GKB
Enterprises

Breaking through

The prophecies, the very miracles and proofs of our Religion, are not of such a nature that we can say they are absolutely convincing. But they are also of such a kind, that none can say that it is unreasonable to believe in them. Thus there is both evidence and obscurity to enlighten some and to to blind others …
— Blaise Pascal: Pensées.

Robertson Smith’s urge to be published, outwith the narrow bounds of the Royal Society of Edinburgh’s Transactions, took added stimulus from his decision in December, 1869, to compete for the Aberdeen Free Church College chair; and his efforts rapidly bore fruit in a paper published in the April (1870) number of the British Quarterly Review.1 Smith’s biographers comment:

Its acceptance by the editor seems to have been due, in part at least, to the good offices of Smith’s new friend, McLennan; on its appearance it received the warmly expressed approbation of Dean Stanley, who had not yet awakened the resentment of Scottish patriots, and was then enjoying that sort of undenominational celebrity which often belongs to those who are not regarded as wholly orthodox by their own church.2

Entitled “The question of prophecy in the critical schools of the Continent”, the article was an ambitious undertaking, strikingly characteristic of its young author’s Hebraic “fire and energy”. Ostensibly a searching review of recent Continental writings on prophecy by Ewald, Kuenen and Gustav Baur,3 it afforded Smith the opportunity to develop still further his own thinking on the nature of prophecy, while also displaying to the full his intimate and possibly unsurpassed familiarity (in Britain) with the latest German and Dutch biblical criticism.4 Smith’s hopes were immediately buoyed by the favourable comments of his teachers at New College and he wrote again to his mother on April 5:

Candlish is much delighted with my Paper and snaps his fingers at Salmond. He at first thought (Lindsay was the recipient of all this) that I should publish it separately – in which case he would have been glad to subscribe to help to print it. But on second thoughts he conceived it wd be better not to do this.
His only objection is the word Jahveh. That he says is most injudicious. Many will read no further. I don’t believe that however …
I saw Davidson today. He thinks if Candlish comes over to me at all it does not matter when Meyer is withdrawn.5

The paper’s continuing interest for us lies in its mirroring of Robertson Smith’s internal debate over the relative merits of Ewald and Kuenen as Biblical critics. The former represented the “positive” or “believing” school of critics; the latter, the “negative,” “naturalistic” or “unbelieving” school – and Smith’s own attitude fluctuates throughout the long paper. He is prudent enough to avoid offering his wholehearted allegiance to either side but while he concludes –

[Kuenen’s] whole theory, ingenious as it is, bears with it not only its own condemnation, but the condemnation of the principles on which it rests. That is not a true historical criticism which does not acknowledge in history a higher element than the merely natural6

– he nevertheless betrays his personal disposition to be more stimulated by Kuenen’s “cold pellucidity of thought” than by Ewald’s “waywardness and arbitrary self-reliance”.7 Smith is careful to stress that both write as “historical” critics rather than as theologians and this caveat serves him as a safeguard at several points where even the paraphrasing of Kuenen’s rationalistic views on prophecy might have laid Smith open to charges of heterodoxy. Thus, while Kuenen, in his naturalistic theory of prophecy, logically ruled out any element of fulfilled messianic prediction in the Hebrew scriptures, WRS was careful to distance himself from that ultra-radical view and to this end introduced his single quotation from the moderate (but by no means brilliant) Gustav Baur8 to assert that the Old Testament illustrates a gradual process of divine preparation, leading to the new dispensation of Christianity.9

At the outset, Smith adopts the “fundamental principle” that the higher criticism perceives history as an “organic unity”.10 There is, accordingly, an implicit evolutionary process in history and hence:

A tradition that violates the continuity of historical evolution and stands in no necessary relation to the conditions of the preceding and following age must be untrue; and, above all, an ancient writing which is no frigid product of the school, but is instinct with true life, must be the product of that age which contained the conditions of the life it unconsciously reflects.11

Thus Smith expects to authenticate a particular scriptural text by reference to the internal evidence for its stylistic and thematic consistency, by its freedom from anachronism, and by those features which stand as testimony to its contemporary authenticity. In addition, however, he expects prophetic writing to have the impress of the “creative Spirit” which inspired its germination and which thus raises it above the mere “sweep of natural law”.12 Moreover, it is Smith’s own fundamental belief that the coming of Christianity represents the node of that evolutionary process which is also, for him, the unfolding of God’s plan; and he uses the familiar metaphor of Christ’s life as a developmental focal point in history:

Rightly to conceive the progress of religious faith, thought and life in the people of Israel, until the theocratic development received its absolute conclusion in the life of Him who gathered all the rays of splendour that flash through the Old Testament into the effulgent focus of His transcendent personality, and in the course of this task to inweave the Bible record with the history of which it is itself a part – such is the critical problem of the theocratic history.13

This colourful prose seems to reveal the young Smith, not without a certain awkwardness, embracing an evolutionary view of history while simultaneously holding fast to the principle of a divine plan operating within a temporal and secular framework of historical events. It is significant that, throughout this particular article, WRS rarely uses the term “supernatural”; yet his thinking is everywhere preoccupied with that concept, which by upbringing and conviction he was unable to discard.14

The prophetic books of the Old Testament, for Smith, constitute those Biblical texts which most powerfully witness to “the purest religious conceptions and the deepest national feelings that these ages could show”.15 That being the case, they were certainly “no pious fraud”; rather, the prophetic writings were “the key to the marvellous religious development, which is, in fact, the kernel of all Israel’s history”.16 Nevertheless, they are documents which require to be critically assessed in the light of what the purely historical books tell us. The latter were generally written down well after the events they described, and the earliest prophetic books could therefore contribute significantly to an understanding of the actual historical situation.17 By using this legitimate argument, Smith carefully and prudently validated the application of “historical criticism” to the earlier prophetic books, by which he meant Amos, Hosea, Micah and the initial section of Isaiah.

Amos, for example, “detects the instrument of Jahveh’s wrath in the distant Assyrians”;18 for Robertson Smith, this was an example of true prophecy on the authenticity of which there was (he believed) general agreement, yet its real importance lay, not in any actual prediction, but rather:

in the religious and ethical ideas drawn from a profound spiritual Theism which constrain the prophet to look for an inevitable judgment. But the question remains, how far the definite colouring of this judgment passes beyond the limits of the impressions which present facts would naturally make on an able and reflecting mind. That is, in the present case, How far had the westward development of the Assyrian empire extended itself when Amos wrote?19

Ewald, as Smith correctly notes, adopted a much more supernaturalistic view of prophecy than Kuenen, Ewald discerning more “spiritual insight” on the prophet’s part than Kuenen would allow. Both agreed, however, that the true core of the prophetic message lay in the moral or ethical ideas communicated to the people at the time. Indeed, it had to be concluded that:

True prophecy is always ideal, seeking to grasp, not the immediate future, but the eternal and unchanging principles which Jahveh, the living God, is ever working out more fully among His people. The critical study of prophecy has done no greater service than to point out how small a fraction of the prophetic writings is strictly predictive. Not detailed events lying in the future, but broad religious principles, are the ground on which the prophets are at home. But then these principles are grasped with such firmness, with so concrete a hold, that they never remain floating, as it were, in the air, but are always applied with confidence to the special needs and special circumstances of the theocracy.20

On this basis, the critical study of Amos, Hosea and Micah is straightforward: they are simultaneously “instinct with Divine eternal truth” and “instinct with fresh human life”; their concern was with contemporary problems and, insofar as they may have peered into the future, it was not for the sake of prophesying “to the future”. Their duties “lay with their own age”.21 In the case of Isaiah, however, matters were more complex – and here Smith was as yet reluctant to adopt Kuenen’s blunt approach:

A prophecy … coming to us in the name of Isaiah, but having no roots in Isaiah’s age, is to the historical student either an inexplicable phenomenon, or a phenomenon displaced. Certainly, he [the historical critic] is called upon to admit that another inquirer, approaching the problem from a theological standpoint, taking the prophet on the Divine side, may be able to explain what he cannot understand. But, meanwhile, we cannot deny him the right to test the phenomenon in his own fashion, to transpose the unintelligible utterance into a different historical setting, to ask whether, so transposed, it may not become doubly resplendent with the twofold brilliancy of an eternal Divine thought and a manifest historical propriety. The principle on which the modern criticism herein acts is carefully to be distinguished from the old rationalistic absurdity of bringing down all prophecy post eventum: not the aim to which the prophet tends, but the starting-point from which he advances, affords to the historical inquirer the basis of his critical activity.22

This uncharacteristically tentative approach by Smith to the multiple authorship of Isaiah can hardly be explained other than by judging it to be a reflection of his wariness in broaching, within the pages of a non-specialist periodical publication, an idea which, put more simply and directly, might well cause consternation in a readership quite unfamiliar with contemporaneous Continental theology.23 Still, the eventual conclusion of WRS’s argument must have become reasonably clear to those prepared to follow him thus far:

… in one word, if Isaiah wrote these [later] chapters he lived two lives – not a natural and a prophetic life, but two prophets’ lives, one in his own day, and one in the far future. And, if this be the real state of the case, Isaiah will be to the critic, for all practical purposes, two men; the whole historical significance of these chapters must still be transferred from the age of Hezekiah to the age of Labynetus.24

Rather than pursue “these intricate questions”, however, Smith states that his true purpose is to clarify the function and status of the Hebrew prophets. They were true religious leaders of the people, possessing the gift of speaking “as the word of Jahveh, the God of Israel – a name which the rebellious people might often forget, but never dared repudiate”.25 This, says Smith, was Kuenen’s position: that the prophets’ status in the eighth century must have been such that their loud judgments upon current abuses and moral backsliding carried authority because of their firm belief in the one God of Israel. Like Kuenen, Robertson Smith disagrees with most contemporary interpretations of prophecy as the outcome of some form of ecstasy or furor vaticinius:

That they did not speak to the people in a state of ecstasy is certain.26 Their prophecies bear on every page the stamp of a vigorous, healthy, waking life. Their influence lay not in their words only but in the force of their whole personality which everywhere shines through their utterances.27

The prophet is no passive recipient of the divine Word – indeed he may at times wrestle against it – but the prophet’s receptiveness is due essentially to “the personal sympathy between himself and Jahveh, by virtue of which the God-sent thought approves itself to him inwardly, and not by mere external authority”. The divine message is indeed communicated supernaturally, but never at the cost of taking over the prophet’s own rational thinking and personal volition. In examining the prophetic rôle, therefore, we are witness to the “personal union” of the human and the divine.28 In this respect, Smith strongly favours Ewald’s perception (against Kuenen’s) of the prophet as a person in “peculiar communion” with God and therefore able to penetrate, as a “seer,” into God’s eternal truths.

In Smith’s eyes then, Ewald (as a “believing” or “positive” critic) is largely right:

The prophets really were what they claimed to be – privileged ambassadors of God. And the proof that they were so lies not in the supernatural process by which they received the Divine message, not in the fulfilment of individual predictions, but in their work as a whole. That work was true work.29

Kuenen, as representative of the “unbelieving” or “negative” critic,30 follows a naturalistic interpretation: the prophets are “geniuses or heroes in the ethico-religious field, produced by Israel in the same sense as every nation produces its great men”.31 Accordingly, the prophets of Israel do not differ from the seers or men of great foresight who arose amongst other peoples, for all were and are “the product of natural development”. Smith takes issue with Kuenen in the latter’s assumption that any of the prophets were passively inspired in the course of an ecstatic experience – for that implied the presence of a pathological condition which for Smith, as we have seen, was an unthinkable characteristic of such great figures.32

In Smith’s judgment, Kuenen’s theory, while “ingenious”, lacks plausibility, gives insufficient weight to the spiritual nature of the prophetic character and employs a “petty pragmatism” to diminish the predictive foresight of the great prophets. Moreover, Kuenen “reverses the order of cause and effect” by attributing the increasingly spiritual perception of religion amongst the Israelites to a natural process of development at work “in the heart of the people”, rather than to the impact upon the people of the divinely-inspired prophets themselves. A man like Amos was, according to Kuenen, the product of his culture and environment rather than a man specially endowed by God’s grace with a message for His people.

And so Robertson Smith, after much overt debate, appears to set his face against Kuenen’s naturalism and offers his personal endorsement of the supernaturalistic position:

That is not a true historical criticism which does not acknowledge in history a higher element than the merely natural.33

At heart, the whole article is a sustained attempt to reclaim the higher criticism (which Smith prudently calls “historical criticism” throughout) from the threat of contamination by those sceptical schools which proliferated on the Continent. Robertson Smith had, by now, committed himself, heart and soul, to the higher criticism and his aim at this stage was to preserve that method from any taint whatsoever of anti-supernaturalistic bias. He continues:

It is from a criticism that has learned this lesson that we can approach the weighty problem of prophecy from the human side without ignoring the hand of God, that we can look for real fruit. Already, indeed, the results of such a criticism extend through the whole field of prophecy, and are ignored by no school of theologians. Readers of last year’s Bampton Lectures cannot have failed to observe how great an influence recent inquiry into the Old Testament from the human side has exerted on a theologian so little disposed as Dr Payne Smith to do homage to the spirit of criticism, or to yield to the temptations by which even believing Continental thought is so readily beset.34

This is an intriguing reference on Smith’s part. Not only does it serve to illustrate his familiarity with the condition of Anglican theology at Oxford but it seems an unsubtle attempt to suggest that even the most conservative of British theologians were slowly being converted to the new principles. Reading those lectures today, it is difficult to find convincing evidence for Robertson Smith’s stated optimism as to the enlightening influence of the higher criticism upon Payne Smith. Certainly the Bampton lecturer for 1869 cautioned his audience at the outset against over-estimating the element of prediction in prophecy:

It has been my object in the following course of Lectures to show that there exists in the Old Testament an element, which no criticism on naturalistic principles can either account for or explain away. That element is Prophecy: and I have endeavoured to prove that its force does not consist merely in its prediction.35

Yet he swiftly continued:

And here we affirm that the prophecies contained in the Old Testament are so numerous, so entirely interwoven with its innermost substance, so consistent with one another, and yet so contrary to the whole tenour [sic] of Jewish thought, so marvellously fulfilled in Christianity, and yet in a way so different from every anticipated fulfilment, that, while it is unscientific to refuse to listen to the proof of their reality because of any a priori supposition, it is even worse to speak of them as mere forecasts and anticipations. The argument for prophecy does not rest upon a small number of predictions, but on a vast preparation for an equally vast result.36

The “negative criticism”, Payne Smith insists, has proved nothing; there are no spurious predictions “subsequent to the event” and the book of Isaiah is no “olla podrida” but is manifestly the work of a single author: any other conclusion is “monstrous”. Indeed, the whole system of so-called higher or “subjective” criticism, is no more than a “farrago of disjointed conjecture”.37 Its protagonists even claim that Deuteronomy is no more than a “pious fraud” palmed off by Jeremiah and Hilkiah upon the “too credulous Josiah”. Payne Smith’s reverence for scripture demands that “such of us as believe in inspiration can never consent to treat the Bible as an ordinary book”; but he immediately concedes:

In one sense, indeed, it is a painful necessity that it must be so treated. It must be subjected to exactly the same tests as any other document. Its claims are a matter of such incalculable importance to every one of us, that they must be clearly and critically examined: every possible argument for and against the authenticity and genuineness of the Bible must be closely studied: history, chronology, philology, must all be made to contribute their aid to this enquiry.38

There is not the least vein of irony in those observations by Payne Smith; for he concludes this curious argument with the comment:

We may be glad, then, that the examination has been made, and the claims of the Bible closely scrutinized, even if our reverence for it forbids our entering upon the task.39

As Robertson Smith, in his BQR article, had pictured Christ as the focal point, marking the transition to a new dispensation, so Payne Smith uses a similar metaphor:

As till Christ [the Biblical history] was an ever narrowing stream, till it all centred in Him, so from Christ the stream is ever widening, till the knowledge of the Lord shall at length be universal as the waters cover the sea.40

Beyond that, the two writers seem at first sight to share very little in common. Payne Smith, lecture by lecture, follows the sublimely uncritical principle that all historical events could only have occurred through an act of God’s will, since each event (by definition, the writer seems to imply) is evidence of the Divine purpose:

We do not hesitate to affirm that the conquests of Alexander, the empire of Rome, the translation of the Septuagint, and the gropings of philosophy after truth, were all ordained by the Divine Providence, and so regulated as best to lend their aid to this part of the preparation for Christ.41

This was the kind of loose apologetic writing which Smith had deplored in his 1869 presentation to the Theological Society at New College;42 it was a form of pseudo-science that ignored or denied the personal faith which lay at the root of Christian belief and it offered instead a variety of spurious arguments of the kind quoted above. Yet, paradoxically, both WRS and Payne Smith were attempting to harness the same arguments to their cause: both appealed to “science” and espoused the concept of “development.”43 Both also leant extensively on the authority of Ewald; but for Payne Smith the sceptics (including the higher critics) were those who had plainly “lost their reason.”44 Similarly, although he is prepared to acknowledge that, “the voices of the prophets are in exact relation to their times,”45 (which superficially seems to parallel Smith’s famous utterance for his EB9 article, “Bible” – “There is no reason to think that a prophet ever received a revelation which was not spoken directly and pointedly to his own time”),46 Payne Smith immediately proceeds:

… in other words, the history of the Jewish people combines with the express teaching of their holiest men in setting up that wide circle of doctrine which finds in Christ and in Christianity its exact fulfilment.47

Indeed, as Payne Smith’s lectures unfold, they become ever more openly representative of the then prevalent anti-Jewish sentiment48 that the Hebrew scriptures possessed no intrinsic worth whatsoever except insofar as they anticipated the coming of Christ. Furthermore, it is not merely the Messianic prophecies within the Old Testament which serve that end, for:

The whole atmosphere of the Old Testament is instinct with prophecy; Judaism from first to last is a progress towards the Gospel. You have, I grant, many remarkable predictions which came exactly true: this is something – a great thing. Still, far more weighty is the fact that these express predictions are but the highest summits as it were of a whole region rising up everywhere to Christ… All the institutions of Judaism, the whole state of things which it sets before us, as well as the express teaching of its sacred books, look forward to and converge in Jesus of Nazareth.49

Such sentiments in turn reflect a near-universal attitude amongst all Christian denominations, persisting well into the twentieth century – an attitude which took for granted the expropriation by Christianity of the Hebrew Bible in toto. It represents a set of assumptions uncritically held by such disparate figures as Robertson Smith himself (together of course with his Free Church colleagues) and Matthew Arnold, who, as we have seen, proposed to reconstruct a suitably modern Christianity using the best material from both Hebraism and Hellenism. As Robert Carroll writes:

Smith was first and foremost a traditional Christian theologian, with a strong commitment to the “truths” of Protestantism as defined by Scottish Presbyterianism. It is therefore hardly surprising to discover that his representation of the ancient biblical prophets should make those figures approximate to something like presbyterian reformers of ancient religion. The dogmas of Chalcedonian Christianity were believed absolutely by Smith and in his researches on the Bible from a historical-critical point of view he sought better and sounder reasons for believing in the dogmas of conciliar Christianity. His work is incomprehensible today without being seen in that light.50

However, Carroll fails to acknowledge the dominance of such views, not simply within the Free Church of Scotland itself, but within mainstream Christianity as a whole; accordingly he falls short of identifying the more positive elements in Robertson Smith’s struggle to unravel the true meaning of prophecy from the centuries-old accumulation of Christian apologetic. Undoubtedly Smith was unable to perceive the Christian reinterpretation of the Hebrew scriptures in terms of a presumptuous annexation of Judaism’s precious birthright: it is neither conceivable nor possible, given his background and conditioning, that he could have done so; but the first steps in that direction were being made on the Continent and WRS was to become increasingly drawn to those incipient stirrings. And Kuenen was the first such radical influence to unsettle Robertson Smith’s thinking.

Abraham Kuenen on Prophecy51

Unable as Robertson Smith was to abandon a supernaturalistic view of prophecy, he was clearly impressed, as we have seen, by Kuenen’s “cold pellucidity of thought,” matching as it did Smith’s own searchingly analytic cast of mind, and the Dutch scholar’s scrupulous dissection of the prophetic writings, and of their subsequent utilisation by the New Testament writers, could hardly have failed to shape WRS’s subsequent thinking. Kuenen began by challenging the contemporary tendency to downgrade the importance of the predictive element in OT prophecy: plainly the whole rationale of NT usage of the Hebrew scriptures lay in their avowed foretelling of Christ’s coming:

The way is there [i.e. in the OT] prepared for it [i.e. Christianity] – nay, it is actually present, viz., in prophecy and in the prophets.52

The NT reading of the Hebrew scripture was to perceive in them a progressively more definite and circumstantially detailed prefiguration of Christ’s incarnation, as expressed through successive prophets:

The figure of the son of David was delineated by them with outlines which grew gradually more distinct, his great work of redemption was described with more exactness. Thus the task of bearing witness to his divine nature and vicarious sufferings was assigned to Isaiah; Micah announced his birth at Bethlehem; Hosea, his flight into Egypt; while Messianic prophecy reached its highest point in the prediction of the birth of Christ by Daniel.53

To subordinate the predictive element in OT prophecy was therefore to nullify the value of such prophecy for Christianity.54 Kuenen had no intention of devaluing OT prophecy – or its rôle in preparing the way for Christ’s coming; but the prophets were human, and their predictions were fallible: indeed, decidedly so.

A preparation for Christianity? Yes; but in another sense than that which tradition means by these words – no prediction of facts in the life of the Christ, but a preparation of the soil, out of which Christianity was to spring, the prelude to the new religious creation which mankind owe to Jesus of Nazareth.55

Not only would Kuenen’s trenchant and systematic demolition of traditional hermeneutics have appealed to Smith’s combative and analytic temperament, but he would have strongly identified with the latter’s description of the new criticism encircling the “beleaguered fortress” of traditional orthodoxy and already breaching its defences at numerous points.56 Kuenen effectively dealt, moreover, with Dr Payne Smith’s approach and in particular with the latter’s contention that the nebî’îm comprised “ordinary” prophets, whose vocation as seers (in guilds or schools) was of a strictly uninspired nature, alongside those “extraordinary” and truly inspired prophets whose utterances have come down to us in the canonical books of prophecy and who reliably spoke as “ambassadors of God”.57 Kuenen’s counter-argument is an interestingly psychological one:

It is not difficult to discover the motives which have led Dr Payne Smith – and so many others before him – to the conception which they have formed. They would like at once to limit and sharply to define the domain of the supernatural. They place the great majority of the Nebiim on the outside of that domain, in order to be better able to uphold the divine mission and inspiration of the small number, especially of the prophets, whose writings have been preserved for us in the Old Testament. But the passages which lie before us frustrate any such attempt. According to the convictions of the Israelites – of the contemporaries of the prophets as well as of the writers of the Old Testament – all prophecy is a supernatural phenomenon resulting from and explained by the workings of Jahveh’s spirit.58

Over the course of several chapters, Kuenen proceeds to examine in detail the predictions of the prophets, both those widely regarded as fulfilled and those judged as yet unfulfilled; and he concludes that (as one might express it in modern terms) the accuracy of those predictions is no better than might have been expected to occur by chance.59 The whole exercise is elegantly conducted with a scientific precision which Robertson Smith could not have failed to admire: the available data are marshalled, inspected and analysed, as objectively as their nature permits, after which Kuenen draws the inescapable inferences. Where the fulfilment of a prophecy was contingent upon reformation or penitence, the intransigence of the people could be said to have accounted for its non-fulfilment. If the prediction were contingent upon lack of moral improvement, the prophecy would be self-fulfilling for the same reason.

Kuenen concluded accordingly that the prophets themselves made conflicting predictions, both individually and collectively; and he attributed such variation to such purely human or psychological causes as temperament, mood or circumstances.60 The prophecies therefore were subjective – a product of the prophet’s own humanity, despite being identified and hallowed as “the word of Jahveh”. Thus the true task of the prophets was not prediction but exhortation:

Their business is not to communicate what shall happen, but to insist upon that which ought to happen. The maintenance of the Jahveh worship as they comprehended it – that is what they had in view in the whole course of their activity.61

In this respect – that the prophet’s rôle is primarily moral and only secondarily predictive – Kuenen is superficially at one with Robertson Smith and Payne Smith. The crucial difference for Kuenen was of course that the positing of supernatural forces was no longer necessary in order to explain the peculiar phenomenon of prophetic behaviour:

The inference from this does not seem doubtful. The prediction of the future possesses a secondary importance for the prophets themselves. It is not the end at which they aim, but the means which they employ. In their spirit, it must be regarded as threatening or promise, as impressive warning or powerful encouragement.62

The prophets’ typical behaviour stemmed from their perception of Jahveh’s nature and attributes and, in this regard, the wish was father to the thought. Jahveh’s own behaviour is never inconsistent; hence the varying outcomes identified result from the human response, which is at best capricious and most commonly quite at odds with the divine wish:

In other words, the realisation of the prophecy is always dependent on Jahveh’s nature. Must not then its purport also be determined by that nature? It is at least the most obvious course to assume provisionally that such is the case. Let me add to these considerations, in the last place, that the alternation or dissimilarity also of the prophetical predictions seems to indicate that they are dependent on something else. It is at least explained at once and perfectly, when we regard these predictions as postulates, as the application of a universal rule, of a certain firm conviction regarding Jahveh’s relation to Israel, or to men in general.63

There remained, however, the problem of the New Testament’s use of Old Testament prophecy – by the Evangelists, by Paul, by the writer to the Hebrews and by Jesus himself. Kuenen proceeded, with his customary exactitude and pertinacity, to demonstrate that the New Testament citations constituted a medley of misquotations, alterations and arbitrary combinations or conjunctions of quite discrepant and unrelated prophecies, further distorted by faulty exegesis both within the New Testament itself and through the labours of subsequent interpreters. The objective text had everywhere been exposed to subjective handling in the interests of aligning the Hebrew prophecies to the needs of a new religion:

When we compare Christianity as it presents itself to us in the Founder and in the first preachers of his gospel, with the predictions of the Old Testament, it becomes at once evident that they do not agree fully and literally. There is no similarity and conformity between prophecy and issue. The difference may be thus expressed: the national, particularistic, and material elements in the predictions regarding the future are in the New Testament thrust into the background or even distinctly contradicted; the universalistic and spiritual side comes into the foreground, and is worked out with cordial sympathy.64

Specifically, the New Testament writers had no interest in the restoration of Israel; hence they either ignored or altered predictions relating to that event. The pre-eminent status of Israel in the eyes of the prophets is transferred instead to the Gentile nations, with all the accompanying “privileges and promises”.65 The Old Testament prophecies, in other words, had been mined eclectically by the Fathers of the Christian Church and all material suited to the purpose had been diligently recycled to provide foundational evidence for the new religious constructs that were to cohere in Christianity. Kuenen here permitted himself the rare luxury of an ironic comment:

It is already implied in what is said above, that the prophetical promise of material welfare, which takes for granted the continued existence of the nation of Israel, does not come into the foreground in the New Testament. I purposely do not express myself more strongly. For the felicity which is there announced as revealed in Christ is not purely spiritual and heavenly, although the modern reader of the New Testament involuntarily understands it thus. “The Kingdom of God” or “of the heavens” – two expressions which mean precisely the same thing … – is usually represented in the New Testament as a state of felicity which shall begin, after a short time, upon earth. The Apostle Paul, and the writer of the Apocalypse, are at one on this point, although the latter depicts the heavenly Jerusalem in a way which might readily appear to the former to be too materialistic.66

Nevertheless, the predominant tone of the New Testament is a spiritual one centred upon fellowship with Jesus. In this regard, Kuenen observes, the various Messianic prophecies – and the Suffering Servant imagery of Isaiah 52:13 to 53:12 in particular – were freely and selectively applied to the image of Christ, who was portrayed accordingly in ideal theocratic terms as both king and high priest.67 This process entailed substantial modification of the OT text so that the NT reformulation of the prophecies frequently transgressed the sense of the original.68

Kuenen concludes his lengthy dissertation with a traditional disclaimer. If it is judged regrettable that he has had so often to discredit the exegesis of the NT writers and their successors, he feels obliged at the same time to pay due homage to their success in reinterpreting the Hebrew scriptures with such elaborate skill, piety and devotion:

It is almost impossible for us to form too high an estimate of the importance of the application of these passages – not only of Isaiah liii., but also of the passion-psalms – to the Messiah. They reconciled the Christians to the suffering and the dying of their Lord; they established them in the conviction that this termination of his earthly life had been willed and ordained by God; and they led them to see therein the indispensable condition of His glorification, and finally matured their ideas regarding the fruits of that suffering and dying.69

Isaiah 53 provided, moreover, the crucial source material which enabled Paul to define and give authoritative sanction to the sacrificial and expiatory rôle of Jesus.70 Thus, Kuenen argues, all these clues enable him to exhibit “the relation of the New Testament to the ideals of the Israelitish prophets”.71 He has established the links but has yet to explain why the NT writers so deviated from the original text. Not unexpectedly, his conclusion is that:

The Christian religion, as it is known from the books of the New Testament, is a more highly developed form, or rather, it is the completion, of Israel’s religion.72

By the term “completion”, explains Kuenen (quite conventionally and with apparent sincerity), is meant the radical re-formation of the Hebrew “law and the prophets”, along with the substitution of a new and higher ethic of love, mercy and judgment:

Jesus himself and the first preachers of the gospel no longer occupy the standpoint of the writers of the Old Testament. And yet they have not abandoned the ground of Israel’s religion. Prophecy is the basis on which they build a new structure, or, to express the matter otherwise, it showed them the direction in which they further developed Christian truth. Without neglecting what the Old Testament furnished besides, they yet preferred to attach their preaching closely to prophecy. And they were fully justified in doing so, for the religion, which they proclaimed, was the ripe fruit of the tree which had sprung from this root.73

Kuenen’s final task is to justify his naturalistic approach against the prevailing supernaturalism of other theologians. The manifest inaccuracy or non-fulfilment of OT prophecy ruled out the divine origin of such prophecies. The supernaturalists sought to match prophecy to outcome, in terms of the principle that both were God’s work; they took no account therefore of the “subjective” or human element in history, nor did they allow for any process of historical development within mankind’s thinking such as had occurred in the four or five hundred years since the heyday of the OT canonical prophets. Jesus and his followers reverentially took that prophetic material, reworked it to meet the needs of a new age and, out of that work, developed a new (and “higher”) form of religion. All these conclusions, for Kuenen, represented the fruits of modern scientific exegesis:

It is the task of scientific exegesis accurately to determine where the one case is presented, and where the other. It cannot withdraw itself from the task, it must execute it with complete freedom. Its method, like that of all other sciences, has been perfected and developed in the course of ages, and now stands firm as a rock. This method is imperative upon all who practise it, as well when they interpret, as when they criticise the exposition of scripture given by others. They have no right to deviate from it, and there is, in truth, nothing which should urge them to do so.74

In 1875, Robertson Smith would have read those words in the original and they would have constituted for him a manifesto that he could scarcely resist embracing. In 1870, when Smith published his BQR review, the position was much less clear-cut: Kuenen’s views75 were still too radical in many ways for the young man – and his Aberdeen ambitions in any case dictated prudence. If Payne Smith occupied one end of the theological spectrum, there was no doubt that Kuenen stood at the opposite; all that one can discern clearly at this stage is the evident pull exerted on Smith by both writers. When WRS writes that Kuenen “lays bare to himself and others the real principles and unavoidable problems of a purely naturalistic criticism,”76 it is patently his own dilemma that he alludes to. Kuenen’s establishment of a rigorous scientific method, founded on scientific exegetical principles, would have been immediately irresistible, had they not demanded the abandonment of supernaturalism. And Smith was far from being able to take that step: he had after all set out his argument for the necessity of “guarding” the supernatural within Christianity only a year earlier in “Christianity and the Supernatural” and in the course of doing so had, by implication, severely criticised Kuenen’s position,77 while holding firmly to a belief in the scientific method.

Master and pupil

Hitherto, no one (with the possible exception of Smith’s father) had exerted a stronger theological influence on WRS than his Hebrew teacher and mentor, A.B. Davidson.78 In many ways, that influence was mutual, for Davidson quickly recognised the brilliance of the pupil,79 gave him, as we have seen, the task of tutoring the Junior Hebrew class, and involved him closely in the preparation of his celebrated Hebrew Grammar.80 Following Smith’s move to the Aberdeen Free Church College chair in 1870, Davidson continued to seek his advice and in November, 1871, for instance, we find him respectfully asking for his former pupil’s advice on the classification of certain segholate verbs:

I have always had great trouble with that seghol vowel in a variety of places. No doubt you will have solved the problem.81

In the next few lines, Davidson goes on to shed light, not only on the extent to which Smith had already come under Kuenen’s influence, but on the way in which the young man’s thinking had independently been moving in that direction during his student days:

I don’t know Kuenen on the Hagiographa. I have no doubt he deserves the commendation you bestow on him. He is really very good on the Prophets, and on the Poetical books. His critical principles will not perhaps come much into collision with your own views.82

Davidson’s Old Testament Prophecy well exemplifies its author’s personality and the quality of his lectures. The exposition is gentle yet meticulously thorough and lucid throughout. At the same time, Davidson’s advanced thinking and penetrating observations are often in open conflict with that underlying, self-protecting timorousness83 which was to inhibit him subsequently from coming out openly in Smith’s support during the heresy trial. Both in his letters to Smith and in his lectures, it is evident that Davidson was subject to a chronic anxiety over the possibility of laying himself open to charges of heterodoxy, if not of outright heresy.84 Thus the lectures on prophecy combine acute critical judgment with what is, at times, extraordinary caution and nervousness.

The prophets were indeed messengers of God and “the bearers of the idea of God’s design”85 but:

Particularly, we cannot restrict prophecy, as it used to be restricted, to prediction. The prophets teach great truths, and illustrate their development; they do not foretell contingent events.86

Davidson observes that Kuenen, as an exponent of the “Naturalistic school”, discounts prediction altogether and that even “writers of a wholly opposite school” such as Dr Payne Smith now assign “a limited place” to the predictive activity of the prophets.87 But Davidson himself vacillates throughout his lectures: Old Testament prophecy was certainly a manifestation of the Spirit, just as much as was the Pentecostal phenomenon, of which the prophecy in Joel was an inspired prediction, albeit couched in general terms.88 On the whole, Davidson concludes, somewhat illogically, that both the high ethical tone and the general outcome of such predictions ought to satisfy us as to their validity and veracity.89 That is Davidson at his weakest and least acute. On the other hand, Davidson does cling firmly to the principle that the prophets “speak to their own time” and that:

… in all their statements about the kingdom of God, even when uttering the most spiritual and glorious truth regarding it, what they speak about is the kingdom of God in that form and in those relations in which it existed in their own day.90

He is agonisingly cautious and circumspect, however, on the matter of retrospective interpretation: one ought not, he counsels, be too specific as to the time, the precise nature or the degree of prophetic fulfilment that has taken place. Thus, in relation to the dramatic prophecy of Pentecost (Joel 2:28):

What Joel predicts is that thing which is characteristic of Christianity – the pouring out of God’s Spirit; the question of time is given in the expression “the last days”, the dispensation of which the thing predicted is characteristic. But the prediction may be fulfilled in any event exhibiting this characteristic, whether at the beginning or towards the consummation of the new dispensation, or at any point within its duration, that is, the prediction may be a-fulfilling – may be receiving fulfilment, more or less complete, throughout the Christian dispensation, though it must yet be adequately fulfilled. In other words, what the prophecy contains is not strictly the historical event of Pentecost; it may contain many other historical events, some of which are yet to come.91

Indeed, Davidson’s strength lies in setting out good exegetical principles rather than in applying these himself. He urges his students to use commonsense in their approach; to sift the essential from the inessential; and to avoid strained, artificial allegorical interpretative techniques. Where he fails is in adopting a clear, unambiguous personal stance on prophecy and one may either praise him for leaving his students to make up their own minds or condemn him for sitting on the theological fence throughout his long teaching career. In nurturing Smith without directing his path, Davidson certainly deserves commendation rather than censure, and it is fitting to cite here Davidson’s exposition of the principles of the higher criticism:

Its most powerful instrument is really the progressiveness of the religion of Israel. Consequently the judgment as to the authorship of any passage must depend upon the time at which the ideas found in it became current. All criticism is really an application of common sense by a person provided with the requisite knowledge of facts.92

He proceeds to explain that the method meets all the criteria of an inductive science: it starts without a priori assumptions and proceeds to establish those conclusions which have the greatest probability. The principles by which it operates:

are themselves the fruits of induction. It examines the prophecies, and observes the facts; and its conclusions are those which an examination leads it to consider probable. It eschews the region of abstract principles. Some who practise it have, no doubt, spoken of certain things, such as the projection of the prophet’s views into the minute circumstances of a period a century ahead of him, as “psychological impossibilities”. These statements, however, are aberrations, – though aberrations which, from the love of the human mind for general principles that go further than mere conclusions founded on the registration of facts, it is difficult to avoid; and they are to be paralleled by similar excesses on the part of investigators in physical science. Such things, in both cases, are merely the individual faults of particular men, and are not to be laid to the charge of the science itself.93

No better example than this could be cited of Davidson’s cardinal weakness – in Black and Chrystal’s words, that “curious turn” of his for inopportune qualification. Having, with admirable clarity and succinctness, set out the fundamentals of the inductive process, he then guards himself and others against reaching any undesirable, awkward or theologically offensive conclusions by assuring his auditors that any such findings deriving from an application of the process must be aberrations to be laid to the fault of the individual concerned. Indeed, the passage quoted affords a sufficient explanation of Davidson’s pusillanimity during the Smith trial; for by making a virtue of even-handedness, he secured himself from the duty of reaching a personal conclusion. Earlier in Old Testament Prophecy, Davidson had unconsciously gone to the heart of his own intellectual (and spiritual) problems:

Our mental danger is reaction. When we have emancipated ourselves from one error, we are apt to fall immediately into the error opposed to it.94

Like that amiable epitome of indecision, Sir Roger de Coverley, Davidson charmed his audience but “told them, with the air of a man who would not give his judgment rashly, that much might be said on both sides”.95 Yet, in 1876, when the opening salvoes in Smith’s battle had been fired, Davidson wrote to his academic colleague and former prize pupil:

I have designed to write you for some time, tho’ feeling that you must be bored with communications just now I have always deferred doing it. I suspect you will have to do something positive with regard to your article. I will go so far as to say that I hope you will do something, less for the sake of those who may disagree with your opinions than for the sake of those who whatever they may think of the opinions in themselves are anxious in the interests of freedom not to precipitate a conflict which they fear could not be waged without disastrous results on some side or other. I do not consider myself very well fitted to be a counsellor, but I will say in two sentences what I think you might do, & if it were done I think it would end the matter & I cannot think with any loss but rather with a gain of prestige & influence to you.
There must be no question of retracting any of the critical opinions advanced in y^r article [“Bible”]. They are opinions not lightly expressed nor carelessly thought out, & you ought to stand by them as of such a kind. Some people may doubt them or deny them or repudiate them with any variety of emotion whatever. They may think them groundless, even ridiculous – all that is not the question. Such sentiments regarding them may lay the proper ground for a critical controversy – if anyone cares to enter upon such an undertaking… If there is any question of retraction of your positive teaching regarding the Old Test. then of course the campaign is opened – what you teach may be right or wrong – if any one considers it wrong let him refute it. What has to be defended is your liberty to teach what you have taught.96

Davidson’s appeal for liberty of thought is impassioned and his insistence that Smith should retract nothing could hardly be construed as other than the most wholehearted and unconditional assurance of support from his old teacher; yet Davidson’s characteristic hesitancy (not to mention his procrastination) is already evident and his plainly agitated wavering grows steadily more prominent as the letter proceeds:

But what really alarms people I find is less what you teach positively than what you omit to state at all or what your positive teaching aims to carry with it as necessary conclusions. They say here is an Article on the “Bible” which treats the Bible as a religious book no doubt but not as differing – except that it may be somewhat truer – from the religious books of other nations. As an article on the Bible it is defective in ignoring essential characteristics of “the Bible” & yet for all that appears it exhausts the author’s idea of the Bible… perhaps neither the circumstances of its publication nor the extreme generality of the title “the Bible” were sufficiently considered…

By this stage, Davidson has now argued himself into the opposite camp – and he suggests that Smith should reassure his opponents that his intention had simply been to give “an account of the historical rise of the Biblical Books as far as the Hebrew authors were concerned”. If that were done, it would, Davidson believed, prove “all that is needful to allay the uneasiness that prevails”. His “two sentences” of advice have now indeed extended to seven pages (excluding a postscript apologising for the less than perfect grammar); and, far from counselling steadfastness and tenacity, Davidson concludes by recommending what is to be, in effect, a strategic and apologetic withdrawal, only slightly less bizarre than Principal Rainy’s proposed letter of apology, drafted with a view to securing Smith’s compliant signature97:

At present I think a very little explanation – nothing else, or if anything else, expression of regret that your omission to give equal prominence to all parts of your conception of “the Bible” should have led to any misapprehension & uneasiness – would be eagerly accepted… .
It would be a great gain to be able to devote ourselves to our quiet pursuit of studies without fearing the rising of a tempest w^h might rage for a life time.

No one need doubt Davidson’s transparent sincerity in this matter; but the letter stands as a somewhat sad commentary upon the regrettable tergiversation of an otherwise fine and progressive scholar. Undoubtedly it betrays also that ever-present threat of internecine condemnation which pervaded Free and Established churches alike throughout the nineteenth century and which so inhibited the pursuit of free enquiry. Only a rare spirit such as Robertson Smith, imbued with Arnold’s Hebraic fervour, could dare stake everything for his ideals.