CHAPTER XIV

ORTHODOXY AND THE "ORAL" HYPOTHESIS

The diverging schools of documentary "construction" being thus alike unable to yield a coherent notion either of the process of Gospel-making or of the beginnings of the cultus, it is not surprising to find yet a third school of scholarly interpretation undertaking to do better, and to build on an "oral" basis where others have vainly built on documents. This theory, long ago predominant in Germany, [117] is latterly represented in England by the Rev. Arthur Wright, author of The Composition of the Gospels, a Synopsis of the Gospels, and Some New Testament Problems.

Writing before the appearance of Dr. Petrie's treatise, Mr. Wright did not contemplate that development of the later school which gives the earliest possible dates for the Gospels; but we may feel sure that he would give it small quarter. Himself essentially orthodox, and making without question all the primary assumptions of historicity, he dates the Epistle of James before the year 50, Paul's Epistles to the Thessalonians in the year 52; Mark about 70; Matthew "not much" later; Luke in 80; and John later still. [118] He is not tied to the synoptics: when they become unmanageable he vigorously rectifies them by the aid of the Fourth Gospel. But on his own lines he is so candid that he can always be read with pleasure; and his arguments are well worth consideration.

Mr. Wright's theory, in brief, is that the Gospels, one and all, represent the late consignment to paper of matter preserved from the first in the Christian catechetical schools, given by the apostles and preserved by their pupils in the Rabbinical fashion. As Matthew divides plausibly into fifty-one lessons, and Mark in the Westcott and Hort text into forty-eight paragraphs, it is suggested that the plan in both cases had been to attain to a set of fifty-one or fifty-two; and

If there really was an attempt to provide every Sunday with a Gospel of its own, we shall understand why the formation of Gospel sections proceeded rapidly at first and then ceased; we shall understand why all our Gospels are so short and contain so little which is not essential; we shall understand how S. Mark's order became fixed. [119]

This plausible but dangerous detail, however, is not insisted on; what is essential is the datum of long oral tradition. Orthodox as he is, too, Mr. Wright holds that Luke i; ii; iii, 23-38, "are comparatively late additions, which never formed part of the primitive oral teaching." [120] Thus he can summarily get rid of a number of incredibilities which the other schools more prudently leave to be excised by the reader as he sees fit. But we shall find him making a stout fight for many others.

On the "oral" theory every Church had its own tradition, [121] "differing both in contents and wording from that of other Churches, and in particular exhibiting much mixture and many sayings of Christ which are not in our Gospels at all" [122]--an interesting approximation, in effect, to the theory of scattered leaflets. Thus is to be accounted for the endless variety in Gospel phrasing and detail. For Mr. Wright, further, it is inconceivable that any evangelist left out anything he knew of. "The common idea" (before Dr. Petrie) "that they picked and selected what was specially adapted to their readers, I most confidently reject." [123] Matthew would gladly have given the parable of the Prodigal Son, and Luke the story of the Syrophoenician woman, which would so well have suited his purpose. [124] "He did not give it because he had never heard of it." Thus, in brief, Mr. Wright posits much teaching lost even from the oral tradition, as Dr. Petrie posits many lost leaflets.

But Mr. Wright's conception of the oral tradition, upon scrutiny, becomes disquieting to the critical sense. In one place, discussing Luther's estimate of the Epistle of James as an epistle of straw, he remarks--with a great deal more truth, I fancy, than he dreams of--that James's Epistle "is Christianity in swaddling-clothes." [125] Again, the opening verses of John's Gospel "reveal a depth of knowledge to which S. James never attained. Not that S. James would have contradicted them or doubted their truth. But it is one thing to see truth when it is set before you; it is another to set it forth yourself. There is such a thing as latent knowledge." [126] Yet on the same page with the swaddling-clothes passage Mr. Wright has said, with regard to Mark's omission of the words, "Come unto me all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest":--

Was it humility that made him deliberately omit them as too good for so insignificant a creature as himself to record? Or was it a conscious or unconscious feeling that they were unsuited to his readers? A man with such preposterous humility was ill-equipped for the work of an evangelist. Readers so unchristian would not value a Gospel.

What now becomes of the two presentments of James and John? Both must presumably have known most that was to be known, ex hypothesi. Yet James has not a word of specifically Christian doctrine, and, save in two sentences, one of which has every appearance of interpolation, while the other is only less suspicious, no mention of Jesus. John, on the other hand, as an apostle (whether or not the beloved one), must on the theory have heard many of the sayings given in the synoptics, which he does not report. Why does he not? Had he never heard of the "Come unto me" allocution? Could he conceivably have put it aside from a preposterous humility? If he had not heard that, had he not heard the Sermon on the Mount, or any of the parable-solutions given in the synoptics as specially addressed to the twelve disciples? Can Mr. Wright, holding by the central tradition of Jesus and the twelve, believe that John had heard none of the teachings which he does not repeat? If, on the other hand, he admits wholesale suppression in John's case, what becomes of the argument above cited?

It matters little that Mr. Wright credits John with evolving the Logos doctrine out of his own profound meditation, and with having "remoulded" the sayings of Jesus which he does give. That is a standing device of exegesis, Unitarian and Trinitarian alike; and by his account the general oral tradition did the same thing indefinitely. But all the while Mr. Wright is going a great deal further. He alternately insists that every evangelist told all he knew, and assumes that the two evangelists who are alleged to have been apostles did not. If, he writes--

If, as becomes increasingly probable, a Johannine course of teaching was extant in comparatively early times, it is not strange that, as S. John dealt chiefly with the Judæan ministry, S. Peter should have refused to intrude into his brother Apostle's domain. They may have agreed at the outset to divide the work thus between them.

It is impossible to reconcile this with Mr. Wright's theory of the inclusiveness of the evangelists. Why should not Mark do what Matthew and John did in the terms of the case?

Of course this is not the true critical solution; the immediate question is the consistency of Mr. Wright's critical principles. To the eye of unbiassed criticism the "Come unto me" logion is not a possible oracle at all; it is an unintelligently inserted liturgical formula from the mysteries, misplaced and meaningless as a public teaching. [127] As regards the fair historical inference from the wide difference between the synoptic Gospels and the fourth, it is not possible to accept any of Mr. Wright's solutions, tried by his own tests. To suggest that John had not "heard" of the Virgin Birth story is for him impossible, unless he post-dates that as he does the birth-stories in Luke. If he follows that course, what can he make of the 13th chapter of John, a palpable interpolation or substitution between the 12th and the 14th, which form a sequence that the 13th absolutely breaks? [128] If that interpolation be admitted, what exactly is left to fight for?

In any case, the implication that Matthew, the apostle, "had not heard of" what John declares to be the first miracle, or of the raising of Lazarus, is as destructive of every traditionalist assumption as is the implication that John the Apostle had not heard of the Sermon on the Mount, or of the parables of the mystery of the kingdom. Mark and Luke expressly declare that John was present at the raising of Jairus' daughter; and the fourth Gospel makes no mention of it. It was perhaps to meet cruces of this kind that Mr. Wright makes John and Peter "divide between them" the portions of the ministry; but such a device simply destroys, as we have seen, another main part of his case. Mr. Wright may well reject the thesis of Mr. Halcombe, who, severely condemning "modern criticism," produces a modern criticism of his own, which makes John's Gospel the first--another of the hopeless devices of traditionalist critics to escape from the imbroglio of the tradition. Mr. Halcombe gravely reasons that the best Gospel came first; and Mr. Wright pronounces that "such a plan of composition seems unworthy of God and incredible in man." [129] But his own theory presents only a different set of incredibilities. He accepts without a misgiving the most staggering anomalies. "If it were not for a single incidental statement in S. John" (iv, 1, 2), he writes, "we should have concluded confidently that the sacrament of holy baptism was first instituted after the Resurrection." John's statement is in fact the sole intimation that Jesus or the disciples ever baptized at all; and it is either a designed or redacted equivoque or a flat contradiction in terms:--

When therefore the Lord knew that the Pharisees had heard that Jesus was making and baptizing more disciples than John (although Jesus himself baptized not, but his disciples), he left Judæa, and departed again into Galilee.

The exegesis which can take this for a historical datum, and compose it with the theory of an oral tradition in which baptism either by Jesus or by his disciples never appears, is really outside serious discussion. The proposition that, given the main tradition, either Jesus or the disciples baptized freely, and that yet neither Matthew, Mark, nor Luke ever heard of it, is a mere flouting of the critical reason to which it professes to appeal. And there is no alternative save an honest confession that the record is incredible. The whole Christian tradition of baptism breaks down on examination, as does the record of the acceptance of the higher mission of Jesus by John, followed by statements affirming the continuance of John's movement and teaching alongside of the Jesuine. Mr. Wright is severe on the orthodox harmonists in general. "If I am right," he remarks, "the exhausting labours and tortuous explanations of the harmonists, in their endeavour to reconcile what cannot be reconciled, have been wasted." [130] That is exactly what the attentive reader must regretfully say of Mr. Wright's own reconstructions.

His handling of the problems of the date of the crucifixion and the duration of the Ministry is a warning to every student who desires to be loyal to critical principle. By his final admission, no one can tell whether the Ministry lasted one, two, three, four, ten, or twenty years. He frankly rejects Sir William Ramsay's attempt to salve as history Luke's story of the census. The alleged procedure, he sees, is simply impossible--"S. Luke evidently has somewhat misunderstood the situation"--and he solves the problem by throwing over Luke's opening chapters as late accretions. But the question of the duration of the Ministry, which is bound up with that of the date of the crucifixion, and thus lies at the very centre of the whole historic problem, he is content to leave as insoluble, yet without a misgiving as to the historicity of the record.

John makes Jesus go four times to Jerusalem; while in the synoptics we note "the extraordinary fact that they do not bring Christ to Jerusalem until He entered it to be crucified." [131] John puts the cleansing of the temple at the beginning of the Ministry, and the synoptics place it at the close. Orthodox exegesis then assumes two cleansings, but "such a repetition is, to say the least, highly improbable," for Mr. Wright. "What end would such a repetition serve? And if repeated, why should not S. Mark or S. John have told us so?" [132] Why, indeed! So Mr. Wright suggests that the synoptics may have telescoped several years into one. "Events in real life move much more slowly." [133] They certainly do!

Yet, on the other hand, "the one-year ministry would solve many difficulties. It is the only scheme which reconciles S. Luke, S. Matthew, and S. John. Not improbably it is true: the more I consider it, the more attractive it appears." [134] Such, evidently, was the view of the Christian and other Gnostics. But Irenæus, the first Father to handle the problem, declared for a ministry of about twenty years, founding not only on the quotation in John, "Thou art not yet fifty years old," but on the fact that "all the elders who had known John the disciple of the Lord in Asia witness that he gave them this tradition." [135] On the other hand, in Mr. Wright's opinion, "ten years is the utmost length to which we can stretch the ministry without throwing overboard S. Luke's chronology altogether." [136] Yet Bishop Westcott declared concerning the record of Irenæus that, "however strange it may appear, some such view is not inconsistent with the only fixed historical dates which we have with regard to the Lord's life, the date of His birth, His baptism, and the banishment of Pilate." Thus turns the kaleidoscope of the tradition of which Harnack has latterly affirmed the "essential rightness, with a few important exceptions."

It is hardly necessary to point out that the "oral" hypothesis, like the "documentary" and that of scattered logia, is more compatible with the negative than with the affirmative answer on the question of historicity. Contradictions and anomalies irreconcilable with the assumption of a real historical process present not difficulty but confirmation to the theory of a fictitious production, whether documentary or oral, to establish a transforming cult, supplying a quasi-historical basis where none such existed. Contradictory episodes and dicta stand for diverging sects and movements. Save for incidental concessions, all the traditionist schools alike ignore the grounds for inferring a long-continued modification of the Gospels at many hands; though, when Celsus late in the second century alleged the common practice of interpolation, Origen could only explain that it was the work of heretics. Such a procedure is for the rational critic only the natural continuance of the method of formation.

Over the point upon which Mr. Wright most completely diverges from the various Unitarian schools--his acceptance of the Fourth Gospel as essentially historical--we need not here concern ourselves. Those who can accept the Fourth and the Synoptics cannot be supposed to admit the application of criticism to fundamentals at all, however critically they may handle secondary issues. And they have their defence. The liberalizers who see that the Fourth as a whole is a work of invention, making free play with previous material, and yet cannot conceive that the synoptics had beforehand followed a similar method, can make no claim to critical consistency. They merely realize that the Fourth and the Synoptics cannot all be records of a real Life and Teaching, and they decide to reject the last rather than the prior documents. The argument from "vividness" and lifelike detail simply goes by the board. In the fourth Gospel there are many more lifelike details than in the second; but that is not allowed to count.

For the rational inquirer, however, the fact remains that the dismissal of the fourth Gospel is a beginning of historical as distinct from documentary discrimination; and it is to those who have made such a beginning that a further critical argument falls to be addressed. Mr. Wright, facing a chaos of doctrinal contradictions and chronological divergences, falls back trustingly on the reflection that "after all we are not saved by the Gospels, but by Christ." He has no misgiving as to the evangelists being inspired. "Inspiration quickens their spiritual perception, but does not altogether preserve them from errors of fact": e.g. Mt. i, 9, 11; Mk. iii, 26; Lk. ii, 2; John xii, 3; Acts v, 36; vii, 16. [137] Perhaps Mr. Wright would grant some dozens more of errors of fact if pressed; but his faith would not be modified unless he should be shaken on the resurrection. "History as well as criticism leaves us no room to question this. On so sure a foundation is our most holy faith erected." [138] For Mr. Wright that is supremely certain which a myriad Christian scholars now find incredible. And we can but take our leave of him with the question of the Jew of Celsus, "Did Jesus come into the world for this purpose, that we should not believe in him?"