1 76 REV. JOHN TUCKWELL, M.R.A.S., ON MODERN THEORIES 



It has been commonly supposed that these " results " are due 

 to a more exact knowledge of the Hebrew than the ordinary 

 English reader possesses. But such is not the case. Indeed, a 

 critical examination of the Hebrew gives " results " quite 

 opposed to these. For instance, the Hebrew of Ezra, Nehemiah 

 and Daniel — the time of the Exile — abounds witli Aramaisms, 

 l)ut the Hebrew of the I^entateucli is the purest in almost the 

 whole volume of tlie Old Testament, and does not contahi a 

 single chapter which could on these grounds be assigned to the 

 same period as the Exilic Books. With regard to the New 

 Testament, the personality of the Evangelists, and with it their 

 personal testimony, almost disappear. The original source is 

 supposed to be, in some cases, certain undiscovered and possibl}^ 

 imaginary logia^ or the first and third Evangelists are supposed 

 to have copied from the second. Thus in the Gospel of St. 

 Matthew 816 verses out of the total of 1,068 are supposed to 

 have been taken from St. Mark, or from the same original source, 

 while of St. Luke's 1,149 verses, 798 are said to have been 

 derived from the same source, and this in spite of the fact that 

 St. Luke himself absolutely disavows — if words have any 

 meaning at all — having made use of any such sources (i, 1 -3). 



All this is very remarkable, and the astuteness claimed by 

 means of which these supposed different documents are dis- 

 criminated is an unprecedented phenomenon of the human 

 intellect. Hence when the scissors are passed between the ") 

 and the ^ of the word ^n^jl (Genesis xxii, 20), and Professor 

 W, H. Bennett professes to have detected the junctions of 

 nineteen different scraps or snippets on one page of the Poly- 

 chrome Bible, we begin to wonder whether the length of rope 

 claimed has not resulted in the proverbial suicide of the 

 principle. It is necessary to remember also that although these 

 various documents are spoken of with as much confidence as 

 though they lay side by side snug and safe in the British 

 Museum, not one of them has ever been found, nor the least 

 fragment of one, nor the remotest allusion to one among all 

 the known writings of antiquity, nor was their existence ever 

 conceived of by the human mind until their invention became 

 necessary by this theory of composite authorship. 



As to the manner in which these imaginary documents are 

 used by modern criticism, let us hear a whilom expert. 

 " Such theories," says Professor Piamsay in St. Paul the 

 Traveller, " usually assign varying degrees of accuracy to the 

 different older documents ; all statements which suit the critic's 

 own views on early Church history are taken from an original 



