Silanus the Christian

by Edwin Abbott Abbott

CHAPTER XX
SCAURUS ON FORGIVENESS

At this point, Scaurus had drawn two lines, thus:

Then the letter continued, “These two lines, my dear Silanus, represent two portions of Mark’s ‘gospel’—which word you know, I presume, that the Christians use, as the Greeks do, to mean ‘good news.’ Well, the short thin line represents the portion given by Mark to the moral precepts or sayings of Christ. The long thick line represents the portion given to framework—for example, to describing a certain John, called the Baptist, who, so to speak, introduces Christ to the people; to casting out devils; to healing specified diseases, fever, leprosy, paralysis, blindness, deafness, dumbness, lameness; to the raising up of a child apparently dead; to the destruction of a herd of swine by suffering devils to enter into them; to walking on water; to calming a tempest; to a feeding (or rather two feedings) of thousands of men with a few loaves and fishes; to blasting a fig-tree (but that comes later on); to the character of Herod the tetrarch, and his birth-day feasting, ending in the beheading of the above-mentioned John; to the finding of an ass by the disciples in exact accordance with Christ’s predictions and precepts; lastly, to very minute details of Christ’s trial and crucifixion. There are also a few fables, called parables, likening the good news, or gospel, to seed, which will not grow if sown in wrong places but will grow without man’s interference if sown rightly. But, all this while, about the good news itself, and about its nature, and about the persons to whom the good news is to be brought, and about the good that it will do people—hardly one word! Do not take my word for this. Take your own copy of Mark and look at the first words of Jesus, ‘Repent and believe the gospel.’ But what gospel? Jesus has not mentioned the word before. This is a specimen of the whole work. It is not a gospel at all. It leaves out essential things. It is only the frame of a gospel.”

I did not see at first how to answer this. But on looking into the matter it seemed to me that Scaurus had not noticed Mark’s first words, “The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ as it is written in Isaiah the prophet.” Moreover Christ’s first words were not “Repent,” but “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God hath drawn near. Repent and believe in the gospel.” Now the first mention of “preaching the gospel” in Isaiah is in a passage that begins thus: “Comfort ye, comfort ye, my people, saith God … because her humiliation is fulfilled, her sin is loosed.… The voice of one crying in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord … and the glory of the Lord shall appear and all flesh shall see the salvation of God …”; and soon afterwards come the words, “Unto a high mountain get thee up, O thou that preachest the gospel to Sion.” A marginal note in my Isaiah said that—instead of “her humiliation is fulfilled”—the right translation was “her time of service is fulfilled,” which resembled Mark, “The time is fulfilled”—words omitted by Matthew and Luke.

Reviewing Mark and Isaiah together, I came to the conclusion that Mark took for granted that his readers would refer to the passage in Isaiah, and that he meant, in effect, this: “The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ was the fulfilment of Isaiah’s gospel (namely, ‘Comfort ye my people because the time is fulfilled and her sin is loosed’).” John the Baptist, according to Mark, fulfilled Isaiah’s prophecy. He was the voice crying in the wilderness, “Prepare the way,” namely, for this gospel of the salvation of God. Then came Jesus saying, in the words of Isaiah, “‘The time is fulfilled,’ that is, for the gospel of the ‘loosing of sins’; believe in this gospel.” Looked at in this way, Mark, though brief and obscure, did not seem to me to have “left out” what was (as Scaurus said) “essential,” but to have referred his readers to Isaiah for what was essential, if they were not already familiar with the passage, so that they might understand the meaning to be, “Believe in the gospel of the loosing, or forgiveness, of sins, predicted by Isaiah, and fulfilled now.”

Scaurus’s next objection was this: “Soon after telling us that Jesus called four men away from being fishers of fish to be ‘fishers of men’—without explaining the nature or object of this ‘fishing,’ Mark says, ‘Men were amazed at his teaching. For his way of teaching was that of one having authority and not as the way of the scribes.’ But what kind of ‘authority’? Listen to the rabble, how they define it (a few lines lower down). ‘What is this? A novel teaching! With authority does he dictate even to the unclean spirits and they obey him.’ Now Flavius Josephus has told me that he himself has known a conjurer or exorcist cast out an unclean spirit or demon—in the presence of Vespasian and his officers—and make it knock over a bucket of water in its exit: but he never told me—and you may be sure he would never have supposed—that the conjurer, on the strength of his exorcisms, would claim to preach a gospel!”

This struck me at first as a very forcible objection. And I was not surprised that Matthew omitted the whole of this narrative; for it is liable to be misunderstood. But I found on examination that Jesus did not (as Scaurus said) “claim to preach a gospel” on the strength of such exorcisms. On the contrary, Mark and Luke say soon afterwards, that Jesus “would not allow the demons to speak because they knew him.” Moreover I found that the man from whom the demon was said to have been expelled cried out that Jesus was “the Holy One of God.” So it appeared possible that Jesus—if he possessed, like Apollo or Æsculapius, some divine power of healing—might heal lunatics or possessed persons among others, and yet might not claim, on the strength of such exorcisms alone, to preach a gospel. From what I had read in Paul’s epistles, and also from my recent reading of Isaiah’s prediction of the “gospel,” it seemed to me more likely that Jesus would connect his gospel—though what the connexion would be I did not yet see—with the forgiveness of sins.

And this indeed I found to be the subject of Scaurus’s next objection; “Then Jesus says that he will cure a man of paralysis in order that the spectators ‘may know that the Son of man hath authority on earth to forgive sins.’ Now this is the first mention of ‘the Son of man.’ Who, or of what nature, is this Son of man? There is no answer.”

Scaurus spoke thus, perhaps, because he had in his mind some passages in the Jewish scriptures where a “son of man” is described as coming on the clouds to judge mankind, and others where a “son of man” means “son of a mere mortal.” He may have thought that Mark ought to have explained which of the two was meant.