Chapter 4

NEARER THE CRISIS

Our author begins his "Introduction to the Study of the New Testament" with an account of the language and characters in which most of it was originally written, as he did the Old. These were Greek Uncials, all capital letters, without any space divisions between the words, and neither accent nor punctuation marks; that from these original manuscripts, down to the invention of printing, all copies were made by hand copying. The oldest existing manuscripts were made in the fourth and fifth centuries of the Christian era, and no two of these are exactly alike. During the succeeding centuries several thousand manuscript copies of all or parts of the New Testament were made that are still extant, _and no two exactly alike_!

I also learned that there are still extant quite a number of ancient Versions of the New Testament, translated into different languages, all of which are more or less different from each other, not alone in the text, _but in the books recognized as authentic and canonical_.

Here the author gives a brief history of the formation of the New Testament Canon, which so surprised, and even startled me, that I must make some mention of it. (In his treatment of the Old Testament the author gives but a few pages to the formation of the Old Testament Canon.) In the fifth Article of Religion in the Methodist Discipline it says: "In the name of the Holy Scriptures we do understand those canonical books of the Old and New Testaments of whose authority _was never any doubt in the Church_." (Italics mine.) But here I was to learn that for over three hundred years there was more or less controversy, and sometimes very bitter, over what books of the New Testament were, or were not, authentic and authoritative; that as a matter of fact there never was complete agreement among the Church Fathers; and that there never was any authoritative declaration on the subject by any Church Council until the Council of Trent (Roman Catholic) in 1545, which included in its canon all of our present recognized books of both the Old and New Testaments, and in addition thereto, included as canonical the Old Testament Apocrypha, which is universally excluded from the Protestant Bibles.

As this work is designed, at least partly, to stimulate additional study in others it may be well to cite a few examples, as I learned them from this book, designed to prove conclusively the authenticity, divine inspiration and infallible truth of the Holy Scriptures.

The canon of Muratori, about A.D. 160, omits Hebrews, both epistles of Peter, James and Jude, as uncanonical, and expresses doubts as to the Revelation.

The Peshito Syriac, about A.D. 200, omits Second Peter, Jude, Second and Third John and Revelation.

The Latin Version Itala, about the middle of the second century, omits James and Second Peter.

The Version of Clemens, about A.D. 202, omits Second Peter, James, Second and Third John and Philemon.

That of Cyprian of Carthage, about A.D. 250, omits Hebrews, Second Peter, Second and Third John, and Jude.

Eusebius, the great church historian, about A.D. 340, disputes the authenticity of James, and omits Jude, Second Peter, second and Third John, and doubts the Revelation. He also gives a list of "Spurious writings" at that time, a number of which are still extant. (It was years after this before I saw The Apocryphal New Testament.)

Ambrose of Milan, late in the fourth century, rejects Hebrews, Second and Third John, Jude, James, and Philemon.

Chrysostom, of Antioch, about A.D. 400, omits Second Peter, Jude, Second and Third John, and Revelation.

Jerome, about A.D. 420, rejects Hebrews, doubts James and Jude, and attributes Second and Third John to John, a Presbyter of Ephesus, and not the Apostle John.

I have only cited the names of those who _did not_ accept the present canon. That many of the Church Fathers, perhaps a majority of them, did accept it is not questioned. I have cited these instances--and not near all our author gives--to show that opinion on this subject was by no means unanimous in this early day; nor was all the intelligence, ability and character on one side. I quote it also to show that the teachings of my church concerning those books, that there "was never any doubt in the church" was not correct.

It must however be said in all fairness, according to our author, that from about the close of the second or the beginning of the third century, there was practical unanimity in the church as to the authenticity of all the books in our present New Testament except these seven: Hebrews, Jude, Second Peter, Second and Third John, James and Revelation. Over these the controversy continued until the Roman Hierarchy overshadowed the Church and suppressed all liberty of thought or expression.

We now come to the detailed study of the origin, authorship, date and character of the different books of the New Testament.

The first shock I got was learning that "The Gospel According to Matthew," was not written in its present form by the Apostle of that name. Nor is the author or date definitely known. The substance of a long article on the subject is to the effect that Matthew the Apostle, about A.D. 68, wrote an account of the doings and sayings of Jesus, in the Syro-Chaldee language, the vernacular of Palestine at the time, for the benefit of the Hebrew Christians. From this basis some later hand, unknown, translated into Greek, and elaborated it into substantially our present version. The earliest known Hebrew, or Syro-Chaldee version was that used by the Ebionites, which materially differed from our present Greek version; but which is the original and which the recession has never been settled. The early Ebionite version did not contain the first two chapters, giving the account of the miraculous birth; but our author insists that these were cut off from the original, rather than added on, tho nobody knows which.

Concerning the Gospel of Mark, he insists that it was also written as was the original of Matthew, before the destruction of Jerusalem, but after Matthew; that the material in it was learned from Peter, whose companion Mark was (how does this comport with divine inspiration?) as Mark was not an apostle and could not have known these facts at first hand. He admits the last twelve verses to be spurious and added by a later hand.

Concerning Luke he says that he derived his information from Paul (another case of doubtful inspiration), admits the date and place he wrote are unknown; admits the discrepancies between him and Matthew, in regard to the circumstances of the miraculous birth and the genealogy of Jesus--something I had never noticed before!--and undertakes to reconcile them. When I turned to the records and read them in this new light, his attempted reconciliation, to my mind, was an utter failure. Like every attempted reconciliation I have ever read since, it was done by "reading into the record," not only what was not there, but what was wholly inconsistent with the record that is there. If any candid reader will first read carefully the first two chapters of Matthew, noting all the details, and then likewise the first two chapters of Luke, he will see that they are wholly irreconcilable in their details. They agree in but two points: That Jesus was miraculously begotten, and born at Bethlehem. But in every detail of what went before and after, they are wholly at variance.

My belief in divine and infallible inspiration was here materially weakened. How could the Holy Spirit "inspire" in two different men, writing upon the same subject, such varying and irreconcilable accounts of the same event? Besides, our author had practically abandoned the idea of inspiration by attributing Mark's knowledge of the life of Jesus to Peter and Luke's to Paul. But, on the other hand, as I learned a little later, in all the writings attributed to Paul, there is not a single reference, even most remotely, to the miraculous birth of Jesus; but on the other hand there is much evidence in his writings to lead to the conclusion that he knew nothing about it. Then where did Luke get this information?

Concerning the Gospel according to John, our author devotes forty-eight pages to an effort to support its authorship in the Apostle John, and to try to reconcile it with the other Gospels. Like the differences between Matthew and Luke concerning the birth of Jesus, this was the first knowledge I had that there were any discrepancies between them, or that there was any doubt about its authorship. He quotes elaborately from the Church Fathers in its favor, as well as from the modern critics both for and against. He admits that chapter xxi is a later addition to the book, but insists that John wrote it himself, except the last two verses, which were "added by the church at Ephesus." He also admits that v, 2, 3, and viii, 1-11, are both spurious and added by a later and unknown hand.

When I had read it all I knew less about the authorship of the book than when I began. But the discrepancies between it and the synoptics loomed large and menacing. I will not go into details concerning these. The reader can easily see them for himself. But on the question of inspiration I was about at my wits' end. Here I was at the very vital part of the Christian religion, as I had been taught it and was trying to teach it to others. I have already told how I passed up the matter of the inspiration of the Old Testament as being of little importance under the Christian dispensation. And now every prop was falling from under me in regard to the inspiration of the New. If the very records of the life and teachings of the Christ himself, upon which the whole fabric of Christianity rested, were now shown to be discordant and irreconcilable in their contents, and some of them very doubtful in their authorship; with it the whole doctrine of a divine and infallible revelation would have to go.

I was dumfounded. Was it possible that all this upon which I had staked my whole life, and had been preaching for years, was a mere fiction? It seemed to be so, if the Bible was not divinely inspired, a true revelation from God, and infallibly correct. But how could it _all_ be true, when it told so many different and conflicting stories about the same thing? Was not God the very essence of truth? Then how could He miraculously reveal one thing to Matthew, another and entirely different one to Luke, and still another and different one to John, all about the same thing? And yet, that in many instances this was true, I could no longer doubt. Even tho these discrepancies might not go to the essence of Christianity as a system of religion; nor materially affect its fundamental doctrines; yet they did go to the very foundations upon which it was based,--a divine and infallible revelation from heaven. Take this away and orthodox Christianity is not left a leg to stand on; and I knew it.

But we will hurry on thru this subject. The authorship of the Acts of the Apostles was attributed without serious question to Luke. All the Epistles usually attributed to Paul are conceded to him by our author, except that to the Hebrews, while some critics reject the Pauline authorship of any of the Pastoral Epistles,--those to Timothy, Titus and Philemon. The author of the Epistle to the Hebrews is admitted to be unknown, and its date uncertain, tho it existed in the church quite early.

The Epistle of James is admitted to be doubtful; and especially as to which of several men of this name might have written it. It is admitted that it could not have been written by the Apostle James, as he was put to death at Jerusalem long before the epistle was known. As has already been seen, it was rejected by many of the Fathers; and even Martin Luther dubbed it "an epistle of straw."

First Peter is considered genuine, and written by the Apostle; but Second Peter is admitted to have been unknown in the church before the third century, and consequently spurious.

The First Epistle of John is believed by our author to have been written by the same hand that wrote the Fourth Gospel, the Apostle John. Second and Third John are admitted to be doubtful, probably written by some other John, and by later tradition, because of the identity of the names, attributed to the Apostle. Third John was unknown in the church before the third century.

The Epistle of Jude is admitted to be a mystery. Nobody knows even who Jude was, or what he was, or when the epistle was written. It was known to exist early in the second century. It was generally rejected by the early church, but somehow got into the canon.

The Book of Revelation is admitted to be the most mysterious book in the whole Bible. By whom and when written are both unknown. Tradition and its internal content is the only evidence that the Apostle John wrote it, and this would apply to any other John as well. It is evident that the same person did not write it and the Fourth Gospel. It was unknown in the church until near the middle of the second century; tho it bears internal evidence of having been written before the fall of Jerusalem. Most of the early Church Fathers rejected it, but it got into the canon;--and is therefore divinely inspired!

My study of "Harman's Introduction of the Study of the Holy Scriptures" was here finished. I have elaborated somewhat on these studies for two reasons: First, because the results that these studies produced in me, that I shall presently sum up, were the results of the whole, rather than any particular part of it, except those portions which I have already specially noted. Second, I desire to arouse a similar spirit of study and investigation in my readers; and I thus give this outline of study in detail, as a sort of basis from or upon which to work.

I have already indicated in part my feelings at this time. I summed the whole thing up briefly. The one great question around which it all hinged was this: If the authorship of the books of the greater portion of the Old Testament are wholly unknown, as well as the dates when they were written, and the same is true of several of the books of the New Testament, how are we to know these same books are divinely inspired, the infallible truth, the word of God? This is a fair question and a reasonable one.

I had set out in earnest and good faith to find the proofs of inspiration, in which I had always believed, and only found them wanting. Add to this the manifold discrepancies and direct contradictions which I now began to discover running thru the whole Bible, both Old and New Testaments, and I found them wholly irreconcilable with any idea of divine revelation and infallible truth.

I here recalled a small book I had read some years before on Inspiration,--the author I have forgotten,--but I remember the three leading reasons for the inspiration of the Bible which he gave, and which, with my limited knowledge at the time, seemed satisfactory. These were: Tradition, Necessity and Success. The tradition of the Jews as to the authenticity and inspiration of the books of the Old Testament: it was argued, that whatever may at this time be the limits of our knowledge concerning these books, the ancient Jewish Rabbis _knew_ just what they were, and if they had not every one been the word of God, these Rabbis would have known it, and they never would have been in the canon. The same doctrine of tradition was applied to the Church Fathers concerning the books of the New Testament. But I had here learned that these Church Fathers were by no means agreed as to these books. I began to see now that the same argument might be applied with equal force to the Vedas, the Zend Avesta, or the Koran.

The argument from necessity was based upon the assumption that man in his fallen and sinful state was by nature wholly unable to discover anything about God, or the means of his redemption. Therefore a divine revelation was necessary to meet man's needs in this case; and the Bible meets this necessity. Therefore the Bible is a divine revelation. But I here recalled that the only evidence we have of man's original perfection and fall is in the Bible itself; and that this line of argument must ultimately drive us back to the mere _assumption_ of the facts upon which this supposed "divine necessity" was based.

The argument based upon success was that Christ and Christianity were not only the fulfillment of Old Testament promise and prophecy; but that it never could have made the success in the world that it has _if it had not been of divine origin, the result of divine revelation_. I was prepared at this time to look with some favor on the argument drawn from "promise and prophecy"; but if success was a true test I wondered if the same argument would not apply with equal force to Buddhism, with a third more followers than Christianity, or to Mohammedanism with half as many in a much shorter time.

These arguments could satisfy me no longer, in the light of the new facts I had learned. But I was not yet ready to give up religion and Christianity. I began to look for some new basis of interpretation. I asked myself the questions: May not Christianity be substantially true after all? Is not man a sinner? And as such does he not need a Savior? Does not Christianity meet this necessity? Is not the Bible after all, tho of purely human origin as I now conceived, a valuable book? May we not yet find much valuable truth in it, tho neither inspired nor infallible? May not the "great plan of salvation" be true after all? Is it not of vital importance to know? But if the Bible in which we find it cannot be relied upon infallibly, _how_ are we to know?

In thus questioning myself I took into consideration my own personal experiences, those emotional impressions and manifestation which I had always been taught were the supernatural manifestations of the Holy Spirit on my life and consciousness. I could not deny them, nor get away from them. They were real. It was years later before I learned to interpret them from the scientific standpoint of psychology. I determined to take a new course--a course I had never taken before. I had heretofore taken my religion on authority. This authority had now failed. I determined to apply the test of _reason_, with a firm conviction that in doing so God would guide me aright. "If any man will do his will he shall know of the doctrine."

I may say just here that I have never yet met a person who undertook to defend the "Christian System," or doctrine of sin and salvation, from the standpoint _of its own intrinsic reasonableness_. The only manner in which reason has been applied to its defence is, that it is _a reasonable deduction_ from the _divine revelation_ upon which it is based; which revelation _must be accepted_ as true without question or equivocation. To doubt is to be damned. In fact, its _unreasonableness_, from any natural human viewpoint, was quite freely admitted. But it was argued that man in his fallen state was quite incapable of perceiving, or understanding, any of the great mysteries of God. "Great is the mystery of Godliness" was often quoted to me; as well as, "For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways," saith Jehovah. "For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts." This was the court of last resort and must be accepted, and to ask further questions was to blaspheme.

Perhaps it may be well to give here a quotation which I came across years afterwards, as illustrating this process of reasoning from the assumed hypothesis of a divine and infallible revelation, that _must be taken_ as the starting point. It is from Dr. Albert Barnes, a distinguished Presbyterian minister of Philadelphia, about the middle of the last century. I quote him because of his high character and representative position; and his dilemma is substantially the same with practically all others with whom I have conversed on the subject. Here is what he says:

"That the immortal mind should be allowed to jeopard its infinite welfare, and that trifles should be allowed to draw it away from God and virtue and heaven; that any should suffer forever,--lingering on in hopeless despair and rolling amidst infinite torments, without the possibility of alleviation and without end; that since God _can_ save men, and _will_ save a part, He has not purposed to save _all_; that, on the supposition that the atonement is ample, and that the blood of Christ can cleanse from all and every sin, it is not in fact applied to all; that, in a word, a God who claims to be worthy of the confidence of the universe, and to be a being of infinite benevolence, should make such a world as this, full of sinners and sufferers; and that, when an atonement had been made, He did not save _all_ the race, and put an end to sin and woe forever,--these, and kindred difficulties, meet the mind when we think on this great subject; and they meet us when we endeavor to urge our fellow-sinners to be reconciled to God, and to put confidence in him. On this ground they hesitate. These are _real_, not imaginary difficulties. They are probably felt by every mind that has ever reflected on the subject; and they are _unexplained, unmitigated, unremoved_. I confess, for one, that I feel them more sensibly and powerfully the more I look at them, and the longer I live. I do not understand these facts; and I make no advances towards understanding them. I do not know that I have a ray of light on the subject, which I had not when the subject first flashed across my soul.

"I have read, to some extent, what wise and good men have written; I have looked at their theories and explanations; I have endeavored to weigh their arguments; for my whole soul pants for light and relief on these questions. But I get neither; and, in the distress and anguish of my own spirit, I confess that I see no light whatever, I see not one ray to disclose to me the _reason_ why sin came into the world, why the earth is strewed with the dying and the dead, and why man must suffer to all eternity.

"I have never yet seen a particle of light thrown on these subjects that has given a moment's ease to my tortured mind; but I confess, when I look on a world of sinners and sufferers, upon death-beds and graveyards, upon the world of woe, filled with hosts to suffer forever; when I see my parents, my friends, my family, my people, my fellow-citizens,--when I look upon a whole race, all involved in this sin and danger; and when I feel that God only can save them, and yet he _does not_ do it,--I am struck dumb. It is all _dark, dark, dark_ to my soul, and I cannot disguise it."

I think the conclusions Dr. Barnes reached are about the only conclusions any honest, intelligent _man_ can reach, starting from his hypothesis, that a certain book is a divine and infallible revelation from God, which no one dare question, or go behind. But, as has been seen, this foundation had now entirely slipped from under me. My only course was to proceed just as tho no such book were known; or at least, that it was completely shorn of all claim to being a divine revelation, or infallible truth. I proposed to analyze every element that entered into the whole Christian system, creation, sin, redemption, atonement, salvation, immortality, heaven and hell, going back to original sources so far as possible, without any preconceived hypothesis whatever, in search of abstract truth. I felt that since God had left me without any conclusive and indisputable proofs of the truth of those things which I had always believed to be of the most supreme importance to mankind for time and eternity, that this supreme, distinguishing feature of man that lifts him above all known forms of creation could, and should be, appealed to as the final authority and last test in all things. And since reason was universally recognized as the court of last resort in all other things outside of religion, why should it not be applied to this also? I felt that if I thus honestly and sincerely followed the last and only light I had, that God could not be just and everlastingly damn me for some possible error in my conclusions. The process I followed and the results I reached will be told in the next chapter.