Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 3.djvu/662

644 is careful to mention all references to disputed books, it does not appear that it was part of his design to cite testimony to a book so universally allowed as John s gospel. ATid Papias does give testimony to the first epistle of John, which is hardly separable from the gospel. On the whole, then, we repeat that, on the most cardinal points, the external evidence for the New Testament books is as strong as can fairly be looked for, though not, of course, strong enough to convince a man who is sure a priori that this or that book is unhistorical and must be of late date.

The strength of the negative critics lies in internal evidence. And in this connection they have certainly directed attention to real difficulties, many of which still await their explanation. Some of these difficulties are not properly connected with the Tubingen position. The genuineness of 2d Peter, which, indeed, is very weakly attested by external evidence, was suspicious even to Erasmus and Calvin, and no one will assert that the Pauline authorship of 1st Timothy is as palpable as that of the epistle to the Romans. So, again, it is undeniable that the epistle to the Colossians and the so-called epistle to the Ephesians differ considerably in language and thought from other Pauline epistles, and that their relation to one another demands explanation. But in the Tubingen school all minor difficulties, each of which might be solved in detail without any very radical procedure, are brought together as phases of a single extremely radical theory of the growth of the New Testament. The theory has two bases, one philosophical or dogmatical, the other historical; and it cannot be pretended that the latter basis is adequate if the former is struck away. Philosophically the Tubingen school starts from the position so clearly laid down by Strauss, that a miraculous interruption of the laws of nature stamps the narrative in which it occurs as unhistorical, or, at least, as more cautious writers put the case, hampers the narrative with such extreme improbability that the positive evidence in favour of its truth woiild require to be much stronger than it is in the case of the New Testament history. The application of this proposition makes a great part of the narrative of the Gospels and Acts appear as unhistorical, and therefore late ; and the origin of this late literature is sought by regarding the New Testament as the monument of a long struggle, in the course of which an original sharp antagonism between the gospel of Paul and the Judaizing gospel of the old apostles was gradually softened down and harmonized. The analysis of the New Testament is the resurrection of early parties in the church, each pursuing its own tendency by the aid of literary fiction. In the genuine epistles of Paul on the one hand, and in the Revelation and some parts of Matthew on the other, the original hostility of ethnic and Jewish Christianity is sharply defined ; while after a series of intermediate stages the Johannine writings present the final transition in the 2d century from the contests of primitive Christianity to the uniformity of the Old Catholic Church. This general position has been developed in a variety of forms, more or less drastic, and is supported by a vast mass of speculation and research ; but the turning points of the controversy may, perhaps, be narrowed to four questions (1.) Whether in view of Paul s undoubted conviction that miraculous powers were exercised by himself and other Christians (1 Cor. xii. 9, /. ; 2 Cor. xii. 12) the miracle criterion of a secondary narrative can be maintained 1 ? (2.) Whether the book of Acts is radically inconsistent with Paul s own account of his relations to the church at Jerusalem, and whether the antithesis of Peter and Paul is proved from the epistles of the latter, or postulated in accordance with the Hegelian law of advance by antagonism? (3.) Whether the gospel of John is necessarily a late fiction, or does not rather supply in its ideal delineation of Jesus a necessary supplement to the synoptical gospels which can only bs understood as resting on true apostolic reminiscence? (4.) Whether the external evidence for the several books and the known facts of church history leave time for the suc cessive evolution of all the stages of early Christianity which the theory postulates?

The Christian Canon of the Old and New Testaments.—We have already seen that the Apostolic Church continued to use as sacred the Hebrew Scriptures, whose authority derived fresh confirmation from the fulfilment of the prophecies in Christ. The idea that the Old Testament revela tion must now fall back into a secondary position as compared with inspired apostolic teaching was not for a moment entertained. Still less could the notion of a body of New Testament Scriptures, of a collection of Christian writings, to be read like the Old Testament in public worship and appealed to as authoritative in matters of faith, take shape so long as the church was conscious that she had in her midst a living voice of inspiration. The first apostolic writings were, as we have seen, occasional, and it was not even matter of course that every epistle of an apostle should be carefully preserved, much less that it should be prized above his oral teaching. Paul certainly wrote more than two epistles to the Corinthians, and even Papias is still of opinon, when he collects reminiscences of apostolic sayings from the mouths of the elders, that what he reads in books cannot do him so much good as what he receives &quot;.from a living and abiding voice.&quot; Nay, the very writers who are the first to put Old and New Testa ment books on a precisely similar footing (e.g., Tertullian) attach equal importance to the tradition of churches which had been directly taught by apostles, and so were presumed to possess the &quot; rule of faith &quot; in a form free from the difficulties of exposition that encumber the written word. In the first instance, then, the authoritative books of the Christian church were those of the Old Testament; and in the time of the apostles and their immediate successors it was the Hebrew canon that was received. But as most churches had no knowledge of the Old Testament except through the Greek translation and the Alexandrian canon, the Apocrypha soon began to be quoted as Scripture. The feeling of uncertainty as to the proper number of Old Testament books which prevailed in the 2d century is illus trated by an epistle of Melito of Sardis, who journeyed to Palestine in quest of light, and brought back the pre sent Hebrew canon, with the omission of the book of Esther. In the 3d century Origen knew the Hebrew canon, but accepted the Alexandrian additions, apparently because he considered that a special providence had watched over both forms of the collection. Subsequent teachers in the Eastern Church gradually went back to the Hebrew canon (Esther being still excluded from full canonicity by Athanasius and Gregory of Nazianzus), dis tinguishing the Alexandrian additions as dvaytyvwo-Ko/x,ej/a books used for ecclesiastical lessons. In the Western Church the same distinction was made by scholars like Jerome, who introduced for merely ecclesiastical books the somewhat incorrect name of Apocrypha ; but a laxer view was very prevalent and gained ground during the Middle Ages, till at length, in opposition to the Protestants, the Council of Trent accepted every book in the Vulgate translation as canonical.

We turn now to the New Testament collection. The idea of canonicity the right of a book to be cited as Scripture was closely connected with regular use in public worship, and so the first step towards a New Testament canon was doubtless the establishment of a custom of reading in the churches individual epistles or gospels. The first beginnings of this custom must have been very early. The reference to Luke in 1 Tim. v. 1 8 is disputed, and 