Читать книгу God and My Neighbour - Robert Blatchford - Страница 12

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?"