CHAMBERS'S INFORMATION FOR THE PEOPLE. 



revealed religion. His words are : ' Provide 

 yourselves with Biblia, the medicine of the soul ; 

 but if you desire no other, at least procure the 

 new, the Epistles, the Acts, and the Gospels.' Both 

 as regards language and contents, they are divided 

 into two parts the Old and the New Testament, or 

 rather the Old and New Covenant ; for the word 

 testamentum is only a translation into the later 

 Latinity of the 2d century of the Greek diatheke, 

 ' covenant' The history of the Old Testament is 

 connected with that of the New by a series of 

 writings not received by Protestants as canonical, 

 and collectively styled the Apocrypha, which we 

 shall consider separately. 



The Old Testament is a collection of 39 books, 

 written mainly in Hebrew, but also partly in 

 Chaldee, and containing all the remains of 

 Hebrew-Chaldaic literature down to at least the 

 3d century B.C. By an artificial arrangement 

 under the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, the 

 number of books has been limited to 22. These 

 writings were spoken of in the time of Christ as 

 ' Scripture,' ' Holy Scripture,' or more specifically 

 with regard to their principal contents, as ' the 

 Law and the Prophets.' Sometimes the Psalms 

 and the remaining holy writings (Hagiographa) 

 are distinctively noticed. The usus loquendi of 

 the New Testament (Matt xi. 13 ; xxii. 40 ; Acts 

 xiii. 15 ; Luke xxiv. 44, &c.) is evidence of this. 

 The Law comprised the Pentateuch, or the first 

 five books. The Prophets were subdivided into 

 earlier and later : the former including the books 

 of Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings ; and the 

 latter containing the three great prophets, Isaiah, 

 Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, to whom the Christians, 

 in accordance with the Alexandrine translation, 

 add Daniel and the 'minor' prophets. The 

 third division of the Old Testament embraced the 

 Hagiographa, consisting of the books of Job, Pro- 

 verbs, Psalms, the Song of Solomon, Ecclesiastes, 

 Ruth, Lamentations, and Esther ; together with 

 the books of Daniel, Ezra, Nehemiah, and i and ; 

 2 Chronicles. With regard to the order of these j 

 several books, the Septuagint, the Fathers of the j 

 Church, and Luther on one side differ from the 

 Jews ; again, among the Jews, the Talmudists 

 differ from the Masoretes ; while a difference is 

 also found between the Spanish and German 

 manuscripts. Hence have sprung the different 

 arrangements of the books of the Old Testament. 



Questions concerning the correct classification ! 

 of the divine oracles have become subsidiary, if | 

 not insignificant, in the presence of that criticism 

 which for more than a century has been inces- 

 santly assailing the ancient theory of their origin. 

 Our limits hinder us from doing more than pre- 

 senting a general sketch of its results. First of 

 all, we may state the tradition of the Jews them- 

 selves regarding their canon : they affirmed that 

 the various books of the Old Testament were 

 originally written wholly or chiefly by the persons 

 whose names are affixed to them, except Judges \ 

 and Ruth, which were executed by Samuel ; 

 Esther, which was the composition of Mordecai ; 

 Kings and Chronicles, done by Ezra and Jere- 

 miah ; and Job, which was probably the work of 

 Moses ; but that these original manuscripts 

 having perished in the destruction of the first 

 temple, when Nebuchadnezzar took Jerusalem, 

 the members of the great synagogue which 

 included Ezra, Nehemiah, Haggai, Zechariah, 



386 



Malachi, and afterwards, Simon the Just fifty 

 yea*s after the building of the second temple, 

 acting in accordance with a divine commission, 

 re-wrote the Old Testament, or, rather, made a 

 recension of other existing copies, to which were 

 subsequently added the books of Ezra and Nehe- 

 miah. Thus the canon was completed. There 

 might be slight variations on points of detail, but 

 this was in the main the ' fixed belief of the Jews 

 for at least three centuries before Christ It 

 passed over with many other Jewish notions into 

 the Christian Church, but was there handled with 

 greater freedom by the early Fathers, whose 

 various origin, culture, and prepossessions natu- 

 rally led to wide diversities of opinion. But when 

 the Graeco-Roman civilisation with its educated 

 intelligence passed away, the Jewish belief regard- 

 ing the Old Testament, which was probably that 

 of Paul and the other apostles, and which had 

 always been the popular and orthodox belief 

 in the church, obtained absolute ascendency. 

 Though here and there, between the fall of the 

 Roman Empire and the dawn of the Reformation, 

 faint murmurs of doubt arose, they are scarcely 

 audible in the silence of catholic assent. 



It is hardly necessary to notice the partial and 

 fragmentary suspicions regarding the canon of 

 the Old Testament that accompanied the rise of 

 Protestantism, as they did not rest on a scien- 

 tific basis. Luther's contempt for the book of 

 Esther, which he declared, on account of its 

 ' heathenish extravagance,' to be ' more worthy 

 than all of being excluded from the canon,' is 

 perhaps as justifiable as the fond admiration of 

 the Jewish commentators, who ranked it next to 

 the Pentateuch, and explained the absence of all 

 recognition of God by the hypothesis, that it was 

 originally a part of the Persian chronicles exe- 

 cuted by Mordecai, who omitted the sacred name 

 because it was designed for the heathen ; but 

 neither opinion deserves serious consideration, for 

 the reasons assigned. 



The new criticism turns, not on the discussion 

 of the canonicity of any book or its claims to in- 

 spiration, but on questions of composition, author- 

 ship, and date. These questions have for the most 

 part never been matters of faith ; current views 

 as to the authorship of many of the books of the 

 Bible rest solely on ancient tradition, which, till 

 recent times, neither had been examined nor could 

 have been. The solution of these problems, though 

 having a very manifest bearing on theology, is 

 itself purely a matter of scholarship ; the question 

 as to inspiration is necessarily for theology to 

 discuss, and is posterior to those concerning the 

 time at which a book was written, and the 

 materials from which it was drawn. The modern 

 movement centred long in the question as to 

 the author of the Pentateuch. Hobbes, the 

 Malmesbury philosopher, pointed out in 1653 

 the difficulties in the way of assuming Moses to 

 be the author, and emphasised the citations in 

 the Pentateuch ' from another more ancient book 

 entitled the Book of the Wars of the Lord.' 

 Spinoza's Tractatus Theologico-Politicus discusses 

 the Hebrew canon with new freedom. Pere 

 Simon and Clericus both brought accurate learn- 

 ing to bear on the investigation. And an epoch 

 in Biblical criticism is marked by the ingenious 

 hypothesis of Astruc, a Belgian physician, that 

 the use of the names Elohim and Jehovah in 



