Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 31.djvu/188

176 which belongs to the Babylonish captivity; of parts of Zechariah, which belong to several periods; and of the Book of Daniel, which is not properly to be numbered with the Prophets (the critics in this respect following the old Jewish estimate), but consists of a series of traditions put together for the encouragement of the faithful Jews in the time of the Maccabees.

In regard to the New Testament there is far less tendency to agreement among scholars. The researches relating to the Synoptic Gospels have made it clear that they are not independent accounts, but have a common origin either in an oral or a written tradition which was variously handled; that in all probability Mark was the oldest and Luke the latest of the three, but that the title "according to" St. Matthew or St. Mark permits of the hypothesis that they passed through a rehandling in a later generation of their disciples, and that the same is highly probable in the case of the fourth Gospel, which, however, many believe to have been wholly composed in the second century by some disciple or successor of St. John; that the Acts of the Apostles can not be wholly relied on for the details of the history; that the four great epistles of St. Paul are the earliest and most certain Christian documents; and that no reasonable doubt attaches to the Epistles to the Thessalonians. The Epistles of the Captivity present so different an aspect of Christianity that their actual Pauline authorship is the subject of some doubt, though from this doubt the Epistle to the Philippians is almost free; the pastoral Epistles, however, can not be treated with any certainty as having been written by St. Paul himself, and the Hebrews are almost certainly by another, though one in close sympathy with him. The Epistle of St. James is reckoned genuine; the Second Epistle of St. Peter and that of Jude are liable to the gravest doubts, and the First Epistle of Peter is not wholly undoubted. The Johannine epistles go with the fourth Gospel, and can hardly be by the same author as the Apocalypse, which is fixed almost without doubt to be the work of the apostle, and to have been written in the reign of the Emperor Galba.

It is, of course, quite possible that some of these opinions may be unsound. Few of them are wholly undisputed. It is possible also that the estimate here given of the tendency of opinion may not be entirely correct. Yet it can hardly be far from the truth; and the main lines of this criticism acquire a greater certainty and acceptance every year. In any case it has become impossible to deal with the sacred history as exempt from the conditions of ordinary history, or with the Psalms and prophets as if their glowing words could be taken as definitions of theological truths or rules of life. In the history we have to pick our way amid many doubtful paths, to ask at every turn whether the facts are exactly as they have been represented. Even in the didactic portions we have to inquire whether the sayings are genuine, and if so, to which of the various phases of a