AGNOSTICISM, 757 



deal more. As competent scholars and honest men, our revisers 

 have felt compelled to point out that such things have happened 

 even since the date of the oldest known manuscripts. The oldest 

 two copies of the second Gospel end with the eighth verse of the 

 sixteenth chapter ; the remaining twelve verses are spurious, and 

 it is noteworthy that the maker of the addition has not hesitated 

 to introduce a speech in which Jesus promises his disciples that 

 " in my name shall they cast out devils." 



The other passage " rejected to the margin " is still more in- 

 structive. It is that touching apologue, with its profound ethical 

 sense, of the woman taken in adultery— which, if internal evidence 

 were an infallible guide, might well be affirmed to be a typical ex- 

 ample of the teachings of Jesus. Yet, say the revisers, pitilessly, 

 " Most of the ancient authorities omit John vii, 53, viii, 11." Now, 

 let any reasonable man ask himself this question: If, after an 

 approximative settlement of the canon of the New Testament, and 

 even later than the fourth and fifth centuries, literary fabricators 

 had the skill and the audacity to make such additions and inter- 

 polations as these, what may they have done when no one had 

 thought of a canon ; when oral tradition, still unfixed, was regard- 

 ed as more valuable than such written records as may have existed 

 in the latter portion of the first century ? Or, to take the other 

 alternative, if those who gradually settled the canon did not know 

 of the existence of the oldest codices which have come down to 

 us ; or if, knowing them, they rejected their authority, what is to 

 be thought of their competency as critics of the text ? 



People who object to free criticism of the Christian Scriptures 

 forget that they are what they are in virtue of very free criticism ; 

 unless the advocates of inspiration are prepared to affirm that the 

 majority of influential ecclesiastics during several centuries were 

 safeguarded against error. For, even granting that some books of 

 the period were inspired, they were certainly few among many ; 

 and those who selected the canonical books, unless they them- 

 selves were also inspired, must be regarded in the light of mere 

 critics, and, from the evidence they have left of their intellectual 

 habits, very uncritical critics. When one thinks that such deli- 

 cate questions as those involved fell into the hands of men like 

 Papias (who believed in the famous millenarian grape story) ; of 

 Irenseus with his "reasons" for the existence of only four Gospels ; 

 and of such calm and dispassionate judges as Tertullian, with his 

 " Credo quia impossibile," the marvel is that the selection which 

 constitutes our New Testament is as free as it is from obviously 

 objectionable matter. The apocryphal Gospels certainly deserve 

 to be apocryphal ; but one may suspect that a little more critical 

 discrimination would have enlarged the Apocrypha not incon- 

 siderably. 



