BS2320 M82.2 £-U THE PRESBYTERIAN AND REFORMED REVIEW No. 25— January, 1896. THE BEGINNING AND GROWTH OF THE CANON OP THE NEW TESTAMENT. OUR LORD and His apostles were accustomed to refer to the Jewish Scriptures as to a well-known, definite body of sacred writings that had been handed down from past ages. They assumed that- there was agreement among the people of the Jews as to the particular books that constituted these Scriptures ; and they actually quoted from the great majority of them as of unquestionable authority in matters of doctrine and duty. It could not occur to any reader of the New Testament that in the time of Christ the Canon of the Old Testament had not yet been determined, or that it was still an open question whether certain books should be received into it, or should be excluded from it. It is inconceivable, too, that Josephus could have written as he has done of the books which he describes as "justly believed to be divine" and held to be most sacred by all Jews,* if the rabbis of his time had felt themselves at liberty to add to, or to take away from the number of these sacred books. When Strack wrote his arti- cle on the Canon of the Old Testament,f he could affirm that there was then unanimity among critics of opposite schools in regarding the Canon of Josephus as embracing neither more nor less than the th'rty-nine books of our present Hebrew Bible. He attached no importance, as bearing on the extent of the Canon, to the discus- sions which rabbis of the first century engaged in with respect to * Contra Apion, i, 8. fHerzog's Real-Encyk., 2d ed., vii, p. 428. 1 £> THE PRESBYTERIAN AND REFORMED REVIEW. certain books, as Ecclesiastes, the Song of Solomon, Esther and Ezekiel. These discussions, Strack observes, seem to have been indulged in for the purpose of displaying the acuteness of the rabbis, and of making it clear that the authority of the holy books was absolutely certain. Kautzsch, too, a much more radical critic of the Old Testament than Strack, decidedly denies that the dis- putes referred to involved the question of the canonical authority of the books under discussion.* In speaking, then, of the formation of the Canon of the New- Testament, we are fully warranted to assume the previous existence of a fixed Canon of the Old Testament. This Old Testament our Lord and His apostles looked upon as possessing supreme authority and infallible. "We content ourselves with appealing to two famil- iar declarations made by them as to the character of the Scriptures in the hands of the Jews. One is the statement of Christ recorded in John x. 35, " The Scripture cannot be broken." We hold it to be arbitrary and unjustifiable to limit the application of this asser- tion to the particular words of Scripture that had just been quoted. Yet Dr. Sanday admits that " even if we take the narrower view and restrict the saying to the particular passage, it would hardly be applied to that unless it represented a general principle which might be applied to other passages as well."f And the same writer acknowledges in regard to the classic declaration of Paul in 2 Tim. iii. 16 that, even adopting the Revised Version, " Every Scripture inspired of God is also profitable for teaching," etc., we are still " obliged to interpret the words by the current conception of what Scriptures were so inspired, and we should find that it included all, or very nearly all, those which form our present Old Testament." "We may make another quotation from Dr. Sanday in regard to the formation of the Canon of the New Testament. He tells us that it was " really the process by which the writings of the New Testament came to be placed on the same footing with those of the Old.";}: "Wej^adjlvadm^^ place a writ- ing of the New Testament on the same footing wlth~ those of frTe Old was to declare it canonical. But we demur to what is implied in Dr. Sanday's statement, that writings of the New Testament were not in the age in which they appeared placed on a line with the Old; and that it was only gradually that any of them "caie to be" so highly appreciated. For it seems to us a very plain matter that a writing that had not a just and avowed claim to be regarded as divine and authoritative on its first promulgation, * Studien und Kritiken, 1892, pp. 188, 189. See also Buhl's Canon and ,r ext of the Old Testament, p. 25, etc. ^Inspiration, p. 88. %Ibid., p. 4. THE CANON OF THE NEW TESTAMENT. 3 could not rightly acquire such a claim in auy subsequent time. The notion of a writing's title to inspiration being held in abeyance for generations and finding recognition only after a long time, is not to be entertained. * Here we have to put ourselves in decided opposition to some of the most influential writers on the Canon of the New Testa- ment in the present day. Thus Bishop Westcott begins his work on The Canon of the New Testament by declaring his design " to trace the gradual recognition of a written apostolic rule as authoritative and divine, to observe the gradual equalization of the ' Gospels and Epistles ' with the ' Law and the Prophets.' " Again he writes :f ' ; It cannot be denied that the idea of the inspi- ration of the New Testament, in the sense in which it is maintained now, was the growth of time ; " and he goes on to affirm that the Old Testament was the only Bible of the Christian Church for two or three generations. Prof. Zahn, of Erlangen, too, maintains that, it was the actual use of the writings of our present New Testament^ and the authority which they acquired in the life and public wor- ship of the Church by this customary use, that eventually sur- rounded these writings with the nimbus of holiness and generated conceptions of their supernatural origin and of their dignity far beyond that of all other literature. He affirms that it was owing to this practical application of these writings in life and especially in worship, and not owing to any preconceived opinion of the inspiration of their apostolic authors, that the New Testament of the Church was brought into being, and that its separate books found entrance into this sacred collection.^: Prof. Weiss allows himself * "I suppose I am right in saying that we mean by inspiration the divine in- fluence exerted upon the minds of the writers of the Bible, which led them to choose and shape their material so as to make the result the authoritative rule of faith and practice," says Prof. H. P. Smith in his Biblical Scholarship and Inspiration, p. 72. This definition, though defective, professes to give, as the result of the divine influence exerted, an authoritative rule of faith and prac- tice in the several books of the Bible as they came from the hands of their inspired authors. It is fundamentally at variance with the theory that the New Testament was not an authoritative rule of faith and practice till the latter half of the second century, when, we are told, authority was first ascribed by the Church to the books contained in it. f Canon, 2d ed., p. 49. X "Nicht eine vorgefasste Meinung von dem unterscheidenden Character bestimmter Schriften, nicht ein Dogma von der Inspiration der apostolischen Schriftsteller hat das N. T. der Kirche geschaffen und den einzelnen Biichern den Eintritt in diese Sammlung erschlossen oder versperrt, sondern umgekehrt, die thatsachliche Anwendung und die durch das Herkommen begrundete Geltung der Schriften im Leben und insbesondere ini Gottesdienst der Kirche hat sie mit dem Nimbus der Heiligkeit umgeben und hat die Vorstellungen von einem iibernaturlichen Ursprung und von einer alle sonstige Literatur weit 4 THE PRESBYTERIAN AND REFORMED REVIEW. to say, " It is certain that until after the middle of the second cen- tury no other Canon was set up in the Church than the Word of God [in the Old Testament]."* Prof. Harnack ascribes to the conflict of the Church with Gnosticism and Montanism a determin- ing influence in the formation of the New Testament, and he makes its recognition as of equal authority with the Old a suddenly emerging phenomenon of the latter part of the second century. The Church, he concedes, had holy Christian writings long pre- viously, but they were not in our sense a New Testament even in an embryonic state, not a collection of writings esteemed of like dignity with the Old Testament and regarded as bequeathed by the apostles to be the Canon of Catholic doctrine and disci pline.f hinter sich lassenden AViirde derselben erzeugt " (Zahn, Gesclrichte des Kanons des N T, i, p. 83). Zahn writes again (Gesch. des Kanons des N. T, i, pp. 436, 437): "Certainly it is not without interest and not altogether unimportant for the history of the Canon, to settle when first in the Church the idea of theop- neusty was attached to the writings of the New Testament. Every reflecting man must say to himself that this presupposes a long habit of using these writ- ings in the Church and of placing them in divine service on a par with the writings of the Old Testament. For how else could that idea have arisen ? There were as yet no Synods, still less General Councils, at which dogmas were fixed How shall we then determine since when the writings of the New Testament were in the thought and language of the Church put on a level with the Old Testament Scriptures in respect to supernatural origin and infalli- bility ? " Now Zahn himself informs us that the very earliest Christian literature outside of the New Testament presents this view of the teaching of the apostles: "As God through Christ, so did Christ act and speak through the apostles. Thereby the doctrines and instructions of the apostles were set on a level with those which Christ immediately, and which God through the prophets, communicated" (Gesch., u. s. w., i, p. 804). Here Zahu maintains that the first generation of Christians already held that the words of the apostles which we have in the New Testament were as divinely inspired and as authori- tative as those of the prophets. Zahn describes the apostles as, in the view of the apostolic fathers, "authorities for the present and all the future of the Church" (ubi supra, p. 808). He maintains (p. 810) that " the dead apostles could be an authority, owned as binding and in living force in all parts of the Church, only if everywhere writings were received and listened to in the Church in which every one was convinced that he heard the voice of the apos- tles." Clement of Rome expressly attributes the inspiration of the Spirit to the First Epistle of Paul to the Corinthians. He wrote it " iit a\r t dsia<; TtveufiaTtxaJg-" The words, "of a truth," before "spiritually," are emphatic, and forbid our taking this expression, "spiritually," as signifying less than that the Epistle was written under full inspiration of the Spirit, or "in words which the Spirit taught," to employ the language of Paul himself in the same Epistle respecting the Spirit's influence on him as a teacher (1 Cor. ii. 13). * Introduction to the New Testament, pp. 32, 33. •)■ Das Neue Testament urn das Jahr 200, p. 111. A keen discussion has been carried on by Zahn and Harnack on the history of the New Testament Canon. The points of agreement and difference between the two distinguished scholars are drawn out by Koppel in an article, "DerZahn-Harnack'scheStreit," u. s. w., in the first Heft of the Studien und Kriliken for 1891. THE CANON OF TEE NEW TESTAMENT. *> Harnack has aggressive followers in the United States ; and his view that the conception of an apostolic Canon of Scripture was unknown to the primitive Church is one with which we are becom- ing quite familiar on this side of the A tlantic. To all these theories we oppose the witness of the New Testament and of the early Church. "We must guard against being misunderstood. Any one who has studied the Church history of Eusebius, or who has read even a popular treatise on the Canon of Scripture, is well aware that it is not to be maintained that there is equal evidence that every book in our present New Testament was recognized everywhere in the Church Catholic during the first half of the second century as an authoritative rule. The New Testament was not published at once as a complete whole. Its books were separately written, in sundry places and at sundry times, till the last writing of the Apostle John appeared near the close of the first century. From the nature of the case, time and careful and' extensive inquiry and intercommunica- tion between churches remote from each other were needed in order to ascertain precisely the full number of the writings which the Lord had provided for the Church of the New Covenant. But the belief in a new, inspired rule of faith and duty additional to that furnished by the Old Testament, and equally deserving with it of credence and obedience, was in the Church from the time that the name of a Church was first applied to the followers of the Lord Jesus Christ. We emphatically deny the statement of Bishop Westcott that " the Old Testament was for two or three generations a complete Bible, interpreted in the light of the Gospel." There were, indeed, early Christian writers, like the Pseudo-Barnabas, who allegorized the Old Testament ad libitum, and who could find in any part of it the mysteries of the Gospel. In this sense they could be said to have a complete Bible in the Old Testament. And the same might be affirmed of allegorizing interpreters of later ages, who read into the Old Testament all the doctrines of the New. But it can be shown that Christ placed His disciples under a new rule of faith and practice, and that this new rule of faith was not only a spoken, but also a written word, revered as Scripture and actually designated as Scripture, even in the days of the apostles. If this can be established, then it is a very grave error to teach that " the idea of the inspiration of the New Testament, in the sense in which it is maintained now, was the growth of time" — time that may have extended beyond the first century of the Christian Church. We would not affirm, as a matter capable of explicit proof, that any of th'e churches planted by the apostles knew, in the year when John (the last of them) died, where were all the b THE PRESBYTERIAN AND REFORMED REVIEW. writings that now constitute our New Testament. Still we would not dare to assert that in no church of that time did such knowledge exist. But we do maintain that the belief in the in- spiration of a large portion of the New Testament as the infalli- ble Word of God was then as full and strong and clear and defin- ite in the minds of enlightened Christians as it is now in the minds of such. It might well be accounted strange if those who first received the books of the New Testament, and for whose instruction they were primarily written, were not taught to estimate them at their proper worth, and if their transcendent value as God's inspired Scripture should have been suffered to remain concealed from the Christian Church for a century or longer. We agree so far with Zahn as to admit that the habitual public and private employment of the writings now in the New Testament for purposes of religious edifi- cation and worship would lead to a better practical appreciation of their incomparable excellence. But before they were hallowed by such long usage they were, as we hope to show, received as divine and authoritative. Such usage did not originate the belief in their in- spiration, but only strengthened and confirmed this belief. It was natural, too, for orthodox Christian teachers to quote the Christian Scriptures far more freely in their controversy with heretics, such as Gnostics and Montanists, than they felt themselves at liberty to do when seeking to persuade Jews and the heathen. In dealing with these latter classes they could set forth in general terms the unri- valed moral and religious teaching of Christianity. But to the particular books of the New Testament it was not needful to refer them. The great proof relied on for convincing those altogether outside the pale of Christianity was the fulfillment of the prophe- cies of the Old Testament respecting Christ. Hence in the days when the conflict of the Church was chiefly with Jew and Gentile unbelievers, the Old Testament was the great armory of Christian apologists. But when, at a later period, the most formidable con- flict was with those who called themselves Christians, and who admitted the New Testament either in whole or in part, then it was the New Testament that was properly appealed to as the judge of controversies. Then its statements were abundantly and specifi- cally quoted, as was required by the exigencies of the new contro- versies that had arisen. But the men who, in the latter part of the second century, thus employ the New Testament in confuting heresy, do not appeal to it as if its authority had only lately come to be recognized. They appeal to it as that which was from the begin- ning the rule of faith in the churches and which had been as such handed down from the apostles and faithfully preserved. We may THE CANON OF THE NEW TESTAMENT. i make this manifest here by a quotation from Irenseus,* postponing the calling of other witnesses. How could the venerable Irenasus, whose integrity is unimpeachable, have made the following state- ments if, as some of our critics will have it, the writings of the New Testament were not invested with canonical authority till he was a man of mature years ? In the conclusion of the Preface to the third book of his work Against Heresies, he thus writes : " The Church has received from the apostles and imparted to her sons the only true and life-giving faith. For the Lord of all gave the power of the Gospel to His apostles, through whom also we have known the truth, that is, the doctrine of the Son of God ; to whom also did the Lord declare : ' He that heareth you heareth me ; and he that despiseth you despiseth me and Him that sent me.' " And Irenasus begins the third book with these words: ""We have learned from none others the plan of our salvation than from those through whom the Gospel has come down to us, which they did at one time proclaim in public, and at a later period, by the will of God, handed down to us in the Scriptures to be the foundation and pillar of our faith." But let us now go back to the New Testament itself for the proof that it stood in the Church from the beginning on an equal footing with the Old Testament.f The Epistle to the Hebrews opens with * "Irenseus," says Ligktfoot, "is the first extant writer in whom, from the nature of his work, we have a right to expect explicit information on the subject of the Canon His work is the first controversial treatise addressed to Christians on questions of Christian doctrine where the appeal lies to Christian documents." The extraordinary attempt of Dr. Werner (in Gehhardt und Har- nack's Texteund Untersuchungen, Band vi, " Der Paulinismus des Irenseus") to show that Irenseus did not regard the Epistles of Paul as canonical Scripture led us to go through Irenseus with some care to see what truth there might be in "Werner's contention. Out of many quotations of Paul's Epistles in Irenseus which we noted, and which are clearly adduced as "Scripture," it may suffice here to give one, Gal. v. 21, which thus appears in the work Against Heresies, Bk. i, vi, 3 : "Wherefore also it comes to pass that the 'most perfect' among them addict themselves without fear to all those kinds of forbidden deeds of which the Scriptures assure us that 'they who do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God.'" In Bk. i, chap, iii, sec. 4, four quotations from Paul's Epistles (two from Romans, one from Ephesians, and one from Colossians) are expressly said to be "found in Scripture." f That in 2 Pet. iii. 15-17 the Epistles of Paul are treated as on equality with the Scriptures of the Old Testament is to us clear, in spite of all that has been recently said to the contrary. Only on this supposition is the "wresting" of them complained of intelligible. The fact that they were abused and perverted to evil purposes implies that they were regarded as sacred and authoritative. Before and during the apostolic age, the Old Testament Scriptures were per- verted ; and there are indications even in the Epistles of Paul that they, too, were misinterpreted and misapplied. But tbe critics object to our making quo- tations from 2 Peter as a part of the New Testament. It is the one book which Dr. Sanday, though very hesitatingly, would exclude from the Canon. We do o THE PRESBYTERIAN AND REFORMED REVIEW this declaration : "God, having of old time spoken unto the fathers in the prophets by divers portions and in divers manners, hath at the end of these days spoken unto us in His Son." After a full and impressive setting forth of the superangelic and divine glory of the Son, the revealer of the new dispensation, the second chapter begins with this exhortation and appeal : " Therefore we ought to give the more earnest heed to the things that were heard, lest haply we drift away from them. For if the word spoken through angels proved steadfast, and every transgression and disobedience received a just recompense of reward, how shall we escape if we neglect so great salvation, which having at the first been spoken through the Lord, was confirmed unto us by them that heard, God also bearing witness with them, both by signs and wonders, and by manifold powers, and by gifts of the Holy Ghost, according to His own will." We need not multiply testimonies as to the sacredness of our Lord's words from the very time they were first uttered (Matt. vii. 26 ; John xii. 48). They were the words of God (John iii. 34). And what at the first began to be spoken by the Lord was, after his removal, proclaimed by those who had been with Him and heard Him. And their teaching had the most signal and abundant divine attestation ; and as great obligation to believe and obey it rested on those who heard them as had rested on those who listened to the living voice of Christ Himself (Heb. ii. 1-4 ; Matt. x. 40). Dr. Harnack concedes that " what the Master had said was from the beginning considered holy." * But here is a very striking and instructive fact. While " what the Master had said " is very often not need its testimony for our argument, and therefore refer to it only in this footnote. Dr. Warfield maintains the canonicity of 2 Peter in an article in the Southern Presbyterian Review for January, 1882, which Dr. Sanday admits to be "very able." New historical evidence of its genuineness has been lately brought to light. Nosgen ( Geschichte der neutest. Offenbarung, 2. Band, p. 46) has good remarks on its relation to 1 Peter. But he does not rest the decision of the case on the weighing of critical niceties. "The question is whether we can assume in a Christian of such moral strictness and of such lively antipathy to all liars and cunningly invented fables, that he has put on the mask of an eye- witness and apostle of Christ in order not only to say in his name what he was set- ting forth, which in itself was very striking and powerful, but to invest it with apostolic authority." This is truly hard to believe. We have of late read 2 Peter frequently ; and every fresh perusal only confirms our faith in its divine inspiration. We should like to see the identity of the basal principles and circle of ideas of 1 and 2 Peter, which the superficial reader does not notice, fully brought out. It impresses us profoundly. Dr. Edwin A. Abbott's attempt to detect evidence that 2 Peter borrows from Josephus made only a pass- ing sensation. Dr. Salmon was justified in saying that the "discovery was merely that of a mare's nest." Few chapters of the epistles of the New Testa- ment have influenced Christian life and sentiment more than the first and third chapters of 2 Peter. * Outlines of the Hist, of Dogma, p. 91. THE CANON OF THE NEW TESTAMENT. 9 expressly quoted in the earliest Christian literature outside the New Testament, it is very seldom referred to in the New Testament itself (though everywhere implied), save in the four Gospels. This remarkable phenomenon is most satisfactorily explained if we attribute it to the consciousness of the apostles, who wrote the other books of the New Testament, that Christ still spoke in them (2 Cor. xiii. 3) and that their words deserved to be looked on as the " words of our Lord Jesus Christ" (1 Tim. vi. 3) and to be received with equal reverence. As it was in the plan of our Lord that all things whatsoever He commanded should be taught to all nations, and that His religion should endure even to the end of the world (Matt, xxviii. 19, 20), it was an easy and natural thing to transfer the same deference to the authentic report of what He had taught that was due to the utterances of His living voice. Divine authority must from the very first have been ascribed to the Gospels. They must, without delay, have been placed on an equal footing with the his- torical books of the Old Testament, because they purported to be the vehicle of a more perfect revelation (Heb. i ; 2 Cor. iii). The apostle John gave forth his written record of the life of our Lord as an adequate basis for believing in Him and for attaining eternal life in His name (John xx. 31). A book recognized by thoss who received it as serving such a purpose, and as coming from an apostle, would assuredly not have to wait for a single generation to be sur- rounded with the " nimbus of holiness." Again, the Apocalypse of John is professedly a prophetic book (Rev. i. 3, x. 7, xxii. 6, 7, 9, 18, 19). "The strongest language which is found in the older Scriptures the author uses and applies to his own book " (Sanday). The Apocalypse is one of the few books of the New Testament which the Tubingen school allowed to be genuine. Justin Martyr describes its author as "John, one of the apostles of Christ, who prophesied by a revelation that was made to him."* Here, then, is a book of the New Testament which must from the first have been believed to be equally inspired with the prophetical books of the Old Testament by those who accepted it as genuine. This cannot be doubted by any one who considers the references to the claims of the book itself, which we have given above, and it over- turns the theory of those who maintain that till the closing part of the second century the Old Testament had a position of dignity and divine authority in the Church to which no writing of the New Testament might aspire. John prefixes his name to his book of prophecies, as do all the prophets of the Old Testament to their prophetic writings. But John's name does not introduce his history of the life of Christ. * Dialogue with Trypho, c. 81. 10 THE PRESBYTERIAN AND REFORMED REVIEW. Herein, too, John adheres to the analogy of the Old Testament, whose historical writings, with the exception of the Book of Nehemiah, are anonymous. It is important to bear in mind that the historical books in the Canon of the Old Testament in the hands of the first Christians were treated as equally divine and authoritative with the strictly prophetic. And they who were familiar with such a Canon of the books of the Old Covenant would be prepared to receive historical books as a part of the revelation of the New Covenant. John's history of Jesus was known to be true (John xxi. 24), and it claims to be written with extreme accuracy, as every careful reader must note. Regarding it as com- ing from one who was esteemed to be both an apostle and a prophet, with the transcendent facts and words which it relates, how could a discerning Christian of the early Church think of placing it in an inferior category to that of the historical books of the Old Testament ? It is admitted that books of the New Testament were read together with the Old in divine worship from an early date. It ought not to have required this practice to prevail for a long time — a century or a decade, or even a year— to enable an earnest spiritual man to see that the New Testament was as deserving as the Old to be regarded as the Word of God, or Holy Scripture. But is there actual evidence that the Gospels were at first so re- garded ? Prof. Stapfer, of the Protestant Faculty of Theology in Paris, in an opening lecture on the exegesis of the Gospel of Luke delivered in 1891, made the assertion that Luke would have been " surprised to learn that his books would be one day considered as infallible, and added with others to the sacred code of the Old Testament." Similar language has been employed by other critics. But notwithstanding their scornful tone of confidence, it is possible to produce conclusive proof that the very Gospel of Luke was con- sidered as infallible Scripture in Luke's own lifetime by so com- petent an authority as the apostle Paul, whose most faithful com- panion Luke was (2 Tim. iv. 11), and who of all men known to us was the most likely to have been early acquainted with the third Gospel. A careful study of the words of Paul in 1 Tim. v. 18, has fully satisfied our mind that he there quotes as Scripture the saying of our Lord recorded in Luke x. 7.* In the verse in 1 Tim. v, he must be held, according to all analogy, to make a double quotation of Scripture. The verse is: " For the Scripture saith, Thou shalt not muzzle the ox when he treadeth out the corn : and, The labourer is worthy of his hire." Compare this language with our Lord's com- bination of two passages of Scripture in Matt. xv. 4 : " For God said, Honour thy father and thy mother ; and, He that speaketh * Cf. Presb. and Ref. Review, January, 1895, p. 113. THE CANON OF THE NEW TESTAMENT. 11 evil of father or mother, let him die the death." Here the first saying of Scripture, " Honour thy father and thy mother," is taken from Ex. xx. 12 ; the second is taken from Ex. xxi. 17. The two are joined by the connective " and." The quotation of a merely human judgment, or proverb, in the clause beginning with the con- junction " and " would be felt to be incongruous and discordant. We instinctively expect to find a second Scripture quoted ; and on discovering like words in Ex. xxi. 17, we unhesitatingly conclude that there was an intended reference to this place. The same re- marks, mutatis mutandis, may be made on Acts i. 20, where also " and " stands between two Scriptural quotations. So also in Eom. ix. 33, and in James ii. 23. If any words at all resembling the say- ing, " The labourer is worthy of his hire," could be discovered in the Old Testament, it is certain that commentators would not dis- pute that the " and " in 1 Tim. v. 18 introduces a second quota- tion of Scripture.* It does introduce words which are exactly the same as a saying of the Lord Jesus recorded in Luke x. 7. And it does look like prejudice to refuse to acknowledge that this saying is quoted by Paul as Scripture on a par with the law of Moses. That Paul really does this seems to us placed beyond a doubt by comparing his argument in 1 Cor. ix. 9-14, on behalf of the same cause for which he wrote 1 Tim. v. 18. In that argument he quotes as " written in the law of Moses" (Deut. xx. 4), " Thou shalt not muzzle the ox when he treadeth out the corn," as sanctioning the principle that they who devote themselves to the ministry of the Word should be supported by the Church. After justifying his application of this passage of the law, and further illustrating the equity of his contention, he finally clenches his argument by this decisive allegation (v. 14), " Even so did the Lord ordain that they which preach the Gospel should live of the Gospel." Here, as in 1 Cor. vii. 10, Paul refers to what the Lord Jesus had ordained dur- ing His earthly ministry ; as is pointed out by the best commentators. Both in Matt. x. 10 and Luke x. 7, we find this particular ordi- nance of the Lord recorded. Luke has the exact words which meet us in 1 Tim. v. 18, while Matthew has, " The labourer is worthy of his foody It is conceded on all hands that Luke's Gospel has more affinity with Paul's forms of thought and expression than Matthew's Gospel has ; and there is internal evidence of Paul's in- fluence on its composition. Hence not without reason is it called the Pauline Gospel. The fact of Paul's influence on Luke is also * An illustration ex contrario is seen in 1 Cor. xv. 45. If after the clause, "The first Adam became a living soul," an "and " followed, we should be led to regard the last clause, "The last Adam became a life-giving spirit," as also a quotation of Scripture. But the two clauses are not thus connected. 12 THE PRESBYTERIAN AND REFORMED REVIEW. strongly attested by ancient Christian authors. We are, therefore, to seek the record of Paul's reference to our Lord's ordinance in Luke rather than in Matthew. As a matter of fact, there is a per- fect coincidence between Luke x. 7 and 1 Tim. v. 18. Here, then, are very striking and significant agreements in 1 Cor. ix and 1 Tim. v. Both quote Deut. xx. 4, for the same purpose, and make an ap- plication of it which is not obvious and which extends its meaning beyond the letter of the precept. We fully admit that the principle lying at the basis of the injunction in Deut. xx. 4 warrants the use which Paul makes of the injunction. But still it is a very peculiar use of the text, and one not likely to occur to any other person. And this singular employment of a saying primarily and im- mediately relating to oxen is combined in 1 Cor. ix with a refer- ence to a saying of our Lord respecting the support of his ministers. When we find in 1 Tim. v the same use of the same Old Testament text combined with the very words of our Lord's declaration in Luke x. 7, respecting the right of ministers of the Word to be main- tained, how can we say that these words in 1 Timothy are quoted, not as the words of the Lord, but merely as a proverb or moral maxim which commends itself to our sense of justice ? When we have once established that Paul had in writing (1 Cor. ix. 14), the words, "The labourer is worthy of his hire," fixed in his mind as a saying of Christ, we cannot think of him repeating these words without re- membering that they were the words of the Lord Jesus. The words, too, when presented as an utterance of the Lord, would be seen to have double weight. Another consideration strongly con- firms our view. When Paul has to quote Deut. xx. 4, in 1 Cor. ix, he prefaces it by the formula, " It is written in the law of Moses." When he has to adduce the same passage in 1 Tim. v, he drops the formula, " It is written in the law of Moses," and uses the more general one, " The Scripture saith." The latter formula allows us to sub- sume the saying, " The labourer is worthy of his hire," as included under what " Scripture saith." Its subsumption would have been excluded if the prefatory formula in 1 Cor. ix. 9 had been retained. The change is significant and should impress every one. Thus Paul's very remarkable association and use of the Law and the Gospel in 1 Cor. ix. 9, 14, reappear in 1 Tim. v. 18, in a way which could not be the work of an imitator. It would be to make Paul violate the clear usus loquendi of the New Testament in the quota- tion of combined Scriptures, and what is worse, to impute to the apostle gross forgetfulness, to make him reproduce, in a later epistle, as a commonplace observation which his Lord had never used, a saying which, when writing to the Corinthians, he had referred to as having proceeded out of the mouth of Christ. And this saying THE CANON OF THE NEW TESTAMENT. 13 of Christ is one which Paul would be likely to refer to frequently, as it decided an important practical question which would necessarily arise in every church which the apostle organized. We conclude that when Paul wrote from Eome his first Epistle to Timothy, who was at Ephesus, the Gospel of Luke must have been recognized as Scripture by the Christians of both these cities. This is a fact of the greatest moment in the history of the Canon of the New Testament. It shows how utterly false is the teaching of those critics who seem never weary of repeating that the designation ypayy, or Scripture, was not applied to the New Testament till after the middle of the second century. John wrote in Ephesus his Gos- pel, which supposes on the part of its readers a knowledge of the evangelical narrative which we have in the Synoptics* What is written in its very first chapter (vers. 19-34) is intelligible only to those who were previously acquainted with the history of John the Baptist and his baptism of Jesus. If Luke's Gospel had alreadv the authority and designation of Scripture at Ephesus, it goes without saying that the Apostle John's Gospel, when it appeared there, would at once be invested with equal dignity. The effort, we are aware, is made to postdate the composition of the Synoptic Gospels. But there are many signs in them of the early date, and of the historical character of their contents, some of which have been well pointed out by Dr. Sanday.f The narratives in the first three Gospels may be shown to be altogether in accordance with the tradition of the Church that they were written before the destruction of Jerusalem. Critics, indeed, have fixed on such passages as Luke xix. 43, 41, and xxi. 24 as indications of a late date; and Dr. Sanday is willing to con- cede that " slight alterations " have been introduced defining the allu- sions to the fall of Jerusalem in accordance with the history of that event. But this concession is improperly made owing to the influ- ence of a theory that our Lord could not, or did not, utter a definite prediction. Such negative criticism has in this particular point been excellently answered by Nosgen.^; It omits entirely to ex- plain why the evangelists, who, according to it, must have written down Christ's announcement of the destruction of Jerusalem after that catastrophe, do not point out the fulfillment of this prophecy of Christ as emphatically as they do the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecies in Him. The sources of Luke's Gospel were (Luke i. 2) the statements made by those who " from the beginning were eyewitnesses and * The words [ibpou vdpdou TziGTUrfi, which are common to Mark xiv. 3 and John xii. 3, make it hard to believe that the writer of the Fourth Gospel was not acquainted with the Second. f Inspiration, Lecture vi. % Oeschichte Jesu Christi, i, pp. 31, 32. 14 THE PRESBYTERIAN AND REFORMED REVIEW. ministers of the Word." Irenasus believed that it is the apostles who are thus described by Luke.* He writes (Bk. iii, chap, xiv, sec. 2) : " Thus did the apostles simply and without respect of per- sons, deliver to all what they had themselves learned from the Lord. Thus also does Luke, without respect of persons, deliver to us what he had learned from them, as he has himself testified, say- ing, ' Even as they delivered them unto us, who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and ministers of the Word.' " What Luke wrote down from his sources Paul stamped with the signature of Scrip- ture. His Gospel thus comes to us clothed with apostolic authority. This principle of apostolic authority was the dominant one in the formation of the Canon of the New Testament, and to this doctrine Dr. Sanday assents : " The general test which determined the place of a book in the New Testament was no doubt apostolicity"^ He proceeds to cite the Muratorian Fragment, Tertullian and Irenseus as witnesses to the truth of this position. But Zahn opposes it with all decision.:}: We have already stated how Zahn explains the for- mation of the New Testament Canon. According to him the books now comprised in it came through use in the Church gradually to obtain a place in the sacred collection of canonical Scriptures. But Zahn supplies the means of refuting his own theory. He him- self informs us § that Clement of Rome and Hermas cite as Holy Scripture apocryphal writings of the Old Testament which were not read in Christian worship. He shows | that Origen could main- tain the genuineness, inspiration and authority of Jewish writings, which were not authorized to be read in public. Zahn makes men- tion of Didymus of Alexandria, at the close of the fourth century, openly alleging that an epistle, which was publicly read in churches, was neither genuine nor canonical.^" We have, too, in Eusebius,** an extract from a letter in the reign of Marcus Aurelius, addressed * Eusebius {H. E., iii, xxiv, 15), likelrenreus, makes the apostles the sources of the "accurate account which Luke delivered in his own Gospel." No forcing is done to the language employed by Luke in the preface of his Gospel in drawing from it this meaning. To whom but the apostles does the description exactly a PPly. "They who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and ministers of the word ?" Luke in the Acts emphasizes these two characteristic marks of the apos- tles. As to their being accredited eyewitnesses, see Acts i. 2, 3, 21, 22, x. 41. Again, " The ministry of the word " was regarded by the apostles as their office preeminently (Acts vi. 4). To fit them for this ministry the Lord kept the twelve with Him whom He appointed (Mark iii. 14). None but the apostles could be properly described as either eyewitnesses or ministers of the word from the beginning, still less as both eyewitnesses and ministers of the word diz dpp^. t Inspiration, p. 47. % Oeschichte des Kanons des Neuen Testaments, i, p. 477, sq. §i, p. 961. «[i, p. 312. || i, p. 127. **H. E., iv, 23. THE CANON OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 15 by Dionysius, bishop of Corinth, to Soter, bishop of Rome, in which he says : " To-day we have passed the Lord's holy day, in which we have read your epistle. From it, whenever we read it, we shall always be able to draw advice, as also from the former epistle which was written to us through Clement." Yet these epistles of Clement and Soter, though read on Sunday in the church of Corinth, were not received into the Canon. And we might instance the fact that in the public worship of the English Episcopal Church books have been regularly read for instruction, to which canonical authority was expressly disallowed. Such facts are fatal to the theory of Zahn touching the rise and growth of the Canon of the New Testament. It cannot compete with another theory already mentioned, which prevailed in the early Church, and which can be shown to be fully sanctioned by the teaching of the New Testament. This theory is • that the apostles, the divinely appointed founders of the Church (Eph. ii. 20 ; Rev. xxi. 14) gave to it the books of the New Testa- ment as an authoritative and divine rule ; and that these books, when all collected, formed with the Old Testament a complete Bible. Christ kept the apostles with Him throughout His ministry, that they might be able to bear witness of Him (John xv. 27). He promised that the Holy Spirit would speak in them (Matt. x. 19, 20) ; that the Spirit would teach them all things and bring to their remembrance all that Christ said to them (John xiv. 26). After His resurrection He said to them : " As my Father hath sent me even so send I you" (John xx. 21). And in telling them of their mission He declared that a more dreadful sentence would be pro- nounced in the day of judgment on those who would not receive them than on the most wicked men who had lived before the coming of Christ (Matt. x. 14, 15). The promised Spirit was j imparted to the apostles ; and they could say of the things of God which they spake : " Which things also we speak, not in words which man's wisdom teacheth, but which the Spirit teacheth" (1 Cor. ii. 13). The word which they delivered was " in truth the Word of God " (1 Thess. ii. 13). They could tes- tify of the Gospel which they preached that it was neither received from man nor taught, but that it came through revelation of Jesus Christ (Gal. i. 12). They spoke with all authority : " He that knoweth God, heareth us; he who is not of God heareth us not" (1 John iv. 6). The commandment of the Lord through the apos- tles is according to 2 Pet. iii. 2 as sacred as the words spoken by the prophets. What Dr. Sanday affirms of Paul is true of all the apostles : " He is evidently as sure as any of the Old Testament prophets was ever sure, that the message which he delivered was no invention of his own, that it was not commended by ability and 16 THE PRESBYTERIAN AND REFORMED REVIEW. skill on his part, but that he was merely an instrument in the hand of God, that anything which he had to say came from God."* If this is a true representation, then what the apostle did say was to be received as* coming from God and not inferior in authority to anything contained in the Old Testament. As to the distinction attempted to be drawn between the spoken and the written words of the apostles, as if the latter were inferior to the former, it will not bear a moment's examination/}- Paul would have his written word to be equally believed and held fast with his spoken word (2 Thess. ii. 15). A man who should refuse to attend to the apostle's instruction given in an epistle was to be excluded from the fellowship of the Church (2 Thess. iii. 14). The directions which Paul communicated in writing he would have to be received as the commandment of the Lord (1 Cor. xiv. 37). And not to multiply proofs, we find the letters which John wrote to the seven churches of Asia spoken of as what the Spirit said unto the churches (Rev. ii. and iii). In opposition to this doctrine that the apostles were empowered to give the Church an authoritative rule of faith and practice, Reuss contends that " all Christians had the Holy Spirit, that is, were inspired from the same source and for the same end.":]; Such possession by Christians of this universal gift of the Holy Ghost rendered them, we are told, above the need of any such external authority as a New Testament. This is the doctrine which is so zealously advocated by Harnack, and which Prof. A. C. McGiffert seems to consider it his mission to propagate in this country. It is an utterly mistaken doctrine. A man could have the Spirit of Christ, without which he is none of His, without being endowed with extraordinary charisms. Immediately after the monstrous paradox which we have just quoted, Reuss adds: "This (viz., having the Spirit so as to be inspired and not to need a New Testament for instruction) constitutes the nature of Christianity." The fruit of the Spirit which constitutes essential Christianity as described by * Inspiration, p. 334. fit was Spinoza who first gave currency to this distinction. We doubt if Reuss was in earnest when he said : " Bei der Aufziihlungder Charismen (Rom. xii ; 1 Cor. xii) keine besondere Qabe der Schriftstellerei " {Gesch. der heil. Schriftm N. T., § 285, A, 3). We are not informed that the art of compo- sition was imparted as a gift to the writers of the Old Testament. Each of them was allowed to use his natural style of speech. Yet what they wrote was inspired Scripture, and was received as such by our Lord and His apostles. Dr. Sanday acknowledges that the written word of the apostles " would count for just as much as their spoken word " {Inspiration, p. 866). It is only a dic- tate of common sense to which Prof. H. P. Smith gives expression in saying : " The authority of an apostle was, of course, the same to command by letter as to command by word of mouth " {Inspiration and Inerrancy, p. 250). X Gesch. der heil. Schriftm N. T., § 285, A. 2. TEE CAN ON OF TEE NEW TESTAMENT. 17 Paul (Gal. v. 6, 22-24) is of a very different nature (cf. Matt. vii. 22, 23). The extraordinary gifts of the apostolic age were not im- parted alike to all Christians, but were distributed according to the will of the Spirit (1 Cor. xii. 11), and, as a rule, in connection with the laying on of the hands of the apostles. The Church of Corinth, was inferior to no other Church in the special endowments of utter- ance and knowledge (1 Cor. i. 5-7). Yet the apostle in his two epistles to that Church speaks as one who had the exclusive power to settle how the Church of Christ should be ordered (2 Cor. xiii. 10). He claimed that the Lord had given him such authority. A man who thought himself to have the gift of the Spirit, or to be a prophet, was required to make good such a claim by taking knowledge of the things which the apostle wrote, that they were the commandments of the Lord (1 Cor. xiv. 37). This is the doc- trine of enthusiasm with a vengeance — that all Christians were so inspired by the Spirit as to need no apostolic writing for their in- struction ! Then why did Paul take needless pains to instruct them by writing to them ? Why did the Corinthian Christians find it necessary to consult Paul and to seek direction from him (1 Cor. vii)? How did it happen that they did not know the proper course to be pursued toward the incestuous member (1 Cor. v) ? Why did Paul take upon him to tell them what must be done by them in this case ? Why, again, does he praise the Corinthians for remembering him in all things and holding fast what he had deliv- ered to them (1 Cor. xi. 1) ? Was ever a falser or more foolish statement penned than that of Reuss ? " All Christians have the Holy Ghost — are inspired !" And to reiterate such nonsense is to show one's self a scholar up to date, an advanced theologian ! One of the texts which Reuss refers to as proving that all Christians who have the Holy Ghost are, eo ipso, inspired, is 1 Cor. iii. 16 : " Know ye not that ye are a temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you ?" Yet in the beginning of the same chapter Paul could say to these persons in whom the Spirit of God dwelt : " I fed you with milk, not with meat ; for ye were not yet able to bear it : nay, not even now are ye able." Think of it. Such im- mature babes in Christ, who were incapable of receiving the higher Christian instruction from the apostle, being privileged with ex- emption from the obligation to submit to the external authority of apostolic Scripture ! Paul, an apostle of the Lord, who received from the Lord Himself, not only the Gospel which he preached, but the truth regarding the institution of the Holy Supper which he taught the churches to observe (1 Cor. xi. 23),* could say that the *It is painful to find even Nosgen {Qeschichte Jesu Christi, i, p. 22) making Paul here refer his knowledge of the Supper to tradition. On the contrary, he declares that he received it from the Lord. 9 18 THE PRESBYTERIAN AND REFORMED REVIEW. other apostles imparted nothing to him (Gal. ii. 6). But no one else outside the circle of the Twelve durst use such language. Are all apostles ? No ; but only those whom God set in the Church to be such (1 Cor. xii. 28). What was the opinion of the apostles held by those who, as teachers in the Church, were nearest to them in point of time, we mean the apostolic fathers? "The relation," says Lightfoot, "of these writers (Clement, Ignatius and Polycarp) to the canonical Scriptures may be briefly summed up as follows : (1) They assign a special and preeminent authority to the apostles, while distinctly disclaiming any such exceptional position for themselves. This is the case with Clement (1 Cor. v. 47), and Ignatius (Rom. iv) speak- ing of St. Peter and St. Paul, and with Polycarp (Phil, iii) speaking of St. Paul, these being the only apostles mentioned in their writings."* We have studied the apostolic fathers with the view of ascertaining if their estimate of the apostles as organs of revela- tion and teachers of the Church was at all lower than that expressed by the best Christian writers at the close of the second century ; and we are persuaded that in the subapostolic age the apostles held the same unique position which was assigned to them by Irenseus and Tertullian and their contemporaries.-]- Want of space hinders our setting forth as fully as we had intended the passages which sustain this judgment. Polycarp in his epistle to the Philippians (chap, vi) thus writes : " Let us serve Him (Christ) in fear and with all reverence, even as He Himself has commanded us, and as the apostles who preached the Gospel unto us, and the prophets who proclaimed beforehand the coming of the Lord." Here the teaching of the apostles is put on the same line with that of Christ and of the prophets of the Old Testament. Ignatius thus exhorts the Magnesians, chap, xiii, " Study, therefore, to be estab- lished in the doctrines of the Lord and of the apostles " {h tot? 86yi±aai too xupiou xai ru>v aTtoardXiov). The doctrines of the apostles are thus put on a par with those of the Lord. Clement of Rome speaks of the " good " apostles as the " greatest and most righteous pillars" of the Church (1 Ep. v). He makes the apostles in their * Lightfoot's 8. Clement of Rome, i, p. 9. A man of discernment, whether a Christian or not, must perceive the immense inferiority of the works of the apostolic fathers to the Scriptures of the New Testament. Sir John Luhbock thus relates his experience in the perusal of the writings of the former : "I must humbly confess that I was disappointed. They are perhaps all the more curious from the contrast they afford to those of the apostles themselves." (The Pleasures of Life, iv. ) f Prof. H. M. Scott's article on "The Apostolic Fathers and the New Testa- ment," in this Review for July, 1892, may be profitably studied on this ques- tion. THE CANON OF THE NEW TESTAMENT. 19 mission stand to Christ in the same relation in which Christ stood to God (chap. xlii). Ignatius writes to the Eomans (chap. iv) ? " Not as Peter and Paul do I command jou, for they were apostles." As Zahn observes, to command, biaxaaataOa^ becomes apostles only, according to Ignatius (Trail, iii ; Rom. iv ; Trail, vii). But we may, without giving further references to passages in the apos- tolic fathers, translate a brief extract from Zahn, describing what is said of the apostles as organs of revelation in subapostolic litera- ture. Zahn in footnotes furnishes dicta probantia of his statements. " Their having received their commission immediately from Christ is on a par with the sending of Christ by the Father ; is, as this, a fact belonging to the history of revelation. As God through Christ acted and spoke, so did Christ through the apostles. Thereby the doctrines and instructions of the apostles are placed on the same line with those which were communicated immediately by Christ, and by God through the prophets. The possibility that an apostle could have erred in his doctrines and instructions addressed to the churches, had manifestly no place in the circle of ideas of the genera- tion that succeeded the apostles." * Papias, whom Irenaaus makes a hearer of John and a friend of Polycarp, reports how he had heard an elder (one who belonged to the generation that had conversed with the apostles) say that, " Mark having become the interpreter of Peter, wrote down accu- rately whatsoever he remembered Wherefore Mark made no mistake in thus writing some things as he remembered them. For of one thing he took special care, not to omit anything he had heard, and not to put anything fictitious into the statements " * "Die Moglichkeit dass ein Apostel in seinen an die Gemeinden gerickteten Lehren und Anweisungen geirrt haben konnte, hat offenbar im Vorstellungs- kreis der nacbapostolisclien Generation keinen Raum gebabt " (Gesch. desneutest. Kanons, i, p. 804). Far too much is made by Dr. Sanday (Inspiration, p. 303), of the fact that in the early use of the Gospels they are not quoted with verbal exactness, as if this looseness of quotation were evidence that the Gospels could not have been held by those employing them to be the work of inspired men, or to have been yet invested with canonical dignity. Not a few critics have argued from this freedom in quotation that other Gospels than the present canonical ones must have been the sources drawn from. Against such reasoning the example of Josephus may be appealed to. That he believed in the divine and authoritative character of the Old Testament and its plenary inspiration will be conceded. Yet he could quote from the Old Testament with at least as much freedom as early Christian authors have quoted from the New. Witness the fol- lowing instance : "For, says the Scripture, A woman is inferior to her husband in all things," (Contra Apion, ii, 25). Lightfoot affirms that in the apostolic fathers "there is not a single evangelical quotation which can be safely re- ferred to any apocryphal source. The two exceptions, which were at one time adduced from Barnabas, have both vanished in the fuller light of 'criticism,' " (Lightfoot's S. Clement of Rome, i, p. 10). 20 THE PRESBYTERIAN AND REFORMED REVIEW. (Eusebius, H. E., iii, 39). What made Mark's Gospel worthy of confidence in the eyes of Papias was, that the information it sup- plies was drawn from an infallible source, the apostle Peter. It is supposed that his authority was unquestionable ; and because Mark faithfully reported what Peter had orally delivered, his Gospel could be relied on as truly relating the sayings and deeds of Christ as far as they were contained in it. The writer of the epistle to Diognetus, which has clear indications of an early date (as in its first chapter Christianity is spoken of as something new, which " has only now entered into the world "), calls himself (chap, xi) " a disciple of the apostles." In the same chapter he coordinates "the tradition of the apostles" with the Law, the Prophets and the Gospels. By the " tradition of the apostles " we are not to understand their teaching orally trans- mitted, but the epistles of the apostles. Thus in chap, xii we have a quotation from 1 Cor. viii. 1, adduced in this way, " The apostle says, Knowledge puffeth up, but charity edifieth." * What is called the second epistle of Clement (which is not an epistle but a homily, which had another author than Clement, as appears from the complete text that has been recovered), was com- posed probably before A.D. 140. It puts the authority of the apostles on a par with that of the Old Testament, as even Weiss admits {Introd. to New Testament, p. 45), in placing together " the Books and the Apostles," rd piRXia xat ol axoaroXoi, " the books " be- ing a designation of the Old Testament. The name given to the newly discovered Didache, The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles, is significant. This " oldest church manual," as Schaff calls it, is put forth in the name of the apostles, thus im- plying that the apostles are the source of authoritative teaching in the Church. Justin Martyr {Dialogue, chap, cxix) makes " the voice of God spoken by the apostles of Christ " the foundation of the faith of Christians. The very title, " Memoirs of the Apostles," which Justin gives to the Gospels, " expresses," in the words of Harnack, " the judgment that everything which was reported of the Lord could be traced directly or indirectly to the apostles."f In the Muratorian Fragment, which we still venture to think is most probably placed A.D. 170, rather than A.D. 200, the sole but suffi- cient reason for the exclusion of the Shepherd of Hermas from a place in the Canon is, that it belonged to an age subsequent to the time of the apostles. The Fragment says of it : " It ought to be *It is proper to say that the unity of the Epistle to Diognetus may without excessive skepticism be questioned. f Outlines of Hist, of Dogma, p. 89. THE CANON OF THE NEW TESTAMENT. 21 read ; but it cannot be made public in the church to the people, nor placed among the prophets, as their number is complete, nor among the apostles to the end of time." This statement proceeds on the principle that as prophetic authorship was the criterion of a book of the Old Testament, so apostolic authorship (immediate or mediate) was the criterion of a book of the New Testament. The Fragment connects Luke with Paul, in whose name it states he wrote. Both Irenseus and Tertullian make mention of the relation in which Mark and Luke stood to the apostles Peter and Paul respec- tively. Irenaeus {Against Heresies, Bk. iii, chap, xi, 9) calls our four Gospels " the Gospels of the Apostles," " those which have been delivered to us from the apostles." He enjoins (iv, chap, xxxiv, 1), " Eead more diligently the Gospel which has been given to us by the apostles, and read more diligently the prophets." Ter- tullian {Against Marcion, iv, 2) says : " We lay it down as a first principle that the Evangelic Instrument has apostles for its authors, on whom this office of publishing the Gospel was laid by the Lord Himself; if also [it includes the writings of] apostolic men, yet they were not alone, but [wrote] with [the help of J apostles, and after [the teaching of] apostles."* " Mark and Luke," says Augus- * "Constituimus in primis, Evangelicum Instrumentum Apostolos auctores habere, quibus hoc munus Evangelii promulgandi ab ipso Domino sit iniposi- tum. Si et Apostolicos, nontamen solos, sed cum Apostolis et post Apostolos." Harnack tries to show that Theophilus of Antioch (A.D. 181) occupied a very different standpoint from Irenseus and Tertullian, and did not think of connect- ing the divine authority of Christian writings with their apostolicity. "By nothing is it indicated that for Theophilus the value of the writings which he coordinated with the Old Testament consisted in their being apostolical" (Das Neue Testament urn das Jahr 200, p. 39). But Theophilus, in writing to the heathen Autolycus, would naturally not think of appealing to the authority of apostles. Irenseus and Tertullian were arguing against heretics. The way in which Theophilus quotes the Pastoral Epistles discountenances the notion that they had only lately come to be regarded as invested with divine authority : "The divine word, moreover, commands us also concerning being subject to principalities and powers, and to pray for them that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life" (Ad Autolycum, iii, 14). Here we have a combination of two passages (1 Tim. ii. 1, 2, and Tit. iii. 1). This certainly has the appearance of treating the epistles of Timothy and Titus as belonging to a long established authoritative rule. Serapion, who was bishop of Antioch only a short time after Theophilus, as he held office during the reign of Commodus, thus writes to Christians: "For we, brethren, receive both Peter and the other apostles as Christ " (Eusebius, H. E., vi, xii, 3). There is no mistaking the significance of this statement. It is a curious fact that Theophilus does not apply the name ypa