ABSTRACT

This chapter shows that the churches have never maintained that Christians must obey all the prescriptions in the Old Testament. The German original had been published in 1770-75 and several projects to have it translated into English had foundered in the eighteenth century Michaelis was one of the encyclopaedic scholars of the eighteenth century who had combed not only the classical and Arabic sources for information about the ancient world. He had made an extensive study of accounts of so-called primitive peoples known to eighteenth-century Europeans. A modern ethical standpoint the Bible, especially the Old Testament, contains material that falls far short of contemporary moral standards. The view that the Old Testament is the record of the progressive self-revelation of God, or the record of the divine education of the Israelites/the human race, has lost the attraction that it exercised so powerfully in the nineteenth and first part of the twentieth century.