Antiquity of the Scriptures.
By Dr. Upson
Few of us ever stop to think how old the Bible is. Yet “the Scriptures are believed by candid critics to contain the most ancient forms of truth now known to men.” With the aid of chronological tables, any one may easily make profitable comparisons between the antiquity of these books and that of other writings and events. The Scriptures contain the only authentic history of the world before the flood. We find in the Pentateuch one or two stanzas of poetry composed in the antediluvian period. The Hebrew statutes were enacted a thousand years before Justinian reformed the Roman jurisprudence. In the Bible we have the record of chartered rights secured to the people more than two thousand years before the Magna Charta. What a sensation would be produced if the first chapter of Genesis should appear for the first time in one of the newspapers to-morrow! Yet there can be no doubt that that chapter contains the oldest writing—twenty-five hundred years before the invention of printing. Xenophon’s record of the conversations of Socrates, in his Memorabilia, seems an old book to us, yet similar topics were discussed in Ecclesiastes six hundred years before. The works of Tacitus, Plutarch, and Quintilian are not modern; yet the books of the New Testament are older than they. As to the book of Job, its age is beyond conjecture. Those who make it as modern as they can are compelled to place its origin at least one thousand years before Homer. When Priam was king of Troy, Job was of remote antiquity. The name of Alexander has no modern sound for us, yet when Alexander invaded Syria, the book of Job might have been read before him as the work of an author more time-honored than the name of Alexander is now. The writings of Confucius are modern when compared with most of the Bible; and the most that the Hindoos can justly claim for their sacred books, the Vedas, is that they were written five hundred years after the death of Moses. The Koran is a book fresh from the press compared with the Scriptures.—Dr. Upson.