I. We know that Marcion mutilated Paul’s

Epistles; he would hardly hesitate to mutilate Luke’s Gospel. The passages which he omitted in the Epistle to the Galatians are inconsistent with the theory that the Creator of the world, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God of Jewish psalmists and prophets, was the God who sent the Lord Jesus Christ to save mankind. The early chapters of Luke are equally inconsistent with this theory. The reasons which led him to mutilate the Epistle to the Galatians would lead him to mutilate the Gospel.
2. There are indications of a very striking and decisive character that the passages which Marcion
1 The quotations in the preceding paragraphs are from Pro- fessor Sanday’s Zhe Gospels in the Second Century, pp. 214-216. The sentences not marked as quotations contain either sum- maries of Professor Sanday’s statements or explanatory matter introduced for the sake of readers who are not conversant with inquiries of this description. I have inserted the figures (1), (2) etc., to make the separate arguments more distinct.
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omits must have come from the same hand as the main body of the Gospel which he preserves. Luke has a style of his own. There are words that occur with great frequency in the third Gospel, which occur very rarely, or not at all, in the other books of the New Testament. The writer has his peculiar phrases, and he has his peculiar forms of construction. He has peculiarities in his use of adverbs, of pre- positions, of pronouns, and in the combination of participles. These characteristics of his style are, for the most part, not so obvious as to strike ordinary readers: to detect them requires exact and laborious examination. But the style of the passages omitted by Marcion is identical with the style of the rest of the Gospel and of the Acts of the Apostles. Luke’s Gospel contains 309 verses which are absent from Marcion’s: “In those verses there are found 111 distinct peculiarities of St. Luke’s style, numbering in all 185 separate instances ; there are also found 138 words peculiar to or specially characteristic of the third Evangelist with 224 instances. In other words, the verified peculiarities of St. Luke’s style and dic- tion . . . are found in the portions of the Gospel omitted by Marcion in a proportion averaging con- siderably more than one to each verse.” !
It would not be difficult for a man of literary skill to write passages which might pass for Dr. Johnson’s ;
* PROFESSOR SANDAY: The Gospels in the Second Century, Pp. 229.
anes Sai
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it would be less easy to produce half a dozen para- graphs that could be mistaken for Gibbon’s ; and still less easy to achieve an ease, transparency, and grace that might be mistaken for Mr. Froude’s ; but for one author to write passages in imitation of another, which would stand the tests of concordance and grammar that have been applied to the “omitted” passages of Luke, would require—if possible at all—an artist of almost miraculous skill. There are no grounds for supposing that any Christian scholars in the middle of the second century subjected the style of Luke or of any other New Testament writer to the kind of scrutiny to which it has been subjected by the modern scholars of Germany and England ; and in the absence of the results which such a study yields, no imitator could have reproduced the peculiarities of Luke as they appear in those passages of our third Gospel which are absent from the Gospel of Marcion. Which then is the more probable alternative? Did some unknown writer in the second century work a literary miracle? Or did Marcion, who mutilated the Epistles of Paul, mutilate the Gospel of Luke? Hesi- tation is impossible. The Gospel of Luke is the original document; Marcion’s is a mutilated abridg- ment.
III.
In A.D. 150, according to Justin, Marcion had dis- ciples in many countries. He must, therefore, have been teaching for many years. There is a general
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agreement that he was teaching his heresies in Rome about A.D. 139-142. Very early in his assault on the traditional faith of the Church he must have found it necessary to give his disciples a life of our Lord. His Gospel was probably published as early as A.D. 140, perhaps earlier ; and as Marcion’s Gospel was a mutilated abridgment of Luke’s, the date of Luke’s must have been earlier still.
But how much earlier? Professor Sanday has given a very striking answer to this question. Be- fore the invention of printing, books had to be copied by hand. If the first- copyist of the original manu- script made a few mistakes, these mistakes would probably be reproduced with errors of their own by the writers who copied from him. The second man who copied the original manuscript would probably make another set of mistakes, and these also would be reproduced, with errors of their own, by the writers who copied from him. And the same thing would happen in the case of the third, the fourth, and every later copyist of the original. It is the business of those who study what is called the criticism of the New Testament texts to examine and compare the _ various readings of different ancient manuscripts. They also examine and compare the various read- ings found in the quotations from the New Testament which occur in ancient Christian writers, and from these they are able to discover the readings of the manuscripts which were used by these writers. As the result of this examination, they can ascertain,
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sometimes with practical certainty, sometimes with a high degree of probability, what manuscripts and what readings have a claim to be regarded as the more ancient. They can trace, so to speak, the pedi- gree and history of the various readings.
Now Professor Sanday, who is an authority in this curious province of learning, says: “If Marcion’s Gospel was an extract from a manuscript containing our present St. Luke, then not only is it certain that that Gospel was already in existence, but there is further evidence to show that it must have been in existence for some time.” !
“In the year 140 A.D. Marcion possesses a Gospel which is already in an advanced stage of transcription —which has not only undergone those changes which in some regions the text underwent before it was translated into Latin, but has undergone other changes besides” ;* that is, our Gospel of Luke must have passed through the hands of a succession of copyists before the text came into the condition in which Marcion used it. There is no direct evidence, says Professor Sanday, of the antiquity of the earth ; put the geologist judges by the fossils—the relics of an extinct age—which he finds imbedded in the strata; so here, in the Gospel of Marcion, do we find relics which to the initiated eye carry with them their own story. Marcion’s Gospel was derived from Luke’s ; but the text of Luke which Marcion used—this is
1 Pages 230, 231. 2 Page 238. 3 Page 236.
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Professor Sanday’s argument—must have had “a long previous history, and the manuscripts through which it was conveyed must have parted far from the parent stem.”! Luke, therefore, must have been originally written a long time before A.D. 140.
Only scholars who have studied the criticism of ancient texts can form an independent judgment of the validity of this kind of evidence ; and only geologists can form an independent judgment on the geological evidence for the antiquity of the earth. Most of us have to accept the fact of the earth’s antiquity on the authority of geologists; and this particular argument for the antiquity of Luke’s Gospel must rest, for most of us, on the authority of critical scholars. Professor Sanday’s authority has great weight.
IV.
Marcion’s Gospel omits, as I have already said, the early chapters of Luke’s Gospel. Perhaps to some of you it may appear that these chapters, with their story of angelic appearances and of prophecies uttered by Zacharias, the father of John the Baptist, by Mary the mother of our Lord, and by the aged Simeon, give a mythical character to all that part of the narrative. You may feel half inclined to believe that though the rest of the Gospel may con- tain an early and authentic account of our Lord’s history and teaching, these chapters must preserve
1 Page 236.
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the popular legends of a later generation, or must have been the deliberate invention of a later writer.
But examine their contents, and ask whether it is conceivable that they were invented by a Christian writer in the middle of the second century, or even in the earliest years of the second century ; and ask, too, whether it is conceivable that popular Christian legends could have taken this form?
What strikes me in these chapters is that they show no trace of those great discoveries concerning the true glory of Christ which came to the Church after our Lord’s return to the Father. In the words of the angel to Zacharias about the mission of the son that was to be born to him in his old age, and who was to go before the face of God and “make ready for the Lord a people prepared for Him,” there is nothing that passes beyond the old horizons of Jewish hope and prophecy. There are the same limi- tations in the words of the angel to Mary about the destiny of the child who was to be at once her own Son and the Son of God. Nor in the song of Mary herself, in answer to the congratulations of Elizabeth, is there any premonition of the revelations of the glory of Christ which appear in the apostolic epistles. Zacharias “was filled with the Holy Ghost and pro- phesied” : but his prophecy is the prophecy of a de- vout Jew, who saw, in the approaching advent of the Messiah, the fulfilment of the oath of God to Abraham, the restoration of the throne of David, the deliverance of the Jewish race from their enemies and from the
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hand of all that hated them. With these external and national deliverances there was to be a great ethical and religious reformation ; but the whole of the prophecy, in its substance as well as in its form, is Jewish. Even Simeon’s thanksgiving, in which Christ is described as “a light for revelation to the Gentiles” as well as “the glory” of God’s people Israel, is also Jewish ; it is the echo of some of the noblest of ancient Jewish prophecies; it shows no trace of the influence of the new spirit and the new modes of thought which were created by the Chris- tian Gospel. :
On the hypothesis that Marcion’s Gospel represents the original document, these chapters were a later insertion. We are required to suppose that some Christian writer in the second century composed these psalms and prophecies and angelic communi- cations concerning the birth of Christ, and that he excluded from them every characteristic Christian element, everything that could distinguish them from the visions of the greatness of the Messiah which came to ancient Jewish prophets many centuries before. Is that conceivable? Would it have occurred to a Christian writer to practise that exclusion? Would it not have been natural for him to assume that, when an angel came to announce to Zacharias the birth of the forerunner of the Messiah, and to Mary the birth of the Messiah Himself, the angelic message would be penetrated with at least some tays of that splendour which did not break upon
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the common world till after our Lord’s resurrection and ascension? Would it not have been natural for him to assume that Zacharias, Simeon, and Mary, the mother of our Lord, when they were filled with the Holy Ghost, must have had clearer visions of the true glory of Christ than had come to the ancient prophets of Judaism ?
There would have been nothing to zzvalidate the authenticity of the narrative if the messages at- tributed to the angel, and in the prophecies and psalms attributed to Zacharias, Simeon, and Mary, there had been these large anticipations of the new Christian conception of the Divine, redemption and the Divine kingdom. The absence of these anticipa- tions is a strong, and to some minds will be a de- cisive, proof of the historic truth of the story. That it was necessary to exclude them would never have occurred to a Christian writer who was zmagining what might have been said about the advent of Christ by an angel and by devout persons speaking under the inspiration of the Holy Ghost. If he had tried to exclude them, he could hardly have done it. It is still less conceivable that these anticipations of maturer Christian knowledge could have been ex- cluded from legends which had been created by the devout imagination of the commonalty of the Church.
The angelic messages, the psalms, the prophecies which are preserved in the two first chapters of Luke, give strong internal confirmation to the historical
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trustworthiness of this part of the narrative.” The new revelation had not been made when Christ was born ; and neither the messages of the angel Gabriel nor the prophecies and psalms of devout persons under the inspiration of the Holy Ghost anticipate it. The profound consistency between all that is con- tained in these two chapters and the actual stage of the development of Divine revelation at the time to which they refer, is beyond the reach of both acci- dent and art. Its only explanation is the simplest one: the writer had learnt what was actually said by the persons whose words he professes to record.!
1 The argument in the text for the genuineness of the first two chapters is sustained by the evidence from style. “In the principal omission—that of the first two chapters, containing 132 verses—there are 47 distinct peculiarities of style [z.e. peculiarities characteristic of the Gospel generally] with 105 instances; and 82 characteristic words with 144 instances.” --SANDAY: The Gospels in the Second Century, p. 229.
LECTURE XIL PAPIAS.
HIS evening I shall speak to you of a man whc
knew some, perhaps many, of the friends of the apostles, and who knew two of the original disciples of our Lord. That the apostles had friends whose names are not mentioned in the New Testament, friends whom they loved, and who loved them, has perhaps never occurred to some of us. And we may not find it easy to give a place in our imagination to the forgotten men and women with whom Peter, James and John, Andrew, Philip, Matthew, and the rest used to dine; in whose houses they were guests for days and weeks together; whose children they nursed and prayed for ; whose misfortunes, illnesses, bereavements filled them with anxiety and sorrow, and in whose health and happiness they rejoiced ; to whom they used to give accounts of the discourses of our Lord and of His miracles; and of Mary His mother, and of Lazarus and Martha and Mary of Bethany ; of the desolation and terror of the night in which He was betrayed ; the awful darkness which
fell on the world while He was hanging on the cross,
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the wonder and the doubt with which they heard in the early morning the first news of His resurrection, and their perfect blessedness when He appeared to them in the evening.
Not very many yeats ago there were people to whom it was wonderful that any one they knew should leave England, and, after a few months’ absence, should return and tell them what he had seen in the Holy Land. It seemed very strange that a man living in the next house had walked in the streets of Jerusalem, had stood on the Mount of Olives, had seen Bethany and Bethlehem, had sat by Jacob’s well, had been in a boat on the Lake of Gennesareth. It gave them a shock. For Jerusalem, the Mount of Olives, Bethany, Bethlehem, Jacob’s well, and the Lake of Gennesareth seemed to belong to another world than that which is visited by the light of the common day. They were visited in hours of devout thought. They were separated by a great mystery from the ordinary paths of men. A glory transfigured them. It was not possible to think of them as we think of Geneva and Mont Blanc and the Lake of Lucerne. With some perhaps this feel- ing still lingers.
In the same way, the apostles seem to some of us to have no other place than in the New Testament. They lived with Christ during His earthly ministry. They knew people whose names are mentioned in the Acts of the Apostles and in the apostolic Epistles. But to the imagination they are separated
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from all the rest of mankind. It is forgotten that Paul must have had innumerable friends in Philippi, in Thessalonica, in the towns of Galatia, in Corinth, in Ephesus, in Rome—friends, who for twenty, thirty, or even forty years after his death must have had many things to say about him and his teaching. It is forgotten that the other apostles must also have had innumerable friends in different parts of the world, who transmitted to the next generation the substance of the story of Christ as they had heard the apostles themselves tell it, and the substance of apostolic doctrine. Papias, as I have said, knew men who were friends of the apostles; and he knew two men, who, though they were not apostles, had known Christ.
I.
He was bishop of Hierapolis in Phrygia, in the first half of the second century. Hierapolis—it is now in ruins—lay a few miles north of Laodicea and about one hundred miles east of Ephesus. A Christian Church was formed there in very early times, and it is mentioned by Paul in his Epistle to the Colossians (Col. iv. 13). It is probable that Papias was born between A.D. 60 and A.D. 70; his book, entitled An Exposition of Oracles of the Lord, was probably published about A.D. 135.
He had excellent opportunities for knowing men who had known the apostles. For the Apostle John lived in Asia Minor during most of the thirty years
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between the fall of Jerusalem in A.D. 70 and his death at the end of the century, and he must have been well known to a large number of the ministers and mem- bers of the Churches in Ephesus, Smyrna, Laodicea. Hierapolis, and the other great cities of the pro- vince. Ephesus was his usual home; there he died, and there he was buried. In the time of Eusebius there was a tomb at Ephesus which bore his name, and which was regarded by the Christians with affec- tion and veneration.
According to a tradition which seems to be trust- worthy, the Apostle Andrew went with him into Asia Minor. You remember the earliest notice that we have of these two friends. Both John and Andrew were disciples of the Baptist, and they were with their master on the banks of the Jordan when he delivered his great testimony to Jesus: “Behold the Lamb of God.” The rest of the day they spent with our Lord, and they were His first disciples. Till they died, the memory of those great hours must have bound their hearts together in unperishable love.
The Apostle Philip, the friend of Andrew, settled in Hierapolis. Papias knew his two daughters, and recorded in his Exposition what Eusebius describes as a “wonderful narrative,” which he had heard from them. Among the older members of the Church there must have been many who had known Philip himself intimately. Papias also met persons who had known several others of the apostles.
In his Exposition of Oracles of the Lord he made
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use of what the friends of the apostles had told him. In what seems to have been a letter addressed to a friend to whom the book was dedicated he says:
“TI will not scruple also to givea place . . . along with my interpretations, to everything that I learnt carefully and remembered carefully in time past from the elders, guaranteeing their truth! . . . Onany occasion when any person came [in my way] who had been a follower of the elders, I would inquire about the discourses of the elders—what was said by Andrew, or by Peter, or by Philip, or by Thomas or James, or by John or Matthew, or any other of the Lord’s disciples, and what Aristion and the Elder John, ¢he disciples of the Lord, say. For I did not think that I could get so much profit from the contents of books as from the utterances of a living and abiding voice.”
This is the account which Papias gives of the method he follows in his Axfositcon. The work itself, which appears to have been a considerable one, has been lost ; nearly all the brief fragments of it which remain have been preserved by Eusebius and Irenzeus, the most valuable of them by Eusebius. The latest trace of the existence of the book itself is in an inventory of the possessions of the cathedral at Nismes, dated A.D. 1218. As the Lectures of Ephraem and the Dzatessaron of Tatian have beer. recently recovered, after having been lost for many centuries, the Exposition of Papias may also be re- covered, and it would be more valuable than either
of them.
1 He means that he himself assured his friend of the accuracy of his reports of what the elders had told him.
LC: 15
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His reference to “ Aristion and the Elder John” is rather obscure. The sentence is clumsily formed. It might convey the impression that, as he had learnt from the friends of the apostles what the apostles had said, he had also learned from the friends of Aristion and the Elder John what these two immediate dis- ciples of our Lord had said. But this was not his meaning. He tells us that he had inquired and care- fully considered what was said by the apostles ; but when he comes to “ Aristion and the Elder John,” he changes the tense from the past to the present, and tells us that he had considered as carefully what these two men say. And Eusebius, who had the complete work of Papias in his hands, states distinctly, on Papias’s own authority, that Papias himself knew Aristion and the Elder John, so that he had no need to rely on their friends for reports of what these two men had said about Christ.
It appears therefore that (1) Papias knew men who were friends of many of the original apostles ; that (2) he knew two women who were daughters of the Apostle Philip; that (3) he knew two men who were immediate disciples of our Lord ; that (4) he had tried to learn from all these persons what they could tell him about Christ and about what had been said by the apostles about Christ ; and that (5) he had used what they had told him in his Exfosition. He may not have been a man in whose critical judgment we could place any great confidence ; some of the traditions of our Lord’s sayings which he records
a ES
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may have the faults of all similar traditions, and may be wholly untrustworthy ; but, as I think I shall be able to show, the evidence which can be drawn from him in support of the historical truth of the first three Gospels is of decisive weight.
II.
He wrote an Exposition of Oracles of the Lord What he meant by “Oracles of the Lord,” or, as Dr. Lightfoot sometimes translates the phrase, “ Do- minical Oracles,” appears from his own account of Mark’s Gospel, a part of which I will now quote; it will be necessary to quote the whole passage later on. He says that, according to “ the elder,”
‘Mark, having become the interpreter of Peter, wrote down accurately everything that he remembered, without however recording in order what was either said or done by Christ. For neither did he hear the Lord, nor did he follow Him ; but after- wards, as I said, [attended] Peter, who adapted his instruction to the needs [of his hearers], but had no design of giving a con- nected account of the Lord’s Oracles [or Discourses].”
There is a various reading in the Greek text of the last words of this passage. Some authorities give “Oracles,” others give “ Words,” or “ Discourses ” ; but the most recent critical editor has adopted “Oracles.”1 If this is the true reading, then Papias
1 LIGHTFOOT: Essays on the Work entitled “ Supernatural Religion.” If the other reading is adopted, the argument in the text is not substantially weakened. The later statement—that Mark did not intend to give “a connected account of our Lord’s Discourses,” or “ Teaching”—must cover the same ground as
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describes Mark’s work as “an account of the Lords Oracles” ; and Papias’s own book is an exposition of the Lord’s “Oracles”;1 that is, an exposition of “what was said or done by Christ.” The word Gospel had not yet come into use as the title of a narrative of our Lord’s Life.
It was an Exposition of Oracles of the Lord, not an independent account of our Lord’s life and ministry. Side by side with his own interpretations he quoted what the apostles themselves had said about our Lord and our Lord’s teaching to persons whom he knew. The daughters of Philip may have told him many things which they had heard their father say about Christ—about His doctrines and about His precepts. So that if the book is ever recovered, we may find in it Philip’s own explanation of the singular emphasis in the question addressed to him by our Lord after the Last Supper: “Have I been so long time with you, and dost thou not know Me, Philip? . . . How sayest thou, Show us the Father?” as though there was something exception- ally surprising in Phclif’s failure to recognise the Divine glory of his Master, and implying that a
the earlier statement that he did not record ‘in order what was either said or done by Christ”; and an exposition of the “Oracles” must cover at least as much ground as an account of the “ Discourses” or “ Teaching.”
1 The phrase in Papias’s account of Mark’s Gospel is the same as that in his own title. Mark wrote an account of the Dominical Oracles. The other reading would, of course, give Dominical Discourses or Teaching.
Lae
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similar failure in Matthew or any of the others would have occasioned our Lord a less keen disappointment.
ITI.
We return now to his account of Mark’s Gospel, and I will give the whole passage as it stands in Eusebius.
“And the elder said this also: Mark, having become the interpreter of Peter, wrote down accurately everything that he remembered, without however recording in order what was either said or done by Christ. For neither did he hear the Lord, nor did he follow Him ; but afterwards, as I said, [attended] Peter, who adapted his instructions to the needs [of his hearers], but had no design of giving a connected account of the Lord’s oracles [or discourses]. So then Mark made no mistake, while he thus wrote down some things as he remembered them ; for he made it his one care not to omit anything that he heard, or to set down any false statement therein,”
That you may estimate the real importance of this testimony, I must remind you once more that Papias had known men who were the personal disciples of seven of the apostles—of John, of Matthew, of Andrew, of Peter, of Philip, of Thomas, of James. ~ When he met them he used to ask them what the — apostles had said about our Lord. He knew two daughters of the Apostle Philip; they belonged to the Church of which he was bishop, and they lived to a great age. He also knew two men who were immediate disciples of our Lord. With all these
1 Eusesius : Ecclesiastical History, book iii., cap. 39.
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sources of information concerning our Lord’s life and teaching, he declares that the Gospel of Mark is an authentic narrative. It is certain, therefore, that our second Gospel, in its substance, contains the very story that was told by the original apostles. These, and such as these, are the miracles which they declared that Christ had worked. These, and such as these, are the discourses which they said that Christ had delivered. Men whom Papias knew had heard the story of Christ from the apostles ; Papias asked them about it, and Papias says that Mark has preserved the story which was told by Peter. If Peter and the other apostles had told a different story, is it possible that Papias could have believed that Mark recorded the story told by Peter? The two daughters of the Apostle Philip were living in the city where Papias lived, were members of the Church of which Papias was bishop; is it credible, if Mark’s Gospel contained a different account of Christ from that which these women had heard from their father, that Papias would have said that “Mark made no mistake.” Aristion and “the presbyter Tohn” were surviving representatives of the first generation of Christians, disciples of our Lord Himself; is it credible that Papias, who knew them ard who talked to them about their Master, would have accepted Mark’s Gospel, if Mark’s account of our Lord had not been in substance the same as theirs ?
SSS
a ee ee ET ee ee ee
Te ee is OP ae A Ne a ee
PAPIAS, 231 SOON EES ala Gi Ny
IV.
Papias also tells us something about Matthew’s Gospel. He says:
“So then Matthew composed the oracles in the Hebrew language, and each one interpreted them as he could.” !
All that I have said in connexion with the testi- mony of Papias to the second Gospel might be re- peated in connexion with his testimony to the first. It is not credible that Papias, who knew men that were friends and disciples of seven of the original apostles, who knew two women who were the daugh- ters of one of them, who knew two of the original disciples of our Lord, would have received the first Gospel as Matthew’s if it had contained a story which, in its substance, was not the same as that which the apostles themselves had told.
V.
But this is not an adequate statement of the real strength of the evidence contained in the passages which I have quoted from Papias. The historical trustworthiness of the Four Gospels does not rest on the sagacity or the knowledge of individual men. It is not the judgment of Papias himself, whatever materials he may have had for forming it, that makes his testimony important. It is apparent that while friends, disciples, and children of the apostles were still
1 Eusesius: Lcclestastical History, book iii., cap. 39.
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living, and while some who had known Christ were still living, our first and second Gospels were received —and received with their consent—as containing true accounts of our Lord’s ministry. The friends and disciples of apostles received them as containing in substance the story which they had heard the apostles tell; the children of an apostle received them as con- taining the story which they had heard their father tell; men who had known Christ received them as containing in substance the story of Christ which they had known from the beginning—had known, in part, from what they themselves had heard and seen, in part from what had been told them by their friends, who had seen miracles which they did not see, and heard discourses which they did not hear. Whether, according to the information which Papias had from “the elder,” Mark wrote the second Gospel or not is a matter of secondary importance. Whether Matthew originally wrote his Gospel in Hebrew is a matter of less importance still. The main point is this: the generation of Christians that heard the story of Christ from the apostles, some men who had known Christ Himself, received our first two Gospels as containing a true account of what our Lord had said and done. After the lapse of nearly eighteen hundred years I see them standing before me—men who had known John, and Matthew, and Andrew, and Peter, and Philip, and Thomas, and James,—the daughters of Philip—men who themselves had seen and heard our Lord ; and as they point to these two
; (
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Gospels, I hear them say, “These books contain the story of the mighty works and gracious teaching of Christ, ‘even as they delivered them unto us, who from the beginning were eye-witnesses and ministers of the word.’” I require no stronger evidence. For myself I am satisfied. In the Gospel of Matthew and in the Gospel of Mark I am sure that I have, in sukstance, the story which was told by the original apostles.
VI.
At this point we are met by, I will not say a plausible or ingenious, but a very audacious objec- tion. We are asked to believe that the original Mark, the Mark of Papias, the Mark whose historical trustworthiness is so strongly authenticated, has vanished ; has vanished we know not how ; vanished we know not exactly when; and that another Mark has taken its place; that if we had the Mark of Papias, something might be said for the trustworthi- ness of its story ; but that our Mark is another and a later document.
Of course some reasons are given for this startling theory. We are assured that since Mark’s Gospel omits many most interesting facts about Peter which are contained in the other Gospels, Mark could not have obtained his materials from Peter’s preaching. We are reminded that our Mark is just as orderly in its arrangement as Matthew and Luke, but that the Mark which Papias knew did not record “in
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order” what was said and done by our Lord. And, further, it is argued that Mark’s record of what he remembered of Peter’s preaching must have been a more fragmentary narrative than that which is given in our second Gospel.
I do not very much care to reply to these objec- tions in detail. I shall discuss presently the con- clusion which is drawn from them. But it does not seem to me very surprising that a Gospel composed from materials supplied by Peter’s preaching should place less emphasis than the other Gospels on the eminent position of Peter in the apostolic company, and should omit some things greatly to Peter’s honour, and some things greatly to his discredit, which the other Gospels contain. As for the “order” of the second Gospel, it is not quite the same as Luke’s, it is very different from John’s; and Papias, after what he had learnt from the friends of the apostles or from the daughters of Philip, may have concluded that either Luke’s arrangement or John’s was better than Mark’s. Or he may have come to the conclusion that none of the evangelists had followed the actual chronological order of the events of our Lord’s history. That Papias gives the impression that the Mark which he had was more fragmentary than our Mark is an objection which hardly needs discussion.
It is also maintained that his account of Matthew’s Gospel shows that he had quite a different Matthew from that which stands first of our four. Papias
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describes Matthew’s work as a collection of “ Oracles” (ogia), and we are told that this means a collection of our Lord’s discourses; but our Matthew is not simply a collection of discourses, it contains a large amount of narrative matter. This limitation of the meaning of the word “Oracles” cannot however be maintained. When Paul says that the Jews were entrusted with “the Oracles of God,”! he means that they had the keeping of the whole of the sacred Scriptures, not merely the keeping of those parts of them which record words that came direct from the Divine lips ; in bulk these form a very inconsiderable part of the Old Testament. When the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews speaks of “ the first principles of the Oracles of God,” ? it is clear that he is thinking of the principles of the Divine order which are implicated in the whole story of the relations between God and the Jewish people as recorded in their sacred books. Clement of Rome, writing in the first century, uses the phrase as synonymous with “the sacred Scriptures”: “ye know, beloved, and ye know well, the sacred Scriptures, and have studied the Oracles of God.”* Philo of Alexandria quotes as an “Oracle” 4 the narrative in Genesis iv. 15, “ The Lord God set a mark upon Cain, lest any one finding him should kill him.” Papias himself, as we have seen,
1 Rom. iti. 2. 2 Heb. v. 12. 3 Clem. Rom. 53. 4 LicHTFOOT: Essays on the Work entitled “ Supernatural Religion,” p. 174. See the whole passage.
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describes Mark’s story of what was said and done by Christ as an “account of the Lord’s Oracles.”
The word “Oracles” covers both the discourses of our Lord and the account of His Birth, Temptation, Miracles, Death, and Resurrection.
The second objection to identifying our Matthew with the Matthew of Papias is more serious. He says that Matthew composed the Oracles “zu the flebrew language, and each one interpreted them as he could.” It is maintained that this implies, not only that Matthew wrote his book in Hebrew—the Aramaic dialect spoken by the Jews in Palestine—but that in the time of Papias there was no authorized transla- tion of it into Greek for the use of those who did not speak Aramaic; that to Papias therefore a Greek Matthew was unknown. This however is not a legitimate inference from his statement. He does not say, “ Matthew composed the Oracles in the Hebrew language, and each one zuterprets them as he can,” but “ Matthew composed the Oracles in the Hebrew language, and each one zuxterpreted them as he could.” This implies that in the time of Papias it was no longer necessary that each man should interpret the Aramaic original for himself and “as he could”; there was already a Matthew in Greek. The legi- timate conclusions to be drawn from the statement of Papias are these: (1) While friends and disciples of the original apostles were still living, and while some men were still living who had known our Lord, there was a Greek narrative of our Lord’s life
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and teaching which was accepted as Matthew’s; (2) Papias had been told, on what he believed to be good authority, that this narrative was originally written in Hebrew.
It is this second inference which creates a difficulty, and a difficulty which has not, I think, received any satisfactory solution. There is a general agreement among scholars that our Matthew is not a mere translation of a Hebrew original. Dr. Lightfoot refuses to concede that “it cannot have been trans- lated from the Hebrew at all,’ and he thinks that it would be nearer the truth to say that “it is not a homogeneous Greek version of a homogeneous Hebrew original.” ! The question resolves itself into the larger one which is raised by the coincidences and differences between the first three Gospels, a question which cannot be discussed in these Lectures.
VII.
Whatever may be the true solution of this last difficulty, the theory that our Matthew and our Mark are not the Matthew and Mark of Papias is un- tenable. It requires us to believe that a Gospel attributed to Mark, and supposed to preserve the account of our Lord’s Life and Ministry given by
1 LIGHTFOOT: Essays on the Work entitled “ Supernatural Religion,” p.170. The question is fully discussed in Bleek’s Introduction to the New Testament, and other similar works. See also Salmon’s Historical Introduction to the Study of the Books of the New Testament, Lect. x.
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Peter, was in common use among the disciples of Peter and John and Andrew when the second © century began; that this was lost, and a different Gospel, supposed to be Mark’s, was being read in the Christian assemblies in the middle of the century. As if the disappearance of one Gospel were not enough, we are required to believe that another Gospel shared the same fate. At the beginning of the century the Church had a narrative of our Lord’s Ministry, which the immediate disciples and personal friends of the original apostles believed was written by an apostle, by Matthew. In the middle of the century it had still a narrative of our Lord’s Ministry which was believed to have been written by Matthew ; but we are required to believe that the first Matthew, the true Matthew, had slipped out of the hands of the Church, and that another Matthew, a false Mat- thew—written we know not when, we know not by whom—had quietly taken its place. That within half a century two Gospels, each of them having such high authority, should have been lost, and that two others should have taken their place, and should have been regarded by all Christian Churches as the very Gospels that had fallen into disuse and dis- appeared within the memory of large numbers of — living men, is extravagantly improbable.
It has been suggested that the original Matthew and the original Mark were never actually displaced, but that they were gradually changed by the addition of new and spurious narratives and discourses, until
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at last they became practically new Gospels. This is an impossible theory. If copies of the Gospels had been in a very few hands between A.D. 100 and A.D. 150, and if a strong central authority had existed which could have controlled the additions made to the original text, the theory, though without a par- . ticle of evidence to support it, might not have been wholly incredible. But the Gospels were widely scattered ; there was no central authority to control the interpolations and modifications of the text ; and if this process of gradual change had gone on dur- ing fifty years, there would have been a countless variety in the contents of each one of the Gospels. One Matthew, one Mark would have contained twice as much as another; one would have contained large masses of material not found in another; for the growth would have gone on independently in dif- ferent countries; and these differences would have survived in ancient MSS. and versions. But, as a matter of fact, no such differences exist. Here and there an interpolation may be detected, as in the case of the account of the angel who descended and troubled the water in the Pool of Bethesda; but that an interpolation can be detected shows that the MSS. preserve the Gospels as they were originally written ; the errors of copyists and editors may be corrected by a comparison of copies; and the occasional inter- polations, which, perhaps, generally arose from the transfer into the text of an explanation or an illus- trative fact which some copyist had written in the
240 PAPIAS.
margin, are too few and too easily recognisable to be of any serious importance.
If our Gospels are not the same as the Gospels of Papias, the original Matthew and the original Mark have been lost—they have not growz into the Gos- pels which have inherited their name. Only the strongest evidence could make this theory of “growths” credible.
But all the evidence is on the other side. Papias wrote and published his Exposition of Oracles of the Lord about A.D. 135. At that date it may be assumed that the Matthew and the Mark which were received by the Church when he made inquiries about them from Aristion and “the Elder John,” from the disciples of Andrew, and Peter, and Philip, and Thomas, and James, and John, and Matthew, were the Matthew and Mark which were still received by the Church; for he was not writing about books which had been re- jected or lost, but about books which in the year A.D. 135 were well known, and which were received as con- taining the authentic story of Christ. They must have been the same books that were known to the disciples and friends of the original apostles. But fifteen years later, when Justin wrote his First Agology, Gospels containing the same story as our Matthew and Mark _were read every Sunday in the Christian assemblies. A few years later still, our Matthew and Mark had a place in Tatian’s Diatessaron. How did it happen that, with one consent, and within so brief a period, the Churches all over the world parted with the true
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eee
Matthew and the true Mark? How did it happen that, with one consent, they put the same two new Gospels in the place of the two old ones, and attri- buted to them the authority and the honour of the two which had been rejected ?}
Finally, Eusebius gives these statements of Papias about Matthew’s Gospel and Mark’s Gospel in fulfil- ment of his promise to indicate in his History what- ever had been said about the canonical books by earlier writers.2, Eusebius had in his hands the whole of the Exposztzon from which the statements are extracted. If the Matthew and Mark of Papias had been different books from the canonical Matthew and Mark, Eusebius could not have failed to discover it. The Matthew and Mark of Papias were the Matthew and Mark of Eusebius; and the Matthew and Mark of Eusebius—about this there is no dis- pute—are the Matthew and Mark of our own New Testament.
VIII.
In the fragments of this ancient writer preserved by Eusebius there are no references to either the Third or the Fourth Gospel. It does not follow that the Exposition itself contained no quotations from
1 That the so called Gospel of the Hebrews could not have been the original of the Greek Matthew which was known to the Church in thi: second century, is conclusively shown in the tenth Lecture of Dr. Salmon’s /utroduction.
2 See ante, p. 110.
TAG. 16
242 PAPIAS.
these Gospels, or no comments upon them. You will remember that Eusebius did not propose to give mere quotations that he found in early writers, when these quotations were from books about whose authority there was no dispute ; and the authority of none of the Four Gospels had ever been disputed. It was only when he found some interesting statements about the undisputed books that he proposed to give them a place in his history. What Papias had said about the relation of Mark’s narrative to the preach- ing of Peter, and about the language in which Mat- thew’s “Oracles” were originally written, seemed to Eusebius sufficiently interesting to be recorded. It is to be assumed that Papias had said nothing equally interesting about the Gospels of Luke and John.
But while, as a rule, Eusebius does not take any notice of mere guotations from books which were universally received, he sets the rule aside in the case of the First Epistle of John and the First Epistle of Peter, although these were among the undisputed books.1 Accordingly he informs us that Papias “made use of testimonies from the First Epistle of John.”? But if Papias used John’s First Epistle, he must also have used John’s Gospel; if he acknow- ledged the authority of the Epistle, he must also have acknowledged the authority of the Gospel. For the Epistle is a supplement to the Gospel; it de-
1 See ante, pp. 110, 111. * Ecclesiastical History, book iii., cap. xxxix.
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velops the dogmatic and ethical contents of the Gospel ; it illustrates and applies them; the two are inseparable ; Epistle and Gospel are vitally and organically one.
IX.
The argument from Papias for the historical trust- worthiness of the story of Christ contained in our New Testament is not yet exhausted. As I said earlier in this Lecture, the narratives of our Lord’s life and teaching were not in his time called “Gospels”; or if that title was ever given to them, it was not in com- mon use. Matthew’s narrative he calls the “ Oracles” ; Mark’s, an “ Account of the Lord’s Oracles.” But “Oracles” was the title given to sacred books. To Paul the ancient Scriptures of the Jewish people were the “Oracles. of God.” To Philo, the great Jewish scholar of Alexandria, the narrative parts of the Old Testament, as well as the words of Jehovah, were “Oracles.” To Clement of Rome the Jewish Scrip- tures were also “Oracles of God.” When Papias gives this great title to the narratives of Matthew and Mark, he attributes to them the same dignity, the same authority, the same sacredness that was attributed to the books of the Old Testament. It is inconceivable that this was his private act. The title may have been given to the books by the personal friends and disciples of Andrew, and Peter, and James, and John, and Thomas, and Matthew; it was certainly given to them by those who had known
244 PAPIAS.
the friends of these apostles. Already these two narratives were not mere common books; they were “sacred Scriptures.” Papias wrote an exposition of them, an Exposition of Oracles of the Lord. That books which commanded this affection and reverence among the friends of men who had known the ori- ginal apostles—books to which they attributed so great an authority, books which they regarded as. sacred Scriptures—should have been suffered to dis- appear within a single generation, leaving no trace behind them, and that they should have been imme- diately replaced by other books inheriting their names and inheriting their sacredness; that the Christian Churches in every part of the world, in Rome, in Carthage, in Alexandria, in Jerusalem, in Asia Minor, in Southern Gaul, should have silently consented to part with the old Gospels and to receive the new ; and that they should all have believed that the new were the same as the old—this is impossible. Strip the theory of the infinite ingenuity, the learn- ing, the brilliance of exposition by which its real nature and form have been concealed, and it ceases to be even arguable. The miracles recorded in the Four Gospels, these are credible; but the miracles which this hypothesis requires us to receive are incredible. For if it is true, then there was a sus- pension of some of the most ordinary and certain laws of human thought and conduct, a suspension extending over many years and operating in tens of thousands of men, belonging to different races and
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living in many lands. This is asking us to believe too much; the demands of the new criticism are more exorbitant than the demands of the old faith. For myself, I cannot submit to them ; and I therefore continue to believe that our Matthew and our Mark are the same Matthew and the same Mark that were regarded as “Oracles of the Lord,” sacred Scriptures, by those who had known the friends and disciples of the original apostles. They contain in substance the story of Christ that was told by Peter, and James, and Andrew, and Philip, and Thomas, and Matthew. and John.
LECTURE XIll POLYCARP.
iE
OLYCARP, bishop of Smyrna, was martyred A.D. 155 or 156.1 The proconsul urged him to deny his faith, and save his life: “Swear, and I will set thee at liberty; reproach the Christ.” Polycarp answered, “Eighty and six years have I served Him, and He never did me any wrong ; how then can I blaspheme my King, my Saviour?” I suppose that he meant to say that he had served Christ from his birth, and he was therefore born about A.D. 70. His © parents were probably Christians; in any case he must have received baptism and been instructed in the Christian Faith in early childhood.
Only fifteen years before he was born—perhaps only twelve years—Paul’s long stay in Ephesus had come to anend. In all the cities of Asia Minor the remembrance of the great apostle of the Gentiles was
1 The date which has been commonly received is A.D. 166 or 167. The earlier date is the result of recent investigations, See LIGHTFOOT, Lssays on the Work entitled “ Supernatural Religion,” pp. 103, 104.
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still fresh; and the parents of Polycarp, and his early religious teachers, may have received the Chris- tian Gospel from Paul himself.
About the time of his birth, if, as I suppose, he was born in A.D. 70, the Apostle John, the Apostle Philip, probably the Apostle Andrew, and, with them, other men who were the immediate disciples of our Lord settled in Asia Minor.t John spent the greater part of the remaining years of his life at Ephesus. At John’s death Polycarp was, at least, thirty years of age. Polycarp had known John. You will remember the letter of Irenzeus to Florinus, which I had occa- sion to quote in a former Lecture*—the letter in which he reminds his friend of the time when they listened to Polycarp together. “I can describe,” says Irenzus, “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 ke would describe his intercourse with John and with the rest who had seen the Lord, and how he would relate their words. And whatsoever things he had heard from them about the Lord, and about His miracles, and about His teaching, Polycarp, as having received them Srom eye-witnesses of the life of the Word, would relate altogether in accordance with the Scriptures.”
1 See auie, pp. 223-225 ® See ante, p 46
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When Ignatius passed through Smyrna on his way to martyrdom in Rome—about A.D. 1101—Polycarp was bishop of the Church in that city. He must then have been about forty years of age.
For the next forty years he was the most con- siderable of all the bishops of the Asiatic Churches ; and towards the end of his life he travelled from Smyrna to Italy, to discuss with Anicetus, the bishop of Rome, the difference of practice between the Churches of Asia and the Churches of the West in relation to the celebration of Easter. During this visit, his testimony to the true Faith led many who had received the doctrines of Valentinus and Mar- cion to renounce their heresies. He was martyred, as I have said, in A.D. 155 or 156.
II.
Irenzeus speaks of the epistles which he wrote to neighbouring Churches to confirm their faith, and to some of his brethren. Of these one only remains.
Soon after Ignatius left Smyrna, Polycarp wrote a letter—he “and the presbyters with him ”—to “the Church of God sojourning at Philippi” ; and this is the letter which has been preserved. It was written at the request of the Philippian Christians, and con- sists very largely of exhortations to the practice of
* The exact date is uncertain. “The earlier date assigned is about A.D. 107, and the later about A.D. 116.”—LIGHTFOOT ; Essays, etc. p. 59.
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the Christian virtues, to steadfastness of hope and firmness of faith, to patience, to meekness, to brotherly love, to prayer, and to fasting. It contains warnings against covetousness, evil-speaking, false witness, and the spirit of revenge. There are exhortations addressed to presbyters, to deacons, to young men, young women, and widows; and they are cautioned against receiving the teaching of men who would draw them from the truth. There are some sorrow- ful sentences about Valens, who had been a presbyter of the Church, but who had fallen into sin. At the close of the epistle he tells the Philippians that he is sending them the letters which Ignatius had written to himself, and to the Church of Smyrna, and to some other persons or Churches ; and he asks them to let him know anything that they had heard about Igna- tius and those that were with him. Polycarp either knew or assumed that Ignatius had suffered martyr- dom, but had received no certain information either about his sufferings or how he bore them.
The letter shows that Polycarp was a devout, earnest, and humble-minded man, very solicitous about the practical righteousness of those who bore the Christian name, and for the peace of Christian Churches ; but it gives no proof of any considerable intellectual power, and is singularly destitute of originality.
He had been educated as a Christian from his childhood ; and his memory was charged with the writings of the apostles. The letter is a short one ;
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it covers nine rather small octavo pages in Hefele’s edition of the apostolic Fathers, and there are foot- notes to every page; and yet Dr. Lightfoot finds “ decisive coincidences with, or references to, between thirty or forty passages in the New Testament.”! Dr. Charteris, in his Canonicity, makes what he calls the “quotations” and the “echoes” from New Testa- ment writers much more numerous. By “echoes” he means passages in which the thought or phrase has evidently been shaped by the remembrance of some New Testament sentence.
_ Polycarp had a great admiration for “the blessed and glorious Paul,” and reminds the Philippians of the Epistle which Paul had written to them; and there are definite quotations or distinct “echoes” of Paul’s Epistles to the Thessalonians, Galatians, Corinthians, Romans, Philippians, Colossians, Ephe- sians, and of the two Epistles to Timothy. There is a striking “coincidence” with a passage in the Acts of the Apostles. There is a trace—not very decisive—of the Epistle of Jude. Peter’s First Epistle had impressed Polycarp very deeply ; the frequency with which he quotes it is remarkable.
He quotes our Lord as saying, “The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak,” in the precise form in which the words are given in Matthew xxvi 41 and Mark xix. 38, and there are other passages which recall our first three Gospels. For example, he
1 LIGHTFOOT: Lssays, etc., p. 94
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charges the Philippians to remember what the Lord said: “Judge not, that ye be not judged ; forgive, and it shall be forgiven unto you ; pity, that ye may be pitted; with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured unto you again; and that blessed are the poor, and those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”! This passage is made up from words of our Lord in Luke vi. 36-38, 20, and Matthew v. 1o. There are other sayings of our Lord which are not given with any formula of quotation: “If we pray the Lord to for- give us, we also ought to forgive” (cap. vi.) ; “And if we suffer for His name, let us glorify Him” (cap. viii.) ; “Pray for them that persecute you and hate you, and for the enemies of the cross, that your fruit may be made manifest in all things, that ye may be therein perfect” (cap. xii.).2 These are “echoes” rather than “ quotations.”
It is contended that as the first passage is given as an express quotation of what our Lord said,— “remembering what the Lord said, teaching ”—and that as (1) there is no passage in our Gospels in which these words occur in the order in which Poly- carp gives them, or in the precise form in which he gives them ; and as (2) the words, “ pity, that ye may be pitied,” do not occur in our Gospels,—Polycarp
1 Cap. ii. It has been pointed out that the words italicised occur in the First Epistle of Clement of Rome (cap. xiii.), but not in our Gospels.
2 Compare Matt. vi. 14, seg. 3 Vv. 11, Seg. 3 V- 44, 48.
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must have used some other collection of our Lord’s sayings ; and that therefore he did not recognise the authority of the Gospels in our canon.
But suppose that this passage contained a decisive proof that he used some collection of our Lord’s say- ings which has disappeared, or one of those narratives of what Christ had said and done and suffered which, according to Luke, “many” had drawn up, how does this affect the authority of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John? We know that such “narratives” existed in the early days of the Christian Church; they dis- appeared, because they were displaced by more complete and authentic Gospels. When Polycarp was. a child and his Christian education began—he was ten years old in A.D. 80—he may have received his first instruction in the story of Christ from one of these earlier narratives; he may have learnt long passages from them by heart; and the words of our Lord, as he had learnt them in childhood, would occur to him more naturally than the words as they appeared in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, although he believed that Matthew, Mark, and Luke were more trustworthy. Those of us who have used the Re- vised Version of the New Testament ever since it was published, and who believe that it is much more accurate than the Authorized Version, which we used when we were children, find ourselves quoting the Authorized Version still when we are quoting from memory ; and in all probability we shall continue to quote it to our dying day. We know that, though
POLYCARP. — 253
the later version is more accurate than the earlier, the substance of both is the same. And if Polycarp used some earlier narrative which has been lost, his quotations from it only confirm, as far as they go the trustworthiness of our present Gospels. In the earlier narratives the teaching of our Lord is in sub- stance the same as in the more authoritative narratives which displaced them.
I deny however that the quotation is a decisive proof, or a proof at all, that he used an earlier narrative. He has drawn together precepts of our Lord which enforce certain gracious Christian vir- tues, and he recalls certain promises which encourage those who are in trouble to bear their troubles with buoyant hopefulness. These precepts and these promises, he says, were spoken by Christ. Some of them he gives very much as they are found in one or other of our Gospels; others are given in substance, though the form is varied. He does precisely what Christian preachers are doing every Sunday. When we say that Christ has given us certain exhortations and promises, which we proceed to quote, we do ‘not mean that He gave them in the order in which we quote them ; and when we quote from memory, very many of us are certain to give them in a form different from that in which they are expressed in the Gospels. The remarkable formula with which Polycarp introduces the words of our Lord, all of which are taken from the Sermon on the Mount, “ Remembering what, the Lord said, zeaching,” recalls
254 POLYCARP.
the words with which the Sermon on the Mount is introduced by Matthew: “When He had sat down, His disciples came unto Him; and He opened His mouth, and taught them, saying,” etc. He has blended into one sentence two separate Beatitudes ; but his account, as tested by our Matthew and Luke, of the specific blessings which are promised to two specific classes of persons is perfectly accurate. Now that Christ has come they that mourn are to be com- Sorted ; the meek are to ztnherit the earth; they that hunger and thirst after righteousness are to be filled; the pure in heart are to see God; the peacemakers are to be called the children of God. But according to Luke our Lord declared that the joor are blessed, because theirs is the kingdom of God, and according to Matthew that the oor in spirit are blessed, because theirs is the kengdom of heaven. And accord- ing to Matthew He said, “Blessed are they that have deen persecuted for righteousness’ sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” The kingdom of God or the kingdom of heaven is promised by our Lord to two descriptions of persons; and it is to these same two descriptions of persons that, according to Poly- carp, our Lord assures the same blessedness: “Blessed are the foor, and those who are persecuted for right- eousness’ sake: for theirs is the kingdom of God.” And the words, “ Pity, that ye may be pitied,” are in substance identical with another beatitude, “ Blessed are the merciful,” or the pitiful: “for they shall ob- tain mercy,” or pity. There is nothing in Polycarp’s
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quotation that requires us to believe that he did not use our Gospels.
He has one sentence which is almost verbally identical with 1 John iv. 3: “For whosoever does not confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is antichrist” (cap. vii.). And there is a phrase in which it is difficult not to recognise an echo of a phrase in the same chapter of the same Epistle. After quoting the words of Peter concerning our Lord, “who bore our sins in His own body on the tree,” “who did no sin, neither was guile found in His mouth,” he adds, “ but endured all things for us, that we might live in Him.’ Surely there were vaguely present in Polycarp’s mind the words of John (1 John iv. 9): “Herein was the love of God manifested in us, that God hath sent His only be- gotten Son into the world, that we might live through Him.”
Ill.
But the letter contains no quotation from the Fourth Gospel. Nor can I find in it any proof that John’s characteristic conception of our Lord, or John’s characteristic theology, had exerted any power over Polycarp’s religious thought and life.
The Christ of Polycarp is the Christ of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, not the Christ of the Fourth Gospel. The light and the fire which John brought down to the Church from the heights of God, of these the letter shows no knowledge; the light does
256 POL YCARP.
not shine there; the fire does not burn. Polycarp seems to have found what was most closely akin to his own life in the First Epistle of Peter. He had been powerfully influenced by Paul; but though he knew the Epistle to the Colossians and the Ephe- sians, there is as little trace of the loftier speculation of Paul as of the mystical theology of John. The letter gives me the impression that his Christian thought and life had received their definite form before he came under John’s influence. He was thirty years old when John died; his intimacy with John may not have begun till he was twenty, or even five-and-twenty. He had been educated in the Christian Faith from his childhood ; his conception of the revelation of God in Christ and the type of his religious character were already fixed. His intellect, as the letter shows, was of a very ordinary kind ; after he reached manhood, he was not likely to re- construct his religious thought under the influence of a new teacher. For John he had a deep affection and reverence ; but his theology—at least, when he wrote his letter to the Philippians—was not Johan- nine. I shall have to recur to this fact later in the Lecture. It will have its place in the argument.
It may be said that Polycarp’s letter is too brief for such large conclusions to be drawn from it. But the mystic thought of the Fourth Gospel and of John’s First Epistle has a strange power. Wherever it finds its way it gives decisive proofs of its presence. It is like one of those strong perfumes which fill the house
FS Ne ee te Te a eT
pee
tm I aa ns
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with their odour. It is masterful in its authority. It governs speculation ; it adds a new quality to ethics ; it determines the whole development of the spiritual life. If Polycarp had been Johannine we should have known it.
John stands apart. There are regions of thought in Paul which extend to the very confines of the kingdom of John; but John’s kingdom remains his own. In the first three Gospels there are hints and suggestions of the Christ who stands revealed in the Fourth, but they are only hints and suggestions ; there are gleams of that transcendent glory, but the gleams are transient and faint.
There are other contrasts on which critics have insisted between the whole contents of the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and the contents of the Gospel of John. It is maintained that the chrono- logy of our Lord’s ministry as related by John is irreconcilable with its chronology as related by Matthew, Mark, and Luke: that according to the Fourth Gospel the principal scene of our Lord’s ministry was in Jerusalem and the south ; according to the first three, on the shores of the Lake of Galilee and in other districts of the north: that the first three evangelists represent our Lord’s teaching as having all the qualities that charm great crowds of unculti- vated people, as being familiar, homely in its illus- trations, rapid in its transitions, picturesque, piquant ; that according to John He delivered long, elaborate, and mystical discourses: that in the first three Gospels
Lc: 17
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our Lord’s chief care is for good morals ; that in the Fourth He recurs again and again, in private and in public, to certain mysterious dogmas, as if these were of supreme importance, and is always asserting His Personal claims: that the contrasts are so vivid and the differences so profound, that if John has given a true account of our Lord’s teaching, Matthew, Mark, and Luke have missed the very substance of it; that there is one religion in the first three Gospels, and another in the Fourth. Finally, we are assured that, as the first three Gospels preserve, though with many legendary and mythical accretions, the true substance and method of our Lord’s teaching, it is impossible that John or any other of our Lord’s personal friends could have written the Fourth; and that it was written in the second century by some unknown author, a man of remarkable genius, whose Christian Faith had been transformed by the mys- tical speculations of a daring philosophy, which had endeavoured to penetrate the secret of the eternal life of God. /
The differences and the contrasts have been enor- mously exaggerated. The ethical perfection de- manded in the Sermon on the Mount is impossible apart from that mysterious birth of the Spirit of which our Lord speaks in His conversation with Nicodemus, and that mysterious union with Himself which is illustrated in the parable of the vine and the branches. When He places His own personal authority over against the authority of the law of
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Moses ;! when He calls to Himself all that labour and are heavy laden, and promises that He will give them rest ;? when He says that all things have been delivered to Him by the Father, and that no one knoweth the Son save the Father, neither doth any know the Father save the Son, and he to whomso- ever the Son will reveal Him ;* when He declares that He will come in His glory, and all the angels with Him to judge the nations *—He claims a great- ness as august and awful as that which is attri- buted to Him in the opening verses of the Fourth Gospel, and as that which is assumed by Himself in the discourse which He delivered and the prayer which He offered during the night of His betrayal.
IV.
But while the Christ of John is the Christ of the earlier evangelists, the differences and contrasts be- tween his Gospel and theirs are obvious and striking. How do they affect the evidence for the historical trustworthiness of John’s Gospel ?
In the Lecture on Papias proof was given that ~ur Matthew and our Mark were written and known au! received as authentic while children and persona. friends and immediate disciples of the original apostles were still living, while some men who had known Christ Himself were still living. These
1 Matt. v. 21, 22, 27, 28. 2 Matt. xi. 28. 8 Matt. xi. 27. 4 Matt. xxv. 31-46.
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Gospels therefore contain in substance the story of our Lord’s ministry which was familiar to the ministers and members of the Christian Churches in Ephesus and Smyrna and Colosse, and throughout Asia Minor. They contain the story which Polycarp had known from his childhood.
How then came Polycarp to accept the Fourth Gospel, if John did not write it, if it did not appear till some years after John’s death? The differences between this new account of our Lord and the account which was given of Him in the Gospels with which he had been familiar for so long, were too strike ing to be missed. It contained a large amount of wholly new material—new miracles, new discourses, The new material was in many respects wholly un- like the old; the picturesque parables, the ethical precepts of the earlier Gospels, had disappeared and given place to long discourses, illustrating the deepest mysteries of the life of God and the life of man. How then, I ask again, came he to accept it? There is only one answer to that question. He knew that John wrote it, and it contained the very representation of our Lord that he had been accustomed to hear from John himself.
If the new Gospel had not been John’s, Polycarp would have found nothing in its characteristic quali- ties to attract him. We have seen that, as far as we can judge from his Epistle to the Philippians, he was untouched by those religious and philosophical specu- lations which are supposed to have transformed the
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original simplicity of the Christian tradition into the profound and mystical doctrine of the Fourth Gospel. His intellect was not speculative and adventurous, but practical. What he cared for was the traditional beliefs and plain Christian living. He was very little of a theologian. He was nothing of a mystic. He held fast by the simpler truths and duties of the Christian Faith, and delighted to recall the very words in which he had been taught them. With all his admiration for Paul, whose Epistles he knew so well, those transcendent regions of thought which are illus- trated in the Epistles to the Colossians and the Ephe- sians seem to have had no charm ‘for him ; in his own Epistle to the Philippians there is no indication that he had ever visited them. Imagine such a man as this discovering that a Gospel had appeared under the name of John, a Gospel wholly unlike the Gospels he knew, a Gospel containing a representation of our Lord wholly unlike that which had been given by John himself during the years that he had been John’s disciple and friend: the Churches of Asia would have rung with his denunciations of the fraud.
The stronger the contrasts, the profounder the differences, between the new story and the old, the more vigorous and vehement would have been Poly- carp’s hostility. Every fresh article in the elaborate indictment of the Fourth Gospel, on the ground that it differs from the first three, adds to the strength of the proof that, since Polycarp accepted the Fourth Gospel, John must have written it.
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But I may be told that the force of this argu- ment depends upon the assumption that Polycarp was accustomed to read the story of Christ in our Matthew, Mark, and Luke; and that with whatever satisfaction I may regard the proofs which I have given in previous Lectures that these Gospels were in common use, and were regarded as authoritative before the end of the first century, I have no right to take it for granted that the proofs will be equally satisfactory to everybody. It is possible—so it may be suggested—that our Matthew, Mark, and Luke are of later origin, and that to Polycarp they were wholly unknown.
I accept the suggestion for the moment; it adds fresh, though wholly unnecessary, support to an argu- ment which seems to me already irresistible.
On this hypothesis the narratives of our Lord’s life and teaching which were in the hands of Polycarp represented an earlier form of the Christian tradition than that which has been preserved in any of our Gospels. The devotion and imagination of the Church had not yet surrounded our Lord with the glory which appears in even our Matthew and our Mark, much less with the transcendent glory which transfigures Him in John. Those earlier narratives contained fewer and less impressive assertions of His personal greatness, attributed to Him fewer and less remark- able miracles and a simpler kind of teaching. On this hypothesis the Christ known to Polycarp, the Christ of whom he had heard and read from his child-
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hood, was a Christ in whose earthly history there was even less of the mysterious, the supernatural, the Divine than in the Christ of our first three Gospels.
This is the hypothesis. How then, I ask again, are we to account for Polycarp’s acceptance of John’s Gospel? If the contrasts and differences between our first three Gospels and the Fourth are great, the contrasts and differences between these earlier narra- tives and the Fourth Gospel are greater still. It may sometimes be difficult for ourselves to believe that the Christ of John is the Christ of Matthew, Mark, and Luke; but how was it possible for Polycarp to believe that the Christ of John’ was the Christ of these plainer and simpler narratives? Those who deny that the Fourth Gospel was written by John gain nothing by the hypothesis that Polycarp knew nothing of our first three Gospels. In that case his acceptance of John becomes still more impressive. That he did accept it is, in my judgment, absolutely certain.
V.
For if John did not write the Fourth Gospel, when was it written? Baur placed it as late as A.D. 170; but subsequent critics that deny the Johannine authorship have been unable to resist the force of the arguments with which that position has been assailed, and have placed it in A.D. 150 or 155, and even as early as A.D. 130.
Assume that it was written in A.D. 130. Irenzeus
264 POLYCARP.
could hardly have been a hearer of Polycarp earlier than A.D. 135; he may have heard him as late as A.D. 150, but the more probable date is A.D. 145. For reasons which have been stated earlier in this Lecture, it seems to me certain that if a Gospel had already appeared attributed to John, but containing a representation of our Lord and of His ministry different from that which John had been accustomed ot give in his oral teaching, Polycarp would have denounced it vehemently. If it appeared as early as A.D. 130, Irenzeus would have heard him denounce it. How could Polycarp have spoken of what he had heard from John about our Lord’s miracles and teach- ing, without warning his hearers against the fictitious Gospel, claiming to be John’s, which contained stories of miracles of which John had never spoken and dis- courses of our Lord wholly different in their sub- stance and their form from those which John had been accustomed to repeat ?
But assume that it was written after Irenzeus had ceased to be avhearer of Polycarp. This does not lessen the real force of the testimony of Irenzus, if the Gospel appeared at any time before Polycarp’s martyrdom in A.D. 155 or 156. For Irenzus was not the last of Polycarp’s hearers, and even after he had
-gone to Lyons, the relations between southern Gaul and Asia Minor were so intimate, that if Polycarp had declared that the new Gospel could not have been John’s, Irenzeus would have been sure to hear of it.
Assume—though this is becoming impossible—that
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the Fourth Gospel appeared after the death of Poly- carp. Even this does not destroy the value of the testimony of Irenzus. That Irenzus believed that our Fourth Gospel was written by the Apostle John is certain ; there is no hint or trace in his writings that he had ever doubted it. But he had heard Polycarp describe his intercourse with John and with the rest who had seen the Lord; he had heard him relate their words. “ And whatsoever things 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.’ Polycarp’s recollections of what he had heard from John and the rest were “ altogether in accordance with the Scriptures,’ and among these Scriptures Irenzeus placed our Fourth Gospel. The vivid contrasts, the profound differences, between the Fourth Gospel and the first three give to this testi- mony immense weight. In Polycarp’s recollections of John’s teaching there must have been the same representation of our Lord as that which is contained in John’s Gospel.
VI.
John, Polycarp, Irenzeus,—these three, it has been well said, are inseparable, so inseparable as to con- stitute an indestructible argument for the historical trustworthiness and the genuineness of the Fourth Gospel. But in these inquiries, carried on in the
266 POLYCARP.
silence and loneliness of libraries, we too easily forget _ that when the ancient books were written which we are reading in order to find traces of the existence and authority of our Gospels, there were thousands and tens of thousands of living men who could have told us very much more about what we want to know than we can learn by the most patient examination of these ancient writings. We unconsciously lapse into the habit of thinking that the historical trustworthi- ness of the story of Christ is built upon the scattered sentences which can be quoted from the writings of less than a score of ancient authors. The supports seem unequal to the weight which is placed upon them. But these scattered sentences which can be quoted are but hints and suggestions of the real argument, which is to be found, not in books, but in what must have been in the knowledge and faith of thousands and tens of thousands of living men and women.
Take, for example, the testimony of Irenzeus about Polycarp, on which I have been saying so much in this Lecture. An extract, preserved by an ecclesias- tical historian living in Caesarea in the fourth century, from a letter written by a Christian bishop living in Lyons in the second century, seems a very slender thread on which to hang a conclusion of such immense importance as the genuineness of the Fourth Gospel. But Irenzeus and Polycarp represent an immense number of Christian people who were living in those times in many parts of the world.
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Polycarp was not the only man who heard about the miracles and ‘the teaching of Christ from the Apostle John. John died about A.D. 100; twenty, thirty, forty years later there were men still living, ministers of Churches, members of Churches, who could remember John and “the rest who had seen the Lord” just as distinctly as he could. Of this great company Polycarp is the representative. Their names are lost; but in their day they were loyal to Christ, and contended earnestly for the faith which was once for all delivered to the saints. While they lived they shared with Polycarp the defence of that conception of Christ and of that account of His ministry which they had received from John and other friends of our Lord.
From this generation, consisting of the friends and immediate disciples of John and of the rest who had seen Christ, the story of what our Lord had done and taught was transmitted to a still greater number of devout men, some of whom—many of whom— endured torture and died cruel deaths rather than deny Christ. This generation is represented by Irenzeus. In A.D. 185, the year in which he published his work, Against Heresies, the Fourth Gospel had already secured its great and authoritative position ; and it was universally attributed to the Apostle John. But in that year there could hardly have been a con- siderable Church in Asia Minor in which there were not many men and women who might have used his own words, and said that they could “describe the
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very place in which the blessed Polycarp”—or some other friend of John—“used to sit when he dis- coursed, 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 whatso- ever he had heard from them about the Lord, and about His miracles, and about His teaching,” he, the friend and disciple of John, “as having received them from eye-witnesses of the life of the Word, would relate altogether in accordance with the Scriptures.” It is impossible that these men would have received the Fourth Gospel as the Gospel of John, that they would have allowed the Church to receive it, if its account of Christ, His miracles, His teaching, His personal greatness and glory, had not been identical in substance with that which they themselves had heard from John’s personal friends and immediate disciples.
LECTURE XIV. REVIEW OF THE ARGUMENT.
N bringing this course of Lectures to a close, f
invite you to recall the ground over which we
have travelled together, and to review the main posi- tions which I have endeavoured to establish.
I.
We began by inquiring why it is that the faith of the great majority of Christian people has not been shaken by the varied, incessant, and formidable assaults which in our time have been made upon the Jewish and the Christian Scriptures. It is commonly assumed that these ancient books are the very foun- dation of our faith in Christ, and that while their genuineness, their historical trustworthiness, and their inspiration are uncertain, faith is impossible. But during the last thirty or forty years it has come to be generally known that there are grave controversies concerning a large number of the books contained both in the Old Testament and the New; that men of great learning are of opinion that even the Four Gospels were not written by Matthew, Mark, Luke,
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270 REVIEW OF THE ARGUMENT.
and John, but by unknown authors, who constructed _ their story from the untrustworthy traditions of a later generation, or who deliberately wrote fictitious narratives in the interest of conflicting “tendencies ” in the Church, tendencies which were at last recon- ciled by mutual concessions and compromises towards the close of the second century. While these con- troversies are undetermined, and the authority of great scholars can be appealed to on both sides, how is it possible for ordinary Christian people who know anything of the seriousness of the subjects in debate and the severity of the conflict to continue to believe in Christ ?
My first answer to the question was this: That whatever may have been the original grounds of their faith, their faith has been verified in their own personal experience. They trusted in Christ for the remission of sins, and they have been liberated from the sense of guilt ; for deliverance from sin and the chains of evil habits have been broken or loosened, and the fires of evil passion have been quenched or subdued. They trusted in Christ for a firmer strength to resist temptation and to live righteously, and the strength has come. They have received from Him —they are sure of it—a new life, a life akin to the life of God. They have been drawn into a wonderful personal union with Christ Himself; “in Christ” they have found God, and have passed into that invisible and eternal order which is described as “ the kingdom of God.” Whatever uncertainties there may
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be about the historical worth of the four narratives which profess to tell the story of Christ’s earthly ministry, their faith in Him is firm, because they know by their own experience that the Living Christ is the Lord and Saviour of men.
My second answer to the question was this: That there are Christian men who would say that the representation of the Lord Jesus Christ in the Four Gospels appeals, and appeals immediately, to all those elements and powers of life that give answer to manifestations of the presence of God. They believe in Christ because they see God in Him. They dc not ask for proofs that He wrought miracles; He Himself is the great Miracle; He transcends all the miracles attributed to Him by the evangelists. Discussions about the age in which the Gospels were written and about their authorship are of secondary interest ; if they were written by unknown men who belonged to the second, the third, or even the fourth generation of Christians, they preserve the substance and give a true account of His earthly history. The story they tell is no involuntary creation of passionate love; much less is it a deliberate invention. The life of the Eternal God is in it.
For these two reasons, critical and historical con- troversies do not destroy faith,
Il.
This discussion reminds me of a passage in a book by Mr. Francis Newman which had a great
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popularity forty years ago, though I suppose that it is now almost forgotten. The book assailed the dearest traditions of the orthodox and evangelical Churches, and yet there were devout Christians who found in it very much that seemed true and edifying. The passage of which I am reminded is rather long, but I will quote it, for I think that it will assist me to make clearer and more definite one or two of the principal positions which I have endeavoured to make good in these Lectures. Mr. Newman says:
“If we form an a frioré conception of the genuine champion of the Gospel from the New Testament, we shall say, that he is girt with the only sword of the Spirit, the living word of God, which pierces to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart. In his hands it is as lightning from God, kindled from the spirit within him, and piercing through the unbeliever’s soul, convincing his conscience of sin and striking him to the ground before God ; until those who believe receive it, not as the word of man, but as, what it is in truth, the word of God. Its action is directly upon the conscience and upon the soul ; and hence its wonderful efficacy; not upon the critical faculties, upon which the Spirit is powerless. Such at least was Paul’s weapon for fighting the Lord’s battles. But when the modern battle commences,! what do we see? A study table spread over with books in various languages ; a learned man dealing with historical and literary questions; referring to Tacitus and Pliny; engaged in establishing that Josephus is a credible and not a credulous writer ; inquiring whether the Greek of the Apocalypse and of the Fourth Gospel can have come from the same hand ; searching through Justin Martyr and Irenzeus,
1 These italics are my own.—R. W. D.
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in order to find out whether the Gospels are a growth by accretion or modification, or were originally struck off as we now read them; comparing Philo or Plotinus with John and Paul: in short, we find him engaged (with much or little success) in praiseworthy efforts at Local History, Criticism of Texts, History of Philosophy, Logic (or the Theory of Evi- dence), Physiology, Demonology, and other important but very difficult studies ; all inappreciable to the unlearned, all remote from the sphere in which the Soul operates.” !
When I first read that passage I was a very young man, and it made a deep impression on me. I could not shake it off. It perplexed me. In those days, though I had come to see that the Gospel of Christ is a direct appeal from God to what is deepest and most central in the life of man, my thought had not worked itself clear from the assumption that faith demands for its very existence adequate guarantees of the genuineness and authenticity of the Four Gos- pels. If I recall accurately my position at that time, I thought that all the other books, both of the Old Testament and the New, might be submerged under “sunless seas of doubt,” and Christian faith remain, but that if the historical trustworthiness of the Gospels was lost, all was lost. And yet, if their authenticity was challenged, this criticism of texts, this history of philosophy, this discussion of the theory of evidence, this laborious search through Justin Martyr and Irenaeus, this comparison of Philo and Plotinus with John and Paul, studies which, as
i ——————————
1 FRANCIS WILLIAM NEWMAN: Zhe Soul : its Sorrows and its Aspirations (fourth edition), p. 151.
Zc 1g
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Mr. Newman says, are “all inappreciable to the un-_ learned, all remote from the sphere in which the soul operates,” were necessary. Mr. Newman seemed to me wholly in the right when he insisted that the power of the true preacher of the Christian Gospel is the power of the truth and of the Spirit of God ; and yet it seemed that the preacher could do nothing until scholars, working through long and laborious years, in many difficult and obscure provinces of learning, had demonstrated the authenticity and genuineness of four ancient books. It looked as if critics must settle their differences before preachers could bring home to men the reality and glory of the Christian redemption.
But what are the facts? Has the Christian preacher ever been compelled to be silent until the controversies of scholars were closed? Has he ever had to rely on the authority of scholars for the sub- stance of the Gospel of Christ? Has he ever been uncertain about it, because there were learned ques- tions on which/scholars were not agreed? How was it with the original apostles? They had known Christ for themselves during His earthly ministry, and they had seen Him and listened to Him after He had risen from the dead. They knew that He was near them still, and that in His power and grace they had passed into the light of God. What they had to tell men about the great things which Christ had done and taught while He was visibly present in the world, and about the greater things which He was
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eee re eee Shere sry ek Dye Yt ie Oe still doing, came from their own personal knowledge ; it required no authentication from the rabbis of the Jews or from the philosophers of the Greeks.
How was it with their immediate successors, the preachers of the second generation of Christians? They had been taught the Christian Gospel by the apostles and disciples of our Lord ; but that Gospel had been verified in their own experience. They too knew Christ for themselves—the risen, the glori- fied Christ. They had received from Him the remis- sion of sins and the gift of the Divine life. They knew the mystery and the blessedness of translation into the kingdom of God’s dear Som. They spoke to Christ, and He answered them. Through Him they had found God. The greatest things about which they preached were things which had passed into their own experience. They were not mere guardians of a tradition, but spoke as witnesses, and told men what they themselves had seen and heard of Christ, the Lord and Saviour of men.
It is true that for their knowledge of what our Lord had done and taught in Jerusalem and Galilee they had to depend on those who had known Christ “after the flesh” ; but there were some passages of the story which commanded their faith, even apart from their confidence in the accuracy of the recollec- tion and the personal trustworthiness of the men by whom the story was told—passages which shone in their own light, words which had a Divine accent and a Divine power. It was the same when the story
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was fixed in the Gospels. The story rested on the authority of the original apostles of our Lord ; it was the story which the apostles had told ; and yet there were parts of it which, in a very true sense, were independent of apostolic testimony, and made an irre- sistible appeal to the faith of every man that knew for himself the glorified Christ, and had received the illumination of the Spirit of God.
The same conditions were repeated in the life and preaching of the third generation of Christians and the fourth. And in every new generation, from the time of the apostles to our own, the substance of the Christian Gospel has been verified afresh in the ex- perience of penitents and saints. The true preachers of every new generation have been new and inde- pendent witnesses to the power, the grace, the glory of the Redeemer of men. They have spoken on the strength of their own knowledge. Even those of them who had the greatest reverence for tradition and authority would have been powerless, but for their direct vision of’ Christ, and their personal conscious- ness of the reality and greatness of the Christian redemption. Speaking broadly and generally, the actual experience of one generation creates, under God, the faith of the next. You and I received the Christian Gospel because men whom we knew and who spoke to us about Christ were vividly conscious that they had found redemption in Him; and we ourselves must have a vivid consciousness of redemp- tion in Him if we are to transmit the Christian Faith
i
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to those who will come after us. The Divine fire passes from hand to hand, from living men to living men. This is the general law. It has rarely to be rekindled from the torches of an earlier age.
The books which record the earthly life of our Lord—a treasure of infinite worth to the Church and the human race—have been held sacred, partly be- cause the tradition has been transmitted from gene- ration to generation that they contain the story of our Lord which was told by His original apostles, partly because very much of the story has in it a certain wonderful power which commands faith and exerts a gracious but regal authority over the central elements of the spiritual life.
But what is to happen when their historical trust- worthiness is assailed by scholars, who use all the resources of ingenuity and learning to destroy their authority? What is to happen when it is alleged that there is no decisive proof that all the Four were in existence before the later years of the second century; that the sayings of our Lord, as quoted by earlier Christian writers, vary so much from His sayings as given in our Gospels, that the quotations must have been derived from narratives which have wholly disappeared ; that the Fourth Gospel differs so widely in style from the Apocalypse that both books cannot have been written by the same author, and differs so much from the first three, that if chey are historically trustworthy, it must be a theologica! fiction ?
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Those who believe that the story of Christ which was received by the Church from the apostles has been held fast ever since have no choice. They are compelled by the assailants to discuss questions of literature and history.
It is an error to say that, “when the modern battle commences” —to use Mr. Newman’s phrase—it is the man who ought to be girt with “the sword of the Spirit” that is sitting at a study table, spread over with books in various languages, Tacitus and Pliny Plotinus and Philo, Justin Martyr, Irenzeus, and the rest. When the battle “commences,” it is quite another man that is sitting there: not the preacher, but the critic, who denies that the Lord Jesus Christ walked on the sea, cooled the fires of fever, gave sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf, speech to the dumb, and raised the dead; the crztzc, who denies that the Lord Jesus Christ, after dying for the sins of men, rose again the third day, and appeared to the disciples ; the crztic, who, since he denies the truth of the story told’in the Four Gospels, is endeavouring to show that we have no proof that this was the story which was told by the men who knew Christ, and that the books are by unknown authors belonging to a later generation. It is the hostile critic, not the Christian preacher, who is responsible for beginning, and continually renewing, the “modern battle,’ on fields which are so remote from the spiritual life of man
When once they have been raised, the literary and historical questions at issue must be determined by
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literary and historical considerations. But I endea- voured to show, in the earlier Lectures of this course, that the controversy does not touch the faith of Christian men in the Lord Jesus Christ as the Lord and Saviour of the human race, the Root of the Divine life in man, the Way to God. This faith does not ask for the protection of friendly scholarship ; and the assaults of hostile scholarship cannot reach it. It needs neither Tacitus nor Pliny, neither Philo nor Plotinus, neither Justin Martyr nor Ireneus. It is in actual possession of the salvation which Christ has achieved for mankind.
But though faith in Christ is not imperilled by the literary and historical controversy, the controversy is a grave one; and in repelling the assaults of hos- tile criticism the Christian apologist discharges an honourable service. It is for him to show that the story of our Lord’s earthly history, which has been the consolation, the support, the light, the joy of countless millions of men, has attracted their love, their wonder, and their awe, has revealed to them the loftiest ideal of human goodness, and exalted their conception of the righteousness and grace and pity of God, is not the mere dream of a fervent enthusiasm, or the deliberate invention of a daring imagination, but the story which was told by the elect friends of Christ, whom He trusted to make His Gospel known to all nations, and that it was after this manner that the Son of the Eternal lived among men.
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Ill.
In the later Lectures I have laid before you some of the proofs on which Christian apologists rely for defence of this position. Those which I have sub- mitted have been nearly all of one kind. There are lines of argument of a different description. But some of these can hardly be made intelligible except to persons of considerable scholarship. Others— such, for example, as that which finds in the contents of the Fourth Gospel evidence that it was written by the Apostle John—can be best examined in books ; that argument is full of interest ; but I did not feel that I had the skill to deal effectively, before a popu- lar audience, with all the details which must have a place in any adequate statement of it. Nor have I exhausted the particular argument which I have endeavoured to illustrate; other quotations from other Christian writers can be alleged to corroborate it. But, in my own judgment, what I have said is sufficient, and more than sufficient, for its purpose.
I began by reminding you that, at the close of the second century, the story of the Lord Jesus Christ contained in our Four Gospels was received as authentic by Christian Churches throughout the world, that the books themselves were reverenced as sacred Scriptures, and that it was universally believed that they were written by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.
In A.D. 185, Irenzus, bishop of Lyons, who had
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spent his early years in Asia Minor, and who, about ten years before, had been sent on an important mission to Rome, wrote of the Four Gospels in a way which shows that they had been used by the Church sc long, and held so high a place in the religious life of Christian people, that even the number of the Gospels was supposed to have mystical meanings. That was about eighty-five years after the death of the Apostle John. Now it is not easy to believe that while John was living, and while other men were living who had known our Lord, spurious Gospels, containing untrustworthy accounts of what our Lord said and did, would have been received by the Church as having been written by John himself, by Matthew his brother apostle, by Mark and Luke, who were friends of Peter and Paul. If therefore it can be made clear that the Gospels—which are our Gospels —received and reverenced by Irenzus in AD. 185 were not written after John’s death, about A.D. 100, the main contention of these Lectures is established. The interval to be bridged is about eighty-five years ; and the question to be determined is whether it is probable, whether it is possible, that at the end of that period Christian Churches all over the world would have received the Four Gospels as containing the original, authentic, apostolic story of Christ, if these Gospels had not been generally accepted by Christian Churches when the period began. Eighty-five years :—it seems a long time ; but it is exactly the time since my predecessor in the pastorate
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of this Church came to Birmingham. He began his ministry in Carrs Lane in the early autumn of A.D. 1805. This morning I am separated by as many years from the commencement of Mr. James’s minis- try in this congregation as separated Irenzeus, when he wrote his book Against Heresies, from the death of the Apostle John. That may help you to appreciate the strength of the argument which rests on the recep- tion of the Gospels in the time of Irenzeus. During the six years that I spent at Spring Hill College, between the summer of 1847 and the summer of 1853, I was frequently the guest of Mr. James. It was his custom to invite two or three of the students to din- ner on Saturday afternoon ; and he used to talk to us about the work for which we were being prepared, and about his own ministry, and about the preachers who were famous early in the century. In the sum- mer of 1853 I became his assistant, in the summer of 1854 his colleague; and I was his colleague till his death in the autumn of 1859. During this second period of six years I was, of course, more intimately associated with him. We talked together about many things: about the history of this congregation ; about the changes which had passed upon his own theolo- gical opinions since his ministry began ; about other Congregational Churches in this city and in other parts of England ; about his early friends in the ministry ; about sermons and speeches which he had heard from men who had long been dead.
I have known, of course, a great deal about you
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and your fathers since 1853, when I began my minis- try here, and I have known about all the principal events in the history of the Congregational Churches of England since then ; but from my association with Mr. James, my memory, both of yourselves and of English Congregationalism, may be said to extend over the whole eighty-five years between this morn- ing and that Sunday in September, 1805, when he preached his first sermon as your minister ; whatever important events in your history or the history of English Congregationalism happened between the beginning of his ministry and the beginning of mine I came to know through him.
For example, it would be impossible for me to sup- pose that this chapel—meeting-house was the older and better name for it—was in existence when he came to Birmingham ; for he used to talk to me about the old chapel which formerly stood on this site, about how the new chapel came to be built, and about things that happened in connexion with the opening. It would be equally impossible for me to commit the error of supposing that the Congregational Union of England and Wales is a venerable institution, founded by the Congregationalists of a century or a century and a half ago. I have what may be called a “second- hand recollection” of its formation early in the “thirties” of the present century, rather less than sixty years ago. He used to talk to me about its formation; about the distrust with which it was regarded by some stanch Independents ; about the
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drawing up of the “ Declaration of Faith and Order” by Dr. Redford, of Worcester, and himself, Dr. Red- ford doing the larger share of the work; about its first secretary, Mr. Algernon Wells ; about the small- ness of the numbers that were present at the early meetings ; and about the brevity of the “ addresses ” of the early chairmen.
And soa large number of men living in the time of Irenzus, A.D. 185, could themselves remember the principal events in the history of their own Churches and of many other Churches during the preceding thirty-five years;! and many of them may have known—some of them must have known—men whose recollections travelled back to the very beginning of the century. If the Gospels which were received by the Church at the beginning of the century—during the first ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty years of it— Gospels which the Church believed were written by apostles,—if, I say, these Gospels had disappeared, and other Gospels had taken their place—taken their place in Carthage, Alexandria, Rome, Czsarea, Smyrna, Ephesus, and Lyons—Irenzus and his con- temporaries must have known it ; and it would have been impossible for the new Gospels to have drawn to themselves, in the year A.D. 185, universal venera-
1 My own memory as minister of Carrs Lane congregation extends over thirty-seven years, as my ministry commenced in 1853; but I could claim a large knowledge, both of Carrs Lane congregation and of Congregationalism during the six years between 1847 and 1853.
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tion as narratives of our Lord’s ministry which had been received by the Church from the hands of apostles and their immediate disciples.
Take the Gospel of John. Irenzus had heard Polycarp describe his intercourse with John and the rest who had seen the Lord; this must have been long after John’s death, perhaps as late as A.D. 145, or even A.D. 150, for Irenzus lived into the third century. Was the Fourth Gospel published before that time? Then Polycarp must have spoken of it ; if John had not written it, Polycarp would have denied that it was genuine; and Irenzus, who re- verenced Polycarp, would never have received it. But if it was not published before that time, if it was unknown to John’s friend and disciple forty or fifty years after John’s death, then, again, it is in- credible that Irenzus should have received it.
Polycarp’s martyrdom was in the year A.D. 155 or A.D. 156. He had known John; and for more than fifty years after the death of John he was one of the trustees and guardians of John’s memory. During a great part of that time he was the most conspicuous personage among the Churches of Asia Minor. Nor did he stand alone. He lived to such an advanced age, that he probably survived all the men who had listened with him to John’s teaching ; but for thirty or forty years after John’s death there must have been a large number of other persons who would have associated themselves with him in rejecting a Gospel which falsely claimed John’s authority. While
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these persons lived, such a Gospel would have had no chance of reception; and for thirty years after their death, their personal friends, who had heard them speak of their intercourse with John, would have raised a great controversy if they had been asked to receive as John’s a Gospel of which the men who had listened to John himself had never heard, and which contained a different account of our Lord from that which John had given. But within thirty years after the martyrdom of Polycarp our Fourth Gospel was universally regarded by the Church as having a place among the Christian Scrip- tures, and as the work of the Apostle John. The con- clusion seems irresistible ; John must have written it. —
IV.
From the Fourth Gospel let us pass to the other three. Five and thirty years before A.D. 185, we learn from Justin Martyr that when Christian Churches met for worship it was their regular custom to read’ certain narratives of our Lord’s life, which he calls Memoirs, Memoirs of the Apostles, Memoirs drawn up by the Apostles and those who followed them, Memoirs composed by them [the apo- stles], which are called Gospels.” The description of these writings corresponds accurately to our Four Gospels, which are memoirs, recollections, not regular biographies, and which are attributed to Matthew and John, who were apostles, and to Mark and Luke, who were followers of the apostles. In Justin’s
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works there are no less than 200 passages in which he either quotes words which are found in our Gospels, or refers to facts which our Gospels record. The quotations, indeed, are, for the most part, in- exact ; but they are such quotations as a man might make from memory. The story of our Lord which can be compiled from Justin’s works is the same story as that which is given in the Gospels which are now universally received by the Church. There are a few—a very few—statements about our Lord in Justin which are not contained in any of our Gospels ; as he must have known many men who had known the apostles, these statements may have come to him from tradition ; the wonder is that they are not more numerous. Further, from Justin’s quotations, every one of our Four Gospels receives support. It seems reasonable to infer that Justin’s Gospels were the same as our own.
There is one consideration which makes this infer- ence certain. It is not conceivable that in A.D. 185 our Four Gospels would have been regarded with religious reverence, and would have been attributed to apostles, if they had appeared within the previous five and thirty years. Living men would have clearly remembered when they were first published, and when they were first introduced into the services of the Church. In A.D. 150—just five and thirty years before A.D. 185—Justin’s Memoirs, which he also calls Gospels, were being read to Christian men and women every week when they met for worship. By
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what miracle did they suddenly drop out of use, and drop out of use everywhere? By what miracle did new Gospels immediately succeed to their authority, and succeed to it everywhere? By what miracle did all the copies of the old Gospels suddenly perish, so that learned men like Irenzus had no suspicion that they had ever existed, and imagined that the new Gospels had been in existence from the beginning? Churches, like nations and individuals, are slow to change their customs. It takes time in our days to induce a single group of Churches, if they are not under a strong central ecclesiastical authority, to change their hymn-book; in the second century there was no strong central ecclesiastical authority, and the great Churches stood on their traditions ; and yet we are asked to suppose that between A.D. 150 and A.D. 185 they all changed their Gospels And to increase the wonder, they believed that the Gospels which they surrendered were written by apostles and followers of the apostles. It is incre- dible. The Gospels which were read in the Christian assemblies in Justin’s time were the Gospels which a few years later were “welded together” by Justin’s friend Tatian in his Harmony, and a few years later still were described by Irenzeus in terms which show that during his memory they had always been regarded with reverence by the Church. Justin’s Gospels were the Gospels of Irenzeus; the Gospels of Irenzus are ours. The Memozrs of the Apostles, the Gosfels which were read in the services of the
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Church in A.D. 150, were the same Gospels that are read in the services of the Church every Sunday in England.
At that time, in A.D. 150, Polycarp was still living. He and the surviving friends of the Apostle John would, as I have argued already, have prevented the Church, during the first half of the second century, from accepting any Gospel as John’s which John had not written. But he and they would also have prevented the Church, during the first half of the second century, from accepting any other Gospels as authentic which contained a story of Christ dif- ferent from that which the original ‘apostles had told. That during their lifetime Matthew, Mark, and Luke were received as genuine and authentic is a proof that the narrative contained in these three evangelists was, in substance, identical with that account of our Lord’s life which they had heard from the beginning.
V.
But we have a definite witness to Matthew and Mark in the person of Papias of Hierapolis, who had known friends of Andrew, and Peter, and Philip, and Thomas, and James, and John, and Matthew ; who had known the daughters of Philip, for they were members of the Church of Hierapolis, of which he was bishop ; and who had known two men who were immediate dis- ciples of Christ. Papias had been anxious to learn about the discourses of the apostles from the men who had listened to them and had been their disciples,