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Authorship

The Lucan authorship of the third gospel has been occasionally challenged by those critics who find it impossible to accept Luke as the final author of the Acts of the Apostles, which is generally agreed to be the work of the same hand as the gospel. The problems presented by the Acts of the Apostles are discussed later, but it may be said here that they are not such as to justify the attribution of Acts to another than Luke, ‘the beloved physician’ (Col.5:14) and companion of Paul.

The tradition of Luke’s authorship of the gospel remained undisputed till modern times, and can be traced back to the second half of the second century A.D. An early prologue to the gospel survives, which was perhaps written to stress the genuineness of the full gospel against a garbled version which Marcion, a second century heretic, edited to propagate his own views. In this prologue are given a number of details about Luke which may well preserve much genuine tradition.

The tradition finds confirmation in the Preface to the gospel and the general character of the gospel itself. In the Preface (Lk. 1:1-4) the author of the gospel claims to have followed all things from the first, and that he is in a position to let Theophilus know the truth of the instruction which he has received; at the same time he distinguishes himself from those who ‘from the beginning were eye-witnesses and ministers of the word’. The most natural interpretation of these statements is that the author of the gospel comes from among those who have been in intimate contact with Christian disciples of the first generation. In the same way the author combines the use of written sources, e.g. Mark and Q, with an attitude, at least towards Mark, of confident independence, which leads him to treat Mark’s text with considerable freedom and, in a number of places, to prefer his own version, e.g. of Peter’s call, of the rejection of Jesus at Nazareth, of the Anointing of Jesus by a woman that was a sinner.

Two other arguments in favour of Luke’s authorship may be mentioned. The gospel has some literary pretensions, and it is at least possible that the author’s name was attached to the original copy, as seems to have been the case with most ‘literary’ works of antiquity. Nor is Luke’s name one which would have been likely to have been attached to the gospel and the acts, unless he was in fact the author; many names that would carry greater weight were available, and Tertullian (c. A.D. 200) goes so far as to depreciate the value of this gospel as being only by the follower of an apostle, and that apostle behind Matthew, Peter, and John in importance.

Proto-Luke

The theory has already been mentioned that Luke had composed a gospel before he came into possession of a copy of Mark, and that our present gospel is a revised and enlarged edition of his earlier work. This theory, which is particularly associated with the names of the late Dr. Streeter and of Dr. Vincent Taylor, is based on the fact that in large sections of Luke, Mark is not employed as a source, and that it is possible to reconstruct from Luke, omitting all his borrowings from Mark, a gospel-like document of considerable extent.

Streeter thinks that the passages most probably to be assigned to Proto-Luke are as follows (Dr. Taylor’s reconstruction, on similar lines, has been published [in English] as The First Draft of St. Luke’s Gospel [S.P.C.K.].

3:1-4:30 John the Baptist’s Preaching, the Baptism of Jesus

Genealogy, Temptation, Arrival in Galilee and

Rejection at Nazareth.



5:1-11 The Call of Simon Peter.

6: 14-16 The Names of the Twelve Apostles.

6: 20-8:3 The Great Sermon, Healing of the Centurion’s

Servant, Raising of the Young Man at Nain, TheBaptist’s

Question and Jesus’ Answer, The Anointing of Jesus, The

Women who accompanied Him.

9:51-18:14 Jesus’ Journey towards Jerusalem, the Sending

Out of the 70, the Good Samaritan,

Martha and Mary, the Lord’s Prayer, the

Beelzebub Charge, the Sign of Jonah,

Denunciation of Pharisees and Lawyers,

the Rich Fool and other Parables and

Sayings, the Healing of 10 Lepers, the

Days of the Son of Man, The Unjust

Judge, the Pharisee and Publican.

19:1-27 Zacchaeus, the Parable of the Pounds.

19:37-44 Entry into Jerusalem and Lament over the

City.

21:18, 34-36 Sayings about the End.

22:14 to the end of the Gospel, except for such verses as are derived from

Mark, the identification of which is very problematical.

This hypothetical ‘gospel’ has incorporated material from Q, and some at least of its other material, according to Streeter and Dr. Taylor, can be ascribed to Luke’s activity in Caesarea during Paul’s imprisonment there (c. 56-57). Its general framework is similar to that of Mark, the Baptism and Temptation prefacing a ministry in Galilee followed by a journey to Jerusalem through Samaria (9:51-52), Galilee itself (17:11), and Jericho (19:1); there is more teaching than in Mark, and although there appears to be the same distinction as in Mark between Jesus’ enigmatic teaching about himself to the multitudes (cf. 7:16-17) and his private teaching to the disciples (esp. 10:21-24), the distinction is sometimes blurred (3:22, 4:18-21, 7:22, 34, 11:29 ff., etc.). Within the framework the order of many incidents is different (e.g. the Rejection at Nazareth, the Call of Peter, the Anointing), and their details are often hard to reconcile with those of the parallel accounts in Mark. Thus the Last Supper may have been distinguished from the Passover meal (22:14-16), there is an additional trial before Herod (23:8-12), and the Resurrection Appearances are all in or near Jerusalem.

The importance of the Proto-Luke theory, if it be accepted, lies in the evidence which it provides for the existence of a tradition about the course of Jesus’ ministry, independent of Mark but confirming much of the substance of Mark, and of a date possibly earlier than the writing of Mark. On the other hand, the existence of such an earlier ‘gospel’ of Luke is denied by many critics who maintain that, especially in the Passion Narrative, Luke has used Mark as the foundation of his narrative. It is possible to account for Luke’s use of Mark largely in separate ‘blocks’ as due to his methods of utilising his sources, for he apparently treats Q in the same way, inserting Q material in separate sections which are edited but not conflated with other sources on a large scale.

Luke’s Treatment of Mark

In using Mark, Luke frequently abbreviates, and he leaves out a number of passages, some because he prefers another account, e.g. the Beelzebub Charge, some for reasons at which we can only guess, e.g. the Seed Growing Secretly, the Cursing of the Fig Tree. His greatest omission is to leave out everything in Mark from Mk. 6:45 to 8:26. It has been thought by some that his copy of Mark did not contain these verses, or that Luke left them out accidentally, but the most probable explanation is that he left them out deliberately. This part of Mark includes the Walking on the Water, Summaries of Healings, Disputes with Pharisees, a second Feeding; the Healing of the Syro-Phoenician woman (Mk. 7:27) is in sharp contrast to that recorded by Luke in the story of the Centurion’s servant. The Healing of the Deaf-Mute, involving the touching of the affected parts (Mk. 7:33), and that of the Blind Man of Bethsaida, involving material means of healing (Mk. 8: 23) and stages of healing (8:24-25) were both omitted by Matthew as well.

This explanation fits in with Luke’s rather cavalier treatment of Mark as a whole. He treats the general framework of Mark with respect, and preserves, with some significant exceptions, his order, but whether he is fitting Mark into Proto-Luke or not, he does not hesitate to omit Mark’s stories and sayings when he has what he considers a better version. Thus he prefers Q’s version of the Temptation and the Beelzebub Charge, although he incorporates two Mission charges, one from Mark, and one, in greater detail, partly at least from Q, and two Discourses on the End, one from Q, and one much edited, but partly at least from Mark. He prefers different versions of Peter’s Call and the Anointing to those given by Mark, and makes many alterations in Mark’s account of the Passion. He omits one of Mark’s references to Jesus’ promise of a Resurrection Appearance in Galilee (Mk. 14:28), and completely alters the sense of the other to suit his own account of the Appearances at Jerusalem (cf. Mk. 16:7 with Lk. 24:6).

There is a double significance in this. Luke knew Mark (Col.4:10,14), and he could hardly have treated the gospel of Mark as he did if he had known it to be Mark’s record of Peter’s teaching. Luke’s attitude to the second gospel is perhaps the strongest argument against its traditional authorship. On the other hand Luke himself writes with a certain authority. Although he was a Gentile, and does not seem to have spent more than a few weeks at most in Jerusalem (Acts 21:17 ff.), he stayed some time in Caesarea (Acts 27:1) and had met many men who were closely connected with the Christian communities in Palestine, e.g. Mark, Silas (Acts. 15:40, 16:10 ff.), Philip (Acts 21:9-10) Mason (Acts 21:16), not to mention his close association with Paul and the possibility of his having been a member of the church at Antioch. It would be too much to claim for his gospel complete accuracy and freedom from exaggerations and mistakes, but the claim of his Preface (Lk.1:1-4) is at least partly justified.

Luke’s other sources

It is unlikely that Luke, with all these opportunities for gaining information, depended for the bulk of his information, outside what was provided by Mark and Q, on written sources. He may, of course, have kept a diary or have recorded material in notebooks, but there is no way of proving or disproving this. Nor is there any satisfactory means of determining from which of many possible informants he derived any particular incident or parable.

The first two chapters, with their accounts of the birth and childhood of John the Baptist and Jesus, stand apart in the gospel both because of the close connection they assume between John and Jesus and of the Semitic style in which they are written. Luke may be using a written Palestinian source here, but it is quite possible that he has himself recorded the narrative in the style of the Greek LXX version of the Old Testament to suit its general nature and the hymns, which are clearly of Palestinian origin.

In the main non-Marcan section, 10:51-18:14, much of the material peculiar to Luke gives the impression of having been fitted by him into a loose and at times artificial narrative, e.g. the grouping of a healing, teaching, and a parable round a meal (14: 1-24) and a collection of three parables on the Lost Sheep, the Lost Coin, and the Prodigal Son in a context where the Pharisees are murmuring against Jesus for receiving sinners (15:1-32). The comparatively unsystematic arrangement of this material with matter from Q is consistent with the view that Luke derived most or all of it from oral tradition and not from documents.

The Lucan changes in Mark’s Passion Narrative, e.g. in his variant accounts of the Institution of the Eucharist (22:15-21)), of the Trials (22:66-71, 23: 4-16), and of the details of the Crucifixion (23: 34, 39-43, 46), also seem to indicate that, while Luke shared Mark’s general view of the course of events, he was able to supplement it and correct it (e.g. by the transference to another context of the Anointing Mk. 14:3-9) from familiarity with different and fuller versions that circulated orally in communities which he had visited. His account, too, of the Resurrection Appearances in and near Jerusalem would have been influenced by the oral information which Paul (I Cor. 15: 3-8) and many others were able to give; his limitation of these appearances to the neighbourhood of Jerusalem must rest on what he considered to be the best authority, although it must be remembered that he gives only a selection of the appearances known to him (cf. his own variant account in Acts 1:1-11) and that he knew of the tradition of appearances in Galilee.

Circumstances of writing

Luke’s purpose in writing is sufficiently explained in his preface to Theophilus (1:1-4). It is to give to Theophilus -- and other Gentile Christians -- in a period when original ‘eyewitnesses and ministers of the word’ are no longer available, an accurate narrative to confirm them as to the truth of what they have been taught. Luke refers to predecessors who have taken this task in hand, but writes in the consciousness that he is able to offer a more complete and accurate account.

The tradition that he wrote in Greece need not be doubted and it is probable that the date of the gospel is to be put after the disastrous Jewish revolt against Rome that culminated in the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple in A.D. 70 (cf. 19: 42-44). This date marks a watershed in the history of the Church; the Christian community at Jerusalem had fled from the city before the siege to the little town of Pella across the Jordan, and from now on the Jewish element in the Church became insignificant and the Jerusalem Church no longer enjoyed the position of being, as it were, the headquarters of Christianity. Most of the original apostles seem to have been already dead, and with them leaders like Paul and Barnabas. The need for preserving in writing what was still remembered of the life and teaching of Jesus had become imperative, and Luke, with his previous special opportunities for acquiring information, set himself to supplement and improve upon the earliest documents.

While his gospel is in some ways the most important historically of the four, it is probable that he wrote under the handicap of being no longer able to check the value of some of his material. With the example of Paul before our eyes we are perhaps inclined to exaggerate the ease with which travel was possible for other Christians; Luke himself, after accompanying Paul from Troas to Philippi (Acts 16:11-17), is apparently still there six years later (20:6) when he rejoins Paul for a longer journey. It seems likely that, when he wrote the gospel, he did so on the basis of his own recollections and some written sources, but without a further visit to Palestine or consultation with such of the oldest disciples as were still living, but were not within reach of Luke, living as he did in Greece. This would account for some of the defects of the gospel, as Luke’s earlier intercourse with Palestinian Christians accounts for many of its great merits.

The Problem of the Attribution to Matthew

The tradition that the apostle Matthew wrote our first gospel, or an Aramaic gospel of which the Greek is a translation, went unchallenged from the middle of the second century to the nineteenth century, but can no longer be defended with any confidence. The main reason for this lies in the fact, now generally accepted, that the first gospel is not a translation from the Aramaic, but was composed originally in Greek on the basis of at least two written Greek sources, Mark and Q. The comparatively few narrative additions made by the evangelist include some more suggestive of legendary accretion than the pen of an apostle (e.g. 17: 24-27, 27: 51-53), although much of the teaching material peculiar to Matthew is universally recognised as of high value.

An examination of the earliest tradition that has been preserved on Matthew as a writer gives a possible clue as to how the tradition arose of his authorship of the first gospel. Papias has recorded an enigmatic statement that --

Most scholars are agreed that ‘Hebrew’ here probably means

‘Aramaic’, the everyday language of Jews in the first century A.D, but opinion is very divided about the meaning of ‘Logia’ which is sometimes rendered as ‘oracles’ or ‘sacred utterances’. The most widely accepted view is that these ‘oracles’ were sayings of Jesus, with perhaps occasional stories about him; some critics, however, hold that they were Old Testament prophecies about Jesus, of which Matthew made a collection. There is a further division of opinion as to whether these ‘oracles’ needed interpretation, to apply them to particular circumstances, or whether they were translated into Greek by different people. This question is further discussed in connection with the question of the sources behind the gospel.

Two explanations have been suggested for the transference of this tradition to the first gospel in its present form. It may be that one of the sayings-sources behind the gospel is Matthew’s collection of Logia, and that the name has been transferred from the part to the whole. There is also evidence that the first gospel was very early translated into Aramaic, and it is possible that such a gospel, which may well have circulated at first anonymously, was soon wrongly identified with the Aramaic document which Matthew was known to have written. It is significant that little seems to have been known of Matthew as a person, and that such information as the tradition gives about the writing of his gospel is clearly conjecture spun out of his apostleship and the fact that he wrote in ‘Hebrew’. Indeed it has even been suggested that the name ‘Matthew’ was attached to the gospel because in Mt. 9:9 the taxcollector is called Matthew instead of Levi, son of Alphaeus, as in Mk. 2:14; such a reason, however, hardly seems adequate by itself to explain the attribution of the gospel.

The Character of The Gospel

If Luke’s gospel is essentially an attempt to improve and supplement Mark as an historical account of Jesus’ ministry for the benefit of Gentile Christian readers, Matthew’s gospel is an attempt to improve and supplement Mark as a record of Jesus’ teaching and as a testimony to his Messiahship for the guidance of Jewish Christians. Matthew adds to the narrative of Mark, which he shortens but reproduces in essentials, only an account of Jesus’ birth and infancy, a few incidents from Q, a couple of other stories, a few variations in Mark’s narrative, and a Resurrection appearance in Galilee; some of this material is of doubtful historical value, and the author of the first gospel seems to have written at a time when oral tradition in his community could no longer supplement the Marcan history with much of real importance.

On the other hand the first gospel is peculiarly rich in teaching, and has largely for this reason been throughout the centuries the most popular of all gospels with Christian readers. Matthew had a teaching source or sources of great value, whose material he has for the most part combined with that of Mark and Q to form five great discourses, each of which ends with a formula ‘and it came to pass when Jesus ended those words, etc.’

Mt. 5: 3-7: 27 The Sermon on the Mount

10:5-42 The Mission Discourse

8:3-52 Parables

18: 3-35 On a variety of subjects

24:3-25:46 Eschatological Discourse

(23:1-39 Woes against the Scribes and Pharisees forms another discourse, but here the closing formula is missing.)

These discourses are clearly composed by the author of the gospel, who sets them in suitable places in the Marcan framework and conflates his various sources with great skill. In the same way he has incorporated most of his remaining teaching material from Q and his special source or sources in other shorter discourses.

The purpose of this editorial collection of the teaching of Jesus was a double one. It had a great practical advantage in making the gospel also a handbook on Christian life and conduct, and there are many signs that this was in Matthew’s mind (e.g. 6:1-18, 18: 15-17). It also enabled him to represent Jesus as a new lawgiver, whose law was the true consummation of the law given to Moses (5:17-20), just as in his narrative he stressed his Messiahship in Jewish terms.

The whole gospel is written with the aim of establishing this Messiahship in terms which would have a special appeal to Jewish Christian readers. In the very first verse (1:1) Jesus is the ‘Son of David, the Son of Abraham’, and the Messianic title ‘Son of David’ is repeatedly given to him by those who believe in him. A series of fulfillment’s of Old Testament prophecies accompany his birth, infancy, and ministry. There is a special stress on Jesus’ teaching about the Kingdom (usually ‘the Kingdom of Heaven’ in Matthew as a periphrasis for the ‘Kingdom of God’) and its eschatological aspect.

This preoccupation with Jesus’ Messiahship has led to the blurring in Matthew’s gospel of the outline of the Marcan framework. Matthew allows himself considerable liberties with the order of Marcan incidents, and, in his anxiety to stress the Messiahship of Jesus and the impression made by Jesus on his hearers, he has often amended Mark’s narrative in such a way as to obliterate the distinctions drawn by Mark in the stages of Jesus’ revelation of his Sonship. Thus at his baptism John the Baptist recognises him and has to be persuaded to ‘fulfill all righteousness’ by baptising him (3:14-15), and Jesus is made to proclaim his Sonship openly and to be recognised by some men as Messiah quite early in his ministry, e.g. 9:27, 14:33.

The Sources of The Gospel

Of the additions made to Mark’s narrative of Matthew by far the most extensive is his account of the birth and infancy of Jesus (Chapters one and two); these chapters are probably put together by Matthew himself on the basis of a genealogy and a series of stories, most of which are presented as the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecies (1:23, 2:6, 15, 18, 23). The stories are quite independent of those told by Luke, and contain features which make it probable that much of their content is legend rather than history.

It is noteworthy that Matthew does not appear to have any continuous written narrative source other than Mark, and that his additions to Mark are either single incidents, e.g. the Temple Tribute (17:24-27) and Judas’ death (27:3-10), or imply the existence of a narrative similar to the Marcan one in which they are embedded, e.g. John’s Protest at the Baptism (3:14-15), Peter Walking on the Water (14:28-33) and a number of additions to the Narrative of the Passion and Resurrection (27: 19, 24-25, 51-53, 62-66, 28:2-4, 8-15). Even Matthew’s Resurrection Appearance gives the impression of being founded on the promise of Mk. 14:28, 16:7 and an oral tradition that had preserved few details (cf. ‘but some doubted’, 28: 17).

Most of these narrative additions of Matthew are of doubtful historical value. It would seem that the Marcan account of Jesus’ ministry was the only written one known to the community in which Matthew lived, but that it had circulated long enough for a number of additions and variations to have grown up, which Matthew in turn incorporates in his gospel. That Matthew should have had so little of real value to add suggests that he wrote at a time when the first generation of disciples were dead and the catastrophes of the Jewish War of A.D. 66-73 had interrupted the channels of genuine oral reminiscence. It also makes it unlikely that he wrote in one of the larger Christian churches like that of Antioch, where much good information to supplement Mark’s narrative must still have been available long after A.D. 70.

In striking contrast to the poverty of Matthew’s narrative additions is the richness of the teaching material to be found only in his gospel. In view of what has been said above it is probable that he drew much of this material from a written source or sources. The reconstruction of such sources can only be conjectural, but there are some grounds for thinking that the substance of two sources at least can still be discerned in spite of Matthew’s skillful editorial conflation.

The first of these sources seems to have been a list of Old Testament ‘Testimonies’ to Jesus. Matthew himself normally quotes the Old Testament from the Greek LXX (LXX = The Greek version of the Old Testament called the Septuagint. [Latin septuaginta = 70] from a tradition that 70 translators took part in the work.) version, and when he is using Mark he preserves Mark’s versions of Old Testament quotations or brings them slightly nearer to the LXX text. There are, however, in Matthew’s gospel eleven quotations, 1:23, 2:6, 15, 18, 23, 4:15-16, 8:17, 12:18-21, 13:35, 21:5, 27:9, which show significant variations from the LXX text and approach more or less closely to the Hebrew text of the Old Testament (allowance has to be made in some of them, e.g. 1:23, 12:21, for Matthew’s editorial revision). Each of these quotations is introduced by the formula ‘. . . that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophet, saying’, or by a similar phrase; they are attached to short accounts of incidents connected with Jesus’ birth and infancy (1:23, 2:6, 15, 18, 23), with his settlement at Capernaum (4:15-16), his healing powers (8: 17), his meekness (12: 18-21), his teaching in parables (13: 35), his entry into Jerusalem (21:5), and with the death of Judas (27: 9); in the process of incorporation by Matthew this original context has sometimes been disturbed or enlarged.

Some have seen in this list of ‘Testimonies’, the original collection of Logia, which Papias ascribes to Matthew with accompanying ‘interpretations’, but against this view is the artificiality of some of the ‘fulfillments’, e.g. 2:15, 18, 23. It is more probable that the list represents the work of a Christian of a later generation, who searched his Hebrew Bible for texts which would fit some of the details of Jesus’ life as it was known to him.

Far more valuable is the collection of Jesus’ sayings that Matthew utilises in the Sermon on the Mount and perhaps elsewhere. It has already been noted that Matthew and Luke sometimes agree so closely in their account of Jesus’ teaching as to make it certain that they both used the Greek document Q. There are also a number of places where they give versions of Jesus’ teaching that are in general agreement but show substantial variations in wording. This phenomenon has sometimes been interpreted as showing the continued influence of oral tradition, or as indicating that Matthew used a different and fuller edition of Q. It is perhaps more easy to explain this ‘agreement with variations’ by supposing that Matthew had a second written collection of Jesus, sayings that largely overlapped Q.

In favour of this theory is the high value that Matthew seems to have attributed to this source, and the fact that the first half of his first great discourse, the Sermon on the Mount (5:3-6:18), only occasionally shows signs of agreement with Q, while the second half of the discourse (6: 19-7:27) is for the most part clearly composed of material drawn from Q. The first half of the discourse, moreover, has a formal arrangement -- 7 Beatitudes, 2 parallel similes of Salt and Light, the New Law and the Old under 5 heads, Murder, Adultery, Swearing, Retaliation, Love of One’s Enemies; 3 parallel instructions on Almsgiving, Prayer, and Fasting. There is no such ordered arrangement of the Q material, and while Matthew clearly adopts editorial arrangements and formulas in other parts of his gospel, e.g. in the artificial arrangement of the Genealogy in 3 sections, each of 14 names, it would be curious if he had himself arranged the material in the first half of the Sermon on the Mount and then given up the attempt in the rest of the discourse. It is at least possible that the arrangement here goes back in part to that of a written source which he employed, although allowance must be made for some editorial work and conflation with Q material by Matthew.

Whether this source, if it existed in written form, was more extensive and was used elsewhere by Matthew, can only be conjectured. It is perhaps significant that in his account of Jesus’ denunciation of the Scribes and Pharisees (23) Matthew appears to be conflating Q with other material, some of which is very reminiscent of the first half of the Sermon on the Mount (compare 23:2 with 5:17-18, 23:5-7 with 6:5, 23:16-22 with 5:23, 33-37); there is also a sevenfold series of denunciations, and a repetition of the formula, ‘Woe unto you, Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites’, which suggests that Matthew is here following the arrangement of a source other than Q, which in Luke’s parallel section (Lk. 11:39 ff.) is differently assembled.

If these two sections of Matthew are largely dependent on a written source, it is apparently an early and valuable one, overlapping Q but containing also much material not found elsewhere, and some which seems to be known in much the same form to James in his epistle (compare 5:33-37 with James 5:12, 5:19 with James 2:10, 5:9 with James 3:18). The teaching is more suited for Jewish Christians than that of Q, and lays stress on the keeping of the Law (5:17-20, 23:2) as well as referring to the Temple and its sacrifices (5:23-24, 23:16-21). It is even possible -- although it must be remembered that the very existence of this source as a written document can be only a matter of guesswork -- that this source was the apostle Matthew’s collection of Logia, and that it provides the answer to the riddle of Matthew’s connection with the gospel. In this case Papias’ ‘interpretation’ may be taken as ‘translation’, but more probably means that each man, as is still the case, had to apply the teaching to his own life and circumstances.

There is little to guide us in determining the sources from which come the remaining sayings and parables peculiar to this gospel. Three passages, however, are of special importance and deserve individual mention.

In the discourse which Matthew places at the sending out of the Twelve (10:1-42) he has conflated material from Mark and Q with sayings found only in this gospel. In 10:5-6, 23, we read --

These words are clearly not invented by the evangelist, although he echoes them in his account of the healing of the Canaanitish woman’s daughter (15:24); he is emphatic in his representation of the universality of the gospel (e.g. 10:18, 24:14, 28:19) and he must have drawn them from an older source. Dr. Schweitzer (The Quest of the Historical Jesus, pp. 283 ff., 357 ff.) has seen in them Jesus’ mistaken expectation of the almost immediate coming of the Son of Man and the end of the age, but such an interpretation is in conflict with the general tenor of Jesus’ teaching. There is no need to doubt that Jesus may deliberately have limited his disciples’ first mission to Jewish territory, but the verse 23 may well be an edited version of his words out of their true context; it seems unlikely that Jesus would have expected his disciples to meet with persecution on their first short mission.

In following Mark’s account of Peter’s confession at Caesarea Philippi Matthew has inserted three verses (16:17-19) which contain a special promise to Peter of the keys of the kingdom of Heaven. These verses have played a significant role in controversies between Christian churches and it has been disputed whether Jesus in fact spoke such words. They are manifestly introduced here by Matthew himself on the basis of tradition, and he shows elsewhere a particular interest in Peter, although at times he associates him with incidents which have legendary features (e.g. Mt. 14:28-31, 17:24-27). It is perhaps significant that the word ‘church’ occurs in the gospels only twice, here and in Mt. 18:17, a passage where the words of Jesus as given by Matthew do not ring true.

The discourse in Mt.18 contains material from Mark and other sources, much of it clearly of great value. In the section 15-17, however, there are traces of editorial work which has distorted or replaced Jesus’ original teaching. A rule is given for the treatment of a brother who has sinned against another. If he does not hear the offended person, witnesses are to be taken to hear his words; ‘if he refuse to hear them, tell it to the Church; and if he refuse to hear the Church also, let him be unto thee as the Gentile and the publican’. It is only necessary to compare these last words with the reproach levelled at Jesus by the Pharisees when he dined with his new disciple, Matthew, and with Jesus’ answer (Mt. 9:11-12), to understand that in 18:15-17 ecclesiastical practice has been read back into Jesus’ mouth.

The Date and Place of the writing of the Gospel

The use of Mark and an apparent reference (22:7) to the destruction of Jerusalem imply a date for the gospel of Matthew later than A.D. 70; on the other hand the gospel is probably quoted by Ignatius (c. A.D. 110) and by the unknown author of ‘The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles’, a document thought by many to have been composed in Syria about the end of the first century or in the first half of the second century. A date between A.D. 80 and 100 would fit the internal evidence of the gospel itself, and would account both for the growth of legendary accretions and for the absence of reliable tradition, other than that provided by written sources, about the course of Jesus’ ministry.

Antioch has been suggested as the place of writing,(E.g. by Streeter, op. cit., pp 500 ff., and by McNeile, Introduction to the New Testament, p. 38.) but reasons have been given above for thinking that Matthew was written in a community where the tradition of Jesus’ acts was less trustworthy than would have been the case in a church so closely linked in early days with the mother church of Jerusalem. On the other hand the early use of the gospel by Ignatius and the author of ‘The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles’ makes the writing of the gospel in a remoter district of Syria more probable. We know next to nothing of the coming of Christianity to Syria, outside Antioch, but it is known that Christianity was well established in many Syrian cities by the middle of the next century, and there are signs that it was among the large Jewish population in these cities that Christianity first took root.

The Earliest Canonical Gospel

One of the greatest achievements of New Testament criticism in the last century has been to establish beyond reasonable doubt that the gospel of Mark formed one of the principal sources used both by Matthew and Luke, and that it is both the earliest and in some ways the most important of our gospels. For centuries Mark had been the least read and regarded of the four gospels for the very reason that both Matthew and Luke contained most of its material, and had the further advantages of better styles and much additional information on the teaching and life of Jesus. We can now see that the main framework of the ministry of Jesus in Matthew and, to a lesser extent, in Luke is dependent on information supplied by Mark, and that in Mark we have an earlier and clearer picture of the course of Jesus’ ministry, even if it has to be supplemented from the other gospels, especially John.

This fundamental solution of the relationship of the Synoptic gospels, as the first three gospels are called because of their common view of the life of Jesus (Gr. synoptikos = seeing together), has only been reached after the prolonged testing of every possible view, e.g. that Mark is an abbreviation of Matthew, that Mark and Matthew both used Luke, that all three gospels derive from a comparatively fixed oral tradition. Years of patient study have made it certain that the degree of verbal resemblance between the three gospels is too great for explanation on the basis of common oral sources only, and that the one theory which does full justice to the resemblances of language is that both Matthew and Luke used Mark. It is possible that they used Mark in a rather different form to that in which we possess it, or even in two different forms, but the simplest explanation, that they both used substantially our gospel of Mark, is by far the most probable, and is now generally accepted.

The arguments on which this solution is based are worked out in great detail in many books, but their force can be sufficiently expressed in a few brief statistics. Of Mark’s 661 verses, some 430 are substantially reproduced in both Matthew and Luke. Of the remaining 231 verses 176 occur in Matthew and the substance of 25 in Luke. Only 30 verses in Mark do not appear in some form in either Matthew or Luke. Moreover, both Matthew and Luke normally follow Mark’s order of events, but, when one departs from the Marcan sequence, the other supports Mark’s order.

The question of John’s use of Mark is a disputed one, but even those who deny that Mark was known to or used by John admit that Mark is the earlier of the two gospels.

The Connection of The Gospel with John Mark

The gospel of Mark is traditionally connected with Peter’s preaching. Papias (c. A.D. 120) has recorded the following passage about Mark, which, although not explicitly connected with the gospel of Mark, was taken by later authors as referring to the gospel:

Just as Papias’ statement on Matthew’s oracles (cf. p. 64) is not a good description of our first gospel, the statement of the Elder hardly fits our second gospel. This gospel is precisely a recording of what was said and done by Christ ‘in order’, and the Marcan ‘order’ of events is generally agreed to be clear and intelligible. Attempts have been made to force the meaning of the Greek in the passage, and to explain it as meaning that the Elder preferred the order of the fourth gospel, and was criticising Mark’s gospel as not giving events in the right order. This is a desperate remedy, and does not touch the problem of the internal evidence of the second gospel, which contains some things which are hard to reconcile with Marcan authorship, much less with Peter’s teaching.

While there is much in the gospel that has a strong claim to rest on Peter’s account of events, there is also much that can hardly be attributed to him. In Mk. 14:12,16 it is indicated that the Last Supper was the Passover Meal; this identification raises great difficulties, as it places the arrest, the meeting of the Sanhedrin at night, the trial, and the crucifixion, during the feast (the Jewish day began at sunset), when all business was normally suspended. The fourth gospel gives a different account, in which the Last Supper is not the Passover Meal (13:1-2), and the Trial and Crucifixion take place before the feast begins (18:28, 29:31); this dating of events would appear much the more likely. There can be no certainty here, but, if John’s version is right, it is hard to see how Mark, whose home was in Jerusalem (Acts 12:12), could have made such a mistake.

There are other puzzling passages in the gospel, such as the description of Jesus’ journey (7:31) from Tyre to Galilee ‘through the midst of the borders of Decapolis’ (S.E. of the Sea of Galilee, and on the other side from both Tyre and Galilee itself), and the highly-coloured account of John the Baptist’s death, which bristles with improbabilities; these errors are unlikely to come from the pen of Mark, who was presumably familiar with Palestinian conditions. But the most serious objection against Marcan authorship of the gospel as it stands lies in the ‘developed’ nature of many of the stories about Jesus and of some of the teaching attributed to him. Thus in Mk. 6:34-8:26 two parallel cycles of events can be traced, each of which contains, in the same sequence, a miraculous feeding of a crowd, a voyage by boat, a conflict with Pharisees, and a healing. It is difficult not to think that these are variant accounts of the same events (to which Jn. 6 offers an instructive parallel), and difficult to ascribe both accounts to Peter or to Mark’s misunderstanding of his words. Again the apocalyptic teaching of Mk.13 far beyond that which might be expected of Peter.

It must be admitted that there are grave obstacles in the way of accepting the second gospel, in its present form, as the work of Mark, although there is much in the gospel which clearly comes ultimately from Peter. On the other hand there is no good reason for doubting the general accuracy of the Elder’s statement, as far as it goes. To account for the tradition there are two alternatives. Either the author of the gospel has used Marks notes, and what the Elder said about these has been later applied to the whole gospel, or the Elder’s statement was originally made about a document not used in this gospel, (It is noteworthy that Q seems to have fulfilled some of the necessary conditions. It was ‘not in order’, it was suited to the needs of early converts, and it carried the authentic ring of genuine reminiscence; on the other hand there is little specifically ‘Petrine’ about it.) but the gospel itself was recognised as containing much-of Peter’s teaching and was wrongly attributed to Mark, who was known to have been Peter’s ‘interpreter’. The meaning of this last word is much disputed, and amongst those suggested are that Mark was literally an interpreter who translated Peter’s Aramaic into Greek, that Mark was Peter’s ‘dragoman’ (cf. Acts 13:5), and that Mark ‘interpreted’ Peter’s teaching by handing it on and explaining it (Papias speaks of himself as handing on what he had learnt from the elders ‘with my interpretations’). In any case it must be remembered that many people besides Mark had heard Peter teach, and that his words would be preserved, at least orally, through many channels.

The Sources of The Gospel

Many attempts have been made to trace in the gospel a definite written source which can be identified with Mark’s record of Peter’s preaching, but none of these attempts has gained general approval. Peter may well have been present at most of the scenes recorded in the gospel, and much of the narrative is probably derived ultimately from him. Thus Mk. 1:6-38 represents the beginning of Peter’s new life (cf. p. 35), and a number of incidents where only the ‘inner circle’of disciples were present are recorded, including the healing of Jairus’ daughter, the Transfiguration (followed by a description of the healing of the Epileptic Boy from the standpoint of one of the three named disciples, cf. Mk. 9:14), the forecast of the destruction of the Temple, the agony in Gethsemane. The story of Peter’s confession at Caesarea Philippi, and of his denial of Jesus must have formed part of his own teaching. Yet some of these Petrine incidents are told so baldly, e.g. the Call of Peter 1:16-18 (cf. Lk. 5:1-9), or have acquired so many accretions, e.g. the apocalyptic discourse of 42, that it is impossible to be certain that all these stories came direct from Peter, and have not in some cases passed from mouth to mouth.

While the question of a direct Petrine source, therefore, can never be fully answered, there are a number of signs that the author of the gospel put together a mass of material, some of which was already in small collections, whether written or oral. It has already been suggested (cf. pp. 35 ff.) that he had, in addition to a more or less fixed form of Passion-narrative, collections of controversies, e.g. 2:1-3:6, 11:27-33 and 12:13-40, and cycles of narratives, e.g. 6:34 7:37, 8:1-26; it is possible that the bulk of the apocalyptic discourse in xiii also lay before him in written form (cf. 13:14), and the sayings of 9:39-50 may have acquired their connection before his time (cf. p. 44). Besides these possible ‘larger’ sources he incorporated a number of single incidents, parables, and sayings, which probably circulated orally as examples of Jesus’ actions and words.

Plan of The Gospel

The part of the final author of the gospel was to give to his sources a narrative framework and to make of his fragments of material a connected whole. He seems to have been the first person to attempt to construct in writing a sketch of the whole ministry of Jesus, although he must have worked on the basis of an oral account such as the skeleton speeches in Acts suggest formed part of Peter’s preaching (e.g. Acts 10:37-42). His sources of information were limited, and he shows no sign of knowing, for example, that Jesus’ ministry had extended to Judaea and Jerusalem even before its close, as John makes clear. The insertion of incidents and pieces of teaching from his sources into his framework seems often to have been made for their suitability to the situation, and not because the author of the gospel knew that they were actually connected with the particular historical situation.

Yet the main plan of the gospel is simple and straightforward, and contains a number of consecutive historical developments which have a good claim to rest upon a true tradition. The key to the understanding of this plan is the author’s conviction that Jesus was from the first, and knew himself to be, the Son of God, but that he chose to reveal the full implications of this by stages. The gospel falls into two main parts, the Ministry in and around Galilee (1-9), and the Last Week in Jerusalem (11-16), which are joined by a short account of the Journey to Jerusalem (10).

The preparation for the ministry is provided by the teaching of John the Baptist that a mightier than he is coming after him, by Jesus’ baptism, and by the temptation in the wilderness. After John had been imprisoned by Herod, Jesus comes into Galilee, proclaiming that the time is fulfilled, the kingdom of God is at hand, and men must repent and believe in the good news. Little is said about the details of Jesus’ preaching, but its success is described, and attributed in large measure to Jesus’ healing powers. These are the inevitable consequences of Jesus’ Sonship, as is recognised by the evil spirits, but Jesus does not suffer the spirits to speak and tries as far as possible to prevent news of his healings from spreading abroad. These healings arouse opposition from some of the scribes when Jesus claims the power to forgive sins (2:6-7), and when he heals on the Sabbath the Pharisees and Herodians take counsel to destroy him (3:6); later, scribes from Jerusalem ascribe his powers to possession of Beelzebub (3:22). Meanwhile Jesus has from the first been gathering disciples, to whom he imparts fuller instruction about the parabolic teaching which he gives to the multitudes; he tells them that the purpose of this method of teaching is to hide its real meaning from them that are without (4:11-12) but that to the disciples is given the mystery of the kingdom of God.

Jesus’ apparent success continues, except in ‘his own country’ (6:1), and the training of the Twelve advances sufficiently far for him to send them out two by two to exorcise evil spirits, to heal the sick, and to call men to repent. At this stage Herod himself hears of Jesus, and of the rumours that he is Elijah, who was supposed to return to earth to herald ‘the great and terrible day of the Lord’ (Malachi 4:5), or a prophet, although Herod himself thinks that he is John the Baptist risen from the dead. On the return of the Twelve from their mission Jesus brings them for rest and quiet to a desert place, but the crowds follow them, and Jesus out of compassion teaches them and feeds them by a miracle. Mark does not give to this feeding, or to the parallel account of the feeding of the four thousand, the special significance that it has in the fourth gospel (Jn. 6:15), where the motive for Jesus’ withdrawal afterwards is to prevent the crowd taking him by force ‘to make him king’; yet it marks the height of his popular success in Galilee (cf. 6:53-56).

Between his two parallel sequences of feeding, voyage, controversy with Pharisees, and healing (cf. p. 36) Mark inserts the departure of Jesus to the borders of Tyre and Sidon (7:24), and his return ‘through Sidon unto the sea of Galilee, through the midst of the borders of Decapolis’ (7:31). This journey has been made the basis of a theory that Jesus deliberately left Galilee to avoid trouble with the authorities, now alarmed at his popular success, and that he deliberately skirted round Galilean territory on his return. But such a motive is not hinted at by the evangelist, who pictures Jesus’ withdrawals as being for the purpose of training the disciples in private, and the geographical puzzles presented by his mention of ‘the country of the Gerasenes’ (5:1) and ‘the parts of Dalmanutha’ (8:10) suggest that the reference to Decapolis in 7:31 is an error caused by his unfamiliarity with the geography of Northern Palestine.

After the two ‘feeding’ cycles is introduced Jesus’ question to his disciples on the way to Caesarea Philippi, ‘Who say ye what I am ?’,and Peter’s reply, ‘Thou art the Christ’ Jesus warns them to keep this secret, and explains that he is ‘ the Son of Man’. but that he has to die and rise again; to the multitudes he speaks less explicitly, warning them that to reject him is to be rejected by the Son of Man when he comes in glory (8:38). To the inner circle of disciples is vouchsafed the vision of the Transfiguration and the heavenly assurance that Jesus is the Son of God. Even so the disciples continue to misunderstand the nature of the Kingdom of God (9:33 ff., 10:35 ff.), and fail to comprehend his repeated references to his death and resurrection (9:32, 10:32 ff.)

Jesus’ movements from the Confession at Gaesarea Philippi take him through Galilee (9:30,33), into the borders of Judaea and beyond Jordan (10:1), and so to Jericho and Jerusalem. At Jericho he is hailed by Bartimaeus with the Messianic title ‘Son of David’, and his entry into Jerusalem is the scene of a ‘Messianic’ ovation from his supporters (11:7-10). At Jerusalem Jesus is heard gladly by the people (12:37), but is involved in a series of controversies with Scribes, Pharisees, Sadducees, and the Chief Priests. His opponents plot to get rid of him before the feast (14:1-2), and Judas agrees to betray him. Jesus is represented as conscious of all this (14:18, 27-30), and prophesies that all his disciples will forsake him, but that he will rise again and go before them to Galilee. He is arrested, condemned by the high priest, on his own admission that he is the Christ, the Son of Man, who is to come with the clouds of heaven, and again condemned as ‘King of the Jews’ by Pilate, is crucified, and dies. Thirty-six hours later his tomb is found empty, and a young man in a white robe tells the women to inform the Twelve and Peter that Jesus goes before them to Galilee. The women are too frightened to obey.

The value of this narrative framework can be challenged on a number of points, e.g. the significance given by Jesus to his teaching in parables, the uncertainty that surrounds some of the miraculous events, the length of time between the Confession of Caesarea Philippi and the Passion; yet the honesty of the writer in leaving vague most of the temporal connections in the narrative gives an added importance to the consistency of his general picture. The gradual unfolding of the Messianic secret, in particular, and Jesus’ lack of immediate success in instructing his disciples as to the true nature of the Kingdom, have an inherent probability that is confirmed by the later history of the misinterpretation of his teaching in the New Testament Church. The second gospel furnishes only an incomplete and at times a confused record of Jesus’ ministry, but its account is sufficient to establish the main lines on which Jesus conducted the major part of his ministry with some degree of certainty.

To discredit completely the Marcan framework would not only leave us in the dark as to the main features of Jesus’ ministry --that is an alternative which the honest historian must face -- but would also leave inexplicable the fact that one who taught of himself and the Kingdom in such terms as Q, for example, relates, was also crucified as a false Messiah.

The Ending of The Gospel

The MS. evidence makes it clear that ‘the longer ending’ found in most Bibles (Mk. 16:9-20) is in fact an early addition to bring Mark into line with the other gospels in recording Resurrection appearances of Jesus. It is probable that both Matthew and Luke used Mark in a form which broke off at 16:8, and this ending, though abrupt and awkward, may well be original. A number of theories, however, have been advanced to account for the loss of a supposed original ending which included Resurrection appearances in Galilee (cf. 16:7). It is possible that the gospel was not finished, or that the original copy was accidentally mutilated, and it has even been suggested that an account of Jesus’ appearance in Galilee has been suppressed in view of the alternative tradition (witnessed by Luke 24) that the appearances of the risen Christ were in the neighbourhood of Jerusalem.

Date and Place of Writing

The use of Mark by Luke and Matthew makes it difficult to date this gospel later than A.D. 70. On the other hand the present form of the apocalypse of Mark 42 is held by some scholars to indicate its composition in the late fifties, and the emergence of the earliest gospel is widely held to have been most probable at a time when the first generation of Christian teachers was beginning to die out, c. A.D. 60-70. Such a date would account most satisfactorily for the combination of much valuable and primitive tradition with other less historical material, which we find in Mark, and would allow time for the development of those collections of material whose use in the gospel has been seen to be probable.

The place of writing is more difficult to fix. Traditionally the gospel is associated with Rome, but the tradition may well be due to that which connected Mark and Peter with Rome. The few ‘latinisms’ of the gospel are of a kind that would naturally arise in popular Greek wherever Roman influence had been at work, e.g. legion (5:9), scourge (15:15), centurion (15:29). The style is rough and such as might be expected of a Jew who thought in Aramaic, but wrote in Greek. He is careful, however, to supply a translation whenever he gives Jesus’ words in their original Aramaic, e.g. 5:31, 7:38, and to explain Jewish customs, e.g. 7: 3-4. He does not appear, as we have seen, to have himself a good knowledge of Palestinian conditions. If he wrote in Syria, the use of his gospel by Matthew and Luke would be perhaps easiest to explain, but this can only be a conjecture.

The Existence of Written Sources Behind The Gospels

Luke begins his gospel by referring to the fact that ‘many have taken in hand to draw up a narrative concerning those matters which have been fulfilled among us, even as they delivered them unto us, which from the beginning were eye-witnesses and ministers of the word’ (1:1-2). Among the sources which were used by Luke himself and by Matthew were at least two written documents, one of them the gospel of Mark in substantially its present form, and the other a collection in Greek of sayings of Jesus, incorporating some narrative details, which is nowadays known as Q (from the German Quelle = source). The use by Luke and Matthew of these sources can be demonstrated because, in the case of Mark, the source itself is available, and a comparison of the texts of the three gospels leaves no reasonable doubt as to its employment in the other two gospels; in the case of Q, although the original document has not survived, the occasional verbal agreement in ‘non-Marcan’ passages of Matthew and Luke is such as to show that a document existed, although its extent can only partially be established and the possibility always remains that more than one document was used.

Many more written accounts of Jesus’ teaching, his controversies, his miracles, and his ministry, may have been in existence when our gospels were written. If so, they have perished, and we can only search for traces of them in our existing gospels. As none of them seems to have been used in more than one of our gospels, the task of reconstructing them is difficult, and none of the theories which have been put forward can be regarded as more than a possible hypothesis. Yet the question is of such interest and importance that some at least of the theories suggested deserve to be mentioned here, and further discussed in connection with the composition of the individual gospels.

Two types of theory can be distinguished, that which seeks to explain almost the whole of a gospel as compiled from written sources, and that which argues from peculiarities of style, language, and form, that written sources of limited extent were used by the final author of a gospel in conjunction with a mass of oral tradition. This distinction is an important one, as the former type of theory reduces the status of the final author of a gospel almost to that of an editor writing at a late period when trustworthy oral traditions were comparatively scarce; the latter type of theory assumes the existence of smaller, but earlier and more valuable written sources, some of which may even be apostolic, which have been combined with considerable oral tradition, of varying historical value, by the final author.

Mark is generally admitted to be our earliest gospel, but there are difficulties in accepting it, in its present form, as John Mark’s transcript of Peter’s preaching. Attempts to solve this difficulty by source-theories have been along two lines. Some critics have attempted to sketch out one large original Marcan source (often called UrMarkus, from the German = ‘Original Mark’) which has been later edited, while others have tried to show that Mark or another has employed a number of small sources, collections of Jesus’ controversies and sayings, e.g. Mk. 3:20-35, 7:1-23, 9: 38-50, 13, some of them at least already in written form.

That Matthew used both Mark and Q is generally admitted, although some scholars think that he used Q in a different ‘edition’ from that which lay before Luke. It has been suggested, notably by Streeter,(The Four Gospels, pp. 254-265.) that virtually all remaining sayings of Jesus in this gospel are drawn from one further written source (M), but other scholars think that Matthew, while employing written sources for some of his Old Testament quotations and for part of the Sermon on the Mount, also drew much of his material from the oral tradition of his own time.

The question of Luke’s sources is complicated by Streeter’s theory (Op. cit., pp. 199-222) that an earlier edition of this gospel, Proto-Luke, was later enlarged by the incorporation of much of the material of Mark. Proto-Luke itself, according to Streeter, (Op. cit., pp. 208 ff.) is a combination of two written sources, Q and L, the latter a document compiled by Luke himself, embodying traditions of the Caesarean church. Others would see in L Luke’s own collection of information from more extensive oral sources, and others again a series of short written ‘fly-sheets’ used by Christian missionaries.

In John’s gospel the question of written sources is a very difficult one, but amongst the multitude of explanations that have been offered for the problems presented by this gospel are the redaction by a later editor of an earlier gospel or gospel-material, and the use by the author of a number of written sources, e.g. in the prologue, in his collection of ‘signs’, and in the discourses.

While none of these theories can ever be finally proved, it seems probable that Q was not the only early document about the life and teaching of Jesus which has disappeared, and that our gospels represent the climax of a development in the writing down of the oral tradition. On the other hand there is much to be said for the view that Mark was the first writing that assumed a ‘gospel’ form, in the sense that it attempted to give an account of the whole period of Jesus’ ministry as well as giving examples of his teaching; it is even possible that the ending of Mark’s gospel with the appearance of the angel at the empty tomb and the flight of the women (16:8; the verses that follow were not part of the original gospel) indicates that his pioneer plan was to tell of the earthly ministry of Jesus, and that he regarded the Resurrection appearances as part of the later story of the heavenly Christ.

The Document Q

The difficulties of reconstructing this lost writing from the gospels of Matthew and Luke can be illustrated from their treatment of Mark. If we did not possess Mark’s gospel, and could only reconstruct it from the agreement in language of Matthew and Luke, our reconstruction would contain less than three-quarters of the actual gospel of Mark. Furthermore Q seems to have been predominantly a collections of sayings, and the possibility cannot be overlooked of the agreement of language between Matthew and Luke being sometimes due to the overlapping of sayings-sources or to the faithfulness of oral tradition. The order in which Matthew and Luke use pieces of Q is often very different, and while it is on the whole probable that Luke has usually preserved the right order, it is impossible to be certain of this.

What can be regarded as a certain nucleus of Q is given below in Luke’s order; many other passages from Luke and/or Matthew may well be considered as having belonged to Q, but are here disregarded.

From this reconstruction of the kernel of Q, (The English text of Q, following Streeter’s more extended reconstruction of this source, has been compiled in a handy form by A. Peel, The Earliest Gospel [Epworth Press.]) it was clearly not a gospel, but a collection of Jesus’ teaching, illustrated occasionally by the introduction of events such as the Temptation and the Healing of the Centurion’s Servant. Matthew and Luke rarely agree in their wording when they provide introductions to Q sayings, and it seems likely that in the original Q such introductions were usually very short, i.e. ‘And Jesus said’, or not present at all.

No attempt to ‘reconstitute’ Q has succeeded in making of it a well-arranged ‘handbook’, although there are signs of a rough general arrangement by subjects,(Cf. T. W. Manson in The Mission and Message of Jesus, pp. 3 f.) and these subjects seem to have included those most vital for Christian evangelism, the Substance of the Christian Life, Principles of Christian Missionary Propaganda, Defence of the New Religion against Jewish Attacks, Expectation of the Judgement. The selection of topics makes it reasonable to assume that the purpose for which Q was written was to furnish a standing record from the sayings and acts of Jesus to support the teaching (Didache) with which early Christian missionaries encouraged and exhorted their converts.

Any selection from the sayings and acts of Jesus was bound to have ‘a Jewish and Palestinian horizon’, (Harnack, The Sayings of Jesus, p. 248) but there are a number of signs that Q was compiled primarily for the instruction of Gentile Christians. It was known both to Matthew and Luke in Greek, and no conclusive evidence has ever been produced for its translation from an Aramaic original, as distinct from its ultimate derivation from Jesus’ teaching in Aramaic; (The view that the differences between Mt. 23:26 and Lk. 11:41 are due to a mistranslation of a common Aramaic source is now discredited.) the Old Testament quotations are few in number and reflect the Greek Septuagint version rather than the Hebrew. The teaching of Q is generally universalist in nature, and the element of polemic with the Jews is comparatively small. The one healing which is given special prominence is that of the Gentile Centurion’s servant, and Jesus’ attitude to the Gentiles here is in sharp contrast with his address to the Syro-Phoenician women in Mk. 7:27 (cf. Mt. 15:26).

The value of Q as a record of part of Jesus’ teaching is shown by its treatment at the hands of Matthew and Luke. Luke in particular often prefers the Q version of a saying to that given in Mark, e.g. Lk. 13:18-21, 16:18. Matthew, although he appears to break up his Q material more, and to conflate some Q sayings with those from other sources, seems to treat the sense of Q’s teaching with great respect. This respect for Q is shared by the great majority of modern scholars, who see in it a generally faithful record of some of Jesus’ teaching.

The date of Q’s composition cannot be accurately determined, but clearly lies within 20 or 30 years of the Resurrection. It does not seem to have been known by Mark, whose gospel, when it overlaps with Q, e.g. in John the Baptist’s teaching, the Temptation, the Beelzebub controversy, follows an independent course. Probably a date between A.D. 50 and 60 would command most general assent for the writing of Q, and the possibility of authorship by one of the original apostles cannot be ruled out. It has sometimes been thought that the tradition of Matthew’s authorship of the first gospel, which is not now seriously defended, rests upon the mistaken application to the whole gospel of a tradition which originally referred to one of his sources, Q. Papias (c. A.D. 120) refers to Matthew as having ‘composed the oracles in the Hebrew language, and each one interpreted them as he could’. The meaning of this passage is much disputed (cf. p. 64), but could be understood as indicating that Matthew made an arrangement of Jesus’ sayings in Aramaic, the interpretation (or translation) of which was left to individuals. It is improbable, however, that Q is based on Matthew’s Sayings; apart from the doubt as to whether Q ever existed in Aramaic, Matthew is traditionally supposed to have written in Palestine for Jewish Christians, and Q, as stated above, is more easily understood as a collection of Jesus’ sayings for Gentile Christians.

It can be taken for granted that the earliest Christian preaching contained as two of its most important elements a number of facts about Jesus, with the interpretation to be placed upon them, and numerous sayings of Jesus, with their application to the needs of believers. These elements correspond to the two great divisions of Christian evangelism, the Proclamation or Kerygma (from the Greek Keryssein, to proclaim) that Jesus is the Christ of God, and the Teaching or Didache (from the Greek Didaskein, to teach) which those who believe in him must follow.

The Kerygma and Didache

It was essential in the proclamation of the Good News to let all hearers know HOW Jesus had been shown to be in truth the Messiah who was to come again. In the speeches that are scattered through the Acts of the Apostles, and in the Pauline epistles, a skeleton pattern can be traced, which indicates the lines on which Christian missionaries answered this question. Jesus of Nazareth, of the seed of David, was ‘approved of God unto you by mighty works and wonders and signs, which God did by him in the midst of you’ (Acts 2:22) He suffered, as had been foretold by the prophets, and after his crucifixion in Jerusalem God raised him from the dead on the third day, and he appeared to witnesses from among his disciples. He is exalted to the right hand of God, and will return again to judge the quick and the dead. What Luke adopts as a short and summary pattern for the missionary speeches which he puts into the mouths of Peter and Paul has to be considered in the light of literary exigencies and of the fuller details which he has already given to Theophilus in his gospel. Paul, although he probably had not himself seen Jesus in the flesh (yet cf. II Cor. 5:15), from time to time makes it clear, not only that the outlines of such a pattern were familiar to him, but that he can supplement it with much fuller details, as when he wishes to support his message to the Corinthians with appeals to the institution of the Eucharist at the Last Supper (I Cor. 11) and to Resurrection appearances (I Cor. 15).(Cf. C.H. Dodd, The Apostolic Preaching and its Developments.

Once the hearer of the Kerygma had been converted he had to be instructed more perfectly as to the implications of the new life. This involved not only the teaching of what Jesus had laid down on particular subjects, e.g. on Marriage or on Swearing, but the illustration from Jesus’ words of the great new principles involved in his message, e.g. the nature of the Kingdom of God, the imminence of the Second Coming and the Judgement, the fundamental nature of the two great commandments. In the process of such teaching examples of Jesus’ teaching were employed which often involved the narration of some scene in Jesus’ ministry. It is probable indeed that most of the facts about Jesus, apart from the great and significant narratives, were handed down almost incidentally as part of the necessary background for the sayings of Jesus which were of supreme authority for guiding the lives of the early Christians.

As the Christian mission spread, so both Kerygma and Didache inevitably expanded, changed their emphasis, and tended to crystallize in form. Papias quotes an Elder as saying of Peter that he used to suit his teachings to the needs (of his hearers), and the needs of Gentile converts were often very different from those of Jewish converts. Jews could understand without difficulty the implications of the title Christ, and much of Christian morality is in fact Jewish morality informed by the Holy Spirit; for Gentiles on the other hand the title of Christ needed explanation and interpretation, and much of Christian moral teaching was new and difficult. Sayings of Jesus that had special reference to Jewish ceremonial customs, such as those on the washing of hands contained in Mark 7, were of little interest to Gentiles and are omitted by Luke from his gospel; Matthew has preserved two sayings connected with the Temple altar (Mt. 5:23, 23:18) which had a special significance for Jewish Christians, but which would lose much of their effectiveness for Gentile Christians. On the other hand, ever new problems arose for the solution of which the authority of a saying of Jesus, originally uttered in a different context, was sometimes legitimately, sometimes illegitimately claimed, and at times even perhaps invented. Thus we have Jesus’ teaching on divorce preserved in three forms. In what seems to be the earliest and best form (preserved in Luke 16:18) Jesus says that a man who divorces his wife and marries another, or who marries a woman who has been divorced, commits adultery. This is in accord with conditions in Jewish Palestine in the first century A.D.; divorce was a prerogative of the husband and the wife had no similar rights. Mark gives a similar saying of Jesus (Mk. 10:11-12) which condemns divorce initiated by the husband or wife; this seems to be a -- legitimate -- adaptation of the principle laid down by Jesus for Gentile conditions under which the woman was in many places able to divorce her husband. Matthew preserves the reference to men alone (Mt. 5:32, 19:9), but inserts the clause ‘except for fornication’, which is widely regarded as a later weakening of what Jesus actually said.

Lack of Biographical Interest

While both Kerygma and Didache involved incidental references to the ministry and sayings of Jesus, there seems to have been comparatively little biographical interest in the minor details of his life. This should not surprise us overmuch. The modern interest in detailed biography was not marked in the ancient world, and Professor Burkitt has claimed the Gospel of Mark as the earliest biography. There can be no doubt that the apostles and the family of Jesus in fact told much more of the life of Jesus than has been preserved, but with the passing of the earliest Christian generation, and with the catastrophe of the Jewish War and the destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 70, which largely severed the communications between the Christians in Palestine and those of the Gentile world, most of this information, preserved only orally and temporarily, was lost to posterity. Here and there an incident in the gospels, such as that of the young man who fled away naked at Jesus’ arrest (Mk. 14:51-52), or that of the friendly Pharisees who warned Jesus of Herod’s plot to kill him (Lk. 13:31), or the connection of Jesus with Nazareth and his approximate age, has preserved such incidental knowledge, but the great bulk of gospel material owes its preservation not to biographical interest but to its value for preaching and teaching.

The Facts About Jesus

1. Old Testament Prophecies fulfilled

Expectation of a Messiah (Greek, Christos = anointed) was widespread among the Jews of the first century A.D. The Christians, in proclaiming that Jesus was indeed the Christ, supporting their claim by appealing to his fulfillment of the prophecies that had been made about the Christ to come. The genealogies, differently given by Matthew and Luke, agree on his legal descent from David. Matthew and Luke, in the course of differing narratives about the birth of Jesus, supported in Matthew by a series of prophecies from the Old Testament, agree again on his birth of a virgin at Bethlehem. Luke prefaces the ministry of Jesus with Jesus’ own summary at Nazareth of his fulfillment of the prophecy of Isaiah 61:1-2, and with the parallel drawn by Jesus between his rejection by his own people and the missions of Elijah and Elisha to non-Israelites (4:24-27). The reply of Jesus to John the Baptist’s enquiry as to whether he is the Christ (Mt. 11: 5-6, Lk. 7:22-23) is in effect a claim that his words have fulfilled the prophecies. The healings of the blind, the lame, the lepers, the deaf, the raising of the dead, and the evangelising of the poor, are recorded in the gospels in detail not least because they illustrate this claim. The teaching in parables (Mt. 13:35) and its purpose that ‘hearing ye shall hear, and shall in no wise understand’ (Mt. 13:13 f.) are likewise shown to be in accordance with Old Testament prophecy. So, too, many of the details of the Passion narrative are indicated as fulfillments of the Old Testament, e.g. the entry to Jerusalem on an ass, the price of the betrayal, and the correspondence of many features of the crucifixion with Psalm 22. Finally the resurrection itself, as the suffering before, is interpreted by the risen Jesus as in accordance with the Scriptures (Lk. 24:26-27).

The influence of such Old Testament prophecies in the selection of material for Christian preaching about the life of Jesus is clear. In many points it has been argued that such influence has led to the material alteration of facts to suit prophecies -- the two asses of Mt. 21:2-7, due to a misunderstanding of Zech. 9:9, is a clear case, but it remains true that it also led to the preservation of much valuable material about the teaching and ministry of Jesus.

2. John the Baptist

Another influence which led to the accumulation of a cycle of stories about Jesus was the need felt by Christian preachers to relate the work of Jesus with that of John the Baptist. How far a John the Baptist sect continued after John’s death is uncertain, but John’s fame was widespread, and probably many of the earliest Christians had first been baptised by John (cf. Jn. 1 esp. 35-40). The motive for the several references to John that are found in the gospels seems to have been not primarily one of rivalry with later disciples of John, if indeed such disciples continued to proselytise after John’s death, but the desire to show that John’s place in the scheme of God’s revelation as the forerunner of Christ had been expressly confirmed by the Christ himself. This interest led at any rate to the preservation of much important information about John the Baptist and about Jesus’ baptism and later references to John. Here again the tradition seems later to have gained accretions of doubtful worth, such as the narrative connecting John’s birth with that of Jesus (Lk. 1:5 ff.), the effort to explain away the baptism of Jesus by John (Mt. 3:14-15), and the highly coloured account of John’s death (Mk. 6:17-29).

3. Turning points in the Ministry

It is possible that the gospels have preserved the narratives of the three incidents, outside the Passion Narrative, which mark decisive turning points in the ministry of Jesus, and which were told as such by apostles, although their original significance has been in part lost by the variations in the tradition visible in the gospels as they stand. The motive in all three of these narratives, if they go back to the teaching of Peter, as they may well do, is not so much a biographical one in the ministry of Jesus as an autobiographical one of witness on Peter’s part. The first of these narratives concerns what is told in Mk. 1:16-38 of the call of Peter, Andrew, James, and John, the casting out of an unclean spirit in the synagogue at Capernaum, the healing of Peter’s mother-in-law, and of many sick, the departure of Jesus to pray in a desert place next morning, and his words to Peter and others who followed him there. It has sometimes been called ‘a day in the life of Jesus’ but could be even more justly called ‘the beginning of the new life of Peter’. As such it may well have formed a favourite part of Peter’s preaching, although probably in a less bald form than that in which Mark gives it. For us it furnishes, if this theory is acceptable, a starting point for the Galilean ministry of Jesus.

The second of the narratives, the Mission of the Disciples, is recorded by Mark (6:7-13) and seems also to have stood in the now lost document Q (Lk. 10:1-20), with parallels to many verses in Mt.9:37-38, 10:7-16, etc.). Although little is told of the actual mission apart from references to its general success, it clearly marked a memorable stage in the training of the disciples who were now sufficiently advanced to be entrusted with authority to heal and to preach. It also marks, of course, a stage in the ministry of Jesus, who had now achieved both some popular success and a deeper and more enduring task in the instruction of his disciples. While the narrative was probably remembered and passed on as an example and inspiration for later Christian missionaries, it may well preserve also one of the significant steps in the ministry of Jesus himself.

It may even be that this mission was the immediate cause of, and originally connected with, the third narrative, a cycle containing the account of the feeding of the multitude beyond the lake and the signs of great popular success (in John 6:15, Jesus, perceiving that they were about to come and take him by force, to make him king, withdrew again into the mountain himself alone’), a crossing of the lake, a demand for a sign, and then, after an interval, Peter’s confession at Caesarea Philippi that Jesus was the Christ (Mk. 8: 1-33, cf. Jn. 6:1-69). The substantial agreement of John with Mark here appears to be due to the following of a similar tradition rather than to literary dependence, and it is at least conceivable that we have here a series of consecutive narratives, largely altered in detail during their transmissions, which go back to Peter’s recollections. Peter’s reasons for telling of this connected series of events may well have sprung in part from the memory of the moment of his avowal as at once his greatest and most chastening, but the point of the narrative for missionary preaching lay above all in Jesus’ prophetic rejection of the popular conception of the Messiah-king for the true one of the suffering Son of Man who would rise again. To the student of the life of Jesus the confession of Peter represents in itself a decisive point in the ministry of Jesus. If it is true that we have this confession preserved in its original historical setting, embroidered but not substantially altered by the vicissitudes of oral transmission, a flood of light is thrown on the reasons for Herod’s suspicions and for Jesus’ retirement before his final challenge to authority in Jerusalem.

The treatment of these narratives has been brief and of necessity speculative, yet enough has been said, perhaps, to suggest that the possibility of reconstructing some of the main stages of Jesus’ ministry must not be too carelessly dismissed.

4. The Passion Narrative

While Mark and Luke differ considerably in the substance, order, and arrangement of the events of Jesus’ ministry, and John shows even wider differences from both, all three of these gospels come together again into substantial agreement, although not without quite considerable variations, when they tell the story of the Passion of Jesus. It is generally held that this agreement indicates the existence of a comparatively trustworthy record of the outlines of the Passion story from the earliest days of the primitive church, a record which has preserved the main outlines of what really happened. That this should be so is only natural, in view of the consuming interest and concern of every Christian in this climax of the life of Jesus. The drama and significance of the events have exercised upon Christians of every generation a special influence, and from the very beginning the story has belonged to the essential core of Christian preaching. Professor C. H. Dodd has summarised the nine chief episodes that seem to have constituted the original pattern of the Passion-narrative as follows: (History and the Gospel, pp. 80 f.)

1. The Last Supper. Forecast of the treachery of Judas.

2. Forecast of Peter’s denial, and of the desertion of the disciples.

3. Retirement to a place on or near the Mount of Olives. Betrayal, arrest, desertion of disciples.

4. Examination before the High Priest. Peter’s denial.

5. Trial before Pilate. Declaration of innocence. Condemnation as King of the Jews. Release of Barabbas.

6. Crucifixion at Calvary, with two others.

7. Burial.

8. The Empty Tomb.

9. Appearances to Disciples.

To this we are perhaps entitled to add, in view of Paul’s account in I Cor.11 and in spite of John’s silence, the institution of the Eucharist at the Last Supper. The general sequence of events from the Last Supper up to the Burial presents a coherent picture, self-authenticating in its simplicity and starkness.

Round this central core there tended inevitably to gather, snow-ball fashion, additional material not all of the same value. While the incident of the young man at the arrest in Mark or the trial before Herod in Luke may represent the filling out of the story from the testimony of eye-witnesses, many of the other additions, notably those in Matthew, seem to be of the nature of ‘pious embroidery’. Yet, whatever difficulties are raised by the variations in the additional details provided by the evangelists, the main lines of the Passion narrative can be clearly traced.

5. The Resurrection

Paul’s list of resurrection appearances in I Cor.15 and his emphatic statements as to the central and vital part of the resurrection in Christian faith illustrate the importance attached to such testimony in Christian preaching. It is possible that Mark’s gospel did originally end at 16:8, and hinted only at an appearance or appearances to come in Galilee (Mk. 14:28,16:7). If so, the explanation probably lies in the fact that he wished to include only the ministry of the earthly Jesus in his book, and counted the appearances as of the heavenly Christ. Yet it was inevitable that those who wrote gospels later, if not Mark himself, should include accounts of some at least of the resurrection appearances. That they should include fewer appearances than those mentioned by Paul as having been received by him is not surprising, but the differences that the gospels show between themselves indicate the speed with which the form of the appearances, as distinguished from the fact of the appearances, could change in the course of oral transmission. They witness, too, to the difficulty, once the apostles were scattered abroad, of harmonising the various strands of tradition that developed. If the problems which the gospel accounts present to the modern reader are largely insoluble, they furnish evidence at any rate of the universal Christian conviction that the risen Christ did in fact appear to his disciples after his death and of the strength and power of that conviction in the face of inconsistencies between different forms of the tradition.

The facts of the gospel material so far discussed have the common characteristic that they have each their particular place in the gospel as a whole. There remain to be considered, besides the sayings of Jesus, a number of stories about Jesus, which seem to have been originally told as single stories to illustrate some particular point of preaching by an appeal to an action of Jesus. While many of these stories are of great value for helping to reconstruct the details of Jesus’ ministry, and may well have been told originally by eye-witnesses of the events, their preservation is due to the aptness with which they supported the missionary preaching, and in a number of cases the stories appear to have undergone considerable changes in their transmission to enable them to be used with ever greater point. They fall into two main categories, evidences of Jesus’ power over disease and nature, and evidences of Jesus’ rejection of the Jewish religion of his time and of his authority.

6. Evidences of Jesus’ power over disease and nature

The number of healings recorded in the gospels is high, but can only represent a selection from a much larger number that would for a time be remembered. The selection seems to have been made in Mark to illustrate the healing of as many different kinds of affliction as possible -- a fever, leprosy, paralysis, a withered hand, madness, an issue, deafness and stuttering, blindness (twice), epilepsy, and even, in the case of Jairus’ daughter, death itself. In oral preaching, where the needs of the hearers had to be considered, such a variety of evidence was both necessary and forthcoming, and Christian sufferers would take comfort from the way in which Jesus had healed in the course of his earthly ministry men, women and children with the same afflictions to which they themselves were subject. So, too, for Gentiles, the healing of the Gentile Centurion’s servant (Q, Mt. 8:5-13, Lk.7:9-10) and of the Syro-Phoenician woman’s daughter (Mk.7:25-30) had a special meaning, although in this latter case Luke seems to have omitted the story deliberately because of Jesus’ apparent depreciation of the Gentiles. That the stories should often have been ‘heightened’ in the telling was inevitable, but in the majority of cases recorded in the gospels it is possible to accept without difficulty the nucleus of the healings as a true reminiscence of Jesus’ activity.

The nature-miracles are harder to assess. The purpose of their telling is clear, the demonstration of Jesus’ mighty powers in stilling the storm, in walking on the water, in feeding great multitudes, in destroying a fig tree, in changing water into wine. The quick growth and wide popularity of such stories in connection with great men in credulous ages serve as a warning against accepting their truth too readily, but that such stories should soon acquire wide currency in Christian circles and be widely employed as evidences of Jesus’ powers is easy to understand. It is only surprising, and to the credit of the general trustworthiness of the oral tradition, that these stories are so few in number.

7. Evidence of Jesus’ rejection of the religion of his time

While most of the gospel material that deals with Jesus’ controversies is contained in his sayings and in stories leading up to sayings, there are a number of incidents which have been preserved whose narration was clearly intended to establish that Jesus judged differently from the Jewish religious leaders of his time and acted with authority, e.g. the call of the publican Levi as his disciple and the cleansing of the Temple.

8. Signs of Jesus’ Divinity

Into a similar but different category fall those incidents where Jesus’ authority is made manifest supernaturally, e.g. at the Baptism, Temptation, and Transfiguration. The effectiveness for Christian preaching of these triumphs of Jesus was undoubted. In each case the story would appear to rest upon what an intimate disciple of Jesus heard from him or saw for himself, although in each case too there is clear evidence of development in the form of the story.

The examples that have been given so far serve to show how a great deal of our gospel material owes its preservation to the demands made by Christian Kerygma for illustrations from the life and ministry of Jesus to support the central proclamation that Jesus was indeed the Christ. Side by side with such material and often -- as in the case of some ‘pronouncement-stories’ --overlapping it stands the mass of sayings of Jesus, often embedded in a small piece of narrative, whose preservation was primarily due to the need for supporting the instruction of Christians with authoritative examples of what Jesus had himself laid down.

The Sayings of Jesus

1. Pronouncement Stories

The gospels contain some thirty or so stories which share a common form in that their main interest is to illustrate the setting for a pronouncement of Jesus, and Professor Vincent Taylor’s suggested title of ‘Pronouncement-story’ (Formation of the Gospel Tradition, p. 30.) is a suitable and convenient one for them. Typical of such stories are those of the controversy about plucking the ears of corn on the Sabbath, leading up to Jesus’ saying about the Sabbath being made for man (Mk. 3:23-28), or the question of the scribe about the greatest commandment, leading up to Jesus’ great answer (Mk.12:28-34).

This and similar classifications must not, however, be pushed too far. Some of the healing stories, e.g. those of the paralytic (Mk.2: 3 ff.) and of the man with the withered hand (Mk. 3:1 ff.), may have been told primarily for their illustration of Jesus’ healing power and have only incidentally provided examples of Jesus’ claim to authority and to do good on the Sabbath. It is impossible to lay down clearcut definitions in each case. In giving instruction about particular problems, such as the observance of the Sabbath or of fasting, or of regulations about ceremonial purity, or in laying down the great principles of the faith, such as belief in the resurrection, the authority of Jesus, the central commandments, the Christian missionary would drive home his teaching with a suitable story of what Jesus had said in a particular controversy or in answer to a particular question. In the process of such teaching many fragments of the biography of Jesus were preserved, valuable in themselves, though often presenting problems as to their exact setting in his ministry. These problems have been made more difficult, not only by changes introduced into some of the stories to make them more pointed, but by the collection of such stories into artificial groups, such as the collections of Jesus’ controversies in Mark 2:1-3, 6 and Mark 11: 27-35, 12:13-40. Such collections, in a more or less floating form, may well go back to the oral stage of the tradition.

2. Parables and Sayings

Of less value for the facts of Jesus’ life, but of supreme value for his teaching, are the parables and sayings that have been preserved, for the most part in clearly editorial settings and groupings, in the gospels. The parable form, although clearly a favourite one of Jesus himself, was very liable to changes and to incorrect interpretation. A comparison of the parable of the Marriage Feast as it is found in Matthew (22:1-14) with the Lucan form of the parable (Lk. 14:16-24) shows plainly enough that in Matthew another parable of the Wedding Garment has been introduced into an alien context which spoils its point. Some of the interpretations given to parables in the gospels likewise raise doubts as to their authenticity, e.g. Matthew’s interpretation of the parable of the Tares (Mt.13:36-43).(See Dr. B.T.D. Smith, The Parables of the Synoptic Gospels, p.200.)

Even more subject to distortion were the individual sayings of Jesus, once their true context had been forgotten. Thus in the Beatitudes (Mt. 5:3-12, Lk. 6:20-23) there is a clear and important difference between the Matthaean emphasis on the kingdom as a reward for spiritual qualities and the Lucan emphasis on the kingdom as a reward for earthly misfortunes. Can Jesus have said both that ‘he who is not against us is for us’ (Mk. 9:40) and that ‘he who is not with me is against me’ (Q, Mt. 12: 30, Lk. 11:23) ? Perhaps the best example of the confusion and error that in oral tradition attack the transmission of sayings is in the Marcan collection of Jesus’ apocalyptic sayings (Mk. 13). Here genuine sayings lie side by side with sayings apparently altered in the tradition (Mk. 13:9 ?) and with others whose attribution to Jesus involves grave inconsistencies with the words of Jesus in other forms of the tradition (contrast the signs before the end of Mk. 13:24-26 with the sudden and unexpected coming of the end predicted by Jesus in Q, Mt. 24:37-41, Lk. 17:26-27). The total effect of such an artificial collection of sayings, of which the genuine ones are quite out of their correct context, was to distort the teachings of Jesus under the influence of Jewish apocalyptic expectation.

Yet a process of collection and arrangement was inevitable if individual sayings of Jesus were to be long remembered. Traces of such arrangement made probably in the oral stage of the tradition can still be found in the gospels. Thus, sayings on the same subject tend to be grouped together; a comparison of the twin parables of the Mustard Seed and Leaven (Q, Mt. 13:31-33, Lk. 13:18-21) with the single parable of the Mustard Seed preserved by Mark (4:30-32) indicates the kind of way in which such grouping came about. In one case at least (Mk. 9:41-50), the connection appears to be a mnemonic one suggested by a word or theme in each saying.

Form Criticism.

In offering this sketch of the way in which the material of our gospels can largely be derived from the needs of early Christian preaching and teaching, little has so far been directly said of the methods of Form-criticism which have developed, especially in Germany, since 1918. In an attempt to get behind the period of written documents to the development of the gospel-material in the oral stage a number of scholars, notable K. L. Schmidt, Bultmann, and Dibelius on the continent, and at a later stage R. H. Lightfoot and V. Taylor in England, have drawn on the analogies with this material presented by other types of oral tradition. By showing that such material tends to observe certain rules of form and to undergo certain normal processes of development they have endeavoured to trace the kind of developments that can be expected to have taken place in the narratives and sayings of the gospels before the gospels themselves were written. Such methods have in fact proved of great value, especially when used by those who have not been unduly influenced, as Bultmann has, by a radical scepticism as to the historicity of the main lines of the gospel narrative. Yet the rules of oral tradition are not absolute rules, nor are the forms of oral tradition fixed in any than the widest sense. It is significant that the pioneers of Form-criticism found themselves seriously at variance in drawing up their categories of ‘forms’, and that more conservative scholars have been satisfied with very few wide classifications, Vincent Taylor for example (The Formation of the Gospel Tradition) using only those of Passion-narratives, Pronouncement stories, Sayings and Parables, Miracle-stories and Stories about Jesus.

The value, however, of even such a limited use of the methods of Form-criticism is very real, not least in suggesting the main lines along which the stories and sayings of the gospels tended to ‘develop’, and in furnishing certain criteria as to their probable origin and worth. What has been written in the last few pages is dependent on the results achieved by modern scholars in this field. Indications have been given of the more important ways in which the material was subject to change, the tendency to shorten stories in a narrative, the inevitable heightening of the miraculous element and the moulding of material to sharpen the point of the moral, the intrusion of false sayings and incidents and of artificial explanations, the shift of meaning that sometimes followed the loss of the true context, and the growth of cycles of stories and of sayings which gave to the material a new and sometimes unnatural setting, but which once committed to writing was to fix within narrow limits the possibilities of further change.

The gospels are for Christians of great value and authority, but they have not the supreme importance of Jesus himself. The critical study of the gospels can be justified only by its aim of obtaining a truer picture of Jesus and his teaching than that given by the gospels in their present form. To the superficial reader the gospels appear to furnish a uniformly consistent representation of Jesus’ life and message, but closer examination reveals that there are in fact serious inconsistencies in the accounts both of what Jesus did and said. To account for these inconsistencies involves the most detailed and painstaking study of the circumstances in which the gospels came to be written and of the value that is to be attached to the material which they contain.

Of the problems which confront the student of the gospels two are of overriding importance. The first is that of the apostolicity of the gospels. In the light of recent criticism it is no longer possible to accept the Matthaean authorship of the first gospel in its present form, and both the Marcan authorship of the second gospel and the Johannine authorship of the fourth gospel are matters of dispute. Yet, if the traditional authorship of these gospels is abandoned, the authority of the gospels is in some ways shaken. An apostle may well have made mistakes in his recollection of Jesus’ words and actions, and his own interpretation of Jesus’ teaching may not always have been faithful to Jesus’ intention, but he is unlikely to have distorted Jesus’ teaching outside certain narrow limits and we can confidently assume that he would not deliberately have falsified his reports of what Jesus had done. On the other hand an anonymous tradition that cannot be checked by the witness of an apostle such as Peter, Matthew, or John, may not be trusted to have preserved the memory of Jesus’ words and actions without serious distortion. The problem of apostolicity is, therefore, a serious one for the historical value of the gospels.

The second problem is that of Jesus’ own consistency. He is represented in the gospels as teaching in very different ways. In the fourth gospel he proclaims his Sonship of God openly from the beginning of his ministry, speaks of his Kingdom almost always in spiritual terms, makes discipleship dependent on the use of sacraments not yet established, and promises the coming of the Holy Spirit. In Mark, Jesus reveals his Messiahship only towards the end of his ministry, speaks of his Kingdom now as present and now as future, uses apocalyptic language, says little of the Spirit and nothing of baptism. Even when allowance has been made for the distortion of Jesus’ teaching by the evangelists the evidence permits of more than one interpretation of Jesus’ teaching, and there is a final residue of inconsistency which may be attributed either to Jesus or to Christian tradition. The question is of particular importance in relation to the place of apocalyptic in Jesus’ message side by side with so much that is of a purely spiritual nature.

Answers are suggested to both these questions in the pages that follow, but no claim is made that different answers are not possible. The reader must ultimately make his own decisions in the consciousness that his answers will determine his understanding of the Jesus of history.

Books for Reading:

Of the many good commentaries available on the gospels, the following are some of the most useful for those who do not know Greek:

Mark: A. W. F. Blunt (Clarendon Bible). Brief but good.

A. E. J. Rawlinson (Westminster). More advanced.

Matthew: B. T. D. Smith (Cambridge Bible), A small but important work.

T. H. Robinson (Moffatt).

Luke: H. Balmforth (Clarendon Bible).

W. Manson (Moffatt).

John: R. H. Strachan (S.C.M.).

G. H. C. MacGregor (Moffatt).

SIR E. C. Hoskyns (Faber).

The Four Gospels: Major, Manson and Wright. The Mission,

Message and Teaching Of Jesus (Nicholson and Watson).

This is a very valuable book, if only for its arrangement of the gospel material, with a running commentary, by sources. Part of this book has been re-issued as T. W. MANSON. The Sayings of Jesus.

On the problems of literary and form criticism:

On the Life and Teaching of Jesus:

M. GOGUEL. The Life of Jesus (Allen and I Jnwin).

G. DUNCAN. Jesus, Son of Man (Nisbet).

C. H. DODD. The Parab1es of the Kingdom (Nisbet).

C. H. DODD. History and the Gospel (Nisbet).

J. MOPFATT The Theology of the Gospels (Duckworth).

V. TAYLOR. Jesus and His Sacrifice (Macmillan).

W. MANSON. Jesus the Messiah (Hodder and Stoughton).

A. E. J. RAWLINSON. Christ in the Gospels (Oxford)

The New Testament claims from its readers an unique authority, and the reliability of its text is therefore of great importance. We wish to be assured that, when we read it, even in translation, we are reading essentially what the original authors wrote, and not a corrupted version of their work. In one sense it is true that no translation can correctly render the nuances and subtleties of thought of the original, but for practical purposes the ordinary reader will be content if he can be reasonably certain of the fidelity of the translation which he reads to a Greek text which can claim to be substantially that of the original works.

If the Authorised Version of 1611, still by far the most widely read of all English translations of the New Testament, is compared with later authoritative translations, such as the Revised Version of 1881, or the American Revised Standard Version of 1946, it is at once clear that there are numerous differences, but that the sum of all these differences amounts to very little. In the words of one of the latest revisers --

While the general reliability of the Authorised Version has thus been confirmed by recent scholarship, there is no doubt that the modern translations bring the reader in hundreds of small instances nearer to the words and meaning of the original writers. The Authorised Version is not altogether free from mistranslations, e.g. Mk. 14:8 ‘being before instructed ‘for’ ‘being put forward’, or I Cor. 4:4 ‘I know nothing by myself’ for ‘I know nothing against myself’, but its most serious defect, and one which requires it to be corrected in more than a thousand places -- most of them, of course, of trivial importance -- is that it is a translation of a Greek text which we now know to be comparatively late and inaccurate. Two examples will illustrate this. A comparison between the Authorised and Revised Versions of the Lord’s Prayer in Lk. 11:2-4 shows that in the Revised Version the prayer is much abbreviated; the abbreviation often strikes with a shock the reader who is familiar with the Lord’s Prayer as it is said in church services, and yet the shorter version is certainly nearer to what Luke wrote; the additions, mostly from Matthew’s form of the prayer, crept into later manuscripts which were employed for the earliest printed Greek texts on which the Authorised Version is based. Again the reader will look in vain in the Revised Version for the Three Heavenly Witnesses of I Jn.5: 7 in the Authorised Version; when Erasmus published the first printed Greek text of the New Testament in 1516, he left out the words because they were not to be found in any Greek manuscript known to him, promising to insert the clause if it could be shown to exist in a simple Greek manuscript. The clause is in fact a late gloss which crept into the Latin Vulgate in the sixth century; unfortunately, however, it was shown to Erasmus in a sixteenth century Greek manuscript which had been assimilated to the Latin Vulgate text; Erasmus kept his promise, and the translators of the Authorised Version followed the erroneous text.

Between the Authorised and Revised Versions there stand two and a half centuries of progress in the science of textual criticism and of the collection and study of manuscripts. In the nineteenth century especially, the scientific study of the text developed apace, and the Revisers included in their number the two great scholars Westcott and Hort, whose theories as to the history of the New Testament text played then, as they have done since for other translators, a large part in determining the text to be followed

Westcott and Hort were able to utilise a mass of new knowledge that their predecessors had brought to light. Thousands of Greek manuscripts of the New Testament, as well as versions in numerous other languages, had been examined by scholars, dated, and grouped into ‘families’. The older and more important manuscripts had been minutely studied and exactly reproduced in printed editions. The chief textual variants had been grouped in the ‘apparatus criticus’ of critical texts, notably in the later editions of Tischendorf’s Greek New Testament.

On the basis of this accumulated knowledge and of their own painstaking studies, Westcott and Hort made a great step forward in the search for the true text. They divided the readings of manuscripts into four great groups. The great mass of readings of later manuscripts they regarded as deriving from a Syrian revision of the text, which took place in the fourth century, and as largely worthless for the reconstruction of the true text. A number of readings found especially, but not exclusively, in manuscripts from the West, and termed ‘Western’, they regarded as early but as generally due to a corruption of the apostolic texts. Another type of text, the ‘Alexandrian’, supported largely by writers and manuscripts associated with Alexandria, was to be suspected as likely to have been the result of correction by literary scribes. Finally, a ‘Neutral’ text was constructed containing readings that were pre-Syrian but neither ‘Western’ nor ‘Alexandrian’ and proclaimed as the purest. No manuscript, version, or Father preserved this text in its original purity, but the great fourth century manuscript B (preserved in the Vatican Library) comes nearest to doing so, often with the support of ((the fourth or fifth century Codex Sinaiticus, then in St. Petersburg and now in the British Museum).

Since the time of Westcott and Hort textual criticism of the New Testament has made great strides. New manuscripts and papyrus fragments have come to light, notably a fourth or fifth century Syriac ‘Gospels’ from Sinai which has preserved a very old translation from the Greek, the Chester Beatty Papyri from Egypt of the third century, our oldest witness by a century for the text of much of the New Testament, and a small fragment of papyrus from Egypt (now in the John Rylands Library at Manchester) which contains Jn. 18:31-33, 37-38 and is dated by experts within the first half of the second century, or within half a century of the original writing of the gospel.

Side by side with this acquisition of new material have gone new developments in textual theory. The ‘Western’ text, which is now seen from newly utilised evidence to have been more widespread than Westcott and Hort perceived, has been given by some scholars greater weight than before (in Acts especially the ‘Western’ text contains many interesting variations from the ‘Neutral’ text, some of which are mentioned in chapter 13). New problems, too, have come to light as our knowledge of the early text has grown. At present, indeed, there is a widespread inclination among scholars to doubt whether we can ever pierce through the period of ‘variations’ in the first three centuries to any certain knowledge of the original text. Yet it must be remembered that these ‘variations’ are comparatively small, and of little religious significance. It is also perhaps significant that the translators of the latest American Revised Standard Version of 1946, who preferred an eclectic principle in determining the text which they should follow in place of adherence to such a theory as that of the ‘Neutral Text’, found that --

The reader of any of the standard modern translations, such as the Revised Version, the new American Version, or Moffatt, can have confidence that he will nowhere be seriously misled on important points of Christian doctrine in his reading.

Books for Reading:

H. W. Robinson. Ancient and English Versions of the Bible (Oxford).

F. Kenyon. Our Bible and the Ancient Manuscripts (Eyre and Spottiswoode).

G. Milligan. The New Testament and its Transmission (Hodder and Stoughton).

An Introduction to the Revised Standard Version of the New Testament (International Council of Religious Education) explains briefly the principles on which this recent new Version is based.

For more advanced study:

K. and S. Lake. The Text of the New Testament (Rivington).

F. Kenyon. The Textual Criticism of the New Testament (Macmillan).

The phrases ‘canonical books’ and ‘canon of scripture’ are often used for the books which are recognised as authoritative for Christian doctrine, i.e. the books of our Bible. The Greek word ‘canon’, which originally meant a bar or measuring rod, came to mean a rule or standard, or even a list. The Christians early came to speak of the formulated profession of their faith, e.g. in the baptismal creed, as ‘the canon of faith’, and although the use of

‘canon’ and ‘canonical’ in connection with the books of the Bible probably came originally from the meaning of ‘list’ it naturally acquired also a sense of ‘authoritative standard’. It is in this sense that to-day we speak of the books of our New Testament as ‘canonical’ or belonging to the Canon of the New Testament, because of the authority that has been attached to them by the Church. A great German scholar (C. R. Gregory, Canon and Text of the N.T.., p. 294) has written:

The process by which the books of our New Testament came to acquire their canonical authority was a long one, and in the case of such books as II Peter and Revelation involved much controversy. There were two main stages in the growth of the canon, first a period extending from the writing of the books to about A.D. 200 when most of the New Testament books had been collected and had acquired a position of authority side by side with that of the Old Testament, and then a further period of two centuries and more in which the bounds of the New Testament were finally fixed with very general agreement.

The Collection of The New Testament

The earliest Christians had at first no sacred books other than those of the Old Testament, which they, like their Jewish neighbours, regarded as the word of God. The books of our New Testament were written over a period of not much less than a hundred years, the earliest being perhaps the Epistle of James (c. A.D. 45 ?) and the Pauline epistles, the latest probably the pseudonymous II Peter (between A.D. 100 and 150). Most of the epistles were ‘occasional writings’, written in the first place to deal with particular situations and problems, and it is clear that Paul, for example, though he claimed to write with authority, never dreamt that some of his letters would later be collected and venerated as of universal application and of permanent authority. In the same way both Luke and ‘Matthew’ did not hesitate to treat Mark’s gospel with considerable freedom, and to amend his narrative in many particulars.

Our knowledge of the early history of our canonical New Testament books is slender, but it is clear that most of them were preserved by the person or community for whom they were written, and that their circulation by means of copies must have originally been as separate units and comparatively slow. Their authority, too, was at first by no means undisputed, and from two early second-century writers we hear of people who preferred the authority of the Old Testament and of living witnesses respectively. Ignatius, writing to the Philadelphians c. A.D.110 recalls that:

Papias, writing about ten years later, also in Asia Minor, gives as his own opinion

With the passage of time, however, the prestige of these Christian writings increased, as the first and second generations of disciples passed away, and men turned instinctively for information to the written documents which preserved so many details of the ministry and teaching of Jesus and of what his apostles had taught. Readings from such writings must from an early period have played an important part in the services of the different churches, side by side with readings from the Old Testament; yet such readings were at first largely governed, not by any conscious conception of the ecclesiastical authority of these ‘new’ writings, but by what was available and edifying. We know that many books not in our New Testament were read in churches in the second century, e.g. accounts of martyrs and their sufferings, and the first epistle of Clement, written from the Church of Rome to that of Corinth and read in church there long after the occasion for its writing had passed away; we even hear of a Bishop of Antioch c. A.D. 190 visiting the church at Rhossus in Cilicia and approving the reading there of a gospel of Peter, only to withdraw his approval when he had later been informed of its heretical nature.

The epistles of Paul seem to have been formed within a generation of his death into a separate collection which enjoyed a wide circulation. The author of II Peter, writing in the first half of the second century, refers to ‘Paul . . . in all his epistles’ (3: 15-16), and Polycarp of Smyrna soon after A.D. 110 shows knowledge of at least eight of them. The Gospels, too, supplementing each other as they did, came to be grouped together, although the evidence suggests that their collection was later, and at first sometimes only partial; thus Justin Martyr, writing after the middle of the century, speaks of the ‘memoirs of the apostles’ as being read with the prophets in the weekly services (Apol. 68), but does not seem to include John’s gospel with the others.

Round these two main groups of writings collected other books, e.g. Acts and I Peter, but even in a large church not all our New Testament books would be known in the second century, while others not included in our New Testament seem often to have been collected and used as of comparable value and authority. The difficulties of circulation were very real, and it is by no means surprising that the Epistle of James, for example, is unmentioned by name in any Christian writing that has survived, up to the time of Origen in the third century.

It was not until the middle of the second century that the Church began consciously to erect a ‘canon’ of Christian writings, which could be reckoned (at least in a wide sense, e.g. Mark’s gospel based on Peter’s teaching) as apostolic, and the impulse to do so came from the heretics. The great heretical leaders in the second century supported their perversions of Christian doctrine by appealing to private traditions handed down by apostles, or even by forging or adapting gospels and epistles. Thus the followers of Basilides (fl. c. A.D. 130) claimed that he had been taught by one Glaucias, ‘the interpreter of Peter’, and they used also a kind of gospel that claimed to be ‘the Traditions of Matthias the Apostle’, while the great heretic Marcion established his own canon of scripture, rejecting the Old Testament and accepting as the only authoritative books carefully edited versions of Luke’s gospel and of ten of Paul’s epistles. The second century, too, saw a spate of gospels, acts, and apocalypses, to which apostolic names were attached, but which contained little of historic value and much of legend and false doctrine. It was in the face of such developments that the Church was driven to make a clear distinction between those works which could be vouched for as of apostolic authority and the others.

By the close of the second century this process had advanced sufficiently for there to be general agreement within the Church on the acceptance as authoritative of our four gospels and thirteen epistles of Paul, and the refusal to accord the same veneration to such a nonapostolic work as e.g. the Shepherd of Hermas. In a list drawn up, perhaps at Rome, towards the end of the century, the late date of Hermas is stressed, and that

Of the remaining books of our New Testament some were not yet in general circulation, e.g. James, Jude, II and III John; the apostolic authorship of others was not yet universally admitted, e.g. Hebrews and II Peter, and in the case of Revelation, with its material picture of heaven and of the thousand year reign of Christ before the end, the Eastern churches as a whole were still unwilling to accept its authority. The Christian Church, it must be remembered, was still only loosely organised, and although all of our New Testament books are continually quoted, and often quoted as authoritative, by Christian writers from the third century on, it was not until the close of the fourth and beginning of the fifth century that the Canon of the New Testament, as we know it, can be said to have obtained almost (The Syriac-speaking churches continued to hesitate for centuries about accepting II Peter, II and III John, Jude and Revelation, and their doubts about Revelation were long shared by the Greek Church generally.) universal acceptance.

The Value of The Canon

The Canon of the New Testament was fixed in accordance with two criteria, that the writings which it contains were apostolic, and that the words of these writings consequently had an authority which could not be given to other Christian writings, however edifying. How far can the books of the New Testament still claim such an especial authority ?

Before discussing the effects of recent biblical criticism on our estimation of the value of the canon, it is well to remember that, even in the days when the authority of scripture was accepted on the traditional grounds, not all Christians have accorded an equal authority to all the books. Thus Luther could say of the Epistle of James that ‘it has no character of the gospel in it’, and refuse to count the Epistle to the Hebrews and the Epistle of Jude among the books necessary to lay the foundation of faith. Calvin, too, significantly omitted the Book of Revelation from the number of New Testament books which he furnished with a commentary.

But it is within the last century that the whole conception of canonicity has been subjected to criticism on the basis of our new knowledge. The general rejection of the apostolic authorship of e.g. the Gospel of Matthew, the Epistle to the Hebrews, and the Book of Revelation, has changed the basis on which authority can truthfully be claimed for the New Testament. The whole conception, too, of the absolute authority of every word of the New Testament has itself been undermined. Thus an Archbishop of Canterbury has felt able to withdraw the ban on women coming bare-headed to church, in spite of the words of Paul in I Cor. 9: 5-16. While this is in itself, of course, a minor matter, it illustrates a very important principle, that the words even of Paul must be weighed by the teaching of Christ before they can be accepted as fully authoritative.

This is not to say that once the traditional principles on which the canon was established have been challenged, the whole idea of an authoritative canon must be abandoned. A truer estimate of the results of modern criticism would be that it has substituted for the traditional principles new ones which establish the authority of our New Testament on sounder and abiding foundations.

While the New Testament can now be regarded as ‘apostolic’ only partially, and in a very wide sense, it remains true that the New Testament does contain substantially all that has survived of those first-century Christian writings which preserved the knowledge of the early ministry of Christ and the teaching of the first Christian generation. As such it is of unique authority for Christians. None of the other Christian writings which survive from the first and second centuries can rank as serious competitors for inclusion; neither in information about Jesus nor in the formulation of Christian doctrine do they add anything that is at once important and primitive. Only in the New Testament itself can we still have confidence that the essential truths proclaimed by the apostles are preserved, even if we now must add that the books of the New Testament are not free from faults and errors. The true significance of canonicity lies not in the inerrancy of scripture, but in the fact that it ‘containeth all things necessary to salvation’.

Books for Reading

A. Souter. The Text and Canon of the New Testament

(Duckworth).

The article, ‘The Bible in the Church’, by Bishop Gore in The New Commentary (S.P.C.K.) gives a short but interesting account of the growth of the idea of canonicity.

C. R. Gregory. Canon and Text of the New Testament (Clark).

A. Harnack. The Origin of the New Testament (Williams and Norgate).

Christians agree in regarding the books of the New Testament as possessing a special authority. They differ as to the nature of this authority and in their interpretation of the contents of the books. The purpose of the critical study of the New Testament, if it is also religious, is to use all the available methods of applying human knowledge to discover how the authority of the New Testament is to be understood, and to set the revelation which it contains as far as possible in its original historical context. The central fact that God has revealed himself to men through Jesus Christ is in the last resort based for Christians on faith and experience and not on knowledge alone. It can be accepted or rejected, but, for those who accept it, it becomes as the act of God no longer a matter for human argument, but the supreme event of history. The final aim of Christian study of the New Testament is the better understanding of the revelation which it contains, and here the resources of human knowledge can be fitly employed, because the books of the New Testament were written and copied by men who were fallible like ourselves and under the influence of their human environment.

This fallibility becomes evident as soon as we undertake the necessary preliminary examination of the text of the New Testament and of the way in which the books of the New Testament were gathered into one authoritative collection. There are a great many places where the wording of our oldest Greek manuscripts differs, and a considerable number where it is impossible to decide with certainty exactly what the original authors wrote. A study of the history of the early Church reveals disagreements as to the books which should be reckoned as of special authority, and it took centuries of dispute before the final selection received general agreement. The detailed study of the books themselves provides further evidence that this fallibility extended to the authors themselves and to the sources which they used. ‘We have this treasure in earthen vessels’(2 Cor. 4:7).

When once we have come to see that the early disciples did not have perfect memories and that their understanding of Jesus was influenced at many points by the mental and religious background of their time, the purpose of the modern critical and scientific approach to the contents of the New Testament becomes clear. It is to establish as far as possible the historical truth as to what Jesus said and did, how the Church grew and developed, and the historical circumstances in which Christians came to write the books of the New Testament. We cannot, of course, achieve more than a very limited reconstruction of the New Testament events and teaching, and on many important points there will continue to be great disagreement. Yet for all the uncertainties that follow in its train, the critical study of the New Testament provides us with a picture of Christian origins that gives a new focus to certain aspects of Jesus’teaching and the development of the Church and a truer understanding of the mode of God’s revelation than that which derives from a complete and uncritical acceptance of the New Testament as uniformly and verbally inspired.

The Progress of Criticism

It was only by slow degrees over a period of centuries that the Church settled which books were to be included in the New Testament and given a place side by side with the Old Testament. The ancient Church contained some acute and learned scholars who raised many of the critical questions that are discussed to-day. Thus Irenaeus at the close of the second century noted the different numbers given to the Beast in his texts of Rev. 23:8, and preferred the reading ‘666’, as modern scholars do, on the ground that it was contained in the oldest copies known to him. In the third century Origen expressed doubts as to the Pauline authorship of the Epistle to the Hebrews on the grounds of the epistle’s style and thought, and Dionysius of Alexandria on similar grounds distinguished between the author of the fourth gospel and the author of Revelation. Such instances of critical acumen could be multiplied, but for the most part members of the Church lacked a scholarly knowledge of Greek and by the end of the fourth century the text of the chosen books was received unquestioningly as of apostolic authority; a series of revisions produced an ‘official’Greek text which was to remain of great influence from the fifth to the nineteenth century, but which we now see in the light of further knowledge to have been based on wrong principles.

The attribution to this New Testament text -- as to that of the Old Testament -- of verbal inerrancy was associated with methods of exegesis which often disregarded the literal meaning of a passage for an allegorical interpretation which gave it a meaning of more present significance. Such methods had been employed by the New Testament writers themselves in their interpretation of Old Testament passages (e.g. I Cor.10 1-2, Heb. 7: 1-17) and for the same reason, the desire to gain the authority of infallible scripture for purposes of controversy or instruction; they could only be justified when the original meaning of the passage had been taken into account, and even in the New Testament this had often not been done. In the later Church this type of exegesis sometimes led to fantastic misinterpretations, e.g. the view held by both Origen and Jerome that Peter and Paul had only pretended to quarrel at Antioch (Gal. 2:11 ff.). Even when the New Testament was literally interpreted, the conception of the equal authority of all passages in it led to distorted ideas of what was the teaching of Christ: the literal interpretation of the Revelation, for example, with its material and temporal picture of Christ’s reign (Rev. 20) has sometimes obscured the spiritual nature of Jesus’teaching on the kingdom.

The effect of such a mechanical doctrine of inspiration and of such inadequate methods of interpretation was to rob the New Testament of much of its true force and to make it the handmaid of ecclesiastical tradition for more than a thousand years. The Reformation saw the reemergence of some true principles of criticism, but they were only slowly to influence the now widespread reading of the New Testament. Thus Erasmus’publication in 1516 of a Greek text based on the comparison of manuscripts marked the beginning of a new era in the determination of the correct text, but progress in the examination and classification of manuscripts was slow, and three centuries were to pass before the textual criticism of the New Testament was firmly based on scientific principles. Luther himself distinguished between the value of different parts of the New Testament (p. 18), and Calvin declared it as ‘the first business of an interpreter, to let his author say what he does say, instead of attributing to him what we think he ought to say’, but neither reformer fully lived up to his own precepts, and it was only gradually that scholars began to adopt a truly historical approach to the documents of the New Testament.

There is no one moment at which ‘modern’methods of criticism can be said to have come into existence, but the first half of the nineteenth century saw their adoption on a wide scale in the universities of Germany. The rationalism of the eighteenth century had led to the widespread abandonment of belief in the infallibility of the Bible and to the rejection e.g. of the miraculous elements of the Old Testament narratives. The application of scientific methods of source-criticism and textual criticism to the writings of Greek and Latin authors had also begun. When men trained in such scientific methods and dominated by philosophical preconceptions which left no room for the miraculous in human life turned to the study of the New Testament, they started a revolution in New Testament criticism. The philosophical bases of thought changed, and are still changing, and the Lives of Jesus and Histories of the Early Church which were written under their influence have each yielded place in turn to a new interpretation, but in the process of controversy the documents of the New Testament have been subjected to such a continuous and minute scrutiny that their scientific study is now established on firm and stable foundations. Perhaps the most important pioneer in the early nineteenth century was the great scholar Lachmann who applied to the New Testament methods which he had learnt from his study of the Classics. It was he who in 1830 laid the foundations of modern textual criticism of the New Testament by rejecting the authority of the traditional ‘textus receptus’(p. 21) in favour of the witness of the oldest Greek and Latin manuscripts, and his declaration in 1835 that the gospels of Matthew and Luke presuppose the Marcan order of the gospel-narrative pointed the way to what is now the accepted basis of any comparative study of the gospels.

The priority of Mark, however, was not generally acknowledged for many years, and only when every possible explanation of the similarities between the gospels, e.g. that Matthew used Luke, that Luke used Matthew, that a common oral tradition alone accounts for the similarities, had been put forward and examined in great detail, did it become finally clear that Mark was the earliest of our gospels. In the process of controversy that led to this conclusion it became widely recognised that a second document, largely composed of sayings of Jesus, was also used by Matthew and Luke, although controversies still continue as to the nature and extent of this source, which is normally designated as Q (from the German Quelle = source).

When once Mark had been acknowledged as the ‘foundation’gospel, the implications of such a belief were seen to be important. The Matthaean authorship of the first gospel was no longer defended by the majority of critics, and both the apostolic authorship and the historical value of the fourth gospel were matters of dispute. On the other hand there was widespread agreement at the end of the century that Mark provided a generally trustworthy account of the ministry of Jesus, although in the prevailing liberal temper of the time critics tended to question the historicity of the miracles recorded in the gospel and also to disregard the apocalyptic nature of e.g. Mk. 13. The authority of Mark was claimed in support of the view that Jesus was first and foremost a great human ethical teacher, whose teaching had been altered by the early Church, and especially by Paul, into a system of theological and sacramental belief.

The problem of reconciling a merely human view of Jesus with the emergence of the Catholic Church was, of course, much older, and the theories of the Tübingen school of critics, which had first been put forward in the eighteen-thirties by F. C. Baur, exercised a wide influence on men’s conceptions of the early history of the Church for most of the nineteenth century and spread a distorted view of the circumstances in which Acts and the epistles were written. Under the influence of the philosopher Hegel’s theory that history proceeds by thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, Baur and his followers proclaimed that the early Church was rent asunder by conflict between Jewish (Petrine) and Gentile (Pauline) factions, and that Acts represented an attempt of later Catholicism to veil these differences. To support these views Baur denied the Lucan authorship of Acts, whose historical value he impugned, and left to Paul the authorship only of Romans, I and II Corinthians, and Galatians; the other ‘Pauline’epistles were products of the Christian struggle against Gnosticism. It was fifty years before the traditional authorship of Acts and of most of Paul’s epistles were again re-established in the favour of the leading German scholars.

The nineteenth century was above all a period in which new knowledge was gained, systematised, and made available for effective use. In the textual field thousands of manuscripts were examined, collated, and classified, and it was the new availability of adequate material that made possible the establishment of the New Testament text on scientific principles (p. 22). Archaeological finds threw new light on the accuracy of many of the details in Acts, e.g. the Asiarchs of 29 31 and the ‘chief man’ of Malta xxviii 7, and papyri dug up in Egypt helped to elucidate the language of the New Testament. The knowledge of the New Testament background was immensely increased both by archaeological discoveries and by the scientific assessment of new sources of evidence. The effect of the accumulation of this knowledge was to make possible a much fuller understanding of the New Testament writers as men of their own time; there is hardly a verse in the New Testament where the application of this knowledge does not bring out some new aspect of the original meaning.

The early years of the twentieth century saw the rise of two new schools of thought which have each made a permanent contribution to the understanding of Jesus and the early Church, although not in the form in which it was originally made.

The ‘eschatological’interpretation of Jesus was a protest against the liberal misinterpretation of him as primarily an ethical teacher. In the last years of the century J. Weiss had shown that such a picture of Jesus was incompatible with the presentation of him in Mark as proclaiming the imminence of the Day of Judgment and the setting up of the Kingdom of God. Weiss, and after him A. Schweitzer in a book, The Quest of the Historical Jesus, which made a great impression on English scholars, interpreted Jesus as primarily a prophet of the approaching world-catastrophe who stood in the succession of Jewish apocalyptists. Such a theory, however, has proved too one-sided for acceptance as a satisfactory explanation of Jesus’life, although it has brought out the undoubted apocalyptic element in the gospels and has forced all subsequent critics to offer an explanation of it.

Of even greater influence has been the ‘sceptical ‘approach to the gospels of a succession of German critics. The ‘Christ-myth’ theory that Jesus never existed (Cf. A. Drews, The Christ-Myth; J. M. Robertson, Pagan Christs.) was an aberration of thought that could never be taken seriously, but the view that we can know very little about him because the gospels are the creation of the Christian community has received unexpected support in the last fifty years. The starting-point of the movement was the publication by Wrede in 19O1 of a book (Das Messiasgeheimnis in den Evangelien (=The Messianic Secret in the Gospels). Significantly enough the book has not appeared in an English translation.) in which he challenged the genuineness of the Marcan outline of Jesus’ministry. The book made little stir at the time, but was to have great influence, especially upon the advocates of ‘Form Criticism’, a new method of gospel criticism that arose in the years succeeding the first World War.

The Form critics treated the gospels as ‘Folk literature’compiled out of the beliefs of a community, and broke down the gospel material into separate incidents and pieces of teaching which had had a separate existence before being collected together and ultimately formed into a gospel. They drew on parallel folk traditions to show that such isolated stories obey certain laws of development, and that they often lose their original point in the telling. The result of the application of such principles of criticism to Mark by sceptical scholars was to change ‘the memoirs of Peter’into an anonymous compilation of material, the historical value of which could not be determined with any certainty. The methods of form criticism have a certain value, and the employment of them opens up new possibilities of understanding how the gospels were composed, but the majority of critics today would separate the employment of such methods from the adoption of the sceptical standpoint which used them to such a negative effect.

For all those who hold that the early Christians misunderstood Jesus there arises the necessity of accounting for the misunderstanding and for the development of the earliest community into the Church as we know it in the second century. The breakdown of the Tübingen theory was followed by the development of other theories which attempted to solve the same problem without disregarding so much of the evidence of Acts and the epistles. Attempts were made to show that Paul was responsible for the transformation of a simple Jewish cult in which Jesus was thought of as Messiah into a Hellenistic mystery-religion, and some scholars tried to push the Hellenisation of Christianity even farther back and to associate it with the introduction of title ‘Lord’ (Greek, kyrios) for Jesus in early Syrian-Christian circles. Against such theories the eschatological school maintained the essentially Jewish nature of Paul’s teaching and held that his conceptions, e.g. of baptism and the eucharist, were based on eschatological expectation and not on any ‘magical’regard for them; the Hellenisation of Christianity was due not to Paul but to his Gentile converts.

This sketch of the development of ‘tendencies’ in modern New Testament criticism has been confined for the most part to work done by German scholars. This is not accidental, for the Germans have been the outstanding pioneers, not only in the production of new theories about the New Testament, but in the accumulation of knowledge. Yet it would be wrong to ascribe too much importance to the emergence of ‘new schools of thought’in the progress of New Testament studies. Such developments have played a useful and valuable part in increasing our understanding of the New Testament, but even more valuable has been the patient sifting of each new theory as it has appeared, the elimination of what is unsound, and the retention for permanent profit of what has proved to be of worth when tested by the New Testament documents themselves.

It is in this field that scholars in England, America and elsewhere, as well as in Germany, have made their most important contributions. The progress of criticism in England, for example, has not been by violent swings of opinion but by gradual steps, in which the conception of a verbally inerrant New Testament has yielded slowly but surely to that of a collection of books, imperfect in all kinds of ways, but containing very much that is historically trustworthy and offering still a sure witness to the truth of the revelation which it contains.

The present position of New Testament criticism cannot be easily defined, although the later chapters of this book attempt to summarise some of the more generally accepted views, and to indicate the main issues of present controversy. There are many important points on which critical opinion is likely to continue divided, but there are good grounds for thinking that we can still get from the New Testament a knowledge of Jesus and of his Church different in some respects from that of earlier days but with the same power to inspire men to follow him in their lives.

Books For Reading:

W. F. Howard. The Romance of New Testament Scholarship (Epworth Press).

M. Jones. The New Testament in the Twentieth Century (Macmillan).

A. Schweltzer. The Quest of the Historical Jesus (Black).

A. Schweitzer. Paul and His Interpreters (Black).

M. J. Lagrange. The Meaning of Christianity according to Luther and his Followers (Longmans).

S. L. Caiger. Archaeology and the New Testament (Cassell).

R. M. Grant. The Bible in the Church (Macmillan).

Modern Introductions to the New Testament for the most part confine themselves to providing introductions to the separate books, their authorship, contents, and problems, with discussions of text and canon, and of the inspiration and value of the New Testament as a whole. While this method of treatment has considerable advantages, it has, especially for the uninstructed reader, the disadvantage of introducing him to the detailed study of the New Testament without focusing his attention on the religious problems involved.

The importance of the application of modern methods of criticism to the New Testament for the ordinary Christian man and woman lies in their influence upon our attitude to some of the cardinal tenets of our religion. Once we have lost our unquestioning belief in the truth and authority of every word in the New Testament -- and few persons can study the results of the last century’s work upon the New Testament and retain such a belief -- both those doctrines which divide the Christian Churches and those which they share in common have to be justified again in the light of our new attitude to those documents which support them. To take one example out of many, the different doctrines of Baptism and Confirmation held in different Churches were worked out and established largely on the basis of a true and authoritative New Testament; to-day many New Testament scholars would hesitate to accept any of the three commands in the gospels to baptise (Mt. 28:I9, Mk. 16:16, Jn. 3:5) as having been spoken by Jesus, and their interpretations of the baptismal references in Acts would be influenced by the degree of historical accuracy which they were willing to ascribe to the author of Acts. This is not to say, of course, that any large number of competent critics would deny the dominical institution of Baptism, but only that the establishment of such doctrines must rest upon a revised treatment of the New Testament evidence.

It is here that the ordinary Christian reader has both great difficulties to face and a great reward to win. The difficulties arise from the lack of certainty inherent in historical criticism: historical judgements are seldom unanimous, and must often be qualified; where the evidence is scanty and confused, as is often the case in the New Testament, the historian can attain to no more than a disputed probability. The ordinary reader can expect help and guidance for drawing his own conclusions, but not the help and guidance of infallible authority. On the other hand he can hope, by studying the results and probabilities that have been achieved, to gain for himself a truer knowledge of how Christianity came into the world, and a truer understanding of the life and teaching of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.

In the pages that follow an attempt is made to introduce the reader to the relevance of the separate books of the New Testament, in the light of their authorship, circumstances of composition, and teaching, to some of the great religious issues of the New Testament. Four of these issues have been selected as having each of them a particular -- though not exclusive -- connection with one of the four types of book to be found in the New Testament, the Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, the Epistles, and the Revelation of John, and as providing a framework for the discussion of the problems connected with them.

The first of these issues, and to most Christians by far the most important, is that of the historical value of the Gospels. If they are not free from error and inconsistency, do they still enable us to form a generally reliable and trustworthy picture of Jesus’ life and teaching on earth ?

The second issue is primarily, but not exclusively, concerned with the historical value and the interpretation of the Acts of the Apostles. How far can we reconstruct the earliest history of the Christian Church, and trace developments in its order, worship, etc.?

The questions that arise about the authorship and teaching of the Epistles are clearly of importance for this second issue, as the Gospels and the speeches in Acts are for the third, which is concerned with the value of the Epistles for reconstructing what the Apostles preached about the significance of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection, and what they taught about the Christian life.

The fourth issue concerns the place of apocalyptic expectation in the New Testament. While it is treated here in connection with the value of the Revelation of John, the discussion inevitably involves both the message of the Apostolic Church and that of Jesus himself, and the ultimate problem is the place of such expectation in the message of Jesus.

Each of these questions is discussed in the pages that follow. No more is claimed for these discussions than that they suggest one out of many possible Christian solutions to the problems. Their purpose is to concentrate the attention of the reader on the religious implications of modern New Testament criticism and to encourage him to follow up the evidence for himself with the more intensive study of the text and the important books and commentaries to which it is the function of an Introducion to lead him.

BOOKS FOR READING

The first essential for the serious study of the New Testament, if the student cannot read Greek, is a good modern translation. The Revised Version, with marginal references and with alternative readings at the foot of the page, has the advantage of being a good translation of a Greek text which has more claim to represent the original wording than that followed by the Authorised Version. Much can be learnt, however, about the meaning of difflcult passages, especially in the epistles, by comparing this translation with some of the more recent ones, such as Moffatt or, perhaps the best translation of all, the new American Revised Standard Version (cf. chapt.3). Of the Commentaries that cover the whole Bible in one volume the three best are the Abingdon Commentary (Abingdon Press, New York), Peake’s Commentary (Jack) and A New Commentary, edited by Gore, Goudge, and Guillaume (S.P.C.K.). The New Testament section of this last is sold separately. These standard works provide introductions and commentaries to each book, a series of general articles on Biblical history and religion, and useful bibliographies for further reading. Up to date bibliographies are contained in two book-lists published jointly by the Lutterworth Press, S.C.M. and S.P.C.K., A Popular Bibliography of the Christian Faith, and, for more advanced works, A General Bibliography of Christian ffeology, History, and Apologetic.

Of modern Introductions to the New Testament those of K. and S. Lake (Christophers) and of Sir E. C. Hoskyns and N. Davey, The Riddle of the New Testament (Faber), may be mentioned, and for advanced study those of A. H. McNeile (Oxford) and J. Moffatt (Clark).