[Even in the pertinent observations of Wellhausen and Nestle] we feel the absence of a careful separation of Hebrew and Aramaic possibilities.... He [Wellhausen] must be reminded that the Jewish literature to this day is still mainly composed in Hebrew.
These may suffice to illustrate the point. Few of the other experts escape Dalman’s Ithuriel spear; and as he frankly confesses past blunders of his own, it is not to be doubted that some of the others have returned his thrusts.[3] Supposing then that this body of experts, so many of them deep in Aramaic, so opposed to each other on so many issues clearly within the field of their special studies, were to unite in affirming the historicity of the Gospel Jesus, what would their consensus signify? Simply that they were agreed in affirming the unknown, the improbable, and the unprovable, while they disputed over the known. Their special studies do not give them the slightest special authority to pronounce upon such an issue. It is one of historic inference upon a mass of data which they among them have made common property so far as it was not so already, in the main documents and in previous literature. Dalman, who takes for granted the historicity of Jesus and apparently of the tradition in general, pronounces (p. 9) that
the actual discourses of Jesus in no way give the impression that He had grown up in rural solitude and seclusion. It is true only that He, like the Galileans generally in that region, would have little contact with literary erudition.
If Professor Dalman cannot see that the proposition in the first sentence is extremely disturbing to the traditional belief in its Unitarian form, and that the second is a mere petitio principii which cannot save the situation, other people can see it. His scholarship gives him no “eminent domain” over logic; and it does not require a knowledge of Aramaic to detect the weakness of his reasoning. Fifty experts in Aramaic carry no weight for a thinking man on such a non-linguistic issue; and he who defers to them as if they did is but throwing away his birthright. When again Dalman writes (p. 60) that “Peter must have appeared ([Acts x, 24]) from a very early date as a preacher in the Greek language,” he again raises an insoluble problem for the traditionalists of all schools, and his scholarly status is quite irrelevant to that.
When, yet again, he writes (p. 71) that “what is firmly established is only the fact that Jesus spoke in Aramaic to the Jews,” his mastery of Aramaic has nothing to do with the case. He is merely taking for granted the historicity of the main tradition; and until he faces the problems he has ignored (having, as he may fairly claim, been occupied with others), and repelled the criticisms which that tradition incurs, his vote on the unconsidered issue has no more value to a rational judgment than any other. I have seldom read a scholarly treatise more satisfying than his within its special field, or more provocative of astonishment at the extent to which specialism can close men’s eyes to the problems which overlap or underlie theirs.
And that is the consideration that has to be realized by those who talk of scholarship (meaning simply what is called New Testament scholarship) settling a historical problem which turns upon anthropology, mythology, hierology, psychology, and literary and historical science in general. On these sides the scholars in question, “Wir Gelehrten vom Fach,” as the German specialists call themselves in the German manner, are not experts at all, not even amateurs, inasmuch as they have never even realized that those other sciences are involved. They have fallen into the rôle of the pedant, properly so-called, who presumes to regulate life by inapplicable knowledge. And even those who are wholly free of this presumptuous pedantry, the sober, courteous, and sane scholars like Professor Schmiedel, whose candour enables him to contribute a preface to such a book as Professor W. B. Smith’s Der vorchristliche Jesus, to whose thesis he does not assent—even these, as we have seen, can fail to realize the scope of the problem to the discussion of which they have contributed.
Professor Schmiedel’s careful argument from “derogatory” episodes in the gospel of Mark, be it repeated, is not merely inconclusive; it elicits a rebuttal which turns it into a defeat. Inadequate even on the textual side, it is wholly fallacious on the hierological and the mythological; and no more than the ordinary conservative polemic does it recognize the sociological problem involved. For those who seek to study history comprehensively and comprehendingly, the residuum of the conservative case is a blank incredibility. Even Dalman, after the closest linguistic and literary analysis, has left the meaning of “the Kingdom of God” a conundrum;[4] and the conservative case finally consists in asserting that Christianity as a public movement arose in the simple announcement of that conundrum—the mere utterance of the formula—throughout Palestine by a body of twelve apostles, who for the rest “cast out devils,” as instructed by their Teacher. The “scholarship” which contentedly rests facing that vacuous conception is a scholarship not qualified finally to handle a great historical problem as such. It conducts itself exactly as did Biblical scholarship so long in face of the revelations of geology, and as did Hebrew scholarship so long over the problem of the Tabernacle in the wilderness.
Deeply learned men, in the latter case, went on for generations solemnly re-writing history in the terms of the re-arranged documents, when all the while the history was historic myth—perceptible as such to a Zulu who had lived in a desert. And when the Zulu’s teacher proved the case by simple arithmetic, he met at the hands alike of pedants and of pietists a volley of malignant vituperation, the “religious” expert Maurice excelling many of the most orthodox in the virulence of his scorn; while the pontifical Arnold, from the Olympian height of his amateurism, severely lectured Colenso for not having written in Latin.
Until the scholars and the amateurs alike renounce their own presumption, their thrice stultified airs of finality, their estimate of their prejudice and their personal equation as a revelation from within, and their sacerdotal conviction that their science is the science of every case, they will have to be unkindly reminded that they are but blunderers like other men, that in their own specialties they convict each other of errors without number, and that the only path to truth is that of the eternal free play and clash of all manner of criticism. It is an exceptionally candid orthodox scholar who writes: “It is a law of the human mind that combating error is the best way to advance knowledge. They who have never joined in controversy have no firm grasp of truth. Hateful and unchristian as theological disputes are apt to become, they have this merit, that they open our eyes.”[5] Let the conservative disputants then be content to put their theses and their arguments like other men, to meet argument with argument when they can, and to hold their peace when they have nothing better to add than boasts and declamation.
Before the end of the nineteenth century the very school which we are asked to regard as endowed with quasi-papal powers in matters of historical criticism was declared by one of its leading representatives in Germany to have been on a wrong track for fifty years. In the words of Professor Blass:—