Scientific Investigation of the Old Testament

It is the purpose of the present volume to show that intelligent Christians have a reasonable ground for concluding that the text of the Old Testament which we have is substantially correct, and that, in its true and obvious meaning, it has a right to be considered a part of the 'infallible rule of faith and practice' that we have in the Holy Scriptures. I have not gone into a discussion of miracles and prophecy, either as to their possibility or as to their actuality. All believers in the incarnation and the resurrection must accept this possibility and this actuality. I seek rather to show that, so far as anyone knows, the Old Testament can be and is just what the authors claimed it to be, and what the Christ and the New Testament writers thought it to be. The theory of kenosis, so far as it affects the Lord's knowledge of the Old Testament, is, I hope, shown to be unnecessary, because the facts and the evidence bearing upon the Old Testament support the testimony of Jesus. I have not said much about the chronology and the geography of the Old Testament, because in neither of these two departments of history are the facts and the evidence sufficiently well established to give us reliable testimony upon the details of the Biblical records as they bear upon these two important subjects.