VT 



LIGHTS OF THE CHURCH AND SCIENCE 207 



Testament ; that the points of contact of " sacred " 

 and " profane " history are innumerable ; and 

 that the demonstration of the falsity of the 

 Hebrew records, especially in regard to those 

 narratives which are assumed to be true in the 

 New Testament, would be fatal to Christian 

 theology. 



My utmost ingenuity does not enable me to 

 discover a flaw in the argument thus briefly 

 summarised. I am fairly at a loss to comprehend 

 how any one, for a moment, can doubt that 

 Christian theology must stand or fall with the 

 historical trustworthiness of the Jewish Scrip- 

 tures. The very conception of the Messiah, or 

 Christ, is inextricably interwoven with Jewish 

 history; the identification of Jesus of Nazareth 

 with that Messiah rests upon the interpretation 

 of passages of the Hebrew Scriptures which have 

 no evidential value unless they possess the 

 historical character assigned to them. If the 

 covenant with Abraham was not made ; if circum- 

 cision and sacrifices were not ordained by Jahveh ; 

 if the " ten words " were not written by God's 

 hand on the stone tables ; if Abraham is more or 

 less a mythical hero, such as Theseus ; the story 

 of the Deluge a fiction ; that of the Fall a legend ; 

 and that of the Creation the dream of a seer ; if 

 all these definite and detailed narratives of 

 apparently real events have no more value as 

 history than have the stories of the regal period 



