THE FIRST THREE GOSPELS1 THREE periods can be roughly distinguished (Jülicher) in the process of gospel-composition: (a) the oral (30-60 A.D.), during which the necessity for written narratives had not yet emerged fully or widely, (b) the evangelic (60-100 A.D.), in which our synoptic gospels substantially came to their present shape, and (c) the apocryphal (after 100 A.D.), when a crop of fabricated narratives sprang up, which lie round the evangelic histories in the early church, cold and vanquished, like the snakes about the cradle of Herakles. The presuppositions of the synoptic gospels are to be found in the requirements and tendencies which prevailed in the period, (a) especially among the circles of Christianity in JerusalemJudaea. It is not over-praise to speak of the splendid service 2 rendered to Christianity by their maintenance of the historic tradition, and by the tenacity with which they cherished and reproduced, in the more or less stereotyped forms of oral reminiscence, words and acts of Jesus. During the years 30-60 this stream carried in solution memories and historic traits which were afterwards consolidated into the inestimable deposit of the gospels. In form the tradition was fluid and free. Its pirmary shape and scope, the stages of its passage from a previously condensed and oral form into the comparative fixity of written memoirs-these are unresolved problems. The point is that up to the seventh decade the propaganda of Jesus must have been mainly oral. Parallel with Paul's preaching and writing lay this work of the primitive church, as it clung to the historical base of the faith in the human life of Jesus. Yet apparently it was not till after 60 that written records of this work began to show themselves. Composition of this kind was much slower to waken than epistolary writing. Historical records3 possibly would have had a certain flavour of mechanical authority and fixity. Book-religion, even historically considered, is legal 1 Although in chronological order Hebrews intervenes between Matthew and Luke, I have incorporated here the note upon the latter gospel, for the sake of practical convenience. 2 Weizsäcker, AA, ii. p. 34 f., Pfleid. Urc. p. 758 f.; cp. Holsten, Die Synopt. Evglien. (1886) p. 160 f., and the interesting but somewhat arbitrary statement in Blass' PG, pp. 21-28, on the occasion and need for written evangelic narratives. The fall of the Jewish state in 70 A.D. brought consequences which seriously affected early Christian literature, as well as the external circumstances of the church. But we must not argue from it too rigidly for the production of gospels either prior or subsequent to the crisis. To deduce the development of early Christianity in doctrine and organisation from the period 66-70 in Judaea would be as legitimate as o explain the English Reformation solely from the matrimonial crisis of Henry the Eighth. 3 Unless the speeches in Acts are an exception. If they are not free compositions by the author (or authors of the sources), they must have been partly based on tradition or reminiscence, partly compiled from notes or journals made by contemporaries during the years 40-60 A.D. Clemen has a full note with references (Chron. pp. 88-90). 1 religion; its associations are with technicality. Until the fixing of the tradition in literature became a religious necessity to the church, belief came from hearing,2 and hearing from a spoken message about Christ. Indeed, the fact that Christ's life was narrated at all was due ultimately to the need felt by the early Christians for some knowledge of his laws. They looked forward to appearing before his tribunal, where he was to be their judge; their fate depended on their obedience to his precepts. Hence it was essential to know these, in order that life might be regulated by them exactly and conscientiously. The words of the Lord thus assumed a place of authority side by side with the OT scriptures, under whose moral code the majority of the first generation of Christians had been trained. But for these laws and words the only available source lay in the Master's life. What he practised, what he commanded, was the supreme concern of all; and to meet this, among other needs, the gospels were compiled. For he who was to judge his followers had been once among them in human person, and the future judgment would be determined by the precision with which his example had been followed and his commands obeyed. Whatever narratives accompanied or preceded the extant gospels have passed out of existence, like the Ionian chroniclers (λoyóypapoi, σvyypapeis) superseded by Herodotus. This fact lends an appearance of some abruptness to their genesis. Their origin seems to resemble that of the great Hebrew prophecies in the eighth century B.C., which start up on the horizon with an appearance of great suddenness, probably because the antecedent conditions are obscure, partly because the preceding literature is no longer extant. Still, in the case of the synoptic gospels, the conditions of their origin are neither quite indistinct nor lacking in significance. 1 Deissmann, Bibel-studien (1895), s. v. vpάçw, pp. 108-111; zatw; λeypazтaι is used in the inscriptions and Egyptian papyri as a juristic phrase. Dryden rather happily remarks of Jesus (The Hind and the Panther, part ii.), "He could have writ himself, but well foresaw 2 But it is exegetically needless to accept the ingenious conjecture (God and the Bible, ch. vi.) that a survival of the oral Johannine tradition is awkwardly but consistently preserved by the editor of the fourth gospel in the recurring or; (46 1325 211), which might be rendered, says M. Arnold, by the phrases, "as I have been saying," or 'as I am telling," or "as I am going to tell " you. 66 3 There is a familiar parallel in the cold reception given by the early Greeks to the art of writing, and traces of the way in which they disparaged treatises and literature appear even in Plato Phaedrus, 275D, 276A, λογον ζῶντα καὶ εὔψυχον οὗ ὁ γεγραμμένος εἴδωλον ἄν τι λέγοιτο δικαίως). This shy suspicion was due to the Hellenic instinct for flexibility: through politics, morality, religion, they felt a certain horror of whatever tended to petrify and fix ideas. As Prof. Butcher has pointed out (Aspects of Greek Genius, on the written and spoken word," pp. 166-199), it was the very sense that the laws represented a personal intelligence" that "probably caused a disinclination to reduce them to written and stereotyped commands.” Consequently "long after writing was well known in Greece, the laws remained unwritten." For all its semi-artistic shape, this feeling is in some respects akin to that of the early Christians with regard to the authority of Jesus. When one adds to it the contemporary distaste of the Jews to commit anything to writing, and the displacement of authorship by rhetoric in Asia Minor (Mommsen, Provinces R.E, i. 363), the comparatively late rise of the gospels becomes less surprising. An example of retentiveness on the part of a pupil is given incidentally by Irenaeus in his description of Polykarp's lessons (Eus. HE, v. 20). Taurα xai TÓTE DIN TÒ ÉλEOS TOŨ DO TÒ IT' ἐμοὶ γεγονὸς σπουδαίως ἤκουον, ὑπομνηματιζόμενος αὐτὰ οὐκ ἐν χάρτῃ, ἀλλ' ἐν τῇ ἐμῇ καρδία. καὶ αἰὶ διὰ τὴν χάριν τοῦ θεοῦ γνησίως αὐτὰ ἀναμαρυκῶμαι. For one thing, the extension of Christianity across the confines of Palestine, which had already proved an incentive towards oral tradition, now became a capital stimulus towards the shaping of more permanent records. The development of the faith required a method of instruction fuller and less occasional than apostolic letters (1 Th 527, Col 416), or peripatetic teaching; and as this lack came to be felt very widely (Lk 11), it was natural that efforts should be made to supply it. Sketches of Christ's acts and words were put into circulation. The supreme aim was to preserve a uniform, sufficient standard for faith and morals, which rested on a continuous tradition; for only in this way could the most distant churches be made independent of any weakness or irregularity in instruction, and at the same time furnished with some clue to the meaning of Jesus and his reign. Thus the written gospels were at once a result of the church's progress and a necessity for that progress. The local severance brought about by the fall of Jerusalem only rendered this exigency more imperative than ever. So far as the NT is concerned, the activity of the next period is devoted to conserving a historical past, the outward association with which had been snapped, the connection with which had become increasingly vital, and the abuse of which was no longer to be seriously feared. Not only the fourth gospel but also the three earlier narratives represent the intense and manifold interest roused by the historical Jesus in the "theological" consciousness of the church, as well as the practical needs which turned the whole church, in a special sense, into a "Christ-party" during the latter half of the first century. To know Jesus was their requirement. But that knowledge meant no dry historical light upon the Master's life. It could be satisfied by no mere annalist. To love him, to hope in him, to rule one's life by his precepts and for his sake-this was the craving of the church,2 and it was instruction upon these lines that the gospels were intended to contain and to convey. Among even the Greeks, as Dr. Gardner points out, much more among the early Christians, history was nearly always strongly motivé or didactic. When the circumstances of the age are taken into account, then, the composition of gospels after the seventh decade becomes a timely and natural phenomenon. A first-class criterion for their position amid the varying phases of early Christianity is the expectation by which it was dominated, that Christ would speedily return and reign. Such a hope formed its primitive and distinctive tenet, together with the idea of 1 Holtzmann (NTTh, i. p. 404 f.) distinguishes three dominant motives which he considers to have operated during the composition of our extant gospels: (a) the dogmatic, which strove to portray Jesus in relation to the Messianic ideal and the work of redemption, (b) the aesthetic, drawn from the OT speeches and songs, and devoted to the presentation of Jesus in his wisdom and activities, (c) the Oriental, arising from the current speculations and prepossessions of Oriental mysticism, such as, e.g., the idea of pre-existence. The moral basis of the mythopoeic spirit, with its bearing upon the historical expression of early Christianity, is discussed by Dr. Percy Gardner, Exploratio Evangelica, pp. 94-117, 144 f., 300 f., 312 f., and incidentally in M. Paschoud's article in Revue de Théol. et de Philosophie (1900), pp. 59-82, "Le Mythe et la Légende." 2 On this dominant sense of Christ's personality and spirit in early Christianity, see the fine statement in Ruskin's Stones of Venice, vol. ii. ch. viii. § xlv. But, as the epistles and gospels prove, this common ground of interest was able to support varied and distinctive theories upon the significance of Jesus. The tradition itself was not rigid, much less the ensuing interpretation. "Kann von einer in der ganzen apostolischen Christenheit verbreiteten stereotypen Überlieferung auch nur in bezug auf die wichtigsten Tatsachen der ev. Geschichte nicht die Rede sein " (Zahn). the resurrection, and must have had strong support in the teaching of Jesus himself, as the congenial Messianic beliefs of contemporary Judaism would hardly have been sufficient to start the opinion unless it had had some base in the authority of Christ. The history of early Christianity, as that is mirrored in the gospels, is in large measure the emancipation and transformation of this cardinal belief. Three forces were at work: (a) the natural process of disappointment, fostered by the lapse of time; (b) the logic of events, including the fall of Jerusalem and the gradual dethronement of Jewish particularism and materialism from the evangelic consciousness; (c) the influences of Hellenistic Judaism and the broader thoughts of the age, which in Paul and the fourth evangelist were able to spiritualise the primitive conception. These forces and factors are not independent of one another, and all go back to an element in the consciousness of Jesus which was only appreciated and developed several decades after his death. However, they are historical entities which orientate most effectively the period of the gospels' composition, and explain their birth. For "events," as Vinet has somewhere remarked, "are the real judges of events, and-purely moral questions excepted— history only gets itself written under their dictation." In this connection it may be also observed that, while the phrase "Jesus above the head of his reporters" indicates a real truth of history, affording a correct standpoint from which to valuate the extant sources, it is apt, nevertheless, to convey a wrong impression. Jesus had no reporters. So far as his words have reached us, their existence is due to the keen and loving memory of his adherents. It is to attach a modern and quite a misleading idea to his life when we allow ourselves to think of him as surrounded like a philosophic lecturer by those who treasured up his words in view of future developments, to be authoritative for a community, or to furnish by anticipation some guidance for a strange prospect ahead. Nothing was further from the thoughts of the primitive disciples, and it may be questioned how far even Jesus occupied such a standpoint of prevision. At any rate, anything like an immediate and tangible preservation of his sayings or deeds is historically incredible. Simple and informal, they rose from the wayside of his experience. Simply and informally they were remembered and repeated by his adherents. Their passage to us has all the charm and impressiveness of this natural process, and there is no need to crush it into mechanical supernatural methods which rob it of reality, in the vain attempt to increase its reliability. "Do not degrade the life and dialogues of Christ out of this charm, by insulation and peculiarity. Let them lie as they befell, alive and warm, part of human life, and of the landscape, and of the cheerful day." That is a true protest, truer than Emerson meant; for it applies to the subsequent transmission no less than to the original setting of the life of Jesus in the gospels. Broadly speaking, we may say that two streams coloured the evangelic narratives. One contained the volume of practical interests and requirements germane to the growing church. The variety of the gospels proves 1 So far as regards Jesus, the historical interest of the early Christians was determined by the demands of faith, which centred upon three subjects: (a) the sufferings and death, (b) the notable actions and events of his life, (c) his teaching. The human birth and childhood forms only a secondary stage of interest (Matt-Lk), which is again transcended by the later growth of reflection (Jn 11-18) upon the pre-existence of the Christ. Of the three former topics, the passion probably formed the leading object of attention to judge from the space assigned it in the synoptists, and the references in 1 Pet. and Hebrews. that these were not altogether homogeneous; but they must have possessed common features which went far towards determining the conception of Christ preserved in the records. To the fact of these general practical requirements, of which our gospels are partly the precipitate, must be added the primary fact of the early Christian consciousness, namely, the sense that in the historical Jesus Messianic hopes and promises were fulfilled. To some degree this significance of Jesus is recognised in Paul, though it is not prominent. His knowledge of, and interest in, the career and human character of Jesus represent quite an appreciable quantity, although they have been depreciated and exaggerated by various schools of criticism. Still there can be no doubt that other interests were unsatisfied. There was always the lingering tradition of the historical Jesus, and the parallel movement of Judaism back to OT prophecy probably intensified the passion-partly intuitive, partly born of the exigencies of controversy--for finding in him, from the evidence of his own words and deeds (Ac 222), an actual and detailed fulfilment of the Messiah sketched in the OT. Among such vigorous convictions and creative tendencies the synoptic gospels were shaped (cp. Prof. Rendel Harris in Contemp. Review, August, 1895). The most objective writings 1 in the NT literature, they were not born in vacant space. Their antecedents are as obvious as their definite origin in the needs and ideas of the time with which they are in correspondence, and it is hardly possible to miss in each its birth-marks or heredity. 1 It is like trying to drink out a sea, said Goethe once, to enter into an historical and critical examination of the gospels. Eighty years of research have not sensibly abated this impression of complexity and intricacy in dealing with the synoptic problem. While enquiry has exhausted one or two lines of treatment, it has at the same time thrown open others which are still unsurveyed. Still it is possible out of the chaos of synoptic criticism to secure the following postulates, which not only are sufficient for the purposes of the present edition, but also command very wide recognition among competent and independent scholars. Taking the gospels in their present form, we note their (A) Succession. (i.) The priority of Mark to the others is generally accepted: cp. Ritschl (Gesammelte Aussätze, pp. 1-57, Entstehung, pp. 28, 34), Reuss, Renan, B. Weiss in his long series of critical monographs, Holtzmann (Einl. pp. 340-390, HC, i. Einleitung), Wendt ("Die Lehre Jesu" (1886), pp. 1-44), Havet (Origines, iv. pp. 225-296), Jacobsen (Untersuch. über die syn. Evv. 1883), E. A. Abbott (E. B., art. "Gospels," and in The Common Tradition, p. vi), Volkmar (Jesus Nazar. pp. 18-19, his date is exactly 73 A.D.), Carpenter (The First Three Gospels), Westcott (Introduction to Study of Gospels), Sanday (Smith's Dict. B2. (1893), pp. 1222–1242), Massebieau (Examen des citations de l'ancien Testament dans l'évangile selon S. Matthieu), and Harnack (Chron.). There is a pretty fair agreement among scholars working along different lines, that "the common tradition upon which all the three synoptics were based is substantially our St. Mark, so far as matter, general form, and order are concerned" (F. H. Woods, Studia Biblica, vol. ii. p. 94). Compare Salmon, INT (lect. ix.); Jülicher, Einl. p. 215; Pfleiderer's Urc. p. 360; Resch, TU, x. 1, ch. 5; Bruce, ExGT, i. (1897); E. Roehrich, la Composition des Évangiles 1 The objectivity varies: its maximum lies in Mark, the presentation of Matt. and Luke has been more influenced by other interests, while in the fourth gospel we have the minimum. Compare Westcott's remarks (Gospel of John, Introd. pp. liv-lv), on subjectivity in relation to the truthfulness of a narrator. |