Crawford Howell Toy

Crawford Howell Toy (1836–1919), American Hebrew scholar, was born in Norfolk, Virginia, on 23 March 1836. He graduated at the University of Virginia in 1856, and studied at the University of Berlin from 1866 to 1868. From 1869 to 1879 he was professor of Hebrew in the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (first in Greenville, South Carolina, and after 1877 in Louisville, Kentucky), and in 1880 he became professor of Hebrew and Oriental languages at Harvard University, where until 1903 he was also Dexter lecturer on biblical literature.

While Professor Toy was a professor at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, he was embroiled in one of the earliest theological controversies of the Southern Baptist Convention, which was founded in 1845. Influenced by European higher criticism of the Bible and advances in science, Toy began intellectual pursuits that would ultimately cost him his tenure at Southern. Toy began to see Darwin's theories as truth revealed by God "in the form proper to his time." Shaped by the historical-critical method of studying scripture that had been popularized in Europe by Julius Wellhausen, Toy came to believe that the writers of the New Testament—using a rabbinical hermeneutic of their day—misunderstood the original meaning of several Old Testament passages (e.g., Psalm 16:10, Isaiah 53) when they placed a christological emphasis on them.

The founding president of Southern, Dr. James P. Boyce, asked Toy to refrain from teaching contrary to the school's Abstract of Principles on the doctrine of biblical inspiration. Toy, however, insisted on answering questions by students pertinent to his modernist understanding of the Old Testament. It was an April 1879 article in The Sunday School Times on his views of Isaiah 53:1-12 that would lead to his resignation in May of the same year.

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