THE RELATIONS OF NEW TESTAMENT SCIENCE TO 

 KINDRED SCIENCES 



BY BENJAMIN WISNER BACON 



[Benjamin Wisner Bacon, Professor of New Testament Criticism and Exegesis, 

 Yale Divinity School, Yale University, b. January 15, 1860, Litchfield, Con- 

 necticut. B.A. Yale, 1881; B.D. ibid. 1884; M.A. ibid. 1892; D.D. Western 

 Reserve University, 1892; Litt.D. Syracuse, 1894; LL.D. Illinois College, 1904. 

 Pastor of First Church (Congregational) , Old Lyme, Connecticut, 1884-89; Pas- 

 tor of Congregational Church, Oswego, New York, 1889-96; Professor in Yale 



Divinity School, 1896 . Member of Society of Biblical Literature, American 



School of Oriental Research in Jerusalem. Author of Genesis of Genesis; Triple 

 Tradition of the Exodus; Story of St. Paul; and other works.] 



MR. PRESIDENT, AND FELLOW SCIENTISTS, When the chairs of 

 New Testament science in our principal New England universities 

 were founded, the discipline was entitled New Testament Criticism 

 and Interpretation. At that time "criticism" meant scarcely more 

 than the establishment of the exact text of the twenty-seven canon- 

 ical books; "interpretation" meant the grammatical rendering of 

 the strict verbal sense. This was a finality. With author's text and 

 meaning you had all that could be asked without impiety, the ulti- 

 mate "word of God." Relations with other sciences conformed to 

 this estimate of our relative importance. 



To-day we may still employ the same subdivision; but we mean 

 more by "criticism," more by "interpretation," and much more 

 by "the word of God." We have not begun to think of our science 

 as profane, but we see something sacred in other sciences. 



Criticism now includes the higher as well as the lower. It traces 

 the antecedents as well as the life-history of the writing, its origin as 

 well as transmission, derivation of thought as well as transcription of 

 words. It involves even the genetic study of ideas older than any 

 literature; traditions, beliefs, in which no author, certainly no in- 

 spired author, can claim exclusive rights. Inevitably this widening 

 of scope has established new points of contact; for the history of 

 ideas is even less tolerant of artificial segregation and classification 

 into sacred and profane than the history of institutions and events. 

 Let the earlier embodiment be written or oral, be the ideas clearly 

 traceable in surviving documents of parchment, stone, clay, papyrus, 

 or only in institutions, forms, traditions; in either case the modern 

 method leads directly into the wide, free ranges of the history of 

 religious thought. 



Even textual criticism overflows its former bounds. To Westcott 

 and Hort a clearly extraneous variant was almost a negligible quantity. 

 "Corruptions," except as they might furnish a clue to the original, 



