of literary violence and vagrancy shows the almost infinitesimal extent to which their writings were affected. Infinitesimal, that is to say, when one speaks comparatively. For the amount of such a contemporary legitimate influence, even if it be small, is real;1 and the demand for an estimate of it is compatible with a desire to do the fullest justice to the historicity and trustworthiness of the total narrative. Many estimates of the gospels and their contents really remind one of the phrase with which it used to be said the older school of political economists opened their argument: "Suppose a man upon a desert island." No discussion on the gospels will lead to satisfactory results by any similar isolation of the literature from the interests and activities of the apostolic age. The histories of the NT are no abstract pictures of the past, and their contents are to be rightly orientated only by a criticism which stands between and beyond the conception of

1Cp. Bruce, Apologetics, pp. 448–465; Cone, Gospel Criticism, pp. 337–355 ; and Jülicher, Einl. § 29, "Der Wert der Syn. als Geschichtsquellen," a wellbalanced discussion: also Zahn (Einl. ii. p. 220 f.). After praising Matthew's gospel for the magnitude of conception and the able management of a great theme, which make it superior to any other historical work in the OT or the NT, or even in the literature of antiquity, the last-named proceeds to point out with equal justice that it does not represent a historical work, in the Greek sense of the term. "Was man Geschichte erzählen nennt, versucht Mt kaum." Cp. his instances (pp. 286-289), from Matthew's treatment of the stories and the sayings of Jesus, quoted to illustrate the author's free handling and polemical purpose. "The work is a historical apology of the Nazarene and his church against Judaism." Such a position is true, so far. But it requires to be supplemented (a) by a widening of the writing's scope. The audience in view probably embraced much greater variety of feeling and opinion than was to be found in a purely Jewish-Christian circle. (b) Also the sovereign freedom with which the author handled his material, is considerably more thorough and detailed (e.g. Weizsäcker and Jülicher). For a standard discussion of the whole subject, cp. Holtzmann's Synopt. Evglien. pp. 377-514, and for an essay upon the gospels as the outcome of early Christian apologetic, Wernle, ZNW (1900), pp. 42–65. Wendland (Beiträge, "Philo und die kynische-Stoische Diatribe," pp. 1-6), after defining "Diatribe as "die in zwanglosen, leichtem Gesprächston gehaltene, abgegrenzte Behandlung eines einzelnen philosophischen, meist ethischen Satzes," proceeds to point out that the polemic and conversational tone easily led to the sermon or address. "Und wenn neutestamentlichen Schriften manche Begriffe und Ideen, Stilformen und Vergleiche mit der philosophischen Litteratur gemeinsam sind, so ist es nicht ausgeschlossen, dass die Diatribe schon auf Stücke der urchristlichen Litteratur einen gewissen Einfluss ausgeübt hat, den man sich nicht einmal litterarisch vermittelt zu denken braucht."

them as mere annals, and the equally crude notion that they are the free products of an inventive imagination.

It follows that if the favourite paradox be legitimate— "the epistles are also gospels"—there is equally a sense in which it might be said that "the gospels are also epistles." As the preface to the third gospel openly indicates, the immediate instruction and impulse which it was the function of the oral teaching (and consequently of the epistles) to supply, tended to pass into another religious need, namely, acquaintance with the events and teaching which formed tho basis of the faith. This need was finally met not by catechists, but by authors. The epistles were reinforced by the gospels in the common task of religious edification, and in the latter writings traces of their audience and object are still to be discovered, e.g. the comments of the evangelist (Mk 330 719, etc.), their explanations and notes, their obvious wish to correct misunderstandings and prevent misconceptions, their selection of homiletic material, their grouping of narratives and sayings to throw light on contemporary difficulties and facilitate mnemonic retentiveness. The recollection of this intrinsic element will serve to correct any extravagant use of a popular and modern theory which plays off the gospels against the epistles, the former being hailed as undogmatic, impervious to theological reflection, the undefiled sources of genuine Christianity. This tendency has sprung, it is true, from a natural and wholesome reaction. But the reaction has gone quite far enough, when the gospels are practically regarded as if they were records composed during the lifetime of Jesus, or as if they contained an absolutely objective representation of his teaching, and could be compared-in point of value and authority-with the other writings of the NT, considerably to the disadvantage of the latter. There is a sense in which a prima facie view like this has a truth of its own. But it is a mischief and disaster to imagine that even the gospels are insulated from contemporary extraneous influences, or that their world is inherently different from the world of the epistles. Gospels and epistles alike are children of what is substantially the same age. They worked

for similar ends. They differ utterly in form, but it is a historical rupture to make out of this difference a clever and false antithesis, finding in the one the religion of Jesus Christ, and in the other the Christian religion. Apart from the fact that the extant gospels, and even the main sources from which they derive, were not composed until at least nine or ten of the chief epistles had been written, the facts of their age and the feelings of their authors could not be wholly obliterated from their pages; and certainly they cannot be passed over in a study of these pages. In undervaluing or absolutely ignoring their subjective and didactic elements, there is neither faith nor philosophy. One might even say, for example, that Peter speaks through Mark's gospel no less than through his own epistle, certainly as authentically as in the speeches attributed to him in Acts; also that the third gospel, no less than the Thessalonian epistles, has in its pages something of the breath and mind of Paul. In fact, the slightest consideration of the circumstances in which the epistles and the gospels were composed, will keep in check a method which is a specious and well-intentioned endeavour to conserve the essence of Christianity, and yet implies an unhistorical divorce between two correlative portions of the NT literature.

One

The form and substance of these literary products in the dawn of Christianity was determined by the nature of their aim. As the Christian preaching began to extend not only to a second generation, but even previously to non-Jewish audiences and the region of pagan difficulties, the simple evidence of eye-witnesses had to develop fresh methods. Two of these predominated, and survive in different forms. ! consisted in exhibiting the historical record of Jesus' words and life. By means of this, some credible and plain evidence was afforded for the historical basis underlying the new faith. Every catechumen and convert would receive some such instruction, and be taught to find within the words of Jesus laws for his own conduct. This evangelic tradition expanded in subsequent years, and from it the gospels rose. But the other method proved a salutary supplement. It contained 2 the appeal to experience, the exhibition of the new faith as a

spirit and a character produced and sustained alike by God's grace in human nature. The statement of this attitude was due primarily and distinctively to Paul. When information about Jesus reached the pagan world, or, for the matter of that, the colonial Jews throughout the empire, " would it not come," as Dr. Crozier graphically argues, "like a sudden illumination in the darkness, which would leave behind it dim visions of something that would haunt the memory? And yet what proof that there was any truth in it? . As the actual eye-witnesses [1 Co. 156] sank one by one to their rest, the belief which had arisen in a natural way with them would have died out with them. At each remove the tradition would have become fainter, the evidence more and more hollow and uncertain the faith of the original believers being more and more untransferable to their descendants of the new generations until soon it would have been swallowed up again in the great Pagan night that surrounded Lall." 1 The secure method of propagating the faith was to set forth its inner contents; and it is this aim which prompts the epistolary form and didactic substance of these, the earliest documents of Christianity. The evangelic tradition is presupposed. But it is not prominent. The formal historical base (Lu 11-4) is absent,2 partly because it was implied, or could be taken for granted, partly owing to the idiosyncrasies of the author, but chiefly on account of the special apologetic emphasis which Paul laid upon the divine Spirit and self

1 Hist. Intell. Developm. i. (1897) p. 339. Cp. Mackintosh (Nat. Hist. of Christian Religion, p. 338) on the service of Paul in winning entrance for the ideas of Jesus to the average and sensuous understanding (?).

A brilliant sketch of Essene and Orphic influence, and indeed of the ethnic religious situation at the dawn of Christianity, is given by Zeller, ZwTh (1899), pp. 195–269. For a sympathetic study of Epiktetus, cp. M. F. Picavet, "Les rapports de la religion et de la philosophie en Grèce" (Revue de l'histoire des Religions (1893), pp. 315-344). A readable summary of the Hellenic and Oriental environment may be found in Dr. Gardner's Explor. Evangelica, pp. 325–357.

2 Paul definitely recalls his readers to the remembrance of the historical Jesus (e.g. 1 Co 1123. 24). Yet upon the whole his writings bear out the estimate which views him as translating the Christian principle "into terms of theology, and so, as it were, writing it in large letters on the clouds of heaven" (Caird, Evol. Religion, ii. pp. 200, 201).

sufficiency of the faith. In his earliest paragraph he stands upon history; but it is the history of the Spirit in Thessalonika (1 Th 15-8), not of Jesus in Palestine. Here, as in his subsequent writings, the distinctive note is an endeavour to ground the guarantee of faith in its moral implicates, along with the argument that these implicates are finally accessible, not in memory, nor in historical research, but in the contemporary Christian experience. He would not have understood the difference between Jesus" and "Christ in heaven"; but from the modern standpoint it is perfectly true to say that Paul's reasoning rests not on memories of the Galilean Jesus, but on a direct and immediate intuition of that living and exalted Christ, whose holy land is in the human spirit.

1

"The two movements, however, are not independent. Almost parallel to the composition of the Pauline 1 letters ran the transition from the spoken to the written gospel. It must have been gradual: it remains obscure. It was gradual: for the oral teaching subsisted long after the first gospels were put into writing; indeed, the latter were supplementary to it, and did not by their prestige and use supplant it. It remains obscure for no accurate record of its motives and stages was preserved by an age which could hardly be conscious of the significance attaching to what was being slowly finished under its eyes. Between the early and the final stages of the transition the epistles lie. Their atmosphere is that of the gospels, in the sense that they presuppose the rudimentary teaching of the narratives which came to be worked up into these histories. It is true that the epistles get the start of the gospels in the order of written composition. But this fact has to be qualified, not only by the consideration just mentioned, but also by the other fact that this slowness to commit the history of Jesus to writing was due less to a suspicion of the written word as an adequate representation, than to the value attached in that age to the spoken and taught

1 Schürer (HJP, 11. iii. p. 196) notices the languid interest felt by Pharisaic Judaism in history. "It saw in history merely an instruction, a warning, how God ought to be served. Hellenistic Judaism was certainly in a far higher degree interested in history as such."