Criticism

Criticism

CRITICISM.1. A little more than seventy years ago (18351905), a turning-point was reached in NT criticism, the importance of which is generally admitted.* [Note: See, e.g., Schwarz, Zur Gesch. der neutest. Theol.; Pfleiderer, Development of Theology, p. 133; Nash, History of the Higher Criticism, p. 123: Altogether 1835 is something more than a date in the history of literature. It stands for a new turn and direction in the Higher Criticism.] In the year 1835 David Strauss published his Leben Jesu (to be followed exactly ten years later by F. C. Baurs Paulus). The mythical theory was remorselessly applied by Strauss to the whole of the Gospel history.

It must not be forgotten that from the middle of the preceding century Semler had applied the word myths to some of the OT narratives, as, e.g., to the exploits of Samson; and later at the beginning of the 19th cent. de Wette had not hesitated to point out the important part which, in his judgment, was played both by myth and by legend in the writings of the OT. [Note: For a discussion of the differences between myth and legend, reference may be made to Knowling, Witness of the Epistles, p. 16 ff.] At the same time he had not hesitated to accentuate, in language very similar to some of the utterances familiar to us to-day, the difference which lay between the application of the mythical and of the legendary theory to the OT and to the NT. [Note: See, e.g., Dr. Drivers remarks, LOT p. xvii, and further below.] There were, indeed, two parts of our Lords life, the beginning and the end, which this earlier criticism did not scruple to regard as shrouded in darkness, and to relegate to the same domain of myth or legend. The supporters of this kind of criticism were content, as Strauss himself expressed it, to enter the Evangelical history by the splendid portal of myth and to leave it by the weary paths of a natural explanation. This method of so-called natural explanation, which in its most crude form was characteristic of Paulus and the school which bore the name of Rationalists, a method which Strauss remorselessly attacked, became discredited and gave place to the mythical theory, which at least laid claim to thoroughness. But it is not too much to say that an explanation of the miraculous which is often akin to the crude exegesis of Paulus, meets us not infrequently in Strauss himself and in much more recent attempts to prove that miracles did not happen. [Note: Lichtenberger, History of German Theology in the 19th Century, p. 328.]

But by another path of inquiry the way was being prepared for Strauss. In 1750, J. D. Michaelis published his Introduction to the NT, and in the fourth edition of that work he examined with caution and candour the origin of all the NT books. Michaelis was followed by Semler in his Treatise on the Free Investigation of the Canon, the very title of which seemed to mark the new principle of inquiry which was abroad. Semler has been recently called the father of criticism; and if that title is not always appropriate to him, we may, at all events, speak of his epoch-making influence, and of the break which he caused between the traditional views of inspiration and the free examination of the authority and origin of each sacred book.|| [Note: | Cf. B. Weiss, Einleitung in das NT3, p. 5 ff.] The new century was marked by Eichhorns Introduction. This writer applied systematically the principle laid down by his forerunners, like Semler and Herder, and continued the attempt to read and examine the writings of the NT from a human point of view. His rule was that the NT writings are to be read as human books, and tested in human ways.* [Note: Nash, op. cit. p. 114.]

But up to this time and even later, no systematic attampt, if any, was made, as by F. C. Baur, to place the NT in relation to the varying phases and circumstances of early Church history and life. Even de Wette, one of the best representative men of the period, who combined so remarkably deep evangelical piety with freedom from prejudice and with thoroughness of learning, was often undecided in his judgment, and his conclusions were vague and uncertain. The criticism characteristic of the time was carried on, as it were, piecemeal: one book was defended or attacked, or the alleged author was accepted or rejected, but there was no attempt to bring the books of the NT under one general conception.

There were henceforth two great critical movements proceeding side by sidethe effort to interpret the Gospel narratives, and the effort to investigate the origin of the NT books.

To the former of these efforts Strauss stood in the closest relation, and he claimed to introduce a theory of interpretation which should be complete and final. [Note: On the unsatisfactoriness of the attempt to apply the mythical theory to the rise of the primitive Christian tradition, see esp. Fairbairn, Philosophy of the Christian Religion, p. 467 ff.] To the latter Baur stood in the closest relation, and he claimed to make good a theory which treated the books of the NT from the point of view not only of their origin, but of their purpose. Baurs book on the Pastoral Epistles, published in the same year as Strauss Life of Jesus (1835), showed that his intention was to treat the NT books in connexion with their historical setting.

Some of the most successful attacks upon the first edition of Strauss book were based upon the fact that he paid so little attention to the Gospel sources. A few pages are all that he devotes to the authorship of the Gospels, and it is no wonder that men like Tholuck rightly fastened on this weakness in their opponents position, and that much of Strauss own subsequent vacillation was due to the same cause. [Note: O. Zockler, Die christliche Apologetik im neunzehuten Jahrhundert, 1904, p. 16.]

But in 1864, apparently stirred by the reception given to Renans Vie de Jsus, Strauss published his popular edition for the German people. And here he showed how thoroughly he was prepared to endorse Baurs view of the late dates of the Gospels, and to assimilate the methods and conclusions of the Tbingen school. [Note: See Lichtenberger, op. cit. p. 333; and. J. E. Carpenter, The Bible in the Nineteenth Century, pp. 277, 278.] But, as Dr. Matheson and other writers have so forcibly pointed out, the two theories of Strauss and Baur are incompatible. The conscious tendencies and the dogmatic purpose discovered by Baur in the composition of the NT books cannot coexist with the purely unconscious working of myth.|| [Note: | Baur saw in the NT literature the workings of a compromise between the two radically antagonistic parties of Judaism and Paulinism. In the exigencies of his theory he divided the period of literary development into three divisions(1) Extending to a.d. 70, a period including the Hauptbriefe of St. Paul and the Apocalypse of St. John. Here the antagonism was at its height between the original Ebionitic Christianity and Paulinism. (2) Extending to about a.d. 140, in which period we have the Gospels of St. Matthew and St. Luke, the former being Petrine, the latter (with the Acts) Pauline, but bearing marks of conciliation with reference to the above antagonism, and later the Gospel of St. Mark (also of a conciliatory type), whilst Ephesians and Colossians were invented by the Pauline party for the same conciliatory purpose. (3) Extending to a.d. 170, when the controversy was finally settled, and the conflicting extremes rejected by the Catholic Church, a period marked by the Gospel and Epistles which bear the name of St. John, as also by the Pastoral Epistles assigned to St. Paul.]

That which is mythical grows up unconsciously. But if our Gospels were constructed to meet or to modify certain special historical circumstances, if they are to be regarded as artistic creations, or as tendency writings, they cannot be mythical, as Strauss maintained, nor can they be regarded as the spontaneous and unconscious workings of the human mind in its efforts to impart reality to its hopes. One cannot, in short, have the mythical Gospels of Strauss and the tendency Gospels of Baur.* [Note: Matheson, Aids to the Study of German Theology, p. 151; cf. also B. Weiss, Leben Jesu4, i. p. 153.]

But while Strauss thus attempted to adapt this later work to some of the results and methods of the Tbingen school, he also came nearer to Baur in that he gave in this popular edition of his famous book an account of Jesus utterly incommensurate with the greatness of His influence and of the position which He achieved. Baur had taken little or no account of Jesus Himself and His Person, and now Strauss, by withdrawing what he had conceded in the second edition of his Leben Jesu as to the greatness and moral perfection of Jesus, was in a position no less impracticable than Baurs, so far as any satisfactory explanation of the work and person of the Founder of Christianity was concerned. We cease to be so much surprised that Strauss should regard the history of the resurrection of our Lord as a piece of colossal humbug, when the Jesus whom he depicted was so insignificant; or that Baur should regard this same account of the resurrection as a fact outside the province of historical inquiry, when he made no serious attempt to answer the question who Jesus was, or to understand Him and His life.

This supreme importance of the Person of Jesus had been rightly emphasized by earlier writers of the century. Paulus, with all his faulty method, had at least recognized that the miraculous in Christianity was Christ Himself, His Person. Schleiermacher had seen in Christ the greatest fact in history, the one only sinless and perfect Man, in whom the Divinity dwelt in its fulness. Herder, of whom it has been said that his Christliche Schriften gave the first impulse to the immense literature generally known under the name of the Life of Christ, did not forget even in his constant denunciations of the corruptions of Christianity to hold up to admiration the Person of Jesus as the Prophet of the truest humanity.

This primary importance of the fullest consideration of the Person of Christ is nowhere seen more strikingly than in one of the earliest and most effective replies to Strauss work, by C. Ullmann, a reply which so influenced Strauss that he modified his position, at least for a time, so far as to concede to Christ a place historically unique as a religious genius. As Ullmann insisted, Strauss was by his own fundamental philosophical assumptions debarred from doing justice to the Person of Jesus. [Note: To the same effect Weinel, Jesus im neunzehuten Jahrhundert, 1904, p. 42.] But if Strauss position is correct, then it is impossible to understand why the disciples of Jesus should have regarded Him as the Messiah; for they could scarcely have done so, and with such surprising success, unless there had been something extraordinary about Him. The dilemma, therefore, which Ullmann proposed was really thisDid Christ create the Church, or did the Church invent Christ? If the former, Jesus must have been no mere Jewish Rabbi, but a personality of extraordinary power; if the latter, we have an invention which would make the history of Christianity quite incomprehensible. It was, of course, open to Strauss to reply that whilst the powerful personality of Jesus had created the Church, yet subsequently mythical hopes and conceptions might have been at work, transforming and magnifying the idea of the Christ. [Note: See Pfleiderer, op. cit. p. 220. For Ullmann and his reply to Strauss, reference may be made to Knowling, Witness of the Epistles, pp. 20, 132.] But at all events for a time Strauss hesitated. He not only acknowledged the supremacy of Jesus in the sphere of religion, but he maintained that He possessed such power over the souls of men, to which there may have been conjoined some physical force like magnetism, that He was able to perform cures which were regarded as miraculous. He even went so far as to consider the Fourth Gospel as a possible historical authority.* [Note: Lichtenherger, op. cit. p. 328.]

In face of all this confusion, and of the number of replies to Strauss and the position which they took up, it is easy to understand that the question of the sources of the Gospel history and a criticism of them assumed a growing importance. This importance Strauss had practically ignored, and now Baurs theory of early Church history and of the origin of early Christian documents was to be worked in to supply the want, and to be adopted by Strauss as a remedy for his own indecision or indifference as to the Gospel sources. Strauss felt, it would seem, the justice of Baurs reproof, viz. that he had written a criticism of the Gospel history without a criticism of the Gospels. [Note: See Schwarz, op. cit. p. 545 f.]

But just as it may be affirmed that Strauss had started with dogmatic philosophical assumptions, so the same judgment must be passed upon Baurs starting-point. No one has admitted this more fully than Pfleiderer, so far as the first three Gospels are concerned (op. cit. pp. 231, 232).

Wilke and Weisse had already proved, says Pfleiderer, the priority of Mark (and had thus, with Herder, anticipated much later criticism), and it could only have been the fact that Baur was wedded to his dogmatic method which prompted him to place Marks Gospel at least as late as a.d. 130, and to see in it a Gospel consisting of extracts from Matthew and Luke.

The impossibility of separating any account of the life of Christ from its sources became more and more evident in the succeeding literature.

2. Closely related in point of time to Strauss popular book is that of the Frenchman Renan. To attempt any examination of the defects of this famous work would be beyond our province. But just as Strauss was blamed for his indifference to any treatment of the sources, i.e. the Gospels, so Renan was blamed for his half-and-half treatment of the same Gospels. For this he is severely taken to task by Schwarz. [Note: cit. pp. 538540; see also B. Weiss, Life of Christ, i. pp. 203, 205, Eng. tr.] He blames Renan for passing so lightly over the inquiries of a man like Baur as to the origin of our Gospels; and he points out that Renans half-and-half treatment of these same Gospels, especially of the Gospel of John, avenges itself upon him, in that it leads him on from half-rationalistic explanations of the miracles to explanations which are adopted even at the cost of the moral perfection of Jesus. And in this connexion he refers, like other writers, to the explanation which Renan gives of the resurrection of Lazarus. Of course the earlier Renan placed the Gospels, the more difficult it was for him to account for the miracles which gathered around Jesus; and it is not too much to say that the earliest Gospel, St. Mark, the Gospel which Renan himself regarded as the earliest, is bound up with the miraculous. Renans short and easy method was to declare dogmatically that there was no room in history for the supernatural. Like Strauss and Baur, Renan too had his assumption as to the historical worth of the Gospels; he too sets out with a general and comprehensive judgment as to their contents; for him the Gospels are not biographies, after the manner of those of Suetonius, nor are they legends invented after the manner of Philostratus; they are legendary biographies. I would compare them with the Legends of the Saints, the Life of Plotinus, Proclus, Isidorus, and other similar writings, in which historic truth and the purpose of presenting models of virtue are combined in different degrees. It is not, perhaps, surprising that B. Weiss should speak of Renans Vie de Jsus as not a history but a romance, and should add that, as our sources in their actual form were in many respects out of sympathy with, indeed almost incomprehensible to him, he could not escape the danger of rearranging them according to his own taste, or in a merely eclectic way.* [Note: Weiss, op. cit. pp. 184, 187.]

3. If we turn to Theodor Keim (18671872), to whom has sometimes been attributed the Life of Jesus from a rationalistic standpoint, we notice that he too is severely taken to task by Pfleiderer for his unsatisfactory and fluctuating criticism of the Gospels as sources, and for his too close adherence to the views of Baur, especially in regard to the relation of the Synoptics to each other. St. Mark, e.g., is a compilation from St. Matthew and St. Luke, and St. Matthews is regarded as the earliest Gospel. In comparing Keims various works relating to the life of Jesus, we certainly find a strange fluctuation with regard to his statements as to the sources and their validity. Thus he actually places St. Matthew in its primitive form as early as a.d. 66, and supposes it to have been revised and edited some thirty years later; St. Mark he places about 100; and St. Luke, in which he sees a Gospel written by a companion of St. Paul, about 90.

But in 1873 Keim issued a book of a more popular character, and in this we find that the revision of St. Matthew is placed about 100, St. Mark about 120, St. Luke also about 100, while it is no longer referred to a companion of St. Paul. Some years later (1878) Keims position with regard to the Gospels was again differently expressed, and he seems to be prepared to make certain concessions to his opponents, and to attach more weight to the two-document theory as the result of a fresh study of Papias. [Note: Sanday, art. Gospels in Smiths DB 2 ii. p. 1218.] But it will be noticed that Pfleiderer has nothing but praise for Keims treatment of the Fourth Gospel, which in 1867 he places between 100 and 117, and a few years after (1873) as late as a.d. 130. It must not, however, be forgotten that, as Dr. Drummond rightly points out, Keims position with regard to St. Johns Gospel marks a very long retreat in date from the position of Baur, whilst Pfleiderer himself is the sole critic of importance who still places the Gospel in question at the extravagant date, 170, demanded by the founder of the Tbingen school.

But with all these variations as to dates, and with the free concession of the presence of mythical elements in the accounts of the great events of our Lords life, Keim takes up a very different position from Strauss and Baur, and at all events the early members of the Tbingen school, with regard to the importance of the Person of Jesus and of our knowledge of Him. Nowhere is this more plainly seen than in the remarkable stress which he lays upon St. Pauls references to the facts of our Lords earthly life and upon his high Christology. Baur and his followers had fixed mens attention upon Paul, Keim insists upon the unique and supreme importance of Jesus, and he sees in Him the Sinless One, the Son of God.

But Keims portraiture of Jesus is marred by many inconsistencies. Thus he is prepared to admit that the miracles of healing may have happened in response to the faith evoked by the peraonality of Jesus, or he is thrown back in his treatment of the miraculous upon the old rationalistic methods; the atory, e.g., of Jesus walking upon the sea had its origin in the words, Ye know not at what hour of the night your Lord Cometh. In some respects it is not too much to say that even the moral sinlessness of Jesus is endangered, if not sacrificed. Keim rejects, it is true, the visionary hypothesis, but he finds no alternative except the conviction that nothing irrefutable can be known concerning the issue of the life of Jesus, an assertion equally unsatisfactory with that of Baur. He speaks sometimes of the early and Apostolic teatimony rendered to the appearances of the risen Jesus, while at times be seems unable to realize the full force of this early teatimony and its marked reserve. In his chronology we note another instance of Keims arbitrary method, for he knows of no going up to Jerusalem before the last Passover, and the public career of Jesus is comprised within a single year.

In spite of much that savours of subjectivity, Keim, however, stands out as the writer who, in the Life of Jesus movement, as Nippold has called it, has hitherto treated most fully of the Gospels as authorities, with the exception, perhaps, of Weizscker. We have seen how this need of a full treatment of the Gospels as sources had been felt since the days of Strauss first edition of his Leben Jesu, and we shall see that this need is still further felt and emphasized.

4. Within a few years of the latest publication of Keims work, two important Lives of Jesus, which are often mentioned together, issued from the press in Germany, viz. B. Weiss Leben Jesu and Beyschlags book bearing the same title. These books are of interest not only as important in the Life of Jesus movement, but as further and valuable attempts to deal with our Gospels and their sources. Here it must be sufficient to say that they testify to the new importance which had been given to the Synoptic problem by H. Holtzmanns book, Die Synoptischen Evangelien, 1863.

5. Holtzmanns book gains its value not only by its rejection of the tendency theories with regard to the composition of the Gospels, but also because, in its advocacy of the two-document hypothesis, as we now call it, it marks a new departure, and lays down a foundation for future study.* [Note: See also J. Estlin Carpenter, The Bible in the Nineteenth Century, p. 301, and his remarks on the two-document hypothesis. He points out that the conclusion of Weizsackers investigations pointed in the same direction (cf. his Untersuchungen ber die Evangelische Geschichte, 1869, 2nd ed. 1901).] Holtzmanns investigations had been published in the year before Strauss gave to the German people his popular Life of Jesus, in which, as we have seen, his account of the Gospels was still based upon the Tbingen researches; but Holtzmanns theory has a permanent interest for us to-day, while the authors subsequent statements of his views may be found in his published commentaries. It has indeed been said of the two-document theory that it may almost be reckoned to have passed out of the rank and number of mere hypotheses; [Note: Moffatt, Historical HT2, p. 264.] and at all events any account of the life and teaching of Jesus, or any investigation as to the historical character of the Gospels, will have to take note of it not only in itself, but in its many possible combinations with other sources.

This statement can be easily verified by a perusal of recent expositions of their views by representative writers. We turn, e.g., to Wendts Die Lehre Jesu, and we see how he allows a connexion in all likelihood between the statement of Papias as to St. Mark being the interpreter of St. Peter, and the actual contents of our earliest Gospel, and how he finds in the Logia of St. Matthew an uncommonly rich and valuable material of Apostolic tradition, which may be placed by the side of St. Mark as a complementary source for a knowledge of the teaching of Jesus. Bousset, in his little but important book, Was wissen wir von Jesus?, is loud in his praises of the way in which modern research as to the original sources of the Synoptics harmonizes so strikingly with the famous statement of Papias. So, too, von Soden refers to the previous work of Weizsacker and Holtzmann, and speaks of two Urevangelien (although he uses this term with some hesitation), which go back one to St. Peter and the other to St. Matthew, and he finds it possible to trace a connexion between the familiar statement of Papias and our Gospela of St. Mark and St. Matthew (Die wichtigsten Fragen im Leben Jesu, 1904, pp. 42, 62). [Note: So, too, Deissmann, Evangelium und Urchristentum in Beitrge zur Weiterentwicklung der christlichen Religion, p. 128. Deissmann seems inclined to attach some considerable weight to oral tradition and its trustworthiness, a very important consideration.]

It must, of course, be remembered that, like H. Holtzmann, these other writers referred to did not regard the two-document theory as alone sufficient to explain the origin of the Gospels. Other material was no doubt present in the Synoptics in addition to the two documents, as we can see in the case of St. Luke (cf. art. Luke).* [Note: The two-document theory is sharply criticized by M. Lepin (Jsus Messie et Fils de Dieu, p. xxxvi, 1905), although he admits that it is adopted by a certain number of Romanist writers, e.g. Loisy, Batiffol, Minocchi, Lagrange. M. Lepins contention is that the theory in question is not in agreement with the most ancient testimony, which regards St. Matthew as the first of the Gospels, composed for the Jewish Christians of the first days, and as an authentic work of the Apostle. He admits at the same time (p. xxxvi) that some Protestant writers claim to make this two-document theory accord with the full authenticity of the First Gospel (i.e. St. Matthew), and that admission is at least made of the semi-authenticity of this Gospel by those who claim to recognize in the primitive document, the Logia of Papias, the actual work of St. Matthew. He also observes that even Schmiedel allows that if St. Matthew was not the author of the Logia, he may at all events have been the author of a writing, more ancient still, upon which the Logia depended (Encyc. Bibl. art. Gospels, ii. 1891). See also Stanton. The Gospels as Historical Documents, pp. 17, 18, for the fact that the Gospel which bears the name of St. Matthew is the most often quoted of the Synoptics in early days: and it is difficult, as even Jlicher allows, to account for the attribution of a Gospel to an Apostle so little known as St. Matthew.]

And it must also be remembered that Holtzmann did not start with a belief that the sources of the first two Gospels, St. Mark and St. Matthew, must correspond with the two documents referred to by Papias. On the contrary, the investigation of the Gospels showed him that there were two sources at the base of our Synoptic writings, which closely resembled the statements of Papias with regard to the documents which he referred to St. Mark and St. Matthew.

6. But some half dozen years before Holtzmanns book was published, another, and in many respects a more serious, opposition to the methods of the Tbingen School, had made itself felt in the breaking away of Albrecht Ritschl from his former standpoint. In 1857 this final break was made, and for more than thirty years Ritschl was destined to be a great and growing factor of interest in the German theological world. Ritschl was keenly alive to the importance to be attached to the Person of Christ. In his treatment of the books of the NT he was to a great extent conservative, inasmuch as he accepted the traditional authorship of so many of those books, as, e.g., of the Gospel of St. John.

But, on the other hand, it is urged that Ritschls own peculiar doctrine and the paramount stress which he laid on our experimental knowledge of Christs power to confer spiritual freedom and deliverance, no doubt tended to make him independent of, if not indifferent to, the results of criticism. Ritschl and his distinguished follower W. Herrmann lay the greatest stress, and would have us lay the greatest stress, upon the impression made upon us by the historical Christ. But it is not easy to ascertain what is meant by this historical Christ, by loyalty to whom the true Christian is known, This is the favourite Ritschlian position, this insistence upon the impression which Christ makes upon the soul historically confronted with Him. But we naturally ask, From whence and from what is this impression derived? Not, surely, from the impression of the earthly life of Jesus alone, as Herrmann maintained, but from what Khler has called the Biblical Christ; the Christ of the NT is the Christ not only of the Gospels, but of the Epistles and of the Church.

It is urged, indeed, by the Ritschlians represented by Herrmann, that this faith in the historical Christ guarantees that, whatever criticism may effect, it cannot interfere with the truth and power of the position already won, and with the response made by the human soul to the perfection of Christ presented to us in the Gospels. But whatever may have been the case with Ritschl himself, it can scarcely be said that his method has prevented those who claim in some measure to be his followers from dealing very loosely with the Gospel miracles, or with such events as the Virgin-birth and the Resurrection of the Lord. And it is difficult to see how this process of solution can fail to weaken the impression made by the historical Christ, and our confidence in the revelation which we owe to His life.

Many of those who are classed as Ritschlians dismiss in a somewhat arbitrary fashion sayings and deeds of our Lord which seem to them to admit of difficulty. The manner, e.g., in which J. Weiss has dealt with the oldest Gospel, that of St. Mark, in his Das lteste Evangelium, cannot be said to inspire a conviction of the truthfulness of many of the most familiar Gospel narratives. Herrmanns own statements help us to see how subjective his method may become. He maintains, e.g., that through the impression which Christ makes upon us and our experimental knowledge of His power to confer freedom and deliverance, all uncertainty as to whether the figure of Jesus, which works thus upon us, belongs to legend or to history is in the nature of the case impossible.* [Note: See, e.g., Communion with God, p. 177, and cf. p. 81 ff. Eng. tr., for other statements made above.]

But it seems a curious argument to maintain that the impression which Jesus makes upon us is the positive revelation made by God in Christ, while the Gospels from which we derive that impression may or may not consist in this instance or in that of legendary and untrustworthy matter. Herrmann himself says that, in face of the seriousness of a desire for a salvation which means forgiveness of sins and life in spiritual freedom, the miracles in the NT necessarily become of minor importance he who has found Jesus Himself to be the ground of his salvation has no need of those miracles (op. cit. p. 180). But if Jesus is found through the portrait of His life presented to us in the NT, it is not too much to say that that life is inextricably bound up, from its beginning to its close, with the miraculous, and that the impression which that life has made upon the world has been made by a record from which the miraculous cannot be eliminated. Conviction of sin, e.g., must precede deliverance from it; and St. Peters cry, Depart from me; for I am a sinful man, O Lord (Luk 5:8), resulted not only from Christs teaching, but also from the proof of His miraculous power.

7. It is in this attitude towards the miraculous, and in this effort to lessen its scope, that we may find a point of contact between what we may call the scientific and the Ritschlian school. In a large and growing number of German critics who might be described as scientific, if not as radical, there is an acceptance of the miracles of healing as due to the power of the personality of Jesus and to the response of faith which He evoked. We may see this in more or less degree in the statements of O. Holtzmann (Leben Jesu, pp. 58, 149, 166), or in those of Furrer (Das Leben Jesu Christi, pp. 129, 130), or in Bousset (Was wissen wir von Jesus?, p. 56). So, too, statements of a similar kind meet us again and again in the account of the miracles of Jesus given us in the series of popular little books on the religious-historical aspects of Christianity, which is now in course of publication in Germany (cf. Die Wunder im NT, pp. 32 ff., 51 ff, by Traub). [Note: See on the value of these little books the Hibbert Journal, January 1906.] And in our own country we remember how decisively Dr. P. Gardner would discriminate between mere wonders of healing and miracles proper, and how he describes Jesus as a healer of disease as historic.* [Note: A Historic View of the NT, p. 141 ff.]

But at the same time it is evident how much there is which is arbitrary in this modern treatment of the miraculous. Thus Lepin justly criticises Schmiedels attitude in this connexion. [Note: Jsus Messie et Fils de Dieu, 1905, pp. lxvi, lxvii.] Schmiedel distinctly affirms that it would be wrong in any investigation of the miracle-narratives of the Gospels to start from any such postulate or axiom as that miracles are impossible (Encyc. Bibl. art. Gospels, col. 1876). But a few pages later in the same article (col. 1885) he writes that it is quite permissible for us to regard as historical only those cures of the class which even at the present day physicians are able to effect by psychical methodsas, more especially, cures of mental maladies (cf. also Harnack, Das Wesen des Christentums, p. 18). The same occasional power is ascribed to Jesus by Professor N. Schmidt, The Prophet of Nazareth, p. 264.

So, too, Schmiedel (op. eit. col. 1882) and Wendt (Die Lehre Jesu, p. 471) agree in interpreting the words in our Lords message to the Baptist as referring to the spiritually dead, the dead are raised (Mat 11:5, Luk 7:22), just as in their opinion the preceding words are to be interpreted of the spiritually lame and blind. But, in the first place, there is no proof that the previous clauses are to be interpreted in any such spiritual sense, and the Evangelists evidently did not so interpret them. It is urged that we can find a precedent for this spiritual interpretation in the familiar passage Isa 35:5; but nothing is said in Isaiah of the raising of the dead, a fact entirely ignored by N. Schmidt, who is at one with Schmiedel and Wendt in their interpretation (i.e. p. 238). Moreover, it is very open to question if there was any Jewish expectation that the Messiah would raise the dead, so that St. Matthew and St. Luke had no ground of general belief upon which to base the raisings of the dead which they so evidently attributed to Jesus of Nazareth. Even if there are isolated statements in Jewish theology which attribute to the Messiah the power of raising the dead, it would seem to have been far more generally believed that God would Himself raise the dead. Further, even in those passages which do attribute this power to the Messiah, it is most important to remember that they refer to the resurrection of all the dead, and that there is no allusion of any kind in Jewish writings to the raising by the Messiah of single individuals (cf. Edersheim, Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah, i. p. 632).

But this attitude, maintained by some of Ritschls followers and by the representative critics of the scientific school, extends to a crucial question and a crucial miracle, viz. the Resurrection of our Lord from the dead. We may readily grant Ritschls own acceptance of this fundamental historical fact of Christian belief. [Note: See the remarks of Garvie, The Ritschlian Theology, p. 225.] But what is to be said of a large number of his followers? Some of them would no doubt allow that Christ awoke to a heavenly life with God, or they would labour to draw a distinction between the Easter faith and the Easter message; or they would allow that the Resurrection was a fact of religious faith, or that, whilst the traditional record is often doubtful, the essential contents of the record are, and mean, everything. [Note: Orr, Ritschlian Theology, p. 203.] But it is upon this question of the Resurrection that Feine rightly takes his stand, and upon the inclusion or exclusion of this fact in any satisfactory picture of the historical Christ.* [Note: Thus, in dwelling upon the contending parties and their disputes as to the historical and the biblical Christ, Feine writes: Die Streitfrage lief also darauf hinaus, ob die Auferstehung Jesu mit in der Bild des geschichtlichen Chriatus einzubezichen aei oder nicht; cf. Das Christentum Jesu und das Christentum der Apostel, 1904, p. 54.]

If we turn again to one of the most prominent critics who may be classed as Ritschlians, A. Harnack, we are not only met by his famous distinction between the Easter faith and the Easter message, but we also become aware that his classification of the Gospel miracles is not calculated to increase our belief and confidence in the character of the Gospel narrative. Harnack admits, indeed, that the spiritual power of Jesus was so great that we cannot dismiss offhand as an illusion the reports that He could make the blind to see or the deaf to hear. But, apart from these reports of surprising cures, Harnack would regard the stories of the miraculous which are connected with Jesus as arising from exaggerations of natural and impressive events, or from the projection of inner experiences on to the outer world, or from an interest in the fulfilment of OT records, or from various parables and sayings. In these and in similar ways the miraculous stories arose. And yet, after all is said, it will be noticed that there are narratives of miracles which do not fall under the above heads, and these Harnack comprises under one category as impenetrable stories, the secret of which we cannot solve. [Note: See especially the reply of Prof. W. Walther of Rostock to Harnacks Das Wesen des Christentums5, 1904, pp. 47, 48. Harnacks last category is expressed by the word Undurchdringlichea. Reference should also be made to T. H. Wrights The Finger of God, 1903, p. 194, and his valuable Appendix on the view taken by Dr. Percy Gardner and by Dr. Harnack of our Lords miracles, and also on early Christian and mediaeval miracles.]

8. One other and important point in which the scientific German theologians and the left wing of Ritschls followers agree is in the rejection of the Apostolic authorship of the Fourth Gospel. And with this rejection there must needs be a serious weakening of the evidence as to our Lords Deity, although no doubt this evidence may be substantiated from the Synoptists alone. The remarkable thing is that both Ritschlian and scientific critics are alike impressed with the indications that in the Fourth Gospel we are dealing with a source or sources full of minute details and vivid recollections.

Thus Wendt, while he refers the Gospel to some Christian of Asia Minor, admits that this Evangelist, whoever he was, belonged to the same circle in which the old Apostle St. John had lived, and that he thus had access to written information and to oral tradition received from the beloved disciple (Das Johannesevangelium, p. 216 ff.). P. W. Schmidt, in his Die Geschichte Jesu (1904, p. 95), cannot help feeling the force of the exact and minute geographical references which the Fourth Gospel contains, although he rejects the Johannine authorship. Von Soden, although he refuses to rank the Fourth Gospel amongst the historical sources for a Life of Jesus, admits on the same page that the writer of that Gospel had access to good traditions in his notices of place and time, in the small details which mark his recitals, and in his information as to various personalities (Die wichtigsten Fragen im Leben Jesu, 1904, p. 5). [Note: See, further, Lepin, op. cit. p. 360. He rightly emphasizes the fact that Jlicher, in the last edition of his Einleitung (p. 324), dismisses the attribution of the Fourth Gospel to a preahyter John as without value, and regards the Gospel as composed by a Christian, dependent upon the Apostle John, at the opening of the 2nd century.] If we turn to English critics we find Dr. Percy Gardner inclined to follow Dr. Harnacks view that the Fourth Gospel was the work of John the Elder, who was a disciple of John the son of Zebedee. Dr. Gardner, too, is so impressed with the writers precise local knowledge, that he thinks it may well have been derived from one of the Apostles, and very likely from John the son of Zebedee. [Note: A Historic View of the NT, pp. 153, 184.]

So far as English criticism is concerned, it cannot be said that anything which has been urged has broken down the strong lines of defence which we owe to Lightfoot, Westcott, Sanday, and more recently to Dr. Drummond. As Dr. Stanton has rightly urged, there must have been good grounds for believing that the Fourth Gospel was founded upon Apostolic testimony, in order to overcome the prejudice which would be created by the contrasts between it and accounts which had been more generally received.* [Note: The Gospels as Historical Documents, i. p. 277; and cf. to the same effect, Sanday, The Criticism of the Fourth Gospel, 1905, pp. 15, 41; see also Dr. Chase, Cambridge Theological Essays, 1905, p. 383. Mr. Conyheare has the boldness to assure ua that any modern scholar who upholds the hypothesis of the Apostolic authorship of the Fourth Gospel is at least as wanting in perspective and insight as the much derided upholders of the view that the Pauline Epistles were only concocted in the 2nd cent. (Hibbert Journal, July 1903, p. 620). But he takes no notice of Dr. Drummonds defence, and, whilst he is loud in his praises of the Abb Loisy, it may be of interest to note that another liberal Romanist, Pre Calmes, has now given us an admirable defence of the Johannine authorship, lEvangile selon Saint Jean, 1906. For a sharp and decisive reply to the extraordinary attack by Kreyenbhf upon the authorship, see Gutjahr, Die Glaubenswrdigkeit des Irenischen Zeugnisses ber die Abfassung des vierten kanonischen Evangeliums, 1904, p. 4 ff.]

9. But whilst, in the respects which we have mentioned, the position of the Ritschlian School is so unsatisfactory, we may welcome, with those who are not at all in sympathy with Ritschls views or with the views of his followers, the witness borne by so many Ritschlians to a living Lord and the unique place which they assign to the Person of Christ in any account of Christianity. [Note: See Orr, The Christian View of God and the World, pp. 53, 79, on the central place of Christs Person in His religion. Ritschlianism is perhaps nothing more nor less than a determined attempt to find the whole contents of Christianity in the Person of Christ (Cambridge Theological Essays, 1905, p. 517).]

Among those, e.g., who are classed as Ritschlians we have on the one hand men like Troeltsch supporting strongly and ardently the value of the study of Comparative Religion for a right knowledge of Christianity, and maintaining that the religious-historical method should be applied to every department of theological thought; whilst Harnack, with Reischle, hesitates to follow, and is evidently alive to the fact that the method in question may be carried too far. Dr. Harnacks words on the subject are remarkable. He expresses his desire that the German theological Faculties may remain as for the pursuit of inquiry into the Christian religion, because Christianity is not a religion by the side of other religions, but the religion, and because Christ is not one Master by the side of other Masters, but the Master; the disciples were conscious that they possessed in Christ not merely a Master, but that they knew themselves to be men, new men, redeemed by Him, and that therefore they could preach Him as Saviour and Lord. [Note: Die Aufgabe der theol. Facultaten und die allgemeine Religionsqeschichte, pp. 16, 17.] It is quite true that the American writer, Professor W. A. Brown, sees in some of Harnacks statements, and in his recognition of the gospel of Jesus as that which satisfies the deepest depths of humanity, the promise of a better understanding between the two parties in the Ritschlian ranks: With this recognition of the anima naturaliter Christiana, of a preparation for Christianity within the very nature of man, we find Harnack, even while insisting with Ritschl upon the originality of Christianity, admitting the complementary truth for which the speculative school contend. [Note: The Essence of Christianity, 1903, pp. 286, 287.]

Unfortunately, however, the advocates of the religious-historical method, at least in its extreme form, show no disposition to confine themselves to the comparison of Christianity with other religions in respect to its inward witness alone; they extend this comparison to the historical facts of the NT, and they do as in a manner which savours of recklessness and extravagance.|| [Note: | See, e.g., Dr. Blass on Gunkela extraordinary theory as to the resurrection of our Lord on the third day. Expos. Times, xvi. [1904] p. 14; and the present writer may refer to The Testimony of St. Paul to Christ, pp. 526, 527, or A. Meyers Die Auferstehung Christi, 1905, p. 167.] The need of caution seems to be admitted even by Pfleiderer when he writes, Before all things, we must guard against the constant practice of imagining that the inward affinity of religious conceptions implies a connexion in their external history. [Note: Early Christian Conception of Christ, pp. 153, 154.]

And when we turn to the Ritschlians, it is evident that men like Reischle are well aware of the many safeguards with which the religious-historical method and its study should be guarded.** [Note: * See his Theologie und Religionsgeschichte, 1904, p. 27 ff.] His criticism, e.g. that we should note not only points of likeness but points of unlikeness in any pursuit of the method in question, is endorsed by Heinrici and others, who have Joined with Harnack in opposing the religious-historical study of Christianity as if it were only one of many religions. Thus Heinrici insists with great force that if the resurrection of Jesus is considered from the religious-historical point of view it is unique; and in the same manner A. Jeremias, in answer to Gunkel, insists that the resurrection of Jesus, as it is described as taking place, is without analogy in any other religion.* [Note: Heinrici, Urchristentum, 1902, p. 38; A. Jeremias, Babylonisches im NT, p. 43: Die Tatsache der Auferstehung Jesu Christi ist in der Religionageschichte analogielos.] In the same pamphlet Reischle warns us against the danger of attaching too great value to analogies, and transforming them into relations of dependence. He does not deny that analogies exist between Oriental religions and Christianity, but he is keenly alive to the fact that their right and correct appreciation is a very difficult matter. He allows, e.g., the existence of a Jewish Gnosticism in the Apostolic Age, but he regards as a fantastic hypothesis Gunkels attempt to attach to this Jewish Gnosticism an important role in establishing points of connexion between Christianity and other religions (op. cit. pp. 30, 31). So, too, he rightly draws attention to the danger of overvaluing the form of an expression to the neglect of the actual meaning of its contents, and he quotes the sphorism, Si duo dicunt idem, non est idem (op. cit. pp. 31, 33). He further illustrates this position by the use of the familiar formula, In the Name of Jesus, of which Heitmller has made so much. [Note: Im Namen Jesu, 1903, p. 197 ff.] Such words might, no doubt, be employed as a magical or superstitious formula, but they might also be used as a confession of Christian faith in Jesus, or as an invocation to Him in prayer, or as an appeal to Him as the Mediator with God.

Once more, and above all, Reischle rightly insists upon the insurmountable limits which beset the religious-historical method in any endeavour to solve the problem of the personal religious life of great religious personalities. If this is difficult in the case of Paul, it is still more so, urges Reischle, in the case of Jesus (op. cit. pp. 42, 43). [Note: See on this pre-eminence belonging to the Person of Christ in contrast to other religions, Fairbairn, Philosophy of Religion, pp. 532, 533; and Sderblom, Die Religionen der Erde, 1905, pp. 6264.]

10. But this acknowledgment of the marvellous personality of Jesus may not only be seen in the writings of the Ritschlian School and its various and variant members. We may recognize itit is not too much to sayin German writers of every school and in German works which appeal to all sorts and conditions of men.

Amongst modern Church historians in Germany no name stands more deservedly high than that of von Dobschtz. The Apologist, he tells us in the concluding words of his work on Primitive Life in the Early Church, could point triumphantly to the realization of the moral ideal among Christians of every standing. That was due to the power which issued from Jesus Christ, and actually transformed men. In the midst of an old and dying world this new world springs up with the note of victory running through it. If God be for us, who can be against us? And this is the victory which overcometh this world, even our faith. Christianity possessed what the speculations of Neo-Platonism lscked, the sure historical basis of Jesus Christs Person. But the remarks of von Dobschtz are of further interest, because he again emphasizes the importance to be attached to the Person and work of Jesus, in his contribution to the Religionsgeschichtlichs Volkabcher, in the course of publication in Germany. Here, too, he dwells upon the Apostolic Age, and he points out that in it we do not only find Judaism with a strong addition of Messianic expectation; Jesus had transformed the stiff monotheistic belief in God into a living trust in God, and a joyous spirit of adoption as Gods children had taken the place of Pharisaic self-satisfaction and timorous fear. [Note: Das Apostolische Zeitalter, p. 5.] Or we turn to another series of books, of a somewhat larger and more expensive kind, entitled Lebensfragen, and here, too, we meet with the same emphatic testimony. Thus Weinel tells us that the Hegelian philosophy hindered Strauss from estimating or understanding the greatness of the personality of Jesus (Jesus im neunzehnten Jahrhundert, p. 42, 1904). Again, a little later on (p. 64), in summing up the significance of modern criticism, he declares that no century has striven so earnestly to discover the features of the true historical Jesus as the nineteenth; and he points out that whilst almost all the witnesses whom he cites in proof of this occupy a critical standpoint in dealing with tradition, they show at least respect, and for the most part reverence, for Jesus of Nazareth, and have recognized the power of salvation in the gospel which He taught. And as this image of Jesus in its living reality and in its purity is placed before the eyes of men, he prophesies that it will win the heart of humanity until all men are more and more transformed into its likeness.

11. But then we have to face the remarkable fact that this picture of the wondrous personality of Jesus is most frequently derived by advanced critics from the Synoptics alone. The Fourth Gospel is ruled out of court, or at the best reduced to a testimony of secondary worth. The account, e.g., of the raising of Lazarus, if it is no longer treated after the manner of Renan as a flagrant deception to which Jesus lent Himself, is regarded not as historical but as allegorical.* [Note: See, e.g., the remarks of Loisy, Autour dun petit livre, 1903, p. 97 ff.; and, on the other hand, Loisys fellow-countryman and religionist Th. Calmes, LEvangile selon Saint Jean, 1900, pp. 68, 75.] But even in what is allowed to us of the Synoptic record, doubt is thrown upon our Lords claim to judge the world, or upon His declaration that He would give His life as a ransom for many, to say nothing of the refusal to admit, as we have already noted, a large proportion of His miracles as historical.

In like manner the significance of St. Pauls testimony to the facts and teaching of the Gospels, as also the significance of his claim to work miracles in the power which Christ bestowed, is minimized, if not disregarded.

We thus owe this wonderful picture of a great personality mainly, if not entirely, to documents bearing the names of three writers of whom we are assured that we know very little, and whose claims to be the authors of the books (in their present shape at all events) which bear their names must be very largely and seriously discounted. And yet these obscure writers have given us the picture of a life and of a teaching the beauty and the excellence of which mankind has never ceased to acknowledge.

Here, says a learned and cultured Jew, alter allowing that the Synoptic Gospels do contain teaching which in comparison with average Judaism is both valuable and original, both new and true, we have religion and morality joined together at a white heat of intensity. The teaching often glows with light and fire. The luminous juxtaposition of even familiar OT doctrines may be novel and stimulating. The combination of Deu 6:4-5 with Lev 19:18the love of God with the love of manin Mar 12:29; Mar 12:31 was surely a brilliant flash of the highest religious genius. [Note: G. Montefiore, The Synoptic Gospels and the Jewish Consciousness, in the Hibbert Journal, July 1005, p. 658.] Elsewhere he speaks of the first-classness of the Synoptics, and points out that there are one or two facts which still tend to weaken the effect of the best Rabbinic teachings and sayings upon the average Jewish consciousness. The first fact is that these nobler sayings and teachings are buried in a mass of greatly inferior matter, so that they are difficult to unearth. They are not collected together in a lovely setting, united and illumined by the story of a noble life. He further remarks that, suppose we make a selection of the great sayings and teachings of the Talmud and the Midrash, it must be admitted that the same powerful, driving, and emotional effect as the sayings and teachings of the Gospels is not produced. [Note: p. 652.]

12. But we note that this picture is in many respects entirely opposed to current Jewish conceptions of the day. No one has emphasized this more strongly than Bousset in relation to the Jewish anticipations and expectations of the Kingdom of God. He insists, indeed, upon the Messianic consciousness of Jesus, without which he regards not only the whole work of Jesus, but the conduct of His disciples after His death, as unintelligible. But if Jesus regarded Himself as the Messiah, it is evident, continues Bousset, that He did so in a manner totally opposed to the predominant and current Jewish expectations. Spiritual conceptions of the Messiah were not altogether wanting, but political hopes always occupied the central place in the picture. In the sense of such hopes Jesus was not the Messiah, and would never have become so. He expected the sovereignty of God and not that of Israel, the victory of good and the judgment of evil, not the triumph of the Jew and the annihilation of the Roman; He preached a kingdom in which the vision of God was granted to the pure, and as the preparer for and the ruler in that kingdom He regarded Himself. [Note: See Boussets remarks in his Was wissen wir von Jesus? p. 61.] But the Synoptists no less than St. John furnish us with another picture which was even more decisively opposed to the current conceptions of the Jewish nation, the picture of a suffering Messiah. It is not too much to say that the idea of the Messianic sufferings and death is one that wakes no echo in the heart of any Jewish contemporary of our Lord, not excepting even His disciples.* [Note: Muirhead, Eschatology of Jesus, 1904, p. 256. See, further, Fairbairn, Studies in the Life of Christ, p. 308 ff.; J. Drummond, The Jewish Messiah, 1877, pp. 356, 357; Row, Jesus of the Evangelists4, pp. 140, 213; Bishop Gore, Bampton Lectures, p. 192. The whole appendix in Schrers GJV3 ii. p. 553 ff., eotitled Der leidende Messias, should be consulted.] In short, the words of Dalman are amply justified, Suffering and death for the actual possessor of the Messianic dignity are in fact unimaginable according to the testimony of the Gospels (Words of Jesus, p. 265, English translation ).

Nothing could mark more strongly the contrast between Jewish Messianic notions and the picture of the Messiah as realized in our Gospels, than the following passage from the Jewish Encyclopedia: Jesus word on the cross, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? was in all its implications itself a disproof of the exaggerated claims made for Him after His death by His disciples. The very form of His punishment would disprove those claims in Jewish eyes. No Messiah that Jews could recognise could suffer such a death. [Note: Professor Votaw (Chicago), The Modern Jewish View of Jesus, in the Biblical World, xxvi. No. 2 [Aug. 1905], p. 110. The passage above is cited from the Jewish Encyc. vii. p. 166; and the present writer would venture to refer for further literature to the Witness of the Epistles, pp. 23, 360.]

This representation of a suffering Messiah which the Gospels presented so uncompromisingly, pressed hard for a solution upon the famous founder of the Tbingen School:

Never was that which bore the outward appearance of ruin and annihilation turned into such signal and decisive victory, and so glorious a passage into life, as in the death of Jesus. Up to this time there was always a possibility that He and the people might come to agree on the ground of the Messianic faith but His death made a complete and irreparable breach between Him and Judaism. A death like His made it impossible for the Jew, as long as he remained a Jew, to believe in Him as the Messiah. To believe in Him as the Messiah after His dying such a death involved the removal from the conception of the Messiah of all the Jewish and carnal elements which were associated with it (Church History, i. p. 42, English translation )

Baurs solution of the difficulty forms one of the most curious pages in the history of modern criticism. He allows that nothing but the miracle of the Resurrection could restore the faith of the disciples after such a death as that of the Cross, and yet he assures us in the same breath that the question as to the nature and the reality of the Resurrection lies outside the sphere of historical inquiry. What history requires is not so much the fact of the Resurrection of Jesus, as the belief that it was a fact.

In more recent utterances we seem to catch an echo of Baurs words, and his remarks anticipate Harnacks familiar distinction between the Easter faith and the Easter message. The Easter faith, according to Harnack, is a conviction which tells us that the Crucified has achieved an inward victory over death, and has entered into eternal life. But this so-called Easter faith appears, not unjustly, to many thoughtful minds to do away with the need of Easter altogether. The Crucified overcame death on Good Friday, so far, that is, as an inward triumph was concerned. On Good Friday, and not upon the third day, He entered upon eternal life. And if nothing special happened on Easter Day, there seems to be little sense or point in talking about Easter faith. [Note: See Dr. Walthers valuable criticism, Ad. Harnacks Wesen des Christentums fr die christliche Gemeinde geprft5, 1904, p. 134; and also Dr. F. Blass, Science and Sophistry in Expos. Times, Oct. 1904.]

But, further, this contrast between the current ideas of the Messiah and the Messiahship of Jesus in the Gospels may be illustrated from the succeeding history of the Jewish nation and from the culmination of the Jewish hopes in the pretender Bar Cochba in the reign of Hadrian. The report was circulated that the Messiah had at last appeared, and fabulous numbers are said to have joined his standard in insurrection against the Romans. We know how the struggle ended in terrible disaster to the Jews, although for some few years they fought with all their characteristic stubbornness and desperation. But the chief actor in the drama, Bar Cochba, reveals to us only too plainly the kind of Messiah whom the majority of the Jews expected, and whom they were prepared to welcome: Jesus offered Himself unresistingly to death; the impostor died in arms whatever Jesus Christ was not, this pretender was. Whatever this pretender was, Jesus Christ was not.* [Note: Row, Jesus of the Evangelists, p. 147 ff.] One feature in the new Messiahs career may be specially noted, viz. the absence of any attempt on his part to work miracles, although no doubt all sorts of exaggerated stories of strength and power gathered round his name. [Note: Edersheim, History of the Jewish Nation, p. 200 ff.] But if, as we are told, there was an irresistible tendency to attribute miraculous powers to the Messiah, if, as Professor Percy Gardner asserts, there was every probability that whether actual or not the miracles would be reported, how is it that no such miracles gathered around the name of Bar Cochba? Is not the only explanation to be found in the fact that Jesus of Nazareth actually worked miracles, while the pretender worked none? [Note: See especially the Church Quarterly Review, Jan 1904.] Nor must it be forgotten in this connexion that the Jews in early times never attempted to deny that our Lord wrought miracles; on the contrary, they admitted the miracles, whilst they referred them to Satanic arts or to a knowledge of the sorcery which Jesus had brought with Him from Egypt. [Note: Jesus Christ in the Talmud (Laihle), p. 45 [Eng. tr].] In the same manner the modern Jews admit that our Lord gained His notoriety not merely from His teaching but from His miracles, specially from those which He wrought as a healer of the sick. It was not, writes Dr. Kohler in the Jewish Encyc. vii. p. 167, as the teacher of new religious principles nor as a new lawgiver, but as a new wonder-worker that Jesus won fame and influence among the simple inhabitants of Galilee in his lifetime.|| [Note: | The Modern Jewish View of Jesus, by Prof. Votaw, p. 109, Chicago University Press, 1905.]

13. But there were other claims made by our Lord, in addition to the claim to work miracles, and of these great and supernatural claims it may be said that they cannot possibly be derived from the picture of the Messiah which meets us in the OT. Some words remarkable in their bearing upon this subject were uttered by Dr. Charles in speaking before the University of Oxford on The Messiah of the Old Testament and the Christ of the New Testament:

As other claims which are without parallel in the Old Testament prophecy of the Messiah, we shall mention first His claim to judge the world; and next, to forgive sin; and, finally, to be the Lord of life and death. In the Old Testament these prerogatives helong to God alone as the essential Head of the kingdom, and appear in those prophetic descriptions of the kingdom which ignore the figure of the Messiah, and represent God as manifesting Himself among men. Here, then, we have the Christ of the Gospels claiming not only to fulfil the Old Testament prophecies of the various ideals of the Messiah, but also to discharge the functions of God Himself in relation to the kingdom. [Note: Expositor, 6th series, v. [1902] p. 258. In Jewish apocalyptic literature, it should be added, the Messiah is in many cases the agent of God in the judgment which takes place at the beginning or close of the Messianic reign; even in the final judgment He is represented as Gods agent, and only in the later section of the Book of Enoch does He appear as the judge at the last day. We may also contrast our Lords own words as to His Parousia with the fantastic and grotesque descriptions of Jewish theology.]

Nor can it be said with any justification that these Divine prerogatives are ascribed to our Lord late in time, or that they were simply Christian accretions. We need look no further than St. Pauls earliest Epistle, 1 Thess., to come across statements which can scarcely mean anything less than that our Lord was associated as Judge with God the Father; that He is the medium of salvation, and that we obtain life through His death; that the prayers of Christians are to be addressed to Him; that whether we wake or sleep our true life is in Him (cf. 1Th 3:13; 1Th 5:9-10). Nor is there any reason to suppose that in such statements to the Thessalonians St. Paul is putting forward a conception of Christ which differed from that entertained by the rest of the Church:* [Note: See, further. Dr. Sanday, Criticism of the Fourth Gospel, p. 231; Bishop Gore, The Permanent Creed and the Christian Idea of Sin, p. 10 ff. If we compare 1Co 2:8 and Jam 2:1, it is notable how both St. Paul and St. James can speak of Jesus as the Lord of the (i.e. the Divine) glory.] The Son of God, he writes to the Corinthians, who was preached among you by us (not by St. Paul himself alone), even by me and Silvanus and Timothy, was not yea and nay, but in him is yea, 2Co 1:19 (cf. 1Th 1:1). Moreover, in the expression the Son of God St. Pauls teaching no less than that of the Gospels indicates a unique relationship between the Father and the Son; cf. e.g. Rom 8:3; Rom 8:32. And if we ask whence St. Pauls conception was derived, it seems not unreasonable to maintain that it was derived from the statements and the teaching of our Lord Himself.

There is a famous passage contained in two of the Synoptic Gospels which so strongly resembles the phraseology of St. John that it has been called, and not unjustly, an aerolite from the Johannine heaven: All things have been delivered unto me of my Father, and none knoweth the Son save the Father, neither doth any know the Father save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son willeth to reveal him (Mat 11:27, Luk 10:22). Dr. Harnack, although he does not deny that Jesus spoke these words, weakens their force and meaning, and it is well to turn for a criticism of his statements to Dr. Swetes remarks on The Teaching of Christ, Expositor (6th Series, vii. [1903] p. 407):

The knowledge claimed is that of a son, and it rests upon sonship; it is a strange misreading of the words which reversea this order, as Professor Harnack seems to doit is not knowledge which makes Christ the Son, but sonship which enables Him to know. He declares that He knowa God as only a son can know his father, and that this knowledge is not a possession which other sons of God naturally share with Him, but one which belongs of right to Him alone, and to others only so far as He is pleased to impart it. This is to claim not only unique knowledge, but a unique Sonship. It is difficult to discover any essential difference between this statement of St. Matthew and the closing words of St. Johns prologue.

The Abb Loisy does not allow that our Lord ever spoke these words, but affirms that they are derived from some primitive Church tradition; and he goes so far as to suppose that they were derived, in part at all events, from Sirach 51. [Note: See for a recent criticism, Cambridge Theological Essays, 1905, p. 455 ff.] But it is difficult to believe that such words could have found the place which they occupy in two of our Gospels unless they were spoken by our Lord. It should be remembered that they are regarded, not merely by conservative but by scientific critics, as forming part of that collection of discourses which probably comes to us from the Apostle St. Matthew. Indeed, Keim long ago affirmed that there is no more violent criticism than that which Strauss had introduced, viz., the repudiation of a passage so strongly attested. Moreover, the alleged dependences upon Sirach 51 are in reality very superficial; in some particulars the alleged likenesses are such as might be found in the utterances of any Jewish speakers. It may also be noted that while the points of comparison are preserved, the points of contrast are entirely omitted. For example, Jesus the son of Sirach in his prayer thanks God because He has hearkened to him and delivered him from peril; our Lord in His prayer thanks the Father for revealing to babes that which had been concealed from the wise and prudent.* [Note: Lepin, op. cit., Appendix, on the Abb Loisys position, 1904.]

But it should further be borne in mind that these statements in Mt. and Lk. do not stand alone; that the Gospel which is probably the earliest of the Synoptics speaks of the Father and of the Son absolutely, and that the words employed can only be fairly explained as assigning to our Lord a unique relationship to God: But of that day or that hour knoweth no one, not even the angels in heaven, neither the Son, but the Father (Mar 13:32). If such words are suspected, we may fairly ask who would have been likely to introduce them? Dr. Schmiedel, who generously allows us to construct a scientific Life of Christ from five sayings and four incidents of the Gospels, does not attempt to deny that our Lord spoke these words; and although, of course, he uses them for his own purposes of exegesis, we may now take it that this representative of the most advanced criticism allows us to regard this verse in St. Marks Gospel as an utterance of our Lord Himself. [Note: See art. Gospels, Encyc. Bibl. ii. 1881. For a valuable criticism of Schmiedels position, cf. Fairbairn, The Philosophy of the Christian, Religion, p. 303.] Professor N. Schmidt refuses to accept even Mar 13:32, and regards the words in question, neither the Son, as probably an interpolation (The Prophet of Nazareth, pp. 147, 231). Such words presuppose, he thinks, such a doctrine of subordination as was cherished in the Church of the second century. But has he forgotten the doctrine of subordination in 1Co 15:28, a passage which even he dares not refuse to St. Paul?

In addition to Dr. Swetes remarks, to which reference has been made above, we may cite the following passage, as bearing closely on our subject, from the Dean of Westminsters Study of the Gospels, p. 109: Observe that the titles the Father and the Son are used absolutely (i.e. in Mt. and Lk. loc. cit.). We are familiar with this use from St. Johns Gospel. But it occurs but once again in the Synoptic Gospels, Mar 13:32. It is an important fact to be borne in mind in connexion with the Christology of Johns Gospel, that this special mode of speech is attested once for St. Mark and once also for the non-Markan document. We could hardly have stronger evidence, from the historical point of view, that our Lord Himself did thus speak of Himself absolutely as the Son. It is not necessary to explain how unique is the claim which is put forward by this language. [Note: See, further, Sanday, Criticism of the Fourth Gospel, p. 211; Fairbairn, op. cit. p. 476; Headlam, Critical Questions, pp. 190, 191; Cambridge Theological Essays, 1905, p. 431.]

Professor N. Schmidt, indeed, has boldly argued against this uniqueness in His relation to the Father which our Lord claims, by asserting that He always availed Himself of the general expression Abba, Father, and that the variants my Father and your Father were introduced by the Greek Evangelists. [Note: Bibl. art. Son of God, iv. 4696. This is one of the most painful articles in the whole of the four volumes, and we cannot be surprised that Professor Schmidt throws doubt upon our Lords exact words, when at this time of day he can throw doubt, as in this same article, upon St. Pauls authorship of 1 Thessalonians. More recently Professor Schmidt has repeated these arguments, and be appears to regard Mat 11:25, Luk 10:21 as casting an undeserved reflexion upon the character of Jesus! (The Prophet of Nazareth, p. 152). On Schmidts denial that our Lord ever called Himself the Son of Man see Stalkers Christology of Jesus, p. 72, and Muirheads Eschatology of Jesus, p. 148). If the Gospels were written as late as Schmidt believes, it is certain that the introduction into all of them of such a title as the Son of Man would have been regarded with the gravest suspicion, and would have failed to gain acceptance in Christian circles where our Lords Godhead was fully recognized.] But, as M. Lepin has pointed out in his valuable book, it is to be noted that a distinguished Aramaic scholar, Dr. Dalman, does not hesitate to affirm, in contradistinction to the assertions of Dr. Schmidt, that the unique position assumed by Jesus follows from the invariable separation which He makes between my Father and your Father (Words of Jesus, p. 281 [English translation ]); and a few pages later Dr. Dalman writes: Nowhere do we find that Jesus called Himself the Son of God in such a sense as to suggest a merely religious and ethical relation to God, a relation which others also actually possessed, or which they were capable of attaining or destined to acquire (p. 287).* [Note: See also Lepin, Jsus Messie et Fils de Dieu, pp. 297, 300, 2nd ed. 1905.]

14. We must remember, too, that not only do a great number of English and German writers of note acknowledge the closeness of St. Pauls acquaintance with our Lords life and teaching, [Note: See, e.g., Zahn, Einleitung, ii. p. 166 ff., where references to (1) the history, (2) the words of Jesus, are drawn out at length; J. Weiss, Das lteste Evangelium, 1903, p. 33 ff.; Weinel, Paulus, 1904, p. 246 ff.; P. W. Schmidt, Die Geschichte Jesu, 1904, ii. pp. 67, 68; Bacon, Story of St. Paul, 1905, p. 53; Fairbairn, The Philosophy of the Christian Religion, p. 443 ff.; Chase, Credibility of the Acts of the Apostles, p. 252 ff.; II. A. A. Kennedy, St. Pauls Conceptions of the Last Things, p. 96 ff.; Headlam, Critical Questions, 1903, p. 161 ff.; and the present writer would venture to refer to the last lecture in The Testimony of St. Paul to Christ.] but that this testimony of St. Paul is materially and increasingly strengthened by the large number of Epistles which are now almost universally acknowledged to have been from his pen. Some sixty years ago (1845), F. C. Baur, the founder of the Tbingen School, published his Life of St. Paul, and accepted only four of the Apostles letters, in which he believed that he could discover the notes of a fundamental difference between Paul and the Twelve; to-day at least double that number of the Epistles which bear St. Pauls name is accepted by nearly all critics alike. It would be easy to point in proof of this to Dr. C. Clemens statements in his recent Life and Work of St. Paul (see i. pp. 6162). We must not forget that Professor Schmidt is prepared to accept only the Hauptbriefe and Philippians, and that he regards even the former as having suffered insertions; thus, 1Co 15:5-11 is a later insertion (The Prophet of Nazareth, pp. 193, 200, 397). Colossians and even Philemon are rejected; and we are told, in the only reference to Bishop Lightfoot in the volume, that his is the ablest defence of these two Epistles, but that it fails to do full justice to the counter arguments (p. 194). It is not surprising after this that Professor Schmidt, following on the lines of Van Manen, rejects all the Epistles of St. Ignatius, and that he makes no reference to their acceptance by Lightfoot, Harnack, Zahn.

If we turn for a moment to the little books of a popular kind which are in course of publication in Germany, at the price of a few pence each, we find that to Professor Vischer of Basle (known to us in England first of all through Dr. Harnack) is committed the volume which treats of the Epistles of St. Paul. Vischer accepts all the Epistles, nine in number, which are accepted by Dr. Clemen; and even when he comes to deal with Ephesians (which Clemen rejects), he frankly acknowledges, with Erich Haupt in the latest edition of Meyers Commentary, that the alleged objections are by no means decisive, and that more is to be said for St. Pauls authorship than against it. In cases, moreover, in which the traditional structure of the Epistles is questioned, as in 2 Cor., it is frankly allowed that the separate letter alleged to be found in chs. 1013 is, no less than the rest of the Epistle, the work of St. Paul; and even in the case of the Pastoral Epistles, the existence of genuine Pauline fragments is constantly maintained (see, further, von Sodens Urchristliche Literaturgeschichte, 1905, pp. 28, 162).

15. It has been recently said by Dr. Driver that the testimony to our blessed Lords life and work is so much more nearly contemporary with the events recorded than can often be shown to be the case in the Old Testament, and also so much more varied and abundant, that by an elementary principle of historical criticism it is of proportionately higher value.* [Note: The Higher Criticism, 1905, pp. ix and 32; cf. also and esp. Dr. Drivers remarks in his LOT6 p. xi, where the same point is more fully elaborated: Viewed in the light of the unique personality of Christ, as depicted both in the common tradition embodied in the Synoptic Gospels and in the personal reminiscences underlying the Fourth Gospel, and also as presupposed by the united testimony of the Apostolic writers belonging almost to the same generation, the circumstances are such as to forbid the supposition that the facts of our Lords life on which the fundamental truths of Christianity depend can have been the growth of mere tradition, or are anything else than strictly historical. The same canon of historical criticism which authorizes the assumption of tradition in the OT forbids itexcept within the narrowest limits, as in some of the divergences apparent between the parallel narratives of the Gospelsin the case of the NT.] This claim to be so nearly contemporary with the events of the Gospels may fairly be made for the testimony of St. Paul; and even if Dr. Zahn is right in refusing to follow the recent trend of criticism, which places the Apostles conversion within a year or two of our Lords death, it is certain that St. Paul must have been acquainted, at a very early date, with those who had known the Christ, and who had recognized and felt His power (Gal 1:18-19, Rom 16:7). Professor Schmidt has lately argued (The Prophet of Nazareth, p. 157) that as the distance of time increased between Jesus and the later Pauline literature, the term Son of God assumed more and more a metaphysical significance. But Professor Schmidt accepts Philippians as undoubtedly the work of St. Paul. How then does he deal with the great Christological passage, Php 2:6 ff.? We are simply informed that this passage may easily be an interpolation (p. 195 f.).

It seems to the present writer quite beside the mark to maintain that, in investigating the facts and beliefs which lie between a.d. 3045, we have no contemporary documents, that, in fact, none exist, and that our only guide is inference based on later writings and developments. [Note: This is apparently maintained by Dr. Moffatt, Historical NT2, p. 66.] We have already seen the inferences to be derived from the statements in one of St. Pauls earliest and practically undoubted Epistles, 1 Th., and that these inferences of necessity presuppose a preaching and teaching considerably anterior in time to the actual date of the Epistle mentioned.

Moreover, we may well ask. What is meant by the word contemporary? General Gordon was murdered in the Sudan in 1884. If a man wrote an account to-day of the closing years of Gordons life, we should scarcely refuse to give it the title of a contemporary record. [Note: Prebendary Sadler (The Lost Gospel, p. 196), writing in 1876, well asks if we should refuse to describe an account of the Crimean War (18541855) as a contemporary history.] But we are separated from the death of Gordon by a longer period of time than that which elapsed between the conversion of St. Paul and his earliest written testimony to the belief and practice of the primitive Church. [Note: In this connexion we may recall Renans words, Jesus is known to us by at least one contemporary piece of evidence, that of St. Paul (Histoire du Peuple dIsrael2. 1887, i. p. xviii).]

16. But, further, in any attempt to estimate, however briefly, the bearings of modern criticism, it must not be forgotten that the Gospels are now placed at a much earlier date than formerly.|| [Note: | An excellent summary of data bearing out this in connexion with prominent critics is given by Lepia, op. cit. p. xxxi. Cf. also Deissmann, Evangelium und Urchristentum, in Beitrge zur Weiterentwicklung der Christlichen Religion, 1905; and also Harnack, Chron. i. pp. 654, 655. In this first volume Dr. Harnack (1897) places the Synoptic Gospels well within the 1st century, and a.d. 110 is assigned as the furthest limit for the Gospel of St. John with the Epistles of St. John and the Apocalypse. In this and in other respects great jubilation was raised at Dr. Harnacks conservatism; but he soon made it clear that the acceptance of the date or the authorship of a book by no means involves the acceptance of its contents. Hubas series of Helps to the Understanding of the Bible, which has had a large circulation in Germany, is not very satisfactory in relation to the Gospels. Hhn, however, admits that the Logia which were used by Matthew, if not composed by him, date before a.d. 70. Of the author of the Gospel of Mark he holds that nothing definite can he known; but at the same time he speaks of Matthew as composed after 70, and of Mark as being of an earlier date. Luke is the latest of the three, and, like so many advanced critics, Hhn places Luke after 70 on the ground of 21:2124. But it does not increase our confidence in Hhns researches when he places St. Johns Gospel at 135140, and gives as one of his chief reasons the passage Joh 5:43, in which he sees a reference to Bar Cochba (a.d. 132), who came in his own name, and was recognized as the Messiah of the Jews (Das Neue Testament, 1904, p. 13 ff.). In answer to Huhns inference from Luk 21:21 see Blass, Philology of the Gospels, 1898, p. 41.]

Strauss long ago maintained that the Gospel story would be impregnable if it was certain that it was written by eye-witnesses, or at all events by men who lived close to the events. And this hypothesis of Strauss has at least been verified to this extent in our day, by the acknowledgment that all three of the Synoptics rest in no small degree upon genuinely Apostolic sources. Even Jlicher, who places our First Gospel at the year 100 or thereabouts, admits that the writer used our Second Gospel and a collection of Logia made by St. Matthew; and in this Second Gospel he sees the work of John Mark, founded on reminiscences of the Petrine circle. And if, as is generally admitted, the writer of our Third Gospel employed Mark and the Matthaean Logia among his chief means of information, he, too, must have based a great part of his work upon two Apostolic sources.* [Note: See Biblical World (Chicago), December 1895, art. Sources of the Life of Christ, by Professor Burton; and the Church Quarterly Review, January 1905, art. The Synoptic Gospels and Recent Literature, pp. 416, 417.]

The force of St. Pauls contemporary testimony we have already noted, and we are now able to point in addition to the Apostolic sources underlying our Gospels. And thus we have a twofold guarantee against the alleged process of idealization which magnified by degrees the deeds and sayings of Jesus, a theory which, as M. Lepin observes, is urged by writers in many respects so far removed from each other as Schmiedel and Loisy. [Note: cit. pp. xlviiil.]

17. And if modern criticism has strengthened the external evidence for the early date of our Gospels, may we not say that it has strengthened the internal evidence also? If we turn, for example, to the Gospel of St. John, we find a remarkable testimony in Furrers well-known Leben Jesu Christi (1905), a testimony the force of which is increased when we remember the writers close acquaintance with the geography of the Holy Land. Thus Furrer speaks of the definite and exact geographical notices which are scattered up and down the pages of the Fourth Gospel, many of which we know only through the author of the book, and which correspond so thoroughly to the actual conditions. [Note: See, further, Sanday, Criticism of the Fourth Gospel, p. 113.] The narrator must thus have been a man who was acquainted with the home of Jesus by his own personal observation, so that we have the feeling that we are able to realize the scenes as it were with our own bodily eyes. If we consider the picture drawn by the Synoptists, we are again struck with its vivid reality, its truthful correspondence to the conditions, social and political, of the country, its acquaintance with the religious parties of the Jews and the Messianic hopes of the people, with its curious mixture of a foreign civilization and government with the hereditary customs and judicial procedure of the Jews. But the picture thus presented to us could not have been drawn except by the hands of men contemporary with the events which they purport to describe. It would have been impossible after the fall of Jerusalem in a.d. 70 and the entire bouleversement which that catastrophe caused, to recreate, as it were, the conditions which prevailed socially, politically, religiously before that capital event.* [Note: Swete, Critical Questions, pp. 47, 48; and Lepin, op. cit. pp. xxixxx.] This impression of truthfulness which the contents of our Gospels cannot fail to make, is witnessed to even in quarters in which we might not altogether expect it. Thus Jlicher speaks of our Gospels as of priceless value as authorities for the history of Jesus; and even if much of their data may be uncertain, Jlicher nevertheless maintains that the impression of the Saviour which they leave on the readers mind is a faithful one; if the total picture of Jesus which we obtain from the Synoptics displays all the magic of reality, this is owing to the fact that they painted Jesus as they found Him already existing in the Christian communities, and that their model corresponded in all essentials to the original. [Note: See Church Quarterly Review, l.c. p. 411; and also Jlicher, Einleitung in das NT 3, p. 294.]

18. In concluding this article, it will not be unfitting, especially in a Dictionary devoted to the subject of Christ and the Gospels, to emphasize once again the importance attached to the Person of Christ in the current literature of to-day. It would be easy to refer in this connexion to the statements made by representative writers in England and America. We turn, e.g., to Professor Nashs History of the Higher Criticism, and we find him speaking (p. 25) of that Christ who is humanitys Amen to all the Divine promises; or to Dr. P. Gardners Historic View of the NT, and we find him maintaining (pp. 8891) that the founder of Christianity stands above all other religious teachers. [Note: In a noteworthy passage (op. cit. p. 100) the same writer says, after referring to the fact that Jesus does not use the phrase Our Father in heaven as including both Himself and His disciples: It would not show awant of the critical spirit to go further than this, and to maintain with Professor Harnack that Jesus assigned a special significance to His death in relation to the forgiveness of sins, claimed an unique dignity as King and Lord, regarded His death as a passage to glory, and anticipated a speedy return to the earth as judge. It is disappointing to read the next paragraph: Yet I cannot persuade myself that on strictly historical grounds these statements could be definitely established.] Even Professor Schmidt can speak again and again of the wonderful personality of Jesus: While other teachers may and will do much for our modern world, the healing, purging, elevating influence of Jesus is of priceless value. No man can come into contact with him without feeling that life goes out of him (The Prophet of Nazareth, p. 360).

At the Liverpool Church Congress, 1904, one of the speakers on NT criticism, Professor F. C. Burkitt, remarked at the close of his speech that the only time when Christians would have cause to be afraid was when the far off figure of Jesus Christ no longer attracted the critic and the student, but that there was no evidence that that day was within sight. The last statement finds ample corroboration in the English and German literature of to-day. [Note: See, e.g., Fairbairn, Christ in Modern Theology, pp. 18, 21; and Sir Oliver Lodge in Hibbert Journal, Apr. 1906, p. 644, where he accepts the general consensus of Christendom as testifying to the essentially Divine character of Christ.] We may look again at the little series of popular books to which reference has been made as in progress of publication for the German people. One of them is entitled Die Quellen des Lebens Jesu, by Professor Wernle of Basle, whose name is widely known in England for his works on the Gospels and the Beginnings of the Christian Religion. Here again we find this same primary importance attached to the Life and Person of Jesus, in spite of so much which betrays impatience of any definite dogmatic teaching. Whatever else, in Wernles view, we may learn from St. Paul, we may at all events learn this, that in Jesus, notwithstanding the fact that He died a death of shame on the cross, St. Paul saw his own life and that of the world divided, as it were, into two partswith Jesus, without Jesus. In Jesus we behold a man who helps us to understand aright ourselves, the world, and God; who accompanies us as the truest friend and guide in the needs and struggles of the present, and to whom we can entrust ourselves with all confidence for the future. In the same series Professor Pfleiderer, who discusses the preparation for Christianity, finds in the sentence, The Word was made flesh, the dividing line between the many and varied speculations of philosophy and the full and actual manifestation of the Divine Logos in the life of the Son of God (Vorbereitung des Christentums in der Griechischen Philosophie, p. 66). Another writer, Dr. Bousset, to whom reference has been made, and who is also well known to English readers, expresses himself in the little book Was wissen wir von Jesus?, which H. Holtzmann recommends as the best guide-book for the German laity, in almost rapturous language:

Gradually there rises before us a Form in which the soul rejoicea, the Form of the great liherator, the mighty opponent of all forms of Pharisaism, and at all times the great upholder of simplicity in religion. And more even than this: there stands before us the Form of Jesus the friend of sinners, the preacher of the forgiveness of sins, who in all the greatness of His own moral strength condescends with all the tenderness of a woman to the lost and the outcast, the Form of One who, conscious of victory, could unite His disciples to Himself by an everlasting bond when the last sad night of His earthly life had come and death stood before His eyes.

In this Personality Bousset finds the true origin of Christianity. Other factors no doubt contributed, but there was one factor above and beyond them all, the Person of Jesus. Jewish Messianic hopes, Greek philosophy, the social conditions of the Roman Empire, the organization and the spirit of the religious social clubs and of the mysteries, all these contributed. One by one, in a few graphic pages, Bousset passes them in review, and shows how each of them was insufficient alone, because each of them wanted the distinctive power which made Christianity all-sufficient and all-victorious, the power of a life-giving Personality, the possessor and the bestower of new spiritual agencies, the bringer of life out of death. In words of almost evangelical fervour Bousset proclaims the presence in history of this unique personal power. None can doubt the power of personality in the religious life, and all religions which occupy the foremost place in the world testify to this in some measure more or less.* [Note: This insistence upon the importance of the personal influence is again notably marked in one of the most recent of popular Lives of Jesus by Dr. Furrer of Zurich. See. e.g., the closing page of his Leben Jesu, 1905, p. 261, in which, after insisting upon regarding Jesus as man, he ends, as he himself expresses it, with the confession of the centurion, This man was the Son of God. Furrers treatment of his theme is marked by reverence and sympathy, and he rightly points out that, until the heart is in sympathy, no justice can be done to the holiest portraiture of humanity (Vorwort, p. v).]

In face of such acknowledgments, we cease to wonder that von Soden in his recent Die wichtigsten Fragen im Leben Jesu, 1904, devotes so much of his book to a consideration of the Personality of Jesus (p. 82 ff.). Amongst other matters of varied interest, he points out that there is no evidence that Jesus was influenced in any direct manner by Buddha or Plato, or by Philo and his predecessors (p. 108). He was the child of His people and country, He knew no foreign literature (p. 109), He was far removed from any association with the hard and gloomy character of Pharisaic piety, but at the same time His life was in harmony with all that was best in the Jewish and Greek types of humanity, and von Soden concludes his book (p. 111) by saying that this Personality which was beyond the invention of the Evangelists, and which is presented to us in a picture which knows no flaw, is an irrefutable, integral fact, and the wonder of wonders in the worlds history rich in wonders. (See, further, the same writers Urchristliche Literaturgeschichte, p. 5).

Once more; we turn to H. Wendt, another German well known in England, not only by his works on the Teaching of Jesus and the Gospel of St. John, but by two lectures delivered in this country in 1904. He speaks of the significance of Jesus in revelation (The Idea and Reality of Revelation, p. 28 ff.). Jesus is for him the highest revelation of God, although not the only one.* [Note: In this book (p. 88) Wendt speaks of the Gospel type of Christian piety which has no analogy in other religions, and the significance of salvation by Jesus Christ is found in His revelation, as perfect Son of Ood, of Gods fatherly love, and in the powerful impulse which He has exerted on men to draw them into this blessed sonship. This Gospel type, he adds, has found its expression in Apostolic times in many great passages of the Pauline letters, and above all in the First Epistle of St. John, which Wendt regards as the genuine work of the disciple who stood nearest to Jesus, the most beautiful record of a mind directly inspired by His words and life.] At the foundation of all the forms of Christianity there is a reverence for Jesus Christ as Saviour and Mediator. And Wendt concludes by assuring us that a large number of the German theologians of to-day aspire to lead Christianity back to its original form, to the simplicity and sublimity of the primitive teaching of Jesus (p. 91). There is much in such acknowledgments which carries us back to the confession of A. Rville. For him Jesus is supremely great, and he adds, Let us fear nothing as to the glory of the Son of Man. We owe it to Him, to the Divine ideal dwelling within Him, that we know ourselves to be the children of God; it is in His pure heart that love between God and man has been realized, and in this He possesses a crown which none can ever take from Him (History of the Doctrine of the Deity of Jesus Christ, English translation p. 164).

In such utterances as these, which might be easily multiplied, although they fall very far short of the language of the Church and the Creeds, we mark how the interest of thoughtful minds in Germany, America, France, England is centred in the Person of Christ, and how also many of these writers whom we have mentioned admit that there was a relationship between Jesus and the Father so intimate as to be, if not metaphysical, yet at all events unique, and that this is conceded by critics who would depreciate St. Lukes opening narrative of the Gospel history or St. Peters confession at Caesarea Philippi (Mat 16:16).

And as we listen to such utterances, sometimes full of hope and confidence, sometimes full of pathos and tender religious feeling, we are conscious that the old question, Lord, to whom shall we go? has not lost its interest for the world or for ourselves, and we thankfully recognize the acknowledgment rendered even by the spirit of criticism and inquiry, as it searches into the will and the teaching of Him who alone is the Revealer of the Father, Thou hast the words of eternal life.

Literature.Lichtenberger, Hist. of Germ. Theol. in 19th Cent., English translation ; Mill, Mythical Interpretation of the Gospels; Pfleiderer, Development of Theology, Germany and Great Britain; J. E. Carpenter, The Bible in the Nineteenth Century; Nash, Hist. of the Higher Criticism; Matheson, Aids to the Study of Germ. Theol.; Fairbairn, Place of Christ in Mod. Theol., and Philos. of Christ. Rel.; Schwarz, Zur Gesch. der neuesten Theol; A. S. Farrar, Crit. Hist. of Free Thought (Bampt. Lect. 1862); Plumptre, Christ and Christendom (Boyle Lect.); Nippold, Hdbch. der neuesten Kirchengesch. vol. iii. pt. 2; C. L. Broun, Protest. Crit. of NT in Germany, Interpreter, vol. ii. No. 1; W. Adams Brown, The Essence of Christianity; Weinel, Jesus im neunzehnten Jahrhundert; N. Schmidt, The Prophet of Nazareth, p. 21 ff.; Harnack, Chronol. der Altchrist. Litt. i., and Das Wesen des Christentums; Cremer, A Reply to Harnack on the Essence of Christianity, English translation ; Walther, Ad. Harnacks Wesen des Christentums fur die Christliche Gemeinde gepruft; Herrmann, Communion with God, English translation ; Orr, Christ. View of God and the World, and Ritschlianism: Expository and Critical Essays; Garvie, Ritschlian Theology; Reischle, Theol. und Religionsgesch.; Sderblom, Religionen der Erde, iii. Hett 3, in Religionsgesch. Volksbcher and other volumes in the same series, as, e.g., Der Ursprung des Buddhismus by Hackmann, and Welche Religion hatten die Juden als Jesus auftrat? by Hollmann; Bousset, Die Religionsgesch. und das NT in Theol. Rundschau, July 1904 and following numbers; Cumont, Les mystres de Mithra; A. Jeremias, Babylonisches im NT; Gunkel, Zum religionsgesch. Verstndniss des NT; Impressions of Christianity from the point of view of non-Christian Religions, Hibbert Journal, July 1905 and following numbers; Farnell, Evolution of Religion; Jordan, Comparative Religion; Cheyne, Bible Problems; Westcott, The Gospel of Life; Wace, Christianity and Agnosticism; Illingworth, Reason and Revelation; Swete, The Teaching of Christ; Stalker, The Christology of Jesus; Godet, Defence of the Christian Faith, English translation ; Row, The Jesus of the Evangelists; Stanton, The Jewish and the Christian Messiah; Dalman, Die Worte Jesu, i.; Heunecke, Neutest. Apokryphen, 1904; Baldensperger, Die Messianisch-apokalyptischen Hoffnungen des Judenthums; Schrer, GJV [Note: JV Geschichte des Jdischen Volkes.] 3 [Note: designates the particular edition of the work referred] ; Muirhead, The Eschatology of Jesus; Votaw, Modern Jewish View of Jesus, Biblical World, xxvi. 2 [1905]; Sanday, Inspiration, and Criticism of the Fourth Gospel; J. A. Robinson, Study of the Gospels; Gore, The Permanent Creed and the Christian Idea of Sin, Contentio Veritatis, 1902; Headlam, Critical Questions, 1903; Cambr. Theol. Essays (esp. those by Chase, Mason, Foakes-Jackson); Criticism of the NT (St. Margarets Lectures), 1903; W. M. Ramsay, The Education of Christ; P. Gardner, A Historical View of the NT, with Sandays criticism in JThSt [Note: ThSt Journal of Theological Studies.] , Jan. 1902; Moffatt, Historical NT; von Soden, Urchristliche Literaturgeschichte; Gamble, Christ and Criticism; Loisy, Lvangile et lEglise, and Autour dun petit livre; Lepin (esp. in reply to Loisy), Jsus Messie et Fils de Dieu, 2nd and 3rd edd. [Note: editions or editors.] ; T. A. Lacey, Harnack and Loisy; Hollmann, Leben und Lehre Jesu in Theol. Rundschau, April 1904 and following numbers; Luthardt, Gesammelte Vortrge, pp. 3173; G. Uhlhorn, Das Leben Jesu in seinen neueren Darstellungen; E. de Pressens, Jsus-Christ, pp. 456; Annibale Fiori, Il Christo della Storia e della Scrittura, 1905; Vischer, Jesus und Paulus in Theol. Rundschau, April, May, 1905; Feine, Jesus und Paulus; Deissmann, Evangelium und Urchristentum in Beitrage zur Weiterentwicklung der Religion, 1905; M. Dais, The Bible. See, further, books mentioned above, and in artt. Birth of Christ, Gospels, etc.

R. J. Knowling.

Fuente: A Dictionary Of Christ And The Gospels

Criticism

CRITICISM.Biblical criticism is divided into two branches: (1) Lower Criticism, which is concerned with the original text of Scripturethe Hebrew of the OT and the Greek of the NT, by reference to (a) the external evidence of MSS, versions, and citations in ancient literature, and (b) the intrinsic evidence of the inherent probability of one reading as compared with a rival reading, judged by such rules as that preference should be given to the more difficult reading, the shorter reading, the most characteristic reading, and the reading which accounts for the alternative readings (see Text of the NT); (2) Higher Criticism, which is concerned with the authorship, dates, and circumstances of origin, doctrinal character and tendency, historicity, and other such questions concerning the books of Scripture, as far as these matters can be determined by a careful examination of their contents, comparing the various sections of each one with another, or comparing the books in their entirety with one another, and bringing all possible light to bear upon them from history, literature, antiquities, monuments, etc.

The title of the second branch of criticism is often misunderstood in popular usage. The Lower Criticism being little heard of except among experts, while the Higher Criticism is often mentioned in public, the true comparison suggested is not perceived, and the latter phrase is taken to indicate a certain arrogance on the part of advanced critics, and contempt for the older scholarship. Then the word criticism is also taken in its popular sense as implying captiousness and faultfinding. Further, the most startling, and therefore the most generally observed, results of criticism being destructive of preconceived notions, criticism itself has been regarded as a negative process, and even as an attack on the Bible. It is not to be denied that there are Higher Critics whose arguments may be construed in this way; but these are a minority, and there are also Higher Critics who are not only loyal to the Divine revelation in Scripture, but whose work may be described as largely constructive. Higher criticism itself is neutral; it has no bias; it is a scientific process. The champions of accepted views are compelied to use this process when arguing with scholars who take up positions with which they disagree. But, strictly speaking, it is not a controversial weapon. It is a powerful instrument for ascertaining facts about the history of the Bible. Seeing, however, that a certain amount of odium has been attached to the titlehowever unwarrantablyperhaps it would be better to substitute a phrase less liable to misinterpretationsuch as the expression Historical method. For in point of fact it is in the application of this method, which has been found so fruitful in other regions of study, to the Bible, that the actual work of the Higher Criticism is carried on. The several parts of Scripture are viewed in their places in the total development of the literature to which they belong, with regard to the spirit of the times in which they were produced, and as themselves throwing light on the problem of their own origin and purpose. In place of the external evidence of testimony conjoined to mere tradition, attention is now given more carefully to the internal evidence of literary and doctrinal characteristics.

Traces of the Higher Criticism are to be discovered among the Fathers, e.g. in Origen with his discussion of the authorship of Hebrews, in Dionysius of Alexandrias critical objections to the ascription of the Revelation to the author of the Fourth Gospel, etc. It was revived at the Renaissance by Reuchlin and Erasmus, and it was fearlessly pursued by Martin Luther. But the scientific development of the method begins with Michaelis (1750) and Semler (1771), especially the latter, for Michaelis did not fully develop his critical views till he issued the 4th ed. of his Introduction to the NT (1788). Eichhorn went further in raising a criticism of the NT Canon (1804), and was opposed by Hug, a Roman Catholic writer, in a very scholarly work. A little later came de Wette (1826), who pursued the new critical method with moderation and great precision of scholarship. Credner followed on similar lines (1836). Meanwhile Guericke, Olshausen, and Neander opposed the contemporary trend of criticism. A new departure was taken by Ferdinand Christian Baur in 1831, who introduced the tendency criticism, the result of which has come to be known as the Tbingen hypothesis, according to which there was a sharp division in the early Church between St. Paul and the twelve Apostles, and which regarded the several NT books as in some cases inspired by the tendency of one or other of these parties, and as in other cases written with a view to effect a reconciliation between them in the interest of a subsequent Catholic unity. Zeller (1842) and Schwegler (1846) followed on the same lines. A little later (1850) one of Baurs disciples, Albrecht Ritschl, threw a bombshell into the Tbingen camp by starting from the same position as his master, but advancing to very different conclusions. The Tbingen hypothesis was advocated in England by S. Davidson; but its extreme positions have been given up by most scholars, although it had a later representative in Hilgenfeld, and its spirit has been continued in Pfleiderer.

Meanwhile new problems have emerged, represented in a free critical manner by the Holtzmanns, Weizscker, Wernle, etc., while the Ritschlian school has been brought down to recent times in Harnack, Jlicher, etc. A line of negative criticism, first seen in Bruno Bauer (1850), who gave up all historicity in the Gospels, and denied the genuineness of any of St. Pauls Epistles, was revived during the latter part of the 19th cent. in Holland, by Loman and Steck. Schmiedel took up an extreme negative position with regard to the Gospels, but he has since modified it, and Van Manen has argued against the genuineness of all St. Pauls Epistles. In the second half of the last cent. the historicity of the Gospels and the genuineness of all the Pauline Epistles were maintained by Lightfoot, Westcott, Hort, and others in the first rank of scholarship. Zahn, with great learning, argues for a conservative position, and the tendency of the mediating school represented by Harnack and Jlicher is to admit the genuineness of much the greater part of the NT, the exceptions with this school being especially Eph., 2 Thess., the Pastorals, 1 and 2Peter, James. There is a tendency to connect the Fourth Gospel more closely with St. John, even among those who do not attribute it immediately to the pen of the Apostle.

Criticism came later into contact with the OT; but here it has been much more revolutionary, and not only extremists but nearly all scholars of eminence have now come to agreement with regard to the main points of the new position. It may be said to have commenced with Lessing and Herder in their literary treatment of Scripture; but this did not seriously affect the historical position. That was first attacked on modern critical lines by Vatke early in the 19th cent., but his work met with universal disapproval, due in a great measure to its difficult Hegelianism. We come to more intelligible positions in Ewald, the first edition of whose History of Israel appeared in 184352, and contained criticism of authorities, four of which he distinguished in the Pentateuch. Then K. H. Graf (1866), following hints of Reuss, dropped in the lecture-room, but never published by that cautious scholar, put forth the hypothesis which became the basis of the subsequently developed theory of the early history of Israel, and thus gave rise to the phrase the Grafian hypothesis, according to which the Priestly legislation of the Pentateuch came later than Deuteronomy, and was only incorporated with the earlier work of the Deuteronomist after the Exile. Meanwhile Colenso was working at the historical difficulties of the Pentateuch, and he was followed by Kuenen, whose Religion of Israel (186970) drew attention to the great 8th cent. prophets as affording the true basis of that religion, rather than the Pentateuch which is later in date, and the references of which to earlier times can be best appreciated after a study of the prophets. This study of the prophets, as the key to the OT, was greatly promoted in England by Robertson Smith, who also introduced the newer views of the OT generally to English readers. Wellhausens History of Israel (1878) worked out a view of the early history, on the basis of the analysis of the documents along the lines laid down by Graf, with such clearness and force that his positions have come to be accepted by most OT scholars, especially as they were subsequently more fully developed (1884). Reuss, after keeping silence on the subject for half a century, published his own views on the OT (1879), and these also tended to confirm the Grafian theory. Even Franz Delitzsch, after long maintaining a conservative standpoint, moved at last a good way towards the accepted theory, and thus proved his openness of mind and loyalty to truth. Less radical positions than that of Kuenen and Wellhausen have been defended by Dillmann, Schrader, Nldeke, Strack, Ryssel, Kittel. On the other hand, we see in Duhm, among the more recent critics, an advance of disintegrating criticism, especially with regard to the prophets; and a quite unique attitude is taken up by Cheyne. But English scholars are more in agreement with the views of Driver and G. Adam Smith, who accept the main positions of Wellhausen and assign a primary place to the prophets as the chief exponents of the higher religion of Israel, in which the world possesses a genuine revelation of the mind and will of God of the highest value for all ages.

W. F. Adeney.

Fuente: Hastings’ Dictionary of the Bible

Criticism

(Kant.) An investigation of the nature and limits of reason and knowledge, conducted in a manner to avoid both dogmatism and skepticism. The term is generally used to designate Kant’s thought after 1770. See Kantianism. — O.F.K.

Fuente: The Dictionary of Philosophy