Short Studies on Great Subjects

by James Anthony Froude

How far may we apply the parallel to the Synoptical Gospels? In one sense the inspiration lifts them above comparison, and disposes summarily of critical perplexities; there is no difficulty which may not be explained by a miracle; and in that aspect the points of disagreement between these accounts are more surprising than the similarities. It is on the disagreements in fact that the labours of commentators have chiefly been expended. Yet it is a question whether, on the whole, inspiration does not leave unaffected the ordinary human phenomena; and it is hard to suppose that where the rules of judgment in ordinary writings are so distinct, God would have thus purposely cast a stumbling-block in our way, and contrived a snare into which our reason should mislead us. That is hard to credit; yet that and nothing else we must believe if we refuse to apply to the Gospel the same canons of criticism which with other writings would be a guide so decisive. It may be assumed that the facts connected with them admit a natural explanation; and we arrive, therefore, at the same conclusion as before: that either two of the evangelists borrowed from the third, or else that there was some other Gospel besides those which are now extant; existing perhaps both in Hebrew and Greek—existing certainly in Greek—the fragments of which are scattered up and down through St. Mark, St. Matthew, and St. Luke, in masses sufficiently large to be distinctly recognisable.

That at an early period in the Christian Church many such Gospels existed, we know certainly from the words of St. Luke. St. Paul alludes to words used by our Lord which are not mentioned by the evangelists, which he assumed nevertheless to be well known to his hearers. He speaks, too, of an appearance of our Lord after His resurrection to five hundred brethren; on which the four Gospels are also silent. It is indisputable, therefore, that besides and antecedent to them there were other accounts of our Lord's life in use in the Christian Church. And indeed, what more natural, what more necessary, than that from the day on which the apostles entered upon their public mission, some narrative should have been drawn up of the facts which they were about to make known? Then as little as now could the imagination of men be trusted to relate accurately a story composed of stupendous miracles without mistake or exaggeration; and their very first step would have been to compose an account of what had passed, to which they could speak with certainty, and which they could invest with authoritative sanction. Is it not possible then that the identical passages in the Synoptical Gospels are the remains of something of this kind, which the evangelists, in their later, fuller, and more complete histories, enlarged and expanded? The conjecture has been often made, and English commentators have for the most part dismissed it slightingly; not apparently being aware that in rejecting one hypothesis they were bound to suggest another; or at least to admit that there was something which required explanation, though this particular suggestion did not seem satisfactory. Yet if it were so, the external testimony for the truth of the Gospel history would be stronger than before. It would amount to the collective view of the first congregation of Christians, who had all immediate and personal knowledge of our Lord's miracles and death and resurrection.

But perhaps the external history of the four Gospels may throw some light upon the question, if indeed we can speak of light where all is a cloud of uncertainty. It would seem as if the sources of Christianity, like the roots of all other living things, were purposely buried in mystery. There exist no ancient writings whatever of such vast moment to mankind of which so little can be authentically known.

The four Gospels, in the form and under the names which they at present bear, become visible only with distinctness towards the end of the second century of the Christian era. Then it was that they assumed the authoritative position which they have ever since maintained, and were selected by the Church out of the many other then existing narratives as the supreme and exclusive authorities for our Lord's life. Irenæus is the first of the Fathers in whom they are found attributed by name to St. Matthew, St. Mark, St. Luke, and St. John. That there were four true evangelists, and that there could be neither more nor less than four, Irenæus had persuaded himself because there were four winds or spirits, and four divisions of the earth, for which the Church being universal required four columns; because the cherubim had four faces, to each of which an evangelist corresponded; because four covenants had been given to mankind—one before the Deluge in Adam, one after the Deluge in Noah, the third in Moses, the fourth and greatest in the New Testament; while again the name of Adam was composed of four letters. It is not to be supposed that the intellects of those great men who converted the world to Christianity were satisfied with arguments so imaginative as these; they must have had other closer and more accurate grounds for their decision; but the mere employment of such figures as evidence in any sense, shows the enormous difference between their modes of reasoning and ours, and illustrates the difficulty of deciding at our present distance from them how far their conclusions were satisfactory.

Of the Gospels separately the history is immediately lost in legend.

The first notice of a Gospel of St. Matthew is in the well-known words of Papias, a writer who in early life might have seen St. John. The works of Papias are lost—a misfortune the more to be regretted because Eusebius speaks of him as a man of very limited understanding, πανυ σμικρος τον νουν. Understanding and folly are words of undetermined meaning; and when language like that of Irenæus could seem profound it is quite possible that Papias might have possessed commonplace faculties which would have been supremely useful to us. A surviving fragment of him says that St. Matthew put together the discourses of our Lord in Hebrew, and that every one interpreted them as he could. Pantænus, said by Eusebius to have been another contemporary of the apostles, was reported to have gone to India, to have found there a congregation of Christians which had been established by St. Bartholomew, and to have seen in use among them this Hebrew Gospel. Origen repeats the story, which in his time had become the universal Catholic tradition, that St. Matthew's was the first Gospel, that it was written in Hebrew, and that it was intended for the use of the Jewish converts. Jerome adds that it was unknown when or by whom it was rendered into a Greek version. That was all which the Church had to say; and what had become of that Hebrew original no one could tell.

That there existed a Hebrew Gospel in very early times is well authenticated; there was a Gospel called the Gospel of the Ebionites or Nazarenes, of which Origen possessed a copy, and which St. Jerome thought it worth while to translate; this too is lost, and Jerome's translation of it also; but the negative evidence seems conclusive that it was not the lost Gospel of St. Matthew. Had it been so it could not have failed to be recognised, although from such accounts of it as have been preserved, it possessed some affinity with St. Matthew's Gospel. In one instance, indeed, it gave the right reading of a text which has perplexed orthodox commentators, and has induced others to suspect that that Gospel in its present form could not have existed before the destruction of Jerusalem. The Zachariah the son of Barachiah said by St. Matthew to have been slain between the temple and the altar, is unknown to Old Testament history, while during the siege of Jerusalem a Zachariah the son of Barachiah actually was killed exactly in the manner described. But in the Ebionite Gospel the same words are found with this slight but important difference, that the Zachariah in question is there called the son of Jehoiadah, and is at once identified with the person whose murder is related in the Second Book of Chronicles. The later translator of St. Matthew had probably confused the names.

Of St. Mark's Gospel the history is even more profoundly obscure. Papias, again the highest discoverable link of the Church tradition, says that St. Mark accompanied St. Peter to Rome as his interpreter; and that while there he wrote down what St. Peter told him, or what he could remember St. Peter to have said. Clement of Alexandria enlarges the story. According to Clement, when St. Peter was preaching at Rome, the Christian congregation there requested St. Mark to write a Gospel for them; St. Mark complied without acquainting St. Peter, and St. Peter when informed of it was uncertain whether to give or withhold his sanction till his mind was set at rest by a vision.

Irenæus, on the other hand, says that St. Mark's Gospel was not written till after the death of St. Peter and St. Paul. St. Chrysostom says that after it was written St. Mark went to Egypt and published it at Alexandria; Epiphanius again, that the Egyptian expedition was undertaken at the express direction of St. Peter himself.

Thus the Church tradition is inconsistent with itself, and in all probability is nothing but a structure of air; it is bound up with the presence of St. Peter at Rome; and the only ground for supposing that St. Peter was ever at Rome at all is the passage at the close of St. Peter's First Epistle, where it pleased the Fathers to assume that the 'Babylon' there spoken of must have been the city of the Cæsars. This passage alone, with the wild stories (now known to have originated in the misreading of an inscription) of St. Peter's conflict with Simon Magus in the presence of the emperor, form together the light and airy arches on which the huge pretences of the Church of Rome have reared themselves. If the Babylon of the Epistle was Babylon on the Euphrates—and there is not the slightest historical reason to suppose it to have been anything else—the story of the origin of St. Mark's Gospel perishes with the legend to which it was inseparably attached by Church tradition.