Chapter 39

The Epistle to the Hebrews, the style of which is so unlike that of the Apostle Paul, was possibly written by Apollos, who was an Alexandrian Jew,“a learned man”and“mighty in the Scriptures”(Acts 18:24); but it may notwithstanding have been written at the suggestion and under the direction of Paul, and so be essentially Pauline. A. C. Kendrick, in American Commentary on Hebrews, points out that while the style of Paul is prevailingly dialectic, and only in rapt moments becomes rhetorical or poetic, the style of the Epistle to the Hebrews is prevailingly rhetorical, is free from anacolutha, and is always dominated by emotion. He holds that these characteristics point to Apollos as its author. Contrast also Paul's method of quoting the O. T.:“it is written”(Rom. 11:8; 1 Cor. 1:31; Gal. 3:10)with that of the Hebrews:“he saith”(8:5, 13),“he[pg 153]hath said”(4:4). Paul quotes the O. T. fifty or sixty times, but never in this latter way.Heb. 2:3—“which having at the first been spoken by the Lord, was confirmed unto us by them that heard”—shows that the writer did not receive the gospel at first hand. Luther and Calvin rightly saw in this a decisive proof that Paul was not the author, for he always insisted on the primary and independent character of his gospel. Harnack formerly thought the epistle written by Barnabas to Christians at Rome, A. D. 81-96. More recently however he attributes it to Priscilla, the wife of Aquila, or to their joint authorship. The majesty of its diction, however, seems unfavorable to this view. William T. C. Hanna:“The words of the author ... are marshalled grandly, and move with the tread of an army, or with the swell of a tidal wave”; see Franklin Johnson, Quotations in N. T. from O. T., xii. Plumptre, Introd. to N. T., 37, and in Expositor, Vol. I, regards the author of this epistle as the same with that of the Apocryphal Wisdom of Solomon, the latter being composed before, the former after, the writer's conversion to Christianity. Perhaps our safest conclusion is that of Origen:“God only knows who wrote it.”Harnack however remarks:“The time in which our ancient Christian literature, the N. T. included, was considered as a web of delusions and falsifications, is past. The oldest literature of the church is, in its main points, and in most of its details, true and trustworthy.”See articles on Hebrews, in Smith's and in Hastings' Bible Dictionaries.(e) As to 2 Peter, Jude, and 2 and 3 John, the epistles most frequently held to be spurious, we may say that, although we have no conclusive external evidence earlier than A. D. 160, and in the case of 2 Peter none earlier than A. D. 230-250, we may fairly urge in favor of their genuineness not only their internal characteristics of literary style and moral value, but also the general acceptance of them all since the third century as the actual productions of the men or class of men whose names they bear.Firmilianus (250), Bishop of Cæsarea in Cappadocia, is the first clear witness to 2 Peter. Origen (230) names it, but, in naming it, admits that its genuineness is questioned. The Council of Laodicea (372) first received it into the Canon. With this very gradual recognition and acceptance of 2 Peter, compare the loss of the later works of Aristotle for a hundred and fifty years after his death, and their recognition as genuine so soon as they were recovered from the cellar of the family of Neleus in Asia; De Wette's first publication of certain letters of Luther after the lapse of three hundred years, yet without occasioning doubt as to their genuineness; or the concealment of Milton's Treatise on Christian Doctrine, among the lumber of the State Paper Office in London, from 1677 to 1823; see Mair, Christian Evidences, 95. Sir William Hamilton complained that there were treatises of Cudworth, Berkeley and Collier, still lying unpublished and even unknown to their editors, biographers and fellow metaphysicians, but yet of the highest interest and importance; see Mansel, Letters, Lectures and Reviews, 381; Archibald, The Bible Verified, 27. 2 Peter was probably sent from the East shortly before Peter's martyrdom; distance and persecution may have prevented its rapid circulation in other countries. Sagebeer, The Bible in Court, 114—“A ledger may have been lost, or its authenticity for a long time doubted, but when once it is discovered and proved, it is as trustworthy as any other part of theres gestæ.”See Plumptre, Epistles of Peter, Introd., 73-81; Alford on 2 Peter, 4: Prolegomena, 157; Westcott, on Canon, in Smith's Bib. Dict., 1:370, 373; Blunt, Dict. Doct. and Hist. Theol., art.: Canon.It is urged by those who doubt the genuineness of 2 Peter that the epistle speaks of“your apostles”(3:2), just asJude 17speaks of“the apostles,”as if the writer did not number himself among them. But 2 Peter begins with“Simon Peter, a servant and apostle of Jesus Christ,”and Jude,“brother of James”(verse 1)was a brother of our Lord, but not an apostle. Hovey, Introd. to N. T., xxxi—“The earliest passage manifestly based upon 2 Peter appears to be in the so-called Second Epistle of the Roman Clement, 16:3, which however is now understood to be a Christian homily from the middle of the second century.”Origen (born 186) testifies that Peter left one epistle,“and perhaps a second, for that is disputed.”He also says:“John wrote the Apocalypse, and an epistle of very few lines; and, it may be, a second and a third; since all do not admit them to be genuine.”He quotes also from James and from Jude, adding that their canonicity was doubted.[pg 154]Harnack regards 1 Peter, 2 Peter, James, and Jude, as written respectively about 160, 170, 130, and 130, but not by the men to whom they are ascribed—the ascriptions to these authors being later additions. Hort remarks:“If I were asked, I should say that the balance of the argument was against 2 Peter, but the moment I had done so I should begin to think I might be in the wrong.”Sanday, Oracles of God, 73 note, considers the arguments in favor of 2 Peter unconvincing, but also the arguments against. He cannot get beyond anon liquet. He refers to Salmon, Introd. to N. T., 529-559, ed. 4, as expressing his own view. But the later conclusions of Sanday are more radical. In his Bampton Lectures on Inspiration, 348, 399, he says: 2 Peter“is probably at least to this extent a counterfeit, that it appears under a name which is not that of its true author.”Chase, in Hastings' Bib. Dict., 3:806-817, says that“the first piece ofcertainevidence as to 2 Peter is the passage from Origen quoted by Eusebius, though it hardly admits of doubt that the Epistle was known to Clement of Alexandria.... We find no trace of the epistle in the period when the tradition of apostolic days was still living.... It was not the work of the apostle but of the second century ... put forward without any sinister motive ... the personation of the apostle an obvious literary device rather than a religious or controversial fraud. The adoption of such a verdict can cause perplexity only when the Lord's promise of guidance to his Church is regarded as a charter of infallibility.”Against this verdict we would urge the dignity and spiritual value of 2 Peter—internal evidence which in our judgment causes the balance to incline in favor of its apostolic authorship.(f) Upon no other hypothesis than that of their genuineness can the general acceptance of these four minor epistles since the third century, and of all the other books of the New Testament since the middle of the second century, be satisfactorily accounted for. If they had been mere collections of floating legends, they could not have secured wide circulation as sacred books for which Christians must answer with their blood. If they had been forgeries, the churches at large could neither have been deceived as to their previous non-existence, nor have been induced unanimously to pretend that they were ancient and genuine. Inasmuch, however, as other accounts of their origin, inconsistent with their genuineness, are now current, we proceed to examine more at length the most important of these opposing views.The genuineness of the New Testament as a whole would still be demonstrable, even if doubt should still attach to one or two of its books. It does not matter that 2nd Alcibiades was not written by Plato, or Pericles by Shakespeare. The Council of Carthage in 397 gave a place in the Canon to the O. T. Apocrypha, but the Reformers tore it out. Zwingli said of the Revelation:“It is not a Biblical book,”and Luther spoke slightingly of the Epistle of James. The judgment of Christendom at large is more trustworthy than the private impressions of any single Christian scholar. To hold the books of the N. T. to be written in the second century by other than those whose names they bear is to hold, not simply to forgery, but to a conspiracy of forgery. There must have been several forgers at work, and, since their writings wonderfully agree, there must have been collusion among them. Yet these able men have been forgotten, while the names of far feebler writers of the second century have been preserved.G. F. Wright, Scientific Aspects of Christian Evidences, 343—“In civil law there are‘statutes of limitations’which provide that the general acknowledgment of a purported fact for a certain period shall be considered as conclusive evidence of it. If, for example, a man has remained in undisturbed possession of land for a certain number of years, it is presumed that he has a valid claim to it, and no one is allowed to dispute his claim.”Mair, Evidences, 99—“We probably have not a tenth part of the evidence upon which the early churches accepted the N. T. books as the genuine productions of their authors. We have only their verdict.”Wynne, in Literature of the Second Century, 58—“Those who gave up the Scriptures were looked on by their fellow Christians as‘traditores,’traitors, who had basely yielded up what they ought to have treasured as dearer than life. But all their books were not equally sacred. Some[pg 155]were essential, and some were non-essential to the faith. Hence arose the distinction betweencanonicalandnon-canonical. The general consciousness of Christians grew into a distinct registration.”Such registration is entitled to the highest respect, and lays the burden of proof upon the objector. See Alexander, Christ and Christianity, Introduction; Hovey, General Introduction to American Commentary on N. T.D. Rationalistic Theories as to the origin of the gospels. These are attempts to eliminate the miraculous element from the New Testament records, and to reconstruct the sacred history upon principles of naturalism.Against them we urge the general objection that they are unscientific in their principle and method. To set out in an examination of the New Testament documents with the assumption that all history is a mere natural development, and that miracles are therefore impossible, is to make history a matter, not of testimony, but ofa priorispeculation. It indeed renders any history of Christ and his apostles impossible, since the witnesses whose testimony with regard to miracles is discredited can no longer be considered worthy of credence in their account of Christ's life or doctrine.In Germany, half a century ago,“a man was famous according as he had lifted up axes upon the thick trees”(Ps. 74:5, A. V.), just as among the American Indians he was not counted a man who could not show his scalps. The critics fortunately scalped each other; see Tyler, Theology of Greek Poets, 79—on Homer. Nicoll, The Church's One Foundation, 15—“Like the mummers of old, sceptical critics send one before them with a broom to sweep the stage clear of everything for their drama. If we assume at the threshold of the gospel study that everything of the nature of miracle is impossible, then the specific questions are decided before the criticism begins to operate in earnest.”Matthew Arnold:“Our popular religion at present conceives the birth, ministry and death of Christ as altogether steeped in prodigy, brimful of miracle,—andmiracles do not happen.”This presupposition influences the investigations of Kuenen, and of A. E. Abbott, in his article on the Gospels in the Encyc. Britannica. We give special attention to four of the theories based upon this assumption.1st. The Myth-theory of Strauss (1808-1874).According to this view, the gospels are crystallizations into story of Messianic ideas which had for several generations filled the minds of imaginative men in Palestine. The myth is a narrative in which such ideas are unconsciously clothed, and from which the element of intentional and deliberate deception is absent.This early view of Strauss, which has become identified with his name, was exchanged in late years for a more advanced view which extended the meaning of the word“myths”so as to include all narratives that spring out of a theological idea, and it admitted the existence of“pious frauds”in the gospels. Baur, he says, first convinced him that the author of the fourth gospel had“not unfrequently composed mere fables, knowing them to be mere fictions.”The animating spirit of both the old view and the new is the same. Strauss says:“We know with certainty what Jesus wasnot, and what he hasnotdone, namely, nothing superhuman and supernatural.”“No gospel can claim that degree of historic credibility that would be required in order to make us debase our reason to the point of believing miracles.”He calls the resurrection of Christ“ein weltgeschichtlicher Humbug.”“If the gospels are really historical documents, we cannot exclude miracle from the life-story of Jesus;”see Strauss, Life of Jesus, 17; New Life of Jesus, 1: preface, xii. Vatke, Einleitung in A. T., 210, 211, distinguishes the myth from thesagaor legend: The criterion of the pure myth is that the experience is impossible, while thesagais a tradition of remote antiquity; the myth has in it the element only of belief, thesagahas in it an element of history. Sabatier, Philos. Religion, 37—“A myth is false in appearance only. The divine Spirit can avail himself of the fictions of poetry as well as of logical reasonings. When the heart was pure, the veils of fable always allowed the face of truth to shine through. And does not childhood run on into maturity and old age?”[pg 156]It is very certain that childlike love of truth was not the animating spirit of Strauss. On the contrary, his spirit was that of remorseless criticism and of uncompromising hostility to the supernatural. It has been well said that he gathered up all the previous objections of sceptics to the gospel narrative and hurled them in one mass, just as if some Sadducee at the time of Jesus' trial had put all the taunts and gibes, all the buffetings and insults, all the shame and spitting, into one blow delivered straight into the face of the Redeemer. An octogenarian and saintly German lady said unsuspectingly that“somehow she never could get interested”in Strauss's Leben Jesu, which her sceptical son had given her for religious reading. The work was almost altogether destructive, only the last chapter suggesting Strauss's own view of what Jesus was.If Luther's dictum is true that“the heart is the best theologian,”Strauss must be regarded as destitute of the main qualification for his task. Encyc. Britannica, 22:592—“Strauss's mind was almost exclusively analytical and critical, without depth of religious feeling, or philosophical penetration, or historical sympathy. His work was rarely constructive, and, save when he was dealing with a kindred spirit, he failed as a historian, biographer, and critic, strikingly illustrating Goethe's profoundly true principle that loving sympathy is essential for productive criticism.”Pfleiderer, Strauss's Life of Jesus, xix—“Strauss showed that the church formed the mythical traditions about Jesus out of its faith in him as the Messiah; but he did not show how the church came by the faith that Jesus of Nazareth was the Messiah.”See Carpenter, Mental Physiology, 362; Grote, Plato, 1:249.We object to the Myth-theory of Strauss, that(a) The time between the death of Christ and the publication of the gospels was far too short for the growth and consolidation of such mythical histories. Myths, on the contrary, as the Indian, Greek, Roman and Scandinavian instances bear witness, are the slow growth of centuries.(b) The first century was not a century when such formation of myths was possible. Instead of being a credulous and imaginative age, it was an age of historical inquiry and of Sadduceeism in matters of religion.Horace, in Odes 1:34 and 3:6, denounces the neglect and squalor of the heathen temples, and Juvenal, Satire 2:150, says that“Esse aliquid manes et subterranea regna Nec pueri credunt.”Arnold of Rugby:“The idea of men writing mythic histories between the times of Livy and of Tacitus, and of St. Paul mistaking them for realities!”Pilate's sceptical inquiry,“What is truth?”(John 18:38), better represented the age.“The mythical age is past when an idea is presented abstractly—apart from narrative.”The Jewish sect of the Sadducees shows that the rationalistic spirit was not confined to Greeks or Romans. The question of John the Baptist,Mat. 11:3—“Art thou he that cometh, or look we for another?”and our Lord's answer,Mat. 11:4, 5—“Go and tell John the thing which ye hear and see: the blind receive their sight ... the dead are raised up,”show that the Jews expected miracles to be wrought by the Messiah; yetJohn 10:41—“John indeed did no sign”shows also no irresistible inclination to invest popular teachers with miraculous powers; see E. G. Robinson, Christian Evidences, 22; Westcott, Com. on John 10:41; Rogers, Superhuman Origin of the Bible, 61; Cox, Miracles, 50.(c) The gospels cannot be a mythical outgrowth of Jewish ideas and expectations, because, in their main features, they run directly counter to these ideas and expectations. The sullen and exclusive nationalism of the Jews could not have given rise to a gospel for all nations, nor could their expectations of a temporal monarch have led to the story of a suffering Messiah.The O. T. Apocrypha shows how narrow was the outlook of the Jews. 2 Esdras 6:55, 56 says the Almighty has made the world“foroursakes”; other peoples, though they“also come from Adam,”to the Eternal“are nothing, but be like unto spittle.”The whole multitude of them are only, before him,“like a single foul drop that oozes out of a cask”(C. Geikie, in S. S. Times). Christ's kingdom differed from that which the Jews expected, both in itsspiritualityand itsuniversality(Bruce, Apologetics, 3). There was no missionary impulse in the heathen world; on the other hand,[pg 157]it was blasphemy for an ancient tribesman to make known his god to an outsider (Nash, Ethics and Revelation, 106). The Apocryphal gospels show what sort of myths the N. T. age would have elaborated: Out of a demoniac young woman Satan is said to depart in the form of a young man (Bernard, in Literature of the Second Century, 99-136).(d) The belief and propagation of such myths are inconsistent with what we know of the sober characters and self-sacrificing lives of the apostles.(e) The mythical theory cannot account for the acceptance of the gospels among the Gentiles, who had none of the Jewish ideas and expectations.(f) It cannot explain Christianity itself, with its belief in Christ's crucifixion and resurrection, and the ordinances which commemorate these facts.(d) Witness Thomas's doubting, and Paul's shipwrecks and scourgings.Cf.2 Pet. 1:16—οὐ γὰρ σεσοφισμένοις μύθοις ἐξακολουθήσαντες =“we have not been on the false track of myths artificially elaborated.”See F. W. Farrar, Witness of History to Christ, 49-88. (e) See the two books entitled: If the Gospel Narratives are Mythical,—What Then? and, But How,—if the Gospels are Historic? (f) As the existence of the American Republic is proof that there was once a Revolutionary War, so the existence of Christianity is proof of the death of Christ. The change from the seventh day to the first, in Sabbath observance, could never have come about in a nation so Sabbatarian, had not the first day been the celebration of an actual resurrection. Like the Jewish Passover and our own Independence Day, Baptism and the Lord's Supper cannot be accounted for, except as monuments and remembrances of historical facts at the beginning of the Christian church. See Muir, on the Lord's Supper an abiding Witness to the Death of Christ, In Present Day Tracts, 6: no. 36. On Strauss and his theory, see Hackett, in Christian Rev., 48; Weiss, Life of Jesus, 155-163; Christlieb, Mod. Doubt and Christ. Belief, 379-425; Maclear, in Strivings for the Faith, 1-136; H. B. Smith, in Faith and Philosophy, 442-468; Bayne, Review of Strauss's New Life, in Theol. Eclectic, 4:74; Row, in Lectures on Modern Scepticism, 305-360; Bibliotheca Sacra, Oct. 1871: art. by Prof. W. A. Stevens; Burgess, Antiquity and Unity of Man, 263, 264; Curtis on Inspiration, 62-67; Alexander, Christ and Christianity, 92-126; A. P. Peabody, in Smith's Bible Dict., 2:954-958.2nd. The Tendency-theory of Baur (1792-1860).This maintains that the gospels originated in the middle of the second century, and were written under assumed names as a means of reconciling opposing Jewish and Gentile tendencies in the church.“These great national tendencies find their satisfaction, not in events corresponding to them, but in the elaboration of conscious fictions.”Baur dates the fourth gospel at 160-170 A. D.; Matthew at 130; Luke at 150; Mark at 150-160. Baur never inquires who Christ was. He turns his attention from the facts to the documents. If the documents be proved unhistorical, there is no need of examining the facts, for there are no facts to examine. He indicates the presupposition of his investigations, when he says:“The principal argument for the later origin of the gospels must forever remain this, that separately, and still more when taken together, they give an account of the life of Jesus which involves impossibilities”—i. e., miracles. He would therefore remove their authorship far enough from Jesus' time to permit regarding the miracles as inventions. Baur holds that in Christ were united the universalistic spirit of the new religion,andthe particularistic form of the Jewish Messianic idea; some of his disciples laid emphasis on the one, some on the other; hence first conflict, but finally reconciliation; see statement of the Tübingen theory and of the way in which Baur was led to it, in Bruce, Apologetics, 360. E. G. Robinson interprets Baur as follows:“Paul = Protestant; Peter = sacramentarian; James = ethical; Paul + Peter + James = Christianity. Protestant preaching should dwell more on the ethical—cases of conscience—and less on mere doctrine, such as regeneration and justification.”[pg 158]Baur was a stranger to the needs of his own soul, and so to the real character of the gospel. One of his friends and advisers wrote, after his death, in terms that were meant to be laudatory:“His was a completely objective nature. No trace of personal needs or struggles is discernible in connection with his investigations of Christianity.”The estimate of posterity is probably expressed in the judgment with regard to the Tübingen school by Harnack:“Thepossiblepicture it sketched was not thereal, and the key with which it attempted to solve all problems did not suffice for the most simple.... The Tübingen views have indeed been compelled to undergo very large modifications. As regards the development of the church in the second century, it may safely be said that the hypotheses of the Tübingen school have proved themselves everywhere inadequate, very erroneous, and are to-day held by only a very few scholars.”See Baur, Die kanonischen Evangelien; Canonical Gospels (Eng. transl.), 530; Supernatural Religion, 1:212-444 and vol. 2: Pfleiderer, Hibbert Lectures for 1885. For accounts of Baur's position, see Herzog, Encyclopädie, art.: Baur; Clarke's transl. of Hase's Life of Jesus, 34-36; Farrar, Critical History of Free Thought, 227, 228.We object to the Tendency-theory of Baur, that(a) The destructive criticism to which it subjects the gospels, if applied to secular documents, would deprive us of any certain knowledge of the past, and render all history impossible.The assumption of artifice is itself unfavorable to a candid examination of the documents. A perverse acuteness can descry evidences of a hiddenanimusin the most simple and ingenuous literary productions. Instance the philosophical interpretation of“Jack and Jill.”(b) The antagonistic doctrinal tendencies which it professes to find in the several gospels are more satisfactorily explained as varied but consistent aspects of the one system of truth held by all the apostles.Baur exaggerates the doctrinal and official differences between the leading apostles. Peter was not simply a Judaizing Christian, but was the first preacher to the Gentiles, and his doctrine appears to have been subsequently influenced to a considerable extent by Paul's (see Plumptre on 1 Pet., 68-69). Paul was not an exclusively Hellenizing Christian, but invariably addressed the gospel to the Jews before he turned to the Gentiles. The evangelists give pictures of Jesus from different points of view. As the Parisian sculptor constructs his bust with the aid of a dozen photographs of his subject, all taken from different points of view, so from the four portraits furnished us by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John we are to construct the solid and symmetrical life of Christ. The deeper reality which makes reconciliation of the different views possible is the actual historical Christ. Marcus Dods, Expositor's Greek Testament, 1:675—“They are not two Christs, but one, which the four Gospels depict: diverse as the profile and front face, but one another's complement rather than contradiction.”Godet, Introd. to Gospel Collection, 272—Matthew shows the greatness of Jesus—his full-length portrait; Mark his indefatigable activity; Luke his beneficent compassion; John his essential divinity. Matthew first wrote Aramæan Logia. This was translated into Greek and completed by a narrative of the ministry of Jesus for the Greek churches founded by Paul. This translation was not made by Matthew and did not make use of Mark (217-224). E. D. Burton: Matthew = fulfilment of past prophecy; Mark = manifestation of present power. Matthew is argument from prophecy; Mark is argument from miracle. Matthew, as prophecy, made most impression on Jewish readers; Mark, as power, was best adapted to Gentiles. Prof. Burton holds Mark to be based upon oral tradition alone; Matthew upon his Logia (his real earlier Gospel) and other fragmentary notes; while Luke has a fuller origin in manuscripts and in Mark. See Aids to the Study of German Theology, 148-155; F. W. Farrar, Witness of History to Christ, 61.(c) It is incredible that productions of such literary power and lofty religious teaching as the gospels should have sprung up in the middle of the second century, or that, so springing up, they should have been published under assumed names and for covert ends.[pg 159]The general character of the literature of the second century is illustrated by Ignatius's fanatical desire for martyrdom, the value ascribed by Hermas to ascetic rigor, the insipid allegories of Barnabas, Clement of Rome's belief in the phœnix, and the absurdities of the Apocryphal Gospels. The author of the fourth gospel among the writers of the second century would have been a mountain among mole-hills. Wynne, Literature of the Second Century, 60—“The apostolic and the sub-apostolic writers differ from each other as a nugget of pure gold differs from a block of quartz with veins of the precious metal gleaming through it.”Dorner, Hist. Doct. Person Christ, 1:1:92—“Instead of the writers of the second century marking an advance on the apostolic age, or developing the germ given them by the apostles, the second century shows great retrogression,—its writers were not able to retain or comprehend all that had been given them.”Martineau, Seat of Authority, 291—“Writers not only barbarous in speech and rude in art, but too often puerile in conception, passionate in temper, and credulous in belief. The legends of Papias, the visions of Hermas, the imbecility of Irenæus, the fury of Tertullian, the rancor and indelicacy of Jerome, the stormy intolerance of Augustine, cannot fail to startle and repel the student; and, if he turns to the milder Hippolytus, he is introduced to a brood of thirty heresies which sadly dissipate his dream of the unity of the church.”We can apply to the writers of the second century the question of R. G. Ingersoll in the Shakespeare-Bacon controversy:“Is it possible that Bacon left the best children of his brain on Shakespeare's doorstep, and kept only the deformed ones at home?”On the Apocryphal Gospels, see Cowper, in Strivings for the Faith, 73-108.(d) The theory requires us to believe in a moral anomaly, namely, that a faithful disciple of Christ in the second century could be guilty of fabricating a life of his master, and of claiming authority for it on the ground that the author had been a companion of Christ or his apostles.“A genial set of Jesuitical religionists”—with mind and heart enough to write the gospel according to John, and who at the same time have cold-blooded sagacity enough to keep out of their writings every trace of the developments of church authority belonging to the second century. The newly discovered“Teaching of the Twelve Apostles,”if dating from the early part of that century, shows that such a combination is impossible. The critical theories assume that one who knew Christ as a man could not possibly also regard him as God. Lowrie, Doctrine of St. John, 12—“If St. John wrote, it is not possible to say that the genius of St. Paul foisted upon the church a conception which was strange to the original apostles.”Fairbairn has well shown that if Christianity had been simply the ethical teaching of the human Jesus, it would have vanished from the earth like the sects of the Pharisees and of the Sadducees; if on the other hand it had been simply the Logos-doctrine, the doctrine of a divine Christ, it would have passed away like the speculations of Plato or Aristotle; because Christianity unites the idea of the eternal Son of God with that of the incarnate Son of man, it is fitted to be and it has become an universal religion; see Fairbairn, Philosophy of the Christian Religion, 4, 15—“Without the personal charm of the historical Jesus, the œcumenical creeds would never have been either formulated or tolerated, and without the metaphysical conception of Christ the Christian religion would long ago have ceased to live.... It is not Jesus of Nazareth who has so powerfully entered into history: it is the deified Christ who has been believed, loved and obeyed as the Savior of the world.... The two parts of Christian doctrine are combined in the one name‘Jesus Christ.’”(e) This theory cannot account for the universal acceptance of the gospels at the end of the second century, among widely separated communities where reverence for writings of the apostles was a mark of orthodoxy, and where the Gnostic heresies would have made new documents instantly liable to suspicion and searching examination.Abbot, Genuineness of the Fourth Gospel, 52, 80, 88, 89. The Johannine doctrine of the Logos, if first propounded in the middle of the second century, would have ensured the instant rejection of that gospel by the Gnostics, who ascribed creation, not to the Logos, but to successive“Æons.”How did the Gnostics, without“peep or mutter,”come to accept as genuine what had only in their own time been first sprung upon the[pg 160]churches? While Basilides (130) and Valentinus (150), the Gnostics, both quote from the fourth gospel, they do not dispute its genuineness or suggest that it was of recent origin. Bruce, in his Apologetics, says of Baur“He believed in the all-sufficiency of the Hegelian theory of development through antagonism. He saw tendency everywhere. Anything additional, putting more contents into the person and teaching of Jesus than suits the initial stage of development, must be reckoned spurious. If we find Jesus in any of the gospels claiming to be a supernatural being, such texts can with the utmost confidence be set aside as spurious, for such a thought could not belong to the initial stage of Christianity.”But such a conception certainly existed in the second century, and it directly antagonized the speculations of the Gnostics. F. W. Farrar, onHebrews 1:2—“The wordæonwas used by the later Gnostics to describe the various emanations by which they tried at once to widen and to bridge over the gulf between the human and the divine. Over that imaginary chasm John threw the arch of the Incarnation, when he wrote:‘The Word became flesh’(John 1:14).”A document which so contradicted the Gnostic teachings could not in the second century have been quoted by the Gnostics themselves without dispute as to its genuineness, if it had not been long recognized in the churches as a work of the apostle John.(f) The acknowledgment by Baur that the epistles to the Romans, Galatians and Corinthians were written by Paul in the first century is fatal to his theory, since these epistles testify not only to miracles at the period at which they were written, but to the main events of Jesus' life and to the miracle of his resurrection, as facts already long acknowledged in the Christian church.Baur, Paulus der Apostel, 276—“There never has been the slightest suspicion of unauthenticity cast on these epistles (Gal., 1 and 2 Cor., Rom.), and they bear so incontestably the character of Pauline originality, that there is no conceivable ground for the assertion of critical doubts in their case.”Baur, in discussing the appearance of Christ to Paul on the way to Damascus, explains the outward from the inward: Paul translated intense and sudden conviction of the truth of the Christian religion into an outward scene. But this cannot explain the hearing of the outward sound by Paul's companions. On the evidential value of the epistles here mentioned, see Lorimer, in Strivings for the Faith, 109-144; Howson, in Present Day Tracts, 4: no. 24; Row, Bampton Lectures for 1877:289-356. On Baur and his theory in general, see Weiss, Life of Jesus, 1:157sq.; Christlieb, Mod. Doubt and Christ. Belief, 504-549; Hutton, Essays, 1:176-215; Theol. Eclectic, 5:1-42; Auberlen, Div. Revelation; Bib. Sac., 19:75; Answers to Supernatural Religion, in Westcott, Hist. N. T. Canon, 4th ed., Introd.; Lightfoot, in Contemporary Rev., Dec. 1874, and Jan. 1875; Salmon, Introd. to N. T., 6-31; A. B. Bruce, in Present Day Tracts, 7: no. 38.

The Epistle to the Hebrews, the style of which is so unlike that of the Apostle Paul, was possibly written by Apollos, who was an Alexandrian Jew,“a learned man”and“mighty in the Scriptures”(Acts 18:24); but it may notwithstanding have been written at the suggestion and under the direction of Paul, and so be essentially Pauline. A. C. Kendrick, in American Commentary on Hebrews, points out that while the style of Paul is prevailingly dialectic, and only in rapt moments becomes rhetorical or poetic, the style of the Epistle to the Hebrews is prevailingly rhetorical, is free from anacolutha, and is always dominated by emotion. He holds that these characteristics point to Apollos as its author. Contrast also Paul's method of quoting the O. T.:“it is written”(Rom. 11:8; 1 Cor. 1:31; Gal. 3:10)with that of the Hebrews:“he saith”(8:5, 13),“he[pg 153]hath said”(4:4). Paul quotes the O. T. fifty or sixty times, but never in this latter way.Heb. 2:3—“which having at the first been spoken by the Lord, was confirmed unto us by them that heard”—shows that the writer did not receive the gospel at first hand. Luther and Calvin rightly saw in this a decisive proof that Paul was not the author, for he always insisted on the primary and independent character of his gospel. Harnack formerly thought the epistle written by Barnabas to Christians at Rome, A. D. 81-96. More recently however he attributes it to Priscilla, the wife of Aquila, or to their joint authorship. The majesty of its diction, however, seems unfavorable to this view. William T. C. Hanna:“The words of the author ... are marshalled grandly, and move with the tread of an army, or with the swell of a tidal wave”; see Franklin Johnson, Quotations in N. T. from O. T., xii. Plumptre, Introd. to N. T., 37, and in Expositor, Vol. I, regards the author of this epistle as the same with that of the Apocryphal Wisdom of Solomon, the latter being composed before, the former after, the writer's conversion to Christianity. Perhaps our safest conclusion is that of Origen:“God only knows who wrote it.”Harnack however remarks:“The time in which our ancient Christian literature, the N. T. included, was considered as a web of delusions and falsifications, is past. The oldest literature of the church is, in its main points, and in most of its details, true and trustworthy.”See articles on Hebrews, in Smith's and in Hastings' Bible Dictionaries.(e) As to 2 Peter, Jude, and 2 and 3 John, the epistles most frequently held to be spurious, we may say that, although we have no conclusive external evidence earlier than A. D. 160, and in the case of 2 Peter none earlier than A. D. 230-250, we may fairly urge in favor of their genuineness not only their internal characteristics of literary style and moral value, but also the general acceptance of them all since the third century as the actual productions of the men or class of men whose names they bear.Firmilianus (250), Bishop of Cæsarea in Cappadocia, is the first clear witness to 2 Peter. Origen (230) names it, but, in naming it, admits that its genuineness is questioned. The Council of Laodicea (372) first received it into the Canon. With this very gradual recognition and acceptance of 2 Peter, compare the loss of the later works of Aristotle for a hundred and fifty years after his death, and their recognition as genuine so soon as they were recovered from the cellar of the family of Neleus in Asia; De Wette's first publication of certain letters of Luther after the lapse of three hundred years, yet without occasioning doubt as to their genuineness; or the concealment of Milton's Treatise on Christian Doctrine, among the lumber of the State Paper Office in London, from 1677 to 1823; see Mair, Christian Evidences, 95. Sir William Hamilton complained that there were treatises of Cudworth, Berkeley and Collier, still lying unpublished and even unknown to their editors, biographers and fellow metaphysicians, but yet of the highest interest and importance; see Mansel, Letters, Lectures and Reviews, 381; Archibald, The Bible Verified, 27. 2 Peter was probably sent from the East shortly before Peter's martyrdom; distance and persecution may have prevented its rapid circulation in other countries. Sagebeer, The Bible in Court, 114—“A ledger may have been lost, or its authenticity for a long time doubted, but when once it is discovered and proved, it is as trustworthy as any other part of theres gestæ.”See Plumptre, Epistles of Peter, Introd., 73-81; Alford on 2 Peter, 4: Prolegomena, 157; Westcott, on Canon, in Smith's Bib. Dict., 1:370, 373; Blunt, Dict. Doct. and Hist. Theol., art.: Canon.It is urged by those who doubt the genuineness of 2 Peter that the epistle speaks of“your apostles”(3:2), just asJude 17speaks of“the apostles,”as if the writer did not number himself among them. But 2 Peter begins with“Simon Peter, a servant and apostle of Jesus Christ,”and Jude,“brother of James”(verse 1)was a brother of our Lord, but not an apostle. Hovey, Introd. to N. T., xxxi—“The earliest passage manifestly based upon 2 Peter appears to be in the so-called Second Epistle of the Roman Clement, 16:3, which however is now understood to be a Christian homily from the middle of the second century.”Origen (born 186) testifies that Peter left one epistle,“and perhaps a second, for that is disputed.”He also says:“John wrote the Apocalypse, and an epistle of very few lines; and, it may be, a second and a third; since all do not admit them to be genuine.”He quotes also from James and from Jude, adding that their canonicity was doubted.[pg 154]Harnack regards 1 Peter, 2 Peter, James, and Jude, as written respectively about 160, 170, 130, and 130, but not by the men to whom they are ascribed—the ascriptions to these authors being later additions. Hort remarks:“If I were asked, I should say that the balance of the argument was against 2 Peter, but the moment I had done so I should begin to think I might be in the wrong.”Sanday, Oracles of God, 73 note, considers the arguments in favor of 2 Peter unconvincing, but also the arguments against. He cannot get beyond anon liquet. He refers to Salmon, Introd. to N. T., 529-559, ed. 4, as expressing his own view. But the later conclusions of Sanday are more radical. In his Bampton Lectures on Inspiration, 348, 399, he says: 2 Peter“is probably at least to this extent a counterfeit, that it appears under a name which is not that of its true author.”Chase, in Hastings' Bib. Dict., 3:806-817, says that“the first piece ofcertainevidence as to 2 Peter is the passage from Origen quoted by Eusebius, though it hardly admits of doubt that the Epistle was known to Clement of Alexandria.... We find no trace of the epistle in the period when the tradition of apostolic days was still living.... It was not the work of the apostle but of the second century ... put forward without any sinister motive ... the personation of the apostle an obvious literary device rather than a religious or controversial fraud. The adoption of such a verdict can cause perplexity only when the Lord's promise of guidance to his Church is regarded as a charter of infallibility.”Against this verdict we would urge the dignity and spiritual value of 2 Peter—internal evidence which in our judgment causes the balance to incline in favor of its apostolic authorship.(f) Upon no other hypothesis than that of their genuineness can the general acceptance of these four minor epistles since the third century, and of all the other books of the New Testament since the middle of the second century, be satisfactorily accounted for. If they had been mere collections of floating legends, they could not have secured wide circulation as sacred books for which Christians must answer with their blood. If they had been forgeries, the churches at large could neither have been deceived as to their previous non-existence, nor have been induced unanimously to pretend that they were ancient and genuine. Inasmuch, however, as other accounts of their origin, inconsistent with their genuineness, are now current, we proceed to examine more at length the most important of these opposing views.The genuineness of the New Testament as a whole would still be demonstrable, even if doubt should still attach to one or two of its books. It does not matter that 2nd Alcibiades was not written by Plato, or Pericles by Shakespeare. The Council of Carthage in 397 gave a place in the Canon to the O. T. Apocrypha, but the Reformers tore it out. Zwingli said of the Revelation:“It is not a Biblical book,”and Luther spoke slightingly of the Epistle of James. The judgment of Christendom at large is more trustworthy than the private impressions of any single Christian scholar. To hold the books of the N. T. to be written in the second century by other than those whose names they bear is to hold, not simply to forgery, but to a conspiracy of forgery. There must have been several forgers at work, and, since their writings wonderfully agree, there must have been collusion among them. Yet these able men have been forgotten, while the names of far feebler writers of the second century have been preserved.G. F. Wright, Scientific Aspects of Christian Evidences, 343—“In civil law there are‘statutes of limitations’which provide that the general acknowledgment of a purported fact for a certain period shall be considered as conclusive evidence of it. If, for example, a man has remained in undisturbed possession of land for a certain number of years, it is presumed that he has a valid claim to it, and no one is allowed to dispute his claim.”Mair, Evidences, 99—“We probably have not a tenth part of the evidence upon which the early churches accepted the N. T. books as the genuine productions of their authors. We have only their verdict.”Wynne, in Literature of the Second Century, 58—“Those who gave up the Scriptures were looked on by their fellow Christians as‘traditores,’traitors, who had basely yielded up what they ought to have treasured as dearer than life. But all their books were not equally sacred. Some[pg 155]were essential, and some were non-essential to the faith. Hence arose the distinction betweencanonicalandnon-canonical. The general consciousness of Christians grew into a distinct registration.”Such registration is entitled to the highest respect, and lays the burden of proof upon the objector. See Alexander, Christ and Christianity, Introduction; Hovey, General Introduction to American Commentary on N. T.D. Rationalistic Theories as to the origin of the gospels. These are attempts to eliminate the miraculous element from the New Testament records, and to reconstruct the sacred history upon principles of naturalism.Against them we urge the general objection that they are unscientific in their principle and method. To set out in an examination of the New Testament documents with the assumption that all history is a mere natural development, and that miracles are therefore impossible, is to make history a matter, not of testimony, but ofa priorispeculation. It indeed renders any history of Christ and his apostles impossible, since the witnesses whose testimony with regard to miracles is discredited can no longer be considered worthy of credence in their account of Christ's life or doctrine.In Germany, half a century ago,“a man was famous according as he had lifted up axes upon the thick trees”(Ps. 74:5, A. V.), just as among the American Indians he was not counted a man who could not show his scalps. The critics fortunately scalped each other; see Tyler, Theology of Greek Poets, 79—on Homer. Nicoll, The Church's One Foundation, 15—“Like the mummers of old, sceptical critics send one before them with a broom to sweep the stage clear of everything for their drama. If we assume at the threshold of the gospel study that everything of the nature of miracle is impossible, then the specific questions are decided before the criticism begins to operate in earnest.”Matthew Arnold:“Our popular religion at present conceives the birth, ministry and death of Christ as altogether steeped in prodigy, brimful of miracle,—andmiracles do not happen.”This presupposition influences the investigations of Kuenen, and of A. E. Abbott, in his article on the Gospels in the Encyc. Britannica. We give special attention to four of the theories based upon this assumption.1st. The Myth-theory of Strauss (1808-1874).According to this view, the gospels are crystallizations into story of Messianic ideas which had for several generations filled the minds of imaginative men in Palestine. The myth is a narrative in which such ideas are unconsciously clothed, and from which the element of intentional and deliberate deception is absent.This early view of Strauss, which has become identified with his name, was exchanged in late years for a more advanced view which extended the meaning of the word“myths”so as to include all narratives that spring out of a theological idea, and it admitted the existence of“pious frauds”in the gospels. Baur, he says, first convinced him that the author of the fourth gospel had“not unfrequently composed mere fables, knowing them to be mere fictions.”The animating spirit of both the old view and the new is the same. Strauss says:“We know with certainty what Jesus wasnot, and what he hasnotdone, namely, nothing superhuman and supernatural.”“No gospel can claim that degree of historic credibility that would be required in order to make us debase our reason to the point of believing miracles.”He calls the resurrection of Christ“ein weltgeschichtlicher Humbug.”“If the gospels are really historical documents, we cannot exclude miracle from the life-story of Jesus;”see Strauss, Life of Jesus, 17; New Life of Jesus, 1: preface, xii. Vatke, Einleitung in A. T., 210, 211, distinguishes the myth from thesagaor legend: The criterion of the pure myth is that the experience is impossible, while thesagais a tradition of remote antiquity; the myth has in it the element only of belief, thesagahas in it an element of history. Sabatier, Philos. Religion, 37—“A myth is false in appearance only. The divine Spirit can avail himself of the fictions of poetry as well as of logical reasonings. When the heart was pure, the veils of fable always allowed the face of truth to shine through. And does not childhood run on into maturity and old age?”[pg 156]It is very certain that childlike love of truth was not the animating spirit of Strauss. On the contrary, his spirit was that of remorseless criticism and of uncompromising hostility to the supernatural. It has been well said that he gathered up all the previous objections of sceptics to the gospel narrative and hurled them in one mass, just as if some Sadducee at the time of Jesus' trial had put all the taunts and gibes, all the buffetings and insults, all the shame and spitting, into one blow delivered straight into the face of the Redeemer. An octogenarian and saintly German lady said unsuspectingly that“somehow she never could get interested”in Strauss's Leben Jesu, which her sceptical son had given her for religious reading. The work was almost altogether destructive, only the last chapter suggesting Strauss's own view of what Jesus was.If Luther's dictum is true that“the heart is the best theologian,”Strauss must be regarded as destitute of the main qualification for his task. Encyc. Britannica, 22:592—“Strauss's mind was almost exclusively analytical and critical, without depth of religious feeling, or philosophical penetration, or historical sympathy. His work was rarely constructive, and, save when he was dealing with a kindred spirit, he failed as a historian, biographer, and critic, strikingly illustrating Goethe's profoundly true principle that loving sympathy is essential for productive criticism.”Pfleiderer, Strauss's Life of Jesus, xix—“Strauss showed that the church formed the mythical traditions about Jesus out of its faith in him as the Messiah; but he did not show how the church came by the faith that Jesus of Nazareth was the Messiah.”See Carpenter, Mental Physiology, 362; Grote, Plato, 1:249.We object to the Myth-theory of Strauss, that(a) The time between the death of Christ and the publication of the gospels was far too short for the growth and consolidation of such mythical histories. Myths, on the contrary, as the Indian, Greek, Roman and Scandinavian instances bear witness, are the slow growth of centuries.(b) The first century was not a century when such formation of myths was possible. Instead of being a credulous and imaginative age, it was an age of historical inquiry and of Sadduceeism in matters of religion.Horace, in Odes 1:34 and 3:6, denounces the neglect and squalor of the heathen temples, and Juvenal, Satire 2:150, says that“Esse aliquid manes et subterranea regna Nec pueri credunt.”Arnold of Rugby:“The idea of men writing mythic histories between the times of Livy and of Tacitus, and of St. Paul mistaking them for realities!”Pilate's sceptical inquiry,“What is truth?”(John 18:38), better represented the age.“The mythical age is past when an idea is presented abstractly—apart from narrative.”The Jewish sect of the Sadducees shows that the rationalistic spirit was not confined to Greeks or Romans. The question of John the Baptist,Mat. 11:3—“Art thou he that cometh, or look we for another?”and our Lord's answer,Mat. 11:4, 5—“Go and tell John the thing which ye hear and see: the blind receive their sight ... the dead are raised up,”show that the Jews expected miracles to be wrought by the Messiah; yetJohn 10:41—“John indeed did no sign”shows also no irresistible inclination to invest popular teachers with miraculous powers; see E. G. Robinson, Christian Evidences, 22; Westcott, Com. on John 10:41; Rogers, Superhuman Origin of the Bible, 61; Cox, Miracles, 50.(c) The gospels cannot be a mythical outgrowth of Jewish ideas and expectations, because, in their main features, they run directly counter to these ideas and expectations. The sullen and exclusive nationalism of the Jews could not have given rise to a gospel for all nations, nor could their expectations of a temporal monarch have led to the story of a suffering Messiah.The O. T. Apocrypha shows how narrow was the outlook of the Jews. 2 Esdras 6:55, 56 says the Almighty has made the world“foroursakes”; other peoples, though they“also come from Adam,”to the Eternal“are nothing, but be like unto spittle.”The whole multitude of them are only, before him,“like a single foul drop that oozes out of a cask”(C. Geikie, in S. S. Times). Christ's kingdom differed from that which the Jews expected, both in itsspiritualityand itsuniversality(Bruce, Apologetics, 3). There was no missionary impulse in the heathen world; on the other hand,[pg 157]it was blasphemy for an ancient tribesman to make known his god to an outsider (Nash, Ethics and Revelation, 106). The Apocryphal gospels show what sort of myths the N. T. age would have elaborated: Out of a demoniac young woman Satan is said to depart in the form of a young man (Bernard, in Literature of the Second Century, 99-136).(d) The belief and propagation of such myths are inconsistent with what we know of the sober characters and self-sacrificing lives of the apostles.(e) The mythical theory cannot account for the acceptance of the gospels among the Gentiles, who had none of the Jewish ideas and expectations.(f) It cannot explain Christianity itself, with its belief in Christ's crucifixion and resurrection, and the ordinances which commemorate these facts.(d) Witness Thomas's doubting, and Paul's shipwrecks and scourgings.Cf.2 Pet. 1:16—οὐ γὰρ σεσοφισμένοις μύθοις ἐξακολουθήσαντες =“we have not been on the false track of myths artificially elaborated.”See F. W. Farrar, Witness of History to Christ, 49-88. (e) See the two books entitled: If the Gospel Narratives are Mythical,—What Then? and, But How,—if the Gospels are Historic? (f) As the existence of the American Republic is proof that there was once a Revolutionary War, so the existence of Christianity is proof of the death of Christ. The change from the seventh day to the first, in Sabbath observance, could never have come about in a nation so Sabbatarian, had not the first day been the celebration of an actual resurrection. Like the Jewish Passover and our own Independence Day, Baptism and the Lord's Supper cannot be accounted for, except as monuments and remembrances of historical facts at the beginning of the Christian church. See Muir, on the Lord's Supper an abiding Witness to the Death of Christ, In Present Day Tracts, 6: no. 36. On Strauss and his theory, see Hackett, in Christian Rev., 48; Weiss, Life of Jesus, 155-163; Christlieb, Mod. Doubt and Christ. Belief, 379-425; Maclear, in Strivings for the Faith, 1-136; H. B. Smith, in Faith and Philosophy, 442-468; Bayne, Review of Strauss's New Life, in Theol. Eclectic, 4:74; Row, in Lectures on Modern Scepticism, 305-360; Bibliotheca Sacra, Oct. 1871: art. by Prof. W. A. Stevens; Burgess, Antiquity and Unity of Man, 263, 264; Curtis on Inspiration, 62-67; Alexander, Christ and Christianity, 92-126; A. P. Peabody, in Smith's Bible Dict., 2:954-958.2nd. The Tendency-theory of Baur (1792-1860).This maintains that the gospels originated in the middle of the second century, and were written under assumed names as a means of reconciling opposing Jewish and Gentile tendencies in the church.“These great national tendencies find their satisfaction, not in events corresponding to them, but in the elaboration of conscious fictions.”Baur dates the fourth gospel at 160-170 A. D.; Matthew at 130; Luke at 150; Mark at 150-160. Baur never inquires who Christ was. He turns his attention from the facts to the documents. If the documents be proved unhistorical, there is no need of examining the facts, for there are no facts to examine. He indicates the presupposition of his investigations, when he says:“The principal argument for the later origin of the gospels must forever remain this, that separately, and still more when taken together, they give an account of the life of Jesus which involves impossibilities”—i. e., miracles. He would therefore remove their authorship far enough from Jesus' time to permit regarding the miracles as inventions. Baur holds that in Christ were united the universalistic spirit of the new religion,andthe particularistic form of the Jewish Messianic idea; some of his disciples laid emphasis on the one, some on the other; hence first conflict, but finally reconciliation; see statement of the Tübingen theory and of the way in which Baur was led to it, in Bruce, Apologetics, 360. E. G. Robinson interprets Baur as follows:“Paul = Protestant; Peter = sacramentarian; James = ethical; Paul + Peter + James = Christianity. Protestant preaching should dwell more on the ethical—cases of conscience—and less on mere doctrine, such as regeneration and justification.”[pg 158]Baur was a stranger to the needs of his own soul, and so to the real character of the gospel. One of his friends and advisers wrote, after his death, in terms that were meant to be laudatory:“His was a completely objective nature. No trace of personal needs or struggles is discernible in connection with his investigations of Christianity.”The estimate of posterity is probably expressed in the judgment with regard to the Tübingen school by Harnack:“Thepossiblepicture it sketched was not thereal, and the key with which it attempted to solve all problems did not suffice for the most simple.... The Tübingen views have indeed been compelled to undergo very large modifications. As regards the development of the church in the second century, it may safely be said that the hypotheses of the Tübingen school have proved themselves everywhere inadequate, very erroneous, and are to-day held by only a very few scholars.”See Baur, Die kanonischen Evangelien; Canonical Gospels (Eng. transl.), 530; Supernatural Religion, 1:212-444 and vol. 2: Pfleiderer, Hibbert Lectures for 1885. For accounts of Baur's position, see Herzog, Encyclopädie, art.: Baur; Clarke's transl. of Hase's Life of Jesus, 34-36; Farrar, Critical History of Free Thought, 227, 228.We object to the Tendency-theory of Baur, that(a) The destructive criticism to which it subjects the gospels, if applied to secular documents, would deprive us of any certain knowledge of the past, and render all history impossible.The assumption of artifice is itself unfavorable to a candid examination of the documents. A perverse acuteness can descry evidences of a hiddenanimusin the most simple and ingenuous literary productions. Instance the philosophical interpretation of“Jack and Jill.”(b) The antagonistic doctrinal tendencies which it professes to find in the several gospels are more satisfactorily explained as varied but consistent aspects of the one system of truth held by all the apostles.Baur exaggerates the doctrinal and official differences between the leading apostles. Peter was not simply a Judaizing Christian, but was the first preacher to the Gentiles, and his doctrine appears to have been subsequently influenced to a considerable extent by Paul's (see Plumptre on 1 Pet., 68-69). Paul was not an exclusively Hellenizing Christian, but invariably addressed the gospel to the Jews before he turned to the Gentiles. The evangelists give pictures of Jesus from different points of view. As the Parisian sculptor constructs his bust with the aid of a dozen photographs of his subject, all taken from different points of view, so from the four portraits furnished us by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John we are to construct the solid and symmetrical life of Christ. The deeper reality which makes reconciliation of the different views possible is the actual historical Christ. Marcus Dods, Expositor's Greek Testament, 1:675—“They are not two Christs, but one, which the four Gospels depict: diverse as the profile and front face, but one another's complement rather than contradiction.”Godet, Introd. to Gospel Collection, 272—Matthew shows the greatness of Jesus—his full-length portrait; Mark his indefatigable activity; Luke his beneficent compassion; John his essential divinity. Matthew first wrote Aramæan Logia. This was translated into Greek and completed by a narrative of the ministry of Jesus for the Greek churches founded by Paul. This translation was not made by Matthew and did not make use of Mark (217-224). E. D. Burton: Matthew = fulfilment of past prophecy; Mark = manifestation of present power. Matthew is argument from prophecy; Mark is argument from miracle. Matthew, as prophecy, made most impression on Jewish readers; Mark, as power, was best adapted to Gentiles. Prof. Burton holds Mark to be based upon oral tradition alone; Matthew upon his Logia (his real earlier Gospel) and other fragmentary notes; while Luke has a fuller origin in manuscripts and in Mark. See Aids to the Study of German Theology, 148-155; F. W. Farrar, Witness of History to Christ, 61.(c) It is incredible that productions of such literary power and lofty religious teaching as the gospels should have sprung up in the middle of the second century, or that, so springing up, they should have been published under assumed names and for covert ends.[pg 159]The general character of the literature of the second century is illustrated by Ignatius's fanatical desire for martyrdom, the value ascribed by Hermas to ascetic rigor, the insipid allegories of Barnabas, Clement of Rome's belief in the phœnix, and the absurdities of the Apocryphal Gospels. The author of the fourth gospel among the writers of the second century would have been a mountain among mole-hills. Wynne, Literature of the Second Century, 60—“The apostolic and the sub-apostolic writers differ from each other as a nugget of pure gold differs from a block of quartz with veins of the precious metal gleaming through it.”Dorner, Hist. Doct. Person Christ, 1:1:92—“Instead of the writers of the second century marking an advance on the apostolic age, or developing the germ given them by the apostles, the second century shows great retrogression,—its writers were not able to retain or comprehend all that had been given them.”Martineau, Seat of Authority, 291—“Writers not only barbarous in speech and rude in art, but too often puerile in conception, passionate in temper, and credulous in belief. The legends of Papias, the visions of Hermas, the imbecility of Irenæus, the fury of Tertullian, the rancor and indelicacy of Jerome, the stormy intolerance of Augustine, cannot fail to startle and repel the student; and, if he turns to the milder Hippolytus, he is introduced to a brood of thirty heresies which sadly dissipate his dream of the unity of the church.”We can apply to the writers of the second century the question of R. G. Ingersoll in the Shakespeare-Bacon controversy:“Is it possible that Bacon left the best children of his brain on Shakespeare's doorstep, and kept only the deformed ones at home?”On the Apocryphal Gospels, see Cowper, in Strivings for the Faith, 73-108.(d) The theory requires us to believe in a moral anomaly, namely, that a faithful disciple of Christ in the second century could be guilty of fabricating a life of his master, and of claiming authority for it on the ground that the author had been a companion of Christ or his apostles.“A genial set of Jesuitical religionists”—with mind and heart enough to write the gospel according to John, and who at the same time have cold-blooded sagacity enough to keep out of their writings every trace of the developments of church authority belonging to the second century. The newly discovered“Teaching of the Twelve Apostles,”if dating from the early part of that century, shows that such a combination is impossible. The critical theories assume that one who knew Christ as a man could not possibly also regard him as God. Lowrie, Doctrine of St. John, 12—“If St. John wrote, it is not possible to say that the genius of St. Paul foisted upon the church a conception which was strange to the original apostles.”Fairbairn has well shown that if Christianity had been simply the ethical teaching of the human Jesus, it would have vanished from the earth like the sects of the Pharisees and of the Sadducees; if on the other hand it had been simply the Logos-doctrine, the doctrine of a divine Christ, it would have passed away like the speculations of Plato or Aristotle; because Christianity unites the idea of the eternal Son of God with that of the incarnate Son of man, it is fitted to be and it has become an universal religion; see Fairbairn, Philosophy of the Christian Religion, 4, 15—“Without the personal charm of the historical Jesus, the œcumenical creeds would never have been either formulated or tolerated, and without the metaphysical conception of Christ the Christian religion would long ago have ceased to live.... It is not Jesus of Nazareth who has so powerfully entered into history: it is the deified Christ who has been believed, loved and obeyed as the Savior of the world.... The two parts of Christian doctrine are combined in the one name‘Jesus Christ.’”(e) This theory cannot account for the universal acceptance of the gospels at the end of the second century, among widely separated communities where reverence for writings of the apostles was a mark of orthodoxy, and where the Gnostic heresies would have made new documents instantly liable to suspicion and searching examination.Abbot, Genuineness of the Fourth Gospel, 52, 80, 88, 89. The Johannine doctrine of the Logos, if first propounded in the middle of the second century, would have ensured the instant rejection of that gospel by the Gnostics, who ascribed creation, not to the Logos, but to successive“Æons.”How did the Gnostics, without“peep or mutter,”come to accept as genuine what had only in their own time been first sprung upon the[pg 160]churches? While Basilides (130) and Valentinus (150), the Gnostics, both quote from the fourth gospel, they do not dispute its genuineness or suggest that it was of recent origin. Bruce, in his Apologetics, says of Baur“He believed in the all-sufficiency of the Hegelian theory of development through antagonism. He saw tendency everywhere. Anything additional, putting more contents into the person and teaching of Jesus than suits the initial stage of development, must be reckoned spurious. If we find Jesus in any of the gospels claiming to be a supernatural being, such texts can with the utmost confidence be set aside as spurious, for such a thought could not belong to the initial stage of Christianity.”But such a conception certainly existed in the second century, and it directly antagonized the speculations of the Gnostics. F. W. Farrar, onHebrews 1:2—“The wordæonwas used by the later Gnostics to describe the various emanations by which they tried at once to widen and to bridge over the gulf between the human and the divine. Over that imaginary chasm John threw the arch of the Incarnation, when he wrote:‘The Word became flesh’(John 1:14).”A document which so contradicted the Gnostic teachings could not in the second century have been quoted by the Gnostics themselves without dispute as to its genuineness, if it had not been long recognized in the churches as a work of the apostle John.(f) The acknowledgment by Baur that the epistles to the Romans, Galatians and Corinthians were written by Paul in the first century is fatal to his theory, since these epistles testify not only to miracles at the period at which they were written, but to the main events of Jesus' life and to the miracle of his resurrection, as facts already long acknowledged in the Christian church.Baur, Paulus der Apostel, 276—“There never has been the slightest suspicion of unauthenticity cast on these epistles (Gal., 1 and 2 Cor., Rom.), and they bear so incontestably the character of Pauline originality, that there is no conceivable ground for the assertion of critical doubts in their case.”Baur, in discussing the appearance of Christ to Paul on the way to Damascus, explains the outward from the inward: Paul translated intense and sudden conviction of the truth of the Christian religion into an outward scene. But this cannot explain the hearing of the outward sound by Paul's companions. On the evidential value of the epistles here mentioned, see Lorimer, in Strivings for the Faith, 109-144; Howson, in Present Day Tracts, 4: no. 24; Row, Bampton Lectures for 1877:289-356. On Baur and his theory in general, see Weiss, Life of Jesus, 1:157sq.; Christlieb, Mod. Doubt and Christ. Belief, 504-549; Hutton, Essays, 1:176-215; Theol. Eclectic, 5:1-42; Auberlen, Div. Revelation; Bib. Sac., 19:75; Answers to Supernatural Religion, in Westcott, Hist. N. T. Canon, 4th ed., Introd.; Lightfoot, in Contemporary Rev., Dec. 1874, and Jan. 1875; Salmon, Introd. to N. T., 6-31; A. B. Bruce, in Present Day Tracts, 7: no. 38.

The Epistle to the Hebrews, the style of which is so unlike that of the Apostle Paul, was possibly written by Apollos, who was an Alexandrian Jew,“a learned man”and“mighty in the Scriptures”(Acts 18:24); but it may notwithstanding have been written at the suggestion and under the direction of Paul, and so be essentially Pauline. A. C. Kendrick, in American Commentary on Hebrews, points out that while the style of Paul is prevailingly dialectic, and only in rapt moments becomes rhetorical or poetic, the style of the Epistle to the Hebrews is prevailingly rhetorical, is free from anacolutha, and is always dominated by emotion. He holds that these characteristics point to Apollos as its author. Contrast also Paul's method of quoting the O. T.:“it is written”(Rom. 11:8; 1 Cor. 1:31; Gal. 3:10)with that of the Hebrews:“he saith”(8:5, 13),“he[pg 153]hath said”(4:4). Paul quotes the O. T. fifty or sixty times, but never in this latter way.Heb. 2:3—“which having at the first been spoken by the Lord, was confirmed unto us by them that heard”—shows that the writer did not receive the gospel at first hand. Luther and Calvin rightly saw in this a decisive proof that Paul was not the author, for he always insisted on the primary and independent character of his gospel. Harnack formerly thought the epistle written by Barnabas to Christians at Rome, A. D. 81-96. More recently however he attributes it to Priscilla, the wife of Aquila, or to their joint authorship. The majesty of its diction, however, seems unfavorable to this view. William T. C. Hanna:“The words of the author ... are marshalled grandly, and move with the tread of an army, or with the swell of a tidal wave”; see Franklin Johnson, Quotations in N. T. from O. T., xii. Plumptre, Introd. to N. T., 37, and in Expositor, Vol. I, regards the author of this epistle as the same with that of the Apocryphal Wisdom of Solomon, the latter being composed before, the former after, the writer's conversion to Christianity. Perhaps our safest conclusion is that of Origen:“God only knows who wrote it.”Harnack however remarks:“The time in which our ancient Christian literature, the N. T. included, was considered as a web of delusions and falsifications, is past. The oldest literature of the church is, in its main points, and in most of its details, true and trustworthy.”See articles on Hebrews, in Smith's and in Hastings' Bible Dictionaries.(e) As to 2 Peter, Jude, and 2 and 3 John, the epistles most frequently held to be spurious, we may say that, although we have no conclusive external evidence earlier than A. D. 160, and in the case of 2 Peter none earlier than A. D. 230-250, we may fairly urge in favor of their genuineness not only their internal characteristics of literary style and moral value, but also the general acceptance of them all since the third century as the actual productions of the men or class of men whose names they bear.Firmilianus (250), Bishop of Cæsarea in Cappadocia, is the first clear witness to 2 Peter. Origen (230) names it, but, in naming it, admits that its genuineness is questioned. The Council of Laodicea (372) first received it into the Canon. With this very gradual recognition and acceptance of 2 Peter, compare the loss of the later works of Aristotle for a hundred and fifty years after his death, and their recognition as genuine so soon as they were recovered from the cellar of the family of Neleus in Asia; De Wette's first publication of certain letters of Luther after the lapse of three hundred years, yet without occasioning doubt as to their genuineness; or the concealment of Milton's Treatise on Christian Doctrine, among the lumber of the State Paper Office in London, from 1677 to 1823; see Mair, Christian Evidences, 95. Sir William Hamilton complained that there were treatises of Cudworth, Berkeley and Collier, still lying unpublished and even unknown to their editors, biographers and fellow metaphysicians, but yet of the highest interest and importance; see Mansel, Letters, Lectures and Reviews, 381; Archibald, The Bible Verified, 27. 2 Peter was probably sent from the East shortly before Peter's martyrdom; distance and persecution may have prevented its rapid circulation in other countries. Sagebeer, The Bible in Court, 114—“A ledger may have been lost, or its authenticity for a long time doubted, but when once it is discovered and proved, it is as trustworthy as any other part of theres gestæ.”See Plumptre, Epistles of Peter, Introd., 73-81; Alford on 2 Peter, 4: Prolegomena, 157; Westcott, on Canon, in Smith's Bib. Dict., 1:370, 373; Blunt, Dict. Doct. and Hist. Theol., art.: Canon.It is urged by those who doubt the genuineness of 2 Peter that the epistle speaks of“your apostles”(3:2), just asJude 17speaks of“the apostles,”as if the writer did not number himself among them. But 2 Peter begins with“Simon Peter, a servant and apostle of Jesus Christ,”and Jude,“brother of James”(verse 1)was a brother of our Lord, but not an apostle. Hovey, Introd. to N. T., xxxi—“The earliest passage manifestly based upon 2 Peter appears to be in the so-called Second Epistle of the Roman Clement, 16:3, which however is now understood to be a Christian homily from the middle of the second century.”Origen (born 186) testifies that Peter left one epistle,“and perhaps a second, for that is disputed.”He also says:“John wrote the Apocalypse, and an epistle of very few lines; and, it may be, a second and a third; since all do not admit them to be genuine.”He quotes also from James and from Jude, adding that their canonicity was doubted.[pg 154]Harnack regards 1 Peter, 2 Peter, James, and Jude, as written respectively about 160, 170, 130, and 130, but not by the men to whom they are ascribed—the ascriptions to these authors being later additions. Hort remarks:“If I were asked, I should say that the balance of the argument was against 2 Peter, but the moment I had done so I should begin to think I might be in the wrong.”Sanday, Oracles of God, 73 note, considers the arguments in favor of 2 Peter unconvincing, but also the arguments against. He cannot get beyond anon liquet. He refers to Salmon, Introd. to N. T., 529-559, ed. 4, as expressing his own view. But the later conclusions of Sanday are more radical. In his Bampton Lectures on Inspiration, 348, 399, he says: 2 Peter“is probably at least to this extent a counterfeit, that it appears under a name which is not that of its true author.”Chase, in Hastings' Bib. Dict., 3:806-817, says that“the first piece ofcertainevidence as to 2 Peter is the passage from Origen quoted by Eusebius, though it hardly admits of doubt that the Epistle was known to Clement of Alexandria.... We find no trace of the epistle in the period when the tradition of apostolic days was still living.... It was not the work of the apostle but of the second century ... put forward without any sinister motive ... the personation of the apostle an obvious literary device rather than a religious or controversial fraud. The adoption of such a verdict can cause perplexity only when the Lord's promise of guidance to his Church is regarded as a charter of infallibility.”Against this verdict we would urge the dignity and spiritual value of 2 Peter—internal evidence which in our judgment causes the balance to incline in favor of its apostolic authorship.(f) Upon no other hypothesis than that of their genuineness can the general acceptance of these four minor epistles since the third century, and of all the other books of the New Testament since the middle of the second century, be satisfactorily accounted for. If they had been mere collections of floating legends, they could not have secured wide circulation as sacred books for which Christians must answer with their blood. If they had been forgeries, the churches at large could neither have been deceived as to their previous non-existence, nor have been induced unanimously to pretend that they were ancient and genuine. Inasmuch, however, as other accounts of their origin, inconsistent with their genuineness, are now current, we proceed to examine more at length the most important of these opposing views.The genuineness of the New Testament as a whole would still be demonstrable, even if doubt should still attach to one or two of its books. It does not matter that 2nd Alcibiades was not written by Plato, or Pericles by Shakespeare. The Council of Carthage in 397 gave a place in the Canon to the O. T. Apocrypha, but the Reformers tore it out. Zwingli said of the Revelation:“It is not a Biblical book,”and Luther spoke slightingly of the Epistle of James. The judgment of Christendom at large is more trustworthy than the private impressions of any single Christian scholar. To hold the books of the N. T. to be written in the second century by other than those whose names they bear is to hold, not simply to forgery, but to a conspiracy of forgery. There must have been several forgers at work, and, since their writings wonderfully agree, there must have been collusion among them. Yet these able men have been forgotten, while the names of far feebler writers of the second century have been preserved.G. F. Wright, Scientific Aspects of Christian Evidences, 343—“In civil law there are‘statutes of limitations’which provide that the general acknowledgment of a purported fact for a certain period shall be considered as conclusive evidence of it. If, for example, a man has remained in undisturbed possession of land for a certain number of years, it is presumed that he has a valid claim to it, and no one is allowed to dispute his claim.”Mair, Evidences, 99—“We probably have not a tenth part of the evidence upon which the early churches accepted the N. T. books as the genuine productions of their authors. We have only their verdict.”Wynne, in Literature of the Second Century, 58—“Those who gave up the Scriptures were looked on by their fellow Christians as‘traditores,’traitors, who had basely yielded up what they ought to have treasured as dearer than life. But all their books were not equally sacred. Some[pg 155]were essential, and some were non-essential to the faith. Hence arose the distinction betweencanonicalandnon-canonical. The general consciousness of Christians grew into a distinct registration.”Such registration is entitled to the highest respect, and lays the burden of proof upon the objector. See Alexander, Christ and Christianity, Introduction; Hovey, General Introduction to American Commentary on N. T.D. Rationalistic Theories as to the origin of the gospels. These are attempts to eliminate the miraculous element from the New Testament records, and to reconstruct the sacred history upon principles of naturalism.Against them we urge the general objection that they are unscientific in their principle and method. To set out in an examination of the New Testament documents with the assumption that all history is a mere natural development, and that miracles are therefore impossible, is to make history a matter, not of testimony, but ofa priorispeculation. It indeed renders any history of Christ and his apostles impossible, since the witnesses whose testimony with regard to miracles is discredited can no longer be considered worthy of credence in their account of Christ's life or doctrine.In Germany, half a century ago,“a man was famous according as he had lifted up axes upon the thick trees”(Ps. 74:5, A. V.), just as among the American Indians he was not counted a man who could not show his scalps. The critics fortunately scalped each other; see Tyler, Theology of Greek Poets, 79—on Homer. Nicoll, The Church's One Foundation, 15—“Like the mummers of old, sceptical critics send one before them with a broom to sweep the stage clear of everything for their drama. If we assume at the threshold of the gospel study that everything of the nature of miracle is impossible, then the specific questions are decided before the criticism begins to operate in earnest.”Matthew Arnold:“Our popular religion at present conceives the birth, ministry and death of Christ as altogether steeped in prodigy, brimful of miracle,—andmiracles do not happen.”This presupposition influences the investigations of Kuenen, and of A. E. Abbott, in his article on the Gospels in the Encyc. Britannica. We give special attention to four of the theories based upon this assumption.1st. The Myth-theory of Strauss (1808-1874).According to this view, the gospels are crystallizations into story of Messianic ideas which had for several generations filled the minds of imaginative men in Palestine. The myth is a narrative in which such ideas are unconsciously clothed, and from which the element of intentional and deliberate deception is absent.This early view of Strauss, which has become identified with his name, was exchanged in late years for a more advanced view which extended the meaning of the word“myths”so as to include all narratives that spring out of a theological idea, and it admitted the existence of“pious frauds”in the gospels. Baur, he says, first convinced him that the author of the fourth gospel had“not unfrequently composed mere fables, knowing them to be mere fictions.”The animating spirit of both the old view and the new is the same. Strauss says:“We know with certainty what Jesus wasnot, and what he hasnotdone, namely, nothing superhuman and supernatural.”“No gospel can claim that degree of historic credibility that would be required in order to make us debase our reason to the point of believing miracles.”He calls the resurrection of Christ“ein weltgeschichtlicher Humbug.”“If the gospels are really historical documents, we cannot exclude miracle from the life-story of Jesus;”see Strauss, Life of Jesus, 17; New Life of Jesus, 1: preface, xii. Vatke, Einleitung in A. T., 210, 211, distinguishes the myth from thesagaor legend: The criterion of the pure myth is that the experience is impossible, while thesagais a tradition of remote antiquity; the myth has in it the element only of belief, thesagahas in it an element of history. Sabatier, Philos. Religion, 37—“A myth is false in appearance only. The divine Spirit can avail himself of the fictions of poetry as well as of logical reasonings. When the heart was pure, the veils of fable always allowed the face of truth to shine through. And does not childhood run on into maturity and old age?”[pg 156]It is very certain that childlike love of truth was not the animating spirit of Strauss. On the contrary, his spirit was that of remorseless criticism and of uncompromising hostility to the supernatural. It has been well said that he gathered up all the previous objections of sceptics to the gospel narrative and hurled them in one mass, just as if some Sadducee at the time of Jesus' trial had put all the taunts and gibes, all the buffetings and insults, all the shame and spitting, into one blow delivered straight into the face of the Redeemer. An octogenarian and saintly German lady said unsuspectingly that“somehow she never could get interested”in Strauss's Leben Jesu, which her sceptical son had given her for religious reading. The work was almost altogether destructive, only the last chapter suggesting Strauss's own view of what Jesus was.If Luther's dictum is true that“the heart is the best theologian,”Strauss must be regarded as destitute of the main qualification for his task. Encyc. Britannica, 22:592—“Strauss's mind was almost exclusively analytical and critical, without depth of religious feeling, or philosophical penetration, or historical sympathy. His work was rarely constructive, and, save when he was dealing with a kindred spirit, he failed as a historian, biographer, and critic, strikingly illustrating Goethe's profoundly true principle that loving sympathy is essential for productive criticism.”Pfleiderer, Strauss's Life of Jesus, xix—“Strauss showed that the church formed the mythical traditions about Jesus out of its faith in him as the Messiah; but he did not show how the church came by the faith that Jesus of Nazareth was the Messiah.”See Carpenter, Mental Physiology, 362; Grote, Plato, 1:249.We object to the Myth-theory of Strauss, that(a) The time between the death of Christ and the publication of the gospels was far too short for the growth and consolidation of such mythical histories. Myths, on the contrary, as the Indian, Greek, Roman and Scandinavian instances bear witness, are the slow growth of centuries.(b) The first century was not a century when such formation of myths was possible. Instead of being a credulous and imaginative age, it was an age of historical inquiry and of Sadduceeism in matters of religion.Horace, in Odes 1:34 and 3:6, denounces the neglect and squalor of the heathen temples, and Juvenal, Satire 2:150, says that“Esse aliquid manes et subterranea regna Nec pueri credunt.”Arnold of Rugby:“The idea of men writing mythic histories between the times of Livy and of Tacitus, and of St. Paul mistaking them for realities!”Pilate's sceptical inquiry,“What is truth?”(John 18:38), better represented the age.“The mythical age is past when an idea is presented abstractly—apart from narrative.”The Jewish sect of the Sadducees shows that the rationalistic spirit was not confined to Greeks or Romans. The question of John the Baptist,Mat. 11:3—“Art thou he that cometh, or look we for another?”and our Lord's answer,Mat. 11:4, 5—“Go and tell John the thing which ye hear and see: the blind receive their sight ... the dead are raised up,”show that the Jews expected miracles to be wrought by the Messiah; yetJohn 10:41—“John indeed did no sign”shows also no irresistible inclination to invest popular teachers with miraculous powers; see E. G. Robinson, Christian Evidences, 22; Westcott, Com. on John 10:41; Rogers, Superhuman Origin of the Bible, 61; Cox, Miracles, 50.(c) The gospels cannot be a mythical outgrowth of Jewish ideas and expectations, because, in their main features, they run directly counter to these ideas and expectations. The sullen and exclusive nationalism of the Jews could not have given rise to a gospel for all nations, nor could their expectations of a temporal monarch have led to the story of a suffering Messiah.The O. T. Apocrypha shows how narrow was the outlook of the Jews. 2 Esdras 6:55, 56 says the Almighty has made the world“foroursakes”; other peoples, though they“also come from Adam,”to the Eternal“are nothing, but be like unto spittle.”The whole multitude of them are only, before him,“like a single foul drop that oozes out of a cask”(C. Geikie, in S. S. Times). Christ's kingdom differed from that which the Jews expected, both in itsspiritualityand itsuniversality(Bruce, Apologetics, 3). There was no missionary impulse in the heathen world; on the other hand,[pg 157]it was blasphemy for an ancient tribesman to make known his god to an outsider (Nash, Ethics and Revelation, 106). The Apocryphal gospels show what sort of myths the N. T. age would have elaborated: Out of a demoniac young woman Satan is said to depart in the form of a young man (Bernard, in Literature of the Second Century, 99-136).(d) The belief and propagation of such myths are inconsistent with what we know of the sober characters and self-sacrificing lives of the apostles.(e) The mythical theory cannot account for the acceptance of the gospels among the Gentiles, who had none of the Jewish ideas and expectations.(f) It cannot explain Christianity itself, with its belief in Christ's crucifixion and resurrection, and the ordinances which commemorate these facts.(d) Witness Thomas's doubting, and Paul's shipwrecks and scourgings.Cf.2 Pet. 1:16—οὐ γὰρ σεσοφισμένοις μύθοις ἐξακολουθήσαντες =“we have not been on the false track of myths artificially elaborated.”See F. W. Farrar, Witness of History to Christ, 49-88. (e) See the two books entitled: If the Gospel Narratives are Mythical,—What Then? and, But How,—if the Gospels are Historic? (f) As the existence of the American Republic is proof that there was once a Revolutionary War, so the existence of Christianity is proof of the death of Christ. The change from the seventh day to the first, in Sabbath observance, could never have come about in a nation so Sabbatarian, had not the first day been the celebration of an actual resurrection. Like the Jewish Passover and our own Independence Day, Baptism and the Lord's Supper cannot be accounted for, except as monuments and remembrances of historical facts at the beginning of the Christian church. See Muir, on the Lord's Supper an abiding Witness to the Death of Christ, In Present Day Tracts, 6: no. 36. On Strauss and his theory, see Hackett, in Christian Rev., 48; Weiss, Life of Jesus, 155-163; Christlieb, Mod. Doubt and Christ. Belief, 379-425; Maclear, in Strivings for the Faith, 1-136; H. B. Smith, in Faith and Philosophy, 442-468; Bayne, Review of Strauss's New Life, in Theol. Eclectic, 4:74; Row, in Lectures on Modern Scepticism, 305-360; Bibliotheca Sacra, Oct. 1871: art. by Prof. W. A. Stevens; Burgess, Antiquity and Unity of Man, 263, 264; Curtis on Inspiration, 62-67; Alexander, Christ and Christianity, 92-126; A. P. Peabody, in Smith's Bible Dict., 2:954-958.2nd. The Tendency-theory of Baur (1792-1860).This maintains that the gospels originated in the middle of the second century, and were written under assumed names as a means of reconciling opposing Jewish and Gentile tendencies in the church.“These great national tendencies find their satisfaction, not in events corresponding to them, but in the elaboration of conscious fictions.”Baur dates the fourth gospel at 160-170 A. D.; Matthew at 130; Luke at 150; Mark at 150-160. Baur never inquires who Christ was. He turns his attention from the facts to the documents. If the documents be proved unhistorical, there is no need of examining the facts, for there are no facts to examine. He indicates the presupposition of his investigations, when he says:“The principal argument for the later origin of the gospels must forever remain this, that separately, and still more when taken together, they give an account of the life of Jesus which involves impossibilities”—i. e., miracles. He would therefore remove their authorship far enough from Jesus' time to permit regarding the miracles as inventions. Baur holds that in Christ were united the universalistic spirit of the new religion,andthe particularistic form of the Jewish Messianic idea; some of his disciples laid emphasis on the one, some on the other; hence first conflict, but finally reconciliation; see statement of the Tübingen theory and of the way in which Baur was led to it, in Bruce, Apologetics, 360. E. G. Robinson interprets Baur as follows:“Paul = Protestant; Peter = sacramentarian; James = ethical; Paul + Peter + James = Christianity. Protestant preaching should dwell more on the ethical—cases of conscience—and less on mere doctrine, such as regeneration and justification.”[pg 158]Baur was a stranger to the needs of his own soul, and so to the real character of the gospel. One of his friends and advisers wrote, after his death, in terms that were meant to be laudatory:“His was a completely objective nature. No trace of personal needs or struggles is discernible in connection with his investigations of Christianity.”The estimate of posterity is probably expressed in the judgment with regard to the Tübingen school by Harnack:“Thepossiblepicture it sketched was not thereal, and the key with which it attempted to solve all problems did not suffice for the most simple.... The Tübingen views have indeed been compelled to undergo very large modifications. As regards the development of the church in the second century, it may safely be said that the hypotheses of the Tübingen school have proved themselves everywhere inadequate, very erroneous, and are to-day held by only a very few scholars.”See Baur, Die kanonischen Evangelien; Canonical Gospels (Eng. transl.), 530; Supernatural Religion, 1:212-444 and vol. 2: Pfleiderer, Hibbert Lectures for 1885. For accounts of Baur's position, see Herzog, Encyclopädie, art.: Baur; Clarke's transl. of Hase's Life of Jesus, 34-36; Farrar, Critical History of Free Thought, 227, 228.We object to the Tendency-theory of Baur, that(a) The destructive criticism to which it subjects the gospels, if applied to secular documents, would deprive us of any certain knowledge of the past, and render all history impossible.The assumption of artifice is itself unfavorable to a candid examination of the documents. A perverse acuteness can descry evidences of a hiddenanimusin the most simple and ingenuous literary productions. Instance the philosophical interpretation of“Jack and Jill.”(b) The antagonistic doctrinal tendencies which it professes to find in the several gospels are more satisfactorily explained as varied but consistent aspects of the one system of truth held by all the apostles.Baur exaggerates the doctrinal and official differences between the leading apostles. Peter was not simply a Judaizing Christian, but was the first preacher to the Gentiles, and his doctrine appears to have been subsequently influenced to a considerable extent by Paul's (see Plumptre on 1 Pet., 68-69). Paul was not an exclusively Hellenizing Christian, but invariably addressed the gospel to the Jews before he turned to the Gentiles. The evangelists give pictures of Jesus from different points of view. As the Parisian sculptor constructs his bust with the aid of a dozen photographs of his subject, all taken from different points of view, so from the four portraits furnished us by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John we are to construct the solid and symmetrical life of Christ. The deeper reality which makes reconciliation of the different views possible is the actual historical Christ. Marcus Dods, Expositor's Greek Testament, 1:675—“They are not two Christs, but one, which the four Gospels depict: diverse as the profile and front face, but one another's complement rather than contradiction.”Godet, Introd. to Gospel Collection, 272—Matthew shows the greatness of Jesus—his full-length portrait; Mark his indefatigable activity; Luke his beneficent compassion; John his essential divinity. Matthew first wrote Aramæan Logia. This was translated into Greek and completed by a narrative of the ministry of Jesus for the Greek churches founded by Paul. This translation was not made by Matthew and did not make use of Mark (217-224). E. D. Burton: Matthew = fulfilment of past prophecy; Mark = manifestation of present power. Matthew is argument from prophecy; Mark is argument from miracle. Matthew, as prophecy, made most impression on Jewish readers; Mark, as power, was best adapted to Gentiles. Prof. Burton holds Mark to be based upon oral tradition alone; Matthew upon his Logia (his real earlier Gospel) and other fragmentary notes; while Luke has a fuller origin in manuscripts and in Mark. See Aids to the Study of German Theology, 148-155; F. W. Farrar, Witness of History to Christ, 61.(c) It is incredible that productions of such literary power and lofty religious teaching as the gospels should have sprung up in the middle of the second century, or that, so springing up, they should have been published under assumed names and for covert ends.[pg 159]The general character of the literature of the second century is illustrated by Ignatius's fanatical desire for martyrdom, the value ascribed by Hermas to ascetic rigor, the insipid allegories of Barnabas, Clement of Rome's belief in the phœnix, and the absurdities of the Apocryphal Gospels. The author of the fourth gospel among the writers of the second century would have been a mountain among mole-hills. Wynne, Literature of the Second Century, 60—“The apostolic and the sub-apostolic writers differ from each other as a nugget of pure gold differs from a block of quartz with veins of the precious metal gleaming through it.”Dorner, Hist. Doct. Person Christ, 1:1:92—“Instead of the writers of the second century marking an advance on the apostolic age, or developing the germ given them by the apostles, the second century shows great retrogression,—its writers were not able to retain or comprehend all that had been given them.”Martineau, Seat of Authority, 291—“Writers not only barbarous in speech and rude in art, but too often puerile in conception, passionate in temper, and credulous in belief. The legends of Papias, the visions of Hermas, the imbecility of Irenæus, the fury of Tertullian, the rancor and indelicacy of Jerome, the stormy intolerance of Augustine, cannot fail to startle and repel the student; and, if he turns to the milder Hippolytus, he is introduced to a brood of thirty heresies which sadly dissipate his dream of the unity of the church.”We can apply to the writers of the second century the question of R. G. Ingersoll in the Shakespeare-Bacon controversy:“Is it possible that Bacon left the best children of his brain on Shakespeare's doorstep, and kept only the deformed ones at home?”On the Apocryphal Gospels, see Cowper, in Strivings for the Faith, 73-108.(d) The theory requires us to believe in a moral anomaly, namely, that a faithful disciple of Christ in the second century could be guilty of fabricating a life of his master, and of claiming authority for it on the ground that the author had been a companion of Christ or his apostles.“A genial set of Jesuitical religionists”—with mind and heart enough to write the gospel according to John, and who at the same time have cold-blooded sagacity enough to keep out of their writings every trace of the developments of church authority belonging to the second century. The newly discovered“Teaching of the Twelve Apostles,”if dating from the early part of that century, shows that such a combination is impossible. The critical theories assume that one who knew Christ as a man could not possibly also regard him as God. Lowrie, Doctrine of St. John, 12—“If St. John wrote, it is not possible to say that the genius of St. Paul foisted upon the church a conception which was strange to the original apostles.”Fairbairn has well shown that if Christianity had been simply the ethical teaching of the human Jesus, it would have vanished from the earth like the sects of the Pharisees and of the Sadducees; if on the other hand it had been simply the Logos-doctrine, the doctrine of a divine Christ, it would have passed away like the speculations of Plato or Aristotle; because Christianity unites the idea of the eternal Son of God with that of the incarnate Son of man, it is fitted to be and it has become an universal religion; see Fairbairn, Philosophy of the Christian Religion, 4, 15—“Without the personal charm of the historical Jesus, the œcumenical creeds would never have been either formulated or tolerated, and without the metaphysical conception of Christ the Christian religion would long ago have ceased to live.... It is not Jesus of Nazareth who has so powerfully entered into history: it is the deified Christ who has been believed, loved and obeyed as the Savior of the world.... The two parts of Christian doctrine are combined in the one name‘Jesus Christ.’”(e) This theory cannot account for the universal acceptance of the gospels at the end of the second century, among widely separated communities where reverence for writings of the apostles was a mark of orthodoxy, and where the Gnostic heresies would have made new documents instantly liable to suspicion and searching examination.Abbot, Genuineness of the Fourth Gospel, 52, 80, 88, 89. The Johannine doctrine of the Logos, if first propounded in the middle of the second century, would have ensured the instant rejection of that gospel by the Gnostics, who ascribed creation, not to the Logos, but to successive“Æons.”How did the Gnostics, without“peep or mutter,”come to accept as genuine what had only in their own time been first sprung upon the[pg 160]churches? While Basilides (130) and Valentinus (150), the Gnostics, both quote from the fourth gospel, they do not dispute its genuineness or suggest that it was of recent origin. Bruce, in his Apologetics, says of Baur“He believed in the all-sufficiency of the Hegelian theory of development through antagonism. He saw tendency everywhere. Anything additional, putting more contents into the person and teaching of Jesus than suits the initial stage of development, must be reckoned spurious. If we find Jesus in any of the gospels claiming to be a supernatural being, such texts can with the utmost confidence be set aside as spurious, for such a thought could not belong to the initial stage of Christianity.”But such a conception certainly existed in the second century, and it directly antagonized the speculations of the Gnostics. F. W. Farrar, onHebrews 1:2—“The wordæonwas used by the later Gnostics to describe the various emanations by which they tried at once to widen and to bridge over the gulf between the human and the divine. Over that imaginary chasm John threw the arch of the Incarnation, when he wrote:‘The Word became flesh’(John 1:14).”A document which so contradicted the Gnostic teachings could not in the second century have been quoted by the Gnostics themselves without dispute as to its genuineness, if it had not been long recognized in the churches as a work of the apostle John.(f) The acknowledgment by Baur that the epistles to the Romans, Galatians and Corinthians were written by Paul in the first century is fatal to his theory, since these epistles testify not only to miracles at the period at which they were written, but to the main events of Jesus' life and to the miracle of his resurrection, as facts already long acknowledged in the Christian church.Baur, Paulus der Apostel, 276—“There never has been the slightest suspicion of unauthenticity cast on these epistles (Gal., 1 and 2 Cor., Rom.), and they bear so incontestably the character of Pauline originality, that there is no conceivable ground for the assertion of critical doubts in their case.”Baur, in discussing the appearance of Christ to Paul on the way to Damascus, explains the outward from the inward: Paul translated intense and sudden conviction of the truth of the Christian religion into an outward scene. But this cannot explain the hearing of the outward sound by Paul's companions. On the evidential value of the epistles here mentioned, see Lorimer, in Strivings for the Faith, 109-144; Howson, in Present Day Tracts, 4: no. 24; Row, Bampton Lectures for 1877:289-356. On Baur and his theory in general, see Weiss, Life of Jesus, 1:157sq.; Christlieb, Mod. Doubt and Christ. Belief, 504-549; Hutton, Essays, 1:176-215; Theol. Eclectic, 5:1-42; Auberlen, Div. Revelation; Bib. Sac., 19:75; Answers to Supernatural Religion, in Westcott, Hist. N. T. Canon, 4th ed., Introd.; Lightfoot, in Contemporary Rev., Dec. 1874, and Jan. 1875; Salmon, Introd. to N. T., 6-31; A. B. Bruce, in Present Day Tracts, 7: no. 38.

The Epistle to the Hebrews, the style of which is so unlike that of the Apostle Paul, was possibly written by Apollos, who was an Alexandrian Jew,“a learned man”and“mighty in the Scriptures”(Acts 18:24); but it may notwithstanding have been written at the suggestion and under the direction of Paul, and so be essentially Pauline. A. C. Kendrick, in American Commentary on Hebrews, points out that while the style of Paul is prevailingly dialectic, and only in rapt moments becomes rhetorical or poetic, the style of the Epistle to the Hebrews is prevailingly rhetorical, is free from anacolutha, and is always dominated by emotion. He holds that these characteristics point to Apollos as its author. Contrast also Paul's method of quoting the O. T.:“it is written”(Rom. 11:8; 1 Cor. 1:31; Gal. 3:10)with that of the Hebrews:“he saith”(8:5, 13),“he[pg 153]hath said”(4:4). Paul quotes the O. T. fifty or sixty times, but never in this latter way.Heb. 2:3—“which having at the first been spoken by the Lord, was confirmed unto us by them that heard”—shows that the writer did not receive the gospel at first hand. Luther and Calvin rightly saw in this a decisive proof that Paul was not the author, for he always insisted on the primary and independent character of his gospel. Harnack formerly thought the epistle written by Barnabas to Christians at Rome, A. D. 81-96. More recently however he attributes it to Priscilla, the wife of Aquila, or to their joint authorship. The majesty of its diction, however, seems unfavorable to this view. William T. C. Hanna:“The words of the author ... are marshalled grandly, and move with the tread of an army, or with the swell of a tidal wave”; see Franklin Johnson, Quotations in N. T. from O. T., xii. Plumptre, Introd. to N. T., 37, and in Expositor, Vol. I, regards the author of this epistle as the same with that of the Apocryphal Wisdom of Solomon, the latter being composed before, the former after, the writer's conversion to Christianity. Perhaps our safest conclusion is that of Origen:“God only knows who wrote it.”Harnack however remarks:“The time in which our ancient Christian literature, the N. T. included, was considered as a web of delusions and falsifications, is past. The oldest literature of the church is, in its main points, and in most of its details, true and trustworthy.”See articles on Hebrews, in Smith's and in Hastings' Bible Dictionaries.(e) As to 2 Peter, Jude, and 2 and 3 John, the epistles most frequently held to be spurious, we may say that, although we have no conclusive external evidence earlier than A. D. 160, and in the case of 2 Peter none earlier than A. D. 230-250, we may fairly urge in favor of their genuineness not only their internal characteristics of literary style and moral value, but also the general acceptance of them all since the third century as the actual productions of the men or class of men whose names they bear.Firmilianus (250), Bishop of Cæsarea in Cappadocia, is the first clear witness to 2 Peter. Origen (230) names it, but, in naming it, admits that its genuineness is questioned. The Council of Laodicea (372) first received it into the Canon. With this very gradual recognition and acceptance of 2 Peter, compare the loss of the later works of Aristotle for a hundred and fifty years after his death, and their recognition as genuine so soon as they were recovered from the cellar of the family of Neleus in Asia; De Wette's first publication of certain letters of Luther after the lapse of three hundred years, yet without occasioning doubt as to their genuineness; or the concealment of Milton's Treatise on Christian Doctrine, among the lumber of the State Paper Office in London, from 1677 to 1823; see Mair, Christian Evidences, 95. Sir William Hamilton complained that there were treatises of Cudworth, Berkeley and Collier, still lying unpublished and even unknown to their editors, biographers and fellow metaphysicians, but yet of the highest interest and importance; see Mansel, Letters, Lectures and Reviews, 381; Archibald, The Bible Verified, 27. 2 Peter was probably sent from the East shortly before Peter's martyrdom; distance and persecution may have prevented its rapid circulation in other countries. Sagebeer, The Bible in Court, 114—“A ledger may have been lost, or its authenticity for a long time doubted, but when once it is discovered and proved, it is as trustworthy as any other part of theres gestæ.”See Plumptre, Epistles of Peter, Introd., 73-81; Alford on 2 Peter, 4: Prolegomena, 157; Westcott, on Canon, in Smith's Bib. Dict., 1:370, 373; Blunt, Dict. Doct. and Hist. Theol., art.: Canon.It is urged by those who doubt the genuineness of 2 Peter that the epistle speaks of“your apostles”(3:2), just asJude 17speaks of“the apostles,”as if the writer did not number himself among them. But 2 Peter begins with“Simon Peter, a servant and apostle of Jesus Christ,”and Jude,“brother of James”(verse 1)was a brother of our Lord, but not an apostle. Hovey, Introd. to N. T., xxxi—“The earliest passage manifestly based upon 2 Peter appears to be in the so-called Second Epistle of the Roman Clement, 16:3, which however is now understood to be a Christian homily from the middle of the second century.”Origen (born 186) testifies that Peter left one epistle,“and perhaps a second, for that is disputed.”He also says:“John wrote the Apocalypse, and an epistle of very few lines; and, it may be, a second and a third; since all do not admit them to be genuine.”He quotes also from James and from Jude, adding that their canonicity was doubted.[pg 154]Harnack regards 1 Peter, 2 Peter, James, and Jude, as written respectively about 160, 170, 130, and 130, but not by the men to whom they are ascribed—the ascriptions to these authors being later additions. Hort remarks:“If I were asked, I should say that the balance of the argument was against 2 Peter, but the moment I had done so I should begin to think I might be in the wrong.”Sanday, Oracles of God, 73 note, considers the arguments in favor of 2 Peter unconvincing, but also the arguments against. He cannot get beyond anon liquet. He refers to Salmon, Introd. to N. T., 529-559, ed. 4, as expressing his own view. But the later conclusions of Sanday are more radical. In his Bampton Lectures on Inspiration, 348, 399, he says: 2 Peter“is probably at least to this extent a counterfeit, that it appears under a name which is not that of its true author.”Chase, in Hastings' Bib. Dict., 3:806-817, says that“the first piece ofcertainevidence as to 2 Peter is the passage from Origen quoted by Eusebius, though it hardly admits of doubt that the Epistle was known to Clement of Alexandria.... We find no trace of the epistle in the period when the tradition of apostolic days was still living.... It was not the work of the apostle but of the second century ... put forward without any sinister motive ... the personation of the apostle an obvious literary device rather than a religious or controversial fraud. The adoption of such a verdict can cause perplexity only when the Lord's promise of guidance to his Church is regarded as a charter of infallibility.”Against this verdict we would urge the dignity and spiritual value of 2 Peter—internal evidence which in our judgment causes the balance to incline in favor of its apostolic authorship.(f) Upon no other hypothesis than that of their genuineness can the general acceptance of these four minor epistles since the third century, and of all the other books of the New Testament since the middle of the second century, be satisfactorily accounted for. If they had been mere collections of floating legends, they could not have secured wide circulation as sacred books for which Christians must answer with their blood. If they had been forgeries, the churches at large could neither have been deceived as to their previous non-existence, nor have been induced unanimously to pretend that they were ancient and genuine. Inasmuch, however, as other accounts of their origin, inconsistent with their genuineness, are now current, we proceed to examine more at length the most important of these opposing views.The genuineness of the New Testament as a whole would still be demonstrable, even if doubt should still attach to one or two of its books. It does not matter that 2nd Alcibiades was not written by Plato, or Pericles by Shakespeare. The Council of Carthage in 397 gave a place in the Canon to the O. T. Apocrypha, but the Reformers tore it out. Zwingli said of the Revelation:“It is not a Biblical book,”and Luther spoke slightingly of the Epistle of James. The judgment of Christendom at large is more trustworthy than the private impressions of any single Christian scholar. To hold the books of the N. T. to be written in the second century by other than those whose names they bear is to hold, not simply to forgery, but to a conspiracy of forgery. There must have been several forgers at work, and, since their writings wonderfully agree, there must have been collusion among them. Yet these able men have been forgotten, while the names of far feebler writers of the second century have been preserved.G. F. Wright, Scientific Aspects of Christian Evidences, 343—“In civil law there are‘statutes of limitations’which provide that the general acknowledgment of a purported fact for a certain period shall be considered as conclusive evidence of it. If, for example, a man has remained in undisturbed possession of land for a certain number of years, it is presumed that he has a valid claim to it, and no one is allowed to dispute his claim.”Mair, Evidences, 99—“We probably have not a tenth part of the evidence upon which the early churches accepted the N. T. books as the genuine productions of their authors. We have only their verdict.”Wynne, in Literature of the Second Century, 58—“Those who gave up the Scriptures were looked on by their fellow Christians as‘traditores,’traitors, who had basely yielded up what they ought to have treasured as dearer than life. But all their books were not equally sacred. Some[pg 155]were essential, and some were non-essential to the faith. Hence arose the distinction betweencanonicalandnon-canonical. The general consciousness of Christians grew into a distinct registration.”Such registration is entitled to the highest respect, and lays the burden of proof upon the objector. See Alexander, Christ and Christianity, Introduction; Hovey, General Introduction to American Commentary on N. T.D. Rationalistic Theories as to the origin of the gospels. These are attempts to eliminate the miraculous element from the New Testament records, and to reconstruct the sacred history upon principles of naturalism.Against them we urge the general objection that they are unscientific in their principle and method. To set out in an examination of the New Testament documents with the assumption that all history is a mere natural development, and that miracles are therefore impossible, is to make history a matter, not of testimony, but ofa priorispeculation. It indeed renders any history of Christ and his apostles impossible, since the witnesses whose testimony with regard to miracles is discredited can no longer be considered worthy of credence in their account of Christ's life or doctrine.In Germany, half a century ago,“a man was famous according as he had lifted up axes upon the thick trees”(Ps. 74:5, A. V.), just as among the American Indians he was not counted a man who could not show his scalps. The critics fortunately scalped each other; see Tyler, Theology of Greek Poets, 79—on Homer. Nicoll, The Church's One Foundation, 15—“Like the mummers of old, sceptical critics send one before them with a broom to sweep the stage clear of everything for their drama. If we assume at the threshold of the gospel study that everything of the nature of miracle is impossible, then the specific questions are decided before the criticism begins to operate in earnest.”Matthew Arnold:“Our popular religion at present conceives the birth, ministry and death of Christ as altogether steeped in prodigy, brimful of miracle,—andmiracles do not happen.”This presupposition influences the investigations of Kuenen, and of A. E. Abbott, in his article on the Gospels in the Encyc. Britannica. We give special attention to four of the theories based upon this assumption.1st. The Myth-theory of Strauss (1808-1874).According to this view, the gospels are crystallizations into story of Messianic ideas which had for several generations filled the minds of imaginative men in Palestine. The myth is a narrative in which such ideas are unconsciously clothed, and from which the element of intentional and deliberate deception is absent.This early view of Strauss, which has become identified with his name, was exchanged in late years for a more advanced view which extended the meaning of the word“myths”so as to include all narratives that spring out of a theological idea, and it admitted the existence of“pious frauds”in the gospels. Baur, he says, first convinced him that the author of the fourth gospel had“not unfrequently composed mere fables, knowing them to be mere fictions.”The animating spirit of both the old view and the new is the same. Strauss says:“We know with certainty what Jesus wasnot, and what he hasnotdone, namely, nothing superhuman and supernatural.”“No gospel can claim that degree of historic credibility that would be required in order to make us debase our reason to the point of believing miracles.”He calls the resurrection of Christ“ein weltgeschichtlicher Humbug.”“If the gospels are really historical documents, we cannot exclude miracle from the life-story of Jesus;”see Strauss, Life of Jesus, 17; New Life of Jesus, 1: preface, xii. Vatke, Einleitung in A. T., 210, 211, distinguishes the myth from thesagaor legend: The criterion of the pure myth is that the experience is impossible, while thesagais a tradition of remote antiquity; the myth has in it the element only of belief, thesagahas in it an element of history. Sabatier, Philos. Religion, 37—“A myth is false in appearance only. The divine Spirit can avail himself of the fictions of poetry as well as of logical reasonings. When the heart was pure, the veils of fable always allowed the face of truth to shine through. And does not childhood run on into maturity and old age?”[pg 156]It is very certain that childlike love of truth was not the animating spirit of Strauss. On the contrary, his spirit was that of remorseless criticism and of uncompromising hostility to the supernatural. It has been well said that he gathered up all the previous objections of sceptics to the gospel narrative and hurled them in one mass, just as if some Sadducee at the time of Jesus' trial had put all the taunts and gibes, all the buffetings and insults, all the shame and spitting, into one blow delivered straight into the face of the Redeemer. An octogenarian and saintly German lady said unsuspectingly that“somehow she never could get interested”in Strauss's Leben Jesu, which her sceptical son had given her for religious reading. The work was almost altogether destructive, only the last chapter suggesting Strauss's own view of what Jesus was.If Luther's dictum is true that“the heart is the best theologian,”Strauss must be regarded as destitute of the main qualification for his task. Encyc. Britannica, 22:592—“Strauss's mind was almost exclusively analytical and critical, without depth of religious feeling, or philosophical penetration, or historical sympathy. His work was rarely constructive, and, save when he was dealing with a kindred spirit, he failed as a historian, biographer, and critic, strikingly illustrating Goethe's profoundly true principle that loving sympathy is essential for productive criticism.”Pfleiderer, Strauss's Life of Jesus, xix—“Strauss showed that the church formed the mythical traditions about Jesus out of its faith in him as the Messiah; but he did not show how the church came by the faith that Jesus of Nazareth was the Messiah.”See Carpenter, Mental Physiology, 362; Grote, Plato, 1:249.We object to the Myth-theory of Strauss, that(a) The time between the death of Christ and the publication of the gospels was far too short for the growth and consolidation of such mythical histories. Myths, on the contrary, as the Indian, Greek, Roman and Scandinavian instances bear witness, are the slow growth of centuries.(b) The first century was not a century when such formation of myths was possible. Instead of being a credulous and imaginative age, it was an age of historical inquiry and of Sadduceeism in matters of religion.Horace, in Odes 1:34 and 3:6, denounces the neglect and squalor of the heathen temples, and Juvenal, Satire 2:150, says that“Esse aliquid manes et subterranea regna Nec pueri credunt.”Arnold of Rugby:“The idea of men writing mythic histories between the times of Livy and of Tacitus, and of St. Paul mistaking them for realities!”Pilate's sceptical inquiry,“What is truth?”(John 18:38), better represented the age.“The mythical age is past when an idea is presented abstractly—apart from narrative.”The Jewish sect of the Sadducees shows that the rationalistic spirit was not confined to Greeks or Romans. The question of John the Baptist,Mat. 11:3—“Art thou he that cometh, or look we for another?”and our Lord's answer,Mat. 11:4, 5—“Go and tell John the thing which ye hear and see: the blind receive their sight ... the dead are raised up,”show that the Jews expected miracles to be wrought by the Messiah; yetJohn 10:41—“John indeed did no sign”shows also no irresistible inclination to invest popular teachers with miraculous powers; see E. G. Robinson, Christian Evidences, 22; Westcott, Com. on John 10:41; Rogers, Superhuman Origin of the Bible, 61; Cox, Miracles, 50.(c) The gospels cannot be a mythical outgrowth of Jewish ideas and expectations, because, in their main features, they run directly counter to these ideas and expectations. The sullen and exclusive nationalism of the Jews could not have given rise to a gospel for all nations, nor could their expectations of a temporal monarch have led to the story of a suffering Messiah.The O. T. Apocrypha shows how narrow was the outlook of the Jews. 2 Esdras 6:55, 56 says the Almighty has made the world“foroursakes”; other peoples, though they“also come from Adam,”to the Eternal“are nothing, but be like unto spittle.”The whole multitude of them are only, before him,“like a single foul drop that oozes out of a cask”(C. Geikie, in S. S. Times). Christ's kingdom differed from that which the Jews expected, both in itsspiritualityand itsuniversality(Bruce, Apologetics, 3). There was no missionary impulse in the heathen world; on the other hand,[pg 157]it was blasphemy for an ancient tribesman to make known his god to an outsider (Nash, Ethics and Revelation, 106). The Apocryphal gospels show what sort of myths the N. T. age would have elaborated: Out of a demoniac young woman Satan is said to depart in the form of a young man (Bernard, in Literature of the Second Century, 99-136).(d) The belief and propagation of such myths are inconsistent with what we know of the sober characters and self-sacrificing lives of the apostles.(e) The mythical theory cannot account for the acceptance of the gospels among the Gentiles, who had none of the Jewish ideas and expectations.(f) It cannot explain Christianity itself, with its belief in Christ's crucifixion and resurrection, and the ordinances which commemorate these facts.(d) Witness Thomas's doubting, and Paul's shipwrecks and scourgings.Cf.2 Pet. 1:16—οὐ γὰρ σεσοφισμένοις μύθοις ἐξακολουθήσαντες =“we have not been on the false track of myths artificially elaborated.”See F. W. Farrar, Witness of History to Christ, 49-88. (e) See the two books entitled: If the Gospel Narratives are Mythical,—What Then? and, But How,—if the Gospels are Historic? (f) As the existence of the American Republic is proof that there was once a Revolutionary War, so the existence of Christianity is proof of the death of Christ. The change from the seventh day to the first, in Sabbath observance, could never have come about in a nation so Sabbatarian, had not the first day been the celebration of an actual resurrection. Like the Jewish Passover and our own Independence Day, Baptism and the Lord's Supper cannot be accounted for, except as monuments and remembrances of historical facts at the beginning of the Christian church. See Muir, on the Lord's Supper an abiding Witness to the Death of Christ, In Present Day Tracts, 6: no. 36. On Strauss and his theory, see Hackett, in Christian Rev., 48; Weiss, Life of Jesus, 155-163; Christlieb, Mod. Doubt and Christ. Belief, 379-425; Maclear, in Strivings for the Faith, 1-136; H. B. Smith, in Faith and Philosophy, 442-468; Bayne, Review of Strauss's New Life, in Theol. Eclectic, 4:74; Row, in Lectures on Modern Scepticism, 305-360; Bibliotheca Sacra, Oct. 1871: art. by Prof. W. A. Stevens; Burgess, Antiquity and Unity of Man, 263, 264; Curtis on Inspiration, 62-67; Alexander, Christ and Christianity, 92-126; A. P. Peabody, in Smith's Bible Dict., 2:954-958.2nd. The Tendency-theory of Baur (1792-1860).This maintains that the gospels originated in the middle of the second century, and were written under assumed names as a means of reconciling opposing Jewish and Gentile tendencies in the church.“These great national tendencies find their satisfaction, not in events corresponding to them, but in the elaboration of conscious fictions.”Baur dates the fourth gospel at 160-170 A. D.; Matthew at 130; Luke at 150; Mark at 150-160. Baur never inquires who Christ was. He turns his attention from the facts to the documents. If the documents be proved unhistorical, there is no need of examining the facts, for there are no facts to examine. He indicates the presupposition of his investigations, when he says:“The principal argument for the later origin of the gospels must forever remain this, that separately, and still more when taken together, they give an account of the life of Jesus which involves impossibilities”—i. e., miracles. He would therefore remove their authorship far enough from Jesus' time to permit regarding the miracles as inventions. Baur holds that in Christ were united the universalistic spirit of the new religion,andthe particularistic form of the Jewish Messianic idea; some of his disciples laid emphasis on the one, some on the other; hence first conflict, but finally reconciliation; see statement of the Tübingen theory and of the way in which Baur was led to it, in Bruce, Apologetics, 360. E. G. Robinson interprets Baur as follows:“Paul = Protestant; Peter = sacramentarian; James = ethical; Paul + Peter + James = Christianity. Protestant preaching should dwell more on the ethical—cases of conscience—and less on mere doctrine, such as regeneration and justification.”[pg 158]Baur was a stranger to the needs of his own soul, and so to the real character of the gospel. One of his friends and advisers wrote, after his death, in terms that were meant to be laudatory:“His was a completely objective nature. No trace of personal needs or struggles is discernible in connection with his investigations of Christianity.”The estimate of posterity is probably expressed in the judgment with regard to the Tübingen school by Harnack:“Thepossiblepicture it sketched was not thereal, and the key with which it attempted to solve all problems did not suffice for the most simple.... The Tübingen views have indeed been compelled to undergo very large modifications. As regards the development of the church in the second century, it may safely be said that the hypotheses of the Tübingen school have proved themselves everywhere inadequate, very erroneous, and are to-day held by only a very few scholars.”See Baur, Die kanonischen Evangelien; Canonical Gospels (Eng. transl.), 530; Supernatural Religion, 1:212-444 and vol. 2: Pfleiderer, Hibbert Lectures for 1885. For accounts of Baur's position, see Herzog, Encyclopädie, art.: Baur; Clarke's transl. of Hase's Life of Jesus, 34-36; Farrar, Critical History of Free Thought, 227, 228.We object to the Tendency-theory of Baur, that(a) The destructive criticism to which it subjects the gospels, if applied to secular documents, would deprive us of any certain knowledge of the past, and render all history impossible.The assumption of artifice is itself unfavorable to a candid examination of the documents. A perverse acuteness can descry evidences of a hiddenanimusin the most simple and ingenuous literary productions. Instance the philosophical interpretation of“Jack and Jill.”(b) The antagonistic doctrinal tendencies which it professes to find in the several gospels are more satisfactorily explained as varied but consistent aspects of the one system of truth held by all the apostles.Baur exaggerates the doctrinal and official differences between the leading apostles. Peter was not simply a Judaizing Christian, but was the first preacher to the Gentiles, and his doctrine appears to have been subsequently influenced to a considerable extent by Paul's (see Plumptre on 1 Pet., 68-69). Paul was not an exclusively Hellenizing Christian, but invariably addressed the gospel to the Jews before he turned to the Gentiles. The evangelists give pictures of Jesus from different points of view. As the Parisian sculptor constructs his bust with the aid of a dozen photographs of his subject, all taken from different points of view, so from the four portraits furnished us by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John we are to construct the solid and symmetrical life of Christ. The deeper reality which makes reconciliation of the different views possible is the actual historical Christ. Marcus Dods, Expositor's Greek Testament, 1:675—“They are not two Christs, but one, which the four Gospels depict: diverse as the profile and front face, but one another's complement rather than contradiction.”Godet, Introd. to Gospel Collection, 272—Matthew shows the greatness of Jesus—his full-length portrait; Mark his indefatigable activity; Luke his beneficent compassion; John his essential divinity. Matthew first wrote Aramæan Logia. This was translated into Greek and completed by a narrative of the ministry of Jesus for the Greek churches founded by Paul. This translation was not made by Matthew and did not make use of Mark (217-224). E. D. Burton: Matthew = fulfilment of past prophecy; Mark = manifestation of present power. Matthew is argument from prophecy; Mark is argument from miracle. Matthew, as prophecy, made most impression on Jewish readers; Mark, as power, was best adapted to Gentiles. Prof. Burton holds Mark to be based upon oral tradition alone; Matthew upon his Logia (his real earlier Gospel) and other fragmentary notes; while Luke has a fuller origin in manuscripts and in Mark. See Aids to the Study of German Theology, 148-155; F. W. Farrar, Witness of History to Christ, 61.(c) It is incredible that productions of such literary power and lofty religious teaching as the gospels should have sprung up in the middle of the second century, or that, so springing up, they should have been published under assumed names and for covert ends.[pg 159]The general character of the literature of the second century is illustrated by Ignatius's fanatical desire for martyrdom, the value ascribed by Hermas to ascetic rigor, the insipid allegories of Barnabas, Clement of Rome's belief in the phœnix, and the absurdities of the Apocryphal Gospels. The author of the fourth gospel among the writers of the second century would have been a mountain among mole-hills. Wynne, Literature of the Second Century, 60—“The apostolic and the sub-apostolic writers differ from each other as a nugget of pure gold differs from a block of quartz with veins of the precious metal gleaming through it.”Dorner, Hist. Doct. Person Christ, 1:1:92—“Instead of the writers of the second century marking an advance on the apostolic age, or developing the germ given them by the apostles, the second century shows great retrogression,—its writers were not able to retain or comprehend all that had been given them.”Martineau, Seat of Authority, 291—“Writers not only barbarous in speech and rude in art, but too often puerile in conception, passionate in temper, and credulous in belief. The legends of Papias, the visions of Hermas, the imbecility of Irenæus, the fury of Tertullian, the rancor and indelicacy of Jerome, the stormy intolerance of Augustine, cannot fail to startle and repel the student; and, if he turns to the milder Hippolytus, he is introduced to a brood of thirty heresies which sadly dissipate his dream of the unity of the church.”We can apply to the writers of the second century the question of R. G. Ingersoll in the Shakespeare-Bacon controversy:“Is it possible that Bacon left the best children of his brain on Shakespeare's doorstep, and kept only the deformed ones at home?”On the Apocryphal Gospels, see Cowper, in Strivings for the Faith, 73-108.(d) The theory requires us to believe in a moral anomaly, namely, that a faithful disciple of Christ in the second century could be guilty of fabricating a life of his master, and of claiming authority for it on the ground that the author had been a companion of Christ or his apostles.“A genial set of Jesuitical religionists”—with mind and heart enough to write the gospel according to John, and who at the same time have cold-blooded sagacity enough to keep out of their writings every trace of the developments of church authority belonging to the second century. The newly discovered“Teaching of the Twelve Apostles,”if dating from the early part of that century, shows that such a combination is impossible. The critical theories assume that one who knew Christ as a man could not possibly also regard him as God. Lowrie, Doctrine of St. John, 12—“If St. John wrote, it is not possible to say that the genius of St. Paul foisted upon the church a conception which was strange to the original apostles.”Fairbairn has well shown that if Christianity had been simply the ethical teaching of the human Jesus, it would have vanished from the earth like the sects of the Pharisees and of the Sadducees; if on the other hand it had been simply the Logos-doctrine, the doctrine of a divine Christ, it would have passed away like the speculations of Plato or Aristotle; because Christianity unites the idea of the eternal Son of God with that of the incarnate Son of man, it is fitted to be and it has become an universal religion; see Fairbairn, Philosophy of the Christian Religion, 4, 15—“Without the personal charm of the historical Jesus, the œcumenical creeds would never have been either formulated or tolerated, and without the metaphysical conception of Christ the Christian religion would long ago have ceased to live.... It is not Jesus of Nazareth who has so powerfully entered into history: it is the deified Christ who has been believed, loved and obeyed as the Savior of the world.... The two parts of Christian doctrine are combined in the one name‘Jesus Christ.’”(e) This theory cannot account for the universal acceptance of the gospels at the end of the second century, among widely separated communities where reverence for writings of the apostles was a mark of orthodoxy, and where the Gnostic heresies would have made new documents instantly liable to suspicion and searching examination.Abbot, Genuineness of the Fourth Gospel, 52, 80, 88, 89. The Johannine doctrine of the Logos, if first propounded in the middle of the second century, would have ensured the instant rejection of that gospel by the Gnostics, who ascribed creation, not to the Logos, but to successive“Æons.”How did the Gnostics, without“peep or mutter,”come to accept as genuine what had only in their own time been first sprung upon the[pg 160]churches? While Basilides (130) and Valentinus (150), the Gnostics, both quote from the fourth gospel, they do not dispute its genuineness or suggest that it was of recent origin. Bruce, in his Apologetics, says of Baur“He believed in the all-sufficiency of the Hegelian theory of development through antagonism. He saw tendency everywhere. Anything additional, putting more contents into the person and teaching of Jesus than suits the initial stage of development, must be reckoned spurious. If we find Jesus in any of the gospels claiming to be a supernatural being, such texts can with the utmost confidence be set aside as spurious, for such a thought could not belong to the initial stage of Christianity.”But such a conception certainly existed in the second century, and it directly antagonized the speculations of the Gnostics. F. W. Farrar, onHebrews 1:2—“The wordæonwas used by the later Gnostics to describe the various emanations by which they tried at once to widen and to bridge over the gulf between the human and the divine. Over that imaginary chasm John threw the arch of the Incarnation, when he wrote:‘The Word became flesh’(John 1:14).”A document which so contradicted the Gnostic teachings could not in the second century have been quoted by the Gnostics themselves without dispute as to its genuineness, if it had not been long recognized in the churches as a work of the apostle John.(f) The acknowledgment by Baur that the epistles to the Romans, Galatians and Corinthians were written by Paul in the first century is fatal to his theory, since these epistles testify not only to miracles at the period at which they were written, but to the main events of Jesus' life and to the miracle of his resurrection, as facts already long acknowledged in the Christian church.Baur, Paulus der Apostel, 276—“There never has been the slightest suspicion of unauthenticity cast on these epistles (Gal., 1 and 2 Cor., Rom.), and they bear so incontestably the character of Pauline originality, that there is no conceivable ground for the assertion of critical doubts in their case.”Baur, in discussing the appearance of Christ to Paul on the way to Damascus, explains the outward from the inward: Paul translated intense and sudden conviction of the truth of the Christian religion into an outward scene. But this cannot explain the hearing of the outward sound by Paul's companions. On the evidential value of the epistles here mentioned, see Lorimer, in Strivings for the Faith, 109-144; Howson, in Present Day Tracts, 4: no. 24; Row, Bampton Lectures for 1877:289-356. On Baur and his theory in general, see Weiss, Life of Jesus, 1:157sq.; Christlieb, Mod. Doubt and Christ. Belief, 504-549; Hutton, Essays, 1:176-215; Theol. Eclectic, 5:1-42; Auberlen, Div. Revelation; Bib. Sac., 19:75; Answers to Supernatural Religion, in Westcott, Hist. N. T. Canon, 4th ed., Introd.; Lightfoot, in Contemporary Rev., Dec. 1874, and Jan. 1875; Salmon, Introd. to N. T., 6-31; A. B. Bruce, in Present Day Tracts, 7: no. 38.

The Epistle to the Hebrews, the style of which is so unlike that of the Apostle Paul, was possibly written by Apollos, who was an Alexandrian Jew,“a learned man”and“mighty in the Scriptures”(Acts 18:24); but it may notwithstanding have been written at the suggestion and under the direction of Paul, and so be essentially Pauline. A. C. Kendrick, in American Commentary on Hebrews, points out that while the style of Paul is prevailingly dialectic, and only in rapt moments becomes rhetorical or poetic, the style of the Epistle to the Hebrews is prevailingly rhetorical, is free from anacolutha, and is always dominated by emotion. He holds that these characteristics point to Apollos as its author. Contrast also Paul's method of quoting the O. T.:“it is written”(Rom. 11:8; 1 Cor. 1:31; Gal. 3:10)with that of the Hebrews:“he saith”(8:5, 13),“he[pg 153]hath said”(4:4). Paul quotes the O. T. fifty or sixty times, but never in this latter way.Heb. 2:3—“which having at the first been spoken by the Lord, was confirmed unto us by them that heard”—shows that the writer did not receive the gospel at first hand. Luther and Calvin rightly saw in this a decisive proof that Paul was not the author, for he always insisted on the primary and independent character of his gospel. Harnack formerly thought the epistle written by Barnabas to Christians at Rome, A. D. 81-96. More recently however he attributes it to Priscilla, the wife of Aquila, or to their joint authorship. The majesty of its diction, however, seems unfavorable to this view. William T. C. Hanna:“The words of the author ... are marshalled grandly, and move with the tread of an army, or with the swell of a tidal wave”; see Franklin Johnson, Quotations in N. T. from O. T., xii. Plumptre, Introd. to N. T., 37, and in Expositor, Vol. I, regards the author of this epistle as the same with that of the Apocryphal Wisdom of Solomon, the latter being composed before, the former after, the writer's conversion to Christianity. Perhaps our safest conclusion is that of Origen:“God only knows who wrote it.”Harnack however remarks:“The time in which our ancient Christian literature, the N. T. included, was considered as a web of delusions and falsifications, is past. The oldest literature of the church is, in its main points, and in most of its details, true and trustworthy.”See articles on Hebrews, in Smith's and in Hastings' Bible Dictionaries.(e) As to 2 Peter, Jude, and 2 and 3 John, the epistles most frequently held to be spurious, we may say that, although we have no conclusive external evidence earlier than A. D. 160, and in the case of 2 Peter none earlier than A. D. 230-250, we may fairly urge in favor of their genuineness not only their internal characteristics of literary style and moral value, but also the general acceptance of them all since the third century as the actual productions of the men or class of men whose names they bear.Firmilianus (250), Bishop of Cæsarea in Cappadocia, is the first clear witness to 2 Peter. Origen (230) names it, but, in naming it, admits that its genuineness is questioned. The Council of Laodicea (372) first received it into the Canon. With this very gradual recognition and acceptance of 2 Peter, compare the loss of the later works of Aristotle for a hundred and fifty years after his death, and their recognition as genuine so soon as they were recovered from the cellar of the family of Neleus in Asia; De Wette's first publication of certain letters of Luther after the lapse of three hundred years, yet without occasioning doubt as to their genuineness; or the concealment of Milton's Treatise on Christian Doctrine, among the lumber of the State Paper Office in London, from 1677 to 1823; see Mair, Christian Evidences, 95. Sir William Hamilton complained that there were treatises of Cudworth, Berkeley and Collier, still lying unpublished and even unknown to their editors, biographers and fellow metaphysicians, but yet of the highest interest and importance; see Mansel, Letters, Lectures and Reviews, 381; Archibald, The Bible Verified, 27. 2 Peter was probably sent from the East shortly before Peter's martyrdom; distance and persecution may have prevented its rapid circulation in other countries. Sagebeer, The Bible in Court, 114—“A ledger may have been lost, or its authenticity for a long time doubted, but when once it is discovered and proved, it is as trustworthy as any other part of theres gestæ.”See Plumptre, Epistles of Peter, Introd., 73-81; Alford on 2 Peter, 4: Prolegomena, 157; Westcott, on Canon, in Smith's Bib. Dict., 1:370, 373; Blunt, Dict. Doct. and Hist. Theol., art.: Canon.It is urged by those who doubt the genuineness of 2 Peter that the epistle speaks of“your apostles”(3:2), just asJude 17speaks of“the apostles,”as if the writer did not number himself among them. But 2 Peter begins with“Simon Peter, a servant and apostle of Jesus Christ,”and Jude,“brother of James”(verse 1)was a brother of our Lord, but not an apostle. Hovey, Introd. to N. T., xxxi—“The earliest passage manifestly based upon 2 Peter appears to be in the so-called Second Epistle of the Roman Clement, 16:3, which however is now understood to be a Christian homily from the middle of the second century.”Origen (born 186) testifies that Peter left one epistle,“and perhaps a second, for that is disputed.”He also says:“John wrote the Apocalypse, and an epistle of very few lines; and, it may be, a second and a third; since all do not admit them to be genuine.”He quotes also from James and from Jude, adding that their canonicity was doubted.[pg 154]Harnack regards 1 Peter, 2 Peter, James, and Jude, as written respectively about 160, 170, 130, and 130, but not by the men to whom they are ascribed—the ascriptions to these authors being later additions. Hort remarks:“If I were asked, I should say that the balance of the argument was against 2 Peter, but the moment I had done so I should begin to think I might be in the wrong.”Sanday, Oracles of God, 73 note, considers the arguments in favor of 2 Peter unconvincing, but also the arguments against. He cannot get beyond anon liquet. He refers to Salmon, Introd. to N. T., 529-559, ed. 4, as expressing his own view. But the later conclusions of Sanday are more radical. In his Bampton Lectures on Inspiration, 348, 399, he says: 2 Peter“is probably at least to this extent a counterfeit, that it appears under a name which is not that of its true author.”Chase, in Hastings' Bib. Dict., 3:806-817, says that“the first piece ofcertainevidence as to 2 Peter is the passage from Origen quoted by Eusebius, though it hardly admits of doubt that the Epistle was known to Clement of Alexandria.... We find no trace of the epistle in the period when the tradition of apostolic days was still living.... It was not the work of the apostle but of the second century ... put forward without any sinister motive ... the personation of the apostle an obvious literary device rather than a religious or controversial fraud. The adoption of such a verdict can cause perplexity only when the Lord's promise of guidance to his Church is regarded as a charter of infallibility.”Against this verdict we would urge the dignity and spiritual value of 2 Peter—internal evidence which in our judgment causes the balance to incline in favor of its apostolic authorship.(f) Upon no other hypothesis than that of their genuineness can the general acceptance of these four minor epistles since the third century, and of all the other books of the New Testament since the middle of the second century, be satisfactorily accounted for. If they had been mere collections of floating legends, they could not have secured wide circulation as sacred books for which Christians must answer with their blood. If they had been forgeries, the churches at large could neither have been deceived as to their previous non-existence, nor have been induced unanimously to pretend that they were ancient and genuine. Inasmuch, however, as other accounts of their origin, inconsistent with their genuineness, are now current, we proceed to examine more at length the most important of these opposing views.The genuineness of the New Testament as a whole would still be demonstrable, even if doubt should still attach to one or two of its books. It does not matter that 2nd Alcibiades was not written by Plato, or Pericles by Shakespeare. The Council of Carthage in 397 gave a place in the Canon to the O. T. Apocrypha, but the Reformers tore it out. Zwingli said of the Revelation:“It is not a Biblical book,”and Luther spoke slightingly of the Epistle of James. The judgment of Christendom at large is more trustworthy than the private impressions of any single Christian scholar. To hold the books of the N. T. to be written in the second century by other than those whose names they bear is to hold, not simply to forgery, but to a conspiracy of forgery. There must have been several forgers at work, and, since their writings wonderfully agree, there must have been collusion among them. Yet these able men have been forgotten, while the names of far feebler writers of the second century have been preserved.G. F. Wright, Scientific Aspects of Christian Evidences, 343—“In civil law there are‘statutes of limitations’which provide that the general acknowledgment of a purported fact for a certain period shall be considered as conclusive evidence of it. If, for example, a man has remained in undisturbed possession of land for a certain number of years, it is presumed that he has a valid claim to it, and no one is allowed to dispute his claim.”Mair, Evidences, 99—“We probably have not a tenth part of the evidence upon which the early churches accepted the N. T. books as the genuine productions of their authors. We have only their verdict.”Wynne, in Literature of the Second Century, 58—“Those who gave up the Scriptures were looked on by their fellow Christians as‘traditores,’traitors, who had basely yielded up what they ought to have treasured as dearer than life. But all their books were not equally sacred. Some[pg 155]were essential, and some were non-essential to the faith. Hence arose the distinction betweencanonicalandnon-canonical. The general consciousness of Christians grew into a distinct registration.”Such registration is entitled to the highest respect, and lays the burden of proof upon the objector. See Alexander, Christ and Christianity, Introduction; Hovey, General Introduction to American Commentary on N. T.D. Rationalistic Theories as to the origin of the gospels. These are attempts to eliminate the miraculous element from the New Testament records, and to reconstruct the sacred history upon principles of naturalism.Against them we urge the general objection that they are unscientific in their principle and method. To set out in an examination of the New Testament documents with the assumption that all history is a mere natural development, and that miracles are therefore impossible, is to make history a matter, not of testimony, but ofa priorispeculation. It indeed renders any history of Christ and his apostles impossible, since the witnesses whose testimony with regard to miracles is discredited can no longer be considered worthy of credence in their account of Christ's life or doctrine.In Germany, half a century ago,“a man was famous according as he had lifted up axes upon the thick trees”(Ps. 74:5, A. V.), just as among the American Indians he was not counted a man who could not show his scalps. The critics fortunately scalped each other; see Tyler, Theology of Greek Poets, 79—on Homer. Nicoll, The Church's One Foundation, 15—“Like the mummers of old, sceptical critics send one before them with a broom to sweep the stage clear of everything for their drama. If we assume at the threshold of the gospel study that everything of the nature of miracle is impossible, then the specific questions are decided before the criticism begins to operate in earnest.”Matthew Arnold:“Our popular religion at present conceives the birth, ministry and death of Christ as altogether steeped in prodigy, brimful of miracle,—andmiracles do not happen.”This presupposition influences the investigations of Kuenen, and of A. E. Abbott, in his article on the Gospels in the Encyc. Britannica. We give special attention to four of the theories based upon this assumption.1st. The Myth-theory of Strauss (1808-1874).According to this view, the gospels are crystallizations into story of Messianic ideas which had for several generations filled the minds of imaginative men in Palestine. The myth is a narrative in which such ideas are unconsciously clothed, and from which the element of intentional and deliberate deception is absent.This early view of Strauss, which has become identified with his name, was exchanged in late years for a more advanced view which extended the meaning of the word“myths”so as to include all narratives that spring out of a theological idea, and it admitted the existence of“pious frauds”in the gospels. Baur, he says, first convinced him that the author of the fourth gospel had“not unfrequently composed mere fables, knowing them to be mere fictions.”The animating spirit of both the old view and the new is the same. Strauss says:“We know with certainty what Jesus wasnot, and what he hasnotdone, namely, nothing superhuman and supernatural.”“No gospel can claim that degree of historic credibility that would be required in order to make us debase our reason to the point of believing miracles.”He calls the resurrection of Christ“ein weltgeschichtlicher Humbug.”“If the gospels are really historical documents, we cannot exclude miracle from the life-story of Jesus;”see Strauss, Life of Jesus, 17; New Life of Jesus, 1: preface, xii. Vatke, Einleitung in A. T., 210, 211, distinguishes the myth from thesagaor legend: The criterion of the pure myth is that the experience is impossible, while thesagais a tradition of remote antiquity; the myth has in it the element only of belief, thesagahas in it an element of history. Sabatier, Philos. Religion, 37—“A myth is false in appearance only. The divine Spirit can avail himself of the fictions of poetry as well as of logical reasonings. When the heart was pure, the veils of fable always allowed the face of truth to shine through. And does not childhood run on into maturity and old age?”[pg 156]It is very certain that childlike love of truth was not the animating spirit of Strauss. On the contrary, his spirit was that of remorseless criticism and of uncompromising hostility to the supernatural. It has been well said that he gathered up all the previous objections of sceptics to the gospel narrative and hurled them in one mass, just as if some Sadducee at the time of Jesus' trial had put all the taunts and gibes, all the buffetings and insults, all the shame and spitting, into one blow delivered straight into the face of the Redeemer. An octogenarian and saintly German lady said unsuspectingly that“somehow she never could get interested”in Strauss's Leben Jesu, which her sceptical son had given her for religious reading. The work was almost altogether destructive, only the last chapter suggesting Strauss's own view of what Jesus was.If Luther's dictum is true that“the heart is the best theologian,”Strauss must be regarded as destitute of the main qualification for his task. Encyc. Britannica, 22:592—“Strauss's mind was almost exclusively analytical and critical, without depth of religious feeling, or philosophical penetration, or historical sympathy. His work was rarely constructive, and, save when he was dealing with a kindred spirit, he failed as a historian, biographer, and critic, strikingly illustrating Goethe's profoundly true principle that loving sympathy is essential for productive criticism.”Pfleiderer, Strauss's Life of Jesus, xix—“Strauss showed that the church formed the mythical traditions about Jesus out of its faith in him as the Messiah; but he did not show how the church came by the faith that Jesus of Nazareth was the Messiah.”See Carpenter, Mental Physiology, 362; Grote, Plato, 1:249.We object to the Myth-theory of Strauss, that(a) The time between the death of Christ and the publication of the gospels was far too short for the growth and consolidation of such mythical histories. Myths, on the contrary, as the Indian, Greek, Roman and Scandinavian instances bear witness, are the slow growth of centuries.(b) The first century was not a century when such formation of myths was possible. Instead of being a credulous and imaginative age, it was an age of historical inquiry and of Sadduceeism in matters of religion.Horace, in Odes 1:34 and 3:6, denounces the neglect and squalor of the heathen temples, and Juvenal, Satire 2:150, says that“Esse aliquid manes et subterranea regna Nec pueri credunt.”Arnold of Rugby:“The idea of men writing mythic histories between the times of Livy and of Tacitus, and of St. Paul mistaking them for realities!”Pilate's sceptical inquiry,“What is truth?”(John 18:38), better represented the age.“The mythical age is past when an idea is presented abstractly—apart from narrative.”The Jewish sect of the Sadducees shows that the rationalistic spirit was not confined to Greeks or Romans. The question of John the Baptist,Mat. 11:3—“Art thou he that cometh, or look we for another?”and our Lord's answer,Mat. 11:4, 5—“Go and tell John the thing which ye hear and see: the blind receive their sight ... the dead are raised up,”show that the Jews expected miracles to be wrought by the Messiah; yetJohn 10:41—“John indeed did no sign”shows also no irresistible inclination to invest popular teachers with miraculous powers; see E. G. Robinson, Christian Evidences, 22; Westcott, Com. on John 10:41; Rogers, Superhuman Origin of the Bible, 61; Cox, Miracles, 50.(c) The gospels cannot be a mythical outgrowth of Jewish ideas and expectations, because, in their main features, they run directly counter to these ideas and expectations. The sullen and exclusive nationalism of the Jews could not have given rise to a gospel for all nations, nor could their expectations of a temporal monarch have led to the story of a suffering Messiah.The O. T. Apocrypha shows how narrow was the outlook of the Jews. 2 Esdras 6:55, 56 says the Almighty has made the world“foroursakes”; other peoples, though they“also come from Adam,”to the Eternal“are nothing, but be like unto spittle.”The whole multitude of them are only, before him,“like a single foul drop that oozes out of a cask”(C. Geikie, in S. S. Times). Christ's kingdom differed from that which the Jews expected, both in itsspiritualityand itsuniversality(Bruce, Apologetics, 3). There was no missionary impulse in the heathen world; on the other hand,[pg 157]it was blasphemy for an ancient tribesman to make known his god to an outsider (Nash, Ethics and Revelation, 106). The Apocryphal gospels show what sort of myths the N. T. age would have elaborated: Out of a demoniac young woman Satan is said to depart in the form of a young man (Bernard, in Literature of the Second Century, 99-136).(d) The belief and propagation of such myths are inconsistent with what we know of the sober characters and self-sacrificing lives of the apostles.(e) The mythical theory cannot account for the acceptance of the gospels among the Gentiles, who had none of the Jewish ideas and expectations.(f) It cannot explain Christianity itself, with its belief in Christ's crucifixion and resurrection, and the ordinances which commemorate these facts.(d) Witness Thomas's doubting, and Paul's shipwrecks and scourgings.Cf.2 Pet. 1:16—οὐ γὰρ σεσοφισμένοις μύθοις ἐξακολουθήσαντες =“we have not been on the false track of myths artificially elaborated.”See F. W. Farrar, Witness of History to Christ, 49-88. (e) See the two books entitled: If the Gospel Narratives are Mythical,—What Then? and, But How,—if the Gospels are Historic? (f) As the existence of the American Republic is proof that there was once a Revolutionary War, so the existence of Christianity is proof of the death of Christ. The change from the seventh day to the first, in Sabbath observance, could never have come about in a nation so Sabbatarian, had not the first day been the celebration of an actual resurrection. Like the Jewish Passover and our own Independence Day, Baptism and the Lord's Supper cannot be accounted for, except as monuments and remembrances of historical facts at the beginning of the Christian church. See Muir, on the Lord's Supper an abiding Witness to the Death of Christ, In Present Day Tracts, 6: no. 36. On Strauss and his theory, see Hackett, in Christian Rev., 48; Weiss, Life of Jesus, 155-163; Christlieb, Mod. Doubt and Christ. Belief, 379-425; Maclear, in Strivings for the Faith, 1-136; H. B. Smith, in Faith and Philosophy, 442-468; Bayne, Review of Strauss's New Life, in Theol. Eclectic, 4:74; Row, in Lectures on Modern Scepticism, 305-360; Bibliotheca Sacra, Oct. 1871: art. by Prof. W. A. Stevens; Burgess, Antiquity and Unity of Man, 263, 264; Curtis on Inspiration, 62-67; Alexander, Christ and Christianity, 92-126; A. P. Peabody, in Smith's Bible Dict., 2:954-958.2nd. The Tendency-theory of Baur (1792-1860).This maintains that the gospels originated in the middle of the second century, and were written under assumed names as a means of reconciling opposing Jewish and Gentile tendencies in the church.“These great national tendencies find their satisfaction, not in events corresponding to them, but in the elaboration of conscious fictions.”Baur dates the fourth gospel at 160-170 A. D.; Matthew at 130; Luke at 150; Mark at 150-160. Baur never inquires who Christ was. He turns his attention from the facts to the documents. If the documents be proved unhistorical, there is no need of examining the facts, for there are no facts to examine. He indicates the presupposition of his investigations, when he says:“The principal argument for the later origin of the gospels must forever remain this, that separately, and still more when taken together, they give an account of the life of Jesus which involves impossibilities”—i. e., miracles. He would therefore remove their authorship far enough from Jesus' time to permit regarding the miracles as inventions. Baur holds that in Christ were united the universalistic spirit of the new religion,andthe particularistic form of the Jewish Messianic idea; some of his disciples laid emphasis on the one, some on the other; hence first conflict, but finally reconciliation; see statement of the Tübingen theory and of the way in which Baur was led to it, in Bruce, Apologetics, 360. E. G. Robinson interprets Baur as follows:“Paul = Protestant; Peter = sacramentarian; James = ethical; Paul + Peter + James = Christianity. Protestant preaching should dwell more on the ethical—cases of conscience—and less on mere doctrine, such as regeneration and justification.”[pg 158]Baur was a stranger to the needs of his own soul, and so to the real character of the gospel. One of his friends and advisers wrote, after his death, in terms that were meant to be laudatory:“His was a completely objective nature. No trace of personal needs or struggles is discernible in connection with his investigations of Christianity.”The estimate of posterity is probably expressed in the judgment with regard to the Tübingen school by Harnack:“Thepossiblepicture it sketched was not thereal, and the key with which it attempted to solve all problems did not suffice for the most simple.... The Tübingen views have indeed been compelled to undergo very large modifications. As regards the development of the church in the second century, it may safely be said that the hypotheses of the Tübingen school have proved themselves everywhere inadequate, very erroneous, and are to-day held by only a very few scholars.”See Baur, Die kanonischen Evangelien; Canonical Gospels (Eng. transl.), 530; Supernatural Religion, 1:212-444 and vol. 2: Pfleiderer, Hibbert Lectures for 1885. For accounts of Baur's position, see Herzog, Encyclopädie, art.: Baur; Clarke's transl. of Hase's Life of Jesus, 34-36; Farrar, Critical History of Free Thought, 227, 228.We object to the Tendency-theory of Baur, that(a) The destructive criticism to which it subjects the gospels, if applied to secular documents, would deprive us of any certain knowledge of the past, and render all history impossible.The assumption of artifice is itself unfavorable to a candid examination of the documents. A perverse acuteness can descry evidences of a hiddenanimusin the most simple and ingenuous literary productions. Instance the philosophical interpretation of“Jack and Jill.”(b) The antagonistic doctrinal tendencies which it professes to find in the several gospels are more satisfactorily explained as varied but consistent aspects of the one system of truth held by all the apostles.Baur exaggerates the doctrinal and official differences between the leading apostles. Peter was not simply a Judaizing Christian, but was the first preacher to the Gentiles, and his doctrine appears to have been subsequently influenced to a considerable extent by Paul's (see Plumptre on 1 Pet., 68-69). Paul was not an exclusively Hellenizing Christian, but invariably addressed the gospel to the Jews before he turned to the Gentiles. The evangelists give pictures of Jesus from different points of view. As the Parisian sculptor constructs his bust with the aid of a dozen photographs of his subject, all taken from different points of view, so from the four portraits furnished us by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John we are to construct the solid and symmetrical life of Christ. The deeper reality which makes reconciliation of the different views possible is the actual historical Christ. Marcus Dods, Expositor's Greek Testament, 1:675—“They are not two Christs, but one, which the four Gospels depict: diverse as the profile and front face, but one another's complement rather than contradiction.”Godet, Introd. to Gospel Collection, 272—Matthew shows the greatness of Jesus—his full-length portrait; Mark his indefatigable activity; Luke his beneficent compassion; John his essential divinity. Matthew first wrote Aramæan Logia. This was translated into Greek and completed by a narrative of the ministry of Jesus for the Greek churches founded by Paul. This translation was not made by Matthew and did not make use of Mark (217-224). E. D. Burton: Matthew = fulfilment of past prophecy; Mark = manifestation of present power. Matthew is argument from prophecy; Mark is argument from miracle. Matthew, as prophecy, made most impression on Jewish readers; Mark, as power, was best adapted to Gentiles. Prof. Burton holds Mark to be based upon oral tradition alone; Matthew upon his Logia (his real earlier Gospel) and other fragmentary notes; while Luke has a fuller origin in manuscripts and in Mark. See Aids to the Study of German Theology, 148-155; F. W. Farrar, Witness of History to Christ, 61.(c) It is incredible that productions of such literary power and lofty religious teaching as the gospels should have sprung up in the middle of the second century, or that, so springing up, they should have been published under assumed names and for covert ends.[pg 159]The general character of the literature of the second century is illustrated by Ignatius's fanatical desire for martyrdom, the value ascribed by Hermas to ascetic rigor, the insipid allegories of Barnabas, Clement of Rome's belief in the phœnix, and the absurdities of the Apocryphal Gospels. The author of the fourth gospel among the writers of the second century would have been a mountain among mole-hills. Wynne, Literature of the Second Century, 60—“The apostolic and the sub-apostolic writers differ from each other as a nugget of pure gold differs from a block of quartz with veins of the precious metal gleaming through it.”Dorner, Hist. Doct. Person Christ, 1:1:92—“Instead of the writers of the second century marking an advance on the apostolic age, or developing the germ given them by the apostles, the second century shows great retrogression,—its writers were not able to retain or comprehend all that had been given them.”Martineau, Seat of Authority, 291—“Writers not only barbarous in speech and rude in art, but too often puerile in conception, passionate in temper, and credulous in belief. The legends of Papias, the visions of Hermas, the imbecility of Irenæus, the fury of Tertullian, the rancor and indelicacy of Jerome, the stormy intolerance of Augustine, cannot fail to startle and repel the student; and, if he turns to the milder Hippolytus, he is introduced to a brood of thirty heresies which sadly dissipate his dream of the unity of the church.”We can apply to the writers of the second century the question of R. G. Ingersoll in the Shakespeare-Bacon controversy:“Is it possible that Bacon left the best children of his brain on Shakespeare's doorstep, and kept only the deformed ones at home?”On the Apocryphal Gospels, see Cowper, in Strivings for the Faith, 73-108.(d) The theory requires us to believe in a moral anomaly, namely, that a faithful disciple of Christ in the second century could be guilty of fabricating a life of his master, and of claiming authority for it on the ground that the author had been a companion of Christ or his apostles.“A genial set of Jesuitical religionists”—with mind and heart enough to write the gospel according to John, and who at the same time have cold-blooded sagacity enough to keep out of their writings every trace of the developments of church authority belonging to the second century. The newly discovered“Teaching of the Twelve Apostles,”if dating from the early part of that century, shows that such a combination is impossible. The critical theories assume that one who knew Christ as a man could not possibly also regard him as God. Lowrie, Doctrine of St. John, 12—“If St. John wrote, it is not possible to say that the genius of St. Paul foisted upon the church a conception which was strange to the original apostles.”Fairbairn has well shown that if Christianity had been simply the ethical teaching of the human Jesus, it would have vanished from the earth like the sects of the Pharisees and of the Sadducees; if on the other hand it had been simply the Logos-doctrine, the doctrine of a divine Christ, it would have passed away like the speculations of Plato or Aristotle; because Christianity unites the idea of the eternal Son of God with that of the incarnate Son of man, it is fitted to be and it has become an universal religion; see Fairbairn, Philosophy of the Christian Religion, 4, 15—“Without the personal charm of the historical Jesus, the œcumenical creeds would never have been either formulated or tolerated, and without the metaphysical conception of Christ the Christian religion would long ago have ceased to live.... It is not Jesus of Nazareth who has so powerfully entered into history: it is the deified Christ who has been believed, loved and obeyed as the Savior of the world.... The two parts of Christian doctrine are combined in the one name‘Jesus Christ.’”(e) This theory cannot account for the universal acceptance of the gospels at the end of the second century, among widely separated communities where reverence for writings of the apostles was a mark of orthodoxy, and where the Gnostic heresies would have made new documents instantly liable to suspicion and searching examination.Abbot, Genuineness of the Fourth Gospel, 52, 80, 88, 89. The Johannine doctrine of the Logos, if first propounded in the middle of the second century, would have ensured the instant rejection of that gospel by the Gnostics, who ascribed creation, not to the Logos, but to successive“Æons.”How did the Gnostics, without“peep or mutter,”come to accept as genuine what had only in their own time been first sprung upon the[pg 160]churches? While Basilides (130) and Valentinus (150), the Gnostics, both quote from the fourth gospel, they do not dispute its genuineness or suggest that it was of recent origin. Bruce, in his Apologetics, says of Baur“He believed in the all-sufficiency of the Hegelian theory of development through antagonism. He saw tendency everywhere. Anything additional, putting more contents into the person and teaching of Jesus than suits the initial stage of development, must be reckoned spurious. If we find Jesus in any of the gospels claiming to be a supernatural being, such texts can with the utmost confidence be set aside as spurious, for such a thought could not belong to the initial stage of Christianity.”But such a conception certainly existed in the second century, and it directly antagonized the speculations of the Gnostics. F. W. Farrar, onHebrews 1:2—“The wordæonwas used by the later Gnostics to describe the various emanations by which they tried at once to widen and to bridge over the gulf between the human and the divine. Over that imaginary chasm John threw the arch of the Incarnation, when he wrote:‘The Word became flesh’(John 1:14).”A document which so contradicted the Gnostic teachings could not in the second century have been quoted by the Gnostics themselves without dispute as to its genuineness, if it had not been long recognized in the churches as a work of the apostle John.(f) The acknowledgment by Baur that the epistles to the Romans, Galatians and Corinthians were written by Paul in the first century is fatal to his theory, since these epistles testify not only to miracles at the period at which they were written, but to the main events of Jesus' life and to the miracle of his resurrection, as facts already long acknowledged in the Christian church.Baur, Paulus der Apostel, 276—“There never has been the slightest suspicion of unauthenticity cast on these epistles (Gal., 1 and 2 Cor., Rom.), and they bear so incontestably the character of Pauline originality, that there is no conceivable ground for the assertion of critical doubts in their case.”Baur, in discussing the appearance of Christ to Paul on the way to Damascus, explains the outward from the inward: Paul translated intense and sudden conviction of the truth of the Christian religion into an outward scene. But this cannot explain the hearing of the outward sound by Paul's companions. On the evidential value of the epistles here mentioned, see Lorimer, in Strivings for the Faith, 109-144; Howson, in Present Day Tracts, 4: no. 24; Row, Bampton Lectures for 1877:289-356. On Baur and his theory in general, see Weiss, Life of Jesus, 1:157sq.; Christlieb, Mod. Doubt and Christ. Belief, 504-549; Hutton, Essays, 1:176-215; Theol. Eclectic, 5:1-42; Auberlen, Div. Revelation; Bib. Sac., 19:75; Answers to Supernatural Religion, in Westcott, Hist. N. T. Canon, 4th ed., Introd.; Lightfoot, in Contemporary Rev., Dec. 1874, and Jan. 1875; Salmon, Introd. to N. T., 6-31; A. B. Bruce, in Present Day Tracts, 7: no. 38.

The Epistle to the Hebrews, the style of which is so unlike that of the Apostle Paul, was possibly written by Apollos, who was an Alexandrian Jew,“a learned man”and“mighty in the Scriptures”(Acts 18:24); but it may notwithstanding have been written at the suggestion and under the direction of Paul, and so be essentially Pauline. A. C. Kendrick, in American Commentary on Hebrews, points out that while the style of Paul is prevailingly dialectic, and only in rapt moments becomes rhetorical or poetic, the style of the Epistle to the Hebrews is prevailingly rhetorical, is free from anacolutha, and is always dominated by emotion. He holds that these characteristics point to Apollos as its author. Contrast also Paul's method of quoting the O. T.:“it is written”(Rom. 11:8; 1 Cor. 1:31; Gal. 3:10)with that of the Hebrews:“he saith”(8:5, 13),“he[pg 153]hath said”(4:4). Paul quotes the O. T. fifty or sixty times, but never in this latter way.Heb. 2:3—“which having at the first been spoken by the Lord, was confirmed unto us by them that heard”—shows that the writer did not receive the gospel at first hand. Luther and Calvin rightly saw in this a decisive proof that Paul was not the author, for he always insisted on the primary and independent character of his gospel. Harnack formerly thought the epistle written by Barnabas to Christians at Rome, A. D. 81-96. More recently however he attributes it to Priscilla, the wife of Aquila, or to their joint authorship. The majesty of its diction, however, seems unfavorable to this view. William T. C. Hanna:“The words of the author ... are marshalled grandly, and move with the tread of an army, or with the swell of a tidal wave”; see Franklin Johnson, Quotations in N. T. from O. T., xii. Plumptre, Introd. to N. T., 37, and in Expositor, Vol. I, regards the author of this epistle as the same with that of the Apocryphal Wisdom of Solomon, the latter being composed before, the former after, the writer's conversion to Christianity. Perhaps our safest conclusion is that of Origen:“God only knows who wrote it.”Harnack however remarks:“The time in which our ancient Christian literature, the N. T. included, was considered as a web of delusions and falsifications, is past. The oldest literature of the church is, in its main points, and in most of its details, true and trustworthy.”See articles on Hebrews, in Smith's and in Hastings' Bible Dictionaries.(e) As to 2 Peter, Jude, and 2 and 3 John, the epistles most frequently held to be spurious, we may say that, although we have no conclusive external evidence earlier than A. D. 160, and in the case of 2 Peter none earlier than A. D. 230-250, we may fairly urge in favor of their genuineness not only their internal characteristics of literary style and moral value, but also the general acceptance of them all since the third century as the actual productions of the men or class of men whose names they bear.Firmilianus (250), Bishop of Cæsarea in Cappadocia, is the first clear witness to 2 Peter. Origen (230) names it, but, in naming it, admits that its genuineness is questioned. The Council of Laodicea (372) first received it into the Canon. With this very gradual recognition and acceptance of 2 Peter, compare the loss of the later works of Aristotle for a hundred and fifty years after his death, and their recognition as genuine so soon as they were recovered from the cellar of the family of Neleus in Asia; De Wette's first publication of certain letters of Luther after the lapse of three hundred years, yet without occasioning doubt as to their genuineness; or the concealment of Milton's Treatise on Christian Doctrine, among the lumber of the State Paper Office in London, from 1677 to 1823; see Mair, Christian Evidences, 95. Sir William Hamilton complained that there were treatises of Cudworth, Berkeley and Collier, still lying unpublished and even unknown to their editors, biographers and fellow metaphysicians, but yet of the highest interest and importance; see Mansel, Letters, Lectures and Reviews, 381; Archibald, The Bible Verified, 27. 2 Peter was probably sent from the East shortly before Peter's martyrdom; distance and persecution may have prevented its rapid circulation in other countries. Sagebeer, The Bible in Court, 114—“A ledger may have been lost, or its authenticity for a long time doubted, but when once it is discovered and proved, it is as trustworthy as any other part of theres gestæ.”See Plumptre, Epistles of Peter, Introd., 73-81; Alford on 2 Peter, 4: Prolegomena, 157; Westcott, on Canon, in Smith's Bib. Dict., 1:370, 373; Blunt, Dict. Doct. and Hist. Theol., art.: Canon.It is urged by those who doubt the genuineness of 2 Peter that the epistle speaks of“your apostles”(3:2), just asJude 17speaks of“the apostles,”as if the writer did not number himself among them. But 2 Peter begins with“Simon Peter, a servant and apostle of Jesus Christ,”and Jude,“brother of James”(verse 1)was a brother of our Lord, but not an apostle. Hovey, Introd. to N. T., xxxi—“The earliest passage manifestly based upon 2 Peter appears to be in the so-called Second Epistle of the Roman Clement, 16:3, which however is now understood to be a Christian homily from the middle of the second century.”Origen (born 186) testifies that Peter left one epistle,“and perhaps a second, for that is disputed.”He also says:“John wrote the Apocalypse, and an epistle of very few lines; and, it may be, a second and a third; since all do not admit them to be genuine.”He quotes also from James and from Jude, adding that their canonicity was doubted.[pg 154]Harnack regards 1 Peter, 2 Peter, James, and Jude, as written respectively about 160, 170, 130, and 130, but not by the men to whom they are ascribed—the ascriptions to these authors being later additions. Hort remarks:“If I were asked, I should say that the balance of the argument was against 2 Peter, but the moment I had done so I should begin to think I might be in the wrong.”Sanday, Oracles of God, 73 note, considers the arguments in favor of 2 Peter unconvincing, but also the arguments against. He cannot get beyond anon liquet. He refers to Salmon, Introd. to N. T., 529-559, ed. 4, as expressing his own view. But the later conclusions of Sanday are more radical. In his Bampton Lectures on Inspiration, 348, 399, he says: 2 Peter“is probably at least to this extent a counterfeit, that it appears under a name which is not that of its true author.”Chase, in Hastings' Bib. Dict., 3:806-817, says that“the first piece ofcertainevidence as to 2 Peter is the passage from Origen quoted by Eusebius, though it hardly admits of doubt that the Epistle was known to Clement of Alexandria.... We find no trace of the epistle in the period when the tradition of apostolic days was still living.... It was not the work of the apostle but of the second century ... put forward without any sinister motive ... the personation of the apostle an obvious literary device rather than a religious or controversial fraud. The adoption of such a verdict can cause perplexity only when the Lord's promise of guidance to his Church is regarded as a charter of infallibility.”Against this verdict we would urge the dignity and spiritual value of 2 Peter—internal evidence which in our judgment causes the balance to incline in favor of its apostolic authorship.(f) Upon no other hypothesis than that of their genuineness can the general acceptance of these four minor epistles since the third century, and of all the other books of the New Testament since the middle of the second century, be satisfactorily accounted for. If they had been mere collections of floating legends, they could not have secured wide circulation as sacred books for which Christians must answer with their blood. If they had been forgeries, the churches at large could neither have been deceived as to their previous non-existence, nor have been induced unanimously to pretend that they were ancient and genuine. Inasmuch, however, as other accounts of their origin, inconsistent with their genuineness, are now current, we proceed to examine more at length the most important of these opposing views.The genuineness of the New Testament as a whole would still be demonstrable, even if doubt should still attach to one or two of its books. It does not matter that 2nd Alcibiades was not written by Plato, or Pericles by Shakespeare. The Council of Carthage in 397 gave a place in the Canon to the O. T. Apocrypha, but the Reformers tore it out. Zwingli said of the Revelation:“It is not a Biblical book,”and Luther spoke slightingly of the Epistle of James. The judgment of Christendom at large is more trustworthy than the private impressions of any single Christian scholar. To hold the books of the N. T. to be written in the second century by other than those whose names they bear is to hold, not simply to forgery, but to a conspiracy of forgery. There must have been several forgers at work, and, since their writings wonderfully agree, there must have been collusion among them. Yet these able men have been forgotten, while the names of far feebler writers of the second century have been preserved.G. F. Wright, Scientific Aspects of Christian Evidences, 343—“In civil law there are‘statutes of limitations’which provide that the general acknowledgment of a purported fact for a certain period shall be considered as conclusive evidence of it. If, for example, a man has remained in undisturbed possession of land for a certain number of years, it is presumed that he has a valid claim to it, and no one is allowed to dispute his claim.”Mair, Evidences, 99—“We probably have not a tenth part of the evidence upon which the early churches accepted the N. T. books as the genuine productions of their authors. We have only their verdict.”Wynne, in Literature of the Second Century, 58—“Those who gave up the Scriptures were looked on by their fellow Christians as‘traditores,’traitors, who had basely yielded up what they ought to have treasured as dearer than life. But all their books were not equally sacred. Some[pg 155]were essential, and some were non-essential to the faith. Hence arose the distinction betweencanonicalandnon-canonical. The general consciousness of Christians grew into a distinct registration.”Such registration is entitled to the highest respect, and lays the burden of proof upon the objector. See Alexander, Christ and Christianity, Introduction; Hovey, General Introduction to American Commentary on N. T.D. Rationalistic Theories as to the origin of the gospels. These are attempts to eliminate the miraculous element from the New Testament records, and to reconstruct the sacred history upon principles of naturalism.Against them we urge the general objection that they are unscientific in their principle and method. To set out in an examination of the New Testament documents with the assumption that all history is a mere natural development, and that miracles are therefore impossible, is to make history a matter, not of testimony, but ofa priorispeculation. It indeed renders any history of Christ and his apostles impossible, since the witnesses whose testimony with regard to miracles is discredited can no longer be considered worthy of credence in their account of Christ's life or doctrine.In Germany, half a century ago,“a man was famous according as he had lifted up axes upon the thick trees”(Ps. 74:5, A. V.), just as among the American Indians he was not counted a man who could not show his scalps. The critics fortunately scalped each other; see Tyler, Theology of Greek Poets, 79—on Homer. Nicoll, The Church's One Foundation, 15—“Like the mummers of old, sceptical critics send one before them with a broom to sweep the stage clear of everything for their drama. If we assume at the threshold of the gospel study that everything of the nature of miracle is impossible, then the specific questions are decided before the criticism begins to operate in earnest.”Matthew Arnold:“Our popular religion at present conceives the birth, ministry and death of Christ as altogether steeped in prodigy, brimful of miracle,—andmiracles do not happen.”This presupposition influences the investigations of Kuenen, and of A. E. Abbott, in his article on the Gospels in the Encyc. Britannica. We give special attention to four of the theories based upon this assumption.1st. The Myth-theory of Strauss (1808-1874).According to this view, the gospels are crystallizations into story of Messianic ideas which had for several generations filled the minds of imaginative men in Palestine. The myth is a narrative in which such ideas are unconsciously clothed, and from which the element of intentional and deliberate deception is absent.This early view of Strauss, which has become identified with his name, was exchanged in late years for a more advanced view which extended the meaning of the word“myths”so as to include all narratives that spring out of a theological idea, and it admitted the existence of“pious frauds”in the gospels. Baur, he says, first convinced him that the author of the fourth gospel had“not unfrequently composed mere fables, knowing them to be mere fictions.”The animating spirit of both the old view and the new is the same. Strauss says:“We know with certainty what Jesus wasnot, and what he hasnotdone, namely, nothing superhuman and supernatural.”“No gospel can claim that degree of historic credibility that would be required in order to make us debase our reason to the point of believing miracles.”He calls the resurrection of Christ“ein weltgeschichtlicher Humbug.”“If the gospels are really historical documents, we cannot exclude miracle from the life-story of Jesus;”see Strauss, Life of Jesus, 17; New Life of Jesus, 1: preface, xii. Vatke, Einleitung in A. T., 210, 211, distinguishes the myth from thesagaor legend: The criterion of the pure myth is that the experience is impossible, while thesagais a tradition of remote antiquity; the myth has in it the element only of belief, thesagahas in it an element of history. Sabatier, Philos. Religion, 37—“A myth is false in appearance only. The divine Spirit can avail himself of the fictions of poetry as well as of logical reasonings. When the heart was pure, the veils of fable always allowed the face of truth to shine through. And does not childhood run on into maturity and old age?”[pg 156]It is very certain that childlike love of truth was not the animating spirit of Strauss. On the contrary, his spirit was that of remorseless criticism and of uncompromising hostility to the supernatural. It has been well said that he gathered up all the previous objections of sceptics to the gospel narrative and hurled them in one mass, just as if some Sadducee at the time of Jesus' trial had put all the taunts and gibes, all the buffetings and insults, all the shame and spitting, into one blow delivered straight into the face of the Redeemer. An octogenarian and saintly German lady said unsuspectingly that“somehow she never could get interested”in Strauss's Leben Jesu, which her sceptical son had given her for religious reading. The work was almost altogether destructive, only the last chapter suggesting Strauss's own view of what Jesus was.If Luther's dictum is true that“the heart is the best theologian,”Strauss must be regarded as destitute of the main qualification for his task. Encyc. Britannica, 22:592—“Strauss's mind was almost exclusively analytical and critical, without depth of religious feeling, or philosophical penetration, or historical sympathy. His work was rarely constructive, and, save when he was dealing with a kindred spirit, he failed as a historian, biographer, and critic, strikingly illustrating Goethe's profoundly true principle that loving sympathy is essential for productive criticism.”Pfleiderer, Strauss's Life of Jesus, xix—“Strauss showed that the church formed the mythical traditions about Jesus out of its faith in him as the Messiah; but he did not show how the church came by the faith that Jesus of Nazareth was the Messiah.”See Carpenter, Mental Physiology, 362; Grote, Plato, 1:249.We object to the Myth-theory of Strauss, that(a) The time between the death of Christ and the publication of the gospels was far too short for the growth and consolidation of such mythical histories. Myths, on the contrary, as the Indian, Greek, Roman and Scandinavian instances bear witness, are the slow growth of centuries.(b) The first century was not a century when such formation of myths was possible. Instead of being a credulous and imaginative age, it was an age of historical inquiry and of Sadduceeism in matters of religion.Horace, in Odes 1:34 and 3:6, denounces the neglect and squalor of the heathen temples, and Juvenal, Satire 2:150, says that“Esse aliquid manes et subterranea regna Nec pueri credunt.”Arnold of Rugby:“The idea of men writing mythic histories between the times of Livy and of Tacitus, and of St. Paul mistaking them for realities!”Pilate's sceptical inquiry,“What is truth?”(John 18:38), better represented the age.“The mythical age is past when an idea is presented abstractly—apart from narrative.”The Jewish sect of the Sadducees shows that the rationalistic spirit was not confined to Greeks or Romans. The question of John the Baptist,Mat. 11:3—“Art thou he that cometh, or look we for another?”and our Lord's answer,Mat. 11:4, 5—“Go and tell John the thing which ye hear and see: the blind receive their sight ... the dead are raised up,”show that the Jews expected miracles to be wrought by the Messiah; yetJohn 10:41—“John indeed did no sign”shows also no irresistible inclination to invest popular teachers with miraculous powers; see E. G. Robinson, Christian Evidences, 22; Westcott, Com. on John 10:41; Rogers, Superhuman Origin of the Bible, 61; Cox, Miracles, 50.(c) The gospels cannot be a mythical outgrowth of Jewish ideas and expectations, because, in their main features, they run directly counter to these ideas and expectations. The sullen and exclusive nationalism of the Jews could not have given rise to a gospel for all nations, nor could their expectations of a temporal monarch have led to the story of a suffering Messiah.The O. T. Apocrypha shows how narrow was the outlook of the Jews. 2 Esdras 6:55, 56 says the Almighty has made the world“foroursakes”; other peoples, though they“also come from Adam,”to the Eternal“are nothing, but be like unto spittle.”The whole multitude of them are only, before him,“like a single foul drop that oozes out of a cask”(C. Geikie, in S. S. Times). Christ's kingdom differed from that which the Jews expected, both in itsspiritualityand itsuniversality(Bruce, Apologetics, 3). There was no missionary impulse in the heathen world; on the other hand,[pg 157]it was blasphemy for an ancient tribesman to make known his god to an outsider (Nash, Ethics and Revelation, 106). The Apocryphal gospels show what sort of myths the N. T. age would have elaborated: Out of a demoniac young woman Satan is said to depart in the form of a young man (Bernard, in Literature of the Second Century, 99-136).(d) The belief and propagation of such myths are inconsistent with what we know of the sober characters and self-sacrificing lives of the apostles.(e) The mythical theory cannot account for the acceptance of the gospels among the Gentiles, who had none of the Jewish ideas and expectations.(f) It cannot explain Christianity itself, with its belief in Christ's crucifixion and resurrection, and the ordinances which commemorate these facts.(d) Witness Thomas's doubting, and Paul's shipwrecks and scourgings.Cf.2 Pet. 1:16—οὐ γὰρ σεσοφισμένοις μύθοις ἐξακολουθήσαντες =“we have not been on the false track of myths artificially elaborated.”See F. W. Farrar, Witness of History to Christ, 49-88. (e) See the two books entitled: If the Gospel Narratives are Mythical,—What Then? and, But How,—if the Gospels are Historic? (f) As the existence of the American Republic is proof that there was once a Revolutionary War, so the existence of Christianity is proof of the death of Christ. The change from the seventh day to the first, in Sabbath observance, could never have come about in a nation so Sabbatarian, had not the first day been the celebration of an actual resurrection. Like the Jewish Passover and our own Independence Day, Baptism and the Lord's Supper cannot be accounted for, except as monuments and remembrances of historical facts at the beginning of the Christian church. See Muir, on the Lord's Supper an abiding Witness to the Death of Christ, In Present Day Tracts, 6: no. 36. On Strauss and his theory, see Hackett, in Christian Rev., 48; Weiss, Life of Jesus, 155-163; Christlieb, Mod. Doubt and Christ. Belief, 379-425; Maclear, in Strivings for the Faith, 1-136; H. B. Smith, in Faith and Philosophy, 442-468; Bayne, Review of Strauss's New Life, in Theol. Eclectic, 4:74; Row, in Lectures on Modern Scepticism, 305-360; Bibliotheca Sacra, Oct. 1871: art. by Prof. W. A. Stevens; Burgess, Antiquity and Unity of Man, 263, 264; Curtis on Inspiration, 62-67; Alexander, Christ and Christianity, 92-126; A. P. Peabody, in Smith's Bible Dict., 2:954-958.2nd. The Tendency-theory of Baur (1792-1860).This maintains that the gospels originated in the middle of the second century, and were written under assumed names as a means of reconciling opposing Jewish and Gentile tendencies in the church.“These great national tendencies find their satisfaction, not in events corresponding to them, but in the elaboration of conscious fictions.”Baur dates the fourth gospel at 160-170 A. D.; Matthew at 130; Luke at 150; Mark at 150-160. Baur never inquires who Christ was. He turns his attention from the facts to the documents. If the documents be proved unhistorical, there is no need of examining the facts, for there are no facts to examine. He indicates the presupposition of his investigations, when he says:“The principal argument for the later origin of the gospels must forever remain this, that separately, and still more when taken together, they give an account of the life of Jesus which involves impossibilities”—i. e., miracles. He would therefore remove their authorship far enough from Jesus' time to permit regarding the miracles as inventions. Baur holds that in Christ were united the universalistic spirit of the new religion,andthe particularistic form of the Jewish Messianic idea; some of his disciples laid emphasis on the one, some on the other; hence first conflict, but finally reconciliation; see statement of the Tübingen theory and of the way in which Baur was led to it, in Bruce, Apologetics, 360. E. G. Robinson interprets Baur as follows:“Paul = Protestant; Peter = sacramentarian; James = ethical; Paul + Peter + James = Christianity. Protestant preaching should dwell more on the ethical—cases of conscience—and less on mere doctrine, such as regeneration and justification.”[pg 158]Baur was a stranger to the needs of his own soul, and so to the real character of the gospel. One of his friends and advisers wrote, after his death, in terms that were meant to be laudatory:“His was a completely objective nature. No trace of personal needs or struggles is discernible in connection with his investigations of Christianity.”The estimate of posterity is probably expressed in the judgment with regard to the Tübingen school by Harnack:“Thepossiblepicture it sketched was not thereal, and the key with which it attempted to solve all problems did not suffice for the most simple.... The Tübingen views have indeed been compelled to undergo very large modifications. As regards the development of the church in the second century, it may safely be said that the hypotheses of the Tübingen school have proved themselves everywhere inadequate, very erroneous, and are to-day held by only a very few scholars.”See Baur, Die kanonischen Evangelien; Canonical Gospels (Eng. transl.), 530; Supernatural Religion, 1:212-444 and vol. 2: Pfleiderer, Hibbert Lectures for 1885. For accounts of Baur's position, see Herzog, Encyclopädie, art.: Baur; Clarke's transl. of Hase's Life of Jesus, 34-36; Farrar, Critical History of Free Thought, 227, 228.We object to the Tendency-theory of Baur, that(a) The destructive criticism to which it subjects the gospels, if applied to secular documents, would deprive us of any certain knowledge of the past, and render all history impossible.The assumption of artifice is itself unfavorable to a candid examination of the documents. A perverse acuteness can descry evidences of a hiddenanimusin the most simple and ingenuous literary productions. Instance the philosophical interpretation of“Jack and Jill.”(b) The antagonistic doctrinal tendencies which it professes to find in the several gospels are more satisfactorily explained as varied but consistent aspects of the one system of truth held by all the apostles.Baur exaggerates the doctrinal and official differences between the leading apostles. Peter was not simply a Judaizing Christian, but was the first preacher to the Gentiles, and his doctrine appears to have been subsequently influenced to a considerable extent by Paul's (see Plumptre on 1 Pet., 68-69). Paul was not an exclusively Hellenizing Christian, but invariably addressed the gospel to the Jews before he turned to the Gentiles. The evangelists give pictures of Jesus from different points of view. As the Parisian sculptor constructs his bust with the aid of a dozen photographs of his subject, all taken from different points of view, so from the four portraits furnished us by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John we are to construct the solid and symmetrical life of Christ. The deeper reality which makes reconciliation of the different views possible is the actual historical Christ. Marcus Dods, Expositor's Greek Testament, 1:675—“They are not two Christs, but one, which the four Gospels depict: diverse as the profile and front face, but one another's complement rather than contradiction.”Godet, Introd. to Gospel Collection, 272—Matthew shows the greatness of Jesus—his full-length portrait; Mark his indefatigable activity; Luke his beneficent compassion; John his essential divinity. Matthew first wrote Aramæan Logia. This was translated into Greek and completed by a narrative of the ministry of Jesus for the Greek churches founded by Paul. This translation was not made by Matthew and did not make use of Mark (217-224). E. D. Burton: Matthew = fulfilment of past prophecy; Mark = manifestation of present power. Matthew is argument from prophecy; Mark is argument from miracle. Matthew, as prophecy, made most impression on Jewish readers; Mark, as power, was best adapted to Gentiles. Prof. Burton holds Mark to be based upon oral tradition alone; Matthew upon his Logia (his real earlier Gospel) and other fragmentary notes; while Luke has a fuller origin in manuscripts and in Mark. See Aids to the Study of German Theology, 148-155; F. W. Farrar, Witness of History to Christ, 61.(c) It is incredible that productions of such literary power and lofty religious teaching as the gospels should have sprung up in the middle of the second century, or that, so springing up, they should have been published under assumed names and for covert ends.[pg 159]The general character of the literature of the second century is illustrated by Ignatius's fanatical desire for martyrdom, the value ascribed by Hermas to ascetic rigor, the insipid allegories of Barnabas, Clement of Rome's belief in the phœnix, and the absurdities of the Apocryphal Gospels. The author of the fourth gospel among the writers of the second century would have been a mountain among mole-hills. Wynne, Literature of the Second Century, 60—“The apostolic and the sub-apostolic writers differ from each other as a nugget of pure gold differs from a block of quartz with veins of the precious metal gleaming through it.”Dorner, Hist. Doct. Person Christ, 1:1:92—“Instead of the writers of the second century marking an advance on the apostolic age, or developing the germ given them by the apostles, the second century shows great retrogression,—its writers were not able to retain or comprehend all that had been given them.”Martineau, Seat of Authority, 291—“Writers not only barbarous in speech and rude in art, but too often puerile in conception, passionate in temper, and credulous in belief. The legends of Papias, the visions of Hermas, the imbecility of Irenæus, the fury of Tertullian, the rancor and indelicacy of Jerome, the stormy intolerance of Augustine, cannot fail to startle and repel the student; and, if he turns to the milder Hippolytus, he is introduced to a brood of thirty heresies which sadly dissipate his dream of the unity of the church.”We can apply to the writers of the second century the question of R. G. Ingersoll in the Shakespeare-Bacon controversy:“Is it possible that Bacon left the best children of his brain on Shakespeare's doorstep, and kept only the deformed ones at home?”On the Apocryphal Gospels, see Cowper, in Strivings for the Faith, 73-108.(d) The theory requires us to believe in a moral anomaly, namely, that a faithful disciple of Christ in the second century could be guilty of fabricating a life of his master, and of claiming authority for it on the ground that the author had been a companion of Christ or his apostles.“A genial set of Jesuitical religionists”—with mind and heart enough to write the gospel according to John, and who at the same time have cold-blooded sagacity enough to keep out of their writings every trace of the developments of church authority belonging to the second century. The newly discovered“Teaching of the Twelve Apostles,”if dating from the early part of that century, shows that such a combination is impossible. The critical theories assume that one who knew Christ as a man could not possibly also regard him as God. Lowrie, Doctrine of St. John, 12—“If St. John wrote, it is not possible to say that the genius of St. Paul foisted upon the church a conception which was strange to the original apostles.”Fairbairn has well shown that if Christianity had been simply the ethical teaching of the human Jesus, it would have vanished from the earth like the sects of the Pharisees and of the Sadducees; if on the other hand it had been simply the Logos-doctrine, the doctrine of a divine Christ, it would have passed away like the speculations of Plato or Aristotle; because Christianity unites the idea of the eternal Son of God with that of the incarnate Son of man, it is fitted to be and it has become an universal religion; see Fairbairn, Philosophy of the Christian Religion, 4, 15—“Without the personal charm of the historical Jesus, the œcumenical creeds would never have been either formulated or tolerated, and without the metaphysical conception of Christ the Christian religion would long ago have ceased to live.... It is not Jesus of Nazareth who has so powerfully entered into history: it is the deified Christ who has been believed, loved and obeyed as the Savior of the world.... The two parts of Christian doctrine are combined in the one name‘Jesus Christ.’”(e) This theory cannot account for the universal acceptance of the gospels at the end of the second century, among widely separated communities where reverence for writings of the apostles was a mark of orthodoxy, and where the Gnostic heresies would have made new documents instantly liable to suspicion and searching examination.Abbot, Genuineness of the Fourth Gospel, 52, 80, 88, 89. The Johannine doctrine of the Logos, if first propounded in the middle of the second century, would have ensured the instant rejection of that gospel by the Gnostics, who ascribed creation, not to the Logos, but to successive“Æons.”How did the Gnostics, without“peep or mutter,”come to accept as genuine what had only in their own time been first sprung upon the[pg 160]churches? While Basilides (130) and Valentinus (150), the Gnostics, both quote from the fourth gospel, they do not dispute its genuineness or suggest that it was of recent origin. Bruce, in his Apologetics, says of Baur“He believed in the all-sufficiency of the Hegelian theory of development through antagonism. He saw tendency everywhere. Anything additional, putting more contents into the person and teaching of Jesus than suits the initial stage of development, must be reckoned spurious. If we find Jesus in any of the gospels claiming to be a supernatural being, such texts can with the utmost confidence be set aside as spurious, for such a thought could not belong to the initial stage of Christianity.”But such a conception certainly existed in the second century, and it directly antagonized the speculations of the Gnostics. F. W. Farrar, onHebrews 1:2—“The wordæonwas used by the later Gnostics to describe the various emanations by which they tried at once to widen and to bridge over the gulf between the human and the divine. Over that imaginary chasm John threw the arch of the Incarnation, when he wrote:‘The Word became flesh’(John 1:14).”A document which so contradicted the Gnostic teachings could not in the second century have been quoted by the Gnostics themselves without dispute as to its genuineness, if it had not been long recognized in the churches as a work of the apostle John.(f) The acknowledgment by Baur that the epistles to the Romans, Galatians and Corinthians were written by Paul in the first century is fatal to his theory, since these epistles testify not only to miracles at the period at which they were written, but to the main events of Jesus' life and to the miracle of his resurrection, as facts already long acknowledged in the Christian church.Baur, Paulus der Apostel, 276—“There never has been the slightest suspicion of unauthenticity cast on these epistles (Gal., 1 and 2 Cor., Rom.), and they bear so incontestably the character of Pauline originality, that there is no conceivable ground for the assertion of critical doubts in their case.”Baur, in discussing the appearance of Christ to Paul on the way to Damascus, explains the outward from the inward: Paul translated intense and sudden conviction of the truth of the Christian religion into an outward scene. But this cannot explain the hearing of the outward sound by Paul's companions. On the evidential value of the epistles here mentioned, see Lorimer, in Strivings for the Faith, 109-144; Howson, in Present Day Tracts, 4: no. 24; Row, Bampton Lectures for 1877:289-356. On Baur and his theory in general, see Weiss, Life of Jesus, 1:157sq.; Christlieb, Mod. Doubt and Christ. Belief, 504-549; Hutton, Essays, 1:176-215; Theol. Eclectic, 5:1-42; Auberlen, Div. Revelation; Bib. Sac., 19:75; Answers to Supernatural Religion, in Westcott, Hist. N. T. Canon, 4th ed., Introd.; Lightfoot, in Contemporary Rev., Dec. 1874, and Jan. 1875; Salmon, Introd. to N. T., 6-31; A. B. Bruce, in Present Day Tracts, 7: no. 38.

The Epistle to the Hebrews, the style of which is so unlike that of the Apostle Paul, was possibly written by Apollos, who was an Alexandrian Jew,“a learned man”and“mighty in the Scriptures”(Acts 18:24); but it may notwithstanding have been written at the suggestion and under the direction of Paul, and so be essentially Pauline. A. C. Kendrick, in American Commentary on Hebrews, points out that while the style of Paul is prevailingly dialectic, and only in rapt moments becomes rhetorical or poetic, the style of the Epistle to the Hebrews is prevailingly rhetorical, is free from anacolutha, and is always dominated by emotion. He holds that these characteristics point to Apollos as its author. Contrast also Paul's method of quoting the O. T.:“it is written”(Rom. 11:8; 1 Cor. 1:31; Gal. 3:10)with that of the Hebrews:“he saith”(8:5, 13),“he[pg 153]hath said”(4:4). Paul quotes the O. T. fifty or sixty times, but never in this latter way.Heb. 2:3—“which having at the first been spoken by the Lord, was confirmed unto us by them that heard”—shows that the writer did not receive the gospel at first hand. Luther and Calvin rightly saw in this a decisive proof that Paul was not the author, for he always insisted on the primary and independent character of his gospel. Harnack formerly thought the epistle written by Barnabas to Christians at Rome, A. D. 81-96. More recently however he attributes it to Priscilla, the wife of Aquila, or to their joint authorship. The majesty of its diction, however, seems unfavorable to this view. William T. C. Hanna:“The words of the author ... are marshalled grandly, and move with the tread of an army, or with the swell of a tidal wave”; see Franklin Johnson, Quotations in N. T. from O. T., xii. Plumptre, Introd. to N. T., 37, and in Expositor, Vol. I, regards the author of this epistle as the same with that of the Apocryphal Wisdom of Solomon, the latter being composed before, the former after, the writer's conversion to Christianity. Perhaps our safest conclusion is that of Origen:“God only knows who wrote it.”Harnack however remarks:“The time in which our ancient Christian literature, the N. T. included, was considered as a web of delusions and falsifications, is past. The oldest literature of the church is, in its main points, and in most of its details, true and trustworthy.”See articles on Hebrews, in Smith's and in Hastings' Bible Dictionaries.

The Epistle to the Hebrews, the style of which is so unlike that of the Apostle Paul, was possibly written by Apollos, who was an Alexandrian Jew,“a learned man”and“mighty in the Scriptures”(Acts 18:24); but it may notwithstanding have been written at the suggestion and under the direction of Paul, and so be essentially Pauline. A. C. Kendrick, in American Commentary on Hebrews, points out that while the style of Paul is prevailingly dialectic, and only in rapt moments becomes rhetorical or poetic, the style of the Epistle to the Hebrews is prevailingly rhetorical, is free from anacolutha, and is always dominated by emotion. He holds that these characteristics point to Apollos as its author. Contrast also Paul's method of quoting the O. T.:“it is written”(Rom. 11:8; 1 Cor. 1:31; Gal. 3:10)with that of the Hebrews:“he saith”(8:5, 13),“he[pg 153]hath said”(4:4). Paul quotes the O. T. fifty or sixty times, but never in this latter way.Heb. 2:3—“which having at the first been spoken by the Lord, was confirmed unto us by them that heard”—shows that the writer did not receive the gospel at first hand. Luther and Calvin rightly saw in this a decisive proof that Paul was not the author, for he always insisted on the primary and independent character of his gospel. Harnack formerly thought the epistle written by Barnabas to Christians at Rome, A. D. 81-96. More recently however he attributes it to Priscilla, the wife of Aquila, or to their joint authorship. The majesty of its diction, however, seems unfavorable to this view. William T. C. Hanna:“The words of the author ... are marshalled grandly, and move with the tread of an army, or with the swell of a tidal wave”; see Franklin Johnson, Quotations in N. T. from O. T., xii. Plumptre, Introd. to N. T., 37, and in Expositor, Vol. I, regards the author of this epistle as the same with that of the Apocryphal Wisdom of Solomon, the latter being composed before, the former after, the writer's conversion to Christianity. Perhaps our safest conclusion is that of Origen:“God only knows who wrote it.”Harnack however remarks:“The time in which our ancient Christian literature, the N. T. included, was considered as a web of delusions and falsifications, is past. The oldest literature of the church is, in its main points, and in most of its details, true and trustworthy.”See articles on Hebrews, in Smith's and in Hastings' Bible Dictionaries.

(e) As to 2 Peter, Jude, and 2 and 3 John, the epistles most frequently held to be spurious, we may say that, although we have no conclusive external evidence earlier than A. D. 160, and in the case of 2 Peter none earlier than A. D. 230-250, we may fairly urge in favor of their genuineness not only their internal characteristics of literary style and moral value, but also the general acceptance of them all since the third century as the actual productions of the men or class of men whose names they bear.

Firmilianus (250), Bishop of Cæsarea in Cappadocia, is the first clear witness to 2 Peter. Origen (230) names it, but, in naming it, admits that its genuineness is questioned. The Council of Laodicea (372) first received it into the Canon. With this very gradual recognition and acceptance of 2 Peter, compare the loss of the later works of Aristotle for a hundred and fifty years after his death, and their recognition as genuine so soon as they were recovered from the cellar of the family of Neleus in Asia; De Wette's first publication of certain letters of Luther after the lapse of three hundred years, yet without occasioning doubt as to their genuineness; or the concealment of Milton's Treatise on Christian Doctrine, among the lumber of the State Paper Office in London, from 1677 to 1823; see Mair, Christian Evidences, 95. Sir William Hamilton complained that there were treatises of Cudworth, Berkeley and Collier, still lying unpublished and even unknown to their editors, biographers and fellow metaphysicians, but yet of the highest interest and importance; see Mansel, Letters, Lectures and Reviews, 381; Archibald, The Bible Verified, 27. 2 Peter was probably sent from the East shortly before Peter's martyrdom; distance and persecution may have prevented its rapid circulation in other countries. Sagebeer, The Bible in Court, 114—“A ledger may have been lost, or its authenticity for a long time doubted, but when once it is discovered and proved, it is as trustworthy as any other part of theres gestæ.”See Plumptre, Epistles of Peter, Introd., 73-81; Alford on 2 Peter, 4: Prolegomena, 157; Westcott, on Canon, in Smith's Bib. Dict., 1:370, 373; Blunt, Dict. Doct. and Hist. Theol., art.: Canon.It is urged by those who doubt the genuineness of 2 Peter that the epistle speaks of“your apostles”(3:2), just asJude 17speaks of“the apostles,”as if the writer did not number himself among them. But 2 Peter begins with“Simon Peter, a servant and apostle of Jesus Christ,”and Jude,“brother of James”(verse 1)was a brother of our Lord, but not an apostle. Hovey, Introd. to N. T., xxxi—“The earliest passage manifestly based upon 2 Peter appears to be in the so-called Second Epistle of the Roman Clement, 16:3, which however is now understood to be a Christian homily from the middle of the second century.”Origen (born 186) testifies that Peter left one epistle,“and perhaps a second, for that is disputed.”He also says:“John wrote the Apocalypse, and an epistle of very few lines; and, it may be, a second and a third; since all do not admit them to be genuine.”He quotes also from James and from Jude, adding that their canonicity was doubted.[pg 154]Harnack regards 1 Peter, 2 Peter, James, and Jude, as written respectively about 160, 170, 130, and 130, but not by the men to whom they are ascribed—the ascriptions to these authors being later additions. Hort remarks:“If I were asked, I should say that the balance of the argument was against 2 Peter, but the moment I had done so I should begin to think I might be in the wrong.”Sanday, Oracles of God, 73 note, considers the arguments in favor of 2 Peter unconvincing, but also the arguments against. He cannot get beyond anon liquet. He refers to Salmon, Introd. to N. T., 529-559, ed. 4, as expressing his own view. But the later conclusions of Sanday are more radical. In his Bampton Lectures on Inspiration, 348, 399, he says: 2 Peter“is probably at least to this extent a counterfeit, that it appears under a name which is not that of its true author.”Chase, in Hastings' Bib. Dict., 3:806-817, says that“the first piece ofcertainevidence as to 2 Peter is the passage from Origen quoted by Eusebius, though it hardly admits of doubt that the Epistle was known to Clement of Alexandria.... We find no trace of the epistle in the period when the tradition of apostolic days was still living.... It was not the work of the apostle but of the second century ... put forward without any sinister motive ... the personation of the apostle an obvious literary device rather than a religious or controversial fraud. The adoption of such a verdict can cause perplexity only when the Lord's promise of guidance to his Church is regarded as a charter of infallibility.”Against this verdict we would urge the dignity and spiritual value of 2 Peter—internal evidence which in our judgment causes the balance to incline in favor of its apostolic authorship.

Firmilianus (250), Bishop of Cæsarea in Cappadocia, is the first clear witness to 2 Peter. Origen (230) names it, but, in naming it, admits that its genuineness is questioned. The Council of Laodicea (372) first received it into the Canon. With this very gradual recognition and acceptance of 2 Peter, compare the loss of the later works of Aristotle for a hundred and fifty years after his death, and their recognition as genuine so soon as they were recovered from the cellar of the family of Neleus in Asia; De Wette's first publication of certain letters of Luther after the lapse of three hundred years, yet without occasioning doubt as to their genuineness; or the concealment of Milton's Treatise on Christian Doctrine, among the lumber of the State Paper Office in London, from 1677 to 1823; see Mair, Christian Evidences, 95. Sir William Hamilton complained that there were treatises of Cudworth, Berkeley and Collier, still lying unpublished and even unknown to their editors, biographers and fellow metaphysicians, but yet of the highest interest and importance; see Mansel, Letters, Lectures and Reviews, 381; Archibald, The Bible Verified, 27. 2 Peter was probably sent from the East shortly before Peter's martyrdom; distance and persecution may have prevented its rapid circulation in other countries. Sagebeer, The Bible in Court, 114—“A ledger may have been lost, or its authenticity for a long time doubted, but when once it is discovered and proved, it is as trustworthy as any other part of theres gestæ.”See Plumptre, Epistles of Peter, Introd., 73-81; Alford on 2 Peter, 4: Prolegomena, 157; Westcott, on Canon, in Smith's Bib. Dict., 1:370, 373; Blunt, Dict. Doct. and Hist. Theol., art.: Canon.

It is urged by those who doubt the genuineness of 2 Peter that the epistle speaks of“your apostles”(3:2), just asJude 17speaks of“the apostles,”as if the writer did not number himself among them. But 2 Peter begins with“Simon Peter, a servant and apostle of Jesus Christ,”and Jude,“brother of James”(verse 1)was a brother of our Lord, but not an apostle. Hovey, Introd. to N. T., xxxi—“The earliest passage manifestly based upon 2 Peter appears to be in the so-called Second Epistle of the Roman Clement, 16:3, which however is now understood to be a Christian homily from the middle of the second century.”Origen (born 186) testifies that Peter left one epistle,“and perhaps a second, for that is disputed.”He also says:“John wrote the Apocalypse, and an epistle of very few lines; and, it may be, a second and a third; since all do not admit them to be genuine.”He quotes also from James and from Jude, adding that their canonicity was doubted.

Harnack regards 1 Peter, 2 Peter, James, and Jude, as written respectively about 160, 170, 130, and 130, but not by the men to whom they are ascribed—the ascriptions to these authors being later additions. Hort remarks:“If I were asked, I should say that the balance of the argument was against 2 Peter, but the moment I had done so I should begin to think I might be in the wrong.”Sanday, Oracles of God, 73 note, considers the arguments in favor of 2 Peter unconvincing, but also the arguments against. He cannot get beyond anon liquet. He refers to Salmon, Introd. to N. T., 529-559, ed. 4, as expressing his own view. But the later conclusions of Sanday are more radical. In his Bampton Lectures on Inspiration, 348, 399, he says: 2 Peter“is probably at least to this extent a counterfeit, that it appears under a name which is not that of its true author.”

Chase, in Hastings' Bib. Dict., 3:806-817, says that“the first piece ofcertainevidence as to 2 Peter is the passage from Origen quoted by Eusebius, though it hardly admits of doubt that the Epistle was known to Clement of Alexandria.... We find no trace of the epistle in the period when the tradition of apostolic days was still living.... It was not the work of the apostle but of the second century ... put forward without any sinister motive ... the personation of the apostle an obvious literary device rather than a religious or controversial fraud. The adoption of such a verdict can cause perplexity only when the Lord's promise of guidance to his Church is regarded as a charter of infallibility.”Against this verdict we would urge the dignity and spiritual value of 2 Peter—internal evidence which in our judgment causes the balance to incline in favor of its apostolic authorship.

(f) Upon no other hypothesis than that of their genuineness can the general acceptance of these four minor epistles since the third century, and of all the other books of the New Testament since the middle of the second century, be satisfactorily accounted for. If they had been mere collections of floating legends, they could not have secured wide circulation as sacred books for which Christians must answer with their blood. If they had been forgeries, the churches at large could neither have been deceived as to their previous non-existence, nor have been induced unanimously to pretend that they were ancient and genuine. Inasmuch, however, as other accounts of their origin, inconsistent with their genuineness, are now current, we proceed to examine more at length the most important of these opposing views.

The genuineness of the New Testament as a whole would still be demonstrable, even if doubt should still attach to one or two of its books. It does not matter that 2nd Alcibiades was not written by Plato, or Pericles by Shakespeare. The Council of Carthage in 397 gave a place in the Canon to the O. T. Apocrypha, but the Reformers tore it out. Zwingli said of the Revelation:“It is not a Biblical book,”and Luther spoke slightingly of the Epistle of James. The judgment of Christendom at large is more trustworthy than the private impressions of any single Christian scholar. To hold the books of the N. T. to be written in the second century by other than those whose names they bear is to hold, not simply to forgery, but to a conspiracy of forgery. There must have been several forgers at work, and, since their writings wonderfully agree, there must have been collusion among them. Yet these able men have been forgotten, while the names of far feebler writers of the second century have been preserved.G. F. Wright, Scientific Aspects of Christian Evidences, 343—“In civil law there are‘statutes of limitations’which provide that the general acknowledgment of a purported fact for a certain period shall be considered as conclusive evidence of it. If, for example, a man has remained in undisturbed possession of land for a certain number of years, it is presumed that he has a valid claim to it, and no one is allowed to dispute his claim.”Mair, Evidences, 99—“We probably have not a tenth part of the evidence upon which the early churches accepted the N. T. books as the genuine productions of their authors. We have only their verdict.”Wynne, in Literature of the Second Century, 58—“Those who gave up the Scriptures were looked on by their fellow Christians as‘traditores,’traitors, who had basely yielded up what they ought to have treasured as dearer than life. But all their books were not equally sacred. Some[pg 155]were essential, and some were non-essential to the faith. Hence arose the distinction betweencanonicalandnon-canonical. The general consciousness of Christians grew into a distinct registration.”Such registration is entitled to the highest respect, and lays the burden of proof upon the objector. See Alexander, Christ and Christianity, Introduction; Hovey, General Introduction to American Commentary on N. T.

The genuineness of the New Testament as a whole would still be demonstrable, even if doubt should still attach to one or two of its books. It does not matter that 2nd Alcibiades was not written by Plato, or Pericles by Shakespeare. The Council of Carthage in 397 gave a place in the Canon to the O. T. Apocrypha, but the Reformers tore it out. Zwingli said of the Revelation:“It is not a Biblical book,”and Luther spoke slightingly of the Epistle of James. The judgment of Christendom at large is more trustworthy than the private impressions of any single Christian scholar. To hold the books of the N. T. to be written in the second century by other than those whose names they bear is to hold, not simply to forgery, but to a conspiracy of forgery. There must have been several forgers at work, and, since their writings wonderfully agree, there must have been collusion among them. Yet these able men have been forgotten, while the names of far feebler writers of the second century have been preserved.

G. F. Wright, Scientific Aspects of Christian Evidences, 343—“In civil law there are‘statutes of limitations’which provide that the general acknowledgment of a purported fact for a certain period shall be considered as conclusive evidence of it. If, for example, a man has remained in undisturbed possession of land for a certain number of years, it is presumed that he has a valid claim to it, and no one is allowed to dispute his claim.”Mair, Evidences, 99—“We probably have not a tenth part of the evidence upon which the early churches accepted the N. T. books as the genuine productions of their authors. We have only their verdict.”Wynne, in Literature of the Second Century, 58—“Those who gave up the Scriptures were looked on by their fellow Christians as‘traditores,’traitors, who had basely yielded up what they ought to have treasured as dearer than life. But all their books were not equally sacred. Some[pg 155]were essential, and some were non-essential to the faith. Hence arose the distinction betweencanonicalandnon-canonical. The general consciousness of Christians grew into a distinct registration.”Such registration is entitled to the highest respect, and lays the burden of proof upon the objector. See Alexander, Christ and Christianity, Introduction; Hovey, General Introduction to American Commentary on N. T.

D. Rationalistic Theories as to the origin of the gospels. These are attempts to eliminate the miraculous element from the New Testament records, and to reconstruct the sacred history upon principles of naturalism.

Against them we urge the general objection that they are unscientific in their principle and method. To set out in an examination of the New Testament documents with the assumption that all history is a mere natural development, and that miracles are therefore impossible, is to make history a matter, not of testimony, but ofa priorispeculation. It indeed renders any history of Christ and his apostles impossible, since the witnesses whose testimony with regard to miracles is discredited can no longer be considered worthy of credence in their account of Christ's life or doctrine.

In Germany, half a century ago,“a man was famous according as he had lifted up axes upon the thick trees”(Ps. 74:5, A. V.), just as among the American Indians he was not counted a man who could not show his scalps. The critics fortunately scalped each other; see Tyler, Theology of Greek Poets, 79—on Homer. Nicoll, The Church's One Foundation, 15—“Like the mummers of old, sceptical critics send one before them with a broom to sweep the stage clear of everything for their drama. If we assume at the threshold of the gospel study that everything of the nature of miracle is impossible, then the specific questions are decided before the criticism begins to operate in earnest.”Matthew Arnold:“Our popular religion at present conceives the birth, ministry and death of Christ as altogether steeped in prodigy, brimful of miracle,—andmiracles do not happen.”This presupposition influences the investigations of Kuenen, and of A. E. Abbott, in his article on the Gospels in the Encyc. Britannica. We give special attention to four of the theories based upon this assumption.

In Germany, half a century ago,“a man was famous according as he had lifted up axes upon the thick trees”(Ps. 74:5, A. V.), just as among the American Indians he was not counted a man who could not show his scalps. The critics fortunately scalped each other; see Tyler, Theology of Greek Poets, 79—on Homer. Nicoll, The Church's One Foundation, 15—“Like the mummers of old, sceptical critics send one before them with a broom to sweep the stage clear of everything for their drama. If we assume at the threshold of the gospel study that everything of the nature of miracle is impossible, then the specific questions are decided before the criticism begins to operate in earnest.”Matthew Arnold:“Our popular religion at present conceives the birth, ministry and death of Christ as altogether steeped in prodigy, brimful of miracle,—andmiracles do not happen.”This presupposition influences the investigations of Kuenen, and of A. E. Abbott, in his article on the Gospels in the Encyc. Britannica. We give special attention to four of the theories based upon this assumption.

1st. The Myth-theory of Strauss (1808-1874).According to this view, the gospels are crystallizations into story of Messianic ideas which had for several generations filled the minds of imaginative men in Palestine. The myth is a narrative in which such ideas are unconsciously clothed, and from which the element of intentional and deliberate deception is absent.This early view of Strauss, which has become identified with his name, was exchanged in late years for a more advanced view which extended the meaning of the word“myths”so as to include all narratives that spring out of a theological idea, and it admitted the existence of“pious frauds”in the gospels. Baur, he says, first convinced him that the author of the fourth gospel had“not unfrequently composed mere fables, knowing them to be mere fictions.”The animating spirit of both the old view and the new is the same. Strauss says:“We know with certainty what Jesus wasnot, and what he hasnotdone, namely, nothing superhuman and supernatural.”“No gospel can claim that degree of historic credibility that would be required in order to make us debase our reason to the point of believing miracles.”He calls the resurrection of Christ“ein weltgeschichtlicher Humbug.”“If the gospels are really historical documents, we cannot exclude miracle from the life-story of Jesus;”see Strauss, Life of Jesus, 17; New Life of Jesus, 1: preface, xii. Vatke, Einleitung in A. T., 210, 211, distinguishes the myth from thesagaor legend: The criterion of the pure myth is that the experience is impossible, while thesagais a tradition of remote antiquity; the myth has in it the element only of belief, thesagahas in it an element of history. Sabatier, Philos. Religion, 37—“A myth is false in appearance only. The divine Spirit can avail himself of the fictions of poetry as well as of logical reasonings. When the heart was pure, the veils of fable always allowed the face of truth to shine through. And does not childhood run on into maturity and old age?”[pg 156]It is very certain that childlike love of truth was not the animating spirit of Strauss. On the contrary, his spirit was that of remorseless criticism and of uncompromising hostility to the supernatural. It has been well said that he gathered up all the previous objections of sceptics to the gospel narrative and hurled them in one mass, just as if some Sadducee at the time of Jesus' trial had put all the taunts and gibes, all the buffetings and insults, all the shame and spitting, into one blow delivered straight into the face of the Redeemer. An octogenarian and saintly German lady said unsuspectingly that“somehow she never could get interested”in Strauss's Leben Jesu, which her sceptical son had given her for religious reading. The work was almost altogether destructive, only the last chapter suggesting Strauss's own view of what Jesus was.If Luther's dictum is true that“the heart is the best theologian,”Strauss must be regarded as destitute of the main qualification for his task. Encyc. Britannica, 22:592—“Strauss's mind was almost exclusively analytical and critical, without depth of religious feeling, or philosophical penetration, or historical sympathy. His work was rarely constructive, and, save when he was dealing with a kindred spirit, he failed as a historian, biographer, and critic, strikingly illustrating Goethe's profoundly true principle that loving sympathy is essential for productive criticism.”Pfleiderer, Strauss's Life of Jesus, xix—“Strauss showed that the church formed the mythical traditions about Jesus out of its faith in him as the Messiah; but he did not show how the church came by the faith that Jesus of Nazareth was the Messiah.”See Carpenter, Mental Physiology, 362; Grote, Plato, 1:249.We object to the Myth-theory of Strauss, that(a) The time between the death of Christ and the publication of the gospels was far too short for the growth and consolidation of such mythical histories. Myths, on the contrary, as the Indian, Greek, Roman and Scandinavian instances bear witness, are the slow growth of centuries.(b) The first century was not a century when such formation of myths was possible. Instead of being a credulous and imaginative age, it was an age of historical inquiry and of Sadduceeism in matters of religion.Horace, in Odes 1:34 and 3:6, denounces the neglect and squalor of the heathen temples, and Juvenal, Satire 2:150, says that“Esse aliquid manes et subterranea regna Nec pueri credunt.”Arnold of Rugby:“The idea of men writing mythic histories between the times of Livy and of Tacitus, and of St. Paul mistaking them for realities!”Pilate's sceptical inquiry,“What is truth?”(John 18:38), better represented the age.“The mythical age is past when an idea is presented abstractly—apart from narrative.”The Jewish sect of the Sadducees shows that the rationalistic spirit was not confined to Greeks or Romans. The question of John the Baptist,Mat. 11:3—“Art thou he that cometh, or look we for another?”and our Lord's answer,Mat. 11:4, 5—“Go and tell John the thing which ye hear and see: the blind receive their sight ... the dead are raised up,”show that the Jews expected miracles to be wrought by the Messiah; yetJohn 10:41—“John indeed did no sign”shows also no irresistible inclination to invest popular teachers with miraculous powers; see E. G. Robinson, Christian Evidences, 22; Westcott, Com. on John 10:41; Rogers, Superhuman Origin of the Bible, 61; Cox, Miracles, 50.(c) The gospels cannot be a mythical outgrowth of Jewish ideas and expectations, because, in their main features, they run directly counter to these ideas and expectations. The sullen and exclusive nationalism of the Jews could not have given rise to a gospel for all nations, nor could their expectations of a temporal monarch have led to the story of a suffering Messiah.The O. T. Apocrypha shows how narrow was the outlook of the Jews. 2 Esdras 6:55, 56 says the Almighty has made the world“foroursakes”; other peoples, though they“also come from Adam,”to the Eternal“are nothing, but be like unto spittle.”The whole multitude of them are only, before him,“like a single foul drop that oozes out of a cask”(C. Geikie, in S. S. Times). Christ's kingdom differed from that which the Jews expected, both in itsspiritualityand itsuniversality(Bruce, Apologetics, 3). There was no missionary impulse in the heathen world; on the other hand,[pg 157]it was blasphemy for an ancient tribesman to make known his god to an outsider (Nash, Ethics and Revelation, 106). The Apocryphal gospels show what sort of myths the N. T. age would have elaborated: Out of a demoniac young woman Satan is said to depart in the form of a young man (Bernard, in Literature of the Second Century, 99-136).(d) The belief and propagation of such myths are inconsistent with what we know of the sober characters and self-sacrificing lives of the apostles.(e) The mythical theory cannot account for the acceptance of the gospels among the Gentiles, who had none of the Jewish ideas and expectations.(f) It cannot explain Christianity itself, with its belief in Christ's crucifixion and resurrection, and the ordinances which commemorate these facts.(d) Witness Thomas's doubting, and Paul's shipwrecks and scourgings.Cf.2 Pet. 1:16—οὐ γὰρ σεσοφισμένοις μύθοις ἐξακολουθήσαντες =“we have not been on the false track of myths artificially elaborated.”See F. W. Farrar, Witness of History to Christ, 49-88. (e) See the two books entitled: If the Gospel Narratives are Mythical,—What Then? and, But How,—if the Gospels are Historic? (f) As the existence of the American Republic is proof that there was once a Revolutionary War, so the existence of Christianity is proof of the death of Christ. The change from the seventh day to the first, in Sabbath observance, could never have come about in a nation so Sabbatarian, had not the first day been the celebration of an actual resurrection. Like the Jewish Passover and our own Independence Day, Baptism and the Lord's Supper cannot be accounted for, except as monuments and remembrances of historical facts at the beginning of the Christian church. See Muir, on the Lord's Supper an abiding Witness to the Death of Christ, In Present Day Tracts, 6: no. 36. On Strauss and his theory, see Hackett, in Christian Rev., 48; Weiss, Life of Jesus, 155-163; Christlieb, Mod. Doubt and Christ. Belief, 379-425; Maclear, in Strivings for the Faith, 1-136; H. B. Smith, in Faith and Philosophy, 442-468; Bayne, Review of Strauss's New Life, in Theol. Eclectic, 4:74; Row, in Lectures on Modern Scepticism, 305-360; Bibliotheca Sacra, Oct. 1871: art. by Prof. W. A. Stevens; Burgess, Antiquity and Unity of Man, 263, 264; Curtis on Inspiration, 62-67; Alexander, Christ and Christianity, 92-126; A. P. Peabody, in Smith's Bible Dict., 2:954-958.

According to this view, the gospels are crystallizations into story of Messianic ideas which had for several generations filled the minds of imaginative men in Palestine. The myth is a narrative in which such ideas are unconsciously clothed, and from which the element of intentional and deliberate deception is absent.

This early view of Strauss, which has become identified with his name, was exchanged in late years for a more advanced view which extended the meaning of the word“myths”so as to include all narratives that spring out of a theological idea, and it admitted the existence of“pious frauds”in the gospels. Baur, he says, first convinced him that the author of the fourth gospel had“not unfrequently composed mere fables, knowing them to be mere fictions.”The animating spirit of both the old view and the new is the same. Strauss says:“We know with certainty what Jesus wasnot, and what he hasnotdone, namely, nothing superhuman and supernatural.”“No gospel can claim that degree of historic credibility that would be required in order to make us debase our reason to the point of believing miracles.”He calls the resurrection of Christ“ein weltgeschichtlicher Humbug.”“If the gospels are really historical documents, we cannot exclude miracle from the life-story of Jesus;”see Strauss, Life of Jesus, 17; New Life of Jesus, 1: preface, xii. Vatke, Einleitung in A. T., 210, 211, distinguishes the myth from thesagaor legend: The criterion of the pure myth is that the experience is impossible, while thesagais a tradition of remote antiquity; the myth has in it the element only of belief, thesagahas in it an element of history. Sabatier, Philos. Religion, 37—“A myth is false in appearance only. The divine Spirit can avail himself of the fictions of poetry as well as of logical reasonings. When the heart was pure, the veils of fable always allowed the face of truth to shine through. And does not childhood run on into maturity and old age?”[pg 156]It is very certain that childlike love of truth was not the animating spirit of Strauss. On the contrary, his spirit was that of remorseless criticism and of uncompromising hostility to the supernatural. It has been well said that he gathered up all the previous objections of sceptics to the gospel narrative and hurled them in one mass, just as if some Sadducee at the time of Jesus' trial had put all the taunts and gibes, all the buffetings and insults, all the shame and spitting, into one blow delivered straight into the face of the Redeemer. An octogenarian and saintly German lady said unsuspectingly that“somehow she never could get interested”in Strauss's Leben Jesu, which her sceptical son had given her for religious reading. The work was almost altogether destructive, only the last chapter suggesting Strauss's own view of what Jesus was.If Luther's dictum is true that“the heart is the best theologian,”Strauss must be regarded as destitute of the main qualification for his task. Encyc. Britannica, 22:592—“Strauss's mind was almost exclusively analytical and critical, without depth of religious feeling, or philosophical penetration, or historical sympathy. His work was rarely constructive, and, save when he was dealing with a kindred spirit, he failed as a historian, biographer, and critic, strikingly illustrating Goethe's profoundly true principle that loving sympathy is essential for productive criticism.”Pfleiderer, Strauss's Life of Jesus, xix—“Strauss showed that the church formed the mythical traditions about Jesus out of its faith in him as the Messiah; but he did not show how the church came by the faith that Jesus of Nazareth was the Messiah.”See Carpenter, Mental Physiology, 362; Grote, Plato, 1:249.

This early view of Strauss, which has become identified with his name, was exchanged in late years for a more advanced view which extended the meaning of the word“myths”so as to include all narratives that spring out of a theological idea, and it admitted the existence of“pious frauds”in the gospels. Baur, he says, first convinced him that the author of the fourth gospel had“not unfrequently composed mere fables, knowing them to be mere fictions.”The animating spirit of both the old view and the new is the same. Strauss says:“We know with certainty what Jesus wasnot, and what he hasnotdone, namely, nothing superhuman and supernatural.”“No gospel can claim that degree of historic credibility that would be required in order to make us debase our reason to the point of believing miracles.”He calls the resurrection of Christ“ein weltgeschichtlicher Humbug.”“If the gospels are really historical documents, we cannot exclude miracle from the life-story of Jesus;”see Strauss, Life of Jesus, 17; New Life of Jesus, 1: preface, xii. Vatke, Einleitung in A. T., 210, 211, distinguishes the myth from thesagaor legend: The criterion of the pure myth is that the experience is impossible, while thesagais a tradition of remote antiquity; the myth has in it the element only of belief, thesagahas in it an element of history. Sabatier, Philos. Religion, 37—“A myth is false in appearance only. The divine Spirit can avail himself of the fictions of poetry as well as of logical reasonings. When the heart was pure, the veils of fable always allowed the face of truth to shine through. And does not childhood run on into maturity and old age?”

It is very certain that childlike love of truth was not the animating spirit of Strauss. On the contrary, his spirit was that of remorseless criticism and of uncompromising hostility to the supernatural. It has been well said that he gathered up all the previous objections of sceptics to the gospel narrative and hurled them in one mass, just as if some Sadducee at the time of Jesus' trial had put all the taunts and gibes, all the buffetings and insults, all the shame and spitting, into one blow delivered straight into the face of the Redeemer. An octogenarian and saintly German lady said unsuspectingly that“somehow she never could get interested”in Strauss's Leben Jesu, which her sceptical son had given her for religious reading. The work was almost altogether destructive, only the last chapter suggesting Strauss's own view of what Jesus was.

If Luther's dictum is true that“the heart is the best theologian,”Strauss must be regarded as destitute of the main qualification for his task. Encyc. Britannica, 22:592—“Strauss's mind was almost exclusively analytical and critical, without depth of religious feeling, or philosophical penetration, or historical sympathy. His work was rarely constructive, and, save when he was dealing with a kindred spirit, he failed as a historian, biographer, and critic, strikingly illustrating Goethe's profoundly true principle that loving sympathy is essential for productive criticism.”Pfleiderer, Strauss's Life of Jesus, xix—“Strauss showed that the church formed the mythical traditions about Jesus out of its faith in him as the Messiah; but he did not show how the church came by the faith that Jesus of Nazareth was the Messiah.”See Carpenter, Mental Physiology, 362; Grote, Plato, 1:249.

We object to the Myth-theory of Strauss, that

(a) The time between the death of Christ and the publication of the gospels was far too short for the growth and consolidation of such mythical histories. Myths, on the contrary, as the Indian, Greek, Roman and Scandinavian instances bear witness, are the slow growth of centuries.

(b) The first century was not a century when such formation of myths was possible. Instead of being a credulous and imaginative age, it was an age of historical inquiry and of Sadduceeism in matters of religion.

Horace, in Odes 1:34 and 3:6, denounces the neglect and squalor of the heathen temples, and Juvenal, Satire 2:150, says that“Esse aliquid manes et subterranea regna Nec pueri credunt.”Arnold of Rugby:“The idea of men writing mythic histories between the times of Livy and of Tacitus, and of St. Paul mistaking them for realities!”Pilate's sceptical inquiry,“What is truth?”(John 18:38), better represented the age.“The mythical age is past when an idea is presented abstractly—apart from narrative.”The Jewish sect of the Sadducees shows that the rationalistic spirit was not confined to Greeks or Romans. The question of John the Baptist,Mat. 11:3—“Art thou he that cometh, or look we for another?”and our Lord's answer,Mat. 11:4, 5—“Go and tell John the thing which ye hear and see: the blind receive their sight ... the dead are raised up,”show that the Jews expected miracles to be wrought by the Messiah; yetJohn 10:41—“John indeed did no sign”shows also no irresistible inclination to invest popular teachers with miraculous powers; see E. G. Robinson, Christian Evidences, 22; Westcott, Com. on John 10:41; Rogers, Superhuman Origin of the Bible, 61; Cox, Miracles, 50.

Horace, in Odes 1:34 and 3:6, denounces the neglect and squalor of the heathen temples, and Juvenal, Satire 2:150, says that“Esse aliquid manes et subterranea regna Nec pueri credunt.”Arnold of Rugby:“The idea of men writing mythic histories between the times of Livy and of Tacitus, and of St. Paul mistaking them for realities!”Pilate's sceptical inquiry,“What is truth?”(John 18:38), better represented the age.“The mythical age is past when an idea is presented abstractly—apart from narrative.”The Jewish sect of the Sadducees shows that the rationalistic spirit was not confined to Greeks or Romans. The question of John the Baptist,Mat. 11:3—“Art thou he that cometh, or look we for another?”and our Lord's answer,Mat. 11:4, 5—“Go and tell John the thing which ye hear and see: the blind receive their sight ... the dead are raised up,”show that the Jews expected miracles to be wrought by the Messiah; yetJohn 10:41—“John indeed did no sign”shows also no irresistible inclination to invest popular teachers with miraculous powers; see E. G. Robinson, Christian Evidences, 22; Westcott, Com. on John 10:41; Rogers, Superhuman Origin of the Bible, 61; Cox, Miracles, 50.

(c) The gospels cannot be a mythical outgrowth of Jewish ideas and expectations, because, in their main features, they run directly counter to these ideas and expectations. The sullen and exclusive nationalism of the Jews could not have given rise to a gospel for all nations, nor could their expectations of a temporal monarch have led to the story of a suffering Messiah.

The O. T. Apocrypha shows how narrow was the outlook of the Jews. 2 Esdras 6:55, 56 says the Almighty has made the world“foroursakes”; other peoples, though they“also come from Adam,”to the Eternal“are nothing, but be like unto spittle.”The whole multitude of them are only, before him,“like a single foul drop that oozes out of a cask”(C. Geikie, in S. S. Times). Christ's kingdom differed from that which the Jews expected, both in itsspiritualityand itsuniversality(Bruce, Apologetics, 3). There was no missionary impulse in the heathen world; on the other hand,[pg 157]it was blasphemy for an ancient tribesman to make known his god to an outsider (Nash, Ethics and Revelation, 106). The Apocryphal gospels show what sort of myths the N. T. age would have elaborated: Out of a demoniac young woman Satan is said to depart in the form of a young man (Bernard, in Literature of the Second Century, 99-136).

The O. T. Apocrypha shows how narrow was the outlook of the Jews. 2 Esdras 6:55, 56 says the Almighty has made the world“foroursakes”; other peoples, though they“also come from Adam,”to the Eternal“are nothing, but be like unto spittle.”The whole multitude of them are only, before him,“like a single foul drop that oozes out of a cask”(C. Geikie, in S. S. Times). Christ's kingdom differed from that which the Jews expected, both in itsspiritualityand itsuniversality(Bruce, Apologetics, 3). There was no missionary impulse in the heathen world; on the other hand,[pg 157]it was blasphemy for an ancient tribesman to make known his god to an outsider (Nash, Ethics and Revelation, 106). The Apocryphal gospels show what sort of myths the N. T. age would have elaborated: Out of a demoniac young woman Satan is said to depart in the form of a young man (Bernard, in Literature of the Second Century, 99-136).

(d) The belief and propagation of such myths are inconsistent with what we know of the sober characters and self-sacrificing lives of the apostles.

(e) The mythical theory cannot account for the acceptance of the gospels among the Gentiles, who had none of the Jewish ideas and expectations.

(f) It cannot explain Christianity itself, with its belief in Christ's crucifixion and resurrection, and the ordinances which commemorate these facts.

(d) Witness Thomas's doubting, and Paul's shipwrecks and scourgings.Cf.2 Pet. 1:16—οὐ γὰρ σεσοφισμένοις μύθοις ἐξακολουθήσαντες =“we have not been on the false track of myths artificially elaborated.”See F. W. Farrar, Witness of History to Christ, 49-88. (e) See the two books entitled: If the Gospel Narratives are Mythical,—What Then? and, But How,—if the Gospels are Historic? (f) As the existence of the American Republic is proof that there was once a Revolutionary War, so the existence of Christianity is proof of the death of Christ. The change from the seventh day to the first, in Sabbath observance, could never have come about in a nation so Sabbatarian, had not the first day been the celebration of an actual resurrection. Like the Jewish Passover and our own Independence Day, Baptism and the Lord's Supper cannot be accounted for, except as monuments and remembrances of historical facts at the beginning of the Christian church. See Muir, on the Lord's Supper an abiding Witness to the Death of Christ, In Present Day Tracts, 6: no. 36. On Strauss and his theory, see Hackett, in Christian Rev., 48; Weiss, Life of Jesus, 155-163; Christlieb, Mod. Doubt and Christ. Belief, 379-425; Maclear, in Strivings for the Faith, 1-136; H. B. Smith, in Faith and Philosophy, 442-468; Bayne, Review of Strauss's New Life, in Theol. Eclectic, 4:74; Row, in Lectures on Modern Scepticism, 305-360; Bibliotheca Sacra, Oct. 1871: art. by Prof. W. A. Stevens; Burgess, Antiquity and Unity of Man, 263, 264; Curtis on Inspiration, 62-67; Alexander, Christ and Christianity, 92-126; A. P. Peabody, in Smith's Bible Dict., 2:954-958.

(d) Witness Thomas's doubting, and Paul's shipwrecks and scourgings.Cf.2 Pet. 1:16—οὐ γὰρ σεσοφισμένοις μύθοις ἐξακολουθήσαντες =“we have not been on the false track of myths artificially elaborated.”See F. W. Farrar, Witness of History to Christ, 49-88. (e) See the two books entitled: If the Gospel Narratives are Mythical,—What Then? and, But How,—if the Gospels are Historic? (f) As the existence of the American Republic is proof that there was once a Revolutionary War, so the existence of Christianity is proof of the death of Christ. The change from the seventh day to the first, in Sabbath observance, could never have come about in a nation so Sabbatarian, had not the first day been the celebration of an actual resurrection. Like the Jewish Passover and our own Independence Day, Baptism and the Lord's Supper cannot be accounted for, except as monuments and remembrances of historical facts at the beginning of the Christian church. See Muir, on the Lord's Supper an abiding Witness to the Death of Christ, In Present Day Tracts, 6: no. 36. On Strauss and his theory, see Hackett, in Christian Rev., 48; Weiss, Life of Jesus, 155-163; Christlieb, Mod. Doubt and Christ. Belief, 379-425; Maclear, in Strivings for the Faith, 1-136; H. B. Smith, in Faith and Philosophy, 442-468; Bayne, Review of Strauss's New Life, in Theol. Eclectic, 4:74; Row, in Lectures on Modern Scepticism, 305-360; Bibliotheca Sacra, Oct. 1871: art. by Prof. W. A. Stevens; Burgess, Antiquity and Unity of Man, 263, 264; Curtis on Inspiration, 62-67; Alexander, Christ and Christianity, 92-126; A. P. Peabody, in Smith's Bible Dict., 2:954-958.

2nd. The Tendency-theory of Baur (1792-1860).This maintains that the gospels originated in the middle of the second century, and were written under assumed names as a means of reconciling opposing Jewish and Gentile tendencies in the church.“These great national tendencies find their satisfaction, not in events corresponding to them, but in the elaboration of conscious fictions.”Baur dates the fourth gospel at 160-170 A. D.; Matthew at 130; Luke at 150; Mark at 150-160. Baur never inquires who Christ was. He turns his attention from the facts to the documents. If the documents be proved unhistorical, there is no need of examining the facts, for there are no facts to examine. He indicates the presupposition of his investigations, when he says:“The principal argument for the later origin of the gospels must forever remain this, that separately, and still more when taken together, they give an account of the life of Jesus which involves impossibilities”—i. e., miracles. He would therefore remove their authorship far enough from Jesus' time to permit regarding the miracles as inventions. Baur holds that in Christ were united the universalistic spirit of the new religion,andthe particularistic form of the Jewish Messianic idea; some of his disciples laid emphasis on the one, some on the other; hence first conflict, but finally reconciliation; see statement of the Tübingen theory and of the way in which Baur was led to it, in Bruce, Apologetics, 360. E. G. Robinson interprets Baur as follows:“Paul = Protestant; Peter = sacramentarian; James = ethical; Paul + Peter + James = Christianity. Protestant preaching should dwell more on the ethical—cases of conscience—and less on mere doctrine, such as regeneration and justification.”[pg 158]Baur was a stranger to the needs of his own soul, and so to the real character of the gospel. One of his friends and advisers wrote, after his death, in terms that were meant to be laudatory:“His was a completely objective nature. No trace of personal needs or struggles is discernible in connection with his investigations of Christianity.”The estimate of posterity is probably expressed in the judgment with regard to the Tübingen school by Harnack:“Thepossiblepicture it sketched was not thereal, and the key with which it attempted to solve all problems did not suffice for the most simple.... The Tübingen views have indeed been compelled to undergo very large modifications. As regards the development of the church in the second century, it may safely be said that the hypotheses of the Tübingen school have proved themselves everywhere inadequate, very erroneous, and are to-day held by only a very few scholars.”See Baur, Die kanonischen Evangelien; Canonical Gospels (Eng. transl.), 530; Supernatural Religion, 1:212-444 and vol. 2: Pfleiderer, Hibbert Lectures for 1885. For accounts of Baur's position, see Herzog, Encyclopädie, art.: Baur; Clarke's transl. of Hase's Life of Jesus, 34-36; Farrar, Critical History of Free Thought, 227, 228.We object to the Tendency-theory of Baur, that(a) The destructive criticism to which it subjects the gospels, if applied to secular documents, would deprive us of any certain knowledge of the past, and render all history impossible.The assumption of artifice is itself unfavorable to a candid examination of the documents. A perverse acuteness can descry evidences of a hiddenanimusin the most simple and ingenuous literary productions. Instance the philosophical interpretation of“Jack and Jill.”(b) The antagonistic doctrinal tendencies which it professes to find in the several gospels are more satisfactorily explained as varied but consistent aspects of the one system of truth held by all the apostles.Baur exaggerates the doctrinal and official differences between the leading apostles. Peter was not simply a Judaizing Christian, but was the first preacher to the Gentiles, and his doctrine appears to have been subsequently influenced to a considerable extent by Paul's (see Plumptre on 1 Pet., 68-69). Paul was not an exclusively Hellenizing Christian, but invariably addressed the gospel to the Jews before he turned to the Gentiles. The evangelists give pictures of Jesus from different points of view. As the Parisian sculptor constructs his bust with the aid of a dozen photographs of his subject, all taken from different points of view, so from the four portraits furnished us by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John we are to construct the solid and symmetrical life of Christ. The deeper reality which makes reconciliation of the different views possible is the actual historical Christ. Marcus Dods, Expositor's Greek Testament, 1:675—“They are not two Christs, but one, which the four Gospels depict: diverse as the profile and front face, but one another's complement rather than contradiction.”Godet, Introd. to Gospel Collection, 272—Matthew shows the greatness of Jesus—his full-length portrait; Mark his indefatigable activity; Luke his beneficent compassion; John his essential divinity. Matthew first wrote Aramæan Logia. This was translated into Greek and completed by a narrative of the ministry of Jesus for the Greek churches founded by Paul. This translation was not made by Matthew and did not make use of Mark (217-224). E. D. Burton: Matthew = fulfilment of past prophecy; Mark = manifestation of present power. Matthew is argument from prophecy; Mark is argument from miracle. Matthew, as prophecy, made most impression on Jewish readers; Mark, as power, was best adapted to Gentiles. Prof. Burton holds Mark to be based upon oral tradition alone; Matthew upon his Logia (his real earlier Gospel) and other fragmentary notes; while Luke has a fuller origin in manuscripts and in Mark. See Aids to the Study of German Theology, 148-155; F. W. Farrar, Witness of History to Christ, 61.(c) It is incredible that productions of such literary power and lofty religious teaching as the gospels should have sprung up in the middle of the second century, or that, so springing up, they should have been published under assumed names and for covert ends.[pg 159]The general character of the literature of the second century is illustrated by Ignatius's fanatical desire for martyrdom, the value ascribed by Hermas to ascetic rigor, the insipid allegories of Barnabas, Clement of Rome's belief in the phœnix, and the absurdities of the Apocryphal Gospels. The author of the fourth gospel among the writers of the second century would have been a mountain among mole-hills. Wynne, Literature of the Second Century, 60—“The apostolic and the sub-apostolic writers differ from each other as a nugget of pure gold differs from a block of quartz with veins of the precious metal gleaming through it.”Dorner, Hist. Doct. Person Christ, 1:1:92—“Instead of the writers of the second century marking an advance on the apostolic age, or developing the germ given them by the apostles, the second century shows great retrogression,—its writers were not able to retain or comprehend all that had been given them.”Martineau, Seat of Authority, 291—“Writers not only barbarous in speech and rude in art, but too often puerile in conception, passionate in temper, and credulous in belief. The legends of Papias, the visions of Hermas, the imbecility of Irenæus, the fury of Tertullian, the rancor and indelicacy of Jerome, the stormy intolerance of Augustine, cannot fail to startle and repel the student; and, if he turns to the milder Hippolytus, he is introduced to a brood of thirty heresies which sadly dissipate his dream of the unity of the church.”We can apply to the writers of the second century the question of R. G. Ingersoll in the Shakespeare-Bacon controversy:“Is it possible that Bacon left the best children of his brain on Shakespeare's doorstep, and kept only the deformed ones at home?”On the Apocryphal Gospels, see Cowper, in Strivings for the Faith, 73-108.(d) The theory requires us to believe in a moral anomaly, namely, that a faithful disciple of Christ in the second century could be guilty of fabricating a life of his master, and of claiming authority for it on the ground that the author had been a companion of Christ or his apostles.“A genial set of Jesuitical religionists”—with mind and heart enough to write the gospel according to John, and who at the same time have cold-blooded sagacity enough to keep out of their writings every trace of the developments of church authority belonging to the second century. The newly discovered“Teaching of the Twelve Apostles,”if dating from the early part of that century, shows that such a combination is impossible. The critical theories assume that one who knew Christ as a man could not possibly also regard him as God. Lowrie, Doctrine of St. John, 12—“If St. John wrote, it is not possible to say that the genius of St. Paul foisted upon the church a conception which was strange to the original apostles.”Fairbairn has well shown that if Christianity had been simply the ethical teaching of the human Jesus, it would have vanished from the earth like the sects of the Pharisees and of the Sadducees; if on the other hand it had been simply the Logos-doctrine, the doctrine of a divine Christ, it would have passed away like the speculations of Plato or Aristotle; because Christianity unites the idea of the eternal Son of God with that of the incarnate Son of man, it is fitted to be and it has become an universal religion; see Fairbairn, Philosophy of the Christian Religion, 4, 15—“Without the personal charm of the historical Jesus, the œcumenical creeds would never have been either formulated or tolerated, and without the metaphysical conception of Christ the Christian religion would long ago have ceased to live.... It is not Jesus of Nazareth who has so powerfully entered into history: it is the deified Christ who has been believed, loved and obeyed as the Savior of the world.... The two parts of Christian doctrine are combined in the one name‘Jesus Christ.’”(e) This theory cannot account for the universal acceptance of the gospels at the end of the second century, among widely separated communities where reverence for writings of the apostles was a mark of orthodoxy, and where the Gnostic heresies would have made new documents instantly liable to suspicion and searching examination.Abbot, Genuineness of the Fourth Gospel, 52, 80, 88, 89. The Johannine doctrine of the Logos, if first propounded in the middle of the second century, would have ensured the instant rejection of that gospel by the Gnostics, who ascribed creation, not to the Logos, but to successive“Æons.”How did the Gnostics, without“peep or mutter,”come to accept as genuine what had only in their own time been first sprung upon the[pg 160]churches? While Basilides (130) and Valentinus (150), the Gnostics, both quote from the fourth gospel, they do not dispute its genuineness or suggest that it was of recent origin. Bruce, in his Apologetics, says of Baur“He believed in the all-sufficiency of the Hegelian theory of development through antagonism. He saw tendency everywhere. Anything additional, putting more contents into the person and teaching of Jesus than suits the initial stage of development, must be reckoned spurious. If we find Jesus in any of the gospels claiming to be a supernatural being, such texts can with the utmost confidence be set aside as spurious, for such a thought could not belong to the initial stage of Christianity.”But such a conception certainly existed in the second century, and it directly antagonized the speculations of the Gnostics. F. W. Farrar, onHebrews 1:2—“The wordæonwas used by the later Gnostics to describe the various emanations by which they tried at once to widen and to bridge over the gulf between the human and the divine. Over that imaginary chasm John threw the arch of the Incarnation, when he wrote:‘The Word became flesh’(John 1:14).”A document which so contradicted the Gnostic teachings could not in the second century have been quoted by the Gnostics themselves without dispute as to its genuineness, if it had not been long recognized in the churches as a work of the apostle John.(f) The acknowledgment by Baur that the epistles to the Romans, Galatians and Corinthians were written by Paul in the first century is fatal to his theory, since these epistles testify not only to miracles at the period at which they were written, but to the main events of Jesus' life and to the miracle of his resurrection, as facts already long acknowledged in the Christian church.Baur, Paulus der Apostel, 276—“There never has been the slightest suspicion of unauthenticity cast on these epistles (Gal., 1 and 2 Cor., Rom.), and they bear so incontestably the character of Pauline originality, that there is no conceivable ground for the assertion of critical doubts in their case.”Baur, in discussing the appearance of Christ to Paul on the way to Damascus, explains the outward from the inward: Paul translated intense and sudden conviction of the truth of the Christian religion into an outward scene. But this cannot explain the hearing of the outward sound by Paul's companions. On the evidential value of the epistles here mentioned, see Lorimer, in Strivings for the Faith, 109-144; Howson, in Present Day Tracts, 4: no. 24; Row, Bampton Lectures for 1877:289-356. On Baur and his theory in general, see Weiss, Life of Jesus, 1:157sq.; Christlieb, Mod. Doubt and Christ. Belief, 504-549; Hutton, Essays, 1:176-215; Theol. Eclectic, 5:1-42; Auberlen, Div. Revelation; Bib. Sac., 19:75; Answers to Supernatural Religion, in Westcott, Hist. N. T. Canon, 4th ed., Introd.; Lightfoot, in Contemporary Rev., Dec. 1874, and Jan. 1875; Salmon, Introd. to N. T., 6-31; A. B. Bruce, in Present Day Tracts, 7: no. 38.

This maintains that the gospels originated in the middle of the second century, and were written under assumed names as a means of reconciling opposing Jewish and Gentile tendencies in the church.“These great national tendencies find their satisfaction, not in events corresponding to them, but in the elaboration of conscious fictions.”

Baur dates the fourth gospel at 160-170 A. D.; Matthew at 130; Luke at 150; Mark at 150-160. Baur never inquires who Christ was. He turns his attention from the facts to the documents. If the documents be proved unhistorical, there is no need of examining the facts, for there are no facts to examine. He indicates the presupposition of his investigations, when he says:“The principal argument for the later origin of the gospels must forever remain this, that separately, and still more when taken together, they give an account of the life of Jesus which involves impossibilities”—i. e., miracles. He would therefore remove their authorship far enough from Jesus' time to permit regarding the miracles as inventions. Baur holds that in Christ were united the universalistic spirit of the new religion,andthe particularistic form of the Jewish Messianic idea; some of his disciples laid emphasis on the one, some on the other; hence first conflict, but finally reconciliation; see statement of the Tübingen theory and of the way in which Baur was led to it, in Bruce, Apologetics, 360. E. G. Robinson interprets Baur as follows:“Paul = Protestant; Peter = sacramentarian; James = ethical; Paul + Peter + James = Christianity. Protestant preaching should dwell more on the ethical—cases of conscience—and less on mere doctrine, such as regeneration and justification.”[pg 158]Baur was a stranger to the needs of his own soul, and so to the real character of the gospel. One of his friends and advisers wrote, after his death, in terms that were meant to be laudatory:“His was a completely objective nature. No trace of personal needs or struggles is discernible in connection with his investigations of Christianity.”The estimate of posterity is probably expressed in the judgment with regard to the Tübingen school by Harnack:“Thepossiblepicture it sketched was not thereal, and the key with which it attempted to solve all problems did not suffice for the most simple.... The Tübingen views have indeed been compelled to undergo very large modifications. As regards the development of the church in the second century, it may safely be said that the hypotheses of the Tübingen school have proved themselves everywhere inadequate, very erroneous, and are to-day held by only a very few scholars.”See Baur, Die kanonischen Evangelien; Canonical Gospels (Eng. transl.), 530; Supernatural Religion, 1:212-444 and vol. 2: Pfleiderer, Hibbert Lectures for 1885. For accounts of Baur's position, see Herzog, Encyclopädie, art.: Baur; Clarke's transl. of Hase's Life of Jesus, 34-36; Farrar, Critical History of Free Thought, 227, 228.

Baur dates the fourth gospel at 160-170 A. D.; Matthew at 130; Luke at 150; Mark at 150-160. Baur never inquires who Christ was. He turns his attention from the facts to the documents. If the documents be proved unhistorical, there is no need of examining the facts, for there are no facts to examine. He indicates the presupposition of his investigations, when he says:“The principal argument for the later origin of the gospels must forever remain this, that separately, and still more when taken together, they give an account of the life of Jesus which involves impossibilities”—i. e., miracles. He would therefore remove their authorship far enough from Jesus' time to permit regarding the miracles as inventions. Baur holds that in Christ were united the universalistic spirit of the new religion,andthe particularistic form of the Jewish Messianic idea; some of his disciples laid emphasis on the one, some on the other; hence first conflict, but finally reconciliation; see statement of the Tübingen theory and of the way in which Baur was led to it, in Bruce, Apologetics, 360. E. G. Robinson interprets Baur as follows:“Paul = Protestant; Peter = sacramentarian; James = ethical; Paul + Peter + James = Christianity. Protestant preaching should dwell more on the ethical—cases of conscience—and less on mere doctrine, such as regeneration and justification.”

Baur was a stranger to the needs of his own soul, and so to the real character of the gospel. One of his friends and advisers wrote, after his death, in terms that were meant to be laudatory:“His was a completely objective nature. No trace of personal needs or struggles is discernible in connection with his investigations of Christianity.”The estimate of posterity is probably expressed in the judgment with regard to the Tübingen school by Harnack:“Thepossiblepicture it sketched was not thereal, and the key with which it attempted to solve all problems did not suffice for the most simple.... The Tübingen views have indeed been compelled to undergo very large modifications. As regards the development of the church in the second century, it may safely be said that the hypotheses of the Tübingen school have proved themselves everywhere inadequate, very erroneous, and are to-day held by only a very few scholars.”See Baur, Die kanonischen Evangelien; Canonical Gospels (Eng. transl.), 530; Supernatural Religion, 1:212-444 and vol. 2: Pfleiderer, Hibbert Lectures for 1885. For accounts of Baur's position, see Herzog, Encyclopädie, art.: Baur; Clarke's transl. of Hase's Life of Jesus, 34-36; Farrar, Critical History of Free Thought, 227, 228.

We object to the Tendency-theory of Baur, that

(a) The destructive criticism to which it subjects the gospels, if applied to secular documents, would deprive us of any certain knowledge of the past, and render all history impossible.

The assumption of artifice is itself unfavorable to a candid examination of the documents. A perverse acuteness can descry evidences of a hiddenanimusin the most simple and ingenuous literary productions. Instance the philosophical interpretation of“Jack and Jill.”

The assumption of artifice is itself unfavorable to a candid examination of the documents. A perverse acuteness can descry evidences of a hiddenanimusin the most simple and ingenuous literary productions. Instance the philosophical interpretation of“Jack and Jill.”

(b) The antagonistic doctrinal tendencies which it professes to find in the several gospels are more satisfactorily explained as varied but consistent aspects of the one system of truth held by all the apostles.

Baur exaggerates the doctrinal and official differences between the leading apostles. Peter was not simply a Judaizing Christian, but was the first preacher to the Gentiles, and his doctrine appears to have been subsequently influenced to a considerable extent by Paul's (see Plumptre on 1 Pet., 68-69). Paul was not an exclusively Hellenizing Christian, but invariably addressed the gospel to the Jews before he turned to the Gentiles. The evangelists give pictures of Jesus from different points of view. As the Parisian sculptor constructs his bust with the aid of a dozen photographs of his subject, all taken from different points of view, so from the four portraits furnished us by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John we are to construct the solid and symmetrical life of Christ. The deeper reality which makes reconciliation of the different views possible is the actual historical Christ. Marcus Dods, Expositor's Greek Testament, 1:675—“They are not two Christs, but one, which the four Gospels depict: diverse as the profile and front face, but one another's complement rather than contradiction.”Godet, Introd. to Gospel Collection, 272—Matthew shows the greatness of Jesus—his full-length portrait; Mark his indefatigable activity; Luke his beneficent compassion; John his essential divinity. Matthew first wrote Aramæan Logia. This was translated into Greek and completed by a narrative of the ministry of Jesus for the Greek churches founded by Paul. This translation was not made by Matthew and did not make use of Mark (217-224). E. D. Burton: Matthew = fulfilment of past prophecy; Mark = manifestation of present power. Matthew is argument from prophecy; Mark is argument from miracle. Matthew, as prophecy, made most impression on Jewish readers; Mark, as power, was best adapted to Gentiles. Prof. Burton holds Mark to be based upon oral tradition alone; Matthew upon his Logia (his real earlier Gospel) and other fragmentary notes; while Luke has a fuller origin in manuscripts and in Mark. See Aids to the Study of German Theology, 148-155; F. W. Farrar, Witness of History to Christ, 61.

Baur exaggerates the doctrinal and official differences between the leading apostles. Peter was not simply a Judaizing Christian, but was the first preacher to the Gentiles, and his doctrine appears to have been subsequently influenced to a considerable extent by Paul's (see Plumptre on 1 Pet., 68-69). Paul was not an exclusively Hellenizing Christian, but invariably addressed the gospel to the Jews before he turned to the Gentiles. The evangelists give pictures of Jesus from different points of view. As the Parisian sculptor constructs his bust with the aid of a dozen photographs of his subject, all taken from different points of view, so from the four portraits furnished us by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John we are to construct the solid and symmetrical life of Christ. The deeper reality which makes reconciliation of the different views possible is the actual historical Christ. Marcus Dods, Expositor's Greek Testament, 1:675—“They are not two Christs, but one, which the four Gospels depict: diverse as the profile and front face, but one another's complement rather than contradiction.”

Godet, Introd. to Gospel Collection, 272—Matthew shows the greatness of Jesus—his full-length portrait; Mark his indefatigable activity; Luke his beneficent compassion; John his essential divinity. Matthew first wrote Aramæan Logia. This was translated into Greek and completed by a narrative of the ministry of Jesus for the Greek churches founded by Paul. This translation was not made by Matthew and did not make use of Mark (217-224). E. D. Burton: Matthew = fulfilment of past prophecy; Mark = manifestation of present power. Matthew is argument from prophecy; Mark is argument from miracle. Matthew, as prophecy, made most impression on Jewish readers; Mark, as power, was best adapted to Gentiles. Prof. Burton holds Mark to be based upon oral tradition alone; Matthew upon his Logia (his real earlier Gospel) and other fragmentary notes; while Luke has a fuller origin in manuscripts and in Mark. See Aids to the Study of German Theology, 148-155; F. W. Farrar, Witness of History to Christ, 61.

(c) It is incredible that productions of such literary power and lofty religious teaching as the gospels should have sprung up in the middle of the second century, or that, so springing up, they should have been published under assumed names and for covert ends.

The general character of the literature of the second century is illustrated by Ignatius's fanatical desire for martyrdom, the value ascribed by Hermas to ascetic rigor, the insipid allegories of Barnabas, Clement of Rome's belief in the phœnix, and the absurdities of the Apocryphal Gospels. The author of the fourth gospel among the writers of the second century would have been a mountain among mole-hills. Wynne, Literature of the Second Century, 60—“The apostolic and the sub-apostolic writers differ from each other as a nugget of pure gold differs from a block of quartz with veins of the precious metal gleaming through it.”Dorner, Hist. Doct. Person Christ, 1:1:92—“Instead of the writers of the second century marking an advance on the apostolic age, or developing the germ given them by the apostles, the second century shows great retrogression,—its writers were not able to retain or comprehend all that had been given them.”Martineau, Seat of Authority, 291—“Writers not only barbarous in speech and rude in art, but too often puerile in conception, passionate in temper, and credulous in belief. The legends of Papias, the visions of Hermas, the imbecility of Irenæus, the fury of Tertullian, the rancor and indelicacy of Jerome, the stormy intolerance of Augustine, cannot fail to startle and repel the student; and, if he turns to the milder Hippolytus, he is introduced to a brood of thirty heresies which sadly dissipate his dream of the unity of the church.”We can apply to the writers of the second century the question of R. G. Ingersoll in the Shakespeare-Bacon controversy:“Is it possible that Bacon left the best children of his brain on Shakespeare's doorstep, and kept only the deformed ones at home?”On the Apocryphal Gospels, see Cowper, in Strivings for the Faith, 73-108.

The general character of the literature of the second century is illustrated by Ignatius's fanatical desire for martyrdom, the value ascribed by Hermas to ascetic rigor, the insipid allegories of Barnabas, Clement of Rome's belief in the phœnix, and the absurdities of the Apocryphal Gospels. The author of the fourth gospel among the writers of the second century would have been a mountain among mole-hills. Wynne, Literature of the Second Century, 60—“The apostolic and the sub-apostolic writers differ from each other as a nugget of pure gold differs from a block of quartz with veins of the precious metal gleaming through it.”Dorner, Hist. Doct. Person Christ, 1:1:92—“Instead of the writers of the second century marking an advance on the apostolic age, or developing the germ given them by the apostles, the second century shows great retrogression,—its writers were not able to retain or comprehend all that had been given them.”Martineau, Seat of Authority, 291—“Writers not only barbarous in speech and rude in art, but too often puerile in conception, passionate in temper, and credulous in belief. The legends of Papias, the visions of Hermas, the imbecility of Irenæus, the fury of Tertullian, the rancor and indelicacy of Jerome, the stormy intolerance of Augustine, cannot fail to startle and repel the student; and, if he turns to the milder Hippolytus, he is introduced to a brood of thirty heresies which sadly dissipate his dream of the unity of the church.”We can apply to the writers of the second century the question of R. G. Ingersoll in the Shakespeare-Bacon controversy:“Is it possible that Bacon left the best children of his brain on Shakespeare's doorstep, and kept only the deformed ones at home?”On the Apocryphal Gospels, see Cowper, in Strivings for the Faith, 73-108.

(d) The theory requires us to believe in a moral anomaly, namely, that a faithful disciple of Christ in the second century could be guilty of fabricating a life of his master, and of claiming authority for it on the ground that the author had been a companion of Christ or his apostles.

“A genial set of Jesuitical religionists”—with mind and heart enough to write the gospel according to John, and who at the same time have cold-blooded sagacity enough to keep out of their writings every trace of the developments of church authority belonging to the second century. The newly discovered“Teaching of the Twelve Apostles,”if dating from the early part of that century, shows that such a combination is impossible. The critical theories assume that one who knew Christ as a man could not possibly also regard him as God. Lowrie, Doctrine of St. John, 12—“If St. John wrote, it is not possible to say that the genius of St. Paul foisted upon the church a conception which was strange to the original apostles.”Fairbairn has well shown that if Christianity had been simply the ethical teaching of the human Jesus, it would have vanished from the earth like the sects of the Pharisees and of the Sadducees; if on the other hand it had been simply the Logos-doctrine, the doctrine of a divine Christ, it would have passed away like the speculations of Plato or Aristotle; because Christianity unites the idea of the eternal Son of God with that of the incarnate Son of man, it is fitted to be and it has become an universal religion; see Fairbairn, Philosophy of the Christian Religion, 4, 15—“Without the personal charm of the historical Jesus, the œcumenical creeds would never have been either formulated or tolerated, and without the metaphysical conception of Christ the Christian religion would long ago have ceased to live.... It is not Jesus of Nazareth who has so powerfully entered into history: it is the deified Christ who has been believed, loved and obeyed as the Savior of the world.... The two parts of Christian doctrine are combined in the one name‘Jesus Christ.’”

“A genial set of Jesuitical religionists”—with mind and heart enough to write the gospel according to John, and who at the same time have cold-blooded sagacity enough to keep out of their writings every trace of the developments of church authority belonging to the second century. The newly discovered“Teaching of the Twelve Apostles,”if dating from the early part of that century, shows that such a combination is impossible. The critical theories assume that one who knew Christ as a man could not possibly also regard him as God. Lowrie, Doctrine of St. John, 12—“If St. John wrote, it is not possible to say that the genius of St. Paul foisted upon the church a conception which was strange to the original apostles.”Fairbairn has well shown that if Christianity had been simply the ethical teaching of the human Jesus, it would have vanished from the earth like the sects of the Pharisees and of the Sadducees; if on the other hand it had been simply the Logos-doctrine, the doctrine of a divine Christ, it would have passed away like the speculations of Plato or Aristotle; because Christianity unites the idea of the eternal Son of God with that of the incarnate Son of man, it is fitted to be and it has become an universal religion; see Fairbairn, Philosophy of the Christian Religion, 4, 15—“Without the personal charm of the historical Jesus, the œcumenical creeds would never have been either formulated or tolerated, and without the metaphysical conception of Christ the Christian religion would long ago have ceased to live.... It is not Jesus of Nazareth who has so powerfully entered into history: it is the deified Christ who has been believed, loved and obeyed as the Savior of the world.... The two parts of Christian doctrine are combined in the one name‘Jesus Christ.’”

(e) This theory cannot account for the universal acceptance of the gospels at the end of the second century, among widely separated communities where reverence for writings of the apostles was a mark of orthodoxy, and where the Gnostic heresies would have made new documents instantly liable to suspicion and searching examination.

Abbot, Genuineness of the Fourth Gospel, 52, 80, 88, 89. The Johannine doctrine of the Logos, if first propounded in the middle of the second century, would have ensured the instant rejection of that gospel by the Gnostics, who ascribed creation, not to the Logos, but to successive“Æons.”How did the Gnostics, without“peep or mutter,”come to accept as genuine what had only in their own time been first sprung upon the[pg 160]churches? While Basilides (130) and Valentinus (150), the Gnostics, both quote from the fourth gospel, they do not dispute its genuineness or suggest that it was of recent origin. Bruce, in his Apologetics, says of Baur“He believed in the all-sufficiency of the Hegelian theory of development through antagonism. He saw tendency everywhere. Anything additional, putting more contents into the person and teaching of Jesus than suits the initial stage of development, must be reckoned spurious. If we find Jesus in any of the gospels claiming to be a supernatural being, such texts can with the utmost confidence be set aside as spurious, for such a thought could not belong to the initial stage of Christianity.”But such a conception certainly existed in the second century, and it directly antagonized the speculations of the Gnostics. F. W. Farrar, onHebrews 1:2—“The wordæonwas used by the later Gnostics to describe the various emanations by which they tried at once to widen and to bridge over the gulf between the human and the divine. Over that imaginary chasm John threw the arch of the Incarnation, when he wrote:‘The Word became flesh’(John 1:14).”A document which so contradicted the Gnostic teachings could not in the second century have been quoted by the Gnostics themselves without dispute as to its genuineness, if it had not been long recognized in the churches as a work of the apostle John.

Abbot, Genuineness of the Fourth Gospel, 52, 80, 88, 89. The Johannine doctrine of the Logos, if first propounded in the middle of the second century, would have ensured the instant rejection of that gospel by the Gnostics, who ascribed creation, not to the Logos, but to successive“Æons.”How did the Gnostics, without“peep or mutter,”come to accept as genuine what had only in their own time been first sprung upon the[pg 160]churches? While Basilides (130) and Valentinus (150), the Gnostics, both quote from the fourth gospel, they do not dispute its genuineness or suggest that it was of recent origin. Bruce, in his Apologetics, says of Baur“He believed in the all-sufficiency of the Hegelian theory of development through antagonism. He saw tendency everywhere. Anything additional, putting more contents into the person and teaching of Jesus than suits the initial stage of development, must be reckoned spurious. If we find Jesus in any of the gospels claiming to be a supernatural being, such texts can with the utmost confidence be set aside as spurious, for such a thought could not belong to the initial stage of Christianity.”But such a conception certainly existed in the second century, and it directly antagonized the speculations of the Gnostics. F. W. Farrar, onHebrews 1:2—“The wordæonwas used by the later Gnostics to describe the various emanations by which they tried at once to widen and to bridge over the gulf between the human and the divine. Over that imaginary chasm John threw the arch of the Incarnation, when he wrote:‘The Word became flesh’(John 1:14).”A document which so contradicted the Gnostic teachings could not in the second century have been quoted by the Gnostics themselves without dispute as to its genuineness, if it had not been long recognized in the churches as a work of the apostle John.

(f) The acknowledgment by Baur that the epistles to the Romans, Galatians and Corinthians were written by Paul in the first century is fatal to his theory, since these epistles testify not only to miracles at the period at which they were written, but to the main events of Jesus' life and to the miracle of his resurrection, as facts already long acknowledged in the Christian church.

Baur, Paulus der Apostel, 276—“There never has been the slightest suspicion of unauthenticity cast on these epistles (Gal., 1 and 2 Cor., Rom.), and they bear so incontestably the character of Pauline originality, that there is no conceivable ground for the assertion of critical doubts in their case.”Baur, in discussing the appearance of Christ to Paul on the way to Damascus, explains the outward from the inward: Paul translated intense and sudden conviction of the truth of the Christian religion into an outward scene. But this cannot explain the hearing of the outward sound by Paul's companions. On the evidential value of the epistles here mentioned, see Lorimer, in Strivings for the Faith, 109-144; Howson, in Present Day Tracts, 4: no. 24; Row, Bampton Lectures for 1877:289-356. On Baur and his theory in general, see Weiss, Life of Jesus, 1:157sq.; Christlieb, Mod. Doubt and Christ. Belief, 504-549; Hutton, Essays, 1:176-215; Theol. Eclectic, 5:1-42; Auberlen, Div. Revelation; Bib. Sac., 19:75; Answers to Supernatural Religion, in Westcott, Hist. N. T. Canon, 4th ed., Introd.; Lightfoot, in Contemporary Rev., Dec. 1874, and Jan. 1875; Salmon, Introd. to N. T., 6-31; A. B. Bruce, in Present Day Tracts, 7: no. 38.

Baur, Paulus der Apostel, 276—“There never has been the slightest suspicion of unauthenticity cast on these epistles (Gal., 1 and 2 Cor., Rom.), and they bear so incontestably the character of Pauline originality, that there is no conceivable ground for the assertion of critical doubts in their case.”Baur, in discussing the appearance of Christ to Paul on the way to Damascus, explains the outward from the inward: Paul translated intense and sudden conviction of the truth of the Christian religion into an outward scene. But this cannot explain the hearing of the outward sound by Paul's companions. On the evidential value of the epistles here mentioned, see Lorimer, in Strivings for the Faith, 109-144; Howson, in Present Day Tracts, 4: no. 24; Row, Bampton Lectures for 1877:289-356. On Baur and his theory in general, see Weiss, Life of Jesus, 1:157sq.; Christlieb, Mod. Doubt and Christ. Belief, 504-549; Hutton, Essays, 1:176-215; Theol. Eclectic, 5:1-42; Auberlen, Div. Revelation; Bib. Sac., 19:75; Answers to Supernatural Religion, in Westcott, Hist. N. T. Canon, 4th ed., Introd.; Lightfoot, in Contemporary Rev., Dec. 1874, and Jan. 1875; Salmon, Introd. to N. T., 6-31; A. B. Bruce, in Present Day Tracts, 7: no. 38.

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