It is true that historical criticism has raised difficulties about it; the battle of the critics has been raging around it for half a century; but one after another of the positions taken by men like Strauss and Baur have been shown to be untenable; and it can truthfully be said, in the words of Professor Ladd, "that the vigorous and determined attacks upon the genuineness of the Fourth Gospel have greatly increased instead of impairing our confidence in the traditional view." [Footnote: What is the Bible? p. 327.] And I am ready to go farther with the same brave but reverent scholar, and say, "Having thus grounded in historical and critical researches the genuineness of the Fourth Gospel, we have no hesitation in affirming what position it must take in Sacred Scripture. It is the heart of Jesus Christ with which we here come in contact. Inspiration and reflection uniting upon the choicest and most undoubted material of history, and fusing all the material with the holy characteristics of revelation, are nowhere else so apparent as in the Gospel of the Apostle John." [Footnote: Doctrine of Sacred Scripture, i. 573]
Such, then, is the fourfold biography of Jesus the Christ preserved for us in the New Testament. If this study has removed something of the mystery with which the origin of these writings has been shrouded, it has, I trust, at the same time, made them appear more real and more human; and it has shown the providential oversight by which their artless record, many-sided, manifold, yet simple and clear as the daylight, has been preserved for us. Of these four Gospels we are certainly entitled to say as much as this, that whatever verbal discrepancies may be detected in them, and however difficult it may be satisfactorily to explain all the phenomena of their structure and relations, in one thing they marvelously agree, and that is in the picture which they give us of the life and character of Jesus Christ. In this each one of them is self-consistent, and they are all consistent with one another. And this, if we will reflect upon it, is a marvelous, not to say a miraculous fact. That four such men as these Evangelists incontestably were should have succeeded in giving us four portraitures of the Divine Man, without contradicting themselves, and without contradicting one another,--four distinct views of this wonderful Person, which show us different sides of his character, and which we yet instantly recognize as the same person, is a very great wonder. No such task was ever laid on any other human biographer as that which confronted these men; no character so difficult to comprehend and describe ever existed; for one man to preserve all the unities of art in describing him would be notable; for four men to give us, independently, four narratives, from the simple pages of which the same lineaments shine out, so that no one ever thinks of saying that the Jesus of Matthew is a different person from the Jesus of Mark or Luke or John,--this, I say, is marvelous.
And it is this character, majestic in its simplicity, glorious in its humility, the Ideal of Humanity, the Mystery of Godliness, that these Gospels are meant to show us. If they only bring him clearly before us, make his personality real and familiar and vivid before our eyes, so that we may know him and love him, that is all we want of them. Infallibility in details would be worthless if this were wanting; any small discrepancies are beneath notice if this is here. And this is here. Read for yourselves. From the page of Matthew, illuminated with the words of prophecy that tell of the Messiah's coming; from the vivid and rapid record of Mark, in which the Wonder-worker displays his power; from the tender story of Luke, speaking the word of grace to those that are lowest down and farthest off; from the mystical Gospel of the beloved disciple opening to us the deep things that only love can see, the same divine form appears, the same divine face shines, the same divine voice is speaking. Behold the man!
Chapter X.
New Testament History and Prophecy
The Acts of the Apostles contains the history of the Christian church from the time of the ascension of our Lord to the end of the second year of Paul's first imprisonment at Rome. The period covered by the history is therefore only about thirty years. The principal events recorded in it are the great Pentecostal Revival, the Martyrdom of Stephen, the first persecution of the church and the dispersion of the disciples, the conversion and the missionary work of Paul, with the circumstances of his arrest at Jerusalem, his journey as a prisoner to Rome, and a brief account of his residence in that city. In the first part of the book Peter, the leader of the apostolic band, is the central figure; the last part is occupied with the life and work of Paul.
Who is the writer? Irenæus, about 182, names Luke as the author of the book, and speaks as though the fact were undisputed. He calls him "a follower and disciple of apostles," and declares that "he was inseparable from Paul and was his fellow-helper in the gospel." This is the earliest distinct reference to the book in any ancient Christian writing. After this, Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, Origen, and Eusebius bear the same testimony. But these are late witnesses. The earliest of them testified a hundred years after the death of Luke. The direct testimony to the existence of this book in the first two cenuries is not, therefore, altogether satisfactory. The indirect testimony is, however, clear and strong.
That the Acts was written by the author of the Third Gospel is scarcely doubted by any critical scholar. The fact of the identity of authorship is stated with the utmost explicitness in the introduction of the Acts. "The former treatise I made, O Theophilus, concerning all that Jesus began both to do and to teach" (Luke i. I, 2). The author of the Acts of the Apostles certainly intends to say that he is the writer of the Third Gospel. If he is not the author of the Third Gospel he is an artful and shameless deceiver. But the whole atmosphere of the book forbids the theory that it is a cunning imposition. And the internal evidence that the two books were written by the same author is ample and convincing. The style and the method of the treatment of the two books are unmistakably identical. Every page bears witness to the fact that the author of the Third Gospel and the author of the Acts are one and the same person. Now we know, beyond all reasonable doubt, that the Gospel of Luke was written certainly as early as the year 80 A. D. And there is as good reason, as we have seen already, for accepting the ancient and universal tradition of the church that Luke was its author. If Luke wrote the two books, the date of both of them is carried back to the last part of the first century. But the concluding portion of the Acts of the Apostles seems to fix the date of that book much more precisely. The author, after narrating Paul's journey to Rome, his arrival there, and his first unsatisfactory interview with the Jewish leaders, closes his book with this compendious statement:--
"And he abode two whole years in his own hired dwelling, and received all that went in unto him, preaching the kingdom of God, and teaching all things concerning the Lord Jesus Christ with all boldness, none forbidding him."