In Defence of the Faith The Gospels as Historical Documents
[The writer of this article, Prof. C.' H. Turner, is Dean Ireland Professor of Exegesis and Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford. He is one of the greatest living authorities on the New Testament, and an experienced student of the early history of the Church.] PERHAPS nothing in the early history of the Christian church is more remarkable than the instinctive " canonization," somewhere about the middle of the second century after Christ, of the documents that we know as the Four Gospels. Without any formal decisions, without any elaborate process of comparison or dis- cussion, without (so far as we know) any difference of opinion, the communities' of Christians from one end of the great Church to the other found theMselves agreed in regarding four particular accounts of the Life and Teaching of their Founder as alone authoritative. It was not that there were no possible rivals in existence ; you might even find here and there that an isolated com- munity made public use of some such writing other than the Four. But the exceptions were few and short-lived. No one in the Church ever represented the view that there were in fact either more Gospels or fewer than these. Whatever sporadic exceptions there were as to Epistles or Revelations, no manuscript of the Gospels as a whole was ever written, so far as the evidence goes to show, no case of rolls in earlier days had been complete, unless it contained the works of our Four Evangelists and no more.
Now this segregation of four documents into a class by themselves implied already some conclusions as to qualities possessed by them and not by any of their possible competitors. Either they were more ancient and so nearer to the events of which they professed to tell, or they were more authoritative because their writers occupied a more responsible position, or both. Whoever were the actual writers, all four were " apos- tolic," and were conceived as supplying a sure guarantee of what had been believed and taught about Christ from apostolic days and by apostolic tradition. These second- century Christians may have been wrong in their view of the amount of direct responsibility of the Apostle Matthew for the Gospel that bears his name ; they may have been wrong in their identification of the John to whose reflections and reminiscences the latest of the Four Gospels owed its birth. It does not follow that they were misled when they accepted each of the four as making, in contradistinction with all the rest, its own special contribution to the picture of the historic Christ.
But in the process of critical analysis it is natural and necessary to begin with the documents of most certain authorship, Mark and Luke, and as between them with the document of earliest date and most homogeneous origin, the Gospel according to St. Mark, written at Rome not much, if at all, later than A.D. 65.
Now the striking thing about this Gospel is the extent to which use was made of it by other writers of Gospels in the half or three-quarters of a century that followed its publication. After 150 A.D. it was superseded by the other and longer accounts of the Life of Jesus. But the three other canonical Gospels, and the one non-canonical Gospel of which a substantial fragment survives, all draw—and draw independently of one another—on Mark. Matthew incorporates, at one place or another in his Gospel, practically, the whole of- Mark : Luke, at „several different places, inserts en bloc long sections based on Mark ; John perhaps did not know either Matthew or Luke, but of Mark his knowledge is indu- bitable : the unorthodoX Gospel of Peter probably made use of all four canonical Gospels, but made far greater use of Mark than of the other three. To what did the Gospel of Mark owe this prerogative position ?
The 'answer on the side of external evidence is clear : Christian tradition was unanimous that Mark's Gospel Stood in some special relation to the leading apostle St. Peter. Does internal evidence bear out or not the data of tradition ?
There are two main features of this Gospel which seem to take. us back straight into the most intimate company of the original disciples and to their first-hand reminis- cences of the Ministry of Jesus. One of these is the habitual use of the plural in the course of the narrative where Matthew and Luke tend to say " He came," or the like, Mark tends to say, " They 'came "—the events are told, that is to say, from the point of view not of a his- torian of events so much as of one of the actors in them. If Mark is translating Peter's oral story into a written one, Peter would have put it, " We came." And the other feature that reproduces experiences, it seems, as they really happened, is the picture given us of the Master's gradual' education of the apostles, and of the apostles' gradual assimilation of the teaching and response to it, a response in which Peter, with whatever failures and hesitations, leads the way. No other Gospel represents for us, as this does, the evolution of a disciple's faith.
Historically, then, Mark has unique value as in the main embodying the straightforward record of an Apostle's companionship of his Master. Luke's Gospel stands at the opposite pole to Mark's, as the most elabo- rate in contrast to the least elaborate of the Four. He is a Greek, a man of education and culture, a historian with the consciousness of a historian's responsibility, who sets himself to collect evidence wherever it is available, and welds it together to present a finished and rounded portrait of the life and teaching of One, who though He lived and taught on the narrow stage of Judaism and Palestine had a universal message, for Greek as well as Jew, for women as well as men, for the poor and sinful and outcast as much as for the righteous or the respectable. Of all the Evangelists, Luke has perhaps the most con- scious purpose in his work, and for this he uses a con- summate literary and artistic gift. His Gospel has been well called " the most beautiful book ever written " and perhaps its appeal has been the most widely flung of all the Four. What his sources were or how he used them, we can only tell for certain in his relation to St. Mark : we may guess that he was in contact with some- one once of Herod's court, and .perhaps even with the Mother of Jesus : all that we know of him as author of the Acts confirms the expectation raised by the preface to the Gospel that in his collection of material he was careful and accurate and depended on original authorities. In the setting of the story his evidence would not compete with that of Mark : but so far as his main preoccupation was with the faithful transcription of the Sayings and Parables of the Master,, may it not be said that they carry on the face of them the guarantee of, their authen- ticity ? The Gospel known by the name of Matthew contains much that is common to it with Mark, and a good deal that is common_ to it with Luke. But it has also a good-deal of matter peculiar to itself, and here we are more in the dark than in any other _ part of the criticism of the Gospels. We can see-that " Matthew is more specially interested than any other Gospel in the relation of Christianity with Judaism, and it is natural to conclude that it was composed on or not far from the soil of Palestine. But - if it always remained the standard authority among Jewish Christians, it also enjoyed at least equal vogue with the others among Christians at large. Presumably its origins had some near connexion with the Apostle Matthew ; and yet, as we have it, it bears clear traces, in contradistinction, to the other three, of an element of legend. If the theory, much in vogue among recent German .scholars, that the Gospels grew up by accretion of isolated tales that had passed from mouth to mouth among groups of rustic disciples, has any basis in fact at all, it is only in regard to the Matthaean Gospel that we can find any real room for it. " Matthew," in fact, may have had a more composite origin than either "Mark," "Luke," or "John."
The Fourth Gospel has for long been the storm-centre of criticism. I do not myself think that it is the work of the son of Zebedee : on the other hand, I am con- vinced that it enshrines the testimony of an eye-witness, and I am convinced that in one important respect it stands with. " Mark " over against" Matthew " and "Luke." All four were written in Greek. Wellhausen was wrong in thinking that "Mark," Burney was wrong in thinking that "John," was written in Aramaic; but these scholars were so far right that the authors of both these Gospels were men who thought in their native Semitic tongue. John's Greek is indeed more correct than Mark's ; but in the structure of the sentences, in all that underlies the actual Greek, his Gospel is perhaps even more impregnated than Mark's with a vernacular atmosphere. By thought and upbringing John is a Jew of Palestine. He is acquainted at first hand with the events and their setting : if sometimes the old man's memory plays. him false, sometimes also he intervenes with telling effect to set right mistakes or misapprehensions of the earlier narrative. Mainly, however, his historical contribution as an Evangelist is to supplement what, save for the last week, was the story of a Ministry outside Jerusalem with the happenings on the occasions of various visits to the feasts. Jesus had all his life been accustomed to go up, we may suppose, with His family, and the evidence hardly suggests that, at least in the earlier days of the Galilead Ministry, His disciples replaced His family as His companions on His visits to Jerusalem. John therefore, a dweller at Jerusalem, records another side of the Master's activity, unknown in detail to the Gali- laean apostles, and, just because his moments of intimacy were occasional and brief, pondered the fragments of teaching that came to him with intenser concentration. The other Gospels give us more, much more, of what we may believe, allowance made for rendering from Aramaic into Greek, to be actual sayings of Jesus. It may be that the language used in the teaching at Jerusalem was not quite of the same type as that used to the Galilean followers, and in any case it has come to us through the medium of fifty years' reflective thought of an ardent disciple. But though historically Mark, the amanuensis of Peter, is the primary fount of our knowledge of the Life lived in Palestine nineteen hundred years ago, each of the other evangelists adds in his different degree something indispensable to the completeness of the [Next week Dr. Gordon Selwyn will write on " The Miracu- lous Elements in the Gospels." Previous articles in this series have been : " Philosophy and Religion," by the Archbishop of York, " The Elements of Religion," by Professor Albert A. Cock, of University College, Southampton, " Evolution and Revealed Religion," by Dr. Charles E. Raven, and " The Nature of Christ," by Dr. Alfred Garvie, Principal of New College, Hampstead, and Hackney College.]
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