1964 Awake! - Theocratic Collector.com

JESUS CHRIST, in prayer to his Father
on the night of his betrayal, said, among
other things. "Your word is truth." Therefore
all who would be his followers must,
to be consistent, accept God's Word, the
Bible, as truth.-John 17:17.
But not so, says the modernist clergyman.
Although claiming to be a Christian,
he denies the inspiration of the Bible. And
he considers the Bible to be the work not
only of imperfect men hut of dishonest men
at that. Thus a certain clergyman of the
Church of Scotland claims to have scientific
evidence that, of all the letters credited
to the apostle Paul, only Romans, First
and Second Corinthians, Galatians and perhaps
Philemon were actually written by
Paul and that the rest were written by
several others.
But how could this be if God's "word
is truth"? Of the fourteen letters credited
to Paul thirteen mention Paul as the writer
from one to three times. Are we to conclude
that all this logical Scriptural exposition,
all this fine admonition is the
work of forgers, a number of them at that,
and yet writing so much alike? Every time
Paul's name is mentioned in these letters
it represents a lie if Paul did not write
them.
More than that, there are ever so many
personal references in these letters, as
when Paul refers to his prison bonds and
his being acquainted with Timothy's mother
and grandmother. If Paul did not write
MAY 8, 1964
these letters, then all such references are
lies. And what about his use of the personal
pronoun? In the letter to the Philippians
alone he uses "I" more than sixty
times. If he ,did not write that letter, then
everyone of those sixty "I's" represents a
lie.
On what basis does this clergyman rest
his radical conclusions? To quote him:
"The results are convincing. The work is
based on the principle that authors have
certain habits of style deeply ingrained. For
the present study we have considered such
things as the space between the uses of the
word 'and,' r('pctitive uses of the word, sentences
beginning with the word and so on."
By checking some dozen classical Greek
writers, such as Aristotle, Plato and Socrates,
and finding that each one of these
writers has his o\vn way of using this
Greek conjunction kal, he evolved a hypothesis
that he tried out on the writings of
Paul. In doing this work he depended upon
an electrical computer.-Toronto, Canada,
Globe and Mail, February 26, 1963.
What about this hypothesis? Is it sound?
Must we conclude, on the basis of his style,
that the nine or ten letters following Galatians
in our Bibles were not written by
Paul? Does the use of the very common
Greek word kal, which may be translated
not only "and" but "also," "even," and so
forth, dictate this? No, and that for very
compelling reasons. The hypothesis is entirely
unsound, for it makes comparisons
between things that are not comparable.
There is no question about the classical
Greek writers, whose \vorks he used to
develop his theory, having certain definite
individual styles. For one thing, they
wrote a great deal. They were concerned
with style, with producing fine literature,
with making a name for themselves as
writers and so took time to stamp their individuality
upon their works.
How different from all these was the
apostle Paul! In the first place, he was not
27