Гуманизм и религия
Некоторые рассуждения о влиянии реформизма на западное христианство, в контексте сравнения с историей религии в мусульманском мире. Довольно интересные мысли (автор перевел и издал то что осталось от эллинского философа Порфирия - который, еще до Юлиана Отступника, написал критику христианства в 15 томах и был старательно "забыт" последующей многовековой христианской историей).
Я поздно встал и на дороге
застигнут ночью Рима был.
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(from Why I am not a Muslim / by Ibn Warraq)
Foreword
R. Joseph Hoffmann
Westminster College, Oxford
Few books about religion deserve the attribution "courageous." This book, I am pleased to report, does. It is courageous because it is (as the term originally denoted) full of heart (coeur) and courageous because it is an act of intellectual honesty and bravery, an act of faith rather than of faithlessness. It will undoubtedly be a controversial book because it deals personally and forthrightly with a subject widely misunderstood by fheists and nontheists of various stripes. That subject is the Islamic faith.
New religions depend for their sustenance on the energy of converts. Thus Christianity in the first century of the common era and Islam in the sixth depended on the enthusiasm of the newly persuaded. Each had its prophet, each its network of zealous missionary-evangelists and later organization-minded hierarchs and caliphs to drive and sustain the structures that faith invented. Christianity and Islam (like rabbinic Judaism before them) arose as monotheistic reform movements with strong legalistic and dogmatic tendencies. Both idealized, if only the former idolized, the work, teaching, and revelations of their prophets in the form of sacred scripture. Both proclaimed the true God, the importance of charity toward the dispossessed, the quality of mercy. Yet both were inclined, as circumstances required and need dictated, to propagate their ideals and to enlarge the kingdom of God by force when persuasion failed. The dar-al-Islam and the kingdom of Christ, once called Christendom, were in many respects evolutionary twins for the better part of twelve centuries. The unlikely symbol of this relationship is the fraternal feud over proprietorship of the religious womb of the book religions- the wars known as the Crusades. It is Jacob's legacy that his progeny would learn to hate each other and fight religious wars in the name of his God. For all their likeness, the historical course of Christianity has differed remarkably from that of Islam since the late Middle Ages. The cliche that Islam somehow got intellectually stalled in the European feudal era overlooks too much that is undeniably rich, new, and momentous about "the Arab mind," as a standard title describes the culture of Islam. Most Westerners who are not simply islamaphobes are willing to acknowledge where our system of numerical notation comes from; where algebra got started; how Aristotle was saved from puritan schoolmen in the Middle Ages; indeed, where scientific thinking in a number of disciplines originated. The culture of Islam, ranging in its missionary extent from Baghdad to Malaysia, is humanistically rich and potent. And yet. The Middle Eastern culture which spurred humanistic learning and scientific thinking remains a religious culture in a way that befuddles liberal Christians and secularists, and in a way that has not existed in the West since the decline and fall of Christendom in the Reformation. At least a part of our befuddlement stems from the fact that the Reformation is often seen by historians, not as a fall or a falling apart but as a rejuvenation of Christian culture. The persistence of misperceptions about what "happened" with the advent of humanistic thinking in the late Middle Ages stems from the view that the Christian reform was a "back to basics" movement- an attempt to restore biblical teaching and practice to the church rather than (as it was at its roots) a radical challenge to systems of religious authority, a challenge that would eventually erode even the biblical pillars of authority upon which the Reformation itself was based. Islam underwent no such change and entertained no such challenge to Koranic teaching; its pillars remained strong while those of Christianity, unknown even to those who advocated the reform of the church "in head and members," were crumbling.
To misunderstand the disjoining of Islam and Christianity as religious twins is, I would argue, the key to Western misunderstanding of the Islamic faith. The Christian reformation in the West (there was nothing remotely like it in the Eastern church, which, not coincidentally, provides a much closer analogy to Islamic conservatism) proceeded on the false assumption that knowlege of Scripture was ultimately compatible with human knowledge-discovery of the original meanings of texts, linguistic and philological study, historical investigation, and so on. Without tracing the way in which this assumption developed, the fragmented churches that exited the process of cultural, geographical, and denominational warfare between the sixteenth and the twentieth centuries proved the assumption false. Europe would never again be Christendom, and the New World would emerge as an archetype of the bifurcations, rivalries, and half-way compromises that the failure of religious authority had made necessary in the Old. By the end of the nineteenth century, liberal Christian scholarship, with its inherent historical skepticism, which did not spare even the divinity of the founder nor the sacredness of sacred scripture, was verdict enough on the marriage between humanistic learning and divine knowledge, as it was promoted energetically by the early Christian reformers. From the end of the eighteenth century to the present day, Christianity was a recipient religion, which found itself either at war with humanistic learning (as among the evangelicals from Paley's day onward) or, to use Berger's term, an accommodationist faith, whose role in the world seemed to be to accept the truths that culture provided and to express them, whenever possible, in a Christian idiom. Islam scarcely represented a "fundamentalist" reaction to contemporary culture, since the humanistic renaissance it sponsored was not implicitly a rejection of the structures of religious authority. Nor was the "accommodationist" option available to Muslims, since what constituted "secular" truth could not be equated with the prophetic truths of sacred scripture. Islam could only look at what Niebuhr once called the "Christ and Culture" debate with astonishment and as a debate that Christianity sooner or later must lose. To Western ears, Islamic talk of "decadence" seems offensive. In fact, it is an expression of the Islamic view that Christianity has lost the moral contest between secular culture and religious truth, Islam as a religious culture has not confused humanistic learning with the revealed word; accordingly, it has been spared-or in any event has avoided- the historical acids that have eroded biblical faith and Christian "culture" since the sixteenth century. Its methods of exegesis, legal reasoning, and political argumentation look peculiar and retrograde to the Westerner precisely because the Westerner-whether a liberal Anglican or an evangelical Christian-stands on the other shore of a sea that Islam has not chosen to cross. It is small consolation to those who yearn for a restoration of Christian values or biblical religion that Christianity did not mean to cross the sea of faith either, or at least had expected, in embarking on its intellectual journey during the Renaissance, to find God on the other side.
And so to the present work. This book is all about a journey: a journey from the certainties of childhood in a Muslim family (but they could be any childhood certainties) through a process of doubt and, finally, negation, as a result of exposure to what some might dismiss as a "Western" way of thinking about revealed religion. There must be many Muslims who have undertaken such a journey-who have, so to speak, crossed the sea of faith and who have in their personal lives traveled through the intellectual, equivalent of a protestant reformation, which their religious culture, as a whole, did not travel through. A l l such odysseys must be very lonely ones. (For that matter, Odysseus himself was lonely.) The religious pilgrim-and I consider the author of this work to be one-is bound to feel isolated. He does not have the benefit of a convert "to" a new religion, that is to say, a made-to-order group to support and sustain him in hours of crisis and doubt, to assuage his fears and prevent his wavering. In writing a book like this, the religious pilgrim reaches out to an unseen audience for hearing and understanding, in the hope that what he says will ring true for some (certainly not for all) who have shared his faith and who may now share his rejection of it.
It is my privilege to recommend this book as one rich in reflection and intelligence. It is a helpful and in some respects a ground-breaking effort to provide a critical perspective on a faith that is too often-and usually for all the wrong reasons-regarded as uncritical, bellicose, and regressive. What we have is surely no more than one former Muslim's view of his "former" life; but we are mistaken to read this as a coming-out saga. It is part-for-whole a late twentieth-century account of the shrinkage of religious culture, the universality of knowledge, and the inescapability of the humanistic culture, which will survive all particular forms of religion in the twenty-first century. Whether that process, inevitable as it seems, will be marked by violence or accepted with enlightened resignation by defenders of old religious orders and regimes will depend, it seems to me, on how books such as this one are read and received.
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И чтоб напомнить, что такое был еще не так и давно этот самый "разъедающий основы" библейский критицизм (то-бишь критика) и беспомощное противостояние оному, приведу содержание случайно попавшейся на глаза американской книги 1902 года:
AUTHORSHIP OF THE BOOK OF DEUTERONOMY, with its bearings on the higher criticism of the pentateuch
TABLE OF CONTENTS.
INTRODUCTION.
81. APOLOGY FOR WRITING ill.
§2. HIGHER CRITICISM DEFINED iii.
§3. THE ANALYTICAL THEORY OP THE PENTATEUCH vll.
§4. THE SUSPICIOUS SOURCE OF THIS THEORY xv.
§5. THE UNBELIEVING TENDENCY OF IT xvil.
§6. THE RELATION OF DEUTERONOMY TO THIS THEORY xix.
§7. THE PLAN OF THIS WORK xx.
§8. AUTHORITIES AND ABBREVIATIONS XXl.
PART FIRST.
EVIDENCES FOR THE LATE DATE ASSIGNED TO DEUTERONOMY.
§1. FROM THE ACCOUNT OF THE BOOK FOUND BY HILKIAH 1
82. FROM ALLEGED CONFLICTS WITH PREVIOUS LEGISLATION 28
83. FROM THE EARLY DISREGARD OF A CENTRAL SANCTUARY 34
84. FROM THE ALLEGED ABSENCE OF THE AARONIC PRIESTHOOD 49
§5. FROM ALLEGED CONTRADICTIONS 54
1. As to the Financial Condition of the Levltes 55
2. As to Tithes 63
3. As to the Priest's Portion of the Peace-offering 67
4. As to the Sacrifices of the Passover 68
5. As to Eating that Which Died of Itself 69
6. As to Hebrew Bondservants 71
7. As to the Decalogue 78
8. As to Acts of Moses at Mount Sinai 83
9. As to the Mission of the Twelve Spies 88
10. As to the Time Spent at Kadesh 91
11. As to When the Levltes were Consecrated 94
12. As to the Sentence on Moses 95
13. As to the Asylum for the Manslayer 97
14. As to the Year 01 Release 99
15. As to Eating the Firstlings 100
16. As to a Fragment of the Wilderness Itinerary 104
86. INTERNAL EVIDENCE FOR THE LATE DATE 106
1. From the Expression, "Beyond Jordan" 106
2. From Passages Implying Dates Long After the Events 112
3. From Differences Between Laws 115
4. The Date of the Blessing and Cursing, the Song of Moses, and
His Blessing of the Trihes 125
87. EVIDENCES FOR THE LATE DATE IN THE HISTOBICAL BOOKS 137
1. Joshua and Chronicles Set Aside. 137
2. The Confession of Nehemlah and the Levites 139
3. Religion in the Time of the Judges 141
4. The Service at Shiloh 144
5. Offerings Made by Saul and David 152
6. The Priesthood of David's Sons 153
7. Solomon's Career 155
8. Foreign Guards in the Sanctuary 160
9. The Toleration of High Places 165
§8. EVIDENCES FKOM THE EARLY PROPHETS 168
1. From Elijah and Elisha 169
2. From the Prophet Amos 171
3. From the Prophet Hosea 175
4. From the Book of Isaiah 180
5. From a Passage in Micah 182
6. From the Prophet Jeremiah 184
|9. EVIDENCE FROM STYLE 190
PART SECOND.
EVIDENCES FOR THE MOSAIC AUTHORSHIP.
51. INTERNAL EVIDENCE 195
1. From the Title of the Book 195
2. From the Preface to the Second Discourse 197
3. From Directions as to the Ceremony at Mt Ebal 197
4. From the Preface to the Covenant 198
5. From Assertions About the Writing 198
6. From the Preface to the Song and to the Blessing 199
82. INDIRECT TESTIMONY OF THE AUTHOR 200
1. Constant Allusions to Entering Canaan as Yet Future 202
83. INCIDENTAL EVIDENCE 202
1. The Decree Against Amalek 202
2. The Order to Exterminate the Canaanites 203
3. The Order Respecting Ammon, Moab and Edom 204
4. The Predictions in the Book 205
54. THE QUESTION OF FRAUD 209
1. The Charge Preferred 209
2. The Charge Admitted 210
3. The Charge Denied 212
§5. EVIDENCE IN THE BOOK OF JOSHUA Z18
1. Jehovah's Charge to Joshua 218
2. The Case of the Altar Ed 220
3. The Devoted in Jericho 223
4. The Altar and Reading at Mt. Ebal 225
5. The Doom of the Glbeonites 226
6. The Cities of Refuge 227
и тд и тп
«THE AUTHORSHIP OF DEUTERONOMY.
INTRODUCTION.
§1. APOLOGY FOR WRITING.
If an apology were needed for calling in question the con- clusion of those scholars who deny that Moses was the author of the Book of Deuteronomy, it is furnished by these scholar.4 themselves. They constantly insist that men of thought should hold their most cherished convictions subject to revision. They denounce as unreasoning traditionalists those who, rejecting further investigation, cling tenaciously to old beliefs. They are the last men, therefore, who should object to any fresh re-ex- amination of their own conclusions. They would thus be imi- tating those whose unwillingness to hear them excites their dis- pleasure. In no conclusion are these scholars more confident than in the one just mentioned; and if I shall appear to them exceedingly rash in publishing at this late date an attempt to tliovr that it is erroneous, they are still bound by their own principles not to condemn me without a hearing. (...)
§2. HIGHER CRITICISM DEFINED.
The process by which the scholars referred to in the preceding section. have reached their conclusions, is commonly styled The Higher Criticism. This title distinguishes it from "Textual Criticism," or the discovery and correction of clerical errors in the original text . Strictly defined, higher criticism is the art of ascertaining the authorship, date, credibility and literary characteristics of written documents.1 It is a legitimate art, and it has been employed by Biblical scholars ever since the need of such investigations began to be realized. Only, however, within the last hundred years has it borne this title.2 Previously both the textual and the higher criticism were known under the common title, "Biblical Criticism." It scarcely needs to bo added. that the exclusive use of the title Higher Criticism for that application of it which seeks to revolutionize established beliefs in reference to the Bible, ia erroneous: as is also the tacit claim of some advocates of these revolutionary efforts to the exclusive title of higher critics.3 All confusion in the use of these terms will be avoided if the definition just given is kept in mind.
This definition will be better understood if we add to it a statement of the method in which the inquiries of the art are properly conducted. This method is well defined by Prof. W. Kobertson Smith in these words: "The ordinary laws of evidence and good sense must be our guides. For the transmission of the Bible is not due to a continued miracle. but to a watchful Providence ruling the ordinary means by which all ancient books have been handed down. (...)
From these remarks it naturally follows that higher criticism, however correct the principles by which it seeks to be guided, is, in practice, an extremely variable quantity-so variable as to include the writings of extreme rationalists on the one hand and the most conservative of Biblical scholars on the other. From these premises there springs again the inference that those who-have adopted the conclusions of certain critics should not be so confident of their correctness as to practically assume their infallibility. We hear much of "assured results," but there are none so assured as to be exempt from revision. (...)
§3. THE ANALYTICAL THEORY OF THE PENTATEUCH.
It is with the application of higher criticism to the Book of Deuteronomy that we are especially concerned in this work. As a result of the labors of a century on the part of a succession of writers, mostly German rationalists, a theory of the origin and structure of the Pentateuch has been evolved which meets with the general approval of those who deny that Moses was its author.4 This theory is styled the analytical theory, because of the peculiar analysis of the Pentateuch which it involves. The authorship and date of Deuteronomy is one of the subjects involved in this analysis, and this renders it important to present here a brief outline of tihe theory to which easy reference may be had in reading the following pages. (...)
We now see what is made of the Pentateuch, if this theory is true. The question is sometimes raised, What difference does it make whether Moses or some other man wrote the Pen- tateuch ? If this means whether Moses wrote it, or some other man who lived at a time to possess correct information, the difference might be immaterial. But this is not the question. It is, whether Moses is its author, or several unknown men who lived from seven hundred to one thousand years after Moses, and who had no means of correct knowledge. In other words, the question is, whether it came from a man who was the chief actor in much the greater part of its events, and could therefore give an authentic account of them, or from a set of men re- moved many centuries from the events, whose source of information was nothing better than a hoary tradition, and who have actually given us nothing that is certainly real history. (...)
§4. THE SUSPICIOUS SOURCES OF THIS THEORY.
Before we consider the evidences for and against this theory, it is proper that we note some prima-facie considerations which cast upon it a cloud of suspicion. Those who have wrought it out were unbelievers, and were moved in their labors by hostility to the Bible and the Christian religion. Especially is this true of the two scholars to whom, above all others, the present form of the theory owes its completion and defense, A. Kuenen, now deceased, and Julius Wellhausen, who is still living.7 They unhesitatingly reject as incredible all accounts of supernatural events, including those connected with the career of Christ. These statements are freely admitted by the advocates of the theory, and some of them strive, as best they can, to ward off the suspicion thence arising. W. Robertson Smith acknowledges his own indebtedness to these two scholars in the following two sentences: "The first to attempt a connected history of the religion of Israel on the premises of the newer criticism was Professor Kuenen, the value of whose writings is admitted by candid inquirers of every school." "Taken as a whole, the writings of Wellhausen are the most notable contribution to the historical study of the Old Tea lament since the great work of Ewald, and almost every part of the present lectures owes something to them" (Prophets, 12, 13). Professor Briggs makes a similar acknowledgment, and seeks to guard against its effect: "We should not allow ourselves to be influenced by the circumstance that the majority of the scholars who have been engaged in these researches have been rationalistic or semi-rationalistic in their religious opinions; and that they have employed the methods and style peculiar to the German scholarship of our century. Whatever may have been the motives and influences that led to these investigations, the questions we have to determine are: (1) What are the facts in the case, and (2) do die theories account for the facts :" (Bib. Study, 212). But it is vain to attempt to allay suspicion by such remarks as these. When the enemies of the Bible invent and propagate theories in the direct effort to destroy faith in the Bible, the friends of the Book must necessarily be suspicious of them; for such men would not be satisfied with their own works did they not believe that the Bible is discredited by them.
Prof. W. H. Green expresses himself on this point, with his usual calmness, in the following words: "It is noteworthy that the partition hypotheses in all their forms have been elaborated from the beginning in the interest of unbelief. The unfriendly animus of an opponent does not indeed absolve us from patiently and candidly examining his arguments, and accepting whatever facts he may adduce, though we are not bound to receive his perverted interpretations of them. Neverthless, we can not intelligently nor safely overlook the palpable bias against the supernatural which has infected the critical theories which we have been reviewing, from first to last. (...)
§5. THE UNBELIEVING TENDENCY OF THIS THEORY.
If the actual tendency of accepting the theory in question is toward unbelief in the Christian religion, this fact is the strongest possible vindication of such a work as the present. That the theory is at least dangerous in this respect, is acknowledged by one of its most able advocates, Prof. Andrew Harper, in the following words: "The debate concerning the critical views of the Old Testament has reached a stage at which it is no longer confined to professed teachers and students of the Old Testament . It has filtered down, through magazines first, and then through newspapers, into the public mind, and opinions are becoming current concerning the results of criticism which are so partial and ill-informed that they can not but produce evil results of a formidable kind in the near future. (...)»
Я поздно встал и на дороге
застигнут ночью Рима был.
---------
(from Why I am not a Muslim / by Ibn Warraq)
Foreword
R. Joseph Hoffmann
Westminster College, Oxford
Few books about religion deserve the attribution "courageous." This book, I am pleased to report, does. It is courageous because it is (as the term originally denoted) full of heart (coeur) and courageous because it is an act of intellectual honesty and bravery, an act of faith rather than of faithlessness. It will undoubtedly be a controversial book because it deals personally and forthrightly with a subject widely misunderstood by fheists and nontheists of various stripes. That subject is the Islamic faith.
New religions depend for their sustenance on the energy of converts. Thus Christianity in the first century of the common era and Islam in the sixth depended on the enthusiasm of the newly persuaded. Each had its prophet, each its network of zealous missionary-evangelists and later organization-minded hierarchs and caliphs to drive and sustain the structures that faith invented. Christianity and Islam (like rabbinic Judaism before them) arose as monotheistic reform movements with strong legalistic and dogmatic tendencies. Both idealized, if only the former idolized, the work, teaching, and revelations of their prophets in the form of sacred scripture. Both proclaimed the true God, the importance of charity toward the dispossessed, the quality of mercy. Yet both were inclined, as circumstances required and need dictated, to propagate their ideals and to enlarge the kingdom of God by force when persuasion failed. The dar-al-Islam and the kingdom of Christ, once called Christendom, were in many respects evolutionary twins for the better part of twelve centuries. The unlikely symbol of this relationship is the fraternal feud over proprietorship of the religious womb of the book religions- the wars known as the Crusades. It is Jacob's legacy that his progeny would learn to hate each other and fight religious wars in the name of his God. For all their likeness, the historical course of Christianity has differed remarkably from that of Islam since the late Middle Ages. The cliche that Islam somehow got intellectually stalled in the European feudal era overlooks too much that is undeniably rich, new, and momentous about "the Arab mind," as a standard title describes the culture of Islam. Most Westerners who are not simply islamaphobes are willing to acknowledge where our system of numerical notation comes from; where algebra got started; how Aristotle was saved from puritan schoolmen in the Middle Ages; indeed, where scientific thinking in a number of disciplines originated. The culture of Islam, ranging in its missionary extent from Baghdad to Malaysia, is humanistically rich and potent. And yet. The Middle Eastern culture which spurred humanistic learning and scientific thinking remains a religious culture in a way that befuddles liberal Christians and secularists, and in a way that has not existed in the West since the decline and fall of Christendom in the Reformation. At least a part of our befuddlement stems from the fact that the Reformation is often seen by historians, not as a fall or a falling apart but as a rejuvenation of Christian culture. The persistence of misperceptions about what "happened" with the advent of humanistic thinking in the late Middle Ages stems from the view that the Christian reform was a "back to basics" movement- an attempt to restore biblical teaching and practice to the church rather than (as it was at its roots) a radical challenge to systems of religious authority, a challenge that would eventually erode even the biblical pillars of authority upon which the Reformation itself was based. Islam underwent no such change and entertained no such challenge to Koranic teaching; its pillars remained strong while those of Christianity, unknown even to those who advocated the reform of the church "in head and members," were crumbling.
To misunderstand the disjoining of Islam and Christianity as religious twins is, I would argue, the key to Western misunderstanding of the Islamic faith. The Christian reformation in the West (there was nothing remotely like it in the Eastern church, which, not coincidentally, provides a much closer analogy to Islamic conservatism) proceeded on the false assumption that knowlege of Scripture was ultimately compatible with human knowledge-discovery of the original meanings of texts, linguistic and philological study, historical investigation, and so on. Without tracing the way in which this assumption developed, the fragmented churches that exited the process of cultural, geographical, and denominational warfare between the sixteenth and the twentieth centuries proved the assumption false. Europe would never again be Christendom, and the New World would emerge as an archetype of the bifurcations, rivalries, and half-way compromises that the failure of religious authority had made necessary in the Old. By the end of the nineteenth century, liberal Christian scholarship, with its inherent historical skepticism, which did not spare even the divinity of the founder nor the sacredness of sacred scripture, was verdict enough on the marriage between humanistic learning and divine knowledge, as it was promoted energetically by the early Christian reformers. From the end of the eighteenth century to the present day, Christianity was a recipient religion, which found itself either at war with humanistic learning (as among the evangelicals from Paley's day onward) or, to use Berger's term, an accommodationist faith, whose role in the world seemed to be to accept the truths that culture provided and to express them, whenever possible, in a Christian idiom. Islam scarcely represented a "fundamentalist" reaction to contemporary culture, since the humanistic renaissance it sponsored was not implicitly a rejection of the structures of religious authority. Nor was the "accommodationist" option available to Muslims, since what constituted "secular" truth could not be equated with the prophetic truths of sacred scripture. Islam could only look at what Niebuhr once called the "Christ and Culture" debate with astonishment and as a debate that Christianity sooner or later must lose. To Western ears, Islamic talk of "decadence" seems offensive. In fact, it is an expression of the Islamic view that Christianity has lost the moral contest between secular culture and religious truth, Islam as a religious culture has not confused humanistic learning with the revealed word; accordingly, it has been spared-or in any event has avoided- the historical acids that have eroded biblical faith and Christian "culture" since the sixteenth century. Its methods of exegesis, legal reasoning, and political argumentation look peculiar and retrograde to the Westerner precisely because the Westerner-whether a liberal Anglican or an evangelical Christian-stands on the other shore of a sea that Islam has not chosen to cross. It is small consolation to those who yearn for a restoration of Christian values or biblical religion that Christianity did not mean to cross the sea of faith either, or at least had expected, in embarking on its intellectual journey during the Renaissance, to find God on the other side.
And so to the present work. This book is all about a journey: a journey from the certainties of childhood in a Muslim family (but they could be any childhood certainties) through a process of doubt and, finally, negation, as a result of exposure to what some might dismiss as a "Western" way of thinking about revealed religion. There must be many Muslims who have undertaken such a journey-who have, so to speak, crossed the sea of faith and who have in their personal lives traveled through the intellectual, equivalent of a protestant reformation, which their religious culture, as a whole, did not travel through. A l l such odysseys must be very lonely ones. (For that matter, Odysseus himself was lonely.) The religious pilgrim-and I consider the author of this work to be one-is bound to feel isolated. He does not have the benefit of a convert "to" a new religion, that is to say, a made-to-order group to support and sustain him in hours of crisis and doubt, to assuage his fears and prevent his wavering. In writing a book like this, the religious pilgrim reaches out to an unseen audience for hearing and understanding, in the hope that what he says will ring true for some (certainly not for all) who have shared his faith and who may now share his rejection of it.
It is my privilege to recommend this book as one rich in reflection and intelligence. It is a helpful and in some respects a ground-breaking effort to provide a critical perspective on a faith that is too often-and usually for all the wrong reasons-regarded as uncritical, bellicose, and regressive. What we have is surely no more than one former Muslim's view of his "former" life; but we are mistaken to read this as a coming-out saga. It is part-for-whole a late twentieth-century account of the shrinkage of religious culture, the universality of knowledge, and the inescapability of the humanistic culture, which will survive all particular forms of religion in the twenty-first century. Whether that process, inevitable as it seems, will be marked by violence or accepted with enlightened resignation by defenders of old religious orders and regimes will depend, it seems to me, on how books such as this one are read and received.
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И чтоб напомнить, что такое был еще не так и давно этот самый "разъедающий основы" библейский критицизм (то-бишь критика) и беспомощное противостояние оному, приведу содержание случайно попавшейся на глаза американской книги 1902 года:
AUTHORSHIP OF THE BOOK OF DEUTERONOMY, with its bearings on the higher criticism of the pentateuch
TABLE OF CONTENTS.
INTRODUCTION.
81. APOLOGY FOR WRITING ill.
§2. HIGHER CRITICISM DEFINED iii.
§3. THE ANALYTICAL THEORY OP THE PENTATEUCH vll.
§4. THE SUSPICIOUS SOURCE OF THIS THEORY xv.
§5. THE UNBELIEVING TENDENCY OF IT xvil.
§6. THE RELATION OF DEUTERONOMY TO THIS THEORY xix.
§7. THE PLAN OF THIS WORK xx.
§8. AUTHORITIES AND ABBREVIATIONS XXl.
PART FIRST.
EVIDENCES FOR THE LATE DATE ASSIGNED TO DEUTERONOMY.
§1. FROM THE ACCOUNT OF THE BOOK FOUND BY HILKIAH 1
82. FROM ALLEGED CONFLICTS WITH PREVIOUS LEGISLATION 28
83. FROM THE EARLY DISREGARD OF A CENTRAL SANCTUARY 34
84. FROM THE ALLEGED ABSENCE OF THE AARONIC PRIESTHOOD 49
§5. FROM ALLEGED CONTRADICTIONS 54
1. As to the Financial Condition of the Levltes 55
2. As to Tithes 63
3. As to the Priest's Portion of the Peace-offering 67
4. As to the Sacrifices of the Passover 68
5. As to Eating that Which Died of Itself 69
6. As to Hebrew Bondservants 71
7. As to the Decalogue 78
8. As to Acts of Moses at Mount Sinai 83
9. As to the Mission of the Twelve Spies 88
10. As to the Time Spent at Kadesh 91
11. As to When the Levltes were Consecrated 94
12. As to the Sentence on Moses 95
13. As to the Asylum for the Manslayer 97
14. As to the Year 01 Release 99
15. As to Eating the Firstlings 100
16. As to a Fragment of the Wilderness Itinerary 104
86. INTERNAL EVIDENCE FOR THE LATE DATE 106
1. From the Expression, "Beyond Jordan" 106
2. From Passages Implying Dates Long After the Events 112
3. From Differences Between Laws 115
4. The Date of the Blessing and Cursing, the Song of Moses, and
His Blessing of the Trihes 125
87. EVIDENCES FOR THE LATE DATE IN THE HISTOBICAL BOOKS 137
1. Joshua and Chronicles Set Aside. 137
2. The Confession of Nehemlah and the Levites 139
3. Religion in the Time of the Judges 141
4. The Service at Shiloh 144
5. Offerings Made by Saul and David 152
6. The Priesthood of David's Sons 153
7. Solomon's Career 155
8. Foreign Guards in the Sanctuary 160
9. The Toleration of High Places 165
§8. EVIDENCES FKOM THE EARLY PROPHETS 168
1. From Elijah and Elisha 169
2. From the Prophet Amos 171
3. From the Prophet Hosea 175
4. From the Book of Isaiah 180
5. From a Passage in Micah 182
6. From the Prophet Jeremiah 184
|9. EVIDENCE FROM STYLE 190
PART SECOND.
EVIDENCES FOR THE MOSAIC AUTHORSHIP.
51. INTERNAL EVIDENCE 195
1. From the Title of the Book 195
2. From the Preface to the Second Discourse 197
3. From Directions as to the Ceremony at Mt Ebal 197
4. From the Preface to the Covenant 198
5. From Assertions About the Writing 198
6. From the Preface to the Song and to the Blessing 199
82. INDIRECT TESTIMONY OF THE AUTHOR 200
1. Constant Allusions to Entering Canaan as Yet Future 202
83. INCIDENTAL EVIDENCE 202
1. The Decree Against Amalek 202
2. The Order to Exterminate the Canaanites 203
3. The Order Respecting Ammon, Moab and Edom 204
4. The Predictions in the Book 205
54. THE QUESTION OF FRAUD 209
1. The Charge Preferred 209
2. The Charge Admitted 210
3. The Charge Denied 212
§5. EVIDENCE IN THE BOOK OF JOSHUA Z18
1. Jehovah's Charge to Joshua 218
2. The Case of the Altar Ed 220
3. The Devoted in Jericho 223
4. The Altar and Reading at Mt. Ebal 225
5. The Doom of the Glbeonites 226
6. The Cities of Refuge 227
и тд и тп
«THE AUTHORSHIP OF DEUTERONOMY.
INTRODUCTION.
§1. APOLOGY FOR WRITING.
If an apology were needed for calling in question the con- clusion of those scholars who deny that Moses was the author of the Book of Deuteronomy, it is furnished by these scholar.4 themselves. They constantly insist that men of thought should hold their most cherished convictions subject to revision. They denounce as unreasoning traditionalists those who, rejecting further investigation, cling tenaciously to old beliefs. They are the last men, therefore, who should object to any fresh re-ex- amination of their own conclusions. They would thus be imi- tating those whose unwillingness to hear them excites their dis- pleasure. In no conclusion are these scholars more confident than in the one just mentioned; and if I shall appear to them exceedingly rash in publishing at this late date an attempt to tliovr that it is erroneous, they are still bound by their own principles not to condemn me without a hearing. (...)
§2. HIGHER CRITICISM DEFINED.
The process by which the scholars referred to in the preceding section. have reached their conclusions, is commonly styled The Higher Criticism. This title distinguishes it from "Textual Criticism," or the discovery and correction of clerical errors in the original text . Strictly defined, higher criticism is the art of ascertaining the authorship, date, credibility and literary characteristics of written documents.1 It is a legitimate art, and it has been employed by Biblical scholars ever since the need of such investigations began to be realized. Only, however, within the last hundred years has it borne this title.2 Previously both the textual and the higher criticism were known under the common title, "Biblical Criticism." It scarcely needs to bo added. that the exclusive use of the title Higher Criticism for that application of it which seeks to revolutionize established beliefs in reference to the Bible, ia erroneous: as is also the tacit claim of some advocates of these revolutionary efforts to the exclusive title of higher critics.3 All confusion in the use of these terms will be avoided if the definition just given is kept in mind.
This definition will be better understood if we add to it a statement of the method in which the inquiries of the art are properly conducted. This method is well defined by Prof. W. Kobertson Smith in these words: "The ordinary laws of evidence and good sense must be our guides. For the transmission of the Bible is not due to a continued miracle. but to a watchful Providence ruling the ordinary means by which all ancient books have been handed down. (...)
From these remarks it naturally follows that higher criticism, however correct the principles by which it seeks to be guided, is, in practice, an extremely variable quantity-so variable as to include the writings of extreme rationalists on the one hand and the most conservative of Biblical scholars on the other. From these premises there springs again the inference that those who-have adopted the conclusions of certain critics should not be so confident of their correctness as to practically assume their infallibility. We hear much of "assured results," but there are none so assured as to be exempt from revision. (...)
§3. THE ANALYTICAL THEORY OF THE PENTATEUCH.
It is with the application of higher criticism to the Book of Deuteronomy that we are especially concerned in this work. As a result of the labors of a century on the part of a succession of writers, mostly German rationalists, a theory of the origin and structure of the Pentateuch has been evolved which meets with the general approval of those who deny that Moses was its author.4 This theory is styled the analytical theory, because of the peculiar analysis of the Pentateuch which it involves. The authorship and date of Deuteronomy is one of the subjects involved in this analysis, and this renders it important to present here a brief outline of tihe theory to which easy reference may be had in reading the following pages. (...)
We now see what is made of the Pentateuch, if this theory is true. The question is sometimes raised, What difference does it make whether Moses or some other man wrote the Pen- tateuch ? If this means whether Moses wrote it, or some other man who lived at a time to possess correct information, the difference might be immaterial. But this is not the question. It is, whether Moses is its author, or several unknown men who lived from seven hundred to one thousand years after Moses, and who had no means of correct knowledge. In other words, the question is, whether it came from a man who was the chief actor in much the greater part of its events, and could therefore give an authentic account of them, or from a set of men re- moved many centuries from the events, whose source of information was nothing better than a hoary tradition, and who have actually given us nothing that is certainly real history. (...)
§4. THE SUSPICIOUS SOURCES OF THIS THEORY.
Before we consider the evidences for and against this theory, it is proper that we note some prima-facie considerations which cast upon it a cloud of suspicion. Those who have wrought it out were unbelievers, and were moved in their labors by hostility to the Bible and the Christian religion. Especially is this true of the two scholars to whom, above all others, the present form of the theory owes its completion and defense, A. Kuenen, now deceased, and Julius Wellhausen, who is still living.7 They unhesitatingly reject as incredible all accounts of supernatural events, including those connected with the career of Christ. These statements are freely admitted by the advocates of the theory, and some of them strive, as best they can, to ward off the suspicion thence arising. W. Robertson Smith acknowledges his own indebtedness to these two scholars in the following two sentences: "The first to attempt a connected history of the religion of Israel on the premises of the newer criticism was Professor Kuenen, the value of whose writings is admitted by candid inquirers of every school." "Taken as a whole, the writings of Wellhausen are the most notable contribution to the historical study of the Old Tea lament since the great work of Ewald, and almost every part of the present lectures owes something to them" (Prophets, 12, 13). Professor Briggs makes a similar acknowledgment, and seeks to guard against its effect: "We should not allow ourselves to be influenced by the circumstance that the majority of the scholars who have been engaged in these researches have been rationalistic or semi-rationalistic in their religious opinions; and that they have employed the methods and style peculiar to the German scholarship of our century. Whatever may have been the motives and influences that led to these investigations, the questions we have to determine are: (1) What are the facts in the case, and (2) do die theories account for the facts :" (Bib. Study, 212). But it is vain to attempt to allay suspicion by such remarks as these. When the enemies of the Bible invent and propagate theories in the direct effort to destroy faith in the Bible, the friends of the Book must necessarily be suspicious of them; for such men would not be satisfied with their own works did they not believe that the Bible is discredited by them.
Prof. W. H. Green expresses himself on this point, with his usual calmness, in the following words: "It is noteworthy that the partition hypotheses in all their forms have been elaborated from the beginning in the interest of unbelief. The unfriendly animus of an opponent does not indeed absolve us from patiently and candidly examining his arguments, and accepting whatever facts he may adduce, though we are not bound to receive his perverted interpretations of them. Neverthless, we can not intelligently nor safely overlook the palpable bias against the supernatural which has infected the critical theories which we have been reviewing, from first to last. (...)
§5. THE UNBELIEVING TENDENCY OF THIS THEORY.
If the actual tendency of accepting the theory in question is toward unbelief in the Christian religion, this fact is the strongest possible vindication of such a work as the present. That the theory is at least dangerous in this respect, is acknowledged by one of its most able advocates, Prof. Andrew Harper, in the following words: "The debate concerning the critical views of the Old Testament has reached a stage at which it is no longer confined to professed teachers and students of the Old Testament . It has filtered down, through magazines first, and then through newspapers, into the public mind, and opinions are becoming current concerning the results of criticism which are so partial and ill-informed that they can not but produce evil results of a formidable kind in the near future. (...)»