Twilight of the Higher Critics

...Every time some new statement points uncomfortably close to the historic or the supernatural character of a biblical book, a new redactor is sprung on the scene...

...She is sometimes caught napping and still disproving what was said about her on Monday, to the neglect of the completely contrary thing that is said about her on Tuesday...

...Yes, considerable...

...The higher critics snorted in superior contempt upon seeing the clumsy handiwork of their predecessors...

...Nothing at all to worry about...

...The true scientific investigator is ever timid, even hesitant, in advancing new theories, wishing each step forward to have the solid footing of facts...

...It has never been reported that Scotland Yard uses Conan Doyle's mystery novels as a textbook for criminal investigations...

...And just as there is noticeable a monotonous sameness in the vapid faces of the movie idols, so the reflective scriptural student will soon remark a vaguely familiar similarity of character in the persons or menFebruary 24, 1926 THE COMMONWEAL 437 tality of the redactors, shadowy as they may be...

...She does sometimes live pathetically in the past, to the extent of innocently supposing that the modern thinker may think today what he thought yesterday...

...Vanished into dust before the wind of their mighty words, was that printing press cornerstone upon which the original Protestants had claimed to found their faith without works...

...Learned philologists had applied to the corpus biblicum scalpels originally whetted for Homer and the other ancient classic texts...

...Outside the Church it became old-fashioned to believe in an inspired or even historic Bible...

...Conan Doyle's fictional detective's exploits were but awkward amateurisms compared to their feats of keen deduction...

...They had still left whole the stones into which they had broken up the original temple...

...But, not content with brushing away the literary sand and dust which through centuries and even millenia of time had accumulated about the mighty pillars and stones that constitute the magnificent temple of sacred Scripture, some of those over-zealous workmen began prying into the well-joined crevices in order to wedge out not a few of the stones themselves, on the plea that the building would thus look more smooth and finished...

...The tombs of Egypt, the ruins of Assyria and Babylonia, the refuse heaps of border and villages, even the lumber rooms of antique synagogs, were ransacked to find evidence...

...On this assumption the Bible was declared to be exposed as a conglomerate of not particularly clever forgeries, practically devoid of any historic and, "a fortiori," of any supernatural value...

...Perhaps by some, these diligent investigations were undertaken in the hope that they might verify extravagant critical theories...

...Increased attention was given to the study of ancient Oriental languages...

...But, unlike Conan Doyle, they could not confine their interesting conclusions to the realm of fiction or, at best, theory (nowadays the boundaries of the two are often not definitely distinguished) where most of them properly belong...

...First of all, exaggerated qualities and functions ascribed to the Bible by the sixteenth-century innovators, have been rather drastically eliminated by those who inherited the prophet's mantle of their teachings...

...At least, a higher critic would have made an excellent redactor...

...It is no longer dogmatically pronounced as an undeniable assumption that the Bible is a book whose true and full meaning is obvious to all mankind, even to the butcher arid baker and phonograph-maker...

...Like Sherlock Holmes's, theirs was very clever work, and tickled the ears of the groundlings...

...Instead, they dogmatically insisted "ex cathedris lectoralibus" that their fine-spun elucubrations be applied to real life...

...Often there seem to have been as many of them tinkering about a book of the Scripture as there are union carpenters a-building the above-mentioned California bungalow...

...Even if they seem hazardous to him, he will tolerate them in the hope of finding in even absurd propositions some new phase of truth— as the diamond seeker might search in a pile of rubbish...

...Science believed in discerned innumerable weaknesses and impossibilities in the eight authors' testimony...

...But, it is the redactors who are the perennial "dii ex machina" of the higher critics...

...Then the science that had been sceptic was faced suddenly by a startling series of new discoveries, and in consequence, the whole structure of higher criticism totters today and threatens collapse, while the writings of the eight authors of the New Testament have been justified and confirmed...

...And then, uquod non fecerunt barbari, fecerunt Barberini...

...Indeed, the very stones which the scientist's pick turned up in order to build a foundation for the critic's destructive preconceptions, have cried out in witness to the historic verity of God's written Word...

...The practical insufficiency or exaggeration of destructive hypercritical theories has been demonstrated so clearly by recent biblical research that even popular periodicals have announced the twilight of the higher critics...

...The safest histories are written by those who consult original sources...

...First of these literary wrecking crews were the "textual critics...

...Anyhow, most of the redactors, on broad examination, bear an astounding likeness to their discoverers (or, better, creators...

...But, it is not the purpose of this paper to refute the extravagancies of the last lustrum of biblical study...

...But, what was a bit of manuscript evidence between higher critics...

...In fact, entire architectural units of the primitive edifice still remained practically intact, because the poor textual critics, working closer to facts, at least sometimes had the honesty to admit that their manuscript evidence unmistakably pointed to authenticity...

...Year by year the volume of this doubt and criticism has grown until recently, when the discoveries of science refuted the scepticism of the scientist...

...Has anything of permanent value resulted from the last century's emphasis on the critical phase of scriptural study...

...On the other hand, all this agitation roused the activity of scriptural students in a field of Bible study which had lain rather fallow since the sixteenth-century dogmatists had taken the Bible as the be-all and end-all of religion...

...Their proper function was to restore the primitive text of sacred Scripture, largely by eliminating material errors or changes which had been introduced by generations of successive copyists...

...In fact, their processes, being quite independent of texts, left them much larger liberty of investigation—and destruction...

...That has been done superabundantly by others...

...Modern scriptural students can toss about their queer names, J-e, J-i, P-i, P-2, Deutero-Isaiah, Trito-Isaiah, with the same glibness that the flapper mouths the names of her favorite movie stars—and with about the same usefulness, as far as practical valuation of the Bible is concerned...

...The higher critics gradually constructed an imposing edifice of indictments against its authenticity, against even its probability...

...For, as Chesterton so pithily put it, "the Church cannot change quite so fast as the charges against her do...

...Those had not done their work half thoroughly enough...

...The members of the Church who pointed to the exaggerations and other intrinsic defects of these theories, were promptly railed at as obscurantist conservatives...

...Where he might have plausibly inferred yesterday's bushiness of the murderer's whiskers from the length of a discarded cigarette stub, they could infallibly establish from a single word the whole political platform of a gentleman designated cryptically as P-r, who lived millenia ago...

...For, next came the "higher critics," who did for the Bible what their lineal descendants, the quack psychoanalysts of today, would wish to do for the soul...

...It was what some astute subsequent pro-Deuteronomic or pro-Messianic or proPauline redactor had done with the insignificant contents of the scraps of original papyrus, that the higher critics knew all about...

...For, far from discrediting the authenticity and substantial integrity of the Sacred Books, archaeological testimonies have but shown the futility of the critics' theorizing and established the common-sense tenets of the Church in this matter...

...However, false theories are generally sprung with such dazzling glare of publicity that even after their utter confutation it generally takes the world at large years of blinking disillusionment to realize they are really out...

...This is the field of scriptural origins in the natural plane...

...Were one still to believe in metempsychosis or the Buddhistic transmigration of souls, one would surely say that the mind nowadays inhabiting the body of a higher critic was ages ago incarnate in some redactor...

...And when Harnack, Bauer, Loisy, Haupt, Steuernagel, and their ilk had finished, the Bible was finished too...

...As the makers of movie thrillers have chiefly two stereotyped lines of hokum, male and female—so the remakers of the Bible have two much-overworked tricks of the trade, sources and redactors...

...What the original hagiographers wrote concerned them little...

...Just how the discovery that a hagiographer made use of several documents or sources in compiling his book, should invalidate the historical veracity of that book, is not clear...

...Consequently, as far as the Church is concerned, it is not surprising that her students of sacred Scripture are still largely occupied with examining and refuting the theories of higher critics whose works before the world are already becoming unreadable in their twilight...

...Both dissolve their subject into a mass of tendencies...

...In fact, some of the redactorial jobs postulated could have been perpetrated only through the combination of microscopic brilliancy in details with myopic inadvertence to broad outlines, which seems so characteristic of many a higher critic...

...Thus for years the conjectures of the critics were blatantly acclaimed as facts...

...Thus Frederick Van de Water, reviewing the light thrown on the New Testament by recent research, avows, in the Saturday Evening Post of May 30, 1925 : Scientists have doubted and questioned...

...If so, they were disappointed...

...They would have reduced the massive jpylones of Egypt and the rugged stages of a Babylonian ziggurat to the smooth smugness of a California bungalow-— never dreaming that, perhaps, the oddities and unevennesses they objected to might be the surest indications of the original architect's design...

...Above all, the services of archaeology were impressed to throw light on the times and customs and records of biblical peoples and their contemporaries...

...Babel und Bibel raised a babble which bid fair to rival the confusion and ruin of its ancestral occasion...

...But the higher critics forced their almost equally imaginative works to monopolize the duty of teaching eager students how to value and interpret the inspired pages of Holy Writ...

...Pieces, fragments, splinters— to such debris had the whole of sacred Scripture, from Genesis even unto the Apocalypse, been demolished only a few years ago...

...Perliaps even brain children take after their fathers...

...On the other hand, he is generally open-minded toward theories advanced by others...

...On the positive side, the substantial authenticity and historic veracity in the natural order which the Church has ever maintained for the sacred Scriptures as the necessary basis of their supernatural character, has been brought out more emphatically than ever by the keen searchlights of critical investigations...