Appendix J
CONSPIRACY, FORGERY, AND HIGHER CRITICISM For we have not followed cunningly devised fables. . . . (II Peter 1:16a).
I make an assumption when I come to the text of any biblical passage: it is consistent with all the other passages. I agree with Jesus: Scripture cannot be broken (John 10:35b). This distinguishes my approach from the higher criticism of the Bible, which assumes that there is no unity in the Bible, that every text will be found to contradict at least one other text, and that even within chapters, an astute critic can find lots of inconsistencies. Having identified these supposed inconsistencies, the traditional higher critic then attributes them to the supposed fact that different authors wrote the book, with long periods of time separating them. He makes this assumption regarding the Bible: "Different human authors = irreconcilable statements." He transfers a methodological assumption from the world of literary criticism to the word of God, where it does not apply. He does this because he assumes that the Bible is just another book.(1) He assumes this, in turn, because he does not want to hear the consistent testimony of the God who brings final judgment against covenant-breakers. To stop his ears from hearing God's testimony, he fills them with noise: academic incoherence.
Academic Incoherence What marks the arguments of traditional higher critics is an incoherence born of extraordinary precision. The higher critics of the Bible have sharpened their intellectual tools so precisely that the tools are useful only for splitting academic hairs.
As with any other discipline, higher critics are marked by differences in skill. There are varying degrees of precision and complexity in their arguments. Few scholars in the Anglo-American tradition can match the precision and complexity of the average German scholar. The average German higher critic could identify at least two authors in the words, "Mary had a little lamb; its fleece was white as snow." If given tenure in a major state-supported university, teaching no more than three graduate students in a single four-hour seminar each week, he could, over ten or fifteen years, write an entire volume on "Deutero Mary." Then at least five other German scholars would write a minimum of one book each refuting the first scholar, showing that more than two Marys were involved. The average Anglo-American critic cannot do this. He is not up to the challenge. To identify Deutero Mary, he would need an additional text: "And everywhere that Mary went, the lamb was sure to go."
Traditional higher critics base their case on the supposed incoherence -- theological, judicial, and moral -- of the Bible's texts. When we read the convoluted, unsubstantiated, jargon-filled, verbally constipated essays and books by higher critics, we get the impression that higher critics assume that the biblical texts are as incoherent as previous higher critics were -- that is to say, monumentally incoherent. Higher critics spend at least as much time refuting previous higher critics as they do in explaining how and why the Bible's texts are supposedly jumbled. Traditional higher criticism is composed of layer upon layer of jumbled arguments, not reaching to heaven, like the Tower of Babel, but rather like layers found in an archeological dig: each level has been razed almost completely (but not quite) in order to provide a new foundation for the next critic's reputation.(2)
Professor Hartley's Insight The conservative Bible scholar is expected by his academic peers to genuflect whenever he visits the ever-expanding mausoleum known as the temple of higher criticism. He is expected to visit it whenever he writes an introduction to a Bible commentary, even if he only passes through briefly. A good example of this obligatory respect for the spiritually dead is found in John Hartley's 1992 commentary on Leviticus. Hartley's bibliography gives the impression that he has read everything ever written on Leviticus, even in Italian.
In the book's Introduction, he includes a seven-page section in small print on "Author and Origin." Guess what? "Views about the authorship and the origin of the Book of Leviticus vary widely." No kidding! He attributes this situation to two factors: 1) the "sparsity of materials available for reconstructing a history of Israelite worship and the priesthood," and 2) "divergent methodologies for interpreting ancient texts."(3) This is a scholarly, respectful way of saying: "There simply aren't enough documented facts to arrive at an unambiguous conclusion, so every covenant-breaking professor of Old Testament `literature' who can read Hebrew, German, and English (let alone Italian) can safely propose any goofy theory he can dream up in his attempt to advance his academic career. If published -- and in the arid field of Old Testament studies, it probably will be -- the theory will have an academic half-life of about five years."
After surveying dozens of speculative, factually inconclusive, and mutually contradictory theories about who wrote Leviticus and when, Professor Hartley gives us his conclusion. Brace yourself. He says that the authors and revisers of Leviticus, whoever they may have been, and whenever they may have lived, surely influenced the Israelite community. But, he hastens to add, we need to recognize that the Israelite community surely influenced the authors and revisers. Specifically, he says that the text of Leviticus had an important role in "forming the ancient Israelite community." Nevertheless, higher criticism has provided us with "great benefits" by revealing to us "the significant role that the community had in shaping and interpreting the text. . . ."(4)
What does all this mean? It means that Professor Hartley, in order to cover his backside from carping academic critics, is still relying on his fading notes from a lecture on "Circular Social Causality in a Linear World" that he scribbled down long ago in some introductory sociology course. (I could be wrong, of course. I suffer from, as he puts it, "a sparsity of materials.")
How Did the Forgers Do It? Hartley's positive view of the legacy of higher criticism is misplaced. The higher critics' theory of mutual interaction between text and community makes no sense. It assumes that many (if not all) specific texts were repeatedly revised in terms of later community standards. We need to think critically about such an assumption. First, everyone acknowledges that the Old Testament contains the only surviving written documents that record the history of Israel in detail from the exodus through the prophets. These texts survived only because the Jews were religious in their intense desire to preserve the texts from error. Copyists have long been governed by elaborate rules to preserve faithful copies. Even in our own day, the Orthodox Jewish community supports such work, despite the existence of photocopies, CD-ROM drives, and "write once-read many" magnetic memories. Working six hours a day, five days a week, a professional scribe takes a year and a half to copy 248 parchment sheets of the Torah (Genesis through Deuteronomy): almost two thousand hours. A newly certified scribe works hard to complete five lines an hour.(5)
Second, the higher critics expect us to believe that later scribes successfully tampered with these texts -- not just once, but many times -- over many centuries. Third, they want us to believe that nobody outside the continuing conspiracy ever caught on. This is a conspiracy view of history that dwarfs all other examples of the genre. Somehow, all those painstakingly transcribed scrolls that were in the Israelite community disappeared, leaving only the fake one, only to be superseded by later fakes. Like the evolutionist's theory of a mutant gene that somehow makes one member of a complex species uniquely fit to survive -- in the face of the huge odds against positive mutation -- so is the higher critics' theory of the corrupted text: generation after generation, text after text, the forgeries survived and prospered for a time, re-shaping Israelite culture, only to be completely replaced by other forgeries.
Princeton Seminary's Robert Dick Wilson was one of the most skilled scholars of the Old Testament in his day. He had a reading knowledge of some 45 languages. Despite his academic reputation, he occasionally indulged in sarcasm, even in his professional writing. (Too bad this practice is out of style in today's Bible-believing academic circles; it would liven up things considerably.) Wilson wrote of the Mosaic law:
. . . the critics have undertaken the difficult task of proving that these laws constitute a series of forgeries, extending over a period of about 500 years, committed by more than seventeen different persons, all reformers of the highest ethical standards and all devoted to the service of Jehovah, the God of truth. Besides mirable dictu, the forgeries were all successful in that prophets, priests, Levites, kings, and people, were all alike induced to receive them as genuine and to adopt them as obligatory, as soon as they were made known to them. The Jews and the Samaritans, the Pharisees and the Sadducees, the Rabbis, Aristeas, Josephus, Philo, Christ and the Apostles, all accepted the combined works as of real Mosaic authorship. But no amount of camouflage could deceive the critical eyes of the German professors and their scholars (all of whom agree with them; hence the phrase, "All scholars are agreed"). To them the imperfections of the codes and their disagreements, yes, even the particular half century in which each law was promulgated, are as clear as the spots on the sun, if only you will look through their glasses, and are not blinded by prejudice occasioned by faith in Jehovah, or Christ, or by the rules of evidence.(6)
Wilson indulged in ridicule. And why not? As Augustine wrote in The City of God (XVIII:40), ridicule is an appropriate response when dealing with ridiculous ideas. (He was referring to the pagan theory that the world is much older than 6,000 years -- a theory that most seminary professors and Christian college professors today take so seriously that they refuse to discuss the six-day creation, either in class or in print.)(7)
In Search of the Missing Original Texts To prove that later scribes (i.e., forgers) 1) inserted new material into copies of the received judicial texts, and 2) this new material was consistent with the respective dominant worldview of each scribe's era, the higher critic needs information about the judicial and theological content of these successive worldviews. The problem is, such detailed information is available today only in the Old Testament's historical passages. But these texts, too, are thought to have been corrupted by later copyists. So, where is the fixed standard -- the "autograph," as it were -- by which a higher critic can evaluate which corruption came during which era? If a judicial text was corrupted by a scribe, but the historical record of the scribe's era was itself subsequently corrupted, how can the higher critic prove that a particular law was inserted by a particular scribe-forger at a particular point in Israel's history? In other words, how can the critic prove that the text influenced the community, while the community influenced the text? Where is the untampered-with evidence? Where is the fixed textual standard that is necessary in order to identify which revision was made during which era?
No fixed textual standard exists today. If it did, it would be the long-denied "autograph" -- the original biblical text to which defenders of biblical inerrancy have appealed for over a century. Denying the theory of a flawless autograph written down by a God-inspired scribe, each higher critic has been free to promote this or that law as the product of this or that much later scribe. But the critics do not agree on which laws were inserted when. Conclusion: without a fixed textual standard for the Pentateuch, and without uncorrupted historical texts, higher critics cannot identify which worldview assuredly belongs to which era, and therefore which era's worldview led to the forging of which specific legal text. But they pretend that they can. Anyone who openly challenges this pretension in public will probably not be allowed to graduate from the prestige institutions of the academic world, all of which are controlled by the pretenders. Then the absence of such graduates will be presented by the pretenders as evidence that all serious (degree-holding) scholars agree with the pretension. They employ circular certification to back up their theory of circular causation: text and community.
Copyists' Known Errors Were Deliberately Preserved
Let me state unequivocally: there are errors in the surviving biblical texts. That is to say, the texts that have survived are not so perfect as the autographs were. Put another way, the transcribers were not guided by God in the same way and to the same degree that the original authors were. Let me state the obvious: those scholars who defend the infallibility of the original texts of the Bible do not defend the infallibility of the subsequent copyists.(8)
If they were to defend such a position, they would be denying the uniqueness of the originally infallible Bible. This would defeat their purpose, i.e., to defend the unique revelation of God in the Bible: one scribe per revelation.
The existence of obvious errors in the Bible testifies to the extraordinary faithfulness of the transcribers. Consider one exceedingly obvious contradiction: "Jehoiachin was eighteen years old when he began to reign, and he reigned in Jerusalem three months. And his mother's name was Nehushta, the daughter of Elnathan of Jerusalem" (II Ki. 24:8). "Jehoiachin was eight years old when he began to reign, and he reigned three months and ten days in Jerusalem: and he did that which was evil in the sight of the LORD" (II Chron. 36:9). Eight years old or eighteen? What copyist could ignore this discrepancy? But his job was not to correct the text, presumably by changing eight to eighteen in II Chronicles 36:9. He let the error in Second Chronicles stand, visible to all.
The defense of the inerrancy of the original written revelation should not also be a defense of the God-sustained perfection of every succeeding copyist. The miracle took place once per text, and only once. Mistakes then followed. That an early mistake would be retained, given the fanatical dedication of the Jewish scribes, is hardly surprising. What ought to be very surprising is the conclusion of the critics, namely, that later copies could have been successfully reworked, except at one point in Israel's history: the discovery of a single copy of the law during Josiah's reign (II Ki. 22). A secondary opportunity existed at the return to Jerusalem under Nehemiah (Neh. 8), but this would not have solved the problem of the many texts left behind in Babylon where a majority of Israelites remained.
The Mysterious Disappearance of All Previous Copies
The higher critics, had they not overplayed their hand very early, might have retained the illusion of credibility if they had confined their theory of scribal re-writing to this one period. But once the theory of successive forgeries is invoked, the old question raises its head: Where did all the previous copies go after a successful forger plied his trade? The higher critics deride inerrancy's theory of the missing autographs. Far more preposterous is the higher critics' theory of the instantly disappearing rival texts whenever a forgery was perpetrated by some editor or team of editors. In the higher critics' social evolutionary theory of the "textual survival of the fittest," the forgeries somehow gained dominance, while the older copies all "died out as a species." As with Darwin's missing links between species, the textual "missing links" remain missing. We are expected to believe that all of the older copies in many synagogues and households somehow perished, but the single forgery and its copies survived, just as we are expected to believe that a single prehistoric reptile triumphed over all of its scaly competitors within the particular species because it had a partially developed feather -- not sufficiently developed to make it airborne, however -- instead of a claw.(9) ("Take this," cried the mutant lizard as he smashed his opponent with his feather in their life-and-death battle for access to a female. "And that!" People who believe in evolution through natural selection have been sitting ducks -- figuratively speaking -- for higher criticism.)
The defender of the inerrant original texts admits that the perfect original copies disappeared very early. Then how did the common Masoretic Hebrew text become dominant? Why are the number of its internal discrepancies so limited? More important, why aren't there hundreds of competing versions with competing errors? Why did one version of imperfect copies survive and almost all other flawed versions disappear? The only reasonable answer is this: the major errors must have occurred very early in the copying history of any given text. After that, competing new copies that failed to correspond with existing copies were burned or otherwise destroyed, as traditional Judaism's rules of copying require. That a copyist's error could occur shortly after the original appeared is conceivable. That a single late forgery could have replaced all the earlier versions is far less believable. The longer that an existing common text had been available, with its familiar errors, the less likely that any recently modified version could have triumphed so completely that all the older versions disappeared. The larger the number of successive forgeries required by the theory, and the longer the time period in which these totally successful forgeries took place, the less believable the theory is, except to men who prefer noise to God's judicial word in history.
Relativism Eats Its Own Children I ask: Of what possible intellectual benefit is any theory of mutually reinforcing historical causation -- text and revision -- that is based on the shifting sands of higher criticism? The higher critics have no agreed-upon methodology -- no hermeneutic -- to resolve their own endless disputes. This is one reason why Professor Reventlow was correct in 1980 when he wrote: "Any attentive observer will note a considerable decline in the significance of biblical study within the general framework of Protestant theology as it is practised in universities and church colleges and as it affects the work of local church communities. . . . [H]istorical criticism and exegesis have come to take very much a back place." The "vanishing role of biblical study in the wider context of theology is a failure of exegetes to reflect adequately on their methodology and the presuppositions, shaped by their view of the world, which they bring to their work."(10) Meanwhile, the unity of theology has collapsed; its inner center has disappeared.(11) And no wonder: relying on the presumption of textual disunity promoted by higher criticism, liberal theology could not maintain its own unity.
This is why there has been a shift of opinion occurring within theological liberalism since about 1960: a growing readiness to accept instances of thematic unity in the Bible's texts. Today's more innovative liberals search for literary unity in biblical texts, even though they do not regard literary unity as evidence of divine authorship. The critics still deny the Bible's theological unity, for theological unity points to an unchanging and judgmental God. Literary unity is becoming acceptable, for it supposedly points to anonymous authors with a taste for great literature, which is all that the critics want the Bible to be. The literary criticism of the Bible, which originally launched the literary criticism of secular texts, has now come full circle: modern critics of secular literature have brought to the Bible their practice of discovering common themes in literature. The emphasis today is increasingly on unity rather than diversity. The newer critics are still moral relativists, but at least they perceive some coherence in the world of literature. They have seen where absolute textual relativism was headed -- into literary chaos -- and some of them have turned back. (The literary "deconstructionists" have not.)(12)
American church historian Edwin Scott Gaustad has well described the relativistic worldview that undergirded the higher critics early in the twentieth century: "Everything had a history, even dogma, as the German Protestant Adolph Harnack had shown. Very little, if anything, was `the same yesterday, today, and forever.' Very little, if anything, had been believed `by all men, always, everywhere.' Very little, if anything, escaped the captivity of its own culture, the relativity of its own terminology, the perceptual limitations of its own advocates."(13) This relativism almost completely eroded the few remaining traces of methodological unity and coherence in the academic discipline of higher criticism. This is what has caused the reaction in recent years. About all that remained of traditional higher criticism by 1960 was the practitioners' faith in the possibility of gaining academic tenure with their arcane skills. Frankly, they all sounded incoherent. But academic reputations are made by developing new approaches. So, to distinguish themselves from their incoherent competitors, some of the newer generation of critics came to a radical conclusion: the Bible's texts do show traces of coherence!
In 1957, Old Testament scholar Edward J. Young pointed to the epistemological problem of his generation of higher critics: "Furthermore, if fallible human writers have given us a Bible that is fallible, how are we ourselves, who most certainly are fallible, to detect in the Bible what is error and what is not? . . . How shall we evaluate the God of Scripture? How do we know whether we can separate the wheat from the chaff in the Biblical teaching about God? The answer is that we simply cannot do so. . . . How then can we judge the Scripture? Judge the Scripture we cannot; we are left in a hopeless scepticism."(14) This has become true of the higher critics: they have been left without hope by their own skepticism. All that the best of them have today is a sense of satisfaction for having discovered continuity in a literary theme or two.
The discipline of higher criticism is smoke and mirrors with footnotes. Yet still we find, as late as 1992, a smoke-inhaling commentator stumbling around in higher criticism's hall of mirrors. Professor Hartley doffs his cap to "the great benefits" of the work of higher critics. He genuflects at the mausoleum of dead theories of multiple Pentateuchal authorship. He sings brief a hymn of praise to the sociology of knowledge: texts influencing culture, culture influencing texts.
Pardon my irreverence. The tombs of the physically dead are to be respected. The tombs of the spiritually dead are to be razed, and occasionally razzed.
One God, One Author, Once I have worked with the texts from Genesis through Leviticus over the last two decades. I have found exactly what I assumed from the beginning: the texts are part of a coherent whole. This unity exists because a coherent God revealed these texts to one inspired man, Moses. What has impressed me as I have worked through the Pentateuch is how the economic laws of God are part of an integrated judicial and theological system. The economics of the Pentateuch, Genesis through Leviticus, makes sense as a unit. This judicial unity enables the reader to make sense of the individual texts. The evidence continues to build: the law of God is not a patchwork of texts that were added and later modified by many anonymous authors over the centuries in a vain attempt to provide unity to an otherwise incoherent collection of mutually contradictory principles. In other words, the Bible was not written by successive teams of higher critics.
What has impressed me is the judicial unity of the Pentateuch's structure. I regard the religion of traditional higher criticism as a theology too fantastic for a careful reader to believe without a gigantic leap of nonrational faith. How could such unity have been achieved by a series of authors, each with a different outlook, each with a different agenda, each in a different historical era, over many centuries? How did they produce, retroactively, a document which is supposed to have been written by one man anywhere from five centuries to a millennium earlier, depending on which text was written by which anonymous author, and when? Here is E, the Elohist, rewriting J, the Jehovist (or was it the other way around?), only to be followed by D, the Deuteronomist, who adds his two shekels' worth. Finally P, the priestly redactor, shows up, who in the 1920's had been regarded by critical scholars as the first Elohist, but by 1943 was believed to have served as the Pentateuch's final copy editor.(15)
How did these four forgers do it? How did they hide their identities? How did all the other minor rewrite specialists hide their identities? How was the judicial unity of the variant texts preserved? More to the point, why did generations of Israelites fail to spot the jumbled nature of the Pentateuch's original legal order -- the disunity that later rewriters somehow overcame? What I have found in the first three of the five books of Moses is economic unity. How did it get there? Equally worth asking, why do today's higher critics -- academic layer 19? 27? 33? -- refuse to acknowledge this remarkable economic unity? They are so busy identifying the supposed linguistic variations of the layers of texts that they cannot see the structural unity of the judicial order -- not just a literary theme or two -- presented in these texts.
Conclusion Higher critics of the Bible have proposed a theory of biblical textual disunity. Their motivation has always been judicial: to escape the biblical doctrine of final judgment and the correlative doctrine of each individual's personal responsibility before God in terms of God's special revelation. From the beginning, they have opposed the biblical concept of fixed ethical standards.
Their strategy of denial has always rested on the techniques and premises of literary criticism. This tradition began in the mid-seventeenth century, as Reventlow's detailed study of the early history of English higher criticism indicates. It accelerated during the first half of the nineteenth century, even in conservative Calvinistic circles in the United States.(16) The acceptance of higher criticism was made far easier after 1859 as a result of Darwin's theory of evolution through natural selection: the survival of the fittest (texts). After 1875, the spread of higher criticism was unstoppable, despite a "guilty" verdict in 1893 in the most famous heresy trial of the nineteenth century, the Briggs case.(17) Evolutionism is modern man's most widely shared alternative to fixed law: in social theory, legal theory, biology, geology, and ultimately cosmology. But cosmology really is primary: covenant-breaking man's denial of God's final judgment.
Evolutionary process when applied to the Bible mandates a theory of progressive rewrites of the texts of Scripture. This theory mandates a conspiracy theory of monumental proportions. The details of the operations of this conspiracy are rarely discussed in public. The theory is never called a conspiracy theory, for conspiracy theories are almost always officially out of favor in academic circles, but it is a conspiracy theory.
This multi-stage conspiracy theory proclaims the successive rewriting of the holy texts by numerous anonymous forgers. Successful forgers were not caught or even perceived. Unsuccessful ones, if any, have also left no traces. Each successful forger suppressed all traces of every previously forged copy of the holy texts. Each forger had a specific goal in mind: to rewrite the past in terms of the his goals for his social order and legal order. Without a convenient Orwellian memory hole, these forgers were somehow able periodically to re-centralize Israel's civil and priestly orders, suppress all rival judicial positions and all earlier texts, publish their new texts, get them accepted as supernaturally binding by the entire social order, and then de-centralize the social order once again, as required by the law's tribal order. Improbable? At least.
This improbability has not fazed the higher critics. Furthermore, this conspiracy theory is academically untouchable: no fundamental criticism of its presuppositions, methodology, or conclusions is tolerated. There are no prominent dissenters within the academic community. The scholarly world has swallowed this conspiracy theory to the same degree, and for the same reasons, that it has swallowed evolutionism. But while Darwinism's missing biological links perished completely through natural causes, leaving no traces, higher criticism's missing textual links were actually ferreted out and suppressed by an unknown number of conspirators. The successful operations of these Israelite conspirators are as improbable as the theory is universally accepted.
Biblical higher criticism is never identified as a conspiracy theory. What more could anyone ask of a conspiracy theory? Paraphrasing Saddam Hussein's late 1990 pre-war rhetoric, higher criticism of the Bible is the mother of all conspiracy theories.
Footnotes:
1. Gary North, Tools of Dominion: The Case Laws of Exodus (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1990), Appendix C: "The Hoax of Higher Criticism."
2. For a critique of the whole procedure, and also the paganism of the university system that has fostered it, see the marvelous book by a former higher critic, Eta Linnemann, Historical Criticism of the Bible: Methodology or Ideology? (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker, 1990).
3. John E. Hartley, Leviticus, vol. 4 of Word Bible Commentary (Dallas, Texas: Word Books, 1992), p. xxxv.
4. Ibid., p. xliii.
5. Betsy Thatcher, "Special project: Scribe writing Torah Scroll," Milwaukee Sentinel (Dec. 26, 1990).
6. Robert Dick Wilson, A Scientific Investigation of the Old Testament (Chicago: Moody Press, [1926] 1959), pp. 39-40.
7. This has been true for over a century. Even though the Westminster Confession of Faith specifies that the world was created in six days (IV:1), both Charles Hodge and his son A. A. Hodge rejected this doctrine despite their affirmation of the Confession, an untenable position that received considerable attention from the Presbyterian Church's theological liberals and biblical higher critics. On Charles Hodge's age-day theory, see his Systematic Theology (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, [1871]), I, p. 570. He wrote: "The Church has been forced more than once to alter her interpretation of the Bible to accommodate the discoveries of science. But this has been done without any violence to the Scriptures or in any degree impairing their authority" (p. 573). On A. A. Hodge's open rejection of the Confession in the name of uniformitarian geology, see his book, The Confession of Faith (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, [1869] 1992), pp. 82-83. He stated that the geological time scale is "unquestionable," revealing "a process of divinely regulated development consuming vast periods of time" (p. 82). While the Bible's account "is infallibly true," we must recognize that "it was not designed either to prevent or take the place of a scientific interpretation of all existing phenomena, and of all traces of the past history of the world which God allows men to discover" (p. 83).
8. On this point, the Westminster Confession is misleading: "The Old Testament in Hebrew (which was the native language of the people of God of old), and the New Testament in Greek (which, at the time of the writing of it, was most generally known among the nations), being immediately inspired by God, and, by His singular care and providence, kept pure in all ages, are therefore authentical; so as, in all controversies of religion, the Church is finally to appeal unto them." WCF, I:8 (emphasis added).
9. Vic Lockman, Link Lizard Defeats Evolution, a children's cartoon tract that has yet to be answered by tenured university evolutionists.
10. Henning Graf Reventlow, The Authority of the Bible and the Rise of the Modern World (London: SCM Press, [1980] 1984), p. 1.
11. Idem.
12. Harold Bloom, et al., Deconstruction and Criticism (New York: Continuum, 1979); Mark C. Taylor (ed.), Deconstruction in Context: Literature and Philosophy (University of Chicago Press, 1986).
13. Edwin Scott Gaustad, "Did the Fundamentalists Win?" in Mary Douglas and Steven Tipton (eds.), Religion and America: Spiritual Life in a Secular Age (Boston: Beacon, 1983), p. 171.
14. Edward J. Young, Thy Word Is Truth: Some Thoughts on the Biblical Doctrine of Inspiration (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1957), p. 76.
15. Oswald T. Allis, The Five Books of Moses (Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed, [1943] 1949), Introduction.
16. Jerry Wayne Brown, The Rise of Biblical Criticism in America, 1800-1870: The New England Scholars (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1969), ch. 6.
17. Mark Stephen Massa, S.J., Charles Augustus Briggs and the Crisis of Historical Criticism (Minneapolis, Minnesota: Fortress Press, 1990).
If you are interested in receiving Dr. North's FREE monthly e-mail newsletter send an e-mail to:
If this book helps you gain a new understanding of the Bible, please consider sending a small donation to the Institute for Christian Economics, P.O. Box 8000, Tyler, TX 75711. You may also want to buy a printed version of this book, if it is still in print. Contact ICE to find out.