In any case we learn this much from a comparative study of religions, that the majority of them have their holy books, which are usually the oldest remains of literature, oral or written, that they possess. They look upon the authors of these Scriptures as extraordinary, even superhuman beings; and the later theologians in order to remove from the minds of the people every doubt as to their truth, devised the most ingenious theories, to show how these books were not produced by men, but were merely seen by them, and how in the end even the words and letters of the original text were dictated to certain individuals. It is imagined, therefore, that the Deity condescended to speak Hebrew or Greek in the dialect of that period, and that therefore no letter or accent may be disturbed.
This would, of course, make the matter very easy, and this is no doubt the reason why the theory has found so many adherents. It is only strange that no founder of any religion ever appears to have felt the necessity of leaving anything in his own writing either to his contemporaries or to posterity. No one has ever attempted to prove that Moses wrote books, nor has it ever been said of Christ that he composed a book (John vii. 15). The same is true of Buddha, in spite of the legend of the alphabets; and of Mohammed we know from himself that he could neither read nor write. What we possess, therefore, in the way of holy Scriptures is always the product of a later generation, and subject to all the hazards involved in oral tradition. This was not to be avoided, and ought not to surprise us. If we attempt ourselves to write down without the aid of books or memoranda, occurrences or conversations of which we were witnesses fifty years ago, we shall see how difficult it is, and how untrustworthy is our memory. We may be entirely veracious, but it by no means follows that we are also true and trustworthy. Let any one try to describe the incidents of the Austro-Prussian War without referring to books, and he will see how, with the best intentions, names and dates will waver and reel. When did the German National Assembly elect the German Emperor? Who were the members of the regency? Who was Henry Simon, and were there one or more Simons, like the nine Simons in the New Testament? Who can answer these questions now without newspapers, and yet these are matters only fifty years old, and at the time were well known to all of us. Was it different with the Christians in the year 50 A.D.? It was therefore very natural that a certain inspiration or preëminent endowment should be demanded for the authors of the Gospels; if some do so still, it is on their own responsibility, just as if we demanded for the mother of Mary the same immaculate birth as for Mary herself, et sic ad infinitum. These are for the most part merely excuses for human unbelief. Nothing proves the veracity of the authors of the Gospels so clearly as the natural, often derogatory words which they use of themselves, or even more of the apostles. These did not understand, as they say, the simplest parables or teachings; they were jealous of one another; Peter even denied the Lord; in short, the authors of the Gospels cannot be credited with sinlessness and infallibility, supposing that they were really the apostles.
If they were not, then all these difficulties of our own making disappear. We then find in the Gospels just what we might expect: no ingeniously prepared statements without inconsistencies and without contradictions, but simple, natural accounts, such as were current from the first to the third generations in certain circles or localities, and even according to the attachment of certain families to the personal narrations of one or another of the apostles. We must not forget that in the first generation the necessity for a record was not even felt. Children were still brought up as Jews, for Christianity did not seek to destroy, only to fulfil; and as all the Scriptures, that is the Old Testament, were derived from God and were good for instruction, they continued in use for teaching without further question. But in the second and third generations the breach between Jews and Christians became wider and wider, and the number of those who had known Christ and the apostles, less and less; the need of books especially for the instruction of children consequently became more urgent, and the four Gospels thus arose by a natural process in answer to a natural and even irresistible want. The difficulties involved even in the smallest contradiction between the Gospels on a theory of inspiration thus disappear of themselves; nay, their discrepancies become welcome, because they entirely exclude every idea of intentional deviation, and simply exhibit what the historical conditions would lead us to expect. Of what harm is it, for instance, that Matthew (viii. 28), in relating the expulsion of the devils in the land of the Gergesenes, speaks of two possessed men, while Mark (v. 2) knows only of one among the Gadarenes? Mark also speaks only of unclean spirits, while Matthew speaks of devils. Mark and Luke know the name of the sufferer, Legion; Matthew does not mention the Roman name. These are matters of small import in human traditions and records; in divine revelations they would be difficult to explain.
But it becomes still more difficult when we come to expressions which are really significant and essential for Christianity, for even in these we find inconsistencies. What can be more important than the passage in which Christ asks his disciples, “But whom say ye that I am,” and Peter answers, “Thou art the Messiah” (Mark viii. 29). That was a purely Jewish-Christian answer, and Jesus accepts it as the perfect truth, which, however, should still remain secret. In (Matthew xvi. 16) Peter says not only, “Thou art the Messiah,” but adds, “Son of the living God.” This makes a great difference, and the remarkable thing is, that later on Jesus only commands his disciples to keep secret that he, Jesus, was the Messiah, and says nothing of himself as the Son of God. So much has been written about other discrepancies in this passage, particularly of the promise of the building of the church upon this rock (Peter), which is only found in (Matthew xvi. 18), that we have nothing further to say about it, unless it be that in Mark in this very passage Jesus rebukes Peter because he thinks more of the world than of God, like so many of his later successors.
Let us bear in mind further that neither revelation nor divine inspiration was really necessary for recording most of the things related in the Gospels. The less, the better; for either the witnesses knew that Pilate was at the time governor in Palestine, that Caiaphas was high priest, and that Jairus was ruler of a synagogue, or they did not know it, and in that case we cannot assume that these things were revealed to them by God without irreverence. If, however, it is impossible that God should have inspired or sanctioned the historical part of the Gospels, why then the other part, which contains the teachings of Christ? Is it not much better, much more honest and trustworthy for the writers to have communicated them to us, as they knew and understood them (and that they occasionally misunderstood them they themselves quite honestly admit), than to have been supernaturally inspired for the purpose, and even to have received a revelation in the form of a theophany? Through such weak human ideas we merely drag the Real, the truly Divine, into the dust, and from whom do these ideas of a divine inspiration or revelation come, if not from men as they were everywhere, whether in India or Judea? Everywhere the natural is divine, the supernatural or miraculous is human.
Even for the Apostles and the authors of the Gospels there was only one revelation: that was the revelation through Christ; and this has an entirely different meaning. To understand this, however, we must glance at what we know of the intellectual movements of that time. The Jewish nation cherished two great expectations. The one was ancient and purely Jewish, the expectation of the Messiah, the anointed (Christ), who should be the political and spiritual liberator of the chosen but enslaved people of Israel. The other was also Jewish, but transfused with Greek philosophy, the recognition of the word (Logos) as the Son of God, who should reconcile or unite humanity with God. The first declares itself most clearly, though not exclusively, in the three so-called Synoptic Gospels, the second in the so-called Gospel of John. But it is worthy of note how often these apparently remote ideas are found combined in the Gospels. The idea that a man can be the Son of God was blasphemy in a strict Jewish view, and it was for this reason that the last question of the high priest was, “I adjure thee by the living God, that thou tell us whether thou be the Christ, the Son of God” (Matthew xxvi. 63). The Jewish Messiah could never be the Son of God, the Word, in the Christian sense of the term, but only in the sense in which many nations have called God the Father of men. In this sense, also, the Jews say (John viii. 4), “We have one father, even God,” while they start back affrighted at the idea of a divine sonship of man. The Messiah, according to Jewish doctrine, was to be the son of David (Matthew xxii. 42), as the people appear to have called Jesus (Mark x. 47, xv. 39), and in order to counteract this view Christ himself said, in a passage of great historical import: “How then doth David in spirit call the Messiah Lord, saying, The Lord said unto my Lord, Sit thou on my right hand till I make thine enemies thy footstool? If then David called him Lord, how is he his son?” With these words the true Messiah publicly renounced his royal descent from David, whilst he immediately laid claim to a much higher one. Of what use is it, then, that the author of the Gospel takes such pains in the first chapter to trace Joseph's descent genealogically from David, in spite of the fact that he does not represent Joseph himself as the natural father of Jesus?
These contradictions are quite conceivable in an age strongly influenced by different intellectual currents, but they would be intolerable in a revealed or divinely inspired book. All becomes intelligible, clear, and free from contradiction, if we see in the Synoptic Gospels that which they profess to be—narratives of what had long been told and believed in certain circles about the teaching and person of Christ. I say, what they themselves profess to be; for can we believe, that if the authors had really witnessed a miraculous vision, if every word and every letter had been whispered to them, they would have made no mention of it? They relate so many wonders, why not this one, the greatest of all? But it is not enough that they do not claim any miraculous communication for themselves or their works. Luke states in plain words the character of his gospel, “For as much as many have taken in hand to draw up a narrative concerning those matters which have been fulfilled among us, even as they delivered them unto us, which from the beginning were eye-witnesses, and ministers of the word (Logos); it seemed good to me also, having traced the course of all things accurately from the first, to write unto thee in order, most excellent Theophilus, that thou mightest know the certainty concerning the things wherein thou wast instructed.”
What can be clearer? Theophilus had evidently received a not very systematic Christian training, such as was possible under the conditions of that time. As Luke says, there were even then several works on the matters of common belief among Christians. In order, however, that Theophilus may have a trustworthy knowledge of them, his friend (whether Luke or any one else) determines to communicate them to him in regular order, as they had been imparted to him, without asserting that he had himself been from the beginning an eye-witness of them, or a minister of the Word. It is apparent, therefore, that the writer rests upon a tradition derived from eye-witnesses, and that he had even investigated everything with care. Is it credible that he would not have made mention of a revelation or a theophany, had either fallen to his lot? He also lays stress upon his orderly arrangement, which probably implies that even at that time there were the same discrepancies in the sequence of events that we observe in the four Gospels, to say nothing about the numerous apocryphal Gospels. This is just what we as historians expected, in fact it could scarcely be otherwise. Christ's message had first to pass through the colloquial process, the leavening process of oral transmission; then followed the reduction to written form, and it is this that we have, apart from the corruptions of copyists. It is difficult to conceive how it could have been otherwise, and still we are not content with these facts, and imagine that we could have done it much better ourselves.
When we take the Synoptic Gospels one by one, we find in Luke the most complete and probably the latest sequence of all the important events; in Mark, the shortest and probably most original narrative, which only contains that which seemed to him undisputed or of the greatest importance; while Matthew, on the contrary, clearly presents the tradition formed and established among the Jewish Christians and believers in the Messiah.
If we may speak of communities at this early time, the community for which the first Gospel was intended manifestly consisted of converted Jews, who had recognised in Jesus their long-expected Messiah or Christ, and were, therefore, convinced that everything which had been expected of the Messiah came true in this Jesus. They went still farther. When they were once convinced that Jesus was the Messiah, many traditions arose which ascribed to him what he, if he were the Messiah, must have done. This is the pervading feature of the first Gospel, as every one who reads it carefully may easily be convinced. This alone explains the frequent and frank expression that this and that occurred “for thus it was written, and thus it was spoken by the prophet.” Every idea of intentional invention of Messianic fulfilments, which has so often been asserted, disappears of itself in our interpretation of the origin of the Gospel. It must be so, people thought, and they soon told themselves and their children that it had been so, and all in good faith, for otherwise Jesus could not have been the expected Messiah.
If we examine the gospel of Matthew from this historical standpoint in detail, we find that it begins with an entirely unnecessary genealogy of Joseph, the ostensible father of Jesus. Then follows the birth, and this is confirmed in i. 22, “For all this was done, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the Lord through the prophet,” namely, Isaiah (vii. 14), “Behold a maiden is with child and shall bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.” This means simply that it will be the first-born son, and that he will be called “God is with us,” and, therefore, certainly nothing supernatural.
The next story that the birth took place in Bethlehem, and that the wise men from the East saw the star over Bethlehem, is again founded on the prophet's word that the ruler of Israel would come from Bethlehem.
When the flight of Joseph and Mary to Egypt with the Christ child is told, it is again set forth in ii. 15, that what the prophet said might be fulfilled, “Out of Egypt have I called my son.”
The massacre of the children in Bethlehem, with all its difficulties in the eyes of the historian, finds a sufficient reason in verse 17 on the words which were spoken by Jeremiah the prophet, “A voice was heard in Rama, weeping and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children; and she would not be comforted, because they are not.”
Later, when Joseph returns with the child and journeys to Nazareth, this too is explained by the words of the prophet, who said, “He shall be called a Nazarene.”
On the false idea of the words of the prophet, that a Nazarene is an inhabitant of Nazareth, I shall say nothing here. Everything, even such popular errors, is quite intelligible from this point of view, and only shows how convinced the people were that Jesus was the Messiah, and therefore must have fulfilled everything which was expected of the Messiah. To us these fulfilments of the prophecy may not sound very convincing. But as a presentation of the ideas which then held sway over the people, and as proof of the grasp of the colloquial process, they are of great value to the historian.
The appearance of John the Baptist, too, is immediately explained by reference to prophetic words (iii. 3). And when Jesus, after the imprisonment of John, left his abode and removed to Capernaum, as was quite natural, this, likewise must have occurred (iv. 14-16) that certain words of Isaiah should be fulfilled.
There follows in the fifth to the seventh chapters the real kernel of Christian teaching in the sermon on the mount, and the announcement of the coming kingdom of God upon earth. Here we ask nothing more than a true statement, such as an apostle or his disciples were fully in a position to give us. No miraculous inspiration is needed for it; on the contrary, it would only injure for us the trustworthiness of the reporter. In the next chapters we read of the works done by Jesus, which were soon construed by the people as miracles, while in another place the evangelist sets the forgiveness of sins higher than all miracles, than all healing of the sick, and even declares this to be a power which God had given to men (ix. 8). Jesus himself often makes his healing power depend on the faith of the person to be healed, and of miraculous arts he says not a word (ix. 28). Next follow the appointment and despatch of the disciples, and soon after those words, which are so significant for this Gospel (xi. 27), “All things are delivered unto me of my Father; and no man knoweth the Son, but the Father; neither knoweth any man the Father, save the Son, and he to whomsoever the son willeth to reveal him.” Here we have in a few words the true spirit, the true inspiration of the teaching which Christ proclaimed, that he was not only the Messiah or the son of David, but the true son of God, the Logos, which God willed when he willed man, the highest thought of God, the highest revelation of God, which was imparted in Jesus to blind humanity. We cannot judge of this so correctly as those who saw and knew Jesus in his corporeal existence, and found in him all those perfections, particularly in his life and conduct, of which human nature is capable. We must here rely on the evidence of his contemporaries who had no motive to discover in him, the son of a carpenter, the realisation on earth of the divine ideal of man, if this ideal had not stood realised in him, before their eyes, in the flesh. What is true Christianity if it be not the belief in the divine sonship of man, as the Greek philosophers had rightly surmised, but had never seen realised on earth? Here is the point, where the two great intellectual currents of the Aryan and Semitic worlds flow together, in that the long-expected Messiah of the Jews was recognised as the Logos, the true son of God, and that he opened or revealed to every man the possibility to become what he had always been, but had never before apprehended, the highest thought, the Word, the Logos, the Son of God. Knowing here means being. A man may be a prince, the son of a king, but if he does not know it, he is not so. Even so from all eternity man was the son of God, but until he really knew it, he was not so. The reporters in the Synoptic Gospels only occasionally recognise the divine sonship of man with real clearness, for in their view the practical element in Christianity was predominant, but in the end everything practical must be based upon theory or faith. Our duties toward God and man, our love for God and for man, are as nothing, without the firm foundation which is formed only by our faith in God, as the Thinker and Ruler of the world, the Father of the Son, who was revealed through him as the Father of all sons, of all men. Such sayings are especially significant in the Synoptic Evangelists, because it might appear as though they had not recognised the deepest mystery of the revelation of Christ, but were satisfied with the purely practical parts of his teachings. Shortly after, when Jesus again proves his healing powers among the people, and the Pharisees persecute him because the people were more and more inclined to recognise in him the son of David, the Evangelist again declares (xii. 17) that all this occurred that the words of the prophet Isaiah might be fulfilled, “Behold my servant, whom I have chosen, my beloved in whom my soul is well pleased; I will put my spirit upon him, and he shall declare judgment unto the Gentiles.”
Then follow many of the profoundest and most beautiful parables which contain the secrets of Christ's teaching, and of which some, as we read, and not by any means the most obscure, remained unintelligible even to the disciples. Even at that time his fame had become so great, that on returning to his own birthplace, the people would scarcely believe that he was the same as the son of the carpenter, that his mother was named Mary, and his brothers, Jacob, Joseph, Simon, and Judas, who like his sisters were all still living. Yet among his own people he could accomplish but few works. The Gospel then goes on to relate that as Herod had caused John to be beheaded, Jesus again withdrew to a lonely place, probably to escape the persecutions of Herod. Then follow the really important chapters, full of teachings and of parables, intended to illumine these teachings and to bring them home to the people. Here we naturally do not expect any appeal to the prophets; on the contrary we often find a very bold advance beyond the ancient law or a higher interpretation of the ancient Jewish teachings. As soon, however, as we return to facts like the last journey to Jerusalem, and the arrest of Jesus through the treachery of Judas, the words immediately recur that all this came to pass that the Scriptures should be fulfilled (xxvi. 54). Even Jesus himself, when he commands his disciples to make no resistance, must have added the words, “But how then shall the scriptures be fulfilled, that thus it must be,” which clearly refers to the famous prophecy of Isaiah in the fifty-third chapter. Even the thirty pieces of silver which were paid Judas for his betrayal, are considered necessary, that a prophesy of Jeremiah's may be fulfilled. But it seems that this prophesy is not to be found in Jeremiah, and must be sought in Zechariah (xi. 12, 13). Such a confusion might easily occur among the people, imperfectly acquainted with the text of the prophets. In this case, therefore, it is quite harmless; but how could it possibly occur in a revealed gospel? At the crucifixion of Jesus the garments are divided, and another passage is immediately recalled, this time in a Psalm (xxii. 19), in which the poet says of himself that his enemies divided his garments between them, but there is no mention of the Messiah. Such an application of the words of the Psalm to Jesus is perfectly intelligible in the contemporary feeling of the Jewish people. Once convinced that Jesus was the Messiah or Christ, all the incidents of his life and death must necessarily remind them of the prophecies which had been current for years, and kept alive among them the hope of their deliverer. Such details were probably employed to deepen the conviction in themselves and others that Jesus was really the Messiah. This is all quite natural and comprehensible; but if we look at it with the idea that the writer was called and inspired by God, what must we say? First, in some cases there are plain errors which would be impossible in an infallible witness. Secondly, must we believe that such events as the birth of Christ in Bethlehem and his betrayal by Judas took place merely in order that certain prophecies might be fulfilled? This would reduce the life of Christ to a mere phantasm and rob it of its entire historical significance. Or shall we assume (as some critics have done) that all these events were simply invented to prove the Messiahship of Jesus?
From all these difficulties we escape when we recognise in the Gospels a record or deposit of what was developed in the first century in the consciousness of the Christians, and concerning the Gospel of Matthew in particular, Christians who were converts from Judaism. In this view everything that borders on intentional deceit drops away of itself. The facts remain as before, as the people had explained and arranged them. According to Matthew and his successors, Christianity originated as is described in the Gospel according to Matthew. Many facts may in the minds and mouths of the people have assumed a more popular or legendary form; that was not to be avoided. We know how much this popular influence, or what I call the colloquial process, has infected the traditions of other nations, and it is very helpful to know this, in order to do justice to the Gospels. For how should this influence have been wanting just in the first and second centuries in Palestine? Everything becomes clear when we accept the historical view, supported by many parallel cases, of the origin of the Gospels in the mouths of the people. The tradition was just such as we should expect under the existing conditions. Of intentional deceit there is no further question. We cannot expect anything other or better than what we have, i.e. what the people, or the young Christian community, related about the life of the founder of the new religion, unless it were a record from the hand of the founder of our religion himself; for even the apostles are only depicted as men, and their comprehension is represented as purely human and often very fallible. When we speak of revelation, the term can only refer to the true revelation of the eternal truths through Jesus himself, as we find them in the Gospels, and the verity of which, even where it is somewhat veiled by the tradition, confers on it the character of revelation. For it is a fact which we should never forget, that even the best attested revelation, as it can only reach us in human setting and by human means, does not make truth, but it is truth, deeply felt truth, which makes revelation. Truth constitutes revelation, not revelation truth. We therefore lose nothing by this view, but gain immensely, and are at once relieved from all the little difficulties which a laborious criticism thinks it discovers by a comparison of the Gospels with one another. The only difficulty that seems to remain is this, that the Synoptic Gospels are so often content to put the Jewish conception of Jesus as the Messiah, as the son of David and Abraham, and finally as the bodily son of God, in the foreground, and only hint at the leading and fundamental truth of Christ's teaching. We must never forget that the apostles were no philosophers, and the Logos idea in its full significance and historical development demands, for its correct understanding, a considerable philosophical training.
Here we are helped by the Fourth Gospel, which must decidedly be ascribed to Christians with more of Greek culture. That Greek ideas had penetrated into Palestine is best seen in the works of Philo Judæus, the contemporary of Jesus. We cannot suppose that he stood alone, and other Jewish thinkers must like him have accepted the Logos idea as a solution of the riddle of the universe. Out of soil like this, permeated and fructified with such ideas, grew the Fourth Gospel. If we ever make it plain to ourselves that Jews who, like Philo, had adopted the Logos idea with all its consequences, necessarily recognised in the Logos the Son of God, the chosen of God (Luke xxiii. 35), the realised image of God, and then in the actual Jesus the incarnation or realisation, or rather the universalising of this image, the Fourth Gospel ascribed to John will become much clearer to us. Here lies the nucleus of true Christianity, in so far as it deals with the personality of Christ, and the relation of God to humanity. It is no longer said that God has made and created the world, but that God has thought and uttered the world. All existences are thoughts, or collectively the thought (Logos) of God, and this thought has found its most perfect expression, its truest word, in a man in Jesus. In this sense and in no other was Jesus the Son of God and the Word, as the Jews of Greek culture believed, and as the author of the Fourth Gospel believed, and as still later the young Athanasius and his contemporaries believed, and as we must believe if we really wish to be Christians. There is no other really Christian explanation of the world than that God thought and uttered it, and that man follows in life and thought the thoughts of God. We must not forget that all our knowledge and hold of the world are again nothing but thoughts, which we transform under the law of causality into objective realities. It was this unswerving dependence on God in thought and life that made Jesus what he was, and what we should be if we only tried, viz., children of God. This light or this revelation shines through here and there even in the Synoptic Gospels, though so often obscured by the Jewish Messianic ideas.
In the Fourth Gospel the influence of these ideas and their employment by Jesus and his disciples cannot be mistaken. And why should not Jesus have adopted and fulfilled the Logos ideas of the Greek world as well as the Messianic ideas of the Jewish people? Do the Jews as thinkers rank so much higher than the Greeks? How does the first verse read, which might well have been said by a Neo-platonic philosopher, “In the beginning was the Word”? This Word is the Logos, and this Greek word is in itself quite enough to indicate the Greek origin of the idea. Word (Logos), however, signified at the same time thought. This creative Word was with God, nay, God himself was this Word. And all things were made by this Word, that is to say, in this Word and in all Words God thought the world. Whoever cannot or will not understand this, will never enter into the deepest depths of the teaching of Christ, good Christian as he may otherwise be, and the Fourth Gospel in its deepest meaning does not exist for him. That there was life in these words or things shining forth from God, we know, and this life, be it what it may, was a light to man, the light of the world, even though man had long been blind and imprisoned in darkness, and did not understand the life, the light, the Word.