290 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY: 



of the Pentateuch, and especially of Genesis, not only as a record 

 of the past, but as a revelation of the future. 



The culmination of this view in the Protestant Church was the 

 Pansophia Mosaica of Pfeiffer, a Lutheran general superintend- 

 ent or bishop in northern Germany, near the beginning of the 

 seventeenth century. He declared that the text of Genesis " must 

 be received strictly " ; that " it contains all knowledge, human and 

 divine " ; that " twenty-eight articles of the Augsburg Confession 

 are to be found in it " ; that " it is an arsenal of arguments against 

 all sects and sorts of atheists, pagans, Jews, Turks, Tartars, Pa- 

 pists, Calvinists, Socinians, and Baptists " ; " the source of all sci- 

 ences and arts, including law, medicine, philosophy, and rhetoric " ; 

 " the source and essence of all histories and of all professions, 

 trades, and works " ; " an exhibition of all virtues and vices " ; 

 " the origin of all consolation." 



This utterance resounded through Germany from pulpit to pul- 

 pit, growing in strength and volume, until a century later it was 

 echoed back by Huet, the eminent bishop and commentator of 

 France. He cited a hundred authors, sacred and profane, to prove 

 that Moses wrote the Pentateuch ; and not only this, but that from 

 the Jewish lawgiver came the heathen theology that Moses was, 

 in fact, nearly the whole pagan pantheon rolled into one, and really 

 the being worshiped under such names as Bacchus, Adonis, and 

 Apollo.* 



About the middle of the twelfth century came, so far as the 

 world now knows, the first gainsayer of this general theory. 

 Then it was that Aben Ezra, the greatest biblical scholar of the 

 middle ages, ventured very discreetly to call attention to certain 

 points in the Pentateuch incompatible with the belief that the 

 whole of it had been written by Moses and handed down in its 

 original form. His opinion was based upon the well-known texts 

 which have turned all really eminent biblical scholars in the 

 nineteenth century from the old view by showing the Mosaic 

 authorship of the five books in their present form to be clearly 

 disproved by the books themselves. 



But Aben Ezra had evidently no aspirations for martyrdom ; 

 he fathered the idea upon a rabbi of a previous generation, and, 

 having veiled his statement in an enigma, added the caution, " Let 

 him who understands hold his tongue." f 



* For the passage from Huxley regarding Mosaic barriers to modern thought, see his 

 Essays recently published. For Pfeiffer, see Zoeckler, Theologie und Naturwissenschaft, 

 vol. i, pp. 688, 689. For St. Jerome's indifference as to the Mosaic authorship, see the first 

 of the excellent Sketches of Pentateuch Criticism, by the Rev. S. J. Curtiss, in the Biblio- 

 theca Sacra for January, 1884. For Huet, see also Curtiss, ibid. 



f For the texts referred to by Aben Ezra as incompatible with the Mosaic authorship of 

 the Pentateuch, see Meyer, Geschichte der Exegese, vol. i, pp. 85-88 ; and for a pithy short 



