ENGLISH.
To the first Christians, who were Jews, the law and the Prophets were already sacred. Their national sacred writings were to them the oracles of God, though they could no longer be regarded as containing the whole truth of God. The coming of the Messiah had revealed God with a completeness that could not be discovered in the Old Testament. The word of the Lord was authoritative as even Moses and the prophets were not. Yet since all the hopes of the Old Testament seemed to these Jewish Christians to be fulfilled in Jesus Christ, they more than ever were convinced that their national sacred books were divinely inspired. From this source they drew, if not the articles of their creed, at least the proofs and supports of their doctrines. Christ died and rose again, according to the scriptures. All the writings of the Old Testament spoke of Christ to them. Legal enactment, prophetic utterance, simple historical record, and more emotional psalm,— all alike could be covered by the phrase "the scripture says," all were treated as of one piece, and by diligent use of type and allegory single passages torn from any context could be used as proof-texts to commend or defend belief in Christ.
It is not strange that Jewish Christians claimed the Old Testa ment as their book and found in it the confirmation of their faith. It is more remarkable that the Old Testament in its Greek dress appealed to the Gentile world and became a valued weapon in the armoury of the Christian evangelist. It was not on account of any literary charm of the Greek version. Educated readers were offended by the poor style of the Septuagint. But a passage from Tatian, a second century Apologist, may serve to show how this very poverty of style sometimes proved arresting. "When I was giving my most earnest attention to discover the truth, I happened to meet with certain barbaric writings, too old to be compared with the opinions of the Greeks, and too divine to be compared with their errors and I was led to put faith in these by the unpretending cast of the language, the inartificial character of the writers, the foreknowledge displayed of future events, the excellent quality of the precepts and the declaration of the gov ernment of the Universe as centred in one Being." (Tatian, Address to the Greeks, 29.) Evidently non-Jews were impressed by the supposed antiquity of the Hebrew scriptures and by the simplicity and directness of the teaching of the prophets. To philosophers weary of the discussions of the schools the Church offered in the Old Testa ment, with its note of assurance and absence of logical argument, that divine word which Plato desired as a surer and safer guide through life than human reason. The elaborate argument from prophecy to which the Church attached so much weight, con vinced Gentiles as well as Jews ; indeed it convinced Gentiles rather than Jews. Moreover men appreciated the moral insight of the prophets. Their oracles were not only less ambiguous but also more ethical than those of Delphi. And then there was the uncompromising monotheism of Israel and the doctrine of Crea tion. The opening chapter of Genesis won men to Christ, because it declared the government of the Universe to centre in one Being.
When, towards the close of the second century, the collection of apostolic writings was associated with the Old Testament, and the Bible was practically complete (see below, NEW TESTA MENT, I. CANON), the Church could point enquirers to a number of books originally composed in Greek. But even so, the style of an evangelist like Mark offended the taste of educated readers, and the letters of St. Paul are not literature when judged by the standards of the age. When Celsus urges that truths taught in the gospels are expressed much better in the language of Plato, Origen does not deny the literary advantage of Plato, but claims that the simplicity of the scriptures appeals to the multitude.
In the characteristics which offended literary taste, Origen saw the proof that God had chosen the foolish things of this world to confound the wise. He makes much of the argument from prophecy, but stresses most the fact that "men of all nations have deserted the laws of their fathers and the established gods, for the observation of the laws of Moses and the discipleship of the words of Jesus Christ." He states very clearly the direct appeal of many parts of the scripture to men's conscience. "He who reads the words of the prophets with care and attention, feeling by the very perusal the traces of the divinity that is in them, will be led by his own emotions to believe that those words which have been deemed to be the words of God are not the compositions of men." (De Princ. iv. z and 6.) Once the Bible was in being, Christians naturally attributed to the Bible as a whole the characteristics which the Jews had attributed to the Old Testament. According to Philo, all that the scriptures contain is true, and all truth is contained in them. It was easier for the Christians to assert this of the Bible than for Philo to assert it of the Law. But this assertion compelled Christian theologians to adopt Philo's method of dealing with difficult passages. Origen could see that there were passages, par ticularly in the Old Testament, but also in the gospels, that were not true in their literal sense. He could see that some passages were morally perplexing, and indeed indefensible on any Christian standard. The difficulty thus presented he surmounted by Philo's method of allegory. Where the literal sense of the scriptures is obscure, or untrue, or immoral, deeper meanings must await dis covery. So he found a three-fold sense in scripture. For the most part, the literal sense is edifying and will appeal to all. But it is legitimate everywhere to look for secondary meanings, and in some passages it is imperative to do this, since only in this way can scripture be harmonized with itself. It was assumed that there could be no real contradictions in scripture. The sense of the fundamental harmony of the Old and New Testaments was expressed in Augustine's aphorism, "The New Testament lies hid in the Old, and the Old Testament is manifested in the New." Most Christians took over the view of inspiration accepted by Philo and Josephus, which regards the prophet or writer as a passive instrument in the hands of God. Some of the Fathers, such as Gregory of Nazianzus, perceived that divine inspiration did not override the personality of prophet or evangelist, but the Church in general tended to accept the ecstatic view of prophecy and the mechanical conception of inspiration. It is worth noting that the ancient Catholic Church encouraged Bible-reading, and that the Bible was early accessible in Syriac and Latin for those who did not read Greek. Harnack writes : "The Church was com pelled to lay stress on Bible-reading because, according to her doctrine, souls could be lost through want of knowledge, and so she became the great elementary school mistress of the Greeks and Romans." (Bible Reading in Early Ch. p. 85.) While the ancient Church up to the fall of the Roman Empire in the West encouraged Bible-reading, Christianity did not become simply the religion of a book. The baptismal confession of faith was attributed to the apostles as definitely as the New Testament itself, and when the claims of heretics to possess esoteric apostolic traditions had been refuted, the Church did not hesitate to assert apostolic sanction for traditions and usages that could not be directly traced in the apostolic writings. Consequently for the mediaeval Church the scriptures are still the final authority, but they are associated closely with ecclesiastical tradition, and this complex is assumed to represent the minds of the apostles. For St. Thomas Aquinas, the authority of the Church, both in its teaching and in its practice, cannot be distinguished from the authority of scripture. "In spite of the very explicit assignment of the sole ulti mate authority to the scriptures, and the recognition of the duty of the theologian to bring all his teaching to the test of scripture and be content to rest upon no lower grade of assurance, we feel our selves from the very first guided in our interpretation of scripture by an invisible hand, and referred to clauses of the creeds, to verses in the liturgy or to decrees of councils as though they were final authorities." Aquinas was able to harmonize scripture and Church tradition because he had at his disposal the methods of scripture interpretation that the scholastics took over from the Fathers, particularly from Origen and Augustine. Once again the allegorical method saved the situation. Positively the claim of the Christian scriptures to be a divine revelation rests for Aquinas on two elements : the element of miracle and the wide appeal of the truths contained therein. Miracle and prophecy and the power of inspiring a faith that triumphs over death are the main proofs of the divine origin of the scriptures.
The circumstances of the Dark Ages made a breach in the earlier habits of Bible-reading among the laity, and it was not till towards the close of the 12th century that the situation began to change. Perhaps the superstitious use of the scriptures to provide amulets and omens—a tendency that began early and grew more intense in the Dark Ages—may have inclined the Church to with hold the Bible from the laity. However that may be, when popu lar interest in the scriptures revived, the Church felt apprehensive because Bible-reading led to heresy. As men became acquainted once again with the text of the scriptures, they inevitably realized that the harmony which Aquinas assumed between the teaching of scripture and Church tradition was not obvious or complete. In the work of a commentator like Lyra, the traditional methods of interpretation were challenged by insistence on the literal mean ing of the scriptures as fundamentally important. The Reforma tion detached the scriptures from the Church tradition, and permitted the plain sense of the scriptures to make a direct appeal to the common people.
The great Reformers held that all truths necessary for salvation were to be found in the scriptures and were to be found so plainly expressed that the ordinary devout reader could discover them for himself. They dwelt much on the sufficiency and perspicuity of the scriptures. Difficulties remained and perhaps would always remain, to exercise men's faith, but normally scripture was its own interpreter and light on its dark places could be derived from the texts whose meaning was clear. In exalting the scriptures over against Mediaeval Church tradition, the followers of the great Re formers assumed the perfection of the scriptures. The Bible was the source of guidance and enlightenment in every department of human life and thought. The Puritans tended to push the claim so far as to insist that no action in daily life could be regarded as righteous unless expressly warranted by Holy Writ. Whatsoever is not of faith is sin, and faith is not, save where there is an appeal to the word of God, and the word of God is the scripture.
Over against this extreme, Hooker advocated the claim of reason to be a God-given guide and defended the Anglican prin ciple that Christians do not always need positive assurance from the scriptures for any given Church-rite or individual action, though they must never contravene scripture in the name of reason. George Fox and the Quakers urged that inspiration was not confined to the scriptures. The spirit of Christ still guided men, and though His guidance would not be contrary to the essential life of the scriptures, yet it might be given apart from the scriptures and would take men beyond the letter of the scrip tures. But the main current of religious thought in England in the 17th century and later in the Evangelical revival endorsed the Puritan estimate of the Bible. The influence of the Bible was thus carried into the heart of English life and literature, but it was accompanied by the moral dangers of Bibliolatry. Scripture had still to be harmonised with itself, and this was the more difficult since symbolic interpretations were to be abandoned. Forced exegesis was constantly resorted to, both to defend the inerrancy and authority of the scriptures themselves and to secure Biblical authority for the tenets and practices of particular churches and individuals. Yet through it all, the case for the authority and in spiration of the scriptures is based broadly on the same grounds as in the days of the Apologists. Thus, Whitaker, the Elizabethan divine, summarizes the evidence for inspiration under eight heads: "(I) The majesty of the doctrine itself ; (2) the simplicity, purity and divinity of the style; (3) the antiquity of the books them selves (the books of Moses are more ancient than the writings of any other men) ; (4) prophetic oracles; (5) miracles; (6) the failure of enemies to destroy them; (7) the testimony of martyrs, and (8) the character of the writers, mostly illiterate and inca pable of writing without inspiration." John Owen, Vice-Chancellor of Oxford in the time of the Commonwealth, who makes the strongest claims for the infallible authority of the scriptures is somewhat more discriminating in stating the grounds of his faith. He does not think that the evidence of miracles counts for much, and he holds that the authority of scripture must rest on its self evidencing light and power.
Many difficulties of the Puritan view of the scriptures arose from the unsolved problem of harmonizing the contents of a litera ture whose production extends over a thousand years, when once the methods of interpretation adopted by the Fathers and the Schoolmen were surrendered. But more serious questions were precipitated by developments of natural science and by the progress of literary and historical criticism. Even before the ad vent of Copernicus, Colet saw that the story of creation could not be harmonized with natural science, and the work of Copernicus and Galileo brought men face to face with the actual limitations of the knowledge of Biblical writers. It was becoming apparent that not all truth is contained in the scriptures and not all that the scriptures contain is true. This problem of a conflict between the contents of the Bible and the findings of natural science has been intensified by every advance of science, and reached an acute stage in the work of Darwin. Men's reactions to this problem have varied. Those who suppose that the authority of the Bible de pends on its inerrancy have tended to become either obscurantists or rationalistic agnostics. Those who reject this supposition have of ten restricted the sphere of the Bible to faith and morals, and have assumed with Spinoza that it has no ultimate authority in the realm of natural science, or of historical enquiry, or of philosophic speculation. The Bible is not intended to teach science or history : it is to guide men in faith and conduct. This attempted solution is expressly rejected in the Encyclical Letter Providentissimus Deus of Leo XIII. "For the system of those who, in order to rid themselves of these difficulties, do not hesitate to concede that di vine inspiration regards the things of faith and morals and nothing beyond, because (as they wrongly think) in a question of the truth or falsehood of a passage, we should consider not so much what God has said as the reason and purpose which He had in mind in saying it—this system cannot be tolerated." "It is absolutely wrong and forbidden, either to narrow inspiration to certain parts only of Holy Scripture or to admit that the sacred writer has erred." The position thus defined by the Pope is still the position adopted by a large number of Protestants.
Side by side with the advance of natural science came the devel opment of literary and historical scholarship, and the demand that the Bible should be read and studied like any other book. This meant not that the Bible was the same in character as any other book, but that the same canons of criticism must be applied to the national literature of the Hebrews and the writings of the first Christians as were applied to the literature and history of other people or to the classical documents of other faiths. "The study of Hebrew and Greek texts dissolved at last the cement by which the doctrine of Inspiration had held together the whole Bible as a homogeneous Divine product." The discrepancies and disharmonies in the scriptures could no longer be disguised. Moreover many traditional beliefs concerning the date and authorship of particular books were found to have no support in the text of the Bible itself. Thomas Hobbes had observed that the Pentateuch seems to be written about Moses rather than by Moses. Literary criticism showed that the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch was a Rabbinic tradition, which was unsupported by the Pentateuch.
The net effect of the progress of natural science and literary criticism was to undermine the claims made for the scriptures on the grounds of their alleged antiquity and absolute harmony. The traditional arguments from prophecy ceased to carry weight, and the appeal to miracles was discounted. The fundamental argu ment for regarding the scriptures as sacred and inspired remained untouched. Coleridge restated this essential argument in his Con fessions of an Enquiring Spirit, where he urged that "whatever finds me, bears witness for itself that it has proceeded from a Holy Spirit." But the significance of his confession lies in his realization that this evidence for inspiration does not confirm the traditional ideas of verbal inspiration and complete inerrancy. Indeed he felt that to attribute equal value to all the contents of the Bible is to falsify the findings of the conscience of its readers. The propositions, "The Bible contains the religion revealed by God" and "Whatever is contained in the Bible is religion and was revealed by God," are not interchangeable.
The characteristics of the Bible emphasized in modern study are briefly these : First, its popular character and appeal, admitted by the early Fathers and asserted by the Reformers, have been confirmed by modern research. Thus, the Greek of the New Testa ment has been shown to be the language in every-day use in the Roman Empire in the first century A.D. Secondly, the literary charm of the Bible is in the main a modern discovery. Tindal perceived that the Hebrew of the Old Testament would go much better into English than into Latin or Greek, and certainly the Old Testament in the Septuagint or the Vulgate made little appeal to men of taste. In England, through the authorized version, Hebrew literary genius has exerted a healthy influence both on language and literature. Thirdly, the Bible is at length discovered to be, not a manual of theology, but the record of a varied and developing religious experience. In it religion is presented, not in an abstract and dogmatic form, but in concrete historical embodi ments. It thus becomes the guide and inspiration of personal re ligion. Fourthly, the Bible is contrasted with a book like the Koran, inasmuch as the Koran represents a revelation to a single prophet, while the Bible contains writings ranging from the He brew monarchy to A.D. Ioo, contributes to the true understanding of a series of uniquely vital centuries in human history, and exhib its a variety of experience combined with the real unity of a gen uine development. Thus, historical criticism suggests the idea of progressive revelation and outlines the steps of the actual progress. Fifthly and lastly, the permanent and unique value of the Bible is now seen to depend, not on any miracle attending its composition, not on any form of inspiration confined to Biblical writers, but simply on the unique phenomenon of Hebrew prophecy and its culmination in the life and teaching of Jesus. So long as men recognize the distinctive character of Hebrew prophecy or so long as they respond to the influence of Jesus, the volume which con tains the history of His people and their preparation for His com ing, together with the memories, impressions and reflections of His first disciples, must retain in their hearts and thoughts a place no other book can claim or fill.