His German contemporary,
Reimarus, a student of the New Testament, anticipated the modern
conclusion that Jesus had no intention of founding a new religion, and
saw that the Gospel of St. John presents a different figure from the
Jesus of the other evangelists.
But in the nineteenth century the methods of criticism, applied by
German scholars to Homer and to the records of early Roman history, were
extended to the investigation of the Bible. The work has been done
principally in Germany. The old tradition that the Pentateuch was
written by Moses has been completely discredited. It is now
[193] agreed unanimously by all who have studied the facts that the
Pentateuch was put together from a number of different documents of
different ages, the earliest dating from the ninth, the last from the
fifth, century B.C.; and there are later minor additions. An important,
though undesigned, contribution was made to this exposure by an
Englishman, Colenso, Bishop of Natal. It had been held that the oldest
of the documents which had been distinguished was a narrative which
begins in Genesis, Chapter I, but there was the difficulty that this
narrative seemed to be closely associated with the legislation of
Leviticus which could be proved to belong to the fifth century. In 1862
Colenso published the first part of his Pentateuch and the Book of
Joshua Critically Examined. His doubts of the truth of Old Testament
history had been awakened by a converted Zulu who asked the intelligent
question whether he could really believe in the story of the Flood,
"that all the beasts and birds and creeping things upon the earth, large
and small, from hot countries and cold, came thus by pairs and entered
into the ark with Noah? And did Noah gather food for them all, for the
beasts and birds of prey as well as the rest?" The Bishop then proceeded
to test the accuracy of the inspired books by examining
[194] the numerical statements which they contain.
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