Testament Sentence Examples
His optimistic attitude was a testament to Nick's love of life.
The very brevity of the New Testament narratives is astounding.
The spirit in the Old Testament is a refined material thing that may come or be poured out on men.
They did not get their ideas of church polity from one another, but drew it directly from the New Testament.
In later usage it describes those of the New Testament books which have obtained a doubtful place in the Canon.
The Old Testament references to Arabs were obscure.
The Graf-Wellhausen hypothesis, that the hierarchical law in its complete form in the Pentateuch stands at the close and not at the beginning of biblical history, that this mature Judaism was the fruit of the 5th century B.C. and not a divinely appointed institution at the exodus (nearly ten centuries previously), has won the recognition of almost all Old Testament scholars.
There is also an unmistakable development in the laws; and the priestly legislation, though ahead of both Ezekiel and Deuteronomy, not to mention still earlier usage, not only continues to undergo continual internal modification, but finds a further distinct development, in the way of definition and interpretation, outside the Old Testament - in the Talmud.
He commenced his great work on the textual criticism of the Scriptures; and at the instigation of his friend Ambrosius, who provided him with the necessary amanuenses, he published his commentaries on the Old Testament and his dogmatic investigations.
Origen's textual studies on the Old Testament were undertaken partly in order to improve the manuscript tradition, and partly for apologetic reasons, to clear up the relation between the LXX and the original Hebrew text.
AdvertisementOrigen worked also at the text of the New Testament, although he produced no recension of his own.
Of the names of the planets Estera (Ishtar Venus, also called Ruha d'Qudsha, "holy spirit"), Enba (Nebo, Mercury), Sin (moon), Kewan (Saturn), Bil (Jupiter), and Nirig (Nirgal, Mars) reveal their Babylonian origin; Il or Il Il, the sun, is also known as Kadush and Adunay (the Adonai of the Old Testament); as lord of the planetary spirits his place is in the midst of them; they are the source of all temptation and evil amongst men.
In the Mandaean view the Old Testament saints are false prophets; such as Abraham, who arose six thousand years after NU (Noah) during the reign of the sun, Misha (Moses), in whose time the true religion was professed by the Egyptians, and Shlimun (Solomon) bar Davith, the lord of the demons.
The service opened with a procession of Old Testament characters, prophets, patriarchs and kings, together with heathen prophets, including Virgil, the chief figure being Balaam on his ass.
In addition to the books mentioned above he published a number of books which had a remarkable circulation in England and America, such as Speaking to the Heart (1862); The Way to Life (1862); Man and the Gospel (1865); The Angel's Song (1865); The Parables (1866); Our Father's Business (1867); Out of Harness (1867); Early Piety (1868); Studies of Character from the Old Testament (1868-1870); Sundays Abroad (1871).
AdvertisementOn the other hand, he came to look upon the Old Testament prophets as approved by their antiquity, sanctity, mystery and prophecies to be interpreters of the truth.
His works are also of great value for the history of the New Testament writings.
He knows of no canon of the New Testament, i.e.
The mosaics of the atrium date from 1200 to 1300; the subjects are taken from Old Testament story.
The interior, a basilica with nave and two aisles, contains columns said to come from a temple of Minerva and a fine mosaic pavement of 1166, with interesting representations of the months, Old Testament subjects, &c. It has a crypt supported by forty-two marble columns.
AdvertisementBut the persecution of the clergy led him to seek an antidote for what he regarded as the corruption of the Church, and he resolved to translate the New Testament into the vernacular.
After visiting Luther at Wittenberg, he settled with his amanuensis William Roy in Cologne, where he had made some progress in printing a 4to edition of his New Testament, when the work was discovered by John Cochlaeus, dean at Frankfurt, who not only got the senate of Cologne to interdict further printing, but warned Henry VIII.
Besides the New Testament, the Pentateuch and Jonah, it is believed that he finished in prison the section of the Old Testament extending from Joshua to Chronicles.
The name of Catholic Epistles is given to those letters (two of Peter, three of John, one of James, one of Jude) incorporated in the New Testament which (except 2 and 3 John) are not, like those of St Paul, addressed to particular individuals or churches, but to a larger and more indefinite circle of readers.
The supernatural element that is prominent in the Old Testament is God's providential guidance and guardianship of His people, and His teaching and training of them by His prophets.
AdvertisementThe Apostolic miracles, to which the New Testament bears evidence, were wrought in the power of Christ, and were evidences to His church and to the world of His continued presence.
There he collaborated with Oscar Leopold von Gebhardt in Texte and Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der altchristlichen Litteratur (1882 sqq.), an irregular periodical, containing only essays in New Testament and patristic fields.
His distinctive characteristics are his claim for absolute freedom in the study of church history and the New Testament; his distrust of speculative theology, whether orthodox or liberal; his interest in practical Christianity as a religious life and not a system of theology.
This was followed in 1777 by A Letter to Dr Hurd, Bishop of Worcester, wherein the Importance of the Prophecies of the New Testament and the Nature of the Grand Apostasy predicted in them are particularly and impartially considered.
Evanson rejected most of the books of the New Testament as forgeries, and of the four gospels he accepted only that of St Luke.
This usage is not Hebrew; it is not found either in the Old Testament or in the later (Mishnaic)Hebrew.
It is not certain that it is quoted in the New Testament, but it appears to be included in Josephus' list of sacred books.
In addition to the Old Testament the Therapeutae had books by the founders of their sect on the allegorical method of interpreting Scripture.
In Josephus and the New Testament the name Peraea or ripav Tou 'Iopbavou is most frequently used; and the country is sometimes spoken of by Josephus as divided into small provinces called after the capitals in which Greek colonists had established themselves during the reign of the Seleucidae.
The cities of Gilead expressly mentioned in the Old Testament are Ramoth, Jabesh and Jazer.
In the Old Testament it is regularly written with the article, i.e.
In the public and private use of Christians some parts of Ephesians have been among the most favourite of all New Testament passages.
But from a comparison of prophetic passages of the Old Testament learned apocalyptic writers came to the conclusion that a distinction must be drawn between the earthly appearance of the Messiah and the appearance of God Himself amongst His people and in the Gentile world for the final judgment.
Dionysius of Alexandria had already referred a Messianic prediction of the Old Testament to the emperor Gallienus.
The main, the overwhelming value of the book lies not in this province, but in its ethical teaching, which has achieved a real immortality by influencing the thought and diction of the writers of the New Testament, and even those of our Lord.
This ethical teaching, which is indefinitely higher and purer than that of the Old Testament, is yet its true spiritual child, and helps to bridge the chasm that divides the ethics of the Old and New Testaments.
The first Greek translation was used by our Lord, by St Paul, and other New Testament writers.
They read the Greek Testament and the classics; fasted on Wednesday and Friday; received the Lord's Supper every week; and brought all their life under review.
His teaching may be described as Evangelical Arminianism and its standards are his own four volumes of sermons and his Notes on the New Testament.
The suggestion has been made that the name Cain is the eponym, of the Kenites, and although this clan has a good name almost everywhere in the Old Testament, yet in Num.
The cycle of Old Testament subjects is equally limited.
These and similar statements favouring the doctrines of the New Testament made many Kabbalists of the highest position in the synagogue embrace the Christian faith and write elaborate books to win their Jewish brethren over to Christ.
The first Welsh testament issued by that Society appeared on the 6th of May 1806, the bible on the 7th of May 1807 - both being edited by Charles.
This is the last historical event related in the Old Testament of Bashan.
A duty of 10 per mille on its estimated value has to be paid on transfer by sale, donation or testament; 5 per mille on transfer by inheritance; and, a registration duty on expenses of transfer.
He quotes all the books of the Old Testament except Ruth and the Song of Solomon, and amongst the sacred writings of the Old Testament he evidently included the book of Tobit, the Wisdom of Solomon and Ecclesiasticus.
He is equally full in his quotations from the New Testament, for he quotes from all the books except the epistle to Philemon, the second epistle of St Peter, and the epistle of St James, and he quotes from The Shepherd of Hermas, and the epistles of Clemens Romanus and of Barnabas, as inspired.
It is to be remarked that the "laying on of hands," which in the Old and the New Testament alike is the usual "form" of blessing, is not used in liturgical benedictions, the priest being directed merely to extend his right hand towards the person to be blessed.
According to the Old Testament account the Assyrian king even advanced against Israel, and only withdrew in consideration of a tribute amounting to about f400,000.
The traditional history of Ammon as related in the Old Testament is not free from obscurity, due to the uncertain date of the various references and to the doubt whether the individual details belong to the particular period to which each is ascribed.
The word is commonly used in the Alexandrian Greek translation of the Old Testament (Septuagint) for the Hebrew word (ger) which is derived from a root (gur) denoting to sojourn.
Some authorities think that the " God-fearers " of some of the Psalms and of the New Testament were these limited proselytes.
The other objections, however, remain, and have provoked a variety of theories from Old Testament scholars, of which three call for special notice.
The closing verses strike that deep note of absolute dependence on God, which is the glory of the religion of the Old Testament and its chief contribution to the spirit of the Gospels.
The different application of these words in the New Testament to "faith" Earlier, however, than Ps.
He took his theological degree in March 1890, by the oral defence of forty Latin scholastic theses and by a French dissertation, Histoire du canon de l'ancien testament, published as his first book in that year.
This metal was known to the ancients, and is mentioned in the Old Testament.
Perowne was a good Hebrew scholar of the old type and sat on the Old Testament Revision Committee.
Besides those already mentioned it is sufficient to refer to his New Testament Introduction (the first edition, 1750, preceded the full development of his powers, and is a very different book from the later editions), his reprint of Robert Lowth's Praelectiones with important additions (1758-1762), his German translation of the Bible with notes (1773-1792), his Orientalische and exegetische Bibliothek (1775-1785) and Neue 0.
As they stood in the Septuagint or Greek canon, along 2 The New Testament shows undoubtedly an acquaintance with several of the apocryphal books.
Already Wycliffe had declared that " whatever book is in the Old Testament besides these twentyfive (Hebrew) shall be set among the apocrypha, that is, without authority or belief."
Thus the Apocrypha Proper constitutes the surplusage of the Vulgate or Bible of the Roman Church over the Hebrew Old Testament.
Since this surplusage is in turn derived from the Septuagint, from which the old Latin version was translated, it thus follows that the difference between the Protestant and the Roman Catholic Old Testament is, roughly speaking, traceable to the difference between the Palestinian and the Alexandrian canons of the Old Testament.
It should further be observed that the Vulgate adds the Prayer of Manasses and 3 and 4 Ezra after the New Testament as apocryphal.
The quotations from the Old Testament are made from the Massoretic text.
And the name of Javan is not found in any part of the Old Testament certainly older than Ezekiel.
Christians being released, in important particulars, from conformity to the Old Testament polity as a whole, a real difficulty attended the settlement of the limits and the immediate authority of the remainder, known vaguely as the moral law.
Marcionites, named by Clement of Alexandria Antitactae (revolters against the Demiurge) held the Old Testament economy to be throughout tainted by its source; but they are not accused of licentiousness.
Among the few prose writers of distinction were Andrew Spangar, whose " Hungarian Bookstore," Magyar Konyvtdr (Kassa, 1738), is said to be the earliest work of the kind in the Magyar dialect; George Baranyi, who translated the New Testament (Lauba, 1 754); the historians Michael Cserei and Matthew Bel, which last, however, wrote chiefly in Latin; and Peter Bod, who besides his theological treatises compiled a history of Hungarian literature under the title Magyar Athends (Szeben, 1766).
Among these may be mentioned his Brief Outline of the Evidences of the Christian Religion (1825), which passed through several editions, and,; was translated into various languages; The Canon of the Old and New Testament Ascertained; or the Bible Complete without the Apocrypha and Unwritten Traditions (1826); A History of the Israelitish Nation (1852), and Outlines of Moral Science (1852), the last two being published posthumously.
Having studied theology at the university of Gottingen under Heinrich Ewald, he established himself there in 1870 as privat-docent for Old Testament history.
Wellhausen made his name famous by his critical investigations into Old Testament history and the composition of the Hexateuch, the uncompromising scientific attitude he adopted in testing its problems bringing him into antagonism with the older school of biblical interpreters.
He also did useful and interesting work as a New Testament commentator.
Indeed it is at least equally probable that it was the recent translation of some of the poetical books of the Old Testament which fired him with a desire to translate his grandfather's book, and perhaps add the work of a member of the family to the Bible of the Egyptian Jews.
For the Psalms, as for the other books of the Old Testament, the scholars of the period of the revival of Hebrew studies about the time of the Reformation were mainly dependent on the ancient versions and on the Jewish scholars of the middle ages.
This theory, which he set forth with all his accustomed learning and force, is still accepted in many quarters, many other passages of the Old Testament being likewise assigned to the same date.
In the judgment of the present writer however, the results of Old Testament study (particularly in the Prophets) since Professor Robertson Smith's death have shown that this theory is untenable.
The received Syriac Bible or Vulgate (called the Peshitta or " simple " version from the 9th century onwards 4) contains all the canonical books of the Old Testament.
The Peshitta version of the Old Testament must have been originally made mainly by Jews, of whom we know there were colonies in Mesopotamia in the 2nd century.
The Peshitta New Testament - according to the convincing theory which at present holds the field s - is not the oldest form of the Syriac version, at least as regards the Gospels.
It appears to be traceable in its Greek dress in writings of the philosopher Democritus and the dramatist Menander; it was certainly known to the author of Tobit and perhaps to the author of Daniel; some would trace its influence in the New Testament, in the parable of the wicked servant and elsewhere; it was known to Mahomet and is referred to in the Koran; it has been included among the tales in the Arabian Nights; and it survives in a good many versions ancient and modern.
By the wish of ZEthelweard he also began a paraphrase 3 of parts of the Old Testament, but under protest, for the stories related in it were not, he thought, suitable for simple minds.
The "Gospel and Apostle" was a comprehensive term for the whole of the New Testament (except perhaps Revelation), as read in church.
Yet this did not probably go beyond the dualism of the New Testament itself.
Before passing to the special covering for the feet and head some further reference to the Old Testament usage may be made.
Of the well-known Notes on the New Testament it is said that more than a million volumes had been issued by 1870.
He is named in Lyndsay's Testament and Complaynt of the Papyngo (1530) with poets then dead, and the reference precedes that to Douglas who had died in 1522.
Probably nowhere can the actual historical progress from the primitive use of animal sacrifices to the later refinement of burning incense be more clearly traced than in the pages of the Old Testament, where no mention of the latter rite occurs before the period of the Mosaic legislation; but in the monuments of ancient Egypt the authentic traces of the use of incense that still exist carry us back to a much earlier date.
In Montpellier, where he lived from 1303 to 1306, he was much distressed by the prevalence of Aristotelian rationalism, which, through the medium of the works of Maimonides, threatened the authority of the Old Testament, obedience to the law, and the belief in miracles and revelation.
The writer is more versed than any other New Testament writer except the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews, and very much more than most of them, in the literary Greek of the period of the rise of Christianity; and he has, also, like other writers, his favourite words, turns of expression and thoughts.
The promises of Old Testament prophets that the Gentiles would share in the blessing of the coming of Christ are also recalled, ii.
Philemon, ein Vorbild fiir die 1 History of the New Testament Times (1895), iv.
Eine Prophetenstimme aus der Gegenwart, in which, starting from texts in the Old Testament and assuming the tone of a prophet, he discussed topics of every kind.
This " bank " or kisad, together with the corresponding western bank of the Tigris (according to Hommel the modern Shatt el-Hai), gave its name to the land of Chesed, whence the Kasdim of the Old Testament.
The only ancient authority of value on Babylonian and Assyrian history is the Old Testament.
This led to an examination of the New Testament foundation of the Christian Church, and in 1725, in a letter to Francis Archibald, minister of Guthrie, Forfarshire, he repudiated the obligation of national covenants.
So far as the Old Testament goes, therefore, we gather that the Hittites were a considerable people, widely spread in Syria, in part subdued and to some extent assimilated by Israel, but in part out of reach.
We shall now consider (I.) Apocalyptic, its origin and general characteristics; (II.) Old Testament Apocalyptic; (III.) New Testament Apocalyptic.
Old Testament prophecy had addressed itself to both these problems, though it was hardly conscious of the claims of the latter.
Apocalyptic thus forms the indispensable preparation for the religion of the New Testament.
The ethical character of the book is of the highest type, and its profound influence on the writers of the New Testament is yet to be appreciated.
About a half of the original Testament is preserved in the Latin version.
With this "Testament" the "Assumption," to which almost all the patristic references and that of Jude are made, was subsequently edited.
Hence we shall not be surprised to find that the two tendencies are fully represented in primitive Christianity, and, still more strange as it may appear, that New Testament apocalyptic found a more ready hearing amid the stress and storm of the 1st century than the prophetic side of Christianity, and that the type of the forerunner on the side of its declared asceticism appealed more readily to primitive Christianity than that of Him who came "eating and drinking," declaring both worlds good and both God's.
At the peace congress of Abo (January - August 1743) he insisted that the whole of Finland should be ceded to Russia, by way of completing the testament of Peter the Great.
He soon became the most popular teacher of Hebrew and of Old Testament introduction and exegesis in Germany; during his later years his lectures were attended by nearly five hundred students.
The poem is based, not directly on the New Testament, but on the pseudo-Tatian's harmony of the Gospels, and it shows acquaintance with the commentaries of Alcuin, Banda and Hrabanus Maurus.
It is usually maintained that this work was written before the Old Testament poems. The arguments for this view are that the Heliand contains no allusion to any foregoing poetical treatment of the antecedent history, and that the Genesis fragments exhibit a higher degree of poetic skill.
Yet we must beware of regarding Barnabas as merely a fine character; he plays too prominent a part in the New Testament for any such limitation.
At the end of the Codex Sinaiticus of the 4th century, as a sort of appendix to the New Testament, there stands an "Epistle of Barnabas."
His views on questions of Old Testament criticism were "advanced" in his own day; for on all the disputed points concerning the unity and authorship of the books of the Old Covenant he was opposed to received opinion.
But with respect to the New Testament his position was conservative.
An opponent of the Tubingen school, his defence of the genuineness and authenticity of the gospel of St John is among the ablest that have been written; and although on some minor points his views did not altogether coincide with those of the traditional school, his critical labours on the New Testament must nevertheless be regarded as among the most important contributions to the maintenance of orthodox opinions.
This evidence is confirmed by (a) the canon of Theodore of Edessa (800) allowing metropolitans of China, India and other distant lands to send their reports to the catholikos every six years; (b) the edict of Wu Tsung destroying Buddhist monasteries and ordering 300 foreign priests to return to the secular life that the customs of the empire might be uniform; (c) two 9th-century Arab travellers, one of whom, Ibn Wahhab, discussed the contents of the Bible with the emperor; (d) the discovery in 1725 of a Syrian MS. containing hymns and a portion of the Old Testament.
And there has lately come to light a MS. of the 9th or 10th century in Sogdianese, an Indo-Iranian language spoken in the north-east of Asia,which shows that theNestorians had translated the New Testament into that tongue and had taught the natives the alphabet and the doctrine.
But in the spring of 1824 he was recalled to Göttingen as repetent, or theological tutor, and in 1827 (the year of Eichhorn's death) he became professor extraordinarius in philosophy and lecturer in Old Testament exegesis.
Rather its contents came to him piecemeal and at various stages in his ministry as a Christian "prophet," extending over a period of years; and, like certain Old Testament prophets, he shows us how by his own experiences he became the medium of a divine message to his church and to God's " elect " people at large.
Generally speaking, Hermas's piety, especially in its language, adheres closely to Old Testament forms. But it is doubtful (pace Spitta and Volter, who assume a Jewish or a proselyte basis) whether this means more than that the Old Testament was still the Scriptures of the Church.
The Samaritans, who otherwise shared the scruples of the Jews about the utterance of the name, seem to have used it in judicial oaths to the scandal of the rabbis.4 The early Christian scholars, who inquired what was the true name of the God of the Old Testament, had therefore no great difficulty in getting the information they sought.
The name Jhvh enters into the composition of many proper names of persons in the Old Testament, either as the initial element, in the form Jehoor Jo- (as in Jehoram, Joram), or as the final element, in the form -jahu or -jah (as in Adonijahu, Adonijah).
The association of Yahweh with storm and fire is frequent in the Old Testament; the thunder is the voice of Yahweh, the lightning his arrows, the rainbow his bow.
In the Christian Church the tradition of faith healing dates from the earliest days of Christianity; upon the miracles of the New Testament follow cases of healing, first by the Apostles, then by their successors; but faith healing proper is gradually, from the 3rd century onwards, transformed into trust in relics, though faith cures still occur sporadically in later times.
Day by day his impassioned words, filled with the spirit of the Old Testament, wrought upon the minds of the Florentines and strung them to a pitch of pious emotion never before - and never since - attained by them.
He also collated some Paris manuscripts of the Greek Testament for John Fell, bishop of Oxford.
Hereafter the simple name Pontus without qualification was regularly employed to denote the half of this dual province, especially by Romans and people speaking from the Roman point of view; it is so used almost always in the New Testament.
They possess - not in Hebrew, of which they are altogether ignorant, but in Ethiopic (or Geez)- the canonical and apocryphal books of the Old Testament; a volume of extracts from the Pentateuch, with comments given to Moses by God on Mount Sinai; the Te-e-sa-sa Sanbat, or laws of the Sabbath; the Ardit, a book of secrets revealed to twelve saints, which is used as a charm against disease; lives of Abraham, Moses, &c.; and a translation of Josephus called Sana Aihud.
It was an attempt to provide a more accurate rendering of the Greek Bible than had hitherto existed in Syriac, and obtained recognition among the Monophysites until superseded by the still more literal renderings of the Old Testament by Paul of Tella and of the New Testament by Thomas of Harkel (both in 616-617), of which the latter at least was based on the work of Philoxenus.
Origen indulged in many speculations which were afterwards condemned, but, as these matters were still open questions in his day, he was not reckoned a heretic. (iii.) In accordance with the New Testament use of the term heresy, it is assumed that moral defect accompanies the intellectual error, that the false view is held pertinaciously, in spite of warning, remonstrance and rebuke; aggressively to win over others, and so factiously, to cause division in the church, a breach in its unity.
If any person who has been educated in or has professed the Christian religion shall, by writing, printing, teaching, or advised speaking, assert or maintain that there are more Gods than one, or shall deny any of the persons of the Holy Trinity to be God, or shall deny the Christian religion to be true or the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testament to be of divine authority, he shall for the first offence be declared incapable of holding any ecclesiastical, civil, or military office or employment, and for the second incapable of bringing any action, or of being guardian, executor, legatee, or grantee, and shall suffer three years' imprisonment without bail.
Here you find articles in the encyclopedia on topics related to the Old Testament.
On the other Old Testament references to creation, and on the prophetic doctrine of creation, see Ency.
On the traces of dragon and serpent myths in the Old Testament and their significance, see Gunkel, Schopfung and Chaos (1895) - a pioneering work of the highest merit - and Ency.
Graf was one of the chief founders of Old Testament criticism.
A more discriminating light is thrown upon him by the New Testament narratives of the trial of Jesus.
It allowed that the bishops were the successors of the apostles, that the Catholic rule of faith was a complete and authoritative exposition of Christianity, and that the New Testament was the supreme rule of the Christian life.
In his time there was no fixed, divinely instituted congregational organization, no canon of New Testament Scriptures, no anti-Gnostic theology, and no Catholic Church.
In their origin they were designed to meet the needs of the unlearned among the people who had ceased to understand the Hebrew of the Old Testament.
But it is highly probable that this prohibition, in the case of the Targums, was mainly enforced with respect to those parts of the Old Testament which were read in the synagogal services, e.g.
In his revised New Testament Marcion speaks of " the covenant which is the mother of us all, which begets us in the holy Church, to which we have vowed allegiance."
Its prosperity, as also its profligacy, is attested by the New Testament, by Strabo and Pausanias.
At Rome were published the Gospels (with a dedication to Pope Damasus, an explanatory introduction, and the canons of Eusebius), the rest of the New Testament and the version of the Psalms from the Septuagint known as the Psalterium romanum, which was followed (c. 388) by the Psalterium gallicanum, based on the Hexaplar Greek text.
Jerome's mind was evidently full of anxiety about his translation of the Old Testament, for we find him in his letters recording the conversations he had with learned men about disputed readings and doubtful renderings; the blind Didymus of Alexandria, whom he heard interpreting Hosea, appears to have been most useful.
Here he did most of his literary work and, throwing aside his unfinished plan of a translation from Origen's Hexaplar text, translated the Old Testament directly from the Hebrew, with the aid of Jewish scholars.
The story of Abraham is of greater value for the study of Old Testament theology than for the history of Israel.
Moffat's Historical New Testament, 2nd ed., p. 589, contains a convenient summary of the evidence with copious bibliography.
Not many years ago it would have been accounted a heresy to suggest that the historical books of the Old Testament had conveyed to our minds estimates of Oriental history that suffered from this same defect; but to-day no one who is competent to speak with authority pretends to doubt that such is really the fact.
The case of the historical books of the Old Testament furnishes no exception.
From the standpoint of the historian even greater interest attaches to the records of the Assyrian and Babylonian kings when compared with the historical books of the Old Testament.
This work was valuable for the use which its author made of the Greek of the Septuagint, of the Old and New Testament Apocrypha, of Josephus, and of the apostolic fathers, in illustration of the language of the New Testament.
He sets his face against innovation in such matters as the accepted authorship of canonical writings, verbal inspiration, and the treatment of persons and events in the Old Testament as types of the New.
Here you find articles in the encyclopedia about places occuring in the Old Testament.
The title is different from what the New Testament use of the term would have led us to expect, i.e.
It formed no part of the Peshitta New Testament.
If, therefore, the possibilities of exegesis were exhausted in the list of methods already enumerated, science would have to put the New Testament Apocalypse aside as a hopeless enigma.
For in the New Testament Apocalypse there is not that rigid consistency and unity in detail that the past presupposed.
The critical studies of recent years have shown that most of the Old Testament prophetical books are composite.
Now modern scholars have with varying success used in turn these three hypotheses with a view to the solution of the problems of the New Testament Apocalypse.
Julicher (Einleitung in das Neue Testament', 1901, pp. 204-29) adopts the same three methods of interpretation.
The author or the final redactor has impressed a certain linguistic character on the book, which differentiates it not only from all secular writings of the time, but also from all the New Testament books, including the Johannine.
As a result of these considerations we may arrive at the date of the work with almost greater certainty than that of any other New Testament book.
But this universal characteristic of apocalyptic is almost wholly lacking in the New Testament Apocalypse.
Hence he began to study the New Testament.
The jury decided unanimously in the affirmative, and on the 16th of October 1793 Marie Antoinette was led to the guillotine, leaving behind her a touching letter to Madame Elizabeth, known as her "Testament."
The practice of the Jewish courts in New Testament times may be inferred from certain passages in the Gospels.
The general principles which govern the exclusion of members from a religious community may be gathered from the New Testament writings.
It is clear from these illustrations that within the New Testament there is development from spontaneous towards strictly regulated methods; also that the use of excommunication is chiefly for disciplinary and protective rather than punitive purposes.
Even at this time he had religious doubts; it is interesting in view of his later work that one cause of his perplexities was the difficulty of ascertaining the true reading of certain passages in the Greek New Testament.
The works on which Bengel's reputation rests as a Biblical scholar and critic are his edition of the Greek New Testament, and his Gnomon or Exegetical Commentary on the same.
The text was followed by a critical apparatus, the first part of which consisted of an introduction to the criticism of the New Testament, in the thirty-fourth section of which he laid down and explained his celebrated canon, "Proclivi scriptioni praestat ardua" (" The difficult reading is to be preferred to that which is easy"), the soundness of which, as a general principle, has been recognized by succeeding critics.
Griesbach, and worked up into an elaborate system by the latter critic. Bengel's labours on the text of the Greek Testament were received with great disfavour in many quarters.
In answer to these strictures, Bengel published a Defence of the Greek Text of His New Testament, which he prefixed to his Harmony of the Four Gospels, published in 1736, and which contained a sufficient answer to the complaints, especially of Wetstein, which had been made against him from so many different quarters.
Bengel's hope that the Gnomon would help to rekindle a fresh interest in the study of the New Testament was fully realized.
It has passed through many editions, has been translated into German and into English, and is still one of the books most valued by expositors of the New Testament.
John Wesley made great use of it in compiling his Expository Notes upon the New Testament (1755) Besides the two works already described, Bengel was the editor or author of many others, classical, patristic, ecclesiastical and expository.
The Manicheans' answer to such arguments was that miracles worked by Christ and the Apostles in the material world were only apparitional and not real, while those of the Old Testament were satanic.
The only New Testament reference is in Acts viii.
The laity should read their New Testament, and would in this way come to feel the true significance of Christ's life and teachings, which, rather than the Church, formed the centre of Erasmus's religion.
Luther had meanwhile been concealed by his friends in the Wartburg, near Eisenach, where he busied himself with a new German translation of the New Testament, to be followed in a few years by the Old Testament.
The old tithe on grain shall continue to be paid, since that is established by the Old Testament.
Scholars, like Colet, read the New Testament in Greek and lectured on justification by faith before they knew of Luther, and More included among the institutions of Utopia a rather more liberal and enlightened religion than that which he observed around him.
Later he revised an existing French translation of both the New Testament (which appeared in 1523, almost contemporaneously with Luther's German version) and, two years later, the Old Testament.
This is the golden freedom of preaching which the holy words of the New Testament so strictly enjoin upon us....
Sufficient reasons could be assigned for accepting the New Testament as God's word and Christ as the Christian's guide.
The object of this work was to recast the language and ideas of the New Testament and give them the form of 18th-century illuminism.
The story is doubtless based on ancient traditions, current in various forms; the Old Testament references are not wholly consistant.
Speaking animals are a common feature of folk-lore; the only other case in the Old Testament is the serpent in Eden.
Jeremias, Das Alte Testament im Lichte des alten Orients, p. 278, adopts Marquart's view that the "River" (nahar) is the socalled "River" (better "Ravine" nahal) of Egypt or Musri, on the southern frontier of Judea.
Schrader's Die Keilinschriften and das Alte Testament.
In the New Testament Balaam is cited as a type of avarice;6 in Rev. ii.
Many of his theological writings were collected in one volume (Paris, 1622), and at the time of his death in 1623 he was engaged on a translation of the New Testament which is still in manuscript.
The ministry of enthusiasm which they represent is about to give way to the ministry of office, a transition which is reflected in the New Testament in the 3rd Epistle of John.
While the New Testament knows only the political usage of 56yµa, the Greek Fathers follow one which is more in keeping, with philosophical tradition.
During his latter years he took great interest in the revision of the authorized version of the Bible, and was chairman of the revisers of the Old Testament.
After studying at Tubingen and Leipzig and travelling in Egypt and Syria, he entered the ministry of the Free Church of Scotland and was appointed professor of Old Testament subjects in the Free Church College at Glasgow 1892.
Among his works are The Book of Isaiah (2 vols., 1888-1890); The Book of the Twelve Prophets (2 vols., 1876-1877); Historical Geography of the Holy Land (1894); Jerusalem (2 vols., 1907); The Preaching of the Old Testament to the Age (1893); The Life of Henry Drummond (1898).
Luther never quite shook off scholasticism, whereas Zwingli had early learnt from Dr Thomas Wyttenbach that the time was at hand when scholastic theology must give place to the purer and more rational theology of the early Fathers and to a fearless study of the New Testament.
There he studied the New Testament in the editions of Erasmus and began to found his preaching on "the Gospel," which he declared to be simple and easy to understand.
For Waldo had a translation of the New Testament made into Provençal, and his preachers not only stirred up men to more holy lives but explained the Scriptures at their will.
Congregationalism proper, as a theory of the organized Christian life contemplated in the New Testament, re-emerges only at the Reformation, with its wide recovery of such aspects of evangelic experience as acceptance with God and constant access' to Him through the sole mediation of Christ.
Then only did some of their members resume secret assembly, with a more definite view to conformity in all things to the New Testament type and that alone.
A moderately liberal theologian, he became best known as a New Testament critic and exegete, being the author of the Commentary on the Synoptics (1889; 3rd ed., 1901), the Johannine books (1890; 2nd ed., 1893), and the Acts of the Apostles (1901), in the series Handkommentar zum Neuen Testament.
The parish church, rebuilt in 1808, contains a tablet to Charles James Fox, who resided at St Anne's Hill in the vicinity, and another to Lawrence Tomson, a translator of the New Testament in the 17th century.
In the canonical Old Testament angels may inflict suffering as ministers of God, and Satan may act as accuser or tempter; but they appear as subordinate to God, fulfilling His will; and not as morally evil.
In the New Testament angels appear frequently as the ministers of God and the agents of revelation"; and Our Lord speaks of angels as fulfilling such functions', implying in one saying that they neither marry nor are given in marriage.
The New Testament takes little interest in the idea of the angelic hierarchy, but there are traces of the doctrine.
The Old Testament says nothing about the origin of angels; but the Book of Jubilees and the Slavonic Enoch describe their creation; and, according to Col.
He took part in revising the Dutch translation of the Old Testament in 1633, and after his death a book by him, called the Lyra Davidis, was published, which sought to explain the principles of Hebrew metre, and which created some controversy at the time, having been opposed by Louis Cappel.
His advocacy of a revised translation of the New Testament (1858) aided to promote another great national undertaking.
In the following year he was called to the Freiburg chair of Oriental languages and Old Testament exegesis; to the duties of this post were added in 1793 those of the professorship of New Testament exegesis.
The author's intelligence and acuteness are more completely hampered by doctrinal presuppositions when he comes to treat questions relating to the history of the individual books of the New Testament canon.
Christians have no standing in the Old Testament prophecies, and their talk of a resurrection that was only revealed to some of their own adherents is foolishness.
As regards the New Testament his position is closely in agreement with that reflected in the contemporary Acts of the Martyrs of Scili.
A good deal of the neo-Platonic polemic naturally went back to Celsus, and both the ideas and phrases of the True Word are found in Porphyry and Julian, though the closing of the New Testament canon in the meantime somewhat changed the method of attack for these writers.
Returning to Heidelberg he became Privatdozent in theology in 1829, and in 1831 published his Begriff der Kritik am Allen Testamente praktisch erartert, a study of Old Testament criticism in which he explained the critical principles of the grammatico-historical school, and his Des Propheten Jonas Orakel uber Moab, an exposition of the 1 5th and 16th chapters of the book of Isaiah attributed by him to the prophet Jonah mentioned in 2 Kings xiv.
At last he found work on a 32mo New Testament, set in agate, double columns, with a middle column of notes in pearl.
Most of his numerous publications had reference to his great critical edition of the New Testament (1857-1872; see Bible; New Testament, Textual Criticism).
The style of the language, and also the position of the book in the Jewish Canon, stamp the book as one of the latest in the Old Testament, but lead to no exact determination of the date.'
This opinion is not improbable, as the earlier books of the Old Testament cannot have been unknown in his age; and the critical analysis of the canonical book of Kings is advanced enough to enable us to say that in some of the parallel passages the chronicler uses words which were not written in the annals but by one of the compilers of Kings himself.
Biblical References to the Adam-story.-It is remarkable how little influence the Adam-story has had on the earlier parts of the Old Testament.
It is now generally recognized in histories of the Old Testament that a proper estimate of Solomon's reign cannot start from narratives which represent the views of Deuteronomic writers, although, in so far as late narratives may rest upon older material more in accordance with the circumstances of their age, attempts are made to present reconstructions from a combination of various elements.
Deissmann, Bible Studies, pp. 1-60, for this distinction between the genuine "letter" and the literary "epistle," as applied to the New Testament in particular.
Thus both are hortatory writings, the one argumentative in form, the other prophetic, after the manner of later Old Testament prophets whose messages came in visions and similitudes.
Hence there appear constant traces of study of the Apostolic writings, so far as these were accessible in the locality of each writer at his date of writing (for the details of this subject, and its bearing on the history of the Canonical Scriptures of the New Testament, see The New Testament in the Apostolic Fathers, Oxford, 1 9 05).
Thus one New Testament type is echoed in one and another in another; or it may be several in turn.
Impressive as is their witness to the persistence of the Apostolic teaching in its essential features, amidst all personal and local variations, perhaps the most striking thing about these writings is the degree in which they fail to appreciate certain elements of the Apostolic teaching as embodied in the New Testament, and those its higher and more distinctively Christian elements.'
The Old Testament presents very varied teaching on this subject without attempting to co-ordinate its doctrines in a harmonious system.
The Old Testament has no theory of sacrifice; in connexion with sin the sacrifice was popularly regarded as payment of penalty or compensation.
The Old Testament nowhere explains why this importance is attached to the blood, but the passage is often held to mean that the life of the victim represented the forfeited life of the offerer.
The idea of vicarious atonement appears in the Old Testament in different forms. The nation suffers for the sin of the individual; 8 and the individual for the sin of his kinsfolk 7 or of the nation.
The Old Testament, however, only prepares the way for the Christian doctrine of the atonement; this is clear, inasmuch as its teaching is largely concerned with the nation, and hardly touches on the future life.
In the New Testament, the English version uses " atonement " 1 Lev.
But the idea which is now usually expressed by " atonement " is rather represented in the New Testament by iAaQµos and its cognates, e.g.
The New Testament, however, does not indicate that its writers were agreed as to any formal dogma of the atonement, as regards the relation of the death of Christ to the sinner's restoration to God's favour; but various suggestions are made as to the solution of the problem.
St Paul's teaching connects with the Jewish doctrine of vicarious suffering, represented in the Old Testament by Is.
In later times the title of tetrarch is familiar from the New Testament as borne by certain princes of the petty dynasties which the Romans allowed to exercise a dependent sovereignty within the province of Syria.
After a long war between mankind aided by Prunikos against Ialdabaoth (this is the inner story of the Old Testament), the Holy Spirit sends Christ to the earth to enter (united with his sister Prunikos) the pure vessel, the virgin-born Jesus.
But the bent of his reading is shown by the manuscript with which he returned to Paris at the close of 1.504 - Valla's Annotations on the New Testament,.
In Cambridge he completed his work on the New Testament, the Letters of Jerome, and Seneca; and then in 1514, when there seemed no prospect of ampler preferment, he determined to transfer himself to Basel and give the results of his labours to the world.
On the completion of the New Testament in 1516 he returned to his friends in England; but his appointment, then recent, as councillor to the young king Charles, brought him back to Brussels in the autumn.
Of his most important edition, that of the Greek text of the New Testament, something will be said farther on.
Of Erasmus's works the Greek Testament is the most memorable..
As an edition of the Greek Testament it has no critical value.
Besides translating and editing the New Testament, Erasmus paraphrased the whole, except the Apocalypse, between 1517 and 1524.
This found expression in the formulation of an apostolic scripture canon, our New Testament, and of an apostolic rule of faith, of which the old Roman symbol, the original of our present Apostles' Creed, is one of the earliest examples.
Their ideal was a return to that simplicity of primitive Christendom which they believed they found revealed in the New Testament and in the writings of the early Fathers.
But in the English Bible the presbyters of the New Testament are called " elders," not " priests "; the latter name is reserved for ministers of pre-Christian religions, the Semitic a '?"
The first forms the text of the principal argument in the Epistle to the Hebrews, in which the author easily demonstrates the inadequacy of the mediation and atoning rites of the Old Testament, and builds upon this demonstration the doctrine of the effectual high-priesthood of Christ, who, in his sacrifice of himself, truly " led His people to God," not leaving them outside as He entered the heavenly sanctuary, but taking them with Him into spiritual nearness to the throne of grace.
The idea that presbyters and bishops are priests and the successors of the Old Testament priesthood first appears in full force in the writings of Cyprian, and here it is not the notion of priestly mediation but that of priestly power which is insisted on.
Becoming a Congregationalist, he accepted in 1842 the chair of biblical criticism, literature and oriental languages at the Lancashire Independent College at Manchester; but he was obliged to resign in 1857, being brought into collision with the college authorities by the publication of an introduction to the Old Testament entitled The Text of the Old Testament, and the Interpretation of the Bible, written for a new edition of Horne's Introduction to the Sacred Scripture.
Davidson was a member of the Old Testament Revision Committee.
Its various constituents, however, and of these there were three - the Martyrdom of Isaiah, the Testament of Hezekiah and the Vision of Isaiah - circulated independently as early as the 1st century.
The book was written in Greek, though not improbably the middle portion, the Testament of Hezekiah, was originally composed in Semitic. The Greek in its original form, which we may denote by G, is lost.
He executed the first translation of the New Testament in 1551.
In October 1511 he was teaching Greek to a little band of students in Cambridge; at Basel in 1516 he produced his edition of the Greek Testament, the first that was actually published; and during the next few years he was helping to organize the college lately founded at Louvain for the study of Greek and Hebrew, as well as Latin.
An educational aim is also apparent in his editions of Terence and of Seneca, while his Latin translations made his contemporaries more familiar with Greek poetry and prose, and his Paraphrase promoted a better understanding of the Greek Testament.
Greek was taught in all the great schools, but became more and more confined to the study of the Greek Testament.
In 1637, when the doubts of Scaliger and Heinsius as to the purity of the Greek of the New Testament prompted the rector of Hamburg to introduce the study of classical authors, any reflection on the style of the Greek Testament was bitterly resented.
A modern education is also the aim of the general introduction to the nova methodus of Leibnitz, where the study of Greek is recommended solely for the sake of the Greek Testament (1666).
We shall begin by giving a general account of the historical and literary conditions under which the unique literature of the Old Testament sprang up, of the stages by which it gradually reached its present form, and (so far as this is possible) of the way in which the Biblical books were brought together in a.
There exists no formal historical account of the formation of the Old Testament canon.
The first traces of the idea current in modern times that the canon of the Old Testament was closed by Ezra are found in the 13th century A.D.
From this time, as is clearly shown by the series of quotations in Ryle's Canon of the Old Testament, p. 257 ff.
The statement just quoted, however, that in the Jewish canon the books of the Old Testament are divided into three parts, though the arrangement is wrongly referred to Ezra, is in itself both correct and important.
The expansion of the Talmudic twenty-four to the thirty-nine Old Testament books of the English Bible is effected by reckoning the Minor Prophets one by one, by separating Ezra from Nehemiah, and by subdividing the long books of Samuel, Kings and Chronicles.
This threefold division of the Old Testament, it cannot reasonably be doubted, rests upon an historical basis.
And here it will be found to be characteristic of nearly all the longer books of the Old Testament, and in some cases even of the shorter ones as well, that they were not completed by a single hand, but that they were gradually expanded, and reached their present form by a succession of stages.
The influence of Deuteronomy upon subsequent books of the Old Testament is very perceptible.
The style of Deuteronomy, when once it had been formed, lent itself readily to imitation; and thus a school of writers, imbued with its spirit, and using its expressions, quickly arose, who have left their mark upon many parts of the Old Testament.
The writings of the canonical prophets form another important element in the Old Testament, also, like the historical books, of gradual growth.
If only upon linguistic grounds - for the Hebrew of the book resembles often that of the Mishnah more than the ordinary Hebrew of the Old Testament - Ecclesiastes must be one of the latest books in the Hebrew canon.
It is probable that the present text became fixed as early as the 2nd century A.D., but even this earlier date leaves a long interval between the original autographs of the Old Testament writers and our present text.
In dealing, therefore, with the textual criticism of the Old Testament it is necessary to determine the period at which the text assumed its present fixed form before considering the means at our disposal for 'controlling the text when it was, so to speak, in a less settled condition.
For these Tigqune Sopherim or " corrections of the scribes " see Geiger, Urschrift, pp. 308 f.; Strack, Prolegomena Critica, p. 87; Buhl, Canon and Text of the Old Testament, pp. 103 f.
The earliest among the versions as well as the most important for the textual criticism of the Old Testament is the Septuagint.
The name Septuagint, strictly speaking, only applies to the translation of the Pentateuch, but it was afterwards extended to include the other books of the Old Testament as they were translated.
The position of the Septuagint, however, as the official Greek representative of the Old Testament did not long remain unchallenged.
It was not until after the 6th century that the Old Latin was finally superseded by the Vulgate or Latin translation of the Old Testament made by Jerome during the last quarter of the 4th century.
This new version was translated 1 Introduction to the Old Testament in Greek, p. 51.
The Peshito (P'shitta) or " simple " revision of the Old Testament is a translation from the Hebrew, though certain books appear to have been influenced by the Septuagint.
Of the remaining versions of the Old Testament the most important are the Egyptian, Ethiopic, Arabic, Gothic and Armenian, all of which, except a part of the Arabic, appear to have been made through the medium of the Septuagint.
The aim of scientific Old Testament criticism is to obtain, through discrimination between truth and error, a full appreciation of the literature which constitutes the Old Testament, of the life out of which it grew, and the secret of the influence which these have exerted and still exert.
For such an appreciation many things are needed; and the branches of Old Testament criticism are corre s ondin 1 numerous.
One branch seeks to determine the scope, purpose and character of the various books of the Old Testament, the times in and conditions under which they were written, whether they are severally the work of a single author or of several, whether they embody earlier sources and, if so, the character of these, and the conditions under which they have reached us, whether altered and, if altered, how; this is Literary Criticism.
In brief, then, the criticism of the Old Testament seeks to discover what the words written actually meant to the writers, what the events in Hebrew history actually were, what the religion actually was; and hence its aim differs from the dogmatic or homiletic treatments of the Old Testament, which have sought to discover in Scripture a given body of dogma or incentives to a particular type of life or the like.
Biblical criticism, and in some respects more especially Old Testament criticism, is, in all its branches, very largely of modern growth.
Jerome, perceiving the unsatisfactory position of Latin-speaking Christian scholars who studied the Old Testament at a double remove from the original - in Latin versions of the Greek - made a fresh Latin translation direct from the Hebrew text then received among the Jews.
The spirit and the age of humanism and the Reformation effected and witnessed important developments in the study of the Old Testament.
This has done much to render possible a more critical interpretation of the Old Testament.
But, however slowly and irregularly, the new conditions and the new spirit affected the study of the Old Testament.
There are also, however, certain conditions peculiar to the text of the Old Testament.
The first task, of Old Testament textual criticism after the Reformation was to prove the independence of these two texts, to gain general Tecognition of the fact that vowels and accents formed no part .of the original Hebrew text of the Old Testament.
The coeval origin of consonants and vowels had indeed been questioned or denied by the earliest reformers (Luther, Zwingli, Calvin), but later, in the period of Protestant scholasticism and under the influence of one school of Jewish Rabbis, Protestant scholars in particular, and especially those .of the Swiss school, notably the Buxtorfs, had committed themselves to the view that the vowels formed an integral and original part of the text of the Old Testament; and this they maintained with all the more fervency.
But the original text of the Old Testament long before it was combined with the text of the Jewish or Massoretic interpretation had already undergone a somewhat similar change, the extent of which was indeed far less, but also less clearly discoverable.
For reasons suggested partly by the study of Semitic inscriptions, partly by comparison of passages occurring twice within the Old Testament, and partly by a comparison of the Hebrew text with the Septuagint, it is clear that the authors of the Old Testament (or at least most of them) themselves made some use of these vowel consonants, but that in a great number of cases the vowel consonants that stand in our present text were inserted by transcribers and editors of the texts.
In view of all this, the first requisite for a critical treatment of the text of the Old Testament is to consider the consonants by themselves, to treat every vowel-consonant as possibly not original, and the existing divisions of the text into words as original only in those cases where they yield a sense better than any other possible division (or, at least, as good).
Capellus drew conclusions from such important facts as the occurrence of variations in the two Hebrew texts of passages found twice in the Old Testament itself, and the variations brought to light by a comparison of the Jewish and Samaritan texts of the Pentateuch, the Hebrew text and the Septuagint, the Hebrew text and New Testament quotations from the Old Testament.
Some important contributions towards a right critical method of using the material collected have been made - in particular by Lagarde, who has also opened up a valuable line of critical work, along which much remains to be done, by his restoration of the Lucianic recension, one of the three great recensions of the Greek text of the Old Testament which obtained currency at the close of the 3rd and beginning of the 4th centuries A.D.
It has only been possible here to indicate in the briefest way what is involved in the collection and critical sifting of the extant evidence for the text of the Old Testament, Results of how much of the work has been done and how much Criticism.
In so far as it is possible to recover the Hebrew text from which the Greek version was made, it is possible to recover a form of the Hebrew text current about 280 B.C. in the case of the Pentateuch, some time before loo B.C. in the case of most of the rest of the Old Testament.
Haupt's Sacred Books of the Old Testament, edited by various scholars, was designed to present, when complete, a critical text of the entire Old Testament with critical notes.
Father Simon in his Histoire critique du Vieux Testament (1682) also argues that the Pentateuch is the work of more than one author, and makes an important advance towards a systematic analysis of the separate elements by observing that the style varies, being sometimes very curt and sometimes very copious " although the variety of the matter does not require it."
For subsequent developments, and the fruitful results of documentary analysis as applied to the Pentateuch and other composite books, which cannot be dealt with in any detail here, reference must be made to the special articles on the books of the Old Testament.
Lowth's contribution to a more critical appreciation of the Old Testament lies in his perception of the nature and significance of parallelism in Hebrew poetry, in his discernment of the extent to which the prophetical books are poetical in form, and in his treatment of the Old Testament as the expression of the thought and emotions of a people - in a word, as literature.
Eichhorn who has, not without reason, been termed the " founder of modern Old Testament criticism."
Certainly the publication E of his Einleitung (Introduction to the Old Testament), in 1780-1783, is a landmark in the history of Old Testament criticism.
His Introduction, consisting of three closely packed volumes dealing with textual as well as literary criticism, is the first comprehensive treatment of the entire Old Testament as literature.
His peculiar qualities were conspicuous in his early and exceedingly influential work - the Beitrcige zur Einleitung in das Alte Testament (1806-1807).
These principles he applied to the Old Testament, firstly to the Books of Chronicles, and then to the Pentateuch.
He closes one epoch of Old Testament criticism; by his influence he retards the development of the next.
The next stage brings us to the critical theories or conclusions which at first gradually and then rapidly, in spite of the keenest criticisms directed against them both by those who clung more or less completely to tradition and by the representatives of the earlier critical school, gained increasing acceptance, until to-day they dominate Old Testament study.
This sketch of the critical movement has now been brought down to the point at which the comprehensive conclusions which still dominate Old Testament study gained clear expression and were shown to be drawn from the observation of a large body of facts.
Nor was it till late in the 18th century that criticism seriously challenged the dominance of the Protestant scholastic treatment of the Old Testament on the one hand, and the rough and ready, uncritical explanations or depreciations of the Rationalists on the other.
Dean Stanley owed something to Ewald and spoke warmly of him, but the Preface to the History of the Jewish Church in which he does so bears eloquent testimony to the general attitude towards Old Testament criticism in 1862, of which we have further proof in the almost unanimous disapprobation and far-spread horror with which Colenso's Pentateuch, pt.
From about 1880 the prevailing temper had changed; within a decade of this date the change had become great; since then the influence of Old Testament criticism has grown with increased acceleration.
From 1875 onwards Smith contributed to the 9th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica a long series of important articles, which, together with the articles of Cheyne, Wellhausen and others, made that work an important factor in the change which was to pass over English thought in regard to the Bible; in 1878, by his pleadings in the trial for heresy brought against him on the ground of these articles, he turned a personal defeat in the immediate issue into a notable victory for the cause which led to his condemnation; and subsequently (in 1880), in two series of lectures, afterwards published 2 and widely read, he gave a brilliant, and, as it proved, to a rapidly increasing number a convincing exposition of the criticism of the literature, history and religion of Israel, which was already represented in Germany 2 The Old Testament in the Jewish Church (1881); The Prophets of Israel (1882).
In 1891 Dr Driver published his Introduction to the Literature of the Old Testament (6th ed., 1897); less popular in form than Smith's lectures, it was a more systematic and comprehensive survey of the whole field of the literary criticism of the Old Testament.
Space forbids any attempt to sketch here the special growth of criticism in other countries, such as France, where the brilliant genius of Renan was in part devoted to the Old Testament, or within the Roman Catholic Church, which possesses in Pere Lagrange, for example, a deservedly influential critical scholar, and in the Revue Biblique an organ which devotes much attention to the critical study of the Old Testament.
More especially since the middle of the 19th century the decipherment of Egyptian and Assyrian inscriptions and systematic excavation in Palestine and other parts of the East have supplied a multitude of new facts bearing more or less directly on the Old Testament.
It has contributed nothing whatsoever to our knowledge of any Hebrew individual of this period,' and consequently what elements of history underlie the stories in Genesis, in so far as they relate to the Hebrew patriarchs, must still be determined, if at all, by a critical study of the Old Testament.
Archaeology has not yet found the key to every unopened door; but it has already done enough to justify the surmise that if criticism had not already disintegrated the traditional theories of the Old Testament, archaeology in the latter half of the 19th century would itself have initiated the process.
As already indicated, the exposition of Literary Criticism in English is Driver's Introduction to the Literature of the Old Testament.
The exact dates of events in Hebrew history can be determined only when the figures given in the Old Testament can be checked and, if necessary, corrected by the contemporary monuments of Assyria and Babylonia, or (as in the post-exilic period) by the knowledge which we independently possess of the chronology of the Persian kings.
In the following parts of this article the chronological character of each successive period of the Old Testament history will be considered and explained as far as the limits of space at the writer's disposal permit.
The New Testament is the collection of the Sacred Books of Christians.
It forms in the Bible the distinctive possession of Christians, just as the Old Testament is the collection of Sacred Books which Christians share with Jews.
The model throughout was the Old Testament.
The result was attained when there was a definite volume called the New Testament by the side of the earlier volume called the Old Testament, complete like it, and like it endowed with the attributes of a Sacred Book.