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REV. J. E. H. THOMSON, M.A., D.D., ON 



the son-in-law of Sanballat, would have been named. Of course 

 when Nehemiah drove him from his presence, Manasseh might 

 have gone to Samaria, and might have taken the Law with him, 

 and ynight have persuaded the Samaritans to adopt it ; but 

 possibility is not actuality. On the basis of this mere possibility 

 or series of possibilities — highly improbable most of them are, 

 as we have already seen — is erected the whole history of the 

 reception by the Samaritans of the Priestly Code with the rest of 

 the Jewish Torah ! It is as much a work of imagination as 

 Dumas' Three Musketeers. If this piece of imaginary history 

 is not true, then the whole chronology of the Wellhausen hypo- 

 thesis is destroyed, and Ezra had no more to do with the 

 compilation of Leviticus than Wellhausen himself. That this is 

 really the case, I think we have proved. 



Discussion. 



Mr. Theodore Roberts instanced the Samaritan woman, in 

 John iv, 12, claiming Jacob as " our " father (not dissented from 

 by our Lord) as supporting the Lecturer's conclusion that the 

 Samaritans were genuine Israelitps. He referred to the use by New 

 Testament textual critics of independent lines of transmission to 

 ascertain the original text as showing that the Lecturer's use of 

 the Samaritan Pentateuch to prove the antiquity of the Pentateuch 

 as a whole was a valid argument. 



He instanced the disregard of the Scriptures during the Middle 

 Ages, and their rediscovery by Luther, with its tremendous results, 

 as showing that the idolatry of Israel and Judah was quite compatible 

 with the existence of the Pentateuch at that time. 



He considered that the suggestion that the purest and most 

 austere literature in the world was the result of a forgery by Jeremiah, 

 as the Higher Critics contended, proved that they had a mind " void 

 of moral discernment," which he believed was a true translation of 

 the word rendered " reprobate " in Romans i, 28. 



Mr. J. 0. CoRRiE, B.A., F.R.A.S., said : — Our Lord took occasion 

 to define His mission in the words, " I am not sent but unto the lost 

 sheep of the house of Israel " (Matt, xv, 24). Yet He had spent two 

 days in Samaria, preaching and teaching (John iv, 39-42). Was not 

 that a recognition of Samaritans being of the house of Israel ? 



The Very Rev. Dr. M. Gaster said : — I should like to expreps 



