arise from questions of authorship and date of writing, the critical
methods have brought much relief. Even very orthodox biblicists no
longer insist that it is necessary to oppose the teaching that the first
five books of the Bible were written at different times and by different
men. In fact, there is no reason to quarrel with the theory that many
parts of these books are not merely anonymous, but are documents
produced by the united effort of narrators and correlators reaching
through generations--the narratives often being transmitted orally from
fathers to sons. There is no reason for longer arguing against the claim
that the book of Isaiah as it stands in our Scriptures is composed of
documents written at widely separated periods. It is permissible even
from the standpoint of orthodoxy to assign a late date to the book of
Daniel. No harm is wrought when we insist that the book of Mark must
have priority in date among the Gospels, and that Matthew and Luke are
built in part from Mark as a foundation. It is not dangerous to face the
facts which cause the prolonged debate over the authorship of the fourth
Gospel. It is not heresy to teach that the dates of the epistles must be
rearranged through the findings of modern scholarship. There is not only
no danger in a hospitable attitude toward modern scholarship, but many
difficulties disappear through adjusting ourselves to present-day
methods. If contradictions appear in a document hitherto considered a
unit, the contradictions are at least measurably done away with when the
document is seen to be a composite report from the points of view of
different authors. The critical method has been of immense value in
enforcing upon us that the scriptural books were written each with a
distinctive intention, apart from the purpose to represent the facts in
the method of a newspaper reporter or of a scientific investigator. In a
sense many of the more important scriptural documents were of the nature
of pamphlets or tracts for the times in which they were written. The
author was combating a heresy, or supplementing a previous statement