Constantin von Tischendorf · 3 of 10

Origin of the Four Gospels · Part 1

THE life of Jesus has become the center of the religious controversies which agitate our age. The importance of this fact is great. At its foundation lies the confession that Christianity is not grounded so much on the doctrines of Him from whom it receives its name as upon his person. Every acceptation of the word Christianity which is antagonistic to this confession, disowns the real character of the term, and rests on a misconception. The person of Jesus is the corner-stone on which the church bases its foundations; to it the doctrine of Jesus and of his disciples always and with the utmost distinctness points; with the person of Jesus Christianity stands or falls. To rob this person of his greatness,—of that greatness which the entire church ascribes to him under the name Son of God,—and yet to think to retain the Christian faith and the Christian church, is a futile attempt, a vain mockery. Even the morality which some might hope to rescue from the general shipwreck of faith is weakened by the unavoidable and remorseless contradictions which arise; for if the morality is sound, it must be a good tree growing from a diseased root. The life of Jesus is the most momentous of all questions which the church has to encounter,—the one which is decisive whether it shall or shall not live.

Whence do we derive our knowledge of the life of Jesus? Almost exclusively from our four Gospels, in which the divine person of Jesus, the center of the Christian belief, and the main object too of all attacks upon it, is presented in essentially the same light as in the Epistles of Paul, unquestionably the oldest of all the apostolical documents. All else that we know of him is confined to a few expressions and acts, and, with unimportant exceptions, is in direct connection with, and dependence on, the Gospels. By far the most of these sources are to be found in apocryphal, i.e. not genuine, untrustworthy fragments, not bearing the true names of their authors, and aiming with more or less skill to supplement and complete the gospel narrative; others, partly of Jewish and partly of heathen origin, avow at the very outset the intention of assailing the Gospels. Finally, we possess in two classic writers of the first and the two following centuries, Tacitus and Pliny, a few incidental expressions which have a lasting interest: the first testifying that Christ, the founder of the religion which had gained so strong a hold even in Nero's time, had been punished with death by the procurator Pontius Pilate during the reign of Tiberius; while Pliny asserts in a communication to Trajan that the Christians, already a numerous body in Bithynia, were in the habit of singing songs of praise to Christ as to a God. Our Gospels therefore, if not the only authorities relative to the life of Jesus, are by all odds the most important ones, and the only direct sources that are in existence. If then the life of Jesus is only made known to us by the Gospels, if we are directed to these books for the solution of all our questions about the birth, the activities, the conversation, character, and fortunes of Jesus, we have of course no less weighty an inquiry before us than this, Whence spring our Gospels? For upon the origin of these books hinge their trustworthiness and all their value.

So much depending upon this first step, very many are the investigations which have been made in these modern times into the origin of the Gospels. It has been a question with what justice the names of those prominent members of the twelve, Matthew and John, and the names of the helpers and followers, Mark and Luke, have been assigned to the four Gospels. Just so far as the authorship of these documents has been admitted as due to those revered men, the Gospels have been accepted as authentic and trustworthy records of the life of the Lord. Their names have been regarded as a satisfactory guaranty that, in the writings with which they were coupled, truth only could be sought, that in them truth only was wished, and that in them truth was authentically recorded. There is indeed another way of testing the reliability of the Gospels. After the rise of the rationalizing or rationalistic spirit, and when the attempt was made to set the reason of man above everything which had previously borne the name of Divine Revelation, hands were laid at once on the biblical miracles, and it was claimed that they must be explained by the light of the imperfect culture of that time, and the incorrect appreciation of the Old Testament. Out of this grew the theory of accommodation, as it was called, which asserted that Jesus made his words chime in with the expectations of his age, and that he gave himself out to be a more important personage than he really was. This theory of the rise of the Gospels has culminated in the piece of botchwork which issued from the Paris press in 1863. The author of that book, not troubling himself with any speculations respecting the share which the apostles may have had in delineating the gospel portraits, but following his own self-imposed theories about miracles and revelation, has displayed boundless recklessness and given way to the most unbridled phantasies respecting the gospel history, caricaturing both it and its hero. He has written a book which has much more the character of a shameless calumny of Jesus than of an honest investigation into his career. Can we apply the term historical inquiry to an attempt to show that John wrote the fourth Gospel out of a spirit of self-love, not without jealousy of Peter, and full of hatred to Judas Iscariot? Can we dignify by so high a term as scientific investigation such a theory as his respecting the cause of the sympathy felt for Jesus by the wife of Pilate, that she saw the "gentle Galilean," the "fine-looking young man," from a window of the palace that looked out on the temple-court, and that in consequence the thought that his blood was to be spilled rested like a mountain load upon her soul? To cite one or two more examples of his mode of dealing with the Gospels, what shall we say of his manner of treating the raising of Lazarus, where he endeavors to show that Jesus, whose role was becoming more and more difficult every day, practiced an involuntary piece of deception upon the people and the credulous sisters of Lazarus? His theory is that the latter, while still sick, caused himself to be laid out for burial, and deposited in the family vault; that Jesus, wishing to see his friend once more, caused the tomb to be opened, and on seeing Lazarus come forth was himself led to believe that the dead man had come to life again,—the power of resuscitating him, meanwhile, being ascribed by the witnesses to the wonderful gifts of Jesus. Or what shall we say of a theory of the conflict in Gethsemane, which seeks to throw light on the Saviour's grief by such words as these: "Perhaps his thoughts were running back to the clear springs of Galilee where he had often found refreshment, to the vine-stock and the fig-tree beneath whose shade he had rested, to the young maidens who it may be had responded to his love. Did he curse his hard fate, which denied him all the old joys of his life? Did he lament his high call, and weep, a sacrifice on the altar of his own greatness, that he had not continued to be a simple Nazarene artisan?" What shall we think of the supposition that the dreary landscape of Judæa—with Jerusalem, the sacred center of the Jewish faith and worship—drove the thoughts of the Galilean to the luxuriance of his own country's hills, and added to his grief? What shall we say of his exclamation, that if a better understanding of Christianity is to prevail among men, and the apocryphal shrines which now claim veneration are to be superseded by authentic ones, the temple, the great church for all Christians, is to be built upon the hill of Nazareth,— the soil beneath which are sleeping the carpenter Joseph and thousands of Nazarenes? What shall we say to the crudest of all Renan's vagaries, the investing with the crown of immortality and the glittering halo of a saint the head of that Jew dying on the cross, at the outset a mere kindly poetical enthusiast, and at last an idolizing fanatic, involved irretrievably with the dominant party, and rushing willingly into the arms of death?

Surely it requires no further citations to justify the expression of a condemnation of Renan's book: these few instances are sufficient to put the reader in possession of materials adequate to enable him to judge of the character of the work. That, in spite of its frivolous pretenses to science, in spite of its fantastic caricatures of history, it has found such favor and endorsement in Germany, only shows how widely are diffused, even in Germany, the lack of sound criticism, and of acquaintance with biblical history, as well as the depraved taste of an age which is sunk in unbelief.

In this matter, German science and scholarship have subjected themselves to a severe reproach. Not only is the prevalent rationalism, which places our common human reason above a divine revelation, and so sets aside the supernatural claims of the Gospels, a product of this French book, but German zeal is aroused, as well, to supply what is lacking of scientific accuracy in Renan's work, and to make his results more trustworthy. And so we have one of the frightful spectacles of our time,—French levity and German learning reaching brotherly hands to each other over the fresh grave of the Saviour. Unbelief, it would seem, gives even more strength than belief.

In those quarters where regard is paid to historical authority, one of the points brought into the foreground in the attacks upon the authenticity of the Gospels, is the lack of early evidence that they were in existence at the opening of the Christian era. Nor can any one deny that this objection, if it can be maintained, is entitled to much weight. If it is as late as the year 150, or still later, that we receive the first tidings about John's Gospel, who. would not find it hard to believe that it was written by the beloved disciple of the Lord a half century before? If there is not in our possession evidence in support of the other Gospels dating from that time, or from the years just preceding it, who can deny that it does not raise doubts respecting their authenticity? It is true, we must take into account the paucity of the literature which comes down to us from the earlier epoch of the church; and besides, many a good book might have been written without verbally incorporating or directly using our Gospels; especially at a time when those who had been eye-witnesses had not been long dead; when the life of the churches was directly sustained by the spirit of the Gospels; and when the written letter had not begun to be dominant over the living evangel. If these considerations diminish the importance which might be attached to the absence of biblical quotations in the primitive Christian literature, yet it is clear, on the other hand, that if such quotations are really to be found there, the manifest acquaintance which they might show that men had with the Gospels in the first half of the second century must be of the greatest weight in establishing their age, their apostolical origin, and their genuineness. And therefore it is a sacred duty that those who would subject the authenticity of our Gospels to a thorough scrutiny, should make one of their chief duties a most careful investigation into the most ancient sources of testimony respecting the existence and the recognized credibility of the records of Jesus' life.

It seems to me that this duty has been by no means faithfully enough most for the first three so-called synoptical Gospels, and still less for that of John, whose want of authenticity has been inscribed in flaming letters upon the banners of the negative school. The writer of these lines imposes upon himself the task of trying to throw some light upon the authority of the evangelical documents, although in preparing the work not for special students, but cultivated Christians generally, it may not be possible to enter so exhaustively into the subject as under other circumstances might be desirable.

We can make as our starting-point the unquestioned fact that in the last decades of the second century our four Gospels were known and acknowledged in all portions of the church. Irenæus, from 177 on, Bishop of Lyons, where the first Christian church of Gaul was established, wrote a great work in the last decades of the second century, directed at the earliest heresies, the Gnostic, and on every page made use of the Gospels, providing himself from them with materials to overthrow a system which was threatening to destroy the doctrines of the church. The number of passages where he has recourse to the Gospels is about four hundred, and about eighty of these contain quotations from John. From the closing decade of the second century on, the able and learned Tertullian lived and labored at Carthage, in Africa, and in his numerous writings there exist hundreds of citations from the text of the Gospels, which he made use of as his most decisive authorities. The same is true of Clemens, the celebrated teacher in the school of catechumens at Alexandria, about the end of the second century. Nor must I fail to allude to a catalogue, generally known by the name of its discoverer, the Italian scholar, Muratori, of all the books which were regarded as canonical in the very earliest times. This work was probably prepared at Rome, and shortly after the time of the Roman bishop Pius, i. e. somewhere where between 160 and 170. In this catalogue of the books thus reckoned as comprising the New Testament, the four Gospels are at the head. It is true, the first few lines which relate to Matthew and Mark have been lost; but, at the close of the still extant words respecting the latter, the Gospel of Luke is spoken of as the third, and that of John as the fourth; enabling us to see that even in the very earliest days the order was followed with which we are so familiar.

I have thus summoned witnesses from Gaul, from proconsular Africa (the present Algiers), from Alexandria, and from Rome. Two others can be cited fitly here, although one of them goes back to a remoter date: I mean the two oldest translations from the Greek text used by the apostles themselves. One of these is the Syriac version, and bears the name Peshito; the other is the Latin version, known under the title Itala: both of them give the four Gospels the first place. The canonical acceptance of all four must unquestionably have been general, as we see that they were transferred openly, and as a whole, into the language of the newly-converted Christians, the Latins and Syrians. The Syriac translation, which takes us to the neighborhood of the Euphrates, is almost universally assigned to the end of the second century; and, although positive proofs are wanting in support of this date, yet we are not without good grounds for accepting it. The Latin version, on the contrary, had begun to gain general recognition even before the end of the second century; for both Tertullian, in his quotations from Irenæus, and the Latin translator of Irenæus's great work against heresy, writing about the end of the second century, make use of the text of the Itala. This, of course, implies that the Latin translation was made some years before the close of the second century. I shall have occasion subsequently to allude again to the striking fact that it was necessary to translate the Gospels into Latin and Syriac as early as the second half of the second century, and that the number of documents was limited to the four with which we are now familiar.

Looking a little more closely into the testimony of the two great Fathers, Irenæus and Tertullian, we have to ask, Can their evidence be so limited in its application as to only prove that the four Gospels were fully accepted in their day? Irenæus not merely invests these documents with entire authority in the citations which he makes to overthrow the Gnostic heretics; it even appears in his work that the Gospels, or rather, to use his own expression, the fourfoldness of the Gospel, has been conformed to the analogy of the four quarters of the globe, the four chief winds, the four faces of the cherubim. He asserts that the four Gospels are the four pillars of which the church rests as it covers the whole earth, and in this number four he recognizes a special token of the Creator's wisdom. Is such a representation compatible with the fact that at the time of Irenæus the four Gospels first began to be accepted? or that an attempt was then being made to append a fourth and newer one to the three older ones then current? Is it not much more credible that the acceptance of all the four was then of so long standing and so thoroughly complete, that the Bishop of Lyons could allude to the fourfoldness of the Gospel as a thing universally recognized, and in consequence of this very recognition speak of it as a thing which harmonizes with great and unchanging cosmical relations? Irenæus died in the second year after the close of the second century, but in his youth he had sat at the feet of the venerable Polycarp, who had been a disciple of John the evangelist, and had been acquainted with many eyewitnesses of Jesus' life. In mentioning this fact Irenæus alludes very tenderly to the statement of his revered teacher Polycarp, that all that he had heard from the lips of John and other disciples of Jesus coincided fully with the written account. Yet let us hear his own words as given in a letter to Florinus: "I saw you while I was yet a youth in Lower Asia with Polycarp, when you were living in scenes of princely splendor, and when you were striving to gain the approval of Polycarp. What took place then is fresher in my memory than what has occurred more recently. What we took in our youth grows up as it were with us, and is incorporated in us. And so I can even now bring back to mind just the place where the good Polycarp used to sit when he talked to us, how he looked as he came in and as he went out, how he lived, how he used to speak to the people, how he used to allude to his intercourse with John and repeat the words of others who had seen the Lord, how he used to recount what he had heard from their own lips about the miracles and the teachings of the Lord,—and all in full accordance with the written narrative."

Thus writes Irenæus respecting his intercourse with Polycarp and respecting the communications of Polycarp. The date of the young Irenæus's intercourse with the aged saint must be set approximately at about the year 150. Irenæus died in 202, according to old accounts a martyr, while Polycarp perished at the stake in 165, "1 after having," to use his own expression, served the Lord eighty-six years." And is it to be believed that Irenæus never heard from his teacher, whose communications respecting John he expressly refers to, one word regarding the Gospel of John? Indisputably, one part of Polycarp's testimony relative to John's Gospel carries us back to John himself. For Polycarp's evidence respecting the work of his teacher must be based upon the testimony of his teacher himself. The case becomes all the more clear the more closely we look into it on the adversaries' side, and range ourselves with those who deny the validity of John's Gospel. According to this view, Polycarp, although saying so much to Irenæus regarding John, did not drop a word regarding the Gospel of John. But supposing he did not, is it credible that Irenæus fully accepted that Gospel, that work which seemed to be the noblest gift of John to Christianity, the report of an eye-witness respecting the life, death, and resurrection of the Saviour of the world, as a Gospel which ran directly counter to the testimony of the three other evangelists? Would not the very circumstance that Polycarp made no mention of it have convinced Irenæus of its want of authenticity? And yet it is asserted that in order to meet and overthrow false teachers, and the men who falsified the canon, he did not hesitate to reckon the Gospel of John as strictly embraced among the sacred books.

This on which I am now laying stress is nothing new; it has long stood recorded on the pages of Irenæus, and has long been read there. But it has not had its due weight; else how could it have been so lightly passed over? For my own part I must completely justify the assigning of much greater weight, on the part of correct and thorough investigators, to the testimony of Polycarp and Irenæus respecting the Gospel of John, than to all the difficulties and all the objections urged by skeptical scholars.

And is the case not similar with Tertullian and his testimony respecting the Gospel? This man, who had been transformed from a worldly heathen lawyer into a powerful advocate of divine truth, enters so critically into the question of the origin and relative value of the four Gospels as expressly to subordinate Mark and Luke to Matthew and John, on the ground that the former were mere helpers and companions of the apostles, while the latter were selected by the Lord himself and invested with full authority. The same author propounds also an inexpugnable canon of historical criticism, a test of the truth of the early Christian documents, and especially those of apostolic origin, in that he makes the value of testimony dependent on the epoch of the witness, and demands that what was held as true in his day should be judged in the light of its prior acceptance. If it had been accepted before, it was fair to suppose that it had been equally accepted in the time of the apostles; its authenticity must therefore have been admitted by the apostolical church, founded as it was by the apostles themselves. And is it to be believed that this acute man was capable of being deceived in his acceptance of the Gospels and in his defense of them by any thin web of sophistry or touch of charlatanism? The passages just referred to are taken from his celebrated reply to Marcion, who in a wanton and heretical spirit had impugned the authenticity of the Gospels. Three of the four he had wholly excluded, and of the fourth he retained only just so much as it pleased him to do. In replying to him, Tertullian expressly bases his argument on the ground that at the time when the apostolical church was founded all the four Gospels were accredited. Has such a statement no weight in the mouth of a man like Tertullian? When he wrote, scarcely a hundred years had elapsed since the death of John. At that date the testimony, appealed to by him, of the church at Ephesus, in which John had labored so long and amid which he had died, must have been full and decisive respecting the genuineness or spuriousness of John's Gospel. Nor was it a matter of any difficulty to ascertain what was the judgment which this church passed on the Gospel. And we must not overlook the fact that we have not to do, in this matter, with a scholar who is contenting himself with merely learned investigations, but with a man full of earnestness respecting his faith, and taking very seriously the question of human salvation. The Christian documents which asserted a connection between themselves and the origin of the new faith, the documents at which all the worldly wisdom of the time in which Tertullian himself was reared took offense,—were they likely to be accepted by him without inquiry, and in a blind credulity? And inasmuch as he expressly assures us that he bases his acceptation of all the four Gospels on the credit of the apostolical church, is it not an unworthy suspicion, the doubting that he made thorough inquiry into the capacity of the apostolical church to pass an authentic judgment on the Christian documents?

I insist therefore, to sum up the matter, that the testimony of Irenæus and Tertullian respecting the four Gospels is not to be taken as an isolated, unrelated fact, but that it must be considered as a valid result of all the historical evidence which was at their command. And how far we are justified in this, is shown not only by the authorities already adduced, the author of the Muratori list of New Testament books, the African translator of the Gospels into Latin, the originator of the Itala, but by all the other witnesses who lived prior to the time of Irenæus and Tertullian. Many of my readers are acquainted with the so-called Harmonies of the Gospels,—the works in which the four sacred narratives are co-ordinated into a single one. In this way an effort has been made to draw from the Gospels alone a closely followed and faithful portrait of our Lord's life, those points which one narrator has brought more prominently into view than the others being employed as supplementary to the other accounts, and a complete picture being the result. In these works the narrative of John has been drawn upon to supply the incidents occurring in the last three years of Jesus' life, and to follow his course step by step. Harmonies of this kind were prepared as early as the year 170 by two men whose names are known to us: one of them was Theophilus, Bishop of Antioch in Syria; the other was Tatian, a disciple of Justin the great theologian and martyr. True, both of those works are lost; but Jerome speaks in the fourth century of the one prepared by Theophilus as still existing, describing it as a combination of the four Gospels in one continuous narrative; respecting the second we have the testimony of Eusebius and Theodoret, the latter of whom speaks with intimate knowledge. Tatian himself alludes to his work as "the Gospel made up of four, the Diatessaron." Both of these men wrote other works which are still extant. In 180 and 181 Theophilus indited the three books to Autolycus, a learned heathen who had assailed Christianity. In this work are extracts from Matthew, Luke, and John. It is especially noteworthy that he cites the latter (ii. 22), alluding explicitly to the name of the author. His words are, "This is taught by the Holy Scriptures and all inspired men, among whom is John, who says, 'In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God,' and then follows, 'and the Word was God: all things were made by him, and without him was not anything made that was made."' This makes it certain that the Harmony of Theophilus embraced the Gospel of John. The same is true of Tatian: for in his Addresses to the Heathen, a work filled with learning, and very decided in its tone, written probably between 166 and 170, there are several passages quoted from John's Gospel, such as this: "The Light shineth in darkness, and the darkness comprehendeth it not. . . . . The Life was the Light of men. . . . . All things were made by him, and without him was not anything made that was made." From this it would seem certain that his Harmony, like that of Theophilus, although it may have taken some liberties with the order of the narrative, included the Gospel of John: and this chimes admirably with the statement of Bishop Bar Salibi, that the Diatessaron of Tatian, accompanied by a commentary by Ephraim, and thus discriminated from the Diatessaron of Ammonius, began with the words, "In the beginning was the Word."

These Harmonies last mentioned, one of which must with much probability be ascribed to a date within the first sixty years of the second century, have far more worth than what would be gathered from single scattered extracts, for their preparation points back conclusively to a time when the four Gospels were already accepted as a perfect record, and when the necessity had begun to be felt of deducing a higher unity and a more harmonious completeness from them than the diversity of the various books and the apparent discrepancies had rendered apparent. If these efforts are to be assigned to a date as early as the second decade subsequently to the middle of the second century, it makes the inference a necessary one that the use and recognition of the four Gospels must be assigned to a much earlier date.

Similar testimony we owe to a cotemporary of the two men just named, Claudius Apollinaris, Bishop of Hierapolis in Phrygia, whose epoch is assigned by Eusebius (iv. 26) to the reign of Marcus Aurelius. For in a fragment preserved in the Chronicon Paschale he declares that if the Quartodecimanians (so called from holding like the Jews that the fourteenth of Nisan was the day for celebrating the paschal sacrifice) appeal justly to Matthew in support of the view that Jesus partook of the last supper with his disciples at the precise time of celebrating the paschal offering, there must be an antagonism among the writers of the several Gospels. Now as in this contest Matthew, Mark, and Luke must be ranged on the one side, and John on the other, the words of Apollinaris indicate that all the Gospels were conceded in his day to have equal value. To this may be added that in one passage still extant in the same Chronicon there is undeniable reference to John's allusion (xix. 34) to the piercing of Jesus' side.