The study of the Bible [microform]

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The Study of the Bible

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS, CHICAGO

THE BAKER & TAYLOR COMPANY, NEW YORK; THE CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY
PRESS, LONDON; THE MARUZEN-KABUSHIKI-KAISHA, TOKYO, OSAKA,
KYOTO, FUKUOKA, SENDAIJ THE COMMERCIAL PRESS, LIMITED, SHANGHAI

The Study of the Bible

By

ERNEST CABMAN COLWELL

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The University of Chicago

The University of Chicago Press
Chicago, Illinois

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

Dedicated in love and esteem
to my parents

ANNA CATHERINE COLWELL

and
ERNEST COLWELL

Preface

A VOLUME that travels through as wide a
field as the study of the Bible today soon
takes the specialist beyond all the old fa-
miliar landmarks out into strange and bewildering
territory. In this situation his only hope lies in ob-
taining local guides who will not suffer his feet to
stumble into a crevasse hidden from him by his ig-
norance. To the many who have tried to keep the
author's feet upon the straight and narrow path, he
here makes grateful acknowledgment.

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

Thanks are due also to Professor S. J. Case, Dean
of the Divinity School, who read and criticized one
of the recensions of the manuscript; to my colleagues
in the New Testament Department Professor H.
R. Willoughby, who read the first two chapters, and
Professor. D. W. Riddle, who made valuable sugges-

Vll

viii PREFACE

tions for the section on interpretation and to Mr.
B. LeRoy Burkhart, Fellow in the Divinity School of
the University of Chicago, whose patient, accurate,
and stimulating assistance is deeply appreciated. In
the field of linguistic study the author has long been
indebted to Professor J. M. Steadman of Emory Uni-
versity; the chapter on translation owes much to his
teaching.

No one of these scholars is to be held responsible
for the positions taken by the author or for any of the
errors in this work.

The International Council of Religious Education,
owner of the copyright, kindly gave permission for
the use of the American Standard Version of Matt.
3:7-10; Luke 3:7-9; Matt. 9:14-17; Mark 2: 18-22;
Luke 5:33-39. This version is published by Thomas
Nelson and Sons, New York City.

ERNEST CADMAN COLWELL

UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
February 19, 1937

I

Introduction

book is an introduction to the study of
the Bible, and its primary concern is to pre-
pare the student for his own study of the
Bible rather than to present him with an encyclo-
pedic survey of the factual data that have accumu-
lated in the critical investigation of the Christian
Scriptures. It is designed to orient the reader in
the field of biblical study to give him a sense of
direction, some indication of possible itineraries, a
road map with good roads plainly labeled and dan-
gers clearly marked.

It is not planned to minister to the devotional use
of the Bible. The author believes that the Bible has
valuable contributions to make to modern life, but
to define those values here might easily lead to the
dogmatic presentation of the author's personal opin-
ion or to a long survey of the many positions taken
by others. Neither of these programs falls naturally
into the purpose of this book. It gladly recognizes the
existence of these values, the need for their study,
and the validity of the use of the Bible in modern
religious life. But the road it follows leads the stu-
dent away from these areas toward an intelligent
comprehension of what his own Bible is and an in-
troduction to its study.

IX

* INTRODUCTION

To this end it presents the problems faced and the
resources used in the study of the Bible's origin,
transmission, translation, and interpretation. In each
of these areas an attempt is made to define the task
that faces the student, to describe the helps and hin-
drances, to explain methods, and to suggest the
amount of progress already made. There is no at-
tempt to discuss in comprehensive fashion all the
literary or historical problems involved in the study
of each of the sixty-six books of the Bible. No at-
tempt is made to survey in detail the history of the
canon, or the materials and methods of textual criti-
cism, or to present in summary all that is known in
any area of biblical study.

The student who is anxious to go on from this book
to such study will find a bibliography at the end of
each chapter, which is designed to lead him as far in
the pursuit of the subject as his own interest will
carry him. The bibliographies group the books re-
ferred to under two headings "General" and "Ad-
vanced" and most of the books listed are briefly
characterized. A strenuous effort has been made to
include in each of these divisions the clearest and
soundest work of contemporary scholarship, prefer-
ence being given to works which themselves contain
good bibliographies and are of recent vintage. A final
Bibliography lists periodicals, dictionaries, encyclo-
pedias, series of commentaries, etc.

An especial emphasis is laid upon the part played
by the religious experience of the group in the crea-
tion of the literature and also upon the part played

INTRODUCTION xi

by the needs of the community in molding the litera-
ture into its present form. This is one of the vital
interests of biblical scholarship today; and, as it has
only recently won prominence, many of the older
handbooks give it but scant attention.

This book has been planned to serve as an orienta-
tion in the study of the Bible both for those who plan
to specialize in the pursuit of biblical lore and also
for those whose interest in the subject is of a more
general character. The work of many a sincere stu-
dent is fruitless because his attitudes are basically
wrong or his methods unsound. This is often true
of the "nonprofessional" student, the undergraduate
in college, or the intelligent layman. The questions
that come from these sources to the specialist's desk
betray a dismaying vulnerability to the attacks of
quackery and fanaticism. While no one book can
equip the beginner with attitudes and methods ade-
quate for all his needs, this one it is hoped will
help him toward that attainment. In so far as it
accomplishes this it will provide the student with
some solid ground on which to stand while he works;
it will set up compass marks to prevent his being lost
in the confusion of innumerable details and conflict-
ing methods and theories.

Table of Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I. THE ORIGIN AND GROWTH OF THE BIBLE . ?

II. THE TRANSMISSION OF THE BIBLE '. . . 38

III. THE TRANSLATION OF THE BIBLE , . . . 71

IV. THE INTERPRETATION OF THE BIBLE THE
MODERNIZING METHOD 102

V. THE INTERPRETATION OF THE BIBLE THE
HISTORICAL METHOD: LITERARY CRITI-
CISM 121

VI. THE INTERPRETATION OF THE BIBLE THE
HISTORICAL METHOD: HISTORICAL CRITI-
CISM ......' 148

GENERAL BIBLIOGRAPHY 176

INDEX OF AUTHORS AND SUBJECTS .... 179

INDEX OF PASSAGES CITED 185

Xlll

Chapter I
The Origin and Growth of the Bible

I

study of the origin, of the Bible begins
with definitions. The Bible, according to a
contemporary dictionary, is the collection of
books which Christians accept as divinely inspired
and as possessing divine authority. Of these two ele-
ments inspiration and authority it is authority
which is the more distinctive of the Bible. The Bible
is Bible as an authoritative book; any separate book
became Bible when its inspiration was recognized as '
of such a quality as to give it authority. The study
of the origin and development of the Bible as Bible
is therefore limited to the study of books accepted as /
inspired and authoritative.

DISTINCTION BETWEEN LITERATURE AND CANON

It is equally legitimate to study the books of the
Bible as books. This study of the literature tries to
answer such questions as: Who was the author of the
book? When was it written? Where was it written?
What sources did the author use ? etc. Such questions
reach back beyond the existence of the books as Bible
to the time when they existed simply as religious
books. The discussion of this literary criticism of the

2 THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE

Bible is postponed until the origin of the acceptance
of the books as authoritative has been investigated.
In technical jargon the study of the literary problems
of the Bible is called "Introduction" short for "In-
troduction to Biblical Literature" and the study of
the Bible as authoritative is called the "study of the
canon." It is this canonization of the Scriptures that
is studied in this chapter.

The word "canon" is used with a bewildering va-
riety of meanings. It may refer to a support for bells,
a bone in a horse's foreleg, a cathedral official, an
ecclesiastical law, etc. In terms of Bible study it

V usually indicates the books accepted as authoritative
by the church; that is, it is used as a loose synonym
for Bible. But it has other meanings here also. It is
used to mean a list of the sacred books; e.g., the

-/Muratorian canon is a Roman list of books accepted
by the church about A.D. 180. It is used also of a
group of books within the Bible; the manuals speak
of "the prophetic canon," "the gospel canon," etc.
And in a very broad sense the word "canon" is used
to cover the study of the origin and growth of the
Bible as Bible; here it is really shorthand for canoni-
zation.

Before the student is equipped to face the basic
problems involved in a study of how the books of the
Bible became sacred, he must assimilate the fact that
the literature existed before it was canonized. The
existence of the books as nonsacred through a period
preceding their acceptance by the cult as authorita-
tive literature has important implications for the

ORIGIN AND GROWTH OF THE BIBLE 3

study of the canon. It makes impossible the simple
assumption that the Jewish people (or the Christian
church) rushed to read and obey each new volume
before the ink was dry.

We who were born into a church which has rever-
enced the Scriptures for centuries find it hard to lay
aside this casual acceptance of the Bible and see the
problems that exist. There have been four gospels in
the New Testament since we first saw it but why
four? why not three? or five? or, better yet, why not
one? Why two testaments? Why didn't the Chris-
tians expand the Jewish Scriptures instead of adding
a new volume? How could the Christian church exist
for a century without a distinctive Christian canon ?
Why do the Roman Catholic and the Protestant Old
Testaments differ in contents? When and why was
the Old Testament Apocrypha dropped from the
printings of the English Bible ? Has the church ever
limited inspiration to the Bible and refused to recog-
nize it elsewhere? These questions are examples of
the basic and baffling problems that face the student
of the canon. They show clearly that the student
must be constantly alert to overcome his familiarity
with the Bible, to recognize problems when he meets
them, and to travel back into the past back of the
days when there was a Bible.

Most of the Bible was not written as Bible, nor did
its first readers read it as Bible. When Paul wrote to
his churches, he was so far from expecting that his
letters would be accepted as equal in authority to the
Jewish Scriptures that he sometimes despaired of hav-

4 THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE

ing his wishes carried out. After writing a harsh letter
to the Corinthians, he worries so much over how it
will be received that he cannot rest but starts to-
ward Corinth to meet his messenger as soon as possi-
ble and learn the fate of his letter. When he writes
to Philemon about his slave Onesimus, he bolsters
up this appeal by referring to it in a letter to a church
group. The fiery, almost desperate, tone of his letter
to the Galatian churches springs from the hope but
not from the certainty of converting them to his
position. These are not the attitudes of a man con-
scious of writing sacred scripture and sure of its ac-
ceptance as authoritative.

No more dramatic demonstration of the nonsacred
character of these writings in their early form can be
found than the story of the book which Jeremiah
dictated to Baruch to be read before all the people.
As the story is told in chapter 36 of Jeremiah's proph-
ecy, it is plain that some of the leaders of the people
were terrified by what was written in the book; but
the king the Lord's anointed was unmoved by its
message, cut it in pieces, and threw it into the fire.
This dramatic rejection is the more interesting in that
the book was a deliberate attempt to influence the
cult group and was written by an individual who held
a recognized position in the life of the cult.

Another instance may be found in the Book of
Amos. The only narrative in this short but vigorous
prophecy relates a stormy interview between the
royal priest and the prophet, in which the prophet
is ordered out of the country. It is quite plain from
this story that there was no overwhelming desire on

ORIGIN AND GROWTH OF THE BIBLE 5

the part of king and priest in Israel to accept the mes-
sage of Amos as divinely authoritative. Somewhere
between 750 B.C. and 200 (?) B.C., the Book of Amos
acquired authority; and the exact period (if there was
any exact period) was certainly closer to the later
than the earlier date. Thus, this book must have
existed for more than four centuries before it was
accepted as part of the authoritative religious litera-
ture of the Jewish people.

In the case of those sections of the Bible which had
a long preliterary existence, the interval between cre-
ation and canonization was even longer. Much of the
older material in the Old Testament has a remote past
as folklore, poetry, story, and song. For example, it
is generally agreed that the major part of the content
of the Book of Judges is much older than the book in
which we read it. The author, or editor, who com-
piled our book has such a distinctive and repetitious
style that it is easy even for the novice to see the earlier
elements within the framework. One of the oldest and
most famous of these sections is the Song of Deborah,
which may go back to the twelfth century B.C. It is
a sweeping, partisan, brutal song of war and victory
and exultation over the enemy a true war song. Our
Book of Judges was written toward the end of the
fifth century B.C. and was accepted as scripture by
200 (?) B.C. In the seven hundred years that Deb-
orah's Song was sung by Jewish patriots, was it ac-
cepted as an authoritative religious guide by the
cult as a cult? To ask the question is to answer it
with a negative.

Examples of this sort could be multiplied until the

6 THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE

reader was lulled to sleep by their monotony. There
are large areas in the Pentateuch whose composition
is separated from their acceptance by an interval of
many centuries. This is true also of most of the other
books of the Old Testament. Sometimes in them we
catch glimpses of the literature before our literature.
There are quotations from, and references to, other
books; e.g., the Book of Jasher is quoted, but no one
supposes that Jasher was ever regarded as an authori T
tative volume in the sense that Genesis later was.
Even some of the latest books in the Old Testament
e.g., Chronicles give evidence of using ancient
volumes as sources. The existence of these ancient
books behind our biblical books shows how long a
pre-biblical history much of the Bible had.

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

WHY HAVE A BIBLE?

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

ORIGIN AND GROWTH OF THE BIBLE 7

Many religions have so existed; some still do. One
of the most vigorous competitors of Christianity in
the Roman empire was the cult of the sun god
Mithras. It swept through the legions and spread
rapidly to the frontiers of the empire, yet it was in
no sense a book religion. The answer to the question,
"Why have a Bible?" must, therefore, b~e sought in
some of the characteristic features of Jewish religion
and life.

The remote distance at which the process of can-
onization began adds to the difficulty of answering
this primal question. The reason for later develop-
ments and for the formation of new canons is deter-
mined with relative ease; for in these later areas we
have, as one influential element in the situation, the
presence of the first sacred collection, and the amount
of contemporary evidence as to the process increases
as the story approaches modern times. It is easy to
say why Mohammed produced an authoritative book
for his cult, but the activity of pious Jews in the
seventh century B.C. follows no well-known precedent
and is shrouded in the obscurity of antiquity.

The movement toward the creation of an authori-
tative religious literature rose out of the conception
of the nation as the chosen people of a particular
deity. Since this conception was not peculiar to Israel
and existed in other nations before the Exodus, the
ultimate source of the canon lies in the early history
of cultures that were old before the Hebrews came to
the promised land. If the nation exists in an intimate
reciprocal relationship to the deity, it naturally fol-

8 THE STUDY O^ THE BIBLE

lows that the laws of the nation are God's laws and
that the history of the nation is sacred history. Fur-
thermore, the deity would not be so thoughtless of
his people as to cut them off from the prospect of
receiving additional messages from him as occasion
demanded. Throughout the ancient world prophets
appeared who spoke for God, whose words had a
degree of sanctity derived from the source from which
they came. It was, therefore, not only possible but
natural that codes of law, books of history, and ser-
mons of the prophets should attain to some measure
of sanctity.

A concrete representation of this is to be seen on
.the Susa stele found in A.D. 1901 and written about
2000 B.C. Here the Babylonian king Hammurabi is
shown in bas-relief, standing on a mountain top be-
fore his god, who hands him the laws inscribed be-
neath them. Several of the precepts of this code are
strikingly parallel to items in the Code of the Cove-
nant (Exod. 20:23 23:19); e.g., the demand of an
eye for an eye and the prescriptions as to liability for
damages incurred by the owner of a goring ox. Thus
the code of Hammurabi and the covenant code in
Exodus alike possessed some degree of divine author-
ity from the day of their codification at least. But
their early users were still far from regarding them
as part of a Bible.

CANONS ARE ADOPTED IN CRISES

Some light is shed on the origin of the Bible as Bible
by the study of certain characteristics which are com-

ORIGIN AND GROWTH OF THE BIBLE 9

mon to the various specific situations in which formal
canonization emerges. One of these common ele-
ments is the presence of strife between parties within
the cult.

At least from the time when the Hebrew people
settled in Canaan, there was conflict between the
rigorous religion they brought with them from the
desert which we later call "prophetic" and the
softer cult of the people of the land with their Baalim.
The influence of the Canaanite religion upon that of
the Hebrews was ancient, strong, and persistent. One
of the recent archeological discoveries emphasizes the
extent of its influence upon even the early ritual. Our
biblical history is written from the prophetic and
priestly viewpoint; thus those kings are good who
keep the cult "pure," and those are bad who favor
and foster Canaanitish elements and practices. One
of the worst kings in this regard was Manasseh, who
ruled in the first half of the seventh century B.C. He
restored and enriched the hillside shrines and favored
the Canaanitish elements in the cult. A few years
after the death of Manasseh, the prophetic party
greatly influenced his grandson, King Josiah.

This influence culminated in the reforms of 621
B.C., which consisted of the abolition of all shrines
except the temple in Jerusalem and the adoption of
a book found in the temple as a religious authority
for the people. This book with its anti-Canaanitish
emphasis was written by some leader of the opposi-
tion to Manasseh in the dark days before Josiah came
to the throne. This explains the rigorous nature of

io THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE

/

the legislation the destruction of all shrines but one.
Josiah's acceptance of the teachings of the party op-
posed to Amon and Manasseh could not be trans-
ferred to the mass of the people as a casual or routine
matter. The ruthless nature of the reversal of policy
and the destruction of all shrines outside Jerusalem
must have stirred the people deeply and unsettled
many. In that time of disquiet the change was sup-
ported by a new authority the adoption of a sacred
book. Scholars identify this book as the core of the
present Book of Deuteronomy.

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

He bitterly attacked the Old Testament, claiming
that it was not inspired by the Father of Jesus but
by an inferior deity. He claimed to be a true repre-
sentative of the apostles, especially of Paul (the only
true representative of Jesus); and he supplied his

ORIGIN AND GROWTH OF THE BIBLE 11

churches with a New Testament consisting of "Gos-
pel and Apostle" (Luke and Paul) to replace the Old
Testament. Thus he set an ancient authority (ancient
in Christian history) which had already acquired
some prestige, over against the authority of local
ecclesiastical officials the bishop and presbyters of
Rome and of other cities. Within a generation of his
arrival at Rome, the Roman church set up a definite
list of books which it accepted as authoritative. This
earliest list of New Testament books, called the
"Muratorian canon," emerges in a situation charac-
terized by strife within the cult.

CANONS ARE ADOPTED UNDER POLITICAL
PRESSURE

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

12 THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE

One of the most valuable of these resources was
the Sacred Book, which at that time consisted of three
collections of books the Law, the Prophets, and the
other writings. The first two were definite in content
and accepted beyond question; the third group had
no sharpness of outline, and about some books the
question of inclusion or omission was a very live one.
The weakening of the religion consequent to the dis-
aster of A.D. 70 made this uncertainty as to the exact
limits of the Bible intolerable; and the rabbis of Pales-
tine began an intensive discussion of the Bible's con-
tents which led ultimately to agreement on its exact
limits.

In the second century B.C. the strenuous efforts of
King Antiochus Epiphanes of Syria to stamp out the
religion of his Jewish subjects introduced a period of
conflict between cult and state of great significance
for the canon. The attack was begun before the days
of Antiochus, for the attractive features of Hellenism
had drawn many Jews away from their loyalty to
their own cult. The critical nature of the situation
when Antiochus threw the military power of the state
against Judaism cannot be overemphasized. Pious
Jews did not underestimate the danger; under the
military leadership of Judas and his family they re-
pulsed invaders, threw off the Syrian yoke, and at-
tained an approximate independence. Since the Syri-
an persecution deliberately singled out the sacred
books of the Jews for destruction, and even forbade
the reading of the Scriptures, it was important to
know which books were Scriptures. This situation

ORIGIN AND GROWTH OF THE BIBLE 13

made a vital issue of the exact definition of the Bible's
contents. From it, in all probability, came the im-
petus to the final definition of the prophetic canon,
the second division of the Jewish Bible.

Although we know little of the details of the action,
there can be no doubt that Jewish leaders found in
their military victories a victory for Torah, too. It is
perhaps an oversimplification of the processes to point
out that the three great national disasters of Israel
(i) the Babylonian captivity, (a) the Syrian per-
secution, and (3) the capture of Jerusalem by the
Romans are followed in turn by the closing of the
three divisions of the Jewish Bible (i) the Law (2)
the Prophets, and (3) the Writings.

The pressure exerted upon the cult in regard to the
formation of the canon by the association of the cult
with political life was equally strong in days of-
triumph. Early in the fourth century A.D., Chris-
tianity won tolerance and favor from the Emperor
Constantine; and in A.D. 380 Theodosius I proclaimed -
Christianity the official religion of the state. That
Constantine's recognition sprang from a desire to
strengthen the unity of the empire is shown by the '
strenuous efforts he made to bring the dissident
groups of the church into harmony. Dislike of heresy
(that is, of division) in the dominant cult of the realm
has characterized other able rulers since Constantine;
Theodosius' denial to heretics of the right to make
bequests indicates plainly the value he attached to a
united church. That the pressure toward unification
which the state brought to bear upon the church

i 4 THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE

throughout the fourth century affected canon as well
1 as doctrine is certain, for the value of canon as a source
of doctrine was unquestioned. It is not chance coin-
cidence that this century which saw the church be-
come the one religion of the state saw the church
agree on one canon. That this agreement was still
far from unanimous is true; it would, perhaps, be
more accurate to say that the degree of agreement
here reached its high point. The exaltation of the
church at the right hand of the emperor takes place in
the period which sees the Christian canon formally
completed.

WHAT BOOKS ARE TO BE INCLUDED?

The question raised above Why a Bible? is
partly answered by the fact that in the crucial sit-
uations (like those described above) there was at
hand a body of literature which had already acquired
some prestige.

This prestige was in part due to the antiquity of
the literature at the time of its canonization. In the
Roman Catholic church today no person is canonized
until at least fifty years after the date of death. In the
history of the growth of the Bible, the interval be-

- tween the writing of a book and its canonization was
always greater than that or was believed to be so.
The first codes of laws to acquire prestige claim Moses
as their author and are written against the birth of
the Hebrew people (the Exodus) as a background. In
the Christian Testament, literature that went back

- to Jesus and his circle gained prestige from the tre-

. ORIGIN AND GROWTH OF THE BIBLE 15

mendous significance of Jesus for the church. From
the moment of the resurrection appearances, Jesus
loomed so large on the stage of Christian history that
the Gospels, for example, from the time they were
written possessed importance from the fact that they
told about Jesus.

But, in the longer span of Old Testament history
especially, the preceding point does not explain how
these books came to be preserved long enough to
acquire the sanctity of antiquity. The origin of the
canon is not explained by quoting the venerable say-
ing about religion's habit of sanctifying everything
more than five hundred years old, for the puzzling
query still remains, "How did these books acquire
enough prestige to attain such an advanced age?"

The sanctity ascribed to a book as Bible was first. .
and most naturally ascribed to cult prescriptions. In
Exodus, chapter 34, an ancient code describes the
covenant made between Jahweh and Moses and con-
tains a decalogue which is entirely cultic. Its ritual
legislation prescribes the feast of unleavened bread,
the offering of first-born males (except the first-born
of an ass or of man), the Sabbath rest, the feast of
weeks, the feast of ingathering at the year's end, the
use of unleavened bread, and the offering of the first
of the crop. It forbids leaving the sacrifice of the
feast of the Passover until the morning and boiling a
kid in its mother's milk. 'It is easily seen that pre-
scriptions and proscriptions of this sort would early
acquire a sacred authority from the intimacy of their
association with the rites of the cult.

1 6 THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE

It is no accident that the first code formally ac-
cepted by the Jews as Bible (the Deuteronomic code)
' included laws controlling the location of the temple,
the observance of the religious festivals, the paying
of tithes, etc. This code itself acquires antiquity and
prestige through its ascription to Moses and the quo-
tation of older laws, beginning with the Ten Com-
mandments. Many of its prescriptions are much older
* than 621 B.C.; Deuteronomy simply transfers the lo-
cation of their observance from the country shrines
to Jerusalem. The transference was due to the con-
temporary crisis; the prescriptions had already ac-
quired antiquity through the vitality and conserva-
tism of cult practice. j t

But the services rendered to the cult by religious;
books were not all of a liturgical nature. Other elef
ments than liturgy survive or recur from generation ;
to generation. The problems met by one individual
in his lifetime are not entirely and uniquely his own.
Some of the righteous are poor and afflicted ih every
generation; so many of the good persist in dying
young that they have created a proverb. Neither
false friends nor scolding wives are modern inven-
tions, nor is the divorce of the wife of one's youth a
new device of the shyster lawyer of today. Short
weights and measures and the exploitation of labor
have ancient precedents. Religious books that cham-
. pioned the good life and tackled these problems inter-
ested more than one generation; the cult found
enough value in them to keep them alive.

Liturgy and personal morality by no means exhaust .

ORIGIN AND GROWTH OF THE BIBLE 17

the areas served through successive generations by
religious books, but these two are significant exam-
ples of the values which won survival for the religious
book in its precanonical days. Thus the first answer
given to the question, "What books?" is, "A book
already ancient, already revered from intimate asso-
ciation with the cult or from the enduring service of
recurrent needs, and useful to the dominant element
in the cult in days of crisis."

The question, "What books are to be included?"
has often been answered too simply by saying, "those
books which were read in public worship, whether of
synagogue or church." I say "too simply," for there
are books in the canon that were not read in the
synagogue or the church service. The books of the
Writings, or Hagiographa, the third section of the
Old Testament canon, were not read in the synagogue
service. That is to say, in the formal systems of lec-
tions for Sabbath reading throughout the year, no use
was made of the Writings; the use of the five rolls in
connection with the festivals is hardly analogous. The
Revelation of John was not read in church service in
early Christian days; the lection aries of the Orthodox
church derive no lections from it. There are Gospel
lectionaries and Apostle (Acts and Epistles) lection-
aries, but no Apocalypse lectionaries.

Not only are there books in the canon that were
not read in church but there are some books that
were read in synagogue or church only after they were
accepted as canonical. Does anyone imagine that the
Deuteronomic code was read in sacred service for a

1 8 THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE

long time and thus became Bible? Of course not.
Throughout the entire history of the development of
the Jewish Bible it is difficult to establish clearly the
chronological order of synagogue reading and can-
onization.

Moreover, some books were read in church services
and probably also in the synagogue that never
became part of the Bible. At an early point in the
development of the liturgy, the stories of the mar-
tyrs were read in church service; they are still being
read in the appropriate services of the ancient com-
munions; but they are not in the Bible. Nor can any
clear case be made for the claim that they ever came
near to sanctity. The letter of Clement of Rome to
the Corinthians is another instance of widespread and
long-continued church reading which did not lead to
canonization. Eusebius (Church History iii. 16) makes
a strong statement as to this use of I Clement: "It has
been read publicly before the congregation in very
many churches from a long time ago, and [is so read]
in our own time."

At least one important book, the Psalter, obtained
its place not because it was read in synagogue or
church but because it was sung in the temple at Jeru-
salem. This intimate association with the ritual of the
cult gave it a prestige great enough to lead to its in-
clusion in the Jewish Bible after the Law and the
Prophets were closed. It is quite probable that it
was the importance of the Psalter that kept the Old
Testament canon open after the collection of the
Prophets had been completed. It led the way to the

ORIGIN AND GROWTH OF THE BIBLE 19

forming of the third group the Writings to be ad-
ded to the Law and the Prophets. The primal im-
portance of the Psalms in this area is shown by the
way it dominates references to the Scripture outside
the Law and the Prophets in the early Christian
period. In fact, the only New Testament reference to
the Old Testament which mentions the three sections
refers to them as "the Law, the Prophets, and the
Psalms." Whether this be taken as an indication that
the Psalter alone had been added to the Law and
Prophets at this time, or it be assumed that a group
of the Writings is referred to under the name of the
Psalter, it is clear that the Psalter holds the leading
position in this group.

BOOKS ARE ADOPTED IN GROUPS

The selection of books for the Bible proceeded in
waves, in the acceptance of a group of books at a
time. Thus the Old Testament contains three groups:
(i) the Law the Pentateuch; (2) the Prophets
Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings, Isaiah, Jeremiah,
Ezekiel, and the twelve "minor" prophets; (3) the
Writings Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Job, Es-
ther, Ruth, Song of Songs, Lamentations, Daniel,
Ezra, Nehemiah, Chronicles and often other books
in addition. The New Testament is essentially a two-
fold canon containing (i) the Gospel our four; (2)
the Apostle the' rest of the New Testament.

But it must not be assumed that there are five
groups within the Christian canon because the mak-
ers of the canon, those responsible for formal adop-

20 THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE

tion, chose certain groups as groups. The groups did
not exist as groups until their adoption. Each adop-
tion was intended to be final. When the Law was
canonized, it was not canonized as "Part I" of the
Bible but as the Bible. The Law became a section of
the Bible a group of books within the Bible only
when more books were added. The Old Testament
is no older than the New Testament, for before the
New Testament was canonized, the Old Testament
was the Bible. When the prophetic books were can-
onized, they were not chosen as a group from various
rival groups of books but rather as a collection of all
the books that were worthy of canonization. Thus
each extension of the canon involved a rejection of
books not included, a negative judgment on their
value. And the possibility must not be overlooked
that strong dislike of some recent religious writings or
oral effusions may have been one of the immediate
causes of the canonization of older works.

Every group of books accepted acted as a bar to
the acceptance of other books of the same type or
date. The acceptance of the Torah meant that no
more legal codes would be accepted as such; and, in
fact, Esther and Ezekiel were attacked because they
did not harmonize with the laws of the Pentateuch.
The acceptance of a group of prophetic writings prac-
tically closed the door to additional prophecies. From
that moment on, no new prophecy could be accepted
as authoritative. It was the general recognition of
the fact that a definite group of prophecies had been
accepted as Bible that led to the formulation of the

ORIGIN AND GROWTH OF THE BIBLE 21

dogma that prophecy was dead. This teaching arose
from the closing of the second section of the canon,
not from the disappearance of prophets and prophecy
in Israel. The writings of Josephus, the New Testa-
ment itself, and the Old Testament Apocrypha and
Pseudepigrapha with their frequent references to
prophets and prophecy, all clearly show that proph-
ecy was still vital in Jewish religion in the first cen-
tury B.C. and in the first century A.D.

After the closing of the prophetic canon, prophets
wrote "prophecies" (apocalypses) in which the author
borrows the mantle of some ancient worthy so that
his book may reach back of the closing of the pro-
phetic canon into a period when authoritative books
of prophecy could still be written. The strong oppo-
sition to the inclusion of Daniel sprang from the fact
that it won importance as a prophecy after the pro-
phetic canon was closed. It was only when its disguise
was accepted at face value that this prophecy was
reluctantly included. That is to say, its claims to
being an ancient work could only be accepted after
the date of its appearance was forgotten, and it had
to be accepted as ancient before it was accepted as
prophetic.

The argument over whether or not a disputed
book of the Writings is "prophetic" is thus seen to
rest on the determination of date. The same thing is
true in the use of the term "apostolic" in New Tes-
tament controversy. For better or for worse, the sec-
ond century A.D. saw the Christian churches accepting
apostolicity as the test of a book's right to a place in

22 THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE

the canon. But to be apostolic a book had to be
(relatively) old. Thus the Muratorian list (A.D.
180-2,00) rejects the Shepherd of Hermas, an apoca-
lypse (prophecy). The reasons given are that it was
written quite recently, "in our own times"; that it
cannot be included with the Prophets, whose number
is complete, or with the apostolic group since Hermas
has just appeared.

How were groups of books collected, and the collec-
tion closed? The collecting began as a natural, that is,
a spontaneous, movement; it ended in some formal
authoritative action. For example, there can be little
doubt that the captivity in Babylon led to a new
appreciation of the message of Jeremiah. In a sense
the destruction of Jerusalem and the exile confirmed
his preaching. From the reading of Jeremiah to the
reading of other prophets of doom was a natural and
easy step. The collection grew slowly and irregularly
from the exile to the second century B.C., as the Jew-
ish people found inspiration and encouragement in the
writings of these vigorous preachers of righteousness.
The closing of this particular collection is shrouded
in obscurity. The explanation often heard that the
dying-out of prophecy finally led to the acceptance of
these surviving prophetic books will not bear careful
scrutiny, as we have shown above. A more probable
situation for the formal closing of the prophetic canon
existed in the Maccabean period after Antiochus'
attack on the Scripture had been beaten back.

In the absence of direct evidence it is dangerous to
speculate on the action that closed the prophetic

ORIGIN AND GROWTH OF THE BIBLE 23

canon. Yet it seems clear that it was closed not only
out of reverence for the old prophets but also out of
fear and dislike of the new ones. The post-Exilic peri-
od is one in which the priest and the scribe attain an
ever increasing importance in the cult; they are them-
selves officialized and institutionalized the one in
connection with the temple; the other, with the syna-
gogue. That their leaders came to depreciate con-
temporary prophecy, always inclining toward inde-
pendence of established authority, was natural. That
had happened in the days of Amos; it happened in
Jesus' day; it probably happened in Jerusalem in the
Ptolemaic period. The fanatical extravagance and
independence of some "prophets" in the late third
century B.C., or Jin the turbulent days of the Macca-
bees, was probably part of the cause of the official
closing of the prophetic canon; and the closing was
probably made official by the willing co-operation of
the priesthood.

Toward the end of the second century A.D. the
Christian church went through a similar experience.
The Montanist movement placed a high value on
spirit guidance and prophecy. These prophets set
their direct inspiration over against the prestige slow-
ly built up by local bishops and by earlier writings.
That the officials of the church in this situation re-
ferred to the closed nature of the prophetic canon was
natural; that they used the growing prestige of the
apostles to shut out these books was equally natural;
and in the Muratorian canon's treatment of the
Prophecy of Hermas we have an example of this ex-

24 THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE

elusion in action. Ultimately, all prophecies but one
were excluded from the New Testament; the inclusion
of that one was due to its claim of apostolic_jiithor-
ship. This ultimate canon was, of course, a canon pro-
mulgated by councils and ecclesiastics. This was true
also as we have already noted of the closing of the
canon of the Writings in the Old Testament, closed
for Palestinian Jews by the pronouncements of rab-
bis. The first canonical book was officially accepted
by the people under the leadership of king and priest.
All later books canonized came to their final accept-
ance in a closed collection through some official ac-
tion. Yet the official action, generally speaking, is no
more than the ratification of a popular choice mani-
fested by the continuing use of the books in the pri-
vate devotions of the individual as well as in cult
usage. Let this fact be emphasized as it deserves (and
it is the most important validation of the canon to the
modern man), it must still be remembered that the
acceptance of the same list of books by the vast ma-
jority of the membership of a cult is historically in-
credible without some formal authorization.

WHY DO CANONS VARY?

The books chosen were not always the same; in
fact, a brief survey of any elementary introduction to
the canon leaves one with the impression that they
were never the same. The amount of this variation
may be indicated by the extreme and yet accurate
statement that exactly the same Bible (as to books
included) was never accepted at any one time by all

ORIGIN AND GROWTH OF THE BIBLE 25

the believers in the cult. The church member today
is aware that there is some sort of difference in content
between Roman Catholic and Protestant Bibles; the
student in college and seminary has a faint and ac-
curate idea that there was an equal difference in the
contents of the Jewish canon as it existed for the Jew
of Palestine and the Jew of Alexandria in A.D. 30. It
is not our purpose here to list all the known differ-
ences in Bibles' contents the lists can be easily found
in the books referred to in the bibliography but
rather to raise as sharply as possible a question as to
the reason for this variation and to suggest some of
the possible answers.

Sometimes the difference in canonical lists is due
to what may be called "historical accident." Under
this none-too-satisfactory heading various incidents
and influences may be grouped; the discussion of ex-
amples will make the meaning of the term clearer
than a wordy definition could hope to do.

The Samaritans pride themselves on being the true
Israel; their Sacred Scripture contains the Penta-
teuch and nothing else. The present tense is used in
speaking of them because they still exist (although
in dwindling numbers) as a distinct sect in Palestine.
The division between Jews and Samaritans became
final and irreconcilable in the days of Alexander the
Great. The Pentateuch had been formally accepted
by the Jewish people about a generation earlier; the
Samaritans, therefore, naturally carried the Scrip-
ture with them in their separation from the Jews of
Jerusalem. The propinquity and similarities between

26 THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE

these two rival cults generated such bitterness that
any transfer of sacred books adopted by the Jews
after the split was an impossibility. Ill will began
between the groups in Samaritan opposition to Jew-
ish innovations, although the Jewish leaders regarded
their work as reform and return to older patterns.
This conservatism prevented the growth of the Sa-
maritan canon; but, had the schism been delayed a
century and a half, the Samaritan canon would con-
sist of the Law and the Prophets.

Another example of the influence of "historical ac-
cidents" upon the process of canonization can be seen
in the case of the Book of Esther. Esther was read in
connection with the feast of Purim by the Jews of the
Dispersion within a short time of its composition.
But the Palestinian Jews celebrated as an important
religious festival Judas Maccabaeus' victory over
Nicanor on the very day on which the Jews of the
Dispersion first celebrated the feast of Purim: Con-
sequently, this feast (Purim) did not enter Palestine
until some centuries after its establishment. As a
secondary consequence, since Esther gained religious
prestige from being read in connection with the ob-
servance of Purim, Esther was accepted as canonical
much sooner outside Palestine than inside Palestine.
But, if Judas had attacked Nicanor a day or a week
sooner

Differences in content sprang also from the absence
of a critical situation and consequent formal canoniza-
.tion in one part of the world and its presence in an-
other section. We have already seen that the Jewish

ORIGIN AND GROWTH OF THE BIBLE 27

war and the destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 70 were
influential in leading to the closing of the scriptural
canon in Palestine. But there was in the Dispersion
no analogous crisis involving the Bible, and as a re-
sult the canon was not formally closed in the Disper-
sion at this time. Hence the extra-Palestinian Bible
contained from eight to a dozen books not in the
Scriptures accepted in the Holy Land.

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

There was also a difference in the rate at which
books were accepted as authoritative by the churches
in the important cities, on the one hand, and the
churches of the backwoods districts, the hinterland,
on the other. The big cities were often in closer touch
with one another than they were with the small
churches scattered through the adjacent rural sec-
tions. One could travel easily and rapidly from city
to city especially the cities on or near the Mediter-
ranean Sea. In the big cities local judgment was
easily influenced by the decisions made in other im-
portant churches; thus their canons at least kept
within sight of one another. But in the backwoods

28 THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE

the small amount of intercommunication left the local
or sectional church more independent in its choice.
As a result, the churches of these areas either lagged
behind the majority in accepting new books as canon
(as was the case in Syria outside Antioch) or con-
tinued to accept books unchecked by outside criti-
cism (as was the case in Ethiopia and, to some extent,
in Armenia).

These facts may be covered by the generalization
[ that some areas were more cautious or conservative
I in the matter of canonization than others. The out-
lying districts of Syria were more conservative than
Antioch; Palestinian Judaism than the Diaspora;
Rome than Alexandria.

The conservatism of the Syrian territory is seen in
both Old Testament and New Testament. Its Old
Testament did not include Chronicles; through the
fourth century its New Testament included neither
Catholic Epistles nor Apocalypse. But, as Chrysos-
tom's usage shows, the city of Antioch had already
accepted three of the Catholic letters: James, I Peter,
and I John.

This conservatism of Syria was in accord with the
conservatism of Palestine in regard to the Old Testa-
ment canon. The canon as adopted in Palestine to-
. ward the end of the first century was identical with
that of the present-day Protestant Old Testament.
At that time there was still some hesitation as to the
acceptance of even some of these books Esther,
Ezra-Nehemiah, Chronicles, and the Song of Songs.
Jews outside of Palestine were much freer in their

ORIGIN AND GROWTH OF THE BIBLE 29

treatment of the canon, which they used in the Greek
translation called the Septuagint. They accepted
books more rapidly than the Palestinians; they am-
plified some of the books they both accepted; they
were evidently less concerned about the limits of the
canon than were their compatriots in the homeland.
Thus we cannot be too confident that every book i
found in a manuscript of the Septuagint was an inte-
gral part of the Bible for Alexandrian Jews. But the
evidence is sufficient to indicate a much larger canon
at Alexandria than was accepted in Jerusalem.
Among the books they received are the following:
I and II Esdras, Tobit, Judith, Additions to Esther,
Wisdom of Solomon, Wisdom of Jesus the son of
Sirach (Ecclesiasticus), Baruch, Additions to Daniel,
Prayer of Manasses, I-II Maccabees. Of these, only
Ecclesiasticus enjoyed any prestige in Palestine.

. In the Christian church of Alexandria an equally
liberal view as to the contents of Scripture was domi-
nant. In the writings of Clement we see the same
inclusive and carefree attitude toward Christian
Scripture that we have noticed in the Jews of Alexan-
dria toward the Old Testament. Clement used half-a-
dozen gospels; fourteen letters of Paul; six Catholic
epistles including Barnabas and I Clement; three
Apocalypses John, Peter, and Hermas the Acts of
the Apostles; the Preaching of Peter; and the Di-
dache. Except for his surplus gospels, most of these
works are either explicitly or implicitly used as Scrip-
ture by Clement. Thus Alexandria was the home of,
an extensive Scripture in both Testaments. It is no

30 THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE

accident that it was also the home of allegorical inter-
pretation. The use of this method of interpretation
from pre-Christian times on made it possible for the
Alexandrian to overcome difficulties in regard to
canonical books very easily. In Palestine and Syria
a more sedate, more literal and historical criticism
was employed. This goes far toward explaining the
variations in canon in the two sections.

Rome was early forced by Marcion into the defini-
tion of the Scriptures. Its New Testament never
knew the exuberance of the Alexandrian, but its Old
Testament grew into practical identity with that of
Egypt. In the Christian books the affinities of Rome
are in general with Syria and Asia Minor; in the
Jewish Scriptures it reaches through North Africa to
Alexandria and a "full" Old Testament.

The student who faces the problems raised by these
variations in the contents of the Bible can simplify
his task by establishing a list of those books com-
monly accepted throughout the cult. In the Old Tes-
tament these unquestioned books include the Protes-
tant Old Testament with the exception of Esther,
Ezra-Nehemiah, Chronicles, Daniel, Song of Solo-
mon, and perhaps Job and Ecclesiastes. In the
New Testament the unquestioned books are the Four
Gospels, the Acts, and ten letters of Paul. The books
which won their place in the final official canon only
after the dissent of a minority had been overcome
are the crucial points for study in the history of the
canonization of individual books. The pronounce-
ments of councils did more for these "disputed" books
than for the rest of the Bible.

ORIGIN AND GROWTH OF THE BIBLE 31

What these councils really ratified for these dis-
puted books was their authenticity in terms of author
and date. It was in the final period of canon forma-
tion that questions as to authorship played their
supremely important part. If the letter to the He-
brews was the work of Paul, then it was apostolic and
deserved a place in the Christian canon. It is doubt-
ful if questions of authorship have had any vital im-
portance for the Scriptures in any other period. Nor
has any more artificial method of determining author-
ship been employed than the majority vote of a.
council of ecclesiastics. If these councils had made
fewer mistakes, the work of modern scholarship would
be much less "negative."

AFTER THE LAST COUNCIL

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

Thus, in the Hebrew Scriptures, no later book or
books ever attained to the pre-eminence occupied by
the Law. Within the Holy Book, the Law was the
Holy of Holies. Next to it in general esteem came the
Prophets, but the Prophets were definitely below the
Law in sanctity. This is most dramatically shown in

32 THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE

the prescriptions for the reading of the Bible in syna-
gogue services. In New Testament times it was cus-
tomary to read from the Hebrew in short passages
which were translated at once into Aramaic by the
Meturgeman so that the Scripture might be under-
stood by the congregation that knew no Hebrew. The
rule as given in the Mishna (Megilla iv. 4) follows:
"He who reads in the Pentateuch must not read to
the Meturgeman more than one verse, and in the
Prophets three verses [at a time]. If each verse is a
paragraph, they are read one by one. He who reads
may skip in the Prophets, but not in the Law."
Equally significant as to the relative prestige of the
various sections of the canon is the fact that the
Writings the third section of the Old Testament
was not read at all in synagogue services.

What Torah was to the Jew, the Gospel was to the
Christian. Its pre-eminence is shown not only by its
appearance in every Christian canon but also by the
favor shown it by the members of the cult. This can
be seen objectively in the number of manuscripts of
the Greek New Testament in existence today. Manu-
scripts of the Four Gospels number more than two
thousand; in addition, there are more than a thousand
Gospel lectionary manuscripts. Manuscripts of the
Acts and Epistles and their lectionary are less than
half as numerous. There are. less than two hundred
manuscripts of Revelation, aside from fragments.
These totals accurately represent the relative pres-
tige of these volumes in Eastern Christendom down
through the Middle Ages.

ORIGIN AND GROWTH OF THE BIBLE 33

No decree of a. council could ever give to any Chrisl
tian book the prestige enjoyed by the Gospel. No
council of rabbis could ever lift any other volume to
the level of Torah. Nor did formal acceptance by the ,
leaders of the cult always mean vital acceptance by
the mass of the believers. It is sometimes said that
the Jewish canon was closed in Palestine about A.D. 90
with the acceptance of Esther, Song of Solomon,
Daniel, Ezra-Nehemiah, and Chronicles. Yet the
Syriac version dominated by Palestinian ideals
did not include Chronicles. Esther was not accepted
by Theodore of Mopsuestia; by the Nestorians;
by the Palestinians whom Melito visited about
A.D. 150; by Athanasius of Alexandria in A.D. 365;
by Gregory Nazianzen (fA.D. 389). The Talmud itself
contains items that show Esther was not universally
accepted after A.D. 100. The Babylonian Gemara (fol.
ja) of the tractate Megi/Ia tries to meet the difficulties
caused by R. Samuel's statement that Esther was not
canonical. The tractate Sanhedrin (fol. 1000) states
that Esther does not need covers as canonical books
do. It was only the association of Esther with the
feast of Purim that gradually increased its prestige.
In the Christian church, in periods of freedom of
thought, Esther has once more been under attack.
Luther, in speaking of II Maccabees, said: "I am
so opposed to this book and to Esther that I wish
they did not exist, for they Judaize too much, and
have many heathenish improprieties." So far is the
pious layman today from using his Bible as equally
valuable in all its parts that he is willing to award

34 THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE

some badge of merit to anyone who has read the
Bible all the way through; he, himself, very naturally
and justifiably, selects his readings from those areas
which he finds most inspiring.

What we have seen to be true in the case of Esther
was equally true in the experience of the Apocalypse
of John in the New Testament canon. It was not
popular in the Eastern half of the Roman world; Con-
stantinople, Antioch, Syria, and Caesarea were not
enthusiastic about it as part of the canon. Yet, under
the wing of Rome, Africa, and Alexandria, it was
formally declared canonical at Hippo and Carthage
in councils at the end of the fourth century, by
Athanasius of Alexandria (A.D. 367), by Basil the
Great (fA.o. 379), and by Gregory of Nyssa (\ca. A.D.
394), as by many others. In the West it first ap-
peared in the Muratorian canon (ca. 180) and was an
integral part of the canon throughout the Middle
Ages. But in the East its position was never secure.
Two of the four Doctors of the Orthodox church
(Chrysostom and Gregory of Nazianzus) did not ac-
cept Revelation as canonical. It was not in the Old
Syriac version or in the Syriac Peshitta (ca. 415). It
was not in the original Armenian version. Theodore
of Mopsuestia (fA.o. 428), Amphilochius of Iconium
(fA.D. 394), the sixtieth canon of "Laodicea," the List
of the Sixty Canonical Books, all reject the Apoca-
lypse. Even as late as A.D. 850, it is listed as a "dis-
puted" book in the Stichometry of Nicephorus.

In spite of formal canonization, the Revelation of
John did not win widespread acceptance in the East.

ORIGIN AND GROWTH OF THE BIBLE 35

We have already noticed that in number of manu-
scripts extant its total is about one-seventh of that
of manuscripts of the Gospels. Moreover, many of
these manuscripts are not part of larger New Testa-
ments but often contain noncanonical material. Nor
did the Orthodox church use the Book of Revelation
in its preparation of lections for use in the liturgy;
to this day it is not read regularly in church services.

An unusual example of the lower level of canonicity
enjoyed by the Apocalypse was noted in the study of
a sixteenth-century Greek manuscript containing the
Apocalypse and commentary, translated into con-
versational Greek of the period. In the comment
other books of the Bible are quoted, but it is the
author's general rule not to translate them into the
conversational idiom they were too sacred! Yet
the main purpose of this work was to translate the
Apocalypse into conversational idiom.

In the Western world Luther's opinion of the
Apocalypse is well known; less familiar is the similar
judgment of the Roman Catholic scholar Erasmus
(expressed at the end of his notes on the first edition
of the Greek New Testament). He comments on its
vicissitudes in the past with keen discernment, raises
questions as to its authorship, and concludes with an
analogy whose accuracy cannot be concealed even by
the decision of an ecumenical council. "Since even
among jewels," he says, "there is some difference, and
some gold is purer and better than other; in sacred
things also one thing is more sacred than another."

This discussion of the origin and growth of the

36 THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE

Bible is designed to open up the field for study. It
raises questions as to the ultimate origin of the canon
and tries to indicate its process of growth. The part
played by heresy and council in advancing the canon
has been suggested with no attempt at comprehensive
treatment. The important Council of Trent, for ex-
ample, has been passed over in silence. For the pur-
suit of factual material, and a study of other prob-
lems, the student's attention is called to the bibliog-
raphy that follows.

BIBLIOGRAPHY ON CANON

GENERAL

LEWIS, F. G. How the Bible Grew. Chicago: University of Chi-
cago Press, 1924.

This volume makes large use of the Bible's testimony to its own de-
velopment.

SLEDD, ANDREW. The Bibles of the Churches. Nashville: Cokes-
bury Press, 1930.

A stimulating presentation of the main factors in the building of the
canon and of the basic problems with which the student is confronted.

SMYTH, J. PATERSON. The Bible in the Making in the Light of
Modern Research. New York: James Pott & Co., 1914.

A very simple treatment of the process of canonization with a fair
statement as to objective data but little recognition of their implications.

ADVANCED

BUHL, F. P. W. Canon and Text of the Old Testament (trans, by
J. MACPHERSON). Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1892.

A careful study of the course of canonization of the Old Testament by,
first, the Jews and, then, the Christians. The greater part of the book is
occupied with textual criticism.

ORIGIN AND GROWTH OF THE BIBLE 37

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

Macmillarij 1895.

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

WILDEBOER, G. The Origin of the Canon of the Old Testament
(trans, by B. W. BACON). London: Luzac, 1895.

A detailed study of the history of canonization of the Old Testament
with citation and careful discussion of the ancient sources.

ZEITLIN, S. An Historical Study of the Canonization of the Hebrew
Scriptures. (Offprint from the Proceedings of the American
Academy for Jewish Research, 1931-1932.} Philadelphia:
Jewish Publication Society, 1933.

An independent and stimulating study which makes large use of rab-
binic sources and reaches some conclusions at variance with those general-
ly received.

ENSLIN, MORTON S. "On the Way to a Canon," Crozer Quarterly,

XIV (1937), 127-44.

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

GOODSPEED, EDGAR J. The Formation of the New Testament.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1926.

A brief chronological and geographical outline of the varying contents
of the New Testament down to A.D. 400.

HARNACK, ADOLF VON. The Origin of the New Testament (trans,
by J. R. WILKINSON). New York: Macmillan, 1925.

The most stimulating definition of the problems involved in the
making of the New Testament canon.

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

Still valuable for its thoroughgoing discussion of the origin and func-
tion of the Christian Testament in the cult.

WESTCOTT, B. F. A General Survey of the History of the Canon of
the New Testament (7th ed.). New York, Macmillan, 1896.

A full presentation of the relevant data; most of the important sources
are quoted in the original language. Useful as a reference work.

Chapter II
The Transmission of the Bible

1

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

It is only since the invention of the printing press,
about the middle of the fifteenth century, that It has
been easy to determine the original content of a book.
The printing press first made it possible to have
thousands of copies of a book all exactly alike. Before
its invention no two copies of a book were ever

38

TRANSMISSION OF THE BIBLE 39

exactly alike. Man has never attained the accuracy
of the machine, and his laborious production of books
in the ante-printing-press age was slow and inevitably
erroneous.

If a book was first written before the fifteenth cen-
tury, therefore, its original content can be determined
only from a study of handwritten copies, or manu-
scripts. The contents of the so-called "classical litera-
ture" the writings of ancient Greece and Rome
were determined in this fashion; and the contents of
the Bible are determined in the same way. This study
of ancient documents in an attempt to overcome the
errors of copyists and editors and establish the exact
wording of the original is a basic discipline in the
study of any ancient literature. It is called "textual
criticism" and is often classed with the more in-

/

offensive areas of biblical study as "lower criticism."
It is lower criticism in the sense that the foundation
of a skyscraper is lower than the rest of the building
which rests upon it. Its technical name, "textual
criticism," is often misleading to the devout student
who thinks of texts only as points of departure for
the Sunday morning sermon. "Text" is used here in
the sense of content. Textual criticism is interested
in reconstructing the long history of the transmission
of that content from its origins to our day so that the
original content, or text, may be accurately restored.
It has already been suggested that the study of
textual criticism faces the student of any ancient
literature. Students who specialize in English litera-
ture learn its techniques to establish an accurate text

40 THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE

of Chaucer's poems; students of Cicero, Caesar,
Homer, and Vergil are forced to use either the
methods or the results of textual criticism. Its devo-
tees are the pioneers who blaze the trail for learning
to travel back through the centuries to the actual
words written centuries ago by gifted and inspired
men. Np matter what book may be the object of this
study, the methods and techniques employed are the
same. There may be particular tools of language or
paleography needed in one case and not in another;
but, in general, the methods are the same. Textual
criticism of the Bible is not a thing apart. In a
university seminar which attempts to establish the
original wording of Chaucer's poems, F. J. A. Hort's
exposition of the methods employed in textual criti-
cism of the New Testament is required reading.

THE MATERIALS OF TEXTUAL CRITICISM

This study covers an area which is easily and
naturally divided under the headings f Materials"
and "Methods." The materials are ultimately manu-
scripts physical, objective materials. The solidity of
manuscripts and the routine nature of the elementary
work in textual criticism have misled many beginners
into the belief that all its methods are objective and
that it is an exact science. Yet, like most other areas in
the humanities, it is at some points subjective. The
manuscripts are objective enough, but the methods
by which they are studied and their evidence inter-
preted cannot be 100 per cent objective.

TRANSMISSION OF THE BIBLE 41

O) MANUSCRIPTS IN THE ORIGINAL LANGUAGE

The manuscripts studied in the textual criticism of
the Bible are of three sorts: (i) manuscripts in the
language of the original, (2) manuscripts of transla-
tions, and (3) manuscripts of quotations. The study
of these materials is more difficult when a thousand
years intervene between the date of writing the
original and the date of our copies; it is less difficult
when the gap is narrower. In the Greek classics the
gap stretches approximately a thousand years wide;
in the Latin, it is much narrower, although about
three centuries separate the most favored of the
Latins Vergil from the extant manuscripts of his
works. In the case of the Hebrew manuscripts of the
Old Testament, the interval is sometimes as much as
seventeen hundred years; in the New Testament, it
is sometimes as little as one hundred and fifty years.
But the student should not rashly conclude that the
New Testament text is inevitably ten times as ac-
curate as the text of the Old Testament. The study
of the text in the last fifty years has shown that the
earliest period was the most fruitful in the creation
of variant readings. The last thousand years can be
retraced easier than the hundred that immediately
followed the writing of a book. It is unlikely that any
manuscript discoveries will ever carry us all the way
back to the original; the most arduous part of the
task of textual criticism must, therefore, be achieved
with the help of translations and quotations and the
use of theory theory as sound as the careful study of
all the materials can evolve.

42 THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE

b] TRANSLATIONS

Among the materials employed in this study, the
manuscripts of translations of the Bible play an
important part. This is especially the case in the Old
Testament area where early translations compensate
somewhat for the lack of early Hebrew manuscripts.
The Pentateuch was translated into Greek in Alexan-
dria soon after 250 B.C. The Palestinian Old Testa-
ment was translated into Syriac about A.D. aoo. The
Old Testament was translated into Latin before the
great scholar Jerome in the latter half of the fourth
century began the making of the Latin Vulgate.
Such early witnesses might confidently be regarded
as satisfactory substitutes for the missing Hebrew
manuscripts of these periods.

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

Even if we possessed the original content of the
various versions of the Bible which for the most part
we do not the difficulty of using them in textual

TRANSMISSION OF THE BIBLE 43

criticism could hardly be overestimated. Their use
requires some mastery of language as well as of
languages. The student must be keenly aware of
what is involved in the making of a translation. He
must retranslate the translation into the original
language in the manner of the original translators
before the evidence of the version is available.

C) QUOTATIONS

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

Yet these values cannot be obtained without effort.
We, unfortunately, do not possess the original manu-
script of the writings of the rabbis and the Fathers.
Critical editions (i.e., attempts to reconstruct the
original content) of the Christian Fathers are steadily
and sys.tern~atically being prepared; valuable work is
in process on rabbinical literature. But it is not yet
possible to use the writings of all the early believers
who quoted the Bible, with complete confidence as to
the accuracy of the printed text on which you rely.

Even when you have a critical text, your task has
only begun.* Quotations from the Scriptures were
often harmonized to contemporary standards by
scribes when ..the rest of the text was left in its

TS'

primitive form. Moreover, the value of the specific

44 THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE

quotation for textual criticism depends to some extent
upon the author's general practice in quotation. If
he usually quotes in paraphrastic fashion, then the
quotations from the Scripture must be studied with
this in mind. If he edits as he quotes, unusual items
in his quotations can be ascribed to the Scriptures
only when they are supported elsewhere.

The nearer the quotations are in time to the
original, the greater is their value. But, as we have
already noticed, it is exactly in the earliest period that
the biblical text is quoted with the greatest freedom.
The first great scholar of the Christian church was
Clement of Alexandria, who taught in a Christian
school in that city toward the end of the second
century A.D. He quotes Matthew 21:9 {Instructor
\. 5) as follows "Plucking branches of olives or
palms, the children went forth to meet the Lord, and
cried, saying, 'Hosanna to the Son of David ! Blessed
is he who comes in the name of the Lord.' " This is
unusual in that it introduces "the children" as the
ones who went out to meet Jesus. None of our biblical
manuscripts (all later than Clement) mentions the
children in this scene at all, although their presence-
inside the temple is commented on in a later section
(Matt. 21 : 15). Should we change the manuscripts on
the basis of Clement's quotation ?

These "children" are found everywhere in later
Christianity. We meet them in an apocryphal gospel
of the fourth century. In the earliest picture of
the Triumphal Entry (fifth to sixth century), they
are prominent characters; and they are frequently

TRANSMISSION OF THE BIBLE 45

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

UNINTENTIONAL CHANGES

In the lives of manuscripts, as of people, the first
hundred years are the hardest. We have already seen
that the various books which make up our Bible today
were not accepted as Bible the moment they were
written. The safeguards which sanctity throws
around the content of a Bible were not applied to our
books until they were at least a hundred years old.

46 THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE

To some extent in the case of the Old Testament, to a
large extent in the New Testament, the cult itself
lacked the organization, the trained individuals, and
the interest necessary to preserve the exact wording
of the documents. The New Testament is one of
triplets: It was born at the same time as dogma and
hierarchy. It would be more accurate to say that the
doctrine of the importance of the letter of Scripture
evolved with the Scripture and with the ecclesiastical
organization capable of applying it to the careful
preservation of the sacred text.

In Old Testament as in New Testament the
earliest period of copying was one in which many
careless errors of a scribal nature crept into the text.
This is partly due to the fact that in this period the
writings were not yet canonized. But in part it was
due to the lack of educated and trained scribes in the
service of the cult. The Hebrews were not a literary
people; the early Christians came from the lower
classes. The general message of a book was much
more important than exactness in matters of detail.

The proof of this generalization can be 'seen in the
wealth of variation in Old Testament text down to
A.D. 200 as contrasted with its stereotyped nature
since that date. It can be seen also in the earliest
Greek manuscripts of the New Testament. The
Beatty manuscript of Paul's letters (the oldest manu-
script of Paul, written ca. A.D. 200), which has been
published in the last few years, abounds in. careless
errors. Some of these are omissions; e.g., in Rom.
12:8, the words "he that shows mercy, with cheerful-

TRANSMISSION OF THE BIBLE 47

ness" are omitted because of the similarity between
the end of this phrase and the preceding phrases.
The scribe's eye passed from one ending to the other,
and a line was omitted by error. Another example of
this very common error can be drawn from the fourth-
century Greek Bible in the Vatican library. In John
17:15, most manuscripts read:

.... I do not ask that

you should take them from the world, but that
you should keep them from the evil.

But the scribe of the Vatican codex skipped from
"that" to "that" and wrote:

.... I do not ask that
you should keep them from the evil.

In similar fashion, in both Greek and Hebrew
manuscripts, letters, syllables, phrases, clauses, and
sentences were omitted. Letters and words were mis-
read. Sometimes a slip of the pen created a new
reading. Very common are the errors of hearing the
confusion of. two words pronounced alike. These "ear
spellings" occurred not only when the manuscript
was written from dictation but also when a single
scribe was copying directly from the page of the
exemplar. Again, if a scribe detected the omission of
a word or phrase after the next word or two was
written, he often inserted the omitted element at
once, thus creating a variation in word order. From
all of these causes, unintentional variations entered
the textual tradition in large numbers.

The synagogue far surpassed the church in the

48 THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE

efficiency of the controls it devised and employed to
preserve the content of the sacred books unchanged.
From early in the Christian era down to the invention
of printing, the Hebrew text varied but slightly from
manuscript to manuscript. It must be understood
that this is a relative judgment. Some idea of the
amount of variation can be gained from the following
figures. In I Chronicles, chapter n, one manuscript
has twenty-two variations from the printed text,
another has seventeen, a third has eighteen, and a
fourth, twenty-eight; the majority of these are scribal
errors. The manuscripts of the Greek New Testa-
ment and the Latin Vulgate present many more
variations in a comparable space and have a much
higher proportion of significant variations.

It is possible to explain the success of the synagogue
and the failure of the church by referring to the
meticulous checking of the total number of words in
the Hebrew books and to other similar precautions.
But these are secondary phenomena. Why was the
Christian church, both Greek and Latin, less inter-
ested in the accurate preservation of every letter of
Scripture than the synagogue was ? The answer must
lie in the highly centralized authority of the Bible in
Judaism; Torah monopolized religious authority. It
had no such rivals in Judaism as the Christian Bible
found in hierarchy and creed. Judaism had no Roman
pope, no ecumenical patriarch, no Nicene Creed, no
such councils as those of Carthage and Chalcedon.
The very force that modernized the Jewish Bible
rabbinical interpretation went back (at least for-

TRANSMISSION OF THE BIBLE 49

mally) to Torah for its base of operations. Inter-
preters found the various minute elements of the text
of great significance and, therefore, the more de-
serving of accurate transmission. In the Christian
church, on the contrary, the clergy and the increasing
body of Christian dogma shared the position of
authority with the Bible; with the result that the
exact wording of Scripture was never as important or
as carefully preserved here as it was in Judaism.

The scribal errors mentioned above as character-
istic of the earliest period were committed (in slightly
less frequency) throughout the Middle Ages in the
Greek and Latin manuscripts. In the Greek tradition,
the last three centuries before the printing press were
almost as bad as- the first three, and the Latin
Vulgate reached the press in an unfortunately corrupt
form. Especially in these areas, the student of textual
criticism is faced with the task of setting up a method
or methods to overcome scribal mistakes. ,

STANDARD EDITIONS

The carefree attitude toward Scripture which ex-
isted in the earliest period of Christian history and in
the religion of Israel in the pre-Christian period was
followed by attempts to control and purify the text.
This often led to the publishing of standard texts,
revised texts, etc., in the manuscript period. These
standard editions were prepared from the highest
motives; their makers sought to remove corruptions
from the text and to prevent further deterioration by
establishing a standard that could be carefully pre-

50 THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE

served. The development of ecclesiastical organiza-
tion, the increased efficiency of the controls used by
the cult, the growth of culture especially book
culture as the result of the impact of Hellenistic
civilization on Christianity all these supported the
creation of purified and standard texts.

The number of such texts is large. In Syriac the
early fifth century saw the Peshitta Version com-
pleted. The fourth century saw the making of the
Latin Vulgate. As early as the second century, the
Massoretic Hebrew text had been standardized. By
the time of Chrysostom, the Greek text of the New
Testament had been edited in at least two standard
editions: one in Alexandria in Egypt, the other in
Syrian Antioch.

In so far as these ecclesiastical texts checked the
rate of corruption, they made a positive contribution
to the history of the text. Nor can it be doubted that
corruption proceeded more slowly under their repres-
sive influence than it had in the uncontrolled period
that preceded. Yet, in two ways, the making of these
"revisions" makes the task of the student of the text
more difficult today.

In the first place, every revision tends to displace
the unrevised earlier text. Second editions replace
first editions; hence the scarcity of first editions.
Very often the makers or champions of the revised
edition actively attacked the earlier forms of the text,
destroying earlier manuscripts wherever they could
find them. Thus the champions of the standard
Syriac text of the Gospels destroyed manuscripts of

TRANSMISSION OF THE BIBLE 51

the earlier Syriac Gospel harmony with such en-
thusiasm that not a single manuscript survived in the
Syriac language. The champions of the Massoretic
Hebrew text are at least partly responsible for the
disappearance of all pre-Massoretic manuscripts of
the Hebrew Bible. The difficulty caused by the lack
of early manuscripts springs in part from the making
of these standard versions of antiquity.

The appearance of these standard versions compli-
cates the history of the text. In only one case, that of
the Hebrew text, did the standard text dominate the
ensuing tradition universally and continuously. In
the Greek, Syriac, Egyptian, and Latin Bibles, the
success of the revision was only partial. Not all older
manuscripts were destroyed; some were corrected.
And correction was never 100 per cent complete.
The result is the creation of mixed texts the curse of
the manuscript student. One manuscript was cor-
rected in some variants; another in a different set of
readings. As additional manuscripts of different
types were corrected to standards of varying degrees
of mixture, the confusion became worse confounded.
This mixture of revised with prerevised texts makes
it very difficult to establish the text of the revision.
The possession of the text of the revision is, however,
an almost indispensable tool for the task of getting
back of the revision to the primitive text.

One of the most scholarly, dramatic, and disastrous
of these ancient revisions was Origen's (|A.D. 254)
revision of that Greek translation of the Old Testa-
ment which is called the Septuagint. His edition is

52 THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE

called the Hexapla and was carried out on the grand
scale. Part of his purpose was to show the relation
between the Hebrew text and that of the various
Greek translations. He, therefore, published his work
in six columns of parallel material. At the left was
the Hebrew text; next, a transliteration of the He-
brew in Greek letters; then, four Greek translations:
Aquila, Symmachus, the Septuagint, and Theodotion.
This magnificent production had an unfortunate in-
fluence on the text of the Septuagint.

To begin with, the Hebrew column established the
order of the contents; the Septuagint material was
transposed to parallel the Hebrew. Moreover, Origen
added to the Septuagint any material which it lacked
that the Hebrew of his day contained. He usually
marked this additional material by prefixing an
asterisk; and, in some cases where the Greek manu-
scripts differed, he chose the reading that was closest
to the Hebrew, without indicating the existence of the
variants. Since these manuscripts had undoubtedly
suffered some corruption from the influence of the
Hebrew before Origen's day, the result was that he
frequently preferred the worse reading. The ultimate
catastrophe was that the bulk of his work prevented
its mass production; hence the Septuagint column
was copied out alone, in many cases without much
effort to reproduce the asterisks and other diacritical
marks. Thus the great difficulty in the study of the
Septuagint text is to get back of Origen's Hexapla,
His work, like a seven-barred gate, stands across the
path that criticism must follow. The exultation with

TRANSMISSION OF THE BIBLE 53

which the recent discovery of a pre-Hexaplaric manu-
script was received is a by-product of the pernicious
results of Origen's attempt to improve the text.

INTENTIONAL CHANGES

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

correct its "errors."

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

ure . . . ."

Some of these changes were intended to make the
parallel accounts of the same incident agree in details.
There are four accounts of Jesus' baptism. In the

54 THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE

Johannine account the distinctive item is the asser-
tion that the Spirit abode upon Jesus after the
baptism (i '.31, 33). In many manuscripts the words
"and abode upon him" are added to the accounts of
the baptism in the first three gospels. In some in-
stances the scribes carefully corrected quotations
from the Old Testament in the New Testament so
that the New Testament would agree with the Old
Testament. The older sources of Mark i:i refer to
"Isaiah the prophet" and precede to quote from
Malachi the prophet and then from Isaiah. Later
manuscripts change "Isaiah the prophet" to "the
prophets," thus making the reference to the Old
Testament more accurate.

Occasionally, the Greek manuscripts of the Old
Testament were edited to make them conform more
explicitly to Christian faith. The ninety-fifth Psalm
(ninety-six in the Septuagint) was identified as a
messianic Psalm, probably because of the reference to
the Lord (God) coming in judgment. The tenth verse
of this Psalm reads, "Say among the nations, the
Lord reigns." Some enthusiastic Christian scribes
have made this a reference to the crucifixion by
adding the words "from the tree" (i.e., the cross)
after the verb "reigns."

Not only was book harmonized with book, but the
Scriptures were harmonized also with liturgical prac-
tice. In the Greek church, on the fourth evening of
Lent, Matt. 7:7 was read after Mark 11:26. The /
same combination of passages was read quite fre-
quently on saints' days, especially on December 9.

TRANSMISSION OF THE BIBLE 55

As a result of this, some manuscripts of the Gospels
follow Mark 1 1 : 26 with Matt. 7:7. The same natural
influence of liturgy upon the text can be seen in the
addition of the doxology to the Lord's Prayer.

Some intentional changes were purely explanatory
in character, intended to clear up obscurities in the
text. They were written on the margin of the manu-
script or between the lines; from these positions some
of them crept into the text itself. They usually are
brief additions.

A larger number of changes were of a dogmatic
nature. Where the scribe found the sacred text saying
something unworthy of deity, he knew it was wrong
and preceded to correct it as well as he could. The
development of paraphrases for the divine name in
the Old Testament, the avoidance of anthropo-
morphisms in the versions of the Old Testament, etc.,
are all examples of this. The Old Testament scribes
had the term Tiqqune sopherim for their deliberate
changes made in the interest of dogma or decency.
An interesting example is Hab. i :I2, where "you do
not die," said to God was changed to "we shall not
die." The original form of the verse was, "Are you
not from everlasting, O Yahweh, my God ? My Holy
One, you do not die." Another example is the change
in Gen. 18:22 from "The Lord was yet standing
before Abraham" to "Abraham was yet standing
before the Lord." Similar deliberate changes were
made by the scribes who copied the New Testament.
Mark 13:22 reads, "But of that day and that hour
knoweth no man, no, not the angels which are in

56 THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE

heaven, neither the Son, but the Father." Several
New Testament manuscripts omit the words "neither
the Son" because of the implication of limitation of
Jesus' knowledge.

Not only theological doctrines but also social
feeling affected the text. This was especially true in
the earliest period when the transmission was least
controlled. Early Christianity became anti-Semitic
before it was one hundred years old, and the word
"anti-Semitic" is used here to mean dominated by
prejudice and passion in general attitudes toward the
Jews. In a manuscript of the Old Syriac version,
called the Curetonian manuscript, a striking change
is made in Matt. 1:21 because of this anti-Semitic
bias. Most manuscripts read, "You shall call his
name Jesus, for he shall save his people . . . ." but
this manuscript changes "his people" to "the world,"
thereby removing one Jewish element from the
gospel. I have called attention elsewhere to the
thoroughness with which the author of the Fourth
Gospel has read Jesus out of Judaism.

The early Christian believers were sensitive to -the
charge that Jesus was a criminal because he had been
executed by Roman authority in the most shameful
manner possible. They did everything they could to
reduce the reproach of the cross. Luke 2.3:32 says,
"There were also two others, malefactors, led with
him to be executed." Nothing but the final s on
"others" and the commas save the reader of the /
English version from assuming that this implies that '
Jesus was a malefactor. The possibility of reading the

TRANSMISSION OF THE BIBLE 57

passage this way in the ancient languages was even
stronger. The vast mass of our earliest New Testa-
ment manuscript text was written without commas,
thus the risk of reading that Jesus was a malefactor
was much greater. Some Old Latin manuscripts and
the Sinai tic Syriac manuscript omit the word "other"
or "others," thus removing all implication that Jesus
was a criminal. The Fourth Gospel achieves the
same result by retaining "others" and omitting
"malefactors."

METHODS

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

There are several 100 per cent objective methods,
and they are all worthless. One is to count the num-
ber of manuscripts supporting one reading and the
number supporting the rival reading and then to
accept the reading supported by the larger number of
manuscripts. There is one drawback to the adoption
of this method. As with people so with manuscripts
those with the worst character often have the most
children. One thousand descendants of a very care-
lessly written manuscript do not outweigh ten de-
scendants of a carefully written manuscript. In the
last fifty years this method has been repudiated by

58 THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE

the world of scholarship. The statement that "most
manuscripts" read "so-and-so" is not decisive.

Equally objective but even less defensible is the
choice of the oldest manuscript as representing the
original text. It would be possible to publish a Bible
whose content was determined solely on the basis of
date; that is, the reading with the most ancient
attestation would be chosen. This is never seriously
considered by scholarship but is occasionally at-
tempted by those who have gulped down one hasty
mouthful of manuscript lore. Its repudiation by the
authorities in this field rises from their recognition ,of
two facts: (i) the period of wildest variation was the
earliest period and (a) no one manuscript (not even
the oldest) is entirely correct. The antiquity of a
reading is not in itself a decisive criterion of authen-
ticity.

A much more popular and significant method is
called the genealogical method from its attempt to
trace the ancestry of manuscripts. If -manuscripts
were all related to one another in the pattern son-
father-grandfather-greatgrandfather, etc., it would
be a simple matter to establish a family tree for each
late manuscript and then group the families into
clans and tribes and nations, to identify the "father"
of each nation, and finally to find the parent of these
fathers in the original manuscript. Theoretically,
this is accomplished by the genealogical method as
applied to manuscripts. But, actually, the method /
has not been applied to biblical manuscripts as
manuscripts.

TRANSMISSION OF THE BIBLE 59

The reasons for this are manifold. In the Old
Testament there are so few manuscripts of any
antiquity that the family tree could be held together
only by the most extensive use of all the devices of
tree surgery. In the New Testament there are so
many manuscripts that the tree would have to be
taller than the sequoias with a tangle of branches sug-
gesting a cross between the banyan and the crab
apple. A beginning has been made by the identifica-
tion of a few families (with six to twenty members)
and their tentative grouping in larger units; but the
real work on a genealogical scheme of New Testa-
ment manuscripts is still to be done.

More serious obstacles to the employment of the
genealogical method exist in the complex nature of
relationships between manuscripts. The mixture of
texts that results from "correction" has already been
mentioned. When part of the readings throughout
one manuscript come from one ancestor and part
from a very different ancestor, and when this is the
case with scores and hundreds of manuscripts, the
complexity of a chart that would represent ancestry is
bewildering and intimidating. Another type- of mix-
ture springs from the use of two or more manuscripts
in sequence in the making of a manuscript. Matthew
may have been copied from one source, Mark from
another, Luke from a third, and John from a fourth
thus one manuscript of the Four Gospels would have
four fathers.

Nor would four fathers be an extravagant number,
especially in the early period and (in the New

60 THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE

Testament area) the latest period. The early and
famous Washington manuscript of the Gospels not
only has different ancestors in different Gospels but
also switches parents within the Gospel of Mark. The
Four Gospels of Karahissar from the late thirteenth
century is descended from eight different "fathers,"
and in at least two sections the text was corrected by
still other types.

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

Another valuable method is the internal criticism
of readings. Down through the generations of careful
study. of manuscripts, scholars have set forth longer
and shorter lists of "canons" or rules to guide the
student in that choice between alternative readings
which is the central task of textual criticism. Some of
these sound paradoxical, and most of them have little
practical value. Two of the most famous are "the
more difficult reading is to be preferred" and "the
shorter reading is the older." The first springs from/
the assumption that a scribe would never intention-
ally make a reading more difficult. But what of

TRANSMISSION OF THE BIBLE 61

unintentional change? And would readings that seem
difficult to us always seem difficult to all the scribes
who have worked on the text? If this rule were fol-
lowed rigorously in all cases, the original text would
approach unintelligibility. The second rule ignores
the common tendency of scribes to omit either
intentionally (in times of revision or in the primitive
period) or unintentionally. Suppose the student must
choose between two readings one long and one short,
and the long one is the more difficult. He must either
find additional rules or fall back on his own judgment
of the relative value of these rules.

Additional rules can be found in the combination
of genealogical method with study of variants. All
the variations in one passage are assembled,- the
student then chooses that one which best explains all
the others. In other words, he constructs a family
tree of variants. In Mark 1 : 12-13 some manuscripts
read, "And immediately the Spirit drove him out into
the desert. And he was in the desert forty days.
. . . ." Others read, ". . . . into the desert. And he

was there forty days " Still others read, "-. ...

into the desert. And he was there in the desert forty

days " Obviously, the third is the child of the

first and the second. The choice between the other
two, so far as this rule is concerned, then depends on a
judgment as to whether "into the desert. And he was
in the desert . . . ." would be changed to "into the
desert. And he was there . . . ." or vice versa.

To assist in such difficult decisions the further rule
is employed that that variant is to be chosen which

62 THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE

best fits the context which is most at home in the
author's style, vocabulary, ideas, and purpose. These
two rules are the most practical and valuable for
internal study of readings.

The last method is called "^QnJC^uaj__e^nenda-
.tion." When the text as preserved in all the manu-
scripts does not make sense, it is clear that (i) we are
too stupid to understand it, or (2) the author wrote
nonsense, or (3) the original reading has been lost.
Since we usually think too highly of ourselves and the
author to accept (i) or (2), we try to restore the lost
reading by conjecture. This is employed more rarely
in the New Testament area than in the Old Testa-
ment for obvious reasons. The greater number and
greater antiquity of New Testament manuscripts
makes it less probable that many readings have been
lost; this judgment is objectively supported by the
large number of unintelligible passages in the Hebrew
Old Testament and the small number of such passages
in the Greek New Testament.

All students of the biblical text have admitted the
legitimacy of conjectural emendation. Even the
sacred name of Hort can be quoted in support of its
application to the New Testament in moderation. In .
The New Testament: An American Translation, Pro-
fessor Goodspeed has translated several conjectural
emendations. One of the most striking is in I Pet.
3:19, where he accepts the suggestion of Rendel
Harris that the name of Enoch has dropped from all
manuscripts. The omission would be caused by the
similarity of the two lines ENOK(AI) and ENOCH,
which are easily confused in Greek uncial characters.

TRANSMISSION OF THE BIBLE 63

The sixteenth edition of Nestle's Greek text of the
New Testament records about two hundred con-
jectural emendations. These are given in the critical
apparatus below the text; in ninety instances they are
accompanied by the name of the scholar who first
suggested them; in a few cases they are marked by
Nestle with the symbol used to designate readings
"which, according to widespread opinion, might be
original." An example is Matt. 2:6, "And you Beth-
lehem, land of Judah, . . . ." which by the addition
of one letter in the Greek text reads (more sensibly),
"And you Bethlehem of the land of Judah "

A striking conjectural emendation in the Old
Testament is that of Professor Arnold in I Sam.
14: 1 8. The Hebrew reads, "And Saul said to Ahijah,
Bring hither the ark of God, for the ark of God was in
that day and the children of Israel." The Greek
version reads, ". . . . hither the Ephod; for he bore
the Ephod in that day before Israel." The conjecture
is that the Hebrew was deliberately corrupted to hide
the fact that there were many arks in ancient Israel,
the Greek version obtaining the same result by
translating "ark" as "Ephod." If "ark" be sub-
stituted for "Ephod" in the Greek, the original sense
of the passage is recovered.

Another emendation of a famous Old Testament
passage is made in Isa. 9:3, which has been read in
three ways. The Massoretic Hebrew text reads (as
the King James Version translates), "Thou hast
multiplied the nation, and not increased the joy; they
joy before thee according to the joy in harvest, as men
rejoice when they divide the spoil." All the rest of

64 THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE

the verse argues against the authenticity of the nega-
tive before "increased the joy." As a recognition of
this, the Revisers read it as, "Thou hast multiplied
the nation; thou hast increased their joy, etc." This
change is made possible by reading to' as Id. But this
reading has been further improved by attaching this
lo' to the preceding word, which gives the meaning:
"Thou hast multiplied rejoicing; thou hast increased
joy, etc." A slight change in word division restores
the clear meaning of the original.

By conjectural emendation, by genealogical study
of manuscripts and variants, by a careful study of
each manuscript's distinctive characteristics, by the
help of versions and quotations, and by the most
searching scrutiny of all the variant readings, the
text of the Bible is established. No one method is
employed to the exclusion of the others; internal and
external criticism support one another's hands. In
the objective part of the task the law is accuracy; in
the subjective, common sense.

ACHIEVEMENTS

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

TRANSMISSION OF THE BIBLE 65

It is this type of text which was translated to make
the King James Version. But throughout this period
the manuscript resources were being constantly en-
riched by discovery and study, and methods were
being improved and refined. Tischendorf s discovery
of a fourth-century Greek Bible on Mount Siani
dramatized the value of the new resources in effective
fashion, and the second half of the nineteenth century
saw the production of new editions of the Greek
Testament based on hundreds of manuscripts, scores
of them earlier than the earliest used by Erasmus.

The Massoretic Hebrew text of the Old Testament
was at the same time being revised into greater
accuracy, and the versions of the Old Testament have
been used to make significant improvements in the
English Bible. Better methods and new materials
have each done their part to carry the content of our
Bible back closer and closer to its original form.
Where the King James Version represented the text
of the Bible as it existed from the tenth to the
fifteenth century, the revised versions and to a still
higher degree some of the modern-speech translations
go back to the Bible as it existed in the late third or
early fourth century. Finality has not been attained,
nor will it be attained in our lifetime. But the great
wealth of second- and third-century manuscripts
discovered in the last decade and the slow but con-
stant increase in our knowledge of the significance of
all the sources will make a still better text possible
for our children.

66 THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE

BIBLIOGRAPHY ON TRANSMISSION

GENERAL

KENYON, FREDERIC. The Story of the Bible: A Popular Account
of How It Came to Us. New York: E. P. Button, 1937.

. Books and Their Readers in Ancient Greece and Rome.

Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932.

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

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

The best elementary treatment of the transmission of the Bible.
Good bibliographies.

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

A good brief treatment of the process, not very penetrating in analysis.
Reprints dated later are unchanged.

ADVANCED

a) MANUALS

BUHL, F. Canon and Text of the Old Testament (trans, by J.
MACPHERSON). Edinburgh: T. &. T. Clark, 1892. (See
chap, i.)

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

RAHLFS, A. Verzeichnis der griechischen Handschriften des Alten
Testaments. Berlin: Weidmann, 1914.
Standard catalogue of Greek manuscripts of the Old Tesament.

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

TRANSMISSION OF THE BIBLE 67

COLLOMP, P. La Critique des textes. Paris: Societe d'edition
les belles lettres, 1931.

On method. Valuable discussion, exposition, and criticism of con-
temporary scholarly positions on methods of textual criticism not
limited to biblical text.

GREGORY, C. R. Textkritik des Neuen Testamentes. 3 vols. Leip-
zig: Hinrichs, 1900-1909.

This contains the standard catalogue of New Testament manuscripts,
continued until 1933 in Zeitschrift fur die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft
by von Dobschiitz.

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

. Recent Developments in the Textual Criticism of the Greek

Bible (Schweich Lectures for 1932). London: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1933.
Helps to bring the Handbook up to date.

. The Text of the Greek Bible. London: G. Duckworth,

Not as heavy as the Handbook, more up to date.

LAGRANGE, M. J. Introduction a V etude du Nouveau Testament,
Part II: Critique textuelle; Vol. II: La Critique rationelle.
Paris: J. Gabalda, 1935.

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

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

VAGANAY, L. An Introduction to the Textual Criticism of the
New Testament (trans, by B. V. Miller). London: Sands &
Co., 1937.

Brief but valuable analysis; good bibliographies including work up to
date. The history of the manuscript transmission and the discussion of
method are exceptionally good.

68 THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE

b) CRITICAL EDITIONS

I. NEW TESTAMENT

WESTCOTT, B. F., AND HORT, F. J. A. The New Testament in the
Original Greek, Vol. I: The Text; Vol. II: Introduction and
Appendix. New York: Harper & Bros., 1882.

This text has practically become the standard text of the Greek New
Testament in England and, to a lesser degree, in America. The text
itself has no critical apparatus, but the second volume gives a classic
discussion of methods and principles of textual criticism. The lexicon
by Hickie, which is often bound in with the text in Macmillan's edition,
is the worst lexicon of the Greek New Testament in use today. Student's
who buy the text volume should buy the edition without the lexicon.

EBERHARD NESTLE'S Novum Testamentum Graece cum apparatu
critico curavit (i6th ed. by ERWIN NESTLE). Stuttgart:
Priviligierte Wiirttembergische Bibelanstalt, 1936.

This is the best edition for classroom use. It is less expensive than any
of its rivals. It gives variant readings in a critical apparatus which is
constantly revised. This edition contains the evidence of the Beatty
papyri and Codex Koridethi. Cross-references are given in the margins,
Old Testament sources being identified. Verse divisions are plainly
indicated. Most of the equipment of the medieval Greek manuscripts is
reproduced. The text is derived from those of Weiss, Tischendorf, and
Hort; it is quite close to that of Westcott and Hort.

TISCHENDORF, C. Novum Testamentum Graece .... editio critica
octavo motor. Leipzig: Heinrich's, 1869-72.

A critical text with a good apparatus, now antiquated by the dis-
coveries of the last half-century. The text is in general similar to that of
Westcott and Hort.

VON SODEN, H. Die Schriften des Neuen Testaments in ihrer
dltesten erreichbaren Textgetsalt, Vol. I. Berlin: Glaue, 1902-
10. Vol. II: Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1913.

Von Soden's theory of the history of the text has been severely criti-
cized and generally repudiated by scholarship. As a result, his text has
not been accepted for scholarly study. But his work is an invaluable intro-
duction to the study of the medieval manuscripts of the New Testament.

LEGG, S. C. E. Novum Testamentum Graece Oxford:

Clarendon Press, 1935.

Only the Gospel of Mark has appeared as yet. The text printed is that
of Westcott and Hort; the critical apparatus claims to bring Tischendorf

TRANSMISSION OF THE BIBLE 69

up to date, but it is disappointingly inaccurate and incomplete. Expen-
sive.

EBERHARD NESTLE'S Novum Testamentum Latine (6th ed.).
Stuttgart: Privilegierte Wiirttembergischen Bibelanstalt,

1935-

The text printed is the official Roman Catholic text; the apparatus
gives all variant readings of the Sixtine edition of A.D. 1 590 and of the
edition of Wordsworth and White, etc.

WORDSWORTH, I. AND WHITE, H. I. Novum Testamentum domini
nostri Jesu Christi Latine. Oxford : Clarendon Press, 191 1 .

This is now the outstanding critical edition of the Vulgate; so far the
books of the New Testament through Ephesians have been published. A
manual edition without lengthy introductions and apparatus was pub-
lished in 191 1 at the Clarendon Press, Oxford.

2. OLD TESTAMENT

KITTEL, R. Biblia Hebraica (jd ed.). Stuttgart: Privileg.
Wiirtt. Bibelanstalt, 1929 .

A sound critical edition of the Hebrew Scriptures, with brief appa-
ratus. This differs from the second edition in that it includes the Mas-
sorah parva and gives the text of the Leningrad Codex, whereas all
earlier printings have reproduced the text of Jacob ben Chaim of 1525.

RAHLFS, A. Septuaginta. Stuttgart: Privileg. Wiirtt. Bibel-
anstalt, 1935.

This appears in two forms a two-volume student edition and a one-
volume de luxe edition. The text is based on the three oldest manuscripts
as a primary source, but much additional evidence is given in the appa-
ratus. This edition is cheaper, more legible, and more up to date than
that of Swete.

BROOKE, A. E., AND MCLEAN, N. The Old Testament in Greek
according to the Text of Codex Vaticanus. Cambridge: At the
University Press, 1906 .

This larger Cambridge edition repeats and improves in details the text
made familiar to students for the last generation in the manual edition
of H. B. Swete. In this larger work, the text is supplemented by the evi-
dence of a valuable selected apparatus, which includes all the uncials, all
early versions, much important patristic evidence, and a small group of
minuscules. The last fasciculus to appear contained I Esdras, Ezra-
Nehemiah (1935).

70 THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE

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

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

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

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

3. APOCRYPHA AND RELATED WRITINGS

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

LIPSIUS, R. A., AND BONNET, M. Acta Apostolorum Apocrypha.
Leipzig: Mendelssohn, 1891-1903.

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

Most complete critical apparatus. Vol. II (Hermas) has not yet ap-
peared.

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

GOODSPEED, E. J. Die altesten Apologeten. Gottingen: Vanden-
hoeck & Ruprecht, 1914.

A critical edition of the Greek text of the first Christian apologists
through Tatian.

Chapter III
The Translation of the Bible

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

REASONS FOR TRANSLATING
O) MISSIONARY

The rapid expansion of the Christian religion
created situations in which the need of translations of
the Scriptures was felt strongly. The twentieth-
century Christian can sympathize with his predeces-
sors in their recognition of this need. The Christian
religion has come a long distance in time and territory

72 THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE

from the cities of Corinth, Philippi, and Rome cities
in which Christian churches read the letters that Paul
wrote to them in Greek. It has come still farther
away from the background and language of the books
of the Old Testament. This expansion of the cult to
groups that did not know the language of its sacred
writings demanded the production of translations.

The work of supplying this need of the expanding
cult began long before Christianity came to Birming-
ham and Chicago. Before the Christian church was
two hundred years old, its missionaries had gone
beyond the limits of the Greek-speaking centers of the
Mediterranean world. This was partly due to a de-
crease in the use of Greek and an increase in the use of
the old national languages during the period of the
church's expansion. Christian penetration into the
back-country sections of Africa and Syria called forth
translations of the gospels into Latin and Syriac./V
Ever since then translation has been a recognized
missionary activity in the Christian church. The
great Bible societies of the present day publish the
Scriptures in literally hundreds of languages.

b) LINGUISTIC CHANGE

Another element that called forth translations of
the Bible was change in linguistic usage. The only
certain thing that can be said about the future of any
language that is being spoken is that it will change.
It is equally certain that they have all changed and
that all living languages are in constant process of
change. The changes occur in form, in the mechanics
of sentence structure, in the meaning of words, etc.

TRANSLATION OF THE BIBLE 73

The changes in the meanings of words are often so
great that they make the tracing of etymologies a
fascinating sport. "Sincere" comes from two Latin
words meaning "without wax"; "treacle" ("molas-
ses" in the United States) goes back to a Greek
adjective meaning "pertaining to a wild beast."
There is little rhyme or reason to some of these
changes, but the student may be able to understand
why all words that mean "at once" today will mean
"after a little while" tomorrow.

In Shakespeare's day the word "presently" meant
"at once," as the following example from Hamlet
shows. As Polonius urges the king and queen out of
the way with the words, "I'll board him presently,"
Hamlet enters and is at once addressed by Polonius
(11,2). But when the modern husband who is asked
by his wife to fix the curtain in the dining-room mut-
ters, "I'll fix it presently," she knows and he knows
that he has not promised to fix it "at once."

Words that refer to odors inevitably come to mean
bad odors, no matter how neutral their origin.
Dry den could speak of "clouds of savory stench"
without being humorous, but the modern poet cannot.
That Spenser whose Faerie Queene is so delightful to
some scholars and so boring to the college undergrad-
uate wrote of his bride in the Epithalamion (1. 148),
"Loe, where she comes along with portly pace!" Yet
she was not a large woman, nor did he mean to im-
ply that she was stout. The word "portly" in. his day
meant among other things dignified, stately; to-
day it always implies stoutness of girth.

Similar changes in the meaning of English words

74 THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE

make much of the King James Version of the Bible
obscure today. The obscurity in the following pas-
sages is due to linguistic change in the English
language, not to any obscurity in the original: "My
eyes prevent the night watches" (Ps. 119:148);
". . . . a valley with running water, which is neither
; eared nor^sown . . . ." (Deut. 21:4). "Prevent" no
longer means "anticipate," nor does "eared" today
mean "plowed." When the makers of the King James
Version asked, "Who can find a virtuous woman?"
(Prov. 31:10), they were no more cynical about
women than the Revisers, who said "A worthy
woman who can find?" or the maker of the American
Translation, who said, "If one can find a good wife,
she is worth far more than corals." The word "virtu-
ous" when applied to a woman had a much broader
meaning in the days of King James than it has today.
These examples give an indication of the way in
which change in language makes the sacred text
obscure. Over longer periods of time, or in periods of
sudden linguistic change, the need for a new transla-
tion is even more manifest. Thus Hebrew became a
dead language for the Jews in the period following the
Exile, although its prestige as the language of the
Scriptures gave it a limited existence, especially in
Palestine. But the majority of the people needed a
translation, which was supplied in Palestine in oral
translation into Aramaic, the contemporary lan-
guage; and in the Dispersion by a translation into
Greek. This translation was begun in Alexandria
three centuries before the Christian Era. The Jews of

TRANSLATION OF THE BIBLE 75

that city were familiar with Greek as the spoken
language of the metropolis; many of them were
bilingual; some probably knew Greek alone. But the
Hebrew Bible was unintelligible to the vast majority
of them; they needed a new translation. The transla-
tions into Anglo-Saxon are of no use to the English-
speaking Christian today for the same reason; they
are written in a dead language. The changes in the
English language especially the changes that oc-
curred from 1525 to 1900 have been influential in
creating new translations: the revised versions and
the modern-speech translations of this century.

A student of translations has observed that the
language of a translation ages more rapidly than does
the language of works that are native to the tongue.
What in an original composition is an ornament (the
quaintness of language now become archaic, etc.) is a
defect in a translation whose primary function is to
convey meaning. Hence no translation of any classic
is ever final, and periodic translation is the intelligent
ideal.

C) COMPETITION AND STRESS

New translations of the Bible spring not only from
the missionary needs of the church and the aging of
language but also from the confusion and stress
caused by the presence of rival translations, or by the
presence of translations that clash with contemporary
faith. One of the important elements in the situation
that produced the Latin translation of Jerome was
the presence of a large number of varying earlier
Latin translations. Sophronius Eusebius Hieronymus

76 THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE

(Jerome to us) may have exaggerated slightly when
he insisted that there were as many different Latin
translations of the Bible as there were Latin manu-
scripts of the Bible, for it must be remembered that
he was the champion of yet another translation. Yet
the support given the undertaking by the pope shows
that official Christianity regarded these contradictory
versions as a liability; the hierarchy was anxious to
reduce variety in translation to uniformity.

In the earliest decades of Christian history, Chris-
tians and Jews alike used the Septuagint translation
of the Old Testament into Greek as the authoritative
Bible. It was, in fact, from the Jews that the Chris-
tians received this version. The welcome they gave
it was too warm to please the Jews; for the rivalry
between the two cults was bitter, and the use of
allegorical interpretation made it possible for the
Christian Fathers to baptize the Septuagint itself.
Its language was appealed to in support of Christian
doctrine until the pious Jew in desperation demanded
another, more accurate version. In Isa. 7:14 the
Septuagint prediction that a "virgin" would bear a
son was hailed by the Christian as proof that Jesus
was the Messiah; while the Jew cried for a translation
that would more accurately represent the Hebrew
word "maiden." The second century saw several such
translations prepared to meet this need; the most
famous of these is the one attributed to a certain
Aquila.-

In the middle of the nineteenth century in the
United States there was a strong and sometimes bitter

TRANSLATION OF THE BIBLE 77

debate between various Protestant denominations as
to the mode of baptism which was scriptural. Some
denominations permitted baptism by immersion, by
sprinkling, or by pouring; others permitted baptism
by immersion alone, claiming that this was the sole
scriptural method. The intensity of feeling aroused
can be seen in the following title: Immersionists
against the Bible, or the Babel Builders Confounded, in
an Exposition of the Origin, Design, Tactics and
Progress of the New Version Movement of Campbellites
and Other Baptists. This work was published by N. H.
Lee at Nashville, Tennessee, in 1856.

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

It may be that the intensity of the debate weakened

78 THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE

in the rank and file of the believers with the passing of
time, for at the same time and place the Baptist
Society published an edition with "baptize" as the
translation of the Greek baptizo. The two editions
were otherwise identical; they are distinguished by a
label on the title-page; one is marked "Edition with
Immerse," the other "[Baptize]."

In Elizabethan England the Protestants espe-
cially the more zealous reformers were able to read
the Bible at home in one of several translations made
into the English from Greek, Hebrew, and other
sources. Preachers read these vernacular versions in
the pulpit and quoted them copiously in their ser-
mons. In the stress of that era of change, many of
these sermons were attacks on Rome. It is not, there-
fore, strange that champions of the Roman faith
found this use of the English versions trying. The
popularity of these new translations especially the
Geneva Bible among the masses of the people
probably led some of the Roman Catholics to an
unauthorized reading for themselves. Further stress
was introduced into the situation by the recent
decree of the Council of Trent (1546), which had
established the Latin version of Jerome (the Vulgate)
as the authoritative form of the Roman Catholic
Bible. But none of the English translations in use
then was translated from the Vulgate. Under the
pressure of these "heretical" versions (as the transla-
tors say in their Preface), a translation of the New
Testament from the Latin Vulgate was made at
Reims, and later the Old Testament was trans-

TRANSLATION OF THE BIBLE 79

lated at Douai. Thus missionary activity and natural
change in language have been joined by cult needs in
times of competition as causes of new translations of
the Bible.

THE TASK OF THE TRANSLATOR

The production of a new translation always leads
the translator into difficulties and problems. His first
task and not his easiest one is to define the work he
is about to do. Is he going to make a new translation
from the best editions of the Bible in the original
languages? Or is he to be content with a revision, a
polishing, of an earlier translation? The latter ideal
has controlled most English translations of the Scrip-
tures, and in most of them the rule has been not to
make as many improvements as possible but rather
to make only those improvements which could not be
avoided. But, even if the natural conservatism of all
religions is overcome and a new translation is decided
on, the most difficult problems still await solution.

O) DEFINITION OF THE TASK

The most baffling problem of all is: What is trans-
lation? How does it differ from paraphrase? Is it, in
any sense, interpretation? What is an accurate trans-
lation ? Is a translation literal when it translates word
by word, or phrase by phrase, or sentence by sen-
tence? Must poetry be translated into poetry? Is it
possible to translate the "spirit" or "feeling" of a
work without translating its words? How many
words .in one language are the exact equivalent of
similar words in another? What should the translator

8o THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE

do with proper nouns that have lost significance ?
What should be done with ancient weights and
measures? Can a translation be twice as long as the
original and still be a translation?

It is generally agreed that a translation must be
faithful to the original; agreement vanishes when this
fidelity is defined. The sanest ideal is summed up in
the adage: "As literal as possible, as free as is neces-
sary." Some freedom is a necessity for idiomatic and
intelligible translation; the translation of units small-
er than sentences or independent clauses seldom
permits the attainment of clarity or idiomatic treat-
ment. But the freedom of the translator is intolerable
when it produces "libertine" translations.

The twenty-fourth book of the Iliad ends with the
line, "Such was the burial of Hector, master of
horses." Alexander Pope, master of the heroic coup-
let in English, translated this as follows:

Such honors Ilion to her hero paid

And peaceful slept the mighty Hector's shade.

Who said anything about Ilion ? What has become of
the horses? And how does Pope know that Hector's
shade slept peacefully? This is something more than
translation. The doubling of the quantity in the
process of translation is here seen for the dangerous
thing it is. Fidelity in translation includes fidelity to
the amount of the original. The introduction of
proper names not in the text is still another mislead-
ing feature of too-free translation. Fortunately, there
is almost no translation of this kind in the English

TRANSLATION OF THE BIBLE 81

versions of the Bible. The innate conservatism of the
religious has kept the translator closer to the text.

The outstanding fault of translations of the Bible is
that they are too close to the original too literal.
The ideal of absolute fidelity may lead the translator
as far astray as too much love of freedom. In Hebrew
the pronoun "I" has a longer and a shorter form, and
the verb is frequently omitted in such simple affirma-
tions as "I (am)' the king." The Septuagint translator
of some of the Former Prophets was led by these facts
and his desire for fidelity to translate these two forms
of the pronoun consistently in two ways. Where the
longer form occurred, he translated it as "I am";
while he regularly translated the shorter form with
"I." This causes no difficulty in sentences like "I am
thy God" but is disastrous in "I am said unto

him " Every student of this version has been

exasperated at some time or other by the translator's
refusal to perform his function: in the substitution of
transliteration for translation. Transliteration may \
be faithful, but it does not glow with meaning. '

The English versions of the Bible have produced
literalisms as unintelligible as any in the Septuagint.
The obscurity that results from an unintelligent
fidelity to each word of the original can be seen in the
American Revised Version of Eph. 1:3-14, where
participial phrases alternate with relative clauses
through a sentence of two hundred and sixty-eight
words that conveys the minimum of meaning. But
the champion of champions in literalness is the Douai
version (also called the Reims). The translators' con-

82 THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE

ception of their task is expressed in the following lines
from their Preface:

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

Such a principle applied to the Latin Vulgate pro-
duced incredible English.

This translation is much clearer in the Gospels than
it is in the rest of the New Testament; this is due, at
least in part, to the greater simplicity of the original
in the gospel section. The following passages from the
Epistles give some idea of the degree of unintelligi-
bility that can be attained by literal translation.
Rom. 1:28 f., "God delivered them up into a rep-
robate sense: to do those things that are not con-
venient: replenished with all iniquity, malice, forni-
cation, avarice, wickedness, .... detractours, odible
to God, contumelious." Rom. 2:11, ". . . . for there
is no acception of persons with God." Rom. 2 : 14-16,
"For when the Gentiles which have not the Law,
naturally do those things which are of the Law: the
same not having the Law, themselves are a law to
themselves: who shew the work of the Law written
in their hearts, their conscience giving testimony to
them and among themselves mutually their thoughts
accusing, or also defending, in the day when God shall

judge the secrets of men " Rom. 5 : 14, ". . . .

that sinned not after the similitude of the prevarica-
tion of Adam " Titus 3:1, "Be subject to

Princes and Po testates to obey at a word "

Philem. 6, ". . . . that the communication of thy faith

TRANSLATION OF THE BIBLE 83

may be made evident in the agnition of all good that is
in you in Christ Jesus. For I have had great joy and
consolation in thy charitie, because the bowels of the
sainctes have rested by thee, brother. For the which
thing having great confidence in Christ Jesus to
command thee that which pertaineth to the purpose:
for charitie rather I beseech, whereas thou art such an
one as Paul being old and now prisoner also of Jesus
Christ." This cannot be read without a Latin lexicon.
Even with the help of such a lexicon, one cannot easily
grasp its meaning. The excessive fidelity of the trans-
lators has betrayed the reader.

This extreme literalness as an ideal sometimes holds
the translators to a text which makes no sense what-
ever, when the use of conjectural emendation or a
little more freedom in translation would solve the
difficulties. Note the increase in intelligibility in the
following verse (Ps. 45 : 5) as it moves from transla-
tion to translation. The Bishops' Bible: "Thyne ar-
rowes are sharp: a people the king's enemies shall
submit in heart themselves unto thee." The King
James Bible: "Thine arrowes are sharp in the heart
of the king's enemies; whereby the people fall under
thee." The Douai Bible: "Thy sharp arrowes, the
peoples underneath thee shall fal into the hartes of
the king's enemies." The American Revised: "Thine
arrows are sharp; the peoples fall under thee; they are
in the heart of the king's enemies." The American
Translation: "May your sharp arrows be in the
midst of the king's foes ! May peoples fall under you !"

A passage famous for its obscurity is Eccles. 12 : n.

84 THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE

The King James Version loses none of the obscurity
in its rendering: "The words of the wise are as goads,
and as nails fastened by the masters of assemblies,
which are given from one shepherd."

The dangers implicit in obscure or ambiguous
translation are very real; naturally, they are greater
for the pastor or layman who must rely on his English
version alone for his understanding of the Scriptures.
There is no more dangerous passage in the so-called
"standard versions" (King James, English Revised,
and American Revised) than Matt. 26:27. These
versions agree in rendering this verse, "And he
[Jesus] took a cup, and gave thanks, and gave to
them saying, Drink ye all of it " A recent in-
spirational article in a denominational weekly ex-
pounds the words "Drink ye all of it' " through six
columns. The author takes these words as a com-
mand to the disciples to drink all of the wine in the
cup. "If they drank only part of the wine they were
only partially consecrated, while if they drank all of
the wine they were completely consecrated. So Jesus
said, 'Drink ye all of it!' " But the "ye all" of these
versions is the ancestor of our modern southern
idiom "you all." It means "all of you"; there is no
ambiguity whatever in the Greek, which says plainly,
"all of you drink of it."

b) SELECTION OF A TEXT

The translator cannot escape the problems of
textual criticism outlined in the preceding chapter.
He must select a text to translate. The best transla-

TRANSLATION OF THE BIBLE 85

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

86 THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE

Most of the translations made in the last fifty years
rest on texts of comparable quality. In the New
Testament the Greek texts translated are all fairly
close to the edition of Westcott and Hort. This is true
of the English Revised Version, the American Revised
Version, the Twentieth Century New Testament,
Weymouth's New Testament in Modern Speech,
Goodspeed's American Translation, and others.
There are some striking exceptions. A West Coast
group in 1919-24 produced a translation made from
the three oldest manuscripts (Vaticanus, Sinaiticus,
and Alexandrinus), translating their agreements as
the "Concordant Version." We have discussed the
futility of such a method of selecting a text in the
preceding chapter; its futility is further indicated by
the discovery of still older manuscripts of the New
Testament, notably the Chester Beatty papyri.
*** Another exception is the translation of the New
Testament made by Professor Moffatt, who trans-
lated the Greek text of von Soden. This Greek text
is somewhat closer to the old King James type than
any other of recent vintage; von Soden's faulty
method has led gradually to the repudiation of his
Greek text by the world of scholarship, and it is not
used for scholarly purposes today.
"*- A third exception is the Westminster Version.
This was begun by Roman Catholic scholars in 1928
as "A New Translation from the Greek and Hebrew
Texts." It makes no statement as to what text is used
as the basis of the translation, but it differs from
Westcott and Hort, e.g., in the inclusion of Matt.

TRANSLATION OF THE BIBLE 87

16:2-3, of the words "Son of God" in Mark i :i, of
the long ending of Mark, and of the interpolations at
the end of Luke.

In the Old Testament the variation between the
several modern translations is much higher than is
the case in the New Testament. This is due to two
factors, both growing out of the large number of
obscure passages in the extant Hebrew text of the
Old Testament. Translators vary in the positions
they take (i) as to the number of conjectural emenda-
tions which should be accepted and translated and
(a) as to the extent to which the evidence of the an-
cient versions should be used to correct and illuminate
the Hebrew text. The American Revised Version, for
example, is quite close, almost slavishly close, to the
Hebrew text. Theological students have discovered
this and use this version as a "help" in translation
courses in Hebrew. Several of the modern-speech
translations have used the ancient versions, notably
the Septuagint, in a number of passages where the
Hebrew is meaningless or obviously corrupt. For
example, the first edition of the American Translation
of the Old Testament printed at the end of the work a
list of passages in which the reading of the Septuagint
had been preferred to that of the Hebrew.

c) DIFFICULTIES IN BIBLE TRANSLATION

The scholar who works on the translation of the
Bible has to overcome some difficulties which are not
faced by any and all translators. Thus, in the Old
Testament, he faces the special difficulty of the

88 THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE

vowelless character of the Hebrew original. This v |
made mistakes in translation almost inevitable. Sup-
pose, Gentle Reader, that you were faced with the
task of translating vowelless English into some other
language. What, for example, would you make of the
following?

PRSDNTGRFLDSLDNSPPRSSFRRPTDNFRTN

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

It is no wonder that translators of the Old Testa-
ment have made mistakes in translation. Some of
these were made as far back as the first translation of
the Old Testament. In the Hebrew of Gen. 47 131 we
read, "Jacob leaned back on the head of his bed." In
the Septuagint translation of this into Greek, we
read, "Jacob bowed upon the head of his staff." The
Hebrew for "the bed" as written without vowels is
Hmmtth; "the staff" is identical, the difference ap-
pearing entirely in the vowels. "The bed" is Ham-
mittah; "the staff" is Hammatteh. The possibilities of
confusion in the translating of the vowelless text are
obvious. Interestingly enough, the author of the
Epistle to the Hebrews quotes the passage with the
word "staff," for he used the Septuagint version and
not the Hebrew. Thus the modern Bible contains
both readings of the word: "bed" in Gen. 47:31 and
"staff" inHeb. ii:ai.

Another example of the difficulty caused by the

TRANSLATION OF THE BIBLE 89

vowelless character of the Hebrew text is found in
Jer. 2:23. Our Hebrew text contains a phrase which
is now commonly read as "[thou art] a swift drome-
dary traversing her ways." But the Septuagint trans-
lators, working on the same text, supplied a different
set of vowels, with the result that their version read,
"Her voice cried traversing her ways."

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

Transliteration is the easier and (from one point of
view) the more accurate method; but all will agree
that it is not the more luminous solution of the task.
The reader who learns that the water jars at Cana
held two or three metretes apiece has not learned
much until someone tells him what a metretes is. X
If there is to be any translation of measures, it should
certainly be into contemporaneous measures^ The
average American gains little information from the
statement of the American Revised Version that the
waterpots held two or three "firkins" apiece. Since a
large part of the significance of the miracle is the
lavish fashion in which the wine was bestowed by
Jesus, it is important that the reader should know
that each jar held twenty to thirty gallons.

In other of these areas it is harder to set up a rule.

90 THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE

Are the modern equivalents really equivalent? Does
the word "church" adequately represent the Pauline
ekklesia? The translator's mastery of English idiom
should ideally be equal to his knowledge of Hebrew or
Greek idiom. That this is ever the case is doubtful,
but it is not always realized that the deficiency exists
as often in knowledge of English as of the original
languages. The translator should see the English
language as objectively as he sees the Greek or
Hebrew; he should be able to estimate accurately the
extent to which his English phrases will produce
effects equivalent to the effects produced by the
language of the original. For the ideal of fidelity in
translation includes the preservation of those quali-
ties of the original which determined its effect upon
its first readers.

PROGRESS IN TRANSLATION

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

TRANSLATION OF THE BIBLE 91

New Testament in our denominational seminaries
and graduate schools, it is nowhere in use today.

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

Although the centuries that followed A.D. 1516 saw
the Greek New Testament studied as well as trans-
lated, they often saw the students bewildered by the
peculiarities of the Greek in which the New Testa-
ment was written. It was early noted that in vocabu-
lary and usage it was a very different language from
that in which the great writers of ancient Greece
produced their masterpieces. The new and strange
words bothered the translators; so, also, did the
"unusual" constructions. A study of the sources of
New Testament Greek printed as late as 1895 con-
tains a somewhat padded list of five hundred and
fifty "biblical" words words found only in the New

92 THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE

Testament or in the Greek Old Testament. These
once-only words, or New-Testament-only words, very
naturally baffled the translators. For, while the high-
school Sophomore believes that the way to find the
meaning of a word is to look in a vocabulary or
lexicon, the more advanced student knows that the
maker of the lexicon has nothing reliable to put in
until he has a reasonable number of occurrences of
the word.

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

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, a
German pastor, Adolf Deissmann, read a publication
of some private papers written in Greek in the Roman
period and dug up by archeologists working in Egypt.
As he read, he was constantly reminded of the
vocabulary and construction of the Greek Bible, both
in the Septuagint version of the Old Testament and

TRANSLATION OF THE BIBLE 93

also in the New Testament. With aroused curiosity
and increased interest, he made a serious study of the
language of these papyri (Egyptian papers) to see
what light would be thrown upon the idiom of the
Greek Bible. The result has revolutionized the lin-
guistic study of both Greek Testaments, for he first
convinced himself and then the world of scholarship /
that the "biblical" Greek was essentially the Greek
in which these nonliterary documents were written.

That Greek was a simple language, the conversa-
tional language of ordinary people. In it the farmer's
tax receipt was written; in it petitions were sent to
Roman officials. Its vocabulary supplied the missing
parallels to the long list of New Testament words,
until the number now without parallel has been
reduced to considerably less than fifty. Even to those
words that were already known, increased clarity and
significance have come from their appearance in these
contemporary documents. The New Testament ex-
hortation to be reconciled to God gains meaning for
the student when he hears a dissolute youth away
from home implore his mother in a letter, "Be rec- >
onciled to me!"

The illumination cast by the study of these docu-
ments upon the problems of New Testament grammar
has been as helpful as that shed on the meaning of
words. The anomalies, the "exceptions" to classical
rules, have become regular in our increased knowledge
of the Greek of the New Testament period. Many a
construction which bafHed the student in the days
before Deissmann's discovery now became normal

94 THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE

and luminous. In view of all this it is not strange that
grammars and lexicons of the Greek New Testament
have been remade in a flood of new editions since
1900.

All this had tremendous significance for the trans-
lation of the New Testament and, indirectly, for that
of the Old Testament too. For the first time scholars
knew in what kind of language the original New
Testament was written. Now it was possible to
translate it into an English approximately equivalent
in cultural level to the language of the original.
Moreover, the translator now knew the meaning of
the original much more clearly than his predecessors
had done. The result has been a flood of modern-
speech translations, which render the New Testa-
ment in English of a nonliterary level analogous to
that of the Greek original.

The vast majority of these are new translations,
not revisions of older translations. Their advance
upon earlier translations was made possible by an
increase in linguistic knowledge not by an increase
in the accuracy of the Greek and Hebrew texts such
as called forth the revised versions of 1881 and 1901.
Their excellencies are greater clarity of language,
more contemporary language, and a more accurate
representation of the language of the original. To
compare these translations at least in the New
Testament with the stately flow of the Tudor trans-
lations, as though these more recent translators were
striving to match that diction, is a serious error. They
must be measured against the original. That many

TRANSLATION OF THE BIBLE 95

devout persons would today prefer that the New
Testament should have been written in a literary
Greek cannot alter the fact that it was not. Those
whose primary demand upon a version is fidelity will
welcome these attempts to take the English reader
back into the very quality of the original language.
This is not to argue that such translations as those
of Goodspeed and Moffatt are the final word in
English versions of the New Testament, or that
Moffatt or the makers of the "American Translation"
of the Old Testament have translated the Hebrew
Scriptures for the last time. On the contrary, it is to
be hoped that within fifty years all these translations
will either be remade or vanish, so that the path lead-
ing to the making of contemporary translations for
our children's generation may be free from the ob-
stacles raised by emotional attachments to these
present versions.

BIBLIOGRAPHY ON TRANSLATION

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

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

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

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

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

96 THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE

GOODSPEED, E. J. The Making of the English New Testament.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1925.

A history of the making of English versions of the New Testament
from 1525 to 1925.

(ed.). The Translators to the Reader: Preface to the King

James Version of 1611 A.D. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1935.

The King James translators here state their own opinion of the King
James Version.

PRICE, I. M. The Ancestry of Our English Bible (gth ed.). New
York: Harper & Bros., 1934.
Especially chapters xix-xxvi. Good Bibliography.

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

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

MILLIGAN, G. A. Here and There among the Papyri. London:
Hodder & Stoughton, 1922.

A readable manual on the nature and content of the papyri in rela-
tion to New Testament studies.

TRANSLATIONS 1

The American Revised Version or American Standard Version.
The title-page reads: The Holy Bible Containing the Old and
New Testaments Translated Out of the Original Tongues , Being
the Version Set Forth A.D. 1611, Compared with the Most
Ancient Authorities and Revised A.D. 1881-1885, Newly
Edited by the American Revision Committee A.D. igoi: Stand-
ard Edition. New York: Thomas Nelson 82 Sons, 1901.

This is closer to the Greek text of Westcott and Hort (and the other
modern critical editions) than was the English revision of 1881. It is more
modern and, consequently, clearer in diction than the English Revised
Version. It is accepted in America as the best of the "standard" versions.
Yet it remains essentially a revision of the King James Version of 1611;
it is not a new translation.

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

TRANSLATION OF THE BIBLE 97

MOFFATT, JAMES. The Bible: A New Translation. New York:
Harper & Bros.

The New Testament was first translated in 1913 from the Greek text
of von Soden (see p. 86); the Old Testament in 1925. In some areas
Mr. Moffatt has edited as well as translated; e.g., in rearranging the con-
tents of the Fourth Gospel to suit his theory of the original order.

SMITH, J. M. P., AND GOODSPEED, EDGAR J. (eds.). The Bible:
An American Translation. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
The New Testament was translated from the Westcott and Hort text

by Mr. Goodspeed in 1923; the Old Testament was translated by A. R.

Gordon, T. J. Meek, J. M. Powis Smith, and Leroy Waterman (ed. by

J. M. P. Smith) in 1927.

WEYMOUTH, R. F. The New Testament in Modern Speech (ed.

and rev. by E. HAMPDEN COOK, M.A.). Boston: Pilgrim

Press.

This was first published in 1903, from a Greek text very similar to
that of Westcott and Hort.

The Twentieth Century New Testament: A Translation into Modern
English Made from the Original Greek (Westcott and Hart's
Text} by a Company of About Twenty Scholars Representing
the Various Sections of the Christian Church. New York:
Revell.

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

FENTON, FERRAR. The Holy Bible in Modern English. London:
Oxford University Press.

In this translation the New Testament was completed in 1895; the
Bible in 1900. No statement is given as to texts used other than that the
translation was made from the original Hebrew, Chaldee, and Greek.

The Holy Scriptures according to the Massoretic Text: A New
Translation. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of
America, 1917.
A scholarly and stimulating version of the Old Testament.

TRANSLATORS' TOOLS
TEXTS

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

98 THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE

GRAMMARS
0) FOR THE BEGINNER

MOULTON, J. H. An Introduction to the Study of New Testament
Greek (4th ed.). London: Epworth Press (J. A. Sharp), 1926.

With this is bound "A First Reader in New Testament Greek."
The best of the introductions.

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

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

. Introductory Hebrew Method and Manual (new rev. ed.

by J. M. Powis SMITH). New York: Scribners, 1921.

DAVIDSON, A. B. An Introductory Hebrew Grammar (23d ed.;
rev. by J. E. MCFADYEN). Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1930.
A good introduction, which does not use the inductive method.

b) FOR THE SPECIALIST

MOULTON, J. H., AND HOWARD, W. F. A Grammar of New Testa-
ment Greek. Edinburgh: T. &T. Clark, 1908 .

Only two volumes have appeared. The first is a general introduction
which rambles over the field in the most stimulating fashion. The second
discusses accidence and word formation. The third will deal with syntax.
Vol. I is the most valuable general discussion of New Testament Greek
in print in English today.

BURTON, E. D. New Testament Moods and Tenses. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1898.

A thorough and stimulating study but pre-Deissmann in methods and
materials. Burton relied more heavily on classical patterns than he would
today; his work was not revised after 1 898 .

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

TRANSLATION OF THE BIBLE 99

RADERMACHER, LUDWIG. Neutestamentliche Grammatik: Das
Griechisch des Neuen Testaments im Zusammenhang mit der
Folks sprache (2d ed.). Tubingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1925.

This is not a formal grammar but a most interesting discussion in
essay form, which integrates New Testament usage in the popular lan-
guage of its period.

MAYSER, E. Grammatik der griechischen Papyri aus der Ptole-
maerzeit mit Einschluss der gleichzeitigen Ostraka und der in
Agypten verfassten Inschriften. Berlin and Leipzig: Walter de
Gruyter & Co., 1923-34.

In two volumes; the second volume in three parts. An invaluable
work for the student of biblical Greek in either Testament.

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

BERGSTRASSER, G. Hebrdische Grammatik mit Benutzung der
von E. Kautzsch bearbeiteten 28. Auflage von Wilhelm Gesenius
hebrdische Grammatik. I. Teil, Leipzig: F. C. W. Vogel,
1918; II. Teil, i. Halfte, Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1926; II. Teil,
2. Halfte, Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1929.

This is the twenty-ninth edition of Gesenius; it is the best of the ad-
vanced grammars but, unfortunately, is not yet complete.

Gesenius' Hebrew Grammar as Edited and Enlarged by E. Kautzsch
(trans, from 25th German ed. by REV. G. W. COLLINS, the
translation revised and adjusted to the 26th ed. by A. E.
COWLEY). Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1898.

Quite old but yet the best advanced grammar in English.

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

LEXICONS

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

ioo THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE

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

KONIG, E. Hebraisches und aramaisches Worterbuch zum Alten
Testament mit Einschaltung und Analyse aller schwer erkenn-
baren Formen Deutung der Eigennamen sowie der massoretischen
Randbemerkungen und einen deutsch-hebraischen Wortregister.
Leipzig: Dieterich, 1931.

ABBOTT-SMITH, G. A Manual Greek Lexicon of the New Testa-
ment (id ed.). New York: Macmillan, 1923.

Does not make full use of new material.

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

Best of New Testament lexicons.

SOUTER, A. A Pocket Lexicon to the Greek New Testament. Ox-
ford: Clarendon Press, 1916.

Fresh, clear definitions; no helps for locating forms.

MOULTON, J. H., AND MiLLiGAN, G. The Vocabulary of the Greek
Testament Illustrated from the Papyri and other Non-literary
Sources. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1914-29.

A most stimulating work, unsurpassed in its field.

PREISIGKE, F. Worterbuch der griechischen Papyrusurkunden.
.... Berlin, 1924-27.

LIDDELL, H. G., AND SCOTT, R. A Greek-English Lexicon: New
Edition, Revised and Augmented by H. S. Jones and R. Mc-
Kenzie. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925 .

This work is made more valuable to the New Testament student than
former editions by inclusion of the nonliterary sources.

PAPYRUS STUDY

MITTEIS, L., AND WILCKEN, U. Grundzuge und Chrestomathie der
Papyruskunde. Leipzig and Berlin: Teubner, 1912.

The classic introduction to this area of study.

TRANSLATION OF THE BIBLE 101

DEISSMANN, A. Light from the Ancient East: The New Testament
Illustrated by Recently Discovered Texts of the Graeco-Roman
World (trans, from 4th German ed. by L. R. M. STRACHAN).
London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1927.

A dramatic and stimulating exposition of the significance of the new
discoveries, valuable illustrations. Not as technical or inclusive in
design as Mitteis and Wilcken.

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

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

GOODSPEED, E. J., AND COLWELL, E. C. A Greek Papyrus Reader
with Vocabulary (ad printing). Chicago: University of Chi-
cago Press, 1936.

Has eighty-one representative texts for class use.

CONCORDANCES

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

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

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

GOODSPEED, E. J. Index patristicus sive clavis patrum apostolico-
rum operum. Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1907.

. Index apologeticus sive clavis Justini martyris operum

aliorymque apologetarum pristinorum. Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1912.

Chapter IV

The Interpretation of the Bible
The Modernizing Method

I

"\HE selection and collection of books and the
making of a careful translation from an accu-
rate text all of this merely paves the way to
the ultimate question, "What does the Bible mean?"
All the minute and tedious studies of language and
manuscripts that enter into the study of any ancient
literature look ahead to the illumination of the con-
tent of that literature; their aim is to make it easier
for the modern reader who does not possess technical
knowledge to understand the message of these books
written long ago in a strange world.

The early Protestant ideal was often so expressed
as to suggest that, if the Bible were placed in the
hands of the layman in a vernacular translation, there
would be no further difficulty. The reader would be
his own interpreter. Several centuries of experience
have indicated that the untrained layman is often
helpless, or too ingenious, as an interpreter of Holy
Writ. There was something dismaying about the
zeal with which he found the Roman pope indicated
by the number "666" in Revelation; and who that

102

INTERPRETATION OF THE BIBLE 103

has seen it can ever forget the rapt expression of the
interpreter who found the explanation of the Beast of
Revelation in the N.R.A. ? X-

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

Generally speaking, there are only two methods of
interpreting the Bible. They are the "modernizing"
method and the "historical" method. Each of these
methods has numerous modifications and forms, but
these two are separated from each other by a gulf that
is so wide that it dwarfs all the minor divisions. The
method which has been called the modernizing meth-
od has its feet firmly planted in the period in which '
the interpreter lives; it finds the Bible's basic meaning
with reference to the "modern" period in which the

io 4 THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE

interpreter is, naturally, most interested. The histori-
cal method, on the other hand, finds the Bible's
basic meaning with reference to the situation in which
the Bible was written.

THE MODERNIZING METHOD DEFINED

The interpreter who uses this method approaches
the Bible with certain answers already in his posses-
sion. His basic assumption is that what was written
by a Hebrew prophet in the eighth century B.C. or by
a Christian missionary in A.D. 50 finds its significance
in the interpreter's day. The forces that Jead to this
emphasis upon the interpreter's own group can be
easily identified and understood. The basis upon
which this type of interpretation rests is the canoniz-
ation of the Scriptures. As soon as any scripture is
recognized as authoritative in the cult, leaders of the
religious group are forced to come to terms with it.
In succeeding generations the appeal to this authority
from the past becomes more difficult. The leaders
with new programs must either repudiate the Bible
and set up some substitute or they must forcefully
interpret the Scriptures into agreement with the new
program and the new needs. One can easily under-
stand that, in spite of the number of laws canonized
in the Pentateuch (613 according to one count),
the changes that came with the centuries would
inevitably produce problems. No matter how exactly
these laws fitted the situations in which they were
produced, there was bound to be some little strain in
applying them to a later situation. Unfortunately,

INTERPRETATION OF THE BIBLE 105

the doctrine that they were God's law grew in rigor of
definition as time passed. A modernizing interpreta- /
tion is an almost inevitable result of the canonization *
of the Scriptures as the full and complete revelation
of God's will.

The simple syllogisms employed by the modern-
izing interpreter are something like this. The will of
God for his people is fully and adequately expressed in *
, Scripture. We are God's people. Therefore, God's
will for us is expressed in the Scriptures. If the inter-
preter is a legalist, he reasons as follows: God's word
contains his divine law for his people; we are his
people; therefore, we will find divine law for our
guidance in the Bible. If he is primarily interested in
the end of the world, he arrives at similar conclusions.
God would not fail to tell his people (us) when the
world was to end; therefore, we can find in the Bible
the date of the end.

This type of interpretation owes most of its worst
features to dogmas about the Bible as the Word of
God. 'Since all Scripture is the Word of God, there can
be no contradictions in it. Since all Scripture is the
Word of God, it can have nothing superfluous in it.
Since Scripture is the Word of God, it can contain
nothing unworthy of God. Each of these dogmas
leads to the perversion and the modernizing of
Scripture.

To take up the last one first it plainly means that
the Bible cannot say anything which the interpreter
regards as unworthy of God. But this can be a sound
rule for interpretation only if the interpreter's ideas

io6 THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE

as to what is worthy of God coincide identically with
all the biblical author's ideas or with God's own
thoughts. Unless the student is willing to make these
assumptions, he should avoid interpretations based
on this dogma. In practice the appeal to this dogma
gives the interpreter license to edit Scripture into
conformity with his own ideas.

The insistence that the Scripture can have nothing
superfluous is another screen for modernizing inter-
pretation. The perversion is justified by a question-
begging argument. Anything that does not apply to
the interpreter's own day is labeled superfluous; there-
fore, it must be made to apply to the interpreter's
times. To the Gentile Christians of the first few
centuries the food laws of the Pentateuch were super-
fluous if taken in their natural meaning. This was
enough to convince almost every one of the early
Christian interpreters of the Old Testament that
these laws were not to be taken in their literal mean-
ing. They must have some Christian meaning, some
modern meaning. Thus Barnabas found that the
proscription of animals that do not chew the cud is
an exhortation to meditation. Moreover, he felt sure
that this was the primary and original intention of
the law.

In the fourteenth chapter of Genesis, the reader is
informed that Abraham defeated the invading kings
with an army composed of three hundred and eight-
een men born in his own house. Later interpreters of
this passage, both Jewish and Christian, found little
religious inspiration in this statement of fact. They,

INTERPRETATION OF THE BIBLE 107

therefore, searched for some deeper meaning. The
number "318" suggested that a modern meaning
might be found by the use of numerology. Among
both Hebrews and Greeks, letters were used as num-
bers; that is, all letters had numerical value. From
this fact it was easy to find significance in numbers.
A Jewish interpreter of this passage, seeking dili-
gently for some significance in it, noticed that
Abraham had a servant born in his household named
Eliezer (Gen. 15:2-3). The letters in the word
Eliezer when added up as numbers total 318. This
shows that Abraham's army consisted of Eliezer.

The Christian author of the Letter of Barnabas
felt sure that the Old Testament was written for the
sake of the Christians. But what did the Christians
care about how many servants Abraham had who
were born in his own household? They were not
interested in the number of his servants. Yet this
statement must mean something to them otherwise
this line of Scripture would be superfluous, and the
Word of God could not contain anything superfluous.
By the ingenious application of a little numerology,
Barnabas was able to find in this verse a prediction
that Jesus was to be crucified.

For it says, "And Abraham circumcised from his household
eighteen men and three hundred." What then was the knowledge
that was given him ? Observe that he first says the eighteen, and
after a pause the three hundred. The eighteen is I, ten, and H,
eight; you have Jesus [IHSOUS]. And because the cross was to
have grace in the Tau [Tau, T, equals 300], he says also the three
hundred. He indicates, then, Jesus in the two letters; and in the
one, the cross. He who freely planted his teaching within us

io8 THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE

knows this. No one has learned a more excellent lesson from me,
but I know that you are worthy [ix. 8-9].

An implication of this modernizing method of
interpretation is that the first readers of the Scripture
could not understand it. When the Scofield Reference
Bible says that the mention of Rosh, Meshek, and
Tubal in Ezek. 38 : 23 means Russia, Moscow, and
Tbolsk, "in the opinion of all interpreters [!]," it asks
us to believe that the first readers of Ezekiel (and "
their successors for a thousand years) could not
possibly understand what Ezekiel was talking about.
One wonders why God was so concerned about the
generation which was to read the Scofield Bible and
so little concerned with Ezekiel's contemporaries.
Early Christian interpreters did not shrink from the
implications of this type of exegesis. Justin Martyr
denied that the literal meaning of the Old Testament
had any significance; Barnabas indignantly denies
that the Old Testament is the joint possession of Jew
and Christian. He insists that it belongs to the
Christians alone. Since it was written for the Chris-
tians, the Jews naturally could not understand it.

TYPES OF MODERNIZING INTERPRETATION

A rich vocabulary has grown up around the effort
to read modern meanings into the Scriptures. Ex-
ponents of this school of interpretation speak of the '
use of allegory, typology, numerology, tropology, and
the anagogical sense. The distinction between these
various systems, or methods, or senses, is not always
clear to the naked eye.

INTERPRETATION OF THE BIBLE 109

As an example of the lack of definite meaning in
these sonorous terms, consider the distinctions made
between the allegorical meaning, the tropological
meaning, and the anagogical meaning of Scripture,
as a contemporary manual on the study of the Bible
presents them. By way of preface, we should note
that the author insists on the existence of a literal
meaning in addition to these "spiritual" or "mysti-
cal" meanings, s

The allegorical meaning is the reference of the text
to a doctrine of the faith, especially to Christ and the
church. If the text "admits or requires" this refer-
ence, then it possesses an allegorical meaning; e.g.,
Matt. 12:39 shows that the experience of Jonah with
the sea monster refers allegorically to the resurrection
of Jesus. /

The tropological meaning of a passage is the
application of a passage to moral life. In Gen. 15:6
we read that Abraham believed, and it was reckoned
to him for righteousness. In Rom. 4:23 Paul finds
here the meaning that mankind should believe in
Christ. /

The anagogical meaning of a passage is the applica-
tion that it allows to the future life. The familiar
story of Noah and the ark in Genesis may be applied
also to the faithful who find salvation in the church
(cf. Matt. 24:37; I Pet. 3:20).

The reader can easily see that there is no distinction
of method here; these labels are used for one method '
with the results classified according to their subject
matter. Even this classification does not seem very

no THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE

objective to judge from the author's own examples;
for the definition of the first class would include the
examples of the second and third classes. Allegory,
tropology, typology, anagoge, and their brood are
basically one type of interpretation. On the assump-
tion that there is a deeper meaning in Scripture than
has been expressed by the inspired writer, these inter-
preters proceed in any devious way, on the basis of
hints which first win their significance in the inter-
preters' own eyes.

One of the few "methods" of modernizing the
meaning of Scripture which can be recognized as a
distinct pattern of interpretation is numerology.
This rests on the numerical values of the Hebrew and
Greek alphabets and makes much of the fact that it
works on the original languages of the Bible. We
have already noted a glowing example of its use in
antiquity in Barnabas' explanation of the number
"318."

Not only does numerology make it possible to find
a modern meaning in a dark passage but it also
demonstrates that the Scripture is the Word of God.
Three and seven are good numbers. God made the
natural world with its seven planets, seven tones in
the scale, seven colors, etc.; the Bible is full of sevens;
therefore, God wrote the Bible. The number of nouns
in certain verses of Genesis, chapter i, is a multiple of
seven. If nouns don't work out, adjectives, adverbs,
or prepositions will. It is here that the subjective
element enters. The interpreter selects the units to be

INTERPRETATION OF THE BIBLE in

counted or the words to be translated into their
numerical equivalents.

The same methods will prove the inspiration of any
document. I applied it some years ago to the letter of
Ignatius to the Ephesians and unearthed an enormous
mass of threes and sevens. A hurried count of the
first paragraph of the popular novel Gone with the
Wind showed that the first sentence had twenty-one
words, three y's; the second, twenty-eight words or
four 7's. Add these together and you get seven 7's.
The third sentence has three nouns. The first para-
graph has twenty-eight (4X7) nouns, seven proper
adjectives, and nine (3X3) adverbs. Will some
numerologist claim inspiration for this book? No,
he will not; for numerology proves the divine origin
of the Bible only to those who knew it in advance.

It might be possible to separate typology, tro-
pology, etc., from allegory if we were using these
terms for the first time today. But they have a long
history a history in which they are often confused
with one another. At first, the interpreters spoke of
only one meaning above the literal meaning. This
was usually referred to as a "spiritual" meaning.
When skilful exegetes like Origen found three mean-
ings, they were driven to poetry for labels and
definitions of the extra meanings. Augustine found
four meanings in a passage, and the later ages pro-
duced as many as seven meanings from one passage,
although the classification is stretched somewhat thin
at spots.

In Paul's interpretation of Abraham's family life

ii2 THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE

we have a clear example of a confusion in terminology
which began early and still persists. In Gal. 4:21-31
he presents Sarah and Hagar, Isaac and Ishmael, as
types of Judaism and Christianity. The reader's nat-
ural inclination is to classify this as typological inter-
pretation; but in 4:24 Paul says that these Scripture
texts are allegorical. Of all the titles used for these
modernizing methods, allegorical is the most fitting.
Its basic significance of saying one thing and meaning
another is at home with these interpreters.

MODERNIZED BIBLES

A sounder classification of the modernizing schools
of interpretation can be based on the messages they
read into the Scriptures. Each of these interpreters
brings a certain message to the Bible and reads it into
the sacred text by means of his system of interpreta-
tion. But not all of them bring the same message to
the Book.

The Jewish rabbis, for example, in the days after
their national glory had departed, brought to the
Torah a glorification of the scribe and his work
which the sacred book had not known before. The
extent to which this was done has often been illus-
trated, but no more forceful example can be found
than the Targum on the Song of Deborah. This is
not designed primarily as interpretation but rather as
translation; however, we have seen in the chapter
on translation that the two are not always as distinct
as they should be. Judg. 5 : 8-9 is a strong statement
of the lack of soldiers in Israel; the Targum expands

INTERPRETATION OF THE BIBLE 113

this into a wordy praise of the scribes who interpreted
the Law accurately and patiently in the days of crisis.

The Christians of the first few centuries brought
to the Old Testament a belief that Jesus was the
Messiah; this belief they read into almost every line of
the Jewish Scriptures. Two of the great classics in
this "interpretation" are The Letter of Barnabas and
Justin's Dialogue with Trypho.

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

Justin finds the cross (Dialogue Ixxxvi) in the "tree"
of life planted in Paradise, in the "rod" with which
Moses was sent to free Israel, in the "tree" cast into
the bitter waters of Mara, in the "rods" used by Jacob
to win his uncle's sheep, in the "staff" with which, as
Jacob "boasted," he had crossed the Jordan, in the
"ladder" of Jacob's dream upon which he saw God
not the Father "fixed," in the "rod" of Aaron which
blossomed, in the "shoot" from the root of Jesse
which Isaiah predicted, in David's portrayal of the
righteous man as a "tree" planted by the water

u 4 THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE

courses, in David's claim that the righteous would
flourish like a palm "tree," in the "tree" from which
God appeared to Abraham the oak of Mambre in
the seventy willow "trees" which the people found
when they crossed over Jordan, in the comforting
"rod" and "staff" of the twenty-third Psalm, in the
"tree" [ax handle] which Elisha threw into the
Jordan to recover the lost ax head, in the "staff"
which Judah gave Tamar as a pledge for the payment
of her prostitution.

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

Other times, other Bibles. Once the Christian-
messianic nature of the Old Testament was accepted
by all but the Jews, the church brought different
messages to be read into the Bible. For example,
Clement of Alexandria was worried by the effemi-
nacy of some of the Christians of his day. One of

INTERPRETATION OF THE BIBLE 115

their perverted habits was that of shaving. Imagine
his horror when he found large numbers of Christian
men shaving off not merely part of the beard (he
could have stood that) but every last whisker!
Against this contemporary custom, Clement invoked
the authority of the Scriptures. He couldn't find a
law saying, "Do not shave"; but in the one hundred
and thirty-third Psalm brotherly unity is likened to
"the precious ointment upon the head, that ran down
upon the beard, even Aaron's beard: that went down
to the skirts of his garments." David wrote this so
that Clement's contemporaries might not shave.

Each generation often each individual interpreter
brought a new message to the Bible and found it
there. In the days of the Reformation, it was Luther-
anism, or Calvinism, or Arminianism. German inter-
preters wrote learned works showing that Adam was
a Lutheran. Frenchmen proved that not only Paul
but also Jesus and Abraham were faithful to Calvin's
Institutes.

In this regard the Roman Catholic church differs
from the others in the degree of explicitness with
which it directs the interpreter to find in the Scrip-
tures the teaching of the church. Its logic is simple.
Since these books have a divine origin, written with
the aid of the Holy Spirit, they can be understood
only with the same divine assistance. But the Holy
Spirit cannot be certainly found anywhere except in
the church; therefore, the interpreter must first find
out the opinion of the church and be guided by it.

The extent of ecclesiastical control over inter-

n6 THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE

pretation is plainly stated in an encyclical of Pope
Leo XIII, "Providentissimus Deus" (November 18,
1 893) . After insisting that it is the place of the church
to judge the true sense of Scripture, he reassures the
interpreter as to the liberty with which he may work.
The church in no way hinders the study of the Bible
except as it prevents error, he says; for the individual
scholar can exercise his liberty in two ways. First,
his study of passages not yet officially interpreted by
the church may help the church to decide what the
correct interpretation is. Second, his work on pas-
sages whose meaning has been defined by the church
may expound that meaning more clearly or defend it
better from hostile attack. The primary object of the
Catholic interpreter's work in those areas where the
judgment of the church has already been pronounced
"is to interpret those passages in that identical sense,
and to prove by all the resources of learning that
sound laws of interpretation admit of no other mean-
ing." The reader might assume that the Catholic
interpreter actually is free in those areas where judg-
ment has not yet been pronounced, but the encyclical
goes on to point out that legitimate interpretation
is bound to produce meanings in harmony with
Catholic doctrines. Any interpretation that finds
contradictions in the Scriptures or finds the Scriptures
contradicting the teaching of the Roman Catholic
church is either "foolish or false."

The justification of ecclesiastical control of inter-

. pretation, which is practiced by Protestant churches

as well as by the Roman Catholic, is that it prevents

INTERPRETATION OF THE BIBLE 117

error. The wild luxuriance of interpretations made
possible by the modernizing method have inevitably
embarrassed all cults which rest upon the authority
of Scripture. The presence of a large number of con-
flicting interpretations of the same passage always
produces a strain in those areas where orthodoxy is
prized. The judgment may be hazarded that uni-
formity was one of the desires of those who in various
times and places have set up cult control of inter-
pretation.

Examples of this painful extravagance in inter-
pretation can be found in the meanings found by
Christian scholars in Rev. 13 : 18 ". ... for it is the
number of a man, and his number is six hundred and
sixty-six." Irenaeus claimed that the number was
Noah's age at the time of the flood plus the height
and breadth of the image set up by Nebuchadnezzar;
he identified "the man" as Evanthus, or Lateinos, or
Titan. For Hippolytus it meant "I deny (my cruci-
fied Savior)." To more modern interpreters, it has
meant Mohammed, Pope Benedict IX, any pope,
Martin Luther, Lenin, the N.R.A., etc. Such a rank
growth of definition creates stress within the cult.

This pressure was felt in Judaism in the days of the
rabbis. Out of it arose the dictum that no interpreta-
tion could be accepted which went against the
Tradition, the oral interpretation. This made the
Tradition rather than the Scripture the norm. Quite
analogous is the Roman Catholic position quoted
above although it must be remembered that Juda-
ism has no monarchical authoritative hierarchy.

n8 THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE

The Protestant churches have followed similar prac- .
tices although to a less degree. The primitive freedom /
of the individual interpreter was soon curbed by the /
formulation of authoritative confessions of faith, or
articles of religion. The doctrines championed in
these confessions are defined as an accurate state-
ment of the meaning of Scripture. This promulgation
limited the freedom of the interpreter who desired to
be orthodox, for it prescribed certain interpretations
as the correct interpretations and anathematized
others. Thus both British and Continental scholars
of the Reformation period in their interpretation of
the Apocalypse abstained from the millennial views of
earlier scholars whose work they accepted, for the
Augsburg and Helvetic confessions had branded
Chili asm as a heresy.

The situation of the layman whose Scripture is
modernized for him by the church lacks the confusion
of freer believers. He often welcomes the increased
surety even when it is purchased at the cost of
freedom. The value to the institutionalists in the
cult of admitting only those modernizations which
they favor is unquestioned. But it is the belief of
modern scholarship that there is a better way. The
history of the Christian world has failed to convince
most students of history that errors can be avoided in
any field of study by the exercise of ecclesiastical
authority. Progress in modern learning has followed
not preceded the emancipation of scholarship
from ecclesiastical shackles.

INTERPRETATION OF THE BIBLE 119
BIBLIOGRAPHY ON INTERPRETATION

GENERAL

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

CHARLES, R. H. Studies in the Apocalypse. Edinburgh: T. & T.
Clark, 1913.

Chapters i and ii give a history of the interpretation of the Book of
Revelation.

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

EAKIN, FRANK. Revaluing Scripture. New York: Macmillan,
1928.

This work offers a revaluation of the scriptures of all religions as a
basis for revaluing the Jewish-Christian Scriptures.

FULLERTON, K. Prophecy and Authority: A Study in the History
of the Doctrine and Interpretation of Scripture. New York:
Macmillan, 1919.

A very readable and stimulating treatment of the problems of inter-
pretation.

GILBERT, G. H. Interpretation of the Bible: A Short History.
New York: Macmillan, 1908.
The best chronological treatment of interpretation in English today.

. Jesus and His Bible. New York: Macmillan, 1926.

A careful investigation of the methods of interpretation employed by
Jesus, with an Appendix on the use of the Old Testament in Paul and
Hebrews.

PEAKE, A. S. The Nature of Scripture. London: Hodder &
Stoughton, 1922.

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

120 THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE

ROBINSON, T. H. "The Methods of Higher Criticism," in The
People and the Book, ed. A. S. PEAKE. Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1925.
Exposition of these methods as applied to parts of the Old Testament.

SEISENBERGER, MICHAEL. Practical Handbook for the Study of
the Bible (new rev. ed.). New York: Joseph F. Wagner, Inc.,
1925.

A Roman Catholic manual published with the imprimatur. It gives
English translations of the important papal decrees relating to Scripture
(pp. 159-86). Interpretation is discussed in pages 449 ff.

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

Stimulating and valuable discussion of interpretation of the Old Testa-
ment.

TRATTNER, E. R. Unravelling the Book of Books: being the Story
of How the Puzzles of the Bible Were Solved and Its Documents
Unravelled. New York: Scribner's, 1929.

An interesting and readable approach to the story of biblical criti-
cism.

ADVANCED

KITTEL, G. et al. Theologisches Worterbuch zum Neuen Testa-
ment. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1932 .

Technical studies of important words.

LOOFS, F. Leitfaden zum Studien der Dogmengeschichte (4th ed.).
Halle a.S., Niemeyer, 1906.

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

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

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

Chapter V

The Interpretation of the Bible

The Historical Method

Literary Criticism

1

"AHE basic task of interpretation, as the ad- /
vocates of this method conceive it, is to
establish the literal meaning of the sacred

text for its first readers. In their insistence on the
primacy of the literal meaning they do not deny or
slight the poetic and figurative elements in the Scrip-
ture but insist that these elements be identified and
interpreted according to the literary standards of the
age in which they were produced. They do not deny
that the Scriptures can have other values today than
they have had in the past, but they see the task of
defining these modern values as one transcending the
field of historical criticism. The task which they as-
sign to the interpreters of the Bible as their own
peculiar task in a special discipline is the determina-
tion of the meaning of these documents in the time of
their origin.

This type of interpretation is essentially an ap-
plication of the methods of historical study. It
strives to be as objective as historical study can be.

121

122 THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE

It unhesitatingly submits its results to the most
searching scholarly examination. It accepts correc-
tion and change, for it is supported by no dogma of
infallibility. Unlike the modernizing methods de-
scribed above, it brings no answers to the investiga-
tion. It comes with questions and with an eagerness
to find the historical evidence which will establish the
correct the intended meaning of a passage. It is
full of hope, for it looks back upon a history of
glorious achievement, but it promises no rush de-
liveries of adequate interpretations

NO DISTINCTIVE TECHNIQUES

But, though it brings no ready-made answers to the
study of the Christian literature, it does bring certain
convictions as to method and procedure and the sig-
nificance of evidence convictions which it shares
with those who work in other areas of historical in-
vestigation. It assumes that Christianity is a move-
ment like other religious movements; it believes that
Christianity like all other religions inherited much,
borrowed freely, and was constantly changing its
primitive elements and as constantly adapting what
it adopted. When it finds two very similar phe-
nomena appearing in the same area at approximately
the same time, it assumes the existence of some sig-
nificant relationship between them. It has learned
that hostility between religions does not exclude the
influence of one upon the other.

It is convinced that the methods and techniques
applied to the solution of problems in the Christian

INTERPRETATION OF THE BIBLE 123

literature must not differ from the methods used in
the study of similar problems in other literatures.
Take, for example, the problems involved in the
miracle stories of the Bible. If the student of the
Bible appeals to the general reliability of the biblical
writers as guaranty of the accuracy of these stories,
he must accept miracle stories from the pagan cults
which are related by reliable writers. If the testimony
of eyewitnesses is enough to establish the validity of
these incidents, pagan miracles attested by eye-
witnesses must be accepted also.

The position of the conservative Protestant in re-
gard to miracles is singularly indefensible in its limita-
tion of miracles to those recorded in the Scriptures. N
This would bring the age of miracles to an end about
the middle of the second century, but the Christian
writers of the second, third, and fourth centuries are
entirely unaware that the age of miracles is over and
continue to report the miraculous achievements of
Christians until modern times changed the basic
world-view.

The Roman historian Tacitus was a writer of more
than average dependability and was decidedly against
superstition and extravagance. It is significant, there-
fore, to find him accepting as fact a story of a double
miraculous healing. When Vespasian was in Alex-
andria, a blind man and a cripple appealed to the
emperor for healing. The sufferers were advised to
make this supplication by Egyptian deities. Ves-
pasian at first demurred but finally yielded to their
importunity and healed them by applying his saliva

i2 4 THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE

to the eyes of the blind and stepping on the ankle
of the cripple. Tacitus assures his readers that he re-
ceived the story from eyewitnesses after the dynasty
of Vespasian had left the throne, when flattery would
not create such stories.

The interpreter of Scripture who uses the historical
method does not permit himself to use any means of
explaining the healing of the blind man at the pool
of Bethesda which he cannot use with equal effect
to explain the healing by Vespasian in Alexandria.

For the sake of emphasis and clarity, let it be said
again that there are no methods of biblical study
which are not at the same time methods of studying
other religious literatures. This is not to deny that
a student may need some particular tool in the study
of the Christian Bible which he will not need else-
where (e.g., a knowledge of biblical Aramaic) but
only to insist on the general agreement in matters
of importance for methodology between biblical
scholarship and the scholarship of the humanities in
general. The methods employed in the study of Plato
and Plutarch, of Chaucer and Corneille, are also em-
ployed in the study of Isaiah and Paul.

We have seen in a preceding chapter the essential
oneness in methods of textual criticism, whether the
text studied be that of Chaucer, the Roman de la
rose, or the Bible. In a generation now gone, stu-
dents of textual criticism in the humanities were
under great obligation to two biblical scholars, West-
cott and Hort. Today the debt is paid by the work
of such eminent scholars as Hunt, Bedier, and Col-

INTERPRETATION OF THE BIBLE 125

lomp. The methods worked out by Hunt in the study
of Greek papyrus texts of the classical authors and by
Bedier in the study of the Lai de T ombre are being
applied all too tardily to the study of the biblical
text.

The plea for some special endowment as a pre-
requisite for biblical study seems rather out of place
in such areas as textual criticism and the study of
biblical languages. It is obvious even to the most
dogmatic that here an ounce of intelligence is worth
a pound of piety. But in the field of interpretation
there are many to echo the claim advanced by
Roman Catholicism: The Bible is an inspired book;
it can be understood only with the help of inspiration.
The Protestant often makes the same claim with
reference to the inspiration of the individual rather
than of the church.

The student who uses the historical method of in-
terpreting the Bible relies upon no supernatural aids.
What can be known by the conscientious and well-
trained student is his objective. This does not in-
clude as he will gladly admit the proof or disproof
of dogmas whose authority inheres in their promulga-
tion by some cult. Yet, however much his apprecia-
tion of the message of some inspired author may be
increased by the fact that he has had an analogous
religious experience, he refuses to impugn the reliabil-
ity of human intelligence by assenting to the popular
fallacy that the messages of the sainted authors can
be understood only by those who have duplicated
their experiences.

126 THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE

In so far, therefore, as he is a historian, he resolute-
ly rejects all special treatment, all concessions to the
cloth; he refuses to use a technique that will not work
elsewhere. Yet the number of techniques he calls
upon is large. All the resources of literary and his-
torical criticism, the results of philological study, the
political, economic, social, and religious background
of the books, and the archeologist's spade all these
make their contribution to the understanding of the
Scriptures. The techniques which are most familiar
to the student in Protestant schools are those which
are at home in the field of literary criticism.

LITERARY CRITICISM DEFINED

The tasks faced by the student of the biblical
literature have been most memorably grouped in a
series of six questions: Who? When? Where? To
Whom? Why? What? Authorship, date, place of
composition, audience, purpose, and content these
make convenient subdivisions of that literary criti-
cism of. the Bible which is frequently referred to
under the technical term of "introduction," or, more
fully, "introduction to the literature of the Bible."
Some of these questions move out of the purely liter-
ary realm into that of history, but they have usually
been treated with an emphasis on the more purely
literary questions.

For example, the question "What?" brings the
content or message of the book into investigation.
But, when we use it under the heading of literary
criticism, we turn most naturally to the literary

INTERPRETATION OF THE BIBLE 127

features of its content. Such purely literary questions
as, "Is this book poetry or prose?" raise issues of
great importance for the interpreter. Hebrew poetry
had rules of composition and structure which differ
widely from those used in English versification. An
ignorance of the nature of parallelism in the poetic
part of the Hebrew Scriptures often has disastrous
results in the final interpretation of the passage.

One of the common types of Hebrew parallelism
is called "synonymous parallelism"; in it the second
line repeats the content and thought of the first with
no more than minor modification. In Zech. 9:9, the
prophet exhorts Jerusalem in language that is full of
this parallelism: "Rejoice greatly, O daughter of
Zion; shout, O daughter of Jerusalem: behold, your
king comes unto you; he is just, and having salvation;
lowly, and riding upon an ass, even upon a colt, the
foal of an ass." It is plain that the daughter of Zion
is identical with the daughter of Jerusalem and that
the colt and the ass are one. But, to the author of Mat-
thew's Gospel, the double mention of the animal im-
plied two animals, and he interprets the fulfilment
of the passage with that in mind. Matt. 21:6-7,
"And the disciples went and did even as Jesus ap-
pointed them, and brought the ass, and the colt, and
put on them their garments; and he sat upon them"
An ignorance of a literary form led Matthew to ask
us to picture Jesus as riding two animals into Jeru-
salem.

It needs no such example to persuade the seasoned
student of any literature that a knowledge of literary

128 THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE

forms and their significance is a prerequisite to ade-
quate interpretation. An awareness of the variation
in structure between the Shakespearean and the
Italian form of the sonnet is essential to the interpre-
tation of an anthology of English sonnets. It is equal-
ly true that the interpreter of apocalypses will be
amply rewarded for the time spent in mastering the
literary pattern of apocalyptic composition.

a) DATING OF DOCUMENTS

Less obviously literary, but equally a problem
faced in the study of any piece of literature, is the
problem of date. There is no difference in methods
employed in the task of establishing the date of the
Gospel of John and the date of- the Discourses of
Epictetus. In both cases the scholar will assemble
all the available evidence, evaluate it as carefully as
possible, and thus reach his conclusion as to the date
of composition.

For convenience of handling, the evidence is usually
assembled under two categories external and inter-
nal. These terms refer to the document itself; that
evidence which comes from outside the document is
called "external" evidence. Invaluable evidence as to
the date of a book is found in quotations from it.
The latest possible date for its composition is fixed
by the first clear quotation from it in another writing
which can be dated. For this evidence to be certain,
however, the quotation must be unmistakable, and
the date of the document in which the quotation oc-
curs must be established beyond question. Further

INTERPRETATION OF THE BIBLE 129

external evidence for date is to be found in explicit
tradition as to the time of composition of a document.
There is not much early tradition of this sort as to
the date of the books of the Bible. The Christian
tradition begins to specify dates for its documents no
earlier than the last two decades of the second cen-
tury.

It is only in the last few years that manuscripts of
the Bible have been found which are themselves as-
signed to dates close enough to the origin of the sacred
literature to be of value in the determination of date.
In 1935 C. H. Roberts published a fragment of one
page of the Fourth Gospel, which he assigned on the
basis of its handwriting to the first half of the second
century. Several New Testament scholars welcomed
the publication of this fragment as evidence that the
Fourth Gospel was written before A.D. 100 or at the
very latest soon after 100. This conclusion rests on
twp assumptions; and, since they are assumptions
that are frequently made, they deserve criticism.

The first of these assumptions is that the dating of
a papyrus document written in a literary hand is ac-
curate within a score of years. One New Testament
handbook says of the new John fragment that it was
written "about A.D. 130" and then proceeds to argue
from the year 130 with as much finality as though
this manuscript were actually dated in A.D. 130. In
the present state of our knowledge on the paleog-
raphy of the Greek papyrus book hand, it seems
precarious to assign any such document to a period
narrower than a century in extent. No undated

130 THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE

manuscript of a book can establish the existence of
the book before or after a definite year.

This fragment of John's Gospel was found in
Middle Egypt. If it was written "about A. 0.130,"
the Gospel itself must have been written before 100
if it took the Gospel five years to win prominence in
Ephesus and twenty-five years or more to reach
Middle Egypt. This argument from the length of
time it would take a Christian book to circulate after
publication is commonly employed, although there
are no objective data available to modern scholarship
which would make it possible for us to ascertain the
facts. So far as the speed of communication is con-
cerned, no one assumes that it would take a year to
move a book from Ephesus to Middle Egypt, or from
Alexandria to Rome. Christian travelers made these
distances in less than a year, and it is certainly con-
ceivable that they could have carried a book with
them. As to the length of time it took any particular
book to become known, we have no data. Those
who have observed the spread of books in modern
times might argue that a book is most widely known
right after publication, but arguments from analogy
are dangerous; the safest course for the student is to
reject all arguments as to date that rest on an appeal
to the length of the period essential to the winning
of an audience for a book.

The internal evidence for the date" of a document
may include a definite reference to a date. The men-
tion of the fifteenth year of Tiberius Caesar in Luke
3 : i demands a date later than that for the composi-

INTERPRETATION OF THE BIBLE 131

tion of that Gospel. Isaiah's first vision (6:1 ff.) 5 his
"call to preach," opens with the invaluable date line,
"In the year that King Uzziah died." Even more
valuable are casual or incidental references to events,
persons, or things that can be dated. A medieval
document that casually referred to a trip in an air-
plane could not be medieval no matter how explicitly
it was dated. Chapter 14 of the Book of Genesis tells
of Abraham pursuing Lot's captors far into the north
country "as far as Dan"; this shows that this story
in Genesis was written after the events described in
chapter 18 of Judges, where the tribe of Dan moves
into the north for the first time.

The identification of sources that are dated or
datable sometimes helps in the dating of a document.
The identification of an author whose date is known
leads directly to the dating of the composition that
came from his pen. The place of the literary work in
the history of thought, culture, and social movements
is another indication of date. A Jewish document
which assumes the control of Palestine by Gentiles
cannot be placed in the reign of David. A Christian
book which on every occasion prefixes homoousion to
the word Christ cannot come from the first century of
Christian history. Christian documents which as-
sume the authority of ecumenical councils, or the
papacy, or reflect a highly developed monasticism,
etc., are not earlier than A.D. 250. The caliber of the
language itself will often assist in the dating of a
document. The only books in the Hebrew canon
which use Aramaic extensively are assigned late

132 THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE

dates on the basis of both linguistic and non-linguistic
evidence. Old Testament scholars refer to the use of
late Hebrew as an indication of the date of various
passages. No document written in a form of Greek
which had lost the infinitive and the optative and
possessed an indeclinable participle would ever be
accepted as an original composition of the first Chris-
tian centuries.

fr) AUTHORSHIP OF DOCUMENTS

Another example of the employment of the tech-
niques of literary criticism can be drawn from the
study of authorship. The methods employed by stu-
dents of the Bible are identical with those employed by
students of English literature in the evaluation of the
claim that Bacon wrote Shakespeare. The external
evidence here is of two kinds: the tradition as to au-
thorship and the light thrown on the authorship by
the way in which the document was received by its
public. Internal evidence of the most value is derived
from a study of the vocabulary and style of the docu-
ment with reference to other works by the author and
the comparison of ideas and content.

The most clear-cut decision of a dispute as to the
authorship of a biblical book has been won in the case
of the Letter to the Hebrews. The question at issue
was, "Did the Apostle Paul write this book?" The
answer established by several generations of careful
scholarly study is an emphatic negative. For pur-
poses of illustration, the arguments and evidence that
led to the acceptance pf this answer are briefly sum-
marized here.

INTERPRETATION OF THE BIBLE 133

The external evidence for the Pauline authorship of
Hebrews is far from unanimous; in fact, it divides
quite cleanly on geographical lines. In the East, as
early as Clement of Alexandria, the letter is referred
to as Paul's work; although some later leaders sup-
port no more than a mediated Pauline authorship
i.e., they think that Paul dictated it to a disciple or
that it was the work of some ardent Paulinist. In
the West the situation is quite different. Tertullian
alludes to it as the work of Barnabas, as though that
authorship was unquestioned. No leader of the
church in the West accepts it as the work of Paul un-
til the time of Hilary of Poitiers, the second half of
the fourth century. From the Muratorian canon to
Jerome, the Latin church rejects the Pauline author-
ship. This is the more striking when it is remembered
that it is now generally agreed that the letter was
written to Rome, and it is certain that Clement of
Rome was the first Christian writer to make use of
the letter. Thus the tradition of Pauline authorship
does not arise, and only slowly wins acceptance, in
the territory where the letter was first known.

The internal evidence is overwhelmingly against
the theory of Pauline authorship. In language, style,
ideas, and situation reflected, it is not Pauline. The
contrast of its smooth Greek with the rough style of
Pauline letters was noticed by Origen and other
Alexandrians. It was this which led them to claim
only a mediated Pauline authorship for the letter;
they were too much at home in Greek to believe that
this could have come from the same pen as the letters
of Paul. There are striking differences in vocabulary;

134 THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE

even as characteristic a Pauline phrase as "Christ
Jesus" does not occur. The essentially Pauline "in
Christ," which occurs even in the one-page letter to
Philemon, does not occur in Hebrews. The formulas
with which quotations from the Scriptures are intro-
duced consistently differ from Paul's usage.

The differences in ideas and religion are equally
striking. There is in Hebrews no justification by
faith, no attack on justification by law, no hope for
Israel, and no advantage in being an Israelite. No
Gentiles concern the author of this letter, and faith
is little more than a hope it lacks the robust
mysticism of the Apostle to the Gentiles. Here Christ
is portrayed as a priest a figure that cannot be ade-
quately paralleled from Paul's writings. Sanctifica-
tion, good works, and obedience are the virtues; mar-
riage is praised as a good thing. There is no con-
trasted spirit and flesh.

This is a different apostle from the author of
Galatians, Romans, Corinthians, Thessalonians, etc.;
and he writes for a different situation. The Christian-
ity to which this letter is addressed is later than that
of Paul's day. The hope of the second coming is
faint; many Christians have died, and yet the great
day has not dawned. Attendance at the religious
services of the Christians is falling off. There is here
no claim of apostolic authority, or of any sort of
direct contact with the founder of the cult. The clear
statement of Heb. a 13-4 sets the believers at least one
generation farther from Jesus than Paul was: ". . . .
How shall we escape if we neglect such a great salva-

INTERPRETATION OF THE BIBLE 135

tion, which in the beginning was spoken by the Lord
[Jesus] and then was confirmed unto us by those who
had heard it, to whom God bore witness in signs and
wonders and various mighty works and gifts of the
Holy Spirit according to his plan." It is hardly con-
ceivable that the author of Galatians could thus con-
fess that he received the gospel from men.

Evidence of this kind (and much of its detail has
not been quoted) has convinced scholars that the
Letter to the Hebrews did not come from the pen or
the mind of the Apostle Paul. The alternative
theories as to authorship have little more to com-
mend them than their ingenuity, and general schol-
arly opinion supports two conclusions: first, the!
Apostle Paul did not write Hebrews; second, we do;
not know who did.

Decision as to the authorship of other books in the
Bible is made in the same way as this decision that
Paul was not the author of Hebrews. Equally definite
and clear-cut decisions have been reached in regard
to many of the other books. This is true, for example,
of the book called by the name of Isaiah. It is gen-
erally agreed today that chapters 40 ff. are the work
of another man than the author of chapters 1-39.
The reference to events of the Exile in 40 ff., the dif-
ferences -in religious ideas, etc., all point to another
author. In the case of book after book, similar care-
ful study has led to equally definite conclusions as to
authorship, and these conclusions are now part of the
common fund of knowledge in the field of biblical
study.

136 THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE

But it should not be assumed that the study of
authorship is a study of accuracy. No scholar assents
to the proposition that composition by an apostle or.
prophet guarantees the historical accuracy of the
events related, or that a work written by anon-
apostolic and nonprophetic author is by that fact
made unreliable. The question as to the reliability
of the events in the Fourth Gospel is not a question
as to whether or not the Apostle John wrote it. The
Scriptures themselves testify that at least one apostle
was unreliable in three statements, and the claim that
all who were not apostles or prophets were unreliable
needs only to be stated to be rejected.

The importance of identifying the author of these
books wherever possible comes from the need of
locating them as accurately as we can in place and
time. The demonstration that Paul did not write
Hebrews does not diminish) the historical validity of
the letter, but it does make it possible for us to as-
sign it to a definite situation in Rome at the end of
the first century. When the letter is read against that
background, it becomes luminous with meaning, and
the contribution which it makes to our knowledge of
early Christianity is more than doubled. The time
and energy spent in the accurate determination of
authorship by the scholars are, therefore, to be re-
garded as a preliminary aid to the accurate interpre-
tation of the book, not as attack on, or defense of,
traditions as to authorship.

Authorship by apostle or prophet was of tre-
mendous importance to the Christian church in the

INTERPRETATION OF THE BIBLE 137

period of the formation of the canon, as we saw in
chapter i; but it has no analogous importance to the
modern historian. For purposes of historical study
the canon itself can set no limits. The student can-
not assume that what is canonical is accurate and
what is apocryphal (noncanonical) is inaccurate.
Gospels and Acts that were not in the canon are ac-
cepted or rejected by the student on the same bases
as those which appear in the canon. Neither apostolic
authorship nor canonicity can exempt documents
from the most searching investigation of their reliabil-
ity.

c) IDENTIFICATION OF SOURCES

A fascinating exercise is the identification of sources
in some work of literature. The vogue for source
analysis "of the Scriptures seems to be on the wane at
the present moment, but it may not be amiss to point
out to the student the tenuous nature of some of the
"reconstruction" of literary sources. If no source
used by the author in question has survived, and the
author does not introduce any sources by formal
quotation, the identification of sources is an almost
hopeless task unless the author copies his various
sources rather slavishly.

For the difficulty of identifying sources is directly
proportionate to the literary ability of the author
who used the sources. The more he re-wrote and as-
similated what he drew from sources, the harder it is
to identify the sources in the finished product. A re-
cent evaluation of Elinor Wylie's work quoted one of
her sources and compared it with the finished product.

138 THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE

The forty-four lines of the source were reduced to
twenty- two in the finished product; at least eight im-
portant details were changed by the novelist, and the
style of the finished work was the style of Elinor
Wylie. The identification of a source so thoroughly
re-written as was this one is impossible unless we
possess a copy of the source.

Fortunately for the student of biblical documents,
their authors were sometimes less rigorous in the re-
writing of source material. In the writing of Hebrew
history, for example, the method commonly em-
ployed in the use of sources was what has been called
a "scissors and paste" method. The author copied
one section from one source and the next section from
another; re-writing was slight in degree and quantity.
Very frequently the author refused to choose between
his sources and copied the story first from one and
then from another.

One of the clearest examples of this can be found
in the story of creation in the opening chapters of
Genesis. The reader finds the record of creation com-
plete in Gen. I :i 2:3. In this section, only thirty-
four verses in length, creation is finished in six days.
God creates by divine fiat day and night, sky, sea and
land, plants, stars, sun, moon, animals, birds, and
human beings, male and female. The seventh day is
hallowed as a day of abstinence from labor. Yet in
chapter a, verse 4, the process of creation starts all
over again with the formation of a man for whose sake
plants, animals, and a woman are created. The two
stories are equally distinct in idea and style. The first

INTERPRETATION OF THE BIBLE 139

is formal in pattern and exalted in tone. In it the
work of creation is divided up by days, and a refrain
closes the day's work. God creates by the spoken
word and, as a climax to his creative activity, hallows
the Sabbath by resting on it. In the second story
there are no day-by-day divisions; God forms man
out of earth, plants a garden, etc. In the first story
the deity is consistently referred to as God, in the
second as Jehovah God. From a study of similar
features in duplicate stories, students of the Old
Testament have identified several sources of the
Pentateuch and made invaluable contributions to
our understanding of this literature.

A contribution of similar value has been made by a
study of the literary sources of the first three gospels.
The authors of these gospels wrote much as the au-
thors of Hebrew history wrote. They copied their
sources with little re-writing, often in alternate
blocks. One of the common sources used by Matthew
and Luke was Mark; another was a document (since
lost) which probably antedated Mark. The identi-
fication of these sources made a sane interpretation of
Gospel parallelisms possible and dealt a deathblow
to superficial harmonizing of the Gospels.

The nature of these parallels can be seen in the fol-
lowing examples:

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142

THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE

The comparison of the parallels between the Gos-
pels led also to the discovery that Matthew and Luke
relied upon some common source other than Mark.
The nature of their agreement against Mark can be
seen in their report of the preaching of John the
Baptist. In Mark this is briefly summarized as the
preaching of a baptism of repentance unto remission
of sins; in Matthew and Luke the content of an ex-
hortation is given.

MATT. 3:7-10

But when he saw many of the
Pharisees and Sadducees, com-
ing to his baptism, he said
unto them,

Ye offspring of vipers, who
warned you to flee from the
wrath to come? 8 Bring forth
therefore fruit worthy of re-
pentance: 9 and think not to
say within yourselves, We
have Abraham to our father:
for I say unto you, that God
is able of these stones to
raise up children unto Abra-
ham. 10 And even now the
axe lieth at the root of
the trees: every tree there-
fore that bringeth not forth
good fruit is hewn down, and
cast into the fire.

LUKE 3: 7-9

He said therefore to the mul-
titudes that went out to be
baptised of him

Ye offspring of vipers, who
warned you to flee from the
wrath to come? 8 Bring forth
therefore fruits worthy of re-
pentance, and begin not to
say within yourselves, We
have Abraham to our father:
for I say unto you, that God
is able of these stones to
raise up children unto Abra-
ham. 9 And even now the
axe also lieth at the root^of
the trees: every tree there-
fore that bringeth not forth
good fruit is hewn down, and
cast into the fire.

From the most minute study of evidence of this
sort, invaluable results for the literary criticism of the
New Testament have been obtained. It is, indeed, no
exaggeration to say that the major achievements

INTERPRETATION OF THE BIBLE 143

made in the early generations of scholarly study of
the Bible and the history of Judaism and Christian-
ity were attained by the use of such literary criticism
as that which we have briefly discussed and illus-
trated here. But the significance of this source analy-
sis has sometimes been overemphasized or misinter-
preted. Superficial features of the data are seized
upon as possessing basic significance. The illustra-
tions given above show that some passages occur in
all three of the Synoptic Gospels Matthew, Mark,
and Luke. This triplication^ of the story has been
called "the triple tradition"; and, since a threefold
cord is stronger than one with a single strand, it has
been assumed that what was in the triple tradition
was historically more reliable than that which ap-
peared in but one of these Gospels. This would be true
if the authors had access to accurate sources of in-
formation and were concerned primarily with attain-
ing factual accuracy. But their purposes were re-
ligious rather than historical, and the quality of their
sources undoubtedly varied. It is quite possible that
an event related in a single Gospel, any one of the
four, might surpass in the accuracy of its detail any
story that appeared in three or even all four of the
Gospels.

Another example of the perversion of source
analysis can be found in the tendency to favor the
"oldest" source. From the assumption that the
earliest must be the most accurate, Mark's Gospel has
been given an extravagant recognition ever since its
priority in date was demonstrated by scholarship.

144 THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE

When one of the theories of Gospel origins labeled the
non-Markan source common to Matthew and Luke
with the name "Q" and claimed that it was probably
earlier than Mark, many transferred to it the extrava-
gant loyalty earlier rendered to Mark. But our earli-
est literary sources leave us all too far from the period
of the events described, and the nature of their con-
tents is such as to call for the most rigorous scrutiny.
It is worth the student's notice that in modern courts
the testimony of even the most reputable eyewitness
is accepted only when it has withstood the most
searching examination and has been checked against
all available controls. No careless acceptance of all
the contents of any particular document or source
as the "oldest" source will be possible for the serious
student.

This is still more evident when the goal of the stu-
dent of Scripture is the understanding of all primitive
Christian experience not that of Jesus alone or the
comprehension of all phases of Hebrew religion not
that of any "pure" period alone. This more inclusive
goal has become the commonly accepted aim of
biblical students in our generation. When the pur-
poses of Bible study are so defined, any special source,
or particular element in the tradition, loses pre-
eminence; all sources are a priori equally valuable.
To the student of the Scriptures in this generation,
the literary criticism of the Bible presents a set of
sharpened tools which he should use in the attempt to
create a full and accurate account of Christian life
and Hebrew religion in Bible days. The methods and

INTERPRETATION OF THE BIBLE 145

materials employed in this broad and ultimate task
are the subject of the next chapter.

BIBLIOGRAPHY ON LITERARY CRITICISM

GENERAL

GOODSPEED, E. J. The Story of the Bible. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1936.

Brief but clear statement of positions generally held by scholars on
the questions of literary introduction: date, author, place, etc.

BEWER, J. A. The Literature of the Old Testament in Its His-
torical Development (rev. ed.). New York: Columbia Uni-
versity Press, 1933.
A rather detailed presentation in chronological order, with copious

quotations.

SCOTT, E. F. The Literature of the New Testament. New York:
Columbia University Press, 1932.

Similar to the work of Goodspeed but a little more detailed in treat-
ment.

BRIGHTMAN, E. S. Sources of the Hexateuch. New York, Cin-
cinnati, etc.: Abingdon Press, 1918.

BURTON, E. D., AND GOODSPEED, E. J. Harmony of the Synoptic
Gospels. New York: Scribners, 1917.

This book, with the preceding one, will make easily available to the
student the evidence on which the study of the sources of the Pentateuch
and the first three gospels rests.

JAMES, M. R. The Apro'cryphal New Testament. Oxford: Univer-
sity Press, 1924.

Brief introductions with English translations of a large number of
books more or less marginally connected with the New Testament.

. The Lost Apocrypha of the Old Testament, Their Titles

and Fragments, Collected, Translated, and Discussed. New
York: Macmillan, 1920.

KRUGER, G. History of Early Christian Literature in the First
Three Centuries (trans, by C. R. GILLETT). New York: Mac-
millan, 1897.

146 THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE

OESTERLEY, W. O. E. An Introduction to the Books of the Apoc-
rypha. New York: Macmillan, 1935.

A thorough literary introduction to the books of the Old Testament
which are accepted as authoritative Scripture in the Catholic but not in
the Protestant Church.

OTTLEY, R. R. A Handbook to the Septuagint. London: Methuen
& Co., 1920.

An introduction to the study of the Greek version of the Old Testa-
ment.

STRACK, H. L. Introduction to Talmud and Midrasch. Philadel-
phia: Jewish Publication Society, 1931.

Authorized translation from the author's revision of the fifth German
edition.

ADVANCED

OESTERLEY, W. O. E., AND ROBINSON, T. H. An Introduction to
the Books of the Old Testament. London: S.P.C.K.; New York:
Macmillan, 1934.
A fresh and thorough critical manual.

MOFFATT, J. Introduction to the Literature of the New Testament.
New York: Scribners, 1918.

A fine piece of work, still the standard, though now in sad need of re-
vision.

GRANT, F. C. The Growth of the Gospels. New York, Cincinnati,
etc.: Abingdon Press, 1933.

A fine introduction to technical study of the Gospels; good Bibliog-
raphy.

CHARLES, R. H., et al. The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the
Old Testament in English with Introductions and Critical and
Explanatory Notes to the Several Books, Vol. I: Apocrypha;
Vol. II: Pseudepigrapha. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1913.

BARDENHEWER, O. Geschichte der altkirchlichen Literatur. . Frei-
burg im Breisgau: Herder, 1902-32. Vol. I (2d ed.), 1913;
Vol. II (2d ed.), 1914; Vol. Ill (ad ed.), 1923; Vol. IV, 1924;
Vol. V, 1932.

The most up to date of exhaustive histories of early Christian litera-
ture.

INTERPRETATION OF THE BIBLE 147

EPSTEIN, I. (ed.). The Talmud. London: Soncino Press,

'935

This English translation, edited with introductions and notes, is to be
completed in about thirty volumes. First set of 8 vols. (Nezikin) pub-
lished in 1935; second set (Nashim) published in 1936.

CADBURY, H. J. The Style and Literary Method of Luke. ("Har-
vard Theological Studies," Vol. VI.) Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1920.

A brilliant piece of literary and linguistic criticism which annihilated
the "medical language" of Luke.

Chapter VI

The Interpretation of the Bible

The Historical Method

Historical Criticism

I

historian of pagan antiquity limits him-
self to no harrow field. He is vitally con-
cerned with political history. He studies gov-
ernments and international relations; the reigns of
kings and emperors attract his attention. But he no
longer focuses attention upon this one aspect of life
to the exclusion of others. Other more prosaic areas
make their contribution to his reconstruction of the
past. Geography, for example, is studied in its broad-
est terms; cities, rivers, climates, crops, roads, etc.,
all come within the scope of his investigation.

The two aspects of life that have been touched on
here (political and geographical) do not exhaust the
territory that the historian attempts to cover but
suggest the diversity of the elements that attract his
attention. These elements have not all exercised the
same degree of fascination for each historian, or even
for each generation of historians. Some scholars have
emphasized political phenomena as the dominant

148

INTERPRETATION OF THE BIBLE 149

factor in the story of the past; others have focused
the reader's attention on economic factors as the pri-
mary ones. At the present time an increasing amount
of attention is given to social history. The record of
the past is no longer presented as incarnate in the
biographies of a few distinguished leaders; it is found
to the same degree in the story of the masses.

This type of history is primarily interested in
group life and group movements. It sees political,
economic, and religious history as social process. In-
stitutions as it portrays them are not static and stolid
but move through a constant change, as new genera-
tions, faced with new problems, adapt them to their
needs. The ultimate interest of the social historian
is to revitalize the past by recapturing the living ex-
periences of the individual in relation to the various
groups to which he belonged. He sees literature as
a deposit niade by the rich life of the time in which
it was produced; he studies it not as an end but as a
means. He strives to comprehend it so that he may
comprehend the life that produced it.

This emphasis has driven the historian to the by-
ways as well as to the highways; it has put a new
premium on the nonliterary sources for ancient his-
tory. It is clear, for example, that a scholar who is
trying to write the economic history of the Roman
Empire will find valuable information in the excava-
- tion of a store that dealt in agricultural implements
as well as in the sonorous description of the charms
of rural life by one of the gilded youths of Rome.
The recovery of tens of thousands of tax receipts from

150 THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE

ancient Egypt on pieces of papyrus and ostraca has
made possible the writing of the story of taxation
even for separate sections and cities. Sources of this
type are made available to the historian by the
archeologist, and the study of archeology has become
more and more important as the study of the social
and economic life of antiquity has gained in empha-t
sis. The result is that from numerous expeditions a
rich stream of archeological finds has been poured at
the historians' feet.

THE SCOPE OF BIBLICAL HISTORY

Historical criticism of the Scriptures is as exten-
sive in scope and diversified in interests as the history
of any secular movement. The emphasis on political
history which characterized many of the school texts
of my childhood has been equally widespread on the
pages of sacred history. Most of my devout readers
have struggled with lists of the kings of Israel and
Judah, or with outlines of evidence for identifying
Merneptah or Ramses II as the pharaoh of the Op-
pression.

Nor was this study made in vain. The current
emphasis upon other elements in the social complex
should not blind us to the real significance of the so-
called "political history" of the Bible. It has crowded
meaning into the terms "pre-Exilic," "Exilic," and
"post-Exilic," and against these backgrounds many an
Old Testament book has become more intelligible.
The story of the Maccabean rebellion adds meaning
to the pages of every Jewish and Christian apoca-

INTERPRETATION OF THE BIBLE 151

lypse. A knowledge of Roman administration in
Palestine under Herod and his sons and successors
clarifies much of the gospel story.

Secular interest in geography has been matched in
the biblical field. Every detailed modern introduc-
tion to the Bible- has included a" discussion of the
geography of Palestine, and historical geographies of
the Holy Land have filled imposing volumes. If
biblical scholars have erred in this area, it is in giving
too much attention to miscellaneous geographical
data.

These interests in political and geographical history
can be matched in a half-dozen other areas. The eco-
nomic background of the gospels has been made the
subject of special study. The perennial interest in the
great personalities of the religion still continues to
produce biographies of Jesus, Paul, and David. The
magnitude of the contribution made by .the indi-
vidual religious genius is given due recognition, but
the major emphases of contemporary study fall in
the area of social-historical method.

PRESENT-DAY EMPHASES IN HISTORICAL
CRITICISM OF THE BIBLE

The development of a widespread interest in social
movements and group processes has been noted above
with reference to the writing of secular history. This
development has had important results for the study
of the Bible; its. influence upon the study of Judaism,
Christianity, and the Bible has been of epoch-making
importance in more than one area.

152 THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE

O) RELIGIONS ARE DEVELOPMENTAL

In the first place, the religions themselves are now
studied as movements of a vitally developmenta 1
character. The older conception of them as static, jli-
vinejnserts into history has been repudiated. Empha-
sis is no longer put upon the originality of the message
of Jesus and the prophets; modern historical study of
the environment of both the Jewish and the Chris-
tian religions has patiently accumulated parallel
after parallel, antecedent before antecedent, until the
word "unique" as applied to the elements of these
cults has lost much of its significance. These religions
are now seen as the product of social forces directed
by individual genius. The historians have shown
how extensively they inherit, borrow, adopt, and
adapt.

It is now recognized that Judaism and Christian-
ity change naturally, inevitably, and constantly. The
old idealization of some one period or the literature
of one period as representing the "pure" religion
has been seriously modified if not rejected. With it
has vanished its corollary, the disparagement of all
changes subsequent to the period of "purity" as cor-
ruptions, dilutions, perversions, etc., and therefore
essentially bad. The religion is seen to change as the
believers' vital religious experience is conditioned by
new social situations. Christianity is defined not as a
creed, or as the religion of any one individual, group,
or period, but as the vital religious life of the succes-
sive generations of Christians.

INTERPRETATION OF THE BIBLE 153

K) LIFE PRECEDES LITERATURE

A second result of social historical study is the
general recognition of the priority of the religion to
the religious literature. It has been one of the short-
comings of Protestantism so to stress the importance
and authority of the Bible that many devout Chris-
tians have come to believe that Christianity origi-
nated in and from the New Testament. The most
superficial study, however, will show that Christian-
ity existed for at least a century without a New Testa-
ment as a sacred book. Christianity had left Palestine
and spread far and wide in the Roman world before
the first book of the New Testament was even writ-
ten, much less published or accepted as authoritative.
Strong Christian communities dotted the shores of
the Mediterranean before the Four Gospels were
written.

Thus the period of Christian history to which the
Protestant has most often pointed as representing
"pure" Christianity the first century of the cult's
existence is a period in which there was no New
Testament. This indicates a very different evalua-
tion of the role of the New Testament in Christianity
on the part of the primitive Christian and the con-
ventional modern Protestant. Exactly the same facts
exist in regard to the Old Testament. The important
period of Jewish life suggested by the words "exo-
dus," "conquest," and "kingdom" knew no sacred
literature. Moses, Abraham, Elijah, and David lived
their religion without the sacred book.

154 THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE

c) EXPERIENCE CREATES LITERATURE

In ever widening circles the creative role of the
religious experience of the group and individual in re-
gard to the literature is frankly admitted. The sig-
nificant part played in the production of the litera-
ture by social experience is admitted by more scholars
today than was the case a generation ago, and the
creative function of the religious group is seen at work
throughout more and more of the canonical litera-
ture.

From the moment that the historical method of in-
terpretation was applied to the letters of Paul, it was
obvious that the problem situations in the churches
founded by Paul had almost as much to do with the
contents of Paul's letters as Paul himself did. This
is seen clearly in Galatians, a letter which focuses
all the fiery enthusiasm of Paul's religion on a single
issue as sharply as a glass brings the sun's rays to a
single burning point. It can be seen with equal clarity
in the complexity of I Corinthians, where the first part
of the letter is taken up with Paul's attempts to
straighten out troublesome situations at Corinth that
have been reported to him (factions, lawsuits, im-
morality), and the second part is concerned with the
apostle's answers to half-a-dozen specific questions
asked him in a letter from the church at Corinth. In
these letters by Paul we can clearly see the Christian
trying to work out a pattern of living in a society al-
ready crowded with religions. The thorough integra-
tion of these pagan cults in the social life of the time
caused many of the problems of the Pauline converts.

INTERPRETATION OF THE BIBLE 155

Butchering had religious implications, political life
was religious both locally and imperially recrea-
tion was religious, etc. The everyday experiences
of devout Christians in this religious fulness of
the time determined the table of contents of most of
the letters written by Paul. This does not deny the
significant contribution made to those letters by the
rich religious experience of the apostle himself, yet
it must be remembered that that experience was it-
self in some part social.

This has long been recognized by interpreters of the
Pauline writings. The situation at Corinth, in Ga-
latia, etc., is now studied along with or before the
message written by the apostle. The creative influ-
ence of the social environment has been recognized
also in the later books of the New Testament and in
the Old Testament writings that represent late
Judaism. Among Protestant interpreters, it has of-
ten been popular to interpret these books as the
product of periods of corruption of the pure religion
of earlier days. Thus it is claimed that the true
vision of God won by the prophets was obscured by
the priests and scribes who came after them; that the
pure word of God uttered by Jesus was diluted by
the incipient Catholicism of the late first and early
second centuries. These changes were explained as
due to compromise with environment, assimilation
of external influences, etc. Hence, in these areas, the
recognition of the significant influence of environ-
ment upon the creation of the sacred literature was
easy for the champions of such views.

156 THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE

But the recognition of the similar situation in the
Gospels and the Prophets came more slowly. The his-
torical study of literary problems helped to make this
possible. The removal of the Fourth Gospel from a
close association with the others to .the very end of
the first century or the beginning of the second
hastened a sane evaluation of the part played by the
religious experience of post-resurrection Christianity
in the composition of that gospel. The study of the
literary sources of the first three gospels led to the
identification of "secondary" elements in the gospel
tradition, and it was freely admitted that the chang-
ing .experiences and beliefs of second-generation
Christianity had affected the formation of these
strands of the tradition. But in some areas a certain
insulation of the revealed message is claimed for the
earliest layer of the gospel content; this, it is felt,
came straight and undiluted from the mind of God.

This position has been abandoned by the majority
of scholars for two reasons. The first is that the in-
creased knowledge of Judaism has made it plain that
Jesus like the prophets before him was himself in-
fluenced by the social situation in which he formu-
lated his message. The second is that the increased
knowledge of the Christianity of the second genera-
tion and of its gentile environment has made it plain
that the part played by the church in the creation of
the gospels was a major part. Today no one can stop
with Mark or "Q" and say "here is the pure gospel."

The Gospels were produced to meet the needs of
Christians removed by at least one full generation

,.-?* *

INTERPRETATION OF THE BIBLE 157

from the death of Jesus. But the gap is deeper than
it is wide, for the gospels were produced to meet the
needs of self-conscious, gentile churches, struggling
for their existence in the strenuous religious compe-
tition of the cities of the Graeco-Roman world. The
infant cult needed organization, sanctions for cult
practices, information, definition of the distinctively
Christian way of life, defense from state and rivals,
solution of the problem of its relation to Judaism, etc.
Most of these problems were unknown to Jesus and
his followers, or were seen by them in different degrees
of intensity and under different aspects.

Most of all, the church needed an adequate defini- "\
tion of Jesus in terms of its own contemporary faith
and experience. By the time that Paul's letters were ,
written, Jesus is already defined as a divine Lord and
Savior as well as the Messiah of Old Testament hopes.
Yet Paul can find no validation for his faith in the
story of Jesus' life that has reached him. For him the
proof of Jesus' lordship lies in his own experience of /
communion with Jesus and salvation through union ,
with him. The resurrection was the demonstration J
of Jesus' divinity; before the resurrection there was
nothing but a humble career.

The evangelists modify this definition. In Mark
the humility of Jesus' earthly career is lightened by
previews of the resurrection. As in Paul, Jesus is not
really the Messiah until the resurrection, but oc-
casionally there is a partial revelation of his divine
nature. The demons recognize him; their own super-
natural nature allows them to identify him. On the

158 THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE

mountain top he appears for a moment to the inner
circle of his followers as he really is. Yet throughout
the major part of Mark, the messiahship of Jesus is
a secret, a dark mystery even to his most intimate
associates. This frame of definition is part of the
evangelist's contribution to the Gospel story.

The distinctive nature of the Markan definition of
Jesus can be seen by contrasting it not only with
that of Paul but also with that of John. In the Fourth
Gospel the Lord of the Christian cult is openly the
Messiah, the divine world-savior, from the first scene
of the Gospel to the last. He himself teaches this
without hesitation and with monotonous repetition.
His disciples and his hearers generally (except the
Jews) have no difficulty in recognizing him as the
divine son of God, the Messiah, the Light of the
World, etc. This frame of definition is part of this
evangelist's contribution to the Gospel story.

Later in the second century some unknown Chris-
tians wrote gospels which told the story of Jesus'
infancy. These carry the definition of Jesus as being
openly a god on earth several steps farther than John
had done. In these infancy gospels Jesus knows he
is a god when he is a little boy. Moreover, he shows
his deity in numerous actions and teachings. His
birds made of mud come to life; anyone who injures
him in play is slain with a word; teachers are baffled
again and again by his wisdom. The boy Jesus is a
god in that he possesses supernatural power and
supernatural wisdom. This frame of definition is part
of these evangelists' contribution to the Gospel story.

INTERPRETATION OF THE BIBLE 159

d) GROUP INFLUENCE BEFORE THE GOSPELS

In the last generation the attention of scholars has
been drawn to the study of the Gospel story as it '
existed in the days before the Gospels were written.
It is now generally admitted that in its earliest form j
the story existed in separate bits of information about /
Jesus' actions or teachings. Sayings were repeated \
and cherished in a group of Galileans who had fol-
lowed Jesus, as disciples long before had followed the
prophets. Stories of actions performed by Jesus were
repeated by other Christians to show what Jesus
meant to them. At various times and places and in
various ways, these fragments of tradition were
grouped, edited, expanded, abbreviated. The inter-
est of the Christians in these items was basically-re-
ligious rather than historical; therefore, it was easy
for unhistorical elements to enter stories with a basis
of fact; it was possible for stories to be generally ac-
cepted which had no basis in the facts of Jesus' life;
it was easy for accurate stories of what Jesus had said
and done to die for lack of repetition when these ac-
curate stories served no need of the group to which
they came.

One^pf the first and clearest implications of the
existence of the Gospel stories in little independent
sections (called "pericopes") is that we owe the
time and place sequences in our gospels to the rela-
tively late and unreliable work of the evangelists.
Many of these little stories in the gospels are still
without any indication of time or place; that many
more of them were originally without such indications

160 THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE

is a probable assumption. The more frequently a story
is repeated, the more specific it becomes. Locations
are supplied, anonymous characters are identified,
. and the time is given. The "framework" of the gospel
v ...message is almost entirely the creation of second-gen-
eration Christianity.

The immature church's needs were legion. It
needed sanctions for its simple ritual. The story of
Jesus' last meal with his followers becomes the story
of the institution by Jesus of a ceremony for his fol-
lowers to observe: at first a memorial service, later a
sacramental communion. Jesus sets his own teaching
above the Jewish law. Jesus' authority is invoked to
prevent Christians from going to law in non-Christian
t courts; the story is told with explicit reference to the
existence of Christian church groups.

In Palestine in Jesus' day, his followers were not
troubled by table etiquette. The question of obeying
or not obeying the Old Testament dietary laws was
not a pressing one to them. The Palestinian customs
were well established and included prescriptions as to
the nature and extent of table fellowship between
Jews and Gentiles. But, when Christianity moved
outside both Palestine and Judaism and welcomed
masses of Gentiles into its communion, questions as
to the validity of the Jewish dietary legislation arose
frequently and clamored for an answer. We hear the
clamor echoing through Paul's letters. Paul's own
claim that these laws were invalid for Gentile Chris-
tians ultimately became the position of the church.
But the church was not satisfied with a Pauline au-
thorization of the repudiation of these laws and found

INTERPRETATION OF THE BIBLE 161

in a pronouncement of Jesus himself that revocation
of the Old Testament legislation for which it yearned.

The saying appears in Mark 7:14-15 and is ex-
plained in 7:17-23 (cf. Matt. 15:10-20). Jesus calls
the crowd to him and says, "It is not anything from
outside of a man entering into him which can defile
him, but the things which come forth from the man
are the things which defile the man." After his
withdrawal into the house, he explains the saying to
the disciples, pointing out that food for the body does
not touch the soul, but that vices like envy, adultery,
etc., which spring from within, are the real defile-
ment. In the original form of the saying there was
here no more than a strong declaration of the supe-
riority of spiritual values to mere ritual conformity.

But as Mark tells the story, and he may be accu-
rately reporting the form in which it reached him,
this is an emancipation of Jesus' followers from all
food laws. The specific authorization is made by a
brief explanatory note in 7:19, "making clean all
foods." This clause directly applies Jesus' pronounce-
ment to the later Christian controversy over clean
and unclean foods. It is interesting to note that
Matthew does not follow Mark in this particular ap-
plication. He omits the explanatory clause, and, by
the addition of one brief sentence at the end of the
explanation to the disciples, he refers the whole dis-
cussion to ritual washings. Thus the same saying of
Jesus emancipates Christians from Jewish food laws
(in Mark) and from Jewish ritual washings (in
Matthew).

The last generation has seen the careful study of

1 62 THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE

the content of the first three gospels, section by sec-
tion, in the attempt to establish the extent of the
church's contribution to the picture of Jesus. In
Germany it has been carried on by the champions of
a discipline called Formgeschichte ("form criticism"
or "form history"), which gets its name from the least
important aspect of its work. It has tried to classify
the forms in which the separate units of the tradi-
tion exist; hence its name. But its contribution in the
study of forms has been of minor importance. Much
more significant has been its insistence upon the im-
portant role of group needs and interests in the forma-
tion of Gospel stories. This is not a new discovery of
the Formgeschichte school; they share this method
and emphasis with the "social historian" and with
many a scholar who is still content with the simple
title "historian."

If today the Gospels are approached solely as a
source of information about the historical Jesus, the
result will be meager in quantity and definitely un-
satisfactory in quality to the pious layman. He may
find some consolation in the fact that no historian
will identify this residue as the total picture of
Jesus' personality or career. The church's creative
role included rejection. Whatever Jesus was, he was
certainly more than the fragments which the his-
torian accepts after his rigorous inspection of the tra-
dition.

<?) NOTHING IS SPURIOUS FOR THE HISTORIAN

But the social historian is, in a sense, more rigorous
than the general public has yet realized. His interest

INTERPRETATION OF THE BIBLE 163

and curiosity are catholic in scope. He does not ap-
proach the Gospels for the sole purpose of finding out
what is historical in the stories about Jesus. His pur--^,.
pose is also to find out what can be known about the
vital experiences of Jesus' followers. He rejects none
of the Gospel material; the section which tells him
nothing about Jesus may be of great value as a source
of information on the faith and experience of the mass
of unknown Christians in the second generation of
Christianity's history.

The student of the Old Testament, for example, in
generations past often labeled certain sections of the
books as "spurious" and then proceeded to ignore
them. This happened all too frequently in the study
of the prophets. If Amos 9 : 8-i 5 was a later addition
to the great prophecy, then the student of Amos
ignored it. Unfortunately, no other student picked
it up, and no attention at all was given to these
"spurious" passages. But today their authenticity as
representatives of the age in which they were pro-
duced is emphasized, and they are carefully studied
for what they can tell us of these later periods.

Partly as a reaction to the tendency of past genera-
tions to center attention on the isolated individuals
who attained prominence and immortality for their
names in the leadership of the cult, the modern his-
torian focuses attention jDn the anonymous masses,
on social movements, on group needs, on the common < * r ~
faith, on the laymen whose contribution to the cult
was as significant as that of the leaders. The knowl-
edge of the New Testament is not, therefore, the goal

164 THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE

of his study. Once that knowledge is gained, it be-
comes a tool, a source, to be used in writing the his-
tory of the vital religious movements of early Chris-
tian history.

/) IMPORTANCE OF ARCHEOLOGY

The student of Christianity or Judaism who ac-
cepts the emphases of social history turns more and
more to the use of the nonliterary sources. He can-
not study the movements and experiences of cult
groups in a vacuum. The society in which they existed
becomes of vital importance to him. He prizes the
results attained by the student of the social and eco-
nomic history of the ancient East and the Graeco-
Roman world.

These historians have shown the tremendous value
of archeological sources for the reconstruction of
social life in all its phases. The student who investi-
gates religious societies has turned his own attention
in increasing measure to the study of nonliterary
sources of information on the religions in which he is
interested. But in the study of early Christian history
the Protestant historian has used this material last
and least.

Part of this tardiness has been due to a narrow
sectarian loyalty. Roman Catholic learning had long
ago appealed to archeological evidence in support of
its doctrines and claims. For example, inscriptions
from the Eternal City were used to support the claim
that Peter was the founder of the Roman papacy.
Other nonliterary sources established an earlier exist-

INTERPRETATION OF THE BIBLE 165

ence of liturgy and officialdom than fervent Protes-
tants of an extreme type were willing to accept. In the
bitterness of the debate they attacked not only the
interpretation of archeological evidence but also the
entire discipline in so far as it applied to Christian
origins.

In the more innocuous field of Old Testament his-
tory, however, archeological techniques were not only
employed but even employed in the very manner in
which earlier Roman Catholic scholars had used them
in their study of early Christian history. Book after
book on "Archeology and the Bible" took as its
thesis the defensive assertion that the results of
archeological study confirmed or supported the Bible
(almost always giving 90 per cent of the space to the
Old Testament) in its statements as to dates, kings'
reigns, geography, etc. This use of archeology was
atomistic. Any isolated item that was related to any
Old Testament passage was featured as another valu-
able confirmation of the Bible.

The use of archeology which is today making a
valuable contribution to the interpretation of the
Bible has a very different basis. Its purposes and
methods are far removed from those defined in the
preceding paragraph. Illumination not confirma-
tion is its goal. It rejoices not in isolated dis-
coveries, no matter how dramatic, but in the patient
accumulation of a mass of detailed evidence that will
help the historian to reconstruct a vanished culture.
To the interpreter of the Bible it is an auxiliary disci-
pline which supplies him with invaluable source ma-

1 66 THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE

terial. Archeological evidence on dates is of relative-
ly little importance when compared with the light
shed by this discipline on the life of the world in
which Judaism and Christianity lived, moved, and
had their being.

If we take for granted that the student of the Bible
is interested in archeological evidence as to business
conditions, etc., in the environment of the cult he
studies, we can pass on to a more focal point the
light that archeology has shed (and is shedding) on
the cults which were predecessors and/or competitors
of Judaism and Christianity.

For the student of the Old Testament this light
has been steadily growing in illuminating power.
There is no need or space here to detail its progress,
but the nature of the recent discoveries at Ras
Shamra may be summarized as an example of the
type of contribution made. Beginning in 1929, exca-
vators working on a little promontory twenty miles
south of the mouth of the Orontes River found a large
number of tablets inscribed in a "cuneiform alpha-
bet." They contain cult prescriptions, liturgy, and
legends of about the thirteenth century B.C. They
supply the student of Semitic languages with a wealth
of evidence, hitherto unknown, as to Syro-Phoeni-
cian usage at this period. The study of the Ras
Shamra myth and cult patterns has already illumi-
nated many a dark spot in the Old Testament litera-
ture and has raised anew in challenging fashion the
question as to an important genetic relationship be-
tween the religion of the Old Testament and the

INTERPRETATION OF THE BIBLE 167

indigenous Canaanite culture. One of the ritual com-
mands of the Ras Shamra tablets is "Boil a kid in the
milk"; this is one item in the magical technique for
producing early rains. The Old Testament proscrip-
tions of boiling a kid in its mother's milk (Exod.
23:19; 34:26; Deut. 14:21) can no longer be ex-
plained as nomadic and therefore presumably Mosaic.
It now seems more probable that seething a kid in its
mother's milk was part of the cult technique of the
early Hebrews, carrying a function analogous to that
which it served at Ras Shamra. The attack on the
practice in the Old Testament passages referred to
above would be a later modification of a primitive
cult practice. Not only in matters of ritual detail but
in the broader areas of world-view, of dualism, of
hope of life as a religious gift, of messianism, etc.,
these fruits of the archeologist's patient labor are
making important and often startling contributions
to our knowledge.

From Graeco-Roman archeology has come an
analogous illumination of the field of early Christian
history. In this area, also, our knowledge of the com-
peting cults has been greatly increased by the study
of archeological sources. This has been noteworthy in
the study of those personal salvation cults, the
mystery religions, which were so popular in the
Graeco-Roman world in the time of the Roman Em-
pire. They present the historian with dismayingly
scanty literary remains; the emphasis upon secrecy
and "mystery" in the cult discouraged the writing of
adequate descriptions by the initiates. For the most

1 68 THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE

part their testimony consists of obscure passwords
and mottoes which demand rather than supply il-
lumination.

But the archeologist has made up for the meager
amount of literary remains, as can be seen, for ex-
ample, in the case of the cult of Mithras. The vol-
umes in which Franz Cumont has edited the archeo-
logical evidence for the worship of the Persian god
present the student with a wealth of information.
The location of Mithras monuments on a map dots
its surface from the Euxine Sea to the mountains of
Scotland, and from the banks of the Rhine to the
Sahara Desert. Thus the extent of the distribution
of the cult is indicated with an accuracy impossible
for one who used literary sources alone. The fact
that these sources can be dated, at least approxi-
mately, adds to their value. Moreover, they give in-
direct suggestions concerning the cult ritual sugges-
tions which are made the more valuable by the
prejudiced nature of the literary references to cult
practices. Most of the latter come from Christians
engaged in the most bitter competition with the sun-
god's cult. With the help of the archeological wit-
nesses, Mr. Willoughby, in his study of regeneration
in the pagan world, has given a vivid reconstruction
of one of the cave chapels in which the worshipers
of Mithras met and presents the rites and beliefs of
the cult in an impressive manner.

The newcomer in the field of early Christian arche-
ology is constantly stimulated by unexpected ele-
ments in the nonliterary tradition. As he leafs

INTERPRETATION OF THE BIBLE 169

through the facsimiles of catacomb paintings, he is
astonished to find Jonah and the hippocampus lead-
ing all other characters in popularity. Pagan cupids
and Orpheus "good shepherds" have an important
message to give as to the nature and extent of pagan
influence. There is significance in the absence of any
crucifixion scene in the early period, as also in the
extreme rarity of crosses. That Jesus used a magi-
cian's wand like Circe's is somewhat surprising.
Rather unexpected to the novice is the amount and
early date of Christian paintings and the presence of
frescoes and mosaics in Jewish synagogues.

Nor do the inscriptions fall behind the pictures in
the value of the information they impart. On the
basis of a study of a collection of Jewish inscriptions,
E. R. Goodenough has made several tentative but
most stimulating suggestions; e.g., that "normative"
Judaism was unknown until after the publication of
the Talmud and that Judaism at the time of the
formation of the New Testament was borrowing
heavily from Hellenism.

Christian inscriptions likewise are a valuable source
of information on the life and customs of the early
Christians. Dean Case, in writing the story of the
place of Christianity in the business life of the
ancient world, found in the inscriptions alone ade-
quate information as to the occupations of the early
Christians.

The French archeologist Le Blant and, after him,
Sir William Ramsay found in certain types of names
in the Christian inscriptions valuable evidence as to

170 THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE

pagan attitudes toward Christianity. The terms of
contempt which the pagans applied to the Christians
were often accepted by the latter and worn as
names. Among these "epithet names" are the follow-
ing: "gullible/' "unreasonable," "criminal," "trick-
ster," "insolent," "churlish," "pernicious," "filth,"
"evil," "knavish," "brute," "contemptible," "de-
serter," "refuse," and "dirty." By accepting these
names (according to Le Blant's theory) the indi-
vidual Christians made a boast out of slander.
Leclerq has more recently quarreled with Le Blant's
theory and favors the explanation that these names
were charms. They would save the bearer from the
envy and abuse of the minor supernatural powers;
the demons would be misled by these unattractive
names and so would tolerate these unfortunates and
abstain from attacking them. Whichever explanation
finally wins the support of scholarship, the data them-
selves are evidence of no slight value.

Harnack found in the study of Christian names
valuable evidence as to the attitude of the Christians
toward the pagans. He has shown that the use of
Christian names taken from the Bible does not go
back to the first centuries. Until after the middle of
the third century, Christians made an almost exclu-
sive use of the old pagan names. Among the names
of Christians appearing in inscriptions are the names
of pagan deities; e.g., Heraclius, Mercurius, Aphro-
disius, Dionysius. "The martyrs perished because
they refused to sacrifice to the gods whose names
they bore." This paradox can be explained only by

INTERPRETATION OF THE BIBLE 171

admitting that the general custom of the world in
which the Christians were living proved stronger than
any reflections of their own. The sense of real inner
distinction as a Christian was so strong that it made
the name relatively unimportant. But from A.D. 250
on, as the church conforms more and more to the
world, the use of distinctively Christian names be-
came first preferable and then normative. More than
one force led to this reversal. The changing of names
was a common pagan practice, especially after A.D.
212; the growing importance of infant baptism
favored the use of Christian names; and, as the world
moved into the church, it carried with it a supersti-
tious evaluation of the power of names. Thus a
second paradox confronts the first. As the individual
Christian came to resemble his pagan neighbor more
and more closely, his name proclaimed his Christian-
ity most emphatically. Whereas, in the period when
the individual Christian was set off against the
pattern of the surrounding demonic culture, his name
proclaimed a loyalty to these demonic powers.

Archeological evidence as to the use of Bible
names by Christians clearly reflects also the anti-
Jewish sentiment of the church. This is more evident
in the West than in the East, but it is New Testa-
ment not Old Testament names that are first used
Peter and Paul, for example and Old Testament
names run a bad third to names of local Christian
heroes and saints. If Shakespeare had asked the
Christian archeologist "What's in a name?" the
answer would have been "Plenty!"

172 THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE

From archeology's cornucopia a wealth of evidence
is poured out before the student of the Bible. Today
he includes it with the fruit of other disciplines (liter-
ary and historical) as resource material to be used in
his attempt to master not the literature of the canon
alone, not the literature of the cult alone, but the
whole of the religious life whose richness and vigor
produced the books and gives them meaning.

BIBLIOGRAPHY ON HISTORICAL CRITICISM

GENERAL

BARTON, G. A. Archaeology and the Bible (6th ed.). Philadelphia:
Sunday School Union, 1933.

Valuable for its extensive quotation of illuminating parallels; more
important for Old Testament than for New Testament.

CASE, S. J. The Social Origins of Christianity. Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 1923.

Chapter i, "The 'New' New Testament Study," is especially valuable
here.

EDMAN, I. The Mind of Paul. New York: Holt, 1935.

A very stimulating and readable interpretation of Paul's religion.

GRANT, F. C. (trans.). Form Criticism: A New Method of New
Testament Research (including "The Study of the Synoptic
Gospels," by RUDOLF BULTMANN, and "Primitive Christianity
in the Light of Gospel Research," by KARL KUNDSIN). Chi-
cago: Willett, Clark & Co., 1934.
The simplest introduction to this method by its own exponents.

HERFORD, R. TRAVERS. Judaism in the New Testament Period.
London: Lindsay Press, 1928.

Valuable for its sympathetic appraisal of Pharisaism in the New
Testament period.

LIETZMANN, H. The Beginnings of the Christian Church (trans, by
B. L. WOOLF). New York: Scribner's, 1937.

Clear, vivid, scholarly, and yet concise presentation of Christian his-
tory to A.D. 1 80.

INTERPRETATION OF THE BIBLE 173

LOWRIE, WALTER. Monuments of the Early Church. New York:
Macmillan, 1901 (reprinted 1923).

A good general introduction to Christian archeology, illustrated with
182 figures.

MARUCCHI, ORAZIO. Christian Epigraphy: An Elementary Trea-
tise with a Collection of Ancient Christian Inscriptions Mainly
of Roman Origin (trans, by J. A. WILLIS). Cambridge: At the
University Press, 1912.

A brief, general introduction, followed by a classified collection of
Roman inscriptions, illustrated with thirty plates.

MATHEWS, SHAILER. A History of New Testament Times in
Palestine (rev. ed.). New York: Macmillan, 1933.
A concise but thorough study of the political history of the period.

MATTHEWS, I. G. Old Testament Life and Literature (2d ed.).
New York: Macmillan, 1934.

Life and literature are discussed together in chronological pattern;
a useful manual.

RIDDLE, D. W. Early Christian Life as Reflected in Its Literature.
Chicago: Willett, Clark & Co., 1936.

This volume uses the literature as a source for the study of early Chris-
tian life rather than as an end in itself.

ROBINSON, B. W. The Life of Paul (ad ed.). Chicago: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, 1928.

A useful manual on the events of Paul's life. This second edition has
added a brief chapter on Paul's religion.

ADVANCED

CASE, S. J. The Evolution of Early Christianity. Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 1914.

Significant definition and interpretation of Christianity as a vitally
developmental movement. Valuable bibliographies to 1914.

. Jesus: A New Biography. Chicago: University of Chi-
cago Press, 1927.

An important study, which uses social-historical method. Good bibli-
ography.

. The Social Triumph of the Ancient Church. New York:

Harper & Bros., 1933.

A vivid description of the changes in the church's attitude toward
wealth, social position, learning, and the state.

174 THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE

DEISSMANN, A. St. Paul (new and rev. ed.). London: Hodder &
Stoughton, 1926).
Sympathetic interpretation of St. Paul's religion.

DIBELIUS, M. From Tradition to Gospel (trans, by B. L. WOOLF).
London: I. Nicholson & Watson, 1934.
An exposition of Formgeschichte by one of the masters of the method.

DODD, C. H. The Parables of the Kingdom. New York: Scrib-
ner's, 1936.

Makes use of recent studies and presents valuable interpretation of
the parables.

EASTON, B. S. Christ in the Gospels. New York: Scribner's, 1930.

Thoroughgoing criticism of Formgeschichte and social-historical meth-
od, a comprehensive critical survey of recent study of Jesus and the Gos-
pels, written from a conservative viewpoint.

ENSLIN, M. S. The Ethics of Paul. New York: Harpers, 1930.
The best of recent studies of Pauline ethics.

FOAKES-JACKSON, F. J., AND LAKE, KiRsopp (eds.). The Begin-
nings of Christianity, Part I: "The Acts of the Apostles."
New York: Macmillan. Vol. I (1920), Prolegomena I : Jewish,
Gentile, and Christian Backgrounds; Vol. II (1922), Prolegomena
II: Criticism; Vol. Ill (1926), The Text of Acts (J. H. ROPES);
Vol. IV (1933), English Translation and Commentary (K. LAKE
AND H. J. CADBURY); Vol. V (1933), Additional Notes to the
Commentary (K. LAKE AND H. J. CADBURY [eds.]).

The special studies in the prolegomena and the additional notes give
this work a much broader significance than that of the usual commentary
on Acts. Valuable bibliography.

GRAHAM, W. C., AND MAY, H. G. Culture and Conscience. Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press, 1936.

These collaborators have made valuable use of archeological finds in
presenting the religion of the Hebrews in relation to its environment.

GRANT, F. C. The Economic Background of the Gospels. London:
Oxford University Press, 1926.

A brief presentation of economic data in regard to Palestinian life in
gospel times.

INTERPRETATION OF THE BIBLE 175

HOOKE, S. H. (ed.)- Myth and Ritual: Essays on the Myth and
Ritual of the Hebrews in Relation to the Culture Pattern of the
Ancient East. By A. M. BLACKMAN AND OTHERS. London:
Oxford University Press, 1933.

KLAUSNER, J. Jesus of Nazareth (trans, by H. DANBY). New
York: Macmillan, 1926.
A scholarly study of Jesus from the Jewish viewpoint.

MOORE, G. F. Judaism in the First Centuries of the Christian
Era. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1927-30.

A comprehensive study of Judaism, advancing the thesis that Judaism
is to be defined in terms of the "normative Judaism" of the Pharisees.
Full of valuable information and stimulating discussion.

OESTERLEY, W. O. E., AND ROBINSON, T. H. A History of Israel,
Vol. I: From the Exodus to the Fall of Jerusalem 586 B.C., by
Robinson; Vol. II: From the Fall of Jerusalem 586 B.C. to the
Bar-Kokhba Revolt A. D. 135, by Oesterley. Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1932.
A standard work.

OTTO, RUDOLF. Reich Gottes und Menschensohn. Munich: C. H.
BECK, 1934.

A stimulating religious geschichtliche study, which argues in convinc-
ing fashion that Jesus preached a kingdom that had already dawned
and thought of himself in terms of the Enochic Son of Man.

WILLOUGHBY, H. R. Pagan Regeneration. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1929.

A sympathetic and scholarly study of the experience of religious re-
birth in the pagan world of New Testament times.

GENERAL BIBLIOGRAPHY

The student's attention is drawn to the presence of the special
bibliographies at the end of the chapters. In those lists will be
found introduction to the literature on canon, text, translation,
and interpretation. An attempt was made there to include books '
that would introduce the reader to further literature on the sub-
ject. This is supplemented by listing here some of the periodicals,
dictionaries, and commentaries that will lead the student into
broader areas and make it possible for him to keep abreast of
recent developments.

Of the special works on bibliography itself, the student will
find the following helpful: S. J. Case, J. T. McNeill, W. W.
Sweet, W. Pauck, and M. Spinka, A Bibliographical Guide to the
History of Christianity. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1931). The most inclusive listing of current titles is published in
the Bibliographisches Beiblatt of the Theologische Literaturzeitung.

Four of the leading periodicals which deal with the study of
the Bible are the Journal of Biblical Literature and Exegesis,
Revue biblique, Zeitschrift fur die neutestamentliche Wissen-
schaft, and Zeitschrift fur die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft.

More general in scope of subjects treated, but valuable in the
presentation of significant studies of the Bible, are the Journal
of Religion, the Anglican Theological Review, the Journal of
Theological Studies, the Harvard Theological Review, Church
History, and the American Journal of Semitic Languages and
Literatures. The book-review sections of the journals listed in this
paragraph are of value in keeping the student informed as to new
works; this is the especial merit of the Journal of Theological
Studies. The Harvard Theological Review has no book-review
section but, like most of the others listed here, occasionally pub-
lished lengthy surveys of recent study in some one area. For
current information in the general field of archeology, see the
American Journal of Archeology, the Bulletin and Annual of the
American Schools of Oriental Research, the Palestine Explora-
tion Fund Quarterly Statement.

176

GENERAL BIBLIOGRAPHY 177

In the field of dictionaries, two old publications are of great
value: the eleventh (twelfth or thirteenth) edition of the Encyclo-
paedia Eritannica (1912) for solid factual studies as of that date;
and the five-volume Dictionary of the Bible (1898-1904) of J.
Hastings one-volume edition in 1909. Similar to the Hastings
work is the Encyclopaedia biblica edited by T. K. Cheyne and
A. S. Black in four volumes (1899-1903). Similar in size and solid
value to the Eritannica is the exhaustive study of Christian
archeology edited by Cabrol, Dictionnaire a" archeologie chretienne
et de liturgie, which is still in process of publication.

The student has probably already discovered for himself that
the separate volumes of the great commentary series are not of
uniform quality. The general evaluations given here are not,
therefore, equally applicable to all the works in any series. The
outstanding technical series in English is still the International
Critical Commentary on the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New
Testaments, edited by Driver, Plummer, and Briggs. At the inter-
mediate level there is little to choose between The New Century
Bible, edited by W. F. Adeney for the Oxford University Press,
and The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges, edited in the
Old Testament by A. F. Kirkpatrick and in the New Testament
by R. St. John Parry, for the Cambridge University Press. Both
of these have now passed middle age. In German the Handbuch
zum Neuen Testament, edited by Lietzmann, and the Handbuch
zum Alten Testament, edited by O. Eissfeldt, are the most stimu-
lating and up-to-date series. The MoffatNew Testament Commen-
tary: Based on the New Translation by the Rev. Prof. J. Moffat and
under His Editorship is the best of recent popular commentaries,
although of very uneven quality; the volume on John is one of the
best.

Of the three outstanding one- volume commentaries Peake's,
Gore's, and the Abingdon the Abingdon is the most recent.
It was edited for the Abingdon Press by Eiselen, Lewis, and
Downey, in 1929.

INDEX OF AUTHORS AND SUBJECTS

Abbott-Smith, G 99 Bihlmeyer, K 70

Adeney, W. F .............. 177

Allegorical meaning ....... 108 f.

American Revised Version ... 96
literalism in ........ 81, 83, 87

obscurity in ........... 84, 89

origin of ........... 85 f., 90 f.

American Translation of the
Bible .............. 83, 86, 96

Amos, reception of preaching
of ...................... 4 f .

Anagogical meaning ...... 109 f.

Antiochus Epiphanes ........ 12

Anti-Semitism and manu-
scripts .................. 56

Apostolic authorship ...... 21, 31

Aquila's Version ............ 76

Archeology and the Bible. 164-71
Arnold, W. R .............. 63

Authorship, importance of

Authorship of Hebrews. . . . 132 f.

Bacon, B. W ............... 37

Bardenhewer, ............ 146

Barton, G. A .............. 172

Bauer, H. . . . ............... 99

Bauer, W .................. 100

Bergstrasser, G ............. 99

Bethune-Baker, J. F ........ 119

Bewer, J. A ................ 145

Biblical geography .......... 151

Biblical Greek ............. 91 f.

Bishops' Bible 83

Black, A. S 177

Blass, F 98

Bonnet, M 70

Briggs, C 99, 177

Brightman, E. S 145

Brooke, A. E 69

Brown, F 99

Buhl, F. P. W 36, 66

Bultmann, R 172

Burkhart, B. LeRoy viii

Burton, E. D 98, 145

Cabrol, F 177

Cadbury, H. J 147, 174

Canaanite cult

in conflict with prophets. . 9
in new archeological dis-
coveries 166 f.

Canon

of Alexandria 29 f.

choice of books for 14 f.

closing of Old Testament 1 1 f.

crises and 8 f .

councils and 31 f.

definition of if.

of the Dispersion 28 f.

groups within 19 f.

origin of 6 f .

politics and 1 1 f.

prophecies in the 20 f.

Psalter in the 18 f.

reasons for variations in 24 f.
of Rome 30

179

i8o

THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE

Canons of textual criticism ... 60
Case, S. J.. . vii, 169, 172, 173, 176

Charles, R. H 119, 146

Chesterton, G. K 71

Cheyne, T. K 177

Chrysostom 50

Clement of Rome, the letter of 1 8

Collomp, P 67, 124

Colwell, E. C 101

Concordant Version 86

Conjectural emendation. ... 62 f.
Constan tine and the canon.. . 13

Cook, E. Hampden 97

Covenant Code 8

Cowley, A. E 99

Creation stories 138 f.

Cumont, Franz 168

Dana, H. E 119

Davidson, A. B 98

Deborah, Song of 5

Debrunner, A 98

Decalogue, a ritual 15

Deissmann, A. ... 92, 93, 100, 174

Deuteronomy, canonization of

10, 1 6, 1 8

Dibelius, M 174

Dodd, C. H 174

Dogmas about Scripture 105

Douai Version

nature of 81 f.

origin of 78 f.

Downey, D. G 177

Driver, S. R 99, 177

Dryden 73

Eakin, F 119

Easton, B. S 174

Edman, 1 172

Eiselen, F. C 177

Eissfeldt, 177

English Revised Version. . . 85, 86

Enslin, M. S 37, 174

Epstein, 1 147

Erasmus:

on the Apocalypse 35

editor of Greek New Testa-
ment 64

Esther and the canon 20, 26 f., 33
Ezekiel and the canon 20

Ferrar Fenton's Version 97

Foakes-Jackson, F. J 174

Formgeschichte 159 ff.

Fullerton, K 119

Funk, F. X 70

Gasquet, A 70

Gebhardt, 70

Geden, A. S 101

Genealogical method in tex-
tual criticism 58 f.

Geneva Bible 78

Gesenius, W 99

Gilbert, G. H 119

Ginsburg, C. D 66

Goodenough, E. R 169

Goodspeed, E. J.

37, 62, 70, 86, 95, 96, 1 01, 145

Gordon, A. R 97

Gore, C 177

Gospel parallels 139 f.

Graham, W. C '. . . 174

Grant, F. C 146, 172, 174

Gregory, C. R 67

INDEX OF AUTHORS AND SUBJECTS 181

Hammurabi, code of 8

Harnack, A. von 37j7j *7

Harper, W. R 98

Harris, Rendel 62

Hastings, J 177

Hatch, E 101

Hebrew manuscripts, variants
in 48 f.

Heresies and the canon

10 f., 23, 27

Herford, R. Travers 172

Hernias, Shepherd of 22, 23

Hexapla, the 51 f.

Historical method of inter-
pretation:

historical criticism 1 50 f.

literary criticism I2T f.

Hooke, S. H 175

Hort, F. J. A.

40,62,68,86,97,124

Howard, W. F 98

Hunt, A. S 124

Immersion Versions 76 f.

Interpretation

bibliography on 1 19 f.

historical criticism

bibliography on 172 f.

denned 1 50 f.

present-day emphases

in 152-71

historical method defined. 121
literary criticism

bibliography on 145 f.

defined 126 f.

illustrated

in re authorship. . 132 f.

in re dating 128 f.

in re source analysis

137 f-

the modernizing method of

denned 102 f.

results of 112 f.

types of 108 f.

Irwin, W. A vii

James, M. R 145

Jasher, Book of 6

Jeremiah, reception of his
prophecy 4, 22

Jerome 75 f.

Jesus, definitions of 157 S.

Jewish Version of Old Testa-
ment. 97

Jones, H. S 100

Josiah, King 9

Judas Maccabaeus 12, 26

Kappler, W 70

Karahissar, the Four Gospels
of 60

Kennedy, A. G 95

Kenyon, F 66, 67

King James Version

obscurity in 74, 83, 84

source of 64 f., 85, 90 f., 95

Kirkpatrick, A. F 177

Kittel, G 120

Kittel, R 69

Klausner, J 175

Konig, E 99

Kriiger, G 145

Kundsin, Karl 172

Lagrange, M. J 67

Lake, K 67, 174

Leander, P 99

LeBlant, E 169 f.

Leclercq, H 170

182

THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE

Lee,N.H 77

Legg, S. C. E 68

Lewis, E 177

Lewis, F. G 36

Liddell, H. G 100

Lietzmann, H 172, 177

Lipsius, R. A 70

Loofs, F 120

Lowrie, W 173

Luther 33> 35

Lyonnet, S 67

McFadyen, J. E 98

Machen, J. G 97

McKenzie, R 100

McKnight, G. H 95

McLean, N 69

McNeill, J. T 176

Manasseh, King 9

Mandelkern, S 101

Marcion and the canon. . . 10 f., 27

Marti, K 99

Marucchi, 173

Massoretic Hebrew Text. . 50 f., 65

Mathews, S 173

Matthews, I. G 173

May, H. 174

Mayser, E 98

Meek, T. J 97

Messianic interpretation of

Old Testament 113 f.

Milligan, G. A 96, ico

Miracles, the study of 123 f.

Mithras 6, 168

Mitteis, L 100

Mixture in manuscript texts. 51

Modern-speech translations . 93 f.

Modernizing method of inter-
pretation 102 ff.

Moffatt, J. . . . 86, 95, 96, 146, 177

Mohammed 7

Montanism and the canon ... 23

Moore, E. C 37

Moore, G. F 175

Moulton, J. H 97, 98, 100

Moulton, W. F io"i

Muratorian canon. . . 2, n, 22, 23

Nestle, Eberhard 68, 69

Nestle, Erwin 63, 69

New, Silva 67

Numerology 106 f., no f.

Oesterley, W. O. E 146, 175

Old Testament canon, closing
of 1 1 f.

Origan's Hexapla 51 f.

Ottley, R. R 146

Otto, R 175

Papal encyclical, "Providen-
tissimus Deus" 116

Papyri and the New Testa-
ment 92 f.

Papyri, Beatty 46, 86

Papyrus of John, the Rylands

129 f.

Parry, R. St. John 177

Pauck, W 176

Paul, authority of 3 f .

Peake, A. S 119, 120, 177

Peshitta Version 50

Plummer, A 177

Political history 150

Pope, Alexander 80 .

INDEX OF AUTHORS AND SUBJECTS 183

Postgate, J. P 95

Preisigke, F 100

Price, I. M 66, 96

Prophecy and the canon. ... 21 f.

Protestant confessions and
interpretation 125

Psalter and the canon 18 f.

Quentin, H 70

Radermacher, L 98

Rahlfs, A 66, 69, 70

Ramsay, Wm 169

Ras Shamra tablets 166 f.

Reading in church and canon-
ization 17 f., 32

Redpath, H. A 101

Reims Version

nature of 81 f.

origin of 78 f.

Reuss, E 1 20

Revelation, in the canon. . 17, 34 f.

Riddle, D. W vii, 173

Roberts, C. H 129

Robinson, B. W 173

Robinson, T. H 120,146,175

Ropes, J. H 174

Ryle, H. E 37

Samaritan canon 25 f.

Scofield Reference Bible 108

Scott, E. F 145

Scott, R 100

Seisenberger, M 1 20

Septuagint Version

mistranslations in 81, 88 f.

origin of 74 f.

recent use of 87

rivalry over 76

Sledd, Andrew 36

Smith, H 120

Smith, H. P 120

Smith, J. M. P 96, 97, 98

Smyth, J. Paterson .... 36, 66, 96

Soden, H. von 68, 88

Souter, A 100

Spenser, E 73

Spinka, M 176

Spiritual meaning in

Spurious passages 162 f.

Steadman, J. M viii

Strack, H. L 146

Sweet, W. W 176

Synoptic problem 139 f.

Targumic interpretation. . . 112 f.

Textual criticism

achievements of 64 f.

bibliography on 66 f.

intentional changes 53 f.

materials of . . 40 f.

methods of 57 f.

standard editions 49 f.

unintentional changes in

MSS 45 f.

Tiqqune sopherim 55

Tischendorf, C. E.. . 65, 68, 70, 85

Translation

bibliography on 95 f.

definition of 79 f.

difficulties in 87 f.

progress in 90 f.

reasons for 71 f.

text and 84 f.

Trattner, E. R 1 20

Trent, Council of 36, 78

Triumphal Entry in Clement
of Alexandria 44

1 84

THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE

Tropology 109 f.

Twentieth Century New
Testament 86, 97

Vaganay, L 67

Vaticanus, codex 47

Vulgate, Latin 49, 50, 75 f., 78, 91

Washington Gospels 60

Waterman, L 97

Weir, T. H 66

Wesley, John 71

Westcott, B. F. 37,68,86,97,124

Westminster Version 86

Weymouth's translation. . . 86, 97

White, H.I 69

Wilcken, U 100

Wildeboer, G. . . . . 37

Willoughby, H. R.. . . vii, 168, 175

Winter, J. G 100

Wylie, Elinor 138

Wordsworth, 1 69

v

Zahn, T 70

Zeitlin, S 37

INDEX OF PASSAGES CITED

Genesis:

chap, i ................. no

1:12:3 ............... J 38

2:4 f- ................ 138 f.

chap, xiv ........... io6 } 131

15:2-3 .................. I0 7

15:6 ................... 109

18:22 .................. 55

Exodus:

20:23 23:19 ........... 8

20:22; 23:20, 21 ......... 113

23:19 .................. 167

chap, xxxiv ............. 15

34:26 .................. 167

Deuteronomy:

14:21 .................. 167

21:4 ................... 74

Judges:

chap. 5 ................. 5

5:8-9 .................. 112

chap. 18 ................ 131

I Sam. 14:18 .............. 63

I Chron. chap, n . . . ....... 48

Psalms:

45:5 ................... 83

95:io .................. 54

119:148 ................ 74

133 .................... IJ 5

Prov. 31 : 10 ................ 74

Eccles. 12: n .............. 83

Isaiah:

6:1 ff. .................. 131

7:i4 ................... 76

9:3 ............. ...... .- 63

chaps. 40 ff. ............ 135

Jeremiah:

2:23 ................... 89

chap. 36 ................ 4

Ezek. 38:2-3 .............. 108

Amos 9: 8^-1 5 .............. 163

Hab. 1:12 ................. 55

Zech. 9:9 .................. 127

Matthew:

1:21 ................... 56

2:6 .................... 63

3:7-! ................. H2

7:7 .................... 54

9 : 14-17 .............. 140 f.

12:39 .................. 109

15:10-20 ............... 161

16:2-3 ................. 87

21:6-7 ................. 127

21:9 ................... 44

21:15 .................. 44

24:37 .................. 109

25:33 ................ ' 45

26 : 27 .................. 84

Mark:

1:1 .................... 87

1:2 .................... 54

1:12-13 ................ 61

2:18-22 .............. 140 f.

4:24 ................... 53

7:14-23 ................ 161

11:26 ................. 54 f.

13:22 .................. 55

16:9-20 ................ 87

Luke:

3:7-9 .................. 142

5:33-39 .............. 14 f-

23:32 .................. 56

185

i86

THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE

John:

1:32,33 ................ 54

I7:i5 .................. 47

Romans:
i:28f.

2:11

2:14-16

4:23

5514
12:8

82
.-. . . 82

82
109

82
46

Gal. 4:21-31 ............... 112

Eph. 1:3-14 ............... 81

Titus 3:1 .................. 82

Philem. 6 .................. 82

Hebrews:

2:3-4 ............. - 134 f-

11:21

88

I Peter:

3:19 62

3:20 109

Rev. 13:18. 117

Barnabas ix. 8-9 107 f.

Clement of Alexandria In-
structor 1.5 44

Eusebius Church History iii. 1 6 1 8
Hamlet II, 2 ^73

Justin Dialogue with Trypho:

Ixxv. 1 113

Ixxxvi 113

Leo XIII's encyclical, "Pro-

videntissimus Deus" 116

Mishna, Megilla iv. 4 32

Muratorian canon 22

Pope, Iliad, 24 80

Spenser, Epithalamion, 1. 148. 73

PRINTED I
IN U-S-A-J

BS

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C66

cop.2

Colwell

Study of the Bible

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UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO