It is to be observed that several of the points in the expectation thus depicted are of a somewhat recondite character. ‘We know this man whence he is: but when the Christ cometh, no one knoweth whence he is.’ This point can be verified, at least approximately. There is a Jewish saying that ‘three things come wholly unexpected, Messiah, a god-send, and a scorpion[[52]].’ And Justin Martyr alludes to another tradition, that the Messiah would not even know his own mission until he was anointed by Elijah[[53]]—the idea of this was perhaps suggested by the anointing of David.
Again we note that the writer assumes the point of view of the crowd, according to which Christ was regarded as coming from Nazareth in Galilee, though in any case he had before him the First and Third Gospels which placed His birth in Bethlehem. Not a hint escapes the Evangelist of his knowledge of this, although the point is brought as an objection to our Lord’s Messianic claims. In other words, the Gospel reflects the real state of things in A.D. 28, not the Christian beliefs of A.D. 90. We have to say the same of the test applied by the Sanhedrin, that a prophet was not to be looked for from Galilee.
All these points agree beautifully with the time when Jesus was moving about with His disciples among His countrymen, a time of which the genuine recollection must have been long lost to all those Christians who had not themselves actually lived in it. The same comment would have to be made upon the language in which the Evangelist more than once refers to Christ’s mission, or rather the popular conception of it. In vi. 15, the people are represented as coming to take Him by force and make Him king; and at the entry into Jerusalem He is greeted as the King of Israel, and the prophecy of Zechariah is applied to Him, ‘Behold thy King cometh, &c.’ In all this there are evident traces of the unreformed Messianic idea, as associated with political domination. By the year 90 all such ideas must have entirely vanished, and it must have required an effort of mind to recover them which one who had not been himself connected with the events would have had no incentive to make.
I am greatly mistaken if the mass of particulars collected in this lecture does not come home to the mind with great, and even overwhelming, force. In me at least it inspires, and has always inspired ever since I took up the study of the Gospel, a strong conviction that it could only be the work of one who had really lived through the events that he describes. Perhaps there is a little exaggeration in the phrase that it ‘could only be’ such a one. It is the kind of rough approximate phrase that one is apt to use for practical common-sense purposes. Strictly speaking, there is the other alternative, of which we ought not wholly to lose sight, that the author was a second-century Christian, perhaps of Jewish descent and with some Jewish training, who by a tour de force threw himself back into the circumstances of the time and had a wonderful success in reproducing them. Dr. Drummond reminds us that there is this alternative.
‘It is sometimes said that to produce an untrue narrative possessing such verisimilitude as the Gospel would have been quite beyond the capacity of any writer of the second century: such an author would be without example; such a work would be a literary miracle. In making this allegation people seem to forget that the book is in any case unique. Whether it be true history, or the offspring of spiritual imagination, or a mixture of both, no one, so far as we know, could have written it in the second or any other century, except the man who did write it; and to assert that an unexampled, unknown, and unmeasured literary genius could not have done this or that appears to me extremely hazardous’ (p. 378 f.).
Perfectly true; there doubtless is the possibility that ‘an unexampled, unknown, and unmeasured literary genius’ could have done what we find. But as a rule, where facts can be explained easily and naturally without having recourse to any such extraordinary assumption, the world is content so to explain them. The practical question is a balance of probabilities. And even now, as in the days of Bishop Butler, probability is the very guide of life.
LECTURE V
THE CHARACTER OF THE NARRATIVE
The last lecture called attention to a multitude of little points that seem to lead to a definite conclusion. They almost all belonged to the framework, or setting of the narrative, and not to its salient features. I was conscious, not seldom, of stopping short just where we seemed to be coming to something of more importance, and to which exception would be more likely to be taken. I stopped short deliberately and of set purpose, because I am myself of opinion that from the point of view of critical method, it is just these small incidental details that are most significant. They are the sort of details that an author throws in when he is off his guard. From them, far more than from his laboured arguments, we may tell what is his real standpoint and attitude. In regard to the abundant details which we have examined, the Evangelist had plentiful opportunities of tripping; but in no single instance is he really convicted of doing so, whereas in a vast number his record has been verified.
Taking this ample verification of details with the direct claim considered in the last lecture but one, we have reached a point at which the authentic character of the Gospel, its claim to come from an eye-witness if not from an Apostle, seems to be really well assured. But the question that now meets us is, how far this assurance is neutralized by the arguments brought against the Gospel from a comparison of it with the Synoptics and from certain points of general probability. It is true that there are differences, which may amount to discrepancies, between the Fourth Gospel and its predecessors.