The Permanent Value of the Old Testament

THE PERMANENT VALUE OF THE OLD TESTAMENT*· W. R. TAYLOR IN the discussion of the topic indicated by the title of this article, I assume that those who read it have a general knowledge of the contents of the Old Testament, and that the immediate interest is to know how this ' literature is to be viewed or assessed in the midst of the hurly-burly of contemporary thought and attitudes. We scarcely need to remind ourselves that the Old Testament is, in one sense, an artificial creation. It is the net result of a selective process applied to Hebrew literature over a series of about nine centuries. The work of selection was completed some twenty years after the Romans destroyed Jerusalem. Faced with the dissolution of their nation ·and the scattering of its people to the four corners of the earth, the Jews had to decide what of their writings should for all time be reckoned as containing the authoritative standard of their faith. The decision was made about 90 A.D. in a council of the elders at J amnia. As they approached their task, they were conscious that their literature had been suffering a decline in quality and· in power for over two centuries. They explained this defect as due to the ~ess~tion of Divine inspiration. In fact, they agreed that this inspiration · had come to an end by the time of Ezra in the fifth-century B.C. SO, roughly) no book was admitted to the sacred list unless it could be shown that: first,· it had been composed in Hebrew, sec· ondly, it was in accord with their religious laws and thirdly, it was written before the time of Ezra. Decisions as to the dates of certain books were based on poor or even fictitious groun~s. An inferior and late book such as Ecclesiastes w~s admitted because the name of Solomon, associated with it, seemed to guarantee both its earliness and its sanctity, whereas a finer book, such as the Wisdom of Ben, Sira, written about the same time as Ecclesiastes, was excluded because it was too frank about itself to be pushed forward over the assumed terminal date, for inspiration. But on the whole~ the spiritual instincts of the membe~s of the Council were better than their professed criteria. In spite of their rules, the Old Testament emerged as the mo~umental creation that history . knows it to ·be. But many Jews were dissatisfied with the work of the Council. For example, the Jews in Alexandria added se~eral other books to the list adopted in Palestine. This fact explains why the Old Testame'nt of the Roman Church contains more books than the Old Testament of the Protestants . The former follows · the Alexandrian tradition, and the latter the Palestinian. In each case, however, the Chris'tians took over a Jewish pronouncement without any re-examination of its soundness or validity. Then, by ca. 200 A.D. the Church added the New Testament to the Old *This article was wri tten for the centenary of Julius Wellhausen (1844-1918). 34 THE PERMANENT \:"ALUE OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 35 and regarded them not as literature but as oracles of God, inspired in every word and letter and inerrant in .all matters, religious, historical and scientific . Where statements occurred that jarred on conscience ' or commo'n sense, resort was had to allegorism in order·to explain away the difficulties. This conception of the Scriptures continued down to the time of the Reformation. Finally, under the reformers and their successors, it was raised to 'a higher pitch of sanctity and became nothing less than bibliolatry. From time to time, first in the seventeenth century and then in the eighteenth century, there were vigorous protests against the dogmatic ' assumptions of the theologians, but it was left to the nineteenth century to rid the Bible of the incumbrance of false and indefensible assumptions about its nature, and to redefine the grounds of its authority and its claims to permanent worth. The crisis came scarcely more than seventy-five years' ago. At that time religious belief was passing through a serious struggle because of the growing tension...