"Let Sacred Criticism be a Historian, not a Conjuror"
“We
value highly, for the church of God, every labor which makes her
understand a passage better; yes, were it only one passage, one
single word of the holy Scriptures. But when you pass on to crude
hypotheses; when you embrace a thousand conjectures concerning the
sacred writers, to make their word depend on the hazard of their
presumed circumstances, instead of regarding their circumstances as
prepared and chosen of God in reference to their ministry; when you
subordinate the nature, the abundance or brevity of these
instructions to more of less fortunate concurrence of their ignorance
or of their recollections; - this is to degrade inspiration, and to
bring down the character of the word of God; it is to lay deep the
foundations of infidelity; it is to forget that 'men of God spake as
the were moved (φερόμενοι) by the Holy Ghost, not in the words
which man's wisdom teacheth, but which the Holy Ghost teacheth” (2
Peter 1:21; 1 Corinthians 2:13)
“It
has been asked, “Did the Evangelists read each others writings?”
And what is that to me, if they were all 'moved by the Holy Ghost;'
and if, like the Thessalonians, I receive their book, 'not as the
word of man, but as it is, in truth, the word of God.' Let this
question be proposed in its place, it may be entirely innocent; but
it is so no longer when it is discussed as it has been, and when so
much importance is attached to it. Can the solution of it throw light
on one single passage of the sacred books, and establish their truths
more firmly? We do not believe that it can.
“When
we hear it asked whether St. John had read the Gospels of the other
three; if St. Mark and St. Luke had read the Gospel of St. Matthew
before writing their own; when we hear it asked whether the
Evangelists did anything more than describe with discernment the most
important portions of oral traditions; when we see great volumes
written upon these questions, to attack or defend these systems, as
if faith and even science were truly interested in it, and as if the
answers were very important to the Christian Church; when we hear it
affirmed that the first three Evangelists had consulted some original
document now lost; Greek, according to some; Hebrew, according to
others; when we see men plunging still farther into this romantic
field; when we see them reaching the complicated drama of the Bishop
of Landaff (Herbert Marsh - aku), with his first Hebrew historical
document, his second Hebrew dogmatic document, his third Greek
document, (a translation of the first); then his documents of the
second class, formed by the translation of Luke, and Mark, and
Matthew, which finally reduces the sources to seven, without counting
three others, peculiar to St. Luke and St. Mark; or even, again, when
we see Mr. Veysie in England, and Dr. Gieseler in Germany, deriving
either the first three Gospels, of the four Gospels from apocryphal
histories previously circulated among the Christian churches; when we
see the first of these Doctors determining that Mark has copied them
with a more literal exactness than Luke, on account, they say, of his
ignorance of the Greek; while Matthew's Gospel, written at first in
Hebrew, must, doubtless, have been translated afterward into Greek by
a person who modified it to make it correspond with Mark and Luke,
and, finally, gave it to us as we have it; when we see these systems
exhibited, not in a few phrases in the indulgence of a light
curiosity, but so many and such great volumes written upon them as if
they involved the interests of the kingdom of God; Oh! we must say
it, we feel, in the view of all such science, a sentiment profoundly
painful. But, after all, is that science? Is judicial astrology a
science? No; and these men are no longer philosophers: they have
abandoned facts; they prophesy the history of the past; they are,
alas! the astrologers of theology.”
Louis
Gaussen, “Theopneusty, or The Plenary Inspiration of the Holy
Scriptures,” (Sacred Criticism, A Historian, Section II)
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