Christ Is Discredited by the Critics

“The law of Moses, and the prophets, and the psalms” was the well-known division of the Jewish Scriptures — the Old Testament as we have it in our English Bible to-day, not one chapter more or less. “These are My words which I spake unto you, while I was yet with you.” He thus adopted and confirmed all His previous teaching respecting Holy Scripture. And He sent out His apustles to communicate that teaching to others. But the Higher Critics would have us believe that instead of “opening their understanding that they might understand the Scriptures,’ He deluded them into misunderstanding the Scriptures, with the result that Church and world were kept. in ignorance and error on the subject for-eighteen centuries, until the German Rationalists

exposed the fraud! Some o ities, indeed, would offer us an

alternative here. They hold that the Lord had fuller knowledge than His contemporaries, but that on grounds of expediency and policy He adapted His teaching to prevailing prejudices

dnd ignorance. As a blunt man of the world

pa would say, He was not a blind Jew, but only an opportunist. And if a disciple of Tom

“Paine should seize upon these statements as

implying that the Founder of Christianity was

admittedly either a nave, the only chet which been old mao. would be to rosscoarsenessof the language. Surely we may be pardoned for refusing to discuss a position, the mere statement of which savours of profanity.

Not that the critics see anything profane in it. But this may be due to the fact that their point of view differs from that of the ordinary Christian. They are not thinking of the living Lord, before whom they must stand in judgment, but of “a man of the name of Jesus Christ,” the dead Buddha, who is a fit subject for post mortem inquiries of this kind.

Let it be kept clearly in view, then, that it is upon the authority of the Lord Jesus Christ that we accept the Old Testament Scriptures. I avail myself of words borrowed from Dean Alford’s Commentary to mark the significance of the closing passage of Luke, quoted above : — “The whole Scriptures are a testimony to Him: the whole history of the chosen people, with its types, and its law, and its prophecies, is a shewing forth of Him: and it was here the whole that He laid out before them... Observe the testimony which the verse gives to the divine authority, and the Christian interpretation of the Old Testament Scriptures: so that the denial of the references to Christ’s death and glory in the Old Testament is henceforth nothing less than a denial of His own teaching.”