Criticism And The Gospel History

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Title:     Criticism And The Gospel History
Author: James Anthony Froude [More Titles by Froude]

The spirit of criticism is not the spirit of religion. The spirit of criticism is a questioning spirit; the spirit of religion is a spirit of faith, of humility and submission. Other qualities may go to the formation of a religious character in the highest and grandest sense of the word; but the virtues which religious teachers most generally approve, which make up the ideal of a Catholic saint, which the Catholic and all other churches endeavour most to cultivate in their children, are those of passive and loyal obedience, a devotion without reserve or qualification; or to use the technical word, 'a spirit of teachableness.' A religious education is most successful when it has formed a mind to which difficulties are welcome as an opportunity for the triumph of faith--which regards doubts as temptations to be resisted like the suggestions of sensuality, and which alike in action or opinion follows the path prescribed to it with affectionate and unhesitating confidence.

To men or women of the tender and sensitive piety which is produced by such a training, an enquiry into the grounds of its faith appears shocking and profane. To demand an explanation of ambiguities or mysteries of which they have been accustomed to think only upon their knees, is as it were to challenge the Almighty to explain his ways to his creatures, and to refuse obedience unless human presumption has been first gratified.

Undoubtedly, not in religion only, but in any branch of human knowledge, teachableness is the condition of growth. We augur ill for the future of the youth who sets his own judgment against that of his instructors, and refuses to believe what cannot be at once made plain to him. Yet again, the wise instructor will not lightly discourage questions which are prompted by an intelligent desire of knowledge. That an unenquiring submission produces characters of great and varied beauty; that it has inspired the most splendid acts of endurance which have given a lustre to humanity, no one will venture to deny. A genial faith is one of that group of qualities which commend themselves most to the young, the generous, and the enthusiastic--to those whose native and original nobleness has suffered least from contact with the world--which belong rather to the imagination than the reason, and stand related to truth through the emotions rather than through the sober calculations of probability. It is akin to loyalty, to enthusiasm, to hero-worship, to that deep affection to a person or a cause which can see no fault in what it loves.

'Belief,' says Mr. Sewell, 'is a virtue; doubt is a sin.' Iago is nothing if not critical; and the sceptical spirit--der Geist der stets verneint--which is satisfied with nothing, which sees in everything good the seed of evil, and the weak spot in every great cause or nature, has been made the special characteristic--we all feel with justice--of the devil.

And yet this devotedness or devotion, this reverence for authority, is but one element of excellence. To reverence is good; but on the one condition that the object of it be a thing which deserves reverence; and the necessary complement, the security that we are not bestowing our best affections where they should not be given, must be looked for in some quality which, if less attractive, is no less essential for our true welfare. To prove all things--to try the spirits whether they be of God--is a duty laid upon us by the highest authority; and what is called progress in human things--religious as well as material--has been due uniformly to a dissatisfaction with them as they are. Every advance in science, every improvement in the command of the mechanical forces of nature, every step in political or social freedom, has risen in the first instance from an act of scepticism, from an uncertainty whether the formulas, or the opinions, or the government, or the received practical theories were absolutely perfect; or whether beyond the circle of received truths there might not lie something broader, deeper, truer, and thus better deserving the acceptance of mankind.

Submissiveness, humility, obedience, produce if uncorrected, in politics a nation of slaves, whose baseness becomes an incentive to tyranny; in religion, they produce the consecration of falsehood, poperies, immaculate conceptions, winking images, and the confessional. The spirit of enquiry if left to itself becomes in like manner a disease of uncertainty, and terminates in universal scepticism. It seems as if in a healthy order of things, to the willingness to believe there should be chained as its inseparable companion a jealousy of deception; and there is no lesson more important for serious persons to impress upon themselves than that each of these temperaments must learn to tolerate the other; faith accepting from reason the sanction of its service, and reason receiving in return the warm pulsations of life. The two principles exist together in the highest natures; and the man who in the best sense of the word is devout, is also the most cautious to whom or to what he pays his devotion. Among the multitude, the units of which are each inadequate and incomplete, the elements are disproportionately mixed; some men are humble and diffident, some are sceptical and enquiring; yet both are filling a place in the great intellectual economy; both contribute to make up the sum and proportion of qualities which are required to hold the balance even; and neither party is entitled to say to the other, 'Stand by; I am holier than thou.'

And as it is with individuals, so is it also with whole periods and cycles. For centuries together the believing spirit held undisputed sovereignty; and these were what are called 'ages of faith;' ages, that is, in which the highest business of the intellect was to pray rather than to investigate; when for every unusual phenomenon a supernatural cause was instinctively assumed; when wonders were credible in proportion to their magnitude; and theologians, with easy command of belief, added miracle to miracle and piled dogma upon dogma. Then the tide changed; a fresh era opened, which in the eyes of those who considered the old system the only right one, was the letting loose of the impersonated spirit of evil; when profane eyes were looking their idols in the face; when men were saying to the miraculous images, 'You are but stone and wood,' and to the piece of bread, 'You are but dust as I am dust;' and then the huge mediæval fabric crumbled down in ruin.

All forms of thought, all objects of devotion, are made thus liable to perpetual revision, if only that belief shall not petrify into habit, but remain the reasonable conviction of a reasonable soul. The change of times and the change of conditions change also the appearance of things which in themselves are the same which they always were. Facts supposed once to be as fixed as the stars melt into fiction. A closer acquaintance with the phenomena of experience has revealed to us the action of forces before undreamt of working throughout nature with unerring uniformity; and to the mediæval stories of magic, witchcraft, or the miracles of saints, we are thus placed in a new relation. The direct evidence on which such stories were received may remain unimpaired, but it no longer produces the same conviction. Even in ordinary human things where the evidence is lost--as in some of our own State trials, and where we know only that it was such as brought conviction to judges, juries, and parliaments--historians do not hesitate to call their verdicts into question, thinking it more likely that whole masses of men should have been led away by passion or fraud or cowardice than that this or that particular crime should have been committed. That we often go beyond our office and exaggerate the value of our new criteria of truth may be possible enough; but it is no less certain that this is the tendency of modern thought. Our own age, like every age which has gone before it, judges the value of testimony, not by itself merely, but by the degree to which it corresponds with our own sense of the laws of probability; and we consider events probable or improbable by the habit of mind which is the result of our general knowledge and culture. To the Catholic of the middle ages a miracle was more likely than not; and when he was told that a miracle had been worked, he believed it as he would have believed had he been told that a shower of rain had fallen, or that the night frost had killed the buds upon his fruit trees. If his cattle died, he found the cause in the malice of Satan or the evil eye of a witch; and if two or more witnesses could have been found to swear that they had heard an old woman curse him, she would have been burnt for a sorceress. The man of science, on the other hand, knows nothing of witches and sorcerers; when he can find a natural cause he refuses to entertain the possibility of the intervention of a cause beyond nature; and thus that very element of marvel which to the more superstitious temperament was an evidence of truth, becomes to the better informed a cause of suspicion.

So it has been that throughout history, as between individuals among ourselves, we trace two habits of thought, one of which has given us churches, creeds, and the knowledge of God; the other has given us freedom and science, has pruned the luxuriance of imaginative reverence, and reminds piety of what it is too ready to forget--that God is truth. Yet, essential as they are to one another, each keeps too absolutely to the circle of its own convictions, and, but half able to recognise the merit of principles which are alien to its own, regards the other as its natural enemy.

To the warm and enthusiastic pietist the enquirer appears as a hater of God, an inveterate blasphemer of holy things, soiling with rude and insolent hands what ought only to be humbly adored. The saint when he has the power calls the sword to his aid, and in his zeal for what he calls the honour of God, makes war upon such people with steel and fire. The innovator, on the other hand, knowing that he is not that evil creature which his rival represents him as being, knowing that he too desires only truth--first suffers, suffers in rough times at stake and scaffold, suffers in our own later days in good name, in reputation, in worldly fortune; and as the whirligig of time brings round his turn of triumph, takes, in French revolutions and such other fits of madness, his own period of wild revenge. The service of truth is made to appear as one thing, the service of God as another; and in that fatal separation religion dishonours itself with unavailing enmity to what nevertheless it is compelled at last to accept in humiliation; and science, welcoming the character which its adversary flings upon it, turns away with answering hostility from doctrines without which its own highest achievements are but pyramids of ashes.

Is this antagonism a law of humanity? As mankind move upwards through the ascending circles of progress, is it for ever to be with them as with the globe which they inhabit--of which one hemisphere is perpetually dark? Have the lessons of the Reformation been thrown away? Is knowledge always to advance under the ban of religion? Is faith never to cease to dread investigation? Is science chiefly to value each new discovery as a victory gained over its rival? Is the spiritual world to revolve eternally upon an axis of which the two poles are materialism and superstition, to be buried in their alternate occultations in periods of utter darkness, or lifted into an icy light where there is neither life nor warmth?

How it may be in the remote future it is idle to guess; for the present the signs are not hopeful. We are arrived visibly at one of those recurring times when the accounts are called in for audit; when the title-deeds are to be looked through, and established opinions again tested. It is a process which has been repeated more than once in the world's history; the last occasion and greatest being the Reformation of the sixteenth century; and the experience of that matter might have satisfied the most timid that truth has nothing to fear; and that religion emerges out of such trials stronger and brighter than before. Yet Churchmen have not profited by the experience; the pulpits and the religious press ring again with the old shrieks of sacrilege; the machinery of the law courts is set creaking on its rusty hinges, and denunciation and anathema in the old style take the place of reasoning. It will not answer; and the worst danger to what is really true is the want of wisdom in its defenders. The language which we sometimes hear about these things seems to imply that while Christianity is indisputably true, it cannot stand nevertheless without bolt and shackle, as if the Author of our faith had left the evidence so weak that an honest investigation would fail to find it.

Inevitably, the altered relation in which modern culture places the minds of all of us towards the supernatural, will compel a reconsideration of the grounds on which the acceptance of miracles is required. If the English learned clergy had faith as a grain of mustard seed, they would be the first to take possession of the field; they would look the difficulty in the face fearlessly and frankly, and we should not be tossing as we are now in an ocean of uncertainty, ignorant whether, if things seem obscure to us, the fault is with our intellects or our hearts.

It might have been that Providence, anticipating the effect produced on dead testimony by time and change, had raised religion into a higher sphere, and had appointed on earth a living and visible authority which could not err--guided by the Holy Spirit into truth, and divinely sustained in the possession of it. Such a body the Roman Catholic Church conceives itself to be; but in breaking away from its communion, Protestant Christians have declared their conviction that neither the Church of Rome, nor they themselves, nor any other body of men on earth, are exempt from a liability to error. It is no longer competent for the Anglican communion to say that a doctrine or a fact is true because it forms a part of their teaching, because it has come down to them from antiquity, and because to deny it is sin. Transubstantiation came down to the fathers of the Reformation from antiquity; it was received and insisted upon by the Catholic Church of Christendom; yet nevertheless it was flung out from among us as a lie and an offence. The theory of the Divine authority of the Church was abandoned in the act of Protestantism three centuries ago; it was the central principle of that great revolt that the establishment of particular opinions was no guarantee for their truth; and it becomes thus our duty as well as our right to examine periodically our intellectual defences, to abandon positions which the alteration of time makes untenable, and to admit and invite into the service of the sanctuary the fullest light of advancing knowledge. Of all positions the most fatally suicidal for Protestants to occupy is the assumption, which it is competent for Roman Catholics to hold, but not for them, that beliefs once sanctioned by the Church are sacred, and that to impugn them is not error but crime.

With a hope, then, that this reproach may be taken away from us; that, in this most wealthily-endowed Church of England, where so many of the most gifted and most accomplished men among us are maintained in well-paid leisure to attend to such things, we may not be left any longer to grope our way in the dark, the present writer puts forward some few perplexities of which it would be well if English divinity contained a clearer solution than is found there. The laity, occupied in other matters, regard the clergy as the trustees of their spiritual interests; but inasmuch as the clergy tell them that the safety of their souls depends on the correctness of their opinions, they dare not close their eyes to the questions which are being asked in louder and even louder tones; and they have a right to demand that they shall not be left to their own unaided efforts to answer such questions. We go to our appointed teachers as to our physicians; we say to them, 'We feel pain here, and here, and here: we do not see our way, and we require you to help us.'

Most of these perplexities are not new: they were felt with the first beginnings of critical investigation; but the fact that they have been so many years before the world without being satisfactorily encountered makes the situation only the more serious. It is the more strange that as time passes on, and divine after divine is raised to honour and office for his theological services, we should find only when we turn to their writings that loud promises end in no performance; that the chief object which they set before themselves is to avoid difficult ground; and that the points on which we most cry out for satisfaction are passed over in silence, or are disposed of with ineffectual commonplaces.

With a temperament constitutionally religious, and with an instinctive sense of the futility of theological controversies, the English people have long kept the enemy at bay by passive repugnance. To the well-conditioned English layman the religion in which he has been educated is part of the law of the land; the truth of it is assumed in the first principles of his personal and social existence; and attacks on the credibility of his sacred books he has regarded with the same impatience and disdain with which he treats speculations on the rights of property or the common maxims of right and wrong. Thus, while the inspiration of the Bible has been a subject of discussion for a century in Germany, Holland, and France; while even in the desolate villages in the heart of Spain the priests find it necessary to placard the church walls with cautions against rationalism, England hitherto has escaped the trial; and it is only within a very few years that the note of speculation has compelled our deaf ears to listen. That it has come at last is less a matter of surprise than that it should have been so long delayed; and though slow to move, it is likely that so serious a people will not now rest till they have settled the matter for themselves in some practical way. We are assured that if the truth be, as we are told, of vital moment--vital to all alike, wise and foolish, educated and uneducated--the road to it cannot lie through any very profound enquiries. We refuse to believe that every labourer or mechanic must balance arduous historical probabilities and come to a just conclusion, under pain of damnation. We are satisfied that these poor people are not placed in so cruel a dilemma. Either these abstruse historical questions are open questions, and we are not obliged under those penalties to hold a definite opinion upon them, or else there must be some general principle accessible and easily intelligible, by which the details can be summarily disposed of.

We shall not be much mistaken, perhaps, if we say that the view of most educated English laymen at present is something of this kind. They are aware that many questions may be asked, difficult or impossible to answer satisfactorily, about the creation of the world, the flood, and generally on the historical portion of the Old Testament; but they suppose that if the authority of the Gospel history can be well ascertained, the rest may and must be taken for granted. If it be true that of the miraculous birth, life, death, and resurrection of our Lord, we have the evidence of two evangelists who were eye-witnesses of the facts which they relate, and of two others who wrote under the direction of, or upon the authority of, eye-witnesses, we can afford to dispense with merely curious enquiries. The subordinate parts of a divine economy which culminated in so stupendous a mystery may well be as marvellous as itself; and it may be assumed, we think, with no great want of charity, that those who doubt the truth of the Old Testament extend their incredulity to the New; that the point of their disbelief, towards which they are trenching their way through the weak places in the Pentateuch, is the Gospel narrative itself.[A] Whatever difficulty there may be in proving the ancient Hebrew books to be the work of the writers whose names they bear, no one would have cared to challenge their genuineness who was thoroughly convinced of the resurrection of our Lord. And the real object of these speculations lies open before us in the now notorious work of M. Renan, which is shooting through Europe with a rapidity which recalls the era of Luther.

To the question of the authenticity of the Gospels, therefore, the common sense of Englishmen has instinctively turned. If, as English commentators confidently tell us, the Gospel of St. Matthew, such as we now possess it, is undoubtedly the work of the publican who followed our Lord from the receipt of custom, and remained with Him to be a witness of His ascension; if St. John's Gospel was written by the beloved disciple who lay on Jesus' breast at supper; if the other two were indeed the composition of the companions of St. Peter and St. Paul; if in these four Gospels we have independent accounts of our Lord's life and passion, mutually confirming each other, and if it can be proved that they existed and were received as authentic in the first century of the Christian Church, a stronger man than M. Renan will fail to shake the hold of Christianity in England.

We put the question hypothetically, not as meaning to suggest the fact as uncertain, but being--as the matter is of infinite moment--being, as it were, the hinge on which our faith depends, we are forced beyond our office to trespass on ground which we leave usually to professional theologians, and to tell them plainly that there are difficulties which it is their business to clear up, but to which, with worse than imprudence, they close their own eyes, and deliberately endeavour to keep them from ours. Some of these it is the object of this paper to point out, with an earnest hope that Dean Alford, or Dr. Ellicott, or some other competent clergyman, may earn our gratitude by telling us what to think about them. Setting aside their duty to us, they will find frank dealing in the long run their wisest policy. The conservative theologians of England have carried silence to the point of indiscretion.

Looking, then, to the three first Gospels, usually called the Synoptical, we are encountered immediately with a remarkable common element which runs through them all--a resemblance too peculiar to be the result of accident, and impossible to reconcile with the theory that the writers were independent of each other. It is not that general similarity which we should expect in different accounts of the same scenes and events, but amidst many differences, a broad vein of circumstantial identity extending both to substance and expression.

And the identity is of several kinds.

I. Although the three evangelists relate each of them some things peculiar to themselves, and although between them there are some striking divergencies--as, for instance, between the account of our Lord's miraculous birth in St. Matthew and St. Luke, and in the absence in St. Mark of any mention of the miraculous birth at all--nevertheless, the body of the story is essentially the same. Out of those words and actions--so many, that if all were related the world itself could not contain the books that should be written--the three evangelists select for the most part the same; the same parables, the same miracles, and, more or less complete, the same addresses. When the material from which to select was so abundant--how abundant we have but to turn to the fourth evangelist to see--it is at least singular that three writers should have made so nearly the same choice.

II. But this is not all. Not only are the things related the same, but the language in which they are expressed is the same. Sometimes the resemblance is such as would have arisen had the evangelists been translating from a common document in another language. Sometimes, and most frequently, there is an absolute verbal identity; sentences, paragraphs, long passages, are word for word the very same; a few expressions have been slightly varied, a particle transposed, a tense or a case altered, but the differences being no greater than would arise if a number of persons were to write from memory some common passages which they knew almost by heart. That there should have been this identity in the account of the words used by our Lord seems at first sight no more than we should expect. But it extends to the narrative as well; and with respect to the parables and discourses, there is this extraordinary feature, that whereas our Lord is supposed to have spoken in the ordinary language of Palestine, the resemblance between the evangelists is in the Greek translation of them; and how unlikely it is that a number of persons in translating from one language into another should hit by accident on the same expressions, the simplest experiment will show.

Now, waiving for a moment the inspiration of the Gospels; interpreting the Bible, to use Mr. Jowett's canon, as any other book, what are we to conclude from phenomena of this kind? What in fact do we conclude when we encounter them elsewhere? In the lives of the saints, in the monkish histories, there are many parallel cases. A mediæval chronicler, when he found a story well told by his predecessor, seldom cared to recompose it; he transcribed the words as they stood into his own narrative, contented perhaps with making a few trifling changes to add a finish or a polish. Sometimes two chroniclers borrow from a third. There is the same identity in particular expressions, the same general resemblance, the same divergence, as each improves his original from his independent knowledge by addition or omission; but the process is so transparent, that when the original is lost, the existence of it can be inferred with certainty.

Or to take a more modern parallel--we must entreat our readers to pardon any seeming irreverence which may appear in the comparison--if in the letters of the correspondents of three different newspapers written from America or Germany, we were to read the same incidents told in the same language, surrounded it might be with much that was unlike, but nevertheless in themselves identical, and related in words which, down to unusual and remarkable terms of expression, were exactly the same, what should we infer?

Suppose, for instance, the description of a battle; if we were to find but a single paragraph in which two out of three correspondents agreed verbally, we should regard it as a very strange coincidence. If all three agreed verbally, we should feel certain it was more than accident. If throughout their letters there was a recurring series of such passages, no doubt would be left in the mind of any one that either the three correspondents had seen each other's letters, or that each had had before him some common narrative which he had incorporated in his own account. It might be doubtful which of these two explanations was the true one; but that one or other of them was true, unless we suppose a miracle, is as certain as any conclusion in human things can be certain at all. The sworn testimony of eye-witnesses who had seen the letters so composed would add nothing to the weight of a proof which without their evidence would be overwhelming; and were the writers themselves, with their closest friends and companions, to swear that there had been no intercommunication, and no story pre-existing of which they had made use, and that each had written bonâ fide from his own original observation, an English jury would sooner believe the whole party perjured than persuade themselves that so extraordinary a coincidence would have occurred.

Nor would it be difficult to ascertain from internal evidence which of the two possible interpretations was the real one. If the writers were men of evident good faith; if their stories were in parts widely different; if they made no allusion to each other, nor ever referred to one another as authorities; finally, if neither of them, in giving a different account of any matter from that given by his companions, professed either to be supplying an omission or correcting a mistake, then we should have little doubt that they had themselves not communicated with each other, but were supplementing, each of them from other sources of information, a central narrative which all alike had before them.

How far may we apply the parallel to the Synoptical Gospels? In one sense the inspiration lifts them above comparison, and disposes summarily of critical perplexities; there is no difficulty which may not be explained by a miracle; and in that aspect the points of disagreement between these accounts are more surprising than the similarities. It is on the disagreements in fact that the labours of commentators have chiefly been expended. Yet it is a question whether, on the whole, inspiration does not leave unaffected the ordinary human phenomena; and it is hard to suppose that where the rules of judgment in ordinary writings are so distinct, God would have thus purposely cast a stumbling-block in our way, and contrived a snare into which our reason should mislead us. That is hard to credit; yet that and nothing else we must believe if we refuse to apply to the Gospel the same canons of criticism which with other writings would be a guide so decisive. It may be assumed that the facts connected with them admit a natural explanation; and we arrive, therefore, at the same conclusion as before: that either two of the evangelists borrowed from the third, or else that there was some other Gospel besides those which are now extant; existing perhaps both in Hebrew and Greek--existing certainly in Greek--the fragments of which are scattered up and down through St. Mark, St. Matthew, and St. Luke, in masses sufficiently large to be distinctly recognisable.

That at an early period in the Christian Church many such Gospels existed, we know certainly from the words of St. Luke. St. Paul alludes to words used by our Lord which are not mentioned by the evangelists, which he assumed nevertheless to be well known to his hearers. He speaks, too, of an appearance of our Lord after His resurrection to five hundred brethren; on which the four Gospels are also silent. It is indisputable, therefore, that besides and antecedent to them there were other accounts of our Lord's life in use in the Christian Church. And indeed, what more natural, what more necessary, than that from the day on which the apostles entered upon their public mission, some narrative should have been drawn up of the facts which they were about to make known? Then as little as now could the imagination of men be trusted to relate accurately a story composed of stupendous miracles without mistake or exaggeration; and their very first step would have been to compose an account of what had passed, to which they could speak with certainty, and which they could invest with authoritative sanction. Is it not possible then that the identical passages in the Synoptical Gospels are the remains of something of this kind, which the evangelists, in their later, fuller, and more complete histories, enlarged and expanded? The conjecture has been often made, and English commentators have for the most part dismissed it slightingly; not apparently being aware that in rejecting one hypothesis they were bound to suggest another; or at least to admit that there was something which required explanation, though this particular suggestion did not seem satisfactory. Yet if it were so, the external testimony for the truth of the Gospel history would be stronger than before. It would amount to the collective view of the first congregation of Christians, who had all immediate and personal knowledge of our Lord's miracles and death and resurrection.

But perhaps the external history of the four Gospels may throw some light upon the question, if indeed we can speak of light where all is a cloud of uncertainty. It would seem as if the sources of Christianity, like the roots of all other living things, were purposely buried in mystery. There exist no ancient writings whatever of such vast moment to mankind of which so little can be authentically known.

The four Gospels, in the form and under the names which they at present bear, become visible only with distinctness towards the end of the second century of the Christian era. Then it was that they assumed the authoritative position which they have ever since maintained, and were selected by the Church out of the many other then existing narratives as the supreme and exclusive authorities for our Lord's life. Irenæus is the first of the Fathers in whom they are found attributed by name to St. Matthew, St. Mark, St. Luke, and St. John. That there were four true evangelists, and that there could be neither more nor less than four, Irenæus had persuaded himself because there were four winds or spirits, and four divisions of the earth, for which the Church being universal required four columns; because the cherubim had four faces, to each of which an evangelist corresponded; because four covenants had been given to mankind--one before the Deluge in Adam, one after the Deluge in Noah, the third in Moses, the fourth and greatest in the New Testament; while again the name of Adam was composed of four letters. It is not to be supposed that the intellects of those great men who converted the world to Christianity were satisfied with arguments so imaginative as these; they must have had other closer and more accurate grounds for their decision; but the mere employment of such figures as evidence in any sense, shows the enormous difference between their modes of reasoning and ours, and illustrates the difficulty of deciding at our present distance from them how far their conclusions were satisfactory.

Of the Gospels separately the history is immediately lost in legend.

The first notice of a Gospel of St. Matthew is in the well-known words of Papias, a writer who in early life might have seen St. John. The works of Papias are lost--a misfortune the more to be regretted because Eusebius speaks of him as a man of very limited understanding, [Greek: panu smikros ton noun]. Understanding and folly are words of undetermined meaning; and when language like that of Irenæus could seem profound it is quite possible that Papias might have possessed commonplace faculties which would have been supremely useful to us. A surviving fragment of him says that St. Matthew put together the discourses of our Lord in Hebrew, and that every one interpreted them as he could. Pantænus, said by Eusebius to have been another contemporary of the apostles, was reported to have gone to India, to have found there a congregation of Christians which had been established by St. Bartholomew, and to have seen in use among them this Hebrew Gospel. Origen repeats the story, which in his time had become the universal Catholic tradition, that St. Matthew's was the first Gospel, that it was written in Hebrew, and that it was intended for the use of the Jewish converts. Jerome adds that it was unknown when or by whom it was rendered into a Greek version. That was all which the Church had to say; and what had become of that Hebrew original no one could tell.

That there existed a Hebrew Gospel in very early times is well authenticated; there was a Gospel called the Gospel of the Ebionites or Nazarenes, of which Origen possessed a copy, and which St. Jerome thought it worth while to translate; this too is lost, and Jerome's translation of it also; but the negative evidence seems conclusive that it was not the lost Gospel of St. Matthew. Had it been so it could not have failed to be recognised, although from such accounts of it as have been preserved, it possessed some affinity with St. Matthew's Gospel. In one instance, indeed, it gave the right reading of a text which has perplexed orthodox commentators, and has induced others to suspect that that Gospel in its present form could not have existed before the destruction of Jerusalem. The Zachariah the son of Barachiah said by St. Matthew to have been slain between the temple and the altar, is unknown to Old Testament history, while during the siege of Jerusalem a Zachariah the son of Barachiah actually was killed exactly in the manner described. But in the Ebionite Gospel the same words are found with this slight but important difference, that the Zachariah in question is there called the son of Jehoiadah, and is at once identified with the person whose murder is related in the Second Book of Chronicles. The later translator of St. Matthew had probably confused the names.

Of St. Mark's Gospel the history is even more profoundly obscure. Papias, again the highest discoverable link of the Church tradition, says that St. Mark accompanied St. Peter to Rome as his interpreter; and that while there he wrote down what St. Peter told him, or what he could remember St. Peter to have said. Clement of Alexandria enlarges the story. According to Clement, when St. Peter was preaching at Rome, the Christian congregation there requested St. Mark to write a Gospel for them; St. Mark complied without acquainting St. Peter, and St. Peter when informed of it was uncertain whether to give or withhold his sanction till his mind was set at rest by a vision.

Irenæus, on the other hand, says that St. Mark's Gospel was not written till after the death of St. Peter and St. Paul. St. Chrysostom says that after it was written St. Mark went to Egypt and published it at Alexandria; Epiphanius again, that the Egyptian expedition was undertaken at the express direction of St. Peter himself.

Thus the Church tradition is inconsistent with itself, and in all probability is nothing but a structure of air; it is bound up with the presence of St. Peter at Rome; and the only ground for supposing that St. Peter was ever at Rome at all is the passage at the close of St. Peter's First Epistle, where it pleased the Fathers to assume that the 'Babylon' there spoken of must have been the city of the Cæsars. This passage alone, with the wild stories (now known to have originated in the misreading of an inscription) of St. Peter's conflict with Simon Magus in the presence of the emperor, form together the light and airy arches on which the huge pretences of the Church of Rome have reared themselves. If the Babylon of the Epistle was Babylon on the Euphrates--and there is not the slightest historical reason to suppose it to have been anything else--the story of the origin of St. Mark's Gospel perishes with the legend to which it was inseparably attached by Church tradition.

Of St. John's Gospel we do not propose to speak in this place; it forms a subject by itself; and of that it is enough to say that the defects of external evidence which undoubtedly exist seem overborne by the overwhelming proofs of authenticity contained in the Gospel itself.

The faint traditionary traces which inform us that St. Matthew and St. Mark were supposed to have written Gospels fail us with St. Luke. The apostolic and the immediately post-apostolic Fathers never mention Luke as having written a history of our Lord at all. There was indeed a Gospel in use among the Marcionites which resembled that of St. Luke, as the Gospel of the Ebionites resembled that of St. Matthew. In both the one and the other there was no mention of our Lord's miraculous birth; and later writers accused Marcion of having mutilated St. Luke. But apparently their only reason for thinking so was that the two Gospels were like each other; and for all that can be historically proved, the Gospel of the Marcionites may have been the older of the two. What is wanting externally, however, is supposed to be more than made up by the language of St. Luke himself. The Gospel was evidently composed in its present form by the same person who wrote the Acts of the Apostles. In the latter part of the Acts of the Apostles the writer speaks in the first person as the companion of St. Paul; and the date of this Gospel seems to be thus conclusively fixed at an early period in the apostolic age. There is at least a high probability that this reasoning is sound; yet it has seemed strange that a convert so eminent as 'the most excellent' Theophilus, to whom St. Luke addressed himself, should be found impossible to identify. 'Most excellent' was a title given only to persons of high rank; and it is singular that St. Paul himself should never have mentioned so considerable a name. And again, there is something peculiar in the language of the introduction to the Gospel itself. Though St. Luke professes to be writing on the authority of eye-witnesses, he does not say he had spoken with eye-witnesses; so far from it, that the word translated in the English version 'delivered' is literally 'handed down;' it is the verb which corresponds to the technical expression for 'tradition;' and the words translated 'having had perfect understanding of all things from the first,' might be rendered more properly, 'having traced or followed up all things from the beginning.' And again, as it is humanly speaking certain that in St. Luke's Gospel there are passages, however they are to be explained, which were embodied in it from some other source, so, though extremely probable, it is not absolutely certain that those passages in the Acts in which the writer speaks in the first person are by the same hand as the body of the narrative. If St. Luke had anywhere directly introduced himself--if he had said plainly that he, the writer who was addressing Theophilus, had personally joined St. Paul, and in that part of his story was relating what he had seen and heard, there would be no room for uncertainty. But, so far as we know, there is no other instance in literature of a change of person introduced abruptly without explanation. The whole book is less a connected history than a series of episodes and fragments of the proceedings of the apostles; and it is to be noticed that the account of St. Paul's conversion, as given in its place in the first part of the narrative, differs in one material point from the second account given later in the part which was unquestionably the work of one of St. Paul's companions. There is a possibility--it amounts to no more, and the suggestion is thrown out for the consideration of those who are better able than this writer to judge of it--that in the Gospel and the Acts we have the work of a careful editor of the second century. Towards the close of that century a prominent actor in the great movement which gave their present authority to the four Gospels was Theophilus, Bishop of Antioch; he it was who brought them together, incorporated into a single work--in unum opus; and it may be, after all, that in him we have the long-sought person to whom St. Luke was writing; that the Gospel which we now possess was compiled at his desire out of other imperfect Gospels in use in the different Churches; and that it formed a part of his scheme to supersede them by an account more exhaustive, complete, and satisfactory.

To this hypothesis indeed there is an answer which if valid at all is absolutely fatal. We are told that although the names of the writers of the Gospels may not be mentioned until a comparatively late period, yet that the Gospels themselves can be shown to have existed, because they are habitually quoted in the authentic writings of the earliest of the Fathers. If this be so, the slightness of the historical thread is of little moment, and we may rest safely on the solid ground of so conclusive a fact. But is it so? That the early Fathers quoted some accounts of our Lord's life is abundantly clear; but did they quote these? We proceed to examine this question--again tentatively only--we do but put forward certain considerations on which we ask for fuller information.

If any one of the primitive Christian writers was likely to have been acquainted with the authentic writings of the evangelists, that one was indisputably Justin Martyr. Born in Palestine in the year 89, Justin Martyr lived to the age of seventy-six; he travelled over the Roman world as a missionary; and intellectually he was more than on a level with most educated Oriental Christians. He was the first distinctly controversial writer which the Church produced; and the great facts of the Gospel history were obviously as well known to him as they are to ourselves. There are no traces in his writings of an acquaintance with anything peculiar either to St. John or St. Mark; but there are extracts in abundance often identical with and generally nearly resembling passages in St. Matthew and St. Luke. Thus at first sight it would be difficult to doubt that with these two Gospels at least he was intimately familiar. And yet in all his citations there is this peculiarity, that Justin Martyr never speaks of either of the evangelists by name; he quotes or seems to quote invariably from something which he calls [Greek: apomnêmoneumata tôn Apostolôn], or 'Memoirs of the Apostles.' It is no usual habit of his to describe his authorities vaguely: when he quotes the Apocalypse he names St. John; when he refers to a prophet he specifies Isaiah, Jeremiah, or Daniel. Why, unless there was some particular reason for it, should he use so singular an expression whenever he alludes to the sacred history of the New Testament? why, if he knew the names of the evangelists, did he never mention them even by accident? Nor is this the only singularity in Justin Martyr's quotations. There are those slight differences between them and the text of the Gospels which appear between the Gospels themselves. When we compare an extract in Justin with the parallel passage in St. Matthew, we find often that it differs from St. Matthew just as St. Matthew differs from St. Luke, or both from St. Mark--great verbal similarity--many paragraphs agreeing word for word--and then other paragraphs where there is an alteration of expression, tense, order, or arrangement.

Again, just as in the midst of the general resemblance between the Synoptical Gospels, each evangelist has something of his own which is not to be found in the others, so in these 'Memoirs of the Apostles' there are facts unknown to either of the evangelists. In the account extracted by Justin from 'the Memoirs,' of the baptism in the Jordan, the words heard from heaven are not as St. Matthew gives them--'Thou art my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased'--but the words of the psalm, 'Thou art my Son, this day have I begotten Thee;' a reading which, singularly enough, was to be found in the Gospel of the Ebionites.

Another curious addition to the same scene is in the words [Greek: kai pur anêphthê en Iordanê], 'and a fire was kindled in Jordan.'

Again, Justin Martyr speaks of our Lord having promised 'to clothe us with garments made ready for us if we keep his commandments'--[Greek: kai aiônion basileian pronoêsai]--whatever those words may precisely mean.

These and other peculiarities in Justin may be explained if we suppose him to have been quoting from memory. The evangelical text might not as yet have acquired its verbal sanctity; and as a native of Palestine he might well have been acquainted with other traditions which lay outside the written word. The silence as to names, however, remains unexplained; and as the facts actually stand there is the same kind of proof, and no more, that Justin Martyr was acquainted with St. Matthew and St. Luke as there is that one of these evangelists made extracts from the other, or both from St. Mark. So long as one set of commentators decline to recognise the truth of this relation between the Gospels, there will be others who with as much justice will dispute the relation of Justin to them. He too might have used another Gospel, which, though like them, was not identical with them.

After Justin Martyr's death, about the year 170, appeared Tatian's 'Diatessaron,' a work which, as its title implies, was a harmony of four Gospels, and most likely of the four; yet again not exactly as we have them. Tatian's harmony, like so many others of the early evangelical histories, was silent on the miraculous birth, and commenced only with the public ministration. The text was in other places different, so much so that Theodoret accuses Tatian of having mutilated the Gospels; but of this Theodoret had probably no better means of judging than we have. The 'Diatessaron' has been long lost, and the name is the only clue to its composition.

Of far more importance than either Justin or Tatian are such writings as remain of the immediate successors of the apostles--Barnabas, Clement of Rome, Polycarp, and Ignatius: it is asserted confidently that in these there are quotations from the Gospels so exact that they cannot be mistaken.

We will examine them one by one.

In an epistle of Barnabas there is one passage--it is the only one of the kind to be found in him--agreeing word for word with the Synoptical Gospels, 'I came not to call the righteous but sinners to repentance.' It is one of the many passages in which the Greek of the three evangelists is exactly the same; it was to be found also in Justin's 'Memoirs;' and there can be no doubt that Barnabas either knew those Gospels or else the common source--if common source there was--from which the evangelists borrowed. More than this such a quotation does not enable us to say; and till some satisfactory explanation has been offered of the agreement between the evangelists, the argument can advance no further. On the other hand, Barnabas like St. Paul had other sources from which he drew his knowledge of our Lord's words. He too ascribes words to Him which are not recorded by the evangelists, [Greek: houtô phêsin Iêsous; hoi thelontes me idein kai hapsasthai mou tês basileias opheilousi thlibentes kai pathontes labein me]. The thought is everywhere in the Gospels, the words nowhere, nor anything like them.

Both Ignatius and Polycarp appear to quote the Gospels, yet with them also there is the same uncertainty; while Ignatius quotes as genuine an expression which, so far as we know, was peculiar to a translation of the Gospel of the Ebionites--'Handle me and see, for I am not a spirit without body,' [Greek: hoti ouk eimi daimonion asômaton].

Clement's quotations are still more free, for Clement nowhere quotes the text of the evangelists exactly as it at present stands; often he approaches it extremely close; at times the agreement is rather in meaning than words, as if he were translating from another language. But again Clement more noticeably than either of the other apostolic Fathers cites expressions of our Lord of which the evangelists knew nothing.

For instance--

'The Lord saith, "If ye be with me gathered into my bosom, and do not after my commandments, I will cast you off, and I will say unto you, Depart from me, I know you not, ye workers of iniquity."'

And again:--

'The Lord said, "Ye shall be as sheep in the midst of wolves." Peter answered and said unto Him, "Will the wolves then tear the sheep?" Jesus said unto Peter, "The sheep need not fear the wolves after they (the sheep) be dead: and fear not ye those who kill you and can do nothing to you; but fear Him who after you be dead hath power over soul and body to cast them into hell-fire."'

In these words we seem to have the lost link in a passage which appears in a different connection in St. Matthew and St. Luke. It may be said, as with Justin Martyr, that Clement was quoting from memory in the sense rather than in the letter; although even so it is difficult to suppose that he could have invented an interlocution of St. Peter. Yet no hypothesis will explain the most strange words which follow:--

'The Lord being asked when His kingdom should come, said, "When two shall be one, and that which is without as that which is within, and the male with the female neither male nor female."'

It is needless to say how remote are such expressions as these from any which have come down to us through the evangelists; but they were no inventions of Clement. The passage reappears later in Clement of Alexandria, who found it in something which he called the Gospel of the Egyptians.

It will be urged that because Clement quoted other authorities beside the evangelists, it does not follow that he did not know and quote from them. If the citation of a passage which appears in almost the same words in another book is not to be accepted as a proof of an acquaintance with that book, we make it impossible, it may be said, to prove from quotations at all the fact of any book's existence. But this is not the case. If a Father, in relating an event which is told variously in the Synoptical Gospels, had followed one of them minutely in its verbal peculiarities, it would go far to prove that he was acquainted with that one; if the same thing was observed in all his quotations, the proof would amount to demonstration. If he agreed minutely in one place with one Gospel, minutely in a second with another, minutely in a third with another, there would be reason to believe that he was acquainted with them all; but when he merely relates what they also relate in language which approaches theirs and yet differs from it, as they also resemble yet differ from one another, we do not escape from the circle of uncertainty, and we conclude either that the early Fathers made quotations with a looseness irreconcileable with the idea that the language of the Gospels possessed any verbal sacredness to them, or that there were in their times other narratives of our Lord's life standing in the same relation to the three Gospels as St. Matthew stands to St. Mark and St. Luke.

Thus the problem returns upon us; and it might almost seem as if the explanation was laid purposely beyond our reach. We are driven back upon internal criticism; and we have to ask again what account is to be given of that element common to the Synoptical Gospels, common also to those other Gospels of which we find traces so distinct--those verbal resemblances, too close to be the effect of accident--those differences which forbid the supposition that the evangelists copied one another. So many are those common passages, that if all which is peculiar to each evangelist by himself were dropped, if those words and those actions only were retained which either all three or two at least share together, the figure of our Lord from His baptism to His ascension would remain with scarcely impaired majesty.

One hypothesis, and so far as we can see one only, would make the mystery intelligible, that immediately on the close of our Lord's life some original sketch of it was drawn up by the congregation, which gradually grew and gathered round it whatever His mother, His relations, or His disciples afterwards individually might contribute. This primary history would thus not be the work of any one mind or man; it would be the joint work of the Church, and thus might well be called 'Memoirs of the Apostles;' and would naturally be quoted without the name of either one of them being specially attached to it. As Christianity spread over the world, and separate Churches were founded by particular apostles, copies would be multiplied, and copies of those copies; and, unchecked by the presence (before the invention of printing impossible) of any authoritative text, changes would creep in--passages would be left out which did not suit the peculiar views of this or that sect; others would be added as this or that apostle recollected something which our Lord had said that bore on questions raised in the development of the creed. Two great divisions would form themselves between the Jewish and the Gentile Churches; there would be a Hebrew Gospel and a Greek Gospel, and the Hebrew would be translated into Greek, as Papias says St. Matthew's Gospel was. Eventually the confusion would become intolerable; and among the conflicting stories the Church would have been called on to make its formal choice.

This fact at least is certain from St. Luke's words, that at the time when he was writing many different narratives did actually exist. The hypothesis of a common origin for them has as yet found little favour with English theologians; yet rather perhaps because it would be inconvenient for certain peculiar forms of English thought than because it has not probability on its side. That the Synoptical Gospels should have been a natural growth rather than the special and independent work of three separate writers, would be unfavourable to a divinity which has built itself up upon particular texts, and has been more concerned with doctrinal polemics than with the broader basements of historic truth. Yet the text theory suffers equally from the mode in which the first Fathers treated the Gospels, if it were these Gospels indeed which they used. They at least could have attributed no importance to words and phrases; while again, as we said before, a narrative dating from the cradle of Christianity, with the testimony in its favour of such broad and deep reception, would, however wanting in some details, be an evidence of the truth of the main facts of the Gospel history very much stronger than that of three books composed we know not when, and the origin of which it is impossible to trace, which it is impossible to regard as independent, and the writers of which in any other view of them must be assumed to have borrowed from each other.

But the object of this article is not to press either this or any other theory; it is but to ask from those who are able to give it an answer to the most serious of questions. The truth of the Gospel history is now more widely doubted in Europe than at any time since the conversion of Constantine. Every thinking person who has been brought up a Christian and desires to remain a Christian, yet who knows anything of what is passing in the world, is looking to be told on what evidence the New Testament claims to be received. The state of opinion proves of itself that the arguments hitherto offered produce no conviction. Every other miraculous history is discredited as legend, however exalted the authority on which it seems to be rested. We crave to have good reason shown us for maintaining still the one great exception. Hard worked in other professions, and snatching with difficulty sufficient leisure to learn how complicated is the problem, the laity can but turn to those for assistance who are set apart and maintained as their theological trustees. We can but hope and pray that some one may be found to give us an edition of the Gospels in which the difficulties will neither be slurred over with convenient neglect or noticed with affected indifference. It may or may not be a road to a bishopric; it may or may not win the favour of the religious world; but it will earn at least the respectful gratitude of those who cannot trifle with holy things, and who believe that true religion is the service of truth.

The last words were scarcely written when an advertisement appeared, the importance of which can scarcely be over-estimated. A commentary is announced on the Old and New Testaments, to be composed with a view to what are called the 'misrepresentations' of modern criticism. It is to be brought out under the direction of the heads of the Church, and is the nearest approach to an official act in these great matters which they have ventured for two hundred years. It is not for us to anticipate the result. The word 'misrepresentations' is unfortunate; we should have augured better for the work if instead of it had been written 'the sincere perplexities of honest minds.' But the execution may be better than the promise. If these perplexities are encountered honourably and successfully, the Church may recover its supremacy over the intellect of the country; if otherwise, the archbishop who has taken the command will have steered the vessel direct upon the rocks.

 

FOOTNOTES:

[A] I do not speak of individuals; I speak of tendency.

[The end]
James Anthony Froude's essay: Criticism And The Gospel History

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