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No.
JOHN HARVEY TREAT.
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AN AKGU3IENT
CONSTANTINE TISCHENDORF.
NARRATIVE OF THE DISCOVERY
THE SINAITIC MANUSCRIPT.
[SECOND EDITION.]
LONDON :
THE EELIGIOUS TEACT SOCIETY,
56, PATERNOSTER ROW, AND 164, PICCADILLY.
1867.
ONE SHILLING.
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Published under arrangement with the Author.
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TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE
The name of Dr. Constantino Teschendorf is too well
known to need any introduction to the English reader.
As a critic and decipherer of ancient manuscripts he is
without a rival, and to his other services in this impor-
tant department of sacred literature he has added one
which, alone, would reward the labour of a lifetime
in the discovery of the Sinaitic Manuscript, the full
particulars of which are now given to the English
reader for the first time in the following pages.
The original pamphlet of Dr.Tischendorf, Wann wurden
umere Evangelien verfasst, attracted great attention on
its publication, now upwards of two years ago ; but as
it was written in the technical style in which German
professors are accustomed to address their students and
the learned classes generally, it was felt that a revision
of this pamphlet, in a more popular form and adapted
to general readers, would meet a want of the age. Dr.
Teschendorf accordingly complied with this request,
and prepared a popular version, in which the same
arguments for the genuineness and authenticity of our
Gospels were reproduced, but in a style more attractive
to general readers, and with explanations which clear up
what would otherwise be unintelligible. Of this revised
a2
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IV TRANSLATORS PREFACE.
and popular version of his proof of the genuineness of
our Gospels the following is an accurate translation.
It may interest the reader to know that the pamphlet
in its popular form has already passed through four
large impressions in Germany : it also has been twice
translated into French; one version of which is by
Professor Sardinoux, for the Religious Book Society of
Toulouse. It has also been translated into Dutch and
Russian; and an Italian version is in preparation at
Rome, the execution of which has been undertaken by
an Archbishop of the church of Rome, and with the
approbation of the Pope.
We have only to add that this version into English
has been undertaken with the express approbation of
the Author, and is sent forth in the hope that, with
the Divine blessing, it may be instrumental in con-
firming the faith of many of our English readers in
the " certainty of those things in which they have been
instructed." If the foundations be overthrown, what
shall the righteous do ? On the credibility of the four
Gospels, the whole of Christianity rests as a building on
its foundations. Hence it is that the Infidel and the
Deist, with their unnatural ally the rationalising Chris-
tian professor, have directed their attacks to the task of
sapping these foundations. How unsuccessful as yet
these repeated attempts of negative criticism have been,
may be seen from the fact that the assault is repeated
again and again. Infidelity, we are sure, would not
waste her strength in thrice slaying the slain, or in
raking away the ruins of a structure which has been
demolished already. If the objections of Paulus and
Eichhorn had been successful, the world would never
have heard of Baur and the school of Tubingen. And
again, if the Tubingen school had prevailed, there would
not have been any room for the labours of such destruc-
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translator's PREFACE. V
tive critics as Volckmar of Zurich and others. The
latest attack is, we are told, to be the last, until it fails,
and another is prepared more threatening than the
former. Thus every wave which beats against the rock
of eternal truth seems to rise out of the trough caused
by some receding wave, and raises its threatening crest
as if it would wash away the rock. These waves of
the sea are mighty, and rage terribly, but the Lord who
sitteth on high is mightier. It is of the nature of truth,
that the more it is tested the more sure it becomes under
the trial. So it has been with the argument for the
genuineness of the Gospels. The more that infidels have
sought to shake the character of St. John's Gospel, the
more collateral proofs have started up of the apostolic
character of this Gospel. Thus, though they mean
it not so, these attacks of opponents are among the
means whereby fresh evidences of the certitude of the
Gospels are called out. No one has contributed more
to this department of Christian literature than Dr.
Tischendorf. This is an age when little books on great
subjects are in greater request than ever. No defence
of truth can therefore be more serviceable than the
following short pamphlet, in which, in a few pages, and
in a clear and attractive style, the genuineness of the
Gospels is traced up inductively step by step, almost,
if not quite, to the days of the Apostles.
The method of proof is one which is thoroughly
satisfactory, and carries the convictions of the reader
along with it at every step. Circumstantial evidence
when complete, and when every link in the chain has
been thoroughly tested, is as strong as direct testimony.
This is the kind of evidence which Dr. Tischendorf
brings for the genuineness of our Gospels.
By what logicians call the method of rejection, it
is shown successively, that the Gospels which were
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vi translator's preface.
admitted as canonical in the fourth century oould not
have been written so late as the third century after
Christ. Then, in the same way, the testimony of the
third century carries us up to the second. The writers,
again, of the second century not only refer to the
Gospels as already commonly received as parts of sacred
Scripture, but also refer their origin to a date not later
than the end of the first century.
The induction is thus complete, that these writings
which the earliest of the apostolic fathers refer to, and
quote as apostolic writings, must have had their origin
in apostolic times. Thus we see, that of all theories,
the most irrational is that of the Rationalists, who
would have us believe that the Gospel of St. John was
not written before the middle of the second century,
and by a writer who palmed himself off as the Apostle
John. We are at a loss to understand how the Church
of the second century could have been so simple as not
to detect the forgery, as it did in the case of the so-
called Apocryphal Gospels. The Rationalists give us
no explanation of this, but would have us believe, on
grounds of pure subjective criticism, that the deity of
our Lord was a development of the second and third
centuries, after that the earlier Ebionite view of Jesus
of Nazareth had been mixed up with the Alexandrian
doctrine of the Logos : and that, as an amalgam of these
two elements, the one Jewish and the other Greek, there
resulted the Athanasian formula of the fourth century.
The historical proofs of Dr. Tischendorf blow to
pieces this unsubstantial structure of inner or subjective
criticism. No English reader of common sense will
hesitate for an instant to decide to which side the scale
inclines. With that reverence for facts which is our
English birthright, we should set one single documen-
tary proof like that, for instance, of the Codex Muratori,
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translator's preface. v&
referred to in the following pages; against all flier
subjective criticism of the Tubingen school. Too long*
has Germany dreamed away her faith in the historical
Christ, under the sleeping potions of these critics of the
idealist school, who, with Baur at their head, only apply
to theology the desolating and destructive theory of
Hegel, that thought, when it projects itself outward, (
produces things; and that all things exist, because they
seem to exist.
With such a school of metaphysics to start from!
it is easy to see what the results would be when applied
to historical criticism. "As with an enchanter's wand,"
factB which inconveniently did not square with the
professor's theory were waved away into thin air, /
and history became a kind of phantasmagoria, a series
of dissolving views. But the " magic lantern school,"
as they have been happily called, has been already
discredited in Germany, and is not likely to gain much
ground in this country. To complete their discomfiture,
the labours of such textuary critics as Dr. Tischendorf
are invaluable : critical proofs such as his are all the
more acceptable as coming from Germany. The good-
ness and wisdom of God is seen in this, that as negative
criticism had struck its roots deepest in German soil,
so from Germany it is now receiving its deadliest blow.
In nature, we know the antidote to certain poisons is
found growing close beside the bane. In Corsica, for
instance, the mineral springs of Orezza are considered
a specific for the malaria fever produced in the plains
below ; so healthy German criticism has done more than
anything else to clear the air of the miasma caused by
unhealthy speculation.
The results of a single discovery such as that of
Tischendorf will neutralise to every unprejudiced mind
all the doubts which subjective criticism has been able
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viii translator's preface.
to raise as to the genuineness of St. John's Gospel,
Thus it is that God's word is tried to the uttermost, and
because so tried and found true, his servants love it. If
the doubting of Thomas was overruled to the confirma-
tion of the faith of all the Apostles, we see the reason
why the subjective criticism of the Tubingen school
has been allowed to sap, if it could, the evidence of the
Gospel of St. John, in order that additional testimony-
should be brought from a convent on Mount Sinai to
confirm us still more fully in " the certainty of those
things in which we have been instructed."
The Translator.
October, 1866.
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THE DISCOVERY
0»
THE SINAITIC MANUSCKIPT.
As the Conference of the Evangelical Church of
Germany, held at Altenburg, in the month of
September, 1864, turned its attention to certain
recent works on the Life of Jesus, I was re-
quested by my friends to put together a few
thoughts on this important subject, and read
them before the Congress. This I consented to
do, and pointed out that M. Renan has taken
strange liberties with the Holy Land ; and that
the history of the early Church as well as that of
the sacred text, contains abundant arguments in
reply to those who deny the credibility of the
Gospel witnesses. My address was so favour-
ably received by the Congress, that the Editor
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10 NARRATIVE OP THE DISCOVERY
of the Allgemeine Ktrchemeitung, on the 3rd of
June last, made use of the following language :
"I venture to say that no address has ever
stirred our hearts like that short one of M.
Teschendorf. As a critic he is here on ground
on which he has no rival. When history speaks,
it is the duty of philosophy to be silent."
Familiar as I am through my long studies
with those facts which are best calculated to
throw light on that great question which now
agitates Christendom, I have thought it right
to publish the sketch of the subject, hasty as
it was, which I had prepared at Altenburg.
My work, printed in the month of March of
this year, has been so favourably received, that
in three weeks an edition of 2,000 copies has
been exhausted : a second edition was brought
out in May, and translations into French and
English were also prepared.
At the same time, the Committee of the
Religious Tract Society of Zwickau expressed
a desire to circulate this pamphlet, provided
it were recast and adapted for popular use.
Although I had many other occupations, I could
not but comply with their request, and without
delay applied myself to the task of revising the
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OP THE SINAITIC MANUSCRIPT* 11
pamphlet. I was glad of the opportunity of
addressing in this way a class of readers whom
my former writings had not reached; for, as
the real results of my researches are destined to
benefit the church at large, it is right that the
whole community should participate in those
benefits.
This popular tract, in the shape in which I
now publish it, lacks, I admit, the simple and
familiar style of the usual publications of the
Zwickau Society ; but, in spite of this fault,
which the very nature of the subject renders
inevitable, I venture to hope that it will be
generally understood. Its chief aim is to show
that our inspired Gospels most certainly take
their rise from apostolic times, and so to enable
the reader to take a short but clear view of one
of the most instructive and important epochs of
the Christian church.
In sitting down to write a popular version
of my pamphlet, the Zwickau Society also ex-
pressed a wish that I should preface it with a
short account of my researches, and especially
of the discovery of the Sinaitic Codex, which
naturally takes an important place in my list
of documentary proofs. The account of these
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12 NARRATIVE OP THE DISCOVERY
discoveries is already before the public, but as it
is possibly new to many of those who read the
Zwickau publications, I yielded to the wish of
the Committee, having no other desire in this
attempt than to build up my readers in their
most holy faith.
As several literary and historical essays,
written by me when a very young man, and
in particular two theological prize essays, were
favourably received by the public, I resolved,
in 1839, to devote myself to the textual study
of the New Testament, and attempted, by
making use of all the acquisitions of the last
three centuries, to reconstruct, if possible, the
exact text as it came from the pen of the sacred
writers. My first critical edition of the New
Testament appeared in the autumn of 1840.
But after giving this edition a final revision, I
came to the conviction that to make use even
of our existing materials would call for a more
attentive study than they had hitherto received,
and I resolved to give my leisure and abilities
to a fresh examination of the original docu-
ments. For the accomplishment of this pro-
tracted and difficult enterprise, it was needful
not only to undertake distant journeys, to
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OP THE 8INATTIC MANUSCRIPT. 13
devote much time, and to bring to the task
both ability and zeal, but also to provide a
large sum of money, and this — the sinews of
war — was altogether wanting. The Theological
Faculty of Leipzig gave me a letter of recom-
mendation to the Saxon Government; but at
first without any result. Doctor Von Falken-
stein, however, on being made Minister of Public
Worship, obtained a grant for me of 100 dollars
(about £15) to defray my travelling expenses,
and a promise of another hundred for the fol-
lowing year. What was such a sum as this with
which to undertake a long journey ? Full of
faith, however, in the proverb that " Grod helps
those who help themselves," and that what is
right must prosper, I resolved, in 1840, to set out
for Paris (on the very day of the Feast of the
Reformation), though I had not sufficient means
to pay even for my travelling suit ; and when I
reached Paris I had only fifty dollars left. The
other fifty had been spent on my journey.
However, I soon found men in Paris who
were interested in my undertaking. I managed
for some time to support myself by my pen,
keeping, however, the object which had brought
me to Paris steadily in view. After having
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14 NARRATIVE OF THE DISCOVERT
explored for two years the rich libraries of this
great city, not to speak of several journeys
made into Holland and England, I set out in
1843 for Switzerland, and spent some time
at Basle. Then passing through the south of
France I made my way into Italy, where I
searched the libraries of Florence, Venice,
Modena, Milan, Verona, and Turin. In April,
1844, 1 pushed on to the East. Egypt and the
Coptic convents of the Libyan desert, Mount
Sinai in Arabia, Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and the
Convent of St. Saba on the shores of the Dead
Sea, Nazareth and its neighbourhood, Smyrna
and the island of Patmos, Beyrout, Constanti-
nople, Athens ; these were the principal points
of my route, and of my researches in the East.
Lastly, having looked in on my way home on
the libraries of Vienna and Munich, I returned
to Leipzig in January, 1845.
This journey cost me 5,000 dollars. You
are ready to ask me, how the poor traveller,
who set out from Leipzig with only a few
unpaid bills, could procure such sums as these.
I have already partly given you a clue to
explain this, and will more fully account for it
as we go on with the narrative. Such help as
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OP THE SINATTIC MANUSCRIPT. 15
I was able to offer to fellow-travellers, a great
deal of kindness in return, and, above all, that
enthusiasm which does not start back from
privations and sacrifices, will explain how I got
on. But you are naturally more anxious to hear
what those labours were to which I devoted
five years of my life.
With this view I return to that edition of the
New Testament of which I have spoken above.
Soon after the Apostles had composed their
writings, they began to be copied, and the
incessant multiplication of copy upon copy went
on down to the sixteenth century, when printing
happily came to replace the labour of the
copyist. One can easily see how many errors
must inevitably have crept into writings which
were so often reproduced ; but it is more diffi-
cult still to understand, how writers could allow
themselves to bring in here and there changes,
not verbal only, but such as materially affect
the meaning, and, what is worse still, did not
shrink from cutting out a passage or inserting
one.
The first editions of the Greek text, which
appeared in the sixteenth century, were based
upon manuscripts which happened to be the
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16 NARRATIVE OP THE DISCOVERY
first to come to hand. For a long time men
were satisfied to reproduce and reprint these
early editions. In this way there arose a dis-
position to claim for this text, so often reprinted,
a peculiar value, without ever caring to ask
whether it was an exact reproduction or not of
the actual text as it was written in the first
century. But in the course of time manuscripts
were discovered in the public libraries of
Europe, which were a thousand years old, and
on comparing them with the printed text,
critics could not help seeing how widely the
received text departed in many places from the
text of the manuscripts. We should also here
add that from the very earliest age of the
Christian era the Greek text had been translated
into differed languages — into Latin, Syriac,
Egyptian, etc. Ancient manuscripts of these
versions were also brought to light, and it was
impossible not to see what variation of readings
there had been in the sacred text. The quota-
tions made by the Fathers from as early as
the second century, also confirmed in another
way the fact of these variations. It has thus
been placed beyond doubt that the original
text of the Apostles' writings, copied, recopied,
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OF THE SINAITIC MANUSCRIPT. 17
and multiplied during fifteen centuries, whether
in Greek or Latin, or in other languages, had
in many passages undergone such serious modi-
fications of meaning as to leave us in painful
uncertainty as to what the Apostles had actually
written.
Learned men have again and again attempted
to clear the sacred text from these extraneous
elements. But we have at last hit upon a better
plan even than this, which is to set aside this
teztus receptus altogether, and to construct a
fresh text, derived immediately from the most
ancient and authoritative sources. This is un-
doubtedly the right course to take, for in this
way only can we secure a text approximating
as closely as possible to that which came from
the Apostles.
Now to obtain this we must first make sure
of our ground by thoroughly studying the
documents which we possess. Well, in com-
pleting my first critical edition of the New
Testament, in 1840, I became convinced that
the task, so far from completed, was little more
than begun, although so many and such cele-
brated names are found on the list of critical
editors ; to mention only a few out of many :
B
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18 NABRATIVE OF THE DISCOVERY
Erasmus, Robert Stephens, Beza, Mill, Wet-
stein, Bengel, Griesbach, Matthaei, and Scholz.
This conviction led me to begin my travels. I
formed the design of revising and examining
■with the utmost possible c&re, the most ancient
manuscripts of the New Testament which were
to be found in the libraries of Europe; and
nothing seemed to me more suitable, with this
end in view, than to publish with the greatest
exactness the most important of these docu-
ments. I should thus secure the documents
as the common property of Christendom, and
ensure their safe keeping by men of learning
should the originals themselves ever happen to
perish.
I extended, for this reason, my investigations
to the most ancient Latin manuscripts, on
account of their great importance, without
passing by the Greek text of the Old Testa-
ment, which was referred to by the Apostles in
preference to the original Hebrew, and which,
notwithstanding its high authority, had during
the lapse of two thousand years become more
corrupt than that of the New Testament. I
extended my researches also to the Apocryphal
books of the New Testament, as the present
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OF THE SINATTIC MANUSCRIPT. 19
treatise will readily show. These works bear
upon the canonical books in more respects than
one, and throw considerable light on Christian
antiquity. The greater number of them were
buried in our great libraries, and it is doubtful
if any one of them had received the attention
which it deserved. In the next place, I proposed
to collect together all the Greek manuscripts
which we possess, which are of a thousand
years' antiquity, including in the list even those
which do not bear on the Bible, so as to exhibit
in a way never done before, when and how the
different manuscripts had been written. In
this way we should be better able to understand
why one manuscript is to be referred to the
fourth century, another to the fifth, and a
third to the eighth, although they had no
dates attached to determine when they were
written.
Such then have been the various objects
which I hoped to accomplish by my travels. To
some, all this may seem mere learned labour :
but permit me to add that the science touches
on life in two important respects ; to mention
only two, — to clear up in this way the history
of the sacred text, and to recover if possible the
82
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20 NARRATIVE OP THE DISCOVERY
genuine apostolic text which is the foundation
of our faith, — these cannot be matters of small
importance. The whole of Christendom is, in
fact, deeply interested in these results. Of
this there can be no doubt ; and the extra-
ordinary proofs of interest that the Christian
world has given me are alone a sufficient
attestation.
The literary treasures which I have sought to
explore have been drawn in most cases from the
convents of the East, where, for ages, the pens
of industrious monks have copied the sacred
writings, and collected manuscripts of all kinds.
It therefore occurred to me whether it was not
probable that in some recess of Greek or
Coptic, Syrian or Armenian monasteries, there
might be some precious manuscripts slumbering
for ages in dust and darkness ? And would not
every sheet of parchment so found, covered
with writings of the fifth, sixth, and seventh
centuries, be a kind of literary treasure, and a
valuable addition to our Christian literature ?
These considerations have, ever since the year
1842, fired me with a strong desire to visit the
East. I had just completed at the time a work
which had been very favourably received in
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OF THE SINAITIC MANUSCRIPT. 21
Europe, and for which I had received marks of
approval from several learned bodies, and even
from crowned heads.*
The work I advert to was this. There lay-
in one of the libraries of Paris one of the most
important manuscripts then known of the Greek
text. This parchment manuscript, the writing
of which, of the date of the fifth century, had
been retouched and renewed in the seventh,
and again in the ninth century, had, in the
twelfth century, been submitted to a twofold
process. It had been washed and pumiced, to
write on it the treatises of an old father of
the Church of the name of Ephrem. Five cen-
turies later, a Swiss theologian of the name of
Wetstein, had attempted to decipher a few traces
of the original manuscript; and, later still,
another theologian, Grriesbach of Jena, came to
try his skill on it, although the librarian assured
him that it was impossible for mortal eye to
rediscover a trace of a writing which had
* M. Tischendorf, then 27 years of age, received from a
German University the degree of Doctor of Divinity just as
a Swiss University was about to confer it. Three foreign
governments decorated him. Others sent him gold medals.
The Dutch Government caused one to be engraved expressly
in recognition of this work.
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22 NABRmVE OF THE DISCOVERY
perished for six centuries. In spite of these
unsuccessful attempts, the French Government
had recourse to powerful chemical re-agents, to
bring out the effaced characters. But a Leipzig
theologian, who was then at Paris, was so un-
successful in this new attempt, that he asserted
that it was impossible to produce an edition of
this text, as the manuscript was quite illegible-
It was after all these attempts that I began, in
1841-2, to try my skill at the manuscript, and
had the good fortune to decipher it completely,
and even to distinguish between the dates of
the different writers who had been engaged on
the manuscript.
This success, which procured for me several
marks of recognition and support, encouraged
me to proceed. I conceived it to be my duty
to complete an undertaking which had hitherto
been treated as chimerical. The Saxon Govern-
ment came forward to support me. The king,
Frederick Augustus n., and his distinguished
brother, John, sent me marks of their approval ;
and several eminent patrons of learning at
Frankfort, Geneva, Rome, and Breslau gene-
rously offered to interest themselves in my
attempt.
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OF THE SINAmC MANUSCRIPT. 23
I here pass over in silence the interesting
details of my travels — my audience with the
Pope, Gregory xvl, in May, 1843 — my
intercourse with Cardinal Mezzofanti, that sur-
prising and celebrated linguistr-and I come
to the result of my journey to the East. It
was in April, 1844, that I embarked at Leg-
horn for Egypt. The desire which I felt to
discover some precious remains of any manu-
scripts, more especially Biblical, of a date
which would carry us back to the early
times of Christianity, was realised beyond my
expectations. It was at the foot of Mount
Sinai, in the Convent of St. Catherine, that I
discovered the pearl of all my researches. In
visiting the library of the monastery, in the
month of May, 1844, I perceived in the middle
of the great hall a large and wide basket full of
old parchments, and the librarian, who was a
man of information, told me that two heaps of
papers like these, mouldered by time, had been
already committed to the flames. What was
my surprise to find amid this heap of papers a
considerable number of sheets of a copy of the
Old Testament in Greek, which seemed to me
to be one of the most ancient that I had ever
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24 NARRATIVE OF THE DISCOVERY
seen. The authorities of the convent allowed
me to possess myself of a third of these parch-
ments, or about forty-three sheets, all the more
readily as they were destined for the fire.
But I could not get them to yield up possession
of the remainder. The too lively satisfaction
which I had displayed, had aroused their sus-
picions as to the value of this manuscript. I
transcribed a page of the text of Isaiah and
Jeremiah, and enjoined on the monks to take
religious care of all such remains which might
fell in their way.
On my return to Saxony there were men of
learning who at once appreciated the value of the
treasure which I brought back with me. I did
not divulge the name of the place where I had
found it, in the hopes of returning and recover-
ing the rest of the manuscript. I handed up
to the Saxon Government my rich collection of
oriental manuscripts in return for the payment
of all my travelling expenses, I deposited in
the library of the University of Leipzig, in the
shape of a collection, which bears my name,
fifty manuscripts, some of which are very rare
and interesting. I did the same with the
Sinaitic fragments, to which I gave the name
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OP THE SINAITIC MANUSCRIPT. 25
of Codex Frederick Augustus, in acknowledg-
ment of the patronage given to me by the King
of Saxony ; and I published them in Saxony in
a sumptuous edition, in which each letter and
stroke was exactly reproduced by the aid of
lithography.
But these home labours upon the manuscripts
which I had already safely garnered, did not
allow me to forget the distant treasure which I
had discovered. { I made use of an influential
friend, who then resided at the court of the
Viceroy of Egypt, to carry on negotiations for
procuring the rest of the manuscripts. But his
attempts were, unfortunately, not successful.
" The monks of the convent," he wrote to me
to say, "have, since your departure, learned
the value of these sheets of parchment, and will
not part with them at any price."
I resolved, therefore, to return to the East
to copy this priceless manuscript. Having set
out from Leipzig in January, 1853, I embarked
at Trieste for Egypt, and in the month of Feb-
ruary I stood, for the second time, in the Convent
of Sinai. This second journey was more suc-
cessful even than the first, from the discoveries
that I made of rare Biblical manuscripts ; but I
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26 NAERATSVE OP THE DISCOVERY
was not able to discover any further traces of
the treasure of 1844. I forget : I found in a roll
of papers a little fragment which, written over
on both sides, contained eleven short lines of
Genesis which convinced me that the manu-
script originally contained the entire Old Tes-
tament, but that the greater part had been long
since destroyed. V
'' On my return I reproduced in the first
volume of a collection of ancient Christian
documents the page of the Sinaitic manu-
script which I had transcribed in 1844, without
divulging the secret of where I had found it.
I confined myself to the statement that I claimed
the distinction of having discovered other docu-
ments, — no matter whether published in Berlin
or Oxford — as I assumed that some learned
travellers who had visited the convent after me
had managed to carry them off.
The question now arose how to turn to use
these discoveries. Not to mention a second
journey which I made to Paris in 1849, 1 went
through Germany, Switzerland, and England,
devoting several years of unceasing labour to a
seventh edition of my New Testament. But I
felt myself more and more urged to recommence
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OF THE SINArnC MANUSCRIPT. 27
my researches in the East. Several motives, and
more especially the deep reverence of all Eastern
monasteries for the Emperor of Russia, led me,
in the autumn of 1856, to submit to the Russian >
Government a plan of a journey for making
systematic researches in the East. This pro-
posal only aroused a jealous and fanatical
opposition in St. Petersburg. People were
astonished that a foreigner and a Protestant
should presume to ask the support of the
Emperor of the Greek and orthodox church for
a mission to the East. But the good cause
triumphed. The interest which my proposal
excited, even within the imperial circle, inclined
the Emperor in my favour. It obtained his
approval in the month of September, 1858, and
the funds which I asked for were placed at
my disposal. Three months subsequently my
seventh edition of the New Testament, which
had cost me three years of incessant labour,
appeared^ and in the commencement of January,
1859 5 1 again set sail for the East. /
I cannot here refrain from mentioning the
peculiar satisfaction I had experienced a little
before this. A learned Englishman, one of my
friends, had been sent into the East by his
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28 NARRATIVE OF THE DISCOVERY
Government to discover and purchase old Greek
manuscripts, and spared no cost in obtaining
them. I had cause to fear, especially for my
pearl of the Convent of St. Catherine ; but I
heard that he had not succeeded in acquiring
anything, and had not even gone as far as
Sinai ; " for," as he said in his official report,
" after the visit of such an antiquarian and
critic as Dr. Tischendorf, I could not expect
any success." I saw by this how well advised I
had been to reveal to no one my secret of 1 844.
/By the end of the month of January I had
reached the Convent of Mount Sinai. The
mission with which I was intrusted entitled me
to expect every consideration and attention.
The prior, on saluting me, expressed a wish
that I might succeed in discovering fresh
supports for the truth. His kind expres-
sion of goodwill was verified even beyond his
expectations.
After having devoted a few days in turning
over the manuscripts of the convent, not with-
out alighting here and there on some precious
parchment or other, I told my Bedouins, on
the 4th February, to hold themselves in readi-
ness to set out with their dromedaries for Cairo
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OF THE SINATTIC MANUSCRIPT, 29
on the 7th, when an entirely fortuitous circum-
stance carried me at once to the goal of all my
desires. On the afternoon of this day, I was
taking a walk with the steward of the convent
in the neighbourhood, and as we returned
towards sunset he begged me to take some
refreshment with him in his cell. Scarcely
had he entered the room, when, resuming our
former subject of conversation, he said, " And
I too, have read a Septuagint, i.e. a copy of the
Greek translation made by the Seventy ;" and
so saying, he took down from the corner of the
room a bulky kind of volume wrapped up in a
red cloth, and laid it before me. I unrolled the
cover, and discovered, to my great surprise, not
only those very fragments which, fifteen years
before, I had taken out of the basket, but also
other parts of the Old Testament, the New
Testament complete, and, in addition, the
Epistle of Barnabas and a part of the Pastor
of Hennas. Full of joy, which this time I had
the self-command to conceal from the steward
and the rest of the community, I asked, as if in
a careless way, for permission to take the manu-
script into my sleeping chamber to look over it
more at leisure. There by myself I could give
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30 NAERATTVE OF TEDS DISCOVERY
way to the transport of joy which I felt. I
knew that I held in my hand the most precious
Biblical treasure in existence — a document
whose age and importance exceeded that of all
the manuscripts which I had ever examined
during twenty years , study of the subject. I
cannot now, I confess, recall all the emotions
which I felt in that exciting moment with such
a diamond in my possession. Though my lamp
was dim and the night cold, I sat down at once
to transcribe the Epistle of Barnabas. For two
centuries search has been made in vain for the
original Greek of the first part of this Epistle,
which has been only known through a very
faulty Latin translation. And yet this letter,
from the end of the second down to the be-
ginning of the fourth century, had an extensive
authority, since many Christians assigned to it
and to the Pastor of Hernias a place side by
side with the inspired writings of the New
Testament. This was the very reason why
these two writings were both thus bound up
with the Sinaitic Bible, the transcription of
which is to be referred to the first half of the
fourth century and about the time of the first
Christian emperor.
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OF THE SINArnC MANUSCRIPT, 31
Early on the 5th of February, I called upon
the steward. I asked permission to take the
manuscript with me to Cairo to have it there
transcribed completely from beginning to end ;
but the prior had set out only two days before
also for Cairo, on his way to Constantinople to
attend at the election of a new archbishop, and
one of the monks would not give his consent to
my request. What was then to be done ? My
plans were quickly decided. On the 7th, at
sunrise, I took a hasty farewell of the monks in
hopes of reaching Cairo in time to get the prior's
consent. Every mark of attention was shown
me on setting out. The Russian flag was hoisted
from the convent walls, while the hill sides
rang with the echoes of a parting salute, and
the most distinguished members of the order
escorted me on my way as far as the plain.
The following Sunday I reached Cairo, where
I was received with the same marks of good-
will. The prior, who had not yet set out, at
once gave his consent to my request, and also
gave instructions to a Bedouin to go and fetch
the manuscript with all speed. Mounted on his
camel, in nine days he went from Cairo to Sinai
and back, and on the 24th February the price-
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32 NABRATTVE OP THE DISCOVERY
less treasure was again in my hands. The time
was now come at once boldly and without delay
to set to work to a task of transcribing no less
than a hundred and ten thousand lines, of
which a great number were difficult to read,
either on account of later corrections or through
the ink having faded, and that in a climate
where the thermometer during March, April
and May, is never below 77° of Fahrenheit in
the shade. No one can say what this cost me
in fatigue and exhaustion.
The relation in which I stood to the monas-
tery gave me the opportunity of suggesting to
the monks the thought of presenting the original
to the Emperor of Russia as the natural pro-
tector of the Greek orthodox faith. The pro-
posal was favourably entertained, but an unex-
pected obstacle arose to prevent its being acted
upon. The new archbishop, unanimously elected
during Easter week, and whose right it was to
give a final decision in such matters, was not
yet consecrated, or his nomination even ac-
cepted by the Sublime Porte. And while they
were waiting for this double solemnity, the
Patriarch of Jerusalem protested so vigorously
against the election, that a three months' delay
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OP THE SINAITIC MANUSCRIPT. 33
must intervene before the election could be rati-
fied and the new archbishop installed. Seeing
this, I resolved to set out for Jaffa and Jerusalem.
Just at this time the Grand-Duke Constan-
tino of Russia, who had taken the deepest
interest in my labours, arrived at Jaffa. I
accompanied him to Jerusalem. I visited the
ancient libraries of the holy city, that of the
monastery of Saint Saba on the shores of the
Dead Sea, and then those of Beyrout, Ladikia,
Smyrna, and Patmos. These fresh researches
were attended with the most happy results.
At the time desired I returned to Cairo ; but
here, instead of success, only met with a fresh
disappointment. The Patriarch of Jerusalem
still kept up his opposition, and as he carried it
to the most extreme lengths, the five represen-
tatives of the convent had to remain at Con-
stantinople, where they sought in vain for an
interview with the Sultan to press their rights.
Under these circumstances, the monks of Mount
Sinai, although willing to do so, were unable to
carry out my suggestion.
In this embarrassing state of affairs the arch-
bishop and his friends intreated me to use my
influence on behalf of the convent. I therefore
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34 NAKRATITE OF THE DISCOVERY
set out at once for Constantinople with a view
of there supporting the case of the five repre-
sentatives. The Prince Lobanow, Russian
ambassador to Turkey, received me with the
greatest goodwill, and as he offered me hospi-
tality in his country-house on the shores of the
Bosphorus, I was able the better to attend to
the negotiations which had brought me there.
But our irreconcileable enemy, the influential
and obstinate Patriarch of Jerusalem, still had
the upper hand. The archbishop was then
advised to appeal himself in person to the
patriarchs, archbishops, and bishops, and this
plan succeeded; for before the end of the year,
the right of the convent was recognised, and we
gained our cause, I myself brought back the
news of our success to Cairo, and with it I also
brought my own special request, backed with
the support of Prince Lobanow.
' On the 27th of September I returned to
Cairo. The monks and archbishop then warmly
expressed their thanks for my zealous efforts in
their cause, and the following day I received
from them, under the form of a loan, the Sinaitic
Bible, to carry it to St. Petersburg, and there
to have it copied as accurately as possible.
I set out for Russia early in October, and
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OP THE SINAITIC MANUSCRIPT. 35
on the 19th of November I presented to their
Imperial Majesties, in the Winter Palace at
Tsarkoe-Selo, my rich collection of old Greek,
Syriac, Coptic, Arabic, and other manuscripts,
in the middle of which the Sinaitic Bible shone
like a crown. I then took the opportunity of
submitting to the Emperor Alexander n. a pro-
posal of making an edition of this Bible worthy
of the work and of the Emperor himself, and
which should be regarded as one of the greatest
undertakings in critical and Biblical study.
I did not feel free to accept the brilliant
offers that were made to me to settle finally,
or even for a few years, in the Russian
capital. It was at Leipzig, therefore, at the
end of three years, and after three journies to
St. Petersburg, that I was able to carry to com-
pletion the laborious task of producing a facsimile
copy of this codex in four folio volumes.
In the month of October, 1862, I repaired to
St. Petersburg to present this edition to their
Majesties. The Emperor, who had liberally
provided for the cost, and who approved the
proposal of this superb manuscript appearing
on the celebration of the Millenary Jubilee of
the Russian empire, has distributed impres-
sions of it throughout the Christian world,
c2
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36 DISCOVERT OF THE SINAITIC MANUSCRIPT.
which, without distinction of creed, have
expressed their recognition of its value. Even
the Pope, in an autograph letter, has sent to
the editor his congratulations and admiration.
It is only a few months ago that the two most
celebrated Universities of England, Cambridge
and Oxford, desired to show me honour by con-
ferring on me their highest academic degree.
" I would rather," said an old man — himself of
the highest distinction for learning — " I would
rather have discovered this Sinaitic manuscript
than the Koh-i-noor of the Queen of England."
But that which I think more highly of than
all these flattering distinctions is the fact that
Providence has given to our age, in which
attacks on Christianity are so common, the
Sinaitic Bible, to be to us a full and clear light
as to what is the real text of God's Word written,
and to assist us in defending the truth by esta-
blishing its authentic form.
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WHEN WERE OUB GOSPEIS WRITTEN?
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CHAPTER I.
ECCLESIASTICAL TESTIMONY.
And now what shall we say respecting the life
of Jesus ? What do we certainly know on this
subject ?
This question has been much discussed in
our days. It is well known that several learned
men have, quite recently, written works on the
life of Jesus, purporting to prove that He whom
Christendom claims as her Lord did not really
live the life that the Gospels record of Him.
These works, which have been very freely
circulated, have found a large number of
readers. It may be that there are some points
not yet fully understood, but this at least is
undeniable, that the tendency of the works
referred to is to rob the Saviour of his Divine
character.
But, perhaps, it will be said that the Deity
of Christ is not an essential element of Christi-
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40 THE DATE OP THE GOSPELS.
anity. Does there not remain to us its sublime
system of morals, even though Christ were not
the Son of God ? To reason in this way seems
to us to imply either that we have no idea at
all of what Christianity is, or, which comes
to the same thing, that we have an essentially
wrong idea, Christianity does not, strictly
speaking, rest on the moral teaching of Jesus,
however sublime that is, but it rests on his
person only. It is on the person of Christ that
the Church is founded ; this is its corner-stone ;
it is on this the doctrines which Jesus and his
apostles taught, rest as the foundation truth of
all. And if we are in error in believing in the
person of Christ as taught us in the Gospels,
then the Church herself is in error, and must
be given up as a deception.
The link then which unites the Church to the
person of Christ is so close, that to determine
the nature of that Person, is to her the vital
question of all. The Christian world is per-
fectly sure that it is so, and I need appeal to no
other fact than her anxiety to know all that can
be known of the life of Jesus, since the nature of
his person can only be known through his life.
All the world knows that our Gospels are
succinct narratives of the life of Christ. We
must also firankly admit that we have no other
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ECCLESIASTICAL TESTIMONY. 41
source of information with respect to the life of
Jesus than the sacred writings. In fact, what-
ever the early ages of the Church report to us
concerning the person of Christ from any inde-
pendent source is either derived from the Gos-
pels, or is made up of a few insignificant details
of no value in themselves, or is sometimes drawn
from hostile sources. These are the only sources
from which opponents of the life of Christ,
of his miraculous ministry, and his Divine
character draw their attacks on the credibility
of the four Gospels.
But it will then be said, how has it been
possible to impugn the credibility of the Gos-
pels — of these books which St. Matthew and
St. John, the immediate disciples and apostles
of the Lord, and St. Mark and St. Luke, the
friends and companions of the apostles, have
written ?
It is in this way: by denying that the
Gospels were written by the authors whose
names they bear. And if you ask me, in the
next place, why it is that so much stress is laid
on this point? I will answer that the testimony
of direct eye-witnesses, like John and Matthew,
or of men intimately connected with these eye-
witnesses, like Mark and Luke, is entitled,
for this very reason, to be believed, and their
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42 THE DATE OF THE GOSPELS.
writings to be received as trustworthy. The
credibility of a writer clearly depends on the
interval of time which lies between him and the
events which he describes. The farther the nar-
rator is removed from the facts which he lays
before us, the more his claims to credibility are
reduced in value. When a considerable space of
time intervenes, the writer can only report to us
what he has heard from intermediate witnesses,
or read of in writers who are perhaps unde-
serving of credit. Now the opponents of our
Gospels endeavour to assign them to writers of
this class who were not in a position to give
a really credible testimony; to writers who
only composed their narratives long after the
time when Christ lived, by putting together
all the loose reports which circulated about
his person and work. It is in this way that
they undermine the credit of the Gospels, by
detaching them completely from the Evangelists
whose names they bear.
This is certainly one most successful way of
overturning the dignity and authority of the
Gospels.
There is another plan even more likely to
effect the same end, and which they have not
failed to have recourse to. There are men who
call themselves enlightened who think that com-
mon sense is quite superior to Divine Revelation,
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ECCLESIASTICAL TESTIMONY. 43
and who pretend to explain the miracles of
Scripture, either by the imperfect ideas of these
times, or by a certain prejudiced theory of the
Old Testament, or by a sort of accommodation,
according to which Jesus adapted his words
and deeds to meet the hopes of the Jews, and
so passed himself off among them as something
greater than he really was.
This exaltation of common sense is not with-
out its attractions for men of the world. It
is easily understood, and so, little by little, it
has become our modern form of unbelief. Men
have withdrawn themselves from God and
Christianity, and it must be confessed that many
of these empty and sonorous phrases about
liberty and the dignity of man have contributed
not a little to this result. " Do not believe,"
they will Jell you, "that man is born in sin
and needs to be redeemed. He has a nature
which is free, and which has only to be elevated
to all that is beautiful and good, in order that
he may properly enjoy life." Once admit this,
and it is easy to see that this kind of unbelief
will soon make away with the Gospels, as well
as the rest of the Scriptures. It will despise
them as the expressions of an antiquated and
bygone state of feeling, and will shake them off
as cumbrous chains, as soon as it can.
The volume which appeared in Paris in 1863,
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44 THE DATE OF THE GOSPELS.
and which has since made such a stir in the
world, La Vie de Jesus, by M. Renan, is one of
the fruits of this unbelief. This work has
nothing in common with those that loyally and
honestly inquire into the facts of the case. It
is written on most arbitrary principles of its
own, and is nothing else than a caricature
of history from beginning to end. Can we
suppose, for instance, that M. Renan seriously
believes his own theory, that St. John wrote his
Gospel because his vanity was offended, either
through jealousy of St. Peter or hatred of
Judas ? Or, when he accounts for the interest
of the wife of Pilate in Jesus in these terms,
"That she had possibly seen the fair young
Galilean from some window of the palace which
opened on the Temple court. Or perhaps she
saw him in a dream, and the blood of the
innocent young man who was about to be
condemned gave her a nightmare." Again,
when he attempts to explain the resurrection of
Lazarus by a deception of this same Lazarus,
which was afterwards found out by Jesus, and
by an act of extravagance of his sisters, which
is excusable on account of their fanaticism.
"Lazarus," M. Renan says, "yet pale with
sickness had himself wrapped up in grave-
clothes, and laid in the family sepulchre."
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EOCLESUSHCAL TESTIMONY. 45
These examples, which we could easily add
to if we did not wish to avoid giving our readers
unnecessary pain, seem to us sufficient to give
our readers an idea of M. Renan's book : and
since, in spite of all its frivolity, its historical
inconsistency, and its tasteless disfigurement of
facts, this production has made, even in Ger-
many, such an impression, is it not plain
that, alas ! even among us, infidelity is widely
diffused ? — partly produced by, and partly the
cause, in return, of our ignorance of the history
of the Bible.
For this book of Kenan's, German criticism
is in a certain sense responsible. The manner
of handling the Bible which we have described
already, and which consists in setting common
sense above revelation, took its rise on the soil
of Germany. M. Renan sets out with this
principle, and there are not wanting learned
men in Germany who endeavour to give it com-
pleteness, by supplying it with the scientific
base which it wants. This leads us, quite
naturally, to speak of the direct attacks against
the authenticity and apostolic authority of the
Gospels, though, as far as this French work is
concerned, it is written in too thin and super-
ficial a style to be of much account one way
or the other, and would certainly not have
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46 THE DATE OF THE GOSPELS.
much effect in shaking any thinking person in
his belief in the Gospel, or cause him, without
further inquiry, to give up the traditional view,
that the Gospels really came from the writers
to whom the Church refers them.
To know what we are to believe in this
matter, we must carefully examine the proofs
which our adversaries bring forward. The chief
points in their case are the assertions which
they make, and pretend to support by the
history of the second century — that the Gospels
did not see the light till after the end of the
apostolic age. To support this point, they
appeal to the testimony of the most ancient
Church literature. They maintain that the
Christian writings composed immediately after
the Apostles do not show any trace of acquaint-
ance with, nor use of, the Gospels, which we
possess, and especially with that of St. John,
and they conclude that the Gospels could not,
consequently, have been in existence.
If this assertion of theirs is well-founded — if
there exists such a Christian literature as they
speak of, that is, a series of works written
between the end of the first century and the
middle of the second, and if we do not find in
these writings any reference to our Gospels,
then I should admit that the faith of the
Church, which teaches that the Gospels were
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ECXJLESIASTICAL TESTIMONY. 47
written during the second half of the first
century, -would be seriously compromised.
Against such an assertion as this we could only
raise one objection : we should ask if the nature
and extent # of the literature absolutely and
inevitably required that it should refer to and
quote the Gospels, and whether we should be
entitled, from its silence on the subject of the
Gospels, to claim such an inference as this? —
for it is conceivable that many excellent things
might have been written on the subject without
any direct reference to the Gospels. But what
could we say if we had to prove the direct con-
trary ? I mean, if we were to find in works
written a little after the apostolic age, direct
quotations from the Gospels ; or if we see them
treated with the greatest respect, or perhaps
even already treated as canonical and sacred
writings? In this case, it would be beyond
doubt that our Gospels would have been really
composed in the apostolic age, a conclusion
which our opponents resist and deny with all
their might.
The writer of this pamphlet, in common with
many other impartial critics, is firmly con-
vinced that a conscientious examination of the
question proves precisely the very opposite to
that which the adversaries of the Gospel affirm ;
and this is especially true of the Gospel of
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48 THE DATE OP THE GOSPELS.
St. John, the most important of the four. To
throw light on this important question, we
must enter without delay on this inquiry, and
ascertain as clearly as possible, whether the
most primitive Christian literature bears any
testimony for or against our Evangelists.
To do this, let us transport ourselves back to
the latter half of the second century, and in-
quire how the Christian Church of that day
thought of the four Evangelic narratives.
The first thing which strikes us is, that in all
parts of the Church the four Evangelists were
treated as a part of Holy Scripture. The
Church Fathers of that age, belonging to many
different countries, have written works in
which they are very frequently quoted, and
are always treated as sacred and apostolic
writings.
At Lyons, where the first Christian Church
in Gaul was founded, the Bishop Irenaeus
wrote, at the end of the second century, a great
work on those early Gnostic heresies, which
arbitrarily attempted to overturn the doctrine
of the Church : and in combating these errors
he made a general use of the Gospels. The
number of the passages which he refers to is
about four hundred^ and the direct quotations
from St. John alone exceed eighty.
We may say as much for the energetic and
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ECCLESIASTICAL TESTIMONY, 49
learned Tertullian, who lived at Carthage about
the end of the second century. His numerous
writings contain several hundred passages taken
from the Gospels — two hundred of these, at
least, taken from St. John.
It is the same with Clement, the celebrated
teacher of the Catechetical School of Alexandria,
in Egypt, who also lived about the end of the
second century.
Add to these three testimonies a catalogue
which bears the name of Muratori, its dis-
coverer, and which enumerates the books of the
New Testament which from the first were con-
sidered canonical and sacred. This catalogue
was \taritten a little after the age of Pius I.
(a.d. 142-157), about a.d. 170, and probably in
Rome itself; and at the head of the list it
places our four Grospels. It is true that the first
lines of this fragment, which refer to Matthew
and Mark, have perished, but immediately
after the blank the name of Luke appears as the
third, and that of John as the fourth ; so that,
even in this remote age, we find even the
order in which our Evangelists follow each
other thus early attested to— Matthew, Mark,
Luke, and John.
Let us quote two other witnesses, one of
whom carries us back to an antiquity even
more remote. We here refer to the two
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50 THE DATE OP THE GOSPELS.
most ancient versions made of the New Testa-
ment. One of these translations is into Syriac,
and is called the Peschito. The other, in Latin,
is known by the name of the Italic, and both
assign the first place to the four Evangelists.
The canonical authority of these four Gospel
narratives must have been completely recog-
nised and established in the mother Church
before they would have been translated into the
dialect of the daughter Churches, Syriac and
Latin.
When are we to say that this took place?
The Syriac version, which carries us as far East
as to the banks of the Euphrates, is generally
assigned to the end of the second century, and
not without good reasons, though we have not
any positive proof to offer. The Latin version
had acquired, even before this period, a certain
public authority. Thus the Latin translator of
the great work of Irenaeus, written in Greek,
which ^e assign to the end of the second cen-
tury (Tertullian, in fact, copies this translator
in the quotations which he makes from Irenaeus),
and Tertullian also, at the end of the same cen-
tury, follow the Italic version. The estimation
in which the Latin version of the Gospels was
then held, necessarily supposes that this transla-
tion must have been made some ten or twenty
years at least before this. It is thus a well
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ECCLESIASTICAL TESTIMONY. 51
established fact that already between a.d. 150
and 200, not only were the Grospels translated
into Latin and Syriac, but also that their number
was defined to be four only, neither more nor
less ; and this remarkable fact is well calculated
to throw light on the question of their true age
and origin. We shall return to this farther on.
Let us pause here to consider again these two
great church teachers — Irenaeus and Tertullian.
Their testimony is decisive, and no one, even
among those who deny the authenticity of St.
John, is able to question it. We have here
only to inquire whether their testimony is to be
limited to the time only when they wrote — that
is to say, whether it proves nothing more than
the high consideration in which the Evangelists
were held at the time when they wrote. In his
refutation of these false teachers, Irenseus not
only refers to the four Gospels with perfect
confidence, and with the most literal exactness,
but he even remarks that there are necessarily
four, neither more nor less ; and in proof of
this he adduces comparisons from the four quar-
ters of the world, the four principal winds, and
the four figures of the cherubim. He says that
the four Evangelists are the four columns of the
Church, which is extended over the whole world,
and sees in this number four a peculiar appoint-
ment of the Creator of the world. I ask then
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is such a statement consistent with the assertion
that the four Gospels first became of authority
about the time of Irenaeus, and that Christians
then set up a fourth and later Gospel, that of
St. John, beside the other three older Gospels ?
Are we not rather constrained to admit that
their authority was already then ancient and
established, and that their number four was a
matter already so undisputed that the Bishop
Irenaeus could justify and explain it in his own
peculiar way as we have just now seen ? Irenaeus
died in the second year of the third century,
but in his youth he had sat at the feet of the
aged Polycarp, and Polycarp, in his turn, had
been a disciple of the Evangelist St. John, and
had conversed with other eye-witnesses of the
Gospel narrative. Irenaeus, in speaking of his
own personal recollections, gives us Polycarp's
own account of that which he had heard from
the lips of St. John and other disciples of
our Lord, and expressly adds that all these
words agree with Scripture. But let us hear
his own words as contained in a letter to
Florinus : —
"When I was yet a child I saw thee at
Smyrna, in Asia Minor, at Polycarp's house,
where thou wert distinguished at Court, and
obtained the regard of the bishop. I can more
distinctly recollect things which happened then
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ECCLESIASTICAL TESTIMONY. 53
than others more recent; for events which hap-
pened in infancy seem to grow with the mind,
and to become part of ourselves, so that I can
recall the very place where Polycarp used to sit
and teach, his manner of speech, his mode of life,
his appearance, the style of his address to the
people, his frequent references to St. John and
to others who had seen our Lord ; how he used
to repeat from memory their discourses, which
he had heard from them concerning our Lord,
his miracles and mode of teaching, and how,
being instructed himself by those who were eye-
witnesses of the Word, there was in all that he
said a strict agreement with the Scriptures."
This is the account which Irenaeus himself
gives of his connection with Polycarp, and of
the truths which he had learned from him.
Who will now venture to question whether this
Father had ever heard a word from Polycarp
about the Gospel of St. John ? The time when
Irenseus, then a young man, was known to
Polycarp, who died a martyr at Smyrna, about
a.d. 1 65, could not have been later than a.d. 150 ;
yet they would have us believe that Irenaeus had
not then heard a word from his master, Poly-
carp, about the Gospel of St. John, when he so
often recalls the discourses of this apostle ! Any
testimony of Polycarp in favour of the Gospel
refers us back to the Evangelist himself; for
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54 THE DATE OP THE GOSPELS.
Polycarp, in speaking to Irenaeus of this Gospel as
a work of his master, St. John, must have learned
from the lips of the Apostle himself whether he
was its author or not. There is nothing more
damaging to these doubters of the authenticity
of St. John's Gospel than this testimony of
Polycarp; and there is no getting rid of this
difficulty unless by setting aside the genuine-
ness of the testimony itself. This fact also
becomes more striking if we consider it under
another aspect. What I mean is this : those who
deny the authenticity of St John's Gospel, say
that this Gospel only appeared about a.d.. 150,
and that Polycarp never mentioned the Gospel
as such to Irenaeus, But in this case can we
suppose that Irenaeus would have believed in
the authenticity of this Gospel, a work that
professed to be the most precious legacy of St.
John to the Christian Church, as the narrative
of an eye-witness and an intimate friend of the
Redeemer, and a Gospel whose independent
character, as regards the other three, seemed to
take away something from their authority ? The
very fact that such a work of St. John had never
once been mentioned to him by Polycarp would
have at once convinced Irenaeus that it was an
audacious imposture. And are we to believe
that Irenaeus would produce such a forgery as
this with which to reply to these false teachers,
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ECCLESIASTICAL TESTIMONY. 55
who themselves falsified Scripture, and appealed
to apocryphal writings as if they were genuine
and inspired ! And are we farther to suppose
that he would havfe linked such a writing up
with the other three Gospels to combine what
he calls a quadruple or four-sided Gospel !
What a tissue of contradictions, or rather, to
use the right word, of absurdities !
These arguments, as we have just stated them,
are not new ; they are at least found in Irenaeus,
They have been stated before, but they have
scarcely ever received the consideration which
they deserve. For our part we think serious
and reflecting men quite right in attaching
more weight to these historic proofs of Irenaeus,
derived from Polycarp, in favour of the authen-
ticity of St. John's Gospel than to those scruples
and negations of learned men of our day, who
are smitten with a strange passion for doubt.
We say as much for Tertullian and his tes-
timony. This man, who from an advocate of
paganism became a powerful defender of the
Christian truth, takes such a scrupulous view of
the origin and worth of the four Evangelists that
he will allow to Mark and Luke, as apostolic men,
i.e. as companions and assistants of the apostles,
a certain subordinate place, while he upholds
the full authority of John and of Matthew, on
account of their character of real apostles,
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56 THE DATE OF THE GOSPELS.
chosen by the Lord himself. In his work
against Marcion (book iv., ch. v.), Tertullian
lays down the principle by which we should
decide on the truth of the articles of the Christian
faith, and especially of that most important one
of all, the authenticity of the apostolic writings.
For this, he makes the value of a testimony to
depend on its antiquity, and decides that we
are to hold that to be true for us which was
held to be true in former ages. This appeal to
antiquity leads us back to the apostles' day,
and in deciding what is the authenticity of any
writing which claims to be apostolic, we must
refer to those churches which were planted by
the apostles. I ask, then, is it credible in any
degree that this man, so sagacious, could have
acted hastily and uncritically in accepting the
credibility and authenticity of the four Evan-
gelists ? The passages I have referred to are
taken from his celebrated reply to Marcion,
who, on his own authority, and in conformity
with his own heretical tastes, had attacked the
sacred text. Of the four Gospels, Marcion had
completely rejected three, and the fourth, that
of St. Luke, he had modified and mutilated
according to his own caprice. Tertullian, in
his reply, formally appeals to the testimony of
the apostolic churches in favour of the four
Gospels. Is such a challenge as this, in the
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ECCLESIASTICAL TESTIMONY. 57
mouth of such a man as Tertullian, to be passed
by as of no weight ? When he wrote his reply-
to Marcion, the apostle St. John had been dead
only about a century. The Church of Ephesus,
among whom the apostle St. John had so long
lived, and in which city he died, had surely time
to decide the question once for all, whether the
Gospel of St. John was authentic or not. It
was not difficult to find out what was the judg-
ment of the apostolic Church on this question.
Moreover, we must not forget, that in Ter-
tullian we have not merely a man of erudition,
occupied in laying down learned theses, but a
man of serious mind, to whom a question like
this was 4 one on which his faith, and with it
the salvation of his soul, depended. Is it then
likely that such a man would have given easy
credence to writings like these, which concern the
fundamental doctrines of Christianity — writings
which distinctly claimed to be apostolic, and at
which the wisdom of the world in which he had
been educated professed to be offended ? Now,
since Tertullian expressly asserts, that in de-
fending the apostolic origin of the four Evan-
gelists he rests his case upon the testimony of
the apostolic churches, we must be incorrigible
sceptics to doubt any longer that he had not
thoroughly examined for himself into the origin
of these Gospels.
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58 THE DATE OF THE GOSPELS.
We maintain, then, that the attestations of
Ireneeus and Tertullian have a weight and a
worth beyond the mere range of their own age.
These attestations carry us up to the four first
witnesses, and the evidence which they depose
is in favour of these primitive times. This is
the conclusion which we think we are warranted
in drawing ; and it is best established, not only
by those more ancient witnesses above referred
to and given by the writer of the list of books
in the New Testament known as the Mura-
tori catalogue, as well as the author of the
Italic version, but also by the consent of the
Church and the uncontradicted records of the
earliest times prior to those of Irenaeus and
Tertullian.
My reader has doubtless heard of those works
called " Harmonies of the Gospels," in which
the four narratives are moulded and fused into
one. They sought in this way to produce a
complete picture of our Lord's life, by supple-
menting the narrative of the one Gospel by
details supplied from another, and especially by
interpolating the discourses of St. John between
those of the other Evangelists, so as to trace out
in this way, step by step, the three years of
the Lord's ministry. As early as a.d. 170,
two learned men undertook works of this
kind. One of these was Theophilus, Bishop of
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ECCLESIASTICAL TESTIMONY, 59
Antioch, in Syria; and the other Tatian, a
disciple of the great divine and martyr, Justin.
These two books are lost ; but Jerome, in the
fourth century, gives us some account of that of
Theophilus, which he calls a combination of
the four Gospels into one ; and Eusebius and
Theodoret, in the fourth and fifth centuries,
speak of that of Tatian in the same way.
Tatian had given his the name of Diatessaron,
that is, the Gospel according to Four. These
two writers produced other works, which are
still extant, and in which there are undoubted
quotations from St. John's Gospel, not to speai
of the other three. But these Harmonies, which
have not come down to us, are of much higher
value than mere isolated quotations, and fur-
nish a proof that at the time when they were
first attempted the four Gospels were regarded
as a single work, in which the variety of the
narratives, which sometimes amounts to a real
difference, was plainly perceptible. Hence a
desire arose to draw out of these differences
a higher unity, and combine them as one har-
monious whole. These two attempts to write
a "Harmony" were made soon after the middle
of the second century, whence we may certainly
conclude that the Gospels themselves were gene-
rally recognised and received as such for at least
a long time previous.
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We here pass by other testimonies, in order to
say a few words on the letters of Ignatius and
Polycarp, the disciples of the Apostle, which
carry us up to an age as early as the beginning
of the second century. When the holy Igna-
tius, whom his master, St. John, had conse-
crated Bishop of Antioch, was led as a martyr to
Rome, between a.d. 107 and a.d. 115, he wrote
several letters while on his journey to Rome,
of which we have two versions, one shorter
and the other longer. We shall here refer only
to the shorter, which is enough for our purpose,
since its genuineness is now generally admitted.
These letters contain several passages drawn
more or less directly from St. Matthew and St.
John. Ignatius thus writes in his letter to
the Romans : —
" I desire the bread of God, the bread of
heaven, the bread of life, which is the flesh of
Jesus Christ, the Son of God. And I desire
the drink of God, the blood of Jesus Christ,
who is undying love and eternal life." These
words recall the sixth chapter of St. John,
where it is said, " I am the bread which came
down from heaven. I am the bread of life. I
am the living bread. The bread that I shall
give is my flesh. He that eateth my flesh and
drinketh my blood hath eternal life" (verses
41, 48, 54),
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ECCLESIASTICAL TESTIMONY. 61
In the same letter, Ignatius writes, "What
would a man be profited, if he should gain the
whole world, and lose his own soul ?" — words
literally found in Matt. xvi. 26.
Let us quote another passage of his letter to
the Church of Smyrna, where it is said of Jesus
that he was baptized by John, in order that he
might fulfil all righteousness, and which exactly
recalls Matt. iii. 15.
The short letter of Polycarp, written a little
after the death of Ignatius, about a.d. 115,
bears reference, in the same way, to certain
passages of St. Matthew. So when we read,
" We desire to pray to Grod, who sees all, that
he may not lead us into temptation, for the
Lord has said, that the spirit is willing, but the
flesh is weak" (see Matt. vi. 13, and xxvi. 41).
Though we do not wish to give to these
references a decisive value, and though they do
not exclude all doubt as to their applicability
to our Gospels, and more particularly to that of
St. John, they nevertheless undoubtedly bear
traces of such a reference: and we have thus
an additional proof to offer, that our Gospels
were in use at the commencement of the second
century.
It is certainly a fact well deserving of atten-
tion, that we find in the Epistle of Polycarp
a certain trace of the use of the first Epistle
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62 THE DATE OF THE GOSPELS.
of St. John. Polycarp writes thus : " Whoso-
ever confesses not that Jesus Christ is come in
the flesh is Antichrist." Now we read these
words in the First Epistle of St. John, iv. 3 :
"Every spirit that confesses not that Jesus
Christ is come in the flesh, is not of God : and
this is that spirit of Antichrist."
This passage of the Epistle of John, as cited
by Polycarp, about a.d. 115, is of very great
importance, since, in fact, the ideas and style
in this Epistle and in the Gospel of St. John
are so like, that we are compelled to refer
them to the same writer. To recognise the
Epistle we must also recognise the Gospel.
The testimony of Polycarp, if we bear in mind
the close relationship in which he stood to the
Apostle, is, as we have seen above, of such
weight that there is no room left to contradict
or attack the authenticity of writings supported
in this way. To get rid of this testimony,
writers of the sceptical school have made use
of the following argument: "It is not abso-
lutely necessary to take these words of Polycarp
as a quotation from St. John. They may have
been sentiments which were current in the
Church, and which John may have gathered
up, as well as Polycarp, without pretending to
have first originated them." A partisan of this
school has had recourse to another means to
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ECCLESIASTICAL TESTIMONY. 63
evade the difficulty: " Can we not reverse the
argument, and say that it is the author of the
so-called Epistles of St. John who quotes Poly-
carp?" A man must have some courage to start
such an extravagant theory as this. But there
are learned men capable even of this. And
even if this does not succeed, they have one
expedient yet, which they do not fail to use as
the last resort of all. They will say that the
letter is not Polycarp's at all. It is true that
Irenaeus, his disciple, believed in its genuineness:
but what matters that ? One has always some
good reasons with which to back up an auda-
cious assertion, and to shake and overthrow,
if possible, a truth which is firmly established.
I cannot, however, help saying to any one who
shudders at these antichristian attempts, that
they are as weak as they are worthless, and my
reader will soon see that it is so.
Let us now turn to one of the most worthy
of Polycarp's contemporaries — I refer to Justin
Martyr, who already had been highly esteemed
as a writer, before his martyrdom in Rome (about
a.d. 166) had made his memory precious to the
Church. Two of his works are taken up with
a defence of Christianity. He presented these
apologies to the Emperor, the first in a.d. 139 ;
the second in a.d. 161. One can easily see from
these dates, and especially from the earlier of the
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two, that it is important to know whether Justin
supports the use and authority of our Gospels. It
is well established that he made use of the first
three — that of Matthew in particular ; and this
fact is beyond the reach of the attacks of doubt.
This is the very reason why sceptics say all the
more obstinately that he does not make use of St.
John. We, on the contrary, without hesitation,
assert the very opposite. In several passages
of Justin, we cannot fail to recognise an echo
of that special sentence of St. John: "The
Word was made flesh." The reply which Justin
puts in the mouth of John the Baptist, when
interrogated by the messenger of the Sanhedrin,
"I am not the Christ, but. the voice of one
crying," is nothing but a citation of a passage
of St. John, i. 20-23. The apostle cites the
words of Zechariah (chapter xii. 10), in such a
way as they are found nowhere else ; and as
Justin uses the quotation in the same way, it is
clear that he has borrowed them from St. John.
We also read in Justin's first apology, a.d. 139,
" Christ has said, Except ye are born again ye
cannot enter into the kingdom of Grod; — but
that it is impossible that those who v are once
born should enter a second time into their
mother's womb and be born is clear to every
one." There has been much dispute as to the
meaning of this passage. For our part, we
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ECCLESIASTICAL TESTIMONY. 65
take the view that Justin was referring to
John iii. and to our Lord's discourse with
Nicodemus: "Verily, verily, I say unto you,
Except a man be born again, he cannot see the
kingdom of God." That this passage of St.
John occurred to Justin's mind is, in my judg-
ment, indubitable on this account : that he adds
in the same loose way, in which he is in the
habit of quoting the Old Testament, certain
other words of our Lord, which, in the text of
St. John, are as follows : " How can a man be
born when he is old ? can he enter a second
time into his mother's womb and be born ?" If
we are justified in assuming the use of the
Gospel of St. John by Justin, then the suppo-
sition that the Gospel was only written about
a.d. 150, and is consequently unauthentic, is
proved to be an unwarranted assumption.
We can also show, in another way, that
Justin proves that the authenticity of this Gospel
was well established in his day. We will only
refer to one. He tells us in the same apology,
written a.d. 139, that the memoirs of the apostles,
called Evangels, were read after the prophets
every Lord's day in the assemblies of the
Christians. Here we have to remark that the
Gospels are placed side by side with the
prophets. This, undoubtedly, places the Gos-
pels in the rank of canonical books, the same
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as the prophets were regarded in the Jewish
synagogue. But who in the world would ever
think that the Church at the time of Justin used
any other Gospels than those which we now
know of, and which, within a few years of that
time, were heard of throughout the whole
Christian world? Indeed, it contradicts all that
we know of the rise and origin of the Canon to
suppose that as 'late as Justin Martyr's time,
only Matthew, Mark, and Luke had been
accepted as canonical, and that John's Gospel
was brought in afterwards !
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CHAPTER II.
THE TESTIMONY OP HERETICS AND HEATHEN
DURING THE SECOND CENTURY.
Our observations so far have been confined
almost entirely to the writings of those men
whom the Church of the second century re-
garded as pillars of the faith. During the
same period, however, there sprang up a litera-
ture of heretical and erroneous teachers, which,
like grafts of a wild tree, threw up a rank
luxuriance of strange doctrine. We can pro-
duce satisfactory testimony even from writings
of this kind, that about the middle, and before
the middle, of the second century, our Gos-
pels were held in the highest esteem by the
Church. This branch of our inquiry is as in-
teresting on account of the insight it gives us
into the opinions of those erroneous teachers as
e 2
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68 THE DATE OF THE GOSPELS.
it is important on account of the information it
gives us on the age and authority of our Gos-
pels. In appealing to these false teachers as
testimony to the truth of the Gospels, we follow
no less a precedent than that Irenaeus the well-
known Bishop of Lyons to whom we have
already referred. Irenaeus makes the observa-
tion: "So well established are our Gospels
that even teachers of error themselves bear
testimony to them : even they rest their objec-
tions on the foundation of the Gospels" (Adv.
Haer. iii. 11, 7).
This is the judgment which the last half of
the second century passes on the first half; and
this first half of the second century is the very
time from which the opponents of the Gospel
narrative draw their principal objections. Now,
surely a man like Irenaeus, who lived only
twenty years or so later than this very time,
must have known this fact better than certain
professors of the nineteenth century ? The more
respect, then, that we pay to the real culture
and progress of our age, the less can we esteem
those learned men, who only use their know-
ledge and acuteness to make away with history.
What Irenaeus affirms is fully borne out by
facts. We may, therefore, with all confidence,
intrust ourselves to his guidance. As a fact,
the replies of the early Church fathers to these
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HERETICAL AND PAGAN TESTIMONY. 69
heretics, to which we owe all that we know
about them, furnish positive proof that these
false teachers admitted our Gospels to be,
as the Church already declared them to be,
canonical ; and Irenaeus this Bishop of Lyons is
one of the chief authorities on this subject. Next
to him we should place a work, discovered
about twenty years ago, of a disciple of Iren-
aeus, by name Hippolytus, a man who lived
sufficiently near the time of these erroneous
teachers to be, like his master, a competent
testimony on such a subject.
One of the most intelligent and able of these
early heretics was Valentinus, who came from
Egypt to Rome sometime in the early part of
the second century, and lived there about
twenty years. He undertook to write a com-
plete history of all the celestial evolutions
which, in the mysterious region of those celes-
tial forces and heavenly intelligences (which he
called the Pleroma), prepared the way for the
coming of the Only-Begotten Son, and pre-
tended to determine in this way the nature and
power of that Only-Begotten Son. In this
extravagant attempt he did not hesitate to
borrow a number of expressions and ideas —
such as the Word, the Only-Begotten, Life,
light, Fulness, Truth, Grace, the Redeemer,
the Comforter, from the Gospel of St. John, and
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70 THE DATE OF T£E GOSPELS.
to use them for his own purposes. There is
thus such an undeniable connection between
the Gospel of St. John and this Valentinian
scheme of doctrine that one of two explanations
only is possible. Either Valentinus has bor-
rowed from St. John, or St. John from Valen^
tinus. After what we have said already, the
latter supposition must appear utterly incredible,
and a nearer consideration of the subject only
confirms this. Now, when a sceptical school of
our age resorts to such a hypothesis as this, it
proclaims its own downfall. Irenseus, in fact,
expressly declares that the Valeritinians made
use of St. John's G-ospel, and he shows us in
detail how they drew from the first chapter
some of their principal dogmas.
Hippolytus confirms this assertion of Irenseus.
He quotes several of the sayings of our Lord as
recorded by St. John, which were adopted by
Valentinus. One of the most distinct references
is that to John x. 8, of which Hippolytus writes,
" Since the prophets and the law, according to
Valentinus* doctrine, were marked by an in-
ferior and less intelligent spirit." Valentinus
quotes, in proof of this assertion, the words of
the Redeemer, " All that ever came before me
were thieves and robbers" (Hippolytus, Philoso-
phoumenon, vi. 35). It is easy to prove that
Valentinus treated the other Gospels in the same
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HERETICAL AND PAGAN TESTIMONY. 71
way as he did that of St. John. According to
Irenaeus, he supposed that the inferior spirit,
whom he called the Demiurge, or maker of the
world, was typified in the centurion of Caper-
naum (Matt. viii. 9; Luke vii. 8). In the
daughter of Jairus, dead and raised to life, he
fancied a type of his lower wisdom (Achamoth),
the mother of the Demiurge ; and in the history
of the woman who, for twelve years, had the
issue of blood, and who was healed by the
Lord (Matt. ix. 20), he saw a figure of the
suffering and deliverance of his twelfth JEon.
What bearing, then, has all this on our in-
quiry? Already, before the middle of the second
century, we see that our Gospels, and especially
that of St. John, were held in such esteem that
even a fantastic philosopher attempted to find
support in the simple words of the Gospels for
his fanciful scheme of celestial Powers, primi-
tive Intelligences, JEons, and so forth.
Besides Valentinus, we possess a learned
letter written by a disciple of his, by name
Ptolemy. It contains, in addition to several
quotations from St. Matthew, a passage taken
from the first chapter of St. John, in these
words : " The apostle says that all things were
made by him, and that without him was not
anything made that was made."
Another distinguished follower and companion
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72 THE DATE OP THE GOSPELS.
of Valentinus, by name Heracleon, wrote an
entire commentary on the Gospel of St. John,
several fragments of which still remain. In it
he endeavours to twist the words of the Gospel
into agreement with the fancies of Valentinus.
What must have been the esteem, then, in
which this Gospel was held in the second
century, when a leading follower of such a
fanciful and erroneous theorist as Valentinus
should feel himself driven to draw up a com-
mentary on this Gospel, in order to make it
support his heresy !
Valentinus and his school were not the only
writers who sought, though hostile to the Church,
to have the Gospels on their side instead of
against them. There were other sects, such as
the Naassenes, so called from their possessing
the spirit of the serpent (Nachash) that tempted
our first parents, and the Peraticse, a sect of
enthusiasts, so called from their pretending to
see into the heavenly future, who* wove into
their teaching many passages of St. John, as
we learn from Hippolytus.
Already under Adrian, between a.d. 117-
13#, Basilides had written a long work to ex-
plain the Gospels, in the same fantastic spirit
as Valentinus. We can only infer this from a
few fragments which remain to us. But we can
say, with some degree of certainty, that he
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HERETICAL AND PAGAN TESTIMONY. 73
used the Gospel of St. John ; for Hippolytus
expressly says that he used the expressions,
" That was the true light which lighteth every
man that cometh into the world," John i. 9,
and " Mine hour is not yet come," John ii. 4.
Let us not pass over another heretic of the
early part of the second century, whose name
has been used by those who take the contrary
view. We refer to Marcion, in reply to whom
Tertullian wrote the work we have above
referred to. He was born at Sinope, on the
shores of the Black Sea; but it was at Rome
that he afterwards wrote those works which
brought his name into notice. It was his special
effort to break the link which connects Christi-
anity with Judaism, and for this reason tried
to get rid of everything in the Apostles' teach-
ing which seemed to countenance Judaism. As
we learn from church history that Marcion
composed a canon of Scripture adapted to his
own peculiar views, and that this collection
contained only the Gospel of St. Luke, with
ten of the apostle Paul's epistles, and that he
even accommodated the text of these to fit in
with his notions, certain learned men have
thought that this was the first collection of
Holy Scripture known to the Church — that his
Gospel was the original of that which now
passes for the Gospel of St. Luke, and that he
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74 THE DATE OF THE GOSPELS.
was not acquainted with the Gospel of St. John.
We hold that all these three assertions are quite
erroneous: as regards the second of the three,
it is admitted on all sides to be so. As to the
third of these assumptions, of which so much
has been made, that Marcion was unacquainted
with St. John's Gospel, the following testimony
of Tertullian is decisive against it. This writer
tells us of an earlier work of Marcion's, in which
he made use of all the four Gospels, and that
to suit his own purposes he afterwards rejected
all but that of St. Luke. We have not the least
right to doubt this statement, since the whole
of Tertullian's reply to Marcion rests on this
point as on an undisputed fact.
These heretics, then, of the early Church,
have rendered considerable service by their
testimony to the early reception of the Gospels.
We now pass them by to notice those open
enemies of Christianity, to whom the preaching
of the Cross was nothing but a stumbling-block
and foolishness. About the middle of the second
century there was such an one in Celsus, who
wrote a book full of ridicule and reproach
against Christianity. The book itself has long
since been lost — a fate which it well deserved ;
and yet, in spite of all its bitterness and scorn,
it did no real damage to the young Christian
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HERETICAL AND PAGAN TESTIMONY. 75
Church still suffering under persecution — a fact
which is encouraging to us, who have to meet
similar attacks in the present day. It is well
for us, however, that Origen has preserved
several extracts from this book of Celsus.
From these extracts we gather that Celsus, in
attacking Christianity, made use of the Gos-
pels, and, as " the writings of the disciples of
Jesus," employed them to show what was
believed by Christians. He notices in this way
the story of the wise men coming from the
East, the flight of the child Jesus into Egypt,
the appearing of the dove at our Lord's bap-
tism, his birth from a virgin, his agony in the
garden, his thirst on the cross, etc. While he
gathers these facts from the first three Gospels,
he takes even more details from the Gospel of
St. John ; as, for example, that Jesus was asked
by the Jews in the temple to do some miracle,
that Jesus was known as the Word of God, that
at the crucifixion blood flowed from his side.
Of the accounts of the resurrection he notices
that in one Gospel there are two angels, and in
another Gospel only one is spoken of as present
at the grave ; to which Origen said, in reply,
that the one account is based on the Gospels
of St. Luke and St. John, the other on that of
St. Matthew and St. Mark. We may, therefore,
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76 THE DATE OF THE GOSPELS. j
conclude that this heathen opponent of the
Gospel in the second century knew of the four
Gospels which we possess, and considered them,
as we do, to be genuine apostolical writings.
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CHAPTER III.
APOCRYPHAL LITERATURE.
The same service which the early heretics and
heathen opponents of Christianity render to our
cause, we may get from consulting the so-called
Apocrypha of the New Testament. My reader
will ask, What is this Apocryphal literature ?
Now I can give some information on this subject
as I have paid much attention to it, and have
discovered several originals in old libraries, and
edited them for the first time. Sixteen years
ago I wrote an essay, which obtained a prize
in Holland, on the origin and worth of the
Apocryphal Gospels. The Apocryphal books
are writings composed with a view of being
taken up into the Canon, and put on a level
with the inspired books, but which were delibe-
rately rejected by the Church. They bear on
their front the names of Apostles, or other
eminent men; but have no right to do so.
These names were used by obscure writers, to
palm off their productions. But for what pur-
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78 THE DATE OP THE GOSPELS.
pose were these Apocryphal books written?
Partly to embellish and add to, in some fanciful
way of their own, Scripture narratives ; partly
to invent others about the Saviour, Mary,
Joseph, and the Apostles; and partly to
support false doctrines, for which there was
no support in Scripture. As these objects were
decidedly pernicious, the Church was fully justi-
fied in rejecting these writings. They never-
theless contain much that is interesting and
curious, and in early times, when the Church
was not so critical in distinguishing the true
from the false, they were given a place which
they did not deserve. We have already
explained in what sense we shall use them:
they will go to strengthen our proof for the
early reception of the canonical Gospels.
Everything will therefore depend upon the
age of these Apocryphal writings, and here
we confine ourselves to two only, The Gospel
of St. James, and the so-called Acts of Pilate.
We think we shall be able to prove that both of
these date from the early part of the second
century. To begin with the Gospel of James.
In Justin Martyr's Apology, written a.d.
139, we find certain details of the birth of our
Lord, which are only found in this so-called
Gospel of James. Justin relates that the
birth of Christ was in a grotto near Bethle-
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APOCRYPHAL LITERATURE. 79
hem: so we read in the Apocryphal Gospel,
In the account of the Annunciation to the
Virgin Mary, Justin concludes with the words,
" And thou shalt call his name Jesus ;" and he
adds, immediately after, " for he shall save his
people from their sins." The order is the same
in St. James's Gospel. According to St.
Matthew, these words were spoken to Joseph ;
while they are wholly wanting in St. Luke's
Gospel. We pass by other instances. But
an objection may be raised. It may be said
that Justin obtained his account from some
other document since lost. For my part, I
cannot agree with this objection. I find no
references to any lost Gospels ; the attempts to
discover them on the part of the sceptical
school have not been successful; and as the
materials of Justin's information lie before
us in the Gospel of St. James, I have no
hesitation in ascribing it to that source. Not
only does Origen mention this Gospel of James
as everywhere known about the end of the
second century, but we have also about fifty
manuscripts of this Gospel of the date of the
ninth century, and also a Syriac of the sixth
century. To get rid of the inference that
Justin made use of this Gospel, we must lose
ourselves in wild conjecture.
Now the whole of the writing called after
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80 THE DATE OP THE GOSPELS.
St, James is so closely related to our Gospels,
that they must have been extensively known and
used before the former was concocted. Matthew
and Luke had declared that Mary was a virgin-
mother : now there were sects who taught that
there was also a son naturally born to Joseph
and Mary: that the brethren of Jesus are
referred to in the Gospels seems to imply this-
There were learned Jews who denied the
meaning of the prophet's reference to the Virgin
(Matt. i. 23), and heathen and Jews as well
mocked at the doctrine of a son born to a
virgin. These objections were raised as early
as the former part of the second century, and
the Gospel of James was written in reply to
these objections. It set forth by proving that
from her birth Mary had been highly favoured ;
that from her birth she was marked out as the
Virgin; and that her relationship to Joseph
always stood higher than that of a mere matri-
monial union. Now if this writing is assigned
to the early part of the second century, the
Gospels of St. Matthew and St. Luke, on which
it is grounded, could not have been written
later than the end of the first century.
It is the same with the Acts of Pilate,
with this difference only, that it rests on the
Gospel of St. John as well as on the other
Evangelists, Justin is our earliest authority
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APOCRYPHAL LITERATURE. 81
for the writing which professes to have appeared
under Pilate, and which adduces fresh and
convincing testimony for the Grodhead of Christ
from events before, during, and after His cru-
cifixion. That it was a pious fraud of some
Christian, neither Justin, Tertullian, nor any
other ever suspected. On the contrary, Justin
twice refers to it. First, he refers to it in con-
nection with the prophecies of the crucifixion
(Isa. lxv. 2 ; lviii. 2 ; Ps. xxii. 16-18), adding,
" that this really took place, you can see from
the Acts composed under Pontius Pilate;" and,
in the second place, when he adduces the mira-
culous cures wrought by Christ, and predicted
by Isaiah (Isa. xxxv. 4-6), he adds, " That
Jesus did these things, you may see in the
Acts of Pontius Pilate," The testimony of
Tertullian is even more express (Apology, xxi.),
when he says, " The doctors of the law delivered
Jesus through envy to Pilate: that Pilate,
yielding to the clamour of his accusers, gave
him up to be crucified ; that Jesus, in yielding
up his breath on the cross, uttered a great cry,
and at the instant, at midday, the sun was
darkened; that a guard of soldiers was set at
the tomb, to keep the disciples from taking
away the body, for he had foretold his resurrec-
tion ; that oil the third day the earth suddenly
shook, and that the stone before the sepulchre
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82 THE DATE OP THE GOSPELS,
was rolled away, and that they found only the
grave-clothes in the tomb ; that the chief men
in the nation spread the report that his dis-
ciples had taken away the body, but that Jesus
spent forty days still in Galilee, instructing his
Apostles, and that after giving them the com-
mand to preach the Gospel, he was taken up
to heaven in a cloud." Tertullian closes
this account with the words, "Pilate, urged
by his conscience to become a Christian,
reported these things to Tiberius, who was
then emperor."
These are the testimonies of Justin and Ter-
tullian as to the Acts of Pilate. We have, to
this day, several ancient Greek and Latin
manuscripts of a work which corresponds with
these citations, and which bears the same name
as that referred to by Justin. Is it, then, the
same which Justin and Tertullian had read ?
This view of the question has been opposed in
several ways. Some have maintained that these
testimonies only existed in imagination, but that
the writing itself, suggested by these very quo-
tations, afterwards appeared. But this is a base-
less supposition. Others think that the original
has been lost, and that these are only copies of
it. Is there any ground for supposing this?
No. It is true that the original text has been
altered in many places; and in the middle
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APOCRYPHAL UTERATURE. 83
ages the Latins mixed up the title of the Acts
of Pilate with that of the Acts of Nicodemus,
and added a preface to it in this altered form :
and lastly, side by side with the ancient Greek
text, we have a recast of it comparatively modern.
But, notwithstanding all this, there are decisive
reasons for maintaining that the Acts of Pilate
now extant contain substantially that which
Justin and Tertullian had before them. Our own
researches in the great libraries of Europe have
led us to discover important documents to prove
this. I would mention only an Egyptian manu-
script, or papyrus, and a Latin manuscript, both
of the fifth century. This last, though rubbed
over about a thousand years ago, and written
over with a new writing, is still legible by
practised eyes (manuscripts of this kind are
called palimpsests). These two originals, one
Egyptian, ihe other Latin, confirm the high
antiquity of our Greek text, on which they
were founded; for, if there were versions of
these Acts as early as the fifth century, the
original itself must certainly be older.
Let us look at the matter a little more closely.
This ancient work was very highly prized by the
Christians. Justin and Tertullian are proofs of
this, and Justin even appeals to it, in writing to
an emperor, as to a decisive testimony. It still
maintained its place of authority, as Eusebius
f2
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84 THE DATE OP THE GOSPELS.
and Epiphanius attest. The first tells us that
at the beginning of the fourth century the
Emperor Maximin, who was hostile to Christi-
anity, caused some pretended Acts of Pilate to
be published, full of false charges and calum-
nies, and circulated it through the schools with
the evident intention of throwing into the shade
and discrediting the Acts which the Christians
prized so highly. I ask then, is it the least
credible that this ancient Apocryphal book, so
freely used up to this time, could have been
so completely recast towards the end of the
fourth or fifth century, as that the original dis-
appeared, and a spurious version took its place.
Such a supposition violates all probability, and
also carries a contradiction on the face of it in
that it implies that a work so mutilated could
retain at the same time a certain real resem-
blance to the Gospels. Such a theory can only
mislead those who are entirely ignorant of the
subject. We cannot class ourselves among such :
we rather rely with confidence on our own con-
scientious examination of the documents, and
our conclusion is as follows : Our Acts of Pilate
not only presuppose acquaintance with the
first three Gospels, but also and especially with
St. John's. For if the details of the crucifixion
and resurrection rest on the former, those of the
trial of Christ refer to the latter. It follows
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APOCRYPHAL LITERATURE. 85
from all this that as the so-called Acts of Pilate
must have been compiled about the beginning
of the second century (as Justin, A.D. 139, refers
to them), the original Gospels on which they* are
based, including that of St. John, must have
been written in the first century.
This conclusion is so satisfactory and decisive
that we do not seek to add anything to it from
any further uses of the Apocryphal books of the
New Testament.
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CHAPTER IV.
TESTIMONY OF APOSTOLIC FATHERS:
BAENABAS — PAPIAS.
The testimony of the Acts of Pilate and the
Book of James, falls thus within the early part
of the second century. We have advanced step
by step from the latter to the former part of
this century. Another remarkable writing of
this age here meets us at this time — a writing
which was put together by several remarkable
men between the end of the second and the
beginning of the fourth century. That it bears
most decisively on the question of the author-
ship of the Gospels we can now most con-
fidently maintain since the discovery of the
Sinaitic Bible. We here speak of the Epistle
of Barnabas.
This Epistle, in its style and matter, resembles
that to the Hebrews. It is addressed to those
Christians who, coming out of Judaism, desired
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to retain, under the New Testament, certain
peculiarities of the Old ; in the same way that
the Judaising teachers among the Galatians had
acted. In opposition to such tendencies the
Epistle asserts the truth that the new covenant
which Christ established had abolished the
old, and that the old was never more than an
imperfect type and shadow of the new.
During the last two centuries this Epistle has
been well known; but, unfortunately, the first
four chapters were wanting in the copies of all
the Greek manuscripts found in the libraries of
Europe. It was only in a Latin version, and
that of a very corrupt text, that the entire
Epistle was to be read. In this Latin version
there was a passage, in the fourth chapter,
which had excited peculiar attention : €€ Let us
take care that we be not of those of whom it is
written — that many were called, but few chosen."
The expression, " as it is written," every reader
of the New Testament is familiar with already.
I would ask you to read Matt. iv. 1-11, where
the temptation of our Lord is recorded. The
weapon which our Lord used against the
tempter is contained in the words H It is
written;" and even the tempter uses this
weapon in return, plying his temptation with
the words, " It is written." It is the formula
by which expressions out of Scripture are
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APOSTOLIC FATHERS. 89
distinguished from all others, and marked out
as the Word of God written. The Apostles,
like the Saviour, often use the expression
when introducing a quotation from the Old
Testament. It was natural, therefore, to apply
this form of expression to the Apostles 7 writings,
as soon as they had been placed in the Canon
with the books of the Old Testament. When
we find, therefore, in ancient ecclesiastical
writings, quotations from the Gospels intro-
duced with this formula, "It is written," we
must infer that, at the time when the expression
was used, the Gospels were certainly treated
as of equal authority with the books of the
Old Testament. As soon as they were thus
placed side by side, there was a Canon of the
New Testament as well as of the Old, for the
words which are referred to under the formula
in Barnabas' Epistle are found, as is well
known, in Matt. xxii. 14, and also xx. 16. If
this argument is of any weight, it follows that,
at the time when the Epistle of Barnabas was
written, the Gospel of St. Matthew was treated
as part of Holy Scripture.
But as the Epistle of Barnabas is undoubtedly
of high antiquity, the fact that the formula, "It
is written," is used, has been disputed by many
learned men. And what gave some counte-
nance to the doubt is this, that the first five
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90 THE DATE OF THE GOSPELS.
chapters were extant only in the Latin version.
They were able to say that this important
expression was introduced by the Latin trans-
lator. A learned theologian, Dr. Credner,
literally wrote, in the year 1832, as follows : —
"This disputed expression does not exist for
us in the original Greek. It would have been
easy for the translator to introduce the usual
formula, and for internal reasons we shall hold
the genuineness of the phrase to be unproved
till the contrary is proved." The decision,
then, of the genuineness or not of the expres-
sion depended upon the discovery of the original
Greek text. And not long after these words
of Credner were written the original Greek
text was discovered. While men were dis-
puting in learned Germany as to whether
the Latin version was to be relied on in this
question or not, the original Greek text, which
was to decide the question, lay hid in a Greek
convent in the deserts of Arabia, among a
heap of old parchments. While so much has
been lost, in the course of centuries, by the
tooth of time and the carelessness of ignorant
monks, an invisible Eye had watched over this
treasure, and when it was on the point of
perishing in the fire, the Lord had decreed its
deliverance. In the Sinaitic Bible, the entire
of this Epistle of Barnabas has been found in
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APOSTOLIC FATHERS, 91
the original Greek. And how does this original
text decide this important question ? It decides
that this expression, " It is written," was first
prefixed to the quotation from St. Matthew, not
by the Latin translator, but by the author
himself in the Greek original.
Since this momentous fact has been decided
in this unexpected way, it has been asked a
second time, whether we are entitled to draw
from it such important consequences. Might
not the formula, " It is written," have been
applied to any other written book ? That this
could not be the case) our previous remarks on
the use of the formula sufficiently prove. We
have no right whatever to weaken the use of
the expression in this particular case. But a
4 critic of the negative school has tried to show his
ingenuity in a peculiar way. In an Apocryphal
book, called the Fourth Book of Ezra, written
probably by some Jewish Christian, after the
destruction of Jerusalem, we read " For many
are born, but few shall be saved." This expres-
sion has a certain resemblance to the expression
of St. Matthew, but it is clearly different.
But a learned man has, with all seriousness,
attempted to show that the words of the Saviour,
introduced by the expressive, ." It is written," in
the Epistle of Barnabas, are not really taken
from St. Matthew, but from this Book of Ezra,
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92 THE DATE OF THE GOSPELS.
and that the writer of the Epistle has substituted
the one phrase for the other; and consequently
that the formula, " It is written," applies to the
Apocryphal Book of Ezra, not to the Gospel,
of St. Matthew. It is characteristic of Strauss,
who has attempted to turn the life of Jesus into
a mere fancy or cloud picture, that he has
marked with his approval this trick of con-
juring away a passage in the Epistle of
Barnabas. For our part, we see in it nothing
more than an outcome of that anti-Christian
spirit which has matured itself in the school of
Renan. It is best described in the words of the
Apostle to Timothy (2 Tim. iv. 4), " And they
shall turn away their ears from the truth, and
shall be turned unto fables." I think the reader
will now agree with me when I say, that so
long as nothing stronger than this can be
adduced to weaken the force of this passage
in the Epistle of Barnabas, no one can go
wrong who simply holds by the truth. The
above effort of misapplied ingenuity only proves
what efforts must be made to get rid of the
force of the passage.
We have to consider these conclusions yet
more attentively. The Epistle of Barnabas
does not date from later than the early part of
the second century. While critics have gene-
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APOSTOLIC FATHERS. 93
first or second decade of the second century,
the Sinaitic Bible, which has for the first time
cleared up this question, has led us to throw its
composition as far back as the last decade of
the first century. In this venerable document,
which Clement of Alexandria, at the end of the
second century, reckoned as part of Holy Scrip-
ture, there are several passages which refer to
St. Matthew's Gospel (as in chapter ix. 13,
when our Lord says, he was not come to call
the righteous but sinners to repentance : the
words " to repentance " are here introduced in
the Epistle of Barnabas, as well as in St.
Matthew's Gospel, by way of explanation, from
Luke v. 32). It is very probable, also, that the
remarks of Barnabas on the serpent of Moses as
a type of the Saviour are founded on the well-
known passage in John iii. 14. It is remark-
able, moreover, that Matthew xxii. 14, is intro-
duced with the usual formula which marks a
quotation from Holy Scripture. It is clear,
therefore, that at the beginning of the second
century the Gospel of St. Matthew was already
regarded as a canonical book.
This result is all the more remarkable when
we consider that St. Matthew's Gospel has been
considered not so much a book by itself, as one
of four Gospels that together entered into the
Canon of the New Testament. The inquiries
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94 THE DATE OP THE GOSPELS.
which we have made into the first three quarters
of the second century have given prominence
at one time to the Gospel of St. Matthew, at
another time to that of St. Luke and St. John ;
but the Gospel of St. Mark has been less noticed,
as it furnished fewer citations. It would not be
fair to infer from this that the Gospel which
was alone cited, alone had any authority in the
early Church. Now the use which Justin makes
of the Acts of Pilate proves to us that, at least
as early as the end of the first century, the
Gospel of John must have been in use; and
Justin himself, in the first half of the second
century, makes frequent reference to St* John,
and even more frequent to St. Matthew's Gos-
pel. Is not this of itself a sufficient proof that
if, at the time when Barnabas' Epistle was
written, St. Matthew's Gospel was considered
canonical, the same must be the case with
St. John ? Basilides, in the reign of Adrian
(117-138) made use of St. John* and St. Luke.
Valentinus, about a.d. 140, makes use of St.
Matthew, St. Luke, and St. John. Are not these
additional proofs in our favour ? Already as
early as the time of Justin, the expression, " the
Evangel," was applied to the four Gospels, so that
the name of each of the four writers dropped
into the background ; and in the second half of
the second century we find the number of the
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APOSTOLIC FATHERS. 95
Evangelists restricted to four, and the matter
treated as a subject which was beyond dispute.
What follows from this? It follows that no
one of these Gospels could have been elevated
by itself to a place of authority in the Canon of
Scripture. The Church only ventured to place
them in the Canon when they had been already
received as the four Gospels, and as such had
been long prized as genuine apostolical writings.
When we further ask ourselves when this
took place, we are forced to the conclusion that
it must have occurred about the end of the first
century. This was the time when, after the
death of the aged John, those holy men who
had known the Lord in the flesh, including the
great Apostle of the Gentiles and the early
Church, had thus lost a definite centre of autho-
rity. It was at this time, when the Church
dispersed over the world, was persecuted with-
out, and distracted by error within, that she
began to venerate and regard as sacred the
writings which the Apostles had left behind
them as precious depositories of truth, as un-
erring records of the life of the Saviour, and
as an authoritative rule of faith and practice.
The right time had therefore come for enrolling
their writings among the Canon of Scripture.
The separation between the Church and the
Synagogue was now complete. Since the
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destruction of Jerusalem and the temple service,
a.d. 70, the Church had been thrown more
entirely on her own resources, and stood now
independent. It was a marked proof of her
independence when she ventured to rank her
sacred writings on a level with those of the
Old Testament, which the Christian Church
herself prized so highly.
Do you ask in what way and by what act
was this done ? Certainly no learned assemblies
sat to decide this question. If men like
Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John had left
behind them outlines of the Lord's life, did
it need anything more than their names to
make their writings of the highest value to the
early Church ? And had not these men stood
in such near relationship to the Church as to
make it impossible to pass off forged writings of
theirs without detection ? There was no Gospel
more difficult to be tampered with than St.
John's. His Gospel went forth from the midst
of the circle of Churches of Asia Minor, and
spread thence into all the world. Was this
possible if the slightest taint of suspicion had
lain upon it? Suppose, on the other hand,
that it first appeared elsewhere, then we may
be sure that these Asiatic Churches would have
been the first to detect the fraud. It would
have been impossible to palm upon them a
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APOSTOLIC FATHERS. 97
spurious document as the writing of their
former bishop.
We have an old tradition on the subject, which
Eusebius, in his Church History (Hi. 24) has
referred to. It says that the three Gospels
already extensively known were laid before, St,
John by his friends. He bore witness to their
truth, but said that they had passed over what
Jesus had done at the beginning of his public
ministry. His friends then expressed a desire
that he should give an account of this period
which had been passed over. This narrative
is substantially confirmed by the contents of
St. John's Gospel, a point which Eusebius has
not failed to notice.
We conclude, then, that it was towards the
end of the first century, and about the time of
John's decease at Ephesus, that the Church
began to place the four Gospels in the Canon.
The reasons which lead us to assign this as the
right date for the commencement of the Canon
are of themselves sufficient ; but we would not
so confidently maintain this opinion of the
history and literature of the entire second cen-
tury, as far as we have been able to look into
the subject, did it hot support our view of the
case.
We have only one authority more to produce
in our review of the earliest Christian literature.
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98 THE DATE OP THE GOSPELS.
It is the testimony of Papias, who more than
any other has been misrepresented by modern
opponents of the Gospel. The uncertainty
which rests over Papias himself and his testi-
mony does not allow us to class him in the
same rank with the other testimonies we have
already adduced. But such as it is, we here
produce it.
We learn from Eusebius (iii. 39) that Papias
wrote a work in five books, which he called a
" Collection of the Sayings of the Lord." In
collecting materials for this work, he preferred
to lean rather on uncertain traditions than on
what was written in books. He drew accord- N
ingly upon certain oral traditions which could
be traced up to the Apostles. His own words
on these traditions are as follows : — " Iantend
to put together what has- been reported to me
by the elders of that time, in so for as I have
been able to verify it through my own in-
quiries." He adds further, " Whenever I met
any one who had held converse with these
elders, I at once inquired after the words of
the elders, what Andrew, Peter, or Philip, or
Thomas, James, or John, or Matthew, or any
other of the Lord'^ disciples, had said." It is
not clear from these words whom he means by
the elders. Some learned men have erroneously
supposed that he referred to the Apostles them-
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APOSTOLIC FATHERS. 99
selves as his authorities. It is much more likely
that he refers to those venerable men who had
spoken with the Apostles. So Eusebius thinks,
who had the whole work of Papias before him,
and he distinctly says so. He records of Papias
that he nowhere claims to have seen or heard
the holy Apostles but as a pupil of Aristion
and of John the Presbyter, to whose testimony
he generally refers. It struck Eusebius, there-
fore, that it was an error in Irenaaus to call
Papias "a disciple of John 'and the companion
of Polycarp," a mistake which he fell into
by confounding John the Presbyter with the
Apostle John. This is confirmed by the won-
derful tradition which Irenaeus relates of the
millennial reign, " out of the mouth of those
elders who had seen John, the Lord's disciple."
In this place, Irenaeus undoubtedly distinguishes
between these elders and the Apostles. But
inasmuch as he appeals to Papias as his autho-
rity for this tradition of a reign of a thousand
years, he leaves no doubt that the elders of
whom he speaks are no others than those named
by Papias.
Eusebius gives some further extracts from
this work of Papias, namely, the story related to
him by the daughters of Philip the deacon, of
the raising to life of a dead man by their father,
and that Justus Barsabas had drunk a cup
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100 THE DATE OF THE GOSPELS.
of poison without receiving any hurt. Papias
went on farther (we follow here the account
of Eusebius) to give some detailed accounts
which he professed to have received by tradi-
tion, such as "certain unknown parables and
lessons of our Lord and others, some of which
are fabulous." Of this kind is the doctrine of a
millennial kingdom, which is to take place in
a certain carnal sense oik this earth after the
general resurrection. Eusebius has not given
us a delineation of this kingdom, but Irenaeus
has. It is as follows : — " The days shall CQme
in which vines shall grow, of which each vine
shall bear ten thousand branches, each branch
ten thousand clusters, each cluster ten thousand
grapes, and each grape contain ten measures of
wine; and when any one of the saints shall
go to pluck a grape, another grape shall cry
out, c I am better ; take me, and praise the
Lord/ So each corn of wheat shall produce
ten thousand ears, and each ear ten thousand
grains," etc.
This narrative Papias professed to have re-
ceived from certain elders, who in their turn
received it from St. John. Eusebius remarks
on this, that Papias, who was a man of very
narrow understanding, as his book fully proves,
must have got these opinions from misunder-
standing some of the Apostle's writings. He
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APOSTOLIC FATHERS. 101
goes on to say that there are other accounts
of the Lord's sayings taken from Aristion and
Presbyter John to be found in Papias' book, for
which he refers the curious to the book itself.
Here, Eusebius says, he will close his remarks
on Papias with one tradition about St. Mark. It
is to this effect, " And so the Presbyter said —
Mark, the interpreter of St. Peter, had written
down whatever saying of Peter's he could
remember, but not the sayings and deeds of
Christ in order ; for he was neither a follower of
the Lord, nor had heard Him, but, as we have
seen above, learned these things from Peter,
who was in the habit of referring to the events
of the Lord's life as occasion might suggest,
but never in any systematic way. Mark, in
consequence, never failed to write down these
remembrances as they fell from Peter's lips,
and was never known to have failed in thus
preserving an exact record of what Peter said."
To these extracts from Papias, Eusebius added
another upon St. Matthew, as follows : — a Thus
far on St. Mark — as to St. Matthew, Papias tells
us thai he wrote his words of the Lord in
Hebrew, and whoever could do so afterwards
translated it." In this extract there is some-
thing obscure ; it is doubtful whether we have
rightly rendered " the words of the Lord,"
since what Papias has before observed upon
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102 THE DATE OF THE GOSPELS.
Mark (we refer to the words, " What Christ
has spoken or done") makes it probable that we
are to include under the expression both words
and deeds. [Now, all these traditions of the
Presbyter John and of Papias are derived from
the Gospels of St. Matthew and St, Mark.] Even
if the expression, "the words of the Lord," is to
be understood strictly, we are not to conclude
that there was then no written record of these
sayings already in existence, since neither
Eusebius nor an^ other early writer ever sup-
posed that these extracts of Papias stood in
contradiction with the two Gospels of Matthew
and Mark. When, therefore, modern writers
undertake to show that our Gospel of Mark is
not the original Gospel written by St. Mark
himself, but only a compilation from that
original, this very theory convicts itself of being
an arbitrary assumption. The theory is only
too well adapted to invite a spirit of loose
conjecture as to the origin of our Gospels.
This is true of St. Matthew's Gospel, as well
as of St. Mark's. The point of ths extract from
Papias about St. Matthew lies in this, that he
says that the Evangelist wrote it in Hebrew.
If this assertion of Papias is well founded, the
next saying of his, " that any one translated it
who was able to do so," opens a wide field for
supposing all manner of differenced between the
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APOSfOLIC FATHERS. 103
Hebrew original and the Greek text. This
Hebrew text must have been lost very early, as
not one even of the very oldest Church Fathers
had ever seen or used it. My reader will see
that I am casting a hasty glance at a very
tangled and intricate question. For our. part,
we are fully satisfied that Papias' assertion of an
original Hebrew text rests on a misunderstand-
ing of his. To make this clear would take up too
much space ; we can, therefore, only giveh ere
the following brief explanation of Papias' error.
From the Epistle of St. Paul to the GraJa-
tians, we gather that thus early there was a
Judaising party. This party spirit broke out
even more fiercely after the destruction of
Jerusalem. There were two parties among
these Judaisers ; the one the Nazarenes, and the
other the Ebionites. Each of these parties used
a Grospel according to St. Matthew ; the one
party using a Greek text, and the other party
a Hebrew. That they did not scruple to
tamper with the text, to suit their creed, is
probable from that very sectarian spirit. The
text, as we have certain means of proving,
rested upon our received text of St. Matthew,
with, however, occasional departures, to suit
their arbitrary views. When, then, it was
reported, in later times, that these Nazarenes,
who were one of the earliest Christian sects
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104 THE DATE OP THE GOSPELS.
possessed a Hebrew version of Matthew, what
.was more natural than that some ' person or
others thus falling in with the pretensions of this
sect should say that Matthew originally was
written in Hebrew, and that the Greek was
only a version from it? How far these two
texts differed from each other no one cared to
inquire ; and with such separatists as the Naza-
renes, who withdrew themselves to the shores
of the Dead Sea, it would not have been easy
to have attempted it.
Jerome supports us in this clearing up of
Papias' meaning. Jerome, who knew Hebrew,
as other Latin and Greok fathers did not,
obtained in the fourth century a copy of this
Hebrew Gospel of the Nuzarenes, and at once
asserted that he had found the Hebrew origi-
nal. But when he looked more closely into
the matter, he confined himself to the state-
ment that many supposed that this Hebrew text
was the original of St. Matthew's Gospel. He
translated it into Latin and Greek, and added
a few observations of his own on it. From
these observations of Jerome, as well as from
other fragments, we must conclude that this
notion of Papias — in which several learned
men of our day agree — that the Hebrew was
the original text of St. Matthew, cannot be
substantiated; but, on the contrary, this
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APOSTOLIC FATHERS. 105
Hebrew has been drawn from the Greek text,
and disfigured moreover here and there with cer-
tain arbitrary changes. The same is applicable
to a Greek text of the Hebrew Gospel in
use among the Ebionites. This text, from the
fact that it was in Greek, was better known
to the Church than the Hebrew version of the
Nazarenes ; but it was always regarded, from
the earliest times, as only another * text of St.
Matthew's Gospel. This explains [also what
Papias had said about several translations of
St. Matthew.
We have something more to say about Papias
and his strange compilation. On the subject of
his materials, he says that he sought for little
help from written records. Of what records
does he here speak ? Is it of our Gospels ?
This is not impossible from the expression itself,
but from the whole character of his book it
seems very improbable, since it seems to have
been his object to supplement these with tra-
ditions about the Saviour which were current
about a.d. 130 or 140. We cannot suppose that
the Gospels themselves were the store-houses
from which he compiled these traditions. He
must have sought for them among those Apocry-
phal writings which began to circulate from the
very first. To those traditions of the Apocryphal
Gospels he opposed his own collection of tradi-
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106 THE DATE OF THE GOSPELS.
tions, whose genuineness he pretended could,
like the Gospels themselves, be traced up to the
Apostles.
We have seen already from Eusebius' notice
of Papias' work, what kind of traditions they
were which he collected — traditions such as
those about Philip the Deacon having raised
the dead, or Justus Barsabas having drunk
poison without receiving any hurt. A third
tradition of the same kind, which he says is
contained in the Gospel of the Hebrews, is that
of the history of a woman who was a sinner
accused before Jesus. In this same book also,
as we learn from (Ecumenius, there is a
story to the effect that the body of Judas the
betrayer was so swollen, that being thrown
down by a chariot in a narrow street, all his
bowels gushed out. The book also contained,
as we have already seen on the authority of
Eusebius, certain unknown parables and lessons
of our Lord ; but he does not think it worth
his while to notice one of them ; nor did any
other Church writer do so, with the excep-
tion of Irenseus (whose account of Papias'
millenarian fancies we have already referred to),
and Andrew of Csesarea, in the sixth century,
who notices, in his Commentary on the Book
of Revelation, a remark of Papias about the
fallen angels. Eusebius, for his part, dismisses
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APOSTOLIC FATHERS. 107
these accounts of Papias, about parables of our
Lord, which he received by tradition, as " alto-
gether fabulous."
Now, with all that we thus know about the
truth of Papias and his book, what credit are
we to attach to him as a testimony for our
Gospels? Though there are men of ability here
and there who have credited Papias, we cannot
help taking the contrary side. Eusebius*
opinion abqut Papias, that he was a man of
very contracted mind, is proved, not only by
the extracts from him we have already noticed,
but also by the way in which his attempt to
enrich the Gospel narrative has been allowed
to drop into oblivion by the entire Christian
Church. How we should have prized even a
single parable of our Lord, if it had borne
any internal marks of being genuine! But -no
one paid the slightest attention to this collec-
tion of Papias; the air of fable, which even
Eusebius — who is himself by no means re-
markable for critical acumen — exposes, throws
a cloud of suspicion over the whole book.
Yet, notwithstanding all this, there are men
in the present century, professing to be models
of critical severity, who set up Papias as their
torch-bearer in these inquiries. They have
attempted to use his obscure and contradictory
remarks about St. Matthew and St. Mark, to
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108 THE DATE OF THE GOSPELS.
separate between the original element and
the spurious additions to these Gospels. This
is indeed to set up Papias on a pedestal ! But
Papias is even more readily seized on by those
who wish to overturn the credit of St. John's
Gospel. And why so ? Papias is silent as to
this Gospel. This silence of Papias is advanced
by Strauss, Renan, and such like opponents of
the faith of the Church, as a most damaging
fact against the genuineness of the Gospel. I
rather think our readers who have measured
Papias aright will not readily agree to this. , Did
riot the motive ^betray itself, I should ask the
reader, whether producing Papias as a witness
on such a question does not imply a misunder-
standing of him and his book? His notices
about St. Matthew and St. Mark do not change
the character of his book. But they say that
Papias could not have known of John's Gospel,
or he would have mentionedit. We have thus
a proof that the Gospel could not have been in
existence, since Papias was Bishop of Hiero-
polis, a town in the neighbourhood of Ephesus,
from whence the Gospel of St. John was
sent forth; and the earliest record we have
about the martyrdom of Papias sets it down
about the same time as that of Poly carp, i.e.
about a.d. 1 60.
Now, it is difficult to conceive a statement
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APOSTOLIC FATHERS. 109
more utterly groundless and arbitrary than this,
that the silence of Papias as to the Gospel of
St. John is a proof against its genuineness. For, '
in the first place, any notice of John's Gospel
lay altogether out of the direction of Papias*
researches ; and, secondly, we have no right to
conclude, from Eusebius' extracts out of Papias*
book, that there was no reference to St. John's
Gospel in the entire book. The notices of
St. Matthew and St. Mark which Eusebius
quotes from Papias are not introduced to prove
their authenticity, but only for the particular
details which he mentions. It is quite possible
that this writing did not contain the same kind
of reference to St. John's writings, and this is
all that the silence of Eusebius proves. Let us
only add, that Eusebius, in his extracts from
Papias, makes no reference to St. Luke's Gospel.
Are we, therefore, to conclude that Papias
knew nothing of this Gospel also? And yet
we are logically bound to draw this conclusion, .
absurd as it is, in both cases.
We have only one point more to touch upon
here. At the end of his notice of Papias,
Eusebius remarks, that this writer has made use
of passages taken from the first Epistle of John
and the first Epistle of Peter. Does not this
fact bear against us who refuse to see any force ,
in his silence as to St. Luke, St. Paul, and the
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110 THE DATE OF THE GOSPELS.
Gospel of St. John ? Quite the contrary. No
one in the early Church era doubted these
writings, and so it never occurred to Eusebius
to collect testimonies in their favour. But it
was otherwise with the Catholic Epistles, the
Apocalypse, and the Epistle to the Hebrews;
and it was of importance to adduce testimonies
in their favour. But it may be said this pro-
ceeding is arbitrary. No, we answer; and in
favour of the justice of our point of view, we
have two arguments to adduce. Eusebius only
says one thing of Polycarp's letter to the Phi-
lippians — that it contains passages taken from
the first Epistle of Peter; and yet the letter
is full of quotations from St. Paul! He. also
mentions (iv. 26), that Theophilus, in his letter
to his friend Autolycus, made use of the Apoca-
lypse, and yet he does not so much as notice
that these books contain a citation of a passage
from the Gospel of St. John, and even with the
name of the Apostle given. Now, the blind
zeal of the adversaries of the Gospel has either
chosen not to see this, or has passed it over in
silence.
But there is another argument which we
can appeal to. Eusebius has told us that
Papias made use of St. John's first Epistle.
Now, there are strong reasons, as we have seen
above, for concluding that the Gospel and the
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APOSTOLIC FATHERS. Ill
Epistle came from the same hand. The testi-
mony, therefore, of Papias in favour of the
Epistle really amounts to one in favour of the
Gospel. It is quite possible that those critics
who treat history so freely, after having set
aside the greater number of St. Paul's Epistles,
can also treat in the same way the Gospel of
St. John, though unquestioned hitherto. They
have done so; but in face of such prejudice,
and a determination to see only from their own
point of view, we have nothing more to say.
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CHAPTER V.
MANUSCRIPTS AND VERSIONS OF THE SECOND
CENTURY.
Such, then, are the weapons which we employ
against an unbelieving criticism. But to com-
plete our aim, and maintain the truth of the
Gospel, we must procure a new weapon, or,
rather 5 open a new arsenal of defence. It bears
the name of New Testament Textual Criticism.
It is not easy to make this at on6e clear to all
readers ; we must endeavour to do so.
The name denotes that branch of learning
which is concerned with the originals of the
sacred text* The inquiry into these originals
should teach us what the Christian Church ill
various times and in different lands has found
written in those boohs which contain the
New Testament. Thug", for instance, it should
teach us what was the text used by Colromb*
in the sixth century, by Ambrose and Augustine
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114 THE DATE OP THE GOSPELS.
in the fourth, and by Cyprian and Tertullian,
in their Latin copies, in the third and second
century; or what the Patriarch Photius in
the tenth, Cyril, Bishop of Jerusalem, in the
fifth, Athanasius in the fourth, and Origen in
the third, had before them in the Greek text.
The chief end of such inquiries, however, lies
in its enabling us to find out the very words
and expressions which the holy Apostles either
wrote or dictated to their amanuenses. If the
New Testament is the most sacred and precious
book in the world, we should surely desire to
possess the original text of each of its books,
in the state in which it left its author's hands,
without either addition or blank, or change of
any kind. I have already spoken of this in
the account of my travel and researches, to
which I here refer the reader.
If you ask me, then, whether any popular
version, such as Luther's, does or does not con-
tain the original text, my answer is Yes and No.
I say Yes, as far as concerns your soul's salva-
tion ; all that is needful for that, you have in
Luther's version. But I also say No, for this
reason, that Luther made his translation from a
text which needed correction in many places.
For this Greek text which Luther used was no
better than the received text of the sixteenth
century, based on the few manuscripts then
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MANUSCRIPTS OP SECOND CENTURY. 115
accessible. We have already told you that this
text differs in many places from the oldest
authorities of the fourth, fifth, and sixth cen-
turies, and, therefore, must be replaced by a
text which is really drawn from the oldest
sources discoverable. The difficulty of finding
such a text lies in this, that there is threat
diversity among these texts; we have, there-
fore, to compare them closely together, and
decide on certain points of superiority on which
to prefer one text to another.
We have in this, then, a fixed point of the
greatest importance on which we can safely
take our stand, that the Latin text, called
the old Italic version, as found in a certain
class of manuscripts, was already in use as
early as the second century. The text of
the old Italic is substantially that which Ter-
tullian, about the end of the second century,
and the Latin translator of Irenaeus still earlier,
made use of. If we had any Greek text of the
second century to compare with this old Italic
version, we should then be able to arrive at the
original Greek text at that time in use. We
should thus be able to approach very nearly
to the original text which came from the
Apostles' hands, since it is certain that the text
of the second century must resemble more
closely that of the first than any later text can
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116 THE DATE OF THE GOSPELS.
be expected to do. Such a manuscript is before
us in the Sinaitic copy, which more than any
other is in closest agreement with the old Italic
version. We do not mean that there are no
other versions which agree as closely with the
Sinaitic copy as the old Italic version, which
the translator, who lived in North Africa, some-
wheifPnear our modern city of Algiers, had
before him. For we find that the old Syriac
version which has been recently found is quite
as closely related as the Italic. The fathers
of the Egyptian Church of the second and
third century, moreover, establish the trust-
worthiness of this Sinaitic text.
What, then, do these considerations lead us
to ? In the first place, they establish this — that
as early as the middle of the second century
our four Gospels existed in a Syriac and in a
Latin version. This feet proves, not only what
the harmonists of the latter half of the second
century also prove, that our Gospels had already
been received intp the Canon, but they also
decide that point which has been raised as to
the genuineness of our present copies of St.
Matthew and St. Mark's Gospels. We have seen
how certain critics, on the authority of certain
loose expressions of Papias, have said that our
present Gospels are only versions of the original
documents. Against this supposition these two
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MANUSCRIPTS OF SECOND CENTURY. 117
versions enter an emphatic protest. At least,
at the time when these versions were produced,
our present Gospels of Matthew and Mark must
have been considered genuine. This being
settled, it is a groundless and unreasonable
supposition that, about the beginning of the
second century, there were two entirely different
copies of St. Matthew and St. Mark in existence ;
for then we should have to admit that these
authentic copies disappeared, leaving not a
trace behind, while other spurious copies took
their place, and were received everywhere
instead of the genuine originals.
We have only one more inference to draw :
from the state of the text of these early docu-
ments, the old Greek, Syriac, and Latin copies.
Although these set forth the text which was
in general use about the middle of the second
century, we may well suppose that before this
text came into use it had a history of its own.
I mean that the text passed from one hand to
another, and was copied again and again, and
so must have suffered from all these revisions.
I can only here assert this as the result of my
long experience in dealing with manuscripts,
without- going into details to prove that it was
so. But I must here make the assertion as
one of the most important results of my critical
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118 THE DATE OP THE GOSPELS.
labours. If no one before me has been able to
establish this point in the same way, this is
owing to my fortunate discovery of the Sinaitic
copy. Now, if my assertion on this point has
any solid base to rest upon, as I hope to make
good on another occasion, we may confidently
say, that by the end of the first century our
four Gospels were in use in the Church. I
here advance nothing new. For confirmation
of what I say, I refer my reader to what I have
already advanced, and endeavoured to make
clear and apparent to all.
And now I draw my argument to a close.
Should it fall into the hands of learned oppo-
nents, they will doubtless say that I have left
out much that is important. This seems to me
to be mere trifling. It has been easy for writers
with a little subtlety and apparent seriousness
to set forth the alleged contradictions and
mistakes in early Church History ; but which are
in truth their own. In this they have used all
sorts of devices, and easily succeeded in deceiving
the ignorant. And it is to meet these special
pleadings that historical testimony becomes so
important. A single well-established fact weighs
more in the scale of good sense than the most
dazzling wit, or the most ingenious sophistry,
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MANUSCRIPTS OF SECOND CENTURY. 119
with which they torture and twist the facts
which occurred eighteen hundred years ago.
May my writing serve this end, to make you
mistrust those novel theories upon, or rather
against, the Gospels, which would persuade you
that the wonderful details which the Gospels
give us of our gracious Saviour, are founded
on ignorance or deceit. The Gospels, like the
Only-Begotten of the Father, will endure as
long as human nature itself, while the dis-
coveries of this pretended wisdom must sooner
or later disappear like bubbles. He who has
made shipwreck of his own faith and who lives
only after the flesh cannot endure to see others
trusting in their Saviour. Do not, then, let
yourself be disturbed by their clamour, but
rather hold what you have, the more firmly be-
cause others assail it. Do not think that we are
dubious about the final victory of truth. For
this result there is One pledged to whom the
whole world is mere feebleness. All that con-
cerns our duty is, to bear testimony to the truth,
to the best of our ability, and that not for
victory, but for conscience' sake.
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CONTENTS.
PAOB
Prepack 3
introductory— narrative of thb discovery of the
Snurno Manuscript 9
Chapter L— Ecclesiastical Testimony 39
Chatter n.— The Tesitmony of Heretics and Hea-
then DURING THE SECOND CENTURY 67
Chapter m. — Apocryphal Literature 77
Chapter IV.— Testimony of Apostolic Fathers : Bar-
NABAS AND PAPIA8 87
Chapter V.— Manuscripts and Versions of the Second
Century 113
London : Benjamin Pardon, Printer, Paternoster-row.
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ffinhlituthm* *& % ^Iigb»B Cract Stooets*
BOOKS FOR ^HE TtfflES.
GOD'S WORD WRITTEN: the Doctrine of ijie
Inspiration of the Holy Scripture Explained and Enforced. By
the Eev. E. Gabbett, M.A., Author of " Religion in Daily TJ£L*\
Boyle Lecturer for 1861, 1862, and 1863. Crown 8vo, 4s. ^d.
clQthJboards. •
SCIENCE and CHRISTIAN THOUGHT. By John
Duns, BtD., RE.S.E., Professor of Natural Science, New College,
Edinburgh, drown 8vo, 4s. 6d. cloth boards.
TteH CHRIST of the GOSPELS and the ROMANCE
of Ml RE#A$T. Three Essays by Dr. Schaef and M. Rottssel,
Crown 8vo, 2s. 6d., cloth boards. # e ,
THE AWAKENING of IT^LY and the CRISIS
of ROME : being a Pour Months' Tour of Observation in the
Summer of 1864. By the Eev. J. A. Wylie, LL.D., Author of
" The Papacy," etc.* Crown 8vo, 5s/ 6d. cloth boards.
THE BIBLE and MODERN THOUGHT, With
an Apj>endix. By the Rev. T. R. Birks, M.A., of Trinity College,
Cambridge. 8vo, 7s. cloth boards; 12mo edit., 4s. cloth boards.
THE EXODUS ipf ISRAEL : its Difficulties Examined,
and its Truth Confirmed? *By the Rev. T. R. Birks, M.A. 8vo
edit., 7s. cloth boards; 12tdo edit., 2s. 6d. cloth boards.
' THE -NOVELTIES of ROMANISM. In Three Parts.
By Charles Hastings Collette. Second Edition, Revised and
Enlarged. Crown 8vo, 4s. 6d. cloth boards.
THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY of a FRENCH PROTES-
TANT, condemned to the Galleys for the sake of his Religion.
Translated from the Prench. Crown 8vo, 3s. 6d. cloth boards.
AONIO PALEARIO. A Chapter in the History of
the Italian Reformation. Prom the Prench of M. Bonnet. Crown
•8vo, 3s. 6d. cloth boards,
DEPOSITORIES: 56, PATERNOSTER ROW,
and 164, PICCADILLY, LONDON.
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APR S3 1890
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