The Bible, what it is and is not

Contents

PAGE

I. The Great Bibles of the World . 9

II. The Authorized Version ... 24

II

We have seen that the Bible does not stand alone, but is one of a distinct class of books called the sacred books of the world. All the foremost religions of mankind have had sacred books which have been regarded with the same feelings of veneration that our own Bible inspires among us. This is not for one moment to say that one Bible is as good as another, or that all stand on one level. Snowdon is a mountain and the Matterhom is a mountain, but one is immeasurably loftier than the other. And the Bibles of the world differ in their value to the human race, differ in the nobility and inspiration to which they rise. Our own Bible is easily first, although perhaps not for the reasons generally assigned. Its superior divinity has for the most part engrossed the zeal of its defenders. But what I care for most is its superior humanity.

OLD TESTAMENT HEROES 25

Shakespeare is not a whit more human. What an insight it has into the human heart ! How it reveals to us the secret places of the human mind, and so reveals to us ourselves ! How, as it unfolds the great drama of humanity, are we shown that God is the educator of man ! Human life, as depicted in the Bible, is largely typical. Men lived boldly from within, and what they said and did had that broad human significance which forecasted what men would say and do to the end of time. How true to human nature is that mixture of good and evil we find in its heroes ! Popular theology would have us think of Abraham, Jacob, Moses, and David as almost perfect in character, quite beyond anything which we see in our day. Popular scepticism flies to the other extreme, and can speak only of the deceitfulness of Jacob, and the adultery of David, asking with a sneer, ' What sort of a God is he when these are called men after his own heart ? ' Both are wrong. These men were by no means perfect, and the Bible never speaks of them in that way. They were terribly imperfect ; they fell, they were punished, and they carried the penalty of wrongdoing with them to their graves. But this is their glory : that they knew they were imperfect, and were not content ; they lifted themselves above the average morality of their day ; they made strenuous efforts after something nobler ; they were led on by God to higher levels than men had yet attained ; they were men who, in spite of their sins, still clung to the sense of God. The good that was in them was marred and debased by the alloy of selfish, base, and cruel elements ; and we are shown, as we are shown nowhere else, these two struggling with each other, the victory sometimes to the evil and sometimes to the good, yet on the whole, in the long run, the good prevaiHng. It is our own deceit we read in the story of Jacob ; it is our own shame and repentance we hear in the bitter cries of David. These men are not wax figures on which moral maxims are hung like suits of clothes made to the pattern we require. They are warm, living, human souls in whom we find our own experience. We see how Jacob's treachery found him out and was paid back in kind, and accompanied him, a dark shadow upon his life, all the days of his pilgrimage ; and we know from our own lives that we can never escape the consequences of any of our deeds. We listen to Job arraigning and challenging God, and we think we hear our own hearts speak in passionate trial. We hear Nathan saying unto David, ' Thou art the man,' and we know that Nathan stands just for our own accusing conscience. Whether the Bible be a divine book or not, it is certainly the greatest

THE BOOK OF TWO RELIGIONS 27

book of the human heart and of human Hfe ever written.

It is the distinction of the Bible to be the sacred book of two great religions, the Jewish and the Christian. Consider what the Old Testament has been to the Jewish people — a nation without a country now for eighteen centuries — in all their homeless wanderings. It was their consolation through a thousand years of Christian persecution. Consider, too, what the Bible has been to Protestant Christians, the charter of their freedom from the jurisdiction of the Pope ; an armoury of weapons against idolatry and priestly domination ; to French Huguenots and Scotch Covenanters and English Puritans, a nurse of heroes, teaching them many a song of battle, many a hope of final victory.

Surely such a book, with such a history, and such a fame, and such intrinsic value, merits the most careful consideration. It has been before the world so long — its youngest chapters 1700 years — and has been so much read and studied, that it would seem as if it ought to have been fairly comprehended long ago. But please remember that until the Protestant Reformation the Bible was hidden from the common people in the priestly ark of an unspoken language. The common people have only been in possession of the Bible about four centuries. A little farther back the New Testament was assailed by monks and priests as an invention of the devil ; and even the scholarship which hung over the Bible before Erasmus was superstitious and uncritical to the last degree. Since then there has been a steady progress in the direction of a more scientific comprehension of its character ; and through the labours of a host of great and laborious scholars we are now in a better position to judge of the Bible, to separate the legendary from the historical, and the true from the erroneous, the gold from the rubble, than were even those who lived when its parts were first brought together into one book. And yet, so far as I can judge, the new criticism has made but very little impression upon the popular estimate of the Bible and the uses to which it is put. Even ministers who are acquainted with the new criticism, and substantially accept it, go on using the Bible as if nothing had happened, when something has happened of fundamental interest and importance. As for the average disciple in our Protestant communities, the Bible is for him what it was for his fathers. It is one book. Its parts are all of equal value. A text here is as good as a text there or anywhere else ; Old Testament as edifying as New ; the Book of Judges on the same level as the Epistle to the Philippians ; words taken out of their connexion

THE DANGERS OF LITERALISM 29

made to mean exactly the opposite of what was in the writer's mind ; the minutiae of Christian theology found in or read into the obscurities of Hebrew history. Dr. J. Mason Neale, the well-known hymn writer, has pubhshed a sermon on the text, ' Now therefore^ king, come down according to all the desire of thy soul to come down.''^ The literal sense of the passage, a petition of the Ziphites to Saul to come down that they may deliver David into his hand, is nowhere mentioned. It is applied to Christ's coming down, first in his incarnation ' from the crown of celestial majesty to the diadem of thorns,'' and secondly to his coming down in the Eucharist at the call of the priest ! Such a method of interpreting Scripture is both fanciful and frivolous. Or, take the words ' Touch not, taste not,'^ which are constantly quoted on temperance platforms as though they were an Apostolic injunction not even to hand to a neighbour a glass of wine. But these words are a popular saying of the ascetics which Paul quotes only to condemn. He reproaches those who are subject to such rules and ordinances. The text is made to mean exactly the contrary of what the Apostle taught. These are only two instances of the misuse of the Bible out of thousands that might be given.

What then have we in our Authorized Version of the Bible ? First notice the title. The Bible, that is to say, The Book. But this title is a very modem one. It is only within recent centuries it has gone by this name — ' the book ' in the singular number. Five hundred years ago the Bible was not called ' Ton Bihliofiy the book, but * Ta Bihlia,^ the books — a much exacter designation ; one which, if it had been retained, would have done something to prevent the almost universal misconception that the Bible is one book, and not a collection of books, the various offspring of 1200 years of literary activity — the collected fragments and remnants of a great national literature. What we have in the Bible is not one book, but a library brought together within the same covers. Even the plural form of the name was never used until the fifth century. Before that they were called the scriptures, or the writings.

Leaving the title and opening the book, what do we find ? If it be a Catholic copy or one of the older Protestant copies, we shall find three divisions : the Old Testament, the , Apocrypha, and the New Testament. We will, however, leave out of consideration the Apocrypha, although it is received by CathoHcs as of equal authority with the rest.

The two divisions that are left consist of

FRAGMENTS OF A NATIONAL LITERATURE 3 1

histories, legal enactments, poetry, prophecy, letters, myths, hymns, sermons, pamphlets, fly sheets, stories, parables, proverbs, treatises, and almost every kind of hterary effort.

The Old Testament has in it thirty-nine separate books, and the New Testament twenty-seven, making a library of sixty-six little volumes in all. So far as the thirty-nine books of the Old Testament are concerned, they are, as I have said, the collected fragments and remnants of a great national literature. The lost books of the Bible would be an inestimable treasure if they could be found. It seems that there are no less than sixteen books missing from the Old Testament which clearly ought to be there ; at least, which are referred to and quoted in the Bible as if they were genuine Old Testament Books. The Book of Jasher, the Book of Nathan and Gad, the Book of the Wars of the Lord, the Book of Ahijah and Iddo, Solomon's Parables and Treatise on Natural History, the Words of the Seers, the Prophecy of Enoch, and others are all mentioned ; and in some places long quotations are given from them, such as David's lament over Saul and Jonathan. This is the first point that comes out in the most superficial examination of the Bible ; that it contains the remnants of two great hteratures — that of the Jewish nation, and that of the early Christian Church.

Then as to its authors. Many of the books are anonymous, and others, such as the Pentateuch, are attributed to people whom we know could never have written them, because they contain allusions to events which happened after they were dead. Who wrote the Book of Judges and of Joshua, the so-called Five Books of Moses, the Books of Samuel, the Book of Job, we shall never be able to settle ; about some of them we cannot even make a guess. As for the others they represent all classes of society from King David to the shepherd Amos ; there are women, poets, soldiers, musicians, fishermen, statesmen, physicians, men of all callings and all conditions, among the writers and contributors to this wonderful collection.

As to its date, the most erroneous opinions prevail. The notion formerly held was that the first five books of the Old Testament were written by Moses nearly 1500 years before Christ. But with the growth of modern scholarship this idea has been steadily losing ground. It is now seen that very large portions of those books could not have been written or arranged until long after Moses' death, probably not until he had been dead four hundred years. Moses did not write the account of his own death, Moses did not give in the Pentateuch the names of places which had no existence when he lived ; or mention names of

MOSES AND THE PENTATEUCH 33

weights and measures then unknown, or allude to events as past and well known which only happened after his death, or show a technical acquaintance with the topography of a land he was never allowed to enter. Moses probably wrote very little, only the Ten Commandraents, the Song of Miriam, and one or two other passages. In some form or other, * the Law,' as this part of the Bible was called, was probably first put together in Samuel's time — perhaps by Samuel ; but in the form in which we have it, not until about four hundred and fifty B.C., in the reign of Nehemiah. The Genesis myth of the creation of the world, the stories of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, had long been transmitted in oral form, and no doubt date back much before Moses. They may, indeed, have existed in a written form as family records, but were certainly not brought together in the way we have them until a late period in Jewish history.

Our English Bible is, as you know, a translation from certain Hebrew and Greek MSS. But this which we call the Authorized Version to-day was not the first of such translations. It is the last but one of the series beginning with the work of Tyndale, Coverdale, and their compeers, followed by the Geneva, the Bishops', the Douay Bible and others, until at last under the patronage of King James I in 1611, 294 years ago, the version was published with which we are all so familiar.

Now I must call your attention to two or three particulars of our English Bible. You will find as you open it that it is divided not only into books, but these books are cut up into chapters and verses. Are these chapters and verses any part of the original ? Not at all. We need to bear this in mind because sometimes it is a matter of great practical importance. There are no chapters and verses in the Hebrew and Greek, but each book consists of one solid mass of words, without divisions of any sort, without capitals or marks of punctuation. Not until 1551 was the Bible printed with its present divisions of chapter and verse, by Henry Stephens, the great printer-scholar of his time. The divisions, though often convenient, yet often obscure the sense and break the connexion ; and the verse arrangement especially has been a fruitful source of textual polemics, resulting in bad blood and bad theology. The verse divisions are often so purely arbitrary that in many instances it would have been just as accurate if the text had been divided into sections of half an inch in length without any regard to their meaning.

Another thing peculiar to our English Bible is the chapter headings and running titles, indicating, according to King James's translators, the mean-

TRANSLATION NOT INFALLIBLE 35

ing of the authors. With the exception of the Psalms they all date from 161 1. They are no part of the Bible. Many of them are not only fanciful but grossly incorrect. They are really a process of interpreting Scripture according to the theology which was orthodox in 1611. It is these headings which have caused that noble eastern love-poem, the Song of Songs, to be so misunderstood and ridiculed, turning a beautiful human lesson into an allegory of Christ and his Church. Many of the running titles in the Pentateuch and Prophets are equally absurd.

Let us remember, then, as we handle the Bible that the original writers are not responsible for these headings any more than they are responsible for the divisions into chapters and verses.

One other thing about our English Bible must be borne in mind. Let us grant for a moment that the original Hebrew and Greek MSS. are the infallible word of God. Nevertheless, as we open our English Bible, we cannot feel that we have in our hands an infallible translation of this infallible work. No one claims that the translators were infallible. We have only their judgment as to what the original writers mxcant, put into the best English they knew. But now we know that many portions of the existing Hebrew and Greek MSS. were copied from other sources.

Were those copyists infallibly protected from error ? The records, had they been originally infallible, would still have needed special and continuous miracle (which no one claims) to protect them through generations of oral tradition, cuneiform, and hieroglyphic picture-writing, many languages, many scribes, many printers. No two translations are exactly alike. Even in the Revised Version, made by the best scholarship in the world, the American and English members differed very seriously as to the meaning of certain words and phrases. These differences are so important that an appendix has been added containing them. Supposing even that 3500 years ago God Almighty spoke a few sentences face to face with Moses, there is no conceivable machinery or combination of circumstances which could ensure the perfectly accurate transmission of those words to us. We have received them through records which, while generally trustworthy, cannot be trusted in many of their minute details, and through men who were as liable to err as we are. We may well believe that nothing essential has been lost ; but we cannot believe that everything preserved has been preserved without mistake. Yet in our English Bible as it is, what a boon we have ! Even the obscurer parts of the Pentateuch are full of moral and spiritual teaching of eternal value. In spite of

THE VALUE OF THE BIBLE 37

their unintelligent and often superstitious interpretation, how mightily have the Scriptures worked for life and godliness ! Many who use the Bible in a very faulty way have yet found it to be the Bread of Life unto their souls. It is like the air we breathe : we may pollute it but we cannot do without it. It is like wheaten flour : we may cook it badly, and make an indigestible mess of it instead of palatable bread ; but even as heavy and unpalatable dough it sustains human life. EngHshmen have long misunderstood and misapplied many parts of the Bible ; yet how much of what is best in the EngHsh character, how much of its love of honesty and plain dealing, its reverence for domestic purity, its passion for freedom, may be traced to the famiharity of om* fathers with the letter of the Bible ! And if the Bible has exercised so great an influence over men who so often used it wrongly, how much greater wiU be its influence when it is everywhere used with intelligence, by men who are alive to the eternal difference between the letter and the spirit !

Ill

In connexion with these lectures I have received an interesting letter in which the writer says : ^ If we admit that any fart of the Bible is mistaken, how can we have confidence with regard to the rest ? Either it is all inspired or every man is free to pick and choose as he pleases'

Now this is not at all an uncornmon frame of mind. Often in the course of controversy the cry is raised, ' The whole Bible or nothing.' In the ' Life of Lord Shaftesbury/ we are told that this great-hearted but narrow-minded man was much shocked by the assertion that the Books of Chronicles and the Gospel of St. Luke were not on the same level of inspiration. He replied : ' There is no security whatever except in standing upon the faith of our fathers, and saying that the blessed old book is God's word written from the very first syllable to the very last, and from the last book to the first.' But is it true that we are shut

THE ' ALL OR NOTHING ' THEORY 39

Up to the alternative, the whole Bible or nothing ? If we speak of a gold mine we do not mean to say that nothing but gold is found there : what we mean is that while quartz, and sand, and mud, and rubble are there, gold is its valuable and distinctive product. What would you think of a miner who should say : ' How am I to tell the difference between the gold and the rubbish ? ' You would say : ' You must use your eyes, your common sense, and the tests which a knowledge of mining supply.' The Bible is a gold mine ; but all is not gold found there, and we have to discriminate. We are told that to destroy a verse or a letter of the Bible is to destroy the whole ; either all is true or nothing can be rehed upon. But you never think of applying the * all or nothing theor^^ ' to any other book. If I open the Globe edition of Shakespeare, I find included among his plays, ' Timon of Athens,' which, when I carefully examine, I conclude was written by Shakespeare only in part. But do I therefore invalidate Shakespeare's claim to be the author of ' Hamlet ' ? Or do I ask the foolish question, how am I to know that anything is by Shakespeare if I admit that he did not write every word of that which passes under his name ? The answer is obvious. You must discriminate : you must bring to bear the tests furnished by wide reading, by literary criticism, by familiarity with Shakespeare and his comrades, and, above all, by good sense.

You would think the man a fool who threw away his Shakespeare because it turned out that * Timon of Athens ' was not from Shakespeare's pen at all ; and what shall we say of men who declare that the Bible is worthless for a similar reason ? When a man asks how he may know whether this portion of the Bible is inspired or not, I answer. Use your common sense ; what is the impression the passage makes on you ? Do you feel it to be an utterance of quickening, hallowing power ? How does it compare with other utterances about whose inspiration you have no doubt ? And if you are warned that in all this you are just trusting to the light of reason, I answer. What else is a man to trust ? Unless he brings his reason to bear upon religious problems — reason enHghtened by conscience, affection, experience, and knowledge, what else can he bring to bear ? But his reason may deceive him. Yes, and so may our eyes deceive us, when they tell us that the sun goes round the earth. Often we have to correct the testimony of our eyes by knowledge obtained in other ways. Yet, on the whole, our eyes are the guides God intended us to follow, and we do not pluck them out because once and again they make mistakes. So, on the whole, reason is the guide God intends us to follow

NO ORIGINAL MS. 4I

in religion, and we do not discard its testimony because sometimes it is mistaken. If reason ever leads us astray it is simply because we have not exercised it diligently enough.

This much, then, to dispose of an objection which has troubled some who are attending these lectures.

To-night our subject is the Text and the Canon. By the text we mean the original Hebrew and Greek MSS. from which our translation is made.

Now it may surprise some of you to know that there is no one original Hebrew or Greek MS. containing the books of our Bible. There is no one authorized copy of the Old Testament in Hebrew, no one authorized copy of the New Testament in Greek. There are great numbers of MSS., some older than the others ; but no two of them exactly alike, so that scholars, before they translate, have to construct a text — that is, have to compare and collate, and out of various MSS., and various readings, compile a Greek Testament, from which they make the translation.

Let us take the New Testament. We have in the world a collection — not in any one place, but in many places — of nearly 1700 Greek MSS. of the New Testament. Sometimes a MS. is complete, containing all the books, sometimes containing certain books not now admitted, sometimes omitting books which we receive.

Are all these MSS. aUke ? Does there seem to h,ave been any supernatural supervision exercised in making these copies to keep out errors or mistakes ? You can judge for yourselves when I tell you that in these 1700 MSS. there are nearly 150,000 various readings. It is only just to say, of course, that the larger part of these variations are minute, not touching matters of great importance ; sometimes only the difference in the spelUng of a word ; sometimes a difference in the name of a place ; but some of them are important enough to extend to whole paragraphs and parts of chapters.

These variations came about in the most natural way. Through the errors of copyists ; through the desire of copyists to make something clear which they thought they could do by changing one word for another ; through differences of opinion as to the evidence for this and that story or utterance ; through the incorporation into the text of some comment made by a learned father ; and alas ! through the wilful changing or insertion of words to bolster up a particular theological doctrine, these variations were produced. Most of them are the simple errors of copyists, mere slips of eye, ear, memory, or judgment. If you have ever had a long letter

THE THREE EARLIEST MSS. 43

copied by the hands of a clerk, or if you have ever attempted to do any copying yourself, you know how easy it is to leave out or mis-spell a word, or to substitute a wrong one, or to make any one of a dozen common errors. If, however, you remember that these Greek MSS. were not divided into chapters and verses, but were written sohd, without capitals, without punctuation marks, without any division even into paragraphs, you will see how easy it was for errors of one kind or another to creep in.

But, you say, surely the earliest MSS. of all would be free from most of these errors, and if we translate from them we shall be all right. But the earliest MSS. of all are copies of copies, of copies, of copies ! Do you know we have no MS. of the New Testament earlier than the fourth century ? There are three MSS. earliest in date which are reckoned as the greatest authorities on the Text of the New Testament. The oldest in existence is the Sinaitic ; the next is the Vatican ; and the third is the Alexandrian. The Sinaitic is at St. Petersburg ; the Vatican is at Rome ; and the Alexandrian in the British Museum.

The Sinaitic and the Vatican belong to the fourth, and the Alexandrian to the fifth century. That is to say, we have no MS. that takes us back nearer to Jesus than 300 years after his death.

But we know from other sources that if earUer MSS. could be recovered they would be as full of differences as those we possess. The works of the Fathers of the second and third centuries contain quotations from the New Testament, many of which do not at all agree with each other ; and these same Fathers are constantly charging their opponents with wilfully corrupting the text of Scripture for their own party purposes. The greatest name of those days is that of Origen, and, writing on this subject, he says : ' As the case stands, it is obvious that the difference between the copies is considerable, partly from the carelessness of individual scribes, partly from the wicked daring of some in correcting what is written, partly from those who add or remove what seems good to them in the process of correction.''

He himself expressly notices thirteen different readings in the four Gospels. If even the first autograph MSS. from the writers' hands were before us, we should not feel confident that we had received in every case the exact words of Jesus. For the Evangelists themselves tell us how often the disciples misunderstood their Master. When he called himself ' The Bread of Life,'' and said, ' He that eateth me shall live by me^ they understood the words literally and could make no sense of them. How can we be sure of the verbal accuracy of reporters who

DIFFERENCES IN MSS. 45

are so liable to be stuck fast by the letter ? I have no doubt that, on the whole, we have in the Gospels an account which gives us substantially the sayings and the teaching of Jesus ; but we have no such infallibly accurate account as justifies us in building a tremendous doctrine — such, for instance, as that of everlasting punishment — on the literal rendering of a couple of texts. Before a doctrine so awful is offered me for belief, I should like to be assured that the meagre texts on which it is based do really report the very words of Jesus, and that it has no other authority than the blunder of a copyist. Why, these three great MSS. preserved to us, differ from each other on many minor and some important points. The Alexandrian MS. contains the Epistle of Clement to the Corinthians, and omits the first twenty-four chapters of St. Matthew. The Vatican MS. does not contain the Epistles to Timothy, Titus, and Philemon — nor the Apocalypse. The Sinaitic MS., procured by the great scholar Tischendorf from an old monastery on Mount Sinai in the year 1859, contains the Epistle to Barnabas and the Shepherd of Hermas — two books now rejected. When these MSS. contain the same books they differ as to many words and phrases in them, and we are thrown back on probability, on common sense, and on human scholarship as to which is the most likely reading.