criticism was applied to the initial problems of Old Testament
history. The investigation lagged strangely. Starting from the clues
given by Hobbes, Spinoza, and Simon, and above all by the suggestion
of Astruc (1753) as to the twofold element implied in the God-names
Jehovah and Elohim, it had proceeded, for sheer lack of radical
skepticism, on the assumption that the Pentateuchal history was
true. On this basis, modern Old Testament criticism of a professional
kind may be said to have been founded by Eichhorn, who hoped by a
quasi-rationalistic method to bring back unbelievers to belief. [1801]
Of his successors, some, like Ilgen, were ahead of their time; some,
like De Wette, failed to make progress in their criticism; some,
like Ewald, remained always arbitrary; and some of the ablest and most
original, as Vatke, failed to coördinate fully their critical methods
and results. [1802] Thus, despite all the German activity, little
sure progress had been made, apart from discrimination of sources,
between the issue of the Critical Remarks on the Hebrew Scriptures of
the Scotch Catholic priest, Dr. Geddes, in 1800, and the publication
of the first part of the work of Bishop Colenso on The Pentateuch
(1862). This, by the admission of Kuenen, who had begun as a rather
narrow believer, [1803] corrected the initial error of the German
specialists by applying to the narrative the common-sense tests
suggested long before by Voltaire. [1804] That academic scholarship
thus wasted two generations in its determination to adhere to the
"reverent" method, and in its aversion to the "irreverence" which
proceeded on the simple power to see facts, is a sufficient comment
on the Kantian doctrine that it was the business of scholars to adapt
the sacred books to popular needs. Tampering with the judgment of
their flocks, the German theologians injured their own.
As of old, part of the explanation lay in the malignant resistance
of orthodoxy to every new advance. We have seen how Strauss's
appointment to a chair at Zürich was met by Swiss pietism. The same
spirit sought to revert, even in "intellectually free" Germany, to
its old methods of repression. The authorities of Berlin discussed
with Neander the propriety of suppressing Strauss's Leben Jesu;
[1805] and after a time those who shared his views were excluded
even from philosophical chairs. [1806] Later, the brochure in
which Edgar Bauer defended his brother Bruno against his opponents
(1842) was seized by the police; and in the following year, for
publishing The Strife of Criticism with Church and State, the same
writer was sentenced to four years' imprisonment. In private life,
persecution was carried on in the usual ways; and the virulence
of the theological resistance recalled the palmy days of Lutheran
polemics. In the sense that the mass of orthodoxy held its ground
for the time being, the attack failed. Naturally the most advanced
and uncompromisingly scientific positions were least discussed, the
stress of dispute going on around the criticism which modified without
annihilating the main elements in the current creed, or that which
did the work of annihilation on a popular level of thought. Only in
our day is German "expert" criticism beginning openly to reckon with
propositions fairly and fully made out by German writers of three
or more generations back. Thus in 1781 Corodi in his Geschichte des
Chiliasmus dwelt on the pre-Hebraic origins of the belief in angels,
in immortality, and heaven and hell, and on the Persian derivation of
the Jewish seven archangels; Wegscheider in 1819 in his Institutes of
Theology indicated further connections of the same order, and cited
pagan parallels to the virgin-birth; J. A. L. Richter in the same year
pointed to Indian and Persian precedents for the Logos and many other
Christian doctrines; and several other writers, Strauss included,
pointed to both Persian and Babylonian influences on Jewish theology
and myth. [1807] The mythologist and Hebraist F. Korn (who wrote as
"F. Nork"), in a series of learned and vigorous but rather loosely
speculative works, [1808] indicated many of the mythological elements
in Christianity, and endorsed many of the astronomical arguments of
Dupuis, while holding to the historicity of Jesus. [1809]
When even these theses were in the main ignored, more mordant doctrine
was necessarily burked. Such subversive criticism of religious
history as Ghillany's Die Menschenopfer der alten Hebräer (1842),
insisting that human sacrifice had been habitual in early Jewry,
and that ritual cannibalism underlay the paschal eucharist, found
even fewer students prepared to appreciate it than did the searching
ethico-philosophical criticism passed on the Christian creed by
Feuerbach. F. Daumer, [1810] who in 1842 published a treatise on the
same lines as Ghillany's (Der Feuer und Molochdienst), and followed it
up in 1847 with another on the Christian mysteries, nearly as drastic,
wavered later in his rationalism and avowed his conversion to a species
of faith. Hence a certain setback for his school. In France the genial
German revolutionist and exile Ewerbeck published, under the titles
of Qu'est ce que la Religion? and Qu'est ce que la Bible? (1850), two
volumes of very freely edited translations from Feuerbach, Daumer,
Ghillany, Lützelberger (on the simple humanity of Jesus), and Bruno
Bauer, avowing that after vainly seeking a publisher for years he had
produced the books at his own expense. He had, however, so mutilated
the originals as to make the work ineffectual for scholars, without
making it attractive to the general public; and there is nothing
to show that his formidable-looking arsenal of explosives had much
effect on contemporary French thought, which developed on other lines.
Old Testament criticism, nevertheless, has in the last generation been
much developed, after having long missed some of the first lines of
advance. After Colenso's rectification of the fundamental error as
to the historicity of the narrative of the Pentateuch, so long and
so obstinately persisted in by the German specialists in contempt
of Voltaire, the "higher criticism" proceeded with such substantial
certainty on the scientific lines of Kuenen and Wellhausen that,
whereas Professor Robertson Smith had to leave the Free Church of
Scotland in 1881 [1811] for propagating Kuenen's views, before the
century was out Canons of the English Church were doing the work with
the acquiescence of perhaps six clergymen out of ten; and American
preachers were found promoting an edition of the Bible which exhibited
some of the critical results to the general reader. Heresy on this
score had "become merchandise." Nevertheless, the professional tendency
to compromise (a result of economic and other pressures) keeps most
of the ecclesiastical critics far short of the outspoken utterances of
M. M. Kalisch, who in his Commentary on Leviticus (1867-72) repudiates
every vestige of the doctrine of inspiration. [1812] Later clerical
critics, notably Canon Driver, use language on that subject which
cannot be read with critical respect. [1813] But among students at the
end of the century the orthodox view was practically extinct. Whereas
the defenders of the faith even a generation before habitually stood to
the "argument from prophecy," the conception of prophecy as prediction
has now become meaningless as regards the so-called Mosaic books; and
the constant disclosure of interpolations and adaptations in the others
has discredited it as regards the "prophets" themselves. For the rest,
much of the secular history still accepted is tentatively reduced
to myth in the Geschichte Israels of Hugo Winckler (1895-1900). The
peculiar theory of Dr. Cheyne is no less "destructive."