When therefore the Lord knew that the Pharisees had heard that Jesus was making and baptizing more disciples than John (although Jesus himself baptized not, but his disciples), he left Judæa, and departed again into Galilee.
The exegesis which can take this for a historical datum, and compose it with the theory of an oral tradition in which baptism either by Jesus or by his disciples never appears, is really outside serious discussion. The proposition that, given the main tradition, either Jesus or the disciples baptized freely, and that yet neither Matthew, Mark, nor Luke ever heard of it, is a mere flouting of the critical reason to which it professes to appeal. And there is no alternative save an honest confession that the record is incredible. The whole Christian tradition of baptism breaks down on examination, as does the record of the acceptance of the higher mission of Jesus by John, followed by statements affirming the continuance of John’s movement and teaching alongside of the Jesuine. Mr. Wright is severe on the orthodox harmonists in general. “If I am right,” he remarks, “the exhausting labours and tortuous explanations of the harmonists, in their endeavour to reconcile what cannot be reconciled, have been wasted.”[14] That is exactly what the attentive reader must regretfully say of Mr. Wright’s own reconstructions.
His handling of the problems of the date of the crucifixion and the duration of the Ministry is a warning to every student who desires to be loyal to critical principle. By his final admission, no one can tell whether the Ministry lasted one, two, three, four, ten, or twenty years. He frankly rejects Sir William Ramsay’s attempt to salve as history Luke’s story of the census. The alleged procedure, he sees, is simply impossible—“S. Luke evidently has somewhat misunderstood the situation”—and he solves the problem by throwing over Luke’s opening chapters as late accretions. But the question of the duration of the Ministry, which is bound up with that of the date of the crucifixion, and thus lies at the very centre of the whole historic problem, he is content to leave as insoluble, yet without a misgiving as to the historicity of the record.
John makes Jesus go four times to Jerusalem; while in the synoptics we note “the extraordinary fact that they do not bring Christ to Jerusalem until He entered it to be crucified.”[15] John puts the cleansing of the temple at the beginning of the Ministry, and the synoptics place it at the close. Orthodox exegesis then assumes two cleansings, but “such a repetition is, to say the least, highly improbable,” for Mr. Wright. “What end would such a repetition serve? And if repeated, why should not S. Mark or S. John have told us so?”[16] Why, indeed! So Mr. Wright suggests that the synoptics may have telescoped several years into one. “Events in real life move much more slowly.”[17] They certainly do!
Yet, on the other hand, “the one-year ministry would solve many difficulties. It is the only scheme which reconciles S. Luke, S. Matthew, and S. John. Not improbably it is true: the more I consider it, the more attractive it appears.”[18] Such, evidently, was the view of the Christian and other Gnostics. But Irenæus, the first Father to handle the problem, declared for a ministry of about twenty years, founding not only on the quotation in John, “Thou art not yet fifty years old,” but on the fact that “all the elders who had known John the disciple of the Lord in Asia witness that he gave them this tradition.”[19] On the other hand, in Mr. Wright’s opinion, “ten years is the utmost length to which we can stretch the ministry without throwing overboard S. Luke’s chronology altogether.”[20] Yet Bishop Westcott declared concerning the record of Irenæus that, “however strange it may appear, some such view is not inconsistent with the only fixed historical dates which we have with regard to the Lord’s life, the date of His birth, His baptism, and the banishment of Pilate.” Thus turns the kaleidoscope of the tradition of which Harnack has latterly affirmed the “essential rightness, with a few important exceptions.”
It is hardly necessary to point out that the “oral” hypothesis, like the “documentary” and that of scattered logia, is more compatible with the negative than with the affirmative answer on the question of historicity. Contradictions and anomalies irreconcilable with the assumption of a real historical process present not difficulty but confirmation to the theory of a fictitious production, whether documentary or oral, to establish a transforming cult, supplying a quasi-historical basis where none such existed. Contradictory episodes and dicta stand for diverging sects and movements. Save for incidental concessions, all the traditionist schools alike ignore the grounds for inferring a long-continued modification of the Gospels at many hands; though, when Celsus late in the second century alleged the common practice of interpolation, Origen could only explain that it was the work of heretics. Such a procedure is for the rational critic only the natural continuance of the method of formation.
Over the point upon which Mr. Wright most completely diverges from the various Unitarian schools—his acceptance of the Fourth Gospel as essentially historical—we need not here concern ourselves. Those who can accept the Fourth and the Synoptics cannot be supposed to admit the application of criticism to fundamentals at all, however critically they may handle secondary issues. And they have their defence. The liberalizers who see that the Fourth as a whole is a work of invention, making free play with previous material, and yet cannot conceive that the synoptics had beforehand followed a similar method, can make no claim to critical consistency. They merely realize that the Fourth and the Synoptics cannot all be records of a real Life and Teaching, and they decide to reject the last rather than the prior documents. The argument from “vividness” and lifelike detail simply goes by the board. In the fourth Gospel there are many more lifelike details than in the second; but that is not allowed to count.
For the rational inquirer, however, the fact remains that the dismissal of the fourth Gospel is a beginning of historical as distinct from documentary discrimination; and it is to those who have made such a beginning that a further critical argument falls to be addressed. Mr. Wright, facing a chaos of doctrinal contradictions and chronological divergences, falls back trustingly on the reflection that “after all we are not saved by the Gospels, but by Christ.” He has no misgiving as to the evangelists being inspired. “Inspiration quickens their spiritual perception, but does not altogether preserve them from errors of fact”: e.g. [Mt. i, 9, 11]; [Mk. iii, 26]; [Lk. ii, 2]; [John xii, 3]; [Acts v, 36]; [vii, 16].[21] Perhaps Mr. Wright would grant some dozens more of errors of fact if pressed; but his faith would not be modified unless he should be shaken on the resurrection. “History as well as criticism leaves us no room to question this. On so sure a foundation is our most holy faith erected.”[22] For Mr. Wright that is supremely certain which a myriad Christian scholars now find incredible. And we can but take our leave of him with the question of the Jew of Celsus, “Did Jesus come into the world for this purpose, that we should not believe in him?”
[1] Strauss speaks of it as having been “firmly established.” Das Leben Jesu, Einl. § 9, end. [↑]