5. Recent Reaction.
Far as I conceive that all these writers have travelled away from the truth, they followed each other in such quick succession that it would have been strange if public opinion had not been affected by them. To one who himself firmly believed in St. John’s authorship of the Gospel, and in its value as a record of the beginning of Christianity, the outlook last autumn seemed as, I said, very black. A single book dispelled the clouds and cleared the air. Dr. Drummond’s Character and Authorship of the Fourth Gospel is of special value to the defenders of the Gospel for two reasons: (1) because it is the work of one who cannot in any case be accused of dogmatic prepossessions, as it would to all appearance be more favourable to his general position that the Gospel should not be genuine or authentic; and (2) because the whole work is something more than a defence of the Gospel; it is a striking application to a particular problem of principles of criticism in many respects differing from those at present in vogue, and at the same time, as I cannot but think, a marked improvement on them.
To these points must be added the inherent qualities of the book itself—the thorough knowledge with which it is written, its evident sincerity and effort to get at realities, its nervous directness and force of style, its judicial habit of weighing all that is to be said on both sides.
Perhaps the most important and the most far-reaching of all the corrections of current practice is a passage in the text with the note appended to it upon the argument from silence. The text is dealing with the common assumption that because Justin quotes less freely from the Fourth Gospel than from the other three, therefore he must have ascribed to it a lower degree of authority.
‘But why, then, it may be asked, has Justin not quoted the Fourth Gospel at least as often as the other three? I cannot tell, any more than I can tell why he has never named the supposed authors of his Memoirs, or has mentioned only one of the parables, or made no reference to the Apostle Paul, or nowhere quoted the Apocalypse, though he believed it to be an apostolic and prophetical work. His silence may be due to pure accident, or the book may have seemed less adapted to his apologetic purposes; but considering how many things there are about which he is silent, we cannot admit that the argumentum a silentio possesses in this case any validity.’
To this is added a note which raises the whole general question:
‘An instructive instance of the danger of arguing from what is not told is furnished by Theophilus of Antioch. He does not mention the names of the writers of the Gospels, except John; he does not tell us anything about any of them; he says nothing about the origin or the date of the Gospels themselves, or about their use in the Church. He quotes from them extremely little, though he quotes copiously from the Old Testament. But most singular of all, in a defence of Christianity he tells us nothing about Christ Himself; if I am not mistaken, he does not so much as name Him or allude to Him; and, if the supposition were not absurd, it might be argued with great plausibility that he cannot have known anything about Him. For he undertakes to explain the origin of the word Christian; but there is not a word about Christ, and his conclusion is ἡμεῖς τούτου εἵνεκεν καλούμεθα ὅτι χριόμεθα ἔλαιον θεοῦ (Ad Autol. i. 12). In the following chapter, when he would establish the doctrine of the resurrection, you could not imagine that he had heard of the resurrection of Christ; and instead of referring to this, he has recourse to the changing seasons, the fortune of seeds, the dying and reappearance of the moon, and the recovery from illness. We may learn from these curious facts that it is not correct to say that a writer knows nothing of certain things, simply because he had not occasion to refer to them in his only extant writing: or even because he does not mention them when his subject would seem naturally to lead him to do so[[19]].’
The remarkable thing in this note is not only its independence and sagacity, but more particularly the trained sagacity which brings to bear upon the argument just those examples which are most directly in point and most telling.
Professor Bacon, in the first of his recent articles (Hibbert Journal, i. 513), good-naturedly defends the present writer from the charge of wishing to discredit the argument from silence in general. And it is true that in the place to which he refers I had in mind only a particular application of the argument. Still I am afraid that I do wish to see its credit abated. At least it is my belief that too much use is made of the argument, and that too much weight is attached to it. There are two main objections to the way in which the argument is often handled. (1) The critic does not ask himself what is silent—what extent of material does the argument cover? Often this extent is so small that, on the doctrine of chances, no inference can rightly be drawn from it. And (2) experience shows that the argument is often most fallacious. Dr. Drummond’s examples of this will I hope become classical[[20]].
Dr. Drummond’s book contains a multitude of passages like the above and exhibiting the same qualities. Many of them are a vindication of popular judgement as against the far-fetched arguments of professed scholars. The excellence of his method seems to me to consist largely in this, that he begins by making for himself an imaginative picture of the conditions with which he has to deal, not only of the particular piece of evidence which shows upon the surface, but of the inferential background lying behind it; that he thus escapes the danger of the doctrinaire who argues straight from the one bit of evidence before him to the conclusion; and that he also constantly tests the process of his argument by reference to parallel conditions and circumstances in our own day which we can verify for ourselves.