Evening Post. SATURDAY, DECEMBER 21, 1929. SWALLOWING THE WHALE

Evening Post, Volume CVIII, Issue 150, 21 December 1929, Page 8

Evening Post. SATURDAY, DECEMBER 21, 1929. SWALLOWING THE WHALE

Two years ago the Bishop of Birmingham, England, made an emphatic declaration in favour of Darwinism. We commented at the time that it would have been more noteworthy if his diocese had been Birmingham, Alabama. Alabama at the time was one of the few States of the American Union in which Bible reading in the public schools was required by law, and it was surrounded by States in which the supposed antagonism of evolution to the Bible had for years been the subject of fierce controversy. Though its own Legislature appeared not to have interfered, Alabama had doubtless^ suffered enough from the storm which had swept other Southern States to make it very undesirable for a leading churchman to speak too plainly for a doctrine popularly supposed to have come straight from hell. How fierce was that storm one many judge from the invective of Mr. W. J. Bryan as champion of the anti-evolutionists in the great Tennessee "Monkey Law" trial. The young schoolmaster, Mr. Scopes, who was prosecuted for a breach of the law, was regarded by Mr. Bryan as the representative of "a big bunch of anarchists, atheists, and. scoundrels who are trying to take our children to hell with them." What bounds would have been set to the indignation of the anti-evolu-tionists if the supporters of Darwinism had been bold enough even, to question the existence of that hell which Mr. Bryan believed was reserved for their reception?

Birmingham, Alabama, has not yet produced one so daring. At least it has not turned on him the limelight of publicity, in place of the flames which he denies. It has remained for Dean Inge to deprecate the "ghastly pictures of hell which filled Christian literature," and for the Bishop of London to say that "the pictures of roasting souls made more atheists than anything else in the world." But Alabama has its own less notorious character. The Baptist College at Birmingham (we were informed this week) has discharged its Professor of Biology, who refused to accept the story of Jonah and the whale. The interest of this brief announcement was not so great as it might have been if the' argument of the Professor and the judgment of the College had been set forth even briefly." The cablegram which recorded the pronouncement of the Bishop of London" that "self will was hell" was more enlightening, as it gave an inkling of his argument. "It seemed certain (he said) that there were passages in St. Matthew attributing to our Lord things which He never said." This follows the line of a writer in "The Nation and Athenaeum," who reviewed a recentlypublished work, "The Legend of Hell," by Dr. Pearcy Dearmer, D.D.

It is only the textual discoveries and criticism of recent years (wrote the reviewer) that have demonstrated the fact that there are, after all, no contradictions in Christ's teaching, since all His supposed references to hell, save those used in an obviously parabolic sense, are now proved to be uncanonical. It is useless to substitute, as Protestantism is at present inclined to do [here he differs from the Bishop], a spiritual for a material hell. All vindictive punishment whatsoever is now seen, in the light of modern criticism, to be inconsistent with Christ's method of redemption through forgiveness.

No similar statement of the argument for or against Jonah and the whale was given; but it i 9 not really necessary. The dispute is an old one, and, except in Alabama, even out of date. It raged during the Nineteenth Century, and many were the writings for and against accepting the Book of Jonah as historical. But early in the Twentieth Century Dr. T. K. Cheyne, D.D., Oriel Professor of the Interpretation of Holy Scripture at Oxford, could write in the "Enyclopaedia Britannica" that one widely accepted result of criticism was that the narrative was "not historical but an imaginative story (such as wasj called a Midrash), based upon Biblical data, and tending to edification." Sir James Frazer was more outspoken ,in "Folk-lore in the Old Testament." There he compared Jonah and the whale with a "less artistic but equally veracious story" told by the natives of Northern New Guinea. In this latter story five natives and a canoe were swallowed., by a whale. The natives cut slices from the whale's liver and cooked them on a fire kindled with the wood of their canoe. Thus mangled, the fish died and drifted , ashore. The natives were given timely warning of the landing by a hornbill, which also advised them to return and bring their people to the island. Before this was written, however, the historical acceptance of Jonah had many able defenders. One such was Prebendary Huxtable, a contributor to the Bible Commentary (1882 edition). Prebendary Huxtable could reconcile the Gospel references (foretelling the Resurrection): "There shall no sign be given to this generation, but the sign of the prophet Jonas" with the Midrash idea; but he found an obstacle in the reference to Nineveh: "The men of Nineveh shall rise up in judgment with this generation and shall condemn it; because they repented at the preaching of the prophet Jonas; and behold a greater than Jonas is here." If the preaching and repentance were not matters of fact, could that parallel have been drawn? Incidentally Prebendary

Huxtable devoted much space to consideration of the question whether there was a fish with a throat sufficiently capacious to admit a man surely an unnecessary argument. If one would accept the miraculous, why seek a natural explanation of a detail? , In latter days (except, again, in Alabama) the greatest interest in Jonah has been in the meaning of the story and how the author came by his symbolism. A widely-accepted explanation of the narrative is that it was intended as a rebuke to Israel. The nation was to be a prophet to the nations at large; but it had fled from its mission, as Jonah did; and, for a punishment, it was swallowed up in foreign lands, to be released later, so that the prophetic mission might be fulfilled. The origin of the symbolism was harder to find. Some early critics sought it in mythology, and recalled that it was at Joppa (where Jonah found the ship bound for Tarshish) that Andromeda of the Greek legend was chained to a rock as a sacrifice to a dragon. But to see the resemblance one had to omit Perseus and Andromeda, and change the dragon into a big fish. Only the place would be the same. A more feasible explanation was that the author of Jonah obtained his big fish from the widespread nature-myth of the dragon, representing chaos. Dr. Cheyne, in the "Encyclopaedia Biblica," found the link between Jonah and the Babylonian myth in Jere^ miah: Nebuchadnezzar, the King of Babylon, hath devoured me. ... he hath swallowed me up like a dragon. . And I will punish Bel in Babylon, "and I will bring forth out of his mouth that which he hath swallowed up. Birmingham, Alabama, however, has no concern with such criticism and theorising. It*is well content with Jonah and the whale as history, and, presumably, with hell as an essential fact in view of the necessity of providing ultimately for the people who do not agree with Alabama. - .