Sword & Trowel 2020: Issue 1
Left: William Robertson Smith, right: Andrew Bruce Davidson, both by Samuel Alexander Walker, 1874.
© National Portrait Gallery, London
he moved to Edinburgh to study theology there, at the Free Church College in 1866. At the Free Church College, Smith fell under the influence of its Old Testament Profes- sor, Andrew Bruce Davidson, the second of the human faces in our drama. Davidson, another son of Aber- deenshire, had begun his career in the Free Church as the assistant to the brilliant, endearingly eccentric, and thoroughly orthodox Rabbi Duncan, teaching Hebrew alongside Duncan in Edinburgh’s Free Church College from 1858. When Duncan retired in 1863, Davidson succeeded him as Old Testament Professor in the College. The issue with Davidson was that, perhaps through Rabbi Duncan’s restraining hand being re- moved, he became very sympathetic to the new so-called Higher Critical theories of the Bible that were current in many, if not all, German universi- ties.
Higher Criticism was the view of the Bible which had been develop- ing since the 18th century within European Protestantism. It basically consisted in treating the Bible just like any other ancient writing, and applying the same critical historical methods in assessing the Bible’s com- position, authorship, and reliability, such as a scholar would use in study- ing and assessing any document from
the ancient world, say Homer’s Iliad. Maybe the most famous single the- sis of Higher Criticism (although not all Higher Critics in the 19th century necessarily accepted the whole of it) was that the Pentateuch, the Torah, the first five books of the Old Testa- ment, were not in any meaningful sense written by Moses. Instead, the Pentateuch is a much later compila- tion of four quite separate documents called J, E, D, and P, which were ed- ited together by a person or persons unknown, six or eight hundred years after the time of Moses. The names J, E, D, and P, were
so given from the alleged four docu- ments that were supposedly woven together. J was the Jahwist document, in which God was called Jahweh or Yahweh, the Lord; E was the Elohist document, in which God was called Elohim, or simply God; D was essen- tially the book of Deuteronomy; and P was the Priestly document, character- ised by an exaltation of the Aaronic priesthood, and the view that no sacrifice was ever instituted by God prior to the covenant made at Mount Sinai. We might say that when Higher
From Divine Revelation to Human Reason page 23
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