(2) A little later two French Catholics made important contributions to Old Testament criti cism. One, a priest, Richard Simon (born 1638, died 1712), who is sometimes called the father of Biblical introduction, was the author of a Critical History of the Old Testament.
(3) Astruc (born 1684. died i766), a Catholic layman, was the founder of the literary analysis of the Pentateuch in his "Conjectures Upon the Original Memoirs which Moses Seems to Have Used in Composing the Book of Genesis." (4) The condition of the text, which has an important bearing on interpretation, also received great attention in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. After a hard fought battle between the Buxtorfs, father (born 1564, died 1629) and son (born 1599. died 1664), on the one hand, and Ca pellus on the other, it was proved conclusively that the vowel points used in reading Hebrew, far from being original with Moses, were an inven tion of the Massoretes (after 600 A. D.), the guardians of Jewish text criticism. Kennicott, an English, and De Rossi, an Italian, scholar, devo ted great attention to the comparison of Old Tes tament Hebrew MSS.. leading to the negative re sult, that none of those in existence originated before the Middle Ages, and that the variations in their readings were so slight as to be of no account.
(5) Lowth and Herder were eminent as exe getes, but no scholar arose who effected a general change in the principles of interpretation as in troduced by the theologians succeeding the Refor mation. They went to the Bible for proof texts to establish the doctrines of the church; and since they sought these by sound, rather than through a historical, interpretation, they found them in the Old Testament as well as the New. Human agency in the production of Scripture was lost sight of, and God was considered the author of Scripture in such a sense that the writers were hardly more than amanuenses of the Divine Spirit.
6. Interpretation During the Nineteenth Century. The last hundred years has marked an epoch in the history of Old Testament inter pretation. Ecclesiastical and theological fetters are being struck off from the Old Testament, so that the ancient writers can deliver their message to us in some such way as they sought to deliver it to their contemporaries. Up to the present
century, with a few exceptions, the Church was in clined to regard the Old Testament purely as a divine book. Now the critics are teaching the church that the Old Testament is best understood when we give the human element in Scripture its due place; that, as we draw nearer the Master by dwelling on his humanity, so we see God's infinite wisdom in his dealings with Israel more clearly when we recognize the human and dis pensational limitations of the Old Testament mes sengers and those to whom they were sent. High er criticism cannot disprove the fact of a Divine revelation; indeed, it does not seek to do so; it simply deals with the temporal and natural pe culiarities of those Who bore it, and to whom it was given through many centuries. While such critics as Kuenen may claim that prophecy in an cient Israel was the product of mere naturalism, the history of ancient religions does not furnish a parallel to any such naturalistic development as is sometimes claimed for the Old Testament. The results of the prophecies demand a supernatural cause. The origin of the Old Testament, in its relation to the New, cannot be explained merely as a human production. No higher critic, so far as he is a careful and conscientious investigator, is to be regarded an enemy nf revealed relig ion on account of his investigations. Whatever his personal attitude may be to the religion of Israel, his investigations, so far as they are con ducted in a scientific spirit, with an honest effort to know the truth. are to be hailed with satisfac tion.. This may serve to explain a seeming in consistency in the attitude of evangelical higher critics. to results which are sometimes called "de structive." They are not destructive of the au thority of the Old Testament, as tested by the New, but of traditional views with respect to its origin and composition. Hence, they claim they do not affect the fact of a Divine revelation, but rather the manner of it.