the seed
from which it sprang, and that has shaped all its growth, coordinating
the forces of nature, and producing this individual form and this
particular variety of fruit,-- this I do not know. There are questions
here that no man of science can answer. Life in the seed of the apple
as well as in the soul of man is a mystery. But there are some things
about the apple-tree that may be known. I may know--if any one has
been curious enough to keep the record--when the seed was planted,
when the shoot first appeared above the ground, how many branches it
had when it was five years old, how high it was when it was ten years
old, when this limb and that twig were added, when the first blossom
appeared, when that branch was grafted and those others were trimmed
off. All this knowledge I may have gained; and in setting forth these
facts, or such as these, concerning the natural history of the tree, I
do not assume that I am telling all about the life that is in it. In
like manner we may study the origin and growth of the Bible without
attempting to decide the deeper questions concerning the inspiration
of its writers and the meaning of the truths they reveal.
That the Bible has a natural as well as a supernatural history is
everywhere assumed upon its pages. It was written as other books are
written, and it was preserved and transmitted as other books are
preserved and transmitted. It did not come into being in any such
marvelous way as that in which Joseph Smith's "Book of Mormon," for
example, is said to have been produced. The story is, that an angel
appeared to Smith and told him where he would find this book; that he
went to the spot designated, and found in a stone box a volume six
inches thick, composed of thin gold plates, eight inches by seven,
held together by three gold rings; that these plates were covered with
writing in the "Reformed Egyptian" tongue, and that with this book
were "the Urim and the Thummim," a pair of supernatural spectacles, by
means of which he was able to read _and translate_ this "Reformed
Egyptian" language. This is the sort of story which has been believed,
in this nineteenth century, by tens of thousands of Mormon votaries.
Concerning the books of the Bible no such astonishing stories are
told. Nevertheless some good people seem inclined to think that if
such stories are not told, they might well be; they imagine that the
Bible must have originated in a manner purely miraculous; and though
they know very little about its origin, they conceive of it as a book
that was written in heaven in the English tongue, divided there into
chapters and verses, with head lines and reference marks, printed in
small pica, bound in calf, and sent down to earth by angels in its
present form. What I desire to show is, that the work of putting the
Bible into its present form was not done in heaven, but on earth; that
it was not done by angels, but by men; that it was not done all at
once, but a little at a time, the work of preparing and perfecting it
extending over several centuries, and employing the labors of many men
in different lands and long-divided generations. And this history of
the Bible as a book, and of the natural and human agencies employed in
producing it, will prove, I trust, of much interest to those who care
to study it.
Mr. Huxley has written a delightful treatise on "A Piece of Chalk,"
and another on "The Crayfish;" a French writer has produced an
entertaining volume entitled "The Story of a Stick;" the books of the
Bible, considered from a scientific or bibliographical point of view,
should repay our study not less richly than such simple, natural
objects.
A great amount of study has been expended of late on the Scriptures,
and the conclusions reached by this study are of immense importance.
What is called the Higher Criticism has been busy scanning these old
writings, and trying to find out all about them. What is the Higher
Criticism? It is the attempt to learn from the Scriptures themselves
the truth about their origin. It consists in a careful study of the
language of the books, of the manners and customs referred to in them,
of the historical facts mentioned by them; it compares part with part,
and book with book, to discover agreements, if they exist, and
discrepancies, that they may be reconciled. This Higher Criticism has
subjected these old writings to such an analysis and inspection as no
other writings have ever undergone. Some of this work has undoubtedly
been destructive. It has started out with the assumption that these
books are in no respect different from other sacred books; that they
are no more a revelation from God than the Zendavesta or the
Nibelungen Lied is a revelation from God; and it has bent its energies
to discrediting, in every way, the veracity and the authority of our
Scriptures. But much of this criticism has been thoroughly candid and
reverent, even conservative in its temper and purpose. It has not been
unwilling to look at the facts; but it has held toward the Bible a
devout and sympathetic attitude; it believes it to contain, as no
other book in the world contains, the message of God to men; and it
has only sought to learn from the Bible itself how that message has
been conveyed. It is this conservative criticism whose leadership will
be followed in these studies. No conclusions respecting the history of
these writings will be stated which are not accepted by conservative
scholars. Nevertheless it must be remembered that the results of
conservative scholarship have been very imperfectly reported to the
laity of the churches. Many facts about the Bible are now known by
intelligent ministers of which their congregations do not hear. An
anxious and not unnatural feeling has prevailed that the faith of the
people in the Bible would be shaken if the facts were known. The
belief that the truth is the safest thing in the world, and that the
things which cannot be shaken will remain after it is all told, has
led to the preparation of this volume.
I have no doubt, however, that some of the statements which follow
will fall upon some minds with a shock of surprise. The facts which
will be brought to light will conflict very sharply with some of the
traditional theories about the Bible. Some of my readers may be
inclined to fear that the foundations of faith are giving way. Let me,
at the outset, request all such to suspend their judgment and read the
book through before they come to such a conclusion. Doubtless it will
be necessary to make some readjustment of theories; to look at the
Bible less as a miraculous and more as a spiritual product; to put
less emphasis upon the letter and more upon the spirit; but after all
this is done it may appear that the Bible is worth more to us than it
ever was before, because we have learned how rightly to value it.
The word "Bible" is not a biblical word. The Old Testament writings
were in the hands of the men who wrote the books of the New Testament,
but they do not call these writings the Bible; they name them the
Scriptures, the Holy Scriptures, the Sacred Writings, or else they
refer to them under the names that were given to specific parts of
them, as the Law, the Prophets, or the Psalms. Our word Bible comes
from a word which began to be applied to the sacred writings as a
whole about four hundred years after Christ. It is a Greek plural
noun, meaning the books, or the little books. These writings were
called by this plural name for about eight hundred years; it was not
till the thirteenth century that they began to be familiarly spoken of
as a single book. This fact, of itself, is instructive. For though a
certain spiritual unity does pervade these sacred writings, yet they
are a collection of books, rather than one book. The early Christians,
who honored and prized them sufficiently, always spoke of them as "The
Books," rather than as "The Book,"--and their name was more accurate
than ours.
The names Old and New Testament are Bible words; that is to say we
find the names in our English Bibles, though they are not used to
describe these books. Paul calls the old dispensation the old
covenant; and that phrase came into general use among the early
Christians as contrasted with the Christian dispensation which they
called the new covenant; therefore Greek-speaking Christians used to
talk about "the books of the old covenant," and "the books of the new
covenant;" and by and by they shortened the phrase and sometimes
called the two collections simply "Old Covenant" and "New Covenant."
When the Latin-speaking Christians began to use the same terms, they
translated the Greek word "covenant" by the word "testament" which
means a will, and which does not fairly convey the sense of the Greek
word. And so it was that these two collections of sacred writings
began to be called The Old Testament and The New Testament. It is the
former of these that we are first to study.
When Jesus Christ was on the earth he often quoted in his discourses
from the Jewish Scriptures, and referred to them in his conversations.
His apostles and the other New Testament writers also quote freely
from the same Scriptures, and books of the early Christian Fathers are
full of references to them. What were these Jewish Scriptures?
At the time when our Lord was on the earth, the sacred writings of the
Jews were collected in two different forms. The Palestinian
collection, so called, was written in the Hebrew language, and the
Alexandrian collection, called the Septuagint, in the Greek. For many
years a large colony of devout and learned Jews had lived in
Alexandria; and as the Greek language was spoken there, and had become
their common speech, they translated their sacred writings into Greek.
This translation soon came into general use, because there were
everywhere many Jews who knew Greek well enough but knew no Hebrew at
all. When our Lord was on earth, the Hebrew was a dead language; it
may have been the language of the temple, as Latin is now the language
of the Roman Catholic mass; but the common people did not understand
it; the vernacular of the Palestinian Jews was the Aramaic, a language
similar to the Hebrew, sometimes called the later Hebrew, and having
some such relation to it as the English has to the German tongue.
There is some dispute as to the time when the Jews lost the use of
their own language and adopted the Aramaic; many of the Jewish
historians hold the view that the people who came back from the
captivity to Jerusalem had learned to use the Aramaic as their common
speech, and that the Hebrew Scriptures had to be interpreted when they
were read to them. Others think that this change in language took
place a little later, and that it resulted in great measure from the
close intercourse of the Jews with the peoples round about them in
Palestine, most of whom used the Aramaic. At any rate the change had
taken place before the coming of Christ, so that no Hebrew was then
spoken familiarly in Palestine. When "the Hebrew tongue" is mentioned
in the New Testament it is the Aramaic that is meant, and not the
ancient Hebrew. The Greek, on the other hand, was a living language;
it was spoken on the streets and in the markets everywhere, and many
Jews understood it almost as well as they did their Aramaic
vernacular, just as many of the people of Constantinople and the
Levant now speak French more fluently than their native tongues. The
Greek version of the Scriptures was, for this reason, more freely used
by the Jews even in Palestine than the Hebrew original; it was from
the Septuagint that Christ and his apostles made most of their
quotations. Out of three hundred and fifty citations in the New
Testament from the Old Testament writings about three hundred appear
to be directly from the Greek version made at Alexandria. Between
these two collections of sacred writings, the one written in Hebrew,
then a dead language, and the other in Greek,--the one used by
scholars only, and the other by the common people,--there were some
important differences, not only in the phraseology and in the
arrangement of the books, but in the contents themselves. Of these I
shall speak more fully in the following chapters. It is to the Hebrew
collection, which is the original of these writings, and from which
our English Old Testament was translated, that we shall now give our
attention. What were these Hebrew Scriptures of which all the writers
of the New Testament knew, and from which they sometimes directly
quote?
The contents of this collection were substantially if not exactly the
same as those of our Old Testament, but they were arranged in very
different order. Indeed they were regarded as three distinct groups of
writings, rather than as one book, and the three groups were of
different degrees of sacredness and authority. Two of these divisions
are frequently referred to in the New Testament, as The Law and The
Prophets; and the threefold division is doubtfully hinted at in Luke
xxiv. 44, where our Lord speaks of the predictions concerning himself
which are found in the Law and the Prophets and in the Psalms.
The first of these holy books of the Jews was, then, THE LAW contained
in the first five books of our Bible, known among us as the
Pentateuch, and called by the Jews sometimes simply "The Law," and
sometimes "The Law of Moses." This was supposed to be the oldest
portion of their Scriptures, and was by them regarded as much more
sacred and authoritative than any other portion. To Moses, they, said,
God spake face to face; to the other holy men much less distinctly.
Consequently their appeal is most often to the law of Moses.
The group of writings known as "The Prophets" is subdivided into the
Earlier and the Later Prophets. _The Earlier Prophets_ comprise
Joshua, the Judges, the two books of Samuel, counted as one, and the
two books of the Kings, counted also as one. _The Later Prophets_
comprise Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the twelve Minor Prophets, the
last books in our Old Testament,--Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah,
Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi.
These twelve _were counted as one book_; so that there were four
volumes of the earlier and four of the later prophets. Why the Jews
should have called Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and the Kings books of the
Prophets is not clear; perhaps because they were supposed to have been
written by prophets; perhaps because prophets have a conspicuous place
in their histories. This portion of the Hebrew Scriptures, containing
the four historical books named and the fifteen prophetical books
(reckoned, however, as four), was regarded by the Jews as standing
next in sacredness and value to the book of the Law.
The third group of their Scriptures was known among them as Kethubim,
or Writings, simply. Sometimes, possibly, they called it The Psalms,
because the book of the Psalms was the initial book of the collection.
It consisted of the Psalms, the Proverbs, Job, the Song of Solomon,
Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, Esther, Daniel, Ezra, Nehemiah, and
the Chronicles. This group of writings was esteemed by the Jews as
less sacred and authoritative than either of the other two groups; the
authors were supposed to have had a smaller measure of inspiration.
Respecting two or three of these books there was also some dispute
among the rabbis, as to their right to be regarded as sacred
Scripture.
Such, then, were the Hebrew Scriptures in the days of our Lord, and
such was the manner of their arrangement.
They had, indeed, other books of a religious character, to which
reference is sometimes made in the books of the Bible. In Numbers xxi.
14, 15, we have a brief war song quoted from "The Book of the Wars of
Jehovah," a collection of which we have no other knowledge. In Joshua
x. 13, the story of the sun standing still over Gibeon is said to have
been quoted from "The Book of Jasher," and in 2 Samuel i. 18, the
beautiful "Song of the Bow," written by David on the death of Saul and
Jonathan, is said to be contained in the "Book of Jasher." It is
evident that this must have been a collection of lyrics celebrating
some of the great events of Hebrew history. The title seems to mean
"The Book of the Just." The exploits of the worthies of Israel
probably furnished its principal theme.
In 1 Chronicles xxix. 29, we read: "Now the acts of David the king,
first and last, behold they are written in the History of Samuel the
Seer, and in the History of Nathan the Prophet, and in the History of
Gad the Seer." There is no reason to doubt that the first named of
these is the history contained in the books of Samuel in our Bible;
but the other two books are lost. We have another reference to the
"History of Nathan," in 2 Chronicles ix. 29,--the concluding words of
the sketch of King Solomon's life. "Now the rest of the acts of
Solomon, first and last, are they not written in the History of Nathan
the Prophet, and in the Prophecy of Abijah the Shilonite, and in the
Visions of Iddo the Seer concerning Jeroboam the son of Nebat?" Here
are two more books of which we have no other knowledge; their titles
quoted upon the page of this chronicle are all that is left of them. A
similar reference, in the last words of the sketch of Solomon's son
Rehoboam, gives us our only knowledge of the "Histories of Shemaiah
the Prophet."
In the Kings and in the Chronicles, reference is repeatedly made to
the "Books of the Chronicles of the Kings of Israel," and the "Books
of the Chronicles of the Kings of Judah," under which titles volumes
that are now lost are brought to our notice. Undoubtedly much of the
history in the biblical books of Kings and Chronicles was derived from
these ancient annals. They are the sources from which the writers of
these books drew their materials.
We are also told in 2 Chronicles xxvi. 22, that Isaiah wrote a history
of the "Acts of Uzziah," which is wholly lost.
Other casual references are made to historical writings of various
sorts, composed by prophets and seers, and thus apparently accredited
by the biblical writers as authoritative utterances of divine truth.
Why were they suffered to perish? Has not Emerson certified us that
"One accent of the Holy Ghost The heedless world has never lost"?
But this is a fond exaggeration. Mr. Emerson was certainly not himself
inspired when he uttered it. Many and many an accent of the Holy Ghost
has been lost by this heedless world. And it is not at all improbable
that some of these histories of Nathan and Gad and Shemaiah held vital
and precious truth,--truth that the world has needed. The very fact
that they are hopelessly lost raises some curious questions about the
method of revelation. Is it to be supposed that the Providence which
suffers whole books to be lost by men would infallibly guarantee those
that remain against errors in the copies, and other imperfections? As
a matter of fact, we know that He has not so protected any of them.
Still I doubt not that Providence has kept for us the best of this
Hebrew literature. To say that it is the best literature that the
world has produced is to say very little. It is separated widely from
all other sacred writings. Its constructive ideas are as far above
those of the other books of religion as the heavens are above the
earth. I pity the man who has had the Bible in his hand from his
infancy, and who has learned in his maturer years something of the
literature of the other religions, but who now needs to have this
statement verified. True it is that we find pure maxims, elevated
thoughts, genuine faith, lofty morality, in many of the Bibles of the
other races. True it is that in some of them visions are vouchsafed us
of the highest truths of religion, of the very substance of the gospel
of the Son of God. But when we take the sacred books of the other
religions in their entirety, and compare them with the sacred writings
of the Hebrews, the superiority of these in their fundamental ideas,
in the conceptions that dominate them, in the grand uplifting visions
and purposes that vitalize them, can be felt by any man who has any
discernment of spiritual realities. It is in these great ideas that
the value of these writings consists, and not in any petty
infallibility of phrase, or inerrancy of statement. They are the
record, as no other book in the world is a record, of that increasing
purpose of God which runs through the ages. I hope that it will appear
as the result of our studies, that one may continue to reverence the
Scriptures as containing a unique and special revelation from God to
men, and yet clearly see and frankly acknowledge the facts concerning
their origin, and the human and fallible elements in them, which are
not concealed, but lie upon their very face.