THE LOGIA THEORY AND THE HISTORICAL TEXT
So much for the "especially remarkable" fact that churches were
desecrated in the sack of Rome in 1527, and that Savonarola should
in 1496 have predicted such things for his own day. We have seen
that his prediction was not a forecast of the event, that he had no
idea of the causation of the ultimate sack of Rome, that he really
prophesied an early event, and that he was simply announcing speedy
divine vengeance after the manner of the Hebrew and many previous
Christian prophets. What ground for argument, then, does his case
furnish for an inference as to the date of the quasi-prophecy of the
fall of Jerusalem in the third Gospel? Blass, despite his "especially
remarkable" argument, puts his case pretty low:--
Accidentally, you will say, the event [in 1527] corresponded with
the prophecy. But that is not my point, whether it was accidental,
or the prophet had really foreseen the event; for in the case of
the prophecies recorded by Luke you may raise the same controversy
if you like. [95]
What then were the manner and the matter of the prophecy in Luke? The
Messiah expressly grounds his prediction upon the non-acceptance by
Jerusalem of him and his mission:--
If thou [Jerusalem] hadst only known in this day the things which
belong unto peace! but now they are hid from thine eyes. For the
days shall come upon thee when thine enemies shall cast up a bank
about thee, and compass thee round, and keep thee in on every side,
and shall dash thee to the ground, and thy children within thee;
and they shall not leave in thee one stone on another (Luke xix,
42-44).
But when ye see Jerusalem compassed with armies, then know that
her desolation is at hand. Then let them that are in Judæa flee
unto the mountains.... For these are days of vengeance, that all
things which are written may be fulfilled.... And they shall fall
by the edge of the sword, and shall be led captive into all the
nations, and Jerusalem shall be trodden down of the Gentiles,
until the times of the Gentiles be fulfilled. And there shall
be signs in sun and moon and stars.... And then shall they see
the Son of Man coming in a cloud with power and great glory. But
when these things begin to come to pass, look up, and lift up
your heads; because your redemption draweth nigh (id. xxi, 20-28).
"I do not think," says Blass, "that either the former or the latter
of these foretellings is very distinct, since there are neither names
given nor peculiar circumstances indicated; only the common order of
events is described...." That will certainly not hold in respect of
the "shall not leave in thee one stone on another," or the "cast up
a bank about thee," which is a distinct specification of the Roman
siege method of 70.
But let us follow up the implication, which is that a Jewish
vaticinator, mindful of Daniel, might about the year 30 so predict
the events of the year 70, and a world of other events which never
happened, without astonishing us more than does Savonarola.
As we shall see, not only the circumstantial details but the remainder
of the prediction completely exclude the idea of fortuitous real
vaticination, even if it be argued that prophecies of quite visionary
prodigies may conceivably have been made at any date. As to the
prophecy of the fall of the temple, which is common to the three
synoptics, the Professor leaves it "out of the present discussion,"
seeing that the liberal theologians are willing to let it stand as a
prophecy ante eventum. Certainly he may well contemn such a critical
method. The prophecy as to the temple, and that in Matthew (xxiv,
3-31) and Mark (xiii, 3-27) as to the sequence of war, persecution,
dissension, false prophets, evangelization of the whole world, the
abomination of desolation in the holy place, false Christs (twice
specified), signs and wonders, and the final cosmic catastrophe--all
this is certainly on all fours, critically considered, with the
presages in Luke. But how shall rational criticism be induced to take
the whole mass of quasi-vaticination as the utterance of a wandering
thaumaturg of the year 30? It is idle for Professor Blass to explain
to us that when Luke makes Jesus say "Jerusalem shall be trodden down
of the Gentiles," with mere reminiscence of the Septuagint Daniel, and
Matthew and Mark make him speak with exact reference to Sept. Dan. ix,
end, they are citing independently from their original. Their original
may just have been the cited passage in Daniel, with no intervening
document. "It is self-evident," says the Professor, [96] "that the
real speech of Christ must have been longer than we read it now in
any Gospel." That thesis cannot be self-evident of which the subject
invites and admits a wholly different explanation; and the "must"
is a sample of the Professor's critical ethic.
Similarly Dr. Petrie assumes that there were any number of logia
current, all genuine, and that the gospel-makers simply cite from
them wherever they are found appropriate to the circumstances of
the moment. "These episodes, thus brought into prominence by the
conditions of the time, were therefore incorporated in the Nucleus,
or in the gospels which grew upon that." [97] It now behoves us to
consider that interesting development of traditionalist theory.
The Nucleus, be it explained, is Dr. Petrie's substitute for the
Primitive Gospel of the school of B. Weiss, and is constructed
by the simple and certainly quite objective process of selecting
"everything that is common to all three synoptics in a parallel
text"--that is, occurring in all three in the same order. This is
the "structural" test, and it yields a document which does not, like
the Weiss selection, end before the Last Supper, but goes on to the
Resurrection. But this Nucleus, be it noted, was practically complete
almost immediately after the Founder's death. The close "suggests
a document drawn up within a few months of the final events." [98]
How, then, Dr. Petrie can speak of logia incorporated in the Nucleus
in respect of the conditions of the time, is not very clear. By
his account the prevalent Christian idea about the year 30, during
the Ministry, "was the proper understanding of the law, which was
not yet abrogated in any particular." At this stage, accordingly,
the Sermon on the Mount would be the prominent logion. "And when
we notice how the fulfilling of the law is the main theme of the
nucleus, and how little [even] of the completed Gospels refer to
the Gentile problems, we must see how devoid of historic sense is
the anachronism of supposing the main body of the Gospels to have
originated as late as the Gentile period" [99] [i.e. 60-70!]. But
in 40-50, with the spread of the Church, as set forth in the Acts,
"the Samaritans were welcomed, and Gentile proselytes such as the
centurion Cornelius"; whereupon the suitable logia would be added to
the Gospels current. Then in 50-60, when the Gentiles began to enter
in decisive numbers, there was "a special meaning in the parable
of the Prodigal Son, and in the subjection to kings and rulers";
hence further embodiments. Then, after the fall of Jerusalem in 70,
"Christianity lost its sense of any tie to Judaism."
It will be admitted that this is a stirring change from the run of
New Testament criticism of the past seventy years. That criticism
more or less unconsciously recognized the problem set up by the
entire ignorance of gospel teaching revealed in the Pauline and other
epistles. Dr. Petrie, following Professor Blass in an unhesitating
acceptance of the narrative of the Acts, simply ignores the Pauline
problem altogether. He boldly credits the Church with a Gospel before
Paul's conversion, and, like other traditionalists, supplies Paul,
the gospel-less, with a physician, Luke, who had collected from the
scattered mass of logia more gospel than anybody else!
Thus has the pendulum swung back to the furthest extreme from that at
which men carried down the Gospel dates to accommodate the data. As
to chronology, Dr. Petrie is practically at the orthodox standpoint
of Professor Salmon. [100] An objective and ostensibly scientific
method, involving no element of personal bias or preference, is
employed to make a selection from the Gospels which shall present as
it were mathematically or statistically the earliest elements in the
synoptics. On that selection, however, there is brought to bear no
further critical principle whatever. It is assumed that it must all
come from the traditional founder, a mass of whose utterances must
have been committed by auditors to writing as they were delivered
(the power to write being held to be common in Galilee and Judea in
the first century because it was common in Egypt in the third); and a
nucleus collection of these separate documents must have been made soon
after the crucifixion, and there and then wound up. At any rate, such
a collection is yielded by selecting the groups or blocks of matter
which occur in all three synoptics in the same order; and this must
have been made about the year 30, because it is mainly occupied with
the problems of the law, and very little with "the Gentile problems"
which so soon began to come to the front. The history of the Acts is
here taken as unassailable ground, like the main Gospel record.
Two comments here at once suggest themselves. Dr. Petrie's line of
construction might with perfect congruity be employed to yield evidence
that the assumed original Teacher was mainly concerned with problems
of the law; and (2) the inferred multitude of original floating dicta
may with immense gain in plausibility be transmuted into a series
of interpolations made by different hands long after the supposed
Founder's death. For what critical right has Dr. Petrie to subsume
a store of floating Jesuine dicta which supplied the Church, in its
changing circumstances, for three or four decades, with suitable
parables and teachings to meet every new problem? If you profess to
seek a strictly impersonal principle of selection, why not apply a
strictly impersonal principle of inference from the result?
Obviously the additional logia are far more likely to have been
invented than found. Such a chronic windfall of papyri is a
sufficiently fantastic hypothesis on the face of it, in no way
justifiable from the recent discovery of a few enigmatic scraps
that had not been embodied, and suggest no community of thought with
those embodied. But even if we allow the probable existence of many
floating leaves, where is the likelihood that their sayings all came
from the same Teacher? In the terms of the hypothesis, he occupied
himself mainly with the law (unless the lost logia outbulk the saved),
while at the same time he duly provided for the Samaritans and the
Gentiles! His disciples and apostles, nonetheless, paid no attention
to these latter provisions until they found that such provisions were
really necessary to accommodate the thronging converts! All this is
very awkwardly suggestive of the Moslem saying that the Khalif Omar
"was many a time of a certain opinion, and the Koran was revealed
accordingly." [101] It would indeed have been a remarkable experience
for the evangelist to discover the logion (Mt. xvi, 17-19) as to the
founding of the Church on the rock of Peter when a Petrine claim had
to be substantiated. To the eye of Dr. Rendel Harris, an orthodox but
a candid scholar, the "rock" text suggests an adaptation of a passage
in the Odes of Solomon in which God's "rock" is the foundation not
of the Church but of the Kingdom. [102] Such probabilities Dr. Petrie
never considers.
Let us see how Dr. Petrie's method explains Matthew x, 5: "Go not
into any way of the Gentiles, and enter not into any city of the
Samaritans." It occurs only in Matthew: Luke gives the parable of
the Good Samaritan, with its flings at the lawyer and at the Jews
in general; and in John the Founder makes Samaritan converts. The
anti-Gentile text Dr. Petrie never discusses! Yet his method does not
permit him to exclude it. It belongs to his "sixth class," of "sayings
and episodes which only occur in one Gospel. These classes are almost
entirely in Matthew and Luke, and are the accretions which were added
after the Gospels had finally parted company." [103] So that after the
Gentile period had set in, Matthew, the one "professional scribe among
the apostles," somehow found a logion Iesou which suited the need
of the Church to exclude Samaritans and Gentiles, while Luke found
another which suited the need to welcome them. And yet, in respect
of its very purport, the anti-Gentile and anti-Samaritan teaching
ought, if genuine, to belong, on Dr. Petrie's general principle,
to the earliest collection of all. Such is the dilemma to which we
are led by the strictly statistical method of selection, conducted
without any higher light.