BRIEF SUMMARY OF CRITICISMS

through another. Like myself, Harnack Adolf von Harnack (1851–1930), a highly influential German theologian and church historian. does not love the hypothesis of interpolations The theory that later scribes inserted new material into an original text., but it is a hypothesis to which one must sometimes resort. In particular, at the time when one great religion is passing into another, and the books are, of necessity, passing over with the migrant people, it is in the highest degree likely that Christian editions will be produced of favourite Jewish books. We have, in fact, proof positive of such transfers in the case of the Teaching of the Twelve Apostles Also known as the Didache, an early Christian treatise. and its dependence upon the Jewish Doctrine of the Two Ways, and in the Christian additions which can be dissected out of the text of the Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs. Something of the same kind, but perhaps not quite so early, has happened in the famous Christian expansions of the text of Josephus Referring to the "Testimonium Flavianum," a passage in Josephus's Jewish Antiquities that mentions Jesus and is widely believed to have been altered by Christian scribes.; and, for a much less probable, but not impossible, parallel, we might refer to those attempts which have been made to dissect original Jewish writings out of the Apocalypse of John The Book of Revelation., in which case the hypothesis of Vischer Eberhard Vischer, who proposed that Revelation was originally a Jewish manuscript. that we should treat the expression ‘God and the Lamb’ as an interpolated expansion of the Divine Name, has a seductive simplicity which, if I remember rightly, bewitched even Harnack himself, who confesses not to love hypotheses of interpolation.

There is, however, not the least need to apologize for the use of such hypotheses, if the criticism of the text breaks down for want of them. After all, it does not mean, in the present case, more than the substitution of two authors for one: it is not a case of multiplied redaction The process of editing or revising a text. like that which is affirmed for the Pentateuch The first five books of the Hebrew Bible. or Isaiah. Two authors are not too many for this little book; if two are intelligible where one is unintelligible, by all means let us have two: only let us keep in reserve the caution that it will always be easy to prove a document to be Jewish when you have dissected out of it everything that is Christian.

Certainly I have no right, from the outset original: "a priori", to object to the extension which Harnack makes of my first thesis, seeing that I had already set aside certain Odes which discussed the Virgin Birth and the descent into Hades The realm of the dead; in Christian context, the "Harrowing of Hell.", as belonging to a relatively later stratum of thought than the main collection; and if one may resort to the hypothesis of interjection for whole Psalms, how can one reasonably object to the hypothesis of interpolation in selected Psalms; the interpolator has been admitted into the argument