the letters of the Hebrew alphabet from to are represented except, 1, and P. But it is quite easy to restore these. The line with is restored by making the preceding verse close with N. The measure requires this change also. The line beginning with is restored by transposing 1 to the second clause before 7. A prosaic copyist has combined two lines of poetry into a single prose sentence. The line with has been lost by a slip of the eye causing a repetition of of the next line. Change

.אותך

Examples of dittography are Ps. 678 and 11812 b, 15 b

.and the line is restored ,קרה to ראה

is a mere repetition of the first two יברכנו אלהים,67 .In Ps

words of the preceding line. The Psalm is composed of three trimeter pentastichs. This dittography destroys the measure of the last line by just these two words.

There are two examples in Ps. 118: verse 12 b repeated from the preceding line, and verse 156 by a slip of the eye to the following line. In both cases they destroy the measures of the lines. They are but half lines, and, if counted, would destroy the symmetry of the strophes of the Psalm, which are composed uniformly of seven hexameters.

Examples of the wrong separation of words are:

It is .בא מסיני בקדש should be בם סיני בקדש : 6818 .a) Ps) יהוה מסיני בא : 332 .a citation from Deut

,as Sept., Aq הר כמו צפור should be הרכם צפור :1111 .Ps (0)

Jer., Syr., Targ.

The letter has been overlooked by an ancient scribe of the Massoretic text of Ps. 1404, and so we have instead of the correct of the Sept.

The particle has been omitted in the Massoretic text of Ps. 1439, and so the assonance with vss. 8a,", 10° has been lost. The is preserved in or of Sept. The final of" in Ps. 1442 has been overlooked; hence the pointing: but is sustained by Aq., Jer., Sept. Targ., as well as by the original from which the citation was made, Ps. 1848 2 Sam. 2249.

=

Ps. 312 presents an interesting example of a tetrastich, rhyming in, which has been obscured in the Massoretic text but can easily be restored. It is cited in the later Psalm, 713. In both Psalms there has been a transposition of p, which begins the second verse of Ps. 71, but which with the following closes the second verse of Ps. 31. It should begin the second verse, and the first verse should close with . Ps. 71 has changed the imperative to a jussive, and substituted ", and then by conflation added . The second line of Ps. 31

its place by a slip of the eye to the close of the following line, In the third line Ps. 31

has taken והושיעני 71 .In Ps מהרה הצילני proper closes with

.has been left out מהרה הצילני and so

-in the ancient unpointed con מענלבתמדצות as מעולבתמצדות

is entirely correct. But Ps. 71 in the Massoretic text has misread

tinuous text. Apart from the quiescent letters the only difference is a mistake of for and a transposition of and 7. But Sept., Sym., Targ., and some Hebrew manuscripts read here, although Jerome and the Syriac follow the present text. So Sept. reads eis TÓTоν OXUρóv here, but Sym., Jerome, Syr., and Targum agree with the Massoretic text. It is altogether probable, therefore, that in the Maccabean Hebrew text Ps. 71 agreed with the original Ps. 31. The corruption of the text was later. In the fourth line Ps. 31 is correct, except that a final has been added by conflation, being a variation of . The second half of the line is not given in Ps. 71.

44

The original words of Jesus in the Logia may be discerned from the use of Textual Criticism of the several citations in the Gospels and elsewhere. Jesus said: "A prophet is not without honour, save in his own country, and among his own kin, and in his own house." (Mk. 6.) This is given in Mt. 135: "A prophet is not without honour, save in his own country, and in his own house." Lk. 4 23-24 has: "Doubtless ye will say unto me this parable, Physician, heal thyself; whatsoever we have heard done at Capernaum, do also here in thine own country." John 4" gives it in the form, "Jesus himself testified that a prophet hath no honour in his own country." A study of these citations makes it plain that the original saying of Jesus did not include "and among his own kin, and in his own house." That is an enlargement of the original words "in his own country," given in Luke and John. This is confirmed by the recently discovered Logia of Jesus, from an early Greek papyrus. The fifth of these has οὐκ ἔστιν δεκτὸς προφήτης ἐν τῇ πατρίδι αὐτοῦ, which is very close to Luke's οὐδεὶς προφήτης δεκτός ἐστιν ἐν τῇ πατρίδι αὐτοῦ.

This line has an additional line in parallelism with it in this fifth logion, namely: οὐδὲ ἰατρὸς ποιεῖ Θεραπείας εις τοὺς γινώσκοντας avróv. This makes with the other a couplet. In all probability, this presents the original couplet of Jesus, which is preserved only in the single line of the Gospels, for it is contrary to the usages of Hebrew Wisdom to use single lines, or a form of poetry of less than a couplet. Single lines of Wisdom do not exist except as fragments of groups of lines. Furthermore, this second line is suggested by the context of Luke. The original couplet is:

A prophet is not acceptable in his own country;

Neither doth a physician work cures upon them that know him.

By a careful, accurate, and thorough-going use of the scientific methods and principles of Textual Criticism, the traditional texts upon which the earlier scholars relied have been purified, and we may, with considerable confidence, determine, to a great extent, very ancient forms of the text quite near to the original autographs of the final editors of the biblical writings, and in not a few cases we may determine with reasonable accuracy the autographs of the authors themselves. We may be encouraged by the advance in the science of Textual Criticism to look for greater productivity and fruitfulness in the future.

CHAPTER XI

HISTORY OF THE HIGHER CRITICISM OF HOLY SCRIPTURE

WE have seen in previous chapters that there was a great critical revival at the Reformation; that the Biblical Criticism of the Protestant Reformers was based on the formal principle of Protestantism, the divine authority of Holy Scripture over against tradition; that the voice of God Himself, speaking to His people through His Word, was the great test; that the Protestant Reformers tested the traditional theory of the Canon and eliminated the apocryphal books therefrom; that they rejected the Septuagint and Vulgate versions as the ultimate appeal, and resorted to the original Greek and Hebrew texts; that they tested the Massoretic traditional pointing of the Hebrew Scriptures, and, rejecting it as merely traditional, resorted to the original unpointed text; that they tested the traditional manifold sense and allegorical method of interpretation, and, rejecting these, followed the plain grammatical sense, interpreting difficult and obscure passages by the mind of the Spirit in passages that are plain and undisputed.

We have also studied the second critical revival under the lead of Cappellus and Walton, and their conflict with the Protestant scholastics who had reacted from the critical principles of the Reformation into a reliance upon Rabbinical tradition. We have seen that the Puritan divines still held the position of the Protestant Reformers, and were not in accord with the scholastics. We have now to trace a third critical revival, which began toward the close of the eighteenth century in the investigations of the poetic and literary features of the Old Testament by Bishop Lowth in England and the poet Herder in Germany, and of the structure of Genesis by the physician Astruc in France. The first critical revival had

been mainly devoted to the Canon of Scripture, its authority and interpretation. The second critical revival had studied the original texts and versions. The third critical revival gave attention to the Sacred Scriptures as literature.

I. THE HIGHER CRITICISM IN THE SIXTEENTH AND SEVENTEENTH CENTURIES.

Little attention had been given to the literary features of the Bible in the sixteenth century. We may infer how the Reformers would have met these questions from their freedom with regard to traditional views in the few cases in which they expressed themselves. Luther denied the Apocalypse to John and Ecclesiastes to Solomon. He maintained that the Epistle of James was not an apostolic writing. He regarded Jude as an extract from 2 Peter, and said, What matters it if Moses should not himself have written the Pentateuch? He thought the Epistle to the Hebrews was written by a disciple of the apostle Paul, who was a learned man, and made the epistle as a sort of a composite piece in which there are some things hard to be reconciled with the Gospel. Calvin denied the Pauline authorship of the Epistle to the Hebrews and doubted the Petrine authorship of 2 Peter. He taught that Ezra or some one else edited the Psalter and made the first Psalm an introduction to the collection, not hesitating to oppose the traditional view that David was the author or editor of the entire Psalter. He also regarded Ezra as the author of the prophecy of Malachi Malachi being his surname. He furthermore constructed, after the model of a harmony of the Gospels, a harmony of the pentateuchal legislation about the Ten Commandments as a centre, holding that all the rest of the commandments were mere "appendages, which add not the smallest completeness to the Law." 2

1 See Diestel, Gesch. des Alten Test. in der christlichen Kirche, 1869, pp. 250 seq.; and Vorreden in Walch edit. of Luther's Werken, XIV. pp. 35, 146-153; Tischreden, I. p. 28.

2"Therefore, God protests that He never enjoined anything with respect to sacrifices; and He pronounces all external rites but vain and trifling if the very least value be assigned to them apart from the Ten Commandments. Whence we more certainly arrive at the conclusion to which I have adverted, viz. that