To the Editor of the "Norra-Cuina Dairy News."
Sir,—This burning question has to go on burning until all that false is burned up. It is not, however, @ question between traditionalist Jew and sceptical German as Rabbi Hirsch seems to suppose. The Christiam scholar certainly does not say, "A plague on both your houses!" because he owes so much to a Jewish Montefiore and a German Ewald, but he tries to establish the faith and interpret the Bible on grounds that are independent of both, believing in the ce-operation of the human reason and the Holy Spirit. The Rabbi quotes Canon Liddon. Liddon was no doubt a light in his day, but Gore has taken his place as High Church champion of the faith, and long ago he gave up the traditional position that Liddon held.. The same is true of 19 out of 20 who have been trained to be interpreters of the Bible in England The Rabbi also. quotes the learned Sayce, the stock opponent of a certain section of the modern position, but by no means a believer in Mosaic authorship.
1 was glad that Rabbi Hirsch confirmed one point made about tradition, namely that it did not get set until about 200 A.D. He admits that Jewish elders at that time exercised their critical faculties regarding Ezekiel and Ecclesiastes. Thenceforward such 5 criti-' cism was closed by authority, but it never lost its rights. But I cannot admit his own canon of criticism when he says: "We have no means of testing truth except subjectively." That would give scope to the wildest vagaries of criticism and is quite contrary to the spirit of scholarship. Another sentence of his will contradict on better authority than my own: "The internal evidence of the Sacred Books is not opposed to it (viz:—the Jewish traditions) as was indeed demonstrated by scholars of universal reputation." The learned Presbyterian Principal of Westminster College, Cambridge, (Dr. John Skinner) writes: We believe that the Jews were wrong in their views of the date and authorship of the Old Testament and wrong in their doctrine of a time-limit to inspiration."
So much of this controversy, however, is unreal and merely rhetorical. Why does the Rabbi assume that there is no alternative between the traditional view that Moses wrote the Pentateuch (including the account of hig death) and a view I had not heard of before that they were "the fabrications of a Babylonian obscurantist who lived 1,000 years after the Lawgiver?' So far as I know there is not a Biblical scholar of any note in Eng-view. In the serious matter of 1nterpreting the Bible rhetoric of this kind is worse than irrelevant because it confuses the untrained mind.
The' Rabbi denies my statement that '"'the Jewish elders were anxious to authenticate writing by the.attribution of distinguished authorship." He says it is untrue, yet he knows quite well that the Book of Baruch (friend of Jeremiah) the Second Book of Esdras, (Ezra), the Secrets of Enoch, the Psalms and the Odes of Solomon and other Jewish books were written centuries after the distinguished authors of their traditional titles were dead.
It is this literary habit that has to be taken into account in considering the traditional authorship of the canonical Scripture. It is evident that the Jews had not lost this habit of ming when they attributed Job to Moses, Ecclesiastes to Solomon, the book that tells of Samuel's death and successors to Samuel himself and so on. But why should the Rabbi declare or suggest that the Pentateuch would be untrue if Moses did not write it? Is not truth its own witness without the autograph of Moses? We Christians at any rate remember the jApostle's dictum: "The Law came" by Moses: Truth came by Jesus Christ."
Finally the Rabbi questions the dictum of the Bishop of Manchester that inspiration is never a guarantee of truth. Truth in this world is a matter of finding not of finality. That is the reason of the conflicts that have characterized mental history in philosophy and science as well as in religion. How can we wish it were otherwise seeing that if truth were given complete, we should stop seeking it, then Jose the power to seek it, then give up interest in it and at last fail to be worthy of it?
I am, ete.,
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.