TRUTH AND FALSEHOOD 779 corrupt the world.' It would go too far to invert the adage of Shakespeare's King Henry, and to declare: 'There is a soul of evil in things good'; but it is true, and it seems to be one of the strange methods by which God makes us think and move forward, that there lurks in good a frequent element or germ of evil. Yet even this apparently mournful fact God uses for his own great purpose in the spiritual education of the human race. By means of it he urges us on, by the working of it he leads us forward. To my mind, and to the mind of most Jews, this mixture of truth and falsehood is curiously illustrated by the religious teaching of the New Testament.' There is much in that book which is great and noble, much which is sublime and tender, much which is good and true. Of this 'much,' the greater part consists in a fresh presentment of some of the best and highest teaching in the Old Testament,' in a vivid reformulation of it, in an admirable picking and choosing, an excellent bringing together. But a part consists in a further development, or in a clearer and more emphatic expression of certain truths which previously were only implicit or not fully drawn out. Thus of its excellence part may in this sense be called old, and part may in this sense be called new. But in close and curious combination with what is good there are some things which are erroneous and harmful, and there are others which are liable to dangerous perversion, or which hold within them the germs of evil and have borne evil fruit. Among the good and true elements of the New Testament' may be mentioned important and suggestive modifications of the doctrine of retribution and of the relation of suffering to sin, a fresh and noble restatement of the old prophetic doctrine, 'I desire love and not sacrifice,' a passionate enthusiasm for the moral and religious regeneration of the outcast and the sinner, fine teaching about the nature and power of love and the duty of forgiveness, fresh contributions to the conception of self-sacrifice, suffering, and religious inwardness, suggestive (if somewhat dangerous) teaching on the subject of the divine 'immanence' and of the divine' in man, a striking presentment of the true and intimate relation of the human child to the divine Father, and, last not least, a clear and emphatic recognition that this divine fatherhood extends equally to the Gentile and the Jew. It should be noted that parallels to many of these excellent teachings are also to be found in the Rabbinical writings. It was indeed perfectly natural that the same religious ideas and developments should occur independently to several Jewish minds. Thus, for example, the deep reply which, according to the Talmud, was made by the 'wise men of the south' to the king of Macedon is the precise equivalent of one of the most notable sayings attributed to Jesus of Nazareth. (Alexander said to them, "What should a man do that he may live ?" They said, "Let him kill himself." "And what should a man do that he may die?" They said, "Let him seek to keep himself alive."") Among the elements of the New Testament' to which Jewish critics (as it seems to me most rightly) take strong exception there may be mentioned the serious weakening of that fundamental doctrine of Judaism which declares the unity of God, the exaltation of a man into partnership with Deity, the strange conception of the absolute incarnation of God in human form, the putting of an intermediary, half God and half man, or wholly man and wholly God, between the human child and the divine Father, certain teachings about atonement, demoniacal possession' and punishment after death, and a one-sided conception of 'faith' containing within it the seeds of persecution and fanaticism, and sometimes tending to the severance of morality from religion. For good and for evil -and the two have often been strangely mixed up and interwoven together-the New Testament has been of enormous influence in the moral and religious history of the world. For that reason alone all Jews who, like other civilized persons, want to know about that history must read the New Testament, and read it, if they can, with impartial minds, ready to receive the good and to reject the evil. But it cannot be admitted into a Jewish Bible for Home Reading. Not only that the critical study of it is unsuited for the young. There is more than this involved. For if it be said that in the Hebrew Bible too we have found higher and lower teaching, doctrine to reject as well as doctrine to receive, this argument would not suffice for the inclusion of the New Testament into the Bible of the Jews. It is one thing to observe, with growing thought and developed conceptions of religion and morality, deficiencies and unevennesses in the sacred scriptures which have been your community's sacred scriptures for 2,000 years; it is quite another thing to add on to those scriptures other writings in which evils and errors, some of which I have mentioned above, are known and recognized to exist. Moreover, the grave errors which we Jews think that we can detect in the New Testament are very closely connected with, even if they do not actually constitute, its most essential teachings. These errors are in fact among the very points which the great mass of Christians regard as its most peculiar characteristics and its most vital truths. Some of them, at any rate, seem to us to contradict the teaching of the Old Testament just where that teaching is at its truest, its purest and its best. For these reasons, THE HEBREW SCRIPTURES AND NOBLE LIVING 781 even if there were no others, the Bible of the Jews must remain limited to the books which now compose it. Later on, if I happen to live, I may be able to issue an edition of the New Testament for Jewish readers, in which I shall try to distinguish between the good and the evil, seeking to render full justice to what is great and new, while pointing out at the same time that which seems to me either directly false or liable to dangerous perversion. 6 We are not limited for our moral and religious edification,' the building up of our moral and religious character, to the Biblical books. We may find truth, consolation and enlightenment wherever we can. Put from the Hebrew Scriptures we still can gather those essential doctrines by which the purest faith in the Divine can be quickened and sustained, and by which the noblest life among and for our fellow-men can be lived in the realized presence of God. INDEXES THE first index follows the pages of the present volume, and gives the The second index follows the books and chapters of the Bible and the lxiii. 17-19; lxiv. 1-8. 7. lxiv. 9-12. 18. Song of Songs viii. 6, 7. 24. Proverbs x. 19-21, 31; xii. 18, 25. - xviii. 13, 21; XX. 15; xxi. 26. -x. 18; xi. 13; xvi. 28; xvii. 28. - PAGE 29. Proverbs xxiv. 34; xxvi. 13– 30. - 31. - -xi. 24, 25, 26, 28; xiii. 23; 35. 36. 37. |