The New Testament is a series of early Christian writings which the
Church came to regard as canonical, i.e. they were placed in the same
category as the Old Testament, the writings which the Christian had
inherited from the Jewish Church. Just as the ancient Scriptures were
considered to be the Word of God, so that what they contained was
necessarily the true and inspired doctrine, so also the New Testament
was available for proving the Church's dogma. The assured canonicity of
the whole New Testament resulted in its use by the medieval theologians,
the Schoolmen, as a storehouse of proof-texts. Thus the New Testament
seemed to exist in order to prove the Church's conclusions, not to tell
its own tale.
Erasmus.
The _Novum Instrumentum_ published by Erasmus in 1516 (see above,
_Textual Criticism_) contained more than the mere Editio Princeps of the
Greek text: Erasmus accompanied it with a Latin rendering of his own, in
which he aimed at giving the meaning of the Greek without blindly
following the conventional phraseology of the Latin Vulgate, which was
the only form in which the New Testament had been current in western
Europe for centuries. This rendering of Erasmus, together with his
annotations and prefaces to the several books, make his editions the
first great monument of modern Biblical study. Medieval Bibles contain
short prefaces by St Jerome and others. The stereotyped information
supplied in these prefaces was drawn from various sources: Erasmus
distinguishes, e.g., between the direct statements in the Acts and the
inferences which may be drawn from incidental allusions in the Pauline
Epistles, or from the statements of ancient non-canonical writers.[54]
This discrimination of sources is the starting-point of scientific
criticism.
The Reformers.
The early champions of Church reform in the beginning of the 16th
century found in the Bible their most trustworthy weapon. The picture of
Apostolical Christianity found in the New Testament offered indeed a
glaring contrast to the papal system of the later middle ages. Moreover,
some of the "authorities" used by the Schoolmen had been discovered by
the New Learning of the Renaissance to be no authorities at all, such as
the writings falsely attributed to Dionysius the Areopagite. When,
therefore, the breach came, and the struggle between reformers and
conservatives within the undivided Church was transformed into a
struggle between Protestants and Romanists, it was inevitable that the
authority which in the previous centuries had been ascribed to the
Church should be transferred by the Reformed Churches to the Bible. "The
Bible, the Bible alone, is the religion of Protestants"[55] did really
express the watchword of the anti-Romanist parties, especially towards
the close of the acuter struggle. At the beginning of the movement the
New Testament itself had been freely criticized. Luther, like his
countrymen of to-day, judged the contents of the New Testament by the
light of his leading convictions; and in his German translation, which
occupies the same place in Germany as the Authorized Version of 1611
does in English-speaking lands, he even placed four of the books
(Hebrews, James, Jude, Apocalypse) in an appendix at the end, with
prefaces explanatory of this drastic act of criticism. But though we may
trace a real affiliation between the principles of Luther and modern
German critical study--notably in the doctrines of the Gospel within the
Gospel and of the residual Essence of Christianity--Luther's
discriminations were in the 17th century ignored in practice.
Influence of textual criticism.
From cover to cover the whole New Testament was regarded at the
beginning of the 18th century by almost all Protestants as the
infallible revelation of the true religion. The doctrines of
Christianity, and in many communities the customs of the Church, were
held to be inferences from the inspired text of the Scriptures. The
first serious blow to this view came from the study of textual
criticism. The editions of Mill (1707) and of Wetstein (1751) proved
once for all that variations in the text, many of them serious, had
existed from the earliest times. It was evident, therefore, that the
true authority of the New Testament could not be that of a legal code
which is definite in all its parts. More important still was the growing
perception of the general uniformity of nature, which had forced itself
with increasing insistence upon men's minds as the study of the natural
sciences progressed in the 17th and 18th centuries. The miracles of the
New Testament, which had formerly been received as bulwarks of
Christianity, now appeared as difficulties needing explanation.
Furthermore, the prevailing philosophies of the 18th century tended to
demand that a real divine revelation should be one which expressed
itself in a form convincing to the reason of the average plain man,
whatever his predispositions might be; it was obvious that the New
Testament did not wholly conform to this standard.
Rationalists.
Strauss.
But if the New Testament be not itself the direct divine revelation in
the sense of the 18th century, the question still remains, how we are to
picture the true history of the rise of Christianity, and what its true
meaning is. This is the question which has occupied the theologians of
the 19th and 20th centuries. Perhaps the most significant event from
which to date the modern period is the publication by Lessing in
1774-1777 of the "Wolfenbuettel Fragments," i.e. H.S. Reimarus'
posthumous attack on Christianity, a work which showed that the mere
study of the New Testament is not enough to compel belief in an
unwilling reader. Lessing's publication also helped to demonstrate the
weakness of the older rationalist position, a position which really
belongs to the 18th century, though its best-remembered exponent, Dr
H.E.G. Paulus, only died in 1851. The characteristic of the rationalists
was the attempt to explain away the New Testament miracles as
coincidences or naturally occurring events, while at the same time they
held as tenaciously as possible to the accuracy of the letter of the New
Testament narratives. The opposite swing of the pendulum appears in D.F.
Strauss: in his _Leben Jesu_ (1833) he abandons the shifts and
expedients by which the rationalists eliminated the miraculous from the
Gospel stories, but he abandons also their historical character.
According to Strauss the fulfilments of prophecy in the New Testament
arise from the Christians' belief that the Christian Messiah must have
fulfilled the predictions of the prophets, and the miracles of Jesus in
the New Testament either originate in the same way or are purely
mythical embodiments of Christian doctrines.
Tuebingen school.
The main objection to this presentation, as also to that of the
rationalists, is that it is very largely based not upon the historical
data, but upon a pre-determined theory. Granted the philosophical basis,
the criticism practised upon the New Testament by Paulus and Strauss
follows almost automatically. Herein lies the permanent importance of
the work of Ferdinand Christian Baur, professor of theology at Tuebingen
from 1826 to 1860. The corner-stone of his reconstruction of early
Christian history is derived not so much from philosophical principles
as from a fresh study of the documents. Starting from Galatians and I
Corinthians, which are obviously the genuine letters of a Christian
leader called Paul to his converts, Baur accepted 2 Corinthians and
Romans as the work of the same hand. From the study of these
contemporary and genuine documents, he elaborated the theory that the
earliest Christianity, the Christianity of Jesus and the original
apostles, was wholly Judaistic in tone and practice. Paul, converted to
belief in Jesus as Messiah after the Crucifixion, was the first to
perceive that for Christians Judaism had ceased to be binding. Between
him and the older apostles arose a long and fierce controversy, which
was healed only when at last his disciples and the Judaizing disciples
of the apostles coalesced into the Catholic Church. This only occurred,
according to Baur, early in the 2nd century, when the strife was finally
allayed and forgotten. The various documents which make up the New
Testament were to be dated mainly by their relation to the great
dispute. The Apocalypse was a genuine work of John the son of Zebedee,
one of the leaders of the Judaistic party, but most of the books were
late, at least in their present form. The Acts, Baur thought, were
written about A.D. 140, after the memory of the great controversy had
almost passed away. All four Gospels also were to be placed in the 2nd
century, though that according to Matthew retained many features
unaltered from the Judaistic original upon which it was based.
Later views.
The Tuebingen school founded by Baur dominated the theological criticism
of the New Testament during a great part of the 19th century and it
still finds some support. The main position was not so much erroneous as
one-sided. The quarrel between St Paul and his opponents did not last so
long as Baur supposed, and the great catastrophe of the fall of
Jerusalem effectually reduced thorough-going Judaistic Christianity into
insignificance from A.D. 70 onwards. Moreover, St Paul's converts do not
seem to have adopted consistent "Paulinism" as a religious philosophy.
St Paul was an emancipated Jew, but his converts were mostly Greeks, and
the permanent significance of St Paul's theories of law and faith only
began to be perceived after his letters had been collected together and
had been received into the Church's canon. All these considerations tend
to make the late dates proposed by Baur for the greater part of the New
Testament books unnecessary; the latest investigators, notably Professor
A. Harnack of Berlin, accept dates that are not far removed from the
ancient Christian literary tradition.
Literary criticism of the Gospels points to a similar conclusion. A
hundred years' study of the synoptic problem, i.e. the causes which make
the Gospels according to Matthew, Mark and Luke at once so much alike
and so different, has resulted in the demonstration of the priority of
Mark, which "was known to Matthew and Luke in the same state and with
the same contents as we have it now."[56] This Gospel may be dated a
very few years after A.D. 70. Luke and Matthew appear to have been
published between 80 and 100.[57] Besides the Gospel of Mark these
Evangelists made use of another document, now lost, which contained many
sayings of Jesus and some narratives not found in Mark. This document is
by many scholars identified with the "Logia," mentioned by Papias
(Eusebius, _Ch. Hist_. in. 39) as being the work of Matthew the Apostle,
but the identification is not certain.
The Johannine writings, i.e. the Fourth Gospel and the three Epistles of
John, represent the view of Christ and Christianity taken by a Christian
teacher, who seems to have lived and written in Asia Minor at the close
of the 1st century A.D. The value of the Fourth Gospel as a narrative of
events is a matter of dispute, but the view of the personality of Jesus
Christ set forth in it is unquestionably that which the Church has
accepted.
The discoveries of papyri in Upper Egypt during recent years, containing
original letters written by persons of various classes and in some cases
contemporary with the Epistles of the New Testament, have immensely
increased our knowledge of the Greek of the period, and have cleared up
not a few difficulties of language and expression. More important still
is the application of Semitic study to elucidate the Gospels. It is idle
indeed to rewrite the Gospel narratives in the Aramaic dialect spoken by
Christ and the apostles, but the main watchwords of the Gospel
theology--phrases like "the Kingdom of God," "the World to come," the
"Father in Heaven," "the Son of Man,"--can be more or less surely
reconstructed from Jewish writings, and their meaning gauged apart from
the special significance which they received in Christian hands. This
line of investigation has been specially followed by Professor G. Dalman
in his _Worte Jesu_. The study of the Semitic elements in early
Christianity is less advanced than the study of the Greek elements, so
that it is doubtless from the Semitic side that further progress in the
criticism of the New Testament may be expected.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.--See the separate bibliographies to the separate
articles on the books of the New Testament. The selection here given
of the vast literature of the subject has been drawn up with the idea
of setting the student on his way. 1. _General and
Historical._--Jerome's _Prefaces_ (to be found in any R.C. edition of
the Vulgate); Luther's _Prefaces_ (to be found in German-printed
editions of Luther's Bible); F. Seebohm, _The Oxford Reformers_ (3rd
ed., London, 1887)--for Erasmus; M. Creighton, "Chillingworth" in the
_Dict. of Nat. Biogr_.; Chr. Schrempf, _Lessing als Philosoph_
(Stuttgart, 1906); J. Estlin Carpenter, _The Bible in the 19th
Century_ (London, 1903); A. Schweitzer, _Von Reimarus zu Wrede_
(Tuebingen, 1906). 2. _For the Synoptic Gospels._--W.G. Rushbrooke,
_Synopticon_ (London, 1880), (trans. in _The Common Tradition of the
Synoptic Gospels_ by E.A. Abbott and W.G. Rushbrooke, London, 1884),
Sir J.C. Hawkins, _Horae Synopticae_ (Oxford, 1899); Prof. Julius
Wellhausen, _Einleitung in die drei ersten Evangelien_ (Berlin, 1905),
_Das Evangelium Marci_ (1903), _Das Ev. Matthaei_ (1904), _Das Ev.
Lucae_ (1904)--these four books make one work; Prof. A. Harnack,
_Lukas der Arzt_ (Berlin, 1905). 3. _For the Fourth Gospel._--K.G.
Bretschneider, _Probabilia_ (Leipzig, 1820); Matthew Arnold's _God and
the Bible_, chaps, v., vi. (still the best defence in English of a
Johannine kernel, new ed., 1884); W. Sanday, _Criticism of the Fourth
Gospel_ (Oxford, 1905); A. Loisy, _Le Quatrieme Evangile_ (Paris,
1903); Prof. P.W. Schmiedel, _Das vierte Evangelium gegenueber den drei
ersten_ (Halle, 1906). 4. _For the Semitic Elements in the
N.T._--Prof. G. Dalman, _Die Worte Jesu_ (Leipzig, 1898), (Eng.
trans., _The Words of Jesus_, 1905); Prof. Johannes Weiss, _Die
Predigt Jesu vom Reiche Gottes_ (1st ed. 1892, 2nd ed. 1900). The
Protestant view of the New Testament in Prof. A. Harnack, _Das Wesen
des Christentums_ (Berlin, 1900), (Eng. trans., _What is
Christianity?_, London, 1901) may be compared with the Liberal
Catholic view in A. Loisy, _L'Evangile et l'Eglise_ (2nd ed., 1903).
(F. C. B.)