You force me to digress. My object just now was to shew that the life of
Christ (no less than the history of the redemption of Israel) can be
disentangled from “miracles”, although not from “mighty works”; and I
proposed to take the six or seven principal miracles attributed to
Christ by the Synoptists and to shew of each account that it may have
naturally and easily crept into the Gospels without any intention to
deceive.
But you will not let me go on in my own way; for you ask a question that
claims immediate answer, and something more than a mere Yes or No: “Did
or did not, the Publican and Apostle St. Matthew write the Gospel
attributed to him? And if he did, how can he have suffered a ‘legendary’
miracle to ‘creep into’ his narrative? The same question,” you add,
“applies to the Gospel of St. John. If these two Gospels, as they stand,
were written by Apostles, that is, by personal disciples of Jesus and
eye-witnesses of the events they profess to describe, then there is no
alternative; either Jesus wrought miracles, or the Apostles lied. No
eye-witness can err as you suppose some one (I know not whom) to have
erred, by interpreting metaphor as though it were literal statement.
Imagine Boswell, for example, misinterpreting some metaphorical
expression concerning Dr. Johnson to the effect that ‘the great
lexicographer was exalted by his countrymen to the pinnacle of honour
and fame’ and consequently inferring that his statue was set up on a
column like Lord Nelson or the Duke of York! The notion is too
grotesque. If then Jesus did not perform miracles we are forced to
conclude either that the Apostles deceived us or that the Gospels
bearing their names are forgeries. Which is it?”
In order to meet this objection I must say a few words about the
composition of the Gospels. For indeed your question shews a complete
misapprehension of the manner in which the Gospels grew up, and of the
ancient notions about authorship. In particular, you are far too free in
the use of the word “forgeries.” The book called the _Wisdom of Solomon_
contains some of the noblest sentiments that have ever found eloquent
expression, and yet the philosophic author who composed it (probably in
Alexandria about eight or nine centuries after Solomon’s death) does not
hesitate to appeal to the Almighty in words by which he ascribes the
authorship to Solomon himself: “Thou hast chosen me to be a king of Thy
people and a judge of Thy sons and daughters: Thou hast commanded me to
build a temple upon Thy Holy mount,” (ix. 7, 8). Now do you call him a
forger? The book of Ecclesiastes, one of our own canonical books,
declares that it was written by “the son of David, king in Jerusalem”
and that the author was a “King over Israel in Jerusalem,” (i. 1-12). No
one now (worth mentioning) believes these statements to be true. Yet
would you call the composer of Ecclesiastes a forger? Probably in both
cases the authors felt that they were honouring the memory of the great
king in thus introducing new truths to the world under the protection of
his name. I believe many other instances might be given of the literary
laxity of ancient times. But besides, in the case of the Gospels, you
must remember that authorship hardly came into question at all events
for a long time. The story of the life of Christ would be, in some
shape, current among the Church as the common property of all, as soon
as the Apostles began to proclaim the Gospel. Probably it was not, for
some time, reduced to writing. Among the Jews the Old Testament was
spoken of as Writing or Scripture; but their most revered and sacred
comments on it were retained in oral tradition: and hence all through
the New Testament you will find that “Scripture” refers to the Old
Testament, and that no mention is made of the doctrine about Christ
except as “tradition” or “teaching.” What therefore would probably at
first be current in the Church, perhaps for thirty or forty years after
Christ’s death, would be simply a number of “traditions” or oral
versions of the Gospel, current perhaps in different shapes at the great
ecclesiastical centres, such as Jerusalem, Antioch, Ephesus, Alexandria,
Rome, yet presenting a general affinity, and all claiming to represent
“the Memoirs of the Apostles” or to be “the Gospel of the Lord Jesus
Christ.”
It ought not to seem strange to you that the Church could exist, and the
Good Tidings be preached for some years without the aid of written
Gospels. Did not St. Paul preach the Gospel in his letters? Surely he
preached it very effectually: yet his letters do not contain a single
quotation from any written Gospel.[18] The same may be said of the
letters attributed to St. Peter, St. James, and St. John: not one quotes
a single saying of Christ, or contains a phrase that can be said, with
certainty, to be borrowed from our Gospels. The book of the Acts of the
Apostles, the earliest summary of Church history, contains many speeches
by Apostles, one by St. James, some by St. Peter and several by St.
Paul: in all these speeches only one saying of our Lord is quoted; and
that is a saying not found in any of our extant Gospels. Conjecture
might have led us to conclude that this would be so. We might reasonably
have inferred that, as long as the Church had in its midst the Apostles
and their companions, and as long also as they daily expected that
Christ would “come”, the notion of committing the Gospel to writing for
posterity would seem superfluous, distasteful, almost implying a want of
faith. But when we find this conjecture confirmed by the undeniable fact
that the earliest teachers and preachers of the Gospel, in their
teaching as it is handed down to us, made no use whatever of our written
Gospels, we may regard it as a safe conclusion that, during the first
generation after the crucifixion, written Gospels were neither widely
used nor much needed.
But soon the need would arise. One after another the Apostles and their
companions would pass away, and Christ’s immediate “coming” would now be
less and less sanguinely anticipated. The great mass of the earliest
Christians were either Jews or proselytes to the Jewish religion; but
now the Gentiles, who had come to Christ without first passing through
the Law of Moses, would become the majority in the Church; and for them
the Old Testament would not have the same pre-eminent title as “Writing”
or “Scripture.” For these Gentiles too the old Rabbinical prejudice
against committing the teaching of the Church to writing would have no
weight. Now therefore in several churches simultaneous efforts would be
made to write down the traditions current amongst the brethren; and
hence we find St. Luke prefacing his own Gospel with the remark that he
was induced to attempt this task because “many” others had attempted it.
St. Luke could hardly have written thus if one authentic and apostolic
document already occupied the ground and stood pre-eminent in the Church
as the written record of Christ’s life by an eye-witness. That there was
no such document, known to St. Luke, we may also infer from his
acknowledgment of his obligations to those who were “eye-witnesses and
ministers of the word.” It says that he shapes his narrative “as they
handed down the tradition” for that is the meaning of his word not “as
they _wrote_ the tradition.” You must have noticed that the extant
titles of the Gospels declare them to have been written not “by,” but
“according to” their several authors. The explanation (which has not
been successfully impugned) is that, even in the later times in which
their titles were given, the old belief continued, that the men who
compiled them did no more than commit to writing their version of a
tradition already current. They did not compose, they reported, the
tradition; the Gospel was supposed to be the same in all Churches, but
here “according to” one version or writer, there “according to” another.
The Apostles, being with one or two exceptions mere fishermen and
unlearned men, ignorant of letters, could not very well be supposed to
be authors of written compositions; but St. Matthew, being a
tax-gatherer, would necessarily be an expert writer, and therefore one
of the earliest traditions committed to writing would be naturally
attributed to his penmanship. But the evidence for St. Matthew’s
authorship appears, when tested, to be extremely slight. It was the
universal belief of the early Church that the Gospel according to St.
Matthew was originally written in Hebrew, and Jerome has quoted, as
coming from the Hebrew original, a passage not found in our Greek Gospel
of St. Matthew. Even when this Gospel is quoted by the earliest writers,
it is frequently quoted inexactly, and never connected by them with the
name of St. Matthew as the author. We ought not to infer from these
unnamed and inexact quotations that the writers did not recognize St.
Matthew as the author for their habit is almost invariably to quote
Gospels, simply as Gospel, inexactly, and without mentioning the name of
the Evangelist. But this unfortunate habit leaves us without any early
and trustworthy evidence for St. Matthew’s authorship. On the whole,
then, there is very little evidence for supposing that any part of our
present Gospel according to St. Matthew was written by an Apostle or by
an eye-witness of Christ’s life, and there is very much evidence tending
to show that such a supposition is extremely improbable.
Even if we grant that parts of the Gospel were composed by an Apostle,
it by no means follows that the whole was. There was a very natural
tendency, in the earliest days of the Church—when the traditional Gospel
was as it were everybody’s property and had not yet acquired the
authority of Scripture—to make the tradition as full, as edifying, and
as correct, as possible. If we may judge from the style of the book of
Revelation (which is said on rather more substantial grounds than are
generally alleged for the authorship of most of the books of the New
Testament, to have been the work of the Apostle John) the earliest Greek
traditions must have been composed in an ungrammatical, mongrel kind of
Greek, which must have been as distasteful to the well-educated
Christian as cockney English or pigeon English would be to us. This
could not long be tolerated in traditions that were repeated in the
presence of the whole congregation; and alterations of style, for
edification, would naturally facilitate alterations of matter, also for
edification. The love of completeness would introduce many corrections
and sometimes corruptions. Often, in those early times, the teacher,
catechist, or scribe, who knew some additional fact tending to Christ’s
glory, and not mentioned in the tradition or document, would think that
he was not doing his duty if he did not add it to his oral or written
version of the tradition. Even in MSS. of the fourth or fifth centuries
we have abundant instances to shew how this tendency multiplied
interpolations; principally by interpolating passages from one Gospel
into another, but sometimes by interpolating traditions not found now in
any Gospel with which we are acquainted. Occasionally there are also
corruptions of omission, arising from the desire to omit difficult or
apparently inconsistent passages; but by far the more common custom is
to add. If this corrupting tendency was in force in the fourth century
when the Christian religion was on the point of becoming the religion of
the empire, and when the sacred books of Christianity had attained to a
position of authority in the Church not a whit below the books of the
Old Testament, you may easily imagine what a multitude of interpolations
and amplifications must have crept into the original tradition at a time
when it was still young, unauthoritative, and plastic, during the first
two or three generations that followed the death of Christ. The result
of all these considerations is that we are not obliged and this, to my
mind, is a great relief to suppose that any passage which we may be
forced to reject from our Gospels as false, was written by an Apostle.
I say this is to me a great relief, but perhaps it is not so to you.
Your notion of what the Gospels ought to be, is perhaps borrowed from a
passage in Paley’s Evidences where he likens the evidences for the
miracles of Christ to that of twelve eye-witnesses, all ready to be
martyrs in attestation of the truth of their testimony; and you are
shocked perhaps when you find that the Gospels fall very far indeed
below the level of such a standard of evidence. What would have seemed
best to you would have been an exact record of Christ’s teaching and
acts, drawn up by one of the Apostles in the name of the Twelve, duly
dated and signed by all, and circulated and received by the whole Church
from the day after the Ascension down to the present time. And I quite
agree with you. But then, as we have seen in the history of astronomy
and in the history of the Old Testament, it has not pleased God to
reveal Himself or His works to men in the way which men have thought
best. Now you are not indeed obliged to infer that, because revelation
in the Old Testament was accompanied by illusion, therefore revelation
in the New Testament must have contained a similar alloy; but you ought
at least to be prepared for such a discovery. For me, it would be a
terrible shock indeed if I were forced to suppose that a faithful
Apostle of the Lord Jesus Christ had wilfully misrepresented the truth
with a view to glorify His Master: but it is no shock at all to find
that the highest revelation of God to man has been, like all other
revelations, to some extent misinterpreted, obscured, materialized. I
have learned to accept this as an inevitable law of our present nature.
If it had been God’s will to suspend this law of nature in favour of the
New Testament, I think He would have consistently gone further, and
miraculously prevented the scribes from making errors, or posterity from
perpetuating them. But how can I think God has done this, when I know
that even the words of the Lord’s own Prayer are variously reported in
the two Gospels of St. Matthew and St. Luke, and that every page of a
critical edition of the New Testament teems with various readings
between which the ablest commentators are perplexed to decide?
You must therefore make up your mind to believe that the earliest Gospel
traditions and even that triply attested tradition[19] which is common
to the first three Gospels and which runs through the three with a
separate character of its own, like a distinguishable stream passed
through several phases before they assumed their present shape. In my
next letter I shall probably ask you to consider what phases they passed
through; but you may perhaps expect me to say something at once about
the Fourth Gospel; for to that book many of the previous remarks do not
apply. It was much later than the rest; it has little in subject-matter,
and nothing at all in style, in common with the rest; it contains
scarcely a word of the Common Tradition which pervades the first three
Gospels; it probably passed through no phases and suffered few
accretions; and it differs from the other Gospels, even from St. Luke’s,
in bearing a far more manifest impress of personal authorship. The three
synoptic Gospels really agree with their titles in representing the
Gospel “according to” their several authors; but the Fourth Gospel
(although, like the rest, preceded by “according to”) is a Gospel
written “by” whoever wrote it.
The question is, who did write it? If it was written by an Apostle, an
eye-witness of the life of Christ, then we have to face—I am not sure we
have to accept—your alternative: “Either Jesus worked miracles, or the
Apostles lied.” But there is very little evidence (worth calling
evidence) for the hypothesis that an Apostle wrote it, and much evidence
against that hypothesis. St. John, the reputed author, is said, on the
evidence of Justin Martyr, to have written the Apocalypse; which, while
it resembles in style what we might have expected from a Galilean
fisherman, differs entirely from the style of the Fourth Gospel. Whoever
wrote the Gospel, we may be sure that he did not reproduce the words of
Jesus, but gave rather what appeared to him to be their latent and
spiritual meaning. This can be proved as follows. Suppose three
writers—say Boswell, Mrs. Thrale, and Goldsmith—had composed accounts of
the life and sayings of Dr. Johnson, widely differing in the
subject-matter and style of the narrative, but closely agreeing in the
character of Johnson’s thoughts, as reported by them, and very often
agreeing in the actual words imputed to Johnson; and suppose a fourth
writer, say Burke, had written his reminiscences of Dr. Johnson, which
entirely differed in language, in thought, and in subject-matter from
the first three: would you not say at once that this was strong proof,
that Burke did not report Dr. Johnson’s actual words, and that he had
probably tinged them with his own style and thought? But if furthermore
Burke reported Dr. Johnson’s words and long discourses _in the same
language as he reported Sheridan’s, and in language indistinguishable
from his own contextual narrative_, then you would, I am sure, find it
difficult to be patient with any one who, through force of prejudice and
pleasing associations, obstinately maintained that Burke’s biography was
equally faithful and exact with the three other concordant or synoptic
biographies. Now this comparison exactly represents the facts. You will
find several of the most learned and painstaking commentators differing
as to where the introductory words of the author of the Fourth Gospel
cease, and where John the Baptist’s words begin; and the style of our
Lord’s discourses in the Fourth Gospel is quite indistinguishable from
the style of the author himself. As to the immense difference, in
respect of style and thought and subject-matter, between the Synoptic
Gospels, and the Fourth Gospel, you must have felt it, even as a child,
reading them in English.
I must refer you to the article on “Gospels” in the _Encyclopædia
Britannica_ for what I believe to be the most probable explanation of
the origin of this remarkable work. It is there shown that there are
extraordinary points of similarity between the emblematic language and
emblematic acts attributed to Jesus in the Fourth Gospel, and the
emblematic conceptions of the Alexandrine philosopher Philo, who
flourished some sixty or seventy years before that Gospel was written.
Dealing, for instance, with the dialogue between Jesus and the woman of
Samaria near the well at Sychem, the writer of that article shews that,
in the works of Philo, the well is an emblem of the search after
knowledge; Sychem is an emblem of materialism; the “five husbands”, or,
as Philo calls them, “five seducers” represent the five senses so that
the whole dialogue appears to contain a poetic appeal to the heathen
world, to turn from the materialistic knowledge which can never satisfy,
to the knowledge of the Word of God which is the “living water”. Still
more remarkable is Philo’s emblematic use of Lazarus (or Eleazar, for
the words are the same) as a type of dead humanity, helpless and
lifeless till it has been raised up by the help of the Lord. But into
this I have no space to enter. If you care to pursue the subject, I must
refer you to the article above mentioned. Canon Westcott has pointed out
that in arrangement and structure the Fourth Gospel has some distinct
poetic features. I should go further and say that, in this Gospel,
History is subordinated to poetic purpose, and that its narratives of
incidents, resting sometimes on a basis of fact, but more often on a
basis of metaphor, are intended not so much to describe incidents as to
lead the reader to spiritual conclusions.
We have no account of the authorship of the Fourth Gospel till the year
170 A.D., and this we find to be “already legendary.”[20] It is there
said that, being requested by his fellow-disciples and bishops to write
a Gospel, John desired them to fast for three days and then to relate to
one another what revelation each had received. It was then revealed to
the Apostle Andrew that “while all endeavoured to recall their
experiences, John should write _everything in his own name_”. No
confidence can be placed in the exactness of testimony that comes so
long after the event; but it points to some kind of joint contribution
or revision such as is implied in John xxi. 24: “This is the disciple
which testifieth of these things and _we know_ that his testimony is
true.” That the Gospel was written “in the name of John” by some pupil
of his—perhaps by some namesake—and revised and issued in the name of
John by the Elders of the Ephesian Church, is by no means improbable. In
some matters of fact, for example in distinguishing between the Passover
and “the last supper,” the Fourth Gospel corrects an (apparent) error of
the Synoptic Gospels, a correction that possibly proceeded from the
Apostle John; and perhaps the solemn asseveration as to the issue of
blood and water from the side of Jesus (“And he that hath seen hath
borne witness, and his witness is true: and he knoweth that he saith
true, that ye also may believe”) may be a reminiscence of some special
testimony from the aged Apostle; but it is impossible to ascertain how
far emblematic and historical narratives are blended in such passages as
the dialogue with the Samaritan woman, the miracle at Cana, and the
raising of Lazarus. The author was convinced (like every other believer,
at that time) that Jesus _did_ work many miracles, and _could_ have
worked any kind of miracle; but he had noted the unspiritual tendency to
magnify the “mighty works” of Jesus as merely “mighty:” he therefore
selected from the traditions before him those in which the spiritual and
emblematic meaning was predominant. In doing this, he sometimes took a
spiritual metaphor and expanded it into a spiritual history. Again, he
had also noted an unspiritual tendency to lay undue stress upon the
exact words of Jesus; and he therefore determined—besides giving
prominence to the promise of Jesus concerning His Spirit, which was to
guide the disciples into all truth—to exhibit, in his Gospel, the
spiritual purport of Christ’s doctrine rather than to repeat each saying
as it was actually delivered.
As I write these words, with the pages of the Gospel open before me, my
eye falls upon the story of the raising of Lazarus: “Jesus said unto
her, I am the resurrection and the life: he that believeth on me, though
he die, yet shall he live; and whosoever liveth and believeth on me
shall never die.” Is it possible, I say to myself, that Jesus did _not_
say these entrancing words? And how often does the same question arise
as one turns over the leaves: “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give
unto you: not as the world giveth, give I unto you:” “Yet a little while
and the world beholdeth me no more; but ye behold me: because I live, ye
shall live also.” Could any one at any time have invented such sayings?
Still less, is it possible they could have been invented in the times of
Trajan or Hadrian by any Asiatic Greek or Alexandrian Jew? But truth
compels me to answer that, just as the Asiatic Jew St. Paul, although he
never saw or heard Jesus, was inspired by the Spirit of Jesus to utter
words of spiritual truth and beauty worthy of Jesus Himself, so an
Asiatic Greek or Alexandrian Jew of the time of Trajan may have been
prompted by the same Spirit to penetrate to the very depths of the
meaning of Jesus and to express some of the conclusions to be derived
from His sayings more clearly than we can see them even in the words of
Jesus Himself, as they are recorded in the Synoptic Gospels. I do not
see on what principle we can so limit the operation of the Holy Spirit
as to say it could not extend, in its most perfect force, beyond the age
of Domitian or Nerva or even Trajan. Having before me the doctrine of
the Synoptic Gospels, I am forbidden by mere considerations of style and
literary criticism from believing that Jesus used the exact words, “I am
the true vine,” “I am the good shepherd,” “I am the light of the world,”
“I am the resurrection and the life;” but I accept these sayings as
divinely inspired, and as being far deeper and fuller expressions of the
spiritual nature of Jesus than any of the inferences which I could draw
for myself from the Synoptic doctrine. Do not then say that I “reject”
the Fourth Gospel. I accept all that is essential in it; and this I
accept on far safer grounds than many who would accuse me of rejecting
it. For their acceptance might be shaken to-morrow if some new piece of
evidence appeared decisively shewing that the Gospel was not written by
John the Apostle; but my acceptance is independent of authorship, and is
based upon the testimony of my conscience.
Surely you must feel that it would be absurd for one who tests religious
doctrine to some extent by experience and by history, to reject the
Fourth Gospel because it is in a great measure emblematic, and because
it was not written by the man who was supposed to have written it. Be
the author who he may, I shall never cease to feel grateful to him. The
all-embracing sweep of view which enabled him to look on the Incarnation
as the central incident of the world’s history and to set forth Christ
as the Eternal Word and Eternal Son, not dependent for this claim upon a
mere Miraculous Conception; the spiritual contempt for mere “mighty
works,” which leads him repeatedly to claim faith for Jesus Himself
firstly, and for the “words” of Jesus secondly, and only as a last
reserve to demand belief “for the works’ sake;” and the true intuition
with which he fastens on the promise of Jesus (only hinted at in the
Synoptic Gospels) that He would be present with His disciples at every
time and place and that He would give them “a voice,” and a Spirit not
to be gainsaid—from which brief suggestion the author worked out in
detail the promise of the Holy Spirit, and predicted the nobler and
ampler future of the Church these true, and profound, and spiritual
intuitions will always excite my deepest gratitude and admiration. The
doctrine of the Eternal Word had its origin perhaps in the schools of
Alexandria, and certainly formed no part of the teaching of Jesus; but,
Christianized as it is by the author of the Fourth Gospel, it commends
itself as a key to many mysteries, and (like the Fourth Gospel itself)
it appears to be but one among many illustrations of the divine
development of Christian doctrine; “I have yet many things to say unto
you, but ye cannot bear them now. Howbeit when he, the Spirit of Truth,
is come, he will guide you into all truth.” In a word, without the
Fourth Gospel, Christendom might (it would seem) have failed forever to
appreciate the true nature of its Redeemer.
I cannot indeed repress some regret that this most marvellously endowed
minister and prophet of Christ should have been allowed to select a
poetic and even illusive form in order to publish his divine truths.
Hitherto I have been able with pleasure and satisfaction to see the
illusive integument being gradually separated from the inner truth, as
in astronomy and in the history of the Old Testament. Now comes a point
where I myself should like to recoil. But how puerile and faithless
should I be if I assumed that God would give to the world along with His
divine revelation precisely that modicum of illusion (and no more) which
I myself personally am just able to receive with pleasure! Let us rather
follow where, as Plato says, “the argument leads us.” Or, if you prefer
me to quote from the Fourth Gospel itself, let us follow the guidance of
Him who is both “the Way and the Truth.”
Footnote 18:
If 1 Tim. v. 18 were an exception, it would shew that that letter,
quoting a Gospel as “Scripture,” was later than St. Paul. But it is
possibly not an exception.
Footnote 19:
“Attested” is not the same as “originated.” The tradition may
(possibly) have been originated by a single author: but witness, or
“attestation”, was borne to its authoritative character by the three
earliest Gospels, whose authors, or compilers, independently adopted
it. It is therefore ‘triply attested’.
Footnote 20:
“The Fragment of Muratori,” Westcott, _Introduction to the Gospels_,
p. 255.
XVII
CHRISTIAN ILLUSIONS