Bishop John William Colenso
THE WORD OF GOD IN THE OLD TESTAMENT
The Colenso Affair
I was both surprised, and delighted when visiting the cathedral at Pieter Maritzburg in South Africa in 1991 to find a memorial to the late Bishop Colenso of Natal.
I say "surprised" in view of all the trouble he caused in the Church in the middle of the last century.
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John William Colenso trained as a mathematician, and it was as a tutor in mathematics at Cambridge that he first turned his mind to the study of theology. He was subsequently ordained and in 1853 appointed by the Crown (on the advice of the Archbishop of Canterbury), as the first Bishop of Natal in Southern Africa.
Upon arrival, Colenso immediately set about translating the Bible for the local Zulus. Soon he found himself having to face certain problems which he had previously managed to evade.
For instance, whilst translating the story of the flood, one of his Zulu helpers asked if it was true. Colenso, from his knowledge of geology, felt unable to answer positively. Another Zulu challenged the morality of the Old Testament, pointing out that it seemed to be in no way superior to the folk tales of his own people.
However, the real crunch came when Colenso applied his mathematical mind to the story of the Exodus - the escape of the Israelites from the hands of the Egyptians at the dead of night. He concluded it was on practical grounds impossible and therefore historically untrue.
He sought to demonstrate his thesis in a book called The Pentateuch and the Book of Joshua Critically Examined which he commenced writing in 1862.
For instance, he pointed out that, according to the Old Testament, six thousand able bodied men left Egypt. This implied a total population of at least two million people. He therefore asked the simple question: How could such a force be got away in a single night undetected by the Egyptians?
He goes on to demonstrate the unreliability of the text by making further comparisons based upon his mathematical calculations. He asks:What about the sick, the infirm, or women in recent or imminent childbirth, in a population of similar size to London where 254 children are born every day, or one every five minutes? Or again: How can one begin to imagine a whole nation on the march, as a single body, about 20 miles long and six yards wide without raising the suspicion of the Egyptians? The whole story begins to reach absurdity when it comes to the sacrificial regulations. He calculated that for the sacrifice at Passover animals would have had to be killed at a rate of 1,250 lambs a minute and each priest would have had to sprinkle the blood of 333 lambs a minute for two hours together! !
Clearly, Colenso was beginning to allow his mathematical mind to run wild. Nevertheless, the conclusion was quite simple, namely, that the first five books of the Old Testament could not be historically true. In short, he was challenging the simple fundamentalism of his day.
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Rather than face the challenge which Colenso presented, the Church sought to silence him, not least because he was a bishop.
A Synod of South African Bishops, under the chairmanship of Bishop Gray of Cape Town, sought in 1863 to depose Colenso from his bishopric and from exercising the office of a clergyman.
Colenso came to England and appealed, as a citizen of the Empire, to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. The Privy Council ruled in 1865 that since he was appointed prior to Bishop Gray, by Letters Patent from England, Bishop Gray and his fellow bishops had no authority to depose him.
Bishop Gray excommunicated Colenso in 1866 and attempted to have him condemned at the first Lambeth Conference in 1867, but without success. By a series of judicial decisions, Colenso continued to serve the cathedral and the diocese. In the meantime, another Bishop of Natal was consecrated in South Africa by Bishop Gray in Cape Town.
So a schism occurred in the Anglican Church of Natal and continued until 1911, long after Colenso's death in 1883.
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Sadly, this episcopal storm in the Biblical teacup could easily have been avoided had the Church been courageous enough to face with honesty the questions being posed by Colenso's mathematical mind.
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Looking back on the Colenso affair, we may well smile and wonder what all the fuss was about.
Biblical study in subsequent years has helped us to appreciate more fully the human element in the composition and writing of the Old Testament.
Firstly, whereas Colenso believed that the first five books of the Old Testament were written by a single author, namely Moses to whom they are attributed, today we see them as compilations based upon at least four independent sources, written by unknown authors. In fact, the Old Testament comes from the pens of many writers, each writing from a different perspective.
Secondly, the first five books of the Old Testament were written long after Moses was dead and buried. They were written possibly over a period of five hundred years, between 900 and 400 BC. In fact, the writing of the whole of the Old Testament, probably covered a span of some 1,500 years and was not finalised until the end of the first century AD.
Thirdly, the Old Testament contains a wide variety of different types of literature. It contains poetry and prose; narration and oration; shopping lists and inventories; family trees and court records; proverbs and prophecies. In fact, the Old Testament is not so much a single book but a library of different books.
Now this human element helps to explain many of the historical inaccuracies, and sometimes contradictions, to which Colenso drew attention in the middle of the nineteenth century.
However, we need not be afraid that this human element will destroy the truth of the Old Testament. It does not make the Old Testament null and void which was the fear of Colenso's critics.
Behind the various human writers and behind the various types of writings, there still lies a basic truth which they seek to convey as far as they were able to perceive it. A truth which cannot be fully comprehended by the human mind, let alone adequately expressed in human words.
And what is that truth?
The truth is simply this. God was perceived as being active in the historical events, whereby Israel was chosen, set free, given the Law and the Covenant and ruled providentially by God in various happenings such as the Exile and Restoration, which the prophets interpreted as a sign of God's mercy and judgement.
In other words, Biblical scholarship encourages us to stand back from the details, in order to see the broader picture of God, as revealed through the writers of the Old Testament.
So the question that we must always ask ourselves is this: What must the truth have been, and still be for us today, for men and women who thought and wrote as they did then?
Now this is not to deny the work of the Spirit of God in the inspiration of the Bible. After all, it was through the influence of the Holy Spirit that the writers first put pen to paper and the Church later came to a common mind as to which documents to include and which to exclude from the Old Testament. That was settled at the end of the first century AD and has never been subsequently challenged.
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I said at the beginning of the sermon I was both surprised and delighted to see the memorial to Bishop Colenso in the cathedral at Pieter Maritzburg. I was surprised when I recalled the trouble he caused the Church by raising questions about the historical accuracy of the first five books of the Old Testament, which eventually led to a temporary schism in
the Anglican Church in Southern Africa.
I was delighted that he has now been vindicated in the light of subsequent Biblical scholarship, which has sought to face with honesty the challenge of his mathematical mind.
We need never fear a questioning mind because the God who is revealed in the pages of the Old Testament continues to lead us into all truth, as we seek to discern his revelation of himself in the pages of Holy Scriptures.