Beginnings

‘Tue Bible is a book of single yet composite authorship. This is the fact that marks it as unique and sets it apart from all other books in the world. Between it and other writings there is fixed a great gulf, impassable and never to be bridged by the production of another book comparable to it. The Bible is God expressing Himself through humanity. Men wrote it, but they wrote it only under the guidance of the Almighty. His was the ruling hand; His was the mind that originated the grand conception; His was the Spirit that, entering into humble men, caused them to record words that will never die.

Humanly speaking, then, the Bible is of composite authorship. About forty men took part in writing it. Few of these men in the

1 modern sense of the word were scholars. They came from all stations in life. Some, like Moses, David, and Solomon, were leaders and kings; others, like Peter, were humble laborers. They wrote over a wide period of years. Moses began the Pentateuch about 1500 B.C.;? St. John wrote the Revelation about A.D. 97. These writers were not merely literary men. They did not devote their lives to writing jas did Cervantes or Goethe or others noted in the history of books. [They were men of action — generals, princes, and kings; priests, prophets, and religious leaders; stout-hearted apostles and missionaries, fighting to make known to pagan Rome the revelation of God.| Daniel

+A fundamental contention of the liberal school of Biblical criticism is that Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy were not written by Moses, but that they constitute a compilation of various traditionary narratives made about 900 years after the time of Moses. For an able defense of the Mosaic authorship consult “The Higher Criticism of the Pentateuch,” William Henry Green (Scribner’s),

2 was Prime Minister of Babylon, the world-empire of his time; Ezekiel was a priest, bred in the atmosphere of ritualistic observances; Amos was a lowly gatherer of sycamore figs. Yet this diverse group produced history, poetry, drama, and narrative, that, for consummate artistry of form and sheer beauty of expression, stand upon the lonely pinnacle of supreme greatness.

Remarkable! A paradox! These are exclamations fully justified. Never was such great literature written under such varied and unfavorable conditions by men so little fitted, most of them, for the exacting work of composition.) Yes, this is indeed a paradox. How is one to account for it? There are two explanations. On the one side is the conservative point of view which asserts that writings so aglow with the very presence of God must have been sent by Him to men, must have been divinely inspired. On the other side is the modernist point of view which maintains that much of the Old Testament was compiled from traditional sources, that some of it is sheer legend, and that even its most sublime portions are the product of human genius alone. The New Testament is regarded as the work of early converts, not chiefly influenced by divine power, chronicling the life of our Lord and the history of the first years of the church. Every man must judge for himself the alternative most reasonable and most consonant with the highest view of God.

Obscurity veils the actual writing of the Bible. We do not know the precise conditions under which God revealed His Word. There is in existence no single original manu- script, either of the Old Testament or of the New Testament. As early as the first century A.D. the originals of the Old Testament appear to have been lost. And the original documents of the New Testament have shared the same fate. When the Bible first assumed its present form, it was made up of Hebrew copies or a Greek translation

of the Old Testament and the Greek of the New Testament. But although every original manuscript has apparently perished, there are extant a great many ancient copies of the Bible and parts of the Bible. Old Testament manuscripts are exceedingly numerous; the libraries of certain scholars contain hundreds of copies of the Hebrew Scriptures. Scattered throughout libraries all over the world are about four thousand ancient New Testament manuscripts. Of Jerome’s Latin translation we have thousands of old copies.

[At first thought it would seem almost certain, in view of the vast number of different copies of the Bible and in view of the fact that all originals have been lost, that the present text must contain countless errors. For scribes are commonly supposed to have made a large number of mistakesy Such errors, as manuscripts continue to be copied and recopied, multiply with amazing rapidity. The text of Chaucer, for example, in

5 the decades intervening between his life and’ Caxton’s first edition of his works, became greatly corrupted.

Yet the Bible must always be considered a special case. {Despite the oft-heard cry that it should be treated precisely as other books, one cannot ignore its unique claims. In the first place, it makes a direct assumption of divine inspiration. Scores of times the prophets proclaim the majestic words, “Thus saith the Lord.” Over and over again they cry, “The word of the Lord came unto me.” When sorely beset by Satan in the wilderness, the Saviour answered His tempter with three appeals to the Old Testament scriptures. And He is reported to have prefaced each direct quotation with the words, “It is written.”

From the very first, men have accepted the assumption of divine inspiration. And, in accepting it, they have been forced, by the

@Matthew IV, 1-11; Luke IV, 1-13.
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very nature of the case, to treat the Bible as a book apart. To the ancient copyists it was what it always has been to every Christian — the Book of Life. Just as the scholars who made the Authorized Version worked to the limit of their capacity for accuracy and painstaking, so these early scribes sought perfection in the arduous labor of copying the Bible word for word. This Book was the foundation of their faith; upon it were based all their hopes for eternity. They could not help bringing to their task care increased ten-fold. They could not but regard the merest error with the most shocked abhorrence.