Counterfeit | thebereancall.org

TBC Staff

TBC: The ongoing attack against the Bible is nothing new. In this short excerpt from 1903, the author quotes Sir Robert Anderson’s response to two recent (at the time) books by Critics of the Bible.
 
The two most pretentious works which have appeared in the English language within the last ten years, in support of "modern scientific criticism," are Hastings' "Bible Dictionary" and Cheyne's "Encyclopædia Biblica." Mr. Anderson has looked into both of them, and he happily points out the difference between them in the following paragraph:
 
Sir Robert Anderson: "The difference between the work in question [that of Cheyne] and the more conservative and cautious "Dictionary of the Bible," edited by Dr. James Hastings, to which Professor Driver, of Oxford, has lent his name, is that the one represents the Bible as error and romance mingled with truth, and the other as truth mingled with romance and error. For certain purposes the distinction is a real one, but here it is immaterial. For the question I have raised is, whether the old-fashioned belief in the inspiration of the Scriptures can be maintained; and the main purpose of every work emanating from these writers is, as they would say, to remove the difficulties and dangers which the historic view of inspiration is supposed to create. The one set of writers hand me a purse of coins, with an assurance that the most of them are genuine. The other set of writers hand me a purse of coins with the warning that most of them are counterfeit. But, as I  am unable to distinguish between the base coins and the gold, honesty forbids my trading with any of them, and therefore all my seeming wealth is practically useless. In either case, the Bible is like a lottery bag, from which the blanks and prizes must be drawn at random. If the one section of the critics may be trusted, the prizes abound; if the other section be right, the blanks predominate. But in either case, I repeat, faith is impossible, and therefore Christianity is destroyed".
 
On another page our author gives a striking illustration of the irreverent manner in which this criticism picks to pieces and discredits the Bible:
 
Sir Robert Anderson: "I appeal to all intelligent and fair-minded thinkers. The only kind of person I wish to ignore is the fool. We all know the sort of morbidly active-brained child who will pull a valuable watch to pieces, and then tell us with a smile that "there was nothing in it but wheels and things." He has his counterpart in the foreign infidel type of scholar who, albeit as ignorant of man and his needs as a monk, and as ignorant of God and his ways as a monkey, sets himself with a light heart to tear the Bible to pieces" (J. W. McGarvey, "Short Essays in Biblical Criticism," 1910, pp. 420-424).