THE NEW TESTAMENT

Evening Post, Issue 99, 24 October 1934, Page 7

THE NEW TESTAMENT

"NOT LITEEALLY TEUE"

A PROFESSOR'S ATTITUDE

Professor J. F. Bethune Baker, Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, speaking at Birmingham, declared that tho New Testament could no longer be regarded as literally true, says the "Daily Telegraph." Ho was presiding at a meeting of the Modern Churchman's Conference. The Gospels had some characteristics in common with works of fiction, he said, "If we follow the methods of modern study we become convinced that our Gospels are honest documents according to the standards that werey current for religious literature in the firßt century of our era. "But to assert that it in any way j confirms the historical accuracy of such, stories as those of the birth of our Lord or of the details of his resurrection is, in my opinion, to assert that it does what it does not do and in the nature of the case could not do. "Though in the past the Church has treated all the New Testament as liteerally true, we cannot do so today. It is religious literature, and its value is to be found in the religious ideas it Buggcsts to us." The Christian religion and the doctrine of the incarnation had as strong a claim on their allegiance as they ever had, he concluded. But Christianity had lived by adapting itself to new knowledge and new environment, and those who would keep the great faith of the incarnation bound for ever with old beliefs of the Church on matters such as these were not doing good service to the cause. DB. BARNES'S DEFENCE. The Bishop of Birmingham said there existed at the present time a widespread tendency to ignore or belittle, or even to repudiate, the Old Testament. "The primitive passions let loose during the Great War," ho said, "found some support in certain Old Testament narratives, though in fact they were no more typical of the teachings of the great Hebrew prophets than extravagant war-time sermons were of the teachings of Christ. "There has of late grown up an understanding that the feverish animosities engendered by war are not admirable. As a natural consequence those whose remembrance of the Old Testament is associated with stories like SauFs slaughter of the Amalekites feel little attraction towards the Jewish Scriptures. "The first chapter of Genesis obviously cannot be harmonised with the scientific conclusions which naturally all English children now learn as a part of their education. Our modern outlook has created a background of thought against which we cannot maintain the traditional belief in the infallibility of Scripture. "There is a third reason why the Oid Testament is disregarded.^ At the present timo anti-Semitism is, unfortunately, widespread. In Britain and America it has net grown to such absurd lengths as amongst the Germanspeaking peoples of Central Europe. But if you hate the Jews you naturally disparage their greatest contribution to human civilisation. "As we enumerate reasons why the Jewish Scriptures are avoided we must take account of the age-long antipathy between Catholic and Jew." Dr. Barnes said he personally accepted the contention that in the New Testament there could be found the germs of ideas alien from Christ's thought, and yet prominent in modem' Catholicism. From* the low esteem into which the Old Testament had fallen, Modernists must rescue it as part of their professed object of exhibiting the Christian faith in its uncontaminated beauty and power.