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Friday, May 1, 2009

Leupold Genesis part 13 g-w failings

There are other failings that mark the critical approach to the problem. The argument in a circle is, for example, employed frequently. We shall draw attention to quite a number of instances in the course of the following exposition. Passages having a certain type of vocabulary are assumed to belong to one source; when that type of vocabulary is discovered, the proof that there is such a source is treated as complete. Again, when added details appear that were not indicated at the commencement of a narrative, these added details, though they are merely supplementary to the original statements, are construed as being at variance with the original, and so evidence for the existence of two or more separate sources is manufactured, whereas, in reality, other sides of the matter are merely coming to the surface, as every unbiased reader can readily detect.

Again and again the critical approach gives evidence of being guided by purely subjective opinion instead of by valid logical proof. The critic expected that the writer would proceed to follow up a certain approach by a certain type of statement--at least the critic would have followed up by such a statement. The author's failure to offer what the critic expected is supposed to constitute sufficient proof that the case in point is an instance where two documents have been welded together rather crudely. Equally common is the critical practice of conjecturing how the Hebrew text may originally have read, especially if the Hebrew text offers material conflicting, with the critical theories, and the Septuagint happens to disagree more or less with the Hebrew. Strangely, in such cases the conjectures as to the original form of the text always offer support to the critical position.

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