282 



♦ KNOWLEDGE ♦ 



[July 1, 1886. 



bettei- way show their zeal than by lying zsalously in the 

 cause they had espoused. 



From amidst all this heap of piously intended forgeries 

 the selection of trustworthy material must have been diffi- 

 cult iudeed. One is disposed to wonder what a Tischendorf, 

 if a man with knowledge and acumen such as his had existed 

 in those days, would have made of the task. The Hil- 

 kiahs, Shaphans, and Huldahs of old had simply to form an 

 opinion about documents whos3 oi-igin and greater or less 

 antiquity they were acquainted with. Ezra and Xehemiah 

 had a similar task, and not being so exacting accepted more, 

 while in later ages nearly everything Hebrew was accepted 

 as sacred until close upon the fall of Jerusalem. But those 

 who, in the sscond century of the Christian era, had to deter- 

 mine what was good, indifferent, or bad, in the immense 

 mass of stories which so many (as the author of the third 

 gospel tells us) had '-taken in hand to draw up," had a much 

 more difficult task. 



We have in reality no trustworthy evidence as to the 

 real authorship of any of the four gospels, or of the Acts ; 

 for even the internal evidence, such as it is, is questionable, 

 on account of the prevailing taste for literary forgery. 

 Those who first tried to draw up anything like a canon of 

 the New Testament were neither very critical nor very 

 learned ; and if they were able to form an opinion as to the 

 authorship of some original form of any one of the gospels, 

 they would yet have been quits unable to distinguish be- 

 tween the genuine text and interpolated matter. 



The study of a single book may suffice to show what know- 

 ledge the critics of those days had and had not. There is 

 a tradition that the Gospel of Matthew was originally 

 written in Hebrew, but there is very little evidence, or none 

 at all, in its support. A peculiarity of the author of this 

 gospel, whoever he may have been, is his anxiety to devise 

 fnlfilments of misunderstood prophecies. He was misled by 

 the redundancy of Hebrew poetical expression resulting from 

 the recognition of something especially beautiful in repeat- 

 ing the same idea in different words, or in the same words 

 variously arranged, as in the lines — ■ 



At her feet he bowed, he fell, lie lay : 



At her feet he bowed, he fell : 



Where he bowed, there he fell down dead. 



Jutffffs V. 27. 



This peculiarity belongs to the earlier stages of poetical 

 development, and is especially characteristic of the poetry 

 of semi-savage races.* But the writer of the first gospiel 

 was not aware of this, so he deemed it necessary, for 

 the conversion of the Hebrews to Christianity, to present 

 Christ as not only entering Jerusalem on " an ass," but also 

 moreover on " a colt, the foal of an ass " (the method not 

 stated) ; whereas the author of the second gospel is content 

 with the colt alone. It should be noticed, however, that it 

 is the author of the fourth gospel who thought it necessary 

 to show how not only were Christ's garments jjarted, but 

 lots were cast for his vesture, a rendering which (apart from 

 the mistaken idea about prophecy being intended) would 

 probably have much surprised the ancient poet who 

 lamented among other griefs the abstraction of his clothing. 

 It was also the author of the fourth gospel who recognised 

 in the saying, " a bone of him shall not he broken," a pro- 

 phetic indication of death rather than of safety I It was, 

 however, the author of the first gospel who made the most 

 grievous mistake of all — a mistake unintelligible unless we 



* For an excellent example of this style, see the song of triumph 

 of Jim, the Australian savage, in " Never Too Late to Mend." " I 

 slew him, he fell ; / slew him, he fell ; I slew kirn, lie fell ; and so 

 on. This is the style of the savage. The song of Deborah and Barak 

 is a fuller development of the same method. 



remember that an illiterate Hebrew, even though he might 

 have heard the greater part of the ancient scriptures read 

 often in the synagogue, would remember only scattered 

 verses, not their context. Anyone who reads Isaiah, chap, 

 ter vii. verses 11 to 17, and chapter viii. verses 3 to 8, 

 will see that the words, " Behold, a virgin shall conceive," 

 ifec, though they related to a "sign" and purported to con- 

 vey a projjhecy, related to no such miracle as the incarna- 

 tion, and conve3'ed only a prediction about matters which 

 were to follow within two or three years, and did so follow 

 according to the prophet's account. One who was then a 

 virgin was to become presently a mother, preciselv as many 

 maidens of to-day will in the ordinary course of events be 

 mothers before this day twelve months. The child was to 

 be called Immanuel ; and he received that title, besides the 

 less euphonious names Maher-shalal-hash-baz ; and before he 

 had knowledge to cry, '• My father " and " My mother," the 

 Kingof Assyria was to achieve a triumph, then perhaps some- 

 what obviously impending. But the writer of the fii-st gospel, 

 with the words of the well-known verses in his memory and 

 the context forgotten, perhaps also with some vague recol- 

 lection of a tradition belonging to the old and almost uni- 

 versal belief in the birth of the Sun-god from a virgin, 

 supposed the birth of the Messiah was referred to, and spoke 

 of events long after Isaiah's time, as occurring that that sup- 

 posed prophecy might be fulfilled ! 



While we may wonder that these blemishes in the first 

 gospel, and kindred errors in the others, natural enough in 

 the writings themselves, should have escaped the carping race 

 of critics, even in the second century, we mu.st not wonder 

 that they noticed none of those mistakes which modern 

 science has detected. Doubtless these were few, and those 

 not likely to be Christians, who, in the first six centuries 

 even, would have noticed the mistake involved in supposing 

 that from an exceedingly high mountain all the kingdoms 

 of the earth could be seen at a single view. Probably there 

 were none, and assuredly there were no Christians, who knew 

 that the phenomena attributed by the writere of all four 

 gospels, as well as of most of the remaining books of the New 

 "Testament, to possession by evil spirits, were in reality due to 

 causes purely' physical. 



On the whole, we may admit that, if any among the multi- 

 tudinous gospels existing in the middle of the second century 

 were to be retained, the four gospels which seem to have 

 definitely taken their place in the canon of the New Testa- 

 ment before the end of that century were deservedly 

 .selected ; though it must also be admitted that, while a very 

 slight diminution of critical keenness would have brought in 

 many more, a moderate increase of acumen woitld, at any 

 rate, have caused the excision of many intere.sting but 

 questionable passages now remaining in each of the four 

 narratives retained. 



The Muratori fragment — if genuine, as seems likely — 

 shows that a sort of canon of the later scriptures had been 

 drawn up a generation at least before the time assigned by 

 the author of '•'Supernatural Religion " as the earliest date to 

 which the acceptance of the four gospels can be referred. 

 The epistle of Barnabas, though doubtless a forgery, shows 

 that even earlier some of the sayings embodied in the gospels 

 were regarded as scriptural, — though that, of course, is not 

 saying much. Again, we learn from Dionysius, Bishop of 

 Corinth about 170 a.d., that the epistle of Clement had 

 been read in his Church from ancient times ; and in this 

 epistle, whose authenticity seems probable, there are many 

 quotations of sayings of Christ, such as are found — though 

 never in the same precise words — in the four go.spels. 

 Hermas, Ignatius, Polycarp, and Justin Martyr, ranging in 

 time from the latter half of the first century to the middle 

 of the second century, give corresponding evidence. It may 



