George Foote - The Book of God - In the Light of the Higher Criticism

His references to Justin Martyr and Papias seem less than ingenuous. It is not true that Justin Martyr "freely uses the Gospels." Dr. Farrar admits that he "does not name them." Saying that he "used" them is quietly assuming that they existed. All that Justin Martyr does, as a matter of fact, is to cite sayings ascribed to Jesus, but not in one single case does he cite a saying of Jesus in exactly the form in which it appears in the Four Gospels. Supposing that he wrote freely, and had ever so bad a memory, and never took the trouble to refer to the originals, it is simply inconceivable that he should never be right. Now and then he must have deviated into accuracy. And the fact that he never does is plain proof that he had not our Gospels before him. Nor does Papias mention "the Gospels." He mentions only two, Matthew and Mark, and he says that Matthew was written in Hebrew , Now, the earliest date at which Papias can be fixed is a.d. 140. This is chosen by Dr. Farrar, and we will let it pass unchallenged. And what follows? Why this, that no Christian writer before a.d. 140 betrays that he has so much as heard of any Gospel, and even then but two are known instead of four , and one of these is most certainly not the Gospel which opens the New Testament.

All this was proved a quarter of a century ago by the author of Supernatural Religion – a work which is systematically ignored by the so-called Higher Critics because its author was a pronounced Rationalist. An excellent summary of this writer's demonstrations appears in the late Matthew Arnold's God and the Bible : —

"He seems to have looked out and brought together, to the best of his powers, every extant passage in which, between the year 70 and the year 170 of our era, a writer might be supposed to be quoting one of our Four Gospels.

"And it turns out that there is constantly the same sort of variation from our Gospels, a variation inexplicable in men quoting from a real Canon, and quite unlike what is found in men quoting from our Four Gospels later on. It may be said that the Old Testament, too, is often quoted loosely. True; but it is also quoted exactly; and long passages of it are thus quoted. It would be nothing that our canonical Gospels were often quoted loosely, if long passages from them, or if passages, say, of even two or three verses, were sometimes quoted exactly. But from writers before Irenæus not one such passage can be produced so quoted. And the author of Supernatural Religion by bringing all the alleged quotations forward, has proved it." 1 1 Arnold, God and the Bible, pp. 222-3.

Now what is the exact value of these demonstrations? We will give it in Mr. Arnold's words: "There is no evidence of the establishment of our Four Gospels as a Gospel-Canon, or even of their existence as they now finally stand at all, before the last quarter of the second century." Not only is there no evidence of the orthodox theory, but, as Mr. Arnold says, the "great weight of evidence is against it."

Dr. Giles – another ignored writer, although a clergyman of the Church of England – had said and proved the very same thing in his Christian Records ; and had appended the following significant declaration: —

"There is positive proof, in the writings of the first ages of Christianity, that the same question as to the age and authorship of the books of the New Testament was even then agitated, and if it was then set at rest, this was done, not by a deliberate sentence of the judge, but by burning all the evidence on which one side of the controversy was supported," 2 2 Dr. Giles, Christian Records, p. 10.

It is probable that Dr. Farrar is well aware that our Four Gospels cannot be traced beyond the second half of the second century – that is, considerably more than a century after the alleged date of the death of Christ. But he shrinks from a frank admission of the fact, and leaves the reader to find it out for himself.

Instead of making this important and, as some think, damning admission, Dr. Farrar continues his remarks on the Bible Canon. That thirty-six books are accepted "on the authority of the Church" simply means, he tells us, that they are accepted "by the general consensus of Christians." The whole Church, as such, has hardly pronounced an opinion on the subject. The Churchmen who voted at Laodicea and Carthage "exercised no independent judgment," and their critical knowledge was "elementary." Nor was the decision of the Council of Trent any real improvement. Dr. Farrar approves the reply of the Reformed Churches, that "any man may reject books claiming to be Holy Scripture if he do not feel the evidence of their contents." But this is to make every man a judge, not only of what the Bible means, but also of what it should contain. Each unfettered Christian may therefore make up a Bible for himself; which is simply chaos come again. What then is the way of escape from this grotesque confusion? Dr. Farrar indicates it with a crooked finger: —

"The decision as to what books are or are not to be regarded as true Scripture, though we believe it to be wise and right, depends on no infallible decision. It must satisfy the scientific and critical as well as the spiritual requirements of each age."

This reduces the Bible Canon to a perpetual transformation scene. It is a tacit confession that the Protestant Bible is an arbitrary collection of questionable documents; that it has nothing to plead for itself but common usage; that its very contents, as well as their interpretation, are liable to change; in short, that if the Catholic stands upon the rock of implicit faith, and defies all dangers by closing his eyes and clutching the reassuring hand of his Holy Mother Church, the Protestant flounders about with the poor little dark-lantern of private judgment in a frightful mud-ocean – his old rock of faith in an infallible Bible having been reduced to dust by the engines of criticism, and finally to slush by a downflow from the lofty reservoir of pure reason. 3 3 It would be a pity to omit an amusing instance of the contemptuous dogmatism of Christian divines when they had the field to themselves. Dr. William Whitaker, a famous learned writer on the side of the Reformation in England, in his Disputation with two of the foremost Jesuits, Bellarmine and Stapleton, wrote as follows: – "Jerome, in the Proem of his Commentaries on Daniel, relates that Porphyry the philosopher wrote a volume against the book of our prophet Daniel, and affirmed that what is now extant under the name of Daniel was not published by the ancient prophet, but by some later Daniel, who lived in the times of Antiochus Epiphanes. But we need not regard what the impious Porphyry may have written, who mocked at all the scriptures and religion itself." Well, this opinion of the blasphemous Porphyry, whose writings were burnt by the Christian Church, is now accepted by the Higher Critics. Canon Driver, for instance, admits that the Book of Daniel is not the work of Daniel, that it could not have been written earlier than 300 B.C., and that "it is at least probable that it was composed under the persecution of Antiochus Epiphanes, B.C. 168 or 167" (Introduction to the Literature of the Old Testament, p. 467). This involves that the fulfilled prophecies of Daniel were written after the events.

Having examined Dean Farrar's observations on the Bible Canon, and seen that it is a more or less arbitrary selection from Hebrew and early Christian literature, many of the books being anonymous, while others bear the names of authors who did not write them, and most of them being much later compositions than orthodoxy supposes; we now take a leap forward to his twelfth chapter to see what he has to say on the subject of the Bible and Science. His first object is to drive home to his co-religionists the mischief of adhering to the old doctrine of Bible infallibility. Consequently he does not mince matters in dealing with the difficulties of the literal theory of inspiration. Writers like Gaussen contend that the Bible is a perfect authority in matters of science. Mr. Gladstone argues that Moses supernaturally anticipated the teachings of modern evolution, and that the inspired fishermen of Galilee, notably St. Peter, no less supernaturally anticipated all that modern astronomy teaches as to the final destiny of our planet. Dr. Farrar declines to follow them in this perilous path. He does not walk in the opposite direction, for that would lead him among the "infidels." He strikes off at right angles, and takes the line that the Bible was never intended to teach science, or anything else but religion. He quotes with approval the saying of Archbishop Sumner, that "the Scriptures have never revealed a scientific truth." He maintains that the writers of Scripture had only a natural knowledge of exact science; and that was precious little, and was indeed rather ignorance than knowledge, as they belonged to "the most unscientific of all nations in the most unscientific of all ages." "It is now understood by competent inquirers," he says, "that geology is God's revelation to us of one set of truths, and Genesis of quite another." "Nature," he says, "is a book which contains a revelation of God in one sphere, and Scripture a book which contains a revelation of him in another. Both books have often been misread, but no truth revealed in the one can be irreconcilable with any truth revealed in the other." This, however, is a mere truism; for one truth cannot be irreconcilable with another truth. Dr. Farrar's statement sounds imposing and consolatory, but when you look into its meaning you see it is only a pulpit platitude.