Feb. 1, 1886.] 



KNOWLEDGE 



109 



But the most important fossils are those of the earliest- 

 known and lowest class vertebrates in the form of 

 armoured fishes, allied to our sturgeon, and called 

 ganoids (Gr. ganos, splendour; and eidos,ioTm), from the 

 brilliancy of their enamelled scales. 



In this seemingly sudden appearance of highly-organised 

 animals marking so great an advance in structure on the 

 higher invertebrates, the imperfection of the geological 

 record is brought home to us. If later forms are modified 

 descendants of earlier, then not only are the transitional 

 ancestral forms of the ganoids missing, but the species 

 itself is much older than the fossils imply. The 

 inquirer need not despair ; for only a limited portion 

 of the dry land has as yet been explored, and there 

 are vast fossil-holding areas submerged and inacces- 

 sible ; yet one by one missing links ai-e being found, 

 and if the ancient intermediate forms, with their shorter 

 life-span, between the higher mollusca and the lowest 

 vertebrates, elude us, fortunately there are extant 

 organisms through which the connection can be traced. 



In this brief survey of the three earliest systems we 

 have already travei'sed more than half the total thickness 

 of the fossilifei'ous rocks, the deposit of which involved a 

 lapse of time and series of changes of which no conception 

 is possible. The base-line of our life is torf short for 

 measurement of the distance which separates the forami- 

 uifera from the ganoids ; of time, as of space, we see 

 neither beo-iuning nor end. 



HISTORICAL PUZZLE, 

 Br Richard A. Procioe. 



^E^QVn XE of the most remarkable problems — one 

 S'/'^JT^^ might almost perhaps say puzzles — of 

 P L^T^'-hVi history, is the entire absence of any refer- 

 S It-- i- W a cnce by Josephus to those events which 

 i\^^'^ 7Ai -iccording to the gospels took place in 

 iintfeftim.1 Jerusalem during the years which pre- 

 ceded his birth. He was regarded by 

 hi.s contemporaries as a sagacious, careful, and well- 

 informed man, especially in regard to the history of his 

 own country, ftnd still more especially of Jerusxiem 

 during the century preceding the capture of thr.t city. 

 His father resided in Jerusalem throughout the whole 

 time covered by the life of Christ according to the 

 narrative of Matthew (that is from B.C. 4, determined 

 from the death of Herod the Great, to A.D. 33) or 

 according to Luke (that is, from A.D. 9 — the taxation 

 by Cyrenius — to A.U. 33) or r.ccording to the narrative 

 of John (which, if the remark " thou art not yet fifty " 

 be taken in its natural sense would be difFerent from 

 either). It is evident, independently of the evidence of 

 Josephus, that his father, and the whole family, were in 

 a position of dignity, while also in such a position that 

 they could not but hear cf everything of interest which 

 happened in Jerusalem, or indeed anywhere in Palestine. 

 It is absolutely impossible that thej' could have remained 

 ignorant of the strange events which took place in their 

 own time and country, events which we are told moved 

 even the most conservative minds to recognise that 

 a man of marvellous powers as well as of profound 

 insight and of singularly pure and blameless life, was in 

 the land. At the time when the whole city of Jerusalem 

 was stirred either to symjjathy with Christ and his 

 followers, or to anger against them, when the powers of 

 nature were moved, insomuch that the sky was darkened, 

 while the graves opened and gave up their doad, who 



going about were seen of many, the family of Josephus 

 must have been among those who marvelled at these 

 strange events and were terrified by such tokens of divine 

 displeasure. That a man so careful to collect even the 

 most minute details about these very times, having access 

 . to all the public records (even to the sacred records of the 

 priesthood), to the evidence of all the leading men and 

 familif.s, and who lastly must repeatedly have heard the 

 membots of his own family speaking about these mar- 

 vellous yet well-known events, should have either over- 

 looked them or thought them not important enough for 

 mention, must be regarded as utterly incredible. 



Yet Josephus, as is well known, says nothing whatever, 

 either about John the Baptist, or about Christ, or about 

 the Apostles or disciples of Christ. So remarkable did 

 this silence seem to the early Christian writers, that after 

 Photius had dwelt upon it in his articles on Josephus, a 

 passage was interpolated relating to John the Baptist ; and 

 after Origen (taking the interpolated passage as genuine) 

 had dwelt on the still more striking circumstance that 

 Josephus referred to John the Baptist but did not refer 

 to Christ, another passage was interpolated in which 

 Josephus appears to refer to Christ in terms implying 

 that he regarded Christ as the promised Messiah. 

 Although in those uncritical days this forgery passed 

 muster, as did many much more glaring, yet now no 

 critic of repute admits this incongruous paragraph 

 (clumsily inserted where — if Josephus could have 

 written it — he assuredly would not have placed it) as 

 genuine. As Bishop Warburton said, it was clearly "a 

 rank forgery and a very stupid one too," and " it has 

 long been given up," says De Quincey, " as a forgery — by 

 all men not lunatic." Those who introduced it had pious 

 intentions, no doubt ; but they were apparently not 

 conscious of the bad effect its appearance would have, 

 after the regrets expressed by Photius r.nd Origen in 

 regard to the absence of any reference to Christ in 

 Josephus's works. It was much the sime in this case, 

 as with the addition to the Annals of Tacitus of a passage 

 relating to persecutions of Christians by Nero (at a time 

 when according to the Acts of the Apostles the Christians 

 were left in peace) though the early Christian fathers who 

 had ransacked Tacitus, Suetonius, and every Roman 

 writer, for just such passages, had failed to find anything 

 of the kind in those works as known in their daj'. - Such 

 forgeries, as Bishop Warburton implied, were most mis- 

 chievous as well as most unwise, however they may have 

 commended themselves to men of the type of the 

 Christian historian Eusebiu.s, who expressly taught that 

 " falsehood may be employed by way of medicine for 

 those wlio need it, ' and boasted openly that he had 

 "related all which might redound to the glory and 

 suppressed all that could tend to the discredit of our 

 religion." 



Canon Farrar, in his " Life of Christ," takes r.t onco 

 a bolder and a wiser course in regard to this historic 

 puzzle. " No one can doubt," he says, " that the silence 

 of Josephus on the subject of Christianity was as deli- 

 berate as it was dishonest." " The probable reason of 

 this silence," he remarks further, '"is that Josephus, 

 whom, in spite of all the immense literary debt we owe 

 to him, we can only regard as a renegade .and as}-cophant, 

 did not choose to make any allusion to facts which were 

 even I'emotely connected with the life of Christ." 



This of course explains the whole matter, as completely 

 and unanswerably as what is sometimes ungallantly called 

 "a lady's reason." If Josephus was silent on the subject 

 of Christ because he did not choose to speak, it might 

 ssem that there is nothing more to be said. 



