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THE VALIDITY OF
THE GOSPEL RECORD
THE INTERNATIONAL LIBRARY OF CHRISTIAN KNOWLEDGE
Edited by
DR. WILLIAM ADAMS BROWN AND DR. BERTRAM LEE WOOLF
JEW AND GREEK: TUTORS UNTO CHRIST
THE JEWISH AND HELLENISTIC BACKGROUND OF THE NEW TESTAMENT
By G. H. C. MACGREGOR, M.A., B.D. (Cantab.), D.Litt. (Glas.),
D.D. (Edin.), and A. C. PURDY, A.B., B.D., Ph.D. (Hartford) .
A HISTORY OF RELIGION IN THE OLD TESTAMENT
67 MAX LOEHR (Professor in the University of Koenigsberg) .
A FRESH APPROACH TO THE NEW TESTAMENT AND
EARLY CHRISTIAN LITERATURE
By MARTIN DIBELIUS (Professor in the University of Heidel-
berg).
THE BEGINNINGS OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH
(Being the first volume of "A History of the Early Church")
By HANS LIETZMANN (Professor in the University of Berlin).
THE FOUNDING OF THE CHURCH CATHOLIC
(Being the second volume of "A History of the Early Church")
By HANS LIETZMANN (Professor in the University of Berlin) .
THE PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
FROM THE STANDPOINT OF PROTESTANT THEOLOGY
By EMIL BRUNNER (Professor in the University of Zurich) .
A FRESH APPROACH TO THE PSALMS
By W. O. E. OESTERLEY, D.D., Litt.D. (Professor of Hebrew
and Old Testament Exegesis at King's College, University of
London) .
THE VALIDITY OF THE GOSPEL RECORD
By ERNEST FINDLAY SCOTT, D.D. (Professor of New Testament
Criticism, Union Theological Seminary , New York) .
THE VALIDITY OF
THE GOSPEL RECORD
By
ERNEST FINDLAY SCOTT, D.D.
Professor of New Testament Criticism
Union Theological Seminary
New York
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
1938
COPYRIGHT, 1938, BT
CHARLES SCKffiNER'S SONS
Printed in the United States of America)
All rights reserved. No fart of this book
may be reproduced in any form without
the permission of Charles Scrioner's Sons
LIBRARIES
.j.
:AGO,
1223768
PREFACE
FOR a long time past the Christian mind has been
steadily turning from .doctrines about Christ to the his-
torical facts. It would be easy to enumerate at least fifty
books, written within the last few years, in which the life
of Jesus has been presented from every conceivable point
of view. They all bear witness to the growing conviction
that before we can understand the religion of Jesus we
must know more of him as an historical Person. This
interest in the life has led to an ever more searching
enquiry into the documents which record it. Some of the
acutest minds of our time have been engaged in this
investigation, and not a year passes but some new and
unexpected light is thrown on the familiar Gospels.
This intensive study, to which we owe so much, has
in some ways confused the issues. A picture loses its out-
lines when it is examined close at hand through a mag-
nifying glass. The Gospel history, under critical scrutiny,
tends to dissolve into a mass of unmeaning fragments.
An impression has been created that the evidence of the
records has broken down, and that the truth about Jesus,
if he ever lived at all, has now vanished beyond recovery.
The aim of the present book is to call attention to some
factors which have too often been overlooked in the con-
sideration of the Gospel testimony. It is now admitted
that our existing Gospels have grown out of an earlier
VI PREFACE
tradition, which was handed down orally before it was
committed to writing. The credibility of the record de-
pends on the value of that tradition 5 and the author has
sought to discover how it was formed and transmitted.
He acknowledges his debt to the many eminent scholars
who have worked on this problem, but who have some-
times failed, in his opinion, to perceive the true signifi-
cance of their own findings.
He is himself convinced, as he has tried to show in
the following chapters, that the Gospels have every
claim to be accepted as substantially a record of fact.
Their evidence would hardly be challenged if they were
concerned with some other hero of antiquity, and it is
only because they recount the life of Jesus that they are
viewed suspiciously. This is not unreasonable, for since
our religion is bound up with the validity of these Gospels
no criticism that we apply to them can be too exacting.
Yet they ought to be treated with the same fairness as
other historical documents. If they can be proved, by
all the customary tests, to embody a sound tradition, they
ought not to be discounted on any purely arbitrary
grounds. The present book will have served its purpose
if it helps to secure this justice for the Gospel records.
E. F. SCOTT
CONTENTS
PREFACE v
I. THE GOSPELS AS HISTORY i
II. THE HISTORY AND THE MESSAGE 25
III. THE TRADITION IN CHURCH WORSHIP 54
IV. THE TRADITION AND THE COMMUNITY 85
V. THE ORAL TRADITION no
VI. THE MEANING OF FORM 134
VII. THE BEGINNING OF THE TRADITION 162
VIII. CONCLUSION 188
BIBLIOGRAPHY 203
INDEX 207
THE VALIDITY OF
THE GOSPEL RECORD
CHAPTER I
THE GOSPELS AS HISTORY
OUR records of the life of Jesus have all come to us
from a later age. The oldest Gospel, that of Mark, may
have been written about 70 A.D., and the two longer
Gospels of Matthew and Luke nearly twenty years
afterwards. Can there be much historical value in these
belated records? They belong to a time when the imme-
diate followers of Jesus had passed from the scene, and
a haze of legend had settled on his memory. They
were drawn up by men who were steeped in theological
ideas, and could no longer distinguish the doctrines
from the facts. What is given us in the Gospels is not
so much an authentic record as the myth which the
church had woven, out of a few uncertain traditions,
around the life of its Founder.
This conclusion, to which criticism seemed to be driven
a century ago, has now been largely corrected by criti-
cism. It has been demonstrated that although the Gos-
pels themselves are late, they have been compiled from
earlier documents, and these from still earlier ones. In
recent years the effort has been made to get behind all
documents. It may be taken as certain that the Christian
message was first proclaimed, and for a considerable
time was handed down, by word of mouth. While men
2 VALIDITY OF THE GOSPEL RECORD
were still living who had known Jesus personally they
could speak of him at first hand, and such teaching was
far more welcome and effective than any which might
be conveyed through books. It was believed, too, that
the Lord would return at any moment to bring in the
Kingdom, and there could be no purpose in writing down
a record of him for a future age which would never
come.
At the outset, therefore, all Christian instruction was
by word of mouth, and it is here we encounter the baf-
fling factor in the investigation of the history. With
written documents we are on firm ground. The facts
are set down in black and white, and all later departures
from them can be brought to the test. When a written
statement is known to exist there is, indeed, little
temptation to devise fanciful stories which can at once
be exposed. As soon as it was put into writing the Gos-
pel history was fixed. Apocryphal tales of Jesus grew
up abundantly in the second century, but no one took
them seriously, since they could be checked by the
Gospels. Within the Gospels themselves the modern
critic seeks to determine the sections which were writ-
ten earliest, for here he has the standard by which he
can judge the value of all later additions. The very
purpose of writing is to guard the known facts from
those perversions which are sure to creep in when every-
thing is left to the spoken word. In so far, then, as o^
Gospels are based on written sources they may be
deemed trustworthy, but it has always to be borne in
mind that these sources contained the facts only as they ;
THE GOSPELS AS HISTORY 3
were reported at the time of writing. There is no rea-
son to doubt that the writers put down honestly what
they knew 5 but what did they know? Only those
memories of Jesus which had undergone all the wear
and tear of a period of oral tradition. How long that
period had lasted we cannot tell. Some of the written
documents may go back to a date as early as twenty
years after Jesus' death, or even earlier. But they still
leave us with an interval of years during which the
facts were orally transmitted. Each person who re-
counted the story of Jesus was free to exercise his own
prejudice or fancy, and there was no means of correct-
ing him. Every one knows how an incident becomes
distorted when it is left to hearsay for even a few
weeks or days. Is there any reason to believe that the
events of Jesus' life fared any better, as they passed
from one narrator to another in those early days of
the church? That period of oral transmission, however
short we may contrive to make it, must always be the
chief obstacle to our knowledge of the life of Jesus.
It may be granted that our evangelists, and the authors
of their sources, faithfully put down the record which
had come to them 5 but what had happened to the record
in the preceding years? Under what conditions had it
been transmitted? Had any precautions been taken to
secure it against the many accidents which waylaid it as
it passed from mouth to mouth?
One fact has emerged clearly from the modern inves-
tigation. It has been established that the Gospels as-
sumed their present form gradually, as enlargements or
4 VALIDITY OF THE GOSPEL RECORD
revisions of previous works which had served the same
purpose in a less adequate manner. When Mark wrote
his Gospel he would not think of himself as doing some-
thing which was entirely new. He was merely continu-
ing, with a little more skill and knowledge, the work
of teachers before him. His aim was to follow their
methods as far as possible, and to incorporate what they
had given him. This is how the two later evangelists
have dealt with Mark, and we may infer that he had
done the same with his predecessors. 1 It may likewise
be inferred that those earlier writers were in the same
position as Mark. They also were not attempting any-
thing new. They collected and arranged the material
. which had come to them, in the manner approved by
previous teachers. To be sure they put into writing
what had hitherto been delivered orally, and this was
an innovation. Yet it did not affect the content of their
record, or even its form, but was only a mechanical de-
vice for assisting the memory. There was thus a direct
continuity between the later tradition and the earlier.
In a real sense the Gospels as we have them provide the
clue to what the record had always been. They were not
works of a new character, based, to some extent, on the
primitive reminiscences. They contain the primitive
record itself, as it had been preserved and transmitted
by a succession of teachers.
In the study of all documents, and particularly of the
Gospels, we need to be on constant guard against what
1 C/. B. H. Branscomb (Commentary on the Gospel of Mark, xxii f .) ; gives
an excellent summary of the arguments.
THE GOSPELS AS HISTORY 5
may be called the literary illusion. As they pass from
the spoken to the written form words seem to acquire
a new quality. Something is said in ordinary conversa-
tion, and you hardly listen to it. When you see it in
print, although it is still the same foolish or trivial
statement, you feel, in spite of yourself, that it is im-
portant. The power of the press is founded on this
weakness in human nature, to which no one is so liable
as the professional critic. He takes for granted that all
writings must be treated with reverence. He dates a
nation's literature from its first book usually a dull
chronicle which is not to be compared with the tales and
ballads current among the people. So in Biblical criti-
cism the authors of written documents are placed, as a
matter of course, in a higher class by themselves. The
history of Hebrew prophecy is divided sharply into
two periods that in which the prophets merely spoke
their oracles and presumably had little to say, and the
true age of the writing prophets. The early history of
the church is likewise divided into the period before
Paul, when nothing was written, and the period of
real activity which opened with Paul's Epistles. Yet
it is evident, on a little reflection, that the mere act of
writing made no intrinsic difference. Elijah and Elisha
were prophets, in the same sense as Amos and Hosea.
Paul never conceived of himself as called to a different ^
work from Peter because he happened sometimes to
write down what he was prevented from speaking. The
written word is permanent, and it makes all the dif-
ference to us riow that the thoughts of some men have '
6 VALIDITY OF THE GOSPEL RECORD
been preserved, while those of others have gone with
the breath that uttered them. Yet the writing is only
speech in another form, and in no way changes the na^
ture of the message.
This must always be borne in mind when we consider
the Gospels in their relation to the earlier tradition.
Mark gave fixity to the church's records by compiling
them j in a book, but he was not for that reason an in-
novator. He merely transferred to paper what the
other teachers had passed on by word of mouth. He
recorded the same facts as they did, with the same
purpose, and in much the same words. For that part,
he was one in a succession of teachers who had already
made use of writing. With various objects in view
they had thrown into this form some of the things which
they were accustomed to speak, and were not aware that
by so doing they had made any real change.
So between the Gospels and the previous tradition
there was a vital continuity. It is commonly said that
the process which led up to the making of our Gospels
is shrouded in darkness, but this is not strictly true.
Although we know nothing of the earlier teachers we
can tell how they dealt with the tradition, for they were
in a direct line with our evangelists, and went about
their work in the same manner. "Oral tradition" and
"written documents" appear at first sight to be differ-
ent things, and criticism has made great play with the
supposed difference. But the documents are nothing es-
sentially but the tradition put into writing. No doubt
the act of writing entailed more conciseness of language
THE GOSPELS AS HISTORY "J
and a more studied arrangement j but in its substance
the record was the same. This, indeed, was necessary if
the new Gospels were to win acceptance. The Chris-
tian public had to feel assured that nothing had been
changed in the teaching through the different method
of presentation. Here in a book was the familiar record
which had been known hitherto in oral form. One
might compare the evangelists with those mediaeval
builders who replaced the old wooden churches with
structures of stone. The material was different, and
made possible a new and more elaborate architecture}
but the churches conformed to the same general plan as
the old ones, and were adapted to the same type of
worship. There was no feeling of strangeness in passing
from the old buildings to the new.
From our present Gospels, therefore, we may infer
the nature of the earlier records, and the interests by
which the church was guided in collecting and preserv-
ing them. No definite line can be drawn between the!
Gospels as we have them and the tradition out of whichj
they grew. This is a conclusion which can hardly be
pressed too strongly, since it is completely overlooked
in much of the modern criticism. We are given to un-
derstand that at a certain point the church conceived
the idea of making a history of Jesus out of the vague
reminiscences which had come down to it. A number
of anecdotes were current which had hitherto been
prized, when they were known at all, for the sake of
their edifying moral. These were now taken seriously.
They were held to embody the facts of Jesus' life, and
8 VALIDITY OF THE GOSPEL RECORD
were placed in sequence, and were fitted into some kind
of biographical framework. It is maintained that in any
attempt to recover the truth about Jesus this artifice of
the evangelists must be disregarded. They have im-
posed on their material a coherence and an historical
quality which it did not possess, and the work of the
investigator is to break up the Gospels into their ele-
ments, and to seek in these for some possible grains of
fact. No record of Jesus can be pieced together, since it
never existed j but a few things reported about him in
the generation following his death may be sifted out
from the later legend, and in this way we may obtain
at least a glimpse of the historical figure. 2 This method
of enquiry, although at first sight it may appear severely
scientific, is based on an assumption for which there is
no ground whatever. It takes for granted that in our
Gospels the tradition made a new beginning, and we
know from criticism, if it has taught us anything, that
the evangelists took up a work already in process. They
adhered closely to the earlier documents, and these, in
turn, were linked with an oral tradition. So far from
concealing or misrepresenting the primitive account of
Jesus, our Gospels afford us the one safe clue to its
nature. In order to penetrate the dark period before the
Gospels, we have to examine the aim and character of
the Gospels themselves.
There is nothing in literature that exactly corre-
sponds with those Gospels. Attempts have been made
to find parallels to them in the sacred books of various
2 The theory is pushed to its limit in C. A. H. Guignebert, Jesus.
THE GOSPELS AS HISTORY 9
religions, or in biographical writings of ancient or medi-
aeval times, but all comparisons break down at some
crucial point. It is evident that the Gospels were not
written according to any stated pattern, but grew, in a
manner of their own, out of conditions which were in
many ways unique. They differ from each other in
plan and outlook, but in all of them three main inter-
ests are interwoven. This is at once apparent in the
Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke, and hardly less
so in the Fourth Gospel, although it must be placed
in a different category from the other three, (i) In
the first place they- are written in the interest of a given
message. Jesus was proclaimed by the church as the
Messiah, through whom God had offered salvation to
his people, and it is shown in the Gospels how he had
fulfilled the Messianic prophecies, how his work had
been accompanied with a divine power, how his teaching
had borne witness tp an immediate knowledge of God's
will, how his death was the supreme act, divinely or-
dained, by which the Kingdom of God was to be real-
ised. The Gospels have manifestly been written under
the influence of this belief in Jesus. Their selection of
sayings and incidents has been determined by it} and
to this extent their purpose is a theological, or, it would
be more just to say, a religious one.
(2) Again, they were intended for the practical guid-
ance of the Christian brotherhood. Matthew and Luke
have incorporated with their narrative a full collection
of Jesus' sayings on man's duty to God and to his fel-
low-men, on work for the Kingdom, on the inward
IO VALIDITY OF THE GOSPEL RECORD
disposition that belongs to the, true servant of God.
In Mark also the main outline of the teaching is clearly
indicated, and the actions of Jesus are so described as to
give an example to his followers. The church as an in-
stitution had grown up in the time subsequent to Jesus,
and no counsel could be offered to it directly in words
that purported to be his own. But it is not difficult to
see, as we read between the lines of any of these Gos-
pels, that the church is constantly in the writer's mind.
In the light of Jesus' own teaching the Christian com-
munity is advised as to how it should order its fellow-
ship and deal with its various problems. Christianity was
not only a form of belief but a mode of living which had
to be practised within the bonds of a society, and one of
the main purposes of the Gospels is to make clear to
Christians the nature of the life to which they were com-
mitted. Each of the writings, considered in one of its
aspects, is a hand-book for the practical guidance of
believers.
(3) The chief interest of the Gospels is historical.
| They are meant to inspire faith in Jesus and to teach
his rule of life 5 but as the necessary foundation of all
else they explain who he was and what he had done and
suffered. Luke, in the prelude to his Gospel, expressly
declares that his object is to impart this knowledge.
Many had undertaken to recount the facts of Jesus'
life, on the ground of the testimony offered by his im-
mediate followers: this new work is written to put all
the material in order and to present it fully and ac-
curately. There is no reason to doubt that Luke has
THE GOSPELS AS HISTORY II
here stated the principal aim which he had in viewj he
may have had other aims religious, ethical, apologetic
but he was not seeking to further some ulterior object
under the pretence of writing a history. His primary
concern was with the facts. It was on these that The-
ophilus and all his other readers wished to be better in-
formed, and he has set himself to answer the demand.
This is equally true of the other two evangelists, al-
though they do not state their motive in the same ex-
plicit terms. They may have other motives, as Luke him-
self has, but these are apparent only on close analysis,
or require to be read in by ingenious conjecture and
inference. The historical motive is written large over
every paragraph. Whatever else these writings are they
are records of the acts and teachings of Jesus. This is
the sense in which their readers have always understood
them, and which they were plainly meant, to beaiv-
Since this is the purpose of the Gospels we need not
question that it was likewise the purpose of the docu-
ments which lay behind them. It cannot be assumed
that the church, after long contenting itself with ab-
stract reflection on Jesus, awoke suddenly to the need
of knowing something about him, arid that the evan-
gelists, aware of this need, laid hold of the few doubt-
ful traditions which were still current, and wove them
into the semblance of a history. The Gospels are com-
piled from documents of the same character as them-
selves. They merely present in a more adequate form
what the church already possessed. Luke testifies in his
prelude to the eager interest which had long been felt
12 VALIDITY OF THE GOSPEL RECORD
in the doings of Jesus, and which many writers had
sought to satisfy. This interest had existed from the
first, and one of the chief tasks of all Christian teachers
was to impart the knowledge which had come to them.
The evangelists continue this work of instruction.
Admittedly the Gospels are more elaborate than the
earlier records, and this was the very reason why they
were written. But since they were works of the same
order as those which they displaced we can learn some-
thing from them as to the nature of the previous tradi-
tion. It is evident, for one thing, that they are composed
with great care. This is particularly noticeable in the
work of Matthew, who must have thought out his plan
with almost mathematical precision, and has been hardly
less precise in matters of detail. One has only to think
of the Sermon on the Mount, in which detached sayings
are chosen out from a number of sources and linked to-
gether so skilfully that they form a consecutive dis-
course. Luke's Gospel is composed more freely, but
for that reason is still more a work of art. All the epi-
sodes appear to follow each other naturally .and spon-
taneously, and yet are so ordered that the story unfolds
itself with a true dramatic movement. The Gospel of
Mark is cruder in its workmanship, and Papias, in the
first criticism ever made of it, 3 objects to its want of
"order" meaning, no doubt, that it is more like a dis-
jointed chronicle than a finished work. Yet the narra-
tive of Mark, for all its apparent bareness, is perhaps
more carefully constructed than any of the others. Al-
3 Quoted in Eusebius, III:3Q.
THE GOSPELS AS HISTORY 13
though he is wanting in literary skill the author has
arranged his material with rare judgment. It is now
generally acknowledged that the sequence of events is
most intelligible when Mark's order is followed j and
this can be due to no mere happy accident. Mark has
been at trouble with his work. He has never put down
anything until he has decided, to the best of his knowl-
edge, where it ought to stand.
This care displayed in the making of the Gospels is
highly significant. It shows, for one thing, that the
church valued its records, and expected them to be
handled conscientiously. As we compare the Gospels
with one another we cannot but be struck with the anxiety
to keep close to an approved tradition. In all of them
the same verse is often repeated word for word, just
as it had been handed down. When a serious change is
made it seems usually to be due to the use of an alter-
native record, which, after due consideration, has been
preferred. In not a few instances a saying or incident is
recorded twice, because it had been found in two some-
what different version's and neither of them could be
put aside. Throughout their work the evangelists are
content to act as compilers, and this is certainly not be-
cause they were lacking in creative power. Luke, more
particularly, had a r&rvid imagination, which it cost him
an effort to restrain, and he could easily have invented,
instead: of piecing together the data of his sources. The
reason why the Gospels are compilations must be
sought in reverence for the tradition, which could not
be discarded or falsified. It had to be reproduced with
14 VALIDITY OF THE GOSPEL RECORD
all fidelity, and as far as possible in the very words with
which the church was familiar. Sometimes the evangel-
ist does not himself understand a saying of Jesus, and
yet feels obliged to report it. Sometimes it runs counter
to his own conception of Jesus' message, but he does not
venture to leave it out. All the writers are conscious
of an obligation laid upon them to transmit the record
in the form approved by the church.
It must here be repeated that our Gospels were in-
tended to replace previous works, of substantially the
same character. Matthew and Luke are enlargements
of Mark, which was written perhaps twenty years ear-
lier. Mark itself, there is every reason to believe, had
been enlarged in a similar manner from a work already
existing. Nothing in Gospel literature appears at first
sight to be so original as Matthew's compendium of
Jesus' main teaching in the Sermon on the Mount.
Hitherto the thought of Jesus had only been known in
separate aphorisms. Matthew has hit on this bold de-
vice of a continuous discourse in which it may be pre-
sented as a whole. Yet it is evident, when we compare
this section of Matthew with the sixth chapter of Luke,
that a number of the principal sayings had already been
grouped together. Not only here but everywhere else
our evangelists have availed themselves of the work
of previous editors. Wherever there is a cluster of kin-
dred sayings or incidents in one Gospel, we are pretty
sure to find it in another 5 and this is only one of many
signs that long before the date of our present Gospels
the record had in some degree been sifted and consoli-
THE GOSPELS AS HISTORY 15
dated. It may fairly be said, indeed, that our evan-
gelists fell heirs to two traditions that of the facts
concerning Jesus and that of the methods by which this
material should be treated.
It was expected, therefore, that certain principles
should be observed in the transmission of the record.
The work was a responsible one, and those entrusted
with it were bound by the example of earlier teachers.
This did not mean that they must only repeat, blindly
and credulously, what had been said before, for it had
always been required that the teacher should use his
judgment. It was- his duty to examine the record and
correct it wherever it was deficient. This, it can be
shown, was the manner in which our evangelists have
understood their task. They have taken pains to ar-
range their material, alike in their general plan and in
matters of detail. When they have several accounts to
choose from they ^ have either tried to blend them or
have decided on one in preference to the others. Their
object is to preserve the record and at the same time
hand it down in an improved form. Does this imply,
however, that they sought to improve it historically?
They, and likewise their predecessors, may have taken the
facts for granted^and devoted their whole effort to
orderly presentation. Or they may have been indiffer-
ent to the facts as such, and sought only to bring out,
more forcibly than had hitherto been done, the religious
truth involved in them. A dramatist may deal admir-
ably with some historical episode and yet trouble him-
self little with the accuracy of every detail. The Chris-
l6 VALIDITY OF THE GOSPEL RECORD
tian teachers may have taken a similar attitude towards
their work. They were bound to do their very best with
the tradition, but this did not mean that they were re-
sponsible for all the facts. Their task was one of pres-
entation," not of research.
It is often contended that our Gospels make no pre-
tension to serious historical value. 4 Behind them, it may
be granted, lie some genuine recollections of the life
of Jesus, but these have been overlaid with a mass of
legend and doctrine and symbolism. The evangelists are
content to take over all the material without any ques-
tion. They had no conception of what history means
and never dreamed of historical method. The Gospels
have been assigned to various classes of literature, but
the suggestion is rarely made that they may be ranked
as history. They are compared to the Lives of the Saints,
the Northern Sagas, the Jewish Haggada, the legendary
memoirs of Greek thaumaturgists. Yet it cannot be de-
nied that they remind us most obviously of historical
writings. That is how men have always read them, and
how their authors must have intended them to be read.
May there not be some solid ground for this estimate of
their character?
They have certainly come to us from a time when the
idea of history was by no means unknown. Some of the
greatest of all historians had already written, and had
established the historical methods which have been fol-
lowed, in all essentials, to this day. Not only so, but
4 Drews, Couchod, Kalthoff, W. B. Smith and others would resolve the whole
history into myth or allegory. A. F. Loisy (La nahsance du christianisme)
and C. A. H. Guignebert (Jesus) allow the very minimum of historical fact.
THE GOSPELS AS HISTORY IJ
the first century was, in a pre-eminent degree, an age of
history-writing. With the decay of free political life in-
terest had been diverted to the past. With the decline
of creative art the literature of the time found its nat-
ural channel in works of history. It may be objected
that the makers of our Gospels were outside of the lit-
erary movement j but fashions in literature, as in every-
thing else, have a strange way of diffusing themselves.
Bunyan, it is pretty certain, knew nothing of Spenser
and the other allegorical poets, but in an age when al-
legory was cultivated he found means of putting his
thought into that form. It cannot be deemed impossible
that in the first century, when literary men from the
Emperor Claudius downward were writing history,
there were also historians in the Christian church.
If they knew nothing of the classical histories the
Christian teachers at least had access to Jewish litera-
ture, above all to the Old Testament. The books of
Samuel and Kings are in a real sense historical works,
arid the evangelists have plainly studied them and used
them as models. They were doubtless acquainted, too,
with such later histories as the books of the Maccabees,
and perhaps with similar writings of their own time.
There are many ejqdences that in the first century Jew-
ish authors were peculiarly active in the field of history.
Josephus was engaged on his great works in the very
years when the Gospels of Matthew and Luke appear
to have been written. He acknowledges his debt to au-
thors who had preceded him, and we may fairly speak
of a school of Jewish historians which flourished in the
l8 VALIDITY OF THE GOSPEL RECORD
period between 50 and 100 A.D. If our Gospels had not
been Christian writings they would have taken their
place as admirable examples of Jewish historical litera-
ture, and there is no just reason for denying their his-
torical character because they deal with the acts of Jesus
and not with those of Herod or Annas the high-priest.
Not only did the evangelists write with historical mod-
els before them, but they have demonstrably used the
methods with which competent historians have always
worked. They have gone back to sources. They have
weighed various testimonies against each other, and ex-
ercised their judgment carefully as to which one should
be accepted. When no information has come to them
they say nothing with the result that there are gaps and
abrupt transitions in their narrative, which they doubt-
less regretted as much as we do. There have been popu-
lar historians, both in ancient and modern times, who
relied for their data on one single document, and filled
in all the blanks in their knowledge with general reflec-
tions or imaginary pictures. The evangelists have not
worked in this facile manner. That brief preface in
which Luke tells us what he has sought to do describes
almost to the letter the aims and methods of any se-
rious historian in our own time. He has tried, in the
light of the early documents, to trace accurately the
course of all things from the beginning, so as to pro-
duce an orderly and trustworthy narrative. This has
equally been the object of Mark and Matthew, whose
Gospels correspond so closely with that of Luke 5 and
THE GOSPELS AS HISTORY
it is hard to see why writings of this character should
be denied the name of history.
It may be argued that these considerations only ap-
ply to the Gospels as we now have them works of
trained writers, who collected the early traditions and
tried to reproduce them in the form of history. Livy.
has recounted the stories of Romulus and the legend-
ary kings with the same gravity and circumstance as
when he .afterwards describes the Punic War. They
read like history, but it does not follow that they are
so. The art of a skilful historian has thrown the illu-
sion of reality over the data of folk-lore and old songs
and liturgies. But this comparison is beside the mark.
Our Gospels are not the creation of literary art, work-
ing on nothing else but a few popular tales. They are
made out of documents which, for the most part, are
copied almost word for word. If they bear the appear-
ance of history this is not a quality which has been im-
posed on them but one which has passed into them
from the earlier records. The evangelists write as his-
torians, and this was also true, so far as we can judge,
of those who had worked before them on the tradition
of Jesus. It seems, to have been treated from the first
in what may fairfyjbe called an historical spirit. From
all that we can learn of it the primitive church was not
made up exclusively of simple-minded people, who were
prepared to accept anything. In the earliest days, much
more than^afterwards, freedom was of the very essence
of the brotherhood. Its members may have been of
2O VALIDITY OF THE GOSPEL RECORD
one heart, but the book of Acts itself provides evidence
that they were hardly of one mind. Disputes arose, al-
most from the outset, which threw the little group of
believers into separate camps. In such a community
doubtful statements would not easily pass muster, and
evidence would be scrutinized. It must never be for-
gotten, too, that for many years personal disciples of
Jesus were still alive and were held in peculiar honour.
Their testimony was always available on matters of
historical fact, and we know that it was given. Paul is
careful to note, in his account of the Resurrection ap-
pearances, that his teaching agreed with that of the
Apostles, and we need not doubt that a similar warrant
was constantly demanded. All Jews were trained from
childhood in the habit of appeal to some binding au-
thoritythe text of scripture, the custom of the elders,
the word of an outstanding Rabbi. The primary au-
thority for the life and teaching of Jesus was the wit-
ness of his disciples 5 and whatever was questioned in
the record would be brought to this touchstone. Here,
indeed, we may find the guiding principle by which an
approved tradition gradually took shape in the church.
Out of all the mass of rumour the Christian teachers
sought to determine those things which could be traced
back, directly or through accredited testimony, to the
original disciples. "As they delivered them unto us
who from the beginning were eye-witnesses and minis-
ters of the word." This, according to Luke, was the
rule he went by when he examined the varied pieces of
THE GOSPELS AS HISTORY 21
information which had come to his hand,^and this, we
may be reasonably sure, was the test which had always
been applied.
It may therefore be maintained that in our Gospels
we have the final deposit of a genuine historical tradi-
tion. This does not imply that everything contained in
them must be accepted as indubitable fact. There can
be no serious question that the stream of tradition, flow-
ing on through two generations, had gathered into it
many elements which impress the modern reader as
plainly unhistorical miraculous actions and interven-
tions, voices from heaven, angelic appearances, super-
natural foresight. In most cases these probably go back
to the earliest phase of the record, and had place in the
teaching of immediate witnesses. It must always be
remembered that the ancient mind worked on assump-
tions which have now become untenable. The higher
world was conceived in realistic fashion, and many
things were construed as miracle which we should now
explain by natural causes. Looking back on the life of
Jesus under the full conviction that he was Messiah, the
disciples would see all his action in a supernatural light,
and their testimony, given in perfect good faith, would
be received withou^any of the doubting criticism which
it now awakens. What surprises us is not that these
things .find a place in the Gospels but that they are com-
paratively so few. The narrative, however, might have
been just as historical although it had been full of that
element which might seem at first sight to discredit it.
22 VALIDITY OF THE GOSPEL RECORD
We have to do with a history attested by men of the
ancient world, whose attitude of mind was different from
ours. Their interpretation of the facts does not affect
the facts themselves.
. It is no longer on the ground of that miraculous ele-
ment in the Gospels that the modern enquiry is disposed
to question their historical value. Allowance is now
made for the ancient mode of presentation, but it is
maintained that the facts, as such, cannot be reconciled
with an actual life of Jesus. Everywhere in the narra-
tive there appear to be traces of ideas and influences
which only became operative after his death. A com-
munity had come into being which made him the central
figure in its worship, and built up a legend to justify the
central place it gave him. A theology had shaped itself
around his Person, and the later doctrines were read
back into the history, and in some measure created it.
Difficulties of a practical nature were continually arising
in the life of the church, and Jesus was conceived as
answering them by some pregnant saying, or by his ac-
tion in a given situation. It is argued that for the true
origin of the tradition we must look to this experience
of the later church. On the grounds, perhaps, of a few
vague reminiscences the community itself devised a se-
ries of incidents which were supposed to manifest the
mind of Jesus, and which came to be accepted as his-
torical. This formation of a legend around the figure
of Jesus was further assisted by Messianic prophecy.
It was assumed that Jesus, as Messiah, had duly fulfilled
THE GOSPELS AS HISTORY 23
all that the scriptures had foretold. The predictions were
now read as actual history, and were transformed into
things that Jesus had done or that had happened to him.
What we have in the Gospels is thus nothing but the
final precipitation in the form of an historical record of
this varied material which had been produced under the
.later influences.
Now it may be admitted that the record has been af-
fected by the thought and experience of the Christian
community. No history has ever been written which did
not, in some degree, reflect the interests of the historian's
own age. The conflict in ancient Greece or Puritan Eng-
land reminds him at every point of some contemporary
struggle, and unconsciously he puts something of the
present into the past. For the early church it was impos-
sible to look back on Jesus with perfect detachment. He
was regarded as still living, and sharing in the effort of
his people and whatever he had once done merged in-
sensibly in what he was doing now. "To me to live is
Christ," says Paul ; and he expresses a mood which was
familiar to all the early believers. Yet it does not fol-
low that their picture of the historical Jesus was nothing
but a shadow, projected from the later conception. Peri-
cles and Cromwell may be presented to us through the
atmosphere of our own day, but they were none the less
real figures, and what is offered to us as their history
is substantially true. In like manner we may accept the
record of Jesus. Though it has been modified in the
course of transmission it is no less credible than anything
24 VALIDITY OF THE GOSPEL RECORD
else that has come down to us as history. This confidence
in the record will only be strengthened when we con-
sider in detail how it seems to have been moulded into
its present form.
CHAPTER II
THE HISTORY AND THE MESSAGE
THE Gospels, according to Luke's own description,
are the record of "those things which Jesus both did
and taught" (Acts 1:1). They have been compared,
not inaptly, to the biographies of famous men which
were much in vogue in the first century, and of which
Plutarch's Lives are the classical example. These writ-
ings were intended to have at once an historical and an
ethical value. The career of the man was clearly out-
lined, and particular attention was directed to his char-
acter. Anecdotes were told of him which were often of
little importance in themselves, but which illustrated his
disposition and his peculiar virtues. His sayings espe-
cially were put on record, as indicating even more plain-
ly than his achievements the manner of man he was.
Our Gospels, with their mingling of narrative and anec-
dote and teaching, are similar to those biographies, and
the resemblance may not be wholly accidental ; but at
the crucial point the comparison breaks down. They are y
not intended to satisfy curiosity about a remarkable man,
nor yet to inculcate virtue by noble example. Their pur-
pose is a religious one. They provide the basis for the
Christian message, and their value as history cannot be
separated from their religious value.
We have here to reckon with a factor in the Gospels
25
26 VALIDITY OF THE GOSPEL RECORD
which might seem fatal, from the start, to their histori-
cal character. They are written under the influence of a
given belief, and the aim of their writers is to justify
that belief. During the generation which followed the
death of Jesus he had become the object of Christian
faith, and his name was associated with theological and
mystical ideas. The record has come to us from that
later period when the historical Jesus had been over-
shadowed by the Christ of faith. 1 Must we not conclude
that the facts are so hopelessly confused with the mes-
sage that they are now lost beyond recovery?
The teaching of Jesus for this, at least, seems clear
from the Gospels had dealt with the proclamation of
the Kingdom of God. The old order was presently to
come to an end and give place to a new order, in which
the will of God would prevail. Jesus called on men to
prepare themselves for this great coming change. He
claimed that to him had been granted a unique knowl-
edge of the will of God, which he imparted by deed and
saying and parable. Men were to break with their past
and follow his new way of life, so that they might be
ready for the Kingdom and enter it when it came. To-
wards the close of his ministry he appears to have de-
clared himself the Messiah, who according to prophecy
was to bring in the Kingdom. On the ground of this
claim, whether he made it publicly or only within the
inner circle of his followers, he was put to death. Hence-
forward the Messianic aspect of his message became
iperhaps the ablest statement of this view is by R. H. Lightfoot, History
and Interpretation in the Gospels.
THE HISTORY AND THE MESSAGE 2J
central. A community grew up at Jerusalem which ac-
cepted his claim, and believed that he would presently
return in glory and establish the Kingdom which he had
foretold. The thought of the Kingdom was now merged
in the Messianic faith. All the thought and activity of
the new community were determined by the one belief
that the Messiah had now appeared in Jesus of Nazareth,
and that he would ensure salvation for his people. This
belief was formulated in a definite message which the
Christian teachers proclaimed to the world.
The nature of the message can be ascertained with
sufficient clearness from a number of passages in the
book of Acts and in Paul's Epistles. 2 Jesus had been sent
from heaven as the Messiah. He had died to make
atonement for sin, and thereby to secure for men that
righteousness before God which would enable them to
enter his Kingdom. Although he had died he had risen
again, and his resurrection had been at once the crown-
ing proof of his Messianic claim and the act whereby
he had assumed the full Messianic dignity. He had not
only been restored to life but had risen into a new state
of being, and from heaven, to which he had now as-
cended, he would shortly return to judge mankind and
to bestow eternal life on those who had put faith in him.
On the basis of these convictions a separate group was
built up within Judaism. Its members were "the breth-
ren," "the believers," "those who waited for the Lord's
2 C. H. Dodd (The Apostolic Preaching) has sought to make out that the prim-
itive beliefs were summarised in a formal statement, resembling a creed, which
was employed by all missionaries as the basis of their preaching. The refer-
ences to the "Kerygma" will hardly admit of this literal interpretation.
28 VALIDITY OF THE GOSPEL RECORD
coming." They drew into their community not only
Palestinian Jews but Jews of foreign origin and finally
pure Gentiles 5 and through the mission of Paul, who
was himself a Hellenistic Jew, the new religion became
predominantly a Gentile one, and acquired many ele-
Khients from Pagan worship and philosophy. Of this for-
eign strain, however, there is little trace in our Gospels.
The tradition concerning Jesus appears to have de-
veloped, almost wholly, within the Palestinian Church.
It is possible, then, to speak of the Christian message
as of something distinct from that of Jesus. His own
"gospel" was his announcement of the Kingdom} the
church proclaimed that he was himself the Messiah, the
Son of God, and this was its "gospel." Paul expressly
says that he had determined henceforth not to know
Christ after the flesh (II Cor. 5:16). He would con-
cern himself not with Jesus as he had been on earth,
but with the exalted Lord through whom we have new
life and fellowship with God. In some degree this was
also the attitude of those followers of Jesus who, unlike
Paul, had personally known him. Their loyalty to him
was now inseparable from those beliefs which had grown
up since his death, and in this light they now thought of
him and worshipped him. According to a view now
widely accepted the Gospel tradition arose out of this
later estimate of Jesus. He had now ceased to be in any
real sense an historical figure. He was invested with all
the attributes which prophecy and apocalyptic had be-
stowed on the Messiah, and his work was interpreted in
terms of a theology. What has come to us as his history
THE HISTORY AND THE MESSAGE 29
is nothing but the expression in a concrete form of the
speculations of the early church.
Before considering the relation of the Christian mes-
sage to the history it will be well to clear our minds of
a confusion in which a great deal of the recent discus-
sion is involved. It is taken for granted that no history
can be true to fact unless it is perfectly objective and
impartial. In so far as the historian sets out with pre-
conceived ideas he is deemed incapable of seeing events
as they really happened. But if this principle were to
be strictly applied, it would go hard with most histori-
ans, and especially with those who have always been
reckoned the greatest. They invariably approach their
subject with some theory of its significance 5 they seek
to present a philosophy as well as a record of fact. This,
indeed, is the difference between a mere chronicle and a
history. The chronicler has no other aim than to cata-
logue the events as they occurredone following an-
other like waves on the beach. History only begins
when this work of the annalist is ended. It seeks to
discover a cause and a purpose in events that seemed
meaningless, and to co-ordinate them by means of some
governing idea. By this effort to interpret them the
historian does not distort the facts. He rather illumi-
nates them and helps us to see them in their right per-
spective. This is true of history, and particularly of
biography. The writer must know from the outset what
his hero was destined to achieve, and consider all that
happened to him in relation to that. Things which in
themselves were of little consequence may be all-im-
3O VALIDITY OF THE GOSPEL RECORD
portant when they went towards the making of a poet,
a discoverer, a liberator. Without this clear conception
of the sort of life he is dealing with, a biographer ought
never to undertake his task. So it must not be objected
to our evangelists that they set out with pre-conceived
ideas. Mark declares at the very outset of his Gospel
that he thinks of Jesus as the Messiah, the Son of God,
and the story that follows has plainly been influenced
by that assumption. Must it therefore be set aside as
historically worthless? One cannot but wonder some-
times what kind of Gospels some writers are wanting
when they reject the present ones as unsatisfactory.
Would they have preferred something by a scribe or a
Sadducee, who saw nothing in Jesus but a Galilasan car-
penter? Would they have wished Mark, when he sat
down to write, to divest himself entirely of his Chris-
tian ideas and to adopt a purely official attitude, stating
the bare facts just as they might have appeared to any
casual observer? Such a Gospel would have had a very
limited value, even as a record of fact. It might have
given more accurate information on some of the ex-
ternal matters in the life of Jesus, but it would have told
nothing of the things worth knowing. Books have been
written in our own day with the deliberate object of
viewing Jesus impartially, and reducing our knowledge
of him to the absolute minimum of attested fact. For
purely critical purposes these books are useful, but every
one feels in reading them that the essential thing has
been left out. Jesus, when all is said, has been the most
potent force in the world's history 5 and if this meagre
THE HISTORY AND THE MESSAGE 3!
residuum must be taken as everything he remains a pure
enigma. Our eyangelists may be wrong in thir interpre-
tation, but they have at least faced the problem. They
have come to their task with a due sense of the greatness
of Jesus, and of the divine power which was somehow
working in him. This must not be dismissed as prejudice
or illusion. It was the right historical attitude for the
understanding of such a life.
The word "theology" ought not, perhaps, to be used
at all in connection with our Gospels. Properly speak-,
ing the word denotes an effort to explain or justify by
reason the truth which is received by faith. In these
theological explanations there is always something futile
and artificial. As rational beings we are obliged to fall
back on them 5 but our knowledge of God is different in
kind from ordinary knowledge, and cannot be grounded
in principles derived from it. The evangelists are not
theologians. They do not attempt to explain the work
of Jesus by any intellectual theory. To be sure they
think of him as the Messiah, but this was only the ex-
pression of a religious judgment. It meant that he came
from God, that in some sense he represented God, that
all his words and actions had a divine significance. The
Messianic conception was bound up with Jewish apo-
calyptic and could not be applied to Jesus without, in
some measure, changing the character of the historical
facts. Yet it was a flexible idea, which had already been
construed by Jewish teachers in a great variety of ways. 3
By adopting it the evangelists did not commit them-
&Cf. J. Klausner, Die Messianischen Vorstellungen; G. F. Moore, Judaism,
II, 323 &
32 VALIDITY OF THE GOSPEL RECORD
selves to any specific theory of the person of Christ, and
its value for them is simply to define the point of view
from which they approach the history. They are con-
vinced that Jesus was something more than man, that
he not only proclaimed the Kingdom but was essential
to its coming, that his life and death were in accordance
with a divine plan. This did not involve any theologis-
ing of the history. The facts could be recounted as they
were, although they were placed in a light which brought
'out something of their deeper import. In other words,
the evangelists had that feeling for Jesus which all
reverent souls have had since. They expressed it through
the Messianic idea, which was the only one provided
for them by the thought of their time. But they were
not seeking in this manner to change history into doc-
trine.
It has been maintained, however, that we must allow
for something much more subtle and elaborate in the
Messianic teaching of the Gospels. They not only rep-
resent Jesus as the Messiah but connect his Messiahship
with a theory, to which the facts of the history have been
subordinated. What they have given us is not the record
but a theological construction of the record. Much has
been made in recent years of the idea of the "Messianic
secret," which is held to be all-pervasive in the Gospel
of Mark. 4 According to this hypothesis Mark thinks of
the Messiahship as a mystery, which was concealed in
Jesus' life-time, or was only divulged towards the close
4 The first, and still the most important, statement of the theory is W. Wrede's
Das Messianische Geheimniss (1901).
THE HISTORY AND THE MESSAGE 33
to the inner group of disciples. Now and then it was
penetrated by the demons, who were beings of a super-
natural order j but flesh and blood could not apprehend
it, and even the disciples could make little of it until
after the Resurrection. In this light we must understand
the use, in the later part of Mark's Gospel, of the mys-
terious title "Son of man." It is meant to indicate that
Jesus was the Messiah in no traditional Jewish sense,
but by virtue of a hidden divine Sonship. Mark begins
with the announcement that this is "the Gospel of Jesus
the Messiah, the Son of God," and near the very end he
records the centurion's confession, "Truly this was the
Son of God." Throughout his work he is the spokes-
man of some group which held a cryptic doctrine of the
Messiahship, and the history is revised in this theologi-
cal interest. Some elements of fact may be preserved,
but they are treated merely as the adumbration of a hid-
den truth in which the Christian message essentially
consists. 5
Now it is difficult to credit Mark with this abstruse
doctrinal purpose, which would certainly be missed by
his early readers, as by every one since, except some in-
genious critics in the twentieth century. If he had wished
to promulgate a new theory he would have done so
more explicitly 5 and it is more natural to suppose that
he works with the Messianic idea as it was commonly
understood in the church of his day. If he sought to
introduce a new and more profound Christology his in-
tention was not perceived by the other two evangelists,
B R. H. Lighf oot, History and Interpretation, Ch. III.
34 VALIDITY OF THE GOSPEL RECORD
who apparently thought him defective at this very point.
Again and again they find it necessary to correct his lan-
guage, as wanting in due reverence for Jesus. Writing
as they do in the next generation they are aware that
Mark reflects the attitude of a time when the tradition
had not been fully correlated with the message. There
is, indeed, no reason why that secrecy on which Mark in-
sists should not correspond with an historical fact. Jesus
had arrived at the conviction that he was Messiah with
many misgivings conscious, it may be, that his calling
was not wholly in keeping with the prophetic hope.
Nearly to the end he was seeking for more certainty,
and was unwilling to commit himself by a public proc-
lamation. He knew, moreover, that as soon as his claim
was disclosed he would cease to be master of his own
actions, and might be hurried into imprudent courses.
No theology is needed to explain an aspect of the his-
tory which in itself is perfectly intelligible. Jesus with-
held his secret because he wished as long as possible to
keep himself free, and to make his declaration at his own
time and in his own way.
What Mark affirms, from the beginning to the end of
his Gospel, is simply the fact that Jesus was the Mes-
siah. This was the cardinal Christian belief, and in proof
of it the evangelist tells of the miracles, the testimony
offered by angels and demons, the convincing power of
the teaching, the faith awakened in the disciples, the
manner of the death and resurrection. There is prob-
ably no passage in Mark's Gospel which has not some
bearing on the Messianic belief, and to this extent it may
THE HISTORY AND THE MESSAGE 35
be said that the writer is concerned not only with facts
but with their import. He lies open to the suspicion
which attaches to all historians who have written with
a purpose Thucydides, Tacitus, Macaulay, Carlyle and
countless others. In their version of events we have con-
stantly to allow for a motive, but this does not mean
that the events themselves are doubtful. If the writer
were merely inventing, or repeating vague hearsay, he
would defeat his own intention, which is to support the
view he holds by admitted facts. At most we can only
object to Mark that he has selected his facts and put his
own construction on them 5 and the same is true of the
other evangelists. Their procedure is much the same as
that which Luke has followed in his supplementary
work, the book of Acts. His view of the task and char-
acter of the early church is different from that which we
might gather from Paul's Epistles j but it is obtained by
careful selection and skilful changes of emphasis. The
facts themselves are substantially the same in Luke's
account and in Paul's.
It is a fundamental principle in all enquiry that fact
and interpretation ought not to be confused with each
other. A theory may be totally wrong, and yet may be
based on observations which cannot be disputed. We
reject the Ptolemaic astronomy, but the phenomena
which it seeks to explain are none the less real. We
may question the opinions of Thucydides on Athenian
policy, but the conduct of Athens during the war was
no doubt as he describes it. This distinction must never
be forgotten in our criticism of the Gospels. It may be
36 VALIDITY OF THE GOSPEL RECORD
that mistaken meanings have been read by the evangel-
ists into their account of Jesus, but this must not affect
our judgment of the history. There is no reason to ques-
tion that the things recorded are authentic, although at
some points we can trace the ideas of a later time. The
evangelists are interpreters as well as historians, and it
need not be assumed that the interpretation has pro-
duced, or even seriously modified, the facts.
It is necessary, however, to enquire more closely into
the relation of the Gospel history to the message which
it is intended to support. We know that in the age fol-
lowing the death of Jesus there grew up certain beliefs
concerning him which apparently had little connection
with anything he had actually done. The Apostles'
Creed, in which these beliefs were firmly summarised,
passes at once from the birth of Jesus to his death. No
mention is made of the events between, for it was felt
that Christianity essentially consisted in the acceptance
of that salvation which had come through Jesus. To
believe in him it was no more necessary to know his his-
tory than to study the career of Euclid before you can
trust his conclusions. Paul himself refuses to know
Christ after the flesh. It was enough to be assured that
Christ was now Lord, and had won redemption for his
people.
A message was thus proclaimed by the church, which
might seem to stand by itself, with little connection ex-
cept in name with the historical figure of Jesus. Many
theories have been put forward as to how this message
had come into being. According to one view it had
THE HISTORY AND THE MESSAGE 37
sprung out of Jewish apocalyptic. The Christ whom the
church believed in was the Messiah of the apocalyptic
hope, who had now come to be vaguely identified with
the prophet of Nazareth. Others would find the true
origins of Christianity in some esoteric school of Jewish
thought, either in Palestine itself or in the more specu-
lative Judaism of the Dispersion. Or they would trace
it directly to Hellenistic influences which may have act-
ed, almost from the beginning, on the community which
formed itself at Jerusalem. It is indeed more than prob-
able that a number of forces co-operated in the making
of early Christianity. Correspondences may be found
in the New Testament to almost all the religious con-
ceptions which were current in the first century, and in
many cases this can hardly have been fortuitous. But
these extraneous influences came into effect only in the
formulation of the message. They do not account for
its substance, and much less do they explain how it came
to be associated with Jesus. This, when all is said, is the
real problem.
It is not enough to say that by the confluence of many
streams of thought a new religion evolved itself, and
somehow found its missionaries in the obscure Christian
sect. Why did it do so? This cannot be accounted for
by any theory of happy coincidence. There must have
been something in the Christian tradition itself which
enabled it to press into its service all that could be con-
tributed by the miscellaneous thinking of the time. It
has been argued that Paul takes his real departure from
the Jewish apocalyptic idea of the Messiah. He con-
38 VALIDITY OF THE GOSPEL RECORD
nects it with the Christian faith in Jesus, but all the time
it is the Messiah of Jewish speculation in whom Paul's
thought is centred, and around whom he weaves his
whole message of salvation. But his procedure, when
we examine it, is just the opposite. He starts always
from certain facts, received, as he tells us, from the
church before him. Christ had appeared and had died
for men and through him God had revealed himself and
had done for us what we could not do ourselves. Every-
thing in Paul that is speculative and theological, every-
thing that is brought in from apocalyptic and Hellenistic
thought, is used only to explain those facts which were
given in the Christian tradition. Nothing could be fur-
ther from the truth than to ground the message of Paul
in ideas which serve only for its doctrinal expression.
What is demonstrably true of Paul is no less true of
the Christian teaching generally. It cannot be main-
tained that the message came first, and then produced a
history which aimed at justifying it. This, on the face
of it, is incredible, and is contrary to all the evidence.
although
it may be that when the message, under various influ-
ences, had assumed a doctrinal form, it re-acted on the
history out of which it had grown. Facts were now con-
ceived, not entirely as they had been, but in the light of
doctrines which they had suggested. The Ptolemaic as-
tronomy, to take our previous instance, was founded on
the observed motions of the stars 5 but when once the
theory had been accepted no one could regard those mo-
tions except in the light of it. So in history there is al-
THE HISTORY AND THE MESSAGE 39
ways a tendency to credit a great man with the conscious
pursuance of aims which were only implicit in his work.
The wars of Caesar are explained as waged deliberately
for the creation of the later empire; the thought of Soc-
rates as inspired by those conceptions to which it event-
ually gave rise. This has doubtless happened, to some
extent, in the record of the life of Jesus. When our Gos-
pels were written the church had reflected on its mes-
sage, and had learned to express it in terms which might
have appeared strange to Jesus himself. The later con-
ceptions could not but affect the minds of the evangel-
ists as they dealt with the records. They believed in the
message as now proclaimed by the church, and tried to
find confirmation of it in the history. But from this it
does not follow that the history was dependent on the
message.
Much of the modern criticism of the Gospels would
seem, indeed, to be based on a misconception. It is as-
sumed that the message and the record were, from the
outset, quite different things, and that the record owed
its existence to a kind of afterthought^, For a generation
or more the message had been proclaimed as something
by itself that Jesus was the Messiah sent from God,
and that by faith in him men might enter into fellow-
ship with God and obtain his salvation. Then a time
came when Christians began to ask themselves, "Who
was this Jesus who wrought such great things for man-
kind?" In answer to this demand for more definite
^ position is tacitly adopted by most of the exponents of Formgeschichte.
4O VALIDITY OF THE GOSPEL RECORD
/
knowledge of him our Gospels appeared. The memory
of Jesus had now grown dim* Those who knew him
personally had passed away, and the church, pre-oc-
cupied with its message, had taken no care to enquire
into his history. But the practice now began of collect-
ing the stray reminiscences which still happened to sur-
vive. They had grown faded, and were mingled with
doubtful legend, but such as they were they were put
into writing and finally gathered into our Gospels. What
purported to be a history was thus added as a pendant
to the message.
, There are two great weaknesses in this theory. On
the one hand it rests on the assumption that the making
of a record was a late development, never even contem-
plated until the beliefs of the church had been fully
defined. If this were so, it would indeed follow that the
Gospels can have only a secondary value. There would
always be a suspicion that they merely reflected the later
teaching, and even if it could be shown that they con-
tained elements of good tradition, this would have to be
regarded as irrelevant. The substance of Christian be-
lief would be the message itself. These reminiscences
of Jesus would at best be a mere appendix, intended to
satisfy a reasonable curiosity as to the earthly life of
this divine Person, who was the object of faith. It can
be proved, however, that the record was not a late de-
velopment. Our Gospels may have been written in the
second or third generation after Christ; the earliest of
them certainly dates from a time subsequent to the the-
ology of Paul. But they are made from material which
THE HISTORY AND THE MESSAGE 4!
existed, even in a written form, in a much earlier time.
They can be traced back to a tradition which must have
been current in the church in Palestine almost from the
beginning. Whatever its origin, therefore, the record
was not due to the research of later teachers, who felt
the need of supplementing in this manner the beliefs
of the church. Nor was it sometjiing extraneous, grafted
on to a message which had grown up apart from it and
had taken definite shape before it was added. Both the
record and the message went back to primitive days. If
they were different they had always been inseparable.
There was never a- time when the^hurdpyas neglectful,
of the life of Jesu^jaclthought onlyjrf the message.
On the other hand, this theory leaves out of account
what was always the distinctive thing about Christianity.
In other religions the personality of the founder is
non-essential. Very little is known of Moses, Buddha,
Zoroaster, and even if it were proved that they had
never lived at all, the religions which accept them as
prophets would remain the same. All that matters is the
teaching attributed to those great names, and it would
be just as valid if it were connected with others. Jesus,
^however, is central to his religion, which would at once
lose all its meaning if he were withdrawn. When Paul
was asked in a moment of crisis to sum up in one word
the way of salvation, he could only answer "Believe in
the Lord Jesus Christ." This faith in Christ is the vital
thing in Christianity, and it cannot be resolved into faith
in a principle, or a symbol, or an imaginary being. It
means, in the last resort, that the power of God was
42 VALIDITY OF THE GOSPEL RECORD
manifested in very deed through a human life. Jesus,
for the Christian, is the unassailable fact on which his
faith is based, and which gives it certainty. This demand
for faith in Christ was not a later element in Christian-
ity, introduced by Paul or some other innovator. It was
the substance of the religion from the first. The very
mark of a Christian was baptism in the name of Christ,
that is, a personal surrender whereby you became a
servant of Christ. This loyalty to him was the one thing
that mattered in the Christian life, and expressed itself
in the confession "Jesus is Lord," which for a long time
was the only creed of the church.
So by its nature Christianity involved a knowledge of
Jesus. Faith in him was impossible without some clear
conception of what he was. It was not enough to say
"Believe in Jesus, who appeared on earth as Messiah and
has now ascended to heaven." The question would at
once be raised, "Where and when did he appear? How
did he show himself to be Messiah?" A missionary at
the present day needs always to lead up to his message
by some account of the Gospel history. Much of his
teaching consists in nothing else than in repeating the
simple facts, and making them vivid and concrete. The
call to believe in Jesus has no meaning whatever until
Jesus is thus presented as a living personality. It is not
conceivable that the primitive missionary can have fol-
lowed any different method. Since his aim was to awak-
en faith in Jesus he must have told what he knew of
Jesus; he must have been far more explicit than the
modern missionary, speaking as he did to Jews and
THE HISTORY AND THE MESSAGE 43
Pagans who were often misinformed on the facts. Much
has been made of Paul's refusal to know Christ after
the flesh, and of his comparative silence, throughout the
Epistles, on the story of the earthly life. Do we not
here have evidence that Paul, at any rate, made little of
the historical life and threw the whole emphasis on the
message? But Paul implies in this very passage (II Cor.
5:16) that too much attention was commonly given to
the life. The ordinary Christian was content to remem-
ber what Jesus had once been, and had no desire to press
forward and know him as still living. Paul confesses
that he himself, before he had learned the full scope of
the revelation, had been satisfied with the historical
knowledge. His endeavour now is to build on that foun-
dation and attain to the larger conception of Christ.
Here, then, we are to seek the true relation of the
Gospel history to the Gospel message. The whole en-
quiry has been vitiated by the idea that the two things
must be kept separate. It is assumed that on the one
hand there were certain beliefs held by Jesus' followers,
and on the other hand a tradition about Jesus himself.
The historical content of the Gospels is thus arrived at
by a method of subtraction. All the theological ele-
ments have to be squeezed out of the narrative, and we
are then left with a residuum, which may possibly con-
sist of historical fact. At every point the two interests
must be carefully distinguished Jesus as an actual Per-
son and Jesus as the object of faith. Only when this is
done can we hope to get behind the Gospels to the his-
tory.
44 VALIDITY OF THE GOSPEL RECORD
It is along this line of reasoning that the narrative is
set aside, as merely an outgrowth of the later message or
an appendix which came in the course of time to be at-
tached to it; but surely another view is possible. The
record was not something added to the message, but was
itsolf the message in its original form. At a later day the
church expressed its beliefs in theological language, and
these abstract statements were accepted, as containing
the substance of Christian faith. In the earlier time the
account of what Jesus had said and done took the place
of formal doctrine. Here were the facts which repre-
sented the new message, and the hearer might make of
them what he would. He was not asked to assent to any
creed, but merely to believe, on the word of those who
had witnessed it, that the life of Jesus had been lived in
this manner. The record itself was held to be sufficient.
Those who laid it to heart would perceive that Jesus was
indeed the Messiah, and that salvation must be by faith
in him. The teacher would certainly do his best to make
that conclusion evident, but his chief business was to im-
press on his hearers the Christian facts. .
When it is thus considered the record is no mere sup-
plement to the message, but the message itself in its
earlier form. Our evangelists belonged to the genera-
tion after Paul, and perhaps availed themselves of ideas
which had come in through Paul and other thinkers;
but their aim has been to gather up and to present in
orderly fashion the primitive traditions. They preserve
to us what was taught in the church at the time when
it had no other teaching. Their record, so far from
THE HISTORY AND THE MESSAGE 45
growing out of the later message, was the material out
of which the message was formed. It gives us the things
known about Jesus, and from these the church proceeded
to construct its doctrine of his Person and work. An
illustration may be taken from the Lord's Supper, the
observance of which, according to Paul's testimony, had
always been modelled on the original rite. In this in-
stance an act of Jesus was not merely recounted but re-
enacted. It stood for the solemn pledge which Jesus
had made to his people, and was therefore repeated, in
a visible, impressive form, at every church meeting. Al-
ready in the time of Paul the observance was interpreted
doctrinally, and it gradually became the centre of a whole
mystical theology. But in the primitive days the church
was satisfied with the repetition of the rite itself. The
message intended by it was conveyed by the presentation
to mind and senses of what Jesus himself had done,
while he was still with men. This one act of Jesus was
dramatised 5 others were only recounted. But the nar-
rative had a religious value, similar to that of the re-
enactment of the Supper. By receiving the tradition of
Jesus his followers received his message, which was in-
separable, in the last resort, from the facts of his life.
One thing, indeed, has always to be borne in mind-
that the closing events of the life over-shadowed every-
thing that had gone before. In our present Gospels
practically nothing is told us of the years preceding the
Baptism, with which the Messianic career of Jesus had
begun; and in a similar manner the ministry itself is
eclipsed by the great events which crowned the Mes-
46 VALIDITY OF THE GOSPEL RECORD
sianic work. Nearly half the space in each of our Gos-
pels is occupied with the closing week of Jesus' lifer All
the rest is treated as a preparation for the fulfilment,
which is kept steadily in view from the beginning. From
this it is sometimes argued that the whole narrative
which leads up to the Passion lies open to suspicion. We
know that in Paul's teaching the death of Jesus is every-
thing. He tells us himself that he preached Christ cruci-
fiedthat he held up before his hearers, as in a vivid
picture, the scene of Christ dying for man's salvation
(Gal. 3:1). Paul, it must never be forgotten, was only
one of the early teachers, and there is no ground for
supposing that in his general method he differed from
the others. They also would throw the emphasis on the
death and the incidents related to it 5 and this presump-
tion is borne out by the place given in the Gospels to the
Passion story. Must we not conclude that originally
it stood by itself the one part of the narrative which
had come down from the primitive time, and that all
the rest was added later, from vague reminiscence or
pure fancy, to give a semblance of completeness to what
would otherwise have been a fragment?
Such a theory is at first sight plausible. Since the
Christian message was concerned supremely with the
death of Christ, this was the one part of the historical
record which needed to be constantly repeated, and the
church would grow careless of everything else in the
story so long as this one essential element was preserved.
To this it may be answered that at the time when our
Gospels were written an account of the ministry was al-
THE HISTORY AND THE MESSAGE 47
ready an integral part of the tradition. The motive
which weighed with the evangelists had also affected
the authors of their documents, and must have been op-
erative from the first. It had always been felt that the
later part of the history could not be understood without
the earlier. The record of the death contained the es-
sential message, but it could not stand alone. Those who
listened to it would inevitably ask many questions. What
had Jesus done before that last week in Jerusalem?
How had he drawn on himself the hostility of priests
and scribes? What evidence had he given before his
Messianic death that he was in truth the Messiah? We
perceive, as we read the Gospels now, that the life and
the death are all of one piece, and that otherwise the
death itself would lose its significance. This would be
no less apparent to those who first listened to the Chris-
tian teachers. There must always have been some intro-
duction to the Passion story, explaining who Jesus was
and illustrating his aims and character by things he had
done. The more men heard of his death the more they
would desire to learn how he had lived, and the two
parts of the record would merge together. This was the
history of Jesus, and at the same time the proclamation
which the church offered to the world.
It is thus by no accident that the writings which give
us the narrative of Jesus' life are now known as the
"Gospels." 7 This name, one might think, would apply
TAs first used by Ignatius (letters to Philadelphia and Smyrna) the term
"Gospel" seems to denote the account of Jesus not some particular writing
in which it is contained.
48 VALIDITY OF THE GOSPEL RECORD
more properly to the later New Testament books, in
which we have no mere chronicle but the message itself,
the clear exposition of God's purpose, as manifested in
Christ. Yet men have always turned from the exposition
to the record, and have felt that here they discover the
true "gospel." This was already realised by the primi-
tive church. Itsjnessage did not consist in some-dojArine
jbout Jesus but inJLhe plain_account _oj how_he had
lived and died. Through these facts he had made his
revelation.
In this connection it will be well to consider the place
of the Fourth Gospel in the development of the tra-
dition. The modern discussion has based itself, in large
measure, on the character of this Gospel, in which the
facts are interpreted by certain doctrinal ideas which
tend, at every turn, to modify or displace them. History
and theology are fused together. For this reason it was
generally admitted, twenty or thirty years ago, tfyat the
Fourth Gospel was on a different footing from the other
three 5 but this is now denied by many scholars. They
hold that John is in direct succession to Mark, Matthew
and Luke, and exhibits in a more advanced and ex-
plicit form that work on the tradition which had been
continually going on. 8 In him we see the process of Gos-
pel-making in its final outcome, so that he provides us
with the clue to the Synoptic Gospels and the documents
behind them. The aims and methods which had hither-
^This is the underlying thesis of R. H. Lightf oot's History and Interpretation
i the Gospels. M. Goguel (Vie de Jesus) regards the Fourth Gospel as mainly
theological, but holds that it is based, like the Synoptics, on genuine historical
documents.
THE HISTORY AND THE MESSAGE 49
to been partially concealed are now disclosed in a man-
ner that cannot be mistaken. Following this clue we can
perceive that Mark, which at first sight appears to be a
purely historical record, was written in a theological in-
terest. It mingles interpretation with fact 5 it freely
adapts the history to the existing needs and problems of
the church. Everything that can be predicated of John's
Gospel must hold equally true of the others, which were
tending in the same direction.
Now it cannot be denied that in this view there is a
measure of truth wjiich needs to be recognised. The au-
thor of the Fourth Gospel took up the work of his
predecessors. He seeks like them to record the life of
Jesus, and probably made use, not only of the Synoptic
narratives, but of other historical material of undoubted
value. He is conscious, like the other evangelists, that
the Christian message cannot stand alone but must be
linked with the things that actually happened. 9
At the same time it remains true, as even the casual
reader has always been aware, that the Fourth Gospel
is different from the others. While it is of the same fam-
ily it marks a new departure, and any attempt to ex-
plain the Synoptists from John can only lead to confu-
sion. This becomes apparent when we consider some
of the distinctive features of this Gospel.
(i) It is not a compilation of earlier documents but
a new and independent work. We feel that the author
. Goguel, in his recent Vie de Jesus (translation, Life of Jesus) y discovers
behind the Fourth Gospel a document of primary historical value. This idea is
pressed too far, but some recognition of the authentic character of certain
parts of the Johannine record was more than due.
5O VALIDITY OF THE GOSPEL RECORD
has read and assimilated a number of previous writings,
and has then laid them aside. His object is not merely
to hand down the tradition but to pour it into a new
mould and re-fashion it.
(2) Though almost certainly a Jew, he is a Hellen-
ist, and works with the Alexandrian method. It was the
aim of the Rabbis to keep faithful to tradition, preserv-
ing the data of their predecessors with the necessary
comments and elucidations. Alexandrian teachers went
back to the original scripture and sought with the help
of allegory to fill it with new meaning. The church in
Palestine had followed the example of the Rabbinical
schools, maintaining as far as possible the tradition of
what Jesus had said and done. John seeks, like the
Alexandrians, to penetrate the hidden import of the
historical facts. Between him and the Synoptists there
is the same kind of difference as between Philo and the
Rabbis.
(3) The Fourth Gospel is controversial. It deals
with the Christian teaching not only in its intrinsic char-
acter but in its contrast with Judaism and Gnosticism.
There may be controversial motives in the Synoptic
Gospels, but they arise for the most part from differ-
ences of opinion within the community itself, and do
not affect the central principles of Christian faith. The
Synoptic writers, moreover, are content to indicate their
own views by means of selection and emphasis, and hold
carefully to the facts as recorded in their sources. With
John the controversial motive is of primary impor-
tance. In order to bring out more clearly the Christian
THE HISTORY AND THE MESSAGE 51
answer to what he conceives to be error, he does not
hesitate to take liberties with the facts.
(4) The historical life is subordinated in the Fourth
Gospel to the Logos doctrine, and this involves a theo-
logical treatment far more drastic than in the other
Gospels. The conception of Messiahship was not, in
the proper sense, a doctrinal one. It was historical in its
origin and lent itself, without undue strain, to the in-
terpretation of a history. Little was required to prove
that Jesus was the Messiah except to show that at one
point and another he gave fulfilment to Old Testament
prediction j and this could be done without any serious
departure from the known circumstances of his life.
Not only so, but the Synoptic writers work on the as-
sumption that in his lifetime the Messiahship of Jesus
was latent, and was not fully disclosed until after the
Resurrection. This idea, as we have seen, has in recent
times been construed as a subtle theological one, elab-
orated by Mark under the guise of history. But it may
more reasonably be explained as Mark's device for af-
firming the Messianic belief and yet presenting the life
historically. Jesus was the Messiah, but this truth, in
its higher significance, was only perceived afterwards.
The events of the life could be viewed apart from it, as
they appeared at the time to the imperfect vision of men.
For the Fourth evangelist Jesus was the Logos, and in
all his action he made this Logos nature apparent. "He
manifested forth his glory." His teaching all centred
on the oracular "I am," with which he asserts his pre-
rogative as Son of God. This conception of Jesus in-
52 VALIDITY OF THE GOSPEL RECORD
volves the re-writing of the history. It is no longer
sufficient to record the traditions j they have to be re-
vised and transformed, in the light of Logos theory.
(5) The Fourth Gospel is consciously the transcript
of a mystical experience, as well as of a history. Two
conceptions are always present to the writer's mind-
that of Jesus as he lived on earth, and that of Jesus
as he now dwells invisibly in the hearts of believers. By
his death he was set free from the limitations of space
and time, and so returned to abide with his people for-
ever. His earthly life had been only the foreshadowing
and the guarantee of this other and deeper fellow-
ship with him which would ensue. It is not too much
to say that the real interest of John is in this inward
manifestation of Christ. He keeps it in his mind and
is trying to describe it all the time that he traces out
the earthly history.
The Synoptists, it may be answered, are also con-
scious of a permanent value in the life, and for this
reason preserve incidents which may seem, at times, to
have little import in themselves. But the value which
they attribute to the life is of a different kind. They
think of Jesus as setting the great example, as teaching
the fixed principles of Christian action, as bringing the
revelation of God's will, as accomplishing by his death
the Messianic redemption. His work for men had a
permanent value because it was achieved once for all,
and thus gave the Christian religion its permanent basis.
For John the work had a meaning for all times because
it would repeat itself endlessly in the experience of
THE HISTORY AND THE MESSAGE 53
faith. As Jesus had lived with his first disciples he
would continue to live, making the same revelation and
doing the same deeds under ever-changing forms. It
is evident that a history so conceived is of a different
order from that in the Synoptic Gospels. Its object is
not the preserving of a tradition but the merging of this
tradition in a mystical experience.
Thus it is misleading to speak of all the Gospels as
linked together in the same succession, and to assume
that in Mark we must look for all the characteristics
which we find in John. By an assumption of this kind
we miss the true significance alike of the Synoptic Gos-
pels and of the Fourth. We construe in a purely ex-
ternal sense those great utterances of the Fourth Gos-
pel which tell of the living Christ, who comes back as
an inward presence to those who love him. We read
theology into those Synoptic narratives which are of in-
finite value because they are history. They do not set
before us some fancied interpretation of the Christian
message but the message itself, as it was given through
the actual life of Jesus Christ on earth.
CHAPTER III
THE TRADITION IN CHURCH WORSHIP
IT is almost an axiom with many modern scholars
that the Gospels arose, almost of their own accord, out
of the life of the Christian community. 1 During the
whole of that dark period before anything was written,
reminiscences of Jesus had been current among the vari-
ous groups of believers in Palestine, and had been used
in the common worship and in the ordering of the com-
mon activities. By this constant employment they had
acquired new forms and meanings. They had been
adapted and readapted to changing circumstances, until
they lost their original shape, like pebbles which are
finally worn smooth by the action of the tides. Many
critics would go a step farther. They would hold that the
tradition was not only modified by its use in the commun-
ity, but was in some measure created. When examined
in detail it is found to reflect conditions which were not
those of Jesus' lifetime, but which answer to those
which existed, or may have existed, in the early church. 2
Must we not infer that the Christian society, in the ef-
fort to maintain itself, evolved principles and ideas
position is well stated by Kundsin: "It has become increasingly clear
that the Gospels and their sources are primarily the expression and reflection
of the faith and life of the early Christian churches which produced them."
(Form Criticism, edited by F. C. Grant, p. 8 1.) .
. S. J. Case, Social Origins of Christianity.
54
TRADITION IN CHURCH WORSHIP 55
which it made authoritative by ascribing them to its
Founder? At the most it can have derived from him
only the bare suggestion of much that it put forward as
his word or example. The tradition as it finally emerged
from that period of silent growth in the community was
mainly the product of the community itself.
This theory undoubtedly contains some elements of
truth. Our Gospels go back to records which were pre-
served in the church, and the church preserved them
for a practical purpose. It had accepted Jesus as its
Master, and looked to him for guidance in the urgent
difficulties which it encountered as it felt its way along
untried paths. The memories of Jesus which survived
in the church would, for the most part, be those which
appeared most relevant to its own problems, and to
this extent the church was an all-important factor in the
making of the tradition. If it did not create those rec-
ords of Jesus, at least it was the sieve through which
they had to pass, and which selected some things in
preference to others. More than this may be granted.
In the endeavour to make a word or action of Jesus
fully applicable to a new situation, some turn would
occasionally be given to it which altered its character.
There is a passage in First Corinthians in which this
modification takes place, as it were, before our very
eyes. Paul has occasion to quote Jesus' teaching on di-
vorce: "To the married I command, yet not I but the
Lord} Let not the wife depart from her husband (but
if she depart let her remain unmarried or be reconciled
to her husband) and let not the husband put away his
56 VALIDITY OF THE GOSPEL RECORD
wife (I Cor. 7:10, n). The parenthesis is Paul's own
addition, but he combines it with the saying quoted, in
such a way that Jesus becomes responsible for the rule
which must henceforth be observed. A still more strik-
ing example is to be found in the passage on the erring
brother, as reported by Luke and by Matthew. Luke
gives the saying in what is doubtless its original form.
"If thy brother sin rebuke him, and if he repent for-
give him (Lk. 17:3). In Matthew this is transformed
into a rule of ecclesiastical order: "If thy brother sin,
rebuke him between thyself and him alone 5 but if he
does not listen, take with thyself one man or two 5 and
if he will not hear them tell it to the church, and if he
will not hear the church, let him be to thee as the
heathen or the publican" (Mt. 18:15-17). Here we
can see the community (still on Palestinian ground,
as is evident from the concluding words) doubtful as to
how it should deal with a recalcitrant member. It takes
a saying of Jesus which is too general to meet the spe-
cial case, and expands it into a definite rule of church
discipline. Something of this kind has no doubt hap-
pened repeatedly in the Gospels. There is hardly a
paragraph in which we may not suspect a later adap-
tation. Sometimes it is so considerable that the under-
lying words of Jesus can only be conjectured. Some-
times it is nothing but a blur, like that of finger-marks
on an object that has been handled. The critical reader
soon learns to make a constant allowance for these
changes to which the record has been subject.
It cannot be admitted, however, that the Gospels are
TRADITION IN CHURCH WORSHIP 57
mainly the T?7ork of the Christian community. .This
theoQ^jffihich has won a great vogue in recent years,
may be set down partly to mere looseness of thinking.
Since the Gospels came into existence, and we cannot
find out exactly how, we are content to say that they
grew up in some way out of the common mind of the
church. The theory is the more acceptable as it an-
swers to our modern faith in the mysterious virtue of
a crowd. We trace everything back to mass movement.
We regard it almost as a law of nature that if plenty
of people can be got together they will be sure to in-
cubate something 1 great. Jesus himself cannot have
originated his religion 5 neither can it be credited to any
individual teachers. But when we assume a community,
made up of very ordinary people but a great number of
them, putting their minds together, everything seems
to become possible. Now the truth js that a community,
as such, never produces anything. For whatever it
decides or does some one man is ultimately responsible,
although the consent of the many gives the necessary
weight to his action. A group is never creative. Left to
itself it only stands still 5 and in all ages this has been
the fatal drawback to any type of society that is strictly
communal. Least of all in matters of the spirit is any-
thing produced by the group. We speak of an ancient
song or ballad as made by the people 5 but this is only
our way of saying that we cannot name the author.
There was not a village crowd which broke out into
the song spontaneously: some one made it, just as surely
as Milton made Paradise Lost. In the same manner
58 VALIDITY OF THE GOSPEL RECORD
every religion, even the crudest, has come, in the last
resort, out of the soul of some one man. We may call
it tribal or primitive, and so contrast it with the reli-
gions that had definite founders. But the distinction is
unreal, and serves no other purpose than to mask our
ignorance. Behind every religion there lies some reve-
lation, made not to the tribe but to some nameless
prophet. It is necessary to insist on these obvious facts,
because in our time the notion of communal activity is
so often employed, even by serious thinkers, to do duty
for real investigation into the sources of ideas and move-
ments. Anything that cannot be explained is now at-
tributed to the communal mind, much as all strange
phenomena are put down among primitive peoples to
some hidden agency into which it is impious to enquire.
This mode of thought has found its way into the study
of Christian origins, and is posing, for the moment, as
the only one that is truly scientific. Everything was the
work of the community. All that was new in Christian
teaching and institutions sprang somehow out of the
general mind, and in this way also the Gospel tradition
must be explained. So much has been made of this
strange theory that it is necessary to consider in some
detail what was the real function of the church in the
making of the Gospels.
There can be little doubt that the community in
question was that which grew up in Palestine, and was
comparatively untouched by Gentile influences. The
Gospels, probably all of them, were written on Gentile
soil and were based on Greek sources, drawn up in
TRADITION IN CHURCH WORSHIP 59
churches which had Greek for their language. But in
the Greek it is not difficult to trace forms of expression
which betray an Aramaic original, and the whole col-
ouring both of style and contents is Palestinian. This is
true also of the general background of the records. If
they had originated in any foreign land it would have
been impossible to reproduce with such fidelity the Pal-
estinian setting of custom, scenery, religious practice,
social and political conditions.
It has been suggested that at least some part of the
record may have been formed at Antioch, where an im-
portant church was founded within a very few years of
Jesus' death. 8 This is conceivable, but there is nothing
in the Gospels themselves which lends support to the
theory. If the accounts of Jesus' teaching had taken
shape in a church planted in a great Gentile city, we
should have expected some reference to the special
problems which beset Christianity in such an environ-
ment. When Paul writes his first Epistle to the Cor-
inthians he is conscious in almost every verse of the
heathen surroundings in which the Christian message
has now to work, and presents it in its bearing on these
changed conditions. Nothing of the kind is indicated
in the sayings of Jesus preserved in our Gospels. The
people addressed are those to whom the Law is the norm
of righteousness; the sins condemned are not the gross
heathen vices but pride, hypocrisy, self-seeking, reli-
&B. H. Streeter (The Four Gospels, 400 ff.) adduces strong reasons for
regarding Antioch as the birthplace of the Gospel of Matthew. This does
not mean, however, that the tradition embodied in Matthew was formed at
Antioch.
6O VALIDITY OF THE GOSPEL RECORD
gious parade sins which were only 'too familiar ^in
Judaism but for which the Gentiles had hardly a name.
In like manner there is no hint of the controversies
which agitated the Gentile churches, or of the criti-
cisms against which they had to defend their faith. All
the horizons are those of a community confined to Pal-
estine. This is the more remarkable as the Gospels in
their present form were undoubtedly composed in the
Greek language for the Gentile church. It may be in-
ferred that the records from which they are made were
not only of Palestinian origin, but had been so long
and intimately connected with Palestine that their
character could not be altered.
The community, then, to which we owe the Gospels
was that which existed in Palestine in the generation
which followed the death of Jesus. This community
is only known to us from the scanty notices in the book
of Acts and a few incidental references in Paul's Epis-
tles. Our information would be more extensive if we
could take into account those passages in the Gospels
themselves which seem to bear on the later church; but
their evidence must be disregarded since our very ob-
ject is to discover whether it is really present. Gospel
criticism has too often reached its conclusions by a
method which is found, on examination, to be nothing
else than reasoning in a circle. The circumstances of
the church are deduced from the Gospel narrative, and
then it is shown, without much difficulty, that the nar-
rative conforms to those circumstances. It will be well
to confine ourselves, at least in the first instance, to the
TRADITION IN CHURCH WORSHIP 6l
positive knowledge, however meagre, which may be
gathered from independent testimony.
We know, then, that a community of Jesus' followers
was formed, after his death, at Jerusalem, and. grad-
ually threw out offshoots intb the surrounding coun-
try. We hear most of Christian activity in the larger
towns, particularly to the west of Jerusalem and along
the seaboard. Strangely enough Galilee falls out of
the picture, and it may be inferred that for some reason
the mission had failed to prosper in the region of its
origin. 4 Our record of the Galilsean ministry might
have been fuller if the church had established itself
s
more firmly in that part of the country where Jesus had
chiefly laboured. It is -doubtful, however, whether any
of the outlying communities contributed much to the
record. Unlike the Pauline churches, each of which had
a standing and character of its own, *hose in Palestine
were dominated by Jerusalem. The country was a
small one, and the mission as it spread could easily be
controlled from the centre. Jerusalem, moreover, had
a unique prestige as the holy city and the home of the
leading Apostles. All evangelising seems to have been
carried out under their direction, and by personal visits
from time to time they maintained their hold on the
daughter churches. When Paul contrasts his fatherly
attitude with the authority claimed as their due by
s
4 An interesting theory has lately been advanced by . Lohmeyer (Gal-
ilaa und Jerusalem) that a Christian community, disregarded in our New
Testament, grew up in Galilee, under the supervision of the Lord's own fam-
ily. The theory is highly conjectural; and against it there is the indubitable
fact that James, the Lord's brother, was head of the church at Jerusalem.
62 VALIDITY OF THE GOSPEL RECORD
other Apostles, we may catch a side-light on the condi-
tions which were accepted as normal in the Palestinian
mission. Jerusalem was everything, and the other com-
munities were made to feel that they had no initiative,
and no valid existence apart from the ruling church.
The Jewish emissaries, when they sought to win over
Paul's Gentile converts, relied on this primacy of Jeru-
salem. They took for granted that everywhere, as in
Palestine itself, the word of the mother church was
final. All this must be borne in mind when we con-
sider the formation of the Gospel record. It is often
assumed that each of the little communities in Palestine
had its own particular tradition, and that our Gospels
resulted from a blending of these diverse accounts.
Such a view can hardly be reconciled with the given sit-
uation. All the local churches on Jewish territory were
connected in the closest manner with each other, and
had been instructed by the same body of teachers. We
have to do, not with a number of traditions gathered
from different quarters, but with the one tradition which
had developed within the circle of Jerusalem.
It is therefore in this mother church that we must
seek the influences which went towards the moulding
of the record; and our data for the most part are of a
purely external nature. We hear of conflicts with the
Jewish authorities, of increases in numbers, of con-
tinued poverty, of changes in leadership. It is only in-
cidentally that any light is thrown on the activities of
the church and the character of its piety and beliefs.
We can gather, however, that it was made up of very
TRADITION IN CHURCH WORSHIP 63
diverse elements. Within a year or two of its founda-
tion the native and foreign-born members were sharply
divided, and at a later time Paul encountered much
difference of opinion when he sought a decision on, the
validity of his teaching. Under jthe leadership of James
the mother church appears to have steadily grown more
Jewish in its outlook, and finally to have parted com-
pany with Gentile Christianity. We can gather, too,
that it continued to hold firmly to apocalyptic beliefs,
and perhaps the poverty under which it always suffered
was due, in some measure, to the stubborn expectation
that the end was immediately at hand. It is sometimes
assumed that with its bias towards the Law and the Jew-
ish apocalyptic hopes, the church in Palestine was na-
tionalistic, and regarded Jesus as in some literal sense
the Messiah who would deliver Israel. Some passages
in the Gospels might seem to point to this attitude to
the Messiahship, and they have been singled out as
typical of the prevailing mood. It would indeed be nat-
ural that many of the Palestinian Christians would
cling to literal Messianic ideas long after the Gentile
church had discarded them; but the general sentiment
cannot have been a narrowly nationalistic one. We know
that the Christians in Jerusalem refused to participate in
the great revolt, and withdrew in a body to the region
beyond Jordan on the outbreak of the war. This action,
we may be sure, was consistent with the position they
had always taken. If they stood for a Christianity which
did not relinquish its hold on Judaism they still recog-
nised that Jesus had taught no mere political religion.
64 VALIDITY OF THE GOSPEL RECORD
Their hope was for a Kingdom of God such as Jesus
himself had proclaimed.
Occasional glimpses of this community are not want-
ing in aspects of its life which had little to do with exr
ternal or dogmatic interests. Meetings for prayer were
held in private houses, the sick and poor were diligently
cared for, the brethren associated daily at common meals,
they shared their possessions, they rejoiced to suffer for
Christ's cause. Luke, in the early chapters of Acts, may
have idealised the primitive conditions, but he cannot
have done so unless he had facts to build on. It was re-
membered in the later age, when most other things had
been forgotten, that the early church had been animated
by a fervid spirit of devotion and brotherly love. Men
and women, in their little house-gatherings, had waited
from day to day for the Lord's coming, and the King-
dom, which he was presently to bring in, was more real
to them than the actual world. This side of the church's
activity must never be forgotten when we try to realise
the conditions under which the Gospel record was pre-
served and transmitted.
One fact can hardly be emphasised too much that
their association in the church covered the whole life
of those early believers. This is apparent from the let-
ters of Paul, who takes for granted that all the interests
of 'his readers are controlled by their fellowship together
as Christians. On stated occasions they meet in small
groups or as a whole community for purposes of wor-
ship, but at all times they feel themselves united in
Christian living. Although they must needs have inter-
TRADITION IN CHURCH WORSHIP 65
course with the outer world they constitute, as far as
possible, a self-contained society, watching over each
other's needs, settling all differences among themselves,
marrying within their own circle, making ''brotherly
love" their chief moral aim. Thefcommon worship was -
only the religious expression of that unity in thought
and action which embraced the whole of their life.
This effort to include all interests in the Christian
society must have been even more pronounced in Pales-
tine than among the Gentiles. For the Jews, to an ex-
tent unknown in other nations, religion meant every-
thing; and no distinction was made between religious
and secular activities. Not only so, but in that first gen-
eration, when they were looking hourly for the return
of Christ, the believers had a single purpose in their
lives. Prayer and action and social duty, were all fused
together. It is the weakness of much recent enquiry that
everything is considered from the side of worship in its
purely Ceremonial sense. 5 Because the Gospels are re-
ligious books it is assumed that they grew out of re-
ligious practice and must be related in every detail to
the cult and doctrine of the church. But it must be re-
membered that religion for the primitive Christians
was life in its whole extent. Just as the law of Moses
was concerned not only with sacrifice and the Sabbath
but with marriage and property and agriculture and
all the business of living, so the Christian demand in-
. Dibelius (From Tradition to Gospel) assumes that the Christian cultus
was the main factor in the formulation of the record. A. F. Loisy (Les
mysteres -patens et le mystere chretien) would deduce everything from religious
ceremony.
66 VALIDITY OF THE GOSPEL RECORD
volved everything. The service offered to Christ within
his community meant the whole of life.
It is nevertheless true that the brotherhood found its
centre in the common meeting, in which the believers
were conscious of that fellowship with Christ which
bound them together. This meeting for worship was
the most powerful single factor in the moulding of
Christian ideas, institutions, and literature, and against
this background the history of the Gospel tradition has
to be understood. The practice of reading was confined,
in ancient times, to a small educated class. It was prob-
ably more widely diffused in Palestine than elsewhere,
since religion was inseparable from the study of a book,
and every synagogue had its school, in which children
were taught to read. Yet books were scarce and expen-
sive, and could not be the private possession of any but
the few. Knowledge had to be taken in by the ear, and
if Christians were to learn the record of Jesus they
needed to listen to it at the church meeting. The man-
ner in which it was there delivered would in great meas-
ure determine its character.
In our earliest glimpses of the disciples after Jesus'
death we find them gathered together for worship 5 and
the common meeting continued, and has done so to this
day, to be the outstanding fact in the new religion. Its
procedure was inevitably modelled on that of the syna-
goguethe only type of religious meeting with which
the brethren were acquainted. Praise was offered to
God in prayer and song. A passage was read from scrip-
ture, and was selected as bearing, in some manner, on
TRADITION IN CHURCH WORSHIP 6^
the nature and work of Christ. An address was given in
which the implications of the scripture passage were ex-
pounded. But while the synagogue service was fol-
lowed, new elements were introduced which had sprung
out of Christianity itself, and in Paul's Epistles we have
frequent reference to these distinctive Christian addi-
tions. Paul, to be sure, speaks of the service in Gentile
churches, which may have differed in some respects
from that followed in Palestine 5 but he indicates that
the practice of the mother church was normative for all
others. 6 This might have been inferred without any
express statement, for religious bodies are always con-
servative in their forms of worship. Paul tells us that
place was given in the service to the utterances of
"prophets," who spoke of the future and the unseen
world under the impulse of the Spirit. He tells us also
that in Christian worship the individual members were
given opportunity for self-expression. "When ye come
together, every one of you hath a psalm, hath a doc-
trine, hath a tongue, hath a revelation, hath an inter-
pretation" (I Cor. 14:26). Each member was expected
to contribute something of his own to the common wor-
ship. This aspect of the primitive service must never
be left out of account. It belonged to the very essence
of the new religion that it broke with the old concep-
tion of God as caring only for the tribe and city, or for
humanity in the mass. Men had access to him now as
individuals, and this must be acknowledged in the
forms of worship. The expression of a communal faith
. Gal. 1:7-95 I Cor. 11:16} Rom. 15:27.
68 VALIDITY OF THE GOSPEL RECORD
was combined with free utterance for the individual.
Paul, indeed, finds it necessary to warn his converts
against the abuse of this liberty. In a company where
each man was conscious of his own religious worth all
were anxious to assert themselves, and too often there
was no order or dignity in the service. These conditions
of license would be accentuated in a Greek community '
like that of Corinth, but they were inherent in the na-
ture of the early church.
The record, then, was handed down through the
meeting for common worship. We are not to conceive
of the makers of the Gospels as travelling over the
country and interviewing one person and another who
was known to have seen Jesus or to have learned some-
thing about him from private sources. All that was nec-
essary was to collect the accounts which were already
public property through their use in the church meet-
ing. At a later time the Gospels were themselves part
of scripture, and were read out as a matter of course by
way of lesson. In the early days the only Bible of the
church was the Old Testament. How was it that the
record of Jesus found a place in the service and thus
made itself familiar?
According to one modern theory it was preserved al-
most accidentally by means of the address which was
regularly given. 7 Some teacher spoke to the people on
7 M. Dibelius (From Tradition to Gospel, 25 f.) supports this view from ex-
amples, of Apostolic preaching in the book of Acts. He suggests that in these
brief reports the original stories have been cut down to bare allusions. It might
rather be inferred that a mere reference was sufficient, since the full narra-
tive was already known.
TRADITION IN CHURCH WORSHIP 69
the subject of Christian faith or duty, and would illus-
trate his thought by some word of Jesus, or the ac-
count of something that Jesus had done. These anec-
dotes would be remembered when the homily was for-
gotten, and would pass into general currency. Collec- /
tions of them would gradually be formed, and out of
this material the Gospels were eventually put together.
But it is not credible that the tradition came into being
in this casual fashion. We know that the Lord's say-
ings and example were authoritative for the church.
They are so regarded by Paul, whose attitude, we may
be sure, was that of all Christians. Is it conceivable
that memories of Jesus were not preserved for their
own sake, but only survived because they happened to
be used now and then by preachers as illustrations? A
theory so absurd on the very face of it ought never to
have found its way into serious criticism.
A more plausible conjecture is that which would con-
nect the tradition, at least in some of its elements, with
that exercise of spiritual gifts which was part of the
church service. 8 These gifts, as we know from Paul,
were largely practised in the Gentile churches, and espe-
cially in that of Corinth; but there can be little doubt
that they had a place in Christian worship from the ear-
liest days. Peter declares at Pentecost that with the
coming of the Spirit the words of Joelare fulfilled:
"Your sons and your daughters shall prophesy." We
hear of Agabus and the daughters of Philip, and of
prophets who went from Jerusalem to Antioch. "Proph^
&A great deal is made of this in Couchod, Le mystere de Jesus. For a full
reply) see M. Goguel, Jesus the Nazarene, 267 f. (EngwTrans.)*
V
7O VALIDITY OF THE GOSPEL RECORD
ets and teachers" are mentioned together in an eaily
notice which is certainly authentic (Acts 13:1). The
teacher, whenever he passed from the calm exposition
of truth and broke into glowing eloquence (as Paul does
in some of his great passages), became a prophet.
The question arises, then, whether the pmphetic_ele-
ment in Christian teaching may not have affected th&
Gospel tradition. It would happen sometimes that the
teacher, caught up in the prophetic rapture, would de-
clare that he saw Jesus perform some act or heard him
speaking. These visionary experiences would be under-
stood literally and would be incorporated into the rec-
ord of Jesus' actual life. A great deal, therefore, which
has come down to us as Gospel history, and perhaps
most of it, may have no other origin than the rhapsody
of prophets in the primitive church.
This view must not hastily be put aside, for it serves
to remind us of one fact which must never be over-
lookedthat the early church was enthusiastic. The
followers of Jesus were intensely convinced that he was
still living, and doing mighty works, and speaking to
his people. In this atmosphere of faith in the living
Lord the record of his earthly career was moulded 5 and
it is more than likely that in some degree the memo-
ries of Jesus have blended with that knowledge of him
which came through prophetic vision. A hint of this
kind may be conveyed in the story of the Transfigura-
tion, which is described by Luke as partly an actual
event and partly a dream-experience. Not infrequently,
perhaps, the disciples in later days were uncertain (as
TRADITION IN CHURCH WORSHIP 71
all of us sometimes are) whether the thing they seemed
to remember was a fact or a vision.
Yet this exercise of the spiritual gifts, though here
and there it may have had some influence on the rec-
ord, cannot have produced or even seriously modified
it. This is apparent, for one thing, from the intrinsic
character of the things recorded. Very few of them are
of the kind that would suggest themselves in prophetic
rapture. Nothing impresses us more in the life of Jesus,
as we know it from the Gospels, than his tranquillity
his perfect clarity of thought and judgment. He
breathes on the higher level as in his natural air. His
greatest sayings do not come from him, like the out-
bursts of Paul, in sudden gusts of inspiration. Nothing,
indeed, could be more alien to the. Sermon on the Mount
'
or the Parables than that ecstatic mood in which the
prophets declared their visions.
Apart from the character of the records themselves
we have good evidence that the memories of Jesus were
not confused with the spiritual intimations. Although
prophets and teachers are often mentioned together,
the difference between them was recognised, and there
would be no one in the primitive church who could not
tell at once when the one function gave way to the
other. If prophetic visions were accepted into the record,
this would be done consciously and deliberately. Paul
was himself a visionary, and believed that his spiritual
knowledge of Christ was fully valid 5 yet he draws a
clear distinction between that which has come to him
from the Spirit and that which he has received. When
72 VALIDITY OF THE GOSPEL RECORD
he quotes a definite saying of Jesus he is careful to put
in "not I but the Lord." When he can adduce no sucfi
saying he frankly admits that he has no clear word to
guide him (I Cor. 7:10, 12). We need not doubt that
the primitive teachers would likewise separate the knowl-
edge given them by the Spirit from the actual tradition.
This, indeed, was possibly the very reason why the
record was set apart and transmitted. If we can now see
the danger that vision might be confused with facts, this
would be still more apparent to the early believers.
They were accustomed at every meeting to hear prophets
speaking in the name of Jesus and knew how easily these
deliverances might be taken for his genuine words. No
restraint must be placed on the work of the Spirit, but
there must be no intrusion of the spiritual revelation in-
to the facts. There was certainly no Christian teacher
who was more spiritually gifted than Paul, or who set
a higher value on what he learned through the Spirit.
He believed that his own knowledge of Christ, though
it had come to him by vision, was no less valid than that
of the immediate disciples. Yet he falls back on their
evidence for the primary facts that Christ had lived
with men, that he had died on the Cross, that he had
risen from the dead. Apart from those historical facts
there was no gospel 5 and they could only be established
on the evidence of the original witnesses. Visions and
revelations could afford no ultimate ground for faith.
This was the position of Paul, and it was shared, we may
be sure, by the whole early church. A line was drawn
from the first between the interpretations given by the
TRADITION IN CHURCH WORSHIP 73
Spirit and the fundamental facts the tradition which
had been "received from the Lord Jesus."
We must therefore look to another part of the church
service as the medium through which the acts of Jesus
were made known to the early worshippers.- In the
Christian assembly, as in the synagogue, a passage was
read from scripture 5 and there isjreason to believe that
this reading was followed by some utterance of Jesus,
or by some episode from his life, which served to illumi-
nate or supplement the scriptural passage. One of the
characteristics of our Gospels, and especially of the Gos-
pel of Matthew, is the conjunction of an act of Jesus
with a text of scripture which it is described as fulfilling.
It may be conjectured that this practice ^goes back to
that which had always been observed, with the difference
that while Matthew quotes the relevant scripture at the
close of an incident it would come at the beginning in the
church service. A passage was selected from the Psalms
or the Prophets in which the coming of the Messiah ap-
peared to be foretold. This would be followed by the ^'
recounting of something in the life of Jesus which gave
fulfilment to the prophecy and thus proved that he
was indeed the Messiah. In his account of Jesus' own
address in the synagogue at Nazareth, Luke may have
in mind this custom which all his readers would recog- j
nise. He tells how Jesus read a passage from Isaiah, I
and then laid aside the roll and proceeded, "This dayj
you see this Scripture fulfilled" (Lk. 4: 20, 21). In like \
manner the Christian teacher would follow up his read-
74 VALIDITY OF THE GOSPEL RECORD
ing with the account of how the scripture forecast had
been realised in some event of the life of Jesus. Per-
haps he would add his own comment on the story he
told, and point its bearing on Christian duty or doc-
trine. But the record of what the Lord had done would
stand by itself, as the essential part of the instruction
conveyed.
The handing down of the tradition would thus have
its stated place in the church service 5 but we must also
bear in mind the part which was taken, according to
Paul's testimony, by individual worshippers. Each mem-
ber was expected to make some contribution of his own
(I Cor. 14:26)5 and in the early days there would
usually be some one present who had listened to Jesus.
Even at a later date there would be those who had heard
reports of him from immediate witnesses. No "psalm
or tongue or interpretation" would be so welcome as
some new anecdote of Jesus, or some saying of his which
was not yet generally known. Many of those memories
would be doubtful, or perhaps trivial and pointless.
Others would be valuable, but would seem to have little
relevance to the needs of the church, and would fall out
of sight. Now and then there would be some new remi-
niscence which would take its place at once in the perma-
nent record.
In all these ways we can see how a set tradition would
form itself through the agency of the church meeting.
We can see, too, how the message and the tradition went
hand in hand. The chief purpose of the meeting was to
enforce the Christian message and apply it to the life
TRADITION IN CHURCH WORSHIP 75
and needs of the community} but the message was one
with the history. It could not be apprehended and ex-
plained except through the constant repetition of those
deeds and words of Jesus in which the will of God had
been revealed.
We have now to ask ourselves how this transmission
of the record through the church meeting would affect
its^nature_and validity. Several conclusions at once sug-
gest themselves.
(i) It is apparent, in the first place, that a method
was provided by which the tradition could be preserved,
even though it was not yet committed to writing. If it
had remained in the keeping of private persons, its for-
tune would have been highly precarious. Every one
knows how the memory even of one's own actions and
experiences gradually becomes uncertain. When it is
passed on to another it becomes distorted, and at the
third remove can hardly be recognised. Doubts as to the
historical character of the Gospels are chiefly based on
the assumption that they are made up of private remi-
niscences j and if this were their origin we should have
good reason to question hem. Even Peter in his later
days would only have blurred impressions of things he
had himself witnessed, and when Peter's story was re-
called by some one else, years afterwards, very little of
it would be left. But we are to conceive of the church's
record as in some sense officially preserved. It belonged
to the public worship and was treasured as a common
possession. Changes might creep into it, as into hymns
and liturgies which are subject to constant repetition}
76 VALIDITY OF THE GOSPEL RECORD
but in the main the frequency with which it was recited
would make for stability. Peter, recalling after twenty
years an incident in which he had himself borne a part,
would be a less trustworthy witness than a church com-
munity in which the incident had been continually re-
told.
(2) Again, the use of the record in the public meet-
ing would ensure accuracy. It is often assumed that a tra-
dition which was common property would soon lose all
definite outline, like a book of reference which is han-
dled by so many people that before long it falls to
pieces. An analogy of this kind seems to be in the minds
of those critics who hold that since the record was trans-
mitted through the community we must allow for a
wear and tear which battered it out of all shape. But
it is evident, on a little reflection, that the parallel is
misleading. A tradition adopted by the community
would be safe-guarded, as it could not have been if it
had been handed down through a chain of individuals,
however conscientious. When you tell a story to a sin-
gle auditor you can make free to modify it. Each time
you tell it you may omit or add, and in this new shape
the story will be accepted. But if you repeat it in a com-
pany of people, some of whom have heard it previously,
you need to be careful. If you deviate at any point from
the known version there is sure to be some one who will
put you right. Nothing is more remarkable than the
fixity of those popular tales which, in all countries, have
come down by word of mouth for centuries together.
They have remained the same, even in the smallest de-
TRADITION IN CHURCH WORSHIP 77
tails, for the simple reason that they were known to
everybody and no one was at liberty to change them.
Of this we have a conspicuous instance in the Greek
tragedies, which drew their subjects from the old leg-
ends. The poet had no choice but to bring in the famil-
iar characters and incidents, for the whole audience knew
the tale and insisted that it should be told in the ex-
pected way. An interesting modern instance has been
brought to light by the explorer Stefansson. He tells
that among the stories constantly repeated in one of the
Esquimaux tribes is that of Sir John Franklin's expe-
dition. It has come down by word of mouth from
Franklin's native guides, and is told at great length,
with much circumstantial detail 5 and at every point
where it can be checked it is true to fact. The Gospel
narratives, told and re-told in the church meeting,
would be protected in the same manner. By frequent
handling on the part of numbers of people they would
not be worn down or defaced. On the contrary, each
member of the community could be relied on to pre-
serve, in its integrity, the communal possession.
(3) Again, their use in the common meeting would
determine the selection of the records. It would very
soon be discovered that some episodes in the life of
Jesus had a more general appeal than others, and that
some of the sayings impressed themselves with peculiar
power. There would be problems, too, which were al-
ways recurring in the life of the church, and which
called for repeated citation of particular parts of the
teaching. It is significant, for instance, that so large a
78 VALIDITY OF THE GOSPEL RECORD
place is given in our Gospels to the question of divorce,
to the settlement o quarrels, to the treatment of false
and unworthy brethren. The church would constantly
be required to give its judgment in such matters, and
on each occasion would remind itself of the demands of
Jesus. There is no reason to assume that since passages
in the Gospels are apposite to given situations in the
early church they must have been devised for that end.
They can be sufficiently explained by a process of natu-
ral selection. In its perplexities the church fell back (as
it has always been doing since) on those directions of
Jesus which appeared most applicable to the matter in
hand. It must be noted, moreover, that x the directions
for the most part are general in their nature. If the
church was inventing it would have taken care to put
into the mouth of Jesus something that bore definitely
on the particular case. It contents itself, however, with
his statement of broad principles which are capable of
a thousand applications. Limited, apparently, to actual
sayings of Jesus, it took from them what came nearest
to its purpose.
(4) Since they were connected with the worship of
the church, the records must have answered some re-
ligious need. The object of the service was to confirm
the faith of believers, and the life of Jesus was recalled,
not so much for its intrinsic beauty and interest, as be-
cause it gave meaning to the message of salvation. It
was apparent from the actions of Jesus that he was in-
deed Messiah, that he was endowed with divine power,
that he was filled with compassion for men, and brought
TRADITION IN CHURCH WORSHIP 79
healing and forgiveness. As we listen to them still in
Christian worship the Gospels convey a present mes-
sagesuggesting to us from all that he did in his life-
time that Jesus is still the Friend and Master and Sav-
iour. They had a like significance to the early disciples,
who were confident that he had risen from the dead
and was still near to them. From the story of his life
they sought the assurance that in all danger and trouble
they could look for his help. This devotional interest
pervades our Gospels, and explains in large measure
why they have taken their present form. Everything
included in them was meant, in some way, to serve the
needs of a worshipping community. Here again it must
be borne in mind that for the early church everything
fell within the sphere of religion. A great part of the
teaching is to our minds of a purely ethical nature, and
many people in their study of the Synoptic Gospels are
conscious of a certain disappointment, since they find so
little of that element which is usually called "spiritual."
But to the early church, for which Christianity in all its
requirements was the new way of life, there was noth-
ing in /the Gospels which was not religion. What men
ultimately sought, as they listened to these records, was
fellowship with God.
(5) In the effort to adapt the tradition to use in the
public meeting, a certain form would need to be im-
posed on it. At the outset it was probably conveyed in
ordinary conversational language, but it could not be
recited again and again before a worshipping assembly
unless it was invested with a proper dignity. All the
8O VALIDITY OF THE GOSPEL RECORD
more if the account of Jesus was conjoined with the
scripture reading, it would acquire a form which was
not too glaringly in contrast with that of the passage
read. The question of form in the Gospel record has of
late years assumed great importance, and will call for
special consideration in a subsequent chapter. At pres-
ent it is enough to note that the association of the record
with the church meeting must, in some degree, have
affected the form in which it was presented. Worship,
by its very nature, demands a certain elevation above
the ordinary modes of speech and action. Not only
prayer and praise but everything that concerns the ap-
proach to God tends to take on a liturgical character.
The church service, then, was a determining factor in
the moulding of the tradition. This does not imply that
Christians revived their memories of Jesus only at the
weekly meeting, so that nothing survived except the
communal records. In the earliest years the doings of
Jesus must have formed the constant subject of discus-
sion among his followers. The story of the travellers to
Emmaus, recalling their memories as they went on
their journey, is doubtless taken from life. From the
outset, too, instruction was one of the chief functions
in the church's activity. Luke tells that the brethren at
Jerusalem "attended continually to the Apostles' teach-
ing," and this would include as its chief element the
witness to Jesus. At a later time a course of instruction
in Christian principles was the stated preparation for
baptism, and it was so obviously necessary that it must
have been offered from the first. Apollos was full of
TRADITION IN CHURCH WORSHIP 8l
Christian zeal, but before he proceeded to baptism he
was taken in charge by Aquila and Priscilla, "who ex-
pounded unto him the way of God more perfectly"
(Acts 18:26). For that part, Luke presents his Gospel
to Theophilus as a more adequate record of "the things
in which thou wast instructed." This intelligent convert
had already passed through the ordinary course of
teaching, but was eager to have some fuller and more
accurate knowledge. Luke, it will be observed, takes
for granted that the instruction given to Theophilus had
been on the subject of Jesus' life. So in many ways the
record was passed on, and the meeting was only one of
the agencies for its transmission 5 but it was the most im-
portant one. It acted also as a crucible for all the infor-
mation that was received from other sources. The facts
which were brought before the assembly would be those
which had proved their value 5 and when a place was
given them in the church's worship their preservation
was ensured. It was these parts of the tradition which
eventually were written down and incorporated in our
Gospels. Matthew <md Luke have probably included
a good deal more. Luke expressly claims to have taken
account of "all things" not merely the matters which
were common knowledge but others which he had
learned from private sources. It is possible that these
additions to his material are sometimes valuable, but for
the most part they bear obvious marks of rumour and
legend. They represent elements in the history which
had never been stabilised by use in the church meeting.
We have to do, then, with a tradition which was
82 VALIDITY OF THE GOSPEL RECORD
formed within the community, in connection with its
worship. This must be borne in mind, for it is often as-
sumed that the Gospels were intended for propaganda.
Their testimony has been challenged on this very
ground, that they were written for an outside public and
would naturally present the life of Jesus in the most
favourable light, and would include all kinds of doubt-
ful material so long as it had apologetic value. For a
certain type of critic the Gospels are nothing but pam-
phlets written in a church interest for readers who had
no means of testing them. Jesus is known to us only
through his own advocates, and the truth might appear
quite different if we could hear the other side.
Now it may be granted that the men to whom we
owe our records believed in Jesus, but they were not
addressing the world at large. Nothing was further
from their minds than to conduct a propaganda. They
spoke to their fellow-Christians, who stood in need of
no persuasion. When Mark asserts that Jesus was the
Messiah, the Son of God, and supports this belief by
instance of his marvellous works, his object is not to
prove the Messiahship to those who have called it in
question. The evangelist takes for granted that his
readers, like himself, have all accepted Jesus as the
Messiah, and seeks only to confirm them in their faith
and make clearer to them its significance. This was the
purpose of those Christian meetings in which the Gos-
pel records were handed down. The believers in their
common worship were not concerned with the doubt and
opposition of the outside world. They met together
TRADITION IN CHURCH WORSHIP 83
in order to quicken their own faith, and to deepen their
sense of brotherhood by loyalty to Jesus, the one Lord.
It is argued, however, that much in the Gospels is
plainly controversial. 9 Jesus is described as debating
with scribes and Pharisees. Again and again he criticises
the Jewish beliefs and customs in terms which may well
have a contemporary reference. In the person of its
Master the church itself is replying to hostile Rabbis
in the Palestine of a later day. But there is no good
reason to doubt that these passages of controversy are
historical, and are brought into the narrative because
it could not be understood without them. Jesus had
aroused an opposition so bitter that it could only be sat-
isfied with his death 5 how had he brought on himself
this hostility? This was the first question that would be
asked by those who heard the story of the Passion, and
it could only be answered by some account of the
conflict with the religious leaders. To this may be
added that Jesus' own teaching was not fully intelligible
unless it was contrasted with that which had opposed it.
The controversial sections, so far from being later in-
trusions into the record, are the necessary key to its
meaning. It may be doubted, also, whether the debates
recorded in the Gospels have any aptness to the later
circumstances of the church. Christianity in Palestine
continued to hold fast to the Law, and was not exposed
to attacks from the side of Pharisaism. The wonder is
that the church which tried to thwart Paul's mission be-
cause he broke with the Law yet preserved those say-
&The fullest and ablest treatment of the controversial elements in the Gos-
pels will be found in M. Albertz, Die Synopitschen Streitgesprache.
84 VALIDITY OF THE GOSPEL RECORD
ings of Jesus in which the legal system is implicitly con-
demned. In several places there is an obvious attempt
to qualify them as in the distinction between the pre-
cepts of the Pharisees and their practice (Mt. 23:2),
and in the assertion that the Law, in every jot and
tittle, must stand for ever. It is not in Jesus' criticism
of the Pharisees but in such efforts to soften it that we
may detect the hand of the later church.
If there is a contemporary debate in the Gospels it
must be sought in references to opinions and practices
on which the church itself was divided. In Matthew,
for instance, there is a whole series of passages in which
the message is addressed to the Jews, while in others it
is declared to be universal. A similar cleavage is appar-
ent in Luke, where the first two chapters with their
pronounced nationalism are in strange contrast with the
large humanity of the book as a whole. In all the Gos-
pels diverging views on special questions can be dis-
tinguished y for instance, on the nature and mission of
the Messiah, on the date and circumstances of the Pa-
rousia, on the legitimacy of divorce. A vital and many-
sided message like that of Jesus lent itself from the first
to a variety of interpretation, and we have to allow for
the reflection in our record of the opinions of different
teachers. To this extent the Gospels betray the influence
of later controversy, but it was controversy within the
church. There is no evidence that anything was altered
for the sake of propaganda, or under external pressure.
The tradition was framed by the church, in the interest
of the church itself.
CHAPTER IV
THE TRADITION AND THE COMMUNITY
THE instinct of a community has always been con-
servative. A number of persons are devoted to some
principle or idea and are anxious to secure its perma-
nence. Since their individual lives are brief and uncer-
tain, they unite themselves together. It is often com-
plained that societies of all kinds are slow to move, and
foster a conventional type of thought and behaviour.
This, however, is the very reason why they exist. They
are formed in brder to give stability to an interest which
is worth preserving, and in so far as it changes they
have failed in their purpose.
According to a wide-spread modern theory the primi-
tive church was different in this respect from all other
associations which we know. 1 Instead of preserving the
message which it took over from Jesus, it deliberately
transformed the message within a single generation.
He had announced the Kingdom of God and declared
himself Messiah 5 and a community had come into being
for the maintenance of his work. But although it called
itself by his name, it began, almost at once, to revise
his aims and teaching. It adapted his precepts to its
own changing requirements, and supplemented them
1 W. Bousset's Kyrios Christos is still the ablest and most elaborate state-
ment of this position.
85
86 VALIDITY OF THE GOSPEL RECORD
with new ones from time to time. As a result of this
communal action the tradition was radically modified.
What has come to us as the record of Jesus is nothing,
for the most part, but the history of the primitive
church, reflected in a mirror.
Now it is true that the Christian community, in its
earliest phase, was not an organisation. It did not be-
gin in any official manner with the drawing up of a con-
stitution and by-laws, ensuring that it should always
preserve its original character. For a long time it had
no fixed order and allowed itself to be guided in all its
action by the operation of the Spirit. None the less it
realised from the first that it was a Society. The very
name by which its members called themselves was "the
brethren," and one of the chief objects which they set
before them was to strengthen in every possible way the
feeling of brotherhood. If this unanimity was to be at-
tained the first thing necessary was to make sure of the
common basis. The new society existed in order to bear
witness to Jesus, and there needed to be a clear concep-
tion of what he had been, and what he had done and
taught. Paul acknowledges this when he indignantly
denies that he was preaching "another gospel" (Gal.
1:9). He was well aware that any attempt to change
the settled tradition would destroy the church. This
had become the more apparent in view of the great in-
flux of new converts who had no direct knowledge of
Jesus. Their presence, it is often assumed, must have
made it impossible for the church to maintain its tra-
dition j but an inference of this kind is unfounded. With
TRADITION AND THE COMMUNITY 87
so many alien influences at work it would become im-
perative to have the fundamental facts of the message
clearly understood and defined. If the church was not
to be swept away it must anchor itself more firmly than
ever to its first principles. The change in the compo-
sition of the church did not involve a change in its teach-
ing. On the contrary, it provided the strongest motive
for ensuring a firm basis.
There were special causes at work which made it
easier than it might otherwise have been to guard
against innovation. ( i ) For one thing, the primitive
church was Jewish, and a reverence for tradition was
ingrained in all who had undergone the Jewish disci-
pline. The Law was a sacred possession, which was pre-
served with scrupulous care. Words of eminent Rabbis
were handed down for generations, and were made nor-
mative for all subsequent teaching. To their new tra-
dition the followers of Jesus would transfer that atti-
tude of mind with which they had regarded the old.
Here was something which must be treasured and re-
vered, and passed on, in its authentic form, to the age
that followed. (2) Again, the church was confined with-
in a narrow area, and its members were all living un-
der the same conditions. At a later time the various
communities were widely scattered, and had to consult
the needs of diverse races. Adaptations and changes
were necessary if the mission was to make progress, al-
though in spite of new conditions the distinctive cus-
toms and beliefs were in a wonderful degree main-
tained. But in Palestine itself there seem to have been
VALIDITY OF THE GOSPEL RECORD
few innovations, either in teaching or practice. Much
has been said about the changes which must have been
made in the tradition under pressure of changing cir-
cumstances. But there is no ground for supposing that
the circumstances were appreciably altered. Right on
to the eve of the great revolt life went on in Palestine
much as it had done in the life-time of Jesus. No doubt
some adptations of his teaching would be necessary, as
they always are when broad principles are applied in
the concrete 5 but there was no such change in outward
conditions as would make any of the precepts out of
date. (3) Again, in the Palestinian church no original
teacher appeared whose ideas could in any way over-
shadow those of Jesus. In the Gentile church the
thought of Jesus was interpreted by Paul, and after-
wards by the Fourth Evangelist, with the result that
Christianity developed in new directions. There was no
influence in Palestine which was at all comparable with
that of Paul or John. From all that we can learn of
them the leaders of the mother-church were able men,
but had no marked intellectual gifts. They had nothing
to contribute which could be accepted even for a mo-
ment as an advance on Jesus' own teaching. So far from
endeavouring to guide the church into new paths they
were anxious to guard against that danger, as we can
plainly see from their attitude to Paul. During its
whole history the church in Palestine remained the
stronghold of all the most conservative forces in the
new religion, and we cannot believe that in the
early days it made itself responsible for vital changes.
TRADITION AND THE COMMUNITY 89
(4) Once more, it must never be forgotten that in the
primitive church the return of Christ was expected al-
most immediately. All Christian thought and activity
took colour from this hope, which by its nature placed an
arrest on progress. If the end was to come at once there
could be no object in changing anything. Paul himself,
believing that the great crisis was just at hand, laid
down the principle, "Let every man, in whatever posi-
tion he is, therein abide with God" (I Cor. 7:24). This
was certainly the mood of the church in Palestine. Its
members were those who waited for the Lord's coming,
and who were content, in the brief interval left to them,
to remain as they were. They were in no mind to adapt
the message as they had received it to the possible re-
quirements of a future which would never come. All
their desire was simply to hold fast to what they had.
There is every presumption, therefore, that the com-
munity in Palestine would preserve the Gospel tra-
dition with little change. The attempt to make out that
it was lost or perverted through the action of this com-
munity is on the face of it a hopeless one. It may in-
deed be granted that in all tradition, however faithfully
guarded, allowance must be made for disturbing f actors j
and_some of these are quite apparent when we examine
our records of Jesus. For the early church he was the
Messiah, and under the influence of this belief all his
actions and the things that happened to him took on a
peculiar significance. He was also "the Lord" whom
his people were sworn to obey; and from this it fol-
lowed that the thought of him was intimately bound up
9O VALIDITY OF THE GOSPEL RECORD
with the life of the brotherhood. All Christian beha-
viour was modelled on his example. All decisions were
made in accordance with his precepts. In every act of
worship he was believed to be present, mediating be-
tween his servants and God. It is not surprising that
the record of him came to bear the impress of the com-
munity, as a garment adapts itself to the body on which
it is constantly worn. But these factors, which have
given a certain bias to the tradition, cannot be said to
have perverted it. Through the Messianic idea the
church was enabled to see Jesus in the light that was
necessary for understanding him. There was something
in him which made men conscious that he had come
from God and was doing an inestimable work for man-
kind. That, as his followers realised in his life-time,
was the supreme fact about him 5 and the church defined
it by the Messianic idea, which was surely as appropri-
ate as any other. Neither was the record perverted be-
cause it was interpreted through the experience of the
believers. They were striving to model themselves on
Jesus and to carry his demands into practice, and in this
effort they could not fail to see him more truly, as one
learns to understand a picture when trying to copy it.
If the language attributed to Jesus is sometimes differ-
ent from what he himself could have used, it expresses
the thought in his mind. Sometimes a saying has come
down to us in several versions, and from this it has been
inferred that the words of Jesus were adapted from time
to time to new situations, and cannot now be recovered in
their original form. In a literal sense this may be true 5
TRADITION AND THE COMMUNITY 9!
but those very differences in the tradition are proof of the
fidelity with which the church preserved it. However
it may be adapted, the saying is manifestly the same.
While changing the language in order to bring out some
special aspect of Jesus' meaning, the church was careful
to transmit his essential thought.
It is not probable that a tradition once established in
the Palestinian church would be greatly altered. The
church was conservative in temper, and in its communal
capacity would act as a bulwark against any wilful per-
version of the record. By itself, however, this is no
proof that the Gospels contain a true report of the life
of Jesus. At most it can only be maintained that cer-
tain primitive beliefs were taken over by a society which
was anxious to preserve them, and to hand them down
in an approved form. The crucial question still remains,
"How did those beliefs originate? Can we have any
assurance that they correspond with a reality?" No com-
petent scholar would now hold that they were a con-
scious fabrication} but there is always the possibility that
they grew, pretty much of their own accord, out of ma-
terials furnished by current Judaism. Such a view might
seem to be supported by the many parallels to our Gos-
pels ^which can be found in the later Jewish literature.
The parallels are often far-fetched 5 but it is undeniable
that for almost every Gospel saying and incident there
is some analogy in Jewish writings which still survive,
and these can be only a fraction of what is lost. Is it not
conceivable that out of this great mass of Jewish wis-
dom and legend some body of teachers selected the
92 VALIDITY OF THE GOSPEL RECORD
more valuable elements, and formed them into a new
tradition, attached to the name of Jesus? The sect which
adopted this tradition may have guarded it faithfully,
but this does not make history out of a structure which,
from the outset, was artificial. A theory of this kind has
frequently been put forward with various modifica-
tions, 2 but it does not carry us far. That some Rabbini-
cal sayings have been attributed to Jesus is not unlikely,
and he himself may have made use occasionally of the
maxims of previous teachers. When a thought had al-
ready been expressed as well as it needed to be, he saw
no object in saying it differently. But to explain the
whole of Jesus' teaching as a tissue of Rabbinical max-
ims, carefully selected and interwoven, is to evade the
real problem. For one thing, the sifting out of those
yjtal elements from the vast accumulation of Jewish
legalism would have been a task of infinite labour, and
would have called for a spiritual discernment hardly
inferior to that which produced them. Moreover, when
we compare the sayings of Jesus with their Jewish paral-
lels we find invariably that something is added which
makes all the difference. Even when they seem to be
identical, they are brought into a new context they are
subordinated to a new conception of God and of man's
relation to him. It is in this new factor that Christian-
ity consists. We cannot but feel that a creative power
has been at work, putting the breath of life into every-
thing that has been borrowed. The play of Macbeth is
. the discussions in Vol. I of F. J. Foakes Jackson and K. Lake, The
Beginnings of Christianity.
TRADITION AND THE COMMUNITY 93
not explained when we have discovered in a forgotten
chronicle the materials which went to the making of it.
Something has been taken from what existed already,
but just as evidently something has been given 5 and
the real question has not even been touched until we
consider what it was. This is no less true of our Gospels.
It must be admitted, therefore, that every theory of
the tradition as devised, in some manner, by the primi-
tive church, is beset with difficulties. The most natural
assumption will always be that Jesus lived the life and
spoke the words ascribed to him, and that the part of
the church was that of transmitting an authentic record.
This, however, is only a negative conclusion, forced on
us by the improbability of any other view. Are there
any positive grounds for believing that the tradition
is authentic? Does it contain within itself the convinc-
ing evidence that it was not made by the church, but
goes back to historical facts? This must always be the
ultimate problem of Gospel criticism.
It is a problem to which no definite solution is pos-
sible. All historical facts must be accepted on testimony,
and there is no testimony which may not be questioned.
An able advocate can make out, in the face of a dozen
good witnesses, that the events on which judgment must
be passed did not happen. With the Gospel narratives
we have the further difficulty that they stand alone, and
cannot be compared with other testimonies by which
their truth might in some measure be established. The
nearest approach to such independent witness is to be
94 VALIDITY OF THE GOSPEL RECORD
found in the references of Paul, which are, indeed, of
inestimable value. They prove to us, on the word of a
contemporary, that Jesus lived, and had won such de-
votion from his followers that they regarded him as
Messiah. They tell us of certain facts which had come
to Paul's knowledge from companions of Jesus whom
he had personally known. Paul, however, was con-
cerned with the message rather than with the life. He
had resolved to know nothing of Christ after the flesh,
and only touches incidentally on the history. In any
case it may be argued that Paul was himself a child of
the primitive church. His Epistles come to us from a
time when the primary Gospel literature was taking
shape, and are open to the same suspicions. There is no
first-hand evidence by which we can test our records}
and if there were it would probably help us little, for
the question of credibility would only face us again in
some new form. Those who demand that our accounts
of Jesus should be linked directly with indubitable fact
are asking for the impossible. We reach a point here,
as in all historical evidence, when we must rest every-
thing on some one's bare word.
Yet there are solid grounds for the conviction that
what the church preserved was the record of an actual
history. For one thing, as has been pointed out already,
the church itself has to be explained. It is easy to say
that the Gospels were produced by the Christian com-
munity 5 but what was the community? It consisted of
men and women who acknowledged Jesus to be the
Messiah, and from this it is certain that Jesus had ex-
TRADITION AND THE COMMUNITY 95
isted, and had acted in such a manner as to awaken faith
and devotion. The very fact of the church involves the
reality of the life just as a building which rests ap-
parently on a sheet of water is proof that it has a rock
beneath it. In like manner, the church's message needs
to be accounted for. There can be no question that the
church proclaimed a message which was carried to all
nations, and it is contended that this message gave birth
to a tradition. But how had the message itself origi-
nated? It cannot have developed out of Judaism, for
at all essential points it broke away from the religion
of the Law. Faith took the place of legal observance.
Righteousness was identified with the new will. The
promise made to Israel was extended to all races of men.
The Messianic hope was associated with the Cross. In
this new religion the pious Jew could see nothing but
a betrayal of all that was most sacred in his beliefs, and
his attitude to it was that of Paul the persecutor. How
could a message so abhorrent to all Jewish sentiment
have emerged from Judaism? It can only have done
so because something had happened which had revolu-
tionised the old conceptions. When a mountain is rent
by a deep chasm, we know that at some time there has
been _an earthquake. When Judaism is found in one
particular age to change into something different, there
can be no talk of development. A convulsion has taken
place, due to some quite specific cause 5 and the only
cause which can be deemed at all adequate is of the kind
known to us through the Gospel history.
This conclusion is now accepted, in however grudg-
96 VALIDITY OF THE GOSPEL RECORD
ing a fashion, by all serious students of Christian origins.
Even those who cannot believe in the history are driven
to postulate something which took the place of it. They
assume that Jewish religion had come in contact with
some other 5 that certain elements in it which had hith-
erto lain separate had suddenly fused together 5 that a
forgotten myth or speculation had forced its way up-
ward from subterranean depths. Behind this message
which came to light in the first century and produced
the Christian church, there must have been some ex-
traordinary event in man's outward or spiritual life: that
is now admitted by all. And the one event which will
explain everything is the emergence of a great per-
sonality, such as is described in our Gospels. The church
and the message both arose out of that historical life
which had preceded them. This is the conclusion which
cannot be avoided, and there are several considerations
which appear to make it certain.
(i) We cannot but perceive, for one thing, that the
record does not properly answer its purpose. It was
meant to confirm the church in its belief that Jesus was
the Messiah, who had fulfilled the hope of Israel and
had brought life and salvation to the world. But if the
church had itself devised a mythical history to suit its
purpose, it performed its work with a singular lack of
skill. It was free, according to the hypothesis, to put
anything it pleased into the life of Jesus, and so con-
struct the sort of history it needed. What it has given
us is the story of a teacher who had worked obscurely
in a remote province, who had roused against him pow-
TRADITION AND THE COMMUNITY 97
erful enemies and was compelled in the end to yield to
them, who was accepted by men as one of themselves
and who did little, to all outward seeming, that was not
within the range of normal human life. Here and there,
to be sure, we meet with a surprising miracle, or with
an incident like the Transfiguration 5 but these episodes
at once strike us as doubtful. They are out of keeping
with the prevailing tone of the narrative, and we feel
justified in supposing that whatever core of fact may be
in them has been elaborated and overlaid by the later
reflection of the church. If the history had been made
to order, for the confirmation of Christian belief, every-
thing would have been of this character. As it is, the
most uncritical reader is at once aware when myth or
doctrine has encroached on the history. It cannot be
said that the Gospel writers have been wholly success-
ful even in their effort to prove the Messiahship of
Jesus. Mark has plainly made it his object to adduce
evidence for this belief, and on this ground it has been
argued that his work cannot be regarded as historical.
The author must be either inventing his facts or modi-
fying them in the interest of a doctrine. But to this it
may be answered that if his one purpose is theological
he has woefully failed in it. The facts which he brings
forward do not prove, except to those who are convinced
already, that Jesus was "the Messiah, the Son of God."
Those acts of power, of which so much is made, might
have been done by any wonder-worker, or might be ac-
counted for by natural causes. Those prophecies which
Jesus is said to have fulfilled have little real bearing
98 VALIDITY OF THE GOSPEL RECORD
on the incidents with which they are connected. It is
admitted by Mark himself that the Pharisees were dis-
satisfied with the "signs" which Jesus offered, and asked
him for a clear and decisive one, which he refused. The
church was much more anxious than the Pharisees for
an unanswerable sign, and a fictitious narrative could
have supplied it without difficulty^ but Mark is obvi-
ously limited to the given facts, and has to make the
best of them. In like manner the account of the Last
Supper does not express the sacramental ideas which
the church would fain have read into it} the parable of
the sower does not apply to the later mission, as Mark
has tried to make it. All the evangelists are constantly
seeking, as he does, to fit the later ideas into the history,
but their effort is rarely successful. The record and the
doctrine, as soon as we look even a little way beneath
the surface, are incompatible. This, perhaps, was one
reason why Paul made so little of the Gospel tradition.
That he was well acquainted with it cannot be doubted,
but he was conscious that it did not bear out his theol-
ogy 5 and the teaching of Paul was not essentially dif-
ferent from that of the Palestinian church. 8
The evangelists, then, have failed to disguise the
cleavage between the tradition and the later beliefs, and
of this there can only be one explanation. A record had
come down in the church which was known to contain
the authentic memories of Jesus' life. With this record
no liberties could be taken beyond a certain point. It
3 C/. Gal. 1:6-8. It It significant that while Paul takes issue with the
mother-church on the question of the Law, he assumes that its doctrinal posi-
tion is fully in harmony with his own.
TRADITION AND THE COMMUNITY 99
was not fully consistent with the doctrines and practices
which were now based on itj but as the historical record
it had to be allowed to stand. The church made what
it could of the facts, and strained all probabilities to
suit them to its purpose, but it could do no more. Be-
hind the accepted beliefs there was a body of historical
fact out of which they had grown, but with which they
could not be fully reconciled. This is perhaps our
strongest proof that the tradition is rooted in an au-
thentic history.
(2) Again, the record is composed, for the most part,
of isolated incidents and sayings. The material had
evidently come down in this fragmentary condition,
and the chief aim of the evangelists is to combine it in
an ordered whole. They repeatedly differ from each
other as to the context of an anecdote or saying, and it
is too often apparent that the choice has been made by
guess-work. The narrators before them had evidently
been faced by the same problems of arrangement, and
had solved them in the same precarious fashion. This
detached character of the record has been apparent ever
since the critical enquiry began. The Gospels, as we now
have them, have been compiled from earlier sources, and
these, m turn, can be resolved into a great number of
unrelated fragments. 4 From this fact alone it is pos-
sible to draw some far-reaching conclusions. If the
church had itself been responsible for the record it
would not have devised a series of episodes which in
*This is demonstrated in detail by K. L. Schmidt, Der Rahmen der Ge-
schichte Jesu.
IOO VALIDITY OF THE GOSPEL RECORD
themselves are frequently obscure and unintelligible.
No conceivable object could be served by the invention
of stray passages of which no one could see the appli-
cation. Take, for instance, the saying "Agree with thine
adversary quickly while thou art in the way with him,
etc." (Mt. 5 125) which as we now have it is a mere
piece of prudential wisdom, hardly to be deemed worthy
of preservation. It must have formed part of a parable,
or was intended in some figurative sense which the con-
text would have made clear j but with its isolation the
key to its meaning has been lost. This passage is only
one of a large number which cannot be accounted for
except on one hypothesis. Included in the tradition
there were sayings, parables, incidents which were no
longer understood. Their survival was due to some ac-
cident, or to some trick of memory which had left out
the thing of most importance, so that now they stand up
like pillars after the roof they once supported has fallen
in. If the church continued to treasure them it must
have been because they were part of the genuine record
of Jesus - y no other reason can be conceived.
(3) Again, there is hardly anything in the Gospels
which does not find its most natural explanation in the
circumstances of Jesus' own life. According to modern
theory it was the community which framed the tra-
dition, ascribing to Jesus, whenever the need arose, some
action or precept by which it might be guided. Either it
invented some occasion in his life when he was called
on to deal with the given problem, or it laid hold of
some vague reminiscence and worked it up into an anec-
TRADITION AND THE COMMUNITY IOI
dote which furnished the required moral. On this view
the task of criticism is to determinate the "living situ-
ation," the connection with early church history, in
which each passage in the Gospels had its origin. 5 For
example, there was the case of the wealthy man who
sincerely wished to join the Christian fellowship, but
still hankered after his possessions. The question of how
to deal with such converts must have come up many
times in the primitive church, which aimed at practis-
ing, at least in some degree, a community of goods. So
the story was devised of how Jesus was once met with
this very problem, and gave his judgment. With a little
ingenuity it is not difficult to place most of the Gospel
incidents in such "living situations"} but there is no
need for so explaining them. The story of the rich
young ruler, taken just as it stands, is natural and touch-
ing and beautiful. The new version of it is forced and
pedantic, and also misses the point which is that there
can be no discipleship without renunciation: the question
of whether rich men should be admitted to the church
is entirely a side-issue. Moreover there are many epi-
sodes in the Gospels which cannot, even by straining,
be fitted into any church situation the scenes in the
synagogue at Capernaum, the healing of the centurion's
servant and of the woman who touched Jesus in the
crowd, the stories of Zacchseus and the penitent woman
and the paralytic who was let down through the roof.
The sayings, more particularly, cannot have been in-
*>It is unfortunate that most of the exponents of Form Criticism have so
deeply committed themselves to this theory of the "Sitz im Leben."
IO2 VALIDITY OF THE GOSPEL RECORD
tended to meet the definite exigencies which arose in
the early church. They were applicable, no doubt, to
those occasions, just as they have been ever since to the
needs and questionings of men in all manner of circum-
stances. Their greatness consists in nothing else than
this universality. They have to be interpreted not from
their aptness to the difficulties of the church in Palestine
but from their profound relation to the permanent facts
of human life. If the church had wished to invent
something which would give explicit direction for its
special needs, it would not have been content with those
broad statements of duty. It required sayings of which
the bearing was unmistakable, and these would have
been just as easy to invent as the others indeed in-
finitely easier.
Nothing, in fact, could be less justified than the claim
that by connecting a Gospel episode with a supposed
church problem we put it back into its "living situa-
tion" into the soil out of which it grew. This attempt
to re-plant turns out, in almost every instance, to be an
uprooting. The passage refuses to unfold itself in its
full wealth of meaning unless it is related to the life of
Jesus to the whole of his thought and character. That
is its native soil, the necessary texture from which it
cannot be severed. The community indeed availed itself
of what Jesus had taught, by word and example, and
applied this teaching to its own needs. To this extent
the history as we have it was affected by the experiences
of the early church. But the connection of Jesus' teach-
ing with his own life and purpose was never forgotten.
TRADITION AND THE COMMUNITY
Along with the flower the church retained the roots,
with some of the soil still clinging to them. The pre-
cepts of Jesus could not be separated from his living
example, and that is the very reason why our Gospels
came to be written.
(4) Again, the modification of incidents and sayings
in view of later conditions is itself a proof that they go
back to something authentic. As a rule the contrary in-
ference is drawn. When we find, for instance, that the
teaching on divorce is given differently in the several
Gospels, or that the command to forgive the erring
brother becomes in Matthew a formal rule for church
discipline, must we not assume that Jesus left no direc-
tions, and that the community itself devised a mode of
procedure which it altered from time to time? This,
however, is to ignore a principle which holds good in
all historical enquiry. It happens invariably that the
same fact is reported in varying terms by the several
authorities, each of them with a bias of his own. But
the historian does not on this account question the fact.
On the contrary he knows that something of the kind
must have happened, or there would have been no need
for explaining it from all those different points of view.
His task is to compare the conflicting reports and dis-
cover the truth which gave rise to all of them and per-
haps is disclosed in none. This principle holds good
with regard to the Gospel records. They are frequently
at variance, and the effort to make a special application
of something done or said by Jesus may be obvious.
This, however, does not mean that all the accounts may
IO4 VALIDITY OF THE GOSPEL RECORD
be set aside. It proves, rather, that we have to do with
a genuine tradition, for if there had been no fact there
would have been no dissension.
(5) This brings us to another, and in some respects
the most convincing evidence that the church trans-
mitted an authentic history. Ever and again in the Gos-
pels we meet with sayings which were opposed to later
practice, or which had ceased to be understood. Refer-
ence has been made already to the prominence given to
Jesus' criticism of the legal system. The church in Pal-
estine was faithful to the Law, and upheld it against the
innovations of Paul. If it preserved a strain in Jesus'
teaching which was so inconsistent with its own posi-
tion, this can only have been because Jesus had thus
spoken. So with the admissions of blindness and weak-
ness on the part of the disciples, who for the church
were consecrated figures, and the account of how Jesus'
brethren, now pillars of the church, had sought to with-
draw him from his work. Very significant, too, is the
absence of all teaching on Baptism, the complete silence
on the work of the holy Spirit, the primary place as-
signed to the message of the Kingdom, which for the
later church had ceased to constitute the gospel. In like
manner, sayings are attributed to Jesus which were no
longer intelligible to the church that transmitted them.
It is evident that neither Matthew nor Luke can make
anything of the words "The Kingdom of heaven is taken
by violence" (Mt. 11:125 Lk. 16:16). Mark admits
that the most serious testimony brought against Jesus at
his trial was that he had been heard to say, "Destroy
TRADITION AND THE COMMUNITY
this temple and I will re-build it in three days" (Mk.
14:58)5 but Mark was ignorant, as we are now, what
was meant by that fateful saying. Parables of Jesus are
recorded at length, but it is quite apparent that the
point of not a few of them has been missed e.g., the
Good Samaritan and the Labourers in the Vineyard. 6
This frequent misunderstanding on the part of the
evangelists has sometimes been set down to their im-
perfect knowledge of the Aramaic idiom in which the
records had come to them. Attempts have been made,
and perhaps in some cases legitimately, to recover the
true sense by re-translation. 7 But most prooably the
key to many of the sayings had been lost before any doc-
uments, Greek or Aramaic, had come into existence. So
far from creating the record of Jesus the church was
often in a difficulty as to its import. It reverently pre-
served the tradition as it had come down from the earli-
est teachers, but some things in Jesus' words and ac-
tions were enigmatic, and had probably been so from
the first.
In all these ways we can discover evidence of a posi-
tive nature that the Gospel record was independent of
the community by which it had been transmitted. This
does not mean that the community was nothing but a
neutral medium. Its influence was a powerful one, and
6 B. M. T. Smith (The Synoptic Parables) has clearly demonstrated that the
evangelists have repeatedly misunderstood the parables which they record.
7 Dr. C. C. Torrey (The Four Gospels and-jOur Translated Gospels) has
maintained,. with immense learning and ingenuity, that the Gospels are wholly
translated from Aramaic. The theory will not stand, in the face of assured
critical results; but the author succeeds in showing that behind many single
passages an Aramaic original can be detected.
IO6 VALIDITY OF THE GOSPEL RECORD
must never be disregarded. To some extent it was ex-
ercised unconsciously, as always happens when events
are narrated with a full knowledge of what has followed
them. Looking back on the life of Jesus in the light of
its own faith and experience the church could not but
read a significance in all his action which had not been
apparent at the time. He had proclaimed the Kingdom,
and must therefore have foreseen all those signs of its
coming which had been witnessed since; and predictions
are assigned to him which he never uttered. He had
given instructions to his disciples, and these are ex-
panded, so as to bear directly on the missionary work
that was now in process. He had confessed himself the
Messiah, and all that had happened to him is seen, in
retrospect, as evidence of his claim. Allowance must also
be made for a conscious influence on the part of the
community. For one thing, it deliberately selected from
all that it knew about Jesus those memories which were
helpful to it in its own struggle. Perhaps there is noth-
ing in the Gospels which did not find its way there be-
cause of some need experienced by the early church.
For the most part its needs were the large human ones
of which all communities are conscious; but here and
there we meet with passages which can be related defi-
nitely to conditions in Palestine. Besides its work of
selection, the church permitted itself at some points to
modify the record. It was the practice of the Rabbis to
add something of their own, by way of emphasis or
qualification, to the counsels they transmitted; and there
is a suggestion in at least one verse in the Gospels that
TRADITION AND THE COMMUNITY IO7
this example was followed by the Christian teachers.
"Every scribe who is instructed towards the Kingdom
of heaven [/.<?., every teacher of the Christian message]
is like a householder who brings out of his treasure
things new and old" (Mt. 13:52). His first duty is to
guard the tradition, but he must also be able to interpret
and apply it. There is no reason to suppose that the
Christian teachers took out of their treasure new things
which they had themselves put in. The changes they
made were intended only to elucidate what they actu-
ally found. In passages that seem the most doubtful
we can always feel that we have the import of what
Jesus said, though he may not have used these literal
words.
There is no ground for believing that the community,
though in details it may have modified the record, in
any sense produced it. The community itself is, indeed,
the decisive guarantee for the record. By no accumula-
tion of evidence can it ever be demonstrated that Jesus
lived the life described in our Gospels. There is not a
single episode in their record of which we can be en-
tirely certain. Our own senses constantly deceive us,
and we have no means of verifying things reported, in
documents many centuries old. Yet we do know that
after Jesus' death a community arose which believed in
him with a boundless devotion. We know that this com-
munity had a conception of God and a moral standard
and a number of practices and ^doctrines which dis-
tinguished it from all others. There is no source from
which these things can have been borrowed, but they
IO8 VALIDITY OF THE GOSPEL RECORD
do correspond with that teaching which is ascribed to
Jesus in the Gospels. The presumption surely is that
they came from Jesus. Attention has been too much
concentrated in recent years on what the church may
have given, out of its own reflection and activity. This
contribution of the church has been magnified until it
seems to account for everything. Yet when all is said
the church was the society of those who believed in
Jesus, and who had been won to that belief by the
knowledge of what he had been. All that the church
may have given goes back, in the last resort, to what it
received from Jesus himself.
It will never be possible to separate with any preci-
sion those elements in the record which are purely his-
torical from those which were added by the community.
If this could be done it would probably be found that
the church was responsible for very little. From the
few notices which have come to us we can gather that
the Palestinian Christians were not creative. Stephen
and the Hellenists, with their more liberal understand-
ing of the message, were forced to part company with
the native believers. Paul, with his splendid original
genius, found no welcome in Palestine, and had to seek
a new field among the Gentiles. The Christians in Pal-
estine, although they had responded to the message of
Jesus, continued in all their habits of mind to be Jews,
and into their Christianity they seem to have carried
their Jewish reverence for the letter. It was in virtue
of this very literalism that they performed their ines-
timable service to the new religion. While in the Gen-
TRADITION AND THE COMMUNITY IC>9
tile world the message was transformed by a succession
of great thinkers, the Palestinian teachers took their
stand on the facts, which they often apprehended very
imperfectly. They were content to remember what Jesus
had done. They piously collected his actual words, and
treasured them, as far as was possible, unaltered. Even
in their Christianity they were confined within the pale
of traditional religion, and for this reason we owe to
them the priceless tradition of Jesus.
CHAPTER V
THE ORAL TRADITION
JESUS proclaimed his message by word of mouth, and
looked forward to its diffusion by the same means. His
life was cut short before he could give effect to his wider
plans j but at least on one occasion he sent out his disci-
ples to announce, as he himself had done, that the
Kingdom was at hand. Mark says explicitly that he
chose them in order that they might act as his "heralds,"
promulgating his gospel by the living voice (Mk. 3 114).
After his death we find them entering immediately
on their mission, though it now consisted not merely in
the announcement of the Kingdom but in the vindica-
tion of Jesus himself as the Messiah. They had no
thought of anything except an oral teaching. Not only
was this in accordance with Jesus' own example, but
all written testimony was deemed to be superfluous
since the Parousia was expected at any moment. More-
over, the field of activity was limited to Jerusalem and
its neighbourhood, and the brethren were in daily in-
tercourse with one another. The first mention we have
of writing, in connection with the work of the church,
is in Luke's account of the Council, when a decree was
drawn up in the name of the leading Apostles (Acts
15:20). It is to be noted, however, that writing is here
no
THE ORAL TRADITION III
assumed to be the usual practice in communicating with
brethren at a distance. There is no reason to doubt that
the church had always numbered among its members
men who were accustomed to write, and that writing
was freely employed for various church purposes. The
poorer members, for instance, were supported by the
community, and this would entail the keeping of a roll.
Meetings were held for the making of grave decisions,
and there would need to be some record of these meet-
ings. It has been observed that certain passages in the
early chapters of Acts have all the appearance of ex-
tracts from official documents minutes preserved at
Jerusalem or Antioch, from which Luke obtained the
most trustworthy part of his information.
The enquiry into the origins of the church has too
often proceeded on the assumption that it was made up
entirely of illiterate people who had to entrust every-
thing to memory. Analogies to Christian tradition have
been drawn from the rudest phases of culture from the
practice of savage tribes, of Arabian nomads, of the peas-
antry of the Middle Ages. 1 This is surely a strange his-
torical error. The first century was the culminating pe-
riod of ancient civilisation, and the Jews were one of the
most highly civilised of ancient peoples. It may be that
most of the Christian converts were "unlearned and ig-
norant men" (Acts 4:13), but this account of them must
1 K. L. Schmidt (Die Stettung der Evangelien in der allgemeinen Litera-
turgeschichte) places the Gospel records in the* class of "Kleinliteratur," i.e.,
popular broadsides, etc., as contrasted with genuine literature. Dibelius seems
to adopt a similar view which has nothing in its favour except that the
Gospel narratives are brief and simple. It seems hard to exclude them, for that
reason, from the class of good writings.
112 VALIDITY OF THE GOSPEL RECORD
be taken in a relative, one might almost say a technical
sense. They did not belong to the class of professional
Rabbis j but from this it did not follow that they were.,
utterly uncultivated. Christianity at all times has made
difficult demands, moral and intellectual. We should
naturally expect that those who were attracted to it in
the early days should have been much above the gen-
eral level, and from all we can learn of them it is abun-
dantly clear that they were. The audiences for which
Paul wrote his Epistles must have had no ordinary in-
telligence, and this would be equally true of the Pales-
tinian Christians. By the very fact that they had broken
with conventional Judaism they gave proof that they
were able to think independently. It is generally found,
too, that the higher spiritual interests go together, and
that the man of religious nature is also the most devoted
to things of the mind. This would be true in the primi-
tive age, as it is today. Many foolish theories which
have befogged the modern enquiry would be cleared out
of the way if we would only bring ourselves to realise
that the early Christians were not ignorant boors, who
held erratic beliefs because they knew no better. In the
most real sense they were educated men. If it had been
otherwise they could never have appreciated the records
of Jesus and gathered them finally into books which are
among the very greatest in the world's literature.
For a considerable time, however, the church did not
put its tradition into writing. This is evident from the
fact that the same narratives and sayings have come
down to us in varying language, as they could not have
THE ORAL TRADITION
done if they had been fixed from the outset in written
form. But if writing was not employed the reason is by
no means to be sought in illiteracy. The supposition that
no one was able to write, in this highly intelligent com-
munity, dwelling in the capital of a nation which held
writing in peculiar honour, is nothing else than absurd.
It is in other ways that we must explain why nothing
was written, even in years much later than the initial
period when the Lord's return was immediately expected.
Something must be attributed to the example of scribal
teaching. The function of the Rabbi was to transmit by
word of mouth what he had so learned from his prede-
cessors 5 and the Christian teacher in Palestine would
naturally follow this established practice. It is signifi-
cant that when Paul speaks of "transmitting" to his con-
verts that which he had "received" (I Cor. 15:3), he
uses the identical terms which were employed. in the
Rabbinical schools. He takes for granted that the Chris-
tian method is the same as the Jewish. Again, for the
early Christian mind the message, by its very nature,
required to be spoken. It was the "kerygma," the proc-
lamation. That term had been applied to it from the
first, and had been taken over from Jesus himself, who
had associated it with the spoken word. His example
was binding on his disciples. In the early years, too, the
effectiveness of the message depended on its coming
directly by the living voice. The teacher could stand
before his hearers and declare, "I myself was present
when Jesus spoke this word, or did this wonderful ac-
tion." A story is always more impressive when recounted
114 VALIDITY OF THE GOSPEL RECORD
by one who has participated in the event, and can vouch
in his own person for the truth of it. You may have
heard or read it already, but when you fall in with an
eye-witness you want to hear it again from his own lips,
and it seems to become quite new. Again, something
must be attributed to the force of custom. In religion,
more than anywhere else, rules that have been followed
for some time become sacrosanct, and by their practice
of oral teaching the primitive Apostles would establish
a convention which it was difficult to break. Since the
first days the community had been used to have the rec-
ord orally delivered, and would dislike to have it fixed
in writing, even when the hope of the Parousia was fad-
ing and the immediate disciples were passing from the
scene. A doubt may be hazarded as to whether the Pal-
estinian church ever possessed a written record. There
are clear traces of Aramaic originals behind the Greek
documents on which our Gospels were based} but it does
not follow that those originals existed in a written form.
The presumption is rather that the whole enterprise of
writing out the tradition was carried through, from the
beginning, in Greek. In this respect, as in many others,
the Gentile church would seem to have departed from
Palestinian custom.
We have to conceive, then, of a tradition which for
some years was orally transmitted, and which consisted
of detached episodes and sayings. That they were orig-
inally separate is evident from their connection in the
Gospels by links which are almost always formal and
artificial. ("And it came to pass." "He arose from
THE ORAL TRADITION 115
thence." "On another day." "When he had come into
the house.") When the Gospels were written these pas-
sages had to some extent been grouped together in ear-
lier documents, but the evangelists are clearly conscious
that the record before them has no inner cohesion. They
feel themselves at liberty to rearrange the pieces in new
settings and combinations. They treat their material as
consisting of single blocks, which the builder is free to
manipulate in the manner he thinks best.
In recent years an intensive study has been given to
these primary elements, these ultimate cells or crystals
out of which the Gospels are composed. It can hardly be
doubted that they represent the tradition as it existed in
the age prior to that of written documents, and by closer
analysis of their nature and structure we may hope to
learn more of the conditions under which the record took
shape. The line of enquiry is a new one, and perhaps
has awakened false expectations. It has been hailed in
many quarters as at last providing a clue to all those
problems of Gospel criticism which have hitherto baffled
solution. This is not the fault of the theory, or of the
eminent scholars who have developed it. Every new
method is bound to prove disappointing. It seems at
first to promise an explanation of everything, and is
gradually found to lead only a little way forward.
In some respects it is unfortunate that attention has
been so largely directed at the present time to the new
line of approach. Whatever may have been the original
sources of our Gospels there can be no doubt that the
evangelists worked with written documents, the nature
Il6 VALIDITY OF THE GOSPEL RECORD
of which cannot be said to have yet been fully deter-
mined. It may fairly be questioned whether the oral
tradition, which is hypothetical, can be profitably dis-
cussed until we have learned more about the written
tradition, which is in our hands. A biologist, seeking
to trace out the evolution of the horse, must first examine
the animal in all its known varieties, and so work back-
ward. He must not begin by conceiving the original
horse, and then proceed to show how it must have de-
veloped from this phase into the horse we know. Too
often this would appear to be the method now adopted
by Gospel critics. They assume the types of oral tra-
dition current in the primitive church, and so consider
the various stages through which these types must have
passed until they resulted in the writings which we now
possess. The true method of enquiry is undoubtedly the
opposite one, from the known to the unknown.
It has to be recognised, therefore, that all theories
about the oral tradition are still tentative, and await
the fuller investigation of a number of questions re-
lating to our present Gospels. What was the nature and
extent of the document Q? Did Matthew and Luke
use it directly, or had it already been edited, and em-
bodied in some larger work? When a saying or inci-
dent has come to us in several versions, how are we to
determine which is preferable, and how the difference
arose? To what extent do the Greek records bear evi-
dence of translation from Aramaic? Have our evan-
gelists simply transcribed their sources, or have they
modified them, more or less seriously, by editorial
THE ORAL TRADITION 117
methods? These are all questions to which a more in-
tensive analysis of the existing Gospels may provide an
answer, and until it is forthcoming no one can pass any
confident judgment on the underlying tradition. The
literary questions are the more urgent as the new criti-
cism is occupied so much with the matter of "forms";
and it is precisely these which would suffer most in a
process of translation and editing. A translator is more
concerned with substance than with form; an editor
creates new forms in which he combines those parts of
his documents which he considers most valuable. It
may be granted that ideas and facts have been consci-
entiously transferred from the earlier records to our
present Gospels, but what of the forms? If they are
ever in any degree to be recovered, it can only be by
a literary criticism, more patient and exact than has yet
been attempted.
It must be acknowledged, therefore, that all study
of the oral tradition is still, for the most part, prema-
ture. For a long time to come the investigation must
concern itself, as hitherto, with the Synoptic problem,
which has not yet been brought within sight of a solu-
tion. At present the temptation is to take liberties with
the written documents, and to force them into the shape
required of them by given theories. 2 The new enquiry
has to this extent been a positive obstruction to prog-
ress. A warning may here be derived from the history
of Homeric criticism, with which, from the time of its
2 M. Dibelius, Die Botschaft von Jesus Christus, wiederhergestellt is an
attempt to reconstruct the tradition in what may have been its original form.
Il8 VALIDITY OF THE GOSPEL RECORD
inception more than a century ago, the criticism of the
Gospels has been curiously linked. The theory was put
forward, and for some time was generally accepted,
that the Iliad and Odyssey were compounded of a great
number of ballads, different in date and authorship and
revised by several editors. In this account of the poems
there were doubtless some elements of truth 5 but the
main effect was disastrous. Homer was sacrificed in the
interests of a theory. His most splendid passages were
discarded because they were too good for a primitive
ballad or lengthened it out unduly. Sane critics are now
agreed that if we are ever to explain these poems we
must take them as they are, not as they might have been
if they had been made according to our formula. It is
more than likely that a similar judgment will finally
be reached with regard to the Gospel tradition.
The new enquiry, however, has compelled us to give
attention to the all-important fact that before it was
written down the record had passed through an oral
phase. Scholars had long recognised this fact, but had
never properly weighed its significance. They were con-
tent to say that the tradition in its earliest form was
fluid, and by making this admission they felt that they
had disposed of all previous questions and could now
settle down to their real task of examining the written
sources. Matter, however, even in its fluid state is sub-
ject to laws which need to be ascertained. What are
now the mountain ranges assumed their contour when
the earth was a molten mass 5 and we have to transport
ourselves into that remote past before we can explain
THE ORAL TRADITION 119
the realities before our eyes. The Gospels as we have
them are in written form, and the business of the scholar
is with the actual writings. Yet he can make little of the
later formations unless he takes account of the time when
there was no writing, but only the fluid mass of the oral
tradition.
It has been the signal service of the newer criticism
to indicate the "forms" or patterns which are traceable
throughout our Gospels. 3 Those separate passages of
which the tradition originally consisted seem all to have
been constructed on given models, according o the na-
ture of their subject. Seven or eight of these "forms"
have been distinguished, although none of the schemes
proposed can be made to fit in exactly with the material
as we now have it. Our Gospels, it must never be for-
gotten, are the final outcome of a long process in which
the records had been edited and re-edited, and all ef-
forts to determine their original structure must be con-
jectural at the best. There may have been a time when
the forms were rigid, and miracle, parable, historical
incident, moral maxim and anecdote, controversy and
rebuke had all their set patterns, from which there
could be no deviation. As it is, we can only speak of an
approximation to certain types which may once have
been definite but are now blurred beyond all hope of
restoration.
3 The main forms distinguished are: (i) miracle stories} (2) "paradigms'*
or "pronouncement stories"} (3) aphorisms} (4) tales} (5) legends} (6)
controversies} (7) apocalyptic utterances. Each writer, however, has his own
classification, and the effort to multiply and isolate the patterns has tended to
discredit a method which in principle is sound.
I2O VALIDITY OF THE GOSPEL RECORD
The main contention, however, appears to be a sound
one that the tradition, in its oral phase, consisted of a
large number of detached pieces, each of which was
cast in something like a regular mould. Even now the
forms can be made out, at least in outline, like the first
tracing under a picture which has been altered and elab-
orated. Perhaps the most frequent and the best defined
of these forms is the illustrative anecdote, in which a
weighty saying of Jesus is appended to an incident in his
life. He passed, for instance, through the fields with his
disciples on a Sabbath day, and they began to pluck ears
of corn. The Pharisees objected to this breach of the
Law, and he said, "The Sabbath was made for man, not
man for the Sabbath" (Mk. 2:27). Or he was at supper,
and publicans and sinners were eating with him. His
enemies criticised his action and he said, "They that are
whole have no need of the physician j I came to call not
righteous men but sinners (Mk. 2:17). Children were
brought to him for his blessing, and the disciples drove
them off. He was displeased and called the children to
him and said, "Of such is the Kingdom of heaven"
(Mt. 19:14). The Gospels are full of such anecdotes,
and it is obvious that they are all told in much the same
way. Jesus does something, objection is taken, he justi-
fies himself by a saying of far-reaching import. Or some
one comes to him with a question, representing the point
of view which has hitherto been accepted. He answers
with another question, suggesting a deeper truth. In all
these anecdotes the important thing is not the incident
itself but the comment of Jesus which it called forth;
THE ORAL TRADITION 121
.The thing that happened is only the framework for
the saying.
The miracle stories form a considerable part of all
the Gospels j and they too are recounted according to a
scheme which may be called conventional. Some one
comes to be healed, the gravity of his affliction is em-
phasised, the onlookers are incredulous of Jesus' power,
yet he performs the miracle and its efficacy is made ap-
parent in some striking way. In like manner a plan may
be discerned in the controversial passages of the narra-
tive. A commonly accepted belief is stated, usually by
a scribe or Pharisee, and is supported by a text of scrip-
ture. Jesus refutes it, also in the light of scripture, and
adds his rebuke to those who have misconstrued the will
of 'God.-..
One thing is at once apparent when these "forms"
are examined. On the face of them they are artificial.
Things do not happen in real life according to a uniform
plan, and we cannot believe that Jesus was always en-
countering incidents which lent themselves exactly to
pointed sayings, which he was able on every occasion to
produce instantly. There has clearly been some manipu-
lation of the facts in order to enforce their significance.
The hand of the narrator has been at work, giving a
turn in some required direction to the action of Jesus.
This criticism, however, must not be pushed too far.
Though we may call it artificial the form is natural, and
one may almost say inevitable. In the report of any
memorable saying a method similar to that of the Gos-
pels has always to be followed a note of the occasion,
122 VALIDITY OF THE GOSPEL RECORD
a remark or question, the unanswerable reply. The
biography of any famous man affords many analogies
not to speak of the variety column in any newspaper. It
may be true that in real life things do not happen- in
just that way, but the art of the narrator consists in
leaving out irrelevant details and sharpening the point.
No reasonable person would complain that truth has
been sacrificed, for the effort has been to bring out the
truth more clearly. So also the form adopted in the
miracle stories is entirely natural. We still follow it
instinctively in describing anything remarkable that
has come under our observation. The hearer must be
made to feel that the incident was out of the common,
that no one believed it could happen, that it did happen
beyond the possibility of doubt. It is difficult to under-
stand the argument, sometimes advanced quite gravely,
that the Gospel stories are open to suspicion because
they are couched in particular forms. The same argu-
ment might be urged against almost any narrative. In
every age there are recognised modes of telling a story,
and if we want information about things which then
happened we must be willing to receive it in that man-
ner. The mere fact that forms are employed in the re-
cording of the Gospel tradition has no bearing whatever
on its substance.
One thing must never be forgotten. From the outset
a peculiar significance would attach itself, in the minds
of all Christians, to the things done by Jesus. Stories
told of him would be something more than interesting
THE ORAL TRADITION 123
anecdotes. Things said by him were no mere epigrams
or sage reflections, like those ascribed to celebrated Rab-
bis. Behind all the record lies the conviction that Jesus
was the Messiah, who spoke with a divine authority.
There is a constant suggestion that he was a being of
superior order, and that his sayings were of the nature
of oracles, beyond which there was no appeal. This
conception of the unique dignity of Jesus reflects itself
in the forms under which his actions are described. To
say that in the Gospels we have a series of anecdotes,
leading up to pointed sayings, is utterly beside the mark.
While the narrative forms of the time are adopted, they
are remodelled, often with a conscious reminiscence of
the language employed in scripture. In the Aramaic
originals these peculiarities of form would doubtless be
more pronounced. Semitic devices for giving eleva-
tion to ordinary narrative could not be reproduced in
Greek; turns of phrase which had solemn associations
could only be rendered by common words, or hinted at
by awkward additions. Thus in the forms of the Gos-
pel record, as in its substance, we have to allow for a
new element, due to the Christian beliefs. A partial il-
lustration may be drawn from the letters of Paul, which
are composed in the usual epistolary manner, with greet-
ings, compliments, thanksgivings according to the con-
ventions of letter-writing in that age. Yet a new char-
acter is imposed on those forms by their association with
Christian ideas. We have likewise to allow for a re-
moulding of inherited forms when they were applied
124 VALIDITY OF THE GOSPEL RECORD
to the purposes of the Christian tradition. Parallels de-
rived from Rabbinical and other literatures are imper-
fect at the best, and for the most part misleading.
It is in connection with the Gospel history that the
question of form has chiefly been discussed in recent
years 3 but it has a bearing, perhaps still more impor-
tant, on the record of Jesus' teaching. As we have them
now the sayings have almost all a rhythmical, poetical
character. They answer, in most instances, to the laws
of Hebrew parallelism 5 and in addition to the brief
sayings we occasionally have passages of some length
which may be regarded as short poems (e.g. Mt. 6:25-
333 11:20-245 11:25-305 23:34-39). Their beauty
is due not merely to the thought conveyed but to a
structure of clauses and cadences which bears all the
marks of conscious elaboration. Was it the custom of
Jesus to express himself with this studied art? We can
well believe that in his mode of speech there was some-
thing highly distinctive a matchless clearness and con-
centration, a vividness of metaphor, a loftiness of
thought which reflected itself in his language. The
style in which his teaching is reported would not have
been attributed to him unless it was in some degree
characteristic. It has lately been proved that Boswell
is himself responsible for much of the wording of John-
son's conversation j but he could not have made his
hero speak in that manner unless it was reminiscent.
The whole art consisted in making the man speak ex-
actly as he might have spoken. This must have been
THE ORAL TRADITION 125
equally true of sayings ascribed to Jesus by the early
church. There were many people still living who had
listened to Jesus, and well remembered his mode of
teaching. They would perceive at once, by the very
turn of phrase, whether any given utterance was really
in character. No saying would find its way into the
record unless it bore the intrinsic marks of the language
of Jesus. Nevertheless it is difficult to believe that we
have his sayings precisely in the words he used. What
is evidently the same maxim has sometimes come to us
in several versions, all of them different, although they
all have the same characteristic note. The inference
can hardly be avoided that the thought was preserved
but was restated, by one teacher and another, in such
terms as might have been used by Jesus. Not only so,
but we have to reckon with a deliberate recasting in
poetical form. This is not mere conjecture, for it is
possible in some measure, by a comparison of the sev-
eral Gospels, to trace the process by which given sayings
were wrought into shape. The Beatitudes, for exam-
ple, have a place both in Luke and Matthew, but the
version in Matthew is clearly an advance on that in
Luke. The four simple blessings are extended to seven
or eight, and in all of them the language has become
richer and more expressive. So the criticism of the old
commandments is presented by Matthew in well-
marked sections, which have some resemblance to regu-
lar strophes: the woes on the Pharisees are fully drawn
out and worked to a climax, so that the whole chapter
becomes a counterpart to the lyrical denunciations in
126 VALIDITY OF THE GOSPEL. RECORD
Amos and Isaiah. Jesus' teaching has been preserved,
but has been invested, in a subsequent time, with a more
imposing form.
It is not improbable that the single sayings have like-
wise undergone some change in their mode of expres-
sion. Many of them have the appearance of compress-
ing into the fewest possible words what had been said
at much greater length. We know from Mark that
"without a parable he spoke nothing to them" (Mk.
4:34), and here we have no doubt a genuine reminis-
cence. Jesus habitually taught in parables, and a num-
ber of his parables have been recorded in fulleach of
them closing with a gnomic saying which gathers up its
meaning. In some cases this has obviously been added
by the reporter himself, since it betrays a misunder-
standing of the parable j and as a rule the story conveys
its own moral so lucidly that all explanation is superflu-
ous. Yet we can easily see how the custom would arise
of condensing an extended parable into its one main
idea, which in some instances Jesus himself may have
indicated in a few pregnant words at the close. Many
of the sayings which survive may thus represent the
final deposit of a great mass of parabolic teaching. It
is hardly conceivable that Jesus regularly spoke in
pointed maxims, one succeeding another without a
break. Not only would such a mode of teaching have
been unnatural but it would have been ineffectual.
Nothing is more irritating than a string of epigrams,
each one driving out the memory of the one before,
and all of them suggesting a pose and a self-conscious-
THE ORAL TRADITION 127
ness which would be utterly foreign to all that we
know of Jesus. Those pregnant sayings which have
come to us cannot have stood alone, but must represent
the hammer-blows by which he finally drove home
the truths he had been expounding.
Many of the sayings, therefore, may have been
spoken by Jesus very much as we now have them. He
may have added them to clinch the meaning of lost
parables, or have thrown them out from time to time
in the course of debate or conversation. It may be taken
as certain, in view of the unanimous tradition, that he
possessed in a very rare degree the gift of pungent ex-
pression. Things that he said would stick in the mem-
ory, and in the Gospels we have a selection of his most
impressive sayings, remembered after his death. But it
is difficult to account in this manner for all the sayings.
Not only are they too numerous to have been carried
in the memory word for word, but they seem to indicate
by their form the work of later reflection. This does
not mean that they are too perfectly expressed to have
come out on the spur of the moment, for Jesus may well
have uttered even more beautiful sayings than any that
have come down to us. He instinctively put his thought
into fitting words 5 and it must also be borne in mind
that although he spoke without premeditation he had
been pondering his message for years before he entered
on his ministry. Nothing that he ever said was merely
improvised. The problem before us does not concern
the beauty of his language but the nature of its beauty.
Those sayings are not framed in terms of ordinary
128 VALIDITY OF THE GOSPEL RECORD
speech. They are adapted to the acknowledged forms
of Hebrew poetry, corresponding, in our own usage, to
rhyme and rhythm 5 and it cannot be supposed that
Jesus habitually spoke in that fashion. One of the chief
marks of his teaching was its perfect naturalness. Lis-
tening to him the common people were able to feel
that he spoke their own language, and thus made reli-
gion intelligible and real. They could not have so re-
sponded to him if he had always expressed his thoughts
in studied, oracular terms.
It may therefore be assumed that in the process of
transmission the sayings were remodelled. While the
substance of the thought was retained, it was thrown
into forms which defined it more sharply and at the
same time made it easier to remember. This practice
had already established itself in the Rabbinical schools,
to which Christian teachers in early days must have
looked for example. Each famous Rabbi was remem-
bered by a few characteristic utterances, which summed
up his teaching, or at least indicated its nature. Many
of these maxims are preserved, and they betray a uni-
formity of pattern which cannot be entirely due to the
teachers themselves. A technique had been developed
in the Rabbinical schools for the transmission of impor-
tant sayings 5 and the church apparently followed this
practice. Jesus, it is true, had not taught like the scribes.
There had been a freedom and originality in his thought
which had also stamped itself on his mode of utterance,
and the church sought, as far as possible, to reproduce his
manner. Nevertheless, it employed a number of set
THE O.RAL TRADITION 129
forms in which the substance of his teaching could be
preserved and handed down.
Our Gospels themselves provide evidence of the care
which was bestowed on the formulation of the say-
ings. The evangelists make it their aim to record every-
thing as they found it in their sources, but while doing
so, they alter and improve. There is hardly a verse in
which Matthew and Luke are in precise agreement.
Sometimes a change is made on purely linguistic
grounds, to correct the sentence in its grammar or phras-
ing. Sometimes the aim is greater clarity, or force, or
conciseness. Sometimes the sense is modified, in order
to replace an obscure thought by one which will be di-
rectly understood. It is doubtless true of all the evan-
gelists that while adhering to their sources they exer-
cise a conscious literary art 5 and Luke expressly tells
us that this has been one of his objects. He prides him-
self on his "order" meaning by this his careful ar-
rangement, not only of the narrative as a whole, but of
all the separate details. He has tried to put every-
thing more succinctly, and so to do fuller justice to the
tradition. Such, we may be sure, had always been the
effort of the church teachers. In perfecting the form
they did not conceive that they were doing any violence
to the record. On the contrary they thought it part of
their obligation to put into fitting shape what they had
received. We expect of a good translator that he should
give us not merely a faithful but an elegant version,
and this was also regarded as the task of a good trans-
mitter. He was required to convey the record intelli-
I3O VALIDITY OF THE GOSPEL RECORD
gently, making the sense clear and effective, even
when this involved a remodelling of the literal words.
It rarely happens, even in these days of short-hand re-
porting, that a speech is printed exactly as it was de-
livered, with all the hesitations and repetitions and
loosely strung sentences. If it is to impress the readers
as it did the audience it must be put into some kind of
readable shape. That, indeed, is the object of all litera-
ture and art to impose those qualities of form which do
not destroy but enhance the reality.
It may be granted, then, that we do not possess the
fysissima verba of Jesus. Occasionally he may have ut-
tered a sentence so brief and arresting that it rang for
years afterwards in the memory of his hearers exactly
as he had spoken it. But in far the greater number of
sayings this cannot be assumed. No one, so far as we
know, took notes of Jesus' teaching. It was entrusted
to the memory, and words remembered very quickly
lose their original form. Great importance has usually
been attached to the time that may have elapsed between
the utterance and the writing down of Jesus' sayings j
but this element of time is, after all, a secondary one.
Even a week or a single day after Jesus had spoken,
men would be doubtful as to what he had said, and
would report him differently. May we not discover an
actual proof of this in one outstanding instance? At the
trial before the Council it was all-important to make
sure of the very words in which Jesus had declared that
in three days he could rebuild the temple. This was
the crucial "blasphemy" on which the accusation hinged,
THE ORAL TRADITION
and several witnesses were brought in, who had heard
the words spoken, only a day or two before. The Coun-
cil was eager to have their evidence, and they had prob-
ably been hired for the express purpose of obtaining it j
yet they could not be made to agree on what Jesus had
actually said (Mk. 64:58, 59). Must it not have been
the same with nearly all the sayings? The Gospels are
constantly at variance in their record, and this was in-
evitable. What Jesus literally said on any given oc-
casion can never be ascertained not because the account
was not written down until years afterwards, but because
it had never been uniform. The witnesses, like those at
the trial, had differed from each other from the very
start. It is sometimes argued, on this ground, that we
cannot know anything of the actual teaching of Jesus. 4
Those sayings which we attribute to him were not
strictly his own. As they came down through the com-
munity they were expressed in new language, and were
revised and edited, so that the real message is irretriev-
ably lost. We call our religion by the name of Jesus,
but there can be no certainty that at any point we have
direct contact with him. At first sight the argument
might seem to destroy all confidence in the Gospel rec-
ord, but it would apply with equal force to any record
that has ever been. Words have been attributed to every
famous man which have made him a living figure to
succeeding times, but which do not correspond to what
he literally said. One thinks, for instance, of Luther's
great defiance at the Diet of Worms. Undoubtedly he
*/. C. A. H. Guignebert, Christianity, ch. I.
132 VALIDITY OF THE GOSPEL RECORD
made that defiance, but his words have come to us in
four or five accounts which differ from each other, and
no one can tell whether any of them is correct. It is
seldom, indeed, that any man can repeat quite accurately
what he himself said on some given occasion. He knows
what he intended 5 he remembers the general tenor of
his words j but when you try to fasten him down to any
precise statement he can only say, "It must have been
something like that." This is also the furthest we can
go with regard to any of the recorded words of Jesus.
We know that the church accepted these words as hav-
ing been spoken by him. We need not doubt that the
thought was his, even though he may not have expressed
it in just those terms. If it is argued that the different
versions of a saying are proof that he never uttered it,
we may fairly answer that they prove the very opposite.
Several reporters are agreed that he spoke to that effect 5
and if they differ as to the words we can be all the more
certain of the thought conveyed.
Thus the church inherited a large number of sayings
which purported to be those of Jesus. They had been
transmitted in different versions, but this was not due
to any tampering with the record, or to the fading out
of authentic memories through lapse of time. The dif-
ferences had always existed, and could not but arise
when spoken words were reported by various witnesses.
It was not so much the words as the teaching of Jesus
which the church was anxious to preserve, and for this
reason it allowed itself a certain freedom. Sayings as-
cribed to him were sometimes recast, to make them more
THE ORAL TRADITION 133
pointed and explicit. What he had spoken at consider-
able length was often compressed into a single maxim.
Out of a whole discourse or parable only the one sen-
tence that contained the significant idea was preserved.
These changes were all made with the purpose of eluci-
dating the message of Jesus, by clearing it of all that
seemed irrelevant, and stating it in plainer and more
forcible language 5 and the church took a yet further
liberty with its tradition. It threw the original records
into certain patterns, sometimes with the aid of rhyth-
mical devices. This would appear to have been the chief
modification which the church made on what it had re-
ceived from the immediate witnesses, and the purpose
of these "forms" has now to be considered. 5
*>The literature of "Formgeschichte" is now extensive and is constantly
growing. Among the works of special value are: M. Dibelius (translated by
B. Lee Woolf ), From Tradition to Gospel; E. Fascher, Die Formgeschichtlicke
Methode (critical as well as expository)} M. Albertz, Die Synoptische Streit-
gesprache; R. Bultmann, Geschichte der Synoptiscken Tradition and Die Er-
forschung der syn. Evangelien; B. S. Easton, The Gospel before the Gospels;
V. Taylor, The Formation of Gospel Tradition; F. C. Grant, Form Criticism
(a translation of two outstanding German contributions).
CHAPTER VI
THE MEANING OF FORM
THE investigation of form has marked a real ad-
vance in Gospel criticism. It may be that too much has
been claimed for the new method, and that most of its
findings are premature, and will always remain, in a
greater or less degree, conjectural. But at least a crev-
ice has been opened through which we can see some lit-
tle way into that background of oral tradition which lies
behind our documents. If nothing has been positively
discovered a number of probabilities have come to light
which may lead, in course of time, to solid results. 1
The temptation hitherto has been to confuse the facts
obtained by the new method with theories which are
more than doubtful. Too often, indeed, theory is used
as an instrument for determining the facts. It is as-
sumed that the tradition arose out of the cult or doctrine
or practice of the Christian community, and the forms
are adjusted to this supposition. In the framing of a
myth to suit its requirements the church must have been
guided by certain principles, and we can thus discover
the laws by which the record was formulated. Wher-
ever it conflicts with these laws it must be set aside, or
undergo the necessary correction.
1 The value of the method has been admirably explained by B. S. Eastern in
his two books, The Gospel before the Gospels, and Christ in the Gospels. He
also indicates some of its limitations.
134
THE MEANING OF FORM 135
Even when the facts are obtained by legitimate criti-
cal methods, conclusions are sometimes drawn from
them which are purely fanciful, and are yet passed off,
by a sleight of hand, as part of the criticism. The liter-
ary structure of the records is made a ground for assess-
ing their historical and religious value. It is claimed that
by mere analysis of their form we can tell that most of
the narratives of Jesus are imaginary, or in any case
were mainly fashioned by the community itself out of
a few very slight recollections. The form in which any
episode has come to us is now accepted by some scholars
as the criterion by which a judgment may be passed on
its historical substance. 2 This, however, is highly ques-
tionable. It may be granted that the literary character
of a document is, to some extent, a clue to its value.
From a composition which on the face of it is poetical
we do not look for the same accuracy as in a work of
prose. If the language used is that of a given period we
accept the document as good evidence for the history of
that period. A diary or private letter is more to be re-
lied on than a pamphlet, written obviously in some party
interest. Yet the worth of the contents cannot be judged
from the form alone. A song or ballad may be better
history than a set chronicle. A late work may be nearer
to the facts than one written by a contemporary. Official
statements need to be checked as well as popular tales
and casual anecdotes. The forms of the Gospel narra-
tive must indeed be taken into account j but on this evi-
2 M. Dibelius (Die Botschaft von Jesus Chris tun) has sought to reconstruct
the original message by applying the supposed laws of form to the record as
we now have it.
136 VALIDITY OF THE GOSPEL RECORD
dence alone it is impossible to base any historical judg-
ment.
One fact in particular has emerged from the modern
criticism, and might seem, at first sight, to rule out all
claims of the record to be considered as history. The
forms in which it is cast are demonstrably artificial. It
cannot, therefore, have reached us in its original state
but has passed through a process in which various fac-
tors have played their part. Must we not conclude that
this is true of the substance as it is of the form? These
accounts of the work of Jesus have been mediated by
the life and reflection of the early community. It used
the memory of Jesus as a sort of screen on which it pro-
jected its own experiences, and in this manner devised
a series of episodes which have the appearance of being
authentic, but the illusion can be detected when we ob-
serve the artificial character of the forms. A story which
wears the manifest garb of fiction may reasonably be
presumed to be more fiction than fact.
Different theories have been put forward to account
for the narrative which thus purports to be the life of
Jesus 5 and some of them have already been examined.
We have seen that the whole idea of the community as
itself creating the record is due, in the main, to loose
thinking and a loose employment of language. The
term "community" is equivalent to the symbol "x," and
merely denotes that everything must be explained by
causes of which we know nothing. There is no evidence
that the community in any way invented or distorted the
record. Everything would appear to show that its ac-
THE MEANING OF FORM 137
tion was conservative. A record transmitted through in-
dividuals might fairly be suspected, but one that was
used constantly in the public worship of a community
was safe-guarded. There could be no more effective
check on any attempt to deviate from a received tra-
dition.
No one, indeed, would maintain that the record has
come to us through a purely colourless medium. Jesus,
for the early church, was the Messiah, who had won sal-
vation for his people and to whom they looked for pres-
ent guidance. His life could not be treated merely as an
interesting chapter of bygone history. The object of the
church in recalling it was to strengthen faith in Jesus,
and to make his example effectual 5 and this practical
purpose is never forgotten in our Gospels. Their narra-
tive is to this extent determined by the conditions which
prevailed in the Christian community. But it must
never be forgotten that those conditions which are re-
flected in the history had themselves been created by the
work of Jesus. We do not argue that the career of Julius
Caesar must be fictitious because the Roman Empire had
somehow come into being and needed to postulate a
man of that kind as its founder. If the Empire was
based on ideas which it ascribed to Caesar, the natural
assumption is that Caesar was a real person, who origi-
nated those ideas and with them the Empire which
preserved his story. And when we find a community
which called itself by the name of Jesus and sought to
order its life by his precepts, we may conclude that its
account of him is substantially true. There is no fair
138 VALIDITY OF THE GOSPEL RECORD
ground for a theory that the church in some mysterious
way grew up of its own accord, and then compiled a
legend, explaining how it came to be.
Assuming, then, that the record is historical, how are
we to interpret those forms in which it was embodied,
and which are still traceable under the Greek of our
Gospels? In the narrative portions they consist of little
more than an order, relatively fixed, in which the ele-
ments of each story are placed. In the teaching we have
to do with something that approaches a poetical form.
Some of the sayings are highly elaborated, and even in
the Greek suggest a rhythm, which was probably much
more pronounced in the Aramaic. This feature of the
record plainly goes back to the period before the tra-
dition was put into writing. Our evangelists had found
it in their sources, and it was characteristic of all the
sources, and must have been present in the original ma-
terial out of which they were made. They were tran-
scriptions, as may be gathered from Luke's prelude, of
the primitive testimony that is, of the oral tradition.
Formerly it could only be said that the tradition was at
first handed down by word of mouth, and to this state-
ment it could be added that this tradition, as orally de-
livered, was not continuous, but was made up of a num-
ber of short, detached pieces. Now we are in a position
to say that the pieces were constructed in a particular
manner, each of them with a stated outline and content.
Before considering the significance of these forms it
is necessary to meet the contention that a narrative which
THE MEANING OF FORM 139
is couched in artificial forms cannot be in harmony with
facts. Reflection and manipulation have plainly been
at work in the framing of the various episodes. Does not
this throw suspicion on their whole character? Those
who fashioned the vehicle would take similar liberties
with the things conveyed. But this does not follow.
Nothing more can be inferred from the nature of the
forms than that the church was accustomed to tell sto-
ries of Jesus in a particular way. The stories themselves
might be true or false, but it was expected that they
should be thrown into this approved mould. We have
here no singularity of the early church, which calls for
ingenious theories to account for it. If the methods of
any narrator were examined it would be found that all
his stories, however they may differ in character, have
a family likeness. He has developed his own technique
in story-telling, and applies it to all kinds of material-
to what he has himself witnessed as well as to things he
has imagined. For that part, the form is usually most
rigid when the narrative is most matter-of-fact. One has
only to think of a business letter, a captain's log-book,
a policeman's evidence in court, a scientific demonstra-
tion. Nothing could be more conventional than these
statements. They are framed, in every instance, on ex-
actly the same pattern, for the simple reason that they
set forth the facts required in what has proved to be the
necessary order. It would not be too much to say that
artificial form, so far from throwing doubt on the things
stated, is the mark of veracity. This has been understood
by all writers who have tried to give an air of realism to
I4O VALIDITY OF THE GOSPEL RECORD
a narrative that is pure invention. Defoe, for example,
is the most convincing of story-tellers because he has
mastered the art of constructing his tales as formal doc-
uments. The reader cannot but believe that a narrative
which is so faithful in every particular to some conven-
tional manner must be true.
Perhaps it was for this reason that in ancient story-
telling the form was much more regular than it is now.
There, were certain schemes to which every record had to
adapt itself, and the reader expected to have the facts
presented to him in just that way. He Was put out
when the familiar formulae were omitted, and the events
were not unfolded in the customary order. In the East,
more especially, the methods of narrative were strictly
prescribed. The frame was not fitted to the picture but
the picture to the frame. If this is true of the Gospel
narratives it is equally true of the Old Testament sto-
ries, of the Arabian tales, of the chronicles of Egyptian
and Persian kings. To our minds the forms appear arti-
ficial, but to those for whom they were intended they
were natural, and a loose, flexible mode of narration
would have caused misgivings. A story did not appear
credible unless it was told in the fixed order, according
to the set rules.
The forms of the Gospel tradition afford no proof
that it is not historical, and we may go further. The
form is a guarantee of the contents and was imposed for
that very purpose. For a generation the record was
transmitted orally, and was at the mercy of every acci-
dent. Every one who told the story of Jesus was at
THEMEANING QF FORM
liberty to add and omit and modify, and there was no
standard by which the alterations could be checked. It
is only too apparent that an oral record, after many such
repetitions by different people, would become so changed
that even the main drift of it could hardly be recovered^
This is evident to us now, and negative criticism has
made the most of it 5 but it would be still more evident
to members of the primitive church. Again and again
they would hear the story/which they had heard in one
version told shortly afterwards in quite another 5 and
the need ofj>res@rving some consistency would force it-
self on them for urgent reasons both of faith and prac-
tice. How was this consistency to be secured? The one
certain method was to commit the record to writing, and
eventually this method was adopted 5 but so long as it
was deemed necessary to adhere to oral tradition only
one device was possible* The message which had been
delivered in loose, improvised language must; be in-
vested with a stated form. This would serve a* double
purpose. On the one hand it made the facts easy to re-
member. Instead of a diffuse account there would be a
brief compact one, in which the essential points were se-
lected, and placed in a uniform order, so that each of
them would suggest the one that followed. On the other
handand this was much more important the fixed
form would act as a safe-guard. If it was not observed
the listeners would at once recognise that something had
been added or left out. The form bound down the nar-
rator to the one accepted version of the facts.
That this was one main object of the forms which
142 VALIDITY OF THE GOSPEL RECORD
are traceable in the Gospel tradition is more than prob-
able, and is borne out by many analogies. We find that
invariably, when the aid of writing is not available, some
kind of form has been used as a substitute. Much of the
poetry of early times had its origin in a utilitarian mo-
tive. The metrical form was employed to give perma-
nence to things that needed to be remembered, and at
the same time to preserve them from alteration. Laws
were drawn up in a rude rhythm 5 thinkers expressed
their cardinal ideas in verse, which their disciples would
commit to memory 5 kings and cities had their official
poets, whose duty it was to chronicle famous events and
pass them on securely to following generations. In all
these instances the same two motives can be discerned
to assist the memory, and to stabilise the approved ver-
sion of things that mattered. Order and language were
now fixed, and into such a record it was difficult to in-
troduce any changes. With a similar motive the church
put its tradition into form. For passages of narrative it
was enough to arrange the facts according to a given
scheme, which ensured that they should come in the
right order and lead up to the truth or warning they
were meant to enforce. The narrator was held within
bounds, and his hearers were made aware when he
brought in anything that had no proper place in the
story. For the preservation of the teaching more defi-
nite forms were necessary. The sayings of Jesus were
reproduced in poetical modes of speech, resembling those
of the prophets and the authors of the Wisdom litera-
ture. He himself had probably spoken in this manner
THE MEANING OF FORM 143
only on rare occasions, and it is more than likely that
his words as we have them bear the impress of the later
church. None the less, the object was to preserve what
he had really taught. He had used the common lan-
guage, and if he had done otherwise the common people
would not have heard him gladly 5 but for the purpose
of transmission this language was unfitted. When yoti.
report a f amilar conversation you put the sense of it into
different words, and with ,the change of words there is
always some distortion. After several repetitions the
sense is lost, as well as the original language. If the
thought of Jesus was to be preserved it had to be trans-
posed out of the language he had employed into senten-
tious utterance which had a set form. The memory could
now take a firm hold of the saying, and the idea con-
tained in it was clearly defined, and could not easily be
perverted. It is a curious logic which finds evidence in
the forms that the church wilfully corrupted its record,
and ascribed to Jesus its own reflections and beliefs. The
natural conclusion is just the opposite. By means of
form the church deliberately put a curb on its own fancy.
It was conscious that the teaching of Jesus, so long as it
was freely repeated, was liable to a constant process of
modification. Pains were therefore taken to preserve the
various sayings by fixing them. The forms are our se-
curity that the teaching of Jesus has (been transmitted,
not perhaps in his literal words, but in the sense which
it conveyed to the earliest believers.
^
At this point, however, several questions of the high-
144 VALIDITY OF THE GOSPEL RECORD
est importance fall to be considered, (i) In the first
place, when did the imposition of form begin? To this
question no definite answer is possible 5 but it may be said
generally that forms would be adopted when the dan-
ger of corruption had become apparent, but could still
be overcome. At the outset the account of Jesus would
be delivered by eyewitnesses in any language that came
to them at the moment. It could be taken for granted
that these men who had been in Jesus' company would
report him correctly, and no one would demand that
they would always repeat themselves in the same words.
But a time came when the accounts began to deviate.
Different teachers would give conflicting versions of
what they had heard from Peter and John 5 and perhaps
these Apostles would sometimes contradict themselves.
It was felt necessary to decide, once for all j in what man-
ner some particular story should be told, and one version
was agreed on, and was fixed in appropriate form. The
process would be carried out very gradually. We are
not to imagine that the church, on a certain day, decided
that its whole record should be put into form, and ap-
pointed a committee for this purpose. Things were not
done in that fashion in the primitive church. The proc-
ess of formulation would extend over years, and would
be applied to one portion of the record and another, as
the need arose. But the transposition into form, how-
ever it was effected, may be taken to mark the true be-
ginning of a Gospel literature. It is customary to make
a division between the period of oral tradition and that
of written documents. The record which had previously
THE MEANING OF FORM 145
been fluid was put into writing, and this is supposed to
be the grand turning-point in the history of the tra-
dition. From this time on we are clear of the quaking
bog and can feel solid ground beneath our feet. But the
real division ought to be made farther back, at the time
when the floating tradition was thrown into forms. The
distinction between word of mouth and writing is, af-
ter all, an arbitrary one, since the writers merely set
down what was already, crystallised. We date the
Homeric poems "and the Icelandic sagas from the time
when they were romposed by poetic craftsmen. It was
then that they became literature not at the time, per-
haps centuries later, when they were committed to pa-
per. The origin of the Gospel literature ought to be
dated in the same way.
(2) Another question which cannot but suggest itself
is that of the agency by which the tradition was reduced
to form. The work is credited to the community, and
in view of our blank ignorance it is impossible to speak
with greater precision. But we must be careful to guard
against the idea, which in recent years has been such
a fruitful source of error, that the record in some way
shaped itself automatically. The more we study any
fragment of it, the more we realise that we have before
us a piece of art, which could not have come into being
by some happy accident. There musdhave been teach-
ers in the church who not only repeated but deliberately
shaped the tradition. Who they were we shall never
know 5 but it is evident that they must have given time
and reflection to the work, which is performed, for the
146 VALIDITY OF THE GOSPEL RECORD
most part, with exquisite skill. Any one who studies our
Gospels in a Synopsis is aware how every phrase and
word in the sources has been carefully weighed; and the
authors of the sources would follow a similar method,
and likewise the teachers before them who put the rec-
ord into form. It is necessary to remind ourselves again
that the early disciples were not barbarians, as we are
far too apt to assume, but belonged to a cultured age,
and to a nation in which literary expression had been
carried to high perfection. Among its teachers the church
would have men who well understood the finer uses of
language, and to such men we owe the casting of those
forms which not only ensured the permanence of the
records but have won them a place among the world's
great literature.
It can hardly be doubted that the chief object of for-
mulation was to preserve and fix the tradition, but this
implies a further motive. Whenever form is applied to
matters which have hitherto been conveyed in ordinary
speech, we may infer that the thing so treated is valu-
able. From the mass of common facts or ideas a selec-
tion has been made, and what is deemed most important
has been set aside, and expressed in such language that
it will be remembered. This, for example, was the ori-
gin of all popular proverbs. They were devised, in an
early stage of society, as finger-posts for the conduct of
life. From time to time a principle was observed which
was eminently true and helpful, and it was put into ar-
resting words, so that it might stand out from the con-
THE MEANING OF FORM 147
fusion of opinions. This also was the motive at work in
the making of popular songs. Events were singled out
which were worth remembering 5 thoughts and emotions
were recognised which were richer in quality than those
of every-day existence. Poetry, by Matthew Arnold's
definition, is a criticism of life. Perhaps it might be de-
fined more accurately as a selection from life an effort
to sift out from common experience the things of lasting
value. Form always implies a selection. Just as we set
apart our more precious belongings and keep them in
drawers or boxes, so we instinctively enclose in forms
the ideas and memories and sentiments which we are
most anxious to preserve. And this, it may be presumed,
was one main reason why form was employed in the
treatment of the Gospel tradition. Out of all that was
.known or rumored of the life and teaching of Jesus the
church laid hold of those things which it most desired to
keep. These, at least, must be made secure. They were
fundamental to any true conception of what Jesus had
been, and of what he had taught and done.
It is generally assumed that the church has trans-
mitted to us in the Gospels almost all that it ever knew
about Jesus. The modern investigation is to a great ex-
tent built on this assumption, which passes, as a rule,
without challenge. We are asked to believe that after
his death the memory of Jesus quickly faded. Occupied
as it was with what it conceived to be his message the
church lost sight of Jesus himself j he had become a
shadowy figure even in the first generation, and after it
was passed very little was remembered of his actual life.
148 VALIDITY OF THE GOSPEL RECORD
Then it was suddenly realised that unless some effort
was made the facts about him would be forgotten alto-
gether, and the church set itself diligently to collect the
fragments of reminiscence which still survived. These
were now few and meagre, but everything that could be
discovered was scraped together, and these scanty glean-
ings were eked out with doubtful hearsay. Thus our
Gospels came into existence made up of miscellaneous
materials, for the most part of inferior value, but con-
taining all that could possibly be ascertained of Jesus
in the succeeding age. So in each new Life of Jesus it is
impressed on us that the attempt to make anything like
a biography is well-nigh hopeless, since we have nothing
to go by but those scraps of information which, by some
accident, escaped the wreck.
It is worth suggesting that this theory, for which
there is no evidence whatever, ought to be reversed.
Our Gospels, so far from containing everything that
could be discovered by the most diligent scrutiny, are
the final outcome of a long process of selection. This is
more than a hypothesis, for the Gospels consist for the
most part of episodes and sayings which had been in-
vested with form, at a time previous to any written doc-
uments. Form implies selection, and the inference may
be fairly drawn that a large mass of material was avail-
able. Many who had known Jesus were still living, and
all Christians were eager to hear from them whatever
they could tell. There will be occasion to return later
to this neglected aspect of the tradition, but at present
it is enough to note that memories of Jesus were in the
THE MEANING OF FORM 149
first age plentiful. We have in our Gospels not the rec-
ord which the church was compelled to give, for want
of anything better, but that which it chose to give. From
all that it possessed it selected those things which ap-
peared to be best worth preserving.
What were the motives which determined the se-
lection? It might have been expected that the most sig-
nificant acts and sayings would at once be evident, and
would naturally take their place in the regular tradition.
To a considerable extent this is what happened, and
some things are included in all the Gospels, just as there
are twenty or thirty hymns which cannot be omitted
from any collection. Yet it is surprising that many epi-
sodes to which we now attach the v highest value are
passed over by one or other of the evangelists, though it
is almost certain that he must have known them. On
the other hand, things that seem to^us relatively unim-
portant, for instance some of the miracle stories, are
found in all the Gospels. This, perhaps, is the chief
argument for the theory that little was knqwn. If there
was a copious tradition, why is the selection not made
with more discernment? Every anthology j however, is
liable to the same criticism. We look in vain for the
extracts we should certainly have chosen, and find them
replaced by others, which to our mind could have been
left out. This only means that one man's choice will al-
ways differ from another's} and it must also be remem-
bered that our attitude today is not that of the primitive
church. The Gospels were drawn up for their own age,
with its peculiar standards of what was valuable. They
I5O VALIDITY OF THE GOSPEL RECORD
were intended, too, for practical use in a miscellaneous
community. If the evangelists had been entirely free
they might have done their work differently 5 but they
had to consider the needs of the church and the variety
of people included in it. Their selection is, in some
sense, an official one, and must be judged from that point
of view.
It must be noted, too, that when our Gospels were
composed the selection was, in large measure, already
made. Parts of the record had been separated from the
rest and put into form, and were in general use at the
church meetings. What the evangelists have done is, in
the main, to combine in a coherent whole the passages
which had commended themselves to the judgment of
the church. We have to put ourselves in the position of
the early teachers, and enquire what motives would
weigh with them when they selected certain parts of the
material which lay to their hands, and threw them into
form by this means securing that they should be pre-
served and handed down.
(i) The existing conditions of the church would
doubtless count for much. From the words and examples
of Jesus the brethren sought direction for the conduct
of daily life, for the solution of urgent problems, for
the administration of worship and of the communal life.
Preference would be given to acts and sayings of Jesus
which appeared to bear more immediately on those pres-
ent needs, and in the formulation of such passages a
turn would often be given them which made their ap-
plication more obvious. This was natural, and it can be
THE MEANING OF FORM
demonstrated in not a few instances that this has been
done. But the passages themselves, though they may
have been modified, belonged to the record, and were
selected in view of their fitness to a special purpose.
(2) Preference would be given to incidents which
lent confirmation to the beliefs of the church, and espe-
cially the central belief that Jesus was the Messiah.
This has manifestly been one of the guiding principles
of the selection. As the scriptures were searched for pre-
dictions of Jesus' Messiahship, so was the record for
incidents that seemed to reveal him in his Messianic
character. From the prominence of this motive it has
been held that the Gospels are little more than theo-
logical pamphlets in the guise of history; and the view
is justified to this extent that a doctrinal motive has
largely determined the selection. Many things were
known about Jesus which in themselves were more val-
uable than some which have been preserved $ but they
had no apparent bearing on that belief which controlled
the life of the church, and they were allowed to go. The
scope of the Gospels has in some ways been narrowed
by this concentration on the Messianic belief. This is
apparent when Luke is compared with the more arid
narratives of Mark and Matthew. Luke, writing for the
Gentile church, has in large measure broken away from
the Messianism of Palestinian Christianity. He has
learned to think of Jesus as the messenger of peace and
human brotherhood, and is able to bring in a whole mass
of material which we now regard as the most precious
in the Gospels. This is commonly set down to his pos-
152 VALIDITY OF THE GOSPEL RECORD
session of sources which were unknown to the other two
evangelists, but perhaps it would be nearer the truth to
say that he has been less limited in his selection. Setting
before himself a wider purpose he has been able to ad-
mit from the current tradition a great deal that the
others have purposely omitted.
(3) It would be wrong, however, to think of the early
teachers as concerned wholly with the passing needs of
the community and the doctrines on which it took its
stand. They were fully awake to the spiritual value of
the story of Jesus, and to the newness and splendour of
his teaching. Our Gospels are full of passages which
only by a forced ingenuity can be construed as topical.
If they were significant for the early church they are no
less so for earnest men and women in all ages. It is the
evident aim of those who drew up the record to preserve
whatever they can of what was most distinctive in the
work of Jesus. Emphasis is continually laid on the con-
trast between his teaching and the practices and beliefs
which had hitherto prevailed: He is set before us as the
prototype of a new humanity, the pioneer of a new and
better way of obedience to God. It is utterly unjust to
the early Christians to conceive of them as wholly oc-
cupied with doctrinal shibboleths and the regulations of
their own little group. For the members of the primi-
tive church, as for the church in all ages, Christianity
meant a new approach to God, a new outlook on life.
We cannot but realise, as we read the First Epistle of
Peter, the thirteenth chapter of I Corinthians, the Sup-
per Discourses in the Fourth Gospel, that the imitation
THE MEANING OF FORM 153
of Christ was the primary interest in the Christian re-
ligion. It had been so from the very first, and we can-
not understand why the Gospels were written unless we
take account of this motive, more than of any other. The
record was intended to inspire and direct Christ's fol-
lowers by the example of Christ. A selection was made
of actions which made him real as a personality, and
words which illustrated most clearly his mode of
thought.
(4) Nearly half the space in each Gospel is occupied
with the account of Jesus' death, with all its accompany-
ing circumstances. There are various indications that the
Passion story was originally a unit by itself j and this
was inevitable, since the death of Christ was the chief
theme of missionary teaching. Paul had resolved not to
know Christ after the flesh, but he himself tells that he
was wont to describe, as in a vivid picture, how Christ
had died (Gal. 3:1')- To Paul we owe our primary evi-
dence on the two great episodes of the Lord's Supper
and the Resurrection*- Intent as he was' on the inner '
meanings of the Christian message he placed a cardinal
value on the facts, and we cannot but be struck with the
preciseness of detail in his historical statements. They
read almost like official declarations, and Paul indicates
that this was indeed their nature by the terms in which
he quotes them. "I delivered what also I received" (I
Cor. 15:3). "Whether it be I or they, thus we teach"
(I Cor. 15:11). It may almost be said that in these pas-
sages of Paul we find the earliest examples of how form
was applied to the Gospel record. Primary episodes of
154 VALIDITY OF THE GOSPEL RECORD
the history are presented in a brief recitative, in which
the main facts are carefully chosen out and succinctly
put together.
The Passion story, then, appears to have been the first
part of the narrative which was treated in this manner,
and here we can trace the operation of all the motives
we have been considering. For the purpose of church
worship, which centred in the commemoration of the
Lord's death, it was necessary to have a plain record of
how the death had taken place. Since the death of Jesus
was his crowning Messianic work, all the facts concern-
ing it had to be clearly set forth. And since the church
looked to Jesus as its teacher and example it was bound
to remember his death, in which everything he had
taught was gathered up in one supreme act. Thus in the
selection from the record the first place was given to
that portion of it on which all the rest depended. The
account of the life became only a prelude to that of the
death, and is meant to be considered in the light of it.
Many readers have observed that nothing in the Gos-
pels is recounted with such austerity and simplicity as
this story of the Passion. This is especially striking in
Mark's narrative, and the inference has sometimes been
drawn that the purpose of his Gospel is not historical
but ritual or theological. Everything is told in bare
outline with no attempt to rouse emotion no appreci-
ation, one might think, of the great human tragedy. But
this character of the narrative can be explained when we
think of it as composed with a definite object. The account
of the Passion was the fundamental part of the record,
THE MEANING OF FORM 1$$
and was also that part of it which lent itself most easily
to fanciful accretions. This is apparent from the later my-
thology of the church, and from the extravagant de-
tails which have crept into the versions even of Luke
and Matthew. It was imperative that the facts should
be recalled, just as they had happened. The death of
Christ was the central theme of the Christian message,
and all teachers were left free to make their own theories
as to its significance. But the facts must not be confused
with any myth or speculation. Since everything else
rested on them they must be set forth exactly as they
were. So in his accounts of the Supper and the Resur-
rection Paul confines himself to a mere summary, one
might almost say a catalogue, of certain things which
had been vouched for by the immediate witnesses. He
discerns a profound religious meaning in those events,
and is preparing the way for its exposition. But before
he can proceed any further he feels it necessary to state,
as exactly as he can, the historical facts. This is also the
motive in that plain chronicle, so impressive because o
its utter simplicity, in which Mark recounts the story
of the Passion.
These are some of the reasons which must have
weighed with the church when it selected a number of
episodes from the life of Jesus, and gave them perma-
nence by means of form. But was there not a further
reason? May we not believe that Christian teachers were
anxious to transmit a record which, to the best of their
knowledge, was authentic? It is strange that this pos-
156 VALIDITY OF THE GOSPEL RECORD
sibility should hardly be entertained by many recent
writers. They work on the assumption that the church
took no trouble whatever with its tradition. Some things
were remembered about Jesus, but purely by accident.
Legendary material was admitted as freely as fact in-
deed more freely, since it allowed more scope for those
doctrinal and communal interests which were all that
really mattered. It is taken for granted that until our
own time no effort was ever made to sift out the true
elements of the history. Now on the face of it this con-
ception of the attitude of the early church is incredible.
Since Jesus was the object of faith there must have been
some desire to know what he had actually done while he
lived on earth. In all times since there has been an in-
tense curiosity about his life 5 even the wild fables which
began to spring up as early as the second century are
proof of this interest in him. It must have been at least
as strong in the age following his death, when first-hand
information was still available. As we have seen al-
ready, the absorption in his message cannot have dis-
placed the interest in his life, for the two things were
inseparable. The message consisted in nothing else than
the proclamation that the Messiah had at last appeared,
and every one must have wanted to know how he had
appeared, and what he had done that proved him to be
Messiah. It must also be borne in mind (and this is
a point too often forgotten) that even if the church was
disposed to forget the facts the unbelieving world for-
bade it to do so. The whole point of the Jewish attack
was that Jesus, in his known career, did not fulfil the
THE MEANING OF FORM 157
Messianic conditions. One fact after another was brought
forward and exploited to the utmost, which threw doubt
on his claims. Malicious stories were invented, which
could only be countered by a statement of the facts. One
of the chief cares of the church was to neutralise these
attacks, which were directed not so much against Chris-
tian doctrine as against the character and action of Jesus
himself. Of this we have striking evidence in the Fourth
Gospel, with its constant polemic against the slanders
and misconceptions of "the Jews." It is evident that
Jewish criticism, in the evangelist's time, had fastened
on the historical career of Jesus, and he feels it necessary
to deal with the various objections. This, perhaps, is
one of the chief reasons why his work, theological in its
nature, takes the form of history. He is aware that
Christian ideas cannot be presented in a true light unless
the facts of Jesus' life are cleared of all doubts and as-
persions. 3 A similar task was imposed on Christian teach-
ers from the first. The easiest method of attacking the
Christian mission was to spread discreditable rumours
about Jesus himself. These could not be answered by
mere fables, in a time so near to the events 5 and those
who believed in Jesus had no choice but to inform them-
selves of the facts and make them known.
Thus it was a matter of practical concern to the church
to become acquainted with the history. It was not
enough to form some hazy imaginative picture of Jesus,
**W. Wrede (Charakter und Tendenz des Johannischen Evangeliums) draws
attention to the prominence, in early controversy, of attacks on the personal
history of Jesus.
158 VALIDITY OF THE GOSPEL RECORD
for there was always the danger that ignorant statements
would be challenged. There was, moreover, on the part
of Christians, a deep desire to know more of Jesus and
to learn all the facts correctly. This we may infer from
Luke's preface to his Gospel. His friend Theophilus
had already passed through a course of instruction, in
which he had received knowledge of Jesus, but he
wished to know more, and to make sure that the informa-
tion given him could be relied on. Luke offers him the
results of a full historical enquiry. He takes Theophilus
as typical of all intelligent converts, and presents them
with a book from which "they may know with certainty
the things in which they had been instructed" (Lk. 1 14).
This, then, it may be maintained, was one motive,
and not the least cogent, in the selection that was made
from the miscellaneous record. In the course of those
years when all teaching was by word of mouth it was
difficult to make sure that the facts were rightly trans-
mitted. Much that passed as information was mere
hearsay. Reminiscence had become coloured by imagi-
nation. Things in themselves authentic had been wrested
from their proper meaning. The church was aware that
the record was in danger of perversion, and was anxious
to know what it could believe. It was in this interest,
more, perhaps, than in any other, that form was applied
to a number of episodes in the history. Here were some
things which were well authenticated. Amidst all that
was doubtful the church could hold firmly to these ele-
ments in its tradition, which might serve as a touch-stone
for everything else. It is noteworthy that most of the
THE MEANING OF FORM 159
narratives which bear the impress of form are, on the
face of them, credible. Allowing for the tendency, natu-
ral to the ancient world, to explain remarkable events
as miracles, there is very little in the Marcan narrative
which might not have happened. We can feel at every
point that this Was how the disciples, after some lapse of
time, would recall the events they had witnessed. This,
it may be surmised, was the chief motive which guided
Christian teachers in their work of selection. When the
tradition had been duly sifted it was found that for some
parts of it there was adequate authority. It might al-
most be claimed that the teachers who put the record
into form were the earliest critics of the Gospel history.
In their own fashion they had examined the material
and placed their stamp of approval on that which they
found trustworthy.
It is not to be supposed that the tests which they em-
ployed were of just the same kind as we should use now.
As yet there was no clear conception of tfce laws of his-
torical evidence, no means of determining whether an
event was possible within the order of nature. Yet we
may credit these early investigators with an honest de-
sire to trace back each report to its source. If the Apos-
tles themselves were no longer accessible there were
those who had listened to them, and could vouch for
what they had said. Papias may be mistaken when he
tells us that Mark recorded what he had heard from
Peter; but his statement at least preserves the memory
of how conscientious teachers in the early days had gone'
about their work seeking their knowledge from those
l6O VALIDITY OF THE GOSPEL RECORD
who could give it at first hand. Papias himself tried to
continue this practice when he sought out the "elders,"
and enquired of them what they had heard from the
disciples of the Lord. 4 We may believe, too, that the
early teachers would compare the current versions of
incidents and sayings, and so arrive at their judgment
as to which one should be preferred. This has been
the method followed by our evangelists. They all adopt
it as a matter of course, and from this we may gather
that it was already in common use. When they are
unable to make a choice between two alternatives they
make room for both, and this custom also may date
back to the early time.
It may be concluded, then, that form was employed
to give permanence and stability to the tradition, and
that it also points to a selection of those parts of the
tradition which the church, for a variety of reasons, was
most anxious to preserve. The forms, however, have a
further significance. They plainly suggest that the pas-
sages so treated were meant for public recital. Liter-
ary modes of expression are always used in order to
give proper dignity to some public utterance, and in
ancient times the distinction between formal and col-
loquial language was much more marked than it is now.
If the Gospel records are formally constructed they
must have been meant for publicity, and this could only
be secured in the early church by recital at the church
meeting. It seems evident, when we examine the sepa-
rate passages contained in our Gospels, that they were
^Eusebius 111:39.
THE MEANING OF FORM l6l
intended for this purpose. Each of them is an inde-
pendent unit complete in itself. They are approximately .
of the same length. They lend themselves to impressive
delivery, as every one feels today when they are read
out in the church service. We know that the books of
the Law were divided, for use in the synagogue, into
brief sections, one for each Sabbath in a cycle of three
years. It may be that a somewhat- similar practice was
adopted in the worship of the early church. A series of
scripture passages would be read, according to a regu-
lar scheme each of them followed by the recital of a
given episode from the life of Jesus.
If the sections of the record were designed for the
church meeting we have a strong guarantee that they
were framed carefully, with a full sense of responsi-
bility. They were to be repeated, time after time, be-
fore the assembled brotherhood. The recital of them
was to rank as an act of worship, and nothing that was
false or unworthy could be admitted. It' must be re- ,
membered, too, that the community itself was the chief
safeguard .of the purity of the tradition. Some one would
certainly be present at every meeting who would know
the facts and would protest against any statement that
was plainly wrong. Those who had the shaping of the
Gospel record would be constantly mindful that their
work would be severely tested, and would take pains to
transmit faithfully what they knew, on good evidence,
to be true.
CHAPTER VII
THE BEGINNING OF THE TRADITION
OUR Gospels represent the final outcome of a long
process, which can be traced backward, up to a certain
point, with a fair degree of confidence. It can be shown
that Matthew and Luke made use of writings which
themselves had some literary pretensions. One of them
was our Gospel of Mark, in which a number of primitive
records were brought together and carefully arranged in
sequence, so as to make a coherent narrative. Mark was
only one of the "many" early works to which Luke ad-
mits his indebtedness, and which were presumably of a
similar character. They were composed in Greek, and
aimed at the collection and arrangement of earlier ma-
terial. Their authors had found the preliminary work
done for them. They had only to put together a number
of episodes and sayings which had been selected, and
thrown into proper language, and perhaps roughly
grouped according to subject.
Before any of these documents came into existence
there was a period in which all records of Jesus must
have consisted of detached pieces, preserved in an oral
tradition. In the light of recent investigation we are able
to penetrate some little way into that dim period. There
is evidence that at some date when it was still in the oral
THE BEGINNING OF THE TRADITION 163
phase the tradition was reduced to form. Stories about
Jesus were cast in a given mouldj his sayings were con-
densed into pointed maxims, or were invested with
poetical rhythm. Here we can discover the first attempt
to give fixity to'the record. Although it was still trans-
mitted orally it was adjusted to patterns which secured
for it something of the permanence which we associate
with literature. This formulation of -the record, although
it was effected gradually, must have begun within a very
few years after Jesus' death. Paul quotes several sayings
of Jesus which have all the characteristics of form, and
which he assumes to be familiar to his readers. He like-
wise recounts two historical episodes in language which
plainly suggests a formal statement, intended for public
recitation. From the time that the record thus began to
be formulated we can trace a continuous development.
Later teachers took up the work of their predecessors and
sought with extended means to preserve and fix the tra-
dition.
But when the record has thus been traced backward as
far as we can go, we are still left with a period in which
everything was unstable. How long it may have lasted
we cannot tellj but even if it may be contracted to a few
years there was time enough for the tradition to become
fatally obscured. The critic of the Gospels, however far
he may push back his sources, has finally to reckon with
that dark interval in which all was at the mercy of popu-
lar rumour. The memories even of eye-witnesses must
often have played them false 5 authentic stories must have
grown distorted, and fables may have crept in under guise
164 VALIDITY OF THE GOSPEL RECORD
of fact. This interval, however short, when there was
no fixed record, must always remain the crux of Gospel
enquiry. All experience proves that even a few months
or weeks are sufficient to destroy any testimony, and the
period with which we have to deal was certainly much
longer. In face of this uncertainty at the very begin-
ning it may seem vain to expect a solid basis for the
Christian tradition. At the best we can only take our
stand on a record which was stabilised after the mis-
chief had already been done. For that part, the effort
to stabilise was itself a confession that the facts were
growing doubtful. Christian teachers were conscious that
unless some measure was taken to arrest the process of
disintegration the history would soon be lost. Have we
any ground for believing that in their attempt to con-
serve a genuine tradition they were not too late?
It is necessary, at the outset, to protest against the
common assumption that little was remembered of Jesus
after his death, and that even these scanty memories
were preserved by some freak of accident. Our Gospels
are themselves the best evidence that this supposition is
false. Whatever their value may be, it cannot be denied
that they exist, and contain a history which purports to
be that of Jesus. They were written in the second gen-
eration, but were made from a number of documents
which must have been current for something like twenty
years. Now it was not these documents which created
an interest in the life of Jesus. They were written, it
cannot be doubted, to satisfy an interest that was widely
THE BEGINNING OF THE TRADITION 165
felt. From the very outset there seems to have been a
general desire to know more about Jesus as he had mani-
fested himself on earth. That he had passed out of
memory, even for the world at large, is simply in-
credible. He ha'd attracted wide attention in his life-
time, and the circumstances of his death had been public
and notorious. Paul, addressing Agrippa, can take for
granted that the king, as a Jew, is well-informed on the
facts, "for this thing was not done in a corner" (Acts
26:26). For some time after his death Jesus must have
been the subject of heated discussion in Jewish circles,
and much more so when a sect came into being which
proclaimed that he was the Messiah and had risen from
the dead. All who had come into contact with him,
whether they were friendly or hostile, would be eager to
report what they knew, as always happens after the
death of any man who has made himself conspicuous.
Within the church itself he was now revered as the Lord
who would presently appear in glory, and whose return
might be looked for at any hour. This new attitude to
Jesus would not obliterate the thought of his life. It
must rather have vastly enhanced its meaning, so that
every detail of it was now doubly memorable. Again
and again in the Gospels we are told that some action
of Jesus was not recalled or understood until after he
had risen from the dead; and this notice, we can well
believe, reflects the mood of the disciples as they looked
back on their fellowship with him. They would ex-
amine with new eyes everything he had done, seeking
for some deeper significance which they had missed.
l66 VALIDITY OF THE GOSPEL RECORD
Moreover, during all that early period the followers of
Jesus were carrying on an ardent mission. They might
themselves have been content with the knowledge that
whatever he had been on earth he was now the glorified
Messiah, but how were they to communicate this faith
to others? They were asked continually "who was this
Jesus? what did he say or do that will convince us of
the claim you make for him?" Unless they had an
answer to such questions it is difficult to see that they
could have made a single convert. Whether they wished
or not, they were compelled to make the life of Jesus
the textbook of their message. Missionaries to-day have
always to impart the necessary knowledge about Jesus
before anything they say is intelligible. It must have
been much the same with the earliest missionaries all
the more so because they addressed themselves to Jews,
who were already acquainted with all that concerned
the Messianic hope. The one thing they demanded was
some concrete proof from the life of Jesus that this was
indeed the Messiah foretold by the prophets.
It was impossible, then, that the history of Jesus
should have fallen into oblivion after his death. The
interest in him must have been keener then than in his
life-time, and the work of the Christian teacher must
have consisted mainly in imparting the information
which every one was demanding. According to the
book of Acts when the disciples were ,called on to ap-
point a colleague, his qualifications were stated by Peter:
"Wheref ore of those men who have companied with us
all the time that the Lord Jesus went in and out among
THE BEGINNING OF THE TRADITION 167
us, beginning from the baptism of John until that same
day when he was taken up from among us, must one be
ordained to be a witness with us of his resurrection"
(Acts. 1:21, 22). It matters little whether Luke here
recounts a definite incident. He describes the conditions
on which it was known that Christian teachers were ap-
pointed in the primitive time. They were the custodians
of the tradition, and it was required of them that they
should have learned it, as far as possible, at first hand.
Luke himself, it may be noted incidentally, claims to
stand in the succession of those early teachers. He did
not have the personal knowledge of Jesus, but relies
on the testimony of those who had. He describes the
ministry from the days of John the Baptist onwards,
"following the course of all things accurately from the
first." His aim is to. do in writing what the early wit-
nesses had done by the Spoken word.
We are not to think, therefore, of the memory of
Jesus surviving by accident, and only in meagre frag-
ments. Everything would seem to indicate that the
church maintained its interest in his life, and had many
sources of information. It may be surmised, too, that
its knowledge did not consist, as is often assumed, in
bare notices which were afterwards expanded into nar-
ratives. The usual process would be just the opposite
one. An Eastern story-teller describes the simplest in-
cident with a wealth of dramatic detail, and his audi-
ence is disappointed unless the story is thus amplified.
We must conceive of the accounts of Jesus as originally
presented with great fulness, and as undergoing a grad-
l68 VALIDITY OF THE GOSPEL RECORD
ual compression at the hands of successive teachers. The
central incident of each narrative would be preserved,
while it was disencumbered of aH the minor circum-
stances which served no purpose except to make it more
realistic. It has often been observed that although
Mark is much the shortest Gospel it is the most diffuse.
The work of Matthew and Luke is largely one of prun-
ing the exuberance of Mark's narrative, often at the sac-
rifice of its colour and freshness. In all probability
Mark is the fullest in detail because he is the earliest of
the evangelists. He stands closest to the primitive nar-
rators, and still possesses something of their manner, al-
though he has doubtless done his best to abridge and
compress. The story of the madman of Gadara is a
typical instance. Though of minor importance it is told
at length with a number of graphic additions which the
other two evangelists have discarded as unnecessary.
Mark, it may be presumed, has told the story much as
it was told in the early days 5 and all the Gospel narra-
tives, though now confined in many instances to two or
three verses, may originally have been drawn out after
the same fashion. The effort of the later teachers was
to abbreviate not to expand or embroider what had
come to them as fragmentary notes.
So it may be inferred that the chief trouble, at the out-
set, was the excess of material. All who could tell any-
thing about Jesus were eager to come forward, and
much that they offered was of trivial value. Paul may
have partly had this in mind when he declared that he
did not wish to know Christ after the flesh. He could
THE BEGINNING OF THE TRADITION 169
not but feel that a great deal of the tradition as com-
monly reported had little or no bearing on the vital in-
terests of the Gospel. It might be interesting in a bio-
graphical way, but tended only to obscure the supreme
significance of Jesus. Not only would the stories told of
him be sometimes trifling and irrelevant, but they would
be mixed up with doubtful elements. The narrators
would give rein to their imagination. In order to im-
press their hearers they would distort the facts and add
many fanciful touches. That this was done we have
evidence in our Gospels particularly in the accounts of
miracles. When once it was recognised that Jesus did
things that were extraordinary there was a natural temp-
tation to make them more and more wonderful. All that
he did was exaggerated in the telling, and marvels were
attributed to him which had sometimes little basis in
fact.
In view of this miscellaneous character of the tra-
dition it was necessary that the things of genuine value
for Christian faith and living should be singled out and
formulated. It was necessary, too, to distinguish be-
tween the history and that growing mass of legend
which threatened to submerge it. Early in the second
century apocryphal Gospels appear to have sprung up
everywhere. Many of them were the deliberate inven-
tion of heretical teachers, but they doubtless included
material which had come down from the previous age.
Some of it has found its way into our present Gospels,
for instance in the Nativity stories 5 and if the work of se-
lection had been delayed much longer the whole history
I7O VALIDITY OF THE GOSPEL RECORD
of Jesus might have been lost in a morass of fable. This
was apparent to those early teachers who made it their
task to ascertain and to fix the authentic tradition. Their
motive, it cannot be affirmed too strongly, was in the
last resort a religious one. The message they proclaimed
was bound up with the reality of the life of Jesus. They
believed that through him a divine power had come into
the world, and before there could be any gospel it was
necessary to make sure of the historical facts on which
it rested. This was apparent to the writer of Hebrews,
who perceives that if Jesus is a true High-Priest he
must have lived a human life, he must have suffered
and been tempted as we are (Heb. 2:17, 1 8). It was
no less apparent to Paul, who indeed directs his faith to
the glorified Lord but centres everything on the con-
viction that this exalted Lord is one with Jesus, who had
lived and died in the manner vouched' for by his Apos-
tles. This, from the outset, had been the cardinal Chris-
tian belief, and all responsible teachers had a vital in-
terest in the purity of the tradition. Mere legends about
Jesus, even if they were intended to magnify him, were
useless for the purpose of the message. If the acts at-
tributed to Jesus had not been done by him they could
afford no ground for Christian faith. In like manner it
was essential that his teaching should be preserved in
authoritative form. For his followers it was not merely
a lofty ideal ethic but a binding rule of life. He was
"the Lord," to whose will they were subject. In the
act of baptism they had undertaken to obey him, and
must know definitely the nature of his commands.
THE BEGINNING OF THE TRADITION IJI
The need for stabilising the tradition was thus ap-
parent, and a time came when this task was deliberately
carried out. Had it been delayed until the harm was
done? There was a period, however brief, when the
memory of JesuS had been left wholly to common re-
port. Not only so, but it was just in this period that
the church was in a fever of apocalyptic excitement, and
was prone to accept visions for certainties. Was there
any means during those earliest years whereby the rec-
ord was controlled and safe-guarded? The later teach-
ers, like Paul, delivered what they had received, and
this tradition was ever afterwards normative for the
church. But what was it that had been received, after
rumour and fancy and extravagant hopes had worked
their will, during those years of flux at the beginning?
That changes had crept in can hardly be doubted. Ac-
cording to Papias, Mark took his information from
Peter, and if this were so we might feel on sglid ground,
though eVen Peter's memory after a lapse of years could ,
not be entirely trusted. But the statement of Papias is
open to question, and in any case can have reference only
to a small part of Mark's material. His Gospel, like
the others, does not consist of the reminiscences of any
one man, but of the general tradition of the church. The
value of the history thus depends on the quality of that
tradition, which had certainly become mingled with
doubtful elements, or the work of selection would not
have been necessary. But there are good grounds for
believing that underneath all the accretions and perver-
sions a genuine record maintained itself, which later
172 VALIDITY OF THE GOSPEL RECORD
teachers were able to sift out and formulate. Even in
the earliest years, when all was apparently at the mercy
of chance, a number of checks were operative, which
ensured the preservation of the facts.
(1) The chief of these was the presence in the com-
munity of men who had personally known Jesus. His
disciples, probably all of them, were about his own age,
and would be under forty when he died. At least some
of them would survive through the greater part of the
first generation. They were for some time the leading
teachers of the church, and while they lived were the
outstanding figures in that Palestinian community in
which the record took shape. We need not suppose that
it was submitted to them in every detail for confirma-
tion; but the fact that these men were still alive would
act as a restraint. All the narrators would be conscious
that their statements might be challenged by those who
were in a position to know. The teaching of the disci-
ples was the norm by which all accounts of Jesus had
to be controlled, and this is plainly recognised by Paul
in his references to what he had received. In his inter-
pretation of the gospel he claims entire freedom, under
the guidance of the Spirit, but he acknowledges that on
the historical facts there can be no appeal beyond the
word of the Apostles.
(2) Again, the record was transmitted in Palestine,
under conditions which were much the same as in Jesus'
lifetime. Ideas and customs, methods of government,
party divisions, had undergone no change. A frame-
work was thus given to which the history had to con-
THE BEGINNING OF THE TRADITION 173
form, and to this extent a limit was placed on free in-
vention. Every one could see at once when an act was
ascribed to Jesus which he could not, under the known
conditions, have performed. One has only to think of
the later time wfien the wildest fictions were able to im-
pose themselves, since the world in which Jesus had
moved was now buried in the past. The narrator of the
first generation, confined within the bounds of what
might have happened, was much more likely to de-
scribe what did happen.
(3) An effective check was provided, as has been al-
ready noted, by Jewish opposition. The missionary was
aware that if he made any false statement it would
quickly be denounced. He knew that if there were awk-
ward facts in the history he was better to admit them,
for if they were concealed or disguised his enemies
would bring them forward and use them maliciously.
We are repeatedly told in the Gospels of criticisms made
on Jesus by unbelievers, and there is no reason to doubt'
that they were indeed made in his lifetime. "Is not this
the carpenter?" "He eats with publicans and sinners."
"He casts out devils by Beelzebub." "If he was a
prophet he would have known that this woman was a
sinner." "If thou art the Christ, come down from the
Cross." But the prominence given to such criticisms is
no doubt due to a consciousness that they were still being
made. The message was proclaimed to a public which
was well aware how Jesus had actually lived. Left to
themselves the Christian teachers might have been
tempted to keep many things in the background, but no
174 VALIDITY OF THE GOSPEL RECORD
choice was given them. Their only safety was to de-
scribe the life of Jesus as it had really been, with no at-
tempt to give a false colour to anything. Misrepresen-
tations could best be answered by a plain statement of
facts.
(4) The Christian message itself was a factor in guard-
ing the record. Some emphasis must be laid on this, for
it is so often taken for granted that the doctrines which
had grown up around the Person of Christ must have
obscured the history almost from the outset. Jesus had
come to be regarded not as a human being but as the
Messiah; his life was construed in terms of prophecy
and apocalyptic; memories of him were dissolved 'into
theological symbols. To many modern writers it has
appeared self-evident that the rise of Christian doctrine
was the fatal obstacle to any true knowledge of Jesus.
As the object of the church's faith he ceased to have his-
torical reality. His earthly story was either forgotten
altogether or was transformed into a myth, similar to
those which had gathered around the divinities of Pagan
cults.
Now it may fairly be contended that the doctrines
in which the church expressed its faith would have just
the contrary effect. For one thing and this cannot be
too often repeated the message was based on the facts,
apart from which it had no meaning. Paul has been
charged, above all other teachers, with changing the
gospel into a theology and replacing the actual Jesus
with an imaginary divine being. Yet it is plain to every-
body who has grasped even the elements of Paul's teach-
THE BEGINNING OF THE TRADITION 175
ing that he builds upon the facts. His whole message
resolves itself into this that Christ, who was the power
and wisdom of God, manifested himself in a human
life and died for men. The historical fact was for Paul
the Christian revelation. This was the fundamental
principle of all the early teaching. It may be true to
say that the church thought of Jesus theologically, but
for this very reason it was compelled to know him as
he had really been. The theology consisted in the ap-
prehension of the fact.
Apart from this wider consideration we can see that
Christian doctrine made for the protection of the his-
torical record. The chief danger from the very outset
was in the exercise of mere fancy on the events of the
life of Jesus. Even in the Synoptic Gospels we can
trace the desire to heighten his miracles, to credit him
with exploits like those of the ancient prophets, to make
him the hero of tales borrowed from folk-lore. In the
course of the Gentile mission Jesus was assimilated to (
the demigods, and much of the old mythology was
transferred to him. The one aim was to make him
extraordinary, to endow him with supernatural powers
which had no necessary relation to any spiritual ends.
But by its conjunction with the Christian message the
record was preserved from these encroachments of
fable. Foreign elements might enter into it, but they
had to be in keeping with its essential character. It
could never be forgotten that Jesus was the Messiah,
who had come to do God's will, who had gone about
doing good, who in word and act had taught the true
176 VALIDITY OF THE GOSPEL RECORD
way of life. The church's conception of Jesus we may
call it theological if we will did not pervert the tra-
dition but provided a channel in which it could securely
flow. When all is said, the message in which the church
believed was itself the outcome of what Jesus had
achieved by his life. Faith in the message thus gave a
touchstone by which all accounts of his life could be
tested. When anything was reported of him which could
not be reconciled with the message it was at once felt
that he could not have done this thing or spoken that
word. This is the test which we still apply to those fan-
tastic modern theories which make him out to have been
a political agitator, a theosophical mystic, a fanatical
dreamer, an ordinary Rabbi. The primitive church ap-
plied the same test, and was saved by its knowledge of
the message from false and narrow estimates of the life.
Even in the earliest days, therefore, the tradition
was in various ways protected. No one had yet thought
of fixing it, and there were many possibilities of error 5
but the essential facts were sufficiently guarded from
perversion. At this point, too, it is well to lay stress on
one consideration which is too often left entirely out of
sight. If the tradition was orally preserved, and re-
mained fluid for a number of years, this was in some
ways a positive advantage. It is indeed true that no rec-
ord is safe until some kind of fixity has been given to
it, and this was soon recognised by the church. Never-
theless there is always a danger when any report is
fixed prematurely. Most of our errors with regard to
the past have been due to this cause, above all others.
THE BEGINNING OF THE TRADITION 177
Before the facts had time to become fully known, some
one wrote them down. He was only half-informed, and
possibly had some interest in putting a false account
into circulation} but his version stood as the original
and therefore the only authentic one, and was implicitly
accepted by all succeeding writers. Any attempt to dis-
card or circumvent it was treated as a breach of historical
veracity. A great part of what we call "history" is
nothing, if we only knew it, but the parrotlike repeti-
tion of 'those primary documents which were indeed
written down at the very time but were never true. For
the making of a genuine historical record there needs
always to be a period when everything is left fluid.
Points of detail, such as names, times, measurements,
orders given, cannot indeed be fixed too soon. If they
are left to the memory they will soon be confused, and
much more when they are entrusted to some one else's
memory. But when there is question not of some pre-
cise matter of fact but of the whole nature and bear-
ing of an event, time must be allowed for all the report's
to come in, and for different judgments to express
themselves. This was made possible by that initial pe-
riod -in which there was no formal record of the life of
Jesus. The church had not yet committed itself to any
set version of the events. Various accounts were cur-
rent} memories were checked against each other 5 reflec-
tion, criticism, imagination came into play, and undoubt-
edly there was some loss of literal correctness. Our
Gospels, it may be, contain no incident of which it may
confidently be said that the thing happened exactly as
178 VALIDITY OF THE GOSPEL RECORD
it is now set down. Yet in that intervening time the
facts were enabled to clarify themselves and reveal
something of their true import. If the earliest reports
were mistaken, the church had not stamped them with
an official sanction, and they could still be modified in
the light of fuller knowledge. A general picture was
forming itself, in which all details could find their right
place. Thus the period of loose oral tradition is not to
be regarded simply as one of unbridled rumour, in
which the history of Jesus became so hopelessly entan-
gled with legend that the truth could no longer be re-
covered. In some respects that initial period was serv-
iceable to the truth. If some record of Jesus had JDeen
written down immediately after his death it would have
ranked ever afterwards as primary and fundamental,
and for that reason would have blocked the way to all
real knowledge. It would have given the facts just as
they appeared at the moment, before they had made
themselves rightly known or had fallen into their due
proportions. Those years in which the church was not
committed to any set record gave opportunity, one may
say, for free discussion, which is always valuable al-
though much of the talk may seem foolish and irrele-
vant. While the question is still open it is examined
by different minds from many points of view, and by
this process the true issues are brought to light. So it
was necessary that the church should have an interval
in which it could freely consider all the accounts that
came to it of the life of Jesus, and allow scope to all
manner of opinions. All this time when it seemed to be
THE BEGINNING OF THE TRADITION 179
merely wandering it was unconsciously making up its
mind. When measures were at last taken to stabilise the
record it was found that most of the work was already
accomplished. The later teachers had only to formu-
late the data which had gradually emerged of their
own accord.
We are thus to conceive of the tradition adjusting
itself through a period in which all kinds of material
were mingled together. In its eagerness to learn more
about Jesus the church had welcomed information from
every quarter. Much of it was of inferior value, and
the wheat and tares, as in the parable, had grown up
side by side. The difficulty of the church, it must be re-
peated, lay not in the scantiness but in the embarrassing
plenty of its early records. Ridicule has often been
thrown on the wild statement of the Fourth Evangelist
that if he told all the things known of Jesus the world
would not contain the books (John 20:305 21:25). It
is naturally asked why, if he had so much to tell, he has
confined himself to a few incidents the same, for the'
most part, as those already recounted in the other Gos-
pels. Yet the statement so deliberately made at the
emphatic close of his work may reasonably be supposed
to have some foundation. If it had been utterly at vari-
ance with notorious fact it would have sounded absurd
to readers of his own time as it does to us. The sim-
plest explanation is that at the end of the first century
there existed a large number of traditions about Jesus.
Some of them had grown up out of later fancy and spec-
ulation, but for the most part they had come down from
l8O VALIDITY OF THE GOSPEL RECORD
earlier days, and were still circulating among the peo-
ple, although they had been excluded from the record.
Out of the abundant material which had accumulated
in the primitive age the church had decided on some
things which were to be preserved.
This selection was the more natural as the reminis-
cences of Jesus consisted of a great many episodes, quite
separate from each other. It would have been difficult
to break up and remodel a coherent narrative; but the
question was only one of choosing from a miscellaneous
heap of anecdotes and sayings those which had proved
themselves best worth keeping. To many people it has
appeared strange and not a little suspicious thaj the
life of Jesus should only have been known in this frag-
mentary fashion. The conclusion has been drawn that
some disaster had overtaken the tradition. By accident
or design the greater part of what must once have been
a complete history has been concealed from our knowl-
edge; the life as a whole has been submerged, and only
a few incidents stand out, like patches of island from a
lost territory. But we may be certain that there never
was a continuous record. Much was remembered about
Jesus, but all in the shape of those separate anecdotes.
This, if we reflect on it, is the manner in which every
man's life is. remembered, before it is purposely made
the subject of a biography. Most of us have had occa-
sion to realise how difficult it would be to give any con-
secutive account of the life-story even of an intimate
friend. We know his early life only in the vaguest out-
line; whole years of his later career are hidden from
THE BEGINNING OF THE TRADITION l8l
usj we cannot tell what he has been doing even in the
few weeks or days since we met him last. It is only in
modern times that biography in the proper sense has
been made possible, since it requires access to official
documents and" collections of letters, easy communica-
tion with many persons in scattered localities. In for-
mer days the life of any man was only known by its
few main landmarks, and by means of these a frame-
work was constructed which was filled in with anecdotal
material/ So it is wrong to infer that the record of
Jesus has been lost or mutilated because it has only
come to us in brief episodes. That was the manner in
which all knowledge of him would naturally be handed
down. A great many incidents were remembered, but
there was no means of linking them together or filling
in the gaps between them. His followers could recall
how on this occasion and that he had done or spoken
something that impressed them, but they had^ never at-
tempted to make a detailed study of his career as a
whole. So the little anecdotal sections which make up
our Gospels are not to be regarded as fragments, broken
off from a narrative which was once complete. They
represent the story of Jesus as it had always been told.
His disciples did not profess to know all about him.
They could only speak of journeys they had made with
him, of actions which at one time and another they had
seen him perform. The result, it must be granted, is a
string of disconnected incidents rather than a history;
but it is just in this manner that we all remember the
friends whom we seem to have known best.
l82 VALIDITY OF THE GOSPEL RECORD
Here we come on a question which has bulked largely
in recent discussion, and has given rise to many doubts
and misgivings. It is pointed out that the Gospels are
nothing but a mosaic of detached pieces which the evan-
gelists themselves have put together, and from this it
is argued that nothing can be rightly known of the true
course of the history. What the writers had before
them was only a confused mass of anecdotes which they
have combined by mere guess-work in a purely arbi-
trary fashion. We know a number of things which Jesus
did, but no clue is given us, for the evangelists them-
selves did not possess it, to the time or circumstances in
which he did them. Thus the history of Jesus, in any
proper sense of the word, is veiled from us. It is open
to any one to break up the Gospel of Mark into its com-
ponent pieces and by rearranging them to build up an
entirely different history from the traditional one. Any
other guess as to the true place of a given incident will
be as good as Mark's, since he could have no better con-
ception of the story as a whole than we can form our-
selves.
Now to some extent it may be admitted that the or-
der of events in our Gospels is artificial. Matthew and
Luke, while they follow Mark in their main outline, are
constantly at variance with him and with each other in
their placing of various incidents. They are evidently
aware that Mark had only been guided by his own judg-
ment, and believe that in some instances it had misled
him and needed to be corrected. Very often their motive
in changing the order seems to be a purely literary one.
THE BEGINNING OF THE TRADITION 183
They are anxious (and this is especially true of Mat-
thew) to bring together passages which bear on the
same theme, or serve in some way to illustrate each
other. Mark himself yields at times to this desire, even
when he has to do violence to historical sequence. At
Cxsarea Philippi, for instance, after Jesus has declared
that as the Messiah he must suffer and die, the narra-
tive proceeds: "And when he had called the people unto
him with his disciples also, he said to them: Whoever
will come after me let him deny himself and take up his
cross and follow me" (Mk. 8:34). It must have been
obvious to Mark as it is to ourselves that this address to
the people was out of place in circumstances where Jesus
was alone with his disciples in a foreign country. The
passage can have been brought in for no other reason
than that it fitted in with the idea that Jesus, as Messiah,
had given the example of suffering. So it has to be rec-
ognised that the evangelists are often careless of his-
torical order. They make room for incidents in settings
where they will be most effective, and sometimes throw
several incidents together and insert them at any con-
venient break in the narrative. The material has come
down in. the form of many stray anecdotes, and no pre-
tence is made that the position of every detail can be
exactly determined.
None the less, the evangelists set themselves to write
history, and have been at pains to get all their data, as
far as possible, into historical sequence. Luke expressly
tells us that one of his main objects is to arrange the rec-
ord "in order." No doubt he uses this phrase in a gen-
184 VALIDITY OF THE GOSPEL RECORD
eral sense, implying that he has sought to make a read-
able narrative out of the disjecta membra of the tradi-
tion j but he also wishes us to understand that the narra-
tive agrees broadly with the true succession of events. It
is clear that Mark has exercised great care in the ordering
of his various episodes. His method has been simply to
recount them, one after another, with the loosest of con-
necting links, and this is apt to create in the reader the
sense of a mere jumble. In our earliest notice of Mark's
Gospel by Papias he is said to have stated his facts "cor-
rectly but without order" 5 but this is manifestly an error.
It cannot be questioned that Mark has placed the events
in a more natural and intelligible order than any other
evangelist j and he cannot have done so by accident. He
must have worked on his material with reflection and
insight. It had come to him from a variety of sources
but he has sorted out the scattered notices and shaped
them into history.
The view is sometimes put forward that what we now
accept as the Gospel history is due to nothing else than
this ingenuity of Mark. He knew nothing whatever of
the true course of the life of Jesus, and was himself solely
responsible for that great story which has so fascinated
all succeeding times. This is a melancholy conclusion,
and also, it may confidently be affirmed, an absurd one.
For one thing, most of the episodes themselves indicate
their place in the history. The Baptism must have come
at the beginning, and the Passion at the end. The Pas-
sion must have been preceded by those events which
plainly lead up to it, while most of the illustrative anec-
THE BEGINNING OF THE TRADITION 185
dotes must belong to the teaching ministry in Galilee.
When they are closely examined it is found that most
of them, by their intrinsic character, can be assigned to
their place in the eaYlier or the later part of the minis-
try. It is hardly too much to say that if nothing were
known of the course of Jesus' life it could still be recon-
structed, with a fair degree of certainty, from the anec-
dotes which have come to us. If these were all written
on separate .cards, which were then 'thrown together
and shuffled a dozen times over, an intelligent man would
be able to arrange them in something like the order
adopted in our Gospels. Although he had no previous
knowledge of the life of Jesus he would perceive, from
the inner character of these stories, that they ought to
stand in that order. It cannot be supposed, however,
that our evangelists entered on their task with minds
entirely blank. They must already have been well in-
formed on the life of Jesus, or else their undertaking to
write an account of it would have been a sheer imperti-
nence. However they may have obtained their knowledge
they must have believed that they were specially quali-
fied to deal with this subject: that is the first inference we
are entitled to draw from the very existence of any book.
For that part, all instructed Christians of the early days
would understand, at least in a general way, how the life
of Jesus had shaped itself, for it was only on that condi-
tion that the separate stories would have any point or
meaning. When an anecdote is told you of some famous
man it is assumed that you know about him and can fit
this particular thing into the framework of your knowl-
1 86 VALIDITY OF THE GOSPEL RECORD
edge. When the ancient minstrel recited some exploit of
King Arthur or William Wallace or Robin Hood he
could take for granted that his audience were familiar
with the history. Each adventure might be complete in
itself, but it stood out against a background apart from
which it was meaningless. In like manner the Christian
who listened to the story of the Temptation or the con-
fession at Caesarea Philippi would require to know some-
thing of Jesus' life as a whole. If this knowledge was
wanting it would need in every case to be supplied by
some brief summary narrative, such as Luke puts into
the mouth of Peter when he met with the heathen cen-
turion Cornelius. "That word which was published
throughout all Judaea and began from Galilee, after the
baptism which John preached 5 how God anointed Jesus
of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power 5 who
went about doing good and healing all who were op-
pressed by the devil, for God was with him. And we
are witnesses of all that he did in the land of the Jews
and in Jerusalem j whom they slew and hanged on a
tree 5 him God raised up on the third day and showed
him openly" (Acts 10:3739). A narrative of this
kind, as Luke was well aware, formed the necessary
prelude to any attempt to explain the meaning of the
message of Christ.
It is thus preposterous to hold that while much was
reported in detail about the actions of Jesus, nothing
was known of the main outline of his life. The theory
has been gravely put forward, but it dissolves of its own
accord as soon as we try to think of it coherently. The
THE BEGINNING OF THE TRADITION 187
one thing which every Christian, from the very begin-
ning, was bound to know was the general history of
Jesus. Paul takes for granted whenever he mentions the
name of Jesus that all his readers have at least this
knowledge. There might be ignorance on every point
of detail but even the humblest convert could tell who
Jesus was, and what course his life had followed before
it culminated in his death. Without this elementary
knowledge no one could become a Christian. The evan-
gelists also pre-suppose this knowledge on the part of
their readers, and on the ground of it they build up their
record of how the varied incidents had happened. They
differ continually, as historians must always do, in their
placing of particular facts 5 but they are agreed on the
broad outline. This, it need not be doubted, had been
inseparable, at every stage of the transmission, from the
church's account of Jesus.
CONCLUSION
THE problem of origins is always an insoluble one.
At the end of his search the explorer comes always on
many streams that combine to make the river; and each
of them issues from springs which are hidden under-
ground. So the course of Gospel tradition cannot be
traced back beyond a certain point. We know that be-
fore anything was written the church possessed records
of Jesus, but how they originated, or what was their
earliest character, we shall never know.
Much has been done, however, by modern criticism
to push farther back, though not to dispel, the darkness
which conceals the primitive tradition. Even in the last
few years a number of new and illuminating facts have
been established. If they have led at times to negative
results this has been due much more to theories read
into them than to the facts themselves.
It may be gathered that the account of Jesus was first
transmitted orally, and consisted of a great number of
separate anecdotes and sayings. This record was pre-
served in the Christian community, and was associated
with the common worship. It was adapted to the needs
and circumstances of the brotherhood and was also em-
ployed in support of the Christian message especially
of the central belief that Jesus was the Messiah. While
it was still in the oral phase it came to be invested with
forms, which were more or less conventional. These
188
CONCLUSION 189
conclusions are reasonably certain, and it does not fol-
low from any of them or from all of them together that
the record is untrustworthy. Each of the factors that
entered into the process of transmission would seem,
rather, to make for authenticity. Since it belonged to the
community the record was saved from the caprice of in-
dividual reporters. Since it remained for some time
fluid, it was open to the additions and corrections which
were rendered necessary by fuller knowledge. Since it
was moulded, at a sufficiently early date, according to
set patterns, it was made secure. The church had now
selected various episodes and sayings which it deemed
peculiarly valuable, and fixed them, by this device of
form, in the most approved version. It would indeed be
idle to maintain that the whole record, as we now have
it, is a literal transcript of historical facts. Changes have
manifestly come about in the course of transmission 5 and
this may equally be said of any history that has ever
been written. But it may fairly be asserted that the
process which led up to the making of our Gospels was"
not one of wilful distortion. Perhaps there could have
been no process which was better fitted to sift out and
conserve the substantial truth.
The question of the validity of the Gospels is a lit-
erary and historical one, and has to be investigated by
critical methods. No end can be served by dogmatic
statements that since our religion is founded on the Gos-
pels everything contained in them must be accepted as
true. Faith cannot be employed in this manner as a
guarantee for historical fact. Nevertheless it is not pos-
I9O VALIDITY OF THE GOSPEL RECORD
sible to study the Gospels, even from a purely critical
point of view, without some regard to their religious
purpose. Whatever their origin may have been they
were meant to bear witness to the Christian message,
and the nature of that message must be borne in mind
before we can assess their value as history. In a very
real sense the critical problem depends in the last re-
sort on the religious one.
It might seem at first sight as if the truth of Chris-
tianity ought to be separated entirely from historical
questions. Jesus may not have lived in just the manner
described in the Gospels 5 he may prove to be a figure
more or less legendary} but so long as he is recognised
by faith as the ideal of the highest life he has religious
value for us. Religion has always been a symbolism,
and Jesus is our symbol of God; in him we are able to
apprehend the fact of God, and to bring it into living
relation to our human life. Faith in Christ does not rest
on what he may have been historically, but on the em-
bodiment which is given by this character, whether real
or imaginary, to our purest conception of the divine. It
is therefore argued that the enquiry into his recorded
life is a matter of secondary importance, and that no
religious interest can be much affected by the results.
Men once believed that Christianity itself was in danger
if any jot or tittle of the Gospel history was set aside,
and for ages a ban was laid on even the most elementary
efforts at criticism. We have now learned that our reli-
gion is secure although various parts of the record may
be considered doubtful. Would anything vital be lost if
CONCLUSION 191
criticism were to go further, and explain the whole his-
torical tradition as the outgrowth of later piety and im-
agination? However the story of Jesus may have arisen
it is still valid as the symbolic expression of our religion.
It is not Jesus himself who is the substance of the Chris-
tian faith but that conception of God and His redeeming
purpose which is summed up for us in our thought of
Jesus.
A view of this kind has often been put forward, and
may be regarded as a survival from those philosophies
which were dominant in the middle of last century. Ac-
cording to the Hegelian formula, "the rational is the
real," and the inner truth of any phenomenon must be
sought in the abstract idea which for the moment has ex-
pressed itself under forms of space and time. What we
call history is nothing but the unfolding of an immanent
reason; and this is eminently true of religious history.
Jesus is a landmark in the realisation of the divine idea.
Everything in his story which was bound up with ephem-
eral conditions was of the nature of parable and illusion^
and must be stripped away before the truth is disclosed. A
century ago this reading of the Gospels appeared to
make them more profound and significant, but for a long
time now there has been a steady reaction against the
type of thought which identifies the real with the ab-
stract. We are coming to recognise that an idea does not
properly exist until it takes shape as picture or poem or
institution or event. The embodiment is no mere husk
or shell which needs to be discarded, but is the perfect-
ing of the idea. The actual is the real.
192 VALIDITY OF THE GOSPEL RECORD
It is this change of attitude, more than anything else,
which accounts for that growing interest in the life of
Jesus, of which there have been so many evidences in
recent years. To some extent it is no doubt due to a
natural curiosity as to the true character of that extraor-
dinary life, which has been at last thrown open to free
investigation. It is due still more to a new perception
of the unique greatness of Jesus. He was formerly
viewed from a distance, through a mist of creed and
dogma, and there was always a fear that he might shrink
to common stature if he could only be looked at more
closely. This fear has proved baseless. With the crum-
bling of those doctrines which were intended to mag-
nify him, Jesus has become yet grander, and stands out
in his own right as the most arresting figure in history.
Once more, behind the interest in the record there is an
urgent practical motive. Amidst the unexampled dif-
ficulties of our time men are seeking for some clear
direction. They have not found it in any traditional
creed, and much less in any of the social or philosophi-
cal substitutes. May it not be that Jesus himself pos-
sessed the secret which all his interpreters have missed?
If we can only reach back to him as he once lived on
earth we may discover his way of deliverance.
These motives, however, all spring from the con-
viction that in religion, as in all else, the truth must be
apprehended as something concrete. In every branch of
the church to-day there is a retreat from those formal
doctrines which were once accepted as the very substance
of Christianity. They have lost their hold, not so much
CONCLUSION , 193
because they have grown doubtful, as because they are
merely doctrines. If a revelation is to have meaning for
us it must be real in the sense that life itself is. A hun-
dred and fifty years ago Lessing declared that a perma-
nent faith cannot be based on contingent facts of history j
and this principle appealed to many as self-evident, and
seemed to spell the doom of historical Christianity. Yet
the modern mind has found itself driven almost to re-
verse it. Apart from the facts of history there can be no
sure basis for faith. Ideas in themselves have no true
existence, and remain outside of our life. Before we can
lay hold of God he must enter into this world of reality
of which we form a part. The Word must become flesh.
This is the conviction which has always lain at the
heart of Christianity, and to which it owes its distinctive
character. It is an historical religion, not merely in the
sense that we know the date and circumstances of its
origin, but in the deeper sense that the history was itself
the revelation. God was made known through things
that actually happened. "What we have heard, what we,
have seen with our eyes and have looked upon, and our
hands have handled of the word of life, declare we unto
you" (I John 1:1). This has always been the essential
Christian message, and can be discerned even in types of
belief which we rightly condemn as unspiritual. Our
sympathy is with the reformers who protested against
the image-worship of the Byzantine church and the
mediaeval cult of sacraments. Yet it needs to be recog-
nised that in those superstitions a genuine religious in-
stinct was at work. The revelation had been given in
194 VALIDITY OF THE GOSPEL RECORD
visible events, and the Christian mind insisted, in how-
ever crude a fashion, on that actuality which was in-
herent in Christian faith. It is this same instinct which
is forcing us back, in our own day, to the historical life
of Jesus. One cannot but feel, at times, that attention
is too much concentrated on the history. Men are in
danger of repeating the error of which Paul was afraid
when he determined that he would no more know Christ
after the flesh. Yet the desire to see Jesus as a definite
figure in history is a legitimate and a profoundly Chris-
tian one. Our religion was given in a life that was once
lived among us, and if we are to recover the religion in
its true significance and power, we must begin with a
fuller understanding of the life.
The question at issue in the investigation of the Gos-
pels is thus of fundamental import. Is this account of
Jesus historical, or must we seek its origin in the pious
fancy of the church? Nothing is gained by contending
that in either case the record inspires and uplifts us:
for there is a world of difference between something
imagined and something that has been realised. The
loftiest ideal, so long as it is nothing more, can do little
to help us. Most often it leaves us with a sense of futil-
ity, as we compare that which is with the perfect thing
which can never be. Plato, himself a great poet, re-
quired that all poets should be banished from his Re-
public. He was aware that poetry tends only to weaken
the nerve of action. From their sojourn among the
clouds men turn with distaste and weariness to the work
that lies to their hands. And if Christianity is to quicken
CONCLUSION 195
and direct the lives of men, it must rest on the assurance
that the story of Jesus is real. If it could be proved to
be nothing more than a glorious legend, woven out of
the dreams and longings of the early believers, our re-
ligion would fall to the ground. It would cease to have
any relation to this world of actuality in which we live.
It would be paralysed at the very centre of its power.
This was fully apparent to the Christians of the first
century. For them, too, the worth of Jesus' message was
bound up with the reality of his life and death; and the
first great controversy in the church turned on this very
question. According to the so-called Docetic teaching the
life of Jesus was only an appearance, since it was incon-
ceivable that the divine nature should ally itself with
material existence. Jesus had indeed come to earth and
had brought the knowledge of God, but he had only
worn the semblance of a human body; he had seemed
to identify himself with man's common lot, while re-
maining aloof from it. The Docetists did not 'question
the validity of the Gospel record, but in their own
strange manner they reached the same position as that
which is often maintained to-day, in the name of the lat-
est criticism. They held that the life of Jesus, while it
had a unique spiritual value, was historically unreal.
Against this Docetic view all the later New Testament
writings are in one way or another directed. The church
perceived that by denying reality to the earthly life the
heretics had cancelled the whole meaning of the Chris-
tian revelation. If Christ had not fully shared the life
of men he had effected nothing, for the divine power he
196 VALIDITY OF THE GOSPEL RECORD
was supposed to impart had never entered the world at
all. It was the Docetic heresy which compelled the
church to state this conviction in explicit terms, but from
the outset all Christian thinking was rooted in the be-
lief that the life of Jesus was real. He had appeared in
the flesh 5 he had taught and done and suffered certain
things which were fully attested. All teachers were
left free to interpret the facts, by the light of scripture
and the Spirit 5 but there must be no dubiety as to the
facts themselves.
Most probably we owe our Gospels to nothing else
than to this consciousness on the part of the church that
fact and interpretation must be kept separate. There
was a place for doctrine and mystical vision, but these
could have no meaning unless the historical facts were
definitely put on record. However the revelation might
be understood, it was contained in the life of Jesus as
it had once been lived on earth, and the knowledge of
this life was the one thing necessary. When Paul con-
trasts the Jew listening to the law of Moses with the
Christian beholding the face of Christ (II Cor. 3:15-
18), he may have meant the comparison literally. The
worship of the synagogue centred on the reading of the
law j that of the church on the recounting of the Gospel
narrative. Believers could feel, as they heard the story
of Jesus, that he lived again before their eyes; and in
this beholding of him the message consisted. Christianity
was nothing else than the apprehension of God through
the word and action of Jesus.
Here, then, we have the ultimate ground for con-
CONCLUSION 197
fidence that in our Gospels we have a genuine historical
record. They were written for a religious purpose which
they could only fulfil by a true narration of the facts.
It is often maintained that in reading the Gospels we
must exercise two kinds of judgment, which need to be
kept distinct. On the one hand, we must be aliv" to their
religious message; on the other hand, we must examine
them critically. In so far as they purport to be works,
of history they are subject to the ordinary laws of his-
torical evidence, and our conclusions must rest on no
other ground. Now it is indeed true that the criticism of
the Gospels ought not to be influenced by any religious
pre-possessibns, but one thing has always to be borne in
mind. The religious value of the Gospels cannot be
separated from their historical value. It was the Chris-
tian belief that God had revealed himself and had
wrought salvation through a human life, which was lived
in a particular manner, in a given place and time. The
religion was contained in the facts which the writings
profess to record, and historical fidelity was essential to ,
their religious purpose. The reporters were fully aware
that by perverting the record they would destroy its
significance. These events had value for Christian faith
because they had really happened, and no invention,
however impressive, could take the place of the fact. It
may be taken as certain that the chief interest of the
early teachers, from the oral period onward, was to pre-
serve the truth of the record. Their motive was a re-
ligious one. The Christian message, as they understood
it, was given in the historical facts, which must there-
198 VALIDITY OF THE GOSPEL RECORD
fore be reported just as they were. When Paul recounts
the Lord's appearances as he knew them from the
Apostles, he declares that if the facts are wrongly stated
"we shall be found false witnesses of God" (I Cor. 15:
15). This was the attitude of all teachers who dealt
with the Gospel history. They were entrusted with the
knowledge of those facts through which God had made
his revelation, and were pledged to offer true witness.
The Christian message, it cannot be too often re-
peated, was the announcement of a fact, and from this
point of view the tradition must be understood. To be
sure there was a theology, which bulks so largely in
the New Testament that it might seem to constitute the
whole religion. We conceive of the primitive believers
as pre-occupied with certain doctrines which gave rise
to a church, and to the story of a half-mythical Lord
who had been its founder. But these doctrines were not
the distinctive element in early Christianity. There was
little in them that was peculiarly new. For almost all of
them it is not difficult to find analogies in Judaism, or
in the religion and philosophy of the Hellenistic world.
Much labour has been expended in tracing out these
analogies, and in thus demonstrating that there was noth-
ing original in the message proclaimed by the church. But
it was never claimed that the theological ideas were new.
They were taken over, more or less consciously, from
the thought of the time in order to explain and illus-
trate the essential message, which consisted simply in the
announcement of what Jesus had done. The doctrines
were borrowed, but the church added to them one tre-
CONCLUSION 199
mendous thing which was absolutely new. It affirmed
that what had been desired and hoped for had now be-
come fact. The prophets had foretold a Messiah j he
had now come. They had sought to believe that God
was merciful and would save his people; Jesus had
manifested this divine goodness in action. By a life
which men had witnessed with their own eyes all the
promises had received the yea and amen. This, as the
early church understood it, was the Gospel. Jews and
Pagans could argue, as we know they did, that the Chris-
tian teachers had nothing to say which they had not
heard already, in more impressive language, from then-
own prophets and mystics and .philosophers. But there
was one thing which they now heard for the first time.
What had hitherto been dream and premonition had
been realised, and the Christian teaching was concerned
with this reality. Unless it transmitted faithfully the
facts of the life of Jesus the church had no message, and
no right to exist.
The origin of the Gospels must thus be sought in the
very nature of the new religion. If God had revealed
himself in events of history a record was necessary, and
it must be in strict accordance with the facts. Nothing
but a true report could answer the purpose, since the
thing that happened was the revelation. It was thus the
Christian religion which preserved the record, and which
also guided the process by which it was sifted and con-
solidated. For the Gospels as we have them cannot have
been made out of chance reminiscences which had some-
how survived after the real history of Jesus had been
2OO VALIDITY OF THE GOSPEL RECORD
forgotten. They contain the final result of a long selec-
tion, in which the church had fastened, with a sure in-
stinct, on those memories of Jesus which were most char-
acteristic of his life and thought. The proof of this may
be found in the sheer excellence of the Gospels. There
are no books in the world which bring together within
so brief a compass so much that is great and beautiful,
and this cannot be due to any accident. An intelligent
reader some ages hence who should come on a copy of
the Golden Treasury, with no clue whatever to its na-
ture, would yet see for himself that it was no mere scrap-
book of stray verse. He would perceive, as he read it,
that it must have had behind it a great literature, of
which it preserved the very quintessence. Must we not
arrive at a similar conclusion regarding our Gospels?
Out of a rich material the church has given us the best.
In some measure, no doubt, it was guided in its choice
by its own immediate needs 5 but it is absurd to think of
the early community as concerned wholly with matters
of cult and administration. The grand interest of that
first community, as of all Christian churches since, was
in the religion of Jesus. It chose out those sayings in
which he gave utterance to his deepest mind, those in-
cidents in which he stood out most manifestly as the
revelation of God's mercy and forgiveness. This re-
sponse to the message of Jesus was the ultimate factor
in the shaping of the records.
Jesus in his own Person is the substance of Chris-
tianity, and it is only through the Gospels that we know
him as he lived on earth. How far can we trust these
CONCLUSION 2OI
narratives, on which our religion, in the final issue, de-
pends? In former times they were fenced around by
church doctrine and authority, and were thus guarded
against all assault j but this is no longer possible, nor is
it consistent with the nature of the Gospels themselves.
They claim to record a history, and thereby challenge
the same scrutiny as that which is applied to other his-
torical documents. If Christianity were nothing but a
mysticism or a philosophy, the religious judgment would
be enough 5 but it bases itself on facts, and we have the
right to demand that it should prove the facts. They
cannot be proved except by the ordinary methods of his-
torical criticism. Yet all Christian men feel it to be in-
tolerable that their religion should lie at the mercy of
academical critics, who will always differ from one an-
other, and whose conclusions are doubtful and fluctuat-
ing at the best. Is there no stable ground on which our
confidence in the Gospel history may be rested? There
is one such ground, which cannot be much affected by'
any changes of critical opinion. For our knowledge of
Jesus we must indeed depend on the records, left to us
by those primitive teachers who alone had acquaintance
with the facts. Yet we can be certain that they witnessed
truly, for their religion was one with the history. They
believed that God had revealed himself through Jesus
Christ, and for that belief they willingly died. But the
revelation had no meaning for them apart from the ac-
tual life. They recorded the life with the full consci-
ousness that if Jesus had not lived in this manner their
faith was vain. It was in the facts that God had spoken,
2O2 VALIDITY OF THE GOSPEL RECORD
and by the knowledge of them men would apprehend
God. This is our ultimate security for the Gospel rec-
ord. It is attested by the faith which inspired the early
disciples, and through them is living to this day. It can
be said of the records, as of the message which they pro-
claim: "therein is the righteousness of God revealed,
from faith to faith."
BIBLIOGRAPHY
BIBLIOGRAPHY
THE enquiry into the validity of the Gospels involves a
multitude of questions, critical, historical and theological. No
complete account of the literature is possible, but the fol-
lowing list of books will at least indicate some of the relevant
lines of study. The books selected are not in every case- the
best, but they are easily accessible, and are typical of the mod-
ern investigation in its more important aspects.
LIVES OF JESUS
Bousset, Wilhelm, Jesus (English translation).
Case, S. J., Jesus; a New Biography.
Eisler, Robert, Messiah-Jesus. (English translation.) A monu-
ment of vast misdirected learning.
Goguel, M., Vie de Jesus. (English translation.) Perhaps the
fullest and most judicious of the more recent "Lives.''
Guignebert, C. A. H., Jesus. (English translation.) A work
of great ability, written from an unduly negative point
of view.
Headlam, A. C., Life and Teaching of Jesus, the Christ. '
Klausner, J., Jesus of Nazareth. (Translated from Hebrew.)
By an eminent Jewish scholar, with a strong Jewish
bias; but for that reason peculiarly interesting and valu-
able.
Merejkowski, D. S., Jesus the Unknown. (English transla-
tion.)
Jesus Manifest. (English translation.) Two wildly
erratic books, with flashes of deep insight, only possible
to a man of genius.
Schweitzer, Albert, Quest of the Historical Jesus. (English
translation.)
205
2O6 BIBLIOGRAPHY.
Warschauer, Joseph, The Historical Jesus.
Wernle, D. P., Jesus. (English translation.)
THE SYNOPTIC PROBLEM
Buckley, E. R., Introduction to the Synoptic Problem.
Burkitt, F. C., The Gospel History and Its Transmission.
Cadbury, H. J., The Making of Luke Acts.
Goodspeed, E. J., An Introduction to the New Testament.
Lake, Kirsopp and Silva, An Introduction to the New Testa-
ment.
Moffatt, James, Introduction to the New Testament.
Stanton, V. H., The Gospels as Historical Documents.
Streeter, B. H., The Four Gospels.
Taylor, V., The Synoptic Problem.
FORM CRITICISM
Bultmann, R., Die Geschichte der syno'ptischen Evangelien.
Dibelius, M., From Tradition to Gospel. (English transla-
tion.)
Easton, B. S., The Gospel before the Gospels.
Fascher, E., Formgeschichte.
Grant, F. C., Form Criticism. (A translation of short books
by D. Rudolf Bultmann and Karl Kundsin.)
Schmidt, K. L., Der Rahmen der Geschichte, Jesu.
THE PRIMITIVE CHURCH
Dobschiitz, Ernst, Christian Life in the Primitive Church.
(English translation.)
Lietzmann, Hans, The Beginnings of the Christian Church.
The Founding of the Church Universal. (Translation
of the first two volumes of Die Geschichte der Alien
Kirche.
Linton, O., Das Problem der Urkirche.
Lowrie, W., The Church and Its Organisation.
BIBLIOGRAPHY 2OJ
Macdonald, A. B., Christian Worship in the Primitive Church.
McGiffert, A. C., The Apostolic Age.
Pfleiderer, Otto, Primitive Christianity. (English translation.)
This work and McGiffert's, though written in the last
generation, are still of first-rate value.
Ropes, J. H., The Apostolic Age in the Light of Modern
Criticism.
Streeter, B. H., The Primitive Church.
Weiss, Johannes, Das Urchristentum.
Weizsacker, K. H., The Apostolic Age of the Christian
Church. (English translation.)
THE JEWISH TRADITION
Abrahams, Israel, Studies in Pharisaism and the Gospels. 1st
and 2nd Series.
Box, G. H., The Religion and Worship of the Synagogue.
Finkelstein, Louis, Akiba.
Herf ord, R. T., Pharisaism, Its Aim and Its Method.
Christianity in Talmud and Midrash.
Montefiore, C. J., Rabbinic Literature and Gospel Teachings.
Moore, G. F., Judaism. 3 vols.
Oesterley, W. O. E., Judaism and Christianity. Vol. I.
Strack, H. C.Billerbeck, Paul, Kommentar zum Neuen
Testament. 4 vols. An indispensable store-house of Rab- '
binical parallels.
PAUL AND THE LIFE OF JESUS
Feine, K. E. P., Neutestamentliche Theologie.
Goguel, Maurice, TJApBtre Paul et Jesus Christ.
Jesus the Nazarene. (English translation.)
Holtzmann, H. J., Neutestamentliche Theologie.
Meyer, Eduard, Ursprung und Anf'dnge des Christentums.
Morgan, W., Religion and Theology of Paul.
Porter, F. C., The Mind of Christ in Paul.
Weinel, Heinrich, Neutestamentliche Theologie.
2O8 BIBLIOGRAPHY
TEACHING OF JESUS
Bacon, B. W., Studies in Matthew.
Branscomb, B. H., Jesus and the Law of Moses.
The Teachings of Jesus.
Dalman, G. F., Die Worte Jesu.
Dodd, C. H., The Parables of the Kingdom.
Jiilicher, Adolf, Die Gleichnisreden Jesu.
Manson, T., The Teaching of Jesus.
Smith, B. M. T., The Parables of the Synoptic Gospels.
Wrede, W., Die Worte Jesu.
COMMENTARIES ON THE GOSPELS
Easton, B. S., St. Luke.
Loisy, A. F., Les evangiles synoptiques. '
McNeile, A. H., The Gospel According to St. Matthew.
James Moffatt New Testament Commentary, the vols. on
Matthew y Mark and Luke.
Montefiore, C. G., The Synoptic Gospels. (Revised edition.)
Rawlinson, A. E. J., St. Mark.
Weiss, J., Die Schriften des Neuen Testaments. Vol. I.
GENERAL
Burkitt, F. C., Christian Beginnings.
Dodd, C. H., The Apostolic Preaching.
Jackson, F. J. Foakes, and Lake, K., Beginnings of Christianity.
Vols. I and II.
James, M. R., The Apocryphal Gospels.
Lightfoot, R. H., History and Interpretation in the Gospels.
McGiffert, A. C., Christianity as History and Faith.
Morgan, W., The Nature and Right of Religion.
Norden, Edward, Agnostos Theos.
INDEX
INDEX
Abundance of early material,
148, i64f., 179
Acts, book of, 35, 60, 64, 166
Actuality, 191, 195
Agabus, 69
Agrippa, 165
Albertz, M., 83, 133
Alexandrian theology, 50
Anthologies, 149
Antioch, 59, HI
Apocalyptic, 171
Apocrypha, 2, 169
Apollos, 80
Apostles' Creed, 36
Apostolic preaching, 68
Arabian tales, 140
Aramaic, 59, 114, 117, 138
Beatitudes, 125
Biography, modern, 181
Boswell, 126
Bousset, W., 85
Branscomb, B. H., 4
Brotherly love, 65
Bultmann, D. R., 133
Bunyan, 17
Byzantine church, 193
Caesar, 39, 137
Cassarea Philippi, 183
Case,S.J.,54
Checks on tradition, I72f.
Christian community, 9, 54, $$S.
Church meeting, 66f.
Church practice, IO
Claudius, 17
Controversy, 50, 83f.
Corinth, 68
Cornelius, 186
Couchod, 1 6, 69
Council of Jerusalem, no
Cromwell, 23
Defoe, 140
Dibelius, M., 65, 68, in, 117,
I33 135
. Divorce, 55, 84
Docetism, 195
Doctrine, I74f., 192
Dodd, C. H., 27
Doublets in Gospels, 13
Drews, 16
Eastern story-telling, 167
Easton, B. S., 133, 1^4
Elders, testimony of, 160
Enthusiasm in worship, 70
Esquimaux, 77
Eusebius, 1 60
Example of Christ, 153
Fact as revelation, 175
Faith in Christ, 41, 137, 190
Fascher, .,133
Fixity of record, 163
Forgiveness, 53
Form, meaning of, I34ff.
Tormgeschichte, 39, H5f.
Formulation, process of, 129, 144
Fourth Gospel, 48f., 179, 202
Gadara, madman of, 168
211
212
INDEX
Gnosticism, 50
Goguel, M., 48, 49, 69
Golden Treasury, 200
"Gospel," 28, 47
Grant, F. C., 54, 133
Guignebert, C. A. H., 8, 1 6, 131
Haggada, 16
Hebrew prophecy, 5
Hebrews, Epistle to, 170
Hegel, 191
Hellenistic influence, 37
Historical methods, 18
Homeric poems, 117, 145
House gatherings, 66
Hymns, 149
Ignatius, 47
Illiteracy, nof.
Illustrative anecdotes, 120
Imitation of Christ, 152
Instruction, 80
Interpretation and history, 35f.
Isaiah, 73
Jackson, F. J. F., 92
James, 63
Jerusalem, 6if.
Josephus, 17.
Kalthoff, 1 6
Kerygma, 27, 113
Kingdom of God, 26
Klausner, J., 31
Kundsin, 54
Lake, K., 92
Legend, 156
Lessing, G. E., 193
Lightfoot, R. H., 26, 33, 48
Literary expression, 146, 160
Literature, Gospels as, 146
Livy, 19
Logos doctrine, 51
Lohmeyer, E., 61
Loisy, A. F., 16, 65
Lord's Supper, 45, 97, 153
Luke, Gospel of, 12, 151
Luke, prelude of, 10, 18, 138,
158, 162
Luther, 131
Maccabees, books of, 17
Mark, Gospel of, 4, 154, 168,
182
Matthew's Gospel, plan of, 12
Messianic message, 9, 3 if., 90,
151, 1 66
Messianic prophecy, 22
Messianic secret, 32, 51
Milton, 57
Miracles, 21, 22, 121, 169
Mosaic law, 65
Motives of selection, 15 of.
Mysticism, 53
Myth and history, 97, 154, 174
Narrative forms, I38f.
Narrative, Marcan, 159
Nationalism, 84
Nativity stories, 169
Naturalness of Jesus' teaching,
128
Opposition of Jews, 173
Oral tradition, 3, I loff.
Order of Luke, 129, 183
Order of Mark, 12, 184
Originals, Aramaic, 123
Palestine, s8f., 88, 171
Papias, 159, 171, 184
Parables, 126
Parallelism, 124
INDEX
213
Parousia, 84
Passion story, 46, 153
Pericles, 23
Peter, 75, 144, 159, 166, 171
Pharisaism, 83, 89
Plato, 194
Plutarch, 25
Poetical forms, 125, 138
Propaganda, 82
Prophets, Christian, 67
Proverbs, 146
Ptolemaic astronomy, 35, 38
Q, the source, 116
Rabbinical maxims, 92, 128
Rabbinical schools, 113
Reading, practice of, 66
Reading of scripture, 73 f.
Resurrection, 19, 153
Return of Christ, 2, 165
Rhythm, 138
Sagas, 16, 145
Sayings of Jesus, 1 28f .
Schmidt, K. L., 99, 1 1 1
Selection, I47f., 180
Sermon on Mount, 12, 14
"Sitz im Leben," 101
Smith, B. M. T., 105
Smith, W/B., 16
Socrates, 39
Son of man, 33
Songs, popular, 147
Spiritual gifts, 69
Stefansson, 77
Stephen, 108
Streeter, B. H., 59
Synagogue service, 66f .
Taylor, V., 133
Teachers, 71
Teaching of Jesus, I42f.
Temple, saying on, 104, 130
Theophilus, 11, 81, 158
IThucydides, 35
Torrey, C. C., 105
Tragedies, Greek, 77
Transfiguration, 70
Transmission, methods of, 1 5
Trial of Jesus, 130
Unbelief, conflict with, 156
Uniformity, 141
Units of Gospel narrative, 161
Unstable phase of record, 163,
171
Value, tests of, I49f.
Veracity, marks of, 139
Verse as means of fixity, 142
Versions, conflicting, 144
Wisdom literature, 142
Worms, Diet of, 131
Worship, 54ff., 137
Wrede, W., 32, 157
Written documents, 6, 141, 144
Writing in primitive church,
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