It has already been remarked that references to the institutions, principles, and historical facts of the Pentateuch pervade the N. T. to at least as great a degree, if not greater, than the Old. Putting direct and verbal allusions for a moment out of the question, the facts and principles of the old covenant so permeate the whole thought and language of the N. T. writers, that if they were taken away and relegated into the region of the mythical and the unhistorical, the N. T. would itself become unintelligible. The truth of its history and the reality of its religious institutions, as things still existing and familiarly known, is assumed equally in the Gospels as in the Epistles ; and the proof of this would suffer little appreciable diminution if the elabo rate comments of the Epistle to the Hebrews were left altogether out of the question. But in addition to this, both our Lord and his apostles have left upon record testimonies both to the Mosaic authorship and to the divine authority of the Pentateuch of the most positive and explicit kind. Twelve times (Matt. xix. 7, 8 ; xxiii. 2 ; Mark x. 3 ; xii. 26 ; John iii. 14 ; v. 45, 46 ; vi. 32 ; vii. 19, 22, 23) our Lord referred to Moses by name. In fourteen places he has made reference to the law ;' in five of these coupling it with the name of the lawgiver ; and in one adding the significant declaration—' And the Scripture cannot be broken' (Matt. v. 17, 18, 40 ; xi. 13 ; xii. 5 ; xxii. 36, 40 ; xxiii. 23 ; Luke xvi. i7 ; John i. 17 ; vii. 19, 23 ; X. 34 ; xv. 25). Seven times our Lord quoted from the Pentateuch as from the authoritative word of God ; three of these occasions being during his temptation, when the quotation will be found to involve not only the authority of the words, but also the historical verity of the facts in connection with which they were originally uttered (Dent. viii. 3 compared with Matt. iv. 4, Luke iv. 4 ; Deut. vi. 16 with Matt. iv. 7; Dent. vi. 13 with Matt. iv. to ; Exod. xx. 12 with Matt. xix. 18 ; Lev. xix. IS with Matt. xix. 19 ; xxii. 39 ; Exod. iii. 6 with Matt. xxii. 32, Mark xii. 27, Luke xx. 37 ; Deut. vi. 5 with Matt., xxii. 37, Mark xii. 30, Luke x. 27). On thirteen different occasions (Matt. viii. 4 ; x. 15 ; xi. 23 ; xvii. 3 ; xxiii. 35 ; xxiv. 37 ; Luke xvi. 29, 31 ; xvii. 28, 32 ; xx. 37 ; xxiv. 27 ; John iii. 14 ; vi. 31 ; viii. 17, 56), our Lord directly set the seal of his own authority to persons or events recorded in the Pentateuch. These in stances are taken from our Lord's personal history alone, and the limits of our article alone forbid the multiplication of similar instances from the teaching of the apostles. In regard to all these references, there are but two alternatives for adoption ;—either the Pentateuch is the inspired book of Moses, and then our Lord gave authoritative testimony to what is true ; or the Pentateuch is not the inspired work of Moses, and then our Lord gave authoritative testimony to what is false. In the latter case we are shut up to the conclusion, either that our Lord believed what he stated, and was therefore deceived in attaching historical reality to persons and events which never had existence ; or else our Lord knew them to be false, and yet spoke of them as true, and therefore must have been a wilful deceiver. Neither supposition can be entertained without something akin to blasphemy. Belief in the divine nature and commission of the Son of God carries with it, therefore, belief in the divine autho rity of the five books of Moses. A man who ac cepts the truth of Christianity must accept likewise the truth of the Mosaic law, and the authority of the Pentateuch which establishes it.
There is, however, another side to this argu ment. If the truth of Christianity involves the acceptance of the Pentateuch, the disproof of the divine authority of the Pentateuch equally involves the denial of Christianity. Just in proportion as we draw tighter the links of the one argument, we equally draw tighter the links of the other. The N. T. Scriptures involve the authority of the Mosaic books ; if, therefore, the Mosaic books can be proved to be unauthoritative, the N. T. must be founded on a falsehood ; and, whatever may he its apparent evidences, must itself necessarily be void of all authoritative obligation upon the human mind and conscience. It was not likely that the oppo
nents of Christianity would fail to perceive this re sult, or would neglect this line of attack ; for there are manifest facilities for an attack upon the O. T., and especially upon its earlier portion, which do not attach to an attack upon the N. T. Scrip tures, since the facts of Christianity fall within the recognised historic period, and were consequently enacted amid such a comparative blaze of light as to render all assaults upon them peculiarly embarras sing. A glance at M. Coquerel's able reply to Strauss will suffice to illustrate this. (This reply has been brought within the reach of the English reader by Dr. Beard's Voices of the Church.) With the Mosaic books it is different. The remote an tiquity of their date, and the consequent absence of those collateral proofs largely supplied by profane history to the later books of the O. T. canon, the condensed form of a narrative comprising the history of a thousand years within a few verses, the consequent absence of precise details, and of the connecting links between effects and their pro minent causes, render the Pentateuch as favour able a sphere as can be conceived for the exercise of a criticism, as arbitrary and capricious as it is destructive. It is a matter of familiar experience how, in the absence of some one part of a whole series, all the rest may appear unintelligible and even contradictory. An interesting example of this may be found in Ebrard, Krilik der .Evang. Geschichte, sec. 72. In proportion to the remote distance of recorded events, and the condensed character of the outlines which alone have been preserved to us, will be the width of the door opened to the ingenious objections of a speculative criticism. It is natural, therefore, that the attacks of unbelief should have been long directed against the Pentateuch, as being, so to speak, the key of the position, and offering peculiar facilities for attack. It is true, indeed, that if Christianity were subverted, the authority of the Pentateuch might still be maintained to a certain degree, as in the case of modem Judaism. But, on the other side, if the authority of the Pentateuch be subverted, Christianity cannot possibly survive.
The tendency of unbelief to take the shape of an assault upon the authority of the Pentateuch was first developed in the 2d century of the Chris tian era. The form in which it first appeared in the teaching of the ancient Ebionites is so remark able as to deserve a somewhat more extended notice than the limits of this article will make it possible for us to give to the subsequent disciples of free thought. But in one or other of the two divisions of the Ebionites, which Neander has respectively designated as the Pharisaic and the Essenian, almost every branch of modern rationalistic argument has been anticipated. It is true that the Pentateuch was professedly placed by them in the first class of inspired writings ; but it was maintained that the Mosaic books were made up of traditional frag ments, that they had been many times re-written.
and that corrupting elements had been introduced into the purity of the original revelation. The genuineness of the Pentateuch was thus boldly assailed, and passages which appeared to conflict with the favourite hypothesis were got rid of by a critical charge of interpolation and corruption of the text. When it is added that the fall of man was rejected as being blasphemy against God, that the supernatural was disavowed, that the highest appeal was made to the inner human consciousness in contrast to an outward revelation, that the in spiration of Scripture was referred to a general not a special action of the Holy Spirit upon the mind of the writers, that in the truth implanted by God in the depths of the human soul all other truth is con tained, and that the revelation of the Divine Spirit does but awaken the consciousness of it, we find in this scheme the pregnant prototype of modern rationalism (see Neander's Church History, London, Bohn, vol. i.) Other early heretics followed in the same path, such as several branches of the Gnostics and the Manicheeans, who boldly pronounced whatever conflicted with their own views in the Mosaic books to be corruptions of the original.