Evenging Post. SATURDAY, JUNE 21, 1930. SAUL AMONG THE PROPHETS

Evening Post, Volume CIX, Issue 144, 21 June 1930, Page 8

Evenging Post. SATURDAY, JUNE 21, 1930. SAUL AMONG THE PROPHETS

German scholarship has never been lacking in industry, thoroughness, independence, or audacity. In balance, in taste, and in common i sense, it has been less conspicuous. German scholars have often pioneered the way which, after due hesitation and circumspection, their British contemporaries have been content to follow. On the other hand, a little more of the British caution and sense of fact would have saved them from wasting an incredible amount of erudition in the discovery of mares' nests. Mr. A. D. Godley has very happily expressed this weakness of German scholarship, yet not without a tarter gibe at its second-hand reproduction in Oxford:—

Ye Germans, whose dating conjectures,

Whose questionings darkly abstruse, Provide our Professors with lectures,

Our Dons with original views, I strive to express what ws owe you

With wholly inadequate pen: Too late and too little we know you, Remarkable men!

Had you lived but two thousand years sooner Poor Plato had ne'er been perplexed, No frequent and fatal "lacuna" Had marred a Thucydides' text: Nor Pindar had puzzled the guesser, And ne'er had the public misled, Had he asked a Teutonic Professor To write him instead. But despite the adulteration of the facts of history by the fancies of German professors and their adoption of critical methods "completely confuted By grammar and sense," the poet arrives at the sad conclusion that, so long as classical studies are tolerated in the Universities, this servitude of British scholars to the less desirable features of German learning must continue: — . Yet 01 till the Pedagogues' Diet (Determined distinctly to speak) Prohibits with terrible flat The teachings of Latin and Greek, • Till then wo will humbly respect your Contempt for the Probably True, And climb to the heights of Conjecture, Great Germans, with you! It was. an Oxford scholar' of a previous generation who expressed the' pious wish that "all the Jarman critics were at the bottom of the Jarman Ocean." Whether the reference was to the profane or to the sacred studies of the Germans we are unable to say, but it is the. latter that have brought the weaknesses in question most prominently before the lay mind. Matthew Arnold, who was shocking the orthodoxy of two. generations ago by his free treatment of Holy Writ, was nevertheless constrained to protest very strongly against the irresponsible perversity of German criticism, especially as illustrated in the attacks of the then fashionable Tubingen school upon the Gospel. Though nobody enjoyed tilting at the weaknesses of his own countrymen better than Arnold, he was nevertheless in this connection able to quote with approval the remarks of Sir Henry Maine,

Nowhere else in the world is there the same respect for a fact as in England, unless the respect be of English origin. • And then after a reference to the recent controversies of German professors, Arnold proceeds ("God and the Bible," p. 241):

These are the intemperances and extravagances which men versed in practical life feel to be absurd. One is not disposed to form great expectations of the balance of judgment in those who commit them. Yet what is literary and historical criticism but a series of most, delicate judgments on the data given us by research —judgments requiring great tact, moderation, and temper? These, however, are what the German professor who has his data from research, and makes his judgments on thorn, is so often without, not having enough of the discipline of practical life to give it to him.

We may illustrate Matthew Arnold's point by a single recent example, and that by no means an extreme one. The authority .of "Acts" was put right out of Court by Baur and his disciples when they reduced its status to that of an "uriauthenticated r.omance" composed about the middle of the second century. One of the most potent objections to this theory is the feeling of reality which pervades almost the whole book, and for most of us reaches its highest points in two of the most vivid episodes in the whole Bible. Nothing in the voyages of Cook or Shackleton is more convincingly real than the story of St Paul's last voyage. The excellent report that we had of the lynching mob in Texas a few weeks ago was not more life-like than St. Luke's account of the mob at Ephesus, of which "the more part knew not wherefore they were come together." But this is how one of the greatest of German scholars—a man. whose eminence in the scholarship of both the Old Testament and the New must surely in these days of intensive specialism be unsurpassed—sweeps away two formidable obstacles from the path of his theories. *

Wellhausen has lately treated us (in the "Nachrichten" of Gottingen) to a conjecture that the account of the shipwreck and voyage (Acts xxvii) was borrowed by the editor (who was, of course, not St. Luke) from elsewhere, and that the mentions in it of St. Paul are interpolations 1 Similarly, the riot at Ephesus (six, 23-40) was a riot against the Jews, which the editor has transformed into a riot against St. Paul and his disciples.

Our quotation is from a review of the English translation of Harnack's

"The Acts of the Apostles," in the "Dublin Review" for April, 1909,. in which Wellhausen is merely cited as a foil to his equally distinguished but more level-headed countryman.

Ho (Haraack) is,, says the reviewer, as enthusiastic in a general way as Sir W. Ramsay about St. Luke $b a historian, though ho "does not carry his admirati . into every detail, and points out defects where Kamsay would see perfection. Dr. Harnack is amazed at the originality of St. Luke's plan, and at the masterly way in which he carried it out, at his literary ability and at his power of varying his' style according to his subject matter. "The Acts" are in the main, he thinks, accurate history, but the earlier chapters are not entirely -to be relied on, and tho first chapter in particular is mere

legend. . . . He holds as strongly as ever with tho unity of authorship of the whole %vork. He is, indeed, most moderate and most sane in comparison with the average liberal critic.

Such was the judgment of an English Roman Catholic on the great scholar of another denomination, on the man whßse death was reported last week. From the standpoint of orthodoxy Adolf yon Harnack may indeed be regarded as a brand snatched from the burning. The leading characteristics of his work are thus described by the "Encyclopaedia Britannica," in a passage which is unfortunately omitted from the last edition:—

Harnack, both as lecturer and writer, was one of the most prolific and most stimulating of modern critical scholars, and trained up in his "seminar" a whole generation of teachers who carried his ideas and methods throughout the whole of Germany and even beyond its borders. His distinctive character-' istics are his claim for absolute freedom in the study of church history and the New Testament; his distrust of speculative theology, whether orthodox or liberal; his interest in practical Christianity as a religious life and not as a. system of theology. '

This practical side of his theology was well expressed by Harnack himself when he wrote in the note prefixed, to the English translation of "What is Christianity?":

The theologians of every country only half discharge their duties if they think it enou'fh to treat of the Gospel in the recondite language of learning and bury it in folios.

On the critical side, Harnack rendered a great service to faith and seriously fluttered the dovecotes of the German liberals who had previously, been proved to follow his lead by his books on "The Acts," and "Luke, the Beloved Disciple," in which he not only put St. Luke's authorship both of "The Acts" and of the third Gospel beyond any reasonable doubt, but, recanting his previous opinions, substantially confirmed,the traditional chronology,

"We can now assert, said Harnack, in tho second of these volumes, that during the years 30-70 A.D., out on the soil of Palestine —more -particularly in Jerusalem —this (Christian) tradit|on as a whole took the essential form which it presented ia its later development.

In the maturity-, of.,his. great powers, Saul .also had taken his place among the prophets, and in so doing struck a powerful blow at destructive criticism. It may no doubt be said that for such a faith as that of Principal Shairp's, for instance, it was not needed.

I have a life with Christ to live, ,

But, ere I live it, must I wait Till learning can clear answer give

Of this and that book's date? I have a life in Christ to live, I have a death in Christ! to die; — And ■ must I wait, till science give All doubts a full reply?'

There is fortunately no need to wait as long as that, but at a time when scepticism has been engaged for nearly a century in endeavouring to weaken the Christian tradition by enlarging the interval between the events and the record, it must surely be admitted that by his learning, no less by his life, Adolf yon Harnack has rendered religion a great service.