Part 29

And this brings us at once to a question of historical research, which, though far too intricate and extensive to be discussed here, we feel bound to notice, as far as it is affected by the newly discovered work. How long did it take for the Christian faith to assume the leading features of its orthodox and catholic form, and especially to work itself clear of Judaism? It is an acknowledged fact, that the earliest disciples, including at the lowest estimate all the converts of the first seven years from the ascension, not only were born Hebrews, but did not regard their baptism as in any way withdrawing them from the pale of their national religion; that, on the contrary, they claimed to be the only true Jews, differing from others simply by their belief in a personally appointed, instead of a vaguely promised Messiah; that they aimed at no more than to bring over their own race to this conviction, and persuade them that the national destinies were about to be consummated, and, so far from relaxing the obligations of their Law, adhered with peculiar rigor to its ritual and its exclusiveness. So long as none but the twelve Apostles had charge of its diffusion, Christianity was only a particular mode of Judaism, and its whole discussion a ζητησις των Ιουδαιων. It is further admitted, that the first inroad upon this narrowness was made by St. Paul, who insisted on the universality of Christ's function, and the abrogation of the Mosaic Law in favor of inward faith, as the condition of union with God. Nor, again, is it denied that this freer view met with great resistance, and that its conflict with the other, apparent throughout the Pauline Epistles, formed the most animating feature of the Apostolic age. During that period, two distinct parties, and two separate lines of development and growth, may be traced; one following out in morals the _legal_ idea into asceticism, voluntary poverty, and physical purity, and in faith the _monarchian_ idea into theocratic and millenarian expectations; the other, proceeding from the notion of _faith_ to substitute an ideal Christ for the historical, a new religion for an old law, the free embrace of divine reconciliation for the anxious strain of self-mortifying obedience. But how long did this struggle and separation continue? According to the prevalent belief, it was all over in a few years; and, by the happy harmony and concurrence of the Apostles, was determined in favor of the generous Pauline doctrine; so that St. John lived to see the Hebrew Christians sink into a mere Ebionitish sect outside the pale, and their stiff Unitarian theology disowned in favor of the higher teachings of his Gospel. Against this assumption of so easy a victory over the Jewish tendency, several striking testimonies have often been urged. Tertullian, in a well-known passage of his treatise against Praxeas, describes the dislike with which the unlearned majority of believers regard the Trinitarian distinctions in the Godhead, and the zeal with which they cry out for holding to "the Monarchy."[42] In the time of Pope Zephyrinus, as we learn from Eusebius, a body of Unitarians in Rome, followers of Artemon, defended their doctrine by the conservative plea of antiquity and general consent; affirming that it was no other than the uninterrupted creed of the Roman Church down to the time of Victor, the preceding pope; and that the higher doctrine of the Person of Christ was quite a recent innovation.[43] Nor are we without ecclesiastical literature, of even a later date, that by its theological tone gives witness to the same effect. The "Clementine Recognitions," written somewhere between 212 and 230, occupy a dogmatic position, higher indeed than the disciples of Artemon, but only in the direction of Arius, and, to save the Unity of God, deny the Deity of Christ.[44] Relying on such evidence as this, Priestley, in his "History of Early Opinions," and his controversy with Bishop Horsley, maintained that the creed of the Church for the first two centuries was Unitarian. But this position was attended with many difficulties, so long as the present canonical Scriptures were allowed to have been in the hands of the Christians of that period, and recognized as authorities; for the narratives of the miraculous conception, the writings of Paul, and the Gospel of John, are irreconcilable with the schemes of belief attributed to the early Unitarians. Moreover, if for two centuries the Church had interpreted its authoritative documents in one way, and formed on this its services and expositions, it is not easy to conceive the rapid revolution into another. During a period of free and floating tradition, there is manifest room for the growth of essentially different modes of faith; but after the reception of a definite set of sacred books, the scope for change is much contracted. To treat the doctrine of the Logos as an innovation, yet ascribe the fourth Gospel to the beloved disciple; to suppose that justification by works was the generally received notion among people who guided themselves by the authority of Paul,--involves us in irremediable contradictions. Avoiding these at least, possibly not without the risk of others, the celebrated theologians of Tübingen have maintained a bolder thesis than that of Priestley, including it indeed, but with it also a vast deal more. Their theory runs as follows. The opposition which St. Paul's teaching excited, and of which his letters preserve so many traces, was neither so insignificant nor so short-lived as is commonly supposed; but was encouraged and led by the other Apostles, especially James and John and Peter, who never heartily recognized the volunteer Apostle; and was so completely successful, that he died without having made any considerable impression on the Judaic Christianity sanctioned from Jerusalem. Accordingly, the earliest Christian literature was Ebionitish; and no production was in higher esteem than the "Gospel of the Hebrews," which, after being long current, with several variations of form, at last settled down into our Gospel of Matthew. In almost all the writings known to us, even in Roman circles of the second century,--the Shepherd of Hermas, the Memorials of Hegesippus, the works of Justin,--some character or other of Ebionitism is present,--millenarian doctrine, admiration of celibacy and of abstinence from meat and wine, denunciation of riches, emphatic assertion of the _Messiahship_ of Jesus, and treatment of the miraculous conception as at least an open question. The labors of Paul, however, had left a seed which had been buried, but not killed; and from the first, a small party had cherished his freer principles, and sought to win acceptance for them; and as the progress of time increased the proportion of provincial and Gentile converts, and the Jewish wars of Titus and Hadrian destroyed the possibility of Mosaic obedience and the reasonableness of Hebrew hopes, the Pauline element rose in magnitude and importance. Thus the two courses of opposite development ran parallel with each other, and gradually found their interest in mutual recognition and concession. Hence, a series of writings proceeding from either side, first of conciliatory approximation only, next of complete neutrality and equipoise, in which sometimes the figures of Peter and Paul themselves are presented with studiously balanced honor, at others their characteristic ideas are adjusted by compromise. The Clementine Homilies, the Apostolic Constitutions, the Epistle of James, the Second Epistle of Clement, the Gospel of Mark, the Recognitions, the Second Epistle of Peter, constitute the series proceeding from the Ebionitish side; while from the Pauline came the First Epistle of Peter, the Preaching of Peter, the writings of Luke, the First Epistle of Clement, the Epistle to the Philippians, the Pastoral Epistles, Polycarp's, and the Ignatians. These productions, however, springing from the practical instinct of the West, deal with the ecclesiastical more than with the doctrinal phase of antagonism between the two directions; and end with establishing in Rome a Catholic Church, founded on the united sepulchres of Peter and Paul, and combining the sacerdotalism of the Old Testament with the universality of the New Gentile Gospel. Meanwhile, a similar course, with local modifications, was run by the Church of Asia Minor. Rome, with its political aptitude, having taken in hand the questions of discipline and organization, the speculative genius of the Asiatic Greek addressed itself simultaneously to the development and determination of doctrine. Here the Epistle to the Galatians marks, as a starting-point, the same original struggle between the contrasted elements which the Epistle to the Romans betrays in Italy; while the Gospel of John closes the dogmatic strife of development with an accepted Trinity for faith, just as the Ignatian Epistles wind up the contests of the West with a recognized hierarchy for government. And between these extremes the East presents to us, first, the intensely Judaical Apocalypse; next, with increasing reaction in the Pauline direction, the rudiments of the Logos idea in the Epistles to the Hebrews, Colossians, and Ephesians; and as Montanism, in the midst of which these arose, had already made familiar the conception of the Paraclete, all the conditions were present for combination into the Johannine doctrine of the Trinity; and then it was, in the second quarter of the second century, that the fourth Gospel appeared. The speculative theology thus native to Lesser Asia was adopted for shelter and growth by the kindred Hellenism of Egypt, and gave rise to the school of Alexandria. In the whole of this theory great use is made of Montanism: it spans, as it were, the interval between the parallel movements of Italy and Asia; and is the common medium of thought in which they both take place. Singularly uniting in itself the rigor, the narrowness, the ascetic superstitions of its Hebrew basis, with a Phrygian prophetic enthusiasm and an Hellenic theosophy, it imported the latter into the doctrine, the former into the discipline, of the Church. The Roman Catholic system betrays its Jewish or Montanist origin in its legalism, its penances, its celibacy, its monachism, its ecstatic phenomena, its physical supernaturalism, its exaggerated appreciation of martyrdom.

Such, in barest outline, is the theory which M. Bunsen characterizes as the "Tübingen romance." Its leading principle is, that the antagonism between the Petrine and Pauline, the Hebrew and the Hellenic Gospel, which has its origin and authentic expression in the Epistles to the Galatians, Romans, and Corinthians, continued into the second century; determined the evolution of doctrine and usage; stamped itself upon the ecclesiastical literature; and ended in the compromise and reconciliation of the Catholic Church. It is evident that, in the working out of this principle, the New Testament canon is made to give way. With the exception of the greater Pauline Epistles and the Apocalypse, both of which are held fast as genuine productions of the Apostles whose names they bear, and the first Gospel, which is allowed to have at least the groundwork in the primitive tradition, the received books are all set loose from the dates and names usually assigned to them, and arranged, in common with other products of the time, according to the relation they bear to the Ebionitish or to the Pauline school, and the particular stage they seem to mark in the history of either. This proceeding, however, is not an original violence resorted to for the exigencies of the theory; but, for the most part, a mere appropriation to its use of conclusions reached by antecedent theologians on independent grounds. The Epistle to the Philippians is the only work, if we mistake not, on the authenticity of which doubt has been thrown for the first time,--in our opinion, on very inadequate grounds. In this, as in many other details of the hypothetical history, there is not a little of that straining of real evidence and subtle fabrication of unreal, which German criticism seems unable to avoid. But the acerbity displayed by the North German theologians towards the Tübingen critics appears to us unwarranted and humiliating; and we certainly wish that M. Bunsen, whose prompt admiration of excellence so nobly distinguishes him from Ewald, could have expressed his dissent from Baur and Schwegler in a tone still further removed from the Göttingen pitch. At least, we do not find the positive assertion that the Tübingen theory is finally demolished by the "Philosophumena" at all borne out by the evidence; and are inclined to think that the case is very little altered by the new elements now contributed to its discussion. The critical offence which he thinks is now detected and exposed, is the ascription of a late origin to the fourth Gospel,[45] and the treatment of it as the perfected product, instead of the misused source, of the Montanist conceptions of the Logos and the Paraclete. It cannot, however, be denied, that, in the previous absence of any external testimony to the existence of this Gospel earlier than the year 170,[46] the internal difficulties are sufficiently serious to redeem the doubt of its authenticity from the character of rashness or perversity. The irreconcilable opposition between its whole mode of thought and that of the Apocalypse is confessed by M. Bunsen himself, when he suggests that the proem on the Logos was directed against Cerinthus,--the very person whose sentiments the Apocalypse was supposed to express, and to whom, accordingly, it was ascribed by those who rejected it. _One_ of the two books must resign, then, the name of the beloved disciple; and, of the two, we need hardly say that the Apocalypse is incomparably the better authenticated. Moreover, the traditions which unite the names of James and John, as the authorities followed by the Church of Lesser Asia, render it hard to conceive that their doctrines can have taken precisely opposite directions; and that, while James represented the Judaic Christianity of the deepest dye, John can have produced the standard and conclusive work on the other side. In particular, the well-known fact, that the Asiatic Christians justified their Jewish mode of keeping Easter by the double plea, (1.) that James and John always did so, (2.) that Christ himself had done so before he suffered, seems incompatible with any knowledge of the fourth Gospel, which denies that Jesus ate the passover before he suffered, and makes his own death to _be_ the passover. How could this Quartodeciman controversy live a day among a people possessing and acknowledging John's Gospel, which so bears upon it as to give a distinct contradiction to the view of the other Gospels, and to pronounce in Asia Minor itself an unambiguous verdict in favor of the West? These are grave difficulties, which, after all the ingenuity, even of Bleek, remain, we fear, unrelieved; and in their presence we cannot feel the justice of M. Bunsen's sentence, that Baur's opinion is "the most unhappy of philological conjectures." Everything conjectural, however, must give way before real historical testimony; and, if new evidence is actually contained in the "Philosophumena," every true critic, of Tübingen or elsewhere, will be thankful for light to dissipate the doubt. Now, it is said that our Roman bishop, in treating of the heresy of Basilides, supplies passages from the writings of this heresiarch which include quotations from the fourth Gospel; and thus prove its existence as early as the year 130. This argument, as stated by M. Bunsen, appeared to us quite conclusive, and we hoped, that a decided step had been gained towards the settlement of the question. Great was our disappointment, on reading the account in the original, to find no evidence that any extract from Basilides was before us at all. A general description of the system bearing his name is given; but with no mention of any work of his, no profession that the words are his, and even so little individual reference to him, that the exposition is introduced as being a report of what "Basilides and Isidorus, and the whole troop of these people, falsely say" (καταψευδεται, sing.). Then follows the account of the dogmas of the sect, with the word φησιν inserted from time to time, to indicate that the writer is still reporting the sentiments of others. The _singular_ form of this word implies nothing at all; it occurs immediately after the word καταψευδεται, and has the same avowedly plural subject. The statement, therefore, within which are contained the Scripture citations, is a merely general one of the opinions of a sect which continued to subsist till a much later time than the lowest date ever assigned for the composition of the fourth Gospel. If the actual words of any writings current among these heretics are given, they are the words of an author or authors wholly unknown, and to refer them to Basilides in particular is a mere arbitrary act of will. The change from the singular to the plural forms of citation in the midst of one and the same sentence, and the disregard of concord between verb and subject, show that no inference can be drawn from so loose a system of grammatical usage. All that can be affirmed is, that our author had in his hand _some_ production of the Basilidian χορος, in which the fourth Gospel was quoted; but this affords no chronological datum that can be of the smallest use.[47] The same remark applies to the use of John's Gospel by the Ophites. That they did use it is evident; that they existed as far back as the time of Peter and Paul is certainly probable; yet it does not follow that the fourth Gospel was then extant. For they continued in existence through two or three centuries, dating, as Baur has shown, from a time anterior not only to the Christian heresies, but to Christianity itself, and extending down to Origen's time; and to what part of this long period the writings belonged which the author of the "Philosophumena" employed, we are absolutely unable to determine. We do not know why M. Bunsen has not appealed also to a quotation from the Gospel which occurs (p. 194) in an account of the Valentinian system. If, as he affirms (I. 63), this account were really in "_Valentinus's own words_," the citation would be of particular value in the controversy. For it has always been urged by the Tübingen critics as a highly significant fact, that while the _followers_ of Valentinus showed an especial eagerness to appeal to the Gospel of John, and one of the earliest, Heracleon, wrote a commentary upon it, no trace could be found of its use by the heresiarch himself. From this circumstance, they have inferred that the Gospel was not available for him, and first appeared after his time. A single clause cited by him from the Gospel would demolish this argument at once. But the assertion that we have here "full eight pages of Valentinus's own words" appears to us quite groundless. No such thing is affirmed by the writer of the eight pages. He promises to tell us how the strict adherents to the original principle of the sect expounded their doctrine (ὡς εκεινοι διδασκουσι); and then passes over, as usual, to the singular φησι, returning, however, from time to time, to the plural forms,--θελουσι, λεγουσι, &c.,--and thus leaving no pretext for the assumption that Valentinus is before us in person. The later Gnostics indisputably resorted to the Gospel of John with especial zeal and preference; and if their predecessors, Basilides and Valentinus, were acquainted with the book, it is surprising that no trace of their familiarity with it has been found; and that the former should have sought to authenticate the secret doctrine he professed to have received by the name of Matthew or Matthias instead of John. It deserves remark, that the citations preserved by our author are made, like those of Justin Martyr, as from an anonymous writing, without mentioning the name of the Evangelist; a circumstance less surprising in reference to the Synoptics alone, which present only varieties of the same fundamental tradition, than when the fourth Gospel, so evidently the independent production of a single mind, is thrown into the group. The Epistles of Paul and the books of the Old Testament are frequently quoted by name; and why this practice should invariably cease whenever the historical work of an Apostle was in the hand, it is not easy to explain. The Apocalypse is mentioned not without his name.[48]