586 NEW TESTAMENT 



there are no inconsistencies in statement of fact or of doctrine in the 

 books of the New Testament, and have compelled the interpreter, 

 if he would be truly an interpreter, to become historian, pledged, 

 not to the discovery, in the books that he studies, of a self-consistent 

 body of Christian doctrine and a self-consistent representation of 

 historic facts, but rather pledged to find the thought of the several 

 writers, whatever that is, and to set it forth with all attainable ac- 

 curacy and clearness. 



Here, of course, the New Testament student might have made 

 a stand, defined his task rigidly as that of the interpreter, and rested 

 content with the exposition of the thought of each book, regardless 

 of the consistency of this with the statements of other books in refer- 

 ence to historic fact or doctrine. But to have pursued this course 

 would have been to deny the motive under the impulse of which 

 he had undertaken his task. For the study of the New Testament 

 has not been, as a rule, carried on by men who were simply pro- 

 fessional interpreters, satisfied to carry to its perfection a scholastic 

 process, arbitrarily defined. They have been men who were seeking 

 for truth, and who, discovering differences in statement of fact in 

 their sources, could not be content with the mere historic fact of such 

 difference, but were impelled by the very motive that made them 

 students of the New Testament to inquire what the historic fact 

 was of which the sources contained these diverse representations; 

 and, finding in the New Testament books different conceptions of 

 religious truth, could not rest content with the statement that as 

 interpreters their task was finished when they had found the thought 

 that underlies each of the variant representations, but have been 

 compelled to press on to ask how these different conceptions are 

 related to one another, if not also ultimately how each of them is 

 related to reality. 



But this transformation of New Testament study into an his- 

 torical discipline raises some new and difficult questions concerning 

 the scope and definition of the discipline questions on which there 

 is not as yet entire agreement among New Testament scholars, 

 and which it belongs to this paper therefore to state. 



If the New Testament student is simply an historian, can he any 

 longer claim to possess a distinct field, or must the New Testament 

 department be merged in that of the history of early Christian lit- 

 erature, or in that of early church history? To the proposal that 

 it be merged in the history of early Christian literature the answer 

 of the great body of New Testament students will, I am confident, 

 be a prompt and decided negative. The books of the New Testa- 

 ment are in the broad sense of the term literature, and, being early 

 Christian writings, may properly be included in a history of early 

 Christian literature. But it is not as literature that the New Testa- 



