The Fundamentals (1910), Vol.1

The Fundamentals. whose “Introduction to the Old Testament,” published in 1862, was largely based on the fallacies of the German rationalists. The supplementary hypothesis passed over into England through him and with strange incongruity, he borrowed fre­ quently from Baur. Dr. Robertson Smith, the Scotchman, recast the German theories in an English form in his works on the Pentateuch, the Prophets of Israel, and the Old Testament in the Jewish Church, first published in 1881, and followed the German school, according to Briggs, with great boldness and thoroughness. A man of deep piety and high spirituality, he combined with a sincere regard for the Word of God a critical radicalism that was strangely inconsistent, as did also his name­ sake, George Adam Smith, the most influential of the present- day leaders, a man of great insight and scriptural acumen, who in his works on Isaiah, and the twelve prophets, adopted some of the most radical and least demonstrable of the^'Ger­ man theories, and in his later work, “Modern Criticism and the Teaching of the Old Testament,” has gone still farther in the rationalistic direction. Another well-known Higher Critic is Dr. S. R. Driver, the Regius professor of Hebrew at Oxford, who, in his “Intro­ duction to the Literature of the Old Testament,” published ten years later, and his work on the Book of Genesis, has elabo­ rated with remarkable skill and great detail of analysis the theories and views of the continental school. Driver’s work is able, very able, but it lacks originality and English inde­ pendence. The hand is the hand of Driver, but the voice is the voice of Kuenen or Wellhausen. The third well-known name is that of Dr. C. A. Briggs, for some time Professor of Biblical Theology in the Union The­ ological Seminary of New York. An equally earnest advo­ cate of the German theories, he published in 1883 his “Bib­ lical Study” ; iri 1886, his “Messianic Prophecy,” and a little later his “Higher Criticism of the Hexateuch.” Briggs studied

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