‘OLD TESTAMENT NARRATIVES’

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 75, Issue 205, 31 August 1932, Page 6

‘OLD TESTAMENT NARRATIVES’

Sir, —When I had finished reading your report of the lecture of the Rev. Mr. Wilkinson in your issue of Ist inst., I was reminded of the great image seen by Nebuchadnezzar in his forgotten drcam, whose head was of gold and its feet of miry clay. The reverend gentleman began excellently, but he ended ingloriously in the muddy paths marked out for him in the works of the self-styled ‘ ‘higher criticism.” The first two columns ol the lecture, as printed, are splendid; it is when the lecture reaches the third column that the descensus averni begins. According to Mr. Wilkinson, “Adam, Noah, and Babel are myths.” The sublime story of creation, with which our Bible opens, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. . . And the spirit of the Lord moved upon the face of the waters” —they were written, not by Moses, the great Hebrew law-giver and prophet, but by some unknown scribbler hundreds of years later, at about 350 B.C. And numbers and Leviticus—“these elaborate and prosaic books,” as Mr. Wilkinson, in his wisdom, calls them, are of the era of Ezra and Nehemiah. about 400 8.C., or perhaps a trifle earlier. That, sir, is what is being poured into the minds of our interdenominational Bible-class members—young mon and women 16 to 20 years of age who will accept it as Gospel truth. German, English and American critics have been labouring for nearly 200 years to convince the world that the ancient documents are unreliable, and that miracle, as we find it in the Old Testament, and particularly the miracle of prophecy, is unthinkable and impossible. To this end they have striven to bring down the production of these Old Testament narratives to comparatively recent times, and they have labelled their conclusions “assured results” of criticism. Will it be believed, sir, that for these “results,” so confidently styled “sure,” there is not a spark of proof? I hope the young people who listened to Mr. Wilkinson’s lecture will note this —not a spark of proof. All tradition and all history are against their assumptions. It is ■well known that some of the plays of ‘ Shakespeare arc believed to have been the work of more authors than one, and the critics have been invited to disentangle the various hands concerned in their production. They have tried, but they have ignominously failed. Their own language, a living language, and the well-known stylo of Shakespeare to guide them' And yet they are confident that they can disentangle the work of different people at different times in the pro duction of works in a foreign and exceedingly ancient language. The wish is father to the thought. Moses himself, the critics would have us believe, is as mythical a person as the rest of the O.T. heroes, and they would have us believe that the “Book, of the Law,” found in the Temple, which was, it is believed, the Book of Deuteronomy, substantially as it is in our Bibles, was first “planted” there in order that it might be found and accepted as the genuine work of Moses, which, of course, according to them, it was not. If such a thing happened, the critics do not seem to sec that it was a literary and religious forgery of the most glaring and indefensible kind. And it presupposes that those who were deceived by it were simpletons of the deepest dye. It purported to be a document about 850 years old, while in reality (so they say), it was quite new. Clever rascals the authors wore, wore they not? 1 wonder what treatment the parchment and the ink were subjected to! For it was received as absolutely genuine! Were the Jews of 600 B.C. such fools? Not they!

I have said that the authors of this forgery were clever rascals. Yes, but there is more to it than that. Their purpose in their deep-laid scheme was a highly-moved one—no less than to bring their fellow countrymen back to a knowledge of the God of Truth, and to restore the purity of His worship. Do we look for manuals of prayer, praise, and lofty ethics from Dartmoor or Wormwood Scrubs or Mount Eden? We may this absurd and unnatural supposition could be proved to be true. But, thank God, it cannot, and our young people may go on believing that the five books nt the beginning of their Bibles are in their right place, and that the grand original Isaiah, one and undivided, wrote the whole 66 chapters that boar his name. That the words, “Ho was despised and rejected of men, a Man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.” Surely He hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows. “lie was led as a lamb to the slaughter and as a sheep before her shearers, is dumb, so He opened not Il is mouth”—these and all the rest of the glorious 53rd chapter were written by the one and only Isaiah, and that they had their fulfilment in the life and death and resurrection of our blessed Redeemer, Jesus Christ. lam. etc., JAMES AITKEN.