Biblical history in the light of the latest research and discoveries. Old Testament. Volume 1

I. Biblical rationalism in its historical origin and development 1. Origins of Biblical Rationalism 2. Open rebellion against the Bible 3. Denial of the supernatural 6. Renan - as the newest representative of biblical rationalism II. Latest Archaeological Discoveries in Egypt, Assyria and Palestine 2. Unlocking the key to the wedge-shaped inscriptions As a result of those truly miraculous discoveries that are being made in our century on the forgotten ashes of the former historical life of the ancient peoples of the east, Biblical history has been extremely enriched in its scientific resources. These discoveries brought into her so much new and precious material that her horizons had to expand far beyond the limits outlined for her in the past. This naturally revived interest in it, and now it attracts the attention of not only specialists - theologians, but also secular scientists - specialists in various departments of historical science, and after them the entire educated society of all civilized peoples of the world. This interest is clearly beginning to manifest itself in our country, and in various magazines, both secular and especially spiritual, there have been quite a few individual attempts to acquaint our society with the most important of the newest data of biblical-historical science 1 . But in general, our literature in this regard is far behind Western European literature, and while we continue to use only, so to speak, crumbs from the rich table of biblical-historical science, in the West there have long been entire courses representing a summary of all the most important discoveries, and many monographs on various biblical issues, developed in the bright light of all the latest research and discoveries. The absence of such integral works in our country constitutes an important gap in the theological literature, and the feasible filling of this gap was what was in mind when compiling this book. This book is compiled according to exactly the same plan as the “Guide to Biblical History” that we published earlier, so that the latter serves as an almost exact outline for it. The significant difference lies in the degree of volume, and what in the manual is considered only briefly, with only a cursory indication of scientific data, is here the subject of detailed consideration - what is often only implied there is here illuminated by the entire mass of biblical-historical material at our fingertips. Hence, in addition to the biblical narrative itself, this book introduces to a large extent the traditions of the Jewish and pagan world about primitive times, insofar as they serve to explain and confirm the truths of Divine revelation, later rabbinical tales, archaeological and geographical data, the most outstanding discoveries in Egypt, Palestine and Assyro-Babylonia - in a word, all the wealth of varied material that is currently available Biblical history. By the very nature of this material, the book was supposed to acquire an apologetic character, and the force of this apologetics often acquires a victorious character, as a result of those unexpected discoveries that deal irresistible blows to old skepticism in many points. The compilation of this book was greatly facilitated by the fact that we were able to use excellent works, which represent a successful grouping of biblical and historical material in its various applications. We could use the material collected in these works freely, drawing from it everything that only suited our plan and our goal, for which we had in mind to give a complete course of Biblical history in its coherent presentation, as far as possible with the extensive material that was brought into it as direct, and sometimes collateral or indirect illumination. This task is not easy, as is already indicated by the fact that Western European scholars, who served as a source for us, essentially do not present a coherent course of Biblical history, but use the latest scientific material only for episodic or monographic coverage of individual eras and events, such as, for example. and the famous work of Vigouroux, which served as the basis for many works of the same kind 2. Another feature of our book in its current edition is its rich illustrations. In this respect, its foreign prototypes, such as the works of Vigouroux and Geikie, which are limited to only a few insignificant photographs of the most important monuments, cannot in any way be compared with it. Taking advantage of the noble enterprise of our publisher, we have collected from various sources a whole mass of illustrations, which are photographs from ancient Egyptian and Assyro-Babylonian monuments, which even more clearly reproduce before us amazing pictures of ancient historical life, as it was imprinted on the granite witnesses of this hoary antiquity 3. Photographs from the ruins of ancient biblical cities, from modern landscapes, as ancient scenes of the events described, as well as from landscapes of modern life in the East with its often unchanged forms and customs - complement the overall picture of Biblical history, not only explaining individual events, but also indelibly imprinting them in the reader’s memory with all the freshness and clarity of tactile reality; among the illustrations there are two drawings by the famous artist Doré, with his rich artistic brush, reproducing the two initial events of Biblical history. A special introduction gives the history of biblical rationalism to its latest manifestation in the famous work of Renan, and also gives a sketch of the latest discoveries in Egypt, Assyria and Palestine, with a brief history of the discovery of the key to the reading of hieroglyphs and wedge-shaped inscriptions, a sketch which may serve to explain what a great victory the scientific genius of our time has won over the mysteries of the ancient world, and what the significance of this victory is for the triumph of truth over its open or secret enemies. A second volume will soon follow, which will cover the rest of the Biblical history of the Old Testament. I. Biblical rationalism in its historical origin and development. Among the greatest books that exist in the literary treasury of mankind and serve for its spiritual enlightenment, St. The Book of Books or the Bible occupies a completely exceptional position. Every book contains a word, as the embodiment of spirit or mind, and the more sublime and perfect the spirit or mind, the higher the word that embodies it is valued, the more expensive the book containing the latter becomes. But the Book of Books contains the divine word, as the embodiment of the infinite Spirit and the all-perfect, all-encompassing Mind. Hence the Bible is as much higher than all other books as the divine, infinite Mind is higher and more perfect than the finite, limited human mind. Therefore, the Bible occupies a more important position among the greatest lights of literature than the sun among the planets. Not only has it always been the source of true spiritual light, the rays of which only occasionally and faintly shine through in simple human books, but for centuries and millennia it has illuminated the mind of mankind with a supernatural light, revealing to it such truths as it vainly tried to achieve by its own efforts. Taken as a whole, the Bible represents, so to speak, a literary miracle, in terms of that truly miraculous worldview that embodies the highest spiritual ideal of humanity with the most striking and instructive examples of its embodiment in individuals and entire nations. In this respect, all other books, even the works of the greatest thinkers, seem to be dim lamps, like will-o'-the-wisps next to the radiant sun. Hence, if humanity did not have the Bible, then it would be doomed to the pitiful position of a person who is forced to inherit the wondrous beauty of the universe in its highest spheres only through the weak, natural organs of vision, and then, of course, the whole world of knowledge would remain inaccessible to him - that sublime knowledge that gives truth and with it freedom. It is in vain that our modern civilization is proud of the extraordinary successes of the human mind in our time, and in vain science tries to show that he achieved these successes only on his own. This is pathetic self-delusion or delusion. What the human mind was able to achieve on its own had already been achieved by the ancient pre-Christian world. Further than that, according to his own consciousness, he could no longer go, and in his pitiful powerlessness, languishing in a hopeless circle of limitation, he thirsted and sought a higher revelation. And only when it was given to him, precisely in the Bible, which became the property of the ancient world through Judaism and then Christianity, from that time on a new vast horizon opened before the mental gaze of mankind, and the human mind became able to see with its own eyes what it had barely foreseen in the foggy mirror of philosophical fortune-telling. The revelation for the mind was infinitely more important than, for example, for the eye, the invention of wonderful optical devices, armed with which, man began to see with his own eyes entire vast worlds, hitherto closed to him by the blue vault of the sky, impenetrable to simple vision - but this can serve as a clear example for understanding its importance for man. And all modern science, with its truly great successes, has only advanced so far in comparison with the science of the ancient world because it arose and grew on new Christian soil, where the human mind, having learned the truth of existence revealed to it from above, received unprecedented strength in action and the greatest freedom in movement. Having recognized the truth of existence in revelation, he was freed from the unbearable burden of delusions and doubts that weighed on him and with greater freedom could devote himself to the search for particular phenomena that served to further clarify the truth revealed to him. But the recognition of this position, which the greatest representatives of science professed and profess, has always found an ardent opponent in the pride inherent in the human mind, due to which it does not want to be in any way dependent on outside interference and strives for complete originality. Therefore, despite all the beneficence of the book of revelation for him, at every opportunity he rebelled against it and tried to bring it down to the same level as other books in order to subject it to the same critical judgments that simple literary works are usually subjected to. This claim of the human mind is known under the name of rationalism, and its history is highly instructive in the sense of understanding how the natural human mind, trying to free itself from the divine mind that was beneficial to it, became sophisticated in every possible way and resorted to all sorts of considerations, methods and means, just to find in the Bible any contradiction with undoubted truths, to suspect its authenticity and truthfulness and, taking advantage of these, to reduce it to the order ordinary literary works, and how, on the other hand, these efforts constantly crumbled into dust before the immutable evidence of truth, radiantly shining from the book of revelation and finding striking confirmation in the best and most indubitable data of scientific knowledge. 4 1. The origin of biblical rationalism. Biblical rationalism dates back to the very first centuries of Christianity, when from among the enlightened pagans who defended the dying ancient world before the victorious power of Christianity, writers came out who tried to suspect or reject the supernatural origin of the Bible or its individual parts (such as Celsus, Porphyry and others). But the rationalism for which our century is especially famous dates back to the Reformation of the 16th century, when it was reason that openly rebelled against the authority of the church, which in turn was based on the authority of the Bible. This is rationalism, which has become the banner of an entire religious system, namely Protestantism. In him, the newest biblical rationalism finds its fullest justification, and the founder of Protestantism as a religious system can rightly be considered its ancestor. But this genetic connection between biblical rationalism and Protestantism was not immediately discovered; From the founder of Protestantism, Luther, to the unbelievers of our time, there is an extremely long path. The Württemberg monk broke only with Roman Catholicism; Freethinkers of our time reject all religion in general. The Father of the Reformation believed in the inspiration of the Bible, in prophets, in miracles, in grace, in justification, in the deity of Jesus Christ, in heaven and hell; rationalistic theologians, who nowadays explain the Old and New Testaments from the pulpits of German universities, coldly mock all this, just as a child who has become an adult mocks the stories of a nurse with which she lulled him in his childhood. The principle of free inquiry, carried to its utmost limits, leads to these fatal denials. Nevertheless, it took many years to reach this last stage, because the human spirit does not rush into such extremes in one leap; he moves away from the right path only little by little, step by step; but sooner or later, once he has entered the path of error, inexorable logic will lead him to the edge of the abyss and plunge him into it. This is exactly what happened with Protestant theology, although at first it was apparently completely alien to any critical attitude towards the Bible - by the very essence of the main dogma of Protestantism. The main dogma of Protestantism is the exclusive authority of the Bible, interpreted by everyone according to the inner illumination that the Holy Spirit imparts to him. All the ancient reformers unanimously recognized St. Scripture is a divine book that came from heaven to reveal to people their duties in relation to the Creator and their own kind, an infallible rule of faith and morality. For a true Protestant, the Bible was everything. He considered it, as Hegel put it, as a stronghold of freedom of thought. There was nothing between him and God but her. Apart from one’s own consciousness, no other authority, either in the present or in the past, has the right to explain the Words of God. Tradition has no significance in explaining the holy book. It is sufficient in itself, no one has the right to either limit or establish its meaning; for him she is the only tradition, the only authority, the only priest, the only teacher. This is the essence of the Reformation, that common connection that from the very beginning connected the first founders of the Reformation with each other. Since their separation from the Roman Catholic Church, Protestants have expressed these principles very clearly in the famous protest against the Second Diet of Speyr (1529), a protest from which Protestantism derives its very name. There they proclaimed the following principles: The Bible should not be interpreted by tradition, but only by itself; The authority of the Bible is higher than the authority of councils and the church. These principles have long enjoyed unanimous acceptance in Protestantism, despite the divisive influence of free inquiry. True, disunity soon began and led to the origin of numerous sects. But, despite these disagreements and these internal divisions, the exclusive authority of the Bible not only did not decrease, but constantly increased and increased precisely because of the need to have some point of unity against the common enemy - Roman Catholicism. Consequently, Protestants necessarily came to exaggerations and extremes regarding the doctrine of inspiration. Not limiting themselves to the confession of verbal inspiration, according to which every word of Holy Scripture was considered revealed from above, Protestants denied, as some of the most strict of them still deny, the possibility of even any accidental change, any accidental change in numbers, any error on the part of the scribe in the original authentic text of the holy books. This is precisely what the most free-thinking of Protestants now call “bibliolatry.” “This effort to rely on the Bible,” says one of them, was the instinctive result of the crusade that was raised against the tradition supported by Rome. The Bible replaced the church... The Bible was equipped with such attributes that, no doubt, were not easy to justify. The doctrine was preached that it is perfect, has nothing unclear, is understandable to everyone and contains everything that is necessary for salvation. Luther declared that Holy Scripture cannot be deceived, and that to say that Holy Scripture is dark is to reveal impiety and blasphemy.” The Bible soon became a kind of paper pope and, like the Roman high priest, appeared as the representative of God and Christ. The stern orthodox Kalov argued that St. writers, when writing sacred books, participated only with their lips and their own hands... At the beginning of the 18th century, George Nitsche, Superintendent of Gotha, compiled an essay under the title, significant in this regard: “St. Scripture - is it God himself or creation? And in view of the lengths to which a Protestant can reach a bibliolatry, it will not be at all surprising how one miserable savage, seeing a Protestant missionary passing with a Bible under his arm, cried out: “This is the God of this man, and what a God! he carries Him in his pocket, while our gods are in our maras” (churches of Polynesian deities). The excessive importance given to the Bible by the Reformation was, of necessity, like any exaggeration, bound to provoke reactions. Meanwhile, the basic teaching of Protestantism about the Bible remained almost untouched until the middle of the 18th century. The wars that Protestants waged for so long against Roman Catholicism prevented them from subjecting this teaching to more thorough research, which at the same time slowed down the development of those destructive germs that this teaching contained. But when Protestantism finally won an independent existence, when the Prussian monarchy, its main patron, provided it with its powerful assistance and secured for it the rights to freedom of thought, then from then on it, free from external worries, left to itself, soon became a prey to that process of decomposition, the results of which were extremely sad for the Bible. Everything is based on the Bible - this has been the main dogma of Protestantism until now. But the time has come when they began to ask: what is the Bible itself based on? where does it come from? what is she? The leaders of Protestantism, of course, argued that it is based on divine infallibility, that it comes from God, that it is the very word of God. But how did the leaders of Protestantism know all this? By what signs could they recognize the divine word? By what signs can I recognize him myself? If Orthodoxy considers the inspiration of Holy Scripture to be a special act of faith, then this is because it accepts the authority of the church, which it considers infallible, and this church teaches to recognize Holy Scripture as divinely inspired; but the advocate of free inquiry cannot rely on the testimony of any one else. He must form his own judgment. Therefore, already the first reformers, Luther and Calvin, tried to present the inspiration of St. books as a self-evident thing. The confidence that a Christian has in this regard, according to Luther, is, by its very essence, like an axiom. He knows that the Bible is inspired by God with the same self-evidence as he knows that 37 makes 10. He cannot prove the truth of these statements, but at the same time he does not have the opportunity to deny it. According to strict logic, a Protestant thus cannot attribute a divine character to Holy Scripture except by his own personal research and by his own insight. If he does not have special insight into understanding the word of God, then the book that is supposed to contain it does not differ for him from the books of other wise men. In denying everything other than the Bible, the reformers acted like those foolish people who destroyed all the supports and braces of some magnificent building, drove away all the guardians and opened indifferent access to every passerby. The building, left without any protection or support, had to decompose and turn into ruins. Strauss, the chief worker in that sad work of destruction which constitutes the second period of Protestantism, has beautifully shown in his introduction to the Life of Jesus how the denial of the authority of the Bible was the necessary consequence of the denial of the authority of the Church, which is exactly what the Reformers began with. “The Reformation,” he says, “gave the first blow to faith in the church; it was the first sign of the existence of a known culture, which, as was already evident in paganism and Judaism, had already in the depths of Christianity itself acquired sufficient strength and stability to counteract the ground on which it stood, that is, the accepted religion. This reaction, directed at first solely against the dominant church, represented a noble, but quickly ended drama of the reformation; later it turned against biblical documents and, initially declaring itself with sharp negative experiments in deism, reached more recent times through a number of different transformations.” Already in the 17th century, Hugo Grotius (1583 - 1646) began to modify the concept of inspiration as it existed among Protestants, and at the same time Spinoza (1632 - 1677) questioned it in his Theological-Political Treatise. Their opinion, meanwhile, remained unrecognized in Germany for a long time. Grotius was considered a heretic there; Spinoza, a Jew, a foreigner and a pantheist, inspired terror by his very name. But it didn't stay that way forever. By the middle of the 18th century, although the mass of the people still remained zealously Christian, the ground had already been prepared and began to accept the first seeds of unbelief. Faith in this era was greatly shaken by a number of famous enlightened minds; Wolf's philosophy taught them to treat the letter of the Bible independently. A student of this head of the school, Lavrentiy Schmidt, drew up a strange, but executed project for translating the Pentateuch into the Wolffian language, that is, a project for replacing the figurative and dogmatic terms of the sacred text with expressions that his teacher had brought into fashion. 5 The writings of French philosophers and, most importantly, English deists increased evil and further developed the germs of rationalism. Herbert, Earl of Cherbury, published a book in 1624 entitled: “On truth and how to distinguish it from revelation, from the probable and the false.” 6 He elevated deism into a system and rejected revelation as useless. Gassendi rejected it in France, Locke in England. But this latter brought more evil to supernatural religion in his fatherland than even the one whom he refuted: in his “Reasonable Christianity,” which appeared in 1695, Locke himself preached natural religion, that is, rationalism. The deists at that time multiplied enormously in Great Britain and filled their fatherland with their irreligious and blasphemous writings. John Toland wrote “Christianity without Mysteries,” invented the name “pantheism,” and no longer had any respect not only for revealed truths, but also for the principles of natural morality. Wolston recognized nothing but allegories in the miracles of the gospels. He developed this theory in his six Discourses on the Miracles of Jesus Christ. Many other English writers preached similar ideas. They were supported by influential members of the English aristocracy, such as Sommers, Buckingham and especially Bolingbroke, who himself went so far as to compare the Bible with Cervantes' Don Quixote. Voltaire, who found refuge in England in 1726, fell into this society of English freethinkers. Upon his return to France in 1728, he brought there the errors of deism gleaned from their school. He had close ties of friendship with Bolingbroke, and took most of his objections to the Bible from that English lord's Letters on History. That is why the name of this unbelieving statesman constantly appears in various jokes of the notorious Ferney patriarch regarding the Old and New Testaments. The French freethinker, however, did not wage a serious war against revelation. In his frivolous mood, he limited himself only to sarcasm and ridicule, although he attached so much importance to them that he considered it not at all difficult for himself to destroy the Christianity that some twelve dark Galilean fishermen had managed to spread. But, thanks to God, now no trace remains of his work against the Bible; even Renan admits his insignificance in this regard. In the last century, however, his witty treatises not only found sympathetic echoes in France, but had powerful supporters in Germany, where Frederick II was a particularly great admirer of him. Fanned by the wind of unbelief blowing from the west, the fire, which had already begun in Germany, began to take on terrifying proportions there and is cruelly raging to this day. Strauss, from a scientific point of view, determined the role of those countries that we just talked about in the spread of rationalism at this time. “In England,” he says, “the first attack and manufacture of weapons began; this was precisely the role played by free thinkers or deists; the French carried these weapons to this side of the strait and deftly used them in small but constant skirmishes; finally, in Germany one man silently undertook a proper siege against faithful Zion. France and Germany divided the roles between themselves in this regard, of which the first took on the more pleasant, and the second, the more serious. There Voltaire, here Samuel Reimarus acted as if they were representatives of these two peoples.” At the moment to which we have reached, the German scientist Reimarus, in the silence of his office, secretly from his brothers and society, was already working on one destructive work, and no one had yet suspected what kind of thunderstorm was being prepared on the horizon of Protestantism. But the path was already cleared for him by extremely many of his irresponsible accomplices. Rationalism was making more and more progress. The King of Prussia, Frederick II, himself gave an example of unbelief. His disbelief became infectious. Many repeated after him that Luther only tore half the veil of superstition. The exaggerated reverence with which the accepted text of the sacred books was treated began to diminish: biblical criticism began its work of collecting ancient manuscripts and summaries of various readings. Wetstein published in 1751 an edition of the New Testament in Greek, which appeared in Germany, indicating the variants. He did not yet dare to correct the textus gecertus, but limited himself to only indicating the readings he had collected, but the first step had already been taken. In 1774, Griesbach boldly published the text of the New Testament, arranging it according to the rules of criticism without any attention to ancient editions. This courage, however, was still nothing in comparison with the courage of such, admittedly, little-known and little-respected scientists as Edelman and Bardt. The first of them published the “Confession of Faith” in 1746, where he declared that God is not a person, but the essence of all things; that He cannot be imagined without the world, which is the shadow, the body, the Son of God; The Old Testament is a collection of legends composed by Ezra; The New Testament has no more historical significance and was written only in the time of Constantine the Great. The second proclaimed an even more extreme opinion. He stated in 1784 that Jesus was prepared for his missionary role by a secret society that revealed to Him hitherto unknown means by which He could perform His miraculous healings. But these insignificant critics, whose whole task, in the absence of true learning, was only to make as much noise as possible with strange paradoxes and attract attention to themselves, were not yet particularly dangerous for revelation. Nicolai, the editor of the General German Library, did much more evil. All articles published in this publication were imbued with the spirit of rationalism and written in a tone of cold and often caustic disbelief. From 1765 to 1792, this “library” consisted of 106 volumes, which, without openly attacking Christianity, silently undermined it and quietly infected their many readers with unbelief. And this did not take long to have the most tragic consequences. The pastors no longer dared to preach the gospel, and the public had already formed the opinion that they were obliged to approach the ideal of that sentimental and rationalistic preacher who was depicted by Nicholas in his “Life and Opinions of Master Sebald Notanker.” 7 This master preached to the peasants that they should get up early, recommended that they take better care of their livestock and cultivate their fields in order to become rich, taught them lessons in hygiene and taught them the art of lengthening their lives. 8 By eliminating Christianity from preaching, such thinkers wanted to undermine it by forgetting it as quickly as possible. Such was the general mood of mind in Germany when the famous “Wolfenbüttel Fragments” appeared. There are moments in the history of nations when one book, one word immediately casts a living and often sad light on the entire given situation. She dispels the darkness that envelops everyone; the evil, hitherto hidden, clearly appears before everyone’s eyes, and the public consciousness comes to its senses in horror. What gives special power to the voice heard at such moments is that this voice itself is only an echo, but an echo that in a certain way expresses a general feeling that has hitherto remained unclear and vague. If the “Wolfenbüttel Fragments” aroused a terrible storm among the Protestants of Germany, it was only because it was clearly revealed to them that they were already less Christian than they would like to think. The first part of the famous “Fragments” was published in 1774. This was the time of the emergence of serious attacks by German criticism on the Bible, and the first initiator of the work, which was later completed by Strauss, was the famous German poet and critic Lessing. He enjoyed extremely loud fame in his country, as the fruit of his literary talents and the living movement that he aroused in Russian literature. He enjoyed a very significant influence on modern minds. His philosophical ideas were far from sound; his religious ideas were Christian in name only. Spinoza, as he put it, was “his own man” for him; he accepted a significant part of his views. Christianity, in his opinion, was independent of the Bible, and he believed that it was possible to deny the authority of the holy book without rejecting the fundamentals. But at the same time, he did not consider it timely to communicate his theological views to the public. One accidental circumstance, however, allowed him to publish them under the guise of an unknown person. In 1768, philosophy professor Samuel Reimarus died in Hamburg. He left in his papers a manuscript entitled “Apology for Worshipers of God According to Reason.” His heirs gave a copy of the work to Lessing, then librarian to the Duke of Brunswick in Wolfenbüttel. It was this latter who published the first extract from it in 1774 under the title “Fragments of the Unknown” 9 in the edition of “Documents (Beitrage) for the Promotion of History and Literature” he edited. Five new fragments appeared in 1777 and finally the last one in 1778. They received the name “Wolfenbüttel fragments” in history. This publication of Lessing sounded like a thunderclap in Germany. It declared an open break with the Bible. “Luther freed us from the yoke of tradition,” Lessing himself wrote, “but who will free us from the even more intolerable yoke of the letter?” And so he began this liberation work, becoming the publisher of Samuel Reimarus. And he was not wrong in this regard. All the extracts he made from the Apology were selected with great skill, and in publishing them he observed scientific consistency. He began with a sermon on toleration in favor of deists in 1774, without yet directly attacking revealed religion; then, in 1777, he first took up revelation in general, and then the Old Testament, and only in the latter did he come out against the New Testament. But he extremely outraged the public conscience. Already the first fragment created a strong excitement; but indignation knew no bounds when the public read a book filled with objections to Revelation and to the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. But as if wishing to add fuel to the fire, Lessing, amid general indignation and excitement, published the seventh and last fragment, the most furious of all, known under the title: “The Plan of Jesus and His Disciples.” The “unknown”, by which the majority meant Lessing, not only considered Moses a deceiver, but was not ashamed to make the same accusation against Jesus Christ. However, he, like many of the German rationalists later, did not yet consider himself an apostate from Christianity. On the contrary, according to his statement, he was precisely a true Christian, and it is not rationalists who should leave the church, but, on the contrary, members of the church should become rationalists. By thus proclaiming himself a follower of Christ, he reduced his Master to the level of a simple patriot who did not even hesitate to deceive himself in achieving his goals. Jesus' goal was lofty and noble. He wanted to inspire the Jewish people with new life and give the theocracy its ancient splendor; To achieve this goal, all means seemed good to Him; He entered into an agreement with John the Baptist, who became His accomplice. They agreed to mutually support each other and thus spread their popularity and influence among the masses. The moment appointed for the fulfillment of this plan of Jesus was the Feast of Passover. On the day that we call Palm Sunday, this transformer, with his solemn entry into the capital of Judea, incited the mob against the high priests and leaders of the people; then, with a little thought and with unheard of courage, He violated the greatness of the church. But this was too much for the first time, His jealousy crossed the proper boundaries; He was arrested, convicted and executed. All His majestic plans for the social revival of the Jewish people were thus to be dashed against an obstacle that He did not foresee, namely the cross. Then He repented of His undertaking and died, complaining that He had been abandoned by God. From the critical situation in which His execution placed the apostles, they did not know how to extricate themselves otherwise than by inventing the story of His resurrection and spiritualizing His teaching about the kingdom of God. With greater courage, as can be seen from this, it is no longer possible to deny the authority of Holy Scripture and faith in it. To bring courage to the point of denying even the sincerity of Jesus Christ - this already exceeded all boundaries. In Germany at that time they were not yet accustomed to hearing such blasphemy. The deeper the reverence for the Word of God at that time, the greater the confusion, especially when such thoughts came from such a famous person as Lessing. Since the founding of Christianity, religion has never been so brutally attacked and insulted 10 . The reaction was therefore stormy. Furious screams rose from all sides. The rationalists themselves, aware of how the immoderate language of the fragments undermined their cause, strongly rebelled against it. Zemler, considered their leader, wrote that Lessing deserved to be imprisoned in a madhouse. 3. Denial of the supernatural. The evil produced by Lessing's publication, however, would not have been particularly great if the rationalists, when the first outburst of indignation had calmed down, had not considered themselves obliged to make more or less important concessions in favor of Christianity. Goetze spoke out against Lessing; although he had, of course, less genius than his terrible opponent, he rightly saw, when he removed the mask from the plans of the Wolfenbüttel librarian, the danger of such attempts and exposed to the rationalists that once they undermine the supernatural meaning of the Bible, there would be little left of Christianity. Now no one seriously disputes that this apologist did not understand Lessing's ideas with sufficient thoroughness and clarity. But he retains the important merit that he was the first to draw attention to the danger that threatened Christianity. The guard, who, seeing the Sovereign's palace engulfed in flames, shouted “fire,” was not mistaken in this regard and did not mistake the mere reflection of the dawn for a fire, because this fire continues even now, although Lessing and his Successors tried to calm the fire. Meanwhile, those who had already been shaken in their faith by reading the works of the deists saw that some of the objections of the “unknown” remained unrefuted. They thought that Christianity could no longer be saved except through a special kind of deal, namely the merciless expulsion of everything that criticism did not allow to retain, reducing it, in a word, to an indefinite feeling, to a system without dogmas and without authority. Religion, in their view, is something completely different from theology; attacking theology does not at all mean attacking religion. In order to be a Christian, everyone must believe only what his own heart tells him. That which makes us the best, that which elevates the soul, is the true religion of Christ. It is necessary to preach only such teachings as contribute to our moral improvement. What edifies us in the Bible is inspired by God, and edification and inspiration are one and the same thing. The only thing that comes from God is that which makes us virtuous. Those who expressed such opinions, however, did not notice that, under the pretext of saving Christianity, they were killing it. Strauss explained this very well later to these inconsistent sophists. Why should I obey the Bible if it is not the true Word of God? With a completely incomprehensible blindness, they refuted Christianity, making a single concession to it, which, in essence, Lessing also allowed, precisely a concession that constituted the grossest of the consequences entailing a complete negation of Christianity. They precisely agreed with Reimarus that the Bible is only a human work and should be considered in exactly the same way as all other literary works. In this way, they completely smoothed out the hitherto generally accepted distinction between sacred books and ordinary books, and at the same time, of course, rejected the doctrine of inspiration. They thought that they would save Christianity by making it independent of Holy Scripture. Lessing preached and demanded nothing else but this. “The letter is not the spirit,” he wrote, “and the Bible is not a religion.” Consequently, objections to the letter and the Bible are not yet objections to the spirit and religion. A religion is not true because the evangelical apostles preached it, but they preached it because it is true. Inner truth itself must serve as a guarantee of written traditions, and it is not written traditions that could ever give to this truth something that is not actually there. Because of this, the truth depends on the internal judgment of everyone; it is subject to arbitrariness and all fluctuations of the human spirit. If the monuments on which a religion rests are not inspired by God, then it is nothing. The denial of the inspiration of the holy books was the most important point that stood out at that time on the path of denying Christianity. From this time on, the historical authority of the books of the Old and New Testaments no longer rests on divine testimony, but solely on the assessment of people. The rationalists could not help but feel great confusion at the result to which they had necessarily arrived. How can the historical character of all parts of the Bible be protected? It is filled with wonderful stories. If God himself did not guarantee us the truth, then how to prove it? Do these stories confuse the mind? Aren't they contrary to experience? These questions necessarily forced us to reject miracles, just as they forced us to reject inspiration. And in this way, by the force of things, the rationalists came to a complete denial of everything supernatural. The exponent of this stage in relation to rationalism towards the Bible was Eichhorn (1752 - 1827). He himself conveys the deep impression that reading the Wolfenbüttel Fragments made on his soul. The accusations of deception brought against the sacred Writers deeply outraged his spirit, because where else could one find irresistible sincerity and honesty after this? But it seemed impossible to him to allow God's direct intervention in the history of the Old Testament. “Among all ancient peoples,” he said, “everything that was inexplicable, extraordinary, belonged to the Divine; the sages of all countries were in communication with higher beings. When we read about such events from civilian writers, we consider them false or legendary; but why do we make the only exception for the Jews?” - The answer to this is simple: if we make such an exception, it is because the books telling about such miracles in Israel are not the same as outside it, that Jewish sources are authentic, while others are not authentic. But Eichhorn did not take this essential difference into account; it seemed to him that justice obliged him to treat the children of Israel in exactly the same way as the rest of humanity. And this thus led him to deny the miracle. This was the second step on the path of rationalism in its relation to the Bible. Having rejected the inspiration of the sacred books, he, with logical necessity, equally began to reject all miraculous works. These are the two points from which the rationalists do not deviate and which from that time on constitute, as it were, the two main tenets of their negative creed; they consider these points to be the unshakable foundations of their system and do not even consider themselves obliged to substantiate them with evidence. Eichhorn, however, felt how the denial of the supernatural seemed irreconcilable with the authenticity of the sacred books. He did not yet think of denying, or at least did not yet dare to dispute, this last truth, which Reimarus did not attack. Rejecting miracles, Eichhorn seemed to take the side of the author of the Fragments and admitted that the narrators of such events were deceivers. But it seemed to him that the very enormity of this conclusion was sufficient to refute it. It is impossible, he says, not to be frightened by such an assumption. How! Could it be that the greatest people of the first centuries, who had such a saving influence on humanity, were all deceivers, without arousing suspicion in their contemporaries! No, that's impossible. The biblical writers did not deceive us; but at the same time, we must admit,” he added, “we did not understand them well.” If they spoke with the philosophical precision of our time, it would be impossible to see in their language an affirmation of the actual intervention of God, which would be a completely false assumption; but when they tell us about absolutely miraculous things and attribute it to God, they simply speak naively, artlessly, without any intent, considering only the ideas and way of expression of antiquity. We only have to translate the language of the first centuries into modern language, and miracles will completely disappear, just as any darkness disappears. Zemler, not yet having in mind the use that later began to be made of his theory, already in 1760 paved the way for this natural explanation of the supernatural. On the occasion of the illness of one poor woman in the vicinity of Württemberg, whom some theologians considered to be possessed by a demon, Zemler published an essay entitled: “On the demon-possessed mentioned in the New Testament.” He argued in it that those who are depicted in the Gospels as possessed were simply sick, fitful and frenzied. Jesus Christ and the apostles treated them as victims of the devil’s malice, only taking into account the language of the times. Assimilating and generalizing this principle of Zemler, Eichhorn explained all the miracles of the Old Testament with allegories and an eastern way of speech. The story of the creation of Adam, as it is told in the Book of Genesis, according to his explanation, is only a painted picture of the first appearance of man on earth. The sacred writer says that Eve was created from the rib of her husband because the latter had a “dream” that he was divided into two. The fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil contained poison that slowly led to death. The voice of God that frightened our forefathers when they ate the poisoned fruit was simply the sound of thunder 11 and so on. Eichhorn explained most of the miracles of the Old Testament in a similar way. He still had enough reverence not to apply a similar explanation to the Gospels; but what he did not dare to do, others who were more daring did without any embarrassment. The founder of the natural explanation of miracles himself apparently finally realized that if you erase everything supernatural from the life of Jesus Christ, then there will be nothing great left in it. Eichhorn's students did not stop at the position taken by their teacher and joined the views of Lessing. In the end, they say with him, we do not need miracles in order to believe in Christianity. People were mistaken in making the truths of religion hitherto dependent on supernatural facts. We can directly understand the truth. Why should we limit ourselves in recognizing the truth to the fact that certain facts connected with it must necessarily be considered true, while we see that these facts, at least with the miraculous character that is falsely attributed to them, are completely useless? And thus they even came to the assumption that Christianity is independent of the opinions that one may have regarding the person of its Founder. “It is of little use,” they repeated with Herder, whose vague and shifting faith contributed greatly to the development of rationalism, “it is of little benefit to Christ if His name is remembered in endless litanies. He who knows how to distinguish gold from clay will honor this hero of humanity, our benefactor, as He should be honored, that is, by keeping silent about His person and imitating Him.” In essence, the scientist Pavlus (1761 - 1850) expressed himself in exactly the same way about the face of Jesus Christ. “Doctor Paulus was the first,” says Strauss, “to acquire the full glory of the Christian Euhemerus. The end of the last century and the beginning of the present were the time of the appearance of numerous writings that offered a natural explanation for miracles; but the classic monuments of this school are, as we know, the interpretations of the Gospel of Paulus and the “Life of Jesus,” which was later written by the same author.” Pavlus, a student of Spinoza and Kant, was even more decisively hostile to miracles than his predecessor Eichhorn. It was he, so to speak, who formulated the theory of the denial of miracles and gave it that definite form that was subsequently adopted by Strauss and all modern rationalists. In his opinion, every fact, the causes of which, internal or external, cannot be reduced to the ordinary laws of history, is nothing and cannot be considered accomplished. The omnipotence, wisdom and goodness of God are manifested through the ordinary order of nature, and not through the abolition of its laws. The most inexplicable violation of the laws of the world can neither confirm nor weaken a known truth. The existence of any dogma cannot be based on a healing, no matter how extraordinary it may be. “These,” says Strauss, “are the positive rules that Paulus set forth and applied and which place his Commentary above many other works of the same kind, not only modern, but also subsequent ones.” The main representative of the natural explanation of the miracle, therefore, denies it a priorii and without any evidence, as Eichhorn already did, as everyone who followed him did, proving with all this his powerlessness to put forward a more or less strong argument against faith in the supernatural - that faith that lies in the depths of the human heart and has an unshakable basis for itself in the omnipotence of God. In Pavlus's theory against miracles one can clearly see the influence of the ideas of Kant, of whom he was a clear adherent. The philosophical systems that appeared in Germany at the end of the last and at the beginning of the present centuries generally had a more significant influence on biblical criticism than is usually thought. Both walked a parallel path, mutually inspiring and supporting each other. Lessing's doubts led to the radical denials of Strauss, Kant's skepticism led to Hegel's pantheism, to the atheism of Feuerbach and Schopenhauer. The heads of philosophical schools considered it their duty to clearly express their views on religious issues. Kant, among others, wrote a book: “On Religion within the Limits of Pure Reason.” 12 There he pursues the idea that natural religion is the only true, the only universal. The religions that he calls revealed are nothing more than human attempts to provide external authority for natural religion. Study of historical issues associated with revealed religion, e.g. the life of its founder, the miracles and prophecies on which it thinks to base its authority - such a study is completely useless: the only point worthy of attention is morality. The Koenigsberg philosopher imagined that in this way all the difficulties raised by biblical criticism would be eliminated. This is precisely what is known as Kant’s “moral interpretation.” 13 Pavlus, fully accepting his teacher’s philosophical ideas about miracles, did not, however, consider it possible to suppress history in such a way; he thought that it was necessary to naturally explain the wonderful facts of the New Testament, as Eichhorn explained the facts of the Old Testament, nevertheless he modified the method of the latter, and replaced his “historical interpretation” with a “psychological” interpretation. In the miracles of the Gospels it was difficult to see only metaphors or oriental hyperboles. It seemed to Paulus that he could deprive them of their supernatural character by attributing the supernatural not to the events of the life of Jesus, not to His actions, but to the spirit or imagination of those who spoke about them, or those who interpreted them: all the actions in the life of Jesus are completely natural, but either His historians or their interpreters falsely gave them a wonderful connotation. Paulus's "Commentary" and his "Life of Jesus" had as their goal only the application of this theory. Using the resources of his inexhaustible imagination, he tried to reduce all the supernatural facts told by the evangelists to the level of the most ordinary events. The biographers of Jesus, says Pavlus, seeing things as they really were, essentially tell much less about miracles than they usually think, and only the most incredible things were mistaken for extraordinary facts. In stories where they thought to see a violation of the laws of nature, the miracle is most often an invention of the exegete, and not the testimony of the narrator. Eg. interpreters of the Evangelist John say that at the wedding in Cana in Galilee, Jesus turned water into wine. This is simply an interpreter's mistake! The Jews had a custom of bringing wine or oil to newlyweds as wedding gifts. Jesus, having brought five new disciples to Cana without an invitation, whom He had just invited to follow Him, foresaw that there would be a shortage of wine, and, in view of this, He ordered them to bring with them a certain amount of wine. Meanwhile, “as a joke,” He kept his gift a secret until the moment when there really was a shortage of wine. Then, to have fun, He ordered water to be poured into one waterpot, and the other waterpots contained the wine he had brought. The glory that He revealed, as St. John, was only that He appeared as such a merry fellow at the wedding. 14 All the gospel miracles are explained by Paulus in a similar way, that is, that a miraculous character is attributed to them either by the apostles or their interpreters. So, according to the testimony of St. Matthew, the Savior, descending from the Mount of Beatitudes, met a leper who, in response to his request for healing, was actually healed. St. says the same thing. Luke and Mark. According to Paulus, the sick man did not ask Jesus for healing, but only for an investigation of his condition. Jesus expressed his willingness to do this and, after a considerable pause, stretched out his hand to feel it, trying at the same time not to come into contact with it, so as not to contract the disease. The study found a profuse eruption of matter, which was a sign that the disease was curable and that the skin had begun to clear. From this Jesus concluded that the disease was no longer contagious, and said to him: cleanse yourself. Thus, He was not a miracle worker, but a simple doctor. In healing the deaf and dumb, He proved, according to Pavlus, his experience as a surgeon. St. Mark narrates that Christ healed a deaf-mute man in Decapolis, saying to him: “Ephphatha, that is, open.” Pavlyus assures that this was done through a special surgical operation and a special powder, which, after taking the patient aside, was applied to his ears. 15 The weakness of such purely puerile explanations is self-evident, and Strauss, who examined them in detail in his Life of Jesus, did them full justice, clearly showing their utter inconsistency. “According to Pavlus,” says Strauss, “criticism always has the right to assume what the documents might have omitted as self-evident; and what is understandable by itself is natural; because the supernatural is not implied by itself, and, therefore, cannot be assumed where it is not deliberately indicated. The disadvantage of such logic is obvious: the gospel stories have miracles as their main theme, and a supernatural cause not only should not be eliminated, but should be assumed even when it is not formally indicated.” In spite of all its weakness, the natural explanation of miracles is something so tempting to the imagination that it was accepted in Germany with an enthusiasm and enthusiasm that does little credit to the human mind. The books inspired by it were numerous; they began to appear from all sides. Even Schiller, in his “History Course” in Jena, decisively adopted it to explain to his listeners the messenger of Moses, and, although it had long since fallen under the blows of ridicule, for some minds it continued to retain such an irresistible attractiveness and its applicability in many respects is so convenient that many critics still continue to resort to it, both in Germany and in other countries (such as Renan in France). While Paulus was occupying the attention of rationalistic Germany with his natural explanations of miracles, a new theory was being quietly developed, which was destined to replace his own theory, and which turned out to be much more dangerous to faith. This is precisely a mythical theory. This latter theory has this in common with its predecessor, that it equally denies the supernatural, but in all other respects it differs from it. While the former accepted the historical character of the holy books and limited itself only to depriving biblical miracles of their divine aura, in order to reduce them to the level of natural facts, the new theory went much further and relegated miracles to the level of fables or, as it put it, myths, and at the same time, while the first still recognized the authenticity of St. Scripture, the second one did not believe in her anymore. From this it is self-evident how the disease of rationalism gradually intensified and developed. Moving from denial to denial, from destruction to destruction, unbelief was soon to see that nothing remained for it from the sacred edifice of the Christian revelation. Having taken the slippery path of doubt, the rationalist walks non-stop, unable to stop. In the mythical as in the natural explanation of the miracle, the attack was at first directed only against the Old Testament, without touching the New. Naturally the Pentateuch should have received the first blows. It constitutes, as it were, an introduction to the sacred books and thereby first of all attracts attention; in addition, by its antiquity and the nature of its stories, it apparently provides more reasons for interpretation by mythologists than any other part of the Bible. Mythologists were the first to deny the authenticity of the Pentateuch; they had predecessors in the first centuries of the church: some Gnostics and some pagans had already expressed doubts regarding the Mosaic origin of the first five books of Holy Scripture, but their voice did not find an echo for a long time, and the general tradition did not encounter any contradiction. In the 12th century, the famous Jewish rabbi Aben Ezra expressed suspicions about certain places; but he did not at the same time extend them to the entire Pentateuch, as was often mistakenly repeated after Spinoza, who wanted to create predecessors for himself. At the beginning of Protestantism, Karlstadt, regarding the story of the death of Moses in Deuteronomy, raised the question (1520) whether the five books of the Pentateuch were written by the lawgiver of the Jews himself. At that time no one paid attention to this emerging doubt. In 1574, a Belgian, Andrew Mazius, in his Commentary on the Book of Joshua, trying to make this assumption more plausible, referred to the Talmud's remark about the secret participation that befell Ezra in the compilation of the Pentateuch. These were the first preludes to the attack. In the 17th century, hostility intensified. The English philosopher Thomas Hobbes formally questioned whether Moses ever wrote the books attributed to him, and in doing so relied on the same arguments expressed in the 19th century by Vater and DeWette. He reveals a number of those who expressly began to deny the Mosaic origin of the Pentateuch. The evidence that Hobbes gave in favor of his opinion was as follows. The author of the Pentateuch says that "the Canaanites then dwelt" in Palestine; he quotes from the book of the Armies of the Lord and claims that no one knows where Moses is buried. Moses obviously could not speak like that, because the Canaanites also lived in his time in the Promised Land; he could not quote the book that told of his exploits; finally, he could not talk about his death. Hence these books are called the Pentateuch of Moses, not because they were written by him, but because they speak about him, just as, for example. give the title “Skandenberg’s History” to the story of this hero, although he is by no means the author of this “History”. Hobbes in another place, however, admits that Moses wrote all that part of the Pentateuch that is generally attributed to him. About the same time (1655), a Frenchman, Isaac Peyrer, the inventor of the pre-Adamite theory, tried to weaken the authority of the book of Genesis, which was not favorable to his system of the existence of people before Adam, and for this purpose declared that Moses was not the author of this book. According to him, Adam of the book of Genesis is only the forefather of the Jews; the story of creation, original sin, the flood and everything else refers only to the sons of Abraham, not to humanity. He disputes the Mosaic origin of the Pentateuch with arguments similar to those of Hobbes. A stronger opponent of the authenticity of the Pentateuch was Spinoza. In his “Theological-Political Treatise” (1670), compiling an almost complete list of all the places that served as a pretext for polemics for two centuries, he makes the following conclusion: “from all these places it is clearer than day that the Pentateuch was not written by Moses, but by another writer who lived several centuries later than him.” The attacks of the Jewish philosopher, however, made less noise at the time they appeared than the attacks of the French Oratorian, Richard Simon. Eight years after the publication of Spinoza's Treatise, this writer, often called the "founder of biblical criticism," published his famous Critical History of the Old Testament. His opinion about the origin of the book of Moses is peculiar; Bossuet considered it so dangerous that he prompted Chancellor Tellier and the Chief of Police to ban the book. Simon suggests that Moses instituted special archivists or scribes whose duty it was to record the most important events. These scribes were divinely inspired. Subsequent prophets revised these stories several times before the time of Ezra or even later, adding, modifying, shortening or expanding the content as they saw fit. This is where noticeable disagreements arise. In addition, since they wrote on separate scrolls or sheets, it happened that these scrolls were mixed with each other, hence the great confusion in the sequence of stories. This opinion, of course, is patently arbitrary, and it would be difficult to further distort the spirit and history of Jewish literature. Meanwhile, it contains an idea that has become very popular in our time, and has found an eloquent panegyrist in the person of Renan, who among other things says in praise of its inventor that “the basic principle of criticism of sacred anonymous books, a principle applicable to almost all the literature of the East, is developed to perfection by him. The idea of ​​altering texts and successive entries replaces his old reasoning about authenticity. The text, from his point of view, is no longer something immutable, so it must be considered either genuine or apocryphal, accepted or denied completely. This is an organic body that grows according to known laws and from time to time is transformed and modified, without ceasing to be the same.” The French Oratorian would of course refuse these praises, since he formally believes in the inspiration of all Writers of sacred books; but nevertheless it is true that he was the first to express the opinion, now universally accepted by rationalists, that the Pentateuch is the fruit of the labor and alterations of several generations of writers. Although he hesitated in his conclusions, although he attributed more and less to Moses, especially in the composition of the book of Genesis, the fact nevertheless remains undoubted that he opened the way for negative criticism in this direction. The question of the authenticity of the Pentateuch was then raised by German mythologists. From the time of the work of Richard Simon to the work of the mythical school on the question of the books of Moses, only one critical work has appeared that deserves mention, namely the work of Jean Astruc: “On the composition of the book of Genesis.” 17 Jean Astruc's father, a Protestant pastor, converted to Rome. Catholicism following the repeal of the Edict of Nantes. Jean himself always professed Roman Catholicism. He became famous for his medical knowledge; in 1743 he was assigned to the medical faculty in Paris and took an active part in its works. Devoting himself entirely to science, he studied St. It was with Scripture that he made the original discovery, which gave his name more fame than that which he acquired with his therapeutic knowledge. Struck by the correctness with which God was called by different names in different chapters of the Book of Genesis, he, on the basis of this observation, built a whole system according to which Moses was rather a compiler than a writer of the first book of the Pentateuch. Astruc begins by noting that Moses is speaking about events that occurred nearly 2,500 years before him. The knowledge of these events was not revealed to him, he says; he achieved it through written tradition, that is, through stories that came to him in writing. Many authors already held this opinion before him. The arguments on which he is based consist in those repetitions that are noticed in the first book of the Pentateuch, what he calls “antichronisms” or “perversions of chronological order,” and in general the varied use of the name of God in different parts of the book of Genesis. This was Astruc's main argument, and he used it with great skill. Here's how he explains it: “In the Hebrew text of Genesis, God is primarily designated by two different names. The first is the name Elohim... All translations render it the same way: the translation of the seventy (LXX) with the word Θεός, the Vulgate Deus, and all the French translations made from the Vulgate with the word Dieu... Another name for God is Jehovah... The Jews did not pronounce this name out of reverence for it and instead read the name Adanai. This name "Adanai", meaning "Lord" in Hebrew, was read by the seventy translators and the author of the Vulgate after the example of the Jews, and that is why they constantly translated the word "Jehovah" seventy (LXX) by the word Κύριος, Vulgate Dominus, and all the French translations, following the Vulgate, used the word Seigneur... One might think that these two names "Elohim" and "Jehovah" are used indifferently in the same places in the Book of Genesis, as synonymous terms, and are adopted for the sake of variety of syllable; but such an opinion would be a mistake. These words are never mixed together: there are whole chapters where God is always called "Elohim" and never "Jehovah"; and on the contrary, there are others, and at least as many of them, where God is given only the name “Jehovah” and is never given the name “Elohim.” If Moses himself composed the Book of Genesis, this peculiar and strange variation would have to be attributed to him. But can one imagine that he would have been so careless in compiling such an important book as the Book of Genesis? Can any parallel example be pointed out, and can a fault be attributed to Moses without proof which no other writer would admit? Is it not more natural, on the contrary, to explain this variation by supposing, as we do, that the Book of Genesis is composed of two or three records, bound and stitched together from separate passages of authors, of which each gave the same name to God, but a different name, one the name Elohim, and the others the name Jehovah, or Jehovah-Elohim? 18 This is the famous origin of the distinction between the places of the Elohists and the Jehovahists in the Book of Genesis, from which Astruc concluded the existence of two original records. This theory played an extremely important role among rationalists in their struggle against the authenticity of the Pentateuch. This distinction is still considered one of the main and most justified points of departure in this difficult work of criticism of the first five books of the Bible. It must be noted, however, that there are two important differences between Astruc's opinion and the opinion of unbelieving critics. The first is that the French physician expressively assumed the Mosaic origin of the Pentateuch: “it all comes down,” he says, “to the proof that Moses must be the author of the Book of Genesis, and he alone can be it.” The second difference is that he limits his hypothesis to Genesis only. Meanwhile, Writers of our time openly declare that Astruc did not sincerely believe in the authenticity of the Pentateuch. But we do not see on what basis one can suspect him of lying. Be that as it may, however, his book was compiled with great care, and the originality of his research could not fail to attract the attention of German scientists, where rationalism began to grow. And the German scholars, one after another, began to develop Astruc's theory and to question the Mosaic origin of various parts of the Pentateuch, each successive writer going a step further against the previous one. In 1795, Georg Bauer expressed the opinion that the Pentateuch contained only a few passages of Mosaic origin. This Bauer (1755 - 1806), who was alternately a professor at Heidelberg and Altorf, was the foremost rationalist of his time. His writings were distinguished more by their courage than by their dignity, since they were superficial, confused and written without sufficient deliberation. Nevertheless, he exerted considerable influence, not because he denied the Mosaic origin of the Pentateuch, but because he was one of the first scholars to apply a mythical interpretation to the Old Testament. He compiled a major work on this subject in two volumes. Although Eichhorn preceded him on this path, it was his “Jewish Mythology” that especially drew the attention of minds to the role that could be extracted from the world in the interpretation of the Old Testament. Eichhorn spoke fearfully; Bauer was already performing boldly, like Reimarus. “A few years ago,” he says, “the mythology of the Old and New Testaments could have confused readers by its very name; but now, I think, compiling Jewish mythology is as natural as compiling Greek or Roman mythology.” And that's exactly what he did. He placed most of the biblical facts on the same level as Greek and Roman fables. His statements were considered exaggerated, but nevertheless it was assumed that several pearls could be extracted from this garbage. At this time, and in general, there was a strong inclination towards mythism. Since 1783, Christian Gottlob (1729 - 1812), a professor at Göttingen, expressed a position that later became famous: “every history and every philosophy of the ancients has its source in myth.” By myth he meant a mythological fable. In his eyes, mythology is only a science about nature and man, deliberately covered with more or less transparent veils. Gottlob had a whole school. Kreutzer (1771 – 1858) explained paganism as religious symbolism, under which an older and purer faith was hidden. Gottfried Müller explained mythology as the product of the interaction of two factors: the real and the ideal, and tried to trace the origin of several myths to the historical period. Friedrich Wolf (1759 - 1824), expanding this theory, applied it to the poems of Homer; he denied the existence of a poet and argued that the Iliad and Odyssey not only did not belong to the same author, but were only a collection of poems composed by various rhapsodists and collected during the time of Pericles. Niebuhr (1776 - 1831) applied the same process to Roman history, but often, despite all his insight and his talents, he fell into error and mistook his assumptions for reality. It is not surprising, in view of this general passion, that among theologians there were also several who, inspired by this example, tried to apply the myth to the explanation of the Old Testament. Myth represented an easy and convenient means of excluding from Holy Scripture everything that had a miraculous character, so that with its help, rationalist theologians thought, it was finally possible to achieve the desired goal in explaining the miracle, where Eichhorn and Pavlus had completely failed. It is impossible to say with Reimarus that the miraculous stories of Holy Scripture constitute only a false fabrication, because they carry too obvious a tone of sincerity; one cannot also say with Pavlus that these are natural facts, because this would mean doing blatant violence to the texts. The myth, meanwhile, reconciled all this; it does not force one to suspect the sincerity of the narrators, it does not force one to give documents a meaning other than the one they represent. You just need to delve into the essence. Myth is “the presentation of a fact or thought, true, under a historical form, but under such a form as was determined by the spirit and full of imagination, the symbolic language of antiquity.” It is enough to establish its existence in this way in order to investigate later, if possible, what contributed to its origin. From here it is self-evident that the mythical explanation is much easier than the natural explanation. According to this latter, the story of the angels saving Lot during the destruction of Sodom, for example. is explained as follows. These angels were simple travelers. They were received with great honor by Abraham and came to Lot with a recommendation from their uncle. The inhabitants of Sodom were at that time at war with Chedorlaomer. Fearing that these travelers might turn out to be spies, they wanted to kill them. Lot could only save his guests by fleeing with them. As if by some strange accident, the city collapsed on the same night, and these strangers, who left the city just before the disaster that befell it, were, as a result, mistaken for divine messengers. Needless to say, how much such an interpretation contradicts the text of the Book of Genesis. Therefore, mythologists, like De-Wette, interpreted this fact completely differently. “The Dead Sea basin was once, according to legend, a fertile valley covered with populous cities. This terrible change was brought about by an earthquake, but from the ordinary point of view of antiquity, the inhabitants of these cities, of course, deserved such a fate by their sins. As a result, the most disgusting deeds were attributed to them... Lot, on the other hand, says, lived in Sodom, but since he escaped death along with the wicked, he had to explain how Jehovah saved him. Thus, tradition, in its inexhaustible fertility, and the narrators, with their poetic spirit, created the myth that we are talking about and to which the rules of neither history nor criticism can certainly be applied.” To facilitate the applicability of their system, mythologists began to distinguish three types of myths. There are historical myths, that is, stories about actual events, but only embellished by ancient opinion, which confused the divine with the human, the natural with the supernatural; There are also philosophical myths, that is, those in which a simple thought, speculation or modern idea is contained... These two types of myths can be mixed with each other or, with poetic decoration, can become poetic myths, where the original fact and the original idea almost completely disappear under the embellishments of a rich imagination. Here is an example of a historical myth as we find it in Bauer. One day Abraham, examining the religious myths of the peoples of his neighbors, noticed that some sacrificed their children on the altars of their deities. Soon after this it occurred to him that perhaps it would not be superfluous to give Jehovah his God a tangible proof of his reverence and sacrifice to Him his dear son, the only son that Sarah had ever given him. Overwhelmed by this thought, which haunted him relentlessly, he fell asleep. And so he sees a dream in which the great godly nature of this deed once again appears to him. Meanwhile, according to the view of those ancient times, sleep was a kind of commandment. As a result, Abraham immediately considered it his duty to fulfill this suggestion, but at that moment, when he had already raised the knife over Isaac, he noticed a ram. Thinking therefore that God, pleased with his voluntary sacrifice, had sent this ram for sacrifice instead of Isaac, he sacrificed him. The history of creation, according to the views of mythologists, is a philosophical myth: it is the work of a sage who tried to imagine the origin of the world under such a form under which the memory of it could be most strongly imprinted. The story of the flood is a mixed or historical-philosophical myth. On the occasion of a great flood that destroyed all people except one family, the ancient sages tried to find the cause of this event, and from here all sorts of assumptions, legends and myths arose. Finally, the vision of the seraphim in the prophet Isaiah is supposedly a poetic myth. 19 The mythical system necessarily forced its adherents to formally deny the authenticity of Holy Scripture. A myth is not a fable invented for pleasure; it is an unconscious product of time, which was formed little by little over the centuries, passing from mouth to mouth, and, therefore, could not be committed to writing by a witness and eyewitness of the very events that it serves as a reflection. It is necessarily added after them. The Pentateuch in particular cannot be the work of Moses, because if he himself told about the crossing of the Red Sea, the story of manna or water flowing from a rock, then it would be impossible to consider these stories as myths. The early mythologists therefore adopted current systems of criticism directed against the authenticity of the first books of the Bible. And this is precisely what Bauer has already done, and after him, Vater and DeWette, the two main representatives of mythism in its application to the Old Testament, also did. Vater (1771 - 1826) taught Oriental languages ​​at various German universities and gained quite a reputation as a philologist, especially for his continuation of Mithridates, begun by Adelung, but he is most interesting to us as a commentator on the Pentateuch. Brought up on the principles of the school of Kant and rationalism, he did not believe in the supernatural; he was of the opinion that the Pentateuch is only a collection of fragments, and tried to explain the miraculous stories in it by myth. While denying the authenticity of the Pentateuch, he reasoned in this way. The true nature of the stories of the Pentateuch cannot be understood otherwise than by assuming that they did not come from eyewitnesses, but came to us through a whole series of traditions. Then, of course, it will not be surprising to find in them obvious traces of a subsequent era, exaggerations in numbers, along with other inaccuracies and contradictions; It will not be surprising to encounter some darkness there regarding many events and concepts, such as. in that the clothes of the Israelites did not wear out when passing through the desert. Vater even asserts that the Pentateuch cannot be completely deprived of the miraculous, without doing violence to the original intention of the writers, although in the presentation of the events themselves it is necessary to attribute a greater role to subsequent tradition. Vater refers to the difference between the places of the Elohists and the Jehovahists in proving that these parts belong to different writers, and thinks that the books attributed to Moses received their final form no earlier than the period of the Babylonian captivity. These opinions about the Pentateuch and about mythism created a significant sensation in Protestant Germany; meanwhile, the influence they produced was, however, much less than that produced by William De Wette, the main and most capable representative of mythical interpretation in its application to the Old Testament. De Wette spent his childhood in Weimar, which then became famous as the residence of the greatest writers that Germany was proud of at that time. He received his education in Vienna and among his teachers was Paulus, the author of a natural explanation of the Gospel miracles. The young scientist himself told how he was at first amazed by the teachings of Paulus, but soon felt the unsatisfactory nature of this teaching and then decided to apply Wolff’s ideas to the Pentateuch. And this is how he became a distributor of mythism in Germany. Recognizing the weakness of the natural mode of explanation in relation to the miraculous events related in the Bible, he began to explain them with the help of myth and thereby dealt a mortal blow to the system of his former teacher. Meanwhile, just as Eichhorn limited himself to the Old Testament and did not dare to lay his hand on the New Testament, De Wette also did not apply his theories to the Gospels. Only Strauss had already decided to complete his destructive work at this point, just as Pavlus completed the work of Eichhorn. In 1805, DeWette published a dissertation in which he argued that Deuteronomy was not written by the same hand that wrote the first four books of the Pentateuch. 20 Subsequently, in 1806, he published an even more important work, namely his “Introduction to the Old Testament.” This work can be considered his manifesto in matters of biblical criticism. He made an extremely deep impression in Germany because of the novelty of his ideas and the new direction he was taking with regard to the essence of the sacred books. The first point from which he left in his new “Introduction” was the abandonment of traditional data regarding the origin of the books of the Old Testament. In his opinion, we have no external means of verifying the historical accuracy of the facts they relate; All external sources of information are absent for us. Therefore, to determine the meaning of their testimony, we must resort to internal criticism, i.e. to the study of the very contents of these books. This principle of De Wette has become the “constituent charter” of modern criticism, so that some even call it the dogma of rationalism, despite all its complexity. – If you look at the essence of this theory, then the position that we do not have any document, no worthy tradition in order to verify the books of the Old Testament outside of these books themselves will immediately turn out to be completely false. This statement was already false in 1806, but it seems even more false now, when the latest archaeological discoveries have given us many means of verification. Internal criticism, without a doubt, deserves to be given a place in biblical exegesis, but it should not exclude external criticism, which always has the right to the first and main role. The origin of a known creation is a fact that must be confirmed by known evidence. To eliminate tradition when discussing historical issues is to close your eyes so as not to see, to substitute a dream for reality. Nothing contributes more to arbitrariness and all kinds of fabrications of the imagination than internal criticism, because it is often the fruit of purely subjective impressions. The completely opposite results to which it leads from different exegetes, and even from the same exegete treating the same subject at different moments, serve as obvious proof of its uncertainty and insufficiency. She is like a weather vane that turns in all directions with the flow of the wind. Meanwhile, based on these principles, De Wette denied the Mosaic origin of the Pentateuch. He understood very well that in order to be able to present the events narrated in the Book of Exodus as myths, it was necessary to first prove that they were not narrated by Moses, a contemporary and participant in the events being narrated. In order to reject the authenticity of the most ancient biblical books, he likened them to the poems of Homer and treated them in the same way as Wolf treated the Iliad and Odyssey. The Pentateuch for him is the national epic of the Jews. Following the example of Wolf, he breaks it down into various fragments, independent of one another, and assumes that they were only joined much later by different hands in order to form them into one whole. Not content with denying that Moses edited the Pentateuch attributed to him, he admits various collectors. Thus, the author who published the Book of Leviticus, in his opinion, probably lived later than the one who published the Book of Exodus. The passages that make up the Book of Numbers were collected as supplements to previous collections. Deuteronomy appeared after all, a little before the captivity of Babylon, during the reign of King Josiah. The most ancient passages of the Pentateuch can be traced back to the time of David. Since the time of DeWette, arbitrary systems that have been invented regarding the origin of the Pentateuch have become very numerous: various scientists have modified its views in many details and even on essential points, but the denial of the authenticity of the books of Moses and the admission of many authors has become one of the main foundations of rationalistic interpretation. The “Introduction” of this innovative theologian was a great success. It owed this success not only to the negative ideas that it presented, but also to the way they were presented. As much as it was radical in its essence, it was just as moderate and respectful in its form. De Wette argued that Holy Scripture has always been a holy and sacred book for him, even in its mythical elements. “Truth,” he says, “is the majestic law of history, and love of truth is the majestic law for the historian. But this truth is an ideal. It is found not only in material precision, but also exists in the poetic expression of noble ideas borrowed from history. There is poetry in history, and this poetry of history is often more wonderful and more beautiful than the poetry itself.” So he wanted to save and preserve the truth of the books of the Old Testament, despite the myths that he thought he was discovering in them. In 1807, De Wette was appointed professor of theology in Heidelberg, and there he still found Pavlus. It was then that he composed his “Commentary on the Psalms,” the only work of this kind on the Old Testament that ever came from his pen. Entirely carried away by negative criticism, he rejected the majority of the psalms that bear his name as belonging to David and attributed them to a later era; and at the same time, he certainly no longer attributed the prophetic psalms to the Messiah. In 1810, De Wette was invited to the newly founded Berlin University and there became a colleague of Schleiermacher, one of those scientists who most excited German youth in the first part of our century. There were several points of affinity between these two professors. Both sought to unite science and faith, but they strove for this goal, which neither one nor the other of them achieved, in completely different ways. Schleiermacher attributed religions to the realm of feeling; De Wette always imagined that he supported the belief in the Old Testament through his mythical system. As a result, he consistently studied all the books of the Old Testament, and the result of his studies was summarized in his “Historical-Critical Introduction,” 21 which appeared in 1817 and which he considered the best of his works. He already spoke about the books of Chronicles in his first “Introduction” and argued that the editor of these books used more ancient books known as the books of Samuel and Kings, modifying them in favor of the Levite caste. In his new work he supported these earlier opinions and applied them to those parts of the Bible that he had not yet dealt with. Here are his general judgments about the Old Testament. “The historical point of view is the point of view of an exclusive theocracy. Almost everything is considered in relation to theocracy, that is, to the relationship that exists between God and the people of Israel... As a result, historical pragmatism is completely absent, and its place is taken by theocratic pragmatism. The Divine plan dominates history in a completely visible way, and all particular events are subordinated to this plan with more or less logic; Moreover, God himself directly intervenes in history with revelations and miracles; in other words, history gives way to mythology.” 22 So he spoke this very derogatory word for the Bible. De Wette thought to soften the harshness of this expression by remarking that stories about miracles are not fictions invented for pleasure, but distorted folk legends that became miraculous, passing from mouth to mouth. Writers who spoke about them long after the events themselves spoke about them, already fully trusting the legend. However, not only miracles are legendary; Some laws are also “legal myths.” There are also etymological myths. Finally, prophecies are also a kind of fiction, the works of poets who, under the form of predictions made by famous persons, talk about things that have already happened, as we see in the Puranas of India. It was in this way that the “theocratic epic of Israel” was formed. 23 As can be seen from this, De Wette always relies on the basic principle set forth by the rationalists who preceded him, that the Bible should be considered like all other literary books and in particular - like the mythologies of India and Greece. But this means forgetting that the Pentateuch and other books of the Old Testament, which tell us about the most remarkable events in the life of Israel, are truly historical books, and not poems like the Iliad, Aeneid and Magabgarata. This means most of all forgetting that the world is ruled by God and that His providence entrusted to the Jewish people a supernatural mission that they were to fulfill in their historical life. Only by not recognizing these truths could De Wette become one of the main disseminators of rationalism and truly the father of biblical mythism. It was he who proclaimed the kingdom of internal criticism; began to deny in general the authenticity of the books of the Old Testament and was the first to invent the multitude of writers who allegedly compiled, arranged and remade various books of the Bible. He finally introduced an explanation of the miracle through myth, although several other unbelieving researchers preceded him in this field. De Wette, however, did not dare to interpret the New Testament in the same way as he interpreted the Old. Representing a rare exception among unbelievers, who usually fall deeper and deeper into the abyss of unbelief as their lives progress, the Berlin professor, as he grew older, returned more and more to Christianity. At Jena he adhered to the ideas of Fries, one of his professors. At first, precisely at the beginning of his studies at this university, at one time he was even carried away by Fichte’s pantheistic atheism. “For some time I was happy in this delusion,” he says himself in an essay published after his death. “I trusted the idea that it was possible to be virtuous without belonging to any faith. But soon this illusion disappeared, and I felt pathetic. Deprived of all faith in the immaterial world, I saw myself alone, left to my own devices, and with all humanity, idlely abandoned in the world. My soul was filled with contradictions and uncertain ideas; no breath of life came to warm the cold of my heart, and death, like an evil genius, took possession of my entire being. No reasoning could bring me peace; my feelings rebelled against the convictions of my mind.” These lines truly deserve to be written in letters of gold, because they express the cry of a sincere man who has lost his faith forever. They show us how his whole life, by its very nature, was imbued with a religious spirit. Unfortunately, he strayed from the right path and could never again find the road to the truth he had lost. Trying to get out of the state of skepticism that depressed him, he did not find anything better than the Fries system. This philosopher worked on the reconciliation of knowledge and faith and taught that in man there are two different sources of knowledge: understanding and feeling. Understanding achieves knowledge through reasoning; feeling guesses, understands and captures objective reality through premonition (Ahnden). These two methods of achieving complete truth complement each other, but without making it possible to reconcile the contradiction that can be noticed in their results. It was this very little logical dualism that DeWette attached himself to in order to avoid the complete shipwreck of his Christian faith. He thought to find in Fries’s “premonition” the satisfaction of the religious need that he felt deep down in his soul. Those mental techniques with which he tried to rise above the pure realm of reason seemed to him the only convenient form under which supranaturalism could be preserved. In Berlin, he outlined these ideas in a special work. Thanks to Fries's system, he imagined himself able to reject everything that was supernatural in theology, and yet protect religion by means of premonition. Myth delivered him from the miracle in the ancient faith, Fris freed him from everything that surpasses reason in the new law. In 1813, he taught that the Jews never expected a Messiah who would suffer for the sins of the people, and that Jesus Christ died for purely human reasons. In his subsequent writings on dogmatics, he argued that the apostles distorted the teachings of Jesus Christ and invented “Christolatry.” Meanwhile, the need for faith became more and more sensitive to the heart of the rationalistic professor, and in the depths of his soul there was so much straightforwardness that Neander called him “Nathanael, in whom there is no guile.” This is precisely what brought him closer to Schleiermacher. Schleiermacher (1768 – 1834) was one of the greatest representatives of Protestantism in Germany. He is called the Kant of modern theology because he sought the laws of religious feeling, just as Kant sought the laws of knowledge. He had a profound influence not only on DeWette, but also on many of his fellow believers in general. His father was involved in one trial for witchcraft, and this influenced him so much that, at first, being a complete unbeliever, he became a believer and gave his son to be raised by the Moravian brothers. The young Schleiermacher did not escape temptation and doubt through this, however. He, like many others, can’t help but feel how the prevailing divisions in Protestantism depressed minds that had no opportunity to find peace anywhere. In 1796, having become a preacher in Berlin, he became friends with Friedrich Schlegel, who introduced him to the circles of the emerging romanticism, where his ideas began to spread. Criticism seemed to him then to be the future guardian of the faith, although hitherto it had been its opponent. But he never had a proper understanding of criticism; in him, feeling took precedence over reason, and he thought that he was speaking on behalf of reason, when in fact he was carried away by feeling. It is not without reason to say that there was something feminine about him. He himself portrayed himself this way in a letter to Jacobi: “reason and feeling live separately in me, but they touch and form a galvanic current; For me, the most intimate life of the spirit consists in that galvanic operation called feeling.” In one of his first works, precisely in discussions about religion, he defines his religion this way: “my religion is entirely the religion of the heart, there is no room in me for another religion.” What we need to believe in does not need to be sought either in books or in legends, but only in ourselves. Religion is a feeling, an influx of the infinite, and we find it in the depths of our spirit. Consequently, it has nothing permanent or stable, it varies among individuals, and the church is, as it were, a liquid mass, without permanent outlines, without a solid organization. Every religious feeling is true; no one has the right to imprison it in the prison of dogmas, it is free and consists in the search for universal life in all its manifestations, in the justification of those mysterious presentiments that arouse pious awe in us. In most dogmatic terms, however, lies the true meaning. Revelation is an inspiration received by man from the infinite; a miracle is a religious name for a natural event. Inspiration is an inner feeling of true morality and true freedom. These are precisely some of Schleiermacher's ideas. That mind in which faith and unbelief were mixed and combined with each other, mysticism coexisted with materialism, Spinoza's pantheism was combined with a vague sense of religiosity, but which felt strongly, expressed itself with fervor and knew how to touch the noblest strings in a person. At some points he approached Fries, and this was precisely what brought him closer to De Wette, although the latter at first did not feel any particular affection for the author of “Reflections on Religion.” Schleiermacher preached a lot in Berlin and with great success. One day, DeWette’s friend, Lykke, an interpreter of the Gospel of John, took him to a sermon by this preacher, who attracted a huge crowd of listeners. The casual listener liked this sermon, he began to follow it exactly and little by little gave a place to the critical element in his study of the Holy Scriptures of the New Testament; he ceased to see Jesus Christ as a pure symbol and began to consider Him as a real being, an incarnate ideal. It was at this time that a terrible blow struck him. He had many enemies among the orthodox Lutherans, who considered him, and not without reason, one of the leaders of biblical rationalism. However, they were not able to force him to leave the professor’s chair. One unwise letter he wrote to Desant's mother, a young fanatic who had killed a Russian agent named Kotzebue, made more impression on the Prussian court than the complaints of his opponents. He was expelled from the university as a “dangerous man” (in October 1819). Retiring to Weimar, he published a religious novel: “Theodore or the Dedication of a Skeptic” (1822), a work of not high literary merit, but which revealed what work was being done in the soul of the author, who always sought to escape from the abyss of the troubled waves of doubt to the pier of faith and truth. Finally, in 1822, De Wette was appointed professor of theology at Basel, and it was there that he spent the last years of his life and published his Commentary on the New Testament. Studying the Gospels was a lifesaver for him. It is clear that Christianity attracted him more and more. Unfortunately, his upbringing placed him outside the truth, and he never again penetrated the fence of the Church of Christ; he always wavered between rationalism and the simplicity of faith. In his “Introduction to the New Testament” (1826), he denies the authenticity of the second letter of St. Peter, doubts about the second letter to the Thessalonians, the letter to the Ephesians, the pastoral letters, the letter of St. James, first epistle of St. Peter and even the Gospel of John. In his “interpretive guide to the New Testament” (1835 - 1848), he allows myths only for the beginning and end of the history of the Savior, and even refutes Strauss, who had already published his “Life of Jesus” when the interpretation of the Gospels appeared; but he was indecisive, showed uncertainty on the most important points and cruelly denounced the interpreters who tried to agree on the narratives of the four evangelists, accusing them of narrowness of mind and even of lack of conscientiousness. In a word, he came only to negative results, and, according to his own statement, the fruit of evangelical criticism is ignorance and impotence. Such is the sad consolation to which this man came, for whose soul one cannot but have sympathy, since it sought the truth, but could not find it. The father of inner criticism, and one might also say of mythism, could never completely break the original threads of error, and he suffered from this throughout his life, as he expressed in one poem found after his death. 24 Such was the religious state of Germany when Strauss appeared on the scene. This was the man who most outraged the religious spirit of Europe in our century. His name will forever remain in the history of the Church as the name of one of the deadliest enemies of Christianity next to the names of the famous sophists of the first times of the Christian era, Celsus and Porphyry. It, so to speak, personified all the warfare raised against Holy Scripture in our time. He was an echo of all the opponents of Revelation, in him the armada of errors gathered all their strength, and this precisely serves to explain the reason for his extremely great influence. Those who preceded him in this field only prepared the ground; but those who already appeared after him, willy-nilly, recognized him as their head. We have already seen that De Wette fully applied the mythical method of explanation to the Old Testament; but he did not have the courage to apply a similar method to the New Testament. Only Strauss has the sad honor of extending this method of explanation to the New Testament, and he was the first to see in the Gospels a “lush growth of myths.” True, even before, some had already tried to explain through mythism the first and last events in the life of Jesus, namely those that precede the temptation and those that follow the crucifixion. Strauss applied this method to all the gospel stories without any limitation. From myth, which was for him the only door to enter and exit from the Gospels, he made such an extensible word that it began to embrace everything. He completely modified the very concept of this word, understanding and expanding it in his own way. But what, according to him, is a myth? In fact, it is very difficult to define this word, and in a sense it remains true what was said in 1839 by one witty author, who very successfully parodied Strauss’s critical techniques in his article entitled “The Life of Strauss, Written in 1839”: “We would like to explain what myth is according to the definition borrowed from Strauss, but this will be impossible. To borrow an image from mythology, from which it originates, we could say that myth, according to Strauss, is a combination of Proteus with a chameleon, because it changes shape and color on every page, depending on how the writer needs it.” 25 And indeed, myth in the definition of the mythical school is something extremely indefinite, vague and extensible. It is a figment of the imagination, but differs in that it represents a kind of embodiment of current ideas at the moment. The aspirations of a certain era, its characteristic way of understanding things, its desires and ideas are embodied at a certain time in a special organism characteristic of it, its ideal is personified in existence, in a real or imaginary event: - this is a myth. Its creator is not the writer who talks about him, and he is not this or that individual person, but this is a collective, spontaneous, unconscious creation, into which everyone brings a certain feature, some element, depending on his character and worldview. In this way, it seems, the Gospels were compiled by the popular imagination, before they were written by the four evangelists. “Religion undoubtedly has feeling as its ancestor, but its mother is imagination,” as Strauss puts it in one place. Thus, the apostles proclaim to the world that their crucified Teacher came out of the tomb alive on the third day. It’s one of two things, the previous criticism said: either this event really happened, or it didn’t happen; in the first case the apostles spoke the truth, in the second they spoke a lie. According to the latest criticism, according to Strauss, between the two members of this dilemma, between the reality of the fact and the fiction of the disciples of Jesus, there is a middle ground - this is precisely myth. Assumptions about the reality of this event cannot be allowed due to the impossibility of a miracle; but at the same time, the assumption of deception is also doubtful. Who will prove to us that the apostles certainly knew that Jesus was not resurrected? Who will prove to us that the popular imagination did not really invent the myth of the resurrection of the Messiah, and that the apostles did not sincerely believe in this myth? They could say this with complete sincerity, and from here the sharp contradiction between conscious lies and ardent faith, sufficient to produce a great revolution in the world, naturally disappears. According to the Church, Jesus miraculously returned to life; according to deists, like Reimarus, His body was stolen by the disciples; according to the interpretation of rationalists, like Paulus, Jesus did not really die, but only seemed like that and quite naturally woke up to life; according to Strauss, “the imagination of the disciples, supported by the tender affection of their hearts, presented to them the Teacher as if returning to life, since they, by their faith in Him, could not consider Him dead. What for entire centuries was considered an external fact, considered as a miraculous event, then as false and finally as completely natural, now belongs to the category of phenomena in the life of the soul and becomes a purely psychological fact,” that is, a product of the people’s imagination, a myth. The origin of the gospel myths is supposedly explained by the state of minds in the era when Jesus of Nazareth appeared. Religion usually appears only in creative eras, when imagination dominates reason. Christianity, it seems, has not escaped this general law. The primitive Church, thanks to a strong work of feeling, of which she herself was not aware, represented to herself, under the form of history and man, a religious idea, the first or main representative of which was Jesus. She attached to Him not only the mythical forms found in all religions, such as the incarnation, the Virgin Birth, but also all those forms under which the Jews, since the time of the captivity, had become accustomed, in their patriotic excitement, to imagine the Messiah. Hence the expectation of the Messiah and the creation of Jesus in the Gospels. From the time when a certain number of the faithful, growing more and more, imagined that they had the promised Messiah in Jesus, they became more and more convinced that all those predictions and prototypes that the rabbinic imagination found in the Old Testament must certainly find their fulfillment in Him. All Palestine knew well that Jesus was from Nazareth; but at all costs it was necessary that he, as the Messiah and son of David, be born in Bethlehem, in accordance with the prediction of the prophet Micah. Everyone remembered Jesus' caustic words against the Jews' greed for miracles. Despite this, since even Moses performed miracles, the Messiah could not be inferior to him in this regard, and He also had to perform miracles. Isaiah foretold that in the days of the deliverer of Israel, the eyes of the blind would be opened, the deaf would hear, and the paralytic would walk. Therefore, from the very beginning and in detail, the miracles that Jesus had to perform were known precisely because He was recognized as the Messiah. The New Testament, therefore, was already written in advance in the Old, and the first enthusiastic Christians could only collect the various features scattered there in order to compose for themselves the ideal of their idolization and their dreams. The idea that the gospels constitute only a copy of the reproduction of Jewish history is a Straussian peculiarity, but a hint of it was made by Samuel Reimarus. Thus, he wanted to explain the “legend” about Daniel by the legend about Joseph. Strauss transferred this process to the New Testament, generalized it, and in all gospel events he sees only the tendency of the Jews and the first Christians to “make new combinations according to the model of the ancients.” These were precisely the principles that guided Strauss in explaining the Gospel events. Three factors thus contributed to their formation: the general expectation of the Messiah in the first century, the Messianic elements spread by the imagination of the scribes and rabbis throughout the Old Testament, and, finally, the belief that Jesus was the expected Messiah. The outline of The Life of Jesus is very simple. Strauss examines one by one the events recounted in the gospels. When considering each of them, he points out the contradictions that he allegedly finds in each story, considered separately or in comparison with other sacred or civil stories; collects all sorts of difficulties that, as it seems to him, can serve as a reason for depriving the New Testament of its historical significance. After such a study of the texts, he sets out the natural explanation given by the rationalists and especially Paulus, and generally shows with sufficient force and clarity their inconsistency and impossibility. Having thus cleared the ground, he sets forth his own hypothesis, that is, a mythical explanation. Strauss's reasoning is extremely petty, his presentation is extremely dry. It would be a greater mistake if anyone thought that his “Life of Jesus,” judging by this title, is a biography of the One whose name it bears. Strauss is in fact concerned only with destruction and does not think at all about creation; the only positive idea contained in his two large volumes is that Christianity is the ideal of humanity. In his conclusions, he assumes that the mythical explanation does not shake the truth of the Christian religion, and that its essence remains inviolable. Every myth contains a deep idea. Eg. The Jewish genius, or rather the genius of mankind, put all that was most sublime and great into the myth of the resurrection of Jesus. Under this form, humanity acquired for the first time a great principle, which, if expressed in the language of the New Testament, can be represented in the following terms: “what is eternal and essential cannot be visible, but is invisible; it is not earthly, but heavenly, not flesh, but spirit.” And from this principle all sorts of consequences are derived. It was necessary to break with that beautiful harmony of spirit and body that dominated the Greek World. The spirit could be recognized as an independent force only in its struggle against feelings, in sorrow and asceticism, in humiliation and despondency. It was necessary for the majestic edifice of the Roman Empire to fall, for the Church to rise in the face of the state, the pope in the face of the emperor, in order to give humanity a full awareness of the truth that the power of conviction, the power of ideas, dominates everything, even over material power, apparently the most secure. All this was contained in germ in the faith in the resurrection of Jesus, just as the hope that He would soon come to establish His kingdom was a premonition of the great historical destiny of Christianity and the new era it opened. This ideal explanation of myths is no less arbitrary than the natural explanation of miracles. Strauss's imitators showed what ridiculous excess she could go to. All this work only led to impossible nonsense. Strauss himself was forced to admit the futility of his criticism. “From all this it follows, it must be confessed,” he says, “that our knowledge has since decreased regarding Moses, Jesus and the apostles; we know less about miraculous objects, following some, less about ordinary objects, following others; but we always know enough to achieve, at least in the main features, a truly historical understanding of what they were and what they did.” But it is not even true that Strauss managed to give a historical concept of Christ and Christianity. Everyone admits, not even excluding freethinkers, that his “Life of Jesus” is a far from satisfactory work. From his criticism one can hardly know what Jesus was like. Strauss speaks more about what He was not than about what He was. He was not a relative of John the Baptist, did not perform miracles, did not institute the Eucharist, did not predict his death or his resurrection; his birth, his baptism, his temptation, in a word, all the great deeds of his life are myths, that is, fictions. All that Strauss recognizes as historical in the life of Christ lies in several missionary journeys and, perhaps, in the healing of several demoniacs, and even these healings only seemed miraculous. But if Jesus was nothing, how could He be the founder of Christianity and how can its origin be explained? This question is so important that it immediately overthrows the entire construction of Strauss, who by no means asked himself such a question and avoided it. His entire argument is thus destroyed at its very core. “The application of the mythical theory to the gospels had no sufficient basis, since it was not justified by a careful criticism of history and documents,” says one impartial researcher. “It is precisely at this most important point that Strauss fails; his criticism of the Gospel history is not based on a criticism of the Gospel narratives. Questions regarding their origin and their authenticity are answered in a few sentences. It assumes, but does not prove, that enough time has passed for myths to be created. This important shortcoming entailed others. Strauss does not say a single word about the importance of the testimony of St. Apostle Paul, he does not even see that we are too close to the sources for there to be enough time for the formation of myths. He does not see the importance of the divisions in the primitive Church, the confidence they give us, and the solid foundations they provide for the events in question, about which disagreement was impossible. Moreover, he does not see the importance of the primitive communication of the estates accepted by believers, the evidence provided by the originality of their institutions, the difference of their character and the originality of their beliefs in relation to the events that created the Church and to the facts on which it rested. The mythical theory thus collapses, at the first touch of analysis, under the weight of its own hypotheses.” 26 If Strauss's "Life of Jesus" was to provoke lively responses and strong objections, then at the same time it was to arouse competition in other members of his party, which went much further than him along the path of unbelief and blasphemy; a whole series of researchers came out of the left Hegelian school who carried godlessness to even more extreme limits. One of the most advanced Hegelians, namely Ludwig Feuerbach (1804 - 1872), decided to fill in what was left unfinished by Strauss. In 1841, he published a book entitled “The Essence of Christianity,” where he directly declared that his goal was to complete what Strauss had left unsaid. Hegel's system, in his opinion, is the old testament of philosophy, and now he wanted to offer a philosophical gospel. Hegel was not sincere enough and therefore, when discussing religion, he expressed himself ambiguously. The supposed identity of human existence with divine existence is only the identity of human existence with itself. The Supreme Being is nothing other than man himself: “Homo sibi Deus,” and man is only what he is: “was der Mensch isst, das ist er,” or in other words, as one of Feuerbach’s followers put it: “there is nothing real on earth except me and the food on which I feed.” Religion from this point of view is a simple illusion and, moreover, a dangerous illusion. This is a vampire who sucks the best juice out of a person to justify his most immoral deeds. Christianity takes a person with all his feelings to heaven, i.e. to the region of chimeras. Therefore, it is necessary to abandon the Christian concept of the state, break with the hypocritical and slavish generation of theologians and not care about anything other than the human body. One of Strauss's followers, Max Stirner, drew clear logical conclusions from this teaching: “Of all people, the one I know and love most is myself. My whole catechism is contained in my “I”; I do what I want and what I like.” Here, obviously, religious speculation reaches almost complete nihilism; but then writers appear who are even more vague in their interpretation of Christianity, showing to what confusion such criticism can lead. Thus, Arnold Ruge, although a follower of Strauss, already declared that Christianity is only a new work of Buddhism, a poetic fiction of nature. Jesus Christ is a myth, as Strauss said, but it must be understood in a completely different way than the author of the Life of Jesus understood. The Jesus myth depicts the physical struggle between summer and winter, light and darkness. Jesus is actually born as the days begin to lengthen, and dies at Easter, when nature awakens for summer. Sin does not exist at all; there is no salvation, no divine consolations, no God, no immortality. There is no other consolation for man than that which he himself provides to himself through various inventions and steam engines. Friedrich Daumer took another step along the path of these extreme absurdities. He believes the biblical story is that we are going to Australia, the homeland of breadfruit. From Australia, people allegedly moved to America and from there to Asia, through the Bering Strait, in winter, when it freezes. This migration is allegedly described in the Book of Numbers. The author attaches extreme importance to his discovery. “My new Biographical and Ethnographical System,” he says, “is for history what the Copernican system was for astronomy.” Jehovah, the national God of the Jews, is, according to him, the Phoenician Moloch - that terrible god, the very sight of which caused death and who demanded human sacrifices and especially the sacrifices of the firstborn. Little by little, people, however, replaced people with animals in sacrifices, and finally the Jehovah's party even completely abolished such sacrifices. Jesus tried to renew it: He preached abstinence, castration, and before His death, in remembrance of ancient sacrifices, he established a disgusting meal in which his disciples had to feed on human body and human blood. Judas, overwhelmed with horror, did not want to take part in it, and reported on these Christian mysteries. Then, in his opinion, Mohammedanism already represented progress in comparison with Christianity. The Koran is the gospel of natural religion; Muslim paradise is amazing; this is the apotheosis of sensual pleasures. Mohammed Hafiz, a Persian poet of the 14th century, a true disciple of Epicurus (translated and imitated by Daumer, who was a fairly famous Orientalist and poet), partially corrected the system of the founder of Islam, appearing as if a new Luther. The religion of the future, in his opinion, is pleasure and the restoration of all the rights of the flesh. 27 We will not mention other writers of the left Hegelian school who spread similar ideas in poetry and literature, in political and social economy. Let's just say that it had its representatives in the natural sciences, which were Vocht, Buchner, Moleschott, and who were finally joined by Strauss, as he proved with his last work, “The Old and New Faith,” which is the last expression of religious nihilism. After Strauss, a special school appeared in rationalist Germany, namely the Tübingen school, the founder of which was Baur. But this school was primarily engaged in petty criticism of the New Testament books, looking for contradictions in them and suspecting their authenticity. Therefore, it did not have such a greater impact than the works of Strauss, and in essence remained the property of scientists. Baur, however, had many followers who, continuing his destructive work, brought the criticism of Holy Scripture to the extraordinary confusion and self-contradiction in which it is currently found. For the most part, these critics did not leave any traces in science, but they prepared the ground on which entire systems on biblical history have recently begun to be erected. Some of the most outstanding scholars, taking advantage of all the results of previous criticism, began to compile entire courses on the “History of the Israeli People,” introducing into them everything that was destructive in criticism. From this point of view, they naturally bypass or deny everything that is miraculous in the biblical books, and try to explain in some natural or mythical way everything that seems inconsistent with historical reality in the history of the people of Israel. A similar history of Israel was compiled by Ewald, who may be considered the type of this class of German theologians. He does not belong to any particular school, but tries to keep in the middle between the naturalists, who, examining the Bible step by step, subjected all the words in it to a kind of chemical analysis in order to extract from it the natural elements; between skeptics who do not want to see anything but myths in the sacred books, and between supranaturalists who understand Holy Scripture in its immediate natural sense. For him, the Old Testament is a collection of conscientious documents, the fruits not of divine inspiration, but of the traditional memories of the Jewish people, and they must be understood, explained and interpreted in accordance with the environment in which these books were written, the state of civilization and the peculiar character of the children of Israel. His main goal is to find in the Jewish books the historical node from which the entire legendary or mythical growth was formed around him. In all the historical writings of the Old Testament there is an element of truth. For example, the exodus of the Israelites from Egypt is a real fact, but it could not have happened exactly as it is described in the book of Exodus: some of the events that accompanied it, completely natural events, were later painted with supernatural colors, such as, for example, the crossing of the Red Sea, which took place without any difficulty at low tide, and the crossing of the Jordan, which was accomplished simply by means of a bridge, the memory of which was allegedly preserved in the legend of the twelve stones collected by in the middle of the river. Other events are also, in his opinion, myths. Thus, Aaron’s rod, which blossomed, is, without a doubt, only a poetic symbol. Historically, the nexus of all these stories may be as follows. Moses was a man of high intelligence and rare moral height. With his talents, his character, his energy and, if you like, the help of Providence, he managed to immediately ignite patriotism in his people. He knew how to extract a miraculous element even from such completely natural phenomena, which are known as the “plagues of Egypt,” and therefore drew the Israelites along with him on the way to the Promised Land. Ewald, out of personal antipathy towards Strauss, tried whenever possible to avoid explanations through myth. Hence the significant gaps in his “History”. He passes over many facts in complete silence, or expresses himself about them so vaguely that it is difficult to determine exactly how he thinks about them. Other rationalist interpreters, however, consider such abstinence unnecessary and are not embarrassed by the use of the word “myth”; so they usually use less the natural explanation and more the mythical one. Tradition, they say, for example, has preserved only the largest features, the skeleton of the events themselves; myth filled in the gaps left in the story of events and poured ghostly life into these dry bones. Thus, the name of Moses was preserved for centuries, as well as memories of his stay in Egypt, the exodus, the Mosaic legislation, etc. But the popular imagination could not be content with such vague and dry facts, which could not be imagined with sufficient vividness. Then myth with all its inexhaustible fabrications came to the aid of the popular mind, to satisfy the popular desire. And so, the idea was formed that such great events in the history of the people could not have happened without some miraculous reasons; and from here a detailed story arose of itself about the circumstances of the passage through the Red Sea, about the miraculous pillar of fire and cloud, etc. The people, who look at everything from their everyday point of view and are very much interested in the question of the first needs of life, then asked: how could our fathers live in the desert without food and without vital supplies? The inexhaustible myth again answered them: manna fell from the sky to feed them, quails flew in to feed them, and even the rocks opened their springs to them to quench their thirst. And in this easy way all the supernatural facts of the Old Testament are explained, precisely by combining a natural explanation with a mythical one. The myth gave form to the legend, the latter gave the outline, and the former brought all the additions and decorations. The writer who recorded these events conveyed only what he heard: he was only the secretary of the people's imagination. But the scope of denial is limitless, and some researchers have taken this nonsense even further. Thus, Schenkel has already ceased to admit that Adam is a historical figure: this, according to him, is simply a mythical invention, which has as its goal an explanation of the origin of man, in accordance with the religious consciousness of that time. Others were not slow to take one step further, and Bernstein, for example, in his essay “On the Origin of the Legends of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob,” in the entire history of the patriarchs no longer sees anything other than “an obviously bilious and poisonous libel against David,” compiled after the fall of the ten tribes by the supporters of Jeroboam. According to him, the wife of Judah, the daughter of Shua (Batshua), is Bathsheba (Batsheba); Shelah, the youngest son of Judah, is Solomon, Onan is Amnon, etc. But here such writers go so far that they lose all significance for science, and they can be mentioned only for curiosity and sad proof of how reason, once rejecting the sound principle of interpretation of the Holy. Scripture, uncontrollably rushes into the abyss of denial, exposing its inconsistency with its own absurdities. 6. Renan - as the newest representative of biblical rationalism. The evil produced by German rationalism did not remain contained within Germany. Like those storms which do not confine themselves to the devastation of their places of origin, but extend their destructive influence far beyond their borders, rationalism spread throughout Europe and had its victims everywhere. In all countries of Europe and even America, one could point out a number of writers who subjected biblical history to all sorts of critical distortions. But we will limit ourselves to pointing out just one example in order to show which learned critics are currently at the head of biblical rationalism. German rationalism had the strongest influence on France, where its most prominent representative is Renan. Especially and most of all, he adopted the theory of the human and natural origin of Christianity, and preached it in a number of brilliantly written works. His first attacks on the holy books date back to 1848 - 1850. From that time on, and especially from 1863, when his Life of Jesus appeared, he never ceased to write against the gospels and against Christianity. What especially characterizes his criticism is skepticism. He has no other philosophical principle except sheer doubt. History for him is only “a conjectural science.” All is well for him as long as he can avoid the supernatural. His article of faith consists in one rite, which states that “there is nothing miraculous.” “The denial of the supernatural,” he says in his Marcus Aurelius, “has become an absolute dogma for every enlightened mind.” Outside of this dogma, nothing more or less important remains for him. He is ready to worship and burn the same idols in turn; here he praises the virtues, there he declares that this is just one empty word; today he bows in Athens before Pallas Athena, and tomorrow he will idolize in Palestine the One who defeated and destroyed paganism; in a word, his tuning fork sounds as its owner pleases, and he is ready to say white or black, true or false, depending on how the wind turns his weather vane, to the right or to the left; but he never admits that there is anything that would stand above him and above his reason. As a result, in the name of criticism, he demands for himself the right not to pay the slightest attention to what has been revered for centuries. At the very beginning of his first article, which he published on biblical issues, he says that “criticism knows no respect: it judges gods and men alike. For her, nothing is inaccessible or secret; it destroys all charms and draws back all veils. This power, alien to any reverence, casting a firm and penetrating gaze on everything, in its essence may even be guilty of lese majeste, divine and human.” Everyone knows with what audacity Renan exercised the right he had invented. Under his pen, neither Jesus Christ nor the Blessed Virgin Mary have mercy. In 1863, the publication of his Life of Jesus caused no less confusion in France than a similar work by Strauss caused in Germany. His work, however, had no other significance than purely artistic. It is a seductive and deadly siren song that attracts victims to strangle them; but in his final analysis, this so-called historian is nothing more than an elegant novelist. The rationalist exegetes of Germany, who are engaged in compiling the biblical history of the Old and New Testaments according to their own plan, usually imagine that the sacred writers are exactly like them and judge them by their own standards. Renan does the same thing: he plays with facts, and he would like to think that the evangelists did no differently. The Gospel, in his opinion, is the fruit of the most elusive fantasy, so that it is difficult for the writer to grasp the thread on which this whole wonderful creation is based. “Historically, Jesus,” he says, “eludes us; everything that is told to us about his birth, his miracles, his sufferings, his resurrection and ascension contradicts and exceeds our power of knowledge. It is therefore necessary to admit that the life of Christ is a legendary plexus, it is an idealization, a work similar to those poems where the real hero is made into an ideal type. Whether the teachings and moral character of Jesus were truly historical cannot be answered.” But if, according to Renan's own consciousness, it is impossible to decide what is real and what is ideal in the life of Jesus, if, as he says, historically Jesus eludes us, then how could Renan write The Life of Jesus? Where did he get the documents necessary for this if they don’t actually exist? The novelist betrayed himself with these words: his work, therefore, is only a fiction, not at all a historical work, but a simple poem, like Klopstock’s “Messiad”, or Milton’s “Paradise Lost”. His Galilean landscape, naively idyllic, set among beautiful and magnificent scenes of nature, the most pleasant and charming of people, although devoid of its divine grandeur, was entirely borrowed by Renan from unbelieving Germany; he only managed to clear the ponderous German work from philological and critical rubbish, and he managed to create this brilliant novel; the characters in it are the same phantoms as in other novels and poetic works. Thanks to a brilliant style and a kind of poetic charm, both this and Renan’s subsequent works, in which he intended to historically trace the origin of Christianity, made a tremendous impression in their time and greatly contributed to the spread of rationalism among the semi-educated masses. But from that time on, both this charm and especially Renan’s scientific authority began to quickly fade, especially when many new facts appeared, in the face of which Renan’s fabrications revealed their complete inconsistency and fantastic fabrication. Nevertheless, he no longer left the point of view he had once taken and, having, in his opinion, exhausted all the material related to the question of the origin of Christianity, he very recently began to present the history of the Old Testament, as he did in the recently published first volume of his “History of Israel.” 28 Now is not the time to subject this new work of Renan to a detailed analysis, since its first volume, of course, does not exhaust the entire stock of the author’s historical scholarship. But we can say that the nature of the work was already fully reflected in the first volume, even in its first chapters. It should be noted that recently Renan was mainly engaged in composing vaguely philosophical dramas and abstract dialogues, in which his rich imagination found full scope for itself. Therefore, it was difficult to expect that he would abruptly move from these purely artistic works to such a work as “The History of Israel,” which requires extreme rigor of historical study, and the appearance of this work of his was a great surprise to many. But for such a scientist as Renan, obviously, nothing is impossible, and his imagination can just as easily relate to the lives of the greatest saints of the Old Testament, as it related to some “Abbess Juarre,” the heroine of one of Renan’s dramas. He clearly proved this by publishing his book. His entire so-called “History of Israel” is nothing more than a weave of the most arbitrary fabrications of unbridled imagination, which put its works in the place of the well-known facts of Old Testament history. He applied his well-known method with which he had once processed the “Life of Jesus” entirely to Old Testament history, although science has since done quite enough to make every more or less impartial researcher doubt the applicability of such a method to sacred history. But for Renan, obviously, there are no laws. He is accustomed to revolving in the realm of fantastic phantoms, and for him every story, and sacred history in particular, is as much a phantom as any real invention of a novelist. He does not care what real science says, which every year with its newest discoveries overthrows the previous constructs of negative criticism and brilliantly justifies the truth of the biblical narrative. He has lagged significantly behind science, according to the consciousness of even his most zealous adherents, and in place of scientific data he cheekily puts the fabrications of his own idle imagination. Hence, in his “History of Israel” it is by no means possible to recognize what is known as biblical history. This is a series of some arbitrary, unproven propositions that are incapable of captivating even with originality, because something similar has already been expressed more than once by other historians of the same type, but with more or less decent attempts to substantiate them. Renan has nothing but bare positions, furnished only with embellishments of the imagination. In his work, all the famous Old Testament historical figures are blurred into entire impersonal clans or reduced to the level of wandering nomads. Abraham is none other than Ovid's pater Orchamus. He completely identifies Jehovah with various national Molochs, although the difference between the great image of Jehovah and the Phoenician Moloch is great enough that even the most inveterate deniers feel embarrassed to identify them with each other. The long-standing fiction regarding the Helogists and Jehovah's Witnesses is being repeated unfoundedly, although this fiction, as will be shown in its place, has already been completely refuted in the latest scientific discoveries. Renan's fantasy plays out more and more as he goes deeper into history and reaches its climax (for the first volume at least) in the history of the Jews in Egypt. At this point, it is the newest discoveries that shed the most light on the biblical stories and brilliantly confirm the truth of their most striking features. But all these scientific works apparently passed by Renan, or, at least, did not speak loudly enough for him to bring him out of the oblivion of his romantic charm, and he repeats almost the same thing that was expressed in this regard by the rationalists of the last century, with the only difference that he gave even more self-confidence to his groundless theses. Thus, he calmly derives all forms of Old Testament religion from Egypt and in this regard goes so far that he even considers the Levites not one of the tribes of Israel, as all historians consider them, but “a special kind of Egyptian priests, whom the Israelites had with them since the time they left Egypt and who were fed by each family in turn as a reward for their religious services.” As for Moses himself, if he existed at all, he was “of mixed origin,” “half-Egyptian,” although Renan is inclined to recognize all this as a myth. On this beloved pegasus, Renan easily and freely rushed through the entire history of the Old Testament in its first half - up to Solomon, and where historical reality was no longer amenable to transformation into myth, Renan poured out all the vials of his anger on it. This is what happened to the great personality of David. In the noblest personality of this king of Israel, who left to mankind in his psalms the most precious legacy of his divinely inspired thoughts, Renan seemed to see his personal enemy, and, not being able to turn him into a myth, persecutes him with all kinds of offensive epithets, calls him a bandit and a loitering rabble, and thus once again brings upon the innocent anointed one of God the persecution to which he was already subjected due to the spirit of malice. Saul. Thus, abandoned by the spirit of respect for the truth, the critic of the 19th century falls into exactly the same injustice into which the king of Israel, abandoned by God, once fell. From what has been said, it is sufficiently clear what kind of “History of Israel” Renan published. Of course, in the capital of that state, where the government itself is taking sad zeal to weaken all true religious influence and is trying to banish the very name of God from official use, such a “history” could not help but gain rapid popularity and has already gone through several editions, and even has every chance of being introduced as a guide in public schools; but generally speaking, such “history” is a disgrace for historical science in general and French science in particular. No one expected such a weak and in all respects untenable work from Renan, and in this regard all his critics agree. Here's what for example. says one of his last reviewers, summarizing the reviews of the most competent critics who have spoken out so far: “Whatever school the critic belongs to, one thing is certain that he will not side with Renan’s criticism. On this point, as far as we know, all his reviewers agree. His method is unsatisfactory and shaky, not to say self-contradictory, his conclusions are weak and obviously untenable; its basic idea is unacceptable. Even the brilliance of presentation that made Renan the darling of literature seems to have almost completely abandoned him. The arrangement of the material, especially in the first half of the volume, is confusing, and the author continually ends up in his own tracks. The book lacks fresh originality and gives the impression that the author tried to collect everything that he found interesting in the books and magazine articles he came across. Hence the lack of unity and harmony in the presentation. Even what for some is the main attraction in Renan’s works is given in too immoderate a dose. The reader is positively tired of constant attempts at a brilliant generalization. In most cases, generalities cover, but hardly hide, logical inaccuracy. When they appear on almost every page, they easily degenerate into empty, albeit beautiful, phrases. You can take it as a rule to suspect lies where there are many brilliant generalizations. Imagination is a dangerous faculty in a historian. It tends to make history rather than interpret it.” In any case, it is by no means safe to read history by the light of fireworks. But there is much more to it than that. The most patient reader will be weary of Renan repeating his dominant idea concerning the religion of Israel, even if it had the dignity of truth. Then, frequent allusions to contemporary French politics and attacks aimed at Germany, no matter how pleasant they may be to French readers, are completely inappropriate in such a book. History is not a feuilleton. The same can be said about the constant attraction of Arabs to the stage. These interesting nomads, encountered in their actual flesh, are by no means as pleasant and innocent as they seem to Renan. In a word, Renan's book is scientifically at least ten years late in comparison with the historical works of German and Dutch scientists. Moreover, sometimes one involuntarily feels the desire to ask whether Renan wrote this book seriously. In fact, if it were not for the name of the author, which involuntarily raises interest in the question of what exactly the author of “The Life of Jesus” can say from biblical history, then this book as a critical-historical study could be left without any attention.” 29 This review is not unique. This, on the contrary, is the general voice of all more or less serious scientific criticism, not just theological, but general scientific criticism, as the journal itself from which we took this review shows. This is a very comforting phenomenon and shows what great strides true science has made in recent decades. Now, obviously, such a frivolous attitude towards deeply important subjects is impossible, as was the case at the time when Renan first stepped onto the ground he occupied and began, with the light heart of a novelist, to remake the history of true religion. His “Life of Jesus” at one time made an extraordinary impression in literary and even scientific criticism, which admired his method and brilliance of presentation, and everything that was in touch with liberal and so-called progressive trends was welcomed in his works as if it were a new gospel. Since that time, true science has moved far ahead, and Renan’s method, in the face of it, revealed all its pitiful inconsistency and backwardness, as his newest book clearly proves. No, biblical history can no longer be interpreted with a light heart, as was possible just a few years ago. In addition to the general voice of the best consciousness of humanity, such impartial witnesses came out for the Bible with their irrefutable evidence, before whom the most desperate deniers were embarrassed. These witnesses are those stone monuments with inscriptions that Providence preserved under the rubbish of ruins for thousands of years before our time, so that with their miraculous discovery they would immediately defeat the rising pack of enemies of the Bible and truth. Stones literally cried out for its truth, and the voices of these stones, that is, stone documents discovered and dismantled in modern times in the very places where the most important biblical and historical events took place, were, as it were, the voices of history itself, speaking out in defense of the trampled truth. These discoveries in themselves, in addition to their deep apologetic significance, are so interesting that a brief outline of them is by no means superfluous in this book, which has the task of using the most important of them to defend biblical truth. Most of the discoveries made by modern archaeologists in Egypt, Assyria and Palestine truly constitute a good treasure for biblical-historical science, since they shed many rays of light that help clarify dark points in the history of God’s chosen people. Jews and Assyrians had a common origin: their ancestors inhabited the same country in ancient times, lived the same life. In the last century of their history, these two peoples were again in communication with each other, when, during the reign of Nebuchadnezzar, the power of arms, or rather Providence, forcibly led the sons of Abraham to the same places that their great ancestor had freely left. Between these two extreme periods of voluntary separation and forced union, the sons of Eber and the sons of Assur led at first for whole centuries an independent existence, but always retained, so to speak, the imprint of the same family education, and these indelible characteristics are noticeable in the manners, customs, language, although, by the manifest grace of God, the religion of the Israelites was completely different from that of the inhabitants of Mesopotamia. Then, after the fall of the ten tribes, almost the next day after the division of the Israelite tribes, sacred history shows how the kings of Assyria already interfered in the most important events of both kingdoms (Judah and Israel). As events progress, the Assyrians appear more and more often on the stage of biblical history. Entire books of the Bible, such as the books of the prophet Jonah and Judith, among others, deal almost exclusively with this destroying people. Some prophets found in the spectacle of his destructive invasions a source of the most formidable warnings. Then, uniting their destinies with the destinies of the Jewish people, Nineveh and Babylon divide between themselves two kingdoms: Israel and Judah, with their new captivity. Other biblical books, like the books of Tobit, Daniel, Esther, and the prophet Ezekiel, take us, following the captives, to the soil and depths of Assyria itself. In ancient times, therefore, there is no other people who had so many points of contact with the Israelites as the Eastern Semites; There is, therefore, no other people whose history would be so useful to know for a complete understanding of the history of the people of God as the history of the people of Sennacherib and Nebuchadnezzar. Consequently, the discoveries made in ancient Assyria constitute an invaluable treasure for Biblical history, and Christians should be imbued with gratitude to archaeologists and scientists who devote their labors and their energies to the exploration and excavation of the hills of Birs-Nimrud, Kuyunjik, Khorsabad, or to the careful reading of those strange wedge-shaped writings, which for centuries were considered in the eyes of Easterners it was a fantastic work of some mysterious geniuses, but in the eyes of Western researchers it was an impenetrable mystery. The discoveries made in Egypt are no less precious for the sacred books. If Chaldea is the cradle of the Israeli people, then Egypt is the land of their upbringing, where they grew up and spent the years of their youth; there it was he who became the people for whom Jehovah performed great miracles; Leaving the land of Goshen, these people left an indelible stamp of their stay in the land of the pharaohs. Until the time of the Savior Jesus Christ, who was also forced to seek refuge in Egypt, the Jews were in frequent relations, sometimes hostile, sometimes peaceful, with the inhabitants of the banks of the Nile. The author of the book of Job saw the river where the hippopotamus and the leviathan, the hippopotamus and the crocodile live, as well as the mines of Sinai; Solomon was married to Pharaoh's daughter; Jeroboam sought refuge in Egypt, Jeremiah lived there; The pharaohs themselves made military campaigns in Palestine more than once. Egyptological research is therefore important not only for historians and archaeologists, but also for theologians and exegetes. After this, is it necessary to say what significance the research carried out by modern scientists in Palestine and neighboring countries has, namely, in the sense of a living understanding of a significant part of the biblical narratives? It was in this country that the entire history of the chosen people took place. It was there that the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob pitched their tents, it was there that Joshua brought the twelve tribes after they left the land of Goshen and the Sinai desert, and there they lived under the protection of God and under the protection of heroic judges; Kings David, Solomon and the prophets performed their great deeds there, awaiting the coming of the Messiah. On the banks of the Jordan, it is true, such brilliant discoveries were not made as were made in Egypt and Assyria, but nevertheless they have their significance for the understanding and protection of the sacred books and have contributed quite a bit to the clarification of many dark indications of the Bible. All these discoveries were made in very recent times, and their history is extremely interesting and represents a wonderful example of the triumph of science over the innermost secrets. A number of the greatest discoveries in the field of historical remains of ancient peoples began with Egypt, precisely with the solution to reading hieroglyphs. Until the beginning of this century, ancient Egypt remained an inexplicable mystery for the scientific world, despite the fact that the “land of wonders” attracted the attention of inquisitive researchers of both the ancient and new worlds. The majestic pyramids and mysterious sphinxes, with their mysterious inscriptions, silently looked at the fate of the historical life of their country for thousands of years and tightly kept the secret of the inscriptions entrusted to them by history. Scientists approached them many times with the desire to find out the eternal secret from them, but, constantly meeting cold silence, “whistling and waving their hands,” according to the sarcastic expression of the prophet (Zophon. II, 15), they left them fruitlessly. Only our century managed to find out the secret of hieroglyphic inscriptions, and a whole world of historical knowledge opened up in them, a very significant part of which serves as an excellent confirmation of biblical legends. The discovery took place at the end of the last century, but attempts to unravel the mystery of the hieroglyphs began much earlier. The Egyptians have long been reputed to be the greatest scientists and sages of the ancient world, and therefore it was natural to assume that these inscriptions contained precisely this great wisdom. But there was no way to read them. All the curiosity and all the efforts of the researchers became a dead end. According to guesses, the hieroglyphs were writing in which the priests expressed or rather hid their knowledge, and there was even an idea that the priests themselves in later times lost the key to reading them and lost the ability to understand them. For an uninitiated observer, nothing could be more mysterious and mysterious than these strange figures, some of which apparently resembled letters, but next to them stood in a disorderly mixture of animals, birds, people, reptiles, inanimate objects and individual parts of them. Every observer involuntarily had a whole series of questions: what kind of images are these? Are they simple symbols, or are they words? if words, are they written in some kind of alphabet? what language is expressed in them: dead or living, spoken? if alive, which one? Isn't this a language known only to the priests, like for example. how in India there was a Sanskrit language? No human wisdom, apparently, was able to answer all these questions. As a result, already in the ancient classical world the most monstrous views on the essence of hieroglyphs were formed. Thus, according to the Greeks, hieroglyphs were a series of mysterious letters intended to preserve the most important secrets of nature and the most sublime inventions of man. The interpretation of these writings exclusively belonged to the priestly class. And it already understood him little, since real knowledge of it was lost with the decline in the power of the pharaohs, and especially during the invasion of the Persian country under Cambyses. This conviction, supported by the mystery with which the high priest initiated the chosen ones into the sublime truths of his knowledge, forced the Greeks to look at hieroglyphs precisely as the expression of these secrets, which were so carefully guarded from the masses that their explanation was in no way possible for the uninitiated. This view passed from the Greeks to the Romans, who, in turn, tried in vain to penetrate the mystery of hieroglyphs. How alive this interest was among them is even shown by the legend that one of the first emperors offered a rich reward to the one who would give a proper explanation of the hieroglyphic inscription on the obelisk, brought at that time from Egypt to Rome, but no one responded to this call. Early Christian writers, especially medieval ones, also had very strange opinions about the essence of hieroglyphic writing. Thus, some even thought that since Egypt occupied a middle position in the world, it had long been the custodian of those great truths that were revealed by Christ to all humanity, and therefore the hieroglyphs contained the principles and system of Christianity, revealed to the Egyptian priests 4000 years before the birth of its Founder. Others asserted with equal plausibility that the inscription on the famous Pamphylian obelisk, transported to Rome, contained a memory of the victory that believers in the Holy Trinity won under the filthy pagans six centuries after the flood during the reign of the sixth and seventh Egyptian pharaohs. Finally, in order to put an end to these theories, which stemmed from a complete misunderstanding of hieroglyphs, let us also point out the opinion of the French scientist Palin, according to which Egyptian hieroglyphs bear a significant resemblance to Chinese writing, and therefore, supposedly, one only needs to translate, for example. Psalms of David into Chinese, write them in ancient Chinese script, and you get Egyptian papyri. Even in the Bible we allegedly have many of the most important sacred scrolls of Egypt translated into Hebrew. Despite these fantastic views, which apparently destroyed all hope of a true interpretation of hieroglyphs, there was no shortage of researchers among scientists who in every possible way sought more rational methods of their interpretation. Particular attention was paid to one ancient work, which was aimed precisely at the interpretation of at least some sculptural images often found in Egypt. This is the work of a certain Horapollo, an Egyptian scholar or scribe. Unfortunately, his authority lost a lot due to the fact that he lived at such a late time as the 5th century AD, and therefore his interpretation could not be based on actual knowledge of the subject, but on the dark indications of tradition and the unclear definition of such symbols, which then still remained somewhat understandable to the Egyptians. But not only that: the original work itself no longer existed, but there was a Greek translation of it made by a certain Philip, a person so little-known and obscure that scientists still do not know what century to date it to; and in any case, he lived at least two centuries later than Horapollo himself, and, therefore, when every trace of actual hieroglyphic knowledge had already been lost. This Philip, undoubtedly, brought something of himself, of his own invention. Nevertheless, with all these shortcomings, Gorapollo's book is not without a certain significance in the sense of characterizing early attempts to explain hieroglyphs. In any case, this is the only book of antiquity entirely devoted to the task of interpreting the mystery in which Egyptian wisdom was clothed, and therefore is not without its own peculiar interest, although it is filled with fabulous and naively childish considerations. Actually, a number of the newest learned interpreters of hieroglyphic writing began with the learned Jesuit Kircher. In 1636 he published six voluminous volumes in which, he claimed, most of the hieroglyphic inscriptions then known in Europe were explained and read. But it is enough to look at these large volumes to doubt the merits of his interpretations. All of them are written in such a mysterious, one might say, incomprehensible language that the interpretation is almost more difficult to read than the hieroglyphs themselves, and in general are filled with such fantastic absurdities that show that the author had an imagination incomparably more fruitful than his learning. Some of his translations of hieroglyphic inscriptions into Latin provide an interesting example of how this classical language can be written without anyone being able to make sense. Nevertheless, his work was not fruitless. He greatly contributed to the success of subsequent research, especially by the fact that in his work he collected a lot of passages from Greek and Latin authors regarding Egypt, and even more so by the fact that he was the first to draw the attention of scientists to the Coptic language, many manuscripts in which were kept in the Vatican and other libraries, public and private, in Italy. Kircher had many followers, and among them a place of honor belongs to the Danish scientist Georg Zege. In 1797, he published an essay “On the Origin and Purpose of Obelisks,” and many of his comments about hieroglyphs were very useful to subsequent researchers. The learned English Bishop Warburton also made several random but apt remarks in his famous essay on “The Divine Messenger of Moses.” There, by the way, based on the study of the evidence of Clement of Alexandria, he came to the conclusion that hieroglyphs were truly a written language applicable to the purposes of history, everyday life, as well as religion and mythology,” and that among the different types of hieroglyphic writing, the Egyptians also had those that were used phonetically, i.e. like alphabetic letters. No matter how important this discovery was, scientists did not dare to immediately believe it, and no one even thought to make sure what kind of alphabet it was, or even to apply the understanding of a learned bishop to the explanation of the Egyptian monuments then known in Europe. To confirm this consideration, three important conditions were necessary. If these writings were indeed phonetic in nature, then the words they expressed must have belonged only to the ancient spoken language of the Egyptians; Therefore, first of all, it is necessary to determine what kind of language it is and whether remains of it have been preserved anywhere. Secondly, a significant collection of inscriptions or accurate photographs from them was necessary so that a scientific comparison could be made between them. Finally, thirdly, it was necessary to obtain an accurate translation of some of the Egyptian inscriptions into a language accessible to the latest scientists. But it is clear how difficult it was to expect that such a combination of all these necessary conditions would ever present itself, and that is probably why Bishop Warburton’s guess was treated with such disdain. And yet, circumstances soon developed in such a way that it became possible to fulfill all these three main conditions, so necessary for the interpretation of hieroglyphs. As for the first condition, it was soon represented by a major study by the French scientist Quatrmer, “On the Language and Literature of Egypt”; in it he satisfactorily proved, to the surprise of the learned world, that the newest Coptic language is the language of the ancient Egyptians. The Copts, indeed, are the only direct descendants of the ancient Egyptians, and some two hundred years ago they spoke the ancient Coptic or Egyptian language, which was fully preserved in their books and thus came down to us. The alphabet in which they are written is Greek with the addition of seven special letters taken from the so-called demotic, i.e. already relatively late Egyptian writing. This letter came into use with them with the introduction of Christianity and is still used in Coptic liturgical books. Since the Copts at the same time had liturgical and sacred books translated from Coptic into Arabic and Greek, this provided an extensive field for philological comparison of languages. Thus, the first condition for the interpretation of hieroglyphs was obvious: the language in which the hieroglyphs were written was discovered. Then the second condition was realized: a sufficient collection of inscriptions had been made. It was realized thanks to the famous expedition of Napoleon I to Egypt. This brilliant commander never lost sight of higher goals during his military campaigns, and, going to Egypt, he took with him several famous French scientists to study Egyptian monuments. These scholars subjected the Egyptian monuments to a thorough description, and a large, luxurious “Description of Egypt” was published, in which many photographs from Egyptian inscriptions were presented. And thus, Egyptian monuments became accessible to desk study by researchers, something in which previously there was a very great lack. The extent to which this deficiency was initially felt is shown by the remarkable fact that there were even many forgeries and crude imitations of Egyptian inscriptions, by which scientists were often misled. Thus, in Europe the so-called Izidin table with hieroglyphic inscriptions was once famous. It was given great importance in the scientific world, and when it changed hands it was valued at extremely high amounts. Meanwhile, it later turned out that this was a crude fake with a crude imitation of Egyptian hieroglyphs. But in order for all this material to become completely fruitful for science, it was necessary to fulfill the third condition, namely, to find the key to reading these inscriptions and precisely to find an inscription that would have a translation into some well-known European language. And fortunately for science, this last condition soon came true. During the campaign of Napoleon I in Egypt, one officer of the French army, Boussard, while doing some work in Rosetta, found at a depth of four feet below the surface a part of an oblong quadrangular slab of black basalt. There was an inscription on it in three languages ​​- hieroglyphic at the top, Greek at the bottom and in the middle the so-called demotic, which came into use in the later centuries of Egyptian history. The Greek text showed that the inscription was made in honor of Ptolemy Epiphanes, around 205 BC. Since the hieroglyphic inscription apparently contained the same content as the Greek one, this was the key to unlocking the secret of the hieroglyphs. Scientific researchers immediately began to analyze this inscription and many of them showed miracles of ingenuity. The French researcher de Sacy first began reading the demotic inscription, as the simplest, and began to analyze it according to the system of solving secret writing. To do this, it was necessary, firstly, to determine the number of different signs encountered; secondly, to notice groups of signs that occur more often than others, and thirdly, based on a guess about the meaning of the inscription, explain the groups with the words of the language in which, by assumption, the inscription was made. The meaning was known from a Greek inscription, and the language was Coptic. The easiest thing, of course, was to turn to parsing and reading proper names, which, as it turned out, were separated from other letters by special circles. And with this method, by guesswork, in 1802 he read the names Ptolemy, Alexander and Veronica. But this reading was only conjectural. De Sacy's work was continued by the English researcher Jung. He also subjected the demotic inscription to a thorough analysis and drew attention to those groups that, by their repetition, already indicated their correspondence with the repeated words of the Greek inscription. Thus, in this inscription one small group of signs was often repeated, which in number turned out to be quite consistent with the Greek union χοί (and) in the Greek inscription. Likewise, another group was repeated about 30 times; and in the Greek translation the word βασιλεύς, meaning “king,” was repeated exactly the same number of times. By hunch, he then found the words Ptolemy and Egypt, which were repeated in the hieroglyphic inscription as many times as in the Greek. Having thus found several corresponding words, he placed the inscriptions one against the other, line after line, so that the familiar words were one against the other. As a result, other unknown words came closer to each other, and a wide field for comparison opened up. So, little by little, he got to the meaning of 150 words, and this was the first dictionary in the study of the ancient Egyptian language. Much, of course, later turned out to be incorrect, but Jung’s works were a fruitful beginning for further research, which was crowned with complete success, thanks to the works of the famous Egyptologist Champollion the Younger. Champollion began studying Egyptology around 1818. Before this, he had been studying the Coptic language and the geography of ancient Egypt, and since he had read and studied everything that was written by the ancients about Egypt, he was thereby excellently prepared for the solution of the task ahead of him. In 1816, a small obelisk with hieroglyphs was opened in Philae, and on its pedestal there were Greek inscriptions, namely Ptolemy and Cleopatra. Champollion drew attention to this obelisk, and with his discerning mind he saw here the key to reading the hieroglyphic inscription. Among the hieroglyphs he found two circles and in one of them the inscription resembled the one that Jung interpreted in the sense of Ptolemy. The other circle, therefore, according to his guess, should have meant Cleopatra. And so he began to carefully analyze these two names. Reasoning in this way that these Greek proper names could not have any special meaning in the Egyptian language, he naturally came to the conclusion that the signs with which these names were written must necessarily represent sounds, and thus the Greek names here are written in Egyptian letters. If this reasoning is correct, then obviously the Egyptian signs must somehow correspond to the Greek letters. And if so, then the first sign in the name Ptolemy should correspond to the Greek P, the second sign to the letter T, etc. To make sure that there was no error here, it was necessary to apply the same reading process to other words, and if the Greek letter P is reproduced by the same sign in other words, then obviously this reading process is correct. He began a similar process of reading through a comparison of two names: Ptolemy and Cleopatra. Comparing the images in both names with one another, he came to the conclusion that these images really represent a kind of letters, but the meaning of the letters themselves is determined by the initial sound of those Egyptian words that name the depicted objects. Having marked the signs in both names with numbers, he analyzed these images one by one, and this analysis completely convinced him of the truth of his guess. Thus, sign No. 1 in the name Cleopatra represents a triangle or “knee,” and since the Coptic word (Kelch), meaning knee, begins with the letter K, then this sign represents the letter K. Sign No. 2 in the same name depicts a lion, and since in Coptic the word “lion” (Labo) begins with the letter l, then, therefore, the image of a lion means the letter L. This was fully confirmed by the fact that the same sign (lion) is also found in the name Ptolemy, and exactly where, according to Greek, the letter l should be. The sign at No. 3 in the name Cleopatra is a reed leaf, and the same sign is at Nos. 6 and 7 in the name Ptolemy. Since the Coptic word for reed begins with the letter a, the sign must be A or E. The sign No. 4 in the same name represents a knot and, according to the Greek, must be equivalent to the letter O. The sign No. 5 in the same name, the same as the sign No. 1 in the name Ptolemy, must therefore represent the letter P. Sign No. 6 in the name Cleopatra represents an eagle, and since in Coptic the word “eagle” (Ahom) begins with the letter a, and since it is identical with sign No. 9 in the same name in the place where the letter a is supposed to be, then, obviously, this sign represents the letter A. Sign No. 7 depicts a hand, and since in Coptic the word “hand” begins with the letter t (Thoth), then this is obviously a sign T. Sign No. 8 in the same name represents a mouth; in Coptic the word for mouth (Ro) begins with the letter p, and obviously it is the letter R. Sign No. 9 is identical with No. 6. Signs No. 10 (corresponding to No. 2 in the name Ptolemy) and No. 11 have nothing corresponding in Greek; but subsequent research proved that these signs were placed after every feminine name. Thus, comparing these signs step by step, Champollion found their complete correspondence both with each other and with Greek letters. In the name Ptolemy there are still signs No. 5 and 8, which do not find a correspondence in the name Cleopatra. By assumption, they were supposed to mean M and S, precisely those letters that are not and should not be in the name Cleopatra. This is how the first Egyptian hieroglyphic words were read and the complete key to reading hieroglyphs was found. Champollion was fully convinced and proved that Egyptian signs are nothing more than words, but they serve to designate precisely those sounds or letters with which these words begin. And since several words can begin with the same letter, then, obviously, the same letter in Egyptian hieroglyphs could be depicted in different ways. This discovery of Champollion made a huge impression throughout the entire scientific world, and Egyptologists set to work together, and from that time Egyptology began to make rapid progress. Thanks to the concerted efforts of a number of Egyptologists, stone documents, as well as papyrus scrolls placed in tombs along with mummies, became completely accessible and understandable to scientists, and now not only are Egyptian documents translated and published, but also on the very monuments of Egypt, European scientists sometimes make new hieroglyphic inscriptions - to the surprise of future generations. Such an inscription, by the way, was made above the entrance to the Great Pyramid of Gizeh by a German scientific expedition led by the famous German Egyptologist Lepsius. 30 The discovery of the key to reading hieroglyphic inscriptions not only constituted a new era in the history of Egypt, but also produced a whole revolution in the field of historical views and criticism regarding Biblical history. Egypt, as already mentioned, had direct biblical-historical significance as the place of formation and initial education of the biblical people, as well as the place of education of the liberator and legislator of this people, Moses. Therefore, the interest of the newly unraveled inscriptions is increased tenfold precisely by their close relationship to the biblical narrative. They provide an excellent illustration of many biblical tales and provide explanations for many obscure passages in the sacred books. But they have even greater significance in historical, critical and apologetic terms. Until recently, rationalist criticism, as we have seen, questioned the reality of many biblical stories and relegated them to the realm of poetic fiction and myth, and since there was no factual evidence to confirm them, such critical views even penetrated into the field of theological commentary. More recently, the English (former) Bishop Colenzo wrote that “all the details of the narrative of the book of Exodus give rise to assumptions as monstrous and absurd as would be the absurd position in arithmetic that two-two-five”, that “there is not the slightest reason to assume that the author of the Pentateuch wrote actual history, and not a story.” 31 Now such criticism is unthinkable in science; it meets an inexorable denouncer of its frivolity in newly discovered and unraveled hieroglyphic inscriptions, which, on the contrary, confirm in every detail the truth of the biblical narrative. 2. Opening the key to the wedge-shaped inscriptions. While the work on reading hieroglyphs was taking place, in the area of ​​​​another ancient people, who had no less historical significance in relation to the biblical people, attempts began to unravel the mystery of other even more mysterious inscriptions. Travelers to ancient Persia and Mesopotamia have long paid attention to some strange inscriptions, like wedges, that amazed with their mystery. Some of these monuments, especially in Persepolis, were erected by the kings of the Achimenid dynasty, namely Darius, the son of Hystaspes, and his successors, from which it was natural to assume that other kings made similar inscriptions. The inscriptions were made by three different cuneiform writing systems; and since these three types of inscriptions were always placed next to one another, it is obvious that these were only different translations of the same text. The subjects of the Persian kings belonged to various tribes, and just as at present the Turkish pasha in the east usually publishes orders in Turkish, Arabic and Persian, so that the order could be understood by the entire population of his district, so the Persian kings were forced to resort to issuing their decrees in several languages ​​in order to bring them to the attention of their multilingual subjects. In view of this, it became clear that these three texts of the Achimenid inscriptions were addressed to the three main nationalities of the Persian empire, and that one of them, constantly standing in front of the other inscriptions, was obviously in ancient Persian, the language of the king himself. Meanwhile, the Persian text, fortunately, presented fewer difficulties for the researcher than the other two, accompanying it. The number of different signs used in this inscription did not exceed 40, and the words in it were separated from one another by special symbols. Some of the words contained so many signs that one could not help but assume that these signs denoted letters, and not syllables, and that, therefore, the Persian wedge-shaped inscriptions must consist of the alphabet, and not of syllabic or word signs. Then, one could also immediately guess that these inscriptions should be read from left to right, since on the left all the lines ran correctly one under the other, without protruding from one line, while on the right their ends were uneven, so that the last line sometimes ended at a considerable distance from the right end of the entire inscription. The key to reading these inscriptions was first discovered thanks to the lucky guess of the German scientist Grotefend. He noticed that the inscriptions generally began with three or four words, of which one varied, while the others remained unchanged. The word being modified had three forms, although the same form always appeared on the same monument. Hence Grotefend suggested that this word represents the name of the king, and the words following it mean royal titles. One of the supposed names appeared much more often than the others, and since it, by the number of characters, was too short for the name of Artaxerxes and too long for the name of Cyrus, one could guess that it meant either Darius or Xerxes. A study of classical writers showed Grotefend that some of the monuments with a similar inscription were erected by Darius. Based on this, he gave the signs that make up the inscription a meaning corresponding to the word Daria in its ancient Persian form (Darayavus), and thus he was able to achieve the supposed reading of six wedge-shaped letters. With this stock of letters in his possession, he then turned to the second royal name, which also appeared on several monuments and was of the same length as the name of Darius. This name could only be the name of Xerxes; but if so, then the fourth letter composing it (the letter r) must necessarily be the same as the third letter in the name of Daria. This is exactly what happened in reality, and this served as the best proof that the German scientist was right and was on the right path to reading wedge-shaped inscriptions. The third name, which was much longer than the first two, differed from the second mainly in the beginning, and the last part of it was quite similar to the name Xerxes. It is clear from this that this name should have meant nothing other than Artaxerxes, and that this was exactly the case, this became undoubted due to the fact that the second sign composing it was completely identical with the one that meant the letter r. Grotefend now had a small alphabet, and with the help of it he began to read the word that always followed the royal name and therefore supposedly meant “king.” Peering at the signs that comprised it, he found that it closely resembled the word “king” in the Zend language - the ancient language of the Eastern Persians - which was used in one part of Persia at the same time as the ancient Persian language - the language of the Achimenids - was used in another part of it. Hence, there could be no more room for doubt that he had actually solved the great problem and discovered the key to the reading of the wedge-shaped texts. Grotefend himself, however, did not have to finish the work so brilliantly begun, and Assyriology began to make more or less significant progress only many years after these discoveries. Meanwhile, the study of the Zend language began to move forward rapidly, especially thanks to the works of Burnouf, who accidentally turned his attention to wedge-shaped inscriptions. But only the next researchers, namely Burnouf’s student, Lyassin, and the Englishman Henry Rawlinson, completed the analysis of these inscriptions. The discovery of the list of Persian satrapies in the inscription of Darius at Naqsh-i-Rustem, and especially of Rawlinson's copy of the long inscription of Darius on the rock at Begistoun, enabled these scholars, independently of each other, to compose an alphabet which differed only in the meaning assigned to one sign, and, by means of the Zend and Sanskrit languages, to translate from the language whose scripts had been so wonderfully discovered. The reading of the Persian wedge-shaped texts had thus become an accomplished fact, and all that remained was to unravel the other two texts that appeared on the same monuments. But it was not an easy task. The words in these inscriptions were not separated from one another, and the signs were extremely numerous. With the help, however, of frequent repetition of proper names, these two texts gradually yielded to the patient art of researchers, and in the course of time it was discovered that one of them was in an agglutinative language, that is, akin to the language of the Turkofin tribes, and the other in a dialect very closely similar to the Hebrew language of the Old Testament. Monuments found almost immediately afterwards in Assyria and Babylonia by Botta and Layard soon showed which people this dialect belonged to. The inscriptions found in Nineveh turned out to be written in the same language and represented the same cuneiform writing system. From here it became obvious that this was an inscription in the language of the Semitic population of Assyria and Babylonia, for whom, obviously, the Persian kings intended their decrees among others. Reading this inscription served as the starting point for reading the inscriptions on those monuments that soon began to be excavated in Assyria. The Assyrians, like the Babylonians, wrote on clay slabs and had entire libraries that were filled with rich literature inscribed on slabs specially burned for this purpose. In this regard, the results of Layard's excavations in Nineveh were especially important, namely the discovery of the destroyed library of this ancient city, now buried under the hills of Kuyundzhik. The broken brick tiles belonging to this library not only provided researchers with an enormous amount of literary material, but also provided them with a direct aid to the study of the Assyrian language. Among all kinds of literature, this library contained entire lists of signs with their various phonetic and ideographic meanings, tables of synonyms and catalogs of names of plants and animals. But that was not all. The inventors of the cuneate writing system were a people who preceded the Semites in the occupation of Babylonia and spoke a language completely different from that of their Semitic successors. It was precisely the Akkadians, as they are usually called, who left behind them a significant amount of literature, highly valued by the Semitic Babylonians and Assyrians. The greater part of the Nineveh tiles therefore consists of parallel translations from Akkadian into Assyrian, as well as primers, dictionaries and grammars, in which the Akkadian original is always placed next to the Assyrian translation. Such bilingual texts not only enabled scholars to restore the long-forgotten Akkadian language, but also served as a great aid in the compilation of the Assyrian dictionary. Three new expeditions, some of which were led by such a famous Assyriologist as George Smith, greatly contributed to the clarification of previously known literary tiles, and discovered quite a few tiles from the library of Babylonia. Hence, although only one of the many libraries still buried under the ruins of Babylonia and Assyria has been explored so far, however, in the hands of scientists there is already such a large reserve of Assyrian literature that it significantly exceeds in its content the entire Old Testament. In view of such an abundance of material for study and comparison, the Assyriologist is now in an even more advantageous position in this respect than the Hebraist, and the latter can now receive quite a lot of help from Assyriology in determining the meaning of many Hebrew words that were hitherto very dubious. The development of Assyriology was especially facilitated by the fact that the wedge-shaped writing system, which owes its origin to the hieroglyphic system, very freely uses the so-called identifying signs, i.e. such signs that, without having a sound meaning, serve to determine the class to which the words they accompany belong. As a result, one can always tell at first glance whether the word in question means a person, a woman, a Deity, a river, a country or a city, or whether it means an animal, a bird, a plant, a stone, a star, etc. With such aids, it is not surprising that Assyriology has made very great progress within a few years, so that wedge-shaped inscriptions are now read with the same ease as the historical books of the Old Testament. In a word, the study of Assyriology now rests on the same solid and true principles as the study of any other ancient language, the knowledge of which has reached us by tradition; and the antiquity of its monuments, the richness of its words, the perfection of its grammar, and the syllabic character of the writing, expressing both consonants and vowels, which is not found in Egyptian, all make it extremely important in the study of Semitic languages. Both the discovery of this language and the reading of the wedge-shaped inscriptions on it not only shed a new stream of light on the history and antiquity of the Old Testament, but also served to explain the language of the Old Testament, as a result of which many hitherto dark passages of Holy Scripture became completely clear, and the defenders of the Word of God find in it a new powerful weapon against denial and unbelief. The brilliant results of discoveries in Egypt and Assyria significantly diverted the attention of scientific researchers in this particular direction, so that for a while the main ground of biblical-historical events, namely Palestine, was left in the shadows. But even in the latter, successful research is now being carried out, which has already been crowned with important results. If discoveries in Egypt and Assyria gave us new documents that served to confirm the truth of biblical historical events, then it was extremely desirable for Palestine to have such a discovery that could serve as confirmation of the historical authenticity and reliability of the biblical books themselves. Negative criticism, which has recently become accustomed to attributing the books of Moses to the time of the Babylonian captivity, constantly has in mind the assumption that the Israelites, as a people, until this period were an illiterate people and therefore for them such books were completely inaccessible and superfluous. If they appeared already at such a late time as the Babylonian captivity, then it is clear that they, since they were written much later than the events described in them, cannot have any historical authenticity and, therefore, convey only walking legends and myths about the foggy past of their historical life. This assumption is now crumbling to dust in the face of recent discoveries in Palestine, and, incidentally, the so-called “Siloam Inscription.” It not only gives us the opportunity to accurately judge how St. books of the Old Testament in the original, but also clearly shows how high civilization was by the time of King Solomon, during whose reign it was created. The Siloam inscription was found in Jerusalem, on the wall of a rock-cut tunnel that carried water from the Virgin's spring into the Pool of Siloam. Its strange position in a dark underground tunnel, through which water constantly flows, was the reason that it remained unnoticed for so long and was only recently found. Even after it was noticed, before it could be dismantled, it was necessary to drain the water in the tunnel and clear the letters of the limescale that filled them. Here is the translation of this inscription: “Look at the excavation! Here is the story of this dig. When there were still three cubits left to go through, and the quarries were raising their picks, each one towards his neighbor, the voice of one man was heard shouting to another. On the day the excavation was completed, the quarrymen struck pickaxe against each other, and water flowed from the spring into the pond at a distance of 1,200 cubits. The height of the hole above the quarrymen’s heads was about an elbow.” In this case, first of all, attention is drawn to the fact that even in such an early period as the one to which the inscription belongs, the art of engineering was so developed that it made it possible for the workers of the Jewish king to begin digging a tunnel simultaneously from two opposite sides, and despite the distance from the beginning of the tunnel to its exit of 732 fathoms and its many bends, calculate it so as to meet in the middle. The exact timing of this work has not yet been determined; some attribute it to the time of Solomon, others to the reign of Hezekiah. In the latter case, it will be the same water supply system mentioned in 2 Kings. 20:20 and in 2 Chron. 32:30. From the style of the letters of the inscription it is clear that its author was accustomed to writing on parchment or papyrus, and not on stone; they are rounded rather than angular. It is clear, therefore, that in Judea such an alphabet was in use, which indicates that the people read and wrote books. Another remarkable feature of the Siloam Inscription is that it is not a public document; it does not even mention the name of the then reigning king. It was probably cut out by one of the workers in a moment of delight at finishing the work. The care with which the letters were carved in a place where there was no one to read or examine them shows that for its author writing was as common an activity as working on a tunnel. From this fact the conclusion is obvious: if a simple worker could write, then specialist scribes, priests and members of prophetic schools even more so. Thus there is no reason to believe that literacy was less widespread in those days than it is now. This is confirmed in the monuments of Egypt and Assyria. In Egypt books were in general use from a very early time; the title of scribe was held in high esteem, and both public and private monuments were covered with writings that were read by all passers-by. Among the fragments of Egyptian literature that have come down to us is a collection of letters that were supposed to serve as an example of this special type of writing. We have already mentioned the library in Nineveh. It was compiled in imitation of the libraries that existed in all the cities of the Babylonian kingdom from the most ancient times. Long before the days of Abraham, there were not only libraries richly stocked with books both on clay and papyrus, but also numerous readers. These libraries were public, and the extent to which their contents increased with new works and copies of old ones shows that they were frequently visited. The books were arranged in order and cataloged in the same way as is done in modern libraries; they applied to all branches of knowledge and to all departments of literature known at that time. If the Israelites, living between Assyria and Egypt and bordering on the highly civilized cities of Phenicia, remained ignorant and illiterate, it would be simply a miracle. That they were not illiterate is now indisputably proven by the Siloam inscription. This is also supported by the evidence of one saying from the book of Solomon's Proverbs, which says that Hezekiah's scribes made a new copy of Solomon's Proverbs (35:1), probably for a library similar to those of Assyria and Babylon. So, let us conclude in the words of one of the most famous Orientalists of our time, discoveries on the basis of the historical life of the ancient peoples of the East in the last half century have made it clear: 1) that the Old Testament narratives, when compared with undoubtedly contemporary documents, turn out to be accurate down to the smallest details; 2) that before the Babylonian captivity, the Jews were a literate people, possessed at least one library and were well acquainted with the art of writing. Therefore, the authenticity of the sacred books of the Old Testament cannot be rejected on the ground that their historical data is incorrect or simply a myth and that they could not have been written at the early period to which they refer. There is no reason to believe that Abraham was illiterate; his contemporaries in Ur of the Chaldeans knew how to read and write; There is even less reason to consider his descendants, who came into contact with the literature of Egypt, to be illiterate. If the biblical books were written during the very events they narrate, then for us they receive the weight and authority of the first source. No writer can misrepresent what is well known to his readers; he cannot invent events and facts that his contemporaries can testify that never happened. The very history of writing in the East not only makes it possible to assume that the biblical books were written at the time to which tradition refers them, but also fully assures us of this. It is incredible that the Israelites, who knew how to write, refrained from compiling books at a time when the peoples around them had long had libraries. That the biblical books actually belong to the period to which tradition refers them is now confirmed by Egyptian and Assyrian monuments. We repeat, the accuracy in the smallest details can only be explained by the fact that they were written down by their contemporaries. The Old Testament is a preparation for the New. The Divine authority of one is closely related to the Divine authority of the other. The history of the Jewish church finds its explanation only in the appearance of Christ into the world; prophecies are understandable only in the light of the Gospel. If the history of the Jewish people were a mixture of myths and legends, then where would there be a foundation on which Christianity could rest? If the prophecies were written down later than the time to which, according to their own testimony, they belong, then what would have happened to their testimony, which the Lord Himself points to? Fortunately, we don't have to resolve these issues; long buried, but now dug up stones cry out against the people attacking our holy faith; the long-forgotten empires of the ancient east rose from their ancient graves to testify to the authenticity of the “words of God.” 32 Several articles of this kind were published by the author in the magazines “Christian Reading” and “Strannik” Intending our book not for learned specialists, who, of course, have access to rich Western European literature on this subject in the original, but in general for a circle of educated readers, we in every possible way avoided burdening our book with heavy ballast of quotes, preferring to always give more positive material instead. In addition to the Bible, I. Flavius ​​and Herodotus, the famous biblical dictionaries of Smith, Rome and Cassel, the Duke's Encyclopedia, the main sources and manuals for us were: 1) F. Lenortant, Histoire ancienne de I'Orient, 9th illust. edition, 6 large volumes; 2) Vigouroux, La Bible et les decouvertes modernes, 4th edition, volumes I–IV; 3) S. Geikie, Ours with the Bible, volumes I–VI; 4) Edersbeim, Bible History, volumes I–VII. and 5) the newest monographic series under the general title Men of the BibleI – Volume VI; 6) Stanley, Lectures on the History of the Jewish church I–III volumes; 7) the works of Milman, Graetz and others. We owe especially much to the works of Vigouroux, Geikie and the Men of the Bible series, from which we used entire chapters and even sections, subjecting them only to such external processing as was caused by the peculiarities of the plan and purpose of our book. We refer to these same works for detailed cytology, from which we have taken only as much as is necessary in order to show the ordinary reader the general nature of the sources from which the material presented in the book comes. Our sources in this regard were the luxurious illustrated edition of Lenormand’s “History of the Ancient East” (9th French edition) and the famous illustrated Bible of Cassel (in London). Doré's drawings are taken from the American album of biblical-historical paintings (Bible Gallery) of this famous artist. See Vigouroux, La Bible et les Decouvertes modernes ect. Paris 1884, ed. pp. 1–115. The history of biblical rationalism is presented in more detail in a special two-volume work by the same author, namely in his: Les Livres saintes et la critique rationaliste, Paris 1880. The proposed essay is based on the first book, but with additions and from a special essay. Die Gottichen Schriften ect. Wertheim, 1735. De Veritate ect. Paris, 1624; 1633 and 1645. Nicolai, Leben und Meinungen des Herrn Magister Sebaldus Nothanker, Berlin, 1773 I–IIIv. It is remarkable that during the heyday of so-called realism in our country in the 60s, the most advanced of the realists expressed exactly the same demand in relation to our clergy. They, of course, did not know that they were repeating the German asses of the last century, and they put forward such a demand as the “last word” of social science. This is how history repeats itself. Fragmente eines Unbekannten. However, a similar grossly negative work was known under the title De tribus impostoribus, where Mohammed, Moses and Jesus Christ are considered as deceivers. This work was attributed to the Middle Ages, but in reality it was written no earlier than the half of the 18th century and belonged to the emerging school of German rationalists. Eichhorn, Repertorium fur biblische und morgenlandische Literatur, t. IV. Urgeschichte. P. 158, etc. Die Religion innerhalb der Granzen der blossen Vernunft, Koenigsberg, 1793. Lecky, in his History of Rationalism in Europe, rightly sees in Kant and Lessing the two main culprits, although in different directions, in the struggle against the Bible raised in Germany. The influence of Kant in Germany on contemporary minds can be judged by the expression of Jean-Paul Richter, who says: “Kant is not only the luminary of the world, but the entire solar system.” Paulus, Philologich-kritischer und hist. Cjmmentar uber d. N. Test, 1804, t. IV, pp. 150–162. Commentary, Bd. II, p. 426. R. Simon, Historie critique ect. Paris, 1678. Astruc, Conjectures sur les memoires originaux don’t il parait que Moyses est servi, Bruxelles, 1753. Astruc, Conjectures, p. 10–13. Hebraische Mythologie, t. I, p. 59, 205–218; t. II, p. 287. Dissertatio critica ect. Jena 1805. Lehrburch der hist.-krit. Einleitung in A. T. 1845. Einleitung, pp. 179–180. The word Mythology is even emphasized in the original for greater expressiveness. Herzog, Real-Encycljp. In XVIII, 1864. Pp. 73. The poem begins with the words: “I sowed the seed, but where is the yellowing field now?” etc. In L'Esperance magazine, 5–12 Oct. 1839. In this humorous article, reminiscent of the well-known essay on “How Napoleon Never Existed" (Perez, librarian of the city of D’Agen), the arbitrariness of Strauss’s critical assumptions is perfectly revealed. The author summarizes his research as follows: “Strauss’s life is nothing more than a myth, without any historical reality, and it represents only the current opinions of the century when, as if If only he had lived." Fairbairn on Strauss in Contemporary Review, May 1876 p. 977. G. F. Daumer, Die Geheimnisse des Christlichen Alterthums, 1847. Histoire du people d'Israel, par Ernest Renan, tome I, ed. 6th Paris1887. The Edinburgh Review, Apr. 1888, pp. 488–89. This elegant hieroglyphic inscription reads as follows: "Thus say the slaves of the king, whose name is the sun and rock of Prussia—Lepsy the scribe, Erbkam the architect, the Weidepbach brothers dyers, Frey the painter, Franke the farmer, Bopomy the sculptor, Wild the architect. Glory to the eagle, patron of the cross, king, sun and rock of Prussia, son of the sun, liberator earth, Frederick William IV, the most merciful father of his country, the favorite of wisdom and history, the guardian of the Rhine, the chosen one of Germany, the giver of life. May the Almighty God grant to the king and his friend, Queen Elizabeth, the most merciful mother of his country, a happy life on earth and a blessed dwelling in heaven forever. In the year of the Christian era 1812, on the tenth month and fifteenth day. month, on the forty-seventh birthday of His Majesty, on the pyramid of King Khufu, in the third year, fifth month, ninth day of the reign of His Majesty, in the year 3164 from the beginning of the sophic cycle under Pharaoh Manenfakh." Let us note by the way that this curious inscription did not pass without a scientific curiosity. One Chinese Egyptologist, who traveled to Egypt for scientific purposes, was especially interested in this inscription, wrote a whole scientific study about it and found that this inscription, in its antiquity, should be contemporary with the third dynasty in China, that is, it dates back to the period 2200 or 2300 years before the Christian era!! The name of this famous Egyptologist of China is Ping-ch-un. The Beijing Academy of Sciences is to give him an honorary prize. Colenso, The Pentateuch critically examined, t II, pp. 370, 375. From an article by Oxford professor, Assyriologist Says: “Evidence of ancient monuments about the reliability of the books of Holy Scripture.” Transl. in "Right View" March 1888 rev. 555–556.