Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 21:83 (Jul 1864)
Article: Authorship Of The Pentateuch
Author: Samuel Colcord Bartlett

BSac 21:83 (July 1864) p. 495

Authorship Of The Pentateuch

Samuel C. Bartlett

(Continued from Vol 20. p. 865.)

Authorship is a matter of testimony. Resemblance in style and thought, and apparent conformity of circumstances, though they may confirm the testimony, can never take its place as evidence. The presence of certain qualities in the composition cannot dispense with actual testimony; because those qualities admit of skilful imitation. Nor can the absence of those qualities, unless in extreme degree, outweigh the force of testimony; because the same writer, in different moods and at distant intervals, sometimes greatly differs from himself. Abundant instances show the facility with which acute judges may be misled when they rely merely on their critical powers; while the frequent conflicting decisions of the most dogmatic of literary critics ought to be a standing admonition to all such arrogance. Men like Hume, Lord Karnes, and Robertson, fully deceived at first by the poems of “Ossian,” and some of them never undeceived; Sheridan and many other literary men of London accepting the “Vortigern “of the boy Ireland as a relic of the myriad-minded Shakspeare; Sir Walter Scott commenting on the “Raid of Featherstonehaugh” as a genuine ancient ballad; Gesenius, Hamaker, and Rochette imposed upon by spurious Greek and Phenician inscriptions from Malta; German scholars (including Tübingen Reviewers) maintaining the antiquity of the “Amber Witch,” till the author found it hard to prove his authorship; the enigma of “Junius,” baffling Europe for half a century; — cases like these are memorable and instructive. Questions of authorship are to be settled chiefly by testimony.

BSac 21:83 (July 1864) p. 496

We bring testimony, positive and various, to sustain the received opinion that Moses was the author of the Pentateuch.

Firsts it has been shown that this position is entirely credible by the known circumstances of the case: The art of writing was in abundant use around the Israelites at that period; the requisite impulse — a great national and religious epoch — had arrived; the occasion for such a composition now existed in the fixed establishment of a nation’s institutions and religion; the requisite person had also appeared, in the remarkable man who is admitted, not only to have delivered the nation, but to have founded their civil and religious institutions, and in whom, legislating for the present and the future, it would have been the height of folly to dispense with written records. Secondly, it has been shown that there is positive, abundant, and uncontradicted testimony to sustain the position: This testimony is found, first, in the volume itself, which ascribes to Moses, and to him alone, a ...