L. C.

name given to the sons of Zebedee,
Luke iv. 23.
Luke xviii. 35-43. Luke xi. 14 ff Luke v. 17-26.
Luke viii. 41 ff. Luke vii. 11-18.
Luke vi. 30.
Luke xii. 22-24.
Luke xiii. 26, 27.
Luke xiii. 28, 29. Luke v. 32.
Luke vi. 13.
13
194 JUSTIN MARTYR.
Boanerges, or “sons of thunder,” Matt. xi. r2-rg. the commission of the apostles, the Luke x. 19. discourse after the departure of the Luke xvi. 16. Matt. xvi. 4. messengers of John, the sign of the Matt. xiii. 3 ff. prophet Jonas, the parable of the Matt. xvi. 15-18. sower, Peter’s confession, the an- Luke viii. 5 f. Matt. xvi, ar. nouncement of the Passion. Luke ix. a2. From the account of the last journey and the closing scenes of Matt. xix. 16,17. our Lord’s life, Justin has the history Matt, xxi. x ff. of the rich young man, the entry Luke xviii. 18,19 into Jerusalem, the cleansing of the Luke xix. 29 ff. Matt. xxii. xx, temple, the wedding garment, the Luke xix. 46. controversial ‘discourses about the Luke xx. 22-25, Matt, xxii. 2x. tribute money, the resurrection, and Luke xx. 35, 36. Matt. xxii. 37,38. the greatest commandment, those Matt. xxill. 2 ff .. i : 2 Matt. xxv. 34, 4r- directed against the Pharisees, and Luke xi. 42-52. Matt. xxv. 14-30. the eschatological discourse, the parable of the talents. Justin’s account of the institution of the Lord’s Supper agrees with that of Luke xxii. 19, 20, Matt. xxvi. 30. Luke. After it Jesus sang a hymn, peg xxvi. 36, and taking with Him three of His i disciples to the Mount of Olives, _ He was in an agony, His sweat Luke xxii. 42-44 falling in dvopfs (not necessarily of blood) to the ground. His captors surrounded Him Like the “horned bulls” of Psalm xxii. 11-14; there Matt. xxvi. 56. was none to help, for His followers to @ man forsook Him.! Matt. xxvi. 57 & | He was led both before the Scribes Luke xxfi. 66 ff and Pharisees, and before Pilate. Matt. xxvii. xx. In the trial before Pilate He kept
1 Professor Sanday italicises this statement, as though it was not cone tained in the Gospels; but when our Lord was arrested, Matthew says, “Then all the disciples left Him and fled” (cap. xxvi. 56). Is not this the same thing ?
Matt. xxvii, 14,
Matt. xxvii. 35. Matt. xxvii. 39 ff.
Matt. xxvii. 42.
Matt. xxvii. 46.
Matt. xxvii. 57-60. Matt. xxvi. 31-36.
Matt. xxviii. x ff.
Matt. xxviii. 19.
JUSTIN MARTYR.
silence, as Psalm xxii. 15. Pilate sent Him bound to Herod. Justin relates most of the incidents
of the crucifixion in detail, for.con- .
firmation of which he refers to the Acts of Pilate. He marks especially the fulfilment in various places of Psalm xxii.
He has the piercing with nails, the casting of lots and dividing of the garments, the smeers of the crowd (somewhat expanded from the Synoptics), and their taunt, He who raised the dead, let Him save Him- self; also the cry of despair, “My God, My God, why hast Thou for- saken Me?” and the last words, ‘“‘ Father, into Thy hands I commend My spirit.”
The burial took place in the even- ing, the disciples being all scattered in accordance with Zechariah iii. 7. On the third day, the day of the sun, or the first (or eighth) day of the week, Jesus rose from the dead. He then convinced His disciples that His sufferings had been propheti- cally foretold, and they repented of having deserted Him. Having given them His last commission, they saw Him ascend up into heaven. Thus believing, and having first waited to receive power from Him, they went forth into all the world and preached the word of God. To this day Christians baptize in the name of the Father of all, and of our Saviour Jesus Christ, and of the Holy Ghost.
195
Luke xxiii. 7.
Luke xxiv. 40. Luke xxiii. 34. Luke xxiii. 35.
Luke xxiii. 46.
Luke xxi. az.
Luke xxiv « ff,
Luke xxiv. sa
196 JUSTIN MARTYR.
Matt. xxviii The Jews spread a story that the ae disciples stole the body of Jesus from the grave, and so deceived men by asserting that He was not risen from the dead and ascended into heaven. There is nothing in Justin (as. in Luke xxiv.; but cf. Acts i. 3) to show that the ascension did not take place om the same day as the resurrection.
It was no part of Justin’s intention to give a regular narrative of our Lord’s life; the references and allusions to it occur incidentally in the course of his two Afologies, and of his Dialogue with the Jew Trypho; and yet, when these references and allusions are drawn together, they constitute an account of our Lord’s birth and the principal events connected with it; of His baptism by John and of John’s preaching, imprisonment, and death; of our Lord’s temptation, His miracles, His election of the apostles, His great discourses, His institution of the supper, His agony in Gethsemane, His crucifixion and resurrection, such as any of ourselves might write with the first three Gospels in our memory. The story which Justin knew is the story which we know.
You will have noticed that he has a few state- ments concerning our Lord which are not contained in any of our Gospels.! Of these, the account of the fire which was kindled on the Jordan at our Lord’s
1 These are italicised in the summary extracted from Pro- fessor Sanday.
JUSTIN MARTYR, — 197
baptism, and the words said to have been heard from heaven at the baptism, “Thou art My Son; this day have I begotten Thee,” instead of “Thou art My beloved Son; in Thee am I well pleased,” occur in some very ancient versions of Matthew and Luke, and represent early readings in those two Gospels. That our Lord worked as a carpenter and made “loughs and yokes,” may have been a tradition. So may the statement that the wise men who according to Matthew, “came from the east,” came from Arabia. The statement that Herod ordered a massacre of all the children in Bethlehem was probably nothing more than a slip of memory. In whatever way these variations from the story contained in our own Gospels may be accounted for, it remains certain that the story contained in Justin’s Gospels was the same as that which is contained in ours.
In Professor Sanday’s summary of Justin’s refer- ences and allusions to our Lord’s history, there is no mention of any fact or of any teaching that appears in John’s Gospel only. But I have already given one passage from the First Apology which, in my judg- ment, must have been drawn from John’s account of | our Lord’s conversation with Nicodemus; there are other passages in the First Apology and the Second, and also in the Dialogue with Trypho, which seem to have been suggested by John’s Gospel, and one very striking passage which must have been suggested by John’s First Epistle! As the Epistle seems to have
1 In the Dialogue, cap. 123, Justin has, “We . . . are called
198 JUSTIN MARTYR.
been a letter written to accompany the Gospel, a quotation from the Epistle is equal in value to a quotation from the Gospel. Further, Justin’s doctrine concerning the Eternal Word is the doctrine which is expounded in the prologue to John’s Gospel.
VI.
In Justin’s own writings therefore there is decisive evidence that the Gospels which he himself used, and which were read in the Christian assemblies about the middle of the second century, were the Gospels of our own New Testament. But this conclusion is supported by evidence drawn from other sources. Tatian was Justin’s comrade and friend, and Tatian’s Diatessaron, as we have seen, was a “welding together ” of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Is it credible that Tatian, who shared with Justin the perils of martyrdom, dropped the Gospels, which were written, as Justin says, by the apostles and the followers of the apostles, and used for his Dzatessaron another set of Gospels of which Justin knew nothing ?
Further: it was in A.D. 150 that these Gospels of which Justin speaks, and from which he quotes so large a number of passages, were read every Sunday when
the true chéldren of God, and we are.” In 1 Johniii. 1, John has, “Behold what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us, that we should be called children of God: and such we are.” The “such” is inserted by our Revisers. The form of John’s sentence, we are “called children of God : and we are,” is very remarkable, and it is reproduced in Justin.
JUSTIN MARTYR, 199
the Christians met for worship; about thirty-five years later Irenzus constructed an elaborate argu- ment to prove that there must be four Gospels, and only four. By universal concession the Gospels which Irenzus used were the same as our own; if they were not the same as Justin’s, what had become of the earlier narratives — narratives written by apostles and the followers of apostles? how did it happen that these ancient and more authentic nar- ratives disappeared? how did it happen that they were replaced by documents of later origin and of inferior authority? how did it happen that no tradition or trace of the abandonment of the earlier Gospels and the acceptance of the later, no protest against the change, can be found in the writings of the men who were living when the change was effected ? The difficulty of answering these questions is enor- mously increased by the fact that the old Gospels— Justin’s Gospels—were not mere private documents, a few copies of which were in the possession of Christian scholars, but public documents, read every Sunday in the Church assemblies. They were written —so Justin believed, and so his contemporaries be- lieved—by the apostles and their followers ; how did it happen that the Churches consented to the with- drawal of these authoritative and sacred narratives of our Lord’s life, and to the introduction into the ser- vices of the Church of other narratives, written by other hands? Was there no doubt, no hesitation, about the authority of the new stories? Did no great
200 JUSTIN MARTYR.
and ancient Church, proud of the traditions which it had inherited from its apostolic founders, resist the inno- vation? But if there was any protest against the new Gospels, any discussion of their superior claims on the affection and reverence of the Church, I ask again, how is it that not the faintest trace of the protest survived, and that within forty years of the time that Justin wrote his Fzrst Apology, the new Gospels had, not only secured universal acceptance, as having been written by Matthew and John, Mark and Luke, but had drawn to themselves religious reverence, as narra- tives which were covered by the authority of God ?
If historical evidence has any conclusive force, it is certain that Justin’s Gospels were the Gospels of Tatian, the Gospels of Irenzeus, the Gospels of Ter- tullian, the Gospels of Clement of Alexandria, the Gospels in which we ourselves have caught the accents of a Divine voice and have seen the light of a Divine glory.
NOTE TO LECTURE ON JUSTIN.
In the Spectator for June 21st, 1890, there is a review of an American edition of the works of the late Mr. Bagehot. The editor appears to have given a great deal of pains to the correction of Mr, Bagehot’s misquotations. Judging from the Spectator article, one begins to suspect that Mr. Bagehot’s exact quotations may be as rare as Justin’s, and his “ varia- tions,” and even his “ decided variations,” as numerous. But Mr. Bagehot lived in a literary age, and when the literary con- science had a code of ethics which imposed the duty of quoting accurately, The Sfectator gives two examples.
& , “f
—S
JUSTIN MARTYR. 201
DICKENS.
“*Tt's always best to do what the mob do.’ ‘But suppose there are two mobs?’ suggested Mr. Snod- grass. ‘Shout with the largest,’ replied Mr. Pickwick.”
CARLYLE.
“Their Amendment Act . . . was imperatively required to be put in practice. To create men filled with a theory, that refusal of out- door relief was the one thing need- ful: Nature had no readier way of getting out-door relief refused.”
BAGEHOT'S QUOTATION.
‘«« Always shout with the mob,’ said Mr. Pickwick. ‘ But suppose there are two mobs?’ said Mr, Snodgrass. ‘Then shout with the loudest,’ said Mr. Pickwick.”
BAGEHOT’S QUOTATION,
‘‘Tt was then above all things necessary that out-door relief should cease. But how? What means did great Nature take for accomplishing that desirable end? She created a race of men who believed the cessa- tion of out-door relief to be the one
thing needful.”
Did Mr. Bagehot use what the critics would call “the original Dickens,” which has mysteriously disappeared, and “the original Carlyle,” which, strange to say, has had a similar fate? Are we to infer that-our Pickwick probably attributes to Sam Weller a score of witticisms which Mr. Bagehot’s Pzckwick did not contain; and that probably the “chops and tomato” letter, and the famous trial of Bardell v. Pickwick, is a later growth? Are we also to infer that it is risky to attribute any startling passages in our C/artism to the real sage of Chelsea?
LECTURE XL MARCION.
I.
JUSTIN MARTYR, in his First Afology, written about A.D. 150, speaks of Marcion as “a man of Pontus, who is even at this day alive and teaching his disciples to believe in some other God greater than the Creator.” He had a large number of followers. Justin says: “He has caused many of every nation to speak blasphemies.” He travelled over many countries, and at the end of the second century his heresy was formidable and widely spread. At the end of the fourth century it still survived in Italy, Egypt, Palestine, Arabia, Syria, Cyprus, and Persia.
Marcion lived a blameless, honourable, and austere life; and the Marcionites maintained the rigid morality of the founder of their sect. They practised a severe asceticism, abstaining from wine, from meat, and from marriage. They were of the same mind as Tertullian as to the crime of concealing their faith in order to escape persecution, and many of them suffered martyrdom for the name of Christ.
Their fundamental doctrine has an interest for us 202
MARCION. 203
even in these times. To Marcion there were two Gods. He found an irreconcilable contrast between the God revealed in the Old Testament and the God revealed in Christ. The God of the Old Testament was a just, but a relentless God. The law which He gave to men was equitable, but stern; it represents His own character and the principles on which He governed mankind: “An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth.” The law of the God whom Christ has revealed is more gracious and more noble: “ Whoso- ever smiteth thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also”; and His law is the expression of His own merciful character and government.
The material universe and the human race were created, according to Marcion, by the God who was worshipped by Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and whose presence was revealed to their terrified descendants at Sinai by the storm-clouds, the lightnings, the thunders, the awful fire, the smoke which “ascended as the smoke of a furnace,” and the agitation of the granite mountain, which trembled because He was near. He was the God whose prophets menaced the Jewish people with terrible punishments for their crimes, and who, when His patience was exhausted, swept them into exile and laid their country in ruins. He wasa just God, but not good and gracious.
The miseries which were being inflicted on men in this life for their sins, the worse miseries to which they were destined in the life to come, touched the mercy of the Supreme. They were suffering justly,
204 MARCION.
but He pitied them. For thousands of years He had left the world and mankind in the hands of their Creator. He had concerned Himself about neither. But at last His heart was moved, and He sent the Lord Jesus Christ to redeem the human race from the power of this just but merciless Deity. Our Lord, on this hypothesis, was not the Messiah of Jewish pro- phecy, but a Messiah of quite another kind ; He came for a wholly different work. He was not sent by the Creator of the world to give great secular splendour to His elect nation, but by the Supreme God, to deliver the human race from the evils which their Creator was righteously inflicting on them. The original apostles had therefore, according to Marcion, misapprehended the true nature of our Lord’s mission. Never was a great teacher more flagrantly unsuccess- ful in making his mind clear to his disciples. The men who had lived with our Lord in the closest intimacy during His earthly ministry believed that He acknowledged the authority of their ancient Scriptures ; that He had come to fulfil the law and the prophets ; that He was revealing more fully the God of Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob; that He was the Christ for whose coming the Jewish race had been waiting and longing through many centuries of glory and of shame. This was their belief while He was with them ; and for this belief they perilled their lives after He had returned to the Father. But, according to Marcion, their belief was wholly false. He there- fore rejected the authority of the original apostles
MARCION. 205
and of their followers. For him neither their Epistles nor their Gospels had any worth. They had continued to worship the God of the Jews as the Supreme God ; they supposed that Jesus was the Jewish Messiah ; to the last they were Jews rather than Christians.
But the Jews—and even many Christian Jews— had hated Paul as the enemy of their faith and their nation, and as a traitor to their sacred traditions, their inalienable prerogatives, and their immeasur- able hopes. There was incontestable evidence that between Paul and Peter there had been grave differ- ences of judgment as to the observance of certain Jewish customs. For Marcion, therefore, Paul was the true representative of the mind of Christ; Paul had discovered what the original apostles had missed —the irreconcilable antagonism between the old Faith and the new. His Canon of the New Testa- ment was constructed on these principles. It con- sisted of two parts—‘The Gospel” and “The Apostolicon.” In the “Apostolicon” he placed ten of Paul’s Epistles, rejecting the Epistles to Timothy and Titus ;! his “Gospel” was the Gospel of Luke.
But even Paul’s Epistles were hard to reconcile with the doctrine of Marcion concerning the God of the Old Testament, and he therefore mutilated them. He cut out, for example, the following passages from the Epistle to the Galatians: “Know therefore that
4 The Epistle to the Hebrews he, of course, rejected.
206 MARCION.
they which be of faith, the same are the sons of Abraham” (cap. iii. 7); “That upon the Gentiles might come the blessing of Abraham in Christ Jesus” (cap. iii. 14); “Now to Abraham were the promises spoken, and to his seed. He saith not, And to seeds, as of many; but as of one, And to thy seed, which is Christ. Now this I say: A covenant confirmed beforehand by God, the law, which came four hundred and thirty years after, doth not disannul, so as to make the promise of none effect. For if the inheri- tance is of the law, it is no more of promise: but God hath granted it to Abraham by promise” (cap. iii. 16-18). But no mutilations—had they been still more audacious than those on which Marcion ventured —could remove from Paul’s Epistles the reverence with which the apostle of the Gentiles regarded the ancient revelation of God to the Jews; and the orthodox assailants of Marcion had no difficulty in showing that even the mutilated Epistles were de- structive of the Marcionite heresy.
It was also necessary to mutilate the Gospel of Luke. According to Marcion, Christ was not born of a woman, with a body of flesh and blood like our own ; for it was impossible that in Him there should be anything that was derived from what had been brought into existence by the Creator of the world and of mankind. His Gospel therefore began with the beginning of our Lord’s public ministry: “In the fifteenth year of Tiberius, God came down to Caper- naum, a city of Galilee, and taught on the Sabbath
MARCION. a 207
”
day.” The early chapters of Luke, which contain the account of our Lord’s birth, His genealogy, His baptism, and His temptation, were omitted. There were also considerable omissions, which are not explicable, from later chapters in the Gospel.
The original text of Marcion’s Gospel has been lost, but it has been reconstructed from Tertullian and Epiphanius, both of whom wrote against Mar- cionism. The assailants of Marcion contended that in the mutilated Gospel of Luke, as in the mutilated Epistles of Paul, enough was left to destroy the fun- damental principles of Marcionism. They therefore had to quote and discuss Marcion’s Gospel at great length ; and from these quotations and discussions we can discover what it preserved of Luke’s Gospel and what it rejected.
IL
There are two questions to be determined before we can draw any conclusion from Marcion’s Gospel in support of the early origin of the Gospel of Luke: (1) Is it not possible that the two Gospels are two independent narratives, and may not the coincidences between them be explained by sup- posing that the two writers drew their story of our Lord’s life and teaching from the same sources. Or, (2) If they are not independent narratives, is it not possible that Marcion’s Gospel, instead of being a mutilated form of a more trustworthy narrative, is really the older document? In that case we should
208 MARCION.
have to speak, not of the “omissions” of Marcion but of the “additions” of our present Luke.
First, then, were the two Gospels independent works? This is not possible.
(1) Marcion contains practically nothing that is not contained in Luke. “The additions are insigni- ficant—some thirty words in all—and those, for the most part, supported by other authority.” With the exception of these thirty words and some slight alterations of phrase Marcion’s Gospel is simply “an abridgment of our St. Luke.”?
(2) The order of Luke’s narrative is very different from the order of Matthew and Mark. Marcion’s order follows Luke’s.
“There is some disturbance and re-arrangement in © the first chapter of Marcion’s Gospel, though the substance is that of the third Synoptic ; but from this point onwards the two move step by step together, but for the omissions and a single transposition (iv. 27 to xvii. 18).”
Out of fifty-three sections peculiar to St. Luke— from iv. 16 onwards—all but eight are found also in Marcion’s Gospel. They are found, too, in precisely the same order. Curious and intricate as is the mosaic work of the third Gospel, all the intricacies of its pattern are reproduced in the Gospel of Mar-
1 PROFESSOR SANDAY: The Gospels in the Second Century, p. 214. The chapter on Marcion is perhaps the most interest- ing and valuable in his interesting and valuable book. I have used it very largely in this Lecture.
ay
MARCION. 209
cion. Where Luke makes an insertion in the ground- stock of his narrative, there Marcion makes an inser- tion also; where Luke omits part of the narrative, Marcion does the same.
In the very heart of Luke’s Gospel (ix. 51 to xviii, 14) discourses of Christ are inserted without regard to chronological order. “This peculiarity is faithfully reproduced in the Gospel of Marcion with the same disregard of chronology, the only change being the omission of about forty-one verses from a total of 380.”
(3) There are names mentioned by Luke which do not appear in any of the other Gospels,—Joanna, Susanna, Cleopas, and Zaccheus ; “not only does each of the sections relating to these persons re- appear in Marcion’s Gospel, but it re-appears pre- cisely at the same place.”
(4) A careful examination of the first three Gospels shows that the three Evangelists do not always agree in their account of the particular occasions and circumstances of some of our Lord’s sayings and actions. For example, the words of our Lord, “ Ye know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones exercise authority over them. Not so shall it be among you: but whosoever would become great among you shall be your minister ; and whosoever would be first among you shall be your servant,’—these words were spoken, according to Matthew and Mark at or near Jericho, when our Lord was on His way to Jerusalem to die ; and they