THE BIBLE. 



389 



gospels and Acts appear as unhistorical, and 

 therefore late ; and the origin of this late litera- 

 ture is sought by regarding the New Testament 

 as the monument of a long struggle, in the course 

 of which an original sharp antagonism between 

 the gospel of Paul and the Judaizing gospel of 

 the old apostles was gradually softened down and 

 harmonized. The analysis of the New Testament 

 is the resurrection of early parties in the church, 

 each pursuing its own tendency by the aid of lit- 

 erary fiction. In the genuine epistles of Paul, 

 on the one hand, and in the Revelation and some 

 parts of Matthew on the other, the original hos- 

 tility of ethnic and Jewish Christianity is sharp- 

 ly defined ; while, after a series of intermediate 

 stages, the Johannine writings present the final 

 transition in the second century from the con- 

 tests of primitive Christianity to the uniformity 

 of the Old Catholic Church. This general posi- 

 tion has been developed in a variety of forms 

 more or less drastic, and is supported by a vast 

 mass of speculation aud research ; but the turn- 

 ing-points of the controversy may. perhaps, be 

 narrowed to four questions : 1. Whether, in view 

 of Paul's undoubted conviction that miraculous 

 powers were exercised by himself and other 

 Christians (1 Corinthians xii. 9,/. ; 2 Corinthians 

 xii. 12) the miracle criterion of a secondary nar- 

 rative can be maintained ? 2. Whether the book 

 of Acts is radically inconsistent with Paul's own 

 account of his relations to the church at Jerusa- 

 lem, and whether the antithesis of Peter and Paul 

 is proved from the epistles of the latter, or pos- 

 tulated in accordance with the Hegelian law of 

 advance by antagonism ? 3. Whether the gos- 

 pel of John is necessarily a late fiction, or does 

 not rather supply in its ideal delineation of Jesus 

 a necessary supplement to the synoptical gospels 

 which can only be understood as resting on true 

 apostolic reminiscence ? 4. Whether the exter- 

 nal evidence for the several books and the known 

 facts of church history leave time for the suc- 

 cessive evolution of all the stages of early Chris- 

 tianity which the theory postulates '? 



The Christian Canon of the Old and New 

 Testaments. — We have already seen that the 

 Apostolic Church continued to use as sacred the 

 Hebrew Scriptures, whose authority derived fresh 

 confirmation from the fulfillment of the prophe- 

 cies in Christ. The idea that the Old Testament 

 revelation must now fall back into a secondary 

 position as compared with inspired apostolic 

 teaching, was not for a moment entertained. 

 Still less could the notion of a body of New 

 Testament Scriptures, of a collection of Chris- 



tian writings, to be read like the Old Testament 

 in public worship, and appealed to as authorita- 

 tive in matters of faith, take shape so long as 

 the Church was conscious that she had in her 

 midst a living voice of inspiration. The first 

 apostolic writings were, as we have seen, occa- 

 sional, and it was not even matter of course that 

 every epistle of an apostle should be carefully 

 preserved, much less that it should be prized 

 above his oral teaching. Paul certainly wrote 

 more than two epistles to the Corinthians, and 

 even Papias is still of opinion, when he collects 

 reminiscences of apostolic sayings from the 

 mouths of the elders, that what he reads in 

 books cannot do him so much good as what he 

 receives "from a living and abiding voice." 

 Nay, the very writers who are the first to put 

 Old and New Testament books on a precisely 

 similar footing (e. g., Tertullian) attach equal 

 importance to the tradition of churches which 

 had been directly taught by apostles, and so 

 were presumed to posses* the " rule of faith " in 

 a form free from the difficulties of exposition 

 that encumber the written word. In the first 

 instance, then, the authoritative books of the 

 Christian Church were those of the Old Testa- 

 ment ; and in the time of the apostles and their 

 immediate successors it was the Hebrew canon 

 that was received. But as most churches had 

 no knowledge of the Old Testament except 

 through the Greek translation and the Alexan- 

 drian canon, the Apocrypha soon began to be 

 quoted as Scripture. The feeling of uncertainty 

 as to the proper number of Old Testament 

 books which prevailed in the second century is 

 illustrated by an epistle of Melito of Sardis, who 

 journeyed to Palestine in quest of light, and 

 brought back the present Hebrew canon, with 

 the omission of the book of Esther. In the 

 third century Origen knew the Hebrew canon, 

 but accepted the Alexandrian additions, appar- 

 ently because he considered that a special provi- 

 dence had watched over both forms of the col- 

 lection. Subsequent teachers in the Eastern 

 Church gradually went back to the Hebrew 

 canon (Esther being still excluded from full 

 canonicity by Athanasius and Gregory of Nazi- 

 anzus), distinguishing the Alexandrian additions 

 as ava.yiyvwffK6jj.iva — books used for ecclesiastical 

 lessons. In the Western Church the same dis- 

 tinction was made by scholars like Jerome, who 

 introduced for merely ecclesiastical books the 

 somewhat incorrect name of Apocrypha ; but a 

 laxer view was very prevalent, and gained ground 

 during the middle ages, till at length, in opposi- 



