THE FUNDAMENTALS VOLUME VIII
CHAPTER I OLD TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND NEW TESTA- MENT CHRISTIANITY BY PROFESSOR W. H . GRIFFITH THOMAS, D. D., WYCLIFFE COLLEGE, TORONTO, CANADA A large number of Christians feel compelled to demur to the present attitude of many scholars to the Scriptures of the Old Testament. I t is now being taught that the patriarchs of Jewish history are not historic persons; that the records con- nected with Moses and the giving of the law on Sinai are unhistorical; that the story of the tabernacle in the wilderness is a fabricated history of the time of the Exile; that the prophets cannot be relied on in their references to the ancient history of their own people, or in their predictions of the future; that the writers of the New Testament, who assur- edly believed in the records of the Old Testament, were mis- taken in the historical value they assigned to those records; that our Lord Himself, in His repeated references to the Scriptures of His own nation, and in His assumption of the Divine authority of those Scriptures, and of the reality of the great names they record, was only thinking and speaking as an ordinary Jew of His day, and was as liable to error in matters of history and of criticism as any of them were. The present paper is intended to give expression to some of the questions that have arisen in the course of personal study, in connection with collegiate work and also during several years of ordinary pastoral ministry. It is often urged that 5
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