614 NEW TESTAMENT 



personality to guide it, scholarship still struggles with but imperfect 

 success to reconstruct the story of Christianity in this later period. 

 What were the experiences of the Jewish Christian communities, 

 with their predilection for pharisaic legalism and apocalyptic messi- 

 anism, and confronted by the downfall of the Jewish temple and 

 state, are in some measure reflected in the first gospel and the Johan- 

 nine apocalypse, if not also in the epistle to the Hebrews. How the 

 Christian of Jewish extraction, but of universal sympathies, sought to 

 commend the gospel to men of Greek ways of thinking, and to trans- 

 late it into their forms of thought, we see in the Johannine gospel and 

 epistles. But it is only as trees that we see men walking. The progress 

 of past years gives reason to hope for still greater achievements in the 

 future, but the goal of full understanding of this period still recedes. 



IV. Indirectly Contributory Sciences 



Concerning those lines of study which in our classification we 

 designated as indirectly contributory, namely, the history of the canon, 

 the history of the transmission and criticism of the text, the history 

 of interpretation and of criticism, a very few words must suffice. 

 They might all be included under the general title of the history of 

 the attitude of the church toward the New Testament literature. 

 Each division of the field is important, and each offers its own peculiar 

 problems. If the history of interpretation and criticism belongs to 

 New Testament study only as the history of any science belongs 

 to that science, and has its value chiefly in enabling. us to criticise 

 our own efforts and achievements in the light of the work of our 

 predecessors, a knowledge of the history of the text, at least its early 

 history, is 'an indispensable tool for the recovery of the text. And 

 the early history of the canon, especially the history of the process 

 by which the conception of the canon of the New Covenant arose 

 and the limits of such canon were fixed, closely related as it is to the 

 history of the origin of the books thus canonized, and showing the 

 attitude of the church toward the literature which sprang from its 

 own bosom, is of the highest value, not only for the light which it 

 throws back upon questions of origin and date, and the possibilities 

 in respect to anonymity, pseudonymity, and the like, but also as 

 defining to what extent and in what sense Christianity was in its 

 origin a book-religion. The limits of this paper forbid discussion, 

 or even detailed enumeration, of the problems in this field. 



If I have in any measure truly apprehended and set forth the 

 nature of the problems which to-day confront the student of the New 

 Testament, I have shown that New Testament study is to-day an 

 historical discipline; that progress is to be made precisely through 

 the more perfect domination of it by the recognition of its historical 



