History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom Part 79

During the latter half of the nineteenth century much the same pressure has continued in Catholic Germany. Strong scholars have very generally been drawn into the position of "apologists" or "reconcilers," and, when found intractable, they have been driven out of the Church.

The same general policy had been evident in France and Italy, but toward the last decade of the century it was seen by the more clear-sighted supporters of the older Church in those countries that the multifarious "refutations" and explosive attacks upon Renan and his teachings had accomplished nothing; that even special services of atonement for his sin, like the famous "Triduo" at Florence, only drew a few women, and provoked ridicule among the public at large; that throwing him out of his professorship and calumniating him had but increased his influence; and that his brilliant intuitions, added to the careful researches of German and English scholars, had brought the thinking world beyond the reach of the old methods of hiding troublesome truths and crushing persistent truth-tellers.

Therefore it was that about 1890 a body of earnest Roman Catholic scholars began very cautiously to examine and explain the biblical text in the light of those results of the newer research which could no longer be gainsaid.

Among these men were, in Italy, Canon Bartolo, Canon Berta, and Father Savi, and in France Monseigneur d'Hulst, the Abbe Loisy, professor at the Roman Catholic University at Paris, and, most eminent of all, Professor Lenormant, of the French Inst.i.tute, whose researches into biblical and other ancient history and literature had won him distinction throughout the world. These men, while standing up manfully for the Church, were obliged to allow that some of the conclusions of modern biblical criticism were well founded. The result came rapidly.

The treatise of Bartolo and the great work of Lenormant were placed on the Index; Canon Berta was overwhelmed with reproaches and virtually silenced; the Abbe Loisy was first deprived of his professorship, and then ignominiously expelled from the university; Monseigneur d'Hulst was summoned to Rome, and has since kept silence.(489)

(489) For the frustration of attempts to admit light into scriptural studies in Roman Catholic Germany, see Bleek, Old Testament, London, 1882, vol. i, pp. 19, 20. For the general statement regarding recent suppression of modern biblical study in France and Italy, see an article by a Roman Catholic author in the Contemporary Review, September, 1894, p. 365. For the papal condemnations of Lenormant and Bartolo, see the Index Librorum Prohibitorum Sanctissimi Domini Nostri, Leonis XIII, P.M., etc., Rome, 1891; Appendices, July, 1890, and May, 1891. The ghastly part of the record, as stated in this edition of the Index, is that both these great scholars were forced to abjure their "errors" and to acquiesce in the condemnation--Lenorment doing this on his deathbed.

The matter was evidently thought serious in the higher regions of the Church, for in November, 1893, appeared an encyclical letter by the reigning Pope, Leo XIII, on The Study of Sacred Scripture.

Much was expected from it, for, since Benedict XIV in the last century, there had sat on the papal throne no Pope intellectually so competent to discuss the whole subject. While, then, those devoted to the older beliefs trusted that the papal thunderbolts would crush the whole brood of biblical critics, votaries of the newer thought ventured to hope that the encyclical might, in the language of one of them, prove "a stupendous bridge spanning the broad abyss that now divides alleged orthodoxy from established science."(490)

(490) For this statement, see an article in the Contemporary Review, April, 1894, p. 576.

Both these expectations were disappointed; and yet, on the whole, it is a question whether the world at large may not congratulate itself upon this papal utterance. The doc.u.ment, if not apostolic, won credit as "statesmanlike." It took pains, of course, to insist that there can be no error of any sort in the sacred books; it even defended those parts which Protestants count apocryphal as thoroughly as the remainder of Scripture, and declared that the book of Tobit was not compiled of man, but written by G.o.d. His Holiness naturally condemned the higher criticism, but he dwelt at the same time on the necessity of the most thorough study of the sacred Scriptures, and especially on the importance of adjusting scriptural statements to scientific facts. This utterance was admirably oracular, being susceptible of cogent quotation by both sides: nothing could be in better form from an orthodox point of view; but, with that statesmanlike forecast which the present Pope has shown more than once in steering the bark of St. Peter over the troubled waves of the nineteenth century, he so far abstained from condemning any of the greater results of modern critical study that the main English defender of the encyclical, the Jesuit Father Clarke, did not hesitate publicly to admit a mult.i.tude of such results--results, indeed, which would shock not only Italian and Spanish Catholics, but many English and American Protestants. According to this interpreter, the Pope had no thought of denying the variety of doc.u.ments in the Pentateuch, or the plurality of sources of the books of Samuel, or the twofold authorship of Isaiah, or that all after the ninth verse of the last chapter of St.

Mark's Gospel is spurious; and, as regards the whole encyclical, the distinguished Jesuit dwelt significantly on the power of the papacy at any time to define out of existence any previous decisions which may be found inconvenient. More than that, Father Clarke himself, while standing as the champion of the most thorough orthodoxy, acknowledged that, in the Old Testament, "numbers must be expected to be used Orientally," and that "all these seventies and forties, as, for example, when Absalom is said to have rebelled against David for forty years, can not possibly be meant numerically"; and, what must have given a fearful shock to some Protestant believers in plenary inspiration, he, while advocating it as a dutiful Son of the Church, wove over it an exquisite web with the declaration that "there is a human element in the Bible pre-calculated for by the Divine."(491)

(491) For these admissions of Father Clarke, see his article The Papal Encyclical on the Bible, in the Contemporary Review for July, 1894.

Considering the difficulties in the case, the world has reason to be grateful to Pope Leo and Father Clarke for these utterances, which perhaps, after all, may prove a better bridge between the old and the new than could have been framed by engineers more learned but less astute. Evidently Pope Leo XIII is neither a Paul V nor an Urban VIII, and is too wise to bring the Church into a position from which it can only be extricated by such ludicrous subterfuges as those by which it was dragged out of the Galileo scandal, or by such a tortuous policy as that by which it writhed out of the old doctrine regarding the taking of interest for money.

In spite, then, of the attempted crushing out of Bartolo and Berta and Savi and Lenormant and Loisy, during this very epoch in which the Pope issued this encyclical, there is every reason to hope that the path has been paved over which the Church may gracefully recede from the old system of interpretation and quietly accept and appropriate the main results of the higher criticism. Certainly she has never had a better opportunity to play at the game of "beggar my neighbour" and to drive the older Protestant orthodoxy into bankruptcy.

In America the same struggle between the old ideas and the new went on.

In the middle years of the century the first adequate effort in behalf of the newer conception of the sacred books was made by Theodore Parker at Boston. A thinker brave and of the widest range,--a scholar indefatigable and of the deepest sympathies with humanity,--a man called by one of the most eminent scholars in the English Church "a religious t.i.tan," and by a distinguished French theologian "a prophet," he had struggled on from the divinity school until at that time he was one of the foremost biblical scholars, and preacher to the largest regular congregation on the American continent. The great hall in Boston could seat four thousand people, and at his regular discourses every part of it was filled. In addition to his pastoral work he wielded a vast influence as a platform speaker, especially in opposition to the extension of slavery into the Territories of the United States, and as a lecturer on a wide range of vital topics; and among those whom he most profoundly influenced, both politically and religiously, was Abraham Lincoln. During each year at that period he was heard discussing the most important religious and political questions in all the greater Northern cities; but his most lasting work was in throwing light upon our sacred Scriptures, and in this he was one of the forerunners of the movement now going on not only in the United States but throughout Christendom. Even before he was fairly out of college his translation of De Wette's Introduction to the Old Testament made an impression on many thoughtful men; his sermon in 1841 on The Transient and Permanent in Christianity marked the beginning of his great individual career; his speeches, his lectures, and especially his Discourse on Matters pertaining to Religion, greatly extended his influence. His was a deeply devotional nature, and his public prayers exercised by their touching beauty a very strong religious influence upon his audiences. He had his reward. Beautiful and n.o.ble as were his life and his life-work, he was widely abhorred. On one occasion of public worship in one of the more orthodox churches, news having been received that he was dangerously ill, a prayer was openly made by one of the zealous brethren present that this arch-enemy might be removed from earth. He was even driven out from the Unitarian body. But he was none the less steadfast and bold, and the great ma.s.s of men and women who thronged his audience room at Boston and his lecture rooms in other cities spread his ideas. His fate was pathetic. Full of faith and hope, but broken prematurely by his labours, he retired to Italy, and died there at the darkest period in the history of the United States--when slavery in the state and the older orthodoxy in the Church seemed absolutely and forever triumphant.

The death of Moses within sight of the promised land seems the only parallel to the death of Parker less than six months before the publication of Essays and Reviews and the election of Abraham Lincoln to the presidency, of the United States.(492)

(492) For the appellation "religious t.i.tan" applied to Theodore Parker, see a letter of Jowett, Master of Balliol, to Frances Power Cobbe, in her Autobiography, vol. 1, p. 357, and for Reville's statement, ibid., p. 9. For a pathetic account of Parker's last hours at Florence, ibid., vol. i, pp. 10, 11. As to the influence of Theodore Parker on Lincoln, see Rhodes's History of the United States, as above, vol. ii, p. 312.

For the statement regarding Parker's audiences and his power over them, the present writer trusts to his own memory.

But here it must be noted that Parker's effort was powerfully aided by the conscientious utterances of some of his foremost opponents. Nothing during the American struggle against the slave system did more to wean religious and G.o.d-fearing men and women from the old interpretation of Scripture than the use of it to justify slavery. Typical among examples of this use were the arguments of Hopkins, Bishop of Vermont, a man whose n.o.ble character and beautiful culture gave him very wide influence in all branches of the American Protestant Church. While avowing his personal dislike to slavery, he demonstrated that the Bible sanctioned it. Other theologians, Catholic and Protestant, took the same ground; and then came that tremendous rejoinder which echoed from heart to heart throughout the Northern States: "The Bible sanctions slavery? So much the worse for the Bible." Then was fulfilled that old saying of Bishop Ulrich of Augsburg: "Press not the b.r.e.a.s.t.s of Holy Writ too hard, lest they yield blood rather than milk."(493)

(493) There is a curious reference to Bishop Hopkins's ideas on slavery in Archbishop Tait's Life and Letters. For a succinct statement of the biblical proslavery argument referred to, see Rhodes, as above, vol. i, pp. 370 et seq.

Yet throughout Christendom a change in the mode of interpreting Scripture, though absolutely necessary if its proper authority was to be maintained, still seemed almost hopeless. Even after the foremost scholars had taken ground in favour of it, and the most conservative of those whose opinions were ent.i.tled to weight had made concessions showing the old ground to be untenable, there was fanatical opposition to any change. The Syllabus of Errors put forth by Pius IX in 1864, as well as certain other doc.u.ments issued from the Vatican, had increased the difficulties of this needed transition; and, while the more able-minded Roman Catholic scholars skilfully explained away the obstacles thus created, others published works insisting upon the most extreme views as to the verbal inspiration of the sacred books. In the Church of England various influential men took the same view. Dr.

Baylee, Princ.i.p.al of St. Aidan's College, declared that in Scripture "every scientific statement is infallibly accurate; all its histories and narrations of every kind are without any inaccuracy. Its words and phrases have a grammatical and philological accuracy, such as is possessed by no human composition." In 1861 Dean Burgon preached in Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford, as follows: "No, sirs, the Bible is the very utterance of the Eternal: as much G.o.d's own word as if high heaven were open and we heard G.o.d speaking to us with human voice. Every book is inspired alike, and is inspired entirely. Inspiration is not a difference of degree, but of kind. The Bible is filled to overflowing with the Holy Spirit of G.o.d; the books of it and the words of it and the very letters of it."

In 1865 Canon MacNeile declared in Exeter Hall that "we must either receive the verbal inspiration of the Old Testament or deny the veracity, the insight, the integrity of our Lord Jesus Christ as a teacher of divine truth."

As late as 1889 one of the two most eloquent pulpit orators in the Church of England, Canon Liddon, preaching at St. Paul's Cathedral, used in his fervour the same dangerous argument: that the authority of Christ himself, and therefore of Christianity, must rest on the old view of the Old Testament; that, since the founder of Christianity, in divinely recorded utterances, alluded to the transformation of Lot's wife into a pillar of salt, to Noah's ark and the Flood, and to the sojourn of Jonah in the whale, the biblical account of these must be accepted as historical, or that Christianity must be given up altogether.

In the light of what was rapidly becoming known regarding the Chaldean and other sources of the accounts given in Genesis, no argument could be more fraught with peril to the interest which the gifted preacher sought to serve.

In France and Germany many similar utterances in opposition to the newer biblical studies were heard; and from America, especially from the college at Princeton, came resounding echoes. As an example of many may be quoted the statement by the eminent Dr. Hodge that the books of Scripture "are, one and all, in thought and verbal expression, in substance, and in form, wholly the work of G.o.d, conveying with absolute accuracy and divine authority all that G.o.d meant to convey without human additions and admixtures"; and that "infallibility and authority attach as much to the verbal expression in which the revelation is made as to the matter of the revelation itself."

But the newer thought moved steadily on. As already in Protestant Europe, so now in the Protestant churches of America, it took strong hold on the foremost minds in many of the churches known as orthodox: Toy, Briggs, Francis Brown, Evans, Preserved Smith, Moore, Haupt, Harper, Peters, and Bacon developed it, and, though most of them were opposed bitterly by synods, councils, and other authorities of their respective churches, they were manfully supported by the more intellectual clergy and laity. The greater universities of the country ranged themselves on the side of these men; persecution but intrenched them more firmly in the hearts of all intelligent well-wishers of Christianity. The triumphs won by their opponents in a.s.semblies, synods, conventions, and conferences were really victories for the nominally defeated, since they revealed to the world the fact that in each of these bodies the strong and fruitful thought of the Church, the thought which alone can have any hold on the future, was with the new race of thinkers; no theological triumphs more surely fatal to the victors have been won since the Vatican defeated Copernicus and Galileo.

And here reference must be made to a series of events which, in the second half of the nineteenth century, have contributed most powerful aid to the new school of biblical research.

V. VICTORY OF THE SCIENTIFIC AND LITERARY METHODS.

While this struggle for the new truth was going on in various fields, aid appeared from a quarter whence it was least expected.

The great discoveries by Botta and Layard in a.s.syria were supplemented by the researches of Rawlinson, George Smith, Oppert, Sayce, Sarzec, Pinches, and others, and thus it was revealed more clearly than ever before that as far back as the time a.s.signed in Genesis to the creation a great civilization was flourishing in Mesopotamia; that long ages, probably two thousand years, before the scriptural date a.s.signed to the migration of Abraham from Ur of the Chaldees, this Chaldean civilization had bloomed forth in art, science, and literature; that the ancient inscriptions recovered from the sites of this and kindred civilizations presented the Hebrew sacred myths and legends in earlier forms--forms long antedating those given in the Hebrew Scriptures; and that the accounts of the Creation, the Tree of Life in Eden, the inst.i.tution and even the name of the Sabbath, the Deluge, the Tower of Babel, and much else in the Pentateuch, were simply an evolution out of earlier Chaldean myths and legends. So perfect was the proof of this that the most eminent scholars in the foremost seats of Christian learning were obliged to acknowledge it.(494)

(494) As to the revelations of the vast antiquity of Chaldean civilization, and especially regarding the Nabonidos inscription, see Records of the Past, vol. i, new series, first article, and especially pp. 5, 6, where a translation of that inscription is given; also Hommel, Geschichte Babyloniens und a.s.syriens, introduction, in which, on page 12, an engraving of the Sargon cylinder is given; also, on the general subject, especially pp. 116 et seq., 309 et seq.; also Meyer, Geschichte des Alterthums, pp. 161-163; also Maspero and Sayce, Dawn of Civilization, p. 555 and note.

For the earlier Chaldean forms of the Hebrew Creation accounts, Tree of Life in Eden, Hebrew Sabbath, both the inst.i.tution and the name, and various other points of similar interest, see George Smith, Chaldean Account of Genesis, throughout the work, especially p. 308 and chaps.

xvi, xvii; also Jensen, Die Kosmologie der Babylonier; also Schrader, The Cuneiform Inscriptions and the Old Testament; also Lenormant, Origines de l'Histoire; also Sayce, The a.s.syrian Story of Creation, in Records of the Past, new series, vol. i. For a general statement as to earlier sources of much in the Hebrew sacred origins, see Huxley, Essays on Controverted Questions, English edition, p. 525.

The more general conclusions which were thus given to biblical criticism were all the more impressive from the fact that they had been revealed by various groups of earnest Christian scholars working on different lines, by different methods, and in various parts of the world. Very honourable was the full and frank testimony to these results given in 1885 by the Rev. Francis Brown, a professor in the Presbyterian Theological Seminary at New York. In his admirable though brief book on a.s.syriology, starting with the declaration that "it is a great pity to be afraid of facts," he showed how a.s.syrian research testifies in many ways to the historical value of the Bible record; but at the same time he freely allowed to Chaldean history an antiquity fatal to the sacred chronology of the Hebrews. He also cast aside a ma.s.s of doubtful apologetics, and dealt frankly with the fact that very many of the early narratives in Genesis belong to the common stock of ancient tradition, and, mentioning as an example the cuneiform inscriptions which record a story of the Accadian king Sargon--how "he was born in retirement, placed by his mother in a basket of rushes, launched on a river, rescued and brought up by a stranger, after which he became king"--he did not hesitate to remind his readers that Sargon lived a thousand years and more before Moses; that this story was told of him several hundred years before Moses was born; and that it was told of various other important personages of antiquity. The professor dealt just as honestly with the inscriptions which show sundry statements in the book of Daniel to be unhistorical; candidly making admissions which but a short time before would have filled orthodoxy with horror.

A few years later came another testimony even more striking. Early in the last decade of the nineteenth century it was noised abroad that the Rev. Professor Sayce, of Oxford, the most eminent a.s.syriologist and Egyptologist of Great Britain, was about to publish a work in which what is known as the "higher criticism" was to be vigorously and probably destructively dealt with in the light afforded by recent research among the monuments of a.s.syria and Egypt. The book was looked for with eager expectation by the supporters of the traditional view of Scripture; but, when it appeared, the exultation of the traditionalists was speedily changed to dismay. For Prof. Sayce, while showing some severity toward sundry minor a.s.sumptions and a.s.sertions of biblical critics, confirmed all their more important conclusions which properly fell within his province. While his readers soon realized that these a.s.sumptions and a.s.sertions of overzealous critics no more disproved the main results of biblical criticism than the wild guesses of Kepler disproved the theory of Copernicus, or the discoveries of Galileo, or even the great laws which bear Kepler's own name, they found new mines sprung under some of the most lofty fortresses of the old dogmatic theology. A few of the statements of this champion of orthodoxy may be noted. He allowed that the week of seven days and the Sabbath rest are of Babylonian origin; indeed, that the very word "Sabbath" is Babylonian; that there are two narratives of Creation on the Babylonian tablets, wonderfully like the two leading Hebrew narratives in Genesis, and that the latter were undoubtedly drawn from the former; that the "garden of Eden" and its mystical tree were known to the inhabitants of Chaldea in pre-Semitic days; that the beliefs that woman was created out of man, and that man by sin fell from a state of innocence, are drawn from very ancient Chaldean-Babylonian texts; that a.s.syriology confirms the belief that the book Genesis is a compilation; that portions of it are by no means so old as the time of Moses; that the expression in our sacred book, "The Lord smelled a sweet savour" at the sacrifice made by Noah, is "identical with that of the Babylonian poet"; that "it is impossible to believe that the language of the latter was not known to the biblical writer" and that the story of Joseph and Potiphar's wife was drawn in part from the old Egyptian tale of The Two Brothers. Finally, after a mult.i.tude of other concessions, Prof. Sayce allowed that the book of Jonah, so far from being the work of the prophet himself, can not have been written until the a.s.syrian Empire was a thing of the past; that the book of Daniel contains serious mistakes; that the so-called historical chapters of that book so conflict with the monuments that the author can not have been a contemporary of Nebuchadnezzar and Cyrus; that "the story of Belshazzar's fall is not historical"; that the Belshazzar referred to in it as king, and as the son of Nehuchadnezzar, was not the son of Nebuchadnezzar, and was never king; that "King Darius the Mede,"

who plays so great a part in the story, never existed; that the book a.s.sociates persons and events really many years apart, and that it must have been written at a period far later than the time a.s.signed in it for its own origin.

As to the book of Ezra, he tells us that we are confronted by a chronological inconsistency which no amount of ingenuity can explain away. He also acknowledges that the book of Esther "contains many exaggerations and improbabilities, and is simply founded upon one of those same historical tales of which the Persian chronicles seem to have been full." Great was the dissatisfaction of the traditionalists with their expected champion; well might they repeat the words of Balak to Balaam, "I called thee to curse mine enemies, and, behold, thou hast altogether blessed them."(495)

(495) For Prof. Brown's discussion, see his a.s.syriology, its Use and Abuse in Old Testament Study, New York, 1885, pa.s.sim. For Prof. Sayce's views, see The Higher Criticism and the Monuments, third edition, London, 1894, and especially his own curious antic.i.p.ation, in the first lines of the preface, that he must fail to satisfy either side. For the declaration that the "higher critic" with all his offences is no worse than the orthodox "apologist," see p. 21. For the important admission that the same criterion must be applied in researches into our own sacred books as into others, and even into the mediaeval chronicles, see p. 26. For justification of critical scepticism regarding the history given in the book of Daniel, see pp. 27, 28, also chap. ix. For very full and explicit statements, with proofs, that the "Sabbath," both in name and nature, was derived by the Hebrews from the Chaldeans, see pp.

74 et seq. For a very full and fair acknowledgment of the "Babylonian element in Genesis," see chap. iii, including the statement regarding the statement in our sacred book, "The Lord smelled a sweet savour," at the sacrifice made by Noah, etc., on p. 119. For an excellent summary of the work, see Dr. Driver's article in the Contemporary Review for March, 1894. For a pungent but well-deserved rebuke of Prof. Sayce's recent attempts to propitiate pious subscribers to his archaeological fund, see Prof. A. A. Bevan, in the Contemporary Review for December, 1895. For the inscription on the a.s.syrian tablets relating in detail the exposure of King Sargon in a basket of rushes, his rescue and rule, see George Smith, Chaldean account of Genesis, Sayce's edition, London, 1880, pp.

319, 320. For the frequent recurrence of the Sargon and Moses legend in ancient folklore, see Maspero and Sayce, Dawn of History, p. 598 and note. For various other points of similar interest, see ibid., pa.s.sim, especially chaps. xvi and xvii; also Jensen, Die Kosmologie der Babylonier, and Schrader, The Cuneiform Inscriptions and the Old Testament; also Lenormant, Origines de l'Histoire.

No less fruitful have been modern researches in Egypt. While, on one hand, they have revealed a very considerable number of geographical and archaeological facts proving the good faith of the narratives entering into the books attributed to Moses, and have thus made our early sacred literature all the more valuable, they have at the same time revealed the limitations of the sacred authors and compilers. They have brought to light facts utterly disproving the sacred Hebrew date of creation and the main framework of the early biblical chronology; they have shown the suggestive correspondence between the ten antediluvian patriarchs in Genesis and the ten early dynasties of the Egyptian G.o.ds, and have placed by the side of these the ten antediluvian kings of Chaldean tradition, the ten heroes of Armenia, the ten primeval kings of Persian sacred tradition, the ten "fathers" of Hindu sacred tradition, and mult.i.tudes of other tens, throwing much light on the manner in which the sacred chronicles of ancient nations were generally developed.

These scholars have also found that the legends of the plagues of Egypt are in the main but natural exaggerations of what occurs every year; as, for example, the changing of the water of the Nile into blood--evidently suggested by the phenomena exhibited every summer, when, as various eminent scholars, and, most recent of all, Maspero and Sayce, tell us, "about the middle of July, in eight or ten days the river turns from grayish blue to dark red, occasionally of so intense a colour as to look like newly shed blood." These modern researches have also shown that some of the most important features in the legends can not possibly be reconciled with the records of the monuments; for example, that the Pharaoh of the Exodus was certainly not overwhelmed in the Red Sea. As to the supernatural features of the Hebrew relations with Egypt, even the most devoted apologists have become discreetly silent.

Egyptologists have also translated for us the old Nile story of The Two Brothers, and have shown, as we have already seen, that one of the most striking parts of our sacred Joseph legend was drawn from it; they have been obliged to admit that the story of the exposure of Moses in the basket of rushes, his rescue, and his subsequent greatness, had been previously told, long before Moses's time, not only of King Sargon, but of various other great personages of the ancient world; they have published plans of Egyptian temples and copies of the sculptures upon their walls, revealing the earlier origin of some of the most striking features of the worship and ceremonial claimed to have been revealed especially to the Hebrews; they have found in the Egyptian Book of the Dead, and in various inscriptions of the Nile temples and tombs, earlier sources of much in the ethics so long claimed to have been revealed only to the chosen people in the Book of the Covenant, in the ten commandments, and elsewhere; they have given to the world copies of the Egyptian texts showing that the theology of the Nile was one of various fruitful sources of later ideas, statements, and practices regarding the brazen serpent, the golden calf, trinities, miraculous conceptions, incarnations, resurrections, ascensions, and the like, and that Egyptian sacro-scientific ideas contributed to early Jewish and Christian sacred literature statements, beliefs, and even phrases regarding the Creation, astronomy, geography, magic, medicine, diabolical influences, with a mult.i.tude of other ideas, which we also find coming into early Judaism in greater or less degree from Chaldean and Persian sources.