Evening Republican, Volume 14, Number 300, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 19 December 1910 — LOOKING UP BIBLE'S PAST [ARTICLE]

LOOKING UP BIBLE'S PAST

Bears Marks of Authenticity Stronger Than Works of Homer and All Classics. The Old and New Testaments come to us bearing marks of authenticity immeasurably stronger than the works of Homer, Horace, Aeschylus, Thucydides —almost all the classics of the ancient world. Let us first consider the older book. To the preservation of this we are, of course, Indebted to the Jews. But they have not merely preserved it; such is their scrupulous regard for it that they have preserved it intact. There are no alternate renderings Hebrew scriptures. Since the. third century, at latest, most minute ru|es have existed for the guidance of the scribes who copied them, and every letter or diacritical mark has been faithfully rendered. The earliest extant the Hebrew Old Testament is a copy of the Pentateuch, now in the British museum, and assigned to the ninth century. The earliest MS. bearing a precise date is a copy of the Prophets at St. Petersburg, dated A. D. 916. Between the text of these copies and that of the Hebrew Bible as it is known today there Is no essential difference. The Hebrew Pentateuch was regarded as the verbally inspired communication from God to man; its text was preserved with the most sedulous care. The books of the New Testament, however, were not regarded as being anything more than the narratives of various authors; in consequence a vast variety of manuscripts was written, which, while tracing back the New Testament to a date not very remote from that of the first Christians, afford a great divergence in text. Discoveries of these early documents—“sayings of Christ” and gospels of Peter—continue to be made during everyKecade; The epistles of St. Paul are paralleled by numbers of similar communications that have been found of recent years in Egypt, and these, incidentally by their structure bear witness to the genuine character of St. Paul’s writings. It wa,s only during the course of the second century that the gospels of the New Testament began to be singled out from among Jjiesa numerous -records, to gether with the remaining books, and to receive recognition as the authentic records of the life of Christ on earth and of the earliest history of the church.—Frank Fleischmann in Harper’s Weekly.