L. C. 7

98 HOW TO APPROACH THE EVIDENCE.
tributed to the foundation on which such a concep- tion might be built. If during His earthly life Christ exerted no greater powers than belong to man, it is hard to understand how His friends were prepared to recognise in Him, when He had returned to the Father, the glory of the eternal Son of God.
IV.
Again: our Lord belonged to a race which had reached a very great and a very noble conception of God. It is unnecessary to discuss contested questions of Old Testament criticism. The Jewish prophets— this is certain—were filled with awe in the presence of the Eternal ; they worshipped and feared Him as infinitely great and infinitely glorious; and He was a God in whose righteousness and mercy men might perfectly trust. Their religious faith was the inspira- tion and the support of a lofty morality. Kings and people were warned that no prayers or sacrifices could shelter them from the anger of Jehovah if they were guilty of injustice, cruelty, and oppression : “ When ye spread forth your hands, I will hide Mine eyes from you: yea, when ye make many prayers, I will not hear: your hands are full of blood. Wash you, make you clean; put away the evil of your doings from before Mine eyes; cease to do evil; learn to do well; seek judgment, relieve the op- pressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the widow.”
_ And for many generations the Jewish people had been expecting the coming of a great Prophet, a
HOW TO APPROACH THE EVIDENCE. 99
great Prince,—the Servant, the Messenger, the Repre- sentative of Jehovah. Our Lord, according to the Four Gospels, claimed to be the Christ of Jewish prophecy and hope; and if the representation of Him given in the Gospels and in the other New Testament writings is true, the prophecy and the hope have been wonderfully fulfilled. He is not indeed the Christ that either the people or the prophets expected ; but He is infinitely greater. He is a Prophet whose Divine commission has been acknowledged by great nations for many centuries ; a Prince who has com. manded in many lands, and for more than sixty generations, an absolute obedience and a passionate loyalty such as were never given during this brief earthly life, and within the boundaries of a single state, to the greatest of earthly sovereigns.
It is extremely remarkable, to say the least, that so singular a hope should have received—or should appear to have received—so singular a fulfilment. It is extremely remarkable that the enduring sovereignty over great nations, which, according to Jewish hope, was to be achieved by their Messiah, has been actually achieved by One of their own race, and achieved in a far loftier form than their prophets had anticipated. It is extremely remarkable that the sovereignty should have fallen to One whose earthly history was wholly unlike what the Jewish people had supposed would be the earthly history of their Messiah—so unlike, that to have constructed the story of Christ, in its substance and its decisive
100 HOW TO APPROACH THE EVIDENCE.
events, out of the popular expectation would have been impossible. And what, for our present purpose, is most remarkable of all, is that the story as told in the Gospels, including the manifestation of our Lord’s miraculous power, forms a perfect transition from the ancient hope of the Jewish people to its transcendent accomplishment in the present glory of the Lord Jesus Christ.
V.
It is my contention that these considerations cannot be reasonably disregarded in our judgment on the evidence for the historical trustworthiness of the Four Gospels. The main objection—I might say the only objection—to their trustworthiness rests on the miraculous events which they record. In judging whether it is possible and probable that the miracles were wrought, we are bound to take into account the whole of the Christian case.
Hardly any conceivable strength of testimony would convince us that miracles were wrought in England three or four hundred years ago by a man who was remembered only by the miracles that were attributed to him. If it were affirmed, even by con- temporary witnesses whose good faith we had no reason to doubt, that such a man had healed the sick, given sight to the blind, raised the dead—a man in whose personality and character and life, so far as they were known to us from the narratives which recorded his miraculous works, there was nothing
HOW TO APPROACH THE EVIDENCE. 10%
wonderful, nothing unique, nothing that created the irresistible impression that he was nearer to God than other men; a man who had originated no great reformation in the moral and religious condition ot mankind, had given to the race no loftier and more affecting conceptions of God, had done nothing to deepen the reverence of men for God’s righteous- ness, nothing to make them the heirs of a larger blessedness in God’s love; a man from whom there had come no loftier, more gracious, or more generous ideal of human goodness, no new force to sustain us in duty, no new consolations to soothe us in sorrow ; —if, I say, it were affirmed by his friends, men apparently intelligent and truthful, that such a man had worked miracles, their testimony would constitute a curious historical problem, to which we might be unable to find any solution; but it would not com- mand our belief. In this imaginary case the alleged miracles would be sporadic, isolated, not woven into the texture of the actual history of mankind. According to the Christian case, the miracles of Christ have their place in that history. They belong to the life and work of One who has changed, and changed immeasurably for the better, the moral and religious condition of great nations, and whose power after the lapse of eighteen centuries is still unspent. In the narratives which record the miracles of Christ the miracles are not the most wonderful elements: His teaching, His unique Personality, the Divine per- fection revealed under human conditions in His char-
ye
102 HOW TO APPROACH THE EVIDENCE.
acter and history, are more wonderful still. Finally, His appearance has proved to be the transcendent fulfilment of a great hope which, for many centuries,
had been the stay, the strength, and the consolation ©
of the race from which He sprang, a race to which had come an exceptional knowledge of God. That Christ should have worked miracles does not surprise me. It would have surprised me if He had not.
VI.
As for those of us who know the Lord Jesus Christ for ourselves, and who know that He is the living Lord and Saviour of men, the Way to the Father, the Giver of eternal life, our own experience—confirmed by the experience of Christian men of all Churches and all ages—prevents us from finding anything incredible in the miracles which He is alleged to have wrought during His earthly ministry.
If you know for yourselves the living and glorified Christ, if you have found God in Him, if you have entered into the actual and conscious possession of the blessings of the Christian redemption, you will see no reason for doubting the historical trust- worthiness of the Four Gospels, because they declare that, during our Lord’s earthly life, He healed the sick, gave sight to the blind, and raised the dead, “He has done greater things than these,” “whereof we all are witnesses.”
Strauss began his investigation by assuming that miracles are impossible, and that therefore the
HOW TO APPROACH THE EVIDENCE, 103
story of the Gospels cannot be trustworthy. We begin the investigation by assuming that miracles are possible, because the living God is greater than the forces of the material universe ; and that, as we know that Christ is the Son of God and the Saviour of men, it is probable that, even during the years of His earthly humiliation, gracious works, which God alone could achieve, revealed His transcendent great- ness, The assumption that the miracles of Christ are impossible is an assumption absolutely without support ; the assumption that it is probable that He wrought them rests on the personal experience of innumerable Christian men, and on the triumphs and glories of the Christian Faith.
LECTURE VI.
EUSEBIUS.
N the argument which I propose to submit to you,
to show that the story of our Lord contained in our Four Gospels is the story which was told by the original apostles, it may appear at first sight— though this is an error which I hope to remove—that no evidence drawn from writings belonging to the second half of the second century can have any weight. But the whole amount of the Christian literature produced before A.D. 150, apart from the books of the New Testament, seems to have been inconsiderable ; and of that which was produced a large part has unfortunately been lost. Enough how- ever remains to give the Gospels solid and secure support.
And the lost books are not wholly unknown to us. Early in the fourth century an eminent scholar, a famous bishop, Eusebius of Czsarea, wrote a history of the Church from the apostolic age to his own; and in this he gives many extracts from writings which have long disappeared, though copies of some
104
“=
EUSEBIUS, 105
of them may, perhaps, still lie hidden in Eastern monasteries, and may yet be recovered.
L
Eusebius was born not much later than A.D. 260, The place of his birth is uncertain ; but he submitted to the Council of Nicaea a confession of faith which he said that he had been taught at Cesarea when he was a child and while he was a catechumen. His earliest associations were with that city; there he was baptized; there he became a presbyter; there too, soon after A.D. 313, he became bishop; and he was bishop of Czsarea at his death A.D. 339 or 340.
In his youth he was the friend of learned men especially of Pamphilus, a fellow presbyter, who was a passionate disciple of Origen of Alexandria. He had access to great libraries: the library of Pam-. philus, which was of extraordinary extent and value; and the library collected during the first half of the third century by Alexander, bishop of Jerusalem. His industry must have been immense; he published more than thirty treatises—historical, apologetic, doctrinal, critical, and exegetical, besides orations and sermons. His great position at the Council of Niczea was due, no doubt, first of all, to the intimacy of his relations with the emperor. He alone of the Eastern prelates could tell what was in the emperor’s mind ; “he was the clerk of the imperial closet ; he was the interpreter, the chaplain, the confessor of
106 EUSEBIUS.
Constantine.”! But he was also “beyond question the most learned man and the most famous living writer in the Church at that time.” *
Before the meeting of the council he had inter- vened on behalf of Arius, and had remonstrated with Alexander of Alexandria for deposing him. By the more vehement enemies of Arianism he was regarded with great distrust. When the creed of Czsarea, which he proposed to the council, had been modified by the introduction into the Nicene Creed of the clauses declaring the Son to be “of the substance of the Father,” “begotten not made,” and “of the same substance” (omoousion) with the Father, Eusebius hesitated whether he should subscribe it. He did not like the new terms; the old creed of his baptism _ was sufficiently explicit for him ; nor did he like the anathema appended to the creed condemning Arian- ism. But after a day’s consideration he signed with the rest, and in a letter to the people of Czsarea he explained that, “though he would resist to the last any vital change in the traditional creed of his Church, he had nevertheless subscribed to these alterations, when assured of their innocence, to avoid appearing contentious.” $
The truth seems to be that he was a man tolerant
1 STANLEY : Eastern Church, p, 102.
* LIGHTFOOT: “Eusebius of Czsarea”: Dictionary of Christian Biography, vol. ii., p. 312
® Ibidy p. 313
EUSEBIUS. 107
of theological differences, profoundly convinced that neither human language nor human thought can define the mysteries of the eternal life of God; and he was very reluctant to deal hardly with friends of his who had been caught by the bold speculations of Arius. For himself, he held the traditional faith ; but he did not see that Arianism cut it up by the roots.
If we were to describe him in the current language of our own times, we should say that he was a Broad Churchman, orthodox, but not inclined to be rigorous in exacting from other men an acceptance of the orthodox definitions; and that in his intellectual temper and habits he was a scholar and literary man, rather than a theologian.
II.
In his time there were seven of the books in- cluded in our New Testament about whose apostolic authority the opinion of the Churches was divided ; and in writing his History Eusebius proposed, as one of his objects, to make some contribution towards a decision of their claims.
The books of the New Testament, as you know, were written by different authors, in different coun- tries, at different times. There are many questions to be asked about them: When were they separated from all other Christian writings and placed in a class by themselves as being the “Sacred Scriptures” of the Christian Faith? By whose authority was the
108 EUSEBIUS.
selection made? On what grounds were some books finally included, others finally rejected? These are subjects which you will find discussed in histories of the New Testament canon.
From such treatises you will learn that, towards the end of the second century, and at least as early as A.D. 185, a unique and sacred authority was attributed to nearly all the writings contained in our New Testa- ment. “The Scriptures are perfect, inasmuch as they were uttered by the Word of God and His Spirit.” This is the testimony of Irenzus ; and by the Scrip- tures he means the books of the Old Testament and, with a few inconsiderable exceptions, about which opinion was divided, the books of the New. With these exceptions, our New Testament books had been received by the Christian Church as authorita- tive and sacred for at least twenty years before the close of the second century ; and they were regarded by the Christians of that age with a reverence as deep as our own.
For Christians of the generation to which Irenzus belonged, Christians living in every part of the empire, our Four Gospels—no other “Gospels ”—con- tained the authoritative story of our Lord’s Life and the authoritative record of His teaching. Our Acts of the Apostles—no other “Acts”—contained the authoritative history of the early years of the Chris- tian Church. They accepted the Epistles of Paul, which have a place in our own New Testament, the First Epistle of Peter, and the First Epistle of John,
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Ta ga A a a rm OS a ce
EUSEBIUS. 109
as containing the authoritative teaching of apostles who spoke in the name of Christ.
These books had been separated from all others, not by the decree of a council or in submission to the judgment of a great theologian or bishop, but by the general consent of Christian Churches in every part of the world. The process had been a silent one. No one can tell how the result had been brought about. But it is certain that, about the year A.D. 180, the books which I have enumerated were regarded as “the Christian Scriptures,” as books written under Divine inspiration and having Divine authority ; and they had their place side by side
’ with the books of the Old Testament.
Concerning the Epistle to the Hebrews, the Epistles of James and Jude, the Second Epistle of Peter, the Second and Third Epistles of John, there was not, in that early age, the same unanimity of judgment. The Apocalypse, which was very gene- rally received at the close of the second century, was regarded with serious distrust in the third. The apostolic origin of some of these seven disputed books was acknowledged by the Churches of one country and denied by the Churches of another. Eminent scholars and bishops differed about them. No attempt was made for a long time to determine the question by authority.!
' Note A in Appendix.
110 EUSEBIUS.
IIl.
Eusebius, as I have said, proposed in his Hestory to make some contribution towards the settlement of the claims of these disputed books, by showing what use had been made of them in the earlier ages of the Church. He also proposed to record anything interesting that he might discover concerning the books which were universally received by the Church. But he draws a very clear distinction between the way in which he intends to deal with the two classes of writings. He promises that, if he finds in any Church writer a guotation from a disputed book, or a reference to a disputed book, he will call attention to it. Every such quotation or reference would illustrate the authority which the book held in the judgment of an earlier generation of Christians, and would assist to determine its claims to be included among the Sacred Scriptures. But to give quota- tions from the undisputed books, and references to them, was unnecessary : the authority of these books was not doubtful, it was universally acknowledged. If however he found in early Christian writers any interesting statement or information, either about the books which were universally received, or about the other seven, he promises to give it a place in his Fitstory.
His general principle would not have required him to call attention to any mere references to the First Epistle of John or the First Epistle of Peter ; their
EUSEBIUS. W141
genuineness had always been acknowledged. But, as a matter of fact, he does call attention to the _ references to those Epistles which are found in some early writers. “He may have thought,” says Dr. Lightfoot, “that this would conduce to a just estimate of the meaning of silence in the case of disputed Epistles, as 2 Peter and 2 and 3 John.”!
Eusebius was a man of large learning. He had access to some of the best libraries of Christian literature that existed in his time. Many books which are now lost were in his hands. From some of them he gives interesting and important extracts. It was his declared purpose to collect and to record whatever information he found in earlier Christian writers, both concerning the seven disputed books and the books which had secured their place among the sacred books of the Church. He was a fair- minded man, with the instincts and habits of a scholar. But throughout his A7zstory there is no hint that any uncertainty had ever existed in the Church with regard to the authority of the Four Gospels. There is nothing to suggest that they had first appeared after the death of the men whose names they bear. It is inconceivable that Christian Churches independent of each other, inheriting different tradi- tions, and situated in different countries, would have come to accept these four books as the genuine
1 Essays on the Work entitled “Supernatural Religion,” P- 47.
112 EUSEBIUS.
writings of Matthew and John, Mark and Luke, if they had appeared for the first time, and without explanation, when Matthew and John, Mark and Luke, had all passed away. And if any explanation of their late appearance had been given, it is also inconceivable that no trace of it should have sur- vived. In the Christian writings which have come down to us there is no hint of any such explanation. If any hint of it had existed in the writings which are now lost, but which Eusebius possessed, he would certainly have told us about it.
IV.
Take the Gospel of John. If a book of such im- mense theological importance as the Fourth Gospel had appeared, for the first time, thirty, forty, or fifty years after John’s death, can we imagine that its claims would have been unchallenged? Would no Church writer have expressed a wish for some account of its history? Would no question have been asked as to the reasons why, if it had really been written by the apostle, it had not been given to the Church thirty, forty, fifty years before? Down to the middle of the second century, and later, there were Christian bishops living in different parts of the world who in their early years had known John ot the friends of John: would they not have wanted to learn how it was that a Gospel of which they had never heard had appeared with John’s name? And would not the unknown writer who had had the
:
EUSEBIUS, : 113
courage to attribute his fictitious Gospel to the apostle have also had the courage to give some fictitious answer to these inquiries? Would not the miraculous ingenuity which enabled him to write a story of Christ, which during so many centuries has commanded the wonder and awe of mankind, have been equal to the invention of a tale concerning the manner in which the book had been preserved, and the grounds for delaying its publication, which would have had an irresistible fascination and charm, —a tale far too beautiful and too pathetic to have passed out of the memory of the Church ?
If any questions about the book had been asked, if any answers had been given, Eusebius would have told us about them ; for he promises to mention what has been said by earlier writers concerning the undis- puted books as well as about the disputed books. He makes a specific promise to mention what they have said about the Four Gospels.! But of any such inquiries as those I have suggested about the Gospel of John, of any such explanation as those inquiries must have drawn out, he says nothing.
V.
That this Gospel would have been received by the Church without controversy, if it had appeared twenty or thirty years after the death of John, is incredible, when we consider the contents of the Gospel itself
1 Fcclestastical History, book iii., cap. xxiv. Bot, 8
114 EUSEBIUS.
and the controversies by which the Church was harassed throughout the second century. Gnosticism destroyed the power of the Gospel by changing it into a philosophy. By those who were contending earnestly for “the faith once for all delivered to the saints,” it was regarded with intense hostility. But among the technical words of this formidable heresy are the very words which hold so conspicuous a place in John’s Gospel, “Only Begotten,” “Life,” “Truth,” “Grace,” “Fulness,” “the Word,” “Light.” Did the Gnostics get these words from John? or did the un- known writer of the Fourth Gospel get them from the Gnostics? The words are just as characteristic of the Gospel attributed to John as of the system taught by Valentinus the Gnostic, though in John they have a different power. Who used them first, the writer of the Fourth Gospel or Valentinus ?
If the Fourth Gospel had appeared for the first time at any date after 120 A.D, what chance would it have had of being received by those who were fight- ing Gnosticism as the deadly foe of the Christian Church? To take a parallel case, suggested by Pro- fessor Salmon, of Dublin!: suppose that when the controversy of the Reformation was at the hottest, it had been announced that the manuscript of
' “You might as well conceive some one who wanted a docu- ment to be accepted as authoritative by us Protestants stuffing it with Roman Catholic technical words, transubstantiation, purgatory, and such like."—SALMON : Historical Introduction to the New Testament, p. 71 (first edition).
i ae
EUSEBIUS. 115
an Epistle of Paul, previously unknown, had just been discovered in some ancient library ; suppose that when the manuscript was published, it was found to be full of such words as “transubstantiation,” “purgatory,” “indulgences,” would not every Protes- tant have rejected it as a forgery? Suppose that the Epistle had been published and accepted as genuine ten, twenty, thirty years before Luther nailed his theses to the door of the church at Wittenberg, would not the outbreak of the Reformation have provoked a fierce controversy concerning its genuineness ?
If the Fourth Gospel had appeared as late as 120 A.D., when Gnosticism was becoming very powerful, the Churches which held fast the traditional faith would never have acknowledged its authority. If at that date it had been only recently received as the work of an apostle—received within the previous twenty years, and received on inadequate evidence— its authority would certainly have been challenged, and some trace of the controversy would certainly have survived.
But I repeat that, in the Christian writings of the second century which are in our own hands, there is no trace of any controversy on the genuineness of John’s Gospel; and the silence of Eusebius assures us that there was no trace of any controversy on this subject in the Christian writings, now lost, which he found in the library of his friend Pamphilus, or in the library of Bishop Alexander at Jerusalem. The inference seems to me irresistible. There was never
116 ZUSEBILUS.
any controversy concerning the genuineness of the Gospel of John because there was never any uncer- tainty about it; and there was never any uncertainty about it because it was published in John’s lifetime, and all John’s friends knew that it was his.’
’ It is hardly necessary to say that the argument in this Lecture was suggested by Dr. Lightfoot’s remarkable chapter on “The Silence of Eusebius” in his Essays on a Work entitled “ Supernatural Religion” ; and the notes to the lecture indicate how much I am indebted to it. But the argument is not identical with that of Dr. Lightfoot, and I must not make his great name responsible for it.
q ; ‘- 4 p : : L
LECTURE VII. CLEMENT OF ALEXANDRIA AND TERTULLIAN.
HAT at the close of the second century all
Christian Churches received our Four Gospels as the authoritative records of the earthly Life and Ministry of our Lord is not contested by any school of criticism. Nor is it contested that, at that time, these Four Gospels were universally attributed to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. To ourselves this is a fact of immense importance.
I.
For when we look back to the early days of the Christian Faith, to the times when men were still living who had seen and heard the writers of our sacred books, had received the Christian Gospel from their teaching, had known them as their personal friends, had talked with them in private about the miracles of Christ, His discourses, His sufferings, and His resurrection, the distance seems immense. The imagination is oppressed by the intervening centuries. How can we make our way through all the confusions
and uncertainties of this vast tract of time? But 317
118 CLEMENT OF ALEXANDRIA
of these eighteen hundred years, we can pass over seventeen hundred at a single stride. We have in our hands the writings of Irenzeus of Lyons, of Tertullian of Carthage, of Clement and Origen’ of Alexandria; and they attribute the Four Gospels to the same authors to whom we attribute them ; they regard them with the same reverence. Is it possible to believe that this general consent rested on no solid foundations ?
Let the question be put in another form, a form suggested by the latest account that has been given of these sacred books by those who deny that they are genuine. At the close of the second century these four narratives had secured in all Christian Churches a place as great, as authoritative, as sacred, as that which they hold now: is it possible to believe that they could have won this universal recognition if they had been written by unknown men, in unknown places, at unknown times, during the first half of that
! The late Dr. Tregelles,an eminent and most painstaking New Testament scholar, says of Origen, who was born in A.D. 185 and died in A.D. 254: “In his writings he makes such extensive use of the New Testament, that, although a very large number of his works are lost, and many others have come down to us only in defective Latin versions, we can in his extant Greek writings alone (I speak this from actual knowledge and exami- nation) find cited at least two-thirds of the New Testament ; so that had such a thing been permitted as that the Gospels and some of the other books should have been lost, we might restore them in a great measure by means of the quotations in Origen.” —Lecture on the Historic Evidence of the Authorship and Transmission of the Books of the New Testament (1853), p. 14.
4
AND TERTULLIAN. 119
same century, and after all the apostles and all who belonged to the first generation of Christians were dead? There are two considerations which make it infinitely improbable: 1, The wzde area over which, in very early times, Christian Churches were planted ; and, 2, Their mutual independence of each other.
1. Within thirty years after the death of our Lord there were Churches in Jerusalem, in Czsarea, in the Syrian Antioch, and in Rome. There were Churches in the heart of Asia Minor and in the great cities on the coast. There were Churches in Philippi, Thessa- lonica, and Corinth. Our materials for constructing the history of the diffusion of the Christian Faith during the next forty years are inconsiderable ; but early in the second century we find that there were large numbers of Christians in the north of Asia Minor. Pliny had been sent into the province by Trajan, and he wrote to the emperor to learn how he is to treat those who are guilty of believing in this strange superstition. The “crime” had continued to spread even while the persecution was going on. If he is still to punish those who persisted in it, he tells the emperor that a great number of persons are in danger of suffering. “For many of all ages and every rank, of both sexes likewise, are accused, and will be
‘accused. Nor has the contagion of this superstition
seized cities only, but the lesser towns also and the open country.” Pliny thinks that by a wise policy it may be restrained and corrected. “It is certain,” he says, “that the temples, which were almost for-
120 CLEMENT OF ALEXANDRIA
saken, begin to be more frequented. And the sacred solemnities, after a long intermission, are revived. Victims likewise are everywhere bought up, whereas for some time there were few purchasers.” He thinks that many “might be reclaimed if pardon were granted to those who shall repent.” That letter was written before A.D. 105. Fifty years later the Christian Gospel had spread so widely, that Justin, in his Dialogue with Trypho says, “There exists not a people, whether Greek or barbarian or any other race of men, by whatsoever appellation they may be dis- tinguished, whether they dwell under tents or wander about in covered wagons, among whom prayers are not offered in the name of the crucified Jesus to the Father and Creator of all things.” Gibbon, who quotes the passage, has no doubt a right to call it “a splendid exaggeration, which even at present it would be extremely difficult to reconcile with the real state of mankind” ; but Justin would hardly have ventured on so glowing a statement, if it had not been notorious that the new Faith had won great triumphs in many remote parts of the world. Indeed, we know, from other sources, that before the middle of the second century there were Christian Churches in nearly all the provinces of the empire.
2. These Churches were not under any central authority. The Apostle Paul, during his lifetime, maintained a vigilant supervision over the Churches which he had founded in Asia and in Europe; but he died more than thirty years before the end of the
AND TERTULLIAN. 121
first century. John must have exerted an immense influence over the Churches of Asia Minor, but he died about the beginning of the second century The age of general councils had not come. As yet the bishop of Rome was not the ruler of Western Christendom. The Churches stood apart. They had friendly relations with each other, but they were not bound together in one great ecclesiastical organi- zation. No theologian, in the second century, rose to the ascendency which belonged to Augustine in the fifth. Ancient Churches, founded by apostles, were regarded with reverence, and the Roman Church had the additional influence derived from its position in the imperial city; but neither Antioch nor Rome
had authority over the rest of Christendom. The
Churches followed their own traditions ; if they modi- fied them, it was in fraternal deference to Churches which they believed had been more faithful to the apostolic rule—not in forced submission to any ex- ternal authority. Towards the end of the second cen- tury there was a sharp controversy between the East and the West on the observance of Easter.
How then are we to explain the fact that, many years before 200 A.D., all these Churches—Churches composed of men of different races, Churches separated from each other by mountains and seas, Churches in Rome and Churches in Asia Minor, Churches.in Gaul and Churches in Northern Africa—received the Four Gospels as sacred Scriptures, and believed that they were written by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John?
SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA SCHOOL OF THEOLOGY LIBRARY
122 CLEMENT OF ALEXANDRIA
I repeat that no great theologian, whose fame ex- tended from the East to the West, drew these remote and independent societies into agreement. Difference of judgment was not suppressed, consent was not com- pelled by the canon of a council or by the authority of a pope. How came the Churches to agree?
There can, I think, be only one answer to this question. The Gospels must have been written and received before the first generation of Christians had wholly passed away. Had any of them appeared for the first time at a later date, ancient Churches which had been founded by apostles would have refused to acknowledge them. If, here and there, a Church had been deceived, Churches elsewhere would have protested against the fraud. The universal reception of the Gospels before 200 A.D. is a proof that they could not have been written by unknown authors between 100 A.D. and 150 A.D.
Il.
From the argument resting on the general consent of the Churches at the close of the second century, I pass to the consideration of the value of the special evidence which is given by two eminent men of that age—Clement of Alexandria and Tertullian of Carthage. The two men, in their intellectual and religious life, were extremely unlike ; and they repre- sent Christian communities having very different characteristics and very different traditions.
The city of Alexandria had long been famous for
AND TERTULLIAN. 133
its immense Library, the literary glory of the ancient world ; and for its Museuni—or, as we should say, its University—in which crowds of students from distant countries listened to illustrious professors whose names have not yet perished. The general population consisted of men of all races, and the Alexandrian schools were hospitable to the learning and speculation of all lands. It was there that the bold attempt was made to blend and to fuse Greek and Oriental thought, and to discover in the books of Moses the last and highest results of the philo- sophy of Paganism. Literature, grammar, criticism ; mathematics, astronomy, medicine—whatever a man cared to study, he could study under great masters and in company with enthusiastic comrades.
As early as the beginning of the second century the number of Christians in the city was very large ; among them Basilides and Valentinus, and other teachers of Gnosticism, found some of their earliest adherents. The Christian Church caught the Alex- andrian spirit. Towards the end of the century the great Christian school of Alexandria, the Catechetical School, became the centre of the intellectual assault of the Church on the thought of the pagan world. The school was open from morning to night, without charge, to men and women alike. Where the intel- lectual life of the world was keenest, most intense, most adventurous, Christian scholars determined with intrepid confidence to demonstrate the transcendent glory of the wisdom revealed to the world in Christ
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Nor were their resources unequal to their task. Over this school Clement presided for about thirteen years (A.D. 190-203).
It is probable, though not certain, that he was educated at Athens, which still preserved in the second century some tradition of its ancient intel- lectual supremacy ; and there are expressions of his from which it has been inferred that in his early life he was a heathen. The nobler forms of heathen thought had a strong attraction for him, and it was by no sudden movement that he reached perfect rest in the Christian Faith. For Clement, even when he has become master of the great Christian school at Alexandria, Plato sometimes speaks “as if divinely inspired.” He believes that, as God is the Author of all good things, God had given philosophy to the Greeks as He had given the law to the Jews, as a ‘discipline of righteousness, as a schoolmaster to bring them to Christ. Perhaps too—it was possible—the gift came direct from the Father of all, and by the immediate illumination of the Holy Spirit ;? or if the philosophers had derived their best knowledge from Hebrew prophets, they were but like Prometheus, who stole fire from heaven for the service of men: the light and fire were from God, by whatsoever means they were obtained?
He was clearly a man of wide and active intel-
1 Stromata, book i., cap. viii. * Jbid., book i., cap. v. ° Jbid., book i., cap. xvii.
j
AND TERTULLIAN. 125
ligence. His sympathies were generous. We are separated from him by seventeen hundred years ; but he often thinks the thoughts which we are inclined to regard as the best results of modern life and speculation. He was a man of large learning;! he was an eminent teacher in a learned Church; he lived in a learned city. That such a man, living and teaching within a hundred years after the death of the last of the apostles, received our Four Gospels as authentic and genuine, that he never suspected that they had been written long after the writers to whom they are attributed were dead, is in itself a strong reason for believing that, at the close of the second century, the tradition which supported their genuine- ness and authenticity was ancient, universal, and decisive.
To give a list of the quotations from the Four Gospels which occur in Clement’s writings, in order to prove that he acknowledges their authority, is wholly unnecessary, as unnecessary as it would be to offer similar proof that their authority is acknow- ledged by Mr. Spurgeon or Canon Liddon. But it may be well to show that he did not accept the authority, either of the Gospels or of the other canonical Scriptures, without inquiry. In a lost
1 “ No heathen contemporary shows such a power of memory or so wide an acquaintance with the classical literature of Greece in all its branches as Clement of Alexandria.”—LIGHT- FOOT: Essays on a Work entitled “ Supernatural Religion,
p. 269.
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work of ne collected the results of his investigations ; some passages have been pre- served. In this work, says Eusebius, Clement gives the tradition respecting the order of the Gospels, as derived from the oldest—or original—presbyters. “He says that those which contain the genealogies were written first ; but that the Gospel of Mark was occasioned in the following manner: ‘When Peter had proclaimed the word publicly at Rome, and declared the Gospel under the influence of the Spirit, as there was a great number present, they requested Mark, who had followed him from afar, and remem- bered well what he had said, to reduce these things to writing ; and that, after composing the Gospel, he gave it to those who requested it of him, which, when Peter understood, he directly neither hindered nor encouraged it. But John, last of all, perceiving that what had reference to the body in the Gospel of our Saviour” (that is, to the earthly and human side of our Lord’s life and work) “was sufficiently detailed, and being encouraged by his familiar friends and urged by the Spirit, he wrote a spiritual Gospel.” } He disputes the authenticity of a saying attributed to our Lord, because, though it is contained in the Gospel according to the Egyptians—an apocryphal Gospel—it is not to be found in “any of the Four Gospels which have been handed down to us.” ?
~
* EUSEBIUS, Ecclesiastical History, book vi., cap. xiv. ® Stromata, book iii., cap. xiii.
AND TERTULLIAN. 127 ee ee ee ee Ne i ee ure There is another point to be considered in con- nexion with the testimony of Clement. He tells us that he wrote his Stvomata as memoranda for his old age, that he might not forget the vigorous and animated discourses which he had heard in early manhood from blessed and truly remarkable men, who had preserved the tradition of the Faith derived directly from the holy apostles Peter, James, John, and Paul. It was God’s will, he says, that the truth should be transmitted from its original teachers as from father to son, though few of the sons were equal to their fathers. He had met the men from whom he had received the tradition in Greece, in Italy, and in the East. One was from Egypt; another was a Christian Jew whom he found in Palestine; another was born in Assyria; another, the greatest of them all—probably Pantzeenus—he found in Egypt; and it was when he found the last that his mind and heart reached their final rest in Christ. Through channels so various the beliefs of an earlier generation had reached him. It is hard to imagine that men who represented countries so remote, and lines of tradition which for two or three generations had been independent of each other, could have agreed to treat the Gospels as having been written by the authors whose names they bear, if these names had been attributed to forgeries pro- duced long after the apostles and all their contem- poraries had passed away.
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III.
From Alexandria we pass to another great African city. The city of Carthage, after its restoration under Cesar and Augustus, rose with extraordinary rapidity to great wealth and splendour. It was inhabited by a mixed population, composed, partly, of the descendants of the ancient Phoenician settlers, who in early times had raised their republic to a greatness which disputed the power of Rome; partly of Roman colonists; partly of strangers from many lands, drawn to the city by its immense commercial prosperity. The external forms of its civilization were derived from Rome. It became famous for its schools of rhetoric and of Roman law. But in the religious faith of the people there were deep traces of the Phoenician origin of the ancient Carthage, and their temper was as fierce as the heat of the African deserts.
The Carthaginian Church shared the intellectual and moral characteristics of the city. Intellectually it was Roman, not Oriental; practical, not specula- tive. Its temper was rigid and intolerant. It was capable of the most violent and passionate en- thusiasm; and, in the person of its sterner sons, capable, too, of an heroic fidelity to Christ under prolonged and cruel sufferings. But when times of persecution came, many of its fanatical members proved inferior in constancy and fortitude to Christian men in other Churches, who were less ostentatious in
AND TERTULLIAN. 129
their professions of devotion to the Faith, and less intolerant in their denunciations of heathenism.
Of the strength and the limitations of this great Church Tertullian is the most illustrious represen- tative. He was born in Carthage between 150 and 160 A.D. He belonged to a good family, and received an excellent education. Philosophy, history, rhetoric, and law were the subjects which had the strongest attractions for him. His parents were heathen, and he was more than thirty years of age—perhaps forty —when he received the Christian Gospel. He soon gave proof of the vehemence of his zeal and the energy and fertility of his intellect; fifteen or six- teen of his books—some of them apologetic, others controversial, others moral and ascetic—were written within seven years after his conversion.
Even these early writings were marked by great moral austerity. According to Tertullian, it was a crime for a Christian man to give any sanction, direct or indirect, to idolatry ; for idolatry is the supreme sin, and includes all others: it is murder, adultery, blasphemy. It was therefore a crime to witness the performances in the theatre and the circus, for all public amusements were associated with honours paid to the gods. It was a crime to have friendly relations with people who were in the habit of witnessing these performances. To share in the observance of the holy days of the heathen was also a crime. On some of these days it was a national custom to pay debts; on others to give
: a of 9
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presents ; Tertullian contended that a Christian man should carefully avoid conforming to the custom ; let him pay his debts and give his presents on days which were not devoted to the gods. To manu- facture idols or to sell them was, of course, a crime. To traffic in any articles used in heathen worship was a crime. Magistrates had to discharge certain functions in relation to heathen temples ; a Christian man could not therefore be a magistrate. School- masters had to teach their scholars the heathen mythology, and to take part in school festivals which were held in honour of the gods; the very first pay- ment of every pupil they consecrated to the honour of Minerva. To be a schoolmaster was therefore not consistent with loyalty to Christ.
It is apparent from the tone and temper of Ter- tullian’s denunciations that there were large numbers of baptized persons in Carthage who listened to this stern teaching either with indifference or with resent- ment. When he reached middle life he turned in despair from what he regarded as the hopeless cor-
? But Tertullian was obliged to admit that Christians could not dispense with that general culture which was needful both for the study of the Scriptures and the intercourse of daily life. He therefore sanctioned the attendance of Christian children at heathen schools, if they could obtain a literary education in no other way ; and he trusted to the influence of the Church and the home to protect them against the contagion of heathenism. The scholars could avoid taking part in heathen festivals more easily than the teachers, See NEANDER: Antignostikus, part i., section 1.
AND TERTULLIAN. 131
ruption of the catholic Church—the luxury, cove- tousness, cowardice, worldliness of both its clergy and laity—and trusted that he had found among the Montanists the lost ideal of the perfect life.
From this time his moral teaching became still more austere. The Christians in Carthage were menaced with persecution. Was it lawful to escape persecution by flight? To Tertullian, who believed that the voice of the Spirit was heard through the prophets of Montanism, the answer was clear; for the prophets incited men to offer themselves for martyrdom. “Why,” they asked, “should you be ashamed of gaining glory? The opportunity is offered you when you are in peril of suffering for the name of Christ. He who is not exposed to dis- honour before men will be exposed to dishonour before the Lord. Seek not to die on your beds from disease, but to die the martyr’s death, that He may be glorified who suffered for you.” The soul of Tertullian vibrated to that iron string. ‘“ More glorious,” he exclaims, “is the soldier pierced with the javelin in battle than he who has a safe skin as a fugitive.” To purchase safety with money was as shameful as to flee. The Christian man had been ransomed by Christ from the spirits of wickedness, from the darkness of this life, from eternal judgment, from everlasting death; “but you bargain for him with an informer, or a soldier, or some paltry thief of a ruler—under, as they say, the folds of the tunic’—as
1 He means that the negotiation was clandestine.
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if ke were stolen goods whom Christ purchased in the face of the whole world—yes, and set at liberty.” No doubt Christ had said to the apostles that, when they were persecuted in one city, they were to flee to another; but they were to flee, not to insure their own safety, but because the work they had to do was urgent and the time was short: “ye shall not have gone through the cities of Israel till the Son of man be come.”
The same austerity and sternness that he showed in his discussion of Christian ethics, and in his de- nunciations of clergy and laity who lived by a less severe rule than his own, appear in his treatment of heathenism. He hates it, scorns it, assaults it with incessant sarcasm and invective. In his Afology, which is one of his earliest writings, there are many characteristic passages. The heathen, he says, falsely charged the Christian with shameful crimes. I will show you, retorts Tertullian, that practices, open or secret, prevail among yourselves, which per- haps have rendered it possible for you to believe that similar enormities are committed by us. You attri- bute to your gods the most horrible offences ; and those who worship them do the same things. He recites with a fierce fidelity the deeds of cruelty and of lust, which he declares were common in heathen nations. And he adds, with bitter irony, that human goodness was an insult to the divinities. “ Deify your vilest criminals, if you wish to please yout gods.”
AND TERTULLIAN. 133 See ee Se ae AG
Clement of Alexandria was eager to find in hea- then thought anticipations of the Christian Gospel ; he looked into the abysses of heathen darkness with the hope of discovering some rays, however faint, of the “light which lighteth every man.” Tertullian poured upon heathenism a fiery stream of insult and hatred. The contrast between the two men is complete. In their temperament and in their methods of thought they were as far from’ each other as the east is from the west. But they were agreed in their reverence for the Four Gospels.
On what ground Tertullian rested his belief in their authority is shown in the following passage, taken from his treatise against Marcion :
“If it is acknowledged that that is more true which is more ancient, that more ancient which is even from the beginning, that from the beginning which is from the apostles, it will in like manner assuredly be acknowledged that that has been derived by tradition from the apostles which has been preserved invio- late in the Churches of the apostles. Let us see what milk the Corinthians drank from Paul ; to what rule the Galatians were recalled by his reproofs ; what is read by the Philippians, the Thessalonians, the Ephesians ; what is the testimony of the Romans, who are nearest to us, to whom Peter and Paul left the Gospel, and that sealed by their own blood. We have,moreover, Churches founded by John. For even if Marcion rejects his Apo- calypse, still the succession of bishops [in the seven Churches], if traced to its source, will rest on the authority of John. And the noble descent of other Churches is recognised in the same manner. I say then that among them, and not only among the apostolic Churches, but among all the Churches which are united with them in Christian fellowship, that Gospel of Luke which we earnestly defend has been maintained from its first publication.”
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“The same authority of the apostolic Churches will uphold the other Gospels which we have in due succession through them and according to their usage, I mean those of [the apos- tles] Matthew and John ; although that which was published by Mark may also be maintained to be Peter’s, whose interpreter Mark was: for the narrative of Luke also is generally ascribed to Paul, [since] it is allowable that that which scholars publish should be regarded as their master’s work.” !
Tertullian’s contention is reasonable. The Churches which apostles had founded preserved the writings of their apostolic founders. The Churches of Thes- salonica, Corinth, Ephesus preserved Paul’s Epistles te the first generation of Christians in those cities. The Epistle to the Galatians, full of sharp rebuke to the men who received the Gospel of Paul with such enthusiasm that they would have plucked out their eyes for him, but who within a year or two were listening to “another Gospel,” which was not a Gospel at all, was preserved by the Churches of Galatia. The Roman Church preserved Paul’s Epistle to the Romans. The Churches founded by John preserved the writings of John. All the Four Gospels—and especially the Gospel of Luke, with which in his controversy with Marcion Tertullian was more im- mediately concerned—had been handed down in the same way. The sacred books were in the keeping of organized societies, whose members regarded them as the authoritative records of a Divine revelation—
1 Against Marcion, iv. §, Dr. Westcott’s translation: Canon of New Testament, pp. 345, 346.
AND TERTULLIAN. 135
a revelation which was the law of their earthly con- duct and the foundation of their immortal hopes. It is irrelevant to say that Tertullian, though a man of powerful intellect, had no faculty for literary criticism. Our contention is, not that he was a great literary critic, and that therefore we ought to accept his judg- ment on the authority and genuineness of the Four Gospels, but that he is a witness to the great place in the thought and the life of the Church which the Gospels held before the close of the second century. For this fact the evidence contained in his writings is decisive.?
§ See Appendix, Note B.
LECTURE VIIs.
IRENEUS.
NDER the reign of Marcus Aarelius—a philo-
sopher among emperors, a saint among philo- sophers—the Christians suffered cruel persecution. The general policy of Rome was a policy of religious toleration; for, to quote the famous sentence of Gibbon, “the various modes of worship which pre- vailed in the Roman world were all considered by the people as equally true, by the philosopher as equally false, and by the magistrates as equally use- ful.” But from this toleration the Christian Faith which maintained an incessant and open war against all the religions’ of the empire, was not unnaturally excluded. The hatred with which it was regarded was not always active, but it never ceased to exist. Under Marcus Aurelius it became furious.
He was one of the greatest and noblest of princes. He accepted the imperial dignity with reluctance, and cared nothing for the splendours of his great position. Could he have chosen for himself, he would have spent his years in meditation on the mystery and
glory of human life and on the ideal. of human virtue. 136
IREN EUS. 137
But the sentence of Plato was always on his lips, that states would be great and prosperous if their philosophers were princes, or if their princes were philosophers ; and he trusted that his own philoso- phical discipline had qualified him to render service to the immense populations which were under the Roman power.
The precepts which he set down for the conduct of his own life show that he saw the moral perils of his great position. “Take care,” he writes, “that thou art not made into a Cesar, that thou art not dyed with this dye; for such things happen. Keep thyself then simple, good, pure,’serious, free from affectation, a friend of justice, a worshipper of the gods, kind, affectionate, strenuous in all proper acts. Strive to continue to be such as philosophy wished to make thee. Reverence the gods and help men. Short is life. There is only one fruit of this earthly life, a pious disposition and social acts. Do every- thing as a disciple of Antoninus. Remember his constancy in every act which was conformable to reason, . . . and his sweetness, and his disregard of earthly fame, and his efforts to understand things ;
and how he bore with them that blamed him unjustly without blaming them in return, how he did nothing in a hurry, and how he listened not to calumnies; . . . and with how little he was satis- fied, such as lodging, bed, dress, food, servants ; and how laborious [he was] and patient; . . . and how he tolerated freedom of speech in those who opposed
138 IRENAUS.
his opinions ; and the pleasure that he had when any man showed him anything better ; and how religious he was without superstition. Imitate all this, that thou mayest have as good a conscience when thy last hour comes as he had.”! His MJMedztations, which were written during his campaign on the Danube, sometimes touch the very confines of the morality illustrated in the Sermon on the Mount Surely his vision of an ideal goodness was revealed to him by light from God. His personal character was not unworthy of his precepts. He was laborious, courageous, upright, kindly, and magnanimous. And yet he persecuted the Christians.
To what extent he was personally responsible for the severities inflicted upon them has been disputed. During his reign the empire suffered grave calami- ties, and was menaced with still graver dangers. The public mind was agitated and alarmed. What were the causes of the earthquakes, pestilences, famines, which filled the Roman world with distress? By what invisible and hostile powers had the barbarians on the frontiers been excited to revolt? Was it possible that the gods were angry because the Chris- tians had forsaken their temples, and were speaking of the ancient worship with fierce contempt? Popular terror may have demanded that the adherents of the new superstition should be sacrificed as a propitiation
* The Thoughts of the Emperor M. Aurelius, translated by George Long, pp. 123, 124.
IRENEUS. 139
to the offended deities ; and the emperor may have be- lieved that it would be imprudent, perhaps impossible, to interfere for their protection. The Christians had suffered under Antoninus, whom he venerated as an example of philosophic virtue; and as the Christians were charged, not only with atheism, but with committing in secret the most horrible crimes, he may have thought that they deserved to die. It is probable that he regarded with apprehension the political effects of this strange superstition ; common worship was one of the strongest securities of the unity of the State ; there was disloyalty to the empire in the refusal to take part in the public religious ceremonies. Whatever may be the explanation of his policy, “ during the whole course of his reign,” to quote the characteristic words of Gibbon, “ Marcus despised the Christians as a philosopher, and punished them as a sovereign.”
I.
The persecution in southern Gaul (AD. 177) seems to have begun in a tumultuous outbreak of popular passion. The general hatred with which the Christians were regarded had, for some unknown reasons, become so fierce, that their presence was not tolerated in the baths, the markets, or the public streets. When they appeared they were violently and brutally attacked ; they were stoned and robbed. To bring the disorder to an end the local authorities intervened, and gave orders that the Christians should
140 IRENALUS.
be imprisoned, and that on the arrival of the governor of the province they should be put on their trial. A letter from “ the servants of Christ dwelling in Lyons and Vienne in Gaul” to their “brethren in Asia and Phrygia” tells the story of the sufferings which the martyrs endured, first from the fury of the mob, and afterwards from the severities of the law. Nearly all the more zealous members of the two Churches were seized. To subdue their courage they were subjected to intolerable tortures. They were cruelly scourged. Some were compelled to sit on chairs of burning iron. Many died from the horrible treatment inflicted on them in prison. There were some whose constancy gave way under these persistent torments ; but most of them showed a glorious fidelity. Those who declared their Roman citizenship were beheaded. The rest were flung to the wild beasts at the public games.
Among the martyrs that died in prison was Pothinus, bishop of Lyons. He was more than ninety years old, and was very infirm, partly from his great age, partly from disease. As he was being dragged away from the public tribunal, the crowd through which he passed struck him and kicked him, “showing no reverence to his age”; those who could not reach him flung at him whatever they had in their hands, to avenge the injuries which he had done to their gods. The old man’s strength was exhausted, and in two days he died.
Irenzus, a presbyter in the Church at Lyons, was
IRENALUS., 141
elected his successor. He was a native of Asia Minor, and in his youth had lived in Smyrna, and had known Polycarp. Between the Churches of Asia Minor and the Churches in southern Ganl the relations were very intimate. It was from Asia Minor, in all probability, that Lyons and Vienne had received the Christian Gospel; and the Churches in Asia Minor would listen to the story of the courage and fidelity of the Christian martyrs in these two cities with the same kind of interest and gratitude and enthusiasm with which the Congregational Churches of England, thirty or forty years ago, listened to the story of the courage and fidelity of the Christian martyrs of Madagascar, who had first heard of the grace and glory of Christ from the lips of Congregational missionaries.
Even as a presbyter of the Church, Irenzeus must have been a man of some distinction. In the early days of the persecution, his brethren, who were suffering for their own faith, sent him to Rome to appeal to the sympathy of Eleutherus, at that time bishop of Rome, on behalf of the Montanists, who were suffering persecution in Asia Minor and Phry- gia. When Irenzus became bishop, after the mar- tyrdom of Pothinus, he showed great vigour. He was zealous for the conversion of the heathen; he was a resolute assailant of heresy ; and he took an active part in the more important ecclesiastical affairs of his time.
142 IRENA&US.
II.
His great work was a controversial treatise against Gnosticism, which was written in the early years of his episcopate, probably between A.D. 180 and A.D. 185. It is usually quoted under the short title, Against Heresies. He uses the books of the New Testament as freely as any modern theologian, and with the same reverence for their authority.
One of his testimonies to the Four Gospels I must give at length. He says:
“ So firm is the ground on which these Gospels rest, that the - very heretics themselves bear witness to them, and, starting from these [documents], each one of them endeavours to establish his own peculiar doctrine. For the Ebionites, who use Matthew’s Gospel only, are confuted out of this very same, making false suppositions with regard to the Lord. But Mar- cion, mutilating that according to Luke, is proved to be a blasphemer of the only existing God, from those [passages] which he still retains. Those again who separate Jesus from Christ, alleging that Christ remained impassible, but that it was Jesus who suffered, preferring the Gospel of Mark, if they read it with a love of truth may have their errors rectified. Those, moreover, who follow Valentinus, making copious use of that according to John, . . . shall be proved to be totally in error by means of this very Gospel. . . . Since then our opponents do bear testimony to us, and make use of these {documents], our proof derived from them is firm and true.
“It is not possible that the Gospels can be either more or fewer in number than they are. For, since there are four zones of the world in which we live, and four principal winds, while the Church is scattered throughout all the world, and the ‘ pillar and ground’ of the Church is the Gospel and the spirit of life, it is fitting that she should have four pillars, breathing out im- mortality on every side, and vivifying men afresh. From which
IRENZUS. 143
fact it is evident that the Word, the Artificer of all, He that sitteth upon the cherubim, and contains all things, He who was manifested to men, has given us the Gospel under four aspects, but bound together by one Spirit. As also David says, when entreating His manifestation, ‘Thou that sittest between the cherubim, shine forth.’ For the cherubim too were four- faced, and their faces were images of the dispensation of the Son of God.” !
The testimony to the Four Gospels in this pas- sage and in other parts of the writings of Irenzeus is something very much more than the expression of the private opinion of a single Christian writer. He is expressing what he assumes to be the general judgment of those Christian Churches which claimed to inherit the apostolic faith. One heretical sect might appeal in support of its heresies to the Gospel of Matthew, another to the Gospel of Mark, another to the Gospel of Luke, another to the Gospel of John ; one of the sects might mutilate one Gospel, and another another: the Churches which were faithful to the apostolic tradition acknowledged the authority of all the Four, and had preserved them unmutilated. Irenzeus was bishop of Lyons ; he had a right to speak for the Churches of southern Gaul. He had recently been sent on an important mission to Rome; he must have known whether or not the Roman Church regarded all the Four Gospels with reverence, and believed that they were written by the I er srs ie Fe el
1 IRENZUS: Against Heresies (“ Ante-Nicene Library *), vol. i., pp. 292, 293.
144 IRENEUS.
men whose names they bear. He was born in Asia Minor, and there were intimate relations between the Churches of Asia Minor and the Churches of Gaul; he had a right to speak for Asia Minor. His testimony is the testimony of the Churches of Asia Minor, Rome, and southern Gaul. In the year A.D. 185, all these Churches held that our Four Gospels were written by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. This, indeed, is not disputed.
III.
It has been alleged that the fanciful arguments by which Irenzus attempts to prove that there must be Four Gospels, and that there cannot be more than Four, deprive his testimony of all value. What weight, it has been asked, can be attached to a man’s critical judgment who contends that, because there are four zones of the world, and because there are four principal winds, the north, the south, the east, and the west, and because there are four cherubim, there must be/four authoritative narratives of the life of our Lord, and no more? But the question has nothing to do with the critical judgment of Irenzeus. The worth of his testimony does not rest upon his personal competence to determine whether the Four Gospels were written by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, but upon the opportunities which he had for knowing that this was the general belief of the Church in his time, and had been the general belief of the Church as long as he could remember.
IRENEUS. 145
He was an able man and a learned man; but, like other able and learned men of those days, he found parables and mysterious symbols where we find none. His logic, though often solid, is sometimes fanciful. But the mystical reasons which he alleges for there being Four Gospels, and only four, instead of lessening the force of his testimony, add immensely to its strength. Religious veneration, such as that with which he regarded these books, is of slow growth. They must have held a great place in the Church as far back as the memory of living men extended. They must have been transmitted to him and his contemporaries as a sacred treasure by the preceding generation.
IV.
Further: Irenzus, as I have said, came from Asia Minor, and it was in Asia Minor that the Apostle John, who died about A.D. 100, had spent his last years. In A.D. 185 there must have been men still living in Smyrna and in Ephesus who had known intimately some of John’s personal disciples and friends. Indeed, Irenzeus himself, in his early youth, had listened to the teaching of Polycarp, and Poly- carp had had “intercourse with John” and with others “who had seen the Lord.” There are several references to Polycarp in the great work of Irenzus on the Heresies, but the most interesting and in- structive reference to him isin a remonstrance which he addressed to Florinus, who was one of his early
LG 10
146 LRENAZEUS.
friends, but had lapsed into heresy.! After saying that the present opinions of Florinus were not those which had been handed down to him by “the elders before us, who also were disciples of the apostles,’ Irenzeus proceeds :
“For I saw thee, when I was still a boy in Lower Asia, in company with Polycarp, while thou wast faring prosperously in the royal court, and endeavouring to stand well with him. For I distinctly remember the incidents of that time better than events of recent occurrence ; for the lessons received in child- hood, growing with the growth of the soul, become identified with it; so that I can describe the very place in which the blessed Polycarp used to sit when he discoursed, and his goings out and his comings in, and his manner of life, and his personal appearance, and the discourses which he held before the people, and how he would describe his intercourse with John and with the rest who had seen the Lord, and how he would relate their words. And whatsoever he had heard from them about the Lord, and about His miracles, and about His teaching, Polycarp, as having received them from eye-witnesses of the life of the Word, would relate altogether in accordance with the Scriptures, To these [discourses] I used to listen at the time with attention, by God’s mercy which was bestowed upon me, noting them down, not on paper, but in my heart ; and by the grace of God I constantly ruminate upon them faithfully.”
We can imagine Irenzus—presbyter, bishop, of Lyons—walking slowly and in deep meditation on
the banks of the Rhone, and thinking of his early years when he listened to Polycarp in Smyrna. The
1 The passage has been preserved by Eusebius, Eccleséastical History, book v. 20. The translation given in the text is by Dr. Lightfoot, and appears in his Zssays om the Work Entitled “ Supernatural Religion,” pp. 96, 97.
IRENZEUS. 147
face, the form, the voice of the saintly man who had died a martyr for Christ’s sake came back to him. He could recall the reverence with which he had heard him speak of the disciple whom Jesus loved, and of other friends of the Lord whom he had known. The miracles of Christ which Polycarp had heard John describe, the discourses of Christ which Polycarp had heard John repeat, Polycarp’s recol- lections of John’s expositions of our Lord’s words, Polycarp’s accounts of what had been told him by other men who had been the friends of Christ dur- ing His earthly history—all these were to Irenzus a most precious and an imperishable possession. Those were his student days.! It was then that he was preparing for his work as presbyter and bishop. What he had heard from Polycarp was a sacred trust ; he was under solemn obligations to be faithful to it.
Is it probable, is it possible, that Irenzeus would have acknowledged the genuineness and authority of a Gospel said to have been written by John if he had never heard Polycarp speak of it? It is certain that, when he heard Polycarp, John had been dead for many years ; if at that time Polycarp, John’s disciple, had known nothing of any Gospel that John had
1 Trenzeus says he was a “boy” when he heard Polycarp ; he does not mean that he was a mere child. Mr. Venables, in his article on Irenzus in the Dictionary of Christian Biography, vol. iii, p. 254, cols. 1, 2, argues that the age of a “boy”—as Irenzeus uses the word—began about the eighteenth year.
148 IRENZUS.
written, had never spoken of it, I cannot believe that Irenzus would ever have been induced to receive the Fourth Gospel as having been written by Polycarp’s master and friend.
V.
Irenezus had received traditions concerning our Lord from other “elders” who had known the ori- ginal apostles. He had also received traditions from some who had been the friends of men who had known the original apostles. These traditions are indeed not always trustworthy. Some of the “elders” whom Irenzus knew or from whom he quotes may have misunderstood what they heard from an apostle or from a friend of an apostle; or may, in later years, have confused what they heard with their own infe- rences from it.
Even Polycarp’s recollection of the precise words which he had heard from John might not always have been perfectly accurate; he might have mis- taken their meaning when he first heard them; with the lapse of years phrases, sentences, lodged in his memory might have been moulded into new forms by the ebb and flow of his own thoughts, as stones lying on the beach are rounded and polished by the ebb and flow of the tide. Traditions of what the apostles sazd, even when they are reported by men who were the immediate disciples of the apostles, cannot command an unqualified confidence. They require collateral support. Still less can they com-
IRENZEUS. 149
mand an unqualified confidence when they are re- ported by men who did not themselves hear the apostles, although the tradition may have come to them from men whose intercourse with the apostles had been intimate and had extended over many years. But, if the question at issue is whether a Gospel bearing the name of John contains an account of our Lord, identical in substance with that which John was accustomed to give to his disciples, then the evidence of the disciples of John and of their dis- ciples is of great and irresistible strength. If they accept the Gospel, if they offer no protest against its genuineness, I, for my part, am compelled to believe that he wrote it.
And this is the real question at issue. For those who contest the Johannine authorship of the Fourth Gospel assert that it contains an account of our Lord wholly different from that which John would have given had he written a Gospel at all; that its concep- tion of Jesus of Nazareth, as the eternal Word who had become flesh to reveal the Father and to save the world, is rooted in philosophical speculations on the nature and being of God, wholly alien from the thought of the fisherman of Galilee, who was an unlearned man; that its spiritual freedom is incon- sistent with the religious position of John, who was an apostle of the circumcision, and who, it is main- tained, regarded Paul’s revolt against Judaism with stern hostility ; that what are described as the simple ethical discourses contained in the first three Gospels
150 IRENEUS.
represent the real character of our Lord’s teaching and that therefore none of His original apostles could have attributed to Him the mystical and dogmatic discourses contained in the fourth. In other words, it is contended, not only that John did not write the Gospel which bears his name, but that he could not have written it, since it contains a theory of our Lord’s Person and an account of our Lord’s teaching such as John himself could never have given to his disciples.
The theory is an impossible one. If the represen- tation of our Lord and of our Lord’s teaching in the Fourth Gospel had been wholly different from that which John had given during his lifetime, neither John’s friends nor the disciples of John’s friends would have allowed it to have been accepted as genuine.
Suppose that Dr. Pusey had never published any books, or tracts, or sermons during his life, but had taught his characteristic doctrines concerning the Church, the Priesthood, and the Sacraments to suc- cessive generations of Oxford students. He died in 1882. Suppose that early in the next century, twenty years after his death, or even thirty or forty, a treatise were to appear, bearing his name, which assailed with elaborate argument the whole theory of Episcopacy, and maintained that every separate congregation of devout men and women is, according to the idea of Christ, a true Church, under Christ’s immediate government, and with powers derived from
IRENZUS. ast
Christ’s presence to appoint its own ministers and to exercise discipline ; suppose that this treatise, attri- buted to Dr. Pusey, contained a vigorous attack on the doctrine of Baptismal Regeneration and the Real Presence in the Eucharist, and defended the Zuinglian theory of the Sacraments: is it credible that, while men were still living who had been Dr. Pusey’s students at Oxford, this treatise would be received as genuine? is it credible that it would be received as genuine while men were still living who had derived their ecclesiastical and sacramental beliefs from Dr. Pusey’s students? Would there be no pro- test, no controversy ? t
But the theory which denies that John could have written the Fourth Gospel requires us to believe something quite as incredible. For, according to this theory, the doctrinal teaching of the Fourth Gospel is as irreconcilable with what it is alleged the doctrinal teaching of John must have been, as the ecclesiastical and sacramental teaching of the imaginary treatise, published after Dr. Pusey’s death, with Dr. Pusey’s ecclesiastical and sacramental teaching during his life. And yet there is no trace of any protest against the Johannine authorship of the Fourth Gospel on the part of the men who had known John for many years and who had loved and reverenced him ; and it [s certain that scholars and bishops who were the friends of John’s friends, and had received from them the tradition of his sanctity and of his teaching, believed that the Fourth Gospel contains an authentic
L520 IRENAUS.
account of our Lord’s ministry, and that John wrote it. For me this, at least, is absolutely certain, that the representation of our Lord and of His teaching, given in the Fourth Gospel is identical in substance with that which the Churches of Asia had heard from John’s own lips.
LECTURE IX. TATIAN.
I
N his Address to the Greeks, Tatian tells us that he was born in Assyria; that in his youth and early manhood he was instructed in the laws, the literature, and the religious beliefs of the Greeks; that he travelled in many lands, and became familiar with the customs and philosophies of many races of men; that he carefully considered their religious rites, and was initiated into their mysteries. According to Eusebius, he was a sophist—a professional rhetorician —and lectured with distinction on various branches of Greek learning.
At last, to use his own phrase, he withdrew into himself, that, if possible, he might discover the truth. While he was earnestly engaged in this inquiry, he happened to meet with certain “barbaric writings,” as he calls them, some of which were more ancient than Homer, and than the earliest of the writers who were honoured by the Greeks, and more ancient than even their legendary heroes. The sacred
books of the Jews attracted him by the simplicity of 153
154 TATIAN.
their style, by the naturalness and sincerity of their writers, by the knowledge of future events which was shown in their prophecies, by their admirable moral precepts, and by their teaching concerning the unity and supremacy of God.! In Christ he found the ful- filment of Jewish hope, and so he became a Christian.
About the middle of the second century he was in Rome. At this time he was intimately associated with Justin Martyr, and was a conspicuous defender of the Christian Faith. He tells us that Crescens, a philosopher, was the bitter enemy of. both of them, and plotted their death. During the life of Justin his opinions were orthodox, but after the death of his friend his name was associated with some serious heresies. He came to hold severe views concerning the evil of the “flesh,” and denounced marriage as a crime against the higher life of the soul. He was also charged with adopting some of the speculations of Valentinus the Gnostic. When he left Rome, he appears to have travelled eastward, and his last years were probably spent among his countrymen on the banks of the Euphrates.
Although he regarded Justin with affectionate ad- miration,” the two men were very unlike. Justin could never wholly forget the charm of his old philosophical studies, and speaks with sympathy of those who by
» Address to the Greeks, cap. 29, 31, 41. * He speaks in his Addvess cap. 18, of “the most admirable Justin.”
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adventurous paths of speculation were endeavouring to find their way to the secret of the universe, and to the life of God. Tatian, who was probably a more learned man than Justin, assails every form of human philosophy with fierce contempt. Pythagoras, Plato and Aristotle, Heraclitus and Diogenes—he scorns and ridicules them all. He exults in the traditions —some of them quite untrustworthy—of their infir- mities and vices, and he mocks at their claims to wisdom. A very few years ago it would have been necessary to say that of all his numerous writings only his Address to the Greeks remains ; but, to the astonishment and delight of scholars, the most im- portant and valuable of his lost books has been recently recovered. The story of the recovery is so interesting that I will venture to tell it.
II.
In several ancient authors there are references to what is described as Tatian’s Diatessaron. Eusebius says that
“Tatian composed a sort of connexion and compilation, I know not how, of the Gospels, and called it Zhe Diatessaron. This work is current in some quarters even to the present day.” 1
Epiphanius (about A.D. 315 to A.D. 403) informs us that
1 Ecclesiastical History, iv.29. The translation given in the text is Dr. Lightfoot’s.
156 TATIAN.
“The Diatessaron Gospel is said to have been composed by him [Tatian]. It is called by some the Gospel according to the Hebrews.” !
In 453, Thevdoret, Bishop of Cyrrhus, near the Euphrates, writes :
“He [Tatian] composed the Gospel which is called Dzates- saron, cutting out the genealogies and such other passages as show the Lord to have been born of the seed of David according to the flesh. This work was in use, not only among persons belonging to his sect, but also among those who follow the apostolic doctrine, as they did not perceive the mischief of the composition, but used the book in all simplicity on account of its brevity. And I myself found more than two hundred such copies held in respect in the Churches of our parts. All these I collected and put away, and I replaced them by the Gospels of the Four Evangelists.” ?
This testimony is important. Theodoret knew the book and had carefully examined it; his words clearly imply that it was a compilation of the Four Gospels with certain passages cancelled which were inconsistent with Tatian’s heresies concerning the necessary evil of the “ flesh.”
There is also a reference to the Diatessaron in the Doctrine of Addai, a kind of romance written in Syriac, and professing to give an account of the intro-
1 That the Déatessaron was the Gospel according to the Hebrews was either a mistake of Epiphanius himself, or else of the persons whose opinions he is reporting. It is clear that Epiphanius had never seen the Diatessaron. For an explanae tion of the origin of the error, see HEMPHILL: Zhe Diatessaron of Tatian, p. xv.
HEMPHILL: Zhe Diatessaron of Tatian, p. xvi.
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duction of Christianity into Edessa.t It contains the legend of Abgarus, the king of Edessa, who, when suffering from an incurable disease, is said to have heard of the miracles of our Lord, and to have sent a message to Him appealing to His pity, and imploring him to come to Edessa. The romance gives the following account of the worship of the Church which was founded in Edessa after our Lord’s resurrection.
“They ministered in the church which Addzus had built, at the order and command of king Abgar, and they were furnished from what belonged to the king and to his nobles with some things for the house of God, and others for the supply of the poor. Buta large multitude of people assembled day by day, and came to the prayers of the service, and to the reading of the Old Testament and the New of the Dzatessaron.”?
The story told in the Doctrine of Addai is wholly untrustworthy, but it shows that the Dzatessaron must have been in common use in the Syrian Church when the book was written.
There is another testimony from a Syrian bishop, Bar-Salibi, who lived at the end of the twelfth century. He says that the Dzatessaron of Tatian
1 Lipsius thinks that it belongs to the end of the third century or the beginning of the fourth, but that “its groundwork must be much earlier.".—Dictionary of Christian Biography, vol. i.
5 Se Z Susie, p. xvii. This romance was first published in Dr. Cureton’s Ancient Syriac Documents (1864). Cureton’s MS. read Ditornon, to which word no meaning could be attached. A MS. since discovered at St. Petersburg contains the reading Diatessaron.
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began with the opening verse of John’s Gospel. He also says that Ephraem the Syrian (about A.D. 308 to A.D. 373), theologian, poet, orator, saint, wrote a com- mentary on it.
“Tatian, the disciple of Justin, the philosopher and martyr, selected and patched together from the Four Gospels and con- structed a Gospel which he called Diatessaron ; that is, Méscel- lanies. On this work Mar Ephraem wrote an exposition, and its commencement was, ‘/” the beginning was the Word.” *
This was about all that was known in England of the Diatessaron when Dr. Lightfoot wrote the article on Tatian which appeared in the Contemporary Review for May, 1877 ; and the evidence did not satisfy those who were unwilling to believe that as early as the middle of the second century, or a little later, our Four Gospels had not only been written, but had secured so uncontested a supremacy that even a heretic like Tatian recognised their authority, and used them as the basis of his narrative of our Lord’s earthly history. Of the witnesses whose testimony has been quoted, it isat least doubtful whether Eusebius had seen the book. It is certain, I think, that Epiphanius had not seen it. The great writers of the West knew nothing of it. Victor of Capua, indeed, who flourished about the middle of the sixth century, had met with a Harmony of the Gospels, and supposed that it was the one which, according to Eusebius, had been composed by Tatian ; but Victor calls it the Dzapente, not the Diatessaron, and it began with the first verse of Luke
} HEMPHILL, p. xix.
TATIAN. 159
instead of the first verse of John. It was only from the three Syrian witnesses—Theodoret, and the writer of the Doctrine of Addai, and Bar-Salibi—that any clear and satisfactory evidence could be derived. But Dr. Lightfoot maintained with great force that the traditional view of the Church was sound ; that Tatian had compiled a story of our Lord’s life from the Four Gospels, and had called it the Diatessaron.
If Ephraem’s Commentary on the Dzatessaron had been preserved, the controversy might have been closed, for the Commentary would certainly show the general structure and outlines of the book, and would probably contain many quotations from it. Unfor- tunately, early in the last century, a ship, laden with
ancient manuscripts for Pope Clement XI., sank in the Nile, and many of Ephraem’s writings were lost ; among them, perhaps, his Lectures on the Dzatessaron. To recover the lost book from the bed of the Nile was impossible; it perished long ago; but might not some other copy be still in existence?
Ill.
Strangely enough, at the very time that Dr. Lightfoot was writing his article, and building up his laborious argument, he had Ephraem’s Lectures on his own bookshelves, and they had been there for several years! An Armenian translation of them SSE Ce URES SAS eA SUI cE face AO le esaend De
1 Essays on the Work entitled, “Supernatural Religion,” p. 287, note.
160 TATIAN.
had been published in 1836 by the Mechitarist monks, who are settled on the island of San Lazzaro, in the lagune between the Lido and Venice. These monks have had a remarkable history, and have done a remarkable work. Mechitar, the founder of the order, was an Armenian, and was born in 1676, at Siwar, the ancient Sebastia,a town near the source of the Halys, on the borders of Pontus and Cappadocia. In 1699 he was ordained priest, and came to be pos- sessed with a passion for promoting both the intel- lectual and spiritual welfare of his countrymen. He went to Constantinople, and formed an association to carry out his design. Difficulties arose which led him to transfer his new society to Modon in the Morea, which at that time belonged to Venice. Here he and his companions worked for fourteen years, until, in 1715, the Morea was recovered by the Turks, and Mechitar’s convent was broken up. He then received from the government of Venice the island of San Lazzaro, and from that time the Venetian convent has been the mother house of the order, and the centre of Armenian culture. Other congre- gations have been founded in Vienna, at Trieste, and at several places in Hungary.
‘The Allgemeine Zeitung (Dec. 17th, 1850), bears a strong testimony to the great services which the Mechitarists have rendered to their fellow country- men. It says:
“When one takes a nearer view of their labours at Vienna and Venice, one is amazed at the powerful influence which the
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literary activity of these learned monks exerts on the Armenian nation scattered throughout the East. The reviews, the books, the numerous translations of works on history, geography, phi- lology, natural science, and voyages and travels, which are printed in the Mechitarist presses of Vienna and Venice, are carried far beyond Persia to the banks of the Indus and the Ganges, and have everywhere called forth among the Arme- nians the desire of knowledge and a taste for reading, and set on foot a literary movement, which was before entirely dormant in a people, till lately, essentially and exclusively commercial.” !
Among the treasures of their library the monks possess “two 12th century MSS. of an Armenian translation, made apparently in the fifth century from the Syriac, of Ephraem’s Commentary on a Gospel Harmony.”* In 1836 they published an Armenian edition of Ephraem’s works in four volumes octavo ; and the commentary is contained in the second volume.
“T had for some years,” says Dr. Lightfoot, writing in 1889, “‘possessed a copy of this work, . . . and the thought had more than once crossed my mind that possibly it might throw light on Ephraem’s mode of dealing with the Gospels, as I knew that it contained notes on St. Paul’s Epistles, or some portion of them. I did not, however, then possess sufficient knowledge of Armenian to sift its contents, but I hoped to investigate the matter when I had mastered enough of the language.” §
1 The account of the Mechitarists in the text is summarized from an article in Addis and Arnold’s Catholic Dictionary : and the passage from the Adigemeine Zeitung is taken from that article.
2? HEMPHILL, p. xxi.
3 Essays, etc., p. 287.
LG II
162 TATIAN.
But even without a knowledge ot Armenian, Dr. Lightfoot might have known the contents of Ephraem’s Lectures before he published his article in May, 1877. For in 1876 a Latin translation had been published in Venice. As early as 1841, one of: the monks, Father Aucha, had translated the Lectures into Latin, but the translation had remained in MS. in the Library of San Lazzaro. At last it somehow came to the knowledge of Dr. George Moesinger, professor of biblical studies at Salzburg, and it was placed in his hands, with one of the MSS. from which the Armenian text had been printed. He revised the translation, and published it, as I have said, in 1876. Dr. Wace, who wrote a series of admirable articles on the Diatessaron, in the Expositor for 1881 and 1882, justly remarks that “considering the im- mense importance of Ephraem’s work, it is a most curious point that it should have been before the world for nearly five years in a Latin translation, and should have remained practically unnoticed by any of the laborious scholars of Germany.”! He adds: “Such an incidént might well lead us to think that our materials for criticism are beginning to overpower us, and that some of our best treasures may be hidden
* The Exfosttor, vol. ii., second series, p. 3. Dr. Wace quotes from a notice by Dr. Adolf Harnack, which had recently appeared in Brieger’s Zectschrift fiir Kirchengeschichte, the following sentence: “Without doubt this publication contains the most important acquisition which our history of pre-catholic — Christianity has received of late years.”
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from us like needles in a hay-stack.” It is also curious that the importance of this discovery was at last brought home to the scholars of Germany and England by an American theologian, Dr. Ezra Abbot, whe called attention to it in his book on the Author- ship of the Fourth Gospel, published in 1880.
The Lectures—or, as Dr. Wace prefers to call them, the Scholia of Ephraem—demonstrated that the Dzatessaron of Tatian, published soon after the middle of the second century, was a continuous narra- tive of our Lord’s life, consisting of “a close welding together of the Four canonical Gospels.” How much of the contents of the Gospels Tatian omitted could not be confidently inferred from Ephraem’s Lectures, for the Lectures are not a continuous commentary ; but it was certain that Tatian used all the Four, and no other.!
IV.
But the romantic story of the Diatessaron is not yet finished. The discovery of Ephraem’s Lectures has been followed by the discovery of the Dzatessaron itself.
A hundred and fifty years ago Stephen Evodius Assemani, a Syrian Maronite, and a member of a family of famous Orientalists, assisted his uncle Joseph Aloysius in his work in the Vatican Library ; and he published, among other learned books, an account of the Oriental manuscripts contained in the
1 Expositor, vol. ii., second series, pp. 10, 11.
164 TATIAN.
Library. In this there is a brief notice of an Arabic MS. professing to be a translation of the Diatessaron of Tatian. Brief accounts of it were also given by Akerblad and the younger Rosenmiiller. Akerblad, a Swedish scholar, who was famous for his Runic, Coptic, Phcenician, and ancient Egyptian learning, died about seventy years ago. The younger Rosen- miiller, Professor of Oriental Literature at Leipsic, died some years later. But the accounts which these three eminent scholars had given of the MS. were meagre and unsatisfactory.
The discussions which were occasioned by the publication of Ephraem’s Lectures recalled attention to these notices of the MS., and Ciasca, one of the scribes of the Vatican, promised in 1883 to give a fuller and more accurate description of it, and, if he had the leisure, to publish it in full. Circumstances delayed the fulfilment of both promises. But in the year 1886 an eminent dignitary among the Catholic Copts was visiting Rome, and Ciasca showed him the Tatian MS, He said that a similar one was in the possession of a member of his communion in Egypt. In the course of the summer this second MS., which is described as beautifully written and illuminated in gold and colours, was sent to Rome; and in 1888 it was published.?
It contains notes at the beginning and the end in
1 Tatiant Evangeliorum Harmonie Arabice. Rome, S.C, De Prop. Fid., 1888.
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TATIAN. 165
which it is described as an Arabic translation of Tatian’s Dzatessaron made from the Syriac; it gives the name of the translator and also the name of the writer of the Syriac MS. from which the translation was made. The translator lived in the early part of the eleventh century ; the writer of the Syriac MS. at the end of the ninth century. The Egyptian MS. supplies passages which are wanting in the imperfect MS. in the Vatican, and it is free from the inter- polations which are recognisable in that MS.
The date of this translation shows that six cen- turies after Theodoret had collected two hundred copies of the Dzatessaron from the Churches of his diocese, and replaced them with copies of the Four Gospels, there were Assyrian Christians who still clung to the book from which their fathers in the second century had learnt the story of Christ. But their country was under the Saracen yoke ; they had forgotten the mother tongue of their race; they were speaking the language of their conquerors ; and so the Diatessaron was translated into Arabic.
In its contents and in the order in which the facts of our Lord’s life are narrated the Arabic Dzatessaron is practically identical with the Syriac Dzatessaron which was used by Ephraem. “Except in four in- stances, the order in which passages of the Gospels are cited by Ephraem is the order in which they occur in the Arabic Harmony.”! It begins with the first
1 HEMPHILL, pp. xxviii, xxix.
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five verses of the Gospel of John; then follows the account of the birth of John the Baptist contained in the first chapter of Luke; then the appearance of the angel to Joseph as told by Matthew ; then the story of our Lord’s birth, the appearance of the angels to the shepherds, the prophecy of Simeon and of Anna as given by Luke; then the visit of the Magi, the flight into Egypt, the slaughter of the children of Bethlehem, and the return of Joseph and Mary to Nazareth, as told by Matthew. From this point Ephraem passes to the great words in the first chapter of John: “ And the Word became flesh, and dwelt in us. Through Moses is the law, but its truth through Jesus our Lord. Grace and truth came through Jesus. The Jews sent to John and say to him, Who art thou? He confessed, saying, I am not the Christ. They say to him, Art thou Elias? He says, No.”? But the Dzatessaron, after the slaughter of the child- ren and after the return to Nazareth, gives Luke’s account of our Lord’s visit to Jerusalem when He was twelve years of age; this is followed by a brief statement of the beginning of the ministry of John the Baptist; and then follows John i. 7-28, which contains the passage just quoted from Ephraem. In
T have given this quotation as it appears in HEMPHILL. It must be remembered that Ephraem wrote in Syriac; that we have his Lectures in an Armenian translation; that the Armenian translation has been translated into Lat, and that it is from this Latin translation of an Armenian translation that the passage has been translated into Eng/ish.
TATIAN, 167
Ephraem, singularly enough, the comments on our Lord’s visit to Jerusalem in His boyhood occur after the comments on this testimony of the Baptist. This is one of the four cases in which Ephraem’s order differs from the order of the Arabic Diatessaron. Until the story reaches the selection of the Twelve Apostles Tatian shows considerable freedom in his arrangement of the incidents ; but after this, and be- ginning with the Sermon on the Mount, he practically follows Matthew’s order, until he comes to the Last Supper. Passages from Mark, Luke, and John are introduced at successive stages of the narrative. On what principle he determined their place it is difficult to discover. Why, for instance, should he have given the account of the visit of Nicodemus to our Lord (John iii. 1-21) after the story of the barren fig tree, and far on towards the close of our Lord’s ministry ? In this singular order Ephraem agrees with the Arabic text.
But while it is apparent that the contents and arrangement of the Arabic Diatessaron are practically identical with the contents and arrangement of the Syriac Diatessaron used by Ephraem, the readings of the translation show that the text had been revised. Ephraem’s quotations represent a more ancient text than that represented by the Arabic translation.
V.
And now, having told the story of the discovery of these two ancient books—the Déatessaron and
168 TATIAN
the Lectures upon it—I have to show their value in— relation to the question of the early origin and the historical trustworthiness of our Four Gospels.
Tatian was a man of intellectual vigour, and a scholar. There was fierceness in him, and obstinacy, and intolerance ; but his Address to the Greeks gives one the impression that he had courage and incor- ruptible honesty. He was a friend of Justin. He had travelled far, and had seen the Christians of many lands. And, what for my immediate purpose is as important as any of the facts which I have just recited, he was a heretic.
The date at which he left Rome is uncertain. It may have been as early as A.D. 150, or even earlier. It can hardly have been as late as AD.170. There is something attractive in the suggestion that, although he believed that on some grave subjects the faith and the practice of the orthodox Churches were at fault, he cared more for the rescue of his countrymen from heathenism than for the correction of the theological and ethical errors of those who had found eternal redemption in Christ. Whatever may have been his motives, he returned to the land of his birth, and preached the Christian Gospel to men who had not yet received it. He found it necessary to give to his converts the story of Christ in their own tongue ; and he took the story as it is given in our Four Gospels. With his characteristic audacity, he cut out the genealogies, which he regarded as inconsis- tent with a true conception of the greatness and glory
Pa Pee ee en is
Se RAT Cae et
STs Nh, oe wore
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Cages
_TATIAN. 169
of Christ; and he did not shrink from tampering with the text of those passages which he retained. But the Gospels which he used, and the greater part of which he transferred to his own narrative, were the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and he used no others. Why did he use all the Four? Why did he use these alone? He had broken with the orthodox Churches, and was beyond their con- trol. It was from himself that the Churches for whose use his narrative was prepared had received the Christian Faith. He was free—absolutely free— to give them any Gospel that he chose. I ask again, Why did he give them a Gospel constructed from the Four Gospels which are still in our hands ?
There is an obvious answer to this question, and I think that the obvious answer is the only reasonable one. When he left Rome, these Four Gospels had a unique place in the Christian Churches of all lands. He knew that they contained the real and authentic story of our Lord’s life. He might think that the genealogies had no right to a place in the first Gospel and the third. He thought it expedient to modify some expressions which might lead his converts into theological error. But if he had to give his converts a narrative of our Lord’s life, it was a matter of course that he should give them the story that had been told by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. This was the trustworthy story ; he could give no other. And although he had tampered with the text, his Diatessaron had so little in it to create orthodox sus-
170 TATIAN.
picion, and contained the narrative in so convenient a form, that Ephraem, the glory of the Syrian Church, expounded it.
Only thirteen years ago the evidence which could be alleged in support of the traditional theory that Tatian’s Diatessaron was composed of our Four Gos- pels, though in my judgment sufficient, was scanty.’ To Christian apologists, Tatian’s Address to the Greeks contained clear proof that he knew the Gospel of John. The following passages seemed to place this beyond doubt: “God is a Spirit” (cap. 4). “And this then is the saying : .The darkness comprehendeth not the light” (cap. 13). “Follow ye the only God. All things have been made by Him, and apart from Him hath been made no one thing” (cap. 19). But the proof was declared to be inadequate. The re- covery of Ephraem’s Lectures, and of the Arabic translation of the Dzatessaron has wholly changed the conditions of the controversy. That Tatian, the friend of Justin Martyr, knew our Four Gospels, and that in his Déatessaron he worked them into a continuous narrative, is now finally demonstrated.
VI.
There is one more chapter to complete the story of this curious work, and you may be interested in hearing it.
I have already told you that Victor of Capua, the
1 See pp. 155-150, ante.
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‘ author of several commentaries on the books of the
Old and the New Testament, and of a work, now lost, on the true method of determining Easter, met with a Latin MS. containing a Harmony of the Four Gospels. That was about A.D. 540. The MS. had no title; but finding in Eusebius that Tatian had constructed a Dzazessaron, he attributed it to Tatian. After the MS. had been copied under his direction, he corrected it, and then published it with the other books of the New Testament!
Till recently it was the general opinion of scholars that Victor was in error in supposing that Tatian was its original author. One piece of evidence seemed to be decisive: Tatian’s Dzatessaron was said to have begun with the first verses of the Gospel of John; in Victor’s Harmony these verses are preceded by four verses from the Gospel of Luke. But the publication of Ephraem’s Lectures on the Dzatessaron, and of the Diatessaron itself, has shown that Victor was right.
The order in which the contents of the Four Gospels are arranged by Tatian is followed with inconsiderable variations in the Latin Harmony of Victor; and this order is so remarkable—I might say so wayward and eccentric—that the coincidence could not have been accidental. Victor corrected the Latin text of the Harmony, and modified it in
1 This is known as the Codex Fuldensis ; it contains, in addi- tion to the books in our present Canon, the apocryphal ZZzstle to the Laodiceans. The Codex is valuable as preserving an early text of the Latin Vulgate of Jerome.
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other ways: the genealogies, for example, and some other passages, were probably inserted by him ; but the Harmony, even as it stands, after Victor’s revision, is substantially Tatian’s.!
The Harmony, published by Victor—Tatian’s Harmony—has had a great place in the history of the Christian Faith in Europe. There is a copy of it at Fulda, in Hesse Cassel, which, according to tradi- tion, was in the hands of Boniface, the apostle of Germany, when he suffered martyrdom. It is sup- posed that when the body of the martyred saint was brought to Fulda the copy of the Gospels which he loved was brought with it. If the tradition is true— and there is said to be internal evidence that the book belonged to Boniface—the great missionary who in the eighth century evangelized the heathen races on the banks of the Rhine used a narrative of our Lord’s life which had originally been prepared by the heretic Tatian for converts from heathenism on the banks of the Euphrates.
In the ninth century it was translated into the dialect of the Eastern Franks; and it appears to have been the basis of a poetical life of our Lord which was written for the Southern Franks, and which was intended to be sung to the harp. In the same century it furnished the substance of the ©
1 The substantial identity of Victor’s Harmony with Tatian's Diatessaron was first shown by Dr. Wace in the Exfosttor, vol. ii, Second Series, pp. 128-137 (1881).
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Héliand, which is described by its editor as the greatest monument of the old Saxon language in existence. For thirty years Charlemagne had en- deavoured to compel the Saxons to accept the Christian Gospel. They abhorred his faith, but could not resist his arms. They submitted to baptism as an acknowledgment of the supremacy of the Franks, rather than as a confession of the authority and grace of Christ ; but they remained heathen still, and they preserved the superstitions of their ancestors by sing- ing in the depths of their forests their old songs in honour of their old gods. When Louis the Pious succeeded his father, he determined on a kindlier and more effective policy. Had not the story of Christ a greater charm than the legends of Woden and of Thor? If the Christian story could be told in song by a poet of genius, it might perhaps win the hearts of the wild and resolute men who, while they bore the Christian name, regarded Christ with indif- ference or hatred as the God of their conquerors. At the request of the king the Hé/and was written—a noble poem telling the story of our Lord as it is told in the Harmony of Victor. According to its editor, it “breathes the spirit of the old Saxon nation and customs ; and the diction sometimes rises to a very high pitch of poetic power and beauty. There is no doubt,” he adds, “that the benign and beautiful doc- trines of Christianity, by soothing the ears of ignorant heathen, would in this way find a ready access to their hearts.”
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It is a wonderful story. The Dzatessaron was pre- pared by a heretic in the second century for the instruction of converts from heathenism in Assyria ; in the eighth century and the ninth, converts from heathenism in the heart of Germany learnt from it the story of Christ. Scholars lamented that it had beer. lost among other treasures of the East; and when within the last few years it was discovered, they learnt that it had been known in the West for 1,300 years. There was ruggedness, fierceness, intolerance in the character of Tatian ; but we may venture to hope that there was also a genuine and even pas- sionate love for his Lord. In the history, could he have foreseen it, of that story of our Lord’s life which he prepared for his countrymen, he would have found abundant consolation for all the distrust and hatred with which he was regarded on account of his heresies. The service which he rendered to men for Christ’s sake Christ has gloriously honoured.
NOTE.
To those of my readers who wish for a fuller account of the Déatessaron and its recovery, I strongly recommend Dr. Hemphill’s Dzatessaron of Tatian (London: Hodder & Stoughton), to which I am largely indebted for the material of this Lecture.
LECTURE X.
SUSTIN MARTYR.
I.
USTIN MARTYR was born at Neapolis, the ] modern Nablous, which lies in the beautiful valley between Mount Gerizim and Mount Ebal, near to Jacob’s Well and “the parcel of ground that Jacob gave to his son Joseph.”
His parents were heathen, and in his Dialogue with Trypho he tells, with considerable grace, humour, and pathos, the story of his early studies. To Justin, philosophy had always been, and it always remained, the noblest of human pursuits; for he believed that its aim was to restore man to God. But he came to the conclusion that the disciples of the illustrious men who first gave themselves to the great search after the supreme truth had unhappily forgotten the real end of the adventurous inquiry ; and so it had come to pass that Platonists, Stoics, Peripatetics, and the rest, were more loyal to the authority of their teachers than to the truth itself. Justin’s first master was a Stoic; but he says, “after
spending a considerable time with him, and finding 175
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that I learnt nothing more about God—for he him- self knew nothing and said that such knowledge was unnecessary—I left him and went to another, who was called a Peripatetic, and who in his own opinion was a very keen and clever person.” In the course of a few days the Peripatetic asked Justin to name the fees he proposed to pay, that their intercourse might be profitable to both of them. Thereupon Justin left him, thinking that a man who was anxious about the money he was to get for his teaching was no true philosopher. Still his soul was possessed with an uncontrollable desire to master the ultimate secret of the universe, and he attached himself to a Pythagorean who had a great reputation, and who had an immense opinion of his own wisdom. His new master asked him whether he had studied music, astronomy, and geometry; “for, surely,” he said, “you do not hope to gaze on the truths which perfect the blessed life unless you have first learnt those things which draw the soul from the things of sense, disci- pline it for the world of the spirit, and so enable it to behold that which is really the beautiful and the good.” Justin lost heart. He knew nothing of music, astronomy, and geometry; he thought that these branches of learning, if he studied them to any pur- pose, would occupy him for many years, and that his passion for the knowledge of God would remain long unsatisfied. He could not endure the delay, and yet he was sorry to go to another master, for he thought that the Pythagorean had some real knowledge of
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the Divine mystery, which he longed to discover. But the Platonists had a great name, and a teacher of Platonism settled in Neapolis;! Justin therefore resolved to try Platonism. He devoted a great part of every day to his new master, and soon began to glow with enthusiasm for the Platonic doctrine. Now, at last, his thought was moving in regions lying beyond and above the vicissitudes and illusions of material things. The contemplation of those Eternal Ideas in which Plato found the ultimate truth and reality of all things gave his mind wings, and he trusted that soon he would have an immediate vision and knowledge of God; “for this is the end of the Platonic philosophy.” '
While he was possessed with these great hopes, it was his custom to go to a lonely spot not far from the sea for purposes of meditation. On one memorable day his solitude was disturbed. He was followed by an aged, venerable man, with gentle manners, who explained to Justin that he had been anxious about some of the members of his household who were away from home, and that he had come to that lonely place to see whether there was any chance of their returning—an explanation in which, under a thin and transparent veil, he indicates that
1 It seems natural to suppose that Justin’s phrase “our city ’ refers to the city of his birth rather than to Ephesus, in which, according to Eusebius, the scene of the conversation with Trypho is laid.