Read Ebook: The Criticism of the Fourth Gospel Eight Lectures on the Morse Foundation Delivered in the Union Seminary New York in October and November 1904 by Sanday W William

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The other four German writers whom I have mentioned all belong to the younger generation. Dr. Schmiedel is the eldest, and he is not yet quite fifty-three: J?licher, the next on the list, is forty-seven. And as they belong to the younger generation, so also they may be said to mark the rise of a new School, or new method of treatment, in German Theology. The Germany for which they speak is not the dreaming, wistful, ineffective, romantic Germany of the past, but the practical, forceful, energetic and assertive Germany of the present. All, as I have said, are able writers; and the type of their ability has much in common, though they have also their little individual differences. They have all a marked directness and lucidity of style. What they think they say, without hesitation and without reserve; no one can ever be in any doubt as to their meaning. They are all apt to be somewhat contemptuous, not only of divergent views, but of a type of mind that differs from their own. Of the four, J?licher and especially Wernle have the warmer temperament; Schmiedel and Wrede are cold and severe. Wrede writes like a mathematician, who puts Q. E. D. at the end of each step in the argument--though it would be a misfortune if the demonstration were taken to be as complete as he thinks it. Schmiedel is rather the lawyer who pursues his adversary from point to point with relentless acumen: if we could grant the major premises of his argument, there would be much to admire in his handling of the minor; but the major premises, as I think I shall show, are often at fault. J?licher is just the downright capable person, who sees vividly what he sees and is intolerant of that which does not appeal to him. Wernle alternately attracts and repels; he attracts by his real enthusiasm for that with which he sympathizes, by his skill in presentation, and his careful observance of perspective and proportion; he repels by aggressiveness and self-confidence.

They all start with the 'reduced' conception of Christianity current in so many quarters, that is akin to the ancient Ebionism or Arianism. But so far as they do this their verdict as to the Fourth Gospel is determined for them beforehand. The position is stated with great frankness by Mr. Conybeare:

'It may indeed be said that if Athanasius had not had the Fourth Gospel to draw texts from, Arius would never have been confuted. Had the fathers of the third, fourth, and fifth centuries not known this Gospel, or not embraced it as authentic, the Church would have remained semi-Ebionite, and the councils of Nice and Ephesus would never have taken place.'

This does not indeed quite correspond to the facts. To make it do so, we should have to blot out St. Paul, and other parts of the New Testament, as well as St. John. But just so far as the reasoning holds good, it is obvious that we may invert it. If a writer starts with a conception of Christianity that is 'semi-Ebionite' or 'semi-Arian,' he is bound at all costs to rule out the Fourth Gospel, not only as a dogmatic authority, but as a record of historical fact.

Another characteristic is common to the writers of the School of which we are speaking. The complexity of a critical hypothesis very rarely stands in the way of its adoption; but a very little psychological complexity acts as a deterrent. For instance, after quoting from B. Weiss some rather exaggerated language as to the freedom used by the evangelist in reproducing the discourses, Schmiedel goes on thus:

'As compared with such a line of defence, there is a positive relief from an intolerable burden as soon as the student has made up his mind to give up any such theory as that of the "genuineness" of the Gospel, as also of its authenticity in the sense of its being the work of an eye-witness who meant to record actual history.'

So far from being an 'intolerable burden,' it seems to me that Weiss' theory is not only in itself perfectly natural, nay inevitable, but that it is also specially helpful as enabling us to account at one and the same time for the elements that are, and those that are not, strictly genuine in the report of the discourses.

J?licher writes to much the same effect as Schmiedel; and the passage which follows is indeed very characteristic of his habit of mind:

To please Professor J?licher a picture must be all black or all white; he is intolerant of half-shades that pass from the one into the other. And no doubt there are some problems for the treatment of which such a habit is an advantage, but hardly those which have to do with living human personalities.

The French writers, like the German, have a certain resemblance to each other. To some of these points I shall have to come back in detail later. I will only note for the present that they are both allegorists of an extreme kind. I would just for the present commend to both a passage of Wernle's:

'This conception, however, of the Fourth Gospel as a philosophical work, to which the Alexandrines first gave currency, and which is still widely held to-day, is a radically wrong one. John's main idea, the descent of the Son of Man to reveal the Father, is unphilosophical.... So, too, the Johannine miracles are never intended to be taken in a purely allegorical sense. The fact of their actual occurrence is the irrefragable proof of God's appearance upon earth.'

If the miracles of the Fourth Gospel were facts there was some point in the constant appeals that the Gospel makes to them; but there would be no point if these appeals were to a set of didactic fictions.

To these points must be added the inherent qualities of the book itself--the thorough knowledge with which it is written, its evident sincerity and effort to get at realities, its nervous directness and force of style, its judicial habit of weighing all that is to be said on both sides.

To this is added a note which raises the whole general question:

'An instructive instance of the danger of arguing from what is not told is furnished by Theophilus of Antioch. He does not mention the names of the writers of the Gospels, except John; he does not tell us anything about any of them; he says nothing about the origin or the date of the Gospels themselves, or about their use in the Church. He quotes from them extremely little, though he quotes copiously from the Old Testament. But most singular of all, in a defence of Christianity he tells us nothing about Christ Himself; if I am not mistaken, he does not so much as name Him or allude to Him; and, if the supposition were not absurd, it might be argued with great plausibility that he cannot have known anything about Him. For he undertakes to explain the origin of the word Christian; but there is not a word about Christ, and his conclusion is ????? ?????? ??????? ????????? ??? ???????? ?????? ???? . In the following chapter, when he would establish the doctrine of the resurrection, you could not imagine that he had heard of the resurrection of Christ; and instead of referring to this, he has recourse to the changing seasons, the fortune of seeds, the dying and reappearance of the moon, and the recovery from illness. We may learn from these curious facts that it is not correct to say that a writer knows nothing of certain things, simply because he had not occasion to refer to them in his only extant writing: or even because he does not mention them when his subject would seem naturally to lead him to do so.'

The remarkable thing in this note is not only its independence and sagacity, but more particularly the trained sagacity which brings to bear upon the argument just those examples which are most directly in point and most telling.

If I were to express an opinion on the characteristic positions which Dr. Drummond takes up, I think it would be that, whereas he seems to me to overstate a little--but only a little--the external evidence for the Gospel, he at the same time somewhat understates the internal evidence. He gives his decision against the Fourth Gospel sometimes where I cannot help thinking that a writer of equal impartiality would not necessarily do so. It would also be unfair if I did not say that his general estimate of the historical trustworthiness of the Gospel is lower than I should form myself.

It may naturally be thought that I am a biased judge in such a case; but I confess that it seems to me that the advantage is very much on the side of my countryman. He shows without much difficulty that Dr. Schmiedel has seriously misrepresented him. Indeed one might say that the critic's representation of views and arguments was not so much derived from the book he was reviewing as from his own internal consciousness of what might be expected from an apologist. This, however, is the personal, and more ephemeral, aspect of the controversy. It is of more general interest to note the critical assumptions made in the course of the review. The writer admits that his opponent 'not unfrequently gives the impression of being animated by the sincere resolve to maintain nothing save only what can be assumed with certainty.' 'With certainty' is characteristic; the writer attributes to Dr. Stanton what he would have aimed at doing himself. In the eyes of the school to which Dr. Schmiedel belongs, I will not say exactly that all the data of which they approve are certain, but they are treated very much as if they were; in building up an argument upon them, possibilities easily and imperceptibly glide into probabilities, and probabilities into certainties. Dr. Stanton disclaims the idea of dealing with certainties; he would only profess to adduce facts on a nicely graduated scale of probability, which by their cumulative weight went some way to carry conviction.

However, it is not of either of these points that I wish to speak, but rather to call attention to what Dr. Schmiedel thinks would be 'in the highest degree surprising.' Why so surprising? What substantial ground have we for expecting anything else? In the first place Dr. Schmiedel begins by exaggerating the significance of the phrase 'it is written,' as though on its first extant occurrence it would necessarily imply full canonical authority. And then he goes on to lay stress upon what is really little more than the absence of literature. If we take the whole extant Christian literature between the years 130 and 170 A.D., it would not fill more than a thin octavo volume, and by far the greater part of that is taken up with external controversy. What sort of argument can be drawn from such a state of things as to the exact estimate which Christians formed of their own sacred books? No valid argument can be drawn from it either way, and it is far better simply to confess our ignorance. It is reasonable to suppose that there was a gradual development in the process by which the Gospels attained to the position that we call canonical; but the data to which we have access do not allow us to map out its stages with any precision.

It seems to me to be a fundamental defect in the reasoning of Dr. Schmiedel and his school that they fail to see that the real question is, not simply, What is the evidence for this or that proposition? but, What is the relation which the extant evidence bears to the whole body of that which once existed, and how far can we trust the inferences drawn from it?

I pass over some quite unwarrantable assumptions which Dr. Schmiedel makes as to the apologetic point of view: such as that, 'if there can be shown to be resemblance between a canonical and a non-canonical writing, the former is uniformly to be regarded as the earlier'; and that 'Apocryphal Gospels would not have been used in the influential circles of the Church.' Apologists would lay down nothing of the kind, though in a certain number of concrete cases they may think that the priority of a canonical to a non-canonical writing does not need arguing, and though they may also think that in some particular case the evidence for the use of an Apocryphal Gospel by a Church writer is insufficient.

Dr. Schmiedel easily satisfies himself that he has refuted an argument bearing on the Fourth Gospel. Professor Stanton had rightly maintained, 'There must have been good grounds for believing that the Fourth Gospel was founded upon the apostolic testimony in order to overcome the prejudice that would be created by the contrasts between it and the Synoptics.' He has shown, I think, in his reply, that the instances alleged against this are not relevant, and also that the part played by the two ideas of Apostolicity and Catholicity in the forming of the Canon are not quite correctly stated by his opponent. But even if they had been as stated the original contention would still have been left standing, because agreement with previously accepted writings was part of the idea of Catholicity. It is a sound argument to say that a work so independent as the Fourth Gospel must have come with good credentials to obtain the place which it held.

Lastly, when Dr. Schmiedel speaks so imposingly of 'the silence of the entire first half of the second century in regard to the sojourn of the Apostle John in Ephesus,' I would once more ask him what this silence amounts to. What is the total bulk of the literature on which the argument is based? Is it possible to draw from it an inference of any value at all?

Footnote 1:

It is this last work that I consider an exception to the high standard of ability in the group of which I am speaking. It is absolutely one-sided. I do not doubt the writer's sincerity, but he is blissfully unconscious that there is another side to the argument.

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Footnote 4:

English readers may be reminded that Dr. Ezra Abbot was an American Unitarian who died in 1884. He was a leading member of the American Committee which joined in the production of the Revised Version, and, after serving as Assistant Librarian, became Professor of New Testament Criticism in Harvard University in 1872. He was a scholar of retiring habits, and was one of those who spend in helping and improving the work of others time that might have been given to great work of their own. His literary remains were religiously collected after his death.

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Bousset thinks that this may mean 'related to' the high priest ; but this is questioned by Zahn .

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Professor Harnack gave a lecture, which I was privileged to hear, at the Union Seminary on October 10, 1904.

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Footnote 13:

A third article, on the internal evidence, appeared in January of the present year, iii. 353 ff.

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LECTURE II CRITICAL METHODS. THE OLDEST SOLUTION OF THE PROBLEM OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL

The main outline of the Preface will be remembered. Looking back over the period from which Science was just beginning to emerge, the writer characterized it as one in which all the early Christian literature including the New Testament had been treated as a tissue of illusions and falsifications. That time, he went on to say, was past. For Science it had only been an episode, during which much had been learnt and after which much had to be forgotten. His own researches, Harnack explained, would be found to go in a reactionary direction even beyond the middle position of current criticism. The results might be summed up by saying that the oldest literature of the Church, in its main points and in most of its details, from the point of view of literary history, was veracious and trustworthy. In the whole New Testament there was probably only a single writing that could be called pseudonymous in the strict sense of the term, the so-called Second Epistle of St. Peter; and, apart from the Gnostic fictions, the whole number of pseudonymous writings down to Irenaeus was very small, and in one case the production of such a work was expressly condemned. In like manner the amount of interpolation was also far less than had been supposed; and the tradition relating to this early period might in the main, and with some reservations, be trusted.

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