Among the many exceptional talents of Brother Robert Roberts, Editor of The Christadelphian from its beginnings as The Ambassador in 1864 until his death in 1898, was his ability to present the Truth through the medium of large-scale formal debates. In an age when public meetings on religious topics could draw big audiences, Brother Roberts was able in such contexts to exploit his prodigious memory, his unparalleled knowledge of Scripture, and his articulate mastery of language and logic to the great benefit of the Brotherhood and of the preaching of the gospel to the world outside.
A joy to share
Those who have been fortunate enough to obtain original copies of the printed versions of Brother Roberts’s public debates—most of which have long since fallen out of print—will no doubt already have marvelled at the fearless and forthright clarity of his arguments. Even more than a century after the events it is still possible by means of these published accounts to enter into at least some of the spirit of such occasions, when the Truth was championed so effectively in the public arena. And whether the subject for debate was the Messiahship of Jesus ( as in the debate with Louis Stern in 1871), or the Divine origin of the Bible ( as in the debate with Charles Bradlaugh in 1876), or the British Israelite theory ( as in the debate with Edward Hine in 1879), the reader of these verbal sword-crossings with the adversaries of theTruth has always stood to gain much from the printed record. It is therefore pleasing to learn that the Christadelphian Scripture Study Service has continued its very valuable contribution to the work of the Truth by making three of these major debates available to a new generation of readers in a single bumper volume.
Though the origins of these debates, and their subject matter, were so diverse, they all add equally to our appreciation of our community’s ‘Great Debater’ at the height of his powers, as well as deepening our understanding of the truths which are “most surely believed among us”. To read the text of these sometimes gruelling encounters is not merely to join brethren and sisters long since dead in witnessing a’ champion’ going out to battle; it is also to wonder anew at the superiority of the Truth over falsehood, and to experience the wholesome satisfaction of vital arguments so comprehensively won. “Revised by the disputants from a shorthand writer’s notes”, the debates have lost little of their cut-and-thrust, and often leave the reader amazed at the mental agility and verbal dexterity displayed. In the case of Brother Roberts, this was clearly a matter of natural ability combined with long personal application to the Word of God and an overwhelming confidence in it. His sense of conviction oozes from almost every line and is a joy to share.
Jesus and the Jews
Louis Stern was an orthodox Jew living in Birmingham. He was in the audience during a public meeting in October 1871 at which Brother Siegfried Gratz (a recent convert to the Truth) and Mr Joel Monaet ( a Jew) were debating the subject of the promises of God, with special reference to the Jews. When Brother Roberts, who was presiding over the meeting, expressed regret that his position as chairman prevented him from speaking on the subject, Mr Stern challenged him to public debate—resulting in a three nights’ discussion later that same month, the agreed topic on the agenda being the question, “Was Jesus of Nazareth the Messiah?”.
With a Unitarian minister in the chair, and a “large and respectable audience”, the debate with Stern followed a typical pattern for such public encounters, with each of the disputants speaking several times in turn for an agreed number of minutes. Since Brother Roberts was cast in the role of proposer of the motion (that Jesus of Nazareth is the Messiah), he spoke first, packing into his opening thirty minutes as much solid evidence as he could in the time: the Seventy Weeks Prophecy of Daniel 9; Josephus’s testimony about the expectancy of the Jews at the time of Jesus’s birth; the promises to David; the genealogies of Jesus and the references by his contemporaries to his Davidic descent, including that by Zechariah the father of John the Baptist. Mr Stern’s first ‘denial’ turned out to be considerably shorter than Brother Roberts’s opening speech (a feature of the whole debate, with Mr Stern frequently choosing not to fill up his time), and he contented himself with refusing to accept that the Seventy Weeks Prophecy had reference to anything more than a period of 490 days at the time of Daniel, pouring scorn on the New Testament as “a compilation of falsehood and forgeries”, and demanding to be shown the original manuscripts before he would accept as true anything it contained.
It is perhaps not altogether surprising that all of Mr Stern’s set speeches (there were four in all on this first night) turned out to be almost wholly negative, since he was seeking to ‘disprove’ the Messiahship of Jesus. Yet there is something really satisfying and reassuring about the well-ordered array of positive evidence which Brother Roberts went on to present: the Messianic prophecies of Isaiah, in chapters 7, 9 and 11; of Micah, in chapter 5; of Genesis 3 and Psalm 116.
With the second night’s discussion centred mainly on Brother Roberts’s detailed explanation of Isaiah 53 (which Mr Stern tried to deny as a prophecy of any kind!), and with the third night concentrating largely on what Jesus himself and the Gospel writers taught about his claim to Divine Sonship and Messiahship (with Mr Stern making every attempt to discredit such testimony), the debate could perhaps be regarded as disappointingly one-sided, since Mr Stern resolutely refused to say what his own view of the Jewish Messiah was, and limited himself to contradicting whatever Brother Roberts demonstrated, whether from Scripture or from history. There were moments on the final night, in fact, when the chairman appears to have had some difficulty in restoring order in the Temperance Hall because of one or two quite outrageous things said by Mr Stern (such as his claim that the Apostle Paul was a thief, on the basis of 2 Corinthians 11:8—”I robbed other churches. . . “).
Yet the final effect is to leave the reader (and presumably the contemporary listener) with a clear picture of the Bible’s claims about Jesus and his mission, claims which can be vehemently (and sometimes blasphemously) denied, but which cannot be convincingly disproved. In its own right, too, Mr Stern’s fierce opposition to the call of the Christian gospel is a remarkable fulfilment of prophecies from his own Jewish Scriptures about his own Jewish race, who “having eyes, see not, neither do they understand”. The case so ably put forward by Brother Roberts will, of course, be even more comprehensively proved when the Mr Sterns of this world will look upon the Messiah whom they pierced and will mourn, rather than mocking at the truth of his claims.
The Bible Divine
The Bradlaugh Debate, which took place in June 1876, was a very different affair from the meeting with Stern. In the first place, it was much longer, being spread over six nights and split between Leicester and Birmingham to accommodate Bradlaugh’s supporters in the Leicester Secular Society. Secondly, Bradlaugh was, unlike Stern, something of a national celebrity: an MP, a leading Rationalist, the Editor of The National Reformer, and a renowned debater. Even the fearless Brother Roberts spoke of himself before the debate as “one who will figure so small in collision with so popular a man and a cause”, and we can only wonder at his courage—not least when we learn that his health was giving him major problems at the time. To add to the strain of it all also, Brother Roberts agreed that the second of their four speeches on each night should be replaced by a question and answer session in the so-called Socratic’ style, with each speaker firing questions at the other for fifteen minutes in turn.
Yet whatever strains Brother Roberts was under, he proved more than equal to the task, being motivated by what he himself described as “a persuasion of the invulnerable strength of the cause which I have to maintain”. He needed every ounce of that persuasion, however, for his adversary showed himself intent on blowing him off course at every available opportunity. In his 58-page review of the discussion, Brother Roberts later expressed surprise and regret that Bradlaugh so rarely addressed himself to the arguments which formed the basis of Brother Roberts’s case for the Divine origin of the Scriptures (the existence of the Jews, the state of the world, including the Christian apostasy, the internal cohesion of the Bible, the evidence of prophecy, the proofs of the resurrection of Christ). Instead, as Brother Roberts says,
“Mr. Bradlaugh. . . wasted his time with the technicalities of the evidence of the so-called ‘Christian fathers’, whose writings are extraneous to the main subject”,
or he provoked mirth (and sometimes hisses) with a stream of ‘Bible difficulties’ in the Tom Paine mould (what Brother Roberts called “the kind of sophistry by which thousands are daily hoodwinked”). But Brother Roberts refused to be distracted, and was able, with some justification, to find a measure of satisfaction in the debate, as he did in the following brief summary of it in his Christadelphian editorial for July 1876:
“Mr. Bradlaugh did not prove the for midable antagonist we anticipated. He found it more difficult to make headway against the Bible in the hands of a Christadelphian than in the hands of its usual defenders . . . There are many acquainted with the truth who admit its beauty and scripturalness, but who, having a doubt as to the Scriptures themselves, are never able to rise to the position of faith and acceptance. Part of their difficulty lies in the fact that such men as Bradlaugh go about the country like roaring lions, before whom the clergy are helpless. It will be a help to such to know that he has been met in a manner that has baffled his usual tactics and made manifest the truthfulness of the Bible, by a variety of lines of evidence which Mr. Bradlaugh neither touched nor sought to touch, because it is out of his power to do so. In any case, the discussion was, on the part of the truth’s friends, a struggle on behalf of the interests of God and man; and, therefore, an event to be satisfied with, quite apart from results, as part of the good fight which will, one day, end in glory and victory in the presence of the Lord at his coming”.
Anglo-Israelism
If the question debated with Bradlaugh (“Is the Bible Divine?”) is of perennial and central importance to lovers of the Truth, it may seem that the third of Brother Roberts’s debates in this collection, on the question, “Are Englishmen Israelites?”, is of minority, and perhaps only of antiquarian, interest, since the ‘British-Israel’ theory may be thought of little relevance today. Two points, however, may be made in this connection, both of which should serve to heighten the importance of the debate from our contemporary point of view. First, the Truth itself is founded upon an Israelitish basis: our hope is the Hope of Israel. It is therefore of great value for us to consider carefully those passages of Scripture which form the bedrock of that hope; and to see our views explained and defended so ably in controversy is itself a most worthwhile exercise. Secondly, Brother Roberts’s opponent, Mr Edward Hine, was the leading advocate of Anglo-Israelism in the nineteenth century, and the arguments used against him are no less valid against his present-day successors, the publishers of the Plain Truth magazine, whose well-packaged appeal is gullibly received, as Hine’s was, by many earnest seekers-after-truth.
The debate with Edward Hine proved to be, by every criterion, a resounding victory for the Truth. Brother Roberts was, as one supporter present reported, “in his very best form”; and even making allowance for the bizarre views that Mr Hine was advocating, the Anglo-Israelite was no match for the Editor of The Christadelphian. On this occasion Brother Roberts was cast in the role of opposer of the motion (that Englishmen are Israelites), and so much more agile in mind and word did he show himself to be ( and so much more well versed in Scripture) that he was able in his own replies not only to dispose of the few clear statements made by Mr Hine but also to preach the true ‘Hope of Israel’. To Mr Hine’s great chagrin and visible discomfiture, he was quite unable either to explain cogently the so-called ‘Identity question’ ( according to which the English are alleged to be the descendants of the ‘lost’ tribes of Israel) or to make Brother Roberts treat it anything other than dismissively. So far out of his depth was Mr Hine that his supporters (who were present in force) had little to cheer, and went home, according to an impartial observer, disconsolate.
The flavour of the debate is captured in the following report by a correspondent of the widely-circulated ‘Christian’ magazine, The Rock:
“Mr. Roberts. . . proved more than a match for a dozen Mr. Hines. He is evidently an able, clearheaded man, with his temper well under control. . . Mr. Roberts seemed to fail, as I did, to catch the thread of Mr. Hine’s speech—which was a mere puff-ball—but he exactly hit the mark when he observed that running glibly over a number of scriptural texts without concatenation or consistency was not argument’. I need scarcely remind you that, according to Mr. Hine and his co-theorists, the Jews, or two tribes, inherit the curses (which they are now undergoing), while Israel, or the ten tribes (ourselves), are entitled to the promised blessings. Here Mr. Roberts swooped down like an eagle on poor Mr. Hine, showing him that whereas in Bible history many glorious things are set down to the credit of Judah’s sons and Judah’s kings, not a single act of loyalty to God is recorded of Israel, either princes or people! . . . Mr. Roberts answered all his opponent’s queries without a moment’s hesitation, and with a simple categorical ‘yes’ or ‘no’. Far otherwise was it when Mr. Roberts came to question Mr. Hine, and mercilessly pinned him down to Scripture. Mr. Hine answered hesitatingly and evasively . . . I should be surprised if he ever challenged any more discussions . . . I gathered from the remarks I heard on every side that—so at least the speakers thought —Mr. Hine had been thoroughly worsted. But how could it be otherwise, supposing the subject to be seriously discussed!”.
The debate, which took place in the Exeter Hall, London, on three separate nights before a paying audience (!) of about 1,000 on each occasion, was followed up on the Sunday after by a full-length lecture by Brother Roberts (which is also reprinted here). Along with the text of the debate, the lecture (under the title “The true position of Britain in prophecy”) puts forward all the Scriptural reasons for the true Hope of Israel and against Anglo-Israelism that anyone could possibly wish for.
In placing so much useful and interesting material in our hands at so little cost, the Christadelphian Scripture Study Service has once again put the Brotherhood greatly in its debt.
Review of “The Early Earth” by John Whitcomb (1972)