Several years ago I listened to a lengthy series of messages by Dr. Francis Schaeffer on the Book of Daniel. In this series he quoted Robert Dick Wilson several times. Since then I have had the opportunity to look up some very interesting information of the amazing Dr. Robert Dick Wilson. Below is some of that information.
The Remarkable Robert Dick Wilson
Robert Dick Wilson was truly a remarkable gentleman. Bible students are indebted to him for the masterful work he did in helping to confirm the credibility of the Old Testament.
Robert Wilson was born in 1856; he graduated from Princeton University at the age of twenty. He went on to earn both a Masters degree and a PhD. He then did further post-graduate work in Germany for two years. He was a brilliant language student; when he was still in college he could read his New Testament in nine languages.
Wilson was but twenty-five years of age when he determined that he would invest years of careful study in the text of the Old Testament so that he could speak with authority as to whether or not it has been preserved in an accurate format.
The body of Old Testament literature was completed by 400 B.C., and yet prior to 1946 (when the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered), the oldest copies of the Old Testament Scriptures we possessed dated to about the tenth century A.D. There was, therefore, a gap of some twelve hundred years between the last of the Old Testament books and the extant manuscripts.
Could we be sure that the writings at our disposal had been faithfully preserved? After all, even if one is confident that the original Scriptures were inspired of God, that would amount to little if they have been grossly corrupted across the centuries. This was the task, therefore, to which young Wilson dedicated himself. And he was a wonderfully disciplined person.
Based upon the longevity of his immediate ancestors, Robert Wilson estimated that he might live to about seventy years of age. Since he was twenty-five at the time, that would give him about forty-five years remaining to accomplish his goal. Accordingly, he divided his projected remaining years into three periods of fifteen years each. Here is how he would pursue his plan:
For the first fifteen years, he would study every language that had a bearing on the text of the Old Testament. He set himself to the task. During that time he mastered forty-five languages! He not only became an expert in Hebrew and its kindred tongues, but he learned all the languages into which the Scriptures had been translated down to the year A.D. 600.
During the next fifteen years Wilson dedicated himself to studying the text of the Old Testament itself. He looked at every consonant in the Old Testament text (the Hebrew Old Testament has no vowels)—about one and a quarter million of them. He made a thorough scientific investigation of the Old Testament text, as compared to other writings of antiquity.
Wilson noted that there are twenty-nine ancient, pagan kings of various nations which are mentioned in the Bible. Their names are also found in the writings of their own lands. The names of these kings consist of 195 consonants. He discovered that in the Old Testament there are only two or three letters—of the entire 195—that are in question as to spelling. By way of contrast, in the secular literature of the same period, the names of those rulers frequently are so garbled that one can scarcely identify the person.
For example, Ptolemy, an ancient writer, drew up a list of eighteen Babylonian kings, and not a one of them is spelled correctly. The text of the Bible was amazingly precise.
Wilson then spent his remaining years writing down the results of his long research. He authored a marvelous book titled, A Scientific Investigation of the Old Testament, in which he confidently affirmed “we are scientifically certain that we have substantially the same [Old Testament] text that was in the possession of Christ and the apostles and, so far as anybody knows, the same as that written by the original composers of the Old Testament documents.”
We ought to be grateful for those who have gone before us, and who have provided us with evidence for the integrity of the biblical text. By the way, Wilson died at the age of seventy-four.
About the Author
Wayne Jackson has written for and edited the Christian Courier since its inception in 1965. He has also written several books on a variety of biblical topics including The Bible and Science, Creation, Evolution, and the Age of the Earth, The Bible on Trial, and a number of commentaries. He lives in Stockton, California with his dear wife, and life-long partner, Betty.
The Bible and Archaeology (1/5)
The Bible maintains several characteristics that prove it is from God. One of those is the fact that the Bible is accurate in every one of its details. The field of archaeology brings to light this amazing accuracy.
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Many people have questioned the accuracy of the Bible, but I have posted many videos and articles with evidence pointing out that the Bible has many pieces of evidence from archaeology supporting the view that the Bible is historically accurate. Take a look at the video above and below.
The Bible and Archaeology (2/5)
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Robert Dick Wilson is one of my heroes and I wanted to pass on a portion of his talk in transcript form:
Clearly attested facts showing that the
destructive “assured results of
modern scholarship”
are indefensible
By the late
Robert Dick Wilson, Ph.D., D.D.
Professor of Semitic Philology in
Princeton Theological Seminary
THE SUNDAY SCHOOL TIMES COMPANY
325 N. 13th Street
Philadelphia 5, Pa.
Copyright, 1922 and 1950, by
THE SUNDAY SCHOOL TIMES COMPANY
Second Edition …………………………..1922
Tenth Edition ……………………….…… .1953
FOREWORD
“As man is interested in his roses, and doesn’t think of the thorns,” so he studied language. That was Professor Wilson’s answer to my query, when I expressed amazement at the range of his linguistic explorations, covering some forty-five languages and dialects. His answer helped me to understand.
And as we sat by the fire in his study at Princeton, with the signs of his labors all around us, on shelves, and tables, and desk––yes, and on the floor, I came to understand still better the stories I had heard of his learning, and of his masterly methods in the defense of the Scriptures.
When he was a little chap, four years old, son of a leading merchant in the little town of Indiana, Pa., he could read. He began to go to school at five, and at eight he had read, among other books, Rawlinson’s “Ancient Monarchies.”
That merchant father was a man of sound culture and good sense. He was president of the Board of Trade of his county, and president of the local school board––with ten children in his own home.
When Robert was nine years old he and a brother were taken by their father on a journey to Philadelphia. One of the exciting and memorable experiences of the trip was the visit to a bookstore on Chestnut Street, where the father left the boys for a little while, so that they might select a number of books of their own choosing. When he returned they had gathered about fifty volumes, including Prescott, Robertson, J. S. C. Abbott, and similar standard works,––examples of the “light reading” that these children enjoyed.
Robert prepared for college in the Indiana public school, and was ready for the sophomore class at Princeton when he was fourteen years old. However, he did not enter his class–the class of 1876–until he was at the advanced age of seventeen, for as he naïvely and rather apologetically remarked: “I had a good deal of headache between my fourteenth and twentieth years, and then typhoid. After that my headache disappeared. I really couldn’t half do my work before that.”
In college young Wilson specialized in language, psychology, and mathematics. In such Bible courses as he then studied he says that he got “a very low grade of 90, which pulled down my average.”
To him language was the gateway into alluring fields that drew him strongly. He prepared himself for college in French, German, and Greek, learned Hebrew by himself, and took a hundred dollar prize in Hebrew when he entered the seminary.
“But how did you ever do it?” I asked. The professor’s eyes twinkled, and he smiled at my surprise.
“Well, you see,” he replied, “I used my spare time. When I went out for a walk I would take a grammar with me, and when I sat down to rest, I would take out the book, study it a little, and learn what I could. I made up my mind that I wanted to read the great classics in the originals, so I just learned the languages in order to do that.
“I would read a grammar through, look up the examples, making notes as I went along, and I wouldn’t pass by anything until I could explain it. I never learned long lists of words, but I would read a page through, recall the words I didn’t know, and then look them up. I read anything that I thought would be interesting to me if it were in English. I got so interested in the story that I was unconscious of the labor,––as a man is interested in his roses, and doesn’t think of the thorns. So I learned Greek, Latin, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Biblical Aramaic, Syriac, Arabic, and so on.”
Now Robert Dick Wilson in all these crowded years was not clear concerning his true calling in life. Before he went to the seminary, he and a brother of his gave much time to evangelism. At Indiana they were in such work for a year and a half, and with ample evidence of God’s blessings upon their labors in great numbers of souls led to Christ. That work was particularly attractive to young Wilson, on fire as he was, and is today, for the furtherance of the Gospel.
But his seminary studies caused him to feel that there was a great need for a type of Biblical scholarship that was not so subjective as much of the teaching he heard, but objective and thorough in dealing with facts that could be known only by exhaustive research over the whole range of the ancient languages related to the Bible. He faced the question seriously,––should he go on in the highly attractive and necessary work preaching in which he had been so greatly blessed, or was God calling him to years of toil in comparative obscurity and seclusion, in order to let his life count for the defense of the Scriptures on the basis of linguistic and historical facts, which only arduous and patient toil could reveal? He chose under God’s guiding hand the life of the scholar, and thousands have thanked God, and oth
What Robert Dick Wilson then believed, and now believes with all his heart is this: that textual and historical Biblical controversies should be taken out of the region of subjective personal opinion, into the region of objective, clearly attested fact. It was to this task that he set himself, and no labor was to be too long or too tedious or exacting to enable him to reach that goal.
He could not at that time learn Babylonian in America, so he went to Heidelberg, determined to learn every language that would enable him the better to understand the Scriptures, and to make his investigations in original documents.
So to Babylonian he added Ethiopic, Phoenician, all the Aramaic dialects, and Egyptian, Coptic, Persian, and Armenian. He studied in Berlin with Schrader, who was Delitzsch’s teacher, called the father of Assyriology. He studied his Arabic and Syriac under Sachau, and Arabic under Jahn and Dieterichi; Hebrew under Dillmann and Strack, and Egyptian under Brugsch. He became conversant with some twenty six languages in these years devoted to language acquisition.
For Professor Wilson had a plan, carefully worked out during his student days in Germany, under which he proposed to spend fifteen years in language study, fifteen years in Biblical textual study in the light of the findings of his studies in philology, and then, God willing, fifteen years of writing out his findings, so that others might share them with him. And now it is our privilege in this booklet to read, in terms that we all can understand, some of the gloriously reassuring facts that he has found in his long pilgrimage through ancient days.
Just a single glimpse of how long it has been startles the superficial and the scholarly student as well, when either learns that in order to answer a single sentence of a noted destructive critic, Professor Wilson read all the extant ancient literature of the period under discussion in numerous languages, and collated no less than one hundred found showed that the critic was wrong. It was largely a case of superior scholarship—accordance with a good definition of the scholarly temperament—”that rare combination
Professor Wilson’s productive work has been presented hitherto almost entirely to his students, some two thousand of whom have been in his seminary classes through the years; in scholarly journals of restricted circulation; and in a few books, one of the most remarkable of which is his “Studies in the Book of Daniel.”
“Professor,” I asked, “what do you try to do for your students?”
Instantly he replied, with quiet earnestness, “I try to give them such an intelligent faith in the Old Testament Scriptures that they will never doubt them as long as they live. I try to give them
evidence. I try to show them that there is a reasonable ground for belief in the history of the Old Testament.” (He has not specialized on the New
“I’ve seen the day,” he went on, “when I’ve just trembled at undertaking a new investigation, but I’ve gotten over that. I have come now to the conviction that
no man knows enough to assail the truthfulness of the Old Testament. Whenever there is sufficient documentary evidence to make an invest
That is a significant statement from one who does not have to trust to hearsay in matters of criticism, and who has worked for so many years in devout self-denying study of the sources and the text of the Old Testament. “When a man says to me, ‘I don’t believe the Old Testament,’” exclaimed Dr. Wilson, “he makes no impression upon me. When he points out something there that he doesn’t believe, he makes no impression
in the original texts, have stood the test.” gation, the statements of the Bible, i Testament.) great historian.” coverer or the disinterested pursuit of truth, which characterizes the great scientific disof profound insight, sustained attention, microscopic accuracy, iron tenacity, and in sand citations from that literature in order to get at the basic facts, which when thou upon me. But if he comes to me and says, ‘I’ve got the evidence here to show that the Old Testament is wrong at this or that point’—then that’s where my work begins! I’m ready for him!” And the professor laughed in his hearty way, in evident enjoyment of the prospect of such an encounter.
I think perhaps one reason why I have been so stirred by many personal talks with this stalwart scholar is the habit he has of putting proof before you as he goes, and not standing on his dignity as though no one had a right to ask questions of him about his findings. But when a
scholar challenges him, then the Professor is a roused lion,—no, an aroused attorney for the defense, massing his facts so overwhelmingly, proving them, driving them home, and disclosing the weakness of his opponent’s case so convincingly, that I should think the attorney for the plaintiff in the attack on the Old Testament would wish for the sake of his reputation that he had not ventured on ground where his own ignorance would be so manifest to the court. For it is made very evident by a study of any of Professor Wilson’s keen critiques of the destructive critics’ work that much of the material so often called by the critics “the assured results of modern scholarship” is nothing more than the quicksand footsteps of a really inexcusable, downright ignorance. “Criticism,” says Dr. Wilson, “is not a matter of brains, but a matter of knowledge.”
But let Professor Wilson lay before you his findings. He is concerned only with evidence, and it will gladden your heart to know even a little of what he has found, as he unfolds some of his experiences in the following studies.
PHILIP E. HOWARD,
Former Publisher of The Sunday School times.
IS THE HIGHER CRITICISM
SCHOLARLY?
Robert Dick Wilson
The history of the preparation of the world for the Gospel as set forth in the Old Testament is simple and clear, and in the light of the New Testament eminently reasonable. In fact, it has been considered so reasonable, so harmonious with what was to have been expected, that Christ and the apostles seem never to have doubted its veracity, and the Christian Church which they founded has up to our times accepted it as fully consonant with the facts. Within the last two centuries, however, largely as a the so-called critical method, there has arisen a widespread doubt of the truthfulness of the Old Testament records. To such doubt many have
Countering With Proof, Defensive and Offensive
But there are many whose faith in the veracity of the Scriptures has been shaken; and the best, and in some cases the only, way to re-establish their faith is to show them that the charges which are brought against the Bible are untrue and unwarranted.
The attempt to show this may be made along two lines. We may take the purely defensive line and endeavor to show that the general and particular attacks upon the truthfulness of the Old Testament narratives are unsupported by facts. Or, we may take the offensive and show that the Old Testament narratives are in harmony with all that is really known of the history of the world in the times described in the Old Testament records, and that these records themselves contain the ineffaceable evidence that the time and place of their origin agree with the facts recorded. The best method, perhaps, will be to make an offensive-defensive, showing not merely that the attacks are futile, but that the events recorded and the persons and things described are true to history,—that is, that they harmonize in general with what we learn from the contemporaneous
This is true of the very earliest narratives of the Old Testament. Even when we look at the two great events occurring before the time of Abraham—the Creation and the Flood—we find that these events are the same that are emphasized among the Babylonians, from the midst of whom Abraham went out. For it is certain, that, however we may account for the difference between the Babylonian and Hebrew accounts of the Creation and of the Deluge, there is sufficient resemblance between them to point to a common origin antedating the time of Abraham’s departure from Ur of the Chaldees.
1
The Old Testament Derived From Written Sources Based on Contemporary Documents
From this time downward there is no good reason for doubting that the Biblical narrative is derived from
written sources based on contemporaneous documents. For, first, Abraham came out of that part of Babylonia in which writing had been in use for hundreds of years; and he lived during the time of Hammurapi, from whose reign we
Babylonische Mythen und Epen – syrisckAs
and Jensen, The Seven Tablets of Creation; See King, 1 documents of other nations. all those who have no doubts. refused to listen, and blessed are result of the Deistical movement in England and of the application to sacred history of 2 have scores of letters, contracts, and other records, of which by far the most important is the so-called code of laws which bears his name.
2Besides, writing had been in existence in Egypt already for two thousand years or more, so that we can well believe that the family of Abraham, traveling from Babylonia to Egypt and at last settling in Palestine, in between these two great literary peoples, had also formed the habit of conducting business and keeping records in writing.3 Abraham would naturally use the cuneiform system of writing, since this is known to have existed in Western Asia long before the time of Hammurapi, and the Amarna letters show clearly that Hebrew was sometimes written in that script.4
But not only do we know that there was a script in which to write; we know, also, that the Hebrew language was used in Palestine before the time of Moses. This is clear not merely from more than a hundred common words embedded in the Amarna letters but from the fact that the names of the places mentioned in them are largely Hebrew.
5In the geographical lists of the Egyptian king, Thothmes III, and of other kings of Egypt we find more than thirty good Hebrew words as the names of the cities of Palestine and Syria that they conquered.
6 From these facts we conclude that books may have been written in Hebrew at that early period. Further, we see that the sons of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob may have been called by Hebrew names, as the Biblical record assures us.7
In “Bible Student and Teacher” for 1905.
Was Abraham a Myth? See article 7 iste thutmoses III. Die PalastinalSee Max Muller, 6 1545f. p. loc. cit., Knudtzon, 5 Tafeln. -Amarna-Die EIand Knudtzon, Amarna Letters; -eI-TelSee Winckler, 4 Rechts. -und ProzessUrkunden des altbabylonischen ZivilSee especially Schorr, 3 The Code of Hammurabi and Harper, The Letters and Inscriptions of Hammurobi; See King, 2
The Daily Hatch 