What I desire to show is, that the work of putting the Bible
into its present form was not done in heaven, but on earth; that
it was not done by angels, but by men; that it was not done all at
once, but a little at a time, the work of preparing and perfecting
it extending over several centuries, and employing the labours of
many men in different lands and long-divided generations.
I now turn to Dr. Aked. On page 25 of his book, _Changing Creeds_, he
says:
Ignorance has claimed the Bible for its own. Bigotry has made
the Bible its battleground. Its phrases have become the
shibboleth of pietistic sectarians. Its authority has been
evoked in support of the foulest crimes committed by the vilest
men; and its very existence has been made a pretext for theories
which shut out God from His own world. In our day Bible worship
has become, with many very good but very unthoughtful people, a
disease.
So much for the attitude of the various schools of religious thought
towards the Bible.
Now, in the opinion of these Christian teachers, is the Bible perfect
or imperfect? Dr. Aked gives his opinion with characteristic candour and
energy:
For observe the position: men are told that the Bible is the
infallible revelation of God to man, and that its statements
concerning God and man are to be unhesitatingly accepted as
statements made upon the authority of God. They turn to its
pages, and they find historical errors, arithmetical mistakes,
scientific blunders (or, rather, blunders most unscientific),
inconsistencies, and manifold contradictions; and, what is far
worse, they find that the most horrible crimes are committed by
men who calmly plead in justification of their terrible misdeeds
the imperturbable "God said." The heart and conscience of man
indignantly rebel against the representations of the Most High
given in some parts of the Bible. What happens? Why, such
men declare--are now declaring, and will in constantly
increasing numbers, and with constantly increasing force and
boldness declare--that they can have nothing to do with a book
whose errors a child can discover, and whose revelation of God
partakes at times of blasphemy against man.
I need hardly say that I agree with every word of the above. If anyone
asked me what evidence exists in support of the claims that the Bible is
the word of God, or that it was in any real sense of the words "divinely
inspired," I should answer, without the least hesitation, that there
does not exist a scrap of evidence of any kind in support of such a
claim.
Let us give a little consideration to the origin of the Bible. The first
five books of the Bible, called the Pentateuch, were said to be written
by Moses. Moses was not, and could not have been, the author of those
books. There is, indeed, no reliable evidence to prove that Moses ever
existed. Whether he was a fictitious hero, or a solar myth, or what he
was, no man knows.
Neither does there appear to be any certainty that the biblical books
attributed to David, to Solomon, to Isaiah, Jeremiah, and the rest were
really written by those kings or prophets, or even in their age.
And after these books, or many of them, had been written, they were
entirely lost, and are said to have been reproduced by Ezra.
Add to these facts that the original Hebrew had no vowels, that many of
the sacred books were written without vowels, and that the vowels were
added long after; and remember that, as Dr. Aked says, the oldest Hebrew
Bible in existence belongs to the tenth century after Christ, and
it will begin to appear that the claim for biblical infallibility is
utterly absurd.
But I must not offer these statements on my own authority. Let us
return to Dr. Gladden. On page 11 of _Who Wrote the Bible?_ I find the
following:
The first of these holy books of the Jews was, then, The Law,
contained in the first five books of our Bible, known among us
as the Pentateuch, and called by the Jews sometimes simply
"The Law," and sometimes "The Law of Moses." This was supposed
to be the oldest portion of their Scriptures, and was by them
regarded as much more sacred and authoritative than any other
portion. To Moses, they said, God spake face to face; to the
other holy men much less distinctly. Consequently, their appeal
is most often to the Law of Moses.
The sacredness of the five books of "The Law," then, rests upon the
belief that they were written by Moses, who had spoken face to face with
God.
So that if Moses did not write those books, their sacredness is a myth.
Now, on page 42, Dr. Gladden says:
1. The Pentateuch could never have been written by any one
man, inspired or otherwise.
2. It is a composite work, in which many hands have been
engaged. The production of it extends over many centuries.
3. It contains writings which are as old as the time of Moses,
and some that are much older. It is impossible to tell how
much of it came from the hand of Moses; but there are
considerable portions of it which, although they may have
been somewhat modified by later editors, are substantially
as he left them.
On page 45 Dr. Gladden, again speaking of the Pentateuch, says:
But the story of Genesis goes back to a remote antiquity. The
last event related in that book occurred four hundred years
before Moses was born; it was as distant from him as the
discovery of America by Columbus is from us; and other portions
of the narrative, such as the stories of the Flood and the
Creation, stretch back into the shadows of the age which
precedes history. Neither Moses nor any one living in his
day could have given us these reports from his own knowledge.
Whoever wrote this must have obtained his materials in one of
three ways:
1. They might have been given to him by divine revelation
from God.
2. He might have gathered them up from oral tradition, from
stories, folklore, transmitted from mouth to mouth, and
so preserved from generation to generation.
3. He might have found them in written documents existing at
the time of his writing.
As many of the laws and incidents in the books of Moses were known to
the Chaldeans, the "direct revelation of God" theory is not plausible.
On this point Dr. Gladden's opinion supports mine. He says, on page 61:
That such is the fact with respect to the structure of these
ancient writings is now beyond question. And our theory of
inspiration must be adjusted to this fact. Evidently neither
the theory of verbal inspiration, nor the theory of plenary
inspiration, can be made to fit the facts, which a careful study
of the writings themselves brings before us. These writings are
not inspired in the sense which we have commonly given that word.
The verbal theory of inspiration was only tenable while they
were supposed to be the work of a single author. To such a
composite literature no such theory will apply. "To make this
claim," says Professor Ladd, "and yet accept the best ascertained
results of criticism, would compel us to take such positions
as the following: the original authors of each one of the
writings which enter into the composite structure were infallibly
inspired; every one who made any changes in any one of these
fundamental writings was infallibly inspired; every compiler
who put together two or more of these writings was infallibly
inspired, both as to his selections and omissions, and as to any
connecting or explanatory words which he might himself write;
every redactor was infallibly inspired to correct and supplement,
and omit that which was the product of previous infallible
inspirations. Or, perhaps, it might seem more convenient to attach
the claim of a plenary inspiration to the last redactor of all;
but then we should probably have selected of all others the one
least able to bear the weight of such a claim. Think of making
the claim for a plenary inspiration of the Pentateuch in its
present form on the ground of the infallibility of that one of
the scribes who gave it its last touches some time subsequent to
the death of Ezra."
Remember that Dr. Gladden declares, on page 5, that he shall state no
conclusions as to the history of the sacred writings which will not be
accepted by conservative critics.
On page 54 Dr. Gladden quotes the following from Dr. Perowne:
The first _composition_ of the Pentateuch as a whole could not
have taken place till after the Israelites entered Canaan.
The whole work did not finally assume its present shape till
its revision was undertaken by Ezra after the return from the
Babylonish captivity.
On page 25 Dr. Gladden himself speaks as follows:
The common argument by which Christ is made a witness to the
authenticity and infallible authority of the Old Testament
runs as follows:
Christ quotes Moses as the author of this legislation; therefore
Moses must have written the whole Pentateuch. Moses was an
inspired prophet; therefore all the teaching of the Pentateuch
must be infallible.
The facts are that Jesus nowhere testifies that Moses wrote the
whole of the Pentateuch; and that he nowhere guarantees the
infallibility either of Moses or of the book. On the contrary,
he set aside as inadequate or morally defective, certain laws
which in this book are ascribed to Moses.
So much for the authorship and the inspiration of the first five books
of the Bible.
As to the authorship of other books of the Bible, Dr. Gladden says of
Judges and Samuel that we do not know the authors nor the dates.
Of Kings he says: "The name of the author is concealed from us." The
origin and correctness of the Prophecies and Psalms, he tells us, are
problematical.
Of the Books of Esther and Daniel, Dr. Gladden says: "That they are
founded on fact I do not doubt; but it is, perhaps, safer to regard them
both rather as historical fictions than as veritable histories."
Of Daniel, Dean Farrar wrote:
The immense majority of scholars of name and acknowledged
competence in England and Europe have now been led to form
an irresistible conclusion that the Book of Daniel was not
written, and could not have been written, in its present form,
by the prophet Daniel, B.C. 534, but that it can only have been
written, as we now have it, in the days of Antiochus Epiphanes,
about B.C. 164, and that the object of the pious and patriotic
author as to inspirit his desponding countrymen by splendid
specimens of that lofty moral fiction which was always common
amongst the Jews after the Exile, and was known as "The Haggadah."
So clearly is this proven to most critics, that they willingly
suffer the attempted refutations of their views to sink to
the ground under the weight of their own inadequacy.
(_The Bible and the Child_.)