The Fundamentals - 1917: Vol.1

The HisJory of the Higher Criticism. 17 at Heidelberg, published a work which ran through six edi­ tions in four decades. His contribution to the introduction of the Old Testament instilled the same general principles as Eichhorn, and in the supplemental hypotheses assumed that Deuteronomy was composed in the age of Josiah (2 Kings 22 :8). Not long after, Vatke and Leopold George (both Hegelians) unreservedly declared the post-Mosaic and post­ prophetic origin of the first four books of the Bible. Then came Bleek, who advocated the idea of the Grundschift or original document and the redactor theory; and then Ewald, the father of the Crystallization theoryr; and then Hupfield (1853), who held that the original document was an inde­ pendent compilation; and Graf, who wrote a book on the historical books of the Old Testament in 1866 and advocated the theory that the Jehovistic and Elohistic documents were written hundreds of years after Moses' time. Graf was a pupil of Reuss, the redactor of the Ezra hypothesis of Spinoza. Then came a most influential writer, Professor Kuenen of Leyden in Holland, whose work on the Hexateuch was edited by Colenso in 1865, and his "Religion of Israel and Prophecy in Israel," published in England in 1874-1877. Kuenen was one of the most advanced exponents of the rationalistic school. Last, but not least, of the continental Higher Critics is Julius Wellhausen, who at one time was a theological professor in Germany, who published in 1878 the first volume of his his­ tory of Israel, and won by his scholarship the attention if not the allegiance of a number of leading theologians. (See Higher Criticism of the Pentateuch, Green, pages 59-88.) It will be observed that nearly all these authors were Germans, and most of them professors of philosophy or the­ ology. THE BRITISH-AMERICAN CRITICS. The third stage of the movement is the British-American. The best known names are those of Dr. Samuel Davidson,

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