Last time I posted about some work I was doing on Washington Gladden, who was a very significant leader in American Protestantism around 1900, and who was also a sharp writer. I will illustrate that from a brilliant (and funny) piece he wrote to illustrate the ideas of Biblical Higher Criticism. His work is a shining example to any later would-be popularizer of weighty academic matters.
In 1891, Gladden published Who Wrote the Bible?, which was intended as a user-friendly guide to recent scholarship. He was pretty conservative on many key issues, but he definitely knew that some of the Biblical books were not written by the figures credited in traditional Christian thought, and usually, they were much later than was claimed.
One of his examples was the Book of Daniel, which is credited to a sage of the sixth century BC, but large portions of the book can be dated pretty clearly to the 160sBC. Gladden summarizes the case:
Words appear in this writing which almost certainly fix it at a later date than the Babylonian period. There are certainly nine undoubted Persian words in this book; there are no Persian words in Ezekiel, who lived at the time when Daniel is placed at the Babylonian court, nor in Haggai, Zechariah, or Malachi. There are several Greek words, names of musical instruments, and it is almost certain that no Greek words were in use in Babylonia at that early day. This philological argument may seem very dubious and far-fetched, but it is really one of the most conclusive tests of the date of a document. There is no witness so competent as the written word.
This might all sound technical, but Gladden then uses a wonderful example to make his point for a lay audience:
Let me give you a homely illustration. Suppose you find in some late history of the United States a quoted letter said to have been written by President Zachary Taylor, who died in 1850, respecting a certain political contest. The letter contains the following paragraph:–
“On receiving this intelligence, I called up the Secretary of State by telephone, and asked him how he explained the defeat. He told me that, in his opinion, boodle [ie corrupt money] was at the bottom of it. I determined to make an investigation, and after wiring to the member of Congress in that district, I ordered my servant to engage me a section in a Pullman car, and started the same night for the scene of the contest.”
Now of course you know that this paragraph could not have been written by President Taylor, nor during the period of his administration. The telephone was not then in existence; there were no Pullman cars; the words “boodle” and “wire,” in the sense here used, had never been heard. In precisely the same way the trained philologist can often determine with great certainty the date of a writing. He knows the biography of words or word-forms; and he may know that some of the words or the word-forms contained in a certain writing were not yet in the language at the date when it is said to have been written. It is by evidence of this nature that the critics fix the date of the Book of Daniel at a period long after the close of the Babylonian empire.
What a great example. To update it, we might imagine someone thinking of buying a letter purporting to be written by Elvis Presley in 1975, where he reports having heard some things about QAnon, that he had tried Googling to find out more, that he had talked to someone about it on his iPhone, and incidentally, that he had no time for all these Marvel superhero films that were taking up all the screens in the movie theaters right now. The document is not genuine!
Or to use another example I cherish, Woody Allen wrote a great essay on “The Scrolls” that had emerged from clay jars in the desert – no, not those Scrolls, the other ones. But as Allen records, “The authenticity of the scrolls is currently in great doubt, particularly since the word Oldsmobile appears several times in the text.”
The example makes Gladden’s point perfectly.
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