600 NEW TESTAMENT 



the letters could not have been written, but when they were written. 

 And the attempt to find for them or for the non-Pauline portions 

 of them, if they be recognized as of composite character a location 

 subsequent to Paul's death, to which they fit themselves more per- 

 fectly than to any point in his life, lacks something as yet of perfect 

 success. On the whole, the unity or composite character of these 

 letters, the period from which they come or the periods from which 

 their component elements arose, the situation in the apostle's life 

 which they or their Pauline elements reflect, or the situation which 

 the later author sought to meet and affect by them these must 

 still be accounted as problems, on which, indeed, many scholars have 

 made up their minds, but which to New Testament scholarship as 

 such are still problems for future investigation. 



The synoptic gospels. It might seem that the diligent labor 

 which since the days of Schleiermacher, Eichhorn, and Gieseler has 

 been bestowed upon the problem of the origin of the synoptic gospels, 

 in which is included, of course, that of their relation to one another, 

 would before this have sufficed, not only to propose every possible 

 hypothesis, but also to reach a definite solution through the elimina- 

 tion of those that are inadequate. It is true that the field of debate 

 and possible difference of opinion has, in the judgment of most 

 scholars, been very greatly narrowed. That the gospels are inter- 

 related, not simply independent narratives of events in part the same 

 is universally confessed. That the relation between them is mediated 

 in part, and indeed mainly, by written documents, is the judgment 

 of the great majority of those who have studied the problem at first 

 hand. That Mark, or a document nearly identical with it, was a chief 

 source of the first and third gospels, and that these two gospels had 

 also another common source, is almost as generally held. But the 

 demonstration of these propositions, granting them to be demon- . 

 strated, falls far short of a complete solution of the problem. The 

 predication of a common source of Matthew and Luke additional 

 to the Mark source but inadequately accounts for the facts. There 

 is much in the peculiar relation of the non-Marcan elements as found 

 respectively in Matthew and Luke to indicate that, even aside from 

 the infancy narratives, and other portions of these gospels that may 

 perhaps be treated as fragmentary, the non-Marcan source of Matthew 

 and Luke is resolvable into distinguishable elements, which call for 

 enumeration and identification. Nor is this probably the end of 

 the scholar's task in this direction. For there are facts that suggest 

 at least the possibility that when the sources immediately employed 

 in common by Matthew and Luke, or by either of them alone, have 

 been enumerated, these documents themselves will call for analysis 

 into the elements from which they were derived. The preponderance 

 in threefold material of the agreements of Mark and Luke against 



