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1. We should expect God to reveal truths of which mankind were
ignorant.
2. We should expect God to make no errors of fact in His
revelation.
3. We should expect God to make His revelation so clear and
so definite
that it could be neither misunderstood nor
misrepresented.
4. We should expect God to ensure that His revelation
should reach _all_
men; and should reach all men directly and
quickly.
5. We should expect God's revelation of the relations existing
between
Himself and man to be true.
6. We should expect the
ethical code in God's revelation to be complete,
and final, and
perfect. The divine ethics should at least be above
human criticism and
beyond human amendment.
To what extent does the Bible revelation fulfil
the above natural
expectations?
1. Does the Bible reveal any new moral
truths?
I cannot speak very positively, but I think there is very little
moral
truth in the Bible which has not been, or will not be traced back
to
more ancient times and religions.
2. Does the Bible revelation
contain no errors of fact?
I claim that it contains many errors of fact,
and the Higher Criticism
supports the claim; as we shall see.
3. Is
the Bible revelation so clear and explicit that no difference of
opinion as
to its meaning is possible?
No. It is not. No one living can claim
anything of the kind.
4. Has God's revelation, as given in the Bible,
reached all men?
No. After thousands of years it is not yet known to
one-half the human
race.
5. Is God's revelation of the relations
between man and God true?
I claim that it is not true. For the word of
God makes it appear that
man was created by God in His own image, and that
man sinned against
God. Whereas man, being only what God made him, and having
only the
powers God gave him, _could_ not sin against God any more than
a
steam-engine can sin against the engineer who designed and built
it.
6. Is the ethical code of the Bible complete, and final, and
perfect?
No. The ethical code of the Bible gradually develops and
improves. Had
it been divine it would have been perfect from the first. It is
because
it is human that it develops. As the prophets and the poets of the
Jews
grew wiser, and gentler, and more enlightened, so the revelation
of
God grew wiser and gentler with them. Now, God would know from
the
beginning; but men would have to learn. Therefore the Bible
writings
would appear to be human, and not divine.
Let us look over
these points again, and make the matter still clearer
and more
simple.
If the children of an earthly father had wandered away and
forgotten
him, and were, for lack of guidance, living evil lives; and if
the
earthly father wished his children to know that they were his
children,
wished them to know what he had done for them, what they owed to
him,
what penalty they might fear, or reward they might ask from him; if
he
wished them to live cleanly and justly, and to love him, and at
last
come home to him--what would that earthly father do?
He would
send his message to _all_ his children, instead of sending it
to one, and
trusting him to repeat it correctly to the others. He would
try to so word
his message as that all his children might understand it.
He would send
his children the very best rules of life he knew. He would
take great pains
to avoid error in matters of fact.
If, after the message was sent, his
children quarrelled and fought about
its meaning, their earthly father would
not sit silent and allow them to
hate and slay each other because of a
misconception, but would send at
once and make his meaning plain to
all.
And if an earthly father would act thus wisely and thus kindly,
"how
much more your Father which is in Heaven?"
But the Bible
revelation was not given to all the people of the earth.
It was given to a
handful of Jews. It was not so explicit as to make
disagreement impossible.
It is thousands of years since the revelation
of God began, and yet to-day it
is not known to hundreds of millions
of human beings, and amongst those whom
it has reached there is endless
bitter disagreement as to its
meaning.
Now, what is the use of a revelation which does not reveal more
than is
known, which does not reveal truth only, which does not reach half
those
who need it, which cannot be understood by those it does
reach?
But you will regard me as a prejudiced witness. I shall therefore,
in my
effort to prove the Bible fallible, quote almost wholly from
Christian
critics.
And I take the opportunity to here recommend very
strongly _Shall We
Understand the Bible?_ by the Rev. T. Rhondda Williams.
Adam and Charles
Black; 1s net.
There are two chief theories as to the
inspiration of the Bible. One is
the old theory that the Bible is the actual
word of God, and nothing but
the word of God, directly revealed by God to
Moses and the prophets. The
other is the new theory: that the Bible is the
work of many men whom God
had inspired to speak or write the
truth.
The old theory is well described by Dr. Washington Gladden in
the
following passage:
They imagine that the Bible must have
originated in a manner
purely miraculous; and, though they know very
little about its
origin, they conceive of it as a book that was written
in heaven
in the English tongue, divided there into chapters and
verses,
with headlines and reference marks, printed in small
pica,
bound in calf, and sent down by angels in its present
form.
The newer idea of the inspiration of the Bible is also well
expressed by
Dr. Gladden; thus:
Revelation, we shall be able to
understand, is not the dictation
by God of words to men that they may be
written down in books:
it is rather the disclosure of the truth and love
of God to men
in the processes of history, in the development of the
moral
order of the world. It is the light that lighteth every
man,
shining in the paths that lead to righteousness and
life. There
is a moral leadership of God in history; revelation is the
record
of that leadership. It is by no means confined to words;
its
most impressive disclosures are in the field of
action. "Thus
_did_ the Lord," as Dr. Bruce has said, is a more perfect
formula
of revelation than "Thus saith the Lord." It is in that
great
historical movement of which the Bible is the record that we
find
the revelation of God to men.
The old theory of Bible
inspiration was, as I have said, the theory that
the Bible was the actual and
pure word of God, and was true in every
circumstance and detail.
Now,
if an almighty and all-wise God had spoken or written every word
of the
Bible, then that book would, of course, be wholly and unshakably
true in its
every statement.
But if the Bible was written by men, some of them more
or less inspired,
then it would not, in all probability be wholly
perfect.
The more inspiration its writers had from God, the more perfect
it would
be. The less inspiration its writers had from God, the less perfect
it
would be.
Wholly perfect, it might be attributed to a perfect
being. Partly
perfect, it might be the work of less perfect beings. Less
perfect, it
would have to be put down to less perfect
beings.
Containing any fault or error, it could not be the actual word of
God,
and the more errors and faults it contained, the less inspiration of
God
would be granted to its authors.
I will quote again from Dr.
Gladden:
What I desire to show is, that the work of putting the
Bible
into its present form was not done in heaven, but on earth;
that
it was not done by angels, but by men; that it was not done all
at
once, but a little at a time, the work of preparing and
perfecting
it extending over several centuries, and employing the
labours of
many men in different lands and long-divided
generations.
I now turn to Dr. Aked. On page 25 of his book, _Changing
Creeds_, he
says:
Ignorance has claimed the Bible for its
own. Bigotry has made
the Bible its battleground. Its phrases have
become the
shibboleth of pietistic sectarians. Its authority has
been
evoked in support of the foulest crimes committed by the
vilest
men; and its very existence has been made a pretext for
theories
which shut out God from His own world. In our day Bible
worship
has become, with many very good but very unthoughtful people,
a
disease.
So much for the attitude of the various schools of
religious thought
towards the Bible.
Now, in the opinion of these
Christian teachers, is the Bible perfect
or imperfect? Dr. Aked gives his
opinion with characteristic candour and
energy:
For observe the
position: men are told that the Bible is the
infallible revelation of
God to man, and that its statements
concerning God and man are to be
unhesitatingly accepted as
statements made upon the authority of
God. They turn to its
pages, and they find historical errors,
arithmetical mistakes,
scientific blunders (or, rather, blunders most
unscientific),
inconsistencies, and manifold contradictions; and, what
is far
worse, they find that the most horrible crimes are committed
by
men who calmly plead in justification of their terrible
misdeeds
the imperturbable "God said." The heart and conscience of
man
indignantly rebel against the representations of the Most
High
given in some parts of the Bible. What happens? Why, such
men declare--are now declaring, and will in constantly
increasing
numbers, and with constantly increasing force and
boldness declare--that
they can have nothing to do with a book
whose errors a child can
discover, and whose revelation of God
partakes at times of blasphemy
against man.
I need hardly say that I agree with every word of the above.
If anyone
asked me what evidence exists in support of the claims that the
Bible is
the word of God, or that it was in any real sense of the words
"divinely
inspired," I should answer, without the least hesitation, that
there
does not exist a scrap of evidence of any kind in support of such
a
claim.
Let us give a little consideration to the origin of the
Bible. The first
five books of the Bible, called the Pentateuch, were said to
be written
by Moses. Moses was not, and could not have been, the author of
those
books. There is, indeed, no reliable evidence to prove that Moses
ever
existed. Whether he was a fictitious hero, or a solar myth, or what
he
was, no man knows.
Neither does there appear to be any certainty
that the biblical books
attributed to David, to Solomon, to Isaiah, Jeremiah,
and the rest were
really written by those kings or prophets, or even in their
age.
And after these books, or many of them, had been written, they
were
entirely lost, and are said to have been reproduced by Ezra.
Add
to these facts that the original Hebrew had no vowels, that many of
the
sacred books were written without vowels, and that the vowels were
added long
after; and remember that, as Dr. Aked says, the oldest Hebrew
Bible in
existence belongs to the tenth century after Christ, and
it will begin to
appear that the claim for biblical infallibility is
utterly
absurd.
But I must not offer these statements on my own authority. Let
us
return to Dr. Gladden. On page 11 of _Who Wrote the Bible?_ I find
the
following:
The first of these holy books of the Jews was,
then, The Law,
contained in the first five books of our Bible, known
among us
as the Pentateuch, and called by the Jews sometimes
simply
"The Law," and sometimes "The Law of Moses." This was
supposed
to be the oldest portion of their Scriptures, and was by
them
regarded as much more sacred and authoritative than any
other
portion. To Moses, they said, God spake face to face; to
the
other holy men much less distinctly. Consequently, their
appeal
is most often to the Law of Moses.
The sacredness of the
five books of "The Law," then, rests upon the
belief that they were written
by Moses, who had spoken face to face with
God.
So that if Moses did
not write those books, their sacredness is a myth.
Now, on page 42, Dr.
Gladden says:
1. The Pentateuch could never have been written by any
one
man, inspired or otherwise.
2. It is a composite
work, in which many hands have been
engaged. The production of it
extends over many centuries.
3. It contains writings which are as
old as the time of Moses,
and some that are much older. It is
impossible to tell how
much of it came from the hand of Moses; but
there are
considerable portions of it which, although they may
have
been somewhat modified by later editors, are
substantially
as he left them.
On page 45 Dr. Gladden, again
speaking of the Pentateuch, says:
But the story of Genesis goes back
to a remote antiquity. The
last event related in that book occurred
four hundred years
before Moses was born; it was as distant from him as
the
discovery of America by Columbus is from us; and other
portions
of the narrative, such as the stories of the Flood and
the
Creation, stretch back into the shadows of the age which
precedes history. Neither Moses nor any one living in his
day could
have given us these reports from his own knowledge.
Whoever wrote this
must have obtained his materials in one of
three ways:
1.
They might have been given to him by divine revelation
from
God.
2. He might have gathered them up from oral tradition,
from
stories, folklore, transmitted from mouth to mouth,
and
so preserved from generation to generation.
3. He
might have found them in written documents existing at
the time of
his writing.
As many of the laws and incidents in the books of Moses were
known to
the Chaldeans, the "direct revelation of God" theory is not
plausible.
On this point Dr. Gladden's opinion supports mine. He says, on
page 61:
That such is the fact with respect to the structure of
these
ancient writings is now beyond question. And our theory
of
inspiration must be adjusted to this fact. Evidently neither
the theory of verbal inspiration, nor the theory of plenary
inspiration,
can be made to fit the facts, which a careful study
of the writings
themselves brings before us. These writings are
not inspired in the
sense which we have commonly given that word.
The verbal theory of
inspiration was only tenable while they
were supposed to be the work of
a single author. To such a
composite literature no such theory will
apply. "To make this
claim," says Professor Ladd, "and yet accept the
best ascertained
results of criticism, would compel us to take such
positions
as the following: the original authors of each one of
the
writings which enter into the composite structure were
infallibly
inspired; every one who made any changes in any one of
these
fundamental writings was infallibly inspired; every
compiler
who put together two or more of these writings was
infallibly
inspired, both as to his selections and omissions, and as to
any
connecting or explanatory words which he might himself
write;
every redactor was infallibly inspired to correct and
supplement,
and omit that which was the product of previous
infallible
inspirations. Or, perhaps, it might seem more convenient to
attach
the claim of a plenary inspiration to the last redactor of
all;
but then we should probably have selected of all others the
one
least able to bear the weight of such a claim. Think of
making
the claim for a plenary inspiration of the Pentateuch in
its
present form on the ground of the infallibility of that one
of
the scribes who gave it its last touches some time subsequent
to
the death of Ezra."
Remember that Dr. Gladden declares, on
page 5, that he shall state no
conclusions as to the history of the sacred
writings which will not be
accepted by conservative critics.
On page
54 Dr. Gladden quotes the following from Dr. Perowne:
The first
_composition_ of the Pentateuch as a whole could not
have taken place
till after the Israelites entered Canaan.
The whole work did not
finally assume its present shape till
its revision was undertaken by
Ezra after the return from the
Babylonish captivity.
On page 25
Dr. Gladden himself speaks as follows:
The common argument by which
Christ is made a witness to the
authenticity and infallible authority of
the Old Testament
runs as follows:
Christ quotes Moses as
the author of this legislation; therefore
Moses must have written the
whole Pentateuch. Moses was an
inspired prophet; therefore all the
teaching of the Pentateuch
must be infallible.
The facts are
that Jesus nowhere testifies that Moses wrote the
whole of the
Pentateuch; and that he nowhere guarantees the
infallibility either of
Moses or of the book. On the contrary,
he set aside as inadequate or
morally defective, certain laws
which in this book are ascribed to
Moses.
So much for the authorship and the inspiration of the first five
books
of the Bible.
As to the authorship of other books of the Bible,
Dr. Gladden says of
Judges and Samuel that we do not know the authors nor the
dates.
Of Kings he says: "The name of the author is concealed from us."
The
origin and correctness of the Prophecies and Psalms, he tells us,
are
problematical.
Of the Books of Esther and Daniel, Dr. Gladden
says: "That they are
founded on fact I do not doubt; but it is, perhaps,
safer to regard them
both rather as historical fictions than as veritable
histories."
Of Daniel, Dean Farrar wrote:
The immense
majority of scholars of name and acknowledged
competence in England and
Europe have now been led to form
an irresistible conclusion that the
Book of Daniel was not
written, and could not have been written, in its
present form,
by the prophet Daniel, B.C. 534, but that it can only have
been
written, as we now have it, in the days of Antiochus
Epiphanes,
about B.C. 164, and that the object of the pious and
patriotic
author as to inspirit his desponding countrymen by
splendid
specimens of that lofty moral fiction which was always
common
amongst the Jews after the Exile, and was known as "The
Haggadah."
So clearly is this proven to most critics, that they
willingly
suffer the attempted refutations of their views to sink
to
the ground under the weight of their own inadequacy.
(_The
Bible and the Child_.)
I return now to Dr. Aked, from whose book I quote
the following:
Dr. Clifford has declared that there is not a man who
has
given a day's attention to the question who holds the
complete
freedom of the Bible from inaccuracy. He has added that
"it
is become more and more impossible to affirm the inerrancy
of the Bible." Dr. Lyman Abbott says that "an infallible book
is an
impossible conception, and to-day no one really believes
that our
present Bible is such a book."
Compare those opinions with the following
extract from the first article
in _The Bible and the Child_:
The
change of view respecting the Bible, which has marked the
advancing
knowledge and more earnest studies of this generation
is only the
culmination of the discovery that there were
different documents in the
Book of Genesis--a discovery first
published by the physician, Jean
Astruc, in 1753. There are
_three_ widely divergent ways of dealing
with these results of
profound study, each of which is almost equally
dangerous to
the faith of the rising generation.
1. Parents
and teachers may go on inculcating dogmas about the
Bible and methods of
dealing with it which have long become
impossible to those who have
really tried to follow the manifold
discoveries of modern inquiry with
perfectly open and unbiased
minds. There are a certain number of
persons who, when their
minds have become stereotyped in foregone
conclusions, are simply
_incapable_ of grasping new truths. They become
obstructives,
and not infrequently bigoted obstructives. As convinced
as the
Pope of their own personal infallibility, their attitude
towards
those who see that the old views are no longer tenable is
an
attitude of anger and alarm. This is the usual temper of the
_odium theologicum_. It would, if it could, grasp the thumbscrew
and
the rack of mediaeval Inquisitors, and would, in the last
resource, hand
over all opponents to the scaffold or the stake.
Those whose intellects
have thus been petrified by custom and
advancing years are, of all
others, the most hopeless to deal
with. They have made themselves
incapable of fair and rational
examination of the truths which they
impugn. They think that
they can, by mere assertion, overthrow results
arrived at by the
lifelong inquiries of the ablest students, while they
have not
given a day's serious or impartial study to them. They
fancy
that even the ignorant, if only they be what is called
"orthodox,"
are justified in strong denunciation of men quite as
truthful,
and often incomparably more able, than
themselves. Off-hand
dogmatists of this stamp, who usually abound among
professional
religionists, think that they can refute any number of
scholars,
however profound and however pious, if only they shout
"Infidel"
with sufficient loudness.
Those are not the words of an
"Infidel." They are the words of the late
Dean Farrar.
To quote again
from Dr. Gladden:
Evidently neither the theory of verbal
inspiration, nor the
theory of plenary inspiration, can be made to fit
the facts
which a careful study of the writings themselves brings
before
us. _These writings are not inspired in the sense which
we
have commonly given to that word._ The verbal theory of
inspiration was only tenable while they were supposed to be
the work of
a single author. _To such a composite literature
no such theory will
apply._
The Bible is not inspired. The fact is that _no_ "sacred" book
is
inspired. _All_ "sacred" books are the work of human minds. All ideas
of
God are human ideas. All religions are made by man.
When the
old-fashioned Christian said the Bible was an inspired book, he
meant that
God put the words and the facts directly into the mind of
the prophet. That
meant that God told Moses about the creation, Adam and
Eve, Cain and Abel,
Noah and the Ark, and the Ten Commandments.
Many modern Christians,
amongst whom I place the Rev. Ambrose Pope, of
Bakewell, believe that God
gave Moses (and all the other prophets) a
special genius and a special desire
to convey religious information to
other men.
And Mr. Pope suggests
that man was so ignorant, so childlike, or so
weak in those days that it was
necessary to disguise plain facts in
misleading symbols.
But the man,
Moses or another, who wrote the Book of Genesis was a man
of literary genius.
He was no child, no weakling. If God had said to
him: "I made the world out
of the fiery nebula, and I made the sea
to bring forth the staple of life,
and I caused all living things to
develop from that seed or staple of life,
and I drew man out from the
brutes; and the time was six hundred millions of
years"--if God had said
that to Moses, do you think Moses would not have
understood?
Now, let me show you what the Christian asks us to believe.
He asks us
to believe that the God who was the first cause of creation, and
knew
everything, inspired man, in the childhood of the world, with a
fabulous
and inaccurate theory of the origin of man and the earth, and that
since
that day the same God has gradually changed or added to the
inspiration,
until He inspired Laplace, and Galileo, and Copernicus, and
Darwin to
contradict the teachings of the previous fifty thousand years. He
asks
us to believe that God muddled men's minds with a mysterious
series
of revelations cloaked in fable and allegory; that He allowed them
to
stumble and to blunder, and to quarrel over these "revelations"; that
He
allowed them to persecute, and slay, and torture each other on
account
of divergent readings of his "revelations" for ages and ages; and
that
He is still looking on while a number of bewildered and
antagonistic
religions fight each other to achieve the survival of the
fittest. Is
that a reasonable theory? Is it the kind of theory a reasonable
man can
accept? Is it consonant with common sense?
Contrast that with
our theory. We say that early man, having no
knowledge of science, and more
imagination than reason, would be alarmed
and puzzled by the phenomena of
Nature. He would be afraid of the dark,
he would be afraid of the thunder, he
would wonder at the moon, at the
stars, at fire, at the ocean. He would fear
what he did not understand,
and he would bow down and pay homage to what he
feared.
Then, by degrees, he would personify the stars, and the sun, and
the
thunder, and the fire. He would make gods of these things. He would
make
gods of the dead. He would make gods of heroes. He would do what
all
savage races do, what all children do: he would make legends, or
fables,
or fairy tales out of his hopes, his fears, and his
guesses.
Does not that sound reasonable? Does not history teach us that
it is
true? Do we not know that religion was so born and nursed?
There
is no such thing known to men as an original religion. All
religions are made
up of the fables and the imaginations of tribes long
since extinct. Religion
is an evolution, not a revelation. It has been
invented, altered, and built
up, and pulled down, and reconstructed time
after time. It is a
conglomeration and an adaptation, as language is.
And the Christian religion
is no more an original religion than English
is an original tongue. We have
Sanscrit, Latin, Greek, French, Saxon,
Norman words in our language; and we
have Aryan, Semitic, Egyptian,
Roman, Greek, and all manner of ancient
foreign fables, myths, and rites
in our Christian religion.
We say
that Genesis was a poetic presentation of a fabulous story pieced
together
from many traditions of many tribes, and recording with great
literary power
the ideas of a people whose scientific knowledge was
very
incomplete.
Now, I ask you which of these theories is the most
reasonable; which
is the most scientific; which agrees most closely with the
facts of
philology and history of which we are in possession?
Why
twist the self-evident fact that the Bible story of creation was the
work of
unscientific men of strong imagination into a far-fetched and
unsatisfactory
puzzle of symbol and allegory? It would be just as easy
and just as
reasonable to take the _Morte d'Arthur_ and try to prove
that it contained a
veiled revelation of God's relations to man.
And let me ask one or two
questions as to this matter of the revelation
of the Holy Bible. Is God
all-powerful or is he not? If he is
all-powerful, why did He make man so
imperfect? Could He not have
created him at once a wise and good creature?
Even when man was ignorant
and savage, could not an all-powerful God have
devised some means of
revealing Himself so as to be understood? If God really
wished to reveal
Himself to man, why did He reveal Himself only to one or two
obscure
tribes, and leave the rest of mankind in darkness?
Those poor
savages were full of credulity, full of terror, full of
wonder, full of the
desire to worship. They worshipped the sun and the
moon; they worshipped
ghosts and demons; they worshipped tyrants, and
pretenders, and heroes, dead
and alive. Do you believe that if God
had come down on earth, with a cohort
of shining angels, and had said,
"Behold, I am the only God," these savages
would not have left all
baser gods and worshipped Him? Why, these men, and
all the thousands
of generations of their children, have been looking for God
since first
they learned to look at sea and sky. They are looking for Him
now. They
have fought countless bloody wars and have committed countless
horrible
atrocities in their zeal for Him. And you ask us to believe that
His
grand revelation of Himself is bound up in a volume of fables and
errors
collected thousands of years ago by superstitious priests and
prophets
of Palestine, and Egypt, and Assyria.
We cannot believe such
a statement. No man can believe it who tests it
by his reason in the same way
in which he would test any modern problem.
If the leaders of religion brought
the same vigour and subtlety of mind
to bear upon religion which they bring
to bear upon any criticism of
religion, if they weighed the Bible as they
have weighed astronomy and
evolution, the Christian religion would not last a
year.
If my reader has not studied this matter, let him read the books I
have
recommended, and then sit down and consider the Bible revelation
and
story with the same fearless honesty and clear common sense with
which
he would consider the Bibles of the Mohammedan, or Buddhist, or
Hindoo,
and then ask himself the question: "Is the Bible a holy and
inspired
book, and the word of God to man, or is it an incongruous
and
contradictory collection of tribal traditions and ancient
fables,
written by men of genius and imagination?"
THE
EVOLUTION OF THE BIBLE
We now reach the second stage in our
examination, which is the claim
that no religion known to man can be truly
said to be original. All
religions, the Christian religion included, are
adaptations or variants
of older religions. Religions are not _revealed_:
they are _evolved_.
If a religion were revealed by God, that religion
would be perfect in
whole and in part, and would be as perfect at the first
moment of its
revelation as after ten thousand years of practice. There has
never been
a religion which fulfils those conditions.
According to
Bible chronology, Adam was created some six thousand years
ago. Science
teaches that man existed during the glacial epoch, which
was at least fifty
thousand years before the Christian era.
Here I recommend the study of
Laing's _Human Origins_, Parson's _Our
Sun God_, Sayce's _Ancient Empires of
the East_, and Frazer's _Golden
Bough_.
In his visitation charge at
Blackburn, in July, 1889, the Bishop of
Manchester spoke as
follows:
Now, if these dates are accepted, to what age of the world
shall
we assign that Accadian civilisation and literature which so
long
preceded Sargo I. and the statutes of Sirgullah? I can
best
answer you in the words of the great Assyriologist, F.
Hommel:
"If," he says, "the Semites were already settled in
Northern
Babylonia (Accad) in the beginning of the fourth thousand
B.C.
in possession of the fully developed Shumiro-Accadian
culture
adopted by them--a culture, moreover, which appears to
have
sprouted like a cutting from Shumir, then the latter must be
far,
far older still, and have existed in its _completed_ form in
the
fifth thousand B.C., an age to which I unhesitatingly ascribe
the
South Babylonian incantations."... Who does not see that
such
facts as these compel us to remodel our whole idea of the
past?
A culture which was _complete_ one thousand years before Adam must
have
needed many thousands of years to develop. It would be a modest
guess
that Accadian culture implied a growth of at least ten thousand
years.
Of course, it may be said that the above biblical error is only an
error
of time, and has no bearing on the alleged evolution of the Bible.
Well,
an error of a million, or of ten thousand, years is a serious thing
in
a divine revelation; but, as we shall see, it _has_ a bearing
on
evolution. Because it appears that in that ancient Accadian
civilisation
lie the seeds of many Bible laws and legends.
Here I
quote from _Our Sun God_, by Mr. J. D. Parsons:
To commence with, it
is well known to those acquainted with
the remains of the Assyrian and
Babylonian civilisations that
the stories of the creation, the
temptation, the fall, the deluge,
and the confusion of tongues were the
common property of the
Babylonians centuries before the date of the
alleged Exodus
under Moses... Even the word Sabbath is Babylonian. And
the
observance of the seventh day as a Sabbath, or day of rest,
by
the Accadians thousands of years before Moses, or Israel, or
even Abraham, or Adam himself could have been born or created,
is
admitted by, among others, the Bishop of Manchester. For in
an address
to his clergy, already mentioned, he let fall these
pregnant
words:
"Who does not see that such facts as these compel us to
remodel
our whole idea of the past, and that in particular to affirm
that
the Sabbatical institution originated in the time of Moses,
three
thousand five hundred years after it is probable that it
existed
in Chaldea, is an impossibility, no matter how many Fathers of
the
Church have asserted it. Facts cannot be dismissed like
theories."
The Sabbath, then, is one link in the evolution of the Bible.
Like the
legends of the Creation, the Fall, and the Flood, it was adopted by
the
Jews from the Babylonians during or after the Captivity.
Of the
Flood, Professor Sayce, in his _Ancient Empires_ of the East,
speaks as
follows:
With the Deluge the mythical history of Babylonia takes a
new
departure. From this event to the Persian conquest was a
period
of 36,000 years, or an astronomical cycle called _saros_.
Xisuthros, with his family and friends, alone survived the
waters which
drowned the rest of mankind on account of their
sins. He had been
ordered by the gods to build a ship, to pitch
it within and without, and
to stock it with animals of every
species. Xisuthros sent out first a
dove, then a swallow, and
lastly a raven, to discover whether the earth
was dry; the dove
and the swallow returned to the ship, and it was only
when the
raven flew away that the rescued hero ventured to leave his
ark.
He found that he had been stranded on the peak of the
mountain
of Nizir, "the mountain of the world," whereon the
Accadians
believed the heavens to rest--where, too, they placed
the
habitations of their gods, and the cradle of their own race.
Since Nizir lay amongst the mountains of Pir Mam, a little south
of
Rowandiz, its mountain must be identified with Rowandiz itself.
On its
peak Xisuthros offered sacrifices, piling up cups of wine
by sevens; and
the rainbow, "the glory of Anu," appeared in
the heaven, in covenant
that the world should never again be
destroyed by flood. Immediately
afterwards Xisuthros and his
wife, like the Biblical Enoch, were
translated to the regions of
the blest beyond Datilla, the river of
Death, and his people made
their way westward to Sippara. Here they
disinterred the books
buried by their late ruler before the Deluge took
place, and
re-established themselves in their old country under the
government
first of Erekhoos, and then of his son
Khoniasbolos. Meanwhile,
other colonists had arrived in the plain of
Sumer, and here,
under the leadership of the giant Etana, called Titan
by the
Greek writers, they built a city of brick, and essayed to erect
a
tower by means of which they might scale the sky, and so win
for themselves the immortality granted to Xisuthros... But
the tower was
overthrown in the night by the winds, and Bel
frustrated their purpose
by confounding their language and
scattering them on the
mound.
These legends of the Flood and the Tower of Babel were
obviously
borrowed by the Jews during their Babylonian
captivity.
Professor Sayce, in his _Ancient Empires of the East_,
speaking of the
Accadian king, Sargon I., says:
Legends naturally
gathered round the name of the Babylonian
Solomon. Not only was he
entitled "the deviser of law,
the deviser of prosperity," but it was
told of him how his
father had died while he was still unborn, how his
mother had
fled to the mountains, and there left him, like a second
Moses,
to the care of the river in an ark of reeds and bitumen; and
how
he was saved by Accir, "the water-drawer," who brought him
up as his own son, until the time came when, under the protection
of
Istar, his rank was discovered, and he took his seat on
the throne of
his forefathers.
From Babylon the Jews borrowed the legends of Eden, of
the Fall, the
Flood, the Tower of Babel; from Babylon they borrowed the
Sabbath, and
very likely the Commandments; and is it not possible that the
legendary
Moses and the legendary Sargon may be variants of a still more
ancient
mythical figure?
Compare Sayce with the following "Notes on
the Moses Myth," from
_Christianity and Mythology_, by J. M.
Robertson:
NOTES ON THE MOSES MYTH.
I have been
challenged for saying that the story of Moses and
the floating basket is
a variant of the myth of Horos and the
floating island (_Herod_ ii.
156). But this seems sufficiently
proved by the fact that in the reign
of Rameses II., according
to the monuments, there was a place in Middle
Egypt which
bore the name I-en-Moshe, "_the island of Moses_." That is
the
primary meaning. Brugsch, who proclaims the fact (_Egypt
Under the Pharaohs_, ii. 117), suggests that it can also mean "the
river
bank of Moses." It is very obvious, however, that the
Egyptians would
not have named a place by a real incident in
the life of a successful
enemy, as Moses is represented in Exodus.
Name and story are alike
mythological and pre-Hebraic, though
possibly Semitic. The Assyrian
myth of Sargon, which is,
indeed, very close to the Hebrew, may be the
oldest form of all;
but the very fact that the Hebrews located their
story in Egypt
shows that they knew it to have a home there in some
fashion.
The name Moses, whether it mean "the water-child" (so
Deutsch)
or "the hero" (Sayce, _Hib. Lect._ p. 46), was in all
likelihood
an epithet of Horos. The basket, in the latter form,
was
doubtless an adaptation from the ritual of the basket-born
God-Child, as was the birth story of Jesus. In Diodorus Siculus
(i. 25)
the myth runs that Isis found Horos _dead_ "on the water,"
and brought
him to life again; but even in that form the clue
to the Moses
birth-myth is obvious. And there are yet other
Egyptian connections for
the Moses saga, since the Egyptians
had a myth of Thoth (their Logos)
having slain Argus (as did
Hermes), and having had to fly for it to
Egypt, where he gave
laws and learning to the Egyptians. Yet, curiously
enough, this
myth probably means that the Sun God, who has in the
other
story escaped the "massacre of the innocents" (the morning
stars), now plays the slayer on his own account, since the slaying
of
many-eyed Argus probably means the extinction of the stars
by the
morning sun (cp. Emeric-David, _Introduction_, end).
Another "Hermes"
was the son of Nilus, and his name was sacred
(Cicero, _De Nat. Deor._
iii. 22, Cp. 16). The story of the
floating child, finally, becomes
part of the lore of Greece.
In the myth of Apollo, the Babe-God and his
sister Artemis are
secured in float-islands.
It is impossible to
form a just estimate of the Bible without some
knowledge of ancient history
and comparative mythology. It would be
impossible for me to go deeply into
these matters in this small book,
but I will quote a few significant passages
just to show the value of
such historical evidence. Here to begin with, are
some passages from Mr.
Grant Allen's _Evolution of the Idea of
God_.
THE ORIGIN OF GODS.
Mr. Herbert Spencer has traced
so admirably, in his _Principles
of Sociology_, the progress of
development from the Ghost to
the God that I do not propose in this
chapter to attempt much
more than a brief recapitulation of his main
propositions, which,
however, I shall supplement with fresh examples,
and adapt at
the same time to the conception of three successive stages
in
human ideas about the Life of the Dead, as set forth in the
preceding argument.
In the earlier stage of all--the stage where the
actual bodies
of the dead are preserved--gods, as such, are for the most
part
unknown: it is the corpses of friends and ancestors that
are
worshipped and reverenced. For example, Ellis says of the
corpse of a Tahitian chief, that it was placed in a sitting
posture
under a protecting shed; "a small altar was erected
before it, and
offerings of fruit, food, and flowers were
daily presented by the
relatives or the priest appointed to
attend the body." (This point
about the priest is of essential
importance.) The Central Americans,
again, as Mr. Spencer notes,
performed similar rites before bodies dried
by artificial
heat. The New Guinea people, as D'Albertis found,
worship
the dried mummies of their fathers and husbands. A
little
higher in the scale we get the developed mummy-worship of
Egypt and Peru, which survives even after the evolution of
greater gods,
from powerful kings or chieftains. Wherever
the actual bodies of the
dead are preserved, there also worship
and offerings are paid to
them.
Often, however, as already noted, it is not the whole
body,
but the head alone, that is specially kept and worshipped.
Thus Mr. H. O. Forbes says of the people of Buru: "The dead
are buried
in the forest on some secluded spot, marked by a
_merang_, or grave
pole, over which at certain intervals the
relatives place tobacco,
cigarettes, and various offerings.
When the body is decomposed the son
or nearest relative
disinters the head, wraps a new cloth about it, and
places
it in the Matakau at the back of his house, or in a
little
hut erected for it near the grave. It is the
representative
of his forefathers, whose behests he holds in the
greatest
respect."
Two points are worthy of notice in this
interesting account,
as giving us an anticipatory hint of two further
accessories
whose evolution we must trace hereafter: first, the
grave-stake,
which is probably the origin of the wooden idol; and
second,
the little hut erected over the head by the side of the
grave,
which is undoubtedly one of the origins of the temple, or
praying-house. Observe, also, the ceremonial wrapping of the
skull in
cloth and its oracular functions.
Throughout the earlier and ruder
phases of human evolution
this primitive conception of ancestors or dead
relatives as the
chief known object of worship survives undiluted; and
ancestor-
worship remains to this day the principal religion of the
Chinese
and of several other peoples. Gods, as such, are
practically
unknown in China. Ancestor-worship, also, survives in
many
other races as one of the main cults, even after other
elements
of later religion have been superimposed upon it. In
Greece
and Rome it remained to the last an important part of
domestic
ritual. But in most cases a gradual differentiation is set
up
in time between various classes of ghosts or dead persons,
some
ghosts being considered of more importance and power than
others;
and out of these last it is that gods as a rule are
finally
developed. A god, in fact, is in the beginning, at least, an
exceptionally powerful and friendly ghost--a ghost able to help, and from whose
help great things may reasonably be
expected. |
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