THE BIBLE. 



387 



the Apostles. The origin and mutual relations 

 of the gospels form at the present moment the 

 field of numerous controversies which can only 

 be dealt with in separate articles. We must here 

 confine ourselves to one or two points of general 

 bearing. 



Jewish disciples were accustomed to retain 

 the oral teaching of their masters with extraordi- 

 nary tenacity and verbal exactness of memory 

 (Mishna, Aboth iii. 8 ; Edaioth i. 3), and so the 

 words of Jesus might for some time be handed 

 down by merely oral tradition. But did the gos- 

 pel continue to be taught orally alone up to the 

 time when the extant gospels were written ? or 

 must we assume the existence of earlier evan- 

 gelical writings forming a link between oral tra- 

 dition and the narratives we now possess ? The 

 earliest external evidence on this point is given 

 in the prologue to Luke's gospel, which speaks 

 of many previous essays toward a regularly di- 

 gested evangelical history on the basis of the tra- 

 dition (whether exclusively oral or partly written 

 is not expressed) of eye-witnesses who had fol- 

 lowed the whole course of Christ's ministry. It 

 seems to be implied that if the eye-witnesses wrote 

 at all, they — at least, so far as was known to Luke 

 — did not compose a regular narrative, but sim- 

 ply threw together a mass of reminiscences. This 

 understanding of the words of the evangelist agrees 

 very well with the uniform tradition of the old 

 Church as to the second gospel, viz., that it was 

 composed by Mark from material furnished by 

 Peter. This tradition goes back to Papias of 

 Hierapolis, about 150 a. d., but it is a fair ques- 

 tion whether the second gospel as we have it is 

 not an enlarged edition of Mark's original work. 

 On the other hand, ecclesiastical tradition recog- 

 nizes the apostle Matthew as the author of the 

 first gospel, but does so in a way that really bears 

 out the statements of Luke. For the tradition 

 that Matthew wrote the first gospel is always com- 

 bined with the statement that he wrote in Hebrew 

 (Aramaic). But from the time of Erasmus the 

 best Greek scholars have been convinced that the 

 gospel is not a translation. Either, then, the whole 

 tradition of a directly apostolic Aramaic gospel 

 is a mistake, caused by the existence among the 

 Judaizing Christians in Palestine of an apocryphal 

 " Gospel according to the Hebrews," which was 

 by them ascribed to Matthew, but was, in fact, a 

 corrupt edition of our Greek gospel, or, on the 

 other hand, what Matthew really wrote in Ara- 

 maic was different from the book that now bears 

 his name, and only formed an important part of 

 the material from which it draws. The latter so- 



lution is naturally suggested by the oldest form 

 of the tradition ; for what Papias says of Mat- 

 thew is that he wrote ra. \6yta, the oracles, an ex- 

 pression which, though much disputed, seems to 

 be most fairly understood not of a complete gos- 

 pel, but of a collection of the words of Christ. 

 And if so, all the earliest external evidence points 

 to the conclusion that the synoptical gospels are 

 non-apostolic digests of spoken and written apos- 

 tolic tradition, and that the arrangement of the 

 earlier material in orderly form took place only 

 gradually and by many essays. With this the 

 internal evidence agrees. The first three gospels 

 are often in such remarkable accord, even in mi- 

 nute and accidental points of expression, that it 

 is certain either that they copied one another, or 

 that all have some sources in common. The 

 first explanation is inadequate, both from the na- 

 ture of the discrepancies that accompany the 

 agreement of the three narratives, and from the 

 impossibility of assigning absolute priority to any 

 one gospel. For example, even if we suppose 

 that the gospel of Mark was used by the other 

 two authors, or, conversely, that Mark was made 

 up mainly from Matthew and Luke, it is still ne- 

 cessary to postulate one or more earlier sources 

 to explain residuary phenomena ; and the longer 

 the problem is studied the more general is the 

 conviction of critics that these sources cannot 

 possibly have been merely oral. 



It appears from what we have already seen 

 that a considerable portion of the New Testament 

 is made up of writings not directly apostolical, 

 and a main problem of criticism is to determine 

 the relation of these writings, especially of the 

 gospels, to apostolic teaching and tradition. But, 

 behind all such questions as the relative priority 

 of Matthew or of Mark, the weight to be assigned 

 to the testimony of Papias, and so forth, lies a 

 series of questions much more radical in char- 

 acter, by which the whole theological world is at 

 present agitated. Can we say of all the New Tes- 

 tament books that they are either directly apos- 

 tolic, or, at least, stand in immediate dependence 

 on genuine apostolic teaching, which they hon- 

 estly represent ? or must we hold, with an influ- 

 ential school of modern critics, that a large pro- 

 portion of the books are direct forgeries, written 

 in the interest of theological tendencies, to which 

 they sacrifice without hesitation the genuine his- 

 tory and teaching of Christ and his apostles ? 

 There are, of course, positions intermediate to 

 these two views, and the doctrine of tendencies 

 is not held by many critics, even of the Tubingen 

 school, in its extreme form. Yet, as a matter of 



