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 etymologies play a part, is founded on the just recognition that a reconciliation of John with the Synoptists can only be effected by transferring some of the Johannine localities to the North; but this involves not only finding Bethany, Arimathea and the other places, but even the scene of Jesus' death in this district. The brook Kedron conveniently becomes the "brook of Cedars."

For fifty years the two earliest Evangelists, in spite of their poverty of incident, sufficed for the needs of the Christians. The "fire of Jesus" was fed chiefly by the Pauline Gospel. The original form of the Gospel of Luke accordingly became the starting-point of the next stage of development. Thus arose the Gospel of Mark. Mark was not a native of Palestine, but a man of Roman extraction living in Decapolis, who had not the slightest knowledge of the localities in which the life of Jesus was really passed. He undertook, about the year 130, "in the interest of the new Christian settlement at Jerusalem in Hadrian's time, deliberately and consciously to transform the original plan of the Gospel history and to represent the Lord as crucified at Jerusalem." The man who from the year 132 onward, as Mark the Bishop, preached the word of the Crucified to a Gentile Christian community amid the ruins of the holy city, had previously, as Mark the Evangelist, taken care that a prophet should not perish out of Jerusalem. In composing his Gospel he made use, in addition to Luke, of a traditional source which he found in Decapolis. He deliberately omitted the frequent journeys to Jerusalem which were still found in the original Luke, and inserted instead Jesus' journey to His death. He it was, also, who made the Nazarite into the Nazarene, laying the scene of Jesus' youth in Nazareth. To the cures of demoniacs he added magical acts such as the feeding of the multitude and the resurrection.

In Matthew, who appeared about 135, legend and fiction riot unchecked. In addition, Jewish parables and sayings are put into the mouth of Jesus, whereas He really had nothing to do with the Jewish world of ideas. For if anything is certain, it is that the moral maxims of the latest Gospel are of a distinctively Jewish origin. About the middle of the second century the originals of John and Luke underwent redaction. The redaction of the Logos Gospel was completed by the addition of the twenty-first chapter, the last redaction of Luke was perhaps carried out by Justin Martyr, fresh from completing his "Dialogue with Trypho"! Thus John and Luke are, in this final form, which is full of contradictions, the latest Gospels, and the saying is fulfilled about the first being last, and the last first.

Arbitrary as these suggestions are, there is nevertheless something impressive in the attempt to explain the remarkable inconsistencies which are found within the Gospel tradition by