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The Fundamentals by the Jews as their great central place of worship, would have been not only an architectural curiosity, but an anachronism such as even the critical imagination could scarcely be accused either of devising or accepting. The only way, therefore, open for the critics, if they are still to hold fast their theory, is for them to do precisely what they have undertaken; namely, to blot out or destroy the Tabernacle as a real existence, and then to reconstruct the entire story of it, as given in the Bible, in the form of a fiction. This they have really attempted. But by so doing the critics must, after all, confess that the foundation upon which they build is very insecure, because it is simply an assumption. If, therefore, in opposition to such assumption, this article shall be able to demonstrate that the old Mosaic Tabernacle actually existed, then the underpinning of the critical hypothesis is at once removed, and the entire edifice with all of its many stories must collapse. And if all this is true, then it is not too much to say, as is affirmed in the sub-title of this article, that the whole truth or falsity of the critical scheme depends upon what may be proven true respecting the Tabernacle’s non-existence or existence. And thus, moreover, is made to appear the exceeding importance of the discussion we have undertaken. V. QUOTATIONS FROM THE HIGHER CRITICS But what do the higher critics themselves say with regard to this matter of the Tabernacle’s real existence? To quote from only a few of them, Wellhausen, e. g., who is the great coryphaeus of the higher-critic doctrine, writes as follows: “The Temple, which in reality was not built until Solomon’s time, is by this document [the so-called Priestly Code] re garded as so indispensable, even for the troubled days of the wilderness before the settlement, that it is made portable, and in the form of a tabernacle set up in the very beginning of things. For the truth is that the Tabernacle is a copy, not
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