Just thus, ye needs must apprehend what truth I see, reduced to plain historic fact, Diminished into clearness, proved a point And far away: ye would withdraw your sense From out eternity, strain it upon time, Then stand before that fact, that Life and Death, Stay there at gaze, till it dispart, dispread, As though a star should open out, all sides, This is assumed to have been said by St. John, the supposed writer of the fourth gospel, just as, late in the first century, he was about to die. II Source-Gospels and Logia.1 Meanwhile, through the preaching of apostolic eyewitnesses, there were gradually accumulated stores of reminiscence, in which Jesus' words and acts were recounted from mouth to mouth, and circulated from one church to another, until a goodly body of such material was in general possession and used for teaching purposes. How such facts of Jesus' ministry would pass into common currency may be illustrated by a quotation made by St. Paul in one of his discourses (Acts xx, 35), in which he, though not an ear-witness, refers to a saying of Jesus, not elsewhere recorded, which evidently he and his hearers had obtained from common and well-known report. A store of such things was gradually accumulating (cf. 1 Tim. vi, 3 for recognition of these) and keeping alive in the thought of the Christian communities the mind of the Master. This material, by constant retelling, assumed a kind of stereotyped form, which favored the purity and carefulness of the tradition. One man's reminiscence would be corrected or tempered by another's, and the sense of its sacred import would deter the reverent disciples from taking liberties with it. Doubtless, too, this material was in various centers noted down in writing, and thus in a measure secured from fanciful additions and exaggerations. That there were such 1 Cf. Hill," Introduction to the Life of Christ," pp. 26 ff. written collections seems certain from the fact that the same event is told with variations in the different gospels, and yet with a general uniformity of phraseology which betokens a general base of supplies. There could not have been very many such collections in existence, however, before the gospels as we have them began to be compiled, else more traces of them would be found. NOTE. In the preface to his gospel St. Luke speaks of narratives in such a way as to indicate that by his time gospel-making was quite vigorous. These were evidently so imperfect, however, that his own gospel and those of the other evangelists drove them out by the survival of the fittest. In Pick, " Paralipomena: Remains of Gospels and Sayings of Christ," is a carefully compiled collection of fragments and scattered sayings from all the early sources that have been discovered. Of the supposable first-hand gospel sources, three main ones may be named which by tradition have been associated Personal with three of the immediate apostles. Sources 1. With the apostle Peter has been associated a plain and vigorous narrative, now identified with the Gospel of Mark, which Justin Martyr (cir. 100–165) calls the Memorabilia of Peter.1 Its connection with Peter is not absolutely proved, though very possible and natural. From the fact that the events of the last week are more full and vivid than the rest, it seems certain that the writer was a resident of Jerusalem and an eyewitness who, as it would seem, added material of his own to what he had heard from St. Peter. One uncoördinated incident (Mark xiv, 51, 52) seems quite motiveless unless it happened to the narrator himself, who, if this is so, was then a young man. This may well have been John Mark, who afterward was an attendant of the apostles (Acts xii, 25; xv, 37, 39), whom Peter calls "his son "" (1 Pet. v, 13), and in whose mother's house the early Christians used to gather (Acts xii, 12). The association of this gospel with Peter is thus very probable. 1 See Burkitt, "Earliest Sources for the Life of Jesus," p. 84. 2. With the apostle Matthew, on much less definite grounds, is associated a body of so-called logia, or sayings of Jesus, written first in Aramaic. These, however, may have been mere fugitive notes of Jesus' discourses, and perhaps of the coincidences between events of Jesus' life and prophecy, such as are numerous in Matthew's gospel. It is Papias who attributes such a body of sayings to the publican disciple Matthew, but the original document is hopelessly lost, and it cannot be determined what it contained. Withthe compiling of finished gospels it would naturally disappear. 3. With the apostle John is associated the fourth gospel; this because he is identified with "the disciple whom Jesus loved," who, according to the testimonial appended to the gospel," is the disciple that beareth witness of these things, and wrote these things" (John xxi, 24). Neither is this disciple's name given, nor is John's name mentioned in the gospel; and it is only by tradition that John's name is associated with the composition of it. What is of more importance, however, is the fact that if written by the disciple in question the gospel is an eyewitness source. The first-hand material that it contains, however, has in the course of many years (for the gospel was at all events written near the end of the century), with the change due to time and ripened meditation, assumed a character very different from that of the other gospels. This has caused scholars to consider it in a class by itself, apart from the synoptics. It will come up for later consideration, as belonging to the Literature of Values.1 Besides the accounts traceable to the apostles themselves, it is not unlikely that single episodes or discourses of Jesus' ministry may have circulated in detached documents,2 and afterwards have been incorporated in the completed gospels. His discourse on the Last Times, Mark xiii and Matthew xxiv, which would have special significance for its bearing 1 See "The Story Told Once More," pp. 645-651, below. 2 See Burkitt, "The Gospel History and its Transmission," pp. 62, 127. on the parousia, would be a likely case in point. The story of the woman taken in adultery (John viii, 1-11), which is lacking in many ancient manuscripts and yet has on it the hall-mark of authenticity, may be another example. Nor will it do to ignore the numerous reminiscences of unnamed persons which must have been forthcoming when our gospels began to be compiled; much as stories of the life of Lincoln are collected nowadays. It will be noted that about the same time has elapsed since Lincoln's death as had then elapsed since the crucifixion, and we can think how easy it was to verify or correct, for permanent record, stories that had acquired a more or less stereotyped form by oral recounting. St. Luke intimates in his preface (Luke i, 2) that some of his information came from individual sources. His account of the birth of John the Baptist and of the birth and infancy of Jesus (Luke i and ii), if not pure invention, must have been of this private sort. Of the three synoptic gospels as we have them, Mark, which was the earliest written, may be regarded as also a Summary of source-gospel, the only one that has come down Apparent to us intact. It is made the basis of their comSources piled gospels by the authors both of Matthew and of Luke; in fact, the substance of almost every verse of Mark may be found in one or both of them. It furnished the biographical and chronological backbone for the composite gospel narrative - a groundwork of plan from which the others may at times digress, but to which they return. Besides this primitive gospel, the authors of Matthew and Luke drew from another source, which the critics call Q (for the German Quelle, "source"), especially for the discourses of Jesus. This may be the source that Papias meant when he spoke of the logia, or sayings of Matthew, but there is no certainty. In addition to these, Luke had certain unknown sources of his own, both for the infancy and. early years and for the latter part of the ministry. From these unknown sources he has drawn some of the most significant parables, like that of the Lost Son, of the Good Samaritan, of Dives and Lazarus, and of the Pharisee and the Publican. Already, when he begins to write, he says that "many have taken in hand to draw up a narrative"; which implies that he had much material to sift and adjust to his purpose. III The Synoptic Gospels as Completed. Beginning with the earliest written, the Gospel of Mark, we find in the successive gospels a kind of gradation. From a literature of pure fact or reportage, such as would come from a plain and forthright mind like that of Peter, through rising degrees of a growing sense for values, we find in the other gospels a tendency to add coloring and interpretative elements. This corresponds to the growing consciousness on the part of the Christian communities, as time went on, of deeper meanings in Christ's personality and ministry, and the desire to coördinate these meanings with the known values of life. The same spiritual desire and growth have continued until this day, and will always continue; creating in a true sense an unending Bible, as each new generation sees things in new lights and applications. The gospels embody but the first stage and tendency, the stage suited to the development of a New Testament canon; and in this stage, even in the case of the latest gospel, that of John, these reports of Jesus' life and words remain essentially a literature of fact. This gospel answers not unfitly to what we should naturally expect if we assumed it to have come, as tradition says, from 1. The Gospel the preaching of Peter. One of his reported discourses in the Book of Acts, indeed, contains a kind of epitome of this whole gospel in a few verses. Peter himself was an apostolic preacher and leader, not a man of of Mark |