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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.— SUPPLEMENT. 



fact, every book in the New Testament, with the 

 exception of the four great epistles of St. Paul, 

 is at present more or less the subject of contro- 

 versy, and interpolations are asserted even in 

 these. The details of such a controversy can 

 only be handled in separate articles, but a few 

 general remarks may be useful here. 



The arguments directed by modern critics 

 against the genuineness or credibility of the New- 

 Testament books do not for the most part rely 

 much on external evidence. Except in one or 

 two cases (particularly that of 2 Peter), the ex- 

 ternal evidence in favor of the books is as strong 

 as one can fairly expect, even where not alto- 

 gether decisive. We shall see, when we come to 

 speak of the canon, that, toward the close of the 

 second century, the four gospels, the acts, thir- 

 teen epistles of Paul, the first epistles of Peter 

 and John, and the book of Revelation, were re- 

 ceived in the most- widely-separated churches 

 with remarkable unanimity. Before this time 

 the chain of evidence is less complete. All our 

 knowledge of the period that lies between the 

 apostles and the great teachers of the Old Cath- 

 olic Church toward the close of the second cen- 

 tury is fragmentary. We possess but scanty re- 

 mains of the literature, and the same criticism 

 which seeks to bring down many New Testament 

 books into this period, questions the genuine- 

 ness of many of the writings which claim to 

 date from the first half of the second century, 

 and so are appealed to by conservative writers. 

 But, on the whole, what evidence does exist is of 

 a kind to push back all the more important writ- 

 ings to an early date. The gospel of John, for 

 example, is one of the books which negative 

 critics are most determined in rejecting. Yet 

 the fairest writers of the school (Hilgenfeld, 

 Keim) admit that it was known to Justin Martyr 

 in the middle of the second century, though they 

 think that, besides our four gospels, he had a 

 fifth of apocryphal character. But references of 

 an earlier date can hardly be denied ; and the 

 gospel may be traced almost to the beginning of 

 the century by the aid of fragments of the Gnos- 

 tic Basilides and of the epistles of Ignatius. The 

 Tubingen school, indeed, maintain that the frag- 

 ments preserved by Hippolytus are not from Ba- 

 silicles, but from a later writer of his school, and 

 utterly reject the Ignatian epistles ; but it cannot 

 be said that they have proved their case beyond 

 dispute. They have at most shown that, if the 

 gospel must on other grounds be taken as spuri- 

 ous, the external evidence may be pushed aside 

 as not absolutely insuperable. On the other 



hand, they try to bring positive proof that cer- 

 tain books were unknown in circles where, if 

 genuine, they must have circulated. But such a 

 negative is in its very nature difficult to prove. 

 Probably the strongest argument of the kind is 

 that brought to show that Papias did not know 

 the gospel of John. But Ave know Papias only 

 through Eusebius ; and, though the latter is care- 

 ful to mention all references to disputed books, 

 it does not appear that it was part of his design 

 to cite testimony to a book so universally allowed 

 as John's gospel. And Papias does give testi- 

 mony to the first epistle of John, which is hardly 

 separable from the gospel. On the whole, then, 

 we repeat that, on the most cardinal points, the 

 external evidence for the New Testament books 

 is as strong as can fairly be looked for, though 

 not, of course, strong enough to convince a man 

 who is sure a priori that this or that book is un- 

 historical and must be of late date. 



The strength of the negative critics lies in in- 

 ternal evidence ; and in this connection they have 

 certainly directed attention to real difficulties, 

 many of which still await their explanation. 

 Some of these difficulties are not properly con- 

 nected with the Tubingen position. The genu- 

 ineness of 2 Peter, which, indeed, is very weakly 

 attested by external evidence, was suspicious 

 even to Erasmus and Calvin, and no one will as- 

 sert that the Pauline authorship of 1 Timothy is 

 as palpable as that of the epistle to the Romans. 

 So, again, it is undeniable that the epistles to the 

 Colossians, and the so-called epistle to the Ephe- 

 sians, differ considerably in language and thought 

 from other Pauline epistles, and that their rela- 

 tion to one another demands explanation. But, 

 in the Tubingen school, all minor difficulties, each 

 of which might be solved in detail without any 

 very radical procedure, are brought together as 

 phases of a single extremely radical theory of the 

 growth of the New Testament. The theory has 

 two bases — one philosophical or dogmatical, the 

 other historical ; and it cannot be pretended that 

 the latter basis is adequate if the former is struck 

 away. Philosophically, the Tubingen school starts 

 from the position so clearly laid down by Strauss, 

 that a miraculous interruption of the laws of Na- 

 ture stamps the narrative in which it occurs as 

 unhistorical, or, at least, as more cautious writ- 

 ers put the case, hampers the narrative with such 

 extreme improbability that the positive evidence 

 in favor of its truth would require to be much 

 stronger than it is in the case of the New Testa- 

 ment history. The application of this proposi- 

 tion makes a great part of the narrative of the 



