According to the tradition preserved through Papias (d. circa 165), from “John the presbyter,” who is not pretended to have been John the Apostle, the first gospels were those of Mark, the “interpreter” of Peter, who set down in no chronological order the “sayings and doings” of the Lord as he had gathered them from Peter; and of Matthew, who wrote the logia or sayings “in the Hebrew dialect”[1]—presumably Aramaic. This, the earliest written tradition concerning the matter embodied in the gospels, is preserved to us from Papias’ lost “Exposition of the Dominical[2] Oracles” (Λογίων κυριακῶν) by Eusebius. For his own part, Papias professed to set more store by what he received from Aristion and the Presbyter John and other disciples of the Lord than by anything “out of books.” And it chances that he gave out as a Dominical Oracle[3] thus certificated a crude picture of millennial marvels which is actually taken from either the Apocalypse of Baruch, which here imitated the Book of Enoch, or from an older source.[4] Concerning this utterance of the Lord, further, Papias narrated a conversation between Jesus and Judas, in which the latter figures as a freethinker, expressing disbelief in the prediction.
Eusebius, scandalized by such testimony, pronounced Papias a man of small understanding. But he is the first Christian authority as to the history of the gospels; and the very fact that he set less store by them than by oral tradition is evidence that he had no reason for thinking them more authoritative than the matter that reached him by word of mouth. It may be that he knew only Greek, and that he could not read for himself the Aramaic logia, concerning which he says that “every one interpreted them for himself as he was able.” From the logia and the proto-Mark to the first two synoptics the evolution can only be guessed. No one now claims that we possess the original documents even in translation. Matthew as it stands is admittedly not a translation; and Dr. Conybeare, who idly alleges that I pay no heed to the order of priority of the gospels, and insists chronically on the general priority of Mark, avows that “Mark, the main source of the first and third evangelists, is himself no original writer, but a compiler, who pieces together and edits earlier documents in which his predecessors had written down popular traditions of the miracles and passion of Jesus.”[5] And he predicates in one part “four stages of documentary development.”[6] How in this state of things the existing Mark can be proved to be the main source of Matthew and Luke is not and cannot be explained. Mark too is admittedly not a translation from Aramaic; but some of his sources may have been.
Concerning Matthew, again, the tradition runs that according to Papias he told a story of a woman accused of many sins before the Lord; and Eusebius adds, apparently on his own part, that this is contained in the Gospel according to the Hebrews. If this was the story (now bracketed in R.V.) found only in late copies of the fourth gospel, the “Hebrew” gospel contained matter notably special to itself; and such is the conclusion established by a collation of all the 33 fragments preserved. “We arrive ... at a Gospel (a) in great part independent of the extant text of our gospels, and (b) showing no signs of relationship to Mark or John, but (c) bearing a very marked affinity to Matthew, and (d) a less constant but still obvious affinity to Luke.”[7] The hypothesis of Nicholson is “that Matthew wrote at different times the canonical gospel and the gospel according to the Hebrews, or at least that large part of the latter which runs parallel to the former.”[8]
On this view, “Matthew” in one of his versions deliberately omitted (1) the remarkable story of the woman taken in adultery; (2) the remarkable story that “the mother of the Lord and his brethren” proposed to him that they should all go and be baptized by John, whereupon he asked “Wherein have I sinned?” but added: “except perchance this very thing that I have said in ignorance,” and went accordingly; (3) the statement that at baptism Jesus saw the dove “entering into him”; (4) the further item that “the entire fountain of the Holy Spirit descended and rested upon him,” addressing him as “My son”; and (5) Jesus’ use of the phrase, “My mother, the Holy Spirit.” Such a hypothesis, if accepted, deprives of all meaning the notion of an “author” of a document. The only fair inference is that a Greek translation of the Hebrew gospel was one of the sources of the present Matthew, and that either (a) many of its details have been rejected, or (b) that many of the preserved fragments were additions to the original.
On either view, we must pronounce that the Hebrew gospel, as exhibited in the fragments, has none of the marks of a real biographical record. The items of narrative are wholly supernaturalist; the items of teaching belong to the more advanced Jewish ethic which we find progressively developed from Matthew to Luke. Once more, the critical inference is either (a) that the ethically-minded among the Jesuist “prophets” set out by putting approved doctrines in the mouth of the legendary Saviour-God, whereafter doctrinary episodes were invented for cult purposes, or (b) that the miraculous life was first pieced out in terms of Old Testament prophecies held for Messianic. Having regard to the ethical nullity of the primary evangel posited in the synoptics, the presumption is wholly against any primary manufacture of new logia. If we take the Sermon on the Mount as typical, the matter is all pre-Christian.[9] If we pronounce the method of the first canonical gospel to be secondary in relation to that of Mark, the ethical element enters only after the cult has gone a long way, and is then Jewish matter subsumed, as in the Didachê.
On bases so laid, there accrue a multitude of expletions, stones added to the cairn, as: episodes favouring this or that view of the proper Messianic heredity; of the Messiah’s ascetic or non-ascetic character; of his attitude for or against Samaritans; of his thaumaturgic principles; of the universality or selectness of the salvation he brings; of his attitude towards the Roman power, towards divorce, towards the Scribes and Pharisees, and so on. Up to the point of the establishment of something like a Canon, the longer the cult lasted, the greater would be the variety of the teaching. Different views of the descent and character of the Messiah, put forward by Davidists and non-Davidists, Nazarites and non-Nazarites, Jews and Samaritans, would all tend to find currency, and all would tend to find a place in the scroll of some group, whence they could ill be ousted by any “Catholic” movement. Still later, definitely anti-Jewish matter is grafted piecemeal by Gentile adherents: the “good Samaritan” is an impeachment of Jewish character; and the legendary apostles are progressively belittled—notably so in the mystery play which finally supersedes the earlier accounts of the Tragedy.
That such a general process actually took place is of necessity admitted by the biographical school, their problem consisting in delimiting the amount of tradition which they can plausibly claim as genuine. From the point of that delimitation they posit a process of doctrinal and other myth-making. The decision now claimed is that there is no point of scientific delimitation, and that the process which they carry forward from an arbitrarily fixed point must logically be carried backwards.
No more general or more far-reaching result can be reached by a mere collation and analysis of the synoptics on purely documentary lines—a process which has gone on for a century without even a documentary decision. The conclusion forced upon Schmiedel, even on the assumption of the historicity of Jesus, that none of the current theories of gospel-composition can meet the problem,[10] becomes part of the case of the myth-theory. The assumption that a “source,” once established, gives a historic foundation, is no more tenable in this than in any other case of a challenged myth; and the current methods of establishing sources, rooted as they are in the assumption of historicity, are often quite arbitrary even when they profess to follow documentary tests. Nevertheless, the normal pressure of criticism is seen driving champions of the priority of Mark to the confession that Mark not only contains late additions but is in itself a secondary or tertiary document, pointing to an earlier Mark, an Ur-Markus. The primary flaw in the process is the habit of looking to an author rather than at a compilation; and this habit roots in the assumption of historicity. At no point can we be sure whether we are reading a transcript of oral lore or a redaction.
Granting that Mark has pervading peculiarities of diction which suggest one hand, we are still not entitled to say that such peculiarities would not be adopted by a redactor. Again, as against the relative terseness or simplicity of a number of passages which suggest an earlier form, we have many which by their relative diffuseness admittedly suggest deliberate elaboration.[11] And if we are to ask ourselves what was likely to be the method of an early evangelist, how shall we reconcile the “in the stern, asleep on the cushion” (iv, 38) with the absolute traditionalism and supernaturalism of the first chapter? John, “clothed with camel’s hair,” is simply a duplicate of Elijah.[12] Is one realistic detail to pass for personal knowledge when the other is sheer typology? In the opening chapter, Jesus comes as the promised “Lord,” is prophesied of by John as the Coming One, is hailed by God from heaven as his beloved son, sees the heavens rent asunder and the Spirit descending as a dove, fasts forty days in the wilderness, is ministered to by angels, calls on men to follow him at his first word, proceeds to give marvellous teaching of which not a word is preserved, is hailed by a demoniac as the Holy One of God, expels a devil, cures a fever instantaneously, heals a multitude, casts out many devils, who know him, goes through the synagogues of Galilee, casting out devils and preaching, cures a leper instantaneously, commands secrecy, is disobeyed, and is then flocked-to by more multitudes. And we are invited to believe that we are reading the biography of a real man, who always speaks to Jews as one Jew to another, and is “not too bright and good for human nature’s daily food.” And the confident champion of this biographical theory assures us that we “need not doubt” that Jesus was a “successful exorcist.”