3. Testimony of other Witnesses to the Author. — (1.) Our Lord and his Apostles. — Tlieir language is such that the hypothesis of the Pentateuch not being the work of Moses must create a very painfid feeling in the mind of every true and simple-hearted follower of Christ.
PENTATEUCH
908
PENTATEUCH
Comp. Matt. xv. 1-0 and INIark vii, 1-13, where the fifth commamlnuMit and the law which sentenced to death the man who cursed his parents are ascribed indiffer- eutlv to God and to Moses, and arc put in opposition to the ' commandments of men wliich had grown up by a course of traditions. In IVIatt. xxii, 24 we read of the Sadducees attempting to jjuzzle our Lord about the res- urrection : " Master, Moses said," etc., or as it is in ;Mark and Luke, " Moses la-ote unto us," referring to the law in Deut. xxv, 5-10. Jesus answered them, " Ye do err, not knowing the Scriptures, nor the power of God. , . . But as touching the resurrection of the dead, have ye not read that which was spoken unto you by God, savuig," etc. ; or as in Mark, " Have ye not i-ead in the book of Moses ;" or as in Luke, •' That the dead are raised, even Moses shoived at the bush, when he calleth the Lord," etc. ; all three quoting from Exod. iii, 6. Again, in IMatt. xix, 4, 5, in answer to the Pharisees who tempted him on the subject of divorce, our Lord said to tliem, "Have j-e not read, that he which made them at the beginning, made them male and female, and said," etc., quoting (ien. ii, 24. Upon this they asked him, " W'hy did Moses then command to give a writing of divorcement, and to put her away?" refer- ring to Deut. xxiv, 1. He replied, "Moses, because of the hardness of your hearts, suffered you to put away your Avives." The language is not less distinct in the parallel passage (Mark x, 2-9). There is also the tes- timony of the risen Saviour to the icritten law of Moses as distinguished from the other Scriptures, namely, the Prophets and the Psalms (Luke xxiv, 27, 44, 45). Without insisting on others of less distinctness (such as Luke ii, 23, 24 ; John viii, 17 ; Acts vii, 37, 44 ; xv, 21 ; Rom. X, 5, 19 ; 1 Cor. ix, 9 ; Heb. viii, 5), we ask par- ticular attention to two statements by our Lord. In Luke xvi, 29, 31, "They have Moses and the prophets, let them hear them. ... If thej' hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded though one rose from the dead." Without even the slight inter- vention of a parable, our Lord said (John v, 46, 47), " Had ye believed Moses, ye would have believed me ; for he n-rote of me. But if ye believe not his writings, how shall ye believe my words V In illustration of our Lord's argument, and as a last testimony to Moses by the apostles, we quote tlie confession of Paul to king Agrippa (Acts xxvi, 22), " Having therefore obtained help of God, I continue unto this day, witnessing both to small and great, saying none other things than those which the prophets and Moses did say should come;" and his earlier confession to Felix (xxiv, 14), "After the manner which they call heresy, so worship I the God of my fathers, believing all things tchich are icritten ill the laio and the prophets." These two statements by Paul make it plain that what he meant by the writings of Moses was the written law as received among the Jews of his day, and not any shorter work, such as crit- ics have imagined to be the genuine work of ;\Ioses and the germ which expanded into our present Pentateuch ; a hypothesis which is also contradicted by the fact that the ((notations of our Lord and his apostles are as freely made from tlie portions which the critics ascribe with greatest confidence to later writers as from the other portions which they concede to be more ancient.
In reference to these testimonies we observe, (a) the habitual reply has indeed been that it was not the busi- ness of our Lord and his apostles to teach Biblical criti- cism. But tlie rejoinder of Witsius is as satisfactory as ever, though tlie precise matter in debate has somewhat shifted since his time. " Certainly Christ and his apos- tles were not teachers of criticism, such as those men demand that they themselves shall be considered, who at the present day claim as their own. the realm of lit- erature in every branch of knowledge whatsoever : yet they were teachers of the truth, and they did not per- mit themselves to be imposed upon by the ignorance of the masses or by the astuteness of the ruling class. They certainly did not come into the world to foster
vulgar errors and to protect them by their authoritj-, and to spread them, not among the Jews alone, but also far and wide among the nations who depended exclu- sively upon them." (6) A fairer reply has been that the name " tiie law of Moses," or the expression " Moses wrote," etc., implies no more than " the psalms of Da- vid," "David said," etc.; and that if the latter class of phrases may be used without affirming the entire psal- ter to be David's own composition, or without decisively attributing to David the particular psalm Avhich is quoted, we are justified in taking the former class of phrases equally in an indeterminate sense. It is prob- ably in this way that a man's mind most readily finds relief when critical objections disturb his faith in the composition of the Pentateuch by Moses, and at the same time he holds fast his faith in Scripture as a whole ; and it is well that there are such halting-places where one may rest in a down^^■ard course, and from which he may start in the hope of recovering himself. But we cannot concede that the phrases are really par- allel. Were there no other difference, there is plainly a broad distinction between a collection of devotional poetrv, which may be partly or wholly anonymous without injury to its character and usefulness, and the authoritative historj' of the commencement of Israel's national existence, of its covenant relation to God, and of its constitution and laws as a state; for this is a doc- ument whose value is intimately connected with the age and circumstances of its author.