CHAPTER XII

FAILURE OF THE LOGIA THEORY

To the open-minded reader it must be already plain that, unless we are to be led into mere chaos, there must at once be added to the statistical test either the proviso that given sayings may for the purposes of certain sections of the Church have been left out in certain Gospels, or that for the purposes of certain sections they may have been invented. And the moment such a concession is made, the primary assumption of necessary authenticity is destroyed. If the anti-Samaritan precept is the utterance of the Founder, the pro-Samaritan parable is not; or else the Founder was literally all things to all men. If either could be foisted on a gospel, anything could be; and the futile historical argument to save the prediction of the fall of Jerusalem--an argument proceeding, as we have seen, on a quite uncritical view of one uninvestigated and loosely described case--becomes doubly irrelevant. Dr. Petrie's Nucleus of triple tradition contains the prophecy:--

The Son of Man shall be betrayed unto the chief priests and unto the scribes, and they shall condemn him to death, and shall deliver him to the Gentiles to mock, and to scourge, and to crucify him; and the third day he shall rise again.

Is that to be salved as historical, on the pretext that Blass has by the case of Savonarola "exploded the dogma" of omne vaticinium post eventum, or is to be salved by the plea that Savonarola, like Lincoln, predicted his own death at the hands of his enemies? And if prudence perforce abandons that course, why was the vaguer prophecy about Jerusalem sought to be salved at all? Why was not the miracle prediction included in the Savonarola argument? Considered as a whole, the other is not at all a bare prediction of the sacking of a city, fortuitously fulfilled forty years after utterance: it is a Messianic judgment, carrying a whole eschatology bound up with it. [104] And the fact that different gospels give it differently is not to be rationally explained by Professor Blass's device of saying that Jesus must have said a great deal more still, and that Luke selected what would appeal to Gentiles, while Matthew and Mark omitted what would give pain to Jews. This conception of evangelists playing fast and loose with the known divine oracles to suit men's susceptibilities ought to be disturbing to any believer's moral sense; while that of a set of propagandists inventing oracles to suit their own religious aim puts the Gospel-makers in a line with the whole succession of Jewish and early Christian framers of supposititious documents, as men of their age, well-meaning, narrow, deluded, devoted.

We have come back to the fundamental issue between authoritarian supernaturalism and free reason. If the prediction of the betrayal, the trial, the scourging, the mocking, the crucifixion, and the resurrection is to stand, there need be no more discussion over miracles or anything else. "It is written," and there an end. Biblical criticism has once more become blasphemy. If reason is to have any access to the matter, the prediction must fall as a fiction; and if the "exploded" argument from Savonarola is to be revived, it will have to be restricted to the case of the prediction to which it was so prudentially applied. But if one hopeless prophecy is to be dropped as post eventum, it is mere irrelevance to debate over another which is only in one selected and isolated aspect less hopeless, while as a whole it is equally so.

Savonarola's prediction of the fall of Rome was one of many, motived by religion and invited by the absolute fact of previous invasions, of which the last had occurred only two years before. The one concrete detail in which it was "fulfilled" was simply a specification of a common feature in the warfare of the age. Another invasion of Italy was believed to be imminent, and actually took place in the year of the prophecy, without fulfilling that in any detail. The Gospel prophecy is Messianic, devoid of political motivation, accompanied by a whole apparatus of Christian eschatology, and backed by other predictions of pure miracle. The details of the siege and the sequel are as plainly supplied after the event as those of the betrayal, the mockery, the scourging, the crucifixion, and the resurrection. To hold by one set of predictions and abandon the other is mere critical trifling. Even orthodox critics give up the early chapters of Luke as late accretions. What kind of credit is it that is to be saved by making him the faithful chronicler of a real prophecy?

The prediction of the fall of the temple, which is in the Nucleus as being common in matter and order to all three synoptics, is in no better case. On Dr. Petrie's principle, it is one of the earliest accepted sayings--that is, it was embodied when the Jesuist movement was pre-occupied over the law, and yet it did not disturb that pre-occupation. On his theory, it should not have appeared in the Nucleus at all, or in any Gospel until the occasion arose. Thus incompatible with Dr. Petrie's own theory, it is equally incompatible with any critical principle. This is a concrete Messianic prophecy, not to be salved by any juggling with mere historiography. In the terms of the case, it was made at a time when there was no politically visible reason for making it, [105] and is not in the least to be explained as were the vaticinations of Savonarola. On the principles of Professor Blass, it ought to have been far too "painful" for preservation by men adhering to the Jewish law.

It is quite thinkable, of course, that the compilers of the Gospels may have found such quasi-predictions already committed to writing, and merely embodied them. But that admission only carries us back to the problem of authenticity. If any current "scrap of paper" concerning "Jesus" or "the Lord" could thus secure canonicity, what trust is to be put in the canon? It is recorded in the history of Islam that Abu Daoud, who collected some half-a-million traditions concerning Mohammed, rejected all but 4,800, which included "the authentic, those which seem to be authentic, and those which are nearly so." [106] This again, it may be argued, proves that false traditions do not negate the historicity of the personage they concern. And that is clearly true. There may conceivably have been a Teacher in whose mouth many invented sayings were put even in his lifetime. But when we thus come to the historicity problem, there is simply no such basis in the Gospels as we have in the life of the confessedly "Illiterate Prophet." The Gospel life begins and ends in miracle, and it yields no intelligible evangel apart from that ostensibly founded on the sacrificial death--the death, that is, of the God.

Apart from the sacramental rite, the whole body of the Teaching is but a mass of incompatibilities, telling of a dozen standpoints, legalism and anti-legalism, Judaism and Gentilism, Davidism and non-Davidism, asceticism and the contrary, a meek Messiah and one claiming to be greater than Solomon, a Teacher vetoing invective and one freely indulging in it, a popular and unexplained Gospel for the masses who are declared to be purposely excluded from comprehension of that very Gospel, whereof the esoteric explanations yield nothing that could apply to the alleged propaganda.

Even self-contradictions, it may be argued, do not negate the authenticity of a teaching. Carlyle and Buskin abound in them; who escapes them? Many passages in the Koran are contradicted or abrogated by others, 225 verses being cancelled by later ones. [107] Here indeed there is plain ground for critical doubt; and some of us must emphatically decline to accept Muir's verdict, endorsing Von Hammer's, that "we may upon the strongest presumption affirm that every verse in the Koran is the genuine and unaltered composition of Mohammed himself." [108] But even if we are satisfied that Mohammed in his long life deliberately modified his doctrine, there is no room for such an explanation in the case of a teacher who is never once said to avow modification, and whose whole teaching career ostensibly covers but a year in the synoptic record.

As the tradition stands, whether read with Unitarian or with Trinitarian assumptions, it is a mere mosaic of enigma and contradiction. If the Teacher never called himself the Son of God in a miraculous sense, how came the men for whom his word was law, and who in the terms of the thesis knew his life history and parentage if any one did, to call him so? In Dr. Petrie's Nucleus, the triple tradition, the Founder does assure his disciples that "in the regeneration" he will sit in the throne of glory, and they on twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes. What room is there for Gentilism here? And if downright miracle and miraculous prediction alike be given up as unhistorical, on what grounds can we give credence to this as a really delivered oracle?

On the other hand, no fundamental difficulty remains when we recognize that the whole Gospel record is the composite result of a process of making a life history for a God. The command of the Messiah to Peter to keep silence as to his Messianic character is quite intelligible as providing at once the claim by Jesus and an explanation of the fact that no such Messianic movement was historically recorded. The blank enigma of the early "popular" evangel is solved when we realize that there had been no such evangel; that the cult had really grown out of the ancient sacramental rite; that the growing movement had to evolve a quasi-biography when the God of the rite was to be developed into a Messiah; and that the Judaism of the old Messianic idea had to be transmuted into universalism when the cult came to a Gentile growth. All the contradictory texts fall (more or less clearly) into their orders as survivals of the divergent sects formed by the changing situation--or, let us say, of those changing needs of the widening cult which Dr. Petrie so arbitrarily makes a ground for the mere selection of dicta from a floating mass of written notes, but which may so much more rationally be taken as grounds for producing the required oracle.

That there were such scattered and floating oracles, indeed, we are not critically entitled to deny. The Judæo-Greek world was indeed familiar with oracles of "the Lord." The Gospel Jesus is made to predict that there would come after him many saying "I am Christ"; and while the traditionalist must accept this as true prediction, the historian must pronounce that various "Christs" or quasi-Christs did come. We have some of their names and their brief secular history. [109] Each of these men would be "the Lord" for his followers; and some of them, surely, propounded some teaching. The Gospel ethic of reciprocity, we know, was put in a saner form by Hillel; did he get it from the Jesuists? Christian scholars do not claim as much. [110] There is no Messianic item in the Gospels, apart from the lore of the sacrament, which may not have been in the legend of any "Christ." As it happens, the best authenticated saying of "the Lord" is one which no Christian now accepts--the fantastic millenarian prediction given by Papias, who had it from "the elders who saw John, the disciple of the Lord," and textually quoted by Irenæus, who is practically corroborated by Eusebius. The latter, it is true, pronounces Papias very limited in his comprehension; [111] but has not the same thing been said many times of the disciples by believers in the gospel Jesus?

The logion preserved from Papias, we know, is in the Apocalypse of Baruch, which imitated the Book of Enoch, both of which are full of oracles of "the Lord." But this only proves that oracles passing current in other quarters and of another source could pass current with devout Jesuists as oracles of Jesus. The Apocalypse of Baruch is pronounced by Canon Charles, who has so ably edited that and other remains of Jewish literature of the same age, a "beautiful" book, "almost the last noble utterance of Judaism before it plunged in the dark and oppressive years that followed the destruction of Jerusalem"; a book written when "breathing thought and burning word had still their home in Palestine, and the hand of the Jewish artist was still master of its ancient cunning." [112] It was admittedly long more widely current in Christian than in Jewish circles, and fell into discredit only when it was felt to contain "an implicit polemic against Christianity." It is to its early Christian vogue that we owe its preservation in a Syriac translation made from the Greek: "of the Hebrew original every line has perished, save a few still surviving in rabbinic writings."

Who can say how many other such Jewish books may not have furnished items for the compilers of the Gospels? The Sermon on the Mount we know is a Judaic compilation; and the "Slavonic Enoch" contains sets of beatitudes closely analogous to those of the Sermon. To the traditionalist these things are matters of profound perplexity; for the rational critic they are evidences for the naturalist conception of the rise of Christianity.