CHAPTER I

EVIDENTIAL VALUE OF HOLY SCRIPTURE

authority

THE quadrifid Gospel history of the Ministry of our Lord is fairly substantiated as authentic and genuine. If the narratives were not Date and written by the disciples whose names of the they commonly bear, they belong at Gospels. latest to the sub-Apostolic age, and they represent the current traditions of the beginnings of Christianity. For centuries, indeed, the Gospels were acknowledged to be the writings of the four Evangelists, and no question was raised about it. A certain weight must be allowed by the most sceptical, even if it be only a trifling weight, to this constant tradition of centuries. But the fashion of destructive criticism which belonged to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries made a change. Holy Scripture was as unpopular as hereditary monarchy or aristocratic privilege.

Only a few years ago it still needed courage on the part of an apologist to make a positive assertion about authorship, or even date, of the Gospels.

1

The beginning of the sceptical prevalence is not difficult to trace. The doubts cast upon the origin of the records of our Lord's life issue out of the general dogmatic degradation of German Protestantism within the last 200 years. The degradation-which some would term elevation instead-is a very natural result of disturbance of the established order, whether religious or civil. Each original thinker finds his ambition in further cavil-saepe trans finem iaculo nobilis expedito; the more extreme, the higher purity; in the phrase of Carlyle, 'the revolution devours itself.' The orthodox Protestantism shaded off into a dogmatic indifference or dissatisfaction that left little unassailed. Thereupon the authenticity of the Evangelical history appeared to be a vulnerable point, as the writings belonged to a pre-historic age, pre-historic, that is to say, in Christian ecclesiastical record, and there would be no proofs to hand. Moreover, it would inflict a deadly blow upon Christianity if its credentials could thus be proved unsound, and the actuating and antecedent motive of those who started the

'Famed for throw of spear beyond the limit.' Hor. Carm. I. viii. 12.

idea, before they started it, and directing their selection of this or that idea to start, was an unreasoning antipathy to Christianity and a desire to deal it the deadliest blow they could.

The objective of the assault once determined, there was plenty of strength to employ; but one might have doubted the tactical wisdom of the way in which the attack was developed. The critics were unreasonably severe and niggling. Allusions in ancient writings, which an ordinary man would not have thought twice about, even apparent, glaringly apparent, quotations from our Gospels, as, e.g., in Justin Martyr' (A.D. 137167), were set on one side, were not allowed to be produced. They need not be, they were not, allusions to the record of the Evangelist or quotations from it, but belonged to some common source (which no one could produce or attempted to identify), the common source to which both the Evangelist and his apparent transcriber were indebted. The explanation was far-fetched and ad hoc, if anything ever was; but, the doubt once started, it was allowed to pass, it held. The venture was intended to have important and far-reaching results. The strength of the attacking position always lay in this, that proof of an ancient writing and of an ancient tradition must in the main be constructive proof. Constructive

1 Dial. 49, p. 146 c ; Apol. i. pp. 62 c, and 80 c.

proof, therefore, should at once be ruled out. The assault met with considerable and widely diffused success. The critics had all the talking, and no one else was allowed to say a word. The ordinary man doubtless did not study the arguments of the critics, but he heard of their conclusions, and he heard of nothing else. What was the use, said the ordinary man, of arguing from Scripture, when we could not know whether the words ascribed to our Lord were anything but the conjectural suitabilities of centuries after His time? Bring the documents into court; but the first step will be that the documents should be authenticated. The documents cannot be authenticated. The case of Christianity is not such as we had believed, and all our regret will not alter the fact. 'Christianity, shorn of some fictions of superstition and some ecclesiastical accretions, was a noble and sublime presentation of God and of our relation to the Supreme Majesty. But what we know as Christianity has no necessary relation to any actual events; it is not the revelation of Christ, but the invention of hundreds of years after Him. Christianity is all too hazy for a sensible mind to trouble over; so much guess-work, so much bibliological and exegetical technicality in the first stages of it, that one must be content to hold dogma altogether at a distance; submitting to be