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