Old Testament and New Testament

“ Besides, prophecies fulfilled, seem the most proper of all arguments to evince the truth of a new revelation which is designed to be universally promulgated to men. For a man who has the Old Testament put into his hands, which contain prophecies, and the New Testament afterward, which is said to contain their completions, and is once satisfied, as he may be with the greatest ease, that the Old Testament existed before the New, may have a complete, internal, divine, demonstration of the truth of Christianity, without long, and laborious enquiries. ”

“ Thus I finished the Old Testament, considerably shaken in faith; but as the Old Testament belonged to a long past dispensation, I considered it of little value anyway, and approached the study of the New with the hope that all difficulties would be removed and all doubts made clear. If the New Testament was truly inspired of God and infallibly true, what difference did it make if the Old was doubtful and uncertain? ”

“ PREFACE During the past generation the Old Testament has commanded equally with the New the enthusiastic and devoted study of the great body of biblical scholars throughout the world. Two out of every three graduate students in our universities who specialize in the general field of biblical literature choose the Old as the special centre of their work. At the same time the tendency of the rank and file of the Christian church within the past decade has undoubtedly been to neglect the older Testament. ”

“ Of course no reasonable man can doubt the importance of studying the early Christian writers, as illustrating not only the history of their own times, but the New Testament also. For the Old Testament, indeed, they do little or nothing, and for the New they are of much less assistance than might have been expected ”

“ A theory is already propounded, both in private and in a naïve simple way in sermons, that the {229} Old Testament is of no particular moment, all that we need being the New Testament, which has been defended by our valiant apologists and expounded by our admirable interpreters. ”

“ The attempt which is often made to show that the New Testament writers have established, by their testimony, the Old Testament canon, as containing just those books which are in our Old Testament, and no more, is a most unwarrantable distortion of the facts. ”

“ The present age is supremely interested in origins. Not until we have traced the genesis and earliest unfolding of an institution or an idea or a literature do we feel that we really understand and appreciate it. Familiarity with that which is noble breeds not contempt but reverence, and intelligent devotion. Acquaintance with the origin and history of a book is essential to its true interpretation. Therefore it is fortunate that modern discovery and research have thrown so much light upon the origin of both the Old and the New Testaments. ”

“ By an overwhelming amount of evidence, the author proves that that which is miraculous, found in the New Testament, cannot be of Christian origin, nor can anything of the same kind found in the Old Testament be of Hebrew origin, the conclusion being irresistible, that if the Christian Bibles are of Divine origin, so must also be all the other and older books which contain these parallels. ”

“ More and more, too, the new scholarship has developed the conception of the New Testament as, like the Old, the growth of literature in obedience to law—a conception which in al probability will give it its strongest hold on the coming centuries. ”

“ Nay, if it be not true, the Old Testament must be false, and all the glorious promises which shine so brightly in it, and the performance of which was limited within certain periods of time, must be a great delusion, which we are sure they are not, and therefore must embrace the New Testament to support the reputation of the Old. ”

“ He created the human body and is the author of sin, which springs from matter and not from the spirit. The Old Testament must be either partly or entirely ascribed to him; whereas the New Testament is the revelation of the beneficent God. ”

“ Such an accusation will, easily, be rejected by any one who considers the uniformity existing between the versions of the Old and New Testament, whether written in Hebrew, Greek, Latin, or any other language, either ancient or modern. Had Christians tampered with the Scriptures, how could the versions of the Bible be uniform? ”

“ It reviews Old Testament history, disclosing the stream of God's redeeming purposes flowing down through the older times. It reviews New Testament history, disclosing the broadening and deepening of that purpose for us men and for mankind in our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ and his Church. ”