God and His Book/Chapter 6
CHAPTER VI.
"Inspired" Bumpkins—Why not "Inspire" the Philosophers of Greece and Rome?—The Unlearned Entirely at the Mercy of the Learned—A Specimen from the Writings of the Holy Ghost—No one Language can be Translated with Exact Equivalency into any other—800,000 Various Readings Admitted—The Potency of a Single Gospel-grinder—Testimony of the Rev. Dr. Irons—Mental Thimble-rigging.
Now that we have seen a fac-simile of the Holy Ghost's handwriting, let us consider for a moment the action of his inspiration upon those he inspired. I question whether the majority of those he employed to write gospels that we might be "saved" knew a ב from a bull's foot, or a ל from a lamb's tail. There are few among us who could set down a hind like Elijah or an eel-fisher like John, who knew as much about handwriting, presumably, as a pig does about the binomial theorem, and "inspire" them to write books that every man of us who will put ourselves to the trouble of reading said books and believing in them might have a harp, a crown, and a pair of wings. For those who do not read the Ghost's books, or, reading them, venture to criticise them, there was once an uncomfortably hot hell: but, through lack of faith and brimstone, that has now subsided into a quiet, cool sheol, for which ever blessed be the name of the Lord.
Just imagine to yourself (if, indeed, it be not sacrilege to permit yourself to imagine an incident so sacred) the Ghost feeling himself in the throes of literary composition. He is possessed with an overwhelming anxiety that every soul of us should get to heaven, and he yearns and burns to write us a guide-book from earth to that locality. He does not go to glorious Greece, with her learning and renown—to the "land of lost gods and god-like men;" he does not go to Rome, where, over the forum, the eloquent air "breathed, burned, of Cicero," and whence the Roman tongue and the Roman sword could have carried a knowledge of his writings to every realm over which the Roman Eagles flew. No, the Ghost recognised that he would have no chance in India, with her learning and civilisation stretching far out into the measureless night of antiquity; no chance in studious Egypt, with her hieroglyphics and esoterics and mystery; no chance on the banks of the Ilyssus, where Genius had touched the marble into rapture, and the thought of Plato had climbed on its ladder of stars to the immortal gods; no chance by the Tiber, whose temples were sublime with the scholar's lore, whose breezes were aflame with the poet's song, and where the cohorts of the legion crashed and thundered down the stately street. None of these were adapted to the requirements of the Ghost and his bookwriting. He was God; but, by the Ganges, the Nile, the Ægean Gulf, and the Tiber, there were Men wiser and nobler than he. So he took to a wretched out-of-the-way burn called the Jordan, to a riddlings-of-creation little patch of ground, of the very existence of which hardly anybody had heard. And, instead of availing himself of the Titanic mind-force of a Plato or the volcanic passion-burst of a Sappho, he set himself down in an unheard-of Galilee village, and commenced to operate upon bumpkins.
To a layman like myself, who has not been taken into the literary confidence of the Trinity, it is exceedingly difficult to understand what assistance to the Ghost "unlearned and ignorant men" could possibly be. Why did he use them? Were they not an obstruction, rather than a service to him? Could he not have managed to write his two contradictory genealogical tables, for instance, as well without "Matthew" and "Luke" as with them ? Could the Holy Ghost not express his priceless treasures of literature except through the medium of an automatically-scrawling yokel? The father, at Sinai, wrote with his finger; could not the Paraclete, at Jerusalem, have written with his toe? This would have allowed maundering Saul of Tarsus, mad John of Patmos, and the rest of them to have devoted their attention to mundane affairs. Was a man much use for makinq tents or hawking fish after the Holy Ghost had used him as a sort of treadle printing-machine? From my studies in esoteric divinity, I infer that "inspiration" was a sort of cross between a galvanic shock and delirium tremens. Why was a yokel used in preference to, say, a he-goat or a pump? A pen could have been fastened to the goat's horns, and, on "inspiration" being turned on, he could have produced "The Gospel of St. Capricornus;" or the pen could have been fixed to the pump-handle, and, under a good strong current of "inspiration," could have been produced "The Gospel According to Pump." It is clear that the Ghost, when writing, cannot write directly, but requires some sort of medium or other; and, after all, it is rather fortunate he used dolts rather than any other kind of rubbish. I, too, if I were in the Ghost's shoes, and found I must use some worthless thing or other to make my writings legible, should use the ordinary brainless homunculus, rather than run the risk of maiming a respectable he-goat or injuring the village pump by using them for my inspirational experiments.
To know what the Ghost wrote, the unlearned are entirely at the mercy of the learned, and the learned themselves are notorious for their disagreement as to what the Holy Dove really wished to be at when cooing the Bible to mankind. Hebrew, the language in which the Holy Dove cooed, and which was, at best, a language suited only to a dove or a savage, has been dead for about two thousand four hundred years; for we find that, when the Hebrew Scriptures were read out to the people in the days of Nehemiah, those who read had to "give the sense, and cause them to understand the reading."[1] During the captivity the Hebrews had forgotten, or had probably been proscribed the use of, their own language, and, as slaves, they had no doubt picked up the patois of Chaldea.
Just to give the English reader some faint idea of the infinite and tender mercies of Jehovah in sending his own Ghost, in whom he was well pleased, to write a Bible, I will quote here the first seven verses of Genesis in Hebrew, using, however, the Roman characters:—
BRASHYTHBRAALHYMATHHSHMYMVATHHARTSVHARTSHYTHHTHHVVBHVVCHSHKGNLPNYTHHVMVRVCHALHYMMRCHPHTHGNLPNYHMYMVYAMRALHYMYHYAVRVYHYAVRVYRAALHYMATHHAVRKYTVBVYBRLALHYMBYNHAVRVBYNHCHSHKVYKRAALHYMLAVRYVMVLCHSHKKRALYLHVYHYNGRBVYHYBKRYVMACHDVYAMRALHYMYHYRKYGNBTHRKHMYMVYHYMBDYLBYNMYMLMYMVYGNSHALHYMATHHRKYGNVYBDLBYNHMYMASHRMTCHTHLRKYGNVBYNHMYMASHRMGNLLRKYGNVYHYKN.
It was so considerate of Jehovah to send his Ghost to furnish us with the foregoing beautiful sentences! The only thing to be regretted is that, since he sent the Ghost to write them, he did not come down himself to translate them. But his ways are not as our ways (for which let us be truly thankful), and he has vouchsafed unto us a composition without beginning of words or end of sentences, for which blessed be his holy name. As far back as the days of Nehemiah, as we have seen, the very Jews themselves do not seem to have been able to make head or tail of the language in which the Ghost had written, and only the learned rabbis, who, on the subject, peradventure, knew very little more than the vulgar, pretended to translate and expound.
Strictly speaking, no one language can be translated into any other. A language is not merely a vocabulary of verbal counters with their exact equivalents in other languages; it is a matrix in which may be found the features and lineaments of the national life. I appeal to those who know the Classics best; and I make bold to ask the man who is deeply learned in Latin and who is a master of English if he ever, in all his life, saw a rendering out of the one language into the other which was, in all respects, satisfactory. This can be predicated of Latin, a language known by thousands and well known by tens. Then what of this shepherd's jargon, Hebrew, that, properly speaking, in its written form, seems never to have been a language at all, but only a number of clumsy and ungainly scrawls, intended to assist the memory of a rude and all but illiterate people?
And it is, perhaps, doubtful whether Hebrew, as written, tended more to lead than to mislead. It was never pretended that the language (by courtesy), in its literary form, indicated anything special and in particular. No MS. was of any use apart from the traditional reading. In other words, the MS. contained only signs intended to assist the memory of the reader. Where the traditional reading was forgotten, and the meaning of any particular word or sentence was sought to be extracted from the writing itself, the most inextricable contradiction and confusion were likely to ensue. As is well known, one set of translators opined that a certain word meant locusts, while another set, equally learned, contended that it meant chimneys! True, the Masoretic points to some extent fix the meanings of particular word-signs; but, then, these points, as I have indicated, are comparatively modern, and were arbitrarily fixed long after Hebrew had ceased to be a living language, and after the traditional reading of its ancient Scriptures had been to a great extent, or altogether, forgotten.
And, mark you, even granted that the original consonant characters of the Hebrew Scriptures were "inspired," the wildest bibliolater has never urged that the Masoretic points were "inspired," and without these points you may just as well try to read logarithms off the sea sands, scrawled over by the toes of sea-gulls, as read any one thing in particular out of the ancient un-vowelled Hebrew. Even with the Masorah the text is notoriously unsatisfactory. Sir William Drummond writes: "I have wholly discarded the Masoretic points. I believe there are few Hebraists who will think of undertaking to defend the Masorah." And again: "I have seldom seen two Hebraists who read and who translated two chapters alike throughout the whole Scriptures."[2] The learned Christian apologist, Professor Moses Stuart, avows: "In the Hebrew MSS. that have been examined some eight hundred thousand various readings actually occur as to the Hebrew consonants. How many as to the vowel-points and accents no man knows."
It is clear to the meanest capacity that the Ghost wrote in a language which was no language, but in an indefinite jargon of which the unlearned know nothing, and which no two learned human beings translate the same way. And yet this Scripture is "the very word of very God," and we have to believe in it under the penalty of being damned. For this and all his other tender mercies, glory be to God in the highest!
All that is sweet and beautiful and elevating in life is due to Christianity. Every preacher whines that, and every baby knows it. But for the creed of the manger, our deportment would be that of bears and our morals those of goats—vestality would be nowhere and bestiality everywhere: we should hunt in vain over all the shores of the world for one footprint of Rhea; but, on the world's every couch, we could find Priapus. Tarquin, from his throne, could scan the globe from horizon to horizon, and see Phrynne amid red wine and lawless orgie, and find Lucretia nowhere but in the grave. But blessed be God that he has dowered us with a huge bundle of inspired contradictions which has purified the world.
We are, of course, stiff necked; we have gone away backward, and have all deserved "God's wrath and curse, both in this life and that which is to come." But a really effective gospel-grinder, standing up on his hind-legs in a ranting-box well-varnished, and telling us forever and forever how Jehovah kicked Adam out of Paradise for eating an apple, and how Jehovah's son, who was at the same time Jehovah's self, got nailed to a stick, is sufficient to keep us pure and holy and divorced from the world, the flesh, and the devil. If we only genuflect properly and howl "Amen," one professional gospel-grinder will be sufficient to "save" about 700 of us from being pickled in brimstone, and from being gnawed by a worm of considerable length, and which no vermin-powder will destroy.
If you are determined to believe in the Scriptures, leave their history and all inquiries as to how they originated and how they have been preserved, severely alone. Faith can flourish and triumph only where Ignorance is cultivated as a virtue. Clothe yourself with prejudice as with a garment, and array yourself in bigotry as with raiment, and obstinately refuse to investigate and to judge, and you may be able to believe that the Bible is the infallible word of God. But, by this course, and by no other course, can you possibly so believe. Intelligent Christians themselves are as fully aware of this as I am; and, occasionally, they express their conviction on this point almost as emphatically as I do. Writing with an emphasis which I could not surpass, even if I tried, and powerfully recapitulating and epitomising much that I have written, the Rev. Dr. Irons, formerly a Prebendary of St. Paul's Cathedral, furnishes us with the following candid but damnatory passage as regards the reliability of the "Word of God."
"We may concede 'that the very copy of the Pentateuch, written by Moses throughout, with National Hymns, and some of the Psalms, and some pieces of history gradually appended, existed for ages in Israel;' but the Sacred Autograph escapes us at last. Or, if the 'Book of Jasher,' for instance, became the standard copy of 'the Scriptures' thus composed—did it contain a transcript of the Divine Writing once made in Horeb? And was that Divine Writing lost altogether after the Captivity? Having existed for 500 years, from Moses to Solomon—and 350 more from Solomon to Hilkiah—and then 150 years more to Ezra—very little noticed in all those ages, so far as the record states—was it really turned into one uniform shape—Chaldee letters, without the written points—with only unwritten 'Masora' to fix its meaning? To conceive of this as 'Revelation for every man's own verifying faculty to judge of'—seems to require credulity more amazing than we can describe.
"We waive, for the present, the literary examination of the contents, and the internal character of any of the Sacred Books. The mere identification of the 'documents,' as such, presents some crushing difficulties to the independent inquirer, 'freely handling Revelation for himself,' that we do not hesitate to say that any reasonable being who would accept the Scriptures at all must take them on some other ground than that which 'identifies the written word with God's Revelation.' Granting the Hebrew Bible a safe transit from the Mediæval schools of Toledo back to the best manuscripts of Bagdat; granting that the Jewish Masoretic points (whenever invented) kept all the traditional sense handed down from Moses; granting that the earliest Jewish records (the best parts of the Mishna or the Targums) give the scholar ground for supporting a true text, till we reach Josephus and Philo, and the Septuagint; and granting that some parts of the Targums may, though unwritten, have been as old as Ezra; yet, if the reproduction of the whole ancient Scriptures, in a new character, interpreted then by an unwritten 'Masora,' be what we come to in Ezra's time, and the documents of the thousand years before all vanish before investigation, it is on the gigantic gifts and inspiration of the transcribers in Ezra's day that we are really depending—gifts and inspiration which yet are a mere hypothesis, of which the possessors tell us no single word! And before Ezra's day, we are thus owning, unmistakeably, that the literary history of the Old Testament is lost! Let all those who would identify this with God's entire revelation, see to what they have brought us."[3]
He that hath ears to hear let him hear. Yet, such is the mystery of godliness. Dr. Irons did not consider the foregoing expression of opinion in regard to God's Book inconsistent with his being God's servant and Prebendary of St. Paul's. So much has this baleful flagitiousness of teaching for many centuries that Faith is superior to and independent of Reason done to dwarf and distort the mental and moral perceptions of the noblest and ablest among us! Theology has made us such adepts with the loaded dice of quibble and paradox that able and honest men like Colenso, Irons, and Giles experience no difficulty in reconciling their appalling heresies with the retention of their "livings." It is natural enough for a student who has been trained in the atmosphere of mental thimble-rigging, which a theological training implies, to work his cerebration so that it arrives inevitably at the result that he is still morally justified in taking the Lord's wages for the planting of weeds in the Lord's vineyard. Now, all except the contemptible residuum of the Lord's own empty pates—little creatures of the Spurgeon, Parker, and Moody order—really stand faithfully by the Lord's mildewed and horrible vines. For them, the book of Historical Criticism has never been opened. I pity their honest but criminal ignorance, and I grieve at the unconscious moral disingenuousness of the men who are immeasurably their superiors in intellect and learning.