VIII.

THE truth of this complaint becomes only too clear when we turn to our Gospels.

Of course we should rejoice still more in an accurate knowledge of the life of Jesus than in a faithful history of the apostolic age. And for this knowledge we have hardly any sources but the four books with which the New Testament begins. No other authorities deserve to be mentioned by their side. Paul gives us a few general characteristics, and makes a few allusions in his letters, but this is all. He had never known Jesus personally. Flavius Josephus, the well-known historian of the Jewish people, was born in A.D. 37, only two years after the death of Jesus; but though his work is of inestimable value as our chief authority for the circumstances of the times in which Jesus and his Apostles came forward, yet he does not seem to have ever mentioned Jesus himself. At any rate, the passage in his "Jewish Antiquities" that refers to him is certainly spurious, and was inserted by a later and a Christian hand. The Talmud' compresses the history of Jesus into a single sentence, and later Jewish writers concoct mere slanderous anecdotes. The ecclesiastical Fathers mention a few sayings or events, the knowledge of which they drew from oral tradition or from writings that have since been lost. The Latin and Greek historians just mention his name. This meagre harvest is all we reap from sources outside the Gospels.

We must be content with the Gospels, then. To learn how far we may trust them we must in the first place compare them with each other. The moment we do so we notice that the fourth stands quite alone, while the first three form a single group, not only following the same general course, but sometimes even showing a verbal agreement which cannot possibly be accidental. For this reason they are called the synoptical Gospels; that is to say, the Gospels which contain accounts of the same events - 66 'parallel passages," as they are called - which can be written side by side so as to enable us to take a general view or synopsis of all the three, and at the same time compare them with each other. A more careful examination shows us that the difference between Matthew, Mark, and Luke on the one hand and John on the other is so great that we must choose between them, since we cannot

1 B. xviii. chap. iii. sec. 3.

2 See vol. i. p. 31, 32.

possibly harmonize them. According to the first three Jesus utters his wisdom in the form of proverbs, or still more frequently of parables. In John the parables disappear entirely, and profound and elaborate disquisitions are put into the mouth of Jesus. In the first three Gospels his words usually refer to the kingdom of God, in the fourth he almost always speaks of himself. In the former he is said to have lived and preached in Galilee alone till within a few days of his death; in the latter we find him frequently, nay generally, working in Judæa, and especially at Jerusalem. In the former he speaks and acts as an Israelite; in the latter he sometimes separates himself so sharply from the people of Israel that he seems to wish no longer to be considered as belonging to the nation at all. In the former he is a man whose character gradually develops under the conflict in which he is engaged and the work he has taken up; in the latter a more than earthly being, perfect from the very beginning. In a word, John gives us a totally different impression both of the whole and of the separate details from that conveyed by the Synoptics.

Attempts to remove this contradiction have been vain. Every means adopted to this end has turned out a mere idle subtlety. There is no escaping the fact that we must make our choice. Nor can we hesitate as to what that choice shall be. The first three Gospels are far simpler and more natural in tone than the fourth; they bring the historical background of the life of Jesus far more clearly before us; they are written with the object of making his person and his preaching, his deeds and his fortunes, known. In the fourth Gospel John the Baptist, Jesus, and the Evangelist himself always speak in the same spirit and adopt the same style; so that any one can see that it is really the Evangelist who is speaking all the time, and that he simply puts his own ideas, clothed in his own style, into the mouths of Jesus and others. The view here taken of the world and man is utterly foreign to the mind of Jesus, and its point of departure must be looked for in the Alexandrine philosophy. Lastly, the writer himself clearly indicates at the end of his book that his object was not so much to give an account of the life of Jesus as to rouse and strengthen faith in him. His work is an expression of faith rather than a historical narrative. In other words, he does not tell us what Jesus was, but what he, the Evangelist, had found in him, — what Jesus was to him, what influence he had exercised upon his spiritual life, and in what light he

therefore regarded him. If we also bear in mind that this author wrote at a comparatively late period, in the first half of the second century, we shall readily assent to the following conclusion: We may read the fourth Gospel for our edification; indeed, there is perhaps no other book of the Bible more eminently suited to this purpose. As we read it we feel compelled to ask ourselves whether we too have derived as much spiritual wealth from Jesus as this writer, with his deep piety and high culture, did. But for the history of Jesus we cannot use the work; we need never consult it, and shall do best to put it entirely out of our minds. In treating of the life of Jesus, then, we shall set this work almost entirely aside, and shall afterwards take it up separately as the most beautiful expression of faith which has come down to us from the post-apostolic age; but even then we shall not stop to inquire particularly whether any historical fact here and there lies at the basis of its representations.

The fourth Gospel forms a beautiful and well-ordered whole, and bears a pre-eminently individual character, for the very remarkable and exalted personality of the writer has stamped its spirit unmistakably upon every portion of the work. But it is far otherwise with the Synoptic Gospels. They can hardly be said to have had authors at all. They had only editors or compilers. What I mean is, that those who enriched the old Christian literature with these Gospels did not go to work as independent writers and compose their own narratives out of the accounts they had collected, but simply took up the different stories or sets of stories which they fonnd current in the oral tradition or already reduced to writing, adding here and expanding there, and so sent out into the world a very artless kind of composition. Their works were then, from time to time, somewhat enriched by introductory matter or interpolations from the hands of later Christians, and perhaps were modified a little here and there. Our first two Gospels appear to have passed through more than one such revision. The third, whose writer says in his preface that "many had undertaken to put together a narrative (Gospel)' before him, appears to proceed from a single collecting, arranging, and modifying hand.

I spoke just now of oral tradition as having preceded any written record. For a considerable period this tradition was the only source of information as to the fortunes and the teaching of Jesus. It was but natural that as long as Jesus

was living no one should think of writing an account of his words or deeds. And even during the first twenty or thirty years or so after his death, when his disciples were preaching him as the Christ to an ever wider circle, though the want of such Gospels must soon have made itself generally felt, no one undertook to write one. For the Christians expected Jesus himself to return ere long from heaven, and what would then be the use of a written record of his former life?

It was not till the expectation of the return of Jesus had fallen somewhat into the background that such a task could be taken up with affectionate zeal. And meanwhile the oral tradition had already taken a tolerably settled form in the various circles of Christians. In an age when reading and writing were less common than they are at present, the memory was much more tenacious, and words were remembered with greater accuracy. Detached accounts as well as whole sets of narratives referring to the labors of Jesus in Galilee, his journey to Jerusalem, his stay in the city, and his death, were current among the Christians. His parables, his aphorisms, and his more elaborate discourses were also passed from mouth to mouth, sometimes in connection with some event, and sometimes quite detached. One of the early Fathers tells us that the Apostle Matthew wrote a collection of "Sayings of the Lord," in Hebrew, by which he means the local dialect which Jesus and his Apostles spoke. This collection has probably been taken up into our first Gospel, which is specially rich in sayings of Jesus; and it may be from this fact that it derives its title "according to Matthew."

Of course, the preservation and promulgation of the sayings and doings of Jesus by oral tradition for so long a period was attended with certain disadvantages. No doubt the tradition was much firmer than would be the case in our day, but still it was constantly subject to variation. The result is very clearly discernible in our Gospels. There are four principal causes of these transformations of the tradition, which were generally unintentional.

In the first place, embellishment was a necessary result of oral promulgation. This will always follow when a story passes from mouth to mouth, especially when it refers to any one for whom a great enthusiasm is felt. One narrator adds a little to it, and the next heightens the coloring somewhat

In the second place, misunderstandings may play an important part in changing the form of a tradition. Examples of this process abound. The metaphorical language of the East, in which Jesus usually expressed himself, and which his first disciples sometimes used concerning him, was specially liable to misconception. It was accepted literally, and thus a figure of speech, or even a parable, was reported as if it were an actual event.

Another source of misconception may be found in the preconceived ideas, especially of a religious character, which exercised so powerful an influence over the tradition from its very origin. The hearers of Jesus, even his Apostles, had very often failed to understand what their Master said, what he did, and what he was aiming at. In their own preaching they reproduced their Master and his teaching not as they really were, but as they had appeared in the light of their own preconceived ideas. And so in after times the original tradition, itself far from pure, was considerably, though unintentionally, modified by such influences as love of the marvellous, the national pride of the Jews, current ideas as to the Messiah and the person of Jesus, and the expectation that he would return to earth.

Closely connected with this last source of error, and most important of all, is the influence exercised upon the tradition by the conflict of parties in the apostolic communities. Each of the two schools of this period, so sharply opposed to each other (the Jewish-Christian and the Heathen-Christian), was filled by a deep and sacred conviction that it and it only thought, spoke, and acted in the spirit of the Master whom both acknowledged. Hence it happened that the two parties might report one and the same saying of Jesus so differently that each of them regarded it as passing a sentence of condemnation upon the other. As a rule, this came to pass involuntarily; but, in the very strength of their conviction, the advocates of either view might now and then expressly put such a sentence into the Master's mouth, or in case of need invent some incident in order to bring clearly into view what they were certain must have been his judgment. In the Synoptic Gospels, accordingly, we find certain narratives which refer to Jesus in appearance only, and really rose in the apostolic communities in consequence of the division in their midst, or with direct reference to it. A great deal then depends upon whether the tradition had been promulgated through a Jewish-Christian or a Heathen-Christian medium,