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 EDITED BY 
 
 AMBROSE WHITE VERNON 
 
THE EARLIEST SOURCES 
 
 FOR THE 
 
 LIFE OF JESUS 
 
 BY 
 
 F. CRAWFORD BURKITT, M. A., D. D. 
 
 NORRISIAN PROFESSOR OF DIVINITY IN THE 
 UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE, ENGLAND 
 
 
 
 
 
 BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
 
 HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 
 
 <$&e fitocrsi&e press Cambridge 
 
 1910 
 

 COPYRIGHT, I9IO, BY F. CRAWFORD BURKITT 
 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 
 
 Published February igio 
 
 £ 
 
 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 Preliminary Considerations 
 
 I-29 
 
 Marks of Genuineness : 
 
 
 Jewish Topography 
 
 H 
 
 Jewish Language 
 
 18 
 
 Jewish Thought 
 
 26 
 
 The Synoptic Problem 
 
 30-46 
 
 The Priority of Mark 
 
 3i 
 
 The Identification of Q^ 
 
 37 
 
 II. 
 
 III. The Gospel according to Mark 47-80 
 
 The Kingdom of God and the M Son of Man " 57 
 Influence of the Book of Enoch 66 
 
 Outline of the Story as given by Mark 72 
 
 IV. Possible " Sources " of the Gospel of 
 
 Mark 81-99 
 
 John Mark 84 
 
 Inaccuracies : 
 
 Abiathar 89 
 
 Jewish Ablutions 91 
 
 Date of the Last Supper 92 
 
 Simon Peter 94 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 V. The Composition of Matthew and 
 
 Luke 100-128 
 
 Matthew and Luke contrasted 101 
 
 Narrative of the non-Marcan Parts of Luke 103 
 
 Did (^contain a Passion Story ? 109 
 
 The M Peraean Source " of Luke 113 
 
 General Faithfulness of Matthew and Luke 116 
 
 Matthew's Treatment of Mark 117 
 
 Luke's Treatment of Mark 1 19 
 
 Note on Recent Reconstructions of " QJ' 124 
 
 Bibliography 1 29-1 31 
 
THE EARLIEST SOURCES FOR 
 THE LIFE OF JESUS 
 
 I 
 
 PRELIMINARY CONSIDERATIONS 
 
 "The originator of that name," — Taci- 
 tus is speaking of those whom the common 
 people in Rome, as he says, called "Chris- 
 tians " as a term of reproach, — " the origi- 
 nator of that name, one Christus, had been 
 executed in the reign of Tiberius by order 
 of the Administrator, Pontius Pilate." The 
 contemptuous sentence of the Roman his- 
 torian 1 is the only information about the 
 life and career of Jesus of Nazareth that has 
 come down to us independently of Christian 
 tradition. So far as it goes, however, it 
 agrees with what we read in the Gospels : 
 Pontius Pilate occupies in the statement 
 
 1 Annals, xv. 44. 
 
 I 
 
SOURCES FOR THE LIFE OF JESUS 
 
 of Tacitus the same place that he occupies 
 in the Church's Creed. He stands there to 
 mark the date of the Crucifixion. 
 
 The Christian Church grew up in ob- 
 scurity under conditions that were by no 
 means favourable to the preservation of ac- 
 curate historical reminiscences of its earliest 
 beginnings. By the time the Christians be- 
 gan to preserve in writing the record of 
 the origin of their religion, deep and ever- 
 widening gulfs had intervened between 
 them and the events. Jesus was born a Jew, 
 and he lived and died among his own 
 countrymen in Palestine; his religion took 
 root in the great cities on the eastern half 
 of the Mediterranean. The first disciples, 
 the men who had really known the Master 
 according to the flesh, were Aramaic-speak- 
 ing Semites; in a couple of generatiQns the 
 great majority of Christians were Greek- 
 speaking townsfolk, mixed perhaps in blood, 
 but educated wholly in Greek ways of 
 
 2 
 
PRELIMINARY CONSIDERATIONS 
 
 thought. In the interval the Jewish State 
 had been annihilated by the forces of the 
 Roman Empire, and what remained of the 
 earliest community of disciples had been 
 broken up. 
 
 But the cause that most of all tended to 
 make the Christians careless of preserving 
 the memory of the past was that their minds 
 were set upon the future, the future which 
 they believed was immediately in store for 
 them and for all the world. They, the first 
 Christian converts, had obeyed the call to 
 save themselves from the crooked genera- 
 tion of their contemporaries. 1 They had 
 turned from idols to serve a living and true 
 God and to wait for His Son from heaven, 
 whom He raised from the dead, even Jesus, 
 their deliverer from the wrath to come.* 
 That generation, some of them at least, 
 would not taste of death till they saw the 
 Kingdom of God come. 3 Jesus their Lord 
 
 * Acts ii. 40. a I Thess. i. 9. • Mark ix. I, and parallels. 
 
 3 
 
SOURCES FOR THE LIFE OF JESUS 
 
 was not only the Faithful Witness, the First- 
 born of the dead; " behold/' they said, "he 
 cometh with the clouds; and every eye shall 
 see him, and they also which pierced him; 
 all the tribes of the earth shall mourn over 
 him." ' 
 
 The time was at hand — the time of the 
 judgment of the heathen and the vindication 
 of the Saints. What was the use of looking 
 back to the humble life of the Son of God 
 on earth, save perhaps to record his final 
 victory over death, which was the earnest 
 and prelude of his immediately expected 
 Presence in glory ? In the events of his 
 earthly career the believers took little in- 
 terest: if they looked back at all, it was to 
 declare that the Lord himself had instituted 
 the rite of the common meal for which they 
 met week by week, and that he had pre- 
 scribed the form of their daily prayer to their 
 Father in Heaven. This is no fancy picture. 
 1 Rev. i. 7. 
 4 
 
PRELIMINARY CONSIDERATIONS 
 
 It reflects the general attitude of Christians 
 towards the life of Jesus on earth, which 
 we can gather from monuments of early 
 Christianity so representative and so differ- 
 ent from one another as the New Testa- 
 ment epistles and the ancient Christian 
 manual known as the " Didache." 
 
 The New Age came in a form very differ- 
 ent from what had been so confidently ex- 
 pected. The little companies of believers 
 did not live to see their Lord appear visibly 
 on the clouds of heaven. Instead of being 
 caught up alive in clouds to meet the 
 Lord in the air, 1 they went one by one to 
 their graves, leaving their successors to 
 carry on the work and the traditions of the 
 Christian Society. Naturally the changed 
 conditions reacted upon Christian theology, 
 upon the Christian view of the Church and 
 of the dispensation in which it found itself. 
 St. Paul himself seems to have been the first 
 
 1 I Thess. iv. 17. 
 
 5 
 
SOURCES FOR THE LIFE OF JESUS 
 
 to realize the new world. He learned to see 
 in the Death of the Christ not merely the last 
 act, the last catastrophe of the old dispen- 
 sation, but also a process which the individ- 
 ual believer had mystically to undergo on 
 earth, so that the historical event of the 
 Crucifixion remained an ever-present re- 
 ality to the members of the Christian com- 
 munity. 1 
 
 " Crucified under Pontius Pilate " — in 
 this phrase we see the indispensable germ 
 of history in the Christian Creed. As the 
 believers meditated yet further upon the 
 nature of their Lord, they perceived that 
 he was no chance favourite of Heaven, but 
 one who had been destined to fulfil his 
 high career in the fulness of time. The 
 Church was the inheritor of the promises 
 made to the fathers of old ; it hardly needed 
 tradition for them to believe that the Lord 
 Jesus had come of the seed of David ac- 
 
 1 See Rom. vi. 3-6; Col. i. 12 ft. 
 
 6 
 
PRELIMINARY CONSIDERATIONS 
 
 cording to the Scriptures. At the same 
 time both their own devotion, and the doc- 
 trine of such Jewish books as the Book of 
 Enoch, assured them that the Elect One 
 had existed from the first with the Most 
 High. It is not surprising to find that there 
 grew up a belief that his birth was miracu- 
 lous, shewing that he was in some sense 
 both God and man. The statements about 
 Jesus Christ which we find in the Creed 
 are such as might have been anticipated. 
 
 It is also not very surprising that at 
 length a book should have been written 
 which professes to give an account of the 
 earthly doings and sayings of the Lord, 
 which, setting forth from his eternal pre- 
 existence with the Father, declares his 
 claims to divine authority, exhibits his 
 unbounded power over disease, over na- 
 ture, and over death itself, and then goes 
 on to relate how he voluntarily gave him- 
 self up to be crucified, and, when all was 
 
 7 
 
SOURCES FOR THE LIFE OF JESUS 
 
 finished, tells how he appeared to his faith- 
 ful friends and disciples ; a book written 
 that the readers might believe that Jesus 
 is the Christ, and that believing they might 
 have life in his name. 1 Such a book as the 
 Gospel according to Saint John we might 
 expect to spring up within the Church and 
 be accepted as the official account of the 
 Incarnation of the Son of God. 
 
 I have begun this discussion of the ear- 
 liest historical sources for the life of Jesus 
 with the "Apostles' Creed " and the Fourth 
 Gospel rather than with the documents that 
 modern criticism regards as giving us ma- 
 terials for history, because I venture to 
 think that the first thing needed to enable 
 the modern investigator to judge the sur- 
 viving documents aright is the attempt to 
 look at them rather from the point of view 
 of the early Christians than from that of 
 our own aims and desires. It is sometimes 
 
 1 John xx. 21. 
 
 8 
 
PRELIMINARY CONSIDERATIONS 
 
 felt to be a matter of surprise or regret that 
 modern investigators of the Gospel History 
 reject so much of the traditional matter as 
 unhistorical ; it is regarded as a matter of 
 surprise or regret that so small an amount 
 of the " Gospels," canonical or uncanonical, 
 is found to come up to our modern stand- 
 ard of what history should be. Closely con- 
 nected with this feeling is the vague expec- 
 tation that the spade of the explorer in 
 Egypt or Palestine will some day dig up 
 something of revolutionary importance, 
 something that will let us go, so to speak, 
 behind the scenes of the rise of Christian- 
 ity. This expectation has been doomed 
 again and again to disappointment, interest- 
 ing as the discoveries of the last fifty years 
 have been to those who know within what 
 limits we may hope to gain accessions to 
 our knowledge. It is unlikely that such a 
 revolutionary document ever existed, or, if 
 it ever existed, that it would have been 
 9 
 
SOURCES FOR THE LIFE OF JESUS 
 
 copied and preserved. There were no dis- 
 interested observers of early Christianity. 
 Those who did not " believe " had no rea- 
 son for analysing the elements of what must 
 have seemed to them to be a new and vul- 
 gar superstition; so that our knowledge of 
 it comes exclusively from the works of 
 already convinced Christians. The question 
 that the scientific investigator has to ask is 
 not why so much of our material seems to 
 be, strictly speaking, unhistorical, but how 
 it comes to pass that any real historical 
 memory of Jesus Christ was preserved. It 
 is easy enough to explain the genesis of the 
 Creed, and the existence and general scope 
 of such a document as the Fourth Gospel. 
 The real problem is the survival of the 
 Gospel according to Mark. 
 
 The difference of standpoint between the 
 
 ancient and modern world that is clearly 
 
 apprehended by all reflecting persons at 
 
 the present day concerns the course of 
 
 10 
 
PRELIMINARY CONSIDERATIONS 
 
 Nature and the domain of Physical Science. 
 We all of us have some idea of the ob- 
 served uniformity of nature, and we regard 
 what are called " miracles " as at least un- 
 likely, even if we do not regard them as 
 impossible. Now it is quite evident that the 
 early Christians did not regard " miracles " 
 as unlikely, in the sense that we regard 
 them as unlikely. The Gospels, and many 
 other early Christian documents, are full of 
 miracles, and in some quarters this raises 
 a prejudice against them, or at least against 
 the stories which contain a "miraculous" 
 element. On the other hand, there are no 
 miracles in the " Sermon on the Mount," 
 or in the fragmentary document dug up a 
 few years ago at Oxyrhynchus in Egypt, 
 and commonly called " Sayings of Jesus "; 
 such pieces of tradition as these are often 
 therefore accepted with little or no serious 
 criticism as being genuine and authentic, 
 merely because they claim to be so. But 
 ii 
 
SOURCES FOR THE LIFE OF JESUS 
 
 this is fundamentally unscientific. It is of 
 course logical enough for the thorough- 
 going traditionalist to accept the " Sermon 
 on the Mount " as genuine and authentic, 
 because it is part of the authoritative tra- 
 dition of the Church, and to look with 
 very great suspicion upon the Oxyrhynchus 
 " Sayings," because they were not included 
 in the Church's tradition. But those who 
 feel themselves free to criticise the Gospel 
 miracles are bound to examine the creden- 
 tials of the Gospel Sayings. 
 
 A truly scientific historical criticism is 
 both stricter and more catholic than popu- 
 lar liberalism. It does not expect from any 
 document an impossible standard of truth- 
 fulness and accuracy. Even the modern 
 astronomer in a scientific observatory has 
 his irreducible personal equation; even the 
 actual eye-witness will tell his tale with 
 variations after the lapse of a few years. 
 Even if we incline to disbelieve in miracu- 
 12 
 
PRELIMINARY CONSIDERATIONS 
 
 lous interference with the course of nature, 
 that does not mean that we have any right 
 to treat stories which contain a miraculous 
 element as if they were mere free inven- 
 tions. The real question that must be asked 
 is, in the first place, one of origin rather 
 than of faithfulness. 
 
 It may not be out of place, before ex- 
 amining the Synoptic Gospels and other 
 parts of the tradition in detail, to consider 
 some of the marks and signs that do indi- 
 cate that a tradition or saying is really in 
 touch with the events of the life of Jesus 
 of Nazareth. When we consider that our 
 documents are Greek and that the original 
 public for whom they were prepared were 
 Greek-speaking Christians in the cities upon 
 or near the shores of the Mediterranean, it 
 is obvious that what we are looking for 
 are signs which indicate a real knowledge 
 of the conditions of life in Palestine among 
 
 13 
 
SOURCES FOR THE LIFE OF JESUS 
 
 the Jewish people during the first half of the 
 first century a. d. These signs may con- 
 veniently be grouped under the heads of 
 (i) Jewish Topography, (2) Jewish Lan- 
 guage, (3) Jewish Thought. 
 
 1. y eivish (and Palestinian) Topogra- 
 phy. — As compared with the ignorance of 
 topography displayed in most of the apocry- 
 phal Acts of the Apostles, it is reassuring 
 to note the general correctness of the geo- 
 graphical information given in our Gospels, 
 not excepting the Fourth Gospel. Most of 
 the places mentioned in the Gospels can be 
 identified, or are mentioned in purely Jew- 
 ish documents such as the Talmud. When 
 we find in words ascribed to Jesus references 
 to Chorazin and Capernaum, 1 towns not 
 mentioned in the Old Testament, though 
 their existence is attested in the Talmud, 
 we may infer that we are dealing with a 
 Palestinian tradition. The Gospel tradition 
 
 1 More accurately, Capharnaum. 
 
 14 
 
PRELIMINARY CONSIDERATIONS 
 
 never makes Jesus have anything to do with 
 the heathen and Greek-speaking cities of 
 Palestine. He never is made to go to Caes- 
 area. Peter's confession is not at Cacsarea 
 Philippi: Jesus is with his disciples "in 
 the villages of Caesarea Philippi," ■ i. e. in 
 the native suburbs or districts round the 
 new heathenish city. Tiberias, founded 
 A. d. 26 and afterwards the centre of Jewish 
 life in Galilee, is only mentioned once and 
 that incidentally;' and we actually know 
 from Josephus that Herod's newly built 
 town was regarded at first with disfavour 
 by the Jews. Of course, correctness and 
 appropriateness in geographical names do 
 not necessarily imply the historicity and 
 accuracy of the stories in which they occur. 
 But such things do shew that the tradition 
 has roots in the soil of the Holy Land. 
 
 We must, however, distinguish this real 
 geographical knowledge from a geograph- 
 
 x Mark viii. 27. 2 John vi. 23. 
 
 is 
 
SOURCES FOR THE LIFE OF JESUS 
 
 ical knowledge which is only the result of 
 studying the Old Testament or some other 
 literary source. Both kinds of knowledge 
 may be notably illustrated from the writings 
 of Luke. St. Luke is at home in Asia Mi- 
 nor and on the sea. The narrative portion 
 of the twentieth chapter of Acts is full and 
 correct enough for a guide-book, and the 
 voyage of Paul, with the shipwreck, reads 
 like what no doubt it really is, an account 
 written by an eye-witness. But when the 
 same author is writing of Palestine, he is 
 merely well read, and like other merely 
 well-read persons he occasionally falls into 
 error. He is careful indeed of his language, 
 and talks of the "Lake," not the " Sea," of 
 Gennesareth; ■ but all the Jews' country is 
 often loosely called "Judaea" by him 2 in a 
 way that betrays a foreigner's hand, while 
 some of his statements in Luke iii. i and 
 
 1 Contrast Luke viii. 23 £f. with Mark v. 1. 
 8 Luke i. 5; iv. 44; vii. 17. 
 
 16 
 
PRELIMINARY CONSIDERATIONS 
 
 Acts v. 36, 37, seem to rest upon a careless 
 use of Josephus. It is therefore unjustifiable 
 to press Luke's proved accuracy with re- 
 gard to the conditions of society in Asia 
 Minor as an argument for the accuracy of 
 his knowledge of Palestine. 
 
 The apocryphal Gospels shew less know- 
 ledge of Palestine than the canonical Four. 
 This is the case even with the fragment dis- 
 covered at Oxyrhynchus in 1905, which at 
 first was supposed to exhibit a real ac- 
 quaintance with Jerusalemite ritual and 
 topography. Further investigation, how- 
 ever, seems to shew that the writer's ideas 
 of the topography of Jerusalem were derived 
 from the Old Testament in Greek, and that 
 his ideas of Temple ritual imply familiarity 
 with Egyptian rather than with Jewish cus- 
 toms. 1 If that be the case, the sayings as- 
 cribed in the fragment to Jesus are more 
 
 1 See H. B. Swete, Zwei neue Evangelienfragmente, in 
 Lietzmann's Kleine Texte. 
 
 17 
 
SOURCES FOR THE LIFE OF JESUS 
 
 likely to represent the ideas of some Egyp- 
 tian Christians of the second or third cen- 
 tury, than to be based upon what Jesus 
 really said in Palestine in the first century. 
 2. yewish Language. — In some of our 
 documents, and notably in the Gospel ac- 
 cording to Mark, we actually find words 
 and sentences written down in Jewish Ara- 
 maic, the vernacular of Palestine. Words 
 like Abba (i.e. " My Father ") , and the 
 cry "Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani," on the 
 Cross, could not have been invented by 
 Greek-speaking persons. They must have 
 come down to us direct and unchanged 
 from the living memory of the first Pales- 
 tinian disciples. The solemn "Amen" at 
 the beginning of our Lord's sayings, un- 
 fortunately translated in English and turned 
 into " Verily," is another instance of direct 
 reminiscence of his manner of speech. For 
 the most part these Semitic phrases tend 
 to be left out in the later documents, and 
 18 
 
PRELIMINARY CONSIDERATIONS 
 
 in one case a non-canonical document, the 
 Gospel of Peter, has actually transmitted a 
 mistranslation of the foreign word. But the 
 fact that such words occur in any of our 
 documents, and that they have not been 
 altogether distorted in transmission, is a 
 very strong indication that such documents 
 contain a historical element not very far 
 removed from the actual events. 
 
 Direct transliterations of Semitic words 
 and phrases are, after all, a sort of historical 
 luxury beyond what one has a right to de- 
 mand. Almost equally conclusive, if not 
 quite so dramatically telling, are the Aramaic 
 idioms scattered over the Gospels, espe- 
 cially in the recorded words of Jesus. Take, 
 for instance, the use of the word homologtn, 
 translated "confess." In Matthew vii. 23 
 it is used merely of a solemn asseveration; 
 in Matthew x. 32, and in some other places, 
 it is used most curiously with the preposi- 
 tion " in." Jesus says, " those who confess 
 
 *9 
 
SOURCES FOR THE LIFE OF JESUS 
 
 in me, I will confess in them," meaning 
 that those who acknowledge that they are 
 his disciples, he will acknowledge to be 
 his disciples. This is mere Aramaic idiom 
 taken over into Greek, shewing that the 
 saying itself must have been originally ut- 
 tered in Aramaic, and that its Greek form 
 is an almost literal translation of the origi- 
 nal. 1 It may in fact be said, that, if we are 
 to regard any alleged saying of Jesus as 
 genuine and historical, we must be able to 
 put back its essential terms from the trans- 
 mitted Greek into the original Aramaic. 
 
 Equally searching are the arguments to 
 be derived from the Old Testament quota- 
 tions and allusions in the Gospel. If they 
 depend upon the renderings of the Septua- 
 gint, they are suspect; if they be genuine, 
 they will be independent of the Septuagint, 
 and will imply a direct use of the Hebrew 
 
 1 It is curious that the idiom does not appear in Greek 
 with the verb for " deny." 
 
 20 
 
PRELIMINARY CONSIDERATIONS 
 
 original or of the Aramaic Targum. This is 
 so important a point, that it may be worth 
 while to explain it more fully. The Septua- 
 gint is the name commonly given to the 
 ancient translation into Greek of the He- 
 brew Pentateuch and other Jewish Scrip- 
 tures, made at Alexandria in the time of the 
 Ptolemies. This version had become the 
 Bible of the Greek-speaking Jews in New 
 Testament times, and from them it passed 
 over to the Christians. In essentials, apart 
 from corruptions of text and certain sub- 
 stitutions in the less-read books, it be- 
 came the Bible of the Church, and it is 
 the Bible of the Greek Church still. It was 
 therefore through the Septuagint, and 
 through the Septuagint alone, that the Bible 
 was known to Christians during the second 
 century and the latter part of the first cen- 
 tury, i. e. during the time that our Gospels 
 assumed their final shape and became ca- 
 nonical. The original Hebrew was a sealed 
 
 21 
 
SOURCES FOR THE LIFE OF JESUS 
 
 book to them after the Church had definitely 
 separated from the Synagogue, i. e. ever 
 since the great catastrophe of 70 a. d. A 
 man like St. Paul could use the Scriptures 
 both in Hebrew and in Greek. He had had 
 some regular Rabbinical training, and he 
 quotes the Bible like a modern English 
 scholar who can read his Greek Testament 
 and who gives sometimes the renderings of 
 the ordinary English version, sometimes 
 his own renderings direct from the original. 
 But our Lord and his first disciples spoke 
 Aramaic; there is nothing to suggest that 
 they were acquainted with the current Greek 
 version. In the Synagogues they would hear 
 the Scriptures read in the original Hebrew, 
 followed by a more or less stereotyped 
 rendering into the Aramaic of Palestine, 
 the language of the country, itself a cousin 
 of Hebrew. A faithfully reported saying 
 therefore of Jesus or of Peter ought to 
 agree with the Hebrew against the Greek, 
 22 
 
PRELIMINARY CONSIDERATIONS 
 
 or at least ought not to acquire its point 
 and appropriateness from a peculiar ren- 
 dering in the Greek. 
 
 A couple of examples will illustrate 
 what has been said. The Gospel of Mat- 
 thew alone records the circumstance that 
 Jesus used to quote the word of the Lord 
 by Hosea, " I desire mercy and not sacri- 
 fice." ■ It is a point in favour of the authen- 
 ticity of the saying that it agrees with the 
 Hebrew text against the Greek translation 
 of the Prophets, which had " I desire mercy 
 rather than sacrifice." At least, it shews 
 us that the tradition about this saying of 
 Jesus goes back to a Palestinian source. 
 We may take as a contrast the story told 
 in Matthew xxi. 16, and there only, that 
 when the boys were crying out " Hosanna " 
 in the Temple, and the Chief Priests were 
 vexed, Jesus replied, " Have ye never read, 
 4 Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings 
 
 1 Hosea vi. 6. 
 
 23 
 
SOURCES FOR THE LIFE OF JESUS 
 
 thou hast perfected <praiseV" Here the 
 whole point of the saying is in the word 
 'praise,' but it is a word that does not 
 occur in the original Hebrew at all. In the 
 Hebrew of Psalm viii. 2 we find, " Thou 
 hast ordained strength " ; it is only in the 
 not very accurate Greek translation of the 
 Psalms that " praise " occurs. The story 
 therefore has evidently at least been recast 
 by some one who used the Old Testament 
 in Greek, and we must consider it impro- 
 bable that Jesus really quoted this verse 
 from the Psalms in the circumstances al- 
 leged. 
 
 Both the above instances are taken from 
 the Gospel according to Matthew. The 
 compiler of that Gospel gives the quota- 
 tions from the Old Testament which he 
 makes in his own person sometimes direct 
 from the Hebrew, sometimes according to 
 the current Greek translation. Like Paul 
 of Tarsus, he illustrates in himself the 
 24 
 
PRELIMINARY CONSIDERATIONS 
 
 transplantation of the Christian movement 
 from the Semitic soil in which it germin- 
 ated into the Graeco-Roman civilization. 
 Luke, on the other hand, always uses the 
 Septuagint in his own quotations and allu- 
 sions to the Old Testament. Whether he 
 was able to understand any Semitic lan- 
 guage is of course unknown to us; but his 
 acquaintance with the Bible is certainly 
 derived from the Greek. We cannot, there- 
 fore, believe that he gives us the actual 
 words used by Jesus in the Synagogue at 
 Nazareth ; ' for the passages there quoted 
 from Isaiah lxi. i ff. and lviii. 6 are taken 
 from the Septuagint. But the quotation 
 from Isaiah liii. 12, at the end of the say- 
 ings given in Luke xxii. 35-37, sayings 
 which on general grounds appear to have 
 the ring of genuineness, does not agree in 
 diction with the Septuagint and does agree 
 with the Hebrew. Here, therefore, we 
 
 1 Luke iv. 18 ff. 
 25 
 
SOURCES FOR THE LIFE OF JESUS 
 
 have an instance of faithful reminiscence 
 of our Lord's words. 
 
 • 3. Jewish Thought. — Properly to dis- 
 cuss the Jewish thought expressed and pre- 
 supposed in the Gospels would be to write 
 a full commentary on them. For our im- 
 mediate purpose it will be sufficient to 
 point out that hardly any other kind of 
 thought is presupposed. There is no doubt 
 a certain amount of thought and philoso- 
 phy which is ultimately Greek, whatever 
 be its immediate origin, presupposed in the 
 Fourth Gospel. In the Nativity Stories, 
 also, some critics have seen Greek notions 
 underlying the narrative. But it is the ob- 
 vious fact that in the rest of the Gospels 
 the Greek influence, so far as the thought 
 and mental atmosphere of the subject-mat- 
 ter are concerned, is simply non-existent. 
 Apart from questions of language and 
 purely literary criticism, the three Synop- 
 tic Gospels might be translations from the 
 26 
 
PRELIMINARY CONSIDERATIONS 
 
 Aramaic. The main ideas of the Synoptic 
 Gospels, the fundamental phrases round 
 which move the thoughts belonging to the 
 Gospel, all have their explanation and illus- 
 tration from contemporary Judaism. The 
 Kingdom of God, the Christ or Messiah, 
 the Day of Judgment, treasure in heaven, 
 Abraham's bosom, — all these are Jewish 
 ideas, entirely foreign to the native thought 
 of the Graeco-Roman world. We hear no- 
 thing in the Gospels about the Immortality 
 of the Soul, much about the Resurrection 
 at the last day; nothing about "Virtue," 
 much about "Righteousness," little about 
 Purification, much about the Forgiveness 
 of Sin. Even the polemic against heathen- 
 ism is absent. 
 
 To such an extent are the Synoptic Gos- 
 pels Jewish books, occupied with problems 
 belonging originally to first-century Juda- 
 ism, that it makes large parts of them diffi- 
 cult to use as books of universal religion. 
 
 27 
 
SOURCES FOR THE LIFE OF JESUS 
 
 But it is just this Jewish character that 
 gives them their value as historical docu- 
 ments. "Lo! the Kingdom of God is in 
 your midst! " said Jesus once. The Oxy- 
 rhynchus " Sayings of Jesus," representing 
 a development of Christianity among the 
 Greek-speaking townsfolk of Egypt, com- 
 bines this phrase with the old Greek Del- 
 phic precept "Know thyself! " If the say- 
 ing had been transmitted to us only in this 
 connexion, we might well hesitate to re- 
 ceive it as a genuine utterance of Jesus 
 of Nazareth. But the canonical Gospel 
 of Luke joins it with the announcement of 
 the unexpected advent of the Kingdom of 
 God, which would come before those who 
 were unprepared were aware. This has a 
 claim, an excellent claim, to be accepted 
 as a historical representation of the teach- 
 ing of Jesus; the occurrence in such aeon- 
 text of the saying about the Kingdom of 
 God appearing in the midst is a strong rea- 
 28 
 
PRELIMINARY CONSIDERATIONS 
 
 son for regarding it as genuine and tells us 
 its historical interpretation. On the other 
 hand, the Oxyrhynchus document gives us 
 only an application of our Lord's words to 
 changed conditions of time and place. 
 
II 
 
 THE SYNOPTIC PROBLEM 
 
 When we study the Gospels together, it 
 is at once obvious that the Fourth Gospel, 
 the Gospel according to John, stands apart 
 from the others. For the most part the nar- 
 ratives and discourses which it contains are 
 not found in the other three Gospels, while 
 the matter contained in these is not found 
 in the fourth. But the three Gospels of Mat- 
 thew, Mark, and Luke have much in com- 
 mon. It is possible to arrange them in par- 
 allel columns, so that their common matter 
 may be studied and compared at a glance. 
 This was first done in a systematic way 
 about a hundred years ago by J. J. Gries- 
 bach, who called this arrangement in paral- 
 lel columns a Synopsis. From the time of 
 Griesbach the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, 
 30 
 
THE SYNOPTIC PROBLEM 
 
 and Luke have been called the Synoptic 
 Gospels, and the problem of the relation of 
 Matthew, Mark, and Luke to one another 
 is the Synoptic Problem. 
 
 A century of investigation has brought 
 the Gospel according to Mark into a gen- 
 erally acknowledged position of priority as 
 a historical source. This has been effected 
 almost LMitirely by internal considerations, 
 by examining the common matter of Mat- 
 thew, Mark, and Luke, comparing the par- 
 allel narratives as wholes and in detail, and 
 by estimating the nature and significance 
 of the peculiar characteristics of each of 
 the three. External evidence, the testimony 
 of ancient writers, is so scanty and obscure 
 that little of direct value can be extracted 
 from it. By about 180 a. d. we find our 
 four Gospels already received in the 
 church as a sacred and exclusive collec- 
 tion. This collection seems to have been 
 already formed by the middle of the sec- 
 
 3 1 
 
SOURCES FOR THE LIFE OF JESUS 
 
 ond century. Before that the several Gos- 
 pels must have circulated independently. 
 The Third Gospel, in fact, was designed by 
 the writer of it to be the first volume of a 
 longer historical work, of which our Acts of 
 the Apostles forms the second. The Second 
 Gospel is mutilated at the end; its text, ac- 
 cording to the oldest manuscripts in Greek 
 and the oldest Syriac version, ends at xvi. 8, 
 in the middle of a sentence. This mutila- 
 tion must have been accidental, for any 
 intentional curtailment would have been 
 made at a more suitable point: even xvi. 7 
 would have made a better finish. There- 
 fore we may go on to infer that all our 
 copies of the Gospel according to Mark 
 are descended from a single copy, imper- 
 fect at the end and perhaps tattered else- 
 where. As a matter of fact, there are one or 
 two places in Mark, e. g. incomprehensible 
 proper names like Boanerges and Dal- 
 manutha^ where the transmitted text can 
 32 
 
THE SYNOPTIC PROBLEM 
 
 best be explained as the result of imperfect 
 attempts to copy an illegible exemplar. But 
 such places are few. On the whole, the text 
 is satisfactory in essentials ; apart from the 
 minor stylistic and harmonistic changes of 
 scribes, we seem to have the work very 
 much as it left the author's hand. 
 
 " Mark was known to the two other syn- 
 optic writers, when it was already in the 
 same condition as we now have it, both in 
 text and contents." So writes Wellhausen. 1 
 This is the result of the critical study of 
 the Synoptic Gospels during the nineteenth 
 century. Now that this result has been 
 attained, it is easy to verify in its main out- 
 lines by any one who will compare for 
 himself the common matter of Matthew, 
 Mark, and Luke. It is possible to explain 
 all, or almost all, the features of the Gos- 
 pel narrative as we read it in Matthew and 
 Luke on the supposition that it is based 
 
 1 Einleitung in die drei ersten Evangelien^ § 6, p. 57. 
 
 33 
 
SOURCES FOR THE LIFE OF JESUS 
 
 upon Mark, impossible to explain Mark on 
 the supposition that it is based on a docu- 
 ment similar to Matthew or Luke. The 
 common order of the anecdotes is Mark's 
 order; where Matthew deserts Mark's or- 
 der, Mark is supported by Luke, where 
 Luke deserts Mark's order, Mark is sup- 
 ported by Matthew. Matthew and Luke 
 never agree in order against Mark. It is 
 practically the same with the text itself as 
 with the order of the narratives : Mark and 
 Luke agree against Matthew, Matthew 
 and Mark agree against Luke, while the 
 points in which Matthew and Luke agree 
 against Mark are so few and so insignifi- 
 cant in character that it seems unnecessary 
 to postulate the existence of an earlier form 
 of Mark — what used to be called in Ger- 
 many Ur-Marcus, i. e. original Mark — in 
 order to account for them. 1 
 
 1 See the discussion in the present writer's Gospel His- 
 tory and its Transmission, pp. 42-58, and also Sir John 
 Hawkins* Horae Synopticae, 172 £f. (2d ed., 208 ff.). 
 
 34 
 
THE SYNOPTIC PROBLEM 
 
 But the demonstration of the relative pri- 
 ority of the Gospel according to Mark is 
 only the first step in the criticism of the 
 Synoptic Gospels. Mark may be older than 
 Matthew or Luke, and may constitute one 
 of the sources from which they were com- 
 piled. We must go on to consider the Gos- 
 pel of Mark in itself as a historical docu- 
 ment, and also to investigate the source 
 and character of those large portions of 
 Matthew and Luke that have no parallel in 
 Mark, or at least cannot have been taken 
 directly from Mark. We may admit that 
 Matthew and Luke used Mark practically 
 in the form which still survives, but was 
 that the original form? Is the Gospel of 
 Mark itself perhaps based on an earlier 
 document? And can we trace in Matthew 
 and Luke the use of any other document 
 besides Mark? 
 
 It will be convenient to say a few words 
 about the last question at this point. The 
 
 35 
 
SOURCES FOR THE LIFE OF JESUS 
 
 Gospels of Matthew and Luke mainly differ 
 from that of Mark in that they contain a 
 large number of sayings of Jesus not given 
 by Mark. Many of these sayings are pecu- 
 liar to Matthew or peculiar to Luke, but 
 others are given in both, and often with 
 such coincidences of language and of order 
 that they must have been derived from a 
 common source. Thus, for instance, Mat- 
 thew v.-vii. (the so-called " Sermon on the 
 Mount ") is parallel to Luke vi. 20-49, anc ^ 
 Matthew xi. 2-19 is practically repeated in 
 Luke vii. 18-35. A comparison of these 
 passages leads us to infer that Matthew and 
 Luke have made use of a common source, 
 written in Greek, which must have con- 
 tained, amongst other things, sayings of 
 Jesus about John the Baptist, together with 
 a collection of ethical sayings which began 
 with the Beatitudes and ended with the 
 similitude of the houses built on the rock 
 or on the river-bed. The common source, 
 
 36 
 
THE SYNOPTIC PROBLEM 
 
 now lost, except so far as it is preserved in 
 Matthew and Luke, it was formerly the 
 fashion to call the " Logia," from a belief 
 that it was mentioned under that name by 
 Papias of Hierapolis in Asia Minor about 
 the mi4dle of the second century. 1 Well- 
 hausen and others, however, call it " Q^," 
 i. e. Quelle (source), and this name is pre- 
 ferable, as we know so little of its origin or 
 extent. 
 
 The common matter of Matthew and 
 Luke, not shared by Mark, almost all con- 
 sists of sayings of Jesus. We therefore as- 
 sume that Q^ mainly consisted of sayings. 
 But the same arguments that prove Q^ 
 to have contained the "Sermon on the 
 
 1 Papias (quoted by Eusebius, Ch. History, Hi. 39) says : 
 41 Matthew indeed in the Hebrew language wrote down the 
 Logia, and each interpreted them as he was able." What 
 the work was to which Papias alludes is very doubtful : it 
 is certain that our Gospel according to Matthew is a Greek 
 work, based upon Greek sources, one of them being in fact 
 our Gospel according to Mark. 
 
 37 
 
SOURCES FOR THE LIFE OF JESUS 
 
 Mount," or at least an earlier form of that 
 collection of sayings, also prove Q^ to have 
 contained the story of the healing of the 
 centurion's boy. It is because Matthew 
 (v. 3-vii. 27) and Luke (vi. 20-49) eac h 
 contains a collection of sayings, beginning 
 with beatitudes and ending with the simili- 
 tude of the House on the Rock, that we 
 infer a similar collection to have existed in 
 Q^. But this collection is followed, both in 
 Matthew (viii. 3-13) and in Luke (vii. 
 1-10), by the story of the centurion. If our 
 first inference be valid, then the story of 
 the centurion must also be assigned to Q^. 
 Q^ therefore was not a mere assembly of 
 sayings of Jesus, but also contained anec- 
 dotes about his wonderful works. 
 
 But when we have said this, we have 
 said nearly everything that is absolutely 
 certain. Professor Harnack in his book, 
 " Sayings and Discourses of Jesus," ■ has 
 
 1 Harnack, Sprilcke und Reden Jesu, 1907. 
 
 38 - 
 
THE SYNOPTIC PROBLEM 
 
 attempted to reconstruct Q^ from the sec- 
 tions of Matthew and Luke which he con- 
 siders to have been derived from this lost 
 document. But it is very doubtful whether 
 his reconstruction can be accepted as any- 
 thing more than a mass of genuine but de- 
 tached fragments, and what we want is a 
 picture of Q^ as a whole. We may agree 
 that the sayings and discourses which 
 Harnack assigns to Q^ really did form part 
 of it, but we have very little reason to think 
 that Q^ did not contain a great deal more. 
 
 One thing at least is clear. We can see 
 by a comparison of Matthew and Luke 
 with Mark that Matthew and Luke have 
 used Mark, making it in fact the basis 
 upon which their own Gospels have been 
 planned. Between them they have managed 
 to incorporate almost all the Gospel of 
 Mark, and by comparing their works with 
 the original, we can see pretty well the rea- 
 sons which led them to drop or to modify 
 
 39 
 
SOURCES FOR THE LIFE OF JESUS 
 
 those portions of Mark which they have 
 severally dropped or modified. But we are 
 able to see all this, because the Gospel of 
 Mark is actually before us. If the Gospel 
 of Mark were unknown to us, if its con- 
 tents had to be inferred from Matthew and 
 Luke, should we be able to reconstruct it 
 at all ? I do not think so. Even if by divi- 
 nation, rather than by legitimate criticism, 
 we recognised as Marcan those sections 
 which are retained only by Matthew or 
 only by Luke, we should still miss all the 
 vivid peculiarities of Mark. And when we 
 are trying to estimate the tendencies and 
 characteristics of the Gospel of Mark, it is 
 just by the peculiarities of the work that 
 its characteristics are revealed. If we were 
 reconstructing Mark by the same process 
 and with the same materials that we use 
 for reconstructing Q^, that is to say, by pick- 
 ing out the Marcan elements from Mat- 
 thew and Luke, we should not arrive at a 
 40 
 
THE SYNOPTIC PROBLEM 
 
 document in which our Lord says, "The 
 Sabbath was made for man, and not man 
 for the Sabbath," or one that tells us how 
 his friends once thought he was mad, for 
 these things are preserved neither by Mat- 
 thew nor by Luke. We should not have 
 any idea that the real Mark contained the 
 parable of the ear of corn growing of it- 
 self. We should not know that it contained 
 the Aramaic sayings, Tali t ha cumi, and 
 Ephphatha, sayings which carry us back 
 to the soil of Palestine. We could not have 
 reconstructed out of Matthew and Luke 
 the important historical notice that Jesus 
 when he for the last time passed through 
 Galilee "would not that any man should 
 know it," or that he began his answer about 
 the great commandment with the " Hear, 
 O Israel ! " All these things are features 
 really characteristic of Mark; it is the pre- 
 sence of strongly individual features such 
 as these in the Gospel of Mark that gives it 
 4 1 
 
SOURCES FOR THE LIFE OF JESUS 
 
 its preeminence as a historical document. 
 But not one of them would be found in a 
 Mark reconstructed out of Matthew and 
 Luke, and I cannot believe that our recon- 
 structions of Q^are any more like the real 
 Q^than our reconstructions of Mark would 
 be like the real Mark. 1 
 
 Another point also has to be taken into 
 consideration. If the Gospel of Mark were 
 not extant, and we had to infer its scope 
 and contents from the Gospels of Matthew 
 and Luke alone, is it not almost inevitable 
 that we should have assigned to Mark some 
 things that we now know to belong not to 
 Mark but to Q^ ? We do not know for cer- 
 tain that Matthew and Luke used only one 
 common source besides Mark, and it re- 
 mains possible that the mass of material 
 which we regard as belonging to Q^may 
 
 1 See Harnack's Spruche und Reden Jesu (1907), and the 
 present writer's review of it in the Journal of Theological 
 Studies, viii. 454-459. 
 
 42 
 
THE SYNOPTIC PROBLEM 
 
 have been drawn from at least two separate 
 sources. It is conceivable, for instance, 
 that the sayings of Jesus which relate to 
 John the Baptist, together with the account 
 of the Baptist's preaching, may have been 
 derived from a document different from that 
 which supplied the outline of the " Sermon 
 on the Mount " and the Parables. I do not 
 think it on the whole probable, but there is 
 something to be said for it, and it is a pos- 
 sibility to be borne in mind. 
 
 What, then, it may be asked, do we gain 
 by the recognition of this lost source Q^, if 
 we cannot reconstruct it? The answer, I 
 believe, is this: that by recognising certain 
 sayings in Matthew and Luke to have been 
 drawn from the same source, we are better 
 able to isolate the features in the sayings 
 that are due to the several Evangelists, and 
 thereby better able to understand what they 
 meant in their original form. We cannot 
 do without either the Lucan or the Mat- 
 
 43 
 
SOURCES FOR THE LIFE OF JESUS 
 
 thaean form of the sayings, but we can use 
 the one to control the other. 
 
 In any case, the material comprehended 
 under the sign (^includes very many of the 
 most precious jewels of the Gospel. When 
 Justin Martyr in the second century wished 
 to exhibit to the heathen Emperor the 
 characteristic ethical teaching of Christ, 
 nine tenths of his examples came out of 
 passages derived from Q^. 1 It is from Q^ 
 that we have the blessing on the poor, the 
 hungry, the reviled; from Q^ come " Love 
 your enemies," "Turn the other cheek," 
 "Be like your Father who maketh His sun 
 to shine on the evil and the good," " Con- 
 sider the lilies," "Be not anxious — your 
 Father knoweth ye have need," " They 
 shall come from east and west and sit down 
 with Abraham in the kingdom of God." It 
 is Q^ that tells us that the adversaries of 
 Jesus found him not ascetic enough and 
 
 * Justin Martyr, Apology, i. 15 f. 
 
 44 
 
THE SYNOPTIC PROBLEM 
 
 mocked at him as a friend of tax-gatherers 
 and sinners. It is Q^ that tells us that Jesus 
 said "I thank thee, Father, that thou hast 
 hidden these things from the wise and re- 
 vealed them to babes, — even so, Father, 
 for so it was pleasing in thy sight." If the 
 work of Mark be more important to the 
 historian, it is Q^that supplies starting-points 
 for the Christian moralist. Most important 
 of all, it gives light and shade to the some- 
 what austere lines of the portrait of Jesus 
 sketched in the Gospel of Mark. 
 
 The interest of Q^ is extremely great. It 
 is great from what we actually know of it, 
 and it possesses the fascination of the elu- 
 sive and the unknown. It is well therefore 
 to keep steadily in mind how little we can 
 be certain even of the general plan of the 
 work, or of what it did not contain. True it is 
 that, as Justin says, "short and concise came 
 words from Christ, for he was no sophist, 
 but his word was a mighty work of God " : 
 45 
 
SOURCES FOR THE LIFE OF JESUS 
 
 detached as the fragments of Q^must remain 
 to us, often devoid of context or presuppos- 
 ing totally different social conditions from 
 those of our own age, yet the single sayings 
 have again and again proved themselves 
 instinct with truly divine power. Yet 
 though they are jewels, they are for the 
 most part jewels detached from their origi- 
 nal setting, and this setting we cannot re- 
 construct as a whole. I am persuaded that 
 Q^ is to us, and must remain, a collection 
 of disconnected fragments. 
 
Ill 
 
 THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO MARK 
 
 The question most in debate at present 
 in the criticism of the Gospel history is 
 whether the Gospel according to Mark 
 gives us a generally faithful representation 
 of the ministry of Jesus. On grounds 
 mainly of literary criticism it is acknow- 
 ledged that our Mark was used as a basis by 
 the other synoptists. The Gospel of Mark 
 is therefore more primitive as a whole 
 than the Gospels of Matthew and Luke as 
 wholes. But is Mark to be regarded as ab- 
 solutely primitive? And even if we regard 
 the analysis of Mark into its component 
 factors as for us an insoluble problem, even 
 if we regard all theories of an Ur-Marcus 
 as baseless guesses, still there remains the 
 inevitable question of the value of our Gos- 
 
 47 
 
SOURCES FOR THE LIFE OF JESUS 
 
 pel of Mark as a historical source. At best 
 it is a mere sketch of the career of Jesus 
 Christ: but is it, we must ask, a trustworthy 
 sketch ? 
 
 The answer given by modern investiga- 
 tors to this most important question de- 
 pends in the last resort upon the view that 
 each one forms of the real work undertaken 
 and accomplished by Jesus of Nazareth. 
 Undoubtedly there are many, coming from 
 very different philosophical and theological 
 camps, to whom the Gospel according to 
 Mark appears to be an inadequate interpre- 
 tation of our Lord. It does not satisfy the 
 modern philosophical liberal, who would 
 like to regard the mission of Jesus as 
 " purely religio-ethical and humanitarian." 1 
 The philosophical liberal finds fewer moral 
 maxims in Mark than in Matthew and 
 Luke, while at the same time he is shocked 
 by the description of a number of miracles, 
 
 1 B. W. Bacon, Beginnings of Gospel Story, p. xxxviii. 
 
 4 8 
 
THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO MARK 
 
 — mostly, it is true, of healing, — the details 
 of which he feels himself obliged to explain 
 away. But the picture drawn in Mark is 
 hardly more satisfactory from the orthodox 
 conservative point of view. In Wellhau- 
 sen's phrase, " we hear of Disciples and 
 we wonder how He comes to have them." ■ 
 Till our eyes become accustomed to the 
 atmosphere it is difficult to recognize the 
 conventional Saviour, with the gentle unin- 
 dividualizcd face, in the stormy and mys- 
 terious Personage portrayed by the sec- 
 ond Gospel. " And they were in the way, 
 going up to Jerusalem, and Jesus was going 
 before them, and they were amazed, and 
 some as they followed were afraid " a — as 
 we read the story in Mark we follow Jesus 
 on his way, and we hardly know why or 
 whither. At least, we hardly know what 
 is being told us, if we listen with mod- 
 ern presuppositions, instead of coming with 
 
 1 Einleitung, p. 51. a Mark x. 32. 
 
 49 
 
SOURCES FOR THE LIFE OF JESUS 
 
 our minds full of the Jewish expectations of 
 the Kingdom of God, as they took shape 
 during the turbulent two centuries that 
 preceded the crucifixion of Jesus. 
 
 The ultimate difficulty felt by so many 
 modern critics about the Gospel of Mark 
 is not the minor discrepancies in the narra- 
 tive, though they are present, or the tales 
 of miracle, for it is always possible to allow 
 for unscientific description or exaggeration. 
 The difficulty lies in its presentation of the 
 actual contents of the " Gospel " itself and 
 of the career of Jesus. According to these 
 critics, Mark has not only put in features 
 of the Ministry that he might have left out, 
 he has left out things, and those the most 
 important, that he ought to have put in. 
 Where, they say, is the Teaching of Jesus ? 
 Mark gives us neither the Sermon on the 
 Mount nor the Parable of the Prodigal Son. 
 One who considers that Mark used (^con- 
 fesses that the use made of it is " by no 
 So 
 
THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO MARK 
 
 means characterized by sympathetic and 
 appreciative insight." l And if, as tradition 
 seems to assert, the ultimate source of the 
 Evangelist's information be St. Peter him- 
 self, is it possible to suppose that the real 
 characteristics of our Lord's career could 
 have been thrown so completely out of 
 focus ? 
 
 It may readily be granted that most of 
 these objections are weighty, if only we can 
 be sure of the foundation upon which they 
 rest. But it is the foundation itself that is 
 insecure. The objections all assume that 
 Jesus was really and primarily an ethical 
 teacher, or a social reformer, or both. 
 Now, if we regard Jesus from this point of 
 view, it is true that many features in the 
 Gospel of Mark can hardly be treated as 
 historically accurate. The very ground plan 
 
 1 Bacon, Beginnings, p. xx. That such a judgment has 
 to be passed upon Mark's use of Q^is an argument for dis- 
 believing that Mark knew Q^at all. 
 
 51 
 
SOURCES FOR THE LIFE OF JESUS 
 
 of the work becomes incredible. It becomes 
 impossible to comprehend or to justify the 
 journey of Jesus to Jerusalem, or to obtain 
 an intelligible picture of his doings and 
 sayings when he arrived there. Both from 
 the liberals and from the conservatives we 
 hear that the Paschal week is too short a 
 period for " the Jerusalem ministry." If the 
 object of Jesus in going to Jerusalem was 
 to teach there, then the time allowed by 
 Mark is insufficient. If his object were " a 
 program of peaceful reform in the interest 
 of the masses," f we can only say that it 
 was eminently unsuccessful. And if his 
 object in going to Jerusalem was, as Mark 
 seems to tell us, simply to be killed, is not 
 that irrational, the act of a fanatic ? Was 
 it worthy of the founder of the religion of 
 the civilized world ? 
 
 It is perhaps not out of place to remind 
 ourselves that this is not the first time the 
 
 1 Bacon, Beginnings, p. 158. 
 
 52 
 
THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO MARK 
 
 Way of the Cross has been accounted fool- 
 ishness both by philosophers and by tradi- 
 tionalists ; for the doctrine set forth by 
 Mark is the Doctrine of the Cross. To such 
 an extent is this the case that the Evangel- 
 ist is commonly supposed in critical theories 
 to have derived his conception of Christ's 
 work from St. Paul. To quote Professor 
 Bacon once more : " The Paulinism of 
 Mark is supremely manifest in this evan- 
 gelist's whole conception of what consti- 
 tutes the apostolic message " ; it is " the 
 continual reiteration of the doctrine, ' He 
 that would save his life shall lose it.' " ■ Of 
 course this is Paulinism ; but what if Paul- 
 inism in this respect was really "the mind 
 of Christ" ? 
 
 Once more it may be well to point out 
 the very peculiar position occupied by the 
 Gospel of Mark in the history of early 
 Christian literature, for it is this peculiar 
 
 1 Beginnings, pp. xxvii, xxviii. 
 
 53 
 
SOURCES FOR THE LIFE OF JESUS 
 
 position that compels us to weigh with the 
 utmost care and deference the story that 
 it offers to us. On the one hand there is 
 nothing in Christian literature to indicate 
 that the Gospel of Mark was ever popular 
 or official, or that it was written to suit the 
 taste of any community that has left any 
 trace in history. Irenaeus says somewhere 
 that Mark was used by the Docetic heretics; 
 but he brings forward no evidence in sup- 
 port of his statement, which seems a mere 
 theory made to correspond with the use 
 of Luke by the Marcionites and of Matthew 
 by the Ebionites. If existing evidence be 
 any reflex of actual use, the Gospel of Mark 
 was, and has been till the present day, un- 
 popular and neglected. It is, in fact, more 
 or less of a puzzle how it came to be in- 
 cluded in the Church's Canon. It is written 
 in an uncultivated style, and it occupies 
 itself with those parts and aspects of the 
 Gospel story concerning which Greek- 
 
 54 
 
THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO MARK 
 
 speaking Christians seem to have taken 
 very little interest, until the rise of the cult 
 of the Holy Places in Palestine toward 
 the very end of the second century a. d. 
 I find it difficult to believe that a book of 
 this kind is the work of an eclectic, who 
 combined Pauline doctrine with Petrine 
 traditions and wove them together into a 
 strange and rough, yet vigorous tale. More- 
 over — and this is the discovery of modern 
 literary criticism — this unpopular Gospel 
 was indeed used by one class of persons, 
 viz. those who after Mark attempted to tell 
 the story of Jesus Christ. St. Luke informs 
 us in his preface that " many," before he 
 himself wrote, had taken in hand to draw up 
 some account of Christian origins; but how- 
 ever many there may have been, he uses 
 the Gospel of Mark for one of the main 
 sources of his own work. The Gospel ac- 
 cording to Matthew to a still greater degree 
 is based upon Mark. It seems almost as if 
 
 55 
 
SOURCES FOR THE LIFE OF JESUS 
 
 these writers had been compelled to use a 
 writing which no one else cared to quote. 
 
 Surely the natural inference to be drawn 
 is that the point of view from which Mark 
 had written was already antiquated when 
 the later synoptic Evangelists made their 
 compilations. The Gospel of Mark may 
 perhaps be the work of a less cultivated 
 mind than that of the other Gospel writers; 
 at any rate it comes before us as a docu- 
 ment belonging to an earlier stage in the 
 development of Christian ideas than the 
 other Gospels. If then we find it animated 
 by ideas which do occur in Paul, though 
 during the second century they find hardly 
 any echo in orthodox Christian literature, 
 some part of the resemblance may be due 
 to its primitive age and character. In any 
 case, it is our plain duty to weigh well 
 the story told in this venerable document, 
 before we reject it in favour of modern 
 reconstructions of the course of events. 
 
 56 
 
THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO MARK 
 
 Naturally we need not expect any im- 
 possible standard of accuracy or insight. 
 The question at issue is not of the presen- 
 tation of details, but of the general view. 
 It is not claimed that the second Evangel- 
 ist was by nature or by training a specially 
 gifted historian, but he was too much in 
 touch with the events to give a wholly 
 distorted account of them. The writer of 
 the Fourth Gospel may perhaps have a 
 claim to be heard as an interpreter of Jesus 
 Christ: the office of Mark is rather to be 
 a witness of what men saw and heard. 
 
 The Kingdom of God and the " Son 
 of Man r 
 
 What, then, is the general conception of 
 the mission of Jesus set before us in the 
 Gospel of Mark ? We may begin with two 
 or three quotations from Professor Bacon, 
 who is all the better witness as he is a con- 
 vinced opponent of apocalyptic eschatology. 
 57 
 
SOURCES FOR THE LIFE OF JESUS 
 
 He speaks of "the sane and well-poised 
 mind of the plain mechanic of Nazareth," 
 and regards the apocalyptic elements in the 
 Gospels as later additions made by " the 
 enthusiastic Church." 1 Yet even Profes- 
 sor Bacon says, and says most justly : 
 " For some reason Jesus did go up to Jeru- 
 salem, and throw down the gauntlet in the 
 face of the priestly hierocracy in the tem- 
 ple itself. For some reason he did follow 
 a role that led to his execution by Pilate 
 as a -political agitator. For some reason 
 his followers, very shortly after, did ascribe 
 to him not mere reappearance from the 
 tomb, but exaltation to the place of the 
 Messiah ' at the right hand of God' — at- 
 tributes so exalted that it is difficult to be- 
 lieve they had no other foundation than 
 mere reverence for an admired Teacher." 2 
 And again (on Mark ix. i): "We cannot 
 do honest justice to the unbroken consensus 
 
 1 Bacon, Beginnings, p. 108. 2 Beginnings, p. 106. 
 
 58 
 
THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO MARK 
 
 of primitive testimony without acknowledg- 
 ing that Jesus pointed his disciples to the 
 expected intervention of God, which should 
 be the vindication of his gospel, before the 
 generation which heard and rejected it 
 should have passed away." ' This is well 
 and justly said; but does it not show that 
 formulas like " the sane and well-poised 
 mind of the plain mechanic of Nazareth" 
 arc inadequate, if not altogether inappro- 
 priate, as a characterization of Jesus? If 
 we rationalize overmuch the ideas and the 
 hopes of Jesus and his friends, how are 
 we to account for their invincible enthusi- 
 asm? 
 
 "The vindication of his gospel" — but 
 what was the Gospel of Jesus? According 
 to Mark it consisted in the announcement 
 that the Kingdom of God was at hand. 2 
 Everything else was inference and deduc- 
 tion from this fundamental idea. 
 
 1 Beginnings^ p. 120. * Mark i. 15. 
 
 59 
 
SOURCES FOR THE LIFE OF JESUS 
 
 The Kingdom of God is indeed familiar 
 to us as a religious phrase, but the concep- 
 tion itself is strange, because at this period 
 of the world's history no one but the social- 
 ists are expecting a great change, and that 
 a change for the better, in the conditions 
 of human life. It was otherwise with the 
 Jewish nation in the first century of our 
 era. For two hundred years, ever since the 
 martyrs in the days before the Maccabees, 
 the martyrs who had preferred to die rather 
 than give up the customs of their inherited 
 religion, the struggle between Judaism and 
 civilization had gone on. The military suc- 
 cesses of Judas Maccabaeus and his family 
 secured to all the Jews the undisturbed exer- 
 cise of their religion, and the outward his- 
 tory of Palestine degenerated into an en- 
 tirely secular and somewhat sordid game of 
 politics, with the irresistible might of Rome 
 looming ever more insistently in the back- 
 ground. But this was only one side of the 
 60 
 
THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO MARK 
 
 great duel. It was a war of ideas, a war 
 between civilization and religion, in the 
 modern sense of these terms. On the side 
 of the Gentiles was philosophy, science, 
 art, good government, all the material 
 goods of this life; on the side of the Jew 
 was the ineradicable conviction that the 
 Lord and Maker of all things visible and 
 invisible had chosen Israel and taught it 
 the way of Life and Death, and that in 
 comparison with this all other privileges 
 and advantages were as nothing. Judaism 
 was a conscious rival to civilization, as 
 civilization was then understood. That the 
 1 Gentiles ' were aware of this we can see 
 from the references to the Jews in con- 
 temporary classical literature, where they 
 are represented as a strange unnatural race, 
 distinct from other human beings. 
 
 Such a condition of things does not en- 
 dure for long. An isolated race cannot per- 
 manently maintain its ideals in the face of 
 61 
 
SOURCES FOR THE LIFE OF JESUS 
 
 the civilized world. In the political sphere 
 the end came in A. d. 70, when, the Jews 
 having at last broken out into open re- 
 bellion against the Gentile yoke, the Jew- 
 ish State was destroyed and the Temple 
 worship abolished. The Judaism that sur- 
 vived, and survives to this day, is really 
 rather a posthumous child of the older Ju- 
 daism than the older Judaism itself. It is 
 rather to be regarded as the younger sis- 
 ter of Christianity than its mother. The 
 older Judaism perished, but its children 
 survived. 
 
 During the long struggle with the world 
 outside, the hopes of the Jews expressed 
 themselves in forms very different from 
 what actually came to pass. These hopes 
 find expression in the long series of apoca- 
 lyptic books that appeared at intervals 
 throughout the whole period, from the 
 Book of Daniel in 168 b. c, just before the 
 Maccabaean rising, to the Apocalypse of 
 62 
 
THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO MARK 
 
 Baruch, written after the Destruction of 
 Jerusalem by Titus; and it is from these 
 books we can trace the rise and develop- 
 ment of that belief in the coming Kingdom 
 of God which is assumed in the New Testa- 
 ment. The books are now, with the excep- 
 tion of the Book of Daniel, rejected both 
 by the Rabbinical Jews and by nearly all 
 Christian bodies; for when the New Age 
 came, the imperfect forecasts of it lost their 
 interest. Rabbinical Judaism rejected the 
 hopes which belonged to a time when the 
 Jews were still a nation, and the Christian 
 Church gradually came to do the same, al- 
 though the Church was in a special sense 
 the heir of the Apocalyptists. 
 
 The main idea of the Kingdom of God 
 is found already in the Book of Daniel. The 
 fundamental notion is that the Most High is 
 indeed Autocrat, He alone has sovereignty, 
 but He hands it over for a time and for 
 His own inscrutable purposes to whomso- 
 
 63 
 
SOURCES FOR THE LIFE OF JESUS 
 
 ever He will. 1 At any given moment there 
 is a world-power, the Babylonian, the 
 " Median," the Persian, the Seleucid Greek. 
 But this will not be for ever. In the end 
 the Most High Himself will take the do- 
 minion into His own hands. The Kingdom 
 of God Himself will be inaugurated, and 
 He will reign for ever, protecting His faith- 
 ful people and rewarding them for all the 
 trials they have undergone at the hands of 
 the heathen. 
 
 This is the apocalyptic hope. It is the 
 correlative of the conflict between Jewish 
 religion and the Graeco-Roman civilization. 
 To do it justice, we must remember that 
 this conflict to the Jews was one between 
 religious faith and material civilization: if 
 the Kingdom of God were to come at all, 
 it would come not by material weapons 
 but by the operation of God. Material force 
 was on the other side. And so the Christian 
 
 1 Daniel iv. 17. 
 
 64 
 
THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO MARK 
 
 is taught to pray u Thy Kingdom come," 
 because it is for God, not for man, to bring 
 it in. When the time is ripe, it will come. 
 
 The Christ or Messiah, that is, the 
 Anointed of God, is one of the features of 
 the coming Kingdom. His function is to 
 judge the heathen and to rule as God's 
 Vicegerent over the Saints, when the Great 
 Day arrives. The Christ does not bring in 
 the Kingdom, — that is the work of God 
 Himself; the Christ only enters on his of- 
 fice when all is ready. He is, in fact, one 
 of the personages of the New Age, not the 
 person through whom the New Age is 
 brought in. If he be conceived of as exist- 
 ing beforehand, then he is not yet properly 
 the Christ. It is most important to keep 
 this in mind when we read the Gospels, as 
 otherwise the command of Jesus that Peter 
 should be silent about his Messiahship be- 
 comes incomprehensible. Before the time 
 Jesus may be Messiah in God's sight, to 
 
 65 
 
SOURCES FOR THE LIFE OF JESUS 
 
 whom to think is to do. 1 He may be Mes- 
 siah to the demons, but to men He is not 
 yet Messiah. It was for God to make Him 
 manifest, not for men. 
 
 Was there then any Scripture that had 
 spoken of the Messiah before he became 
 Messiah? And if so, by what title had he 
 been spoken of? The answer is, that he 
 was the Man from Heaven spoken of by 
 Enoch. 
 
 Here we come to the closely allied ques- 
 tions of the influence of the Book of Enoch 
 upon primitive Christianity, and of the 
 meaning of the title "Son of Man." The 
 Son of Man — as curious a phrase in Greek 
 as in English — is a literal translation of the 
 Aramaic for "the human being," "the Man." 
 It is evident that no one could take " the 
 Man" as a title for himself or his office 
 without something further being under- 
 stood. If any one calls himself " the Man," 
 
 1 Enoch xiv. 22. 
 
 66 
 
THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO MARK 
 
 it must mean " the Man — you know who." 
 When therefore Jesus speaks of himself as 
 "the Son of Man," a phrase in Aramaic 
 identical with "the Man," he must mean 
 "the Man — you know whom I speak of." 
 And when we notice that this Man is one 
 who " comes with the clouds of heaven," 
 with whom is associated functions of judg- 
 ment at the great Assize, it is clear that the 
 Man who is meant is the celestial Man of 
 Daniel vii. 13, a symbolical figure that 
 stands for the Kingdom of the Saints, in 
 contrast to the bestial figures that come up 
 from the sea, which symbolize the heathen 
 empires. 
 
 In Daniel the Man is not individualized. 
 He stands for the nation, not for the Mes- 
 siah. But in the Similitudes of Enoch, the 
 figure of Daniel, the Son of Man who was 
 with the Ancient of Days, 1 is personified 
 and individualized. From of old this Son 
 
 1 Enoch xlvi. 2. 
 
 67 
 
SOURCES FOR THE LIFE OF JESUS 
 
 of Man, this celestial human being, has been 
 hidden with the Most High, 1 but one day 
 he will be revealed. The kings and the 
 mighty, i.e., the heathen rulers of the world, 
 will see and be terrified and beg for mercy 
 in vain. The angels will drag them away 
 to punishment, but the righteous will be 
 saved and protected, and with that Son of 
 Man they will rejoice for ever and ever. 2 
 
 The Book of Enoch is a strange barba- 
 rous work, without poetry, without charm. 
 It has long been rejected from the Bible by 
 every branch of the Church save the bar- 
 barian Christians of Abyssinia. Are we, it 
 may be asked, really to seek the origin of 
 the title of our Lord, round which so many 
 pathetic associations have grown, in this 
 fierce and narrow Jewish apocalypse? And 
 if this was the hope of the Gospel, was it 
 justified? In what sense can it be said that 
 the Kingdom of God was at hand? 
 
 1 Enoch xlviii. 3-7. a Enoch lxii. II» 14. 
 
 68 
 
THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO MARK 
 
 These are fundamental questions for our 
 estimate of Christianity, but they are equally 
 fundamental for the criticism and exegesis 
 of the Gospels. To those who have learned 
 to see the vital principle of the Christian 
 movement in this expectation of the super- 
 natural Kingdom of God, sentence after 
 sentence of the Gospels, saying after saying, 
 parable after parable, falls into its place. 
 And in no document is this clearer than in 
 the Gospel of Mark. The answer we give 
 to the second question will depend almost 
 entirely upon our personal attitude to the 
 Church, to the Christian movement as a 
 whole. Christianity is Judaism recreated in 
 a form that could thrive in, and finally ab- 
 sorb, the civilization of Europe: if Chris- 
 tianity be of God, then the Kingdom of God 
 did come to men. It is the new dispensa- 
 tion of the Christian Church; "the new 
 race of Christians " x are the citizens of the 
 
 1 The phrase is used, e. g., by Bardesanes. 
 
 6 9 
 
SOURCES FOR THE LIFE OF JESUS 
 
 Kingdom of God. And Jesus Christ is, as 
 Tacitus had rightly heard, " the originator 
 of that name"; not that he was the origi- 
 nator of the idea of the Kingdom of God, 
 or that he was the teacher of the Chris- 
 tians, but because he was and remained the 
 source of their inspiration. His words in 
 part, but still more his life and death, kin- 
 dled the fire of the Christian movement. 
 
 As for the Book of Enoch, the evidence 
 does point very strongly to the great in- 
 fluence it exercised on primitive Christian- 
 ity. The date of Enoch is a matter of dis- 
 pute, and the accepted theory is that it is 
 made up of several parts, of different dates. 
 But it is certainly Palestinian, and it existed 
 in its present form at the beginning of the 
 Christian era. It is quoted by name in 
 the Epistle of Jude, a letter that used to be 
 dated much later than necessary, as long 
 as apocalyptic ideas were out of fashion. 
 It is certainly referred to in the First Epistle 
 70 
 
THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO MARK 
 
 of Peter, whatever the date of that work 
 may be; and it was long held in honour 
 among the Christians, who took it for a 
 genuine prophecy of Enoch, " the seventh 
 from Adam." But it is especially in the 
 Gospels that we see its influence, in Q^ as 
 much as in Mark. The theory of demons 
 and demoniacal possession, implied in Luke 
 xi. 24-26 (Matthew xii. 43-45), a passage 
 certainly drawn from Q^, is exactly that set 
 forth at length in Enoch; and the judg- 
 ment scene in Matthew xxv. 31 AT ("the 
 Sheep and the Goats ") loses half its mean- 
 ing, if the corresponding scene in Enoch 
 lxii, where "the Son of Man" is shewn 
 " sitting on the throne of his glory," be not 
 presupposed. Enoch is crude and fierce, 
 the corresponding words of the Gospel are 
 instinct with spiritual power. Yes; but 
 " that is not first which is spiritual, but that 
 which is natural, afterwards that which is 
 spiritual." 
 
 7i 
 
SOURCES FOR THE LIFE OF JESUS 
 
 The Gospel of Mark tells us how Jesus 
 of Nazareth came announcing the impend- 
 ing advent of the Kingdom of God and bid- 
 ding those who heard to repent and prepare 
 themselves. The population of Galilee are 
 generally friendly, but then as always the 
 number of those who are whole-hearted is 
 few: the people as a whole do not repent. 1 
 And, to adopt the imagery of Jesus' own 
 parable of the Ear of Corn, 2 if the fruit be 
 not ripe, how can it be expected that the 
 Lord of the Harvest will put the sickle to 
 the corn ? How can it be expected that God 
 will bring in the New Age, if the people be 
 not ready? Jesus is conscious that he is 
 the destined Messiah, but the time for his 
 manifestation is not yet. To acclaim him 
 as Messiah before the Kingdom of God 
 comes is premature. 3 Meanwhile, Jesus has 
 
 1 Mark viii. 12, 38; ix, 19. 
 
 2 Mark iv. 26-29. 
 
 8 Mark viii. 29, 30. 
 
 72 
 
THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO MARK 
 
 another work before him. He will go up 
 to Jerusalem. 
 
 It is evident from all the Gospel accounts 
 that the adherents of the Galilean Prophet 
 expected something great from the journey 
 to Jerusalem. But Jesus knows that he is 
 setting out on a forlorn hope, and will have 
 no one to follow after him who is not pre- 
 pared to give up everything "for the Gos- 
 pel." 1 What his own thoughts about this 
 momentous expedition were may best be 
 gathered from the Parable of the Wicked 
 Husbandmen. 2 Perhaps, after all, the na- 
 tion and its rulers would reverence the Son 
 of the Lord of the Vineyard, and would 
 give at his summons the fruit of devotion 
 and repentance. But it is clear that that 
 was not the result that Jesus anticipated. 
 
 1 Mark viii. 34-36; x. 21 ff. 
 
 a Mark xii. 1-11. See Burkitt, The Parable of the Wicked 
 Husbandmen, in the Proceedings of the Third Congress of 
 Religions, Oxford, 1908, vol. ii, 321-328. 
 
 73 
 
SOURCES FOR THE LIFE OF JESUS 
 
 Unless our Gospels embody a wholly dis- 
 torted tradition, Jesus expected to die a 
 violent death at the hands of the rulers 
 of Jerusalem. His whole course of action 
 was that of one who desires to precipitate 
 a crisis which he believes to be inevitable. 
 He did not announce himself as Messiah, 
 yet he acted as if he were armed with 
 complete authority. He refused to allow 
 his actions to be supported by force; God 
 would justify him in due time. There 
 was an hour in Gethsemane when he 
 shrank from the ordeal; there was a mo- 
 ment on the cross when he despaired. 
 But with these exceptions he carried 
 through the part of the Son of the Lord 
 of the Vineyard without flinching to the 
 end. 
 
 The end of the Gospel of Mark is muti- 
 lated; the narrative breaks off suddenly at 
 xvi. 8, in the midst of the alarm and amaze- 
 ment of the women at the rock-cut tomb, 
 
 74 
 
THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO MARK 
 
 who cannot find the body of Jesus. Had the 
 true conclusion been preserved, no doubt 
 we should have read of that appearance of 
 the risen Lord to Peter, 1 which seems to 
 have been psychologically the decisive 
 rallying-point of the scattered and disheart- 
 ened disciples. As we know, the new 
 movement did not come to an end with 
 the crucifixion. The Kingdom of God was 
 soon to be made manifest (so the little 
 band that rallied round Peter continued to 
 believe), for their Master was not dead but 
 had been raised to heaven, to sit at God's 
 right hand, till the Kingdom came at last, 
 when Jesus of Nazareth who had been cru- 
 cified would appear as Christ, as the Son 
 of Man spoken of by Daniel, to judge the 
 quick and the dead. 
 
 Perhaps it was a dream, but at least it 
 was a dream that captured the ancient 
 world, and, as Professor Bacon says, in a 
 
 x i Cor. xv. 5 : cf. Mark xvi. 7. 
 
 75 
 
SOURCES FOR THE LIFE OF JESUS 
 
 phrase already quoted, " mere reverence 
 for an admired Teacher" is not sufficient 
 to account for the hopes and the claims of 
 the Christians. And therefore the Gospel 
 of Mark, which makes so much of transcen- 
 dental hopes and claims, which bases so 
 much on the personal ascendency of Jesus, 
 is more likely to reflect the historical truth 
 than any view which regards the mission 
 of Jesus as " purely religio-ethical and hu- 
 manitarian." ■ 
 
 Considerations of the kind put forward 
 in this chapter appeal with different force 
 to different minds, and it must be acknow- 
 ledged that many students of early Chris- 
 tianity still hesitate to accept the tale of 
 the public career of Jesus as told in the 
 Gospel of Mark, though it be the oldest 
 source we possess. There are those who 
 try to read between the lines, who think 
 
 1 Bacon, Beginnings, p. xxxviii. 
 
 76 
 
THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO MARK 
 
 that behind the cross-bars of Jewish escha- 
 tology and Pauline theologizing they can 
 discern a gracious, if shadowy figure, giv- 
 ing utterance to "ethical ideas that are 
 the essential element in the spiritual ex- 
 perience of the modern world." l Professor 
 Peabody, from whom I quote, goes on to 
 say : " There is nothing apocalyptic in the 
 parable of the Good Samaritan, or in the 
 appropriation by Jesus of the two great 
 commandments, or in the prayer for to-day's 
 bread and the forgiveness of trespasses, or 
 in the praise of peace-making and purity 
 of heart. Yet in these, and not in the mys- 
 terious prophecies of an approaching deso- 
 lation, the conscience of the world has 
 found its Counsellor and Guide." 3 Those 
 who put the centre of gravity of our Lord's 
 work in the enunciation of sayings such as 
 
 1 Professor W. Herrmann, quoted by F. G. Peabody, 
 Transactions of the Oxford Congress of Religions, ii, 308. 
 * Ibid., p. 309. 
 
 77 
 
SOURCES FOR THE LIFE OF JESUS 
 
 these are undoubtedly dissatisfied with the 
 proportions of the portrait sketched in the 
 Gospel of Mark. 
 
 A detailed reply might be made to argu- 
 ments like Professor Peabody's. Indeed, 
 the apocalyptic background behind much 
 of our Lord's ethical teaching, notably that 
 about " daily bread," can, I think, actually 
 be recognized. But however this may be, 
 for the student of history the first necessity 
 is not to lay emphasis upon those parts of 
 the remembered words of Jesus which 
 happen to strike an immediate chord in our 
 ethical consciousness. The first necessity 
 is to place him in due relation to the 
 strange and far-off time in which he lived 
 among men. The first thing we have to 
 account for is the enthusiasm and the de- 
 votion of those who claimed to be his 
 followers and apostles. " Let the children 
 first be filled"; we must first of all think 
 of our Lord in connexion with the aspira- 
 
 7 8 
 
THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO MARK 
 
 tions of his own time and his own coun- 
 try, and be ourselves content with the 
 crumbs that have fallen down into our 
 very different world. After all, the table 
 was spread for the lost sheep of the House 
 of Israel, not for us. 
 
 In the end, a frank recognition that the 
 Gospel as a whole looks forward to near 
 and overwhelming catastrophe may be 
 found not inconsistent with due reverence 
 for the always wonderful sayings that light 
 up the Gospel story. However we may 
 look at it, the rise of Christianity is a won- 
 derful, a most wonderful tale. It must al- 
 ways remain a portent to be marvelled at, 
 a thing that cannot wholly be explained. 
 And it is therefore not surprising that 
 Jesus himself cannot wholly be explained. 
 It is not likely that he can really be 
 comprehended under a modern formula, 
 whether ecclesiastical or unecclesiastical. 
 And therefore it is not likely that we are 
 79 
 
SOURCES FOR THE LIFE OF JESUS 
 
 getting any nearer to historical truth, when 
 we desert the earliest ascertainable histori- 
 cal tradition about him, the tradition that 
 is preserved for us in the Gospel according 
 to Mark. 
 
IV 
 
 POSSIBLE " SOURCES " OF THE GOSPEL OF 
 MARK 
 
 Tradition says that the Gospel of Mark 
 embodies St. Mark's reminiscences of what 
 he had heard St Peter say. On the whole, 
 this is doubted by modern critics; is it pos- 
 sible to obtain any plausible view on the 
 subject? The preceding section was neces- 
 sary, in order to meet the general objection 
 that Mark gives a distorted view of the 
 Ministry; but how does the case stand with 
 regard to details? Christian tradition, we 
 may remark, does not represent the num- 
 ber of original witnesses that were avail- 
 able as large. When St. Luke is describing 
 the election of a thirteenth apostle to take 
 the place of Judas Iscariot, he makes it 
 plain that only two of the rallied band of 
 81 
 
SOURCES FOR THE LIFE OF JESUS 
 
 Disciples had" companied " with Peter and 
 the rest from the beginning of the Ministry. 
 It may further be noted that the question 
 of St. Mark's sources has been greatly 
 modified by the progress made with the 
 Synoptic problem. So long as our three 
 Gospels according to Matthew, Mark, and 
 Luke were believed to be so many speci- 
 mens of a common Evangelical tradition, 
 it seemed impossible to particularize the 
 sources of individual features of the narra- 
 tive. Tradition connected St. Peter with 
 our Second Gospel, but there is little in it 
 about St. Peter that is not shared by the 
 others; so that it was difficult to understand 
 what special part St. Peter could have had 
 in it. But now conditions are changed. The 
 Gospel of Mark is not simply more faithful 
 than the others to the Synoptic norm: it 
 was itself the originator of the Synoptic 
 norm, the direct source of the " Synoptic " 
 element in the others. It has become im- 
 82 
 
POSSIBLE SOURCES OF MARK 
 
 probable that there was any common Evan- 
 gelical tradition at all about the course of 
 our Lord's Ministry. We no longer have 
 to ask whether Mark has a better claim 
 than Matthew or Luke to be regarded as 
 the Gospel according to Peter; we have 
 now to ask whether Mark has a better 
 claim to this title than the document or 
 documents grouped under the sign Q^, or 
 than the Gospel of John, or than the types 
 now represented by various fragments from 
 Oxyrhynchus. If, as seems likely, we have 
 in the Gospel of Mark the tale of the Min- 
 istry of our Lord told for the first time as 
 a connected whole from the Voice at the 
 baptism till after his resurrection, what 
 we have to ask is how far this narrative, 
 this general scheme of the Ministry, is based 
 upon what the Evangelist had gathered 
 from Simon Peter. It may be as well to re- 
 mind ourselves here that we do not know 
 how far the narrative extended over the 
 
 83 
 
SOURCES FOR THE LIFE OF JESUS 
 
 ground covered by St. Luke's Acts of the 
 Apostles. The first half of that work ends 
 with the name of John who was surnamed 
 Mark, and it is plausible to suppose that it 
 may have been in the work of Mark that 
 our Third Evangelist came across the life- 
 like episode of Rhoda. 1 
 
 Two remarks of Wellhausen about the 
 Gospel of Mark may here be recorded. 
 "The tradition which Mark embodies is 
 comparatively full about Jerusalem, mea- 
 gre about Galilee";* i.e. the one Week 
 in Jerusalem occupies more than a third 
 of the whole narrative. And again: "The 
 single scenes are often told in a life-like 
 style without unessential additions and re- 
 flections, but they stand for the most part 
 as a mere collection of disconnected an- 
 ecdotes." 3 These facts, as Wellhausen 
 shows, form a serious objection to regard- 
 
 1 Acts xii. 13 £f. 2 Wellhausen, Einleitung, p. 52. 
 
 3 Einleitung, p. 51. 
 
 84 
 
POSSIBLE SOURCES OF MARK 
 
 ing Simon Peter, or any other Galilean, as 
 the planner of the work; but I venture to 
 think they are consistent with the author- 
 ship of "John who was surnamed Mark." 
 
 There is one incident in the Gospel of 
 Mark which is absolutely pointless as it 
 stands, namely, the incident of the youth 
 who tried to follow Jesus after his arrest in 
 the Garden; it is difficult to avoid the infer- 
 ence that the youth was the Evangelist him- 
 self, and that he is giving his personal ex- 
 perience. Can we doubt that it was he who 
 saw and heard in Gethsemane, when Peter 
 and James and John were sleeping? It may 
 even be conjectured that the Last Supper 
 itself was held in the house of Mary the 
 mother of John Mark, 1 and that the dating 
 by days, almost after the manner of a diary, 
 which characterizes the story from Palm 
 Sunday onwards, corresponds to actual 
 reminiscences of the author, who had lived 
 
 1 Cf. Acts xii. 12. 
 
 85 
 
SOURCES FOR THE LIFE OF JESUS 
 
 through the events of that memorable week 
 when a boy, and had himself been a witness 
 of some of them. This assumes that the 
 final visit to Jerusalem did indeed only last 
 a week, but I have endeavoured to show 
 that the eschatological point of view, from 
 which alone this short period is sufficient, 
 is the true historical view. 
 
 For the rest of the Ministry the Evan- 
 gelist must have been dependent on the 
 information of others, and his narrative 
 seems to me to be very much the kind of 
 narrative that one in the position of John 
 Mark might have been expected to com- 
 pose. The earliest tradition — whatever it 
 may be worth — does not represent Mark 
 as writing in the lifetime of Peter. The 
 first generation of Christians, as we have 
 already seen, took little thought for pre- 
 serving " the beginning of the Gospel of 
 Jesus Christ," and there is nothing to show 
 that the Evangelist had taken in hand to 
 86 
 
POSSIBLE SOURCES OF MARK 
 
 draw up an account of the Ministry until 
 the Apostles, and with them the first-hand 
 memory of eye-witnesses of our Lord's 
 public career, had gone to their long home. 
 The memory that still lived was that of the 
 tales which the eye-witness used to tell: 
 that is, striking scenes were remembered, 
 memorable sayings, memorable anecdotes, 
 rather than the sequence and proportion of 
 the whole as it might have appeared to an 
 outsider. The impression I get on reading 
 the Gospel according to Mark is that many 
 of the tales may be traditional, told perhaps 
 again and again, and that some are already 
 on the point of becoming conventionalized 
 and epic, but that the sequence of them, 
 the general scheme of the Ministry as a 
 whole, is being constructed by the Evan- 
 gelist for the first time. " Mark wrote down 
 accurately, though not in order, all that he 
 remembered " ; is it not possible that the 
 confused statement of Papias really implies 
 
 87 
 
SOURCES FOR THE LIFE OF JESUS 
 
 no more than this, that no traditional se- 
 quence, no itinerary of our Lord's footsteps, 
 was ever preserved by those who accom- 
 panied him? 
 
 Be this as it may, the Gospel of Mark, 
 notwithstanding that it is the foundation for 
 the other Synoptic Gospels, gives us only 
 a disjointed narrative. Up to viii. 27 it is 
 not much more than a collection of anec- 
 dotes. At viii. 27 begins the journey to 
 Jerusalem from the north: from that point 
 we need not doubt that Mark presents a 
 chronological series of events, though even 
 here there are gaps about which little is 
 said. But all that goes before might more 
 appropriately be called "scenes from the 
 Ministry of Jesus " than an account of the 
 Ministry. At the same time the scenes, 
 speaking generally, appear to be arranged 
 in their natural order: I see no reason for 
 doubting that the revival in Galilee, 1 the 
 
 1 Mark i. 14 £. 
 
 88 
 
POSSIBLE SOURCES OF MARK 
 
 call of Simon with the first preaching at 
 Capernaum, 1 the breach with the Phari- 
 sees, 2 the sending out of the twelve, 3 " the 
 feeding of the five thousand" followed 
 by wanderings out of Galilee, 4 the voyage 
 to Bethsaida and on to Caesarea Philippi, 5 
 represent the real sequence of events. Cer- 
 tainly nothing that is to be found in any 
 other of the Gospels has any better claim 
 to give the true sequence. 
 
 Minor inaccuracies of the Evangelist. 
 
 There are certain minor inaccuracies in 
 the Gospel according to Mark that throw 
 some light on the general standard of trust- 
 worthiness that he may be supposed to at- 
 tain. In Mark ii. 26 he represents Jesus as 
 saying that David entered into the House 
 of God and ate the shewbread when Abia- 
 thar was high priest. 6 This is a mistake; 
 
 1 Mark i. 16-39. 2 ii.-iii., culminating at iii. 6. 
 
 vi. 7 ff . 4 vi. 30-vii. 31. 
 
 See Swete's note on the passage. 
 
 89 
 
SOURCES FOR THE LIFE OF JESUS 
 
 the event occurred in the lifetime of Abia- 
 thar, but the high priest was not Abiathar, 
 but his father Ahimelech (or, as some au- 
 thorities call him, Abimelech). The im- 
 portance of the matter is that it shows the 
 Evangelist to have had a certain measure 
 of ignorance or carelessness, whether he 
 were John Mark, or some one else. The 
 clause is omitted by Matthew and Luke, 
 presumably because of its inconsistency 
 with the Book of Samuel, though doubtless 
 it stood in the copy of Mark they severally 
 used. We learn therefore that Mark is ca- 
 pable of perpetrating a historical blunder 
 in a matter of "Jewish Antiquities," in re- 
 gard to which he might well have been 
 better informed. 
 
 It would not have been worth while to 
 call attention to this well-known piece of 
 inaccuracy, were it not that there are sev- 
 eral others which appear to me to be of 
 essentially the same nature, i. e. that they 
 90 
 
POSSIBLE SOURCES OF MARK 
 
 arise simply from carelessness and confu- 
 sion in the writer. 1 As however certain of 
 them seem to imply an inaccurate know- 
 ledge of Jewish customs rather than an in- 
 accurate knowledge of the Old Testament, 
 they have been held to indicate that the 
 Evangelist had not himself been born a Jew. 
 The first is the statement in Mark vii. 3 ff, 
 that " the Pharisees and all the Jews " reg- 
 ularly practised certain ablutions, some of 
 which (it is said) were practised only by 
 those of priestly descent. Accepting this 
 correction, we may surely regard the exag- 
 geration in vii. 3 ff as merely a piece of 
 carelessness, similar to that about Abiathar. 
 If Mark was the cousin of Barnabas the 
 Levite," he may have confused ritual that 
 he had seen practised in the home of his 
 
 1 It may be noted here that, according to Josephus, the 
 first husband of Herodias was not called Philip, as in Mark 
 vi. 17, but Herod. The mistake is silently corrected in 
 Luke iii. 19. 
 
 * Colossians iv. 10. 
 
 9i 
 
SOURCES FOR THE LIFE OF JESUS 
 
 boyhood with the customs observed by all 
 his fellow countrymen. 
 
 The other matter is more serious. The 
 Second Evangelist is the chief authority 
 for identifying the Last Supper with the 
 paschal meal, an identification which seems 
 to contradict all the other traditions about 
 the date of the crucifixion, including that 
 which served as the foundation for the 
 narrative of the Second Gospel itself, and 
 to be exceedingly improbable historically. 
 Moreover, the Evangelist introduces this 
 peculiar date by what is practically a con- 
 tradiction in terms. 1 It is held by many 
 scholars that no Jew could have perpetrated 
 this statement, for the fifst day of the un- 
 leavened bread was the 15th of Nisan; but 
 they used to sacrifice the passover on the 
 14th of Nisan. 2 
 
 1 Mark xiv. 12 : " On the first day of the unleavened 
 bread, when they used to sacrifice the passover." 
 
 2 According to our reckoning these two events fell on the 
 same civil day, for the Jewish day begins at sunset. The 
 
 92 
 
POSSIBLE SOURCES 
 
 The error is a very curious and import- 
 ant one, and I think that Professor Bacon 
 is right in connecting it with the mainte- 
 nance of the Roman practice of celebrating 
 Easter always on a Sunday, and not, as 
 the ancient churches of Asia Minor did, by 
 the days of the Jewish month. 1 Be that as 
 it may, the statement in Mark xiv. 12 after 
 all only argues the same inattention to the 
 Old Testament as that about Abiathar in 
 Mark ii. 26, for the .statements in Leviticus 
 xxiii. 5, 6, about the dates of Passover and 
 Unleavened Bread, are perfectly clear to 
 every one that reads them, be he Jew or 
 Gentile. Moreover, if you reckon by Ro- 
 man (and English) days, the slaying of the 
 paschal lambs and the eating of the paschal 
 
 first day of Unleavened Bread (Nisan 15) begins at sun- 
 set, the paschal lambs having been slain a few hours before 
 on what we should call the same day, but which the Jews 
 reckoned as the closing hours of Nisan 14. 
 
 1 Bacon, Beginnings of Gospel Story, pp. xxix ff., 195- 
 198. 
 
 93 
 
SOURCES FOR THE LIFE OF JESUS 
 
 meal with unleavened bread did take place 
 on the same " day." The misdating of the 
 Last Supper, whereby the Jewish Passover 
 is turned into the first Christian Eucharist, 
 is a more serious matter than a mere care- 
 less confusion between Jewish and Roman 
 "days," but it is quite possible that the 
 Easter Eucharistic Feast was already re- 
 garded in Rome as the Christian equivalent 
 of the Jewish Passover meal when St. Mark 
 wrote, and that he had to harmonize this 
 view as best he could with the historical 
 data that had been transmitted to him. 
 
 A word may be said here upon the char- 
 acter of the special references to St. Peter 
 in the Gospel according to Mark. " Sight 
 by hypnotic suggestion has few more curi- 
 ous illustrations than the discovery by 
 writers under the spell of the Papias tradi- 
 tion of traces in Mark of special regard for 
 Peter!" says Professor Bacon. 1 But why 
 
 1 Beginnings, p. xxv. 
 
 94 
 
POSSIBLE SOURCES 
 
 should a narrative founded upon Peter's 
 reminiscences show special regard for Pe- 
 ter? If there be any foundation for the tra- 
 dition which connects the Gospel of Mark 
 with the reminiscences of Simon Peter, — 
 and apart from this connexion it is not easy 
 to understand how this Gospel came to be 
 preserved at all, — then we may expect to 
 find in it features of the Ministry of Jesus 
 that were really fixed in Peter's mind rather 
 than adumbrations of " Petrine claims." 
 Peter may never appear individually on the 
 scene except for purposes of rebuke, as 
 Professor Bacon remarks; 1 but is this feature 
 of the narrative unlikely to have proceeded 
 from Peter himself? All the Gospels tell 
 the story of Peter's confession of Jesus as 
 the Christ: it was indeed a historical mo- 
 ment of immense importance for the com- 
 pany of disciples. But is it psychologically 
 unsuitable that the Gospel which tradition 
 
 1 Beginnings^ p. xxvii. 
 
 95 
 
SOURCES FOR THE LIFE OF JESUS 
 
 associates with the reminiscences of Simon 
 Peter should also emphasize the rebuke 
 which the Master administered to him 
 almost at the moment of his confession? 
 
 Apart from this, the general character of 
 the Gospel seems to me to harmonize well 
 enough with the tradition that Mark's main 
 source for his work was the tales he had 
 heard from St. Peter. It is from the time 
 of the "call" of Peter that the narrative 
 first becomes particularized, and it is mainly 
 round the Sea of Galilee that recorded in- 
 cidents occur. Had the end of Mark been 
 preserved, there can be little doubt, from 
 the mention of Peter in xvi. 7, that we 
 should have had a more detailed account 
 of what Peter saw of his risen Lord than 
 can be conjectured from Luke xxiv. 34 
 and 1 Corinthians xv. 5. The real objec- 
 tion raised against regarding St. Peter as 
 the main authority for the stories told in 
 the Second Gospel is that the resulting pic- 
 
 96 
 
POSSIBLE SOURCES 
 
 ture of Jesus Christ is inadequate or false. 
 But I have attempted to show that, if we 
 frankly accept the eschatological point of 
 view, there is little difficulty in accepting 
 the main outlines of the narrative as a not 
 unfaithful picture of the general course of 
 the Ministry. 
 
 Not all the tales in the second Gospel 
 need be supposed to come direct from St. 
 Peter or from the youthful reminiscences 
 of the Evangelist. I have elsewhere x sug- 
 gested that the tale of the Demoniac and 
 the Swine a may have come to the Evangel- 
 ist from Gerasa rather than direct from the 
 companions of Jesus. Where and how the 
 story of Herod and John the Baptist took 
 shape it is impossible to say: Josephus 3 tells 
 us that many people in Galilee regarded 
 the defeat of Antipas by the Arabian King 
 Aretas, his aggrieved father-in-law, as a 
 
 1 Journal of Biblical Literature, xxvii. 132. 
 
 • Mark v. 20. 3 Antiquities, xviii. 5, 2. 
 
 97 
 
SOURCES FOR THE LIFE OF JESUS 
 
 judgment upon him for his unlawful mar- 
 riage with Herodias. 
 
 To sum up, the view of the Gospel ac- 
 cording to Mark here advanced is that it 
 is a work put together by one who seems 
 to have been present as a youth at the 
 arrest of Jesus in Gethsemane, but was not 
 otherwise a companion of the Ministry. A 
 generation later he formed the design of 
 writing an account of the public career of 
 the Lord, after almost all the witnesses had 
 died, naturally or as martyrs. There is no 
 valid reason to doubt that during some part 
 of his adult life he had accompanied St. 
 Peter, and that he has derived much of his 
 material from what Peter had told him. 
 But there is nothing to make us suppose 
 that the general plan of the work comes 
 from St. Peter, or that the first half of it 
 should be regarded as more than a collec- 
 tion of anecdotes, arranged only in approxi- 
 mate chronological sequence. From the 
 
 9 8 
 
POSSIBLE SOURCES 
 
 time of Peter's confession in the country of 
 Caesarea Philippi we get a real sequence 
 of events, conditioned by the real nexus of 
 the journey south to Jerusalem, though the 
 sequence is not without gaps. For the 
 week's stay in (or rather, near) Jerusalem 
 at the Passover, we have a chronological 
 scheme that may be accepted as historical, 
 though it is disfigured by a serious incon- 
 sistency, whereby the Last Supper is reck- 
 oned as a Paschal Meal. This however 
 was dictated by liturgical rather than his- 
 torical reasons, and is contradicted by the 
 rest of the narrative. It is assumed here 
 that the Gospel is imperfect at the end, and 
 it is regarded as not unlikely that it origi- 
 nally extended over much of the period 
 covered by the first twelve chapters of the 
 Acts of the Apostles. 
 
THE COMPOSITION OF MATTHEW AND LUKE 
 
 The reasons which lead the present 
 writer to believe that we cannot, with any 
 approach to certainty, reconstruct Q^, the 
 lost common source of Matthew and Luke, 
 have been already given. Something may 
 however be said of the methods which 
 Matthew and Luke seem to have used in 
 treating the material under their hand. 
 From the way that they use the Gospel of 
 Mark, which we actually possess, we may 
 not unfairly conjecture how they treated 
 their other sources, which we do not pos- 
 sess. 
 
 It is perhaps advisable to point out in the 
 first place that both Matthew and Luke treat 
 Mark with entire literary freedom. Mark 
 ioo 
 
MATTHEW AND LUKE 
 
 is used by the other evangelists as valuable 
 material ; but they freely omit what seemed 
 to them unsuitable or obscure, they add 
 fresh material from other sources, working 
 it into the Marcan narrative, each in accord- 
 ance with his own literary methods, and 
 they freely change the wording of the say- 
 ings and doings of Jesus. But while they 
 are equally free in dealing with Mark, the 
 manner in which they treat it is different. 
 Matthew retains nearly all the material of 
 Mark, and a plausible reason can be found 
 for the omission of almost every verse that 
 he does omit. But the matter from Mark is 
 often welded together with matter from else- 
 where, in such a way as to make it difficult 
 to separate the two elements in detail. 1 
 
 1 E. g. Matt. iv. n b doubtless comes from Mark i. 13*. 
 The story of the Centurion (Matt. viii. 5-13) and that of 
 the two would-be followers (viii. 19-22) are inserted in the 
 middle of a whole set of anecdotes taken from Mark. Matt. 
 xii. 22-32 is welded together from Mark iii. 20-30 and from 
 the source of Luke xi. 14-23, xii. 10. 
 IOI 
 
SOURCES FOR THE LIFE OF JESUS 
 
 Luke, on the other hand, omits a good deal 
 of Mark, but what he retains does not ap- 
 pear to be mixed with material gathered 
 from elsewhere. The wording is often 
 greatly altered, but this comes from the lit- 
 erary style and method of Luke, not from 
 the introduction of fresh documents. More- 
 over Luke follows the order of Mark in the 
 sections based upon Mark, while Matthew 
 entirely rearranges the order of Mark's 
 anecdotes of the early part of the Galilean 
 Ministry. 
 
 These characteristic differences can be 
 expressed in a single sentence. The Gospel 
 according to Matthew is a fresh edition of 
 Mark, revised, rearranged, and enriched 
 with new material ; the Gospel according 
 to Luke is a new historical -work, made by 
 combining parts of Mark with parts of other 
 documents. 
 
 Generalisations like this have always in 
 them something of over-statement and of 
 102 
 
MATTHEW AND LUKE 
 
 paradox. The essential point is, that while 
 the additions to the Marcan framework in 
 Matthew have been combined and altered 
 by the evangelist to fit them into their place 
 in that framework, the non-Marcan matter 
 in Luke has not been combined with the 
 Marcan matter. It would be impossible to 
 reconstruct the first five chapters of Mark 
 out of the Marcan matter preserved in Mat- 
 thew iii-xiii. 52, although almost every in- 
 cident and parable is more or less ade- 
 quately represented, 1 because the anecdotes 
 have been entirely rearranged, and many of 
 them have been interpolated with sayings 
 of Jesus derived from other sources. The 
 non-Marcan material has no doubt been 
 treated in the same way, that is, it has been 
 rearranged and recast by the evangelist. 
 Sayings of Jesus upon cognate topics have 
 been grouped together, whether with the 
 
 1 The exceptions are Mark i. 23-27, 35-39, Hi. 9-12, 21, 
 iv. 26-29. 
 
 103 
 
SOURCES FOR THE LIFE OF JESUS 
 
 Marcan material, or otherwise (as in the 
 so-called " Sermon on the Mount "), so that 
 we cannot hope to reconstruct the original 
 connexion of this non-Marcan material at 
 all from the position it has come to occupy 
 in the Gospel of Matthew. In the latter part 
 of this Gospel Mark is followed strictly. 
 Hardly anything of any length is omitted, 
 though many fresh collections of sayings 
 and a few fresh incidents, such as the earth- 
 quakes at the Death on the Cross and at the 
 appearance of the Angel at the Resurrec- 
 tion, are introduced into the framework of 
 the Marcan narrative. Whatever the origin 
 or value of these additions, they appear in 
 Matthew as additions and enrichments to 
 the main framework ; it would be fruitless 
 to endeavour to restore their original con- 
 text from the use made of them by Matthew. 
 With the Gospel of Luke it is different. 
 In Luke much of Mark is omitted, and the 
 thread of the Marcan narrative is often 
 104 
 
MATTHEW AND LUKE 
 
 dropped altogether. But where Mark is 
 being followed, it is followed to the exclu- 
 sion of other sources and is generally taken 
 up again almost at the place where it had 
 been dropped. 1 The question therefore 
 
 1 Luke follows Mark throughout five sections of his Gos- 
 pel, viz. 
 
 Luke iv. 31-44 corresponds to Mark i. 21-39 
 
 v. 12-vi. 19 * i. 40-iii. 19 
 
 viii-4-ix. 50 " iii. 31-ix. 40 
 
 (with gaps) 
 xviii. 15-43 ■ x. 13-52 
 
 xix. 29-xxii, 14 " " xi. i-xiv. 17 
 
 In these five sections the only non-Marcan matter is 
 Luke v. 39, xix. 39-44. Much of Mark that falls within the 
 compass of these sections is omitted, viz. Mark iii. 20-30, 
 vi. 1-6, 17-29, vi. 45-viii. 26, x. 35-45, and various bits of 
 xi-xiv. But very little has been dropped at the beginnings 
 and ends of these sections of Luke. Luke v. 12 takes up 
 Mark where it had been left at Luke iv. 44. Only Mark 
 iii. 20-30 is passed over between Luke vi. 19 and viii. 4, 
 and only Mark ix. 41-x. 12 (i. e. 20 verses only) is passed 
 over between Luke ix. 50 and xviii. 15, while nothing of 
 Mark is dropped between Luke xviii. 43 and xix. 29. The 
 only serious transposition of the Marcan matter in these 
 sections is that Mark iii. 31-35 ( 4k Who is my Mother or m\ 
 Brethren?") is placed after the Parables instead of before 
 them. 
 
 105 
 
SOURCES FOR THE LIFE OF JESUS 
 
 naturally arises whether the non-Marcan 
 material in Luke may not have been treated 
 in much the same way, that is to say, that 
 the non-Marcan material stands in Luke in 
 the same order as it stood in the document 
 or documents out of which Luke derived 
 them, and that the thread of it is taken up 
 almost at the places where it has been suc- 
 cessively dropped. 
 
 It is remarkable how coherent a narra- 
 tive of our Lord's Ministry we get if we 
 study the non-Marcan material in Luke by 
 itself. In outline it runs as follows : After 
 the Baptism and Temptation Jesus left 
 " Nazara " x and came to the Sea of Gen- 
 nesaret, where Simon Peter became his 
 disciple. 2 We hear of Jesus at Capernaum 3 
 and at Nain, 4 as he goes " through city and 
 village, bringing the announcement of the 
 
 x Luke iii-v. i £f. ; note the spelling Nazara in Luke iv. 
 16, which reappears in Matt. iv. 13. 
 2 Luke v. 1 ff. 3 Luke vii. 1. 4 Luke vii. 11. 
 
 I06 
 
MATTHEW AND LUKE 
 
 Kingdom of God, and the Twelve with 
 him and certain women," of whom three 
 are named. 1 Then, " when the days of his 
 ascension were fulfilled, he set his face 
 to go to Jerusalem," 3 passing Samaritan 
 country on the way, 3 though most of the 
 anecdotes here related still involve a Gali- 
 lean setting, with synagogues and Pharisees 
 and "multitudes" of hearers. 4 After the 
 parable of the Pharisee and the taxgatherer 
 comes the story of Zacchseus the taxgath- 
 erer. 5 So Jesus journeys on, going up to 
 Jerusalem, and when he comes near he 
 weeps over it. 6 Little is said by Luke of the 
 public activity of Jesus in Jerusalem that 
 is not taken from Mark, but we are given 
 a fresh account of the Last Supper, 7 and 
 
 1 Luke viii. 1-4. 2 Luke ix. 51 £f ; xiii. 22. 
 
 3 Luke ix. 52, xvii. 11. 
 
 4 Luke xiii. 10, xiv. 1 ; x. 25, xi. 37, xiii. 31, etc.; xi. 14, 
 xiv. 25, etc. 
 
 5 Luke xviii. 9-14, xix. 1 ff. 
 
 6 Luke xix. 28, 41-44. 7 Luke xxii. 15, 16, 21, 24-38. 
 
 I07 
 
SOURCES FOR THE LIFE OF JESUS 
 
 much of the Trial of Jesus is independent 
 of Mark, together with nearly all the Lucan 
 account of the Resurrection. 
 
 It is as impossible to reconstruct St. 
 Luke's sources from St. Luke's own nar- 
 rative by the help of our knowledge of his 
 literary methods, as it is to reconstruct Q^ 
 from the common matter of Matthew and 
 Luke. But it seems to me that we do 
 catch a glimpse of this other source of 
 Luke, especially when we join together, 
 as I think we have a right to do, Luke viii. 
 1-4 and ix. 5 1 ff . And then we must ask 
 if this source can be anything else but Q^ 
 itself? 
 
 I doubt very much whether we can get 
 much beyond this stage of queries and un- 
 certainties. But it is well to insist upon 
 the fact of our uncertainty, in order to 
 avoid building pleasing but insecure theo- 
 ries upon unsound literary foundations. Q^ 
 remains an unknown quantity, for all that 
 108 
 
MATTHEW AND LUKE 
 
 some students have begun to treat Har- 
 nack's reconstruction of it (or its practical 
 equivalent) as if it had been really dis- 
 covered, and as if we knew both what it 
 contained and what it left out of the Gospel 
 History. 
 
 There are two theories popular at the 
 present time, which seem to me especially 
 insecure : viz., the theory that (^contained 
 no story of the Passion and the theory of 
 the " Peraean Document." 
 
 The theory that (^contained no story of 
 the Passion rests on the absence from 
 Matthew, in the Story of the Passion, of 
 any fresh material that reappears in Luke. 
 Assuming this argument to be decisive (as 
 Harnack and others do), and remembering 
 also that Qjs no mere collection of Say- 
 ings of Jesus, but a document that con- 
 tained the stories of the Baptism and 
 Temptation of Jesus and of the healing of 
 the Centurion's son— a document moreover 
 109 
 
SOURCES FOR THE LIFE OF JESUS 
 
 which gave prominence to the eschatologi- 
 cal hope/ we should be forced to the con- 
 clusion that it must have been compiled at 
 a very early date, when the first generation 
 of disciples was still living and the Death 
 and Resurrection of the Lord was still not 
 regarded as typical of an experience which 
 all Christians must undergo. This is the 
 stage, to use the striking phrase of Pro- 
 fessor Lake, when not " Christ is risen" but 
 Maranatha ("Our Lord, come!") was 
 the watchword of Christianity. 
 
 But such deductions assume the main 
 theory that the unknown Q^had no Pas- 
 sion-story. This still seems to me doubtful: 
 I would sooner believe that the peculiar 
 element in the Lucan Passion-story was 
 derived from Q^ It is true that we have in 
 the "Didache" a Christian document that 
 makes much of the watchword Marana- 
 
 1 E. g. Luke xii. 35 ££., xvii. 20-37, xx »* 28 -3°> and tne 
 parallels in Matthew. 
 
 IIO 
 
MATTHEW AND LUKE 
 
 tha and all that it implies, while it is silent 
 about the Passion. But the "Didache" 
 does not profess to relate the Gospel story 
 at all : I find it difficult to believe that a 
 document like Q^which on any hypothesis 
 goes into some detail about the Ministry 
 of Jesus, could have been silent about the 
 end of his earthly career. Had Q^been a 
 mere collection of sayings the silence 
 would have been credible, but we are 
 obliged to allow for the presence of the 
 story of the healing of the Centurion's 
 boy. 
 
 And I venture to think that the absence 
 of Lucan parallels in Matthew's story of 
 the Passion is not so very surprising, when 
 we regard the Gospel according to Matthew 
 as what I have called it above ; viz., a 
 fresh edition of Mark rather than a new 
 historical work. Many and important as 
 are the additions which Matthew makes 
 to Mark, it is noteworthy that very few of 
 in 
 
SOURCES FOR THE LIFE OF JESUS 
 
 them interrupt the actual course of the 
 narrative. The " Sermon on the Mount " 
 takes three chapters, but in time and place 
 it corresponds to Mark iii. 13. Matthew x. 
 corresponds to Mark vi. 7-1 1. Mark iv. 
 33 tells us that "with such parables" Jesus 
 spoke to them the Word; Matthew in 
 chapter xiii. gives half a dozen of these 
 parables. And this is carried out all 
 through the Gospel; the added Sayings of 
 Jesus and the few added anecdotes all slip 
 easily into the Marcan framework. They 
 have been torn from their original context 
 and fitted into Matthew's slightly revised 
 edition of Mark, to serve as illustrations 
 and enrichments. If Q^did contain a Pas- 
 sion-story and Matthew made use of it, we 
 need not be surprised to find fragments of 
 it elsewhere than in the Passion-story of 
 Matthew, because Matthew is not combin- 
 ing Q^with Mark, but enriching and illus- 
 trating Mark from Q^and other sources. 
 112 
 
MATTHEW AND LUKE 
 
 For these reasons I think it quite probable 
 that Q^ had a story of the Passion, and I 
 think it not unlikely that some of it is pre- 
 served among the peculiar sections of 
 Luke xxii-xxiv. 1 
 
 The other theory that seems to me haz- 
 ardous is the identification of the so-called 
 " Peraean " source of Luke. In its crudest 
 form this theory regards the long section, 
 Luke ix. 51-xviii. 14, which corresponds 
 roughly to the single verse Mark x. 1, as 
 giving from some peculiar source an ac- 
 count of the teaching of Jesus during his 
 journey to Jerusalem through Peraea, the 
 country on the other side of Jordan. 3 But 
 much of this section obviously belongs to 
 Q^ (e. g. ix. 57-61, x. 13-15), and we have 
 seen that its opening words seem to form 
 the continuation of Luke viii. 1-4. It seems 
 
 1 Notably in Luke xxii. 15 f., 24-32, 35-38. 
 
 2 It should be noted that according to Luke our Lord 
 goes through Samaritan villages, and never is represented 
 to have crossed the Jordan at all. 
 
 113 
 
SOURCES FOR THE LIFE OF JESUS 
 
 to me impossible to distinguish " Luke's 
 special source/' as it is sometimes called, 
 from Q^ itself, while we must not forget 
 that the unity of the fragments which mod- 
 ern scholars have called Q^ is still an un- 
 proven hypothesis. What was the source 
 from which Luke derived the parables of 
 the Good Samaritan, the Prodigal Son, the 
 Unjust Judge, the Pharisee and the Publi- 
 can? I fear it must continue to remain un- 
 certain. They have come to us from St. 
 Luke's hands, and we are left to conjecture 
 whence he came to know them, or what 
 amount of rewriting they may have received 
 when he incorporated them into his work. 
 
 The plan of this little book does not in- 
 clude a discussion of the historical value of 
 the Fourth Gospel, or of the remarkably 
 divergent stories of the Birth of Christ 
 which form the preface to the Gospel, ac- 
 cording to Matthew and Luke. There can 
 114 
 
MATTHEW AND LUKE 
 
 be no doubt that the earliest sources for the 
 Life of Jesus are the Gospel of Mark and 
 the source (or sources) which it is con- 
 venient to call Q^. What has here been at- 
 tempted has been to vindicate the general 
 historical faithfulness of the picture of our 
 Lord's Ministry sketched in Mark, and to 
 plead for caution in dealing with the un- 
 known Q^, a document which the extant 
 evidence does not allow us to reconstruct 
 in detail. 
 
 Were the reconstruction of Q^ possible, 
 were the unlikely to happen and a copy of 
 this long-lost product of primitive Christian- 
 ity to be dug up by the spade of a modern 
 investigator, it would indeed be a histori- 
 cal jewel of inestimable value. As matters 
 stand, the jewel as a whole is for us irre- 
 coverable, but we have in Matthew and 
 Luke many of the detached gems out of 
 which it was composed. And so much has 
 been said in these pages of the superior his- 
 
 "5 
 
SOURCES FOR THE LIFE OF JESUS 
 
 torical value of the Gospel of Mark, as com- 
 pared with those of Matthew and Luke, that 
 it may be well to conclude by pointing out 
 the very considerable degree of faithfulness 
 and historical intelligence which these two 
 evangelists exhibit in essentials, however 
 much the modern investigator may find the 
 naive and unhellenic narrative of Mark 
 more useful as a basis from which to work. 
 For the same method, — the comparison 
 of the narrative of Mark as reproduced in 
 Matthew and Luke with the text of Mark 
 itself, — which showed us that we could 
 not reconstruct Mark as a whole from its 
 use by Matthew and Luke, shows at the 
 same time that the parts of Mark which 
 have been so used are retold without essen- 
 tial injury. We stand indeed further off from 
 the scene, and we can no longer discern 
 some characteristic lines in the Portrait of 
 Jesus, when we look at it from the point of 
 view of Matthew or Luke instead of that 
 116 
 
MATTHEW AND LUKE 
 
 of Mark ; but the figure is the same in es- 
 sentials. As Matthew and Luke have treated 
 Mark, so no doubt they have treated Q^, 
 and if they have retained the essential when 
 they have made use of Mark they will have 
 retained the essential when they have made 
 use of Q^. 
 
 The very considerable amount of the 
 wording of Mark that Matthew has re- 
 tained, while it is among the chief pieces 
 of evidence that prove Mark to have been 
 used by him, is also a proof that it has been 
 used with fidelity. But more than this, the 
 general arrangement of the Gospel accord- 
 ing to Matthew shows that Mark has been 
 used with intelligence and skill. The divi- 
 sions of the narrative that Matthew empha- 
 sizes are the real turning points. The first 
 part of the Ministry leads up to Peter's 
 confession of Jesus as the Messiah, and the 
 second part, containing the story of the 
 Journey to Jerusalem and the Doctrine of 
 117 
 
SOURCES FOR THE LIFE OF JESUS 
 
 the Cross, starts off at Matthew xvi. 21 
 with the same formula (" From then be- 
 gan Jesus . . . ") as is used in iv. 17 to 
 begin the first part. Much of the matter 
 taken from Mark in the first part has indeed 
 been rearranged, but after all it was little 
 more in the original than a collection of 
 anecdotes. The decisive moment of the open 
 rupture between Jesus and the Pharisees 
 in the Synagogue x has been not inappropri- 
 ately deferred, and it is emphasized after 
 the evangelist's manner by a formal quota- 
 tion from the Old Testament. In the second 
 part of the Ministry Matthew follows Mark 
 paragraph by paragraph, merely condensing 
 what seemed to be superfluities and adding 
 here and there fresh sayings and legends. 
 Some of the freshness of Mark is gone, and 
 the style has a certain hieratic and set char- 
 acter, which seems like a premonition of 
 future ecclesiastical use. No one can doubt 
 
 1 Matt. xii. 14, corresponding to Mark iii. 6. 
 
 118 
 
MATTHEW AND LUKE 
 
 that the Gospel of Matthew is better suited 
 than the Gospel of Mark for reading aloud 
 in church. But both tell the same story; the 
 outlines of the picture remain the same. 
 May we not therefore believe that Q^ was 
 treated with similar intelligence, even 
 though the plan of Matthew did not allow 
 the fragments taken from Q^ to cohere in 
 their original context? 
 
 As we have seen, the plan of the Gos- 
 pel of Luke is very different from that of 
 Matthew: it is a combination of Mark 
 with other sources rather than an enrich- 
 ment of Mark from other sources. Much 
 of Mark was dropped altogether in the 
 process, including the general plan of the 
 work. The Ministry of the Christ has be- 
 come timeless: "the acceptable year of 
 the Lord " is a moment of which the com- 
 ponent parts are practically indistinguish- 
 able, except that it ends with the arrival 
 at Jerusalem and the Passion; we lose 
 119 
 
SOURCES FOR THE LIFE OF JESUS 
 
 sight of the story told by Mark as a con- 
 nected whole. But the parts of Mark that 
 are retained are faithfully treated; they 
 are given in their proper order and are 
 very little mixed with other matter. We 
 have therefore some reason for assuming 
 that Luke's other sources have been given 
 in their proper order, without much ex- 
 traneous mixture. The evangelist indeed 
 professes to write "in order" (Luke i. 3), 
 and judging by his treatment of that one 
 of his sources which we actually possess, 
 this appears to mean that he has preferred 
 to dovetail them together rather than make 
 a new arrangement of their contents. 
 
 One special point may be singled out. It 
 has often been noticed that St. Luke's 
 Gospel is eminently the Gospel of women. 
 The Nativity story is told from the wo- 
 man's point of view : the woman that 
 was a sinner, the women who minister to 
 Jesus, " the daughter of Abraham " who 
 120 
 
MATTHEW AND LUKE 
 
 was healed, the "daughters of Jerusalem " 
 who stand on the way to the Crucifixion, 
 the Woman with the Ten Pieces of Silver, 
 the Importunate Widow — all these have 
 come down to us only through the Gospel 
 of Luke. It is therefore worth notice that 
 no sympathetic elaborations are given to 
 the stories of women taken from Mark's 
 Gospel. The stories of Peter's wife's 
 mother, of the Woman with an Issue, and 
 of the Widow's Mites, are repeated in 
 Luke from Mark, but no prominence is 
 given to them; they are, in fact, somewhat 
 curtailed. It seems therefore that the char- 
 acteristic sympathy given to women and 
 the stress laid upon the women's part in 
 the Ministry of Jesus, belong rather to one 
 or more of Luke's sources than to Luke 
 himself. 
 
 However that may be, we cannot doubt 
 that all the sources used by Luke are 
 given by him to us with certain character- 
 121 
 
SOURCES FOR THE LIFE OF JESUS 
 
 istic alterations. His Gospel is like a new- 
 building made with old stones : they have 
 been trimmed at the edges to make them 
 fit, or at the least have been repointed with 
 fresh mortar. We can see this for ourselves 
 in the case of the stories taken from Mark, 
 and doubtless the same process has been 
 at work in the others. When Mark gives 
 us the story of the man sick of the palsy, 
 he tells us that it was at Capernaum, that 
 there was a crowd of the inhabitants at the 
 door and that " some of the scribes " were 
 sitting by; 1 in Luke the place is left vague, 
 but sitting by are " Pharisees and Teachers 
 of the Law who had come from every 
 village of Galilee and Judaea and Jerusa- 
 lem." 2 Caesarea Philippi and the last visit 
 to Capernaum are not mentioned by Luke. 
 We cannot therefore assume, as has been 
 done by some scholars, that the sources 
 from which Luke drew besides Mark were 
 
 1 Mark ii. 1-6. * Luke v. 17. 
 
 122 
 
MATTHEW AND LUKE 
 
 themselves destitute of place-names or of 
 indications of time. 
 
 It all comes to this, that we can do very 
 little toward reconstructing the unknown 
 sources used by Matthew and Luke, and 
 that we have to depend on the faithfulness 
 and intelligence of these writers, as well 
 as on the excellence of the material they 
 made use of. Our chief guide is the ana- 
 logy afforded by their use of the Gospel of 
 Mark, which we do possess and which is 
 by far the most valuable source for the Life 
 of Jesus now extant. And those who take 
 in hand to draw up an account of the few 
 decisive months of the public career of Je- 
 sus the Nazarene must follow the method 
 rather of the Gospel of Matthew than of 
 the Gospel of Luke. We may attempt to 
 enrich and fill in the bare outline given 
 in Mark, but Mark must remain through- 
 out the basis and foundation of the whole. 
 If the outline given in Mark be not histor- 
 123 
 
SOURCES FOR THE LIFE OF JESUS 
 
 ical, the extant material does not allow us 
 to construct any other. 
 
 NOTE ON RECENT RECONSTRUCTIONS OF " q." 
 
 Whether the contents of Q, the " Logian Source," 
 can be safely inferred from a comparison of Mat- 
 thew and Luke, is a question at issue between schol- 
 ars, about which sufficient has been already said in 
 these pages. The object of this Note is merely to 
 exhibit in a tabular form two recent attempts at re- 
 construction, so as to show what kind of document 
 is meant, when Q is named in modern critical dis- 
 cussions. 
 
 The two reconstructions are Professor Harnack's 
 ("Spriiche und Reden Jesu," 1907) and Professor 
 Stanton's (" The Gospels as Historical Documents,'* 
 Part ii, Cambridge, 1909). Harnack constructs Q 
 from 59 or 60 sections of Matthew and Luke, of 
 varying length, and discusses the wording of the 
 several passages in detail ; with regard to the posi- 
 tion of the more important passages (here numbered 
 by me 1-13) he declares himself practically satisfied. 1 
 Stanton confines himself almost entirely to the con- 
 tents of Q^, i. e. his reconstruction does not attempt 
 1 Spruche^ p. 126. 
 124 
 
MATTHEW AND LUKE 
 
 to settle the actual wording of the original docu- 
 ment. 
 
 In the following Table I give Professor Stanton's 
 eight main divisions, somewhat shortening his titles 
 of the sub-sections, for considerations of space. For 
 the same reason I give only the references to Luke, 
 in the order of which Stanton sees approximately 
 the order of Q, (p. 104). The right-hand column 
 contains the corresponding sections of Harnack's Q. 
 
 Stanton, pp. 102-103. Harnack, p. 126. 
 
 I. The ushering in of the Ministry of Christ. 
 
 John the Baptist (Luke iii. 3, 7-9, 16 f.). \a 
 The Baptism (Luke iii. 21 f.). \b 
 
 The Temptation (Luke iv. 1-13). 2 
 
 II. The first stage in the preaching of the Gospel. 
 
 Character of heirs of the Kingdom (Luke 
 vi. 17-49). 3" 
 
 The Centurion of Capernaum (Luke vii. 
 1-10). 4 
 
 Discourse about the Baptist (Luke vii. 
 18-28, 31-35). 6 
 
 1 Note that Harnack's 3 is larger than Stanton's II : it 
 includes, for instance, all Stanton's V. 
 
 125 
 
SOURCES FOR THE LIFE OF JESUS 
 
 III. The extension of the Gospel. 
 
 Missionary tour (Luke viii. i). [omitted] 
 
 44 Foxes have holes," etc. (Luke ix. 57- 
 
 60). 
 Harvest plenteous, laborers few (Luke 
 
 x. 2). 
 Directions to preachers (Luke x. 3-12, 
 
 16). 
 
 5 1 
 
 IV. The rejection and the reception of Divine 
 
 truth. 
 
 44 Woe to thee, Chorazin," etc. (Luke 
 
 x. 13-15)- 7 
 
 44 1 thank Thee, Father," etc. (Luke x. 
 
 21 f.). 8a 
 
 44 Blessed are your eyes," etc. (Luke x. 
 
 V. Instruction on Prayer. 
 
 The Lord's Prayer (Luke xi. 2-4). }^ ar/5 
 Be earnest in prayer (Luke xi. 9-13). X ofz 
 
 VI. Jesus and his antagonists* 
 
 The two great commandments (Luke x. 
 
 25-28). [omitted] 
 
 1 Harnack's 5 is larger than Stanton's III : see below on 
 VII. 
 
 126 
 
.1 
 
 MATTHEW AND LUKE 
 
 Beelzebub (Luke xi. 14 f., 17-23). 
 The unclean spirit (Luke xi. 24-26). 
 The Sign of Jonas (Luke xi. 16, 29-32). 10 
 The lamp of the body is the eye (Luke 
 
 xi. 34-36). part of 1 
 
 " Woe to you, Pharisees! "etc. (Lukexi. 
 
 39-52). I I a 
 
 VII. Exhortations to disciples in view of the 
 opposition and other trials that awaited 
 them. 
 Confess me faithfully (Luke xii. 2- 
 
 10). part of $ 
 
 Consider the ravens (Luke xii. 22- 
 
 34). part of$ 
 
 The Son of Man coming as a thief" 
 
 (Luke xii. 39 f.). 
 Act as a prudent steward (Luke xii. 
 
 42-46). 
 Divisions; bear the cross (Luke xii. 
 
 51-53, xiv. 26 f.). part of $ 
 
 Mustard-seed and Leaven (Luke xiii. 
 
 18-21). ? 
 
 Offences (Luke xvii. 1-4). ? 
 
 Faith as a grain of mustard-seed (Luke 
 
 xvii. 5 f.). ? 
 
 127 
 
 13 
 
SOURCES FOR THE LIFE OF JESUS 
 
 VIII. The doom on Jerusalem and the things of 
 the end. 
 " Jerusalem, Jerusalem !" etc. (Luke 
 
 xiii. 34 f.). \\b 
 
 The Coming of the Son of Man (Luke 
 
 xvii. 22-37). 12 
 
 The sections marked in the right-hand column 
 with (?) are uncertain in position according to Har- 
 nack, but are probably to be inserted very much 
 where Stanton puts them. Stanton's reconstruction 
 of Q^ does not contain Harnack's § 14, i. e. " He 
 that hath, to him shall be given,' ' followed by the 
 saying in Luke xxii. 28-30 (= Matthew xix. 28) 
 about sitting on twelve thrones judging the twelve 
 tribes of Israel. 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 Bacon, B. W., The Beginnings of Gospel Story (Yale Uni- 
 versity Press, 1909). [A very suggestive historical Com- 
 mentary on Mark. The most scientific exposition in Eng- 
 lish of the anti-eschatological point of view.] 
 
 Burkitt, F. C, The Gospel History and its Transmission 
 (Edinburgh, 2d ed., 1907). [Attempts to show why the 
 Church preserved an account of the foundation of Chris- 
 tianity which is on the whole historical.] 
 
 Harnack, A., Lukas der Artt (Leipzig, 1906). English 
 translation, Lithe the Physician, vol. xx of the Crown 
 Theological Library (London and New York, 1907). [A 
 study of Luke, the companion of Paul, and of his writ- 
 ings.] 
 
 Harnack, A., Sprtche und Reden Jesu (Leipzig, 1907). 
 English translation, The Sayings of Jesus, vol. xxiii 
 of the Crown Theological Library (London and New 
 York, 1908). [The most notable attempt to reconstruct 
 
 0..] 
 
 Hawkins, Sir J. C, Horae Synopticae (Oxford, 2d ed., 
 1909). [The best analysis of the peculiarities of the sev- 
 eral Synoptic Gospels, the various Tables being arranged 
 with great intelligence as well as accuracy. Invaluable for 
 all investigators of Synoptic problems.] 
 
 Lake, K., The Historical Evidence for the Resurrection 
 
 of Jesus Christ, vol. xxi of the Crown Theological Li- 
 
 brary (London and New York, 1907). [I introduce this 
 
 book here as the first example in original English work 
 
 I29 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 of the doctrine of the priority of Mark being consistently 
 applied throughout a historical investigation.] 
 
 Sanday, W., The Life of Christ in Recent Research (Ox- 
 ford, 1907). [Lectures, giving a readable survey of the 
 last twenty years of research.] 
 
 Schweitzer, Albert, Von Reimarus zu Wrede (Tubingen, 
 1906). [The indispensable account of the attempt to write 
 a "Life of Jesus," from the posthumous publication of 
 the tracts of H. S. Reimarus by Lessing in 1778 to that 
 of the late Professor W. Wrede's "Messiah-secret" in 190 1. 
 Schweitzer writes from a strongly eschatological point 
 of view. An English translation by W. Montgomery, to 
 be called The Quest of the Historical Jesus, will be pub- 
 lished in London early in 1910.] 
 
 Stanton, V. H., The Gospels as Historical Documents, 
 Part II (Cambridge, 1909). [A valuable and very full 
 study of the Synoptic Problem.] 
 
 Wellhausen, J., Einleitung in die drei ersten Evangelien 
 (Berlin, 1905). — Das Evangelium Marci (Berlin, 1903; 
 2d. ed., 1909). — Das Evangelium Matthaei (Berlin, 
 1904). — Das Evangelium Lucae (Berlin, 1904). — [These 
 four books practically form one short Commentary on 
 the Synoptic Gospels, with an Introduction prefixed. The 
 fresh German translations of the Gospels themselves, 
 the running commentary, and the introductory remarks, 
 are all singularly acute and stimulating.] 
 
 I cannot close this short Bibliography without remarking 
 that those who wish to study Synoptic questions should 
 prepare themselves by underlining, whether in a Greek or 
 an English New Testament, those words and sentences of 
 Matthew and Luke that are found in Mark. The student 
 should distinguish what is common to all three, what is 
 common to Matthew and Mark only, what is common to 
 
 130 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 Luke and Mark only, what is common to Matthew and 
 Luke only. There are several "Harmonies" and "Synop- 
 ses " on the market, some of which are very well arranged. 
 But the grasp of the details of the subject which the student 
 gains by marking the full unabridged texts for himself is 
 worth all the Synopses that ever were compiled. 
 
(£bt niUcrjiDc pre** 
 
 CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS 
 U . S . A 
 
MODERN 
 
 RELIGIOUS 
 
 PROBLEMS 
 
 EDITED BY 
 
 DR. AMBROSE W. VERNON 
 
 For a long time there has been an atmosphere of 
 uncertainty in the religious realm. This uncertainty 
 has been caused by the widespread knowledge that 
 modern scholarship has modified the traditional con- 
 ceptions of the Christian religion, and particularly by 
 widespread ignorance of the precise modifications to 
 which modern scholarship has been led. 
 
 The aim of this series of books is to lay before the 
 great body of intelligent people in the English-speak- 
 ing world the precise results of this scholarship, so 
 that men both within and without the churches may 
 be able to understand the conception of the Christian 
 religion (and of its Sacred Books) which obtains 
 among its leading scholars to-day, and that they may 
 intelligently cooperate in the great practical problems 
 with which the churches are now confronted. 
 
 While at many a point divergent views are cham- 
 pioned, it has become apparent in the last few years 
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 among the leading scholars of England and America, 
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 It is a notable sign of the times that these eminent 
 specialists have gladly consented to pause in their de- 
 tailed research, in order to acquaint the religious 
 public with the results of their study. 
 
 Modern Religious Problems are many, but they 
 fall chiefly under one of the four divisions into which 
 this series of books is to be divided : — 
 
 I. The Old Testament. 
 II. The New Testament. 
 
 III. Fundamental Christian Conceptions. 
 
 IV. Practical Church Problems. 
 
 Under these four main divisions the most vital 
 problems will be treated in short, concise, clear vol- 
 umes. They will leave technicalities at one side and 
 they will be published at a price which will put the 
 assured results of religious scholarship within the 
 reach of all. 
 
 The volumes already arranged for are the following : 
 
 I. OLD TESTAMENT 
 
 "THE ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT OF THE 
 LAW." By Canon S. R. DRIVER, Oxford University. 
 
 "HOW WE GOT OUR OLD TESTAMENT." 
 
 By Professor WILLIAM R. ARNOLD, Andover Semin- 
 ary. 
 
 -THE PRIMITIVE RELIGION OF ISRAEL." 
 
 By Professor L. B. PATON, Hartford Theological Semi»» 
 ary. 
 
II. NEW TESTAMENT 
 
 "THE EARLIEST SOURCES FOR THE LirE OP 
 JESUS." By Professor F. C. BURKITT, Cambridge Uni- 
 versity, England. (Now Ready.) 
 
 ••THE MIRACLES OF JESUS." 
 
 By Professor F. C. PORTER, Yale Unirersity. 
 
 -THE FOUNDING OF THE CHURCH." 
 
 By Professor B. W. BACON, Yale Unirersity. (Now 
 Ready.) 
 
 •HOW WE GOT OUR NEW TESTAMENT." 
 By Professor J. H. ROPES, Harvard University. 
 
 •PAUL AND PAULINISM." 
 
 By Rev. JAMES MOFFATT, D. D., Broughty Ferry, 
 Forfarshire, Scotland. (Now Ready.) 
 
 "THE HISTORICAL AND RELIGIOUS VALUE OF 
 THE FOURTH GOSPEL." By Professor E. F. SCOTT, 
 Queen's University, Kingston. (Now Ready.) 
 
 "THE BIRTH AND RESURRECTION OF OUR 
 LORD." By Professor WILLIAM H. RYDER, of And- 
 over Seminary, Cambridge, Mass. 
 
 III. FUNDAMENTAL CHRISTIAN 
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 ••THE GOSPEL OF JESUS." 
 
 By Professor G. W. KNOX, Union Theological Seminary. 
 New York. With General Introduction to the Series. (Now 
 Ready.) 
 
 •THE GOD OF THE CHRISTIAN." 
 
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 inary. 
 
 •SIN AND ITS FORGIVENESS." 
 
 By President WILLIAM DeW. HYDE, Bowdoia Colleft. 
 (Now Ready.) 
 
 "THE PERSON OF JESUS." 
 
 By President H. C. KING, Oberlin College. 
 
 •THE AUTHORITY OF THE SCRIPTURES." 
 
 By Professor SHAILER MATHEWS, University of Chi- 
 cago. 
 
IV. PRACTICAL CHURCH PROBLEMS 
 
 "THE PLACE OF THE CHURCH IN MODERN 
 SOCIETY." By WM. JEWETT TUCKER, Ex-Jpresi- 
 dent of Dartmouth College. 
 
 "THE CHURCH AND LABOR." 
 
 By CHARLES STELZLE, Superintendent of Department 
 of the Church and Labor of the Presbyterian Church of the 
 United States. (Now Ready.) 
 
 "THE ADJUSTMENT OF THE BIBLE SCHOOLS 
 TO MODERN NEEDS." By Professor CHARLES F. 
 KENT, Yale University. 
 
 "THE CHURCH AND THE CHILD." 
 
 By Rev. HENRY SLOANE COFFIN, Madison Art. 
 Presbyterian Church, New York City. 
 
 "THE PRESENTATION OF RELIGION TO EDU- 
 CATED MEN." By Rev. GEORGE HODGES, D. D., 
 Dean of the Episcopal Theological School, Cambridge, 
 Mass. 
 
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 After two years more of study in Germany, on a fel- 
 lowship, he had an experience of eight years in the 
 pastorate, at Hiawatha, Kansas, and East Orange, 
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 Biblical literature in Dartmouth College, and then 
 professor of practical theology at Yale till the present 
 year, when he returned to the pastorate, succeeding 
 the late Dr. Reuen Thomas at Harvard Church, 
 Brookline, one of the leading churches of metropoli- 
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 gree of D. D. in 1907. 
 
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