The Lost Faith, and Difficulties of the Bible, as Tested by the Laws of Evidence

by Thomas S. Childs

"Where doubt arises," says Starkie (Ev. i. 586), "from circumstances of an apparently opposite and conflicting tendency, the first step in the natural order of inquiry is to ascertain whether they be not in reality reconcilable, especially when circumstances cannot be rejected without imputing perjury to a witness; for perjury is not to be presumed, and in the absence of all suspicion that hypothesis is to be adopted which consists with and reconciles all the circumstances which the case supplies." (See also Starkie, i. 578, 582.)

Take the familiar case of the taxing when Cyrenius was governor of Syria. Luke ii. 2. Everybody knows how confidently it was asserted that Luke was in error because Cyrenius' government of Syria was several years later than Luke makes it; equally, every one knows how that difficulty was met by the supposition, made almost a certainty, that Cyrenius was twice governor of Syria—once at the time in question, and once later. Even if the supposition were not as probable as it is, if there were no other way of solving the difficulty, we should be justified by the principle of law in assuming it rather than to assume that a witness as intelligent as Luke, and with his opportunities of knowledge and with no motive for misstatement, should either wilfully or carelessly have made so gross an error. Here the rule fits perfectly: "In the absence of all suspicion, that hypothesis is to be adopted which consists with and reconciles all the circumstances which the case supplies."

In regard to certain objections to the Mosaic record—for example, the improbability of the desert sustaining the host of the Israelites: we select this as an example of a mass of like objections—Dean Stanley, while holding in general to the historic fact, says the recorded miracles do not meet the difficulty and we have no right to add to them; for "if we have no warrant to take away, we have no warrant to add." If by this he meant we have no right to add to the inspired word as a part of it what is not in it, he is quite correct; but if he meant, as he evidently did, that we have no right to make a reasonable supposition to explain an apparent difficulty of the word, no utterance can be more groundless. He might as well object that Moses could not possibly have led the Israelites through the desert forty years because no man could do that without sleeping, and the record does not say that Moses slept during all that time, and "we have no warrant to add" to the record.

The same difficulty is urged by others from the present barrenness of the desert, which it is contended is substantially as it was in the time of the Exodus. This is to be met not so much by hypothesis as by the facts—(1) that the condition of the desert was very different then from its condition now. Because the country around Philadelphia cannot now support a tribe of Indians by hunting and fishing, it does not follow that it could not do this two hundred years ago. (2) God had undertaken to bring the nation out. If every miracle necessary to accomplish this end is not recorded, it does not prove that it was not wrought. As in the life of our Lord, so in the deliverance of Israel, many miracles may have been wrought of which no account has come down to us.

This suggests an obvious and a very important consideration: facts may now be missing which were perfectly well known at the time of the event, but the record of which has not been preserved. Hence, if a difficulty can be removed by a reasonable supposition, or even by any admissible supposition, of a missing fact, we are entitled to make that supposition.

Webster (Works, vol. vi. p. 64) in his address to the jury on the celebrated trial of the Knapps for the murder of Captain White of Salem, Massachusetts, says: "In explaining circumstances of evidence which are apparently irreconcilable or unaccountable, if a fact be suggested which at once accounts for all and reconciles all, by whomsoever it may be stated, it is still difficult not to believe that such fact is the true fact belonging to the case." The missing fact that was wanted in this case to show a motive for the murder was the stealing of a will, or the purpose to steal a will, and this proved the true hypothesis.

To illustrate by a familiar incident of the Old Testament history. The prophets Jeremiah and Ezekiel foretell the fate of the last king of Judah, Zedekiah. Jer. xxxii.; Ezek. xii. They declare that he shall be taken captive by the king of Babylon, that he shall go to Babylon and that he shall die in Babylon; yet Ezekiel expressly says that he shall not see Babylon. Now, here is apparently as gross a contradiction as there can be; and if our information stopped here, it would be impossible to reconcile it. Fortunately, however, the explanation is given in the history. From 2 Kings xxv. we learn that the king of Babylon, when Zedekiah was brought into his presence at Riblah, ordered his eyes to be put out and sent him blind to Babylon; so that he saw the king of Babylon, he went to Babylon, he died in Babylon, and yet he never saw Babylon. But—and this is the point of this familiar case—if this unexpected and extraordinary fact had not been stated, how absolutely impossible it would have been to give any satisfactory solution of the difficulty! It may be doubted whether any supposition as violent as this needs to be made to reconcile every alleged contradiction of the Bible.

A remarkable illustration of the power of a missing fact occurs in the history of the overthrow of Babylon itself. The Scripture account (Dan. v.) says that Belshazzar was king of Babylon, that he was in the city, engaged in a feast, at the time of its capture, and that he was slain. Reliable secular historians give the name of the king as Nabonnedus or Labynetus, and state that he was not in the city when it was captured, that he was not killed, but taken prisoner, kindly treated and allowed to retire to private life. These different accounts were not only eagerly seized upon by skeptics as proofs of the error of the Scriptures, but even biblical scholars admitted them to be incapable of reconciliation. No longer ago than when the writer was in the theological seminary that prince of biblical students, Addison Alexander, said that no solution of the difficulty was known; he was too wise a man to say that no solution was possible. Kitto, in his Cyclopedia, declared that no hypothesis could harmonize the accounts. Yet the reconciliation was perfectly simple. A cylinder of historic records discovered by Sir Henry Rawlinson in the ruins of Lower Babylon showed that there were at this time two kings of Babylon, a father and a son. One was occupying a stronghold near the city, the other was defending the city itself; the latter was taken and slain, the former was spared. Thus, by the providential bringing to light of a fact buried for centuries, that which had seemed to be, and which had repeatedly and triumphantly been proclaimed to be, and which had been given up as being, an irreconcilable contradiction, was shown to be perfectly harmonious. Yet if the hypothesis of two kings had been suggested as an explanation before the discovery of the fact, it would have been hissed out of court by the whole skeptical school.

The two accounts of the death of Judas have not passed out of the field of popular objection. Matthew (xxvii. 5) says he committed suicide; Luke (Acts i. 18) says he fell headlong and burst asunder. He does not say where he fell from or what were the circumstances of the fall, and it is certainly not impossible, or even improbable, that both accounts are true. The traitor hung himself, possibly, on the verge of a precipice—the supposed spot furnishes all the conditions for this—and afterward (how long is not said) the rope or the limb of the tree gave way, and he fell, striking first on the rocks at the foot of the tree and then plunging over the precipice with the result described by Luke.