1 Reprinted in L&E, pp.163-203, to which subsequent page references are made. Founded in 1845 by the Congregationalist, Robert Vaughan, the British Quarterly Review rapidly became a unifying forum for the expression of “the Nonconformist values of civil and religious liberties” (cf. WIVP, vol.iv, pp.114ff.) in spite of fierce opposition from certain members of the College Committee at Lancashire Independent College (of which Vaughan was President) – rather reminiscent of WRS’s difficulties thirty years later. Matthew Arnold commended the journal’s high seriousness but criticised its sectarianism. Few of its readers came from the British literary or ecclesiastical establishment and this, allied to its conservative editorial policy, led to its demise in 1886.
2 B&C, p.121. The BQR editor at that time was Henry Allon (cf. WIVP, vol.iv, p.120). In a letter to his mother (C163) dated 4 March, 1870 Smith wrote: “My proof sheets as you know came this week. I got Davidson to read them and he thinks the article will be very useful”.
3 The actual books under review were: Die Propheten des Alten Bundes (1867-8) by Heinrich Ewald; two publications by Abraham Kuenen – Historisch-kritisch Onderzoek naar het Onstaan en de Verzameling van de Boeken des Ouden Verbonds (1863) and De Godsdienst van Israël tot den Ondergang van den Joodschen Staat (1869); and Gustav Baur’s Geschichte der alttestamentlichen Weissagung (1861). The last-named of these received only the briefest notice from Smith.
4 WRS subsequently contributed regular reviews of Continental theological publications, mainly to BFER but occasionally also to the Daily Review, between 1871 and 1876.
5 Robert Candlish was Principal of New College until 1873; hence the importance of securing his support at this stage of the contest for the Aberdeen chair. Candlish’s son, James, was to become one of WRS’s closest supporters during the five years of his trial; as editor of BFER, Candlish was enabled to give prominence to Smith’s views until 1876. Salmond (who became Professor of Systematic Theology and NT Exegesis at the Free Church College in Aberdeen in 1876 – and Principal there in 1898) and Theodore Meyer (like Sachs, a German convert from Judaism) were the two other serious contenders for the vacant chair at Aberdeen Free Church College. Meyer became a Presbyterian missionary in Europe and died in 1895.
6 L&E, p.200.
7 Ib., p. 163.
8 “If Revelation is truly Revelation, not unintelligible dead communication, if the faith that grasps it is to be a living faith, the human spirit must be prepared for its reception; and such a preparation must obey the law of continuity. . . . To seek the New Testament fulfilment in the Old Testament preparation, or to seek in the New Testament the fulfilment of every single hope that grew up on the always limited Old Testament ground, is to rob oneself of the possibility of gaining a true insight into the wondrous course of Revelation” (ib., p.202).
9 E.g., ib., p.201: “The religion of Israel stands to Christianity in the relation of its nearest positive preparation, and as the true sense of a riddle cannot be understood till its answer is known, so the full understanding of Old Testament prophecy is only possible from the Christian standpoint . . .” (quoted – as Smith himself puts it – from “Gustav Baur’s careful and learned History of Old Testament Prophecy unhappily still unfinished”).
10 The term organic in this context is Kuenen’s (cf. Kuenen, 1877, p.4) who employs it synonymously with historical-critical to refer to his approach to Biblical criticism. The nineteenth century connotations of the term organic were extensive and usefully imprecise.
11 Ib., p.165. Cf. Davidson (1903) p.169: “We have, in a word, a living, thinking man, taught of God, amidst his circumstances, the leader of God’s people . . . and speaking to them the truth in terms of their circumstances; a man not illuminated further than was needful to make him useful for the work of his day”.
12 L&E, ib. As, for Smith, the prophetic writings are “the kernel of all Israel’s history”, so it seems appropriate to use the term “germination” here.
13 Ib., pp.165f.
14 The doctrine of prevenient grace, for example, was central to the Free Church Confession and, by definition, its bestowal could not be otherwise than a supernatural act.
15 Ib., p.166.
16 Ib.
17 L&E, p.167: “It can hardly, in truth, be doubted that, if we desire to gain the clearest insight into the religious history of Israel, our true starting point must be the period of the earliest extant prophets”.
18 Ib., p.168.
19 Ib., p.168. Cf. Davidson (1903) p.190: “ . . . all prophecy reposes upon the conditions of the world existing in the day of the prophet, and operates with the moral and other forces then prevailing”.
20 L&E, p.176.
21 Ib., p.180. Smith’s precise meaning, in so speaking of the prophetic word, was, of course, to become a most vexatious issue following publication of the article, “Bible”, in EB 9.
22 Ib., pp.180f.
23 As Rogerson (1984, pp.153f.) observes, the multiple authorship of Isaiah had been proposed by the English scholar, Robert Lowth, as early as 1779, in his Isaiah: a New Translation, well before the rise of radical German theology.
24 Ib., p.182.
25 Ib., p.183.
26 Cf. Kuenen (1877) p.84: “Where we discover clear marks of reflection, deliberation, and study, may we not confidently infer there the absence of ecstasy?” This view ran counter to the prevailing assumption that prophecy took place under conditions of altered consciousness. Kuenen argues for development in the prophetic art, from an early stage when “a kind of frenzy” might be an appropriate concomitant of Baal worship, to the later stage where, “the ecstatic excitement . . . gradually retires more into the background, and finally disappears almost altogether” (ib., p.555).
27 Ib., p.185. This, of course, recalls Smith’s earlier paper, “Prophecy and Personality”: cf. above, ch.iv, although the emphasis here (in the BQR article) is on asserting the prophets’ freedom from any kind of mental pathology, rather than on attempting to elucidate the supernatural irruption of the divine message.
28 This is ostensibly opposed to the anti-supernaturalistic views expressed by Kuenen, who nevertheless emphasises the prophets’ complete psychological identification with Jahveh: “For, let it not be forgotten, in those struggles of which the prophets speak, Jahveh is the conqueror at the end. . . They have yielded to his superior might, and they stand before us now as the interpreters of a will which is not their own, but to which, compelled by the force of the truth, they have submitted themselves” (Kuenen, 1877, p.76). The closeness of Smith and Kuenen is very evident.
29 Ib., p.189. The view of the prophet as an “ambassador of God” is one firmly put forward by A.B. Davidson (1903) e.g. (p.89): “[The prophet] is a man of God, a servant of Jehovah, a messenger of God, an interpreter of God, a seer of the things of God, a speaker of the things of God to men” (Davidson’s emphasis).
30 The terms “believing” and “unbelieving” refer, of course, to acceptance or rejection of the supernaturalistic thesis and not to religious faith as opposed to agnosticism. Nevertheless the use of the term “unbelieving” necessarily carries a pejorative connotation.
31 L&E, p.191 (Smith’s emphases).
32 It is relevant to note here that the Victorians were deeply preoccupied with the phenomena associated with drug-induced states – witness the decidedly reckless experimentation amongst members of the medical profession at the time. But the topic was rarely discussed outside the pages of medical journals, although one notable exception is in Conan Doyle’s description of Sherlock Holmes’ cocaine addiction – ambiguously linked to the latter’s deductive powers.
33 Ib., p.200.
34 Ib., p.201. Robert Payne Smith (1819-1895) became Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford in 1865, was invited to deliver the 1869 Bampton Lectures there and was subsequently appointed Dean of Canterbury by Gladstone in 1870. He is described in DNB as “a voluminous writer in controversial theology, in which he favoured the conservative and evangelical side”. It is of interest that he was a member of the Old Testament Revision Committee throughout its existence (from 1870 to 1885) and would therefore have worked closely with Robertson Smith after the latter’s appointment to the Committee in 1874.
35 Payne Smith (1869): preface, p.vii.
36 Ib., p.xvi.
37 Ib., p.xxv.
38 Ib., pp.xf.
39 Ib.
40 Ib., p.28 (footnote).
41 Ib., p.220.
42 “Christianity and the Supernatural” (in L&E, pp.109-136; esp. pp.111f.).
43 Cf. Payne Smith (1869) p.213: “If the world was fit for Christ’s coming only after long ages of preparation, the very fact of the necessity of this preparation shows that there must be a development, a progress in revelation itself . . .”.
44 Ib., p.219: “But those who have not yet lost possession of their reason, and who can weigh evidence, know that the balance of that evidence is largely in favour of Christianity, even though there are difficulties enough to try our faith”.
45 Ib., p.245.
46 EB 9, vol. iii (1875) p.640.
47 Payne Smith (1869) p.244.
48 Payne Smith’s propaganda technique is well illustrated in the following example (ib., p.251): “It is painful constantly to read in the Fathers their rooted and unreasoning antipathy to the Jews, but the aversion remains to this day. Jeremiah’s words have proved true. The Jew is a curse in the mouth of all the nations of the earth (Jer. xxxvi.6)”.
49 Ib., p.247.
50 R.J. Carroll, “The Biblical Prophets as apologists for the Christian religion: reading William Robertson Smith’s The Prophets of Israel today” (in Johnstone ed., 1995, p.150).
51 References are to Kuenen’s definitive views on OT prophecy as set out in The Prophets and Prophecy in Israel (1877). Kuenen was Professor of Theology at Leyden University. Cf. W.H. Green (1883) p.173: “The recent work by Professor Kuenen . . . is written from the standpoint of the most ultra criticism [sic] and of absolute anti-supernaturalism”. Green represents the extreme conservatism of the “Old Princeton School”.
52 Ib., p.2 (Kuenen’s emphasis).
53 Ib., p.4.
54 “Prophecy is prediction, the office of the prophet is to announce the secrets of the future” (ib., p.7)
55 Ib., p.5.
56 Ib., p.7: “The history of theology, during the last few years, speaks with no bated or uncertain voice. The supporters of supernaturalism themselves come forward as witnesses for the necessity of a reformation of their systems”. The theological fondness for militaristic metaphor is replicated in W.H. Green’s counterblast (1883) p.180: The whole field over which the battle has been waged is strewn with their [ie the anti-supernaturalists’] spiked guns and abandoned intrenchments”.
57 Cf. ib., p.50: “Now [according to Payne Smith] the extraordinary messengers of Jahveh, men who consequently were endowed with extraordinary gifts, must clearly be distinguished from such a class of [inferior] prophets”. Payne Smith (1869, pp.55ff.) had presented an elaborate but unscholarly argument based upon the verbal forms aB;nI (Niphal) and aBen"t]hi (Hitpael) to force a distinction between “real” prophets and those who simply acted the part. Without directly referring to Payne Smith, A.B. Davidson discounted this view in his student lectures (Davidson, 1903, p.84).
58 Kuenen (1877) p.54 (the author’s emphasis).
59 Green (1883) p.184ff. presents a view diametrically opposed, as might be expected, to what he describes (p.247) as “the legerdemain of modern criticism”.
60 Cf. Kuenen (1877) pp.336ff., where the writer exhaustively discusses the prophecies of Jeremiah – “whom we can thus accompany step by step in his career”.
61 Ib., p.344.
62 Ib., p.345.
63 Ib., p.347 (Kuenen’s emphases).
64 Ib., pp.499f.
65 Ib., p. 502.
66 Ib., p.504.
67 In his customarily thorough fashion, Kuenen illustrates the influence of many other OT passages, including Ps.110 and Deut.18:15-18.
68 E.g. Matt. 8:17, derived from Is. 53:4.
69 Kuenen (1877) pp.525f.
70 Ib., p.528.
71 Ib., p.533.
72 Ib., p.534 (Kuenen’s emphasis).
73 Ib., p.537.
74 Ib., p.544.
75 As set out in the books by Kuenen under review: viz. the second part of his Historical and Critical Inquiry (1863) and the first part of his Religion of Israel (1869).
76 L&E, p.164.
77 Ib., p.115: “It is a notorious fact that the school that attacks the historic truth of Christianity takes for its presupposition the impossibility of the supernatural – does not profess to be able to carry out its destructive criticism without this presupposition”.
78 A.B. Davidson (1831-1902) had been educated at Marischal College, Aberdeen, and was Professor of Hebrew at New College from 1863 until his death. He published relatively little during his lifetime and his posthumously published Old Testament Prophecy (1903) from which his views are drawn in this section, was compiled by J.A. Paterson from Davidson’s New College lectures on the topic. It is not possible, therefore, to establish with precision how far the views communicated reflect Davidson’s teaching in the late 1860s. However, several references (e.g. to Payne Smith’s Bampton Lectures) suggest that, for the most part, the ideas expressed are contemporaneous with Smith’s attendance at his classes.
79 Cf. A.C. Cheyne (in Johnstone ed., 1995, p.36) who describes Davidson as “the first great practitioner in Scotland of the new [critical] approach” and quotes Davidson’s biography (Strahan, 1917) to the effect that Smith was “far ahead of any other student he [Davidson] ever had”. See Strahan, chapter xv, for an interesting defence of Davidson’s “silence”.
80 In October, 1873, for instance, Davidson wrote to Smith (D175) enclosing “a half sheet of Paradigms” from the proofs of his Hebrew Grammar, requesting that he check it for errors and also advise on layout: “But cd you suggest what to do with the Paradigm of the Pe Nun. The Printer has made it assume the ugly shape it has I suppose in order to get the Pe Gutt paradigm in one view. The Pe Nun is horrible as it stands. . . ”.
81 D174. Davidson also urges Smith in this letter, “I wish you would put out a little Chaldee Grammar. There is terrible scarcity of one and you would soon do it”.
82 Ib.
83 Smith’s biographers describe this charitably as “a certain reticence and a curious turn for qualification which sometimes asserted themselves rather inopportunely” (B&C, pp.76f.).
84 Cf. D175 (in relation to a journal article on messianic prophecy): “I hardly know what to do, whether to drop the thing or to ask Dykes to grant me room for a short reply”.
85 Davidson (1903) p.91.
86 Ib., p.94.
87 Ib., p.96.
88 Ib., pp.144f.
89 Ib., pp.157f.: “And there is another thing which to us in this age is stronger than anything, and that is the internal evidence of the truth of the prophetic word. Their statements regarding God and men and ethical truth commend themselves to us now as self-evidencing. Our position in the world is different from that of antiquity. We are, so to speak, old; and we reason like old men. The world has had experience of other systems than that of Scripture and it finds them unsatisfactory. It has had leisure to compare and live through much. It has, if I may say so, the experience of a long life to go upon, and it now feels that the things said by the Hebrew prophets regarding God are true”.
90 Ib., p.164.
91 Ib., pp.179f.
92 Ib., p.243. Davidson was unhappy with the term “higher criticism” because of its possibly “arrogant” connotations.
93 Ib., p.244.
94 Ib., p.96.
95 J Addison, Spectator, no.122.
96 From D579, as are the subsequent extracts.
97 See B&C pp.206f. For a transcript and discussion of Rainy’s “letter,” conceived on the advice of Dr Alexander Whyte, see Carnegie Simpson (1909) vol.i, pp. 324ff.