16
Just when were the sixty-six books of the Bible written?
This is an absolutely crucial question. If the Bible is what it claims to be, its sixty-six books must have been written by the men named as their authors. The authors of a few books are not stated, but the Bible tells us who wrote all the others. And they cannot have been written by those men unless they were written in their lifetimes.
Well, were they or weren’t they written at the right time?
The short answer is that scholars differ in their opinions. About the books of the Old Testament they differ very much indeed. About the books of the New Testament there is very much less difference of opinion.
Let me warn you of a common fallacy. Some people seem to think that with all this difference of opinion about the Old Testament, the situation is well nigh hopeless. How can the ordinary Bible-believer ever hope to establish the genuineness of the Old Testament books, if even the scholars do not really know the facts?
Don’t worry. There is no need to look at it like that. Every time you receive a letter in an unknown handwriting, do you say, “Perhaps this letter is a forgery”? Of course not. You assume that a letter is genuine unless there is some reason to think otherwise-just as, in English law, a man is deemed innocent until he is proved guilty.
It is not up to you to prove that each letter you receive is genuine, not even if a friend asks you to do so. If he says that a certain letter is a forgery, it is up to him to prove it a forgery. Unless he provides convincing proof of this, you are entitled to go on assuming the letter’s genuineness.
The Bible-believer is in a similar position. He has many good reasons for thinking that the Old Testament is part of the Word of God. (Some of these reasons were given in Part One of this book.) With evidence like that before him, there is no need for him to prove that each book was written at the right time, by the right author. He is fully entitled to assume that they were.
Keep that fact always in mind as you go through this chapter. The Bible-believer is the man in the position of strength. There is no need to ask, “Can we prove that the Old Testament books were written by the men whose names they bear?”
The only legitimate question is this: “Can those who criticise the Bible prove that its books were not written by the men named as their authors?”
That is the question at issue. Now let us look for an answer.
The great scholarly attack on the Old Testament was mounted just over a hundred years ago. But it did not spring into existence overnight. Many of the arguments used were first put forward in the eighteenth century, or even earlier. It was only in the middle of the nineteenth century that those arguments began to lead to a great popular movement.
This movement was associated with a literary technique known as “higher criticism”. This was a perfectly legitimate form of study which had been in use for a long time. It was devoted to studying the sources used by the authors of ancient books-not just Biblical books but any ancient books.
Unfortunately, in the days of the great attack on the Bible, higher criticism was used in a most unbalanced way. Many higher critics chose to ignore what Jesus taught about the Bible, and to let their imaginations run riot. Fierce controversies took place, with both sides sometimes expressing themselves in a less-than-Christian fashion.
These wordy battles had an unhappy sequel. The world’s Biblical scholars became divided into two camps, and the split has continued right down to the present day. Those who continued to regard the Bible as true were the smaller group. They reacted violently against the way their opponents used the methods of higher criticism to undermine people’s faith in the Bible, and they began to use the term “higher critic” as if it meant “someone who pulls the Bible to pieces.”
At the time this was not far from the truth. Even today most higher critics reject the idea that the whole Bible is true, and most Bible-believers refuse to have anything to do with higher criticism. There are a few scholars who use the methods of higher criticism in a sensible way and remain staunch Bible-believers. But for simplicity’s sake I shall disregard their existence, and use the terms “higher critic” and ‘‘critical scholar’’ to mean the general run of higher critics, who argue that the Bible is, at best, only partly true.
Most of the heat has gone Out of the controversy nowadays. Many of today’s critical scholars are much more moderate than those of the last century. But the underlying problems are still there, and so we must have a look at the critics’ point of view. We shall understand this better if we begin by considering how their ideas first developed.
A very brief summary of the nineteenth-century critical scholars’ case runs like this:
(1) Moses could not write’. Archaeologists had found evidence that writing went back to nearly 1000 B.C., but beyond that there was nothing. The idea of Moses writing a code of laws hundreds of years earlier was clearly absurd. Therefore there must be another explanation: some other person, or persons, must have written the Jewish law long after Moses was dead.
(2) Evidences of multiple authorship. Many of the books of the Old Testament do not read like the writings of one man. There is a fair amount of repetition, and sudden changes from one style of writing to another. Therefore it can be inferred that lots of unknown authors wrote little bits of the Old Testament books, and unknown editors welded these bits together into complete books. Eventually the Jewish public were persuaded that long-dead men, like Moses, and David, and Solomon and Isaiah, had written these recently compiled books.
(3) Historical errors. The Old Testament, it was thought, was riddled with historical errors. Eye-witnesses would never have made these blunders. Therefore the Bible was not a book of history written at the time things happened, but a collection of legends handed down by word of mouth for generations, and put in writing long afterwards. The people and places mentioned often did not exist, and when they did were often spelt wrongly or set in the wrong period of history. Even the words used were words from the wrong period-as if someone had tried to write a fake Shakespeare play, but had foolishly included some modern American slang.
It would be an exaggeration to say that the new wave of critical theories about the Old Testament swept all before it. There were a great many Bible-believing scholars who remained unconvinced by the new theories. Nevertheless the critical movement did have a tremendous success.
In one way this success was short-lived, in another, long-lived. In its original form it was short-lived because it had no sooner reached its peak, around the turn of the century, than some of its foundations were shown to be false.
Archaeologists who had been looking for evidence of the dawn of civilisation made an uncomfortable discovery: for many years they had been digging in the wrong place! They had concentrated their efforts in the land we now call Iraq, in the territory of ancient Assyria in the valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates. This earlier work had convinced them that writing was invented less than three thousand years ago.
Then they moved down the rivers to the coastal plain. They dug up a number of cities in the area once called Babylonia, and made some startling discoveries. At Nippur, Ashur, Ur and Kish they found thousands of clay tablets covered With writing, far older than any written material previously known. Many of them were dated at about the time of Moses; some of them went back to far earlier periods, perhaps even as much as a thousand years before Moses was born.
Some of these ancient records consisted of codes of law drawn up by various kings. The earliest law code known today is probably that of the Sumerian king, Ur Nammu. He lived about four thousand years ago. A more famous law code was compiled by Hammurabi, sixth king of the first dynasty of Babylon, in about 1700 B.C.
Since Moses lived around 1300 B.C. it was clear that the early higher critics had made a fundamental blunder. Writing in general, and writing books of laws in particular, was already a very ancient art when Moses was born. So Moses certainly could have written the law that bears his name.
Not only so, but large numbers of people would have been able to read what he wrote. The earliest form of writing was “picture writing”, in which a different little diagram is used for every word. The great breakthrough in human communications - even more important than the invention of printing-was the invention of the alphabet. And this occurred long before the time of Moses.
Consequently writing was already in common use by quite ordinary people. Not only legal documents by kings have been found in these ancient cities, but personal letters, records of business deals, lists of stores held by merchants, and so forth.
There is a very interesting passage in the Revised Standard Version (a Bible translation published in 1952) of the book of Judges. It describes an event occurring about a hundred years after the time of Moses:
“Then Gideon the son of Joash returned from the battle by the ascent of Heres. And he caught a young man of Succoth and questioned him; and he wrote down for him the officials and elders of Succoth, seventy-seven men.”1
When the Revised Version (another Bible translation) was published in 1884 the translators could not bring themselves to say that the young man “wrote”. Their translation says he “described” the men in question (although they pointed out in a footnote that the Hebrew word does really mean “wrote”). Evidently the scholars of the late nineteenth century could not conceive of an ordinary prisoner of war in Gideon’s day being able to write. But in the light of modern knowledge it seems altogether possible.
There is no doubt that a great deal of compiling has occurred in the writing of the Bible. Authors always have made a habit of quoting earlier authors. The Bible makes no secret of this. Moses admitted that he used material from the book of The Wars of Jehovah,2 and two other authors said they borrowed from the book of Jasher.3 Other writers refer to at least eight more lost books that they used as sources of information.4 The question upon which scholars disagree is this: who did the compiling?
When the nineteenth-century critics reached their premature conclusion that Moses could not write, they were led on a false trail. Naturally, they said, the Law of Moses must have been compiled in the days when men could write. So they produced a theory that it was produced roughly halfway between the times of Moses and Christ.
They had no hope of establishing the actual identities of their supposed authors and compilers. So they gave them fictitious labels. One imaginary gentleman was known as J, because he always called God “Jehovah”. Another was called E, because he preferred the Hebrew word Elohim for God. Then there was D; he was largely responsible for the book of Deuteronomy. P was a priest; you could tell the bits he wrote (or so they said) by his priestly leanings.
There were quite a lot of other members of the critics’ Editorial Committee. Some of them were formed by splitting up men like D into D The First, D The Second, and so on. Another view is that some of the JEDP family should be regarded as different traditions rather than as individual men. But we need not concern ourselves with the finer points of the theory. J, E, D, and P always have been the Big Four; it will simplify matters if we concentrate on them.
After years of arguing about who wrote which bits, the critics finally reached something like unanimity. They published an edition of the Bible which, if not intended to be the last word in Biblical scholarship, was at least supposed to be somewhere near it. So that the reader could see who was supposed to have written what, J’s contributions were printed in one colour, E’s in another, D’s in a third, and so on. Since the colours sometimes switched about from verse to verse, or even from line to line, the result looked more like a Scotsman’s kilt than a holy book.
The fact that they could issue such a book as this shows how very self-confident the early higher critics were. It never seemed to occur to them that their work was highly speculative, based on very slender evidence. Like fond parents they could see nothing wrong with their own offspring. “Critical scholars” they called themselves; but where their own work was concerned they were some of the most uncritical people on earth.
If it were not for this, they might have had a fresh look at their subject when their mammoth boob about Moses being “unable to write” was exposed. Unfortunately this did nothing to shake their self-confidence. By this time they were so sold on J, E, D, and P that they pressed on regardless, refining their ideas of which of these mythical gentlemen wrote what.
Meanwhile a considerable number of other men were looking at the Old Testament from another point of view. As Bible-believers they failed to see how the JEDP school could possibly be right, because that would mean that Jesus Christ had been wrong. Because of this their opponents called them biased. Perhaps they were biased, but no more so than the higher critics themselves. And they were certainly not ignoramuses. Many of them were scholars of international renown.
These Bible-believing scholars of seventy years ago published many books and papers opposing the critical theories of the day. Some of these are classics, still worthy of study today.5 They made four main points:
(1) That archaeologists were constantly making discoveries that revealed the unsoundness of many of the critics’ assumptions.
(2) That other theories to explain the evidence of compilation in the Old Testament could be produced; these fitted the facts just as well as the JEDP theories, and had the overwhelming advantage of not conflicting with the views of Christ and His apostles.
(3) That the critics’ arguments based upon style and vocabulary were far from watertight, especially in the light of our rapidly increasing knowledge of ancient languages.
(4) That Old Testament history was far more reliable than the critics had thought. Every year new discoveries were coming to light that necessitated some rewriting of our history books. And frequently, where the older versions of the history books pronounced the Bible ‘wrong, the newer versions agreed that the Bible had been right after all.
This last point, the accuracy of Bible history, is covered in Chapter 18. I shall deal briefly with the other three points here.
If JEDP ~ Co. did not compile the first five books of the Bible, who did?
The obvious answer is, Moses. There is no proof that it wasn’t Moses. Since writing was known long before his time, there would have been plenty of existing writing for him to work with.
God made some tremendously important promises to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the ancestors of Moses.’ According to both the Christian New Testament7 and the Jewish Talmud8 these promises implied a hope of resurrection and personal immortality for Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Since writing was in use in Abraham’s day, it seems highly likely that he and his family would have kept a record of these promises. Perhaps they kept accounts of God’s other dealings with them, too.
One archaeologist has suggested that there may even have been some written records dating back to the time of Adam.9 (The question of whether Adam was a real man, and if so, when he lived, is discussed in Chapter 23.) This startling suggestion may sound highly improbable, but P. J. Wiseman supplies a surprising amount of evidence for it. Don’t dismiss the idea out of hand without first reading his book.
Although they may not have gone back as far as Wiseman suggests, there were undoubtedly many written documents available to Moses. If, as seems almost certain, he made use of these, this could account for all the evidences of compilation in his five books.
For example, some people make a great song and dance about what they call “the two contradictory records of creation” in Genesis 1 and 2. This is a most misleading expression. There are two records, but they are not contradictory. They describe some of the same events, but from two very different points of view.
As Wiseman pointed out, the phrase “these are the generations of so-and-so” occurs eleven times in Genesis, and always at or near the end of the story of so-and-so. It does not mean, “these are the children of”. It means, “that was the story of”. It appears to be Moses’ way of acknowledging that the material he had just included in Genesis was taken from a written record about so-and-so. The writing, by the way, would not have been on paper, but on a baked clay tablet.
The first occurrence of “these are the generations of -. .” is unique. Here in Genesis 2, verse 4, “so-and-so” is not a person but “the heavens and the earth”. It concludes the first creation story, which gives a birds-eye view of the whole of creation. Perhaps, if I may use the expression reverently, a “God’s-eye” view would describe it better.
The second creation story runs from Genesis 2, verse 5, to the end of the chapter. It forms the first section of “the generations of Adam”, which end, with that phrase, in chapter 5, verse 1. So this second narrative is concerned with creation from Adam’s point of view. It is not concerned with the creation of the world, but only with the creation of Adam and his homeland, the Garden of Eden.
The “earth”, whose creation is referred to in verse 5, is almost certainly the land of Eden. It is a translation of the Hebrew word eretz, which can mean “earth” but is more frequently translated “land”-as in Eretz Israel, the Land of Israel. This is why there is no mention of “the heavens” in the second creation narrative.
We do not know why God chose to give these two separate, complementary stories of creation. We don’t know when He revealed them, or to whom. The internal evidence indicates that He did give them, that they were written down, and that Moses brought them together. In the present state of our knowledge we can go no further than that.
And what about the evidence of compilation in the later books of Moses? Here again we cannot go very far, but it is possible to make some reasonable guesses.
Writing in those days was a very laborious business. Moses was a very busy man, and he would have needed some help. In those days great men dictated to professional writers - called “amanuenses” - just as business men dictate to their secretaries today. We can almost take it for granted that Moses used secretaries, just as Paul did.
We do not know how much freedom Moses gave his secretaries. Paul evidently allowed his a certain amount of liberty, because in one of his epistles this verse appears:
“I, Tertius, who wrote this epistle, salute you in the Lord.”10
A German scholar11 has shown that ancient Greek authors generally gave their secretaries a fair amount of freedom. The author would dictate while the secretary wrote on a wax tablet; this allowed him to write very rapidly. Later, the secretary would copy his text on to papyrus (the ancient equivalent of paper), perhaps tidying up the grammar as he went. Then the original author would read his secretary’s handiwork, and correct it himself where he thought necessary. Finally he would add a farewell greeting in his own hand.12
Very tentatively, let us suppose that Moses used several secretaries. Suppose that he allowed each one a certain freedom of style. Suppose that Moses gathered all their writings together, incorporated as much of the already-existing writings as he wanted to use, and then gave the whole job a final editorial polish.
If this is what happened, it would account for all the little peculiarities that the higher critics have pointed out. Moreover, if God was supervising the whole operation and guiding all concerned by His Spirit, the result would be the inspired, infallible book that Jesus and the apostles believed it to be.
Guesswork, conjecture, did you say? Yes, of course it’s all conjecture. How could any theory of the composition of an ancient book be anything else? The JEDP theories are only conjecture. And it is very doubtful whether the critics’ conjectures fit the facts any better than this conjecture.
In much the same way, any compiling that has occurred in the later books of the Old Testament could be the work of the men named in the Bible as their authors.
As a research worker myself, I know what a temptation it is to turn a blind eye to uncomfortable facts. A scientist has said that the frequent tragedy of science is a beautiful theory killed by an ugly fact. Naturally, when it is my own beautiful theory that is in peril, I should not be human if I didn’t shy away from the menacing facts.
To an outside observer it rather looks as if many critical scholars are reacting like that. Having committed themselves to late dates for the Old Testament books, they now find it very hard to give due weight to the evidence for an early date.
Many of the place names in the early chapters of Genesis, for example, have never been explained by the critical scholars.13 One verse says:
“And the border of the Canaanite was from Zidon as thou goest towards Gerar unto Gaza as thou goest towards Sodom and Gomorrah.”14
Sodom and Gomorrah? According to the Bible they were wiped out in the days of Abraham. No factual record of their continued existence occurs anywhere, in the Bible or out of it. How come, then, that we have this geographical instruction based on the location of Sodom and Gomorrah? This is almost overwhelming evidence that these words were written in or before the time of Abraham, and incorporated in Genesis by Moses.
And this evidence is not alone. Genesis 14 is about Abraham. It contains a number of ancient place names used nowhere else in the Bible. None of the readers would have known where those places were. In the same way as a modern writer might say, “Petrograd (now called Leningrad)”, Genesis 14 says:
“Bela (which is Zoar)”-verses * and 8.
“Vale of Siddim (which is the Salt Sea)”-verse 3.
“En-mishpat (which is Kadesh)”-verse 7.
“Hobah (which is on the left hand of Damascus)”-verse 15.
“Vale of Shaveh (which is the King’s Dale)”-verse 17.
Which is more likely: that Abraham, or someone of his day, wrote the original account using the place names as they were then, and that Moses, compiling Genesis, added his “modern” equivalents? Or that, as the critical theories imply, some scribe a thousand years after Abraham invented all those unknown names for no apparent reason?
The critical scholars reply to these arguments by pointing Out that the opposite condition sometimes applies. That is, that some places are called in the Bible by names that were not used at the time the book concerned was said to be written. This is a poor argument. It does not weaken the force of the argument given above, and carries little weight on its own. How do we know that the names used in the Bible were not in use at an early date? Tomorrow some archaeologist may dig up evidence that they were! In any case, there is already archaeological evidence that some cities in Old Testament times had two, three and even four different names, all in use at one time.15
Higher critics have always based a lot of arguments on the nature of words. For example, some words entered the English language suddenly, at a known date. “Blitz” and “quisling”, for instance, were never used in English until 1940.
This is fine, but there are not very many words, even in modern English, that can be dated so accurately. Trying to do this sort of thing with a language three thousand years old is a very chancy business.
Dr. R. D. Wilson was a Bible-believer. He was also a Professor of Semitic Philology. Philology means “the science of language”; Semitic means Hebrew and related languages. In short, he was a leading expert in this field. He spent a vast amount of time-probably as much as almost any critical scholar-analysing the vocabulary of the Old Testament. His findings18 “proved” the early dates for the Old Testament, just as clearly as critics had used the same methods to “prove” late dates for them.
What this really means, of course, is that neither party had really proved anything - except, perhaps, the power of prejudice over the human mind! The real value of Dr. Wilson’s work was to show the uselessness of basing any conclusions on this sort of argument.
Up to a point you can tell a writer from his style. But only up to a point. I write scientific papers, and I write Christian tracts. It would surprise me very much if any reader ever connected one of my unsigned tracts with my scientific papers. Because I am writing in a different field, for a different readership, I deliberately employ a different style.
Authors change their styles unconsciously, as well as consciously. Sometimes their style changes as they grow older. The poems written by Wordsworth at the end of his life are in quite a different style from his earlier poems. Some of Milton’s works are in a very different style from his other writings, perhaps because of changes in his health.17
Because of this, it is surprising to find anyone drawing definite conclusions from variations in literary style. Yet this is just what higher critics tend to do. They say the Book of Deuteronomy “could not” have been written by the same author as the Book of Leviticus, because the style is different. Some of Paul’s epistles “could not” have been written by the same man as the others, because the style is different.
Recently the whole question of style has gained a new significance, because computers are now used to analyse literary style. In fact it is all a lot of fuss about nothing, because the computers are not doing anything new. They are merely being used to do a lot of tedious arithmetic. They count the average length of sentence in a book, the average length of word, the frequency with which certain words and phrases occur, and so on. Thus they enable a statistical measure of the author’s style to be obtained.
But painstaking men were doing this many years ago, long before computers were invented. All that computers do is to make the process easier, and faster. In an article on the use of computers to analyse authors’ styles, a famous scientist concluded with a very sound warning:
“No statistical analysis ever proves anything to be absolutely true. When given the necessary data, however, it can say which of the two alternatives is the more likely to be correct.”18
In other words, this sort of thing cannot establish facts. It can only estimate probabilities.
By drawing conclusions from arguments based on style, higher critics are not only disregarding this warning. They are committing a much more serious error. This is their method:
First, they assume that the Bible is not verbally inspired. They have to assume this before they can start. Nobody knows what the operation of the Holy Spirit would do to a man’s literary style, so if you want to base conclusions on an analysis of style you simply must rule out the possibility of the Spirit affecting your results.
Right. You assume “no inspiration”. You do your analysis. You find differences in style between the Letter to the Galatians and the Letter to the Ephesians. You say: “Therefore Paul didn’t write them both. But the Bible says he did. Therefore the Bible can’t be verbally inspired.”
This is merely arguing in a circle. Starting with an assumption, you end up by concluding what you had first assumed. Any scientist doing that sort of thing would soon find himself looking for another job.
Surely there is only one sane approach to the question of style in the Bible. Leave it alone. It proves little in an ordinary book, and proves nothing at all in a book claiming to be inspired.
In the early days, higher critics spoke with boundless confidence of their methods. Instead of admitting that they were mixing a little evidence With a lot of guesswork and a sprinkling of prejudice, they made claims like this:
“Higher criticism itself is neutral; it has no bias; it is a scientific process.”19
Since those days most of them have mellowed a bit. But as recently as 1943 one of them could still write about critical theories:
“These things are not in doubt; they are not hypothetical reconstructions or tentative suggestions, but truths as assured as anything ever can be in the sphere of literary research.”20
Over-confident assertions like these are astonishing, when you think of all the hard knocks that various higher critics have had to take. The sad story of a professor who tried to win a lawsuit by using the methods of higher criticism has been told by A. J. Pollock:
“A literary lady in Canada, Miss Florence Deeks, wrote the story of the part women have played in history, under the title of ‘The Web’, and lodged her manuscript in the keeping of the Canadian branch of the well-known publishing house of Macmillan in Toronto.
“A few months later appeared ‘The Outline of History’ by Mr H. G. Wells, published also by Macmillan, but from their London office.
“When Miss Deeks read the ‘Outline of History’, she was struck by the fact that Mr Wells had introduced ideas and incidents, which also appeared in her book, and that many of the phrases were common to both. She came to the conclusion that Mr Wells must have had access to her manuscript and was guilty of gross plagiarism.
“Seeing that there was no proof that Mr Wells had seen the manuscript of ‘The Web’, a means of convincing a court of law that plagiarism had really happened must be discovered. Why not try the methods employed by the Higher Critics? Why not get an expert of wide experience on these lines? So Miss Deeks took her case to the Rev. W. A. Irwin, M.A., B.D., PH.D., at that time an associate professor of Ancient and Old Testament Languages and Literature at Toronto University, afterwards Professor of Old Testament Languages and Literature at Chicago University. The Professor in accepting the task said:
‘I consented in considerable measure because this is the sort of task with which my study of ancient literature repeatedly confronts me, and I was interested to test out in modern works the methods commonly applied to those of the ancient world.’
“So he diligently pursued his task, and at length formulated his ‘assured results’ in much detail, proving, as he claimed, that Mr Wells had access to Miss Deeks’ manuscript, that he had made free use of it, and had been guilty of considerable plagiarism.
“Miss Deeks then brought action against Mr H. G. Wells and the Macmillan publishers in a Canadian court, claiming ~5oo,ooo, or about £100,000 damages.
“This court dismissed the case. Miss Decks, not satisfied, carried her case to a Court of Appeal, but with the same result. Miss Deeks then carried the case to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, London, the highest legal tribunal in the British Empire. Again and finally the case was given in favour of Mr H. G. Wells and the Macmillan publishers.
“At these trials it was sworn on oath that Miss Deeks’ manuscript had never been in the hands of Mr H. G. Wells, that it had remained in secure custody in the safe of the Macmillan Company in Toronto, that no copy of the manuscript in part or whole had been made, that in short no leakage of information had taken place, and that Mr H. G. Wells did not even know of the existence of the manuscript. The verdict of the House of Lords was unanimous in dismissing the case.
“What must have been the feelings of the Rev. W. A. Irwin, M.A., B.D., PH.D., when he heard one of the Canadian judges, The Hon. Mr Justice Riddell, a well-known legal luminary, famous throughout Canada and the United States, describing his ‘assured results’ with such epithets as the following, ‘Fantastic Hypotheses’, ‘Solemn Nonsense’, ‘Comparisons without significance’, ‘Arguments and conclusions alike puerile’. Professor Irwin was in a splendid position to arrive at ‘assured results’ when he had before him both documents in question, and both of recent dates; whereas the critics deal with very ancient documents, generally written in dead languages. If Professor Irwin failed so lamentably in the case of what was comparatively easy, what chance have the ‘assured results’ relating to the Ancient Scriptures of being anything else than ‘solemn nonsense’ and ‘fantastic hypotheses’?”21
Since World War II, critical scholars have generally been less confident and more humble about their field of study. One of the most eminent and most moderate of them, Professor H. H. Rowley, has summed up the situation like this:
“When the Society for Old Testament Study was formed, during the First World War, there was a broad agreement amongst the scholars of the world on a large number of questions concerning this book. . . Today the whole scene is changed, and the student of the Old Testament is living in a very different climate. We have passed through a generation of activity, and even of excitement, in the study of the Bible that could not have been foreseen. Many of the conclusions that seemed most sure have been challenged, and there is now a greater variety of view on many questions than has been known for a long time. It is therefore much more dangerous and misleading today to speak of the consensus of scholarship on many questions than it was . . . In contrast to the large measure of unity that prevailed a generation ago, there is today an almost bewildering diversity of views on many questions . . . contrary tendencies have appeared in various quarters leading to a greater fluidity in the field as a whole than has been known for a long time. In the field of Higher Criticism various tendencies have appeared. . - . It is here that the greatest fluidity in the whole field of Old Testament Study is to be found today, though it cannot be said that any agreed pattern is emerging from the welter of challenge to the older views.”22 (The italics are mine.)
Thus Professor Rowley was refreshingly frank and honest. He warned his readers that there were bags of exciting ideas and suggestions floating around, but not so many facts. The Bible-criticising scholars could not agree on much -except to disagree with the Bible-believing community. And they were not even so sure about that as they used to be, for the professor also said:
“In general, it may be said that there has been a tendency towards more conservative views on many questions than were common at the opening of our period. These more conservative views are not shared by all scholars, though they are widespread . .
Twenty years have passed since Professor Rowley made these frank admissions. But the position today is still more or less the same. Old Testament higher critics still disagree vigorously and accuse each other of bad scholarship. The following remark by A. Sperber, Professor of Hebrew at The Jewish Theological Seminary of America, is typical of the present situation:
“It is high time that Bible scholars . . . approach the Bible not as schoolmasters teaching the prophets how Hebrew sentences should be formed and Hebrew words spelled, but as humble students of these great masters of Hebrew.”23
Critical scholars of the Old Testament are evidently still groping in the dark. To use Professor Rowley’s word, the situation is still “fluid”, with no solid facts that could overturn the faith of a Bible believer.
With the New Testament the situation is much simpler. These books belong to the first century A.D. Historians know a great deal about this period. Here we have a great many more facts, and there is far less scope for guesswork.
In the nineteenth century it was not so. In those days the oldest manuscripts available had been written in the fourth century. The critics were able to speculate that at least some of the original books could have been written after the supposed authors were dead. Needless to say, they made the most of their opportunity. All sorts of fancy theories about various New Testament books were trotted out.
Today the situation is very different. A number of much more ancient manuscripts have come to light, which have killed many of the nineteenth-century theories stone dead. Of course, boys will be boys, and critics will be critics; nothing will stop the critical scholars from speculating entirely, but today their speculations about the New Testament are mainly directed into other channels. The dates of most of the New Testament books are now regarded as fairly well fixed.
For example, R. M. Grant is an eminent scholar of critical leanings. Yet he states as a fact that Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians was written “about A.D. 54”.24 Jesus was crucified in about A.D. 30. Consequently, 1 Corinthians, with its very powerful testimony to the resurrection of Jesus25 was written within a third of a lifetime of the crucifixion-while a large proportion of the eye-witnesses of Christ’s resurrection were still living!
The change has been brought about largely by the discovery of several New Testament manuscripts written in the second century. We need not bother with the reasons that have led scholars to decide on the dates of these manuscripts. Archaeological dating is a highly technical subject. It involves studying the ink, the “paper” (or rather, its ancient equivalents), the style of writing, and other features of the manuscript. In addition, modern physics enables radiocarbon tests to be made on tiny portions of the manuscript, and these help to confirm the archaeological studies.
It would be a waste of time to discuss this evidence, because there is nothing very controversial about it. The evidence is so clear that all scholars are agreed on the date of these manuscripts to within a few years or so.
The first of the new manuscripts came to light in 1931. They are called the Chester Beatty Papyri, after the man who acquired most of them. Three of them contain fifteen of the twenty-seven New Testament books. Unfortunately they are in a rather tatty condition, like most ancient books. Many bits and pieces are missing. But there is more than enough material to date them accurately. One of them was written about A.D. 200; the other two were written not long after.
This discovery was soon followed by news of an even older manuscript. It was found in Egypt and had lain in the John Rylands Library, Manchester, since 1920. But nobody realised what a treasure it was until C. H. Roberts studied it, and announced his findings in 1935. It was only a little scrap of papyrus, three and a half inches long by two and a quarter inches wide, with a few verses of John’s Gospel ‘written on both sides. It was evidently all that was left of a complete Gospel of John. And it was written before A.D. 150.
This was, and still is, the oldest piece of New Testament ever discovered. The John Rylands Librarian, Dr. Guppy, went wild with excitement. He declared that it must have been written “when the ink of the original autograph can hardly have been dry” (!) It is easy to forgive him for his slight exaggeration.
Also in 1935 some scholars in the British Museum published details of a much larger papyrus fragment. This was not a piece of the Bible, but a collection of early Christian writings. It included a portion of a “Life of Christ”, sometimes called “the fifth gospel”. This was obviously written by a man who had access to copies of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John and used all four of them in his own writings. It also was written before A.D. 150.
These finds are of tremendous importance. Books had to be copied laboriously by hand in those days. They spread very slowly from land to land. During the first half of the second century men were reading the Gospel of John in Egypt, and they were studying all four gospels in at least one place. Consequently the originals simply must have been written before the end of the first century; perhaps quite a long time before.
The evidence of these twentieth-century manuscript discoveries is strongly supported by two other lines of evidence: (1) ancient translations into other languages and (2) quotations from early Christian ‘writers. Much of this supplementary evidence was already available in the nineteenth century, but it was brushed under the carpet by those who did not want to see it. Nowadays, however, it is recognised at its true worth.
Although we have no very early manuscripts of the New Testament in languages other than Greek, we have evidence that very early translations did exist. In A.D. 180 the Christians in North Africa were being persecuted. We possess the record of the trial of some Christians in the town of Scillium. They admitted keeping some “books, and letters of Paul”. Since their language was Latin it appears that the Latin New Testament was already widespread by A.D. 180.
We also possess many documents in Syriac, which refer to a document called the Diatessaron. They tell us that this was written in Syriac by a man called Tatian in about A.D. 170. It was a book in which all four gospels were woven together into one continuous narrative. So it seems that Syriac translations of the gospels were in use well before A.D. 170.
A Christian leader in Rome called Clement wrote a letter to the Corinthian church in about A.D. 96. In it he referred to the letter that “the blessed Paul the apostle” had previously written to them (our 1 Corinthians). He quoted from this and other New Testament books.
Two other Christian documents written just after A.D. 100 quote extensively from New Testament books. They are called, “The Epistle of Barnabas”, and, “The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles”.26
These lines of evidence point to an unmistakable conclusion. Most of our New Testament books must have been written in the first century; the remainder could have been.
In a book devoted to the New Testament manuscripts, an internationally respected scholar, Professor F. F. Bruce, sums up the situation like this:
“The New Testament was complete, or substantially complete, about A.D. 100, the majority of the writings being in existence twenty to forty years before this. In this country [Britain] a majority of modern scholars fix the dates of the four Gospels as follows:
Matthew, about 85-90; Mark, about 65; Luke, about 80-85; John, about 90-100. I should be inclined to date the first three Gospels rather earlier: Mark shortly after A.D. 6o, Luke between 6o and 70, and Matthew shortly after 70....
“But even with the later dates, the situation is still encouraging from the historian’s point of view, for the first three Gospels were written at a time when many were alive who could remember the things that Jesus said and did, and some at least would still be alive when the fourth Gospel was written.
“The dates of the thirteen Pauline epistles can be fixed partly by internal and partly by external evidence. The day has gone by when the authenticity of these letters could be denied wholesale. There are some writers today who would reject Ephesians; fewer would reject ~ Thessalonians; more would deny that the Pastoral Epistles (1 and 2 Timothy and Titus) came in their present form from the hand of Paul. I accept them all as Pauline. The remaining eight letters . . . [he goes on to imply that these eight are now accepted generally as actually written by Paul].”27
But I will reserve the last word on this subject for another scholar whose opinions carried weight throughout the world, the late Sir Frederic Kenyon, former Director of the British Museum:
“The New Testament books stand in a very strong position, the strength of which has been increased by recent discoveries and investigations. Short of the discovery of first-century manuscripts, their traditional first-century dates are confirmed by as strong evidence as is reasonable to expect.”28
So there, very briefly, are the facts.
There are two schools of thought about the Old Testament. The majority of scholars think it was written at a relatively late date, by men other than the authors named in the Bible. A smaller body of scholars, some of them eminent in their field, take the opposite view. They think that there is reason to believe what the Old Testament tells us about its authors.
The evidence is nearly all of a vague and inconclusive character. There are few really solid facts bearing on the question. The wisest verdict for anyone to give at the present time is, as we say in Scotland, “Not proven”.
In view of this we can well afford to give the Lord Jesus Christ the casting vote. He accepted that the Old Testament was written by the men named as its authors. There is no reason why we should not do the same.
With the New Testament there is much less uncertainty. The bulk of modern scholars agree that most of it was written in the first century. Some think a few books were not written until the second century, but the evidence for this view is not at all conclusive.
This means that most of the New Testament books were almost certainly written by the men whose names appear on them. And there is no real reason to deny that the remaining books were written by their stated authors, either.