The relation between Judaism and Christianity, illustrated in notes on the passages in the New Testament containing quotations from, or references to, the Old.

Front matter

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NOTES

Preface

The following pages make a sequel to my " Lectures on the Jewish Scriptures and Antiquities," a large portion of their contents being a requisite complement to the leading argument of that work.

Independently of the inherent interest which belongs to the Jewish Scriptures, demanding diligent care for their correct exposition, I have chiefly aimed, in the series of comments now brought to a close, to make a contribution to the Evidences of Christianity.

From the earliest to the latest times, from the contemporaries of the Apostles to Voltaire and Thomas Paine, the Old Testament has been used as an arsenal for assaults upon Christianity. The Jews, who were addressed by our Lord and his first ministers, said that he did not correspond to the idea which their Prophets, venerated by them as unerring guides, had presented of the Messiah. The Pagan writers, as Celsus, Porphyry, and the Emperor Julian, adopted the same reasoning; and it has been repeated in modern times by Anthony Collins, and other able men. Physical science, as it has advanced, has sup-

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plied indisputable contradictions to the account of the Creation, and other related statements, in the Book of Genesis, — statements for whose correctness the advocates of Christianity had acknowledged that religion to be responsible. The writings of Jews later than the time of Moses, especially the historical books, are represented to contain accounts of persons and transactions, now contradictory and essentially incredible, now unworthy of God to approve or direct ; and such as are sufficient to refute the claims of Christianity, if they are to be taken as part and parcel of it.

There is no doubt of the exceedingly offensive spirit and language in which these objections have been urged ; but it has never seemed to me, since I began to think upon the subject, that they have been effectually answered. I do not think that Jerome made a satisfactory reply to Porphyry, or Bishop Chandler to Collins, or Bishop Watson to Voltaire and Paine. I was a boy in college when our countryman, Mr. George B. English, published his book, entitled, " The Grounds of Christianity examined by comparing the New Testament with the Old." In the strictures which it drew out, Mr. English was abundantly convicted of plagiarism; but I did not think then that his argument was disposed of, nor do I think so now. Other parts of the Evidences of Christianity may overpower any adverse inference from this class of considerations. But, allow the Jews and Pagans of the first Christian centuries, — allow the moderns, Bolingbroke, Collins, Morgan, and Voltaire,

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— their premises, and I find myself compelled to own, that, as to this topic, they have the best of the dispute.

I deny their premises. If the expositions of the Old Testament, which I have set forth in this series of volumes, are correct, those opponents of Christianity have no ground to stand upon.

First, by a detailed examination of the Old Testament books in my " Lectures on the Jewish Scriptures and Antiquities " ; and now, by an examination of passages in the New Testament which quote from, or refer to, the Old, with a view to show that the New Testament never puts upon the Old a sense different from what I had ascribed to it, — I have aimed to establish the following propositions, viz. : —

1. That the Pentateuch (with the exception of some later interpolations) was written by Moses, the divinely authorized revealer of the Jewish religion.

2. That the history, in the last four books of the Pentateuch, of the ministry of Moses, and of his promulgation of the Jewish Law and miraculous administration of the Jewish people, contains nothing incredible, or dishonorable to God ; but that its contents are eminently of the opposite character.

3. That, as author of the Book of Genesis, Moses nowhere lays claim to the character of an inspired historian ; that his object, in its composition, was to confirm the revelations and provisions of his Law, to which it is a preface ; that its last thirty-nine chapters contain family traditions, sometimes more, some-

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times less credible, — sometimes incredible, by reason of contradictions, and otherwise ; and that the earlier portion, evidently proceeding originally from diverse sources, and embracing irreconcilable statements, was collected and preserved by Moses, not because of its having any warrant of historical truth, but mainly because of its being evidence of a state of opinion, in times anterior to his own, accordant with doctrines and practices inculcated by his religion.

4. That the revelation of Judaism, and all miraculous administration of the Jewish nation, terminated with the age of Moses.

5. That the historical books after the time of Moses have no other authority than that of works of other historical writers of a rude age ; that their authors do not lay claim to supernatural inspiration, nor is that claim asserted for them by any authorized witness ; that they are to be taken, like other such compositions, as containing a basis and outline of truth, but with a large mixture of unfounded, self-contradictory, and incredible narrations ; and that, especially, Christianity neither makes itself, nor is in any way rightfully made, responsible for the accuracy of their contents.

6. That neither the Old Testament, nor the New, teaches, that, from the time of Moses to the time of Jesus, there was any man supernaturally informed of any future event whatever ; that the word prophet, in the Biblical use, did not denote a predicter of future events ; that the office of a prophet was not

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that of a foreteller ; that the anticipations expressed by the prophets often differed from events as they subsequently occurred ; that their conception of the coming Messiah was to a great extent incorrect, and, as far as it was correct, was founded on a declaration of Moses, connected with earlier revelations to the patriarchs ; and that there is no evidence of any fulfilment of an anticipation of theirs, of a nature to show the anticipation to have been supernaturally suggested to their minds.

7. That the miscellaneous writings of the later Jews, including devotional and ethical compositions (like the Books of Psalms and Proverbs), while they are such as to bear testimony to the improving culture exerted through the Law, are not the productions of men miraculously endowed and commissioned ; that, interesting and profitable as any of them may be, they are destitute of any peculiar authority ; and that, in the composition of some, as the books of Jonah and Judith, nothing more was contemplated than a fictitious narrative, with or without a moral.

These, I repeat, are conclusions which I have undertaken to maintain, not upon any grounds of abstract reasoning, but upon an examination, in detail, of the Old Testament itself, and of those texts of the New Testament which bear upon the Old. Few, perhaps, will take up my books prepared to agree with me. But it may not be too much to ask of candid persons who dissent, that they will consider what are the texts of Scripture on which their own difb

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ferent opinion rests, and then turn to the comments which I have made on those texts respectively. Intentionally, I am sure, I have not omitted any passage pertaining to the question, or done injustice to the argument which it may be thought by others to uphold. In respect to every passage which I have treated, I have honestly endeavored to ascertain the sense which the writer or speaker had in his mind, and intended to express.

The quotations from the Old Testament in the New, have, of course, had a principal share of my attention. In many of these, it has been the opinion of Christian scholars, that Jesus and the Apostles and Evangelists ascribed supernatural foreknowledge to the post- Mosaic writers of the Old Testament, and even represented as supernatural predictions passages which do not seem naturally to bear that character in their original use and connection. From an early age of Christianity to the present time, it has been the self-imposed task of commentators to maintain that this supposed representation, by Evangelists and Apostles, of the sense of the Old Testament writers, was a correct representation. In this argument, I am undoubtingly of the opinion, that Collins and other infidels were right in saying that such commentators have failed. Christianity needs, in this particular, a different defence from what has been made.

"William Whiston, the associate and the successor of Sir Isaac Newton as Mathematical Profes-

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sor at Cambridge, made a deplorably lame reply to Collins, in his treatises, entitled, " The Literal Accomplishment of the Scripture Prophecies," and " A Supplement to the Literal Accomplishment of the Scripture Prophecies." He assented to both the postulates of his opponent ; namely, first, that the New Testament writers had applied the Old Testament passages in question to the proof of Christianity ; and, secondly, that, in point of fact, those passages, as they now stand, are inapplicable to that use. But he assumed the utterly indefensible position, that the Old Testament had, in those passages, been corrupted by the Jews since the Apostles' time, for the very purpose of invalidating their argument ; that, as those passages originally stood in the Hebrew Bible, and as they stood at the period when the Apostles quoted them, they were exact descriptions of Jesus, his religion, and his times, and received in him and his Gospel their literal fulfilment ; and that it was only by the perfidious tampering of unbelievers with the records, in the second century, that this correspondence had been made to vanish. I do not know that Whiston's reasoning ever satisfied any wise man, except himself*

My very able and learned predecessor and successor in the chair of Biblical Literature at our University have presented a different view of the subject. Acceding to the prevailing opinion, that, when an Evan-

* See my " Lowell Lectures," Vol. II. pp. 215, 216.

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gelist or Apostle made a quotation from the Old Testament with such a form of introduction as " All this was done that it might be fulfilled," &c, he often meant to represent the original writer as having uttered a prediction now accomplished, they hold that the Evangelist or Apostle was in error in his interpretation of the language quoted by him. They urge that the commission of the Apostles and Evangelists to preach Christianity does not imply their being divinely secured against mistakes on all related subjects ; and that they might be perfectly well qualified to convey to us the miraculous evidence of the doctrine of Jesus, without being disabused of the false theories in which they had been educated, and made competent expositors of the Jewish Scriptures.

An hypothesis which has such advocates is not to be lightly dismissed.* I have given it the best con-

* Mr. Norton has lately passed away from the circle of friends who revered and loved him with a singular devotion.

" My thread of life has even run with his For many a lustre."

The first time that, then a child, I heard his name, I was with Mr. Buckminster, who stopped to accost him. What a conjunction ! Since that day, the thought of one has been scarcely separated from that of the other in my mind. From the moment of my entering on professional studies, I was honored with Mr. Norton's friendship, and, through the many happy years which followed, it made one of the chief joys of my life. I always lived near him afterwards, and eventually, for almost the whole of the last quarter of a century, our homes were side by side. No one who had such opportunities as mine to know the rare extent and thoroughness of his learnin o - , his religious love of truth, and the punctilious accuracy of his habits of study and of reasoning, could dissent from him without great self-distrust. If there was any man I have known to whom I could feel safe in implicitly submitting my own judgment, it would be he. I differed from him widely on some points of Scriptural criticism, as, the external history of the Pen-

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sideration of which I am capable, and cannot find reason to accept it. It appears to me, that, if there was any subject on which the disciples of Jesus — Matthew, John, and Peter, his personal companions and Apostles, — Mark and Luke, intimate and confidential friends of Apostles, — Paul, fully instructed by Jesus himself in the long seclusion which followed his conversion (Gal. i. 11-19) — may be presumed to have been correctly informed, it was that of the evidences of the religion which they were to publish to the world. It is even particularly recorded, that their Lord, in an appearance to two disciples after his resurrection, " beginning at Moses and all the prophets, expounded unto them in all the Scriptures

tateuch, and the use made of the Old Testament by the writers of the New ; but it was with such diffidence as only the most careful and often-repeated revisal of my views would have enabled me to overcome. I know of no theological scholar, who has brought the resources and charms of so various and elegant accomplishments in general learning to be subsidiary to such a rich fund of Scriptural knowledge. His great work on the " Genuineness of the Gospels" — a magnificent monument of erudition, logic, and taste — exhausts the argument, supersedes all that before had been written upon it in modern times, and establishes on an immovable basis that cardinal fact in the Evidences of Christianity. His Translation of the Gospels, with Notes, announced as being now in the printers' hands, is awaited with earnest expectation, as a work which may prove not inferior in importance to any that has seen the light since the time of the Reformers. It is greatly to be hoped that it may be followed by such translations and expositions of portions of the Epistles, as he is understood to have left in a state of preparation for the press.

The void which has been left by the death of this illustrious Christian scholar will not be filled in our age. Surrounded by every thing that could make life desirable, enriching it day by day with dignified employment and benignant kindness, enjoying it for himself and using it for others to the last, he resigned it in sacred peace.

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the things concerning himself" (Luke xxiv. 27). But what is decisive with me is, that, on a careful review of references to the Jewish Scriptures by Evangelists and Apostles, I cannot find an instance of what appears to me misinterpretation on their part. I am not called upon to reconcile their authority as Christian teachers with their misconceptions of the Old Testament, because I do not see that they ever misconceived it. I am persuaded that expositions of that collection of writings, some current in the time of our Saviour, and others, more numerous, in our day, are founded in error; but I am also persuaded that it is error in which the Apostles and Evangelists did not share.

The reception of my theory of the Book of Genesis, expounded in the " Academical Lectures on the Jewish Scriptures and Antiquities " (Vol. II. pp. 1 - 122), has afforded me great satisfaction. Though well satisfied of its truth, I considered it a novelty, as little likely to find favor as any thing which I had proposed. If substantiated, it puts an end to a world of cavil. A friendly critic in the " Christian Examiner" (Vol. LIII. p. 7), while he dissents from other views maintained by me, pronounces this to be " preeminently satisfactory," as well as " original," and to "invest the book with a greater interest and higher value than can be assigned to it on any other hypothesis " ; and I have been much gratified to observe a tacit adoption of this feature of my scheme in other authoritative quarters.

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My argument in the present work (pp. 5-16), that the descent of our Lord from King David was no peculiarity, but a fact equally predicable of the generality of his Jewish contemporaries, will strike readers at first with surprise. But it is only a different application of what Jews and Christians unanimously recognize in another case. The time between David and Jesus was somewhat more than a thousand years. The time between Jacob and David was a century less. (See " Lectures," &c, Vol. II. pp. 130, 131.) But everybody understands the millions of Jews in David's time to have been all descended from Jacob.

I desire it may be remembered that my reasoning (pp. 233 - 237) from the construction of the Hebrew word corresponding to the word " justify " in the New Testament, is an independent passage, and may be thrown out without invalidating the rest of the argument. It seems, however, that, with equal fidelity to the Hebrew original, the Greek translators might have used some word corresponding to rectify, instead of "justify"; and that, had they done so, while the technical character of the expression would have been made manifest, an entirely different direction would have been given to theological speculation.

When, for brevity's sake, I have used the expression, "the pseudo-Isaiah" (e. g. p. 172), I must not be understood as implying that the author of the writings erroneously imputed to Isaiah (xl. - lxvi.)

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designed to pass them off as productions of that prophet. The contrary is apparent. It was a subsequent compiler who arranged with the works of Isaiah those compositions from a later hand. (" Lectures," &c., Vol. III. pp. 180, 181.)

I have a few times referred, in the following pages, to my " Lowell Lectures on the Evidences of Christianity." But the frequent references to " Lectures, §*c." are always intended to indicate a different work ; namely, the " Academical Lectures on the Jewish Scriptures and Antiquities."

The texts commented upon are printed so as to represent the readings of Griesbach's Critical Edition, being copied from my edition, in 1830, of the " New Testament in the Common Version, conformed to Griesbach's Standard Greek Text."

If, in many instances, I have seemed but to encumber the page, by reprinting, with a simple reference to another place, some text which, with or without some verbal difference, had occurred and been discussed in a previous part of the book, I have considered this method to be necessary for the reader's convenience, who might have his attention turned to the same sentence, as it was presented in one or another portion of the New Testament. He might, for instance, look for a comment on Mark i. 11 in its place, and he should either find it there, or else be

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referred for it, as he is (p. 129), to the remarks on the corresponding passage in Matthew iii. 17.

Some of the views and arguments which I present are original with me, and the illustrations the fruits of my own reading in the authors quoted. Others are drawn from the common stock of earlier criticisms, of which the later commentator freely avails himself, with more or less change, or without change, in the application. For others yet, I am specially indebted to this or that writer. And there remains a portion, of which I am now entirely unable to trace the source, so as to refer them to one or another of the classes above defined. I have framed most of these notes out of memoranda accumulated through a course of years, during which I was lecturing on the New Testament, and was used to set down all that occurred as suited to my purpose, generally without noting the source whence it was derived, whether from other commentaries, or from my independent reflections and investigations. Under these circumstances, it would not be possible for me with any completeness to indicate respectively the origin of the remarks which I have brought together ; and I have thought it best wholly to decline an attempt so impracticable for myself, and so fruitless for the reader. I am little concerned, whether more or less of what I propose shall be found novel. Enough for me, should it prove true and useful.

"How well I have succeeded in my design, the

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reader is now to judge. Perhaps it may be thought that I have mistaken the meaning of some passages of Scripture. All that I can say for myself is this only ; — that in the explication of so many, it is well if I have not ; that I have sincerely endeavored to follow truth, being very little solicitous where it led me ; that, if I have failed, yet this I am sure of, that my intentions were good and upright. But if I have made it appear, that the writers of the New Testament argue strictly and very rationally, even in those points where our adversaries represent them as arguing very weakly and absurdly, I hope I have done no disservice to the cause of Christ." (Preface to Sykes's " Essay on the Truth of the Christian Religion.")

Contents

PAGE

Gospel of Matthew 1

Gospel of Mark 128