BS5I I .BIZ \ I HE OPENED TO US THE SCRIPTURES THE MACMILLAN COMPANY NEW YORE • BOSTON • CHICAGO • DALLAS ATLANTA • SAN FRANCISCO MACMILLAN & CO., Limited LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA MELBOURNE THE MACMILLAN CO. OP CANADA, Ltd. TORONTO HE OPENED TO US THE SCRIPTURES A Study of Christ's Better Way in the Use of Scripture BY / BENJAMIN W. BACON D.D., LITT.D. (OXON.) i®eto got* THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1923 All rights reserved PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA Copyright, 1923, By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. Set up and printed. Published January, 1923. Press of J. J. Little & Ives Company New York, U. S. A. CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I Primitive Ideas of Divine Revelation . . 3 II How Christian Writers Conceive of Their Own Inspiration . 29 III Private Interpretation, and Interpreta¬ tion Approvable by All . 47 IV The Example of Jesus and Paul ... 69 V The Witness of the Spirit . 97 Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2019 with funding from Princeton Theological Seminary Library https://archive.org/details/heopenedtousscriOObaco CHAPTER I PRIMITIVE IDEAS OF DIVINE REVELATION HE OPENED TO US THE SCRIPTURES CHAPTER I PRIMITIVE IDEAS OF DIVINE REVELATION The Christian doctrine of sacred Scripture dif¬ fers widely from the pagan, and scarcely less widely from that of contemporary Judaism from which it sprang. The pagan expresses his consciousness of the more than individual authority attaching to a code of laws, such as that of Hammurabi, or Solon, or Lycurgus, or that of the Twelve Tables, by de¬ claring them a divine revelation. Doubtless the codifier enhances their appeal by making the most of this representation. But we do injustice to him and to his readers alike if we think the representa¬ tion is a mere imposition. On the contrary, the ancient framer of a code of law is sincerely conscious that the product of his pen is not his own. Were it indeed of his own manufacture, the code would have by common consent but little value, whether for the compiler or for others. To have any cogency at all, it must embody the mores, the consuetudinary law, the civil and religious usages of the group. It becomes, thus, an expression of its moral and 3 4 HE OPENED TO US THE SCRIPTURES religious consciousness, and, as such, is regarded as in some sense “divine.” The ancient codes have survived because they were crowned with the halo of this divine authority. Without it they would have perished, because antiquity has no other means of expressing authority of this type save to call it divine. The nation feels itself to be indeed “taught of God.” We may state it, then, as a general rule in the history of culture that primitive consuetudinary law, when it advances to the stage of codification, is also canonized. Whether by formal act, or by gradual acceptation, it becomes endowed with super¬ human attributes and authority, because it is felt to embody general rights and obligations. The Old Testament preserves no less than four accounts of the formal process of canonization after codification of the successive strata of “the law of Moses.” Exodus 24:4-8 records the canonization by an act of formal covenant between the people and God (represented through priest and altar, sacrifice and sprinkling of blood) of the code known to critics as the Elohistic Book of the Covenant (Ex. 20-23). A similar scene is enacted with increased elabora¬ tion and solemnity to depict the promulgation of the Deuteronomic Code (Dt. 27:1-26), whose ac¬ tual adoption, through another form of popular pledge to God, is described by a nearly contempor¬ ary historian in II Kings 23:1-3. Finally, Ezra’s reconstructed and enlarged Book of the Law of Moses is validated and adopted by similar cere- PRIMITIVE IDEAS OF DIVINE REVELATION 5 monies covering an entire week of observances de¬ scribed in Nehemiah 8:1-6. Neither pagan nor Jew is limited to law in his conception of the sphere of divine revelation and in¬ spiration. Indeed, to the primitive mind there is something awe-inspiring in literature itself, which through the medium of written symbols enshrines the soul of the past. Primitive man values es¬ pecially the mystic utterances of soothsayer and seer, prophet, priest, or shaman, who in terms of magic or religion interprets to him the reactions of the mysterious universe in which he finds himself. Priest or prophet as well as lawgiver, if he speak for himself alone, is without authority. And he, too, is far from insincere in clothing his oracular ut¬ terances with the halo of divinity. On the con¬ trary, he invariably falls back upon a vast body of inherited mythology, folklore and tradition, in which his own belief is no less intense (if perhaps somewhat more reflective and discriminating) than the superstition of the masses. That is a very crude type of psychology which accounts for the belief in the inspiration of oracle and seer by a theory of purposed imposture on the part of priests bent on promoting their own interests and authority. Self- seeking priestcraft and false prophecy are not un¬ known; priests and prophets can be found at every stage of human culture, who connive at deception or willingly add impetus to popular credulity, know¬ ing its readiness to be turned to any unworthy pur¬ pose. But even in the advance of superstition the 6 HE OPENED TO US THE SCRIPTURES leaders are rarely insincere. They are far more apt to be themselves more deceived than deceiving. In its lowest forms, this expression of mass-psychology is stigmatized as “false” prophecy. The greatest crimes with which the name of religion has been stained have been committed under the domination of its spirit of fanaticism and credulity. But in its higher manifestations prophecy has lifted the spirit of a people to its noblest ideals and attainments. The “prophet” truly worthy of the name uses his utmost power to discriminate, from an inherited mass of mingled truth and superstition, abiding ele¬ ments of moral and religious value. By a divine overruling, or (if we choose to borrow the terminology of the biologists) a survival of that best fitted to the social and ethical ideal, it is the highest which in the end survives. Prophecy, like law, when it has reached the stage of embodiment in literary form is also canonized. The act or process expresses popular appreciation of that more than human factor which enters into prophecy, that burning inspiration of the true champion of right which teaches him that he is not speaking for him¬ self, but is the mouthpiece of an eternal divine law of righteousness shaping the destinies of men and nations. The Jewish people’s sense of this finds ex¬ pression in placing the masterpieces of written prophecy side by side with the codes of law to form a second canon. For in Israel the prophets came to be the statesmen of Jehovah. Their writings, in¬ cluding both narrative and exhortation, understood PRIMITIVE IDEAS OF DIVINE REVELATION 7 to give interpretation and practical application to the divine will laid down in the Law. For in Jewish application “prophecy” includes the narrative books. The prophet thus becomes the successor of Moses. In each successive generation a prophet is “raised up” for the leadership and direction of the people in the path marked out for it by its invisible King (Dt. 18:15-19). In due time poetry, legend, mythology, were re¬ duced to written form; and these, too, so far as popular use found in them expression of its re¬ ligious life, were canonized in Israel. That is, such elements of the mingled later literature as were found helpful in practical experience to the religious life of the people by giving expression and impetus to their moral and religious ideal, were admitted (not without long dispute) to the list of books of¬ ficially approved for public reading in the synagogue. In the Judaism of New Testament times, whence Christianity derives its conception of canonicity, this third group receives the general, all-inclusive title of “Writings” ( Hagiographa , as the Greek translators render the term), a group whose outer limit remained in dispute well into the second cen¬ tury after Christ. Supporters of the claims to ad¬ mission for this or that book maintained that it “defiled the hands,” in other words, should be written on parchment, not on papyrus. For parch¬ ment, being the skin of a dead body, made him who touched it ritually “unclean.” The necessity for washing the hands after touching the book may 8 HE OPENED TO US THE SCRIPTURES have been a protection against careless handling, but the real origin of the strange expression is doubtless the fact that parchment, being much more expensive as well as more durable than papyrus, was in practice reserved for writings of greater value and importance. Simple use and wont had prob¬ ably most to say in securing admission of particular writings to this third group of the Jewish canon. Congregations demanded what in practice they had become accustomed to hearing, and (on whatever interpretation) had found religiously helpful. In the debates of the rabbis reasons are found in the religious lessons which current interpretation dis¬ covered. It was indeed this interpretation (critical or otherwise), not their original and authentic mean¬ ing, which gave them contemporary effect, and thus constituted their real contribution to the re¬ ligious life of the time. In all this long process of canonization we must distinguish between the genuine, unsophisticated instinct of the people as a whole, conscious of the moral uplift it receives, and particular theories ad¬ vanced, whether among the credulous masses, or their scarcely less credulous but more sophisticated religious leaders, to give account of, and justify, this consciousness. The consciousness is of God. Through it the eternal Word bears perennial wit¬ ness to its own authorship. As for the writers and compilers of this multiform literature covering sev¬ eral languages and almost a millennium of time, neither are they so egotistic, nor the people so ir- PRIMITIVE IDEAS OF DIVINE REVELATION 9 religious, as to take the writings as no more than the individual output of so and so many individual human brains. Varied as the collection is, it pos¬ sesses both a national and a religious unity. As an ancient writer expresses it, one dominant Spirit (; 'principalis spiritus ) pervades the whole. It is a canon, a Bible, a people’s expression of its historic spiritual life through selections from its national literature. Even were we then to deny to individual Scripture writers any conscious codperation of the eternal Spirit of Truth, we should still be compelled to admit an element beyond themselves in this un¬ sought unity. The canonization of a sacred litera¬ ture makes it in a real sense “God’s book.” Ancient religious thought expresses its sense of the superhuman factor in such embodiments of national religious life by some form of consecration or taboo. Epic or Veda, mystic Way or Book of the Dead, oracle of priestly shrine or surah of the Koran, the utterance is declared “inspired,” because both he who speaks and they who hear subordinate (though in different degree) elements admittedly human, transient, individual, and fallible to that which by origin and destiny alike may well claim immortality. Preserved in written form, these ut¬ terances of seer, poet, prophet, or lawgiver justify their title to reverence as divinely “revealed” and “inspired” just in so far as we limit our view to that which gives them unity. We count them truly such because of their expression of a religious and moral consciousness at first national, ultimately 10 HE OPENED TO US THE SCRIPTURES universal ; and this growing consciousness can reason¬ ably be regarded by religious-minded men as due to the guidance and discipline of a higher Power, a Spirit that works invisibly through the ages, a “Power not ourselves that makes for righteousness.” As Loescher wisely said of the slow determination of the canon: Not at a single stroke and by human determina¬ tion was it brought forth, as men declare, but little by little, by agency of God, the director of minds and of ages.1 We have seen that there are elements of identity in all doctrines of revelation and inspiration; be¬ cause most religions, once culture has reached the literary stage, tend to produce a canon of sacred Scripture. The communal mind unloads its store of accumulated tradition, law, legend, belief, and poetry upon the written page. Later generations, falling heir to the treasure, naturally invest it with attributes expressive of a divine authority. For records such as these are felt to be written embodi¬ ments of the communal soul-life and are used to promote it. In proportion as the institutions of the group come to be built upon these writings men vie with one another in ascribing to them super¬ human attributes; and ascriptions of this type will always tend to take a hyperbolic form. 1 Non uno, quod dicunt, actu ab hominibus, sed paulatim a Deo, animorum temporumque rectore, productus. Quoted by Driver, Introduction to Old Testament, ed. v., p. xxxvi, from Strack. PRIMITIVE IDEAS OF DIVINE REVELATION 11 In the process of canonization law is apt to take a leading part, because the authority of law is a matter of immediate practical necessity. Post-exilic Judaism was built upon it. When the book was endangered martyrs gave their lives to save it. But in such codes as the Mosaic there is at first no dif¬ ferentiation of civil from criminal law, nor even of religious ceremonial from secular jurisprudence. Still less do we find discrimination between the ideal morality of inward disposition and prescription for external conduct such as the administration of public justice requires. This is true, of course, not only of the Mosaic, but also of other ancient codes. Still there is a difference. In the modern court room lies the Bible, soiled by unreverent kisses of witnesses, true and false. This, not the statute-books at the lawyers’ desks, represents invisible divine authority. Men scarcely realize the meaning of the act. It is almost forgotten in these days when legislation is cheap, and respect for the product of our wholesale lawmakers corresponds to its cheapness, that the laws were once thought of as divine, and those who made and administered them were called by poetic symbolism “gods” and “sons of the Most High” (Ps. 82:6). Matters were somewhat otherwise in the old-time Jewish court room, the synagogue. Here, too, was the law-book of Moses, the Torah, wrapped in its covering embroidered with the wedding chaplets of Israel’s marriage covenant with Jehovah at Sinai. With it in the shrine are “the Prophets,” narrative 12 HE OPENED TO US THE SCRIPTURES and hortatory, understood to be interpretative of the Torah to successive generations. As a later group, associated ultimately with “the law and the pro¬ phets,” are the “Writings” of poetry and philoso¬ phy, and the hymns of temple worship. All were counted divinely “inspired,” but not independently. Prophets and writings derived their authority from the Law. They had no other function than to shed further light upon the problem how Israel should fulfill Jehovah’s will. “Revelation” and “inspira¬ tion” belonged to the second group of the canon, but by a reflected light, and the authority of the third group was still more indirect. But as a whole the book represented Jehovah. It embodied his righteous will. The conception is significant of the nature of Judaism as a religion of law. Since Ezra, the great scribe, laid its founda¬ tions when he returned from Babylon “with the book of the Law of his God in his hand,” the “lawyer,” that is, the “scribe,” has sat in Moses’ seat. Since the time that there has been such a thing as a synagogue the scribe has ruled its destinies ; and for it the attributes of revelation and inspiration have attached primarily to the code of law. This consti¬ tutes the distinctive feature of “Judaism,” the re¬ ligion of Israel since Ezra’s reconstruction. Poets, sages, prophets, obtained in time 1 that place along- ^he Prologue of Ecclesiasticus (ca. 170 b.c.) shows a canon consisting of “the Law, the Prophets and the other books.” But the third group, the Kethubim (“writings”), was of undetermined extent. It remained unsettled until about 125 a.d. PRIMITIVE IDEAS OF DIVINE REVELATION 13 side the Torah which belonged to them by inherent right, and which the religious consciousness of wor¬ shipers insistently demanded. The older literature remained to rekindle prophetic fires. But even in its highest developments the Jewish doctrine of sacred Scripture remains fundamentally what it has been from Ezra’s time, a doctrine of divine Law; a book of precepts to be obeyed under sanction of reward and penalty. In its lower forms we do not need to be told how largely this Jewish doctrine of sacred Scripture partook of the superstitious and magical ideas of pagan bibliolatry. In its higher ex¬ pressions it deserves at least to be understood. Extravagant utterances of rabbinic writers, such as the statement that the Almighty himself spends the morning hours of each day in the study of his own Torah,1 should not be interpreted as sober prose. They employ the characteristic method of paradox and hyperbole to express an appreciation which does not differ in essence from the praises of Psalm 19, Psalm 119, and other late writers for the written word. The sages of the Wisdom literature have similar praises for something behind the letter, the divine “spirit of Wisdom.” This stands over against the externalized revelation of the rabbis as Luther’s doctrine of the Scriptures, which “contain 1 The paradoxical saying may be compared with the Kantian principle of absolute morality, or the contemporary Greek con¬ ception of “fate” to which Zeus himself must bow. The rabbi looks upon the Torah as the reflection of absolute right. To say that Jehovah himself studies it is only a poetic way of saying God himself is limited to that which is right (Gen. 18:25). 14 HE OPENED TO US THE SCRIPTURES the word of God/’ stands over against that of the post-Reformation dogmatists, who decreed that they “are” the word of God. Originally Wisdom ( hoq - mah) was conceived as an exhalation from the Creator himself impregnating the human under¬ standing. Ultimately it was identified with the 1 written Torah. But this was poetic symbolism.1 Doubtless there were in the days of Jesus and Paul, as now, both in Synagogue and primitive Church, differences of view. There may well have been those whose conception of revelation and in¬ spiration was less mechanical and literal than the expressions of Josephus, and even of Philo, would imply. We must make room for both. There are no Biblical critics so unsparing as the Bible writers themselves. One must go to a Jeremiah to see what a living prophet can say of the codified Torah of priest and prophet to which men appealed in his time (Jer. 7:21-28; 31:31-34). One must go to the Sermon on the Mount in the New Testament to hear similar words concerning the prescription of “them of old time,” the divine authority appealed to by scribe and Pharisee. When one attempts to characterize the Jewish doctrine of revelation and inspiration over against the Christian it is important to include the broader as well as the narrower interpreters on both sides. The Talmud classifies them as belonging to the 1 Cf . Ecclus. 24:3 ff. with verses 23 ff. appended to the same poem, and Bar. 3:9-37 with the similar supplement appended in 4:1 ff. PRIMITIVE IDEAS OF DIVINE REVELATION 15 school of Shammai (strict constructionists) or of Hillel (liberals). There were scribes in Jesus’ time who were, to his mind, “not far from the kingdom of God,” because they responded to his summary of the whole Law in the twofold commandment of ab¬ solute devotion to God and recognition of men as sons of the same Father. The public teaching of Jesus ends with the saying of a scribe of this type: “Master, thou hast well said. To love God with all the heart, all the understanding, all the strength, and to love one’s neighbor as oneself is much more than all whole burnt offering and sacrifice.” This scribe is not the only one. A century later we find resistance on the part of rabbis in the schools of Jamnia to attempts to override the sober judg¬ ment of reason and conscience expressed in the vote of the assembly by appeal to vision (contemporary), divine revelation, and miracle. The boldness of these protests astounds the Christian scholar unless he be aware that Jewish rabbis also could insist, like Paul, on testing the spirits, because “the spirits of the prophets are subject to the prophets,” or, as Bishop Butler put it in his famous Analogy : “Rea¬ son [in which he would include the moral judg¬ ment] is the only faculty we have whereby to judge of anything, were it of revelation itself.” While the sober conservatism of the Church in the second century was bringing under control the un¬ bridled millenarian fanaticism of Montanus, the Syn¬ agogue was facing a like danger. Jewish rabbis were forced to discredit appeals to miracle and “voices 16 HE OPENED TO US THE SCRIPTURES from heaven/’ precisely as Christian Church fathers discredited the flood of apocalyses and thaumaturgy, until but a single writing of this type remained in the Christian canon. Even the so-called “Apoca¬ lypse of John” (self-styled “Prophecy”) barely re¬ tained its hold, and in only a portion of the Church. However well worthy of the place, this writing, too, was not retained for its own sake so much as be¬ cause it was ascribed to “a great apostle.” When we seek to define the Jewish doctrine of revelation and inspiration in the time of Jesus and Paul, utter¬ ances of the sober-minded rabbis of the early second century must be taken into the account also. We cannot fairly limit ourselves to the extravagances of their opponents, such as R. Eliezer, and the half¬ pagan laudations of Josephus and Philo.1 1 If any man lack a sense of humor let him ask of God. He may receive it without upbraiding for past offenses. But let him not approach the Talmud until he is sure that his prayer has been answered. In no less than three different passages the Talmud illustrates the disrepute into which appeal to bath qol (= voice from heaven, that is, contemporary supernatural revelation) had fallen, by quoting a saying of R. Samuel invoked by R. Judah: “Every day there goes forth a bath qol saying, So and so’s daughter is intended for so and so.” One might render this into modern speech by saying, “Every time a young couple become engaged they want you to believe the match was made in heaven.” Much more definite still is the story and connected saying, “We do not care jor bath qol,” which is appealed to again and again in both Babylonian and Jerusalem Talmud, to establish the principle that matters of law and conscience ( halakha ) must be settled by majority vote, not by appeal to the supernatural. R. Eliezer, greatest of the college of sages at Jamnia, early in the second century, had been overruled by his colleagues on a question relating to the purification of ovens. He refused to PRIMITIVE IDEAS OF DIVINE REVELATION 17 There should be no need to repeat what has been so admirably said by the late Professor Sanday in his Bampton Lectures for 1893 entitled Inspiration, characterizing the “estimate of the Old Testament yield the point and began an appeal to miracle. “Let this carob- tree prove,” said he, “that the halakha prevails as I state.” The carob-tree was thereupon miraculously thrown off to a distance of one hundred (or, as others say, four hundred) ells. “But they said, ‘The carob-tree proves nothing.’ Again he said, ‘Then let the spring of water prove that this halakha prevails.’ The water began to run uphill. But again the sages said, ‘This proves nothing.’ Again he said, ‘Then let the walls of the college prove that I am right’; whereupon the walls of the college were so shaken that they were about to fall. But R. Joshua rebuked them, saying, ‘If the sages of this college are discussing a halakha what business have you to interfere?’ So they stood still.” Thus Eliezer’s appeal to miracle was ruled out of court. But he was still undaunted. In last resort he cried, “Let it be announced by the heavens that the halakha prevails according to my state¬ ment.” Upon this a bath qol was heard, saying, “Why do you quarrel with R. Eliezer, who is always right in his decisions?” But the indomitable R. Joshua, worthy namesake of him whose faith overthrew the walls of a greater city than Jamnia, not over¬ awed even by one who could evoke echoes from heaven in sup¬ port of his views and thus be “always right in his decisions,” arose and quoted Dt. 30:12 ff.: “The Torah is not in heaven, that thou shouldest say, Who shall go up for us to heaven and bring it to us, but very nigh thee, in thy heart and in thy mouth.” There may be literalists so deficient in sense of humor as not to see the point of this quite fictitious but very pointed anec¬ dote. It is for the sake of such that the Talmud appends a comment which is bolder than the anecdote itself in its use of expository fiction. “How is this to be understood? R. Jere¬ miah said, ‘It means, The Torah was already given to us on Mount Sinai, and we do not care for a voice from heaven, as it reads (Ex. 23:2 in the Targum), “After the majority shalt thou fulfil judgment.” ’ ” Then it goes on, telling a tale to reenforce a tale, “R. Nathan met Elijah the prophet (who was believed to stand in the presence of God), and asked him, ‘What did the Holy One, blessed be He, when R. Joshua made this decision?’ 18 HE OPENED TO US THE SCRIPTURES in the first century of the Christian era” (Lecture II, pp. 70-90). In method and outline it would be hard to improve upon our great English scholar. We have three principal sources for determining what was the Jewish doctrine of inspired Scripture, and they do not materially differ in their general conception ; for on the whole it remains true in sub¬ stance as Loisy has said ( Canon de V A . T., p. 97) : The Savior and the Apostles quoted from a body of divine Scriptures, and it does not appear that in their teaching they desired to make any innovation so far as the extent or authority of this collection are concerned. Neither the apos¬ tolic writings nor the tradition of the Christian Church afford any trace of an explicit decision laid down by Jesus Christ or the Apostles in re¬ gard to the canon of the Old Testament, much less a decision correcting the received opinions of the Jewish world. Taking account of the saving clause “so far as the extent or authority . . . are concerned” this gen¬ eral statement is true, in spite of certain implicit larger principles in the mode of approach to Scrip¬ ture which characterize the utterances of Jesus and Paul, and even to some extent the New Testament writers. These principles, however, as Sanday him- Elijah rejoined, ‘He laughed and said: My children have over¬ ruled me. My children have overruled me.’ ” It is perhaps needless to add that in spite of the affinity of thought the Talmudic vindicators of the right of reason and conscience to overrule revelation itself had not read Butler’s Analogy. PRIMITIVE IDEAS OF DIVINE REVELATION 19 self considers, enable ministers of the New Covenant to “transcend current Rabbinical methods in a man¬ ner to penetrate more deeply to the heart of the Old Testament teaching.” We must later attempt to define these principles more closely. In order of date the three sources for determining current Jewish belief are: (1) Philo, whose works reach down to about 40 a.d. ; (2) the New Testa¬ ment, beginning with I Thessalonians written about 50 a.d., a group of writings covering at least the rest of the century; and (3) the Antiquities and Contra Apionem of Josephus, written about 93-94 a.d. Sanday’s survey of the “properties ascribed to the Old Testament” in these writings is as complete and impartial as could be desired, and requires little, if any, supplementation from Talmudic sources. For the Talmud also, although not reduced to syste¬ matic written form till some two centuries later, gives wholly reliable reports, so far as this particular doctrine is concerned, of the teachings of rabbis contemporary with Jesus and Paul. Only, when we talk of “the received opinions of the Jewish world” as endorsed by Jesus and the Apostles, let us re¬ member that the phrase (while true in substance) is very general, and that the “received opinions” were not then, any more than now, all of one kind. Philo’s conception of inspiration is clearly based on the utterances of the “prophets who spake in the name of the Lord.” To some extent the old mantic idea survives of the seer “falling down and having his eyes opened” (Num. 24:4). Vision and 20 HE OPENED TO US THE SCRIPTURES trance have always been the convenient avenues of communication from the unseen, and at least the form of these is retained even in the written prophecies of the literary period. We cannot be quite sure, when we read the accounts of their divine call given by Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, precisely how much of this apparatus of vision and mystical audition is literary convention, as in Bun- yan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, and how much is actual trance. In Daniel the visions are certainly literary conventions, and this applies still more to Enoch and the later apocalypses; for they obviously imitate one another in reproducing these descriptions. All that we can say with certainty is that men like Amos, Hosea, Micah, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel were profoundly conscious that they were commis¬ sioned by Jehovah with a message for his people. The more directly this message was concerned with justice, mercy, and loyalty, the greater the prophet’s consciousness of divine authority. For men like Amos, Micah, Isaiah, were at least as conscious as we that the Power not ourselves that moves through history is one that “makes for righteousness.” Jus¬ tice and judgment were to them the habitation of Jehovah’s throne. Spiritual vision and audition were in the time of the literary prophets the immemorial methods through which first the seer, afterward the prophet (I Sam. 9:9), had conveyed such messages from Jehovah, and writers such as Isaiah naturally use these immemorial forms. Even Amos, who declines PRIMITIVE IDEAS OF DIVINE REVELATION 21 the title of “prophet” (debased as it was in his time) and scorns the prophets’ pretense of being the confi¬ dants of Jehovah’s secrets (Am. 7:14 f. ; 3:7 f.), does not disdain the method (Am. 7:1, 4, 7; 8:1; 9:1). But the content of the prophet’s message as time goes on becomes more and more religious and moral. He is no longer concerned, like the seer, with ques¬ tions as to where strayed asses are to be sought. In Isaiah’s time the true prophet had become the states¬ man of Jehovah, to declare the divine purpose which his servant, Israel, must perform. Centuries later, when the writings of these men had become canon¬ ized, a Philo will undertake to define for his con¬ temporaries what is implied in the prophet’s “Thus saith Jehovah.” As a theologian, and for the pur¬ pose of making apparent to all that the sacred writ¬ ings do indeed contain a divine message, he will quite naturally insist upon the apparatus and mode of reception, taking all the references to spiritual sight and hearing in the most literal sense. For a prophet, says Philo, gives forth noth¬ ing of his own, but acts as interpreter ai; the prompting of another in all his utterances; and as long as he is under inspiration he* is in ig¬ norance, his reason departing from its place and yielding up the citadel of his soul, whereupon the Divine Spirit enters into it and dwells in it and plays upon the mechanism of his voice, sounding through it to the clear utterance of that which he prophesieth (de spec. legg. iv. 8). We recognize here the favorite figure of the flute- player, which passes on through Jewish writers to 22 HE OPENED TO US THE SCRIPTURES Christian. The Divine Spirit is the breath, the in¬ spired speaker is a mere instrument. His faculties are so subordinated to the will of the Spirit that nothing of his own enters into the utterance, any more than the flute utters a melody of its own com¬ position.1 Josephus uses almost the same language as Philo. For those who fancy that of themselves they can foretell the fortunes of men are all too weak to help saying what God suggests to them, or to resist His will; for when He has entered into us nothing that is in us is any longer our own (Ant. IV. vi. 5). The conception is so completely familiar to us through even very modern writers that we have no need to give further examples.2 The special interest 1 So, for example, Athenagoras (Leg. pro Christ, ix.) : “While entranced and deprived of their natural powers of reason the prophets uttered by the influence of the divine Spirit that which was wrought in them, the Spirit using them as its instruments, as a flute-player might blow a flute.” a For a representative statement the reader may be referred to The Inspired Word, a series of papers and addresses deliv¬ ered at the Bible-Inspiration Conference, Philadelphia, 1887. Edited by Arthur T. Pierson. The Rev. James H. Brookes, D.D., author of the essay entitled “Theories of Inspiration” (pp. 145- 165), maintains that “The Holy Spirit dwells in the believer, con¬ trolling his speech and actions, without reducing him to the help¬ less condition of an unthinking machine (a protest against the designation ‘mechanical’ applied to this type of doctrine), and without changing his style or natural gifts and tendencies.” To the objection that under his conception “the four accounts of the inscription on the cross of our Lord would have been pre¬ cisely alike,” he replies that it was the special design of God in the preparation of the Gospels that all four taken to- PRIMITIVE IDEAS OF DIVINE REVELATION 23 of the passage from Josephus is that it tells us just whence it is derived. Balaam is supposed to be speaking, and Josephus is merely paraphrasing Numbers 23:1-12 to explain the nature of inspira¬ tion. He describes Balaam as prophesying “not as master of himself but moved to say what he did by the Divine Spirit.” Hence Balaam says to Balak, “Thinkest thou that it is in our power to speak or be silent when the Spirit of God takes possession of us? For he causes us to utter words such as he wills and speeches without our knowledge.” But very manifestly Josephus in thus harking back to Balaam is not laying hold upon that element of Hebrew prophecy which gave it, as we have seen, its high distinction. It was its ethical content which raised Jewish prophecy above the mere half-heathen mantic and shamanism from which it sprang, while only telltale and obsolescent vestiges of its origin remained attached to the outward form of its mes¬ sage. Josephus is taking just the opposite course from that which he should have taken to follow the lead of the prophets themselves. He is shutting his eyes to the moral message which made Hebrew prophecy great in the genuine consciousness of speak¬ ing for the eternal God of truth and righteousness, gether should form the complete inscription. For this reason “the Holy Ghost required the writers to arrange the words ac¬ cording to” this design (p. 164 f.). The illustration chosen by Dr. Brookes will show to what extent his doctrine of “verbal inspiration” differs from that of the ancient writers we have quoted, and whether it does or does not deserve the epithet “mechanical.” 24 HE OPENED TO US THE SCRIPTURES while he emphasizes those outworn elements of soothsaying and thaumaturgy which were the main reliance of the false prophets denounced by men like Amos and Jeremiah. The visions and vaticinations of the false prophets are indistinguishable from pagan man tic, and Philo and Josephus, when they ignore the difference in moral content, revert to this. For what is there to differentiate this conception of inspiration as the displacement of the human reason and conscience by an outside power from the soothsaying of pagan oracles and mediums “possessed with a spirit of divination”? Philo’s ex¬ ample is not indeed Balaam, but Abraham in the “trance” which came upon him “about the setting of the sun” (Gen. 15:12; cf. Quis rerum divinarum heres, 53). The sun, says Philo, here represents the light of human reason, which must set in order to give place to the Spirit of God. So long then as our mind shines and stirs about us, pouring as it were noontide brightness into every corner of the soul, we are masters of our¬ selves and are not possessed; but when it draws to its setting, then it is natural that the trance of inspiration should fall upon us, seizing upon us with a sort of frenzy. For when the divine light begins to shine, the human sets; and when the human sets below the horizon, the other ap¬ pears above it and rises. This is what constantly happens to the prophet. The mind in us is ex¬ pelled at the arrival of the Divine Spirit and re¬ turns again to its home at His removal. For it PRIMITIVE IDEAS OF DIVINE REVELATION 25 may not be that mortal dwell with immortal. So the setting of the reason and the darkness that gathers round it generates an ecstasy and heaven- caused madness. Be the example chosen Balaam or Abraham, in the essential point, exclusion of the faculties of reason and conscience from their rightful control, Philo and Josephus hark back to heathenism. They stand at the opposite pole from the New Testament writers, who protest against such abdication of reason and conscience (I Thess. 5:19-21; I Cor. 12— 14 ; cf. I Jn. 4:1 ff.). The Jewish writers in their eagerness to claim miraculous attributes for the sacred writ¬ ings of their own people ignore the vital distinction of spiritual content, and turn back to such supposed characteristics of form as would most commend them to the heathen mind. What they are claiming for Abraham and the prophets is exactly the same which Lucan claims for the priestess who uttered the oracles for the Pythian Apollo: “The god en¬ ters into her, driving out her former mind, and compels everything that is human in her breast to give place to himself/’ Sanday rightly points out that the very language of Philo shows his purpose of assimilation to current heathen ideas of “inspira¬ tion.” The words of which he is fondest, xpyvpos, ^oyiov, pavLa, lepoc^avTrjs, Upo^avrelv, 6eo(f)6priTOs, kmOeia^oo, kvOov -