The higher Criticism—Its Triumph and Its Consequences.
The certainty and the consequences of the Higher Criticism of the Pentateuch are thus expressed by Hupfeld:
“The discovery that the Pentateuch is put together out of various sources, or original documents, is beyond all doubt not only one of the most important and most pregnant with consequences for the interpretation of the historical books of the Old Testament, or rather for the whole of theology and history, but it is also one of the most certain discoveries which have been made in the domain of criticism and the history of literature. Whatever the anti-critical party may bring forward to the contrary, it will maintain itself, and not retrograde again through anything, so long as there exists such a thing as criticism, and it will not be easy for a reader upon the stage of culture on which we stand in the present day, if he goes to the examination unprejudiced, and with an uncorrupted power of appreciating the truth, to be able to ward off its influence.”
The critical labors of Hobbes, Spinoza, Peyrerius, Simon, Astruc, Eichorn, Paine, Bauer, (G. L.) De Wette, Ewald, Geddes, Vater, Reuss, Graf, Davidson, Colenso, Hupfeld, Wellhausen, Kuenen, Briggs, and others, have overthrown the old notions concerning the authenticity of the Pentateuch. There is not one eminent Bible scholar in Europe, and scarcely one in America, who any longer contends that Moses wrote this work.
The pioneers in the field of the Higher Criticism were the Rationalists Hobbes and Spinoza and the Catholics Peyrerius, Simon, and Astruc. More than two hundred years ago Benedict Spinoza, the greatest of modern Jews, with his own race and the entire Christian church against him, made this declaration, which the scholarship of the whole world now accepts:
“It is as clear as the noonday light that the Pentateuch was not written by Moses” (Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, Chap, viii, Sec. 20).
A century passed, and Thomas Paine in France, in the most potent volume of Higher Criticism ever penned, exposed in all their nakedness the wretched claims of the traditionalists. He read the Pentateuch and wrote:
“Those books are spurious.” “Moses is not the author of them.” “The style and manner in which those books are written give no room to believe, or even to suppose, they were written by Moses.” “They were not written in the time of Moses, nor till several hundred years afterwards” (Age of Reason).
About the same time German scholars, ever foremost in the domain of critical analysis, took up the work. The writings of Eichorn, Bauer, Vater, and De Wette, “swept the field in Germany.” De Wette, one of her greatest theologians, thus presents the conclusion of German critics: