1 27 543
VOLUME ONE
The Holy
Scriptures
A Survey
ROBERT C. DENTAN
With the assistance of the Authors' Committee
of the Department of Christian Education of
The Protestant Episcopal Church
THE SEABURY PRESS
NEW YORK
CONTENTS
Foreword i
PART I INTRODUCTION
ONE The Approach to the Bible 5
PART II THE OLD TESTAMENT
TWO Historical Books: I How Israel Became a
Nation 27
THREE Historical Books: II The Hebrew Kingdoms 48
FOUR Historical Books: III Exile and Return 61
FIVE Prophetic Books: Proclamation o God's
Justice and Mercy 77
six Poetical and Wisdom Books: Meditations
on God and Life 93
SEVEN Religious Faith and Practice in the Old
Testament 100
PART III THE NEW TESTAMENT
EIGHT The Four Gospels: Records of Jesus' Earthly
Life 119
NINE The Acts: How the Church Spread from
Jerusalem to Rome 150
TEN The Epistles: Life in the New Testament
Church 159
PART IV CONCLUSION
ELEVEN Christ the Word 185
Chronological Table of Biblical Literature 188
About the Author 190
f or Reference 191
Foreword
This book is the first volume of a series called The
Church's Teaching, prepared for use in the Episcopal
Church. While the succeeding volumes were being pro-
duced, this first volume was reprinted nine times and con-
tinues to be the best seller of the series.
No volume in this series is intended to be used as a
textbook for a Church School course. Each volume is de-
signed for use by older students and adults, both in general
reading and in adult study groups. All six volumes will
find their primary place as resource books in relation to
the total teaching program of the Church. Every course of
study for children and adults will lean upon these six
works for the knowledge of our common heritage. The
popularity and usefulness of each of the volumes as gen-
eral books for all Episcopalians has already been attested
by their immense sales. Each volume in the series should
find its way ultimately into every home in the Church.
The Department of Christian Education and the Church
as a whole are grateful not only to Dr. Dentan for this
basic book on the Bible, but also to the Authors' Commit-
tee which counseled with him, and to the scores of readers
who examined the manuscript originally and assisted in
the production of a book which has received general ac-
claim.
DAVID R. HUNTER
JOHN HEUSS
September,
PART ONE
Introduction
CHAPTER
ONE
The Approach to the Bible
.T IS the conviction of Christians that God
revealed Himself in history. The Bible is the record
of that revelation. It is not primarily a book about men,
but about God; its chief value is not that it contains great
literature, but that it shows us what God is like and what
God has done.
THE BIBLE AS THE REVELATION OF GOD
THE God whom the Bible reveals is not an impersonal
force, not a vague, remote Absolute whom we might call
the Supreme Being, not a mere law of nature, like the
principle of gravitation. He is a personal God, One who
loves, plans, creates, and reveals Himself. This does not
mean that God has a physical body; nor does it mean that
His will and emotions and plans are always changing like
those of human personalities. No words used to describe
human personality can have quite the same sense when ap-
plied to God. God is infinite and His personality is not
changeable, as our limited human personalities are; His
plans and purposes are eternal and His love is unchanging
and unlimited. The God of the Bible is personal because
persons, beings who can think, will, create, and love, are
the highest things we know in all creation, and God must
be at least as great as the greatest things which He has
made. His nature must somehow include all those qualities
which go to make human personality the noblest and
most valuable thing we know.
It is important to understand this clearly because God
Himself is the principal character in the Bible story, and
all through the Bible He is revealed as acting like a person.
He is not abstract and shadowy, but a living God who
thinks, speaks, and acts. He made the world by the decree
of His Will and has a plan for that world and has revealed
His plan to His creatures. The Bible pictures the personal
activity of God so vividly that it often seems to make Him
act exactly as human beings do. It sometimes speaks of
Him as having arms and hands and fingers. It even speaks
of God repenting of what He has done. Such expressions
are not to be taken literally, but are simply vivid ways of
making us realize that God is intensely real and that our
relationship with Him is not with some ill-defined idea
in our own minds nor with some force of nature, but is
the relationship of persons with a Person. The God of the
Bible is not an It to be impersonally discussed; He is a
Thou, who at every point confronts us with an invitation
to believe and a command to obey. 1
i The Christian doctrine of God is discussed at greater length in another
volume of this series.
HOW GOD REVEALS HIMSELF
BECAUSE God is personal and has made us "in His image'*
(Genesis 1:26) to be His children, He desires to reveal
Himself to us in order that we may know and love Him,
For those whose minds and hearts are prepared to receive
it, the revelation of God is unmistakable. It takes place in
three general ways.
First of all, God reveals Himself in Nature, not because
Nature is the same thing as God, but because God created
and controls it. From Nature one can learn that God
exists, and, since Nature was created by God, it shows
something of the character of its Creator. In the beauty
and orderliness and dependability of the natural world
we can see reflected the beauty and order and depend-
ability of God.
In the second place, God reveals Himself in certain
great acts in History. As Christians, we are chiefly con-
cerned with this revelation, since it is the belief that God
has manifested Himself in history which distinguishes the
Christian and Jewish religions from most other religions.
In the third place, God reveals Himself through the
inspired insights of great men whom we call Prophets.
This is really just another side of God's revelation in his-
tory, because we should not understand the meaning of
sacred history if there were no one capable of explaining
it. Ordinary men look at the events of history and see in
them only the operation of chance or of mechanistic laws;
the prophet looks at these same events and sees in them
the unfolding of God's eternal purpose. The prophet
speaks, of course, primarily, to his own contemporaries,
but because he deals with eternal things his message has
enduring significance. It is because of the great prophetic
personalities of the Old and New Testaments that we are
able today to understand the meaning of the story which
the Bible tells. It should be understood, of course, that
the word prophet used in this sense is not limited to
those who are technically called prophets; it includes all
great religious teachers who help men better to understand
the wonderful works of God.
GOD'S SPECIAL REVELATION IN THE BIBLE
IN some sense, no doubt, God reveals Himself in all his-
tory, but the Bible is the story of a particular section of
history in which God chose to make Himself known in an
unmistakable way. This is the history of Israel: the Old
Israel of the Hebrew nation and the New Israel of the
Christian Church. In this history, we see how God chose
one nation to be the agent of His revelation to all men
everywhere. We see how God made Himself known to this
nation by redeeming them out of the land of Egypt; how
He guided and moulded them through the centuries that
followed; and finally, how He finished His work of revela-
tion by another great redeeming act, the victory of Christ
over sin and death, and created the Church to proclaim
the Good News to all humanity.
In the Bible we see God actually at work, creating,
guiding, and redeeming. When we read the Bible, it is not
as though we were in the classroom, listening to one
teacher after another tell us things about God. It is rather
as though we were in a theater and were seeing God en-
gaged in the performance of His mighty acts. The drama
of the redemption of mankind is a long and magnificent
8
one and the various chapters of Biblical history are the
acts of the play. But we must always remember that, even
though we call it a drama, it is a drama that really hap-
pened. In all essential details, the history which is told in
the Bible is true history.
THE BIBLE AS THE WORD OF GOD
SINCE the Bible is the record of how God revealed Himself
to mankind, it is properly called the Word of God. This
is clear when we understand that here Word simply means
communication or message. When we want to communi-
cate our thoughts to others, we make use of words to do
so. Sometimes we use the expression "word" in the singular
to mean a sentence or a whole message, as when we say,
"His last word to me was such and such," meaning some-
one's last connected thoughts. It is in this sense that the
Bible is God's Word to man. In the Bible, we find God's
own message about Himself. The Bible story contains that
communication of the truth about Himself and about His
purposes for the world which God desired mankind to
have.
It is important to notice that when we say the Bible is
the Word of God, we do not mean that it is so many dif-
ferent words of God, as though every separate word or
verse, taken by itself, had God for its author. There is
much in the Bible which clearly refers only to particular
times or situations in the past. There is much that was true
and valid for certain stages in the development of man's
understanding, but is no longer valid once men have
passed beyond that stage. There is much that is included
in the Bible only because it helps us to understand the
progress of the story. Some passages of Scripture are hard
to interpret and some even offend our sense of Christian
morality. But we are not intended to read the Bible in
piecemeal fashion, interpreting every verse and chapter
by itself. Many serious doctrinal and moral errors have
arisen because people have drawn far-reaching conclusions
from particular chapters or verses of the Bible without
trying to see how that particular fragment fits into the
larger pattern. The particular words must be seen in the
light of the Word as a whole.
From the Bible story as a whole we learn: what God is
like; whence man came; what God intended man to be;
how man, by rejecting God's plan and choosing his own,
has brought himself to his present tragic state; and how
God Himself has provided the means of release which
make it possible for men to realize the glorious destiny
of divine sonship for which they were created. This story,
in all its sweep and grandeur, is God's Word to man.
THE INSPIRATION OF THE BIBLE
EVERYONE would agree that the Bible is an inspired book,
but not all would agree as to what inspired means. In
common speech, the word is often used in quite loose
fashion to mean something that is extraordinarily fine,
as when we say that Shakespeare is an inspired poet. Some
would explain the doctrine of the inspiration of the Bible
as nothing more than an extension of this use of the term.
The Bible, they would say, is inspired in the same sense in
which all great literature is inspired, only more so. When
the Church, however, uses the term she means something
much more than this. She means that, in some quite defi-
10
nite and unique way, the Bible is the work of God the
Holy Spirit.
The Bible is inspired, first of all, because it has an in-
spired story to tell. It is a unique story which is not just
the history of a particular nation or an interesting group
of people, but a story in which God is the principal actor.
Behind the whole great drama with its colorful events and
its richly human characters, we see God directing its course
and shaping the end toward which it moves.
But it is also the Church's faith that God, who presides
over the story, presided also in some way over the writing
down of the story, so that the essential meaning was not
distorted by human misunderstanding and thus lost to fu-
ture generations. God the Holy Spirit has watched over
the growth and preservation of this book so that we can
trust it as a reliable record of what God has done for us,
and can accept its general view of the world as a depend-
able basis for our own faith and conduct.
This does not mean that we are bound to believe that
every single word and verse in the Bible has been dictated
by God and is therefore unfailingly true (the doctrine
commonly called verbal infallibility). There are many
things in the Bible which would make it difficult to hold
this view: contradictions, incidental errors of fact, and
ideas which are clearly of human origin. More important
than these considerations, however, is the fact that such
a view would make the Bible an unreal, almost magical
book, and would seem to represent God as acting in a way
which is unlike the way in which He works elsewhere.
In the Bible story, we find God always working through
men, real, human, fallible men like ourselves. The great
11
characters of the Biblical drama are warm, human, and
lovable. The Bible never hesitates to show their faults as
well as their Virtues. Even in the stupendous event of the
Incarnation, which is the central event of Scripture and of
all history, God did not choose to reveal Himself through a
demigod, one far removed from our common humanity,
but through One who was perfectly Man, "in all things
. . . made like unto his brethren" (Hebrews 2:17). So when
God gave us the Bible and made use of human beings as
its authors, we should not expect that He would take
away their natural human qualities from them: their
special interests, their own style of writing, even their ca-
pacity to make mistakes. God did not overpower their
minds and hands so that they ceased to be creative writers
and became, instead, merely His secretaries. The work
of inspiration was rather that of a gentle influence which
guided their work as a whole and made sure that the total
picture was not false or distorted and that nothing essen-
tial was omitted.
THE UNITY OF THE BIBLE
THE Bible is divided into two parts, the Old and the New
Testaments, and each part is essential for the Christian
Faith. Sometimes one part has been overemphasized at
the expense of the other. Some of our religious ancestors
were inclined to depend too much upon the Old Testa-
ment and to slight the distinctive teaching of the New.
Today, we are tempted to do the opposite and think of
the Old Testament as merely a Jewish book which is not
really necessary for Christians. There are those who set the
Old Testament against the New as though it taught a
12
dreadful kind of religion from which we have now been
happily delivered. This is not the teaching of the New
Testament itself nor has such a view ever been accepted by
the Church.
According to the Christian view, the Bible is a single,
organic whole which, though it is composed of many
books by many authors, has a single story to tell. It is like a
play in two great acts, neither of which can be understood
without the other. If one read the Old Testament without
going on to the New, he would miss the climax of the
drama and the point of the whole story, since the New
Testament contains the necessary conclusion of the story
which the Old Testament starts out to tell. On the other
hand, to read the New Testament without the Old would
be like trying to understand the last chapter of a long
novel without bothering to read the earlier pan of the
book, which sets the scene, introduces the characters, and
describes the basic conflicts which are to be resolved.
THE BACKGROUND OF OLD TESTAMENT HISTORY
SINCE the chief danger today is & neglect of the Old Testa-
ment, it is necessary to set forth in somewhat fuller detail
the reasons for including it among the things about which
a Christian should know "to his soul's health." There are
two directions in which an understanding of the Old Tes-
tament is especially required for an understanding of the
New.
First of all one must know the general outline of Old
Testament history in order to understand the historical
situation which is pictured in the New Testament, and the
allusions to that history which the New Testament writers
13
make on nearly every page. Just as one could not hope to
understand the American people without knowing in gen-
eral what their history has been from the founding of the
colonies down to the present, so one cannot hope to un-
derstand the Jews, from among whom Jesus came and to
whom He addressed His message, unless one has some
knowledge of the long history which formed their char-
acter and created their peculiar problems. From one point
of view, the events related in the New Testament may
really be considered the last chapters in the heroic story
of ancient Israel. These events are the high point of that
story: the one great goal toward which it had really been
moving from the very first.
If we look at the Gospel of St. Matthew, we discover a
striking example of this in the very first chapter. More
than half the chapter is merely a list of names taken from
the Old Testament, names which would be meaningless
to a person unfamiliar with Old Testament history. It
seems a dull way to begin a book, but the writer evidently
felt that it was necessary right at the outset to show Jesus
Christ in His proper place as the end and fulfilment of the
whole long history which had gone before.
The other New Testament writers had a similar point
of view. There is hardly a page of the New Testament that
does not have something to say about the men or events
of the Old. The Old Testament was the sacred book of
Jesus and Paul and the other men of New Testament
times, the only Bible they knew. They constantly make
casual references to Abraham, Moses, David, and the
prophets and do not trouble to explain these things in
detail, because they rightly assumed that the people to
whom they were speaking already had a thorough knowl-
edge of the Old Testament story. For this reason, i for
no other, we can hardly hope to understand their mes-
sage unless we also know that story.
THE BACKGROUND OF OU> TESTAMENT IDEAS
IN addition to the general background of Old Testament
history which the New Testament assumes that we know,
there is also a great background of concepts, ideas, and at-
titudes with which the New Testament writers take it for
granted that we are familiar. There are many subjects on
which the New Testament has little to say, not because it
is indifferent to them, but because it assumes that Chris-
tians already will be thoroughly acquainted with the
thought of the Old Testament and will have absorbed such
ideas there.
In the New Testament, for example, there is surpris-
ingly little of what is called the doctrine of God. The New
Testament assumes that the Christian will know what
God is like from reading the Old Testament. There he
will learn:
that God is personal
that He is the Creator
that He loves the world which He has created
that He has a plan for mankind
that He rules over the forces of history
that He demands justice and brotherhood among His
children
that He punishes wickedness and rewards goodness
that He is a God who saves and redeems.
All these things must first be understood before we can
15
understand the special features which the New Testament
has to add to that general picture.
Even what is often regarded as the most character-
istic New Testament idea about God, that He is a Father,
is rooted in the Old Testament and is clearly suggested in
the teaching of such prophets as Hosea, Jeremiah, and
Malachi. What is remarkable in the New Testament is
not the doctrine itself, but the new emphasis which is
placed upon it.
To take another example, the New Testament has little
to say about God's demands for justice and brotherhood
in social relationships. This does not mean that the New
Testament writers were not interested in such things,
but that they took it for granted that their readers were
already familiar with the pronouncements of the Hebrew
prophets on this subject.
One of the later chapters of this book, Religious Faith
and Practice in the Old Testament (pages 100-116), de-
scribes the most important of these Old Testament ideas
which the New Testament presupposes and without which
the New Testament cannot really be understood.
NEW TESTAMENT ESSENTIAL TO UNDERSTANDING OLD
JUST as the Old Testament is necessary for understanding
the New, so, for Christians, the New Testament gives the
necessary key for understanding the Old. When one comes
to the end of any story, things which were said or done
in earlier episodes take on a depth of meaning which
they did not have when the reader first encountered them.
When one reads through any book a second time, if the
book is worth reading, one sees an inner relationship be-
16
tween seemingly disconnected events and subtle shades of
meaning in speeches made by the characters which one
did not see at first reading. The story has a new logic and
the meaning of particular events is illuminated by the
new-found logic of the whole. When we, as Christians,
use the Old Testament in our worship and in our medita-
tion, there is hardly a passage in it which does not take
on some new meaning because we know that God's per-
fect revelation in Christ is the end of the story. The great
poetry of the Psalms, the work of the prophets, the tales
told of the heroes of Israel, the ethical ideals of Israel's
teachers, all receive a new illumination when seen in the
light of Christian experience. The Christian can never be
content merely to interpret the Old Testament in the
light of the times in which it was written. For him, it is a
Christian book and its true significance is disclosed only
when it is bound up in a single volume with the New
Testament and interpreted in the light of the final and
perfect revealing act of God which the New Testament
describes. This inner and essential relationship between
the two Testaments is what we mean by the unity of
Bible.
THE OLD TESTAMENT: PREPARATION FOR THE GOSPEL
THE Old Testament may be defined, from a purely hu-
man and objective point of view, as the literature of
ancient Israel. In one of the popular editions of the
classics, the volumes containing the Old Testament are
called Ancient Hebrew Literature. But even from this
standpoint it differs from other collections of literature
coming down from antiquity, since Israel was different
from all other ancient peoples. The ancient Hebrews had
a concern for God which sets them apart from the rest
of the ancient world and their literature is marked by an
almost exclusive preoccupation with religious ideas and
behavior.
For Christian believers, this complete absorption of the
writers of Israel in God and in His plan for man is some-
thing more than national or racial genius. It is evidence
of the election (that is, the Divine Choice) of Israel to ful-
fil a high and unique destiny. When God began the great
work of redeeming His Creation He chose for Himself, as
the Bible says, "a peculiar people" who were to be His
servants and messengers. However, as with any servants,
there had to be a period of preparation, and the Old Testa-
ment is the story of this preparatory stage.
There were certain attitudes which the people of Israel
had to acquire; certain ideas of God and Man which had
to be deeply impressed upon them. Perhaps most impor-
tant of all, they had to learn the profound meaning of hu-
man sin and man's inability to realize his great possibili-
ties and to attain his deepest desires by his own efforts. So
Old Testament history is largely the story of a deepening
sense of national frustration and tragedy. Through the
teaching of the great prophets the people of Israel were
brought to understand the meaning of their own, and of
all, tragedy. The spiritual leaders of the nation were
brought to a point where they realized that the hope o
man was not in himself, but in God. They came really to
understand that, apart from God's willingness to aid and
lift him out of the mire in which he is sunk, man's cause
is hopeless. .
18
The people of Israel were reminded constantly that
God once had saved them out of the dark bondage of
Egypt. Later they experienced a similar deliverance from
the Babylonian exile. Those who understood the mean-
ing of these things could never really doubt either God's
power or His willingness to save. What God had done in
the past, they were sure He would do again. So the Old
Testament closes in a mood of eager expectation, a belief
that God would soon intervene once more to save His
people (Isaiah 60:1-3; Malachi 3:1). There were some even
who saw that what was needed was not merely deliverance
from external bondage, but from sin, which was the real
root of their trouble (Psalm 130:8; Isaiah 53:4-5). This
new great act of God, they believed, would be the last, for
by it God would establish His eternal Kingdom (Daniel
7:27).
The New Testament begins just where the Old Testa-
ment leaves off. In the first chapter of the Gospel of St,
Mark, the first of the gospels to be written, it says, Jesus
came into Galilee, preaching the gospel of the kingdom of
God and saying, "The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of
God is at hand." The Old Testament looks forward to a
redemption yet to come; the New Testament looks back
on a redemption already accomplished.
The Old Testament, then, is the story of the first long
stage in the history of Israel, the people of God. In its first
stage, Israel was a nation and membership in it was de-
termined chiefly by the accident of birth. This was the
only kind of spiritual community which could have been
established under the conditions of the ancient Semitic
world. With the beginning of the New Testament period,
19
however, the old, national Israel had fulfilled its mission.
Humanity was ready for a great new, creative movement
in the drama of redemption. This did not mean that Israel
was eliminated or that the idea of a holy nation was no
longer important. It was still God's purpose to do His
work through a spiritual community, a society, a brother-
hood, which should be everywhere in the world, yet not
of the world; a leaven which should gradually permeate
the life of humanity. So out of the Old Israel and contin-
uous with it, there grew the New Israel, the Christian
Church. This body was no longer restricted in member-
ship by requirements of race and nation, but was freely
open to all: to Greek and Jew, to barbarian and Scythian,
to slave and free citizen (Colossians 3:11).
In the New Testament and the history of the Church
we continue to read the history of Israel, for the idea of
the Church as the New Israel is basic to any understand-
ing of what the Church claims to be. The Old Testament
is not, therefore, just the history of some curious, ancient
people who somehow provided the historical and physical
environment in which our Lord and his apostles worked.
It is our own history, the first chapter in the story of that
great spiritual and redemptive movement which began
with the Exodus from Egypt and which continues to the
present day. We are a part of that movement.
THE APOCRYPHA: A NECESSARY LINK
BETWEEN the Old and New Testaments, many Bibles do,
and all Bibles should, contain a section called The Apocry-
pha. These are books which appear only in the Greek ver-
sion of the Old Testament, the Septuagint, and not in the
20
Hebrew. They, therefore, were regarded by the Jews of
Palestine as of inferior worth and not treated as a part of
Holy Scripture.
The Christian Church has not been entirely agreed as
to what the status of these books should be. Some, notably
the Roman Catholics, regard them as fully canonical, while
others reject them entirely. The position of the Episcopal
Church (as expressed in the sixth of the Articles of Re-
ligion) is that they are good and useful books, which ought
to be read, but which are not to be used to prove any point
of doctrine. This is certainly a sane and reasonable point
of view. While none of these books reaches the heights
which the Old Testament reaches at its greatest, yet the
Apocrypha contains fascinating and sometimes inspiring
stories like those of Tobit and Judith, excellent moral
and ethical literature such as Ecclesiasticus, significant
theological literature like the Wisdom of Solomon, and
important history such as First Maccabees. The Apocry-
phal literature is extremely important for helping to un-
derstand the historical and religious developments which
took place between the Testaments.
THE NEW TESTAMENT: PROCLAMATION OF THE GOSPEL
LIKE the Old Testament, the New is a collection of writ-
ings of different types and of different degrees of interest
and value. It is not a systematic treatise on Christian doc-
trine. It is a very much smaller book and less complex
than the Old Testament; it covers a much smaller period
of time, and contains a smaller variety of literary types.
Its books fall into four divisions: accounts of the life of
Jesus (the Gospels), the early history of the apostolic
21
Church (Acts), letters of St. Paul and other great figures
of the apostolic age (the Epistles), and an apocalypse (Rev-
elation). These books were not written originally with
the intention of making them pan of a new Christian
scripture, since the Christian Church already had what it
considered a sufficient scripture in the Old Testament.
They were intended to meet the needs of particular times
and places such, for example, as:
The need to preserve in written form the life and
teachings of Jesus when the age of the eye-witnesses
began to draw to a close.
The need to deal with situations which arose in the
new churches which had been founded in Galatia,
Corinth, Colossae, etc.
The need to give some guidance for the crisis cre-
ated by the beginning of persecution.
These writings were all intended for specific situations
and can be understood properly only if those situations
are kept in mind.
In the early ages of the Church, there were many such
writings, but with the rise of heresy (false and dangerous
beliefs), it became necessary to make a selection among
them to safeguard the faith. The books now included in
the New Testament were finally recognized by general
agreement within the Church as safe and trustworthy ac-
counts of the faith of Christian believers during the first
generation. In this way, the Church eventually developed
a body of Christian scriptures roughly parallel to the older
scriptures. They were given the name New Testament
since they describe the means by which God's New Cov-
enant was established, and the way in which it was under*
22
stood by the generation which stood closest to the events.
The books of the New Testament were written under
the over-ruling influence of God's Holy Spirit and pro-
vide a reliable standard for Christian belief and practice.
Once again it must be emphasized that we are not to in-
terpret individual passages by themselves, torn out of their
context, nor may we just select certain passages we like
and ignore others. That which is important in the New
Testament is not the beauty or historical accuracy of cer-
tain particular verses or chapters, but the whole faith to
which the whole New Testament bears witness.
Underlying all the obvious differences in point o view
in the different books, the New Testament bears unified
witness to one great fact, that God the Son has completed
the great work of revelation and redemption, and that
men are saved only as they joyfully accept what God has
done. This message is called the Gospel (Good News).
While there always will be considerable discussion as to
the value of this or that particular passage, or the histori-
cal factuality of some particular incident, there can be no
doubt as to the nature of the faith which the whole New
Testament affirms, nor need there be any doubt as to the
correctness in all essential matters of the story which it
tells.
THE DEVOTIONAL USE OF THE BIBLE
As we turn from considering these basic facts about the
Bible and begin to study the Bible itself, it is important
to remember that it is not merely a source of sacred his-
tory and of inspired ideas, for this would make it just a
record of God's revelation in the past. This might lead us
23
to think that the Word of God is a dead thing, something
once spoken but now preserved in fossil form within the
covers of a book. But God's Word is a living Word and
Christian people have always believed that God makes use
of the Bible to speak directly to the heart and conscience
of the individual in every age. The Bible is a sacramental
thing by means of which God gives His Word to everyone
who comes to it in a spirit of prayer and humility. For
the Christian it is never enough to read the Bible as great
literature or even as the record of dramatic and significant
events of the past. He must also read the Bible in a devo-
tional way, asking for the guidance of God's Holy Spirit
and expecting that, from time to time, he will hear God
speaking from its pages In words clearly addressed to his
own needs. When we read the Bible in this fashion, it
takes on a new meaning. It becomes a living, present-day
revelation: God's word to us.
Prepare Ye
the Way
of the Lord
PART TWO
The Old Testament
CHAPTER
TWO
Historical Books: /. How
Israel Became a Nation
T
JLHE Old Testament is a library rather
than a book. It consists o thirty-nine books representing a
great variety of literary types. In English Bibles, these are
arranged in three main divisions: History (Genesis-Esther),
Poetry (Job-Song of Solomon) and Prophecy (Isaiah-Mala-
chi). It is convenient to study the contents of the books
under these headings, although we should remember that
the division is somewhat artificial and does not correspond
to that of the Hebrew Bible, which arranges them in a
different order under the three headings: Law, Prophets,
and Writings.
It is also important to remember that only a very few
of the smaller books of the Old Testament came into ex-
istence in the fashion of modern books. Most of them are
not the work of an individual author who sat down and
wrote the entire book in the space of a few weeks or
months. They are, rather, the result of a long process of
27
growth and accumulation and have come to their present
form through the work of several successive generations
of editors. Practically speaking, they are all anonymous.
Even those books which have the name of a particular
person attached to them are so-called simply for conveni-
ence, sometimes because that person was one of the prin-
cipal actors in the story (e.g. Samuel or Ezra), sometimes
because his work was the nucleus around which the book
grew (e.g. Isaiah), sometimes because tradition liked to at-
tribute certain classes of writing to certain great men of
the past (e.g. Proverbs to Solomon; Psalms to David).
THE NATURE OF THE HISTORICAL BOOKS
THE historical books in their present form were com-
posed by editors who lived in the sixth century B.C. or
later. They used ancient documents and fragments which
had been handed down to them as a part of the precious
traditions of the nation and wove them into a single
straight-forward narrative. Since they were anxious to use
as much as possible of this old tradition, they did not hesi-
tate to include even different accounts of the same event.
Thus we frequently discover the strange fact that a single
story will be told more than once. It is this which explains
the contradictions and inconsistencies which occasionally
occur in the Bible story. The editors could easily have re-
moved these if they had desired to do so, but they had a
great reverence for the material in its original form and
preferred to let the older documents speak for themselves,
even though their witness was sometimes a bit confusing.
We are grateful for this habit of the Hebrew historians,
because it means that when we read the books of the Old
28
Testament, we are not simply seeing ancient history as it
appeared to the men of the sixth century, but actually
have before us the oldest historical records of the Hebrew
people. By using a certain amount of ingenuity, it is pos-
sible to separate out the various materials which the edi-
tors have used and thus to study directly these old and
very exciting documents.
The first five books of the Old Testament stand in a
special class and are called collectively the Pentateuch,
meaning the Five Books. These are the books which the
Jews called the Law and regarded as the most sacred part
of the Bible. They tell the story of the Hebrew people
down through the giving of the Law to Moses upon Mount
Sinai and the approach of the children of Israel to the
borders of the Promised Land. Scholars have succeeded in
discovering at least four different older documents which
were woven together to form these books and call them
by the somewhat mysterious symbols J, E, D, and P. 1 We
shall not be much concerned with these in our present
discussion, but the reader should at least realize when he
comes across these symbols, that they actually stand for
four originally independent books now fused into one con-
secutive story. In the English Bible the books of the Penta-
teuch are all called Books of Moses, but the tradition that
Moses wrote them is a comparatively late one and the
books themselves make no such claim. Moses is the hero
rather than the author, and does indeed occupy the center
iThe oldest of these documents (about 850 B.C.), J, is so called be-
cause it prefers the name Jehovah or Jahweh (also spelt Yahweh) for
God; the E document (about 750 B.C.) prefers the name Elohim (simply
God in English). D stands for Deuteronomy (621 B.C.) and P for the
priestly document, the latest of them all.
29
of the stage from the beginning of the book of Exodus
through Deuteronomy.
HOW THE WORLD BEGAN
IT is proper that the whole Bible should begin with a
book called Genesis since the word genesis means begin-
ning and this is the book which contains the ancient
Hebrew stories about the beginnings of everything: the
physical world, men, nations, languages, sin, suffering, and
death. It is not a book of science, but a book of religion.
We do not turn to it to learn what we can learn much bet-
ter from scientific textbooks on geology or biology. The ac-
count of the origin of things which we find in this book is
simply what the ancient Hebrews believed to be true ac-
cording to the best knowledge of their time. The things
with which Genesis has to do are really all things which
took place long before real history existed and the stories
are for the most part simply traditional tales which are
not to be understood as reports of things that actually
happened just so. That which is of permanent signifi-
cance in this book is not its science or its history, but the
amazing religious insights which it shows. No other
people in the world have produced a book which can com-
pare with this in its view of the meaning of human life.
Although it is written for the most pan in prose, it is, in a
real sense, a book of poetry, a great epic of creation, and,
in order to understand it, we must approach it from a
poetic and imaginative point of view.
At the head of the book stand the solemn words In the
beginning God created the heaven and the earth, and
these words sum up the religious meaning of the whole
30
account of the physical creation which follows. To what-
ever conclusion science may come in any age as to how the
physical universe began and how m?ry arose within it (and
we must never forget that what we regard as scientific fact
today may well be regarded as ignorant superstition to-
morrow), the Bible still contains the most basic of all
truths, that God stands back of the entire process. The
world did not come into existence by mere chance and
accident, but is the creation of an eternal and all powerful
Mind, who had a purpose to fulfil.
The story which follows these words in the first chapter
of Genesis is a magnificent imaginative description of the
way in which God created the ordered Universe, gradually
bringing order out of chaos by impressing His mind and
will upon it. God is above the process and accomplishes it
merely by speaking His word, which is the Hebrew way
of saying that He did it by His though^. The events which
this chapter describes happened long before the remotest
beginnings of human history and, of course, can actually
neither be described nor understood, but nowhere else
will one find a picture of the creative process which gives
such a real sense of its meaning and its wonder.
HOW MAN WAS CREATED AND HOW HE FELL
THE climax of the creation story is the creation of man,
in God's "image and likeness." There we see a second
great spiritual truth: the sanctity of the human person-
ality. Later on in the book, we are told that this is the
reason for the prohibition of murder (Genesis 9:6). One
must not kill his brother man because every man, whether
small or great, has something Godlike about him. This
3*
conception lies at the root of the distinctively Christian
belief in the absolute value of the individual human per-
sonality and is therefore the foundation of the whole
Christian system of social ethics and morality.
When we read the first chapters of Genesis with an open
mind, we discover a curious fact. There are two accounts
of the creation of man, one in chapter i and another in
chapter 2. This is due to the previously mentioned circum-
stance that the final editors of the book wove their story
out of several older books and often let different accounts
of the same event stand side by side without attempting to
make them agree with each other. The story in chapter i
is from what is called the P document, which is the latest
of all, while the story in chapter 2 is from J, which was
the earliest of all.
When one reads the stories and compares them with
each other, it will be seen very quickly that the story in
chapter 2 is a much more primitive story than that in
chapter i, since it describes God as creating man by
moulding him with His hands out of clay rather than
simply pronouncing the word or conceiving the idea. This
second story, however, also has its spiritual meaning which
no doubt led the editors to retain it. This story goes on to
tell how man, after he was created, rebelled against God
and thereby brought unhappiness and suffering into a
world which God had intended to be wholly good. The
story of Adam and Eve is a profound account of the psy-
chology of man and states the inescapable truth that the
sense of frustration which we often feel in our lives
and in the lives of others around us has its origin in sin,
and that sin, at its roots, is simply pride, our proud un-
3*
willingness to follow the plan of life which God has laid
out for us. Because Adam and Eve chose to do what
they wanted to do rather than what God wanted them to
do, they were driven out of the garden where all was
happy and peaceful into a world of heart-breaking toil and
bitter struggle (Genesis 3:17-1$). It is worth noticing that
the word Adam is simply the common Hebrew word for
man. This gives us the clue for a proper understanding
of the tale, which is really the story of Everyman.
The same ancient document, J, continues in chapter 4
with the story of Cain and Abel. People often ask foolish
questions about this story, such as "Where did Cain get his
wife?" because they do not understand that the people
who preserved the story for us were not themselves inter-
ested in such merely factual matters. They told the story
because they had it ready to hand and found in it an ex-
cellent parable of the growing sinfulness and cruelty of
humankind. As soon as man sets himself up against God
and cuts himself off from fellowship with God, then his
lower nature takes possession of him and he begins to live
on a purely selfish and brutal level, as expressed in the
cynical phrase, Am I my brother's keeper? (Genesis
4:$). The rest of the chapter leads up to the brief account
of the unlimited violence of Lamech, who illustrates hu-
man nature at its unbridled worst (Genesis 4:23, 24).
THE FLOOD
BOTH ancient documents, J and P, proceed to tell the
story of the Flood, an ancient and striking tale, which
shows God's attitude toward sin (Genesis 6-8). God is a
God of purity and justice, and, when Man has utterly
33
corrupted his way upon earth (Genesis 6:12), God passes
judgment upon him and destroys him. The story is a
dramatic parable illustrating the universal principle that
God is of purer eyes than to behold evil (Habakkuk
1:13) and that every system of human life which is based
upon injustice, violence, and bloodshed is bound to perish.
It goes on to show, however, that the mere punishment of
evil is never God's ultimate purpose. It is God's will that
man be saved and eventually restored to perfect fellow-
ship with Him. So out of the catastrophe which over-
whelmed a sinful world, God saved the one righteous man
whom He could find, Noah, and his family, with the pur-
pose of beginning anew with the human family and sal-
vaging something from the shipwreck which man had
made of his own existence.
Once again, in the story of the descendants of Noah
(Genesis 10), we see how the Old Testament conceived of
the unity of the human race, for, as all men, of every race
and nation, are descendants of the same first ancestor, so
all are descendants of Noah by his three sons, Shem, Ham,
and Japheth. God made a covenant, or agreement, with
Noah, described in Genesis 9, which was to be binding on
all his descendants. This is the Old Testament way of say-
ing there is a universal moral law which must be obeyed
by all men and which must be observed toward all men.
The most important provision in this Noachite covenant
is the demand to respect the sanctity of human life, for
men, all men, are made in the image of God (Genesis 9:6).
Thus we see at the very beginning of the Old Testament
story how the purpose of God and His fatherly care ex-
tend to all the human race.
34
THE PATRIARCHS: ABRAHAM AND ISAAC
AFTER telling, in the story of the Tower of Babel, how
man, by his foolish arrogance, again brought disunity and
confusion into the world, the ancient epic then goes on to
relate how God determined to save mankind by choosing
a particular human family to be the agents of His revela-
tion and redeeming work. God chose Abraham in the
distant land of Mesopotamia and called upon him to leave
his kindred and go to a new land of which he knew
nothing except that God would give it to him (Genesis 12)^
So Abraham, who lived in Haran (although his father is
said to have come originally from Ur of the Chaldees) left
his home and, accepting God's promise with perfect faith,,
crossed the desert with his dependents to settle in Canaan,
the land which today we call Palestine. God promised
that this land would be his and that all the families of the
earth would be blessed in him (Genesis 12:3). This agree-
ment which God made with Abraham was the second of
His great covenants with men, this time made not with
the whole human race, but with one particular human
family. The sign of this covenant was to be the rite of cir-
cumcision (Genesis 17:1-14).
After they came to Canaan, Abraham separated from
Lot his nephew, because their flocks and possessions were
too large to permit them to dwell together, and Lot selfish*
ly chose for himself the most beautiful part of the land,
the fertile Jordan valley, where the great Canaanite cities
of Sodom and Gomorrah were located (Genesis 13). After-
wards, Abraham began to worry because he had no son to
inherit his property, and Sarah, his wife, seemed too old
35
to have children. He and Sarah, therefore, made an ar-
rangement by which he took Sarah's serving maid, Hagar,
as a kind of secondary wife, and she bore him a son whom
they called Ishmael (Genesis 16). All this was quite proper
according to the laws which governed the nations of the
Near East in those days. Sarah, however, was unhappy
about the situation and, when God took pity upon her
and gave her a son also, she drove Hagar and Ishmael
from the house (Genesis 16 and 21). It is a tragic story, but
to the people of that ancient time Sarah would have
seemed quite justified in attempting, at all costs, to pro-
tect the interests of her own child. This story is a good
illustration of the fact that we must not take Old Testa-
ment moral standards as necessarily our own, although we
should also be fair enough to recognize that in later times,
even in Israel itself, the conduct of Sarah would certainly
have been frowned upon. To the people who told the
story, however, the important thing was that Abraham
now had a son, whom he named Isaac, and that he was
now assured that God's promise would be fulfilled. Abra-
ham would have a family and that family, the Hebrew
nation, would be a blessing to the whole world.
The story of Sodom and Gomorrah (Genesis 18, 19) il-
lustrates once again God's hatred of evil, for the inhabit-
ants of these cities, who belonged to the Canaanite race
which inhabited the land when Abraham came, were com-
pletely corrupted by the perverseness of their sexual life
and we are told that God at last destroyed them by a hail
of fire and brimstone. The only persons saved from these
cities were Lot and the members of his household. Lot was
saved, not only because he was a member of Abraham's
36
family, but because he was clearly a righteous man, who
had a sense of decency and honor which his Canaanite
neighbors did not possess. Knowledge which has come to
us from the study of archaeology makes us realize that the
picture here is essentially correct, for the Canaanites were
a people of decadent morality and their general standard
of conduct was far lower than that of the Hebrews. The
final victory of the Hebrews over the Canaanites was due
not simply to God's favoritism toward His own people,
but to the inevitable victory of a virile people of high
morality over a people whose morals were debased.
The most touching of all the stories about Abraham is
the one which tells of his willingness to sacrifice to God
even his only son Isaac, whom he loved more dearly than
any other worldly possession (Genesis 2,2). Of course, we
realize today that even the suggestion of human sacrifice
is offensive to God, but in those remote days people were
not quite sure. The most important thing about the story
is that it represents God as merely putting Abraham to
the test, with no thought of ever allowing him to carry it
out. Abraham comes through the test completely vindi-
cated and once more proves himself to be the great ex-
ample of perfect faith in God. The story also expresses the
conviction of the Hebrew people that God does not de-
sire human sacrifice; a tremendous advance in man's con-
ception of God,
JACOB
GENESIS then goes on to tell the beautiful story of the be-
trothal and marriage of Isaac to Rebekah, a wife who be-
longed to a branch of his mother's clan which still re-
37
mained in Mesopotamia (Genesis 24) and of the birth to
them of twin sons, Jacob and Esau (Genesis 25). The hero
of the story is Jacob, although he does not actually appear
a very heroic or noble figure since he cheated his brother
out of his birthright (Genesis 2,5:4-27:40). It is a notable
fact about the Bible that it does not idealize its heroes, but
shows them as real human beings.
Jacob was punished for his treachery by having to flee
for his life. On the way, he came to Bethel where he rested
his head upon a rock and, in a dream, saw angels ascend-
ing and descending upon a ladder which reached up into
heaven (Genesis 28). There God spoke to him and re-
peated the promises formerly made to Abraham, for Jacob
was also to be the direct ancestor of all the people of Israel.
In his flight, Jacob eventually came to Mesopotamia,
where after many years of the hardest kind of labor, he
married Leah and Rachel, who became the mothers of the
twelve sons who, according to Hebrew tradition, were the
ancestors of the twelve tribes of Israel (Genesis 29, 30). At
length he fled from the rule of his crafty and overbearing
father-in-law, Laban, and took his family back with him
to Palestine, where he was finally reconciled with his
brother Esau (Genesis 30-33). One of the strangest of all
the stories in Genesis is one which tells how Jacob once
wrestled with God all night and at last overcame Him and
compelled God to give him His blessing (Genesis 32:22-
32). The story comes to us out of the mists of antiquity and
we can only guess what its original meaning was, but at
least in present form it purports to tell why Jacob's name
was changed to Israel (He who strives with God), the name
by which his descendants would ever afterward be called.
38
JOSEPH
ALL the rest of the Book of Genesis (chapters 37-50) is
taken up by the story of Joseph, one of the twelve sons of
Jacob, and his marvellous adventures in the land of Egypt.
It is undoubtedly one of the great stories of world litera-
ture. The characters in it are real and human and, even
today, we cannot help being moved by the pathos of the
tale and carried along by its atmosphere of suspense and
excitement. Joseph, the story tells us, had innocently
aroused the jealousy of his brothers who, in the extremity
of their hatred, sold him as a slave into the hands of Bed-
ouin traders who were on their way to Egypt. There he
was bought by Potiphar, the chief of Pharaoh's guard. Un-
fortunately, though innocent of any wrongdoing, Joseph
awakened first the love and then the fear and hatred of
Potiphar's wife, who succeeded in having him thrown into
prison. Because God had given him the gift of interpreting
dreams, he came at last to Pharaoh's attention and, inter-
preting the king's own dream, predicted the coming of a
famine of unprecedented severity upon the land. Pharaoh,
admiring his great gifts, appointed him as second in com-
mand over the kingdom, charged with the specific task of
storing up an adequate supply of food for the long, lean
years ahead. When at last the famine arrived, Joseph's
brethren came down from Palestine in hope of securing
food. There, after many adventures, both amusing and
pathetic, they met and were reconciled to the brother they
had treated so badly, but who dealt with them in such a
gentle and forgiving way. Ye meant evil against me, he
said, but God meant it for good (Genesis 50:20). At
39
length, Jacob and all his household were brought down
to Egypt and settled in the Delta, in the land of Goshen
(Genesis 47:27). Finally, Jacob died, and after many
years, Joseph also (Genesis 49:33; 50:26).
HOW GOD BROUGHT ISRAEL OUT OF EGYPT
BETWEEN Genesis and EXODUS there is a gap o approxi-
mately four hundred years about which nothing is re-
corded (Exodus 12:40). The gap is a significant one, since
it marks the transition from what we might call the world
of pre-history to the world of history. There are many
scholars who think that Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are
simply personified tribes rather than real persons and that
their movements really represent the migrations of ancient
races or nations, but there can be no serious doubt, when
we come to Moses, that we are dealing with a man, one of
the great creative figures of all human history. It is with
Moses and the story of the Exodus that the history of the
people of Israel properly begins.
At the beginning of Exodus, the Israelites are laboring
as slaves for the Egyptians, as many other Asiatic tribes
did. They were cruelly oppressed and their lives were un-
speakably bitter (Exodus i). When an attempt was made
to stop the growth of the Hebrew population by killing
all the male children, the little boy Moses was providen-
tially saved by Pharaoh's daughter and raised as her own
son. When he grew to manhood, he killed an Egyptian
whom he found mistreating a Hebrew, and was forced to
flee for his life into the desert of Sinai. There he was re-
ceived into the family of Jethro, the Midianite, and mar-
ried his daughter (Exodus 2). One day, while tending the
40
sheep o his father-in-law on the slopes of Mount Sinai (or
Horeb, as it also is called) he received a wonderful revela-
tion from God, who appeared to him in a mysterious
burning bush and commanded him to return and lead the
people of Israel out of Egypt. God revealed to Moses His
name, Jehovah (or Yahweh, as many believe it was origi-
nally pronounced) and promised to support him in his ef-
forts to win deliverance for his people (Exodus 3, 4).
Moses, as God commanded him, returned to Egypt.
There, after a series of unparalleled plagues, culminating
in the death of all the first-born of Egypt, Pharaoh became
convinced that a stronger God than the gods of Egypt was
on the side of the Hebrews, and gave Moses permission to
lead his people out into the desert. That evening, in ac-
cordance with God's command, they celebrated the sacred
meal which was later to be an annual observance and
which they called the Passover in commemoration of God's
having passed over the houses of the Hebrews when the
first-born of Egypt were slain (Exodus $-13). After they
were on their way, Pharaoh regretted having let them go
and pursued them with his armies but, attempting to fol-
low them through the waters of the Red Sea, which had
been wonderfully swept aside to make a passage for the
children of Israel, he and all his host were drowned
(Exodus 14).
ISRAEL AT SINAI
MOSES then led the people through the desert to Mount
Sinai where they encamped, and he himself went up to the
mountain top to receive the Law which would form the
basis of God's Covenant with Israel (Exodus 15-19)* Be-
ginning with chapter 20, most of the rest of the Book of
Exodus (with the exception of chapters 32, 33) consists of
the various laws and regulations which, according to He-
brew tradition, were delivered to Moses at this time. The
most important of these laws were, o course, the ten com-
mandments (Exodus 20:1-27; also Deuteronomy 5:1-21),
which stand at the head of them and constituted the basic
moral law of Israel. Down to the present day, they remain
the solid basis of all morality. Most of the laws in the rest
of the Pentateuch are of comparatively minor importance
and have to do with ceremonial and ritual matters rather
than with morality. Many are, undoubtedly, much later
than the time of Moses.
It always must be remembered that the story of these
events was handed down orally for many generations be-
fore it was put in written form and in the course of time
the dramatic nature of some of the events may have been
exaggerated and certainly some things were interpreted in
a sense different from the one which we should have given
them. Thus, for instance, the slaying of the innocent
children of the Egyptians seems to us a cruel act which we
would hesitate to ascribe directly to God. It may be that
the Hebrews of those remote times, who would not be
troubled by such scruples, simply interpreted some pesti-
lence which affected the Egyptian children as an act of
God, done on their own behalf. The people of Israel still
had a long way to go before they came to realize, with the
prophet Ezekiel, that the good and righteous God does not
desire the death even of the wicked. We meet with a sim-
ilar problem, though not so acutely, in the story of the
drowning of Pharaoh's army in the Red Sea. Recent schol-
arly studies tend to show that the story of the crossing of
42
the Red Sea, in its original form, was simpler and less
spectacular than the present story in Exodus would lead
us to think, but this does not affect the essential historical
truth o the narrative, which is that God, by delivering a
band of feeble slaves out of the hands of their powerful
oppressors, created for Himself a nation which was to be
the special object of His love and care in the centuries
ahead and from which the Redeemer of the world would
one day come.
Exodus 32 and 33 tell how Moses, when he came down
from the mountain after receiving the tables of the Law,
found that the people had taken up the practice of idola-
try while he was gone and were worshipping a golden calf
which they had made. The story illustrates how hard it is
for sinful man to remain true to God and how much easier
it is for man to adore the things his own hand has made.
Moses was so angered by what he saw that he broke the
stone tablets which were in his hand. Later, the story re-
counts, they were replaced at God's command. The rest
of Exodus describes the building of the tabernacle.
LEVITICUS contains mostly laws, of which the most im-
portant are those regulating the offering of sacrifice
(Leviticus i-j), the ritual of the Day of Atonement (Levit-
icus 16); and the fine humanitarian laws of chapter 19:11-
18 from which our Lord drew the second great command-
ment, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.
THE DESERT WANDERINGS
THE first part of the book of NUMBERS also consists mostly
of laws, but the ancient epic of Israel's history is resumed
at Numbers 10:11 which tells how the tribes left Sinai and
43
moved up to the southern borders of Palestine, the land
which God had promised them. They sent spies to look
over the country, but were terrified at the report which
was brought back of the military strength of the Canaan-
ite inhabitants. They rebelled at Moses' leadership (there-
by showing their lack of faith in God) and were con-
demned to spend forty years wandering in the desert
(Numbers 13, 14).
During this period they made their headquarters at Ka-
desh, an oasis south of Palestine, but eventually resumed
their journey toward the Promised Land (Numbers 20).
They now turned eastward and went around the southern
end of the Dead Sea into what today is called Transjordan
and on the way met with numerous adventures as they
encountered various nations long settled there. Most in-
teresting of these is their experience with Balaam, a wizard
whom the King of Moab had brought from far distant
Mesopotamia to curse the Israelites. Balaam discovered,
however, that God was on the side of the Hebrews, and
every utterance which he intended to be a curse turned
out to be a blessing (Numbers 22, 23). The rest of Numbers
consists largely of laws, with a little narrative material.
Here is found the pathetic story of God's warning that
Moses will not be permitted to lead the people into the
Promised Land, and the command to appoint Joshua as
his successor (Numbers 27:12-22).
The Book of DEUTERONOMY is cast in the form of a fare-
well address by Moses to the people before they cross the
Jordan River into Palestine. In it he summarizes the laws
which God has given them. The laws of Deuteronomy are
especially attractive to us because of the constant appeal
44
they make to the motive of love toward God and
The Ten Commandments stand at the head o the list
(Deuteronomy 5), and the following chapter (Deuter-
onomy 6:^ff) contains the great basic creed of Jewish re-
ligion (the so-called Shema, Hear, O Israel, the Lord our
God is one Lord) from which Jesus drew the first of the
great commandments, Thou shalt lave the Lord thy God
with all thy heart and with all thy soul and with all thy
might. Deuteronomy seems to have been one of our
Lord's favorite Old Testament books. The Pentateuch
comes to an end with the story of the death of Moses on a
mountain top overlooking the Land of Promise, to the
borders of which he had led his people (Deuteronomy 34).
HOW ISRAEL CONQUERED PAU3ST1NE: JOSHUA
THE book of JOSHUA begins a series of historical books
which deal with the fate of the people of Israel during the
period from the death of Moses down to about the year
400 B.C., roughly about eight hundred years. The books
from Joshua through II Kings have a certain unity of pur-
pose and style and can be read in order just as they stand.
The books I-II Chronicles, Ezra, and Nehemiah stand in
some respects in a different category, as we shall see
later (see page 70).
In the book of Joshua the ancient epic continues the
story which began with the Exodus, and tells what befell
Israel immediately after the death of Moses. Under the
leadership of Joshua, the tribes crossed the Jordan Rive*
and there attacked the Canaanite city of Jericho. After
seven days siege, the city fell in a strange and wonderful
way, and, with the barbarism typical of the age, the entire
45
population was slaughtered (Joshua 1-6). The tribes next
ventured an attack upon Ai, a city much nearer the center
of Palestine, and, after an initial repulse, which they inter-
preted as a sign of God's displeasure with one of their
number, they took this also (Joshua 7, 8). Finally, in a
series of battles, Joshua and the Israelites won decisive su-
periority over the Canaanites (Joshua 9-11) and the rest
of the book describes the apportionment of the land
amongst the tribes, and, finally, the death of Joshua (chap-
ter 24).
EARLY DAYS IN PAIXSTINE: THE JUDGES
THE book of JUDGES is made up of a series of fascinating
old tales about life in the troubled times which followed
immediately upon the conquest. The story told is not a
consecutive one, but rather made up of a series of brief
scenes, which give an invaluable picture of the life and
manners of the times. Each story has its hero, a military
leader (called a judge in the Hebrew sense of ruler) who-
arose in some great crisis of his people's life and delivered
them from the hand of a foreign oppressor. The first one
of importance was Ehud, who personally assassinated the
king of Moab in the royal bedroom (Judges 3:12-30). After
him came Deborah, the only female judge, who inspired
Barak to lead the Hebrews in a victorious uprising against
the Canaanites which finally destroyed all semblance of
Canaanite power (Judges 4, 5). The Song of Deborah in
chapter 5 is the oldest document of any length in the He-
brew language and one of the most stirring poems in any
language.
The book goes on to tell of the courage of Gideon, who
46
drove a horde of Bedouin invaders from the land (Judges
6, j), and of Jephthah, a Robin Hood-like character, who
belonged to the tribes east of the Jordan and freed his
people from domination by the Ammonites (Judges
1012). The last and most famous of the judges was Sam-
son, a strong man of somewhat childish mentality, who
was champion of the people of Israel against the rising
power of the Philistines. The story of his tragic involve-
ment with an unscrupulous woman, Delilah, who be-
trayed him to his enemies, and of his heroic death, is one
of the great stories of all literature (Judges 13-16). The
heroes of the book of Judges are not religious leaders and
are sometimes admirable only in the sense in which all
courageous men are admirable, but through the whole of
the book there runs the theme which is so basic to Old
Testament thought, that a nation is really weak only when
it is disloyal to God. When the children of Israel were on
God's side, He was on theirs; when they forsook Him, He
forsook them.
The little book of RUTH is a beautiful, romantic novel-
ette, set in the time of the judges though written eight
or nine centuries later. It is really a tract against race
prejudice. Its heroine, after whom the book is named, is a
generous-spirited Moabite woman who proves herself to
be as fine a person and as devoted a worshipper of the true
God as any Hebrew. The concluding verses make the
point that this noble foreign woman was the ancestress of
King David.
CHAPTER
THREE
Historical Books: //. The
Hebrew Kingdoms
A
jHLLTHOUGH the next two books of the
Bible bear the name of Samuel, in whose days and by
whose authority the Hebrew monarchy was established,
their real hero is David. The situation at the beginning
of I SAMUEL is the same as that in the time of Samson. The
Hebrew tribes, who had been settled in the hill country
of the land of Canaan for about two hundred years and
had won dominion over it but had never been unified
under a single ruler or government, were threatened by
the Philistines, a nation which had settled about the same
time on the coastal plain in the west of Palestine. The
Philistines gradually pressed up into the hills and, as
they did so, aroused the sleeping energies of Israel to re-
sist them. It was the kind of situation which called for
unified leadership and thereby actually created the mon-
archy.
HOW ISRAEL BECAME A KINGDOM: SAMUEL AND SAUL
THE first pan of the story is dominated by the figure of
Samuel, who, from one standpoint, was the last of the
Judges, but, in contrast to his predecessors, was a priest
and a religious, rather than a military leader. The familiar
story of his birth and childhood upbringing in the temple
at Shiloh is told in chapters 1-3, while chapters 4-7 describe
two incidents in the Philistine wars after he had arrived
at manhood and assumed the leadership of the people. The
precarious general situation led inevitably to the demand
for a king who could be a center of unity for the nation
and lead it in battle. There were certain obvious objec-
tions to introducing the institution of monarchy among a
people who were by tradition and culture as democratic
as the Hebrews, but Samuel at last consented to the de-
mand and believed that he had God's permission to do
so (I Samuel 8).
Chapter 9 introduces the man who was destined to be
the first king of Israel, Saul, a noble though tragic figure.
We first see him as a young man in search of his father's
lost asses. When he went to consult Samuel as to their
whereabouts, he learned with amazement that God had
destined him to be king and he was later anointed to that
high office (I Samuel 9, 10). We then see him as Israel's
leader in war, first against the Ammonites in a battle in
which he proved his mettle (I Samuel n), and later against
the Philistines, when his son Jonathan showed himself a
worthy child of his father (I Samuel 13, 14).
Unfortunately, however, the temperaments of Saul and
Samuel did not agree, and Samuel felt that Saul had
49
shown himself proud and undependable on more than
one occasion (I Samuel 13:8-15; 15). Because Saul, by dis-
obeying simple and direct commands (I Samuel 15:22, 23)
had proved himself unworthy to command others, Samuel
declared the kingdom must be taken from him and con-
ferred on another. Among the children of Jesse, a citizen of
Bethlehem, Samuel found the young boy, David, whom he
instantly recognized as the divinely chosen successor of
Saul. David was shortly after this introduced to the court of
Saul because of his gifts as a musician. His songs had power
to soothe the wild rages to which the darkening mind of
Saul was now becoming subject (I Samuel 16). David is
also presented to us as a fearless warrior in the famous
story of the slaying of the Philistine giant, Goliath (I Sam-
uel ij), an event which led to his marriage to the daugh-
ter of King Saul (I Samuel 18). The following chapters tell
of the rapidly developing jealousy between the King and
his now famous and popular son-in-law and the fine friend-
ship which grew up between David and Jonathan.
Saul's insane jealousy finally led David to flee for his
life (I Samuel 19-21). For a considerable time he led the
life of an outlaw as the head of a band of malcontents in
the wild region around Adullam in southern Palestine,
but even during this period showed the essential nobility
of his character by twice sparing the life of Saul, when
tricks of fate delivered the King into his hands (I Samuel
22-26). At last David tired of this life and settled down in
comparative comfort and security under the protection of
Saul's Philistine enemies (I Samuel 2j). The first book of
Samuel closes with the death of Saul and three of his sons
in a great battle with the Philistines. Perhaps the most
pathetic thing in the book is the picture o Saul, a man
broken in mind and spirit, seeking guidance from the
witch of En-dor, and receiving only assurance of disaster
(7 Samuel 28-31).
DAVID BECOMES KING
II SAMUEL opens with the scene in which David hears the
news of the death of the King and his sons, and the first
chapter contains the poignant lament of David over Saul
which is one of the most precious fragments of ancient
Hebrew literature. Here, more than anywhere else, we
feel ourselves in touch with the mind and warm humanity
of David. On Saul's death, David assumed the crown of
Southern Israel, although one of Saul's weaker surviving
sons remained upon the throne in the north and east.
When this poor-spirited creature was finally assassinated
by members of his own household, David almost auto-
matically became king over all Israel (II Samuel 2:1-5; 4).
David was undoubtedly a political genius, as Saul had
never been, and immediately set to work to consolidate
and to organize his kingdom. Although little of the detail
is told, it is clear that he finally put an end to the Philis-
tine menace (II Samuel 5:17-25) and gave Israel a sense of
security in its own land. His most significant single act,
however, one of immeasurable consequence to all later
generations, was the selection of a new capital, Jerusalem.
Both because it was centrally located and because it had
never been a Hebrew city before and therefore occupied a
neutral position with reference to the various tribes, each
jealous of its own territory and traditions, it was peculiar-
ly suited to provide a center of unity for the young na-
tion. Until this time, it had been held by a Canaanite
clan called the Jebusites, but David captured it with a
clever stratagem. He not only made it the center of his
political administration, but also, by bringing the ark
there, made it a center of religious devotion (II Samuel
5, 6). David wished also to build a great temple there, but
the prophet Nathan discouraged him from doing so on
the ground that the God of Israel had no need of such a
dwelling (II Samuel 7). David, however, had laid the
foundations of a great structure of faith and devotion
which was to grow up around Jerusalem, for it was des-
tined to become not simply the capital of a kingdom, but
a spiritual idea, the visible symbol of man's longing for '
the eternal city of God. David was successful in almost
everything he touched and the little kingdom which he
had inherited soon became a great and wealthy empire,
holding sovereignty over most of the surrounding peoples
(II Samuel 8). It was this great success of David, evidence
of God's special favor, along with his unquestioned per-
sonal attractiveness, that made him to all later genera-
tions the ideal king and the image as well as the ancestor
of the future Messiah.
DAVID'S WEAKNESSES
ON the other hand, the character of David was by no means
unblemished, and with an honesty typical of the Bible, the
Old Testament presents the dark side of his nature along
with the bright. Most of the remaining chapters of II
Samuel are concerned with David's private weaknesses and
failures, which stood out in such marked contrast to his
public success. We learn first of his treachery toward his
5*
faithful servant, Uriah the Hittite, whose death he ac-
complished because of his own love for Bathsheba, Uriah's
beautiful wife. We also learn of his penitence when
Nathan the prophet accused him of the crime to his face
(II Samuel n, 12).
David's greatest weakness lay in the foolish indulgence
with which he treated his own children. His failure as a
father appears most acutely in the lengthy and sordid
story of Absalom's revolt. Absalom was one of his favorite
sons, a young man who had inherited all his father's po-
litical acuteness and personal charm, but none of his basic
moral seriousness. He accepted all that David was willing
to do for him, but returned nothing of his affection. At
last he conceived the plan of stirring up dissension among
his father's subjects so as to win the crown for himself.
When the time was ripe he raised a revolt in the south,
and, when he began the march upon Jerusalem, was so
well established in the favor of the people that David
was forced to flee to Transjordan. David was fortunate in
having a wise general and clever councillors and, though
Absalom won the first move, he lost the decisive battle. In
the end, he was ignominiously murdered by Joab, his
father's acute, but ruthless, commander. Even in the mo-
ment of victory, however, David's self-centered lamenta-
tions over the death of his contemptible son almost lost
him the favor of his loyal supporters, and it was necessary
for Joab to recall him to his senses (II Samuel 13-19).
SOLOMON: THE MAGNIFICENT MONARCH
THE two books of the Kings deal with the period from the
death of David to the end of the monarchy. I KINGS begins
53
with an account of the palace intrigues which began while
David was still living, but sick and senile. Bathsheba, by
a clever stroke, succeeded in having her son, Solomon,
recognized by David as his successor before his older
brother Adonijah could fully organize the forces which
were favorable to him (I Kings 1:52:12).
On his accession to the throne, Solomon quickly seized
the opportunity to rid himself of possible adversaries
(I Kings 2:13-46). In this he was merely following the same
cynical policy which has prevailed in oriental courts down
to the present day. Solomon had the good fortune to suc-
ceed to a kingdom which was at the height of its power*
Although he seems to have had little of the kind of ability
which made his father so successful in war and in political
administration, yet he obtained a great reputation in his
own time and in later generations for wisdom, and several
stories are told to illustrate his gifts as a ruler (I Kings 3
and jco). The prosperity of his reign was largely due to
three factors:
The excellence of his inherited political organization
The absence at this time of any great world power able
to challenge the position of Israel
His own apparently real gifts for trade and commerce.
Unlike his father, he was primarily a man of business,
who exploited the resources at his command in order to
increase the wealth and external splendor of his kingdom.
He was actually the first king of Israel who attempted to
imitate the luxuriousness of other oriental monarchies.
Saul had lived as a simple countryman, and even David
was so much concerned with strengthening and enlarging
the kingdom that he had little time left in which to put
54
on the airs of a king. But Solomon lived in splendid state
and embarked upon a great program of public building,
chiefly designed to enhance his own magnificence. His two
greatest buildings were, of course, the royal palace and the
temple. In subsequent history, the latter was destined to
have the greatest importance, but there is little doubt that
in Solomon's mind the building of the temple was merely
incidental to the creation of a whole complex of royal
buildings (I Kings 5-9). In this he was departing very far
from the simplicity of ancient Hebrew life and the tra-
ditional religious and social ideals of his people. These
great works could be completed only at the cost of heavy
taxation and by the use of slave labor, and the ultimate
result of his policy was the weakening and ultimate dis-
solution of the strong, unified kingdom which he had in-
herited. With all his superficial cleverness, which is what
his contemporaries meant by his wisdom, he is actually a
model of what a king, or any man, ought not to be, for his
chief concern was not personal character, but material
wealth; not the things which are eternal, but the things
which are temporal. Tradition was more merciful to him
than history and in later times he was commonly regarded
as a royal philosopher and the author of several profound
books on the nature of reality and the good life, Proverbs,
Ecclesiastes, The Wisdom of Solomon, etc., as well as a
poet, the author of The Song of Solomon, The Psalms of
Solomon, etc.
DIVISION OF THE KINGDOM: THE KINGDOM OF ISRAEL
THE unhappy results of Solomon's short-sighted policy
were already evident in a series of revolts which broke out
55 .
even during his own lifetime (I Kings 11:14-42). Immedi-
ately after his death, when his son Rehoboam attempted to
continue in his footsteps, the kingdom was torn asunder
by violent rebellion and by far the greater part of it be-
came an independent monarchy under a new king, Jero-
boam (7 Kings 12). From this time onward, there were
two Hebrew kingdoms: Israel in the north of Palestine,
the later capital of which was Samaria; and Judah, now a
small and comparatively insignificant kingdom in the
south, which, nevertheless, still possessed the great advan-
tage of having Jerusalem for its capital and the family of
David for its rulers. In the period which immediately fol-
lows, it is the northern kingdom, Israel, which is the cen-
ter of interest, because of its size and importance and be-
cause its internal history was far more marked by violence
and conflict than that of the little kingdom of Judah which
continued to move rather quietly within its own small
orbit.
ELIJAH
A LITTLE less than a hundred years after the division of
the kingdoms, a great conflict, partly religious and partly
political and social, broke out in the northern kingdom.
The king who occupied the throne was Ahab, a strong
and, in his own way, very able ruler. The trouble, how-
ever, seems largely to have arisen over the activities of his
Phoenician wife, Jezebel, who desired to introduce the re-
ligion and social institutions o her own nation among
the people of Israel. Ahab was apparently clay in Jezebel's
strong and resolute hands (I Kings 16:29-34). Fortunately,
in the providence of God, she was not allowed to have her
own way and a champion of Israel's ancient religion and
56
morality arose to oppose her. This was Elijah the Tish-
bite, a prophet, a stern and uncompromising fighter for
what he believed to be right. Many tales were told of his
courage and of the way in which God supported his en-
deavors (7 Kings ij-zi). The most dramatic of these is
that which tells of his contest with the prophets of Jeze-
bel's Phoenician god called Baal at a great outdoor gath-
ering on the summit of Mount Carmel. The 450 prophets
of Baal, goaded to frenzy by the rough humor of Elijah's
taunts, were unable to evoke any response from their god,
but, when at last they gave up the attempt, Elijah had no
difficulty in getting an answer from Jehovah, the God of
Israel, and in bringing to an end the drought which had
long afflicted the land (7 Kings 18). Although he was suc-
cessful in the conflict, he aroused the implacable hatred of
Jezebel and was forced to flee in order to save his life.
Going off into the desert to Horeb, the mountain where
Jehovah in former times had revealed Himself to Moses,
Elijah received a commission to continue his battle and
overthrow the dynasty of Ahab. He was also to insure the
continuance of his efforts by selecting someone to carry
on the work. On his way back from Horeb he came to
Elisha as the latter was plowing a field and chose him on
the spot to be his disciple and successor (I Kings 19). His
next great conflict with Ahab and Jezebel arose over a
matter of social justice. Jezebel had instigated her husband
to act tyrannically in a way which was in accord with the
customs of the rest of the ancient orient, where kings had
absolute power, but was contrary to the democratic spirit
of Israel, where kings had only limited powers and even
the humblest citizen had certain inalienable rights. By
57
fraudulent accusation and judicial murder, Ahab took
possession of the vineyard of his neighbor, Naboth the
Jezreelite, but when he went to inspect his property, Elijah
met him face to face and pronounced God's curse upon
him and his entire family (I Kings 21).
EOSHA
FINALLY it came Elijah's turn to die and II KINGS 2 tells
the story of his ascent to heaven in a whirlwind, with
chariot and horses of fire. Elisha immediately took over
the work which his master had left unfinished. As was
the case with Elijah, many wonderful stories were told
about him and the miracles which he performed. Most
of his miracles were acts of kindness to people who were
sick or in trouble (fl Kings 3-8). One of the most famous
of the stories about Elisha is that of the healing of the
leper, Naaman, an official in the court of the King of Syria,
who had to learn the lesson of strict obedience to God's
will even in things which seem unimportant and even hu-
miliating (77 Kings 5). Elisha believed that God's help
never fails His faithful worshippers. Another famous
story tells how, once, when trapped in a besieged city, he
caused the eyes of his faint-hearted servant to be opened in
order to see the hills round about full of the horses and
chariots of the Lord (II Kings 6:8-19). The climax of
Elisha's career came when he at last instigated a success-
ful revolt against the dynasty of Ahab and placed a new
king, Jehu, upon the throne. Joram, Ahab's son and suc-
cessor, was assassinated along with his friend the King of
Judah and the Queen mother Jezebel (II Kings $, 10).
It is a dreadful story and there can be no doubt that Jehu,
58
the actual agent of the revolt, who became the new king,
was acting rather for reasons of personal ambition than
for the honor of the God of Israel.
We cannot but feel that Elisha chose the wrong means
in order to attain his undoubtedly good end. We can jus-
tify it only by saying that the conscience of the times was
not yet sufficiently sensitive to understand that loyalty to
God can never justify treachery and violence. We should
also remember that Hebrew history itself passed an un-
favorable judgment upon Jehu, and that Hosea, a prophet
who lived only a century later, denounced the bloody
deed of Jehu and declared that his dynasty, too, was
doomed (Hosea 1:4). We can see that the years which fol-
lowed Elisha, although rather obscure from the point of
view of actual history, must have been a time when a new
spirit was stirring in the mind and conscience of Israel.
This was soon to find expression in the work of the great
writing prophets.
THE END OF THE NORTHERN KINGDOM
THE remaining history of the northern kingdom can be
told rather briefly. It had one long period of prosperity
under the rule of a descendant of Jehu, Jeroboam II, in
the closing years of whose reign the first two literary
prophets, AMOS and HOSEA, began their work (II Kings
14:23-29). For the moment it is enough to say that both
predicted the imminent end of the Kingdom of Israel.
Amos did so on the ground that the nation had forsaken
the principles of social justice; Hosea, on the ground that
it had failed in loyalty to God. The great influence which
the literary prophets were to have from this time on was
59
no doubt due to the fact that these first prophecies of
doom came true. For the first time Israel found herself
threatened by a great world empire, Assyria. She rushed
around frantically trying to save her independence, even
going so far as to declare war on little Judah to try and
force her into an anti-Assyrian alliance. Her fate, how-
ever, was sealed. After the death of Jeroboam II, the king-
dom was torn apart by intrigue and rebellion (77 Kings
15:8-37) and so weakened that at length her capital, Sa-
maria, fell to the Assyrian armies (721 B.C.) and the
Kingdom of Israel came to an end forever. Many of her
people were taken into exile and are known to history as
the ten lost tribes of Israel (II Kings 17:1-6). Actually they
were not lost in the usual sense of the term, but were grad-
ually assimilated among the people of the lands where
they settled. The people who were left in the old territory
of Israel, mostly of the lower classes, became partially
mixed with certain pagan peoples, and were the ances-
tors of the Samaritans whom we meet in the New Testa-
ment (II Kings 17:24-41).
60
CHAPTER
FOUR
Historical Books: ///. Exile
and Return
J-JIFE in Judah had been going on all dur-
ing this period, but much more quietly. There were no at-
tempts to overthrow the ruling family. Some of the kings
such as Asa (I Kings 15:9-24) and Jehoshaphat (I Kings
22:41-50) were worthy successors of David, while others,
particularly the infamous Athaliah, the daughter of Ahab
and Jezebel, would have been a disgrace to any kingdom
(II Kings n). Much of the time Judah, because of her
small size and dependent condition, was either allied to
Israel or actually tributary to her. Because she was in a
more remote geographical situation than Israel, Judah
was not so early drawn into the stream of world history
as was her neighbor to the north. She lived in a quiet
backwater and was probably a century or so behind Israel
in the general level of her cultural life. It illustrates a prin-
ciple which frequently holds true in God's dealings with
men that comparatively obscure and backward Judah was
61
finally given the task of furthering the divine purpose
among men rather than wealthy and powerful Israel*
AHAZ THE KING, AND ISAIAH THE PROPHET
As Israel was tottering toward disaster, she sought support
in a policy of strong alliances with neighboring States.
Judah, because of her natural weakness and a strong strain
of isolationism in her national character, refused to join
in any union of States directed against the Assyrians, and
as a result was attacked by the armies of Israel and its near-
est northern neighbor, Syria. This is known to Biblical
history as the Syro-Ephraimite War (Ephraim means Is-
rael).
Ahaz, a king whose thinking ran almost entirely along
political rather than religious lines, was alarmed at the
situation and, anxiously casting around for help, sent mes-
sengers to Assyria begging for armed intervention (II
Kings 16). As so frequently happened in Old Testament
history, the emergency produced a great spiritual leader
who was able to interpret the meaning of the crisis and
give counsel as to the appropriate way to meet it. The
man was ISAIAH and the part he played in the situation is
described in the seventh chapter of his book. His message
was one of simple trust in God and avoidance of all mere-
ly political and military maneuvers: // ye will not believe,
ye shall not be established (Isaiah j;$). Ahaz did not fol-
low Isaiah's advice and won the day in his own fashion by
getting the help of the Assyrians, but only at the cost of
paying heavy tribute and making himself a vassal of the
Assyrian king, thus saving himself from one situation by
precipitating himself into a worse.
6*
Isaiah's ministry as a prophet, unlike that of the north-
ern prophets, Amos and Hosea, extended over a very long
time. It had begun in the very year in which Ahaz came
to the throne (Isaiah 6) and was destined to continue
through the entire reign of his son and successor, Heze-
kiah, a period of at least forty years (II Kings 18-20). He
was on good terms with Hezekiah, who was a reforming
monarch and was accounted by later historians one of the
best kings of Judah. Hezekiah, however, did not in all
particulars follow Isaiah's counsel and, on one significant
occasion, took a precisely opposite line. In spite of having
lived through the declining years of the Kingdom of Is*
rael, and having seen the fate of Samaria, Hezekiah re-
belled against his Assyrian overlord, Sennacherib, and at
length found himself besieged in Jerusalem, the rest of
the country occupied by enemy troops and all hope ap-
parently gone. At this crisis, as at the earlier one in the
reign of Ahaz, Isaiah came forth with his message of faith
in God and assured the king that the Assyrians would
never take the city. 1 And the Assyrians never did. Exactly
what happened is not entirely certain, but both the Bible
and secular history testify that Jerusalem was not taken.
The armies of Sennacherib, when the city seemed already
within their grasp, suddenly picked up their tents and re-
turned in haste to Assyria (77 Kings 19:35-^). Thus Isaiah's
lit is sometimes inferred that Isaiah taught "the doctrine of the in-
violability of Zion," viz. that because Jerusalem was God's City, He would
never allow it to be captured, regardless of the moral condition of the
inhabitants. It is difficult to believe that Isaiah intended his teaching to
be interpreted hi so mechanical a way. His doctrine of faith and his con-
viction as to the manner in which God would act in the particular crises
of 735 and 701 B.C. should not be distorted into a rigid and essentially
immoral dogma.
63
teaching was vindicated. He seems, however, to have died
shortly afterward and Jewish tradition says that he was
martyred, "sawn asunder," in the reign of Hezekiah's suc-
cessor, Manasseh. Judah also had another prophet, who
lived in the time of Isaiah, the peasant prophet, MICAH,
who preached in the southern kingdom the same message
of God's demand for social justice which Amos preached
in Israel.
THE EVIL REIGN OF MANASSEH
MANASSEH, the son of Hezekiah, is regarded by the Jewish
historians as the worst of the kings of Judah, and with
good reason, since he completely reversed the wise policies
of his father and voluntarily entered into a new alliance
with Assyria, a course which involved cultural and reli-
gious, as well as political, ties. He persecuted those who in-
sisted upon undeviating loyalty to Jehovah, the God of
Israel, and either killed the prophets or forced them to
work as a kind of underground movement. This general
state of things continued under Manasseh and his succes-
sors for more than fifty years. Consequently there is no pro-
phetic literature from this period and one can see how
easily, just from the human point of view, the treasure
which had been committed to Israel, the revelation of the
just and holy God, might have been lost beyond recovery
(II Kings 21:1-18). The Spirit of God, however, was at
work through His chosen servants and when at last, Josiah,
regarded by the historians as the best of all the kings of
Judah, came to the throne, the situation was dramatically
reversed, the prophets were encouraged to renew their ac-
tivity and every effort was made to restore the religion of
64
Israel in all its purity. Assyria at this time had suffered a
series of blows and was on the verge of passing forever
from the scene of world history, so Josiah had no hesita-
tion in throwing off his allegiance to her and declaring the
complete political and religious independence of his na-
tion.
JOSIAffS GREAT REFORM
ALL this at last came to a head in Josiah's eighteenth year,
621 B.C., when some workman, engaged in restoring the
Temple which Manasseh had allowed to fall into disrepair,
discovered a book of the laws of God which had apparent-
ly been long lost (II Kings 22). This is now generally be-
lieved to have been the Book of DEUTERONOMY^ Josiah
thereupon began a great reform movement with the pur-
pose of securing the strict observance of these laws.
The most important provision in this particular law
code was that sacrifice must not be offered to God any-
where except in Jerusalem (Deuteronomy 12:1-7) so Josiah
ordered the destruction of all other shrines and altars in
the land (II Kings 23). When worship was being carried on
at so many little local sanctuaries, it had never been pos-
sible entirely to eliminate the unsavoury practices of the
old Canaanite fertility cult, with its repulsive emphasis
upon sexuality, frpm the religious life of the people of
Israel, but now there would no longer be any danger of
contamination from this source since all worship was to
2 Most scholars believe that this book, a compilation of mostly ancient
laws, but revised in a new spirit, actually had been drawn up secretly as
the program of the reforming party in the reign of Manasseh and per-
haps intentionally put where the workmen would find it so that it might
be brought dramatically and forcefully to the attention of the king.
65
be under the direct control and supervision of the re-
forming priesthood in Jerusalem. This decree of Josiah
did more than any other single thing to make Jerusalem
the holy city of the Hebrews.
Josiah's reformation was epoch-making in many ways,
but nothing in it was perhaps more important than the
fact that a book was now declared to be the sole source of
authority in faith and morals and was accepted as such by
the entire nation. This was the real beginning of the
Bible, and it is, in one sense, quite correct to say that the
Book of Deuteronomy is the first book in the Bible, the
first, that is, to be accepted authoritatively as the Word
of God.
THE PROPHET JEREMIAH AND JUDAH*S LAST DAYS
WHEN Josiah lifted the ban on the prophets, new prophetic
books began to appear. The first was that of ZEPHANIAH,
who wrote about some threat to world peace, which many
scholars identify with the invasion of barbarian hordes,
the Scythians, who were terrifying the whole Near East
in the early years of Josiah's reign. The greatest prophet
of the age and, some would say, of any age was Jeremiah,
a young country boy, who felt that God had called him
to go up to Jerusalem to be a religious leader to His
people (Jeremiah i). His prophetic ministry, like that of
Isaiah, was a long one, and lasted through all the years yet
remaining to the Kingdom of Judah. His message was a
consistent one: Doom is coming upon the kingdom of
Judah! (e.g. Jeremiah 4:5-9; tf'-io). There were, of course,
many facets to his message and his contribution to the re-
ligious life of humanity is immeasurable, but, for his own
66
time, the essence of his proclamation was simply this: God
is about to bring judgment upon His people for their age-
long failure to be loyal to Him and to deal justly with each
other (Jeremiah 2:29-37).
In the years which followed the beginning of Jere-
miah's prophetic ministry, his message grew stale to his
hearers through much repetition and there seemed little
in the objective situation of Judah to justify his sombre
tones. Indeed it looked as though Judah was on the verge
of a golden age. The Empire of Assyria had collapsed and
King Josiah evidently thought the time was ripe to re-
establish the kingdom of David in all its ancient extent.
Jeremiah, however, was not judging the future by the
superficial evidence of external conditions. He was deeply
in touch with the moral life of his people and he could
feel within it that corruption of the national morale which
meant that disaster and death were imminent (Jeremiah
73:23-27,).
Toward the end of the seventh century, the form in
which the doom would come began to be more and more
evident. The history of the period is very complex, but it
is enough to say that the good king Josiah was killed in
battle and succeeded by his son, Jehoiakim, a thoroughly
self-centered politician and the willing tool of any foreign
power strong enough to claim his allegiance (Jeremiah
22:13-19). Shortly after this, Babylon succeeded in estab-
lishing her claim to be Assyria's successor as ruler of the
oriental world, and Jehoiakim quite voluntarily submitted
to her overlordship. Eventually, however, having mis-
judged his resources and misled by promises of help from
the Egyptians, he rebelled and attempted to set himself
up as an independent monarch. Nebuchadnezzar, the Baby-
lonian king, immediately marched against him, captured
the city, 597 B.C., and carried away the most influential
among the people to captivity in Babylon. Jehoiakim died
before the city fell, and his son Jehoiachin came to the
throne just in time to be carried away by the Babylonians.
His uncle, Zedekiah, a well-meaning but indecisive indi-
vidual, succeeded him as king, and, ten years later, allowed
the same bad advice and the same false promises of for-
eign assistance to precipitate him foolishly into another
rebellion against the Babylonians. This time, the Baby-
lonians had completely lost patience and when Jerusalem
was captured after a long siege, 586 B.C., the horrors of
which are described in the Book of LAMENTATIONS (e.g.,
chapter 4), Nebuchadnezzar ordered it razed to the foun-
dations, including the walls and the temple of Solomon,
so as to make further revolt forever impossible. This time
a much larger part of the population, though by no means
the whole of it, was carried into exile. Thus Jeremiah's
dark prophecies came true and the Hebrew kingdom was
at an end. The Babylonian Exile had begun. This is the
story told in II Kings 23:26-25:21.
Two more of the prophetic books belong in this period.
The Book of HABAKKUK. is an attempt to wrestle with the
moral problem created by the rapid succession of victories
achieved by the ungodly Babylonians, Chaldeans. The
Book of EZEKIEL is the work of a prophet who in 597 B.C.
went to Babylonia among the first captives and there fol-
lowed, and commented upon, the progress of events in
Palestine. He also continued to prophesy for a number of
years after the Exile began.
68
THE PEOPLE OF ISRAEL IN EXILE
THIS might very well have been the end of Israel and of
the religious truths which had been committed to her
keeping. But God still had a great work, the greatest, for
her to do. His Spirit was at work among the exiles in
Babylonia, stirring up in them a great consciousness of
their own past glories and a sense of greater things yet to
come. During the Exile, the Jews ceased to be a nation in
the former sense of the word and began to become what
God intended them to be: a spiritual community, a
Church. When the religion of sacrifice and Temple was
gone, the religion of the Book and the synagogue was born,
a religion which could be practiced anywhere in the world,
not merely on the soil of Palestine. Thus in the Exile there
began to take place that great expansion of the horizons
of Judaism which was a necessary pre-condition for the
rise within it of the Christian Church.
AFTER THE BABYLONIAN EXILE: THE SECOND ISAIAH
EVENTUALLY the Exile came to an end. The Babylonian
Empire fell before the rising power of Persia, and when
Cyrus, the Persian king, entered Babylon, 539 B.C., one of
his first acts was a decree permitting the Jews who were
settled in Babylonia to return to their homeland. The
progress of Cyrus had been anxiously followed by the ex-
iled Jews and one of their number, an anonymous prophet,
wrote some of the most beautiful chapters in the Old Tes-
tament at this time, telling of the glorious things God was
about to do for his people. These prophecies are now at-
tached to the end of the Book of Isaiah and lacking a better
name, the author is commonly called the Second Isaiah.
69
HOW THE TEMPLE WAS REBUILT
WE have only fragmentary information about the period
which follows and have to depend largely on the rather
confused and episodic story told in the Books of Ezra and
Nehemiah. These two books are merely the concluding
part of a great historical work which begins with I and II
CHRONICLES. The author of this four-volume outline of
world history wrote many centuries after the events and
had very little material with which to work. For the early
part of his story (7-77 Chronicles), he merely rewrote the
Books of Samuel and Kings in accordance with his own
somewhat peculiar philosophy of history, idealizing the
characters, sometimes elaborating, sometimes condensing,
the narrative. These first two books have little new to tell
us, but the last two, Ezra and Nehemiah, with all their
deficiencies as history, are invaluable for the unique,
though fitful, light they throw on the obscure centuries
which followed the Exile.
EZRA 1-4 describes the return of the exiles under the
royal prince Zerubbabel and their first attempts to rees-
tablish the worship of God in Jerusalem. Some eighteen
years after the return, the prophets HAGGAI and ZECHARIAH
stirred up the energies of the people to begin the rebuild-
ing of the Temple and in 516 B.C. it was completed
(Ezra $> 6). Ezra himself, according to the book which bears
his name, (Ezra 7-10), was a scribe (the first to receive the
name) who came to Jerusalem from Babylon about the
middle of the following century and carried on a cam-
paign to reawaken the religious zeal of the Jews, especially
by putting an end to marriages with foreign women,
70
which, he felt, were destroying the unity of the people
of Israel and the integrity of their religion.
He also brought with him a Book of the Law (Nehemiah
8-10) which most scholars identify, at least in part, with the
document in the Pentateuch called P. It was evidently in
the main a book of detailed instructions with regard to
life and worship and was immediately accepted by the
people as of binding authority. It was not long before this
book was combined with the older documents J and E
and the Book of Deuteronomy to form the Pentateuch,
the first five books of the Bible as it is today. These five
books together with the various commentaries which grew
up about them are what the New Testament calls "the
law" for, from the time of Ezra on, they constituted the
fundamental law of the Jewish religion. Because they had
to be interpreted, there grew up a special class of students
of the Law, who became the real religious leaders of the
Jews and were called scribes or rabbis. This kind of re-
ligion, which centered in the Law and the work of the
rabbis, is what is called Judaism and was the religion in
which Jesus and St. Paul were nurtured. Thus the work
begun by Ezra was of almost inestimable importance.
The other great man of this age was NEHEMIAH, a lay-
man who had risen to a high position in the Persian court
and chose to exercise his great influence for the good of
his people. He became governor of the Jews in 444 B.C.
and immediately set to work to restore the city walls of
Jerusalem. In doing so he aroused the enmity of the people
who lived in the north, around Samaria and Shechem, and
the final breach between the Jews and Samaritans is to be
dated from about this time. He also attempted to purify
71
and consolidate the religious life of the people by seeing
that the religious taxes were paid, the Sabbath properly
observed, and marriages with foreign women forbidden.
How necessary Nehemiah's reform was, we see from the
Book of MALACHI, which dates from the period immedi-
ately before his coming to Jerusalem. Despite a certain
narrowness in his vision, Nehemiah emerges as a really
good type of the devout and consecrated layman. Many
scholars believe that the chronology of these books is incor-
rect and that the work of Ezra is actually to be dated about
fifty years after Nehemiah.
To us, the almost fanatical devotion of Ezra and Nehe-
miah to the Jewish nation and their violent opposition to
any compromise with the surrounding Gentile world
seems a severe limitation on their greatness and an un-
fortunate narrowing down of the broad vision which is
evident in some of the earlier prophets. We should recog-
nize, though, that the Jewish religion, the religion of a
small and impoverished community, could hardly have
survived through the difficult years which were to follow,
if it had not been for the uncompromising loyalty to the
nation and the traditional religion engendered by such
men as these and their equally "narrow-minded" follow-
ers. They undoubtedly played a real and very important
role for the time in which they lived, and we should regret
only that the exclusiveness which was a necessity for a
particular age still remained when the crisis was past.
Even in the times following Ezra and Nehemiah, how-
ever, there were protests against the extreme views to
which their teaching gave rise. Thus in the Book of JONAH,
we have an amusing caricature of a narrow-minded
72
prophet who cannot conceive that God is interested in
anyone except Jews, and in the Book of RUTH (see page
47) the attractive portrait of a woman who, although of
non-Jewish origin, proved herself capable of sacrificial de-
votion and genuine religious feeling. These two books
show that the more liberal strain in Jewish religion was by
no means dead. It was, of course, to this strain that Chris-
tianity attached itself.
AFTER THE HISTORICAL BOOKS
VERY little is known of the centuries 400-200 B.C., al-
though most of the books of the Bible, apart from the
Pentateuch, actually came into being or were edited in
their final form during this period. From other sources
than the Bible, we know that Palestine, like the rest of
the oriental world, passed under a series of new rulers
when at last the Persian Empire was overthrown by Alex-
ander the Great. From about 333 B.C. Palestine was a
part of the Greek world and the influence of Greek
language, thought, and culture upon the Jewish people
was enormous. The fact that the New Testament was
written in Greek is one of the most striking evidences of
this. Greek culture became so popular that for a time it
looked as though the traditional culture and religion of
Israel would be entirely lost. Out of this situation grew the
last great crisis of Israel before the Christian era.
THE HEROIC STRUGGLE OF THE MACCABEES
IF the infiltration of Greek culture had continued to be a
gradual thing, it might have succeeded in obliterating the
old national culture of Israel, but things were suddenly
73
brought to a dramatic head when a Grecian king, Antio-
chus Epiphanes, who ruled over the Seleucid (Syrian)
Empire, one of the kingdoms into which Alexander's
world-empire had broken up after his death, attempted
forcibly to suppress the religion of the Jews. The story of
the thrilling battle for national survival which followed is
told in the books of the Apocrypha called I and II MACCA-
BEES. Antiochus had forbidden the practice of Judaism
and had actually set up a pagan altar, "the abomination
of desolation," in the temple at Jerusalem, not realizing
with what kind of people he had to deal. The devout nu-
cleus of the nation rose against him in violent revolt under
the leadership of Judas Maccabeus and gradually drove the
Syrian forces out of the land. It was in this period that the
Book of DANIEL was written, in order to encourage the
Jews to fight bravely against their foreign oppressors by
showing them, on the one hand (Daniel 1-6) how coura-
geously their ancestors in the days of the Babylonian Exile
had stood up for their faith, and on the other hand,
(Daniel 7-14) how certain they could be of victory since
God was on their side and had already determined the out-
come (Daniel 7:27).
THE HASMONEAN KINGDOM
THE Jews were entirely victorious under the leadership
of Judas and other members of his family; the temple was
restored to the worship of Jehovah, 165 B.C., and a few
years later a Jewish kingdom was once more established in
Palestine with the family of the Maccabees, now called
the Hasmoneans, as the ruling dynasty. This began a pe-
riod of aggressive nationalism such as had not been pos-
74
sible for more than three hundred years and would not
be paralleled again until the rise of modern Zionism. It
reached its highest pitch in the forcible conversion to
Judaism of some of the Jews' near neighbors to the north
and south, especially the Idumeans. In all probability, the
Book of ESTHER was written in this age, as no book in the
Old Testament is so completely a product of unrestrained,
purely secular, nationalism as this. It is a romantic novel-
ette laid in the days of the Persian Empire, which reaches
its climax with the slaughter by the Jews of seventy-five
thousand Gentiles! The chief values of this book are lit-
erary and historical. It is an exciting story, well told, and
gives an insight into the mind of many of the Jewish
people at this remarkable period in their history. The
Apocryphal Book of JUDITH is of much the same charac-
ter and was probably written about the same time.
THE ROMAN EMPIRE: HEROD THE GREAT
THE independent Hasmonean kingdom, however, did
not have long to live. In 64 B.C. Syria and Palestine be-
came a part of the Roman Empire. Eventually Herod the
Great, an Idumean whose people had been converted to
Judaism at the sword's point a short time before his birth,
succeeded by an almost incredibly cynical combination of
perfidy, brutality, and political shrewdness in getting him-
self recognized as king of the Jews under Roman suze-
rainty. The fascinating story of his reign is to be read in
the works of the great, but equally worldly and calculat-
ing, Jewish historian, Josephus. It is Herod who Occupies
the throne when the New Testament story begins.
During all the period which followed the Babylonian
75
Exile a great movement, marked by no spectacular events,
had been quietly going on among the Jews. This was the
gradual dispersion of the nation throughout the civilized
world. Palestine was a poor country and the young peo-
ple, fresh, vigorous, and anxious for a better life, had
emigrated in a constant stream until by New Testament
times, there were far more Jews outside the Holy Land
than within it. It was this worldwide diffusion of the
Jewish people, the Diaspora, along with the universal use
of the Greek language, which made possible the preaching
journeys of St. Paul and other early Christian missionaries.
Wherever they went, there were already synagogues in
which they could preach and people who could under-
stand the language which they spoke. Christians have al-
ways seen in these facts the working of God's Holy Spirit,
preparing the world to receive the Gospel.
CHAPTER
FIVE
Prophetic Books: Proclamation
of God's Justice and Mercy
A
X1.LTHOUGH the prophetic books come
last in the Old Testament, it is better to deal with them
here rather than later, because they are so closely connect-
ed with the history of the nation and the greater part of
them were written before the poetic books. Most of them
have already been referred to in the preceding section in
the proper historical order. For convenience of reference,
they are considered in this section in the order in which
they appear in our Bibles.
THE NATURE OF A PROPHET
THE prophetic writings are frequently misunderstood be-
cause people think that a prophet is "one who can fore-
tell the future" and they try to get from the prophetic
books a blueprint of world history for all time to come.
Only one of the so-called prophetic writings, the Book of
Daniel, actually attempts to do anything of this kind, and
77
as we shall see, it is not really a prophetic book at all, in
the Old Testament sense (see page 86). Although the great
prophets were indeed interested in the shape of things to
come, their concern was not with the remote future, but
with that which lay directly before them. They could
see that the events of the immediate future are always
the result of what people are doing and thinking in the
present.
The prophets were not fanciful visionaries who sought to
disclose the secret plan of God for all subsequent history,
but men of tremendously practical interests who were
deeply immersed in the social, political, and moral prob-
lems of their own times. Their chief endeavor was to ex-
plain the will of God to the people of the day in which
they lived and to interpret in moral terms the meaning
of contemporary events. Of course they did not conceive
of themselves as mere teachers or preachers, but regarded
themselves quite literally as men of God, men of whom
God took possession and whose minds and voices He used
to declare His will. Yet, their books dearly show that they
were not mere automatons, simply reproducing the words
of Another. They were, rather, profoundly intelligent men
who actively cooperated with God in the formulation and
proclamation of His message.
A two-fold definition of a prophet will, perhaps, come
somewhere near the truth. The great prophets of the
eighth century and later were, on the one hand, men of
outstanding intelligence and deep moral earnestness, who
were in contact with all the basic forces which were stir-
ring in their times, while on the other hand, the spirit
of the living God was actually at work within them utiliz-
ing them as instruments to mould Israel according to His
will.
The prophets are often difficult to understand. There
are three reasons for this:
First, since they always spoke with regard to a particular
situation, we sometimes fail to understand their mean-
ing, because we no longer know clearly what that situa-
tion was.
Secondly, the addresses of the prophets were always brief
and a single chapter in our Bibles today may contain
several separate prophetic oracles or addresses, delivered
upon different occasions and sometimes even by different
men. The editors who put the prophetic books together
often did not understand the material with which they
were dealing any better than we do and frequently joined
together oracles which are unconnected and make no par-
ticular sense when read consecutively.
Thirdly, since what the oracle originally referred to was
often forgotten in the course of time, the true meaning of
the language has sometimes been forgotten also and the
words and forms have been changed as they were copied
by one scribe after another until, not infrequently, pas-
sages have been corrupted to such an extent that neither
the English translation nor the Hebrew original makes
any very clear sense. These difficulties, of course, should
not be exaggerated unduly and they should not lead us to
neglect the reading of the prophetic books, because, next
to the New Testament itself, they are the noblest religious
writings of all time and contain some of the most stirring
passages in all literature.
79
ISAIAH: THE PROPHET OF FAITH IN GOD
AT the head of the four so-called major 1 prophets stands
the Book of ISAIAH. The nucleus around which this book
grew was a collection of the oracles of the eighth century
Judean prophet Isaiah. Isaiah's oracles make up a large
part of the first thirty-nine chapters. Isaiah exercised his
ministry as a prophet in Jerusalem for more than forty
years, mostly in the reigns of Ahaz and Hezekiah (see
pages 62, 63), and during the successive crises of that time
was the most important spiritual leader of the nation. He
was possibly of noble birth since he had direct access to
the ears of the king. His call to prophesy is beautifully
and simply told in chapter 6. Here, in the song of the
seraphim, we meet one of the great ideas in Isaiah's
thought, that of the majestic and unapproachable holiness
of God. To Isaiah this holiness included the thought of
God's utter moral purity. The first crisis Isaiah had to
meet in his prophetic ministry was that of the Syro-
Ephraimite War (Isaiah 7), during which he first emerged
as the prophet of absolute faith in God. He said, // ye
will not believe, surely ye shall not be established (Isaiah
7:9). The same thought frequently recurs elsewhere in his
teaching, as in the familiar passage, In returning and rest
shall ye be saved; in quietness and in confidence shall be
your strength (Isaiah 30:15).* Chapter 20 describes a later
crisis of the nation's life during which the prophet walked
amongst the people "naked and barefoot" for three years to
try and persuade them not to ioin in armed revolt against
* The terms major and minor are to some extent misleading and are
used here only because they have become fixed in common usage,
a See footnote, page 63.
so
their Assyrian overlords. The last crisis in which we know
he played a part was that connected with the siege of
Jerusalem by Sennacherib (Isaiah 36-39). Once again
Isaiah was sure that God is not on the side of the largest
battalions, but of those who trust Him and do His will.
When Sennacherib lifted the siege and withdrew his
armies, as reported in Isaiah 37:36-38, it seemed that
Isaiah's doctrine of faith had been triumphantly vindi-
cated. Among other famous passages in the book, the most
important for Christian thought are those (perhaps not by
Isaiah himself) which describe the ideal future king of
Israel, the Messiah (Isaiah 9 and n). His name shall be
called Wonderful, Counsellor, The mighty God, The
everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace (Isaiah 9:6), and
the spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him, the spirit of wis-
dom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might,
the spirit of knowledge and of the fear of the Lord (Isaiah
11:2).
SECOND ISAIAH: THE PROPHET OF DELIVERANCE
THE second part of the book of Isaiah (40-66) is the work
of another prophet (see page 69) or perhaps of several
prophets, who lived in the days which just preceded and
followed the end of the Babylonian Exile (539 B.C.), more
than 150 years after the days of the eighth century Isaiah.
These chapters, which are among the most familiar and
appealing in the prophetic books, depict the coming
glories of the kingdom of Israel and set them in striking
contrast to the humiliation which the people of God have
had to suffer for so long. Comfort ye, comfort ye my peo-
ple, saith your God. Speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem,
81
and cry unto her, that her warfare is accomplished, that her
iniquity is pardoned (Isaiah 40:1, 2). When Christians read
these chapters, they quite properly refer the promises of
glory and worldwide dominion to the spiritual Israel,
which is the Christian Church, rather than to the national
Israel of the Jews.
Nothing in these remarkable chapters is more striking
than the description in four passages (Isaiah 42:1-4; 49:1-6;
$0:4-9; 52:1353:12) of a mysterious and touching figure
whom we call "the Suffering Servant of the Lord," an un-
named person who is to save his people, and all peoples,
by suffering and death, by being wounded for their trans-
gressions and bruised for their iniquities. Jewish inter-
preters were never agreed as to whom these chapters re-
ferred, but Christians have always seen in them a fore-
shadowing of the career of Jesus Christ and, according to
the Gospels, our Lord Himself accepted them as con-
taining the divinely intended pattern for His life. It was
by the contemplation of this strange figure that He
realized it was His paradoxical destiny to be a suffering
Messiah.
JEREMIAH: THE PROPHET OF THE INNER UFE
THE second of the major prophets is JEREMIAH (see page
66) and the book which bears his name is largely composed
of three kinds of literary material: oracles spoken by him
and written down at his command (see Jeremiah j6)> auto-
biographical fragments in which he tells of his own life
and inner thoughts (e.g. Jeremiah 12:1-6; 20:7-18) and bio-
graphical sections written by his faithful friend and secre-
tary, Baruch (e.g. Jeremiah 27, 28, 29). Unfortunately, the
8s
order of these materials is in great disarray, and, while the
separate sections are perfectly intelligible as they stand,
one needs the help of a good teacher or commentary to
straighten out the sequence of events. The prophet lived
through the closing years of the kingdom of Judah and was
involved in all the crises of that time. He was frequently
in conflict with the authorities (e.g. Jeremiah 26), incurred
the implacable enmity of king Jehoiakim (Jeremiah
36:2032), on more than one occasion was cast into prison
and was in danger of death (Jeremiah 20:1-6; 38:1-6; 32
and 33). Yet, in spite of constant opposition, he never once
faltered in his declaration that Israel was doomed because
it persistently rebelled against God's leadership. He
warned that it was futile for Israel to resist the Baby-
lonians since God was using them as instruments to punish
His people (e.g. Jeremiah 21:1-10). It may well be imagined
that such defeatist talk did not make Jeremiah popular
with his compatriots or their rulers. His was a lonely life
for all his years of prophesying, a loneliness accentuated
by his feeling that God had forbidden him to marry or
take part in the normal social life of others (Jeremiah
16:1-9). Only the assurance of God's constant presence
made it possible for him to endure. The fine account of
his call to prophesy which stands at the beginning of his
book describes both his hesitation to enter upon such a
life and the conviction of God-given strength which never-
theless made it possible for him to do so. Every indication
is that Jeremiah was a normal, kindly, rather timid man,
who loved the sights and sounds of the countryside around
the little village of Anathoth which had been his home.
There were many times in his career when he longed to
83
give up his unnatural life and this unpopular preaching,
but always the sense o God's call and God's help spurred
him onward (Jeremiah 15:10-21).
One must not think of Jeremiah as a "gloomy prophet."
This reputation has been given to him because of the Book
of Lamentations, which he did not write. He ,had, it is
true, a message of doom to deliver, but always behind the
doom was the sense of God's great purpose which could
not be frustrated, and, once the doom had taken place,
Jeremiah began to speak enthusiastically and beautifully
of the hope of restoration for Israel, a restoration which
would, however, take place on a higher and more spiritual
plane than anything the nation had previously known
(Jeremiah 32:36-44). In what many would consider the
finest passage in the Old Testament (Jeremiah 31:31-34),
he speaks of the New Covenant which God would one day
make with His people. The significance of this passage for
Christian theology is clear when we remember the fa-
miliar words of the Communion Service, This is my blood
of the New Covenant (see St. Luke 22:20).
Aside from his doctrine of the New Covenant, Jere-
miah's chief significance for religion is the revelation
which he gives us of his own inner life of prayer and de-
votion. He is often called the first individual in history
since he was one of the very first to record, not merely the
external events in which he was concerned, but also his
own inner thoughts and his private meditations (e.g. Jere-
miah 15:10-21). Although Jeremiah is obviously bound by
some of the limitations of his age, yet he emerges from the
pages of his book as one of the most human and attractive
figures in all literature.
ETTCKTFL; THE PROPHET OF RECONSTRUCTION
THE prophet EZEKIEL is the least appealing of the ma-
jor prophets, a lonely, forbidding, but towering figure
among the great men of the Bible. His mind is the most
difficult of them all to understand, as one must readily ad-
mit if he compares Ezekiel's verbose and fantastic account
of his call to prophesy (Ezekiel i) with the corresponding
accounts in Isaiah 6 and Jeremiah i. Ezekiel lived among
the Jewish captives in Babylonia in the early days of the
Exile and something of the awkward fancifulness of Baby-
lonian mythology and art seems to have entered into his
soul. His book is, though, more orderly than those of any
of his predecessors. The first 32 chapters consist of proph-
ecies written before the final downfall of the Hebrew king-
dom (that is, between 597 and 586 B.C.). In these he plays
over and over again variations on the theme, "Do not be
encouraged by delusive hopes; Jerusalem is going to be
totally destroyed" (e.g. Ezekiel 4).
The greatest chapter among all these is the eighteenth,
in which Ezekiel, incidental to his main purpose, declares
that God judges men only by what they are at the moment
of judgment. God does not punish an individual for the
sins of his ancestors, his family, or race, nor does He punish
him even for his own sins in the past if these have been
sincerely repented of. God, he says, has no pleasure in
the death of the wicked (Ezekiel 18:23), which is Ezekiel's
somewhat backhanded way of saying that God loves even
the sinner. Ezekiel's emphasis upon the importance of
individuals represents a tremendous advance. Before his
time, the Jews took it for granted that men should be dealt
85
with in groups and that they could be held responsible for
the sins of their family, their compatriots, and even of their
ancestors. They believed that children would be punished
for their father's sins to the third and fourth generations
(Exodus 34:7). How this worked out in practice can be
seen by reading the horrifying story of Achan told in
Joshua 7, especially verses 24, 25.
The second part of Ezekiel's book (chapters 33-48) con-
sists of prophecies uttered after the final siege and de-
struction of Jerusalem. The prophet, who had previously
spoken only of doom, here speaks almost entirely of hope,
of God's plan to restore the nation in purified form under
a just and humane king. The shepherds of chapter 34 are
kings. The future restoration of Israel is most strikingly
depicted in the remarkable vision of "the valley of dry
bones" in chapter 37. The concluding chapters of the book
(40-48) consist for the most part of laws and regulations
which do not make for exciting reading, but are historical-
ly interesting as the first tentative program of life and
worship to be drawn up for the reconstructed Jewish com-
munity after the Exile.
DANIEL: THE HERALD OF THE KINGDOM OF GOD
THE fourth of the major prophets is DANIEL. This actual-
ly is not a book of prophecy at all, in the Old Testament
sense of the word, and is not classified as such in the He-
brew Bible. It is an apocalypse, a kind of writing repre-
sented in the New Testament by the Book of Revelation,
which uses strange, fantastic language to teach the truth
that God has a plan for His world. In all the apocalypses
(and there were many others besides the two which have
86
been preserved in the Bible), this plan is always described
as containing certain standard elements: before the end
there will be a time of great persecution, with much dis-
tress for the faithful, after which God will intervene in
some striking way, destroy the heathen, and establish His
rule or kingdom upon earth. Other elements are the res-
urrection of the dead, a judgment, and eternal happiness
for the righteous. The differences among the apocalypses
are due to the various ways in which they elaborate the
fundamental themes. The Book of Daniel was written, as
has been previously explained (see page 74), to meet a
particular crisis in the history of the nation, the attempt
of Antiochus Epiphanes to suppress the Jewish religion.
The purpose of both parts of the book, the exciting stories
about Daniel and the three Holy Children in chapters 1-6,
and the apocalypse proper in chapters 7-12, is the same:
to encourage the Jews to be faithful to the practice of
their religion because God can be depended upon to take
care of His own. One should not allow the fanciful, and
often unintelligible, imagery of chapters 7-12 to blind
him to the great thought which underlies them, the
thought of God's dominion over the world and the realiza-
tion of His purposes through the course of history.
THE MINOR PROPHETS
IN the Hebrew Bible, the rest of the prophetic writings are
all part of a single volume called The Book of the Twelve.
We call them minor only because their bulk is so much
less than that of the major prophets, but actually such
prophets as Amos and Hosea are decidedly major so far
as their significance is concerned*
First in order, though not quite in order of time, is the
Book of HOSEA (see page 59) who was a prophet of the
northern kingdom in the days just before its final fall
(721 B.C.). The burden of his preaching is that irretriev-
able disaster is on the way and that it is deserved because
the people of Israel have preferred to worship the little
gods of the Canaanite fertility religion rather than Je-
hovah, the god of their ancestors. Hosea, however, is
known to religious history chiefly as the prophet of love,
not because love was the principal thing in his message,
but because he undoubtedly did conceive of God as pri-
marily a God of love and mercy, who punished His people
only as a last desperate measure and would always have
been willing to forgive them if they had ever shown any
sign of repentance. The first three chapters show how
Hosea came to this conclusion through his own unhappy
experience with a faithless wife.
JOEL is one of the latest of the prophetic books, perhaps
written as late as the fourth century B.C. It begins with a
description of a plague of locusts, a terrifying phenomenon
which then leads the prophet on to the thought of that
great "day of the Lord" which will one day come upon the
world.
AMOS (see page 59) was the first of all the writing
prophets, and prophesied in the northern kingdom a few
years before Hosea, beginning perhaps about 750 B.C.
His is one of the dearest and most virile of all the pro-
phetic books, and is dominated by a single theme: God's
demand for absolute justice in social relationships. For
Amos, nothing else counts. Sacrifices, temples, worship of
any kinds is meaningless unless it finds expression in a
88
righteous social order. His thought is well summed up in
the familiar quotation, Let justice roll down as the waters,
and righteousness as a mighty stream (Amos 5:24). The
famous expression / was no prophet, neither was I a
prophet's son is an indignant denial that he was a mere
prophet by profession who earned his living by telling
fortunes and playing upon the religious credulity of the
masses. Instead, he was a laboring man, a shepherd from
Tekoa, in the kingdom of Judah, who in the midst of his
work had heard God's call to be the bearer of His message
to Israel (Amos 7:14, 15; 1:1).
Along with the great prophets whose vision was world-
wide and whose interests were largely moral, we find men-
tion of a large class of professional prophets, who were
men of much smaller vision and whose message consisted
largely in prophesying victory for Israel's armies and disas-
ter for her foes. To such men as Isaiah, Jeremiah, and
Ezekiel, men of this type were merely false prophets (e.g.
Ezekiel 13:1-17). This was certainly an extreme judgment,
as many of the false prophets were undoubtedly conscien-
tious men who, rightly or wrongly, were concerned to em-
phasize God's favor toward His people rather than His
judgment upon them. The Book of OBADIAH is an example
of this kind of writing. Its subject is some terrible doom
which has befallen Edom, the nation situated immediate-
ly southeast of Israel and most dosely related to her by
ties of kinship. Obadiah interprets her fate as an act of
divine retribution for the infamous way in which the
Edomites had supported the Babylonians in the days when
Jerusalem was destroyed.
The Book of JONAH represents as broad and generous a
point of view as is to be found anywhere in the Old Testa*
ment. It is, as a matter of fact, not a book of prophecy, but
a story about a prophet, a little novel which is intended to
show how ridiculous the attitude of the narrow-minded na-
tionalist really is. Jonah, the legendary prophet who is the
central figure of the book, is intended to be typical of those
Jews of the author's time (the late post-exilic period) who
felt that God had no concern with anyone except them-
selves. The point of the book is that God in His universal
love cares as much for the people of Nineveh as for them.
The so-called whale, really "a great fish/' is merely a bit
of picturesque detail which the author introduces in order
to make his story more colorful and interesting.
The Book of MICAH is one of the greatest of the minor
prophetic books, although the work of the eighth century
Judean prophet Micah, a younger contemporary of Isaiah
(see page 64), occupies only the first three chapters. His-
message is essentially the same as that of Amos God's de-
mand for justice in social relations. The anonymous re-
mainder of the book (chapters 4-7) contains the beautiful
picture of the Jerusalem of the future situated in quiet
beauty as the spiritual center of a world at peace (chapter
4:1-5; found in part also in Isaiah 2). Here also is to be
found that definition of God's demands upon man which
is the best of all summaries of the content and spirit of
Old Testament religion: What doth the Lord require of
thee, but to do justly and to love kindness and to walk
humbly with thy God (Micah 6:8).
NAHUM, like Obadiah, is a representative of the nation*
alistic type of prophecy. The entire content of the book i&
a savage exultation over the fall of Nineveh the capital
90
of the great Assyrian Empire (612 B.C.). Regarded purely
as literature, it is one of the most stirring poems in the
Hebrew language and like the Book of Obadiah vividly
pictures the consequences of national pride and cruelty.
The prophet HABAKKUK (see page 68) lived during the
days when the new Babylonian Empire was sweeping
everything aside in its triumphal progress. The problem
with which the main part of the book deals is the peren-
nial one of attempting to reconcile the apparent prosperity
of the wicked with the conviction that a just and omnipo-
tent God is in control of the forces of nature and history
(Habakkuk 1:13). Habakkuk finds no satisfying intellec-
tual answer, but concludes that the righteous man will
nevertheless find the path of life by holding steadfastly to
God and the practices of his religion: The righteous shall
live by his faith (Habakkuk 2:4).
ZEPHANIAH (see page 66) attempted to interpret pro-
phetically the situation apparently created by the incur-
sion of the Scythian barbarians into the Near East in the
late seventh century B.C. The great medieval Christian
hymn Dies irae (468 in the 1940 Hymnal) is based upon
Zephaniah's description of the coming Day of the Lord
(note especially Zephaniah 1:15).
HAGGAI (see page 70), who delivered the four brief
oracles now contained in his book within a few weeks to-
ward the end of the year 520 B.C., had only one concern,
that the Jews should immediately begin the rebuilding of
the Temple which the Babylonians had destroyed in 586
B.C. He explains that all the distress which has come upon
them since their return from Exile is due to their neglect
of this great task.
ZECHARIAH (see page 70) was active at the same time as
Haggai and in the same cause. He, however, had broader
interests, shows much of the moral seriousness of the older
prophets (e.g. Zechariah 7:8-14) and, in chapter 8, draws
one of the most appealing pictures to be found in the Old
Testament of life in the wonderfully restored Jerusalem
of the future. Much of Zechariah's message is surrounded
by fanciful imagery which is similar to that of the later
apocalyptic writers. The last chapters of his book (9-14)
were written by another and much later hand, or by sev-
eral other hands. The material which they contain is partly
apocalyptical in character and is very difficult to interpret.
The most familiar passage is that which describes the
peaceful coming of the messianic king: Behold, thy king
cometh unto thee; he is just and having salvation; lowly,
and riding upon an ass, and upon a colt the foal of an ass
(9^
The last book in the Old Testament is MALACHI (see
page 72). It is actually anonymous, since the word Malachi
is not a proper name, but merely the word in 3:1 which
is translated my messenger. The unknown author of the
oracles contained in it lived in the time shortly before the
coming of Nehemiah and Ezra and describes the low spir-
itual state of the people, particularly as regards their neg-
lect of the worship of God (Malachi i:j) and the preva-
lence of divorce among them (Malachi
CHAPTER
SIX
Poetical and Wisdom Books;
Meditations on God and Life
T
JLHE books to be discussed here (Job
through the Song of Solomon) all belong in the third sec-
tion of the Hebrew Bible, the Writings, as do also some
of the books previously discussed, e.g. Ruth, Daniel, I-II
Chronicles, etc., and were regarded by the Jews as on a
somewhat lower level of inspiration and importance than
the Law and the Prophets. In general, they all belong to
the later period of Old Testament history and are, indeed,
with the possible exception of some of the Psalms, all post-
Exilic. Although the Authorized (King James) Version
prints these books as prose, they are all, with the excep-
tion of Ecclesiastes, written in poetic form, as the Revised
Version clearly indicates. Hebrew poetry has no scheme of
rhymes, nor does it have precisely measured syllabic feet
as does English poetry, but it does have very strongly
marked rhythmic patterns. Its most striking characteristic
is parallelism, as one can see by observing the asterisks
93
which, in the Prayer Book version of the Psalms, always
divide the Psalm-verse into two nearly equal halves. The
second half is always parallel in some way to the first. It
usually expresses the same thought in different words, but
sometimes gives a contrasting or complementary thought.
In Hebrew poetry, as in other poetic literatures, the lan-
guage and vocabulary are more elevated than in prose.
JOB: WHY DO THE INNOCENT SUFFER?
THE Book of JOB is not only a great work of the poetic
imagination, but also a profound discussion of one of the
most difficult of religious questions, Why does God permit
the innocent to suffer? Instead of approaching the ques-
tion in an abstract way, the author adopted the form of
drama, though it was not, of course, actually intended for
stage production, since the Hebrews had no theater. He se-
lected for his hero an ideally righteous man, Job, who was
visited by a series of almost unendurable calamities. He
then represents Job as disputing with three of his friends,
Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar, as to the justice of his fate.
The friends represent the old-fashioned, orthodox point
of view which regarded all misfortune as punishment for
sin. They insist that, since Job suffers so much, he must
be a very bad man. Job, conscious of his own rectitude,
though not in any smug or self-satisfied way, insists that
such is not the case and that a God who can permit such
things to happen is not truly a just God (Job 9:22-24;
19:6-9). He demands that he be permitted to confront God
and hear how God would justify His ways (Job 23:3-5).
While there has been much discussion as to precisely what
answer the author of Job intended to give to the question
94
with which he began, he at least seems to say that no
completely adequate solution is possible for the human
mind. What men need to satisfy their eager and anxious
souls, he seems to say, is not intellectual answers to their
difficult questions, but the actual personal experience o
God (Job 38:rff; 40:1-5).
The first two chapters and the last chapter of the book
are in prose and are written in a very different mood from
the poem. They seem to contain an old folk tale which the
author of the poem has merely taken as a convenient frame-
work for his magnificent picture of the agony of a human
soul. Both in Hebrew and English much of the language
of the book is difficult to understand and there are a num-
ber of intrusions and disarrangements in the various sec-
tions which confuse the main outline of argument and de-
velopment. Nevertheless, it can safely be said'that, in spite
of its length and difficulty, there is no Old Testament book
which has more to disclose with repeated readings.
THE PSALTER: PRAISING GOD IN SONG
THE Book of PSALMS is a hymn book, a collection of re-
ligious lyrics of many different types and moods which
were used in the Temple at Jerusalem to accompany
public worship. A careful reading of the Psalms even in
English reveals the fact that they were written by men
of varied interests and diversified situation. Tradition
ascribes the Psalms to David, but many of them are ex-
plicitly ascribed in their titles to other persons (e.g. 73, 89,
90), and it is doubtful if the great King of Israel was actu-
ally responsible for any of them. The titles, which profess
to name the author and describe the situation in which
95
the Psalm was written (e.g. 34), are much later than the
Psalms themselves and were added by editors who were in
no better position than we are to discuss such things. We
shall do well simply to accept the fact that the Psalms,
like the hymns in the Hymnal, were written by many dif-
ferent authors, whose names have long been forgotten.
Many of the Psalms are certainly of post-Exilic origin and
the collection as a whole was made for use in the second
Temple, that of Zerubbabel (see page 70). Nowhere in
the Old Testament do we come so close to the heart of
its religion as in these inspired songs, which are, for the
most part, direct expressions of the faith and piety of the
men of ancient Israel.
A brief list will show by way of a few examples how
rich is the variety of material contained in the Psalter:
Moral instruction, i, 15; an evening prayer, 4; hymns of
praise to God in nature, 8, 19, 29, 104; a song of personal
trust, 23; a processional hymn, 24; meditations on the
problem of injustice in the world, 37, 73; a royal marriage
hymn, 45; hymn to God as saviour, 46; a confession of sins,
51; a prayer for the king, 72; a lament in time of national
misfortune, 79; hymns for pilgrims, 84, 121, 122; a lament
by one who longs to make the pilgrimage to Jerusalem,
42, 43; a hymn in praise of the Holy City, 87; solemn medi-
tation upon the shortness of human life, 90; praise to God
as king, 95-99; praise to God for His love and kindness,
103; solemn public thanksgiving, 107, 136; an acrostic (an
artificial poem each part of which begins with a successive
letter of the Hebrew alphabet), 119; a meditation on
brotherly love, 133; a meditation on God's omniscience
and omnipresence, 139.
96
This list is far from complete, either as regards cate-
gories or examples, but will serve to indicate why Jewish
and Christian people of every age have always been able
to find in the Psalter poetry which could express their
every mood. A few of the Psalms belong to an outgrown
stage of man's religious thought and are rarely used in
public worship. These are the so-called imprecatory
Psalms (such as 58 and 109), and, when they are used in
Christian worship, are interpreted as referring to spiritual
and not personal enemies.
PROVERBS: THOUGHTS ON HOW TO LIVE WISELY
THE Book of PROVERBS is not a collection of folk sayings,
as the title might lead one to suppose. The brief moral
apothegms which make up most of the book are highly
polished literary maxims, the product of professional
teachers (wise men) who used them for the practical pur-
pose of teaching the good life to their pupils, mostly young
men of the upper classes. Like the Psalms, most of the
Proverbs are late, and the ascription of them to Solomon
(1:1) is a harmless literary device common to the age in
which they arose. 1 This book has often been criticized as
presenting a philosophy of enlightened self-interest as a
substitute for the high ethical idealism of the prophets.
This is to misunderstand its purpose which is a purely
practical one. It does npt deal with morality on the level
of profound religious insight, but for the most part at-
tempts merely to commend the ordinary decencies of civ-
iThus, a book of philosophy in the Apocrypha, written in Greek, is
called the Wisdom of Solomon, and two books written even later were
called, respectively, the Psalms and the Odes of Solomon.
97
ilized existence to young men who were about to enter the
fields of diplomacy and commerce. The morality it teaches
is earthly and common sense. Even here, though, there are
ethical precepts which rise above this level, such as // thine
enemy be hungry, give him bread to eat; and if he be
thirsty, give him water to drink (Proverbs 25:21). The
thinking of the wise men, also, occasionally led them into
deeper speculations than usual, as in the beautiful dis-
cussion of the role played by Wisdom in the creation of the
world (Proverbs 8:22-36) a passage which clearly forms
part of the background to the first chapter of the fourth
Gospel, In the beginning was the Word (St. John 1:1).
ECCLESIASTES: THE VOICE OF DISILLUSIONMENT
THE Book of ECCLESIASTES shows another direction in
which the thought of the wise men sometimes took them.
The endeavor to find a rational and common sense basis
for morality could, and did, lead some of them to negative
and skeptical conclusions, just as, in the modern world,
the attempt to base morality on something other than re-
ligion often leads to moral cynicism as well as religious
disbelief. This book was written by a thoroughly disillu-
sioned man, who had tried everything and found no satis-
faction in anything. He rejected the idea that a moral life
is practically advantageous since, so far as he could see,
the good and the bad come alike to a wretched end (Ecclesi-
astes 9:2; n). He did not doubt the existence of God, but
saw little evidence that God is concerned with man. He
deprecated too much attention to the practices of religion
(Ecclesiastes 5:1-6; 7:16). His positive conclusion is that
one should strive to live the simple life (Ecclesiastes 5:18-
98
so) and practice the golden mean (Ecclesiastes 7:16). Ec-
clesiastes could hardly have been included in the Canon
of Scripture if the author had not chosen to write under
the pseudonym of Solomon and the book had not later
been given an orthodox coloring by the addition of verses
here and there which provide an antidote to the prevail-
ing skepticism (e.g. Ecclesiastes 2:26; 8:11-13; 12:13, 14).
Nevertheless, this is an extremely valuable book since it
exposes the inadequacy of all attempts to create a satis-
fying view of life on the basis of mere intellectual specula-
tion without regard to historic religious faith. The gloomy
rationalistic pessimism of Ecclesiastes is an excellent foil
for the religious, though intensely realistic, optimism of
the Christian Gospel.
SOLOMON'S SONG: THE BEAUTY OF HUMAN LOVE
THE SONG OF SOLOMON, the third of the Biblical books at-
tributed to the great king of Israel's golden age, is actually
a collection of Hebrew love lyrics, compiled perhaps to be
sung at a wedding celebration. They are notable for their
exuberant oriental imagery and for their unusual feeling
for the beauties of nature (e.g. The Song of Solomon 2:10
13). They came to have a religious significance only after
they were reinterpreted to refer, not to the love of a
man for a maid, but to God's love for his people Israel.
When the Old Testament became a part of the Christian
Bible, the book was understood to refer to Christ's love for
the Church, as one can see by referring to the chapter
headings in the Authorized Version. This is, of course,
poetic license and is perfectly legitimate so long as we do
not suppose it was the purpose of the original writer.
99
CHAPTER
SEVEN
Religious Faith and Practice
in the Old Testament
IILE the Old Testament contains
many books and they represent many different interests
and points of view, yet there are certain basic convictions
about God and the meaning of life which are common
to most of them. It is this underlying unity of viewpoint
which justifies speaking of the religion, or theology, of the
Old Testament. Beside this basic unity of faith, the people
of ancient Israel were bound together also in a unity of
worship and religious observance which, especially in later
times, tended to make of them not merely a Nation, but a
spiritual community, a Church.
THE OLD TESTAMENT IDEA OF GOD
THE most distinctive doctrine of the Old Testament with
regard to God is that He is One. The basic creed of Juda-
ism to the present day is Hear, O Israel: the Lord thy God
is one Lord (Deuteronomy 6:4). In the earliest times, this
100
doctrine seems to have meant that there was only one God
for Israel, but later on it came to mean that only one God
exists and that there is no other God beside Him. This
true monotheism finds its most beautiful expression in cer-
tain passages in Second Isaiah (e.g. Isaiah 44:6; see page
81). According to the developed thought of Israel, this God
was the Creator of everything in heaven and earth (Gen-
esis i) and constantly sustains everything by His love and
power (Psalm 104). Although God is often associated with
the forces of nature, He is never identified with them, as is
done in most pagan religions and in much modern re-
ligious thought. God is always represented as superior to
nature and in control of it (Psalm 18:^15; I Kings
19:11, 12).
God in the Old Testament is always represented as per-
sonal, never as an impersonal force. So intense is His per-
sonality that He even has a personal name, Jehovah or
Yahweh (Exodus 6:2, 3); usually translated in our English
versions by the Lord. He is often described as acting like
a man loving, angry, repentant, speaking, even smelling
and sleeping. In very early times these expressions may
have been understood literally, but in later times they
were merely poetic ways of referring to His activity, since
no other language was available. The Hebrews felt it was
more reverent to use even the most extremely human
(anthropomorphic) language about God than to use the
abstract language of philosophy. Philosophy tends to make
God merely the object of our speculative thought rather
than the living God who reigns as King over His creation,
directs the course of history to His own great ends, and
demands personal loyalty from His creatures.
101
Along with this emphasis upon His personality, the Old
Testament also insists that God is spiritual. Although it
is necessary to use human language if one is to speak of
Him at all, yet God is not man and the difference between
the two is an infinite one (Numbers 23:19; Isaiah 55:8, 9).
In order to safeguard the spirituality of God, the men of
the Old Testament were forbidden to make any visible
image or representation of Him (Exodus 20:4) and the
prophets heaped bitter scorn on those who worshipped
idols (Isaiah 44:9-20). While the Old Testament does not
speculate as to what God's nature is, yet it plainly implies
that, in contrast to man and all other creatures, God is
Spirit (Isaiah 31:1-3).
Finally, the Old Testament declares that God is a
righteous God. He does not operate by caprice, but ac-
cording to the fixed and unchangeable law of His own
being (I Samuel 15:29; Genesis 18:25; Psalm 146). Be-
cause He is righteous, He demands righteousness from His
worshippers. No worship is pleasing to Him which is not
an expression of a life lived in obedience to His ethical
demands (Amos 5:21-24; Isaiah 58:1-12). Thus at the heart
of the Old Testament is the finest moral teaching known
to mankind before the coming of Jesus Christ, a moral
teaching which is neither primarily negative or individ-
ualistic, but which is positive and above all is concerned
with justice and decency in social relations (see, for exam-
ple, Deuteronomy 5:7-21; Leviticus 19:11-18; Psalm 15;
Job 31).
Although the Unity of God is one of the basic doctrines
of the Old Testament, yet there are also to be found there
certain ideas which can be regarded as intimations of that
102
richer and more adequate conception of God which is ex-
pressed in the Christian doctrine of the Trinity within
the Divine Unity. The Old Testament frequently speaks
of the Spirit by which God's power becomes operative in
the world. Sometimes, especially in the earlier period, this
was conceived crudely as a mere physical force (Judges
14:6; II Kings 2:16), but later was associated chiefly with
spiritual endowments such as the gift of prophecy (Ezekiel
2:1) and with ethical guidance (Psalm 51:11). In one pas-
sage, the Spirit is spoken of in terms which imply per-
sonality (Isaiah 63:10). The Old Testament also speaks of
God as working by means of His word, as in creation
(Genesis i, cf. Psalm 33:6) and in the book of Proverbs
(8:22-30) a similar role is given to Wisdom. These con-
ceptions are developed and their implications more fully
realized in the Christian doctrine of God.
THE OLD TESTAMENT IDEA OF MAN
ACCORDING to the Old Testament, man was created by God
"in His own image" (Genesis 1:23). Therefore man is dif-
ferent from all the rest of creation. Man was created to be
happy and to enjoy fellowship with God, but was given
free will so that he could choose whether he would live in
obedience and voluntary fellowship with Him or not.
Since Man disobeyed and chose to follow his own will
rather than God's, misery and death came to rule in the
world and Man's lot became desperately unhappy (Gen-
esis 3). He is, therefore, not merely God's creature, but a
fallen creature who is in need of divine assistance to save
him from the tragic situation which is the result of his
sin* Since God is a Father who loves His children (Psalm
103
703:75 ) and does not wish them to perish even though
they have rebelled against Him, it was always His ultimate
purpose to redeem men from the slavery which they had
created for themselves (Psalm 130:7, 8).
In the Old Testament story of creation, God says, It is
not good that man should be alone (Genesis 2:18). All
through the Old Testament (and also the New) there is
this sense that man is in his nature a social being. He al-
ways is seen as part of some larger group, the family, the
clan, or the tribe. The individual is so closely related to
this group that he is often punished or rewarded simply
because he belongs to it, and not because of his own per-
sonal merits or demerits (e.g. Joshua 7:24, 25; Exodus
20:5). In its extreme form this emphasis upon "the solidar-
ity of the group" is repugnant to our Christian conscience
and the worst features of it were finally repudiated by the
prophet Ezekiel (see page 85). In its best form this doctrine
embodies a very important truth about human nature and
remains a constant feature of Old Testament religion.
Man does not fully realize his nature when he lives to him-
self alone. He is a human, being in the complete sense of
the word only when he lives in society, fully participating
in the give-and-take of social intercourse and cooperating
with others for common ends. Because the Hebrews felt
this so keenly they never pictured salvation as a merely in-
dividual matter; man must find his individual salvation
within the redeemed community. In the Old Testament
the community within which men find the abundant life
is the nation of Israel; in the New Testament, of course,
it is the Christian Church.
104
THE IDEA OF THE COVENANT
BASIC to the religion of the Old Testament (and of the
New) is the idea that the relation of God to His people is
founded upon a covenant. The very name we give to the
two parts of the Bible shows the importance of this idea,
for though we call them the Old and New Testaments, yet
the word translated Testament really means Covenant and
is so rendered on the title page of the revised versions. The
word thus translated meant in its original sense a solemn
agreement and was used by the men of the Old Testament
for many different kinds of agreements which men entered
into in order to regulate their life together. Treaties, con-
tracts, partnerships, all relationships which involved mu-
tual privileges and responsibilities, were embodied in cov-
enants.
According to the Bible, when God saved the tribes of
Israel out of the land of Egypt and created Israel as a na-
tion, He entered into a covenant with them by which He
promised to be their God, if they would promise to trust
in Him and do His will (Exodus 19:5; 24:1-8). God's part
of the covenant was to be a King and Father to His people,
to protect them and deliver them from trouble; the peo-
ple's part was to live in accordance with the just and holy
laws which God had given them. Thus, for the Old Is-
rael, the covenant was based primarily upon written laws,
or, as the Hebrews themselves would have said, the Law
(Torah), meaning by that chiefly the first five books of
the Bible.
Although the Old Covenant was based upon laws, yet
we must be on our guard against conceiving of it in too
105
narrowly legalistic a fashion. The whole conception of
covenant among the Hebrews had a broader meaning than
our definition of it as a solemn agreement might seem to
suggest. While the Hebrews used the word for any kind
of formal agreement between two individuals, groups, or
nations, yet they also used it for all kinds of relationships
in which there was no thought of bargaining or of enter-
ing into an explicit legal contract. In Hebrew thought
there was a covenant implicit in every special relationship
into which men might enter: between a husband and his
wife, between a man and his friend, between a nation and
its king. Thus, for the Hebrew, the basic connotation of
the word covenant was not so much that of legal respon-
sibility as of personal and affectionate relationship. Wher-
ever a new relationship arose between persons, there a
covenant came into being and certain duties and privi-
leges were involved on both sides. So when God chose to
take Israel for His own people, the very creation of such
a relationship, for the Hebrew mind, involved the estab-
lishment of a covenant. When the men of the Old Testa-
ment thought of this covenant, the first idea which nat-
urally came to their minds was that of the wonderful love
and condescension of God which made Him wish to enter
into such a personal relationship with men. The covenant,
for them, was not a legal enactment, but an expression of
God's mercy and a pledge of divine grace.
There would naturally be a tendency among unimagina-
tive people to lay undue stress upon the external aspects
of the covenant and to feel that man had discharged his
duties sufficiently when he merely conformed to the divine
Law in a mechanical way without feeling any sense of per-
106
sonal dependence upon God. For this reason a covenant in
which written and codified law played so large a part
eventually had to give way to a higher form of covenant,
just as the relationship which is natural between a young
child and its father must sometime give way to a more
mature form of relationship. Just before the Exile, when
the whole basis of national life among the Hebrews was
being destroyed, the prophet Jeremiah looked into the
future and prophesied that the day would come when
God would establish a new covenant with His people,
based upon surer foundations, upon laws written in men's
hearts rather than upon tables of stone (Jeremiah 31:31)-
Our Lord fulfilled this prophecy and told His disciples on
the night before He died that the shedding of His blood
would actually establish this new covenant (St. Luke
22:20). Because we believe He did this, we call the collec-
tion of books which describe His work and its immediate
consequences The New Covenant or New Testament.
As Christians, then, we too are in a covenant relation-
ship with God. This means that our relationship with Him
is not a formless, indefinite thing, dependent upon our
whims and feelings or upon God's caprice. God is always
the same and our relationship with Him is based upon
principles which do not change. God has promised His
grace and help and we have promised obedience. This is
another way of saying that, from the human side, our re-
lationship, with God is a moral relationship. It does not
depend upon emotion oy upon pur doing merely what
seems right to us at the moment. The only possible rela-
tionship we can have with God is that which arises out of
a sincere effort to discover what His will is and to obey
107
Him whole-heartedly. The conception of religion as a
covenant relationship to God removes it entirely from all
sentimentality and vagueness and sets it firmly in the
sphere of moral obedience. It is God who makes the first
move to establish the relationship and who must ultimate-
ly sustain it; but men must sustain it too by responding
in love and loyalty.
The basic requirement of God under the Old Covenant,
established by the redemption of His people out of Egypt,
was careful observance of His laws; under the New Cove-
nant, established by the redemption of mankind through
the Cross, the basic requirement is faith in Jesus Christ.
Under both covenants what God really asks of men is not
merely external conformity to conditions arbitrarily im-
posed, but glad and loyal acceptance of a gift of grace
which has been freely offered.
THE FUTURE LIFE
WHILE the ancient Hebrews certainly believed in some
kind of survival after death, they had no hope of a happy
immortality until the very latest period of Old Testament
history. Except for a few favored souls such as Enoch and
Elijah, life beyond the grave (in Sheol) was conceived as a
wraithlike existence which hardly deserved the name of
life at all (Psalm 88:5, n, 12). Thus all rewards, satisfac-
tions, and punishments were conceived as being given in
the present life (Deuteronomy 28:1-23; P&dm 37; Proverbs
13:21, 22). Obviously, such a view as, this is not in accord
with the realities of life and eventually gave rise to grave
difficulties in the minds of thoughtful men such as the au-
thors of the Book of Job and Psalm 73. The wicked often
108
seem to prosper and the good to suffer in this life. We can
see at various places in this later period that the Hebrews
were reaching out toward the idea of a future life as a par-
tial answer to the problem of reconciling a belief in God's
justice with the evident injustice of life in this world (Job
14:7-1$; Psalm 16:10, 11), but the doctrine is clearly stated
only in two of the latest passages in the Old Testament,
Daniel 12:2, 3 and Isaiah 26: ig. 1 In both these places, the
idea of the future life takes the form of a belief in the
resurrection of the body, rather than a natural immortality
of the soul, since, unlike the Greeks, the Hebrews did not
think of man as being made up of a body and a soul, but
conceived of him as an indivisible unity, neither part of
which could exist without the other. It is this doctrine of
the future life which is also taught in the New Testament
and in the creeds, I believe in the resurrection of the body.
THE LAW AND ITS OBSERVANCES
THE first five books of the Old Testament are called the
Law, and contain a great many regulations both of a moral
and ceremonial character, especially the books of Leviti-
cus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. For the Christian these
are the least interesting and least profitable parts of the
Bible. That is partly because, in general, laws do not
make very interesting reading, but also because these par-
ticular laws are now for the most part of merely anti-
quarian concern, since the whole system of religion under
law was abrogated by the Christian Gospel. It is the special
service of St. Paul to have shown that the Law has no
i A passage which comes from a much later writer than the eighth cen-
tury prophet Isaiah.
109
longer any claim upon Christians (Galatians 2:16). We
must be careful, however, not to underestimate the value
and importance of law in the development of man's re-
ligious life. Even Paul says that the law is holy, and the
commandment holy and righteous and good (Romans
j:iz). Before men can live under grace they must learn to
live under law; just as a child must first be trained under
a discipline of rules and regulations before it can be
trusted to make free use of its God-given liberty. So the
laws which form the basis of the covenant in the Old Tes-
tament represent a necessary step in the education of man
in preparation for the covenant of grace which was estab-
lished in Jesus Christ. As Paul says, The Law was our cus-
todian until Christ came (Galatians 3:24 RSV).
Many of the laws are of a moral nature and are perma-
nently valid, as setting forth minimum norms of conduct.
Others, even some of a moral nature, are definitely out-
moded and still others have been explicitly altered by our
Lord's command (St. Matthew 5:20-48). The Christian
tests them all by the final standard, the mind of Christ.
SACRIFICE
THE greater part of the laws of the Pentateuch are of a
ceremonial nature and have no longer any validity for the
Christian. We cannot, however, simply ignore them, since
the New Testament presupposes a knowledge of many of
their more important provisions, especially those which
have to do with the offering of sacrifice. To the Jews of
post-Exilic times, the whole elaborate ritual of sacrifice
was part of a sacramental system which God had ordained
for the purpose of enabling man to remain in a state of
no
fellowship with Him. The men of the Old Testament did
not believe that sacrifice by itself had power to obtain for-
giveness of sin. Only contrition and amendment of life
could do that. But the sacrifices were believed to be the
means God had provided to remove the taint which re-
mained even after sin was forgiven. An expression con-
stantly used is to make atonement for (e.g. Leviticus 1:4),
and the sense of it is probably, "to cover over or blot out"
the unwholesome effects of sin, which would otherwise ex-
clude one from full communion with God. The philosophy
which was used to explain the efficacy of sacrifice is a some-
what complex and obscure one, based in large part upon a
belief in the mysterious potency of blood (Leviticus 17:11).
For our purpose it is sufficient simply to state that the basic
reason for observing the intricate rules and regulations
provided in Leviticus 1-7 was not that these things had
any magical virtue, but simply that God had willed it so.
Therefore, the meticulous observance of the Law's pro-
visions with respect to these things was a symbol of one's
complete and whole-hearted obedience to God's will. Un-
fortunately, this noble view could easily be corrupted.
Unimaginative people could suppose that the rites had
value in themselves, and might become more concerned
with the careful observance of the rules than with the
spirit which lay back of them. This could easily happen
with regard to any provision of the Law, and that it did
happen is shown in St. Matthew 23:23.
OTHER ESTABLISHED RITES: THE CHURCH CALENDAR
APART from the regular sacrifices, the principal rites of
Old Testament religion were these:
111
Circumcision was a rite, corresponding somewhat to
Christian baptism, by which the Hebrew child was in-
itiated into the covenant community (Genesis ij).
Then there were the various solemn observances of the
year, above all the regular weekly Sabbath, the seventh
day of the week, on which no labor was to be performed
(Deuteronomy 5:12).
The New Year's day differed in different periods, but
according to one calendar at any rate, the year began in
the month Nisan or Abib (approximately our April) and
the first great feast was the Passover which also in-
cluded the Feast of Unleavened Bread, commemorating
the Exodus from Egypt (Exodus 12; Deuteronomy i6:i-j).
Fifty days later came the Feast of Pentecost, originally a
festival of the grain harvest, but later observed in honor
of the giving of the Law (Deuteronomy 16:9-12).
In the fall, when, according to the system now in use by
the Jews, the New Year began, came the Day of Atone-
ment, Yom Kippur (Leviticus 16), the most solemn day of
all, when the high priest entered the inner sanctuary of the
Temple, the Holy of Holies and made atonement for all
the sins which the people had committed throughout the
year. The most interesting part of the ceremony was that
of driving out the scapegoat which was believed to carry
the sins of the people away into the desert (Leviticus
16:20-22).
Later in the same month (Tishri) came the Feast of Tab-
ernacles, the great harvest festival, also observed in later
times as a commemoration of the dwelling in tabernacles
or booths during the wilderness wanderings (Deuteronomy
16:13-17).
112
The Feasts of Purim (March) and Hanukkah
(December), which are important observances in later
Judaism, were established long after the Law was com-
piled. The book of Esther (9:26-32) describes the founding
of Purim and I Maccabees (4:59) that of Hanukkah.
J I'HK TEMPUE
THE sacrificial worship of the Hebrews centered in the
Temple at Jerusalem and after 621 B.C. (page 65) was
permitted nowhere else. The Temple of Solomon and its
furnishings are described in I Kings 6 and 7 and much
can also be learned about it from the account given of the
Tabernacle which the nomadic Hebrews were believed to
have carried about with them in the wilderness (Exodus
25-30). The Temple was not a building for worship, like a
church or synagogue, but was believed in some real way
to be the "House" of God. Worship and sacrifice took
place at the altar in the great open court in front of the
temple. The Temple itself was divided into two rooms: the
Holy Place and the Holiest Place. Only the priests went
into the Holy Place, which contained the Table of Shew-
bread, the great seven-branched lampstand, and the golden
altar of incense. Back of the Holy Place was the Holiest
Place (Holy of Holies), into which only the high priest
went, once in the year, on the Day of Atonement. This con-
tained the figures of the winged cherubim and the Ark of
the Covenant, a great chest above which God's Presence
was believed mysteriously to dwell. There were three
temples altogether in Hebrew history, the Temple of Solo-
mon, the Temple of Zerubbabel, and finally the Great
Temple built by Herod the Great which was still standing
"3
in our Lord's day (e.g. St. John 2:19, 20). The general fea-
tures of all these temples were the same. The priesthood
which presided over the worship of the temple was strict-
ly hereditary and all its members were believed to be
descendants of Aaron, the brother of Moses.
Christ brought this whole elaborate scheme of worship
and sacrifice to an end, and much of the New Testament
is devoted to showing how His life, death, and resurrection
completely and finally accomplished the great work of
atonement and reconciliation for which the religion of the
Law was only a preparation and foreshadowing. This is
especially the theme of Galatians, Romans, and the epistle
to the Hebrews.
ISRAEL'S HOPE: THE MESSIAH
THE religion of the Old Testament, particularly in the
later period, was a forward-looking religion. Recognizing
fully the prevalence of sin and suffering in the world as
at present constituted, the Hebrews looked with inextin-
guishable hope for a new mighty act of God which would
restore the world to the perfection which its Creator in-
tended and bring man back into fellowship with God and
into harmony with His purposes. The worse the external
situation became, the more brightly this hope shone. It
became an integral article of Jewish faith that God would
one day intervene in the natural course of history and es-
tablish His perfect rule (the Kingdom of God) upon earth.
There would be peace and brotherhood among all men in
a miraculously renovated universe. Typical expressions of
this hope are to be found in Micah 4: 1-5; Isaiah 65: 17-25;
Jeremiah 31:31-34. Sometimes the Old Testament writers
114
speak as though God's kingdom would be established by
Himself alone, without the aid o any intermediary, but
in other passages there is the expectation of a king of the
line of David, a perfect ruler, who will be God's agent in
the building of the new order as in Isaiah 9:2-7; 11:1-9;
Micah 5:2-4; Jeremiah 23:5-8; Ezekiel 34:23-24. This fig-
ure of the glorious future king attained more definite
form as time went on and in the period after the Old Tes-
tament he came to be called the Messiah. 2 Under oppres-
sion by foreign powers, as for instance the days of the
Roman Empire, the expectation of the Messiah became es-
pecially acute. We are, of course, aware of this from a
reading of the New Testament.
In addition to the figure of the Messianic King of
David's line, two other figures in the Old Testament are
associated with Israel's hope for the future. One is the
so-called Suffering Servant who appears in certain parts
of the work of II Isaiah (see page 81) especially chap-
ter 52:13-53:12. This figure probably symbolized origi-
nally the suffering people of Israel, but he is described in
such vivid terms that one can hardly help thinking of him
as an individual. Indeed, various students have attempted
at times to identify him with some well-known tragic
figure in Old Testament history. He is described as one
who is gentle and kind (Isaiah 42:3), whose mission is to
bring light to the Gentile world (Isaiah 49:6) but in the
pursuit of his task is despised by mankind as an ugly and
2 The term itself means merely the anointed one and, as a common
noun is found in many places in the Old Testament. It is one of the usual
titles of the king (e.g. I Samuel 24:6) since anointing was the ceremony by
which the king was inducted into office. The term was literally translated
in the Greek Bible by the corresponding Greek word Christ.
contemptible person (Isaiah 55:1-5). He dies for the sins
of others and offers his life as a sacrifice to God (Isaiah
53:4-6, 10), but at last is victorious over his sufferings and
is exalted to high honor (Isaiah 55:10-12). The Suffering
Servant is a very different figure from the glorious future
king and he does not seem usually to have been identified
with him.
The third figure is that described in Daniel (7:13) as
one like unto a son of man> meaning, in the Semitic idiom,
merely "one like a man." He, too, originally was a symbol
of the Jewish people and the meaning of the chapter is
that the last great kingdom in history will be the King-
dom of God and His faithful people Israel. This figure also
was in time individualized. In a later period there came
to be certain circles which definitely expected that the
Kingdom of God would be established through the agency
of a glorious figure, the Son of Man, whose place was by
the throne of God, but who would one day come on the
clouds of heaven to bring in the new order which God
had ordained.
It is in this great hope of Israel that the direct link be-
tween the Old Testament and the New is to be found. In
Jesus Christ all the hopes of Israel were realized, for He
was the expected Messiah, not a worldly and political Mes-
siah, but a Messiah in whom were gathered up into one
consistent pattern all the fragmentary visions of the seers
of ancient times, One who was at the same time the Son
of David, the Son of Man, and the Suffering Servant of
the Lord.
116
The Lord
Is Come
PART THREE
The New Testament
CHAPTER
EIGHT
The Four Gospels: Records
of Jesus 9 Earthly Life
T
JLHE New Testament relates the two con-
cluding and climactic episodes of the great story begun in
the Old Testament. There is, first o all, the account of
the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ in whom
were fulfilled the hopes and dreams of the Old Israel. This
is the story told in the four Gospels. Secondly, there is
the story of that broadening of the stream of life of the
Old Israel which resulted in the establishment of the New
Israel, the Christian Church. It is this which is told in the
Book of Acts and in the Epistles. Both these events had
been clearly foreshadowed in the Old Testament, the first
in the eager certainty of the great prophets that God
would one day act decisively for the redemption of His
people through One who would be their Prophet, Priest,
and King; the second in the noble speculations concern-
ing the ultimate mission of Israel to all mankind found
especially in the Second Isaiah and his pupils.
"9
HOW THE GOSPELS WERE WRITTEN
IF the story of the New Testament were to be told in the
order in which its books were written, it would begin
with the Epistles of St. Paul, for all these were written
before any of the Gospels. St. Paul was dead before even
Mark, the first of the Gospels, was put into shape. While
it does not appear practical to begin the study of the New
Testament in this way, it should always be remembered
that the earliest Christians had no Gospels such as ours
and their faith was based upon the kind of preaching and
teaching which are illustrated in the Pauline letters. What
they knew of Jesus Christ was what they were told by such
men as Paul and the Twelve, whose testimony was based
either upon a personal knowledge of our Lord's earthly
life, as in the case of the Twelve, or upon a vivid and
equally personal experience of His risen life, as in the
case of Paul. It was only after most of these men were dead
and the day of the eye-witnesses was drawing to a close
that it seemed wise to set down their testimony in the
form of gospels which should tell, in consecutive form,
the story which the apostolic teachers told only in a broken
and fragmentary way.
The earliest preachers of the Gospel, both the apostles
and those who at second-hand repeated their message,
were not much concerned to give their hearers a com-
plete biography of Jesus Christ. They concentrated their
attention primarily on certain major events in His career,
especially His death and the triumph over death which
was the unmistakable sign that God had set the seal of
His favor upon Him, Thus it came about that the earliest
120
part of the Gospel story to take shape was an account of
our Lord's suffering, death, and resurrection. As regards
His teaching and the other events of His life, there seems
to have been no particular attempt to preserve them in
their original setting or sequence. His sayings and par-
ables and familiar stories about Him were used by the
apostolic preachers as texts or illustrations for discourses
on their favorite themes, and the form which many of
them have in the Gospels today still reveals the original
use to which they were put. As a result, the different Gos-
pels often preserve the sayings of Jesus and the events of
His life in widely different contexts and often with inter-
nal differences which point to the use made of them in
preaching and teaching before they were ever set down
in writing.
We must, therefore, think of the writers of the Gospels
as editors rather than authors. They were, of course,
authors in the sense that each tells the story in his own
style and from his own characteristic point of view, but
they were editors inasmuch as they were working with
materials which had come down to them in a traditional
form. Part of this material was oral and part was written.
In some cases larger collections of these sayings and stories
had already been made, as in the case of the collection of
the sayings of Jesus called Q. 1 No doubt it was from such
independent collections of stories or sayings that the
authors of Matthew and Luke drew the material which is
distinctive to each of their books. The interest which the
Gospels have both as literature and as records of history is
greatly increased by realizing that none of them is simply
stands for the German word Quellc> meaning source.
121
the product of a single mind selecting freely from its own
recollections. Each has in a sense been written by many
hands, by a multitude of unknown Christian preachers,
who in special, concrete situations, drew upon the living
memory of the Christian community in order to warn or
console or instruct, and to proclaim anew "the wonderful
works of God." So in a true and vital way, the four Gos-
pels are the Church's books, not merely the memoirs of
individual men. They are the final deposit of the mind
of the primitive Church as it lived in the dawn of his-
tory's great new day and pondered the mystery of the
Word made flesh.
ST. JOHN: THE SPIRITUAL GOSPEL
THE four Gospels, as was seen at a very early period, fall
naturally into two classes. The first three are so much alike
in their construction and general viewpoint that they are
called collectively the Synoptic Gospels. 2 When we begin
to read the fourth Gospel, called by the name of ST. JOHN,
we are immediately conscious of a great difference. Not
only is the pattern of the book and the atmosphere which
pervades it strikingly dissimilar to the Synoptic Gospels,
but even the portrait of our Lord which appears upon its
pages has a majesty and splendor, a depth and height,
which make us feel that we never really knew Him before.
In ancient times it was said that John's was the spiritual
Gospel, thus distinguishing it from the other Gospels
which were regarded as more factual. Today, it is general-
2 The term synoptic refers to the fact that these three Gospels are so
much alike that they can easily be set side by side and compared synop-
tically, that is with one comprehensive look.
12*
ly agreed that the fourth Gospel is not intended to be
historical in the same sense in which the Synoptics are. It
is not so much an account of the life of Jesus Christ, ob-
jectively seen, as it is an appreciation of the meaning
that life. It is like a poem or drama which deals creatively
with its materials in order to make evident their signifi-
cance for human life and thought. It is worth noting
that, whereas the Synoptic Gospels each begin with some
event connected with the earthly career of our Lord, the
fourth Gospel begins with the solemn words, parallel to
the opening words of Genesis, In the beginning was the
Word y and the Word was with God and the Word was
God. The writer of the fourth Gospel, whoever he may
Jhave been, wants us to see the life of Jesus against the
background of the whole sweep of cosmic history and to
understand that in Him was incarnate the eternal truth
of God. While the differences between the two types of
Gospels should not be exaggerated, yet it may be stated
as a rough and approximate rule that we rely more on the
Synoptic Gospels for a knowledge of the external facts
about the life of Christ and on the fourth Gospel for an
understanding of its spiritual meaning. It is this mean-
ing which is summarized in the second paragraph of the
Nicene Creed.
ST. MARK: THE FIRST TO BE WRITTEN
THE first of the Synoptic Gospels to be written was un-
doubtedly ST. MARK, the shortest, and, from a literary
point of view, the least polished of them. It probably was
written in Rome, shortly before 70 AJX, that is, about
forty years after the crucifixion. While all the Gospels axe
123
really anonymous, yet tradition may very well be right in
attributing this one to St. Mark, the Mend and companion,
of St. Peter and St. Paul. The same tradition also says that
Mark made much use of material which he remembered
from the preaching of Peter. This earliest Gospel contains
no stories about the birth or childhood of Jesus but begins
directly with his baptism. It has probably, by accident, lost
its original conclusion, since it seems to break off abruptly
in the middle of a sentence (St. Mark 16:8) although it
was later provided with another (or rather with more than
one other) conclusion. The Gospel is mainly concerned
with the events of the life of Jesus rather than with His
teaching. Because it is the earliest record of Jesus' life ex-
tant, it is, in some ways, the most important of the Gospels.
ST. MATTHEW: THE MOST HEBRAIC OF THE GOSPELS
THOUGH Matthew and Luke were perhaps written about
the same time, ST. MATTHEW seems to represent an earlier
stage than Luke in the development of Christian thought*
Like Mark it was originally anonymous and the name of
Matthew seems to have been attached to it because of an
old tradition that this apostle made a collection of the
sayings of Jesus in Aramaic and such a document has un-
doubtedly been used in the composition of this gospeL
Both Matthew and Luke made use of the Gospel accord-
ing to Mark to provide a framework er their own Gos-
pels. They then introduced into the framework, at what
seemed to them appropriate points, large fragments of the
teaching of Jesus taken from a now lost collection of such
teachings which scholars call simply Q. Both of them also
undoubtedly made use of special oral and written tradi-
1*4
tions which were current in the localities where they
worked; In Matthew the material containing our Lord's
teaching has been introduced in large chunks rather than
distributed more widely. The most important of these is
the long section which we call the Sermon on the Mount
(chapters 5-7}. Matthew draws upon sources peculiar to
himself for the stories of the birth of Jesus, the Wise Men,
the Slaughter of the Innocents by Herod, and the Flight
into Egypt. The Gospel is characterized by a strongly
Hebraic point of view (perhaps derived from its special
source) and a constant interest in the literal fulfillment
of Old Testament prophecies.
ST. LUKE: THE MOST GENTILE OF THE GOSPELS
THE third Gospel, that according to ST. LUKE, is strikingly
different from the other two since it is only the first part
of a two volume history of the beginnings of Christianity.
The second volume is the book called The Acts of the
Apostles. A comparison of the opening verses of each will
make it evident that these two books belong together and
it is unfortunate that they are separated in the present
arrangement of New Testament books. As in the case of
St, Mark, it seems probable that the tradition regarding
its authorship is correct, and that St. Luke, the beloved
physician (Colossians 4:14) an d tk e companion of Paul in
many of his adventures, was the writer. Certainly it was
composed by a man of taste and culture and is by far the
most polished and literary of the Gospels. It was written
for the benefit of a certain person called Theophilus, who
is otherwise unknown.
Partly because it was intended for Gentile readers and
"5
partly because the author was a Gentile, it has less of He-
brew spirit and flavor than the other Gospels. The author
is anxious to commend the Christian Gospel to Gentiles
and does all that he can to explain Jewish terms and cus-
toms and to make the Hebrew environment o the life
of Christ and the history of the early Church intelligible
to them.
This Gospel is marked by a gentleness of spirit which
has always been most attractive to readers of the Bible,
and many would agree with the estimate which calls it
"the most beautiful book in the world." Luke weaves the
account of our Lord's teachings more into the running
narrative than Matthew does. He also makes use of ma-
terial which the other evangelists, that is writers of gos-
pels, did not have. The nativity and childhood stories
with which he prefaces his book and which have touched
the deepest feelings of innumerable generations, the stories
of the Annunciation and Visitation, the Presentation, and
the wonderful parables of the Good Samaritan and the
Prodigal Son are all part of the rich, though unknown,
source upon which he drew,
THE GOSPELS NOT BIOGRAPHIES, BUT GOOD NEWS
THE story which is told by all four of the writers is called
the Gospel, that is the Good News, for to the early Church
the best news possible was the announcement that the
long expected Redeemer of mankind had come. In spite
of the distinction made between the Synoptics and the
fourth Gospel, we must recognize that the differences are
largely matters of degree and that none of the Gospels is
really a biography in the modern sense of the word, since
126
it is not their purpose simply to convey accurate infor-
mation about an interesting historical character. Each was
written with a specifically religious purpose, to show Who,
and what manner of man, the Saviour was, and to arouse
in the reader an attitude of responsive faith and love. This
purpose is explicitly set forth in the words which are the
original conclusion of the fourth Gospel, but which ap-
ply in large measure to all the Gospels, These things are
written that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ the
Son of God; and that believing ye might have life through
His name (St. John 20:31). We shall not really under-
stand these books unless we read them in this spirit, for
they are written by faith and addressed to faith, and un-
less the reader possesses some measure of the faith which
animates them, the real heart of their meaning will al-
ways escape him. We must read them not simply as brief
sketches of the life of one of history's great men, but as
four eloquent attempts to declare in the inadequate
language of human speech, the Good News which the
early Church had heard and which the writers had ex-
perienced: the news of the mighty work which God in
Christ had done for man.
THE LIFE OF CHRIST
Following chiefly the Synoptic Gospels
JUDGED by literary standards, the story which the Synoptic
writers have to tell is a simple one and is told in a direct
and simple way. The tragic elements in the plot are sum-
marized by the fourth Gospel in the poignant words, He
came unto His own and His own received Him not (St.
John 1:11). The Gospel story, however, is not a tragedy
but good news and Paul states its essential content in these
words, . . . the gospel of God . . . concerning his Son,
who was descended from David according to the flesh, and
designated Son of God in power . . . by his resurrection
from the dead (Romans 1:1-4 RSV). The Evangelists are
content to let the story make its own impression without
the assistance of conscious literary art and the simplicity
of their style only emphasizes the sublimity of their
theme.
JESUS' BIRTH AND CHILDHOOD
MATTHEW and Luke 3 take us back to the events con-
nected with Jesus' birth. They tell that St. Mary, our
Lord's mother, bore Him in a stable at Bethlehem, the
little town about six miles south of Jerusalem where David
had been born some thousand years before. Mary and
her husband, St. Joseph, had gone there to be enrolled
in a census decreed by the Roman emperor (St. Luke
2:7-7). Although Jesus was born in the humblest of cir-
cumstances, yet the Evangelists tell how even then God
made it clear that He was set apart from other men, for
He was born of a Virgin and wonderful portents indicated
that Mary's baby was no common child. Months before,
the angel Gabriel had announced His birth (St. Luke
1:26-38). When He was born, shepherds heard choirs of
angels singing above the fields outside of Bethlehem (St.
Luke 2:8-18). Wise men of the East saw a new star shining
in the sky, and Herod the king, when told that a new
king was about to be born, conceived a cruel plot to
& For convenience, we shall continue in the remainder of the chapter
to use the traditional names for the Gospels without implying by this any
conclusions as to actual authorship.
188
destroy him (St. Matthew 2:1-18). Luke includes in his
story of the childhood o Jesus three beautiful hymns
which have become pan of the liturgy of the Church:
The first, the Magnificat, is the song which, according to
Luke's account, the Blessed Virgin sang when she knew
she was to be mother of the Messiah (St. Luke 1:46-55).
The second, the Benedictus, was the song of Zacharias,
the father of John the Baptist, when he learned that his
son was to prepare the way of the Lord. The third, the
Nunc Dimittis, was the song of the aged Simeon when he
saw the infant Jesus in the Temple, the Child having been
brought there in accordance with Jewish custom, forty
days after His birth to be dedicated to God (St. Luke
2:29-32).
Matthew tells how the holy family was compelled to
take refuge in Egypt in order to escape the anger of Herod
and how, when they returned after Herod's death, they
settled in a little village called Nazareth, in the north of
Palestine not far from the Lake of Galilee (St. Matthew
2:16-23).
For nearly thirty years after these events, the writers
of the Gospels have no stories to tell about the life of
Jesus, except for a favorite reminiscence preserved in Luke
which relates how Jesus, as a young boy, once visited Je-
rusalem with His parents and was later found in the court-
yard of the Temple discussing religious questions with
the learned teachers of Israel. These were the hidden
years in the life of Jesus, in which His mind and charac-
ter were developing and He was growing in the conscious-
ness of who He was and what His destiny was to be. We
should like to know more about this period, but that
129
merely indicates how different our point of view is from
that of the Evangelists. 4 As we have seen above, they were
not writing biographies in the modern style and so were
not interested in what we should call the psychological
development of their hero. They had but one concern, to
confront the reader with a personal challenge to faith, the
challenge which is implicit in the story of our Lord's pub-
lic life. The story they tell is not one which can be read
merely with interest and detachment. It is a gospel, as
Mark says, the gospel of Jesus Christ the Son of God (St.
Mark 1:1) and the reader must either accept or reject the
Good News which it brings and the claim to personal de-
votion which it makes. Since it is the Evangelists' purpose
either to bring the reader to this choice or to strengthen
him in a choice which has already been made, they get as
quickly as possible to the heart of their story. The Gospel
of St. Mark actually begins at this point with our Lord's
baptism. Even in the other Gospels, what precedes is mere-
ly by way of preface.
JESUS BEGINS HIS PUBIIC MINISTRY IN GALILEE
THE public ministry of Jesus began when he was about
the age of thirty and in all the Gospels is brought into
connection with the work of John the Baptist. John, who,
according to Luke, was a dose relative of Jesus, was an
eloquent preacher of righteousness who both lived and
spoke in the manner of the Old Testament prophets. He
4 Christians o! the post-apostolic age had the same kind of curiosity we
have and produced innumerable fanciful stories about the birth and child-
hood of Jesus. These are recorded in the so-called Apocryphal Gospels*
which though historically unreliable, are valuable as the product of a
certain naive and touching kind of early Christian piety.
130
exerted a powerful influence upon the people of his day,
as recorded also by die contemporary Jewish historian
Josephus. Great crowds followed him and underwent the
symbolic ceremony of bathing in the Jordan river. By this
they indicated their desire to cleanse themselves of sin in
preparation for the coming of God's kingdom, an event
which John prophesied for the immediate future and
painted in bold and terrifying colors. Among those who
heard him and who received the baptism of repentance
was Jesus and it was this event which seems to have crys-
tallized the thoughts regarding God's purpose for His life
which had been taking shape in His mind. As he emerged
from the waters, He heard the voice of God speaking to
Him and declaring, Thou art my beloved son in whom I
am well pleased (St. Mark 1:11). He now knew Himself
to be the Messiah, the Son of God.
Jesus felt Himself called first of all to the same kind of
public preaching ministry which John had exercised, but
before he began it wished to have a time of quiet prep-
aration. For this purpose he went alone into the rough,
desert region which lay between Jerusalem and the Dead
Sea and in that solitude struggled with a series of tempta-
tions (St. Matthew 4:1-10). There was the temptation to
misuse his newly discovered powers of messiahship for
selfish ends (making stones become bread), or merely to
play the role of the familiar oriental wonder-worker (cast-
ing Himself down from the temple), or to achieve His pur-
pose by unworthy means (worshipping the devil). By the
grace of God he rejected them all and angels came and
ministered unto him (St. Matthew 4:11)* It was only after
He had thus faced the stern realities of the life to which
He was called that He began to preach, as John had done
before Him, The Kingdom of God is at hand; repent and
believe this good news (St. Mark 1:15).
John had preached in Judea in the neighborhood of
Jerusalem, but Jesus carried on His ministry in the north
where His own home was. Although He preached once
in Nazareth, He learned that No prophet is acceptable in
his own country (St. Luke 4:24), and afterwards confined
His activity largely to the fishing villages along the shore
of the nearby Lake of Galilee. This early time of public
teaching is called The Galilean Ministry.
THE TEACHING OF JESUS
DURING this period, our Lord's activities fall naturally
into three main parts: His public teaching, His miracles,
and His private teaching to His disciples. His public
preaching was concerned with proclaiming the imminent
approach of the Kingdom of God and with showing what
it was like, and what great changes its coming, and even
its near approach, must bring. His method of teaching
was almost never that of learned argument, but rather the
telling of stories (parables as they are called), in each one
of which He intended to make clear some point, and only
one point, about God and His Kingdom and the new sit-
uation created by the coming of that Kingdom. In read-
ing the parables today it is necessary to remember this
purpose. They are not designed to state universal moral
principles or to give general suggestions for happy and
successful living. They are primarily intended to show
men what God is like, what the laws of His Kingdom are,
and what the coming of the Kingdom will mean.
13*
Certain of the parables set forth, in story form, the true
character of God. The parable of The Prodigal Son, for ex-
ample, (St. Luke 15:11-32) pictures God's inexhaustible
love, a love which is always awaiting the return of the
prodigal, and is "always more ready to hear than we to
pray." The parable of The Sower and the Seed (St. Mark
4:1-9; St. Matthew 13:1-9; St. Luke 8:4-8) describes the
inevitable triumph of God's plans. God's Word is of such
power, that, despite all the hindrances which human na-
ture can interpose, it will eventually find a lodging place
in good ground and bring forth an hundredfold.
Other parables show what kind of people will be likely
to accept the message of the Kingdom and become its cit-
izens. They reflect our Lord's actual experience in finding
a more receptive audience among the poor and outcast
than among the religiously an4 socially respectable scribes
and Pharisees. The most familiar of the parables of this
type is that of The Pharisee and the Publican (St. Luke
18:9-14). The man who was acceptable in God's sight was
not the self-satisfied, though morally irreproachable Phar-
isee. The better man, in God's eyes, was the tax collector
whose greedy and dishonest life was quite properly de-
spised by his fellow countrymen, but who realized his own
failure and was "of a humble and contrite spirit/' The
message of the parable of The Two Sons (St. Matthew
21:28-32) and of The Rich Man and Lazarus (St. Luke
16:19-31) is similar. In the parable of The Wicked Hus-
bandmen (St. Mark 12:1-12; St. Matthew 21:33-45; St.
Luke 20:9-18), Jesus predicts His own death at the hands
of those who should have been the first to receive Him.
In the parable of The Marriage Feast (St. Matthew
22:1-10; St. Luke 14:15-24) he declares that the place in
the Kingdom which was first offered to the conventionally
religious people of that day will be taken by those whom
they regard as the scum of the streets. The repellent figure
of the elder brother in The Prodigal Son is also modelled
after that of the smug and haughty Pharisee; while the
prodigal is a portrait of "the publicans and sinners."
Still other parables describe the character of the true
citizen of the Kingdom and the laws by which he lives. The
parable of The Good Samaritan (St. Luke 10:29-37) pic-
tures the all-inclusive love which must prevail where God
is King and national and racial boundaries are necessarily
broken down. God's demand for a forgiving spirit is set
forth in the parable of The Unmerciful Servant (St. Mat-
thew 18:23-3$). Men may not pray "forgive us our tres-
passes" unless they can also say "as we forgive those who
trespass against us."
Another group of parables sets forth specifically the im-
minence of judgment and the coming of the Kingdom and
warns men to be ready when it comes. The most familiar
of these is the parable of The Wise and Foolish Virgins
(St. Matthew 25:1-13). Similar in general thought are the
parables of The House Built Upon the Rock (St. Matthew
7:24-27; St. Luke 6:48-49) and that of The Rich Fool (St.
Luke 12:13-21). Both the parable of The Talents (St.
Matthew 25:14-30; St. Luke 19:11-27) and that of The
Unjust Steward (St. Luke 16:1-12) teach that "the sons of
light" should show as much imaginative zeal in the affairs
of God and His Kingdom and in using the privileges
which it brings, as clever citizens of the world show in
furthering their own selfish and even immoral ends. The
parable of The Tares (St. Matthew 13:24-30; 36-43) warns
those whose impatience would lead them to pass hasty
judgment upon others that vengeance belongs only to God
and that in His own good time He will exercise it. The
parable of The Laborers in the Vineyard (St. Matthew
20:1-16) is perplexing to many, but its point is really the
Pauline doctrine of "justification by faith." Whatever God
gives to us either by way of special favors now, or reward
in the day of reckoning, is given out of the richness of His
grace and is not bestowed upon us as a salary paid for
services rendered.
Almost all the parables had some direct concern with
the astonishing fact that the Kingdom of God was then at
hand and perhaps, in some sense, was already there. A new
age of the world had begun and the powers of the coming
Kingdom were already at work. Old things are passed
away; behold all things are become new (II Corinthians
5:17)* One cannot understand the New Testament unless
he first realizes this sense of living in a new period of world
history which permeates it. And one cannot share the
Christian faith today unless he also has the feeling that the
Kingdom of God is near to us too and that we are still
standing in its dawning light.
With this new age a change necessarily had to take place
in the kind of religious and ethical system under which
men were living. So in the Sermon on the Mount (St. Mat-
thew 5-7), we hear the reiterated refrain, Ye have heard
that it was said by them of old time . . . ; but I say unto
you. Men were no longer to live as before under the rigid
rule of codified law and statute, but rather to live by the
law of God which is written in their hearts. This did not
135
mean a relaxation of the stringency of God's demands, but
rather a tightening of them. Once, murder had been for-
bidden; now, it was also forbidden to hate one's enemy in
his heart* Once, sexual impurity was forbidden; now, one
must not even tolerate impure thoughts. Under the New
Covenant, hate is murder; lust is adultery. Once, men had
been permitted to retaliate in kind for injuries done them;
now, they were under obligation to forgive those who ill-
used them and go to almost any extreme to avoid anger
and the spirit of revenge. Once, there had been a multi-
plicity of particular statutes to govern life; now, there was
but one law which was to be applied to every conceivable
situation in life, the law of love toward God and Man (St.
Mark 12:29-31). A new commandment I give unto you,
that ye love one another (St. John 13:34). These things
were the laws of the Kingdom of God and, since men stood
upon the threshold of the Kingdom, they must strive, as
far as humanly possible, to act according to them. They
must already begin to live as citizens of God's Kingdom.
Although the rule 5 of God is called a kingdom yet the
King Himself is called our Father which means that in
His realm, men must live with Him as children and with
each other as brothers.
JESUS' MINISTRY OF HEAIJNG
OUR Lord's work was by no means confined only to teach-
ing. We have already noticed how indifferent St. Mark's
Gospel seems to this side of His activity. To the people of
Jesus' day, certainly, the strongest evidence of the truth
5 The word translated kingdom in the New Testament corresponds
dosely to our English word reign or rule. It has none of the geographical
implications we attach, for example, to the phrase Kingdom of England.
136
of His claim to be the inaugurator of a new age was to be
seen in His ability to heal the sick. There one could plain-
ly see "the powers o the age to come." He Himself said,
// / with the finger of God cast out demons, no doubt the
kingdom of God is come upon you (St. Luke 11:20). Con-
sequently, much of the Gospel story is taken up with the
stories of His power to cast out demons (for insanity and
many other afflictions were in these days believed to be the
work of evil spirits), to heal all kinds of diseases, and even
to raise the dead. It may well be that some of these stories
have been heightened in the telling and that tradition
has conveyed them to us in a form which, to some extent,
reflects the convictions of the early Christians. On the
other hand, the stories of healing are too many and too
basic merely to be explained away. There are too many
to be discussed even briefly here and they all give striking
testimony to the fact that wherever Jesus went He left the
impression that He was One who had the power to do such
things. Men felt that He was surrounded by an aura of
healing strength which was the best evidence that God
was with Him. Because of the things He could do men
could believe the things which He said.
THE CHOICE OF THE TWELVE
ALMOST from the beginning Jesus began to attract follow-
ers and among these He chose twelve, the number of the
tribes of Israel, to be His special emissaries. Their names
were Peter, James and John, Andrew, Philip, Bartholo-
mew, Matthew, Thomas, James the Less, Jude or Thad-
daeus, Simon the Zealot, and Judas Iscariot (St. Mark
These simple, otherwise quite obscure, men were
137
called apostles, that is men sent, representatives bearing a
special commission. The twelve travelled about with Jesus
and formed the nucleus of a new spiritual fellowship. This
was the beginning of the Church in one sense of the word,
although in another and profounder sense, the Church was
not new at all. It was merely the faithful heart of the old
Israel, the remnant of which Isaiah had spoken, out of
which the new and greater Israel of the Christian Church
was to grow. With this inner group of disciples, Jesus had
a special kind of life. They shared their meals together
in a religious fellowship, held their money in common,
and, like other religious fellowships within Israel, cele-
brated the Sabbath and other great days of the Jewish
calendar by taking part in a sacred meal. The Last Sup-
per was, literally, the last of these fellowship meals. Be-
side this stable inner group of specially trained and dis-
ciplined apostles, there was also a larger and more in-
definite group of disciples (that is pupils), whose numbers
varied considerably from time to time. This is illustrated
by one occasion on which Jesus was able to send out sev-
enty of them as heralds of the Gospel (St. Luke 10:1).
Probably the time of pur Lord's greatest popularity is
marked by the story of the Feeding of the Five Thousand
(St. Mark 6:31-44).
ENEMIES BEGIN TO OPPOSE JESUS' WORK
ONE whose ministry was attended with such outstanding
initial success, and whose teaching was by its nature op-
posed in so many points to that of the religious leaders of
the time, was bound to make enemies. The scribes, who
were the official religious teachers of the people, and the
138
Pharisees, who were the dominant sect in Judaism at that
day, attacked His work almost from the beginning (St.
Mark 2:1, 3, 6, j). They were opposed to the freedom with
which He ventured to interpret the Jewish Law, even
though He was careful to observe its major provisions,
and were offended by His tolerant attitude toward the less
respectable classes of the community, "the lesser breeds
without the Law." He also aroused the enmity of Herod
Antipas, tetrarch of Galilee, a son of the Herod who had
been king when Jesus was born. Herod had already exe-
cuted John the Baptist for criticizing his illegal marriage
to his brother's wife (St. Mark 6:14-29) and he was not
likely to treat Jesus more gently if sufficient occasion pre-
sented itself. Faced by this rising tide of opposition, Jesus
seems for a while to have turned from a public to a more
private kind of ministry and we find Him even going
with His followers beyond the borders of Israel into Syria
to the north (the coasts of Tyre and Sidon, St. Mark 7:24).
PETER DECLARES JESUS TO BE THE CHRIST
ACCORDING to the Synoptic Gospels, our Lord had little to
say with regard to His own person in the early part of His
ministry, although He always spoke and acted with an
authority which implied that He was no mere human
teacher. They were astonished at his doctrine; for he
taught them as one that had authority and not as the
scribes (St. Mark 1:22). He felt that His main task was to
preach about the coming of the Kingdom and to manifest
in His healing miracles the powers of the new age. The
nature of His preaching and the mighty works which He
did were sufficient evidence of who He was. Go and show
139
John again those things which ye do see and hear (St.
Matthew 12:2-6).
At last, however, the time seemed ripe to test the con-
victions of His followers, and, at Caesarea Philippi, Peter
freely declared his faith that Jesus was the Messiah whom
the Jews had been looking for for so many centuries. Thou
art the Christ of God (St. Mark 8:29; St. Luke 9:20). It was
important that the disciples should have come to this con-
clusion independently, for now that they understood the
place He occupied in the plan of God, Jesus could go on
another step and explain what kind of Messiah He was to
be. For He knew that His messiahship was not to be pat-
terned, as most people expected, on the lines of a military
leader like David. He found the plan of His life in a part
of the Old Testament which was not ordinarily inter-
preted as referring to the Messiah, the mysterious fifty-
third chapter of Isaiah, which told of one who was to suf-
fer and die for the sins of His people and at last to be
raised up a victor. Because of this our Lord knew His
ministry must end in tragedy and He told His followers
that suffering and death were to be His lot (5*. Mark 8:31).
The disciples, who were still thinking in quite different
terms, seem not to have understood what He meant until
these things actually came to pass. Shortly after this crucial
scene at Caesarea Philippi, three of the apostles were with
him on a mountain top and there saw Him transfigured,
surrounded by heavenly glory. At that moment, although
they failed to grasp its full significance, they had a brief
foretaste of our Lord's triumph over sin and death and
His eternal reign as King (St. Mark 9:2-8). There were
140
many such things of which they saw the true meaning
only in after years, 6
JESUS GOES UP TO JERUSALEM
THESE events brought Jesus' Galilean ministry to a close.
Now recognized for what He knew Himself to be and the
foundation of the new, spiritual Israel firmly laid in the
fellowship of His apostles, it remained only for the pat-
tern which God had prescribed for His life to be realized.
Speedily He turned His face toward Jerusalem where He
knew that He must die (St. Mark 10:1). To many people
of the modern world this deliberate choice of a road
which could end only in death seems almost perverse.
Why should He not have stayed in Galilee and continued
to do good, healing the sick, and teaching His way of life?
The answer is that He did not believe that this was what
God wanted Him to do. As God's Messiah, it was His ap-
pointed destiny to give his life a ransom for many (St.
Mark 10:45). Even regarded from the practical standpoint
of human history, His name would hardly be known to
us today if He had continued to be only a Galilean prophet
and teacher. Because He went up to Jerusalem and there
for the joy that was set before him, endured the cross, de-
spising the shame (Hebrews 12:2), the ages have called
Him Lord.
It was the custom among the Jews to celebrate, when
possible, the great feast of the Passover in Jerusalem, and
e Some scholars believe that the Synoptic Gospels tend to oversimplify
the account of our Lord's self-consciousness and the growing realization
of the significance of His life on the part of the apostles. The fourth
Gospel, it should be noted, presents a somewhat different picture. Never*
theless we can be sure that the narrative in the Synoptic Gospels does not
distort the essential truth.
141
large groups of pilgrims went up each year. It was with
such a group as this that Jesus and the Twelve went up
from Galilee to begin the last dramatic scene of His brief
career. He may have made other journeys to Jerusalem
in previous years, as the fourth Gospel suggests, but if He
did, the Synoptic Gospels make no mention of the fact.
For them it was the last journey which was significant for
faith and it was only at the end of this last journey that
His brief Judean ministry can be said to have begun.
All the Evangelists have some incidents to record which
took place on the road to Jerusalem, Luke more than the
others (St. Luke 9:51 19:28). The route which Jesus and
the disciples took led them through Perea (modern Trans-
jordan) to the city of Jericho near the head of the Dead
Sea. From Jericho the pilgrims had to climb the steep
road from the Jordan Valley to Jerusalem. As they ap-
proached the Holy City by the road which led over the
Mount of Olives and down into the Kedron ravine, the
disciples of Jesus, at His command, fulfilled the ancient
prophecy in Zechariah 9:9. Shout, O daughter of Jeru-
salem; behold thy King cometh unto thee . . . lowly and
riding upon an ass and upon a colt the foal of an ass (St.
Mark 11:1-10). In lowly dignity, enthroned as Prince of
Peace, Jesus rode into the Holy City. He could not have
chosen a clearer way to declare that He was the promised
deliverer of Israel.
"DESPISED AND REJECTED OF MEN"
WITH the triumphal entry on the first day of the week, the
tragic concluding act in the drama of Jesus' life began to
unfold. Each night He and His disciples went out of the
14*
city and stayed with friends in the little town of Bethany,
but each day He came into Jerusalem and continued His
ministry of teaching.
On Monday He went into the Temple and His anger
was aroused when He saw it desecrated by the buying and
selling of animals for sacrifice and by the changing of
money within the sacred precincts. With the authority
which was His as God's Messiah, He drove out the mer-
chants single-handed and purified the Temple courts. It
was this which led directly to His death, since the leaders
of the people realized that His claims to power were now
so sweeping that He could not be dismissed as a harmless
fanatic. His claim to authority and the manner in which
He used it was a direct challenge to their own (St. Mark
11:15-18). In Jerusalem, He came not merely in conflict
with the scribes and Pharisees, as in Galilee, but with the
Sadducees, the priestly, aristocratic party who actually gov-
erned the nation and were no doubt chiefly responsible
for bringing about His death. His enemies began to con-
sult together as to the best manner of removing Him from
the scene in correct legal fashion and without creating
too much disturbance. Their plot was considerably fur-
thered when one of His disciples, Judas Iscariot, offered to
help them carry out their plans, perhaps because he was
disappointed at Jesus' failure to act with the vigor he
thought necessary for one who claimed the throne of David
(St. Mark 14:10, n).
At last the time for celebrating the Passover Feast drew
near. The fourth Gospel is probably correct in represent-
ing the Last Supper which Jesus had with His disciples,
not as the actual Passover Meal, but as a preparatory meal
MS
held the night before (S*. John 13:1; 19:14). This, at least,
is the tradition which the Church follows in its observance
of Holy Week. On Thursday night Jesus and the Twelve
engaged an upper room and celebrated a fellowship meal
which was part of the solemn ceremonies connected with
the Passover. There, as related in the fourth Gospel (St.
John 13:1-12), Jesus washed the feet of the disciples, giv-
ing a practical demonstration of the meaning of the spirit
of brotherhood and mutual helpfulness which was to mark
the common life of Christians. During the meal He took
some of the bread and before He distributed it to the dis-
ciples, said, Take eat, this is my body. After this He took
the cup of wine and, when He had given thanks, said, This
is my blood of the covenant and gave it to the disciples to
drink. He commanded that this action should always be
repeated among them in grateful remembrance of the sacri-
ficial death which He was about to die (St. Mark 14:22-24;
I Corinthians 11:23-29). The Church has always under-
stood that His words, This is my body and This is my
blood y involved a promise that whenever His followers re-
peated this sacred rite, which they came to call the Lord's
Supper, Jesus Himself would in some mysterious way
really be present in their midst. The eating of the bread
would be a communion of the Body of Christ, and the
drinking of the wine a communion of His blood (I Corin-
thians 10:16).
After supper was over, they all went outside the city
to a secluded garden called Gethsemane, on the side of
the Mount of Olives, and there Jesus spent the remainder
of the time in prayer and in a struggle with His own
natural reluctance to face the ordeal which confronted
144
Him (St. Mark 14:32-36; St. Luke 22:39-44). It was to the
garden that Judas, who knew His plans, brought the Jew-
ish temple police to apprehend Him.
From the garden He was taken to the palace of Caiaphas,
the high priest, where He was hastily examined before a
court composed of the high priest and his associates. In
answer to the high priest's question, He publicly claimed
the title of Messiah which Peter had been the first to give
Him. In view of the defiant attitude He had previously
taken toward many of the customs, and particularly the
authorities of the nation, this was sufficient to secure the
unanimous verdict that He must die (St. Mark 14:53-65).
Since Jewish courts were forbidden by their Roman
overlords to carry out a capital sentence, He was remanded
to the court of Pilate and the same morning (Friday)
brought before the Roman governor to have His case re-
viewed. Because the charge of blasphemy under which He
had previously been convicted was a purely religious one
and could not possibly carry weight with the secular power,
He was now accused of rebellion against the authority of
the emperor in that He set Himself up to be The King
of the Jews. Pilate saw through the stratagem and made a
feeble effort to defend Jesus, but, being already in bad
grace with both the Jews and his Roman superiors because
of previous acts of arrogance and greed, he felt it politic in
the long run to conciliate his subjects and acquiesce in
the decision of the Jewish authorities (St. Mark 15:1-15).
Pilate's naive attempt to shift responsibility for the de-
cision in no way alters the fact that it was Pilate who
passed the sentence of death and his soldiers who exe-
cuted it.
145
"CRUCIFIED, BEAD, AND BURIED"
So at last Jesus was condemned to die by the cruel method
of crucifixion, the method used by the Romans for the
execution of slaves and criminals of the lowest class. A
short distance outside the city, at a place called Golgotha,
toward midday on Friday, He and two thieves were hung
upon crosses together. There, through long hours of
agony, He accomplished the destiny which he knew God
intended for Him. There He was numbered with the trans-
gressors and bare the sin of many (Isaiah 53:12). As He
hung upon the cross, He spoke several times, and each of
the Gospels records certain of the words He said, seven
sentences in all (St. Mark 15:34; St. Luke 23:34, 43, 46;
St. John 19:26, 2j, 28, 30). These last words which He
spoke have taken their place among the Church's most
precious devotional treasures. Before the agony (the Pas-
sion) began, He had refused the drink which was offered
to Him to dull His mind and relieve the pain, so He
was fully conscious as He approached the end and finally
committed His spirit to God. The Roman officer who
supervised the execution and had watched the progress of
His suffering, looked upon His crucified body and said
in admiration, Truly this man was a son of God (St. Mark
15:39 RSV). Because of the Passover festival, Jesus was
buried as quickly as possible. So far as His enemies were
concerned, the case was dosed and the authorities, both
secular and spiritual, no doubt slept more quietly that
night in. the knowledge that another potential trouble-
maker was safely out of the way. Even for the disciples, His
death marked the end of everything. They had not realized
146
that He was going to die and therefore they had no ex-
pectation of a resurrection. They had never really under-
stood that Jesus' messiahship was not to be patterned after
the life of a warrior-king like David, but rather after the
model of the mysterious Suffering Servant described by
the unknown prophet of the Exile. He was not to rule in
the midst of His enemies (Psalm 110:2), but to be despised
and rejected of men (Isaiah 53:3)*
"THE THIRD DAY HE ROSE AGAIN"
THROUGHOUT His whole ministry Jesus had insistently
proclaimed the coming of the Kingdom of God The bur-
den of His preaching had been that it is God who rules the
world and that the day when His rule will be clearly evi-
dent among men is near at hand. He died confident that the
Kingdom would come, and by the power of the Kingdom
He rose from the dead. On Sunday morning three women
came to the tomb to perform the last services which the
living can offer to the dead and to their amazement dis-
covered that the tomb was empty and the Lord was gone
(St. Mark 16:1-8). In the days that followed He appeared
in unmistakable form to many of His disciples in different
times and places: to Mary Magdalene and the women (St.
Matthew 28:9, 10), to Peter (St. Luke 24:34; I Corinthians
15:5), to the eleven remaining apostles (St. Matthew
28:16, 77; St. Luke 24:36-48; St. John 20:19-23), and to two
disciples as they were walking toward Emmaus, a little
village near Jerusalem (St. Luke 24:13-35). The earliest
account of the resurrection appearances, that in I Corin-
thians 15:5-8, mentions also appearances to more than five
hundred disciples on some otherwise unspecified occasion
and to James, a member of Jesus' own family, "who had not
previously been among His followers. This does not ex-
haust the list of appearances but is enough to suggest their
variety and the tense excitement of those days.
The very existence of the New Testament and the
Christian Church is the surest proof that these stories
are not the product of illusion but evidence of the most
stupendous event in the history of man, an event which
marked the end of one great age of world history and the
beginning of a new. Nothing in the previous story of the
disciples is adequate to explain the things which now be-
gan to happen. They were simple, ignorant, even coward-
ly men, as their behavior at the time of their Lord's deep-
est extremity showed all too clearly. Yet, as a result of
these awe-inspiring experiences which, contrary to all their
expectation, convinced them that Jesus was indeed the
Son of God (Romans 1:4), they began to preach the Gos-
pel with such conviction that the Church spread within
a few decades throughout the Mediterranean world.
Christ Himself had always known what the result of
His death would be, for He knew that the eternal pur-
pose of God cannot be defeated. His death was only the be-
ginning. It was not to be the end of His work but to be
the means by which the power of God would overcome
the power of sin and death and inaugurate the new and
last age of the world, the age of the Church and of the
Holy Spirit of God. In that age, however long it might
endure in terms of human time, men would always be
standing at the threshold of God's Kingdom. The powers
of that Kingdom would be available to all who chose to
claim them and to shape their lives according to its laws.
148
STTTETH ON THE RIGHT HAND OF GOD"
THE story of the Ascension marks the end of the earthly
ministry of Jesus. From this time forward He was The
Lord, the glorious King who had taken up His rule over
all creation, to whom the Church applied not only the
language which the Old Testament uses for the Mes-
siah, but even the language which is there used only of
God, There could be no doubt in the mind of Jesus' fol-
lowers that this Man who had lived so simply and trag-
ically upon earth was no mere prophet, nor even merely
the long-promised Messiah. No categories derived from
human experience were adequate to describe Him. He
could be no other than a manifestation of the Eternal God
Himself. The fourth Gospel, which endeavors to set forth
in dramatic form the spiritual significance of His life, re-
veals Him as such from the first page to the last. It begins
with the statement that the Word by which God created
the universe and which Itself was God was made flesh and
dwelt among us (St. John 1:1-14). ^ en< k with the confes-
sion of Thomas who fell before the Risen Jesus and cried
My Lord and my God (St. John 20:28). The fourth Gospel
was written in order to show that for those who had eyes
to see and faith to understand the whole earthly career of
Jesus could be seen, in retrospect, as suffused with the
Glory of God, and that from first to last it was the
story of One who was God of God, Light of Light, Very
God of Very God.
149
CHAPTER
NINE
The Acts: How the Church
Spread from Jerusalem to Rome
T
JLHE new age which began with the Res-
urrection of Jesus was and is the Age of the Church.
Therefore, the rest of the New Testament is the first chap-
ter in Church history. It tells how that little group of
men whom our Lord had chosen during His Galilean min-
istry became the center of an expanding Church and how
that Church gradually overflowed the banks of the old
national Israel and began to spread its power and healing
influence among the Gentiles. The prophecy of the Sec-
ond Isaiah was fulfilled, The Gentiles shall come to thy
light and kings to the brightness of thy rising. So slowly
out of the Old Israel the Holy Catholic Church was born.
PETER AND THE CHURCH AT JERUSAIJEM
LUKE'S second volume, THE ACTS OF THE APOSTLES, which
begins with an account of the Ascension, has this story for
its theme. It opens in Jerusalem; it ends in Rome. The
150
history of the Church, which seemed to have begun mere-
ly as an obscure Jewish sect in Jerusalem, is traced until
in the last chapter it is found firmly established in Rome,
the great capital of the Gentile world. The first fifteen
chapters are largely concerned with the Jerusalem Church
and St. Peter is the principal figure. These chapters tell
how after the Ascension, the apostles chose Matthias to
take the place of Judas the traitor and how, on the day
of Pentecost, they received God's Holy Spirit and imme*
diately began to manifest those wonderful powers which
were so marked a feature of the early days of the Church
(Acts ij 2). It also records the manner of life of that early
Church in Jerusalem and how it attempted to realize to
the full the spirit of Christian brotherhood. Many, per-
haps most, of the members sold their private possessions
and agreed to hold all their property in common. Luke
says no one called any of the things which he possessed his
own (Acts 4:32-35).
Already in this early Church there were men called
Hellenists, who though Jews, had a Greek background
and were more sympathetic to the emancipating influences
of the Gospel than those disciples whose background was
purely Jewish and Palestinian. The leaders of this group
were the seven men whom the apostles appointed to ad-
minister the community's common funds and who there-
by became the first members of the order of deacons (Acts
6:1-6). Because of their liberal ideas these men, far more
than any of the original twelve, aroused the enmity of the
Jewish leaders, and St. Stephen, the chief of them, was
stoned to death (Acts 6:8-8:2). The persecution of this
group forced them to flee from Jerusalem, and from their
flight arose incidentally the first missionary work amongst
non-Jews: the conversion of some Samaritans and of the
Ethiopian Eunuch; the spread of the Gospel to Antioch
(Acts 8; 11:19, 20).
This mission to the Gentiles is the theme with which
the book of Acts now becomes chiefly concerned. Paul,
who up to this time had been a violent enemy of the
Church and had set out on a journey from Jerusalem
to Damascus to persecute the Christians there, was over-
whelmed on the way by a vision of the Risen Jesus and
himself accepted the faith. This was a crucial event in the
life of the Church, for Paul was to become the greatest
thinker of the apostolic age as well as the great apostle
to the Gentiles (Acts 9). Peter also became convinced of
the value of the Gentile mission and succeeded in getting
the Church at Jerusalem to endorse it (Acts 10, 11).
THE BEGINNINGS OF GENTILE CHRISTIANITY
THE center of the story now shifts almost imperceptibly
from Jerusalem, the home of Jewish Christianity, to An-
tioch, which soon became the mother city of Gentile Chris-
tianity. It was there that the followers of Jesus first came
to be distinguished from the Jews of the Old Israel by
the name of Christians (Acts 11:26). It was from Antioch,
more than a decade after Paul's conversion, that Paul and
Barnabas, accompanied at the beginning by Mark, set out
upon the first of the great missionary journeys which were
to carry the name of Christ through every province be-
tween Jerusalem and the capital of the Empire (Acts 13,
14). This time the two of them did not go far, but con-
tented themselves with preaching in the island of Cyprus,
and, after crossing over to the mainland of Asia Minor, in
the inland cities of Pisidian Antioch, Iconium, Lystra, and
Derbe. They met with many adventures, as on all the mis-
sionary journeys, and were constantly opposed by the Jews,
who were now becoming aware that they were faced by a
genuine revolutionary movement and not merely by the
rise of a new sect within Judaism.
Wherever Paul went, he found Jewish communities, the
Dispersion, and he almost always began his work in any
new city by preaching in the local synagogue, where a
new and learned rabbi from abroad always was welcome.
It was only natural that he should do so, for the earliest
Christians thought of themselves as still belonging to the
synagogue and regarded the Gospel as the logical consum-
mation of all for which Judaism stood. Paul made a few
converts this way, but on the whole the results were dis-
couraging and time and again he found himself compelled
to turn to the Gentiles (e.g. Acts 13:42-48). Because of the
low state to which religion had fallen in the pagan Greco-
Roman world, he found among the Gentiles much more
fertile soil for the Word of God. The first communities
which Paul visited on the Asiatic mainland were in the
Roman Province of Galatia and it is probably to them
that his epistle to the Galatians was later directed.
On their return to Syrian Antioch, the missionaries
found that a crisis had arisen in the Church over the terms
on which the Gentiles might be admitted to the Chris-
tian fellowship. There was an older group of Jewish Chris-
tians, belonging to the community in Jerusalem, which
felt that the ceremonial and dietary laws which God had
laid on the Old Israel were still in force in the New. This
153
group insisted that Gentiles "who became Christians must
of necessity first become Jews by accepting the initiatory
rite of circumcision and by keeping strictly all the com-
plex ritual requirements of the Law of Moses. They were
demanding that the Church at Antioch accept their views.
Paul, who had fallen under the influence of St. Stephen
and the Hellenists, and was a powerful and original
thinker in his own right, was convinced that the Old Law
had been completely done away in Christ. He and Bar-
nabas were sent up to Jerusalem to present to a council
consisting of the apostles and presbyters of the mother
Church a reasoned exposition of Paul's liberal interpreta-
tion of the Gospel. They were to defend the practice which
had come to prevail in the Church at Antioch and in the
churches founded by Paul according to which Gentiles
were admitted to full membership in the Church on the
ground of baptism and profession of faith in Christ alone,
without being required to observe the Jewish law. In form
the decision finally arrived at by the council (Acts 15)
seemed like a compromise. The new Gentile converts were
ordered henceforth to avoid certain practices which might
give serious offense to their Jewish brethren. Actually,
though, the decision was a complete vindication of the
teaching of Paul and the practice of the Hellenistic
churches and from this time on there could be no serious
question that Paul's gospel had triumphed and that the
future of Christianity lay with the Gentiles. Had the old
restrictions prevailed in the Church contrary to the spirit
of Christ, an insuperable barrier would have been set up
to the progress of the Christian message among non-Jews;
now that those restrictions had been removed by authority
of the Jerusalem council, the way was opened for that
tremendous influx of a spiritually hungry Gentile world
which was to characterize the immediately following cen-
turies. In the artistic structure of the Book of Acts, the
decision marks the beginning of a new epoch. In this one
dramatic scene the author would have us see how Israel
burst the boundaries of nationality and became a Uni-
versal, or Catholic, Church.
PAUL AND THE CHURCH OF THE GENTILES
QUITE naturally, the second half of the Book of Acts, which
begins at chapter 16, is entirely devoted to the work of
Paul, and to the further rapid spread of the Church among
the Gentiles. Since Paul and Barnabas were unable to
agree on giving another chance to Mark, who had deserted
them on the first journey, they decided to go different
ways, and Paul took Silas with him as companion on his
second missionary journey. They briefly revisited the
lurches of South Galatia which had been founded on
the first journey, were joined by Timothy, a young con-
vert from Derbe, and quickly then pressed on across Asia.
At Troas, on the shores of the Hellespont, Paul received a
vision which convinced him that God wished him to carry
the Gospel into Europe (Acts 16:1-9)+ He then crossed over
to Greece and in short order preached and founded
churches at Philippi, Thessalonica, and Berea. During
much of this time, Luke, the author of the book, was his
companion. At Athens, where Paul hoped to make a great
impression by presenting his Gospel persuasively in such
terms as would appeal to Greek philosophical thought,
he suffered his one great failure (Acts 13:16-34) and re-
155
solved from that time on to proclaim the Good News
simply and unaffectedly for what it was (I Corinthians
1:22-24; 2:1-5). Strong in this resolution, he visited Cor-
inth, where he stayed for eighteen months and, after
meeting with another sharp rebuff from the Jews, devoted
himself to preaching with enormous success to Gentiles
alone (Acts 18:1-17). After having preached briefly at
Ephesus, he at last returned to Jerusalem and Antioch
(Acts 18:18-22).
His third missionary journey began at Antioch, as did
all the others, and took him straight across country to
Ephesus (Acts 18:23, 24; 19:1), where for more than two
years he preached and taught daily in a local lecture hall,
after another unsuccessful attempt to work through the
synagogue (Acts 19:8-14). Here he had an exciting and typ-
ical adventure with the partisans of Artemis, the patron
goddess of the city (Acts 19:23-41). Having made a brief
visit to the churches he had established in Greece and in
northern Asia Minor, he returned to Palestine and, in
spite of prophetic warnings that serious danger lay ahead,
completed his third journey by returning to Jerusalem.
Quite innocently, while visiting the temple, he became in-
volved in a riot and was saved from violent death only by
the interposition of the Roman authorities, who placed
him in protective custody (Acts 20, 21).
The remainder of the book (Acts 21:3328:31) tells the
story of his adventures as a prisoner of the Romans. He
was kept under guard at Caesarea, the Roman seat of ad-
ministration in Palestine, for more than two years and re-
ceived hearings under two successive governors, Felix and
Festus, and at last before Agrippa II, a minor king of the
156
Herodian line whom Festus asked to guide him in the
disposition of the case. After Paul's eloquent defense of
himself before the king, Agrippa advised that he could
have been freed if he had not already taken advantage of
his Roman citizenship and made a formal appeal to the
emperor. Since he had done so, the case could be settled
only in the imperial court and Paul was sent on the long,
dangerous voyage to Rome.
The chapter (27) which tells of the sea trip is one of the
most remarkable travel narratives which have come down
to us from ancient times and is full of the excitement
which only an eye-witness, such as Luke, could communi-
cate. At last, after a shipwreck on the island of Malta and
many other adventures, Paul arrived safely at Rome
where he spent two years in mild imprisonment. This
permitted him a good deal of liberty, and he was able to
continue his preaching of the Gospel. Here in Rome he
wrote the Epistles to the Philippians, Colossians, Philemon,
and, possibly, Ephesians.
At this point, the Book of Acts comes to an end without
any hint as to how Paul's trial came out. Some believe that
he was condemned and executed shortly afterward. Ac-
cording to tradition, he was acquitted and continued his
missionary work for a few years, only to be rearrested and
' executed with St. Peter at the time of the first persecution
of the Christians under Nero in 64 A.D. Luke, however,
tells nothing of this. His story ends when he has given a
dramatic illustration of the way in which the center of
gravity in the Church passed from the Jews to the Gen-
tiles, from Jerusalem to Rome. The hero of Luke's book
is neither Peter nor Paul, but the Holy Spirit which was
157
quietly working to bring all things into accord with God's
eternal plan. When Acts ends, the Church is already es-
tablished and carrying on her work in the form which
God intended her to have, and the developments which
followed belong rather to Church history than to the
creative and normative age which is pictured in the New
Testament.
158
CHAPTER
TEN
The Epistles: Life in the
New Testament Church
TH
L HE rest of the New Testament consists
mostly of letters written to churches or to church offi-
cials of the apostolic age. These letters are not general
treatises on Christian doctrine, but (for the most part) are
directed to some concrete situation in the life of a partic-
ular Christian congregation. In order to understand any
one of them, it is necessary to know something about the
life and situation of the church to which it is addressed.
In order to understand them as a whole, one must have in
mind a general picture of life in the apostolic Church.
A SPIRIT-I1LIJED COMMUNITY
IN the discussion of the Book of Acts, it was observed that
the real hero of that book is the Holy Spirit of God. This
preeminent importance of the Spirit is one of the distinc-
tive notes of the entire New Testament period. For men of
the apostolic age, the Church was no mere human society
159
for the propagation of a certain philosophy of life. It was
the actual sphere in which God's Holy Spirit was at work.
The Holy Spirit was not, of course, something different
from God Himself. It was God, God in action. The God
of the New Testament Church, like the God of the Old
Testament, was a living God, never a pale philosophical
abstraction or merely a necessary idea. The Christians of
apostolic times knew that God had been at work in Christ,
reconciling the world unto himself (II Corinthians 5:19);
they found that same God at work in their own midst, do-
ing the works that Christ had done, healing the sick, trans-
forming the lives of ordinary men, making saints out of
sinners and heroes out of cowards. This present work of
God in His Church they ascribed to the Holy Spirit, al-
though they did not always carefully distinguish it from
the work of Christ Himself. They were not concerned, in
the excitement of the times, to formulate precise defini-
tions. The experience was too new and fresh a thing for
such analysis to seem necessary. Later Christian ages, on
the basis of this experience would eventually provide a sat-
isfactory intellectual statement of the relationships within
the Godhead by the doctrine of the Trinity, but the ex-
perience itself was enough for the men of the New Testa-
ment. For them, as for us, the primary fact was that the
remarkable things which were taking place in the Church
were truly the wonderful works of God (Acts 2:11).
LIFE IN CHRIST MEANT LIFE IN THE CHURCH
To become a Christian has never meant merely to adopt a
new set of beliefs or even to accept a new standard of con-
duct. It has always involved at least two things: first- a
160
willingness, in faith and trust, to accept Christ as Lord;
and second, to become a member of His Church. In New
Testament times those who had accepted Christ as Lord
were convinced that in doing so they had undergone an
experience equivalent to passing from death into life (St.
John 5:24). The Christian believed that he had come to
share in the very nature of Jesus Christ. He had become
united to Him in a kind of mystical union so intense that
he could say with Paul, / live, yet not I, but Christ liveth
in me (Galatians 2:20). So strong was the certainty of hav-
ing found a new life in Christ that the relationship of
Christians to Him could best be described in biological
terms. Christ was the vine; they were the branches (S*.
John 15^5)' Or, to use an even more striking image, He was
the body, they were the members. For we are members of
his body, of his flesh and his bones (Ephesians 5:30).
Obviously, people who used this kind of imagery could
not be thinking of Christianity merely in terms of indi-
vidual salvation. The character of their relationship to
Christ involved a close relationship to other Christians.
Christ's body had many members. Salvation could not be
merely personal; it must be corporate. In finding redemp-
tion for himself, the Christian of necessity became the
member of a redeemed and redemptive community.
The Christian of New Testament times knew that his
life as a follower of Christ was life in the Church. The
Church was the society of the New Covenant which Jesus
had come to establish. It is called by many names in the
New Testament: it is the Church of the living God, the
pillar and ground of the truth (I Timothy 3:15); the body
of Christ (I Corinthians 12:27; Ephesians 1:22, 23, etc.);
161
the Israel of God (Galatians 6:16); the fellowship of the
mystery (Ephesians y.$) and, by implication, the bride of
Christ (Ephesians 5:23). This society was the authentic suc-
cessor to the old national Israel- In it the mission of Israel
was finally realized and all mankind brought within the
covenant community of God, for membership in it was
no longer restricted by race, nationality, or social status
(Galatians y.%8). Christians were to love the Jews as mem-
bers of God's ancient chosen people who still had a great
destiny to fulfill (Romans 9-11), but the Jews as a nation
had ceased to be the privileged people. They were re-
garded merely as Israel after the flesh (I Corinthians
10:18); those who belonged to the Church were the true
Israel, the children of promise (Galatians
HOW ONE BECAME A CHURCH MEMBER: BAPTISM
THIS New Israel, like the old, had its appointed ordi-
nances, its officers, and its common life. As time went on,
these things were greatly elaborated, but even in the New
Testament the main lines of the later development were
already laid down. There was, first of all, a ceremony of
initiation, the rite of baptism. At the very beginning of
the Christian's life, its corporate character was emphasized.
The experience of becoming a Christian was no mere in-
dividual matter. It was not enough to have accepted Christ
as Lord in the privacy of one's heart, as though such a
confession concerned the individual soul and God alone.
As in the case of St. Paul, the first step after conversion
was the public acknowledgment of one's faith arid a for-
mal incorporation into the fellowship of Christians by
receiving the waters of baptism (Acts 9:18). To the early
162
Church, baptism was not, o course, merely an empty
ceremony, but an effective sacramental means by which
an individual was brought into a direct and personal re
lation with Jesus Christ and made to share in some mys-
terious way in His death and resurrection. Know ye not,
that so many of us as were baptized into Jesus Christ were
baptized into his death? Therefore we are buried with
him by baptism into death: that like as Christ was raised
from the dead by the glory of the Father > even so we should
also walk in newness of life (Romans 6:3, 4). By baptism,
which set the divine seal upon his personal act of faith, the
believer came actually to participate in Christ's life. He
was in Christ and Christ was in him. Faith and baptism
were both necessary to accomplish this; the act of the in-
dividual and the act of the Church. Thus anyone who felt
faith stirring within him requested first of all that he
might be baptized and received into the Christian fellow-
ship (Acts 8:36-38).
HOW THE CHURCH WORSHIPPED: THE LORD'S SUPPER
THE newly baptized Christian found himself the member
of a society of men deeply conscious of their relation to
each otKer and of the responsibility of all for each. As
members of Christ's Body, they knew that His life flowed
through them all and that they were therefore members of
each other (Ephesians 4:25; I Corinthians 12:12-26). There
was an intimacy to their common life which was partly
lost when the Church later became larger and more
prosperous, but there has never been a time when this New
Testament sense of community has entirely disappeared.
The center of life for the New Testament Church was
the weekly assembly for worship and fellowship. Many
of the early Jewish Christians continued to take part in
the worship of the Old Israel in the Temple and the syn-
agogue (Acts 2:46), and to observe the Sabbath on the
seventh day as prescribed in the Jewish Law. As the mem-
bership of the Church became increasingly Gentile and
the full implications of the Gospel were realized, this
double loyalty ceased and Christians came to worship with
Christians alone. Instead o observing the Sabbath on the
seventh day of the week, Christians began a new custom
of meeting together for worship on the first day of the
week, the day of Christ's resurrection from the dead. This
day came to be called the Lord's Day (Revelation 1:10)
and was celebrated joyfully as befitted a day which was a
weekly Easter.
The most important event of the Lord's Day was the
celebration of the Lord's Supper (Acts 20:7). To the early
Church this observance lay at the very heart of its life, as
we can see from a description of the Church in Jerusalem.
They continued steadfastly in the apostles' doctrine and
fellowship^ and in the breaking of bread and of prayers
(Acts 2:42). In Paul's first epistle to the Corinthians
(11:1*7-34) he gives a picture of the way in which the
Eucharist would be celebrated in one of these New Testa-
ment churches. There were, of course, no church build-
ings, and the services would, of necessity, be held in private
houses, probably in the home of one of the more well-to-do
members of the congregation, since it would have to be
large enough to hold a considerable crowd. The Lord's
Supper was not an entirely separate service as it is with us,
but part of a common meal to which apparently every-
164
one brought his own food. This custom of the fellowship
meal or love-feast, beautiful and appropriate though it
was, later died out, partly as a result of abuses which can
already be seen in Paul's description of the way in which
it was conducted in the Corinthian Church. At some point
in the meal, the elder or bishop blessed some of the bread
and wine in imitation of our Lord's act at the Last Supper
and all those present thankfully received of that which
he had blessed. At each such celebration the sacrifice of
Christ became a present fact (ye do show the Lord's death
till he come) and the communicants became partakers of
the body and blood of the Lord. In this service was gath-
ered up the whole meaning of Christian fellowship, par-
ticipation in a common source of strength and the ex-
pression of that participation in the living of a common
life.
At these services and perhaps on other occasions, there
was a place for prayers, for the reading of Scripture and
for the singing of hymns. Psalms would be used as well as
new Christian hymns which were beginning to appear
(Colossians 3:16). There would on some occasions be a
formal address or sermon by the bishop or elder in charge
of the church, or by some visiting apostle who happened
to be passing through. This would sometimes be an ex-
position of a passage of the Old Testament Scriptures (the
only Bible which the early Christians had), or a stirring
declaration concerning some aspect of the saving work of
Christ, or a homily upon an ethical theme. The Epistle of
James is a good example of this latter type of preaching.
The New Testament churches were much more informal
than the churches of later times became and there was
165
always an opportunity for individual members of the con-
gregation to take special part in it also. This occurred
quite spontaneously and such participation might take
the form of brief sermons or expositions, or prayers and
hymns, or even of highly emotional utterances which ex-
pressed the feelings of the speaker although they were
unintelligible to others, the so-called speaking with
tongues. One can imagine that this excessive informality
might lead to great confusion. It often did so and Paul, in
writing to the Church at Corinth (I Corinthians 14), had
to put some curbs upon it in order to make sure that all
things were done decently and in order. Whatever else
may be said about worship in New Testament times, it
was certainly not dull I Anyone attending the public as-
semblies of the Church would have been struck by a feel-
ing of contagious enthusiasm and exuberant vitality.
HOW THE CHURCH WAS ORGANIZED: THE MINISTRY
THE new Christian community, like the Old Israel, needed
an organized ministry to carry on its affairs, to give author-
itative instruction and to conduct the services of public
worship. In the beginning, this organization was much
looser than it later became and the technical terms used
to describe it in the New Testament are not always used
in the same sense they have today. Nevertheless, the main
outlines of the familiar three-fold ministry are dearly to
be seen. At the top, charged with special authority to gov-
ern the Church, were those who were called apostles.
These included the original twelve, but also some others,
like Paul, who were added to the number later. In general,
these correspond to the bishops of the Church in later
166
times, although they did not have the same kind of
geographical jurisdiction. They had the power of ordina-
tion (Acts 14:23) and were regarded as, in some sense, the
center of authority in the Church. In charge of the local
congregations there were men called sometimes elders and
sometimes bishops. The Greek word for elder is presbyter
or as we say today, priest. The Greek word for bishop is
episcopos and means merely overseer. It was originally ap-
plied to those who had the oversight of local congregations
rather than to those with broader authority. Finally there
was a third group of men who had charge of the practi-
cal matter of administering the charitable funds of the
churches and of taking care of the poor (Acts 6:1-8). These
were called deacons, a term derived from a Greek word
which means servant (I Timothy 3:8-13). There also were
other types of ministries in the apostolic period (I Corin-
thians 12:28), but the relation of these ministries to the
later ministry of the Church is not clear. At any rate they
disappear in the following age. There was also, in New
Testament times, a recognized order of devout women,
the widows of I Timothy 5:3-10, which was the prototype
of the orders of deaconesses and sisters in the later Church.
HOW CHRISTIANS UVED TOGETHER
THE existence of the orders of deacons and widows,
charged with special responsibility for the poor and af-
flicted, calls attention to a striking feature of life in the
New Testament Church: its sense of social responsibility
for its members. This was a practical expression of that
feeling which they all had of sharing a common life in
Christ. The weekly celebration of the Lord's Supper was
167
a constant reminder of this aspect of the Church's life. In
the Jerusalem Church, the sense of communal responsi-
bility was so strong that a large part of the membership
adopted the practice of holding all their property in com-
mon. All that believed were together and had all things
common, and sold their possessions and goods and distrib-
uted them to all as every man had need (Acts 2:44, 4$). Nor
was this spirit of mutual helpfulness limited to the mem-
bers of individual congregations, but was felt by particular
churches toward other churches. So Paul took up a collec-
tion among the churches of Greece for the impoverished
mother church at Jerusalem during a time of famine
(I Corinthians 16:1-3). One of the greatest of New Testa-
ment words is the Greek word koinonia which is trans-
lated in different places fellowship, communion, communi-
cation, and distribution, but always implies the thought of
sharing, sharing in a common life, and sharing in the com-
mon responsibility of the group for all its members. The
basic ethical principle of this early Christian fellowship is
expressed in the words of Paul, Bear ye one another's bur-
dens and so fulfill the law of Christ (Galatians 6:2).
Thus from the beginning, Christianity was not merely
a way of individual salvation; it was a way of life which
could be followed only within the framework of a social
organism, the Christian Church. Within this Divine So-
ciety, which was the Body of Christ, the individual Chris-
tian learned the meaning of the law of love, that love
which puts God and His eternal purposes at the center of
life, and which exalts the permanent good of all above
the selfish and temporary interests of individuals. It was
also the conviction of Christians that this manner of life
168
was intended ultimately to be a pattern for the ordering
of the whole of human society.
GREAT LETTERS OF THE APOSTOLIC CHURCH
THE epistles which, with the exception of one book, Rev-
elation, make up the rest of the New Testament, can be
understood fully only as one sees them against the back-
ground of the particular situation to which they are ad-
dressed. In this section it is impossible to give more than
a brief account of the circumstances which produced each
epistle and to state as concisely as possible the principal
themes which the writer develops. In order to clothe this
skeletal outline with flesh and blood, the reader will have
to read the epistles for himself. For more detailed discus-
sion of the background and of the meaning of individual
passages, the reader is referred to the numerous Introduc-
tions to the New Testament and to commentaries on the
various books.
THE LETTERS OF PAUL
GREATEST of all the New Testament letters is the EPISTLE
TO THE ROMANS written by Paul on his third missionary
journey and addressed to the Church at Rome in order to
prepare the way for a visit which he expected some day to
undertake. Paul wanted the Roman Christians to under-
stand his interpretation of the Christian Gospel and so
took far more care in the preparation of this letter than
was the case with any of the others. It is one of the most
profound and influential documents in all the literature
of the world, and deserves the most thoughtful kind of
study, though much of it is admittedly difficult to under-
169
stand without the aid of a teacher or a commentary. The
basic argument, which is presented in chapters 1-8, is that
salvation comes to men only through faith in Christ, not
through any sort of personal achievement nor by mere
obedience to any set of laws, whether ceremonial or moral.
This is the doctrine of justification by faith alone. By
faith Paul means, not just belief, nor the mere intellectual
acceptance of a set of propositions, but personal commit-
ment in a relationship of love, trust, and obedience.
This part of the epistle reaches a magnificent climax in
the eighth chapter. Some of the argument in the preceding
chapters is hard to follow and there have been those who
have dismissed Paul as a mere academic theologian on the
basis of them. That is quite unjust. Suddenly, in this chap-
ter, we realize the tremendous driving power of his faith,
when he breaks out into something very close to poetry,
// God be for us, who can be against us? . . . For I am per-
suaded that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor prin-
cipalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to
come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall
be able to separate us from the love of God which is in
Christ Jesus our Lord (8:31-39). The triumphant affirma-
tion which these words contain is not something irrele-
vant to the preceding argument, but the direct conse-
quence of it. Paul's sense of victory springs from the kind
of relationship to God through faith in Christ which he
has been describing in the previous chapters. Though
these are perhaps the most difficult chapters in the New
Testament, there are none which bring us closer to the
real heart of the Christian Gospel. In chapters 9-11, Paul
introduces a digression in which he discusses the vexing
170
question, Why did the Jews not receive their own Mes-
siah? and comes to the conclusion that their apparent
apostasy is a necessary part o God's plan for the ultimate
salvation of all mankind. From chapter 12 on, he describes
the kind of moral life which is the inevitable outgrowth of
a saving faith in Christ. The word therefore at the begin-
ning of chapter 12 shows how closely related these ethical
chapters are to the theological discussion in chapters 1-8.
Because Christians have been brought near to God by their
faith in Christ, they must offer themselves, their souls and
bodies, to Him to be a reasonable, holy, and living sacri-
fice. The practical evidence of this, Paul says, will be a life
which is pervaded by love, for love is the fulfilling of the
law (13:10). Next to the Sermon on the Mount these chap-
ters contain the finest account of the Christian life to be
found anywhere.
The two letters to the CORINTHIANS, in contrast to Ro-
mans, were written to a church Paul had founded and
knew intimately. They are warm and human documents,
sometimes affectionate, sometimes angry, and give us an
unequaled picture of life in one of the new churches of
the apostolic age. The first epistle was written in Ephesus
during Paul's two-year stay at that city, located just across
the Aegean Sea from Corinth, and was intended as a formal
answer to the questions contained in a letter which he had
received from the Corinthian Christians (7:1)- Before he
began to answer their questions, however, he rebuked the
Corinthians for some scandals and irregularities in their
church. These were things he had learned about from
friends who had recently visited him (I:H)- He was espe-
cially concerned about the way they had allowed them-
171
selves to become divided into factions (1:10-4:21). Some
were calling themselves disciples of Paul and some, dis-
ciples of Peter, while others considered themselves follow-
ers of Apollos, one of Paul's successors as spiritual leader
of the Corinthian Church. The chief quarrel was over
the merits of Paul and Apollos, and Paul rebukes them
severely for disloyalty to Christ, for both Paul and Apollos
are merely his ministers (4:1)- He then goes on to repri-
mand them further for the complacency with which they
tolerate gross immorality and unbrotherly conduct in their
midst (5, 6). These Corinthian Christians were only a few
years removed from paganism and Paul felt that they
needed to be dealt with by a rod when love and gentleness
failed to move them (4:21). After he has dealt with these
matters, Paul goes on to answer the inquiries which had
occasioned their letter to him. There were, first of all, cer-
tain important questions about marriage (7) and the
scruples which some felt about eating food which had been
offered in the worship of idols (8:10). This last was a very
real concern for Christians who were living in a pagan en-
vironment and could not shut themselves off from daily
contact and social intercourse with the pagan world. Paul's
solution of the problem is one which commends itself to
common sense and illustrates his gifts as a practical ad-
ministrator and pastor (10:2311:1).
In the next section Paul discusses certain questions
which had arisen about the manner of their common wor-
ship (11:14). In connection with this he expounds the
Christian doctrine of the Eucharist (77:77-27; see also
10:16, 77). It is an interesting illustration of the genius of
the New Testament, and indeed of the whole Bible, that
172
this important doctrinal passage wa*j written only because
the things it contained seemed to have direct bearing upon
a particular, concrete situation. Biblical doctrine always
emerges as an answer to the problems o real life; never
from a mere love of theorizing for its own sake. In this
same context Paul sets down his great hymn in praise of
Christian love. Some of the Corinthians were very proud
of what they considered to be their great spiritual gifts
and argued with each other as to the respective value of
"speaking with tongues," "prophesying/' "healing," and
the like (12). Paul assures them that, great as all these gifts
are, there is one that is infinitely greater, the gift of love,
which alone can make a man acceptable to God ( 13:1-3).
The epistle closes with an account of the Christian doc-
trine of the resurrection, which contains the earliest nar-
rative of our Lord's resurrection appearances ( 15), and
with some personal instructions and greetings ( 16).
The second epistle to the Corinthians was written some
time later while Paul was traveling in Macedonia. In this
epistle Paul is much more discursive than in the first,
and the development of his thought is not so easy to fol-
low. The main theme in the first part of the letter is a
defense of his own conduct and apostleship (1-7). Great
as Paul became, and deserved to become, in the eyes of
the later Church, he had to fight a continual battle for
recognition during his lifetime. His enemies accused him
of not being really an apostle, and of being alternately ar-
rogant and cringing toward other Christians (10:10). On
this occasion they had accused him especially of fickleness
because he had had to make some changes in his travel
plans (z:jj-/7). In the first part of the epistle Paul's chief
173
concern is to defend himself against these detractors. His
thought, however, leads him naturally to discuss the na-
ture of the Gospel ministry which he believed himself
to share. The whole of chapters 3:1-7:4 is given over to
this theme. We are ambassadors for Christ, he says, God
making his appeal through us (5:20 RSV). What we preach
is not ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord, with ourselves as
your servants for Jesus' sake (4:5, RSV). This part of the
epistle is followed by a kind of Every Member Canvass let-
ter (8, 9) in which Paul appeals for contributions to a col-
lection he is raising for the impoverished Church at Jeru-
salem, and in which he makes use of some of the subtle
devices to awaken the interest and response of his readers
which we fondly imagine to be the special discovery of
modern advertising psychology.
In the concluding chapters (10-13) Paul returns even
more vigorously to a defense of his right to be an apostle
and gives some interesting and valuable information about
his own adventurous career (for example, 11:22-33). Most
scholars believe these last four chapters are really a sep-
arate letter written earlier than the rest of the book and
perhaps are the very letter referred to in chapter 2:4. It
would certainly make II Corinthians easier to understand
if this were the case.
The EPISTLE TO THE GALATIANS is a passionately angry
letter written to defend Paul's conception of the Gospel
as a message which demands nothing from the believer but
personal faith in Christ against those who insisted that
Gentile Christians must become fully subject to the Jew-
ish Law. It probably dates from about the same period
as Romans to which its thought is very closely related. For
freedom, he says, did Christ set us free; stand fast therefore
and be not entangled again in a yoke of slavery (5:2).
Many scholars, for reasons impossible to discuss here,
believe that EPHESIANS was written by a disciple of Paul,
in the name of his master, as a kind of resum of his teach-
ing. Others, however, accept it as a genuine Pauline let-
ter, in which case it is to be numbered among those let-
ters written during his imprisonment in Rome (3:1). This
epistle is most notable for its highly developed doctrine of
the Church, which it calls the Body of Christ (1:23, 5:30-
32; see also 4:4, 5). Using another striking figure, it com-
pares the relationship between the Church and Christ to
the relationship between a woman and her husband
PHILIPPIANS was written to the first church which Paul
had founded in Europe, to thank the members for their
kindness to him during his imprisonment. It is important
theologically for the doctrine concerning the person of
Christ set forth in a passage which sounds like a fragment
of an early Christian creed or hymn (2:5-11). It is the most
serene and gracious of the letters and shows the character
of Paul on its most attractive side.
COLOSSIANS, also written while Paul was in prison, was
intended to warn the church at Colosse in Asia Minor
against certain forms of Gnostic heresy which were already
beginning to take root (2:8). There are very many close
parallels between this epistle and that to the Ephesians,
particularly in the conception of the Church as the Body
of Christ (1:24). Incidental to his discussion of heresy, Paul
sets forth a high theological conception of the nature of
Christ, who is the image of the invisible God, the first born
175
of every creature, by whom were all things created, that
are in heaven, and that are in earth (1:15, 16).
First THESSALONIANS was probably the earliest of Paul's
letters and if so, was the first book of the New Testament
to be written. It was written from Corinth where Paul
had just learned from his young friend Timothy that the
Church at Thessalonica, one of the first churches he had
founded in Europe (Acts ij:i) was still faithful to him and
to the Gospel he had preached. The epistle is a spon-
taneous outpouring of gratitude for their fidelity (3:6-9).
Paul also attempts to answer in this letter some questions
which were troubling the Thessalonian Christians about
the coming of the last day (4:13-5:11). Some members of
the Church had died since Paul preached in Thessalonica,
and the others were worried for fear that these departed
members would have no part in the glorious day when the
Lord came to receive His own. Paul reassures them by
telling them that those who remain alive in that day will
have no special advantage, for the dead in Christ shall rise
first (4:15, 1 6). Although no one knows when that day will
come, yet all Christians should live as though it were im-
mediately at hand (5:1-8).
As often happens, his teaching in this first letter was
misunderstood and the second epistle was written a few
weeks later to correct the misunderstanding to which the
first had given rise. Some of the Thessalonians had appar-
ently understood Paul to mean in the first letter that the
return of Christ was actually just about to happen and
were giving up their jobs and their normal manner of life
in expectation of it. In consequence, the life of the com-
munity was being seriously disrupted. In the second letter
176
Paul explains that there are certain mysterious events
which must first occur and that Christians should con-
tinue to engage in their ordinary occupations ( 2:1-5). H
people will not work, then they shall not eat (3:10)! Both
epistles illustrate Paul's great capacity for human affection
and his profound common sense.
The three so-called Pastoral Epistles, I-II TIMOTHY and
TITUS, are commonly regarded today as belonging to a
much later age than that of Paul. The vocabulary, style,
and ideas are so different from the authentic letters of
Paul that it is an almost inevitable conclusion that they
were written in the form of Pauline letters by an anony-
mous writer in order to show how he believed Paul would
have dealt with the problems which arose in the Church
after the second century had begun. They are concerned
very largely with practical matters of church discipline and
administration, hence the name, pastoral epistles. They
are very valuable for the insight they give into the thought
and life of the second century Church.
The letter to PHILEMON is a beautiful and kindly little
note which Paul wrote in order to commend a runaway
slave, Onesimus, to a friendly reception by his master, the
Philemon of the title. Though Paul must have written
many such, this is the only example of a Pauline letter
which is concerned with individuals rather than with
churches.
THE LETTER TO THE HEBREWS
THE EPISTLE TO THE HEBREWS was included among the
Pauline letters only by accident, as it nowhere claims to
have been written by Paul, is very different in style and
177
thought to the mind of Paul, and was generally recognized
in the early Church as an anonymous letter. It is, as a mat-
ter of fact, not even in the form of a letter except for the
concluding verses. It is rather a formal essay, or perhaps a
sermon, which endeavors to show by using an allegorical 1
interpretation of certain Old Testament passages, in what
way the work of Christ was a fulfilment of the Jewish
priestly and sacrificial system. Christ is the true priest and
his sacrifice the one true sacrifice. The emotional climax
of the epistle is reached in the eleventh chapter with its
stirring account of the men of old who lived amidst the
hardships of this present world by virtue of their indom-
itable faith in the realities of the unseen world. The
author's practical purpose was to stimulate his readers,
whoever they were, perhaps the Christians at Rome, to
show a like faith and to stand firm in the face of immi-
nent persecution (12:1-11).
LETTERS BY OTHER NEW TESTAMENT PERSONALITIES
THE name of JAMES, the Lord's brother (Galatians 1:19)
and leader of the conservative Jewish faction in the early
Church, is appropriately attached to the little homily, or
collection of homilies, on Christian morality which goes
under his name, whether he was the author of it or not.
It is more Jewish in spirit and contains less of distinctively
Christian doctrine than any other New Testament book.
That is in no way to depreciate it, since it is an excellent
example of the kind of practical moral teaching which
i Allegorical method, a system of interpretation, common among Greek-
speaking Jews of that day, which was concerned with the spiritual mean-
ing believed to underlie the obvious literal meaning of Biblical passages.
178
must have accompanied always the triumphant proclama-
tion of the good news about Christ. It is particularly
notable for its sympathy with the social underdog (5:1-6).
Of the two epistles of PETER, the second was commonly
denied to be the work of the apostle even in the early
Church and is largely a rewriting of the little epistle of
JUDE. The main purpose of both Jude and second Peter is
to attack heresy and to warn that, in spite of long delay,
the day of the Lord is surely coming.
The first epistle, on the other hand, is still regarded by
many competent scholars as an authentic work of Peter,
the prince of the apostles, and is, in any case, one of the
greatest books in the New Testament, written to en-
courage some group of Christians who were about to un-
dergo persecution to be faithful and Christlike in their
behaviour (4:12-19).
It is still a disputed question whether the three epistles
of JOHN were written by the author of the fourth Gospel or
by a disciple of his. The question is largely academic be-
cause there can be no doubt that the spirit and general
point of view are the same. The first epistle was written
to warn the recipients against the Gnostic heresy known
as docetism, which maintained that Christ's life and death
were merely appearances and that He had not really come
"in the flesh" (4:1-3). Along with his principal theme, the
author dwells upon the thought of love as the distinguish-
ing mark of the Christian life and the most direct means
of access to God (4:7).
The same message is concisely contained in the second
epistle, a brief note addressed by the Elder John to
an unknown church, the elect lady. Third John is an
equally brief personal note addressed to a certain Gaius,
commending him for his hospitality toward some itinerant
evangelists.
A VISION OF GOD AND HIS KINGLY RULE: REVELATION
THE last book in the New Testament is, for many people,
the most difficult, and has occasioned more misunder-
standing and fantastic speculation than any other book in
the Bible except Daniel. Both REVELATION and Daniel be-
long to a peculiar category of ancient religious literature
called apocalyptic and one cannot understand them unless
he understands what the apocalyptic writers were trying
to do. The purpose of both Daniel and Revelation was
to encourage their readers to remain steadfast in time of
persecution; in the case of Revelation, the persecution of
the Christians by the Emperor Domitian c. 95 A.D. The
strange and occasionally repellent imagery of Revelation
is simply a part of the traditional apocalyptic language and
can be understood in detail only with the help of a Biblical
commentary. One can read the book, however, with profit
and interest if he will only remember that the author, an
otherwise unknown prophet of Asia Minor whose name
was John, is really writing poetry, not prose, and under
all the confused images of his supernatural drama is trying
to make vivid to his readers the one great truth that all
history, both human and cosmic, is under the dominion
of Almighty God and that those who trust and obey Him
need have no fear however dark the human situation may
seem to be. The thought of the entire work is summed
up in the words, The Lord God omnipotent reigneth
180
It is fitting that the last book in the Bible should have
this thought for its basic theme. The Bible story begins
with the creation of the world; it ends with a vision of the
coming of the Kingdom of God. It was God who made the
world and it is God who will bring it finally to perfec-
tion. The course of Biblical history, like the course of
world history, sometimes seems devious and uncertain, but
over it at every turning of the way presides the figure of
One who is the Alpha and Omega, the Faithful and True,
the King of Kings and Lord of Lords (Revelation 1:8;
19:11, 16).
THE TRANSITION TO CHURCH HISTORY
As we close the last book of the New Testament, we have
come to the end of the great creative and normative age
of Christian history. What follows this is the history of
the Church and adds nothing to the essential content of
the Gospel. In a sense, of course, the whole of the Bible
is a part of Church history, since it tells how and why the
Church began and traces its development from its Jewish
to its Christian form, but nevertheless there is a qualitative
difference between the Biblical books which record the
definitive acts of sacred history, and the writings of the
age which followed. In the New Testament we see how
the Gospel took shape and how the Church received the
basic form which she would bear ever afterward. In the
years which followed there would still be growth and
development; men of brilliant spiritual and intellectual
achievement would bring new insights to illuminate the
meaning of the faith; the Church would adapt Berself to
new conditions in countries yet unknown and in centuries
181
yet undreamed of; but the main lines within which that
development would take place had already been laid
down. The men of the sub-apostolic age were conscious
that they were the guardians of something which had
been entrusted to them; they were building upon a foun-
dation already firmly laid. In some of the later and periph-
eral writings of the New Testament itself, we are already
conscious of the emergence of this new spirit (Jude 5;
I Timothy 6:20), but what is only a rare exception in
the New Testament becomes the dominant note of the
age which follows. Which is only to say that in following
our story beyond the limits of the New Testament, we
move outside the sphere of Biblical Revelation into that
of Church history, the subject of another volume in this
series.
182
Th* Word
Was Made
Flesh
PART FOUR
Conclusion
CHAPTER
ELEVEN
Christ the Word
.HE Faith of the Church is founded upon
the Bible and the heart of the Bible is the Gospel of Jesus
Christ, the Good News that the promises given to ancient
Israel have been fulfilled. A Christian is one who believes
in this Gospel and accepts Christ in trust and obedience
as the long-awaited Saviour and Redeemer of the world.
The various aspects of the nature and redeeming work
of Christ are discussed in another volume in this series,
but here, while we are still dealing with the Biblical ma-
terials, we need to take note of one of His titles which,
more than any other, makes plain the unity and meaning
of the Bible story. This is the title given Him in the first
chapter of the fourth gospel: The Word of God (St. John
1:1). As we have already seen (page 9), the Bible as a whole
is called the Word of God, and it may seem paradoxical
that the same phrase should be used to describe our Lord.
But it is just in this paradox that we see the inner co-
185
herence of the Bible most clearly. It will be remembered
that word means message. It is the faith of Christians that
in the person and work of Jesus Christ there is summed
up the whole word or message of God found scattered
through the rest of the Bible.
In the Old Testament, God's message appears little by
little, emerging slowly over a long period of time, as men
were able to grasp it. But, at the end of this process, in
the fullness of the time (Galatians 4:4), God revealed
Himself completely and finally in Jesus Christ. As the
prologue to the fourth Gospel says, The Word became
flesh and dwelt among us (St. John 1:4). What God had
been trying to say to men in so many different ways and
which they had understood so inadequately, He now says
plainly and unmistakably through a Person; not a mere
man, who could only speak of reconciliation between God
and man, but one who was both God and Man, in whom
that reconciliation actually took place; not a mere teacher,
who could only tell of God's mighty acts, but One in whom
the Godhead dwelt (Colossians 2:9) who could Himself
perform them; not a mere prophet, who could only say
the word, but God's only begotten Son, who is the Word.
Jesus Christ sums up the whole of the previous revelation
and supplies all that still was lacking. His life, death, and
resurrection are the climax of the whole story. And, since
we can understand the full meaning of any story only
when we know how it ends, we can understand the whole
of the preceding story in the Bible only when we see who
He was and what He did. He who was the Word of God
Incarnate gives us the key for understanding the Word of
God contained in the rest of the Bible. Without Him,
186
the rest of the story would be obscure and incomplete.
Furthermore, it is through Him that we see the direct
relevance of the Bible to our own lives. For the Bible is
not a book of good advice which touches us as individuals
only indirectly and as we choose to let it; it is the story
of a divine redemption in which we are directly and in-
escapably concerned. Christ is the center of the story and
we who are members of His Church are pan of that story
and ourselves participants in the great drama of man's
salvation. As we read the Bible story we come to under-
stand how we, by our pride and self-love, have separated
ourselves from God; but we also see how God, across the
centuries, has endeavored to bridge the gulf which we
have made. In Jesus Christ the gulf was bridged and the
way of reconciliation opened. As many as received him, to
them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to
them that believe on his name (St. John 1:12). Because we
have received Him, however ineffectually, our lives have
been drawn into the stream of Biblical history.
Although the whole of the Bible story is important, yet
clearly the story of Christ and His work is most important.
As we read the Bible today we should read it with that
knowledge and allow Him to cast His light on every page
and show Himself as the unseen goal toward which even
the most difficult chapters point. Our chief interest in
reading the Bible should be to capture for ourselves the
experience of the first generations of Christians who could
say, in the words of the fourth Gospel, we beheld his
glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the father . . .
and of his fullness have we received, and grace upon grace
(St. John 1:14, 16).
187
A Chronological Table of the
Literature of the Bible
Important literary units, originally independent but now incorpor-
ated into books of the Bible, are indicated by italics; completed books
of the Bible are in Roman type.
THE OLD TESTAMENT B.C
THE CONQUEST OF CANAAN, c. 1200 B.C.
The Song of Deborah (Judges 5) c. noo
David's Lament over Saul (II Samuel i: 17-27) c. 1000
Court History of David (II Samuel 9-20) c. 950
DIVISION OF THE KINGDOM, 926 B.C.
/ Document of the Pentateuch C. 850
E Document of the Pentateuch c. 750
Amos (All the prophetic books contain some
material added later.) c. 750
Hosea r. 740
FALL OF THE NORTHERN KINGDOM, 721 B.C.
Micah 1-3 c, 720
Isaiah 1-39 c. 700
Zephaniah c. 625
DEUTERONOMIC REFORM, 621 B.C.
Deuteronomy 621
Nahum 612
Habakkuk c. 600
FALL OF JERUSALEM AND THE BEGINNING. OF THE EXILE, 586 B.C-
Jeremiah c. 580
Ezekiel c. 570
Lamentations During the Exile
Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings During the Exile
CONQUEST OF BABYLON BY CYRUS OF PERSIA, 539 B.C.
Isaiah 40-55 c. 539
Obadiah After the Exile
Haggai and Zechariah 1-8 520-518
REBUILDING OF THE TEMPLE, 516 B.C.
Isaiah 56-66 After the building of the temple
P Document of the Pentateuch c. 450
188
Malachi c . 450
The completed Pentateuch c. 400
Ruth, Job, Joel Late post-exilic
CONQUEST OF THE EAST BY ALEXANDER THE GREAT, 333 B.C.
Zechariah 9-14, Chronicles,
Ezra, Nehemiah, Proverbs,
Song of Solomon, Ecclesiastes,
Psalms, Jonah Greek Period
Ecclesiasticus c. 180
MACCABEAN REVOLT, 167-165
Daniel 165
Esther, Judith 150-125
I Maccabees, Wisdom of Solomon c. 100
THE NEW TESTAMENT A.D.
BEGINNING OF ROMAN RULE IN PALESTINE, 63 B.C.
I, II Thessalonians c. 50
I Corinthians c* 54
II Corinthians c. 55
Galatians ?
Romans c. 56
Philippians, Colossians, Philemon 60-62
Ephesians ?
Mark 65-70
FALL OF JERUSALEM, A.D. 70
Matthew, Luke-Acts 75-95
(Ephesians ?)
Hebrews 80-95
DOMITIAN'S PERSECUTION OF THE CHURCH, A.D. 95
Revelation 95
I Peter 95-100
Gospel of John 95- JI 5
I, II, III John 100-115
James ?
Jude ?
II Peter ?
I, II Timothy and Titus ?
The books of the New Testament are arranged in their probable
relative sequence. Approximate dates are given where there is some
objective ground for doing so. Question marks mean that anything
more than a relative date is a matter of pure conjecture.
189
About the Author
THE REV. ROBERT CLAUDE DENTAN, PH.D., S.T.D.,
is Professor of Old Testament Literature and Interpreta-
tion at the General Theological Seminary, New York City.
A graduate of Colorado College and Berkeley Divinity
School, Dr. Dentan spent a year of study at the American
School of Oriental Research in Jerusalem and received his
Ph.D. from Yale University. He was formerly priest-in-
charge of St. John's Church, Donora, Pa.; rector of St.
John's Church, New Haven, Conn.; and a professor at the
Berkeley Divinity School.
OTHER MEMBERS OF THE AUTHORS* COMMITTEE
AT THE TIME THIS BOOK WAS PREPARED
THE REV. POWEL MILLS DAWLEY, PH.D., Professor of Ecclesiastical
History and Sub-Dean at the General Theological Seminary.
THE REV. STANLEY BROWN-SERMAN, D.D., the late Dean and Pro-
fessor of New Testament Language at the Protestant Episcopal
Theological Seminary in Virginia.
THE REV. C. KILMER MYERS, Vicar of St. Augustine's Chapel,
Trinity Parish, New York City.
THE REV. JAMES A. PIKE, J.S.D., D.D., Dean of the Cathedral of
St. John the Divine, New York City.
THE REV. FREDERICK Q. SHAFER, Lecturer in Religion at the
University of the South, Sewanee, Tenn.
THE REV. VESPER O. WARD, D.D., Professor of Christian Education
and Homiletics, School of Theology of the University of the South,
and formerly Executive Secretary of the Department of Christian
Education of the National Council.
THE REV. THEODORE O. WEDEL, PHJX, Warden of the College of
Preachers, Washington, D.C.
190
Books for Reference
LHE books included in this list are intended
primarily for clergy, church school teachers, and interested lay
people who may be desirous of more information about particular
subjects than is contained in this .book. Except where especially
noted, the books in this list are not of a technical character and
should be easily intelligible to the average educated layman. The
inclusion of any book in this list does not imply necessarily approval
of all its conclusions or even of its general point of view. Many
books on the Bible are written by persons who do not sympathize
with the general position of the Episcopal Church. Many are written
from a purely literary or historical point of view without any con-
sideration of the religious values of the Bible. Such books may con-
tain valuable information and stimulating insights, but the reader
must always be on guard against accepting uncritically what may be
only the personal opinions of a particular author as the unques-
tioned conclusions of modern scholarship. This list was revised in
August, 1955.
GENERAL BOOKS ON THE MEANING AND
AUTHORITY OF THE BIBLE
A Preface to Bible Study by Alan Richardson (Philadelphia: West-
minster. 1944). Brief, readable, Christian, and theological in the best
sense of the word
The Authority of the Biblical Revelation by Hubert Cunliffe- Jones
(Boston: Pilgrim. 1949). A brief, but serious, recent study of the
problems involved.
The Bible Today by Charles Harold Dodd (Cambridge University
Press. 1947)- How God reveals Himself in history.
The Relevance of the Bible by Harold Henry Rowley (New York:
Macmillan. 1944). A sane, persuasive discussion of the present value
of the Bible.
The Modern Use of the Bible by Harry Emerson Fosdick (New York:
Macmillan. [1924] 1947)- The most popular book of its kind. The
standpoint is that of Protestant liberalism.
The Authority of the Scriptures by John William Charles Wand
(London: Mowbray. 1949). A popular treatment by the Bishop of
London.
BOOKS WHICH SUGGEST HOW TO READ THE BIBLE
A Guide Book to the Bible by Alice Parmalee (New York: Harpers.
1948). A very useful book for the ordinary reader.
How to Read the Bible by Edgar Johnson Goodspeed (Philadelphia:
Winston. 1946). A practical and reliable course of study outlined by
a great scholar.
An Introduction to the Bible by Stanley Cook (Pelican Books). Con-
tains a remarkable amount of information about Bible background
and the contents of the individual books.
The Bible and the Common Reader by Mary Ellen Chase (New
York: Macmillan. 1944). Deals with the Bible as great literature.
A Guide for Bible Readers by Harris Franklin Rail (Nashville:
Abingdon-Cokesbury). A series of eight paper-bound volumes con-
taining a complete course of reading in the Old and New Testa-
ments with explanatory comments.
GENERAL BOOKS ON THE RELIGIOUS IDEAS
OF THE BIBLE
An Outline of Biblical Theology by Millar Burrow (Philadelphia:
Westminster. 1946). Encyclopedic in scope but not difficult reading.
A Guide to the Understanding of the Bible by Harry Emerson Fos-
dick (New York: Harpers. 1938). Traces through the Bible the at-
tempts to deal with life's basic issues. Chapters on the value of the
individual, the meaning of suffering, the conception of God, etc.
A Theological Word Book of the Bible 9 edited by Alan Richardson
(New York: Macmillan. 1951).
192
MANUSCRIPTS AND VERSIONS OF THE BIBLE
Our Bible and the Ancient Manuscripts by Sir Frederic George
Kenyon (New York: Harpers. 1940).
How Our Bible Came to Us by H. G. G. Herklots (New York: Ox-
ford. 1953).
GENERAL TOOLS FOR BIBLE STUDY
ANYONE who desires to penetrate beyond the surface in Bible study
will need, in addition to a copy of the Bible with Apocrypha, a
concordance, an atlas, and a one-volume Bible commentary. A dic-
tionary of the Bible is also helpful.
VERSIONS OF THE BIBLE
The King James or Authorized Version. Innumerable editions. The
great classic English version. Because its Elizabethan style is in many
places obscure to the modern reader and because recent scholarship
has made it possible to translate many passages more accurately, it
should be supplemented by the use of one of the revised versions
and, if possible, by a modern translation.
The (English) Revised Version. English University Presses.
The American Standard Version (New York: Nelson). Closest of all
versions to the original Greek and Hebrew.
The Revised Standard Version (New York: Nelson). More flowing
and idiomatic in style than the American Standard Version. It may
well become standard in fact as well as in name for American non-
Roman Christianity.
TRANSLATIONS OF THE BIBLE INTO MODERN SPEECH
A New Translation of the Bible by James Moffatt (New York:
Harpers. [19**] 1935).
The Complete Bible, An American Translation by John Merlin
Powis Smith and Edgar Johnson Goodspeed (Includes the Apoc-
rypha) (Chicago: University of Chicago. 1939). The Short Bible is
an abridged version of this translation, published in The Modern
Library, 1933.
The Holy Bible by Ronald Knox (New York: Sheed and Ward. 3 vol.
1938). An authorized translation for Roman Catholics, written in a
delightful English style. The arrangement of the Old Testament
books is that of the Roman Catholic Church and the footnotes must
be used with caution.
193
THE GEOGRAPHY OF PALESTINE
The Westminster Historical Atlas to the Bible by G. E. Wright and
F. V. Filson (Philadelphia: Westminster). An indispensable book
with beautiful maps, as well as a large store of recent and reliable
information about the background of the Bible.
The Historical Geography of the Holy Land by George Adams Smith
(London: Hodder and Stoughton. [1894] 1936). The great classic on
die subject. Eminently readable and on the whole still reliable.
The River Jordan by Nelson Glueck (Philadelphia: Westminster.
1946). A delightful survey of the geography of the Jordan valley.
Attractively illustrated.
CONCORDANCES
A Complete Concordance to the Holy Scriptures by Alexander
Cruden (New York: Revell). The standard work for the reader con-
cerned only with the English text,
Analytical Concordance to the Bible by Robert Young (New York:
Funk and Wagnalls. 1947). Either this or the following volume is
necessary for the reader who knows Greek or Hebrew.
The Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible by James Strong (Nash-
ville: Abingdon-Cokesbury).
Complete Concordance of the American Standard Version by Mar-
shall Custiss Hazard (New York: Nelson. 1922).
ONE-VOLUME BIBLE COMMENTARIES
A Concise Bible Commentary by W. K. L. Clarke (New York:
Macmillan. 1953). Excellent for lay people; includes the Apocrypha.
A New Commentary on Holy Scripture by Charles Gore (New York:
Macmillan. 1929). Written from a distinctly Anglican point of view;
has the advantage of including a brief commentary on the Apocrypha.
The Abingdon Bible Commentary by Frederick Carl Eiselen (Nash-
ville: Abingdon-Cokesbury. 1933). Somewhat more abreast of current
scholarship than Gore.
The Study Bible (Philadelphia: Westminster). The text of the King
James Version with introductions to the books and copious explana-
tory notes. A very useful volume.
DICTIONARIES OF THE BIBLE
The Westminster Dictionary of the Bible edited by Henry Snyder
Gehman (Philadelphia: Westminster. 1944). Conservative and re-
liable. Not as detailed as
194
Dictionary of the Bible edited by James Hastings. One-volume and
five-volume editions (New York: Scribners). The one-volume edi-
tion is a different work, not a mere condensation of the five-volume
edition. Both are standard works of reference.
Harper's Bible Dictionary edited by Madeline S. and J. Lane Miller
(New York: Harpers. 1952). The most up-to-date; and best for most
purposes.
ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND CULTURAL BACKGROUND
An Encyclopedia of Bible Life by Madeline (Sweeny) and John
Lane Miller (New York: Harpers. 1944). Full of fascinating infor-
mation readily available nowhere else.
Light from the Ancient Past by Jack Finegan (Princeton: University
Press. 1947). A large and beautifully printed sketch of the principal
archaeological discoveries as they throw light on the Old and New
Testaments and on the history of the early Church. Profusely il-
lustrated.
Archeology and the Bible by George Aaron Barton (Philadelphia:
American Sunday School Union. 1933). A standard reference work.
Chiefly valuable as containing verbatim the principal ancient texts
which bear on the Bible story.
What Mean These Stones by Millar Burrows (New Haven: Ameri-
can Schools of Oriental Research). A clear and scholarly book which
describes the contributions made by recent archaeology to various
areas of Biblical study.
Archeology and the Religion of Israel by William Foxwell Albright
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 1942). An important
statement by the greatest authority on the subject of the revolution-
ary importance of archaeology for evaluating the nature of Israel's
religion.
The Archeology of Palestine by William Foxwell Albright (Pelican
Books. 1949). Brief, interesting, authoritative, and inexpensive.
The Old Testament Against Its Environment by George Ernest
Wright (London: SCM Press. 1950). Especially valuable as empha-
sizing the distinctive character of Hebrew thought and culture.
Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament edited
by James B. Pritchard (Princeton University Press. 1950). Very ex-
pensive, but monumental in scope and indispensable to die scholar.
Now supplemented by the same editor's The Ancient Near East in
Pictures (Princeton. 1954).
195
BOOKS DEALING WITH THE OLD TESTAMENT
THE HISTORY OF ISRAEL
THERE are two large works which deal with the subject in a detailed
and rather technical way: Oesterley and Robinson's A History of
Israel (New York: Oxford. Two volumes) and A. Lods f two volumes
Israel from Its Beginning to the Middle of the Eighth Century and
The Prophets and the Rise of Judaism (New York: Knopf),
There are many briefer histories of which these are only a selec-
tion:
The History and Religion of Israel by William Landsell Wardle.
Clarendon Bible, vol. I (New York: Oxford. 1936). Probably the
best single volume for the intelligent Sunday school teacher or lay
inquirer.
Essentials of Bible History by Elmer Wallace King Mould (New
York: Nelson. 1939). Covers both the Old and New Testament
periods.
Old Testament History by Ismar John Peritz (Nashville: Abingdon-
Cokesbury. 1915).
Old Testament History by Henry Preserved Smith (New York:
Scribners. 1903).
History of the Hebrew People and History of the Jewish People by
Charles Foster Kent (New York: Scribners). A whole generation of
Protestant Christians was raised on these standard and instructive
works.
Ancient Israel by Harry M. Orlinsky (Cornell University Press.
1954). A brief and interesting account by a liberal Jewish scholar.
INTRODUCTION TO THE LITERATURE OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
Introduction to the Old Testament by Robert Henry Pfeiffer (New
York: Harpers. 1941). This is an extremely technical work which
would not be of interest to the ordinary layman and is probably too
detailed to be especially useful to the average clergyman. It is defi-
nitely a work for specialists and, in this field, has largely taken the
place once held by S. R. Driver's Introduction to the Literature of
the Old Testament.
The following are less technical and better suited to the needs of
the average priest and lay person:
The Old Testament, Its Making and Meaning by Henry Wheeler
Robinson (Nashville: Abingdon-Cokesbury). The best book for a
196
rapid survey of the contents of the Old Testament. It might well
be read in conjunction with L. B. Longacre's The Old Testament,
Its Form and Purpose (same publishers) which describes how the
Old Testament was written and how it came to have its present form.
Introduction to the Books of the Old Testament by William Oscar
Emil Oesterley and T. H. Robinson (New York: Maonillan. 1934).
Introduction to the Old Testament by John Edgar MacFadyen
(London: Hodder and Stoughton. [1932] 1947).
The Story of the Old Testament by Edgar Johnson Goodspeed
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1934). Brief and easy to read.
The Literature of the Old Testament by George Foot Moore (New
York: Holt. Home University Library. [1913] 1948).
The Growth of the Old Testament by H. H. Rowley (New York:
Longmans, Green, 1950).
Literature of the Old Testament in Its Historical Development by
Julius August Bewer (New York: Columbia University. 1992). This
is a different kind of book from those mentioned immediately above
since it discusses the literature in a coherent narrative style in the
order in which the various parts of the Old Testament were written.
It is widely used as a college textbook.
COLLECTIONS OF ESSAYS ON VARIOUS OLD TESTAMENT SUBJECTS
The Old Testament and Modern Study, edited by H. H. Rowley
(Oxford University Press. 1951). An excellent collection of essays
summarizing the conclusions of recent scholarship on such subjects
as the History and Religion of Israel, Old Testament Theology,
Archaeology, Language, etc
Record and Revelation edited by Henry Wheeler Robinson (New
York: Oxford. 1938).
The People and the Book edited by Arthur Samuel Peake (New
York: Oxford. 1926).
Two older, but still valuable collections of essays similar to the
above.
THE RELIGION OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
THE approach to this subject may be made from two directions: that
of the chronological growth of Israel's religion and that of a general
survey of the great religious ideas of the Old Testament. The latter
approach is generally called Old Testament Theology. Both ap-
proaches are necessary for a real understanding of the subject.
197
The Theology of the Old Testament by Otto Justice Baab (Nash*
ville: Abingdon-Cokesbury. 1949). The only thoroughly up-to-data
treatise on the subject.
Outline of Old Testament Theology by Charles Fox Burney (New
York: Gorham). Oxford Church Text Book Series. An excellent
brief manual.
The Religious Ideas of the Old Testament by Henry Wheeler Robin-
son (New York: Scribners. 1913).
The Religious Teaching of the Old Testament by Albert Cornelius
Knudson (Nashville: Abingdon-Cokesbury. 1918).
The Distinctive Ideas of the Old Testament by Norman Henry
Snaith (Philadelphia: Westminster. 1944). Solid reading. Chiefly for
the clergy.
Israel, Its Life and Culture by Johannes Pedir Eiler Pedersen (New
York: Oxford. 1946). An exhaustive study in four volumes of the
psychology and world view of the Hebrews.
These books are all histories of Israel's Religion:
Hebrew Religion by William Oscar Emil Oesterley and Robinson
(New York: Macmillan, 1937). A standard work, but tends rather to
over-emphasize the primitive features in Hebrew religion at the ex-
pense of its distinctive character.
The Religious Pilgrimage of Israel by I. G. Matthews (New York:
Harpers. 1947). The most recent and one of the most elaborate, but
written from a thoroughly humanistic point of view.
Old Testament Religion by Elmer Archibald Leslie (Nashville:
Abingdon-Cokesbury. 1936). Interesting for its use of recent dis-
coveries about the religion of the Canaanites.
The Religion of the People of Israel by Rudolf Kittel (New York:
Macmillan. 1925). Brief, conservative, easily read.
Revelation and Response in the Old Testament by Cuthbert Aikman
Simpson (New York: Columbia. 1947). The development of Hebrew
religious thought to the Exile. Makes much use of Toynbee's phi-
losophy of history.
The Religion of Israel by George Aaron Barton (Philadelphia: Uni-
versity of Pennsylvania. 1928).
The Religion of Israel by Henry Preserved Smith (New York:
Scribners. 1914).
The Religion of Israel by John Punnett Peters (Boston: Ginn).
All three of the above are now somewhat antiquated. In this con-
nection also, mention should be made of Wardle's The History and
198
Religion of Israel which is listed above under histories of Israel. The
latter half of this useful little book gives a brief survey of the
religion.
PERSONALITIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
Great Men and Movements in Israel by Rudolf Kittel (New York:
Macmillan. 1929). An interesting and readable account of the great
characters who move across the pages of the Old Testament.
Personalities of the Old Testament by Fleming James (New York:
Scribners. 1939). A large, but eminently readable account of the
Old Testament in terms of its great figures. One of the best books
to read for a general introduction to the Hebrew Scriptures.
THE RELIGIOUS VALUE OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
The Rediscovery of the Old Testament by Harold Henry Rowley
(Philadelphia: Westminster. 1946). A recent and attractive account
of the significance of the Old Testament for the contemporary world,
which also contains a good deal of information about archaeology
and other subjects.
The Authority of the Old Testament by Arthur Gabriel Hebert
(New York: Morehouse-Gorham. 1947). Almost required reading for
the clergy and educated lay people.
The Throne of David by Arthur Gabriel Hebert (New York: More-
house-Gorham. 1942). A Christological approach to the Old Testa-
ment A good example of contemporary theological study of the
Bible, but can be recommended only with reserve because of the
author's sympathy toward allegorical exegesis.
The People and the Presence by William John Telia Phythian-Adams
(New York: Oxford. 1942). This and numerous other works by the
same author are interesting and contain many stimulating insights,
but should be read with considerable caution, as the majority of Old
Testament scholars would regard many of the author's conclusions
as fanciful in the extreme.
The Challenge of Israel's Faith by George Ernest Wright (Chicago:
University Press. 1944). A stimulating account of the prophetic strain
in the religion of Israel, somewhat tinged with neo-orthodox the-
ology.
BOOKS ON THE PROPHETS
The Goodly Fellowship of the Prophets by John Paterson (New
York: Scribners. 1948). A very readable recent account covering all
the prophetic books.
199
The Prophets and Their Times by John Merlin Powis Smith re-
vised by W. A. Irwin (Chicago: University Press. 1941). Good except
for the chapter on Ezekiel, which embodies Irwin's own peculiar
views.
The Prophets Tell Their Own Story by Elmer Archibald Leslie
(Nashville: Abingdon-Cokesbury. 1939).
Prophecy and the Prophets in Ancient Israel by Theodore Henry
Robinson (New York: Scribners).
Beacon Lights of Prophecy by Albert Cornelius Knudson (Nash-
ville: Abingdon-Cokesbury. 1914).
The Prophetic Movement in Israel by Albert Cornelius Knudson
(Nashville: Abingdon-Cokesbury. 1921). A brief, popular account in-
tended primarily for lay groups.
The Relevance of the Prophets by Robert Belgarnie Young Scott
(New York: Macmillan. 1944). This and the following book give a
cross-section of the prophetic world of thought, rather than a history
of the prophetic movement.
Prophetic Religion by James Philip Hyatt (Nashville: Abingdon-
Cokesbury. 1947).
THE POETIC AND WISDOM LITERATURE
The Poetry of the Old Testament by Theodore Henry Robinson
(London: Duckworth. 1948). The best comprehensive treatment of
the poetical books for the average reader.
Israel's Wisdom Literature, Its Bearing on Theology and the History
of Religion by Oliver Shaw Rankin (New York: Scribners. 1936).
The Wisdom Literature of the Old Testament by William Theo-
philus Bavison (London: Kelly).
The Hebrew Literature of Wisdom in the Light of Today by John
Franklin Genung (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin. 1906).
SPECIAL TOPICS IN OLD TESTAMENT RELIGION
The Ethics of the Old Testament by H. G. Mitchell (Chicago: Uni-
versity Press).
The Moral Life of the Hebrews by John Merlin Powis Smith
(Chicago: University Press. 1923).
The Origin and History of Hebrew Law by John Merlin Powis Smith
(Chicago: University Press. 1931).
Sacrifices in Ancient Israel by William Oscar Emil Oesterley (New
York: Macmillan. 1937).
A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life by Robert Henry
Charles (New York: Macmillan).
20O
Immortality and the Unseen World by William Oscar Emil Oester-
ley (New York: Macmillan. 1921).
Israel's Hope of Immortality by Charles Fox Burney (New York:
Oxford).
The Problem of Suffering in the Old Testament by Arthur Samuel
Peake (London: Bryant).
SEPARATE COMMENTARIES ON THE BOOKS OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
THERE are several series of commentaries which cover all or most of
the Old Testament books. The various volumes of the International
Critical Commentary (New York: Scribners) are too technical for
all except specialists in Biblical study, though they may be useful for
detailed reference on some particularly knotty problem of interpre-
tation. The Westminster Commentaries (London: Methuen) are less
technical and therefore more useful to the common reader. The
series is far from complete. The ordinary lay person will probably
find most help in the various small volumes of the New Century
Bible (New York: Oxford) and the Cambridge Bible for Schools and
Colleges (Cambridge: University Press). These two series are nearly
complete. In the case of the Cambridge Bible, though, the reader
must be careful to get the latest edition, as, in the case of many of
the Old Testament books, the older editions are now antiquated.
The series of small commentaries for lay people entitled The Bible
for Home and School (New York: Macmillan) is rather old, but still
useful where available. The series called the Clarendon Bible (New
York: Oxford) is especially designed for the church school teacher
and excellent of its type. It is attractively published and interesting
to read. The chief defect is that it deals with only selected parts
of the Old Testament, It does, however, cover most that is of
primary significance. The separate volumes are: i. History and
Religion of Israel, 2. From Moses to Elisha, 3. Decline and Fall
of the Hebrew Kingdoms, 4. Israel After the Exile, 5. Judaism
in the Greek Period, 6. In the Beginning (a brief commentary on
Genesis). The several volumes of C. F. Kent's The Historical Bible
(New York: Scribners), although now old and dated in some par-
ticulars, still contain much that is valuable. The same holds true of
the author's more elaborate The Students Old Testament. The
Interpreters' Bible (Nashville: Abingdon-Cokesbury) is encyclopedic
in scope and is the most authoritative source of scholarly opinion
now available.
201
The following list is restricted to the more important books of
the Old Testament and the commentaries mentioned are in each
case the best for general purposes of reference.
The Book of Genesis by Samuel Rolles Driver. Westminster Com-
mentaries (New York: Gorham).
In the Beginning by Samuel Henry Hooke. Vol. VI. The Clarendon
Bible (New York: Oxford).
The Book of Exodus by Samuel Rolles Driver. The Cambridge Bible
for Schools and Colleges (New York: Macmillan).
Deuteronomy and Joshua by Henry Wheeler Robinson. The New
Century Bible.
The Book of Judges by George Albert Cooke. Cambridge Bible for
Schools and Colleges (New York: Macmillan).
The Book of Judges by C. F. Burney (New York: Macmillan). A
much more technical work, intended for the specialist.
I and II Samuel by R. S. Kennedy. The New Century Bible.
T and II Kings by John Skinner. The New Century Bible.
The Books of Ezra and Nehemiah by Herbert Edward Ryle. Cam-
bridge Bible for Schools and Colleges (New York: Macmillan).
Job by Arthur Samuel Peake. New Century Bible.
The Book of Job by Andrew Bruce Davidson. Cambridge Bible for
Schools and Colleges (New York: Macmillan. 1918).
The Cross of Job by Henry Wheeler Robinson. Religion and Life
Book (London: S. C, M. 1938).
Job and His Friends by Theodore H. Robinson (London's S.C.M.
Press. 1954).
The Psalms by Elmer Archibald Leslie (Nashville: Abingdon-Cokes-
bury. 1949). The latest book on the subject. Valuable because of its
scope, but the reader should be aware that it is in part based upon
theories as to the function of some of the psalms which are by no
means universally accepted.
Thirty Psalmists by Fleming James (New York: Putnam. 1938). A
readable account of thirty of the more important psalms.
The Psalms by William Oscar Emil Oesterley (New York: Macmil-
lan. 1938). A complete modern commentary on the psalms.
The Praises of Israel by John Paterson (New York: Scribners. 1950).
The Psalms and Their Meaning for Today by Samuel Terrien (New
York: Bobbs-Memll. 1952).
2O2
Proverbs by William Oscar Emfl Oesterley. Westminster Commen-
taries.
Isaiah by John Skinner. Two volumes. The Cambridge Bible for
Schools and Colleges (New York: Macmillan).
The Book of Isaiah by Sir George Adam Smith. Two volumes. The
Expositors Bible. A standard book of an older generation. Somewhat
verbose, but still very useful (New York: Harpers, new rev. ed. 1928).
Isaiah, His Life and Times by Samuel Rolles Driver (New York:
Revell). A good brief survey of the whole of the writings included
under Isaiah's name.
Event in Eternity by Paul Ehrman Scherer (New York: Harpers.
1945). Not a commentary, but a suggestive homiletic treatment of
Second Isaiah.
The Cross of the Servant: A Study in Deutero-Isaiah by Henry
Wheeler Robinson (London: S. C. M.).
Jeremiah by Leonard Elliot Binns. Westminster Commentaries (New
York: Gorham. 1919).
Jeremiah, Chronologically Arranged, Translated, and Interpreted by
Elmer A. Leslie (Nashville: Abingdon. 1954). Excellent for dergy
and lay people.
Prophecy and Religion by John Skinner (New York: Macmillan.
1936). Not a commentary, but a series of essays. The best book on
Jeremiah, but not for the casual reader.
The Cross of Jeremiah by Henry Wheeler Robinson (London:
S. C. M.).
Studies in the Book of Lamentations by Norman K. Gottwald (Chi-
cago: Allenson. 1954).
The Book of Ezekiel by John Skinner. The Expositors Bible. A
good treatment of the book from a conservative, critical point of
view. The study of the book of Ezekiel is in a more confused state
in present-day scholarship than that of any other prophetic book.
The reader who is interested in getting some idea of the trend of
more recent criticism will find a good example of it in the following
volume.
Ezekiel by Isaac George Matthews (Philadelphia: American Baptist
Publication Society. 1939). A good commentary though in many re-
spects highly individual in its point of view.
Daniel by R. H. Charles. The New Century Bible.
The Book of the Twelve Prophets by George Adams Smith. The
Expositors Bible (New York: Harpers. [1898] 1929). A still unsur-
passed classic from an older generation.
203
The Modern Message of the Minor Prophets by Raymond Calkins
(New York: Harpers. 1947). The most recent treatment of the sub-
ject. For the general reader.
The Books of Joel and Amos by Samuel Rolles Driver. Cambridge
Bible for Schools and Colleges (New York: Macmillan).
The Minor Prophets by Samuel Rolles Driver. Nahum, Habakkuk,
Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi. The New Century
Bible.
Meet Amos and Hosea by Rolland Emerson Wolfe (New York:
Harpers. 1945). An interesting, popular treatment. Includes some
critical opinions of uncertain value.
The Cross of Hosea by Henry Wheeler Robinson (Philadelphia:
Westminster Press). A brief and devout study of the prophet's per-
sonal tragedy.
FICTION DEALING WITH OLD TESTAMENT CHARACTERS
Joseph by Thomas Mann (New York: Knopf. 1944). A massive and
rewarding work for those who have the patience to read it. Not easy.
David the King by Gladys Schmitt (New York: Dial. 1946). Easy
reading, very modern, not devout!
The Giant Killer by Elmer Holmes Davis (New York: The Readers'
Club. 1943). Breezy and readable.
The Herdsman by Dorothy Clark Wilson (Philadelphia: Westmin-
ster. 1946). The career of Amos. Highly recommended.
Hearken Unto the Voice by Franz V. Werfel (New York: Viking.
1938). The life of Jeremiah. Easily the best novel on an Old Testa-
ment subject*
THE PERIOD BETWEEN THE TESTAMENTS
RELIGIOUS AND POLITICAL HISTORY
Jerusalem Under the High Priests by Edwyn Robert Bevan (New
York: Longmans Green).
Environment, Social, Political, Intellectual, and Religious, of Israel
from the Maccabees to our Lord by Edwyn Robert Bevan in Gore's
A New Commentary on Holy Scripture.
Religious Development Between the Old and New Testaments by
Robert Henry Charles (Home University Library. 1914).
The Jews and Judaism During the Greek Period by William Oscar
Emil Oesterley (New York: Macmillan. 1941).
204
Judaism in the Greek Period by George Herbert Box (New York:
Oxford. 1932). The Clarendon Bible, Vol. 5.
See also below under Religious and Cultural Background of the
New Testament.
INTRODUCTION TO THE APOCRYPHAL BOOKS
The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament edited by
Robert Henry Charles (New York: Oxford. 1913). The standard
work for scholars. Two large volumes containing introduction, text,
and commentary for all the books of the Old Testament Apocrypha
and also for those books, never part of any Canon of Scripture,
which are called Pseudepigrapha.
A Source Book of Interbiblical History by W. H. Davis and E. A.
McDowell (Nashville: Boardman Press). Gives the actual text of
the most important documentary material for the period 400 B.C.
to 79 A.D.
The Story of the Apocrypha by Edgar Johnson Goodspeed (Chicago:
University Press. 1939). Brief and readable.
An Introduction to the Books of the Apocrypha by William Oscar
Emil Oesterley (New York: Macmillan. 1935).
The Apocrypha Bridge of the Testaments by Robert C. Dentan
(New York: Seabury. 1954).
The History of New Testament Times, with an Introduction to the
Apocrypha by Robert Henry Pfeiffer (New York: Harpers). The
latest treatment of the subject. The history is excellent, the Intro-
duction somewhat technical.
THERE is no substitute for some firsthand acquaintance with actual
contemporary documents. The most important religious books relat-
ing to the times are the so-called pseudepigrapha, especially I Enoch,
IV Esdras, and II Baruch, which are included in Charles' mammoth
Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament (New York:
Oxford). These picture the strange world of "apocalyptic" which
was so important in New Testament times. The second great strain
of thought in the religious world of the Jews was that of rabbinical
or normative Judaism. Some impression of this world, in all its vast-
ness and complexity, can be gained by dipping into The Mishnah,
translated by H. Danby (New York: Oxford), and A Rabbinic
Anthology, a volume of selections from the haggadic or edifying lit-
erature of the Jews, edited by C. F. Montefiore and H. Loewe (Lon-
205
don: Macmillan). Another variety of Jewish thought, although no
one knows how widespread it really was, is the Hellenistic Judaism
found in the writings of Philo Judaeus (Cambridge: Harvard. The
Loeb Classical Library, 10 vols.), as well as in the apocryphal book
of Wisdom and the pseudepigraphic IV Maccabees. The principal
sources for the history of the times are the voluminous writings of
Josephus, particularly The Antiquities of the Jews and The Jewish
War. The best edition is that of the Loeb Classical Library (trans,
by Thackeray and Marcus) in 9 vols. The Jewish War can also be
obtained in a cheap edition in Everyman's Library (New York:
Button).
The material relating to the Greek and Roman background of
the Gospels is too vast even to be summarized here. The average
reader will probably have to depend largely on secondary sources
of information.
INDIVIDUAL BOOKS OF THE APOCRYPHA
Jewish Apocryphal Literature, edited by Solomon Zeitlin (New
York: Harpers). A series of exhaustive commentaries by Jewish
scholars, now in process of publication.
II (IV) Esdras by William Oscar Emil Oesterley. Westminster Com-
mentaries.
The Wisdom of Solomon by John Allen Fitzgerald Gregg. Cambridge
Bible for Schools and Colleges (New York: Macmillan).
Ecclesiasticus by William Oscar Emil Oesterley. Cambridge Bible for
Schools and Colleges (New York: Macmillan).
The First Book of Maccabees by William Fairweather and J. S.
Black. Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges (New York: Mac-
xnillan).
BOOKS ON THE NEW TESTAMENT
THE RELIGIOUS AND CULTURAL BACKGROUND OF THE NEW TESTAMENT
A History of the Jewish People in the Time of Jesus Christ by Emil
Schuerer (New York: Scribners). The classic work on the subject of
the Jewish background. Too detailed for the ordinary reader and
in its English edition considerably out of date.
Judaism in the First Centuries of the Christian Era by George Foot
Moore (Cambridge: Harvard. 1927). Another classic; also very de-
tailed. Interesting reading for those who have the time.
The New Testament against its Environment by Floyd V. Filson
(London: S.C.M. Press. 1950) stresses the distinctiveness of Chris-
tianity.
206
THOUGHT AND PRACTICE OF JUDAISM
Jew and Greek, Tutors to Christ by Alexander Converse Purdy and
George Hogarth C. MacGregor (New York: Scribners. 1936). The
best book for the general reader on both the Jewish and pagan
background of the Gospels.
The Background of the Gospels by William Fairweather (Edin-
burgh: Clark).
The Pharisees by Robert Travers Herford (New York: Macmillan.
19*4).
Judaism in the New Testament Period by Robert Travers Herford
(London: Lindsey).
The Religion and Worship of the Synagogue by William Oscar Emil
Oesterley and G. H. Box (England: Pitman, Bath).
The Relevance of Apocalyptic by Harold Henry Rowley (London:
Lutterworth Press. 1944).
THE HELLENISTIC BACKGROUND OF CHRISTIANITY
The World of the New Testament by Terrot Reaveley Glover, New
York: Macmillan. 1936).
The Pagan Background of Early Christianity by R. H. Halliday
(University of Liverpool Press).
Hellenistic Civilization by W. W. Tarn (London: Arnold).
The Religious Quests of the Greco-Roman World by Samuel Angus
(New York: Scribners. 1929).
POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC BACKGROUND OF JESUS* TEACHING
Toward the Understanding of Jesus by Vladimir Gregorievitch Simk-
hovitch (New York: Macmillan. [1927] 1937).
The Economic Background of the Gospels by Frederick Clifton
Grant (New York: Oxford. 1926).
THE HISTORY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT PERIOD
A History of New Testament Times in Palestine by S. Mathews
(New York: Macmillan. 1910). A good brief survey of the historical
background.
New Testament History by George Woosung Wade (New York:
Button. 1922). Not only a history, but an encyclopedia of informa-
tion about New Testament background. See also above Introduction
to the Apocryphal Books under R. H. Pfeiffer.
207
GEOGRAPHY
IN addition to the books previously listed under Geography of the
Bible (see page 194) special mention should be made of the delight-
ful travel books of H. V. Morton, In the Steps of the Master and
In the Steps of St. Paul (New York: Dodd, Mead).
GENERAL SURVEY OF NEW TESTAMENT LITERATURE
The Story of the New Testament by Edgar Johnson Goodspeed
(Chicago: University Press). Easy reading.
New Testament Life and Literature by Donald Wayne Riddle and
H. H. Hutson (Chicago: University Press. 1946). Written from a
purely secular and humanistic standpoint.
The Beginning of Christianity by Clarence Tucker Craig (Nash-
ville: Abingdon-Cokesbury). A general survey of the history of Chris-
tianity in the apostolic age in which all the literature is discussed in
its historical order. For the mature inquirer.
The First Age of Christianity by Ernest Findlay Scott (New York:
Maonillan. 1926). Similar in purpose to the above, but much briefer.
Good for a quick over-all view.
The Making of the New Testament by Benjamin Wisner Bacon
(Home University Library. 1912). Rather technical for the ordinary
reader.
INTRODUCTION TO THE LITERATURE OF THE NEW TESTAMENT
The Literature of the New Testament by Ernest Findlay Scott (New
York: Columbia. 1932). A standard and relatively conservative work.
An Introduction to the Literature of the New Testament by James
Moffatt (New York: Scribners, 1911). Distinctly for the scholar. An
old book but still useful.
An Introduction to the New Testament by Edgar Johnson Good-
speed (University of Chicago Press. 1937). Easy to use, but some-
what individualistic
An Introduction to the New Testament by Richard Heard (New
York: Harpers. 1950).
Introduction to the Study of the New Testament by A. H. McNeile.
Second Edition (Oxford University Press. 1953).
208
HARMONIES OF THE GOSPELS
ANY serious student o the Synoptic Gospels will wish to have the
material before him in such form that the different accounts can be
easily compared. A satisfactory harmony arranges the Gospels in
parallel columns.
A Harmony of the Synoptic Gospels by Ernest Dewitt Burton and
E. J. Goodspeed (New York: Scribners. 1917).
The Synoptic Gospels by James Matthew Thompson (New York:
Oxford).
A Syllabus and Synopsis of the First Three Gospels by Walter Ernest
Bundy (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill. 1932). Text of the American
Standard Version.
Gospel Parallels (New York: Nelson. 1949). A synopsis of the first
three Gospels using the text of the Revised Standard Version and
produced under the supervision of the revision committee. Includes
also non-canonical parallels.
THE RELIGIOUS IDEAS OF THE NEW TESTAMENT
The Theology of the New Testament by George Barker Stevens
(New York: Scribners. 1899). Old, but still useful. Primarily for the
minister and scholar.
Theology of the New Testament by Rudolph Bultmann (New York:
Scribners. 1954). A vast and comprehensive work, addressed to the
scholar.
An Introduction to New Testament Thought by Frederick Clifton
Grant (Nashville: Abingdon. 1950). Highly recommended.
The Varieties of New Testament Religion by Ernest Findlay Scott
(New York: Scribners. 1943). A useful book although emphasizing
somewhat onesidedly the variety, as opposed to the unity, of New
Testament thought.
THE LIFE OF JESUS
THERE is no satisfactory biography of Jesus and there never will be.
The Gospels are not biographies in the conventional sense and do
not provide the materials from which a biography can readily be
constructed. Those who are interested in seeing how difficult it has
proved to write the life of Jesus are recommended to dip into
Albert Schweitzer's now classic The Quest of the Historical Jesus
(New York: Macmillan) or C. C. McCown's The Search for the Real
Jesus (New York: Scribners). Ultimately every reader is thrown back
upon the Gospels themselves and each must, within the broad
framework of the Church's faith, write his own life of Christ. Never-
theless, stimulating insights will be found in all the following books,
if one dearly understands that each of them represents only a partial
and onesided view of a very complex subject.
The Life of Jesus by Maurice Goguel (New York: Macmillan. 1944).
A scholarly, objective weighing of the evidence. For the specialist.
Jesus of Nazareth by Charles Gore (Home University Library. 1929).
An honest attempt, by a noted scholar and Christian believer, to deal
with the subject as objectively as possible.
The Real Jesus by Charles Fiske and B. S. Easton (New York:
Harpers. 1929). Possibly the best single volume for the lay inquirer.
A People's Life of Christ by John Paterson Smyth (New York:
RevelL 1934). A retelling of the Gospel story with no attempt to
introduce critical points of view.
The Short Story of Jesus by Walter Lowrie (New York: Scribners.
1943). An interesting and original book, thoroughly critical in its
approach to the subject, yet loyal to tradition and chiefly concerned
with positive religious meanings.
Jesus of Nazareth by Joseph Klausner (New York: Macmillan. 1925).
A life of Jesus by an eminent Jewish scholar, with all the limitations
which that naturally imposes, but with a fascinating amount of use-
ful background information.
The Mission and Achievement of Jesus by Reginald H. Fuller
(Chicago: Allenson. 1954). An important, though technical, re-study
of Jesus' own conception of His life and work.
THE TEACHING OF JESUS
THIS subject is, to some extent, also covered in the above mentioned
lives of Jesus.
The Sayings of Jesus by Thomas Walter Manson (in Major, Manson
and Wright, The Mission and Message of Jesus) (New York: Button.
The Teaching of Jesus by Thomas Walter Manson (Cambridge Uni-
versity Press. 1935). Much more technical than the above.
The Teachings of Jesus by Bennett Harvie Branscomb (Nashville:
Abingdon-Cokesbury. 1931).
*10
The Religion of Jesus by Walter Ernest Bundy (Indianapolis: Dobbs-
Menill. 1928).
The Jesus of the Parables by Charles F. W. Smith (Philadelphia:
Westminster Press. 1948). Highly recommended.
The Parables of the Synoptic Gospels by Bertram Tom Dean Smith
(Cambridge University Press. 1938).
The Sermon on the Mount by Martin Dibelius (New York: Scrib-
ners. 1940). A significant modern work. Somewhat individual in
approach.
The Ethical Teaching of Jesus by Ernest Findlay Scott (New York:
Macmillan. 1925). A readable brief discussion.
The Religion of Maturity by John Wick Bowman (Nashville:
Abingdon-Cokesbury. 1948). An attempt to show how the religion
which Jesus taught was the logical culmination of Old Testament
thought.
Jesus the Messiah by William Manson (Philadelphia: Westminster
Press. 1943). An examination of the self -consciousness of Jesus, His
sense of messiahship.
Christ in the Gospels by Alfred Edward John Rawlinson (New
York: Oxford. 1944).
THE LIFE AND THOUGHT OF ST. PAUL
Paul by Arthur Darby Nock (Home University Library. 1938). The
best brief book on Paul; inexpensive.
St. Paul by Wilfred Lawrence Knox (New York: Appleton. 1932). A
very brief, yet scholarly sketch of Paul's life and religious develop-
ment.
Paul by Edgar Johnson Goodspeed (Philadelphia: Winston. 1947).
Popular and readable.
St. Paul by Gustav Adolf Deissmann (New York: Doran. 1927). Im-
portant and easy to read. A good corrective for the idea that Paul
was primarily a systematic theologian.
Paul for Everyone by Chester Warren Quimby (New York: Macmil-
lan. 1944). A popular sketch of both Paul's life and thought.
A Man in Christ by James Stuart Stewart (New York: Harpers.
1933). Probably the most satisfactory comprehensive account of the
mind of Paul.
Christianity According to St. Paul by Charles Archibald Anderson-
Scott (New York: Macmillan. 1927)* Good, but less original than the
above.
211
Paul of Tarsus by Terrot Reaveley Glover (New York: Harpers).
A valuable and scholarly collection of essays.
THE APOSTOLIC CHURCH
The Apostolic Age by Arthur Cushman McGiffert (New York: Scrib-
ners. o.p.). Old but still useful.
Christian Beginnings by Morton Scott Enslin (New York: Harpers.
1938). Solid, but readable; contains also a good history of New Testa-
ment times.
The Nature of the Early Church by Ernest Findlay Scott (New
York: Soibners. 1948).
The Beginnings of the Christian Church by Hans Lietzmann (New
York: Scribners. 1934).
The Apostolic Preaching and Its Developments by Charles Harold
Dodd (London: Hodder and Stoughton. 1936). The faith which the
early Church proclaimed.
COMMENTARIES ON INDIVIDUAL BOORS OF THE NEW TESTAMENT
THE remarks made above (under The Old Testament) about the
various series of commentaries on the books of the Bible hold also
for those volumes which deal with the New Testament, except in
the case of the Clarendon Bible which, in the New Testament field,
is a series of commentaries on the separate books rather than a
treatment of selected highlights. There is, however, for the New
Testament a special series, The Moffatt New Testament Commen-
tary (New York: Harpers) which is easily the best of all. These
commentaries are thorough, yet non-technical, and all are of com-
paratively recent date. While there is naturally considerable varia-
tion in the quality of the individual volumes, yet all can be recom-
mended to the educated inquirer. For the person who knows Greek
and desires a more extensive commentary than the Moffatt series
affords, there is an excellent series published by Macmillan which
has been coming out over a period of many years and is not yet
complete.
The Mission and Message of Jesus by H. D. A. Major, T. W. Man-
son, and C. J. Wright (New York: Button). A conveniently arranged
one-volume commentary on all the Gospels. The different parts are
of uneven value, Manson's contribution being much the best.
The Gospel of Matthew by Theodore Henry Robinson. Moffatt New
Testament Commentaries (New York: Harpers. 1928).
212
Gospel According to St. Matthew by B. D. T. Smith. Cambridge
Bible (New York: Macmillan. 1934).
The Gospel According to St. Mark by Vincent Taylor (New York:
St. Martin's. 1952). For the scholar.
Saint Mark by Alfred Walter Frank Blunt. The Clarendon Bible
(New York: Oxford. 1929).
The Earliest Gospel by Frederick C. Grant (Nashville: Abingdon-
Cokesbury. 1943). A collection of essays dealing with special prob-
lems.
The Gospel of Luke by William Manson. Moffatt New Testament
Commentaries (New York:. Harpers. 1930).
St. Luke by Henry Balmforth. The Clarendon Bible (New York:
Oxford. 1930).
The Gospel of John by George Hogarth MacGregor. Moffatt New
Testament Commentaries (New York: Harpers. 1929).
The Fourth Gospel by Sir Edwyn Clement Hoskyns and Francis Noel
Davey (London: Faber and Faber. 1940). A profound and important
work. For the theologian.
Christianity According to St. John by Wilbert Francis Howard
(Philadelphia: Westminster Press. 1946). Essays on various aspects
of Johannine thought.
The Acts of the Apostles by Frederick John Foakes-Jackson. Moffatt
New Testament Commentaries (New York: Harpers. 1931).
The Acts by Alfred Walter Frank Blunt The Clarendon Bible (New
York: Oxford. 1934).
The Epistle of Paul to the Romans by Charles Harold Dodd. Moffatt
New Testament Commentaries (New York: Harpers. 1932).
Romans by Kenneth Escott Kirk. The Clarendon Bible (New York:
Oxford. 1937). The best volume in this series.
Paul's Epistle to the Romans by Ernest Findlay Scott (New York:
Scribners. 1947). Brief and popular. All three of the above may be
recommended highly. One should also mention here the old, but
important, commentary in the International Critical Commentary
series by W. Sanday and A. C. Headlam.
The First Epistle of Paul to the Corinthians by James Moffatt
Moffatt New Testament Commentaries (New York: Harpers. 1938).
First Corinthians by A. W. Robertson and A. Plummer. Interna-
tional Critical Commentary.
The Second Epistle of Paul to the Corinthians by Robert Harvey
Strachan. Moffatt New Testament Commentaries (New York: Harp-
ers. 1936).
The Epistle of Paul to the Galatians by George Simpson Duncan.
Moffatt New Testament Commentaries (New York: Harpers. 1934).
Thessalonians and Galatians by Walter Frederic Adeney. The New
Century Bible.
The Epistles of Paul to the Colossians, to Philemon, and to the
Ephesians by Ernest Findlay Scott. Moffatt New Testament Com-
mentaries (New York: Harpers. 1930).
The Epistle of Paul to the Philippians by John Hugh Michael. Mof-
fatt New Testament Commentaries (New York: Harpers. 1929).
Thessalonians and Galatians by W. F. Adeney. The New Century
Bible.
Thessalonians by J. E. Frame. International Critical Commentary.
The Pastoral Epistles by Ernest Findlay Scott. Moffatt New Testa-
ment Commentaries (New York: Harpers. 1937).
The Pastoral Epistles by Burton Scott Easton (New York: Scribners.
1947). Intended for the general reader.
The Epistle to the Hebrews by Theodore Henry Robinson. Moffatt
New Testament Commentaries (New York: Harpers. 1933).
The Epistle to the Hebrews by Ernest Findlay Scott (New York:
Scribners).
The General Epistles, James, Peter, and Judas by James Moffatt.
Moffatt New Testament Commentaries (New York: Harpers. 1928).
The First Epistle of Peter by Edward Gordon Selwyn (New York:
Morehouse-Gorham. 1941). The most recent addition to the Mac-
millan series. For the specialist.
The Johannine Epistles by C. H. Dodd. Moffatt New Testament
Commentaries (New York: Harpers. 1946).
The Book of Revelation by Ernest Findlay Scott (New York: Scrib-
ners. 1940).
The Apocryphal New Testament by Montague Rhodes James (New
York: Oxford. 1924).
214
Index
Aaron, 114
Abel, 33
Abib, 112
Abraham, 14, 35-37* 38, 40
Absalom, 53
Achan, 86
Acts, Book of, 119, 126, 150-158, 159
Adam, 32-33, 86
Adonijah, 54
Adullam, 50
Agape; see Love Feast
Agrippa II, Herod, 156^137
Ahab, 56-38, 61
Ahaz, 62-63, 80
Alexander the Great, 73
Allegorical Interpretation, 178 and
note
Ammonites, 47, 49
Amos, 59, 63-64, 87-89, 90
Anathoth, 83
Andrew, St., 137
Annunciation, 126
Antioch, Pisidian, 153; Syrian, 15**
Antiochus Epiphanes, 74, 87
Apocalypse, 86-87, 92, 180-181
Apocrypha, 20-21, 74, 97 note
Apocryphal gospels, 130 note
Apollos, 172
Apostles, 120, 137, 138, 142, 144*
147, 166
Aramaic, 124
Ark of the Covenant, 52, 113
Artemis, 156
Articles of Religion, 21
Asa, 61
Ascension, 149, 150, 151
Asia (Asia Minor), 153* 155* 1 5 6 >
Assyrian Empire, 60, 62, 63, 64, 65,
67, 81, 91
Athaliah, 61
Athens, 155
Atonement, m; day of, 43, 112, us
B
Baal, 57
Babel, tower of, 35
Babylon, 67, 68, 69, 70
215
Babylonian Empire, 67, 68, 69, 83,
85, 89, 91
Babylonian Exile; see Exile,
Babylonian
Balaam, 44
Baptism, 162-163
Barak, 46
Barnabas, St., 152, 154, 155
Bartholomew, St., 137
Baruch, 82
Bathsheba, 53, 54
Benedictus, 129
Berea, 155
Bethany, 143
Bethel, 38
Bethlehem, 50, 128
Bible, definition of, 5, 24; see also
Devotional use of; Inspiration;
Revelation; Unity; Word of God
B0dad, 94
Bishops, 165, 167
Caesarea Philippi, 140, 156
Caiaphas, 145
Cain, 33
Canaan, 35; see also Conquest
Canaanites, 35, 36, 37, 44, 45, 46,
5* 65, 88
Carmel, Mt., 57
Catholic Church, 150, 155
Chaldeans, 68
Christ, 115, note, 127, 139-140; see
also Jesus; Messiah
Chronicles, Books of, 45, 70, 93
Church, the body of Christ, 161,
163, 168, 175; the bride of Christ,
99, 162, 175; the new Israel, 8,
20, 119, 138, 141, 150, 152, 153,
162, 164, 166; life in, 159-169;
communal living, 167-169; mem-
bership, 162163; ministry, 166-
167; worship, 163-166; spread of,
150-158
Circumcision, 35, 112
Colossians, Epistle to, 157, 175
Communion, Holy; see Lord's
Supper
Conquest (of Canaan), 45-46
Corinth, 156, 166, 171
Corinthians, Epistles to, 147, 171-
174
Covenant, with Abraham, 35; with
Moses, 41; with Noah, 34; New,
84, 108, 136, 144, 161; Old Testa-
ment idea of, 105-108, 112
Creation, 30-33
Cyprus, 152
Cyrus, 69
D
Damascus, 152
Daniel, 74, 77, 86-^7, 93, 109, 116,
180
David, 14, 28, 47, 48, 50-53, 54, 56,
61, 67, 95, 115, 116, 128, 140, 143,
Deaconesses, 167
Deacons, 151, 167
Dead Sea, 131, 142
Deborah, 46
Delilah, 47
Derbe, 153, 155
Deutero-Isaiah; see Isaiah, Second
Deuteronomy, 45, 65 and note, 66,
7* 109
Devotional use of Bible, 23-24
Diaspora, 76, 153
Dies Irae, 91
Dispersion; see Diaspora
Doctrine, Biblical, 15, 16, 173
Doctrine of God; see God, doctrine
of
Doctrine of Man; see Man, doctrine
of
Domitian, 180
Ecclesiastes, 55, 93, 98-99
Ecclesiasticus, 21
E Document, 29 and note, 71
Edom, 89
Egypt, 19, 39, 40, 41, 105, 108, 125,
129
Egypt, flight into, 125
Egyptians, 42, 67
Ehud, 46
Election of Israel, 18
Elijah, 56-58, 108
Eliphaz, 94
Elisha, 57, 58-59
Emmaus, 147
Enoch, 108
Ephesians, Epistle to, 157, 175
Ephesus, 156, 171
Ephraim, 62
Epistles, 119, 120, 157, 159, 169-180
Esau, 38
Esther, 75, 113
Ethiopian Eunuch, 152
Eucharist, 172; see also Lord's
Supper,
Europe, 155, 175, 176
Evangelists, 128, 130 and note, 142
Eve, 32-33
Exile, Babylonian, 19, 68-69, 74 75
76, 81, 85, 90, 91, 107, 147
Exodus, 40-43* 45 11*
Ezekiel, 68, 85-86, 89, 104, 115
Ezra, 28, 45, 70-71, 72, 92
Fall, The, 31-33, 37
Faith, 80, 91, 108, 130, 135, 170, 178
Fatherhood of God, 16, 103, 136
Feasts of the Jews, 112-113
Felix, 156
Festus, 156, 157
Flood, The, 33-34
Future Life, Old Testament idea
of, 108-109
G
Gabriel, 128
Gaius, 180
Galatians, Epistle to, 114, 153, 155,
174-175
Galilee, 129, 132, 139, 141, 142, 143
Genesis, 30-^0, 123
Gethsemane, 144
Gideon, 46
Gnostic heresy, 175, 179
God, doctrine of, 5-6, 15-16, 18,
100-103, 16
Golgotha, 146
Goliath, 50
Gomorrah, 35, 36
Good News, 23, 126-127, 130, 156;
see also Gospel, The
Goshen, 40
Gospel, The, 14, 17-23, 76, 99, 109,
126-127, 151, 170, 174, 176
Gospel, Fourth; see John, Gospel of
Gospels, 119-149; how written, 120-
122
Greece, 155, 156, 168
Greek language, 20, 73, 76, 97 note,
115 note, 167, 168
Greeks, The, 73-74, 109, 151, 155
H
Habakkuk, 68, 91
Hagar, 36
Haggai, 70, 91, 92
Ham, 34
Hanukkah, 113
Haran, 35
Hasmoneans, 74-75
Hebrews, Epistle to the, 177-178
Hellenists, 151, 154
Heresy, 22, 175
Herod Agrippa II; see Agrippa II,
Herod
Herod Antipas, 139
Herod the Great, 75, 113, 125, 128,
129
Hezekiah, 63, 64, 80
Historical Books, 27-76; how writ-
ten, 28-30
History, God revealed in, 5, 7-8, 11,
Holy Communion; see Lord's
Supper
Holy of Holies, 113
Holy Week, 144
Horeb, 41, 57
Hosea, 16, 59, 63, 87, 88
Hymns, 95-97, 165
Iconium, 153
Idumeans, 75
217
Immortality; see Future T.ife
Incarnation, 12, 186
Innocents, Holy, 125
Inspiration, 10-12
Isaac, 36, 37, 40
Isaiah, 28, 62-64, 69, 80-81, 89, 90,
109, 114, 115, 140
Isaiah, Second, 69, 81-82, 101, 115,
"9
Ishmael, 36
Israel, 38; see also Jacob; Church as
the New Israel
Israel, Kingdom of, 55-60
Jacob, 37-38, 39, 40
James, St., the Apostle, 137
James, St., the brother of Jesus,
148, 178
James, Epistle of, 165, 178-179
James, St., the Less, 137
Japheth, 34
J Document, 29 and note, 32, 33, 71
Jebusites, 52
Jehoiachin, 68
Jehoiakim, 67, 68, 83
Jehoshaphat, 61
Jehovah, 29 note, 41, 57, 64, 74, 88,
101
Jehu, 58, 59
Jephthah, 47
Jeremiah, 16, 66-68, 82-84, 89, 107,
114
Jericho, 45, 142
Jeroboam, 56
Jeroboam n, 59, 60
Jerusalem, in Old Testament, 53,
56, 63 see also note, 65, 66, 70, 71,
72, 86, 89, 90, 92, 95, 96, 113; in
New Testament, 128, 129, 131,
132, 141, 142, 143* M?' *54 i55
156; David's capture of, 51-52;
Babylonian siege of, 68; Church
at, 150-152, 168, 174; council of,
154-155
Jesse, 50
Jesus, birth and childhood, 128-
130; baptism, 130-131; tempta-
218
tion, 131; Galilean ministry, 130-
132, 141, 150; teaching, 132-136;
healing ministry, 136-137; disci-
ples, 137, 138; enemies, 138, 139;
messiahship, 139140; triumphal
entry, 141-142; Judean ministry,
141-143; trial, 142-145; crucifix-
ion, 146-147; resurrection, 147-
148; ascension, 149; as the Word
of God, 185-187
Jethro, 40
Jews in the New Testament, 140,
141, 145, 151, 153, 154, 156* 157,
162, 170-171
Jezebel, 56, 57, 58, 61
Joab, 53
Job, 93, 94r-95 108
Joel, 88
John, St., the Apostle, 137; Epistles
of, 179; Gospel of (Fourth Gos-
pel), 98, 122-123, 127, 141 note,
143, 149, 185, 186, 187; Revelation
of, 180-181
John, the Baptist, SL, 129-132, 139
Jonah, 72-73, 89-90
Jonathan, 49, 50
Joram, 58
Jordan, River, 35, 45, 47, 131, 142
Joseph, 39^0
Joseph, St., 128
Josephus, 75, 131
Joshua, 44, 45-46, 86
Josiah, 64, 65-66, 67
Judah, Kingdom of, 56, 58, 61-68
Judaism, 71, 75, 113, 139, 153
Judas Iscariot, 137, 143, 145, 151
Judea, 132
Jude, Epistle of, 179
Jude (Thaddeus) St., 137
Judges, 46-^7, 49
Judith, 21, 75
K
Kadesh, 44
Kedron, 142
Kingdom of God, 86-87,
131* 133-136, 137 139
181
180-
Kingdom, Northern; see Israel,
Kingdom of; Southern; see
Judah, Kingdom of
Kingdoms, The Hebrew, 48-68;
division of, 55-56
Kings, Books of, 53-68, 70, 115
Laban, 38
Lamech, 33
Lamentations, 84
Last Supper, 138, 143, 144, 165;
see also Lord's Supper
Law, The, 27, 29, 4*-45 7*> 93
105108, 109-114, 164; Jesus' atti-
tude toward, 43, 45, 139; Paul's
attitude toward, 109-110, 154, 171,
174
Leah, 38
Leviticus, 43, 109, 111
Lord's Day, 164
Lord's Supper, 84, 138, 144, 163-
166, 167-168
Lot, 35, 36
Love Feast, 165
Luke, St., 155, 157
Luke, Gospel of, 121, 124, 125-126,
128, 129, 142; see also Acts, Book
of
Lystra, 153
M
Maccabean Revolt, 73-74, 87
Maccabees, First, 21, 74, 113
Macedonia, 173
Magnificat, 129
Malachi, 16, 72, 92
Malta, 157
Man, Old Testament idea of, 18,
31-33, 103-104, 108-109
Manasseh, 64-65 and note
Mark, St., 125, 152, 155
Mark, Gospel of, 19, 120, 123-124*
130
Mary, St., the Mother of Jesus, 128,
129
Mary Magdalene, St., 147
Matthew, St., 137
Matthew, Gospel of, 14, 121, 124-
125, 126, 128, 129
Matthias, St., 151
Mesopotamia, 35, 38, 44
Messiah, in the Old Testament, 52,
81, 82, 92, 114-116; in the New
Testament, 129, 131, 140, 141,
143, 145, 147, 149, 171
Micah, 64, 90, 114, 115
Ministry, the New Testament, 166-
167
Moab, 44, 46, 47
Moses, 14, 29, 40-45, 57, 114, 154
Mount of Olives, 142, 144
N
Naaman, 58
Naboth, 58
Nahum, 90
Nathan, 52, 53
Nature, God revealed in, 7, 96, 101
Nazareth, 129, 132
Nebuchadnezzar, 68
Nehemiah, 45, 70, 71, 72, 92
Nero, 157
New Year, 112
Nicene Creed, 123
Nineveh, 90
Nisan, 112
Noah, 34
Numbers, 43-44, 109
Nunc Dimittis, 129
Obadiah, 89, 90, 91
Onesimus, 177
P
Palestine, 35
Parables, 126, 132-135
Passion, 144-147
Passover, 41, 112, 141, 143, 144, 146
Pastoral epistles, 177
Patriarchs, The, 35-37
Paul, St., 71, 76, 109, no, 120, 124,
125, 128, 152, 194-157, l6l l6 *-
164, 165, 166
Paul, Epistles of, 120, 168-178
Paul, teaching of, 109, no, 135,
154, 161, 162, 163, 165, 166, 168,
169-177, 186
P Document, 29 and note, 32, 33,
7i
Pentateuch, 29, 42, 45, 71, 73, no
Pentecost, 112, 151
Perea, 142
Persian Empire, 69, 71, 73, 75
Peter, St., 124, 137, 140, 145* *47>
151. 152* W *79
Peter, Epistles of, 179
Pharaoh, 39, 40, 41, 42
Pharisees, 133, 134, 138-139, 143
Philemon, Epistle to, 157, 177
Philip, St., 137
Philippi, 155
Philippians, Epistle to, 157, 175
Philistines, 47-51
Phoenicians, 56, 57
Pilate, 145
Poetry, Hebrew, 27, 93-94
Potiphar, 39
Presbyter, 167
Priest, 113, 114, 119, 167, 178
Prophets and Prophecy, 7, 8, 16, 53,
57> 59* 77-79* 10 3* "9 5' 13,
i3*> 173
Prophets, books of, 27, 77
Prophets, false, 89
Prophets, Major, 80 and note, 87
Prophets, Minor, 87-92
Proverbs, 55, 97-98, 103
Psalms, 28, 93, 94, 95-97, 108
Presentation, 126
Prince of Peace, 142
Purim, 113
Q Document, 121 and note, 124
Rabbi, 71, 153; see also Scribes
Rachel, 38
Rebekah, 37
Red Sea, 41, 42, 43
Reformation, Deuteronomic, 65-66
Rehoboam, 56
Resurrection, 119, 121, 128, 147-
148, 150, 163, 173, 186
Return from Exile, 69
Revelation, Book of, 169, 180, 182;
Nature of God's, 5-9, 17, 186
Roman Empire, 75-76, 115, 128,
145, 146, 150-153, 156, 157, 180
Romans, Epistle to, 114, 169-171
Rome, 123, 157, 175, 178
Ruth, 47, 73, 93
Sabbath, 112, 138, 164
Sacrifice, 37, 88, 110-111, 114, 116,
171* 178
Sadducees, 143
Salvation, 34, 104, 161
Samaria, 56, 63, 71
Samaritans, 60, 152
Samson, 47, 48
Samuel, Books of, 28, 48-52, 70
Sarah, 35, 36
Saul, 49-51, 54
Scapegoat, 112
Scribes, 71, 133, 138, 143
Scythians, 66, 91
Second Isaiah; see Isaiah, Second
Sennacherib, 63, 81
Septuagint, 20
Sermon on the Mount, 125, 135, 171
Shechem, 71
Shem, 34
Sheol, 108
Shewbread, Table of, 113
Shiloh, 49
Silas, 155
Simeon, 129
Simon, St., the Zealot, 137
Sinai, 40, 41-43
Sin, 18, 19, 32, 33, 34. 85, 86, 103,
104, 111, 116, 148
Social Teaching of Bible, 16, 31,
3* 57-58 78, 88, 89, 90, 102, 104,
i34 1 3 6 ' 15 1 * i67~ l6 9 *79
Sodom, 35, 36
Solomon, King, 53-55, 113; Odes of,
97 note; Psalms of, 55, 97; Song
220
ot 55, 93, 97, 99; Wisdom of, 21,
28, 55 97
Son, God the, 23, 127, 128, 130, 131,
148, 149, 186
Son of Man, 116
Spirit, Holy, 11, 23, 24, 64, 76, 148,
15 1 * 1 57 !59* 16
Stephen, St., 151, 154
Suffering Servant, 82, 115, 116, 140,
147
Synoptic Gospels, 122 and note,
123-126, 127, 139, 141 note, 142
Syria, 62, 75, 139; see also Antioch,
Syrian
Syro-Ephraimite War, 62, 80
Tabernacle, 43, 112, 113
Tekoa, 89
Temple, 95, 112, 115-114
Temple, Herod's, 129, 143
Temple, Second (ZerubbabeTs), 70,
96, "3
Temple, Solomon's, 55, 68, 69, 91,
"3
Ten Commandments, 45
Testament, 107; see also Covenant
Testament, New, 12-17, 21-23, 107,
117, 125, 148, 167, 117-182
Testament, Old, 8, 12-17, 17-20,
25-116, 165, 186
Theophilus, 125
Thessalonians, Epistle to, 176, 177
Thessalonica, 155, 176
Thomas, St., 137, 149
Timothy, St., 155, 176
Timothy, Epistles to, 167, 177
Tishri, 112
Titus, Epistle to, 177
Tobit, 21
Torah, 105; see also Law
Trinity, doctrine of, 103, 160
Troas, 155
Twelve Tribes, 38
U
Unity of the Bible, 12-17
Unleavened Bread, Feast of, 112
Ur, 35
Uriah, 53
Verbal Infallibility, 11
Virgin; see Mary, St., the Mother
of Jesus
Visitation, 126
W
Wanderings in the Wilderness, 43-
45, 112
Wisdom, 97-98, 103
Wise Men from East, 125, 128; ot
Israel, 97-98
Witch of En-dor, 51
Word of God, 9-10, u, 24, 66, 103,
149, 185-187
Writings, The, 27, 93
Yahweh, 29, 41, 101; sec also
Jehovah
Yom Kippur, 112
Zacharias, 129
Zechariah, 70, 92, 142
Zedekiah, 68
Zephaniah, 66, 91
Zerubbabel, 70, 96, 113
Zophar, 94
221
