11. Litt. Bible Problems and the New Material for their Solution
By T. K. Cheyne, D. Litt., D.D. London: Williams & Norgate; New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. 1904. 1 he "Crown Theological Library," of which this volume forms the T eighth number, is a new propaganda of what in our modern nomenclature is miscalled "liberal" Christianity. The most of the essays hitherto published in it are translations from the German and French of characteristic papers by such men as Friedrich Delitzsch, Harnack,
Herrmann, Pfleiderer, Lobstein, Réville, Sabatier. They give the series the appearance of an attempt to naturalize in lands of English speech the variety of "liberal" Christianity now so flourishing on the continent of Europe. An occasional paper of English authorship has, however, been included. Among these certainly none can put in a better claim to either representativeness or readableness than this sprightly essay by Dr. Cheyne.
Were it only on the score of literary delight no one ought to miss anything which Dr. Cheyne writes. The fine patience with which he bears with the
intellectual backwardness of the uninstructed multitude whom he considers it his duty to correct; the tender solicitude with which he chides his fellow laborers in the field of Biblical criticism for their slowness of heart to believe all that this prophet has spoken; the depth of the interest which he exhibits in the religion which he makes it his business sedulously to undermine; the carefully chosen phraseology with which he gloves the hand with which he crushes; the childlike frankness with which he confesses his own great attainments and achievements, and congratulates the Christian world on its possession in these confused days of a guide to truth who unites within himself such clearness of sight, loftiness of aim, courage and tenderness—is it not all most engaging? When we add to these fascinations of manner the rich residuum of facts which the prudent reader may always strain out from Dr. Cheyne's imaginative constructions, and the stimulus which he is sure to receive from contact with so widely-read a scholar, it will be readily understood with what pleasure each succeeding publication of Dr. Cheyne's is received by a very broad public.
The present essay is an expansion of a lecture delivered before a society called "The Churchmen's Union," and is couched throughout in the tone of a heart-to-heart talk from a churchman to his fellow churchmen, with whom he feels heartily at one in all that is of the deepest concern, though not perhaps insensible that it has fallen to him to become the leader of his brethren to a better outlook than may possibly at present obtain among them. He describes the task which he undertakes as "partly an exposition of new facts, partly a plea for a bolder style of Biblical criticism, justified and invited by those facts" (p. 5). This bolder Biblical criticism which he wishes to commend has its application not merely to the Old Testament, but also, and chiefly in this lecture, to the New. The new facts to which he appeals are the facts unearthed by recent Oriental archæology. In effect the lecture is a plea for the employment of the results of recent research in the field of
Oriental archæology not merely to the elucidation but the reconstruction of the Biblical records—in both Testaments. Their bearing on the understanding of the Old Testament has been more fully recognized and therefore is here less fully entered upon: their bearing on the understanding of the New Testament it is therefore made the business of the greater part of the lecture to insist upon. "In short"—the lecturer himself thus sums up this part of his contention—"there are parts of the New Testament—in the Gospels, in the Epistles, and in the Apocalypse—which can only be accounted for by the newly-discovered fact of an Oriental syncretism, which began early and continued late. And the leading factor in this is
Babylonian" (p. 19). The purpose of the lecture may be, therefore, not unfairly described as an attempt to popularize the application of PanBabylonism for "accounting for" the New Testament as well as for the Old
—although, of course, "Pan-Babylonism" must be understood here in no narrow sense, but rather, in accordance with Dr. Cheyne's effort to do justice to the entire range of recent Oriental investigation, broadly enough to include the entirety of ancient Shemitic culture.
The contention of the lecture with respect to the Old Testament is, in brief, that "it is a fact, which cannot be argued out of existence, that we have recently acquired two new keys to the Old Testament, by which great problems are being brought nearer to a solution." One of these, he continues, "is furnished by a critical Assyriology, soon, we may hope, to be reinforced from South Arabia; the other, by a more methodical textual criticism" (p. 185). Why anyone should attempt "to argue out of existence
"such a fact as is here asserted, we cannot ourselves imagine. No one doubts the value of "a critical Assyriology" to Old Testament interpretation; and certainly one of the chief desiderata of Old Testament criticism is "a more methodical textual criticism"—for nothing has brought greater or more deserved reproach upon the reigning school of Old Testament textual
criticism than its subjective arbitrariness. Dr. Cheyne is simply confusing in his thought the recognition accorded to "the two keys to the Old
Testament" he instances, and the reception given to the use which he himself has made of these keys. The heartiest recognition of the value of "a critical Assyriology" "reinforced from South Arabia" is entirely consistent with a most decisive rejection, for both method and result, of Dr. Cheyne's attempt to apply what he deems the results already attained by these branches of investigation to the problem of the interpretation of the Old
Testament. And the most convinced conviction of the clamant need of a "more methodical textual criticism" of the Old Testament, happily, need not commit us to the acceptance of Dr. Cheyne's textual criticism of the Old Testament: it may, on the contrary, be the very reason why we cannot accept Dr. Cheyne's textual criticism, either in methods or in results. There is much that Dr. Cheyne says about the textual criticism of the Old
Testament with which we find ourselves in full agreement. We agree, for example, that the ascertainment of the traditional text or texts and the ascertainment of the true text are two different problems, and ought to be kept separate. We agree, moreover, that the ascertaining of the texts that underlie the Massoretic and the Septuagint transmissions is the prior duty, to which succeeds the further duty of "approximating as closely as possible to the true text" that lies underneath both transmissions. We agree, moreover, that much of the current criticism of the text is arbitrary and subjective and can lead us nowhither. We feel no impulse to demur to the declaration that further criticism of the text must take "account of Winckler's discovery of Musri and Kûs in the inscriptions." But we should be sorry to think that this agreement in obvious principles would commit us to the acceptance of the new Bible which Dr. Cheyne has written on the basis of his Jerahmeel theory, or even of the new Psalms which he has produced by the help of a criticism which seems to us in its subjectivity and
arbitrariness to surpass all that has gone before it—though that, of course, is saying a good deal.
The real purpose of the volume is to carry into the New Testament— somewhat vi et armis, it must be confessed—the "Pan-Babylonism" which has already become an old story in Old Testament criticism. Its fundamental thesis is that "facts of Oriental archæology (including mythology) may hopefully be brought into connection with the New
Testament" (p. 61); or, to be more specific, that "the form of the most peculiar and difficult New Testament statements can only be accounted for by the newly-discovered fact of the all-pervading influence of Oriental and more particularly Babylonian and Persian systems of belief" (p. 62). When stated in this broad manner there is nothing, of course, in principle to be objected to this thesis. The New Testament writers were men of their time, and wrote, of course, in language and modes of statement formed under the influence of the ideas of their time. It would be strange if there were discoverable in their thought and speech no traces of systems of belief which could with any show of right be called "all-pervading." The mischief lies in Dr. Cheyne's definition of what he calls "peculiar and difficult New
Testament statements," and his determination of the line which divides the "form" of these statements from their "essence." The particular "peculiar and difficult statements" which he adduces as illustrations of his thesis are the New Testament accounts of "the Virgin-birth of Jesus Christ, His
Descent into the nether world, His Resurrection, and His Ascension." As the result of his discussion he suggests that "on the ground of facts supplied by archæology, it is plausible to hold that all these" "four forms of Christian belief" "arose out of a pre-Christian sketch of the life, death, and exaltation of the expected Messiah, itself ultimately derived from a widely current mythic tradition respecting a solar deity" (p. 128).
We must observe the slight difference in language between this lastcited proposition and the one formerly cited. There Dr. Cheyne spoke of the possibility of accounting for the "form" of certain "New Testament statements" from the influence of certain Oriental beliefs: now he speaks of these Oriental myths supplying an account of the "form" of certain
"Christian beliefs." It is, in fact, the latter and far more serious proposition which his arguments are directed to justify. His contention is not that the New Testament writers tended to express the facts of the virgin-birth, the descent into hell, the resurrection, and the ascension of our Lord in language which had been formerly employed to express certain Oriental myths, and which therefore preserved a certain coloring derived from them.
It is rather that Christians had already, when the New Testament was written, come through the influence of these myths to express their fundamental ideas in terms of a virgin-birth, descent into hell, resurrection, and ascension. The fundamental ideas so expressed, therefore, have in themselves no implication of a virgin-birth, descent into hell, resurrection, ascension as actually occurring: these things all belong to the mythical form and are to be accounted for, not as things that really happened and are therefore recounted in the narrative, but as modes of conception inherited from immemorial mythological stories, running back, for the most part, to Babylon for their original forms. What the real nature is of "the essential
Christian truths" which are enshrined in these mythical forms as in their "suitable caskets," and to which the faith "of the Christian is pledged," Dr.
Cheyne indicates to us only with brevity—his main object in this lecture being to show whence the forms were derived, not what the substance is. In his most succinct statement he tells us that "the chief of them are,—the uniqueness of the personality of the Lord Jesus, and the immense worth of His act of absolute self-sacrifice; then, by inference, the indestructibleness of His personality, its perpetual redemptive capacity, and its identity with
that manward aspect of the Divine Nature, so full of mingled grandeur and compassion, which, by early efforts of theological thought, acquired the names of the Messiah, the Son of God, the Word of God" (p. 129). It is only (or at least chiefly) these few starved and hunger-bitten dogmas that he recognizes as the substance of those "forms" of Christian belief.
Dr. Cheyne, of course, tells us that there is nothing disparaging to the Christian beliefs in his theory. He means, of course, the Christian beliefs he has just enumerated as "the essential Christian truth" enshrined in these mythological caskets. He would scarcely say that there is nothing in his theory disparaging to the Christian's beliefs of a virgin-birth, descent into hell, resurrection, and ascension for Christ. At least those who will read, even with the best will, his equation of the Messiah and Michael and Marduk, and of the virgin-mother with the mother who was virgin only in the sense that she was not a wife, will scarcely credit that Dr. Cheyne supposes that there is nothing in his theory disparaging to the Christian belief in the virgin-birth of our Lord and Saviour. But these beliefs are in his theory not Christian beliefs, but only the forms in which the real
Christian beliefs have become enshrined as men have sought to give them expression, limited as they were by the modes of expression accessible or familiar to them. If any chance still to look upon such beliefs as themselves
"Christian beliefs," "essential Christian truths," which enter into the very fabric of Christianity (as all of the Lord's apostles did, and the Lord
Himself as reported by them), why then, of course, he must recognize that the Christianity of which they are essential parts is shattered by Dr.
Cheyne's theory. The most interesting part of Dr. Cheyne's theory thus comes to be the conception of the essential truths of Christianity—of the nature, that is, of the Christian religion—which it embodies and, if it should prove to be sound, necessitates. These essential truths—we have already enumerated them—constitute in effect Dr. Cheyne's Confession of
Faith. Do they constitute also Christianity? Certainly not—as Christianity has been hitherto understood, whether by its founders, or its propagators, or its adherents. The upshot of Dr. Cheyne's theory, then, is that it offers us a new Christianity—a Christianity independent of such old forms of belief as the virgin-birth, the descent into hell, the resurrection, the ascension.
Is this new Christianity an improvement on the old Christianity? That is the great question. That is to say, for Dr. Cheyne. It is not an important question for the rest of us. For judging by the evidence that is here presented for it, it is not apt to become the Christianity of very many others, at least of those who are used to give a reason for the faith that is in them. But Dr. Cheyne's main interest, one would think, since this has become his Christianity, would naturally center in the query whether this is an adequate Christianity. And one would think that, trained as he has been as a "Churchman," Dr. Cheyne might well cherish serious doubt on that point. The new Christianity he offers us is certainly not the Christianity one would expect from a good Churchman—whose professed creed is the Thirty-nine Articles, incorporating as they do "the Three Creeds"; and whose ordinary vehicle of public worship is the Book of Common Prayer.
Of course, the modes of expression—and even the conceptions expressed— found in these documents may also be represented as mere "forms," quite as well as the modes of expression—and conceptions expressed—found in the Scriptures. But two questions will arise here—one for us, and one for Dr. Cheyne. We should ask where this interpretation of modes of expression and conceptions expressed as mere "forms"—husks concealing a kernel—is to end? Whether it may not be ultimately applied even to the essential truths of Christianity which Dr. Cheyne himself still enumerates as such? Dr. Cheyne should ask, and one would think should ask seriously, whether, if his representation be true, Socinianism has not at length won its
tardy victory? For after all Dr. Cheyne's new Christianity is just old Socinianism.
1. 1 The Princeton Theological Review, iii. 1905, pp. 674–678.