Abstract

Abridged and Annotated

It is time to start abandoning, as a basic framework for our understanding of Christianity, the “history” which Christians have used almost from the start—the Old Testament narrative, the Gospel narrative, Acts and the Church History of Eusebius of Caesarea. That is so because it is now possible to see that this is an ideology, party history which does not fall within the canons of what is acceptable history for us.

John Bowden

© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Sunday, 7 November 2010

Ancient Exegesis

The various writings which make up the New Testament had no common origin, but were composed at different times by a score of writers in places which were remote and not easily accessible from each other. With the exception of the epistles of Paul, hardly any were composed until about fifty years after the death of Jesus, and another hundred years elapsed before they were assembled together, and began to equal the Jewish scriptures in authority for Christians. Many NT books could easily have been left out of the present canon, and the discussions in the second and early third centuries on which ones merited inclusion by age and attribution is the earliest New Testament criticism. Sixteen centuries passed before any further criticism was allowed.

Eusebius tells us the writings named after John, the son of Zebedee and brother of James, were for long suspect in wide circles of believers. These writings are:

1. the fourth gospel, John, today thought by many, if not most Christians, to be the pick of the gospels
2. three epistles closely resembling that gospel in style and thought
3. the book Revelation, considerably different from the previous four works.

F C Conybeare (History Of New Testament Criticism) tells us that, between the years 170 AD and 180 AD, some Christians in the Church of Asia Minor rejected all these writings. About the year 172 AD, a Bishop of Hierapolis in Asia Minor, Claudius Apollinaris, was critical enough to note that the gospels seemed to conflict with one another. The synoptics give one date for the Last Supper and John another. Anatolian Christians considered John a forgery by an heretic, Cerinthus, who denied the humanity of Jesus. It contradicted the other three gospels in jumbling the events of his life into a different order from that of the synoptic gospels, ignoring the forty days temptation in the wilderness, mentioning two passovers in the ministry where the others mention only one, and making thereby three years of Christ’s ministry not one.

Christians were repelled that the earliest usage of John could be traced only among heretical followers of the Gnostics, Basilides and Valentinus. A presbyter of the Church of Rome, Gaius or Caius, attacked both it and Revelation, supposedly also by John. Hippolytus, Bishop of Ostia, tried to answer the doubts about 234 AD, and so they must still have been widespread, for otherwise there would have been no point in reminding ordinary Christians they had once existed.

Irenaeus, the Bishop of Lugdunum, Lyon in Gaul, around 174 AD, had accepted that John stood alongside the synoptic gospels. He says there must be four gospels, neither more nor less, because there are four corners of the world and four winds. Tatian, another teacher of the same age, also accepted it, and included it in his harmony of the four gospels, the Diatessaron which became popular in the churches of Syria. Epiphanius, Bishop of Salamis in Cyprus, who died in 404 AD, wrote in his work Heresies of the sect of those who denied that Jesus was the Logos or Word of God (the Alogi) by rejecting the fourth gospel. Thereafter no further questions were raised about it.

The apocalypse, Revelation, also supposedly by John, offered more trouble in being accepted. Dionysius, Patriarch (Pope) of Alexandria in the years 247-265 AD, wrote a treatise of high critical merit which Eusebius of Caesarea preserved amply in his History of the Church. Dionysius could not accept that the author of the apocalypse was the apostle who wrote John and the epistles of John. The character and literary style of the two authors, and the tenor of Revelation show the authorship is different. John neither inscribes his name in Revelation nor announces himself in his gospel or epistles—in fact, Dionysius had never heard of the second and third epistles of John so he only speaks of the first. In contrast, the author of the apocalypse says at the very beginning “The Revelation of Jesus Christ which he gave him to show to his servants speedily, and signified by his angel to his servant John”, etc. The revelation was to Jesus Christ, not to John, but John was announced as the messenger appointed to bring it. Farther on he writes:

And also from the thoughts and language and arrangement of words we can easily conjecture that the one writer is separate from the other. For the Gospel and the Epistle harmonize with each other and begin in the same way, the one: “In the beginning was the Word”, and the other: “That which was from the beginning”. In the one we read: “And the Word was made flesh and dwelled among us, and we beheld his glory, glory as of the only-begotten by the Father”, and the other holds the same language slightly changed: “That which we have heard, that which we have seen with our eyes, that which we beheld and our hands handled, about the Word of Life, and the life was manifested”. For this is his prelude, and such his contention, made clear in the sequel, against those who denied that the Lord came in the flesh, and therefore he adds of set purpose the words: “And to what we saw we bear witness, and announce to you the eternal life which was with the Father and was manifested to us. What we have seen and heard we announce to you.”

The writer is consistent with himself, and never quits his main propositions, indeed, follows up his subject all through without changing his catchwords, some of which we will briefly recall. A careful reader, then, will find in each—John and 1 John—frequent mention of Light, Life, of flight from darkness, constant repetition of the words Truth, Grace, Joy, Flesh and Blood of the Lord, of Judgment and Remission of Sins, of God’s love toward us, of the command that we love one another, of the injunction to keep all the commandments, of the world’s condemnation and of the Devil’s, of the Antichrist, of the Promise of the Holy Spirit, of God s Adoption of us, of Faith perpetually demanded of us. The union of Father and Son pervades both works (John and 1 John), and, if we scan their character all through, the sense is forced on us of one and the same complexion in gospel and epistle.

But the apocalypse stands in absolute contrast to each. It nowhere touches or approaches either of them, and, we may fairly say, has not a single syllable in common with them, any more than the epistle not to mention the gospel contains reminiscence or thought of the apocalypse, or apocalypse of epistle, although Paul in his epistles hinted details of his apocalypses (ie revelations), without writing them down in a substantive book. Moreover, we can base a conclusion on the contrast of style there is between gospel and epistle on the one side, and apocalypse on the other. For the former not only use the Greek language without stumbling, but are throughout written with great elegance of diction, of reasoning and arrangement of expressions. We are far from meeting in them with barbarous words and solecisms, or any vulgarisms whatever, for their writer had both gifts, because the Lord endowed him with each, with that of knowledge and that of eloquence. I do not deny to the other his having received the gifts of knowledge and prophecy, but I cannot discern in him an exact knowledge of Greek language and tongue. He not only uses barbarous idioms, but sometimes falls into actual solecisms, which, however, I need not now detail, for my remarks are not intended to make fun of him, far be it from me, but only to give a correct idea of the dissimilitude of these writings.

Dionysius of Alexandria

Modern divines attach little weight to this well reasoned judgement of Dionysius, though Dionysius lived less than one hundred and fifty years later than the authors he compares here, and was therefore eminently qualified to distinguish between them. Whether or not John was a work of the apostle John, it cannot have been from the hand which penned Revelation.

Eusebius, the historian of the Church, espoused this conclusion, and the entire Eastern and Greek speaking Church followed him. Nor was the authority of Revelation rehabilitated in the Greek world before the end of the seventh century, while the outlying Churches of Syria and Armenia hardly admitted it into their canons before the thirteenth. However, in Rome and the West, Revelation circulated in a Latin version which disguised its distinctive coarse style in the Greek, and so seems to have been admitted into the canon from the outset, and its apostolic authorship never impugned.

The early Fathers seldom display such critical ability as the above extract reveals in the case of Dionysius. What was there to awake here this critical ability, when in respect of other writings it continued to slumber and sleep? Eusebius explains. Around 200 AD, many ordinary Christians still believed that Jesus Christ was to come again at once, and establish, not in a vague and remote heaven, but on this earth itself, a reign of peace, plenty, and carnal wellbeing. They were Millennarians, Messianists, the proper meaning of Christiani, the original or primitive Christians. These enthusiasts appealed to the apocalypse when their dreams were challenged, but Christian believers trying to establish the Church were fed up with them. One way to silence them was to prove that their favorite book, Revelation, had no apostolic authority.

Millennarians might have retorted, and their retort would have been true, that if one of the books was to go, then the gospel must go, on the ground that the apostle John, whom the epistle to the Galatians reveals as a Judaizing Christian, could not possibly have written it, though he might have penned Revelation, a typical Jewish apocalypse. We are never so apt to discover the truth as when we have an outside reason for doing so, and in religion especially are seldom inclined to abandon false opinions except in response to material considerations.

Origen

Origen saw the variation in text between one manuscript and another, but was not bothered about which was the true one. In Hebrews 2:9, he read in some MSS…

…that by the grace of God he (Jesus) should taste death,

but in others…

…that without God he should, etc.

He is content with either. He will correct place names, as in Matthew 8:28, in the scene of the swine driven by demons into the lake. In some MSS, it was set at Gerasa, in others at Gadara, but in Origen’s day pilgrims were conducted to Gergesa, which Origen was happy to use. One other example may be advanced of Origen’s want of critical acumen. In Matthew 17:17, he decided against the famous reading “Jesus Barabbas” as the name of the brigand who was released instead of Jesus of Nazareth, because no criminal could be called Jesus.

Origen defended allegorical interpretation of the New as well as the Old Testament. Even as early as the middle of the second century, Marcion had denounced the cruelty, lust, fraud, and rapine of the God of the Jews, and His favorites, the Hebrew patriarchs and kings. In the middle of the third century, it remained a difficult argument for most Christians to justify. Origen saw allegory as the way out of the difficulty, just as Philo had used it to explain the Old Testament.

In his work, On First Principles, Origen explains that the Old Testament is divinely inspired because its prophecies foreshadow Christ, and that neither Old or New Testaments waste a syllable without it having divine meaning. Yet the bible has horrible or unlikely tales like that of Lot and his incestuous daughters, of Abraham prostituting first one wife and then another, of a succession of at least three days and nights before the sun was created. How then can the bible be inspired? Moreover, who will be idiot enough to believe that God planted trees in Paradise like a gardener, that he walked about the garden, that Adam hid under a tree, that Cain fled from the face of God? Nor is the Old Testament alone full of such incidents.

In the gospels such narratives also abound. There is the story of the Devil dumping Jesus on top of a mountain, from which he showed him all the kingdoms of the earth and their glory. Can it be literally true that all the realms of Persia, of Scythia, and of India could be seen all at once, from a single mountain top, with fleshly eyes? In Luke 10:4, Jesus, when he sent off the twelve apostles bade them “Salute no man on the way”. None but silly people can believe that Christ delivered such a precept to the apostles. And how, Origen continues, could anyone be asked to do with only two tunics and no shoes, in a land where winter is bitter with frosts?

Also impossible is the prescription, “if thy right eye offends thee, pluck it out”. Both eyes are used to see, so why is the right eye saddled with guilt rather than the left? Origen thinks such useless or impossible incidents and precepts require an allegorical moral interpretation. God has contrived little traps and stumbling blocks like these to halt a slavish historical understanding of the text. The Holy Spirit has driven Christians by these passages—which cannot be true or useful, taken in their prima facie sense—to search for the truth lying beneath, and to seek in scriptures inspired by God a meaning worthy of Him.

It occurs to Origen that, though some of his readers may be willing to apply this method to the Old Testament, they will resist applying it to the New. He reassures them by insisting on what Marcion had denied, that the same Holy Spirit and the same God inspired both Old and New alike, and in the same manner. Whatever is legitimate in regard to one is legitimate in regard to the other also:

Wherefore also in the Gospels and Epistles the Spirit has introduced not a few incidents which, by breaking in upon and checking the historical character of the narrative, with which it is impossible to reconcile them, turn back and recall the attention of the reader to an examination of their inner meaning.

Origen

Origen admits that the passages in scripture which bear a spiritual sense and no other are considerably outnumbered by those which stand good as history. In the case of as many as possible, their historical truth can be and must be upheld, and most of the precepts delivered by Christ are to be literally observed. When he says: “Swear not at all”, the command cannot be avoided by the belief that it is allegory.

The one precept on the literal observance of which Origen insists—the prohibition of oaths—is just that which for centuries all Christian sects, with the exception of the medieval Cathars and modern Quakers, have flouted and defied.

Jerome, who was born about 346 AD, and died 420 AD made the mistake of basing the Latin Bible not upon the Septuagint, the Greek translation, but upon the Hebrew “original”. The mistake is that it is an assumption, no doubt on the face of it reasonable, but not likely to be entirely true that the Hebrew is original. For even if the bible was originally written in Hebrew, the version that has come down to us more than likely was not. For all it being unusual that a man like Jerome should have taken the trouble to engage rabbis to teach him Hebrew, when Christians had already categorized Jews as insufferable, his work on the New Testament contained nothing noteworthy.

The Harmonists

According to the sixth article of the Church of England:

Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation.

It does not mean that everything contained in Holy Scripture is necessary to salvation. Even so, most Protestant churches believe it. The allegorical method of interpreting the bible that Origen advocated required every smallest portion of the text to be inspired. Without this, passages that in their literal and primary sense seemed unhistorical and absurd could be set aside, limiting inspiration to the text that reasonably could be taken for true. The Reformed Churches had rejected the Pope as the final arbiter of difficulties arising out of the biblical text, and had no oracle left to appeal to except the bible itself, which they fondly imagined they could use as a judge uses a written code of law. Any such code must be consistent with itself, and free from internal contradictions, to be an effective instrument of government and administration. So too then must the bible, and soon it became a blasphemy to impute to “the Word of God” any inconsistencies or imperfections. The bible was held by Protestants to be a homogeneous whole dictated to its several writers, who were no more than passive organs of the Holy Spirit and amanuenses of God. Quenstedt (1617-1688), a pastor of Wittemberg wrote:

Scripture is a fountain of infallible truth, and exempt from all error, every word of it is absolutely true, whether expressive of dogma, of morality, or of history.

Such a view left to Protestants no loophole of allegory, and their divines have for generations striven to reconcile every one statement in the bible with every other by harmonistic shifts and expedients which they would disdain to use in interpreting any other document. Of these forced methods of explanation it is worth while to examine a few examples, for there is no better way of realising how great has been the retreat from enlightenment in present day America.

Our first example shall be taken from a work by William Whiston (1667-1752) entitled A Harmony of the Four Evangelists, published in 1702. Whiston succeeded Sir Isaac Newton in the Lucasian chair at Cambridge, was deeply read in the Christian Fathers, and was the author of many theological works. Yet Whiston, though a vigorous and original thinker, could be so demented by Christianity and the dogma of the infallibility and verbal inspiration of the bible that he believed he could resolvce the contradiction of the bible by a few feeble devices. The seventh of the rules he formulated for harmonising the gospels:

The resemblance there is between several discourses and miracles of our Saviour in the several Gospels, which the order of the evangelical history places at different times, is no sufficient reason for the superseding such order, and supposing them to be the very same discourses and miracles.

An example of the application of this rule is:

Thus it appears that our Saviour gave almost the very same instructions to the Twelve Apostles, and to the Seventy Disciples, at their several missions, the one recorded by S Matthew, the other by S Luke, as the likeness of the occasions did require. Now these large instructions, being in two Gospels, have been by many refer’d to the same time, by reason of their similitude.

Whiston’s rule rejects the idea that the same incident has been repeated with variations. Setting the discourses of Luke 10:1 and Matthew 10:1 together in parallel columns proves how remarkably similar these supposedly separate incidents are in these two gospels. Dean Alford, in his edition of the New Testament which appeared in 1863, begins his commentary on Luke 10 as follows:

Verses 1-16—Mission of the Seventy. It is well that Luke has given us also the sending of the Twelve, or we should have had some of the commentators asserting that this was the same mission. The discourse addressed to the Seventy is in substance the same as that to the Twelve, as the similarity of their errand would lead us to suppose it would be.

Alford thinks we have the discourse herein and separately data about the errand they were to complete, but in fact, the discourse is also the description of the errand. We have two errands but one description repeated to describe them both. Apart from what Jesus here tells them to do, we know nothing. The errands are not mentioned elsewhere in the New Testament to clarify the matter. So, we are left with one description, slightly amended to serve two different situations, and have to believe, if we are Christians who believe in an infallible bible, that the one description serves to describe accurately two ventures. The myth added later, that the seventy were apostles to the gentiles, does not gel because Jesus is saying they were to go before him to the several cities and places which he himself meant to visit. The passage therefore seems to be appropriate for the Twelve, not the Seventy.

Practically every critic, even the most orthodox, admits today that Matthew and Luke, in composing their gospels, used two chief sources, one Mark, close to the form in which we now have it, and the other a document which, because Mark reveals so little knowledge of it, is called the non-Marcan document, and by German scholars Q, short for Quelle or source. By extracting Mark’s words from Matthew and Luke then checking those parts which still reveal, not mere similarity, but passages essentially identical in phrase and wording, the lost document, Q, can be reconstructed. It consisted almost wholly of teachings and sayings of Jesus, with little narratives or incidents.

Why does Luke make two missions and two charges, one of the Twelve Apostles, copied directly from Mark, and the other of Seventy Disciples, copied directly from the non-Marcan document, whereas Matthew makes only one mission that of the Twelve and includes in the charge or body of instructions given to them the instructions which Luke reserves for the Seventy alone? The question arises: Did the non-Marcan source refer these instructions, which Luke keeps distinct, to the Twelve or to the Seventy, or to no particular mission at all? Luke does link the mission of the Seventy with a report of its successful outcome, but Matthew conflates the Twelve’s mission with the Seventy’s, suggesting that it was absent from the non-Marcan source. Moreover, the non-Marcan document which Luke copied in his tenth chapter was effectively identical with the text of Mark 6:7-13, for the ideas and the language therein are so similar Finally, several words and phrases used by Luke in reference to the mission of the Seventy are uncommonly like some in the added twelve verses of Mark. Conybeare suggest they are from a source by Aristion, the Elder, used by Luke.

The best explanation is that there were two closely parallel and ultimately identical accounts of a sending forth of apostles by Jesus, one of which Mark has preserved, while the other was in the non-Marcan document, but the latter did not state the circumstances when the precepts it recorded were delivered. Matthew saw that they referred to one and the same event, and therefore blended them in one narrative. Luke, who preferred to keep separate what was in Mark from what was in the non-Marcan source, even when these two sources repeated each other verbally, assumed the non-Marcan narrative referred to another mission than that of the Twelve, the account of which he had already had from Mark.

He speculated that a mission of seventy disciples must have been sent to the gentiles, corresponding with the seventy elders who had allegedly translated the Jewish scriptures into Greek for diffusion to the gentiles. So, the mission of the Seventy was purely Luke’s conjecture. That is why nowhere outside this chapter of Luke, is it mentioned in the New Testament. Eusebius, the historian of the Church, searched all the Christian writers who preceded him in the first and second centuries, seeking a list of these seventy disciples, but found none. Evidently, the mission created an impression only on Luke.

In the work of Edward Greswell, we find harmonies so forced that even Dean Alford found them excessive. Matthew 8:19-22 and Luke 9:57-60 are another pair of parallel texts, each the same pair of incidents, a short speech from Jesus about having nowhere to rest his head, and a reply to a specific question about burying the dead. In Matthew the events follow the descent of Jesus from the mount on which he had delivered his long sermon, and after he had healed a leper, a centurion’s servant, and Peter’s wife’s mother, and escaped from a multitude across the lake. They occurred, according to Matthew, early in the ministry of Jesus, and in Galilee to the north of Palestine. Luke sets them late in Jesus’s career, when he was on his way southward to Jerusalem, just before the crucifixion. So Greswell, believing verbal inspiration, and needing to include both in his harmony, sets the Matthew passage in the third part of his harmony and the Luke passage in the fourth part.

It was too much even for Dean Alford, who noted that the two incidents in the repeated passage could not have twice happened and both times have been related together. The Harmonists did violence to sound historical criticism, but such difficulties were a valuable guide to the humble searcher after truth. Alford adds that orthodox Harmonists state such variously placed narratives do not refer to the same incidents, thereby, they imagine, saving the reputation of the Evangelists, at the expense of candour. He thought no Christian need be afraid to recognize real discrepancies, in the spirit of fairness and truth. Christianity never was, and never could be, the gainer by any concealment, warping, or avoidance of the plain truth, wherever it was to be found.

Yet, the discrepancies in the gospels cited by Dean Alford are not difficulties apart from the prejudice that the bible is an infallible, uniform, and self consistent whole. Discard this idle hypothesis and these “difficulties” vanish. Later, Alford lays down a proposition more pregnant of meaning than he realised:

We must take our views of inspiration not, as is too often done, from a priori considerations, but entirely from the evidence furnished by the scriptures themselves.

The Dean has to be confessing that gospel inspiration is consistent with discrepancies, and even with untruths and inaccuracies as well. Where there are two rival and inconsistent accounts of the same divinely inspired biblical fact or event, only one can be true—the other must be false despite its inspiration. And yet, he fails to live with this in his commentaries, where he is mainly timorous and unscientific. Most orthodox modern critics frankly admit that the stories of the anointings of Jesus at feasts, first by a woman who was a sinner, in Luke 7:36f, and again by Mary the sister of Lazarus, in Matthew 26:6f, and Mark 14:3f, and John 11:2 and 12:3f, are so like one another that, as Whiston observes, “the great Grotius (d 1645) himself was imposed upon, and induc’d to believe them the very same. Such fatal mistakes are men liable to, when they indulge themselves in the liberty of changing the settled order of the Evangelists on every occasion”. The fatal mistake was Whiston’s and Alford’s, who took up the same position.

Is it open to everyone and anyone to pick and choose and decide what in the scriptures is true and what not, what inspired and what uninspired? Who is to be trusted with this new task of detecting an inner canon inside of the old canon of Scripture? The purpose of fundamentalism is to avoid such questions, though it leaves the other problems highlighted. Given that any church gets liberal enough to allow that there are errors in the bible, it cannot just leave it to any reader to decide on the truth or otherwise of doctrine, so, it has to claim the right of judgement. The doctors of the Catholic Church act in that function. Sir Robert Anderson, in a work entitled The Bible and Modern Criticism (London, 1903), justly observes:

The Lux Mundi school has fallen back on the Church as the source of authority… because the bible, so far from being infallible, is marred by error, and therefore affords no sure basis of faith.

Conybeare concludes:

And this is undoubtedly the point of view of High Church clergymen. It remains to be seen whether in the minds of Englishmen the authority of the Church will survive that of the bible.

The growth of biblical fundamentalists in the intervening century gives the answer. It will not. The evangelicals are taking over the Anglican Church which had become rational, but, in religion, unreason always prevails.

The Deists

The Unitarian movement, which flourished in Poland during the sixteenth century, and penetrated to England in the seventeenth, contributed but little to the criticism of the New Testament. It is true that Lelius Socinus (1525-1562) and Faustus Socinus (1539-1604), his nephew, both of Siena, after whom the Unitarians were called Socinians, denied many tenets held to be fundamental in the great churches of east and west, such as that of the trinity and that of baptism with water, but, no more than the medieval Cathars who in both these respects anticipated them, did they dream of calling in aid the resources of textual criticism. They merely accepted the New Testament text as they found it in Erasmus’s Greek edition, or even in the Latin Vulgate, and accepted it as fully and verbally inspired. No more than their Calvinist and Jesuit persecutors, had they any idea of a development of church doctrine such as could have led incidentally to interpolations and alterations of the texts. They questioned neither the traditional attributions of these texts nor their historical veracity.

Nor did it ever occur even to John Locke to doubt the plenary inspiration of scripture, although his philosophy, with its rejection of authority and appeal to experience and common sense, operated strongly for the creation of that rationalistic school of thinkers who came to be known as Deists. The writers of this school, who flourished at the end of the seventeenth and during the eighteenth century, dealt with many subjects, but they all of them stood for a revolt against authority in religion. Thus Matthew Tindal, in his work, Christianity as Old as the Creation; or, the Gospel a Republication of the Religion of Nature, declares in the preface:

He builds nothing on a thing so uncertain as tradition, which differs in most countries, and of which, in all countries, the bulk of mankind are incapable of judging.

The scope of his work is well indicated in the headings of his chapters, one and all. Take for example this:

Chap. I: That God, at all times, has given mankind sufficient means of knowing whatever he requires of them, and what those means are.

And in this chapter we read:

Too great a stress can’t be laid on natural religion, which, as I take it, differs not from revealed, but in the manner of its being communicated, the one being the internal, as the other the external revelation of the same unchangeable will of a Being, who is alike at all times infinitely wise and good.

This author never wearies of contrasting the simplicity of natural religion, the self evidencing clearness of the laws of goodness, mercy, and duty impressed on all human hearts[†]Moral Instinct. With the scientific discovery of an moral instinct evolved to promote sociality, this is literally true., with the complexity and uncertainty of a revelation which rests or is contained in scriptures, and he knows how to enrol leading Anglican authorities on his side in urging his point. Thus he adduces a passage from the Polemical Works of Jeremy Taylor, which begins thus:

Since there are so many copies with infinite varieties of reading

since a various interpunction, a parenthesis, a letter, an accent, may much alter the sense

since some places have divers literal senses, many have spiritual, mystical, and allegorical meanings

since there are so many tropes, metonymies, ironies, hyperboles, proprieties and improprieties of language, whose under standing depends on such circumstances, that it is almost impossible to know the proper interpretation, now that the knowledge of such circumstances, and particular stories, is irrecoverably lost

since there are some mysteries which, at the best advantage of expression, are not easy to be apprehended, and whose explication, by reason of our imperfections, must needs be dark, sometimes unintelligible

lastly, since those ordinary means of expounding Scripture, as searching the originals, conference of places, parity of reason, analogy of faith, are all dubious, uncertain, and very fallible, he that is wisest, and by consequence the likeliest to expound truest, in all probability of reason, will be very far from confidence.

The alternatives are of becoming “priests’ worshippers”, with “a divine faith in their dictates”, the path taken by Catholics, of course, but also by the modern American fundamentalists, who know so little about the bible in the mass, that they accept whatever their pastors dictate to them, or of resigning oneself to Bishop Taylor’s attitude of suspense and doubt. For as that writer concludes:

So many degrees of improbability and incertainty, all depress our certainty of finding out truth in such mysteries.

These, as he elsewhere says in Polemical Works:

Have made it impossible for a man in so great a variety of matter not to be deceived.

Tindal could not directly attack orthodoxy without losing his fellowship at All Souls College, but his implication throughout was that Christianity is not only superfluous, but too obscure to be set on a level with natural religion. His book is still worth reading. He argues men had to have had:

• an idea of a perfect and supreme being
• a certainty of his existence
• an idea of his perfections,

before they could even ask whether He has made an external revelation. All discussion of the question is idle, unless we could know whether this being is bound by his external word, and had not a secret will inconsistent with his revealed will at the time of giving it, or has not changed it since. The immediate reaction of a Christian would be that their God could not be so deceitful, but most of them are persuaded that God has not revealed everything all at once, but does so by progressive revelation. They therefore already believe that, when Yehouah gave the Law to Moses, he was not revealing all He had to reveal! Moses and the Israelites, the Christian believes, did not receive God’s true will, for God had not revealed the whole truth to them. Christians believe He only did so when he sent Jesus into Judaea and founded the Christian Church and its sacraments, and Moslems only when He sent Mohammed. What then is wrong with Tindal suggesting that we can not be sure that Christianity is God’s final revelation, and that there is still Truth that Christians have not yet received—perhaps Islam? May there not still be a secret will in reserve waiting to be revealed, as little consistent with current orthodoxy and its dogmas and rites as these are with the old Jewish religion of animal sacrifices?

Of Tindal's work only the first volume was published in 1730, when he was already an old man. He died in 1733, leaving a second ready for the press. It never saw the light, for Dr Gibson, Bishop of London, with whom Tindal had more than once crossed swords, got hold of the manuscript after the author’s death, and, judging that it was easier to suppress than answer such a work, had it destroyed.

The late Bishop Stubbs, with unconscious humour, confessed, in one of his letters, to a similar action. He met John Richard Green for the first time in a railway train, and, noticing that he was reading Renan’s Life of Jesus, engaged him in a discussion of other topics. Before the conversation ended the Bishop had transferred the obnoxious volume to his own handbag, whence, when he reached his home, he transferred it into his wastepaper basket. So history repeats itself at long intervals. Amid the revolutions of theology little remains the same except the episcopal temper.

Argument from Prophecy

The author of the first gospel incessantly appends to his narratives of Jesus the tag: “Now all this is come to pass that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophet”. So in Luke 24:25 it is related how the risen Jesus, on the road to Emmaus, by way of convincing two of his disciples of the reality of his resurrection, said unto them:

O foolish men and slow of heart to believe in accordance with all that the prophets have spoken! And beginning from Moses and from all the prophets, he interpreted to them throughout the scriptures the things concerning himself.

And similarly in the fourth gospel (John 19:28), Jesus, “that the scripture might be accomplished”, said:

I thirst… And when he had received the vinegar, he said, This scripture also is fulfilled, and he bowed his head, and gave up his spirit[†]Eusebius. So Eusebius put it, and the Georgian version which itself copies the Syriac version of the second century.

These passages illustrate the embellishment of the narratives of Jesus called “prophecy”, and which was the chief way the first Christians could answer Jews who scornfully denied him to be the Messiah. The same argument was then used to persuade the gentiles to accept the new religion, and Christian literature largely consisted of “the argument from prophecy”. Thousands of passages were torn from the living context which gave them sense and meaning, and distorted, twisted, mutilated, and misinterpreted to fit them as predictions of Jesus the Messiah. No one thought much of what they signified in their surroundings, or whether they had there any rational signification at all.

Early in the seventeenth century a few scholars noticed that various passages taken immemorially for prophecies of Christ seemed to make more coherent sense interpreted according to the particular circumstances of the Old Testament to which they belonged. Those which really anticipated the future had been already fulfilled in the close sequel of Old Testament history. Others were not anticipations at all, but statements of past events made by ancient writers. They pointed out that, in Hebrew, the grammatical forms for past and future action are almost identical, and easily mistaken for one another. Moreover, many passages of the Septuagint did not agree with the Hebrew text. The Hebrew had quite another meaning than that which the scholars supposed the evangelists, in their ignorance of Hebrew, had accepted.

It has to be said that here is an assumption that the Hebrew is indeed the original and not the Septuagint. Changes and additions were being made to the Hebrew texts until the time of Jesus—by the Essenes. And the Septuagint, usually accepted as a Ptolemaic Greek translation of a Hebrew original, was quite possibly a translation of an Aramaic text made at the same time as the Septuagint, so it is far from obvious that the errors were certainly in the Septuagint, and not actually in the Hebrew. As Hebrew was the more scarce language, almost dead in practice, with fewer scholars to translate it, the likelihood of genuine errors in the Hebrew seems more likely than in the Greek.

William Whiston set himself to resolve these doubts. He could not admit that the passages of the Old Testament thought by the evangelists to be prophecies were not, so proposed that old Hebrew text which did not warrant the Christian abuse of it had been changed and corrupted by Jewish enemies of Christ. The texts in their modern form are irreconcilable, and, having learned Hebrew, he boldly set himself to re-write the original, so as to make it tally with Christian requirements. But here a scholar as learned as himself, but less encumbered with the pedantry of orthodoxy, crossed his path. This was Anthony Collins (1676-1729), a scholar of Eton and of King’s College, Cambridge. Already, in 1707, he had published a work in which he pleaded for “the use of reason in propositions the evidence whereof depends on human testimony”.

In 1724, Collins published Discourse on the Grounds and Reasons of the Christian Religion in reply to the work of Whiston. He sums up:

The prophecies cited from the Old Testament by the authors of the New do so plainly relate, in their obvious and primary sense, to other matters than those which they are produced to prove.

Consider his discussion of the text Isaiah 7:14, invoked in Matthew 1:23: “Behold, the virgin shall be with child, and shall bring forth a son, etc”. Collins wrote:

These words, as they stand in Isaiah, from whom they are supposed to be taken, do, in their obvious and literal sense, relate to a young woman in the days of Ahaz, King of Judah.

He then shows from the context of Isaiah 8, how Ahaz…

…took two witnesses, and in their presence went unto the said virgin, or young woman, called the Prophetess (verse 3), who in due time conceived and bare a son, who was named Immanuel, after whose birth, the projects of Rezin and Pekah (Isaiah 8:8-10) were soon confounded, according to the prophesy and sign given by the prophet.

The sign (Isaiah 7:14) was…

…given by the prophet to convince Ahaz that he (the prophet) brought a message from the Lord to him to assure him that the two kings should not succeed against him. How could a virgin’s conception and bearing a son, seven hundred years afterwards, be a sign to Ahaz that the prophet came to him with the said message from the Lord? And how useless was it to Ahaz, as well as absurd in itself, for the prophet to say: Before the child, born seven hundred years hence, shall distinguish between good and evil, the land shall be forsaken of both her kings? which should seem a banter, instead of a sign. But a prophecy of the certain birth of a male child to be born within a year or two seems a proper sign.

Similarly he points out that the words of Hosea cited in Matthew 2:15 were no prediction, but a statement of a past fact viz that Yehouah had brought Israel his son out of Egypt.

Collins also undertook to show that the Book of Daniel, on which his antagonist, Whiston, relied, was a forgery of the age of Antiochus Epiphanes. This brilliant conjecture, which modern inquiry has substantiated, of itself suffices to place him in the foremost rank of critics. Bentley, the King's librarian, indulged in gibes, as cheap as they were coarse, at Collins’s mistakes in the domain of scholarship, but here was a discovery which, had Bentley known it, far outshone in importance, while it rivalled in critical insight, his own exposure in 1699 of the Epistles of Phalaris, the genuineness of which was at the time an article of faith in Oxford colleges.

Miracles

The other writer of this age who must be set alongside of Collins as a critic of the New Testament was Thomas Woolston (1669-1731). The general position of this writer was that the miracles related of Jesus are so unworthy of a spiritual Messiah that they must one and all, including the resurrection, be set down as never having happened at all, and be explained allegorically as types or figures of the real, which is the spiritual, alone. From his Discourse on the Miracles:

I will show that the miracles of healing all manner of bodily diseases, which Jesus was justly famed for, are none of the proper miracles of the Messiah, nor are they so much as a good proof of Jesus's divine authority to found and introduce a religion into the world.

And to do this let us consider, first, in general, what was the opinion of the Fathers about the Evangelists, in which the life of Christ is recorded. Eucherius says that the scriptures of the New as well as Old Testament are to be interpreted in an allegorical sense. And this his opinion is no other than the common one of the first ages of the Church… consequently the literal story of Christ’s miracles proves nothing. But let’s hear particularly their opinion of the actions and miracles of our Saviour. Origen says that “whatsoever Jesus did in the flesh was but typical and symbolical of what he would do in the spirit”, and to our purpose, that “the several bodily diseases which he healed were no other than figures of the spiritual infirmities of the soul, that are to be cured by him”[†]Healing Miracles. This is the view apparently held by the Essenes, and in these pages. The illnesses were degrees of acceptance of the status quo in Judaea, namely that Jews tolerated the Roman occupation, rather than stick by their faith in God and His Messiah and refuse to accept anything other than the rule of God. Cures were persuading Jews to have faith and take heart against the Romans..

The following are some of the results at which he arrives by applying the above canon.

• The spittle miracle (in John 9): “of the blind man, for whom eyesalve was made of clay and spittle, which eyesalve, whether it was Balsamick or not, does equally affect the credit of the miracle. If it was naturally medicinal, there’s an end of the miracle, and if it was not medicinal, it was foolishly and impertinently apply’d, and can be no otherwise accounted for than by considering it, with the Fathers, as a figurative act in Jesus.”
• “Jesus's cursing the fig tree, for its not bearing fruit out of season, upon the bare mention of it, appears to be a foolish, absurd, and ridiculous act, if not figurative. It is so like the malignant practices of witches, who, as stories go, upon envy, grudge, or distaste, smite their neighbours cattle with languishing distempers, till they die.”
• “Of the Wise Men out of the East, with their (literally) senseless and ridiculous presents of frankincense and myrrh, to a new-born babe. If with their gold, which could be but little, they had brought their dozens of sugar, soap, and candles, which would have been of use to the child and his poor mother in the straw, they had acted like wise as well as good men.”
• On the miracle of Cana: “Jesus, after their more than sufficient drinking for their satisfaction of nature, had never turned water into wine, nor would his mother have requested him to do it, if, I say, they had not a mind, and took pleasure in it too, to see the company quite stitch’d up
  The Fathers of your Church, being sensible of the absurdity, abruptness, impertinence, pertness, and senselessness of the passage before us according to the letter, had recourse to a mystical and allegorical interpretation, as the only way to make it consistent with the wisdom, sobriety, and duty of the Holy Jesus.”

In his sixth discourse on the miracles, Woolston assails the narratives of the resurrection. He put his argument into the mouth of an imaginary Jewish rabbi who begins by lamenting the loss of the writings which, according to Justin Martyr (c 130-140), his own ancestors unquestionably dispersed against Jesus. These, if we had them, would, he avers, yield us a clear insight into the cheat and imposture of the Christian religion.

He then proceeds to argue that the priests who sealed the sepulchre waited for Jesus to rise again after three days, ie on Monday but that the disciples stole a march on them by removing the body a day earlier, and then pretended the sense of the prophecy to be that he should rise on the third day. The disciples were…

…afraid to trust Jesus’s body, its full time, in the grave, because of the greater difficulty to carry it off afterwards, and pretend a resurrection upon it….

Jesus s body was gone betimes in the morning, before our chief priests could be out of their beds, and a bare faced infringement of the seals of the sepulchre was made against the laws of honour and honesty.

In short, by the sealing of the stone of the sepulchre we are to understand nothing less than a covenant entered into between our chief priests and the apostles, by which Jesus’s veracity, power, and Messiahship was to be try’d… The condition of the sealed covenant was that if Jesus arose from the dead in the presence of our chief priests, upon their opening the seals of the sepulchre, at the time appointed, then he was to be acknowledged to be the Messiah. But if he continued in a corrupt and putrified state, then was he to be granted to be an impostor. Very wisely and rightly agreed! And if the apostles had stood to this covenant, Christianity had been nipt in its bud and suppressed at its birth.

He anticipates the objection that the theft could not have escaped the notice of the soldiers set to guard the tomb. These were either bribed or, as “our ancestors said, what your evangelist has recorded”, asleep.

The rabbi next raises the objection that Jesus appeared to none except the faithful:

Celsus of old, in the name of the Jews, made the objection, and Olivio, a later rabbi, has repeated it. But in all my reading and conversation with men or books I never met with a tolerable answer to it.

…This objection Origen owns to be a considerable one in his second book against Celsus.

Whoever blends together the various history of the four Evangelists as to Jesus’s appearances after his resurrection will find himself not only perplex’d how to make an intelligible, consistent, and sensible story of it, but must, with Celsus, needs think it, if he closely think on’t, like some of the confused and incredible womanish fables of the apparitions of the ghosts of deceased persons, which the Christian world in particular has in former ages abounded with. The ghosts of the dead in this present age, and especially in this Protestant country, have ceased to appear, and we nowadays hardly ever hear of such an apparition. And what is the reason of it? Why, the belief of these stories being banish’d out of men’s minds, the crafty and vaporous forbear to trump them upon us. There has been so much clear proof of the fraud in many of these stories that the wise and considerate part of mankind has rejected them all, excepting this of Jesus, which, to admiration, has stood its ground…

I can t read the story without smiling, and there are two or three passages in it that put me in mind of Robinson Crusoe’s filling his pockets with biskets, when he had neither coat, wastecoat, nor breeches on. I don’t expect my argument against it (the Resurrection) will be convincing of any of your preachers. They have a potent reason for their faith, which we Jews can’t come at, or I don’t know but we might believe with them.

That the Fathers, without questioning their belief of Jesus’s corporal Resurrection, universally interpreted the story and every part of it mystically, is most certain.

He cites Hilary in behalf of this contention, also Augustine, Origen, John of Jerusalem, Jerome, and then sums up his case in the following words:

What I have said in a few citations is enough to show that they looked upon the whole story as emblematical of his Spiritual Resurrection out of the grave of the letter of the Scriptures, in which he has been buried about three days and three nights, according to that mystical interpretation of prophetical Numbers which I have learned of them… by the three Days, S Augustin says, are to be understood three ages of the world.

I am resolved to give the Letter of the Scripture no rest, so long as God gives me life and abilities to attack it. Origen says that, “when we dispute against Ministers of the Letter, we must select some historical parts of Scripture, which they understand literally, and show that, according to the Letter, they can’t stand their ground, but imply absurdities and nonsense.” And how then is such a work to be performed to best advantage? Is it to be done in a grave, sedate, and serious manner? No, I think ridicule should here take place of sober reasoning, as the more proper and effectual means to cure men of their foolish faith and absurd notions.

Woolston’s argument against the Resurrection is old-fashioned, no doubt, as compared with the subtler criticism of the Abbé Loisy, who challenges the story of the empty tomb altogether, and argues that, Jesus having been really cast after death into the common foss, or Hakeldama, into which other malefactors bodies were thrown, the story of the women’s visit to the empty tomb was invented to buttress the growing belief in a bodily resurrection, such as became a messiah who was to return and inaugurate an earthly millennium.

Woolston was twice attacked by zealots in front of his house, and was in the King's Bench tried before a jury who found him guilty of blasphemy. He was fined a hundred pounds, and, being unable to pay, he went to prison for the last four years of his life.

There is one aspect of these two Deists which escaped their contemporaries and all who have since written about them. It is this, that in dismissing the historical reality of Christ's miracles in favor of an exclusively symbolic interpretation they exactly took up the attitude of the medieval Cathars, called sometimes Albigensians, sometimes Patarenes. Thus in an old imaginary dialogue of the twelfth or thirteenth century, written by a Catholic against these heretics, the Catholic asks:

Why, like Christ and the apostles, do you not work visible signs?

And the Patarene answers:

Even yet a veil is drawn in your hearts, if you believe that Christ and his apostles worked visible signs. The letter killeth, but the spirit quickeneth. Ye must therefore understand things in a spiritual sense, and not imagine that Christ caused the soul of Lazarus to return to his corpse, but only that, in converting him to his faith, he resuscitated one that was dead as a sinner is dead, and had lain four days, and so stunk in his desperate state[†]Lazarus. See the previous note regarding healing miracles..

These heretics, the descendants of Marcion and Mani, held that, as matter was an evil creation, Christ, a spiritual and divine being, could not have wrought material miracles, he could not pollute himself by contact with matter. He only appeared to the eye to work material signs, just as he appeared to the eye to have a human body, though, in fact, he shared not our flesh and blood. His birth, therefore, no less than his death and resurrection, were only fantastic appearances, and not real events.

It is strange to find Woolston reproducing these earlier forms of opinion. Did he blunder into them by himself, or did he, through some obscure channel, inherit them? If we consider that these medieval heretics were in the direct pedigree of some of the Quaker and Anabaptist sects which in the seventeenth century swarmed in England, Holland, and Germany, it is not impossible that he picked up the idea from some of his contemporaries.

The Evangelists

The conventional view of Christians about the gospels is that they are the work of the four evangelists who were eyewitnesses to the events surrounding the ministry, and particularly the death and resurrection of Jesus. Yet Conybeare writing a century ago could enumerate the evidence already well known that this is utterly false. If it is an example of faith, then it shows that faith itself obliges Christians to believe what is demonstrably false.

The gospel called “according to Matthew”, for centuries Christianity’s favorite gospel, is not a work of the apostle called Matthew in the gospels. The name of this man in the gospels is not itself utterly clear. A publican called by Jesus to be an apostle is called Matthew in Matthew, but in the other two synoptic gospels, his name is Levi. Dean Alford gave a typical apologetic explanation:

It is probable enough that Matthew, in his own gospel, would mention only his apostolic name.

In that gospel, though, the account is least satisfactory, so Alford continued with his apologetics:

In this case, when he of all men must have been best informed, his own account is the least precise of the three.

Alford was convinced that no one “of the three evangelists had access to either of the other two gospels in its present form”. He could not accept that Matthew, an apostle, indebted to others, not only for the order in which he arranges the events of the ministry of Jesus, but also for great blocks of his texts. Yet the debt Matthew owes to Mark is axiomatic today among biblical critics, and only a tiny minority dissent from it. Matthew is now considered to be a compilation by an unknown writer of two documents he had before him, namely, Mark and the non-Marcan document mentioned above called Q.

Dr Armitage Robinson, a fairly conservative critic, writes in his work on The Study of the Gospels as follows:

I think that the impression gained by anyone who will take the trouble to do what I have suggested[†]Compare Gospels. Underline in Matthew and Luke all the phrases, sentences, and entire narratives which agree verbally with Mark, so that they may realise for themselves how little of Mark is left that is not either in Matthew or in Luke. will certainly be that S Mark’s Gospel lay before the other two evangelists, and that they used it very freely, and between them embodied almost the whole of it.

Accordingly Dr Robinson boldly asserts the first gospel to be the work of an unknown writer, and warns his readers to prefer either Luke or Mark or the reconstructed non-Marcan document to Matthew:

From the historical point of view he cannot feel a like certainty in dealing with statements which are only attested by the unknown writer of the first gospel.

A gospel that had all the prestige of apostolic authorship, and the only one of the synoptics that had that prestige, has been debased to the level of an anonymous compilation, of less value for the historian than either of the other two. The one synoptic evangelist whom Alford thought had seen things with his own eyes, and on whom he could depend, turns out to be no apostle at all, but an anonymous copyist.

Equally, Father Joseph Rickaby (Jesus or Christ, 1909) had said of Matthew that “its essential value has been proved as it never had been proved before”. And in this connection it is instructive to note how the same hypothesis viz, the dependence of Matthew and Luke on Mark, and of the priority of Mark was regarded before and after its acceptance.

Dean Alford believed the identity of gospel passages across gospels could be explained thus:

While they (the apostles) were principally together, and instructing the converts at Jerusalem, such narrative would naturally be for the most part the same, and expressed in the same, or nearly the same, words: coincident, however, not from design or rule, but because the things themselves were the same, and the teaching naturally fell for the most part into one form.

A Mr Smith sought to test the explanation by seeing of how far and why modern historians, narrating the same events, approximate to one another. They only agree verbally, as the Synoptic Gospels agree, where they copied either one the other or all common documents, and that where they did not so copy they did not agree.

Both Matthew and Luke had conceptions of the character and role of Jesus based partly on reflections of their own, partly on the growing prophetic gnosis of the age, in obedience to which they remodelled Mark’s narrative. Dean Robinson remarks that in Mark the emotions of anger, compassion, complacence, are each recorded of Jesus three times, grief, agony, surprise, vehemence, each once. Of actions, we have “looking around” five times, “looking upon” twice, “looking up” once, “turning” thrice, “groaning” twice, “embracing in the arms” twice, “falling down” once.

In the parallel passages of Matthew and Luke, all the more painful emotions disappear, with one exception—agony. Anger, grief, groaning, vehemence, are gone, compassion remains twice in Matthew, complacence, if it may be so termed, once in both.

Nor is it only in respect of Jesus that these picturesque details disappear. The figures of the disciples are purged in the same manner of human emotions. Dean Robinson continues:

Perplexity (five times), amazement (four), fear (four), anger (once), hardness of heart (once), drowsiness (once), are all recorded with more or less frequency in Mark. But in the other evangelists we find the same tendency to eliminate as before.

The alternative is that some humanizing editor has inserted all these emotions into Mark, a most unlikely hypothesis. Dean Robinson’s explanation, that this suppression of emotional attributes in the persona dramatis was “the result of the reverence of a slightly later stage of reflection, when such traits might seem incompatible with the dignity of the sacred character of Christ and his apostles” is much more likely. On the other hand, as Dean Robinson subtly remarks, the wonderment of the multitudes at the miracles of Jesus, already emphasised in Mark, is still further exaggerated in the later evangelists, and, as for the adversaries of Jesus, “we even seem to discover a general tendency both in S Matthew and in S Luke to expand and emphasise the notices of their hostility”.

This is the best sort of literary criticism, and it really marks an epoch in the history of the Christian religion in England when a Dean of Westminster can deliver it from his pulpit and publish it in a book. But does it not show how swiftly the process was of dehumanizing Jesus, of converting him from a man of flesh and blood into a god, gifted with the ataraxia or exemption from human emotions proper to the Stoic ideal sage and king? This development between the years 70 AD and 120 AD culminates in the fourth gospel.

Now, the early tradition that Matthew was the work of an apostle and eyewitness has been definitely given up. There may have been some truth in the tradition preserved by Papias about 120-140 AD that Matthew composed the logia or oracles of the Lord in the Hebrew tongue ie, in the Aramaic of Palestine, and that various people subsequently rendered these logia into Greek as best they could. Here we seem to get our only glimpse at the pre-Greek stage of the evangelical tradition, but we shall never know whether the word logia here used by Papias signified a collection of sayings or of narratives, or of both together. Matthew’s Hebrew logia may have been a selection of prophecies of Jesus Christ culled from the Old Testament. Maybe this Matthew mentioned by Papias was even the source Q which was combined with Mark by a later redacter, but retained or was given the name of Matthew. In any case, our Matthew is no translation of the document attested by Papias, for, as Dean Robinson remarks, “our Matthew is demonstrably composed in the main out of two Greek books”, so that we must “conclude either that Papias made a mistake in saying that S Matthew wrote in Hebrew, or that if he wrote in Hebrew his work has perished without leaving a trace behind it”.

There is, furthermore, a statement in Irenaeus (about 170-180) to the effect that Matthew published his gospel among the Jews in his own tongue at the time that Peter and Paul were preaching the Gospel in Rome and founding the Church. This statement seems to be independent of that of Papias, as most certainly is the story related by Eusebius, of Pantaenus, the catechist of Alexandria, and teacher of Clement and Origen.

The story runs that, about the year 180 AD, Pantaenus visited India and found the natives using a Gospel of Matthew written in Hebrew, which Bartholomew the apostle had conveyed to them. Origen and Eusebius equally believed that our Matthew was the work of the apostle, originally composed in Hebrew. It surely denotes a great change, almost amounting to a revolution, when so ancient and well attested a tradition as that which assigned the first gospel to the apostle Matthew is set aside by leaders of the English clergy. Before long they must with equal candour abandon the yet more impossible tradition that the fourth Gospel was written by an apostle and eye witness, John, the son of Zebedee, who in the Epistle to the Galatians is presented to us by Paul as a Judaizer and an ally of James, the brother of Jesus.

The tradition that this apostle wrote this gospel is hardly so well authenticated as that which attested the apostolic origin of the first Gospel. It merely amounts to this, that as a child Irenaeus had heard Polycarp, who died about 155 AD speak of John the apostle. But he does not assert that Polycarp attributed the gospel to the apostle, nor is the occurrence in a surviving letter of Polycarp to the Philippians of a phrase from the first Epistle of John proof that Polycarp either knew of the gospel, or, if he knew of it, that he ascribed it to John any more than he does the epistle. It is, moreover, practically certain that the John of whom Irenaeus in his boyhood heard Polycarp speak was not the apostle but the Presbyter John, for Irenaeus reports that Papias, like Polycarp, was a disciple of this John, whereas Papias, according to the testimony of Eusebius, who had his works in his library, learned much of what he recorded in the five books of his lost Diegeseis, or narratives, not from John the apostle but from John the Presbyter. Irenaeus, therefore, confused the two Johns.

The external evidence of the existence of John is no doubt early and ample, but it is chiefly found among heretical and gnostic sects, like the Ophites, Perateans, Basilidians, and Valentinians, and one of the latter, Heracleon, wrote a commentary on it. The attribution to the apostle John was probably made by some of these sects, just as the Basilidians affected to have among them a gospel of Matthew, and as in other circles the so-called gospel of Peter was attributed to S Peter, and read aloud in church as an authentic work of that apostle. If John took its origin from gnostic circles, we can quite well understand why there existed so early in the orthodox Church of Asia such strong prejudice against it.

If the Book of Daniel is the battlefield of the Old Testament, the Gospel of John is the battlefield of the New.

Canon Liddon, Bampton Lectures (1866)

John is the favorite gospel of many Christians, yet a century ago some of the most scholarly Anglicans inclined to give it up. Dean Robinson devotes two luminous chapters to the problem of its age and authorship. Though he inclines to it as a work of the apostle in extreme old age, he sympathizes with those who reject this “the orthodox” tradition:

There are many who are heartily devoted to that central truth—of the divinity of Christ—but yet cannot easily persuade themselves that the fourth gospel offers them history quite in the sense that the other Gospels do, cannot think that Christ spoke exactly as He is here represented as speaking, and consequently cannot feel assured that this is the record of an eye witness, or, in other words, the writing of the apostle, S John.

He continues:

How remote do these theological statements (in the prologue of the fourth gospel) appear from a gospel narrative of the life of Christ, such as the three which we have been hitherto studying. Our surprise is not lessened as we read on. Great abstract conceptions are presented in rapid succession—life, light, witness, flesh, glory, grace, truth.

Of the references to John the Baptist:

We are back on the earth indeed, but the scene is unfamiliar and the voices are strange. We hear not a word of John’s preaching of repentance, or even of his baptism. This is no comment on the facts we know. It is a new story altogether…

If a wholly new story of the beginnings of discipleship is offered us, this is not more startling than the wholly new story of John’s disclaimer of Messiahship…

The whole atmosphere seems different…

Not only do the old characters appear in new situations the scene, being laid mostly in Jerusalem instead of Galilee, but the utterances of all the speakers seem to bear another impress…

At times it is not possible to say whether the Lord Himself is speaking, or whether the evangelist is commenting on what He has said. The style and diction of speaker and narrator are indistinguishable, and they are notably different from the manner in which Christ speaks in the Synoptic Gospels…

Dean Robinson concludes:

An old man, disciplined by long labour and suffering… can no longer sever between the fact and the truth revealed by the fact. Interpretation is blended with event. He knows that he has the mind of Christ. He will say what he now sees in the light of a life of discipleship.

Robinson retains the apostleship of John but only at the expense of the strangeness of the tale being because the old man’s mind was wandering, he was confusing the events, confusing himself with Christ, and seeing a much grander vision than the experience. And all of this loyally recorded and made sense of by John’s disciples. For seventeen hundred years the theology which lifts Jesus of Nazareth out of and above human history, transforms him into the Word of God, which triumphed at Nicea, and inspired Athanasius, was based on this fourth gospel more than on any other book of the New Testament. It now appears, by the admission of Dean Robinson, that this entire theological fabric was woven in the mind of an apostle meditating in extreme old age on the half forgotten scenes and conversations of his youth. Such is the best case which can be made out for orthodox theology. The alternative is that the whole work is deliberately varnished, and the original Jesus can no longer be seen beneath the newly varnished Christ.

Textual Criticism

Until about the year 200 AD, Christians were so much possessed with the dream of the impending dissolution of all existing institutions to make way for their own millennium, that they paid small attention to their scanty records of the earthly Christ, except so far as they were useful to confound their Jewish antagonists. They attached authority not to written documents, nor to priests and bishops, but to itinerant prophets, catechists, and ascetics.

The appearance of the Diatessaron, about 180, showed the Christians had no peculiar respect for the four gospels standing separatey as opposed to being merged into one. In Syria, Tatian’s compilation was accepted instead of the separate documents for reading out in church. After all, the gospels of Matthew and Luke were themselves compilations mainly of Mark and the non-Marcan document, and few would have found fault with Tatian for altering his material as the evangelists did theirs.

Probably when Irenaeus, 180-200 AD, pleaded that there could be only these four Gospels because there were only four winds, he was arguing against people who used other Gospels like that according to Peter and according to the Egyptians, and who regarded them, too, as sacred documents.

Luckily for the gospels, the great controversies of the Church began in the third century only, when the gospel text was too settled for partisans to interfere with it on the large scale on which Marcion tampered with Luke. Even so, details changed to suit the myth or new developments of doctrine, even in the early period[†]Early Period. The contention in these pages is that gentile bishops in the wider empire had to meet the evidence brought out of Judaea by Pharisaic Jews, especially after the Jewish War, and that was an important reason for the publication of the first gospel—to counter the true story of Jesus as a failed seditionist. So the gospels never told the true story.. An example is the story of the rich youth who aspired to become a disciple (Matthew 19:16; Mark 10:17; Luke 18:18). We can seldom estimate the originality and value of rival variants found in one gospel without considering what is read in the other two, supposing these to contain parallel versions of a saying or incident.

Westcott, who co-edited the Greek Testament never abandoned the view that points of agreement and disagreement in the gospels are to be explained from oral tradition alone, but the common element in the gospels was not the Holy Spirit:

No one at present [1860 AD] would maintain with some of the older scholars of the Reformation that the coincidences between the Gospels are due simply to the direct and independent action of the same Spirit upon the several writers.

Yet that it might just as well be the Holy Spirit as a merely oral tradition will be plain to anyone who reflects how impossible it is that three independent writers should remember a long and complicated body of incident and teaching in the same way, and transfer it to paper, page after page, in almost identical words.

Orthodox Corruptions

In 1 John 5:7, most but not all copies of the Latin Bible, called the Vulgate, read as follows:

For there are three who bear witness in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Spirit, and these three are one. And there are three that bear witness on earth, the Spirit and the water and the blood, and these three are one.

In the first printed edition of the New Testament, called the Complutensian, prepared at Alcala in Spain, in 1514, by Cardinal Francis Ximenes, the words here emphasized were included, having been translated from the Latin text into Greek, though the Greek MSS used did not contain them. They are only found in two Greek MSS, one of the fifteenth the other of the sixteenth century. About 400 other Greek codices from the fourth century down to the fourteenth know nothing of them. All MSS of the old Latin version before Jerome lack them, and in the oldest copies even of Jerome’s recension of the Latin text, the Vulgate, they are conspicuously absent.

The first Church writer to cite the verse in such a text was Priscillian, a Spaniard, who was also the first heretic to be burned alive by the Church in the year 385 AD. After him Vigilius, Bishop of Thapsa, cites it about 484. It is probable that the later Latin fathers mistook what was only a comment of Cyprian Bishop of Carthage (d 258) for a citation of the text. It filtered from them into the Vulgate text[†]Gibbon, in a note on chapter 37 of his Decline and Fall, says that in the eleventh and twelfth centuries the bibles were corrected by Lanfranc, Archbishop of Canterbury, and by Nicolas Cardinal and librarian of the Roman Church, from which, as we have seen, it was translated into Greek and inserted in two or three very late manuscripts.

Erasmus’s first edition of the Greek Testament, in 1516, omitted the verse, as also did the second, but in 1522, he issued a third edition containing it. Robert Stephens also inserted it in his edition of 1546, which formed the basis of all subsequent editions of the Greek Testament until recently, and is known as the Received Text, or Textus Receptus.

In 1670, Sandius, an Arian, assailed the verse, as also did Simon, a learned Roman Catholic priest, in his Histoire Critique du Nouveau Testament, about twenty years later. He was followed by Sir Isaac Newton, who, in a learned dissertation published after his death in 1754, strengthened Simon’s arguments. Oddly enough, a Huguenot pastor, David Martin (1639-1721), of whom better things might have been expected, took up the cudgels in defence of the text.

It were to be wished that this strange opinion had never quitted the Arians and Socinians, but we have the grief to see it pass from them to some Christians, who, though content to retain the doctrine of the Trinity, abandon this fine passage where that holy doctrine is so clearly taught.

It is the tolerance of fraud, so long as it makes for orthodoxy, that educated Christians are all too fond of, and the sheep themselves refuse to know anything about. Thus, an Anglican bishop added a footnote in his catechism to the effect that the authenticity of this text, although by many disputed, must be strenuously upheld because it is so valuable a witness to the truth of Trinitarian doctrine. Gibbon, in his thirty-seventh chapter, sarcastically wrote:

The memorable text which asserts the unity of the Three who bear witness in Heaven is condemned by the universal silence of the orthodox fathers, ancient versions, and authentic manuscripts… After the invention of printing, the editors of the Greek Testament yielded to their own prejudices, or those of the times, and the pious fraud, which was embraced with equal zeal at Rome and Geneva, has been infinitely multiplied in every country and every language of modern Europe.

This passage provoked an attack on Gibbon from a certain English Archdeacon, Travis, who rushed into the arena to defend the text which Kettner, answering Simon nearly a century earlier, had extravagantly hailed as “the most precious of Biblical pearls, the fairest flower of the New Testament, the compendium by way of analogy of faith in the Trinity”. It was high time that forgers should receive a rebuke, and Person, the greatest of English Greek scholars and critics, resolved to administer it to them. In a series of Letters to Travis he detailed with merciless irony and infinite learning the history of this supposititious[†]Definition. Counterfeit, falsely inserted. text. Travis answered that Person was a Thersites, and that he despised his railings. He accused him of defending Gibbon, who, as an infidel, was no less Person’s enemy than his own. Person’s answer reveals the nobility of his character, “Why, for that very reason I would defend him”.

These letters of Person are worth reading, and here is one, a single passage about Bengel (d 1752), whose commentary on the New Testament called The Gnomon was, for its day, a model of learning and acumen:

Bengel allowed that the verse was in no genuine MS, that the Complutensian editors interpolated it from the Latin version, that the Codex Britannicus is good for nothing, that no ancient Greek writer cites it, and many Latins omit, and that it was neither erased by the Arians nor absorbed by the homoeoteleuton. Surely, then, the verse is spurious. No, this learned man finds out a way of escape. The passage was of so sublime and mysterious a nature that the secret discipline of the Church withdrew it from the public books, till it was gradually lost. Under what a want of evidence must a critic labour who resorts to such an argument.

Person made himself unpopular by writing these letters. The publisher of them lost money over the venture, and an old lady, Mrs Turner, of Norwich, who had meant to leave him a fortune, cut down her bequest to thirty pounds, because her clergyman told her that Porson had assailed the Christian religion.

The revised English version of this passage omits, of course, the fictitious words, and gives no hint of the text which was once so popular. Archdeacon Travis is discreetly forgotten in the Anglican Church, but the truth has far from triumphed in the Roman, and Pope Leo XIII, in an encyclical of the year 1897, solemnly decreed that the fraudulent addition is part of authentic scripture. He was surrounded by reactionaries who imagined that, if they could wrest such a pronouncement from the infallible Pontiff, they would have made an end for ever of criticism in the Catholic Church. The abbot of Monte Casino, the home of the Benedictines, was, it is said, on the point of publishing a treatise in which he traced this forgery to its sources, when the Pope’s decree was issued. He thrust back his treatise into his pigeon holes, where it remains. The aged Pope, however, who was a stranger to such questions, soon realised that he had been imposed upon. Henceforth he refused to descend to particulars, or to condemn the many scholars delated to him as modernist heretics.

Of these the Abbé Loisy was the chief, and the outcry against him finally decided Leo to establish, in 1902, a commission for the progress of study of holy scripture. For the first time a few specialists were called in by the head of the Catholic Church to guide his judgment in such matters, and Leo XIII directed them to begin by studying the question of the text, 1 John 5:8. They presently sent him their report which was pigeon holed—it found the text was not authentic. But the aged prelate’s mind was ill at ease, and during his last illness, both in his lucid moments and in delirium, he could talk of nothing else. He has been succeeded by one who has no qualms, but condemns learning wherever and whenever he meets with it.

There is a similar Trinitarian text in Matthew 28:19, where the risen Christ is represented as appearing to his twelve apostles on a mountain top in Galilee, and saying to them:

All authority hath been given unto me in heaven and on earth. Go ye therefore, and make disciples of all the nations baptising them into the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost, teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I commanded you: and lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world.

Here Eusebius, Bishop of Caesarea, who died about the year 340 AD, and was entrusted by the Emperor Constantine with the task of preparing fifty editions de luxe of the gospels for the great churches built or rebuilt after the Diocletian persecution was ended, read in such of his works as he wrote before the year 325 as follows, “Go ye therefore, and make disciples of all the nations in my name, teaching them…”.

In the MSS which Eusebius inherited from his predecessor, Pamphilus, at Caesarea in Palestine, some at least preserved the reading in which there was no mention either of Baptism or of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

Not a single MS or ancient version has preserved to us the true reading. The Greek MSS of the text of the New Testament were often altered by scribes, who put into them the readings which were familiar to them, and which they held to be the right readings. We can trace their perversions of the text in a few cases, with the aid of patristic citations and ancient versions, but there must remain many passages which have been thus altered though where we cannot today expose the fraud. Drs Westcott and Hort used to aver that there is no evidence of merely doctrinal changes having been made in the text of the New Testament. This is just the opposite of the truth, and such distinguished scholars as Alfred Loisy, J Wellhausen, Eberhard Nestle, and Adolf Harnack do not scruple to recognise the fact.

Some Pioneers

“Henceforth I mean to be free”, wrote Luther when he broke with the Pope, and he had the merit at least of throwing off authority and asserting the right and duty of the individual believer to read the bible for himself, and interpret it without the help of a priest. “With all due respect for the Fathers, I prefer the authority of Scripture”. To realise how much we owe to him for the bold challenge he hurled at Papal authority, compare the poor treatment by the Pope Pius X of the Modernists, whose chief offence is to desire to understand the bible, with the respect paid in the Lutheran Church to such men as Harnack, Von Soden, Preuschen, Violet, and in the Anglican to such scholars as Robertson Smith, Professor Driver, Professor Sanday, Professor Burkitt. All these men would, in the Roman Church of the early twentieth century, have had to suppress or swallow their opinions, or would have been hounded out of the Church with writs of excommunication amid the imprecations of the orthodox crowd.

Johann Gottfried Herder, a poet and a philosopher, was one of the earliest German scholars who tried to understand the gospels. In his first essay in theological criticism, entitled Letters on the Study of Theology he urged that the bible must be read from a human point of view, and he saw the impossibility of harmonizing the fourth gospel with the Synoptics. Orthodox divines, a hundred years later were still pretending that it supplements, but does not contradict, the other three. Herder argued that you may write a life of Jesus out of John, or out of the Synoptics, but not out of both sources at once—they are irreconcilable. He declared John to have been written from the standpoint of Greek ideas, as a corrective to the Palestinian gospel which the other three reflect. They represent Jesus as a Jewish Messiah, while in John Jesus is Saviour of the world, and the latter drops out of sight the demonology of the other three, because its author, like Philo, regarded it all as so much Palestinian superstition.

Yet Herder did not reject miracles. He even accepted that of the raising of Lazarus from the dead, and argued that the earlier gospels passed it over in silence not to excite the wrath of the Jews against the humble family in Bethany! This argument is not too absurd for Dean Farrar to repeat it a hundred years later in his Life of Christ.

With regard to the interrelations of the Synoptics, Herder anticipated the latest critical positions. He wrote Mark is no abridgment, but a true and self-contained gospel, and if Matthew and Luke contain other and more matter, that is because they added it, and not because Mark, having it before him, left it out. Mark is the unadorned central column on which the other two lean, shorter than they, but more original. They added the Birth Stories because a new want of such information had, later than Mark, grown up among believers. And Mark indulges in less invective than they against the Jews, because the new religion was still largely a Jewish business. That neither the first three Gospels nor the fourth were intended to be read as sober historical treatises was also clear to Herder. The former were aimed to exalt as a Messiah he who fulfilled the Jewish prophecies, the fourth is an epic of the Logos.

But Herder’s appreciations of the Life of Jesus were after all less scientific and earlier in type than those of Hermann Samuel Reimarus, of whose epoch making contribution to the cause of New Testament criticism Albert Schweitzer has in his work, Von Reimarus zu Wrede[†]Schweitzer. Quest of the Historical Jesus reminded those who had forgotten the great theological controversies of Lessing and Strauss.

Reimarus

Reimarus, born in 1694, was for forty one years Professor of Philosophy in Hamburg, and died in 1768. He thus brought to the study of the New Testament a trained judgement unspoiled by the narrow calling of the professional Christian. His treatises on early Christianity were not intended by him for publication, so did not have to be forced into rhe proper dogmatic shape. They would never have been published at all but for Lessing, who published the more important of them entitled Fragments of an Anonymous Wolfenbütteler in the years 1774-8. The Fragments precipitated a crisis in the Protestant Church. The Christ of dogma was had been accused and put up for trial before the court of history. In place of the fanciful figure of orthodox theologians, the real historical Jewish Messiah began to emerge.

Reimarus thought Jesus essentially appealled to Jews to repent because the Kingdom of Heaven was at hand, but he meant by the Kingdom, as did John the Baptist, the Jewish meaning of it current at the time, not what Christians have taken it to be. He never broke with the Law of Moses, and the need for being righteous, but disdained the temple cult, extreme Sabbatarianism and extreme food taboos. He did not dream of initiating a new religion, but merely in exposing Pharisaical hypocrisy in making purity of heart inferior to mechanical extensions to the law.

The creed of the earliest Church consisted of the single clause:

I believe that Jesus shall shortly inaugurate the Kingdom of God on earth.

The Jews of Palestine were groaning under the Roman yoke, and were prepared to welcome a redeemer. Many wanted to believe the promised kingdom was coming, and were eager to acclaim Jesus as God’s prophet and instrument in bringing it about. The message that Jesus's apostles had to carry to the cities of Israel, avoiding those of the Samaritans and gentiles, was that Jews had to be righteous to get admission, and so had to sincerely repent of their sins if they had been sinful, and few had not. A Messiah was Son of God, a title that meant favored by God—all men being sons of God anyway—as David and his successor, the kings of Judah were, but the Messiah was “The Son of God”, a specially chosen leader of the Jews. So, the Messianic claims of Jesus did not lift him above humanity, and did not deify him.

In his parables, Jesus does not have to explain what the kingdom of God is. His audience knows it. Readers of the bible wanting to know what the Jews understood by it have to turn to Jewish writings. It certainly did not include that the Messiah was God, though Essenes may have seen the Messiah as an incarnation of the archangel Michael, heavenly guardian of the Jews. Nor could it include a belief in a Trinity. Jesus never dreamed of abolishing the Jewish religion, or of substituting a new system in its place. Peter, long after the resurrection, had no idea that Jewish food taboos had been lifted by Jesus, because they generally had not been. They had been lifted only in difficult circumstances by those who were otherwise pure hearted. Disciples who fled from Jerusalem after Stephen's martyrdom “spoke the word to none save only to Jews”.

It follows that the text Matthew 28:19 is impossible, not only because it is spoken by one risen from the dead, but because its tenor is universalist, it presupposes the Trinity and the metaphysical sonship of Jesus. It also conflicts with our earliest tradition of baptism in the community of Christians, for, as we learn both from the Book of Acts and from Paul, they baptised at first, not in the name of the three Persons, but in that of Jesus the Messiah or Christ. Neither baptism nor in its later forms the Eucharist derives from Jesus.

Jesus worked cures which the people saw as signs and wonders. Reimarus thinks that Jesus bade those he healed to tell no one of it so as not to excite the curiosity of the crowd, which seems odd and contradictory, but can be understood, because Jesus did not want to attract the attention of the Romans and their collaborators (publicans), not the Jewish crowd. The reason is that the miracles were types of conversions—conversion of collaborators from loyalty to Rome back to loyalty to God. Even, so some miracles were simply invented by propagandists who wanted to prove the Messiah transcended the prophets of the Old Testament. If Jesus was as popular with the multitude as the texts suggest, then a single miracle publicly worked before a large assembly perhaps on a feast day must have carried all before him. Simply riding on a donkey he was followed by such a crowd, so the dramatic miracles did not happen, or did not as miracles!

Twice he seems to have made sure that his vision of the Kingdom was about to be made a reality. Once when, sending forth his disciples, in Matthew 10:23. A second time when he entered Jerusalem riding on the ass amid the acclamations of the multitude. But his prophecy of the kingdom failed. The Galileans had forsaken him, and now the people of Jerusalem had too. He had begun by concealing his quality of Messiah of set purpose, he ended by concealing it from fear and necessity. He ended up on the corss feeling forsaken by God: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” With God’s miraculous aid he had expected to establish a kingdom on earth in which the Jews, rescued from the yoke of gentile oppressors, would live happily ever afterwards, but his countrymen forsook him, and the Romans were killing him with cruelty and mockery.

Reimarus argues that the disciples, after the crucifixion, took refuge in Daniel’s vision of an apocalyptic Son of Man, borne in glory on the clouds of heaven to earth. He also thinks the apostles stole the body of Jesus to promote their story of his resurrection. Conybeare says in this “he betrays a certain want of grip”. Yet, it is true only in Reimarus's belief that it was a deliberate plot. More likely is that the Essenes abducted the body of Jesus because he was one of their leaders, if not their leader, and they felt honor bound to bury him with proper ceremony. But the suggestion by Reimarus of a deliberate abduction of the body roused against Lessing the accusation of impiety from pious Christians. Yet, for hundreds of years, they had accepted Jerome’s view that Peter and Paul never really had been at odds with one another, but had faked their quarrel at Antioch for the Christian gallery, a view that shocked even Augustine[†]Jerome. See Jerome s 89th Epistle to Augustine, where he sticks to his view that Paul and Peter were both acting a part, and that they merely got up their tiff to reassure the Judaizers. Jerome argues that Paul was guilty of similar dissimulation when he took Timothy, a gentile, and circumcized him for fear of the Jews..

Reimarus awoke many Christians out of their torpor of assurance, because he interpreted his documents in their plain and literal, but to the orthodox disconcerting, sense. In the main his arguments were irrefragable. Many modern critics, even in Anglican and Roman circles, have come round to his chief conclusions, that Jesus never meant to found a new religion but only to herald that Kingdom of God towards which the aspirations of pious Jews had for generations been directed, and that the fourth gospel must simply be set aside by those who would discover the true Jesus. His account of Jesus’s attitude towards the law, and its gradual abandonment by his disciples after his death, anticipated modern thought. When writers like Dean Farrar dilate on the “crude negations” and “dreary illuminism of Reimarus”, they betray their true intent not to address the problems of Christian origins but to obfuscate them.

Evanson

About the same time as Reimarus was writing, a striking book appeared in England. This was E Evanson’s work on The Dissonance of the Four Generally Received Evangelists and the Evidence of their Respective Authenticity Examined. Evanson gives examples of dissonance both between one gospel and another, and between separate parts of the same gospel, but he made the mistake of over estimating the trustworthiness of Luke. This he was led to do because he was imposed on, firstly by the parade of historical method and research in Luke’s exordium addressed to Theophilus, and secondly by Luke’s excellence as a stylist. Note, for example, his remarks about the passage, Matthew 8:5-16 = Luke 7:1-10, in which the healing of the Centurion’s child is related. In Matthew, the Centurion himself goes to Jesus, whereas, in Luke, he only sent a deputation of elders of the Jews, and declared that he did not esteem himself worthy to go in person. Evanson continues:

Here, again, one of these historians related a falsehood. It is observable also that, according to this gospel called S Matthew’s, this miracle, in order of time, preceded the healing of Peter s mother-in-law, the calling of Matthew himself, and the choice of the twelve apostles, whereas S Luke tells us that it was subsequent to all three. Yet S Luke assures Theophilus that, having attained perfect information of everything from the very first, he had written an account of every transaction in order. Now, he could have received his information only from the apostles he lived with at Jerusalem, of whom Matthew was one, and as it is impossible but Matthew must have known whether he was himself with Jesus when this miracle was wrought or not, he could not have written that he was not and have informed S Luke that he was, and, therefore, the writer of this gospel could not be S Matthew nor any other of the apostles. To avoid unnecessary repetitions, the reader is desired to consider this as a general remark upon the many instances of contradiction, in the order of the narration, between this writer and S Luke, which are both numerous and obvious to the least degree of attention.

Evanson also saw that the story of the miraculous birth of Jesus was no part of the primitive gospel tradition. He argues that the first two chapters of Luke are an interpolation, but he was well aware of the similarity of vocabulary and idiom which connects them with the rest of the gospel, and met this obstacle to his argument by supposing that the interpolator imitated Luke. He could not believe that the same hand which penned these two chapters could have narrated the incident of John sending his disciples to Jesus to ascertain if he was the Messiah. He writes thus:

Now, it seems absolutely impossible that John, after being from his earliest infancy personally acquainted with Jesus, and not only in possession of all the information respecting him, which he must have learned from the two families, but so miraculously impressed with affection and reverence for him as to exult with joy, though but an embryo in the womb, at the mere sound of his mother s voice, could at any time have entertained the least doubt of Jesus being the Messiah.

The true view, of course, is that Luke, in spite of his pretensions to accuracy, was a careless and credulous writer.

Evanson’s appreciations of the legend of the miraculous birth are couched in a very modern spirit. He notes that, according to Paul’s preaching at Antioch, it was the resurrection and no birth miracle that constituted Jesus the Son of God, and also that Luke, except in his first two chapters, nowhere calls Jesus the Son of God until after the Resurrection. Before that event he terms him Son of Man or Son of David. He speaks of “this pagan fable of the miraculous conception of Jesus Christ”, and just below he writes as follows:

In no one apostolic Epistle, in no one discourse recorded in the Acts of the Apostles, is the miraculous conception, or any circumstance of the history of Jesus previous to John’s baptism, hinted at even in the most distant manner—on the contrary, that baptism is repeatedly referred to and mentioned as the proper commencement of evangelical instruction, and when the eleven Apostles proceeded to elect a twelfth, to supply the place of Judas, the only qualification made essentially requisite in the candidates was, their having been eye witnesses of our Lord s ministry from the baptism of John to his Ascension. These two chapters of Luke are the daring fiction of some of the easy working interpolators (radiourgoi), as Origen calls them, of the beginning of the second century, from among the pagan converts, who, to do honour as they deemed it to the author of their newly embraced religion, were willing that his birth should, at least, equal that of the pagan heroes and demigods, Bacchus and Hercules, in its wonderful circumstances and high descent, and thereby laid the foundation of the succeeding orthodox deification of the man Jesus, which, in degree of blasphemous absurdity, exceeds even the gross fables of pagan superstition.

And in another place, he remarks on the fact that Justin Martyr, in his Apology…

…illustrates and pleads for the toleration of the orthodox doctrine of the generation of the Word by the heathen Emperors, because of its resemblance to the fabulous origin of their own deities Mercury and Minerva, and justifies the doctrine of the incarnation by its similarity to the births of Æsculapius and Hercules, and the other illustrious god-men of pagan mythology.

In these and many other passages Evanson belonged rather to the late nineteenth century than to the eighteenth. No one in his day so clearly realised as he the low standard, or no standard, of literary authenticity which characterized early Christianity. Thus he notes that in the earliest age it was so common among the Christians “to produce entire pieces of their own or others forgery under the name of any writer they pleased that, if what we call the scriptures of the New Testament were not so tampered with, they are almost the only writings, upon the same subject, of those early times which have escaped free”.

Yet a critic may see with one eye and be blind of its fellow. It was so with Evanson, who fell into the extraordinary error of attaching to so called prophecies of Christ an importance which he denied to miracles. He wrote:

Prophecy is not only the most satisfactory, but also the most lasting, supernatural evidence of the truth of any revelation.

And he even went as far as predicting from Revelation the end of the world within a few generations. He saw how insufficient was the evidence of the gospels to carry the vast superstructures that theologians built upon them, but his mind seems also to have been fuddled by them—apparently a reaction that is not uncommon. Woolston was infected with the same craze, and even Isaac Newton himself, in the prime of his life, gave up what time he could spare from his mathematical and astronomical studies in silly mental exertions about the prophecies Daniel and of Revelation.

Priestley

Joseph Priestley, born near Leeds in 1733, was another great man of science who was also a bold innovator in Church history. A History of the Corruptions of Christianity, published in 1782, and a History of Early Opinions Concerning Jesus Christ, printed in 1786, took him into a controversy with a profesional Christian, Dr Horsley. Horsley was rewarded with a fat bishopric for finding a few errors in Priestley's works. Priestley, in 1791, was rewarded by having his house in Birmingham wrecked and set on fire by a right wing mob. It destroyed the apparatus he had used to carry out his important work on the composition of gases, and to discover oxygen, tore his manuscripts into bits, and scattered his books for half a mile along the road. Priestley and his family barely escaped with their lives.

His main heresy was to affirm correctly that the earliest Christians neither knew anything of Trinitarian doctrine nor deified Jesus after the manner of Athanasian doctrine. He denied that the apostles could have thought a man of flesh and blood whom they had long known very well could have been God Almighty. He wrote to Horsley:

I am really astonished how you can really entertain the idea of any number of persons being on this even footing, as you call it, with a being whom they actually believed to be maker of themselves and all things, even the Eternal God himself.

But Priestley did not question the authenticity of the writings of the New Testament any more than his master Socinus, and he accepted, like other Unitarians of that age, all the miraculous legends of the gospels except that of the Virgin birth. Leslie Stephen remarks of Priestley that “it is still rather difficult to understand how so versatile and daring a thinker could have retained so much of the old system”. But the same inconsistency reveals itself in numberless scholars pre-infected with Christianity since.

Priestley also undertook to answer Evanson’s arguments in a work which contains many suggestive passages. He points out:

The books called the gospels were not the cause, but the effect, of the belief of Christianity in the first ages. For Christianity had been propagated with great success long before those books were written, nor had the publication of them any particular effect in adding to the number of Christian converts. Christians received the books because they knew beforehand that the contents of them were true.

Written by long confirmed Christians, the gospels could not fail to reflect their sentiments, beliefs, prejudices, and ritual practices, which had arisen since the death of Christ, to be coloured by Greek philosophy, popular religions, and Roman pragmatism, until divorced considerably from its birth, as it spread among the gentiles in the Roman empire. This is how the Abbé Loisy envisages the whole problem of criticism of the New Testament. It is inseparable from an investigation of the local circles of believers, called Churches, within whose medium the gospels were produced and preserved. All these accretions need to be recognized before the original tale can be revealed. Had Priestley attempted this, he might have anticipated modern criticism, but he was a mixture of enlightenment and superstition.

Baur

No work of biblical criticism published in Germany has made a greater stir in England than Albert Schweitzer’s Von Reimarus su Wrede, an analysis of European study of the gospels during the nineteenth century. In England, the only books which have advanced knowledge have been translations of German or French authors, David Friedrich Strauss, Ferdinand Christian Baur (both Germans), and Ernest Renan, a Frenchman.

Of these the second was the oldest, he was born in 1792, and died in 1860. The son of a Wurtemburg clergyman, he was first a pupil and then a teacher at the Blaubeuren Seminary, where Strauss was among his pupils. In 1826, he was promoted to a professorship at Tubingen. He created the Tubingen school, the bogie of English clergy in the years 1875-1890, and thus inspired hundreds with his own zeal and ardour for learning, and his bold impartiality in pursuit of truth. In this school, were formed such scholars as E Zeller (Baur’s son-in-law), K R Kostlin, Adolf Hilgenfeld of Jena, Otto Pfleiderer of Berlin, Gustav Volkmar of Zurich (died 1896), Edmond Scherer and Timothée Colani in France, the founders of the Revue de Theologie.

Baur discerned a key to the understanding of early Church history in the antagonism within the messianic society which gathered around the memory of Jesus, between, on the one side, his personal disciples, Peter and John, and his brother, James, first leader of the Church of Jerusalem, and, on the other side, Paul and his school who desired the free admission of uncircumcised gentiles. The former three had known Jesus in the flesh, and insisted on the observance of the Jewish law in the matter of food and meats, ablutions, Sabbath observance, and circumcision. They would have confined the new “heresy” or following of Jesus Christ to Jews and orthodox proselytes. Through the gate of the old law alone could any enter the promised Kingdom which a deus ex machina was soon to substitute on Jewish soil for the disgraceful tyranny of a Roman governor and his legions. Paul called these people Judaizers.

This antagonism colours the four great epistles of Paul, Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, and Galatians, and the hatred of Paul long continued among the Palestinian Christians, who called him Simon Magus, and adopted the lifelike personal description of him which still survives in the Acts of Thekla as a picture of the Anti-Christ.

The bitterness between Peter and Paul, the two traditional founders of the leading Church of Rome, was for the Catholic Church a skeleton in the cupboard, and caused much searching of hearts among the orthodox as early as the fourth century. By way of setting their misgivings at rest, Jerome advanced his hypothesis that the dispute with Peter related by Paul in the Epistle to Galatians was no more than a comedy arranged between the two to throw Jewish zealots off the scent. Orthodox historians have sought to minimise the importance of the matter. They could hardly do otherwise.

But Baur rightly saw the importance of this matter, and tried to reconstruct the chronological order of the earliest writings of the Church, on the principle that those in which the quarrel is still open and avowed must have preceded those which try to gloss it over and to pretend that it was never serious. In proportion, Baur argued, as the antagonism died down and leading men on each side drew together in the face of persecution by Jews and Romans, and of the disintegrating propaganda of the Gnostics, the Catholic Church emerged as a middle party, which eventually absorbed the extremes. Its literature then was largely intended to conceal the wounds which had once bled so freely.

In the four epistles of Paul above named, the quarrel is still fresh and actual, and therefore they are the most primitive documents extant, from before the year 70 AD. So is Revelation, an Ebionite document breathing hatred of Paul. The Synoptic Gospels and Acts were written in the interests of reconciliation, and followed, instead of preceding, the lost gospels of Peter, of the Hebrews, of the Ebionites, of the Egyptians. They are hardly earlier than the middle ot the second century. The Gospel of Matthew is the earliest of them, and most Ebionite, then came that of Luke, shaped under Pauline influence. It I as an amplification of Marcion’s gospel. Last is Mark’s, a neutral gospel, made up of odds and ends from the other two. The rest of the Pauline epistles are, all of them, reconciliation documents of about the middle of the second century. The book called Acts is an irenicon penned to show how harmoniously Peter and Paul could work together, and what good friends they were. The epistles of Peter were literary forgeries designed with the same object, and the fourth gospel and the epistles of John are later than 160 AD.

The faults of Baur were that he worked his theory for more than it was worth, that he failed to give due weight to many other ideas and tendencies which equally influenced the development of Church opinion and literature, and, lastly, that he set nearly all the documents at least fifty years too late. Later research has triumphantly proved that Mark is not a compilation from Matthew and Luke, but their basis, and that our Luke was in Marcion’s hands, and mutilated by him to suit his views. Large fragments of the gospel of Peter, and, probably, of that of the Egyptians, have been rescued from the tombs and sands of Egypt, and it turns out that, even if they were not copied or imitated from the Synoptics, they were certainly not their sources. Generally speaking, they are more modern in their tone and post-Galilean. A more thorough examination of the idiom and vocabulary of 1 Thessalonians, Philippians, and Philemon shows that these epistles are from the same hand which penned the four undisputed ones, and Baur’s greatest disciple, Hilgenfeld, has shown this to be the case.

The merit of Baur is that of forcing subsequent investigators to consider documents in relation to when they were written, and explain them from the influences which were then at work, instead of seeing them as isolated works of detached thinkers. If a book seems to be a forgery, we must at once ask cui bono—in whose interests was it forged? Even if it is found authentic, its place in the sequence of doctrine, opinion, and events—the phase it reflects—must still be discovered. Historical perspective is just as important in early Church history as in any other.

Strauss

Baur had approached theology through the philosophy of Schleiermacher and Hegel. He wrote, “Without philosophy history remains for me ever dead and dumb”. To Strauss also (born 1808, died 1874) philosophy was a first love, and he too dreamed of framing Church history in a niche of Hegel’s system of logic. He studied at Blaubeuren under Baur, at Maulbronn, and in Berlin, and in 1832 became a teacher in the University of Tubingen, where he found his old master, Baur. His instinct was to devote himself to philosophical teaching, but the authorities obliged him to remain attached to the theological faculty, and the result was his Leben Jesu, (Life of Jesus), which appeared in 1835.

The work was a gigantic success. He found himself famous, but an outcast without a future. The conservatives denounced him to the educational authorities, and he was deprived of his modest appointment in the university. His enemies complained that he might at least have concealed his thoughts from the general public by writing in Latin, and barely two or three of his friends had the courage to defend him. Yet, his work went through many editions, by no means reprints of one another. The third, for example, made some concessions to the orthodox standpoint, but he took them back in later editions. In 1839, the chair of Dogmatic at Zurich was offered him, but Christian pietists raised such an uproar that the Swiss authorities revoked the appointment, giving him a small pension instead. After that he spent a wandering and rather unhappy life, turning his pen to profane history and literary criticism, but writing a valuable monograph on Reimarus.

In 1864, he returned to theology, and published A Life of Jesus for the German People. In it, he remarks on the happy change which had taken place in public opinion since 1835. In fact, the outcry against him had been counter productive for the defenders of the Christian myth, for its pitch reached the ears of the general public, drawing their attention to a subject of which they would otherwise have remained in ignorance. He also acknowledges of the value of Renan’s work, which had appeared in the interim. He writes:

A book which, almost before it appeared, was condemned by, I know not how many bishops, and by the Roman Curia itself, must necessarily be a most useful book.

Strauss criticzed the French nation in 1870, in the Franco-Prussian war, which made him popular for a time among his countrymen, but which otherwise was a stain on a noble character. Beside his prose works, he wrote many elegant and touching poems.

Because Strauss summarily eliminated the supernatural element, it has been assumed that he turned the entire story of Jesus into myth—this by those who never read the book they denounced, and will hear nothing of a Christ who is not through and through a supernatural being.

The truth is that Strauss understood, far better than the reactionaries of 1835, the conditions under which the gospels took shape, and the influences which moulded their narratives. His critics argued that, since the first and fourth evangelists were eye witnesses and took part in the miraculous episodes, their narratives cannot be myths in any sense whatever. Strauss replied that the outside evidence in favour of their having been eye witnesses is slender, and the internal evidence nil. In this matter, the development of opinion, even in orthodox Church circles, has endorsed Strauss. No one now contends that Matthew’s gospel is other than the work of an unknown writer who compiled it out of Mark’s gospel and Q, the common document of Matthew and Luke.

As to John, Professor Sanday, who continued to uphold it, sacrificed its historicity when he argued that none but an apostle would have taken such liberties with the life of his Master. The Rev J M Thompson (Jesus According to S Mark, 1909) assuredly voiced the opinion of the younger and better educated of the English clergy, by pronouncing this gospel to be “not a biography, but a treatise in theology. Its author would be almost as ready to sacrifice historical truth where it clashes with his dogmatic purpose as he is (apparently) anxious to observe it where it illustrates his point”.

Strauss displayed more insight than Baur when he declared that the single generation which elapsed between the death of Jesus and the date of the earliest gospel was amply long enough time for such mythical accretions as we find to gather about the memory of Jesus. Messianic ideas of the Old Testament, early aspirations of believers, the desire to conform the sparse records of his ministry to supposed prophecies and to parallel his figure with those of Moses and Elijah—these and many other influences rapidly generated in a credulous age and society the Saga-like tales of the gospels about his miraculous powers. These tales Strauss discussed in a chapter entitled “Storm, Sea, and Fish Stories”.

Strauss was the first German writer to discern the emptiness for historical purposes of John, which Schleiermacher had invested with a halo of authority, and by which even Renan was deceived. He pronounced it to be a work of apologetic Christology, composed by a Gnostic who wished to uphold the flesh-and-blood reality of Jesus against other Gnostics who denied that reality and resolved him into a phantasm. Advanced critics in that age lauded this gospel because it contains so little eschatology. That single fact, replied Strauss, convicts it of being both late and false. He wrote:

Jesus in any case expected that he would set up the throne of David afresh, and with the help of his twelve disciples reign over a liberated people. Yet he never set any trust in the swords of human followers (Luke 22:38; Matthew 26:52), but only in the legions of angels, which his heavenly Father would send to his aid (Matthew 26:53). Wherever he speaks of his advent in Messianic glory, it is with angels and heavenly Hosts, not with human warriors, that he surrounds himself (Matthew 16:27, 24:30ff., 25:31). Before the majesty of a Son of Man coming in the clouds of heaven the gentiles will bow without any drawing of swords, and at the call of the Angel’s trumpet will along with the dead risen from their tombs submit themselves for judgment to him and his Twelve.

But this consummation Jesus did not hope to effect by his own will, he left it to the heavenly Father, who alone knows the right moment at which to bring about the catastrophe (Mark 13:32), to give him the signal. That, he hoped, would save him from any error in supposing that the end was reached before due warning was given. Let those who would banish this point of view from the background of Jesus's Messianic plan and outlook, merely because it seems to turn him into a visionary, only reflect how exactly these hopes agreed with the long cherished Messianic ideas of the Jews, and how easily even a sensible man, breathing the contemporary atmosphere of supernaturalism, and shut up in the narrow circle of Jewish nationality, might be drawn over to a belief, however superstitious in itself, provided only it embodied the national point of view and also contained certain elements of truth and grandeur.

The eschatological aspects of Jesus’s gospel could not be better summed up than in the above, and equally admirable are the remarks which follow on the Last Supper:

When Jesus ended this feast with the words, “Henceforth I will not again drink of the fruit of the vine, until I drink it with you new in my Father s Kingdom”, he must have anticipated that the Passover would be celebrated in the Messianic kingdom with special solemnity. If, therefore, he assures his disciples that he will next enjoy this annually recurring feast, not in this, but in the next age (tzori), that shows that he expected this pre-Messianic world order to be removed and the Messianic to take its place within the year.

Actually, that very night! Here Strauss anticipates Wellhausen and other intelligent commentators of today. With the same insight, he traces the gradual emergence in Jesus of the consciousness that he was himself the promised Messiah. In Matthew 12:8, he remarks, anticipating modern criticism, that the Son of Man in the text, “The Son of Man is Lord also of the Sabbath” may mean simply Man in general, but in another class of passages, where Jesus speaks of the Son of Man, a supernatural person is intended wholly distinct from himself, as the Messiah generically. This is the natural interpretation of the passage Matthew 10:23, where at the sending forth of the disciples he assures them that they will not have completed their tour of the Jewish cities before the Son of Man shall come. Plainly, Jesus considers he himself was the Messiah’s forerunner. In that case, this utterance must belong to the earliest period of his career, before he recognized himself to be the Messiah. Strauss hardly realised the importance of the remark which he here throws out, but it contains the kernel of the solution of the problem of the Son of Man provided by the most acute of German critics, Johannes Weiss (Jesus Preaching of the Kingdom of God, 1892, 1900).

Strauss also goes far to explain the genesis of Paul’s conception of Jesus as a pre-existent being. Jesus, he argues, clearly conceived of his Messianic role as involving that he, the Born of Earth, was to be taken up into heaven after he had completed his earthly career, and was to return thence in glory in order to inaugurate the Kingdom of God on earth. Now, in the higher Jewish theology, immediately after the age of Jesus, we meet with the idea of a pre-existence of the Messiah. Did Jesus initiate the idea, or was it then growing in currency? The same or a similar idea seems to have been known among the Essenes, whence Jesus and Paul might both have had it.

Strauss is quite certain that Jesus expected to come amid clouds and with the angelic hosts to usher in his kingdom. The only question is whether he expected his own death to intervene, or only thought that the glorious moment would surprise him in the midst of this life. From Matthew 10:23 and 16:28, one might infer the latter. But it always remains possible that, supposing he later on came to anticipate his death as certain, his ideas may have shaped themselves by way of a final form into what is expressed in Matthew 26:64.

Strauss’s chief defect was that he did not pay enough attention to the relations in which the synoptic gospels stand to one another, and his neglect of this problem obscured for him many features of the first and third gospels. Like Schleiermacher, he believed Mark’s gospel to be a mere compilation from the other two, and regarded it as a satellite of Matthew’s gospel without any light of its own. The many graphic touches which distinguish this gospel were, so he argued, Saga-like exaggerations of the compiler. His work would have gained in clearness and grasp if he had understood that Mark’s gospel forms the basis of the other two synoptists, and furnishes them with the order in which they arrange their incidents. Without this clue a critic or commentator is sure to go beating about the bush after the manner of an old fashioned harmonist, here laying stress on Matthew’s sequence of events, there upon Luke’s, whereas, in point of fact, neither of them had any real guide except Mark, from whose order of events they only departed in order to pursue that of their unassisted imaginations.

Renan

Renan’s volumes will be read for their style, no less than for their candour and nobility of sentiment, for Renan set the stamp of his character and personality on all that he wrote, but his volumes also impress us by the vast learning which lies behind them. Hardly a page of his does not help us to a clear perspective of the period and subject he is handling. The fanatics chased Renan, in 1862, from the chair he held of Semitic studies, and he was only restored by the French Republic, in 1871, but he was not in the least embittered by the experience, and, in spite of their volleys of execration, he continued to the end to cherish the kindliest feelings towards a clergy he had so narrowly escaped from joining.

Of his works, The Life of Jesus, though it is the best known, is not the most valuable, for when he wrote it Renan was still under the spell of John, and inclined to use it as an embodiment of genuine traditions unknown to and therefore unrecorded by the other three evangelists. Then, again, his portraiture of Jesus as a simpering, sentimental person, sometimes stooping to tricks, must grate upon many who yet are not in the least devout believers. There is thus some justification for Schweitzer’s verdict that it is waxworks, lyrical and stagey. Renan, however, in approaching the study of the gospels, had at least the great advantage of being a good Hebrew and Talmudic scholar. In Les Evangiles, he writes, bearing on the date of the Synoptic Gospels:

We doubt whether this collection of narratives, aphorisms, parables, prophetic citations, can have been committed to writing earlier than the death of the Apostles and before the destruction of Jerusalem. It is towards the year 75 that we conjecturally set the moment at which were sketched out the features of that image before which eighteen centuries have knelt. Batanea, where the brethren of Jesus lived, and whither the remains of the Church of Jerusalem had fled, seems to have been the district where this important work was accomplished. The language used was that in which Jesus’s own words—words that men knew by heart—were couched, that is to say, the Syro-Chaldaic (Aramaean), wrongly denominated Hebrew. Jesus’s brethren and the refugee Christians from Jerusalem spoke this language, which indeed differed little from that of such inhabitants of Batanea as had not adopted Greek. It was in this dialect, obscure and devoid of literary culture, that was traced the first pencil sketch of the book which has charmed so many souls. No doubt, if the gospel had remained a Hebrew or Syriac book, its fortunes would soon have been cut short. It was in a Greek dress that the gospel was destined to reach perfection and assume the final form in which it has gone round the world. Still we must not forget that the gospel was, to begin with, a Syrian book, written in a Semitic language. The style of the gospel, that charming trick of childlike narrative which recalls the limpidest pages of the old Hebrew Scriptures, pervaded by a sort of ideal ether that the ancient people knew not, has in it nothing Hellenic. It is based on Hebrew.

In this volume, Renan corrected the error into which he had fallen of overrating the historical value of the fourth gospel. His appreciations of the other gospels are just, and he rightly rejects the opinion, which still governed most minds, that the second gospel is a compilation from the first and third.

English Critics

Strauss’s Life of Jesus was twice published in English, first in 1846, and again in 1865. The earlier translator deplores the fact that “no respectable English publisher” would attempt the publication of his book “from a fear of persecution”. The only work which really threw light on the composition of the gospels, or would have done so could anyone in theological circles have been induced to read it, was the work of a layman, James Smith, of Jordanstown, a leading geologist and a FRS. In his Dissertation on the Origin and Connection of the Gospels (1853) is an abundance of shrewd surmises and conclusions. Smith remarks that “there is a greater amount of verbal agreement in the more modern MSS than we find in the earliest existing ones”. Here is a truth to which critics are only just now waking up viz, that the text was never in any degree fixed until it was canonised and consecrated. Till then it was more or less in flux.

But Smith’s real achievement was to overthrow the old superstition that inspired evangelists could not have written at all except in complete independence of one another, and without the servile necessity of copying common documents. English divines rightly felt that the citadel of inspiration was breached if it were once proved that the Evangelists copied either one another or common documents, and sound criticism could not take root among them until this prejudice was dispelled. It has practically vanished, but it vanished tardily, and professional Christians are now employed in devising plasters and bandages to cover the wounds inflicted on their faith.

It seems strange that nineteenth century professional Christians could not admit what, as James Smith remarks, was obvious to the early Fathers, yet so it was. Augustine wrote thus of the Evangelists:

We do not find that they were minded, each of them, to write as if he was ignorant of his fellow who went before him, nor that the one left out by ignorance what we find another writing.

Augustine also believed that Mark had Matthew before him, and followed him.

Even Dr Lardner, in his History of the Apostles and Evangelists, stuck with this hypothesis of the mutual independence of the gospels. He and others of his age deemed it to be evident from the nature and design of the first three gospels that their authors had not seen any authentic history of Jesus Christ, and the fact that the Synoptists “have several things peculiar to themselves” was held to “show that they did not borrow from each other”. Yet more “the seeming—mark well the meiosis of the professional divine!—contradictions which exist in the first three gospels” were adduced “as evidence that the Evangelists did not write by concert, or after having seen each other's gospels”.

Dr Davidson, a comparatively liberal professional, and one who suffered for his liberality, argued in the same way in his Introduction to the New Testament. Smith, how ever, wrote in answer as follows:

There is not a single phenomenon adduced in proof that the Evangelists made no use of the works of their predecessors, but what may be met with in these modern contemporary historians, in cases where we know that they did make use of the works of their predecessors.

This position he proved incontestably by confronting in parallel columns narratives of the same incidents written by Sir Archibald Alison in his History of the French Revolution, by General Napier, and by Suchet in his Memoirs of the war in Spain. Napier was an eye witness, and also used Suchet. Alison used both. To the divines of that generation who fell back on the soft option of oral tradition, because that alternative was to their minds least incompatible with verbal inspiration, Smith replied in words which put the matter in a nutshell. He writes:

A stereotyped cyclus of oral tradition never did nor ever can exist. Even poetry cannot be repeated without variations. There is one phenomenon peculiar to compositions derived from the same written sources, which may be termed the phenomenon of tallying. The writers may add matter drawn from other sources, or they leave out passages, but ever and anon they return to the original authority, where they will be found to tally with each other, but it is only in such cases that such correspondences occur. Hence, when they do occur, we are warranted in inferring the existence of a written original.

Mr W G Rushbrooke, at the instance and with the insistance of the Rev Dr Edwin A Abbott, Headmaster of the City of London School, finally settled the matter in a work entitled Synopticon (1880). In this he arranged in parallel columns the texts of Mark, Matthew, and Luke, picking out in red whatever is common to all three, and in other distinctive types whatever any two of them share in common. The originality of Mark was thus demonstrated once for all. There are barely half-a-dozen passages which suggest that Matthew had access to the ulterior documents used by Mark, so complete is his dependence on the latter, as he has been transmitted to us. It was not, of course, a new view. Herder had discerned the fact, and the German scholar Lachmann had pointed out as early as 1835, in his Studien und Kritiken, that Mark provided the mould in which the matter of Matthew and Luke was cast. He wrote:

The diversity of order in the gospel narratives is not so great as appears to many. It is greatest if you compare them all with one another, or Luke with Matthew, small if you compare Mark separately with the other two.

In other words, Mark provides the common term between Luke and Matthew. The matter is so plain if we glance at a single page of the Synopticon that one wonders at anyone ever having had any doubts about it.

Another famous controversy raged around the so-called Received Text, or Textus Receptus. Before the year 1633, the term was unknown, but, in that year, the Dutch Elzevir firm issued a slightly revised text of Beza’s New Testament of 1565, which was essentially a reprint of Stephanus’s or Estienne’s fourth 1551 edition, itself a reprint of the Regia, or Royal, which was Erasmus’s first text with variants from fifteen MSS, and the Spanish Editio Princeps of Alcala. Erasmus’s edition was based on half-a-dozen late MSS. There was no standard, save these earlier editions, which represented only a score or so of the 1,300 cursive MSS now known to exist, and not one of the twelve uncial MSS of the gospels ranging from the fourth to the ninth century.

During the eighteenth century further editions were issued of the New Testament by various scholars of different nationalities, who continually collated fresh MSS and ancient versions, either adding the new variants below the text or even introducing them into the text.

In the nineteenth century Carl Lachmann (1831) issued at Berlin the first really scientific text of the New Testament. He followed the earliest MSS, and gave weight to the oldest Latin versions of Africa and Italy. He remarked that an editor who confined himself to the most ancient sources could find no use for the so called Received Text! He accordingly relegated it to the obscurity of an appendix. He followed up this edition with later ones in 1842 and 1850.

Lachmann was not a mere orthodox Christian professional, but was primarily a classical scholar, who brought to the study of the New Testament text the critical principles of honesty common among classical philologists. Clergy had been complaining at the many various readings in scholarly editions of the New Testament, and puzzling how they could be reconciled with the supposed inspiration of the book. To such minds, Lachmann rejection of the entire Textus Receptus seemed to be blasphemy. In short, he was rewarded with the unpopularity in store for everyone who discovers anything new or true in the field of religion. Others were similarly treated. Colenso suffered for advancing Hebrew studies. But the persecutions they endured encouraged honest younger men to study the New Testament in the same free spirit.

In Germany, Constantine Tischendorf carried on the work of Lachmann, discovering and editing many new MSS, and in particular the great uncial of the Convent of Sinai, called by scholars Aleph. In England, Scrivener, Tregelles, Westcott, and Hort devoted their lives to the accumulation of new material and to the preparation of better editions.

In 1870, the English clergy awoke to the fact that the Received Text translated in the old authorised version of King James’s bible was unsatisfactory. A body of revisers was set up to prepare a new English Version, which was issued in 1881. The editors explained that the editions from which the authorised English version was made were based on manuscripts of late date, few in number, and used with little critical skill. This Revised Version of 1881 was a great advance, being based on the earliest known MSS, and especially on the great uncials, and also in that it tries to use consistently the same English equivalent of a Greek word or phrase, a benefit for everyone who reads the bible, even those who know no Greek, for, when stylistic variants which disguise the same Greek words are omitted, they can clearly see the triple and double traditions in the texts of the gospels. The Revised Version's defects briefly are:

1. owing to the number of the scholars employed in revising, and the difficulty of getting them to agree, the text often has the patchwork appearance of a compromise
2. inasmuch as they were orthodox and somewhat timid divines, the more orthodox of two or more ancient readings or interpretations is commonly printed in the text, the rival ones being consigned to the margin or altogether ignored for fear of shocking the weaker brethren.

Nonetheless, it was too much for the run of the English clergy, who found a spokesman in the Rev William Burgon, a Fellow of Oriel College in Oxford, vicar of the University Church, and, finally, Dean of Chichester, an old fashioned scholar of much learning, and a master of mordant wit and incisive language. He fell upon his fellow divines with a fury which provoked much amusement among the scoffers.

Veiled by the prejudice with which the old theory of inspiration covered his eyes, Burgon would not, perhaps could not, see that before the collection of the gospels in a canon, about the year 180, and while they were still circulating singly in isolated churches, their text was less fixed and more liable to changes, doctrinal and transcriptional, than they ever were afterwards. So, the ultimate text, if there ever was one that deserves to be so called, is for ever irrecoverable, but it certainly was not the Textus Receptus. Showing how he prejudged the question at issue, Burgon wrote as follows (1887) to Lord Cranbrook:

You will understand then that, in brief, my object is to vindicate the Traditional Text of the New Testament against all its past and present assailants, and to establish it on such a basis of security that it may be incapable of being effectually disturbed any more. I propose myself to lay down logical principles, and to demonstrate that men have been going wrong for the last fifty years, and to explain how this has come to pass in every instance, and to get them to admit their error. At least, I will convince every fair person that the truth is what I say it is viz, that in nine cases out of ten the commonly received text is the true one.

His one aim was said to be to canonise the misprints of a sixteenth century printer! Anyone who compares the Revised Version with the old authorised texts will have noticed it omits many passages, some of which were of great beauty and pathos. Yet they were not original. That is why they were omitted. Perhaps why they sounded more beautiful is that they were added precisely to enhance the text because they were so beautiful. For the conservative clergy and their supporters, truth was to be sacrificed to practical value for the modern church. Neither Burgon nor his friends seem to have had any idea that, by issuing a translation that is not as exact a representation as possible of the oldest and most authentic texts procurable, you commit in the field of religion the same sort of crime as a forger does in the commercial world by uttering base coin or flash bank notes. No Jesuits were ever more tortuous in their methods.

In his Introduction to the First Three Gospels (1905) J Wellhausen sums up Burgon’s position by saying that the further the manuscript tradition stretches back, the worse it becomes. Grey hairs, he laconically adds, cannot always save a divine from making a fool of himself. If water choked them, what had they left to drink? If the two most ancient of our uncial codices, Vaticanus B and the Sinaitic Aleph, are false witnesses against Christ, and if our oldest ascertainable texts of the second century excel in “foulness”—Burgon’s word—then what corruptions may not lurk in later texts, time and the mechanical errors of scribes being the sole factors in change which the orthodox would allow? Mr Robert Anderson explained the orthodox position thus:

The bible is not infallible, but the Church is infallible, and upon the authority of the Church our faith can find a sure foundation. But how do we know that the Church is to be trusted? The ready answer is, We know it upon the authority of the bible. That is to say, we trust the bible on the authority of the Church, and we trust the Church on the authority of the bible. It is a bad case of “the confidence trick” (The Silence of God, 1898).

Loisy

The Catholic Modernists, addressed in encyclicals of Pope Pius X, were not a close sect. All of them were good Catholics wanting to remain members of their Church, and were united only in their desire to raise its scholarship and thinking to a modern critical level.

Loisy was born 1857. He held the Chair of Assyriology and Hebrew in the Catholic Institute of Paris till 1892, when he was deprived, because he was too much of a scholar and a gentleman to stoop to forced explanations and artificial combinations. He then took up the study of the New Testament, but continued to lecture at the School of Higher Studies on Biblical Exegesis, drawing large audiences, largely composed of clerics. These lectures the Pope told him to cease in March, 1904.

In 1903, he followed up his little book, The Gospel and the Church, which had given much offence, with an ample commentary on the fourth gospel, in which he pulverised the old view of its apostolic authorship. The Papal Biblical Commissioners issued an absurd counterblast. Loisy’s great commentary, in two volumes, on the Synoptic gospels followed in the spring of 1907, just before a Papal bull declared him to be “a man to be avoided, whom everyone is bound to avoid”. He was excommunicated. In the following year, Loisy was chosen Professor of Ecclesiastical History in the University of Paris.

The Pope issued in July, 1907, an encyclical (Lamentabili sane extiu) in which were condemned sixty five theses drawn by the Pope and his inquisitors from Loisy’s works. Though in these theses Loisy’s conclusions are often falsified or exaggerated, they are, on the whole, an apt summary of the then most recent and assured results of criticism, and their dissemination must have damaged the cause of the Modernists about as much as a formal condemnation of Euclid’s axioms would damage geometricians. The following are some of the propositions condemned:

• 15. The gospels, until the canon was defined and fixed, were amplified by continual additions and corrections. There survived in them only tenuous and uncertain vestiges of Christ’s teaching
• 16. The narratives of John are not, properly speaking, history, but a mystical envisagement of the gospel. The discourses in it are theological meditations on the mystery of salvation devoid of historical truth
• 21. The Revelation, which forms the object of Catholic faith, was not completed with the apostles
• 22. The dogmas which the Church regards as revealed are not truths fallen from heaven, but a sort of interpretation of religious facts at which the human mind arrived by laborious efforts
• 27. The divinity of Jesus Christ cannot be proved from the gospels, it is a dogma deduced by the Christian conscience from the notion of the Messiah
• 30. In all the gospel texts the name Son of God is equivalent only to the title Messiah, it in no way signified that Christ was the true and natural son of God
• 31. The teaching about Christ handed down by Paul, John, and the Councils of Nice, Ephesus, and Chalcedon is not that which Jesus taught, but only what Christians had come to think about Jesus
• 32. The natural sense of the gospel texts cannot be reconciled with what our theologians teach about the consciousness and infallible knowledge of Jesus Christ
• 33. It is evident to anyone not led away by his prejudices either that Jesus taught an error about the immediate advent of the Messiah, or that the greater part of his teaching as contained in the Synoptic gospels is unauthentic
• 34. Criticism cannot attribute to Christ knowledge without bounds or limit, except on the hypothesis, inconceivable historically and repugnant to modern feeling, that Christ as man possessed God’s knowledge, and yet was unwilling to communicate a knowledge of so many things to his disciples and to posterity
• 35. Christ was not from the first conscious of being Messiah
• 37. Faith in Christ’s resurrection was, to begin with, a belief in the fact itself than in his being immortal alive in God’s presence
• 38. The doctrine of the expiatory death of Christ is not in the gospels, but was originated by Paul alone
• 43. The custom of conferring baptism on infants was part of an evolution of discipline which eventually led to this sacrament being resolved into two viz, Baptism and Penance
• 45. In Paul’s account of the institution of the Eucharist (1 Corinthians 11:23-25) we must not take everything historically
• 49. As the Christian Supper little by little assumed the character of a liturgical action, so those who were accustomed to preside at it acquired a sacerdotal character
• 51. Marriage could become a sacrament of the New Law only fairly late in the Church, etc
• 52. It was foreign to the mind of Christ to set up a Church as a society which was to endure through long ages upon the earth. On the contrary, he imagined that the Kingdom of Heaven and the end of the world were both equally imminent
• 55. Simon Peter never dreamed of primacy in the Church having been conferred on him by Christ
• 56. The promotion of the Roman Church to be head of other Churches was due to no arrangements of Divine Providence, but purely to political conditions
• 60. Christian teaching was Jewish to begin with, though by successive evolutions it afterwards became, first Pauline, then Johannine, and finally Hellenic and universal
• 65. Modern Catholicism can compound with genuine science only by transforming itself into a sort of undogmatic Christianity that is, into a broad and liberal Protestantism.

Needless to say, these principles are largely exemplified in the lives and writings of our younger English clergy, and Professor Sanday (Christologies) declares that “we must modernize, whether we will or no”. He accordingly argues that the division in Jesus between the Divine and Human was not vertical, as the Fathers imagined, so that his waking actions and thoughts could be apportioned now to one, now to the other class. It was rather horizontal, his divine consciousness being only subliminal, and all the rest of him purely human. As M Jourdain had all his life been talking prose without knowing it, we have been believing all along in an incarnation which Jesus shared with his fellow men.

Now, it is certain that the Fathers of the Church did not mean by their formulas what Professor Sanday tries to make them mean. What, then, is the use of clinging to forms of words which we can no longer take in the sense to express which they were devised? And the same criticism applies to Dr Gore’s explanation of the incarnation as a kenosis or self emptying by Jesus Christ of his divine nature, as a laying aside of his cosmic role and attributes in order to be born a son of woman. Dr Gore himself allows that no Father or teacher of the Church, from Irenaeus down to his friend, the late Professor Bright of Oxford, would have tolerated his explanation. Surely, then, it would be better to give up altogether a form of words which he can no longer accept in the sense in which they were framed.

Dr Sanday declares that he repeats a creed “not as an individual, but as a member of the Church”. He does “not feel that he is responsible for” the creeds, and “tacitly corrects the defects of expression, because he believes that the Church would correct them if it could”. He sums the matter up in the words:

For the creed as it stands the Church is responsible, and not I… I myself regard the creeds, from this most individual and personal point of view, as great outstanding historical monuments of the Faith of the Church. As such I cannot but look upon them with veneration… But, at the same time, I cannot forget that the critical moments in the composition of the creeds were in the fourth and fifth centuries, and that they have never been revised or corrected since.

We enter an impasse if we try to explain conscious experiences and efforts of will as the unfolding of an eternal order already implicit in things. For no moral or speculative end is served by trying to deduce our lives from ulterior spiritual beings or agencies. If all holy thoughts and good counsels proceed from a being called God, whence did he derive them? Why should they not be as ultimate and original in us, who certainly possess them, as in this hypothetically constituted author of them? No doubt on such a view the burden of human responsibility becomes greater, but it is not insupportable.

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