[1] DR. MOFFATT is a figure of considerable interest and importance in the world of New Testament scholarship. He has read very widely in the modern literature of the subject. He has some remarkable literary gifts. He possesses an exceptional faculty for detecting analogies between different classes of literature, in cases where the analogies are more or less hidden by the surroundings. His series of articles called "Opera Foris" in the " Expositor" contained many noteworthy and often really brilliant illustrations of this kind, which at- [2] tested the wide range of his reading) his instinctive and broad sympathy with the thought of others, and his wonderful power of combination. His "Historical new Testament" might fairly be described as the work of a very clever young student, with an astonishing power of assimilating and reproducing in new combinations the opinions (or, as they are called, "results") of older scholars. This is a stage which the brilliant young scholar has to go through; and perhaps the happiest lot for him is to get through it quickly, and not to publish anything until it has been safely traversed. That book, however, was at least pardonable as the work of a young man transported with the enthusiasm of reading, who had not as yet had the leisure to do much real thinking, because the acquisitive process had for the time absorbed his energy and temporarily starved the independence of his intellect.

The "Historical New Testament" possessed at any rate the interest that always belongs to an early stage in the growth of a personality capable of becoming independent and even [3] great, provided that circumstances prove favourable to its development. For my own part I held the opinion, and several times expressed it to others, that the writer of that book would within twenty years do some really good work, and would then partly smile at, and partly regret, his youthful enthusiasm for the ingenious vagaries of forgotten theorists, after his powers had grown stronger and his judgment had matured through experience of life. On one occasion later, when I read in the "British Weekly" a really beautiful leader to which his signature was attached, I claimed credit for having detected under the surface of that early book signs of the fine true quality and the sympathetic feeling which were clearly shown in that subsequent article in a weekly newspaper.

The present work, however, has gone back to the standard of the "Historical New Testament". I can detect no broadening of the outlook, no deepening of the sympathy, little sign of growing independence of thought. The book is antiquated, as if it belonged to the nineteenth [4] century. I do not mean that the author has failed to pay attention to more recent studies on the subject. Quite the contrary. Dr. Moffatt has allowed little or nothing in recent work to escape him. He has been reading the last products of scholarship with the same carefulness and voracity as before, when he wrote the "Historical New Testament". But his method is much the same as formerly. He takes up the more recent theories with the same earnestness and -- I will not say enthusiasm, but rather the same perfectly confident assumption that the right way of study lies in sifting and weighing these theories and thus discovering in them "here a little and there a little" which is correct and valuable, and also with the same antecedent conviction that a certain amount of truth is to be found somewhere amid the mass of writing. This method he would doubtless defend on the ground that he has thus been "moving with the times" and "keeping in the van of modern research " -- (one knows the stock phrases) ; but, if the initial principle is wrong, it is as useless when applied to the critics, whether "orthodox" [5] or "progressive," 1 of the period 1900 - 1910 as when applied to those of the preceding fifty years.

To us the result appears to be that Dr. Moffatt has grown more learned, but that his individuality is as deeply buried as ever; and we cannot forget that it is harder to force one's way out into spiritual independence after ten more years spent in tabulating the results and opinions of other men. He is fit for far higher work than this; but the time is shortened.

In literary criticism it is not uncommon to assume that, because a book shows great learning and ingenuity and ability, therefore there must be a certain amount of truth and value in it; and Dr. Moffatt seeks for this residuum of truth after riddling out all the rubbish; but that is not scientific method.

Many a writer starts his investigation on a false principle, and deduces a series of perfectly logical and wonderfully ingenious conclusions, which share in the weakness of the initial assumption; the sole value of the book, then, is to [6] demonstrate the falsity of 'the first principle. There are many works of modern literary criticism which assume the whole contents and issues in the opening pages; and after reading the earlier paragraphs one can lay the book aside, because one already possesses all that is to follow.

Specific examples one shrinks from giving; it is an invidious thing to do; but I shall give just one, which I find in the writings of a friend of my own, an excellent scholar, who did some excellent work, the late Dr. W. G. Rutherford.; in this case no one can charge me with censorious motives. Dr. Moffatt quotes 1 a sentence from Dr. Rutherford's edition of "The Fourth Book of Thucydides," page xxxi: "Nothing could have prevented the importation into the text of an author of a great deal of what was properly comment". That principle of criticism was quite fashionable for a time among recent scholars. It sounds very plausible: one readily sees the process by which the gloss written on the margin of a page of a manuscript was mis- [7] taken by a subsequent copyist for a part of the text that had been forgotten by the writer of the manuscript; the copyist, making this mistake, put the gloss into the text of his copy at the point at which it seemed to belong. Start with Dr. Rutherford's principle that this must have frequently happened; sit in your study month after month and year after year working at your author; add the magnificent ingenuity and erudition of that great scholar. The result is -- his edition of "Thucydides, Book IV," the main value of which, and of some other modern works on similar lines, simply is to prove that the initial principle is false. The general agreement of more recent scholars has condemned the principle; and the discovery in Egypt of many fragments of very early manuscripts on papyrus has gone far in the way of justifying the manuscript text.

It is quite true that those glosses might through a series of errors have crept into the text, and also that they did in a few cases creep in; but, as a whole, this did not often happen, and glosses generally were recognized as such [8] And vanished from subsequent copies. The scare raised by Dr. Rutherford and by others before him was not more reasonable than the alarm of a merchant, to whom the thought suddenly occurred that all his clerks might be frequently making mistakes in entering figures in account books. Mistakes of that kind are quite possible, and are in some cases made by clerks; but, on the whole, it is safe to say that they need not be taken into reckoning.

It is therefore not right to quote an exploded dictum of Dr. Rutherford's as if it were quite trustworthy. Dr. Moffatt's pages 37 - 38, giving examples of glosses and interpolations in classical authors, contain some that are not correctly stated, and many that are not really analogous to the phenomena which he seeks to establish in regard to the text of the New Testament, along with others that are good and useful, if properly applied.

FOOTNOTES:

1 I apologize for using these cant terms; but desire for brevity forces one to employ them.

2 Footnote to p. 36.