“Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.” Matt. 24:35.
It is very obvious that the question of the essential truthfulness of Scripture is not to remain open until all its manifold facts are seen to form a harmonious and symmetrical whole. Every candid objector must concede that there may be evidence sufficient to produce the conviction of essential truthfulness, although many details and minutiae may appear exceptional. Not until we know all things can we see all truth to be perfectly harmonious with itself. In our study of nature and of history, after being perfectly convinced of certain truths, we always find ourselves carrying along packages of exceptional facts, which we cannot at the time adjust to others, but which we are sure that we can, as we grow wiser, drop into their proper places. “Nature,” says Tyndale, “is full of anomalies which no foresight can predict, and which experiment alone can reveal. From the deportment of a vast number of bodies, we should be led to conclude that heat always produces expansion, and that cold always produces contraction. But water steps in, and bismuth steps in, to qualify this conclusion.”
Yet the anomalies of which Tyndale speaks, when followed out, lead to the discovery of higher harmonies in nature. By a bold sweep of inductive reasoning, Newton grasped the truth of universal gravitation. He came into that close sympathy with nature that led him to judge by unmistakable intuition that he felt the throb of her heart. There were certain facts that could not then be reconciled with this induction, yet so overwhelming was the evidence in its favor that he felt sure that deeper study and broader observation would bring them into harmony. The history of physical science has justified this faith.
Apparent irregularities in celestial phenomena have led to some of the grandest discoveries of astronomy. Mysterious variations in the position of certain fixed stars, carefully observed and studied for more than twenty years, led Bradley to the discovery of the great and fruitful facts of aberration and nutation; the first furnishing final proof of the progressive motion of light, and the second showing that the pole of the earth, instead of describing a smooth and uniform circle in its revolution, traces a wave-like curve among the stars. These two facts have given to modern astronomy its precision and accuracy. Planetary perturbations have been the harvest field of recent astronomical discoveries. Certain irregularities in the path of Uranus led some who feebly held the clue of nature to speculate whether the law of gravity, at that immense distance, operated in all its rigor; but the true astronomer saw mirrored in these perturbations another world, pacing its solitary rounds as the outmost sentinel of the solar system. Nature’s laws are thus often found by the philosophers to be knotted in discrepancies, which, when patiently disentangled, have furnished him threads to guide him through new labyrinths of fact and law. Scripture discrepancies are thus the clues to higher harmonies. The true philosopher does not demand a demonstrated theory of these irregularities in nature. The logical understanding is not troubled by them if a plausible hypothesis of reconciliation can be invented. A reasonable mind, which has satisfied itself on independent evidence as to the essential truth, is content if imagination can suggest any adjustment of exceptional facts. In this respect, we should go to Scripture as the true philosopher goes to nature.
It may be in the first place remarked that modern criticism, with all its acuteness, has not discovered new discrepancies of any importance. Colenso and Strauss repeat objections that were urged against the first Christian apologists. The Wolfenbüttel Fragments urge the same difficulties in the gospel genealogies, and the same differences between the Jesus of John and the Jesus of the Synoptics that were fully discussed by the early Christian fathers. Mr. Parker thus stated the discrepancy between the law and the gospel: “Here are two forms of religion which differ widely, set forth and enforced by miracles: The one, ritual and formal; the other, actual and spiritual; the one, the religion of fear; the other, of love; one, finite, and resting entirely on the special revelation made to Moses; the other, absolute, and based on the universal revelation of God, who enlightens all that come into the world; one offers only earthly recompense, the other makes immortality a motive to divine life; one compels men, the other invites them. One-half of the Bible reveals the other half; the gospel annihilates the law.” (Disc., p. 324.) But we find the original apostles themselves profoundly pondering this problem of the antithesis between the law and the gospel, and the first generation of Christians bewildered and confused about its solution. Paul’s acutest logic and profoundest spiritual apprehension were taxed to the utmost to clearly state and fairly solve this problem. It rent the first church at Jerusalem; it brought upon Paul his heaviest labors and fiercest persecution; it gave rise to the epistles to the Romans, the Galatians, and the Hebrews; the echoes of this controversy ring through every Pauline speech and letter; it was one of the causes or occasions of the formidable and wide-consuming heresy of Gnosticism. Mr. Parker declared this discrepancy irreconcilable and fatal. So did the heretics and persecutors of the first two centuries; and the Gnostic philosophers stated this discrepancy at least as sharply, and urged it more vehemently, than Mr. Parker. Yet, in spite of it, Christianity has become what she is. In her very cradle she throttled this dragon, and will she tremble before the dragon’s seed to-day? If she proved the old and the new covenants to be identical in essence, when it was only by faith that she saw the Christian flower and fruit in the Judaic husk, much more will she triumph when the fragrance of those flowers comes wafted to us through historic centuries, when those ripened fruits are dropping on all lands.
Another preliminary thought of special importance is this: The perfect simplicity, the guileless confidence, with which the Scripture writers spread apparently conflicting statements before us, is most suggestive and instructive. While the earliest commentators, Jewish and Christian, often manifest the greatest anxiety to reconcile and harmonize these discrepancies, the Scripture writers calmly go on their way without giving them the least attention. No editorial explanation is offered to adjust the two narratives of creation. They are simply set side by side with all their divergences and contrasts. There is no editorial weighing of conflicting statements in the gospels, no word of comment to harmonize the different accounts of Christ’s birth and resurrection. Thus is spread over all the Scripture the artlessness of conscious truth. To the candid mind, this impression is irresistible. Everywhere assuming in the most solemn manner its divine truthfulness, yet nowhere anxious to vindicate its consistency with itself, it reveals a sublime consciousness of integrity that, to a healthy soul, is most impressive and convincing. So when Moses wove into his history the patriarchal narratives of creation, he left each to tell its own story. So he wrote down the decalogue of Exodus and of Deuteronomy, without minute reference to the stony tablets, not careful—as a forger would be sure to be—to use the identical words in both copies. So Ezra gives us the first and second records of the kings of Judah and Israel, without any editorial alterations and corrections to bring them into harmony.
The value of these discrepancies is thus very high in enabling us to understand the real nature of the documents in which they occur. They show that we have in the Scripture narratives the original documents, the genealogical records, statutes, speeches, songs, having all the flavor of contemporary authorship, such as would be called in our day the raw material for history, rather than history itself. These materials have never been digested and assimilated into a uniform whole in the mind of any philosophical historian. No Thucydides has woven them into an artistic treatise. So the gospels are memoirs, memorabilia of Christ’s life, sayings, and doings, set down by different authors, at different times and places. The original facts have not been filtered through the imaginations or judgments of professional authors, but are spread before us in what criticism calls rawness, incompleteness, and redundancy—not fitted to each other, or adjusted to any system or theory whatever. Thus the narratives are often abrupt, fragmentary, assuming and suggesting much that is not said, and disappointing by leaving much unsaid. Thus Mark assumes that the reader is already acquainted with Jesus and with John the Baptist. John adds a supplement to his gospel, giving an account of Christ’s appearance at the Lake of Tiberias. The history of the Acts breaks off abruptly in the midst of Paul’s imprisonment without hinting anything about the result of his appeal unto Cæsar. Discrepancies are inevitable in such a mass of materials; but how valuable are they as showing the real character of the materials themselves, proving them to be the original data on which all systematic history must be founded. We have here no secondary formations of critical conclusions or mythical imaginings to dig through in order to reach the primitive facts. The discrepancies of the gospels thus furnish weapons with which Strauss’ whole theory may be overturned. This must be admitted by any candid mind that does not start with the dogmatic assumption that the supernatural, being unnatural, is never to be believed on any evidence whatever.