How to understand the Gospels ..

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HODDER AND STOUGHTON'S
PEOPLE'S LIBRARY

General Editor : Sidney Dark

OTHER WORKS BY THE REV.

CANON ANTHONY C. DEANE, M.A.

IN THE people's LIBRARY

RABBONI.

A Study of Jesus Christ the Teacher.

JESUS CHRIST.

HOW TO ENJOY THE BIBLE.

OUR FATHER.

A Study of the Lord's Prayer. 3/6 net.

HOW TO UNDERSTAND
THE GOSPELS .^n

BY ^(

ANTHONY C. DEANE, M.A

Vicar of All Saints, Ennismore Gardens, and
Hon. Canon of Worcester Cathedral

H^

HODDER AND STOUGHTON

LIMITED LONDON

Made and Printed in Great Britain.
Eaull, Watson <t Viney, Ltd., London and Aylesbury.

Contents

CHAP. PAGE

I. THE BIRTH OF THE GOSPELS . J

II. THE SOURCES OF THE GOSPELS . 30

III. MARK : THE INTERPRETER OF PETER 49

IV. MARK : THE GALILEAN MINISTRY

AND PASSION WEEK ... 65

V. MATTHEW : THE GOSPEL OF THE

MESSIAH 93

VI. MATTHEW I THE TEACHER AND HIS

TEACHING .... 108

VII. LUKE : THE CHURCH AND THE

ROMAN CITIZEN . . . I35

VIII. LUKE : THE BIRTH, LIFE, AND

RESURRECTION . . • I5I

IX. JOHN : THE GOSPEL AND ITS AUTHOR I79

X. JOHN : THE GOSPEL AND ITS

AUTHENTICITY .... I97

Chapter I The Birth of the Gospels

The four canonical Gospels are the
greatest books in the world. Perhaps we
reaUze this most easily if we imagine our-
selves deprived of them. Suppose that
these four had shared the fate of the
" many " known to St. Luke, and that
every copy of them had perished. Eagerly
we should scrutinize the remaining New
Testament books, in the vain hope of de-
ducing from them the work, the words, the
character of Jesus Christ. We should learn,
indeed, that He was betrayed, instituted
the eucharist on the night of betrayal, was
crucified, rose from the dead, was seen of
many witnesses. Beyond these bare state-
ments we should know practically nothing.
Of the Ascension alone we should possess
an account, supplied by a few sentences in
the Acts. That our Lord had brought a
new supernatural power into the world
would be evident from the amazing growth
of the Church. But our guesses concerning

7

8 How to Understand the Gospels

the nature of that power, and of the way
in which it became operative, must have
gone hopelessly astray. Lacking the
Gospels, who could have imagined such
deeds and such teaching as are described
in their pages ? Whether or no we count
ourselves Christians, we cannot escape the
influence of the Gospel ideal upon thought
and conduct. And, as Christians, while we
might still have without the Gospels a
Lord to reverence, we should not have a
Friend to love. The four little books can
be given us in perhaps a hundred and fifty
pages of print. They can be read from
start to finish in a few hours. Yet they
have shaped history to a degree almost
impossible to exaggerate. As the Bible is
incomparably the greatest collection of
writings, so are the Gospels the supreme
treasure of the Bible.

That seems obvious. Yet in the great-
ness of these books there are elements
which we are very apt to overlook, or to
take as a matter of course. Their chief
glory, beyond doubt, lies in the pre-
eminence of their theme. Whatever their
form, pages which describe the life on earth
of our divine Master must be unique in

7 he Birth of the Gospels

value and interest. When, however, this
has been admitted, the marvel of the Gospels
as literature ought not to be forgotten.
Their writers were not conscious artists.
Their simple aim, as one of them defined it
in his preface, was to arrange and set down
in order the facts they had received from
a number of original eye-witnesses. Yet
they succeeded in handling their material
with a skill and sureness of touch that must
amaze every literary craftsman. The
episodes they describe are pictured with
convincing vividness, and are never over-
loaded with detail. Life-Hke portraits are
achieved in a few words. Most wonderful,
when we remember that these are Oriental
writings, must seem their brevity, their
reticences, their restraint. Often they have
to record what transcends all normal experi-
ence, yet there is no hint of exaggeration
or of fulsome comment. They state what
Jesus said and did. So far as is necessary,
they indicate in a phrase or two the effect
of His deeds and words upon the people.
And that is all. The Gospels date from an
age when religious writing was almost
invariably prolix and diffuse. They come
from Orientals, who with any unusual

10 Hozv to Understand the Gospels

experience to relate, loved to set it forth
at vast length, and with wearisome insistence
upon its unique character. But the Evange-
lists are masters of clarity and precision.
They handle their material with con-
summate skill. They can distinguish the
essential from the unimportant. They
know not only what to put in but what
to leave out. In Oriental writings of that
date, how easily there might have been
at least here and there a sentence that
jarred, a fault of taste, a phrase dissonantly
out of tune with the rest 1 From beginning
to end, there is no such flaw in the Gospels.
Is it superstitious to believe that the
Evangehsts were helped by a power more
than human, were given an " inspiration of
selection " ? That, it must be admitted,
is an old-fashioned view. Yet to readers
of a trained literary sense it will seem easier
and more reasonable to account for the
Gospels in this way than to find any other
adequate explanation of what these Evange-
lists were able to do.

II

Their supreme feat was their portraiture
of Jesus Christ. Here, too, our famiharity

i:he Birth of the Gospels ii

with what they did must not bHnd us to its
amazing character. The Evangehsts had no
patterns as their guide. There were no
contemporary biographies or memoirs which
they could take as models. They were
creating a new kind of literature. The
difficulties of their task were immense.
Not the least of them must have been the
embarrassing wealth of their material. If
all the deeds attributed to Jesus by earlier
records or spoken tradition were to be set
down, " I suppose," remarked one Evange-
list, " that even the world itself could not
contain the books that should be written."
From the mass of incidents they had to
select the most important, those that
typified most clearly the teaching and
character of the Master. From accounts
varying in detail they had to choose the
most authentic. If they were to write
honestly, they must record deeds and words
which had astounded those who first saw
and heard them, and the full meaning of
which could not be clear to the Evangelists
themselves. Either they must sacrifice
something of candour, or they must show
the Apostles at times in none too favourable
a light. All such difficulties, however, were

12 How to Understand the Gospels

small in comparison with their chief task.
By means of simple narrative they had
somehow to reveal to their readers the
matchless character and personality of
Jesus Christ. Every other purpose of their
work was subordinate to that aim, an aim
so tremendous that it might have filled the
greatest literary genius with despair.

And they succeeded. The influence of
their Gospels on the world's history and the
tribute of the simplest reader alike attest
their success. Whatever else may be said
of the Gospels, this is their supreme triumph.
They set for ever a superb portrait of Jesus
Christ before the world. It is a portrait
which has compelled the homage of man-
kind. All the resources of literary genius
could not have achieved the feat so well
as did the makers of the four Gospels.
The more we examine the difficulties of
their task, the more remarkable will appear
their success. They had so to describe the
unique personality of Jesus Christ that His
full and complete humanity should be
evident. Yet this they had to do while
making equally plain the grounds of their
conviction that He was the divine Son of
God. They had to leave the reader sure

^he Birth of the Gospels 13

that He was both sorely tempted and
morally perfect. They had to give an
impression of His charm and of His strength,
of His power of withering invective, of the
tenderness which drew the little children
to Him, of His unerring insight into
character, of His matchless sympathy.
They had to show Him scorned, solitary,
homeless, yet quietly asserting claims
that, coming from any teacher merely
human, would have been insufferably
arrogant.

If one Evangelist had contrived in his
few chapters to draw a convincing picture
of our Lord, the fact would have been
notable. But that all four should have
succeeded, and that their four pictures
should be in essential agreement, is far more
wonderful. No doubt Matthew and Luke
borrowed from Mark, or from earlier docu-
ments incorporated in Mark. No doubt,
too, the style of the Fourth Gospel, its
balance of emphasis, and the character of
the teaching it attributes to Jesus, are
sharply different from those of the earlier
three. The Fourth Gospel surveys the
work of the Master from another point
of view. Again, there are evident differences

14 How to Understand the Gospels

between the three synoptists. The special
aim and personal bias of the Matthew
editor and Luke cause them to arrange and
modify with some freedom the material
they have taken over from Mark. More
striking, in consequence, is the truth that
the portrait of Jesus Christ Himself is
essentially the same in all four Gospels.
Where one supplies what is lacking in the
others, it is a detail perfectly congruous
with those already known. We are never
made to feel, for instance, that the Jesus
of Luke is other than the Jesus of Mark.
The teaching chronicled by John is different,
but the Teacher is the same. That each of
the Evangelists gives us clearly a con-
vincing portrait, and that the portrait of
all is essentially one, must seem a fact the
more impressive the more we ponder it.
If, primarily, the Gospels are great because
of their unique theme, they are great also
because they are without parallel as
literature.

That greatness becomes more apparent
when we contrast the four with the numerous
" apocryphal gospels " written from the
middle of the second century onwards.
Some of these combined authentic history

T^he Birth of the Gospels 15

from the canonical Gospels with legends.
Some were fabricated to support a special
theory. Thus there were people anxious
to believe that our Lord could suffer no
real pain, and the so-called " Gospel of
Peter " was written to give colour to this
view. The largest fragment of it we possess
was dug up in Egypt in 1886. It contains
a description of the Crucifixion and Resur-
rection. Jesus, we are told, did not die,
but was miraculously *' taken up " from
the Cross. In manuscripts now at Hereford
and the British Museum is an account of
the Birth of Christ which also may come,
as the Provost of Eton has recently argued
with great cogency,^ from this '* Gospel of
Peter." At the time of the Birth a bright
light is seen which gradually takes the form
of an infant. The child has no weight, and
His eyes dazzle those who look at them. A
number of other apocryphal gospels record
fantastic stories of the birth and boyhood
of Jesus. He makes twelve sparrows of
clay, which come to life and fly when He
claps His hands. ^ A boy who runs up

1 Latin Infancy Gospels, edited by M. R. James
(Camb, University Press, 1927).

2 Gospel of Thomas.

1 6 How to Understand the Gosfels

against Him falls dead.^ A youth has been
changed by witchcraft into a mule ; when
Mary places Jesus on the mule's back it
disappears, and the young man stands in
its place.* When Mary with her child
enters an Egyptian temple, the idols bow
down.' These are but a few from a vast
number of such stories. Their atmosphere
is hke that of The Arabian Nights. Worth-
less as they are in themselves, they help us
to realize the kind of thing which appealed
to the readers of that age. And the differ-
ence between them and the four canonical
Gospels is exceedingly impressive. It
heightens our immense gratitude to the
Evangelists, who did not merely put
together Gospels, but kept them free from
every trace of fantasy. As we examine
their sober pages, we feel that their witness
is true. The ultimate message of our
religion comes to us in a perfect setting,
and the Gospels, wonderful in what they
relate, are wonderful also in their manner
of relating it. They are indeed the greatest
books in the world.

1 Gospel of Thomas.

2 Arabic Gospel of the Childhood.

3 Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew.

^he Birth of the Gospels 17

III

Here, then, they are, preserved for us
through eighteen centuries. As a help to
understanding them, we need to ask the
same questions as would occur to us before
reading any other documents of extreme
antiquity. At what time, and in what
circumstances, came they to be written ?
What do we know for certain of their
authorship and their authors ? For what
readers were they first designed ? How
is it that they are four, that one was not
thought sufficient, or that one of them did
not supersede the other three ? In what
relation of time and trustworthiness do they
stand to one another ? Are the diver-
gences between them fundamental, and do
they invahdate their trustworthiness ? Is
each the work of a single author or a com-
pilation ? Are the Gospels as we possess
them the Gospels as they were originally
written, or as they were subsequently
edited ? Successive generations of scholars
have toiled patiently to answer such
questions. If some points are still, and
seem Hkely to remain, in dispute, there
are many in regard to which definite con-
2

1 8 Hozu to Understand the Gospels

elusions have been reached. And their
importance is hardly realized as yet by
the general Bible-reading pubHc. If the
study of them is necessarily technical, the
results arrived at have much more than a
merely literary or antiquarian interest. We
are helping ourselves to read the Gospels
intelligently, and the precise force of their
spiritual message will be plainer, if we put
ourselves so far as possible in the position
of their first readers. By doing that we
shall avoid misinterpretations that are far
too common. Indeed, any study which
adds to the interest and perception with
which we examine these unique writings
must be evidently worth while.

We begin, then, by trying to reaUze
the conditions in which the earliest Gospels
took shape. Probably that was not until
many years after the Ascension. During
the life on earth of our Lord some of His
disciples may have noted for themselves
accounts of His words and deeds, and such
notes may have been utilized later when a
" Gospel,'' as we now use that term, was
to be written. That is, however, no more
than a possibility ; we are quite without
evidence about it. What seems certain is

l^he Birth of the Gospels 19

that all the letters of St. Paul are earUer
in date than any of our four Gospels. In
the first years of Christianity there would be
no need for a detailed account in writing
of our Lord's ministry. For one things
vivid memories could be obtained in talk
with those who had been eye-witnesses of
His work. When Christians came together,
one or another would relate what he himself
had seen Jesus do, would pass on the
teaching he himself had heard. And, for
another thing, it seemed superfluous at
that time to put together a written Gospel
in order that it might be handed on to later
generations. The Christians of that age
beheved there would be no later generations.
" This generation shall not pass till all
these things be fulfilled " they misinter-
preted as a promise of the Lord's return
within their lifetime. Even when, about
twenty-two years after the Ascension,
I Thessalonians — in all probability the
earliest of the New Testament books —
was written, that behef coloured deeply
the thought of the Church.

But year followed year, and it became
evident that the end was not to be yet.
The number still surviving of those who

20 How to Understand the Gospels

had been eye-witnesses of Christ's ministry
rapidly diminished. Soon none would be
left. Clearly it was desirable that their
first-hand testimony should be collated and
set down in writing. Otherwise some of
the true tradition might be forgotten, while
unauthentic stories or inaccurate recollec-
tions of what others had told might be
mingled with it. Again, so long as the
return of Jesus Christ, and with it the end
of this world, were supposed to be imminent,
the affairs of this life, its relationships and
problems of conduct, seemed of little
importance. But they became acutely
pressing again when it grew certain that
one Christian generation after another must
still play its part on earth. Hitherto
Christian doctrine, as we see from the
Acts and St. Paul's letters, had almost
limited itself to setting forth the death.
Resurrection, and return of our Lord. Now,
however, came a natural wish to know
more of His teaching. Here were the
problems of earthly hfe ; how had He
viewed them ? What counsel had He
given ? How had He Himself lived and
done before the Crucifixion ? A written
Gospel, a story of His life, and a summary

The Birth of the Gospels 21

of His practical instructions about conduct,
became an obvious need. And accordingly
it was a need which at this stage, St. Luke
tells us, many writers attempted to supply.

IV

By this time, too— roughly about thirty
years after the Ascension — the Christian
Church had not only increased vastly
in numbers but undergone an essential
change in character. There are still people
who imagine vaguely that the Church came
into being, or at least was given definite
shape, in consequence of what was written
in the Gospels. So it may be not quite
superfluous to remind ourselves that this
is to reverse the true order. The Church
had been in existence for a whole generation
before the earhest of our Gospels was
written. It was the Church which brought
the Gospels into existence, not the Gospels
which brought the Church. And recent
changes and developments within the Church
accentuated the need which the Gospels
were written to satisfy.

For Christianity in its first days (and this
fact, too, seems seldom understood by the
general reader) was a form of Judaism.

22 How to Understand the Gospels

The first Christians were Jews by rehgion
as well as by race. They did not renounce
Judaism when they accepted Jesus as the
Messiah. All that they did was to identify
the Messiah, in the promise of whose coming
€very Jew believed, with Him. Those
Jews who thus thought of Jesus of Nazareth
formed a kind of guild within the Jewish
Church. They used baptism as the sign
of admission into this guild. They held
their guild meetings in private houses for
prayer and the eucharist — the solemn
^' breaking of the bread." But as yet they
had no thought of any severance from their
national rehgion. As a matter of course they
had their sons circumcised, they took part
in the Temple services, they upheld strict
obedience to the Law as the chief essential
of righteousness. As yet they could not
imagine that God would have direct rela-
tionship except with His chosen people.
Yet their belief in Jesus as the Christ made
the fraternal spirit among this Jerusalem
guild very strong. It led them to make
an experiment of communal ownership.
Before long that experiment proved a
disastrous failure, but its beginning was
bright enough. The last sentences of Acts

l^he Birth of the Gospels 23

ii. picture the life of the guild : " Day by
day, continuing stedfastly with one accord
in the temple, and breaking bread at home,
they did take their food with gladness and
singleness of heart, praising God, and
having favour with all the people. And
the Lord added to them day by day those
that were being saved."

" Having favour with all the people "
needs qualification. The Sadducees were
hostile, because this new sect made much
of the doctrine of resurrection, a doctrine
which the Sadducees bitterly opposed, as
having no place in the original Law. The
opening of Acts iv. records how " the
Sadducees came upon '* Peter and John,
" being sore troubled because they taught
the people and proclaimed in Jesus the
resurrection from the dead." But the small
and aristocratic sect of the Sudducees was
doubtless not included among " the people "
of St. Luke's sentence. The general body
of Jews did beHeve in a resurrection, and
they had no quarrel with their fellow- Jews
who had joined the Christian guild. So
long as these duly upheld the Law and
the traditions, the addition to their creed
seemed of little importance. To accept

24 How to Understand the Gosfels

Jesus as the promised Messiah was a strange
error, yet, in itself, a harmless error.

This attitude, however, did not long
persist. It was changed abruptly by the
teaching of Stephen, which impUed that
the new faith must supersede the Law, and
that the Law itself had served only as a
step towards fuller revelation. This was
an affront not to the Sadducees only, but
to the Pharisees, and indeed to the whole
creed of Judaism, which accounted the Law
as the final revelation. Stephen was
promptly condemned to death. All who
accepted Jesus as Messiah, since they did
not dissociate themselves from Stephen's
views, were persecuted. In consequence,
they fled from Jerusalem and were scattered
throughout Judea and Samaria. After-
wards they went farther afield. And, as a
result, Christianity made new converts in
new regions.

Yet the old conflict of ideals was not
ended. To understand its severity is to
get the key to the Acts and many of St.
Paul's letters. We shall observe, for in-
stance, with what difficulty St. Peter came
over to the new view that Christianity was
to be a world-religion, and a rehgion inde-

l^he Birth of the Gospels 25

pendent of Judaism. We shall see how
immense was the task of St. Paul in persuad-
ing his converts that Gentiles need not
be circumcised as Jewish proselytes in
order to belong to the Church. Gradually
the view for which he stood prevailed.
Christianity became an independent religion,
not a mere cult within Judaism. The
work begun by the disciples of Stephen
was developed by St. Paul and his com-
panions. From Jerusalem the doctrine was
carried through Palestine, from Palestine
through Asia Minor, from Asia Minor to
Greece and Rome. Its headquarters, from
which missions were sent out, soon became
Antioch in Syria, instead of Jerusalem.
And the new wide appeal of Christianity
was typified by the fact that such a city
as Antioch became, in a sense, its centre.
Here Jewish, Greek, and Oriental elements
mingled. It was a city, to borrow Dr.
A. E. J. Rawlinson's description,^ " in whose
streets and colonnades and bazaars a
bewildering variety of human types —
Greek, Syrian, AnatoUan, Chaldaean, Arabian,
Jew — met and jostled and talked and
gesticulated and bargained and exchanged

^ In his Bampton Lectures, 1926.

26 How to Understand the Gospels

ideas in the vulgar colloquial Greek which,
as a result of the conquests of Alexander
and by the policy of his successors, had
become the common medium of intercourse
in the Levant." This picture helps us to
understand why the colloquial Greek of
that age — ^the koine, as it was called — ^was,
instead of Aramaic, the language in which
our Gospels were written. Aramaic was
still the spoken language of the Palestinian
Jews. But they knew Greek also, and Greek
was understood, as Aramaic was not, by
the mass of people elsewhere. Indeed, it
seemed a providential thing that, at the
time when the Gospels were to be written,
a language familiar to men of a vast number
of races, an almost international language,
should have been available for the writers.

V
In such conditions, then, the first three
of our Gospels were put together for the
Church. Perhaps that phrase should be
recast if it is not to mislead ; they were
made for local branches of the Church.
These were not abstract compositions
thrown, so to speak, into the air ; each was
undertaken to suit the needs of one particular

^he Birth of the Gospels 27

set of people — or, in the instance of the
third Gospel, possibly even for the needs
of one particular person — at a special time.
We must use our imaginations to reahze
the circumstances of that age, when travel
was slow and hazardous, when it was im-
possible to multiply rapidly copies of a
document, when a Gospel must laboriously
be written, letter by letter, on a roll of
papyrus some thirty feet long.

The organization of the Church was as
yet of the simplest kind. Each local branch
was virtually a self-contained unit. In
towns which St. Paul or another missioner
had visited — Antioch, Ephesus, Philippi,
Corinth, Rome, and very many more — a
branch of the Church had been formed.
In course of time a certain number of
migrants from other places would be added
to it. Any Christian who came to live in
the place, or, as a trader, was there tem-
porarily on business, would attach himself
to the local church. Sometimes he would
bring a gift or a message from another
church. He would describe its ways and
its services, and thus there would be an
interchange of ideas. The members would
meet regularly on the first day of the week.

28 How to Understand the Gospels

As there were as yet no Christian Church
buildings, they would gather in any large
house available for the purpose. To watch
the men and women who entered must
have convinced the most casual onlooker
that this new religion had a unifying power
without parallel. Among the Christian
community were people of many races,
who in their earlier days had belonged to
many different reUgions. Jew and Gentile
came together, members of various pro-
fessions and callings, rich and poor, learned
and illiterate, the slave-owner and the slave.
At their meeting on the first day of the
week the eucharist would be celebrated,
followed often by a common meal. Set
prayers would be used, and often extracts
from the Old Testament. Churches which
had received a letter from St. Paul would
cause a portion of it to be read aloud for
practical instruction ; as yet there was no
idea, of course, of ranking the epistles as
" scripture." But they were written in
order that their messages might be made
public at gatherings of the church addressed.
Thus the co-called ** Epistle to the
Ephesians " was really a circular letter
sent to the church in each of the chief towns

^he Birth of the Gospels 29

in Asia ; it got its name later because the
copy of this circular letter that was sent
to Ephesus happened to be the copy that
survived.

And at meetings of the local churches
everywhere there would be a keen eager-
ness, we may be sure, to learn all that
could be told of what Jesus Christ had done
and taught. Those who had received in
past years any trustworthy tradition from
eye-witnesses would declare it. But stronger
and stronger became the feehng that,
both for themselves, and still more for
the sake of those to come after, some
definite book of the Gospel of Jesus Christ,
based upon the best evidence, and collated
with any fragmentary records already in
existence, should be provided for the use
of the local church. Local circumstances
would naturally affect its shape. Thus a
branch of the Church with many Jewish
members would welcome details to illustrate
how the deeds of Jesus corresponded with
those which prophecy had assigned to the
Messiah. But such points would have little
interest for another branch of the Church
elsewhere, whose members were Gentiles.

So the Gospels came to be written.

Chapter II The Sources of the Gospels

Even if he knew nothing of technical
scholarship or Biblical *' criticism/' every
careful reader of the Gospels would be im-
pressed by two facts : one, that the Fourth
Gospel is very different from the first three ;
the other, that the first three are very alike.
Differences, plainly, there are. Each gives
us some incidents not recorded by either
of the other two, and each has its own
characteristics of style and treatment.
That is what we should expect in three
books by three authors. What we should
not expect is to find in three separate
Gospels long passages identical in their
wording, or so nearly identical that the
resemblance cannot be due to chance.
It would have seemed likely enough that
actual sayings of Christ should have been
treasured in the memory of those who heard
them, and passed on with careful precision
to those who came after. It would have
seemed reasonable that main facts of
30

^he Sources of the Gospels 31

crucial importance should have been told
and retold in virtually the same words.
Verbal memory was far stronger in ages
before the invention of printing had rendered
it less essential, and the training of the
verbal memory formed a chief part of
Hebrew education. Inability to under-
stand a saying was no bar to remembering
what had been said. Indeed, as a modern
commentator ^ has observed, it had the
opposite effect. The Apostles and first
teachers were '' sometimes stronger in
memory than in understanding. They
remembered what perplexed them, because
it perplexed them ; and they reported it
faithfully."

That there was in the earliest days a
spoken tradition of what our Lord had
done and said seems certain. By this fact
scholars of a past generation accounted
for the verbal identities in the first three
Gospels. Each Evangehst, they supposed,
had reproduced the spoken tradition in
writing. But further study showed this
explanation to be inadequate. It is not
only in describing the main facts, or in
reporting the words of Christ, that these

1 Dr. Plummer, in his St. Matthew, p. lo.

32 How to Understand the Gospels

identities occur. They extend frequently
to small details in the narrative, which
could hardly have been crystallized into
one precise form of words. These identities,
or close resemblances, when describing
details, are so numerous that we must
beheve the earhest of the three Gospels
to have been utilized by the authors of
the other two, or that all three had some
written sources in common before them as
they worked. A modem analogy, suggested
by Dr. Streeter, may be used to illustrate
the point. We look, let us suppose, at
an account of the same football match in
three different newspapers. The main facts
— i.e. the result, the number of goals,
the names of the men who scored them —
will be the same in all accounts. Yet the
detailed description of the play, if it be
written by three independent reporters,
will be worded quite differently in the three
newspapers. If, on the contrary, we find
the match described in almost identical
language, with only slight omissions and
variations, by each newspaper, we know
that each has obtained its material from
the common source — a report suppUed
by a news-agency — and that the varia-

l^he Sources of the Gospels 33

tions are due to the newspaper sub-
editors.

That is a crude and prosaic illustration,
yet it serves to describe the impression left
with the student who examines carefully
our first three Gospels. In each is some-
thing of the Evangelist's own, each supplies
something found in none of the others.
Sometimes, as in the Gospel of Mark, it
may have been derived from the writer's
personal experience. Sometimes it may
have been obtained from a record, spoken
or written, to which none of the other
Evangelists had access. Apart, however,
from this original element in each Gospel,
there is also in each a large proportion which
has been taken from sources common to
them all. Sometimes the author seems to
have transcribed an earlier document with-
out change ; more often, while following
it in the main, he has abridged it here and
there, or altered its wording or interpolated
an explanation.

What, then, are the relations between
the first three Gospels ? The Fourth clearly
stands apart, both in time and character.
We will postpone the questions which arise
concerning it until we come to the chapters
3

34 How to Understand the Gospels

dealing specially with this Gospel of John.
But the other three are connected, and have
much the same standpoint. A name im-
plying this common point of view has been
given them, and they are termed the
*' synoptic " Gospels. In what degree are
they interdependent ? Which is the earliest ?
From which have the others in part been
copied ? What other common sources of
information can we detect in them ? How
are we to account for the identities and the
differences in their narratives ?

II

Questions of this kind constitute what is
known as the ** synoptic problem." Im-
mense pains have been spent upon it, and
the Hterature on the subject, mostly technical
in character, is voluminous. The general
reader may feel that such researches,
fascinating as they may seem to experts,
do not much interest him, and that he need
not trouble about them in order to under-
stand and profit by the Gospels. Up to a
point, of course, that is quite true. He
cannot fairly be asked to concern himself
with the minute processes of technical

The Sources of the Gospels 35

scholarship. On the other hand, he will
find it well worth while to know something
of the results. Not only have they a
good deal of human interest, but they
supply a real help to reading the Gospels
intelligently.

A good many people, too, are haunted
by a rather vague idea that " modern
criticism " has in some way weakened the
authority of the Gospels and made them
less credible. Nothing can allay that fear
so effectively as to know what the results
of criticism really are. No other writings
in the world have been scrutinized so
minutely. Every sentence, almost every
word, in them has been considered from
every point of view. The tests of literature,
archaeology, and comparative religion have
been applied to them. They have been
approached, from one extreme, by cham-
pions of an impossible theory of Hteral
inspiration, and, from the other, by op-
ponents eager to discredit beliefs they are
already determined to reject. From such
ordeals the Gospels have emerged triumph-
antly. No one can pretend that all the
** critical problems " have been solved, or
indeed are capable of solution. We may

36 How to Understand the Gospels

feel that some of the theories advanced
concerning them are far more convincing
and satisfactory than others, yet theories,
not proven facts, all must remain. Again,
there are seeming discrepancies in the
different Gospels for which, with our limited
knowledge, we cannot account. There are
occasional phrases the precise force of which
is still uncertain. Yet modern research,
and particularly the vastly improved
acquaintance with Greek of the New
Testament period, brought by the dis-
covery and study of papyri, has definitely
cleared up many points which, even half
a century ago, seemed hopelessly obscure.
And the main fact is that all this critical
work, all this added knowledge, all this
minute investigation of the Gospels, have
strengthened, not diminished, their general
trustworthiness as historical documents.
" Modern criticism " has made it more,
not less, reasonable to believe in that Person
and work of Jesus Christ which the Gospels
were written to set forth.

From these general considerations let
us turn back to the " synoptic problem."
As I have said, the general reader cannot
be expected to trouble himself with the

^he Sources of the Gospels 37

details of the immense literature that has
been written about it or with the processes
by which scholars have reached their
conclusions. Yet to know the results
themselves is well worth his while. As he
observes the likenesses and differences in the
first three Gospels, the reader will naturally
want to know how these are explained by
the best authorities. If that information
can be given him in a short and simple
form, certainly it should help him to under-
stand the Gospels.

Ill

The " oral-tradition " theory — the theory
that, before they were written, the Gospel
stories were told in a fixed form of words,
that much of this form was incorporated
afterwards in the written Gospels, and that
their frequent identity of wording is thus
explained — has already been mentioned,
with some of the reasons for which it was
found unconvincing. It was superseded by
what was known as the "two-document"
theory, and this held the field until quite
recently.

Briefly summarized, the " two-document "
theory about the synoptic Gospels was as

38 How to Understand the Gospels

follows. Mark ^ is the earliest of the Gospels.
The authors of Matthew and Luke had
Mark before them when they wrote, and
made extensive use of it. In fact, of the
660 verses in Mark, no fewer than 610, it
is said, have been used by Matthew, or
Luke, or both. But then students observed
that there is also much material in both
Matthew and Luke which is absent from
Mark. In the main, this material is com-
posed of " sayings " of Christ, whereas
Mark is more concerned to record His
deeds than His words. The accounts of
these discourses in Matthew and Luke
are so much ahke that they seem to have
been derived from the same document.
Therefore the critics took it as proved that
such a document, a collection of our Lord's
words, must have existed, though no copy
of it survives. This document they named
" Q." Further, there was, of course, in
both Matthew and Luke some original
matter, some information peculiar to the
one Evangelist. In broad outline, then,

1 For the sake of clearness, throughout I prefix
" St." to the name of an Evangelist when the reference
is to the man, but not when it is to his book. Thus
" St. Luke " means the Evangelist, " Luke " the
Gospel he wrote.

l^he Sources of the Gospels 39

and omitting subsidiary developments, the
theory held that when Matthew and Luke
were to be written, the material that each
Evangelist had was : (a) special information
of his own, and [h) two documents — St.
Mark's Gospel, and *' Q/' Such was the
" two-document *' synoptic theory.

It was accepted, either in this form or
with minor variations, by the great majority
of scholars in England and America until
1924.^ In that year a new theory was
propounded by Dr. B. H. Streeter, of
Oxford. He himself had previously held
the " two-document " theory. But, as
the result of immense study, he had ulti-
mately found himself obliged to replace
it by a " four-document " theory. He
still beheved that Mark and " Q " had
been used by Matthew and Luke. Close
examination of these two later Gospels,
however, had enabled him to identify in
them the use of two other documents. In
Matthew he detected the use of an early
Judaistic account of Christ's teaching,
which he names " M." St. Luke, Dr.

* Under their influence, I adopted the "two-docu-
ment " theory when writing, in 1923, the chapter on
The Synoptic Gospels in How to Enjoy the Bible.

40 How to Understand the Gospels

Streeter believes, rewrote the present
Gospel from an earlier form of it, which
in turn he had amplified from a first sketch.
That first sketch he calls " L." According
to the " four-document " hypothesis, there-
fore, Matthew used Mark, " Q," and " M " ;
Luke used Mark, " Q," and " L." No
such bald statement, however, can give
any just idea of the laborious analysis which
Dr. Streeter has made, of the subtleties
of his reconstructions, or the wealth of
detail by which he seeks to uphold them.
Of permanent value, wholly apart from his
theories, is his emphasis of the truth that
each Gospel was originally local in character,
adapted for the use of a local branch of the
Church.

Dr. Streeter's " four-document " hypo-
thesis has gained a large measure of accept-
ance among English-speaking scholars. In
Germany, since the war, attempts have been
made to analyse the contents of the Gospel
by a new method — or, to speak more pre-
cisely, by a method only employed hitherto
in the study of folk-lore. This method
returns, in some degree, to the " oral-
tradition " theory. It holds that there
were current in the first days of the Church

^he Sources of the Gospels 41

traditions of our Lord's teaching grouped
according to subject and form ; one group
of His apocalyptic sayings, another of His
practical exhortations, and so forth, and
that these groups of sayings, originally
collected for oral teaching, are the main
material of the written Gospels. The
critics of this school seem as yet to be
considerably at variance among themselves,
and their views have not gained many
adherents outside Germany. It is rather
strange, however, that Dr. Street er ignores
them entirely.

The weakness of the formgeschichtliche
method of criticism is the rather impossibly
rigid rules of form which it endeavours
to lay down. That weakness is avoided
by the " multiple-document " theory.^
Both the *' two-document " theory and
the " four-document " hypothesis developed
from it are open to far weightier objections
than Dr. Streeter allows his readers to
suppose. Both are based upon the supposi-
tion that Matthew and Luke used " Q"
and Mark. But the very existence of

^ One of its principal exponents. Professor Tonn, of
Copenhagen, gave an admirable summary of it in
the Church Quarterly, July 1927.

42 How to Understand the Gospels

" Q," we must remember, is purely a
hypothesis. As Dr. Torm remarks, " the
more the critics insist on ' Q ' as a large
independent source, the more surprising
is it that it is altogether lost." And, to
take a far weightier point, while we em-
phasize the apparent quotations from Mark
in Matthew and Luke, what are we to make
of the omissions ? Of a long connected
group of narratives, found in Mark vi. 45-
viii. 26, nothing is found in Luke. Dr.
Streeter's attempt to explain this is that
Luke had a " mutilated copy of Mark "
before him. Other ingenious yet uncon-
vincing attempts have been made to account
for the omission of other shorter passages.
The real difficulty, however, which neither
the " two-document '' critics nor Dr. Streeter
frankly recognize, lies in the fact that there
are a very large number of details, often
vivid and life-like details, given by Mark,
and omitted by both Matthew and Luke.
Had they been left out by one or other of
these Evangelists, writing with Mark before
him, we might have wondered at the reason.
But we have far more cause to be surprised
when, supposing them both to be copying
from Mark, both Matthew and Luke omit

^he Sources of the Gospels 43

the same details. That by mere chance
they should have left out precisely the
same things — Professor Torm gives more
than twenty examples — does, indeed, seem
incredible.

One attempted explanation is that
" Mark " as we have it is not the original
Gospel of Mark, the document which
Matthew and Luke copied, but a later and
enlarged edition. That explanation breaks
down, because the details omitted by
Matthew and Luke are eminently charac-
teristic of Mark, and cannot be later inter-
polations.

IV

From all this tangle of intricate and subtle
conjectures, is there any escape to a simpler
explanation which will meet the facts ?
The answer seems to be that there is, if
we can be bold enough to get clear away
from that ** two-document " theory which
for so long held the field, and also from the
" four-document " theory into which Dr.
Streeter's ingenuity has amplified it. Then,
not without a sense of relief, we can get
rid of " Q," that mysteriously vanished
document. The theories of the critics

44 How to Understand the Gospels

brought it into hypothetical being ; if we
can replace those theories, we can escape
the need of imagining " Q."

As it happens, one of the synoptists
does describe the " sources " from which
his own Gospel was compiled. We have
that account in the first four verses of Luke.
St. Luke states that already " many "
people have set their hands to writing down
the established facts of the Christian record.
He and the others have received traditions
(spoken or written) from those who had been
actual eye-witnesses of our Lord's ministry.
Therefore, having carefully examined and
collated all these earher narratives and
traditions, he has resolved to arrange them
methodically in a Gospel of his own. Here,
accordingly, are St. Luke's materials : (a)
written Gospels, whole or fragmentary ;
(b) through them, and probably apart from
them as well, the evidence of eye-witnesses ;
to which we doubtless must add (c) informa-
tion which St. Luke had collected inde-
pendently for himself.

This account of his materials and his
use of them comes, let us remember, from
St. Luke. It is not a modern theory. We
may well believe that the method of one

l^he Sources of the Gospels 45

of the synoptists was, more or less, the
method of the other two, and that they also
were acquainted with some of the " many "
written narratives mentioned by St. Luke.
Individual versions would vary, each would
have some which the other two had not ;
each would make his own choice of material,
and when the document used happened
to be in Aramaic, two or three Evangehsts
would not use precisely the same Greek
words when translating it. We are no
longer driven to suppose that Matthew and
Luke borrowed directly from Mark — a
theory which, as we have seen, involves
great difficulties. A close similarity, or
identity, in two Gospels means that in this
passage both writers were utiHzing the
same earher document. Again, to quote
Professor Torm, ** we reach the most natural
explanation of the fact that Mark vi. 45-
viii. 26 is not found in Luke by supposing
that this passage, originally constituting
a small independent group of accounts,
dropped into the hands of two of the
Evangelists, but not of Luke." Instead,
rhen, of believing, as do the supporters
both of the " two-document " and " four-
document " hypothesis, that the chief

46 How to Understand the Gospels

sources of Matthew and Luke are Mark
and a conjectured document called " Q,'*
those preferring the " multiple-document "
hypothesis believe that Mark, Matthew, and
Luke alike were based on some of those
*' many " earlier Gospels, or fragments of
Gospels, to which St. Luke refers in his
preface.

Time only can show whether the " mul-
tiple-document " theory (linked, possibly,
with the less extravagant of the " form "
theories now popular among German
scholars) will be accepted as the best
solution of the " synoptic problem." But
it would be disingenuous to conceal from
the reader that at present it is the " four-
document " hypothesis, supported as it is
by the brilliant scholarship of Dr. Streeter,
which secures the adherence of most Enghsh-
speaking scholars.

Though it is only in the barest outlines
that I have tried to sketch the "synoptic
problem" and the chief of its attempted
solutions, some of my readers may feel
that, so far as they are concerned, the whole
business is tedious and unprofitable.

^he Sources of the Gospels 47

" Surely it is unnecessary/' they will say,
*' that we should concern ourselves with the
technical controversies of academic experts.
Surely we need not pay attention to such
matters in order to understand the Gospels,
in order to appreciate rightly their spiritual
teaching or their literary charm. Again,
if we are to believe that the Evangehsts
were inspired, is not all this talk about
' sources ' beside the point ? " One can
understand such remonstrances, and, in a
degree, sympathize with them. Yet I
still dare to hope that, in retrospect, the
reader will admit this rather dull chapter
to have been well worth while. For to
know something of the kind of way in which
the Gospels were put together clears away
at once a whole host of difficulties which
otherwise we should encounter, one by
one, as we read their narratives. Remem-
bering the composite nature of the Gospels,
we shall not be perplexed by what seem
like small errors or inconsistencies. The
real marvel is that they should be so few.
Again, all educated people have heard of
the " synoptic problem," yet often speak
of criticism in almost total ignorance of
its real results. It will be a gain, if, without

48 How to Understand the Gospels

going into linguistic and other details, they
can have some idea of the principal lines
modern criticism has taken and the principal
theories it holds. As to inspiration, we
may ponder again St. Luke's Preface.
It shows that an inspired writer thought
care and research essential in order to secure
accuracy.

But from all such preHminary thoughts
and studies we will turn now to the Gospels
themselves. In the Bible, Matthew stands
first ; possibly because its fiequent refer-
ences to the Prophets seemed to make it
a link between the Old Testament and the
New. There is, however, practical unani-
mity among scholars in beHeving Mark to
be the earHest of our Gospels. With Mark,
accordingly, we will begin. I hope that
the reader will keep an open copy of the
Bible — or, at least, of the New Testament —
beside him * all that my book can try to
do is to help him to read the Gospels for
himself with fuller understanding.

So, in all reverence, we turn to these,
the greatest writings in the world.

/// Mark : The Interpreter of Peter

In the first century the meeting of the
local Church in Rome must have been extra-
ordinarily varied and picturesque. On the
further side of the Tiber there had long been
a Jewish colony. It began when Pompey
brought a batch of prisoners from Jerusalem
in 69 B.C. They showed the characteristics
of their race. Within four or five years
they had become a free community, to
whose growing numbers and great influence
Cicero referred. Jews from Rome were in
Jerusalem on the day of Pentecost. They
may have become converts to Christianity
and have spread the new faith on their
return. Certainly when, about twenty-five
years later, St. Paul wrote his letter to the
Church in Rome, it had been in existence
for a considerable time and had, as his
language shows, a wide repute. He is
careful to express his reluctance even to
4 49

50 How to Understand the Gospels

seem to " build upon another man's
foundation " ; a phrase according well with
the ancient tradition that the real pioneer
of the Church in Rome was St. Peter.
His name, and the Lord's phrase about
basing the Church on that rock, give an
obvious aptness to St. Paul's sentence.
St. Paul's imprisonment in Rome proved
to be, as he said, " for the furtherance of
the Gospel " there, and he brought into
its brotherhood persons so dissimilar as a
fugitive slave and members of the Praetorian
Guard. But there is no ground for doubt-
ing the widespread and well-supported
belief that St. Peter spent his last years
continuously in Rome, and presided over
the Christian church in that city.

How strange a spectacle that society
must have presented when it met each
first day of the week ! Here Roman
citizens of aristocratic famihes mingled
with slaves ; here Gentiles knelt beside
Jews. Nowhere was the unifying power
of this new creed, in which " bond and
free, circumcision and uncircumcision,"
were merged, shown more effectively and
pictorially than in the capital of the
Roman Empire. So they met, and, sacra-

Mark : The Inter freter of Peter 5 1

merit and prayers ended, gathered, with an
eagerness we can well imagine, round
St. Peter. When he spoke, they were listen-
ing to one who had been in close companion-
ship with the Lord, one who could tell
what he himself had heard and seen, to
whom the Master had appeared after the
Resurrection. How anxious their questions,
how close their attention ! And how often
they must have said among themselves :
" Ought not one of us to put down in writing
these marvellous reminiscences ? Then we
could get them into due sequence, and
study them at leisure, and use them when
we are trying to make new converts,
and hand them on to those who shall follow
us."

Many may have made that suggestion.
It was John Mark who carried it out. The
affectionate intimacy between him and the
aged Apostle is shown in the First Epistle
of Peter, where the younger man is described
as " Mark, my son." Papias, who wrote
what he had been told by a contemporary
of St. Mark, and himself is quoted by Euse-
bius, the first Church historian, states that
*' Mark, having become Peter's inter-
preter," set down all that the Apostle

52 How to Understand the Gospels

remembered of what Christ had said or
done. But these memories were not then
in chronological order. They were written
down as spoken, except that it was the
work of the '' interpreter " to write them
in Greek. Mark could not originate them,
*' for he," Papias adds, " neither heard the
Lord nor followed Him ; but later was with
Peter, who suited his teaching to his hearer's
needs, not as describing our Lord's sayings
in strict sequence." Papias — or, rather,
the earUer authority he quotes — goes on to
emphasize the extreme care and accuracy
with which St. Mark wrote down what he
had heard. This, among the earhest of
Christian traditions, is confirmed by other
second-century writers.

One of them, Irenaeus, says it was
after Peter's death that " Mark, the disciple
and interpreter of Peter, handed down to
us in writing the things that Peter preached."
But we need not trouble ourselves, as some
commentators have done, over the supposed
discrepancy between what Papias says was
done in St. Peter's hfetime and what
Irenaeus says was done after his death.
The two sentences describe different stages.
Look again at Papias's account. How true

Mark : The Interpreter of Peter 53

to life it is ! St. Peter did not deliver by
instalments a systematic Gospel. He drew
from his store of memories what his hearers
wanted. " Let us hear again about the
Crucifixion," they would say on one day ;
perhaps on the next : " Let us hear how
you were first called to discipleship." So
St. Peter gave them, not a serial narrative
continued from day to day, but, as an old
man will, detached memories as they came
back to him, or as his hearers' questions
or comments prompted. And close beside
him, noting it all, was John Mark, who
thus gradually compiled a manuscript he
might have headed '* Stray Recollections of
an Apostle." That was the first stage.

The second came after St. Peter's death.
Then John Mark resolved to put together
a Gospel. There were many reasons why
he should wish now to do this. A new
generation was growing up. Few were left
of those who actually had witnessed the
Master's work on earth. Evangelists who
preached Christianity needed an authentic
record of its historic facts. Congregations
which met for worship could hear St. Peter
no more, but what he had spoken could
be arranged in order and read to them. As

54 How to Understand the Gospels

a pretence for the persecution which Nero
had set afoot in Rome, many gross false-
hoods were circulated concerning the
Founder of Christianity. They could be
refuted best by a trustworthy narrative
of His ministry. And there were some
Christians who mistakenly thought they
could emphasize His divinity by den3dng
His full humanity. The Gospel shows
St. Mark's evident anxiety to prove the
real manhood of the divine Master.

n

What were the materials out of which
the Evangelist could make his book ?
First, there was the record he had made
of St. Peter's reminiscences. Then there
were other short documents, which, or other
versions of which, were utihzed later by the
writers of Matthew and Luke. And, by
no means least, he had personal recollections
of his own upon which to draw, for, as
we shall see, there is good reason to think
that he had been in Jerusalem through the
week of our Lord's Passion, and had been
an eye-witness of its events. Yet for this
time also he would have obtained much

Mark : ^he hiterpreter of Peter 55

information from St. Peter, whose spoken
reminiscences of it must have contained
many details which only one of the Twelve
could supply.

The work of comparing, revising, and
arranging all this material cannot have
been light, and to decide what should be
omitted must have needed anxious con-
sideration. The " dates " of the Gospels
cannot be given with precision ; there has
been, and probably always will be, differing
opinions among scholars concerning them.
If, however, St. Mark did not write his
book until after St. Peter's death, as Irenseus
states, in all probabiHty it was not written
before the year 64. For that is the year
when Nero began the persecution of the
Christians in Rome which brought about,
as tradition affirms, St. Peter's martyrdom.
On the other hand, the Gospel seems earlier
than the fall of Jerusalem in the year 70.
Yet a note in chapter xiii, verse 14, looks
as if it were written when the fall of the
city was imminent, though we cannot be
sure that this note was not interpolated by
some copyist. " Somewhere between 64 and
70 A.D. " is perhaps as near as we can go
in trying to fix the " date " of St. Mark,

56 How to Understand the Gospels

and even then we are short of anything
hke certainty.

But discussions about the " date " of a
Gospel are often misleading to the general
reader. Even skilled critics seem apt to
forget how limited a meaning the word can
have. In modem conditions, the year
printed on the title-page of a new book
may be considerably distant from the time
when the contents were first put down on
paper. It does show, however, when the
book was published, and thereby made
available for any readers who chose to
buy it. There was no counterpart to that
stage in the history of the Gospels. They
were not published. They were designed
in the first instance for the use of a small
group of people in one place. St. Luke,
indeed, seems to have written his for a
single reader, Theophilus. Thus the " date "
of a Gospel cannot mean the time when it
came before the world, but only the time
when the writing out of the original, letter
by letter, on a roll of papyrus was finished.
Indefinitely later the document might be
used for reading aloud at meetings of the
local church. Afterwards a day might
come when some traveller who wished to

Mark : The Interpreter of Peter 57

make this Gospel known to his own local
church would employ a scribe to copy it.
That is the only sort of " pubHcation " a
Gospel could have ; that is the kind of
way in which first it became known outside
the place of its origin. If the original roll
of papyrus (a very fragile thing) were muti-
lated before any transcription had been
made, then all the copies of it would be
imperfect.

The last point has a special significance
in the instance of St. Mark's book. Either
he left it unfinished through death, illness,
or imprisonment, or else part of the roll
on which he set down his Gospel was torn
away before any copy of it had been made.
For, as it has come down to us, Mark breaks
off abruptly, with an unfinished sentence,
at the eighth verse of the final chapter.^
The twelve verses in our English Bible that
follow are no true part of St. Mark's work.
As a marginal note in the Revised Version
states, they are not found in the oldest
manuscripts of the Gospel that have

^ Of course, the division into " chapters " and
" verses " was made long afterwards, for the sake of
convenience in reference ; there were no such divisions
in the early MSS.

58 How to Understand the Gosfels

survived.^ They represent one of a number
of endings written by unknown hands in
early days in order to fill the gap and round
off the story left unfinished by St. Mark.
Dr. Streeter suggests that, as this was pre-
eminently the *' Gospel of Peter," stories
of Resurrection appearances to St. Peter
would naturally find a place in it, and
that chapter xxi of the Fourth Gospel,
evidently added as a supplement to
that work, was based upon the "lost"
ending of Mark. But this is, of course,
merely a conjecture. Against the theory
of a damaged MS. two points must be
weighed : (i) the damage must have been
done before any copy had been taken,
and had it been done in St. Peter's
lifetime, he would have written anew the
destroyed portion ; (ii) a papyrus was
rolled with the beginning outwards, so that
the first chapter would be more hkely to
suffer accidental injury than the last. On
the whole, therefore, it seems more probable
that St. Mark, hke many another author,
died with his work unfinished. Anyhow,
what we may take as quite certain is that
the ending given in our Bibles, after verse

1 They are of the fourth or fifth century.

Mark : The Interpreter of Peter 59

8 of chapter xvi, did not form part of the
original Gospel.

Ill

As we take a preliminary glance through
the Gospel itself, we may notice how its
character seems to confirm those traditions
about its sources and aim which we have
been examining.

We observed the behef of the early Church
that St. Mark found his chief source in
the " Memoirs of St. Peter." Now, as we look
through the pages of his book, we see that
he makes the call of Peter to discipleship
almost his starting-point. There is not a
word about the birth or youth of our Lord.
The first verse is probably an editorial note
by a copyist. The next two are a quotation
from Isaiah. Then, in a most meagre
fashion, all the stories of the Baptist's
preaching, of our Lord's baptism, and of
the temptation in the wilderness, are com-
pressed into twelve short verses ! But
after that comes the call of Peter, and the
detailed narrative begins. We are told
about Simon Peter's home, and his mother-
in-law ; the disciples are described as
" Simon and they that were with him."

6o How to Understand the Gospels

(i. 36). The language is often that of an
eye-witness when only the Twelve were
with the Master. How unintentionally,
too, the touching humiUty of the aged
Apostle is revealed ! He suppresses the
high eulogy he received from Christ,
" Blessed art thou, Simon," recorded in
the Matthaean Gospel. But he insists that
the scathing rebuke, " Get thee behind me,
Satan," shall be made known to his hearers
— and St. Mark could be sure of his wish
that it should reappear in the written
Gospel also.

Let us pass to another feature of this
Gospel which must impress us at once when
we turn over its pages. It seems to allot a
quite disproportionate quantity of its space
to the story of our Lord's Passion. St. Mark
has to record the ministry of three years.
Yet he assigns more than a third of his total
space to describing the events of one week.
Of course, we have to remember that his
book is incomplete. We cannot tell to what
length he carried it or proposed to carry it.
But even when we take this into account, the
contrast between the brevity of the earlier
narratives and the detail with which the
story of Holy Week is told seems remarkable.

Mark : Ihe Interpreter of Peter 6i

We can understand it, however, if we accept
the ancient tradition that for this part of his
Gospel the writer was able to draw upon his
personal knowledge. Why does he record
the incident of the " certain young man " —
i.e. a young man whose name he could give
if he chose — that fled naked from the Garden
of Gethsemane ? In itself it seems point-
less. But its introduction is intelUgible
enough if that '' certain young man "
were, as tradition affirms, the Evangelist
himself.

Another feature of the Gospel becomes
evident at a first glance through its pages.
It was intended for non- Jewish readers.
Aramaic terms are interpreted. Jewish
customs and seasons are explained, and only
for Gentiles could such explanations be
necessary. Again, the writer is evidently
far more anxious to record what Jesus
Christ did than what He said. The Sermon
on the Mount is not included, or any such
discourses as are found in the Fourth Gospel.
There are only eight parables, as contrasted
with twenty in Matthew and twenty-five in
Luke . The Romans were far more interested
in deeds than in words. The allegorical,
mystical, and spiritual teaching would appeal

62 Hozv to Understand, the Gospels

enormously to Eastern people, but not to
Western, and so the contents of St. Mark's
Gospel accord with the tradition of its Roman
origin. The best means, St. Mark felt, of
countering the slanders about Christianity
which Nero had circulated was to set down
a simple, truthful, and vivid account of
Christianity's Founder, to show what kind
of life He lived and what His deeds were
during the years of His public ministry. He
would dwell specially on the last week, in
order to show that the charge of treason
against Rome was entirely unfounded, and
that it was altogether the spite of the
religious leaders in Jerusalem which brought
Jesus to the Cross.

St. Mark's style fits his theme. Even in a
translation we can realize that it is simple,
straightforward, and brisk. It has move-
ment and colour. A Greek word variously
rendered " forthwith," '' immediately," and
** straightway " is used more that forty
times. And St. Peter's memory was stored
with many Uttle details, lacking in the other
Gospels, which are faithfully reproduced in
Mark. When, to take one example from
many, the five thousand people are fed,
Mark tells us that they sat down in ranks

Mark : The Interpreter of Peter 63

upon the green grass. In a way the Enghsh
version cannot quite reproduce, that sen-
tence gives us the vivid impression left on an
eye-witness of the scene. *' Green " serves to
fix the season ; only in the spring-time was
the soil of the plain green with growth. And
the word rendered " ranks " means literally a
herb-garden. There, then, is the picture :
the wide expanse clothed in its spring-time
green, and the multitude ranged in orderly
rows upon it, looking Uke vast beds of herbs
planted in hues at equal intervals. It is a
picturesque simile such as no one inventing
the story could have used. It is a vivid
little bit of word-painting from memory,
given by St. Peter to the Evangelist, and by
him imbedded in his Gospel.

IV

Now we can take up this Gospel to read
it through, understanding what kind of book
it is ; a chronicle chiefly of our Lord's hfe and
deeds, with outhnes of His teaching, through
the three years of His ministry ; a book
derived principally from the reminiscences of
St. Peter, but amphfied by extracts from
other documents and, towards the close, by
the writer's own experience ; a book written

64 How to Understand the Gospels

at Rome, and designed for non- Jewish
readers in the western world. To keep those
points in mind will enable us to read Mark
with far more understanding and appreci-
ation than otherwise would be possible.

Chapter Mark : The Galilean

IV Ministry and Passion Week

In a far greater degree than any of the
other Evangehsts, St. Mark arranged his
Gospel according to a definite plan. He
divided it into two main sections, linked by a
brief summary of intervening events, and
prefaced by an introduction. '* I must
begin," we may imagine him to have said,
" with some mention of John's ministry and
our Lord's baptism and temptation. I have
little information about that time, and none
about any work the Master did in Jerusalem
before going north to Galilee. But once the
Galilean ministry is reached, I have plenty
of material in my notes of Simon Peter's
teaching. So, from the first day of his
discipleship, I shall be able to give a fairly
full account of what happened. One digres-
sion I must allow myself, because I want to
insert the story of the Baptist's death.
Otherwise I shall carry forward the narrative
5 65

66 How to Understand the Gospels

without interruption. I am fairly confident
that I have managed to arrange the events
in their right chronological order. That
will enable me to show clearly the different
stages of the work in Galilee, and the causes
which forced our Lord to change His
methods. Another main section of my book
will deal with the week of the Crucifixion.
This I can describe in detail from day to day,
for I have my own recollections of it, as well
as Simon Peter's. But between the two
main sections, between the departure from
Gahlee and the final entry into Jerusalem,
I have to interpose some account of a period
about which my information is scanty. I do
know that during it our Lord preached in
Judaea and Peraea. And I have documents
describing events which seem to belong to
this period. From them I can choose a few
of the most important, without trying to
indicate the precise time or place at which
they occurred. However, this intermediate
part of my Gospel shall be quite short, in
order that I may have ample space for the
story of the Crucifixion week. Then I shall
describe the Resurrection '' — and here we
can imagine St. Mark's design no further.
For, as has been said above, we do not know

Mark : Galilean Ministry 6j

at what length he proposed to tell the story
of the Resurrection. What we do know is
that his account of it, as we now have his
Gospel, is broken off almost at the begin-
ning.

At this point I will ask my reader to turn
to St. Mark's Gospel. (I hope he possesses a
Bible printed in good legible type, and the
pages of which lie open easily !) Let us look
at the different sections in Mark. The
Introduction consists of the first fifteen verses
of chapter i. Then the first main section,
describing the Galilean ministry, extends from
i. i6 to the end of chapter ix. There follows
the short intermediate section, chapter x.
Its first verse describes a period extending
probably through some months. Then we
have very short accounts of about half a
dozen incidents, that happened at various
times and at unnamed places within that
period. With verse 32 the final journey to
Jerusalem begins. So we come to the other
main section of the book — from xi. i to
xvi. 8. Here we have a day-by-day
journal from Palm Sunday to Good Friday,
fiUing no fewer than five chapters, xi-xv.
Finally, St. Mark's account of the Resur-
rection begins with chapter xvi, is cut short

68 How to Understand the Gospels

after eight verses, and verses 9-20 are the
work of another hand.

II

The Introduction gives us one graphic
detail that we do not get from any other
source. When our Lord at the time of the
temptation was in the wilderness, " he was
with the wild beasts," it says. Otherwise
the introductory fifteen verses need not
detain us. The events of which they speak
are put before us far better in the other
Gospels. So we will pass on at once to the
first main section — the story of Christ's
ministry in Galilee. Most people will find
it useful, I think, if at this point they will
reread that section — chapter i. 16 to the end of
chapter ix. I should Hke them to read it,
for the purpose I have in mind, attentively
indeed, yet rapidly, going through the whole
section at one sitting. I would have them
read it, on this occasion, without pause to
meditate on any passage that seems specially
suggestive or to elucidate any that seems
difficult. To these a return can be made
afterwards ; a few such points will be dealt
with in the rest of this chapter. But what
I want now is that the reader, by going

Mark : Galilean Ministry 69

quickly through the whole story in this way,
should allow the cumulative effect of it all to
make its full impression upon him. The
wonderful effect of the whole never reaches
us so long as we read a long and connected
part of a book in small snippets.

Now, if I may assume the reader to have
made this experiment, he will feel afresh, I
think, the terse vigour of St. Mark's style,
and his skill in showing how each stage of
our Lord's work in Gahlee was the natural
outcome of the one before it. First, He
teaches as a rabbi in the synagogues, and
with immense success. His fame spreads,
and increasing crowds throng to hear Him.
His words, and His deeds of healing, create
an amazement that St. Mark pictures most
vividly. " What is this ? A new teaching ! "
(i. 27, R.V.) is the word that runs round the
synagogue at Capemaimi. As yet there is
no hint of opposition, even though He heals
on the Sabbath. On the contrary. He is
welcomed everywhere in the synagogues,
" and he went into their synagogues through-
out all Gahlee, preaching and casting out
devils " (i. 39). That is the first stage.

It does not last long. Soon the local
rehgious leaders grow jealous of His immense

70 How to Understand the Gospels

hold on the people, while His doctrine and
deeds seemed at variance with all their
traditions. Notice how subtly St. Mark
indicates the growth of this opposition.
When first we hear of it, the scribes " reason
in their hearts *' (ii. 6) against Jesus, but do
not venture to speak their thoughts aloud.
Next, while they are still afraid to challenge
Him directly, they make their criticism
through the disciples (ii. i6). Then they
criticize the disciples to Him (ii. i8, 24).
After this they watch Him in the synagogue,
to see if He will heal on the Sabbath, " that
they might accuse Him " (iii. 2). Having
drawn upon themselves His angry rebuke,
they combine with " the Herodians " (iii. 6)
— an ecclesiastical-political alHance — in try-
ing to find means of destroying Him.

But it was not altogether of their own
accord that the scribes in GaUlee turned
against our Lord. A powerful influence
from the south was brought to bear upon
them. Observe how skilfully, and inci-
dentally, as it were, St. Mark indicates this.
He does not tell us at length that reports
about the dangerous new teacher were
carried to Jerusalem, and that the Temple
authorities, greatly perturbed, determined

Mark : Galilean Ministry 71

to send some of their scribes to Galilee in
order to denounce the heretic and neutralize
any influence He had gained. Yet all that is
implicit in his narrative when he tells how
*' the scribes which came down from
Jerusalem said. He hath Beelzebub "
(iii. 22).

What followed ? Two results : first, that
the hostiUty of the rehgious leaders closed
the synagogues to Jesus. Therefore, He has
henceforth to give His teaching in the open
air, and does that mostly on the shore of the
Sea of GaUlee. And He orders *' a Uttle
boat to wait on him ** (iii. 9). Partly that
enabled Him to escape the actual pressure of
the crowd, but it had another advantage
also. For the other result arising from the
poUtical hostility shown by Herod and his
followers was that life in Gahlee became
increasingly dangerous for our Lord. If
there were a menace of arrest. He and the
disciples could escape in the boat to the
other side of the lake, where the jurisdiction
of Herod Antipas did not run.

The synagogue-preaching was the j5rst
stage of the GaHlean ministry, the open-air
preaching the second. But the latter seemed
unsatisfactory if the message were to be

72 How to Understand the Gospels

rightly understood and perpetuated ; a
very small proportion of the " seed," as
Christ said, fell on *' good ground." So the
third stage was reached. Instead of trying
to teach many people a httle, the Master
sets Himself to teach a few thoroughly, in
order that afterwards they may be able to
transmit what they have heard. Increasingly
He withdraws Himself from the multitudes,
and, when He does meet them, speaks to
them in parables the inner meaning of which
is explained to the disciples alone. Towards
the end, when Jesus passes through Gililee,
*' he would not that any man should know
it " (ix. 30). Only when He has finished
the Galilean ministry " multitudes come
together unto him again ; and, as he was
wont, he taught them again " (x. 1).

Now, the way in which St. Mark makes
these stages reveal themselves to the careful
reader, the deft touches by which he indi-
cates them, the feehng he gives that each
follows in inevitable sequence the one before
it, the manner in which he compresses and
subordinates details that do not directly
help forward his narrative — aU this seems a
triumph of Uterary art. There has always
been a tendency to underrate Mark in com-

Mark : Galilean Ministry 73

parison with the other Gospels, because it
seems so succinct and matter-of-fact. In
truth, here is the art which conceals artifice.
Each Gospel has its own special merits ; each
contributes something to us which the others
lack. But neither of the other synoptic
Gospels can rival Mark as a narrative. In
Matthew the materials are grouped accord-
ing to subject rather than set forth in
chronological order. Luke is rich in treasures
that we find in no other Gospel. Its author
excelled as a descriptive writer, and in his
Acts, after the first few chapters, he had
direct information and personal knowledge
which enabled him to write a connected
narrative without difficulty. It was other-
wise with his Gospel. Probably he had far
more documents to work from than were at
St. Mark's disposal. The difficulty of col-
lating them and assigning each of the various
events described by them to its right place
and time must have been great. And St.
Luke had not, hke St. Mark, intimate
memories of St. Peter's discourses to guide
him. Great, too, as were his own gifts, he
had not that genius for setting down facts
in their right order which distinguished St.
Mark. That he did attempt to arrange them

74 How to Understand the Gospels

" in order " his preface bears witness. But he
failed where St. Mark succeeded. When, as
happens often, the chronology of Luke
differs from that of Mark, we may be fairly
sure that the order in Mark is the right
one.

Even where there is no doubt concerning
chronological sequence, the writer of history
knows how hard is the task of handhng the
material in precisely the right way, of
deciding what to omit, of writing so that the
chief points, without undue emphasis, make
themselves clear. He knows also that, in
proportion as he succeeds, what he has done
with such skill will seem to the casual
reader a simple piece of straightforward
narrative, requiring no skill at all. That,
until we trouble to look closely, is the kind
of effect produced on us by Mark. But if
anyone with a Hterary sense, and, in par-
ticular, anyone who has ever tried to write
history, will examine with care the story of
the Galilean ministry as St. Mark wrote it,
will notice the effects he gains, and the means
by which he gains them, he will be deeply
impressed, I am confident, by the tech-
nical skill of this work.

Mark : Galilean Ministry 75

III

Let us look at it a little more closely.
Obviously, even if St. Mark had known what
had happened on each day, he could not
find space to record it all. Sometimes he
must compress weeks or months into a
sentence. Yet, that we may reaUze what
the working-Hfe of Jesus in Galilee was like,
now and again he will spare space to describ-
ing a day in full. He does that at the very
start. That we may begin with a clear idea
of the ministry, he takes its opening day, a
Sabbath at Capernaum, and tells us all that
happened in it. (The narrative begins at
chapter i. 21.) Jesus enters the synagogue
at the accustomed hour of pubhc worship —
usually 9 a.m. After the prayers and the
readings from the Law and the Prophets, the
ruler of the synagogue turns to Jesus, as a
visiting rabbi, and invites Him to speak.
St. Mark does not pause even to summarize
the sermon ; that is ahen to his purpose, it
would be a digression weakening the special
effect he wants to produce. What he does
record is the astonishment it stirs in its
hearers. Suddenly there is a disturbance in
the synagogue. A man stricken with mania

76 How to Understand the Gospels

struggles and screams. Jesus heals him,
and the wonder of the gathering in the
synagogue increases. They go to their
homes, some in Capernaum, some in the
neighboiuring villages, full of excitement, and
spreading everywhere the news of what they
have heard and seen. By this time it is
almost noon. Jesus, with Peter and Andrew,
James and John, depart to their house for
the midday meal. They find the household
in dismay. Peter's mother-in-law has been
stricken suddenly with fever. " Straight-
way " they tell Jesus. He goes to her room,
takes her hand in His, and heals her. She
is not merely brought to convalescence ; so
immediate and complete is the cure that she
rises from the bed in her usual health and
" ministers to them," seeing to the delayed
meal. The afternoon is spent in the enj oined
Sabbath-day quiet. But the Sabbath ends
at 6 p.m. No sooner is it over than '* all the
city was gathered together at the door,"
bringing " all that were sick and them that
were possessed with devils." Into the shrill
excited tumult of that Eastern crowd, amid
the groans of the sick, the cries of the
possessed, Jesus steps forth, and heals, and
teaches.

Mark : Galilean Ministry JJ

After such a morning and evening a
long night's rest must have been needed.
Yet Jesus could not forgo that solitary
open-air communing with His Father which
was the mainstay of His life and work.
So "in the morning, a great while before
day, he rose up and went out, and departed
into a desert place, and there prayed/*
It must have been Simon Peter who heard
Him go, and, long years afterwards, told
of that time in the hearing of St. Mark.
At the outset of his Gospel, then, the
Evangelist gives us this wonderful picture
of a day in the hfe of Jesus — the first day
of His pubhc ministry, which so many
others were like. Having given us one
complete day to illustrate the synagogue-
preaching period, St. Mark later adds a
companion picture of a complete day
in the period of open-air preaching. The
reader will find it in chapter vi. 30-55.
The Twelve, returning from their mission,
find Jesus at work on the sea-shore. There
is a huge crowd, of so many with eager
questions, so many waiting to be healed,
" that they had no leisure so much as to
eat." He plans to go with His disciples
" apart into a desert place '* on the other

78 How to Understand the Gospels

side of the lake. They embark for this
purpose. But there is Uttle wind, and the
crossing is slow — so slow that the people,
seeing what He intends, can hurry round
by land to the other side and get there
first. When the boat touches shore,
instead of the solitude on which He had
counted, Jesus finds the same crowd that
He had left behind ! Instead of showing
annoyance. He " had compassion on them,"
and, having taught through the morning
and had no leisure for food, again " He
began to teach them many things," until
the day is " far spent." Then He uses
His power to feed them. The disciples
are sent back in the boat. Alone at last,
** He departed into the mountain to pray."
The night falls, but it is the time of the
Paschal full moon. Presently He sees the
disciples still on the lake, and " distressed
in rowing, for the wind was contrary."
And so " about the fourth watch of the
night he cometh to them " — that is, about
3 a.m. ! Such is the record of another
day's work.

Notice an example of St. Mark's dexterity
of arrangement. In chapter vi. 7-13 we
hear how our Lord sends forth the Twelve.

Mark : Galilean Ministry 79

Their work is summarized in a couple of
sentences. We hear no more of them until
their return. If, however, that return were
described in the next sentence, the interval
of time would be difficult to realize.
Accordingly, having mentioned the de-
parture of the twelve, St. Mark chooses
this point in which to insert the story of
the Baptist's death. So our thoughts are
taken to another theme, and it is with the
desired feeling of time having passed that
we hear, sixteen verses farther on, of the
Apostles' return, when they told Him " all
things, whatsoever they had done and
whatsoever they had taught."

Enough has been said, I hope, to indicate
the subtle skill in the writing of this Gospel,
which at a first glance seems a wholly
artless chronicle of events. And indeed it
is only when we look closely at its con-
struction that we begin to understand the
book. There are no signposts on the road
such as a modem writer would put up for
our guidance. We do not find verses
21-36 of the first chapter introduced by the
words : " here is an account of one day's
ministry in Capernaum," or, later on, a
sentence pointing out that at this stage

8o How to Understand the Gospels

our Lord changed His methods. We are
left to note these things for ourselves. It
follows, therefore, that rightly to appreciate
Mark, we must read it with alert attention.

IV

One of the most valuable characteristics
of the book is its pellucid candour. St.
Mark is not afraid to attribute human
emotions and Hmitations to our Lord ;
He feels grief, anger, surprise, amazement,
fatigue ; He asks questions for information ;
at times He is unable to accomphsh what
He wills. Such phrases, remarkable in
themselves, become yet more striking when
we find that all of them are either toned
down or omitted entirely in the parallel
passages of the Matthsean Gospel. The
compiler of that Gospel was obviously
afraid that such sayings might be mis-
understood, and be used to impugn our
Lord's divinity. Thus again the question
recorded in Mark ** Why callest thou me
good 7 " is most significantly transmuted
by Matthew into ** Why askest thou me
concerning that which is good ? " (Mk. x.
i8 ; Matt. xix. 17), where we cannot doubt
that Mark gives us the true form. The real

Mark : Galilean Ministry 8i

emphasis in it, of course, falls upon the
adjective, not the pronoun ; not " why
callest thou me good ? " but " why callest
thou me * good ' ? " It is the story of a
man in a hurry, who comes " running "
to Jesus and asks, ** Good teacher, what
am I to do to gain eternal life ? " " First
measure your words," is the answer. " You
call me * good.' You use that word lightly ;
what meaning has it for you ? What is
your standard of goodness — what your
ideal ? The divine one of perfection, for
God only is truly * good,' or the human
conventional standard of your day ? Begin
by adjusting your moral values, by pausing
to think what * goodness ' means." The
writer of Matthew, however, fearing that
the saying might be misinterpreted — as,
indeed, it has been often — ^was afraid to
record it with the candour of St. Mark.

Yet, for all its frank and eager insistence
on our Lord's humanity, Mark insists no
less that, in a unique sense. He is divine. It
emphasizes His supernatural powers. It
gives us the story of the Transfiguration.
And it records the decisive answer of our
Lord Himself : " Again the high priest
asked him, and saith unto him, Art thou
6

82 How to Understand the Gospels

the Christ, the Son of the Blessed ? And
Jesus said, I am." (xiv. 62). It is worth
while to notice that in this, the earliest
of our Gospels, the claim of Jesus to be the
divine Messiah is made quite explicitly ;
implicitly also it is the basis upon which
His unique " authority," both as a teacher
and a healer, is based.

Special emphasis in the story of His

Galilean work is laid upon His authority

over evil spirits, which He banishes from

their victims. " Preaching and casting out

devils " is a phrase in which St. Mark

summarizes His work (i. 39). So, too,

when the Apostles were sent forth " they

cast out many devils " (vi. 13). The

belief that many forms of illness were due

to evil spirits was held by all the people

among whom our Lord lived. That many

of such maladies were in truth due to quite

other causes is indubitable. That there

were no genuine cases of demoniacal

possession — or, indeed, that no such cases

exist to-day — is an assertion to which few

medical men who have worked among

primitive races would care to commit

themselves. But the important point for

us to remember as we read the Gospels

Mark : Galilean Ministry 83

is that our Lord spoke and worked in
accordance with the thought of His day.
Dr. Headlam has put this admirably : ^

*' Our Lord's language is completely in
accordance with the religious and scientific
ideas of His contemporaries. He acts,
recognizing fully what both the onlookers
and those whom He cured would think.
It is obvious that nothing else would have
been possible on His part. Let us ask
those who feel troubled by this what
particular theory our Lord should have
substituted for that current in His time.
Do they think that He ought to have
talked in the scientific and medical language
of the present day ? It is obvious that
to have done so would have conveyed no
meaning to anyone who heard Him, deprived
Him of power and influence, made His
actions vain and ineffectual. The one
condition of being able to exercise his
ministry as a man teaching men was that
He should do it in accordance with the
thought and ideas of the day."

Dr. Headlam writes that with special

1 In his Life and Teaching of Jesus Christ, p. 187.

§4 How to Understand the Gospels

reference to the belief in evil spirits current
in our Lord's age. But it is true of many
other beliefs of that time ; beHefs which
Jesus Christ, having taken our nature upon
Him, adopted or shared. A great number
of the difficulties people feel as they read the
Gospels will vanish if they keep this truth
in mind. To understand the Gospels, we
have continually to remember for whom
they were written, and what were the ideas
and knowledge of those people to whom
the words of Jesus were spoken.

V

From the story of the work in Galilee
Ave must turn to the other main section
of Mark. The last journey to Jerusalem
begins at verse 32 of the intermediate
chapter, x. Its first words are unutterably
impressive. In one sentence they give us
a picture we get in no other Gospel. To
appreciate it, we must remember what had
happened. Despite its wonderful incidental
results, our Lord's mission so far had failed
in regard to its great purpose. He had
meant to work through the national church
of His country. That plan had been begun
with every prospect of success. But after

Mark : Passion Week 85

a while, and with steadily increasing bitter-
ness, the leaders of the Church had set
themselves to oppose Him. Then He had
taken to the method of itinerant preaching
among the people, and then to that of
concentrating His instruction upon the
Twelve. Now, even Galilee, though its
people were His enthusiastic followers,
had become territory where He was in
constant danger of arrest, owing to Herod's
hostility. In fact, it was the popular
devotion to Jesus which alarmed Herod
and his advisers, who lived in fear of a
political revolt and an attempt to make
a king of this new leader. Long before
He had been ostracized from the synagogues.
His gospel of a spiritual kingdom had been
misunderstood even by His friends. There
was no great national religious movement,
such as He had desired, which would lead
up to His acceptance as the Messiah. What
could He do ? He could retire into the
country east of Galilee and continue to
teach and heal there in safety. Yet this
would not forward His supreme aim. Or
He could publicly enter Jerusalem at the
time of the coming Passover in a way that
would assert His claim to be the Christ.

86 How to Understand the Gospels

Jerusalem was the home of His bitterest
enemies. To take this step must mean
His death. But by His death He might
estabHsh His Kingdom, as He had failed
to do by His life.

To face those tremendous issues Jesus
had gone apart to meditate. His disciples,
with other Galileans, are on the road to
Jerusalem for the Passover. Suddenly Jesus
appears and places Himself at their head.
His resolve is fixed. His decision has been
made. There is a new look on His face
which fills those who see Him with wonder
and awe. That is the picture which Mark
brings before us. " And they were in the
way, going up to Jerusalem, and Jesus
was going before them ; and they were
amazed, and they that followed were
afraid." We may well be grateful that
St. Peter's memory of this supreme moment
should have been enshrined for us in the
Gospel of St. Mark.

The five chapters that follow give us the
day-by-day account of Holy Week : Sunday
(xi. i-ii) ; Monday (xi. 12-19) ; Tuesday
(xi. 20-xiii. 37) ; Wednesday (xiv. i-ii) ;
Thursday (xiv. 12-52) and Friday (xiv. 53-
XV. 47). Again I would urge the reader

Mark : Passion Week 87

to go through these five chapters at a sitting,
without Hngering on details, in order to
reaUze their full effect. Then, in a way
impossible if we take but a little at a time,
we become conscious of the dignity, the
restraint, the vivid detail, the quiet yet
overwhelming force of this narrative. If,
in one sense, it is magnificently simple,
in another it is simply magnificent. It
carries conviction. Its numerous little life-
like touches and its candour make us sure
that these chapters are based upon accounts
given by those who saw what here is des-
cribed. Beyond all else, and above all
range of human imagination, stands out
the figure of Jesus Christ as He deals with
all manner of people and questions, as He
ministers to His disciples, as He prays, and
suffers, and dies.

There are, of course, some discrepancies
in the accounts of the different Gospels.
We should have far more reason to doubt
their general trustworthiness if we found
what would seem like a contrived agree-
ment on every minute point. Again,
elaborate attempts have been made to
explain away the fact that in xi. 35-37
our Lord bases an argument on the

88 How to Understand the Gospels

assumption that Psalm no is the work
of David, whereas in all probability it
belongs to a much later age. But as Jesus
used the medical knowledge of His own
time, so He adopted the Biblical scholarship
of that period. His acceptance of them
then does not bind His followers to accept
them to-day. The same thought will help
us when we meet, in another Gospel, His
use of the story of Jonah.

A small point in xiv. 41 is worth
noticing, because it may serve to illustrate
the fresh light thrown on the New Testament
within recent years by the discovery of
papyri. These have revealed the fact that
Greek of the kind used in the writing of
the Gospels was the common language of
the time. Thus, though St. Mark wrote
at Rome, far more of his readers there would
know Greek than Latin. The papyri that
have been unearthed are letters, inscrip-
tions, business documents of many kinds,
and so forth. Very many words occur
in them that were previously thought to
be unknown outside the New Testament,
and thus we often get new ideas as to the
real meaning of such words.

Now let us look at xiv. 41 of Mark.

Mark : Passion Week 89

It contains a sentence spoken by our
Lord as the traitor Judas entered Geth-
semane. In our English Bible we read
"it is enough ; the hour is come ; behold,
the Son of man is betrayed into the hands
of sinners." Now what is the force of the
word — ^it is one word in Greek — ^here trans-
lated "it is enough " ? The numerous
receipts that have been found among the
papyri show that it was the word used on
them, as the equivalent, so to speak, of our
" paid." Literally it means " he has it
in full " ; that is, " he has received his
payment." This suggests a rendering of
the sentence in Mark far more significant
than the rather pointless "it is enough."
Our Lord is speaking of Judas. " He has
accepted the bribe ; the hour is come ;
behold the Son of man is betrayed into the
hands of sinners."

As we read the account of our Lord's
trials and condemnation, we should have
in mind their various stages, not aU of which
are mentioned in Mark. We shall remember
them more easily if we tabulate them, thus :

A. The ecclesiastical trial, on the charge
of blasphemy.

(i) Jesus is taken to the house of Annas.

90 How to Understand the Gospels

(2) He is tried by the Sanhedrin, under

the presidency of Caiaphas, and
declared guilty. But the pro-
ceedings were technically ir-
regular, because the Law decreed
that formal meetings of the
Sanhedrin could only be held
between dawn and sunset.
Therefore —

(3) At dawn the Sanhedrin meets

formally and passes sentence of
death. But it has no power to
execute this. On the other hand,
the Roman governor would not
listen to a charge of blasphemy.
So there follows :

B. The civil trial, on the charges of
sedition and treason :

(i) Before Pilate.

(2) Pilate tries to remit the case to

Herod.

(3) Final trial before Pilate, and sen-

tence of death passed by him.

After the Wednesday night there was no
rest for the divine Sufferer before the
tomb.

Mark : Passion Week 91

VI

We have seen that the last twelve verses
of chapter xvi represent an attempt, of the
second century, to complete the unfinished
or mutilated Gospel. Another and shorter
ending, of about the same date, is found in
some MSS. It runs thus :

*' And all that had been commanded they
reported briefly to the companions of
Peter. And afterwards Jesus Himself
appeared to them, and from the east to
the west sent out by means of them the
holy and incorruptible message of eternal
salvation."

As we close this book, let me make a
final suggestion. The reader has foUowed
the plan, I assume, of going straight through
the two main sections, and then has looked
at them, with the preface, intermediate
chapter, and epilogue, in some detail.
Now, after a few days' interval, so that he
may return to it with an unwearied mind,
let him set aside a quiet hour for reading
through at a sitting the whole of Mark,
from beginning to end. That will help to
fix in his memory the points he has noted.

92 Hozu to Understand the Gospels

But, more than that, it will give him an
impression of the book as a whole. The
Gospel of St. Mark will mean more to him
than ever it did previously. It will glow
with fresh beauty, interest, and significance.
It will become a book that, in a new sense,
he understands ; a book the treasures of
which he can now count as his own.

V Matthew : l^he Gospel of the Messiah

The title of each Gospel, as we find it
in the New Testament to-day, does not
come to us from the original document.
It was prefixed by some copyist and, in
its earliest form, consisted of two Greek
words only : *' according to Matthew " —
or Mark, or Luke, or John. To describe
a letter from St. Paul as " Paul's Epistle
to " this or the other church would have
seemed quite legitimate at that period,
but no one would have spoken of ** Matthew's
Gospel." The idea of the copyist who
wrote " according to Matthew " at the
head of his papyrus was that there could be
one Gospel only, the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
The book he was about to transcribe con-
tained the setting forth of that one Gospel
according to an individual tradition . Before
long, " according to " was understood as
ascribing authorship to the nam€ whicli

93

94 How to Understand the Gospels

followed. At first, however, it did not
imply necessarily that the book in its com-
pleted form was written by the teacher
named, though it did imply that his teaching
was contained in it.

A rough analogy may make the dis-
tinction clearer. Let us suppose that some
modern writer wished to popularize
Macaulay's view of English History, and
that he put together a book for the purpose.
We should expect its main feature to be
long passages transcribed from Macaulay,
supplemented by quotations from other
historians, and perhaps from researches of
the compiler himself. Having completed
his book, obviously he could not label it
on the cover " Macaulay's History of
England." Yet he might very well entitle
it *' English History according to Macaulay."
In the same kind of way, " according to
Matthew " did not strictly mean " here
follows a book written by Matthew,"
but " here follows the Gospel of Jesus Christ
according to Matthew's presentment of it."
The reference is to the originator of the
tradition, not necessarily to its recorder.
Of course they may be the same. No
later hand seems to have edited Mark or

Matthew : The Gospel of the Messiah 95

Luke ; here we have two Gospel traditions
written down in their ultimate form by
the men whose names they bear. The
Fourth Gospel, on the contrary, seems to
be explicitly compiled by an editor from
earlier written memoirs of a disciple.
" This," says the editor in speaking of him,
" is the disciple which beareth witness of
these things and wrote these things, and
we know that his witness is true " (John
xxi. 24).

Thus the book we are now to examine is
the Gospel " according to the Matthaean
tradition," and the two conclusions about
it which almost all modern scholars accept
is, first, that it is not written by St. Matthew,
and, secondly, that it contains much which
St. Matthew wrote.

II

Perhaps these statements need elucida-
tion. Let us consider them in turn. Why
is it most unhkely that the Gospel, as we
possess it, was written by St. Matthew
himself ? Through many centuries, indeed
up to a time comparatively recent, his
authorship of it was accepted without
question. As we shall see, however, the

g6 How to Understand the Gospels

belief arose from a misunderstanding for
which it is easy to account. And we have
ample cause for calling the Gospel Matthsean,
for feeHng confident that it embodies St.
Matthew's tradition, even if we cannot
think that the book as it now stands was
his work. Whoever the author, one fact
about his method is clear. When he
described the events of our Lord's ministry,
as distinguished from reports, of His teach-
ing, this writer did not do so in his own
words. Instead, he borrowed the narrative
that had been given already in Mark.^
Sometimes he reproduced the sentences
exactly as they stood. More often he

1 Here, as on later pages, I speak of Matthew or
Luke " copying Mark," because the brevity of the
phrase is convenient, and also because it is really
applicable, whether (as most critics think) they had
before them the actual Gospel of Mark, or (as I incline
to believe) they copied, not from the Gospel, but
from the earlier " Memoirs of St. Peter " which Mark
wrote down and afterwards reproduced in his Gospel.
These memoirs would be eagerly sought after by the
early Church, and copied often. If they were only
to be found in Mark's Gospel, that Gospel would have
had a great vogue. In point of fact, it met with a
neglect that has puzzled students. But Mark himself
had no great status. His Gospel as such would not
be prized highly if his " Memoirs of Peter " had already
been circulated in a separate form.

Matthew : ^he Gospel of the Messiah 97

treated them with great freedom, altering
and rearranging them, and omitting phrases
he thought injudicious. But that his
narrative sections are copied and not
original is beyond question.

Now, is it likely, is it even conceivable,
that St. Matthew, being one of the Twelve,
wishing to describe the ministry he had
witnessed day by day, would not describe
in his own words what he had seen, but
would be content to reproduce a ready-
made account from another man's book ?

Take another point. Mark, embodying
the memoirs of St. Peter, reproduces many
passages which describe quite frankly the
misunderstandings and the failures of the
Apostles. This splendid candour obviously
dismayed the writer of Matthew. There-
fore, whenever in his copying he came upon
such a sentence, either he toned it down or
omitted it entirely. Thus, in place of
"-they disputed one with another, who was
the greatest " and the rebuke which follows
(Mk. ix. 34), we find " the disciples came
unto Jesus, saying. Who then is greatest in
the kingdom of heaven ? " (Matt, xviii. i).
Instead of " they understood not the saying,
and were afraid to ask him " (Mk. ix. 32),
7

98 How to Understand the Gospels

we have " they were exceeding sorry '*
(Matt. xvii. 23). Among the sentences
appearing in Mark, but deleted from the
corresponding passages in Matthew, are
" their heart was hardened," " they ques-
tioned among themselves what the rising
from the dead should mean," " they wist
not what to answer him," and a good many
others. Thinking them derogatory to the
repute of the Twelve, the writer of Matthew
expunged them from his Gospel.

This practice of his is familiar, of course,
to all commentators, and is duly noticed by
them. But I do not know that any of them
has considered its bearing upon the question
of authorship. Supposing that St. Matthew,
being one of the Twelve, had been willing
to take over for his own work St. Peter's
record of facts, I cannot beUeve that he
would have tampered with it for the sake
of putting himself and his fellow-Apostles
in a more favourable light. But I can
easily believe these alterations and omissions
to have been made by a later disciple, if
it were he who compiled the Matthaean
Gospel. He would do it because he was
jealous for the honour of the Apostles in
the Church, and thought that honour would

Matthew : The Gosfel of the Messiah 99

be diminished by, as it seemed to him, St.
Peter's most injudicious candour. This
seems another reason for thinking that the
Gospel, in its present shape, was not written
by St. Matthew the Apostle.

But if he did not write it, what part had
he in it, and how came his name to be linked
with it ? The answer is supplied by Papias,
that second-century bishop who, as we
have seen already, is quoted by the historian
Eusebius. Papias affirmed that St . Matthew
wrote down in Hebrew the logia, or
Discourses, of our Lord. By " Hebrew "
Papias doubtless meant " Aramaic," which
was the vernacular in which most, if not
all, of the Discourses had been spoken.
Now the Discourses, of which the Sermon
on the Mount is a notable example, form a
very important part of the Matthaean
Gospel. None of the other synoptic Gospels
record them with anything like the same
completeness. So we can easily see how
the beUef would arise that the reference of
Papias was to the Gospel, and that he
definitely named St. Matthew as the Gospel's
writer. That behef would be more readily
encouraged because the theory that it
came from an Apostle would invest the

loo How to Understand the Gospels

book with special authority. " This book
is full of the Discourses ; Papias tells us
that St. Matthew wrote down the Dis-
courses ; therefore he must mean that St.
Matthew wrote this Gospel." That was
the line of reasoning, and, in an uncritical
age, it was speedily accepted.

Yet it was mistaken. It ignored the
fact that Papias and the other early
witnesses quoted by Eusebius carefully
state that St. Matthew wrote in Hebrew.
But Matthew is written in Greek, and always
was so written. Its narrative sections could
not have been written in Greek, translated
into Hebrew or Aramaic, translated back
again into Greek, and still have kept just
the same Greek wording that is found in
Mark. It is possible, of course, that St.
Matthew did write a complete Aramaic
Gospel which has disappeared. But there
is no evidence for that view. It is most
unlikely that such a book written by such
a man would have been allowed to pass
completely out of sight. And Papias and
the others do not afftrm that St. Matthew
made a Gospel. All that he did put down,
according to them, was our Lord's
Discourses.

Matthew : The Gospel of the Messiah loi

That collection of Discourses, then, the
compiler of the Matthaean Gospel took over^
translated into Greek, and made them the
most prominent part of his book. Because
in this way so much of its value was due to
St. Matthew's work, and because it en-
shrined his tradition, there was entire fit-
ness in heading it at a later time with the
words " according to Matthew." Then, as
we have seen already, the compiler utihzed,
with his own characteristic modifications,
the *' Memoirs of St. Peter," either in their
original form, or as reproduced in Mark.
Thirdly, he had some independent sources
of information. Thus his account of our
Lord's Birth seems to have been derived
from St. Joseph. Dr. Streeter conjectures
a document he calls " M," originating from
Jerusalem and coloured by the teaching of
St. James, as another source of Matthew.
But, without concerning himself with such
intricate if interesting hypotheses, the
reader will be on fairly sure ground if he
beheves the Gospel to be derived mainly
from {a) the Discourses, [h) the Petrine
Memoirs, and (c) private sources of
information.

102 How to Understand the Gospels

III

In order to read Matthew intelligently,
we must keep in mind its point of view.
We have noted already its main character-
istic. Unhke Mark, which was intended
for a Gentile public, Matthew was composed
solely to meet the needs of the Jews. Its
purpose was to show them Jesus as their
King and promised Messiah. We can
imagine the questions a Jew would ask
when he was invited to accept Jesus of
Nazareth as the Christ. Was He of the
lineage of David ? Could it be shown that
His needs accorded with those foretold of
the Messiah by the prophets ? Was He a
Conservative or a Liberal in the ecclesiastical
controversies of His day ? Had He upheld
the Law ? He had taught as a Rabbi ;
what was His teaching ? How had He
interpreted the traditions of the elders ?
In particular, what were His views about
the chief duties of religion, such as prayer,
fasting, and almsgiving ? Apocalyptic
writings, penned after the age of prophecy
had closed, encouraged the people to expect
the setting up of a divine Kingdom ; had
Jesus proclaimed that Kingdom ? They

Matthew : The Gosfel of the Messiah 103

had pictured a Day of Judgment, when
God's chosen people would be vindicated
and their enemies consumed. Had Jesus
revived that hope ?

Such were questions a religious Jew would
ask. Such were the questions Matthew was
written to answer. And it was not intended
only to convince doubters, but to strengthen
the faith of Jews who already belonged to
the Christian Church. It linked our Lord's
life and teaching with the Scriptures they
had been taught to venerate. And it com-
bined, in a way that at times seems to us
perplexing, the old belief in the exclusive
privileges of the Jew with the new beUef in
a Church where there was neither circum-
cision nor uncircumcision. Some of the
sayings are so reported as to have a dis-
tinctly Judaistic tinge : " I was not sent but
unto the lost sheep of the house of Israel " ;
*' do not even the Gentiles the same ? " ;
" after all these things do the Gentiles
seek " ; *' go not into any way of the
Gentiles," with other sentences that seem to
imply that Christianity is wholly Jewish.
But in sharp contrast with these we find
such sayings as " Many shall come from the
east and the west, and shall sit down with

104 How to Understand the Gospels

Abraham and Isaac and Jacob in the king-
dom of heaven " ; '* the kingdom of God
shall be taken away from you and shall be
given to a nation bringing forth the fruits
thereof " ; "go ye therefore and make
disciples of all the nations.'* These apparent
divergencies may be present because the
compiler has utiUzed a variety of sources
coloured by difterent views. There can be
no doubt, however, which strain of teaching
was the more consonant with the ultimate
intention of our Lord.

To understand the Matthew Gospel, then,
we must always keep in mind the fact that it
was intended, not for the world in general,
but for Jewish readers. Its most probable
date seems to be immediately before, or
shortly after, the fall of Jerusalem in the
year 70. On the whole, the latter seems the
more likely. But the whole of this period
must have been one of intense strain and
doubt for the Jew. The Holy City was
menaced if not already overthrown. That
Second Coming, which the early Christian
Church had looked for so eagerly and antici-
pated so confidently, was still delayed. Was
the behef in Jesus as the Christ, after all,
an illusion ? The old question of the

Matthew : The Gospel of the Messiah 105

Baptist, " Art Thou He that should come, or
do we look for another ? " recurred with a
new intensity. To meet that question, to
allay those fears, the Gospel of Matthew was
written. Its author's endeavour was to
show that the life of Jesus was in such
precise accord with what had been foretold
of the Messiah that all doubts must be laid
aside.

We may feel that a book thus framed to
meet the special needs of Jews in the first
century cannot be the Gospel best suited to
the needs of Gentile readers in the twentieth.
And we may admit frankly that, if we judge
it from a purely modern standpoint, the book
has some evident flaws. We have noticed
already how its writer's fears about the
possible results of St. Peter's frankness led
him to omit some passages and to transform
others. The latter, at least, of these devices
is hard to justify. Again, he seems to stress
overmuch the predictive element in pro-
phecy, while the way in which occasionally
he adapts a prophetic text in order to equip
an event with its prediction must seem
more ingenious than ingenuous. Perver-
sions of this type seem unjustifiable if we
regard them in the Hght of our own Hterary

io6 How to Understand the Gospels

ethics. But that is just what we have no
right to do. Undoubtedly the compiler of
Matthew altered and edited the documents
he cited in order to make them accord with
his ideas of fitness. Yet he would do that
with a perfectly clear conscience, for he was
but following the accepted practice of his
time.

Indeed, there is a true sense in which the
value of this Gospel is enhanced by the very
characteristics that seem most open to
criticism. Just in proportion as it is essen-
tially Jewish in atmosphere, it does for us
what can be done by neither of the other
synoptic Gospels. Mark is a Gentile book.
Luke is a Gentile book. But our Lord spent
His earthly life as a Jew, in a Jewish setting.
Therefore it is Matthew, an essentially
Jewish Gospel, which helps us best to reaUze
that setting. Far more clearly than any
other it reveals the rehgious background of
our Lord's time, the creed and Hmitations of
those by whom He was surrounded, the
strength of the rabbinic tradition against
which He had to contend, His own work as a
Jewish rehgious teacher, and the professional
jealousy which brought about His death.
Remembering, too, that the book enriching

Matthew : The Gospel of the Messiah 107

our knowledge in these ways is also the book
which alone preserves for us in a complete
form the Sermon on the Mount and the
Lord's Prayer, certainly we shall not be
Hkely to underrate the Gospel of Matthew.

Chapter Matthew : ^he Teacher

VI and His Teaching

Even a glance through the pages of the
first two Gospels will show a striking point
of difference between them. In effect, it
is a difference of method due to a difference
of purpose. We may attempt to state it
concisely by saying that the aim of Mark
is to tell a story, of Matthew to paint a
picture. St. Mark's story, through no fault
of his, is incomplete. There are periods in
the ministry of our Lord concerning which
he has Httle information. Then, in places
of a consecutive narrative, his book be-
comes a record of detached incidents. He
is sure that they are authentic, but his
sources do not enable him to specify the
exact time or place of their occurrence.
When, on the other hand, his material is
adequate, as it is for his descriptions of
the Gdlilean ministry, and the last week in
Jerusalem, he brings the scenes before us
in accurate sequence. He is anxious to
io8

Matthew : Teacher and His Teaching 109

tell us not merely what happened, but when
it happened. In fact, through this period,
he is writing the story of our Lord's Hfe.

The Matthaean editor follows quite
another plan. The outline account of main
facts he is content to borrow from Mark,
reinforcing it by information from inde-
pendent sources. Within this framework
he arranges deeds and words, not according
to their order of time, but their congruity of
subject. It is easy to imagine him at work.
He is, let us say, transcribing a parable.
While he does that, he recalls another, rather
similar in its moral. Down, therefore, it
goes, immediately after the first. The one
may have been spoken in Capernaum, the
other two years later in Jerusalem. That
does not trouble the compiler. Unlike
St. Mark, he is not attempting to write
history. For chronological order he cares
very Httle. What he does care for is to set
out our Lord's teaching in the clearest
possible way. He shifts and transposes
events into whatever sequence he thinks
will best help his readers to grasp the
teaching, and to gain a clear picture of the
Divine Teacher, the Messiah of Israel.

It is very important, therefore, that we

no How to Understand the Gospels

should be prepared to find this system of
grouping if we are to read Matthew intel-
Ugently. If we try to take it as a con-
secutive history, while having in our minds
a fairly clear recollection of the Mark
Gospel, we shall be hopelessly perplexed.
We shall find repeatedly the same event
described in both Gospels, but as happening,
apparently, at quite different times. Elabo-
rate efforts to " reconcile " the chronology
of the two books have proved unconvincing.
And well they might, the truth being that,
except in outhne, Matthew is not chrono-
logical at all.

Apart, too, from this aim of making his
picture vivid by massed details, probably
the compiler had a further reason for
grouping. His book would be used for the
instruction of Christian converts. Such
teaching was given by the catechetical
method, and it seems Hkely that the writer
was himself a catechist. What he had to
provide, then, was, as we should say, a book
suitable for the use of study-circles. But
these were study-circles learning by the oral
method only ; it was impossible to equip each
member of the class with a manuscript copy
of the Gospel. That would be in the hands

Matthew : Teacher and His Teaching 1 1 1

of the teacher alone. He would expound
it, and repeat its most important passages
until his hearers had memorized them.
This they would be able to do with a rapidity
that would astonish us. The training and
development of the memory formed an
essential part of Jewish education, and in
eariy ages, before the invention of printing
made reUance on it needless, verbal memory
was much stronger than it is among
civihzed nations to-day.

Naturally, the writer would frame his
Gospel with a view to the use it was to fulfil.
He would so arrange its principal sections
as to make the learning of them by heart as
easy as possible. That may go far to explain
his fondness for grouping. Consider, for
instance, a number of sayings on kindred
subjects spoken at various times during the
three years' ministry. If they are all
brought together and given consecutively,
they will be memorized far more easily than
if they appear at intervals, with long
stretches of narrative between them.

Another device which Matthew seems to
employ very often as an aid to memory
is that of numbers. He puts together say-
ings or events in groups of three, five, or

112 How to Understand the Gospels

seven. In the Introduction to his Com-
mentary on Matthew Dr. Plummer, who
examined this characteristic closely, gave
no fewer than thirty-eight " triplets " from
the Gospel. That seems too large a number
to be the result of accident. By way of
example, let us take those found in a single
chapter (xxiii) ; in it we have : Scribes,
Pharisees, hypocrites ; feasts, synagogues,
market-places (6) ; teacher, father, master
(8-10) ; Temple and gold, altar and gift,
heaven and throne (16-22) ; tithing of mint,
dill, and cummin contrasted with judgment,
mercy, and faith (23) ; tithing, straining,
cleansing (23-26) ; prophets, wise men,
scribes (34). The argument that the very
numerous " triplets " in Matthew are inten-
tional and a part of its scheme appears
much stronger when we observe that, as
Dr. Plummer pointed out, they are fre-
quently absent from the corresponding
passages in Mark and Luke. Often those
Evangehsts have two or four words where
Matthew has the three. Thus Luke has
" judgment and the love of God " instead
of " judgment, mercy, and faith " ; he has
*' heart, soul, strength, and mind '' where
Matthew has '' heart, soul, and mind."

Matthew : teacher and His Teaching 113

Without insisting too much, however, on
this detail of the scheme, we shall feel that
the compiler of Matthew succeeded in his
general purpose. His artificial rearrange-
ment of his materials, if it lessened the value
of the book as history, gave it both colour
and precision. We should still find it much
easier to learn by heart a chapter of Matthew
than a chapter of Mark. This specially
is true of the Discourses, which fill no less
than three-quarters of the whole Gospel.
Every reader wishing to strengthen his
acquaintance with the most characteristic
and valuable feature of the Matthaean
Gospel should read the five great Dis-
courses, each at a sitting. They are (i) the
Sermon on the Mount (chapters v, vi, and
vii) ; (2) the address on discipleship (x. 5-
end) ; (3) the collection of parables (xiii.
3-53) '> (4) lessons of humihty, renuncia-
tion, and forgiveness (xviii) ; and (5) the
Apocalyptic Discourse (xxiv. 4-xxv. end).
It is characteristic, again, of the compiler's
orderly method that he rounds off each of
these Discourses with the same formula,
" when Jesus had finished '' (vii. 28 ; xi. i ;
xiii. 53 ; xix. i ; xxvi. i). He will have
no such ambiguity as occurs more than.
8

114 tiozu to Understand the Gospels

once in the Fourth Gospel, when it is difficult
to be sure at what point our Lord's words
end and the Evangelist's comment begins.

II

The Discourses, then, probably written
down by St. Matthew, and certainly trans-
lated, edited, and arranged by the compiler
of the Matthaean Gospel, form the largest
and most important part of the book. The
compiler was far more interested in them
than in the narrative of our Lord's Hfe, and
frequently he abbreviated his other material
in order to give the Discourses at length.
More clearly than any of the others, this
Evangelist shows us Jesus Christ the
Teacher.

That was the guise in which He appeared
to His fellow-countrymen during the years
of His pubhc work. At its outset He
" preached " for a short time, reiterating
the message of the Baptist. Occasionally
afterwards, as in the lament over Jerusalem,
His words must have recalled to their
hearers the language of the prophets. But
it was as a ** Rabbi," a religious teacher,
that He was known and addressed, ahke by
friends and enemies. As its equivalent, the

Matthew : Treacher and His Teaching 115

Greek word meaning " teacher " is used
of Him repeatedly in the Gospels ; the
Greek word which means " preacher " is not
once applied to Him. That the ambiguous
word *' Master " should have been adopted
by the English translators in place of
" Teacher " is most unfortunate. Only in
the margin of the Revised Version does
" or, Teacher " appear as an alternative
rendering. This undoubtedly has helped
to conceal from English readers the fact
which the Evangelists in general, and the
editor of Matthew in particular, were
anxious to make clear — the fact that Jesus
Hved and worked as a Teacher during most
of His ministry.

The Jewish readers for whom the
Matthaean Gospel was designed would
recognize this fact at once. It would be
shown by numerous little details, the force
of which is apt to be hidden from us. For
example, there seems httle point to us in
the statement that Jesus sat down, as in
the verse prefacing the Sermon on the
Mount. But it had ample point for a Jew.
He knew that the ritual custom of a Rabbi
was to stand for prayer and reading, and
to sit down for teaching. When a Rabbi

Ii6 How to Understand the Gospels

seated himself in public, it was a sign that
he proposed to give instruction. Again,
while anyone who chose might instruct about
morals. Rabbis alone might expound the
Law and the Tradition, giving directions
about such matters as Sabbath observance.
Not for a moment would the people have
listened to a man presuming to handle
such themes unless they had taken him for
a Rabbi. Thus we can understand the
immense astonishment of those who heard
Jesus. He seemed to be a Rabbi, He spoke
as one '* having authority " to interpret
the Law, " yet not as their Scribes " taught
were the interpretations He gave ! Only
in the last week at Jerusalem, however,
was His " authority " challenged.

So this Gospel helps us to realize an
aspect of our Lord's hfe which, evident
to early readers, has subsequently been
obscured. It shows how, humanly speak-
ing, He " rose from the ranks," beginning
as an artisan, and becoming a recognized
Teacher. That, perhaps, had been His
ambition from early days, and therefore,
because of its significance for His future, just
one episode of His boyhood is recorded.
St. Luke shows how in early boyhood

Matthew : Teacher and His Teaching 117

already He wanted to be with the Rabbis,
how eagerly He hstened to their expositions.
His Mother pondered these things in her
heart, as mothers will, but there can have
seemed httle chance that the boyish wish
would be reaHzed. We can only guess at
the self-denial, the hardly-won hours of
study amid the work of an artisan that
made possible its fulfilment. And how
true to human nature is the story of that
day when He returned to teach as a Rabbi
in the synagogue of Nazareth ! Elsewhere
He was honoured, but here, " Is not this the
workman ? " His fellow-townsmen ex-
claimed, and were offended at Him.
Matthew, in characteristic fashion, changes
" the workman " into " the son of the
workman," and tones down other phrases
in the same story. We cannot doubt that
Mark's is the true version.

** Workman," or, more precisely,
" builder," seems a better rendering of
the Greek word than the " carpenter "
of our Enghsh Bible. The word, tekton,
does not occur elsewhere in the New
Testament, but St. Paul describes himself
as an archi-tekton (whence our " architect "),
which is translated " master-builder." Tek-

Ii8 How to Understand the Gospels

ton was used often, but not exclusively,
of workers in wood.^ In late Greek it was
used of a sculptor. And in Palestine the
same man, when engaged in building, was
often both carpenter and mason." Cer-
tainly we shall find a new aptness in many
of our Lord's sayings and illustrations if
we may suppose that He worked as a builder
before beginning His ministry as a Rabbi.
He knew the importance of a good founda-
tion, the difference between houses on rock
and on sand. He himself would build
His Church upon the rock. He knew the
folly of the man who set out to build a
tower without having obtained a precise
estimate. To Him, as an expert, a disciple
turned for an opinion on the great stones
and buildings of the Temple. Finally,
among the sa3dngs attributed to Jesus in
the Oxyrhynchus papyri is the sentence :
" Raise the stone and there thou shalt find

1 " It is worth while to remember that iekton is
wider than ' carpenter.' " Moulton-MilHgan, Vocab.
of N.T. Greek, p. 82. But cf. pp. 628, 629.

2 Even though tekton be rendered faber tignarius, the
definition of Gaius (Dig. 50, 16, 235), " Fabros tignarios
dicimus non eos duntaxat qui tigna dolarent, sed
omnes qui cedificarent," should be remembered.

An excellent article on the whole subject, by Prof.
F. Granger, appeared in the Expositor, June 1920.

Matthew : Treacher and His Teaching 119

Me ; cleave the wood and there am I.'*
The early date of these papyri, the fact
that most of the sentences they quote are
paralleled in the Gospels, and the very
striking character of this particular utter-
ance, seem to favour the possibihty that
it may be authentic. At first sight, how-
ever, it appears to have a pantheistic mean-
ing, difficult to reconcile with our Lord's
recorded doctrine. But the view of His
early years which we have been considering
may give the saying another and more
literal significance. " Raise the stone and
there thou shalt find Me ; cleave the wood
and there am I " — are these the words of
one Who has been both mason and carpenter,
one Who, in our everyday phrase, has put
Himself into His work ?

HI

It is upon Jesus no longer the artisan
but the teacher that the Matthaean Gospel
fixes our gaze. Teaching as a Rabbi, it
would follow that He employed the rabbi-
nic methods of teaching. If He did so, we
can be the surer that the record of His words
is trustworthy. Once more let us remind
ourselves that the Jews used different words

120 How to Understand the Gospels

for " teaching " and " preaching " because
they denoted quite different things. Preach-
ing impHed a connected discourse of some
length. When Jesus preached (as He did
in the Apocalyptic Discourse of xxiv-xxv),
we cannot expect a verbatim report of all
He said. The memory would not retain it
or the Gospel contain it. Of the long Dis-
courses, what we have must be an impression
taken from the transcription, though doubt-
less the more striking phrases are set down
as they were spoken. It is hkely enough
that St. Matthew, whose profession had
accustomed him to the daily use of the pen,
would commit his recollections to writing at
an early date, and the trained memory of the
Jew could achieve a fidelity of reproduction
of which modem hearers would be incapable.
Even so, however, we cannot have a full
account of the preaching, or one in which
misunderstanding may not occasionally have
coloured a sentence.

It is otherwise with the teaching, and of
this the Matthsean Gospel is mainly com-
posed. What, for instance, we term "the
Sermon on the Mount" was not, as we
employ the word, a sermon at all. It is
made up throughout of teaching, not

Matthew : Treacher and His Teaching 121

preaching. The method of the Jewish
rehgious teachers was to compress into a few
succinct and pointed sentences the expres-
sion of any truth they deemed of special
importance. Then the teacher would repeat
the sentences many times with his dis-
ciples, until they knew them by heart.
There is every reason to suppose that Jesus
utilized this accustomed method of teaching
by repetition. The pointed, gnomic sen-
tences of which the Sermon on the Mount
consists are exactly suited for this purpose.
Again, the use of teaching by parable was
common among the Rabbis ; a lesson so
taught would easily be memorized. Here,
too, our Lord found in vogue a practice
exactly suited to His purpose. Hour by
hour He would sit and teach until they who
listened had His sayings firmly in their
memories.

This makes it reasonable to beheve that
the Gospels preserve for us (with the change
only of Aramaic into Greek) what Jesus
actually said when He taught. Of the
teaching, as distinct from the preaching,
the reports given by the EvangeHsts do not
read hke summaries. We seem to have
complete sentences, each of which leads

122 How to Understand the Gospels

logically to the next. Yet a discourse
which, as we gather from the narrative, took
a considerable time for its delivery, can
often be read by us in a few minutes. The
fact is explained, however, if our Lord
followed the teaching method of His day,
repeating many times the same aphorisms
and parables, causing His pupils to recite
with Him His chief rules of conduct. Thus
taught, they would be able afterwards to
reproduce in writing the very words they
had heard. When we read the teaching in
the Gospels, we feel that we too are listening
to the authentic words of Christ. No
human being could have shaped mere
reminiscences of His doctrine into this
perfect form. If we can bring to our
reading not merely technical scholarship
but an alert literary sense, we must feel that
the Gospel record of the Discourses is
accurate. But we have no longer to
postulate some supernatural feat of memory
in order to account for this accuracy.

We can only guess at the toil which the
Master must have given, in those hardly-
won hours of solitude, to framing His
message. He had to condense its essence
into a few sentences. He had to enshrine

Matthew : teacher and His Teaching 123

profound truths in phrases easily remem-
bered by simple folk. We detract from His
greatness as a Teacher if we suppose Him to
have taught without long forethought. We
" multiply miracles beyond necessity " if we
imagine those matchless parables of His to
be mere improvisations. No ; our Lord knew
the true joy of the Teacher as He held the
attention of the listeners by some carefully-
planned lesson, as they recited with Him
the Beatitudes or His Prayer. He knew
the joy of the creative artist as He thought
out, in all its exquisite detail, the story of
the Prodigal Son.

IV

It is, then, its picture of our Lord as the
Teacher, and the detail in which it records
His teaching, that chiefly give this Gospel its
immense and enduring value. But there is
also much else in it both of historic interest
and practical instruction. In order to under-
stand the book as a whole, however, the
reader must keep in mind its primary
object of convincing Jewish readers that our
Lord was the Messiah, the King for whose
advent they had been taught to look.
That purpose dominates the book from

124 How to Understand the Gospels

beginning to end. The genealogy with
which it opens is intended to show that
Jesus is of the royal Hne, is legally descended
from David. The story of the Magi is
symbolical of homage to a King. Ten
parables, given in this Gospel alone, are all
parables of the divine Kingdom. At the
very end of the Gospel the Risen Lord
declares that " all authority hath been given
unto Me in heaven and on earth. ' ' The book
is pre-eminently the Gospel of the Kingdom.
Naturally enough, few modern readers
trouble themselves to scrutinize the gene-
alogy which prefaces the work. Yet it is
worth looking at, as a curious example of the
manner in which the compiler arranges his
material with a view to its being easily
memorized. The purpose of the genealogy
is to show our Lord's descent from David,
and " David " therefore is the keyword.
As in other early alphabets, each Hebrew
letter denoted a number. There are three
letters in the Hebrew word David, and the
sum of the figures of which they are the
equivalents is fourteen. Accordingly, the
table is artificially divided into three
groups, and the appended note states : " So
all the generations from Abraham unto

Matthew : Teacher and His Teaching 125

David are fourteen generations ; and from
David unto the carrying away to Babylon
fourteen generations ; and from the carrying
away to Babylon unto the Christ fourteen
generations/' In point of fact, one name is
missing from the third group, as it contains
thirteen only. Reference to the Old Testa-
ment shows that there should have been
eighteen names in the second group. In-
deed, errors abound in the list. They would
not seriously perturb its author. He had
achieved his purpose, which was to provide
a table of descent connecting our Lord with
David, and to put it into a form which could
be remembered.

The story of the Birth, as given in
Matthew, seems, as we have noted already,
to be derived from St. Joseph. Indeed, its
information, if authentic, could hardly have
come from any other source. And that it is
authentic will probably be the feeling of most
readers who study it without prepossessions.
There is about it a straightforward sim-
plicity, an apparent desire to set down the
salient facts without a word of unnecessary
comment or detail, that place it in striking
contrast with stories of the miraculous Birth
found in the apocryphal Gospels, abounding

126 How to Understand the Gospels

with fantastic portents. It will be better to
postpone further consideration of the subject
until we are looking at the account of it in
Luke. The fact that we have not one
narrative only of the Virgin Birth but two,
derived from quite independent sources, has
its own evident significance. In order to
understand the Matthew narrative and to
appreciate the action of St. Joseph, we ought
to remember that betrothal was, among the
Jews, a formal and legal act. As Deut.
xxii. 23, 24, shows, unfaithfulness in a
maiden after betrothal was punishable by
the same capital penalty as unfaithfulness in
a wife after marriage.

From the point of view of historical
evidence, the inclusion of an episode in Luke
is far more weighty than its appearance in
Matthew. For St. Luke was a careful
historian who, as he tells us, was at pains to
examine his materials critically and to shape
them into an accurate account. The editor
of Matthew, on the contrary, was not a
historian in this sense. He had fulfilled his
purpose when he had painted his picture
of Jesus as the Messiah, the fulfiller of
prophecy, and had preserved for us those
records of His teaching which St. Matthew

Matthew : Teacher and His Teaching 127

had written in Aramaic. That, the main
part of his book, is invaluable. In addition
to it, and the outhne adapted from the
Mark sources, he gives us occasionally some
piece of a tradition which has nothing like
the same authority. As instances, we may
take two stories which in themselves are
puzzling. Both occur in Matthew only, and
I think we may be reUeved to find them only
in this, the least historical of the Gospels.

One (xvii. 24-27) is of the way the Temple
tax was paid. " Go thou to the sea," Peter
is commanded, *' and cast a hook and take up
the fish that first cometh up ; and when thou
hast opened his mouth, thou shalt find a
shekel ; that take, and give unto them for me
and thee." That command may have been
given as the Matthaean Gospel records it ;
obviously, no final proof is possible. But
many of us must have felt rather disquieted
by this story. It seems just the kind of
miracle that Jesus did not work : a miracle
for His own gain, and a miracle to obtain a
few shilUngs that could have been provided
in a normal way. It reads much more
like the conventional tale of magic than a
Gospel miracle. None of the other Gospels
mention it, not even Mark — a fact the more

128 How to Understand the Gospels

striking when we remember that Mark is
based on the " Memoirs of Peter." Even so
conservative a critic as Dr. Plummer
suggests that the words used by our Lord
may have been misunderstood or modified
in tradition. " ' In the fish that thou
shalt catch thou shalt find what will pay for
me and thee ' might mean that the fish would
sell for as much ; and this would easily take
the form which Matthew records."

The other is a strange portent imme-
diately after the Crucifixion described by
Matthew only. All three Gospels state
that the veil of the Temple was rent.
Matthew adds that there was an earthquake,
" and the tombs were opened, and many
bodies of the saints that had fallen asleep
were raised ; and coming forth out of the
tombs after his Resurrection they entered
into the holy city and appeared unto
many." This very perplexing statement
is not even intelligible as it stands, for it
describes this rising from the tombs as
happening (a) at the time of the Crucifixion,
and (b) after our Lord's Resurrection. We
may feel sure that someone inserted the
words " after his resmrrection " without
noticing the confusion they caused, but

Matthew : teacher and His Teaching 129

anxious that Christ's priority as " the
firstfruits of them that slept " should be
preserved. Apart, however, from that
detail, what can we make of the fact that
St. Peter and St. Mark knew nothing of an
event so stupendous ? For that they should
have known of it, yet left it unrecorded, is
unthinkable. St. Luke, again, either never
met the story or deemed it unhistorical,
and therefore unworthy a place in his
Gospel. Anxious though St. Paul is to
convince the Corinthians that the dead will
be raised, he does not beheve that already
the bodies of " the saints " have come
out of their tombs and have been seen by
many in Jerusalem. In short, there seems
ample ground for concluding that the
editor of Matthew, who did not scrutinize
and examine his material like St. Luke
and had not the first-hand evidence which
came to St. Mark from St. Peter, has here
allowed a legend to find a place in his
narrative. I think that very many readers
will be glad that this view can be taken,
not as an arbitrary escape from a difficulty,
but as a reasoned conclusion with real
evidence to justify it.

But the most mysterious passages in

9

130 How to Understand the Gospels

Matthew are, beyond doubt, the great
Apocalyptic Discourse of our Lord
recorded in chapters xxiv and xxv. Much
of it is found in Mark and Luke also, but
Matthew's is by far the fullest version.
Strikingly enough, there is none of this
apocalyptic in the Fourth Gospel ; here it
is to the coming of the Holy Spirit, not to
the return of Christ, that the disciples are
to look forward. In the synoptic Gospels,
and in Matthew particularly, predictions
of an ultimate day of judgment are mingled
with predictions about the siege and
destruction of Jerusalem. That the words
recorded as spoken by our Lord deal with
both these themes, not one only, seems
incontestable. Some of the sentences refer
in a most expHcit way to the attack on
Jerusalem, but others cannot possibly, as
they stand, be limited to that event. It is
a world-judgment, with the return of Jesus
in glory, that these foretell. That the
Church in its first years expected that final
return and judgment to be almost immediate
is a fact of historical certainty. We find
it quite clearly, for example, in St. Paul's
first letter to the Thessalonian Church.
The beHef cannot have been derived from

Matthew : Teacher and His Teaching 131

the Gospels in their present form, because
I Thessalonians is earher in date than
Mark. On the other hand, the writers of
the Gospels may have been influenced by
the existing behef . That would make them
tend, almost unconsciously, to interpret
general sayings of our Lord in a particular
way, and to give some words a stress and
special apphcation which were not in the
mind of their Speaker.

Apart from mere surmise, however, we
ought to remember when reading the
Apocalyptic Discourse in Matthew how
greatly the religiaus Jews had been
influenced by earher apocalyptic writings.
In mysterious and poetic language they had
made famihar many ideas which recur
in the Gospels. When, for instance, we
examine the Book of Enoch, the latest
parts of which seem to have been written
at least half a century before the birth of
Christ, and compare its picture of a judg-
ment-day with that given in Matthew, we
shall be impressed by the resemblance.
Here is a part of the Matthaean picture
(xxv. 31, etc.) :

" But when the Son of man shall come

132 How to Understand the Gospels

in his glory, and all the angels with him,
then shall he sit on the throne of his glory :
and before him shall be gathered all the
nations : and he shall separate them one
from another, as the shepherd separateth
the sheep from the goats : and he shall
set the sheep on his right hand and the
goats on the left. . . . And these shall
go away into eternal punishment ; but the
righteous into eternal life/'

And here an extract from the Book of
Enoch :

" And the Lord of spirits seated him
on the throne of his glory . . . and there
shall stand up in that day all the kings
and the mighty and the exalted and those
who hold the earth, and they shall see
and recognize how he sits on the throne
of his glory, and righteousness is judged
before him. . . . And one portion shall
look on the other, and they shall be terrified,
and they shall be downcast of countenance,
and pain shall seize them when they see
that Son of man sitting on the throne of
his glory. And he will deliver them to the
angels for punishment, to execute judgment

Matthew : Teacher and His Teaching 133

on them because they have oppressed his
people and his elect. . . . And the righteous
and the elect shall be saved in that day,
and they shall never thenceforward see the
face of sinners and the unrighteous, and
the Lord of spirits will abide over them,
and with that Son of man shall they eat
and lie down and rise up for ever and ever.'*

Did our Lord borrow the poetic imagery
of apocalyptic, with which His hearers
were familiar, for His own teaching ? Or
did the writer assimilate and group the
memories of this discourse so as to bring
them into line with apocalyptic ? That
also, when we remember his treatment
of prophecy, seems possible. Obviously,
all such points must remain uncertain.
What is clear, however, and what it is
important to remember, is the affinity
between earlier apocalyptic writings and
the teaching of our Lord, according to the
Matthaean Gospel, about the Last Judgment.
If we have that in mind, we shall not
repeat the common error of interpreting
the mystic language of Oriental symbolism
as though it were literal prose. The general
teaching is clear enough, but our desire

134 How to Understand the Gospels

for precise knowledge, our tendency to
say that this must mean exactly that, our
attempts to fix " the day and the hour,"
despite explicit warning, must always be
futile. It is not at all points that we shall
ever be able to understand the Gospels,
and we should admit the fact frankly.
Such a book as Matthew, wholly designed
for Jewish readers in the first century,
must contain allusions and modes of
expression to which we have lost the key.
But there is a more profound reason also
for the limitations of our knowledge. Much
already we are allowed to know, and more
will be revealed by future thought and
research. Yet, because He is more than
man, the Jesus of history must ever remain
for us in some degree the Jesus of mystery
too.

Chapter Luke : The Church and

VII the Roman Citizen

I

If we were to be deprived of all but one
Gospel, what would our choice among
them be ? There are many people to
whom, especially when old age steals on,
the Fourth Gospel appeals beyond any
other. Problems of its origin do not
perturb them ; in its compelling influence
they find all the proof they need of its
authenticity. Its tranquil charm and deep
spiritual insight give it a unique place in
their affection. Among younger readers,
probably most would give the first place
to Luke. Of the three synoptic Gospels,
indeed, one may beheve that an almost
unanimous verdict would adjudge Luke
to be the most beautiful. Here it is we
find the beloved Christmas picture of the
herald angels, of the shepherds at the
manger ; it is this which gives us our
135

136 How to Understand the Gospels

Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis. We should
have no parables of the Good Samaritan
and the Prodigal Son, no picture of the
walk on Easter evening to Emmaus, if
we had no Luke. Apart, too, from details,
the book as a whole has a charm of style
not to be found in Mark or Matthew. Mark
is a concise and vivid record of the essential
facts, an historical record to which its
early date and its direct link with St. Peter
lend extreme importance. Matthew is the
characteristic work of a Jewish scribe.
But Luke has an individual note, a
range of sympathy, a joyous appre-
ciation of what is noble, that specially
endear it to us. Perhaps Renan was not
far wrong when he termed St. Luke's
Gospel " the most beautiful book in the
world."

Its author was a physician, an educated
man writing for educated readers. We
have observed that each Gospel was written
at a special time to supply some definite
need. It is not difficult to identify the
circumstances which caused St. Luke to
take his pen in hand. A stage in the
growth of the Christian Church had been
reached when it began to draw recruits

Luke : Church and the Roman Citizen 137

from the aristocracy of the Roman Empire.
Neither the somewhat crude writing of
Mark nor the Judaistic exposition of
Matthew would satisfy readers of this
class. As Dr. Streeter has said,^ " Once
Christianity began to reach members of
the high aristocracy, there would arise a
new and insistent demand for a life of
Christ which would not only jar less on
the literary taste of educated circles, but
would also make it clearer than does Mark
that Christ was, and knew Himself to be,
no mere Jewish Messiah, but a World-
saviour, the founder of a world reHgion.
The Third Gospel is an attempt, and an
extraordinarily successful one, to meet
this demand."

Side by side with this purpose must be
set another. Those members of the upper
classes who thought Christianity a mere
Jewish superstition would not feel bound
to oppose it actively so long as the great
majority of its adherents were drawn from
the proletariat. They would view it with
disdain. But their animosity against it
would become far more violent when some
of their own friends and relations became

1 The Four Gospels, p. 537.

138 How to Understand the Gospels

its converts. Already there was a vague
belief that the Church was a treasonable
society, which held secret meetings in order
to plot against the State. The Founder
of this sect, it was said, had been crucified
by the procurator of Judaea for inciting His
fellow-countrymen to refuse tribute to
Caesar. Nero, for his own purposes, had
encouraged the behef in Rome that the
Christians were a league of criminals.
Plainly, it was most important to refute
slanders of that kind. In a.d. 80, which
seems the most probable date of St. Luke's
Gospel in its complete form, Nero had been
dead for twelve years. The reign of Domi-
tian, with its cult of emperor-worship and
resulting persecution of the Church, was
still ten years ahead. Meanwhile, whatever
the official attitude, the Christian community
seems to have been little molested. What
attacks there were came merely from local
officials. On the other hand, a number of
aristocrats were joining the Church, and a
much larger number were making interested
enquiries about it. What was the true
story of its origin ? How had its Founder
lived and taught ? Was it merely a form
of Judaism ? Was it tinged with treason

Luke : Church and the Ro?na?i Citizen 139

to Rome ? The demand for definite infor-
mation on such points was reasonable
enough, and St. Luke set himself the task
of supplying it.

His first concern was to write accurate
history. He was anxious that Theophilus,
and many another like him, should be
reassured about the historical basis of
Christianity. His work should be one to
which they could turn with the knowledge
that the author had been at great pains in
examining and sifting his materials, and had
satisfied himself as to the trustworthiness
of all that he included in it. His preface
emphasizes the trouble he has taken to
make his book trustworthy. He has far
more sources of information to draw upon
than had St. Mark. He is far more critical
in choosing from this material than was the
editor of Matthew. Something has been
said in chapter ii (p. 38) of the sources at
his disposal. He feels he has utilized them
in a way to justify the claim that he has
set down everything " accurately " and
" in order." The second of these terms is,
in point of fact, less well deserved than the
first. St. Mark had written some fifteen
years earlier, and had the *' Memoirs of St.

140 How to Understand the Gospels

Peter " to guide him on points of chronology.
St. Luke's task in this respect was made the
more difficult by the large number of written
documents and other witnesses he con-
sulted. He could, and did, secure trust-
worthy accounts of what happened, but
to determine the precise point in the
ministry at which each happened was far
more difficult. He tried his best to arrange
them in due sequence, but with only
partial success.

Yet the exact occasion of an event
matters far less than that the account of
the event itself should be trustworthy, and
the minute scrutiny to which both the
Third Gospel and Acts have been sub-
jected within recent years has vindi-
cated St. Luke's accuracy as an historian.
Primarily, then, he wrote his Gospel in
order that educated Roman citizens
should have in their hands a Life of
Christ on the strict veracity of which they
could rely.

With this purpose he combined another.
What he wrote was to serve not only as a
history of the Christian reHgion but a
defence of it. Both the Gospel and Acts
are planned to refute the allegation that

Luke : Church and the Roman Citizen 141

Christianity is a merely Jewish creed, and
that from the first it was condemned by the
officials of Rome. St. Luke does this most
effectively by showing that our Lord
addressed His message to Jew and Gentile
alike, that it was a Jewish crowd which
clamoured for His death, a Roman procura-
tor who affirmed " Ye have brought unto
me this man, as one that perverteth the
people (i.e. incites them against Caesar) :
and behold, I, having examined him before
you, found no fault in this man." More
fully than any other Evangehst he records
Pilate's repeated protestations of our Lord's
innocence.

Then the reader should notice with what
skill St. Luke carries out in his second
volume the same purpose. He shows how
the attacks on St. Paul came not from
Rome, but from the Jews, how one Roman
court after another — of Gallio, of FeUx,
of Festus — found him innocent ; how well-
disposed to him were various Roman
officials, from Sergius Paulus onwards ;
how his transhipment to Rome came not
from any condemnation by a Roman
tribunal, but from his own action : " This
man might have been set at liberty if he had

142 How to Understand the Gospels

not appealed unto Caesar." And at the
end, with this clue to his purpose, we shall
see that the last words of the book are no
tame casual sentence, but a triumphant
climax. " If this Christian teacher had
been regarded as a dangerous traitor by the
authorities at Rome, what would have
happened on his arrival there ? He
would have been allowed to utter no word
of his mischievous doctrine. He would
have been flung into prison. His trial and
execution would have followed swiftly.
Such must have been the sequel if this
theory were true that in the first days
Rome condemned Christianity as treason-
able. But what, in point of fact, did
happen ? He abode two whole years in
his own hired dwelling, and received all
that went in unto him, preaching the
kingdom of God and teaching the things
concerning the Lord Jesus Christ with
all boldness, no man forbidding him.*'
Those are the last words of Acts, and
they are the culmination of the argument
implicit through St. Luke's two volumes.
To keep in mind that purpose of St.
Luke, and to notice the subtle skill
with which he accomplishes it, is a con-

Luke : Church and the Roman Citizen 143

siderable help towards understanding his
writings.

II

Who was the " Theophilus " to whom
both Gospel and Acts were dedicated ?
That is a question we cannot answer with
any confidence. Theophilus may have been
a real name, but also, and perhaps more
probably, it may have been a pseudonym
veiling, for the sake of prudence, the identity
of some Roman aristocrat. Whoever this
'* Theophilus " (meaning literally, " lover
of God ") may have been, we may safely
assume that he belonged to the aristocracy,
the special class of readers for whom the
Third Gospel was designed.

Another point of interest in the dedicatory
preface — the first four verses of the first
chapter — lies in the fact that it is written
in " classical " Greek. Its style is an imita-
tion of those stately opening sentences with
which historians in long previous ages had
begun their chronicles. The remainder of
the book is written in the colloquial Greek
of its own time, though, except when St.
Luke is merely transcribing other documents,
in a better style than the other Gospels.

144 How to Understand the Gospels

But the construction of these prefatory
sentences is formal and archaic. An imper-
fect analogy from modem literature may
be used to illustrate the point. Among
Mr. Kipling's earliest works was a small
collection of stories called In Black and
White. The stories are phrased in modem
colloquial English. They are accompanied
by a dedication, filling two pages, addressed
to *' My Most Deare Father," which opens
thus :

" When I was in your House and we
went abroade together, in the outskirtes
of the Citie, among the Gentoo Wrestlours,
you had poynted me how in all Emprysez
he gooing forth fiang backe alwaies a Word
to hym that had instruct him in his
Crafte. . . ."

— and so forth. The reader perceives at
once that, while the stories are done in the
English of the nineteenth century, this
dedicatory letter is an imitation of the
English of the sixteenth century. That is
comparable to the difference between the
preface and main body of the Third Gospel.
A literary artifice of that kind would have

Luke : Church and the Roman Citizen 145

no point for any but educated readers,
and its use is a further proof that for
educated readers St. Luke designed his
work.

It has been suggested — and 'I think the
evidence for this view is very strong — that
Luke, as we now have it, is, to adopt modern
phraseology, a " revised and enlarged edi-
tion," and that, after his original draft was
finished, St. Luke acquired additional infor-
mation which he wished to include in his
book. Beyond anything else in impor-
tance among the fresh knowledge he had
gained was the story of the Birth and
Infancy. Therefore he now inserted it
immediately after his preface, and it occu-
pies the remainder of chapter i. and the
whole of chapter ii. Originally, if this view
be correct, the Gospel itself, after the pre-
face, began with what is now chapter iii in
our version :

" Now in the fifteenth year of the reign of
Tiberius Caesar, Pontius Pilate being gover-
nor of Judaea, and Herod being tetrarch of
Galilee, and his brother Philip tetrarch of the
region of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and
Lysanias tetrarch of Abilene, in the high-
10

146 Hozv to Understand the Gospels

priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word
of God came unto John ..."

Certainly this, with its full and careful fixing
of the period, does seem the kind of sentence
with which an historian would begin his
narrative, does read as though it had been
designed as, apart from the preface, the first
of his book. Of the Gospel of the Infancy
something more will be said in my next
chapter. Here we are considering only the
main outlines and general character of the
book.

Ill

What are the chief impressions it makes
upon us as we look again through its pages ?
We see at once that it contains a great num-
ber of parables, but we ought to note also
that of the total, which is twenty-three, no
fewer than eighteen are not recorded in any
other Gospel. That helps us to estimate our
debt to St. Luke, and it shows again what
rich sources of information he had, in
addition to those that had been used already
in Mark and Matthew. Even when an inci-
dent recorded by him has been described by

Luke : Church and the Roman Citizen 147

another Evangelist, we shall find that St.
Luke often adds some phrase or detail that
makes the picture more vivid and complete.
As one small instance out of many, we may
take the beginning of the story about the
call of the fishermen-disciples : Mark and
Matthew both mention only that Jesus was
standing by the lake ; Luke (v. i) has : " Now
it came to pass, while the multitude pressed
upon him and heard the word of God, that he
was standing by the lake/' etc. A late
tradition affirmed that St. Luke was a
painter, as well as a physician. We can
neither prove nor disprove this statement,
but at least no one who reads the Third
Gospel and Acts with care can doubt that
St. Luke was a most skilful painter in
words.

Perhaps his work as a doctor in foetid
Oriental cities had helped to give him his
keen sympathy with the poor. That is very
evident in his Gospel. In recording the
Master's words, St. Luke always chooses the
tradition which lays most stress upon the
moral dangers of wealth. Indeed, the
contrasts in this respect between the Gospels
of Matthew and Luke are very striking.
Matthew's ** Give to him that asketh of

148 How to Understand the Gospels

thee " becomes " Give to every one that
asketh " ; the Matthaean beatitude ** Blessed
are the poor in spirit " is " Blessed are ye
poor " in Luke, with the addition " woe unto
you that are rich ! " Matthew gives " sell
that thou hast " as the Master's teaching ;
Luke intensifies the saying into " sell
all that thou hast/' And in Luke alone
we find the parables of the unjust steward,
of the foolish rich man, of Dives and
Lazarus.

Perhaps it was again his medical work,
combined with his freedom, as a Gentile,
from Jewish sex prejudice, which accounted
for another well-marked feature of his Gos-
pel. This is the place given in it to women —
the first sign of the wholly new status in the
world which was to be brought to women by
Christianity. We feel that St. Luke is
pre-eminently the right Evangelist to relate
the story of the Birth from the Mother's point
of view. And he individualizes women, as
no' other Evangelist does. He alone gives
the names of the women who accompanied
and ministered to our Lord. He alone gives
us the domestic episode of Martha and Mary,
that lifelong study of two contrasting
feminine characters. How convincingly, yet

Luke : Church and the Roman Citizen 149

in how few words, it is set before us ! The
raising of the widow's son at Nain is a
miracle recorded only in this Gospel.
And that poignant detail of the Cruci-
fixion story, the picture of the weeping
*' daughters of Jerusalem " who follow
Jesus to Calvary, is one we should have
missed had it not been for this Gospel of
Luke.

Because in earlier years St. Luke was the
close friend and travel-comrade of St. Paul,
many scholars have attempted to identify in
his Gospel the influence of the Pauline
theology. All, or almost all, the parallels
they try to establish seem fanciful. On one
great principle, however, there is evident
accord between St. Paul, the Hebrew of
Hebrews who became the Apostle of the
Gentiles, and St. Luke, the Evangelist eager
to show that Jesus Christ was a light to
lighten the Gentiles as well as the glory of
Israel. The love of the Heavenly Father for
all men, and for each individual sinner who
repents ; the mission of the Son as the
Saviour of all the world — these are the truths
with which St. Luke's heart is full ; this is
the message he wished his Gospel to bring to
its readers. It does that still. We cannot

150 How to Understand the Gospels

turn its pages without being impressed by its
charm, its humanity, its happiness. This is
the kind of book which brings health to the
soul in an age like ours. Its author is still a
physician, and still beloved.

Chapter Luke : Jhe Birth, Life,

VIII and Resurrection

I

Probably it is even more true of Luke
than of Mark or Matthew that here it is a
book we must read by fairly long sections at
a time if we are to appreciate rightly its full
power and charm. To do this is made easier
by the well-marked divisions into which this
Gospel falls. The first, as we have seen
already, is the " Infancy " narrative of chap-
ters i and ii. There is a special reason for
studying them with alert attention. For
nowadays the doctrine of our Lord's Virgin
Birth is the theme of frequent discussion, and
of discussion, especially in the popular press,
that is not always well informed. Yet the
evidence bearing on the question is accessible
enough, and, very plainly, the issue is not
one which interests technical scholars alone.
Every one of us must be deeply concerned to
know whether the statement of the creed
that our Lord was born of a Virgin is, or is
not, one that we can reasonably accept.
151

152 How to Understand the Gospels

Absolute proof, either positive or negative,
must be impossible, and it would be futile to
contend that the historical evidence for the
Virgin Birth is as strong as the evidence for
the Resurrection. Yet we are bound to ask
whether or no we are fairly entitled to retain
the beHef . We are bound to ask, as we finish
the first two chapters of Luke, whether what
we have read is fact or fiction. One or the
other it must be. There is no middle term.
Either our Lord's Birth was of the super-
natural kind which St. Luke describes, or it
was not.

St. Luke's own opinion is clear enough.
As we read these chapters, the impression
they give us is that the writer feels certain
about the truth of his narrative. A historian,
who was also a medical man, would not have
immediately followed a preface guaranteeing
his careful accuracy with the story of the
Virgin Birth unless he had for it what seemed
to him absolutely convincing evidence. We
feel, too, how desperate an attempt to
invalidate the story is that which depicts it
as a pagan myth taken over by Christianity.
We recall the intense dread of, and hostility
to, paganism shown by St. Paul and the
Church of the first century. We remember

Luke : Birth ^ Life, and Resurrection 153

St. Luke's close association with St. Paul.
We think again of his preface. And we must
feel that to be asked to beheve that
immediately after it this educated Christian
historian began his Life of Jesus with an
adaptation of a pagan myth is to be asked to
believe the incredible.

Another point that will strike us as we
read this narrative carefully is that, whatever
the immediate source from which St. Luke
derived it, it must have come originally, if it
be true, from the Mother of our Lord. Some
of its details could have been known to her
only. We shall observe also that while the
Luke story and the Matthew story are from
different sources, the one from Mary's
standpoint, the other from Joseph's, and
while there is a consequent difference in the
events which each selects for narration, there
is yet no real inconsistency between them.
Each tells part of the story of the Birth, but
neither part contradicts the other. Another
point brought home to us by a careful
reading of St. Luke's first two chapters is
that this Gentile writer has obtained most of
them from a Jewish source. They abound
with Jewish turns of speech. The Bene-
dictus, Magnificat, and Nunc Dimittis are

154 H^^ ^^ Understand the Gospels

hymns written according to the rules of
Hebrew poetry. We must not forget,
indeed, that some scholars have attributed
the Hebrew (or Aramaic) turns of speech in
these chapters to the skilled hterary crafts-
manship of St. Luke. Dr. Armitage Robin-
son, for example, has said : ^

" I see no reason for thinking that he
used any pre-existing document at this
point ; he was probably putting the story
into writing for the first time, as the result
of his own enquiries ; and his style is
modelled on the old Hebrew stories, which
he was familiar with through the Greek
translation of the Old Testament."

In fact, as in his preface he imitated
classical Greek, so in his account of the
Nativity he imitated scriptural Hebrew.
But it seems more likely that he was working
upon and re-shaping with his accustomed
skill some Aramaic document. When we
find, for instance, such ritual details of the
Purification as :

" When the days of their purification
^ Some Thoughts on the Incarnation, p. 39.

Luke : Birth, Life, and Resurrection 155

according to the law of Moses were fulfilled,
they brought him up to Jerusalem to
present him to the Lord . . . and to offer
a sacrifice according to that which is said
in the law of the Lord, A pair of turtledoves
or two young pigeons,"

most readers will feel inclined to agree with
Dr. Sanday that this ** is very unlike St.
Luke, the disciple of St. Paul, the great
opponent of everything legal, and very
unhke the date a.d. 75-80, when the
Christian Church had long given up Jewish
usages." ^

We must not pause longer over such
details, interesting though they are. Let
us sum up the impressions which, I suggest,
we shall have derived from a careful reading
of the opening chapters in the Third Gospel.
We shall feel assured that St. Luke gives
us the story of the Virgin Birth not as a

1 Critical Questions, p. 135, I take the quotation
from the late Dr. J. H. Bernard's Studia Sacra, which
cxjntains a paper on the Virgin Birth. Without
undervaluing the work of Dr. Knowling or Bp. Gore's
treatment of the subject in his Dissertations, and
again more recently in the S.P.C.K, Commentary,
I still do not hesitate to commend Dr. Bernard's
paper in his Studia Sacra as by far the most lucid and
convincing statement of the " conservative " view.

156 How to Understand the Gospels

pious speculation, but as an historic fact,
about the truth of which he has satisfied
himself. We shall value the restraint and
simple beauty of the writing. We shall
recognize that much of it, if it be authentic,
can have come from no one but the Mother
of our Lord. We shall be convinced that
St. Luke utilized, in part at least, some
earlier Aramaic document. We shall note
that the story of the Virgin Birth is told
independently and confirmed by the
Matthsean Gospel. And then, if we look
beyond the New Testament period, we shall
find that in the year a.d. no, as a letter
of Ignatius shows, the truth of the Virgin
Birth was regarded as certain, as being on
a parity with the truth of the Crucifixion.

Against such evidence is urged the
absence of any explicit reference to the
doctrine in the remaining two Gospels,
the Acts, and the Epistles. I have said
" explicit " reference, because various
critics have held that in the Fourth Gospel
and the Pauline letters are implicit allusions
to the doctrine, and that even Mark is
so phrased as not to be at variance with
it. But there is no need to rely on such
surmises. We can well understand why

Luke : Birth, Life, a?id Resurrection 157

the Virgin Birth was kept secret during
the early years ; even when it was pubUshed,
some opponents of Christianity tried to
give it a scandalous interpretation. We
have seen how much there is to be said
for the suggestion, supported by Dr. Streeter,
that St. Luke himself was unacquainted
with the story when he prepared the first
draft of his Gospel, and that its present
first two chapters were added by him
subsequently. Thus the story of the Birth
may well have been unknown to St. Peter
and St. Paul. The author of the Fourth
Gospel did know of it, in all probability, for
he used St. Luke's Gospel. But his concern
was to record those things which had come
within the personal experience of St. John,
those things which he had seen and known.
Indeed, the argument of silence cuts both
ways, for would he have kept silence had
he heard the story and known it to be
false ? We recall again the unhesitating
statement of the doctrine among the
Ephesians by Ignatius early in the second
century. As Dr. Bernard remarks : ^

*' The Christianity of Ephesus owed much

1 Studia Sacra, p. 193.

158 How to Understand the Gospels

both to St. Paul and to St. John, and it is
incredible that the Virgin Birth should
have been a received dogma in that city
so early as the year no if it had not
been congruous with the well-remembered
teaching of these great Apostles."

Such is the historic evidence for the
Virgin Birth, obviously incomplete, yet
good so far as it goes and unweakened by
any substantial rebutting evidence. But
the real battle-ground of the modem
controversy lies elsewhere. Probably few
people reject the doctrine because they
are dissatisfied with the historical evidence,
but a good many are dissatisfied with the
evidence because antecedently they have
found themselves unable to accept the
doctrine. If we can credit nothing that is
" supernatural," nothing that transcends
normal human experience, plainly, we cannot
believe in the Virgin Birth. But this
attitude must invalidate behef in the
Resurrection also, and in the sinlessness
of our Lord. In fact, what we believe
about Jesus is the fundamental issue. If
He were merely human, not merely the
first two chapters of Luke but the whole

Luke : Birth ^ Life, and Resurrection 159

scheme of the Christian faith becomes
incredible. If, in a unique sense, He
were divine, then the historic tradition that
His mode of entrance into this world was
unique is not one to which reason need
demur. The point has been admirably
stated by Dr. Headlam : ^

*' To sum up, then, the evidence for the
Virgin Birth is slight in quantity, but it
takes us back to an early stage in Christian
teaching. There is little or no evidence
against it. The evidence would not be
strong enough to justify our belief in it
if it were an isolated event apart from the
rest of the Gospel narrative. But if we
have convinced ourselves of the truth
of the Resurrection, of the Divine character
of our Lord's teaching, of the more than
human character of His Hfe, then the further
account of His Birth harmonizes with that,
and the whole presents itself to us as a
record supernatural — unnatural, if you look
at the world from the naturalistic point
of view, but not unnatural if you look at
the world from the point of view of the
doctrine of the Incarnation, from the

^ Jesus Christ in History and Faith, p. 179.

i6o Hozv to Understand the Gospels

point of view of the whole Christian
scheme.

There is no need to apologize, I hope,
for having dealt with this subject at some
Httle length, for it arises directly out of
the first two chapters in Luke, and the
controversy over it has disquieted many
people anxious to understand the Gospels
rightly. A full consideration of it would
need, of course, far more than these few
pages, but I have tried to set forth the
chief points that must be taken into account.
Just one more may be added as we pass
from the subject. It is that the burden
of proof must lie on those who urge us to
abandon, not on those who retain, a belief
in the Virgin Birth of Christ. If a friend
of mine finds himself unable to accept the
supernatural element in the Gospels, clearly
he is compelled to reject the doctrine of the
Virgin Birth, together with much else.
That is, so to speak, his affair, and it is not
for me to judge him. But that personal
disability of his has no weight as an argu-
ment with other people. " The Virgin
Birth," I am entitled to say to him, '' is
recorded independently as a fact by two

Luke : Birth y Life^ and Resurrection i6i

of the Gospels. From at least the beginning
of the second century, it has been beUeved
by every branch of the Christian Church.
It seems consonant with all that the Bible
teaches of our Lord's nature, of His
Incarnation and Resurrection. You cannot
expect me to discard what has been an
integral part of the Christian creed for
eighteen centuries unless you can adduce
some overwhelming evidence to justify
such a step.'* That request cannot be met.
There is no such evidence at all.

II

" The Gospel of the Infancy " in Luke
is followed by another short section, con-
sisting of chapters iii-iv. 13. Its theme
is the preparation for our Lord's ministry ;
the work of John, the Baptism, and the
Temptation. Mark has only the briefest
mention of these events ; Luke's source
for this information about them seems
to resemble that used in Matthew, yet it
varies in some details. The temptations
are given in a different order, and only
in Luke do we find the Baptist's counsel
to the multitude, the pubUcans, and the
soldiers. Then in chapter iii. there is a
II

1 62 Hozu to Understand the Gospels

genealogy of our Lord, widely different
from that given in Matthew. Apart from
lesser points, Matthew, the Gospel of the
Messiah, traces our Lord's descent from
Abraham ; Luke, the Gospel of the world-
Saviour, traces it from Adam. We may
be surprised to find the genealogy in the
third chapter of Luke ; the more natural
place for it would seem to be at the
beginning of the Gospel, as we find it
in Matthew. But its position rather
strengthens the view that our chapter iii.
in Luke was originally chapter i, and that
the present chapters i. and ii. were a later
addition.

Then follows, as in the two other synoptic
Gospels, an account of the ministry in
Gahlee, iv. 14-ix. 50. All three virtually
imply an earlier ministry in Judaea, but only
the Fourth Gospel gives any account of it.

The Galilean ministry, as we saw in
an earHer chapter, forms one of St. Mark's
two main themes, filling almost nine
chapters in his Gospel. St. Luke abridges
considerably the sources used in Mark
and Matthew, and rewrites their material
in a more literary form. Yet often two
of them, and occasionally all three, have

Luke : Birth, Life, and Resurrection 163

a passage in virtually the same words. As
an example, the reader may look at the
accounts of the healing of a paralytic in
Capernaum : Mark ii. 1-12 ; Matthew ix.
1-8 ; and Luke v. 17-26. In each Gospel
is " But that ye may know that the Son
of man hath power on earth to forgive
sins (he saith to the sick of the palsy),
I say unto thee. Arise," etc. Thus, in
each of the three Gospels, precisely the same
parenthetic explanation is inserted in the
middle of the saying of Jesus. This seems
convincing proof either that Matthew and
Luke are copied from Mark, or that all
three are copied from some one earUer
document.

Certainly the common assumption that
St. Luke as he wrote had before him the
Mark Gospel in its present form does not
become easier to credit as we look closely
at the two books. If he had the Second
Gospel to consult, why does he omit so many
details of a kind that would interest his
readers ? The story of the Syro-Phoenician
woman is one that would appeal specially
to the Gentiles for whom St. Luke was
writing, but, though it is reproduced in
Matthew, it is absent from Luke, together

164 How to Understand the Gospels

with everything else between Mark vi. 45
and viii, 26. The attempts to explain this
great omission are unsatisfying. When St.
Luke begins again to narrate incidents
found in Mark also, it is at a point when
St. Peter figures prominently in the narra-
tive. This supports another possibihty.
Was his " source " not our Gospel of Mark,
but earlier '* Memoirs of Peter " which
Mark had written before incorporating them
in a Gospel ? That is no more than a
conjecture ; yet the supposed direct use
of the Mark Gospel by St. Luke is also
only an hypothesis. I doubt if we can go
with confidence beyond the cautious state-
ment of Dr. Plummer ^ that Luke has
*' two main sources, (i) the narrative of
events, which he shares with Matthew and
Mark, and (2) the collection of discourses,
which he shares with Matthew."

I hope the reader will not think such
points dry and technical, of a kind to
interest expert students only. If we want
really to understand the Gospels, we shall
find it a great help not merely to read with
care each of them in turn, but to compare

^ International Critical Commentaries : St. Luka,
p. xxiv.

Luke : Birth, Life, and Resurrection 165

each with the others. At a first glance,
there might seem Httle to delay us in the
section of Luke we are now considering,
because by far the greater part of what it
tells us about the Galilean ministry has
been told already in Mark or Matthew or
both. Yet, in a way, it is just such a section
as this which reveals most of St. Luke's
individuahty. If we take the trouble to
scrutinize his version with care, to notice
the changes he makes from other versions,
what details he omits and what he adds
from his private information, what are the
events and sayings he seems to regard as
the most important, we come to appreciate
far better than before his point of view
and his special gifts as a writer.

In this section, too, we shall find (chapter
vi. 17-end) the sermon " on a level place,''
which is at once so like and so unlike the
Matthaean *' sermon on the mount." Is it
another version of the same discourse, or
is it a quite different one ? That is hard
to decide. On the one hand, we may be
sure that our Lord often repeated the same
teaching to different audiences. On the
other hand, the Matthaean " sermon " does
seem to be lengthened by many sayings

1 66 How to Understand the Gos-pels

spoken at various times, which the editor
of Matthew, following his frequent plan,
has " grouped." We shall notice that a
large proportion of the sayings given con-
secutively in chapters v, vi, and vii of
Matthew are scattered about at intervals
over six chapters of Luke.

It is very interesting to compare the two
versions of the Lord's Prayer given us by
Matthew and Luke. Either St. Luke or
the source he copied has abridged the form
given in Matthew, and also altered some of
the words. There are 57 Greek words in
the Lord's Prayer as Matthew gives it ;
of these 57 Luke uses 25, omits 22, and
replaces the remaining 10 by other words.
Are the two versions copied from different
documents ? We might assume this but
for one fact. In both the Luke and Matthew
versions of the Lord's Prayer there is a
word — the word translated " daily " in our
EngHsh form — which occurs nowhere else.
It is not found in the New Testament, or
in ancient Greek hterature, or in the papyri.
It seems to have been coined for this single
use, in order to represent some Aramaic
term. As it appears in this one place
only, the only clue we have to its mean-

Luke : Birth, Life, and Resurrection 167

ing is its derivation, and this is uncertain.
It is an adjective attached to " bread,"
and its most probable significance seems
to be bread " for the time about to come "
— i.e. " to-morrow." If so, the clause is
not only, or indeed chiefly, a petition for
our bodily needs, but for freedom from
mental worry, from being " anxious for the
morrow." That we may be spared that
anxiety, we ask, not riches, but that we
may have in store enough bread for to-
morrow's need. Literally translated, the
complete Prayer may be rendered :

Our Father in heaven !
As in heaven, so on earth

Thy Name be reverenced.

Thy Kingdom come.

Thy Will be done.

Our bread for to-morrow give us to-day.
And forgive us our debts, for we forgive our debtors.
And bring us not into temptation, but deliver us from
the evil one.

There is good reason for believing that
the longer version of the Prayer, preserved
by Matthew, is correct, but that the account
in Luke of the occasion when it was given —
in answer to a disciple's request — is accurate.

1 68 How to Understand the Gospels

Of course it is possible, and indeed probable,
that this was only one of many times that
our Lord repeated the Prayer in the course
of His travels and teaching.

Ill

Following the story of the work in
GaHlee comes a section of the Gospel we
should read with special care, both because
of its extreme beauty and because nearly
all its contents are found in Luke alone.
It extends from chapter ix. 51 to chapter
xix. 28. It enables us to reaHze that the
Master's final journey from Galilee to
Jerusalem must have extended over a
month or two — a fact not disclosed by Mark
or Matthew. Some critics have discerned
in this section signs of a feminine point of
view, of a sympathy with the Samaritans,
and of an acquaintance with Herod's court.
These features have led them to suggest
that St. Luke was indebted for his informa-
tion to one of the faithful women who
accompanied our Lord. And of these the
most probable seems Joanna, the wife of
one of Herod's ofiicials. Yet, interesting
as it may be, a conjecture of that kind is

Luke : Birth, Life, and Resurrection 169

not very important. Whatever the source
of St. Luke's information, the use made of
it is altogether his own. No part of his
writings shows his skill more convincingly.
It is worth while to read through these
chapters as if we were doing so for the
first time. However well we know them,
I think we shall be impressed more than
ever by St. Luke's quick sympathy, his
deft portraiture, his unerring eye for the
essential points of a story. Everyone
remembers, for instance, the domestic
vignette of Martha and Mary at Bethany.
The contrast between the sisters is quoted
continually, has become one of the most
famihar things in literature. But how
many people realize that the whole of the
story, from start to finish, fills no more than
five verses in our English Bible, that St.
Luke manages in his Greek to tell it all in
precisely ninety-seven words ? Into ten
verses, again, he is able to condense the
vivid story and character-sketch of Zac-
chaeus. These are amazing feats, as every
man of letters will agree.

No less wonderful is the skill with which
the *' atmosphere " is managed in that
section of the Gospel we are now consider-

I JO How to Understand the Gospels

ing. There is sunshine as well as shadow
in these chapters ; rejoicing crowds, and
happy, intimate friendships, and little
children brought for the Teacher's blessing.
Yet always in the background is the impend-
ing tragedy of the Passion, and we are made
to feel its awful and inexorable approach.
All this part of the Gospel may be termed
rightly a triumph of literary craftsmanship.
But we need accept no mechanical theory
of inspiration if we add that the man who
wrote these chapters was taught by the
Spirit of God !

The next section of the Gospel, describing
the last days of teaching in Jerusalem,
extends from chapter xix. 29 to the end of
chapter xxi. Then we have St. Luke's
account of the Passion in chapters xxii and
xxiii, and of the Resurrection and Ascension
in the final chapter, xxiv. These five and
a half chapters best produce their full
cumulative effect if we read them at one
time. Accordingly, the reader who follows
the scheme suggested here will study the
whole of Luke in four instalments : (i) the
Preface and Gospel of the Infancy (i. 11) ;

(2) the Galilean ministry (iii.-ix. 50) ;

(3) the ministry on the way to Jerusalem

Luke : Birth, Life, and Resurrection 171

(ix. 51-xix. 28) ; and (4) the last days.
Passion, and Resurrection (xix. 29-xxiv).

In the account of the last week in
Jerusalem we may notice that Luke, like
Matthew, shows no knowledge of Mark's
careful chronology, which tells us what
events happened on each day of Holy
Week/ Luke gives us no notes of time, but
changes the order of events very consider-
ably. And it is clear that this EvangeUst
had some independent sources of infor-
mation for his story of the Passion. Were
it not for St. Luke, for instance, we should
be without the story of the penitent thief.
The other writers tell us only that the men
who were crucified with our Lord reproached
Him. But St. Luke relates how the one
rebuked the other, and prayed " Jesus,
remember me when thou comest in thy
kingdom." As St. Augustine observed,
some saw Jesus raise the dead, yet did not
beheve ; the robber sees Him dying, yet
beheves. And the reply, emphasized by its
" Verily I say unto thee," seems to many

1 Professor Torin's comment is : " This circumstance
is by itself sufficient to raise serious doubt whether
Matthew and Luke have had our present Mark before
them." — Church Quarterly Review, July 1927.

172 How to Understand the Gospels

of us one of the most precious sentences in
the New Testament. " To-day shalt thou
be with me in Paradise " is an exphcit
pledge that consciousness and personahty
persist through death. Not " thy spirit "
merely, but " thou/* the man himself,
" shalt be with me." Few of us would
willingly be bereft of that saying, and it
is due to St. Luke alone that its comfort
is ours.

IV

He has independent sources of in-
formation, again, for his narrative of the
Resurrection appearances. Indeed, the
apparent divergences of the Gospels at this
point are striking. They have been, and are
still, the theme of intricate discussion.
Attempts to harmonize the different ver-
sions are often ingenious and sometimes
plausible, but this is the most that can
be said for them. The points they try
to establish do not really admit either
of proof or disproof, simply because the
records are fragmentary, and we have not
sufficient knowledge of the facts to justify
a decided conclusion. On the other hand, it
is fair to remark that discrepancies in detail

Luke : Birth, Life, and Resurrectio?i 173

do not invalidate the testimony of all the
accounts to the one fact of overwhelming
importance — that of the Resurrection itself.
We can feel that the differences in the Gos-
pels arise mainly from their incompleteness,
while no discrepancies would have been
allowed to appear if the story had been
fabricated. Those are points we are fairly
entitled to make. But we must not pretend
that there are not two distinct traditions in
the Gospels about the Resurrection appear-
ances of our Lord.

It is the " Jerusalem tradition " that we
find in Luke. If this Gospel (with Acts) were
our only source of information, we should
suppose that the risen Master showed Him-
self in or near Jerusalem and nowhere else.
Also we should gather that His disciples
were told not to leave Jerusalem, and
remained there accordingly between Easter
and Pentecost. When, however, we turn
back to Mark and Matthew, we get a quite
different impression. We learn that before
His Passion our Lord said : ** After I am
raised up, I will go before you into GaHlee "
(Mk. xiv. 28 ; Matt. xxvi. 32), a saying
omitted in Luke. Then, in the dawn of
Easter Day, the message of the angel to the

174 How to Understand the Gospels

women is : " Tell his disciples and Peter,
He goeth before you into Galilee : there shall
ye see him, as he said unto you " (Mk.
xvi. 7 ; Matt, xxviii. 7). Half-way through
the next sentence the original Gospel of
Mark is broken off, but in Matthew (xxviii.
16) we are told that " the eleven disciples
went into Galilee, unto the mountain where
Jesus had appointed them. And when they
saw him, they worshipped him : but some
doubted. And Jesus came to them and
spake unto them. . . ." Here, then, in
Mark and Matthew, we have the " Galilean
tradition," in seeming variance with the
" Jerusalem tradition " of Luke. But Luke
is supported by John, which describes
appearances in Jerusalem to the disciples
on Easter Day and a week later. Yet in the
appendix added subsequently to this Gospel
(chapter xxi), we do find an account of an
appearance in Galilee.

Such then, briefly stated, is the problem.
St. Luke seems to know nothing of Resur-
rection appearances to the disciples in
Galilee ; the editor of Matthew seems to know
nothing of appearances anywhere else.
The existence of the " Jerusalem tradition "
and of the " Gahlean tradition " is indu-

Luke : Birth y Life^ and Resurrection 175

bitable. When this is fully admitted, how-
ever, we have the right to add that the
existence of the two traditions does not
necessarily prove that one or the other must
be false. Rather we may think that both
are true. The Galilean appearances are
not disproved if no account of them happen
to be among St. Luke's materials. Again,
no one Evangelist could record all he had
heard, as the writer of the Fourth Gospel
pathetically insists. He had to make a
choice, and to omit much. In St. Luke's
final chapter, verses 44-50, evidently, are
much condensed. It looks as though the
writer found that the Emmaus story had
taken more space than he anticipated, so that
at its finish he was almost at the end of his
roll of papyrus. To those of the Gospels
we should add also the hst of Resurrection
appearances given by St. Paul in i Cor. xv.
Its early date gives it great evidential value.
The Apostle cites it as one of the traditions
he " received," presumably about the time
of his conversion. That takes us back to a
time within six years of the Resurrection
itself. St. Paul mentions the appearance to
Peter, mentioned by St. Luke also ; a
" Jerusalem " appearance, and the appear-

176 How to Understand the Gospels

ance to " above five hundred brethren at
once," which must have been a " Gahlean "
appearance — for there were not that num-
ber of Christian brethren in Jerusalem before
Pentecost.

Farther than this we need not try to go.
Attempts to explain every detail, or to con-
struct a kind of chronological table for the
forty days between the Resurrection and
Ascension are futile. We have not enough
knowledge of the facts to justify such pious
imaginative efforts. What we can say is
that the stories of the Jerusalem appear-
ances, and of the Emmaus scene in par-
ticular, ring true. It is reasonable also to
think that the Apostles, taught by the Risen
Master what their new life-work was to be,
would need to return to Galilee for a short
time in order to wind up their affairs, and
that other manifestations of the Lord were
given them there before they came back to
Jerusalem. That the two traditions create
a prima facie difficulty should be frankly
admitted. Yet when it is examined without
prejudice, the difficulty is not of a kind
which demands the rejection of either
tradition, or of any incident related in the
Gospels. It is due merely to the incomplete-

Luke : Birth, Life, and Resurrection 177

ness of our information. If we want suffi-
cient historical evidence in the Gospels to
support our religious belief in the Resurrec-
tion, we shall find it. If we require a
detailed and orderly account of everything
that happened in the last forty days of our
Lord's earthly life, we shall not find it, for
it is not there.

Certainly none of us could wish that St.
Luke, in order to say something about
Gahlean appearances, should have abridged
that most beautiful narrative of the Emmaus
journey which is the last and possibly the
greatest treasure of his Gospel. From what
source did he get it ? As we read it care-
fully, as we notice its vivid and life-like
details, we cannot help feeHng, I think, that
it is the record of a personal experience.
And as St. Luke is careful to name one of the
two pilgrims, while the other is unidentified,
the behef that the Evangelist got this
account from Cleopas himself seems one we
may accept. That matters Uttle. What
does matter is the beauty of the tale, its
quiet power, the conviction it brings that it
goes far beyond the range of human inven-
tion. The summarized account of the final
charge and the Ascension follows ; of these
12

178 How to Understand the Gospels

St. Luke was to say more in his later volume.
But the story of the travellers on the road
to Emmaus may well serve us as the epilogue
to his Gospel. As we close it, I think we shall
echo the pilgrims' words : " Did not our
heart bum within us, while he talked with
us in the way ? " Nor, as Ufe goes on, are we
likely to forget our gratitude to St. Luke for
writing down :

" ' Abide with us : for it is toward evening,
and the day is far spent.' "

" And he went in to abide with them/'

IX John : TIhe Gospel and its Author

As he passes from the first three Gospels
to the Fourth, every reader must be con-
scious of an essential difference. To some
extent, as we have seen, each of the synoptic
Gospels is individual in its purpose, contents,
and style. But the point of view and atmos-
phere of this Fourth Gospel seem strikingly
imhke those which are common to the
others. The contrast is evident even at a
casual glance through the book. Closer
study will show the reader that there are also
remarkable points of hkeness, and he may
even come to share Dr. Scott Holland's
beUef that " the Fourth Gospel, far from
being in coUision with the other three, is
absolutely essential for their interpretation. ' ' ^
Yet the great and obvious difference remains,
and has caused the Fourth Gospel in modern
times to be the most discussed book in the
Bible.

1 Creeds and Critics, p. 86.
179

l8o How to Understand the Gospels

The discussion, too, is one of a kind which
the general reader cannot afford to disregard.
Details indeed there are which, though they
have caused and continue to cause volu-
minous controversy, need not affect the profit
and enjoyment with which most of us read
the Fourth Gospel. Whether a.d. 90 or 105
is its more probable " date " ; whether it is
essentially Hellenistic or Semitic in charac-
ter ; whether or no the philosophy of its
prologue has any affinity with that of Philo
— these, and a number of other such ques-
tions, the general reader may leave to
technical experts. The question of '* author-
ship " is more important, especially if that
word be given its right meaning. Yet it is
still secondary. Were we driven to beheve
that we owe the book not to the son of
Zebedee, but to another ** John," or to an
unknown disciple who somehow was present
at the Last Supper, we might regret the
overthrow of the older view, yet the historic
and spiritual values of the book would
remain unimpaired. Again, the great diffi-
culties— personally, I do not think " over-
whelming " too strong a term — against
taking the Fourth Gospel and the Book of
Revelation as the work of the same writer

John : The Gospel and its Author i8i

need not in any way perturb us. It is an
interesting problem to investigate for people
with sufficient leisure and technical equip-
ment. But the decision, whichever way it
be, is not of fundamental importance.

On the other hand, the main point raised
by the modern controversy over the Fourth
Gospel is of an importance quite funda-
mental. It is not of a kind that the general
reader can view with unconcern or leave
scholars to fight out among themselves. It
must affect his whole estimate of the Fourth
Gospel. Indeed, the question propounded
is whether or no he can justly regard this
work as a " Gospel " at all, for that term
is one which seems incongruous to describe
a work of pious imagination. A con-
siderable number of writers would endorse
Canon Streeter's statement ^ that the Fourth
Gospel " belongs neither to history nor to
biography, but to the library of devotion.*'
Another beheves that at the end of the first
century the need was felt of a reinterpreta-
tion of the Hfe of Christ in the light of
Christian experience. Others suggest that
it may most fitly be termed an allegory.
In a paper contributed to Cambridge Biblical

1 The Four Gospels, p. 365.

1 82 How to Understand the Gospels

Essays, Dr. Inge says that " the whole
book is a free composition by the writer
himself," and that " the Discourses " — i.e.
the teaching attributed to our Lord — *' bear
primarily on the conditions of Christian
Hfe in a.d. ioo." It would be easy to add
many other judgments of the same kind ;
it would be no less easy to match them by
the opinions of other critics, no less eminent,
who take a precisely opposite view.

Enough has been said, however, to indi-
cate the nature and the seriousness of the
problem involved. This Fourth Gospel
comes to us in the guise of history. It was
accepted as historically true from the
second century onwards. It affirms that
Jesus Christ in the course of His life on
earth did certain things and spoke certain
words. Either He did and said those
things, in which case the Fourth Gospel is
the record of fact, or He did not, in which
case it is a work of fiction. The latter
alternative does not imply, of course, that
its author wrote with any idea of deception.
But the difference in the value of his book
is immeasurable. Instead of preserving for
us the words of Jesus Christ, it contains
merely (in Dr. Inge's candid phrase) " free

John : T^he Gospel and its Author 183

composition by the writer himself " — the
kind of things he imagined our Lord might
have said. He is not merely interpreting
or expanding, but inventing. And, as Dr.
Bernard remarks,^ "It is one thing to
spirituaUze history ; it is quite another to
put forth as history a narrative which is
not based on fact."

When, therefore, we try to picture to
ourselves the historic Christ and to study
His teaching as a whole, may we use the
material provided by the Fourth Gospel,
or must we limit ourselves to the synoptic
writings ? Is this book what, until modem
times, the Christian Church always supposed
it to be, or is it merely human, a beautiful
meditation or allegory ? If so, we may
value it as we value the Imitation of Christ
or The Pilgrim's Progress, yet that is to
place it on a level very different from a
book recording, not what some devout soul
invented, but what Jesus Christ actually
said and did. Such is the enormously
important question which confronts us.
We are bound to face it. We must try to
arrive at an answer. The general reader
need not imagine that he is incompetent to

1 Commentary on St. John, vol. i, p. Ixxxvi.

184 How to Understand the Gospels

do so because his scholastic equipment is
small. A knowledge of human nature and
psychology, an alert feeling for literature,
and, above all, a devout mind are qualities
quite as hkely to help us as merely academic
learning. The way to form a real opinion
about the character of the book is to read
it again and again.

And this we must try to do without pre-
possessions. It is futile to pretend that
the traditional view is free from difficulties,
or that it must necessarily be right just
because it is the traditional view. On the
other hand, we ought not to be misled by
the unjustifiable attitude of some modernists,
who imply that none but the opinions they
themselves hold are now possible for any
person of intelligence. Some of them are
apt to show a temper of unhappy intel-
lectual arrogance, and to ignore, instead of
trying to answer, evidence against their
theories adduced by scholars of a com-
petence at least equal to their own. This
pose of having said the final word on the
Johannine problem is not taken by all the
radical critics. Yet it is too common, and
has rather misled the general pubUc. We
must remember also that the historic worth

John : The Gospel and its Author 185

of this Gospel is often disparaged because
it cannot be reconciled with a certain type
of modernist Christology. As Dr. Sanday
observed long ago, " If a writer starts with
a semi-Arian conception of Christianity, he
is bound at all costs to rule out the Fourth
Gospel, not only as a dogmatic authority,
but as a record of historical fact."

II

We should try, then, to examine the
Fourth Gospel without prepossessions. Two
questions have to be considered ; those of
its authorship and its authenticity. The
latter, obviously, is by far the more
important.

When we speak of " authorship," we
should be careful to use that word in its
right sense. To say that this book seems to
be the Gospel of St. John the son of Zebedee
is not necessarily to say that all the writing
and arrangement of the book, as we now
have it, were done by him. A modem
analogy may help to explain the point.
Two of the most valuable commentaries on
my bookshelves, published at an interval
of twenty years, are those on this Gospel
by Archbishop Bernard (1928) and by

1 86 How to Understand the Gospels

Bishop Brooke Foss Westcott (1908). Dr.
Bernard passed away in 1927, and therefore
his book, as the title-page states, was
" edited by '' Dr. McNeile ; yet it is Dr.
Bernard's commentary. The other instance
is still more to the point. From his early
years Bishop Westcott planned a full
commentary on the Greek text of the
Fourth Gospel. He was already at work
upon it in 1859. ^^^ ^^ was hindered from
the completion of his task by requests for
other books, among them a short com-
mentary on the EngHsh version of John.
Afterwards he returned to the larger enter-
prise. He accomplished much of it between
1883 and 1887. In 1890 he became Bishop
of Durham ; after that, he could only give
fragments of time to his great commentary,
and it was incomplete when he died in
1901. Afterwards one of his sons set to
work upon the material bequeathed to
him. Of the twenty-one chapters in the
Gospel, the Bishop had re-annotated ten
fully and three partially. For the rest, his
son could use (a) the 1882 commentary on
the Enghsh text, and (b) a large mass of
disconnected notes. Using all these, he was
able, seven years after his father's death.

John : The Gosfel and its Author 187

to bring out the splendid commentary in
two volumes. Now it was the son who, in
a literal sense, was the writer of this book.
He made it ; he pieced together the
materials, both chapters ready for press
and rough notes ; he filled the gaps. With-
out him the book would not have existed.
Yet, most properly, we term Bishop West-
cott the " author," and his name only
appears on the cover, for the whole substance
of the book is his. It appeared seven years
after his death, let us observe, and some of
the notes first printed in 1908 had been
put on paper forty years earher.

That was the way in which a commentary
on the Fourth Gospel came into being, and
possibly that is not unHke the way, allowing
for vastly different conditions, in which
the Fourth Gospel itself was shaped.
Beyond question, it had an editor as well
as an author. Editorial notes are inserted
in it, of which the most important comes
at the close (xxi. 24). We should notice
its wording carefully. There had been
three references in the Gospel to an unnamed
disciple ' ' whom Jesus loved. ' ' The editorial
note has two purposes : first, to let us
know that from the reminiscences and

1 88 How to Understand the Gospels

written memoirs of this disciple the Gospel
has been compiled ; secondly, to give a
certificate, probably on behalf of the elders
of the Church at Ephesus, of his veracity :

" This is the disciple which beareth
witness of these things, and wrote these
things : and we know that his witness
is true."

Such is the account contained in the Gospel
itself of the way in which it was fashioned.
An anonymous editor put it together,
from what a beloved disciple of Christ had
said and written down. The disciple must
have been a very old man by this time ;
but another editorial note (xix. 35) implies
that he was still living. Yet those written
notes of his, utilized in making the Gospel,
might have been set down long years pre-
viously ; his records of what the Master
said might have been committed to writing
within a short time, even within a few hours,
of the discourse itself.

Who, then, was this " beloved disciple '' ?
He must have been an Apostle. He rechned
next to our Lord at the Last Supper. He
was one of the seven to whom the Resm-rec-

John : The Gospel and its Author 189

tion appearance by the sea of Galilee was
given. He survived to old age, and this
fact gave rise to a misunderstanding which
chapter xxi. was written to correct. All
these points are consistent with the early
and continuous tradition that he was St.
John the Apostle, and there was no rival
tradition at all. It seems significant that
he is not mentioned by name in this Gospel.
That is most difficult to explain unless he
appears instead as " the disciple whom
Jesus loved " — for a total lack of reference
to him would be incredible. But, it has
been asked, does not this argue against
St. John's authorship of the book ? Would
he have used so exalted a term as this as
his way of describing himself ? There is
undoubtedly some substance in that diffi-
culty for those who think that St. John
was the actual writer of the Gospel in its
final shape. But if (as those believe whose
views I share) it was compiled from his
writings and reminiscences and edited by
another hand, I can well think that the
Apostle charged the editor not to mention
him by name. Yet the editor had to
describe him somehow, and, having learnt
that " he whom Jesus loved " had been

190 How to Understand the Gospels

the proud title accorded to John by his
companions, would use that mode of
identifying him in the Gospel.

What is beyond controversy is that by
the end of the second century this book
was definitely accepted as a Gospel, equal
in authority with the other three. Those
who attack its authenticity point out how
vastly different it is from the others in
tone, character, and contents. That is
quite true, but as an argument its weight
seems to be rather on the other side. Would
a work so markedly different have been
allowed to rank with the others as a Gospel
unless it had the compelling authority of
an Apostle behind it ?

Ill

Such are a few of the many points that
arise when the authorship of the Fourth
Gospel is discussed. There seems no ade-
quate reason for doubting that it is compiled
and edited from the reminiscences and
writings of the " beloved disciple,'* and if
we are to reject the unanimous tradition
of the Church ^ that the beloved disciple was

^ Attempts have been made in modern times to
show that John the son of Zebedee did not survive to

Joh7i : ^he Gospel and its Author 191

John the son of Zebedee, we have to find
someone else to take his place, and someone
of such authority that his records were
given the supreme rank of a Gospel. Dr.
Bernard favours the theory that " the
writer who compiled the Gospel on the
Apostle's authority " was also called John,
so that " we may find here a plausible
explanation for some confusion of him in
later times with his greater namesake." ^
Yet, as we have seen when we were con-
sidering the analogous instance of Matthew,
the fact that afterwards the Fourth Gospel
was headed " according to John " does not
necessarily imply a belief that he was its
actual writer. " Matthew " was justly so
called, though another than St. Matthew
wrote it, because it enshrines the records of

old age in Ephesus, but was martyred early in Palestine,
and therefore could not have been the author of the
Gospel. This view, however, is opposed to all early
tradition, and the chief argument adduced for it is
what an eighth-century compiler says that a fourth-
century historian says that a second-century bishop
affirmed. It is evidence of a kind that no one would take
seriously unless, on quite other grounds, he had decided
against the traditional authorship of the Gospel. Dr.
Bernard has disposed of it most effectively in his
commentary (i, xxxvii-xlv.).
1 Commentary, i, Ixx.

192 How to Understand the Gospels

our Lord's Discourses which St. Matthew
made. And " according to St. John/' in
the same way, need not mean that St.
John wrote it — though through long
centuries the title was interpreted in that
sense — but that it contains what St. John
wrote. I do not think we press the editorial
phrase " the disciple which heareth witness
of these things, and wrote these things "
too far if we take it to imply that the
beloved disciple supplemented the written
records he had made long before with
verbal reminiscences which he was still
uttering in his extreme old age. The dis-
tinction of tenses seems to support that
interpretation, which is true to life and
human nature.

To determine the precise shares of author
and editor in the completed work is impos-
sible. But the problem of its style is
interesting. The style is consistent through-
out this Gospel ; it is identical with the
style of " the First Epistle of John " \ it
is very unlike the style of ** the Revelation.''
Assuming the matter of the Gospel to come
from St. John, is its manner his own or
his editor's ? Dr. Bernard takes the latter
view. Therefore, as the Gospel and First

John : T^he Gospel and its Author 193

Epistle are identical in style, he has to
attribute the Epistle, not to St. John, but
to the editor of the Gospel, whose name is
also supposed to have been John. Frankly,
this strikes me as incredible. The Epistle
begins :

" That which was from the beginning,
that which we have heard, that which we
have seen with our eyes, that which we
beheld, and our hands handled, concerning
the Word of life . . . that which we have
seen and heard, declare we unto you ..."

Does not such language imply that the
writer had been an eye-witness of our
Lord's ministry ? And the whole letter —
with its tender concern for the " Httle
children " of a new generation, full-grown
men and women though they be, its slow,
ruminative tone, its repetitions and reitera-
tions— seems of the kind a very old man
would write or dictate. That is to say,
it is such a letter as we should expect
St. John to write, and by no means such as
we should expect a young follower of his
to address to his own contemporaries. Then
we must remember that the Gospel, accord-
13

194 How to Understand the Gospels

ing to its own statement, contains what the
beloved disciple " wrote," as well as the
verbal " witness " he gave his editor. It
seems more probable that his pupil would
assimilate the style of his own editorial
notes to that of his master than that he
would rewrite the documents handed to
him by that master in a style of his own.

Behind this question lies another, far
more intriguing. Let us suppose, as I
think we have substantial reason for doing,
that the idiom of the Fourth Gospel is the
idiom of St. John — mainly his own, partly
that of a disciple copying him. How far
did St. John, in turn, mould his own style
on that of his Divine Master ? The language
in which His teaching is reported so closely
resembles that of St. John's interpretation
and comments that often we are puzzled
to know where the one ends and the other
begins. Therefore even those who believe
that the Discourses have an historic back-
ground inchne to think that their form is
St. John's, that he set forth the substance
of the teaching in his own idiom. Yet may
not the reverse process possibly be true ?
Given the beloved disciple's special intimacy
with his Master, given his spiritual sensitive-

Joh7i : The Gospel and its Author 195

ness and his deep devotion, is it not psycho-
logically probable that (almost without
knowing it) he acquired the habit of copying
the Master in his way of speaking about
religious truths ? If so, it is not the Dis-
courses which are assimilated to the style
of St. John, but the style of St. John which
is assimilated to the Discourses. Here, no
doubt, we are in the realm of mere con-
jecture. But, personally, when I read such
teaching as is given in John xiv, with its
slow, tranquil, and most beautiful cadences,
such, I cannot help feeUng, must have been
the kind of way in which our Lord spoke.
And when elsewhere in the Gospel I find
that the author's narrative and comments,
if on a lower plane, yet are in a diction not
unUke that he attributes to our Lord, they
seem natural enough if they come from a
disciple who was the readiest of learners.
One of the arguments used against the
Johannine authorship of the Fourth Gospel
is the alleged difficulty of attributing such
a work to a GaUlean fishing-boat proprietor.
At best, the argument is not worth much.
It is akin to the plea that a Stratford peasant
could not have written Hamlet. One might
reply that, after all, exceptional people

196 How to Understand the Gospels

sometimes appear in the world, and these
exceptional people have a way of doing
exceptional things. But in the instance
of the beloved disciple something further
may be added. There need be no cause
for surprise if a Gospel unique and distinct
in its beauty were written by a disciple
who, beyond any other, knew what was the
power of God's Spirit ; who, beyond any
other, derived all else he knew from his
knowledge of the mind of Christ.

X John : The Gospel and its Authenticity

I

Among the world's greatest writings there
are some, and Luke is of the number, which
reveal much of their beauty and charm at
the first attentive reading we give them.
There are others, and the Gospel of John
is pre-eminent among them, which yield
their chief treasures only if we are willing
to return to them again and again. It is
true that no one with any literary perception
can even dip into this Fourth Gospel with-
out feeUng something of its fascination.
Yet at first he may be misled easily by its
effortless style, its consistently serene at-
mosphere, its lucidity of phrase. Almost it
may seem to him a simple book. Yet if
he will read it through and through, steep-
ing himself in its contents, pondering its
statements and their half-hidden impHca-
tions, and comparing what it has to tell
him with what he learns from other parts
of the New Testament, these chapters will
197

198 How to Understand the Gospels

stir in him an increasing amazement. Apart
even from any theological prepossessions,
he will, as a man of letters, begin to revere
the Fourth Gospel as one of the supreme
triumphs of literature. He will perceive
the magnitude of the task which its author
undertook, and his triumphant success in
doing it.

There is the divine and transcendent
Christ portrayed for us in St. Paul's writings
and the Epistle to the Hebrews. There is
the Jesus of Nazareth at work among the
people of Gahlee brought vividly before us
by the first three Gospels. They, it is
true, proclaim Him to be divine also, as
the Epistles do not fail to proclaim His
perfect humanity. None the less, we needs
must be aware of a difference of emphasis,
and a resultant contrast between the
portraits. That difficulty is ended, that
contrast fades away, as we study the
Fourth Gospel. Here is the Master living
and working among his simple-hearted
companions. Who entered into their daily
needs, Who could talk with and befriend
with equal readiness a woman of Samaria
or a Nicodemus, ruler in Israel. Mostly
we see Him in a different setting of place.

John : The Gospel and its Authenticity 199

and mostly hear Him speaking of different
themes, yet throughout we feel that the
portrait in all four Gospels is consistent ;
the same Personality stands forth in all.
But with this feeling co-exists another.
As we come to know the Jesus Christ
revealed to us in the Fourth Gospel, we
realize that the loftiest language of adoration
applied to Him in the Epistles is not
misplaced. The Jesus Christ of St. Mark's
Gospel is seen to be convincingly one
with the Jesus Christ of Pauline theology.
And the Evangelist who, in a book so
apparently simple, achieved that unifying
interpretation for us accomplished one
of the greatest feats that literature can
show.

Again, as the reader ponders the sayings
attributed to our Lord in this Gospel, he
becomes more and more aware of the
profound thought underlying their pellucid
form. The things said go deep ; the
implications from them go deeper still.
If these are the veritable words of the Son
of God, they add immensely to our know-
ledge of His mind, and there is no part of
our life which they must not influence.
If they are merely the inventions of some

200 How to Understand the Gospels

anonymous writer at Ephesus, our approach
to them must be very different and their
value is immeasurably lower. And there-
fore the question of the authenticity of
this Gospel is of the utmost importance
to us all. That is why everyone, and not
technical students only, must try to form
some conclusion about it. We shall best
qualify ourselves for this by reading through
the book from end to end with an alert
mind, and noticing the impressions it makes
upon us.

As we set about this, it is useful to have
before us a general plan of the book. The
best short analysis of it I know was provided
by the late Mr. J. E. Symes in his Evolution
of the New Testament,'^ and this, with some
slight modifications, I will reproduce here :

Chapter I, 1-18. Prologue.

I, 19-IV, 54. The Lord reveals
Himself to individuals — to the Baptist,
Nathanael, disciples at Cana, Nico-
demus, the woman of Samaria, a
nobleman.

V-VII. He reveals Himself as the
giver of a new Law, as a Healer and

* Murray, 1921.

John : The Gospel and its Authenticity 201

Feeder of the multitude. Opposition
begins from kinsmen and Pharisees.

VIII, 12-X, 42. Opposition grows.
Jesus reveals Himself as Light of the
Worid, Good Shepherd, Son of God.
The Jews, therefore, try to stone Him.

XI. Opposition still increases.
Jesus reveals Himself as the Resur-
rection and the Life. Raising of
Lazarus.

XII. Greeks desire to see Him.
Jews plot His death. The end of His
public revelation of Himself.

XIII-XVII. The private revelation
of Himself to the disciples in deeds,
words, and prayer.

XVIII-XX. The Trial, Death, and
Resurrection.

XXI. Epilogue.

Other commentators supply longer and
more detailed analyses of the Gospel.
But this suffices to bring out its main
theme, the progressive self-revelation of
our Lord. We should notice how dominant
in it are the two words Light and Life.
While, too, we have deduced from the
previous Gospels the special purpose which

202 How to Understand the Gospels

each was written to fulfil, the author of the
Fourth Gospel himself states explicitly the
aim of his book. It was written, he says
(xx. 31), " that ye may believe that Jesus
is the Christ, the Son of God ; and that
believing ye may have life in his name."
His choice from a wealth of material was
guided by this purpose ; he has chosen for
record those events and words and " signs "
which most clearly attest our Lord's
divinity.

II

A few notes on the contents may be
added. The Prologue, some scholars have
suggested, is really a hymn, written, like
the canticles in Luke, in the form of Hebrew
poetry. Dr. Bernard has developed that
idea, and suggests that in the hymn certain
prose notes and explanations have been
interpolated by the editor. These notes
occupy verses 6-9, 12, 13, 15--17 of chapter
i. Then the hymn itself, arranged in the
parallel form of Hebrew verse, will read
in English :

In the beginning was the Word,
And the Word was with God,
And the Word was God.

John : 7he Gospel and its Authenticity 203

The same was in the beginning with God.

In Him was life,

And the life was the light of men.

And the light shineth in darkness ;
And the darkness apprehended it not.

He was in the world.

And the world was made by Him,

And the world knew Him not.

He came unto His own.

And His own received Him not.

And the Word became flesh.
And dwelt among us.

And we beheld His glory.

Glory as of the only-begotten from the Father,

Full of grace and truth.

No man hath seen God at any time ;

The only-begotten Son, which is in the bosom

of the Father,
He hath declared Him.

At the beginning of the first Epistle
of John there are evident references to this
hymn. It need not have been written by
St. John ; more probably it is quoted by
him as a prologue to his Gospel, just as a
modem writer will often quote a poem,

204 How to Understand the Gospels

or some stanza from it, on a flyleaf of his
book or as a heading to a chapter. It
seems significant that " Word " (logos) is
nowhere used of Christ in the Gospel
itself.

That begins, after the Prologue, as if the
author's first idea had been to give a day-
by-day account of our Lord's ministry,
based on a diary kept at the time. We
have an account of a day, then (verse 29)
" on the morrow " ; verse 35 " again on
the morrow " ; verse 43 "on the morrow " ;
and ii. i, ''on the third day." At least
that seems to prove (unless we are reading
fiction) that these narratives are based on
written memoranda made somewhere about
the year 30, and are not reminiscences first
committed to writing about the year 90 —
the approximate date of the Gospel. No
one would profess to remember after an
interval of sixty years not merely what
events happened but which happened on
which day.

The conversation with Nicodemus in the
third chapter is an example of an account
in which it is difficult to know precisely
where the words attributed to Christ end
and the author's exposition of them begins.

John : 7he Gospel and its Authenticity 205

On the whole, verse 16 seems to be this
point, as the paragraphing in our Revised
Version indicates ; yet we cannot be sure.
But how vividly the earlier sentences make
us realize the interview — the cloaked
Nicodemus stealing into the room lit only
by an oil-lamp ; the hint of condescension
in " We — we of the Sanhedrin — admit thy
claim to be a religious teacher " changing
into the sheer bewilderment of " How can
these things be ? " and the night- wind
sighing in the trees. Even finer, as litera-
ture, is the interview with the Woman of
Samaria in the next chapter. There is not
a flaw in the psychology of her portrait.
If it be imaginary, how consummate an
artist was he who drew it ! We should
remark also that this Evangelist, whose aim
as he states it is to show that Jesus is the
Christ, the Son of God, tells us in this
chapter that He was " wearied with his
journey " — is not afraid, as the editor of
Matthew was afraid, of words revealing
the complete hmnanity of our Lord.

We may feel a sense of loss in learning
that vii. 53-viii. II, the story of " the
woman taken in adultery," forms no real
part of this Gospel. It is absent from

2o6 How to Understand the Gospels

all the oldest MSS., it is queried in many
later ones where it is admitted, and the
vocabulary and style are markedly different
from those of the genuine Gospel. They
resemble far more closely those of the
synoptic writers. Yet, though it has no
right place in John, we need not regard
the story as spurious. It has inherent
signs of truth, reference is made to it in a
number of early writings, and we may
accept it as a genuine piece of some
independent tradition. In its present
position, however, it is misplaced.

It is impossible so much as to mention here
all the passages in the later chapters of the
Fourth Gospel which abound with beauty.
In particular, no hasty sketch could do
justice to the three chapters (xiv-xvi) of
Discourses on the eve of the Passion, or to
the marvellous prayer which follows (xvii).
They are among the supreme treasures of
Christendom. As we read them, we may
notice the suggestion, endorsed and developed
by Dr. Bernard, that the present arrange-
ment of their text does not represent the
original order, and that more probably they
should stand thus : xiii. 1-30 ; xv ; xvi ;
xiii. 31-38 ; xiv ; xvii. In the same way

Joh7i : The Gospel and its Authenticity 207

many scholars hold that, earlier in the book,
chapters v. and vi. have been transposed.
No MSS. support these conjectures, yet
possibly the original editor of the Gospel may
have failed to arrange in their right sequence
the materials given him by St. John. If we
try the experiment of reading the debated
chapters as placed by Dr. Bernard, we shall
agree, I think, that the change seems to give
us a more orderly and logical scheme of
narrative and thought. On the other hand,
I doubt if logical orderliness of that kind
seemed so important to St. John as it does
to modern critics. He was not, like St.
Luke, trying to write a manual of history.
He was an extremely old man, putting
together reminiscences of a period sixty
years earlier ; using bits of a diary he had
kept then, scattered notes of special Dis-
courses he had heard, existing Gospels
written by others, and memories which he
gave his editor as they came back to him ;
wandering a little at times from narrative to
his own thoughts, adding afterwards at a
later stage some saying or incident he had
forgotten when describing the stage of the
ministry when it occurred ; unable to supply
an exact chronology, except when his

2o8 How to Understand the Gospels

tattered diaries came to his assistance, and
utterly unconcerned about logical arrange-
ment, so long as he could leave behind him a
portrait of the Master he loved and adored —
that, I think, is the impression which this
Fourth Gospel gives us of its author.

It seems beyond question that, as first
designed, the book was meant to end with
chapter xx, the climax of which is that
wonderful scene when the most resolute of
sceptics has to cry " My Lord and my God,'*
and the last verse of which is a summary of
the whole book's purpose. Then, most
fortunately for us, a misunderstanding of
the Risen Lord's saying about the future of
the beloved disciple caused chapter xxi, full
of beauty and psychological truth, to be
appended as an Epilogue.

Ill

We have read again, let us assume, the
Fourth Gospel. While the cumulative im-
pression of it all is still vivid, let us return
to the question of the book's authenticity.
To put the issue plainly, have we been
reading fact or fiction ? Is it, in the main,
a record of fact, or is it a work of imagina-
tion ? We cannot allow the stark reahty and

John : The Gosfel and its Authenticity 209

urgency of that question to be masked by
well-sounding phrases like " an idealized
portrait of Christ," or "a spiritualized
interpretation of His teaching." They do
not tell us what we want to know. Those
conversations with Nicodemus and the
Woman of Samaria which we have been con-
sidering ; did they happen, or did they not ?
That scene when Thomas worshipped his
Lord and his God ; is it merely a piece of
picturesque imagination ? "I and the
Father are one " ; ** he that believe th in Me
shall never die " ; are those the words of
Jesus Christ or the invention of someone at
Ephesus ? Not scholars only, but everyone
must be enormously concerned to know the
truth about that. On the one hand, the
Christian Church from the second century
accepted the Gospel as authentic. On the
other hand, its authenticity is dismissed as
incredible by a number of prominent
scholars to-day, although many remain its
convinced upholders.

Into the more technical points at issue
between them it would be impossible to
enter in a volume of this kind.^ But the

1 The literature on the subject is immense. But
the reader who wishes to acquaint himself with first-

14

210 How to Understand the Gospels

main points are not technical. They are,
that is to say, of a nature upon which the
general reader, especially if he has an alert
literary sense, is as competent to form an
opinion as the academic expert. Neither he
nor anyone else can, from the nature of the
case, arrive at a certain and irrefutable con-
clusion. Were that possible, the controversy
would be at an end. What he can do, how-
ever, and what for every reason he must try
to do, is to determine for himself whether
the balance of probability is on the side of
the traditional or the modernist view. (It
is convenient to use those terms, but many
scholars support the " modernist " view of

rate statements, in a moderate compass, of the
Johannine problem in its more technical aspects, may-
be strongly counselled to read : (i) Part III (pp.
361-481) of Dr. Streeter's The Four Gospels (Mac-
millan), a most able presentment of the " modernist"
view; and (2) pp. 62-147 of The Son of Zehedee
(S.P.C.K.). by the Rev. H. P. V. Nunn, upholding the
" traditional " view. The Archbishop of York (Dr.
Temple) contributes a preface in which he describes
it as " an impressive study." Mr. Nunn sets himself
to answer Dr. Streeter, and does so in a style always
trenchant, and at times, perhaps, rather truculent.
Yet no one should accept Dr. Streeter's conclusions,
or even his premises, until he has considered how they
stand the test of Mr. Nunn's searching and scholarly
examination^

John : The Gospel and its Authenticity 211

the Fourth Gospel without holding the
doctrinal opinions with which " modernism "
is commonly identified.)

What, then, is the modernist case against
the traditional view of the Fourth Gospel ?
It is based mainly upon the very remarkable
differences between this and the three
synoptic Gospels. " They are so numerous
and great," argues the modernist, " that
John clearly belongs to a different class of
literature from Mark, Matthew, and Luke.
Those three have a historical basis and are
authentic. John, written long afterwards,
is not. In fact, the synoptic and Johannine
traditions are so incompatible that you can-
not accept them both. The synoptics repre-
sent our Lord's ministry as extending over
one or, possibly, two years, and as being
carried out in Galilee. John makes it
extend over three years, and gives us Jeru-
salem and the neighbourhood as its scene.
Characters prominent in the Fourth Gospel
are unmentioned by the other three. It is
inconceivable that all the synoptists should
have said not a word about a miracle so
amazing as the raising of Lazarus had that
story an historic foundation. On the other
hand, John leaves unrecorded some of the

212 How to Understand the Gospels

chief events in our Lord's earthly hfe, such
as the Virgin Birth, the Temptation, and the
Transfiguration. But the supreme con-
trast is in the conflicting accounts of our
Lord Himself and His teaching. In the first
three Gospels He teaches by means of
parables, using them to convey lessons of
practical conduct and to set forth His
doctrine of the Kingdom of God. It is
quite a different Teacher whom we find in the
Fourth Gospel. Here there is not one
parable, but mystical discourses on the
Son's eternal relationship with the Father,
and, instead of a Master who forbids His
disciples to disclose His Messiahship, one
who emphasizes and proclaims it con-
tinually. There is no equivalent here to the
Sermon on the Mount. The addresses in
the Upper Room are of a length which could
not have been memorized. Indeed, only one
style is used in the Fourth Gospel, whether
the speaker be our Lord Himself or Nico-
demus or Pilate ; obviously, this style must
be the writer's own. And that style belongs
to the close of the first century. The author
does not really give Christ's teaching, but
(to* quote Canon Streeter) what He * would
have taught had He been dealing with the

Johfi : ^he Gospel and its Authenticity 213

problems confronting the Church at the
time the Gospel was written.' In short, the
book is not history, but a devout fantasy, a
religious prose-poem."

Such, in outline, is the modernist's case.
How does the traditionahst reply ? He
might begin by referring his opponent to the
text of the Gospel. " You ask us to con-
sider this a work of pious imagination. But
at least it professes to be history ; twice there
is a solemn asseveration of its veracity.
If your view be accurate, you have to postu-
late that the real writer invented, first, the
* beloved disciple ' to figure as the author,
and then inserted an editor, to append a
fictitious note most solemnly declaring that
the beloved disciple was the author, and that
his witness was true. No doubt there are, as
you say, conspicuous differences between
that Gospel and the other three. Yet you
exaggerate the difficulty they cause. On
the point of chronology, most scholars now
admit that when John differs from the
synoptic Gospels — as it does concerning the
day of the Crucifixion — John is probably
right and the synoptics in error. As to
place, if the three describe a ministry in
Galilee and the Fourth a ministry in Jeru-

214 ^^^ ^^ Understand the Gospels

salem, it does not follow that either has gone
astray. In fact, there is much in the
synoptic Gospels which cannot be explained
unless, in addition to the Galilean ministry
they record, there was also a Jerusalem
ministry about which their writers had no
detailed information. ' How often would I
have gathered thy children together ' — it is
in Matthew and Luke that we find this
lament over Jerusalem. Could we need
clearer evidence that our Lord had spoken His
message often, though vainly, in that city ?
*' As, therefore, the first three Gospels deal
mainly with the Galilean, the Fourth with the
Jerusalem ministry, is it surprising that many
personages appearing in the one narrative
should not be found in the other ? Again,
let us try to picture in the light of common
sense what choice of material a writer in
St. John's position would be likely to make.
He was putting together his Gospel for a
Church which possessed three already.
Would it be rational to fill it with accounts
of scenes and reports of teaching which had
been included in one or more of the earlier
works ? Would he not rather, of set pur-
pose, omit most of these, intrinsically
important as they might be, in order to have

John : The Gospel a7id its Authenticity 215

space for words and deeds which none of his
predecessors had described.

" But you point out, and with justice,
that the teaching attributed to our Lord
by the first three Gospels on the one hand
and the Fourth on the other is not merely
different teaching but a different kind of
teaching. That is, I admit, a substantial
difficulty. Yet it is fair to point out
that there were not only different kinds
of teaching, but different kinds of listeners.
To most, the practical instructions and the
attractive parables would appeal greatly,
while the more mystical Discourses would
seem well-nigh meaningless. But St. John
was a man of profound spiritual intuition
and discernment. He would note down and
cherish the profounder truths uttered by
the Master ; truths clad in a form which
would convey nothing to St. Peter ; which
would never find their way through that
Apostle into the Gospel of Mark and the
synoptic tradition. As for the assertion
that St. John has but one idiom for all
his speakers, that, often as it has been
repeated by the modernists, is quite un-
justified. It ignores an immensely striking
fact, mentioned in the article on this

2i6 How to Understand the Gospels

Gospel in Hastings* Dictionary of the Bible
(ii. 719). Its writer points out that the
author of the Fourth Gospel puts into the
lips of our Lord no fewer than 145 words
which he never uses in his own person.
Again, there are 500 words which are
freely used by him in his own portions of
the Gospel, or in the utterances of other
speakers in it, not one of which does he
ever attribute to our Lord. Is not that
immensely significant ? Apart from all
other considerations, does it not seem
incredible that someone should have
fabricated the narrative, fabricated the
Discourses attributed to Christ, and have
managed to preserve consistently so subtle
a difference of idiom between them ? Who
was this superb imaginative artist, this
consummate literary craftsman ? How is it
that his name is unknown, that his very
existence was never suspected until it had
to be assumed, in mxodern times, simply
to justify your theories ?

" No ; the differences between the first
three Gospels and the Fourth, great as they
are, certainly are not greater than we
might expect when we bear in mind that
the Fourth Gospel was written by a man

John : TIhe Gosfel and its Authenticity 217

of very different temperament, and much
more spiritual insight, that he wrote at
a later time and would be eager to relate
what had not been told by the other
Evangelists, and that he wrote with the
special purpose of emphasizing the truth
of our Lord's divinity."

IV

Such, then, though again in outline only,
is the kind of reply which the traditionalist
would make to the modernist. How are
we to decide between them ?

Well, let us consider again the kind of
impression the book made on us as we read
it. For my own part, speaking as one
whose business it has been through a great
many years to examine and appraise
literature, both historical and imaginative,
I feel that this Gospel rings true. Oc-
casionally there are details in it which seem
open to question. But, speaking generally,
I find it impossible to think that anyone
devised out of his own imagination the
incidents which it records. Even the most
marvellous (such as the raising of Lazarus)
are accompanied by small incidental touches
which it would be natural for an eye-witness

21 8 How to Understand the Gospels

to remember, but which it would tax the
powers of the greatest writer of fiction to
invent. Again, the more closely I examine
the Discourses attributed to our Lord,
especially those in chapters xiv-xvi, the
more impossible I feel it to be that any
human being fabricated such matchless
sayings. That they should have been
recorded with anything like verbal exactness
is a point of obvious difficulty. Such an
explanation, for instance, as Professor Swete
gave seems to me far from adequate :

"It is not, I think, unreasonable to
suppose that words spoken on the last
night of the Lord's life . . . produced an
impression that could not be effaced ; that
at the end of a long life one who was present
found almost the very words still ringing
in his ears." *

The length of the Discourses, and the
interval of sixty years which, according
to this theory, intervened between the
hearing and the writing down of the words
have to be taken into account. A more
plausible suggestion, I venture to think,
it is one I made some years ago in an

1 Preface to The Last Discourse and Prayer.

John : The Gosfel and its Authenticity 219

earlier book of mine. According to this
Gospel, on the day of the Crucifixion the
beloved disciple was entrusted with the
care of the Lord's Mother, and led her
from the Cross to his own home. Picture
them together on that evening. How would
he comfort her ? What would be a more
natural, indeed a more inevitable, way of
attempting that than to let her hear what
her Son had said only twenty-four hours
earlier in the Upper Room ? " Let not
your heart be troubled, neither let it be
afraid. ... I go to prepare a place for
you. . . . Peace I leave with you, my
peace I give unto you. ..." Were there
ever words of comfort to match those
spoken in the Upper Room ? And so the
disciple would tell the Mother of them,
and write them down for her while they
were yet fresh in his memory. That record
could be most carefully preserved, and then,
sixty years later, the disciple would in-
corporate it in his Gospel.

Obviously, this is no more than a con-
jecture, but it still seems to me a not
unreasonable way of accounting for what
certainly needs explanation.

While, however, the traditional view of

220 How to Understand the Gospels

the Fourth Gospel has its difficulties, they
may seem slight indeed by contrast with
those which the modernist view involves.
We have to assume some unknown disciple
at Ephesus with a literary genius equal to
Shakespeare's. We have to believe that,
being a devout disciple, he invented out
of his own head story after story about
the Son of God, attributing to Him deeds
He had never done, picturing scenes in
which He never figured, and putting into
His mouth words of the most tremendous
import which, in point of fact, He never
spoke. Did the writer wish his work to
be regarded simply as a pious meditation
or allegory, and not as a record of fact ?
On the contrary, he appended to it —
pretending, to make the deception more
effective, that it came from another hand —
a most solemn affirmation that the witness
of the book was true. Then he allowed
it to go forth to the Church as a Gospel.
Is that psychologically credible ? But the
marvels do not end here. Unlike as it
was to the existing three, the Church ac-
cepted this book as a Gospel, arid as derived
from St. John the Apostle. It is a vast
mistake to suppose that the Church of the

John : T^he Gospel arid its Authenticity 221

first centuries was uncritical. The right
of various books — among them 2 Peter,
Jude, and the Revelation — to be included
in the New Testament was keenly debated.
But, outside one small and obscure sect,
which (like some modern critics) was led
to reject the Fourth Gospel because of
antecedent objections to its Christ ology,
this work was universally recognized as a
Gospel, and as the Gospel of St. John.
Is that likely to have happened if the
work were really nothing but a devotional
meditation written by an unknown hand ?

With these questions before us, we go
back once more to the book itself ; we
turn its pages ; we ponder what we read in
them ; beyond all, we watch Jesus Christ
as we find Him shown to us, and listen to
the serene and ineffable wisdom of His
words. As we do that, I believe that an
intuition, worth more perhaps than any
mere logical process, will lead us to a definite
view about the author of this book. We
may or we may not be convinced that the
" beloved disciple " is one with St. John
the Apostle. That, relatively, is unimport-
ant. But our spiritual faculties, and not
our intellects alone, will convince us, even

222 How to Understand the Gospels

if we doubt the identity of the author,
concerning the authenticity of what he wrote.
As we close his book, we shall echo the
words about him which someone set down
long ago, and say, " We know that his
witness is true/'

V

Here, pausing on my last page, I look
back on this study of the Gospels, to realize
how much it has left unsaid, in how slight
a fashion it deals with its majestic theme.
Yet there is comfort in the hope that it
may move some readers to return, with some
trifle of added interest or knowledge, to
the Gospels themselves. There is no
treasure in the world like them. There
is nothing else which so illuminates life
and death, and what lies beyond death.
Yet the real meaning of the Gospels will
not be disclosed to us if our interest in them
be intellectual only. To look through them
to the living Christ they reveal, to try
resolutely to attune our own lives with the
ideals they present — that is the way, that,
in a true sense, is the only way, to under-
stand the Gospels.

THE END

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