in a literal sense, God was the author of the whole book, the obvious differences among the writings had been obscured.  Men forgot the evolution through which the writings had passed.  The same thing had happened for the Old Testament in the Jewish synagogues and for the rabbis before the Christian movement.  When the Christians took over the Old Testament they took it over in this sense.  It was a closed book wherein all appreciation of the long road which the religion of Israel had traversed in its evolution had been lost.  The relation of the old covenant to the new was obscured.  The Old Testament became a Christian book.  Not merely were the Christian facts prophesied in the Old Testament, but its doctrines also were implied.  Almost down to modern times texts have been drawn indifferently from either Testament to prove doctrine and sustain theology.  Moses and Jesus, prophets and Paul, are cited to support an argument, without any sense of difference.  What we have said is hardly more true of Augustine or Anselm than of the classic Puritan divines.  This was the state of things which the critics faced.

The Old Testament critical movement is a parallel at all points of the one which we have described in reference to the New.  Of course, elder scholars, even Spinoza, had raised the question as to the Mosaic authorship of certain portions of the Pentateuch.  Roman Catholic scholars in the seventeenth century, for whom the stringent theory of inspiration had less significance than for Protestants, had set forth views which showed an awakening to the real condition.  Yet, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, no one would have forecast a revolution in opinion which would recognise the legendary quality of considerable portions of the Pentateuch and historical books, which would leave but little that is of undisputed Mosaic authorship, which would place the prophets before the law, which would concede the growth of the Jewish canon, which would perceive the relation of Judaism to the religions of the other Semite peoples and would seek to establish the true relation of Judaism to Christianity.

In the year 1835, the same year in which Strauss’ Leben Jesu saw the light, Wilhelm Vatke published his Religion des Alten Testaments.  Vatke was born in 1806, began to teach in Berlin in 1830, was professor extraordinarius there in 1837 and died in 1882, not yet holding a full professorship.  His book was obscurely written and scholastic.  Public attention was largely occupied by the conflict which Strauss’ work had caused.  Reuss in Strassburg was working on the same lines, but published the main body of his results much later.

The truth for which these scholars and others like them argued, worked its way slowly by force of its own merit.  Perhaps it was due to this fact that the development of Old Testament critical views was subject to a fluctuation less marked than that which characterised the case of the New Testament.  It is not necessary to describe the earlier stages of the discussion in Vatke’s own terms.  To his honour be it said that the views which he thus early enunciated were in no small degree identical with those which were in masterful fashion substantiated in Holland by Kuenen about 1870, in Germany by Wellhausen after 1878, and made known to English readers by Robertson Smith In 1881.