God and His Book/Chapter 1
God and His Book.
CHAPTER I.
"All Scripture is God-inspired," πάσα γραΦη θεόπνενστος.[1] This is awkward for such theologians as would like to claim that only their own favourite texts are inspired and the passages that lend support to their little ism, but that texts that are repugnant to them, and passages which conflict with their ism, are not God-inspired. This contention, of course, implies that the Holy Ghost produced some writings and shook them up in a sack with the writings of mere mortals, and set mankind to a desperate effort of eclecticism, the determining which are the writings of God and which are the writings of patristic forgers. Man cannot have been made so much lower than the angels after all, if he can write so alarmingly like God that even the learned have not been able to agree as to how much of the Holy Scriptures have been written by Jehovah of Heaven, and how much by John Smith of Earth. If this half-and-half inspiration theory be not particularly complimentary to El Shaddai, "the Almighty," it is certainly a feather in the cap of John Smith, a poor "worm of the dust."
The supporters of the Holy-Ghost-and-John-Smith inspiration theory read the verse in Timothy, "All Scripture that is God-inspired." But they are more ingenious than ingenuous, and their piety is greater than their Greek. The verb substantive must be understood between γραφη and θεοπνευστος, and not between θεοπνευστος and ωφέλιμος, because the conjunction comes between, which renders ωφέλιμος, the second qualitative attribute of γραφη, as θεόπνευστος is the first. I do not know whether the Holy Ghost be still in the shape of a pigeon; but, if he be, theologians twist his writings with a force that would twist his neck.
Peter the fisherman steps in to the assistance of "Timothy" and settles the matter. He assures us that "the prophecy came not in old time by the will of man; but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost."[2] This settles the matter. Peter himself was one of the "holy men of God." He sliced the ear off Malchus, denied his Lord, fished sea of Galilee geds, and devoted his leisure hours to acting as amanuensis to the Holy Ghost. Fine work, too, the Ghost and he produced. When he said, with an oath, to the damsel Rhoda: "Woman, I know not the man!" he told an unmitigated lie. But when he asserted that "prophecy" was written by the Holy Ghost he, of course, told the truth. George Washington could not tell a lie; but Peter apparently could. Was it for this reason that the Holy Ghost selected him as an amanuensis?
If you sin against the Holy Ghost, you cannot "be forgiven, neither in this world nor the world to come." I fear that most of us will never be forgiven; for who among us has not grossly insulted the Ghost by attributing certain of his writings to a poor scribbling worm of the dust, and vice versa? Not only do we frequently fail to distinguish the Ghost's work from Smith's work in the Authorised Version, but there are a number of books which some allege to be the Ghost's and some allege to be Smith's, which are excluded from the Authorised Version altogether. There are the Books of Tobit and Judith, Wisdom, Ecclesiasticus, Baruch, the Epistle of Jeremiah, the Song of the Three Children, Susanna, Bel and the Dragon, and the Maccabees. The Roman Catholic Church believes all these books to be from the pen of the Ghost; but the Protestant Church alleges that they are the worthless writings of Smith. If the Ghost really wrote them, I should like to hear his opinion of the Protestant Church. If he did not write them, it would be interesting to have his verdict upon the Church of Rome.
The books I have enumerated were canonical down till about 360 years ago. Then a Council of Protestant divines determined that they were not in the handwriting of the Ghost. The heavy majority of Christians, however, still believe that they are the work of that "comforter" and author. Nobody seems to have questioned that the truly insane parts of the Scriptures are by the "comforter;" but learned divines have never been able to quite determine that he wrote Chronicles, Esther, Job, Isaiah, Daniel, Jonah, and Zechariah. I repeat that it is unfortunate that the Ghost writes so perplexingly like Smith. Why did he not adopt a style of his own? He seems to have no idiosyncrasy. Literary talent does not run in the family of El Shaddai. The Father himself, amid a great deal of thunder and lightning at Sinai, wrote a very trite and stupid decalogue, the egotistical burden of which was that they should have no other God except himself. A very poor affair after so much thunder and lightning! Then Jerome informs us that the Son could not write at all, nor read either, I should say, from his star-gazing enthusiasm and uncultured hallucinations. Then, as to the third "person," the Ghost, he has written with so little force and character that there are literally scores of books over which the learned have wrangled for ages, unable to determine whether they were written by the literary member of the Trinity, or by some twopence-halfpenny hack of some ancient Grub Street.
We are to "search the Scriptures" in order to obtain "eternal life;" and some of us, who would really like "eternal life," would not mind the trouble of searching the Scriptures if we could only find out what the Scriptures really are. Not one man in fifty thousand has had the leisure and the learning to con over the ancient MSS. and codices, and to determine for himself which writings are divine and which human. Even if God did give man a written revelation, one thing is certain—we have either never seen that revelation, or, when we do see it, we fail to clearly distinguish it from the mass of ancient writings of a similar character with which it has got inextricably mixed. For our Bible, such as it is, we are indebted to the wranglings of the Fathers and the laborious plodding of subsequent pedants. We are entirely at their mercy, and they are at deadly variance among themselves, not only as to certain books which are altogether rejected, but as to which passages are inspired and which are not in the books that have been accepted.
In finding out what the Ghost actually has written, the difficulty of the task becomes more formidable every attempt we make to undertake it. Certain books of the Bible quote from books and records which no longer exist. Were these books and records also inspired? If not, how can portions of books which are not inspired form any portion of books which are inspired? If the Holy Ghost were to quote from the Secular Review, would the Secular Review thereby become inspired? The references of the Holy Ghost to works which seem to have existed before he began to write the Bible for our salvation and bewilderment are more frequent than a superficial reader would suppose. I here give a list of the works the Holy Ghost had before him when he was writing, and from which he has quoted:—
Books Lost, cited in the Old Testament.
The Book of the Wars of the Lord (Numbers xxi. 14).
The Book of the Covenant (Exodus xxiv. 7).
The Book of Jasher, or the Upright (Joshua x. 13, 2 Samuel i. i8).
The Book of the Acts of Solomon (1 Kings xi. 41).
The Book of the Chronicles of the Kings of Israel (i Kings; xiv. 19, and eighteen other places in the Books of Kings; also 2 Chron. xx 34 and xxxiii. 18).
The Chronicles of the Kings of Judah (l Kings xiv. 29, and twelve other places in the books of Kings).
The Book of Samuel the Seer (1 Chronicles xxix. 29).
The Book of Nathan the Prophet (1 Chronicles xxix. 29).
The Book of Gad the Seer (1 Chronicles xxix. 29).
The Chronicles of King David (1 Chronicles xxvii. 24).
The Book of Nathan the Prophet (2 Chronicles ix. 29).
The Prophecy of Ahijah the Shilomite (2 Chronicles ix. 29).
The Visions of Iddo the Seer against Jeroboam the son of Nabat (2 Chronicles ix. 29).
The Book of Shemaiah the Prophet (2 Chronicles xii. 15).
The Book of Iddo the Seer concerning Genealogies (2 Chronicles xii. 15).
The Story of the Prophet Iddo (2 Chronicles xiii. 22).
The Book of the Kings of Judah and Israel (2 Chronicles xvi. 11, and six other places in the same Book).
The Book of Jehu (2 Chronicles xx. 34).
The Memoirs of Hircanus (mentioned in 1 Maccabees).
The Books of Jason (mentioned in 2 Maccabees ii.).
The Acts of Uriah,[err 1] mentioned in 2 Chronicles xxvi. 22.
Three thousand Proverbs of Solomon, mentioned in 1 Kings iv. 32.
A thousand and five Songs, mentioned in ibid.
Several other volumes by the same author, mentioned in ibid.
The Prophecy of Jeremiah, torn in pieces by Jehoiakim, cited in Jeremiah xxxvi.
Another Prophecy of his upon the city of Babylon, mentioned in Jeremiah li.
Memoirs or Descriptions of the same author, mentioned in 1 Maccabees ii.
The Prophecy of Jonah, mentioned in the Book of Jonah.
These works may each and all have been inspired. I cannot allege that I say so through inspiration; nevertheless, I feel inclined to think that the Book of Jasher, the Book of Iddo, and the rest of them, were juvenile and immature performances of the Ghost. I opine that he incorporated the gist of them into his more recent writings, and then committed to the flames the crude compositions of his adolescence. It is, however, a pity he burnt them. With what holy and absorbing interest we should have read them as milestones on the road of mental development on which travelled the only ghost that ever took to writing books! Still, some Tischendorf or Shapira may yet unearth the Ghost's boyish volumes, the Book of Gad and the Book of Nathan. We have certain of the boyish writings of Sir Walter Scott, which were tenderly preserved by his mother; but the Ghost, being his own mother, does not stand on quite parallel lines with Sir Walter Scott.
Then, as to certain of the Targums, God only knows whether the Ghost wrote them or not. The Christians say he did not, and the Jews say he did.[3] The Rabbins contend that, when Jehovah, amid an extraordinary, but quite unnecessary, display of thunder and lightning, gave out the decalogue at Sinai, he issued, at the same time, the Targums of Onkelos and Jonathan. If he did so, it explains what has been otherwise always inexplicable to me—viz., why Moses spent forty days on the mountain over such a trifling job as engraving the decalogue. It has frequently struck me that God and he must have had an idle time of it, if it took the two of them forty days to do as much engraving as is now-a-days found on the tombstone of an ordinary tailor, when his virtues are well set out. But, if they actually produced, in addition to the Decalogue, the Targums of Onkelos and Jonathan, that alters the matter; they cannot have been so very idle after all.
Be this as it may, God must have been very idle in heaven when he came down to earth and spent forty days on the top of a mountain in Arabia over such a poor affair as the Decalogue and the Targums. The "Have no other God save me" business was, perhaps, new; but all the rest was as old as the basis of society. To tell men to honour their father and mother, for instance, was poor work for a god, it being quite unnecessary. All men worthy of the name have honoured their father and mother. Did Jehovah never hear of Troy? Has it not reached his ears how Æneas took his aged father on his shoulders and rushed through the roaring flames, saving the life of his parent at the peril of his own? This was a thousand years before the nomadic carpenter had begun to preach in the villages of Galilee, and I know not how many centuries before Ezra had written a line of the Bible. Æneas had never heard of Jehovah and his Decalogue, and, even if he had, would most likely have laughed at both.
But the most noteworthy thing about Jehovah and his Decalogue is this: He, as the Bible shows, broke every "commandment" in it save one. That one was, Thou shalt have no other God before me. Through all his slaughter and lust and lying he always retained a good opinion of himself, and kept at least one item of his Decalogue intact by never bowing his knee to any other God. He could endure Rahab and Ruth; he could favour incestuous Lot and gory David; but he could not stand Ashtaroth or Baal.
By the way, Jehovah does not, as a rule, have, as a literary deity, the credit which is due to him. He, as a hagiographical writer, does not occupy the niche to which his genius entitles him. His writings are lost sight of in the auriole of glory that flings its halo over the writings of the Ghost. A sense of justice impels me to interfere and claim for him that which is his due. It is common to assume that all the Scriptures are the work of the Ghost. This is a fallacy. Jehovah wrote the Decalogue before the Ghost was invented—while the God of Israel was as yet "One God," and the Ghost has plagiarised it. It must also be remembered, as a feather in Jehovah's literary bonnet, that he is, according to his chosen people, the Jews, the author of at least two dreary and musty Targums—the Targums of Onkelos and Jonathan.
Eternal echoes render;
The mournful Tuscan's haunted rhyme
And Milton's starry splendour."
The Son, unlike the Father and the Ghost, wrote no books. Jerome says he could not write. Joseph had set him to work in the carpenter's shop before he had learnt his pothooks. True, he once stooped down and, with his finger, wrote upon the ground;[4] but the writing was most likely of the kind which, on the moist sand, the sea-gull makes with his feet—viz., an illiterate and unintelligible scribble.
- ↑ 2 Tim. iii. 16.
- ↑ 2 Peter i. 21
- ↑ Vide "Stackhouse's "History of the Bible," vol. i., p. 92.
- ↑ John viii. 6.
- ↑ [Erratum: Acts of Uzziah]