Chapter VI
ik SSUMING that vivisection is lawful wHen some ZJL definite and useful purpose can be attained by -/. jkit, I propose to put a German professor on the table. Some two years ago Professor Friedrich Delitzsch of the University of Berlin delivered a lecture in the presence of the German Emperor upon the relation between the Bible and recent archaeological discoveries. And a second lecture followed on the same subject and under the same auspices. These lectures afterwards appeared in book form with the captivating title of “Babel and Bible “; and an English translation now lies before me, “edited, with an Introduction, by C. H. W. Johns, M. A.,” of Queen’s College, Cambridge.
This introduction recites that in reading these lectures all Bible students “felt themselves on very familiar ground.” “No doubt,” the writer remarks, “some felt a little disappointed at so conservative a treatment.” “It came therefore as a shock of surprise to find that rejoinders were being issued.” And referring to these rejoinders by Christian scholars, Mr. Johns writes, “In an age when almost any argument is enough to base a popular cause upon, when men let themselves be led captive by the most specious nonsense, we are used to the publication of things as meaningless as the scrawlings of planchette. But even these meet with so much acceptance that they become a perilous influence on ill-regulated minds.”
I crave special attention to these words. They are altogether typical of the weapons by which every day, and on every side, humble Christians are being browbeaten into unbelief by the advocates of this modern craze of the pseudo-Criticism. In our own country at least such weapons are not tolerated in other spheres of controversy. Even in the rough struggle of politics it is only the baser sort of men who have recourse to them. And in a sphere in which feeling is so sensitive and so sacred no generous mind will stoop to use them. But we are told at every turn that all intelligence, all scholarship, and all culture are on the side of this new apostasy. The same taunt was as freely urged by the champions of the old Arian heresy, of which this modern heresy is but a veiled revival.
“Ill-regulated minds’’: ‘’The most specious nonsense”: ‘’As meaningless as the scrawlings of planchette.” Such weapons are not to my taste. But if I stoop to wrest them from those whose choice they are, I will use them unsparingly. Spiritual truth is absolutely Divine, and must be spiritually discerned. But error and nonsense are altogether human, and can be refuted on that basis. If men choose to treat the Bible
A most outspoken “rejoinder” to Delitzsch was a sermon preached in the Cambridge University pulpit on 8th Nov., 1903. This indignant repudiation of the methods and conclusions of the book was by the “ill-regulated mind” of the Rev. A. F. Kirkpatrick, D. D., Master of Selwyn College, and one of the Professors of Divinity in the University. — Cambridge Review, 12 Nov., 1903.
as a purely human book, we can meet them on their own ground. But when their lucubrations are shown to be mere senseless scrawlings and specious nonsense, let us have no whining if we brand them as they deserve.
With these prefatory words I open “Babel and Bible.” The first thirty-nine pages of the book are mainly a record of some of the recent archaeological discoveries which have amazed and delighted faint-hearted Christians by the confirmation they afford of the authenticity of Scripture: confirmation of a kind that in other ages was never dreamed of by millions who lived and died in the faith of it. But it is the pages that follow which concern us here, for in these we have the lecturer’s inferences and comments.
Here is the first: “When, therefore, the twelve tribes of Israel invaded Canaan, they came to a land which was a domain completely pervaded by Babylonian culture.”
Yes, and the fact has a significance which neither the German professor nor his English editor seems to understand. Babylon was so essentially the seat and impersonation of the religious apostasy of the old world, that in the Apocalypse the name is used in connection with the religious apostasy of the Christian dispensation. The Reformation was God’s method of setting up a testimony against Rome: the call of Abraham, the Egyptian bondage, the Exodus, and the Eisode were His methods of preparing a people who should be His witnesses against the apostasy of Babylon.
‘p. 39-
Hence the sternness with which every influence that tended toward Babylon was suppressed or barred. But in this age of shallow indifference people who call themselves Protestants disparage the Reformers because of their uncompromising hostility to Rome; and people who call themselves Christians blaspheme the God of the Bible because of His stern severity toward Babylon.
But let us come to the details of this new enlightenment. “Just,” we are told —
“Just as the sacrificial and priestly system of the Old Testament is profoundly influenced by the Babylonian, so it is significant that Israelite tradition itself no longer affords any certain information respecting the origin of the Sabbath {cf. Exod. XX. II with Deut. v. 15).
“But since the Babylonians also had a Sabbath ... it is scarcely possible for us to doubt that we owe the blessings decreed in the Sabbath or Sunday day of rest in the last resort to that ancient and civilised raCe on the Euphrates and Tigris.” ’
Now my purpose here is not to lay down the law, but to treat my readers as a jury, whose function it shall be to decide the issues I submit to them. I pause therefore here to raise the question. What must be the mental condition, the reasoning capacity, of a man who could write the words I have just quoted, or who could, as an editor, adopt them?
The preliminary inquiry — the supposed conflict between Exod. XX. and Deut. v. — may be left to the judgment of any intelligent Christian. The re-promulgation of the Sabbath law at Sinai — for that it was
1 pp. 40, 41.
a re-promulgation the words of the Decalogue expressly recognise — pointed back to the Creation. But that law had been forgotten and lost while Israel was “a slave in the land of Egypt.” Hence Moses’ added words at its second re-promulgation at the Jordan: ‘’ Therefore the Lord thy God commanded thee to keep the Sabbath day.” This, however, is a minor point.
One of the many difficulties and embarrassments of secret service work arises from the necessity of trusting one’s agents. If I want an informant to follow up a clue, I must place the thread in his hand. If I want him to work on the facts already in my possession, it may be necessary to give him those facts. I thus put it in his power to sell my information to the newspapers, or to disclose it to his co-conspirators. And yet I cannot certainly charge him with being false to me; for I have given him facts, and facts may be known to others as well as to myself. But I can easily test him. Let me send him out with a plausibly invented story; and if one word of it appears in the newspapers, or comes back to me through other informants, I know he has betrayed my confidence.
This parable surely needs no commentary. If the Sabbath were a human institution, then the argument would be plausible that, as Babylon had a Sabbath day, and Babylon was an older nation than Israel, the day of rest was borrowed from “that ancient race on the Euphrates.” Plausible, I admit, but nothing more. But when these men go on to lay this down as a fact which ‘’it is scarcely possible for us to doubt,” we can only suppose that their brain power of doubting is already exhausted by the effort of doubting everything which has been most surely believed among Christians of every name in every age. If, on the other hand, the Sabbath is a Divine institution — if, as we know, the seven-day cycle is stamped upon our very physical frame — then the whole argument is absolutely puerile.
In a measure also the foregoing parable applies to the record of the Flood. Even if the Biblical narrative were a mere legend, the student of evidence would decide, not that Genesis was based on the Babylon version of it, but that both were derived from a common source. For the differences which mark them can scarcely be explained on any other ground. But this Deluge controversy is worn threadbare, and I pass on to the Creation.^
I could wish that space permitted of my giving in full Professor Delitzsch’s summary of “the creationepic” of Babylon, recounting the struggle between Marduk, “the god of light,” and the evil dragon, Tiamat. But the following extract must sufRce: —
“Straight he drives to meet the dragon and her army, and utters the call to single combat. Then Tiamat uttered wild and piercing cries until the ground quaked asunder from the bottom. She opened her jaws to their utmost, but before she could close her lips the god Marduk bade the evil wind enter within her; then seizing the javelin, he cut her heart in pieces, cast down her body and stood upon it whilst her
The Sabbath is dealt with on pp. 40 and 41 (see also pp. 181 and 190); the Flood on pp. 42-46; and the Creation on PP- 47-52. Why the Flood should come before the Creation, I do not know.
myrmidons were placed in durance vile. Then Marduk clave Tiamat clean asunder like a fish: out of the one half he formed heaven, out of the other earth, at the same time dividing the upper waters from the lower by means of the firmament.”
We are asked to believe that this is the origin of the simple and sublime record of Genesis! The question which once again I submit to the thoughtful reader is, not as to the truth or heresy of such a theory, but as to the intellectual condition, the reasoning capacity, of men who propound it or who father it. Where is the “specious nonsense” now?
We next come to the story of the Fall, and here again I submit the same issue to the jury. “May we point to an old Babylonian cylinder seal?” the lecturer asks. And a fac-simile of the seal is set out upon the page. “Here, in the middle,” he proceeds, “is the tree hanging with fruit; on the right the man, to be recognised by the horns, the symbol of strength, on the left the woman; both reaching out their hands to the fruit, and behind the woman the serpent. Should there not be a connection between this old Babylonian representation and the Biblical story of the Fall?”
“A connection “? Certainly. No one would dispute it. But the suggestion that this discredits “the Biblical story of the Fall” is worthy of a lunatic asylum. And yet this is clearly the innuendo of the passage.^
^P. 56.
To reproduce the illustration is unfortunately impracticable. It reminds one of a baby’s first attempt at art. The tree in the middle is like a dilapidated hat-stand. On either
We next learn that the heaven and the hell of the Bible are but a perversion of “the simple Babylonian idea of the clear water which is enjoyed in Sheol by those who are perfectly pious.” ‘And as for angels, “the idea that the Deity employs messengers is essentially Babylonian; and the conception of cherubim and seraphim, and of guardian angels attending upon man, is also to be traced back to Babylonia. A Babylonian ruler required an army of messengers to carry his commands into every land; so, too, the gods must have a legion of messengers or angels always ready to do their service.””
Again I ask, What can be the mental condition of people who think the Bible is discredited by such “specious nonsense” as this? Indeed the reader may decide whether, here at least, the qualifying adjective may not be discarded.
Yet another specimen. “The Yahwe faith” was “burdened... with a heathen sacrificial cultus.” Thus it is that this writer brands the sacrifices which, the New Testament expressly declares, were Divine types of Calvary.
side is a petticoated figure in a sitting posture, with an air space between it and a square box. As Professor Delitzsch tells us, we know that one is a man because he has horns; he omits to mention that we know the other is a woman because she has a hat. Behind her is a serpent pirouetting on the tip of its tail. It is most interesting as showing how traditions of the Fall have survived outside the sphere of revelation. But for Professor Delitzsch’s purpose it is grotesquely puerile. That I have not misrepresented his purpose is clear from an appendix note on p. 114; qui s’ excuse s’ accuse. ’ p. 62. p. 63. ’ p. j6.
n PSEUDO-CRITICISM
Here I would propose a question. Did any sane man, savage or civilised, ever evolve from his own brain ‘the thought that if he offended another the right way to appease him would be to make a mess opposite his door by slaughtering a beast there? And the man who could imagine that his god would be propitiated by such a performance must suppose his god to be more of a lunatic than himself. There is only one explanation possible of the “heathen sacrificial cultus,” and that is the tradition of a primeval revelation.
But, we are told, the 19th verse of the 4th chapter of Deuteronomy “at one blow annihilates the phantom of an ’ original revelation,’” and at the same time expresses “in the plainest words” that all nations, Israel alone excepted, are “given up by Yahwe himself to godlessness and idolatry.”
Here are materials for an interesting de lunatico inquiry. Will my reader study for himself this verse — Deut. iv. 19 — and see if he can find in it the meaning thus extracted from it.
There is plenty in these pages about the savage cruelty of “Yahwe,” and much is made of the extermination of the “innocent” Canaanites.^ The lecturer’s archaeological researches might have taught him that those nations were all (as the Bible tells us) “greater and mightier” than Israel. How was it,
pp. 206 and 207; cf. p. 151.
E. g., “The more deeply I immerse myself in the spirit of the prophetic literature of the Old Testament the greater becomes my mistrust of Yahwe, who butchers the people with the sword of his insatiable anger.”
then, that they went down before Israel as ripe corn falls before the sickle?
They had their “walled cities” and “their chariots of iron” — the equivalent of modern artillery. And yet one and all they fell before this nomad Arab tribe, not long rescued from slavery; a tribe that had neither horse nor chariot, nor a “walled city,” and whose “military base” was only an open camp, filled with women and children, and camp-followers and cattle. He who scouts the whole story may be a philosopher; but he who accepts the facts and yet rejects the Scriptural explanation of them must be a — well, he is not a philosopher!
And here two passages of Holy Scripture might have checked the lecturer’s blasphemies. The one tells how, centuries before these nations were given over to destruction by a long-suffering and merciful God, they had become so steeped in nameless vice, that in one of their cities not even ten’ men could be found who were free from it.^ And the other is the awful warning which fell from the lips of the Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, that a fate more terrible than that of Sodom awaits the rejecters of His teaching.
The God who gave up the nations of Canaan to the sword is He who in one hour destroyed the Cities of
The subject is an unsavoury one, and I would deal with it by referring to Mr. Gladstone’s “Impregnable Rock of Holy Scripture,” pp. 112, 113. Those nations, he writes, “had reached that latest stage of sensual iniquity, which respects neither God nor Nature.” Their “bestial indulgencies had become recognised, normal, nay more, even religious and obligatory.” But I refer to the whole passage.
the Plain by fire. And with that God and that judgment the Saviour in His ministry of grace identified Himself.^ But men who hold the Bible in such contempt cannot be expected to read it carefully.
There is another of their errors which the reverent student of Scripture would avoid. I wonder whether Macaulay’s New Zealander, when he comes to write our story, will take our Criminal Code as reflecting the principles by which Christians to-day are guided in their daily life. Yet a blunder as gross marks the criticisms of these pundits. They confound the law of the theocracy with teaching by which the people of God were to direct their lives.
And there is yet another blunder which marks these pages, a blunder shared by very many who have no sympathy with heresy. People seem to think that while grace is Divine, law is altogether human. But “there is no power but of God,” and the criminal magistrate is as definitely a “minister of God “^ as is the preacher of the Gospel. And the very element which leads ignorance to brand the” Mosaic Code “as barbarous is precisely the element the want of which makes English law so cruel in its operation. The “anarchist” — that is, the man who committed a “presumptuous” (or, as R. V. has it, a high-handed) offence, an offence in respect of which no plea of provocation or temptation could be urged — received a pitiless judgment; but for others, even the homicide not excepted, there was mercy.
Matt. X. 15; xi. 24. Rom. xiii.
‘Num. XV. 30-36; XXXV. II. The author deals with this question in his “Christianised Rationalism,” pp. 56-58; and
Professor Delitzsch’s use of the Hammurabi Code is so characteristic of the ways of the pseudo-Critics, that it claims a passing notice. The Amraphel of Genesis xiv. they formerly dismissed as a myth, and the “Mosaic Books,” they declared, could not have been written so early as in the Mosaic age. But now Amraphel stands out as one of the great figures of the old world, and his code has rightly excited admiration. But instead of repenting of their past mistakes and blunders, the Critics now declare that the Mosaic Code was merely an adaptation of this Hammurabi Code of four centuries earlier.
When judged by details of the kind to which the student of evidence would look in testing such a question, the two codes are entirely dissimilar. But this is not all. If the ‘’ Mosaic Code” were purely human and really the work of Moses, the theory would be reasonable that it was borrowed from Babylon; but, according to the Critics, this code was framed a thousand years after Hammurabi had been forgotten. Their one theory thus blows their other theory into the air.
My scheme, however, is not to review or answer this evil book, but merely to enable my readers to estimate aright its character. And this for the purpose I have indicated, namely, to illustrate the effects of the pseudo-Criticism upon minds of a certain kind. In “What is Christianity?” we see how a scholar of
from another point of view in his articles on Crime in the Nineteenth Century, 1901-1904. It is the want of this distinction which makes our English law so cruel to the weak, so inefficient in the case of the wicked.
the highest rank, a grave and reverent theologian, and a master of the rare art of reasoning, is thus, by the inexorable logic of a false system, brought down to the level of mere Rationalism, In “Babel and Bible” we see how a man of a different type is led with levity worthy of a precocious schoolboy to run amuck through all that is most sacred in the Christian revelation. Many a page might be filled with extracts to point the moral. But two more quotations must suffice.
The first of these I cannot bring myself to criticise. I give the shameful words without note or comment: —
“‘O Marduk! ’ — runs a petition in a prayer to the citydeity of Babel — ‘O Marduk! to thee belongs the spittle of life! ‘Who can fail in such a connection to recall New Testament accounts such as that which narrates that Jesus took the deaf and dumb man aside, put his finger unto his ears, spat, and with the spittle touched his tongue, and said, * Ephphatha,” Be thou opened! ‘”
My last quotation is the following: —
“With the giving of the Law from Sinai, the conclusion of a so-called covenant by Yahwe with Israel, it is in no respect different. In spite of this sacrosanct bond the purely human origin and character of the Israelitish Law is sufficiently obvious.”
If “sufficiently obvious,” how strange it is that it was reserved for this “Daniel come to judgment” to discover it. What possible claim to respect or consideration have men who treat in this jaunty way the
‘p. 174. ‘pp. 187, 188, deliberate convictions of others, so many of whom hold the highest rank in the hierarchy of learning and of genius? For page after page might be filled with the names of contemporary thinkers and scholars of world-wide fame in every branch of human knowledge who believe that the Sinai covenant was Divine.
The main *’ argument “of the Epistle to the Hebrews is based upon the contrast between this Divine covenant with Israel, and the new and better covenant of which the Christian revelation speaks. Here we stand upon holy groimd. But there is an inner shrine; and as we pass within the veil into the presence of our Divine Lord, we hear from His lips those most sacred of sacred words. ‘’ This is the new covenant in My blood which is shed for you.”
The greatest of the Apostles was once “a blasphemer,” but he obtained mercy because he sinned in unbelief and ignorance. And all who know the boundless grace which the new covenant betokens may surely cherish the hope that, in the infinite mercy of God, the authors of such books as these may receive a fool’s pardon at the last.