Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 10.djvu/842

Rh Summary of the external evidence. The Gospel of the Hebrews. 818 traditional saviiigs of Jesus) is found in Matthew, or Mark, or Luke, or in all three: and there is also a reference to aii incident recorded by Mark alone ; (5) he never, as from these menioiis, quotes any words, or alleges any incidents not found in our Matthew, Mark, or Luke: (6) he never quotes any rival Gospel, nor alleges any words or facts which make it probable he used a rival Gospel ; (7) such iion-caiionical sayings and facts as he mentions are readily explieable as the results of lapse of memory, general looseness and inaccuracy, extending to the use of the Old as well as the 1cw Testaiiient, and the desire to adapt the facts of the new scriptiircs to the prophecies of the old. Our conclusion is that the memoirs of the apostles which include so much that is contained in our ﬁrst three Gospels, and which were continuously read in the services of the church from the time of Justin downwards, cannot have passed into oblivion a few years afterwards, so as to have given .plaee.to rival Gospels not known to Justin. They must be identical with the Gospels, to some or all of which testimony is successively borne by Mareion (140 A.D.) in spite of his arbitrary and entirely iiii- critical excisions; by the licretical Clementine Homilies (160 A.n.?) in spite of occasional use of apocryphal sources; by the Muratorian fragineiit (170 A.D.); by Atlienagoras and Ptoleinaeus, and the churches of Yienne and Lyons (177 A.D.); till the century closes with the aﬂirmation of Irenzeus, who not only uses three synoptieal Gospels with the Fourth so fully as to leave no doubt of the identity of his Gospels with ours, but also is so convinced of the essential necessity that there should be four and only four Gospels, that he discerns in the quadriform nature of the clierubini a type of the pre- ordained quadriforni nature of the records of the life of Christ.‘ In the foregoing remarks attention has been mainly directed to deﬁnite evidence, whether external or internal. Limits of space, as well as other considerations, prevent the discussion of that more indeﬁnite evidence which might perhaps be called indirect external evidence, and which would treat of the inﬂuences amid which the Gospels grew up and by which they were l_ikely to be moulded. For such a discussion it would be necessary that we should place ourselves in the position of a disciple in some early congregation of Jewish or Gentile Christians, and en- deavour to realize the inﬂuence exerted upon the Christian records—(1) by prophecy; (2) by heathen religions ; by Eastern metaphor acting upon Western literalism ; (4) GOSPELS 1 As a good deal of stress has been laid upon the apocryphal Gospel of the Hebrews, from which (according to the testimony of Jerome, Kirchhofer, p. 449) Ignatius quoted, it may be well to show that this was later than our Gospels. (1) We have seen above (p. 807) that in the common tradition 'li1o'oi39 is habitually employed. and that the use of ii Kiipios, “ the Lord,” in narrative is a sure sign of later origin; but “ the Loi " is habitually used in the narrative of the Gospel of the Hebrews (see Kirehhofer, pp. 450, 453. 45-1). (:2) It softens moral difﬁcultiesz (a) in the story of the rich young man, the Lord says to him, “ Behold, many of the brethren, sons of Abraham, are covered with dung and dying for hunger, and thy house is full with many good things, and naught goeth forth at all from thee to them,” thereby blunting the point of the young man's rejection; (b) after the words " If thy brother shall sin against thee" (cf. Matt. xviii. 22), Jesus adds, in the Gospel of the Hebrews, “in word, and if he shall make thee amends" (lb. p. 454) (in cerbo et satis tibi fecerit): (c) the error iu Matt. xxiii. 35, “son of Barachiah,” is corrected into "ﬁlium Jojadaa,” Jerome (Ib. p. 455). (3) ‘It increases the marvellous element: (a) at the baptism of Jesus, “ It came to pass when the Lord was come up from the water, the whole fountain of the Holy Spirit came down and rested upon Him, and said to lIim, 0 My Son, in all the prophets I was awaiting Thee, that Thou mightest come, and that I might find rest in Thee; for Thou art lily rest, Thou art My first-bom Son, who rcigncst for ever” (Ib. p. 454), (b) hence the Holy Spirit is called the Mother of the Lord, and it is said by the Lord, “ But now My Mother, the Holy Spirit, took Me by one of My hairs, and carried life away to the Mount Tabor" (lb. p 451); (r) after Ilis resurrection, it is added that the Lord ordered a table and bread to be brought, and caused His brother James to break his fast, when James had sworn not to eat bread till he had seen the Lord; in this story James is called “James the Just,” a title which in itself is a mark of late composition. To this note we may add that Celsus, towards the end of the second century, speaks of “the writings of the disciples of Jesus" (lb. p. 330) as the source of his lnforination, and mentions nothing (so far as we know) of any importance that is not found in our Gospels. It is true that Origen (Cont. CeI.s., ii. 74), in answer to Celsns"s boast that he had crushed the Christians with facts taken from their own writings, replies, " But we showed (above) that there has been a great deal of nonsensical blundering, contrary (-rrapé) to the writings of our Gospels," &:c.; but if we refer to what has gone before, we find that Origen is referring (l) to Celsus's unfair inaccuracy, 0.57., in saying that Jesus was betrayed, not by one disciple, but by lIis disciples; (2) to such blunders as the confusion of “ Chaldmans" with “ Magi; " (3) to his ignorance of the number of the disciples, &:c. There is therefore every reason to believe—for if Celsus had attacked any apocryphal narratives as representing the faith of Christ, Origen could not have failed to take advantage of the triumphant rejoinder which such a mistake would have afforded iiim—tiiat an assailant of Christianity, writing before the end of the second century, knew of no writings of the disciples of Christ upon which he could base any effective attacks against their religion, except our four Gospels. [FOURTH GOSPEL. by the ritual and language of the Lord's Supper; (5) by thc universal predilection for the marvellous ; (6) by the fall of Jerusalem. The results thus obtained would be in a great measure conjcctural ; but, compared step by step with the results deduced above, they would enable the reader to feel additional conﬁdence in conclusions supported by the double conﬁriiiatioii of indirect as well as direct evidence. The best work in English bearing on this sub- ject is probably the translation of l{eim’s Jesus of ll'a.=‘ara (London, 1876-79) ; and there is also much valuable iii- formation in the Appendices to Canon F arrar‘s I.{_fe of Clwist. THE FOURTH GosPEL. A '11 t/l0I'Sll 1'1). Evidence from earliest Tmclition.—Before consitlcring Early the subject matter of this Gospel, it will be well to coii-“idef sider the evidence, direct and indirect, bearing on the °f.‘“‘ authorship. The author is not mentioned in the Gospel Ship‘ by name, but only as “the disciple whom Jesus loved” (xxi. 24, 20), “ which also leaned on His breast,” and to whom Jesus commended His mother from the cross (xix. 26 ; xiii. 23). The ﬁrst writer who mentions John as the author in connexion with a passage quoted from our Fourth Gospel is said to be Tlieopliiliis, who wrote towards the close of the second century (170—180 A.D.). The Muratoriau fragment (170 A.D.) speaks of the apostle as the author of a Gospel, but does not quote from it. But Theopliiliis quotes J o. i. 1, as written by John, one of those “inspired by the Spirit” (7-n'cv,i.La'ro§b(ipu)v).2 It is a natural inference that Theophilus (at so late a date), using the name thus without further deﬁnition, iiica.iit by “John,” the “John” best known to his readers, i.e., John, the son of Zebedee, the apostle. But there is un- usually strong evidence to show that John the apostle wrote the Apocalypse, so strong that we may assume the apostolic authorship of that book with more conﬁdence than the authorship of any other book in the New Tes- tanient, except some of Paul’s epistles. The question therefore arises, how far does the style of the Gospel, which was said by Tlieopliilus (l70—18O A.D.) to have been written by John (presumably the apostle), agree with the style of the Apocalypse, which we have so good reason for believing to have been written by the apostle J oliii? If we assume John to have been four or ﬁve years younger than his Master, he would be, according to the commonly received date (68 A.D.) of the Apocalypse, about sixty- seven or sixty—eight years of age when he wrote that work. By that age (one would suppose) an author‘s style would, if ever, have reached its maturity. Even if he were ten years younger than Jesus, so that he was only a little over sixty years of age, yet his style would not be capable of a complete transforiiiatioii. But when the Gospel is compared with the Apocalypse, iii- stead of similarity, we find an almost complete contrast.-5 The vocabulary, the forms, the idioms, the rhythm, the tliought—all is different. That the Apocalypse and the 3 Such at least is the statenient of Kircliliofer (p. 153), and it has been reproduced in modern books. But part of the period of li-ciia-.iis might precede part of the period of Tlieophilus; and ll‘ell{l‘llS quotes John's Gospel (xx. 31) as from “ John the disciple of the Lord," in {L passage of his work Against Ileresies (III. xvi. 5, or ed. Grabe, iii. 19, a passage omitted by Kirchhofer. 3 It is not necessary, however, to deny that the Gospel exhibits traces of the Apocalyptic doctrine and thought. On the contrary, the impression left by a comparison of the two is, that the Gospel exhibits an attempt to reﬁne and spiritualize some of the more material and concrete expressions of the Apocalypse. From this point of view, we may say that “ the Gospel is the spiritual interpretation of the Apoca- lypse. . . . The active and manifold religious thought of Ephesus furnished the intellectual assistance which was needed to exhibit Christianity as the absolute and historical religion in contrast with Judaism and heathenism ” (Westcott, Introd. to St John).