Phases of Faith; Or, Passages from the History of My Creed

by Francis William Newman

At the same time I had reached the conclusion that large deductions must be made from the credit of these old prophecies.

First, as to the Book of Daniel: the 11th chapter is closely historical down to Antiochus Epiphanes, after which it suddenly becomes false; and according to different modern expositors, leaps away to Mark Antony, or to Napoleon Buonaparte, or to the Papacy. Hence we have a prima facie presumption that the book was composed in the reign of that Antiochus; nor can it be proved to have existed earlier: nor is there in it one word of prophecy which can be shown to have been fulfilled in regard to any later era. Nay, the 7th chapter also is confuted by the event; for the great Day of Judgment has not followed upon the fourth[19] Monarchy.

Next, as to the prophecies of the Pentateuch. They abound, as to the times which precede the century of Hezekiah; higher than which we cannot trace the Pentateuch.[20] No prophecy of the Pentateuch can be proved to have been fulfilled, which had not been already fulfilled before Hezekiah's day.

Thirdly, as to the prophecies which concern various nations,—some of them are remarkably verified, as that against Babylon; others failed, as those of Ezekiel concerning Nebuchadnezzar's wars against Tyre and Egypt. The fate predicted against Babylon was delayed for five centuries, so as to lose all moral meaning as a divine infliction on the haughty city.—On the whole, it was clear to me, that it is a vain attempt to forge polemical weapons out of these old prophets, for the service of modern creeds.[21]

V. My study of John's gospel had not enabled me to sustain Dr.
Arnold's view, that it was an impregnable fortress of Christianity.

In discussing the Apocalypse, I had long before felt a doubt whether we ought not rather to assign that book to John the apostle in preference to the Gospel and Epistles: but this remained only as a doubt. The monotony also of the Gospel had often excited my wonder. But I was for the first time offended, on considering with a fresh mind an old fact,—the great similarity of the style and phraseology in the third chapter, in the testimony of the Baptist, as well as in Christ's address to Nicodemus, that of John's own epistle. As the three first gospels have their family likeness, which enables us on hearing a text to know that it comes out of one of the three, though we perhaps know not which; so is it with the Gospel and Epistles of John. When a verse is read, we know that it is either from an epistle of John, or else from the Jesus of John; but often we cannot tell which. On contemplating the marked character of this phenomenon, I saw it infallibly[22] to indicate that John has made both the Baptist and Jesus speak, as John himself would have spoken; and that we cannot trust the historical reality of the discourses in the fourth gospel.

That narrative introduces an entirely new phraseology, with a perpetual discoursing about the Father and the Son; of which there is barely the germ in Matthew:—and herewith a new doctrine concerning the heaven-descended personality of Jesus. That the divinity of Christ cannot be proved from the three first gospels, was confessed by the early Church, and is proved by the labouring arguments of the modern Trinitarians. What then can be dearer, than that John has put into the mouth of Jesus the doctrines of half a century later, which he desired to recommend?

When this conclusion pressed itself first on my mind, the name of Strauss was only beginning to be known in England, and I did not read his great work until years after I had come to a final opinion on this whole subject. The contemptuous reprobation of Strauss in which it is fashionable for English writers to indulge, makes it a duty to express my high sense of the lucid force with which he unanswerably shows that the fourth gospel (whoever the author was) is no faithful exhibition of the discourses of Jesus. Before I had discerned this so vividly in all its parts, it had become quite certain to me that the secret colloquy with Nicodemus, and the splendid testimony of the Baptist to the Father and the Son, were wholly modelled out of John's own imagination. And no sooner had I felt how severe was the shock to John's general veracity, than a new and even graver difficulty rose upon me.

The stupendous and public event of Lazarus's resurrection,—the circumstantial cross-examination of the man born blind and healed by Jesus,—made those two miracles, in Dr. Arnold's view, grand and unassailable bulwarks of Christianity. The more I considered them, the mightier their superiority seemed to those of the other gospels. They were wrought at Jerusalem, under the eyes of the rulers, who did their utmost to detect them, and could not; but in frenzied despair, plotted to kill Lazarus. How different from the frequently vague and wholesale statements of the other gospels concerning events which happened where no enemy was watching to expose delusion! many of them in distant and uncertain localities.

But it became the more needful to ask; How was it that the other writers omitted to tell of such decisive exhibitions? Were they so dull in logic, as not to discern the superiority of these? Can they possibly have known of such miracles, wrought under the eyes of the Pharisees, and defying all their malice, and yet have told in preference other less convincing marvels? The question could not be long dwelt on, without eliciting the reply: "It is necessary to believe, at least until the contrary shall be proved, that the three first writers either had never heard of these two miracles, or disbelieved them." Thus the account rests on the unsupported evidence of John, with a weighty presumption against its truth.