“I do not think,” says Blass, “that either the former or the latter of these foretellings is very distinct, since there are neither names given nor peculiar circumstances indicated; only the common order of events is described....” That will certainly not hold in respect of the “shall not leave in thee one stone on another,” or the “cast up a bank about thee,” which is a distinct specification of the Roman siege method of 70.
But let us follow up the implication, which is that a Jewish vaticinator, mindful of Daniel, might about the year 30 so predict the events of the year 70, and a world of other events which never happened, without astonishing us more than does Savonarola.
As we shall see, not only the circumstantial details but the remainder of the prediction completely exclude the idea of fortuitous real vaticination, even if it be argued that prophecies of quite visionary prodigies may conceivably have been made at any date. As to the prophecy of the fall of the temple, which is common to the three synoptics, the Professor leaves it “out of the present discussion,” seeing that the liberal theologians are willing to let it stand as a prophecy ante eventum. Certainly he may well contemn such a critical method. The prophecy as to the temple, and that in Matthew (xxiv, 3–31) and Mark (xiii, 3–27) as to the sequence of war, persecution, dissension, false prophets, evangelization of the whole world, the abomination of desolation in the holy place, false Christs (twice specified), signs and wonders, and the final cosmic catastrophe—all this is certainly on all fours, critically considered, with the presages in Luke. But how shall rational criticism be induced to take the whole mass of quasi-vaticination as the utterance of a wandering thaumaturg of the year 30? It is idle for Professor Blass to explain to us that when Luke makes Jesus say “Jerusalem shall be trodden down of the Gentiles,” with mere reminiscence of the Septuagint Daniel, and Matthew and Mark make him speak with exact reference to Sept. Dan. ix, end, they are citing independently from their original. Their original may just have been the cited passage in Daniel, with no intervening document. “It is self-evident,” says the Professor,[2] “that the real speech of Christ must have been longer than we read it now in any Gospel.” That thesis cannot be self-evident of which the subject invites and admits a wholly different explanation; and the “must” is a sample of the Professor’s critical ethic.
Similarly Dr. Petrie assumes that there were any number of logia current, all genuine, and that the gospel-makers simply cite from them wherever they are found appropriate to the circumstances of the moment. “These episodes, thus brought into prominence by the conditions of the time, were therefore incorporated in the Nucleus, or in the gospels which grew upon that.”[3] It now behoves us to consider that interesting development of traditionalist theory.
The Nucleus, be it explained, is Dr. Petrie’s substitute for the Primitive Gospel of the school of B. Weiss, and is constructed by the simple and certainly quite objective process of selecting “everything that is common to all three synoptics in a parallel text”—that is, occurring in all three in the same order. This is the “structural” test, and it yields a document which does not, like the Weiss selection, end before the Last Supper, but goes on to the Resurrection. But this Nucleus, be it noted, was practically complete almost immediately after the Founder’s death. The close “suggests a document drawn up within a few months of the final events.”[4] How, then, Dr. Petrie can speak of logia incorporated in the Nucleus in respect of the conditions of the time, is not very clear. By his account the prevalent Christian idea about the year 30, during the Ministry, “was the proper understanding of the law, which was not yet abrogated in any particular.” At this stage, accordingly, the Sermon on the Mount would be the prominent logion. “And when we notice how the fulfilling of the law is the main theme of the nucleus, and how little [even] of the completed Gospels refer to the Gentile problems, we must see how devoid of historic sense is the anachronism of supposing the main body of the Gospels to have originated as late as the Gentile period”[5] [i.e. 60–70!]. But in 40–50, with the spread of the Church, as set forth in the Acts, “the Samaritans were welcomed, and Gentile proselytes such as the centurion Cornelius”; whereupon the suitable logia would be added to the Gospels current. Then in 50–60, when the Gentiles began to enter in decisive numbers, there was “a special meaning in the parable of the Prodigal Son, and in the subjection to kings and rulers”; hence further embodiments. Then, after the fall of Jerusalem in 70, “Christianity lost its sense of any tie to Judaism.”
It will be admitted that this is a stirring change from the run of New Testament criticism of the past seventy years. That criticism more or less unconsciously recognized the problem set up by the entire ignorance of gospel teaching revealed in the Pauline and other epistles. Dr. Petrie, following Professor Blass in an unhesitating acceptance of the narrative of the Acts, simply ignores the Pauline problem altogether. He boldly credits the Church with a Gospel before Paul’s conversion, and, like other traditionalists, supplies Paul, the gospel-less, with a physician, Luke, who had collected from the scattered mass of logia more gospel than anybody else!
Thus has the pendulum swung back to the furthest extreme from that at which men carried down the Gospel dates to accommodate the data. As to chronology, Dr. Petrie is practically at the orthodox standpoint of Professor Salmon.[6] An objective and ostensibly scientific method, involving no element of personal bias or preference, is employed to make a selection from the Gospels which shall present as it were mathematically or statistically the earliest elements in the synoptics. On that selection, however, there is brought to bear no further critical principle whatever. It is assumed that it must all come from the traditional founder, a mass of whose utterances must have been committed by auditors to writing as they were delivered (the power to write being held to be common in Galilee and Judea in the first century because it was common in Egypt in the third); and a nucleus collection of these separate documents must have been made soon after the crucifixion, and there and then wound up. At any rate, such a collection is yielded by selecting the groups or blocks of matter which occur in all three synoptics in the same order; and this must have been made about the year 30, because it is mainly occupied with the problems of the law, and very little with “the Gentile problems” which so soon began to come to the front. The history of the Acts is here taken as unassailable ground, like the main Gospel record.
Two comments here at once suggest themselves. Dr. Petrie’s line of construction might with perfect congruity be employed to yield evidence that the assumed original Teacher was mainly concerned with problems of the law; and (2) the inferred multitude of original floating dicta may with immense gain in plausibility be transmuted into a series of interpolations made by different hands long after the supposed Founder’s death. For what critical right has Dr. Petrie to subsume a store of floating Jesuine dicta which supplied the Church, in its changing circumstances, for three or four decades, with suitable parables and teachings to meet every new problem? If you profess to seek a strictly impersonal principle of selection, why not apply a strictly impersonal principle of inference from the result?
Obviously the additional logia are far more likely to have been invented than found. Such a chronic windfall of papyri is a sufficiently fantastic hypothesis on the face of it, in no way justifiable from the recent discovery of a few enigmatic scraps that had not been embodied, and suggest no community of thought with those embodied. But even if we allow the probable existence of many floating leaves, where is the likelihood that their sayings all came from the same Teacher? In the terms of the hypothesis, he occupied himself mainly with the law (unless the lost logia outbulk the saved), while at the same time he duly provided for the Samaritans and the Gentiles! His disciples and apostles, nonetheless, paid no attention to these latter provisions until they found that such provisions were really necessary to accommodate the thronging converts! All this is very awkwardly suggestive of the Moslem saying that the Khalif Omar “was many a time of a certain opinion, and the Koran was revealed accordingly.”[7] It would indeed have been a remarkable experience for the evangelist to discover the logion ([Mt. xvi, 17–19]) as to the founding of the Church on the rock of Peter when a Petrine claim had to be substantiated. To the eye of Dr. Rendel Harris, an orthodox but a candid scholar, the “rock” text suggests an adaptation of a passage in the Odes of Solomon in which God’s “rock” is the foundation not of the Church but of the Kingdom.[8] Such probabilities Dr. Petrie never considers.
Let us see how Dr. Petrie’s method explains [Matthew x, 5]: “Go not into any way of the Gentiles, and enter not into any city of the Samaritans.” It occurs only in Matthew: Luke gives the parable of the Good Samaritan, with its flings at the lawyer and at the Jews in general; and in John the Founder makes Samaritan converts. The anti-Gentile text Dr. Petrie never discusses! Yet his method does not permit him to exclude it. It belongs to his “sixth class,” of “sayings and episodes which only occur in one Gospel. These classes are almost entirely in Matthew and Luke, and are the accretions which were added after the Gospels had finally parted company.”[9] So that after the Gentile period had set in, Matthew, the one “professional scribe among the apostles,” somehow found a logion Iesou which suited the need of the Church to exclude Samaritans and Gentiles, while Luke found another which suited the need to welcome them. And yet, in respect of its very purport, the anti-Gentile and anti-Samaritan teaching ought, if genuine, to belong, on Dr. Petrie’s general principle, to the earliest collection of all. Such is the dilemma to which we are led by the strictly statistical method of selection, conducted without any higher light.