History of New Testament criticism

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ERASMUS.

HISTORY OF

NEW TESTAMENT
CRITICISM

BY

F. C. CONYBEARE, M.A.,

Late Fellow and Praelector of Univ. Coll., OxforJ :
Fellow of the British Academy ; Doctor of Theology, honoris c
of Giessen ; Officier D'Academie

LONDON :

WATTS & CO.,

JOHNSON'S COfKT, FLEET STREET, E.C.4

Printed in Great Britain

by Watts & Co., Johnson's Court,

Fleet Street, London, E.G. 4

PREFACE

THE least unkind of my critics will probably find two faults
with this work : firstly, that it is sketchy, and, secondly, that
it says too little of the history of textual criticism and of the
manuscripts and versions in which the New Testament has
come down to us.

I must plead in excuse that I could do no more in so short
a book, and that it is in any case not intended for specialists,
but for the wider public. Within its limits there is no room
to enumerate one half of the important commentaries and
works of learning about the New Testament which have
been produced in the last two hundred years. The briefest
catalogue of these would have filled a volume four times
as large. I had, therefore, to choose between a bare
enumeration of names and titles, and a sketch of a move
ment of thought conducted by a few prominent scholars and
critics. I chose the latter. Writing for English readers, I
have also endeavoured to bring into prominence the work of
English writers; and, in general, I have singled out for
notice courageous writers who, besides being learned, were
ready to face obloquy and unpopularity ; for, unhappily, in
the domain of Biblical criticism it is difficult to please the
majority of readers without being apologetic in tone and
"goody-goody." A worker in this field who finds himself
praised by such journals as the Saturday Review or the
Church Times may instantly suspect himself of being either
superstitious or a time-server.

So much in defence of myself from the first charge. As to

v

vi PREFACE

the second, I would have liked to relate the discovery of many
important manuscripts, and to describe and appraise the
ancient versions — Latin, Syriac, Armenian, Gothic, Georgian,
Coptic, Ethiopic, and Arabic — to the exploration of which I
have devoted many years. I would also have loved to bring-
before my readers the great figures of Tyndale, Erasmus,
Beza, Voss, Grotius, Wetstein, Griesbach, Matthaei,
Tischendorf, Lachmann, Scrivener, Lightfoot, and other
eminent translators, editors, and humanists. But it was
useless to explore this domain except in a separate volume
relating the history, not of New Testament criticism in
general, but of textual criticism in particular.

F. C. C.

September, igio.

CONTENTS

PAGB

PREFACE •.....• v

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS ..... x
CHAPTER I. — ANCIENT EXEGESIS

Gradual formation of New Testament Canon . i
Early doubts entertained about the authorship of the

Johannine books ..... 2

Dionysius of Alexandria on the Apocalypse . . 3

Origin's method of Allegory .... 9

Jerome . . . . . . . 14

CHAPTER II. — THE HARMONISTS

The Reformation narrowed the idea of Inspiration,

and excluded the use of Allegory . . . 15
The Harmony of William Whiston . . .16

Example, The Mission of the Seventy disciples . 17

Attitude of Dean Alford towards the Harmonists . 18

Attitude of modern divines — e.g., of Dean Robinson. 20
Another example of forced harmonising from Edward

Greswell ...... 23

Dean Alford on Inspiration . . . .25

Examples of his timidity .... 27

Dr. Sanday repudiates old views of Inspiration . 28
Sir Robert Anderson on Modern High Church

attitude ...... 29

CHAPTER III. — THE DEISTS

Socinian orthodoxy . . . . , 30
Tindal contrasted the certainties of Natural Religion

with the obscurities of the Christian Revelation . 31
Anthony Collins upon Christian use of Old Testament

Prophecy ...... 34

His criticism of the Book of Daniel ... 40
Thomas Woolston's attack on the Miracles of the

New Testament . . . . ' . 41

His pretence of allegorising them ... 4^
Points of contact between the Deists and the

medieval Cathars • .... 47

CONTENTS

CHAPTER IV.— THE EVANGELISTS

Father Rickaby's satisfaction with modern criticism

hardly justified . 49

That criticism invalidates Matthew's Gospel . . 50

And justifies Smith, of Jordanhill, as against Dean

Alford . . -52

Contrast of Dean Robinson's views with those of

Dean Alfoid ... . • 54

Papias's testimony cannot have referred to our first

gospel . . 58

Tendency to reject the Fourth Gospel as a work of

the Apostle John ..... 59

View of Liddon ...... 60

Criticisms of Dean Robinson . . . 61

CHAPTER V. — TEXTUAL CRITICISM

Doctrinal alterations of sacred or canonised texts . 65

Example from Matt. xix. 17 . . . 67

Dr. Salmon on Westcott and Hort ... 68

The text of the Three Witnesses a trinitarian forgery. 69
History of its exposure by -Sandius, Simon, Gibbon,

and Porson ...... 70

Leo XIII. rules it to be part of the authentic text . 74
Trinitarian interpolation at Matt, xxviii. 19 was

absent from Eusebius's MSS. of the Gospels . 75

CHAPTER VI.— SOME PIONEERS

Comparative freedom of Reformed Churches in

contrast with the Latin .... 78

Herder's criticisms . . . .80

H. S. Reimarus ...... 82

E. Evanson on The Dissonance of the Four Gospels . 87
Joseph Priestley and Bishop Horsley ... 93

CHAPTER VII. — FOREIGN WORK.

Albert Schweitzer's work ... 97

F. C. Baur, the founder of the Tubingen school . 98
D. F. Strauss'* Life of Jesus . . . .103
Ernest Renan's work „ . . . . 1 1 1

CHAPTER VIII.— ENGLISH WORK

Its uncritical character . . . . .115

James Smith, a layman, overthrows the hypothesis

of a common oral tradition underlying the Gospels 115
Views of Drs. Lardner and Davidson . . . 117

CONTENTS ix

The Synopticon of E. A. Abbott . . . 118

Lachmann . . . . . .119

Supernatural Religion and Bishop Lightfoot's answer

to it . . . . . .119

The origin of the term " Received Text " or " Textus

Receptus " (T. R.) . . . . .121

Its rejection by Lachmann . . . .123

Tischendorf 's discovery of the Codex Sinaiticus . 124
Dean Burgon assails the revisers of the English New

Testament . . . . . .125

His attack on the Unitarian reviser, Dr. Vance

Smith ....... 127

Burgon false to his own ideal of textual criticism . 128
His Reductio ad absurdum of his own position . 129

Sir Robert Anderson pits the Bible against the Priest 132
Father Rickaby appeals to unwritten tradition outside

the New Testament ..... 133

CHAPTER IX. — THE MODERNISTS

The career of Alfred Loisy .... 134

His excommunication ..... 135
Fio X. issues an Encyclical enumerating the chief

results of modern criticism .... 135

Dr. Sanday declares that " we must modernise" . 138
He identifies the Divine in Jesus Christ with his

subliminal consciousness «... 138

His verdict on the creeds . . . . 139

BIBLIOGRAPHY . . . . . .141

INDEX . . • • • • • 144

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

ERASMUS ...... Frontispiece

PAGE

i JOHN v. 5-10 (Codex Sinaiticus) .... 7

MARK xvi. 5-8 (Codex Alexandrinus) 37

DR. WESTCOTT . . . . . -55

ALFRED LOISY . . ... 73

LUTHER ....... 79

JOHANN GOTTFRIED HERDER . . . .81

F. C. BAUR ....... 99

DAVID F. STRAUSS ...... 105

ERNEST RENAN . . . . . .112

W. J. BURGON, Dean of Chichester 122

The portraits of Baur, Herder, Renan, and Luther are repro
duced from prints published by the Berlin Photographic Company,
London, W. The portrait of Dr. Westcott is reproduced by
permission of Messrs. J. Russell and Sons ; that of Dr. Burgon
was supplied by Messrs. Hills and Saunders.

CHAPTER 1.
ANCIENT EXEGESIS

THE various writing's — narrative, epistolary, and apoca
lyptic — which make up the New Testament had no
common origin, but were composed at different times
by at least a score of writers in places which, in view of
the difficulties presented to travel by the ancient world,
may be said to have been widely remote from each other.
With the exception of the Epistles of Paul, none of them,
or next to none, were composed until about fifty years
after the death of Jesus ; and another hundred years
elapsed before they were assembled in one collection and
began to take their place alongside of the Greek trans
lation of the Hebrew Bible as authoritative scriptures.

Nor was it without a struggle that many of them
made their way into the charmed circle of the Christian
canon, or new instrument, as Tertullian, about the year
200, called the new sacred book ; and this point is so
important that we must dwell upon it more in detail.
For the discussions in the second and early third centu
ries of the age and attribution of several of these books
constitute a first chapter in the history of New Testa
ment criticism, and sixteen centuries flowed away before
a second was added.

We learn, then, from Eusebius that the writings which
pass under the name of John the son of Zebedee were
for several generations viewed with suspicion, not by
isolated thinkers only, but by wide circles of believers.
These writings comprise the fourth gospel, three

ANCIENT EXEGESIS

epistles closely resembling that gospel in style and
thought, and, thirdly, the Book of Revelation. Between
the years 170 and 180 there was a party in the Church
of Asia Minor that rejected all these writings. The
gospel of John, they argued, was a forgery committed
by a famous heretic named Cerinthus, who denied the
humanity of Jesus ; it also contradicted the other three
gospels in extending the ministry over three years, and
presented the events of his life in a new and utterly false
sequence, detailing two passovers in the course of his
ministry where the three synoptic gospels mention only
one, and ignoring the forty days' temptation in the
wilderness. About the year 172 a Bishop of Hierapolis
in Asia Minor, named Claudius Apollinaris, wrote that
the gospels seemed to conflict with one another, in that
the synoptics give one date for the Last Supper and the
fourth gospel another. Nor was it only in Asia Minor
that this gospel, an early use of which can be traced only
among the followers of the notable heretics Basilides
and Valentinus, excited the repugnance of the orthodox ;
for a presbyter of the Church of Rome named Gaius, or
Caius, assailed both it and the Book of Revelation, which
purported to be by the same author, in a work which
Hippolytus, the Bishop of Ostia, tried to answer about
the year 234. We may infer that at that date there
still were in Rome good Christians who accepted the
views of Gaius ; otherwise it would not have been
necessary to refute him.

The gospel, however, succeeded in establishing itself
along with the other three ; and Irenaeus, the Bishop of
Lugdunum, or Lyon, in Gaul, soon after 174 A.D.,
argues that there must be four gospels, neither more
nor less, because there are four corners of the world and
four winds. Tatian, another teacher of the same age,

ANVIKNT KXKGESIS

also accepted it, and included it in a harmony of the
tour gospels which he made called the Diatessaron.
This harmony was translated into Syriac, and read out
loud in the churches of Syria as late as the beginning of
the fourth century.

After the age of Hippolytus no further questions were
raised about the fourth gospel. Epiphanius, indeed,
who died in 404, and was Bishop of Salamis in Cyprus,
devotes a chapter of his work upon Heresies to the sect
of Alogi — that is, of those who, in rejecting the fourth
gospel, denied that Jesus was the Logos or Word of
God ; but by that time the question had no more than
an antiquarian interest.

Not so with the Apocalypse, against which Dionysius,
Patriarch, or Pope, of Alexandria in the years 247-265,
wrote a treatise which more than any other work of the
ancient Church approaches in tone and insight the level
of modern critical research, and of which, happily,
Eusebius of Caesarea has preserved an ample fragment
in his history of the Church : —

In any case [writes Dionysius], I cannot allow that the
author of the Apocalypse is that Apostle, the son of
Zebedee and brother of James, to whom belong the
Gospel entitled According to John and the general
Epistle. For I clearly infer, no less from the character
and literary style of the two authors than from tenour of
the book, that they are not one and the same.

Then he proceeds to give reasons in support of his

judgment : —

For the evangelist nowhere inscribes his name in his
work nor announces himself either through his gospel or
his epistle1 whereas the author of the Apocalypse at

1 Dionysius had never heard of the second and third Epistles of
John.

ANCIENT EXEGESIS

the very beginning thereof puts himself forward and says :
The Revelation of Jesus Christ which he gave him to
show to his servants speedily, and signified by his angel
to his servant John, etc.
Lower down he writes thus : —

And also from the thoughts and language and arrange
ment of words we can easily conjecture that the one
writer is separate from the other. For the Gospel and
the Epistle harmonise with each other and begin in the
same way, the one : In the beginning was the Word ; and
the other : That -which was from the beginning. In the
one we read : And the Word was made flesh and dwelled
among us; and we beheld his glory, glory as of the only-
begotten by the Father ; and the other holds the same
language slightly changed : That which we have heard,
that which we have seen with our eyes, that which we
beheld and our hands handled, about the Word of Life, and
the life was manifested. For this is his prelude, and such
his contention, made clear in the sequel, against those
who denied that the Lord came in the flesh ; and there
fore he adds of set purpose the words : And to what we
saw we bear witness, and announce to you the eternal
life which was with the Father and was manifested to us.
What we have seen and heard we announce to you.
The writer is consistent with himself, and never quits his
main propositions ; indeed, follows up his subject all
through without changing his catchwords, some of which
we will briefly recall. A careful reader, then [of the
Gospel and Epistle], will find in each frequent mention
of Light, Life, of flight from darkness ; constant repeti
tion of the words Truth, Grace, Joy, Flesh and Blood
of the Lord, of Judgment and Remission of Sins, of
God's love to usward, of the command that we love one
another, of the injunction to keep all the commandments,
of the world's condemnation and of the Devil's, of the
Antichrist, of the Promise of the Holy Spirit, of God's
Adoption of us, of Faith perpetually demanded of us.
The union of Father and Son pervades both works (i.e.,

ANCIENT EXEGESIS

Gospel and Epistle of John), and, if we scan their char
acter all through, the sense is forced on us of one and
the same complexion in Gospel and Epistle. But the
Apocalypse stands in absolute contrast to each. It
nowhere touches or approaches either of them, and, we
may fairly say, has not a single syllable in common with
them ; any more than the Epistle — not to mention the
Gospel — contains reminiscence or thought of the Apoca
lypse, or Apocalypse of Epistle ; although Paul in his
epistles hinted details of his apocalypses (i.e., revela
tions), without writing them down in a substantive book.
Moreover, we can base a conclusion on the contrast of
style there is between Gospel and Epistle on the one side,
and Apocalypse on the other. For the former not only
use the Greek language without stumbling, but are
throughout written with great elegance of diction, of
reasoning and arrangement of expressions. We are far
from meeting in them with barbarous words and sole
cisms, or any vulgarisms whatever; for their writer had
both gifts, because the Lord endowed him with each,
with that of knowledge and that of eloquence. I do not
deny to the other his having received the gifts of know
ledge and prophecy, but I cannot discern in him an exact
knowledge of Greek language and tongue. He not only
uses barbarous idioms, but sometimes falls into actual
solecisms ; which, however, I need not now detail, for
my remarks are not intended to make fun of him — far be
it from me — but only to give a correct idea of the dis
similitude of these writings.

Modern divines attach little weight to this well-
reasoned judgment of Dionysius ; perhaps because
among us Greek is no longer a living- language. They
forget that Dionysius lived less than one hundred and
nfty years later than the authors he here compares, and
was therefore as well qualified to distinguish between
them as we are to distinguish between Lodowick
Muggleton and Bishop Burnet. We should have no

ANCIENT EXEGESIS

difficulty in doing so, and yet they are further from us
by a hundred years than these authors were from
Dionysius. Whether or no the fourth Gospel was a
work of the Apostle John, the conclusion stands that it
cannot be from the hand which penned Revelation.
This conclusion Eusebius, the historian of the Church,
espoused, and, following him, the entire Eastern Church ;
nor was the authority of Revelation rehabilitated in the
Greek world before the end of the seventh century,
while the outlying Churches of Syria and Armenia
hardly admitted it into their canons before the thirteenth.
In Rome, however, and generally in the West, where it
circulated in a Latin version which disguised its peculiar
idiom, it was, so far as we know, admitted into the
canon from the first, and its apostolic authorship never
impugned.

The early Fathers seldom display such critical ability
as the above extract reveals in the case of Dionysius.
Why, it may be asked, could so keen a discrimination
be exercised in this particular and nowhere else ?
What was there to awake and whet the judgment here,
when in respect of other writings it continued to
slumber and sleep? The context in Eusebius's pages
reveals to us the cause. The more learned and sober
circles of believers had, in the last quarter of the
second and the first of the third centuries, wearied
and become ashamed of the antics of the Millennarists,
who believed that Jesus Christ was to come again at
once and establish, not in a vague and remote heaven,
but on this earth itself, a reign of peace, plenty, and
carnal well-being. These enthusiasts appealed to the
Apocalypse when their dreams were challenged ; and
the obvious way to silence them was to prove that
that book possessed no apostolic authority. The

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8 ANCIENT EXEGESIS

Millennarists might have retorted, and their retort would
have been true, that if one of the books was to go,
then the Gospel must go, on the ground that the
Apostle John, whom the Epistle to the Galatians
reveals as a Judaising Christian, could not possibly
have written it, though he might well have penned the
Apocalypse. The age was of course too ignorant and
uncritical for such an answer to suggest itself; but the
entire episode serves to illustrate a cardinal principle of
human nature, which is, that we are never so apt to
discover the truth as when we have an outside reason
for doing so, and in religion especially are seldom
inclined to abandon false opinions except in response
to material considerations.

Two other Christian Fathers have a place in the
history of textual criticism of the New Testament—
Origen and Jerome. The former of these was not a
critic in our sense of the word. He notices that there
was much variety of text between one manuscript and
another, but he seems seldom to have asked himself
which of the two variants was the true one. For
example, in Hebrews ii. 9 he notices that in some MSS.
the text ran thus : — that by the grace of God he (Jesus)
should taste death, but in others thus : that without God
he should, etc. He professes himself quite content to
use either. In a few cases he corrects a place name,
not from the evidence of the copies, but because of the
current fashion of his age. Thus in Matthew viii. 28
the scene of the swine driven by demons into the lake
was in some MSS. fixed at Gerasa, in others at Gadara.
But in Origen's day pilgrims were shown the place of
this miracle at Gergesa, and accordingly he was ready
to correct the text on their evidence, as if it was worth
anything. One other reason he adds for adopting the

ANCIENT EXEGESIS

reading- Gergesa, very characteristic of his age. It
amounts to this, that the name Gergesa means in
Hebrew "the sojourning-place of them that cast out";
and that divine Providence had allotted this name to
the town because the inhabitants were so scared by the
miracle of the swine that they exhorted Jesus to quit
their confines without delay !

One other example may be advanced of Origen's
want of critical acumen. In Matthew xxvii. 17 he
decided against the famous reading- Jesus Barabbas as
the name of the brigand who was released instead of
Jesus of Nazareth, on the ground that a malefactor
had no right to so holy a name as Jesus.

Origen's defence of allegory as an aid to the inter
pretation no less of the New than of the Old
Testament forms a curious chapter in the history of
criticism.

Marcion, in the middle of the second century, had
pitilessly assailed the God of the Jews, and denounced
the cruelty, lust, fraud, and rapine of the Hebrew
patriarchs and kings, the favourites of that God. In
the middle of the third century the orthodox were still
hard put to it to meet the arguments of Marcion, and,
as Milton has it, "to justify the ways of God to men."
Origen, learned teacher as he was, saw no way out of
the difficulty other than to apply that method of
allegory which Philo had applied to the Old Testament;
and in his work, On First Principles, book iv., we
have an exposition of the method. He premises, firstly,
that the Old Testament is divinely inspired, because
its prophecies foreshadow Christ ; and, secondly, that
there is not either in Old or New Testament a single
syllable void of divine meaning and import. But how,
he asks (in book iv., chap. 17), can we conciliate with

,0 ANCIENT EXEGESIS

this tenet of their entire inspiration the existence in the
Bible of such tales as that of Lot and his daughters, of
Abraham prostituting first one wife and then another,
of a succession of at least three days and nights before
the sun was created? Who, he asks, will be found
idiot enough to believe that God planted trees in
Paradise like any husbandman ; that he set up in it
visible and palpable tree-trunks, labelled the one " Tree
of Life," and the other "Tree of Knowledge of Good
.and Evil," both bearing real fruit that might be
masticated with corporeal teeth ; that he went and
walked about the garden ; that Adam hid under a tree;
that Cain fled from the face of God ? The wise reader,
he remarks, may well ask what the face of God is, and
how anyone could get away from it? Nor, he con
tinues, is the Old Testament only full of such incidents,
as no one regardful of good sense and reason can
suppose to have really taken place or to be sober
history. In the Gospels equally, he declares, such
narratives abound ; and as an example he instances the
story of the Devil plumping Jesus down on the top of
a lofty mountain, from which he showed him all the
kingdoms of the earth and their glory. _HjyE^-he .asks,
can it be literally true, how a historical fact, that from
a single mountain-top with fleshly eyes all the realms
of Persia, of Scythia, and of India could be seen
adjacent and at once? The careful reader will, he
says, find in the Gospels any number of cases similar
to the above. In a subsequent paragraph he instances
more passages which it is absurd to take in their literal
sense.' Such is the text Luke x. 4, in which Jesus
when he sent forth the Twelve Apostles bade them
"Salute no man on the way." None but silly people,
he adds, believe that our Saviour delivered such a

ANCIENT EXEGESIS ,i

precept to the Apostles. And how, he goes on, parti
cularly in a land where winter bristles with icicles and
is bitter with frosts, could anyone be asked to do with
only two tunics and no shoes? And then that other
command that a man who is smitten on the right cheek
shall also turn the left to the smiter — how can it be
true, seeing- that anyone who smites another with his
right hand must necessarily smite his left cheek and
not his right ? And another of the things to be classed
among the impossible is the prescription found in the
Gospel, that if thy right eye offend thee it shall be
plucked out. For even if we take this to apply to our
bodily eyes, how is it to be considered consistent,
whereas we use both eyes to see, to saddle one eye
only with the guilt of the stumbling-block, and why the
right eye rather than the left?

Wherever, he argues (chap. 15), we meet with such
useless, nay impossible, incidents and precepts as these,
we must discard a literal interpretation and consider of
what moral interpretation they are capable, with what
higher and mysterious meaning they are fraught, what
deeper truths they were intended symbolically and in
allegory to shadow forth. The divine wisdom has of
set purpose contrived these little traps and stumbling-
blocks in order to cry halt to our slavish historical
understanding of the text, by inserting in its midst
sundry things that are impossible and unsuitable. The
Holy Spirit so waylays us in order that we may be
driven by passages which taken in their priina-facie
sense cannot be true or useful, to search for the ulterior
truth, and seek in the Scriptures which we believe to
be inspired by God a meaning worthy of Him.

In the sequel it occurs to Origen that some of his
readers may be willing to tolerate the application of

B

12 ANCIENT EXEGESIS

this method to the Old Testament, and yet shrink from
applying- it wholesale to the New. He reassures them
by insisting1 on what Marcion had denied — namely, on
the fact that the same Spirit and the same God inspired
both old and new alike, and in the same manner.
Whatever, therefore, is legitimate in regard to the one
is legitimate in regard to the other also. "Wherefore
also in the Gospels and Epistles the Spirit has intro
duced not a few incidents which, by breaking in upon
and checking the historical character of the narrative,
with which it is impossible to reconcile them, turn back
and recall the attention of the reader to an examination
of their inner meaning1."

Orig-en admits (chap. 19) that the passages in Scrip
ture which bear a spiritual sense and no other are
considerably outnumbered by those which stand good
as history. Let no one, he pleads, suspect us of assert
ing that we think none of the Scriptural narratives to
be historically true, because we suspect that some of
the events related never really happened. On the
contrary, we are assured that in the case of as many
as possible their historical truth can be and must be
upheld. Moreover, of the precepts delivered in the
Gospel it cannot be doubted that very many are to be
literally observed, as when it says : But I say unto you.
Swear not at all. At the same time, anyone who reads
carefully will be sure to feel a doubt whether this and
that narrative is to be regarded as literally true or only
half true, and whether this and that precept is to be
literally observed or not. Wherefore with the utmost
study and pains we must strive to enable every single
reader with all reverence to understand that in dealing
with the contents of the sacred books he handles words
which are divine and not human.

ANCIENT EXEGESIS 13

It is curious in the above to note that the one precept
on the literal observance of which Grig-en insists —
namely, the prohibition of oaths — is just that which for
centuries all Christian sects, with the exception of the
medieval Cathars and modern Quakers, have flouted
and defied. This by the way. It is more important to
note how these chapters of Origen impress a would-be
liberal Anglican divine of to-day. " In reading- most
of Origen's difficulties," writes Dean Farrar in his

History of Interpretation, p. 193, "we stand amazed

By the slightest application of literary criticism they
vanish at a touch." And just above, p. 190 : " The
errors of the exegesis which Origen tended to establish
for more than a thousand years had their root in the
assumption that the Bible is throughout homogeneous
and in every particular supernaturally perfect." And
again, p. 196 : " Having started with the assumption
that every clause of the Bible was infallible, super
natural, and divinely dictated, and having proved to
his own satisfaction that it could not be intended in its
literal sense, he proceeded to systematise his own false
conclusions."

No doubt such criticisms are just, but did the ante
cedents of Dean Farrar entitle him to pass them upon
Origen, who was at least as responsive to the truth as
in his age any man could be expected to be? In reading
these pages of the modern ecclesiastic we are reminded
of the picture in the Epistle of James i. 23, of him
" who is a hearer of the word and not a doer: he is like
unto a man beholding his horoscope in a divining
crystal (or mirror) ; for he beholdeth himself, and goeth
away, and straightway forgetteth what manner of man
he was."

Jerome, who was born about 346, and died 420

i4 ANCIENT EXEGESIS

deserves our respect because he saw the necessity of
basing the Latin Bible not upon the Septuagint or
Greek translation, but upon the Hebrew original. It
illustrates the manners of the age that when he was
learning Hebrew, in which for his time he made himself
extraordinarily proficient, the Jewish rabbis who were
his teachers had to visit him by night, for fear of
scandal. In this connection Jerome compares himselt
to Christ visited by Nicodemus. It certainly needed
courage in that, as in subsequent ages, to undertake
to revise a sacred text in common use, and Jerome
reaped from his task much immediate unpopularity.
His revision, of course, embraced the New as well as
the Old Testament, but his work on the New contained
nothing very new or noteworthy.

CHAPTER II.
THE HARMONISTS

THE sixth article of the Church of England lays it down
that " Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to
salvation," which is not the same thing as to say that
everything contained in Holy Scripture is necessary to
salvation. Nevertheless, this in effect has been the
dominant view of the reformed churches. Underneath
the allegorical method of interpreting the Bible, which
I have exemplified from the works of Origen, lay the
belief that every smallest portion of the text is inspired;
for, apart from this belief, there was no reason not to
set aside and neglect passages that in their literal and
primary sense seemed unhistorical and absurd, limiting
the inspiration to so much of the text as could reason
ably be taken for true. The Reformation itself pre
disposed those Churches which came under its influence
to accept the idea of verbal inspiration ; for, having
quarrelled with the Pope, and repudiated his authority
as an interpreter of the text and arbiter of difficulties
arising out of it, they had no oracle left to appeal to
except the Bible, and they fondly imagined that they
could use it as a judge uses a written code of law. As
such a code must be consistent with itself, and free
from internal contradictions, in order to be an effective
instrument of government and administration, so must
the Bible ; and before long it was felt on all sides to be
flat blasphemy to impute to a text which was now called
outright "the Word of God" any inconsistencies or

'5

16 THE HARMONISTS

imperfections. The Bible was held by Protestants to
be a homogeneous whole dictated to its several writers,
who were no more than passive organs of the Holy
Spirit and amanuenses of God. " Scripture," wrote
Quenstedt (1617-1688), a pastor of Wittemberg, " is a
fountain of infallible truth, and exempt from all error ;
every word of it is absolutely true, whether expressive
of dogma, of morality, or of history."

Such a view left to Protestants no loophole of allegory,
and their divines have for generations striven to recon
cile every one statement in the Bible with every other
by harmonistic shifts and expedients which, in inter
preting other documents, they would disdain to use.
Of these forced methods of explanation it is worth while
to examine a few examples, for there is no better way
of realising how great an advance has been made
towards enlightenment in the present age. Our first
example shall be taken from a work entitled A Harmony
of the Four Evangelists ', which was published in 1702 by
William Whiston (1667-1752), a man of vast and varied
attainments. A great mathematician, he succeeded Sir
Isaac Newton in the Lucasian chair at Cambridge, but
was deprived of it in 1710 for assailing in print the
orthodox doctrine of the Trinity. In his old age he
quitted the ranks of the English clergy, because he
disliked the so-called Athanasian Creed, and became an
Anabaptist. He was deeply read in the Christian
Fathers, and was the author of many theological
works. It marks the absolute sway over men's minds
in that epoch of the dogma of the infallibility and verbal
inspiration of the Bible that so vigorous and original a
thinker as Whiston could imagine that he had reconciled
by such feeble devices the manifold contradictions of
the Gospels. Take, for example, the seventh of the

THE HARMONISTS 17

principles or rules he formulated to guide students in
harmonising them. It runs as follows : —

P. 118, vii. — The resemblance there is between several
discourses and miracles of our Saviour in the several
Gospels, which the order of the evangelical history places
at different times, is no sufficient reason for the super
seding such order, and supposing them to be the very
same discourses and miracles.

He proceeds to give examples for the application of the
above rule. The first of them is as follows : —

Thus it appears that our Saviour gave almost the very
same instructions to the Twelve Apostles, and to the
Seventy Disciples, at their several missions ; the one
recorded by St. Matthew, the other by St. Luke, as the
likeness of the occasions did require. Now these large
instructions, being in two Gospels, have been by many
refer'd to the same time, by reason of their similitude.

That the reader may judge for himself how absurdly
inadequate this explanation is, the two resembling dis
courses are here set out in opposing columns : —

Luke x. i : Now after these Matthew x. i : And he called

things the Lord appointed unto him his twelve disciples,

seventy others, and sent them and gave them authority

two and two before his face 5: These twelve Jesus sent
into every city and place, forth, and charged them, say-
whither he himself was about ing

to come. And he said unto Matthew ix. 37 : Then saith

them, The harvest is plente- he unto his disciples, The har-

ous, but the labourers are vest, etc

few : pray ye therefore the (Identical as far as " into his

Lord of the harvest, that he harvest.")

send forth labourers into his

harvest. Go your ways : be- Matthew x. 16 : Behold, I

hold, I send you forth as send you forth as sheep in the

lambs in the midst of wolves, midst of wolves.

Carry no purse, no wallet, no 9, 10 : Get you no gold, nor

shoes : and salute no man on silver, nor brass in your

the way. And into whatso- purses ; no wallet for jour-

ever house ye shall enter, ney, neither two coats, nor

THE HARMONISTS

first say, Peace be to this shoes nor staff: for the
house. And if a son of peace labourer is worthy of his
be there, your peace shall rest food,
upon him: but if not, it shall n : And into whatsoever

turn to you again But into city or village ye shall enter,

whatsoever city ye shall enter,
and they receive you not, go
out into the streets thereof
and say, Even the dust from
your city, that cleaveth to our
feet, we do wipe off against
you : howbeit know this, that
the kingdom of God is come
nigh. I say unto you, It shall
be more tolerable in that day
for Sodom, than for that city.

search out who in it is worthy
and there abide till ye go forth.
12 : And as ye enter the house,
salute it. 13 : And if the house
be worthy, let your peace come
upon it : but if it be not worthy,
let your peace return to you.
14 : And whosoever shall not
receive you, nor hear your
words, as ye go forth out of
that house or that city, shake
off the dust of your feet. 15 :
Verily I say unto you, It shall
be more tolerable for the land
of Sodom and Gomorrah in
the day of judgement than for
that city. 7 : And as ye go,
preach, saying, The kingdom
of heaven is at hand.

Dean Alford, in his edition 'of the New Testament
which appeared in 1863, begins his commentary on
Luke x. as follows : —

Verses 1-16. Mission of the Seventy. — It is well that
Luke has given us also the sending of the Twelve, or we
should have had some of the commentators asserting that
this was the same mission. The discourse addressed to
the Seventy is in substance the same as that to the
Twelve, as the similarity of their errand would lead us
to suppose it would be.

But we know only what was the errand of the seventy
from the instructions issued to them, and, apart from
what Jesus here tells them to do, we cannot say what
they were intended to do. Were there any mention of
them in the rest of the New Testament, we might form
some idea apart from this passage of Luke of what their

THE HARMONISTS 19

mission was, but neither in the Acts is allusion to them
nor in the Paulines. It was assumed long afterwards,
in the fourth century, when a fanciful list of their names
was concocted, that they were intended to be missionaries
to the Gentiles, who were, in the current folklore of
Egypt and Palestine, divided into seventy or seventy-
two races ; but this assumption conflicts with the state
ment that they were to go in front of Jesus to the several
cities and places which he himself meant to visit.
Alford, therefore, argues in a circle, and we can only
infer that their mission was similar to that of the
Twelve, because their marching orders were so similar,
and not that their orders were similar because their
mission was so.

In point of fact, we must take this passage of Luke
in connection with other passages in which his language
tallies with that of Matthew. Practically every critic,
even the most orthodox, admits to-day that Matthew
and Luke, in composing their Gospels, used two chief
sources — one the Gospel of Mark, very nearly in the
form in which we have it ; and the other a document
which, because Mark reveals so little knowledge of it,
is called the non-Marcan document, and by German
scholars Q — short for Quelle or source. By comparing
those portions of Matthew and Luke which, like the two
just cited, reveal, not mere similarity, but in verse after
verse are identical in phrase and wording, we are able
to reconstruct this lost document, which consisted
almost wholly of teachings and sayings of Jesus, with
very few narratives of incidents. The Lucan text before
us is characterised by exactly the same degree of approxi
mation to Matthew's text which we find in other passages;
for example, in those descriptive of the temptation of
Jesus — namely, Luke iv. 1-13 = Matthew iv. 1-11.

20 THE HARMONISTS

There also, however, Alford, incurably purblind, asserts
(note on Luke iv. i) that "The accounts of Matthew
and Luke (Mark's is principally a compendium) are
distinct." He refers us in proof of this assertion to his
notes on Matthew and Mark, although in those notes
he has made no attempt to substantiate it.

In the present day, then, it is flogging a dead horse
to controvert Dean Alford or William Whiston on such
a point as this. The standpoint of orthodox criticism
in the twentieth century is well given in a useful little
book entitled The Study of the Gospels ', by J. Armitage
Robinson, D.D., Dean of Westminster (London, 1902).
On p. in of this book there is a table of certain
passages which Luke and Matthew derived in common
from the non-Marcan document, and one of its items is
the following : —

Luke x. 1-12. Mission of seventy disciples = Matt. ix.
37 f-> x. i ff.
And, again, p. 112 : —

Thus in ix. 35~x. 42 he (Matthew) has combined the
charge to the twelve (Mark vi. 7 ff.) with the charge to
the seventy, which St. Luke gives separately.

But there is a problem here over which Dr. Robinson
passes in silence, though it must surely have suggested
itself to his unusually keen intelligence. It may be stated
thus : Why does Luke make two missions and two
charges, one of the Twelve Apostles, copied directly
from Mark, and the other of Seventy Disciples, copied
directly from the non-Marcan document; whereas
Matthew makes only one mission — that of the Twelve —
and includes in the charge or body of instructions given
to them the instructions which Luke reserves for the
Seventy alone ?

The question arises : Did the non-Marcan source

THE HARMONISTS 21

refer these instructions— which Luke keeps distinct—
to the Twelve, or to the Seventy, or to no particular
mission at all ? Here are three alternatives*

In favour of the second hypothesis is the fact that
later on in the same chapter— verses 17-20— Luke
narrates the return of the Seventy to Jesus in a section
which runs thus : —

And the seventy returned with joy, saying, Lord, even
the devils are subject unto us in thy name. And he said
unto them, I beheld Satan fallen as lightning from
heaven. Behold, I have given you authority to tread
upon serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of
the enemy : and nothing shall in any wise hurt you, etc.

Against this second hypothesis it may be contended
that—

Firstly, if the non-Marcan source had expressly
referred these instructions to the corps of Seventy
Disciples, then Matthew could not have conflated them
with the instructions to the Twelve which he takes
from Mark vi. 7-13.

Secondly, the non-Marcan document which Luke
copied in his tenth chapter was itself at the bottom
identical with the text of Mark vi. 7-13, for not only
are the ideas conveyed in the two the same, but the
language so similar that we must infer a literary con
nection between them.

^ Thirdly, in Luke's narrative of the return of the
Seventy several ideas and phrases seem to be borrowed
from a source used by the author (probably Aristion,
the Elder) of the last twelve verses of Mark, where
they are put into the mouth of the risen Christ.

There is really but a single explanation of all these
facts, and it is this : that there were two closely parallel
and ultimately identical accounts of a sending forth of

THE HARMONISTS

apostles by Jesus, one of which Mark has preserved,
while the other stood in the non-Marcan document.
This latter one contained precepts only, and did not
specify to whom or when they were delivered.
Matthew saw that they referred to one and the same
event, and therefore blended them in one narrative.
Luke, on the other hand, obedient to his habit of
keeping separate what was in Mark from what was in
the non-Marcan source, even when these two sources
repeated each other verbally, assumed that the non-
Marcan narrative must refer to some other mission
than that of the Twelve, the account of which he had
already reproduced verbally from Mark. He conjec
tured that as there had been a mission of twelve sent
only to the twelve tribes of Israel, so there must have
been a mission of seventy disciples corresponding to
the seventy elders who had translated 200 years earlier
the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek, and so been the
means of diffusing- among the Gentiles a knowledge of
the old Covenant. But in that case the mission of the
Seventy is pure conjecture of Luke's. With this it
well agrees that outside this chapter of Luke they are
nowhere else mentioned in the New Testament, and
that Eusebius, the historian of the Church, searched all
through the many Christian writers who preceded him
in the first and second centuries— writers known to him,
but lost for us— in order to find a list of these seventy
disciples, but found it not. It is incredible, if they
ever existed, that in all this literature there should have
been no independent mention of them.

In the preceding pages I have somewhat anticipated
the historical development of criticism ; but it was
right to do so, for it is not easy to understand its earlier
stages without contrasting the later ones. The harmony

THE HARMONISTS 23

of William Whiston supplies many more instances of
blind adherence to the dogma that in the New Testa
ment, as being- the Word of God, there cannot be,
because there must not be, any contradictions or incon
sistencies of statement. It is not well, however, to
dwell too long on a single writer, arid I will next select
an example from the Dissertations (Oxford, 1836) of
that most learned of men, Edward Greswell, Fellow
of Corpus Christi College. In these we find harmonies
so forced that even Dean Alford found them excessive.
Take the following as an example.

In Matthew viii. 19-22 and Luke ix. 57-60 the same
pair of incidents is found in parallel texts : —

Matt. viii. 19 : And there Luke ix. 57 : And as they

came a Scribe, and said unto went in the way, a certain

him, Master, I will follow thee man said unto him, I will

whithersoever thou goest. follow thee whithersoever

thou goest.

20 : And Jesus saith unto 58 : And Jesus said, etc. (as
him, The foxes have holes, in Matt.).

and the birds of heaven nests;
but the Son of Man hath not
where to lay his head.

21 : And another of the dis- 59: And he said unto
ciples said unto him, Lord, another, Follow me. But he
suffer me first to go and bury said, Lord, suffer me first to
my father. go and bury my father.

22 : But Jesus saith unto 60: But he said unto him,
him, Follow me ; and leave Leave the dead to bury their
the dead to bury their own own dead ; but go thou and
dead. publish abroad the kingdom

of God.

Now, in Matthew the above incidents follow the
descent of Jesus from the mount on which he had
delivered his long sermon, separated therefrom by a
series of three healings, of a leper, of a centurion's
servant, and of Peter's wife's mother, and by Jesus's
escape from the multitude across the lake. They

24 THE HARMONISTS

therefore occurred, according to Matthew, early in the
ministry of Jesus, and in Galilee, to the very north of
Palestine. Luke, on the contrary, sets them late in
Jesus's career, when he was on his way southward to
Jerusalem, just before the crucifixion. Accordingly
Greswell sets Matt. viii. 18-34 in § xx. of the third
part of his harmony on November i, A.D. 28, and
Luke ix. 57-60 in § xxv. of the fourth part, January 23,
A.D. 30.

This acrobatic feat provokes even from Dean Alford
the following note on Matt. viii. 19 : —

Both the following incidents are placed by St. Luke
long after, during our Lord's last journey to Jerusalem.
For it is quite impossible (with Greswell, Diss., iii.,
p. 155), in any common fairness of interpretation, to
imagine that two such incidents should have twice
happened, and both times have been related together.
It is one of those cases where the attempts of the
Harmonists do violence to every principle of sound
historical criticism. Every such difficulty, instead of
being a thing to be wiped out and buried at all hazards
(I am sorry to see, e.g., that Dr. Wordsworth takes no
notice, either here or in St. Luke, of the recurrence oi
the two narratives), is a valuable index and guide to the
humble searcher after truth, and is used by him as such.
And again in his prolegomena, § 4, Alford writes of
the same two passages and of other similar parallelisms
thus :—

Now the way of dealing with such discrepancies has
been twofold, as remarked above. The enemies of the
faith have of course recognised them, and pushed them
to the utmost ; often attempting to create them where
they do not exist, and where they do, using them to
overthrow the narrative in which they occur. While
this has been their course, equally unworthy of the
Evangelists and their subject has been that of those who

THE HARMONISTS 25

are usually thought the orthodox Harmonists. They have
usually taken upon them to state that such variously
placed narratives do not refer to the same incidents, and
so to save (as they imagine) the credit of the Evangelists,
at the expense of common fairness and candour.

And below he writes : —

We need not be afraid to recognise real discrepancies,
in the spirit of fairness and truth. Christianity never
was, and never can be, the gainer by any concealment,
warping, or avoidance of the plain truth, U'herever it is
to be found.

In the first of the above passages cited from Dean
Alford discrepancies in the Gospels are described as
difficulties. But they were not such apart from the
prejudice that the Bible was an infallible, uniform, and
self-consistent whole. Discard this idle hypothesis,
which no one ever resorted to in reading Thucydides
or Herodotus, or Julius Caesar, or the Vedas, or Homer,
or any other book except the Bible, and these "diffi
culties " vanish. In a later section of his prolegomena,
§ vi., 22, Alford lays down a proposition more pregnant
of meaning than he realised :

We must take our views of inspiration not, as is too
often done, from a priori considerations, but ENTIRELY

FROM THE EVIDENCE FURNISHED BY THE SCRIPTURES
THEMSELVES.

This can only mean that, since the Gospels, no less
than other books of the Bible, teem with discrepancies,
therefore their plenary inspiration (which the Dean
claimed to hold to the utmost, while rejecting verbal
inspiration) is consistent with such discrepancies ; nor
merely with discrepancies, but with untruths ' and
inaccuracies as well. For where there are two rival
and inconsistent accounts of the same fact and event

26 THE HARMONISTS

one must be true and the other false, I do not see
how Dean Alford could, on the above premisses,
quarrel with one who should maintain that the
Chronicle of Froissart or the Acta Sanctorum was
quite as much inspired as the Bible. He denounces
the doctrine of verbal inspiration ; that is to say, the
teaching- " that every word and phrase of the Scriptures
is absolutely and separately true, and, whether narra
tive or discourse, took place, or was said, in every
most exact particular as set down." He claims to
exercise " the freedom of the Spirit " rather than submit
to "the bondage of the letter," and he justly remarks
that the advocates of verbal inspiration " must not be
allowed, with convenient inconsistency, to take refuge
in a common-sense view of the matter wherever their
theory fails them, and still to uphold it in the main."

And yet, when we examine his commentary, we find
him almost everywhere timorous and unscientific. For
example, the most orthodox of modern critics frankly
admits that two miracles in Mark — that of the feeding
of the four, and that of the five, thousand — are a textual
doublet ; I mean that there was one original story of
the kind, which, in the hands of separate story-tellers
or scribes, was varied in certain details, notably as to
the place and period at which the miracle was wrought,
and as to the number of people who were fed. The
compiler of our second Gospel found both stories current

no doubt in two different manuscripts — and, instead

of blending them into one narrative, kept them separate,
under the impression that they related different incidents,
and so copied them out one upon and after the other.
The literary connection between these two stories saute
auxyeux, as the French say — leaps to the eyes. Entire
phrases of the one agree with entire phrases of the

THE HARMONISTS 27

other, and the actions detailed in the one agree with
and follow in the same sequence with those detailed in
the other. Long- before Alford's time open-eyed critics
had realised that the two stories were variations of a
common theme ; and yet Alford, in exemplification of
his canon (Chap. I., § iv., p. 5) that Similar incidents
must not be too hastily assumed to be the same, writes
as follows : —

If one Evangelist had given us the feeding of the five
thousand, and another that of the four, we should have
been strongly tempted to pronounce the incidents the
same, and to find a discrepancy in the accounts ; but our
conclusion would have been false, for we have now both
events narrated by each of two Evangelists (Matthew and
Mark), and formally alluded to by our Lord Himself in
connexion (Matt. xvi. 9, 10 ; Mark viii. 19, 20).

He also, as another example of his canon's applica
bility, instances the stories of the anointings of the
Lord at feasts, first by a woman who was a sinner, in
Luke vii. 36, foil., and again by Mary the sister of
Lazarus, in Matt. xxvi. 6, foil., and Mark xiv. 3, foil.,
and John xi. 2 and xii. 3, foil. These stories are so like
one another that, as Whiston observes, "the great
Grotius (died 1645) himself was imposed upon, and
induc'd to believe them the very same. Such fatal
mistakes," he adds, "are men liable to when they
indulge themselves in the liberty of changing the settled
order of the Evangelists on every occasion."

The fatal mistake, of course, lay with Whiston, and
with Alford, who took up the same position as he.
Whiston unconsciously pays a great tribute to the
shrewdness and acumen of Grotius.

Latter-day divines are somewhat contemptuous of the
attitude of their predecessors fifty years ago. Thus

28 THE HARMONISTS

Dr. Sanday writes in his Bampton Lectures of 1893 as
follows (p. 392) :—

The traditional theory needs little description. Fifty
years ago it may be said to have been the common belief
of Christian men — at least in this country. It may have
been held somewhat vaguely and indefinitely, and those
who held it might, if pressed on the subject, have made
concessions which would have involved them in perplexi
ties. But, speaking broadly, the current view may be
said to have been that the Bible as a whole and in all its
parts was the Word of God, and as such that it was
endowed with all the perfections of that Word. Not only
did it disclose truths about the Divine nature and opera
tion which were otherwise unattainable ; but all parts of
it were equally authoritative, and in history, as well as in

doctrine, it was exempt from error This was the view.

commonly held fifty years ago. And when it comes to be
examined, it is found to be substantially not very different
from that which was held two centuries after the birth of
Christ.

To this idea of verbal inspiration Dr. Sanday opposes
what he calls an inductive or critical view of inspiration,
in accordance with which the believer will, where the
two conflict, accept "the more scientific statement."
On this view the Bible is not as such inspired, and the
inspiration of it is fitful, more active in one portion of it
than in another. Where the two views most diverge is
in the matter of the historical books. These do not
always narrate plain matter of fact, as they were sup
posed to do formerly ; nor are they " exempted from
possibilities of error." Where they conflict with scien
tific statements they must be regarded " rather as con
veying a religious lesson than as histories."

I do not grudge this writer the task of extracting
religious lessons out of certain portions of the Old

THE HARMONISTS 29

Testament, but it is more important to consider the
implications of this modern Anglican doctrine of inspira
tion. Is it open to everyone and anyone to pick and
choose and decide what in the Scriptures is true and
what not, what inspired and what uninspired? Who is
to be trusted with this new task of detecting an inner
canon inside of the old canon of Scripture ?

There is a school of thinkers inside the Church who
desire to assume this task, and who never weary of
insisting on the authority of the priesthood in this
matter. That somewhat mordant, but not very
enlightened, critic, Sir Robert Anderson, in a work
entitled The Bible and Modern Criticism (London,
1903), not unjustly observes (p. 172) that "the Lux
Mundi school has fallen back on the Church as the

source of authority because the Bible, so far from

being infallible, is marred by error, and therefore
affords no sure basis of faith." And this is undoubtedly
the point of view of High Church clergymen. It
remains to be seen whether in the minds of Englishmen
the authority of the Church will survive that of the
Bible.

CHAPTER III.
THE DEISTS

THE Unitarian movement, which flourished in Poland
during- the sixteenth century, and penetrated to England
in the seventeenth, contributed but little to the criticism
of the New Testament. It is true that Lelius Socinus
(1525-1562) and Faustus Socinus (1539-1604), his
nephew, both of Siena, after whom the Unitarians
were called Socinians, denied many tenets held to be
fundamental in the great churches of east and west,
such as that of the trinity and that of baptism with
water ; but, no more than the medieval Cathars who in
both these respects anticipated them, did they dream
of calling in aid the resources of textual criticism.
They merely accepted the New Testament text as they
found it in Erasmus's Greek edition, or even in the
Latin vulgate, and accepted it as fully and verbally
inspired. No more than their Calvinist and Jesuit
persecutors, had they any idea of a development of
church doctrine such as could have led incidentally to
interpolations and alterations of the texts. They
questioned neither the traditional attributions of these
texts nor their historical veracity. Nor did it ever
occur even to John Locke to doubt the plenary inspira
tion of scripture, although his philosophy, with its
rejection of authority and appeal to experience and
common sense, operated strongly for the creation of
that rationalistic school of thinkers who came to be
known as Deists. The writers of this school, who

30

THE DEISTS 31

flourished at the end of the seventeenth and during- the
eighteenth century, dealt with many subjects ; but they
all of them stood for a revolt against authority in
religion. Thus Tindal, in his preface to his work,
Christianity as Old as the Creation; or, the Gospel a
Repnblication of the Religion of Nature, declares in his
preface that —

He builds nothing on a thing so uncertain as tradition,
which differs in most countries ; and of which, in all
.countries, the bulk of mankind are incapable of judging.
The scope of his work is well indicated in the head
ings of his chapters, one and all. Take for example
this :—

Chap. I.: That God, at all times, has given mankind
sufficient means of knowing whatever he requires of
them, and what those means are.
And in this chapter we read : —

Too great a stress can't be laid on natural religion ;
which, as I take it, differs not from revealed, but in the
manner of its being communicated : the one being the
internal, as the other the external revelation of the same
unchangeable will of a Being, who is alike at all times
infinitely wise and good.

This author never wearies of contrasting the simpli
city of natural religion, the self-evidencing clearness of
the laws of goodness, mercy, and duty impressed on
all human hearts, with the complexity and uncertainty
of a revelation which rests or is contained in Scriptures;
and he knows how to enrol leading Anglican authori
ties on his side in urging his point. Thus (p. 214 of
the third edition, London, 1732) he adduces a passage
from the Polemical Works of Jeremy Taylor, which
begins thus : —

Since there are so many copies with infinite varieties
of reading; since a various interpunction, a parenthesis,

THE DEISTS

a letter, an accent, may much alter the sense ; since
some places have divers literal senses, many have
spiritual, mystical, and allegorical meanings; since there
are so many tropes, metonymies, ironies, hyperboles,
proprieties and improprieties of language, whose under
standing depends on such circumstances, that it is
almost impossible to know the proper interpretation,
now that the knowledge of such circumstances, and
particular stories, is irrecoverably lost : since there are
some mysteries which, at the best advantage of expres
sion, are not easy to be apprehended ; and whose explica
tion, by reason of our imperfections, must needs be
dark, sometimes unintelligible ; and, lastly, since those
ordinary means of expounding Scripture, as searching
the originals, conference of places, parity of reason,
analogy of faith, are all dubious, uncertain, and very
fallible ; he that is wisest, and by consequence the
likeliest to expound truest, in all probability of reason,
will be very far from confidence.

The alternatives are thus presented of becoming
"priests' worshippers," with "a divine faith in their
dictates," or of resigning oneself to Bishop Taylor's
attitude of suspense and doubt. For as that writer
concludes : " So many degrees of improbability and
incertainty, all depress our certainty of finding out
truth in such mysteries." These, as he elsewhere says
(Polem. WorkS) p. 521) : " Have made it impossible for
a man in so great a variety of matter not to be
deceived." The first alternative involves, as Chilling-
worth said in his Religion of Protestants^ a " deify
ing " by some Pope or other of "his own interpreta
tions and tyrannous in forcing them upon others "; and
a Pope is " the common incendiary of Christendom,"
who " tears in pieces, not the coat, but the bowels and
members of Christ : ridente Turca, nee dolente ludaeo"

From the above extracts we can judge of Tindal's

THE DEISTS 33

position. He did not directly attack orthodoxy ;
indeed, had he done so he could hardly have retained
his fellowship at All Souls' College. But the direct
implication of his work throughout was this, that
Christianity is not only superfluous, but too obscure to
be set on a level with natural religion. His book is
still worth reading, and very superior to the feeble
counterblasts penned by several contemporary divines,
one of whom was my own direct ancestor, John Cony-
beare, Bishop of Bristol. Space forbids me to dwell as
long as I would like to on the work. I will only draw
attention to his acute discussion in his sixth chapter of
the intellectual preconditions of any revelation what
ever. Men, he there argues, must have been gifted
not only with an idea of a perfect and Supreme Being,
but with a certainty of his existence, and an idea of
his perfections, before they can even approach the
question, Whether he Jias made any external Revelation.
All discussion of such a question is bound to be idle,
"except we could know whether this Being is bound
by his external word ; and had not, either at the time
of giving it, a secret will inconsistent with his revealed
will ; or has not since changed his will." The modern
High Churchman imagines that he has strengthened
the position of orthodoxy by a doctrine of progressive
revelation. In other words, Jehovah, when he delivered
the Law to Moses, communicated neither his true will
nor the whole truth to mankind ; he only did so when
he sent Jesus into Judaea and founded the Christian
Church and its sacraments. We may well ask with
Tindal how we can be sure that the Church and its
sacraments exhaust the truth. May there not still
remain a Secret Will in reserve waiting to be revealed,
as little consistent with current orthodoxy and its

34 THE DEISTS

dogmas and rites as these are with the old Jewish
religion of animal sacrifices? Of Tindal's work only
the first volume was published in 1730, when he was
already an old man. He died in 1733, leaving- a second
ready for the press. It never saw the light, for Dr.
Gibson, Bishop of London, with whom Tindal had
more than once crossed swords, got hold of the manu
script after the author's death, and, rightly judging that
it was easier to suppress than answer such a work, had
it destroyed. The late Bishop Stubbs, with uncon
scious humour, confesses in one of his letters to a
similar action. He met John Richard Green for the
first time in a railway train, and, noticing that he was
reading Renan's Life of Jesus, engaged him in a discus
sion of other topics. Before the conversation ended the
Bishop had transferred the obnoxious volume to his
own handbag, whence, when he reached his home, he
transferred it into his wastepaper basket. So history
repeats itself at long intervals. Amid the revolutions
of theology little remains the same except the episcopal
temper.

I have dwelt first on Matthew Tindal because his
work illustrates so well the general tone of Deists. I
must now turn to two of his contemporaries who
are memorable for their criticisms of the New Testa
ment.

The author of the first Gospel incessantly appends to
his narratives of Jesus the tag : Now all this is coine to
pass that it might be fulfilled -which was spoken by the
prophet. So in Luke xxiv. 25 it is related how the risen
Jesus, on the road to Emmaus, by way of convincing
two of his disciples of the reality of his resurrection,
said unto them, O foolish men and slow of heart to believe
in accordance 'with all the prophets have spoken ! Ana

THE DEISTS 35

beginning from Moses and front all the prophets, he inter
preted to them throughout the Scriptures the things con
cern ing h imself. •

And similarly in the fourth Gospel (xix. 28), Jesus,
that the Scripture might be accomplished, said : / thirst.

And when he had received the vinegar ; he said, This

Scripture also is fulfilled ; and tie bowed his head, and
gave up his spirit. '

I cite these passages to illustrate the character of
that form of embellishment of the narratives of Jesus to
which the name of prophetic gnosis has been given, and
which was the chief — perhaps the only — weapon of his
followers against the Jews who scornfully denied him to
be the Messiah. After doing service against the Jews,
the same argument was used to compel the Gentiles also
to accept the new religion ; and Christian literature,
until the other day, largely consisted of the argument
from prophecy, as it was termed. With rabbinical
ingenuity, thousands of passages were torn from the
living context which gave them sense and meaning,
and distorted, twisted, .mutilated, misinterpreted, in
order to fit them in as predictions of Jesus the Messiah.
No one thought much of what they signified in their
surroundings, or, indeed, of whether they had there any
rational signification at all.

Now early in the seventeenth century a few of the
more intelligent students of the Bible began to express
doubts about the matter. Various passages taken
immemorially for prophecies of Christ seemed on closer

1 Here the English version, following all the MSS., renders:
" he said, It is finished " (or fulfilled). But the words survive as I
have Driven them in Eusebius's citations of the passage and in the
old Georgian version, which probably reflects the second-century
Syriac version. Their extreme frigidity would explain their omis
sion from all the Greek MSS.

36 THE DEISTS

inspection to yield a better and more coherent sense if
interpreted by reference to the particular portions of the
Old Testament to which they belonged. Such of them
as were really anticipations of a future were seen to
have received their fulfilment in the close sequel of the
Old Testament history ; others were not anticipations
at all, but statements of past events made by ancient
writers. It was pointed out by scholars, who now
began to familiarise themselves with that tongue, that
in Hebrew the grammatical forms expressive of past
and future action are almost identical, and easily mis
taken for one another. Worse still, many passages of
the Septuagint or old Greek translation of the Old
Testament were found on examination of the Hebrew
text to be mistranslations. The Hebrew original,
rightly interpreted, had quite another meaning than
that which the evangelists, in their ignorance of
Hebrew, had blindly accepted.

William Whiston, whose harmonistic canons we have
already discussed (p. 16 foil.), was impressed by these
doubts, and set himself to resolve them. He could not,
in a modern and critical manner, admit that the passages
of the Old Testament adduced by the first and other
evangelists as prophecies were not such, but adopted
the topsy-turvy hypothesis that where the old Hebrew
text did not warrant the Christian abuse of it, it had
been changed and corrupted by Jewish enemies of
Christ. In the age of the Apostles, he argued, or
rather assumed, the Hebrew text had agreed with the
Greek, so that they could argue from the latter taken in
its literal sense. He admitted that the texts in their
modern form are irreconcilable ; and, having learned
Hebrew, he boldly set himself to re-write the original,
so as to make it tally with Christian requirements.

K^eHMeMONfcMTOIC

M pN^C TO K M N AC Y K H M
KAIG^ee AM I H OH CAN

6 K.e A.6 re i A YTA i c *
eVeAMf crcee'iM-z.HT««

T".€ TO M W A,:Z A | H N 6 NT*
^ C T" A Y f .c I » M r r i n r i fyfl
o H OY K^CT i/ j;«n A.C£ VAC
oTonocor

ICM AOHTAJ -

i ~i~(jL> n€i~tft»
UTI r i ro A re i Y M ACeiQ

T H M PA A I A A' I X N €? K ^.'^CT

1' cS KI o'4^ t ft o c- K A ovi> c- '^»

c A ic- J>Y'"r)^,AnbT6y
M rs^ »i M fJ I (J *f C. I X . ft • -'~AJ»

C "r A. <5| c KT A i o v A.e N} o Y

^ G^ y I n o M e <t^ o R, o Y N
fo rA'j : -, v •

<Ol-4 >

MARK XVI. 58.

38 THE DEISTS

But here a scholar as learned as himself, but less
encumbered with the pedantry of orthodoxy, crossed
his path. This was Anthony Collins (1676-1729), a
scholar of Eton and of King's College, Cambridge.
Already, in 1707, he had published a work in which he
pleaded for " the use of Reason in propositions the
evidence whereof depends on human testimony." In
1713 he issued A Discourse on Freethinking, in which
he showed that in every age men have been virtuous in
proportion as they were enlightened and free to think
for themselves. Without such freedom of thought
Christianity, he said, could never have won its early
victories. In these two works he hardly went beyond
what his master and intimate friend John Locke might
have written ; and the latter, in a letter addressed to
him ten years earlier, had written thus : —

Believe it, my good friend, to love truth for truth's sake
is the principal part of human perfection in this world, and
the source of all other virtues : and if I mistake not, you
have as much of it as ever I met with in anybody.

The above-mentioned works, and also an earlier work
in 1709 entitled Priestcraft in Perfection, raised up against
Collins a plentiful crop of enemies ; he had already been
obliged, in 1711, to retire for a time to Holland to escape
the storm. There he gained the friendship of Le Clerc
(1657-1736), who as early as 1685 had openly attacked
the belief in the inspiration of the Bible, as it was then
and long afterwards formulated. But it was in 1724
that Collins published the work which most deeply
offended. This was his Discourse on the Grounds and
Reasons of the Christian Religion, and was called forth
by the work of Whiston. The following passage sums
up the results at which he arrives : —

THE DEISTS 39

In fine, the prophecies cited from the Old Testament by
the authors of the New do so plainly relate, in their
obvious and primary sense, to other matters than those
which they are produced to prove that to pretend they
prove, in that sense, what they are produced to prove is
(as Simon, Dibl. Crit., vol. iv., p. 513, and Histoire Crit.
du Nou-v. Test., chaps. 21 and 22, declares) to give up the
cause of Christianity to Jews and other enemies thereof;
who can so easily show, in so many undoubted instances,
the Old Testament and New Testament to have no
manner of connection in that respect, but to be in an
irreconcilable state (as Whiston said in his Essay t etc.,
p. 282).

The remedy proposed by Collins is that of allegorising
the so-called prophecies, and of taking them in a second
ary sense different from their obvious and literal one.
In no other way, he urged, can they be adapted to the
belief in the spiritual Messiah who is yet to appear ; for
the prophecies must have been fulfilled, or the Christian
faith which they evidenced is false. Since they were
demonstrably never fulfilled in their literal sense, Collins
argues that the pointing of the Hebrew text must be
altered, the order of words and letters transposed,
words cut in half, taken away or added — any pro-
crustean methods, in short, employed, in order to force
the text into some sort of conformity with the events.

The good faith of Collins in propounding such a
remedy was questioned by the many divines who
undertook to answer him, and also by modern his
torians of the Deistic movement, like Leslie Stephen.
He was accused of covertly ridiculing and destroying
the Christian religion, while professing to justify and
uphold it. This is a point to which I shall presently
advert. For the moment let us select an example
which illustrates the great sagacity and acumen he

40 THE DEISTS

displayed in his attack on the argument from prophecy.

It shall be his discussion of the text Isaiah vii. 14,

invoked in Matt. i. 23 : Behold, the virgin shall be with

child, and shall bring forth a son, etc.

These words [wrote Collins], as they stand in Isaiah,
from whom they are supposed to be taken, do, in their
obvious and literal sense, relate to a young woman in the
days cf Ahaz, King of Judah.

He then shows from the context of Isaiah, chap, viii.,

how Ahaz

took two witnesses, and in their presence went unto
the said virgin, or young woman, called the Prophetess
(verse 3), who in due time conceived and bare a son, who
was named Immanuel ; after whose birth, the projects of
Rezin and Pekah (Is. viii. 8-10) were soon confounded,
according to the Prophesy and Sign given by the prophet.

The sign (Isaiah vii. 14) was

given by the prophet to convince Ahaz that he (the
prophet) brought a message from the Lord to him tc
assure him that the two kings should not succeed against
him. How could a virgin's conception and bearing a son
seven hundred years afterwards be a sign to Ahaz that
the prophet came to him with the said message from the
Lord ? And how useless was it to Ahaz, as well as
absurd in itself, for the prophet to say : Before the child,
born seven hundred years hence, shall distinguish
between good and evil, the land shall be forsaken of both
her kings? — which should seem a banter, instead of a
sign. But a prophecy of the certain birth of a male child
to be born within a year or two seems a proper sign

Similarly he points out that the words of Hosea cited
in Matt. ii. 15 were no prediction, but a statement of a
past fact — viz., that Jehovah had brought Israel his son
out of Egypt.

Collins also undertook to show that the Book of

THE DEISTS 4I

Daniel, on which his antagonist Whiston relied, was
a forgery of the age of Antiochus Epiphanes. This
brilliant conjecture, which modern inquiry has sub
stantiated, of itself suffices to place him in the foremost
rank of critics. Bentley, the King's librarian, indulged
in gibes, as cheap as they were coarse, at Collins's
mistakes in the domain of scholarship ; but here was a
discovery which, had Bentley known it, far outshone
in importance, while it rivalled in critical insight, his
own exposure in 1699 of the Epistles of Phalaris, the
genuineness of which was at the time an article of faith
in Oxford colleges.

The other writer of this age who must be set along
side of Collins as a critic of the New Testament was
Thomas Woolston (1669-1731). The general position
of this writer was that the miracles related of Jesus are
so unworthy of a spiritual Messiah that they must one
and all, including the resurrection, be set down as never
having happened at all, and be explained allegorically
as types or figures of the real, which is the spiritual,
alone. I reproduce in his own words, from his Discourse
on the Miracles, sixth edition, London, 1729, p. 7, his
programme : —

I will show that the miracles of healing all manner of
bodily diseases, which Jesus was justly famed for, are
none of the proper miracles of the Messiah, nor are they
so much as a good proof of Jesus's divine authority to
found and introduce a religion into the world.

And to do this let us consider, first, in general, what
was the opinion of the Fathers about the Evangelists, in
which the life of Christ is recorded. Eucherius says that
the scriptures of the New as well as Old Testament are
to be interpreted in an allegorical sense. And this his
opinion is no other than the common one of the first a^es
of the Church consequently the literal story of Christ's

42 THE DEISTS

miracles proves nothing1. But let's hear particularly their
opinion of the actions and miracles of our Saviour.
Origen says that whatsoever Jesus did in the flesh was
but typical and symbolical of ivhat he would do in the
spirit ; ami to our purpose, that the several bodily diseases
•which he healed were no other than figures of the spiritual
infirmities of the soul, that are to be cured by him.
The following- are some of the results at which he

arrives by applying the above canon : —

Jesus's feedings of five and four thousand in the

wilderness "are most romantick tales."

The miracle of Mark ii. 1-12 = Luke v. 17-26 is " such

a rodomontado that, were men to stretch for a wager,

against reason and truth, none could outdo it."
He also banters the spittle miracle (in John ix.)
of the blind man, for whom eyesalve was made of clay
and spittle ; which eyesalve, whether it was Balsamick
or not, does equally affect the credit of the miracle. If it
was naturally medicinal, there's an end of the miracle ;
and if it was not medicinal, it was foolishly and imper
tinently apply'd, and can be no otherwise accounted for
than by considering it, with the Fathers, as a figurative
act in Jesus (p. 55).

Of another famous tale he writes : —

Jesus's cursing the fig-tree, for its not bearing fruit
out of season, upon the bare mention of it, appears to be
a foolish, absurd, and ridiculous act, if not figurative.

It is so like the malignant practices of witches, who,

as stories go, upon envy, grudge, or distaste, smite their
neighbours' cattle with languishingdistempers, till they die.

And thus of the Magi : —

Of the Wise Men out of the East, with their (literally)
senseless and ridiculous presents of frankincense and
myrrh, to a new-born babe. If with their gold, which
could be but little, they had brought their dozens of
sugar, soap, and candles, which would have been of use

THE DEISTS 43

to the child and his poor mother in the straw, they had
acted like wise as well as good men (p. 56).

From the Fourth Discourse on the Miracles, London,
'729» P- 36» on the miracle of Cana : —

Jesus, after their more than sufficient drinking for their
satisfaction of nature, had never turned water into wine,
nor would his mother have requested him to do it, if, I
say, they had not a mind, and took pleasure in it too, to

see the company quite stitch 'd up

The Fathers of your Church, being sensible of the
absurdity, abruptness, impertinence, pertness, and sense
lessness of the passage before us according to the letter,
had recourse to a mystical and allegorical interpretation,
as the only way to make it consistent with the wisdom,
sobriety, and duty of the Holy Jesus (p. 35).

In his sixth discourse on the miracles Woolston
assails the narratives of the Resurrection. He evidently
felt that he was running some risk of prosecution and
imprisonment by his freedom of speech, so he puts the
chief of his argument into the mouth of an imaginary
Jewish rabbi. The latter begins by lamenting the loss
of the writings which, according to Justin Martyr
(c. 130-140), his own ancestors unquestionably dispersed
against Jesus. These, if we had them, would, he avers,
yield us a clear insight into the cheat and imposture of
the Christian religion.

He then proceeds to argue that the priests who sealed
the sepulchre waited for Jesus to rise again after three
days— i.e., on Monday— but that the disciples stole a
march on them by removing the body a day earlier,
and then pretended the sense of the prophecy to be that
he should rise on the third day. The disciples were
afraid to trust Jesus's body, its full time, in the grave,
because of the greater difficulty to carry it off afterwards,
and pretend a resurrection upon it

44 THE DEISTS

Jesus's body was gone betimes in the morning, before
our chiej priests could be out of their beds ; and a bare
faced infringement of the seals of the sepulchre was made

against the laws of honour and honesty

In short, by the sealing of the stone of the sepulchre
we are to understand nothing less than a covenant
entered into between our chief priests and the Apostles,
by which Jesus's veracity, power, and Messiahship was

to be try'd The condition of the sealed covenant was

that if Jesus arose from the dead in the presence of our
chief priests, upon their opening the seals of the sepulchre,
at the time appointed ; then he was to be acknowledged
to be the Messiah. But if he continued in a corrupt and
putrified state, then was he to be granted to be an
impostor. Very wisely and rightly agreed ! And if the
Apostles had stood to this covenant, Christianity had
been nipt in its bud and suppressed at its birth.
He anticipates the objection that the theft could not
have escaped the notice of the soldiers set to guard the
tomb. These were either bribed or, as "our ancestors
said, what your evangelist has recorded," asleep.

The rabbi next raises the objection that Jesus appeared
to none except the faithful : —

Celsus of old, in the name of the Jews, made the
objection, and Olivio, a later rabbi, has repeated it. But
in all my reading and conversation with men or books I
never met with a tolerable answer to it.

This objection Origen owns to be a considerable

one in his second book against Celsus.

Whoever blends together the various history of the
four Evangelists as to Jesus's appearances after his
resurrection will find himself not only perplex'd how to
make an intelligible, consistent, and sensible story of it,
but must, with Celsus, needs think it, if he closely think
on't, like some of the confused and incredible womanish
fables of the apparitions of the ghosts of deceased
persons, which the Christian world in particular has in

THE DEISTS

45

former ages abounded with. The ghosts of the dead in
this present age, and especially in this Protestant country,
have ceased to appear; and we nowadays hardly ever
hear of such an apparition. And what is the reason of
it ? Why, the belief of these stories being banish'd out
of men's minds, the crafty and vaporous forbear to trump
them upon us. There has been so much clear proof of
the fraud in many of these stories that the wise and
considerate part of mankind has rejected them all,
excepting this of Jesus, which, to admiration, has stood
its ground

I can't read the story without smiling, and there are
two or three passages in it that put me in mind of
Robinson Crusoe's filling his pockets with biskets, when
he had neither coat, wastecoat, nor breeches on.

I don't expect my argument against it (the Resurrec
tion) will be convincing of any of your preachers. They
have a potent reason for their faith, which we Jews
can't come at ; or I don't know but we might believe
with them.

That the Fathers, without questioning their belief of
Jesus's corporal Resurrection, universally interpreted
the story and every part of it mystically, is most certain.

He cites Hilary in behalf of this contention ; also
Augustine, Sermo clxviii., Appendix ; Origen in Johan.
Evang., C. xx., Tract 120; John of Jerusalem, In Matt.
c. xx.; Jerome, In Matthceum ; and then sums up his
case in the following words : —

What I have said in a few citations is enough to show
that they looked upon the whole story as emblematical of
his Spiritual Resurrection out of the grave of the letter
of the Scriptures, in which he has been buried about
three days and three nights, according to that mystical
interpretation of prophetical Numbers which I have

learned of them by the three Days, St. Augustin says,

are to be understood three ages of the world.

I am resolved to give the Letter of the Scripture no

46 THE DEISTS

rest, so long as God gives me life and abilities to attack
it. Origen (in Psalm xxxvi.) says that, -when we dispute
against Ministers of the Letter, we must select some
historical parts of Scripture, which they understand
literally, and show that, according to the Letter, they carft
stand their ground, but imply absurdities and nonsense.
And how then is such a work to be performed to best
advantage ? Is it to be done in a grave, sedate, and
serious manner? No, I think ridicule should here take
place of sober reasoning, as the more proper and effectual
means to cure men of their foolish faith and absurd notions.

I have cited Woolston's argument against the
Resurrection so fully in order to give my readers an
adequate idea of his method. It is old-fashioned, no
doubt, as compared with the much subtler criticism of
the Abbe" Loisy, who challenges the story of the empty
tomb altogether, and argues that, Jesus having been
really cast after death into the common foss or Hakel-
dama into which other malefactors' bodies were thrown,
the story of the women's visit to the empty tomb was
invented to buttress the growing belief in a bodily
resurrection, such as became a messiah who was to
return and inaugurate an earthly millennium. As
against the traditional acceptance of the narratives,
however, Woolston's arguments are effective enough.
His method of ridicule was, of course, adopted by
Voltaire, who was living in England when he and
Collins were writing. Voltaire, indeed, would have
been the first to laugh at the method of allegory by
which the two English Deists sought to quicken into
spiritual meanings the letter which killeth by its
absurdities. Needless to relate, this saving use of
allegory did not avail to protect Woolston from public
insults, prosecutions, and imprisonment. He was twice
attacked by zealots in front of his house, and was in

THE DEISTS 47

the King's Bench tried before a jury who found him
guilty of blasphemy. He was fined a hundred pounds,
and, being unable to pay, he went to prison for the
last four years of his life. The mere titles of the books
written to answer him sufficiently indicate the odium
they excited. Here are two of these titles : —

Tom of Bedlam's short letter to his cozen Tom Wool-
ston, occasioned by his late discourses on the miracles of
our Saviour. London, 1728.

For God or the Devil, or just chastisement no per
secution, being the Christian's cry to the legislature
for exemplary punishment of publick and pernicious
blasphemers, particularly that wretch Woolston, who
has impudently and scurrilously turned the miracles of
our Saviour into ridicule. London, 1728.

The question remains whether Collins and Woolston
were sincere in their advocacy of an allegorical inter
pretation of the Bible. I feel sure that Collins was,
but not that Woolston was so, at any rate in his latest
works. The worst of them were dedicated in insulting
terms to English bishops of note, whom he invariably
characterised as hireling priests and apostates. For
Whiston, who as a professed Arian was hardly less
offensive to the clergy than himself, Woolston ever
retained his respect, though, like Collins, he forfeited
his friendship. On the whole, there is much to be said
for Leslie Stephen's verdict that the study of Origen
or some similar cause had disordered his intellect. In
other words, he was a religious crank.

However this be, there is one aspect of these two
Deists which escaped their contemporaries and all who
have since written about them. It is this, that in
dismissing the historical reality of Christ's miracles in
favour of an exclusively symbolic interpretation they

48 THE DEISTS

exactly took up the attitude of the medieval Cathars,
called sometimes Albigensians, sometimes Patarenes.
Thus in an old imaginary dialogue of the twelfth or
thirteenth century, written by a Catholic ag-ainst these
heretics, the Catholic asks : " Why, like Christ and the
Apostles, do you not work visible signs?" And the
Patarene answers : —

Even yet a veil is drawn in your hearts, if you believe
that Christ and his apostles worked visible signs. The
letter killeth, but the spirit quickeneth. Ye must there
fore understand things in a spiritual sense, and not
imagine that Christ caused the soul of Lazarus to return
to his corpse ; but only that, in converting him to his
faith, he resuscitated one that was dead as a sinner is
dead, and had lain four days, and so stunk in his
desperate state.

These curious heretics, the descendants of Marcion
and Mani, held that, as matter was an evil creation,
Christ, a spiritual and divine being, could not have
wrought material miracles ; he could not pollute him
self by contact with matter. He only appeared to the
eye to work material signs, just as he appeared to the
eye to have a human body, though, in fact, he shared
not our flesh and blood. His birth, therefore, no less
than his death and resurrection, were only fantastic
appearances, and not real events.

It is strange to find Woolston reproducing these
earlier forms of opinion. Did he blunder into them by
himself, or did he, through some obscure channel,
inherit them ? If we consider that these medieval
heretics were in the direct pedigree of some of the
Quaker and Anabaptist sects which in the seventeenth
century swarmed in England, Holland, and Germany,
it is not impossible that he picked up the idea from
some of his contemporaries.

CHAPTER IV.
THE EVANGELISTS

A LEADIXG writer of the Latin Church, the Rev. Joseph
Rickaby, in an essay on "One Lord Jesus Christ," in a
volume entitled Jesus or Christ, London, 1909, p. 139,
has written as follows : —

At the outset of the argument it is necessary to define
my controversial position in reference to the books of the
New Testament. Never have documents been attacked
with greater subtlety and vehemence : at the end of
forty years' fighting they have emerged in the main
victorious ; their essential value has been proved as it
never had been proved before.

That Dr. Rickaby is easily pleased will be seen if we
consider the results of those forty years of criticism as
they are accepted by a daily increasing number of clergy
men in the Roman, Anglican, and Lutheran Churches,
and also by many Nonconformists. In the first place,
the gospel called " according to Matthew " is no longer
allowed to be from the pen of that Apostle. Here
again we may select Dean Alford as a fair represen
tative of educated opinion fifty years ago. He could
then write of the passage Matt. viii. 2 foil., in which
the cleansing of a leper by Jesus is related, as follows : —
This same miracle is related by St. Luke (ch. v. 12-14)
without any mark of defmiteness, either as to time or

place The plain assertion of the account in the text

requires that the leper should have met our Lord on his
descent from the mountain, while great multitudes were

following him I conceive it highly probable that St.

49

So THE EVANGELISTS

Matthew was himself a hearer of the sermon (on the
mount), and one of those who followed our Lord at this
time.

And again, in reference to the passage ix. 9, where the
publican called by Jesus to be an apostle is called
Matthew, in contradiction of the other two gospels,
which give his name as Levi, Alford could write that
"it is probable enough that Matthew, in his own gospel,
would mention only his apostolic name," and that "in
this case, when he of all men must have been best
informed, his own account is the least precise of the
three." And in his Prolegomena, in ch. ii., he begins
the section upon the authorship of this gospel with the
words : —

The author of this gospel has been universally believed
to be the Apostle Matthew. With this belief the contents
of the gospel are not inconsistent, and we find it current
in the very earliest ages.

Alford also believed that the three Synoptic Gospels
substantially embody the testimony the Apostles gave
of Christ's ministry, from his baptism by John until
his ascension ; that this testimony was chiefly collected
from the oral teaching current among the catechists of
the Church, but in part from written documents as well
which reflected the teaching. He was furthermore
convinced that no one "of the three evangelists had
access to either of the other two gospels in its present
form." He was loth to believe that Matthew, an
Apostle, was a debtor to either of the others, not only
for the order in which he arranges the events of the
ministry of Jesus, but also for great blocks of his texts.
Yet that Matthew was so indebted to Mark is an axiom
with modern orthodox critics. The first gospel is
universally allowed to-day to be a compilation by an

THE EVANGELISTS s,

unknown writer of two ulterior documents — namely,
Mark and the non-Marcan document already mentioned.1
In another work, Myth, Magic, and Morals, \ have
advised my readers to take a red pencil and underline
in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke all the phrases,
sentences, and entire narratives which agree verbally
with Mark, so that they may realise for themselves how
little of Mark is left that is not either in Matthew or in
Luke. Or, conversely, they may underline in Mark all
words or parts of words that are found in the other two
gospels. In the latter case they will find that they
have underlined almost the whole of Mark. The only
explanation is that both the others used Mark ; and
accordingly Dr. Armitage Robinson, a fairly conser
vative critic, writes in his work on The Study of the
Gospels as follows : —

I think that the impression gained by anyone who will
take the trouble to do what I have suggested (viz., under
line common words, etc.) will certainly be that St. Mark's
Gospel lay before the other two evangelists, and that
they used it very freely, and between them embodied
almost the whole of it.

Accordingly Dr. Robinson boldly asserts (p. 101) the
first gospel to be the work of an unknown writer, and
warns his readers to prefer either Luke or Mark or the
reconstructed non-Marcan document to Matthew : —

From the historical point of view he cannot feel a like

certainty in dealing with statements which are only

attested by the unknown writer of the first gospel.

Here, then, we see a gospel that had all the prestige

of apostolic authorship, and the only one of the synoptics

that had that prestige, debased to the level of an

anonymous compilation, of less value for the historian

1 Page 19.

52 THE EVANGELISTS

than either of the other two. The one synoptic evan
gelist on whom Alford thought he could depend, just
because he had seen things with his own eyes, turns
out to be no apostle at all, but an anonymous copyist.
Will Father Rickaby, in the face of such facts, continue
to assert, of the first gospel at all events, that "its
essential value has been proved as it never had been
proved before "?

And in this connection it is instructive to note how
the same hypothesis — viz., of Matthew's (and Luke's)
dependence on Mark, and of Mark's priority — is regarded
by two Anglican deans, respectively before and after its
acceptance. A certain Mr. Smith, of Jordanhill, in a
Dissertation on the Origin and Connection of the Gospels
(Edinburgh, 1853), to which I shall return later, argued
that oral tradition was not adequate to explain the
identities of word and narrative which pervade the
Synoptic Gospels ; and he brought to a test the argu
ments on which the hypothesis of an oral tradition and
narrative underlying them was based. That argument
may fitly be given in the very words of Dean Alford,
who believed in it. They are these (Prolegomena,
ch. i.,§3, 6):—

While they (the Apostles) were principally together,
and instructing the converts at Jerusalem, such narrative
would naturally beforthe most part the same, and expressed
in the same, or nearly the same, words : coincident, how
ever, not from design or rule, but because the things them
selves were the same ; and the teaching naturally fell for
the most part into one form.

Mr. Smith brought this argument to the test of experi
ence by an examination of how far and why modern
historians like Suchet, Alison, and Napier, narrating
the same events, can approximate to one another. He

THE EVANGELISTS 53

proved that they only agree verbally, as the Synoptic
Gospels agree, where they copied either one the other
or all common documents, and that where they did not
so copy they did not agree.

" Reasons could be assigned," answers Dean Alford,
" for the adoption or rejection by the posterior writer of
the words and clauses of the prior one." "Let the
student," he continues, " attempt such a rationale of
any narrative common to the three gospels, on any
hypothesis of priority, and he will at once perceive its
impracticability. If Matthew, Mark, and Luke are to
be judged by the analogy of Suchet, Alison, and Napier,
the inference must be that, whereas the historians were
intelligent men, acting by the rules of mental associa
tion and selection, the evangelists were mere victims of
caprice, and such caprice as is hardly consistent with
the possession of a sound mind."

This argument is unaffected by the circumstance that
Matthew and Luke both copied Mark, instead of all
three having (as was supposed by Mr. Smith) copied
common, but now vanished, ulterior documents. What
I desire to set on record is the condemnation Dean
Alford is ready to mete out to Matthew and Luke in
case they be proved to owe their mutual approxima
tions, not to a common oral tradition, but to common
documents. According to the present Dean of West
minster, that case was the real one. Dean Alford then,
who was no mean scholar and exegete, admitted by
anticipation that the first and third evangelists displayed
an almost insane caprice in the handling of their sources.
In adopting here and rejecting there the words and
clauses of their sources they obeyed no rules of mental
association or selection. In fine, Dean Alford, were
he alive to-day, would have to condemn Matthew and

54 THE EVANGELISTS

Luke for the arbitrariness of their methods of compila
tion, in which he would discern no rhyme or reason.
What, then, becomes of Dr. Rickaby's boast that after
forty years' fighting his documents have emerged in
the main victorious ?

With Alford's judgment, however, let us contrast that
of Dean Robinson, who, I believe, has always rejected
that hypothesis of a common oral source, in which, like
Alford, his master, Dr. Westcott acquiesced. He tells
us that he entertained for a time the hypothesis of the
use by all three evangelists of a common document,
but finally dismissed it as "cumbersome and unneces
sary, and adopted the view that the first and third
embodied St. Mark in their respective gospels."1 As
to this "embodiment of St. Mark by the two subse
quent writers," he holds that " it is not a slavish
copying, but an intelligent and discriminating appro
priation."

For myself, I am of opinion that the truth lies
between Dean Alford and Dean Robinson. Matthew
and Luke are indeed capricious in what they reject and
what they adopt of Mark, but their caprice cannot be
stigmatised as insane. It is only what we might
expect of compilers who, living in uncritical and
uncultivated circles, had no idea of using their sources
in the careful and scrupulous manner in which a
scientific historian of to-day would use them. Mark
did not reach their hands as a canonical Scripture
invested with authority ; and in the view of one of
them, Matthew, it was much more important that the
events of Jesus's life should coincide with certain
Messianic prophecies (as they were held to be) of the

* See The Study of the Gospels, p. 28.

I>K. WESTCOTT.

56 THE EVANGELISTS

Old Testament than with the narrative of Mark. For
several years I have occupied my spare time in com
paring together and sifting the narratives of the lives
and martyrdoms of the Saints of the Church collected
by the Jesuits in their vast series of volumes called the
Acta Sanctorum. In these we can often trace the
fortunes of an originally simple, naive, and veracious
narrative. Later hagiologists, intent on edification,
pad out this narrative with commonplace miracles,
stuff their own vulgar exhortations and admonitions in
the mouths of the original actors, eliminate all local
colour, and bowdlerise the text to suit a later stage of
dogmatic development. Compared with such writers,
it seems to me that Matthew and Luke treated the
probably anonymous doctrines to which they owed
their knowledge of Jesus with singular sobriety and
self-restraint. We have only to compare either of
them with the fourth Gospel to realise how much the
art of portraying Jesus could decline in the course of
little more than a generation.

Both Matthew and Luke had conceptions of the
character and role of Jesus based partly on reflections
of their own, partly on the growing prophetic gnosis of
the age, in obedience to which they remodelled Mark's
narrative. Dean Robinson (in the work above men
tioned) remarks that in Mark the emotions of anger,
compassion, complacence, are each recorded of Jesus
three times ; grief, agony, surprise, vehemence, each
once. " Of actions," he continues, " we have ' looking
around ' five times, * looking upon ' twice, * looking up '
once, 'turning' thrice, 'groaning' twice, 'embracing
in the arms ' twice, ' falling down ' once. Now, in the
parallel passages of Matthew and Luke, we find," he
says, " that all the more painful emotions disappear,

THE EVANGELISTS 57

with one exception (agony). Anger, grief, groaning,
vehemence, are gone ; compassion remains twice in St.
Matthew, complacence (if it may be so termed) once in
both."

Nor is it only in respect of Jesus that these
" picturesque details " disappear. The figures of the
disciples are purged in the same manner of human
emotions. " Perplexity (five times), amazement (four),
fear (four), anger (once), hardness of heart (once),
drowsiness (once), are all recorded with more or less
frequency in St. Mark. But in the other evangelists
we find the same tendency to eliminate as before." It
is very improbable that these later evangelists had an
earlier copy of Mark from which these human traits in
the portraiture of Jesus and his apostles were absent,
waiting for the hand of a humanising editor to fill them
in. Dean Robinson's explanation is much more likely,
that this suppression of emotional attributes in the
persona dramatis was " the result of a kind of reverence
which belonged to a slightly later stage of reflection,
when certain traits might even seem to be derogatory
to the dignity of the sacred character of Christ and his
apostles."

On the other hand, as Dean Robinson subtly remarks,
the wonderment of the multitudes at the miracles of
Jesus, already emphasised in Mark, is still further
exaggerated in the later evangelists ; and, as for the
adversaries of Jesus, " we even seem to discover a
general tendency both in St. Matthew and in St. Luke
to expand and emphasise the notices of their hostility."

This is the best sort of literary criticism, and it really
marks an epoch in the history of the Christian religion
in England when a Dean of Westminster can deliver
it from his pulpit and publish it in a book. The only

58 THE EVANGELISTS

question is how far it tallies with his assertion that the
two subsequent writers were intelligent and discrimi
nating in their appropriation of Mark's narrative.
Does it not rather show how swiftly the process was
in progress of dehumanising Jesus, of converting him
from a man of flesh and blood into a god, gifted with
the ataraxia or exemption from human emotions proper
to the Stoic ideal sage and king? This development
culminates in the fourth Gospel. Pass from the de
feated and tarnished, peevish and vindictive, prisoner
of Elba to the majestic hero enthroned amid silence
and awe in the spacious temple of the Invalides, and
you feel that, mutatis mutandis, the cult of Napoleon
between the years 1815 and 1850 presents a certain
analogy with the deification of Jesus between the years
A.D. 70 and 120.

Thus the early tradition that Matthew, as for sake of
brevity I designate the first Gospel, was the work of an
apostle and eye-witness has been definitely given up.
It is possible that there may have been some truth in
the tradition preserved by Papias about A.D. 120-140
that Matthew " composed the logia or oracles of the
Lord in the Hebrew tongue — i.e., in the Aramaic of
Palestine, and that various people subsequently ren
dered these logia into Greek as best they could. Here
we seem to get our only glimpse at the pre-Greek stage
of the evangelical tradition, but we shall never know
whether the word logia here used by Papias signified a
collection of sayings or of narratives, or of both together.
Many scholars to-day believe that Matthew's Hebrew
logia were a selection of prophecies of Jesus Christ culled
from the Old Testament. In any case, our first Gospel is
no translation of the document attested by Papias ; for,
as Dean Robinson remarks, "our St. Matthew is

THE EVANGELISTS 59

demonstrably composed in the main out of two Greek
books," so that we must "conclude either that Papias
made a mistake in saying that St. Matthew wrote in
Hebrew, or that if he wrote in Hebrew his work has
perished without leaving a trace behind it." There is
furthermore a statement in Irenaeus (about 170-180) to
the effect that Matthew published his Gospel among
the Jews in his own tongue at the time that Peter and
Paul were preaching the Gospel in Rome and founding
the Church. This statement seems to be independent
of that of Papias, as most certainly is the story related
by Eusebius of Pantaenus, the catechist of Alexandria,
and teacher of Clement and Origen. The story runs
that about the year 180 Pantaenus visited India and
found the natives using a Gospel of Matthew written in
Hebrew, which Bartholomew the Apostle had conveyed
to them. Origen and Eusebius equally believed that
our Matthew was the work of the apostle, originally
composed in Hebrew.

It surely denotes a great change, almost amounting
to a revolution, when so ancient and well-attested a
tradition as that which assigned the first Gospel to the
apostle Matthew is set aside by leaders of the English
clergy ; before long they must with equal candour
abandon the yet more impossible tradition that the
fourth Gospel was written by an apostle and eye
witness, John, the son of Zebedee, who in the Epistle
to the Galatians is presented to us by Paul as a Judaizer
and an ally of James, the brother of Jesus. The
tradition that this apostle wrote this Gospel is hardly so
well authenticated as that which attested the apostolic
origin of the first Gospel. It merely amounts to this,
that as a child Irenaeus had heard Polycarp, who died
about A.D. 155, speak of John the Apostle. But he

6o THE EVANGELISTS

does not assert that Polycarp attributed the Gospel to
the apostle, nor is the occurrence in a surviving- letter
of Polycarp to the Philippians of a phrase from the first
Epistle of John proof that Polycarp either knew of the
Gospel, or, if he knew of it, that he ascribed it to John
any more than he does the epistle. It is, moreover,
practically certain that the John of whom Irenaeus in his
boyhood heard Polycarp speak was not the apostle but
the Presbyter John ; for Irenaeus reports that Papias, like
Polycarp, was a disciple of this John, whereas Papias,
according to the testimony of Eusebius, who had his
works in his library, learned not from John the Apostle
but from John the Presbyter much of what he recorded
in the five books of his lost Diegeseis, or narratives.
Irenaeus, therefore, confused the two Johns. The
external evidence of the existence of this Gospel is no
doubt early and ample, but it is chiefly found among
heretical and gnostic sects, like the Ophites, Perateans,
Basilidians, and Valentinians ; and one of the latter,
Heracleon, wrote a commentary on it. The attribution
to the Apostle John was probably made by some of
these sects, just as the Basilidians affected to have
among them a Gospel of Mathew, and as in other
circles the so-called Gospel of Peter was attributed to
St. Peter and read aloud in church as an authentic work
of that Apostle. If the fourth Gospel took its origin
from gnostic circles, we can quite well understand why
there existed so early in the orthodox Church of Asia
such strong prejudice against it.

It is not long ago that Canon Liddon declared in his
Bampton Lectures (1866) that

If the Book of Daniel has been recently described as
the battlefield of the Old Testament, it is not less true
that St. John's Gospel is the battlefield of the New. It

THE EVANGELISTS 61

is well understood on all sides that no question of mere
dilettante criticism is at stake when the authenticity of

St. John's Gospel is challenged For St. John's Gospel

is the most conspicuous written attestation to the God
head of Him whose claims upon mankind can hardly
be surveyed without passion, whether it be the passion
of adoring love or the passion of vehement and deter
mined enmity.

Nevertheless, among the best educated Anglicans
there is a tendency to give up the fourth Gospel. In
the work on the study of the Gospels already com
mended1 Dean Robinson devotes two luminous chapters
to the problem of its age and authorship. Though he
inclines to accept it as a work written by the apostle in
extreme old age, he is nevertheless not without
sympathy for those who reject the orthodox tradition.
" There are," he writes (p. 128), " many who are heartily
devoted to that central truth [i.e., of the divinity of
Christ], but yet cannot easily persuade themselves that
the fourth Gospel offers them history quite in the sense
that the other Gospels do, cannot think that Christ
spoke exactly as He is here represented as speaking,
and consequently cannot feel assured that this is the
record of an eye-witness, or, in other words, the writing
of the apostle St. John."

It is worth while to cite some of the phrases in
which Dr. Robinson describes the impression made by
the first chapter of this Gospel (without going any
further) on the mind of one who has steeped himself in
the study of the three Synoptic Gospels : —

How remote do these theological statements (in the
prologue of the fourth Gospel) appear from a Gospel
narrative of the life of Christ, such as the three which we
have been hitherto studying

1 See pp. 54 foil.

E 2

62 THE EVANGELISTS

Our surprise is not lessened as we read on. Great
abstract conceptions are presented in rapid succession :
life, light, witness, flesh, glory, grace, truth.

Of the references to John the Baptist in chap. i. : —

We are back on the earth indeed ; but the scene is
unfamiliar and the voices are strange. We hear not a
word of John's preaching of repentance, or even of his
baptism. This is no comment on the facts we know : it
is a new story altogether

If a wholly new story of the beginnings of discipleship
is offered us, this is not more startling than the wholly
new story of John's disclaimer of Messiahship

Here, then, is a fair sample of the difficulty which this
Gospel from beginning to end presents to those who
come to it fresh from the study of the Synoptic narratives.
The whole atmosphere seems different

Not only do the old characters appear in new situations
—the scene, for example, being laid mostly in Jerusalem
instead of Galilee— but the utterances of all the speakers
seem to bear another impress

At times it is not possible to say whether the Lord
Himself is speaking, or whether the evangelist is com
menting on what He has said. The style and diction of
speaker and narrator are indistinguishable, and they are
notably different from the manner in which Christ speaks
in the Synoptic Gospels

I do not myself see how a controversy of this kind can
be closed. The contrast of which we have spoken
cannot be removed ; it is heightened rather than
diminished as we follow it into details

Dean Robinson accepts, then, the tradition of
apostolic authorship, but hardly on terms which leave
to the Gospel more value as a record of the historical
Jesus than the dialogues of Plato possess as a record of
the historic Socrates. "It is," he avers, "not history
in the lower sense of a contemporary narrative of events

THE EVANGELISTS 63

as they appeared to the youthful onlooker : not an
exact reproduction of the very words spoken by Christ
or to Christ."

And below he pictures the author of this Gospel as : —
An old man, disciplined by long labour and suffering,
surrounded by devoted scholars, recording before he
passes from them his final conception of the life of the
Christ, as he looked back upon it in the light of fifty
years of Christian experience. To expect that after such
an interval his memory would reproduce the past with
the exactness of despatches written at the time would be
to postulate a miraculous interference with the ordinary
laws which govern human memories.

The Christ is no longer ** known after the flesh ": the
old limitations once transcended cannot be reimposed.
A glorious vision results. A drama is enacted in which
every incident tells, or it would net be there. The record
moves not on the lines of the ordinary succession 01
events so much as on a pathway of ideas.

And once more he says of the author : —

He can no longer sever between the fact and the truth
revealed by the fact : interpretation is blended with
event. He knows that he has the mind of Christ. He
will say what he now sees in the light of a life of
discipleship.

For seventeen hundred years the theology which lifts
Jesus of Nazareth out of and above human history,
transforms him into the Word of God, which triumphed
at Nicea and inspired Athanasius, was based on this
fourth Gospel more than on any other book of the New
Testament. From it as from an armoury the partisans
of the divinity of Jesus Christ, as the Church has
understood and formulated that tenet in its creeds and
councils, have constantly drawn their weapons. It now
at last appears, by the admission of Dean Robinson, that

64 THE EVANGELISTS

this entire theological fabric was woven in the mind of
an apostle meditating in extreme old age on the half-
forgotten scenes and conversations of his youth. Such
is the best case which can be made out for orthodox
theology. We are left with the roofless ruins of the
stately edifice which sheltered the orthodox doctors of
the past. And even these ruins totter and seem to
endanger the lives of the shivering, half-naked figures
who seek a precarious shelter among them. Professor
Sanday, who not long ago tried to save the apostolic
authorship of the fourth Gospel by arguing that no one
but an apostle would have ventured to handle with so
much freedom the life and conversations of his Master,
in his latest book gives signs of abandoning altogether
the attribution to the son of Zebedee. The impression
that Dean Robinson's pages leave on one's mind is that
a real follower of Jesus could never have written such a
gospel, though he himself scruples to draw the conclu
sion which his premisses warrant.

CHAPTER V.
TEXTUAL CRITICISM

THE task of ascertaining the true text of a classical
author, of Virgil or Tacitus, of Euripides or Lysias, is
far simpler and less perplexed with problems than that
of ascertaining- the true text of an evangelist, or of
any other New Testament writing. In the case of
profane writers, we have merely to collate the manu
scripts, to appraise their dates, to ascertain their mutual
affinities, to draw out, if there be enough material, their
genealogy, and discover which copies embody the oldest
tradition ; to detect and exclude the mechanical errors,
the slips of the pen, of the scribe ; to restore from the
work of one copyist passages over which, because they
began and ended with the same word or words, the eye
of another copyist has glided, leaving a lacuna in his
text. When all this is done there is room for con
jectural emendators, the Persons, Bentleys, Jebbs,
Hermanns, to begin and exercise their ingenuity on
passages that are evidently corrupt.

None of this labour can we spare ourselves in the
case of a sacred text, so-called ; but much more awaits
us besides. The profane author's work has never been
the battle-ground of rival sects and creeds. No one
ever asked Plato or Demosthenes to decide whether the
miracle of the miraculous conception and birth really
happened, whether God is a Trinity or no. They are
no arbiters of orthodoxy, and carry no weight in the
question of whether Mary was the mother of God or

65

66 TEXTUAL CRITICISM

not, or whether the Son is consubstantial with the
ather. It has been far otherwise with the Gospels and
the rest of the New Testament ever since about the
year 200. Until then Christians were so much pos
sessed with the dream of the impending- dissolution of
all existing- societies and institutions to make way for
their own millennium, that they paid small attention to
their scanty records of the earthly Christ, except
so far as they were useful to confound their Jewish
antagonists. Authority among- them attached not to
written documents, nor to priests and bishops, but to
itinerant prophets, catechists, and ascetics. The com
position of the Diatessaron,1 about 180, was in itself
no indication of excessive respect for the four Gospels
conflated or fused together, but not harmonised, therein.
If there had already then existed the same superstitious
veneration for the four as was felt a hundred years
later, Tatian would not have been permitted to make
such a compilation of them, nor in Syria would his
compilation have been accepted instead of the documents
themselves as a manual to be publicly read in church.
Probably at that time the individual Gospels were
valued only as the Gospel of Mark and the non-Marcan
document were valued by those who fused them
together in our first and third Gospels ; and few would
have found fault with Tatian if he had re-arranged,
curtailed, and otherwise modified his material on the
same scale as these evangelists did theirs. The emer
gence of the several Gospels and their recognition about
the year 200, alongside of the Old Testament, as autho
ritative Scriptures, unalterable and not to be added to,

1 So called because it was a single Gospel produced by fusing
together the four which still survive.

TEXTUAL CRITICISM 67

was the result of a gradual process ; but the recog
nition, once effected, was all the more complete and
absolute for having been so gradual. Probably when
Irenaeus, A.D. 180-200, pleaded that there could be only
these four Gospels because there were only four winds,
he was arguing against people who actually used other
Gospels like that according to Peter and according to
the Egyptians, and who regarded them, too, as sacred
documents. From the little we know of these outside
Gospels the Church did well to exclude them from its
canon.

But to canonise a document is to expose it to many
dangers, for everyone wants to have it on their side.
Luckily the great controversies of the Church began
in the third century only, when the Gospel text was
already too well fixed and settled for partisans to
interfere with it on the large scale on which Marcion
tampered with Luke. Nevertheless, there are signs
that it was in details changed to suit new develop
ments of doctrine, even at a very early period ; and in
my volume, Myth, Magic, and Morals, I have given
several examples of such doctrinal alterations of the
text. Of these examples one was the story of the rich
youth who aspired to become a disciple. It is read in
Matt. xix. 16, Mark x. 17, Lukexviii. 18. Dr. Salmon,
of Dublin, availed himself of this passage in order to
show "how close is the connection between the
criticism of the Gospel text and theories concerning the
genesis of the Gospels."1 We can seldom estimate the
originality and value of rival variants found in one
Gospel without considering what is read in the other
two, supposing these to contain parallel versions of a

1 George Salmon, Some Criticism of the Text of the New Testa
ment ; London, 1897; p. 117.

68 TEXTUAL CRITICISM

saying- or incident. It is, for example, no use to argue,
as did the Cambridge editors, Westcott and Hort (who
shaped the Revised Version's text), that for Matthew
the MSS. Aleph. B.D.L., on the whole, give the sound
and true tradition, and that their reading- is, therefore,
to be preferred in the passage in question. The other
two Gospel texts, especially if looked at in the light of
the modern theory of the interrelations of the three
synoptics, assure us that those MSS. here contain what
we may term an orthodox corruption.

The critic I have just quoted, the late Dr. Salmon,
whose kindness to myself when I was a youthful
scholar I shall not soon forget, expresses in the same
context his conviction that the work of Westcott and
Hort suffered much from their want of interest in the
problem of the genesis of the Gospels. Westcott, in
particular, seems never to have abandoned the very
inadequate view which he propounded in 1860 in his
Introduction to the Study of the Gospels, that their points
of agreement and disagreement are to be explained
from oral tradition alone. There was, he argues, a
body of oral tradition existing- and passing from teacher
to taught in both an Aramaic and a Greek form. Mark
wrote down the Greek tradition in its earliest form,
then Luke wrote it down in a developed form, and the
Greek Matthew wrote down the later Hebraic re
moulding of the tradition ; but no common document
underlay either all three or any two of them. He
admitted indeed that " No one at present [A.D. 1860]
would maintain with some of the older scholars of the
Reformation that the coincidences between the Gospels
are due simply to the direct and independent action of
the same Spirit upon the several writers." In other
words, the common element in these Gospels was not

TEXTUAL CRITICISM 69

the Holy Spirit. Yet that it might just as well be
the Holy Spirit as a merely oral tradition will, I believe,
be plain to anyone who reflects how impossible it is
that three independent writers should remember a long
and complicated body of incident and teaching in the
same way, and transfer it to paper, page after page, in
almost identical words.

I will conclude this chapter by glancing at some
famous orthodox corruptions, the history of which, as a
lesson in the psychology of obstinacy, is hardly less
instructive than the story of Dr. Bode's bust of
Leonardo da Vinci's Flora.

In the First Epistle of John, chap, v., vs. 7, most but
not all copies of the Latin Bible, called the Vulgate,
read as follows : —

For there are three who bear witness in heaven: the
Father, the Word, and the Holy Spirit; and these three are
one. And there are three that bear witness on earth :
the Spirit and the water and the blood : and these three
are one.

In the first printed edition of the New Testament,
called the Complutensian, prepared at Alcala in Spain
in 1514 by Cardinal Francis Ximenes, the words here
italicised were included, having been translated from
the Latin text into Greek ; for the Greek MSS. used
did not contain them. They are only found in two
Greek MSS., one of the fifteenth the other of the six
teenth century. About 400 other Greek codices from
the fourth century down to the fourteenth ignore them.
All MSS. of the old Latin version anterior to Jerome
lack them, and in the oldest copies even, of Jerome's
recension of the Latin text, called the Vulgate, they are
conspicuously absent. The first Church writer to cite
the verse in such a text was Priscillian, a Spaniard, who

70 TEXTUAL CRITICISM

was also the first heretic to be burned alive by the
Church in the year 385. After him Vigilius, Bishop of
Thapsa, cites it about 484. It is probable that the
later Latin fathers mistook what was only a comment
of Cyprian Bishop of Carthage (died 258) for a citation
of the text. In any case, it filtered from them into the
Vulgate text,1 from which, as we have seen, it was
translated into Greek and inserted in two or three very
late manuscripts.

Erasmus's first edition of the Greek Testament, in
1516, omitted the verse, as also did the second ; but in
1522 he issued a third edition containing it. Robert
Stephens also inserted it in his edition of 1546, which
formed the basis of all subsequent editions of the Greek
Testament until recently, and is known as the Received
Text, or Textus Receptus."2

In 1670 Sandius, an Arian, assailed the verse, as
also did Simon, a learned Roman Catholic priest, in
his Histoire Critique du Nouveau Testament, part i.,
chap. 18, about twenty years later. He was followed
by Sir Isaac Newton, who, in a learned dissertation
published after his death in 1754, strengthened Simon's
arguments. Oddly enough, a Huguenot pastor, David
Martin (1639-1721), of whom better things might have
been expected, took up the cudgels in defence of the
text. "It were to be wished," he wrote, "that this
strange opinion had never quitted the Arians and
Socinians ; but we have the grief to see it pass from
them to some Christians, who, though content to retain

1 Gibbon, in a note on chap xxxvii. of his Decline and Fall, says
that in the eleventh and twelfth centuries the Bibles were cor
rected by Lanfranc, Archbishop of Canterbury, and by Nicolas
Cardinal and librarian of the Roman Church, secundum (\rtho-
doxam fidem. (Wetstein, Prolegom., pp. 84, 85.)

2 See chap. viii.

TEXTUAL CRITICISM

the doctrine of the Trinity, abandon this fine passage
where that holy doctrine is so clearly taught." With
the same tolerance of fraud, so long as it makes for
orthodoxy, an Anglican bishop added a footnote in his
catechism to the effect that the authenticity of this text,
although by many disputed, must be strenuously upheld
because it is so valuable a witness to the truth of
Trinitarian doctrine. Gibbon, in his thirty-seventh
chapter, sarcastically wrote :—

The memorable text which asserts the unity of the Three
who bear witness in Heaven is condemned by the uni
versal silence of the orthodox fathers, ancient versions,

and authentic manuscripts After the invention of

printing, the editors of the Greek Testament yielded to
their own prejudices, or those of the times ; and the pious
fraud, which was embraced with equal zeal at Rome and
Geneva, has been infinitely multiplied in every country
and every language of modern Europe.

This passage provoked an attack on Gibbon from a
certain English Archdeacon, Travis, who rushed into
the arena to defend the text which Kettner, answering
Simon nearly a century earlier, had extravagantly
hailed as "the most precious of Biblical pearls, the
fairest flower of the New Testament, the compendium
by way of analogy of faith in the Trinity." It was high
time that forgers should receive a rebuke, and Person,
the greatest of English Greek scholars and critics,
resolved to administer it to them. In a series of Letters
to Travis he detailed with merciless irony and infinite
learning the history of this supposititious text. Travis
answered that Person was a Thersites, and that he
despised his railings. He accused him of defending
Gibbon, who, as an infidel, was no less Person's enemy
than his own. Person's answer reveals the nobility of

72 TEXTUAL CRITICISM

his character. "Why," he replies, "for that very
reason I would defend him " — a retort worthy of Dr.
Johnson.

Scarcely anything in the English language is so well
worth reading as these letters of Person, and I venture
to quote from his preface a single passage about Bengel
(died 1752), whose commentary on the New Testament
called the Gnomon was, for its day, a model of learning
and acumen : —

Bengel [writes Person] allowed that the verse was in
no genuine MS., that the Complutensian editors inter
polated it from the Latin version, that the Codex Britan-
nicus is good for nothing, that no ancient Greek writer
cites it and many Latins omit, and that it was neither
erased by the Arians nor absorbed by the homoeoteleuton.
Surely, then, the verse is spurious. No ; this learned
man finds out a way of escape. The passage was of so
sublime and mysterious a nature that the secret discipline
of the Church withdrew it from the public books, till it
was gradually lost. Under what a want of evidence
must a critic labour who resorts to such an argument.

Person made himself unpopular by writing these letters.
The publisher of them lost money over the venture, and
an old lady, Mrs. Turner, of Norwich, who had meant
to leave him a fortune, cut down her bequest to thirty
pounds, because her clergyman told her that Porson
had assailed the Christian religion.

The revised English version of this passage omits, of
course, the fictitious words, and gives no hint of the
text which was once so popular. Archdeacon Travis
is discreetly forgotten in the Anglican Church ; but the
truth has far from triumphed in the Roman, and Pope
Leo XIII., in an encyclical of the year 1897, solemnly
decreed that the fraudulent addition is part of authentic
scripture. He was surrounded by reactionaries who

ALFRED LOISY.

74 TEXTUAL CRITICISM

imagined that, if they could wrest such a pronounce
ment from the infallible Pontiff, they would have made
an end for ever of criticism in the Catholic Church.
The abbot of Monte Casino, the home of the Bene
dictines, was, it is said, on the point of publishing a
treatise in which he traced this forgery to its sources,
when the Pope's decree was issued. He thrust back
his treatise into his pigeon-holes, where it remains.
The aged Pope, however, who was a stranger to such
questions, soon realised that he had been imposed upon.
Henceforth he refused to descend to particulars, or to
condemn the many scholars delated to him as modernist
heretics. Of these the Abbe" Loisy was the chief, and
the outcry against him finally decided Leo to establish
in 1902 a commission for the progress of study of holy
scripture. For the first time a few specialists were
called in by the head of the Catholic Church to guide
his judgment in such matters, and Leo XIII. directed
them to begin by studying the question of the text,
i John v. 8. They presently sent him their report.
As this was to the effect that the text was not authentic,
it was pigeon-holed. But the aged prelate's mind was
ill at ease ; and during his last illness, both in his lucid
moments and in delirium, he could talk of nothing else.1
He has been succeeded by one who has no qualms, but
condemns learning wherever and whenever he meets
with it. To be learned in that communion is in our
age to be suspect.

There is a similar Trinitarian text in Matthew xxviii.
19, where the risen Christ is represented as appearing to
his twelve apostles on a mountain top in Galilee, and
saying to them : All authority hath been given unto me

1 I derive these statements from the Abbe1 Albert Houtin, La
Question Biblique au XXe Sitcle. Paris ; 1906 ; p. 94.

TEXTUAL CRITICISM 75

in heaven and on earth. Go ye therefore, and make
disciples of all the nations^ baptising them into the name
of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost ;
teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I com
manded you : and /<?, / am with you alway, even unto the
end of the world.

Here Eusebius, Bishop of Caesarea, who died about
the year 340, and was entrusted by the Emperor
Constantine with the task of preparing fifty editions dc
luxe of the gospels for the great churches built or
rebuilt after the Diocletian persecution was ended, read
in such of his works as he wrote before the year 325 as
follows : "Go ye therefore, and make disciples of all the
nations in my name ; teaching them," etc.

It is clear, therefore, that of the MSS. which Eusebius
inherited from his predecessor, Pamphilus, at Caesarea
in Palestine, some at least preserved the original
reading, in which there was no mention either of
Baptism or of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. It had
been conjectured by Dr. Davidson, Dr. Martineau, by
the present Dean of Westminster, and by Professor
Harnack (to mention but a few names out of many),
that here the received text could not contain the very
words of Jesus — this long before anyone except Dr.
Burgon, who kept the discovery to himself, had noticed
the Eusebian form of reading.

It is satisfactory to notice that Dr. Eberhard Nestle,
in his new edition of the New Testament in Latin and
Greek, furnishes the Eusebian reading in his critical
apparatus, and that Dr. Sanday seems to lean to its
acceptance. That Eusebius found it in his MSS. has been
recently contested by Dr. Chase, the Bishop of Ely, who
argues that Eusebius found the Texlus Receptus in his
manuscripts, but substituted the shorter formula in his

TEXTUAL CRITICISM

works for fear of vulgarising and divulging the sacred
Trinitarian formula. It is interesting to find a modern
bishop reviving the very argument used 150 years ago
in support of the forged text in i John v. 7. It is
sufficient answer to point out that Eusebius's argument,
when he cites the text, involves the text "in my name."
For, he asks, " In whose name ? " and answers that it
was the name spoken of by Paul in his Epistle to the
Philippians ii. 10. It is best to cite the entire passage,
which is in the Demonstratio Evangelica (col. 240, p.
136 of Migne's edition) : —

For he (Jesus) did not enjoin them to make disciples of
all the nations simply and without qualification, but with
the essential addition " in his name." For so great was
the virtue attaching to his appellation that the Apostle
says (Phil. ii. 10) : " God bestowed on him the name
above every name ; that in the name of Jesus every knee
shall bow, of things in heaven and on earth and under the
earth." It was right, therefore, that he should lay stress
on the virtue of the power residing in his name, but
hidden from the many, and therefore say to his apostles,
" Go ye and make disciples of all the nations in my name."
Surely Dr. Chase would not argue that the name
implied in Phil. ii. 10 was the Name of Father, Son,
and Holy Spirit. That would be a pretty heresy for an
Anglican bishop to entertain. Would he attribute a
heresy at once so violent and senseless to Eusebius ?
Where, then, is the point of arguing that Eusebius, in
the score of passages where he cites Matt, xxviii. 19
in the above form, was moved by the disciplina arcani,
or fear of divulging Christian mysteries, from writing
the formula out — the more so as it was on the
lips of many of his contemporaries and had been pub
lished long before by Dionysius of Alexandria, Cyprian,
Tertullian, and perhaps by Irenaeus and Origen ? Why

TEXTUAL CRITICISM 77

did they, too, not hide the sacred formula? Moreover,
why should Eusebius dropout the command to baptise?
Surely the disciplina arcani does not explain his omis
sion of that ?

In the case just examined it is to be noticed that not
a single MS. or ancient version has preserved to us
the true reading. But that is not surprising, for, as Dr.
C. R. Gregory, one of the greatest of our textual critics,
reminds us, "The Greek MSS. of the text of the New
Testament were often altered by scribes, who put into
them the readings which were familiar to them, and
which they held to be the right readings."1

These facts speak for themselves. Our Greek texts,
not only of the Gospels, but of the Epistles as well,
have been revised and interpolated by orthodox copyists.
We can trace their perversions of the text in a few
cases, with the aid of patristic citations and ancient
versions. But there must remain many passages which
have been so corrected, but where we cannot to-day
expose the fraud. It was necessary to emphasise this
point because Drs. Westcott and Hort used to aver
that there is no evidence of merely doctrinal changes
having been made in the text of the New Testament.
This is just the opposite of the truth, and such dis
tinguished scholars as Alfred Loisy, J. Wellhausen,
Eberhard Nestle, Adolf Harnack, to mention only four
names, do not scruple to recognise the fact. Here is a
line of research which is only beginning to be worked.

1 Canon and Text of the A'fw Testament; T. and T. Clark, 1907 ;
p. 424.

F 2

CHAPTER VI.
SOME PIONEERS

Proinde liber esse volo, " Henceforth I mean to be
free," wrote Luther when he broke with the Pope ; and
he had the merit at least of throwing off authority and
asserting the right and duty of the individual believer
to read the Bible for himself and interpret it without
the help of a priest. " With all due respect for the
Fathers" he said, "I prefer the authority of Scripture"
(Salvis reverentiis Patrum ego prcefero auctoritatem
Scripture}.'5- In making such pronouncements Luther
builded better than he knew, and if we would
realise how much we owe to him for the bold chal
lenge he hurled at Papal authority, we have only to
compare the treatment by the Pope Pio X. of the
Modernists, whose chief offence is to desire to under
stand the Bible, with the respect paid in the Lutheran
Church to such men as Harnack, Von Soden, Preuschen,
Violet, and in the Anglican to such scholars as Robert
son Smith, Professor Driver, Professor Sanday, Pro
fessor Burkitt. All these men would, in the Roman
Church of the last ten years, have had to suppress or
swallow their opinions, or would have been hounded
out of the Church with writs of excommunication
amid the imprecations of the orthodox crowd.

One of the earliest German scholars that attempted
to understand the Gospels and divest the figure of

1 See Farrar's History of Interpretation, p. 327.
78

LUTHER.

8o SOME PIONEERS

Jesus of the suit of stiff dogmatic buckram with which
theologians had immemorially bound him was the poet
and philosopher, Johann Gottfried Herder, who made
his literary debut in 1773 in a volume of essays, to
which Goethe also contributed. He was a humanist,
a student of the classics, and an enthusiastic reader of
Shakespeare. It was the age of Frederick the Great
and Voltaire, an age when in north Germany men were
able to think and write freely. In his first essay in
theological criticism, entitled Letters on the Study of
Theology^ he urged that the Bible must be read from a
human point of view, and intuitively discerned the
impossibility of harmonising the fourth Gospel with
the Synoptics. Orthodox divines, like the late Dr.
Hort, a hundred years later among ourselves were still
pretending that this Gospel supplements, but not con
tradicts, the other three. You may write a life of
Jesus, argued Herder, out of John, or out of the
Synoptics, but not out of both sources at once, for they
are irreconcilable with each other. John he declared to
have been written from the standpoint of Greek ideas,
as a corrective to the Palestinian Gospel which the
other three reflect. They represent Jesus as a Jewish
Messiah, John as Saviour of the world ; and the latter
drops out of sight the demonology of the other three
because its author, like Philo, regarded it all as so
much Palestinian superstition.

Yet Herder did not reject miracles. He even accepted
that of the raising of Lazarus from the dead, and argued
that the earlier gospels passed it over in silence in order
not to excite the wrath of the Jews against the humble
family in Bethany ! This argument is not too absurd
for Dean Farrar to repeat it a hundred years later
in his Life of Christ (p. 511). The first evangelists

JOHANN GOTTFRIED HERDER.

82 SOME PIONEERS

would not record "a miracle which would have brought
into dangerous prominence a man who was still living.

Even if this danger had ceased, it would have been

obviously repulsive to the quiet family of Bethany to
have been made the focus of an intense and irreverent
curiosity," etc. With regard to the inter-relations of
the Synoptics, Herder showed more acumen, and antici
pated the latest critical positions. Mark, he wrote, is
no abridgment, but a true and self-contained Gospel ;
and if Matthew and Luke contain other and more
matter, that is because they added it, and not because
Mark, having it before him, left it out. Mark is the
unadorned central column on which the other two lean
— shorter than they, but more original. They added the
Birth Stories because a new want of such information
had, later than Mark, grown up among believers. And
Mark indulges in less invective than they against the
Jews, because the new religion was still largely a
Jewish business. That neither the first three Gospels
nor the fourth were intended to be read as sober
historical treatises was also clear to Herder. The
former were aimed to exalt him as a Messiah who
fulfilled the Jewish prophecies ; the fourth is an epic of
the Logos.

But Herder's appreciations of the Life of Jesus were
after all less scientific and earlier in type than those of
Hermann Samuel Reimarus, of whose epoch-making
contribution to the cause of New Testament criticism
Albert Schweitzer has recently, in his work, Von
Reimarus zu WredeJ- reminded those who had forgotten

1 From R. to W., Tubing-en, 1906, lately issued in an English
translation, under the title The Quest of the Historical Jesus.
On Reimarus and Lessing see also Scherer's History of German
Literature, translated by Mrs. F. C. Conybeare, 1086, vol. ii.,
p. 72 foil.

SOME PIONEERS

the great theological controversies of Lessing and
Strauss. Reimarus, born in 1694, was for forty-one
years Professor of Philosophy in Hamburg, and died
in 1768. He was the son-in-law of the famous philolo
gist, J. Alb. Fabricius, and was himself a man of high
classical attainments. He thus brought to the study
of the New Testament a trained judgment, unspoiled
by the narrow calling of the professional divine. His
treatises on early Christianity were probably the more
untrammelled by orthodox prejudices because they were
not intended by him for publication, and they would
never have seen the light had they not fallen into the
hands of Lessing, who published in the years 1774-8
the more important of them under the title of Fragments
of an Anonymous Wolfenbiitteler. The German world
had seemed to be in a mood for liberal criticism, and
historians and humanists there, as in England, were
already turning their attention to dogmatic religion ;
nevertheless, the Fragments fell like bombshells in the
circles of the pious, and precipitated a real crisis in the
history of the Protestant Church. The Christ of dogma
was now arraigned as never before, and has, so to
speak, been on trial ever since at the bar of History.
For the fanciful figure of orthodox theologians the real
historical Jewish Messiah began to emerge.

The message or Gospel of Jesus was, according to
Reimarus, summed up in the appeal to his countrymen
to repent, because the Kingdom of Heaven was at.
hand. But of the Kingdom he, equally with John the
Baptist, conceived in the current Jewish manner ; and
if he transcended his contemporaries in his forecast
thereof, it was only in so far as he taught that observ
ance of the Law of Moses would develop therein unto
a higher and deeper righteousness, less bound up with

84 SOME PIONEERS

sacrificial cult, false Sabbatarianism, and ritual purity
of meats. He never broke with the law nor dreamed
of doing so. It was only when they were persecuted
and driven out of the synagogue that his disciples broke
with it — not of choice, but of necessity.

Thus the creed of the earliest Church consisted of
the single clause : " I believe that Jesus shall shortly
inaugurate the Kingdom of God on earth." No wonder
that the faith spread rapidly. Multitudes were already
filled with a belief in the imminence of the promised
kingdom, and were but too ready to acclaim Jesus as
God's prophet and instrument in bringing it about.
This was the whole of the message that his apostles
had to carry to the cities of Israel, avoiding those of
the Samaritans and Gentiles. The Jews of Palestine
were groaning under the Roman yoke, and were pre
pared to welcome a redeemer. For them a Messiah
was Son of God ; all the successors of David and kings
of the people of the Covenant were sons of God, but
the Messiah was such in a special sense. The Messianic
claims of Jesus did not lift him above humanity, and
there was nothing metaphysical about the role.

The Gospel parables teach us little of what the
Kingdom was to be. They all assume that we know
it. If we desire to learn more about it, we must go to
the writings of the Jews. In any case the first con
dition of our understanding who and what Jesus was is
that we should turn our backs on the catechism notions
of a metaphysical sonship of God, of the Trinity, on
orthodox dogmas in general, and should study instead
current Jewish ideas. With these a priori notions will
vanish the mistaken supposition that Jesus meant to
found a new religion. He never dreamed of abolishing
the Jewish religion and of substituting a new system

SOME PIONEERS 85

in its place. His chief disciple, Peter, long after the
resurrection, needed the vision at Joppa to assure him
that he might without sin eat with men uncircumcised,
and the disciples who fled from Jerusalem after Stephen's
martyrdom " spoke the word to none save only to
Jews." It follows that the text Matthew xxviii. 19 is
impossible, not only because it is spoken by one risen
from the dead, but because its tenour is universalist
and it presupposes the Trinity and the metaphysical
sonship of Jesus. It also conflicts with our earliest
tradition of baptism in the community of Christians,
for, as we learn both from the Book of Acts and from
Paul, they baptised at first, not into the name of the three
Persons, but into that of Jesus the Messiah or Christ.
Neither baptism nor in its later forms the Eucharist
derives from Jesus.

That Jesus worked cures which the people round him
regarded as signs and wonders cannot be disputed.
When Reimarus further opines that Jesus bade those
he healed to tell no man of it by way of exciting the
curiosity of the crowd, we cannot follow him. But all
will admit that some of his greater miracles were
invented by propagandists who felt a call to prove that
in works of power the Messiah transcended the worthies
of the Old Testament. If it be true that in Jerusalem
the multitude were as convinced as the texts assure us
they were of his immediately manifesting the Kingdom
of God to them, then by a single miracle publicly worked
on a feast-day he must have carried all before him.
Twice he seems to have made sure that his vision of the
Kingdom was about to be made a reality : once when,
sending forth his disciples, in Matt. x. 23, he coupled
their mission with the assurance that they would not
have time to visit all the cities of Israel before the Son

86 SOME PIONEERS

of Man came — that is, that the masses flocking- to him
would erewhile have witnessed the Messiah's advent ;
and a second time when, in the style of Messiah,
he entered Jerusalem riding- on an ass amid the
acclamations of the multitude. But the people hung
back after all, and his feat of clearing- the temple of its
Paschatide traffic fell flat, as also did his denunciations
of priests and pharisees. The Galileans had forsaken
him, and now the erewhile enthusiastic people of
Jerusalem forsook him in the same way. He had begun
by concealing his quality of Messiah of set purpose ; he
ended by concealing it from fear and necessity. He felt
that his star had set and his mission was a failure when
from the cross he uttered the bitter cry of disillusion
ment : " My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken
me?" He had never contemplated suffering- thus,
never looked forward to a death on the cross. With
God's miraculous aid he had expected to establish a
kingdom on earth in which the Jews, rescued from the
yoke of infidel and Gentile oppressors, would live
happily ever afterwards ; and now his countrymen
betrayed and forsook him, and the Roman was slaying
him with every circumstance of cruelty and mockery.

Reimarus shows less insight in his account of the
events which followed the death of Jesus. He is right,
no doubt, in arguing- that the disciples, driven out of
their old enthusiasms by the logic of facts, took refuge
in Daniel's vision of an apocalyptic Son of Man, borne in
glory on the clouds of heaven to earth. But when he
g-ives credit to the story that the apostles stole the body
of Jesus in order to accredit their story of his resur
rection he betrays a certain want of grip. It was this
feature of his reconstruction which more than any other
roused against Lessing the accusation of impiety from

SO. ME PIONEERS 87

those who for hundreds of years had complacently
accepted Jerome's view that Peter and Paul had only
got up their quarrel at Antioch for the gallery, and had
never really been at issue with one another — a view that
shocked even Augustine.1

Reimarus awoke many out of the torpor of assurance.
Particular features of his system were no doubt
erroneous, but in the main his arguments were irre
fragable, because he interpreted his documents in their
plain and literal, but to the orthodox disconcerting,
sense. Modern criticism, even in Anglican and Roman
circles, is slowly coming round to his chief conclusions,
which were that Jesus never meant to found a new
religion, but only to herald that Kingdom of God
towards which the aspirations of pious Jews had for
generations been directed, and that the fourth Gospel
must simply be set aside by those who would discover
the true Jesus. His account of Jesus's attitude towards
the law, and of the gradual abandonment after his death
of that attitude by his disciples, anticipated the best
criticism of our own generation. When writers like Dean
Farrar dilate on the "crude negations " and "dreary
illuminism of Reimarus,"2 they only betray their elemen
tary ignorance of the problems they profess to solve.

About the same time as Reimarus was writing, a
striking book appeared in England. This was E. Evan-
son's work on The Dissonance of the Four Generally
Received Evangelists and the Evidence of their Respective

1 See Jerome's 8Qth Epistle to Augustine, where he adheres to
his view that Paul and Peter were both acting- a part, and that
they merely got up their tiff in order to reassure the Judaisers.
Jerome argues that Paul was guilty of similar dissimulation when
he took Timothy, a Gentile, and circumcised him for fear of
the Jews.

3 See Farrar's History of Interpretation, p. 400.

88 SOME PIONEERS

Authenticity Examined. The author was born at War
ring-ton, in Lancashire, in 1731, and received a classical
education, first from his uncle, Mr. John Evanson,
rector of Mitcham, in Surrey, and then at Emanuel,
Cambridge. He graduated M.A. in 1753, took orders,
and became his uncle's curate. But he was soon con
vinced that the prayer-book was opposed to Scripture,
and accordingly omitted some phrases of it and changed
others in public service. Having also maintained that
Paul denied the physical as opposed to spiritual resur
rection, he incurred a prosecution for heresy. The
Solicitor-General, Mr. Wedderburn, defended him
gratis on this occasion, and, having secured his
acquittal, procured him Church preferment, not aware
that Evanson had made up his mind to quit the
Church.

It was supposed in 1772 that the Archbishop of Can
terbury, with the help of certain of his colleagues, was
preparing a revision of the Anglican liturgy and articles,
so Evanson was encouraged to lay his scruples before
him in a letter, in which he begged him to persevere,
to remove difficulties, and ease the tender consciences
of many learned clergymen. His extremely reasonable
application was never answered, any more than has
been the memorandum of nearly 2,000 incumbents
who recently approached the bishops in a similar
spirit and with a like object. Mr. Evanson next pub
lished a letter to Hurd, Bishop of Lichfield, setting forth
the grounds and reasons of his dissatisfaction, and
shortly after left the Church, resigning his living. Hurd,
in answer, expressed more regret than surprise, but
praised him warmly for following his convictions. He
only lamented the loss to the Church of one so full of
liberal spirit and erudition. The Bishop of Rochester

SOME PIONEERS

89

also expressed his concern that a clergyman of Mr. Evan-
son's abilities should resign his preferment for no other
reasons than those he had assigned to the Bishop of
Lichfield. Subsequently Evanson received a pension
from the family of the Earl of Bute. " An open decla
ration of his faith, which duty called for and sincerity
enjoined, provoked the rancour and malice of bigots
and brought on him their hatred and persecution."1
And certainly Mr. Evanson, at the outset of his work
on the dissonances of the evangelists, strikes no un
certain note, for he begins as follows : —

After so many writers, some of them of great erudition
and distinguished abilities, in almost all ages of what is
called the Christian Church, have undertaken to har
monise and show the perfect agreement of the four
generally received Evangelists, and to reconcile all the
recurring differences in both the facts and order of their
several narrations, it will undoubtedly appear the
highest degree of presumptuous arrogance to attempt
now at last to demonstrate that so much learned and
ingenious labour hath been bestowed in vain.

Evanson gives examples of such dissonance both
between one gospel and another, and between separate
parts of the same gospel ; but he made the mistake of
over-estimating the trustworthiness of Luke. This he
was led to do because he was imposed on, firstly by the
parade of historical method and research in Luke's
exordium, and secondly by Luke's excellence as a
stylist. The latter quality particularly appealed to so
refined a scholar. To illustrate this point I venture to
cite his remarks about the passage, Matthew viii. 5-16 =
Luke vii. i-io, in which the healing of the Centurion's

1 From Some Account of His Life and Religions Opinions,
written by a friend on the occasion of Evanson's death in 1805.

90 SOME PIONEERS

child is related. He notes that in Matthew the
Centurion himself goes to Jesus, whereas in Luke he
only sent a deputation of elders of the Jews, and
declared that he did not esteem himself worthy to go
in person. " Here, again," comments Evanson,

one of these historians related a falsehood. It is
observable also that, according to this gospel called
St. Matthew's, this miracle, in order of time, preceded
the healing of Peter's mother-in-law, the calling of
Matthew himself, and the choice of the twelve apostles ;
whereas St. Luke tells us that it was subsequent to all
three. Yet St. Luke assures Theophilus that, having
attained perfect information of everything from the very
first, he had written an account of every transaction
in order. Now, he could have received his information
only from the Apostles he lived with at Jerusalem, of
whom Matthew was one ; and as it is impossible but
Matthew must have known whether he was himself with
Jesus when this miracle was wrought or not, he could
not have written that he was not and have informed
St. Luke that he was ; and, therefore, the writer of this
gospel could not be St. Matthew nor any other of the
Apostles. To avoid unnecessary repetitions, the reader is
desired to consider this as a general remark upon the
many instances of contradiction, in the order of the
narration, between this writer and St. Luke, which are
both numerous and obvious to the least degree of atten
tion.

Evanson also was shrewd enough to see that the
legend of the miraculous birth of Jesus was no part of
the primitive gospel tradition. He argues that the first
two chapters of Luke are an interpolation ; but he was
well aware of the similarity of vocabulary and idiom
which connects them with the rest of the gospel, and
met this obstacle to his argument by supposing that the
interpolator imitated Luke. He could not believe that

SOME PIONEERS 91

the same hand which penned these two chapters could
have narrated the incident of John sending- his disciples
to Jesus to ascertain if he was the Messiah. He writes
thus :—

Now, it seems absolutely impossible that John, after
being from his earliest infancy personally acquainted
with Jesus, and not only in possession of all the informa
tion respecting him, which he must have learned from
the two families, but so miraculously impressed with
affection and reverence for him as to exult with joy,
though but an embryo in the womb, at the mere sound
of his mother's voice, could at any time have enter
tained the least doubt of Jesus being the Messiah (p. 37).

The true view, of course, is that Luke, in spite of his
pretensions to accuracy, was a careless and credulous
writer.

Evanson's appreciations of the legend of the miracu
lous birth are couched in a very modern spirit. He
notes that, according to Paul's preaching at Antioch, it
was the resurrection and no birth miracle that con
stituted Jesus the Son of God ; and also that Luke,
except in his first two chapters, nowhere calJs Jesus the
Son of God until after the Resurrection. Before that
event he terms him Son of Man or Son of David. On
p. 44 he speaks of " this pagan fable of the miraculous
conception of Jesus Christ"; and just below he writes
on p. 49 as follows : —

In no one apostolic Epistle, in no one discourse
recorded in the Acts of the Apostles, is the miraculous
conception, or any circumstance of the history of Jesus
previous to John's baptism, hinted at even in the most
distant manner — on the contrary, that baptism is
repeatedly referred to and mentioned as the proper com
mencement of evangelical instruction ; and when the
eleven Apostles proceeded to elect a twelfth, to supply

c,

92 SOME PIONEERS

the place of Judas, the only qualification made essentially
requisite in the candidates was, their having' been eye
witnesses of our Lord's ministry from the baptism of
John to his Ascension. These two chapters of Luke are
the daring fiction of some of the easy -working inter
polators (/k5tou/>y<5i), as Origen calls them, of the beginning
of the second century, from among the pagan converts,
who, to do honour as they deemed it to the author of
their newly-embraced religion, were willing that his birth
should, at least, equal that of the pagan heroes and
demigods, Bacchus and Hercules, in its wonderful
circumstances and high descent ; and thereby laid the
foundation of the succeeding orthodox deification of the
man Jesus, which, in degree of blasphemous absurdity,
exceeds even the gross fables of pagan superstition.

And in another place (p. 14) he remarks on the fact
that Justin Martyr, in his Apology ',

illustrates and pleads for the toleration ol the orthodox

doctrine of the generation of the Word by the heathen

Emperors, because of its resemblance to the fabulous

origin of their own deities Mercury and Minerva ; and

justifies the doctrine of the incarnation by its similarity

to the births of ^Esculapius and Hercules, and the other

\l\ustriousg-od-men of pagan mythology.

In these and many other passages Evanson belonged

rather to the late nineteenth century than to the

eighteenth. No one in his day so clearly realised as he

the low standard, or no standard, of literary authenticity

which characterised early Christianity. Thus he notes

that in the earliest age it was so common among the

Christians " to produce entire pieces of their own or

others' forgery under the name of any writer they

pleased that, if what we call the scriptures of the New

Testament were not so tampered with, they are almost

the only writings, upon the same subject, of those early

times which have escaped free."

SOME PIONEERS 93

It is a matter of common observation that, in propor
tion as men overtop their contemporaries in one par
ticular, they often lag- behind them in another ; and a
critic may see with one eye and be blind of its fellow.
It was so with Evanson, who fell into the extraordinary
error of attaching to so-called prophecies of Christ an
importance which he denied to miracles. " Prophecy,'*
he wrote, " is not only the most satisfactory, but also
the most lasting-, supernatural evidence of the truth of
any revelation." And he even went the length of pre
dicting from the Apocalypse the end of the world within
a few generations. Just in proportion as he saw clearly
how insufficient is the evidence of the gospels to bear
the strain of the vast superstructures that theologians
have built upon them, his mind seems to have been
fuddled by the study of this book. We have already seen
that Woolston was infected with the same craze ; and
the great Isaac Newton himself, in the prime of his life,
gave up what time he could spare from his amazing
mathematical and astronomical investigations to what,
to a modern mind, are the silliest lucubrations about
the vaticinations of the book of Daniel and of the
Apocalypse.

In Joseph Priestley, born near Leeds in 1733, we
have another example of a great man of science who
was also a bold innovator in the domain of Church
history. In early youth, he tells us, he "came to
embrace what is generally called the heterodox side of
every question." A History of the Corruptions of
Christianity, published in 1782, and a History of Early
Opinions Concerning Jesus Christ ', printed in 1786,
involved him in a long and keen controversy with an
orthodox divine, Dr. Horsley. This divine was
rewarded with a fat bishopric for detecting a few errors

94 SOME PIONEERS

of scholarship in Priestley's works, while the latter a
few years later, in 1791, was rewarded by having- his
house in Birmingham wrecked and set on fire by the
Tory mob. The chemical instruments, by use of which
he had carried on his epoch-making researches into the
composition of g-ases and made his discovery of oxygen,
were destroyed, his manuscripts torn to bits, and his
books scattered for half-a-mile along the roadside.
Priestley and his family barely escaped with their lives.
His main heresy was the entirely correct opinion that
the earliest Christians neither knew anything of Trini
tarian doctrine nor deified Jesus after the manner of
Athanasian doctrine. He denied that the Apostles
could have discerned God Almighty in the man of flesh
and blood with whom they familiarly consorted. " I am
really astonished," he wrote to Horsley, "how you can
really entertain the idea of any number of persons being-
on this even footing, as you call it, with a being whom
they actually believed to be maker of themselves and
all things, even the Eternal God himself."1 But
Priestley did not question the authenticity of the
writings of the New Testament any more than his
master Socinus, and, like other Unitarians of that
age, he accepted with implicit faith all the miraculous
legends of the gospels except that of the Virgin birth.
Within a charmed circle he shrank from applying his
own canons of criticism. Leslie Stephen2 remarks of
Priestley that " it is still rather difficult to understand
how so versatile and daring a thinker could have
retained so much of the old system." But the same
inconsistency reveals itself in numberless scholars of

1 Tracts, p. 259.

2 English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, chap, vii., § 6.

SOME PIONEERS 95

our own generation. Bishop Stubbs was the acutest
of historical critics in the domain of general history,
but to the Bible and to early Church history he brought
the prejudices of a fourteenth-century monk ; so also
the modern Bollandist editors of the Acts of the Saints,
who are Jesuits, handle any legend later than the year
loo with the greatest freedom, yet abstain from apply
ing the same rules and methods of historical investiga
tion to the solution and sifting out of earlier Christian
problems and narratives. The same remark holds good
of the Abbe" Duchesne, and of the late Bishop Creigh-
ton — not to mention countless scholars who really seem
intent on running with the hare and hunting with the
hounds at one and the same time.

Priestley also undertook to answer Evanson's argu
ments in a work which contains many suggestive
passages. For example, he points out that "the
books called the Gospels were not the cause, but the
effect, of the belief of Christianity in the first ages.
For Christianity had been propagated with great
success long before those books were written ; nor had
the publication of them any particular effect in adding
to the number of Christian converts. Christians
received the books because they knew beforehand that
the contents of them were true " (p. 8).

The last of these statements requires, no doubt, a
little modification ; but the entire passage suggests a
fertile method of inquiry. Emerging in the bosom of
an already long-established Christianity, the Gospels
could not fail in a large degree to reflect the sentiments,
beliefs, prejudices, ritual practices, which arose in
measure as the Faith spread among the Gentiles, was
persecuted alike by Jews and Roman Government, was
coloured by Greek philosophy, was divorced almost

96 SOME PIONEERS

wholly from the scenes of its birth. This is how the
Abbe" Loisy envisages the whole problem of criticism of
the New Testament. It is inseparable from an investi
gation of the circles of believers, called Churches,
within whose medium the Gospels were produced and
preserved. We have to determine how much of the
record was primitive by separating- off all accretions
due to this medium. If, therefore, Priestley had
followed up this line of argument, he might have
anticipated modern criticism. But he was, as we have
said, a mixture of enlightenment and superstition. He
could express himself " greatly obliged " to Evanson
for the latter's " several new and valuable arguments
against the miraculous conception," yet he accepted the
fable of Balaam's ass, and failed to appreciate Evan-
son's argument that in the thirty years or more which
by common consent elapsed between Jesus's ministry
and the emergence of the earliest evangelical document
there was ample time for the other miraculous stones
of Jesus to have arisen in so credulous a medium as
the early Church.

CHAPTER VII.
FOREIGN WORK

No work recently published in Germany has made
a greater stir in England than Albert Schweitzer's
Von Reimarus su Wrede, a systematic resume and
criticism of European study of the Gospels during the
last hundred years. It is mortifying to us Englishmen
to find that barely one page in a hundred of this
remarkable book is devoted to works written by our
selves. The Germans, and in a measure the French,
have for the last hundred years been making serious
efforts to ascertain the truth about Christian origins.
Our own divines, amid the contentment and leisure of
rich livings and deaneries, and with the libraries and
endowments of Oxford and Cambridge at their dis
posal, have done nothing except produce a handful of
apologetic, insincere, and worthless volumes. The
only books which in England have advanced know
ledge have been translations of German or French
authors, and not long since our well-endowed professors
and doctors of divinity greeted every fresh accession
to Christian learning — when they could not ignore
it and maintain a conspiracy of silence — with dismal
howls of execration and torrents of abuse. To three of
these foreign scholars, whose works in English transla
tions were so received, we must now turn. They were
David Friedrich Strauss, Ferdinand Christian Baur
(both Germans), and Ernest Renan, a Frenchman.
Of these the second was the oldest ; he was born in
97

FOREIGN WORK

1792, and died 1860. The son of a Wurtemburg
clergyman, he was still further attracted to theological
study by the influence of Bengel, his uncle, the
scholarly, but orthodox, leader of the theological
school in the University of Tubingen towards the close
of the eighteenth century. He was first a pupil and
then a teacher at the Blaubeuren Seminary, where he
numbered Strauss among his pupils. Thence he was,
in 1826, promoted to a professorship at Tubingen in
succession to Bengel. His geniality and freedom from
affectation and pedantry, combined with a noble
presence, were enough in themselves to attract young
men to his courses ; but the ring of sincerity, the
underglow of devotion to truth, drew to him the affec
tion of all the finer natures among them. He inspired
hundreds with his own zeal and ardour for learning,
his bold impartiality in pursuit of truth, and without
conscious effort he thus created what was known as
the Tubingen school, still the bogie of English clergy
men when I was myself a youth in the years 1875-1890.
In this school were formed such scholars as E. Zeller
(Baur's son-in-law), K. R. Kostlin, Adolf Hilgenfeld of
Jena, Otto Pfleiderer of Berlin, Gustav Volkmar of
Zurich (died 1896), Edmond Scherer and Timothe'e
Colani in France, the founders of the Revue de Theologie.
Baur discerned a key to the understanding of early
Church history in the antagonism between Paul and
his school on the one side, who desired the free admis
sion of uncircumcised Gentiles into the Messianic society
which gathered around the memory of Jesus, and
Peter and John, his personal disciples, and James, his
brother, and first president of the Church of Jerusalem,
on the other. The latter had known Jesus in the flesh,
and insisted on the observance of the Jewish law in the

F. C. BALK.

ioo FOREIGN WORK

matter of food and meats, ablutions, Sabbath obser
vance, and circumcision. They would have confined
the new "heresy" or following- of Jesus Christ to Jews
and orthodox proselytes. Through the gate of the old
law alone could any enter the promised Kingdom which
.a dcus ex machina was soon to substitute on Jewish
soil for the disgraceful tyranny of a Roman governor
and his legions. This antagonism colours the four
great epistles of Paul, Romans i. and ii., Corinthians,
and Galatians, and the hatred of Paul long continued
among the Palestinian Christians, who caricatured him
as Simon Magus, and adopted the lifelike personal
description of him which still survives in the "Acts of
Thekla" as a picture of the Anti-Christ.

This antagonism between Peter and Paul, the two
traditional founders of the leading Church of Rome,
was for the Catholic Church a sort of skeleton in the
•cupboard, and caused much searching of hearts among
the orthodox as early as the fourth century. By way
of setting their misgivings at rest, Jerome advanced
his famous hypothesis that the dispute with Peter
related by Paul in the Epistle to Galatians was no more
than a comedy arranged between the two in order to
throw Jewish zealots off the scent. In general orthodox
historians have sought to minimise the importance of
the matter ; they could hardly do otherwise. But Baur
was not a man to wriggle out of a difficulty. He saw,
and rightly saw, its importance ; and he tried to recon
struct the chronological order of the earliest writings
of the Church on the principle that those in which the
quarrel is still open and avowed must have preceded
chose which try to glose it over and to pretend that it
was never serious. In proportion, Baur argued, as the
antagonism died down and leading men on each side

FOREIGN WORK ,01

drew tog-ether in the face of persecution by Jews and
Romans, and of the disintegrating propaganda of the
Gnostics, the Catholic Church emerged, a middle party,
which little by little absorbed the extremes, and whose
literature was largely inspired by the wish to conceal
even the scars of wounds which had once bled so freely.
In the four epistles of Paul above named the quarrel
is still fresh and actual, and therefore they are the most
primitive documents we have, and are prior to the year
70. So is the Apocalypse, an Ebionite document
breathing hatred of Paul. The Synoptic Gospels and
Acts were written in the interests of reconciliation, and
followed, instead of preceding, the lost gospels of
Peter, of the Hebrews, of the Ebionites, of the Egyp
tians. They are the literary precipitate of oral tradi
tion going back in certain particulars to the Apostolic
;ige, but, as documents, hardly earlier than the middle
ot the second century. The Gospel of Matthew is the
earliest of them, and most Ebionite ; then came that of
Luke, of which the elements took shape under Pauline
influence. It is an amplification of Marcion's Gospel.
Last is Mark's, a neutral gospel, made up of odds and
ends from the other two. The rest of the Pauline
epistles are, all of them, reconciliation documents of
about the middle of the second century. The book
called Acts is an irenicon penned to show how har
moniously Peter and Paul could work together, and
what good friends they were. The epistles of Peter were
literary forgeries designed with the same object, and the
Fourth Gospel and the epistles of John are later than 160.
The fault of Baur was that he worked his theory for
more than it was worth ; that he failed to give due
weight to many other ideas and tendencies which
equally influenced the development of Church opinion

102 FOREIGN WORK

and literature ; and, lastly, that he set nearly all the
documents at least fifty years too late. Later research
has triumphantly proved that Mark is not a compilation
from Matthew and Luke, but their basis, and that our
Luke was in Marcion's hands, and mutilated by him to
suit his views. Large fragments of the Gospel of
Peter, and, probably, of that of the Egyptians, have
been rescued from the tombs and sands of Egypt ; and
it turns out that, even if they were not copied or
imitated from the Synoptics, they were certainly not
their sources. Generally speaking, they are more
modern in their tone and post-Galilean. A more
thorough examination of the idiom and vocabulary of
i Thessalonians, Philippians, and Philemon shows that
these epistles are from the same hand which penned the
four undisputed ones ; and Baur's greatest disciple,
Hilgenfeld, has shown this to be the case. One great
merit, however, must anyhow be ascribed to Baur, that
of forcing all subsequent investigators to consider the
documents purely in relation to the age which saw
their birth, and to explain them from the influences
which were at work, instead of envisaging them as
isolated works of detached thinkers and teachers. If a
book seems to be a forgery, we must at once ask Cut
bono — in the interests of what and of whom was it
forged? If it is admittedly authentic, its place in the
development of doctrine and opinion and events, the
phase which it reflects, must still be studied and set
forth. Historical perspective is all-important, no less
in relation to the documents of the early Church than
to those of any other literature. This must ever be the
most fruitful method of interpretation, and it is a
hopeful sign that even Latin ecclesiastics are furtively
beginning to apply it.

FOREIGN WORK 103

Baur had approached theology through the philo
sophy of Schleiermacher and Hegel. " Ohne Philosophic"
he wrote, "blcibt inirdie Geschichteeivigtodnndstumm"*
To Strauss also (born 1808, died 1874) philosophy was
a first love, and he too dreamed of framing Church
history in a niche of Hegel's system of logic. He
studied at Blaubeuren under Baur, at Maulbronn, and
in Berlin, and in 1832 became a teacher in the University
of Tubingen, where he found his old master Baur. His
instinct was to devote himself to philosophical teaching,
but the authorities obliged him to remain attached to
the theological faculty, and the result was his Leben
Jesu, or " Life of Jesus," which appeared in 1835. The
work was a gigantic success. He woke up to find
himself famous, but an outcast without a future. The
conservatives denounced him to the educational authori
ties, and he was deprived of his modest appointment in
the university. Barely two or three of his friends had
the courage to take up the cudgels in his defence. His
work went through many editions, by no means reprints
of one another. The third, for example, made some
concessions to the orthodox standpoint, which he took
back in the later editions. In 1839 the chair of
Dogmatic at Zurich was offered him, but there such an
uproar was raised by pietists that the Swiss authorities
revoked the appointment, giving him a small pension
instead. After that he spent a wandering and rather
unhappy life, turning his pen to profane history and
literary criticism, and writing among other things a
valuable monograph on Reimarus. In 1864 he returned
to theology, and published A Life of Jesus for the
German People.

1 " Without philosophy history remains for me ever dead and
dumb."

io4 FOREIGN WORK

In his preface to this he remarks on the happy
change which had taken place in public opinion since
1835, when his enemies complained that he might at
least have concealed his thoughts from the general
public by writing- in Latin. In fact, the very outcry
against him, for being pitched in so shrill a key, had
reached the ears of the multitude, and so drawn the
attention of thousands to a subject of which they would
otherwise have remained in ignorance. He closes this
preface with an acknowledgment of the value of
Renan's work, which had appeared in the interim. " A
book," he writes, "which, almost before it appeared,
was condemned by I know not how many bishops, and
by the Roman Curia itself, must necessarily be a most
useful book."

Strauss made a somewhat ungenerous attack on the
French nation in 1870, which made him popular for a
time among his countrymen, but which cannot be
otherwise reg-arded than as a stain on a singularly
noble and upright character. Beside his prose works,
he wrote many elegant and touching poems.

Because Strauss summarily eliminated the super
natural element, it has been assumed that he turned
the entire story of Jesus into myth — this by those who
never read the book they denounced, and will hear
nothing of a Christ who is not through and through a
supernatural being-.

The truth is that Strauss understood far better than
the reactionaries of 1835 the conditions under which
the gospels took shape, and the influences which
moulded their narratives. His critics argued that,
since the first and fourth evangelists were eye-witnesses
and took part in the miraculous episodes, their narra
tives cannot be myths in any sense whatever. Strauss

DAVID F. STRAUSS.

106 FOREIGN WORK

replied that the outside evidence in favour of their
having- been eye-witnesses is slender, and the internal
evidence nil. In this matter the subsequent develop
ment of opinion, even in orthodox Church circles, has
endorsed Strauss's position. No one now contends
that Matthew's Gospel is other than the work of an
unknown writer who compiled it out of Mark's Gospel
and Q, the common document of Matthew and Luke.
As to John, Professor Sanday, the last upholder of it,
sacrifices its historicity when he argues that none but
an apostle would have taken such liberties with the
life of his Master ; and the Rev. J. M. Thompson,1
who assuredly voices the opinion of the younger and
better educated of the English clergy, pronounces this
gospel to be " not a biography, but a treatise in
theology." " Its author," he goes on to observe, " would
be almost as ready to sacrifice historical truth where
it clashes with his dogmatic purpose as he is (appar
ently) anxious to observe it where it illustrates his
point."

Strauss displayed more insight than Baur when he
declared that the single generation which elapsed
between the death of Jesus and the date of the earliest
gospel was amply long enough time for such mythical
accretions as we find to gather about the memory of
Jesus. Messianic ideas of the Old Testament, early
aspirations of believers, the desire to conform the
sparse records of his ministry to supposed prophecies
and to parallel his figure with those of Moses and
Elijah — these and many other influences rapidly
generated in a credulous age and society the Saga-like
tales of the gospels about his miraculous powers.

1 Jesus According to St. Mark, London, 1909, p. u.

FOREIGN WORK 107

These tales Strauss discussed in a chapter entitled
"Storm, Sea, and Fish Stories."

Strauss was the first German writer to discern the
emptiness for historical purposes of the Fourth Gospel,
which Schleiermacher had invested with a halo of
authority, and by which even Renan was deceived. He
pronounced it to be a work of apologetic Christology,
composed by a Gnostic who wished to uphold the flesh-
and-blood reality of Jesus against other Gnostics who
denied that reality and resolved him into a merely
phantasmal being. Advanced critics in that age lauded
this gospel because it contains so little eschatology.
That single fact, replied Strauss, convicts it of being
both late and false.

Jesus [he wrote] in any case expected that he would
set up the throne of David afresh, and with the help of
his twelve disciples reign over a liberated people. Yet
he never set any trust in the swords of human followers
(Luke xxii. 38, Matt. xxvi. 52), but only in the legions of
angels, which his heavenly Father would send to his aid
(Matt. xxvi. 53). Wherever he speaks of his advent in
Messianic glory, it is with angels and heavenly Hosts
(i.e., not with human warriors) that he surrounds himself
(Matt. xvi. 27, xxiv. 30 ff., xxv. 31); before the majesty
of a Son of Man coming in the clouds of heaven the
Gentiles will bow without any drawing of swords, and
at the call of the Angel's trumpet will along with the
dead risen from their tombs submit themselves for
judgment to him and his Twelve. But this consumma
tion Jesus did not hope to effect by his own will ; he left
it to the heavenly Father, who alone knows the right
moment at which to bring about the catastrophe (Mark
xiii. 32), to give him the signal. That, he hoped, would
save him from any error in supposing that the end was
reached before due warning was given. Let those who
would banish this point of view from the background of

io8 FOREIGN WORK

Jesus's Messianic plan and outlook, merely because it
seems to turn him into a visionary, only reflect how
exactly these hopes agreed with the long-cherished
Messianic ideas of the Jews, and how easily even a
sensible man, breathing the contemporary atmosphere of
supernaturalism, and shut up in the narrow circle of
Jewish nationality, might be drawn over to a belief,
however superstitious in itself, provided only it embodied
the national point of view and also contained certain
elements of truth and grandeur.

The eschatological aspects of Jesus's Gospel could
not be better summed up than in the above ; and equally
admirable are the remarks which follow on the Last
Supper : —

When Jesus ended this feast with the words, Henceforth
I "will not again drink of the fruit of the vine, until I
drink it with you new in my Father's Kingdom, he must
have anticipated that the Passover would be celebrated
in the Messianic kingdom with special solemnity. If,
therefore, he assures his disciples that he will next enjoy
this annually recurring feast, not in this, but in the next
age (tzori), that shows that he expected this pre-Messianic
world-order to be removed and the Messianic to take its
place within the year.

Here Strauss anticipates Wellhausen and other intel
ligent commentators of to-day. With the same firm
insight he traces the gradual emergence in Jesus of the
consciousness that he was himself the promised
Messiah. In Matt. xii. 8 he remarks, here again antici
pating the best recent criticism, that the Son of Man
in the text, " The Son of Man is Lord also of the Sabbath"
may mean simply Man in general ; but in another class
of passages, where Jesus speaks of the Son of Man, a
supernatural person is intended wholly distinct from
himself, as the Messiah generically. This, for example,

FOREIGN WORK 109

is the natural interpretation of the passage Matt. x. 23,
where at the sending forth of the disciples he assures
them that they will not have completed their tour of the
Jewish cities before the Son of Man shall come. Here
surely Jesus speaks of the Messiah as being himself the
Messiah's forerunner. In that case this utterance must
belong to the earliest period of his career, before he recog
nised himself to be the Messiah. As Dr. Schweitzer,
to whom I am indebted for the above remarks, says
(p. 89), Strauss hardly realised the importance of the
remark which he here throws out, but it contains the
kernel of the solution of the problem of the Son of Man
recently provided by the most acute of German critics,
Johannes Weiss.1

Strauss also goes far to explain the genesis of Paul's
conception of Jesus as a pre-existent being. Jesus, he
argues, clearly conceived of his Messianic role as
involving this much— namely, that he, the Born of
Earth, was to be taken up into heaven after he had
completed his earthly career, and was to return thence
in glory in order to inaugurate the Kingdom of God on
earth.

Now, in the higher Jewish theology, immediately after
the age of Jesus, we meet with the idea of a pre-existence
of the Messiah. The supposition, therefore, lies near at
hand that the same idea was already current at the time
when Jesus was becoming known ; and that — once he
apprehended himself as Messiah — he may have appro
priated to himself this further trait of Messianic por
traiture. The only question is whether Jesus was so
deeply initiated as Paul in the school-wisdom of his
age, so as to have borrowed from it this notion.

1 Die Predigt Jesu vom Reiche Got/es—i.e., "Jesus' Preaching
of the Kingdom of God." First edition 1892, second 1900.

no FOREIGN WORK

That Jesus expected to come amid clouds and with
the angelic hosts to usher in his kingdom is, according
to Strauss, quite certain. The only question is whether
he expected his own death to intervene, or only thought
that the glorious moment would surprise him in the
midst of this life. From Matt. x. 23 and xvi. 28 one
might infer the latter. But it always remains possible
that, supposing he later on came to anticipate his
death as certain, his ideas may have shaped themselves
by way of a final form into what is expressed in
Matt. xxvi. 64.

Strauss's chief defect was that he did not pay enough
attention to the relations in which the synoptic gospels
stand to one another, and his neglect of this problem
obscured for him many features of the first and third
gospels. Like Schleiermacher, he believed Mark's
gospel to be a mere compilation from the other two,
and regarded it as a satellite of Matthew's gospel without
any light of its own. The many graphic touches which
distinguish this gospel were, so he argued, Saga-like
exaggerations of the compiler. His work would have
gained in clearness and grasp if he had understood that
Mark's gospel forms the basis of the other two
synoptists, and furnishes them with the order in which
they arrange their incidents. Without this clue a
critic or commentator is sure to go beating about the
bush after the manner of an old-fashioned harmonist,
here laying stress on Matthew's sequence of events,
there upon Luke's ; whereas, in point of fact, neither
of them had any real guide except Mark, from whose
order of events they only departed in order to pursue
that of their unassisted imaginations.

The circumstances of Renan's life are so well known
that I need not repeat them. Who has not read that

FOREIGN WORK in

most exquisite of autobiographies, the Souvenirs
(TEnfance cf dc Jcuncsse, in which he leads us along
the path of his intellectual emancipation from being the
inmate of a clerical seminary, first in his native Breton
village and then in Paris, to becoming the author of
The Life of Jesus, The Apostles ( 1 866), * Antichrist ( 1873),
The Gospels (1877), St. Paul (1869), Marcus Aurelius
(1881). These volumes will continue to be read for
their glamour of style, no less than for their candour
and nobility of sentiment ; for on all that he wrote,
however technical and learned the subject-matter,
Renan set the stamp of his character and personality.
But these volumes also impress us by the vast learning
which lies behind them. German theologians too often
overwhelm us by their learning, and in reading them
we cannot see the wood for the trees. But Renan
never committed this fault. Hardly a page of his
that does not help us to a clear perspective of the
period and subject he is handling. He contrasts with
clumsy but learned writers like Keim, as a graceful
symmetrical city like Perugia set on a hill amid Italian
skies contrasts with an English manufacturing city, a
planless congeries of vulgar abominations framed in
grime and smoke and dirt. The fanatics chased Renan
in 1862 from the chair he held of Semitic studies, and
he was only restored by the French Republic in 1871 ;
but he was not in the least embittered by the experi
ence, and, in spite of their volleys of execration, he
continued to the end to cherish the kindliest feelings
towards a clergy he had so narrowly escaped from
joining.

Of the works enumerated The Life of Jesus, though

1 Translated by W. G. Hutchison for the R. P. A., 1905.

ERNEST RENAN.

FOREIGN WORK 113

it is the best known, is not the most valuable ; for
when he wrote it Renan was still under the spell of the
fourth gospel, and inclined to use it as an embodiment
of genuine traditions unknown to and therefore unre
corded by the other three evangelists. Then, again,
his portraiture of Jesus as a simpering, sentimental
person, sometimes stooping to tricks, must grate upon
many who yet are not in the least devout believers.

There is thus some justification for Schweitzer's verdict
that it is waxworks, lyrical and stagey. Renan, how
ever, in approaching the study of the gospels, had at
least the great advantage of being a good Hebrew and
Talmudic scholar ; and only want of space forbids me
to cite many excellent passages inspired by this lore.
The single one I can give is from Les Evangiles, p. 97,
and bears on the date of the Synoptic Gospels : —

We doubt whether this collection of narratives,
aphorisms, parables, prophetic citations, can have been
committed to writing earlier than the death of the
Apostles and before the destruction of Jerusalem. It is
towards the year 75 that we conjecturally set the moment
at which were sketched out the features of that image
before which eighteen centuries have knelt. Batanea,
where the brethren of Jesus lived, and whither the
remains of the Church of Jerusalem had fled, seems to
have been the district where this important work was
accomplished. The language used was that in which
Jesus's own words — words that men knew by heart —
were couched ; that is to say, the Syro-Chaldaic, wrongly
denominated Hebrew. Jesus's brethren and the refugee
Christians from Jerusalem spoke this language, which
indeed differed little from that of such inhabitants of
Batanea as had not adopted Greek. It was in this
dialect, obscure and devoid of literary culture, that was
traced the first pencil sketch of the book which has
charmed so many souls. No doubt, if the Gospel had

ii4 FOREIGN WORK

remained a Hebrew or Syriac book, its fortunes would
soon have been cut short. It was in a Greek dress that
the Gospel was destined to reach perfection and assume
the final form in which it has gone round the world.
Still we must not forget that the Gospel was, to begin
with, a Syrian book, written in a Semitic language. The
style of the Gospel, that charming trick of childlike
narrative which recalls the limpidest pages of the old
Hebrew Scriptures, pervaded by a sort of ideal ether that
the ancient people knew not, has in it nothing Hellenic.
It is based on Hebrew.

In this volume Renan corrected the error into which
he had fallen of over-rating the historical value of the
fourth gospel. His appreciations ot the other gospels
are very just, and he rightly rejects the opinion, which
still governed most minds, that the second gospel is a
compilation from the first and third.

CHAPTER VIII.
ENGLISH WORK

FAR back in the nineteenth century the task of intro
ducing to the English public in translations the works
of the more scholarly and open-minded works ot
German theologians already began, and Strauss's Life
of Jesus was twice published in our tongue, first in
1846, and again in 1865. The earlier translator
deplores the fact that " no respectable English pub
lisher " would attempt the publication of his book
"from a fear of persecution." The Anglican clergy,
much more the Nonconformist, remained untouched by
the new learning until the last two or three decades of
that century ; and it is a significant fact that the only
work of its middle time which really threw light on the
composition of the gospels, or would have done so
could anyone in theological circles have been induced
to read it, was the work of a layman, James Smith, of
Jordanstown, a leading geologist and a F.R.S. In his
Dissertation on the Origin and Connection of the Gospels
(Blackwood, 1853) we find an abundance of shrewd
surmises and conclusions. Thus, a propos of the
multiplicity of readings found in MSS. — a multiplicity
which sorely scandalised the believers in verbal inspira
tion, who were puzzled to say which one of ten different
readings in a single passage was due to the Holy
Ghost rather than to a copyist— Smith remarks that
" there is a greater amount of verbal agreement in the
more modern MSS. than we find in the earliest existing

"5

u6 ENGLISH WORK

ones." Here is a truth to which critics are only just
now waking up — viz., that the text was never in any
degree fixed until it was canonised and consecrated.
Till then it was more or less in flux. For the rest,
Smith argued that Luke and Matthew used the Hebrew
original, of which Mark was the translator, rather than
that they used our Mark. This was an error, but an
error in the direction of the truth. It is impossible,
however, to acquiesce in the view that the agreement
between Matthew and Mark is translational only,
except insofar as Mark in rendering- his source (as to
which Smith accepted Papias's tradition that he was
interpreter of Peter) made much use of an earlier
version of the same made by Matthew. Luke, he
believed, wrote with both Mark and Matthew before
him.

But Smith's real achievement was to overthrow the
old superstition that inspired evangelists could not have
written at all except in complete independence of one
another, and without the servile necessity of copying
common documents. English divines rightly felt that
the citadel of inspiration was breached if it were once
proved that the Evangelists copied either one another
or common documents ; and sound criticism could not
take root among them until this prejudice was dispelled.
It has practically vanished to-day ; but it vanished
tardily, and divines are now employed in devising
plasters and bandages to cover the wounds inflicted on
their faith. It seems strange that nineteenth-century
divines could not admit what, as James Smith remarks,
was obvious to the early Fathers ; yet so it was. For
example, Augustine wrote thus of the Evangelists : —

We do not find that they were minded, each of them,
to write as if he was ignorant of his fellow who went

ENGLISH WORK

before him, nor that the one left out by ignorance what
we find another writing.1

Augustine also believed that Mark had Matthew before
him, and followed him.

Even the celebrated Dr. Lardner, in his History of the
Apostles and Evangelists, was wedded to this hypothesis
of the mutual independence of the gospels. He and
others of his age deemed it to be evident from the
nature and design of the first three gospels that their
authors had not seen any authentic history of Jesus
Christ ; and the fact that the Synoptists "have several
things peculiar to themselves" was held to "show that
they did not borrow from each other ";a yet more " the
seeming [mark well the meiosis of the professional
divine !] contradictions which exist in the first three
gospels" were adduced as "evidence that the Evan
gelists did not write by concert, or after having seen
each other's gospels."

Dr. Davidson, a comparatively liberal divine, and one
who suffered for his liberality, argued in the same way
in his Introduction to the New Testament. Smith, how
ever, wrote in answer as follows : —

There is not a single phenomenon adduced in proof

that the Evangelists made no use of the works of their

predecessors, but what may be met with in these modern

contemporary historians, in cases where we know that

they did make use of the works of their predecessors.

This position he proved incontestably by confronting

in parallel columns narratives of the same incidents

written by Sir Archibald Alison in his History of the

French Revolution, by General Napier, and by Suchet in

1 De Cons. Evang., I., c. i.

• So Home in his now forgotten Introduction to the Bible.

n8 ENGLISH WORK

his Memoirs of the war in Spain. Napier was an eye
witness, and also used Suchet. Alison used both. To
the divines of that generation who fell back on the soft
option of oral tradition, because that alternative was to
their minds least incompatible with verbal inspiration,
Smith replied in words which put the matter in a nut
shell. He writes (p. xlviii.) : — -

A stereotyped cyclus of oral tradition never did nor ever
can exist. Even poetry cannot be repeated without
variations.

There is one phenomenon peculiar to compositions
derived from the same written sources, which may be
termed the phenomenon of tallying1. The writers may
add matter drawn from other sources, or they leave out
passages ; but ever and anon they return to the original
authority, where they will be found to tally with each
other ; but it is only in such cases that such correspon
dences occur. Hence, when they do occur, we are
warranted in inferring the existence of a written original.

Mr. W. G. Rushbrooke, at the instance and with the
issistance of the Rev. Dr. Edwin A. Abbott,1 Headmaster
of the City of London School, finally settled the matter
in a work entitled Synopticon (London, 1880). In this
he arranged in parallel columns the texts of Mark,
Matthew, and Luke, picking- out in red whatever is
common to all three, and in other distinctive types
whatever any two of them share in common. The
originality of Mark was thus demonstrated once for all.
There are barely half-a-dozen passages which suggest
that Matthew had access to the ulterior documents used
by Mark ; so complete is his dependence on the latter,
as he has been transmitted to us. It was not, of course,

1 With the collaboration of another distinguished Cambridge
scholar. Dr. Hort.

ENGLISH WORK 119

a new view. Herder had discerned the fact, and the
German scholar Lachmann had pointed out as early as
1835, in his Studien und Kritiken, that Mark provided
the mould in which the matter of Matthew and Luke
was cast. " The diversity of order in the g-ospel narra
tives is," he wrote, "not so great as appears to many.
It is greatest if you compare them all with one another,
or Luke with Matthew ; small if you compare Mark
separately with the other two." In other words, Mark
provides the common term between Luke and Matthew.
The matter is so plain if we glance at a single page of
the Synopticon that one wonders at anyone ever having
had any doubts about it.

And here we are led to refer to the famous contro
versy between Bishop Lightfoot and the author of a
work entitled Supernatural Religion, of which the first
edition appeared in 1874 anonymously from the pen of
Mr. Walter R. Cassels. In that work it was argued
that our Gospels of Matthew and Mark cannot be those
signified by Papias, whose words, as quoted by Euse-
bius, run thus : —

Mark became the interpreter of Peter, and wrote down
accurately as much as he (? Mark or Peter) remembered
(or reminded him of), not, however, in order, of what was
either said or done by Christ. For he neither heard the
Lord, nor was one of his followers ; but later on became,
as I have said, a follower of Peter, who suited his
teachings to people's needs, without making an orderly
array of the Dominical words ; so that Mark committed
no error in thus writing down certain things as he could
recollect them ; for his one concern was to omit nothing
he heard, and to falsify nothing therein.

Matthew, however, composed (or set in order) the
Logia (or oracles) in the Hebrew dialect, and everyone
interpreted them as best he could.

120 ENGLISH WORK

Lightfoot waxed ironical, because the author of
Supernatural Religion questioned if our Mark were the
same as the Mark of Papias. But, if Papias's Matthew
was quite another document than ours, why not also his
Mark ? — the more so because his description of Mark as
a work devoid of chronological order ill suits the Mark
which stands in our Bibles ; for the latter is most
careful about the order of events, and provides a
skeleton order for the other two Evangelists. Except
in so far as they both follow Mark, the two other
synoptists exhibit no order of events whatever.

For the rest, Lightfoot proved that his antagonist
misinterpreted Eusebius's use of Papias. For where
the historian merely states that Papias used and quoted
certain books of the New Testament — like the Johannine
Epistles — which, as not being accepted by all the
Churches, were called Antilegomena, Mr. Cassels over-
hastily inferred Eusebius to mean that Papias did not
know of other cognate Scriptures universally received
in the Eusebian age ; for example, the fourth gospel.
In the case of generally received books, Eusebius was
not concerned to inform us whether or not he had found
them cited in Papias, and therefore in such cases no
argument can be based on his silence. Papias may or
may not have had them. We only know for certain
that he had those of the Antilegomena, which Eusebius
declares he had.

The Bishop was also able to pick a few hcles in his
adversary's scholarship, and to refute his thesis that our
Luke is merely a later edition of Marcion's Gospel. He
could not, however, touch the chapter on the Authorship
and Character of the Fourth Gospel, and had nothing to
oppose to the remarkable opening chapters on Miracles,
except the usual commonplaces of hazy pietism. In

i:\uLISH WORK 121

critical outlook Lightfoot held no superiority, though
he was a better scholar and, within the narrow circle of
his premises, a more careful and accurate worker.

Not that, on the other hand, the book he criticised has
not grave shortcomings. In general it underestimates
the external evidence in favour of the age of the Synoptic
gospels ; and its author has no clear idea either of the
relations in which they stand to each other, or of the
supreme importance of ascertaining those relations
correctly. He moved exclusively in the circle of Baur's
ideas, and had neglected other German books of equal
weight, like those of C. H. Weisse and C. G. Wilke,
published in 1838. The index of the book has no
refsrence to the eschatology of the gospels and of
Paul ; and to this important subject it contains few,
and those few the most meagre, references. In all these
respects, however, Dr. Lightfoot was as poorly equipped
as Mr. Cassels.

Another famous controversy which aroused the Oxford
and Cambridge of my youth (1880-1890) was that of
Dean Burgon with the Revisers of the English Bible,
and especially of the New Testament. This quarrel raged
around the so-called Received Text, or Textus Receptus.
Before the year 1633 such a term was unknown ; but in
that year the Elzevir firm in Leiden and Amsterdam
issued a slightly revised text of Beza's New Testament
(of 1565), which was, in turn, little more than a reprint
of Stephanus's or Estienne's fourth edition of 1551.
That, in turn, was a reprint of a large edition called the
Rcgia, or Royal, which gave Erasmus's first text with
variants from fifteen MSS., and from the Spanish
Editio Princeps of Alcala. Erasmus's edition was
based on half-a-dozen late MSS. Now, an unknown
scholar who prepared this edition of 1633 wrote in his

W. J. BURGOO, Dean of Chichester.

ENGLISH WORK 123

preface the words : " Here, then, you have the text now
received by all, in which we give nothing altered or
corrupt."

Altered from what? There was no standard, save
the earlier editions, and these represented only a score
or so of the 1,300 cursive MSS. now known to exist, and
not a single one of the twelve great uncial MSS. of the
gospels ranging from the fourth to the ninth century.
During the eighteenth century further editions were
issued of the New Testament by such scholars as John
Mill, Wells, Bentley, and Mace in England ; by Ben-el,
Wettstein, Semler, Griesbach, and Matthai abroad, who
continually collated fresh MSS. and ancient versions,
either adding the new variants below the text or even
introducing them into the text. In the nineteenth
century Carl Lachmann (1831) issued at Berlin the first
really scientific text of the New Testament. He followed
the earliest MSS., and gave weight to the very ancient
Latin versions of Africa and Italy. He remarked that an
editor who confined himself to the most ancient sources
could find no use for the so-called Received Text ; and
he accordingly relegated the readings of this to the
obscurity of an appendix. He followed up this edition
with later ones in 1842 and 1850, expanding each time
his critical apparatus.1

If Lachmann had been an orthodox divine, he might
have shrunk from such innovations ; but he was primarily
a classical scholar, concerned with the texts of Homer
Lucretius, and other profane authors ; and he merely
brought to the study of the New Testament text the

« Critical apparatus is the technical term for the tabulated
textual vanants taken from MSS. and added, so

of the editor

i24 ENGLISH WORK

critical canons and the principles of candour and honesty
in common vogue among- classical philologists. But he
reaped the reward of unpopularity which is in store for
all who discover anything that is new or true in the field
of religion. The pietists had been growling for over a
century at the number of various readings printed by
scholars in their editions of the New Testament, and
cudgelling their brains how to reconcile all these diver
sities of text and meaning with the supposed inspiration
of the book. To such minds Lachmann's edition, which
set aside with contempt the entire Textus Receptus,
savoured of open blasphemy, and in a hundred keys
they let him know it. But the world was moving, and
the new developments of Old Testament criticism
encouraged students of the New Testament to bolder
flights. Colenso seemed to suffer for the advancement
of Hebrew studies only ; but the persecutions he endured
nerved younger men with honest hearts to undertake
the study of the New Testament in the same free spirit.
In Germany Constantine Tischendorf carried on the
good work of Lachmann, discovering and editing many
new MSS., and in particular the great uncial of the
Convent of Sinai, called by scholars Aleph. In England
Scrivener, Tregelles, Westcott, and Hort devoted their
lives to the accumulation of new material and to the
preparation of better editions.

At last, in 1870, the English clergy awoke to the
fact that the Received Text as given in the old
authorised version of King James's translators was no
longer satisfactory, and the two Houses of Convocation
appointed a body of revisers to prepare a new English
Version. This was issued in 1881, and the editors
state in their preface the reasons which justified its
appearance. The editions of Stephanus and Beza, and

ENGLISH WORK 12S

the Complutensian Polyglott, from which the authorised
English version was made, were, they allege, "based
on manuscripts of late date, few in number, and used
with little critical skill."

This Revised Version of 1881 marks a great advance
in interpretation insofar as it is based on the earliest
known MSS., and especially on the great uncials ; and
also in that, wherever practicable, it adheres to the
same English equivalent of a Greek word or phrase.
This uniformity in the rendering of the same words
enables a student who knows no Greek to trace out
accurately the triple and double traditions in the texts
of the gospels. Its defects briefly are, firstly, that,
owing to the number of the scholars employed in
revising, and the difficulty of getting them to agree,
the text often has the patchwork appearance of a com
promise ; and, secondly, that, inasmuch as they were
orthodox and somewhat timid divines, the more
orthodox of two or more ancient readings or interpre
tations is commonly printed in the text, the rival ones
being consigned to the margin or altogether ignored
for fear of shocking the weaker brethren. A genuine
scholar detects on many a page of it the work of rather
weak-kneed people.

Nonetheless it was too strong meat for the run of
the English clergy, who found a spokesman in the Rev.
William Burgon, a Fellow of Oriel College in Oxford,
vicar of the University Church, and finally Dean of
Chichester, an old-fashioned scholar of much learning,
and a master of mordant wit and incisive language. He
fell upon his fellow-divines with a fury which provoked
much amusement among the scoffers, and if his bons mots
could have been printed in a cheap form and dissemi
nated among the crowd, I venture to think they would

126 ENGLISH WORK

have been more effective than all the lectures of Mr.
Bradlaug-h and Colonel Ing-ersoll for the cause that
those lecturers had at heart. I copy out a few flosculi
from the good Dean's articles in the Quarterly Review,
entitled " The Revision Revised," and from his Epistle
of Protest addressed to Bishop Ellicott, who had acted
as president of the committee of Revisers.

Drs. Westcott and Hort, of Cambridge, were by far
the most competent of the Revisers, who as a rule
deferred, and wisely, to their judgment, taking as their
standard the Greek text of the New Testament prepared
by them. Of these scholars, therefore, Burgon writes : —

The absolute absurdity (I use the word advisedly of
Westcott and Hort's New Textual Theory)

In their solemn pages an attentive reader finds himself
encountered by nothing but a series of unsupported
assumptions

Their (so-called) "Theory" is in reality nothing else
but a weak effort of the imagination.

Of the Revision itself he writes : —

It is the most astonishing as well as the most
calamitous literary blunder of the age

Their (the Revisers') uncouth phraseology and their
jerky sentences, their pedantic obscurity and their
unidiomatic English

The systematic depravation of the underlying Greek is
nothing else but a poisoning of the River of Life at its
sacred source. Our Revisers (with the best and purest
intentions, no doubt) stand convicted of having deliber
ately rejected the words of inspiration in every page

Of the five oldest Greek manuscripts on which the
Revisers relied, called by scholars for sake of reference
Aleph A B C D, the Dean writes that they

are among the most corrupt documents extant. Each of

ENGLISH WORK I2;

these codices (Aleph B D) clearly exhibits a fabricated
text— is the result of arbitrary and reckless recension

The two most weighty of these codices, Aleph and
B, he likens to the " two false witnesses " of Matt xxvi.
6p. Of these two I have supplied my readers with fac
similes (see pp. 7 and 37).

^ But it is on Bishop Ellicott that he empties out the
vials of his wrath in such terms as the following- :

You, my Lord Bishop, who have never gone deeply
into the subject, repose simply on prejudice. Never
having at anytime collated codices Aleph A B C D for
yourself, you are unable to gainsay a single statement of
mine by a counter-appeal to facts. Your textual learning
proves to have been all obtained at secondhand

Did you ever take the trouble to collate a sacred MS.?
If you ever did, pray with what did you make your
collation?

You flout me : you scold me : you lecture me. But I
do not find that you ever answer me. You reproduce
the theory of Drs. Westcott and Hort— which I claim to

have demolished Denunciation, my Lord Bishop, is

not argument ; neither is reiteration proof.

Not only have you, on countless occasions, thrust out
words, clauses, entire sentences, of genuine Scripture,
but you have been careful that no trace shall survive of
the fatal injury which you have inflicted. I wonder you
were not afraid. Can I be wrong in deeming such a
proceeding in a high degree sinful ? Has not the SPIRIT
pronounced a tremendous doom against those who do
such things (Rev. xxii. 19) ?

The Revisers had admitted among their number a
learned Unitarian minister, Dr. G. Vance Smith. This,
writes Burgon, is, "it seems to me, nothing else but an
insult to our Divine Master and a wrong to the Church."
Of the marginal note set by the Revisers against Romans

128 ENGLISH WORK

ix. 5, he complains that it is " a Socinian gloss gratui
tously thrust into the margin of every Englishman's
New Testament."

Poor Dean Farrar escapes with an expression of con
tempt for his " hysterical remarks."

Nevertheless, in his saner moments Burgon enter
tained a very just ideal of textual criticism, and in
the same volume from which I have made the above
quotations he writes (p. 125) as follows : —

The fundamental principles of the science of textual

criticism are not yet apprehended Let a generation of

students give themselves entirely up to this neglected
branch of sacred science. Let 500 more copies of the
Gospels, Acts, and Epistles be diligently collated. Let
at least 100 of the ancient Lectionaries be very exactly
collated also. Let the most important versions be edited
afresh, and let the languages in which these are written
be for the first time really mastered by Englishmen.
A bove all, let the Fathers be called upon to give up their
precious secrets. Let their writings be ransacked and
indexed, and (where needful) let the MSS. of their works
be diligently inspected, in order that we may know what
actually is the evidence which they afford. Only so will
it ever be possible to obtain a Greek text on which
absolute reliance may be placed, and which may serve
as the basis for a satisfactory revision of our Authorised
Version.

It is a curious indication ot the muddle into which
theological arriere pensee can get otherwise honest men
that almost in the same breath Burgon could prejudge
the question at issue and write as follows (Feb. 21,
1887) to Lord Cranbrook : — •

You will understand then that, in briet, my object is
to vindicate the Traditional Text of the New Testament
against all its past and present assailants, and to estab
lish it on such a basis of security that it may be incapable

ENGLISH WORK 129

of being effectually disturbed any more. I propose myself
to lay down logical principles, and to demonstrate that
men have been going wrong for the last fifty years, and
to explain how this has come to pass in every instance,
and to get them to admit their error. At least, I will
convince every fair person that the truth is what I say it
is — viz., that in nine cases out of ten the commonly
received text is the true one.

There was some ground then for the gibe that
Burgon's one aim was to canonise the misprints of a
sixteenth-century printer. He was, in fact, upholding
a paradox ; he would not — perhaps could not, so dense
was the veil of prejudice with which the old theory of
inspiration covered his eyes — see that prior to the
collection of the gospels in a canon, about the year
180, and while they were still circulating singly in
isolated churches, their text was less fixed and more
liable to changes, doctrinal and transcriptional, than
they ever were afterwards ; and that the ultimate text,
if there ever was one that deserves to be so called, is
for ever irrecoverable. The reductio ad absurdum of his
bias for the Received, or rather Vulgar, text was, as
might be expected, provided by himself. The passage
is so picturesque as to merit to be cited in its inte
grity :—

I request that the clock of history may be put back
1,700 years. This is A.D. .183, if you please; and —
indulge me in the supposition ! — you and I are walking
in Alexandria. We have reached the house of one
Clemens, a learned Athenian, who has long been a
resident here. Let us step into his library — he is from
home. What a queer place ! See, he has been reading
his Bible, which is open at St. Mark x. Is it not a well-
used copy ? It must be at least fifty or sixty years old.
Well, but suppose only thirty or forty. It was executed,

130 ENGLISH WORK

therefore, within fifty years of the death of St. John the
Evangelist. Come, let us transcribe two of the columns

( <reA£5es) as faithfully as we possibly can, and be off.

We are back in England again, and the clock has been
put right. Now let us sit down and examine our

curiosity at leisure It proves on inspection to be a

transcript of the fifteen verses (ver. 17 to ver. 31) which
relate to the coming of the rich young ruler to our Lord.

We make a surprising" discovery It is impossible to

produce a fouler exhibition of St. Mark x. 17-31 than is
contained in a document older than either B. or Aleph —
itself the property of one of the most famous of the ante-

Nicene Fathers The foulness of a text which must

have been penned within seventy or eighty years of the
death of the last of the Evangelists is a matter of fact,
which must be loyally accepted and made the best of.
The Revised Version, as anyone will have noticed
who has compared it with the old authorised texts,
omits an enormous number of passages, some of which
were of great beauty and pathos. Accordingly Dean
Goulburn, Burgon's friend, partisan, and biographer,
writes (Life of J. W. Burgon^ ii. 213) thus : —

Are not these three passages alone — the record of the
agony, the record of the first saying on the cross, and
the doxology of the Lord's Prayer — passages of such
value as ,to make it wrong and cruel to shake the faith
of ordinary Bible readers in them ?

Here is a pragmatist argument indeed. Truth is to
be sacrificed to efficiency in practical working. In the
same temper Canon Liddon had written to Burgon
lamenting that the Revision had been conducted more
as if it was a literary enterprise than a religious one.
Neither Burgon nor his friends seem to have had any
idea that, by issuing a translation that is not as exact
a representation as possible of the oldest and most
authentic texts procurable, you commit in the field of

ENGLISH WORK 131

religion the same sort of crime as a forger does in the
commercial world by uttering base coin or flash bank
notes. No Jesuits were ever more tortuous in their
methods.

In his Introduction to the First Three Gospels (Berlin,
1905, p. 6) J. Wellhausen sums wp Burgon's position
by saying that the further the manuscript tradition
stretches back, the worse it becomes. Grey hairs, he
laconically adds, cannot always save a divine from
making a fool of himself.1 Even admirers of Burgon
had their misgivings roused by such outbursts as the
one I have cited. If water choked them, what had they
left to drink? If the two most ancient of our uncial
codices, Vaticanus B and the Sinaitic Aleph, are false
witnesses against Christ, and if our oldest ascertainable
texts of the second century excel in " foulness," then
what corruptions may not lurk in later texts, time and
the mechanical errors of scribes being the sole factors in
change which the orthodox would allow? There is no
doubt that such verdicts from one so indisputably
orthodox and learned as the Dean of Chichester helped
to unsettle the minds of the clergy and educated laymen
and that they prepared the way for the outspoken
criticisms of the Encyclopedia Biblica.

A tendency has long been visible in the Anglican
Communion to lighten the ship by jettisoning the books
of Moses ; and the most recent results (we write in
1910) of New Testament textual criticism have still
further undermined faith. The old bull-dog-like con
fidence of Burgon and Liddon is seldom shown to-day.
Mr. Robert Anderson, one of the few whose robust
orthodoxy is still proof against any and all reasoning

1 Richtig ist allerdings, dass Alter nicht vor Thorheit schutzt.

132 ENGLISH WORK

in these domains, justly states the position of the Lux

Mundi school as follows : —

The Bible is not infallible, but the Church is infallible,
and upon the authority of the Church our faith can find
a sure foundation. But how do we know that the Church
is to be trusted ? The ready answer is, We know it upon
the authority of the Bible. That is to say, we trust the
Bible on the authority of the Church, and we trust the
Church on the authority of the Bible. It is a bad case of
"the confidence trick" (The Silence of God, 1898, p. 92).

It remains to be seen whether in the century on the
threshold of which we stand the authority of the
thaumaturgic priest will survive that of the Bible ; and
whether the critics, having- finally discredited the New
Testament, will not turn their bulls'-eyes on to the history
of the Church and Sacraments. In this task they will
have a powerful ally in the new sciences of compara
tive religion and anthropology, just as they may have a
relentless enemy in an electorate in which women may
command a clear majority of votes. It has been said
that Christianity begfan with women and will end with
them. It is certainly the case that they are more
easily imposed upon by priests than are men, more
attracted by pomp of vestments, by music, lights,
incense, auricular confession and magic of sacraments,
less prone to ask about any doctrine or ceremony
presented to them under the rubric of faith and religion
the questions: Is it true? On what evidence does
it repose ? Has it any rational meaning-, any historical
basis?

This dissatisfaction with the Bible as a standard ot
faith is beginning- also to be felt in the Latin Com
munion ; and is really voiced by the distinguished
Oxford Catholic, Father Joseph Rickaby, whom I have

ENGLISH WORK 133

already had occasion to cite, in the following'
passage1 : —

In the Gospels and Acts we do not possess one tenth of
the evidence that carried conviction to Dionysius on the
Areopagus, and to Apollos at Ephesus. We are still
beset with the old Protestant Article, that everything
worth a Christian's knowing was put down in black and
white once and for all in the pages of the New Testament.

In the sequel he declares that "the glad tidings"
which travelled " by word of mouth " from Peter and
John and Paul to their disciples, and from these
" through all generations " — that these " have not dried
up into parchments ; they are something over and
above the Codex Sinaiticus" He admits that " the
written narratives of the New Testament are difficult
to harmonise, and leave strange gaps and lacunae";
but he is not distressed by that, and, much as " he

believes in the Word of the Gospel still more does

he believe in the word of the Church." It is a pity
that he does not specify in what particulars the Church's
unwritten tradition supplements the gaps and lacunas
of the New Testament, or reconciles the many contra
dictions of its narratives. We seem to read between
his lines this, that he is ready to let the critics have
their way with the written records of his religion, if
only the Church can be held together in some other
way, her rites and sacraments guaranteed, and the
sacerdotalist positions secured. It is probable that
the Church can provide a canon of lead more pliable
than the cast-iron rule of the letter. This ecclesiastic,
we feel, is well on his way to become a modernist as
far as the Scriptures are concerned.

1 P. 143 of the \o\umejesus or Christ? London, 1909.

CHAPTER IX.
THE MODERNISTS

RECENT encyclicals of Pope Pio X. speak of the
Modernists as if they formed a close sect ; yet on
closer inspection they are seen to be detached workers
in various fields — in literature, like Fogazzaro ; in
philosophy and religion, like Father Tyrrell and Baron
von Hugel ; in Hebrew philosophy, like Minocchi ; in
Assyriology, Hebrew, and New Testament exegesis,
like Alfred Loisy ; in Church history, like Albert
Houtin. All of them good Catholics, and only desirous
of remaining members of their Church, they were only
united in their desire to raise its scholarship and
thinking to a modern critical level. Loisy was born
1857, and already as a young man made himself a
name. He held the Chair of Assyriology and Hebrew
in the Catholic Institute of Paris till 1892, when he was
deprived, because he was too much of a scholar and a
gentleman to stoop to the forced explanations and
artificial combinations of a Vigouroux. He then took
up the study of the New Testament, but continued to
lecture at the School of Higher Studies on Biblical
Exegesis, drawing large audiences, largely composed
of clerics. These lectures he ceased in March, 1904, at
the instance of the Pope. In 1903 he followed up his
little book, The Gospel and the Church, which had given
much offence, with an ample commentary on the fourth
gospel, in which he pulverised the old view of its

THE MODERNISTS

135

apostolic authorship. The Papal Biblical Commis
sioners alluded to above were interrogated about
it, and issued an absurd counterblast. Loisy's great
commentary, in two volumes, on the Synoptic gospels
followed in the spring of 1907, just before a Papal bull
of major excommunication declared him to be a homo
vitandus qui ab omnibus vitari debet — "a man to be
avoided, whom everyone is bound to avoid." A Latin
Bishop in Great Britain publishing such a document
would render himself liable to imprisonment for malicious
libel. Except, however, that his charwoman gave him
notice and left, Loisy sustained no harm, for the Pope's
spiritual weapons are almost as antiquated as the old
muskets I have seen in the hands of his Swiss guards. In
the following year Loisy was chosen Professor of Eccle
siastical History in the University of Paris, in succes
sion to the late-lamented Jean Rdville, the author of
exhaustive works on the early history of the Episcopate
and on the fourth gospel. Not content with the magni
ficent advertisement of excommunication, the Pope
supplied another, yet ampler, by issuing in July, 1907,
an encyclical (beginning Lamentabili sane extiu) in
which were condemned sixty-five theses drawn, or
supposed by the Pope and his inquisitors to be drawn,
from Loisy's works. Though in these theses Loisy's
conclusions are often falsified or exaggerated, they
are, on the whole, an apt summary of the most recent
and assured results of criticism ; and their dissemination
must have damaged the cause of the Modernists about
as much as a formal condemnation of Euclid's axioms
would damage geometricians. The following are some
of the propositions condemned :—

15. The gospels, until the canon was defined and
fixed, were amplified by continual additions and

136 THE MODERNISTS

corrections. There survived in them, therefore, only
tenuous and uncertain vestiges of Christ's teaching1.

16. The narratives of John are not, properly speaking,
history, but a mystical envisagement of the gospel. The
discourses in it are theological meditations on the mystery
of salvation devoid of historical truth.

2 1 . The Revelation, which forms the object of Catholic
faith, was not completed with the Apostles.

22. The dogmas which the Church regards as revealed
are not truths fallen from heaven, but a sort of interpre
tation of religious facts at which the human mind arrived
by laborious efforts.

27. The divinity of Jesus Christ cannot be proved
from the gospels ; it is a dogma deduced by the
Christian conscience from the notion of the Messiah.

30. In all the gospel texts the name Son of God is
equivalent only to the title Messiah ; it in no way
signified that Christ was the true and natural son of
God.

31. The teaching about Christ handed down by Paul,
John, and the Councils of Nice, Ephesus, and Chalcedon
is not that which Jesus taught, but only what Christians
had come to think about Jesus.

32. The natural sense of the gospel texts cannot be
reconciled with what our theologians teach about the
consciousness and infallible knowledge of Jesus Christ.

33. It is evident to anyone not led away by his preju
dices either that Jesus taught an error about the
immediate advent of the Messiah, or that the greater
part of his teaching as contained in the Synoptic gospels
is unauthentic.

34. Criticism cannot attribute to Christ knowledge
without bounds or limit, except on the hypothesis,
inconceivable historically and repugnant to modern

THE MODERNISTS 137

feeling, that Christ as man possessed God's knowledge,
apd yet was unwilling to communicate a knowledge of
/so many things to his disciples and to posterity.

55- Christ was not from the first conscious of being
Messiah.

37. Faith in Christ's resurrection was, to begin with,
a belief in the fact itself than in his being immortal
alive in God's presence.

38. The doctrine of the expiatory death of Christ is
Xnot in the gospels, but was originated by Paul alone.

43. The custom of conferring baptism on infants was
part of an evolution of discipline which eventually led
to this sacrament being resolved into two— viz., Baptism
and Penance.

45. In Paul's account of the institution of the
Eucharist (i Cor. xi. 23-25) we must not take every
thing historically.

49. As the Christian Supper little by little assumed
l4ie character of a liturgical action, so those who were
/ accustomed to preside at it acquired a sacerdotal
character.

51. Marriage could become a sacrament of the New
Law only fairly late in the Church, etc.

52. It was foreign to the mind of Christ to set up a
Church as a society which was to endure through long
ages upon the earth. On the contrary, he imagined
that the Kingdom of Heaven and the end of the world
were both equally imminent.

55. Simon Peter never dreamed of primacy in the
Church having been conferred on him by Christ.

56. The promotion of the Roman Church to be head
of other Churches was due to no arrangements of
Divine Providence, but purely to political conditions.

60. Christian teaching was Jewish to begin with,

138 THE MODERNISTS

though by successive evolutions it afterwards became,
first Pauline, then Johannine, and finally Hellenic and
universal.

65. Modern Catholicism can compound with genuine
science only by transforming itself into a sort of
undogmatic Christianity — that is, into a broad and
liberal Protestantism.

Needless to say, these principles are largely exem
plified in the lives and writings of our younger English
clergy ; and Professor Sanday, in his latest work on Chris-
tologies, declares that we must modernise, whether we will
or no. He accordingly argues that the division in
Jesus between the Divine and Human was not vertical,
as the Fathers imagined, so that his waking actions
and thoughts could be apportioned now to one, now to
the other class. It was rather horizontal, his divine
consciousness being only subliminal, and all the rest of
him purely human. So I find that, as M. Jourdain had
all his life been talking prose without knowing it, I
have been believing all along in an incarnation which
Jesus at best shared with his fellow men. But to be
quite serious : this view hardly does justice to the mind
and character of Jesus, even in the eyes of those who
deny that he was in any way unique among men. For
the subliminal self is no better than a storehouse of past
experiences and memories, some of them possibly ante
natal, of the individual ; and it is chiefly revealed under
abnormal and diseased cerebral conditions. At best it
is a stepping-stone of the dead self on which " to rise to
higher things." Moral achievements and character
imply more, and are the work of a creative will
generating new results that never pre-existed in any
form ; and we enter an impasse if we try to explain
conscious experiences and efforts of will as the mere

THE MODERNISTS 139

unwinding of a coiled spring, as the unfolding- of an
eternal order already implicit in things. For in the
spiritual domain the past does not wholly contain the
future ; and no moral or speculative end is served by
trying- to deduce our lives from ulterior spiritual beings
or agencies. If all holy thoughts and good counsels
proceed from a being called God, whence did he derive
them ? Why should they not be as ultimate and
original in us, who certainly possess them, as in this
hypothetically constituted author of them ? No doubt on
such a view the burden of human responsibility becomes
greater, but it is not insupportable. The rule, Ex nihilo
nihil fit, holds good only in the phenomenal world of
matter, and perhaps not absolutely there ; and the idea
that so much of revelation as there was in Jesus, or as
there is in any of us, must needs flow from some
ulterior source outside or before us is an illegitimate
extension of this rule to the spiritual sphere. Further
more, we feel that, if Dr. Sanday had not to buttress up
the dogma of the two natures in Christ, he would not
venture on these excursions into modern philosophy.
Now, it is certain that the Fathers of the Church did
not mean by their formulas what Professor Sanday tries
to make them mean. What, then, is the use of clinging
to forms of words which we can no longer take in the
sense to express which they were devised? And the
same criticism applies to Dr. Gore's explanation of
the incarnation as a kenosis or self-emptying by
Jesus Christ of his divine nature, as a laying-aside of
his cosmic role and attributes in order to be born a son
of woman. Dr. Gore himself allows that no Father or
teacher of the Church, from Irenaeus down to his friend
the late Professor Bright of Oxford, would have tolerated
his explanation. Surely, then, it would be better to

K

i4° THE MODERNISTS

give up altogether a form of words which he can no
longer accept in the sense in which they were framed.

And the same reflection must have crossed the minds
of many of the readers of Dr. Sanday's work (already
cited) on Christologies Ancient and Modern when they
reached the passage of it in which he crowns a life of
continuous intellectual growth, of ceaseless endeavour to
understand others and give them their due, of perpetual
and sincere, if cautious, acceptance of Truth as she has
unveiled herself to his eyes, with the declaration that
he repeats a creed "not as an individual, but as a
member of the Church." He does "not feel that he is
responsible for " the creeds, and " tacitly corrects the
defects of expression, because he believes that the
Church would correct them if it could." He sums the
matter up in the words : —

For the creed as it stands the Church is responsible,

and not I I myself regard the creeds, from this most

individual and personal point of view, as great outstand
ing historical monuments of the Faith of the Church. As

such I cannot but look upon them with veneration

But, at the same time, I cannot forget that the critical
moments in the composition of the creeds were in the
fourth and fifth centuries, and that they have never been
revised or corrected since.

As we read these words of Dr. Sanday, we realise
what an advance has taken place in the last thirty
years, and that the day is not far off when Christian
records will be frankly treated like any other ancient text,
and the gospel narratives taken into general history
to be sifted and criticised according to the same
methods and in the same impartial temper which we
bring to the study of all other documents. La verite est
en marche.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

[In the following bibliography I confine myself almost entirely
to works of the last ten years. It is disconcerting to have to name
so few English books ; but, as in earlier decades, so in this, the
majority of English works bearing on the criticism of the Gospels,
are merely apologetic, and deserve little notice as works of
learning. — F. C. C.]

Abbott, Rev. Edwin A. All his works.

Bacon, Dr. B. W. The Fourth Gospel in Research and Debate.
New York, 1910 ; 4 dols.

Bacon, Dr. B. W. The Beginnings of Gospel Story. Yale,
1909 ; IQS.

Bigg, Canon Ch. Wayside Sketches in Ecclesiastical History.

1906 ; 75. 6d.

Blass, Prof. F. Grammar of New Testament Greek. (Trans
lated by Henry St. John Thack •• ay.) 143.

Bousset, Prof. Dr. W. Hauptprobleme der Gnosis. 1907 ; I2S.

Burkitt, Prof. F. C. Evangelion da-Mepharrcshe. Cambridge,
1904 ; 423.

Carpenter, Principal Estlin. The First Three Gospels.

Charles, Rev. R. H. Eschatoloify. London, 1899.

Criticism of the New Testament. St. Margaret's Lectures. 1902.

Deissmann, Adolf. Light from the Ancient East. 1910; 153.

Dobschiitz, E. von. The Apostolic Age. (Translated by
Pogson.) London, 1910; 2s.

Drummond, James. Studies in Christian Doctrine. London,
1909 ; IDS. 6d.

Encyclopedia Biblica. 4 vols. ; 423.

Gardner, Prof. Percy. The Groivth of Christianity. London,

1907 ; 38. 6d.

Gardner, Prof. Percy. A Historic View of the New Testament.
1901.
'Gore, Rev. C. H. Dissertations on the Incarnation. London,

Gregory, Dr. C. R. Canon and Text of the New Testament.
Edinburgh, 1907.

Gregory, Dr. C. R. Text kritik des Neues Testamentes. Three
vols. Leipzig, 1902-1909.

Gregory, Dr. C. R. Die Griechischen Handschriften des Neues
Testamentes. Leipzig, 1908.

141

142 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Gregory, Dr. C. R. Canon and Text of the New Testament.
Edinburgh ; 123.

Harnack, A. Luke the Physician. (Translated by J. R.
Wilkinson.) 1907 ; 6s.

Harnack, A. The Sayings of Jesus. 1908 ; 53.
Harris, J. Rendell. Side-lights on New Testament Research.
1909 ; 6s.

Hastings, James. Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics.
Hasting-s, James. A Dictionary of the Bible. 285.
Houtin, Albert. La Question Biblique au XIXe Siecle. Paris,
1902. And La Q. B. au XXe Siecle. Paris, 1906.

The International Critical Commentary. E. & T. Clark, Edin
burgh.

Jowett, Benjamin. Epistles of St. Paul.

Jiilicher, Adolf. An Introduction to the New Testament.
(Translated by J. P. Ward.) London, 1904.

Knopf, R. Der Text des Neues Testamentes. 1906.
Lake, Prof. Kirsopp. The Historical Evidence for the Resur
rection of Jesus. 1907; 53.

Lake, Prof. Kirsopp. The Text of the New Testament. 1900.
Kiibel, Johannes. Geschichte des Katholischen Modernismus.
Tubingen, 1909 ; 43.

Levy, Albert. David Fre'de'ric Strauss. Paris, 1910; 53.
Lietzmann, Hans. Handbuch zum Neuen Testament. (In this
series are contained Prof. Dr. Paul Wendland's History of
Hellenistic-Roman Culture, and also commentaries on the Gospels
and Pauline Epistles.)

Loisy, Alfred. Les Evangiles Synoptiques. 1907 ; 30 fr.
Loisy, Alfred. Le Quatrteme Evangile. Paris, 1903.
Loisy, Alfred. The Gospel and the Church. (Translated by
C. Home.) 1908; 35. 6d.

Macan, R. W. The Resurrection of Jesus Christ. Edinburgh,
1877.

McGiffert, A. C. The Apostles' Creed. New York, 1902.
McGiffert, A. C. History of Christianity in the Apostolic Age.
New York, 1898; 125.

Martineau, James. The Seat of Authority in Religion. London,
1890.

Moffatt's Historical New Testament.

Montefiore, C. G. The Synoptic Gospels. Twovols.; i8s.
Moulton, James Hope. A Grammar of New Testament Greek.
Two vols. Edinburgh, 1906 ; i6s.

The New Testament in the Apostolic Fathers. Oxford,
1905 ; 6s.

Pfleiderer, Dr. Otto. The Early Christian Conception of Christ.
London, 1905 ; 33. 6d.

Pfleiderer, Dr. Otto. Primitive Christianity. (Translated by
W. Montgomery.) Twovols.; 2 is.

Pfleiderer, Dr. Otto. The Development of Christianity. 55.

BIBLIOGRAPHY 143

Preuschen, Ed. Antilegomena. (Greek texts with German
translation.) Second edition. 1905 ; 4$. 6d.

The Programme of Modernism. (Translated from the Italian by
Rev. A. Leslie Lilley.) 1908 ; SH.

Ramsay, Sir W. M. The Church in the Roman Empire, before
A.D. 770. I2s.

Reinach, Salomon. Orpheus.

Reitzenstein, R. Die Hellenistischen Mysterienreligionen.
Berlin, 1910.

Renan, E. Les Apdtres, 1866; L'Antechrist, 1873; St. Paul.

Reville, Jean. Le Quatrieme Evangile. Paris, 1901.

Robinson, Dr. J. A., Dean of Westminster. The Study of the
Gospels. 1903.

Sabatier, Paul. Notes dl Histoire religieuse contcmporaine, Les
Modernistes. 1909; 33.

Schmiedel, Paul W. The Johannine Writings. London, 1908.

Schurer, Prof. Dr. Emil. History of the Jewish People in the
Time of Jesus Christ.

Schweitzer, Dr. A. The Quest of the Historical Jesus. (Trans
lated by W. Montgomery.) 1910; IDS. 6d.

Smith, Goldwin. In Quest of Light. New York, 1906; 45.

Soden, H. von. History of Early Christian Literature. (Trans
lated by T. R. Wilkinson.) London, 1906 ; 53.

Spitta, Prof. Dr. Fr. Streitfragen der Geschichte Jesus. 1907;
6.80 mks.

Sturt, Henry. The Idea of a Free Church. London, 1909.

Tyrrell, G. The Church and the Future. 1910; 2s. 6d.

Weizsacker's Apostolic Age of the Christian Church. Two vols.

Wellhausen. Einleitung in die drei ersten Evangelien. Berlin,
1905.

Wendt, Prof. Dr. H. H. Die Lehre Jesu. 1901 ; I2S.

Wernle, Dr. Paul. Sources of our Knowledge of the Life of
Jesus. 1907.

Wernle, Prof. P. The Beginnings of Christianity. (Translated
by G. A. Bienenmann.) 1904; zis.

Westcott and Hort. Greek Testament. (With Introduction on
the MSS.)

Zahn, Th. Einleitung in das Neue Testament. Two vols.

INDEX

ABBOTT, Rev. E. A., his Synop-

ticon, 1 1 8
Acta Sanctorum, growth of

legends in, compared with

the Gospels, 56
Alford, Dean, on Harmonising-

of Scripture, 18, 24, 27, 49,

5°> 53
Anderson, Sir Robert, on the

Lux Mundi, 29
Anderson, Sir Robert, onSacer-

dotalistic substitutes for the

Bible, 132
Ataraxia, Stoic ideal of, applied

to Jesus, 58

BAUR, F. C. , his Life and Work,

98 foil.
Bengel on the Three Witnesses,

72

Burgon, Dean of Chichester,
his attacks on the Revised
Version of the Gospels, 125
foil.

CATHARS, on New Testament

miracles, 48
Chase, Rev. Dr., Bishop of Ely,

on Matt, xxviii. 19, 76
Chilling-worth, on Popes, 32
Collins, Anthony, on Prophecy,

38 foil.
Conybeare, John, his Reply to

Tindal, 33
Creighton, Bishop of London, 95

DAVIDSON, Dr., on Matt, xxviii.
*9> 75

Deistic movement, 30
Diatessaron of Tatian, 66

ERASMUS, 70

Eschatology of Gospels, Strauss

on, 106
Eusebian reading- of Matt.

xxviii. 19, 74
Evanson on The Dissonance of

the Evangelists, 87 foil.

FARRAR'S Life of Christ, 82 ;
on Reimarus, 87

Farrar, late Dean of Canter
bury, 13

Female suffrage tends to an
obscurantist regime, 132

GIBBON on the Three Wit
nesses, 72

Gibson, Bishop of London, sup
presses Tindal's works, 34

Gore, Rev. Ch., on the Kenosis,

139

Gospels, their compilation. 19

Goulburn, Dean, on Revised
Version, 130

Green, J. R., and Stubbs, anec
dote of, 34

Gregory, Dr. C. R., on New
Testament text, 77

GreswelFs Harmony of Gospels,
23, 24

Grotius on harmonisings ot
Gospels, 27

HARNACK, Prof., on Matt, xxviii.

75

144

INDEX

Herder, J. G., 80 foil.
Hurd, Bishop of Lichfield,
favours Evanson, 88

INSPIRATION of Scripture, how
regarded by Origen, 9 foil.;
by the Reformers, 16 foil.;
by William Whiston, 16 ; by
Alford, 1 8, 20, 25; by Gres-
well, 23 foil.; by Sir R.
Anderson, 29 ; by Dr. San-
day, 28 ; by John Locke, 30 ;
by Jeremy Taylor, 31

Irenaeus on the Four Gospels,
67 ; on Johannine authorship
of the Fourth Gospel, 50

JEROME'S revision of Latin

Bible, 14
Jesus, his Deification begins in

First and Third Gospels, 57

LACHMANN on priority of Mark,
119; rejected the Tex tits Re-
ceptus, 123

Lardner on Oral Tradition, 117

Leo XIII. on the Three Wit
nesses, 72

Liddon, Canon, on Book of
Daniel and Fourth Gospel, 60

Liddon, Canon, on Revised
Version, 130

Lightfoot's answer to Super
natural Religion^ \ 19

Locke on Inspiration, 30

Loisy, Alfred, protected by
Leo XIII., 74; on dogmatic
changes in New Testament
text, 77

Loisy, excommunicated by Pio

x., 135

Luther, on authority of Church

tradition, 78
Lux Mundi Sermons, 29

MARK'S Gospel used by Matthew

and Luke, 19 foil., 51
Martin, David, on i John v. 7

and 8, 70

Martineau, Dr. James, on Matt,
xxviii. 19, 75

Matthew's Gospel the work of
an unknown compiler, 51 ; not
aversion of the Hebrew Logia
attested by Papias, 59

Millennial belief in early-Church,
66

Modernists, who and what, 134
— and Pio X., 78

NESTLE, Dr. Eberhard, his edi
tion of New Testament, 75, 77

ORAL tradition in Gospels,
hypothesis of, rejected by
James Smith, 115; adopted by
Lardner and Davidson, 117

PAPAL Encyclicals against
Modernists, 134 foil.

Papias on Lopta, 58, 59 ; his
lost Die'ge'seis, 60

Papias's testimony regarding
Gospels of Matthew and
Mark, 119

Pio X., his summary of Modern
ist opinions, 135 foil.

Porson's work on the Three
Witnesses^ 72

Priestley, his controversy with
Horsley, 93 ; criticises Evan-
son, 95

Priscillian's text of the Three
Witnesses, 69

Prophetic Gnosis in New Testa
ment, 34 foil.

REIMARUS, 83 foil.

Renan's life and works, in foil.

Revised Version, 124 foil.

Rickaby, Father Joseph, on
progress of criticism, 49

Rickaby, Father Joseph, on
tradition outside the New
Testament, 133

Robinson, Dr. Armitage, Dean
of Westminster, on composi
tion of Synoptic Gospels, 51

146

INDEX

foil., 54,57; on the Fourth
Gospel, 61 foil.
Rushbrooke's Synopticon, 118

SALMON, Rev. Dr., on Westcott

and Hort, 68
Sanday, Professor, on Fourth

Gospel, 106 ; on Modernising-,

138 ; on Creeds, 140
Sandius on i John v. 7 and 8, 70
Schleiermaeher on Mark, 110
Schweitzer, Albert, on Reim-

arus, 83 ; his work, Von

Reimarus zu Wrede, 97
Seventy disciples, invented by

Luke, 19 foil.

Simon's Histoire Critique, 70
Smith, James, of Jordanhill, on

oral tradition, 115 foil.
Smith, of Jordanhill, on the

Gospels, 52 foil.
Socinians, 30
Stephen, Leslie, on the Deists,

39, 47; on Priestley, 94
Strauss, his Lebenjesu, 103, 115;

on eschatology of Jesus, 107
Stubbs, Bishop of Oxford, his

attitude towards Renan, 34 ;

his uncritical attitude, 95
Supernatural Religion, contro
verted by Dr. Lightfoot, 119

foil.

TAYLOR, Jeremy, on inspira
tion, 31

Text of Gospels in flux till it

was canonised, 116
Textus Receptus, history of the

term, 121 foil.
Thompson, Rev. J. M., on

Fourth Gospel, 106
Three Witnesses, text of the,

70 foil.
Tindal's Christianity as Old as

the Creation, 31
Travis, Archdeacon, on the

Three Witnesses, 71
Trinitarian falsifications of New

Testament, 69 foil.

VANCE SMITH, Dr. G., assailed

by Dr. Burgon, 127
Voltaire and the English Deists,

46

WEISS, JOHANNES, 109
Wellhausen on Dean Burgon,

I3I

Westcott and Hort, defects of
their system of New Testa
ment criticism, 68

Whiston, William, his Harmony,
1 6 foil.

Woolston, Thomas, on the
miracles of the New Testa
ment, 41 foil.

XIMENES, Cardinal, his Greco-
Latin Bible, 69

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