ABSTRACT
Dr. Jacob Hoschander’s efforts, like others, to avoid the obvious conflict between different traditions in the Bible itself leads him into all sorts of serious difficulties. For the Bible is a selection, for religious rather than historical purposes, from writings covering a period of more than eight centuries. Dr. Louis Finkelstein’s book is also an apologia for rabbinic Judaism. Though Christianity has kept the Old Testament, its ethics have been largely derived from Greek and Roman Stoics and Neo-Platonists; and its fundamental dogmas, such as the Trinity, the Incarnation, the Transubstantiation and the like, are clearly Hellenistic. The priests of the former temple traced their descent from Moses while the national tithes paid to the latter temple were attributed by the writer of Genesis to Jacob’s vow when he escaped from his father’s house and received God’s promise that his descendants would form a great nation.
