the Fourth Week of Advent
Click here to join the effort!
Bible Dictionaries
Gospels
Hastings' Dictionary of the New Testament
or I. The First Three Gospels
1. Date.-(a) The central factor here is the date of the Second Gospel. The conspectus of dates given in Moffatt (Introd. to Literature of the New Testament (Moffatt)., p. 213) will show that this Gospel is dated by modern writers between a.d. 44 and 130, and that recent opinion narrows these limits to 64-85. Moffatt himself decides on a date soon after 70 on the following grounds; (1) Irenaeus, adv. Haer. iii. i. 1, dates the Gospel after the death of St. Peter and St. Paul. This is doubtful (see below). (2) ‘The small apocalypse’ (ch. 13) suggests a date soon after 70. This is based on the very precarious inference that Mark 13 could not have been substantially spoken by Christ. He need not have had more than the prophetic insight of a Jeremiah to have spoken everything contained in this chapter.
Since the publication of Moffatt’s book Harnack has re-opened the whole question of the date of the first three Gospels by arguing that Acts was written at the end of St. Paul’s imprisonment in Rome.* [Note: Beiträge zur Einleitung in das Neue Testament, iv., Leipzig 1911.] It would follow, of course, that the Third Gospel must be earlier, and the Second, since it is one of the sources of the Third, earlier still. The fundamental question here is the evidence of Irenaeus The whole passage should be read carefully. One clause in it has generally been taken to mean that St. Mark wrote his Gospel after the death of St. Peter and St. Paul. But J. Chapman,† [Note: JThSt vi. [1905] 563 ff.] and now Harnack, argue that the words ‘after the death of’ do not date the writing of the Gospel, but, taken in the light of the whole context, mean that the apostolic preaching did not come to an end with the death of the apostles, but was handed down after their death, in written books, about the date of the composition of which nothing is said.
Harnack is thus left free to place the Second Gospel before St. Paul’s imprisonment. He thinks that the late evidence of Clement of Alexandria,‡ [Note: Eus. HE vi. 14.] which connects the Gospel with Rome, may perhaps mean that Mark edited there his previously written Gospel. Harnack does not attempt to date the Second Gospel more narrowly.
But we may carry the argument farther. If the writing of Acts at the end of St. Paul’s imprisonment affords a limit after which the Second Gospel could not have been written, the relationship between the Second Gospel and the First, which presupposes it, may furnish another.
(b) The First Gospel is assigned by most modern writers to the period 65-90 (see Moffatt). Harnack thinks that it must have been written neat the Fall of Jerusalem, but not necessarily before it. Moffatt is clear that it must have been written after that event.
Apart from its relationship to St. Mark, the inclination to date the First Gospel relatively late is due to a belief that it reflects the atmosphere of a period in which the Church has become organized and developed. It is, it is argued, ‘Catholic’ in tone. This method of argument seems wholly due to the fact that modern critics read the Gospel through ‘Catholic’ spectacles. Read it from the standpoint of a Jewish Christian of Antioch about the period of the controversy as to the admission of Gentiles into the Church, and everything is in place. In particular, two lines of thought in the Gospel point to this period: (1) the writer’s belief in the permanent validity of the Mosaic Law, (2) his eschatology. On the first see St. Matthew 3 (International Critical Commentary , 1912), p. 326, and Expository Times xxi. [1909-10] 441. As to the second point, a few words may here be added in addition to what is written in St. Matthew 3, p. lxix, and Expository Times xxi. 440.
The First Gospel is, as is well known, the most apocalyptically coloured of the Synoptic Gospels. But there are many who do not realize how deeply the apocalyptic element penetrates the book. It is, e.g., urged by E. Buckley* [Note: Introduction to the Synoptic Problem, p. 278.] that the presence of passages like Matthew 24:29; Matthew 24:34 does not presuppose an early date for the Gospel, because the Evangelist, writing comparatively late, might have preserved such sayings if he found them in his sources. He might of course have done so, but the question is not one of a few isolated passages; it affects the whole Gospel, V. H. Stanton† [Note: The Gospels as Historical Documents, ii. 367.] also says that the language of ch. 24 need not make for an early date, because the writer could quite well have left unaltered expressions of his source. This misses the whole point. Not only does the editor leave unaltered expressions of his sources, but he also alters St. Mark in order to bring that Gospel into fine with the idea of the nearness of the Parousia which was so prominent in his own mind (cf., e.g., Matthew 16:28 with Mark 9:1, Matthew 24:29 with Mark 13:24). It is not only one or two isolated passages in one of his sources, it is the Evangelist himself giving preference to one eschatologically coloured source (Q) and revising another source (St. Mark) in accordance with its ideas. There are many who think that the prominence of the apocalyptic element in the First Gospel is due to the Evangelist forcing it in upon the tradition of Christ’s sayings. The truth is rather that the Evangelist had one source full of this element, and that he was so heartily in sympathy with it that he not only preserved large sections of it, but also allowed himself to transfer sayings of an apocalyptic nature from it into appropriate sections of St. Mark’s Gospel.
That the apocalyptic colouring of the First Gospel, in so far as it is peculiar to that book, is due to the Evangelist himself and not to one of his sources seems wholly incredible. Allow that the Gospel was written about the year a.d. 50 by a Jewish Christian of the party who wished to enforce the keeping of the Law upon the Gentiles, and the writer, as one who was anxious to preserve all those sayings of Christ which represented Him as One who taught that He was the Messiah of the Jews who would shortly inaugurate the Kingdom, is in his natural place in the development of the Church. He is contemporaneous with the apocalyptic period of St. Paul’s teaching. Would the Church ever have received a book into which the writer had thrust his own conception of Christ as an utterer of apocalyptic fantasies at a later period when they had a Gospel of St. Luke? Its reception by the Church seems explicable only on the ground that it was a book written early in the history of the Church, received at first in the district where it was written by a community which was in agreement with its apocalyptic teaching, and that it thus held a place in the Church from which it could not be deposed.
B. H. Streeter* [Note: Interpreter, viii. [1911] 37 ff.] argues that the Apocalypse, written towards the close of the century, proves that there wore at that period circles with a strong liking for apocalyptic literature, and seems to think that the First Gospel may therefore have been written comparatively late. But the two cases are not in the least parallel. The Gospel was read in the Church at an early date and everywhere received. The use of the Apocalypse was long contested. Moreover, it was one thing for the Church to value an Apocalypse placed in the mouth of the Ascended Christ; it would have been quite another matter for it at a date when, as the Third and Fourth Gospels show, the tendency was rather to diminish than to enhance the apocalyptic element in the Lord’s words, to accept a Gospel in which (according to the theory) there were placed wholesale in His month during His earthly life sayings couched in technical apocalyptic language which He never used. A Gospel so judaized, as would be the First Gospel on this theory, in idea and in language, would have been recognized as alien to the true tradition of Christ’s life, and would have stood little chance of being received as an apostolic writing.
Notice may be taken here of a few passages which are supposed to suggest a late date.
Chs. 1 and 2 are certainly early. Harnack now recognizes that nothing in them need have been written later than a.d. 70. The sayings about the Church (16:17ff.; 18:15ff.) are certainly early, for they are couched in language in which the Jewish colouring is very remarkable. The word ‘Church’ is supposed to betray a late date, but why? About a.d. 52 St. Paul was using it of the Church at Thessalonica. When the Evangelist wanted a Greek word to represent the Aramaic word used by Christ, whatever that may have been, what other word would he be likely to choose than the ἐκκλησία of sacred usage?
‘As to the last point [the use or ‘Church’] it is enough to note that the word occurs nearly a hundred times in the Septuagint . Not only is the rest of the vocabulary essentially Jewish, but it must come from a quarter in which the Jewish origin and relations of Christianity mere strongly marked, i.e. from a source near the fountain head.’† [Note: Sanday, in Minutes of Evidence before Royal Com. on Divorce, iii. 241.]
The trinitarian formula in 28:19 need not be late. St. Paul, says Harnack, did not create it (op. cit. p. 108; cf. also The Constitution and Law of the Church, Eng. translation , London, 1910, p. 259ff.).
The narratives peculiar to St. Matthew are, as Harnack recognizes, of a very archaic character.
If then we are right in dating the First Gospel about a.d. 50, we have a further limit for St. Mark. His Gospel must be prior to that date, and fall between 30 and 50. Now it is clear from the early chapters of Acts that St. Peter was prominent in Jerusalem as leader of the little society of disciples of Jesus the Messiah (the First Gospel reflects this rightly). There about the year 39 St. Paul stayed with him for a fortnight. But in 44 St. Peter was obliged to leave Jerusalem (Acts 12:17), and we do not find him there again until the Council some five years later (Acts 15). During this interval the Second Gospel may well have been written. The absence of Peter from Jerusalem would, suggest the writing down of his teachings to compensate for the loss of his personal presence, and no one was so fitted for this work as John Mark. If written at Jerusalem, the Gospel would naturally have been composed in Aramaic, and there is much in its style and language to suggest this. But St. Mark did not stay long in Jerusalem. He left with his cousin Barnabas for Antioch, and there (circa, about 44-47) it may have been found desirable to translate the Gospel into Greek. When the controversy between the Churches of Antioch and Jerusalem broke out a little later, the writer of the First Gospel took St. Mark’s work as his basis, and wrote a longer Gospel, inserting from another source much of the Lord’s teaching as preserved at Jerusalem. The Second Gospel may quite well have been re-edited at Rome; but if so, the changes made in it cannot have been many, for it is clear that the editor of the First Gospel had St. Mark before him much as we have it.
(c) The Third Gospel is generally dated c. [Note: . circa, about.] a.d. 80 (see Moffatt). But if Harnack is right about the date of the Acts, the Gospel must of course be earlier, i.e. it must have been written somewhere between a.d. 47 and 60.* [Note: For a refutation of the argument that the Gospel presupposes the Fall of Jerusalem see Harnack, Beiträge, iv. 81 ff.]
2. Authorship.-(a) The tradition which assigns the Second Gospel to St. Mark is so strong that it requires some boldness to set it aside. It goes back as early as Papias (circa, about a.d. 140), who gives it on the authority of ‘the Elder’ (Eus. HE [Note: E Historia Ecclesiastica (Eusebius, etc.).] iii. 39), and it is now very widely accepted (cf., e.g., Peake, [Critical Introd. to NT, p. 121], Harnack, Moffatt, Bacon [The Making of the NT, p. 159]).
(b) The majority of modern writers are also agreed in referring the First Gospel to an unknown writer. The reasons for this are the following. (1) The earliest witness, Papias or the Elder quoted by him, speaks of a work of St. Matthew which he describes as τὰ λόγια. This term does not describe aptly such a book as our First Gospel, but would more naturally apply to a collection of utterances or sayings (see Moffatt, p. 189). (2) Moreover, this work is said by the same witness to have been written in the Hebrew dialect (=Aramaic?). Now our First Gospel is certainly not a translation of an Aramaic or Hebrew work. It was written in Greek by a writer who used at least one Greek source, the Second Gospel, and who used also the Greek OT (see St. Matthew 3 [International Critical Commentary ], pp. xiii ff. lxii).
But the inference is a natural one that the name of St. Matthew was given to the book because it largely embodies the work of that Apostle referred to by Papias. Modern criticism has therefore been largely absorbed in an endeavour to reconstruct this Matthaean work. Foreign scholars for the most part refuse in any way to identify the discourse source which has been used in the First Gospel with Papias’ Matthaean Logia (Harnack, however, admits that it may well have been an apostolic work). They prefer to give it a name which will beg no questions as to its authorship, and call it simply Q (= Quelle, ‘source’). Three main views as to its contents exist: (1) that of Bernhard Weiss,† [Note: Die Quellen der synoptischen Überlieferung, Leipzig, 1908.] who assigns to it not only material found in both Mt. and Lk., or in one of them, but also a good deal that is common to all three Gospels, because he believes that St. Mark borrowed from Q,‡ [Note: The question whether St. Mark used Q has been much discussed recently. F. Nicolardot (Les Procédés de rédaction des trois premiers Évangélistes, Paris, 1908) thinks that he did so largely. B. H. Streeter (in Sanday, Oxford Studies in the Synoptic Problem) argues that he did so only to a limited extent. Harnack thinks that ‘this assumption is nowhere demanded’ (Sayings of Jesus, p. 226; so Moffatt, LNT, p. 204 ff.).] which therefore lay before Mt. and Lk. in a double form-(i.) its original form, (ii.) as reproduced in Mk. (2) Harnack,* [Note: The Sayings of Jesus.] again, assigns to it only material found both in Mt. and Lk. arid not in Mk. (cf. also Hawkins and Streeter in Sanday, Oxford Studies in the Synoptic Problem). One serious objection to this theory is that, since it is almost incredible that Mt. and Lk. should either have both embodied the whole of Q or both have selected the same sections from it, a reconstruction an these lines must give us on incomplete Q, and possibly one so incomplete that no sure inferences can be drawn from it as to the nature and character of the whole work, (3) Finally, Allen (Oxford Studies, p. 236ff.) believes that Q is best represented in the First Gospel. He thinks that if most of the sayings and discourses peculiar to Mt., and those common to Mt. and Lk., are grouped together, the result forms a collection of discourses of a very primitive character which may well be the Matthaean work referred to by Papias. He thinks that this work was not used directly by Lk., but that many sayings drawn from it passed through intermediate stages into St. Luke’s Gospel, one of these intermediate stages being possibly the First Gospel.
(c) The authorship of the Third Gospel is bound up with the question of the authorship of Acts. Critics, like Jülicher, who date Gospel and Acts about a.d. 100 and deny that the writer of the ‘we’ sections in Acts can be identified with the writer of the whole book of Acts, cannot of course accept the tradition that St. Luke, a companion of St. Paul, wrote both Acts and Gospel. But recent criticism has moved decisively in the direction of affirming the truth of the tradition, Harnack, following on the lines of W. K. Hobart,† [Note: The Medical Language of St. Luke, Dublin and London, 1882.] argues that the style and language of Gospel and Acts, including the ‘we’ sections, decisively prove that both works were written by one person and that he was a physician.‡ [Note: See also J. C. Hawkins, Horae Synopticae,2 Oxford, 1909.] Moffatt says that the supposition that both works did not come from a single pen may nowadays be ‘decently interred’ (Introd. to Literature of the New Testament (Moffatt)., p. 298). It is probable that criticism, after long wandering in a labyrinth of speculation upon this point, will return to the traditional belief in the Lucan authorship of both books. It is accepted in such recent works as that of Peake. For a summary of the linguistic argument, see Harnack, Luke the Physician, or Moffatt, Introd. to Literature of the New Testament (Moffatt)., p. 297f.
Some of those who reject the Lucan authorship of the two books are inclined to think that Luke may have written the ‘we’ sections (so Bacon, Introduction to NT, p. 211).
3. Characteristics
(a) The Second Gospel is neither a history nor a biography. It contains no dates, and the writer is at no pains to give any details of time or place which would help to make the narrative intelligible to a reader previously unacquainted with it. The central figure of the book is introduced under the description ‘Jesus Messiah, Son of God’ (Mark 1:1), but nothing is said of His human parentage. His early life, or the period in which He lived. If we set aside the last five chapters, which describe in detail, disproportionate to the rest of the book, the last few days of the Messiah’s life, the account of His doings in MK Mark 1:14 to Mark 10:52 is strangely disconnected and without sequence. No hint of the length of time occupied by the narrative is given, long periods are passed over without comment, whilst the events of a single day are recorded in detail.
This incompleteness and fragmentariness suggest the writer’s intention. He wished to put into permanent form such of the incidents of the Messiah’s life as were well known from St. Peter’s teaching to the community in which he lived. Behind the book there lies as the only explanation of it the Christian community fat Jerusalem?) orphaned of its chief teacher. If this be lost sight of, the book remains as a mere narrative of disconnected incidents in the life of one Jesus of Nazareth.
If a keynote to the Gospel be wanted, it may be found in the phrase ‘having authority’ (Mark 1:22). Jesus is depicted as one whose words and deeds proved Him to be endowed with power, and so to be the Son of God. Cf. the following:- Mark 1:22 : ‘He was teaching as having authority’; Mark 1:27 : ‘a new teaching, with authority he commands’; Mark 2:10 : ‘the Son of Man hath authority’; Mark 5:30 : ‘knowing the power which had gone forth from him’; Mark 6:2 : ‘the powers (miracles) done by him.’ In accordance with this is the emphasis in the Gospel upon the impression made by Him upon the peasantry. Cf. the following:- Mark 1:22 : ‘the crowds were astonished at his teaching’; Mark 2:12 : ‘all were astonished’; Mark 5:42 : ‘they were astonished with great amazement’; Mark 6:2 : ‘the populace were astonished’; Mark 7:37 : ‘they were above measure astonished’; Mark 11:18 : ‘the crowd were astonished at his teaching’; Mark 1:33; ‘the whole city was gathered at the door’; Mark 1:45 : ‘He could no longer enter into a city, but was without in desert places, and they came to him from all sides’; Mark 2:2 : ‘They were gathered together, so that the space about the door could no longer contain them’; Mark 3:9 : ‘He bade his disciples prepare a boat, because of the crowd’; Mark 3:20 : ‘the crowd again gathers, so that they could not even eat’; Mark 4:1 : ‘and there gathers to him a very great crowd, so that he embarked into a boat’; Mark 6:31 : ‘There were many coming and going, and they had no opportunity to eat.’
(b) If the Second Gospel is a book of reminiscences, or rather of notes of a great teacher’s reminiscences of the life of his Master, the First Gospel is a theological treatise in narrative form. Its purpose is to prove that Jesus of Nazareth was, though rejected by the rulers of His people, the true Messiah, in whom were or would be fulfilled all the Messianic expectations of the OT. The phrase ‘that it might be fulfilled’ may be taken as the keynote of the book. Characteristic of the book are the following: (1) its apologetic aspect; it is a defence of the Messiahship of Jesus against (i.) current slander (cf. esp. chs. 1, 2), (ii.) the hard fact that the Jewish authorities rejected Him; (2) its consequent polemic against the recognized authorities of the Jews; (3) its conception of the Church or Society of the Messiah as consisting of Jews or proselytes still under the authority of the Mosaic Law; (4) its conception of the Kingdom as to be inaugurated shortly when the Messiah returned on the clouds of heaven. See on these points St. Matthew 3, pp. 309ff., 326ff.; Expository Times xxi. 439ff.; and article ‘Matthew (Gospel)’ in Dict. of Christ and the Gospels .
(c) In the Third Gospel we come at last to a professed biography or history of a life. It is best treated when taken as the first part of a Great historical work of which Acts is the second volume, and some of the following features characterize both works: (1) if in the First Gospel Jeans is ‘He who fulfils’ and in the Second He is the one having authority and power, in the Third He is the Divine Healer; (2) there is a strong universalistic note. Jesus is the Second Adam, and His gospel is for all peoples (cf. Luke 2:14; Luke 2:23; Luke 3:6); (3) prominence is given to women in both Gospel and Acts; (4) there is considerable emphasis upon prayer, the influence of the Holy Spirit, and upon Christianity as being a religion marked by thanksgiving, joy, and peace.
Out of his many sources St. Luke has composed a wonderful book. About the first part of the Gospel hangs the peace of God, clothing it like a soft garment. Into the world has entered the Prince of Peace, bringing healing to the souls and bodies of men-not of Jews only but of all mankind, not for the rich and privileged classes but for the poor and the outcast, not for men alone but for women also. To those who are Christ’s disciples the gates of prayer are ever open, and they live in an atmosphere where praise is upon their lips and joy in their hearts. About the second part hangs still the feeling of the joy and peace which Christianity brings with it. But there is now a new note of triumph. The Christian Church as St. Luke describes it in the Acts marches victoriously through the Roman world from conquest to conquest. Harnack somewhere fitly quotes as a keynote to the work the words of the old Latin hymn ‘The Royal banners forward go.’
II. The Fourth Gospel.-The Fourth Gospel is dated by many modern writers in the early part of the 2nd cent. (so recently Clemen* [Note: Die Entstehung des Johannesevangeliums, Halle, 1912.] and Bacon† [Note: The Making of the NT.] ). This of course precludes its apostolic authorship. The line of argument which leads up to this position is as follows. (a) The Fourth Gospel conflicts with the first three in facts such as the date of the Crucifixion, the cleansing of the Temple, and the account of John the Baptist; it is therefore hopelessly unhistorical, and cannot have been written by an apostle. (b) It conflicts with them in its presentation of the Person of Christ. The Christology is so different from that of the Synoptic Gospels that the sayings put into the mouth of Christ must be mainly the work of an author (not an apostle) who is writing under the influence of Jewish Alexandrian Philosophy and of Stoicism.‡ [Note: See Moffatt, LNT, p. 522; Scott, Fourth Gospel, p. 29 ff.] (c) What then of the 2nd cent. attribution of the Gospel to the Apostle? This is hopelessly misleading. Irenaeus misunderstood Polycarp and attributed the Gospel to John the Apostle when he ought to have assigned it to John the Elder. Irenaeus is wrong again when he said that John the Apostle lived to a good age and spent the last part of his life at Ephesus. As a matter of fact, he suffered early martyrdom at the hands of the Jews.§ [Note: Moffatt, LNT, p. 602 ff.]
We may consider further some points in this argument. (a) The historical inaccuracy in matters of fact needs at least considerable qualification. In many respects the writer is remarkably accurate in his representation of Palestine as it was before the Fall of Jerusalem, e.g. in geographical and topographical detail, in his knowledge of Jewish custom, the relationship between Jewish parties, their religious beliefs. Moreover, the Synoptic tradition is too one-sided to be taken as a measure or gauge.
(b) The contrast drawn between the Christology of the Synoptic Gospels and that of the Fourth Gospel is open to the same criticism. What right have we to regard the first three Gospels as an adequate presentation of the Person of Christ, and not as three slightly varying forms of a tradition which represented a very meagre part of a life which was many-sided? For hints in the Synoptic Gospels of a Judaea n ministry see Moffatt, Introd. to Literature of the New Testament (Moffatt)., p. 541. With respect to the teaching of Christ, the Synoptic Gospels give us a significant hint that there were sides of this teaching which they have left almost wholly unrecorded. The saying Matthew 11:27 = Luke 10:22, with its emphasis upon the unique Sonship of Christ, implies the whole Johannine Christology, and is no doubt a fragment from a whole cycle of teaching such as that which has survived in the Fourth Gospel. And St. Mark has another allusion to this teaching in Mark 13:32 (‘the Son’). The modern critic fashions out of the first three Gospels a Jesus after his liking, and then denies that the Christ of the Fourth Gospel is compatible with this Jesus whom his literary criticism has created. But is it not more likely to be the case that the Jesus of history was One too lofty in personality, too many-sided in character, to be understood by His contemporaries? The Synoptic tradition has given to us one impression as it was left upon some of His followers (though even here there are many aspects of character-teacher of virtue, critic of Pharisaic religion, mystic, doer of miracles, apocalyptic seer, etc.); the Fourth Gospel has preserved another side of His character. It may well be that, had others set themselves to describe the life, we should have had information which would have given us quite a fresh conception of Him. It is, moreover, easy to draw quite false antitheses between the Fourth Gospel and the Synoptics. It is, e.g., true that the writer of the Fourth Gospel dwells by preference upon the teaching as to the present possession of Christian privileges rather than upon that as to their future consummation (the apocalyptic teaching of the Synoptic Gospels). But the whole cycle of this apocalyptic teaching is presupposed. There is to be a general resurrection (John 5:28). Eternal life involves a resurrection at the last day (John 6:40). The very conception of eternal life is apocalyptic, involving the thought of the permanence of the individual life and its future entry into a Kingdom which will be a fulfilment of the partial manifestation of the kingdom in the present. The retention of these passages in the Gospel is not a deliberate departure from the writer’s view of life as present, and a falling back on a primitive eschatological view (Scott, Fourth Gospel, p. 249). Rather they are a hint that there is another side of the doctrine of eternal life which the author knows to have been taught by Christ, and which he will not altogether omit because it is the necessary corollary of such teaching on eternal life as he records. They who have eternal life cannot die for ever, and there must be a sphere in which their life will be manifested. That is pure apocalyptic.
The conception of the Christology of the book as being the work of a writer strongly influenced by Alexandrian philosophy is probably a false one due to the fact that modern writers on the Gospel know something about Alexandrian philosophy because Philo wrote in Greek, but little or nothing about Jewish theology in the time of Christ, except at second hand, or in so far as it can be ascertained from Greek sources (the apocalyptic literature). The Gospel is probably thoroughly Hebraic in language, in method of argument, in idea, and it will be seen to be so when Christian scholars take the trouble to set themselves to the work of critically editing the Rabbinical literature, with a view to ascertaining how much of its theology they must carry back into the period of the life of Christ.* [Note: See I. Abrahams, in Cambridge Biblical Essays, London, 1909, p. 181 ff.]
(c) With regard to the 2nd cent. tradition, it is significant that decision as to its value seems to depend upon a prior question-that of the possibility of an apostolic authorship for the Fourth Gospel. That is, critics who find the Gospel so unhistorical as to render its composition by an apostle impossible all depreciate the value of the 2nd cent. witness to St. John as the author. And indeed what need to trouble about explaining away this witness if the Gospel on its own showing cannot be apostolic? On the other hand, all who do not find the Gospel to be so unhistorical as to make its composition by an apostle, or its dependence upon him, incredible, find the 2nd cent. attestation to be good. The most recent critical work, that of Clemen,* [Note: Die Entstehung des Johannesevangeliums.] decides in favour of the literary unity of the Gospel; denies a confusion between two Johns, a presbyter and an apostle; argues that there is no valid ground for denying that the apostle settled in Ephesus at the end of his life, and none for supposing his early martyrdom. Clemen believes the Gospel to be too far removed from history to have been written by the apostle himself, but thinks that Johannine tradition is a main element in it.
Recent attempts to analyze the Gospel into sources seem to have failed,† [Note: Wellhausen, Erweiterungen und Änderungen im vierten Evangelium, Berlin, 1907, Das Evangelium Johannis, do. 1908; F. Spitta, Das Johannes Evangelium als Quelle der Geschichte Jesu, Göttingen, 1910; Bacon, The Fourth Gospel in Research and Debate, London, 1910.] and it is little likely that for the present any fresh light on the book will be forthcoming. It may be hoped that we shall one day have an editor of the Gospel who is trained in Rabbinic exegesis, as well as in Western scholarship. Such a one may find that the Gospel is certainly the work of a Jew, and may see no reason for denying that its author may have been John the son of Zebedee. If he prefer historical evidence as to Christ’s teaching and Person to preconceived ideas about Him, he may also see no reason for denying that both Synoptic and Johannine pictures of Jesus are substantially true, yet equally one-sided, and that the Jesus of history must have been One of whom all our knowledge can be only partial, enough to elicit our devotion and to silence our criticism.
Literature.-This is enormous. The following are some recent books in English: V. H. Stanton, The Gospels as Historical Documents, Cambridge, pt. i. [1903], pt. ii. [1909]; J. Moffatt, Introd. to Literature of the New Testament (Moffatt)., Edinburgh, 1911; A. S. Peake, A. Critical Introduction to the NT, London, 1909; W. Sanday, The Life of Christ in Recent Research, Oxford, 1907, Oxford Studies in the Synoptic Problem, do. 1911, The Criticism of the Fourth Gospel, do. 1905; A. Harnack, Luke the Physician, Eng. translation , London, 1907, and Sayings of Jesus, do. 1908; F. C. Burkitt, The Earliest Sources for the Life of Jesus, Boston, 1910; J. R. Cohu, The Gospels in the Light of Modern Research, Oxford, 1909; E. R. Buckley, An Introductions the Synoptic Problem, London, 1912; B. W. Bacon, The Making of the NT, do. 1912; E. F. Scott, The Fourth Gospel, Edinburgh, 1906; J. Armitage Robinson, The Historical Character of St. John’s Gospel, London, 1908; L. Pullan, The Gospels, do. 1912; W. C. Allan and L. W. Grensted, Introduction to the Books of the NT, Edinburgh, 1913.
W. C. Allen.
These files are public domain.
Text Courtesy of BibleSupport.com. Used by Permission.
Hastings, James. Entry for 'Gospels'. Hastings' Dictionary of the New Testament. https://www.studylight.org/dictionaries/eng/hdn/g/gospels.html. 1906-1918.
