testimony.doc
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Nov. 16, 2005
of these writers was not the science that brought about the scientific revolution of modern
times, because the method of true science starts with observation, whereas these writers
started with a theory and then used that theory to reconstruct history. They either
trampled on or ignored such observations as were beginning to come from archaeological
findings in the ancient Near East. Thus De Wette had no archaeological findings or any
other historical facts to support his theory that the Book of Deuteronomy was invented
during the days of Josiah; the theory merely supplied an explanation to replace the
supernatural alternative, namely that it was a revelation to Moses during Israel's
wandering in the desert. Neither did Wellhausen build his theory of the development of
Israel's religion on a study of ancient Near Eastern inscriptions; instead an imposition of
Darwin's evolutionary ideas and Hegel's dialectic was used to construct a totally
imaginative scheme for the history of Israel and the formation of the OT canon.
THE DEDUCTIVE METHOD AS APPLIED TO THE PROBLEM
Wellhausen's Documentary Hypothesis and its later offshoots (the traditio-historical
school, the socio-economic approaches, etc.) were examples of the deductive method.
Deduction is inference in which the conclusion about particulars follows necessarily
from general or universal premises.
1
One universal premise of these approaches is that
the Scriptures did not come in any supernatural God-with-man encounter or revelation, at
least in the sense of God speaking to and through Moses as stated in the Pentateuch. This
was replaced by various explanations of how writers from a later time fabricated stories
about miracles and revelations that they ascribed to dimly-remembered heroes from their
nation's past. With this view of the origin of Scripture, it would necessarily follow that
the various authors who put together the Books of Kings and Chronicles could not
possibly have handled correctly all the historical details from the time of the Hebrew
monarchs. Thus, with regard to the chronological data in the Books of Kings, we have the
following conclusions from several scholars of the higher critical schools:
R. Kittel: Wellhausen has shown, by convincing reasons, that the synchronisms
within the Book of Kings cannot possibly rest on ancient tradition, but are on the
contrary simply the products of artificial reckoning . . .
1
Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary (Springfield, MA: Merriam-Webster, 1989).