Stumbling Stones Removed from the Word of God

We use the expression, “Stumbling Stones,” merely by way of accommodation. The most devout and patient students of the Word of God fail to find inconsistencies, contradictions or real discrepancies in the Bible. All difificulties are due either to the imperfection of the medium of transmission, human language; or to the imperfection of the receptacle of the truth, the human mind itself. Our limited capacity, or our limited point of view and range of vision, may account for apparent imperfections, obscurities and disagreements in the Divine Word.

The purpose of this little book is not so much to reach those who accuse and assault the Inspired Word, as to help believers. That old Saint, Kleker, told D’Aubigne, that to remove one difficulty out of the way of a caviller only makes way for another; and that, if one will only take Christ as a complete Saviour and make a full surrender to Him, difficulties will commonly vanish. We believe that it is the heart that makes the theology; and that most of our doubts may be ultimately traced to an “evil heart of unbelief” that departs from the living God.

Nevertheless even the most candid and reverent believer finds in the Word of God, especially in the English Bible, some difificulties or hindrances in the way of his understanding, if not of his faith; and such disciples it is our humble aim to help:

1. By removing unnecessary stumbling
stones out of their way;

2. By enabling them to understand what may have been obscure;

3. By laying down certain laws or “canons” of Interpretation;

4. By exposing devices of Satan and other adversaries of the truth;

5. By showing the entire symmetry and self-consistency of the Truth itself.

Where real contradiction exists. Error must be present. Either the error lies in what we mistake for the truths as a mirage is mistaken for a reality; or the error lies in our own organs of visio7i our eye, being diseased, sees double where the object is single. A true believer runs no risk in calmly and resolutely examining into any alleged difficulty or discrepancy in the Bible. If one encounters a supposed ghost on a dark night, the best way is to walk up to it, and look it squarely in the face. To flee from a supposed apparition may leave a lingering doubt whether the ghostly illusion were a reality or not: a bold touch would have dispelled both the illusion and the doubt. To wait patiently and to search diligently is to find even the most formidable difficulties vanish, and to see the error to be one of our own ignorance or misapprehension. Nay, it often happens that stumbling stones become stepping stones, and hindrances are changed to helps.

2320 Spruce St, Philadelphia Pa.
October, 1890.

The so-called ’ discrepancies’ of Holy Scripture may be classified as follows:

First, verbal, or such as concern the words or letters of Scripture;

Secondly, historical, or such as concern the names of persons and places, numbers, dates, and historical statements or events;

Thirdly, moral, or such as concern ethical precepts and principles, duties and relations; and,

Fourthly, doct7’inal, or such as concern the direct doctrinal teaching of the word, especially as to the higher class of spiritual truths. The bibliography of this subject is quite extensive. Some fifty or more volumes have been published, which treat, more or less exclusively, this theme, one of which, by Mr. Haley, covers over five hundred pages. There are probably not less than five hundred other works which contain extended reference to these discrepancies; so that, in the effort to condense what needs to be written upon such a subject into a very brief compass, we find no little additional difficulty. But, as a bulky treatise would defeat our object, we shall simply group all the ’ discrepancies ’ together, and offer general suggestions and principles, covering various particulars in each class.

We begin, very naturally, by inquiring whence these apparent discrepancies come. What Is their sotcrce?

The first general class are those which come from variations in the mere letter of Scripture.

I. Errors in Transcription.

In the absence of the printing press all copies of the Word of God were of course the product of the manual labor of scribes. Prof. Norton estimates that, by the end of the second century, there were sixty thousand manuscripts of the Gospel in existence; and, including manuscripts of the Old Testament, millions of copies of God’s Word have doubtless been made in the course of the ages. From seven hundred to one thousand Greek manuscripts are now extant, of which fifty are one thousand years old, and some few are one thousand five hundred years old, whereas the oldest existing classic manuscript is not nine hundred. Of course the original manuscripts of the Bible have all disappeared, and God meant that they should, to save us from a similar idolatry to that which lifted the Brazen Serpent and Gideon’s Ephod to divine honors.

In producing exact copies, perfect accuracy would be impossible without a perpetual miracle of divine supervision, as great as that of original Inspiration. Even in printed books it is found impraclO STUMBLING STONES REMOVED

ticable to secure entire freedom from errors; even when large rewards have been offered for their detection, new ones have been found after the two hundredth reading. How much more difficult to secure absolute accuracy when the first form is also the final form and there is no chance to correct “proof!”

In manual transcriptions mistakes are therefore inevitable.

1. Hebrew letters often closely resemble each other.

There are at least eight pairs of letters, so nearly alike as to be constantly mistaken for each other, like the English b and d, c and e, f and old-fashioned s, (f) 1 and t. Old manuscripts became faded and blurred, and this increased the liability of such errors, and mistakes in names and figures easily arose in this way, where the context and general sense furnished no guide.

2. It is probable that, both in the Hebrew and Greek manuscripts, letters were anciently used for numerals.

Warrington thinks that the letters of the alphabet, taken in their order, represented numerical values, as follows, units, tens and hundreds up to 400; i, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90, 100, 200, 300, 400; that the five terminal letters supplied the numbers representing the even hundreds, from 500 to 900 inclusive; and that the thousands were represented by affixing marks or points to those representing units, etc.

Two sorts of mistakes might easily creep in; one letter might be mistaken for another of different value; or discrepancies might be introduced where the attempt was made to substitute the full word for the letter. There is scarcely a case in which copyists are believed to have made any intentional change in the original text. In one case, where the name Manasseh appears instead of Moses, some have thought that some officious scribe made the substitution to save the disgrace, to the great Jewish Lawgiver, of recording the idolatry of his grandson (Judges xviii. 30).

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