trustworthy as history; has in fact no historical intent, but belongs to
the class of writings that may be called conciliatory, or mediatorial,
designed to bring opposing views together, to heal divisions, and smooth
over rough places. By pulling hard at both ends of the string, dragging
Peter towards Paul, and Paul towards Peter, ascribing to both the same
opinions, imputing to both the same designs, and passing both through
the same experiences, the author would make his readers believe that
they stood on the same foundation. The grounds of the opinion above
stated cannot be given here; but there are grounds for it, and solid
ones, as any one may discover who will take the pains to look at Edward
Zeller's essay on the "Acts," or any other argument from an unprejudiced
point of view. The conclusion may be arrived at, however, by a shorter
process, namely, by taking Paul's Christology as given by himself in his
own letters, and then considering how completely it is excluded from the
book. It seems to the present writer nothing less than certain, as
plain as any point of literary criticism can be, that the "Acts of the
Apostles" is not to be relied on for information respecting the life and
opinions of the apostle Paul. In this opinion writers belonging to very
different schools of religious philosophy, Mackay, for example, and
Martineau, are cordially agreed. This must henceforth be regarded as one
of the points established. The firmer the apprehension of Paul's
peculiarity, the stronger is the conviction that the description of his
conduct in the book of "Acts" must be fanciful. If he tells the truth,
as there is no reason to doubt, the unknown author of the "Acts"
romances.
The necessity that Paul was under of commending his christology to the
Jews, a self-imposed necessity in part, inasmuch as his own genius being
Jewish, imposed it on him, embarrassed the movement of his mind to such
a degree that he was never able to do perfect justice to his own theory.
Much time was spent in explaining his conduct to orthodox Jews, or in
answering questions raised by hebrew casuistry. The epistle to the
Romans, the most labored of his compositions, is a long argument
addressed to his countrymen in Rome, with the design of persuading them
that Jehovah was quite justified in accepting Gentiles who conformed to
his requirements, and in rejecting children of Abraham who did not. This
is the burden of the letter. The argument is lighted up by splendid
bursts of eloquence, and diversified by keen remarks on points of
psychology. But, omitting two or three of the chapters and scattered
passages in others, the remainder is intellectually arid and devoid of
human interest. The same may be said of the letter to the Galatians. The
epistles to the Thessalonians, and those to the Corinthians, are
occupied chiefly with matters of local and incidental concern. It is
probable that Paul's genius was disastrously circumscribed within hebrew
limits after all; that he never completely emancipated himself even from
the old time traditions of his people; that the Jewish half of the man
was not the weaker half. A philosopher he was not; a theologian, in the
great sense, he was not; a metaphysician he was not; a psychologist he
was not. He was an apostle, a preacher. The problems he discussed were
formal rather than vital, and the spirit in which he discussed them was
the temper of the dogmatist rather than that of the seer. However this
may be, it may be affirmed that his system contained no strictly
original ideas; that his leading thoughts, and even the phases of his
thought, were borrowed from the literature of his nation, or, at least,
may be found there.
It is a frequent remark that, but for St. Paul, Christianity might have
had no life out of Judaea; which is tantamount to saying that it might
have had no prolonged or extended life at all, but would have perished
as an incidental phase of Judaism. The remark is essentially just; at
the same time it must be remembered that the Christianity which Paul
devised and planted was a system quite unlike that of his predecessors,
though still another phase of Judaism, a divergent and cosmopolitan
phase.
Other pieces of literature, Ephesians, Colossians, Philippians, Hebrews,
which, whether the compositions of Paul or not, contain developments of
his thought, and may be called "Pauline," carry further his central
speculation and apply his principle to the new problems that presented
themselves in the social life of the religion; yet these do not go
beyond the lines of Jewish thought. The significant passage in
Philippians, "Who, although he was in the form of God, thought not that
an equality with God, was a thing he ought greedily to grasp at,"
suggests the Greek mythus of Lucifer, who fell because, being already
the brightest of beings, he was discontented with a formal inferiority
of rank. His crime consisted in rapaciously grasping at a power which
was, in all but the name, his own. The Christ, in contrast, was
satisfied with the substance; he willingly resigned pretension to the
position. But the Greek mythus was the reflection of a legend from the
farther East, and came to this author more naturally through Judaism
than through Paganism. According to Neander's classification the
Gnostics, from whom this theosophic conception came, were Judaistic.
Gieseler's classification leads to the same inference, for the
Alexandrian Gnosis was the product of Greek thought, blended with
Jewish. The classification of Gieseler has regard to the source whence
the speculation came; that of Neander to the tendency of the
speculation. In whichever aspect we view the myth, its Jewish character
is apparent. The writer has pushed his speculations into new fields that
yet lay within the ancestral domain. He describes the Christ as being
but the semblance of a man, in "fashion" a man, not in substance. The
thought is a further development, yet a strictly logical one, of Paul's
idea that the Christ was made "in the likeness of sinful flesh." The two
expressions are parallel, in fact identical; "body," in Pauline phrase
being, from the nature of the case, "sinful body." The writer speaks of
the dominion of the Christ as extended over the three spheres, heaven,
earth, and the under-world; scarcely thereby enlarging the scope of a
previous thought, for as much as these spheres were comprehended in the
dominion of the Christ who "created the worlds," the new worlds that
constituted the new creation, whereof he was Lord.
The letter to the Hebrews, an exceedingly elaborate exposition of the
close relation between the new faith and the old, an argument and a plea
for the new faith as containing in substance all that the old contained
in form, is Jewish in coloring throughout, an exaggeration of Jewish
ideas. The argument is that Christianity excels Judaism in its own
excellencies. The Christ is called "high priest," "perpetual priest,"
possessing the power to confer endless life. By the sacrifice of himself
he has entered at once into the holy of holies. He has tasted death for
every man--another way of saying that he has deprived death for every
man of its bitterness. He has destroyed the devil who held the kingdom
of death. He has reconciled man with God by abolishing death, and with
death sin, which is the strength of death. The Christ is represented as
the author of salvation to all that obey him; he lives forever to make
intercession; his blood purges men's consciences from reliance on dead
works; he, once for all, has devoted himself to bear the sins of many;
he will come again, and bring salvation to such as wait for him; all
these are merely completed expressions of the idea enunciated by Paul.
The Christ himself is described in this epistle as "the appointed heir
of all things;" "the brightness of God's glory and the express image of
His person;" "upholding all things by the word of His power;" "the First
Begotten;" "the object of adoration by the angels." To support this
view, the Old Testament is ingeniously quoted and misapplied. The
influence of Jewish thought appears also in the passages that describe
the Christ as an agent, appointed to his office; an official, "sitting
at the right hand of the Majesty on High;" as fulfilling His mission
and obtaining His glory through suffering; as subjected to human
experiences of temptation; as strictly sub-ordinate to God.
The scriptures entitled "Colossians" and "Ephesians" betray still
greater familiarity with Alexandro-Jewish conceptions, and a yet deeper
sympathy with them. The Christ is here "the image of God, the first-born
of every creature." It is declared that "by Him were all things created
that are in heaven and on earth; things visible and invisible; thrones,
dominions, principalities, powers; by Him and for Him they were
created." "He is far above all principality, and power, and might, and
dominion, and every name that is named, whether in this world or the
world to come." He is "all in all." He is the pleroma, the fulness, the
abyss of possibility. "The fulness of the Godhead dwells in Him
visibly." He exhausts the divine capacity of expression. He is the
reality of God. Towards mankind he is the reconciler. In him "all things
are gathered together in one." By the blood of his cross he has made
peace and reconciled all things to himself; things on earth and things
in heaven. In a striking passage, the writer of "Ephesians" describes
the Christ as first descending into the under world to release the
captives bound in the chains of Satan, and thence ascending up on high
and sending down gifts to men.
Both of these compositions abound in Gnostic phraesology. The abstruse
terms "Mystery," "Wisdom," "AEon," "Prince of the Powers" recur again and
again, and always with the cabalistic meaning. The writers are caught in
the meshes of Oriental speculation, and apparently make no effort to
extricate themselves. On the contrary, they welcome their enthralment,
taking the binding cords to be guiding strings towards the truth. So
far, again, instead of escaping from the Jewish tradition we are
tethered to it more securely than before. The literature of the New
Testament is seen to be still a continuation and completion of the
literature of the Old. The earliest form of the Messianic doctrine is
completely distanced. Scarcely a trace of it remains. Of the throne of
David not a word. Not a word of Moses and the Prophets, of the
historical fulfilment of ancient prediction, of the temple worship, of
the chosen people. Pharisees and Sadducees are alike omitted. The very
word "kingdom," as denoting a visible Messianic reign, is dropped. But
the territory of Judaism has not been abandoned. Galilee is deserted;
Jerusalem is overthrown; but the schools of the rabbins are open.
It will be remarked that the moral teaching is more vague and mystical
than it was in the early time. The theological spirit prevails over the
human; the ecclesiastical supersedes the ethical. Practical principle
is postponed to theoretical doctrine. The virtues prescribed are
ghostly, technical; the graces of a church, not the qualities of a
brotherhood. The intellectual air is thinner and more difficult to
inhale. The spiritual atmosphere is not inspiring. Intelligence can make
nothing of writing like this: "The husband is the head of the wife, even
as Christ is the head of the Church; and He is the Saviour of the body.
Therefore, as the Church is subject to Christ, so let wives be subject
in all things to their husbands. Husbands love your wives, even as
Christ also loved the Church, and gave Himself for it, that He might
sanctify and cleanse it with the washing of water by the Word; that He
might present it to Himself a glorious Church, not having spot or
wrinkle, or any such thing; but that it should be holy and without
blemish." The absence of rational ground for duty in the most familiar
relations of life could not be more explicitly declared than in a
passage like this. That such an age should have had a scientific system
of morality cannot be expected; but that the traditional system should
have been lost, and a fantastical one set up in its place, is a
testimony to the influence of the mystical spirit. The fanciful morality
of a small and enthusiastic body may be interesting to the members of
the body and influential on their conduct; but it is no evidence of
health in the moral constitution of the generation. The representation
of the Christian warfare as a conflict "not against flesh and
blood,"--that is, against organized evil in society and the State,--"but
against principalities, against powers, against the princes of darkness,
against wicked spirits that dwell in the air," is another evidence that
conscience had become visionary. Such reasoning is of a piece with the
argument for there being four gospels and no more, namely, that there
were four quarters of the heaven, and four winds; or with the argument
for perpetual virginity, that it supplied the Church with vestals. Such
theologising shows how far speculation may be separated from reality and
yet be entertained by human minds.
VII.
THE LAST GOSPEL.
The author of the fourth Gospel is unknown, but it is incredible that
this wonderful book, wonderful for finish of literary execution as well
as for vigor of intellectual conception, was written by a Galilean
fisherman; a man of brooding and morbid disposition, whose intemperate
zeal earned for him the title "son of thunder;" who, according to Luke,
proposed to call down fire from heaven to consume certain Samaritans
that declined to receive the master; who, according to the same
authority, rebuked certain others that conjured by the Christ's name,
but did not join his company; who, through his mother, asked for one of
the best seats in the "kingdom;" a man who was most intimately
associated with the James described in a former chapter; a man who late
in life, had a reputation for intolerance which started a tradition of
him to the effect that being in the public bath, and seeing enter the
heretic Cerinthus, he rushed out, calling on all others to follow, if
they would not be overwhelmed by the ruin such a blasphemer would pull
down on their heads. All the traditions respecting John are to the same
purport; his constant association with James and Peter, both disciples
of the narrowest creed; his advocacy of chiliasm, the doctrine of the
millennial reign of a thousand years, as testified to by Ephesian
presbyters on the authority of Irenaeus; the description of him, reported
by Eusebius, as a "high priest wearing the mitre," standing in the order
of succession therefore as a hierarch of the ancient dispensation, a
churchman maintaining the ancient symbolical rites.
That such a composition as the fourth Gospel was written by such a man,
in his old age too, the laws of literary criticism cannot admit. To the
present writer the ungenuineness of the fourth Gospel has for several
years seemed as distinctly proved as any point in literary criticism can
be. To maintain the Johannean origin of the book, it must be assumed
that the apostle lived to an extreme old age, nearly double the full
three score years and ten allotted to mankind; that his entire nature
changed in the interval between his youth and his senility; that,
without studying in the schools, he became a profound adept in
speculative philosophy; and that by the same miraculous bestowment, he
acquired a skill in letters surpassing that of any in his generation,
far surpassing that of Paul, who was an educated man, and completely
casting into the shade Philo, the best scholar of a former era. All
this, too, must be assumed, for there is not a fragment of the evidence
to support the bold presumption of authorship.
The book belongs nearer to the middle than the beginning of the second
century, and is the result of an attempt to present the Christ as the
incarnate Word of God. The author is not obliged to go far to find his
materials; they lie ready shaped to his hand in the writings of Philo
and the Gnostics of his century. The thread of Hebrew tradition, has, by
this time, become exceedingly thin; vestiges of the popular Jewish
conception appear, but faintly, here and there. Nicodemus recognizes the
divine character of the Christ by his power to work miracles. The Christ
respects the tradition which accorded special privileges to the genuine
"children of Abraham;" he declares to the woman of Samaria that
"salvation is of the Jews;" he announces that eternal life consists in
the knowledge of God, and the acceptance of his Son. Moses is said to
have written of the Christ. Father Abraham rejoiced to see his day.
Isaiah sang his glory, and spake of him. The brazen serpent is a type of
his mission to deliver.
For the rest, the conceptions of deity, of providence, of salvation, of
the eternal world, are quite different from the recognized Hebrew
conceptions--the title given to God sixty times in the gospel, while
the word "God," occurs less than twenty, is "Father," and this term is
used, not in the sense of Matthew's "Our Father in Heaven," which
describes the Old Testament Jehovah under his more amiable aspect, but
rather as designating the _abyss of potential being_, as the term is
employed in the trinitarian formula, in which the Godhead is broken up
into three distinctions; the declaration "God is Spirit," or, as the
language equally well permits, "Spirit is God," intimates that the
individuality of God has disappeared, that the idea of deity has become
intellectual. The one hundred and thirty-ninth psalm expresses perhaps
as mystical an apprehension of God as the old Hebrew thought admits of,
but that psalm retains the divine individuality; the limits are nowhere
transgressed; it is a sympathetic, regardful eye that searches the
secret place, and an attentive mind that notes the unarticulated
thought. The intelligence loses no point of clearness in becoming
penetrative. But in the fourth Gospel, the individuality is gone
altogether. The Father "loveth," but with an abstract, impersonal
sympathy; the Father "draweth," but with an organic, elemental
attraction; the Father "hath life in himself," and hath given the Son to
"have life in himself;" but neither the possession nor the communication
of this power implies the bestowal of a concrete gift. The Father
"judgeth no man, but hath given all judgment to the Son"--a phrase
intimating that he had gone into retirement, had withdrawn from active
interest in human concerns, had sunk into the depths of the Absolute.
The expression "God is Spirit," taken alone, conveys no idea that is not
contained in the Hebrew conception of the formless Jehovah; but when
taken in connection with other expressions, it is seen to convey
something more, and something different. The formless God may be
strictly local; the "Spirit" is diffused.
In this book, the Christ takes the place of God, as the revealed or
manifest God; he is the Logos, the incarnate word. "He was with God in
the beginning." "All things were made by him." "In him was life, and the
life was the light of men." "He hath life in himself." He is the only
begotten son, who came down from heaven; he is in heaven. All judgment
is committed to him; in him the divine glory is manifest; apart from him
is no spiritual life; he is the vine, the door; he is the intercessor
through whom prayer must be transmitted in order to be made availing.
The divine presence is taken out of nature, and transferred to the
spiritual world; God is made ecclesiastical and dogmatic. Men are saved,
not by natural piety and excellence, but by faith in the Christ as the
Logos. The whole sum of Christianity is conveyed in this one position:
_the manifestation of the Divine Glory in the Only Begotten Son_. This
manifestation is of itself, the coming of salvation, the gift of God's
life to mankind. By this, the Christ overcomes the powers of darkness
and evil. He has come a light into the world; by him come grace and
truth; to believe in him is a sign of God's working. He that cometh to
him shall never hunger; he that believeth on him shall never thirst. It
is enough that blind men believe; to die, believing in him, is to live;
to live, believing in him, is to be saved from the power of death, and
made immortal. To believe in him is the same thing as to believe in the
Father. Not to believe in him, is to be consigned to spiritual death
with sinners; to believe on the Son is to have everlasting life. This
idea recurs with monotonous perseverance, some sixty times.
That this conception of the Christ is not original with our author has
already been said many times. It had been in the world two hundred years
before his day, and had worked its way into the substance of the later
Jewish thought. The personification of the divine reason early occurred
to the Jews who had been touched with the passion for speculation in the
city of Alexandria. Long ago attention was called by Andrews Norton,
among ourselves, to bold personifications of wisdom and the divine
reason, in the Apocrypha of the Old Testament. "She is the breath of
the power of God, a pure influence proceeding from the glory of the
Almighty. She is the brightness of the everlasting light, the unspotted
mirror of the power of God, and the image of his goodness." Chapters
seven and eight of the Book of Wisdom contain an apotheosis of wisdom as
the creative power. In the eighteenth chapter the imagery grows much
stronger. "Thine almighty word leaped down from heaven out of thy royal
throne, as a fierce man-of-war into the midst of a land of destruction."
The twenty-fourth chapter of Ecclesiasticus is devoted to the same
theme. The Word is described as a being: the first born of God; the
active agent in creation; having its dwelling-place in Israel, its seat
in the Law of Moses.
Philo pushes the speculation much further. The Logos is with him a most
interesting subject of discourse, tempting him to wonderful feats of
imagination. There is scarcely a personifying or exalting epithet that
he does not bestow on the divine Reason. He describes it as a distinct
being; calls it "A Rock," "The Summit of the Universe," "Before All
Things," "First-begotten Son of God," "Eternal Bread from Heaven,"
"Fountain of Wisdom," "Guide to God," "Substitute for God," "Image of
God," "Priest," "Creator of the Worlds," "Second God," "Interpreter of
God," "Ambassador of God," "Power of God," "King," "Angel," "Man,"
"Mediator," "Light," "The Beginning," "The East," "The Name of God,"
"Intercessor." The curious on this subject may consult Luecke's
Introduction to the Fourth Gospel, or Gfroerer's Philo, and he will be
more than satisfied that the Logos of the fourth Gospel is the same as
Philo's, and has the same origin.
Christian scholars who admit this have been anxious to break the force
of the inference, by allowing the similarity of the conception and then
supposing the evangelist to have stated the doctrine that he might stamp
it as heresy. But he nowhere does stamp it as heresy. He puts it boldly
on the front of his exposition and constructs his whole work in
conformity with it. Instead of refuting it or denouncing it, he carries
the idea out in all its applications, supplementing it with a
completeness that Philo never thought of.
The Logos becomes a man; "is made flesh;" appears as an incarnation; in
order that the God whom "no man has seen at any time," may be
manifested. He has no parentage; is not born, even supernaturally; he
passes through no childish passages; receives no nurture in a home; has
no experience of growth or development. The incident of his baptism by
John in the sacred river is carefully excluded, that whole episode, so
important in the earliest narratives, being dismissed in the phrase,
"Upon whom thou shalt see the spirit descending, and remaining on him,
the same is he that baptizeth with the Holy Ghost." John says of him:
"This is he that, coming after me, is preferred before me, for he
existed before me." "I saw the spirit descending from heaven like a
dove, and it abode upon him." "I knew him not, but came, baptizing with
water, that he might be made manifest to Israel." "I am a voice crying
in the desert." Every word negatives the notion that the Logos received
consecration at the hands of a prophet of the old dispensation. He is
pre-existent; he comes from heaven; he is full of grace and truth; of
his fulness all have received, grace upon grace.
The temptation is omitted for the same reason. The divine word cannot,
even in form, undergo the experience of moral discipline. The bare
suggestion of evil taint is foreign to him. He must not come near enough
to evil to repel it. A dramatic scene in Matthew represents the conflict
between the Messiah and the Prince of the World; a conflict
inconceivable in the case of a divine being who is, by nature, Lord of
the entire spiritual universe,--whose mere appearance dispels the night.
Even the story of the transfiguration, which in some respects would seem
admirably illustrative of the logos theory, is omitted, probably for the
reason that Moses and Elias are the prominent personages in it.
As a thing of course, the agony in the garden of Gethsemane is
unmentioned. A suggestion of it occurs in a previous chapter, (XII. 27),
but in another connection, and for an opposite purpose, namely, to
extort a tribute to the glory of the Logos.