*iy»^m, KM Division Jlj O Z 549, 557 » 595. Readers who may compare the present with former editions of this work will perhaps find it convenient if I specify a few places where changes or additions are now made. I have added (p. 44) a note on Zahn's speculation concerning the date of the Latin Version of the New Testament : some slight addition is made (p. 86) to what had been said about Tatian's Diates- saron : Dr. Gwynn's discovery of fragments of Caius has made some change necessary in what had been said (p. 227) about Caius's reception of the Apocalypse, and about the Alogi : in a note (p. 255) I have dis- cussed Vischer's assault on the unity of the Apoca- lypse : something has been added (p. 389) with regard to the date of the formation of a collection of Pauline letters, and a fuller discussion than before of the second group of Pauline Epistles has been given (p. 403). On the other hand, I have judged it suf- ficient to present, in an abridged form (p. 545), my Vlll PREFACE. examination of Dr. Abbott's censures of the style of 2 Peter, which in the first and subsequent editions was given with more detail than now appears to be requisite. The change of form of the book, and the consequent alteration in the paging, has rendered necessary the preparation of a new Index ; and though I have taken a good deal of pains, I fear it is too much to expect that I shall have altogether escaped misprints and false references both in the Index and elsewhere. Trinity College, Dublin, October, 1889. ERRATA. Page 209, line iS, for i John v. 24, read i John v. 20, 326, line 5 from foot, for v. 30, read v. 39. 397, note line 2, for 2 Cor. i. 17, read 2 Cor. ii. 17. 487, note line ^,for Rom. iv. 7, read Rom. vi. 7. 494, line IS, for James iii., read 'Jz.mes ii. 495, line 3 from foot, for Genesis xvii., read Genesis xviii. CO NTENTS. LECTURE I. INTRODUCTORY. PART I. Page Principles of the Investigation . . . . i Subject of Lectures defined, pp. i, 2. Question of Inspiration irrelevant here, p. 3 ; amount of external evidence of authen- ticity commonly required in similar cases, pp. 4 — 5 ; authenticity of N. T. books not to be denied because of the miraculous nature of their contents, pp. 6 — 8. Criticism based on the rejectionof the supernatural ; Strauss, Renan, author of ^M/Y>. SI 9 — 593- External testimony, pp. 579, 580. Disuse of non-Canonical writings after rise of Montanism, p. 579. Tertullian and the Shepherd, p. 580. Contents of the Shepherd, p. 581. The date of Hermas, p. 582. The book written in good faith, pp. 583, 584; and accepted as a record of real revelations, p. 586 ; written in the Episcopate of Clement, p. 587. Rejection of Muratorian account, p. 589. Lightfoot's hypothesis that the original of this fragment was in verse, p. 590. Church organi- zation in the time of Hermas, p. 591. Prophets in the early Church, p. 592. Hermas belonged to this order, ib. ; whether he was a Jew, p. 594. Hermas and Theodotion, pp. 594 — 608. The ' Thegri' of Hermas explained by Mr. Rendel Harris from Dan. vi. 22, p. 594. Dr. Hort's further inference, ib. Preliminary consideration unfavourable to his inference, p. 595. Greek translations of the Old Testament, pp. 595 — 599. Theo- dotion's version of Daniel used in the Christian Church, pp. 596? 597- Epiphanius's account of Greek translations not trustworthy, p. 598. Theodotion' s version in use before the time of Irenasus, p. 599. The version used by Hippolytus, Clement, Justin Martyr, and Tertullian, respectively, p. 600. 'A silent rejection of the Septuagint not probable, p. 602. Reasons for believing that there had been a previous version, p. 603. Characteristics of the Chisian Daniel, ib. ; its affinities with the Apocryphal Esdras, ib. Did the New Testament writers make use of the Chisian version } p. 604. Neither Clement of Rome nor Baruch recognize it, p. 607. The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles, pp. 609 — 625. External testimony, p. 609. The 'Church Ordinances,' p. 610. Barnabas and the ' Two Ways,' p. 611. The Western form of the ' Two Ways,' ib. Krawutzcky's theory, p. 612. Bryennius's 'Teaching of the Apostles,' ib. ; its account of Church organization, p. 613. Whether the author was an Ebionite, p. 615. Relations of the Didache to Barnabas and Hermas, p. 616. Dr. Taylor on the Didache, ib. Hypothesis that the Didache is founded on a pre- Christian manual for the instruction of proselytes, p. 617. Re- lations of the Didache to Barnabas, p. 618 ; and to Hermas, p. 619 ; Western form of the book, ib. Whether the Didache in its present form had early circulation in the East, p. 621 ; how much of it may be referred to a pre-Christian model, p. 622 ; its instructions about baptism, ib. ; on prayer, p. 623 ; on the Eucharist, ib. ; the last chapter, p. 624; whether known to Origen, ib. NTRODUCTORY Part I . PRINCIPLES OF THE INVESTIGATION. 'npHE subject appointed for our Lectures this Term is The -■- Bible ; but that opens up a field so wide, that to treat adequately of all that it is desirable should be known about it would give us employment, not for one Term, but for several years. Last year you attended Lectures on Natural Religion and on Christian Evidences. I assume that you then went through the proofs that there is a God ; that there is no impossibility in His revealing His will to His creatures, using miracle or prophecy as credentials to authenticate His message ; and that you went through the proofs of our Lord's divine mission, establishing the conclusion that He was the bearer to the world of a revelation from God. Then, in logical order, follows the question. How is that revelation to be known to us ? what are the books that record it ? — in other words : What is the Canon of Scripture ? In this investigation the determination of the New Testa- ment Canon comes before that of the Old. We must first determine what the books are which contain authentic records of the teaching of our Lord and His Apostles ; because we can then use their testimony to the older books, which they reverenced as divinely inspired. Next after the question of the Canon comes that of Biblical Criticism. Supposing it to be established that certain books were written, containing an authoritative record of Divine revelations, we have still to B 2 INTRODUCTORY. [l. inquire whether those books have come down safely to us — how we are to remove all the errors which may have accumu- lated during the process of transcription in many centuries, and so restore the texts to their original purity. Perhaps here might follow questions concerning the Translation of these texts, for without translation books written in Hebrew and Greek cannot be made available for the instruction of our people. At any rate, we have to consider questions con- cerning the Interpretation of these books. May we follow the same rules as we do in interpreting any ordinary book, and be satisfied in each case with that plain meaning which it seems the writer intended ; or does the fact that the books are divine — that the real author is not man, but God ; that there may, therefore, often be a meaning unknown even to the human agent who was commissioned to write the words — oblige us to employ special methods of interpretation in order to discover the deeper spiritual meaning ? And, lastly, we must inquire what is involved in the Divine Inspiration we ascribe to these books. Does it exclude the supposition of the smallest inaccuracy being found in them in science, history, moral or religious teaching ? If we admit the possibility of any such inaccuracy, can we put any limits to our concession ? The subjects I have named — the Canon, the Criticism, the Interpretation of our books, and the question of their Inspiration — are by no means all that might be discussed in treating of the Bible ; yet these alone form a programme to which it is impossible to do justice in the time at my disposal, and in practice I have found that, with whatever subject I begin, I am obliged, if I wish to treat it at all adequately, to crowd out nearly all the rest. At present I am about to take up the subject which seems in logical order the first — the question what books contain the authentic record of the teaching of our Lord and His Apostles — in other words, the question of the New Testament Canon. I wish to keep the question I have named quite clear of any discussion as to the Inspiration of the sacred books, such discussion plainly belonging to a later stage of the investi- gation. I wish to examine into the evidence for the genuine- ness and authenticity of the books of the Bible in the same I.] PRINCIPLES OF THE INVESTIGATION. 3 way as in the case of any ordinary books. It is clearly one question : At what date and by what authors were certain books written ? And quite another question : Is there reason to believe that the authors of these books were aided by supernatural guidance, and if so, what was the nature and extent of that supernatural assistance ? The former is, as we shall presently see, a question of vital importance in the controversy between Christians and unbelievers ; the latter is one internal among Christians, and only admits of discussion among those who are already convinced of the historic credibility of the New Testament books, and who, because they believe what these books relate about Jesus of Nazareth, find no difficulty in believing also that He endowed with special powers those whom He commissioned to write the revelation which He brought into the world. I make these remarks at the outset, because it enables us at once to set aside certain topics as irrelevant to the present investigation. Suppose, for example, it be alleged that there are plain contradictions between the first Gospel and the fourth ; if we were engaged in an inquiry as to the Inspiration of the Gospels, it would be of the utmost im- portance to examine whether and how far this allegation is true. But it may be quite possible to set it aside as entirely irrelevant, when we are only inquiring whether or not both Gospels were written by Apostles. It is the constant ex- perience of anyone who has ever engaged in historical investigation to have to reconcile contradictions between his authorities; but such contradictions must reach a high point in number and gravity before they suggest a suspicion that the opposing statements do not both proceed, as they profess to do, from persons having a first-hand knowledge of the matters about which they write. I have just said that I wish to investigate the genuineness and authenticity of the books of the Bible in the same way as we should in the case of any uninspired book. But we are not quite permitted to do so. Those who would approve of interpreting the Bible according to the same rules by which we should interpret any other book apply very different rules in determining the authorship of its parts from what are used 4 INTRODUCTORY. [l. in the case of other books. If we were to apply to the re- mains of classical literature the same rigour of scrutiny that is used towards the New Testament, there are but few of them that could stand the test. There are many of you who count as good classical scholars, who have always received with simple faith that what you read in your printed books is the work of the author to whom it is commonly ascribed, and have never applied your minds to consider what answer you could give to anyone who should deny it. You are very familiar, for instance, with Horace. Do you know what interval separates the oldest manuscript of his works from the age of Augustus, in which the poet is said to have lived ? Can you fill up the gap by quotations from ancient authors ? Do you know what ancient authors mention him or quote his poems ? Can you tell how far the earliest quotation is separated in time from the poet himself.^ Can you tell what extent of his writings is covered by quotations ? Can you give separate proofs for each book of the Odes, of the Satires and Epistles, and for the Art of Poetry ? And if you are able to give a proof for every book, can you meet the requirements of a more severe critic, who might demand a distinct proof of the Horatian origin of every ode of every book ? I suppose the chances are that you would not at- tempt to answer these questions ; because, though you pro- bably have heard of the theory of the Jesuit Hardouin, that the Odes of Horace and other classical books were written by Benedictine monks in the dark ages, it is not likely that you have given that theory a serious thought. Yet, if we were called on to refute it, by producing quotations from the Odes by any writer who lived within two centuries of the poet's death (and later testimony than that would not be thought worth looking at in the case of a New Testament book), we should be able to make only a very unsatisfactory reply. One example is often cited to show how little this kind of investigation is in practice judged to be necessary. The Roman History of Velleius Paterculus has come down to us in a single very corrupt manuscript, and the book is only once quoted by Priscian, a grammarian of the sixth century ; yet no one entertains the smallest doubt of its I.] PRINCIPLES OF THE INVESTIGATION. 5 genuineness.* The first six books of the Annals of Tacitus are also known to us only through a single manuscript which came to light in the fifteenth century. Not long ago an elaborate attempt was made to show that all the books of the Annals were forged in that century by an Italian scholar, Poggio. And it was asserted that ' no clear and definite allusion to the Annals can be found until the first half of the fifteenth century.' The latest editor of the Annals, Mr. Furneaux, is what, if the subject of his labours were a New Testament book, would be called an 'apologist': that is to say, he believes that the traditional doctrine as to the authorship is true, and that the supposed discovery of forgery is a mare's nest ; yet, in answer to the assertion just quoted, he can only produce one allusion, by no means ' clear and definite,' and that of a date 300 years later than the historian. Thus you see that if the external testimony to the New Testament books, which I shall discuss in future lectures, had not been forthcoming, we might still have good reason for holding fast to the traditional theory of their authorship. But where external proof is most abundant in the case of profane authors, it falls considerably short of what can be produced in support of the chief books of the New Testament. The reason, however, why a more stringent test is applied to our books is on account of their contents, namely, because the books contain accounts of miracles and what purport to be prophecies. Now, at first sight, it appears unreasonable to allow this consideration to enter when we are discussing the authorship of books. The works of Livy contain ac- counts of prodigies which I may perhaps think Livy credu- lous for believing, yet I am not on that account in the slightest degree inclined to doubt that Livy was the author of the history which bears his name. Still more does the remark apply to the accounts of miracles which swarm in the writings of the monkish historians. I disbelieve the miracles, but I make no question that the histories which relate those * This case is discussed in the controversy between Boyle and Bentley about the Epistles of Phalaris. 6 INTRODUCTORY. [l. miracles were written by the authors to whom they are ascribed. But here is the pinch of the matter. These miraculous tales to which I refer relate for the most part to events which the narrators represent as having occurred a long time before their own date. When honest and in- telligent men relate things of which they have personal knowledge, as a general rule we do not find them telling of anything miraculous. In short, it is only throwing into other words the statement that a miracle is an exception to the ordinary course of nature, to say that an account of a miracle is not likely to occur in true history, and therefore that, if we meet with such an account, it is likely to proceed from persons not truthful or not well informed. So it is a canon of criticism that stories embellished with miraculous ornaments are distant in time from the age in which the scene is laid. Troy may have been really taken ; Achilles and Agamemnon may have been real persons ; but when we read in the Iliad of gods and goddesses taking part in the battles round the city, this in itself is reason enough to suspect that Homer lived at such a distance from the events which he relates as permitted him to imagine the men of former days to be very different from ' such as mortals now are,' so that things might have happened to them unparalleled in his own experience. On these principles, then, it is contended that our sacred books, from the mere fact of their containing stories of miracles, are shown not to be the work of contemporaries. If there is one narrative of the New Testament which more than another contains internal proof of having been related by an eye-witness, it is the account of the voyage and ship- wreck of St. Paul. I recommend to your attention the very interesting monograph of Mr. Smith, of Jordan Hill, who himself sailed over the entire course, and by a multitude of minute coincidences verified the accuracy of St. Luke's narrative. Yet, because the story tells of miracles performed in the island on which Paul was cast, it has been supposed, without the smallest reason of any other kind, that these things must have been added by a later hand.* * Davidson, for instance, says (' Introduction to the New Testament/ II. 134) : 'The description of the voyage and shipwreck of Paul on his I,] PRINCIPLES OF THE INVESTIGATION. 7 The same things may be said as to the prophecies which our sacred books contain. In judging of an ordinary book there is no more certain canon of criticism than that the book is later than the latest person named in it, or the last event described in it. If we read a book which contained mention of the Duke of Wellington and Sir Robert Peel and of the battle of Waterloo, it would take an amazing amount of evidence to convince us that the book was written in the reign of Queen Anne. It is by taking notice of anachronisms of this kind that the spuriousness has been proved of works which had imposed on an uncritical age ; as, for example, the ' Epistles of Phalaris,' which were exposed in Bentley's famous essay, or the Decretal Epistles, purporting to be written by the early Bishops of Rome, on which so much of the fabric of Roman supremacy has been built. Well, the same principles of criticism have been freely applied to our sacred books. Porphyry contended that the prophecy of Daniel must have been written by some one who lived later than Antiochus Epiphanes, who is clearly described in the book : the latter half of Isaiah, it is urged, must be later than Cyrus : the Gospel of St. Luke must be later than the Destruc- tion of Jerusalem, which it describes as to be ' trodden down of the Gentiles until the times of the Gentiles be fulfilled,' showing, it is said, that the writer not only lived after the siege, but so long after as to have known that Jerusalem remained for a considerable time in a condition of abiding desolation. Now, I have intimated in what I have said that I am ready, within reasonable limits, to adopt the canons of criti- cism to which I have referred. But I cannot admit them to be applicable without exception. Miraculous embellishments way to Rome is minute and accurate, proceeding from an eye-witness. A few notices here and there betray a later hand, especially those which are framed to show the wonder-working power of the Apostle, such as xxviii. 3-5, 8, 9.' Dr. S. Davidson, for some time Professor in the Lancashire Indepen- dent College, published an Introduction to the New Testament, in three volumes, 1848-51. In this the main lines of traditional opinion were followed ; but his views show a complete alteration in the new Introduc- tion, in two volumes, which he published in 1868. My quotation is fi'om the second edition of the later book, published in 1882. 8 INTRODUCTORY. [l. may be a ground for suspecting that the narrative is not con- temporaneous with the events ; but if it is asserted that mira- culous stories are never told by men contemporary with the things related, that certainly is not true. I have, at different times, read in periodicals accounts of spiritual manifestations which I entirely disbelieve, yet in many cases impute to the narrators no wilful intention to deceive, nor do I doubt that they were, as they profess, actually present at the scenes they describe. The Life of St. Martin of Tours, by his friend Sul- picius Severus, is full of the supernatural. I do not find that any of those who refuse to believe in the miraculous stories attempt to justify their disbelief by maintaining that Sul- picius was not the author of the Life. These are instances of what I reckon as false miracles ; but the course of lectures of last year must have been a failure if they did not establish that true miracles, though from the nature of the case not of common occurrence, are still possible. If so, when they actually do occur, the witnesses of them may relate them in true histories. In short, if miracle and prophecy be impos- sible, there is an end of the whole matter. Your faith is vain, and our teaching is vain. Now, this principle, namely, the absolute impossibility of miracle, is the basis of the investigations of the school, some of whose results must be examined in this course of lectures. Two of its leading writers, Strauss and Renan, in their pre- faces, make the absolute rejection of the supernatural the foundation of their whole structure. Renan"^" (p. Hi.) declares that he will accept a miracle as proved only if it is found that it will succeed on repetition, forgetting that in this case it would not be a miracle at all, but a newly-discovered natural * The first edition of the 'Vie de Jesus par Ernest Renan' was published in 1863. It was followed by six successive volumes, relating the history of the ' Origines du Christianisme ' : that is to say, the formation and early history of the Christian Church. The last volume, bringing the history down to the reign of Marcus Aurelius, was published in 1882. The refe- rences in these lectures are usually to an 1863 edition of the 'Life of Jesus,' which alone was available when they were written. It has not been necessary for my purpose to examine minutely the modifications introduced into later editions, because the changes in Renan' s views are sufficiently indicated in the later volumes of his series. I,] PRINCIPLES OF THE INVESTIGATION. 9 law. Strauss,"^' equally, in his preface (p. xv) declares it to be his fundamental principle that there was nothing supernatural in the person or work of Jesus. The same thing may be said about a book which made some sensation on its publication a few years ago, ' Supernatural Religion.'f The extreme cap- tiousness of its criticism found no approval from respectable foreign reviewers, however little they might be entitled to be classed as believers in Revelation. Dates were assigned in it to some of our New Testament books so late as to shock * D. F. Strauss (1808-1874), a pupil of Baur, published, in 1835, his •Life of Jesus,' the mythical theory propounded in which gave rise to much controversy, and stimulated other attempts to disprove the historic credi- bility of the Gospel narratives. The book had rather fallen into oblivion when, in 1864, Strauss, availing himself of the labours of those who had written in the interval, published a new ' Life of Jesus,' ' for the German people.' It is to this popular Life that I refer in the text. In 1872, Strauss broke completely with Christianity, in a book called ' The Old Faith and the New.' t This book, published, vols. i. and ii. in 1874, "^'ol. iii. in 1877, obtained a good deal of notoriety by dint of enormous puffing, great pains having been taken to produce a belief that Bishop Thirlwall was the author. The aspect of the pages, bristling with learned references, strengthened the impression that the author must be a scholar of immense reading. The windbag collapsed when Lightfoot showed that this supposed Bishop Thirlwall did not possess even a schoolboy acquaintance with Greek and Latin, and that his references were in some cases borrowed wholesale, in others did not prove the things for which they were cited, and very often appealed to writers whose opinion is of no value. But what I wish here to remark is, that what really made the book worthless was not its want of scholarship, but its want of candour. An indifferent scholar, if he were industrious and honest, and, I must add, modest enough not to find fault with the translations of better scholars than himself, might compile a book which would only need the removal of some surface errors to be a really valu- able contribution to knowledge. But want of candour vitiates abook through and through. There is no profit in examining the conclusions arrived at by a writer who never seems to care on which side lies the balance of his- toric probability, but only which conclusion will be most disagreeable^ to the assertors of the supernatural. For myself, I find instruction in studying the results arrived at by an inquirer who strives to be candid, whether he be orthodox or not ; but I have little curiosity to find out the exact amount of evidence which would leave a captious objector without a word to say in justification of his refusal to admit it. Lightfoot' s answers to ' Supernatural Religion' appeared in the Con- teniporary Revieiv, December, 1874; January, February, May, August, October, 1875 ; February and August, 1876 ; May, 1877. In addition to their temporary object of refutation, these articles contain so much of per- manent value on the criticism of the remains of the second century, that the announcement is welcome that they are at length to be republished. ' Supernatural Religion ' has also been dealt with by Westcott in a Preface to the later editions of his ' New Testament Canon.' 10 INTRODUCTORY. [l. anyone who makes an attempt fairly to judge of evidence. And the reason is, that the author starts with the denial of the supernatural as his fixed principle. If that principle be, in his eyes, once threatened, all ordinary laws of probability must give way. It is necessary at the outset to call your attention to this fundamental principle of our opponents, because it explains their seeming want of candour ; why it is that they are so unreasonably rigorous in their demands of proof of the authenticity of our books ; why they meet with evasions proofs that seem to be demonstrative. It is because, to their minds, any solution of a difficulty is more probable than one which would concede that a miracle had really occurred. Now, it has become more and more plain that, if it be granted that our Gospels were written by the persons to whom they are ascribed, two of whom were Apostles, men who had personal knowledge of the things which they relate, and whose whole narrative bears the impress of honesty, then the reality of miracles necessarily follows. No one has proved this more clearly than Strauss. He has conclusively shown that anyone who has determined to begin by asserting the absolute impossibility of miracle cannot come with a per- fectly unbiassed mind to investigate the history of our sacred books, because an acceptance of the traditional account of their origin would be absolutely fatal to this first principle. Strauss begins his latest work on the life of Jesus by criticiz- ing the works of his predecessors, who were as disinclined as himself to admit the reality of miracles, and who yet accepted the traditional account of the authorship of the Gospels ; and he shows that every one of them failed, and could not help failing, to maintain this inconsistent position. Paulus* may serve as a specimen of writers of this class. He receives the Gospel narratives as in some sense true ; the Evangelists do not intend to deceive ; they tell things that really occurred, but through an error of judgment they represent incidents as miraculous which in truth are capable of a natural explana- * Paulus {1761-1851), Professor, first at Jena, afterwards at Heidelberg, published his ' Commentary on the New Testament,' 1800-1804, and his * Life of Jesus' in 1828. I.] PRINCIPLES OF THE INVESTIGATION. I r tion. For example, according to him, there was nothing miraculous in Christ's feeding of the multitude. But the example of Christ and His Apostles freely distributing their scanty store among the people shamed all the rest into pro- ducing and sharing with their neighbours what they had secretly brought each for himself; and so all were filled, and supposed there had been something supernatural in the mul- tiplication of the food. Similarly, Paulus does not deny that our Lord seeined to walk on the water ; but, since of course He could not really have done so, he concludes that He walked on the bank of the lake, where, through an optical delusion, his movements conveyed a false impression to the spectators. He so far believes the story of the announce- ment by an angel of the Saviour's Incarnation as to concede that the Virgin Mary truly told that a stranger had come in to her with this message, who represented himself to be the angel Gabriel ; but since this could not possibly be true, we must conclude that the messenger was an impostor. These few specimens are enough to give you an idea of the mass of improbabilities and absurdities which are accumulated in the working out of this scheme, so that we may fairly say that the history, as Paulus tells it, is a more miraculous one than if we take the Gospel narratives in their literal sense. It is unnecessary for me to waste words in exposing these absurdi- ties, because no one has a more lively sense than Strauss himself of the failure of the attempts of his predecessors to write a non-miraculous life of Jesus; and he owns distinctly that, if the historical character of the Gospels be ever con- ceded, it will be impossible to eliminate miracle from the life of Christ.* Strauss's own solution, you no doubt know, was to deny that the Gospels are historical. According to him, they are not written by eye-witnesses of the things related, but are legends put together at a considerable interval of time after the supposed events. How Jesus of Nazareth succeeded in collecting a number of disciples, and in inspiring them * ' Sind die Evangelien wirklich geschichtliche Urkunden, so ist das Wunder aus der Lebensgeschichte Jesu nicht zu entfernen.' — Lehen Jesu, p. 17. 12 INTRODUCTORY. [l. with a persuasion, not to be shaken by the unhappy end of his life, that he was the promised Messiah, Strauss very imperfectly explains. But his theory is, that a community of Jewish Christians arose who somehow or another had come to believe that Jesus was the Messiah, and who had all from childhood been brought up in the belief that the Messiah was to have certain distinguishing marks, that he was to be born in Bethlehem, and soforth ; that then stories circulated among them purporting to show how Jesus actually did all that according to their notions he ought to have done ; and that these stories, being in perfect accordance with their preconceived notions,when once started were readily believed, and in simple faith passed on from one to another, until in process of time they came to be recorded in the Gospels. It is not the business of this Term to expose the weakness of this theory ; and, indeed, Strauss himself appears to have become sensible what a difficult task he had set himself when he undertook to deny the truth of the Gospel histories, and yet clear the historians of conscious imposture. Certainly, there is a very perceptible shifting of ground from his original work, published in 1835, in the new popular version brought out for the use of the German people in the year 1864. But common to both is the principle of the absolute rejection of the supernatural ; and this I single out because the investiga- tion in which I wish to engage you proceeds on an opposite plan, and therefore will naturally lead to a different result. My investigation aims at being purely historical. It refuses to be dominated by any philosophical or pseudo-philosophical principle. I wish to examine the evidence for the date of the Christian books on the same principles on which I would act if they were ordinary profane histories, without allowing myself to be prejudiced for or against them by a knowledge of their contents, or by fear of consequences which I shall be forced to admit if I own these works to be genuine. For I do not hold our present experience to be the absolute rule and measure of all possibilities future and past ; nor do I deem it so incredible that God should reveal Himself to His creatures, as to refuse to listen to all evidence for such a fact when it is offered. II.] baur's theory of early church history. 13. II. Part II. baur's theory of early church history. In his new Life of Jesus, Strauss has greatly availed himself of the labours of Baur^' and of the school founded by him, called sometimes, from his place of residence, the Tubingen school, or, from the nature of their theories, the Tendency school. It will be advisable to- give you, by way of preface to our course, some short account of these theories : not only because of the wide acceptance they have met with from writers of the sceptical school both in Germany and of later years in England, but also because the view which they present of the history of the early Church affects the credit to be given to the testimony of that Church concerning our sacred literature. There is no use in calling a witness without making an attempt to remove prejudices which you know to be entertained, whether against his honesty or his means of information. Therefore, before producing to you evidence as to the reception of the Gospels by the early Church, it is expedient to inquire whether certain speculations are de- serving of regard, which represent that Church as having altered so much and so rapidly from its original form, as to be put under a strong temptation to falsify the documents- which relate its early history. According to Baur, our books are not the innocent, purposeless collection of legendary tales for which the disciples of Strauss might take them ; all, even those which seem least artful, are put together with a pur- pose, and have a * tendency' Just as of Mr. Dickens's novels, one is intended to expose the abuses of the Poor Law system, * F. C. Baur (1792-1860) published in the Tubingen ' Zeitschrift' for 1831, a paper on the Christ-party in the Church of Corinth, which con- tained the germs of the theory of which an account is given in the text. The fully developed theory was given in his *Paulus,' published in 1845. 14 INTRODUCTORY. [ll- another of the Court of Chancery, another of Ecclesiastical Courts, and so forth ; so each of the Christian books, how- ever innocently it may seem to profess to give straightforward narrative, is really written with a secret design to inculcate certain dogmatic views. But what are these dogmatic views ? To answer this we must expound the history which Baur gives of the early progress of Christianity. He manufactured it mainly out of his own notions of the fitness of things, with very slender support from external authority ; and it has obliged him to condemn as forged or interpolated the great mass of exist- ing ancient documents, since they are so perverse as not to be reconcilable with the critic's theory. The main pillar of the theory is a work of by no means great antiquity as com- pared with the others which are to be discussed in this course of lectures, being not older than the very end of the second century. I speak of the spurious literature attributed to Clement of Rome, a favourite character with the manufac- turers of apocryphal literature in the second or third century. The history of these writings is so remarkable, that I cannot employ a few minutes better than in giving you some account of them. The work originated among the Ebionites, or Jewish-Christian heretical sects. In its earliest form it contained discourses ascribed to the Apostle Peter,, both in controversy with heathen, and also with heretics, of whom Simon Magus was made the representative and spokesman. This work underwent a great variety -of recastings. It is doubtful whether Clement was introduced into the very earliest form of it ; but he was certainly, at a comparatively early date, made the narrator of the story ; and the account of Clement's history gradually grew into a little romance, which, no doubt, greatly helped the popularity of the work. Clement tells how he had been brought up as a rich orphan at Rome, his parents having been lost in his early childhood. He gives an affecting account of his search for religious truth, which he seeks in vain among the schools of the philosophers, but there finds nothing but strife and uncertainty. At last news is brought to Rome of the appearance of a wonder- working prophet in Palestine. Clement sails in search of II.] baur's theory of early church history. 15 him, arrives after the death of Jesus, but meets Peter, and is instructed and converted by him. Travelling about with Peter, he finds first his mother, then his brothers, then his father ; and it is from these successive recognitions that the work called the ' Clementine Recognitions ' takes its name. This is one of two forms in which the work is still extant ; the other, called the * Clementine Homilies,' being as respects the story substantially the same, but as respects the dis- courses worked into it, and the doctrine contained in them, a good deal different. The ' Homilies ' contain the Ebionite doctrine in its strongest form ; in the ' Recognitions ' the repulsive features of Ebionitism are softened down, so as to make the book not altogether unfit for use among the ortho- dox, and in fact the ' Recognitions ' are only preserved in a Latin translation made for the use of the orthodox by a Church writer, Rufinus. There is good evidence that another form, still more orthodox, which has not come down to us, was once in circulation. And though the heretical character of these Clementine writings was well known to the Fathers, who therefore rejected their doctrine, yet many of the things these writings tell about Peter passed into Church tradition. In particular, this Clementine literature has had a marvellous share in shaping the history of Christendom, by inventing the story that Peter was Bishop of Rome, and that he named Clement to succeed him in that See. At the revival of learning these writings were at first treated with contumely as a good-for-nothing heretical fig- ment. Long time passed before it was noted that, though the book be regarded as no more than a controversial novel, yet, dating as it does from the end of the second century, it must be a most valuable source of information as to the history and opinions of the sect from which it emanated. Baur, in particular, has called special attention to the anti-Paulinism of the work ; and it is quite true that when we look into it carefully, we find that Paul and his labours are passed over in silence, Peter figuring as the Apostle of the Gentiles as well as of the Jews. In one passage in the ' Homilies ' the dislike of Paul passes the bounds of mere silence. For Simon Magus is described as ' withstanding Peter to the face,* and l6 INTRODUCTORY. [ll. declaring that he was ' to be blamed.'* Many a reader might innocently overlook the malice of these expressions; but when attention is called to them, we can hardly deny that the coin- cidence of language with that in the Epistle to the Galatians (ii. 1 1) leads to the surmise that under the character of Simon a reference to Paul is cloaked ; and that Paul is intended by the enemy, 6 ixOpb? a.v$poj7ro<5, who opposed St. Peter and St. James. We see also what interpretation is to be put on a controversy as to relative superiority between Simon Magus, who claims to have seen our Lord in vision, and Peter, who had actually seen Flim in the flesh. It must be admitted that the writer shows a covert dislike to Paul; but we must remark, at the same time, that the obscurity with which he veils his assault on the Apostle shows plainly that he dared make no open attack, and that his views were, at that time, shared by no influential party in the Church. But the Tiibingen school pounced with avidity on this book. Here, they say, we have the key to the true history of the origin of Christianity. Epiphanius tells us that the Ebionites rejected Paul's Epistles, and looked on him as an apostate. This book, then, may be regarded as a specimen of the feelings towards Paul of an early section of the Christians. Baur's idea is, that in all this anti-Pauline rancour we have a * survival' of an earlier state of things, the memory of which had been lost, owing to its variance with the Church's sub- sequent doctrine. At the beginning of the third century we have, in one corner of the Church, men who hate Paul with the utmost bitterness, though, in deference to the then general opinion, they are obliged to cloak their hatred under disguises. At the same time we have, in another corner of the Church, the Marcionites,t who recognize no Apostle but Paul, who utterly reject the Jewish religion and the Old * In order that the coincidence with the Epistle to the Galatians may be more easily recognized, I adopt the language of the Authorized Version in translating ^iuavTios avdecrTrjKcis /xoi,' 'Kareyyujafxeyou yue Aeyets' {Horn. xvii. 19). t The Chronicle of Edessa names A.D. 138 as the date of the rise of the heresy of Marcion, and this is probably as near the truth as we have the means of going. The heresy had reached formidable dimensions when Justin Martyr wrote his Apology. II.] baur's theory of early church history. 17 Testament, and who set aside all the earlier Apostles as of no authority. What, asks Baur, if these extreme views on both sides be not, as had been supposed, heretical develop- ments, but survivals of a once general state of things ? Those who themselves hold our Lord to have been mere man find it natural to believe that this must have been the earliest belief of His followers. Consequently, the theory is that the whole Christian Church was originally Ebionite ; that Paul was a heresiarch, or introducer of novel doctrines violently con- demned by the great mass of existing believers, of whose feelings towards Paul these Clementine writings are regarded as a fair specimen ; that the representations in the Acts of the Apostles that Paul was on good terms with the elder Apostles are altogether false, and that, on the contrary, the early Church consisted of two parties, Pauline and anti- Pauline, bitterly opposed to each other. Such is the general outline of the theory ; but speculation has particularly run wild on the assault on Paul in the Cle- mentines under the mask of Simon Magus. Sceptical critics jump at the conclusion that Simon Magus was the nickname under which Paul was generally known ; and some even go so far as to maintain that the account in Acts viii. is a covert libel on St. Paul, which St. Luke, notwithstanding his Paul- inism, has been so stupid as to perpetuate in his history ; Simon's offer of money to the Apostles representing Paul's attempt to bribe the other Apostles into recognition of his claims by the gift of money which he had collected for the poor saints at Jerusalem. I feel ashamed of repeating such nonsense ; but it is necessary that you should know the things that are said ; for you may meet these German dreams retailed as sober truth by sceptical writers in this country, many of whom imagine that it would be a confession of inability to keep pace with the progress of critical science, if they ventured to test, by English common sense, the suc- cessive schemes by which German aspirants after fame seek to gain a reputation for ingenuity. A more careful examination of the Clementines shows that they did not emanate from that body which opposed Paul in his lifetime. There appear, in fact, to have been two c l8 INTRODUCTORY. lu. distinct kinds of Ebionites. One kind we may call Pharisaic Ebionites, who may be regarded as representing those who strove to combine the acknowledgment of the Messiahship. though not the Divinity, of Jesus with the maintenance of the full obligation of the Mosaic Law. They appear never to have been of much influence, and before long to have died out. But the Ebionites among whom the Clementines origi- nated represented quite a different set of opinions, and appear to have been a continuation of the Jewish sect of the Essenes.* Among their doctrines was a fanatical horror of the rite of sacrifice, which they could not believe to have been divinely instituted. The whole Temple service was abomination in their eyes. They believed that the true prophet had ap- peared in divers incarnations, Adam being the first, and Jesus the last. The story of the fall of Adam, of course, they rejected. And with these opinions it was necessary for them to reject great parts of the Old Testament. The Pentateuch alone was used by them, and of this large parts were cut out as interpolated. You will remember that Paley, in his * Evidences,' quotes an apocryphal Gospel as ascribing to our Lord the saying, * Be ye good money- changers.' This they interpreted as a direction not to be de- ceived by the false coin which purported to be God's Word. This doctrine, of which the Clementine ' Homilies ' are full, would be as repulsive as Paul's own doctrine to the orthodox Jews whom Paul had to encounter ; and therefore, as I say, these Clementines have no pretence to date from the times, or to represent the feelings, of his first antagonists in the Christian Church. The true history of these people seems to have been that, after the destruction of the Temple at Jeru- salem by Titus, some of the Essene communities, who lived on the other side of Jordan, and who knew that Jesus had predicted the destruction of that Temple to w^hose rites they always had been opposed, became willing to own Jesus to * On these two kinds of Ebionites, see Lightfoot's ' Galatians,' p. 318. The Church History of the period is Hkely to be misunderstood if the identity of the latter kind with the Elkesaites is not perceived ; and if it is not recognized, how little claim these heretics have to represent any considerable body, even of Jewish Christians; and how late their origin was by their own confession. II.] baur's theory of early church history. 19 have been divinely sent, but retained a number of their own peculiar opinions. They appear to have made a few converts among the Jews dispersed by the fall of the capital, but not to have extended themselves very widely ; and it is not till the end of the second century, or the beginning of the third, that some of them made their way to Rome. They had among them some men of literary skill, enough at least to produce a forgery. Among the documents they brought to Rome, for instance, was one called the * Book of Elkesai,' which pur- ported to be a revelation of their peculiar doctrines, but for which, it is interesting to remark, no higher antiquity was claimed than the reign of Trajan, a time when all the Apostles were dead. They accounted for this late date by a theory that the ordinary rule of God's Providence was that error should come first, and that the truth which corrected it should be revealed later. An early book of theirs, * The Preaching of Peter,' was improved, first into the form known as the * Recognitions,' afterwards into the * Homilies,' and was made to include these Elkesaite revelations. The making Simon Magus the representative of Pauline ideas has all the marks of being an after-thought. There is not a trace of it in the * Recognitions,' through the whole of which, as well as in every part of the * Homilies ' but the one already referred to, Simon is Simon and Paul is Paul. But, from the nature of the composition, the opinions which the writer means to combat must be put into the mouth of some of the characters in the story. When the object is to combat the doctrines of Marcion, Simon is made the exponent of these doctrines. But this furnishes no justification for the statement that there was a general practice of nicknaming Paul as Simon. As far as we can see, the author of the * Recognitions ' is quite ignorant of it. As the anti-Pauline party is judged of by the Ebionites of the second century, so the school of Marcion is supposed to represent the opposing party. Thus the Christian society is said to have included two schools — a Judaizing school and a Gnostic or philosophizing school — violently hostile to each other. It is not exactly our experience that theological schisms heal up so rapidly and so completely that in fifty 20 INTRODUCTORY. [ll. years no trace remains of them, nor even memory of their ex- istence. But so, we are told, it happened in this case. And as in the process of time the bitterness of the dispute abated, arose the Catholic Church, in which both Peter and Paul were held in honour ; and then were attempts made to throw a veil over the early dissensions, and to represent the first preachers of Christianity as at unity among themselves. It remains to test this whole theory of the conflict of Pau- line and anti-Pauline parties in the early Church by compari- son with the documentary evidence ; and the result is that it bears the test very ill, so much so that, in order to save his theory from destruction, Baur has been obliged to make a tolerably clean sweep of the documents. In four of Paul's Epistles some symptoms may be found which can be inter- preted as exhibiting feelings of jealousy or soreness towards the elder Apostles. But there is nothing of the kind in the other nine. The genuineness of these, therefore, must be denied. The Acts of the Apostles represent Paul as on most friendly terms with Peter and James, and these Apostles as taking his side in the controversy as to imposing Judaism on the Gentiles. The Acts, therefore, cannot be true history. Not only the discourses ascribed to Peter in the Acts, but the first Epistle, which the ancient Church unanimously accepted as Peter's, is thoroughly Pauline in doctrine. "We must, therefore, disregard ancient testimony, and reject the Epistle. The earliest uninspired Christian document, the Epistle of Clement of Rome, confessedly belongs to the conciliatory school, Peter and Paul being placed in it on equal terms of reverence and honour. It, too, must be discarded. So, in like manner, go the Epistles of Ignatius and Poly.carp, the former of whom writes to the Romans (ch. v.), ' I do not pretend to command you, like Peter or Paul.' Now, it is very easy to make a theory on any subject if we are at liberty to sweep away all facts which will not fall in with it. By this method the Elkesaites were able to maintain that the Old Testament did not sanction the right of sacrifice, and Marcion that the New Testament did not recognize the God of the Jews. But one has a right to suspect any theorizer if, in order to clear the ground for a foundation for his theory, II.] BAUR'S theory of early church history. 2 1 he has to begin by getting rid of the previously accepted facts. So it is a presumption against this theory of Baur's, that we find him forced to get rid of nearly all the documents purporting to come from the Apostolic age, because, notwith- standing that they have been searched with microscopic minuteness for instances of Pauline and anti-Pauline rancour, scarcely anything of the kind can be found. I will give a specimen or two of these supposed instances, which will enable you to appreciate the amazing amount of misdirected ingenuity which has been spent in elaborating this system. The first is a specimen which is thought by those who have discovered it to be an exceedingly good and striking one. St. Matthew (vii. 22, 23), in the Sermon on the Mount, makes our Lord speak of men who say, * Lord, Lord,' and who will, at the Last Day, appeal to their prophesying, their driving out devils, and their doing of miracles in the name of Jesus, but who will be rejected by Him as doers of lawlessness {dvoixLo), whom He had never known. It may surprise you to hear that this sentence was coined by the Jewish Christian author of the record as a protest against the opposition to the Law made by Paul and his followers. And it may surprise you more to hear that St. Luke is highly complimented for the skill with which (xiii. 26) he turns this Jewish anti- Pauline saying into one of a Pauline anti-Jewish character. He substitutes the word aSt/cta, ' injustice,' for dvofxia, ' law- lessness,' and he directs the saying against the Jews, who will one day appeal to having eaten and drunk in the presence of Jesus, and to His having taught in their streets, but, notwith- standing, shall be told by Him to depart as doers, not of dvo/xLa, but of iniquity, and shall break forth into loud weeping when they see people coming from the east and west, and north and south, and sitting down with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, while themselves are shut out. One other sample I will give you. St. Matthew says (x. 27), * What I tell you in darkness, that speak ye in light ; and what ye hear in the ear, that preach ye upon the housetops.' St. Luke (xii. 3) — 'Whatsoever ye have spoken in darkness shall be heard in the light; and that which ye have spoken in the ear in closets shall be proclaimed on the housetops.' 22 INTRODUCTORY. [ll. It is contended that, whereas St. Matthew represents the Apostles as directed to speak in the light and on the house- tops, St. Luke turns the phrase into the passive — the pro- clamation shall be by other than the Apostles, namely, by St. Paul and his party. When, however, all ingenuity has been tried, there is no escaping the acknowledgment that, if we are to look for an anti-Pauline Gospel, it cannot be any of those we have now. That Matthew's Gospel was made primarily for the use of Jews most critics are agreed. Yet, do we find this Jewish Gospel hostile to the admission of Gentiles ? It opens (ii. i) with an account of Gentile Magi from the distant East com- ing to worship the infant Saviour. In the first chapter which relates any miracle (viii. 5), we have an account of one per- formed at the request of a Gentile, who is commended as exhibiting faith not to be found in Israel ; and on this occa- sion there is taught the doctrine of the admission of the Gen- tiles, not to equal privileges with the Jews, but to a place vacated by the rejection of the Jews. * Many shall come from the east and west, and shall sit down with Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, in the kingdom of heaven ; but the children of the kingdom shall be cast out into outer darkness ; there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.' It is to be noted that the Gentile centurion of St. Matthew is in St. Luke made a kind of Jewish proselyte — ' He loveth our nation, and hath built us our synagogue' (vii. 5). In a later chapter of St. Matthew the same doctrine is taught even more plainly — * The kingdom of God shall be taken from you, and given to a nation bringing forth the fruits thereof (xxi. 43). The parting command of our Saviour recorded in this Gospel is, * Go ye and make disciples of all nations' (xxviii. 19). In the account of our Lord's death, a critic with a keen eye for * tendency,' might pronounce Matthew strongly anti-Jewish. It is Luke (xxiii. 28), not Matthew, who records our Lord's words of tender pity — ' Daughters of Jerusalem, weep not for Me, but weep for yourselves, and for your children.' St. Matthew seems anxious to throw the guilt of our Lord's death off the Gentiles, and on the Jews. Pilate's wife warns her husband to ' have nothing to do with that just man ' (xxvii. II.] baur's theory of early church history. 23 19). Pilate himself washes his hands before the multitude and declares that he is ' innocent of the blood of this just person.' The Jews accept the awful burden, and exclaim, 'His blood be on us, and on our children' {ih. 24, 25). Nay, we find in our St. Matthew a trait also found in St. John's Gospel, on account of which the latter has been characterized as strongly anti-Jewish, namely, that the unconverted mem- bers of the Jewish nation are spoken of as ' the Jews,' imply- ing- that the Christians were an entirely separate community. In the last chapter of St. Matthew {v. 15) we have, 'This saying is commonly reported among the Jews unto this day.' When it is attempted to get rid of these evidences of anti- Jewish tendency by the assertion that none of these things could have been in the original Matthew, we can only reply, that it is open to anyone to say that the original Matthew contained just whatever he likes. But no theory can be said to rest on a scientific basis which, instead of taking cognizance of all the facts, arbitrarily rejects whatever of them do not happen to accord with the hypothesis. It is plain from what I have said that, when every ingenuity has been expended on our documents, they fail to yield any sufficient evidence of the bitter hostility which, according to Baur's theory, existed between the two great sections of the early Church ; and, therefore, these documents are con- demned by him and his followers as, at least in their present shape, the work of a later age, which had set to work to remove all traces of the ancient dissensions. Baur acknow- ledges only five of our books as genuine remains of the Apostolic age — four Epistles of Paul and the Apocalypse. The four Epistles are those to the Galatians, Romans, and the two to the Corinthians. It is not much to be grateful for that he grants the genuineness of these, for they carry on their face such marks of strong personal feeling, and are so manifestly not the work of a forger, but the outpouring of a heart stirred to its depths by the incidents of a real life, that whoever should deny their genuineness would pronounce on himself the sentence of incapacity to distinguish true from false. But these Epistles have, in Baur's eyes, the further recommendation, that they are those in which Paul has to 24 INTRODUCTORY. [ll. deal with his Jewish opponents, and therefore are the most likely to yield proofs of that jealousy of the elder Apostles and hostility to them which Baur's theory demands. After- wards, when I come to speak of St. Paul's Epistles and of the Acts of the Apostles, I will try to show how little ground there is for the assertion that the view of Paul's relations to the heads of the Jerusalem Church, exhibited in the Epistle to the Galatians, is irreconcilable with that presented by the Acts. If, indeed, anyone imagines that the Apostles were not men of like passions with ourselves, and therefore counts it a thing impossible that one should feel or express dissatis- faction with the conduct of another ; if he cannot believe that they should be differently influenced by diiferent aspects of the truth, or be of various opinion as to the immediate necessity of guarding against different forms of error; why, then, we need not go beyond what the Epistle to the Galatians tells of the dispute between Peter and Paul at Antioch in order to convince him of his mistake. But when we have fully conceded that there was no rigid sameness of utterance among the first preachers of the Gospel, we still fall immensely short of what Baur's theory requires us to grant. In order to adopt his view, we must hold that the differences between St. Paul and the elder Apostles were not like those which are known to subsist at the present day between political leaders of the same party — differences which do not prevent them from sitting in the same cabinet and joining in a common policy ; but rather like the differences which separate the leaders of opposite parties, or even of hostile states. The most Ultra- montane Roman Catholic could not think worse of Martin Luther than, if we believe our modern guides, the members of the Church of Jerusalem thought of St. Paul,* The wildest Protestant could not hate the Pope more than St. Paul's Gentile converts are imagined to have hated the Apostles of the circumcision. But the most wonderful part of the theory is the alleged * ' Jamais, en efiet, I'Eglise chretienne ne porta dans son sein une cause de schisme aussi profonde que celle qui I'agitait en ce moment. Luther et le scolastique le plus routinier differaient moins que Paul et Jacques.' — Renan, SL Paid, p. 289. III.] THE ANTI-PAULINISM OF THE APOCALYPSE. Zs end of the schism, in which Peter and Paul came to be regarded as brothers, and held in equal honour. That is the same as if we Protestants held in equal honour Martin Luther and Ignatius Loyola, and as if it was our popular belief that these two great saints had loved each other as brethren. Surely, the Pauline Christians must have been the most for- giving men in the world. They had been victorious along the whole line. The Judaizers had disappeared. No one dreamed of imposing the yoke of circumcision on the Gentiles. Even in the Clementines no such burden is sought to be laid on Gentile converts. Yet these Gentiles agreed in giving equal honour to the great Apostle who had gained them their liberty and to the bigoted Jews who had cast out his name as evil, nicknamed him Balaam and Simon Magus, and orga- nized conspiracy against him wherever he taught ! Surely this is a theory not so recommended by probability that we can aiford to condone its deficiency in documentary proof; and, for my part, I am well content to abide by the old representations made by the author of the Acts of the Apostles. iij. Part III. THE ANTI-PAULINISM OF THE APOCALYPSE. I HAVE said that the Apocalypse is also received by Baur, and is acknowledged by him as a genuine work of the Apostle John. It is scarcely necessary to say, that he does not look upon it as containing any real prophecy, but merely antici- pations of the future, which have been falsified by the event. In owning the Book of the Revelation to be Apostolic, the modern school of destructive criticism is more easy of belief than part of the early Church ; for in the third century there were many who denied the authority of this book, and I shall have occasion afterwards to speak of an argument by Diony- sius of Alexandria, that the difference in style between this book and the Gospel of St. John proves that both could not 26 INTRODUCTORY. [ill. have the same author. This argument has been eagerly adopted by the modern school, only with a reversal of its application. They hope now, by conceding that the Apoca- lypse is the work of John, to found, upon differences of style, an argument that the fourth Gospel cannot be his ; and, in fact, it is now alleged to be one of the most certain results of criticism, that these two works cannot have the same author. This, again, suggests a topic which I will not anticipate, as the argument must be considered when I come to discuss the Gospel according to St. John. Suffice it now to say, that t\t^ Apocalypse is held to be strongly Jewish and anti-Pauline. In the Epistles to the Seven Churches, Paul is held to be the enemy against whom St. John, writing in our Lord's name, warns his disciples. Indeed, one German teacher of this school (Volkmar) carries out the theory to the absurdity of imagining that by the false prophet predicted as upholding the power of the Beast we are to understand St. Paul. In the Epistle to the Church in Smyrna (ii. 9) we read: — *I know the blasphemy of them which say they are Jews and are not, but are the synagogue of Satan.' And in that to the Church in Philadelphia (iii. 9) : — ' I will make them of the synagogue of Satan which say they are Jews and are not, but do lie, to come and worship before thy feet.' We are asked to believe that those false Jews, with whom St. John has broken so entirely as to call them the synagogue of Satan, are St. Paul and his party. The angel of the Church of Ephesus (ii. 2) is praised because ' he has tried them which say they are apostles, and are not, and has found them liars.' Here again we are asked to believe that it was Paul's claim to apostleship which was thus rejected ; and we are again and again invited by Renan to notice the remarkable fact, that in Ephesus, where St. Paul had resided so long, and laboured for a time so successfully, a few years after his departure his followers had completely disappeared, and his claims to apostleship had been generally owned to be based in falsehood. Lastly, you will remember that in the Epistle to the angel of the Church in Pergamos those are condemned (ii. 14, 15) who * hold the doctrine of Balaam,' and also those who ' hold the doctrine of the Nicolaitans.' It had been con- III.] THE ANTI-PAULINISM OF THE APOCALYPSE. 27 jectured long since — and the conjecture has been received with more favour than I think it deserves — that Nicolaus, ' conqueror of the people,' was but a Greek translation of the name Balaam. The etymology seems to me a forced one ; but Renan adopts this view, with the addition, that Balaam was a nickname for St. Paul, and that the doctrine of Balaam, the teaching *to eat things sacrificed to idols, and to commit fornication ' (by which he understands marriage with Gentiles, regarded by strict Jews as fornication), was the doctrine of St. Paul. Renan would further have us believe that, in another New Testament place where Balaam is mentioned, St. Paul is intended — I mean the Epistle of Jude {v. 1 1). For though that Epistle is one for which we cannot produce as early testimony as for the rest, and is consequently not ad- mitted into Baur's meagre collection of genuine Apostolic Letters, yet the temptation is great to gain some addition to the scanty evidence of anti-Pauline rancour in the early Church ; and so we have presented to us Jude, the brother of James, describing Paul as a ' filthy dreamer,' who * defiled the flesh, despised dominion, and spoke evil of dignities' (namely, of the original twelve Apostles), and who ' ran greedily after the error of Balaam for reward.' Now we can understand easily how it was that an obscure heretic, in the end of the second century, not daring to attack Paul openly, because he knew that such attack would have condemned his book to exclusion from the whole circle of Christian readers, masked his assault under a false name ; so that while he seemed only to expose the wickedness of Simon Magus, and could even, if a question were raised by any of the orthodox, plausibly maintain that no covert mean- ing was intended, he would yet be understood by the few initiated as gratifying their dislike to Paul. But Apostles such as St. John and St. Jude would have had no need to descend to such subterfuges. It is not consistent with the character of the outspoken ' son of Thunder' (either as that character is made known to us by Scripture, or in the tra- ditional story of his treatment of the heretic Cerinthus) to suppose that, if there were false teachers whom he thought it his duty to describe as the synagogue of Satan, he would 2 8 INTRODUCTORY. [ill. have disguised the object of his reprehension under the veil of Balaam or Nicolaus, and never have ventured to mention the name of Paul. Why should not John, one of the pillar Apostles (Gal. ii. 9) of the Church, and Jude, the brother of one of the great three, have courage to speak plainly ? But let that pass : at least their warning must have been intelli- gible at the time it was given. The Church would have known who it was that it was intended to describe ; and if so, is it credible that the tradition should have completely perished out of memory, and that Christians, by whom the great Apostle of the Gentiles was held in the highest love and veneration, should still cherish these letters to the Seven Churches, and this Epistle of St. Jude, never once dreaming that they were honouring party pamphlets of an opposing school ? It is worth while to remark how singularly obtuse the Paulinist party were as to the meaning of the assaults levelled against their master ; or at least at what an early date all knowledge as to the true meaning of these assaults had per- ished. I have already remarked how innocently the author of the Acts of the Apostles tells the story of Simon Magus, without betraying any suspicion that under the mask of this arch-heretic Paul was to be recognized. Twice in the Acts (xv. 20, 29 ; xxi. 25) the same writer goes out of his way to represent the Apostolic heads of the Church of Jerusalem as condemning the eating meat offered to idols and fornication, in evident ignorance that these two things were prominent heads of the accusation brought against the Pauline Chris- tians by their Jewish opponents. Nay, St. Paul himself is represented as concurring in the condemnation, and as, ac- tively employed in disseminating it (xv. 25 ; xvi. 4). Once more, the author of the Second Epistle of Peter (who, if he were not Peter himself, certainly wrote at an early date, and (iii. 15) was an ardent admirer of Paul) adopts as his own (ii. 15) all that was said in Jude's Epistle about Balaam, the son of Beor, and clearly has not the smallest suspicion that under that name Peter's * beloved brother ' Paul was in- tended. I shall have occasion to say something hereafter as to the III.] THE ANTI-PAULINISM OF THE APOCALYPSE. 29 use of tradition in the interpretation of Scripture, and the present instance serves very well to illustrate what that use is. For you can see that these theories as to the reference to Paul, both in the Apocalypse and in the Epistle of Jude, might have deserved some respectful consideration had they dated from the first century instead of the nineteenth. If it had been the case that in early times there was hesitation to acknowledge the authority of these books, on the ground that they disparaged the apostleship of Paul, then we should be bound to look the possibility in the face, that traditioit had preserved correctly the interpretation put on these docu- ments by those to whom they were first addressed, and to inquire dispassionately whether that interpretation were the right one. But an interpretation is condemned at once by the mere fact that it was left to the nineteenth century to discover it, and we may fairly refuse to give it any respectful hearing. But I think it well not to cut the matter short, as I might ; and will go on to show that we can find parallels in Paul's Epistles for all the passages that are cited from the Apocalypse as anti-Pauline. It must be remembered that the doctrine of the calling of the Gentiles is taught as distinctly in the Book of the Revelation as in the saying of the Gospel (x. i6) — ' Other sheep I have which are not of this fold.' We read, indeed, in the Apoca- lypse of a sealing of 12,000 out of each of the tribes of Israel (vii. 4-8) ; but immediately after the account of the bringing in of this large but still finite number of Jews there follows : ' After this I beheld, and lo, a great multitude, which no man could number, of all nations, and kindreds, and people, and tongues, stood before the throne, and before the Lamb, clothed with white robes, and palms in their hands.' And in the mouth of the redeemed is placed a new song unto the Lamb, ' who has redeemed them to God by His blood out of every kindred, and tongue, and people, and nation ' (v. g). The Apocalypse is said to be Jewish, because the heavenly city is described under the name of the New Jerusalem (xxi. 2) ; but this is the very language of St. Paul in his most anti-Jewish Epistle — ' Jerusalem, which is above, is free, which is the mother of us all ' (Gal. iv. 26). For the literal 30 INTRODUCTORY. [111. Jerusalem the Apocalypse has no more complimentary names than Sodom and Egypt (xi. 8). I have already quoted the use made of the words ' those who say they are Jews, and are not ' — words imagined to refer to St. Paul and his school. Those who give them this refe- rence have read Paul's Epistles very carelessly, and have failed to notice one of his most characteristic traits. It is, that this Apostle, who combats so strenuously the notion that the Jew was to possess exclusive privileges in Christ's king- dom, and that circumcision was to be the condition of admis- sion to it, still retained, as was natural in a Jew by birth, his attachment to the name of Jew and the name of circumcision. Educated as he had been to regard these as titles of honour, and to look down on the uncircumcised Gentile, it pains him to hear his disciples called by the name of the uncircumcision, and he contends that they were the true Jews — theirs the only true circumcision. In the Epistle to the Ephesians (ii. ii) he speaks of his Gentile followers as those ' who were called uncircumcision by that which is called the circumcision in the flesh, made by hands.' He tells these Gentiles (Col. ii. 1 1), * ye are circumcised with the circumcision made without hands, in putting oft' the body of the sins of the flesh by the circumcision of Christ.' In the Epistle to the Philippians, when about to give to the Jews the name of the circumcision, he checks himself, and calls them instead the ' concision ' ; ' for we,' he says, ' are the circumcision, which worship God in the spirit, and rejoice in Christ Jesus, and have no confi- dence in the flesh' (iii. 2). In the Epistle to the Galatians he claims for those who walk according to his rule the glorious title of the ' Israel of God ' (vi. 16). And in a well- known passage in the Epistle to the Romans (ii. 28) the same doctrine is summed up. * He is not a Jew, which is one out- wardly ; neither is that circumcision, which is outward in the flesh : but he is a Jew, which is one inwardly ; and circum- cision is that of the heart, in the spirit, and not in the letter ; whose praise is not of men, but of God.' I suppose there is no stronger mark of genuineness in Paul's Epistles, nor any trait less likely to have occurred to a forger, than this, that his aft"ection for the names of Jew III.] THE ANTI-PAULINISM OF THE APOCALYPSE. 3 1 and of circumcision clings to him long after he had ceased to attach any value to the things. It need not surprise us to find the same trait in St. John, who had grown up subject to the same influences ; and we cannot hesitate to believe that those against whom the Seven Churches were warned were the unbelieving Jews, who are pronounced unworthy of the name of Jews, and whose synagogue is called the synagogue of Satan. It deserves to be mentioned that the Jews in Asia Minor long continued to be the most bitter adversaries of the Christian name, and that, when Polycarp was martyred, the Jews were most active in collecting materials for the pyre on which to burn him (Mart. S. Polyc. xiv.,Euseb. H. ^. iv. 15). As little need it be supposed that in those ' who say that they are apostles, and are not,' we must recognize St. Paul. Here again we have an exact parallel in St. Paul's Epistles : ' Such are false apostles, deceitful workers, transforming themselves into the apostles of Christ' (2 Cor. xi. 13). And if any proof were needed of the falsity of the assertion that the Ephesian Church, ten years after St. Paul had founded it, rejected his claims to apostleship, it would be furnished by what immediately follows. For, according to Renan's hy- pothesis, the Church of Ephesus had at the commencement been beguiled into accepting Paul's pretensions, and there- fore would be bound to look back with some shame and regret on its early simplicity. Is there any trace of this in the Apocalyptic Epistle } Nay ; the first state of the Church is recalled as its palmy days. The Church is blamed for having left its first love, and commanded to remember whence it had fallen, and repent and do the first works (ii. 4» 5)- I must not omit to call attention to the extraordinary rapidity ascribed to the supposed counter-revolution in favour of Paulinism. For if we are to believe this theory the elder Apostles must have persevered to the end of their lives in treating Paul as an enemy. St. John, who was their last sur- vivor, must have continued to hold up Paul and his disciples to odium after the death of the Apostle of the Gentiles. No one dates the Apocalypse earlier than the year 69, at which time, according to all tradition, Paul was dead. Up to that 32 INTRODUCTORY. [ill. time, therefore, those who might be regarded as having the best authority to speak had disowned Paul as a false Christian. Paul therefore must have died an excommunicated heretic. Yet, in a quarter of a century later — for that is now the re- ceived date of Clement's Roman Epistle — Paul is universally regarded as one of the chief of the Apostles, and as having been the cherished partner of Peter, both in work and in suffering! (Clem. Rom. 5.) I have spent more time than you may have thought neces- sary in refuting an utterly baseless hypothesis ; but my excuse is, that this hypothesis is treated as authentic history in almost all modern works in England, Germany, and France, which profess to give the latest results of critical science as applied to our sacred books. IV. RECEPTION OF THE GOSPELS IN THE EARLY CHURCH. Part I. THE END OF THE SECOND CENTURY. IREN^US, CLEMENT, AND TERTULLIAN. IF I were lecturing on Christian Evidences, I should com- mence my examination of the books of the New Testa- ment with the Epistles of St. Paul. There are some of these which are owned to be genuine by the most sceptical critics, and these universally admitted Epistles are rich in autobio- graphical details, and set Paul vividly before us as a real living, working character. In connexion with Paul's Epistles we should consider the book of the Acts of the Apostles, the latter half of which bears undeniable marks of having emanated from a companion of St. Paul. We have thus the fullest knowledge what Paul believed and taught, and to what sources of information he had access. We cannot doubt that Paul was thoroughly sincere in his belief of what he preached ; and it is certain, also, that the central topic of his preaching was Christ's Resurrection. * He is never weary of referring to this cardinal fact. He does not defend or prove it, but constantly assumes it as a fundamental fact about which no believer has any doubt whatever.' This fact which Paul receives so confidently was in his time only a few years old ; and, without discussing Paul's claims to have himself seen his risen Master, it is unquestionable that he was on terms of intercourse with Peter, James, John, and D 34 THE GOSPELS IN THE EARLY CHURCH. [iV. Others who claimed to be original witnesses of the Resurrec- tion. If we desire to know what else Paul taught concerning the events of our Saviour's life, we have the answer in St. Luke's Gospel, which is of indisputably common authorship with the Acts, and therefore proceeded from a member of Paul's company. The order of taking the New Testament books which I have thus sketched offers some advantages, but, owing to inconveniences resulting from adopting it, which I will not delay to describe at length, I have fallen back on the obvious course of commencing with the Gospels. If we can establish that the Gospels contain the story told at the time by men who were eye-witnesses of what they related, and who con- firmed their testimony by their sufferings, then, full of mi- racles as our Gospels are, it has been found practically impossible to refuse belief to them. But if the Gospels were written a hundred years or more after the events which they describe ; if the story is not told by eye-witnesses, but has been improved bypassing through several hands ; if there has been time for floating myth and legend to gather round the simple facts, and for men's preconceived notions of what the Messiah ought to do, to ornament the history of what Jesus did ; then the intrinsic improbability of every miracu- lous story outweighs second-hand testimony separated from the original witnesses by so long an interval. Of the two, however, it is a more vital matter with unbelievers to reject the early date of the Gospels than for us to assert it. Bring down the date of the Gospels as low as the most courageous of our adversaries can venture to bring them, and though we thus lose the proof of the greater part of the wonderful works of the Saviour's life, the great miracle of the Resurrection remains untouched. Take St. Paul's abridged account of the Gospel he had received, as given in an unquestioned Epistle (i Cor. XV. 3-7), and, though it is so much shorter than any of the four, it contains quite as much stumbling-block for an anti-supernaturalist — 'that Christ died for our sins, accord- ing to the Scriptures ; that He was buried, and that He rose again the third day, according to the Scriptures ; that He was seen of Cephas, then of the twelve ; after that He was seen of IV.] THE END OF THE SECOND CENTURY. 35 above five hundred brethren at once ; after that He was seen of James, then of all the Apostles.' Thus, from Paul's writings and from other historical evidence, we can still show that men who could not easily have been deceived as to the truth of what they asserted, and who proved their sincerity by their readiness to face sufferings and martyrdom in attestation of their doctrine, declared that Jesus of Nazareth, the third day after He had died on the cross, rose again from the dead. If this one fact be proved, the cardinal principle of the anti- supernaturalists, the impossibility of miracle, is demolished. Christianity thus could survive the loss of the Gospels ; but infidelity is incompatible with the admission of them, as is evidenced by Strauss's confession, already quoted, that if the Gospels be recognized as historical sources, miracle cannot be eliminated from the life of Jesus. In beginning our inquiry concerning the Gospels, I need not take you much later than, at the latest, the year i8o. In every controversy it is always well to see what facts are un- disputed which can be taken as common ground between the parties. Now, to use the words of Strauss, * it is certain that, towards the end of the second century, the same four Gospels which we have still are found recognized in the Church, and are repeatedly quoted as the writings of the Apostles, and disciples of the Apostles, whose names they bear, by the three most eminent ecclesiastical teachers — Irenaeus in Gaul, Clement in Alexandria, and Tertullian in Carthage. There were, indeed, current other Gospels, used not only by here- tical parties, but sometimes appealed to by orthodox teachers — a Gospel of the Hebrews and of the Egyptians, a Gospel of Peter, of Bartholomew, of Thomas, of Matthias, of the Twelve Apostles — but the four were, at that time, and from that time downwards, considered as the peculiarly trustworthy foundation on which the Christian faith rested' {Leben Jesu § 10, p. 47). I will speak a little about each of these witnesses — viz. Irenaeus, Clement, and Tertullian. They are widely separated in space, and they represent the whole extent of the Christian world. They prove that, if there had been any previous doubt or uncertainty which of all the documents purporting to contain records of the Saviour's life were to be D2 36 THE GOSPELS IN THE EARLY CHURCH. [iV. regarded as of superior authority, that doubt had been re- moved before the end of the second century, and that the four Gospels which we recognize had then been established in the place of pre-eminence which they have held ever since. Irenaeus was Bishop of Lyons, in Gaul, about the year 180.* But Irenaeus not only represents the testimony of the Gallican Church ; he had been himself brought up in Asia Minor, from which country Gaul had, as we have every reason to believe, derived its Christianity as well as its early civilization. There remains (ap. Euseb. H. E. v. 2) a most interesting record of the connexion between the two countries in an affecting narrative of the persecution of the year 177, addressed by the Christians of Vienne and Lyons to their brethren in Asia Minor. This Epistle, though it does not quote any of the books of the New Testament by name, is so full of passages in which the writer makes the language of these books his own — weaving texts into the narrative, as you constantly hear preachers doing at the present day — that we cannot doubt that the sacred books in use in that early Church were in the main the same as the books of our own New Testament. The bishop at the time of that persecution was Pothinus, a man of about ninety years of age, who must^ therefore, have been born before some at least of the books of the New Testament were written, and who must have mixed with men contemporary with St. John. His presbyter and successor, Irenaeus, was united by other links to the times of the Apostles. He tells us how well he remembered Poly- carp,! whom in his early years he had known at Smyrna : ' I can recall the very place where Polycarp used to sit and teach, his manner of speech, his mode of life, his appearance, the style of his address to the people, his frequent references to St. John, and to others who had seen our Lord ; how he used to repeat from memory their discourses, and the things * Lipsius, in the 'Dictionary of Christian Biography,' assigns A. D. 13a as the most probable date of the birth of Irenceus ; and the period (180-188) as that in which it is likely that the different books of his treatise against heresies were published. t Recent investigations determine a.d. 155 as the date of the martyrdom of Polycarp, at which time he was about eighty-six years old. IV.] IREN^US. 37 which he had heard from them concerning our Lord, His miracles, and His teaching ; and how, being instructed him- self by those who were eye-witnesses of the life of the Word, there was in all that he said a strict agreement with the Scriptures' {Epistle to Florinus, ap. Euseb. H. E. v. 20). Observe this word 'Scriptures,' for it is plain that the books to which he gave this venerated title are those which contain the record of our Lord's life — the four Gospels. There is a passage in the work of Irenaeus against heresies which proves that he considered these books as, in the highest sense of the word. Scriptures given by inspiration of God. The passage is interesting as bearing testimony to a New Testament reading not found in our existing Greek manuscripts ; but only in the Latin and in the Curetonian Syriac versions. It concerns the passage where we now read, in the opening of St. Matthew's Gospel, * The birth of Jesus Christ was on this wise' (i. 18). Irenaeus is arguing against those who held that Jesus was at first but an ordinary man, and only became Christ when the Holy Spirit descended on Him in His baptism ; and he remarks (iii. xvi. 2) that Matthew might have said that * the birth of Jesus was on this wise,' but that the Holy Spirit, foreseeing the depravers of the truth, and guarding against their fraud, said by Matthew, * The birth of Christ was on this wise,' * showing that Christ was born ; in other words, that Jesus was Christ from His birth. Thus what might seem the accidental choice of one form of expression rather than another is ascribed to the directing care of the Holy Spirit. You see then that Irenaeus believed not only in the genuineness, but also in the inspira- tion, of the Gospels. I dare say you have also heard of his reasons why there are exactly four Gospels, neither more nor less. He argues (ill. xi. 8) that the Gospel is the pillar of the Church ; the Church is spread over the whole world ; the world has four quarters; therefore it is fitting there should also be four Gospels. Again, the Gospel is the divine breath, or wind of * Potuerat dicere Matthaeus, * Jesu vero generatio sic erat' ; sed prae- videns Spiritus Sanctus depravatores et praemuniens contra fraudulentiam €orum, per Matthaeum ait ' Christi autem generatio sic erat.' 38 THE GOSPELS IN THE EARLY CHURCH. [iV. life for men ; there are four chief winds ; therefore, four Gospels. He builds another argument on the fourfold appearance of the cherubim. The cherubim, he says, are fourfold, and their faces are images of the activity of the Son of God. The first beast was like a lion, signifying His commanding and kingly dignity ; the second like a calf, signi- fying His priestly office ; the third like a man, denoting His Incarnation ; the fourth like an eagle, denoting the Holy Spirit flying over the Church. Like these are the Gospels. John, who begins with the Godhead and descent from the Father, is the lion ; Luke, who begins with the priesthood and sacrifice of Zacharias, is the calf; Matthew, who begins with His human genealogy, the man ; Mark, the eagle, who commences with the announcement of the prophetic spirit — ' the beginning of the Gospel as it is written by Isaiah the prophet.* You are aware, I dare say, that this is not the apportionment of the four beasts to the Gospels which ulti- mately prevailed in the West, John being usually represented as the eagle ; Matthew as the man ; Luke as the ox ; and Mark as the lion.** Irenseus goes on to say that Christ's dealings with the world are fourfold. To the patriarchs the word of God came directly ; to those under the Law through the priestly office ; Christ Himself came as man ; since then He has dealt with the Church by His Spirit overshadowing the Church with His wings. Thus the Gospel also is fourfold, and those destroy its fundamental conception who make the number either greater or less ; either desiring to seem to have found out more than the truth, or rejecting part of God's dispensa- tion. The main point in this quotation is, that Irenseus considers the fourfold character of the Gospel to have been * This apportionment seems to have been introduced into the West by St. Ambrose (m Luc. Praef. 8). It was made more widely known by St, Jerome, who professes therein to follow precedmg expositors {Praef. in. Matt.; in Ezek. i. 6). St. Augustine {De Coiise?is. Evangg. i. 9) adopts the same apportionment, except that he assigns the lion to St. Matthew, and the man to St. Mark. He mentions also the arrangement of Irenaeus, but considers that this being founded merely on the manner in which the several Gospels begin, is inferior to an arrangement founded on their general contents. The three terrestrial animals, for instance, are fitly assigned to the three Gospels which are mainly occupied with our IV.] IREN^US. 39 divinely arranged. We are not concerned with the validity of his mystical explanations, but with the manifest inference that the pre-eminence of four Evangelists must have been, in the time of Irenseus, long established, else he would not thus ascribe it to divine appointment. Strauss quotes these mystical explanations of Irenseus with a view to disparage his testimony; but he is forced to admit that the fanciful character of his reasons why there are only four Gospels does not discredit his testimony to the fact that four, and only four, were then acknowledged by the universal Church ; and he owns that the reasons given by Irenseus are not his grounds for receiving only four Gospels, but only his mode of justifying a belief adopted on other grounds."^ Thus you see that, without producing a single other witness, we have proof that towards the end of the second century the Church held the belief that is commonly held by the Church of the present day, namely, that the four Gospels are to be venerated as inspired records of our Saviour's life, and that no others can be placed on a level with these. Test by the evidence of this one witness the theory of some, that St. John's Gospel made its first appearance about the year 150 or 160. Is it credible that, if so, Irenaeus could have accepted a forgery of which, according to the hypothesis, his master, Polycarp, had never told him a word ? For Poly- carp, who, as I said just now, used to repeat from memory the discourses which he had heard from John, could not have been silent about this work, which, if genuine, would be St. John's most precious legacy to the Church ; and the fact that it had not been mentioned by Polycarp would convince Irenaeus that it was an audacious imposture. And again, it is impossible that Polycarp could have accepted as genuine Lord's earthly life : the eagle, to the spiritual Gospel of St, John, who soars above the clouds of human infirmity, and with unwavering eyes gazes on the light of immutable truth. * * Diese seltsame Beweisfiihrung ist zwar nicht so zu verstehen, als waren die angegebenen Umstande der Grund gewesen,warum Irenaus nicht mehr und nicht weniger Evangelien annahm ; vielmehr hatten sich diese vier eben damals in den Kreisen der nach Glaubenseinheit strebenden katholischen Kirche in vorziiglichen Credit gesetzt, imd dieses gegebene Verhaltniss suchte sich Irenaus im Geiste seiner Zeit zurechtzulegen (§ 10, p. 48). 40 THE GOSPELS IN THE EARLY CHURCH. [iV. a work of which he had never heard his master, John, speak. There are, in short, three links in the chain — St. John, Poly- carp, Irenaeus ; and I do not see how it is possible to dissever any one of them from the other two. Similar observations may be made about the conclusions of the author of the work called ' Supernatural Religion.' Other sceptical writers had thought they had done great things if they could bring John's Gospel as late as 150 or 160, allowing the Synoptic Gospels to date from the beginning of the century. This writer imagines that he has demolished all evidence for the existence of the Synoptic Gospels prior to the age of Irenaeus, and will only allow them to count from the very end of the second century. But it is plain that the evidence of Irenaeus, even if we had no other, takes us back a long way behind his own time. Books newly come into existence in his time could not have been venerated as he venerated the Gospels. What length of time must we allow for these books to have come into such esteem, that what might be regarded as their chance expressions should be considered as directed by the Spirit of God, and that among all the different attempts to relate the life of Christ none should seem fit to be put in comparison with these four 7 I suppose fifty years would be a very moderate allowance of time for such a growth of opinion : for the credit of these books mainly rested on a belief that they were of apostolic origin, and if they had been anywhere known to have been recent modifications of an older story, they could not have superseded their progenitors ; so that we may fairly conclude that the time of their appearance was beyond then living memory. Well, then, what we have thus learned from Ire- naeus is of important use when we come presently to look at the works of the generation next before him. When we find in these works what seem to be quotations from our Gospels, we shall not easily be persuaded by small verbal differences that the writers are drawing from some unknown sources, and not from books which we are certain, from Ire- naeus, must in their time have existed, and have been of such credit in the Church as to be well known to these writers. The second witness to whom I have appealed gives us the IV.] CLEMENT OF ALEXANDRIA. 4 1 verdict of another large portion of the Christian world. Cle- ment* of Alexandria lived in what was perhaps the city in all the world where literary criticism was most cultivated. He had been there the disciple of Pantaenus, who very possibly may have been personally connected with disciples of the Apostles. And Clement travelled and learned from other in- structors of various nations, whose names he does not tell us, but only their nationalities, an Ionian, an Italian, a Syrian, an Egyptian, an Assyrian, a Hebrew in Palestine. ' These men,' as he says, 'preserving the true tradition of the blessed teach- ing directly from Peter and James, from John and Paul, son receiving it from father, came by God's providence even to us, to deposit among us those seeds of truth which v/ere de- rived from their ancestors and the Apostles ' {Strom, i. ii). It is needless to quote particular passages from Clement : suffice it to say, that there is no more doubt as to his use of the Gospels than there is as to the place assigned them by any clergyman of the present day. He has traditions to tell concerning the composition of Mark's and of John's Gospel, both of which he regards as later than Matthew's and Luke's. That, like Irenaeus, he recognized as authoritative four Gos- pels, neither more nor less, may be inferred from the manner in which he deals with a saying ascribed to our Lord {Stro?n. iii. 13) — * We have not this saying in the four Gospels which have been handed down to us ; it is found in the Gospel according to the Egyptians f Besides this Gospel according to the Egyptians, he was acquainted with other apocryphal writings — a Gospel according to the Hebrews, Traditions of Matthias, and others ; but the passage I have just cited is evi- dence enough that, in his estimation, no other account of the Saviour's deeds or words stood on the level of the four Gospels. * Clement, possibly a Greek by birth, was born about the middle of the second century, and was head of the Catechetical School in Alexandria {192-202). We last hear of him as alive in 211 (Euseb. H. E. vi. 11). t Some have doubted whether Clement had himself seen the Gospel ac- cording to the Egyptians. He had said a Httle before that ' he thought ' {q1.\i}, aXyjOeia, ;(api9, TrXiJpw/xa, Xoyos, (os. It is quite impossible to invert the order, and to suppose these words first to have been the key-words of a heretical system, and then to have been bor- rowed by someone desirous to pass himself off as St. John, or to suppose that in such a case the Gospel could ever have found acceptance in the Church. You might as well conceive someone who wanted a document to be accepted as authori- tative by us Protestants, stuffing it with Roman Catholic technical words — Transubstantiation, Purgatory, and such like. Putting in such words would clearly show any Protes- tant that the document emanated from a hostile body ; and so, in like manner, if the theory of Valentinus had been pro- mulgated before the publication of the fourth Gospel, the vocabulary of the prologue to that Gospel would have ex- cluded it from Catholic use. There is abundance of other evidence that Catholics and Valentinians were agreed as to the reverence paid to this Gospel. Tertullian contrasts the methods of dealing with the New Testament pursued by Marcion, of whom I shall speak a little later, and by Valen- tinus. Marcion mutilated his New Testament, rejecting all parts of it which he could not reconcile with his theories ; but Valentinus, as Tertullian says, ' integro instrumento uti vide- tur' {Be FrcBscn'p. 38); that is to say, he did not reject the Gospels accepted by the Catholic Church, but he strove by v.] THE VALENTINIANS. 6 1 artificial interpretation to make them teach his peculiar doc- trine. How true this statement is we have extant evidence. The earliest commentary on a New Testament book of which we have any knowledge is by a heretic — that by the Valen- tinian Heracleon on St. John. It is known to us through the use made of it by Origen, who, when commenting on the same book, quotes Heracleon some fifty times, sometimes agreeing with him, but more usually controverting him. We have thus a very minute knowledge of Heracleon's commen- tary on at least four or five chapters of St. John. And this characteristic prevails throughout, that the strongest believer in verbal inspiration at the present day could not dwell with more minuteness on the language of St. John, or draw more mysteries from what might seem the accidental use of one expression rather than another. There is controversy as to the date of Heracleon. All we know with certainty is, that he must have been earlier than, Clement of Alexandria, who quotes him twice {Strom, iv. 9; Eclog. ex Scrip. Proph. 25). Sceptical writers make Heracleon as little earlier than Clement as they can help, and say his commentary may have been as late as 180. Orthodox writers would give it thirty or forty years greater antiquity. For my part, I think it makes little difference as far as the question of the antiquity of St. John's Gospel is concerned. Heracleon was a Valentinian, and it appears that in his time the autho- rity, and I think we may say the inspiration, of John's Gospel was common ground to the Valentinians and the Catholics, faow could that be possible, if it had not been acknowledged before the Valentinians separated from the orthodox.^ ) If the book had been written, subsequently to the separation, by a Valentinian, the orthodox would not have received it ; if by a Catholic the Valentinians would not have re- ceived it. If it had been of unknown parentage, it is in- credible that both communities should have accepted it as Apostolic. What has been said about Valentinus may be repeated about Basilides. Hippolytus produces an extract in which the words of St. John's Gospel are twice quoted (vii. 22, 27), and which he says, as plain as words can do it, is taken from ■62 THE GOSPELS IN THE EARLY CHURCH. [v. a writing of Basilides."^' Admit that Hippolytus was either misinformed on this point, or through inaccuracy said what he did not mean to say, it still remains that the extract was written by at least a disciple of Basilides. It follows that Basilidians and orthodox agreed in their reverence for St. John's Gospel ; and it follows, then, by the same argument which I have used already, that St. John's Gospel must have gained its authority before Basilides separated from the -Church — that is to say, at least before 130. This evidence for the antiquity of St. John is an argument a fortiori for the antiquity of the other Gospels, which all admit to be earlier. I may here mention the only point of any consequence on which a difference is attempted to be made between the testi- mony to the fourth Gospel and to the others, viz. that though Papias, of whom I will speak presently, names Matthew and Mark as the authors of Gospels, and though there are early anonymous quotations of John's Gospel, the first to mention John by name as its author is Theophilus, who was bishop of Antioch about 170 {adAutoL, ii. 22). But this point is of very small worth ; for not to say that the argument might be used equally against Luke's Gospel, the authorship of which is not seriously contested, there cannot be a doubt that any evidence which proves the antiquity of John's Gospel proves also its authorship. In other words, it is plain from the work itself that whoever composed it intended it to be received as ema- nating from the beloved disciple ; and we cannot doubt that it was as such it was received by those who did accept it. Let me call your attention to the singular fact, that the name of the Apostle John is never mentioned in St. John's Gospel. If you had only that Gospel, you would never know that there was an Apostle of the name. The other Gospels, when they speak of the forerunner of our Lord, always give him the title of the Baptist, so as to prevent confusion between the two * Wesrcott New Testament Canon, p. 288) gives strong reasons for believing the extract to be from a work of Basilides himself. So also Hort, Dictionary of Christian Biography, i. 271. The same view is taken by Matthew Arnold, God and the Bible, p. 268, quoted by Dr, Ezra Abbot {Authorship of Fourth Gospel, p. 86). But since there is room for doubt, I use an argument which does not assume the Basilidian authorship. VI.] THE MIDDLE OF THE SECOND CENTURY. 63 Johns. This Gospel speaks of him simply as John, so that a reader not otherwise informed would never have it suggested to him that there was another of the name. This fact is worth attention in connexion with what I shall have here- after to say on the omissions of the Gospel, and on the ques- tion whether John is to be supposed ignorant of everything he does not record in his Gospel. I shall contend, on the contrary, that the things which John omits are things so very well known that he could safely assume his readers to be acquainted with them. It certainly is so in this instance ; for no one disputes that, if the writer were not the Apostle John, he was someone who wished to pass for him. But a forger would be likely to have made some more distinct mention of the person who played the principal part in his scheme ; and he certainly could scarcely have hit on such a note of genuine- ness as that, whereas almost everyone in the Church had felt the necessity of distinguishing by some special name John the forerunner from John the Apostle, there was one person who would feel no such necessity, and who would not form this habit — namely, the Apostle himself. VI. Part III. THE MIDDLE OF THE SECOND CENTURY. JUSTIN MARTYR — T ATI AN. It may now be regarded as proved, that towards the end of the second century our four Gospels were universally accepted in the Catholic Church as the peculiarly trustworthy records of the Saviour's life, and that they were then ascribed to the same authors as those to whom we now ascribe them. Why, then, are we not to accept this testimony ? Is it because of any opposing evidence, external or internal ? Postponing for a moment the question of internal evidence, opposing ex- ternal evidence there is none. All that can be said is. The 64 THE GOSPELS IN THE EARLY CHURCH. [vi. evidence you have produced bears date a hundred years later than the books ; we desire to have earlier testimony. Now, to take the case of a classical author, the testimony to whom bears some faint comparison with that to the Gospels ; the plays of Terence are quoted by Cicero and Horace, and we require neither more nor earlier witnesses. No one objects : Cicero and Horace wrote a hundred years after Terence ; what earlier witnesses can you produce to account for the intervening time ? In the case of the Gospels, however, we can meet what I account an unreasonable demand. I began with the end of the second century, because then first the Christian literature of the period is so abundant as to leave no room for controversy as to the Gospels accepted by that age. We can, however, go back a couple of generations and remain on ground which cannot reasonably be con- tested. The Apology of Justin Martyr was written about a.d. 150. That is the date Justin himself gives {ApoL, i. 46) ; and though, no doubt, it is only a round number, it is as near the truth as we can go. The Apology is addressed to the Emperor Antoninus, who reigned from 138- 161, and it twice (cc. 29, 31) speaks of events in the preceding reign (Hadrian's) as having happened * just now.' Hence, some place the Apology in the very beginning of the reign of Antoninus. Eusebius dates it 141. Dr. Hort, in one of his earliest writings,* tried to prove that Justin died in 148. He did not convince me that there is evidence to justify any positive assertion about the matter ; but in placing the Apology in 150, about the middle of the reign of Antoninus, we are sure that we cannot be very far wrong either way. There has been a good deal of dispute about Justin's New Testament citations ; but, as far as the judgment of candid men is concerned, the question may now be regarded as settled. The result of very long discussions and of a good * Journal of Classical and Sacred Philology, iii. 155. 1856. On the other hand, if we can rely on the genuineness of the Acts of Justin's martyrdom, he was condemned by Rusticus ; and Borghesi, Ouvrages, viii. 545, has made out a probable case that Rusticus was praefectus urhi between 163 and 167. VI.] JUSTIN MARTYR. 65 deal of fighting has been to leave us where we had been. Any ordinary reader would have no doubt that Justin's works contain copious quotations from our Gospels ; and the objections to accepting this conclusion made by those who professed to have gone closely into the matter have been dissipated by still closer examination. In his refe- rences to the events of our Lord's life, Justin goes over all the ground covered by our Evangelists, and almost com- pletely abstains from going beyond it. He informs us also that he drew from written sources the accounts which he gives of our Lord's life. It is true, and our adversaries make the most of it, that he does not mention the names of the authors of these records. But the reason is, that he is ad- dressing heathen who would not be interested in knowing the names of the Christian writers quoted ; and he purposely avoids using Christian technical language. Thus, when he describes the Christian meetings for worship on the Lord's day, he says that they take place on the day which is called the * day of the sun'; and again, he calls the Jews * bar- barians.' And so now he tells his heathen readers that he is quoting from ' memoirs ' of our Lord which are called * Gospels,' and which were composed by the Apostles and by those who followed them. Observe how accurately this agrees with our present Gospels — two being composed by Apostles, two by their immediate followers. Justin adds that these memoirs were read along with the writings of the prophets at the meetings of Christians on each Sunday. Now, is it credible that the Gospels which Justin attests to have been placed by the Christian Church in equal rank with the prophets of the Old Testament, and to have been weekly read in their public assemblies, could be different from those Gospels which were confessedly a few years after- wards exclusively recognized through the Christian world ? Here comes in with great force the reflex action, to which I have already referred, of the testimony of Irenaeus. In his time our four Gospels were in such long-established honour, that it is certain they must have had the same rank at least one generation earlier. In Justin's time, some Gospels were in such honour as to be placed on a level in Church use with F 66 THE GOSPELS IN THE EARLY CHURCH. [vi. the Old Testament Scriptures. We never hear of any revolution dethroning one set of Gospels and replacing them by another ; and we may therefore conclude with tolerable certainty that the Gospels honoured by the Church in Justin's day were the same as those to which the same respect was paid in the days of Irenaeus, some twenty or thirty years later. The only plausible ground on which this has been con- tested is that Justin's citations frequently do not verbally correspond with our Gospels. Many of the differences that have been pointed out are trivial enough, as an example will enable you to judge. In order to show how pure was the morality taught by our Lord, Justin devotes three consecu- tive chapters to quoting his precepts. No other idea than that Justin was quoting our Gospels would occur to anyone whose acuteness had not been sharpened by the exigencies of controversy. For instance, ' He said, ''Give to him that asketh, and from him that would borrow turn not away ; for if ye lend to them of whom ye hope to receive what new thing do ye ? Even the publicans do this. Lay not up for yourselves treasure upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where robbers break through; but lay up for yourselves treasure in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt. For what is a man profited if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul ? or what shall a man give in exchange for it ? Lay up treasure, therefore, in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt." And, ** Be ye kind and merciful, as your Father also is kind and merciful, and maketh His sun to rise on sinners, and the righteous and the wicked. Take no thought what ye shall eat or what ye shall put on ; are ye not better than the birds and the beasts ? and God feedeth them. Take no thought, therefore, what ye shall eat or what ye shall put on ; for your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of these things. But seek ye the kingdom of heaven, and all these things shall be added to you. For where his treasure is, there also is the mind of a man." And, '' Do not these things to be seen of men, otherwise ye have no reward from your Father which is in heaven." ' I need not pursue the quotation. I have read enough to enable you to understand the general character of VI.] JUSTIN MARTYR. 67 Justin's quotations. You will at once have recognized the words I read. If I ask you whence are they taken, you may perhaps reply, From the Sermon on the Mount. But if I go on to ask : Do you mean from the discourse recorded by St. Matthew, or from a parallel passage in St. Luke ? you examine more minutely, and perhaps you find that Justin's version does not verbally agree with one or other. Then comes the question : How do you know that Justin is quoting either ? May he not be taking his account from some other Gospel now lost, which contained a record of the same discourses ? As far as the evidences of our religion are concerned, it makes no difference whether or not the hypothesis of a lost Gospel be true. It is no part of our faith to hold the doctrine of Irenaeus, that it was in the nature of things impossible there should be more than four Gospels. We want to know what was the story concerning Jesus of Nazareth, in attes- tation of which the first preachers of Christianity were con- tent to suffer hardships, and if need be to give their lives ; and to give us that information the Gospel used by Justin, what- ever it was, answers our purpose as well as any Gospel we have. It might be uncomfortable to our feelings to believe that Christian writers for the first century and a half used a dif- ferent Gospel from ours, and that the Church, a.d. 170, for some unaccountable reason, thought proper to bury its ancient text-book in oblivion, and set up our four Gospels in its room. But what would scepticism have gained, when it is also proved that this lost Gospel must have been as like to our present Gospels as the Gospels of St. Matthew and St. Mark are to each other .?^' Substantially the same facts are related in all, and told in the same way. I will just take the account of our Lord's infancy, the sub- ject above all others on which the apocryphal Gospels after- wards ran wild, and you will see that Justin follows throughout the narrative of our existing Evangelists. He does not appear to have known anything more than they knew, and he tells, without doubt, what they have related. I give a summary in * This idea has been worked out by Mr. Sadler in his book called ' The Lost Gospel.' F2 58 THE GOSPELS IN THE EARLY CHURCH. [vi. Westcott's words {New Testament Canon, p. loi): — 'He tells us that Christ was descended from Abraham through Jacob, Judah, Phares, Jesse, and David — that the angel Gabriel was sent to announce His birth to the Virgin Mary — that this was a fulfilment of the prophecy of Isaiah (vii. 14) — that Joseph was forbidden in a vision to put away his espoused wife when he was so minded — that our Saviour's birth at Bethlehem had been foretold by Micah — that His parents went thither from Nazareth, where they dwelt, in consequence of the enrolment of Cyrenius — that as they could not find a lodging in the village, they lodged in a cave close by it, where Christ was born, and laid by Mary in a manger — that while there, wise men from Arabia, guided by a star,, worshipped Him, and offered Him gold, and frankincense, and myrrh, and by revelation were commanded not to return to Herod, to whom they had first come — that He was called Jesus, as the Saviour of His people — that by the command of God His parents fled with Him to Egypt for fear of Herod,, and remained there till Archelaus succeeded him — that Herod, being deceived by the wise men, commanded the children of Bethlehem to be put to death, so that the prophecy of Jere- miah was fulfilled, who spoke of Rachel weeping for her children — that Jesus grew after the common manner of men, working as a carpenter,' and so waited thirty years, more or less, till the coming of John the Baptist.' I need not continue Justin's account of our Saviour's life. This specimen of his account of that part of it where, if anywhere, a difference from the canonical Gospels would be likely to be found, is enough to show that the Gospel used by Justin told substan- tially the same story as that related in the Gospels we have,, and that, as far as controversy with unbelievers is concerned, it is quite immaterial which Gospel is appealed to. There remains the purely literary question. Is there reason to believe in the existence of this alleged lost Gospel ? ' Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem,' and the question is, Are we put under a necessity of postulating the existence of a Gospel which has disappeared, by reason of verbal differ- ences forbidding us to find in our present Gospels the source of Justin's quotations ? An answer to this question has been VI.] JUSTIN MARTYR. 69 provided by a study of Justin's quotations from the Old Tes- tament, which enables us to know what degree of accuracy is to be expected from him. In that c^se we know what he means to quote, and we find him quoting loosely and inaccu- rately, and quoting the same 'passage differently different times.* When we think it strange that an ancient father of Justin's date should not quote with perfect accuracy, we for- get that in those days, when manuscripts were scarce, and when concordances did not exist, the process of finding a passage in a manuscript (written possibly with no spaces between the words), and copying it, was not performed with quite as much ease as an English clergyman, writing his sermon with his Bible at his side, can turn up any text he wishes to refer to ; and yet I should be sorry to vouch for the verbal accuracy of all the Scripture citations we hear in sermons at the present day. The excuse for such inaccuracy at present is one which Justin, too, may have pleaded — that exactly in proportion to a man's familiarity with a book is his disposition to trust his memory, and not verify a reference to it. And the applicability of this remark is confirmed by the fact that there is very much less accuracy in Justin's short quotations, which would be made from memory, than in his long ones, where it would be worth while or necessary for him to turn to the book. On the whole, then, the general coincidence, in range and contents, of Justin's quotations with our Gospels is enough to show that they are the sources whence Justin drew his * See a table of Justin's Old Testament quotations given by Westcott {New Testament Canon, p. 172). Dr. Sanday, in his Gospels in the Second Cetttury, has shown that no greater exactness of quotation is found when we study the quotations of the Old Testament in the New, or in the Apostolic Fathers, or the quotations of the New Testament by Irenseus. I find in an unpublished Paper by the late Bishop Fitz Gerald an apposite quotation from the preface to Pearce's ' Longinus':— Neque ■enim aut Longino aut aliis priorura saeculorum scriptoribus videtur usi- tatuni fuisse accurate fideque satis verba citare. Imo nusquam si bene memini, Longinus per totum suum Commentarium cujusvis auctoris locum iisdem verbis (modo pluribus quam duobus aut tribus consisteret) exhibuit ; nee aliter ab aliis scriptoribus factum video. Si enim sensum auctoris et praecipua citatae sententiae verba ob oculos lectoris ponerent, de caeteris minus soliciti fuere. Accurata haec citandi diligentia, qua hodie utimur, ■quaeque laudabilis sane est, frustra in veteribus quaerenda est. — Praef. in Longinum, p. xix., ed. 1732. 70 THE GOSPELS IN THE EARLY CHURCH. [vi. information. I will give for each of the Gospels one speci- men of a multitude of proofs. In relating the murder of the innocents at Bethlehem, he quotes Jeremiah's prophecy of Rachel weeping for her children, and that in a form agreeing with St. Matthew and differing from the Septuagint. Hence, even if we had no other proof, we could infer that he used St. Matthew's Gospel. Mark has so little that is not in St. Matthew or St. Luke that it might be thought difficult to identify anonymous citations with his Gospel. Yet Justin's quotations from the Gospels are so numerous, that besides some very probable references to Mark, they touch on one point certainly peculiar to him, namely, that Jesus gave to the sons of Zebedee the name of Boanerges. St. Mark alone has preserved to us this and some other Aramaic words used by our Saviour, as Corban, Ephphatha, Abba, Talitha Cumi. St. Luke is, no doubt, Justin's authority for stating that the visit of Mary and Joseph to Bethlehem was occasioned by the taxing under Cyrenius. And I may add that Justin even helps us in the case of disputed readings in St. Luke, for he has a reference to our Lord's bloody sweat, which gives an important attestation to the verses, Luke xxii. 43, 44, which are wanting in the Vatican and Alexandrian mss., but found in the Sinaitic as well as in almost all other mss. As I have mentioned the subject of various readings, I may add that if it could be proved that Justin never trusted his memory, but always literally copied the Gospel he was using— a thing that cannot be proved, for he sometimes quotes the same passage differently — it still would not follow that he was using a different Gospel from ours. It might only be that his copy of Matthew or Luke had readings different from our received text. I will not anticipate what belongs to another branch of our subject by entering into the proofs of the early existence of various readings. Suffice it to say that this is a point which has to be attended to by any careful critic of Justin's quota- tions. That Justin used the three Synoptic Gospels may be regarded as now accepted by the common consent of candid critics : being as freely acknowledged by Hilgenfeld* in Ger- * Professor of Theology at Jena, one of the ablest hvmg representatives of the school of criticism founded by Baur. VI.] JUSTIN MARTYR. 7 1 many as by Lightfoot orWestcott in England. Justin's varia- tions, then, from our text of these Gospels may be divided into three classes. The greater number are quite sufficiently accounted for by the ordinary looseness of memoriter citations ; a few demand the attention of the textual critic as suggesting the possible existence of a various reading in Justin's manu- script ; and lastly, a few more suggest the possibility that, in addition to our Gospels, Justin may have used an extra- Canonical Gospel. For example, in the abstract I read of Justin's account of our Lord's childhood, you may perhaps have noticed that he says that the Magi came from Arabia. Now, St. Matthew only says that they came from the East ; and the question arises, Did Justin draw this localization from a written source, or was he merely expressing the view in his time popularly held as to what St. Matthew meant by the East } A similar question arises as to the statement that Joseph and Mary, when they could find no room in the inn, lodged in a cave. It seems to me very possible that Justin was here drawing from no written source, but that, being a native of Palestine, he described what the received tradition of his time accepted as the scene of our Lord's birth. Justin's additions to our evangelic narrative are exceedingly few and unimportant ; but there is no reason why we should not admit, as a possible account of them, that our Gospels were not the only written documents with which Justin was ac- quainted. But I do not think it possible that any such document could be raised to the level of our four Gospels, even if it had the benefit of far more distinct recognition by Justin than it can actually claim. i^ I have said that Justin's use of the Synoptic Gospels is now pretty generally admitted; but there is still a good deal of unwillingness to acknowledge his use of St. John's. That Gospel deals less in history than do the first three Gospels ; and so there are fewer incidents mentioned by Justin which we can clearly prove to be taken from St. John, while the discourses of that Gospel present little that is suitable for quotation in discussion with unbelievers. Yet there are coinci- dences enough to establish satisfactorily Justin's acquaintance with the fourth Gospel, there being scarcely a chapter of it 72 THE GOSPELS IN THE EARLY CHURCH. [vi. of which some trace may not be found in his works.* But what weighs with me far more is, that the whole doctrinal system of Justin, and in particular his conception of our Lord as the eternal Logos, presupposes St. John to such an extent, that anyone who does not acknowledge it is, in my judgment, either a poor critic or an uncandid controversialist. The name ' Logos ' is habitually used by Justin, occurring more than twenty times. His doctrine is, that this Logos existed before all creation, dwelling with the Father ;f that He was God; J that by Him all things were made;§ that this pre- existent Word took form and became man, and was called Jesus Christ (yApoL i. 5, 63 ; Dial. 48) ; and that He was the only-begotten || of the Father. * See an Article by Thoma in Hilgenfeld's Zeitschrift fur wissenschaftL. Theologie for 1875. Thoma does not discuss Justin's knowledge of the Synoptic Gospels, regarding this as having passed out of the reign of con- troversy ; but he takes St. John, chapter by chapter, exhibiting for each the trace it has left in Justin's works : the result being to show that Justin is completely saturated with that Gospel. Thoma is less successful in establishing a special theory of his own, namely, that Justin, though acquainted with the fourth Gospel, did not regard it as of equal authority with the others, or number it among the ' Memoirs of the Apostles,' which were read in the Christian public worship. For this he has no proof but the very precarious argument ex sile?itio, that Justin does not make as much use of the fourth Gospel as Thoma thinks he would have made if he owned its authority. Dr. Ezra Abbot, a Unitarian, Professor in Harvard University, has dealt well with this argument in his Authorship of the Fourth Gospel, p. 63. He shows that Justin, writing to unbelievers, cannot be expected to make the use of New Testament writings he would have made if addressing men who owned their authority ; that he actually uses them more than do other apologists ; that he does not offer proofs from the Apocalypse, though he confessedly accepted it as an inspired prophecy; and Dr. Abbot adds some instances from modern writers of surprising neglect to use an argument or recognize a fact which we should have confidently expected them to use or recognize. Dr. Abbot, who was one of the most learned of American Theologians, died in 1885. t 6 Se vibs iK^lvov, 6 fi6vos XeyS/nevos Kvpicos vl6s, 6 Xoyos irph twv ttoitj- fxaTcou Kol (Tvvoov KoX yevvwfxevos, ore t^u apx^v St avrov irdvTa e/CTtce koL iK6(r/j.r]ae. — Apol. ii. 6. dpxV "■/)?> iravTwv rwv KTicrfxaTcot/ 6 &ehs yeyevurjKe Svvafjuv riva e| eavTOv \oyiKrjv, rjTis Ka\ 5J|a Kvpiou iiirh rod Trvev/j.aTOs tov ayiov /caAerrat, TTOTe 5e vlhs, Trore Se (To^ia, ttotc 5e &yye\os, irore Se dehs, irore 5e Kvpios Kal \6yos. — Dial. 6i. irph TTOLvroiu tuu TroirjixaTdiu ffvvriv to? narpi. — Dial. 62. + avrhs Sou ovros 6 Oehs airh tov iraTphs rwu o\uu yevvrjOels. — Dial. 6 1 : see also Apol. i. 63 ; Dial. 56, 58, 126, 128. § So(TT€ Xoycf) dfov-. . . yeyepTJaQai rhv irduTa Koajxov. — Apol. \. 52; see also c. 64, and Apol. ii. 6. II fiopoyev'TjS 9iv t^ irarpl rwv oXau. — Dial. 105. VI.] JUSTIN MARTYR. 73 I have by no means enumerated all the coincidences be- tween the teaching of Justin and the prologue of St. John ; but that there is very striking agreement you cannot have failed to see. We ask, is there any reason for rejecting the simple account of this agreement, that Justin was a disciple of St. John : not indeed by personal companionship, but by study of his Gospel, which we have good independent reason to think must have been current at the time, and which Jus- tin could hardly have helped knowing ? And it deserves to be borne in mind that Justin seems to have learned his Christianity at Ephesus (Euseb., H. E. iv. i8), which is generally allowed to have been the birthplace of the fourth Gospel. When we have to speak of the agreement between Justin and the Synoptic Evangelists as to the incidents of our Saviour's life on earth, it is now felt to be a gratuitous and ■unreasonable assumption to imagine that Justin drew his account not from our Synoptics, but from a lost Gospel -coincident with them in a multitude of particulars. Have we any stronger justification for imagining a lost spiritual Gospel identical with St. John's in respect of its teaching as to the pre-existence and divinity of our Lord } Not that these doctrines are peculiar to St. John : they are taught as distinctly by St. Paul (see in particular Col. i.) ; but what may be regarded as special to St. John is the use of the word Logos, to denote the pre-existent Saviour. This name is not found in any of the New Testament writings but the Johan- nine,^ nor does John represent our Lord as ever calling him- self by it. If we ask from what other source but St. John the name could have been derived by Justin, we are referred to the writings of the Alexandrian Jew Philo, who speaks fre- quently of the Divine Word, though there has been much controversy whether he means to ascribe to Him a distinct personality, or merely uses personifying language about the Divine attribute of Wisdom. Nothing forbids us to believe that the speculations of Philo may have been known to St. John.f We have in fact a connecting-link in the Alexandrian * It is not certain whether Heb. iv. 12 is an exception to what is here stated, t Philo was teaching in Alexandria in our Lord's lifetime, so there is aio chronological difficulty. 74 THE GOSPELS IN THE EARLY CHURCH. [vi. Jew Apollos, who taught in Ephesus. It would be quite in the spirit in which Paul dealt with the Grecian philosophers at Athens if John, when not professing to record the words of Jesus, but speaking in his own person, presented Christianity to those whose training had been Alexandrian, by acknow- ledging and accepting all that was true in the Philonic specu- lations about the Divine Logos, but went on to tell of what Philo had not dreamed, that ' the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us.' Now what we find in Justin is not the Philonic but the Johannine doctrine of the Logos, the doc- trine of the Logos incarnate in the person of Jesus Christ^ If before Justin's time anyone but the fourth Evangelist had presented in this form his doctrine concerning our Lord, how is it that all memory of it has perished ?'^ Let me next say something of Justin's mode of presenting- another Christian doctrine, that of Baptism. Justin's name for the rite is ' regeneration.' Speaking of new converts, he says {Apol. i. 6i): 'They are brought by us where there is- water, and are regenerated in the same manner that we our- selves were regenerated. For they then receive the washing of water in the name of God the Father and Lord of the Universe, and of our Saviour Jesus Christ, and of the Holy Spirit. For Christ also said, " Except ye be born again, ye shall not enter the kingdom of heaven." Now that it is im- possible for those who have been once born to enter into * The relations between the Logos doctrine of Justin and that of Philo and of St. John have been carefully investigated by a very able and learned Unitarian, Dr. James Drummond, Principal of Manchester New College, London, in a Paper published by him in the Theological Review, April, 1877. In connexion with this may be read a Lecture" on Philo, published by him in the same year, and since enlarged into a treatise in two volumes, 1888. Dr. Drummond conclusively establishes the depen- dence of Justin's doctrine on St. John's, of which internal evidence shows it to be a later development. ' Not only is every point in the Johannine doctrine contained in Justin's, but almost every portion of it is presented with amplifications ; its ambiguous statements are resolved into the requisite number of definite propositions, and questions which it sug- gests, and does not answer, are dogmatically settled,' The same Paper contains an excellent enumeration of verbal coincidences between Justin and the fourth Gospel. Of these, one which Dr. Drummond has himself added to the list of those previously observed has special interest for me, on account of its turning on an interpretation of John xix. 13, which many years ago I had been in the habit of hearing maintained by Archbishop Whately. He held that, in the phrase iKadia-ev iirl fir)/j.aTos, the verb VI.] JUSTIN MARTYR. 75 their mothers' wombs is manifest to all.' I am sure it is equally manifest to all that there is here striking coincidence with the discourse with Nicodemus recorded by St. John. Now let me add a word as to the cumulative effect of Justin's doctrinal agreements with St. John, and his verbal agreements of which this is a specimen. His doctrine is in perfect harmony with St. John, and we are puzzled to say from what other source he could have derived it. There are also a number of verbal echoes of St. John, not indeed exact, but very closely reproducing him. If Justin used St. John, every- thing is explained : you may try to find some hypothesis which will account for one sort of agreements, and some hypothesis which will account for the other ; but how violent the improbability that both hypotheses shall be true. In the present case, when we ask where Justin found these words of Christ, ' Except ye be born again, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven,' we are inclined to laugh at the special pleading which ansv/ers us. Surely not in St. John. Justin says, ' except ye be born again' ; St. John, ' except a man be born again.' Justin says, * the kingdom of heaven ' ; St. John, * the kingdom of God.'^' And we are referred, as the more probable original of Justin's quotation, to St. Matthew (xviii. 3), 'Except ye become as little children ye shall not enter the kingdom of heaven.' But what, then, about the following sentence as to the impossibility of again entering eKddiu /caret XP'^''""^ 4KKK7\(nav kuKus clprjfMivuu yivofievoi. Papias wished to combat false interpretations of the " oracles " by true.' — Westcott, N. T Canoii, p. 577. H 2 lOO THE GOSPELS IN THE EARLY CHURCH. [vil. apparent — first, Papias had a strong belief in Mark's perfect accuracy. Three times in this short fragment he asserts it : * Mark wrote down accurately everything he remembered ; * * Mark committed no error;' ' He made it his rule not to omit anything he heard, or to set down any false statement there- in.' Secondly, that Papias was for some reason dissatisfied with Mark's arrangeipent, and thought it necessary to apolo- gize for it. No account of this passage is satisfactory which will not explain why, if Papias reverenced Mark so much, he was dissatisfied with his order. Here Kenan's hypothesis breaks down at once — the hypothesis, namely, that Papias was in possession of only two documents, and these totally different in their nature : the one a collection of discourses, and the other a collection of anecdotes. Respecting, as he did, Mark's accuracy, Papias would assuredly have accepted his order had he not been in possession of some other docu- ment, to which for some reason he attached more value in this particular — a document going over somewhat the same ground as Mark's, but* giving the facts in different order. It is clear that the Mark of which Papias was in possession did not merely consist of loose collections of unconnected anecdotes of our Lord's life, but was a Gospel aiming at some orderly arrangement. It was not the case that the copies of this Gospel so differed from each other as to make it uncertain what was the order in which it gave the facts. This order was definite, and though Papias was dissatisfied with it, and tried to explain why it was not different, he never maintained that Mark had originally written the facts in any different or preferable order. And it is clear that he had more such Gospels than one, namely, at the least, St. Mark's Gospel, and some other Gospel, with whose order he compared St. Mark's, and found it different. The question then remains to be answered : If Papias held that Mark's Gospel was not written in the right order, what was, in his opinion, the right order ? Strauss considers and rejects three answers to this question, as being all in- admissible, at least on the supposition that the Gospel known to Papias as St. Mark's was the same as that which we receive under that name. These answers are : first, that the VII.] PAPIAS. 10 1 right order was St. John's ; secondly, that the right order was St. Matthew's; thirdly, that Papias meant to deny to Mark the merit not only of the right order, but of any his- torical arrangement whatever. Of these three solutions, the first — that the right order in Papias's mind was St. John's , — is that defended with great ability by Bishop Lightfoot. Besides these there remains another, which I believe to be the true one, namely, that what Papias regarded as the right order was St. Luke's. The reason, I suppose, why this solution has been thought unworthy of discussion is, that no mention of St. Luke is made in any of the fragments of Papias which have reached us ; from which it has been assumed to be certain that Papias was unacquainted with Luke's writings. Now, if we had the whole work of Papias, and found he had said nothing about St. Luke, it might be reasonable to ask us to account for his silence ; but when we have only remaining some very brief extracts from his book, it seems ludicrous to conclude that Papias was ignorant of St. Luke, merely because Eusebius found in his work no statement concerning Luke which he thought worth copy- ing. With regard to Matthew and Mark, Eusebius found the statements that Mark was the interpreter of Peter, and that Matthew wrote in Hebrew, and these he thought worth pre- serving ; but if Papias added nothing to what was known about Luke, we can understand why Eusebius should not have copied any mention of Luke by Papias. The fragments preserved contain clear traces that Papias was acquainted with the Acts, and since, as we have seen, Luke's Gospel was certainly known to Justin Martyr, who was not so much later than Papias that both may not have been alive at the same time, the conclusion that it was known by Papias also is intrinsically most probable. When, therefore, in explain- ing the language used by Papias, we have to choose between the hypothesis that he was acquainted with Luke's Gospel, and the hypothesis that the Matthew and Mark known to Papias perished without leaving any trace of their existence, and were in the next generation silently replaced by another Matthew and Mark, the former hypothesis is plainly to be preferred, if it will give an equally good account of the pheno- 102 THE GOSPELS IN THE EARLY CHURCH. [vil. mena. Since we know from Justin that it was the custom to read the Gospels every Sunday in the Christian assemblies, the notion that one of these could have been utterly lost, and another under the same name substituted, is as extravagant a supposition as can well be imagined. In support of my opinion that Papias knew St. Luke, I may quote an authority above suspicion — Hilgenfeld, who may be pronounced a leader of the present German Ration- alist school. His notion is that Papias was acquainted with Luke's Gospel, but did not ascribe to it the same authority as to Matthew and Mark. And his opinion, that Papias knew St. Luke, is founded on a comparison of the preface to Luke's Gospel with the preface to Papias's work, in which he finds many phrases which seem to him an echo of St. Luke. I am disposed to think he is right ; but the resemblance is not striking enough to convince anyone inclined to deny it. Lightfoot comes to the same conclusion on different grounds, namely, on account of a striking coincidence between one of the fragments of Papias and Luke x. i8. But if we assume that Papias recognized St. Luke's Gos- pel, the language which he uses with respect to St. Mark's is at once accounted for. The preface to St. Luke's Gospel declares it to be the Evangelist's intention to write in order — ypdif/at KaOe^rj^, but a reader could not go far without finding out that Luke's order is not always the same as Mark's. In the very first chapter of St. Mark the healing of Peter's wife's mother is placed after the Apostle's call to become a fisher of men, in opposition to Luke's order. It is on this difference of order that, as I understand the matter, Papias undertook to throw light by his traditional anecdotes. And his account of the matter is that Mark was but the interpreter of Peter, whose teaching he accurately reported; that Peter had not undertaken to give any orderly account of our Lord's words or deeds ; that he only delivered these instructions from time to time as the needs of his people required ; and that Mark was, therefore, guilty of no falsification in faithfully reporting what he had heard. We have no evidence that Papias's notice about St. Matthew occurred in the same context as that about St. Mark ; but I VII.] PAPIAS. 103 think it likely that this remark was also made in explanation of an apparent disagreement between the first Gospel and one of the others. And I conceive Papias's solution of the difficulty to be, that the Church was not then in possession of the Gospel as Matthew wrote it — that the Greek Matthew was but an unauthorized translation from a Hebrew original, which each one had translated for himself as he could. Thus, in place of its being true that Papias did not use our present Gospels, I believe the truth to be that he was the first who attempted to harmonize them, assuming the principle that no apparent disagreement between them could affect their substantial truth. Thus, then, these explanations lead to the same inference as the use of the word Xoyta in speaking of St. Matthew's Gospel; both indicate that Papias regarded the Gospels as really inspired utterances. When he finds what seems a disagreement between the Gospels, he is satisfied there can be no real disagreement. Mark's order may be diflferent from Luke's ; but, then, that was because it was not Mark's design to recount the facts in their proper order. Three times over he repeats that Mark committed no error, but wrote all things truly. If in Matthew's Gospel, as he read it, there seemed any inaccuracy, this must be imputed to the translators ; the Gospel as Matthew himself wrote it was free from fault. Weighing these things, I have convinced myself that Bishop Lightfoot has given the true explanation of a passage, from which an erroneous inference has been drawn. Papias de- clares, in a passage which I have already cited, ' If I met with anyone who had been a follower of the elders anywhere, I made it a point to inquire what were the declarations of the elders, what was said by Andrew, by Peter, by Philip, what by Thomas or James, what by John or Matthew, or any other of the disciples of our Lord, and the things which Aristion and the presbyter John, disciples of the Lord, say; for I did not think that I could get so much benefit from the contents of books as from the utterances of a living and abiding voice.' The question is : Does this disparagement of written books extend to our Gospels.? Are we to suppose that Papias regarded these books, if he had them, as in no sense inspired, 104 JHE GOSPELS IN THE EARLY CHURCH. [vil. and that he preferred to obtain his knowledge of the Saviour's earthly life from viva voce tradition ? Considering h'S solici- tude to clear the Gospels from all charge of inaccuracy, I feel convinced that these were not the writings which he found comparatively useless to him for his work. The title of his book was, as I understand it, 'An Exposition of the Gospels;' and it was in seeking for traditions to supplement and illus- trate the Scripture history that he found it usele^^s to search the Gnostic interpretations"^' then current, and that he preferred his own collection of viva voce traditions, whose genuineness could, as he alleged, be proved by tracing them up, like the four Gospels, to the Apostles themselves. It is worth while to take notice also of the commencement of the preface of Papias : ' I shall not scruple also to place along with my interpretations anything that I carefully learned from the elders.' Here we have in the first rank, as the object of Papias's work, expositions of the oracles of our Lord — inter- pretations; that is to say, he assumes an existing authoritative text, on which he comments, and which he tries to explain ; and then, with a little apology, he takes leave to put his traditions forward as on the same level with his interpretations. But neither one nor the other seems to come into competition with the text. Those who would have us believe that Papias preferred his traditions to the Evangelic text forget that he tells us the two things — that he was in possession of a book written by Matthew, and that he also made it his business to inquire from anyone who could tell him what Matthew had said. Papias must have been even of weaker understanding than Eusebius would lead us to think, if he regarded hearsay reports as better evidence what were the statements of Matthew than the testimony of a book which he believed to have been written by that Apostle. But Papias might fairly retort the charge of stupidity on his critics. He had called Matthew's * Basilides, apparently a contemporary of Papias, is said to have written twenty-four books on the Gospel (Euseb. H. E. iv. 7). Two fragments of these Exegetica have been preserved : one by Clement of Alexandria {Strom, iv. 12), the other in the 'Acts of the Disputation of Archelaus and Manes' (Routh, Rell. Sac.y. 196). These extracts make it probable that the Gospel of St. Luke was one of the books on which Basilides commented. VII.] PAPIAS. 105 book the ' Logia,' and his own book an interpretation of ' Logia.' To find a parallel case, then, we must imagine a writer of the present day publishing a commentary on the * In Memoriam,' and stating in his preface that he had taken pains to question everyone that he met with who had conversed with the Laureate, and that he regarded the interpretations he had thus been able to collect as more valuable than anything he had seen in print. What should we think of a reviewer who, reading no further than the preface, should report that the author maintained that none of the printed editions of Tennyson's Poems could be relied on, and that he attached aio value to anything save certain stanzas he had heard in conversation to have been recited by the poet ? On the whole, then, I arrive at the conclusion that Papias recognized an Evangelic text, to which he ascribed the highest authority, and in the perfect accuracy of which he had strong faith. In my own mind I have no doubt that this text consisted of the four Gospels we now have. Papias has named two of his Gospels, those of St. Matthew and St. Mark ; and I see no ground for imagining that these names totally changed their signification in the course of a genera- tion. With regard to the use of St. John's Gospel by Papias;^ the presumption arising from his confessed use of the First Epistle is confirmed by several indications in the list of names already quoted. Andrew is placed before Peter, as in John i. 44 (compare Mark i. 29) ; Philip and Thomas are selected for mention, who have no prominence except in St. John's Gospel; Matthew and John are coupled together, the simplest -explanation of which is that both were known to Papias as authors of Gospels. In the context of this list, Papias calls our Lord by the Johannine title of ' the Truth.' And Light- foot gives strong reasons for thinking Papias to be the author of a passage quoted anonymously by Irenaeus, and which contains a quotation from St. John. Lightfoot's reasons have been accepted as convincing by an unprejudiced critic, Harnack. Of Papias's use of St. Luke's Gospel I have spoken already, and we shall not doubt that he recognized this Gospel if we afterwards find reason to think that he was acquainted with the Acts of the Apostles. I06 THE GOSPELS IN THE EARLY CHURCH. [vil. If Still earlier evidence than that of Papias is required, the only difficulty is that the books from which we might have drawn our testimony have perished. The extant remains of earlier Christian literature are few ; and, indeed, it is likely that the first generation of Christians, among whom there were not many learned, and who were in constant expectation of their Master's second coming, did not give birth to many books. As to the remains we do possess, I avoid burdening your memory with too many details, and I will only quote a specimen from him who is accounted the e^^rliest of uninspired writers, Clement of Rome, in order to shew the kind of testi- mony which those who are known as the Apostolic Fathers afford : * Remember the words of our Lord Jesus, for he said. Woe to that man ; it were better for him that he had not been born than that he should offend one of my elect. It were better for him that a millstone should be tied about his neck, and that he should be drowned in the sea, than that he should offend one of my little ones ' (Clem. Rom. 46). Elsewhere he says : ' Especially remembering the words of our Lord Jesus, which he spake, teaching gentleness and long-suffering. For thus he said. Be ye merciful, that ye may obtain mercy : forgive, that it may be forgiven to you. As ye do, so shall it be done unto you : as ye give, so shall it be given unto you : as ye judge, so shall ye be judged : as ye show kind- ness, so shall kindness be shown unto you : with what measure ye mete, with the same shall it be measured unto you' {^Ch. 13). Similar quotations are found in the Letters of Polycarp and Ignatius, but the passages I have read illustrate the two characteristics of these early citations — first, that they do not mention the name of the source whence they are taken ; secondly, that, though they substantially agree with passages in our present Gospels, they do not do so lite- rally and verbally. There are two questions, then, to be settled — First : Is the writer quoting from a written source at all, or is he merely using oral traditions of our Lord's sayings and doings } Secondly : Is he using our Gospels, or some other record of our Saviour's life } It eeems to me that the words ' Remember the words of our Lord Jesus,' when ad- dressed to the members of a distant Church who had received VII.] CLEMENT OF ROME. I07 no oral instructions from the writer, point distinctly, not to oral tradition, but a written record, which Clement could know to be recognized as well by those whom he was addres- sing as by himself. St. Paul, addressing the Ephesian elders, might say, * Remember the words of our Lord Jesus, how he said. It is more blessed to give than to receive ' (Acts xx. 35), although these words do not occur in our Gospel history, because he had taught for three years in Ephesus, and there- fore had the means of knowing that his readers had heard the same words before. But the words, ' Remember the words of our Lord Jesus,' when addressed to men, as to the oral instruction delivered to whom the writer apparently had no means of knowledge, point, in my opinion, plainly to written sources of information. And it appears to me unreasonable to suppose that these written sources of information were works which have disappeared, and not those works to which we find testimonies very little less ancient than the quotations to which I refer, and which contain the passages cited, the verbal differences not exceeding those that are commonly found in mevioriter quotations. I have already spoken of the degree of accuracy that may reasonably be looked for in the memoriter quotations of the very early Fathers. But, before parting with the Apostolic Fathers, I must produce a passage which illustrates the skill of critics in re- sisting evidence produced to prove something which they have, on a priori grounds, decided not to admit. There are those who have made up their minds that the Gospels are comparatively late compositions, and who are certain that they could not, for a long time, have been looked on as inspired or treated as Scripture. Now, the Epistle of Barna- bas is a work which, though not likely to have been written by the Apostle Barnabas, is owned on all hands to be one of great antiquity, dating from the end of the first century, or at least the beginning of the second,^' a period at which, accord- ing to some of our opponents, St. Matthew's Gospel was per- haps not written, and at any rate could not yet have been counted as Scripture. But this Epistle contains (c. 4) the * Hilgenfeld dates it a.d. 97. 108 THE GOSPELS IN THE EARLY CHURCH. [VII. exhortation, ' Let us take heed lest, as it is written, we be found, many called, but few chosen/ Here we have a plain quotation from St. Matthew, introduced with the well-known formula of Scripture citation, ' It is written.' But this part of the Epistle of Barnabas was till lately only extant in a Latin translation ; hence it was said that it was impossible that these words, ' It is written,' could have been in the ori- ginal Greek. They must have been an interpolation of the Latin translator. Hilgenfeld, in an early work,* went so far as to admit that the Greek text contained some formula of citation, but he had no doubt it must have been ' as Jesus says,' or some such like. Unfortunately, however, lately the Greek text of this portion of the Epistle of Barnabas came to light, being part of the newly- discovered Sinaitic Manuscript, and there stands the ' as it is written,' ws yeypaTrrat, beyond mistake. Then it was suggested that the quotation is not from St. Matthew, but from the second book of Esdras. Now, it is a question whether this book is not post-Christian (as certainly some portions of the present text of it are), and possibly later than St. Matthew — say as late as the end of the first century. But the words there are, * Many are created, but few shall be saved.' The contention that the words * Many are called, but few chosen,' are not from St. Matthew, but from this passage, though this itself may have been derived from our Gospels, is only a proof of the straits to which our opponents are reduced. Then it was suggested that the quotation was perhaps from some lost apocryphal book. And lately a more plausible solution, though itself sufficiently desperate, has been discovered. Scholtenf sug- gests that the phrase ' It is written ' was used by Barnabas through a lapse of memory. The words ' many are called, but few chosen,' ran in his head, and he had forgotten where he had read them, and fancied it was somewhere in the Old Testament. I think this is an excellent illustration of the difficulty of convincing a man against his will. * ' Die apostolischen Vater,' p. 4S (1853). + Scholten (born 18 11), Emeritus Professor of the University of Leyden, a representative of the extreme school of revolutionary criticism. ( 109 ) VIII. THE SYNOPTIC GOSPELS P A R T I . INTERNAL EVIDENCE OF THEIR ANTIQUITY. T ^ 7E have now traced back, as far as we had any materials^ ^ ^ the history of the reception of the Gospels in the Church ; and have found no sign that the existing tradition concerning their authorship has ever varied.* One remark I must make as to what that tradition exactly was. Renan observes (p. xvi) that the formulae 'according to Matthew,' * according to Mark,' &c., indicate that the earliest opinion was, not that these stories were written from one end to the other by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, but only that they contain traditions emanating from these re- spective sources and guaranteed by their authority-! But assuredly if that had been what was intended by the phrase * according to,' the second and third Gospels would have been known as the Gospel according to Peter, and the Gospel according to Paul. The account of Papias, that Mark did nothing but record narrations of Peter concerning our Lord, * The student who desires to see the evidence of the early use of the Gospels in fuller detail will find valuable assistance in Anger's ' Synopsis.' It is an arrangement of the Evangelic text in the form of a harmony, and aims at giving in connexion with each passage any illustrative parallel to be found in writers earlier than Irenaeus. 1 1 observe that Renan has struck this sentence out of his later editions, which, I suppose, is to be regarded as a confession that the argument it contained cannot be rehed on. no THE SYNOPTIC GOSPELS. [viTI. was received with general belief by the early Church.* And it was just as generally believed that the third Gospel rested on the authority of St. Paul. Irenaeus, for instance, says (iii. i.) — 'Paul's follower, Luke, put in a book the Gospel preached by him.' Some ancient interpreters even understand the phrase 'according to my Gospel,' which occurs in the Pauline Epistlesf to refer to the Gospel according to St. Luke (Euseb., H. E. iii. 4). Clearly, then, if the phrase 'according to' had been understood to imply anything less than actual author- ship, the Church would never have been content to designate these Gospels by the names of those who transmitted the tradition at second-hand, but would have named them more honourably after the great Apostles on whose authority they were believed to rest. It is plain, then, that the phrase 'the Gospel according to' indicates only the Church's sense of the unity of the fourfold narrative, the same good tidings being contained in all, only presented differently by different hands. Thus, though Justin Martyr uses the word Gospel in the plural number, speaking of the 'Memoirs' that are called Gospels (see p. 65), and Irenaeus also speaks of four Gospels, and tries to prove that there could neither be more nor fewer, yet the use is quite as early of the word Gospel in the singular number to denote the entire record of the Saviour's life. Thus we find in Justin Martyr, 'the precepts in what is called the Gospel' {Trypho, c. 10), 'it is written in the Gospel' (c. 100). In the passage of Irenaeus to which I have just referred, though he does occasionally use the plural number, yet the singular prevails, and it would be more accurate to state his thesis as ' The Gospel is essentially four- fold,' rather than as ' There can be only four Gospels.' And he habitually uses the form of citation ' as it is written in the Gospel, 'I and so do other early writers. Clement of Alex- * See note, p. 93. Clement states (/. c.) that the tradition which had reached him was, that the Gospels containing the genealogies had been written first, and that Mark afterwards wrote his Gospel at Rome at the request of Peter's hearers, who desired to have a permanent record of the Gospel orally preached by that Apostle ; Peter himself not interfering either to forbid or encourage the design. t Rom. ii. 16 ; xvi. 25 ; 2 Tim. ii. 8 ; see also 2 Thess. ii. 14. X For example : ii. xxvi. 2 ; in. xxiii. 3 ; iv. xx. 6. VIII.] THEIR TITLES. Ill andria speaks of the Law, the Prophets, and the Gospel {Strom, iii. 70; iv. 2, 91). Accordingly the earliest mss. represent the Gospels not as four separate works, but as one work bearing the title ' Gospel,' divided into four sections, * according to Matthew,' * according to Mark,' &c. These were, in short, but the forms in which four different Evan- gelists had committed the Gospel to writing.^' And so St. Augustine speaks of 'the four Gospels, or rather the four books of the one Gospel.' f The titles of the Gospels regarded in another point of view prove their own historic character. If they had been arbi- trarily chosen, we may be sure that persons of greater distinction in the history of the Church would have been selected. Matthew is one of the least prominent of the Apostles, and the dignity of Apostleship is not even claimed for Mark and Luke. It would have been so easy to claim a more distinguished authorship for the Gospels, that we have the less right to refuse credence to what is actually claimed, namely, that the two Evangelists just named, though not Apostles, and possibly not even eyewitnesses themselves, were in immediate contact with Apostles and eyewitnesses. It remains, then, to test this tradition by internal evidence. When we examine the Gospels with a critical eye, do we find reason to think that they cannot be so early as the date claimed for them, viz. the first age of the Church — the age when Apostles and other eyewitnesses of our Saviour's ministry were still alive and accessible to the writers of these narratives? If we reflect for a moment we shall be convinced that in that early age there must have been Gos- pels: if not the Gospels we know, at least some other Gospels. Two things may be regarded as certain in the history of our religion: first, that it spread with extraordinary rapidity — that within twenty or thirty years of our Lord's death the Gospel had travelled far outside the borders of Palestine, so that there were Christians in widely separated cities ; and, secondly, that the main subject of the preaching of every * I take this to be what is intended in the account of Irenseus (III. i.) AovKOLS rh vir' eKeiuou Kripvacrofxevou ^vayye\iov iv fii^Aico KaTedero' eireiTa 'IwduvrfS Kal avrhs e'leSwKe rh cvayyeXiov iu 'E^eVoj diaTpi^cav. t Tract in Joan., xxxvi. vol. iii. 543. 112 THE SYNOPTIC GOSPELS. [VIII. missionary of theXhurch was Jesus Christ. Numerous pas- sages will rise to your minds in which the work of these first missionaries is described as 'preaching Christ.' St. Luke says of the Apostles at Jerusalem, 'Daily in the temple and in every house they ceased not to teach and preach Jesus Christ' (Acts v. 42). When persecution scattered away the disciples from Jerusalem, St. Luke tells us of those who came to Antioch and spoke to the Grecians, ' preaching the Lord Jesus' (Acts xi. 20). *We preach not ourselves,' says St. Paul (2 Cor. iv. 5), 'but Christ Jesus the Lord.' What- ever were the dissensions in the early Church, of which we now hear so much, they did not affect this point. ' Some,' says St. Paul (Phil. i. 15), 'preach Christ even of envy and strife, and some also of goodwill;' but 'every way, whether in pretence or in truth, Christ is preached.' The zeal of the first disciples made every Christian a missionary into what- ever town he went ; and the work of the missionary was, as we have seen, to preach a person. Consequently the preacher must have been prepared to answer the questions, Who was this Jesus whom you preach ? What did he do ? What did he teach ? And since the preachers could rarely answer these questions from their personal knowledge, it was a necessity for their work that they'should be furnished with authentic answers resting on a higher authority than their own. We cannot doubt, then, that the first age of the Church must have had its Gospels, and the question is whether we are bound to reject the claim of these books of ours to have been, at least, among the number. When I discussed the external evidences to the Gospels, I considered all four together ; for my judgment is that, with respect to external evidence, there is no appreciable difference between them. But the internal characteristics of the fourth Gospel are so different from those of the other three, and the special objections made against it so numerous, that it will be necessary to consider this Gospel separately. I shall, there fore, now speak only of the first three, commonly called the Synoptic Gospels— a title which is so well established that it is now too late to discuss its propriety.* * The idea is that these Gospels agree in giving one synopsis or general view of the same series of events. VIII.] THEIR REPORT OF OUR LORD's DISCOURSES. I 1 3 There is one class of passages in these Gospels on which the stamp of antiquity is impressed so deeply as to leave no room for dispute : I mean those which record discourses of our Lord. That the report of these discourses is substantially accurate no unprejudiced critic can doubt. Renan speaks of the ' naturalness, the ineffable truth, the matchless charm of the Synoptic discourses ; their profoundly Hebrew turn ; the analogies they present to the sayings of Jewish doctors of the same time ; their perfect harmony with the scenery of Galilee' (p. xxx). Elsewhere (p. xxxvii) he says, 'A kind of brilliancy at once mild and terrible, a divine force, underlines these words, if I may say so, detaches them from the context, and enables the critic easily to recognize them.' * The true words of Jesus, so to say, reveal themselves. When they are touched in this chaos of traditions of unequal authenticity we feel them vibrate. They come, we may say, spontaneously to take their places in our story, where they stand out in striking relief.' Indeed, I need hardly quote the testimony of Renan or of anybody else ; for we have sufficient evidence of the substan- tial truthfulness of the Gospel report of our Lord's discourses in the fact that in all Christian literature there is nothing like them. If, instead of simply reporting these discourses, the first disciples had invented them, they could have invented something else of the same kind. Actually, it is a little sur- prising that the men who were so deeply impressed by our Lord's teaching, and who so fully imbibed the spirit of it, should never have attempted to imitate its form. In point of style, we travel into a new country when we pass from the Synoptic Gospels to the Apostolic Epistles. Those who heard our Lord's parables, and who could not fail to have been struck by their beauty, and by the force with which they brought to the mind the lessons they were meant to convey, never, as far as we know, used the same method of impressing any lessons of their own. Among early uninspired Christian writers there were several imitators of the Apostolic Epistles, but only one, Hermas, who attempted to imitate the parables, and that with such poor success that we need the less wonder that others did not try the experiment. I 114 THE SYNOPTIC GOSPELS. [vill. Thus we see, that if tradition had been silent, criticism would have told us the story that tradition now tells : ' There are things here which must either have been written down by men who heard Jesus of Nazareth speak, or else by men who faithfully transmitted the account given to them by the actual hearers,' And we have every reason also to think that no great time could have elapsed before the recollections of our Lord's teaching were reduced to a permanent form. Cer- tainly those who exclude miracle, and who look upon our Lord merely as an eminent teacher, cannot otherwise account for the substantial faithfulness of the evangelistic record of His discourses. A few detached aphorisms of a great teacher may be carried by the memory for some time, and be passed on from one to another; but discourses of the length we find in the Gospels would, in the ordinary course of things, have perished, if they had not been from the first either committed to writing, or, if committed to memory, kept alive by constant repetition. It is surprising how little of spoken words ordi- nary memories are able to retain. I believe that anyone who has been much in the company of a distinguished man will, on his death, be astonished to find how extremely little in the way of reminiscences of his conversation he will be able to recall. If Boswell has been able to give a vivid representa- tion of Dr. Johnson's Table-Talk, it is because he used to stand behind the chair of the object of his veneration, with note-book in hand. And it was in the same way that Luther's Table-Talk was preserved. It is quite true that some memo- ries are exceptionally retentive, and true also that the words of Jesus were of surpassing interest. All however that follows from this is, that it is not necessary to conclude that our Lord's discourses were written down in His own lifetime : but it seems to me not rational to suppose that, if any long time had passed after the day of Pentecost before his dis- courses were reduced to a permanent form, they could have been preserved to us with so much faithfulness and so much purity. Nor do I think that the case is altered when we look at the matter from a Christian point of view. We believe that the Apostles were aided by the Holy Spirit, who brought to Vlll.] THEIR REPORT OF OUR LORD's DISCOURSES. I15 their memories the things that Jesus had said. But we have no reason to think that this assistance was bestowed on such terms as to relieve them from the duty of taking ordinary precautions for the preservation of what was thus recalled to their minds. I hold it, then, to be certain that the existing Gospels con- tain elements which are, in the highest sense of the word, Apostolic ; and the present question is, Are we to confine this character to that part of them which records our Lord's discourses ? Are we to suppose that the Apostles carefully remembered and accurately reported what Jesus said, and that they neglected the easier task of recording what he did ? or was this a point on which their hearers would not be curious for information.^ No one can answer this or any other historical question rightly who projects his own feel- ings into the minds of men who lived centuries ago. A nineteenth-century critic may be deeply impressed by the excellence and beauty of the moral teaching ascribed to Jesus of Nazareth. He very willingly grants that it would be in- conceivable that four illiterate Jews should each indepen- dently arrive at a degree of wisdom far surpassing that obtained by any other of their nation ; and so he may readily accept their own account of the matter, namely, that all had obtained their wisdom from one common source. But the modern critic does not care to hear of miracles ; and he would, if possible, prefer to believe that one in other respects so admirable as Jesus had made no pretensions to supernatural power. But it is absurd to imagine that this was the frame of mind of the first disciples. Who can conceive of them as men only solicitous to hear what had been the words of Jesus, and indiff'erent to the report of His works ? I have said that the first Christian missionaries summarized their work as ' preaching Christ.' And if we look at the specimens of their teaching, whether as presented in the book of the Acts or in the unquestioned Apostolic Epistles, we see that this meant far less preaching what Christ had said than what He had done. The character in which He is presented is not that of a wise moral teacher, but of one * anointed with the Holy Ghost and with power, who went I 2 Il6 THE SYNOPTIC GOSPELS. [VIII. about doing good, and healing all that were oppressed with the devil.' Look at any of the places in the Epistles where the word Gospel is used, and you will see that * preaching the Gospel' meant telling the story of the life and death and resurrection of our Lord. It follows then (without taking into account the fact that many of our Lord's sayings would not have been intelligible without an explanation of the cir- cumstances under which they were spoken) that we cannot reasonably believe that those who preserved a record of our Lord's words did not also relate something of His acts. In point of fact, our three Synoptic Gospels contain a common element, which includes deeds as well as words of Christ; and the only satisfactory account of this common element is, that it represents an apostolic tradition used by all three. Later on I shall have to say a little as to the theories that have been framed to explain the mutual relations of the Synoptic Gospels: theories which propose to account as. well for their substantial agreement as for their variations in detail. At present I am concerned with the coincidences between the three narratives which are altogether too numerous to be referred to chance. They agree in the main in their selection of facts — all travelling over nearly the same ground ; though independent narrators would be sure to have differed a good deal in their choice of subjects for narration out of a public life of three years. In point of fact we do find exactly such a difference between the life of our Lord as related by St. John and by the Synoptics. These last agree in the main in the order of their narrative; and in many cases they tell the story in almost identical words. If these coincidences of language only occurred in the report of our Lord's discourses, they would not afford much ground for remark; though even in that case, before we could assert the perfect independence of the reporters, we should have to inquire in what language our Lord spoke. If He spoke in Aramaic, different indepen- dent translators of His words into Greek would not be likely to coincide not only in words* but in grammatical constructions. * As an example how likely independent translators are to differ in their choice of words, compare the following two translations given in the Authorized Version for the same Greek words : ' The scribes which love VIII.] THEIR REPORT OF OUR LORD'S ACTIONS. I 17 If we were to consider nothing more than the fact that in Aramaic there are but two tenses, and in Greek a great many, we see that the translator into Greek of an Aramaic sentence, even if he were left no choice as to the words he was to employ, would still have great liberty of choice as to the grammatical structure of his sentence. But although the greater number of coincidences naturally occur in the report of our Lord's discourses, which every narrator would be anxious to repeat in the very words in which they had been delivered to him; yet there are, besides, so many cases where, in the relation of incidents, the same words are employed by different Evangelists, that it would be a defiance of all probability to ascribe these coincidences to chance.* Yet, with all these agreements, there is so much diversity, as to suggest the idea to orthodox and sceptical critics alike, that we have here recastings by three later hands of one original Gospel. The difference is just this, that while the orthodox critic makes the original Gospel proceed from apostolic lips or pen, and ascribes the recastings, if we may call them so, to men who were in immediate contact with the Apostles ; sceptical critics place their original Gospel at about the same date that we assign to the present form of the Gospel ; while to the latter they assign, with one consent, a date later than Papias ; and many of them, owing to a blunder, of which I have already told you, place the death of Papias as late as A.D. 165. I have already argued that the external tradition as to the authorship of a book, if well confirmed, is entitled to much respect, and is not liable to be displaced unless confuted by internal evidence. Now, the mere fact that criticism can discover in the Gospels traces of a still older original is no to go in long clothing, and love salutations in the ■market places and the chief seats in the Synagogues, and the uppermost rooms at feasts, which for a pretence make long prayers.' — St. Mark xii. 38. ' The scribes which desire to zvalk in long robes, and love greetings in the markets, and the highest seats in the Synagogues, and the chief xooras at feasts : which for a shew make long prayers.' — St. Luke xx. 46. * Here are two examples: 'His hand was restored,' aTreKareffrdOri v Xelp avTov (Mark iii. 5 ; Luke vi. 10 : Matt. xii. 13) ; ' Let it out to hus- bandmen and went into a far country.' e'leSoro avrhu yea}pyo7s Kol aweSr)- fiTiaeu (Matt. xxi. 33 ; Mark xii. I ; Luke xx. 9). Il8 THE SYNOPTIC GOSPELS. [vill. proof whatever that they are not of the antiquity that has been claimed for them. Give them that date, and there still remains room for an earlier original ; while I hope to show you that there is not room for any later recasting. But I must first remark that the concessions which the later school of sceptical critics has been forced to make have evacuated the whole field in which critical science has a right to assert itself against tradition. We can well believe that there would be considerable differences between a document written in A.D. 60 and in 160 ; and, therefore, if the question were between two such dates, one who judged only by internal evidence might be justified in maintaining his opinion in opposition to external evidence. But now that all sober criticism has abandoned the extravagantly late dates which at one time were assigned to the Gospels, the difference between the contending parties becomes so small, that mere criticism cannot without affectation pretend to be competent to give a decision. Take, for example, the difference between an orthodox critic, who is willing to believe that the fourth Gospel was written by the Apostle John in extreme old age, towards the end of the first century, and a sceptical critic of the moderate school, who is willing to allow it to have been written early in the second century. It seems to me that this difference is smaller than criticism can reasonably pronounce upon. For I count it unreasonable to say that it is credible a book should have been written eighty years after our Lord's death, and incredible it should have been written only sixty ; when we have scarcely any documentary evidence as to the history of the Church, or the progress of Christian thought during the interval. So I think that the gradual approaches which Baur's successors have been making to the traditional theory indicate that criticism will in the end find itself forced to acquiesce in the account of the origin of the Gospels which the Church has always received. Let us examine, then, the Church account of the origin of the Gospels, and see whether there is anything in it which what we know of the history of the period gives us a right to pronounce improbable. Although there is no evidence that the existing Gospels have suffered material change since VIII.] THEIR PREDECESSORS. II9 their first composition, or that our present Matthew and Mark differ from the original Matthew and Mark, of whom German writers speak so much ; yet it is not asserted that these Gospels of ours had no predecessors. St. Luke tells us that he was not the first to write a Gospel ; nay, that many before him had taken in hand to set forth in order a declara- tion of the things most certainly believed among Christians. What, then, has become of these predecessors of our Gos- pels ? How is it that they have so utterly vanished out of existence 7 That there are extant apocryphal Gospels you have doubt- less heard. In another lecture I hope to give some account of them. Suffice it now to say, that none of them is imagined by critics of any school to be earlier than our four, because the shortest inspection of them shows that they presuppose and acknowledge the Canonical. Accordingly, when Tisch- endorf maintained that the present apocryphal Gospel of St. James was known to Justin Martyr, and that the Gospel of Nicodemus represents the Acts of Pilate, probably current in the second century, such a theory was loudly protested against by sceptical critics, because these documents presup- pose respectively the Gospels of Matthew and John, which, therefore, must have been much earlier. The choice of sub- jects in the apocryphal Gospels is enough to show that they did not proceed from independent tradition. It is a conceiv- able thing that since our Lord, after He had become famous, had crowds of hearers about Him, others besides the Apostles might commit to writing their recollections of His words and deeds : so that if the apocryphal Gospels had purported to give an account of our Lord's public ministry, it might at least deserve an examination whether they do not perchance contain some genuine traditions. But that they proceeded from invention, not from tradition, is shown by the fact that they are silent on those parts of our Lord's life about which traditions might be expected to exist. They rather under- take to fill up the gaps of the Gospel history, to tell us the history of Joseph and Mary previous to their marriage, or the events of the Saviour's infancy or childhood. No doubt, Christians would naturally be curious for information about 120 THE SYNOPTIC GOSPELS. [vill. these topics, and, finding the Gospels silent, might be pre- pared to welcome some answer to their questions from anyone who professed to be able to give it. But nothing is more intrinsically improbable than that anyone should possess trustworthy information on such points as these who could add nothing to the Gospel history of the deeds and words of our Saviour after He became a public teacher. Acknowledging, then, that no Gospel earlier than the Canonical is now extant, we have to ask. Did the Church formally select our four from the mass of evangelical tradi- tion ; and was it in consequence of the pre-eminence given to these by the force of authority that the others then disap- peared ? Not so : it is a remarkable fact that we have no early interference of Church authority in the making of a Canon ; no Council discussed this subject ; no formal deci- sions were made. The Canon seems to have shaped itself; and if, when we come further on, you are disposed to com- plain of this because of the vagueness of the testimony of antiquity to one or two disputed books, let us remember that • this non-interference of authority is a valuable topic of evi- dence to the genuineness of our Gospels ; for it thus appears that it was owing to no adventitious authority, but by their own weight, that they crushed all rivals out of existence. Whence could they have had this weight except from its being known that the framers of these Gospels were men of superior authority to the others, or with access to fuller information ? ^ Accept Luke's account of the matter as given in the pre- face to his Gospel and in the Acts, and all is plain. He tells us at the beginning of the Acts that the qualification necessary in one to be added to the apostolic body was, that he should have companied with the Apostles all the time that our Lord went in and out among them, beginning from the baptism of John until the day that He was taken up. And although it is stated that the specific object of this was in order that the person chosen might give witness of the Resurrection ; yet the qualification itself implies that it was the special function of an Apostle to bear witness to the whole public life of our Lord, from His baptism to His ascension. Even if it had VIII.] THEIR PREDECESSORS. 121 not been the official duty of an Apostle to bear this testimony, who can suppose that the eager curiosity of Christians for authentic information concerning the early life of Him, on whom their whole faith was built, could leave unquestioned the men who had been His intimate companions ; — men, moreover, who had the promise of His Spirit to bring to their recollection the things that Jesus had said to them? It could not be, therefore, but that each Apostle would be frequently called on to repeat the story of the things which Jesus had said or done. Nothing would be more probable than that, on repetition he should tell the story nearly in the same way. Yet we cannot well suppose that the Apostle would at first give one continuous narrative, intended to ■embrace all that Jesus had said or done. He would be more likely, as Papias tells in the case of St. Peter, to give the ac- counts of separate incidents, as the wants of his hearers made it expedient that this or that history should be related. Now, nothing would be more probable also, than that those who heard these sacred narratives, and desired, as every Christian would, to preserve the memory of them, should write down what they had heard ; and the next step would be to frame such detached accounts into an orderly narrative. This is what I understand from Luke's Preface, that before him many had taken in hand to do ; — not to write from their own resources a life of Christ, but merely to arrange into an orderly story {dvard^aaOai hir]yy]crLv) the things which had been orally delivered to them by those who were from the beginning eyewitnesses and ministers of the Word. And this, which they had undertaken to do, Luke, who claims to be possessor of more complete and accurate knowledge, also undertakes to do {yponj/aL KaOe^YJd- Aciav. Without such aV^aAeta the Christian people could not be satisfied. Theophilus of Antioch, writing about a.d. i8o, says : * Writers ought either to have been eyewitnesses them- selves of the things they assert, or at least have accurately learned them from those who had seen them. For those who write uncertain things do nothing but beat the air.' The feeling here expressed is so natural that I cannot believe that those who were in possession of narratives, supposed to have been written by men of such rank in the Church as Matthew, Mark, and Luke, could allow them to be altered by inferior authority. Little do those who suppose such an alteration possible know of the conservatism of Christian hearers. St. Augustine, in a well-known story, tells us that, when a bishop, reading the chapter about Jonah's gourd, ventured to substitute St. Jerome's 'hedera' for the established *cucur- bita,' such a tumult was raised, that if the bishop had perse- vered he would have been left without a congregation.* The feeling that resents such change is due to no later growth of Christian opinion. Try the experiment on any child of your acquaintance. Tell him a story that interests him; and when you next meet him tell him the story again, making variations in your recital, and see whether he will not detect the change, and be indignant at it. I do not believe, in short, that any Church would permit a change to be made in the form of evangelic instruction in which its members had been catechetically trained unless those who made the change were men of authority equal to their first instructors. Take the age in which the Apostles and apostolic men were going about as teachers ; and with regard to that age I can believe in recastings and divers versions of the evangelic narrative, all commended to the Christian world by equal authority. But if a bishop of the age of Papias had presumed to inno- * Augustine, Ep. 71, vol. ii., pp. 161, 179. IX.] THEORIES AS TO THEIR ORIGIN. 1 27 vate on the Gospel as it had been delivered by those * which from the beginning were eyewitnesses and ministers of the Word,' I venture to say that, like the bishop of whom Augustine tells, he would have been left without a congre- IX. Part II. THEORIES AS TO THEIR ORIGIN. Having at some length laid before you the account which Church tradition gives of the origin of our Gospels, I went on in the last lecture to compare with this the conclusions to which we are led by a study of these writings themselves; and I did not then proceed further than was necessary to show that these conclusions are in no wise contradictory to the traditional account, but rather are confirmatory of it. But the study of the genesis of the Gospels has much more than an apologetic interest. Critics of all schools have been tempted to grapple with the perplexing problems presented by the aspect of three narratives of the same series of events, so like each other, not only in arrangement, but in verbal details, as to convince us that there must be a close affinity of some kind between them, and yet presenting manifold diversities, such as to be irreconcilable with the most obvious ways of accounting for the resemblances. It is not without some reluctance that I go on to describe to you more minutely the problems that have to be solved, and to tell you something of the attempts made to solve them. Not that I share the feelings of some who regard their belief in the inspiration of the Gospels as precluding any such inquiry. They cannot imagine that one inspired by the Holy Spirit should have need to consult any previous document, and they think it enough to hold that such as the Gospels are now, such their Divine Author from the first ordained they should be. Some such feeling stood for a time in the way of 128 THE SYNOPTIC GOSPELS. [iX. geological inquiries. If the markings of a stone resembled a plant or a fish, it was held that this was but a sport of Creative Power, which had from the beginning made the fossil such as we see it. Yet we now feel that we may lawfully study the indications of their origin which God's works present, in the reverent belief that He has not mocked us with delusive sug- gestions of a fictitious history. Similarly we may pronounce it to be not truly reverent to decline a careful study of God's Word on account of any preconceived theory as to the mode of composition most befitting an inspired writer. My reluctance to enter with you upon this inquiry arises solely from my sense of its extreme difficulty. As I have already said, we are on ground where we have no authentic history to guide us; for the earliest uninspired Church writers are far too late to have had personal knowledge of the pub- lication of the Gospels, and such traditions as they have preserved are extremely scanty, and not always to be im- plicitly relied on. And the history of the present speculations shows how difficult it is to plant firm footsteps where we are obliged to depend on mere criticism, unaided by historical testimony. For if I wished to deter you from forming any theory as the origin of the Gospels, and to persuade you that knowledge on this subject is now unattainable by man, I should only have to make a list for you of the discordant results arrived at by a number of able and ingenious men who have given much study to the subject. Yet patient and careful thought has so often gained un- expected victories, that we incur the reproach of indolent cowardice if we too easily abandon problems as insoluble. In particular, we ought not to grudge our labour when it is on God's Word we are asked to bestow our study. It is scarcely creditable to Christians that in recent years far more pains have been expended on the minute study of the New Testament writings by those who recognized in them no Divine element, than by those who believe in their inspira- tion. In fact, their very belief in inspiration, fixing the thoughts of Christians on the Divine Author of the Bible, made them indifferent or even averse to a comparative ex- amination of the work of the respective human authors of the IX.] WAYS OF ACCOUNTING FOR THEIR AGREEMENTS. 1 29 sacred books. They were sure there could be no contradiction between them, and it was all one to their faith in what part of the Bible a statement was made, so that no practical object seemed to be gained by inquiring whether or not what was said by Matthew was said also by Mark. In modern times the study of the New Testament has been taken up by critics who, far from shutting their eyes to discrepancies, are eager to magnify into a contradiction the smallest indication they can discover of opposite 'tendencies' in the different books; and we must at least acknowledge the closeness and carefulness of their reading, and be willing in that respect to profit by their example. For these reasons, notwithstanding the dis- couraging absence of agreement among the critics who have tried from a study of the Gospels themselves to deduce the history of their origin, I think myself bound to lay before you some account of their speculations. The hypotheses which have been used to account for the close agreement of the Synoptic Evangelists in so much com- mon matter are three-fold : — (i) The Evangelists copied, one from another ; the work of him whom we may place first having been known to the second, and these two to the third. (2) The Evangelists made use of one or more written documents which have now perished. (3) The common source was not written but oral, the very words in which Apostles had first told the story of the Saviour's works having been faithfully preserved by the memory of different disciples. There is wide room for differences among themselves in details between the advocates of each of these three solutions ; and the solutions also may be variously combined, for they do not exclude one another. If the first of the three Synoptics, whichever he was, made use of a previous document, it is conceivable that the second Evangelist may have not only made use of the first Gospel, but also of that previous document; while, again, if we assert that an Evangelist used written documents, we are still not in a position to deny that some of the things he records had been communicated to him orally. Evidently, therefore, there is room for a great variety of rival hypotheses. Before I enter on any detailed discussion of them there is a preliminary caution which it is by no means unnecessary K »30 THE SYNOPTIC GOSPELS. [iX. to give, viz. that in our choice of a solution we ought to be determined solely by a patient comparison of each hypothesis with the facts ; and that we are not entitled to decide off-hand on any solution according to the measure of its agreement with our preconceived theory of inspiration. For example, there are some who think that they are entitled to reject with- out examination both the first and the second of the solutions I have stated, because they cannot believe that if the story of our Lord's life had been once written down by an inspired hand, any subsequent writer who knew of it would permit himself to vary from it in the slightest degree ; while they do not find the same difficulty in conceiving that variations may have been introduced into the narrative in the process of oral transmission before it was written down.* For myself, I see no a priori reason for preferring one account of the matter to the other. If we had had to speculate beforehand on the way in which it was likely God would have provided an inspired record of the life of His Son upon this earth, we should not have guessed that there would be four different narratives presenting certain variations among themselves. But we know, as a matter of fact, that He has not seen fit to secure uniformity of statement between the sacred writers. I need not delay to give reasons for thinking that the Bible, such as we have it, is better adapted for the work it was to accom- plish than if it had been endowed with attributes which men might think would add to its perfection. I content myself with the matter of fact that God has permitted that there should be variations between the Gospels ; and if He did not choose to prevent them by miraculously guarding the memory of those who reported the narratives before they were written down, I know no greater reason for His interfering miracu- * Thus Mr. Sadler, a writer for whom I have much respect, says (Comm. on St. Matthew, p. xi) : 'St. Luke, if he had either of the two first [Gospels] before him, would have scarcely reproduced so much that is common to both, with alterations also which he could never have made if he looked upon them as inspired documents.' And again, ' The inspira- tion [of the Gospels] is incompatible with the theory that they were all taken from one document, for in such a case that unknown and lost document must have been the only one which could be called the woik of the Spirit; and the alterations which each one made in it, which their mutual discrepancies show, prove that in altering it they individually were not so far guided by the Holy Spirit.' IX.] THEORIES AS TO INSPIRATION IRRELEVANT. 1 31 lously for a similar purpose on the supposition that the Evangelists used written documents. Needless embarrassment, in fact, has been caused by theories invented under a fancied necessity of establishing that conditions have been satisfied in the transmission of the Divine message, which cannot be shown to be essential to what one of the Evangelists declares to have been his object in writing, viz. 'That ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing, ye might have life through His name.' We do not imagine that when two of the apostolic missionaries went about preaching the Gospel they would think themselves bound to tell the story of the Saviour's life exactly in the same way, nor even that if one were relating an incident at which he had not been present himself, he would think it necessary to repeat the identical words of his informant. If God did not see fit to provide statements of rigid uniformity for the establishment of the faith of the first generation of Christians, whose souls were, no doubt, as dear to Him as those of their successors, what warrant have we for asserting that He must have dealt differently with later generations ? When anyone imagines himself entitled to pronounce ofi"-hand that the second Evan- gelist (whichever he was) could not have known that an inspired writer had performed the task before him, we cannot but ask him if he does not believe that the second Evangelist was inspired as much as the first. Whether the human author of the second Gospel knew or not that he had had a predecessor, the Divine Author of the work assuredly knew; and, notwith- standing, it was His will that the second Gospel should be written. The fact that the two Evangelists stood precisely on a level, in respect of supernatural assistance, makes all the difi"erence in the world to the argument. We justly assign to the four Gospels a place apart. Though many in our day undertake to write Lives of Christ, we know that what they presume to add without warrant from these inspired narratives may freely be rejected. But the apostolic preachers were not dependent on any written Gospel for their knowledge. Every one of our Evangelists has told us many things which he could not have learned from the work of any of the other K 2 132 THE SYNOPTIC GOSPELS. [iX. three. If one of the apostolic band of missionaries, on quitting a Church which he had founded, desired to leave behind, for the instruction of his converts, a record of the facts on which their faith rested, I know no reason why he should not be free to choose whether he should give to be copied the story as written by another Evangelist, or whether he should commit to writing the narrative as he had been accustomed, in his oral teaching, to deliver it himself. I am sure that we are over-arrogant if we venture to dictate the conditions according to which inspiration must act, and if we undertake to pronounce, from our own sense of the fitness of things, what mode of using his materials would be per- missible to one commissioned to write by God's Holy Spirit. But Alford objects, that if one of our Evangelists knew the work of another, or a document on which it was founded, the arbitrary manner in which he must have used his arche- type— at one moment servilely copying its words, and the next moment capriciously deviating from them — is inconsis- tent not only with a belief in the inspiration of the antecedent document employed, but also with the ascription to it of any authority whatever. I am persuaded that this assertion can- not be maintained by anyone who takes the pains to study the way in which historians habitually use the documents they employ as authorities. The ordinary rule is, that a great deal of the language (including most of the remarkable words) of the original passes into the work of the later writer, who, however, is apt to show his independence by variations, the reasons for which are often not obvious. Mr. Smith, of Jordan Hill, whose work on the Shipwreck of St. Paul I have already recommended to you, wrote also a treatise on the origin of the Gospels. In this he places side by side accounts of battles, as given in Napier's History of the Peninsular War, in Alison's History, and in a French military memoir employed by both writers; and he finds just the same phenomena as our Gospels exhibit. The three narratives not only agree in their general purport, but have many common words: sometimes a whole sentence is common to two; and yet identity of narration is never kept up long without some interruption. IX.] VARIATIONS IN TRANSCRIPTION. 133 In ancient times it was considered legitimate to use, with- out acknowledgment, the very words of a preceding writer to a much greater extent than would now be regarded as consistent with literary honesty. But even when one means to copy the exact words of another, it is very easy to deviate from perfect accuracy. It might be amusing, but would lead me too far from my subject, if I were to give you illustrations how little we can be sure that what modern writers print with inverted commas does really contain the ipsissima verba of the writer whom they profess to quote. Of ancient writers, there is none whose reputation for accuracy stands higher than that of Thucydides: yet, what he gives (v. 47) as the accurate copy of a treaty presents no fewer than thirty-one variations from the portions of the actual text recently recovered.* The frequent occurrence of variations in what are intended to be faithful transcripts arises from the fact that it is irksome to stop the work of the pen in order to refer to the archetype, and so the copyist is under a constant temptation to try to carry more in his head than his memory can faithfully retain. Naturally, then, when a writer undertakes no obligation of faithful transcription, but of his own free will uses the words of another, he will look at his archetype at longer intervals — not referring to it as long as he believes that he sufficiently remembers the sense; and consequently, while he reproduces the more remarkable words which have fixed themselves in his memory, will be apt to vary in what may seem a capri- cious way from his original. I do not think that the varia- tions between the Synoptic Gospels exceed in number or amount what might be expected to occur in the case of three writers using a common authority ; nor do I think that we have any right to assume that God would miraculously interfere to prevent the occurrence of such variations. If we desire to know what amount of variation an Evange- list might probably think it needless to exclude, some means of judgment are afforded by the three accounts of the conver- sion of St. Paul contained in the Acts of the Apostles. These accounts present the same phenomena of great resemblance * MahafFy's History of Greek Literature, ii. 121. 134 THE SYNOPTIC GOSPELS. [iX. with unaccountable diversities, and even apparent contradic- tions. If they had been found in diiferent works it might have been contended that the author of one had not seen the others; and ingenious critics might have even discovered the different 'tendencies ' of the narrators. As things are, we seem to have in the comparison of these narratives a measure of the amount of variation which St. Luke regarded as com- patible with substantial accuracy. I am therefore unable to assent to those who would set aside without examination the hypothesis that one Evangelist was indebted to another, or that both had used a common document ; and who would reduce us to an oral tradition as the only source of their agreements that can be asserted without casting an imputation on the inspiration or on the authority of our existing documents. Yet, after all, we have advanced but a little way when we have vindicated for the advocates for the documentary hypo- thesis* the right to get a hearing. We may now go on to examine what need there is of any such hypothesis. The oral teaching of the Apostles was, no doubt, the common basis of all the Evangelic narratives. Does this common basis sufficiently account for all the facts .^ Let us then observe the precise nature of the agreement between the Synoptic narratives. If the story of a miracle were told by two independent witnesses we should have relations in substantial agreement no doubt, but likely to differ considerably in their form. But in a number of cases the Synoptic narratives agree so closely, in form as well as in substance, as to convince us that they are not stories told by independent witnesses, but different versions of the story some one witness had told. Take, for example, a verse common to all three Synoptics (Matt. ix. 6 ; Mark ii. lo ; Luke V. 24) : * But that ye may know that the Son of Man hath power on earth to forgive sins (then saith he to the sick of the palsy), Arise, take up thy bed, and go unto thine house.' * ' Hypothesis,' perhaps, is hardly a right word to use. We know as a certain fact, from St. Luke's preface, that other documents were in exist- ence when he wrote. It is then scarcely an hypothesis to assume that he made use of these documents, however much his superior knowledge enabled him to supplement or correct them. IX.] THE TRADITION HAD BECOME FIXED. 1 35 You will feel that it would be scarcely possible for three in- dependent narrators to agree in interpolating this parenthesis into their report of our Lord's words. Take another example : St. Luke (viii. 28), relating the miracle of the healing of the demoniac, tells that 'when he saw Jesus he cried out, 'What have I to do with thee, Jesus, thou Son of God most high ? I beseech thee, torment me not. For he had commanded the unclean spirit to come out of the man.' Now, if the story had been told in the chronological order we should first have Jesus' command to the unclean spirit to depart, and then the remonstrance of the demoniac. So when we find Mark (v. 7) agreeing with Luke in the minute detail of relating the remonstrance first, and then adding parentheti- cally that there had been a command, this coincidence alone gives us warrant for thinking that we have here, not the story as it might have been told by two different witnesses to the miracle, but the story in the form in which a single witness was accustomed to tell it. Add now the consideration that both in the instances just produced, and in many others, we have a vast number of verbal coincidences between the corresponding narratives of different Evangelists ; and we may go further. Either the story, as it proceeded from the lips of that single witness, was written down ; or at least the hearers did not content themselves with a faithful report of the substance of what he related, but must have striven to commit to memory the very words in which he related it. Before the narrative came into our Gospels it had passed out of the fluidity of a story, told now one way, now another, and had crystallized into a definite form. When we have reached this point, it seems to become practically unimportant to determine whether or not writing had been used for the preservation of the story before it was included in our Gospels. If writing was so used, it would clearly be idle to inquire whether the material to which the writing had been committed was papyrus, or parchment, or waxen tablets. Well, if we are willing to believe that the memory of the first disciples, unspoiled by the habit of writ- ing and stimulated by the surpassing interest of the subject, 136 THE SYNOPTIC GOSPELS [iX. retained what was entrusted to it as tenaciously and as faith- fully as a written record, then the hypothesis that a story had been preserved by memory stands on the same level as the hypothesis that it had been preserved on papyrus or on parchment. We should have no means of determining, and very little interest in determining, which hypothesis was actually true. In either case we acknowledge that the tradition had assumed the fixity of a written record. It is because we have not only one but a series of stories common to the Synoptics that the difference between docu- mentary and oral transmission comes to have a practical meaning. The latter supposition contemplates a number of stories preserved independently : the former regards them as already embodied in a document which, even if it did not pretend to be a complete Gospel, contained the narration of more incidents than one, disposed in a definite order. Our choice between the two suppositions can be guided by exa- mining whether the Evangelists agree, not only in their way of relating separate stories, but also in the order in which they arrange them. Now, a careful examination brings out the fact that the likeness between the Synoptic Gospels is not confined to agreement in the way of telling separate stories, but extends also to the order of arranging them. Take, for instance, the agreement between Matthew and Mark as to the place in which they tell the death of John the Baptist (Matt. xiv. i ; Mark vi. 14). They relate that when Herod heard of the fame of Jesus he was perplexed who He might be, and said to his servants, ' This is John whom I beheaded.' And then, in order to explain this speech, the two Evangelists go back in their narrative to relate the beheading of John. Their agreement in this deviation from the natural chronological order can scarcely be explained except by supposing either that one Evange- list copied from the other, or both from a common source. The order of St. Luke deviates here from that of the other two Evangelists. He relates the imprisonment of John in its proper place (iii. 19), and the perplexed inquiry of Herod later (ix. 7); but we are not entitled to infer that he did not employ the same source, for the change is an obvious im- IX.] AGREE IN ORDER OF NARRATIVE. 1 37 provement that would suggest itself to anyone desirous to relate the history in chronological order. And we may even •conjecture that it was in consequence of Luke's thus depart- ing from the order of his archetype that he has come to omit altogether the direct narrative of the beheading of John. The example I have cited is not an isolated one. Our attention, indeed, is caught by a few cases in which an in- cident is differently placed by different Evangelists, but the rule is uniformity of order ; and in particular Mark and Luke are in very close agreement. Of course as to a few leading events, the arrangement would admit of no choice. All narratives would begin with the story of our Lord's Birth, would go on to tell of His Baptism, and would finish with His Passion and Resurrection. But there is a host of in- cidents, the order of arranging which is dictated by no internal necessity. If these had been preserved separately by oral tradition, the chances are enormous that different persons weaving them into a connected narrative would arrange them differently ; for the stories themselves but rarely contain notes of time, such as would direct the order of placing them. I feel bound, therefore, to con- clude that the likeness between the Gospels is not suffi- ciently explained by their common basis, the oral narrative of the Apostles ; and that they must have copied, either one from the other — the later from the earlier — or else all from some other document earlier than any. Reuss * has divided the Evangelic narrative into 124 sections, of which 47 are common to all three Synoptics ; and I believe that in these common sections we have, represented approximately, a primary document used by all three Evangelists. I say approximately, for of course we cannot assume without careful examination that some of these sections may not have come in from a different source, or that some sections * Professor at Strassburg. The division is given, p. 17 of the introduc- tion to his Histoire Evangelique, which forms part of his French transla- tion of the Bible, with commentary. I have found this introduction very instructive, and it would have been more so if Reuss had cleared his mind of the cobwebs that have been spun about the fragments of Papias. 138 THE SYNOPTIC GOSPELS. [iX. which we now find only in two Evangelists, or even only in one, may not have belonged to the common basis. On the other hand, a study of the order of narration gives the death-blow to Schleiermacher's theory that the *Logia' of St. Matthew consisted of a collection of our Lord's dis- courses. It is not only that the words of Papias, as I have contended, give us no authority for believing in the exis- tence of this * Spruchsammlung,' which so many critics assume as undoubted fact ; but critical comparison of the Gospels gives us reason to assert the negative, and say that no such collection of discourses existed. If the Evangelists took their report of our Lord's sayings from a previously existing document, they would have been likely in their arrangement to follow the order of that document ; but if the sayings were separately preserved by the memory of the hearers, two independent arrangers would probably dispose them in different order. Now, the sections common to the three Synoptics contain some discourses of our Lord, and, as a rule, these follow the same order in all ; but besides these Matthew and Luke report many other of His sayings, and in the case of these last there is no agreement between the order of the two Evangelists. Take, for example, the Ser- mon on the Mount, which seems to offer the best chance of complete agreement, there being a corresponding discourse in St. Luke. But the result is, that of the toy verses in the Sermon on the Mount only 27 appear in the corresponding discourse in Luke vi. Twelve more of these verses are found in the nth chapter, 14 in the 12th, 3 in the 13th, i in the 14th, 3 in the i6th, and 47 are omitted altogether. The same dislocation is found if we compare any other of the discourses in St. Matthew with St. Luke. And if we further take into account how many parables and other sayings of our Lord there are in each of these two Gospels, which are not found in the other, and yet which no one who found them in a document he was using would be likely to omit, we can assert, with as much confidence as we can assert anything on critical grounds alone, and in the absence of external evidence, that Matthew and Luke did not draw from any documentary record containing only our Lord's- IX.J MATTHEW AND LUKE INDEPENDENT. 1 39 discourses, but that the sayings they have in common must have reached them as independent fragments of an oral tradition. What I have said gives me occasion to remark that theories as to one of the Synoptics having copied another seem to me deserving consideration, only if we confine them to the relations of Mark to the other two, for Matthew and Luke show every sign of being quite independent of each other.* When we compare the accounts which they give of our Lord's birth, we find them proceed on such difterent lines as to suggest that they have been supplied by inde- pendent authorities. The two accounts agree in the main facts that our Lord was miraculously conceived of the Virgin Mary, who was espoused to a man named Joseph, of the lineage of David ; that the birth took place at Bethlehem, and that the family afterwards resided at Nazareth. But the two Gospels give different genealogies to connect Joseph with David, and with respect to further details those which the one gives are absent from the other. In the one we have successive revelations to Joseph, the visit of the Magi, the slaughter of the Innocents, the flight into Egypt. In the other the annunciation to Mary, the visit to Elisabeth, the taxing, the visit of the shepherds, the presentation in the temple, and the testimony of Simeon and Anna. As we proceed further in our comparison of the two Gospels, we continue to find a number of things in each which are not recorded in the other ; and it is not easy to see why, if one were using the other as an authority, he should omit so many things well suited to his purpose. When, therefore, we have to explain the agreements of these two Evangelists, the hypothesis that one borrowed directly from the other is so immensely less probable than the hypothesis that both writers drew from a common source, that the former hypo- thesis may safely be left out of consideration. The hypothesis that the later of the Synoptics borrowed from the earlier may evidently be maintained, and has actu- * If this be so, no great interval of time can have separated their publi- cations ; otherwise the later could scarcely fail to have become acquainted with the work of the earlier. 140 THE SYNOPTIC GOSPELS. [iX. ally been maintained in six different forms, according as they are supposed to have written in the orders : Matthew, Mark, Luke ; Matthew, Luke, Mark ; Mark, Matthew, Luke ; Mark, Luke, Matthew ; Luke, Matthew, Mark ; Luke, Mark, Matthew. You will find in Meyer's Commentary {or, perhaps, more conveniently in that of Alford, who has copied Meyer's list) the names of the advocates of each of these arrange- ments. However, if we regard it as established that Matthew and Luke were independent, it is only with regard to the relations of these two to Mark that the hypothesis that one Evangelist used the work of another need come under consideration. Some maintain that Mark's Gospel was the earliest, and that Matthew and Luke independently incor- porated portions of his narrative with additions of their own : others believe that Mark wrote latest, and that he combined and abridged the two earlier narratives.* To this question I mean to return. The theory that one Evangelist copied the work of another is sometimes modified by the supposition that the Gospel copied was not one of those we read now, but the supposed original Matthew or original Mark, from which it is imagined that our existing Gospels were developed. I count this as but a form of the solution which will next come under con- sideration, viz. that the Evangelists used common documents. To give to one of these documents the question-begging name of 'original Matthew,' &c., is to overload the hypothesis with an assumption which it is impossible to verify. Such a name implies not only that the compiler of that which we now call St. Matthew's Gospel used previous documents, but that he * This controversy illustrates a source of difficulty in these critical inquiries, viz. : that there is scarcely anything which may not be taken up by one or other of two handles, it constantly happening that the same facts are appealed to by critics who draw from them quite opposite conclusions. For example, certain miracles recorded by St. Mark (i. 32) are related to have been performed ' at even when the sun did set ' {h^ias yevofxev-qs (ire 4Sv(reu 6 rjKios). Here St. Matthew (viii. 16) has 'at even' (ovj/i'as 76J'o- lx4vT]s) ; St, Luke (iv. 40), ' when the sun was setting' {^vvovros rov r)\iov). One critic argues that this comparison clearly shows Mark to be the earnest, his two successors having each omitted part of his fuller statement. Another critic pronounces this to be a clear case of 'conflation,' the latest writer evi- dently being Alark, who carefully combined in his narrative everything that he found in the earlier sources. IX.] HYPOTHESIS OF HEBREW ORIGINAL. 1 41 used some one document in a pre-eminent degree, taking it as the basis of his work ; and further, that the name of the compiler of the present document was not Matthew, and that this was the name of the author of the basis-document. It is unscientific so to encumber with details the solution of a problem which, in its simplest form, presents quite enough of difficulty. Accumulation of unverifiable details is a manifest note of spuriousness. We should, for instance, be thankful to anyone who could tell us in what year Papias or Justin Martyr was born ; but if our informant went on to tell us the day of the month and hour of the day, we should know at once that we had to do with romance, not with history. Quite in like manner we feel safe in rejecting such a history as Scholten has given of the origin of St. Mark's Gospel. He tells how, from the proto-Marcus combined with the collection of speeches contained in the proto-Matthseus, there resulted the deutero-Matthaeus ; how this was in time improved into a trito-]\Iatthaeus, and, finally, this employed by a new editor of the proto-Marcus to manufacture by its means the deutero- Marcus which we have now. A story so circumstantial and so baseless has no interest for the historical inquirer. The advocates of the documentary hypothesis have also been apt to encumber their theories with details which pass out of the province of history into that of romance, as they undertake to number and name the different documents which have been used in the composition of the Gospels. Anyone who assumes that our Evangelists used a common document has first to settle the question. In what language are we to suppose that document to have been written : Greek or Hebrew ? where, of course, the latter word means not the classical Hebrew of the Old Testament, but the modern type of the language, Aramaic, to which the name Hebrew is given in the New Testament, and which we know was extensively used in Palestine in our Lord's time. It was employed for literary purposes : Josephus, for instance, tells us in his pre- face that his work on the Jewish wars had been originally written in that language. It is intrinsically probable that the Hebrew-speaking Christians of Palestine should have a Gos- pel in their own language, and jwe actually hear of Hebrew 142 THE SYNOPTIC GOSPELS. [iX. Gospels claiming great antiquity. It is therefore no great stretch of assumption to suppose that a Hebrew Gospel was the first to be written, and that this was made use of by the writers of Greek Gospels. The hypothesis of a Hebrew original at once accounts for a number of verbal differences between corresponding pas- sages in different Gospels. How easy it is for the process of translation to introduce variations not to be found in the original may be abundantly illustrated from the Authorized Version,* the translators of which declare in their preface that they deliberately adopted the principle of not thinking them- selves bound always to translate the same Greek word by the same English. For example, there is considerable verbal difference between the two following texts : * John had his raiment of camel's hair, and a leathern girdle about his loins, and his meat was locusts and wild honey' (Matt. iii. 4); 'John was clothed with camel's hair, and with a girdle of a skin about his loins, and he did eat locusts and wild honey' (Mark i. 6). Yet the sense is so precisely the same that the varia- tions would be completely accounted for, if we suppose the two to be independent translations of the same original in another language. We know for certain that the most important difference between the two texts can be thus accounted for ; the ' girdle of a skin ' in one Evangelist and the ' leathern girdle ' of the other being both translations of the same Greek words, ^wvryv SepjxaTtvrjv. It is, then, a very tempting conjecture that the further differences, 'had his rai- ment of camel's hair,' ' was clothed with camel's hair ; ' ' his meat was locusts and wild honey,' ' he did eat locusts and wild honey' — -differences which exist in the Greek as well as in our version — might be explained by regarding the two Greek accounts as translations from a common Aramaic original. This supposition evidently gives a satisfactory explanation of all variations between the Gospels which are confined to words and do not affect the sense. Some inge- nious critics have gone further, and tried to show how some of the variations which do affect the sense might have arisen * See note, pp. 116, 117. IX.] POSSIBLE EDITORIAL CORRECTIONS. 1 43 in the process of translation from an Aramaic original. But I do not feel confidence enough in any of these explanations to think it worth while to report them to you. Even when the sense is unaffected, the idea may be pushed too far, and we may easily mistake for translational variations what are really editorial corrections. For example, in Mat- thew (ix. 12) and Mark (ii. 17) we read, ' They that are strong (ot la-xvovTc?) have no need of a physician ; ' in Luke (v. 31) it is ' they that are well ' (ot vytatVoi/res). Now Matthew and Luke may have independently translated the same Aramaic word by different Greek ones ; but it is also a possible sup- position that, having Matthew's or Mark's Greek before him, but knowing that our Lord had not spoken in Greek, Luke purposely altered the popular phrase ot L(r)(yovTeo^ovPTO yap. Two explanations of the absence of a suitable conclusion have been offered. One is that the Evangelist died before bringing his work to a conclusion. But even in the supposed case, that St. Mark, after writing verse 8, had a fit of apoplexy, the disciple who gave his work to the world would surely have added a fitting termination. The other is that Mark copied a previous document, to which he was too conscientious to make any addition of his own. Then our difficulties are simply transferred from St. Mark to the writer of that previous document. But, not to press this point, we must examine whether internal evidence supports the theory that Mark acted the part of a simple copyist, who did not attempt to set the previous tradition in any framework of his own ; and that, consequently IX.] THE CONCLUDING VERSES OF ST. MARK's GOSPEL. 1 63 the second Gospel, as it stands now, was the source used by Matthew and Luke in the composition of their Gospels. I do not beheve this to be true ; and so I find no explanation to make it conceivable that Mark's Gospel could have finished with i(po^ovvro ydp. On the other hand, the opinion that the concluding verses, just as much as the opening ones, belong to the original framework of the Gospel has no internal difficulties whatever to encounter. The twelve verses have such marks of antiquity that Dr. Tregelles, who refused to believe them to have been written by St. Mark, still regarded them as having ' a full claim to be received as an authentic part of the second Gospel.' In fact, we have in the short termination of Codex L, a specimen of the vague generalities with which a later editor, who really knew no more than was contained in our Gospels, might attempt to supply a deficiency in the narrative. The twelve verses, on the contrary, are clearly the work of one who wrote at so early a date that he could believe himself able to add genuine apostolic traditions to those already recorded. If he asserts that Jesus 'was received up into heaven and sat on the right hand of God,' he only gives expression to what was the universal belief of Christians at as early a period as anyone believes the second Gospel to have been written (see Rom. viii. 34 ; Eph. i, 20 ; Col. iii. i ; i Peter iii. 22 ; Heb. i, 3 ; viii. 1 ; X. 12; xii, 2). This belief was embodied in the earliest Christian Creeds, especially in that of the Church of Rome, with which probable tradition connects the composition of St. Mark's Gospel. Further, the twelve verses were written at a time when the Church still believed herself in possession of miraculous powers. Later, a stumbling-block was found in the signs which it was said (verse 17) should ' follow them that believe.' The heathen objector, with whom Macarius Magnes* had to deal, asked if any Christians of his day really did beheve. Would the strongest believer of them all test the matter by drinking a cup of poison.-^ The objection may have been as old as Porphyry, and may have been one of the reasons why Eusebius was willing to part with these verses. We must, therefore, ascribe their authorship to one who lived in the very first age of the Church. And why not to St. Mark .'' Thus, while the Eusebian recension of St. Mark presents intrinsic diffi- culties of the most formidable character, that form of text which has the advantage of attestation earlier by a century and a-half contains nothing inconsistent with the date claimed for it. In spite, then, of the eminence of the critics who reject the twelve verses, I cannot help looking at them * The author of a book called Apocritica, written about a.d. 400, and containing heathen objections against Christianity, with answers to them. In answering an objection founded on the disputed verses, Macarius shows no suspicion that it was open to him to cast any doubt on their genuine- ness. Nothing is known with certainty about this Macarius, and indeed his book had been known only by a few short extracts, until a considerable portion of it, which had been recovered at Athens, was published in Paris in 1876. M 2 1 64 THE CONCLUDING VERSES OF ST. MARK's GOSPEL. [iX. as having been from the first an integral part of the second Gospel ; and I regard the discussion of them as belonging not so much to the criticism of the Text as to the subject of the present lecture, the history of the genesis of the Synoptic Gospels.* * It seems to me that textual critics are not entitled to feel absolute confidence in their results, if they venture within range of the obscurity that hangs over the history of the first publication of the Gospels. Such a task as Bentley and Lachmann proposed to themselves, viz. to recover a good fourth-century text — vi^as perfectly feasible, and has, in fact, been accomplished by Westcott and Hort with triumphant success. I suppose that if a MS. containing their text could have been put into the hands of Eusebius, he would have found only one thing in it which would have been quite strange to him, namely, the short conclusion on the last page of St. Mark, and that he would have pronounced the MS. to be an extremely good and accm-ate one. But these editors aim at nothing less than going back to the original documents ; and, in order to do this, it is in some cases necessary to choose between two forms of text, each of which is attested by authorities older than any extant MS. Now, a choice which must be made on subjective grounds only cannot be made with the same confidence as when there is on either side a clear preponderance of his- torical testimony. And, further, there is the possibiHty that the Evangehst might have himself published a second edition of his Gospel, so that two forms of text might both be entitled to claim his authority. ( i6s ) X. THE ORIGINAL LANGUAGE OF ST. MATTHEW. THE HEBREW GOSPEL. TN this lecture I propose to discuss what amount of -■- credence is due to the statement of Papias that St. Matthew wrote his Gospel in Hebrew — that is, in the later form of the language which was popularly spoken in Palestine in our Lord's time. The question is a very difficult one, on account of the conflict between external and internal evidence. The difficulty I speak of lies in the determination of the exact nature of the relationship between our Greek Gospel and its possible Aramaic predecessors. We need have no difficulty in believing that, before our Gospels, there had been written records of discourses of our Lord and of incidents in His life; that one or more of these may have been in Aramaic, and may have been used by our Evangelists. But when all this has been granted, it still remains a subject for inquiry whether any of these preceding documents had assumed the form of a complete Gospel, and whether our Greek St. Matthew is to be regarded as a mere translation of it, or as an independent work. It is certain that in very early times Hebrew-speaking Christians had in use Gospels in their own language : and these were quite different in character from the Apocryphal Gospels, of which I mean to speak in the next lecture. It was a necessity for Greek Apocryphal Gospels to be different from the Canonical ; for unless they had something new to tell, why should they be written ? They were either framed 1 66 THE ORIGINAL LANGUAGE OF ST. MATTHEW. [x. in the interests of some heresy, the doctrines of which were to obtain support from sayings put into the mouth of our Lord or His Apostles ; or else they were simply intended to satisfy the curiosity of Christians on some points on which the earlier Evangelists had said nothing. In either case it was the very essence of these Gospels to tell something diffe- rent from the Gospels we have. It was quite otherwise with the Hebrew Gospels. They were intended to do the very same thing for the benefit of the disciples who spoke Hebrew that the Greek Gospels were to do for those who could speak Greek. There was no necessity that either class of disciples should be taught by means of a translation from a different language. There were, among those who had personal knowledge of the facts of the Gospel history, men competent to tell the story in either tongue. We might, therefore, reasonably expect that there would be original Gospels in the two languages, proceeding on the same lines, the same story being told in both, and possibly by the same men ; and yet, though in sub- stantial, not in absolute, agreement with each other. There would be no a priori reason why an independent Hebrew Gospel might not differ as much from our Synoptics, as one of these does from another ; and since each of the Synoptics contains some things not told by the rest, so, possibly, might an independent Hebrew Gospel record some sayings or acts of our Lord other than those contained in the Greek Gospels. It is reasonable to believe that if there were any material difference in the way of telling the history, the Hebrew Gospel would be translated into Greek; but if the resemblance between the Hebrew Gospel and one of the Greek ones was in the main very close, it would not be worth while to make a translation of the whole Gospel, and anything special which it contained might pass into Greek independently. I have par- ticularly in my mind the story of the woman taken in adultery. Eusebius, who probably did not read that story in his copy of the Gospel according to St. John, informs us (iii. 39) that Papias had related a story of a woman accused of many sins before our Lord, and that the same story was contained in the Gospel according to the Hebrews. Well, I have no difficulty in admitting it to be possible that a perfectly X.] EXTERNAL EVIDENCE FOR HEBREW ORIGINAL. 1 67 authentic anecdote of our Lord might have been related in the Hebrew Gospel alone, that this might be translated into Greek, and find its way, first into the margin, ultimately into the text, of one of our Greek Gospels. And it seems to me by no means unlikely that this may afford the true explanation of some more trifling insertions found in Western mss., which the severity of modern criticism rejects as not entitled to a place in the Greek text. This also may give the explanation of an interpolation in the 20th Matthew, found in some early authorities, containing instructions substantially the same as those given in 14th Luke, against taking the highest place at a feast. I have said enough to show that there is no antecedent improbability, such as to throw any difficulty in the way of our accepting a statement that an Apostle wrote a Gospel in Hebrew, and that this Gospel was afterwards translated into Greek. Now, that our first Gospel actually is such a trans- lation from one written in Hebrew by St. Matthew is testified by an overwhelming mass of Patristic evidence, which has been accepted as conclusive by a numberof the most eminent modern critics. In the first rank of these witnesses must be reckoned Papias, whom I have already quoted. I do not know whether Irenaeus can be counted an independent wit- ness : for he knew and valued the w.ork of Papias, and may have thence drawn his information; but as he gives a note of time not found in the extract quoted by Eusebius, he may possibly have derived a tradition from some other source. What Irenseus says (iii. i) is, that 'Matthew, among the Hebrews, published a Gospel in their own dialect when Peter and Paul were preaching in Rome and founding the Church.' Again, Eusebius (v. 10) tells a story of Pantaenus, who, about ^the beginning of the last quarter of the second century, was the head of the Catechetical School of Alexandria, where he accordingly was the teacher of Clement of Alexandria. The tradition, which Eusebius reports with an * it is said,' is, that Pantaenus went to preach to the Indians, and that he found the Gospel of Matthew had got there before him: for that the Apostle Bartholomew had preached to the Indians, and had left them St. Matthew's Gospel written in Hebrew letters, 1 68 THE ORIGINAL LANGUAGE OF ST. MATTHEW. [x. which they had preserved to the time of Pantaenus's visit and later. The external evidence for this tradition, it will be seen, is weak; and it certainly has no internal probability to recommend it. A Greek book would have had a better chance of being understood in India (no matter what that word means) than an Aramaic one. What these early fathers asserted, those who came after them naturally echoed, so that the testimony of the majority of later writers cannot be regarded as adding much to the weight of these early witnesses : especially as very few of them knew Hebrew, or could say that they themselves had seen the Hebrew original of St. Matthew. We have, how- ever, in St. Jerome a witness who seems above all suspicion. He says that Matthew wrote his Gospel in Hebrew words and letters for the sake of those of the circumcision who believed in Christ, and that it is uncertain who translated it into Greek. He adds that a copy of the original Hebrew was then still preserved in the library at Caesarea, founded by the martyr Pamphilus, and that he himself had transcribed the Hebrew Gospel with the leave of the Nazaraeans who lived at Bercea in Syria [Aleppo], and who used that Gospel.* We have the further testimony of Epiphanius,f who was well acquainted with Eastern languages. He mentions the same sect of the Nazarenes to which Jerome refers, for he describes Beroea as one of the places where they most flourished ; and he says that they had the Gospel of St. Matthew complete^ written in Hebrew, only he is not sure whether they did not * De Viris illustr., 3. Jerome resided in the desert east of Syria, 374- 379, and it seems to have been at this period that he made acquaintance with the Hebrew St. Matthew. The work from which the citation is taken was published in 392. t Epiphanius, bishop of Salamis in Cyprus, published his great work on Heresies in 377. We have often reason to remark that the literary work of the Fathers tails short of the modem standard of accuracy ; but there is none who is more apt than Epiphanius to make blunders through careless- ness, want of critical discrimination, and, through a habit not unknown at the present day, of stating what he guessed might be true, as if he had ascertained it to be ti-ue. On this account his unsupported testimony can only be used with great caution. But he is well entitled to be heard on the present question, since Syriac was his native language, and he appears to have been well acquainted with Hebrew, besides knowing Egyptian, Greek, and Latin, whence he was called -KivTar/Kwaao^. X.] INTERNAL EVIDENCE FOR GREEK ORIGIN. 1 69 take away the genealogy from the beginning {Haer. 29). This confession of ignorance gives us reason to infer that he does not speak of this Gospel from personal knowledge. In calling their version complete {TrXrjpeaTarov) he meant to contrast it with that used by another Jewish sect whom he calls the Ebionites, and which he describes in his next section. They also had a Hebrew Gospel which they called that according to St. Matthew : and this Epiphanius knew, and gives several extracts from it. He tells us that it was not perfect, but corrupted and mutilated {ovx oXw 8e TrXiypecrraTw, aXA.a vevoBiv^ivio koX 7]KpoiT7}pLa(rfJiev(^). In point of external evidence, then, the proof of the Hebrew original of St. Matthew's Gospel seems as complete as could be desired. Yet there are two considerations to be attended to before we accept all this testimony as absolutely conclusive. One is, that internal evidence leads us to regard our present Matthew as an original work, not a translation. In the first place, we have translations of Hebrew words : ' They shall call his name Emmanuel, which being interpreted is, God with us' (i. 23). *A place called Golgotha, that is to say, a place of a skull' (xxvii. 33); * Eli, Eli, lama sabach- thani, that is to say. My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?' (xxvii. 46). It is evident these explanations could not have been in the Hebrew original, and that they must have been introduced by the translator, if there was one. Next, there are explanations which show a regard to the case of readers unacquainted with the customs of Palestine at the time in question : ' The same day came to him the Sadducees, which say that there is no resurrection' (xxii. 23); 'Now at that feast the governor was wont to release unto the people a prisoner whom they would' (xxvii. 15) ; * That field was called the field of blood unto this day' (xxvii. 8); *This saying is commonly reported among the Jews until this day' (xxviii. 15). These explanations would not have been necessary for one writing in Hebrew to the Jews of Palestine, but are quite suitable in a work written in Greek, and expected to pass outside the limits of the Holy Land. I do not venture to lay much stress on instances of paronomasia, to which attention 170 THE ORIGINAL LANGUAGE OF ST. MATTHEW. [x. has been called, such as a^ai/i^ovcrtv ottcos ^avojo-tv (vi. 16); KaKov