e in masterful fashion substantiated in Holland by Kuenen
about 1870, in Germany by Wellhausen after 1878, and made known to
English readers by Robertson Smith In 1881.

Budde has shown in his _Kanon des Alten Testaments_, 1900, that the Old
Testament which lies before us finished and complete, assumed its
present form only as the result of the growth of several centuries. At
the beginning of this process of the canonisation stands that strange
event, the sudden appearance of a holy book of the law under King
Josiah, in 621 B.C. The end of the process, through the decisions of the
scribes, falls after the destruction of Jerusalem, possibly even in the
second century. Lagarde seems to have proved that the rabbis of the
second century succeeded in destroying all copies of the Scripture which
differed from the standard then set up. This state of things has
enormously increased a difficulty which was already great enough, that
of the detection and separation of the various elements of which many of
the books in this ancient literature are made up. Certain books of the
New Testament also present the problem of the discrimination of elements
of different ages, which have been wrought together into the documents
as we now have them, in a way that almost defies our skill to disengage.
The synoptic Gospels are, of course, the great example. The book of the
Acts presents a problem of the same kind. But the Pentateuch, or rather
Hexateuch, the historical books in less degree, the writings even of
some of the prophets, the codes which formulate the law and ritual, are
composites which have been whole centuries in the making and remaking.
There was no such thing as right of authorship in ancient Israel, little
of it in the ancient world at all. What was once written was popular or
priestly property. Histories were newly narrated, laws enlarged and
rearranged, prophecies attributed to conspicuous persons. All this took
place not in deliberate intention to pervert historic truth, but because
there was no interest in historic truth and no conception of it. The
rewriting of a nation's history from the point of view of its priesthood
bore, to the ancient Israelite, beyond question, an aspect altogether
different from that which the same transaction would bear to us. The
difficulty of the separation of these materials, great in any case, is
enhanced by the fact alluded to, that we have none but internal
evidence. The success of the achieve