Who Wrote the Bible? : a Book for the People

by Washington Gladden

It appears from this clear statement that written memoranda of the discourses of our Lord and of the incidents of his life had been made by many persons. Numbers of these had undertaken to combine their memoranda with their recollections in an orderly statement. This fact itself shows how powerful an impression had been made by our Lord's life and death upon the people of Palestine. Everything relating to him was treasured with the utmost care; Luke, for his part, believing that he had gained by careful investigation sufficient knowledge to warrant the undertaking, sets out to collect the facts and present them in a consecutive and intelligible literary form. Yet Luke, in this announcement of his purpose, betrays no consciousness that he is using any different powers from those employed by the many others of whom he speaks. Rather does he most clearly rank himself with them, as one of many gleaners in this fruitful field. He does claim thoroughness and painstaking accuracy; I believe that every honest man will concede his claim.

This, then, was the way in which Luke went to work to write his Gospel. This is not guesswork; it is the explicit statement of the author himself. Have we not good reason for believing that the Gospels of Matthew and Mark were composed in much the same way?

In addition to the written memoranda of Christ's life which were in the hands of the apostles, and of many others, there was another source from which the Evangelists must have drawn. Luke alludes to it when he speaks of the fact that Theophilus had received much of his narrative "by word of mouth." There was, unquestionably, an oral gospel, covering the larger part of the deeds and the words of Jesus, which had been widely circulated in Palestine and in the whole missionary field. When it is said (Acts viii. 1-4; xi. 19) that they which were scattered abroad by the early persecutions went everywhere preaching the word, it must be understood that they went about simply telling the story of Jesus, his birth, his life, his deeds, his words, his death upon the cross. Sometimes, when preaching to Jews, they would show the correspondence between his life and the Old Testament prophecies, to prove that he was the Messiah; but the substance of their preaching was the telling over and over again of the story of Jesus. It was upon this oral gospel that the apostles and the first missionaries mainly relied. What they desired to do was to make known as speedily and as rapidly as possible the words of his lips and the facts of his life. And it is highly probable that before they set out on these missionary tours, they took great pains to rehearse to one another the story which they were going forth to tell. "The apostles," says Professor Westcott, "guided by the promised Spirit of truth, remained together in Jerusalem in close communion for a period long enough to shape a common narrative, and to fix it with requisite surroundings."

It was these concerted recollections and rehearsals that gave to so many passages of the gospel its identity in form. Some of the sentences often and devoutly repeated were remembered by all, word for word; in some of them there were verbal differences and discrepancies, as they were repeated by one and another. The verbal resemblances as well as the verbal differences are thus explained by this theory of an oral gospel, prepared at first for preaching by the apostles, and held only in their memory.

The preservation of so many passages in words and sentences nearly or exactly similar is nothing miraculous. Even in our own time there are, as we are told, secret societies whose ritual has never been written, but has been handed down with nearly verbal accuracy, from generation to generation. For the Hebrews, who were a people at this time greatly disinclined to write, and thoroughly practiced in remembering and repeating the sayings of their wise men, this task would not be difficult.

The apostles and the early evangelists, as Westcott suggests, were preachers, not historians, not pamphleteers. They believed in living witnesses more than in transmitted documents. They did not write out the record at first, partly because they were naturally disinclined to write, and partly, no doubt, because they expected the immediate return of our Lord to earth. Their gospel was therefore for many years a spoken and not a written word. As they went on repeating it, changes would occur in the repetition of the words; to the remembrance of one and another of them the Spirit of truth would bring facts and circumstances that they did not think of at first; words, phrases, gestures of our Lord would reappear in the memory of each, and thus the narrative became varied and shaded with the personal peculiarities of the several writers.

Years passed, and the expected return of the Lord to earth did not take place. The churches were spreading over Asia and Europe, and the apostles were unable personally to instruct those who were preaching the gospel in other lands. Thus the need of a written record began to make itself felt; and the apostles themselves wrote out the story which they had been telling, or it was written for them by their companions and fellow-helpers in the gospel. The oral gospel as it lived in their memories would form, no doubt, the substance of it, and the written memoranda of the discourses and incidents, to which Luke refers, would be drawn upon in completing the biography. The oral gospel thus carefully prepared and transmitted by memory would be substantially the same, yet many differences in arrangement of words and phrases would naturally have crept in; the written memoranda would in many cases be verbally identical. And each Evangelist, gleaning from this wide field, would collect some facts and sayings omitted by the others.

There are other explanations of the origin of the Synoptic Gospels, some of which are ingenious and plausible, but I shall not burden your minds with them, since the theory which I have presented appears to me the simplest, the most natural, and the most comprehensive of them all.

The Fourth Gospel, it is evident, must have had a different origin. Beyond question it is a consecutive narrative, composed by a single writer, and not, like the Synoptics, a compilation of memoranda, oral or written. It appears to be, in part at least, a supplementary narrative, omitting much that is contained in the other Gospels, supplying some omissions, and correcting, possibly, certain unimportant errors. Mr. Horton illustrates the supplementary work of this Evangelist by several instances. "The communion of the Lord's Supper," he says, "was so universally known and observed when he wrote that he actually does not mention its institution, but he records a wonderful discourse concerning the Bread of Life which is an indispensable commentary on the unnamed institution, and by filling in with great detail the circumstances of the last evening, he furnished a framework for the ordinance which is among our most precious possessions. On the other hand, because the common tradition was very vague in its date he gave precision to the event which they had recorded by fixing the time of its occurrence.... In Matt, iv. 12 and Mark i. 14, the temptation, immediately following Christ's baptism, is immediately followed by the statement, 'When he heard that John was delivered up, he withdrew into Galilee; and leaving Nazareth he came and dwelt in Capernaum.' But this summary narrative had excluded one of the most interesting features of the early ministry of Jesus. Accordingly the Fourth Gospel enlarges the story and emphasizes the marks of time. After the Baptism, according to this authority, Jesus 'went down to Capernaum, he and his mother and his brethren and his disciples, and there they abode not many days' (ii. 12). Then he went up to the Passover at Jerusalem, where he had the interview with Nicodemus. After that he went into the country districts of Judea, where John was baptizing in Ænon, and then the writer adds, as if his eye were on the condensed and misleading narrative of the common tradition, 'For John was not yet cast into prison.' The two great teachers, the Forerunner, and the Greater-than-he, were actually baptizing side by side, and it was because Jesus saw his reputation overshadowing John's that he voluntarily withdrew into Galilee, passing through Samaria. So that while there had been two journeys to Galilee before John was imprisoned, and that early period of the life was full of unique and wonderful interest, all had been compressed and crushed into the brief statement of Matt. iv. 12 and Mark i. 14. In this case we seem to see the Evangelist deliberately loosening and breaking up the current history in order that he might insert into the cramped and lifeless framework some of the most valuable episodes of the Lord's life. If the fourth Evangelist had treated the triple narrative in the way that many of us have treated it, regarding it as a sin against the Holy Spirit to suggest that there was any incompleteness or any misleading abbreviations in it, we should have lost the wonderful accounts of the conversation with Nicodemus and with the woman at the well." [Footnote: Inspiration and the Bible, pp. 95-99.]

If such is the relation of the Fourth Gospel to the Synoptics, it follows that it must have been the work of one who was thoroughly familiar with the events recorded. That the narrative bears evidence of having been written by an eyewitness is to my own mind clear. That the writer intends to convey the impression that he is the beloved disciple is also manifest. Either it was written by John the Apostle, or else the writer was a deliberate deceiver. There can be no such explanation of his personation of John as that which satisfies our minds in the case of Daniel and Ecclesiastes; the book is either the work of John, or it is a cunning and conscienceless fraud. And it seems to me that any one who will read the book will find it impossible to believe that it is an imposture. If any book of the ages bears in itself the witness to the truth it is the Fourth Gospel. It shines by its own light. Any of us could tell the difference between the sun in the heavens and a brass disk suspended in the sky reflecting the sun's rays; and in much the same way the fact is apparent that the book is not a counterfeit gospel.