§ 3 Biblical and Historical Criticism
Most men, in short, accept or reject religious creeds on the strength not of any systematically philosophic reasoning, but of either emotional bias or common-sense examination of concrete evidence. The former is as a rule, though not always, susceptible of influence from the latter. Thus the main instruments in turning men from Christian credences have been the documentary and historical forms of criticism.
Such criticism, secretly frequent among educated men in the sixteenth century, never ventured into print till the seventeenth, and even then did so very circumspectly. English Deism begins its literary existence with Lord Herbert of Cherbury, whose first work, produced under French influences, appeared in Latin in 1624. His position was that the doctrine of forgiveness for faith is immoral; that all pretences of revelation are repugnant to moral reason; and that as all so-called revelations are sectarian and mutually exclusive, human reason must proceed for itself on a basis of natural theism. Such audacity was possible in virtue partly of the resort to Latin, partly of the high personal standing of the writer. The next outstanding anti-Christian work is the Leviathan (1651) of Hobbes, who ventured to publish in English under the doctrinally tolerant rule of Cromwell. In his treatise, not only is the attitude of faith constantly disparaged, despite constant resort to scriptural citation, but there is a beginning of open criticism of the inconsistencies of the Pentateuch. Such criticism seems to have gone much further in private discussion long before that time; and it is clear from many apologetic treatises that doctrinal unbelief was abundant; but the publication of a skeptical work that could be read by the unlearned marks an era of germinating unbelief. Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670) carries the principle of rational textual criticism of the Bible further; and after the French Catholic professor Richard Simon had published in French his critical treatises on the texts of the Old and New Testaments (1678 and 1689), though these were professedly orthodox, Biblical criticism began a new life.
The first drastic attacks of a direct and businesslike kind on orthodoxy were those of the English Deists of the early years of the eighteenth century, typified in the works of Anthony Collins, who soberly and amiably called in question alike revelation, prophecy, and miracles. Soon such criticism was reinforced by the inquiry of Middleton into Roman Catholic miracles, on lines which implicitly called in question those of the gospels; and the essay of Hume on miracles in general put the case against them on grounds which could be turned only by arguments that evaded them. The polemic of the whole French school of freethinkers, headed by Voltaire, thereafter attacked every aspect of Jewish and Christian supernaturalism and of Jewish and Christian history considered as a moral dispensation; the English Unitarians, represented by Priestley, made a number of converts to their compromise; and when Gibbon came to deal with the rise of Christianity in his great work (1776–88), he set forth on naturalistic grounds a tentative sociological explanation which could not be overthrown by orthodox methods, and is to be superseded only by a more searching analysis on the same lines. So decisive was the total effect of the critical attack that in the last quarter of the eighteenth century many German theologians within the Church had begun to deal with the supernatural elements in the Old Testament on rationalistic though temporizing methods, and some had even begun to apply the same treatment to the New. Finally came, in England, the powerful common-sense attack of Thomas Paine (1793), which at once set up a movement of popular rationalism that has never since ceased.
To all such rationalism, however, a strong check was set up for a whole generation, especially in England, by the universal reaction against the French Revolution. Hitherto the upper classes, there as in France, had been noted mainly for unbelief in religious matters; but when it was seen from the course of the Revolution that heterodoxy could join hands with democracy, there was a rapid change of front, on the simple ground of class interest. During the first generation of the nineteenth century, accordingly, all English freethinking was either driven under the social surface or classed as disreputable, so that it was possible to assume a great revival of faith. In France, similarly, the literary pietism of Chateaubriand seemed to have crowned with success the official restoration of the Church’s authority; and even the intellectual revival was associated with Christian zeal on the part of such energetic personalities as Guizot. Even in Germany, though there the work of Biblical criticism on rationalist lines went steadily on, there was a pietist revival. Before the middle of the century was reached, however, it was clear that in France and Germany rationalism was in full renascence; and in England, where such facts are less readily avowed, scholarly writings even in the fourth decade had begun to prove the solidarity of European culture.
As regards Biblical criticism, there appears to be a certain periodicity of action. In the eighteenth century, when the work done was mainly of the common-sense order, the French physician Jean Astruc laid down a basis for exact documentary analysis by pointing to the two elements of Yahwist (Jehovist) and Elohist narrative as indicating two distinct sources. On such lines the earlier German scholars of the nineteenth century long laboured, till the common-sense criticism was lost sight of. In the meantime, however, a long line of partially rationalist criticism of the New Testament culminated in the Life of Jesus by Strauss; and educated Christendom was shaken to its foundations, insofar as it ventured to read. Side by side with that of Strauss, there proceeded in Germany a great movement of documentary and historical analysis, till professional theology there became almost identified with the surrender of Christian supernaturalism.
As the critical movement proceeded in England it came about that an admired dignitary of its Church, Bishop Colenso, was convinced on common-sense lines of the utterly unhistorical character of the main Pentateuchal narrative, and courageously published his views (1862). From that point the European criticism of the Old Testament, which had been proceeding on the assumption of the genuineness of the narrative, took a new course with such rapid success that within a generation the whole mass of the Old Testament had been either decisively or provisionally reduced, chiefly by Dutch and German scholars, to a variety of sources never wholly in accordance with the traditional ascription, and representing collectively a vast historical process of fabrication. In the face of the facts, the claim of “inspiration” still made for the books by some of the scholars who expound the process of their composition is naturally treated with indifference by educated men not professionally committed to such a position.
With whatever bias the problem be approached, all really critical study of the documents latterly tells against the Christian position. Writers who, like Renan, have treated Christian origins in a spirit of literary sympathy with that of belief, none the less undo faith, and offer at best a sentimental historical construction in place of the destroyed tradition. The orthodox defence, on the other hand, grows rapidly less confident in the hands of scholarly men. The later development of professional study, as set forth in the English Encyclopædia Biblica shows a progressive collapse of the traditional belief on almost every detail, some continental theologians now going further in their rejection of it than many professed rationalists.
The general result of two generations of critical research and controversy is that practically all Biblical students have accepted the main results of the “higher criticism,” whatever debate there may still be over details. There is tacit or overt agreement that the Hexateuch is a composite body of writings of many periods; that the Mosaic authorship is a myth; that the quasi-historical books are similarly works of redaction; that the Psalms are not Davidic and the Solomonic books not Solomonic; and that the prophets are endlessly manipulated. Even the view that all the prophets are post-Maccabean finds some acceptance. And the dissolution of the Old Testament tradition necessarily involves the New. Though the rigorous documentary analysis of that lagged behind the criticism of the Hebrew books, the general conceptions of miracles and of inspiration have long lacked serious defence. Arnold’s “Miracles do not happen” startled only those who had been inattentive to the whole movement of scientific and historical thought.
To-day it can hardly be said that there is any serious defence of New Testament supernaturalism. Some years ago a large number of Anglican clerics signed a memorial calling for a liberal attitude towards all historical criticism of the texts, and this was followed by an appeal to the Bishop of London asking that belief in the Virgin Birth should no longer be required of candidates for holy orders. The appeal was of course refused; but no competent inquirer doubts that hundreds of clergymen of the orthodox Churches are Unitarian in their beliefs. Living controversy now turns, not on the supernaturalism of the gospels, but on the purely historical question as to whether the Gospel Jesus ever lived; and over this issue Unitarians are found to be as resentful as Trinitarians ever were on the Unitarian issue. In Germany the debate has gone far, some of the more open-minded theologians admitting that the old lines of defence must be abandoned as inadequate. In England all critical processes take place more slowly, but there is now accumulating a defensive literature which tells of widespread unsettlement. The method of confident bluster is found not to avail in an age which has seen the rapid abandonment of so many vital positions, all in their time maintained with the same contemptuous confidence.
The average layman has of course not yet been reached by such a problem as that of the Historicity of Jesus; but he has long been well accustomed to the defensive attitude in matters of faith. Down to the time of Colenso the “sensations” of the controversy were over the books which attacked. For a generation past the attack has been so general that the new “sensations” were those set up by new attempts at defence or counter-attack. Such books as the late Henry Drummond’s Natural Law in the Spiritual World, Mr. Benjamin Kidd’s Social Evolution, and Mr. Balfour’s Foundations of Belief, in their turn elicited an amount of excitement which told chiefly of eagerness for weapons of defence against the rationalist invasion. None of the works named will bear any critical scrutiny. Drummond’s was repented of by its author, as it well might; and the irrationalism of Mr. Kidd and Mr. Balfour soon ceased to comfort the clergy who hastily hailed it as a means of stablishing the faith.
What subsists is the mass of mainly conventional, formal, and uncritical orthodoxy, the custom of the majority, which stands for the same mental inertia as preserved ancient paganism substantially intact for five hundred years after Socrates, and enabled its traditional polytheism to overgrow early Christianity. And the professional defence to-day is at many points singularly like that put forward for pagan polytheism by the Platonists and Neo-Platonists. At its best it is certainly not more philosophical than the performance of Plotinus; at its worst not more hollow than the performance of Cicero.