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DIVINITY SCHOOL
TROWfiRIDGE LIBRARY

THE FAITH OF THE NEW TESTAMENT

BY THE SAME AUTHOR
The Faith of the Old Testament. With
a Preface by F. C. Burkitt, D.D.,
F.B.A. Crown 8vo. (Layman's
Library.)
Isaiah : the Prophet and the Book.
Crown 8vo. (Liverpool Diocesan
Board of Divinity Publications. )
The Alexandrine Gospel (Sirach,
Wisdom, Philo, The Epistle to the
Hebrews). Crown 8vo. (Liverpool
Diocesan Board of Divinity Publica
tions.)
Johannine Writings. Crown 8vo.
(Liverpool Diocesan Board of Divinity
Publications. )

LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO.
LONDON, NEW YORK, BOMBAY, CALCUTTA
AND MADRAS

THE FAITH OF
THE NEW TESTAMENT
BY THE REV.
ALEXANDER NAIRNE, D.D.
Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, and
Canon of Chester Cathedral

LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO.
39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON
FOURTH AVENUE & 30th STREET, NEW YORK
BOMBAY, CALCUTTA, AND MADRAS
1920
A It rights rtitrved

2 N
MNHMHS XAPIN

PREFACE
This book represents the Hulsean Lectures for 1919-20.
The University of Cambridge expects much from those
to whom the delivery of these lectures is entrusted. I
have tried to be faithful to the trust, but know that I
fall short of my desire, very far short of the duty as it
really is : det Deus humilitatem quam placatus inspiciat,
accipiat confessionem ut peccata dimittat. To Dr. Burkitt
I owe much. He is not responsible for anything I say,
but he has saved me from saying some foolish things.
Mr. G. M. Edwards has helped me by counsel and
criticism and by his fraternal interest in the book and
in preliminary studies for it. I cannot thank Messrs.
Longmans enough for their frequent advice and for
the exceeding kindness with which they have more
than once excused delay and broken promise. And my
obligations to Messrs. Constable, their careful reader
and skilful compositors, grew daily while the book
passed through the press.
The book was begun before my appointment to the
lectureship. Hence it is not a mere expansion of the
lectures. The first four chapters correspond with the
four Hulsean Lectures, and I have kept the titles
which I owe to the imaginative skill of Sir Arthur
Quiller Couch who with his unfailing good will — too
often abused by needy brains — listened and talked and
struck out the phrases. But the lectures (to be heard

viii THE FAITH OF THE NEW TESTAMENT
in church) were very different from the chapters. Some
passages do not reappear in the book. One of these
however I print here for it sets forth the main problem
which has been continually in my mind. It formed
the conclusion of the first lecture : the quotation is
from an address by the Master of Jesus College, given
in the College Chapel at the commemoration of the
Founder, Bishop Alcock, on Sunday, October 19,
1919: ' A few weeks ago I listened in a College Chapel to
this modern hope, this call to hope to-day though
many an earlier hope had been disappointed. To-day,
the preacher said, we are learning new reverence,
reverence towards God and towards men : " And rever
ence for creeds we do not share. We shall slight no
man for his nonconformity. We are passing beyond
form and dogma. We look back — back beyond
reformation, beyond councils of the church, beyond
the doctors, beyond the great figure of Paul himself,
and in the simple Gospel that was preached and under
stood in Galilee we shall find a peace where all our
warring sects may rest.1'
And surely that might very rightly be. To believe
what Jesus Christ taught and to be like him, that is
the narrow and blessed way of the Gospel. Who dare
add lesser tests to that supreme one ?
But can we rest there ? When I hear my friend
speak like that I am convinced and would ask no further
questions, content to believe the simple Gospel which
was preached and understood in Galilee. It seems
that the Galilean disciples could not be thus content.
Their Lord claimed nothing for himself. They found
themselves constrained to render all to him because
they found that from him they drew all. No one of

PREFACE ix
set purpose developed doctrine. Life went on ; first
by his side in Galilee, then with his Spirit guiding
them in many climes : and as life went on they learned
more certainly that he was the fount of all their living,
the light of all their seeing, their Saviour. My Lord
and my God : they could not but say it. But if they
said it, they must say it reverently and honestly :
they could not but learn theology.1

CONTENTS

PAGE

I. The Galilean Gospel : the kingdom of Gon : the
Son of man ..... 1
II. The Galilean Gospel interpreted by S. Paul
THE AMBASSADOR OF CHRIST CRUCIFIED, RISEN AND
TO COME ...... 51
III. a.d. 70: Faith on trial finds its vindication in
retrospect : glory in humiliation . . 118
IV. S. John: the life of Jesus is the metaphybic of
THE WORD ...... 161
V. Conclusion and Retrospect : renascence of spirit
through letter ..... 207
Index ... 231

I

THE GALILEAN GOSPEL; THE KINGDOM
OF GOD : THE SON OF MAN
The faith of the New Testament is the faith of the
creeds, the Apostles' and the Nicene, which, roughly
speaking, do express to-day the mind of 'all faith
ful people.' In all periods the creeds have been
explained and tested by Scripture : they have been
framed, discussed, preserved as true summaries of the
Scripture doctrine.
But in the New Testament we find this faith by
parts : we perceive it emerging, growing, coming
together. The faith of the New Testament developes
like the faith of the Old Testament, which it takes up
and continues. As the prophets built up the faith for
Israel, contributing severally their portion of the truth,
so is it with the writers of the New Testament. In the
creeds we have a general view : in the New Testament
we distinguish aspects and stages.
Again, in the New Testament we have the living
whole of which the creeds are abstracts or schemes.
The New Testament stands to the creeds as nature to
art. The character of nature is abundance : art repre
sents by selection, expresses by symbol. Is the selection
really representative ? Has the symbol become merely
a convention ? By such questions we try art, and
questions of that kind are asked about the creeds
to-day. The artist must return continually to nature,
the churchman to Scripture.
But especially to the New Testament ; for the return
is through the written word to the person of Jesus

2 THE GALILEAN GOSPEL
Christ. The Lord Jesus Christ appeared at a certain
time on the scene of history. The faith springs out of
history. The testing, purifying, deepening of faith
always includes historical study. Such study requires
the testing of tradition by documents, and in this case
the documents are the New Testament.
But what is all this to a man who fears God ? We
have the faith : why disturb it ?
Sooner or later we know ourselves to be sinners, then
we desire to know whether our Lord really saves from
sin. To some this knowledge comes in a flash : yet not
always even to them without supervening doubt. And
to others it does not so come. These — it is an apostolic
rule — search the Scriptures, as we are now to do. The
search must be honest and diligent. We must distin
guish what is clear from what is dim. And in the
clear things we must be accurate. We must proceed by
method, not by leaps and bounds, by guess or prejudice.
An axiom of such method in historical inquiry is that
documents which preserve contemporary witness are
first to be attended to. Hence we arrange the New
Testament in chronological order.
So arranged the Epistles of S. Paul come first. The
epistles to the Ephesians and the Philippians, to the
Colossians and Philemon, seem to bear their date upon
them — from the captivity at Rome. At any rate the
epistles of the missionary period do — Thessalonians,
Corinthians, Galatians, Romans. These six were written
between a.d. 50 and 60, when as yet our Gospels were
not. And from these six alone we can make out almost
the whole of the large faith of S. Paul. Yet we soon
find it to be a faith which needs preliminary explana
tion. Who is the Christ whom this new-born Pharisee
proclaims ? 1
1 There is no better introduction to the faith of the New Testament
by way of S. Paul than Dr. E. A. Abbott's Silanus the Christian
(A. & C. Black, 1906). It is a romance of critical theology, the story of
a young Roman noble, a pupil of Epictetus, who after much exercise of
mind and conscience becomes a Christian. It can be read many times
with increasing enjoyment. Dr. Moffatt's Historical New Testament

S. PAUL AND THE GOSPELS 3
One who is Son of God ; foretold by prophets ; ' born
of the seed of David according to the flesh,' which
phrase (Rom. i. 3) implies the eternal pre-existence
explicitly confessed in the epistles of the captivity ;
crucified for the salvation of all men, for the redemp
tion of all creation ; raised from the dead ; now in
heaven ; to come at the great day with his saints ; his
Spirit is in his faithful ones, the brethren; thereby
even now they dwell with him, for they are ' in Christ,'
his death, his life are theirs (Gal. ii. 20) ; he is Lord of
the living and the dead ; through him we fall asleep
and are quickened ; to die is to be at home with him
(2 Cor. v. 8) ; he with the Holy Spirit is in the trinity
of Godhead.
That is the Christ of S. Paul, and he is Jesus. He
lived, a man, on earth, but Paul says little about that
earthly life. What was it ? Has Paul transfigured
real history ?
For answer we turn to our Gospels ; first to read the
story ; then to test its trustworthiness by its own veri
similitude and consistency, and by comparing early
tradition about the composition of these writings.
First read the story. Read each Gospel through, not
chapter by chapter, but in large draughts or, better
still, a whole Gospel at a time. For here is a story
which, if we could now read it for the first time, would
seize attention, rouse expectation, move us to the heart.
Few can come to it quite fresh like that. But many
can recover the lost freshness by reading it without the
long-used habits and conventions. And the result will
be a strong sense of reality. Once roused it is hardly
possible that this should die away again, however
(T. & T. Clark, 1901) conducts the student by the same road. Dr.
Moffatt gives in this book a New Testament in a version of his own
arranged in chronological order. He gives also a fresh vigorous
introduction, and a series of very useful tables to elucidate the course
of events, their relation to the literature, the growth of the canon, etc.
His later Introduction to the Literature of the New Testament (T. & T.
Clark, 191 1 ; new ed., 1917) is maturer work, but not so friendly and
stimulating a companion.

4 THE GALILEAN GOSPEL
tedious, however embarrassing detailed study or the
doubts of criticism may prove. Nor need there be any
misgiving as though we were allowing judgement to be
biassed from the first, for this is just the natural way
to start. Harmonies of the four narratives, schemes of
chronology, concentration on the problem of miracles,
and so on, do wear away the impression of reality : so
do dogmatic and didactic interests, even the pre
supposition that we ought to read in a devotional
frame of mind. We are likely to be stirred to a deeper
reverence than we ever knew before if we can begin
by laying aside even that presupposition and reading
with simplicity, immersing our whole mind in the
story. Of course we shall recognise that each evangelist
tells the story with marked peculiarity. That is one
of the things which will make their narratives ring
true. We can hardly measure the gain it has been to
the church that the Gospels have been preserved
separately, and not in a harmony ; as for a good while
the Syriac-speaking churches did read them.1 In a
harmony personal impressions are lost ; contradictions
are smoothed away, artificially if not violently ; and
with the contradictions the abundance of real life goes :
in Jesus Christ himself, not in a formal harmony of
the four Gospel narratives, all contradictions are
reconciled. Yet harmonies have a use for students, and it was
natural that harmonising should be the prelude to
criticism. Nor was it less natural that when a harmony
was desired, the Gospel according to S. John should be
chosen for the basis. For that Gospel begins like the
other three in Galilee, but goes on to tell of a ministry
1 In the Diatessaron compiled by Tatian, an Assyrian Christian,
about a.d. 170. An Arabic translation of the whole work was edited
by Ciasca in 1888. Before that it was partly known from an Armenian
version of Ephraem the Syrian's commentary upon it. The Diatessaron
of Tatian, edited by S. Hemphill (1880), gives a good idea of this
' Harmony of Four ' to English readers. See Kenyon's Handbook to
the Textual Criticism of the New Testament, pp. 148 ff.

THE FOURTH GOSPEL AND THE THREE 6
in Jerusalem, extending the one year of the Galilean
Gospels to three. In S. John too the Godhead of the
Lord is more directly displayed than in the Galilean
or synoptic Gospels, and that would seem to make it
the proper groundwork to which the less explicit
narratives should be applied. Yet it was impossible
that the fourth Gospel should remain in this position.
The correspondencies were seen to be dimmed by varia
tions ; the order of events was not the same in the one
Gospel as in the three ; this very insistence on the God
head of the Christ seemed to remove it from the three
in time and place ; they stood near the beginning, this
was a retrospect from further off.
That is indeed in accord with the tradition of
the second century, that S. John wrote the Gospel
in extreme old age at Ephesus, a ' spiritual ' Gospel to
fill up what the earlier evangelists had left unsaid.1
And the tradition was little questioned while the
divinity of the Lord Jesus was received as a dogma
which required no further explication. But when in
the eighteenth century men began to ask crudely
whether the dogma was true, or reverently what did it
in truth imply, then the spirit of criticism awoke, and
the evidence for the apostle's authorship was examined
and found unconvincing. The result was that the
fourth Gospel was put aside as being the expression of
the mind of the church, or of some part of the church
in the second century, but as having no historical value
for the student of origins. So it was to remain till a
larger view of its theology and a closer acquaintance
with first-century thought and circumstance should
reinstate it as a peculiar but most important in
fluence in the final developement of the faith of the
apostolic age, and as also reflecting light on the earliest
origins. Meanwhile the searchers were left with the three first
Gospels to work with. We can see now, as we look
1 Clement of Alexandria in Eusebius' Ecclesiastical History, vi. 14 ;
cf. iii. 24.

6 THE GALILEAN GOSPEL
back, that these men were no triflers, pedants, or de
stroyers. They were searching for the pearl of price,
and for that were bold to sell all that they had so long
enjoyed. Their earnestness was a source of weakness
as well as of strength. When they at first chose
Matthew as the earliest Gospel, they did so with literary
reasons : Luke tells how he used earlier narratives,
Mark read like an epitome. But Matthew is the
Gospel of the sermon on the mount, the Gospel of the
teaching of Christ. And teaching was what that
generation above all believed in. ' Heaven and earth
shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away'
seemed the very clue to the maze. Miracles could be
no test of heart-religion. Jewish picture language
about the kingdom of heaven might be set aside as the
embroidery of those who told the tale. In the words
of the Master they felt the air of eternity. The Gospel
according to S. Matthew, freed from excrescences, gave
the very Christ on whom men might still believe and
be saved.
Swift sketching of that kind takes the fancy, but
soon the intellect insists on detail and accuracy.
Stricter and more literary tests were applied. Mark
was found to be almost wholly included in Matthew
and Luke. And not only did Mark supply the frame
work of the common narrative, but Mark's very words
were repeated, and when altered the reason for the
alteration was commonly apparent. The oral theory,
that the Gospels had taken fixed form in catechetic
instruction,1 no more covered all the facts observed than
1 This theory was defended by Dr. Arthur Wright in The Com
position of the Four Gospels (Macmillan, 1890), a little book which
breathes the fresh air of the sea voyage during which it was written.
Westcott's Introduction to the Study of the Gospels (Macmillan, ist ed.,
1872) was also governed by the oral theory. But though that theory
has proved insufficient, Westcott's Introduction is still very useful.
Apart from its originality, the collection of ancient authority, the con
scientious presentation of the testimonies in scholarly shape, is of
great value. Solid honesty and diligence, considered judgement, de
votion to truth unadorned, renders Dr. Stanton's The Gospels as
Historical Documents (Cambridge University Press, 2 vols., 1903,

MARK THE EARLIEST GOSPEL 7
did the simple preference for John or Matthew. The
oral was drawn further back beyond the literary pro
cess. Something even more trustworthy seemed to be
offered to the inquirer. The preface to Luke shews
his use of written material. Our written Mark was
part, and the chief part, of that material. If so, our
written Mark might itself be far earlier than critics had
dared to put a written Gospel. Let it be read again
more sympathetically, and let it be seen whether it
bear the stamp of primitive simplicity.
Fresh reading snowed that it did. Mark is not in
the style of an epitome. Much is wanting in Mark
which the other Gospels have, but what is in Mark is
vigorous and detailed. Again, Mark is naive. He
tells how in the synagogue our Lord ' looked round
about on them with anger' (iii. 5). In Matthew and
Luke this is omitted, and the omission is typical of the
more reflective reverence for the Lord's perfect character
which the two later Gospels display. But let us look
at Mark now for ourselves ; read the story through ;
and put down the impression it leaves upon us.
After a brief title, Here beginneth the good tidings
of Jesus Christ, the scene opens suddenly in the
wilderness of Judaea. John preaches the baptism of
repentance unto remission of sins ; proclaims the coming
of One mightier than himself; and from Nazareth Jesus
comes, and receiving baptism, is assured by sign and
word, 'Thou art my beloved Son, in thee I am well
pleased.' Thus the ministry of the Lord (i. 9 — xiii.) begins.
Driven by the Spirit (who had descended upon him at
baptism) into the wilderness, he undergoes the tempta
tion : then comes into Galilee preaching the good
1909), a fine work, the worth of which is more appreciated as the
reader becomes more sincere in his own search for truth. Dr. Burkitt's
The Gospel History and its Transmission (T. & T. Clark, 1906), a
more vivacious introduction, must not however be neglected on that
account ; no sensible student would neglect anything Dr. Burkitt offers
him. Very good is Dr. Armitage Robinson's The Study of the
Gospels in Longmans' Handbooks for the Clergy.

8 THE GALILEAN GOSPEL
tidings of God and saying, The time is fulfilled, and
the kingdom of God is at hand — a very startling
announcement which in this Gospel the Baptist has
not made.
Simon, Andrew, James, and John are called. Works
of healing follow at Capernaum. The Lord retires for
prayer: then goes through Galilee preaching in the
synagogues and casting out devils. More works of
healing ; fame spreads : the crowds which in this
Gospel never cease to surround the Lord, are more and
more enthusiastic : he begins to speak of the ' Son of
man,' a title of half-veiled import, who has power on
earth to forgive sins, is Lord of the sabbath : Levi is
called : there is a dispute with the scribes and Phari
sees. Then comes a check. The man with a withered
hand being healed on the sabbath day, Pharisees and
Herodians took counsel how they might destroy him,
and only once again in this Gospel, in his own country
(vi. 1), does the Lord teach in a synagogue. Being in
fact put out of the synagogue he takes new measures :
teaches and heals by the seaside (where the spirits hail
him as Son of God) ; appoints his twelve apostles to
attend his steps and to go forth as missionaries (the
Latin term which corresponds to the Greek ' apostle ') ;
rebukes the Pharisees ; enlarges the ties of kindred to
include all who do the will of God ; proclaims the
kingdom by parables, with private interpretation to
his own disciples ; stills the storm, casts out the legion
of devils from a man and lets them enter the herd of
swine ; cures a woman, raises the child of Jairus — ' The
child is not dead, he said, but sleepeth ' ; then
follows a visit to his own country where ' he could do
no mighty work, save that he laid his hands upon a
few sick folk and healed them. And he marvelled
because of their unbelief.' The twelve receive authority
over unclean spirits and are sent forth preaching
repentance, and casting out devils and anointing and
healing many that were sick.
Then a narrative of the beheading of John the

NARRATIVE OF MARK 9
Baptist closes this first act of the drama (vi. 14-29).
It is introduced to explain Herod's belief that John
had risen from the dead, ' and therefore do these powers
work in him.' Others were saying, ' It is Elijah ' ;
others, ' It is a prophet even as one of the prophets.'
The second stage of the ministry begins with the
feeding of the five thousand (vi. 30-ff.) ; then there is a
dispute with the Pharisees and certain scribes from
Jerusalem, or rather an authoritative utterance to
them, about tradition and true purity ; more works of
healing mind or body; and the feeding of the four
thousand, with a short conversation with the disciples
about the leaven of the Pharisees and the leaven of
Herod. This division culminates in S. Peter's confes
sion, ' Thou art the Christ,' when they were in ' the
villages of Caesarea Philippi,' for in this Gospel the
Lord enters no Greek city. That confession leads at
once to a prediction of the passion, death, and rising
again of the Son of man, made like the confession of
S. Peter, in the privacy of the Lord with his disciples.
But the private prediction is immediately followed by
a summons to the multitude and the disciples together :
' If any man would come after me, let him deny him
self, and take up his cross, and follow me. For whoso
ever would save his life shall lose it; and whosoever
shall lose his life for the sake of me and of the good
tidings shall save it.' Then comes the transfiguration,
the healing of the epileptic boy — 'Thou dumb and
deaf spirit I command thee come out of him, and
enter no more into him.' And then, with a second
prediction of death and resurrection, the journey to
Jerusalem begins. The ambition of the twelve is
corrected by the example of the little child. The
journey continues not by the direct route but through
the borders of Judaea and beyond Jordan : that way,
it would seem, was safest, and there were to be no
needless risks to hinder the consummation of the great
purpose. The little children are blessed. The rich
young man gives occasion for one more revelation of

10 THE GALILEAN GOSPEL
the difficulty and the glory of entering the kingdom,
of which in these paragraphs we seem to feel the near
and nearer imminence. And then there is a break in
the sequence, a moment's silence in the narration.
We start once more with this vivid picture : ' And
they were in the way, going up to Jerusalem ; and
Jesus was going before them : and they were amazed ;
and they that followed were afraid' (x. 32). The
third prediction of the passion and resurrection is at
once added ; then the answer to the sons of Zebedee,
' The cup that I drink ye shall drink, etc.,' and the say
ing which springs from it, ' The Son of man came not
to be ministered unto but to minister, and to give his
life a ransom for many,' draw us into the movement we
are watching ; we feel the same awe as felt the actors
in the scene, the sense of will and destiny and a storm of
spiritual force gathering rapidly on the horizon.
They pass on through Jericho : blind Bartimaeus
hails the Lord as ' Jesus thou son of David ' : Bethany
and the Mount of Olives are reached : the colt is fetched,
and the Lord rides into Jerusalem, 'and they that
went before, and they that followed, cried, Hosanna;
Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord :
Blessed is the kingdom that cometh, the kingdom of
our father David : Hosanna in the highest.' What
enthusiasm, what joy. It is the sequel to the opening
proclamation, ' The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom
of God is at hand ' ; only then the Lord had repeated
the ' Repent ye ' of the Baptist, and to us who know of
Peter's confession, and the stern purpose and sad pre
dictions which succeeded it, there is tragic irony in
the joy.
And the anticipation of tragedy grows steadily.
The last stage of the ministry has now begun, the
ministry in Jerusalem. Every act and word points to
the approach indeed of the kingdom, but through
enmity, violence and death. The temple is cleansed,
the fig-tree cursed, authority assumed, and by the
decision about the tribute-money the support of the

NARRATIVE OF MARK 11
Zealots is lost, the Lord, it almost seems, deliberately
chooses desertion and death. Yet still he teaches,
answering even captious questions with profound simpli
city which abashes the questioner, till the discreet
answer of the scribe, who was not far from the kingdom
of God, gives opportunity for cutting further discussion
short : ' No man after that durst ask him any question.'
The Lord himself sets a problem about ' the Christ '
which confused and still confuses materialists and con
ventionalists, while still 'the great multitude heard
him gladly.' Then, as before he had found refreshment
in children, so now the chapter of controversy ends
sweetly with the poor widow and her generosity. A
strange discourse about the great day, when men shall
' see the Son of man coming in clouds with great power
and glory,' closes the section. It is spoken to the
disciples who had heard S. Peter's confession. It
springs out of a question of theirs which makes us
think of the fall of Jerusalem in a.d. 70. But whereas
in Matthew, and quite plainly in Luke, this discourse
partly depicts the fall of Jerusalem, in Mark there is
hardly a line that need be explained thus. And it
runs out into the paradox : ' Verily I say unto you,
This generation shall not pass away, until all these
things be accomplished. Heaven and earth shall
pass away : but my words shall not pass away. But
of that day or that hour knoweth no one, not even
the angels in heaven, neither the Son, but the Father ' ;
and then closes with the command to watch.
Thus ends the threefold ministry, in Galilee before,
in Galilee after the feeding of the five thousand, in
Jerusalem. With chapter xiv. the third and last
division of the Gospel begins, the passion, crucifixion,
and resurrection.
After two days was the passover : the chief priests
and scribes sought to take and kill the Lord. He is
anointed as for death in the house of Simon the leper.
Judas Iscariot goes to the chief priests and promises to
deliver him to them. On the first day of unleavened

12 THE GALILEAN GOSPEL
bread the disciples make ready the passover in a large
upper room to which the Lord directed them. In the
evening he eats the passover with the twelve, speaks to
them of his betrayal, takes the bread and the cup with
the words, ' This is my body. . . . This is my blood of the
covenant, which is shed for many. Verily I say unto
you, I will no more drink of tlie fruit of the vine, until
that day when I drink it new in the kingdom of God.'
The hymn is sung. Peter is warned. In Gethsemane
Peter and James and John are bid to watch while the
Lord ' greatly amazed and sore troubled ' prays, ' Abba,
Father, all things are possible unto thee ; remove this
cup from me : howbeit, not what I will, but what thou
wilt.' The three watchers sleep, and the men sent
with Judas from the chief priests, scribes and elders
take our Lord. All this is told concisely, yet with
much detail. Then comes the trial before the high
priest with Peter's denial, the failure of the false
witnesses, and the answer of our Lord to the question
of the high priest : ' Art thou the Christ, the Son of
the Blessed ? And Jesus said, I am : and ye shall see
the Son of man sitting at the right hand of power, and
coming with the clouds of heaven.' At last, with the
strange correction of traditional messianic terms to
' Son of man,' the Lord's acceptance of S. Peter's con
fession is made public, and his condemnation ensues.
In the morning after a consultation of the council or
sanhedrin, the Lord is delivered to Pilate. Pilate asks
the political question, ' Art thou the king of the
Jews?' 'Thou sayest,' answered the Lord, and 'no
more answered anything.' Pilate tries to bring about
the release of the Lord, but is obliged to release
Barabbas and to deliver Jesus, when he had scourged
him, to be crucified. The soldiers mock the king of
the Jews, and impressing Simon of Cyrene to bear the
cross, crucify the Lord in the place Golgotha, with two
robbers, one on either side, and the superscription on
his own cross, ' The king of the Jews.' At the third
hour he was crucified, having refused the stupefying

NARRATIVE OF MARK 13
wine mingled with myrrh. From the sixth hour to the
ninth there was darkness. ' At the ninth hour Jesus
cried with a loud voice, Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani ? '
Then with one more loud cry he gave up the ghost.
And the centurion said, ' Truly this man was the Son
of God.' Women were beholding from afar, and two
of them in the evening beheld the rock-hewn tomb
wherein the body was laid by Joseph of Arimathea, ' a
councillor of honourable estate, who also himself was
looking for the kingdom of God.'
That was in the evening, the day before the sabbath.
When the sabbath was past, very early on the first day
of the week, the same two Maries who had beheld the
tomb, went with one more woman, Salome, with spices
to the tomb, and arriving when the sun was risen found
the stone rolled back, and entering into the tomb saw
a young man sitting there arrayed in a white robe, and
they were amazed. ' And he saith unto them, Be not
amazed : ye seek Jesus the Nazarene, which hath been
crucified : he is risen ; he is not here : behold the
place where they laid him ! But go, tell his disciples
and Peter, He goeth before you into Galilee : there
shall ye see him, as he said unto you. And they
went out, and fled from the tomb ; for trembling and
astonishment had come upon them : and they said
nothing to any one ; for they were afraid.'
This account of S. Mark's Gospel has increased in
fulness as it went on. It began as a terse summary.
At the end the present tenses have given way to proper
narrative diction, and more and more has been repeated
in the very phrases of the original. Let the reader set
himself the same task, and see whether he does not slip
into a like change. The cause is the gathering sense
of reality, an impression which becomes overpowering
as the last chapters are reached. The last twelve
verses of our Authorised Version (kept, but separated,
in the Revised) are an addition, one of alternative and
varying conclusions that have been supplied to what
seemed an imperfect narrative. Imperfect it may be.

14 THE GALILEAN GOSPEL
The generally accepted explanation is that the original
manuscript, or at least the archetype of all existing
copies, had been mutilated by some accident. But
there is a remarkable fitness in- the abrupt close. The
two last words in particular are so much in the spirit of
the whole, in which the awe surrounding the Lord is
continually felt. So at the transfiguration S. Peter's
words are not the impetuosity of our conventional
explanation, but ' he wist not what to answer ; for
they became sore afraid.' And whether or no the
abrupt close adds to the effect of the whole account of
the visit to the tomb, is there not something very
primitive and real in the reticence which leaves a
multitude of curious questions we would fain put un
answered, yet satisfies because it preserves the proper
mystery of the ineffable wonder? It is argued that
something must be lost, because S. Mark would never
have omitted that definite evidence for and sequel to
the resurrection which all the other evangelists one
way or another give. But read Mark straight through,
and consider whether any addition would leave so
strong an assurance on the imagination as does this
broken splendour, this transient, but unforgettable
flash of light.
There is a like reticence and mystery about the
person of our Lord. Mystery in the proper sense :
not a dimness into which the mind cannot penetrate
at all, a riddle to be received and let alone; but a
wonder which leads us on and on and still extends
beyond our ken, a starting point from the visible to
the eternal. The portrait is an etching in which the
lines are distinct and beautiful in themselves, but
have a further suggestion and inexhaustibly stimulate
the inner eye. A conspicuous instance is the use of
the title 'Son of man.' This is only used by our
Lord. He says the Son of man hath power on earth
to forgive sins (ii. 10) ; is Lord even of the sabbath
(ii. 28); must suffer, die, and after three days rise
again (viii. 81, ix. 31, x. 33 f.); shall come in clouds

THE SON OF MAN 15
with power and glory (xiii. 26) ; he goeth as it is
written of him and is betrayed (xiv. 21) ; shall be seen
sitting at the right hand of power and coming with
the clouds of heaven (xiv. 62). Does our Lord simply
mean ' myself ' when he speaks thus ? From S. Mat
thew's Gospel we are perhaps habituated to think so,
especially if we read it in the late text or in our
Authorised Version. Thus at the confession of S.
Peter, Mark's ' Who do men say that I am ? ' becomes
in Matthew ' Who do men say that the Son of man is ? '
or, in the later text, ' that I, the Son of man, am.'
And the comparison of Mark, Luke, and Matthew on
the sin against the Holy Ghost compels us to reflection.
Mark has : —
' Verily I say unto you, All their sins shall be forgiven
unto the sons of men, and their blasphemies wherewith
soever they shall blaspheme : but whosoever shall blas
pheme against the Holy Spirit hath never forgiveness
but is guilty of an eternal sin ' (iii. 28 f.).
Luke has : —
' Every one who shall speak a word against the Son
of man it shall be forgiven him : but unto him that
blasphemeth against the Holy Spirit it shall not be
forgiven ' (xii. 10).
Matthew carries definition farther in every direc
tion : —
' Every sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto
men ; but the blasphemy against the Spirit shall not
be forgiven. And whosoever shall speak a word against
the Son of man, it shall be forgiven him ; but whoso
ever shall speak against the Holy Spirit, it shall not
be forgiven him, neither in this world, nor in that
which is to come ' (xii. 31 ff.).
Keeping to S. Mark, are there any passages in which
' Son of man ' is simply equivalent to ' myself ? Con
cerning the sabbath, our Lord seems to explain his

16 THE GALILEAN GOSPEL
own meaning by ' the sabbath was made for man.'
'Son of man' might well be taken as in Psalm viii.
and elsewhere in the Old Testament as the ordinary
Hebrew expression for ' man in general.' Yet the
addition ' So that the Son of man is Lord also of the
sabbath ' does add something, but something complex.
No simple ' claim ' is here, but an enrichment of the
idea of the Christ, and of the incarnation. So in the
passage about forgiving sins. So again (when our
thought has been thus prepared) in the Lord's answer to
the high priest. He alluded to a well-known passage
in Daniel. It was therefore a messianic declaration.
But in Daniel this ' Son of man ' is explained as repre
senting no one person by himself but the whole
company of the saints, and we shall see, when we come
to study S. Paul, that this conception of the ' inclusive '
Christ was part of his Jewish inheritance and of his
Christian theology. So again in the predictions of the
passion and resurrection. Here there seems to be an
allusion to another prophetic passage in the Old
Testament, Hosea vi. 2 f. If so it would seem that
our Lord is speaking of something wider than his own
death and resurrection. He is thinking of its results,
for his people, or even for mankind. These predictions
and the word in x. 45, ' For verily the Son of man
came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and
to give his life a ransom for many,' are commentaries
upon one another.1
This is an example, which may be proved typical by
any reader for himself, of a naive faithfulness in Mark.
He gives no explanations. He sometimes observes,
1 Dr. Abbott has written a large book on The Son of Man. His
smaller preparatory volume, The Message of the Son of Man (A. & C.
Black, 1909), is perhaps even more instructive, at least to those
who do not care for laborious detail. Dalman, The Words offestts,
pp. 235-267 (English translation by D. M. Kay : T. & T. Clark,
1902), should also be consulted. Dalman thinks that the original
Aramaic expression, which our Lord must have used, had a. definite
messianic reference, including a half-veiled reference to the suffering
and death of the Messiah. Dalman's authority is weighty but many
scholars disagree with him.

CHARACTER OF MARK 17
and oftener shows unconsciously, how unable the
disciples were to understand our Lord, and especially
the twelve to whom he imparted his deeper ideas.
Matthew and Luke by reflection bring out something
of the meaning which Mark leaves unexpressed. Yet
it sometimes happens that Mark by his very simplicity
preserves some far-reaching turn of expression which
Matthew and Luke, by their play of later thought,
obscure.1 From one point of view after another the
earliness of Mark's narrative is approved ; and in very
many respects the great value of this early witness
impresses us.
It was, however, the plain fact of Mark being verbally
contained in Matthew and Luke which first compelled
assent to Mark's priority. And the immediate result
was the embarrassment of the old-fashioned critics.
They had been led by their studies hitherto to expect
the primitive Gospel to portray Christ as a teacher, a
reformer, with little of the, to him already obsolete,
Judaean crudeness. Miracles too had been a stumbling
block, and it seemed possible to remove the puerile
romance of the miraculous from the original grandeur
of the history.
But if Mark presents the Gospel in its earliest form
all this must be reconsidered. For in Mark there is
little teaching, and the matter of the narrative consists
of the wonderful works of the Lord. Mark is confined
within the limits of Judaism : our Lord scarce seems
to think of those outside Israel. The healing of the
Syrophoenician's daughter is a special case and proves
the rule ; the healing of the centurion's servant is not
recorded by S. Mark. And the Jewish expectation of
the kingdom of God is the spirit which breathes form
into this Gospel from first to last. According to S.
1 This is brought out with large elaboration by Dr. Abbott in The
Fourfold Gospel (Cambridge University Press, 4 vols. ,1914-1917). His
idea is that John often ' intervenes ' to restore Mark's original obser
vation, to which, however, he gives a spiritual, almost allegoric turn
in many instances. The gist of the four large volumes is jgadably_
given in the smaller Introduction of 1913.
B

18 THE GALILEAN GOSPEL
Mark the essence of the Gospel is not Jesus with a
universal doctrine of the fatherhood of God, but Jesus
as the Christ who brings the kingdom of God.
Review the story. John baptising unto repentance.
Jesus baptised receives the Spirit as Son of God. He
proclaims the kingdom at hand ; the long expected, he
has authority to say, is coming now. He calls on his
people to repent and enter the kingdom. Crowds
attend him, regarding him with awe. He heals and
works wonders and casts out devils. He corrects as
with authority the accepted law of the sabbath, and
incurs the opposition of the Pharisees, and can no more
give his message in synagogues. He therefore chooses
apostles, who attend him as a lord and master and are
sent forth by him to spread abroad his good tidings
— the good tidings of the kingdom at hand, that is
' the gospel.' The enthusiasm of the multitude is kept
in check. The very proclamation of the kingdom is
veiled in parables. He suffers none to call him the
Christ. Yet the truth cannot be hid. Compare the
feeding of the five thousand and the feeding of the
four thousand with the last supper. We all recognise
their affinity with one another and with our Holy
Communion. But S. John recognised the sacrament of
the kingdom in that enthusiastic feast of the expectant
saints (John vi.). The people were for making our
Lord their king. Yet that was not the way this
Christ was learning his royal obedience (cf. Heb. v. 8).
To his apostolic followers he imparts at last the
assurance of his Christship, and sets his face towards
Jerusalem that the kingdom may be inaugurated by
his death — and rising again. To Jerusalem he goes.
The twelve themselves fail in sympathy, and cannot
receive this tragic and far-reaching reformation of the
ancient hope. Bartimaeus and the multitude break
out with their exultant all but certainty of antici
pation. Judas tells what secret to the priests ? At
the last supper the Lord concentrates all the mystery
of his divine consciousness into sacramental acts and

MARK AND THE KINGDOM 19
words which end with 'Next time in the kingdom.'
Before the high priest he refuses not his tremendous
title, and as the Christ he is crucified. With 'Eloi,
Eloi,' the deepest awfulness of tragedy is touched. It
almost seems as though the Lord passed to the king
dom and might not see it come, while the centurion
did see it : in such strange manner Mark transcends,
as though unconsciously, the narrow boundary of this
primitive Judaean Gospel. And on the third day the
young man in white array declared that the promise
was fulfilled : Jesus the Nazarene had risen from the
dead. Limitations and immensities. A Son of man, friend
of Galilean fishermen, moving among the simple
multitude, yet never quite one of them, awfully
revered, working wonders, hailed as the Son of God
at the beginning and end of the story, confessed as the
Christ, bringing the kingdom, yet by a shameful death
and with a dreadful cry of desolation ; and yet again
rising on the third day. We can in part understand
this better than the critics of the early nineteenth
century. For us the strange world of late Jewish
apocalypses has been explored. We know, as they
did not, how minds in Judaea, and still more in
Galilee, were seething with expectation ; expectation
of the kingdom, of a Christ, a Christ who should be
at least in some remarkable sense divine, who would
by some notable act of divine power ' restore the
kingdom to Israel.'
Apocalypse is the Greek term corresponding to the
Latin revelation. It means the 'unveiling' of the
future, of the Day of the Lord, concerning which the
great prophets had spoken. To these prophets, Isaiah
and the rest, the Day seems to have been revealed as
the happy holy time which would follow the judgement
each of them saw coming on their people, through
Assyrian or Babylonian invasion. And to them the
Christ (Greek for Messiah, the Lord's Anointed) seems
to have been the king of David's line who would reign

20 THE GALILEAN GOSPEL
righteously, filled with the Spirit of the Lord, in that
near future of blessedness. So on the whole it seems.
Yet those canonical prophets were inspired if ever men
have been, and it is rash to define the limit or the
mode of their spiritual insight. And they inherited a
religious tradition which has left its traces throughout
the Old Testament and which, for better and some
times perhaps for worse, went beyond what we might
consider likely or reasonable. Isaiah himself was
perhaps more apocalyptic, less soberly a statesman,
than we have been ready to allow. Be that as it may,
in the two centuries before the birth of our Lord, a
new kind of prophecy arose, partly founded on the old.
The book of Daniel is the best example. Daniel is
not classed with 'The Prophets' in the Hebrew Bible.
It stands in the later division, ' The Writings.' What
that position implies is confirmed by its character. It
professes to be written for a later age. It is a consola
tion to ' the saints,' not a warning to the rebellious
nation. It veils history and prediction by curious
symbolism. It is concerned with ' the last days ' when
the kingdom of God shall come, when authority in
that kingdom shall be vested in a person, representing
the saints of God but himself endued with super
natural, almost divine character ; and in these last
days there will be a resurrection of the dead for
judgement. This might be a rough epitome of a large number of
books which were written during the two centuries before
the birth of our Lord, and which continued to be written
or rewritten for a century or more afterwards. Many of
these are known to us in whole or part. The books of
' Enoch,' one of which is quoted in Jude 14, are the
most famous. Another reference to the same class of
literature is to be found in Jude 9. The words of the
angel's message in Luke ii. 1 1, ' There is born in the
city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord,' are
almost exactly what we read in one of 'The Psalms of
Solomon,' a collection of * apocalyptic ' pieces of like

APOCALYPSES 21
kind. These apocalypses concentrate interest upon
the kingdom, its coming in the last days by an act of
God. This coming of the kingdom will be the end of
the world — that is, of this present world order. This
end will be the introduction of another, a holy happy
order, which however is pictured in very various
character. Sometimes, though by no means always,
the Messiah — that is, the Anointed One or Christ — is
expected to come as King. When this Christ appears
in the apocalypses it is in a more personal and definite
form than the older prophets had conceived ; and in
one passage in the Enoch books the Christ is clearly
pre-existent and divine, the Son of God in heaven.
Still it must be admitted that, so far as we have
recovered the Jewish apocalyptic literature, God and
the kingdom fill the scene more than the Christ does.
But there is much variety in this respect as in others.
The apocalyptic movement was a popular one. These
books were to the people what our hymns are as
compared with what the Bible is to us. They are
vague and vivid ; a world of devotion mingled with
fancy; influential in the villages, and patronised by
the Pharisees who were always on the side of popular
developement in religion ; coldly looked upon by the
Sadducees, the priestly conservatives in Jerusalem the
holy city. Our own popular notion of the ' messianic
hope' among the Jews is more accordant with what we
find in these apocalypses than with the Old Testament.
The important question follows, whether this was also
the idea of the evangelists and, still more important,
of our Lord.
At any rate the apocalypses explain that fervour of
expectation which is depicted in Luke iii. 15 ff. : ' And
as the people were in expectation, and all men reasoned
in their hearts concerning John, whether it could be
that he was the Christ ; John answered, saying unto
them all, I indeed baptize you with water ; but there
cometh he that is mightier than I, the latchet of
whose shoes I am not worthy to unloose : he shall

22 THE GALTLEAN GOSPEL
baptize you with the Holy Ghost and with fire : whose
fan is in his hand, throughly to cleanse his threshing-
floor, and to gather the wheat into his garner ; but
the chaff he will burn up with unquenchable fire.'
And they explain much in Mark : the interest of the
multitude: their excitement suppressed, growing, break
ing out at last into exultation at the entry into Jeru
salem : the plan of the narrative so simple, so striking in
its progress and its crises : the distinct reason for our
Lord's condemnation and death ; he claimed to be the
Christ and was condemned for blasphemy. The
apocalypses explain too the awe with which the Lord
was regarded ; the Christ was to be a divine person.
And so, with perfect naturalness, Mark presents him
as divine, doing marvellous works, speaking and acting
with authority, knowing himself to have entered upon
his ministry with an assurance from heaven that he
was the Son of God, conscious of his coming passion
and resurrection, conscious also of the redemption
which he was thus to effect for ' many.' Accept Mark
as true history, and the old difficulty of criticism, How
could S. Paul's doctrine of the divine Christ grow out
of the memory of the Galilean teacher ? disappears.
Some might doubt this earliest witness, but there is no
room for doubting that he means to witness to a
divine Christ from the first : whatever else Mark's
Jesus Christ is or is not, he is certainly that.
On the other hand, does not a new difficulty arise ?
It is the freshness of Mark, the simplicity, the con
centration within narrow Jewish limits which makes all
this so plain. We must also quite honestly recog
nise these limits or we stultify the startling evidence
we have gained. The Christ of Mark seems to contem
plate no world-wide redemption : he is merely national.
He proclaims with awful certainty the immediate
coming of the kingdom. But did the kingdom come
immediately ? Was not his bitter cry upon the cross
a cry of disappointment ? Had not his own expecta
tion been too like the expectation of his fellow-country-

THE CHRIST IN MARK 23
men ; not gross indeed, material, political, yet naive as
of some act of God which would be wrought evidently,
at a moment, a wonderful work, the proper consumma
tion of the wonders, the miracles, he had himself
performed ? And if so, what can we say but that he
was mistaken ? ' And he said unto them, Verily I say
unto you, There be some here of them that stand by,
which shall in no wise taste of death, till they see the
kingdom of God come with power ' (ix. 1 ). Did any
of those who heard these words ever see what the Lord
promised by these words ?
S. Mark is our earliest witness to ' the days of the
flesh ' of our Lord. But that is not to say that this
Gospel was written earliest of the books of the New
Testament. It is the earliest of our written Gospels ;
that can be proved by comparison with the other
three : and it preserves more or less exactly the tradi
tion of the Galilean apostles ; that appears very highly
probable from our examination of its contents accord
ing to the principles of historical criticism. Moreover,
it agrees with the tradition that S. Mark was S. Peter's
interpreter and wrote out in his Gospel the catecheti
cal lessons he had heard from S. Peter. Mark's written
Gospel is a perpetuation, so valuable because the writer
seems so free from private cleverness, of the contem
porary oral Gospel.1 But the Gospels were coming into

1 ' The earliest account of the origin of a " Gospel " is that which
Papias has given on the authority of the Elder John (Euseb. , H. E., iii.
39). Papias was himself a " direct hearer " of this John, and John was
a "disciple of the Lord" (if the text of Papias be correct), or at any
rate contemporary with the later period of the apostolic age. ' ' This
also the Elder used to say. Mark having become Peter's interpreter,
wrote accurately all that he remembered (or that he [Peter] mentioned) ;
though he did not record in order that which was either said or done
by Christ. For he neither heard the Lord nor followed Him ; but
subsequently attached himself to Peter, who used to frame his teaching
to meet the wants of his hearers, but not as making a connected
narrative of the Lord's discourses. So Mark committed no error, as
he wrote down some particulars just as he recalled them to mind (or
as he [Peter] narrated them). For he took heed to one thing, to omit
none of the facts that he heard and to make no false statement in his

24 THE GALILEAN GOSPEL
form and use side by side with the epistles of the New
Testament. We shall presently see how the epistle to
the Hebrews may with probability be dated very nearly
when the written Mark appeared, and how Hebrews
shows one way in which this very difficulty about the
limitations of our Lord's manhood and environment
were met by the church at a period when newly
awakened interest in ' the days of his flesh ' intensified
the ' scandal of the cross ' and of the whole ' humilia
tion' of the Lord. We may so far anticipate the
apostolic teaching on this point as to notice that real
manhood necessarily carries with it real limitations,
that all limitation is also opportunity, that (as we shall
presently see in discussing our Lord's teaching) the
absolute and universal ideals of our Lord's moral
precepts may have received their perfect form from the
very simplicity of his expectation of the kingdom, and
that it is only through frank recognition of his real
manhood that we can apprehend his real Godhead.
But when so much has been allowed there still
remain other considerations : and this first. The
' apocalyptic ' view of the early Gospel was brought into
prominence some years ago by a brilliant book called
account of them." This important testimony notices the three points
. . . the historic character of the oral Gospel, the special purpose with
which it was framed, and the fragmentariness of its contents ; and it
was on such an oral basis that our present Gospel of St. Mark is said
to have been founded, according to the evidence of one who must have
known the apostles ' (Westcott, An Introduction to the Study of the
Gospels, c. m. ii. I, a). Dom Chapman shows how probable it is that
the text of Papias is correct, and that by the Elder John he meant the
Apostle ; cf. p. 171.
F. H. Colson shows that 'in order' may have a technical signi
ficance, ' according to the approved arrangement of the rhetorician '
[fournal of Theological Studies, October 1912).
It will be observed by a reader of S. Mark that there is hardly any
thing in this Gospel which might not have been seen or heard by one
of the Twelve. The voice heard by our Lord at the baptism, the
very brief notice of the temptation in the wilderness, may have been
told them by the Lord himself. The events of the Passion after S.
Peter's denial are different, but even without having recourse to the
Fourth Gospel, it is not difficult to imagine means through which these
would at once have been learned by the disciples.

APOCALYPSE AND CRITICISM 25
Von Reimarus zu Wrede by Albert Schweitzer.1 In
Germany the older criticism, represented by such
weighty names as Harnack's, held its own, and
Schweitzer's book gained far less attention than it did
in England. In England it really did inaugurate a
new start in gospel criticism. It seemed to liberate an
impulse, already working, towards a larger and more
generous philosophy than rationalising methods could
satisfy. A host of books articles lectures appeared
popularising opposing developing, sometimes picking
and choosing between what was acceptable and what
was embarrassing to traditional faith; but on the
whole the new idea dominated, that the first beginning
of the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ was intensely
but narrowly apocalyptic.
The pity was that attention was concentrated too
much on the new book about the gospel, whereas it
would have been fairer to Schweitzer himself to have
followed his lead by reading the Gospels again for our
selves without the sophisticated literary prejudices
which had gathered about them. He threw off a
sketch, we turned it into a system. The great thing
he shewed was that it is always wiser to read the
Gospels as they stand, see what they really say,
consider whether the startling parts of them may not
prove, when we recover the environment, the essential
parts ; and to be suspicious of critical manipulation of
1 Von Reimarus zu Wrede, eine Geschichte der Leben-Jesu-forschung
(Tubingen, 1906). Schweitzer describes the attempts to write a life of
our Lord from the publication of the tracts of H. S. Reimarus by
Lessing in 1778 to Professor Wrede's Messiah-Secret in 1901. He
shows that the eschatological clue, indicated by Reimarus and after
wards lost, has at last been recovered. An English translation was
published with the title The Quest of the Historical fesus in 1910.
The best introduction to the subject is Dr. Burkitt's little book The
Earliest Sources for the Life of fesus (Boston and New York ; and The
Riverside Press, Cambridge, 1910). See also Dr. Burkitt's essay on
' The Eschatological Idea in the Gospel ' in Cambridge Biblical Essays
(Macmillan, 1909) ; Dr. Sanday's The Life of Christ in Recent Research
(Oxford, 1907), and Christologies Ancient and Modern (Oxford,
1910) ; and Loisy's fisus et la Tradition evangilique (Paris, 1910).

26 THE GALILEAN GOSPEL
the text. That is a very different principle from
taking j ust what is given and asking no questions ; it
is the recommendation for scientific criticism of patience
with courage, and of continual revivifying of convention
by going back from commentary to original, from art
to nature. Now do this with the Gospel according to
S. Mark. Forget Schweitzer, and the rationalists, and
the traditionalists alike. What is your own impression ?
Certainly the idea of the kingdom governs the whole.
As certainly the death and rising from death of the
Lord is the culmination and completion of the whole.
That culmination was astonishing to every one. Here
a new force breaks in on the Judaic tradition, a force
of such far promising consequences that ' narrowness '
is the last quality to predicate of this surprising drama.
The roots of the Gospel run deep into Judaic history,
but the Gospel itself inaugurates a new era.
Again, the Christ in Mark is evidently and really a
man, evidently and really a Galilean moving among
Galileans. He is hemmed in by strictest human
limitations. But, as we have already seen, this Gospel
arrests our thought from the first, and more and more
as it proceeds, by indicating the more than human
wonder of the words and acts of this man who is the
expected Christ. It arrests and baffles us ; for it is by
itself an imperfect Gospel. It has indeed the pregnant
imperfection of a sketch. It fires imagination. We
long to know what being Christ meant to this Christ.
And so far as this Gospel does help us to an answer, it
surely compels us at every step to suspect that he had a
very different conception of Christhood, of divine Son-
ship, of the needs of man and God's design to meet
these needs, of the ' ransom for many,' from what the
Galileans round him, even the disciples had. The
difficulty, if the word may be excused, the improba
bility of our dogma of the Incarnation must sometimes
occur even to a devout mind. How can it correspond
to the immensity of truth and life in God ? The
answer is that the truth is so immense that no words

APOCALYPSE AND INCARNATION 27
or imagination of ours can ever embrace more than the
fringe of it ; always it means more than we have yet
known as possible ; and each advance in our knowing
strips away some vain presupposition. That is the
temper with which we must approach all theological
study. And Mark, the gospel 'sketch,' seems pro
videntially fitted to awake this temper as we enter upon
the beginning of the history.
However, we are not left with the sketch and our
imagination. The Gospels according to S. Matthew
and S. Luke do partly fill up the outline. Besides
additions to the narrative these Gospels contain dis
courses and conversations of our Lord. He teaches
and his teaching reveals his mind.1
Nor need we put the teaching on a lower level of
historical value than the Marcan narrative. Read
1 The Gospel according to S. Mark, the Greek text with introduc
tion, notes, and indices, by Henry Barclay Swete, D.D., Regius
Professor of Divinity, Cambridge (Macmillan, 1898), is not concerned
with new light from the eschatological idea, but it is a gospel
commentary of unrivalled excellence. The scholarship is consummate,
and the whole treatment is distinguished by an attractive simplicity.
Without knowing Greek one may read a piece of Mark's narrative
with Swete's terse notes and find that the course of the events moves
vividly before one's eyes ; the inner meaning growing proportionately
in clearness. There could be no better preparation for a plain
sermon. Messrs. Macmillan published in 1915 a commentary on S. Matthew
by Dr. A. H. M°Neile, now Regius Professor in Trinity College,
Dublin. It is planned on the same scale and form as Dr. Swete's.
The commentary on S. Luke which has helped me far more than
any other is The Gospel according to S. Luke in Greek, after the
Westcott and Hort text, edited with parallel illustrations, various
readings, and notes, by the Rev. Arthur Wright, M.A., Vice-
President of Queens' College, Cambridge (Macmillan, 1900). The
notes are few, brief, and unlike the generality of notes. The book
serves as a synopsis for the study of the Gospels as well as for S. Luke.
Mr. (now Dr.) Wright had already published A Synopsis of the
Gospels in Greek (Macmillan, 1896), which is useful to those who
find Rushbrooke's Synopticon (Macmillan, 1880) too elaborate or too
expensive. Dr. Wright's Synopsis is meant to illustrate the oral
theory, but one need not accept the oral theory to enjoy the synopsis.
For ordinary purposes, however, Tischendorf's Synopsis Evangelica
(Leipzig, 5th ed., 1884) will satisfy the need of most students. The
headings, etc., are in Latin, the gospel text in the original Greek.

28 THE GALILEAN GOSPEL
Matthew and Luke and you will find that besides the
Marcan narrative there is another common element in
these Gospels, a cycle of teaching which includes the
sermon on the mount and many parables. This is
differently arranged in the two Gospels. In Matthew,
for instance, the sermon is brought together and com
posed upon a plan. In Luke the precepts of the
sermon appear in different places, with variations. Never
theless the community in matter and in phraseology is
close enough to satisfy nearly all who have examined it
that a written document has been used in both Gospels
for this second mass of common matter. If so, it would
be likely that this primitive document was little later,
indeed it might be earlier, than the other document the
evangelists drew upon, i.e. our Mark. And this fits what
tradition tells of the origin of the Gospel according to S.
Matthew. Eusebius again (iii. 39) preserves the testi
mony of Papias that ' Matthew composed the oracles
in the Hebrew language ; and each reader interpreted
them as he could.' We need not linger over the
precise relationship of these ' oracles ' to the document
from which the teaching of the Lord was drawn in our
Matthew and Luke. Nor on the attempts which have
been made to reconstruct the document, nor on the
question whether it also contained a narrative and
whether that narrative furnished details of the story,
especially of the Passion, to our Matthew and Luke.
We may readily admit that it is a precarious venture
to materialise what the lapse of ages has dissolved, and
yet decide that we have in all this a quite reasonable
assurance about that part of the teaching of our Lord
which is common to Matthew and Luke. And closer
attention to this teaching confirms our decision. The
agreement with a difference between this teaching and
the story in Mark must persuade us that both are
primitive. The broad agreement is in this ; that both are
concerned with the kingdom. The difference is that
whereas Mark depicts Jesus Christ bringing in the

TEACHING OF CHRIST IN MATTHEW AND LUKE 29
kingdom, this teaching is about the moral temper
which belongs to the kingdom. ' The kingdom is at
hand : therefore repent ' was the Lord's proclamation.
In Mark we see the first clause in action ; in the
teaching we learn what repentance is. Hence, in the
cruder sense of the word the teaching is less ' apocalyp
tic' than the story.1 That is in the nature of things,
and agrees with those hints of our Lord's thought upon
the subject which we observed in Mark : he was assured
that the kingdom which his countrymen expected was
at hand, but this kingdom was far from what they
crudely imagined. And if so, the manner of its
coming might be very different from the popular
imagination : and if that, then we have no reason to
simplify the tragedy of his victory through failure
into just 'a mistake.'
Before we go further it will be worth while to stay a
minute or two over the word itself. Dalman shows
that in Hebrew and Aramaic the kingdom of God or
of heaven is an abstract rather than concrete idea.
The kingdom is not the city coming down from
heaven foursquare, but the 'rule' or 'sovereignty' of
God. 'Thy kingdom come, thy will be done' is
exactly a right collocation. Such a kingdom might
already be within or in the midst of men (Luke xvii.
21), and yet its king might wistfully ask, ' When the
Son of man cometh, shall he find faith on the earth ? '
(Luke xviii. 8).
But, these cautions being entered, how much the
teaching gains in power and true distinction when it
is read as part of a bold apocalyptic gospel. We
take parables of the seed growing secretly, the pearl of
price and the rest as inculcating the imitation of
Christ in a fresh and lovely way. But the meaning
seems plain enough. We cannot but feel that Christ's
disciples have progressed a good deal since the day
when such parables had a hidden meaning for the
1 For details see B. H. Streeter in Oxford Studies in the Synoptic
Problem (Oxford University Press, 191 1).

30 THE GALILEAN GOSPEL
multitude. But stand among that multitude, be with
them disturbed by hope and doubt, be asking yourself
and your neighbour what this new prophet is reported
to have said about the time being fulfilled and what it
may be supposed he meant, and what his authority,
nay, who he himself may be. Then hear his veiled
words about long secret growth suddenly bursting into
full life — and such is the kingdom ; or about a pearl,
a treasure, found at last, but to enjoy it the finder
must' part with his all — and such is the kingdom.
Then some months later, stand among the multitude
again, and watch the prophet (whom none dare now
approach unsummoned, so sublime has he grown of
late), in colloquy with the Twelve. Then see him
turn from them and cry aloud that all may hear : ' If
any man will come after me, let him deny himself and
take up his cross and follow me. For whosoever wills
to save his own life shall lose it ; but whosoever shall
lose his life for the sake of me and these good tidings
he shall save it. For what doth it profit a man to gain
the whole world and be robbed of his soul ? For what
should a man give in exchange for his soul ? For who
soever shall be ashamed of me and of my words in this
generation, the adulterous and sinful, even the Son of
man shall be ashamed of him when he cometh in the
glory of his Father with the holy angels ' : and then,
after a moment's silence perhaps, ' Verily I say unto you,
there be some of those who are standing here who shall
by no means taste of death until they see the kingdom
of God when it has come in power.' Would you have
made up your mind at last to be among those ' some ' ?
At least you would have understood something you
had not understood before, and why the Lord had used
ambiguous parables to sift the martyr spirits from
those ' who had no depth.'
So again, we have adopted the Lord's Prayer, and we
repeat it many times for the many occasions of our
ordinary day, and its daily bread means the income
that we need for the complicated use and wont of

APOCALYPTIC CHARACTER OF THE TEACHING 31
modern life, and forgiving those who trespass against
us, and being kept from trial or temptation, meant
something very moderate till war enlightened us. But
carry back the mind and think what that prayer meant
to the little flock to whom indeed it was the Father's
pleasure to give the kingdom (Luke xii. 32), but who
were following their Lord in amazement to Jerusalem
where he had three times said he was going to die miser
ably, yet rise again. Then, with the fresh ideas that
such recollection has formed, read again the precepts,
' Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth where
moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break
through and steal. But lay up for yourselves treasures
in heaven where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt,
and where thieves do not break through and steal,' and
' Take no thought for the morrow,' and ' Turn the other
cheek,' and ' Give to him that asketh,' and ' Enter by
the narrow gate' — mark the 'enter'— all these have
sharp significance and need no toning down for men
who are entering the kingdom which will come so soon
and end the world (if you envisage it so pictorially),
or is even now changing the evil world into a life
beyond all comparison in worth and blessedness (if
your feeling is quicker than your imagination).
Whichever mode, imaginative, emotional or what
not, is ours, we cannot conceive this kingdom as a
Galilean might nineteen centuries ago. European civil
isation is not the village life of Galilee ; the exalted
Christ interprets his Galilean simplicities according to
the duties of the still growing kingdom. He himself
did not turn the other cheek when they smote him in
the high priest's house ; his words were never dully
literal. S. Paul bade men labour with their own hands
to get a living : the interpretation from the exalted
Christ had begun even then. But S. Paul says, like
Tolstoy, we are to labour ' with our hands,' and he did
so himself; and he adds that we should do it in order
that we may always have to give to him that is in need.
The sermon on the mount is so remarkable just because

32 THE GALILEAN GOSPEL
it is capable of ever fresh interpretation, yet interpreta
tion is a snare until we are very honest in it. And
that honesty has always a touch of extravagance, of
' apocalyptic' We are being driven (as drives the
Spirit into the wilderness) to-day to consider whether a
nation must not be ' as good as a good man,' and
whether even a national enemy can be forgiven unto
seventy times seven, and if so what forgiveness means
and how its outward manifestations can be harmonised
with loyalty to other requirements of our Lord him
self, and how far generosity is required in disputes
between capital and labour. And the church, conscious
of the sermon on the mount, cannot quite acquiesce
in the prudence of mere statesmanship.
On the other hand, there is a difference between the
sermon on the mount and Tolstoy, of whom we
naturally thought just now. The sermon is broader,
more flexible, more near to life. To employ a con
venient phrase of the philosophers, it is the difference
between the true and an imperfect absolute. To apply
(as we have to do to-day) the sermon to a vaster scale
of duties, will doubtless be a long and costly enterprise.
Yet it can be done. We see it being done in gradual
progression as the scene extends wider and wider in
the New Testament. With the close of the New
Testament indeed there comes a check. Never again
has there been an age of progress quite like that. Yet
that stands in history and is an immortal idea, for
ever effective. Again and again, as fresh needs arise,
men may, if they believe in the kingdom and trust its
divine extravagance, come indefinitely nearer what our
Lord still aims at.
And now for the bearing of all this on our present
critical study of the Gospel. Here as everywhere we
see the divine ideal realised through limitations. Look
ing at Mark's story and the teaching in Matthew and
Luke with the eye of criticism (which of course is
sympathetic, not cold) we see how the simplicity of
social life in Galilee, the simplicity of Jewish messianic

LUKE LEADS TO JOHN 33
expectation, made just this absolute morality possible,
natural, and therefore vital and fruitful for all time.
A word from Schweitzer has had a vogue. He called
our Lord's teaching Interimsethik. In Schweitzer him
self there was a certain enthusiasm, and it is possible
that he glanced at more in this phrase than his followers
allowed. They understood it simply to mean that
since the end of this world might come in a few months,
our Lord could well inculcate a morality for the mean
while which would have been reckless if he and they
had contemplated a long age of human relationships
and duties. Take our Lord's teaching as a whole and
it will appear fair to respond : Let us believe him to
have thought more of quality than of measured time —
' Of that day and that hour knoweth none, not even
the Son' — more of the pearl of great price than of
when the mustard seed would be full-grown; and so
we find him guided by a very homely faith (which he
partly shared with his fellow-countrymen) to an ideal
which just at that interval of time and just in those
circumstances he was able to make men realise.
If we allowed ourselves at this point to appeal to
the Gospel according to S. John we might go much
farther in attributing interpretation of the current
ideas to our Lord. But that Gospel is almost the
latest book of the New Testament and we cannot
understand its testimony aright till we have followed
the developement which it completes. But preparation
for S. John begins even in the synoptic Gospels. The
Gospel according to S. Luke is one of the links between
Mark and John. An example will explain what is
meant by this assertion. In Luke xvii. 20 f. our Lord,
being asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God
cometh, answered, ' The kingdom of God cometh not
with observation, nor yet shall they say, Behold, here
or there : for behold, the kingdom of God is within
you.' The Greek word for 'within' should perhaps
be translated ' among,' but that is little to our purpose.
Take it either way and still our Lord is saying that
c

34 THE GALILEAN GOSPEL
the coming of the kingdom is not a future event to be
observed as events are observed : it is an influence even
now present among men, it is to be manifested in
spiritual mode rather than to come, as from a distance,
at a future hour. But this is the doctrine which in
John fills our Lord's discourses. It is just on this line of
' the eternal present ' that in John he transforms the
Jewish tradition of the advent. And in Luke we
find our Lord uttering a Johannine idea in synoptic
language. Does this mean that the ideas of the
Johannine Christ were indeed the ideas of our Lord
Jesus, that in John they are drawn out by a disciple's
memory and reflection, while in Luke we have them as
he actually spoke, the style still simple, the thought so
unusual that most of the Galilean apostles wist not
what he meant and let it pass ?
Perhaps no other passage can be found in which
resemblance to John is obvious, though we may note
in passing the reference (iv. 44), obliterated in the
later text, to our Lord's preaching in the synagogues
of Judaea as throwing some faint light on the ministry
in Jerusalem which is so expanded in John. But there
is in Luke, and peculiar to Luke, a whole cycle of
teaching which is marked by a certain subtlety as well
as by other characteristics. Take the parable of the
unjust steward (xvi. 1-12). The main lesson is plain.
This rascally steward was so clever, bold, and pains
taking in his dishonesty, that the master whom he
tricked could not refrain from a sort of admiration,
and our Lord says that the children of light ought
then in their holier wisdom to be as bold and pains
taking as the men of the wicked world are. But that
being settled, our Lord adds, ' And I say to you, make
to yourselves friends of the mammon of unrighteousness,
that when it fails they may receive you into the
eternal tabernacles. He that is faithful in the least
matter is faithful also in the greater, and he that is un
just in the least is unjust also in the greater. If
therefore you were not faithful in the unrighteous

LUKE'S PARABLES : THE UNJUST STEWARD 35
mammon, who will entrust the true to you ? And if
you were not faithful in the alien matter, who will give
to you that which is our proper wealth ? ' The sense has
been obscured by the change of ' when it fails ' to ' when
ye fail ' in the late text ; ' it ' is ' the mammon of un
righteousness,' worldly wealth, which, however used,
must fail at last. But the appended moral is an
assurance to men of business that they may do business
and follow Christ. There is indeed something in
mammon or money which makes a problem — what man
of business knows not that? Nevertheless, business
may be a school of honour, a transforming of competi
tion into friendship, and honour in business is a step
towards, one might almost say, a sacrament of eternal
faithfulness. Here is, it would seem from the Lord
himself, an interpretation for practical life of the
extreme apocalyptic vigour, and an interpretation
which has a meditative intellectual tinge, not quite
like the profound simplicity of our Lord's wisdom
generally ; and yet again, it is like that ; it is aphoristic,
veiled in ambiguous parable.
Now notice the setting of this parable. It follows
the story of the prodigal son. No connexion of time
or occasion is indicated. It is followed by the sneer of
the Pharisees who, says S. Luke, were lovers of money,
and that leads to another story about riches, the rich
man and Lazarus. First, however, a few lines are inter
posed about the law and the prophets and John the
Baptist and how every one is forcing tbeir way into the
kingdom ; about the permanency of the law ; about
divorce. The matter of these few lines is common to
Luke and Matthew, but whereas in Matthew it is
distributed into orderly contexts, here it is just huddled
in. We remember with surprise how Luke promised
in his preface to tell everything ' in order.1
However, we get another impression when we read
this Gospel through. Such disconnected scraps are
few. The connexion of the three parables just noticed
is quite reasonable, though it is a connexion of idea not

36 THE GALILEAN GOSPEL
of time. These come too from some source which
Luke alone has used. In his preface he appears to
assert that he had drawn from many sources, and that
is how his narrative strikes us. He had an abundance
of matter which overflowed the plan laid down in Mark.
Luke keeps that plan, enlarging it by an introduction,
epilogue, and a long digression. After his preface, i.
1-4, he puts his ' Gospel of the Childhood,' i. 5-ii.
Then he begins the Ministry in iii., carries it on to
the Feeding of the Five Thousand and the Confession of
S. Peter in ix., and at ix. 51 records the start upon
the journey to Jerusalem. That is taken up again at
xvii. 11. The ministry in Jerusalem follows. Then,
xxii.-xxiv., the passion, crucifixion, and resurrection,
with important enrichments from Luke's store. And
the book ends with the journey to Emmaus and other
appearances of the risen Lord, at the last of which he
blesses all the disciples and parts from them, and
(according to some texts) is carried up into heaven.
Between ix. 51 and xvii. 11, the start and the
resumption of the journey to Jerusalem, Luke arranges
a quantity of matter, chiefly teaching, which he found
no place for in the movement of his narrative. A good
deal of this is common to him and Matthew, other
pieces of this common matter being placed by Luke
within the story proper. Matthew, who has a very
masterly arrangement of his own, seems to have drawn
together what he derived from this important common
source so as to express his very definite idea of our
Lord's law-giving for his new kingdom. Luke, with
another conception of our Lord's character and purpose,
and having a great variety of collected information,
prefers another expedient. And it looks as though he
had taken less liberty with his material than Matthew
did : but that is not a point to dogmatise upon,
certainly not before we have examined Matthew's
Gospel also.
All this detail about order and sources may read
tediously. The more serious objection is that to be

ARRANGEMENT AND CHARACTER OF LUKE 37
satisfactory it ought to be much more fully and precisely
treated. But that has been done in many books large
and small, and this book is not designed to repeat what
has been so well provided elsewhere. Going back to
chapter xvi., let us once more consider that context of
the parable of the unjust steward. The prodigal son,
the unjust steward, the rich man and Lazarus ; we call
these parables, but they are stories rather than simili
tudes or parables proper. And they have no bearing
on the coming of the kingdom, they strike home far
more directly upon our life to-day. And the prodigal
son : what tenderness, what pathos, what theology.
The rich man and Lazarus : this is often referred to as
authority for the dogma of everlasting punishment,
but read the story and consider its larger emphasis.
The rich man and the poor : there is the main point
for conscience. The better mind to which the rich man
has been brought by his torment, that is at least a
point of some importance in the problem of punish
ment. And not to pursue these characteristics further,
do we not feel that we are almost in another world
from Mark's? The world of the Gospel according
to S. Luke : Luke's idea of the Christ, of the Gospel :
can we describe or suggest this in a few lines ?
Well, there is tenderness, sympathy for the poor, and
a burning zeal against those who use riches ill and
oppress or neglect the poor, and admiration for a
Zacchaeus who dares a princely act of generous res
titution. There is honour for women. There is an
insistence on the possibility of forgiveness of sins, with
which is associated a deep sense of the weakness and
ignorance of man, of the magnanimity of God, of the
joy of penitence. The bounds of the Gospel widen;
to Samaritans, to all the nations beginning from
Jerusalem. This catalogue may be enlarged by any reader of
the Gospel. It is evident that Luke's picture is more
complex than Mark's, or than Mark's with the added
teaching that is common to Luke and Matthew. Cer-

38 THE GALILEAN GOSPEL
tainly Luke includes the simple primitive view of Christ
and the kingdom, but his Christ has other thoughts
and interests as well, the kingdom is the transforma
tion of the present order of the world, not absolutely
its supersession. And for this Luke prepares us by
the opening chapters, the Gospel of the Childhood.
It has been observed by Dr. Sanday x and others that
these chapters bear upon them the signs of good tradi
tion. With the fall of Jerusalem the ancient worship
and church life of Judaism passed away. After that
it was as difficult to describe the old state of things
quite naturally, as it is for a post-reformation historian
to reproduce the daily life of medieval England. But
these chapters tell a story of the earlier times quite
naturally. To take one point which is close to our
purpose, the outlook is the limited messianic outlook
of Judaism before the Gospel. The Magnificat is very
Marcan, the zealous faith of youth in the righting of
wrongs and the overthrowing of oppressors. The
Benedictus is the priest's faith in the dawn of a day
when forgiveness of sins will bring light and freedom.
The Nunc Dimittis is the aged pilgrim's vision of peace.
But the 'light to lighten the Gentiles' is the only
phrase that reaches beyond Israel, and that is just the
old prophetic language and it is co-ordinated with ' the
glory of thy people Israel.'
True; and yet the whole impression we get from
these hymns is deeper than that. It is so spiritual.
' My kingdom is not of this world,' ' The kingdom of
God is righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy
Ghost.' S. Luke would have us believe that our Lord
learned, what the apostles promulgated, a broad, sweet,
holy doctrine of the kingdom from those 'quiet in the
land ' among whom he grew up and was educated.
The question therefore presents itself, whether this
1 See The Life of Christ in Recent Research, pp. 165 ff., and a
sermon by Professor Box on ' The Christian Messiah in the light of
Judaism ancient and modern,' published in the fournal of Theological
Studies, April 1 91 2.

THE GOSPEL OF THE CHILDHOOD 39
view is historical. These hymns for instance : can we
suppose they were really uttered by the Blessed Virgin,
Zacharias, and Simeon ? Professor Box thinks they
were taken by Luke from the worship of the earliest
Palestinian church. If we press beyond that, what
good reason can be brought against their being what
they profess to be ? None, except that such dramatis
ing has always been usual in worship and in literature.
The early Palestinian church may well have thrown
the thought and situation into this concrete form. But
on the other hand the hymns are simple and natural,
almost every phrase of them drawn from the familiar
language of the Old Testament. Aramaic or Hebrew
would probably have been the original language whether
of the three speakers or of the early worship. Luke
gives them in Greek. More than that we have really
no right to aver about the stages of their composition.
At any rate they interpret to us almost as primitive a
conception of the beginning of the Gospel as could be.
There is indeed a certain art in Luke's introduction
of them, in the three ideas they stand for, just as there
is art in the whole picture of the Lord's birth and
childhood. Luke is a fine artist. Read his preface
with the sentence rolling on and breaking like a wave
on ri]v da-ffjaXetav, 'the certainty.' Read his account of
Zacchaeus' meeting with our Lord ; of the trial before
Pilate, with the gathering tumult before the judgement
seat and the sudden stillness when Pilate yields and
then gives sentence ; these are but instances, chosen at
hazard, of what may be observed throughout the
Gospel and throughout Acts. We have been using the
symbol ' Luke,' not the name ' S. Luke,' so as not to
beg the question of who precisely this author was. It
seems almost certain from the conspicuous references to
the fall of Jerusalem in his prophecy of the last days
in chapter xxi. that his Gospel was finished, whenever
it may have been begun, later than a.d. 70. But that
is merely a confirmation of what the preface had already
shown. He was no eye-witness, he belonged to the

40 THE GALILEAN GOSPEL
apostolic not the Galilean period. There is nothing
in the Gospel to prevent his having been Luke the
beloved physician of S. Paul, but we may leave our
final decision on that point till we deal with S. Paul.
For the present we may be content to think of him as
a member of the first-century apostolic church who
wrote the Gospel and at any rate the greater part of
the Acts, a practised writer, consciously a historian.
Does not the experience of his readers allow us also to
say this ? He has composed the Gospel which we
western people find most in harmony with our mode of
thinking ; it is our favourite Gospel because it is the
easiest for us to understand.
That need not mean that he has therefore so trans
formed the eastern original as to be untrustworthy : it
rather means that his literary conscience is so like our
own that we can see how carefully he seeks to get and
keep the truth. Of all the evangelists he is, according
to our notion, most historical. He is poetic, imagina
tive, skilful in making words do work ; he may have
his idea, his purpose, as in Acts it is commonly said
he is ' apologetic ' and desires to recommend Christian
ity to those (perhaps the Romans) who misunderstood
it. But this describes history as distinguished from
statistics, chronicles, legends, and ballads. Mark is
something like a prose ballad, naive and strictly faith
ful, as far as it goes. Luke is the work of a historian,
who has perceived the richness, the many-sidedness,
the future implicit in the past, the difficulty, beauty,
delicacy of his subject, and has done his best to bring
out all its true meaning.
As difficult a part of his task as any was offered by
the reports, often perhaps oral, of simple persons who
had nevertheless been eye-witnesses of the Word. When
that eternal Word broke through (so to say) the use
and wont of life it was impossible that such persons —
perhaps that any persons — should preserve an uncoloured
recollection of plain facts accurately observed, or of
plain statements which they had heard and perfectly

LUKE'S HANDLING OF TRADITIONS 41
understood. Examples are the narratives of the
birth and early childhood of the Lord, and of the
sequel to the resurrection, the ascension, and the first
experiences of the little church at Jerusalem. These
are the narratives of the beginning of the Gospel and
of the Acts. The evangelist seems to have written
these in a peculiarly simple direct style. We might
say he wrote in biblical language, if it were not more
probable that he kept as near as he could to the bibli
cal language which his informants used. Yet it is
easy to feel how he has controlled the report, not
reproducing every word but selecting, equally with
good sense and with reverence, and so disposing em
phasis that the essential 'This indeed happened' is
guarded, while mystery — the profound significance — is
thrown around it. An example may be found in Acts
iv. 23-31, the prayer of the company of disciples when
S. Peter and S. John returned after their arrest, and
the place was shaken and they were filled with the
Holy Ghost. And we may, if we will observe Luke's
own reverent and reticent sense of holiness and mys
tery, refer for another example to what this Gospel
records concerning the annunciation, the salutation
and the birth of the Holy Child. It would be hasty
and shallow to say that Luke lifts this out of the
region of the physical : thus to cut off the physical
from the spiritual is just what he will not do. But
the physical is dim in the distinctness of the envelop
ing spiritual ; and painful modern controversy might
perhaps be stilled, and doubts superseded, if the histo
rical conscience of Luke were more considered.
That is almost to say that for us, just now, on this
point, it might be well if Luke were taken first and
Matthew interpreted by him; for in Luke mystery
predominates, in Matthew there is something more
like dogma. Let us dwell no longer on what is too
sacred to bear discussion, and pass to the consideration
of the more general character of Matthew. ' Dogma '
would not be a happy word to press. But ' ecclesiastic '

42 THE GALILEAN GOSPEL
is a not unsuitable epithet for this first Gospel. If
Luke is the favourite Gospel of many, Matthew is the
best known by all. And the reason is not merely that
it stands first. It impresses by its clear arrangement,
its massive dignity, its liturgical movement : no book
more fit for reading in church services. When we talk
of the teaching of Christ, we mean on the whole that
sermon on the mount in which the Lord's teaching is
gathered up into one ordered whole, and is proclaimed
as the new law of the kingdom. So the parables
follow, collected again and illustrating the idea. So
the narrative unfolds till, as in Mark and Luke, it
culminates in S. Peter's confession (xvi. 13 ff.). But
now the confession is fuller and more sonorous, ' Thou
art the Christ, the Son of the living God.' And then
follows the authoritative response of the royal Christ :
' And Jesus answered and said unto him, Blessed art
thou, Simon Bar-Jonah : for flesh and blood hath not
revealed it unto thee, but my Father which is in heaven.
And I also say unto thee, that thou art Peter, and upon
this rock I will build my church ; and the gates of hell
shall not prevail against it. I will give unto thee the keys
of the kingdom of heaven : and whatsoever thou shalt
bind on earth shall be bound in heaven : and whatsoever
thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.1
Is this history? Did our Lord really utter these
words ? The question is not like that former question
about the Magnificat, Benedictus, and Nunc Dimittis.
A little recollection showed that, though you could
never prove the three persons named to have actually
spoken those hymns, still you could bring no evident
reason against their having done so. Here there is the
silence of the other evangelists, and the strong feeling
which forces itself upon the reflective reader that these
are unusual words for the Lord Jesus to have spoken.
But yet again reflect. Is the sense of the words so
strange ? We can believe from Mark at least as much
as from any other document that the Lord spoke with
more than man's authority. The binding and loosing

MATTHEW AND DOGMA 43
is a Jewish formula expressing a commission which
Jewish churchmen believed to be entrusted to men.
And when it is objected that the Gospels do not make
it clear that our Lord ever intended to found a church,
the obvious retort must be, What do you mean by the
church ? Was not the calling and training of the
Twelve a founding of the church, if only the beginnings
of the church be regarded with proper simplicity ?
Some modern writers make a good deal just now of the
dominance of Rome even in the latter half of the second
century,1 and this passage has accordingly been marked
as an interpolation in the interest of Roman claims, a
precarious conjecture where no textual variation gives
any hint of such a thing. But such suspicions are bred
from reading later precision into words which still
stand for ideas rather than rules. So again in xviii.
17, ' tell it unto the church ' : the margin of the
Revised Version, ' or congregation,' restores the antique
flavour of the phrase.2
Nevertheless it may be doubted whether our Lord
used just these words on just this occasion. Are they
not a summary of his doctrine rather than a single
authoritative pronouncement? Compare the conclu
sion of this Gospel with its command to make disciples
of all nations, 'baptizing them into the name of the
Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.1 There
is a certain difficulty in such a rubrical direction from
the mouth of our Lord, especially of the Lord risen
from the dead and holding communication, ineffably,
with his apostles. But as a summary of the Gospel
lived and taught by him the words are appropriate.3
1 See for instance Bacon, The Fourth Gospel in Research and
Debate (New York, 1910).
a Cf. Burkitt, Evangelion da-Mepharreshe, ii. p. 275. The old
Syriac was like R.V. marg. : the Peshitto corrected and defined.
3 See the Bishop of Ely in /. T.S., January 1907. Mr. Conybeare
had cited Eusebius' omission of part of the formula in the text, arguing
therefrom against the trustworthiness of the whole tradition. Dr. Chase
in answer made this suggestion of the 'summary.' In a succeeding
number the Dean of Wells, Dr. J. A. Robinson, objected to Dr. Chase's
explanation, and put forward a different plea for the defence.

44 THE GALILEAN GOSPEL
And all this tends to bring out the character of the
whole Gospel. It is, one cannot but feel, later than
Luke. Its outlook is later than S. Paul's, at least in
his first missionary period when he was expecting
Christ to come before many of the faithful had fallen
asleep. 'The kingdom is at hand.' ' Ye shall see the
Son of man coming with the clouds.1 Matthew indeed
as well as Luke keeps these sayings and many others
like them. Luke adds, enlarges, makes us understand
that the Lord meant more than the obvious meaning
of such sayings. Matthew carries us on to another
point of view. We look back with the eyes of the
settled apostolic church for whom the end is not yet.
' Teach them to observe all things whatsoever I com
manded you : and lo, I am with you alway, even unto
the end of the world ' ; with that command and promise
the Lord fitly closes the Matthaean history. Jesus the
Christ, as he appeared to a Galilean fisherman during
the year or two he followed his Lord to the cross and
the resurrection: that is the Gospel according to S.
Mark. Jesus Christ the Master, revealing more and more
his divine wisdom, holiness, sympathy, zeal, power, and
unfathomable in his origin and purpose : that is the
Gospel of S. Luke. Jesus, the anointed king under
whom we now live, remembering his earthly life and
fashioning our loyalty by his example, a mystic figure
in the past, a very present help in every trouble now :
that is the Gospel according to S. Matthew. There is
the disciple's memory, the historian's insight — both of
these recalling the past : and here is the worshipping
church which formulates the record of the past to rule
its present energy and its confidence for the future.
' Matthew composed the oracles in the Hebrew
language ; and each reader interpreted them as he could,1
said Papias.1 These oracles were one of Luke's sources ;
they were the foundation of our completed Greek
Matthew. The two metaphors are severally apt.
1 Euseb. H.E. iii. 39. Cf. supra, p. 28.

MATTHEW THE LITURGIC GOSPEL 45
Matthew is built up, and as in an ancient church the
work has been done anonymously. S. Matthew wrote
his Gospel in Judaea ' while Peter and Paul were found
ing the church at Rome,' says Irenaeus, and it was ' for
the use of Jewish converts and in their national
language.' *¦ Irenaeus is not a first-hand authority like
Papias, and his account may be interpreted somewhat
largely. It is but an hypothesis, we cannot be certain
about these far off things ; but it seems to explain both
the external evidence and the character and content of
the Gospel itself if we imagine some such process as
this. The primitive church at Jerusalem for a while
continued its ancestral Jewish practices of worship.
The coming of the Lord was looked for daily. His
prayer was repeated, his sacrament of hope was cele
brated, showing forth his death ' till he should come,'
but little more was needed for the institution of religion
during the brief interval that remained. Then, as is
sketched at the beginning of Acts, delay led on to
settled faith and work. Institutions were adopted,
elders, charities, deacons, ordered worship. Interest of
memory was roused, and the Hebrew oracles of S.
Matthew were read in the church services. S. Paul
and persecution forced the church to become missionary.
New communities were founded. In their worship too
the oracles were read, translated now as each best
could ; translated and combined with the narrative of
the Saviour's deeds and death and resurrection. Trans
lation brought adaptation with it. The glad and
solemn service was an example of faith expressing an
idea in orderly sequence, and the Gospel that grew out
of the lections, as they had fallen into form and order
since they were first selected from the collection of
S. Matthew, was moulded into harmony with the rest
of the liturgy. The faith and hope and penitence, all
the needs and conscience of the divine family were
reflected in its Gospel, and its testimony and their spirit
1 Irenaeus c. Haer. iii. I. I (ap. Euseb. HE. v. 8) ; Westcott,
Introd., iv. 2. i.

46 THE GALILEAN GOSPEL
had reciprocal influence, regulating and stimulating
developement. The developement would take time.
No reference to the Gospel in Christian literature would
prove it to have been finally settled in shape and con
tent before the beginning of the second century, which
is just the date of the church's emerging from its
apostolic inspiration into its period of consolidation.
Of course this is but an hypothesis,1 a guess about
long past facts in order to account for facts that may
still be observed. Nor is it an hypothesis which would
be accepted by all the observers, that is, by all readers
of this Gospel. And this admission is important. It
means that, spite of all we have been noticing, the
impression generally left by the whole is so strongly
primitive. It certainly is, and the hypothesis was
meant to include this impression. Whatever varia
tions were made in arrangement, whatever adaptations
were made in the tradition of the Lord's words, what
ever additions were drawn from records and memories
to fill up the story, all this was done with scrupulous
honesty and reverence. Acts and S. Paul's epistles
and the Gospel and epistles of S. John all shew how
the apostles kept the enthusiasm of the Christian
people in check. What the apostles guarded was also
guarded by their successors. Private gospels, extrava
gant and credulous, were multiplied in the second
century. In the solemn ordered worship of the church
the ancient Gospel remained the norm of Christian life
and Christian thought.
And it was amply sufficient to satisfy the heart.
' Come unto me all ye that labour and are heavy laden,
and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and
learn of me ; for I am meek and lowly in heart : and
1 Partly suggested by some sentences in Dr. Burkitt's Earliest
Sources for the Life of fesus, p. 118: 'Some of the freshness of Mark
is gone, and the style has a certain hieratic and set character, which
seems like a premonition of future ecclesiastical use. No one can
doubt 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.'

MATTHEW'S JEWISH COLOUR 47
ye shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is
easy and my burden is light1 (xi. 28 ff.). This is one
of the ' additions ' in the completed Matthew. It has
something of the ring of the Matthaean summaries.
We may or may not be inclined to imagine that the
saying achieved its perfect liturgical form gradually,
by repeated devotional use, as did our Gloria in excelsis.
But we may also feel assured that it crystallises what
the Lord himself did say, and that it was not added
to the ' All things have been delivered unto me of the
Father * until the church had been thoroughly satisfied
of its being a genuine fragment of Galilean recollection.
There we see Matthew sympathetic to the heart of all
the worshipping disciples, rescuing from oblivion an
echo of the gentleness of Christ. In xix. 28 the con
verse of this is to be found. 'And Jesus said unto
them, Verily I say unto you, that ye which have fol
lowed me, in the regeneration when the Son of man
shall sit on the throne of his glory, ye also shall sit
upon twelve thrones, j udging the twelve tribes of Israel.'
That promise would have sounded natural enough
from the Galilean Christ to Jewish disciples; it was
part of their traditional hope. But how strange, how
all but incomprehensible, it seems to us. And strange
too it must have seemed to many as Aramaic gave
place to Greek, and Gentile hearers took the place of
Jewish. But it was in the primitive record : Luke has
it as well as Matthew : therefore it was preserved : the
antique Gospel was not to be toned down to suit new
taste. In Luke it is toned down a little. The context
suggests a mystical interpretation (Luke xxii. 24-30),
and the old apocalyptic phrase is kept by Matthew
more wholly than by Luke (cf. Acts iii. 21, i. 6). And
that indeed is characteristic of Matthew. The Jewish
Gospel it used to be called. Its Jewish colour is
obvious, the liturgical form is less immediately observed.
And the outcome of the whole examination is that
Matthew as well as Luke concur with Mark in faith
fulness to the original tradition of the good tidings, to

48 THE GALILEAN GOSPEL
the original impression made by the Lord Jesus Christ
on those who heard and saw him.
Faithfulness ; yet not without interpretation and
reflection. But that must be admitted even in Mark.
Our Lord spoke Aramaic ; the earliest written Gospel
is in Greek, a translation from the primitive event,
and translation implies new men and minds to read
it. As soon as translation appears a different set
of traditions has flowed into the main stream : the
absolute pristine simplicity is passed. And the very
distinctness of the apocalyptic idea in Mark betrays
reflection, however unconscious : the story comes re
flected from a mind which puts things clearly because
it does not see all things. Matthew and Luke see
more, but they see their more with less clearness.
So, when we look back and consider what we have
gained by our examination of these three presentations
of the first tradition, we must acknowledge this to
begin with. We cannot quite recover what the Gali
lean disciples felt, still less dare we define precisely
what their Master thought of himself and of his work.
We know all we need to know in order to go on learn
ing about him from the rest of the New Testament,
from the growing experience of the church through
succeeding centuries, and from our own experience.
'I do not think we have material for constructing a
consecutive life of Christ: we can know all that we
need about him,' Dr. Headlam somewhere says.
Secondly, we perceive that these Gospels start from
the visible, the earthly, the human. When ' Jesus came
from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptised of John
in the Jordan ' (Mark i. 9) he came as a man among
men. It may be necessary, if we ' would rightly think
of the incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ,1 that we
should think of the person, in whom the two natures
are held together, as divine, and keep that steadfastly
before us as the regulative principle for doctrine. But
historically, to the reader of the Gospels, that principle

MATTHEW, MARK, LUKE : GENERAL RESULTS 49
is discovered in due course : the story does not start
with it. And indeed when the light of external history
is brought to bear on the composition of the Gospels,
it would appear more than probable that one main
object of the evangelists was to freshen and restore and
guard the doctrine of the real manhood of Christ.
Thirdly however we notice that the apprehension
of the Christhood, and therefore of the more than man
hood of the Lord, begins at once, at the very moment
of the baptism. And that is conspicuously so in Mark,
and it is connected with an apocalyptic view of the
whole Gospel which is intense and penetrating, but
strange to modern western minds, and set about with
difficulties and limitations.
Fourthly, these limitations promise on closer
attention to prove opportunities and faculties : the
glory shines through the humiliation. No other way
could victory have come, redemption have been wrought,
through the cross. Christianity in fact must neces
sarily be apocalyptic. Apocalypse appears at the
beginning in a fleeting form which gradually wears
away as the faith of the New Testament matures. But
it comes also with a moral essence ; and that can never
be disregarded. All worldliness of course is clean
contrary to this. But other and better tempers are
also contrary. Rationalism, the temper which reasons
before it believes,1 may be very moral, the scrupulous
ness of a noble conscience, and being so it cannot be
' far from the kingdom of God.' But it is contrary to
this essential gospel temper : and so we see how again
and again rationalism comes in to refresh, like salt,
conventional faith, yet abides not, and having done its
work is absorbed by the recovered heroic spirit of the
ancient Gospel.
And yet again, fifthly and lastly, an exaggerated
estimate of the apocalyptic element in this primitive
Gospel is false. We do not know all curiosity might
wish to know about Jesus Christ ' in the days of his
1 See Newman's Oxford Sermons, passim.
D

50 THE GALILEAN GOSPEL
flesh,' but we may be sure we gain no accuracy by
making the problem simpler than it is. Mark was too
long neglected. There is no good reason for accepting
the rediscovered Mark as the only witness that stands
the test of historical science. Matthew and Luke are
to be read with proper caution, but there is no need to
check the profound emotions which they rouse. It is
one of the critic's duties to purge himself of sophistica
tion, and when his critical faculties are wide awake,
then to read naturally again. Apply, not some, but
all the critical tests to Matthew and Luke, and their
more complex insight wins credence, and enlarges the
intellect as well as the heart. It is true that Matthew
and Luke carry the reader over that imperceptible line
which distinguishes the ministering from the exalted
Christ. But so in large degree does Mark. There is
no other way of studying the New Testament.

II

THE GALILEAN GOSPEL INTERPRETED BY S. PAUL
THE AMBASSADOR OF CHRIST CRUCIFIED,
RISEN AND TO COME.
Much of S. Paul's life may be gathered from his epistles.
He was one of those who can talk about themselves
and give pleasure thereby. Here are a few passages
out of many, for a whole chapter might be made by
collecting all he tells about himself in his letters :
' If any other man thinketh to have confidence in
the flesh, I yet more : circumcised the eighth day, of
the stock of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew
of Hebrews ; as touching the law, a Pharisee ; as
touching zeal, persecuting the church ; as touching the
righteousness which is in the law,found blameless. How-
beit what things were gain to me, these have I counted
loss for Christ. Yea verily, and I count all things to
be loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ
Jesus my Lord : for whom I suffered the loss of all
things, and do count them but dung, that I may gain
Christ, and be found in him ' (Phil. iii. 4 ff.).
' For I make known to you, brethren, as touching
the gospel which was preached by me, that it is not
after man. For neither did I receive it from man, nor
was I taught it, but it came to me through revelation
of Jesus Christ. For ye have heard of my manner of
life in time past in the Jews' religion, how that
beyond measure I persecuted the church of God, and
made havock of it : and I advanced in the Jews'
religion beyond many of mine own age among my
61

52 THE GALILEAN GOSPEL INTERPRETED BY S. PAUL
countrymen, being more exceedingly zealous for the
traditions of my fathers. But when it was the good
pleasure of God, who separated me, even from my
mother's womb, and called me through his grace, to
reveal his Son in me, that I might preach him among
the Gentiles ; immediately I conferred not with flesh
and blood : neither went I up to Jerusalem to them
which were apostles before me : but I went away into
Arabia ; and again I returned unto Damascus.
' Then after three years I went up to Jerusalem to
visit Cephas, and tarried with him fifteen days. But
other of the apostles saw I none, save James the Lord's
brother. Now touching the things which I write unto
you, before God, I lie not. Then I came into the
regions of Syria and Cilicia. And I was still un
known by face unto the churches of Judaea which
were in Christ : but they only heard say, He that once
persecuted us now preacheth the faith of which he
once made havock ; and they glorified God in me '
(Gal. i. 11 ff.).
He goes on to tell at length of another visit to
Jerusalem fourteen years later. He went up, he says,
' by revelation,' and he insists on his apostleship being
still committed to him by the Lord and not by the
church at Jerusalem and how he and Barnabas were
recognised by James and Cephas and John ' who were
reputed to be pillars " as divinely sent to the Gentiles ;
and how some time afterwards he stood against Cephas
at Antioch for the freedom of the Gentiles from the
law. Compare 1 Cor. ix. 1, ' Am I not free? Am I
not an apostle ? Have I not seen Jesus our Lord ?
Are not ye my work in the Lord ? ' And again speak
ing of the risen Lord, after enumerating those by
whom he was ' seen,' he writes (1 Cor. xv. 8 ff.) :
' And last of all, as unto one born out of due time,
he appeared to me also. For I am the least of the
apostles, that am not meet to be called an apostle,
because I persecuted the church of God. But by the

S. PAUL'S STORY IN HIS LETTERS 63
grace of God I am what I am : and his grace which
was bestowed upon me was not found vain ; but I
laboured more abundantly than they all : yet not I, but
the grace of God which was with me.'
And here, in 2 Cor. xi. 21 ff., is his picture of the
laborious apostolic life :
' Yet whereinsoever any is bold (I speak in foolish
ness), I am bold also. Are they Hebrews ? so am I.
Are they Israelites ? so am I. " Are they the seed of
Abraham ? so am I. Are they ministers of Christ ?
(I speak as one beside himself) I am more ; in labours
more abundantly, in prisons more abundantly, in
stripes above measure, in deaths oft. Of the Jews
five times received I forty stripes save one. Thrice was
I beaten with rods, once was I stoned, thrice I suffered
shipwreck, a night and a day have I been in the deep ;
in journeyings often, in perils of rivers, in perils of
robbers, in perils from my countrymen, in perils from
the Gentiles, in perils in the city, in perils in the
wilderness, in perils in the sea, in perils among false
brethren ; in labour and travail, in watchings often, in
hunger and thirst, in fastings often, in cold and naked
ness. Beside those things that are without, there is
that which presseth upon me daily, anxiety for all the
churches. Who is weak, and I am not weak ? Who
is made to stumble, and I burn not ? If I must needs
glory, I will glory of the things that concern my
weakness.1 And he goes on to show the inward glory and power
of the same apostolic life : ' And he hath said unto me,
My grace is sufficient for thee: for power is made
perfect in weakness. Most gladly therefore will I
rather glory in my weaknesses, that the strength of
Christ may rest upon me. Wherefore I take pleasure
in weaknesses, in injuries, in necessities, in persecu
tions, in distresses, for Chrises sake : for when I am
weak, then am I strong' (2 Cor. xii. 9 ff*.).

54 THE GALILEAN GOSPEL INTERPRETED BY S. PAUL
' Power is made perfect in weakness.1 So the true
text, not ' my power.1 All these passages reveal S.
Pauls character and mind, while he tells facts. And
this is one of his mental habits, to get as soon as may
be to a principle which co-ordinates the facts, and
supplies confidence to face whatever shall still come.
The whole of this epistle is intensely personal, concrete
and historical, and therefore it is almost more creative
in theology than any.
The epistle to the Philippians was written from
Rome : ' Now I would have you know, brethren, that
the things which happened unto me have fallen out
rather unto the progress of the gospel ; so that my
bonds became manifest in Christ in the whole Prae-
torium,1 which seems to mean as the Revised Version
explains, ' throughout the whole praetorian guard.'
He is in danger of his life, yet confidently expects
release. ' For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain.
But if to live in the flesh, — if this is the fruit of my
work, then what I shall choose I wot not. But I am
in a strait betwixt the two, having the desire to
depart and be with Christ ; for it is very far better :
yet to abide in the flesh is more needful for your sake.
And having this confidence, I know that I shall abide,
yea, and abide with you all, for your progress and joy
in the faith ; that your glorying may abound in Christ
Jesus in me through my presence with you again1
(Phil. i. 12 ff).
The short letter to Philemon at Colossae comes from
the same captivity. 'Wherefore, though I have all
boldness in Christ to enjoin thee that which is befitting,
yet for love's sake I rather beseech, being such a one
as Paul the aged, and now a prisoner also of Christ
Jesus.' The epistle to this Colossian Philemon goes
with the epistle to the Colossians as a church, and that
is closely connected with the epistle to the Ephesians.
All four come from a captivity at Rome, from which
S. Paul hopes to be released. In 2 Tim. iv. 6 ff. we
find him in captivity, it seems a second time, for here

S. PAUL'S STORY IN HIS LETTERS 55
he does not expect release but death. 'For I am
already being offered, and the time of my departure is
come. I have fought the good fight, I have finished
the course, I have kept the faith : henceforth there is
laid up for me the crown of righteousnesss, which the
Lord, the righteous judge, shall give to me at that
day : and not only to me, but also to all them that
have loved his appearing.'
We can make out a good deal of S. Paul's travels
from these letters ; x visits to Jerusalem, a stay at
Antioch, journeyings in Galatia and Asia Minor, in
Greece both Macedonia (the northern part) and
Achaia (the southern) ; churches established in Galatia,
and at Thessalonica, Philippi and Corinth ; at Ephesus,
Colossae and Laodicea ; then captivity at Rome where
there had been brethren in the faith (S. Paul does not
address them as a ' church ' ) to whom he had written
an epistle, some time before he came there. Then
there is the second captivity from which the epistle to
Timothy was written : it looks as though this would
end with his death, and according to ancient and un
varying tradition he was martyred at Rome in the
reign of Nero.
A long list, too, of his friends and companions may be
drawn up from the epistles. Silvanus, Timothy, Titus,
Sosthenes, Tertius who 'wrote' the epistle to the
Romans, Onesimus the runaway slave of Philemon,
whom Paul sent back to his master ' that thou shouldest
have him for ever ; no longer as a servant, but more
than a servant, a brother beloved, specially to me, but
how much rather to thee, both in the flesh and in the
Lord'; Epaphroditus, Tychicus, Mark the cousin of
Barnabas, and Barnabas himself though only in the
1 The best account I know of S. Paul's life and work is S. Paul and
Christianity, by A. C. Headlam, D.D., now Regius Professor of
Divinity at Oxford (Murray, 1913). Dr. Inge, the Dean of S. Paul's,
has lately published his incisive study of S. Paul in Outspoken Essays,
(Longmans, 1919). Dr. A. H. MeNeile, Regius Professor, T.C.D.,
has gathered the latest scholarship, adding valuable matter of his own,
in St. Paul, his life, letters, and Christian doctrine (Camb, Univ,
Press, 1929),

56 THE GALILEAN GOSPEL INTERPRETED BY S. PAUL
early Galatian period. We need not complete the list,
but one other name must have special mention. ' Only
Luke is with me,1 he writes to Timothy at the end of
his course (2 Tim. iv. 11) ; ' Luke the beloved physician1
of Col. iv. 14, ' perhaps the brother whose praise in the
Gospel is spread through the churches 1 of 2 Cor. viii.
18. That last reference may however have been but
an early fancy — it is as early as Origen x — playing on
the still earlier tradition of the church that Luke was
the author of Acts and of that 'former treatise1 or
Gospel which the author of Acts also dedicated to
Theophilus (Luke i. 3, Acts i. 1).
It is from the Acts that we fill up the outline of
events for S. Paul's life. We have in Acts speeches of
S. Paul, and especially three in which he describes his
conversion, that conversion to which he refers in
Galatians. And we have a history of his movements
from the martyrdom of S. Stephen, in which he took
part, to his captivity in Rome. We read of his con
version on the road to Damascus; of his baptism at
Damascus ; of his being brought to Antioch by
Barnabas; of his missionary journey with Barnabas in
Asia Minor; of the council at Jerusalem to consider
the position of the Gentile converts he and Barnabas
had made; of his journey to Greece; his stay at
Ephesus; the second journey to Greece, from which
he returned at last to Jerusalem ; of his arrest in
Jerusalem, trial and imprisonment at Caesarea, appeal
to Caesar, and journey to Rome. And the book ends :
' And he abode two whole years in his own hired
dwelling, and received all that went in unto him,
preaching the kingdom of God, and teaching the
things concerning the Lord Jesus Christ with all bold
ness, none forbidding him,1 a state of things which
corresponds with the happy impression left by the
epistle to the Philippians.
Such correspondence between the epistles and the
Acts is, on the surface and on the whole, the rule ; nor
1 Origen ap. Euseb, H.E. vi. 25 ; Westcott, Introd., c. iii,

CANON OF THE EPISTLES 57
are the ' undesigned coincidences 1 rare. Yet there are
differences, and Acts has nothing to say about a release,
further activity, and a second captivity ; that is, Acts
throws no light on the three Pastoral epistles. And
in any case it is necessary to know something more
about all these documents before we take their authority
for granted.
First then the epistles. The earliest canon or list
is Marcion's, the founder of a famous heresy, who
flourished a.d. 150. He received as PauPs ten epistles
and placed them in this order : Galatians, 1 Corin
thians, 2 Corinthians, Romans, 1 Thessalonians, 2
Thessalonians (Ephesians), Colossians, Philemon, Philip
pians. He spoke indeed of an epistle to the Laodiceans,
but it is all but certain that he meant by this the same
epistle as our Ephesians. If any one will look at
Ephesians i. 1 and Colossians iv. 16 in the Revised
Version he will understand why. The words ' at
Ephesus 1 are omitted in ' some very ancient authorities '
(R.V. margin), and this means that Ephesus was only
one of the addresses of this circular letter, Laodicea
being another. Marcion omits Hebrews and the three
Pastorals. Hebrews does not bear the name of Paul,
and nowhere claims to be his. The Alexandrine church
in the latter half of the second century counted it
among the Pauline letters, but as far as we know no
other church did then, and we only know of the custom
of the Alexandrine church from its scholars Clement
and Origen who criticise it, Origen declaring roundly
that S. Paul could not have composed this epistle
himself, whatever its indirect connexion with him may
be : ' Who wrote the letter,1 he says, ' God knows.1
However, the easy Alexandrine habit of reckoning it
somehow Pauline spread, and from the fourth century
it was counted as Paul's in the east generally, and
by many when they mentioned it casually in the
west. Yet Rome and the west continued for many
centuries to protest that this was contrary to ancient
tradition, and we may be satisfied that from the first

58 THE GALILEAN GOSPEL INTERPRETED BY S. PAUL
Hebrews was not accepted by the church at large as a
letter composed by S. Paul. It certainly does owe
much to S. Paul in its theology, but what is original
and different from his mode of teaching is far more
conspicuous in it, and we should only confuse our
examination of the faith according to Paul, if we took
it into consideration in this chapter.
But there is no such early corroboration of Marcion
in his omission of the Pastorals. Besides the Pauline
epistles enumerated, Marcion admitted only one other
book into his New Testament, the Gospel according to
S. Luke, and not the whole of that. His selection was
evidently arbitrary and private. He seems to have
chosen what he wanted to suit his doctrine without
much respect for the tradition of the church. Never
theless it has for some time begun to appear that in
textual matters much of what his orthodox opponents
condemned as wilful alterations were really varieties of
reading for which he had authority in ancient or con
temporary manuscripts, and it may be that he remains
the sole witness to early doubts about these Pastoral
epistles. Doubts were felt about them as soon as
modern criticism arose, and it cannot be said that these
doubts have been annulled. There is little in the lack
of evidence for S. Paul's release and labours after the
imprisonment recorded in Acts. So far as Acts goes it
would rather lead us to suppose that the two years
were not his last two years of life ; else why is nothing
said about his death ? The conjecture that the author
intended to write a third treatise dealing with the later
years is a more probable one. Still it is only a con
jecture, and the Pastorals are left to tell their own
story unsupported. The main objection to that story
is that the three epistles do not tell much, and have
somewhat the air of making what story they do tell
out of the hints from the earlier epistles. And yet
again this is not so very obvious when they are broadly
read, and if it were so, why did not the composer do
bis work more boldly and tell more to satisfy curiosity ?

THE PASTORAL EPISTLES 59
The answer could only be that he was a truthful person
and unwilling to invent. But then he has invented the
great invention, S. Paul's name and greeting : if so, this
is a contradiction which claims more subtle handling.
Then there is the rather highly developed mechanism
of church order. But we are rather rapidly discover
ing to-day that church order did develope sooner than
used to be supposed ; 1 and after all, the developement
in the Pastorals has not gone so very far. Contrast
the office of Timothy and Titus with the idea of a
bishop in the epistles of Ignatius, and go back from
the tabulated arguments of a critical introduction to
the Pastorals themselves and see how simple and primi
tive the ministry in general, the directions about
widows, and so on, are. The language, the words and
phrases, are not quite the same as in Romans, Cor
inthians, Galatians. Nor is the language of Ephesians
and Colossians. That has roused suspicion about
Ephesians and Colossians, but Colossians at any rate
tends more and more to vindicate itself, and when we
compare the whole Pauline collection with a certainly
unpauline book like Hebrews, we feel the general con
trast so strong that a cautious Grecian will hesitate to
make up his mind about the particular contrast within
the group.
There is, however, one true difficulty which does still
daunt the student, and the more he is an enthusiastic
and reverent admirer of S. Paul the more it daunts
him. It is that in the Pastorals the essential mind ot
S. Paul is generally absent. We shall see more dis
tinctly as we go on what that mind is. For the
present let us merely quote Gal. ii. 20, ' I have been
crucified with Christ ; yet I live ; and yet no longer I,
but Christ liveth in me ; and that life which I now live
in the flesh I live in faith, the faith which is in the Son
of God, who loved me and gave himself up for me.'
This deep, personal, intellectual, and moral passion
1 See Essays on the Early History of the Church and Ministry,
edited by H. B, Swete, D.D. (Macmillan, 1918),

60 THE GALILEAN GOSPEL INTERPRETED BY S. PAUL
informs all the other epistles. There is hardly a trace
of it in the regulations, advice, and warning which fill
the pages of the Pastorals. And this cannot be
accounted for by their 'pastoral' character. There
are plenty of directions, rules, and admonitions in the
other epistles. But there all starts from and runs out
into this very marked theology ; all is (to repeat the
word) ' informed ' by it. In the Pastorals it is not so.
Those who have learned the terms from Dr. Bigg1
would say that the ' mystic ' has turned ' disciplinarian.'
That would, of course, be no disparagement of the
Pastorals: Dr. Bigg took the noble first epistle of
S. Peter as the type of disciplinarian theology. But it
is a question whether such a change would befall so
uncommon, so complete, and so deeply moulded a
character as S. Paul's. And there is a further embar
rassment. This Pauline mind does not run through
the Pastorals with lessened or diverted intensity. For
whole paragraphs it is not there at all. But now and
again it appears, contrasting with the context. The
passage in 2 Timothy (iv. 6 ff.) already quoted is an
instance ; 2 and again and again in this epistle especially
we seem to catch and lose again the well-known accent.
^Is it not possible that the explanation may be some
what as follows? These Pastorals are much edited
communications of S. Paul's. He really did write
three, or perhaps more, letters to Timothy and Titus
about their episcopal or presbyteral charge. But these
letters were worn and torn before the time came for
making the collection, the Corpus Paulinum. Filling
up, piecing together, was necessary. Our three Pastoral
epistles are the result. < There has been no forgery;
that odious word is out of the question in any part of
1 Commentary on the epistles of St. Peter and St. fude in Clark's
International Critical Commentaries, Introduction, pp. 37 ff.
2 Of course it is obvious to compare Phil. ii. 17, and the perfect
words in Timothy might be a retouching of the old phrase by another
than Paul : short things of wondrous beauty have been struck out by
imitation or critical conjecture — ' And a' babbled of green fields ' may be
an instance. But is there solid ground for such suspicious caution here ?

THE PASTORAL EPISTLES 61
New Testament criticism. It is not even the possi
bility of innocent imitation that need be considered,
i.e. of directions written in the name of S. Paul
because they were known to be his mind and will, and
that was a recognised mode of continuing the master's
authority ; indeed the conclusion of 2 Timothy would
hardly fit into that hypothesis. It was just the best
expedient that could be devised for preserving what
remained of S. Paul's own words.
Some such explanation seems to cover all the puzzling
peculiarities of 2 Timothy. But it may be combined
with the recollection that in many of his generally
acknowledged epistles S. Paul lets us know that he has
employed a secretary. Sometimes he would dictate,
we may suppose ; and for the most part we do seem to
hear the very words coming fast and earnest from his
lips, as in Romans which Tertius wrote. Sometimes
he may have given the plan and more or less of the
detail and left the secretary to copy all out fair.1 And
this may account for the difficulties which have been
felt about allowing Ephesians as well as Colossians to
be really Paul's. As for Colossians and 2 Thessalonians
(the only other epistles of the collection which are
seriously questioned to-day) it seems hardly necessary
for our purposes to discuss the difficulties which have
been felt about them. To minute observation some
things do appear which are not quite easy to explain.
1 Compare this introductory note to Lightfoot's Biblical Essays :
' Possessed of a remarkably retentive memory, he preferred to trust to
outlines, rather than write out in full what he intended to deliver in
the lecture-room. Accordingly, in those essays which are described as
printed from lecture notes, it has been found necessary to frame into
sentences page after page which in the original notes exists only in the
briefest summary. It is inevitable therefore that in places the
Bishop's meaning will have been obscurely expressed, if not entirely
missed.' The difficulty in editing worn-out documents is illustrated in the
Life of F. D. Maurice, i. pp. 377 ff. A letter from Maurice to A. J.
Scott is printed with five gaps where ' the manuscript is torn off. Mr.
A. J. Scott was so fond of reading the letter that he carried it about in
his waistcoat pocket till it had been worn to pieces. '

62 THE GALILEAN GOSPEL INTERPRETED BY S. PAUL
A quarter of a century ago criticism was minute and
fastidious, and almost expected to discover that tradi
tions of authorship were insupportable. The strictness
of that critical inquiry has been a salutary discipline
not without solid results. To-day we recognise that
the prejudice is not worth more than prejudice gener
ally, and that of the two risks the lesser is to start
from assuming the probable truth of sober claims,
plainly set forth and long admitted, especially as we
know how far from easy-going about ' disputed ' books
the church of the first three centuries was. And
if we hold to the principle, whatever the problem
forgery is not the solution ; and to the evident fact,
that whether entirely from S. Paul or no, the manner
and mind is exceedingly Pauline, our disinclination to
retrace the trite lines of controversy will not seem un
reasonable. To sum up. The letters to Galatians, Corinthians,
Romans, the first to Thessalonians, and with slight
reservation the second, are admittedly Paul's. The
four epistles of the captivity, Philippians, Colossians,
Philemon, and with slight reservation Ephesians, are
also his. Hebrews does not properly belong to the
Pauline collection at all.
We turn to Acts, that delightful story which might
well be styled the best of church histories, if ' history '
did not imply a reconstruction of the past, whereas
the charm of Acts is that it breathes the freshness of
its own period. Few read it as a story (forgetting as
they read its documentary value) without enjoying just
that fresh air ; and this natural enjoyment is quite as
fair a prejudice to start criticism with as any other.
It is the spontaneous first thought, so weighty if third
thoughts effect a return to it.1
1 See for Acts in general, and for justification of conservative second
thoughts after the criticism of twenty or thirty years ago, Dr. Headlam's
article in Hastings' Dictionary of the Bible, and Harnack's Luke the
Physician and The Acts of the Apostles (English translations in Williams
and Norgate's Crown Theological Library).

ACTS 63
The opening verses plainly show that the author of
Acts is the author also of the third Gospel. He seems
to speak of himself (using ' we ') as the companion of
S. Paul from Troas to Philippi (xvi. 11 ff.), and again
from Philippi to Rome (xx. 6 ff.). Tradition, which
goes back to Marcion and is not contradicted by any
earlier statement, says this author is the Luke named
in Col. iv. 14 as the beloved physician and in 2 Tim.
iv. 10 as the last of S. Paul's friends left with him in
his last imprisonment. The phrase in 2 Cor. viii. 18,
' the brother whose praise is in the gospel,1 had been
referred to him as early as Origen, but that was perhaps
only an inference from the already accepted ' Gospel
according to S. Luke.' There is no real difference
in style between the ' we ' passages and the rest of
the story of S. Paul. Such difference as may fairly
be noticed is between the whole of the latter chapters
and the story of the young church in Jerusalem in
the first eleven chapters; and this is analogous to
the style of the opening chapters of the Gospel
in which Luke reports with a peculiar simplicity what
he has learned from ingenuous witnesses but such
as were untrained in literary evidence. And — the
coincidence may be taken for what it may be worth —
the entrance of the ' we ' narrative fits with what we
read of S. Paul's illness in Gal. iv. 13 ; the physician
joined him first as a physician whose services were
required in Galatia, whether south or north. As for
discrepancies between Acts xv. (Paul in Jerusalem for
the 'council') and Gal. i. and ii., obscurities would
be a more accurate term than discrepancies. Such
obscurities still and almost invariably puzzle us when
an event is illustrated by the letters and narratives of
different persons, and much tedious comparison may
be superseded by the consideration that there is no
requirement in friendship for the friends to study
one another's books. Moreover there are differences
between Paul's epistles and the Acts which have
parallels within Acts itself, as for instance the ideas of

64 THE GALILEAN GOSPEL INTERPRETED BY S. PAUL
Paul and of Luke respectively concerning the Holy
Spirit in connexion with the baptism of John (cf. xviii.
25 with xix. 4). These differences are natural between
the layman and the ecclesiastic, and no small measure
of the interest roused by Acts comes from the author's
personal character. He is neither the mystic nor the
disciplinarian of Dr. Bigg. He follows no party in
the church but is intent upon all as historian and
scholar; aware too of the varying approximation to
truth of fact which variety in evidence obliges him to
aim at.
This variety we have already noticed with regard to
the opening record of the beginning of the church in
Jerusalem. It is worth while noting that the suspected
error about Theudas and Judas the Galilean (v. 36 f.)
occurs in these chapters. It is quite unnecessary to
force this into evidence of the (later) author's depend
ence on Josephus. It may be compared with the
reference in the Gospel (ii. 2) to the governorship of
Cyrenius, which may also (though it by no means
certainly does) betray a slight error or carelessness.1
At any rate neither of these possible errors belongs
to the more strictly historical parts of the books,
and even in the parts where they do come — sketched
1 Cyrenius was governor (legatus pro praetor e) in A. D. 6-7 and he
held a census then. That census was well remembered for the riots it
caused. S. Luke makes it clear that the census when our Lord was
born was not the well-known one but earlier. That is the important
point and S. Luke allows no doubt about it. Sir William Ramsay
brings evidence for an earlier governorship of Cyrenius. His evidence
is not conclusive. Cyrenius very likely did hold a temporary appoint
ment as military legatus pro praetore for a while before he held the
administrative appointment. But it is not clear, and perhaps hardly
likely, that he held the administrative appointment twice. Professor
Forbes Duckworth would translate rco&r-n iyaitro ^e/xoyeiWros, k.t.X. ,
' before Cyrenius was governor of Syria.' But though S. John can write
Trpwris pov I doubt whether Luke would have been content with such
colloquialism. The sentence is somewhat loosely written however, and
it looks more as though Luke had corrected a first statement that the
census was Cyrenius's well-known one, and had made his correction
rather roughly. Anyhow he has put the date right — not Cyrenius's
well-known census but the earlier one : and that is enough to indicate
his trustworthiness.

ACTS WRITTEN BEFORE GOSPEL 65
largely with few lines, but those few most true and
telling — they do not greatly affect the clearness of the
narrative. It is impossible to decide with certainty when Acts
was composed. As it tells nothing of S. Paul's fortunes
after the two years in Rome, not even saying whether
he was tried and released or not, the natural supposi
tion would be that it was written just at the end of
the two years (a.d. 61 or 62) while he still awaited
trial. But the Gospel is referred to in the opening
verses as ' the first ' or ' former ' treatise. It is almost
impossible to think that the prediction of the siege of
Jerusalem (Luke xxi.), with the distinct allusions as to
a recollected event which colour it in this Gospel, was
written before a.d. 70, and if this impression were
mistaken, the whole Gospel would still imply some
considerable interval after the appearance of the Gospel
according to S. Mark. No conjecture of two editions
or later retouchings would easily bring this 'former
treatise ' within the first sixty decades. And yet even
severe critics tend more and more to allow Acts to the
two years1 period. All would become intelligible if we
suppose Acts to have been written first, and then the
Gospel. The two (perhaps in the second edition *-) were
published together, ' the former treatise 1 indicating
historical sequence and place in the two-volumed work,
not the order of composition. This supposition would
remove a good deal of the difficulty about the Pastoral
epistles. But it is merely a supposition. It cannot
be proved, and as soon as taste, prejudice, and guess
ing are allowed we are bound to remember that some
readers feel the close of Acts to be quiet not abrupt,
and just what ought to have been the close had the
first (and only) imprisonment ended by condemnation.
1 For the hypothesis of two editions see Blass, Philology of the
Gospels (Macmillan, 1898), and his editions of Acts (Teubner, 1895,
1896), who thus accounts for the large variation of text in Codex
Bezae. An account of his theory is given by Kenyon in his Handbook
to the Textual Criticism of the New Testament, pp. 341 ff.
E

66 THE GALILEAN GOSPEL INTERPRETED BY S. FAUL
Dr. Moffatt writes in The Historical New Testament
(p. 415):
' From the standpoint of modern realism it would no
doubt be more satisfactory to have had Acts rounded
off with an account of Paul's martyr death. But to
expect such a finale is to mistake the whole current of
the book. The author's silence upon Paul's death
almost certainly means that the apostle was condemned
by the Roman authorities, or that the Christian
church had — by the end of the first century — lost all
definite knowledge of how and when he died ; a con
clusion which is corroborated by the vague allusions in
Clement of Rome. Yet even had he known the details
of the apostle's death, there is no reason why this
writer should have added them. The taste for details
of Christian martyrdom was a later growth. Besides,
Acts is not a biography of Paul, but a sketch of the
early church in its development through the jars and
problems and energies of the early apostles to its
culminating hold upon Rome. And as the author
does not give even a full sketch of Paul's previous
career, it is not uncharacteristic of him to stop short
of that tragic event which followed the two years'
residence at Rome. As writer and readers probably
were aware of the general fact of Paul's death, the
former had as little interest in telling it as in suppress
ing it, particularly as it contradicted the general purport
of his volume. Possibly, too, Nero's treatment of Paul
was silently omitted as a deplorable exception to the
normal policy of the State. . . . Acts xx. 25 is more
than a presentiment of the speaker. It is obviously a
tragic fact, solemnly ratified by the historian (xx. 38).'
Some of these observations are more acute than others.
The argument gains apparent force when illustrated by
Dr. Moffatt's view of the New Testament as a whole, and
it is conceivable that some authors at about a.d. 100
might pass over the death of S. Paul as well known.
But that is hard to imagine of Luke the beloved

LUKE THE AUTHOR OF ACTS AND GOSPEL 67
physician ; and if there is no cogent reason to separate
the ' we ' passages, the ' travel document,' from the
rest, we may with some confidence accept Luke
as the author of Acts. The objection to the trust
worthiness of his narrative might still be raised that it
is an ' apology,' constructed to recommend the Christian
church to the Roman empire, or (which seems more
descriptive of the book) the Roman empire to the
church. But the empire with its strong and orderly
justice really was a help to the missionary church during
the period of the Acts. The idea does enter into the
plan of Acts, and if there were no ideas governing the
writer's selection and arrangement his book would
not be the great book it is ; if this were not one of
these ideas he would show that he had not realised the
historical situation in its proper proportions, for the
change from Rome the unconscious protector to Rome
the persecutor is a marked feature in the developement
of the faith of the New Testament, Paul's letters
witnessing to the one stage, Hebrews, Peter, and the
Johannine books to the other.
On the whole then we take Acts as trustworthy
material for filling up the glimpses S. Paul's letters
afford of his life and work. Checked by his letters,
Acts also gives a broad view of the faith and life of
the church in general at this period. It was not
exclusively Pauline. It included considerable variety
in faith and discipline, but it was one and it was
apostolic. Saul of Tarsus was brought up at the feet of
Gamaliel, a good Pharisaic education which he zealously
improved. He may have added a veneer of Greek
letters at Tarsus, but nothing is told of this, nor do we
know how much of his early life was spent at Tarsus.
He seems to have been a well-to-do gentleman, he
commanded a troop under the high priest, he addressed
Felix and Agrippa as no inferior, he was a Roman
citizen, and his trade of tent-making is not against this ;
whether according to ordinary Jewish custom of the

68 THE GALILEAN GOSPEL INTERPRETED BY S. PAUL
time or not, he was grand seigneur enough to work for
a living when he changed his way of life and found it
sometimes necessary to do so.
He enters Luke's history of the church at the
martyrdom of S. Stephen. 'The witnesses,' i.e. the
appointed executioners who after the first rush of the
mob carried out the sentence deliberately, ' laid down
their garments at the feet of a young man named Saul.'
In this abrupt note the figure stands out which is to
fill so many chapters. And the note is precisely calcu
lated as to its position. Here in Jerusalem, the holy
city of bigoted Judaism, a contest has arisen within the
Christian church which springs out of an old opposition
in the Jewish church. It was the opposition of
orthodox to liberal Judaism, of the Hebrews to the
Hellenists. The Hebrews were the old-fashioned Jews
who held strictly to the letter of the law. A century
later these were represented by the descendants of the
Pharisees. At present the Pharisees were with the
Hebrew party indeed, yet entertained a progressive
element in their doctrine ; at least they were on the
side of developement in faith. Still they were strict,
and when things had come to such a pass as Stephen's
audacity, Saul the zealous pupil of the Pharisees
would sternly decide against such soul-destroying
Hellenism. The Hellenists were the Greek-speaking
Jews, imbued with more cosmopolitan ideas in religion,
already looking for some readjustment of the Jewish
law to suit modern needs. The first theological
question which was to trouble and so to broaden and
deepen the Christian faith was whether orthodox or
Hellenistic Judaism should be the matrix of the new
faith. This question the young Pharisee Saul was
destined to grapple with, then to solve by enlarging
the scope of it. He stands here just where historical
art requires that he should stand in the picture, just
as later he appears again where and when he is needed,
to deal with the Hellenistic difficulty in the Christian
church at Antioch, and from thence to be led on by

CONVERSION OF SAUL 69
the Spirit to bring not only Hellenists but Greeks or
mere pagans from Pisidia and afterwards from Corinth
to the Gospel.
And again the note comes just where it should in
preparation for the conversion on the road to Damascus.
Whatever the imperfections of Saul's early life and
faith, no one can read Romans without perceiving that
righteousness had always been his passion.1 In Stephen
he saw righteousness: deplorably misled perhaps but
righteousness at least, and death braved for the sake
of it. But was that all ? It needs no quick imagin
ation to suppose that Saul often asked himself, Did
Stephen really see his Lord ? Then outside Damascus,
he himself saw the same Jesus, and was mastered by
his love, his majesty, his deity. He broke his loyalty
to the high priest and was led blind and dishonoured
into Damascus. Except for one mention of a nephew
in Acts xxiii. we hear no more of his family. Except
affection and obstinate hope for his Jewish brethren as
a whole — he would fain be himself anathema from Christ
for them, and the final issue of the incoming of the
Gentiles shall be that all Israel shall be saved (Rom. ix.
1 ff, xi. 25J — all the relationships of the past were
cut off. Romans vi. should be read in connexion
with Acts ix. Such a dead Saul waking to a real
newness of life when Ananias baptised him, was the
PauJ who wrote to the Romans that ' we were buried
with him through baptism and death, that as Christ
rose from the dead through the glory of the Father, so
also we may walk in newness of life.'
Then came a period of retirement and meditation,
or what S. Paul, with an accuracy we must try to
understand if we would understand his faith, calls
revelation. Things are never quite so absolute as we
would have them and he was not altogether silent at
Damascus (Acts ix. 20, Gal. i. 17), nor perhaps did he
leave his home without farewell (Acts ix. 30, xi. 25).
But his work began in earnest when some had spoken
1 Cf. Matthew Arnold's St. Paul and Protestantism.

70 THE GALILEAN GOSPEL INTERPRETED BY S. PAUL
the good tidings at Antioch to Hellenistic Jews l and
disputes arose thereby and Barnabas brought him
thither. Thence the two friends went with alms to the
brethren in Judaea, and on their return to Antioch the
command of the Holy Spirit completed the impulse
which circumstances had begun, and Barnabas, Saul,
and John Mark started on the first missionary journey.
As in Antioch the Galilean title of ' disciple ' was
first changed to 'Christian,' so on this journey Saul
became Paul. 'Christian' was perhaps a nickname
which the New Testament church never cared to adopt
(cf. 1 Peter iv. 16), and indeed Paul himself with his
' saints,' ' brothers,' and his profound ' in Christ,' must
have made it sound thin; the name 'Paul' was chosen in
triumph and affection from his first notable, perhaps Gen
tile, convert in Cyprus. The j ourney was a modest round
of the southern parts of what we call Asia Minor. The
Romans included a good part of this country in their
province of Galatia, and it may be that the epistle to
the Galatians was addressed to these firstfruits of the
Pauline husbandry.2 The preaching was in the syna-
1 So Cod. B. in Acts xi. 20. It is difficult for one fresh from the
reading or the iterated reading of Hort's Introduction to accept "EXX^vas
here in place of "EW-nvio-rds. Keep the strongly attested 'EWrivio-rcis
and learn from it how deep the roots of Christianity were in the old
orthodoxy, how terrifying the persecution about Stephen had been,
how this explains I Thess. ii. 14, 2 Cor. xi. 26, Galatians and Hebrews,
and what point it adds to Acts xiii. 46, xviii. 6, and S. Paul's
repeated pilgrimages to Jerusalem.
2 Strictly speaking Galatia was a northern district first visited by
Paul on his second journey (if then) before he crossed from Troas into
Macedonia. The South Galatian theory, advocated by Sir William
Ramsay, makes Acts and Epistles fit together with almost suspicious
neatness, and it allows an early date — even before I and 2 Thessa
lonians — for Galatians. But though affinity with Romans does not prove
Galatians to be more close in time to Romans than 1 and 2 Corinthians
are (as Lightfoot argued), the depth and maturity of Galatians does
almost prove it a later utterance than are the simple letters to the
Thessalonians. If then Galatians falls into the same group as Corin
thians and Romans, that is all we need care about : whether it went
north or south matters little. See Ramsay, The Church in the Roman
Empire (1893) and St. Paul the Traveller and Roman Citizen (1895),
and his Historical Commentary on the Galatians (1899). The whole
question is fully discussed in The Earlier Epistles of St. Paid, their

FIRST MISSIONARY JOURNEY 71
gogue. The liberal ' God-fearers,' or as we might call
them 'catechumens' of Judaism, were addressed together
with the regular Jewish churchmen.1 Luke gives a pretty
full summary of one of the sermons. Old Testament
prophecy leads up to the resurrection of the Lord, and
the assurance of forgiveness and righteousness through
him which had been vainly sought in the law. But
opposition arose, and the turning point in the narrative
is when Paul and Barnabas took their courage in both
hands (xiii. 46) and said, ' To you it was necessary that
the word of God should first be spoken. Since ye
thrust it from you and j udge yourselves unworthy of
the life eternal, behold we turn to the Gentiles.' From
this point all is throbbing movement. There is danger,
violence, heroism, fortitude. The Gentiles rejoiced
and glorified the word of God. The missionaries
returned to Antioch, leaving Gentile churches founded.
They had ' fulfilled the work1 to which they had been
appointed. A battle remained to be fought at home,
and a theology to be worked out. But the door was
opened to the whole world of men. Free salvation,
the first article of the Pauline creed, was established.
According to Acts the battle at home broke out at
once, and fiercely : then substantial agreement was
quickly reached. The converts from the Pharisees
motive and origin, by Kirsopp Lake (Rivingtons, 1911). This is a
masterly introduction to the epistles of the missionary period and also
to Acts, setting early Christianity in the movement of the age of its
birth, and dispersing many prejudices in the light of keen and very
modern scholarship. Prolegomena, the first instalment of a Commen
tary on Acts, edited by Professor Kirsopp Lake and F. J. Foakes
Jackson, are shortly to be published by Messrs. Macmillan.
1 For these ' God-fearers ' see Kirsopp Lake, The Earlier Epistles of
S. Paul, pp. 37 ff. If the Hellenistic Jews within the synagogue had
already affinities with the Gospel, these Gentiles who worshipped with
the Jews and took a rule of life from them, smoothed the approach
both to the synagogue and on the other hand to the Gentile world.
The ' God-fearers ' swelled that moderate party in the church to whom
the faith meant chiefly righteousness. From the heart of Judaism and
of paganism came others to whom it rather meant redemption. But
the distinction is little more than a logical device. No apostolic
disciple but would claim both gifts.

72 THE GALILEAN GOSPEL INTERPRETED BY S. PAUL
resented the boldness of Paul and Barnabas. A council
was held at Jerusalem. S. James and the apostles were
strong enough to hold the church together. Certain
simple conditions were laid down. These observed,
the admission of Gentiles was allowed without circum
cision or elaborate obedience to the law. Luke records
difficulties which beset Paul from the Jews in his later
journeys, but it would hardly seem that he meant
Jewish converts within the church, until the last visit
to Jerusalem when the old jealousy broke out again.
In S. Paul's epistles we get a different point of view.
The conditions laid down were mainly ritual. It is
true that the so-called western text makes them moral
not ritual, and this would square with S. Paul's treat
ment in 1 Corinthians of the problem of the food
offered to idols. For he never refers to any authori
tative rule, and does not make his own rule quite in
accordance with the decree. But whatever may be
said for the western text on the proper grounds of
scientific textual criticism, this more subjective test
may easily be turned against it. To S. Paul the coun
cil does not appear to have been a matter of the first
importance. In Galatians he almost certainly alludes
to his visit to Jerusalem on that occasion. But no
one would suppose from what he writes that he had
attended such a formal and impressive gathering at all.
He insists on his recollections being exact. So they
may well be, but he does not recollect a good deal
which had seemed exceedingly interesting to S. Luke's
informants. What he recollects is his independence of
the control of other apostles. He had certain direct
revelations and the other apostles acknowledged their
validity. Now it is by revelation, inspiration, divinely
given insight into great principles of holiness and
charity and community of life in Christ that he settles
the line the Corinthians are to follow concerning food
offered to idols. There can be no doubt that 1 Corin
thians is more grandly inspired than the Jerusalem
decree. We may conjecture that as the mission to the

JMW AND GENTILE : COUNCIL OF JERUSALEM 73
Genti^s expanded, and Paul's faith unfolded into large
theology, the decree was recognised by its very framers
as inadequate, and rescinded or tacitly dropped. But
S. Paul is not much concerned with that piece of
history. He had pressing duties laid upon him : reve
lations, compulsions of the Spirit, ardours of anxious
love for brethren for whom Christ died. And it is
possible he did not render sufficient observance to the
authority of the Jerusalem church. What is autho
rity ? What is ' the ' church ? It may well be that
those questions were already troublesome. It is evident
from his letters that there was a party in the church
which disliked and hindered him. And if it came to
parties, he took a side boldly. His side was liberty.
He believed it was Christ's. The great apostles be
lieved it too : they were not his opponents : they
refused to allow the opened door to be shut again.
But they did not follow Paul any more than he them.
Their conversion had not been the same break with
old tradition as S. Paul's had been. They held fast to
unity but claimed variety within the unity.
And here is the clue to the superficial discrepancy
between Acts and Paul's epistles. Facts are not mani
pulated in Acts for the author's purpose. He exercises
his judgement on the best evidence he can get, and for
the most part attains very fair accuracy. But his
informants were not all Paulinists and he himself was
a scholar and not a party man. Hence the proportions
of things are differently felt in Acts and in the epistles,
and for want of complete knowledge of the details we
sometimes trip at what seems to come near to contra
diction. We ought, however, to remember that this
inconvenience witnesses to the freedom and richness of
early church life, not to the laxity of early church
records. After another stay at Antioch Paul proposed to visit
the churches he had founded with Barnabas. Silas
however, not Barnabas, accompanied him. The jour
ney was prolonged and they were guided by ' the Spirit

74 THE GALILEAN GOSPEL INTERPRETED BY S. PAUL
of Jesus' — note how the true reading in Acts xvi. 7
corresponds with the theology of the Pauline epistles —
north and west till they reached Troas. In a vision
Paul heard a man of Macedonia praying him to ' Come
over and help us,' and so the second missionary journey
made its wider sweep through Macedonia and Achaia,
the northern and southern provinces of Greece. Nea
polis, Philippi, Thessalonica, Beroea, then Athens and
Corinth were entered. At Corinth the first of the
letters we now read were written, the first and second
epistles to the Thessalonians.
In Greece, as in Asia and afterwards when he reached
Rome, Paul approached the Jews first. At Corinth,
as before at Pisidia, he turned from their obstinacy to
the Gentiles (Acts xviii. 6). Jewish opposition had
however been particularly fierce at Thessalonica, and
the first letter was sent to cheer his converts in the
persecution they had to face. The message is brave,
affectionate, and simple. Behind it lies the plain
doctrine that Jesus is the Christ whom the ancient
church expected ; the Son whom the Father had sent
to save his children from the wrath to come ; and they
are steadfastly to wait for his advent in glory. This
advent was certain because God had raised the Lord
Jesus from the dead. Thus we see how naturally (if
that be the proper word) Paul's creed, which is the
infant church's creed, springs out of the Galilean
Gospel, just as the Galilean Gospel had sprung natur
ally out of Judaism. What this epistle adds is an
answer to a question which the Thessalonians had put
as to the state of those who should have fallen asleep —
the Christian church had adopted this beautiful idea
from the Jewish — before the great day. S. Paul
answers the question in the pictorial language of the
apocalypses, only transmuting their luxuriance into a
terse gravity. 'We who survive will not leave the
sleepers behind. The Lord, with a proclamation with
archangel's voice and trump of God, will descend from
heaven, and the dead in Christ will rise first : then we

1 AND 2 THESSALONIANS 75
the living and surviving together with them will be
whirled away in clouds into air to our meeting with
the Lord. And so shall we be ever with the Lord '
(1 Thess. iv. 15 ff.). The letter ends with counsels of
quiet and industry : let them wait and work and love
one another till the great day shall come, and mean
while let them not be anxious about the date of its
coming. Compare with this the naive inquiry with which
Acts opens (i. 6), the apostolic sermons in the early
chapters of Acts, S. Paul's sermon even to an audience
which was not Jewish at Athens (Acts xvii. 31),1 and
so realise how vividly the hope of the Lord's advent
filled the minds of the first generation. If we were
asked to-day, What is the Christian hope ? we might
hesitate between alternatives : not so the early
Christians. And therefore it is not surprising to find
that in spite of S. Paul's advice the Thessalonians were
impatient and excited. A second letter had to be
addressed to them. In this he starts at once from the
advent hope, drawing encouragement therefrom for
their present trial and checking their restlessness by
setting forth the doctrine, no doubt traditional among
Jews, of the prior revelation of ' the man of sin.' Pre
cepts are added, more definite than before, for quiet
orderly working life. The final greeting is in S. Paul's
own handwriting, a sign, he says, of all his true epistles.
He had alluded (ii. 2) to pretended letters, or quota
tion from letters, 'as from us,' and it is one of the
little ironies of criticism that these touches have been
fastened upon as themselves liable to suspicion in a
professedly early letter of his.
1 This apocalyptic seriousness is the culmination to which the whole
sermon leads. And herein we recognise perhaps a sufficient answer
to those who compare the structure of the sermon with the conven
tional speeches of the Greek romances of the time. Luke has com
posed his notes in the accustomed plan, but the substance of which he
makes notes is quite uncommon. See Agnostos Theos, Untersuchungen
zur Formen-geschichte religioser Rede, von Eduard Norden (Teubner,
1913), with Burkitt's review in f.T.S., April 1914.

76 THE GALILEAN GOSPEL INTERPRETED BY S. PAUL
From Corinth S. Paul crossed to Syria and went to
Ephesus. Two missionary journeys had now been
made in widening circuits from Antioch. A third from
Ephesus was presently to bring him to Rome. But it
began by a 'confirming' tour through the Galatian
and Phrygian country (Acts xviii. 23), which may
mean that southern Galatia — the Roman province so
called — where his first churches had been founded : or
it may mean that after Phrygia new ground was taken
in the ancient Galatia of the north. Then came a long
stay again at Ephesus, two years and more.
During these years the first epistle to the Cor
inthians was written. This is no longer in the simple
style of the letters to the Thessalonians. But it has a
plain directness which links it in a manner with the
early way of writing : one point after another needs to
be treated, and is treated distinctly and successively.
More noticeable is the prominence of the early advent
interest. All works up to the great fifteenth chapter
on the advent and the resurrection, a proper sequel to
the brief dogmas in Thessalonians, but like all the rest
of this epistle so rich and profound. And the conclu
sion of all is the weighty watchword, Maran atha,
' Come, Lord ' (cf. Apoc. xxii. 20). The Aramaic
language as well as the signification of this watchword
still indicate the first stage in Pauline theology.
According to his custom S. Paul begins with thanks
giving. Then after reminder of the advent hope, he at
once rebukes the Corinthians for their divisions into
sects or parties. But his rebuke is a remonstrance.
His remedy is good theology, and his good theology is
rich theology, every sentence in his onward pregnant
utterance letting loose unsuspected thought. A seven
teenth-century writer says, ' Of all the Holy Writers
S. Paul is most hard to be understood ; who sometimes
comes to a full stop before he has done. Gagnejus
speaks of his obscure stile which (as many think) that
Apostle did expressly affect . . . But that Apostle in
that did the rather follow his Spirit, which represented

1 CORINTHIANS 77
to him many things at once.' *• The emphasis on the
cross of Christ is especially to be noticed. It comes at
once and is iterated. Perhaps he had lately written
about this to the Galatians, perhaps he is still to write
to them as well as to the Romans. Anyhow here is a
Pauline note which has sounded little hitherto, but still
gathers volume. He goes on to wisdom and foolishness,
apostolic trials and weakness, strength and authority.
One of the Corinthians had committed a grave sin.
This case is now considered. Excommunication is
threatened, which means deliverance to Satan for the
destruction of the flesh, but that the spirit may be
saved in the day of the Lord. Lawsuits, purity, and
marriage are then dealt with. And again a new note
sounds in ' Ye were bought with a price.1 Then comes
the question of food which has been offered to idols, as
so much of the food publicly sold or hospitably used
would be in Corinth. And the answer runs out into
' ascetic theology,' temperance like an athlete's, into
the essential hatefulness of idolatry, the sacredness of
Christian meals. And through all this, as through the
whole epistles, the principle of charity : ' Let no one
seek his own, but each the other's good,' — 'the brother
for whom Christ died.'
Women are to cover the head in prayer and prophe
sying. Reasons are given ; among others a curious bit
of rabbinic fancy such as not unfrequently startles us
in this group of epistles. But tradition, the custom of
the churches, settles the question. This leads to
another point in worship, the eucharistic feast, which
is still combined with the eating and drinking of a
common meal. The profound reality is insisted upon
with which the Lord had filled the sacrament by his
words of institution. Those words are not quoted
exactly as they stand in any of the Gospels. The
addition 'Do this in remembrance of me1 seems to
have been made by the church for its liturgical re-enact-
1 Richard Simon, A Critical History of the text of the New
Testament, ii. p. 91 (London, 1689).

78 THE GALILEAN GOSPEL INTERPRETED BY S. PAUL
ment of the rite. The Lord's words have been pre
served in the Gospel : his meaning and intention have
been brought out by the worshippers. As so often, the
written letters guard past history, the Spirit in them
interprets the future. But this Corinthian worship is
still primitive. ' The Lord's( supper ' is like ' the
Lord's day ' in Apoc. i. 10, an apocalyptic phrase; and
as in the three Gospel records emphasis lies on the
' till he come.'
Directions follow concerning spiritual gifts ; tongues,
prophecy. The argument is cut into two parts by
the praise of charity in xiii., the first of those outbursts
of the Pauline rhetoric of the heart which are as good
as signatures to all the subsequent epistles. As in
the rest of these the rhetoric is shot through with
philosophy : ex umbris et imaginibus in veritatem.
Then the argument returns to prophecy, to reasonable
worship, to the unity in variety of the organic body.
Once more the apostle turns to the women: they are
to keep silence in the assemblies. And he closes with
assertion of authority, — all this is the Lord's command ;
and with a protest against eccentricity.1
1 xiv. 38. The R.V. margin represents the best attested reading.
But ' if any man knoweth not he is not known ' is so ambiguous that
the revisers were not ill advised in keeping ' let him be ignorant ' in
their text. S. Paul however is educing a retributive principle from
the nature of things : eccentricity must issue in loneliness. And it
is worth notice how he, so independent and original, embraces so
genially the order of the whole. Whilst studying the epistles for the
writing of this chapter I have read Ward's Life of Cardinal Newman
again, and the sense, which Newman's sonnet on S. Paul excites, of
likeness between the apostle and his disciple is reinforced. At bottom
Newman's conception of the church is S. Paul's. To Paul the minor
Jewish, as to Newman the medieval superstitions are absorbed in the
full stream of church faith and life. Both hate intellectualism and
hold fast by reason. There is the returning sympathy for a passionate
yearning for the brothers of the old communion. The wrath together
with the love of God : apostolic lowliness with authority : originality
with reverence for traditional order : sensitiveness even fierceness with
an almost clinging gentleness : outbursts of rhetoric and fastidious
restraint and unwearying pains for accurate detail : in and through all
the clear recognition of the supernatural, together with patient appre
hension of ever changing and progressive correspondence of the super-

THE RESURRECTION 79
The subject of the magnificent fifteenth chapter is
the resurrection. Christ's resurrection is admitted :
S. Paul reviews briefly the church's evidence for its
tradition, including the appearance of the risen Lord
to himself. But some are saying there is no resur
rection of the dead generally, and Christ's resurrection
cannot be unless the whole belief in resurrection be
accepted which the Christian church has inherited,
with the rest of the advent doctrine, from the Jewish
church. But Christ has fulfilled with ampler moral
sufficiency the ancient doctrine. He died for our sins,
he rose, and he will come. His coming will however
be but the first act of the drama of ' the end,' which
will issue in ' God all in all.' Then man's destined
change will be completed. He will be fully clothed
with that spiritual body which is not the material
flesh and blood, but another vehicle even now being
formed in righteousness. Only in terms of character,
of righteousness, does Paul ever explain the spiritual
body, and only when we look on to 2 Corinthians,
Ephesians, and Colossians do we understand what
seems the abrupt close of this chapter. Christ who
died for our sins made this righteousness possible by
his victory, superseding law, which could not effect it.1
The epistle closes with appeal for alms for the saints,
i.e. at Jerusalem, sketch of S. Paul's future movements,
greetings, and the watchword Maran atha, ' our Lord
cometh ' or ' Come, Lord,1 followed by the ' Grace of
the Lord.1
natural to fresh knowledge and successive needs and perils : — Newman
was no S. Paul and no doubt others have followed S. Paul at least
as closely, but the list of coincidences might be made a long one, and
they seem to be coincidences, not conscious imitations. Indeed
Newman speaks rather little of S. Paul ; so much oftener of Christ
and the Gospels.
1 Cf. 2 Cor. v. i-io, Eph. iv. 22 ff., Col. iii. I ff., iii. 12 ; also Phil.
iii. 20 f . , Rom. vi. 6, viii. g ff. ; and Dr. J. O. F. Murray in Church
Quarterly Review, April 1916, on ' The Empty Tomb, the Resurrection
Body and the Intermediate State ' ; also a paper on ' The Ascension
and Whitsunday ' by Father R. M. Benson, reprinted from ' The Life
beyond the grave' in The Cowley Evangelist, May 1915.

80 THE GALILEAN GOSPEL INTERPRETED BY S. PAUL
This letter for all its power and pains did not settle
the ' puffed-up ' mind of the Corinthians. They rebelled
against S. Paul, treated him with cruel ingratitude, and
fell away from holiness in their perverse sympathy with
one or more moral offenders whose penitence or punish
ment he insisted upon. The years at Ephesus were
sadly troubled. Besides the Corinthian grief he had
another cause for anxiety in his Galatian churches whose
purity of faith was disturbed by Judaisers virulent
in their opposition to him. And at Ephesus things
went so ill that at last he was compelled by a serious
riot to depart. So at least we gather from Acts xix.,
xx. S. Paul himself refers to the risk lately run in
Ephesus, but only speaks of his departure as it bore on
his relations with Corinth. This is in 2 Corinthians.
He had sent a severe, a ' grievous ' letter thither, and
he had at some time paid a second visit himself. It is
j ust possible that the severe letter has been amalgamated
in the Pauline Corpus with the third letter. If so
our 2 Cor. x.-xiii. 10 is the second letter, in whole or
part ; the rest of 2 Corinthians is the third.1 But this
is conjecture ; 2 Cor. x.-xiii. 10 is not the very grievous
thing one would expect from Paul's description of it ;
and the chapters might be quite needful where they
stand before the happy farewell of the happy third
letter. Corinth was reconciled, yet all things may not
have been quite well yet. Corinth had nigh broken
S. Paul's heart. He was shrewd as well as generous,
faced facts, and knew that the reconciliation would
hardly be quite unanimous. He did not mean to have
the weary business all over again through the obstinacy
of a few.
This was the position when the third letter was
despatched. Titus had been sent to Corinth. He
seems to have been a strong character on whom S. Paul
relied in more than one strait : the epistle to Titus
1 See The Epistles of St. Paul to the Corinthians, a study personal
and historical of the date and composition of the Epistles, by Gerald H.
Rendall, B.D., Litt.D., etc. (Macmillan, 1909).

2 CORINTHIANS 81
reveals just such another difficult commission. Paul
leaving Ephesus was shaping his own course towards
Corinth. He met Titus in Macedonia bringing back
good news. Full of thankful love, he wrote again to
his recovered children.
He blesses God for his consolation and preservation :
recalls his anxiety about Corinth and rejoices at Titus'
glad return. Now, he says, let the repentant offender
of whom he had written so severely, be freely forgiven
and consoled.
Generosity, consolation, confidence, is the temper of
the whole epistle. He declares that he has fresh con
fidence in the apostolic ministry. It is new, spiritual,
free, glorious. Yet the glory is carried in earthy
vessels, and he muses on the waning of the mortal
body, and of that new body with which he longs to be
' clothed upon,' the tabernacle from heaven into which
he more and more transfers his dai'v life.
And this idea of spiritual life soars and circles as,
in great yearning for the Corinthians, he sees Christ,
who died ' one for all,1 no longer ' after the flesh,' that
is as men untouched by spiritual experience estimate
the mystery of life, but aU spiritual and sacramental :
God in Christ reconciling the world to himself, and
the apostles exercising this ministry of reconciliation,
bearing and daring all weariness and dishonour for so
great an end.
He repeats his joy in the return of Titus : ' I rejoice
that in everything I have confidence in you1: then
passes to an eager exhortation to liberality in the collec
tion for the saints. One almost smiles to see how tender
he is of his so lately offended friends' feelings. He is
not quite sure of them here, and he has been a little
rash in boasting among the Macedonians of their
assured liberality: S. Paul's surprise at stinginess in
money matters is always naive and fresh. He deals
gently, cleverly, sublimely with them. He is sending
Titus and other brethren, ' apostles of the churches, the
glory of Christ,' and everything will be done in a business-

82 THE GALILEAN GOSPEL INTERPRETED BY S. PAUL
like way, but let them think of the loving poverty of
our Lord Jesus and of the ineffable bounty of God.
Then (x.) he asserts for the last time his authority
with apostolic paradox : ' I myself Paul exhort you (it
is the same word in his Greek which has hitherto meant
' console ') by the meekness and gentleness of Christ.'
He tells how he supported himself in Corinth, giving
no handle to detractors. He steeps his words once
more in sacramental thought of the eternal and in
visible so strangely manifested in the temporary and
visible (cf. iv. 18), the thought that informs this whole
epistle. So he speaks of apostolic suffering and power ;
of trial, anxiety, and the care of all the churches, but
also of visions of eternity ; of bodily infirmity and
divine grace: 'My grace sufficeth thee; for power is
perfected in weakness.'
It is a remarkable letter. Except for the appeal for
the collection S. Paul has nothing definite to write
about. It is just an overflowing of joy and thankful
ness and love. But with this impulse his faith flows
free and deep as hardly ever before. In 1 Corinthians
lie expounds — in wealthy commentary indeed — the
church's tradition. In 2 Corinthians he opens the
personal treasury of his own heart and shows himself
strong in weakness as being supernaturally one with
Christ, always losing and finding himself again in
Christ, and every day more aware of the wonder of a
world and a course of events which is the revelation of
Christ. The full meaning of the doctrine of Spirit
(which he received in Judaism and ratified in the
Christian church) seems to be possessing him with
more inward force and more intelligible clarity.
This doctrine is the main appeal in the epistle to
the Galatians.1 Whether this was written before,
1 Lightfoot's Commentaries on Galatians, 1'hilippians, Colossians,
and Philemon (Macmillan) are still of immense value. The grasp on
history, exact feeling for language ; the paraphrases and essays ; the
largeness and thoroughness, make these books classics. To work
through one of them would be as good an introduction as could be
devised for serious study of the Greek Testament.

GALATIANS 83
between, or after the epistles to the Corinthians cannot
be settled. Judaisers within the church had tampered
with the faith of the Galatians, perverting the Gospel
they had received from Paul, and setting them against
his authority. This was an additional trouble in so
troubled a time. It involved a problem which we
learn from Acts xv. had been raised as soon as Paul's
mission to Gentiles began, but hitherto the letters we
have received give scarce a hint of it. Now in this
epistle to the Galatians we find him striking his blow,
at once and hard, for the freedom of the Spirit against
the bondage of the flesh. By ' the flesh ' he means the
tyranny of the commonplace and material in religion,
superstitious anxiety about outward ordinances, which
is the very opposite to that sacramental view of the
outward and visible which 2 Corinthians exemplifies.
' Once,' he writes, ' as heathens, not knowing God ye
were slaves to so-called gods which the very nature of
things prove to be no gods at all. Now having known
God, or rather being known by God, how is it that
you turn again to the weak and beggarly elements, to
which you would over again enter into slavery ? Ye
observe months and seasons and years. I fear for you
lest it be that I have spent my toil on you in vain '
(iv. 8 ff.). The proper meanings of theology and
religion, knowing God and obligation to rule and
rite, have been ignored in our popular antithesis of
intellectual theology and religion of the heart. The
true antithesis is S. Paul's argument to the Galatians.
Faith, self- transforming gratitude and love and trust
in God the Father through his dear Son Jesus Christ
who died for sinners, has superseded the Do ut des of
paganism and Jewish legalism and all dry law wherever
found. Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum. The
strong and lovely fruit of the Spirit can never ripen if
the worn-out superstition is allowed in Christ's people.
They are a new creation : by Spirit they live and by
Spirit they must walk.
The passionate note of faith vibrates through the

84 THE GALILEAN GOSPEL INTERPRETED BY S. PAUL
opening salutation : ' . . . God our Father and Jesus
Christ our Lord, who gave himself for our sins that
he might deliver us out of the present world with all
its superincumbent weight of evil.1 Then the remon
strance abruptly starts with ' I marvel at your per
versity,1 instead of the usual 'I thank God.1 Then
the apostle establishes his apostleship by the history of
his conversion and of the direct revelation he had
received. That leads to the disputes which had arisen
between him and Cephas (as he calls S. Peter) and
Barnabas about Gentile freedom from the Law, and so
to the antithesis of Law and Christ. And all this
culminates in that battle-cry of Paulinism (ii. 19 ff.) :
' I through law died to law that I may live to God. I
have been crucified with Christ. And I live, no longer
I, but Christ liveth in me. And the life that I now
live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God
who loved me and gave himself for me.1 The phrase
baffles translation. Paul's faith but begins as ' trust
in' Jesus Christ. It intertwines with the faith of,
Jesus Christ himself in the Father. It is the condition,
almost an aspect of, the Christ life into which the life
of self has been transformed. But no explanations
will suffice. If we would understand S. Paul, his life
and creed, we must take this passage as the ideal to
be always closer approached by reason and morality,
though still it moves onward and beyond our grasp :
a palmary example of New Testament inspiration.
The argument proceeds. At least the Holy Spirit
whom the Galatians received is reality. Are they
to turn from that, by a new conversion, to material
ordinances ? Is not the Spirit ' by faith ' ? What was
Abraham's faith and the promise to Abraham ? The
promise was Christ, and that is far more primitive and
venerable than the temporary discipline of the Law.
In the faith of Jesus Christ free righteousness is ,
promised and fulfilled.
The Law has come in to be a tutor conducting to
Christ. In Christ there is now freedom and sonship.

GALATIANS : ROMANS 85
God sent the Spirit of his Son into your hearts, crying
Abba, Father. But now it is all seasons and ceremonies
again with you, my little children with whom I am
again in travail till Christ be formed in you.
A legal proof of the argument is ironically drawn
(according to the new fashion in Galatia) from the
allegory of Isaac and Ishmael. It is not circumcision
that is wanted but faith working through love. A
fine way, says S. Paul, these Judaisers take to avoid
the scandal of the cross to which Jews are so sensitive
(cf. 1 Cor. i. 23) : circumcision indeed, they had better
adopt brutal mutilation.
Away with all this. There is a rule of service which
is perfect freedom, the rule of love, and that is yours.
Be servants to one another. And the way to attain
such happiness is to walk by Spirit. This external
material flesh-religion issues in all manner of strife and
evil. Those who belong to Christ Jesus crucified the
flesh in their conversion. Forgive, bear, forbear, be
generous, however others act. You are the men of
Spirit, you can do this.
Let Judaisers pride themselves in party : the apos
tolic boast is in the cross. There is a new creation,
the Israel of God, on which be peace.
Henceforth I am immune to all attacks : I bear the
brand of Jesus on my body.
His grace be with your spirit, my brothers. Amen.
' Brothers ' : thus the severity of the whole epistle is
tempered at the end, comments Bengel. But indeed
for some pages Paul has been soaring up beyond the
controversy and the pain. Perhaps the Galatian apos
tasy was the final trial. Perhaps Corinth and the
Ephesian mob were still to make the ' branding ' deeper.
But whatever the order of the other epistles in this
group, Romans undoubtedly comes last. And Romans
was surely written with a quiet mind which had been
made to triumph in Christ over fears and sorrows ;
perhaps during the leisure of the three winter months
spent in Hellas (Acts xx. 2 f.).

86 THE GALILEAN GOSPEL INTERPRETED BY S. PAUL
It is a sequel to the sudden heart cry to the Gala
tians on law and gospel, flesh and Spirit. But it is
more than that. It is a treatise with marshalled argu
ment, and spontaneous but carefully placed appeals,
and in it all the penetrating thoughts, the revelations
of the mind of Christ, are gathered and deepened,
which have but flashed through the earlier letters. It
is a deliberately planned preparation for a visit to
Rome already determined upon (Acts xix. 21 ; cf. xxii.
21, xxiii. 11) and divinely ordained.1
The elaborate salutation is not addressed to the
faithful in Rome as to a church. But there is a tone
of warm affection, ' beloved of God, called to be saints,1
and with a kind of extravagance not used before Paul
calls himself the ' slave of Jesus Christ ' (cf. Phil., Tit.,
and ' prisoner ' in Philemon). And the salutation is a
creed : God's gospel of the eternal Son, incarnate,
risen, and in the resurrection defined as Son through
the Spirit of holiness ; and all by prophecy of
Scripture. ' First I give thanks ' : the Romans' faith, Paul's
prayer and yearning : he would share with them the
gospel of righteousness through faith : then the argu
ment is introduced.
He describes the wrath of God upon the pagan
world. Yet Jew as well as Gentile are culpable and
both may find mercy. The Jew has his prerogative,
but it has proved vain for actual righteousness. The
Law wakes conscience and prepares for j ustification by
the faith of Christ. This faith is the continuation of
the faith of Abraham and issues in the believer being
accounted righteous.
The short creed follows of those who believe on him
1 Sanday and Headlam's Commentary in Clark's International
Critical Scries should by all means be studied. This admirable work
made (in 1897, 1st ed.) a new era in commentaries. Hort's Prolego
mena to St. Paul's Epistles to the Romans and Ephesians (Macmillan,
1895) may also be mentioned here. A good Commentary on a smaller
scale is Dr. R. St. John Parry's in the Cambridge Greek Testament for
Schools and Colleges.

ROMANS 87
who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead: who was
given up for our transgressions and was raised for our
righteousness. Then a prayer upon the creed: Having been justi
fied therefore let us from faith have peace toward God
through our Lord Jesus Christ. Through the death
of Christ God's love has been shown and is richly
effective. It brings in the reign of righteousness; which
the Law had not done, though it did end the reign of
death — the awakened conscience no longer submitted
to that tyranny.
Baptism into Christ is into his death to share his
life. The death is of the ' body of sin,' the ' mortal
body1: the free gift of God is 'eternal life in Christ Jesus
our Lord.' Inward strife was roused by the Law ;
deliverance came through Jesus Christ. His Spirit is
his very self in us, infusing life into our mortal bodies.
This first division of the epistle ends with a burst of
praise and universal hope: Brothers— in Christ, of
Jesus Christ — what a debt and what a hope : counted
righteous, free from fear, we hope for nothing less than
glory. And the hope is for all creation (cf. John i. 3 f.). '
The Spirit breathes through all created life, and inter-
living with our spirit makes intercession beyond our
capacity to express. All is the love of Christ from
whom no powers of death or life can separate us.
In the second division (which begins in chapter ix.)
Paul first passionately declares, then closely argues, his
hope for his Jewish brethren. Their present rejection
is for the sake of the Gentiles. Their recovery will be
life from the dead. And they shall be recovered. The
gathering in of the Gentiles will be fulfilled, and then
' all Israel shall be saved.1 And again he ends with an
outburst of faith and praise: 'O the depth of the
richness both of the wisdom and the knowledge of
God: how unsearchable are his judgements, and his
ways past tracing out . . . from him and through him
and unto him are all things. To him be glory for
ever. Amen.'

88 THE GALILEAN GOSPEL INTERPRETED BY S. PAUL
With chapter xii. the third division begins in which
the new life is described both within the brotherhood,
and in its relations towards those without. All is love
fulfilling the new law.
The strong must bear with the weak and help them.
What are fashions in food and ceremonies ? How easy
it is to keep unity in variety. Christ himself has
become a minister of circumcision for God's truth in
order to bring Jew and Gentile together. May the
God of patience, comfort, and hope fulfil his people's
joy- Finally S. Paul, the priest of the Gentile sacrifice,
going to Jerusalem with Gentile alms for the Jewish
brethren, asks Roman prayers, and proposes to visit
Rome, and after Rome, Spain. And he prays the God
of peace to be with the Romans.
Here we seem to have reached the close of the epistle.
But a long list of greetings is appended, with a rather
peremptory warning against schisms. Then comes the
customary ' Grace of the Lord ' ; a postscript of greet
ings from, not to (as in the long list) the persons
named, among whom is Tertius ' who wrote the epistle ' ;
and a stately epilogue which has considerable resem
blance to some of the grand liturgical passages in the
Pastorals. Varieties of reading — the uncertain position of the
' Grace ' for instance — suggest that the epistle has been
revised once or again at the end. Some critics conjec
ture that the chapter of greetings with its severe
message about schisms is a note, or a part of an epistle
to Ephesus, which has been attached to Romans in the
formation of the Pauline Corpus. There is not very
much in the objection that S. Paul would not have
known so many persons in Rome. Nor perhaps is
Lightfoot very conclusive on the other side when he
finds nearly all the names among the burial inscriptions
of early Rome. Still those names are facts, and the
objection is but conjecture. And if S. Paul could send

JUSTIFICATION BY FAITH 89
this elaborate and weighty treatise to Rome at all, it
would seem likely that he knew enough Christians in
Rome to assure an audience. He was sanguine, but
anxiously so, about his visit, and it at least gratifies
imagination to see in the list a little company of friends
who were working there on his behalf — on behalf of
his Gospel.
The richness of God's wisdom and knowledge which
S. Paul celebrates in xi. 38 was always a wonder in his
mind. He expresses it again in Ephesians iii. 10 by a
vivid phrase, 'the very varied, the many coloured
wisdom of God.' And this richness is reflected in his
own thought. That is why his readers admire and love
him more and more whole-heartedly as continual study
discovers more and more of the whole of him. For
like all strong characters he says things which, taken
by themselves, repel at first. And for a while our very
diligence misrepresents him : we analyse and set his
doctrine out under heads, and shape it into systems,
and perhaps decide that one of his ideas which has
impressed itself strongly upon us, or upon some one
generation of men or some one class, is the only key to
all he writes. Whereas that simple faith in, Jesus as
the Christ, the inevitable sequel to his Pharisaic creed,
unfolds in continuous evolution and deepens with
manifold convolution: it is a life, not a proposition,
and no formula can comprehend it, though several
good ones have been invented to stimulate imaginative
sympathy. < Thus ' j ustification by faith ' has been taken as the
heart of Paulinism. The verb translated 'justify 1 does
certainly mean ' account righteous ' not ' make right
eous.1. The force of it is briefly and clearly shown in
our Lord's parables of the Publican and the Pharisee
(Luke xviii. 10 ff.) and of the Prodigal Son (Luke
xv. 11 ff.).1 And this free forgiveness, this accounting
1 In these parables, in the Lord's Prayer and in the Galilean Gospel
generally, forgiveness or justification issues simply from God's love.
In S. Paul and the rest of the New Testament there is a new emphasis

90 THE GALILEAN GOSPEL INTERPRETED BY S. PAUL
of the sinner righteous by God for Christ's sake, for his
own name's sake (as Ezekiel used to put it) and the
peace of conscience which springs from the return of
the child to his heavenly Father, is the theme of the
first part of Romans and is never absent from Paul's
thought. It is the starting point of the new life. But
it is not the whole of Paul's doctrine. The oftener he
is read the more Matthew Arnold's simplification of
Paulinism will be appreciated,1 that righteousness itself
, had ever been Paul's master passion, and that through
^ Jesus Christ he found at last the power to be righteous.
The being accounted righteous, the reconciliation with
the loving Father is the means, the being righteous is
the life itself. Only, this too is a simplification which
^does not cover all. Christ himself is alone that suffi
cient simplification. There is a metaphysic of holiness
in S. Paul — and Matthew Arnold did not care for
metaphysic. You are accounted righteous and so you
can become righteous : You are forgiven through
Christ, now follow Christ's example : these formulae are
thin and dry. Justification by faith for Paul is being
on the death and resurrection of Christ. This is a particular aspect of
that unfolding of the disciples' love and trust and gratitude into theology
which I try to illustrate throughout this book. It may however be
treated as a special problem, and so Dr. Rashdall has treated it, very
finely, in his Bampton Lectures, The idea of Atonement in Christian
theology (Macmillan, 1919). Dr. Rashdall shews how much of the
formal argument of the apostolic writers rests on the authority of Old
Testament prophecy, while their moral appeal is to the life and death
of Christ as the supremely moving revelation of God's love and
holiness. He concludes, in the spirit of 'Greek theology at its best,'
that ' translated into more modern language the meaning of the
Church's early creed, "There is none other name given among men
by which we maybe saved," will be something of this kind : "There
is none other ideal given among men by which we may be saved
except the moral ideal which Christ taught by His words, and
illustrated by His life and death of love : and there is none other
help so great in the attainment of that ideal as the belief in God as
He has been supremely revealed in Him who so taught and lived and
died." So understood, the self-sacrificing life which was consummated
by the death upon the Cross has indeed power to take away the sins
of the whole world.'
1 5. Paul and Protestantism.

PREDESTINATION 91
crucified with Christ : becoming righteous is living ' no
longer I, but Christ liveth in me.1
Then there is Paul's doctrine of predestination. Not
only do we stumble at that in itself, but we even
think sometimes that it infects his generous mind all
through with discomfiting harshness. We remember
S. Augustine, Pascal, and other of the great and good,
and half confess that this taint spoils the perfection of
them all, and with them even Paul. But read all the
epistles through, read Romans through, read but the
section of Romans which deals with predestination, but
read it through, to the end. The argument is concrete
not abstract. It opens grace to the Gentiles, and is a
widening not a narrowing. Not Jews only, but all
believers of all races, have been ordained to salvation.
In the process of extension Jews are excluded themselves,
yet for Jews too God's eternal purpose lasts. Finally,
' all Israel shall be saved.' It is true that in this plan
Paul, like the ancient prophets, treats of nations and
masses, and leaves unexplained the fate of the several
souls that meanwhile perish. Yet do they perish ?
S. Paul, like our Lord, faces the facts of life, and the
wrath of God (as in Old Testament language he calls
the mystery) is one of the most evident of those facts :
the Scriptures are stern, the Gospel was a narrow way,
and the Lord Jesus was crucified for sinners who but
for his cross must perish. But in 1 Corinthians the
offender was to be delivered to Satan that his spirit
might be saved. And in 1 Cor. xv. a vista opens,
beyond the advent of the judgement, a vista dim with
excess of light, in which God shines in ultimate per
fection, ' God all in all.'1
1 Hell in the New Testament stands to mercy in the proportion of
one to a round thousand. In ' eternal punishment ' the idea of punish
ment is more difficult than the eternity. God's will is that all men
should be saved (i Tim. ii. 4). Yet no man can come to the Father
except through Jesus Christ (John xiv. 6), and no denials of the stern
exclusive things in Scripture and in experience of human nature avail
much. But Scripture and human nature are only read with real
apprehension by conscience, and while each of us (perhaps) can too

92 THE GALILEAN GOSPEL INTERPRETED BY S. PAUL
Schweitzer1 finds the key to S. Paul's mind in his
apocalyptic education as a Jew. The Lord Jesus had
promised the immediate coming of the kingdom of
God, had been acknowledged by the Twelve as the
Christ, and had died to bring the kingdom. The
apostles and the early church in Jerusalem, daunted
indeed by the crucifixion but confirmed in faith by the
resurrection, saw therein the assurance of the promise
and expected from day to day the coming of the Lord
in glory. S. Paul, convinced by Christ's appearing to
him outside Damascus, joined the church, adopted its
simple faith, and all his own deepening and intense
theology was the natural outcome of this. Undoubtedly
this does explain the high doctrine of Christ's person
and work in S. Paul. There is no passage into ' another
kind,' as rationalising critics had supposed, between/
the Galilean Gospel and S. Paul. The teacher of
Nazareth was not thus transformed into the divine
pre-existent Son of Paulinism. The teacher in the
sermon of the mount was the Son of God, the redeemer
of his people, all along. Accepting the resurrection
Paul did quite naturally see the culmination of Judaism
well conceive his own eternal perishing, we can only think of this for
others in an abstract way. Moreover, the Hebrew prophets abolished
that idea of hell and punishment which is intolerable when they
opposed the popular horror of Sheol or the Pit with the faith that there
is no place or state outside the love of God. Mr. H. B. Wilson's
paraphrase of I Cor. xv. 24 ff. in Essays and Reviews would no longer
be condemned as blasphemous, nor (I think) despised as facile uni-
versalism : ' And when the Christian Church in all its branches shall
have fulfilled its sublunary office, and its Founder shall have surrendered
His Kingdom to the great Father, all, both small and great, shall find
a refuge in the bosom of the Universal Parent, to repose, or to be
quickened into higher life, in the ages to come, according to His will.'
The latest and best discussion of this subject is in the Hulsean
Lectures for 1918 by Dr. J. O. F. Murray, Master of Selwyn College,
which (it may be hoped) will presently be published.
1 Who wrote on the apocalyptic view of the Gospel : cf . p. 25. His
book on S. Paul is Geschichte der Paulinischen Forschung von der
Reformation bis auf die Gegenwart (Tubingen, 1911). The relation of
S. Paul to contemporary Jewish thought by H. St. John Thackeray
(Macmillan, 1900) shows how Judaism may have influenced S. Paul in
other directions also.

S. PAUL AND APOCALYPSE 93
in the Christian faith. But here again the simplifi
cation is too narrow, too merely logical. Paul's faith is
ever moving. It draws nourishment from the ever /
widening experience of his life. And his life is Christ's
own life in which he is absorbed. The impulse is
personal and in the noblest sense of the word super
natural. Just as the Lord's resolve to die was a new
thing in the old apocalyptic tradition, and his inscrut
able knowledge that his death was to be the ' ransom
for many' was a divine mystery which ages of Christian
experience must unfold to clearer apprehension, so
S. Paul's mystical union with his Lord was a new act
of God in the education of the world, and it was a ,,
personal, particular, and therefore unique influence.
Paul's apocalyptic Pharisaism was the conditional
circumstance out of which his whole course sprang, but
he entered at his conversion on the 'new creation.'
His advance upon his education had always been zealous
(Gal. i. 14), now it was free. A conversion like his is
always a creative interruption. In him the subsequent
progress is even more remarkable. Schweitzer pays
little attention to the epistles of the captivity, but even
within the missionary period this is evident. The
apocalyptic way of thinking persists, but it does not
seem to be the source of all his thought. Schweitzer
points out the apocalyptic element in Paul's words
about the Lord's Supper (1 Cor. xi. 17 ff.). It is an
element and a very important one. But there is
something besides. And when Schweitzer argues that
the passage in Rom. vi. about baptism shows the samey
apocalyptic, anticipatory view of sacrament, the con
clusion is not obvious. And the change in Paul's
manner of writing about the advent is so remarkable
that the origin is almost forgotten in the develope
ment. In Thessalonians there is the old traditional
scenic pomp, restrained but frankly literal. In
1 Corinthians this supplies indeed the solemn rhetoric,
but the deep substantial interest is elsewhere ; it is in
the profound religious philosophy of the Son delivering

94 THE GALILEAN GOSPEL INTERPRETED BY S. PAUL
up his kingdom, the ' end,' and God all in all ; and in
the elaboration of the doctrine of resurrection which
begins here and progresses through the later epistles.
This too starts from Paul's Pharisaic education.1
' According to Josephus the Pharisees believed that the
souls of good men return to life in other bodies,' that
is, they believed in the creation of a new body not the
resuscitation of the body of mere flesh and blood.
Perhaps the * obvious resemblance ' to 1 Cor. xv. has
suggested in this summary of another's summary a
more Pauline phrase than Josephus or the Pharisees
would have adopted. Anyhow S. Paul's conception
goes very far deeper than theirs. He has his vision of
the risen Lord, his experience of the immeasurable
power of the Lord's Spirit in the faithful and especially
in himself, his confidence that nothing can separate
them from the love of Christ, his growing realisation
of the Spirit by its fruit which is love, joy, peace, etc.,
the new character which clothes the new-born man.
And so, not all at once but by degrees, he gets the
idea clear of the Christian freeing himself more and
more from the needs and desires and of course the sins
of his mortal body of flesh and blood, and being clothed
upon more and more with the new spiritual body, the
vehicle of the life that is already hid with Christ in God.
And this spiritual body will be perfected when Christ
comes and changes all the temporal into the eternal.
Meanwhile Paul never approaches a description of this
new spiritual body except in terms of character. Only
we must also notice that he does not profess to give a
complete description of it at all, and he sometimes lets
drop a phrase (as in Rom. viii. 11) which shows he is
aware of the dignity even of the material creation, and
he seems to restrain himself purposely from saying
anything which would foreclose the question of the
ultimate relation of matter to spirit. This however he
1 See the chapter on ' Thought and practice in Judaism ' in Prole
gomena to Acts, edited by F. J. Foakes Jackson and Kirsopp Lake :
cf. above, p. 71.

SPIRITUAL BODY : MYSTERY RELIGIONS 95
does make plain, that nothing is spiritual but what is
moral, and that this truth rules our hopes of eternal
life.1 If Schweitzer simplifies S. Paul too drastically in the
direction of apocalyptic Judaism, others have done the
opposite, finding that the great contribution he made
to Christianity was due to the influence of the ' mystery
religions.' Most people have heard of the Eleusinian
mysteries in ancient Hellas, and are aware that the
Greek 'mysteries' combined with eastern religion
played a large part in the devotional life of the later
pagan world. The mystery was a drama of life and
death and immortality, of purification and new life.
There was a ceremony of initiation, often with blood.
There was a spectacle and there was a divine meal.
We know a good deal more of late about these
mysteries than former generations did. Unfortunately
most of our evidence comes from a rather later period
than S. Paul's.2 Waiving that objection however, do
we really find much in S. Paul's epistles which proves
this foreign influence? There certainly is a good
deal of coincidence in language. Yet here one
must go cautiously. Read the gnostic writers, or the
romance writers of the early centuries, the ' aretalogoi '
as they are called. Once you are on the look out for a
certain set of words, or certain peculiarities of compo
sition, you will be startled by the frequency of such
coincidences. Do they indicate more than the complex
sources of the general style of all writers of a given
period who do not take pains to practise a literary
1 Cf. p. 79 above, and the references in the footnote.
8 This is brought out by Cumont, Les religions orientates dans le
paganisme romain (Paris, 1909), one of the best books on the whole
subject. The following may also be named : Reitzenstein, Die
hellenistischen Mysterien-religionen, and Poimandres, Studien zur
Griechish-agyptischen und friihchristlichen Liter atur (Leipzig, 1904),
with an article on 'The Hermetic Writings' in J.T.S., July 1914, by
the Rev. J. M. Creed. Dr. Kennedy has discussed the question in a
plain manner in his St. Paul and the Mystery Religions, and the sub
ject has been treated afresh by Loisy in Les mysteres pa'iens ei le
mystire chritien (Paris : Emile Nourry, 1919).

96 THE GALILEAN GOSPEL INTERPRETED BY S. PAUL
style ? Still Paul's free use of this ' mystery 7 phrase
ology is striking. A curious instance is Col. ii. 18.
There are three Greek words here which mean ' walking
on things which he has seen.1 Later scribes made an
attempt at sense by inserting a 'not1 so that such a
metaphorical meaning could be extracted as we find in
our Authorised Version, ' intruding into those things
which he hath not seen 1 ; but the ancient text certainly
lacked the ' not.1 A very slight emendation however,
scarcely more than a different distribution of the letters
into words, gave the vigorous sarcasm ' windily walking
upon air.' The Greek was not quite good, but it
would serve ; and this or some modification of it was
commonly thought probable.1 But a few years ago
Sir William Ramsay found two tablets in a Greek
temple in Asia Minor recording initiations into the
mysteries. The dedicators use almost the very words
of Colossians : ' I have seen : I have walked,1 that is ' I
have looked upon the sacred drama : I have entered
upon the mystic way of life.1 The true text of
Colossians is decisively proved to be the text we
have. It is of course obvious to remark that S. Paul is dis
paraging the cult here, not promulgating it in the
church. But he has used plenty of this kind of lan
guage already in the epistle, professedly adapting it to
the Gospel. Now the other side of his practice appears,
and it corresponds to what we often observe in the
apostolic writings. The Christian people are extrava
gant, superstitious in the zeal of their devotion : their
leaders have to check them. The rebuke of the angel
to the seer of the Apocalypse is typical of much.
And here may be the right point of view for examining
S. Paul's general objection to the mystery religions.
There was much in these religions which rendered
them preparatory to the Gospel. The idea of redemp-
1 See Hort's Introduction to the Greek Testament in the original
Greek, p. 127. Ramsay communicated his discovery to The Athenaeum
of January 25, 1913.

MYSTERY RELIGIONS 97
tion, of mystical union, of new birth was in them.
They satisfied for some, and intensified for others the
yearning after purity and eternity which the Gospel
fully met. Gentile converts brought something with
them into Christian worship from their native mysteries,
partly enriching if often corrupting thereby the sobriety
of the church. S. Paul, 'all things to all men,' quick
to understand, assimilate, and eager in sympathy with
all ardent minds, did not reject the offering. He
recognised in it something he bad long known in
apocalyptic Judaism ; for that was ardent too, and
dreamed of spectacle, and taught new birth, and had
learned from the Law of Moses that the blood is the
life, and God gives it upon the altar to renew spoiled
lives (Lev. xvii. 11). And he felt too that one who had
seen the risen Lord and knew himself to have been
crucified with him and to have risen with him, and
now to be living in him, had a true experience in
common with these pagans whom God had called.
So he encouraged while he discriminated, and he
adopted their phrases of piety in his genial ecclesiastic
fashion. All this is at least quite probable. What
there seems no reason to suppose is that he believed
himself mystically one with Christ because pagans or
pagan converts put the idea into his head ; or that he
discovered in the Lord's Supper deep things suggested
by the pagan mysteries, which the church had known
nothing about, and the Lord had not revealed to him.
Paul did not become ' the slave of Jesus Christ ' because
of the mysteries : he learned something from the mys
teries, and his heart went out to the initiates, because,
being the slave of Christ, he found there too some
breath from his Master's Spirit.1
1 This seems the true proportion of things. At the same time the
subordinate truth must be recognised which is well expressed in the
following words of Dr. Bethune-Baker : ' The background of St. Paul's
thought has not yet been sufficiently explored. Ideas of the "seed,"
and the " garment," and transformation, and divination, played a large
part in the popular Hellenistic piety and the philosophical thought
with which St. Paul, the Jew and the Christian, was in contact — in
G

98 THE GALILEAN GOSPEL INTERPRETED BY S. PAUL
But this discussion has brought us to the epistles of
the captivity. From Greece Paul went to Troas,
picking up, it seems, Luke at Philippi, who remained
with him all through his subsequent adventures. Then
by sea they went to Miletus, where Paul parted from
the elders of Miletus with the address we read in Acts
xx. It was an affecting farewell, and the bold theology
of verse 28 witnesses to the accuracy of the reported
words : ' Take heed to yourselves and all the flock in
which the Holy Spirit set you as overseers (or bishops),
to shepherd the church of God which he made his own
possession through his own blood.' They reached
Jerusalem. The Jews rioted, and Paul was rescued
from their fury by the Roman soldiers. But the rescue
was an arrest. He was sent to Caesarea, where he was
detained a long while and examined before governors
and royal persons. In one of these examinations Luke
describes the scene with characteristic liveliness (xxiv.
1 ff.). Tertullus, a professional orator, began in pom
pous language to open the case against Paul. Confused
by Felix the governor's indifference to his rhetoric, he
involved himself in an endless succession of relative
clauses. The Jews, wearied also, break in with ' So he
did, so he did.1 Tertullus gave up, and the governor
nodded to Paul to make his defence, which he did in
a plain manly speech. The conclusion of all these
examinations was Paul's appeal to Caesar. He was
accordingly sent to Rome, and after the perils by sea
which are recorded in the incomparable narrative of
Acts xxvii., xxviii., he arrived at Rome. He had an
interview with the Jews at Rome, and once more,
as before in Pisidia and at Corinth, his loyalty to
the ancient church was rebuffed, and he turned to the
Gentiles. ' They,' he said, ' will hear.' And so Acts
ends with the two years of 'preaching the kingdom
relation to which he often expressed himself. ... To attribute to
him from first to last a systematised and entirely coherent scheme that
is all his own is to defend him on lines that can hardly be made good '
(J.T.S., October 1919, p. 93).

S. PAUL AT ROME : PHILIPPIANS 99
of God and teaching the things concerning the Lord
Jesus Christ with all boldness and without hindrance.'
That is borne out by the epistle to the Philippians,
which may or may not be the earliest of the four
written from the Roman captivity. Its theology is
the simplest, and it ends with indignation at a
very considerable 'hindrance' arising from Jews or
Judaising Christians. This connects it logically with
the controversy of Galatians and Romans, but proves
nothing about the order of writing. There are in fact
no means for arranging these epistles in order of time.
Paul and Timothy, ' slaves of Christ Jesus,1 greet all
the saints at Philippi with their bishops and deacons.
The term ' church ' does not occur in the salutations of
the captivity except in Philemon, where it hardly bears
the technical meaning ; it is ' the assembly at thy
house.1 x
The letter begins with ' I give thanks.' Paul writes
from his bonds: is confident, rejoicing, hopeful till the
day of Jesus Christ : he remembers the Philippians in
his prayers, and yearns for them in the bowels of affec
tion of Jesus Christ.
All has turned out for the furtherance of the Gospel,
Rome listens ; the brethren are bold.
By ill-wishers or well-wishers Christ is preached and
Paul rejoices. He will die or live as may be; yet is
confident that he will live, for his friends' sake. Only
be they worthy citizens of Christ's Gospel : their motto
' On behalf of Christ ' ; no trembling at the athlete's
contest, but with one spirit and one soul taking the
gospel side.
By all the consolations of Christ, Paul urges them,
keep unity : and keep it by the lowly self-emptying
spirit of Christ,2 who possessing all authority never
1 Cf. p. no.
1 ii. 7. See articles in the Journal of Theological Studies by Mr. J.
Ross, July 1909; Mr. W. Warren, April 191 1 ; and Dr. Bethune-
Baker, October 1914, for this 'emptying' and 'prize to be snatched
at. ' The Revised Version, it seems, has not quite caught the point.
The idea of our Lord's ' emptying ' his humanity of certain properties

100 THE GALILEAN GOSPEL INTERPRETED BY S. PAUL
used it for himself : so now God of his grace has given
him universal dominion.
Trust God then, and work out the salvation initiated ;
for yourselves and for the poor perverse world. Nothing
has been in vain, even if now I am to die as a libation
for your still continuing rites of faithful sacrifice. I
rejoice, I rejoice with you : rejoice ye, rejoice with me.
I send Timothy and Epaphroditus, so dear and good
to me : receive them with a like affection.
Finally, my brothers, rejoice. . . .
But here Paul breaks off in what he is dictating.
We can picture the scene. News is brought into the
room of some fresh attack upon the apostle's work by
the Judaisers. He leaves the sentence unfinished and
breaks out with denunciation. The scribe looks up
with a smile on his face at the temper — a bit of character
which mars the perfection of their master but is dear
to them. Then he writes again swiftly, smiling no
longer as the fierce words modulate into a still deeper
theology and holier richness.
'Ware the dogs, he cries, the spurious circumcision.
I am as good a Jew as they. But I have thrown away
the trappings of Judaism for how much better a power
and progress and hope, the power of Christ's resurrec
tion, good courage to press onward, the hope of glorious
transformation when he comes. We are citizens of
heaven and shall wear the body of Christ's glory.
So, brothers, my joy and chaplet of victory, stand
fast. I repeat my glad farewell — rejoice in the Lord
always. The Lord is near at hand. God's peace be
with you, the peace that surpasses all our intuitions ;
and maintain the nobility of your profession.
Greetings to you all from all of us, with gratitude
of divinity which has prevailed since Dr. Gore wrote his essay in Lux
Mundi is too subtle and precise. S- Paul writes as of the governor of
a province. Christ was no rapacious lord, fleecing his subjects, but
was extreme in lowliness, emptying himself and caring only for them.
' He considered his equality with God not as an opportunity of self-
aggrandisement, but effaced all thought of self and poured out his ful:
ness to enrich others.'

COLOSSIANS 101
for your message and your liberality. The grace of
our Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit.
Joy and confidence ring through Philippians. Im
perial Rome seems to have touched S. Paul's imagina
tion. He takes a new metaphor from the great ' city.'
The Gospel is to fill the world with heaven as Rome
does with civilisation. Meanwhile let the faithful
follow the example of Christ and be made like him,
More than in his earlier epistle he seems to dwell
with loving reverence on the days of the Lord's flesh ;
one of many affinities which Philippians bears to
Hebrews. Colossians looks rather to Christian glory. Yet not
quite in the same manner as before. This epistle is
more directly theological. The mystery — that very
word is employed — of Christ's person is the subject :
the thought of the eternal divine Christ, ' the visible
image of the unseen God,' underlies the whole. As
three centuries later heresy was the opportunity for
the church to make thought clearer by the definition
' consubstantial,' so perhaps Asiatic extravagances of
devotion led S. Paul to strike out phrases which guarded
against error while they illuminated truth. He does
this with a noble freedom, as in spontaneous conversa
tion springing from a rich experience. He makes the
proportions of the faith stand out as it were by masterly
touches of colour : all is warmth and splendour.
Paul and Timothy salute the faithful in Colossae.
We give thanks, they begin, and pray for the faith of
the Colossians. And out of this a long sentence
winds about their hope for the future and gladness for
the past of their friends, for their entrance into the
province of the inheritance of the saints in light.
Then this deepens into a creed, rich in poetic and
sacred associations of phrase, concerning the royal
person of the Son of God. The first clause ends with
the noticeable title ' the head of the body the church.1
Then comes a touch of gnostic language, 'all the
pleroma or fulness ' is in him ; this will get a pregnant

102 THE GALILEAN GOSPEL INTERPRETED BY S. PAUL
turn in Ephesians. Then the work of redemption and
the reconciliation to God of all things in heaven and
earth is rehearsed. All is finally applied to the Colos-'
sians, who must abide in the gospel which is proclaimed
by all creation.
The language is new and old : the piety of the Old
Testament reflected back from Gentile devotion — all
creation is vocal in the gospel : cf. Ps. xix. 3, xxix. 9 ;
Rom. viii. 19 ff. It is the rhetoric of the Greek liturgies,
as in Ephesians, Hebrews, Clement of Rome.1
And now, S. Paul continues, I rejoice at the publica
tion of our mystery or sacrament, Christ in us the hope
of glory. For which I toil and labour ; for your sake
especially of late. In spirit I am with you, and see
with joy your trained and steadfast battle-front of
faith towards Christ.
Onward then in Christ. Be not deceived by vain
philosophy. What is true in the philosophy of your
old world reaches complete expression in Christ. And
he has abolished all the dogmatic exclusiveness of
Judaism and pagan mysteries. Do not entangle your
selves again with such folly. Away with those poor
elements. Ye are risen with Christ. Your life is
hid with Christ in God, and when Christ is manifested
ye shall be manifested with him in glory.
Mortify therefore the limbs of your earthly body,
the vices of paganism. Put off the old humanity.
Clothe yourselves with the new, the ever fresh ; the
Christlike unity of all nations and classes, the lovely
virtue of the new life. And over all put on charity
the binding influence of their perfection. Let Christ's
peace solve all problems. Be glad and thankful.
Wives, husbands, children, slaves, live with affection
the fair life of Christ.
Pray and watch ; and pray for us and for the publica
tion of our mystery of Christ. Out of bad times buy
liberally the opportunity of good.
1 See below, pp. ir,2f.

PHILEMON 103
Tychicus and Onesimus (he is one of us now) will
carry this letter and tell you all our news. Your
many friends here greet you. I have sent a letter to
Laodicea. Get it and send them this. Bid Archippus
good cheer in his sacred ministry.
For signature — Remember my bonds. The grace be
with you.
With this epistle S. Paul sent a short letter to
Philemon, a well-to-do citizen of Colossae, whose slave
Onesimus had run away and taken refuge with Paul ;
had been converted by him to Christ, and now —
Onesimus' first step in the narrow way of the Gospel —
returns to his master.
Paul the prisoner and Timothy the brother write to
their dear Philemon, to his family and to the church
in his house. Paul gives thanks for Philemon's good
ness to the saints, and for love's sake he the ambassador
and prisoner of Christ begs goodness for Onesimus.
Paul has begotten him in bonds and now he is a
brother and must be treated brotherly. Paul will pay
expenses ; and he runs on making play with the jargon
of accounts, with Onesimus the 'useful man's1 name,
and before he ends with greetings and grace, he
confirms what we have already read in Philippians of
his confident hope of release : ' make guest's provision
for me, for I hope that through your prayers I shall
be granted to you.'
The letter is full of sweet unaffected holiness and wit.
Yet it is shrewd and strong. Without commanding
Paul means to be obeyed. And the letter is not
private. It has the formal courtesies of his longer
letters and seems to be meant for the whole assembly
to hear. And what a good illustration it is of the
apostolic attitude to slavery. There is no meddling
with the instituted custom, but within the brotherhood
master and slave are one. The church did away with
the bitterness of slavery at once, and left the politicians
to change the law of the state when they would : ' Take
no thought for the morrow.' ' Wert thou called being a

104 THE GALILEAN GOSPEL INTERPRETED BY S. PAUL
slave ? care not for it. Nay, if thou even canst become
free, use it rather. . . . Put on the new man, where
there is no Greek and Jew, circumcision and uncircum-
cision, barbarian, Scythian, slave, free, but all in all
Christ' (1 Cor. vii. 21 ; Col. iii. 11).
Ephesians is to Colossians what Romans is to Gala
tians and the two Corinthian letters, an epistolary
treatise rather than a personal letter. The treatises are
letter-like with no smell of the study, dictated rather
than composed, though Ephesians looks as if it had
received some final touches from the secretary. Still
there is this difference, and Colossians remains unique in
the history of doctrine for its bold rough-hewing of
dogma, its unpremeditated harmony of head and heart.
Yet Ephesians is not a repetition of Colossians, nor
Colossians a simplification of Ephesians. They are com
plementary. Neither stands secure without the other.
Colossians pictures the person of Christ. Ephesians
deduces the doctrine of Christ's body the church, and
shows how the one mystery or sacrament of the person
is repeated in the various functions of his body, as for
instance in Christian marriage.
Paul the apostle, it begins, with no associated name
and with a blank space left for the successive addresses
of the circular epistle.
Then ' blessed be God,' as in 2 Corinthians, and in
preparation for the 'he that hath blessed us in all
spi ritual blessing.' For this is the starting point of a
long sentence which winds its way as in Colossians but
with more careful subtlety of arrangement. Blessing,
love, purpose : the beloved, grace, forgiveness, purpose
to sum up all in the Christ : the Christ in whom we
hoped of old and now have been sealed in faith by
the Spirit who is the earnest of inheritance — thus the
thought branches and progresses.
Then with the usual thanksgiving S. Paul turns to
prayer for the Spirit of wisdom and revelation to be
given to his friends with knowledge, more personal and
direct, of tlie Lord Jesus. But the prayer passes into

EPHESIANS 105
meditation on the Lord's exalted state as head over
all things for the church which is his body, the fulness
of him who is being all in all fulfilled. You, he goes
on, hath God saved by the free bounty of grace, and
raised you with Christ, and set you in the heavenly
sphere with him, you God's own making, created for
good works, prepared of God for us to walk in.
Wherefore remembering your old heathen estate,
see now how you have been brought into the polity
of the true Israel : in Christ Jesus : all one in him :
distinctions and enmities abolished by the cross : all
one new humanity : a polity, a temple of God, with
Christ Jesus the corner-stone and the Holy Spirit in
dwelling and informing it with divine life.
For which sake I Paul, on your behalf — again he
turns to his prayer, but again the theological thought
overflows and postpones it — Indeed you know my
apostleship to you Gentiles ; that mystery long hidden
but now revealed, how the Gentiles are all one with the
rest of the church by God's richly varied wisdom.
Faint not at my pains for you which are your glory.
And now at last the prayer is ready to take perfect
shape. For which sake, it runs, I bow my knees to the
Father, the source and type of all fatherhood, praying
for your perfection in Christ, your full and steadfast
comprehension of his inexhaustible love ; and giving
glory to him whose liberal omnipotence overpasseth all
desire, to him in the church and in Christ Jesus for
the generations of the ages of the ages. Amen.
I beseech you therefore to walk worthy of your
vocation in gentleness, unity, and love : the Spirit is
unity, the practical bond is love : all things divine are
one. In unity there is living variety of service : so the
body grows, drawing life from Christ the head, and
filling up his fulness until all at last is one man mature
and perfect.
Therefore you must no longer walk like heathen in
whose minds there is no sanctifying faculty. You
know Christ now for you know him as Jesus, and in

106 THE GALILEAN GOSPEL INTERPRETED BY S. PAUL
the human example of Jesus Christ you must put off
the old humanity and clothe yourselves with the new,
ever renewing youth in the Holy Spirit who fills your
mind. Precepts follow for the Christlike life. There seems
to be an echo here from the church's liturgy, Christ
the offering and sacrifice, the hymn of life and light
(v. 2, 14).
Wives and husbands must live in sacramental love
manifesting its original which is Christ's love for the
church. Children, parents, slaves, masters must like
wise live the lovely life of God.
Such is the glorious inner harmony of the church.
But it grows up in a world of spiritual foes, and for
the warfare all must arm themselves with the panoply
of God, adding to the ancient prophetic armour the
great shield of the all-including faith.
Pray for me, Paul concludes, the ambassador in
bonds of the gospel mystery. Tychicus will give our
news. Peace to the brethren : grace with all who love
our Lord Jesus Christ in incorruptibility.
The last line of Ephesians is typical of the whole
epistle. It is the same ' Grace of the Lord ' as in the
earlier epistles, but developed. And the epistle shews
a marked developement upon Romans, which represents
the earlier group as Ephesians represents the group of
the captivity : yet its theology would not be intelligible
except as a developement. Nor does this develope
ment seem to have been shaped in another mind at a
later time than Paul's. The whole of the two series
of epistles are too vitally knit together. Compare
Ephesians with the rest, then do the same with
Hebrews, and you feel this strongly. More facts are
observable than the theory of a second author will
cover. The conspicuous novelty is in the final emphatic
word aphtharsia (Vulgate, incorruptio). It is best
explained from 1 Cor. xv. 58, ' this corruptible must

EPHESIANS AND THE ADVENT 107
put on incorruption (aphtharsian) and this mortal
immortality.' It echoes and sums up a phrase which
S. Paul repeats five times in Ephesians (i. 3, 20 ; ii. 6 ;
iii. 10 ; vi. 12), and which may be paraphrased ' in the
heavenly sphere.' The link with 1 Cor. xv. shows that
he has the great advent in mind, but the whole
context of Ephesians shows that his thought about the
advent has moved forward. The very simple faith of
the early church, as represented in the opening chap
ters of Acts, was this: Jesus is the Christ; now in
heaven ; soon to come from heaven in the glory of the
kingdom, to end the earthly order, and to take the
faithful to heaven. Acts also shows that the Spirit of
Jesus Christ in the faithful was a second article of \
faith, closely connected with the hope of the advent.
In S. Paul we find the Spirit as the inspirer of a new
life which the faithful already live with Christ, or
rather in Christ, anticipating as it were their exaltation
to heaven. 'As it were 'is a right condition of the
statement, for all is highly pictorial ; things ineffable
are with a solemn grandeur symbolised in metaphors
of space and time. So they are all through the writings
of S. Paul. Herein lies one main difference between
Paul and John. But S. Paul presses attention more
and more to the Spirit ; strips away more and more of
the merely traditional scenery. And with this enlarge
ment goes another. The advent moves into the
vaster future. Already he had bidden the Thessa
lonians not to be excited and restless as though the day
of Christ's coming could be foretold. In 1 Corin
thians the coming stretches out into a far wider ' end.*'
Now in Ephesians he contemplates, it seems, a long
vista of growth, the gathering in of multitudes, the
maturing of their faith through increasing knowledge.
It may be that S. Paul, always quick to feel the
mind of Christ in things without as well as within, was
stimulated by Rome. In Rome, the centre, he realised
the extending influence of the empire, the Roman law
and civilisation moulding the world, filling it as with

108 THE GALILEAN GOSPEL INTERPRETED BY 8. PAUL
growing life. And he accepted the sign. Such great
patient work still awaited the Gospel. Christ would
'come,1 but all mankind must be prepared for his
coming. And if so, he was aided from other sides to evolve
the conception. The quarrel of Jew and Gentile
within the brotherhood of the saints was not indeed
quite stilled : the conclusion of Philippians proves
that. But Philippians as a whole combines with
Ephesians to assure us that at least a new stage had
been reached : the old watchwords of the parties were
stale ; that was no longer the burning question. And
as that quarrel died out a fuller idea of unity became
possible ; not bare unity as of one party's victory, or
by compromise, but unity fulfilled in variety. And
that is one main strand of the argument in Ephesians.
But it is interwoven with other strands. Or rather
that metaphor is too material, too dead. Each current
of the argument is living thought, each deepens as it
flows, divides into further life, is lost and found again
in living union with the others. Thus this unity in
variety corresponds to the one, yet very varied wisdom
of God. And this compound idea again meets the
already well-known Pauline phrase ' in Christ,' and fills
it with increased significance.
' Christ ' is the Greek for the Hebrew ' Messiah ' :
both mean in English ' The anointed.' Wherever we
find in our English version of the Old Testament '.The
Lord's anointed,' 'His anointed,1 etc., the Hebrew
has 'The Lord's Messiah,1 the Greek Septuagint and
the Latin Vulgate have ' The Lord's Christ,' etc. For
the Jewish, the Greek, and the Roman churches the
Old Testament is literally full of Christ. But only
once (Dan. ix. 25) does the title stand by itself: the
typical form is ' The Lord's anointed or Christ ' ; and
it is used of the reigning king, sometimes of priests,
sometimes (as in Ps. lxxxix. 51) of the people of Israel
as a whole. Hence we see the point of those quotations
in the first chapter of Hebrews : ' Christ ' was the

CHRIST IN OLD AND NEW TESTAMENT 109
name our Lord inherited from the Christs of past
history. And hence too we understand how S. Paul
would be quite intelligible to a Jew when he spoke of
being ' in Christ ' or ' in the Christ.' For the Jewish
doctrine was that the Christ had always represented,
even included the people, and that it would still be so
when the perfect, divine Christ came. Look at Daniel
vii., and this will be clear. He who in vii. 13 f. is pre
sented (like ' a son of man ' or as ' the son of man ') to
the Most High and receives the kingdom, is in vii. 27
the whole company of the saints.
S. Paul then brought this idea of the representative,
inclusive Christ with him when he entered the Christian
church. He found there Jewish Christians to whom
also it was familiar. He gathered converts from the
Asiatic Greeks who perhaps had a kindred idea of
* mystical ' union in the god of their mysteries. The
passionate faith of gratitude and love which was
awakened by his vision at Damascus revealed to him
intenser truth in these ideas. Meditation on the Lord^
death, experience of life and power and peace imparted
by the risen living Christ revealed still more. The
doctrine of the messianic Spirit (also inherited from
Judaism) brought more and more purity and clearness
to his thought. More and more the formal conception**)
of representation, and the material metaphor of en-(
folding, were dispensed with: more and more all became (
direct, lucid, real as it became spiritual. 'The Lord'
is the Spirit : and where the Spirit of tbe Lord is,
there is liberty,1 he writes in 2 Cor. iii. 17. The pre-''
cise interpretation of these bold words is difficult, but
the general sense is not doubtful. They explain what
he says in v. 16, ' Henceforth we know no man after
the flesh : even though we have known Christ after the
flesh, yet now we know him so no more.1 This does not
mean ' I take no interest in the gospel history ' : it
does mean that S. Paul was what we now call a
' mystic ' (for we have altered the signification of
' mystic,' ' mystical,1 etc., from what that set of words

J

110 THE GALILEAN GOSPEL INTERPRETED BY S. PAUL
bore in Paul's day and in our Prayer Book) : he was
' mystical ' rather than ' sacramental,' and realised union
directly through the Spirit without mediation of even
sign and symbol. Only we should ever observe the
sanity of his mysticism. The Spirit was life, practice,
conduct to him. To walk by the Spirit, to bear the
i fruit of the Spirit, was the only way he recognised of
being spiritual. Spiritual and moral can hardly be
distinguished in his teaching.
And in Ephesians, where this doctrine of the spiritual
Christ reaches its greatest depth and clearness, it is
also most practical. It dominates a doctrine of the
church, which issues in its turn into a larger revelation
of the deity of Christ.
In S. Stephen's speech and throughout the opening
scene of Acts in Jerusalem the word ' church ' stands
for the Jewish church, ancient, one, large, the holy
church of the fathers.1 In Paul's epistles of the
missionary period it designates the assembly (cf. Phile
mon 2) or church of the faithful in a particular place,
and it is found in the plural of these many several
'churches.1 Paul, and no doubt the other apostles,
took pains to preserve the one faith in these many
churches. The strife between Jewish and Gentile
Christians made the task hard, and in discipline some
variety was found necessary. 'The care of all the
churches1 was an anxiety. Paul bore the toil, anxiety,
and opposition gallantly, patiently. By degrees the
strain of Jew against Gentile was lessened. In
Ephesians, perhaps anticipating somewhat in the joy
and courage of his faith, he writes as though all cleavage
were annulled : the mystery is at last revealed : Jew
and Gentile are one. Yet not by losing their dis
tinctive qualities : unity of spirit includes variety of
function : all are one as a complex growing body is one.
After the toil and anxiety of the missionary years, in
1 In v. n the word (ecclesia) signifies the ' assembly ' in no technical
sense. In ii. 47 the word, in its technical sense, betrays the later text :
compare A.V. with R.V.

EPHESIANS AND THE CHURCH 111
the leisure of the captivity, with the encouragement of
new success (such as is witnessed to in the opening
chapters of Philippians) that happened to S. Paul
which, in more trivial measure happens to any one who
labours and broods and then waits in stillness. The
idea descends which brings order into scattered effort.
It was the old idea of Judaism, the idea of the one
church, but it was the old idea reformed, perfected.
It is ancient for it is the ancient Jewish church in
new growth. But it gathers Gentile and Jew together
and continues God's purpose which had been working
hiddenly among the Gentiles also.
It is one : but by expansion not by conquest, as for
the most part the Old Testament had shaped its hope.
Barriers now are taken away and those who had been
far off enter freely. All are fellow citizens in divine
isonomy. It is holy. The traditional term 'holy,' 'saintly,'
belongs to all its members : perhaps that is what is
emphasised hi the unusual phrase ' the holy apostles
and prophets ' (iii. 5) ; the old order and the new are
thus sanctified together. But this holiness is more
practical, thorough and hopeful than ever before.
The church is a church in the world, organised for
service, in order to bring all the world into its
holiness. And it is living. There is no need for exaggerat
ing the rigidity of contemporary Judaism. Doubt
less there was much earnestness and vigour left.
But the crucifixion, the temper of Paul's Judaising
opponents, the temper in which Judaism survived the
fall of Jerusalem and the ruined hopes of Barcochba,
are sufficient to indicate how little Judaism had of life
compared with apostolic Christianity. To Judaism all
things certainly did not become new, and that new
birth is evident throughout the New Testament. This
life is natural but divine; natural in its homeliness
and simplicity; divine in its dependence upon, its
sublime confidence in eternal powers. This is the true

112 THE GALILEAN GOSPEL INTERPRETED BY 8. PAUL
'supernatural'; what the apostolic Christians tersely
summed up in ' the Spirit.'
It is this life, so manifold in unity, so determined in
its growth, so capable of assimilating and transforming
human elements, of drawing more and more from its
spiritual source ; it is this life which S. Paul has chiefly
in view when he describes the church as a ' body,1 the
'body of Christ.'
We, in using this metaphor of the ' body,' are apt to
think of the natural body with its limiting line of
boundary. S. Paul is with us here in one respect. He
too means to indicate the visible society of the faithful
manifesting Christ in the world, and when he speaks of
one Lord and one faith he also speaks of one baptism,
which was a visible sign of entrance. The church was
to him a practical institution. But he differs from our
tendency to harden the visible and the limiting line.
He means spiritual not natural body. And 'body''
implies for him chiefly growth. For him the term is
hardly metaphorical. If the spiritual body with which
each man is clothing himself during his Christian life
is a reality, so is the spiritual body of the risen Christ.
This spiritual body of Christ is the church, and Christ
is still clothing himself therewith. In the last verse of
Eph. i. the rendering of the Revised Version cannot be
justified. The Greek participle must be a passive (as
the Latin Vulgate takes it). The meaning is that the /
church, the body of Christ, is ' the fulness of him who
all in all is being fulfilled.'
So Dr. Armitage Robinson translates it in his
Commentary and exposition of Ephesians,1 in which
he may almost be said to have recovered a forgotten
article of the apostolic faith. This is the doctrine of
1 S. Paul's Epistle to the Ephesians, a revised text and translation
with exposition and notes (Macmillan, 1903). The Exposition, in which
' the doctrine referred to above is fully brought out, has since been
published separately. Westcott in his commentary (Macmillan,
1906) agrees about the translation and sets forth the same doctrine.
But Westcott shews less plainly its peculiar importance and con
sequences.

THE INCLUSIVE CHRIST 113
the inclusive Christ. The Lord Jesus died and rose
from the dead. He rose with all his manhood, in his
human but spiritual body. By the resurrection, accord
ing to the Spirit of holiness, he was determined or
' defined ' to be the Son of God with power (Rom. i. 4).
And now the power of his Godhead is manifest, not in
separation from men, but in enabling him to overcome
the limitations of our manhood in its present imper
fection, and to draw us into himself and make us really
parts of his spiritual body. ' Christ ' is not just the
same as, or just a title of Jesus. 'Christ' is 'the
Christ,' and is the Lord Jesus together with his faithful.
And as the number of the faithful increases, and as
they more and more grow in holiness into the likeness
of their Lord, the head of this body, so the Christ
grows, is all in all being fulfilled. Christ is divine,
not because he is unapproachable, inimitable, but
because he really can do this, because of his trans
cendent faculty of inclusion. This doctrine had been
almost forgotten. Therefore much of the New Testa
ment had been misunderstood. In face of the ' claims '
of the Christ in S. John's Gospel reason had been
separated from the faith. The ideal morality of the
New Testament, that the saints, the faithful, do not
sin, had been put far off as unattainable. Progress in
truth and conduct had been doubted for mankind as a
whole, as though the true faith compelled us to suppose
that from first to last only a little flock must oppose a
hostile world ; human nature remaining on the whole
ever the same. And we called ourselves 'christians,'
and Christ 'the founder of our religion,' instead of
believing ourselves to be ' in Christ,' and recognising^
Christ as having been in the world from the begin
ning, always the author of all goodness and truth,
and as still working in the world until the end,
still growing, being all in all fulfilled. This is
part of the meaning of the verse in the Qui-
cunque vult : ' One Christ, not by conversion of the
Godhead into flesh, but by taking of the manhood

114 THE GALILEAN GOSPEL INTERPRETED BYS. PAUL
into God.' And this was in Tennyson's mind when he
sang (' In Memoriam,' cv.) of ' the Christ that is to
be.' Apostolic truths are after all never forgotten
everywhere at any time.
Thus to S. Paul in his captivity a sublime idea of
the one church came down from God. It reconciled
what had seemed opposites, it corrected first views, as
of the immediate coming of Christ. It was in harmony
with his progressive discernment of the Spirit as the
great reality. It led him into a profounder under
standing of the person of Jesus Christ, of his essential
union with the Father and the Holy Spirit in the
Godhead, and at the same time (the one revelation
throwing light upon the other) of the destiny in God's
purpose for men : they too were to be lifted with
Christ into God : the rhetoric of 1 Cor. xv., 'that God
may be all in all,' could be worked out into clear
thought. And just as in 1 Cor. xv. he passes beyond the
' coming ' to the * end,' when the Son shall have
delivered up the kingdom, and (as he seems to medi
tate) even such terms as we now use with most aweful
reverence to express in human manner the judgements
and the nature of God, shall be superseded ; so here
he passes from the idea of the church, the practical,
social instrument of the inclusive Christ, to even larger
V and more eternal conceptions of this gathering of all
into unity. In spite of the inconveniences of the term,
the limitations of metaphor -and analogy which beset
it, we are finding to-day that eternal truth can best be
^sought through personality. Where we say 'person
ality ' or ' character ' S. Paul used to say ' man ' — the
' old man,' the 'new man,' and so on. And in Ephesians
his ultimate convictions of unity in Christ are expressed
in this manner. Christ Jesus, our peace, made Jew
and Gentile one, having abolished in his flesh the
/ enmity, ' that he might create in himself one new man '
(ii. 14 f.). And in chapter iv., after speaking of the
one body and the one Spirit, etc. ; then of the various

ALL ONE MAN 115
offices and functions in the one practical church ; he
goes on to show how all this is intended ' for the
building up of the body of Christ . . . till we all
attain unto the unity of the faith, and of the know
ledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the
measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ.'
Dr. Armitage Robinson once gathered up the
theology of S. Paul along three lines:1 One for all;
All in one; All one man. The phrases are derived
from 2 Cor. v. 14, Gal. iii. 28, Eph. ii. 15. One for
all, All in one come from epistles of the missionary
period, and express the gospel liberty for which S.
Paul was then striving. That was the period of
' fightings without, and fears within ' (2 Cor. vii. 5), of
gospel ' ambition 1 (Rom. xv. 20, 2 Cor. v. 9, 1 Thess.
iv. 11, R.V. margin). He preached of Jew and Gentile,
law and grace, advent and redemption, Christ dying
for all, Christ receiving from all and opening the way
to all that they may find their home in him. All one
man expresses the joy (Phil. ii. 2, 18, iii. 1, iv. 4) and
peaceful confidence (Phil. iv. 7, 9) of the victorious
vision which was opened in Rome, the large outlook
upon ' The Christ that is to be.1 There the contro
versy of Jew and Gentile draws to a close; larger
thoughts flow in of the person of Christ, the purpose
of God, the unity of all Godhead and all Manhood.
'Ambition1 passes into fulfilment (Eph. i. 28), the
struggle of the ' churches 1 into the ordered, manifold,
and onward sweeping life of the one church (Eph. iii.
10).2 So we may sum up the life of S. Paul ; or all but
sum it up. The close of 2 Timothy really appears to
coincide with sound tradition, not to be the source of
spurious tradition, that he was released from the first
1 Central teachings of the New Testament in Thoughts for Teachers
of the Bible (Longmans, 1914).
8 This paragraph is taken from the second of three lectures on The
teaching of S. Paul, published in The Educational Times, March,
April, May, 1915.

110 THE GALILEAN GOSPEL INTERPRETED BY S. PAUL
captivity, again served Christ and the Gospel in a free
field, and at last died at Rome by the persecuting
hand of Nero; Lightfoot thinks a.d. 67, Mr. C. H.
Turner a.d. 64-65. That agrees with the silence of
Acts and the confidence of Philippians. The last
farewell to the Ephesian elders at Miletus (Acts xx.
25, 38) may be harmonised with a sense of tbe fitness
of the apostle's being cut off in the heyday of his
labour, his eye not dimmed and his strength not
abated.1 But that is romantic not scientific imagina
tion. We have already looked as far as we need for
the purpose of such a sketch as this, into the problem
of the Pastoral epistles. These are not forgeries.
They are much edited fragments of S. Paul. They do
shew how church order had developed even in the life
time of S. Paul. They shew how new disorders
threatened, how the Gnosticism just vaguely stirring
when Colossians was written, took harder outline not
long after. And they shew how Paul could work out
the practical precepts of his early letters in a more syste
matic way when the need arose. And they shew him
to the last as a very gallant gentleman, the lover of his
friends and the undaunted servant of his Lord, still
serenely satisfied with the peace he had found in the
gospel. But the filling up of these fragments shews some
thing else. It shews, what our present use of S. Paul's
writing still shews : how hardly others rise to his
height. In Ephesians the church is pictured as a
building, a process of building (pikodome, ii. 21 ; cf.
patria, iii. 15, which means ' fatherhood ' not ' family,'
the living type not the fixed example of an institution).
In 1 Tim. iii. 15 this 'building' has become a 'house.'
That is one example of the kind of change which may
be noticed again and again in the Pastorals. There
are besides so many instances of a quite different
theological vocabulary from S. Paul's — 'our Saviour
God,' ' the blessed or happy (makarios) and only
Cf. Moffatt, quoted above, p. 66.

LAST GLIMPSES OF S. PAUL IN THE PASTORALS 117
potentate,' etc. — and that signifies much : novelties in
mere vocabulary would signify little, but theological
vocabulary has another kind of importance. Let a man
study the New Testament throughout, spending thought
as well as time upon it : let him bring to bear upon it
the fresh light of modern historical discovery and of
comparative religion : let him clear his mind of old-
fashioned critical prejudice. Then let him read the
fourteen Pauline epistles through again and see for
himself whether he does not at once separate Hebrews
from the rest as not Paul's : whether he does not then
decide that there is no real difficulty in accepting all
the epistles of the missionary and captivity periods :
but finally, whether the feeling does not grow upon
him that the Pastorals represent Paul largely re
fashioned by a different order of mind.
It is the disciplinarian mind hardening the mystical.
It is the freedom of the creative passing into the logic
of an institutional period. We may not say it is the
average limiting the inspired, for the Pastorals are still
fresh and wonderful; the large decisive utterance of
the apostolic church is there still, a salutary refreshment
for our modern consciences. But in these epistles the
voice of the apostle is heard but here and there
through the more prosaic wisdom of the general
church. And yet that wisdom is precious. It witnesses to
what S. Paul himself valued, to the variety in unity
which he preached in Ephesians and recognised as
V corresponding to 'the very varied wisdom' (iii. 10) of
God. He would have been the last to confine the
church within Paulinism. In the next chapter we
shall see certain other impulses at work, other lines of
tradition coming into the web of history. The Pastorals,
whatever the date of their compilation, indicate the
existence of this variety all along.

Ill
A.D. 70 : FAITH ON TRIAL FINDS ITS
VINDICATION IN RETROSPECT : GLORY
IN HUMILIATION
Some hold that Acts was written to put Christianity
in a favourable light before the eyes of Roman author
ities ; that it was the earliest ' apology.' It seems
more obviously to put the rule of Rome in a favourable
light to the Christians, and the most natural way to
read it is to suppose the story a true representation of
things as they were during the missionary labours of
S. Paul. In his epistles too Rome seems to be the just
protective power which makes his hard task easier.
But with S. Paul's death conditions changed. The
Pastorals made us face the question whether S. Paul
was released from his first imprisonment. The trend
of criticism has been of late to suppose that he was.
Mr. C. H. Turner in his article in Hastings1 Dictionary
of the Bible on the chronology of the New Testament
arrives at the carefully calculated dates 59-61 for the
captivity, then rather more than two years further
work, then martyrdom about a.d. 64. In that year the
fire at Rome caused Nero to find scapegoats in the
Christians. That both S. Paul and S. Peter were
martyred at Rome and both under Nero has been in
effect the constant tradition of the Church. The
evidence marshalled by Mr. Turner confirms the tradi
tion, and it is reasonable to conclude that both apostles
were put to death soon after the fire of a.d. 64.
But the trials of the Christians on that occasion had
an important consequence. The crucial question of
the illegality of Christianity was then settled. The
118

THE ERA OF PERSECUTION 119
violence of this first outbreak of persecution was not
for some time repeated. Nevertheless the era of perse
cution had begun. Under Domitian (81-96) persecution
was severe. The relations between the church and the
empire were by then quite different from what they
appear in Acts. The Apocalypse pictures them luridly.
There is a deadly contest between the church, loyal to
the worship of the one God and to Jesus Christ her
Lord, and the Roman empire with its Caesar-worship ;
and twenty years later Pliny writes from Bithynia,
where he is governor, to his emperor Trajan for in
structions about obstinate Christians. He writes with
the kindly moderation of a good Roman, but there is
no mistaking the position : if they will not worship the
emperor they must die.
And besides direct persecution the church felt the
storm which disturbed the whole world in the years
between Nero (a.d. 54-68) and Vespasian's accession
(a.d. 69). Tacitus begins his Histories of these times
thus :
' I start upon a narrative teeming with disasters,
terrible with wars, discordant with seditions, violent
even in the intervals of peace. Three civil wars, more
abroad . . . the Parthians nearly taking up arms
because they were illuded by the appearance of a pre
tender Nero . . . the sea was full of exiles,barren rocks
defiled with murders ... no worse disasters to the
Roman people, no more unmistakeable evidence ever
proved that our imperial continuance is not the care of
heaven, — retribution for our sins is.'
Well might Dr. Sanday write, veering from the later
to the earlier of the disputed dates for the Apocalypse,
' The old impression, of which I have never been able
entirely to rid myself, resumes its force. Can we not
conceive the Apocalypse rising out of the whirling
chaos of the years a.d. 68-69, when the solid fabric of
the empire may well have seemed to be really breaking
up, more easily than at any other period ? And would

120 FAITH ON TRIAL
not the supposition that it did so rise simplify the
whole historical situation of the last five and thirty
years of the first century as nothing else could simplify
it ? ' *
For the Roman empire these years meant civil war
and the rise and fall of three adventurer emperors,
Galba, Otho, and Vitellius. For Jews and Christians
they meant even more. In a.d. 66 that revolt, which
we hear muttering in the Galilean Gospel, broke out.
In a.d. 70 it ended with the sack of Jerusalem by
Titus. The absolute annihilation of the old Judaism
did not come till the insurrection of Barcochba was
suppressed in a.d. 135. But the fall of Jerusalem
marks the great change. The ordered worship, the
church instinct, which S. Luke has enshrined in the
opening chapters of his Gospel, passed away then. The
continuance of young Christianity in the fellowship of
temple devotions which he pictures in the first section
of Acts could never be again : neither that nor any
thing like it, for not only Christian church and temple
but Christian church and synagogue were henceforth
sundered, and even the controversy between Jew and
Gentile within the body of Christ was superseded in a
tragic reconciliation or oblivion. We may therefore
take a.d. 70 as the central date round which to gather
the three books of this period of trial, 1 Peter,
Hebrews, and the Apocalypse. It is not easy to place
them precisely, but we may hazard as a working
hypothesis that 1 Peter was written between 61 and 64
before the Neronian persecution ; Hebrews between 66
and 68 when the Jewish war was beginning ; the
Apocalypse, though probably written under Domitian,
repeats earlier apocalyptic encouragements for times of
trial and is coloured by recollections of the fall of
Jerusalem, perhaps of the persecution of Nero.
The word ' trial ' or ' temptation ' has an intense
* Preface to The Apocalypse of St. John I. -III. , with introduction,
commentary, and additional notes by the late F.J. A. Hort (Macmillan,
1908).

TRIAL HERALDING THE KINGDOM 121
meaning in the New Testament. When all allowance
has been made for the exaggeration of a fresh idea, it
remains evident that our Lord's 'gospel1 or 'good
news,1 was the speedy coming of the kingdom of God,
and that the ' hope ' of the early church was for the
advent of the Lord as Christ in glory. The primitive
gospel completed the Jewish apocalypses. One feature
of those apocalypses was the expectation of a trial,
temptation, or agony which must precede the blessed
era of the kingdom. Through hardships, through
sifting trial the elect must enter into the kingdom.
That persisted as part of the Christian apocalyptic
faith. Our Lord spoke of the wars and terrors which
would be the 'travail pangs1 of the kingdom (Matt.
xxiv. 8; Mark xiii. 8); S. Paul said that we must
enter the kingdom through much tribulation (Acts
xiv. 22). Our Lord shewed from the Scriptures how
the Christ himself must suffer that he might enter into
glory (Luke xxiv. 26), and we may partly imagine how
that conviction inspired him to resolve to die and give
his life a ransom for many. In the prayer he taught
his disciples he bade them say Thy kingdom come.
He also, quite in the spirit of his last apocalyptic
prophecy, bade them say Lead us not into temptation.
For he did not mean by that petition, Keep us from
occasions of ill-temper, self-indulgence, and the other
sins to which the flesh is prone, any more than by
'daily bread1 he meant a moderate income. He
thought of the fiery trial or temptation that must pre
cede the kingdom, and taught how right it was to ask
to be spared its rigour so far as the Father in his
loving wisdom willed it. Now, in the period we are
entering upon, this trial, this ' fiery temptation 1 (1 Pet.
iv. 12) approaches. Like all fulfilments of prophecy,
it comes in somewhat other form than was expected.
And these three books provide encouragement by
revealing that the ' trial ' and the ' advent ? are not to
be separated, first the trial then the advent ; but
in the trial Christ himself comes to help his servants.

122 FAITH ON TRIAL
He will, as S. Paul had already promised, make with
' the temptation ' the way of escape (1 Cor. x. 13).
The faithful have been guarded hitherto for the
salvation which will be punctually revealed 'in a
season of extremity,1 as Dr. Hort would translate
1 Pet. i. 5 : when things are at the worst, then Christ
comes. And so we shall find in these books a developing
faith in the advent. Now Christians begin to under
stand anew their Lord's command, ' Take no thought
for the morrow : the morrow will take thought for
itself: sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.'
' While it is called, To-day ' is the refrain in Hebrews.
Of the final advent none knows how to speak as he
ought to speak — no not even the angels or the Son.
But Christ's advent is, or begins, even now, when in
the time of trial he calls as captain of salvation, loyal
soldiers to follow him ; and when, as the redeemer who
has himself endured the trial, he succours his hard-
tried servants.
1 Peter begins with greeting from ' Peter, apostle of
Jesus Christ.' It was known to the church from very
early years ; indeed it is probably referred to in 2 Peter
(iii. 1), and there seem to be reminiscences of it in
Clement of Rome's epistle to the Corinthians. No
doubt was felt about its authorship till modern times,
and now that the later epistles of S. Paul are generally
allowed to be his own, and his release from imprison
ment in a.d. 61 is so generally considered probable,
these modern difficulties are nearly cleared away. It
does indeed seem unlikely that a Galilean fisherman (a
ship-master, not a peasant) should have written such
good Greek ; for 1 Peter stands with James and Acts on
the more literary side of New Testament Greek. But
that may be due to Silvanus through whom S. Peter says
he wrote (v. 12). On the whole we may be content,
while remembering that some good scholars and good
churchmen still have scruples, to follow Dr. Chase, the
Bishop of Ely, in his fine articles in Hastings'

1 PETER 123
Dictionary? and thus envisage the situation. The
epistle was written shortly after S. Paul's trial had
ended in acquittal. He had summoned S. Peter to
join him at Rome, and with Peter Silvanus. After
Paul's release Silvanus consented to become his delegate
(as he had been before) and on his behalf to journey in
Asia Minor ; there he would explain the situation in
Rome and enforce the doctrine then uppermost in
Paul's mind. This mission was aided by Silvanus
carrying a letter from S. Peter, now a fellow worker
with S. Paul at Rome; Silvanus himself being the
friend of both apostles and now executing Paul's com
mission. This view of the circumstances accounts for
the Pauline colour which is conspicuous in the phrase
ology and not altogether absent from the thought ; and
it fits in with that divergence of temper between the
apostles which Galatians proves to have existed for a
while, but which earlier critics exaggerated till it spoilt
all proportion in their construction of the history.
S. Peter opens his letter by a greeting of grace and
peace from himself as apostle of Jesus Christ to the
sojourners of the dispersion in Asia Minor. The
address and the terms of greeting are taken from the
Old Testament. This is S. Peter's manner throughout
the letter ; he keeps the style of his ancestral Jewish
churchmanship and treats his Gentile brothers as in
heritors of old renown.
Then he proceeds : Blessed be God, the Father of our
Lord Jesus Christ, who long ago provided salvation to
be revealed in time of need : this salvation is the revela
tion of the presence of Jesus Christ which the Spirit of
Christhood in the ancient prophets foreshowed.
Wherefore gird up your loins through Jesus Christ :
in holiness make perfect your trust in God. The time
1 ' Peter (Simon),' ' Peter (first epistle),' ' Peter (second epistle) ' :
Dr. Bigg's very original edition in Clark's International Critical Com
mentaries has already been mentioned (cf. p. 6o). The Commentary
on chapters i. i-ii. 17 by Dr. Hort, published after his death by
Macmillan in 1898, is invaluable for its philosophic breadth and depth
as well as for its penetrating scholarship.

124 FAITH ON TRIAL
of trial is the proving of that royal priesthood which
you inherit from the chosen people of God.
Here ends the introductory part of the letter.
Before leaving it, notice the references to the Blood of
Jesus Christ in i. 2 and 19. The second of these is
general, and might have been made by S. Paul. The
first is rather different : it is not to the shedding but
to the sprinkling of blood, that is to the sacrificial
transaction with the blood of the victim : it is an
approach to the idea of Leviticus, Hebrews, and
S. John.
The second part of the epistle begins at ii. 11. The
threatening trial takes larger shape in the encouraging
sympathetic clauses. Be subject to authority, says the
apostle : authority may seem but human, yet it is
divine in origin. Subjects to magistrates, slaves to
masters, wives and husbands, let due respect and some
thing more than mere respect be paid in all these
relationships. This may involve suffering — for slaves
especially. But think of the suffering of Christ, the
loving martyr whom Isaiah's Servant of the Lord pre
figured ; and in his love do ye too create good.
He, suffering in the flesh, carried wide salvation
through the world of Spirit. Do ye likewise, and
change the world as ye (once heathen) have been
changed. The end of all this present order is nigh. Intensify
sin-covering love : so that God may be glorified through
Jesus Christ to whom is glory and dominion for all
ages in their complex succession. So be it ; that is our
answer to God's onward working will.
Then in the third and last division (iv. 12 to end)
he speaks plainly. Fiery trial indeed draws near for
those whom men scornfully designate 'Christians.'
Meet the trial with goodness worthy of the name and
commit your lives, your natural and your inner Chris
tian lives, to God who made you what you are.
Elders (your brother elder says it), be shepherds like
the Good Shepherd. Younger men, be loyal and

1 PETER : UNDERTONE OF RECOLLECTION 125
obedient. All gird on the lowliness of the Master, the
lowliness to which God is so gracious.
Be lowly in God's protecting hand; and may God
who tries you now establish you for ever.
Silvanus who has written this letter for me carries it
to you : you know him as Paul's friend and our trusty
brother. Receive it as a letter of good cheer from the
Babylon of our time, where I am now with Mark who
is indeed a son to me. Greetings all round and peace.
It was indeed a letter of good cheer ; all the more
because of its marked simplicity. S. Paul with his
passionate consciousness of union in the exalted Christ
had swept the faith onward : henceforth the doctrine
of Christ's person must always be deep and full. But
the glance we gave to the Pastorals showed, what the
experience of all periods confirms, that the average
churchman does not enter perfectly into the mind of
S. Paul. He is too mystical, too intellectually mys
tical, for most people to make quite their own. So to
day ' The Imitation of Christ ' is the food of a hundred
souls to one that really cares for S. Augustine's Con
fessions. And in this early age, when trial and
persecution pressed sensibly upon the church, the
common sense, so to speak, of the rank and file asserted
itself to meet the call. Once more we see the simplicity
of Galilean discipleship, the following of Christ's
example, loyalty to the Lord Jesus. In this epistle of
S. Peter there is retrospect, recollection : it is the letter
of one whose daily teaching might well become the
pattern of a written Gospel, and in ' Mark my son ' of
v. 13 we seem to catch the earliest promise of the first
narrative of the Gospel days. Yet, so far, this is un
obtrusive. Only when we read the letter through from
beginning to end do we feel its undertone of remem
bering affection and loyalty. It is a preparation for
Hebrews with the repeated emphasis upon the human
name ' Jesus ' and the repeated ' days of his flesh,' and
for the problem which this new reminiscent method of

126 FAITH ON TRIAL
devotion soon set, the problem of Christ's person in
the light of realism, the humiliation which obscured
the glory ; the problem already suggested by S. Paul
with ' the scandal of the cross,' and so keenly appre
ciated in these days of ours when Gospel criticism has
been recovering the manhood of the Christ and con
fronting the limitations involved in manhood. Thus,
as we shall see, the simplicity of ' imitation ' could not
stand still, any more than the simplicity of opening
discipleship could. Theology follows practice, and this
new stage of the church's course issues in deepening
and elucidating the reasonable faith.
The epistle to the Hebrews is merely entitled ' To
the Hebrews' in the most ancient manuscripts. No
author gives his name in it, nor is there any opening
greeting with address. No names at all are mentioned
till Timothy is referred to at the end, and greetings
are sent either from the writer and his companions in
Italy, or from his companions who have come from
Italy and are with him in some other place. Clement
of Rome, who alludes to other epistles of the New
Testament, makes long and almost exact quotations
from Hebrews in his letter written about a.d. 96 to the
Corinthians. He does not name the epistle or say any
thing about its author. This is especially significant
because the persistent tradition of the Roman church
was that S. Paul did not write this epistle. Jerome
and Augustine in the fourth century begin to speak of
it loosely as S. Paul's, but they know the custom of
their church is against this, and the western church
preserved the tradition all along, though little attention
was paid to it in the middle ages. Tertullian in or
before the third century quotes the epistle as Barnabas'.
Only at Alexandria in early times do we find it assigned
to S. Paul, and we only know this of Alexandria from
the criticism which the scholars of Alexandria applied
to the popular opinion. Clement of Alexandria, like
his master (probably Pantaenus in the second century)

HEBREWS : TRADITION OF AUTHORSHIP 127
said that the Greek style forbade one to suppose Paul
to have written the epistle : it might be connected with
him but actually written by some disciple of his, Luke
perhaps or Clement of Rome. Origen allowed the
possible connexion, declaring absolutely that no one
who knew Greek could think that S. Paul wrote it.
Who really wrote it, he said, God only knows.1 But
since its doctrine was truly apostolic, and might well
be derived in some manner from S. Paul, there was no
harm, he held, in a church continuing the custom, if
it was its custom, of calling the epistle ' Paul's.1 The
scholar's subtlety was presently forgotten, his indul
gence was accepted, and the uncritical habit spread,
till in east and west Hebrews was commonly included
in the collection of Pauline epistles. Yet in the west
careful writers still recorded the genuine tradition of
their church.
It seems clear that there is no. reason for regarding
S. Paul as the author of the epistle. Tertullian's
ascription to Barnabas would be an obvious conjecture ;
Barnabas the Levite might write this epistle of priest
hood. Clement and Luke, as redactors of Paul's ideas,
is the expedient of a more literary judgement. But we
can only say with Origen that no man knows who
wrote it. There is connexion with S. Paul. There
seems to be direct reminiscence of some of his epistles,
especially of the Roman epistles of the captivity, and
certainly the theology of Hebrews would hardly have
developed if S. Paul had not taught his theology
before it. But the differences from S. Paul's mind are
more conspicuous : the stress upon the days of our
Lord's flesh, the sense in which that word ' flesh ' is
used, the following rather than mystical union with
Christ, and the broad sacrificial analogy which runs
through the whole. This last may have been in part
suggested by a few scattered metaphors in Paul, e.g.
Rom. xii. 1 ; but it is worked out in no Pauline
manner, the profound doctrine of the sacrificial blood
1 See for all this, Eusebius, Eccl. Hist. vi. 14 and 25.

128 FAITH ON TRIAL
is Hebrews' own, and this also proves Clement of
Rome impossible as author.
It is true that the contrast between Paul and Heb
rews runs parallel with a contrast in circumstance and
purpose, but that would not bring the epistle into
Paul's realm of thought. For the understanding of
Hebrews however, circumstance and purpose are of
much importance. And first, it seems to be a letter
to a small group of intimate friends, men like the
author who have had rather an elaborate Alexandrine
education ; who appreciate his good, almost classic
Greek ; his philosophic terminology ; his subtlety in
argument and in the interpretation of the Greek
Septuagint version of the Old Testament. We can
hardly imagine this very literary epistle being read to
the mixed multitude of a ' church,' or (though some
have imagined this) being a sermon delivered to a con
gregation. And it is not a sermon, but a real letter.
Look at the playful remonstrance in x. 25 with ' some
friends of mine who have given up going to church
service with the vulgar ' ; or in xiii. 22, ' Bear with this
long treatise, for you see I am closing with the affec
tionate intimacies of an ordinary letter.' When we
are on the look out for them the epistle is full of such
touches. Secondly, in spite of the contradiction of a
few critics, the Judaic background seems unmistakable.
The first readers were Christians who had been brought
up in the Jewish church, as probably the writer had
been also. Not indeed in the Hebrew-speaking rab
binic church of Jerusalem: if 'To the Hebrews' is
quite an ancient title, ' Hebrews ' is used in a wider
sense than it generally bore, unless indeed we have here
another instance of the author's own pious humour —
' You whom I will still call Hebrews indeed.' This
unhebraic Judaism is a reason against supposing the
letter to have been sent to Jerusalem, and it may be
noticed that the argument has nothing to do with the
temple at Jerusalem but turns wholly upon the taber
nacle in the Pentateuch. The letter is bookish all

HELLENISTS OF IMPERFECT FAITH 129
through, and there is no necessity to suppose that
either writer or readers had ever seen the temple : the
contemporary Judaism it deals with is the Judaism of
the synagogue.
Writer then and readers appear to have been con
verts from Hellenistic Judaism to Christianity. But
there is this difference between them. The writer rests
firmly in the peace of the faith : the readers have never
yet made the whole truth about the Lord Jesus Christ
their own. They accept him as the Christ, but know
not all which that title implies. He was a teacher,
and no doubt more than a mere teacher : but the
divine redeemer, the supreme and only Lord, the living
ruler of the universe, such essence of his mystery they
have cared too little for. And consequently their faith
is insecure. They are anxious and perplexed. A time
of sharp trial has come upon them. Fear of persecution
and still more anxiety for their honour are urging
them to abandon their new allegiance. Theological
controversy, they seem to say (v. 11 ff.), and the
quarrel of the churches is no use to us. We entered
Christianity as a reformed Judaism, and now the
ancient Jewish church of our fathers needs our loyalty
again. We will rally round the old simple faith in
which our fathers served God well, and surely so
may we.
Their friend writes to warn them that this may not
be. Honour is on the other side. You have given
allegiance to the Lord Jesus Christ, he iterates, and
nothing can weigh against that. Nor would you think
of such apostasy if you really understood who and what
he is. You have in fact a hard duty before you. In
face of all threats and all attractions you have to make
up your mind to stand firm for the Lord Jesus Christ.
This is hard and you shrink from it. But our Lord, if
only you knew him aright, will supply the strength
you need. Come now and let me show you the truth.
Think of him as a priest and I believe I can make you
understand. Only, exposition and argument will not

130 FAITH ON TRIAL
carry you all the way. Argument will be clinched by
practical venture of faith. Think of him as I will try
to make you think : resolve to act as he calls you in
this troubled time to act: then you will find him to
be the Saviour that he truly is.
What was that troubled time ? Of late critics have
been inclined to answer, the persecution under Domi
tian. The older answer had been, the outbreak of the
Jewish war. That older answer was often based on
reasons which were mistaken, as that the letter was
addressed to the Jewish church at Jerusalem. But
such reasons are not really bound up with the earlier
date. The letter might well be written for a group of
philosophic liberals in any country who heard the
appeal to throw in their lot with their countrymen
and fight for the temple and the faith : their very
style of life and thought, retiring academic, would
make the appeal to action at last the more irresistible.
We cannot be sure about it, but it seem* most natural
to explain the circumstances thus. And the earlier
date seems to fit the position, between S. Paul and
S. John, which the theology of the epistle suggests.
We cannot pretend to be certain about this, nor about
the place from whence and the place to whichthe epistle
was sent. Some connexion with Italy is indicated at
the end. Let our working hypothesis be as follows.
A Hellenistic Jewish Christian wrote from Rome not
long after S. Paul's death to a group of friends of like
education to his own and who like himself had known
S. Paul. The revolt from Rome was breaking out.
Pressure was upon them to return to Judaism and
make common cause with their nation. They felt
themselves impelled by honour to do so, and their
knowledge of Christ was insufficient to bind them
firmly to the Christian faith. The hard duty of choice
was before them, and their friend wrote to help them
to the right choice.
This is a working hypothesis, probable but not
certain. Nor will our understanding of the epist I be

AND FACED BY A HARD DUTY 131
spoiled if another date and occasion be preferred.
These two points are evident and necessary : that the
writer urges his friends to do a hard duty about which
they still hesitate ; he appeals to the will : that they
have a very imperfect faith which the writer would fill
up by instruction ; he also presents an argument to
their intellect.
Thus brain and heart, reasoning and exhortation
are interwoven throughout the epistle. But it falls
into two main divisions, in the first of which (i.-ix.)
argument, in the second (x.-xiii.) appeal are predomi
nant. The first part is an argument from analogy and
sets forth Christ as high priest and his redeeming
work as sacrifice. In the second analogy passes (as we
should now express it) into psychology, and the readers
are urged to lose and find their will in God's will, as
Jesus Christ did, and so to make his sacrifice their
own.1 1 This doctrine of Christ saving by making his sacrifice our own is
brought out by DuBose in High Priesthood and Sacrifice: an exposi
tion of the Epistle to the Hebrews (Longmans, 1908). ' Our Lord does
not save from having to do it all,' writes Dr. DuBose ; ' He helps and
enables to do it all.' This book is the third of a tetralogy of which
others are The Gospel in the Gospels, in which he passes onward and
inward from the simple faith believed and preached in Galilee to the
full enjoyment of Christ's deity and vindicates a place within Chris
tianity for each stage ; The Gospel according to Saint Paul ; and The
Reason of Life, which treats of the Johannine Gospel.
The Epistle to the Hebrews, the first apology for Christianity : an
exegetical study (T. & T. Clark, 1899) is a notable book in which Dr.
A. B. Bruce shows how these ' Hebrews ' had not attained to more
than an imperfect apprehension of the faith of the church and how this
' apology ' set the full faith before them. Still more important is his
insistence on the teaching of the epistle about our Lord's true man
hood and its doctrine of ' glory in humiliation. ' Dr. A. B. Davidson's
little edition in T. & T. Clark's Handbooks for Bible Classes is espe
cially valuable for its treatment of the theme, ' Priesthood after the
order of Melchizedek.' Menegoz in La Thtologie de Vipttre aux
Hibreux (Paris, 1894) gives among much else that is lucid and interest
ing a good account of the partial interpretations which successive ages
have made of this epistle's doctrine of sacrifice. Dr. Hans Windisch
of Leipzig has furnished a. brief commentary (Tubingen, 1913) with
the various material collected by modern scholarship. But the greatest
commentary is still Westcott's The Epistle to the Hebrews, the Greek
text with notes and essays (Macmillan, ist ed. 1889).

132 FAITH ON TRIAL
The epistle opens with a poet's or artist1s vision.
He sets us as it were in heaven and we behold glory
streaming from the invisible essence of the Godhead,
and illuminating those eminences in history who were
entitled Christs and Sons of God ; a king, a prophet,
the whole chosen people of Israel : then taking definite
form in one who lived on earth as man and wrought
purification for men's sins, and so returned, full circle
completed, to sit on the right hand of the majesty on
high, having inherited and fulfilled those ancient names:
now enthroned he rules all life from the centre. In
the second chapter a brief parenthesis makes it
unmistakable that the Lord Jesus who taught in
Galilee is meant. Then it is shewn that he came to
earth as no angel — the angels are the fires and winds,
forces of nature as we might say and as the Old Testa
ment and later Judaism taught — but as very man,
restoring that personal line of union which runs from
God to man, and doing this by sharing the limitations
of real manhood, suffering and humiliated, for in his
utmost humiliation his supreme glory was perfected ;
he was crowned or garlanded like a victor for the
suffering of death.
In the third and fourth chapters the two pictures, of
the eternal Son proceeding from the glory of the God
head and the man Jesus glorified in humiliation, are
made one in the contemplation of Jesus as the Christ.
And then exhortation breaks the argument for a space.
' To-day ' is the refrain , q uoted from the Psalm . To-day
he comes. The Christians have expected, prayed, and
longed for the great final advent. That is still for the
morrow of which our business is not now to take
thought. In the storm and trouble of to-day he makes
his advent immediate and real. Be ready and be loyal.
Follow the captain wheresoever he calls you to follow.
He is our high priest who has entered heaven before
us. Now we must follow and enter with him into the
peace that trustful obedience assures.
In chapter v. the analogy from priesthood begins.

HEBREWS AND OUR LORD'S MANHOOD 133
This has been prepared for by a few phrases let drop
in chapter i. and chapter iv. concluded with a touching
picture of Jesus as exalted to the heavens, where his
sympathy enables us to follow him and find grace and
mercy from the throne of grace ; and this picture was
inscribed ' High Priest.'
At once two characteristics of priesthood are indi
cated. The priest is taken from among men, he must
be really and truly man; and he is appointed with
regard to the things towards God, or as the same phrase
Used of Moses in his relationship to Aaron (Ex. iv. 16)
instructs us to translate, he is appointed ' on the God-
ward side.' x
Here are two ideas which dominate the epistle.
Almost at once follows the phrase (which will be re
peated) ' in the days of his flesh.1 Then comes a
description of our Lord's agony of prayer issuing in
the bold assertion that though he was Son ' he learned
obedience.' Add to this the continual insistence on
the name of his manhood 'Jesus.' Then remember
that if a.d. 66 be the date of the epistle it was written
just about the time when the earliest gospel, Mark,
appeared. Do we not perceive how in this time of trial
men's hearts were drawn to the earthly life of their
Lord who suffered and was brave, who can sympathise,
and who calls his faithful to follow in his train ? So in
after times, in England for instance at the end of the
civil war of the fifteenth century, a weary generation
has turned to devotion to the Sacred Name. But
so also, as in our own critical enthusiasm of late,
this turning back to the Galilean Gospel has raised
unexpected difficulty in studious minds. The actual
history proves so strangely lacking in all that we
commonly hold glorious. The ministry in so obscure
a corner, the weakness, the problem of the Lord's
restricted knowledge or of his human progress in
obedience, the paradox of modern apocalyptic theory,
1 This translation was suggested by a sermon at Cambridge preached
many yeare ago by Canon J. H. Whitaker.

134 FAITH ON TRIAL
the ancient scandal of the cross ; this daunts us. For
all this perplexity our author seeks a solution. He
was aided by temperament and education. We have
already noticed slightly his picturesque way of writing.
There is more than style in this. It is a symptom of
his habit of seeing eternal things through the visible.
S. Paul in Rom. i. 20 (cf. 2 Cor. iv. 18) just touches
on this habit or principle. But it was not Paul's
characteristic habit. 'After the Spirit' always and
as immediately as possible, was his predilection.
Always through the temporal and visible, was the rule
of the writer to the Hebrews. And as an Alexandrine
Platonist he had been trained to make the most of the
rule. 'Mystical' and 'sacramental' ought no doubt
to mean exactly the same thing. But in modern speech
these words distinguish two classes of mind. And, in
modern speech, if S. Paul is a philosophic mystic, this
author is a sacramental artist. Hence he does not
shrink from representing frankly the real manhood of
his Lord ; the real, with all its limitation and humili
ation. Only through accepting that wholly shall we
reach the true Godhead.
And he presses this. The humiliation is more than
an accident of manhood. In suffering, in humiliation,
the great opportunity of manhood has always been
supplied. This writer finds our Lord's supreme glory
not after his shameful death, as S. Paul had shewn it
in Phil. ii. 5 ff., but in the moment of utmost weakness
and humiliation. He was crowned or wreathed for the
suffering of death, not after it (ii. 9). The subsequent
exaltation is always signified in this epistle by enthrone
ment, as regularly with ancient kings : ' he sat down at
the right hand of God.' So presently we shall find
S. John recognising the moment of glory in the moment
when Judas went out into the night and the last hope
of any other way but the way of the cross was cut off
(John xiii. 31). And the whole Gospel of S. John
is a perfecting of that sacramental answer to the
problem of the person of Christ, which is given in a

PRIESTHOOD ON THE GODWARD SIDE 135
first sketch in the epistle to the Hebrews. Henceforth
there can be no Arian mistake as to our Lord's true
and perfect Godhead and true and perfect manhood.
He can never be imagined as an angel or heavenly
being, partly God and partly man. He is wholly God
because wholly man, and (though even orthodox
theologians were sometimes to forget this) it must be
through the real manhood that men penetrate to the
Godhead within, not from a conception of absolute God
head that they deduce his unique manhood. Only,
our author does open his epistle with that poet's
vision of the divine original. He affirms his agreement
with the full tradition of the church. So is he free to
picture his Lord in the rest of the epistle from the side
of the days of his flesh, and to shew him ' becoming '
our high priest.
Now consider this ' priesthood on the Godward side.'
It is a view of our Lord's salvation which rests on
analogy, and the analogy starts from the Levitical
priesthood as described in the Pentateuch. But this
supplies little more than words and forms. The
Levitical priesthood and the Levitical sacrifices are not
the type of the high priesthood and the sacrifice of
Christ. That type is found wherever in the history of
the wide world a man or a nation has stood on the
Godward side of others. Of course a Levitical priest
must often have done so. Read the opening verses of
chapter v. and consider whether one is speaking who
has known good priests in his own life. But this was
not by virtue of the Levitical institution. As an
institution, the epistle reiterates, it has never effected
that bringing into the very presence of God which it
is the purpose of priesthood to effect. It could not
effect it, since the whole system of Levitical sacrifices
was artificial, a kind of make-believe: the blood of
goats and bulls could never take away sins, nor could
any developement or completion of that artifice pass
into reality. But a king, a prophet, a suffering servant
of the Lord, the people of Israel with their superior

136 FAITH ON TRIAL
faith and their discipline of suffering, have stood on
the Godward side in actual fact. Here are persons,
acting by personal affection, influence, sacrifice of their
real selves, and such Godward-drawing priesthood the
Lord Jesus Christ could and did consummate. And
when we pass into the later chapters of the epistle in
which the will of Christ and his disciples is discussed, we
see how still, through the perfection of his sacrifice, men
may be true priests with him ; the father of a family,
the colonel of a regiment, the friend made strong and
emptied of self by suffering, as well as the parish priest,
may stand on the Godward side of those to whom they
are variously related and draw them into the presence
of God.
To describe this priesthood, the eternal and world
wide, the author chooses a phrase from his Greek Bible.
He calls it priesthood after the order of Melchizedek.
For Melchizedek was priest of the High God and yet
no member of the chosen race. He appears on a scene
of violence with his blessing of peace. He comes and
he passes away again mysteriously, solemnly. His was
a figure which had impressed the Alexandrine scholars
from whom the writer of the epistle and his friends had
learned. To them this label for the eternal priesthood
no doubt seemed entirely apt. We can understand
their feeling, though perhaps such a title as priesthood
after the order of the suffering servant (Is. liii.) might
come closer to our hearts. And yet who would change
the antique reverence, the sense of eternity which
Melchizedek stirs ? ' After the likeness of Melchizedek
there ariseth another priest, who hath been made, not
after the law of a carnal commandment, but after the
power of an indissoluble life : for it is witnessed,
Thou art a priest for ever,
After the order of Melchizedek.'
In chapter ix. we move onward from priest to sacrifice.
That sacrifice is made ' through blood.1 Here again the
Levitical ordinance is the starting point. In those

THE BLOOD OF SACRIFICE 137
sacrifices the slaying of the victim was not the impor
tant act, but the transaction with the blood which was
thus made available for sprinkling on the altar, on a
person, or at the mercy-seat. This is explained by
some verses of Leviticus (xvii. 10 f.) which really do
contain the core of a profound theology :
' And whatsoever man there be of the house of Israel,
or of the strangers that sojourn among them, that
eateth any manner of blood ; I will set my face against
that soul that eateth blood, and will cut him off from
among his people.1
So far we have a taboo inherited from pagan
antiquity. Then comes the theology of the true
religion :
' For the life of the flesh is in the blood : and I have
given it you upon the altar to make atonement for
your lives : for it is the blood that maketh atonement
by reason of the life.1
In Hebrew, as in Greek, there is but one word for
'life1 and 'soul,1 and the passage becomes clearer if we
keep one rendering throughout. Blood is life : life
' atones ' or cleanses and renews life (Babylonian
parallels and Greek equivalents justify this paraphrase):
God so far from having to ' be propitiated,' of his own
grace provides the means for cleansing and renewing
ruined life. That is the noble Levitical idea, which
the artifice of brute sacrifices could never realise, and
which Christ did realise and make for ever effective
when he laid down his life for his friends and offered
himself to the Father of all through the blood of his
cross. The blood is the life. That, literally, was the
primitive Semitic belief: and it deepens in Leviticus
and Hebrews beyond the literal crudeness. It is life
that cleanses and renews life. If we were to substitute
' life ' for ' blood ' wherever such expressions occur we
should go far to restore the strong feeling which our

138 FAITH ON TRIAL
conventional repetitions, and our confusion of sacrifice
with the payment of penalty, have broken down. Yei
that would not be enough. In the Levitical analogy
the death of the victim sets the blood free to be
operated with. When we rise from the Levitical
analogy to the personal reality of the New Testament
and of human experience we certainly may not ignore
the pain and heroism, the affection, the bitterness and
the glory of dying. Let the substitution be 'life
enriched by death ' and we shall come very near the
true idea.
We have been following the epistle almost chapter
by chapter, but in bringing priesthood and sacrifice
immediately together we have passed over chapter viii.
in which the author quotes Jeremiah's prophecy of the
new covenant. That prophecy was delivered when
Jerusalem was about to fall before the Chaldeans.
Temple, monarchy, all the visible pledges and sacraments
of God's presence with his people were to vanish. And
Jeremiah's heart-religion found in that seeming destruc
tion of the faith its opportunity. Now when the
outward falls away the eternal enters in power. The
covenant of God with his people remains ever the same:
' I will be their God and they shall be my people ! '
But now this covenant shall be written on the heart ;
shall pass from shadow and symbol to reality ; shall
transform natural life to divine :
' And they shall not teach every man his neighbour
and every man his brother saying, Know the
Lord :
For all shall know me,
From the least to the greatest of them.
For I will be merciful to their iniquities,
And their sins will I remember no more.'
That 'new covenant' had been revived for the
Christians when their Lord inaugurated it afresh at
the last supper. Yet as in Jeremiah's time, so still,
they waited for its effectual working. The author of

THE NEW COVENANT 189
the Hebrews, with perhaps a second fall of Jerusalem
imminent, sees in this new upheaval of the foundations
of faith the coming of the Lord, the superseding of
dead metaphor (such as foundation, cf. vi. 1) by spiritual
life, the imparting of experience and influence by a
triumphant person to his own faithful followers. For
himself indeed, as for S. Paul and many others, that
imparting had already been consummated. For the
friends to whom he writes, as for many in all genera
tions since, it had not yet been so. He urges them to
seize the opportunity, and the epistle renews its inspira
tion for all ages because in all ages there are imperfect
' Hebrew ' Christians as well as the perfect ' Pauline,'
and because in all ages Christ still 'comes1 in the
opportunity for decisive acts of the will.
Here is the transition to the second main division
of the epistle (x. to the end). Christ offered himself
once for all to his Father. As 'sacrifice1 that can
never be repeated, any more than his incarnation or
crucifixion can be repeated. Yet our author speaks of
men still crucifying Christ (vi. 6), and S. Paul writes
to the Galatians of Christ being formed anew with
birth pangs (Gal. iv. 19). Here, as always in this
analogising epistle, we must guard against pressing the
language of analogy so far as to obscure the meaning
which analogy is to enforce. Sacrifice is the willing
offering of self to God, the losing and finding of
personal will in the one will which carries onward all
that is. That was what the Lord Jesus did when,
obedience fully learned, he gave up his life upon the
cross. And that is what Jesus Christ1 still re-enacts
1 For this antithesis see xiii. 20 f. But the passage must be read in
the Revised Version. The Authorised Version is translated from the
medieval text of the Greek Testament which often departs from the
ancient purity, making a serious difference to the sense. Heb. xiii. 20 f.
is an instance of one kind of corruption to which the late text is prone.
The definite intention of the original occasion is generalised for uni
versal reading. The author in xiii. 20 f. sums up the whole argument
of his letter in a collect-like prayer of blessing. What the ' Lord
Jesus' did in the days of his flesh he now, exalted as 'Jesus Christ,'
enables his followers to do. The writer prays that God will grant

140 FAITH ON TRIAL
in all his faithful, one after another, generation after
generation. They do not ' imitate ' Christ in the
details of his earthly course, so far removed and different
from theirs : they devote their whole will to God as he
did, and this devotion is in another sphere from imita
tion, it is in the sphere of free eternal Spirit (ix. 14),
where time and space and the limitation of unsur
rendered self (x. 39) effect no separation ; and so he
can indeed impart his very self to them, and they can
make his sacrifice their own.
This is the theme of chapter x. in which for a little
while the analogy is laid aside and more immediate
expression of truth is sought in terms of the will.
The author's predilection for picturesque, sacramental
language soon ' brings him back to ' offering '
again. But henceforth the old phrases have fuller
significance, and it is this union with God in will that
those friends whom he addresses to do their hard duty as the Lord
Jesus did his, and so to enter into peace. For himself and those who
with him have already made the willing sacrifice no special petition is
desired : let God go on working in them his good pleasure, they have
nothing more to ask.
The ancient text is generally represented in the Revised Version.
Sometimes it must be sought in the margin : a notable example is ix.
ii. If the Greek is read it should be in Westcott and Horfs edition
(Macmillan) or Sorter's (Clarendon Press) or Nestle's (Bible Society),
not in what used to be the ordinary editions which give the ' textus
receptus.' This received text was called ' medieval ' a few lines back.
' Byzantine ' would be a better name. In the west the Latin Vulgate
preserved a comparatively pure New Testament for the Latin-speaking
church. The corrupted Greek was read in the Orthodox Church from
the fourth century onwards, was printed by Erasmus (1516), and repro
duced in printed Greek Testaments till Westcott and Hort's edition
(1881) drove it out of fashion. If any one wishes to learn the principles
on which this criticism is established, he should read the brief clear
exposition which fills a few pages at the end of Westcott and Hort's
smaller edition. If he would really understand and be convinced, he
should read Dr. Hort's close-reasoned Introduction, the companion
volume to the first edition of The New Testament in the original
Greek. For further developements of textual criticism, Kenyon's
Handbook to the textual criticism of the New Testament (Macmillan,
2nd ed. 1912) may be studied : it is a book which plain men and
scholars will alike find delightful.

THE DOCTRINE OF THE WILL 141
he illustrates throughout his chapter on faith (xi.)
with its roll of great examples ; through the appeal to
follow these examples even to death in chapter xii. ;
and in the final call in chapter xiii. to go forth to
Jesus without the camp bearing his shame ; and so to
enter the city of God, to receive the kingdom, to know
what eternal redemption really means.
The appeal and the promise belong to all ages.
But they belonged with a special intensity to the first
readers of this almost private letter. Its doctrine of
union with Christ is not the same as S. Paul's. S. Paul
assumes that all the ' saints ' to whom he writes —
imperfect though he lets us see that many of them are
— already dwell together 'in Christ,' already 'after
the Spirit1 they are in heaven. The writer to the
Hebrews in his picturesque but earnest way believes
that we go to heaven when we pray (iv. 16 ; cf. the end
of the 'Dearly beloved brethren1 in the Book of Common
Prayer), but even in the passage referred to he urges
the effort, he does not think of a continuous sojourn
corresponding to a 'Pray without ceasing.' And
throughout the letter union in Christ and the heavenly
home are held out as a hope rather than as a present
possession. But this must not be pressed too far so as
to prove a radical difference in thought, far less in faith,
between this writer and S. Paul. Much of the differ
ence springs from the special circumstances. The
friends to whom he wrote had emphatically not yet
realised union in Christ. The sabbath rest which
remains for the people of God was not yet theirs.
Their will was not yet lost and found in God's will.
The letter was written to induce them to take the bold
step, to do the hard duty, and till they did this the
Pauline assurance could not be presumed upon.
Perhaps S. Paul would have reasoned with them
otherwise. Yet this was their friend: he knew how
to treat them, and that friendly knowledge was the
channel of his inspiration. The faith of the New
Testament reflects the mind of Christ from many

142 FAITH ON TRIAL
facets, and still there are hesitating consciences and
scrupulous intellects, which the epistle to the Hebrews
draws with the cord of a man more gradually and
irresistibly than even Paul can manage.
When such persons read the epistle they are watch
ing men like themselves as they come gradually to the
' possession of their souls,' advancing through the
helps and hindrances of imagination to the satisfying
but inexpressible contact with Jesus Christ himself.
Three pictures in the epistle mark the stages of the
progress. The first is at the end of chapter vi. The
ship has run to port from the storm. The anchor has
been dropped into the mysterious deep and holds the
ground. The captain, Jesus, has gone ashore, and the
crew wait for his return to bring the ship to land and
follow him. The next is at xii. 1 ff. Here a race
course is pictured. All round it are the spirits who
have run a like course in their time and now watch
anxiously to see how the young athletes will bear
themselves, for without their victory the promised
prize of their own perfection must still be delayed. At
the end of the course there is a throne whereon Jesus
sits as judge of the contest. He has run this very race
himself. He sits in sight of all, and on him the new
runners must fix their eyes. The moment of representa
tion is that trying moment when the athlete strips off
the wrap, ' which doth so lingeringly beset him,' to start
upon the trial. Then lastly in xiii. 10 ff. there is a
picture of a sacrifice. But picture fades here into the
stronger light of reality. Nowhere in the epistle is it
more needful to free one's self from slavery to the
analogy. Else we waste time over vain questions, such
as What is the altar ? Is the sacrifice a burnt-offering
or a thank-offering ? It is hardly a sacrifice at all : it
is the off-scouring of a sacrifice. But it means the
Lord Jesus glorious in humiliation ; in sight, in touch,
in loving union which surpasses all imagery ; ready to
take to himself his friend for whom he died, the
disciple who at last has shaken himself free from all

RESURRECTION AND ASCENSION 143
the tangle of fear and prejudice. Now he rallies to
his Lord outside the camp of shadows, and with his
Lord finds peace in the will of God. That variety in
the aspect of faith, noticed above, appears more than
once in this epistle. It is the epistle of priesthood.
It might also be styled the epistle of the manhood :
also the epistle of the ascension. And in the stress
which he lays on our Lord's ascension into the presence
of the Father, the author overleaps all interval between
the death upon the cross and that ascension. Nor is
that ascension visible, nor are any earthly visible
events mentioned in this connexion after the death of
the Lord : to him, it would seem, resurrection and
ascension were one act of God, one 'bringing again
from the dead the great shepherd of the sheep1 (xiii.
20), and it took place in the invisible eternal sphere.
This is in accord with the author's principle of
sacrament. He views the crucifixion sacramentally.
What men could see, the outward visible sign, was a
defeated dishonoured man dying as a criminal on a
cross. The inward spiritual reality was that in the
eternal heaven, corresponding to that act in time and
place, the Son of God entered as our perfected high
priest into the very presence of his Father. This
agrees with what we find in 1 Peter iii. 19 ff, iv. 6 : the
medieval notion of 'the harrowing of hell,' between
the time of burial and of resurrection, has been read
into S. Peter's terse sentences, it is not implied by
them. And this too prepares the way for our Lord's
last discourse in the Gospel according to S. John
where he promises that his ' going ' to the Father shall
itself be his 'coming' to his disciples in the new
' mansion ' of the Spirit in which they are henceforth
to dwell in closer communion with him. Nor when
we look back at S. Paul do we find a great difference.
He does indeed speak of our Lord being raised ' on
the third day ' (1 Cor. xv. 4), as S. John narrates the
events of that third day. But S. Paul always insists
that the Lord's appearance to him was of the same

144 FAITH ON TRIAL
kind as the appearances on the day of resurrection,
and what he and S. John considered important about
all that happened on that day was that it happened
'according to the Scriptures.' In Phil. ii. 9, S. Paul
brings ascension and resurrection into one as closely as
in Hebrews, and his invariable insistence on the
spiritual character of our Lord's risen body makes it
very doubtful whether he would have recognised any
difficulty in harmonising the view in Hebrews with his
own : indeed it would be difficult for any one who
quietly thinks it out to suppose that those influxes of
the eternal, after the days of the Lord's flesh were
finished, could be made subservient to the rules and
sequences of ordinary narration. In the Gospel accord
ing to S. Mark there is no attempt to do that ; not at
least in the form in which that Gospel has come down
to us, for the last twelve verses are most certainly from
a later pen. The only appearance of contradiction of
the view in Hebrews arises from the last chapters of
Matthew and Luke and the opening verses of Acts.
There wondrous things are represented in the simple
sensible form of narrative which childlike believers may
have repeated without theological or philosophical
reflection, and which is quite like the story-telling
guise in which even subtle Jewish doctors have always
preferred to interpret ineffable mysteries. We may
surely and with all reverence admit that while the
Gospel narratives of the days of the Lord's flesh are
sober history, the revelations of spiritual action after
the resurrection are symbolic. It may be noticed in
this connexion that the writer to the Hebrews speaks
of the blessed dead as ' spirits,1 and does not labour to
distinguish judgement immediately after death from a
final judgement day. In this treatment of hidden
mysteries he follows, according to his wont, Old Testa
ment usage. He would also, we may be pretty sure,
justify his vagueness by the impossibility of schema
tising spiritual realities which have no plain sacramental
correspondencies in common life.

THE APOCALYPSE OF S. JOHN 145
These however are considerations by the way. They
do not affect the broad interpretation of the epistle.
May we permit ourselves to take leave of it with two
quotations from modern authors which revive the two
emotions roused by it — devotion to the one Will, and
longing for the peace which can only be by entering
into that Will ?
' When we trace the course of human affairs in all
their complexity, and note the trivial incidents which
proved so momentous on the destiny of races or the
rise of empires, we may see, as we gaze from afar, how
the Will of God rides on in majesty.' *
' Milton has written two epic poems in which he
commemorates our fallen and our restored condition.
He has written " Paradise Lost " and " Paradise
Regained." But the true epic of humanity — the epic
which is in a constant course of evolution from the
beginning to the end of time, the epic which is daily
poured forth from the heart of the whole human race,
sometimes in rejoicing paeans, but oftener amid woeful
lamentation, tears, and disappointed hopes — what is it
but Paradise sought for ? ' 2
We now turn to ' John's Apocalypse ' as it is tersely
entitled in the ancient manuscripts. We are accustomed
to the fuller title, ' The Revelation of S. John the divine.'
To scholars this perhaps allows a private distinguishing
between the John of the Apocalypse and the John of
the Gospel and epistles, a distinction which was made
in the third century by Dionysius, Bishop of Corinth,
and which Dr. Swete was inclined to accept when he
wrote his Commentary * and became still more inclined
' W. Cunningham, Th* Gospel of Work, last page (Cambridge
University Press, 1902).
• J. M. Ferrier, Ltctures on Greek Philosophy, i. p. 272 (Black
wood, 1866).
8 The Apocalypse of St. John, the Greek text with introduction, note f
and indices (Macmillan, 1906). This beautiful finished work of a
great scholar theologian and churchman is the best commentary for
K

146 FAITH ON TRIAL
to before he wrote his article on the Apocalypse for
The Cambridge Companion to Biblical Studies in 1916.
Dionysius (quoted by Eusebius, H.E. vii. 25) thought
the Apocalypse so unlike the Gospel and epistles of S.
John that he ascribed it to another John than the
apostle, the son of Zebedee. This opinion was seized
by Eusebius who disliked the extravagances of the pro
phecy about ' the thousand years ' and other things of
the same kind. He started accordingly the idea of a
second John, the presbyter, in Ephesus which has had
so much vogue since, and this book which is the earliest
of all the Johannine writings to be definitely assigned
to the apostle (by Justin Martyr, about a.d. 150) lost
credit for a long while in the eastern church.
Dionysius was a Greek and it was the Greek style of
the Apocalypse which convinced him that it could not
come from the same pen as the Gospel. And indeed it
is hard to fancy that it could. The modern scholar,
turning from classical Greek to the New Testament,
finds a language somewhat strange to him. But when
he takes up the Apocalypse he is amazed by its barbaric
rudeness. Amazed as he may be, let him read on.
English readers, whether they know Greek or not. Other books may
be mentioned as follows : Hort's fragment on chs. i. -iii. (see above,
p. 1 20 ) : C. Anderson Scott, Revelation in Century Bible : F. C. Porter,
Messages of the Apocalyptic Writers (James Clarke) : W. M. Ramsay, The
Letters to the Seven Churches of Asia (Hodder & Stoughton) : W. Bous
set, Die Offenbarung fohannis (Gottingen), and article ' Apocalypse ' in
Encyclopcedia Biblica : also The Apocalypse, an introductory study of the
Revelation of St. John the Divine, being a presentment of the structure
of the book and of the fundamental principles of its interpretation, by
Edward White Benson, sometime Archbishop of Canterbury (Mac
millan, 1900). This last book is very unlike the regular commentaries :
to a reader with any imagination it is illuminating. Bousset has done
more than any other writer for the Apocalypse. He brings together
all the lines of research including Gunkel's (Schbpfung und Chaos)
setting of the Johannine Apocalypse in the long line of apocalyptic
tradition which runs back to ancient Babylonia. He has himself a
broad outlook upon the mind and growth of the early church, and his
Kyrios Christos, a history of the Christian faith from the beginning of
the Gospel to Irenaeus (Gottingen, 1913), opens a large view of
events. And he writes a strong clear German, marshalling his argu
ment with unusual lucidity.

STYLE AND LANGUAGE OF THE APOCALYPSE 147
Presently he is awed by the sublimity achieved by the
writer with this extraordinary instrument. It is often
said that no book has been so much improved by
translation as the Apocalypse. But to say that betrays
narrow sympathy in literature. The Apocalypse in its
original Greek is overwhelming. It is painted with a full
brush of deep colour. The touch is rough but never
coarse. It spreads great vistas, as in the last chapter
where the street of the heavenly city opens in a vast
expanse to the horizon ; the river pours along its gorge
in the midst and the forest of the tree of life clothes
the mountainous sides of the channel with its mysterious
foliage. The picture has a long pedigree. Ezekiel
had made his version of the scene : so had the poet of
Psalm xlvi. with his flood of judgement which to the
city of God becomes a river of healing to make glad
ness. Here is one of the elements in this complex
composition. The apocalyptic tradition stretches back
beyond the beginnings of the people of Israel to
Babylon and hoar antiquity ; and John's memory was
charged with phrases and visionary fancies from many
times and places belonging to that tradition. Some
times they come to him through the Old Testament,
sometimes from less sacred legend, sometimes as vague
and floating imagination from the general mind of
man, dreaming on things to come.
Besides that there are reminiscences of later pro
phecies and consolations from Jewish or Christian
writers. Hort described the occasion of the book thus :
'The day of the Lord which the writer of the
Hebrews saw drawing nigh had already begun to
break in blood and fire when St. John sent his Apoca
lypse to the Gentile Churches of Asia.1 1
1 Judaistic Christianity (Macmillan, 1898), p. 160. This is a course
of lectures, published after Dr. Hort's death. Another course was
published (1897) with the title, The Christian Ecclesia. Both were
edited by Dr. J. O. F. Murray, now Master of Selwyn College. They
are scarcely more than sketches for the lecture room and they were
written a good while ago. But Dr. Hort anticipated much that

148 FAITH ON TRIAL
It was composed, he thinks, when the Jewish war
with Rome had begun which was to end with the
fall of Jerusalem in a.d. 70. The sentence is so well
turned, the view so simplifies the tangled relationships
of literature to events, that assent is almost compelled.
But reflection obliges us to hesitate. Irenaeus in his
treatise ' against Heresies 1 (v. 30. 8) says that the
Apocalypse ' was seen not long ago but almost in our
own generation at the end of Domitian's reign1 (i.e.
about a.d. 95). Attempts are made to give another
turn to his Greek, but that is the plain sense of it. It
is true that some passages in the Apocalypse seem to
imply that earlier date, and it is easy to fancy that the
storm of a.d. 70 infects the whole. But we also find
passages which seem to imply a still earlier date, the
persecution of Nero. And it is hardly possible to
deny that a very great deal can best be understood as
reflecting the bitter days of Domitian. All falls into
place if we imagine a Christian of Asia Minor, iu the
stress of Domitianic persecution, composing an Apoca
lypse for the encouragement of his brethren. He is im
bued with the apocalyptic tradition, and gives his work
a hero's name, as the author of that earlier apocalypse
which was written to cheer the Maccabean saints put it
forth under the patronage of Daniel : this was the apoca
lyptic convention, not deception. Such books have
appeared before in Nero's time, when Titus besieged
Jerusalem, and no doubt in still earlier periods of trial.
Many of these ' consolations ' have been his frequent
companions and support. They all contribute phrase
and hue and temper to his own inspiration. And if
it be observed, as it certainly may be, that his bizarre
was afterwards to be worked out by others, and few histories of the
apostolic age are so instructive as these modest volumes. In another
posthumous volume, Cambridge and ether Sermons (Macmillan, 1898),
there is a plain sermon on ' St. John the Evangelist ' in which Dr.
Hort told the story of S. John's life, as he conceived it, setting
Apocalypse, Gospel, and epistles so naturally into the course of the
church's developement through trial that it is difficult, after a fresh
enjoyment of its scholarly simplicity, to dissolve the view presented
and to form another. Cf. pp. 1 19 f. above.

AUTHORSHIP OF THE APOCALYPSE 149
Greek, for all it is so unlike the Gospel and epistles
which flow as easily as a child's talk, nevertheless
has certain affinities with these in vocabulary and in
thought, that too fits in with the hypothesis. This
is not the son of Zebedee's first crude assault upon a
foreign language which he afterwards managed with art
less cleverness, avoiding the difficulties of an ambitious
style. It is a writer of rude Greek and a Jewish
Christian of rugged temper who is writing when
Johannine theology has begun to make its mark in
Asia Minor. This is how Bousset (quoted by Dr.
Sanday) puts the case :
' It is certainly right when this Johannine colouring
of the language is set down to the last redactor of the
Apocalypse. But it may be seen again that this
redactor has recast the material before him far more
drastically than is commonly supposed. The parallels
just collected appear to justify the supposition that
the whole cycle of Johannine writings comes from
circles which stood under the influence of John of Asia
Minor. From this side too we arrive at the conclusion
that ' my servant John ' is not intended to be, and is
not, any one else than John of Asia Minor. And
when of late the conjecture has been thrown out that
there existed in Asia Minor a language and style of a
specifically Johannine school, it seems to me that the
facts presented by the Apocalypse go to confirm this
conjecture.1 Whether Bousset's ' John of Asia ' is John the son
of Zebedee is a question we will leave to further
consideration in the next chapter. The Domitianic
author of the Apocalypse is not this John. He
narrates and applies the vision which he represents
John as seeing. It may be he has more than that to
go upon ; that he narrates and applies the vision
which John actually did see and in some earlier form
told, Thus we should come near again to Horn's

150 FAITH ON TRIAL
view, while preserving at the same time the tradition
of the church which Irenaeus hands down.
This criticism however, which must still be largely
conjecture, no doubt grows tedious. The main point
is strongly brought out by Bousset, that whatever the
author of the Apocalypse inherited from earlier times
he has made it all his own and writes spontaneously ;
that is, in this connexion, as he was inspired to write.
And the inspiration came to him through the stress of
persecution. In 1 Peter murmurs of a trial still to
come are heard. In Hebrews a hard duty confronts
the readers, but they ' have not yet resisted unto
blood.1 In the Apocalypse the seer is an exile for the
faith on Patmos, a convict probably; and in this
vision he sees multitudes coming out of the great
tribulation, hears the cry of the souls that have been
slain, and hears their cry answered by a command to
wait till more be slain and the number of the martyrs
be made up. In 1 Peter the cause of pagan enmity
seems vague. In Hebrews it seems that Jewish
patriotism is in rivalry with Christian loyalty. But in
the Apocalypse the conflict is with an abomination ;
worship the emperor of Rome or die.
The book begins with a title of some elaboration,
quite distinct of course from the terse ' apocalypse of
John' with which it was registered in the canon of
Scripture. This is marked by certain characteristic
phrases or ideas which recur in what follows : it is ' the
apocalypse of Jesus Christ'; 'things which must
shortly come to pass ' are shewn ; John witnesses ' the
word of God and the witness of Jesus Christ ' ; he who
reads and keeps what is here written is blessed ; ' the
time is at hand.'
Then John greets the seven churches of Asia with
prayer for grace and peace from him ' who is and was
and is to come ' : this name is the more impressive
from its violation of the rules of grammar, and it
introduces some magnificent sentences concerning the
advent of the Redeemer. This introduction closes

THE LETTERS TO THE SEVEN CHURCHES 151
with liturgic solemnity: 'I am Alpha and Omega,
saith the Lord God, which is and was and is to come,
the all-ruler.'
Then John tells of his presence in Patmos — we feel
the horror of persecution but he is reticent. He tells
how he was rapt in the Spirit into the advent day of
the Lord — so Hort, surely right, interprets ' the Lord's
day' — and heard a voice like the trump of advent
(cf. 1 Cor. xv. 52), and saw the Lord Jesus with eyes
of fire and voice as the voice of many waters, who
became dead and 'behold I am living for ever and
ever.1 John is bidden to write to the seven churches,
and the letters to the seven churches follow.
The letters reveal the pressure of the persecution.
It is spiritual and from within as well as from without.
The faith itself is breaking up in heresies. Stern
warnings alternate with tender forgiveness, encourage
ment, and sympathy. To two churches, the two that
are weak and lowly, unalloyed praise is given. The
lukewarmness of Laodicea is the worst fault of all.
What pathos, beauty, courage in extremity of peril,
and all through the presence of Christ who seems in
these letters to be visiting his soldiers in the places
where the line is hardest pressed. There are lurid
passages in the body of the book where we almost
doubt whether the author's temper is quite Christian."
But how loving is the opening, how bright the close,
and in the mid part what bursts of compassion. Love
burns its way against cruel opposition. The book
which tells of the wrath of the Lamb best shews what
that wrath really is.
Then (iv.) a door is opened in heaven and the
trumpet voice calls the seer to ascend. From this
point we look with him and the angel who conducts
him, the hierophant, sometimes at things in heaven,
for the rest as from a height over scenes of far horizons.
In heaven itself the immaterial centring of all upon
the throne creates a sense of boundless space in which
a liturgy freed from the limitations of ritual goes on.

152 FAITH ON TRIAL
About the throne and immediately round the throne
liturgic hymns are sung: sometimes all creation
diffused through earth and heaven swells the harmony.1
Some years ago a book was written to prove a close
and continuous relationship between the epistle to the
Hebrews and the extant form of the Greek liturgies.*
That was too fanciful. But it does appear that before
the close of the first century the Christian liturgy was
taking a more or less definite form, derived probably
from the services of the synagogue. The epistle of
Clement of Rome ends with a prayer of sustained
grandeur which is almost certainly derived from the
language customary, though no doubt free and fluid as
yet, in the eucharistic worship of the church at Rome.
Nor is it only in this concluding prayer that the
liturgical character of Clement's language asserts itself.
One is tempted to conjecture that a good deal of the
priestly language and thought even in Hebrews may
have been influenced by the eucharistic service in a still
earlier and still more free and simple form : if so it is
interesting to notice the far deeper doctrine which the
1 Archbishop Benson points out that in the ' Choric Songs the
Attributes and Beatitudes are Three when they are ascribed to God
immediately round His Throne ; that they are Seven when uttered by
the Angels, and Four when offered by the rest of Creation. Numbers
must be regarded as more than symbols when used in these relations to
the Divine, the Perfect, and the Created.' But in xix. I this rule is
broken in A.V. The late text added 'honour' to the 'salvation
and glory and power' of the heavenly multitude round the throne.
So in i. n ' confusion has been caused for centuries by the false
reading which intrudes into the Trumpet-Voice [of the Guide- Angel]
language possible only for Christ and God, and so takes away the clue
to subsequent utterances both of the same and other voices. But the
Voices are distinct even when heard together as sometimes they are.'
Notice too in the last verse of the book how the significance of the
repeated 'Lord Jesus,' the name of the Lord's manhood, is spoiled by
the added ' Christ ' of the later text.
* The Apostolic Liturgy and the Epistle to the Hebrews, by John
Edward Field (Rivingtons, 1882). In L'Anaphore apostolique et ses
timoins, par Dom Paul Cagin (Paris, 1919), a fresh and scholarly
attempt is made to recover 'the essential Eucharistic formula
which may be considered as having Apostolic sanction and has formed
the groundwork of all Catholic Liturgies.' See review by Dr. Armitage
Robinson in J. T.S., January 1920.

LITURGIC CHARACTER OF THE APOCALYPSE 153
author to the Hebrews recognised in the Christian
sacrifice. Dr. Murray thinks that something of the
same kind may be observed in the epistle to the
Ephesians : ' The literary affinities of great parts of the
first three chapters are not "lyrical11 but liturgical.
The opening sentence is an act of adoration. In the
next, thanksgiving passes into intercession. It is
difficult not to believe that we have in them the fruit
of many years' experience in leading the devotion of
Christian congregations. Just as (S. Paul's) continuous
practice ih teaching and exhortation must be condensed
and crystallised in the doctrinal and hortatory sections
of this and other epistles.' 1
In the Apocalypse this liturgical character is con
spicuous. The hymns are often like the hymns and
prefaces of the later liturgies, such as the Gloria in
excelsis or ' With angels and archangels ' in our English
service. None of them, probably, are transcripts from
Christian worship, but they would seem to a Christian
at the end of the first century a heavenly counterpart
of his worship on earth. And the spirit of eucharistic
worship is everywhere resurgent. Do not these sen
tences from Lightfoot describe the Apocalypse even
more exactly than Clement's epistle? 'All things
spiritual and material, all things above and below, the
kingdom of nature and the kingdom of grace fall within
the scope of this great sacramental system. Heaven
and earth alike are full of God's glory ; and shall they
not be full of human thanksgiving also? This idea
underlies the earliest liturgical forms ; it underlies, or
rather it absorbs, Clement's conception. There is no
narrow ritual and no cramping dogma here. The con
ception is wide and comprehensive, as earth and sea
and sky are wide and comprehensive. It inspires,
explains, justifies, vivifies the sacramental principle.12
1 Thi Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Ephesians, edited by the
Rev. J. O. F. Murray, D.D., with notes and introduction (Cambridge
Greek Testament for Schools and Colleges, 1914), p. xxxix.
• The Apostolic Fathers: Part I., S- Clement of Rome, vol. i. pp.
386-39«-

154 FAITH ON TRIAL
If so, how consolatory for those persecuted saints.
Their worship was real effectual divine. What they
said and did on earth was the echo of the compassionate
and triumphant liturgy in heaven. While faith and
worship persisted in the ancient purity they were not
left desolate or unprotected.
For this liturgy in heaven governs history. The
'unveiling1 shows that the violence of the world does
not proceed by chance or according to the evil will of
men. Great actors in heaven intervene so that all
moves on 1,0 an appointed end. In the right hand of
him that was seated on the throne a sealed book is
seen which none, so at first it seems, can open. But
the Lion of the tribe of Judah comes — and behold the
Lion is the Lamb which stands as though it had been
slain — and opens the seals. When the first seal is
opened the woes that devastate the earth are beheld in
their essential heavenly counterpart. And in heaven
they are not uncontrolled. Leading the four riders of
war, famine, and death is Christ the mounted archer
with the white horse (vi. 2; cf. xix. 11 and Ps. xiv.),
and he ' came forth conquering and meaning to conquer.1
Six of the seven seals are opened. Then the sequence
is interrupted, as it always is throughout the vision.
Before the last event in each series, the opening of the
seventh seal, the sounding of the seventh trumpet,
there is a pause and an episode. After the pouring of
the seventh vial the expected end developes into a
complex and still preparatory course of judgements,
and for all the beauty of the new Jerusalem the vision
reaches no finality : the last act of all is prayer and
promise : an epigram from Flaubert comes to mind,
' Reality is always misrepresented by those who wish
to make it lead up to a conclusion ; God alone may
do that.1
The episode before the opening of the seventh seal
is another sealing, the sealing of the servants of God
on their foreheads. First come the hundred and forty-
four thousand sealed out of every tribe of the sons of

THE MULTITUDE WHICH NONE CAN NUMBER 155
Israel. Liturgic pomp is most impressive here. ' Of
the tribe of Judah twelve thousand sealed: of the
tribe of Reuben twelve thousand. . . .1 The stately
list of the ancient elect is read and ratified with a
final 'sealed,' like the 'judgement written1 in Psalm
cxlix. Then, as in Ps. lxxxvii., the multitude innumer
able are gathered in with these. Privilege is trans
ferred to wider commonalty — mundo maiore sive com-
muni. The motley crowds from the streets and quays
of Ephesus, from London and New York, are born
anew in Sion. Liturgy in heaven is not pomp but love
in realism, medicine for the unartistic sorrows of a time
of trial.
' These are they which come out of the great tribula
tion, and they washed their robes, and made them
white in the blood of the Lamb. Therefore are they
before the throne of God ; and they serve him day and
night in his temple : and he that sitteth on the throne
shall spread his tabernacle over them. They shall
hunger no more, neither thirst any more ; neither shall
the sun strike upon them, nor any heat : for the Lamb
which is in the midst of the throne shall be their
shepherd, and shall guide them unto fountains of waters
of life : and God shall wipe away every tear from their
eyes1 (vii. 14 ff.).
After the seven seals the seven trumpets (viii. ff.).
These herald sharper woes, and the sense of impending
judgement grows awful. But before the seventh
trumpet sounds a promise is interposed. It is like the
promise made to the Maccabees in Daniel and fulfilled
for them (Dan. xii. 7) :
' And the angel which I saw standing upon the sea
and upon the earth lifted up his right hand to heaven,
and sware by him that liveth for ever and ever . . .
that there shall be time no longer : but in the days of
the voice of the seventh angel, when he is about to
sound, then is finished the mystery of God, according

156 FAITH ON TRIAL
to the good tidings which he declared to his servants
the prophets ' (x. 5 ff).
Then follows a good deal of strange symbolic narra
tive in the antique style of apocalypse. The measuring
of the temple in xi. seems to put us back to the months
before the destruction of Jerusalem. But the older
promise (which might seem to have failed) is fused
anew in more spiritual faith. The temple here means
not the Jewish edifice. Nor is ' the great city, which
spiritually is called Sodom and Egypt, where also our
Lord was crucified,1 Jerusalem. It stands in a manner
for Rome, but for the Roman dominion rather than
the city : more profoundly it corresponds to S. John's
' whole world that lieth in the evil one,1 and for our
Lord's crucifixion therein we may again compare Heb.
vi. 6. This is one of the passages where the Johannine
thought jostles with crude apocalyptic imagery, and
that is why we should not adopt the marginal rendering
of R.V. in x. 6, 'delay' instead of 'time.' 'Delay1
seems more intelligible because it is commonplace. As
in S. John's Gospel, as in the Christian liturgies, the
element of 'time' is transcended in this apocalypse,
At the opening the seer was rapt in Spirit into the
advent day. The things he sees 'must shortly come
to pass,' but he sees these things as heavenly realities
concurrent with the events that are in the actual
intolerable present taking place on earth ; and the
concluding promise and prayer, ' Yea, I come quickly.
Even so : come, Lord Jesus,' issues from a very different
stage of faith than S. Luke knew in the primitive
church at Jerusalem (Acts i. 6).
This jostling rather than mingling of Christian
philosophy with sacramental naivete", and sometimes
with crude apocalyptic imagery, should be kept in mind
when we muse upon the fearful pictures of punishment
which disturb many readers of the Apocalypse. It may
be that the author did sometimes fall short of the ideal
of the Saviour's love, and somewhat, here and there,

TERRORS AND CONSOLATIONS OF APOCALYPSE 167
measured the ' wrath of the Lamb ' amiss. It is
evident that inspiration leaves room for human weak
ness, and there is a very human element in this book :
it is hard to keep the fire of Christ's utter charity
bright under insolent tyranny when broken-hearted
men and women ' desire to see one of the days of the
Son of man and see it not.1 But on the whole, and
very mightily, this prophet makes such men and
women see these ' days.1 And the critical probability
if not proof, that this Apocalypse preserves older
language and ideas which have been thought anew by
its late Christian author, must make us pause before
we allow the first obvious interpretation of his ruder
imagery. That at least seems to have been the instinct
of the earlier ages of our Church. Hear what is said
in an article in The Church Quarterly for October 1880,
on ' Christian imaginations of heaven ' :
'The earlier creeds set forth the Life everlasting,
and do not set forth the everlasting Fire, though no
Christian of their day, so far as we know, dared to
deny it. There is a reticence : and it is certainly
observable in the popular symbolic ornamentation used
by the Primitive Church as distinguished from later
Mediaeval work. . . . Certain it is that, though the
presence of the Lord in glory with saints is very early
represented, both in sepulchral decoration, and in the
larger Basilicas, and though He is in about 400 years
surrounded by the mystic splendours of the Apocalypse,
there is no contrasted Inferno that we know of for
twice that time and its introduction is an archaeological
or artistic landmark for the entrance of Church History
on its Mediaeval stage. No " painted hell " existed
that we know of earlier than the eleventh or twelfth
century mosaics of Torcello ; nor is any such repre
sentation on record, except the painting which
Methodius is said to have executed to stimulate the
emotional aestheticism of a certain King Bogoris of
Bulgaria. But at whatever time men ceased to

158 FAITH ON TRIAL
separate the ideas of Eternal Happiness from the dark
relief of Eternal Pain, they had introduced the latter
by the date of the early Venetian mosaics. Florence
repeated the lesson in S. Giovanni, and the illuminated
service books soon carried it all over the world. . . .
The terrors of the soul are in fact, ethnic, or heathen,
or common to all souls : all the consolations belong to
the Faith.'
At xi. 15 the seventh angel blows his trumpet.
Choric songs are sung. The inner shrine of the
heavenly temple is opened. The end seems to be
drawing near.
But the long episodes succeed of the war in heaven
and the wild beasts. These are closed by the vision of
the Lamb standing on the mount of Sion with the
company of those who have his name and the name of
his Father written on their forehead. The voice as of
many waters is heard again, and the voice of harpers
harping on their harps and singing the new song. The
virgin company of the hundred and forty-four thousand,
the firstfruits of mankind, who follow the Lamb
whithersoever he goeth, alone may learn this song.
How certain does the Apocalypse make eternal life.
Heaven is full of living saints. Death works on earth,
but death is no end, it is a mysterious act in life.
Turn the page and read the assurance :
'And I heard a voice from heaven saying, Write,
Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord from hence
forth : yea, saith the Spirit, may they rest from their
labours ; for their works follow with them ' (xiv. 13).
Sometimes this immortality is declared in frank and
gracious imagery : sometimes, as in this last quoted
passage, the spiritual fact is essentialised with scarcely
any aid from figure. But the fact vivifies the whole
Apocalypse. Without it there could be no heaven at
all, no Lamb without his followers and friends. In
Hebrews also we were now and then ' with angels and

ALL THINGS NEW 159
archangels and all the company of heaven,' but the joy
of this populous heaven infects the Apocalypse all
through. Every period of persecution and laying
down of life for a cause has been a period of invigoration
of faith in immortality. And so history still proves.
After all the end is not yet revealed. After the
seven trumpets the seven vials have to be poured out
(xv. 5). But when the seventh has been poured out
the judgement of Babylon is at last consummated
(xvii.) and the judgement of all ' the dead ' is held, and
death and hell are cast into the lake of fire (xx. 11 ff).
Then are seen the new heaven and the new earth and
the holy city the new Jerusalem coming down from
heaven, and the voice proclaims from the throne :
' Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and he
shall dwell with them, and they shall be his people,
and God himself shall be with them : and he shall wipe
away every tear from their eyes ; and death shall be no
more ; neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor
pain, any more; the first things are passed away.
And he that sat on the throne said, Behold, I make all
things new. And he saith, Write : for these words
are faithful and true. And he spake unto me, They
are come to pass. I am the Alpha and the Omega,
the beginning and the end. I will give unto him that
is athirst of the fountain of the water of life freely.
He that overcometh shall inherit these things ; and I
will be his God, and he shall be my son ' (xxi. 1 ff.).
Thus the sorely tried soldiers of the faith in Asia
Minor were encouraged. In the stern words that
follow (as before in the letters to the churches) the
faint-hearted and the traitors are warned. The glorious
picture of the city of eternal light brings the vision to
an end, and in xxii. 8 ff. we seem to watch the seer
gradually waking from his trance, and all concludes as
' the apocalypse of Jesus Christ ' himself :
' I, Jesus have sent mine angel to testify unto you

160 FAITH ON TRIAL
these things for the churches. I am the root and the
offspring of David, the bright, the morning star.'
The author, not the seer, adds his testimony to
which he calls his Lord to witness ; and the last book
of the canon closes with a return to the Galilean
simplicity :
' Amen : come, Lord Jesus. The grace of the Lord
Jesus be with the saints. Even so.'

IV

S. JOHN : THE LIFE OF JESUS IS THE META
PHYSIC OF THE WORD
At the time of our Lord's birth the Jewish people
were swayed by a world of thoughts about the kingdom
of God. The apocalypses had expressed and nourished
this hope. When the Lord Jesus received baptism
from John the Baptist, he answered this expectation
by proclaiming that the time was fulfilled, the kingdom
was at hand, men must repent and believe this good
news. That proclamation of the immediate coming of
the kingdom was the good news, the Gospel. He
preached that Gospel throughout his ministry ; purged
the vulgar hope of its baser elements ; died to bring
about its true fulfilment ; and in defeat was victorious :
when he died the kingdom was indeed planted in the
world. The apocalypses were always full of the kingdom.
Sometimes, not always, they spoke of the Messiah or
Christ, who would bring the kingdom and reign
therein. At his baptism our Lord was 'anointed'
with the Spirit and received assurance that he was the
beloved Son of God his Father. His apostles at last
confessed their belief that he was the Christ. That
claim was the ' blasphemy ' for which he was condemned
in the high priest's court. Yet it is doubtful whether
he ever claimed the Christship for himself. Always
the kingdom, only now and then the Christ : that is
the theme of the Jewish apocalypses. Always the
kingdom, always the Father, always the children of
the Father, but as little as may be about the Christ :

162 S. JOHN
that is the theme of our Lord's Gospel. It is not of
course that he is less than the Christ, but that he is so
much more ; so much more because he makes himself
so little for our sake, and loses his life to find it a
thousandfold as a ransom for many.
By S. Paul the kingdom is not often named:
'Christ,1 'Christ Jesus,1 ' Jesus Christ1 is ever on his
lips. This was natural since in its lowly guise the
kingdom had come when the Lord died, and since it
was to Jesus himself as Christ that Saul was converted.
In his conversion he was convinced of the reality
of the Lord's resurrection. The crucifixion and the
resurrection completed his ancestral Pharisaic faith.
Henceforth not the law, but spiritual union with the
crucified and living Christ was the centre. So he
taught forgiveness and renewal and new life ' in Christ '
according to the Spirit. So he deepened the expecta
tion in the church of the advent of Jesus as the
Christ in glory. So he accepted the revelation of the
expansion of Israel ; all should be one, Jew and Gentile
together, ' in Christ.' So he foresaw the growth of the
church as the spiritual body of Christ, growing still
in wisdom and comprehensiveness, till all men should
be ' one full-grown man in Christ.' As Paul runs his
course, ever deepening his own mystical union with the
Redeemer, the Jewish scenery of faith fades more and
more ; heart-hope fructifies more and more richly.
S. Paul died in Nero's persecution. The era of
'fiery trial' began with the Neronian martyrdoms.
The fall of Jerusalem in a.d. 70 was the culminating
point in this season of faith on trial ; though the trial
continued, ever gathering intensity through the reign
of Domitian to the end of the century. The Jewish
revolt from Rome and its consequence must have been
foreboded by many who watched the signs of the times,
and Matthew and Luke record that our Lord foretold
it. Luke especially seems to show that our Lord
taught how this would be in some sense a coming of
the Son of man, a coming if not the coming. When

SUMMARY OF PRECEDING CHAPTERS 163
the day drew near this teaching was better understood,
and the authors of the epistle to the Hebrews and of
the first epistle of S. Peter encouraged their brethren
by the promise of Christ's revelation of his presence in
the trials that threatened them. There is reason to
suppose that the trial contemplated in the epistle to
the Hebrews was immediately connected with the
Jewish war, and the epistle is not only an exhortation
to duty ; it developes the theology of the faith out of
the circumstances of the hour. So does the Apocalypse
of S. John in which consolations belonging to earlier
stages of trial are perhaps remembered and refined in
the fires of Domitian's persecution.
Thus the high priesthood of the Lord in Hebrews
and the heavenly ritual of the Apocalypse rise from
the vanishing of ancient Jewish ritual, and discover
new and richer views of the divine person of Christ.
Nor less is the doctrine of his true manhood elucidated.
Believers were turning back in memory to ' the days of
his flesh.' The earliest Gospels were being written.
His example was an influence as the expectation of the
advent in glory receded, and the certainty of the advent
of 'to-day ' brought its summons to follow him loyally
as ' captain.' But the retrospect had difficulty as well
as inspiration. The obscurity and suffering, the limita
tions of manhood, the ' scandal of the cross,' the shock
of realism : here was the first setting of that problem
of the Gospels which has recurred at intervals ever
since. The solution was sketched in the epistle to the
Hebrews. An artist author there succeeds the mystical
philosopher S. Paul. The imaginative common-sense
of the mass of believers asserted itself in the face of
peril. They would follow his lead who for their sakes
had lain in darkness and the shadow of death, and now
came to call his followers in a glory of holiness which
seemed anything but glory to the cruel world. So,
now they saw, it had been in the days of his flesh.
The glory always had been in the humiliation, not
after it as a reward. Glory in ljumiliation, the eternal

164 S. JOHN
through the realism of the visible, the Godhead
through the manhood: this was the sacramental
principle which solved the problem and would hence
forth be the current rule for thought and conduct in
a church which could never be entirely composed of
mystics or philosophers. Once more men walked in
the plain man's Galilean 'way'; only there was light
upon that way since Paul had known the Master which
could never be lost again.
The sacramental principle was carried out by one
who was neither greater nor less than S. Paul : his
distinction is that he completes New Testament
revelation. By him all that has gone before is
brought together and expressed with consummate
simplicity. New influences from a wider world helped
to press out his thought. The ground may still be
Jewish, but if so Hellas and Asia play upon it far
more freely than ever before. And with all this the
writer, whom we call S. John, is original: while he
remembers and fuses and re-acts, he creates.1
John, the son of Zebedee and brother of James, after
adventures of which we have no certain knowledge,
seems to have spent a quiet presbyterate at Ephesus
where he lived and taught till he died at the end of the
first century. From the new world at Ephesus, where
the multitude that none can number of all people and
languages thronged the streets and quays, he looked
back upon the Galilean Gospel, and remembering deeper
things in the Lord's teaching than other disciples could
easily harmonise with their Jewish preparation for the
faith, he constantly explained these to his affectionate
1 Cf. Pater, essay on Dante Gabriel Rossetti in Appreciations (Mac
millan, 1904), ' Practically, the church of the Middle Age by its aesthetic
worship, its sacramentalism, its real faith in the resurrection of the flesh,
had set itself against that Manichean opposition of spirit and matter,
and its results in men's ways of taking life ; and in this Dante is the
central representative of its spirit. To him, in the vehement and
impassioned heat of his conceptions, the material and the spiritual are
fused and blent : if the spiritual attains the definite visibility of a
crystal, what is material loses its earthiness and impurity.'

SKETCH OF JOHANNINE DOCTRINE 166
flock. Before or after he died a disciple composed a
Gospel from his teaching, as Mark had done from
Peter's. Somewhat slowly, not without suspicion, it
won its way abroad. The 'elder' of Ephesus had
served his Asian parish in retirement : he had not felt
or been felt much in the current of western church
developement. His own people had gradually grown
to understand his bold meditative mind : its publica
tion surprised strangers, and the Asian Gospel was
too modern for them. In four respects especially
it demanded time for old-fashioned readers to adjust
their point of view.
First in its revelation of the Godhead of our Lord,
the sacramental principle was worked out in ' the
perfection of ultimate utterance.' * What Hebrews had
adumbrated in philosophic rhetoric was now illumin
ated by a narrative, in children's language, of the life
of the Son of God on earth ; a real life on earth and
truly of the Son of God, the eternal ever shining
through the temporal. This is the Gospel of 'Ecce
homo' and also of 'My Lord and my God.' In
homeliest love among his friends God, who is love, is
here revealed. This love, being homely natural, is
intense : being intense its effect flows far forth. So
this Godhead of the Johannine Christ is not exclusive
but comprehending. The Son draws men with himself
into Godhead with the Father.
Secondly, the advent now emerges from all its tradi
tional pomp and scenery. There is no 'here' or
' there ' ; no far-forward gaze towards a point of time to
come. Hope passes into the peace of an eternal ' now.'
Through the ' other Comforter ' the Son who goes,
comes. He is always here. Advent and judgement
are in his eternal presence. Only, what still remains
unknown must be known to each and all. He must
be seen ' as he is,1 that ultimately we may be like him.
Thirdly, and in accordance with this, eternal life is
' to know God.1 The future resurrection is interpreted
1 A phrase from an unpublished lecture of Dr. Scott Holland.

166 S. JOHN
through the communion of saints which can be enjoyed
without delay. 'I am the resurrection and the life,'
said the Lord. The Son, going to the Father, carries
his friends with him, from the ' mansion ' of the senses
— the sweet intercourse of Galilee — into the mansion
of the Spirit, a fuller communion which death cannot
interrupt. And fourthly, behind this Gospel there are the two
church sacraments, baptism and the supper of the Lord,
and the whole order of instituted church life, which
was already highly organised by the end of the first
century. All this the new Gospel continually lifted
from the letter to the Spirit, a process always apt to
cause dismay. On the other hand there have always
been and will be some sincerest souls who feel that the
organised church, Jerusalem built as a city, is far
removed from Galilean simplicity. To such the elder
of Ephesus answers that this is the only way to save a
world which lies whqlly in the evil one. That is half
the burden of his ep\istle, and in epistle and Gospel
alike he tells what the other evangelists do not expressly
tell : how Jesus Christ is the propitiation for the whole
world. Now to justify and illustrate this sketch of the
Johannine writing and doctrine.
In 1880 Westcott edited the Gospel according to
S. John for the Speakers' Commentary. The book has
been issued as a commentary by itself since then and
has run through many editions. For insight into the
theology of the Gospel it remains almost unrivalled ;
though advance has been made of late in knowledge of
contemporary thought and some useful studies have
appeared in which the influences of time and place are
more precisely estimated than Westcott could or cared
to do.1 But the introduction to this commentary has
1 See for instance E. F. Scott, The fourth Gospel, its purpose and
theology (T. & T. Clark) : Gardner, The Ephesian Gospel (Williams
& Norgate). DuBose's The reason of Life (Longmans) has already

WAS S. JOHN IN EPHESUS? 167
not quite so permanent a value. The ancient testi
mony and all the material of criticism is marshalled
with the scrupulous accuracy of the great scholar.
Yet the conclusions are too easily drawn. Neither
Westcott nor Lightfoot J felt sufficiently the difficulty
been mentioned ; Dr. DuBose was more concerned with making the
Johannine thoughts current coin to-day than with origins and influences.
Hort's The Way, the Truth and the Life (Macmillan) must also be
mentioned. Hort, like Westcott, wrote this long ago, but Hort cared
more for history and science as well as for philosophy than Westcott
did, and the foundations of this book (which are not displayed) go
deep into the facts of first-century life. It is indeed a golden treasury
of Christian philosophy expressed in simple language with profound
thought : the argument requires close attention, which is made easier
by the prefixed analysis. In Cambridge Biblical Essays there are two
essays on the Gospel, by the Dean of S. Paul's and Dr. A. E. Brooke.
Dr. Brooke defends its historical character ; Dr. Inge treats it as pure
theology, saying little about date or author but apparently taking for
granted that it is of the second century. Dr. Inge has also written on
this Gospel in Hastings' Dictionary of Christ and the Gospels, and no
formal argument against early date and close connexion with S. John
is so strong as his elucidation of the theology on this presupposition :
it is a creative restoration of faith through criticism. Dr. Inge's recent
lectures on Plotinus show how much this restoration owes to his large
knowledge of the whole range of philosophy. And every student of
S. John should at least have looked through the window of philosophy.
Dr. Henry Jackson used to tell beginners in Greek philosophy to steep
thernselves in Plato's Republic, and beginners in the Johannine philo
sophy would find it worth while to read The Apology, The Phaedo,
and The Republic, if not in Greek, in Jowett's version, or in the
translations in Macmillan's Golden Treasury.
1 In Biblical Essays and in Essays on the work entitled ' Supernatural
Religion ' (Macmillan). H. Latimer Jackson's Problem of the fourth
Gospel is the best summary of the critical arguments (Cambridge, 1918).
Bacon, The Fourth Gospel in research and debate (New York), argues
against John the apostle's ever having been in Ephesus; he writes vigor
ously but not with all the judicial carefulness that is required. He should
be checked by the more conservative inquiry of Stanton, The Gospels as
Historical Documents (Cambridge, 2 vols. ; see above, p. 6), to whom
Bacon often refers with respect. A third volume, entirely devoted to
S. John, is expected from Dr. Stanton before long. The article in
Hastings' Dictionary of the Bible on ' Gospels ' is by Stanton. In
Encyclopedia Biblica Schmiedel writes of the fourth Gospel in the
article on 'John, son of Zebedee' ; E. A. Abbott in the article on
'Gospels.' Dr. Abbott's Fourfold Gospel has been mentioned above,
p. 17. mis Johannine Grammar and Johannine Vocabulary are also
valuable. In The character and authorship of the fourth Gospel
(Scribner) Principal Drummond, in The criticism of the fourth Gospel

168 S. JOHN
which is caused by the lack of early evidence for S.
John's ever having been in Asia Minor. Of course
they knew the lack and noticed it, but it seemed to
them quite easy to dispose of the difficulty. It may
be they were guided by a right instinct, but the point
has been so strongly pressed since their day that fresh
attention must be paid to it and the argument must
be arranged anew.
There is no plain statement that John the apostle
was in Asia till we come to Irenaeus at the end of the
second century. Justin Martyr's reference to John as
author of the Apocalypse is the nearest we get to such
evidence. That carries us back to about a.d. 150, but
the reference is not definite enough to build much
upon. Nor is there definite quotation from the Gospel in
the early second century. What seem to be echoes
and reminiscences of it may be explained as echoes of
an Ephesian theology. That theology indeed cul
minated in the Johannine Gospel. But it may have
been a language, a mode of thought, which floated
through Asia Minor many years before the Gospel was
composed. This may be the source of those early
second-century phrases and ideas which have too lightly
been set down in the same lists as the real quotations
of somewhat later years.
In the early second century there is no clear evidence
for the existence of the fourth Gospel, no clear evidence
for the presence of John the apostle in Asia Minor.
There is evidence for the presence of some one named
John, but that title ' apostle,1 which would remove all
doubt, is never given to this person.
(Oxford) Dr. Sanday review the critical problem and confirm a
moderate conservatism.
Loisy's Le quatrieme Evangile (Paris, 1903, but now out of print)
goes, like Abbott's books, far beyond literary and historical criticism :
it is a monument of the best 'modernist' scholarship and piety.
Good small commentaries on the Gospel (and the Epistles) have
been written by Dr. A. Plummer in the Cambridge Bible and the
Cambridge Greek Testament for Schools and Colleges.

A QUIET APOSTOLATE 169
That after all is the whole case against S. John.
For minor aggravations of it, such as the contention
that the last chapter of the Gospel is an appendix with
interpolations made for the purpose of implying the
apostle's authorship, fall away if the main objections
can be answered. And perhaps they can. Perhaps
Westcott and Lightfoot were justified in obeying
instinct ; though yet again perhaps we may find that
their absolute acceptance of the apostle as author pure
and simple was too hasty.
Tradition is generally worth more than was allowed
in the reaction of fifty years ago. And the tradition
which Irenaeus handed on was a respectable one. -
Irenaeus wrote at the end of the century, but he
was born about a.d. 130, and as the Gospel was in
any case not written much before the end of the first
century, his own life nearly reaches back to its appear
ance. Then that withholding of the title ' apostle ' is dis
appointing to us late inquirers, but it need not have
had much significance to the apostle himself or to his
friends. It may be that we fill out that title too
particularly from S. Paul's insistence upon it. On the
one hand we learn from his epistles and from the Acts x
that others beside the Twelve were called apostles. On
the other hand opposition obliged S. Paul to magnify
his office, and even when he magnified it he seems to
show that an apostle was not always so wonderfully
thought of by every one (1 Cor. iv. 9). Of course the
apostles were very great : with what inner lasting
greatness 2 Corinthians tells. And they had authority ;
established, we may like to fancy, by their courageous
service in the earliest persecution after the martyr
dom of S. Stephen when ' all were scattered abroad
except the apostles' (Acts viii. 1). But it does
not follow that they would always be addressed or
spoken of by their title of dignity, nor even that
1 See Acts xiv. 14 ; Rom. xvi. 7 ; 2 Cor. viii. 23 ; and Hort,
Christian Ecclesia, pp. 76-91.

170 S. JOHN
all of them always would take an active part in the
ecumenical ordering of the church. The latter part
of S. John's career may have been a quiet episcopate
in Ephesus, fallentis semita vitae, where he imbued
a not very extensive flock with a theology which was
to open the ancient Gospel to new worlds and future
ages, but at which the great practical western church
looked askance for a while — there were rumours that
Cerinthus, a most unjohannine heretic, was the real
author — and which no one was very much concerned to
vindicate for the unpretending elder of Ephesus. His
own people might hardly be aware of his intellectual
eminence. Did he not talk with a simpler tongue than
other doctors, and was not the sum of all his instruc
tions, ' Little children, love one another ' ?
The elder of Ephesus ; John the elder : was he a
different person from the apostle? Of him there
certainly are traces from the beginning of the second
century. In particular there is the testimony of
Papias preserved by Eusebius (Hist. Eccl., iii. 39).
Papias in this passage first speaks of presbyters or
elders from whom he himself learned what the * dis
ciples of the Lord' had said. These ' elders1 are men
who have known the ' disciples 1 but have not them
selves known the Lord. 'Elder1 hardly looks like an
ecclesiastical title in this connection. It is still a fluid
word, as in 1 Pet. v. 1, where it seems to bear an
official sense but is immediately afterwards connected
with the ' younger men 1 in no official sense : and notice
how the apostle Peter designates himself a 'fellow-
elder' in this same place. Such then are Papias'
' elders.' His ' disciples ' are the apostles who have
known the Lord ; their names are given, and John is
among them. That of course proves nothing as to
this John having dwelt in Papias' own country, Asia
Minor. But then Papias goes on to speak of Aristion
and the ' presbyter ' or ' elder John ' as disciples of the
Lord who are still saying things which he learns from
his presbyters. The point is in the tenses of the two

JOHN THE ELDER 171
verbs. The other 'disciples of the Lord' had passed
away and spoke no longer: Aristion and John still
live and still speak, and here the inference would be
fair that they speak in Asia Minor where Papias'
presbyters could hear them. But the difficulty lies in
the distinction drawn between John who was one of
the 'disciples' and John 'the elder.' Some think it
establishes the existence of a second John, ' the elder,1
and they therefore discredit the presence of John the
apostle in Asia. They draw attention to two other
fragments of Papias which have been found in two late
Greek writers of the ninth and of the seventh or eighth
centuries.1 In these fragments we are merely told that
John was killed by the Jews, not when he was killed ;
the statement looks suspiciously like an inference from
our Lord's answer to the mother of James and John
(Mark x. 39, Matt. xx. 23) ; and the whole evidence is
too late and too vague to build a tradition of the
apostle's early martyrdom upon it. Returning then
to Papias' acknowledged testimony we ask ourselves
whether the distinction is after all obvious. Dom
Chapman gave some years ago 2 a simple explanation
of Papias' words. He has mentioned John among the
' disciples ' or apostles all of whom except John have
passed from this life. Then he mentions John again
with another ' disciple ' as still living. That there may
be no doubt about the John who is associated with
Aristion being the same John as has just been named
among the disciples, Papias adds in his second mention
of him the title by which, as the second and third
epistles shew, he was commonly known. ' The presby-
1 See Stanton, The Gospels as Historical Documents, p. 1 66 ff.
2 John the Presbyter and the Fourth Gospel, by Dom John Chapman,
O.S.B. (Oxford, 1911). Compare Bousset (Ency. Bibl. 'Apocalypse'):
' Whatever interpretation we put on Papias . . . it is at least certain
that Papias speaks not of. two Johns in Asia Minor — the apostle and
the presbyter — but of one John whom we are to look for as a near
neighbour of Papias in space and time.'
Aristion (sometimes spelled 'Ariston' in antiquity) is he whose
name has been found in an Armenian manuscript as the author of the
last twelve verses of S. Mark. See Swete, 5. Mark, pp. ciii ff.

172 S. JOHN
ters1 were the old men known to Papias who had
known the apostles : ' The Presbyter ' is the unassuming
title by which the last surviving apostle was honoured
at Ephesus.
Let us think then of S. John as exercising during
his latter years a quiet apostolate at Ephesus. There
he repeated his memories of the life and teaching of
the Lord. We have seen in our first chapter that it is
reasonable to suppose our Lord to have gone beyond
the forms of Jewish apocalyptic in his conversation
with the disciples. S. Luke in particular sometimes
records utterances which link the Galilean Gospel with
the Johannine.1 These utterances may have passed
over the heads of the others but found resting place in
the meditation of S. John, and long years of spiritual
communion with his Lord, still present though unseen,
would order and deepen such memories. ' The Son of
man shall come' was the Lord's commoner way of
speaking. But he also said ' The kingdom of God is
among you,' and this presence, this coming in an
' eternal now,' was what S. John's temperament, contact
with Greek and Asian thought, and experience of trial
and support, fitted him to think out. So we may
readily believe that the doctrine of the fourth Gospel
is derived from our Lord himself, actually taught by
him in the days of his flesh, and carried on by him
through the Spirit in his ascended state.
Nevertheless we must suppose the language and
presentation of this teaching to have taken its peculiar
form from the author of the fourth Gospel. 'The
kingdom of God is among you ' is Johannine thought
in synoptic phrase. The same must be said of another
passage which is often quoted as a like example (Matt.
xi. 25 ff, Luke x. 21 ff.).2 The style of our Lord's
1 See pp. 33 ff., and compare a sentence from De Quincey's essay
on Judas Iscariot : ' . . . hearing daily from his master a sublime
philosophy that rested for its key-note upon the advent of vast revolu
tions among men.'
* See below, p. 187.

S. JOHN TAUGHT, A PUPIL WROTE THE GOSPEL 173
discourse in the fourth Gospel is the style of the Gospel
itself. Sometimes it is almost impossible to decide
where the Saviour's words end, where the evangelist's
comment begins, as for instance in iii. 10-21. More
over it is also the style of the three epistles. Dionysius
of Alexandria is convincing when he argues from Greek
style that one John cannot have written both the
Gospel and the Apocalypse. It may be as convincingly
argued from Greek style that the Gospel and epistles
come from the same pen, and that this pen has also
shaped the Lord's discourses within the Gospel.1
But whose pen was this? Not, it would seem,
S. John's own. There is, in truth, little reason to
start from the presupposition that it was. In the
ancient notices of authorship the ' writing 1 of a book
is a very general term. Many if not most of the books
of the New Testament were composed, or owed their
final shape to others than those from whom they were
ultimately derived.2 As S. Mark stood to S. Peter in
the composition of his Gospel so some pupil of S. John
may have stood to him. The observation has not much
weight perhaps, but it has been observed that a certain
1 The style of the various writers of the New Testament has never
been better treated than in the little book of W. H. Simcox, The Writers
of the New Testament, their style and characteristics (Hodder &
Stoughton, 1898). If any one wishes to work out the subject for himself
he will find the tables of words useful at the end of Grimm and Thayer's
Lexicon of the Greek Testament (T. & T. Clark, 1886). Since that
lexicon was published the papyri have been drawn upon to illustrate
the popular Greek to which the New Testament is so nearly related.
Deissmann's Light from the Ancient East (English translation, Hod
der & Stoughton) may be consulted : also Milligan's Selections from the
Greek Papyri (Cambridge), and Moulton's Grammar of New Testament
Greek (T. & T. Clark, vol. i., 1906 ; vol. ii. part i., 1909). Mr. A. D.
Knox, fellow of King's College, Cambridge, who has gone deeply into the
later Greek, insists that the agreement of New Testament Greek with the
papyri must not be pressed : the papyri are lawless, the New Testament
observes certain peculiar but strict grammar rules : see a paper read
before the Cambridge Philological Society, October 23, 1919, a sum
mary of which was published in the University Reporter, November 4,
1919. Mr. Knox perhaps recognised the varieties of style within
the Greek Testament too little.
2 See above, pp. 23 f., 44 ff., 61, 122, 148.

174 S. JOHN
preface to the Gospel seems to speak of S. John as
dictating it, not writing it himself.1 And these are
considerations which recommend the hypothesis of the
writer or evangelist mediating the recollections of his
master. It cannot be denied that the historical accuracy of
this Gospel is in some points doubtful. There are
other points, it is true, on which it seems more accurate
than the earlier Gospels. A notable one is the rela
tion of the last supper to the passover. Mark and
Matthew make it the passover meal, taken by the
Lord and his disciples on the same evening as the rest
of the people. In John it is clear that they took their
last meal together the evening before the passover.
A phrase in Luke — ' With desire I have desired to eat
this passover with you before I die 1 — gains significance
when read in the light of S. John. As elsewhere Luke
stands between the other synoptists and S. John, who
in this matter seems to preserve the true tradition.
Most of the older commentators dwell upon the know
ledge of places and customs in Jerusalem shewn by the
evangelist : that is part of their proof that he was an
' eye-witness.1 Later critics treated the argument with
slight respect, but quite lately it has come forward
again in partly new form : Dr. Israel Abrahams 2 is one
of a number of Jewish scholars who find remarkable
familiarity with ancient Jewish rites and customs in
this Gospel. This may confirm the story of the fourth
Gospel in which the one year's ministry with one
passover in Jerusalem, implied by the synoptists,
expands to a three years' ministry with four visits to
Jerusalem ; though an evangelist might himself know
Jerusalem well and yet be mistaken about the frequency
of the Lord's visits there.
The recognition of the Lord as Messiah by Philip
and Nathanael at the beginning is not really incon-
1 See Burkitt, Two Lectures on the Gospels, pp. 67 ff. (Macmillan,
1901). 2 Studies in Pharisaism and the Gospels (Cambridge, 191 7).

HISTORY IN GOSPEL ACCORDING TO S. JOHN 175
sistent with the confession of S. Peter at the end of the
ministry, especially when the purpose of the whole
Johannine Gospel is considered with regard to the
Messiahship, That title is put into the background,
its ordinary meaning is rejected as inadequate ; quite
in accordance with what we have already seen to have
been our Lord's own attitude.1 And all this preliminary
intercourse with disciples before the call narrated by
the synoptists has been put in quite a reasonable light
by the late Master of Trinity Hall.2 These conver
sations were held in the closing year. When spring
came — 'the time when kings go out to war' — the
Lord sought his friends by the seashore and they
obeyed an expected call.
Again in the account of the feeding of the five
thousand, it is from the Johannine narrative that we
learn the apocalyptic character of this feast in the
wilderness : the people would make the Lord a king ; he
prayed on the mountain that night in preparation for
the decisive discourse next day on the bread of life,
wbich checked the popular messianic enthusiasm and
inaugurated the second stage of the ministry. All the
evangelists record this feeding of the multitude. In
the synoptic Gospels another feast of like character is —
it seems at first sight superfluously — recorded. The
importance of these feasts in the developement of the
Saviour's work is evidently felt ; but only in S. John is
it made clear. And yet again, this does not prove that
the Johannine narrative is pure history. This evangelist
might have perceived, as we do now, that explanation
was needed and might therefore have filled up the story
from such sources as he could find ; the question would
still remain, what kind of sources these were.
And there is the very difficult problem of the miracles.
These are called ' signs ' in the Johannine Gospel and
1 See above, pp. I4ff, 161.
2 Pastor pastorum, or the schooling of the Apostles by our Lord, by
Rev. Henry Latham, Master of Trinity Hall, Cambridge (Deighton,
Bell & Co., 1890).

176 S. JOHN
the term is significant : the inner meaning is intended
to be more than the outward fact. Yet it is impossible
to suppose that S. John, the companion of the Lord,
invented ' signs ' for purposes of allegory which had no
basis in plain fact. And yet again the ' signs ' in this
Gospel are markedly different from the miracles in the
earlier Gospels. Compare the turning of the water
into wine with the stilling of the storm. Both are
worked upon the elements of nature. But in the
storm all is nature in the open air. The act is
marvellous yet harmonises with our Lord's person and
our growing sense of the mystery of nature. The
turning of the water into wine makes us think of the
mystery of the eucharist, the bread and wine which is or
becomes the sacred body and blood. As we read on and
ponder the discourse on the bread of life and notice how
often the two sacraments are, without direct mention, ex
plained and deepened in this Gospel, such thought seems
reasonable, though difficult to complete with precision :
and the question recurs, What in plain fact happened?
The raising of Lazarus is more perplexing still. No
doubt such a mighty work would account for the
enthusiasm of the multitude at the entry into
Jerusalem : but does that need to be so accounted for ?
It might be that fear of the Jews made the earlier
evangelists keep silence because they did not wish to get
the family of Lazarus into trouble. But is not such an
explanation rather far-fetched ? Is not their silence
really strange ? And again, compare this raising with
the simple, almost ' natural,' stories of Jairus' daughter
and the widow of Nain. What a difference, not
merely in the degree of the marvellous, but in the
whole atmosphere. At Bethany it is a 'sign.1 The
supreme significance of the narrative is in the words
' I am the resurrection and the life.' The actual calling
of the corpse from the dead is invested with a kind of
horror, as though to imply that not in such abnormal
interference, but in the divine fulfilment of the law of
universal life— the theme of the whole Johannine

A SPIRITUAL GOSPEL 177
Gospel — is the ' authority ' (cf. i. 12) of the Son of God
revealed. We may indeed reflect that while we moderns
are obsessed with the problem of miracle, S. John
would be untroubled by it ; or that to him, immersed
in consciousness of eternal life suffusing time and space,
the raising of a four-days-dead man might seem a very
little thing in comparison. We may instinctively
reject the idea of the whole story being an allegory of
the raising of the Christian out of the Jewish church :
yet still we ask ourselves, What really happened?
how far have the apostle's recollections undergone
change in lapse of years or in the telling ? And, after
all, did the writer of this Gospel mean this narrative to
be taken literally : did his immediate readers, the
people who had listened to S. John's teaching at
Ephesus, take it literally ?
The last query is of considerable importance. When
Clement of Alexandria called this a ' spiritual ' Gospel
the usage of his time would, on the whole, lead us to
understand his adjective pretty nearly in the sense of
' allegorical.' It is possible that we embarrass our
reverence with difficulties which early Ephesian reverence
did not feel, when we defend the miracles (which are
not called ' miracles ') in this gospel. On the other
hand we are not thoroughly versed in the use of
language in early Ephesus and Alexandria ; and we are
prejudiced by our advancing but still imperfect know
ledge of the relation of ' matter ' to ' spirit.1 True
reverence will be neither sceptical nor credulous in the
matter. We shall remember that ' superstition is the
substitution of human for divine means of approach
ing God,11 shall suspend judgement, be ascetic in the
exercise of intellect, and pray with much humility that
we may never spoil the Gospel according to S. John as
a means of approaching God through Jesus Christ.
So weaning the soul, we may nevertheless reflect that
the difficulty would be lessened if we postulate a disciple
of S. John for the composing of the apostle's teaching
1 Newman, Lectures on Justification, xiii.
M

178 S. JOHN
into a written Gospel. The disciple would be deeply
interested in the doctrine of the Lord Jesus which his
master repeated and interpreted. The events of the
Galilean ministry would impress him less forcibly. ' I
am the resurrection and the life' would work within
his mind and fall into place within the drama he con
structed to embody the revelation of life and light.
What actually happened at Bethany he would not
care to distinguish from the meditative dream upon
what happened, though S. John in his Ephesian sermons
would be careful to do so.
One other consideration may be offered, which strikes
different minds with unequal force. If a disciple wrote
out his master's recollections, it would be exquisitely
fit that he should describe his master in the story as
'the disciple whom Jesus loved.' Would it become
S. John so to describe himself?
It might be also urged that the Gospel owes its
philosophic colour to a writer trained in Alexandrine
schools, and that the Galilean apostle could have had
no such training. But this argument has not much
weight. The philosophy is spontaneous in the thought :
there is far less colour from the schools than in the
epistle to the Hebrews where philosophic language
abounds and where the temper is rather artistic than
philosophic. And it is a question whether Hellenism
is the main channel of the Johannine thought. Dr.
Rendel Harris has shown that every phrase of the
prologue can be found in the Wisdom books of the
Jewish Bible. The ' Word ' was indeed, in his view, a
secondary designation of the Son ; ' Wisdom 1 was the
term which S. Paul and the earliest Christians preferred,
Yet ' Word ' too was derived from the same Jewish
literature, and tbe whole developement of the doctrine
of the Trinity was shaped by the influence of Jewish,
not Hellenic, language.1 That is probably an exag
geration. If Judaism supplied the terminology, Hel-
1 The Origin of the Prologue to S. John's Gospel (Cambridge, 1917),
and The Origin of the Doctrine of the Trinity (Longmans, 1919).

HELLENIC INFLUENCE 179
lenic thought at least contributed to fill up the
meaning. The Wisdom literature itself had been
increasingly affected by Hellenic currents. It was
largely due to interpenetration of the Hellenic or
Hellenistic world that the fourth Gospel proved so fit
to carry the Galilean and Pauline faith quite across its
national boundaries and its first-century limitations.
For it did do that. Paul opened a door of entry to the
Gentiles, but this Gospel poured the Spirit of Christ
into the wandering truth of the whole world, and still
pours that Spirit abroad 'more widely than our
interpretations allow.'
This progress was partly occasioned by the assaults
of error, on the borders of the church and within it.
The beginnings had been felt as early as S. Paul's
captivity. The theology of Colossians, and therefore
of Ephesians, sprang out of S. Paul's energy in checking
a half- Jewish, half-pagan heresy of 'gnosis' in the
Asian district. In the Letters of the Apocalypse
corrupt doctrines more or less akin are rebuked. This
' gnosis ' or ' knowledge ' became the watchword of the
later Gnostics. S. John avoids the noun but adopts
the verb and the thought, turning it back to its proper
purpose. To ' know God ' is eternal life in his Gospel.
So had it been for Hosea and Jeremiah. There is
no ' intellectualism ' in the Johannine doctrine : his
'knowing' is as pure and simple as S. Paul's 'faith.'
But it is not enough to call either 'simple' and leave
it so. The simplicity is the ultimate simplicity which
issues from the clash of much thought. No intellec
tualism is here, but a great deal of intellect, and it is
in its consecration of the reason that the Johannine
Gospel has generally influenced the expanding ages
and is likely to influence the new age just now opening
upon us. We shall hardly find sufficient material to
account for this rich, this ' modern ' simplicity if we
confine the Gospel to merely Jewish antecedents. The
evangelist has drunk from new springs of life and gives
back whence he has drawn.

180 S. JOHN
All this may be more easily imagined of an Ephesian
of the rising generation than of the aged S. John.
However it could be imagined of S. John, and especially
when we observe the freedom from pedantry with which
it is achieved. Here is no book-learned man adapting
the Gospel to the thought of his day. One who has
learned from the still living Lord how the Gospel is
swelling with a wider promise than has hitherto been
conceived, searches for means to make this promise
intelligible to all sorts and conditions of men. The
air around him is permeated with certain ideas taught
in Hellenic schools and caught up in streets and
conversations. They are caught up roughly but
essentially. They give the evangelist what he needs.
In his prologue he acknowledges his debt, speaking of
the ' Word ' and ' life ' and ' light1 as men of ordinary
education speak to-day of ' evolution ' or the ' sub
liminal consciousness.' The neoplatonic terms are
prettier than ours. Love of his Bible has bred a purer
taste in language for him than is common among us.
And he is too much in earnest to dwell long among his
borrowed terms. As quickly as possible he begins the
story which, in homeliest fashion, shall express these ideas.
In the story he concentrates all the ideas in a person.
The ideas were great ones but not many, and in the
person and work of Jesus Christ they attain a unity
which more professedly philosophic authors must envy.
It is some evidence for the comparatively early date of
the Gospel ; it shews more clearly still the keen single
intention with which it is composed, that the only
heresy against which this author ever speaks definitely
is the heresy which in later days was called ' docetism,1
the falsehood which reduced the Lord's manhood to
' appearance,' and made of him a divine being walking
the earth in disguise. ' The Word was made flesh and
dwelt among us ' : ' That which we have seen and have
heard we declare to you also ' : ' Every spirit which
confesseth Jesus Christ to have come in the flesh is of
God 1 : ' As he is we also are in this world 1 : ' Behold

SACRAMENTAL HOMELINESS 181
the man 1 (John i. 14, xix. 5 ; 1 John i. 3, iv. 2, 17).
It is a very superficial reading of this Gospel which
leaves the impression that the true manhood of the
Lord is obscured therein. The out-of-doors freshness
of the early Gospels could not indeed be repeated.
To attempt a repetition would have been superfluous.
Memory and experience had made the stream of
event transparent to S. John. In the manhood he
saw the Godhead clear ; ' God only begotten revealing
God ' (i. 18). That is what he had to tell. But the
revelation was not in the restricted person of the Lord
Jesus alone. John perceived a like essential wonder in
all life around the Lord ; everywhere the divine within ;
everywhere the eternal breaking through appearance.
This he indicates in the prologue. And he perceived
how this was brought to be through the Lord's influence
on the circle of his friends. The ties which bound him
to his disciples in the synoptic Gospels are intensified
in this Gospel. An ever inward burning love, such as
men had not known before, sweeps away the dykes of
vulgar personality, and makes him one with them.
This is brought out partly by the simple homeliness of
their relations ; in the country wedding at Cana, in the
washing of the feet at the last supper ; reverence and
affection surging into flood together: partly by the
opposition of the Jews ; the bitterness (to which again
a superficial reader may give a querulous accent) shews
the mortal issue of this strife, and it also lights up the
unanimity of the Lord and his disciples. ' Let us go
and die with him. . . . My Lord and my God,' said S.
Thomas. That confession of faith follows naturally on
the earlier devotion, and both spring from that Johan
nine love which has been deepening into life and
knowledge all through the story. So too the repeated
sojourns in Jerusalem : part of their significance in the
story is felt in the contrast with Galilee, which is always
home. In the hostile city these country friends draw
closer together. Very fitly does the Gospel close with
the fishermen in Galilee again, talking naively, as it

182 S. JOHN
were, with the risen Master and rejoicing in the glad
promise of his now unconfined life.
The evangelist puts no ' as it were ' into this last
narrative : he would not spoil it by the banality. But
' they knew not that it was Jesus,' and presently ' None
dared ask him, Who art thou ? knowing it was the
Lord.' There is a reticence and mystery over the
whole scene which surely indicates how we should
contemplate it. There is no discrepancy between its
symbolic representation of the beginning of renewed
intercourse in the ' mansion ' of the Spirit and the
language of the last discourse in the supper room.
There the Lord spoke with more spiritual immediacy
than ever before. Here the evangelist recurs to the
custom of Jewish teachers who have always preferred to
throw ineffable truths into story form. Just how far
that may be practised throughout this Gospel is one of
the problems of criticism. But we shall never enjoy it
fully till we recognise that this gracious device,
Platonic and Dantesque as well as Jewish, reasonable
not fanciful, is to some extent employed. And to open
minds that seek the quiet of truth even what remains
of ambiguity presents no serious difficulty.
The Gospel opens with a prologue which sets the
key of the whole. In the divine Word, the reason and
creative expression of the unseen God, all that has
being is life. In men this life is light by which they
are capable of receiving supreme revelation. The facts
of life as it actually goes on are indeed dark, but the
light is victorious over darkness. The light never dis
appears, nor is any man without the light. This light
is the subject of the history about to be told, which
begins with the mission of John the Baptist. But he
was not himself the light. He but bore witness to
another who actually was, at the time of John's mission,
coming into the world and was — what mystery of
abstract and concrete, of personality as we now say —
that light. This light was always in the world which
he as Word had ordered, but the world knew him not.

THE PROLOGUE 183
The place and faith and nation which had been pre
pared for his manifestation knew him not when he
came in kings and prophets nor when he came at last.
Some however did receive him and to these he gave
authority by spiritual birth to become children of God.
In simplest manner, by the homely affections of common
manhood, his disciples have now known him as a person,
like themselves and yet supreme above all. The grace
and truth, the ideal of holy manhood was his, and
because he never fell short of the fulness of that ideal
they recognised in him the one complete manifestation
of the glory of God. In the sacrament of real man
hood the real Godhead has been shewn ; simply, pro
foundly, as in the relation of son to father, a relation
which all can understand. John the Baptist led the way
in this recognition. The disciples all shared it in due
time, for what they perceived in him they partook of.
For here was divine influence working in human inter
course, the kindly grace and truth of the Christ who is
man's brother Jesus, no longer the external impersonal
law of ancestral Jewish churchmanship. Under that law
it was profitable to acquiesce in what is undoubtedly
and unchangeably true, that no man has ever seen God ;
yet now that truth expands in light and life ; here in
this Master the one and only perfect friend, who ever
rests in the bosom of the divine Father, who is himself
divine, the invisible Godhead is revealed.
This prologue sets forth the idea of the history which
is to follow, the idea of the sanctity of all life summed
up in the incarnate Word from whom it proceeds, the
idea of his ever self-imparting deity, the promise that in
common scenes and ordinary events eternal grandeur
will be continually manifest; and, with all this, the
forewarning that the manifestation will be costly; in
this dark world the light survives with difficulty ;
victory will be tragic, but there shall be victory.1
1 These two paragraphs are repeated with a few alterations from
The Johannine Writings (Liverpool Diocesan Board of Divinity pub
lications, No. xix.), Longmans, 1918. The passage on pp. 157 f. from
The Church Quarterly was quoted in the preface to the same lectures.

184 S. JOHN
These opening verses are generally entitled The Pro
logue. The term is apt for the whole Gospel is in the
form of a drama. The action moves onward from the
happy opening through apparent promise of success to
the turning point in the feeding of the multitude and
the discourse on the bread of life. Then the Jews
begin to oppose, the outer circle of disciples to fall
away. Galilee is left and the issue of the struggle
takes place far from home in Jerusalem. It takes the
semblance of a sacrifice with solemn words and priestly
intercession. The priest surrenders himself as victim
to his Father. Yet as all grows dark the light begins
to shine with steadier power, and even before the tragic
close the Lord makes his domination felt ; and at last
when victory is gained in what seems defeat, this
victory is recognised as the goal to which all has been
leading. Finally an epilogue is added. The scene is
again in Galilee. The outlook is on the future, as
though after a night of storm a new day had dawned.
The progress is accentuated by the signs or symbols
in which the inner meaning of the outward course of
events is revealed. The wedding feast at Cana is an
incident in the kindly affection which binds together
the Lord and the intimate group of Galilean friends
and relations. That affection is to deepen into a love
never before equalled which will be the centre whence
the renewing of the union between the Father and all
his children shall proceed. And here at Cana its future
influence is anticipated as the gleam of the eternal
breaks through the common law of things. In the
healing of the nobleman's son, life (which the Word,
life's author, came to make abundant) is saved. So far
all is beautiful, just as it ought to be. But at the
pool of Bethesda the unnatural evil of disease is
encountered and overcome. Then the multitude is fed,
and the discourse that follows strikes a warning note.
Life, always life, is presented to our thought. Now it
is the bread of life, but it is the broken bread, and the
blood of the Saviour : there would be to a Greek ear

THE SIGNS 185
something harsh, almost fierce, in the challenge, ' Except
ye eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood.'
Then sight is given to the blind man, and discourse
again brings out the meaning. Life, it was declared
in the prologue, rises in men to be light, the reason and
the emotion which mediate knowledge of the divine,
and this light the incarnate Word restores. Love,
life, and light are gathered into one at the raising of
Lazarus. ' I am the resurrection and the life : he that
believeth on me shall live though he die.' Reason,
feeling, love, trust, transform vague hope for an external
and future act of God into an immediate and indis
soluble life in union with an adored Master. And so
we pass, through a liturgy of sacrifice (with its pre
paratory anointing, its discourse, its priestly inter
cession) to the final sign of victory through death, this
sign being rich in varied manifestation, cross, death,
tomb, appearances of the risen Lord, commission to
disciples, concentration of all the story in a creed
(xx. 28-31) and the ultimate fulfilment even of know
ledge (xvii. 3) in believing or trusting (xx. 31).
The signs, thus counted, are seven, a symbolic
number. Other numbers of this kind have been observed
in the Gospel and are quoted to corroborate its de
scription as allegorical. That kind of symbolism is
not the highest, and we may often doubt whether it is
consciously devised. The closer art approaches truth
the more it takes the proportions of natural life. These
proportions always vary a little from the symmetry of
artificial schemes, and there is generally a correspond
ing difficulty in getting number symbolism to run quite
regularly. In the Apocalypse something of such a
system is obvious.1 In the Gospel it is rather the
truth to nature of the writer's art which produces these
coincidences. 'The whole drama is indeed symbolic,
but symbolic in the higher sense. The sacramental
principle sketched in Hebrews is balanced and rounded
here. Through the whole of outward things the eternal
1 Compare p. 152 above.

186 S. JOHN
is revealed. As in looking upon water you may focus
the eye upon the surface and ignore the depth, or you
may look through the surface to the depth ; so with
the stream of life. The quality of this Gospel is that
the stream becomes continuously pellucid. There are
supreme moments when the eternal, so to say, breaks
through ; but it also is continually perceived in quiet
light. These supreme moments generally illustrate character.
A notable one is at xiii. 31 where Judas goes out into
the night for the irrevocable act of betrayal, and
' Jesus saith, Now is the Son of man glorified.' The
dramatic power of the book is discerned in this also, that
it illustrates character. The character of the Lord is
central, but he draws forth the character of those with
whom he acts and talks. He draws their real character
from beneath the surface. They say and do greater
things than they would have done by themselves.
Think of John the Baptist, Nicodemus, S. Thomas,
S. Peter. This vivid delineation of character has been
noticed as a proof that the evangelist was an eye
witness. It may or may not prove that : at least it is
a fact in the texture of this Gospel. What the
evangelist would chiefly have us notice is this : through
the revelation of his character what we compendiously
style the deity of our Lord was apprehended by the
first disciples and may still be apprehended by the
reader. S. Thomas' ' My Lord and my God ' follows
long affectionate intercourse in which the Lord's
character had gradually become clear and in which he
had realised that his own and his companions' character
had been educed accordingly. In Hebrews the sinless,
though tempted manhood of the Lord was the main
symbol in the sacrament of his person.. In this Gospel
the manhood is still the visible symbol, but it has a
larger surface and reveals a profounder depth.
Let this also be plain before we leave this part of
our subject. The Godhead revealed in the sacra
mental narrative really corresponds to the manhood.

TAKING MANHOOD INTO GOD 187
The symbol is no allegory ; it is a proper symbol and
partakes of the reality it symbolises. Therefore, as
the manhood is real manhood by virtue of its influential,
diffusive, comprehensive force of character; so is the
Godhead. No book of the New Testament insists on
this so strongly. ' The Christ ' to the Jewish Church
had always been representative and inclusive. S. Paul,
with his ' In Christ,' and his ' Christ who is all in all
being fulfilled,' had enlarged the original Jewish idea.
But S. John goes further with his promise from the
Lord, ' He that believeth on me, the works which I do
shall he do also, and greater works than these shall he
do, because I go unto the Father ' (xiv. 12), and with the
Lord's sacerdotal prayer in xvii., ' And I too, the glory
which thou hast given me I have given them, that they
may be one as we are one, I in them and thou in me,
that they may be perfected into one.' It is commonly
held that one passage in the synoptic Gospels (Matt.
xi. 25 ff., Luke x. 21 ff.) binds their doctrine with S.
John's, because our Lord therein makes as majestic
a claim to deity as he ever does in S. John's Gospel.
That is true, but it is to a unity with the Father which
men may share : so always in S. John, so also here, if
the interpretation proposed by Dr. Burkitt be allowed.1
The disciples have returned from their mission. There
had been disappointment in the Lord's ministry ; now
there comes a success. Each and all turns of fortune,
says the Lord, are delivered to me from my Father
and I the Son accept his will with gladness. So is it
always in true fathership and sonship. So is it now
and always not only for me but for all who through
me learn to know the Father of all. The Greek verb
which represents ' are delivered ' (cf. Matt, xxviii. 18,
though the forms are not quite the same) is not perhaps
what might have been expected if this be the
sense of the whole. But our Lord spoke Aramaic ;
the Greek is but translation ; and the interpretation
is not only harmonious with the rest of the Galilean
1 Journal of Theological Studies, January 191 1.

188 ' S. JOHN
Gospel, but is especially harmonious with the Johannine.
The Johannine Gospel is conspicuous for the august
claim to unity in the Godhead made therein by our
Lord ; no less remarkable is the inclusive character of
that claim. From this Gospel rather than from any
of the others S. Athanasius and the Greek fathers might
justify their bold assertion that the Word became flesh
that men might become divine.
When once this truth has been observed in a few
striking passages the whole Gospel according to S.
John is perceived by the reader to be instinct with it.
And the older criticism of the Gospel is therefore
liable to modification. It was these claims of deity
that seemed to the earlier critics out of consonance
with our Lord's own preaching and with the mind
of the first-century church. Therefore prejudice was
engendered for a second -century date and a frank con
fession of its unhistorical character. But the claim, as
we may now understand it, is highly primitive in tone
whether we compare it with the Galilean preaching or
with the apostolic theology. In a second-century
Gospel it must have almost certainly lost its breadth
and depth. For indeed the true Johannine claim is
larger, more full of divine promise than any more
precise form that human reverence has imposed upon
it since.
These remarks on the narrative and plan of the
Gospel may be summed up in the following sketch :
I. Prolog0e : the drama opens (i. — ii. 11).
The Word made flesh ; the herald : the Lamb of
God : the true Messiah : the Lord of love among
his friends (Cana in Galilee, first sign).
II. The morning of life (ii. 12 — iv.).
Galilee and Jerusalem : first passover : true baptism
and spiritual regeneration (Nicodemus) : the wan
ing of the Baptist : the water of life (Samaria) :
the saving of life (nobleman's son, second sign).

PLAN OF THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO S. JOHN 189
III. Clouds at noon (v. — vi.).
Disease and healing (pool at Bethesda, third sign):
the true eucharist and the broken bread of life
(the five thousand, fourth sign) : turning point ;
the hard way chosen : Jews begin to oppose,
disciples to fall away ; the Twelve are drawn
closer. Farewell to Galilee : second passover.
IV. Gathering storm (vii. — xii.).
Two feasts in Jerusalem : discussions and increas
ing opposition : the Light of the world (sight to
the blind, fifth sign) : the Good Shepherd : the
Resurrection and the Life (Lazarus, sixth sign).
Preparation for liturgy of sacrifice (Mary ; the
multitude; the Greeks).
V. Darkness and light (xiii. — xx.).
Love perfected in humility : the discourse which
interprets the prologue : the true ascension, advent,
and communion of saints : the Comforter who is
the Spirit of truth : knowing and believing.
The priestly intercession : the response of the
cruel world : the completed sacrifice.
The seventh sign in varied manifestations of vic
torious life : apostolate and creed (as the Father
hath sent me. . . . My Lord and my God) : trust
perfected in love.
VI. Epilogue : the new day (xxi.).
Galilee again : again the Lord of love among his
friends.
A few paragraphs must now be given to the view
presented in this Gospel of the advent hope.1 Not
1 Dr. A. E. Brooke has written upon this in his commentary on The
Epistles of St. John in the International Critical Commentaries (T. & T.
Clark, 1912) : see especially pp. xxi, 51, 82 f. Other commentaries

190 S. JOHN
very much need be added to what has already been
said on p. 165. The stripping away of traditional
apocalyptic scenery, already carried far by S. Paul, is
quietly completed by S. John. True, there are places
in the Gospel where the old language seems recrud-
escent. But most, if not all of these may be relieved of
inconsistency if studied with attention, and with that
docility which the work of a profound thinker always
demands : for with a profound thinker we must expect
more than we can fathom at a first attempt; and
we should be slow to credit him with carelessness or
inconsistency ; slow too to explain super£'*?/;a,l dis
crepancies by postulating composite workmanship or
editorial redactions.1 A typical instance may be
seen in v. 24-29. ' Verily, verily,' the Lord begins, as
often when the peculiar doctrine of this Gospel is to
be declared. That doctrine immediately follows : ' He
that heareth my word and believeth him that sent me
hath eternal life, and cometh not into j udgement, but
hath passed out of death into life.' But the ' Verily,
on the Epistles are Westcott's (Macmillan, 1883) with a valuable
essay on ' The Church and the World ' as well as other essays ; and
F. D. Maurice's, who has also left an expository commentary on the
Gospel, both published by Macmillan. Maurice in his generation led
the way to a better understanding of S. John, dissolving mists of
convention. He did this so well that much of what he wrote seems
almost a commonplace to us now, and his thoughts come to us more
freshly in the letters and conversations which his son has preserved
in The Life of Frederick Denison Maurice (Macmillan, 1884), which
should be read by every student of the New Testament. But this
qualification need hardly be made for his notes on the first epistle in
which he found inspiration for so much of his social teaching. The
heart of Maurice's teaching from Holy Scripture may be found in a
book of selections made by Mr. Llewelyn Davies and called Lessons of
Hope (Macmillan, 1889) : a good interpretation of his teaching in terms
of to-day was made by Archdeacon Cunningham, just before he died,
in a small book called The Secret of Progress (Cambridge University
Press, 1919).
1 Compare Coleridge, Biographia Literaria xii. , ' In the perusal
of philosophical works I have been greatly benefited by a resolve ;
which in the antithetical form and with the allowed quaintness of an
adage or maxim, I have been accustomed to word thus : until you
understand a writer's ignorance presume yourself ignorant of his under
standing. '

THE ADVENT HOPE IN S. JOHN 191
verily1 is then repeated, introducing the doctrine in
somewhat modified terms : ' The hour cometh and now
is when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of
God and they that hear shall live. For as the Father
hath life in himself, so also to the Son he gave to have
life in himself. And he gave him authority to do
judgement, because he is the Son of man.' This gets
full significance from the former sentence, but by itself
is but a variant of the synoptic proclamation, ' The
time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God is at hand :
repent and believe the good news,1 together with the
synoptic confession of S. Peter that the Lord Jesus is
the Christ of the kingdom. Hence it easily leads into
the concession to those who cling to the old picture
language, ' Marvel not at this, for the hour doth come
' in which all who are in the tombs shall hear his voice
and shall come forth, those who have done good to
resurrection of life, those who have done evil to resur
rection of judgement.' Here, as in the synoptic
Gospels, our Lord will not force the new wine into the
old bottles, and recognises that those who in sincerity
find 'the old is better' may thus receive the same
truth as the Greeks and moderns : only, there must be
sincerity alike in old and new seekers, and alike they
must be ready to ' hate their life in this world ' and so
to ' keep it unto life eternal ' ; compare xii. 20-26, and
consider how the likeness, with difference, of each
passage to the synoptic sayings illustrates the real
-derivation of the Johannine doctrine from the Galilean,
together with the freedom in expression which the later
evangelist allows himself.
' Life eternal,' not ' everlasting life ' : that accuracy
in translation is necessary. As far as may be, in S.
John as in the ancient liturgies,1 these great truths are
1 See Hammond, Liturgies Eastern and Western, Introd., p. xxxvii
(Oxford University Press, 1878), and compare Plato, Timaeus 37 D, E ;
Time with its parts is an eternal image of the eternity which has no
parts or tenses. So also Philo, quis rerum div. p. 496, de mut. nom.
p. 619.

192 S. JOHN
presented ' timelessly.' All is an ' eternal now.' But
great truths are for practice not for dreaming, and the
Lord's Platonism in this Gospel — as in Socrates' own
Platonism, which was the type of our Lord's fulfilment
— is a ground for action in time, in the succession of
duties in common life. There is a parallel in S. Paul's
doctrine of justification. God accounts the sinner
righteous, and then gives him grace to work out right
eousness : God has given all freely, therefore 'Brethren,
we are debtors.' In John v. 24 a phrase reminds us
of the epistle (1 John iii. 14) : ' We know that we have
passed out of death into life, because we love the
brethren.' The epistle (whether written before or after
the Gospel) is the application of the Gospel doctrine
to the practice of churchmanship. The timeless pass
ing out of death into life is the source of charitable
effort1 (which in the Ephesian church might involve
martyrdom, 1 John iii. 16) : in wise and fearless exercise
of charity the eternal source of active life is proved
by drawing from it.
So too in S. John's conception of the advent. He
no longer looks for a ' coming ' of ' the Christ ' as in a
future day, as from another world. 'The Christ' is
not the title that adequately expresses his enlarging
faith and love : he tries to express more, and more
exactly, by ' Son of God ' and ' Son of man,' or by ' The
Word.' It is to him a little matter if S. Peter's con
fession were anticipated by Nathanael or by the woman
of Samaria : not the occasion of such confession but
the fuller meaning of it is what he cares about. That
need shewn, and as far as may be satisfied, he resumes
the venerable title (xx. 31) : no more than his Master
does he desire to abolish the old wine which still is
good and some say better.
And instead of a ' coming ' he thinks of a ' manifes
tation ' of one who is always ' here ' : but it is a space
less ' here ' as it is a timeless ' now,' we are with him
1 Compare I John iv. 19, 'We love, because he first loved us,' where
the late text ' We love him ' spoils the sense.

DISCOURSE OF THE LAST SUPPER 193
in the spiritually measured 'Father's house.' Dr.
Brooke thinks the epistle shows that at the last S.
John returned to a simpler expectation of the advent.
Is it not more true to think that he found he could
contain all his deep idea in words so simple that the
old-fashioned Christians and the new might both accept
them ? At least in 1 John iii. 1-8 his utmost range
seems reached ; we shall see the Lord, he writes, ' as he
is.' And again in this passage the proving of the
philosophic conception in the practical relationship of
actual ' here ' and ' now ' is inculcated : ' Beloved, now
are we children of God, and it has not yet been mani
fested what we shall be. We know that if he shall be
manifested we shall be like him, for we shall see him
as he is. And every one that hath this hope set on
him purifieth himself even as he is pure.' Again and
again S. John endorses the saying of Tolstoy, that the
life of Jesus is the metaphysic of the Christ.
And we need to remind ourselves continually that
S. John, or his evangelist, or both, mean us to refer
this doctrine, this philosophy, to the Lord Jesus as its
ultimate source. It is most fully and essentially set
forth in the discourse of the last supper with the high-
priestly prayer which completes the discourse (John
xiii.-xvii.). The critical theory we have adopted of the
composition of the Gospel and many observations of
detail which we have made by the way encourage us to
give historical value of a somewhat different kind to
the doctrine than we can give to the events. Both
have probably been shaped with some freedom by the
evangelist. But freedom in recounting events must
impair tradition : doctrine may be blended with inter
pretation without violation of the original.
Let us now look at the discourse. It is the evening
before the passover evening. The Lord has with his
disciples partaken of a solemn meal which is to be
instead of the passover (Luke xxii. 15). Their minds
are heavy with foreboding: the Lord will calm and
comfort them. He makes them feel more than ever

194 S. JOHN
the love which has always united them and him (xiii.
1). He consecrates it by washing their feet, and bids
them ever live in love as his disciples. Troubled in
spirit, he makes three attempts to save Judas; first
throwing the accusation into the midst of all, then
dipping with Judas in the dish, the act of special inti
macy, then bidding him ' What thou doest, do quickly.'
But Judas, confessing not, repenting not, goes out into
the night (xiii. 30).
From this point all is on a more inward stage;
' Now is the Son of man glorified and God is glorified
in him.' The Lord says plainly that he is going. But
he calls the disciples his little children as he says it
and again appeals to their love.1 Peter, ready to
devote his life, is warned of the denial which will delay
his following ; yet he shall follow later.
Then begins (xiv.) the sublime theology of consola
tion. It is to the Father that the Lord goes. The
whole movement is still within the Father's house of
universal life.2 In that house are many mansions or
abiding places — 'spheres 'as we sometimes say in our
more vulgar style. The disciples have been with their
Lord in the mansion of Galilee and Jerusalem : now
they will be with him still in another mansion which
will presently be explained (see verse 15 ff.); it will be
the mansion of the Spirit. Hitherto they have been
together in the mansion of the senses. The disciples
1 Would it not make better sense and be more consonant with all
that follows, if the full stop usually placed at the end of verse 33 were
taken away? — ' Ye shall seek me, and as I said to the Jews, Where I
go ye cannot come ; so to you do I say now, A new commandment I
give to you that ye love one another . . .'? That commandment
kept the disciples can come where the Lord goes.
'* Dr. J. O. F. Murray has pointed out a possible comparison with Luke
ii. 49, where iv tois rod irarpSs pov might be translated ' in my Father's
house,' and the point w^uld be that wherever the child was he was
still at home with the Father. If so, was it not an appeal to his
mother's teaching, and a far-reaching link between the Galilean
Gospel at its very source and the Johannine ? Of course the link
might be meditative rather than historical ; but compare also the
apocalyptic anticipation in. the Magnificat, p. 38.

THE MANSION OF THE SPIRIT 196
have heard the Master's voice, seen his face, touched
him, and followed his footsteps : compare the word of
the risen Lord to Mary Magdalene (xx. 17), ' Touch
me not for I am not yet ascended to the Father.1 That
is finished now. No fancied renewal of such nearness,
for those disciples or for us, may alleviate the parting
of death : as far as the senses go it is a real parting.
But in the mansion of the Spirit the Lord will bring
his disciples into closer communion than the senses
can afford, ' that where I am ye may be also.1
And he adds, ' where I go ye know the way.1 That
evokes S. Thomas1 question which is answered, ' I am
the way, the truth, and the life.1 Since Dr. Hort's
Hulsean Lectures 1 we can never again weaken this into
' I lead the way, show the truth, create the life.'
Wherever in the maze of public history or of the
careers of men severally the ' way ' is discerned through
which events have moved or men have been called to
advance; wherever truth appears in old religions or
new science ; wherever life puts forth its energy in
nature mind affection enterprise; he whom we adore
as Lord is that way truth life. In all history know
ledge energy there are innumerable evolutions and
conversions to the Father, and all are he : ' No one
cometh to the Father but by me.1 This is like what
the Lord had said to Martha at Bethany : ' I am the
resurrection and the life : he that believeth on me
though he die shall live, and every one that liveth and
believeth on me shall, for eternity, not die 5 (xi. 25 f.).
And taken together with this fourteenth chapter, that
teaches us to believe that what the Lord promised to
his first disciples avails for all disciples; that still
death is a step in the movement from the mansion of
the senses to the mansion of the Spirit ; that here and
now we may live with the Lord in that life which is
life indeed ; and if with him, then with all who are
where he is. It creates faith not merely in the resur
rection of the dead — the mystery of that distant
1 See above, p. 167.

196 S. JOHN
morrow is not yet unveiled ; but in the communion of
saints — that is experience which may be enjoyed
without symbol and without delay.
No doubt the experience ebbs and flows. It ebbs
when we fall back upon the senses and regret the
vanished face or insist upon a fancied presence on this
side or on that, instead of desiring ' that he may dwell
in us and we in him.1 It ebbs when we live (in S. Paul's
phrase) after the flesh and fall beneath the Christian
standard. It flows when we rise so high in act or
thought or worship as to forget self and live non sibi
sed toti, not for self but for the whole. And doubtless
the complete achievement of such selflessness is im
possible without him who is the way : ' No one cometh
unto the Father but by me.1 And at this last supper
the Lord set an example which awes us as we let its
full meaning sink into our hearts. In the prologue the
evangelist begins with The Word who is with God, is
God, in whom is life, who is the light which life rises to
become. Gradually the attributes of what we under
stand by a ' person ' gather round this deity and mould
a man among men, an actor in the course of history.
Now saying farewell, ' going ' that he may ' come,1 this
person strips himself of the distinctions and separate-
ness which mortals cling to, and for this transfiguration
S. John can find no words except such abstractions as he
has used in the prologue : ' I am the way, the truth,
the life ; I am the resurrection and the life.1 This is
indeed losing psyche, soul or self, to find it.
And yet again, notice the homeliness (to repeat a
word without which it is impossible to talk long about
this Gospel) ; notice the homeliness of the terms now
used, 'way truth life.1 Presently (xiv. 16) the Spirit
will be introduced into the discourse, which will (as
we have here anticipated) help to explain the first part
of the consolation. The Spirit is called 'another
Paraclete.1 The term recurs in the epistle (1 John ii.
1). There it seems to mean an ' advocate,' one who
stands up for an accused person. But the legal meta-

THE COMFORTER 197
phor hardly bears pressing. A helpful friend, a friend
in need,1 is the main idea, and it is a homely affec
tionate idea. Our familiar translation 'Comforter1 is
very good. And so the discourse continues, very
simply, very rich in our common humanity. The
sacramental principle ousts philosophy again. The last
words in the chamber are words of Galilean love. For
all the effulgence of the eternal Word it is still through
Jesus — Ecce homo — that the Word is revealed.
So is it when they are out of doors conversing by the
way. Only now the simplest words about friendship,
persecution and support, the guidance of the Comforter,
the ' little while and ye shall not see me,' which is the
same little while and they shall see him ; all have
a more intelligible as they have a grander meaning.
The disciples indeed are lulled by the easiness of the
talk and it all but ends with pathetic warning: all
but, for the very end is ' These things have I spoken
unto you that in me ye may have peace : in the world
ye shall have tribulation, but be of good cheer, I have
overcome the world.'
Then the conversation ceased. The Saviour turned
to his Father, free for his own language of prayer. He
intercedes, always drawing his disciples by that means
into the mansion of the Spirit. He asks for conse
cration, divine union life eternal. ' And this,' he says,
' is life eternal that they should know thee the only
true God and him whom thou didst send Jesus Christ '
(xvii. 3). There would be little profit in amplifying
what has been said above (pp. 165 f.) about this 'know
ing God 1 of the Johannine Gospel. Thomas Erskine
of Linlathen once met a shepherd in the Highlands to
whom he put the unlooked-for question, Do you know
the Father?2 Compare that question with Are you
1 Compare Dr. Johnson in Boswell's Life (April 24, 1776), 'What
is a friend ? One who supports you and comforts you, while others
do not.'
2 See Erskine of Linlathen, selections and biography, by Henry F.
Henderson, p. 122 (Oliphant, Anderson & Ferrier, 1899).

198 S. JOHN
saved ? and you feel S. John. But it is worth remark
that the Greek verb in the verse just quoted does not
mean ' know immediately by intuition ' but ' come to
know,' ' know by learning.' Quite in accord with this is
the conclusion of the anecdote about Erskine. ' The
shepherd, taken aback, said nothing; but meeting Mr.
Erskine many years afterwards and recognising him, he
said, "I know the Father now." ' This knowledge is true
mysticism which strives to inward clearness, and is ill
content with mistiness.1 Insistence upon the niceties
of tense and choice of synonyms in New Testament
Greek is indeed regarded with suspicion by many
scholars now, but this nicety may be excused here
for it fits in with the Johannine rule of working out
philosophy in practice. It is also comfortable to plain
men who are conscious of no mystical illumination and
yet are sure that they are strengthened by S. John's
Gospel. A few pages back we spoke of worship and alluded
to phrases in the eucharistic service.2 We might have
completed the allusion by quoting the liturgic preface :
' Therefore with angels and archangels and all the com
pany of heaven . . .' The evangelist would not have
quoted, but so ancient is the hymn we may fancy him
recognising it. Behind his Gospel lies a settled church
life in which the sacraments of baptism and holy
eucharist are an all-important part. He does not
speak of the institution of these sacraments : that had
already been recorded. But he gives two discourses of
the Lord which declare their meaning ; for baptism the
conversation with Nicodemus (iii.), for the eucharist
the sermon on the bread of life ( vi.). When the Gospel
is read through with this sacramental background in
mind the frequency of allusion will be felt, and once
felt it will leave no room for doubt that the two
1 Compare Burnet, Greek Philosophy from Thales to Plato (Mac
millan, 1914), pp. 167 f . ; ' . . . I suspect that all true mysticism is of
this nature, and that to set feeling above reason as a means of knowing
is only a perversion of it. ' Cf . Tennyson, In Memoriam, cxxiii.
1 See p. 153.

BAPTISM AND EUCHARIST 199
passages in iii. and vi. really do treat of these two
sacraments. This has been disputed because the treat
ment so far departs from the somewhat narrow
forms in which we conventionally teach. We may sus
pect that S. John departed in his Ephesian teaching
from the convention of his day. Impressions may
deceive, but the impression is left upon the reader that
this Gospel corrects a reverence for sacraments which
was becoming too materialised. In Acts and S. Paul
the holy eucharist appears as a bond of communion
among the faithful and a shewing forth of the Lord's
death until he should come (Acts ii. 42, 46 ; 1 Cor. x.
16 f., xi. 23 ff.). These two aspects had been stressed by
the Lord at the institution, but he had also said, ' This
is my body, my blood,1 and S. Paul had written of the
awful sacredness of this divine food. In the second
century the sacrament was mainly regarded as the food
of immortality, and the Lord^ presence therein filled
the heart of the worshippers rather than his advent.1
1 See Lake, The Earlier Epistles of S. Paul, pp. 45, 201 ff., 433 ff.
Perhaps Professor Lake separates too sharply. The early act of wor
ship was one whole : theories about it were differentiated afterwards.
There was also from the first an act of offering, hardly a theory about
what was offered. Dr. Anderson Scott writes : ' The Church itself
was the subject of a sacrificial offering to God. It is the proud con
sciousness of being the agent in such an offering, and in that sense a
"sacrificing priest," which rings through Paul's words in Romans xv.
16. He acts as a priest for the Gentiles when he leads them in the
act of worship which consists in the offering up of themselves, of the
sacred Body of Christ, which has been "consecrated by the Holy
Spirit." It is to this conception that we are to trace all the allusions
to " sacrifice" in connexion with the Eucharist down to the end of the
second century ' ( What happened at Pentecost, in a collection of essays
entitled The Spirit, and edited by B. H. Streeter; Macmillan, 1919).
I doubt whether S. Paul means to allude to the eucharist in Rom.
xv. 16, nor do I feel sure that the early eucharistic allusions to sacrifice
are all due to one conception of the offering : some may depend rather
upon the idea which distinguishes Hebrews. That the faithful are
themselves the body of Christ in the eucharist was certainly part of
the ancient faith. See S. Augustine, Tract, in Ev.Joh. xxvi., and com
pare Mason, The faith of the Gospel (Rivingtons, 1889), pp. 318 f. :
' However little this thought is insisted upon at the present day, it is
enshrined in S. Paul's words to the Corinthians, and forms a large
element in the teaching of the Fathers.'

200 S. JOHN
If this twofold shifting of emphasis had begun in S.
John's time it would throw light on much in the
Gospel. Food indeed but spiritual food ; and therefore,
and only so, true nourishment, is the theme of chapter
vi. Present with us now, not merely expected in a
distant advent is one of the themes in the discourse of
the last supper. So too with the life-giving water and
the new birth in baptism. These, the Lord teaches in
S. John, are most real ; only they cease to be real when
materially conceived. The new birth is the same as
entrance into the kingdom : there is a false antithesis
if we separate it from repentance or conversion. And
the water is indeed of life, but it springs and wells up
within ; it acts not from without upon a man (iv. 14).
Most of this teaching in the Gospel is from the
Lord's own lips. The turn it takes may help us to
understand at least part of the principle governing the
modification of the Lord's actual words in this Gospel.
The Lord's words were the text of S. John's sermons
in the Ephesian church. The form given to his words
follows the intention of the sermon. S. Mark had
composed S. Peter's ' catechisings' (cf. Luke i. 4, original
Greek) into his Gospel. The Ephesian pupil made his
Gospel from the more doctrinal sermons of the disciple
whom Jesus loved.
Organised church life lies behind the three epistles
also of S. John. ' Settled ' was perhaps an ambiguous
adjective to use above : when has vigorous church life
ever been settled ? The second and still more the third
epistle indicate some disturbances. In the second ' the
elect lady ' addressed with so much affection is warned
against those who are ' advanced ' in theology (9) and
do not ' abide ' in that true tradition which the forward
guiding Spirit (John xvi. 13) will never supersede
(John xiv. 26). In the third the disagreeable ambition
of one Diotrephes is sharply threatened. These two
epistles seem to be pastorals sent to leading members
of outlying congregations in S. John's diocese, or (as
he preferred to call it) presbyterate.

THE EPISTLES OF S. JOHN 201
It seems that the second and third epistles were not
read as canonical in all the congregations of the early
church.1 Their brevity and the limited scope of their
subject may account for that. No doubt was felt
about the first epistle, and we who are not here engaged
upon minute criticism may be content to accept all
three as S. John's. The—close agreement in Greek
style with the Gospel obliges us to suppose (what is in
itself so likely) that the same pupil who composed the
Gospel was the secretary who wrote the letters — the
thoughts S. John's, the words the younger man's.
The agreement is not quite absolute, but that should
not be expected between a Gospel and a letter. If
that explanation suffices not, we may imagine an
Ephesian style which, like a handwriting, was learned
by many school companions without destroying personal
character. The first epistle applies the Gospel to daily life. It
may be that the Gospel was written after the death of
S. John. Then the Gospel preaching, not the Gospel
book provides the application. On the whole that
seems to fit best with what we observe. The opening
verses of the epistle are more like a first sketch than a
later summary of the Gospel prologue. These verses
are closer to the Galilean memory of the beloved
disciple. His heart rejoiced in the Lord Jesus whom
he knew as the incarnate Word : and so, in this epistle,
he insists directly on that very manhood of the Saviour,
which in the Gospel he illustrates by the progress of
narrative. From the incarnation he passes to the Christian
fellowship which is the extending of the incarnation.
He will not use the word 'churchy As with the
sacrament in the Gospel, so here he would purify con
vention. ' The church ' was the cry of the day : he
will pour the Spirit into what tends to lose vitality in
organisation. First, the faithful must not sin. He starts on this
1 Eusebius, Hist. Eccl. iii. 25.

202 S. JOHN
theme in the first chapter and returns to it in the last.
They have received authority to become children of
God and ' whosoever is begotten of God sinneth not ' ;
the Lord Jesus 'who was begotten of God keepeth
him, and the evil one toucheth him not1 (v. 18 ; cf. iii.
9). We ' know ' this, he says. It is part of the
primitive tradition. In a later age Tertullian and
others hardened this into a dogma, No second repent
ance after baptism.1 There is nothing like that in the
New Testament, but it is evident that the discrepancy
between principle and practice was causing difficulty
at the close of the first century. This was natural.
When our Lord proclaimed the kingdom those who
would enter entered by repentance, by conversion.
The kingdom was at hand : there was, it might seem,
no time for backsliding. When S. Paul preached to
the Gentiles, he preached out of the experience of his
own conversion, and the ' little flocks ' he gathered in
city after city lived with the enthusiasm of converted
men among an antagonistic populace. There were
backslidings in Paul's churches. He dealt with the
several cases without laying out a penitential system.
He still addressed the congregations as 'saints,' and
still upheld the ideal of holiness. In Hebrews the
sinless Lord stands out above all other men- in their
temptations, but the tone of the whole epistle forbids
our supposing that the author would acquiesce in our
modern contentment with a lower standard than the
standard of our Lord. But in S. John's days that
lower standard was gaining acceptance. Some said
they had no sin (i. 8), anticipating the later distinction
between venial and mortal sins. Some said it was
1 Dr. Windisch argues that the original doctrine of the New Testa
ment was as rigorous, and that it was taken over from Ezekiel and the
Old Testament. In S. Paul it is still the rule : 2 Cor. vii. io is rather
strangely quoted in support. So too in Hebrews (vi. 4 ff.). In S.
John's epistle the primitive rule is relaxed : Der Hebraerbrief, pp. 50 ff.
The excursus is learned and careful. It provides the reader with
material to form his own judgement, but a broad view of the material
will hardly make for agreement with Dr. Windisch.

CLEANSING FROM ALL SIN 203
impossible not to sin (v. 18). The fires of conversion
had died down. There were already some hereditary
Christians. The church was established and this
dulness in the pursuit of innocence was involved in the
developement. S. John upholds the ideal yet allows no extenuation
of the sins which do go on. When any of the faithful
sin they thereby fall out of the fellowship of the family
of God. But they must not remain in that separated
state. They must acknowledge their sins and God
will restore them. Whatever they do he remains
faithful to his fatherhood : it is they who separate
themselves not he who casts them off (i. 8 ft'.). And sin
need not be repeated. Means are appointed for com
plete if gradual cleansing from all sin : ' If we walk in
the light as he is in the light, we have fellowship with
one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanseth
us continuously from all sin1 (i. 7). Notice the generic
singular ' all sin ' (as in John i. 29, altered to plural in
Gloria in excelsis); notice also the tense of the verb
'cleanseth1 in which Westcott justly recognises the
force of gradual completion. Notice also the connexion
of Christian fellowship with forgiveness. The faith
and ideal of all avails all mutually. It may be that
the word ' confess 1 or ' acknowledge ' in verse 9 includes
confession to one another. Comparing James v. 16 f.,
we may be sure it does, that is if we include but do not
restrict : no disciplinary system is dominant as yet.
So again ' the blood of Jesus ' may include a reference
to the eucharist, but cannot be restricted thereto.
A like breadth must be allowed in the interpretation
of v. 16 f. There is a sin — or better without the
article, sin — unto death. Concerning that S. John
will not command . his brethren to pray. He does not
say he will ever refrain himself from praying for every
brother who sins at all. We think of our Lord's
words in Mark iii. 28 ff., already hardened from his
large meaning in Luke and Matthew.1 We think of
1 Cf. pp. is f.

204 S. JOHN
Heb. vi. 4 ff., and of the Corinthian whom S. Paul
determined to deliver to Satan for the destruction of
the flesh, in order that the spirit might be saved in
the day of the Lord (1 Cor. v. 5). In venturing to
explain S. John it may be well to go no farther than
this : he would have his brothers intercede with
sincerity. There may be cases in which a heart is so
evidently estranged that some at any rate could no
longer pray without insincerity for a miracle of renewal.
That S. John believed there was a particular form of
sin which could never be forgiven is not to be thought
possible. Read in its obvious sense iii. 19 ff., the
tenderest yet firmest counsel ever offered to a troubled
conscience : ' In this shall we know that we are of the
truth and shall persuade our heart before him that if
our heart condemn us, still God is greater than our
heart, and knoweth all things.'
' In this ' : in what ? The two preceding verses
explain. ' Herein we know love, in that he laid down
his life for us : and we owe now the debt to lay down
lives for the brothers. Whosoever hath the livelihood
of the world and looks upon his brother when he is in
need, and shuts up his compassions from him, how doth
the love of God abide in him ? Little children, let us
not love in word nor yet in tongue but in deed and
truth.' Forgiveness, renewal, a good conscience, all
are bound up with active love of the brethren. The
ideal of Christian holiness is not scrupulous abstinence
from doing wrong things : it is an energy in creating
good. The truly theological question is not academic,
Can a man avoid committance of any sin, small or
great? but practical, Will a man aim at absolute
goodness which is divine love ? For ' God is love '
(iv. 16) not negatively innocence.
Accordingly the greater part of this epistle is taken
up with an exposition of love as the true churchman-
ship. This love springs from its source in Godhead :
' We love because he first loved us' (iv. 19); in calling
us his children the Father gave us the gift of loving

THEOLOGY OF CHARITY 205
(iii. 1). By the incarnation of the Word this love was
implanted in a fellowship of men where it can fructify
(i. 3). The test of orthodoxy and the assurance of
conscience is in love of the brethren (ii. 9 f., iii. 14 ff.).
It unveils the mystery of the advent and the consum
mation of the divine will (iii. 1 ff, iv. 17 f.). It is no
dream but a very plain and practical ordering of life
(iii. 17 f.). Yet commonplace as its exercise may
seem there is no limit to its heroism, for the example
of the Christian lover is the Son of God who died for
him, and who gives him sufficiency for every trial of
love by making his heart pure (iii. 16, iv. 9 ff.).
Here too we may conjecture circumstances which
rendered this counsel opportune. It is when the
church becomes established that it needs direction
about its charities. In the early days of conversion
the church is a little band of saints gathering close
together against the unkind world. All are known to
one another. They are united in a common cause.
They are really and truly brothers. The sick, the
poor cannot be overlooked : their relief is a sweet
relaxation in the strain of peril, a natural fruit of ' the
first love ' (Apoc. ii. 4 ; and compare Acts ii. 44 ff.,
iv. 82 ff.). But this first love wears off as numbers
increase and group themselves in classes and brothers
no longer know each other intimately ; they become
' the brethren ' instead of being each to'each a brother ;
churchmanship is tested by creed and not by love.
Thus some, remembering the poverty of Christ and the
unworldliness of his precepts, desert the fellowship of
creed and sacrament. Others give alms or subscribe to
charities, not of pure love but to gain merit, or at best
to perform duty. And some — so at least the epistle
seems to indicate — talk of love but let the poor suffer.
For remedy of such a state of things this theology of
charity, this treatise on Christian socialism, was
composed. And S. John might well pitch the note deep. For
if the risk is great in an established church grown

206 S. JOHN
lukewarm, its opportunity may be still more greatly
used. The early church of conversion, the apocalyptic
gospel of Galilee, does indeed unite its members in
bonds of love. But it also tends to set hope in another
world, to leave the general evil of this world alone,
even to be satisfied with the peace that passeth under
standing for the elect while the mass of the unpredes-
tinated perish. But as the heat and zeal die down a
steadier love that reaches even beyond the brethren
may grow up instead. And this is tended and directed
by S. John. The two strains, the salvation of the
elect and the taking away of the sin of the world, are
never separated in the New Testament. But they do
vary their intensity in the different writers. It might
cautiously be said that there is more of the first in
S. Paul : certainly the second is to be felt in a new and
special manner in S. John. On a first reading his
epistle seems to close with terrible sternness, as on a
hasty reading our Lord seems in the Gospel to argue
harshly with the Jews ; ' We know that we are of God,
and the whole world lieth in the evil one.1 But read
the book through, if possible read it through aloud,
and let the whole have its effect. Thus it will be clear
that here too the theme of love is kept, is indeed
brought to its height and breadth. For all that S. John
saw his church established he had seen persecution
too, and more persecution was to follow. And still
the most part of Ephesus was heathen, and ' the whole
world lieth in the evil one ^ was a statement of fact :
'we know that we are of God1 was the appeal to
Christian love. By that love, organised in a fellowship
of children of God, the world must be rescued from the
evil one. S. John says what no earlier evangelist had
said explicitly, that Jesus Christ is a propitiation for
the whole world (ii. 2).

CONCLUSION AND RETROSPECT : RENASCENCE
OF SPIRIT THROUGH LETTER
Three books have still to be looked at, the epistles of
S. James and S. Jude and the second epistle of S. Peter.
The epistle of S. James opens thus :
' James, servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ,
to the twelve tribes which are in dispersion, greeting.1
The writer then exhorts to gladness in trials or
temptations which are a proving of faith, yet come not
from God but from the enticing desires of men.
Wisdom is the antidote, and it is to be asked from
God sincerely ; wisdom which is Word or reason im
planted in man, and is a practical influence working
after the perfect law of freedom. He ends this first
division of the epistle with the beautiful definition of
' true religion.1
The second division begins with chapter ii. and con
tinues to iv. 12. The Christian discipline is here de
scribed. It follows the royal law of courtesy which is
love, and which being broken, the whole law is broken.
Nor can faith be faith without such loving works.
Words too matter as much as deeds. The tongue
can work more bitterly than aught else ; clean con
trary to Wisdom.
Bitterness, strife indeed ; greed and contradiction :
who are we that we should judge our neighbour? A
short section (iv. 18-v. 6) echoes this : Who are we
207

208 RENASCENCE OF SPIRIT THROUGH LETTER
with our brief life ? Ah ! the short-sighted tyranny of
mortals. This leads to
The conclusion (v. 7-20). The day of the Lord
comes surely. Wait for it as becomes the people of
the Lord to wait. Restrain speech and swear not at
all. Nor repine; but help one another by mutual
prayer and faith, recovering any brother who falls from
truth or righteousness.
It is commonly supposed that the James who writes
this is James the brother of the Lord and ruler of the
church in Jerusalem. And the predominance of moral
precept over doctrine is thought to indicate a very
early date. It may be so. Yet there is no clear mark
of date in the epistle nor any claim of official distinction
for the writer : he might be any one named James who
was a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ.
The twelve tribes of the dispersion are doubtless, as in
1 Peter, the Christian heirs of the Jewish church.
' Synagogue 1 in ii. 2 may be a general word for assembly
(as it is rendered in A.V.). And if high doctrine is
not to be expected in an early writing, more memory
and mention of the Lord Jesus might be expected than
appears here, whether of the ministry in Galilee, or of
the cross and resurrection, or of the advent.
Perhaps the infrequent repetition of the Lord's
name may be explained otherwise. Does not the whole
piece read less like a letter than a sermon, and less like
a sermon than notes for a series of sermons ? In the
sketch given above rather plainer connexion between
the paragraphs has been suggested than is obvious.
They succeed one another like notes, and in the short
hand of notes the name might be unwritten though the
person was in mind. But if we have a sermon here on
the ethics of the Christian fellowship, in which doctrine
is taken for granted, a late date would be more probable
than an early. There are affinities with the sermon on
the mount, yet not with the whole of it but with those
parts which have themselves affinity with the Wisdom
books of the Jewish church. Quite as marked are the

THE EPISTLE OF S. JAMES 209
resemblances to that homily of the second or late first
century which goes by the name of the second epistle
of Clement. It is hardly reasonable to say that in the
passage about faith and works James could not have
contradicted Paul but Paul might have corrected
James. More naturally we might see there a later
correction of Paulinism misunderstood, as perhaps in
2 Tim. ii. 18 or 2 Pet. iii. 15 f.
It is at least attractive to imagine some bishop or
presbyter of the later though still apostolic church
leaving in this brief document some notes for a course
of homilies ; jotting down his thoughts as the needs of
his people suggest them one after another; in good
easy Greek ; with sympathy generosity and old-fashioned
sobriety; now and then writing out in full a good
phrase which happily expressed his thought. Yet this
is imagination. We have not enough material within
the epistle nor evidence outside it to settle the date.
Perhaps it is an example of the very noble piety of the
later church, masculine ardent quiet self-effacing, a
'tractarian' type. Perhaps we have a glimpse of a
certain temper, the 'wise' rather than the 'saving'
temper, which existed in the earliest church, as it still
exists ; varying, yet harmoniously, the more strenuous
temper of Paul or Peter or Apollos. At any rate this
epistle is of a high order of inspiration and has the
rare excellence of saying great things in plain words,
equally profitable to scholars and to country labourers.1
The epistle of S. Jude opens thus :
- Jude, servant of Jesus Christ and brother of James,
1 J. B. Mayor has written a commentary on James (Macmillan,
1892; second ed., 1897) and another on 2 Peter and Jude (Macmillan,
1907) of great interest. He provides a feast for the classical scholar
and the theologian, from which however far more than crumbs may be
gathered by the plain man or the Gallio. Dr. Bigg's edition of 2 Peter
and Jude has been already mentioned (pp. 60, 123). The Provost of
Eton, Dr. Montagu James, has edited 2 Peter and Jude for the
Cambridge Greek Testament for Schools and Colleges. His large
knowledge of out-of-the-way sources of Jewish and Christian theology
gives this small commentary special value.
O

210 RENASCENCE OF SPIRIT THROUGH LETTER
to the beloved in God the Father and the guarded in
Jesus Christ, the called : mercy to you and peace and
love be multiplied.'
Then the writer plunges into his subject. He was
meditating, he says, an ordinary pastoral when news of
assault (moral rather than doctrinal) upon 'the faith
once for all delivered to the saints' obliged him to
send this exhortation to strive in its defence.
Though his readers received full instruction when
they joined the church (verse 5 ; compare 1 John ii. 20),
he would remind them of the judgement on rebellious
Israel and rebellious angels, on Sodom and Gomorrha.
Here too are rebels who, unlike the reverent archangel
in church legend, blaspheme. Cain, Balaam and Korah
were types of them. They are traitors in the 'love-feasts,'
like rocks in the channels, like all the death in life
which spoils nature's picture. Enoch prophesied of
their ruin. Vile epithets are conglomerated upon them.
Let his own beloved people remember the warnings
of the apostles of the Lord Jesus, and build themselves
on their most holy faith, praying in the Spirit and keep
ing themselves in God's love and waiting for the mercy
of the Lord Jesus Christ, unto life eternal. Nor let
them fail in charity toward their brethren. Some may
be still kept safe; some pitied with holy fear and
separated from their contagious sin.
The letter closes with doxology to God the Saviour
through Jesus Christ the Lord.
Westcott and Hort mark the first verse as probably
disturbed by some ' primitive error,' some corruption of
the original Greek which goes farther back than any
evidence we have for the text. But this epistle is
rough throughout. The aberration from conventional
correctness may incline us to believe it genuine, a real
letter from the brother of the Lord.1 Language taste
1 Compare Gal. i. 19 : and for the effect of such a realisation of
history see a sermon on that text preached before the University of
Cambridge by the Bishop of Durham, February 23, 1919, and after
wards published by A. P. Dixon, Cambridge.

S. JUDE: 2 PETER 211
and style are certainly late. Faith is fixed and con
crete. Consider the likeness and the difference between
verse 5 and 1 John ii. 20 : this may imply community
of period and divergence of mind ; or dependence on
1 John which the author had read. How different
again are the tones in which S. Jude and S. Paul de
nounce evil, yet the Pastorals are not altogether unlike
Jude. The use of Jewish legend has parallels in S. Paul
but goes beyond him : late imitation would avoid
this use.
Yet all is vigorous and loyal. S. Jude has furnished
conservative orthodoxy with great watchwords. ' The
faith once for all delivered ' is not so deeply inspired a
phrase as ' The spirit of truth shall lead you into all
the truth ' ; but it is a text for heroes.
Anyhow Jude is earlier than 2 Peter : else what is
left to S. Jude of his own epistle ? Dr. Bigg laboured
to show how Jude improves the looser language of 2
Peter in the passage common to both. We see what
he means yet are unconvinced. Indeed it is impossible
to read 2 Peter without feeling all but sure that it has
been composed by some Christian of the second century
out of Jude and 1 Peter, with shreds from popular
philosophy, and an honest wish to drive apostolic
precepts home to a forgetful generation. Not long
ago a teacher of theology in Cambridge printed a short
epistle in the style of S. Paul in order to shew his
friends how S. Paul would have treated certain prob
lems of church order : he certainly did not wish to
be taken for S. Paul.1
1 The Bishop of Ely's article in Hastings' Dictionary of the Bible
on ' S. Peter ; second epistle ' leaves little room for doubt about the
late origin of this epistle. The strongest argument against its being
really S. Peter's is the refusal of the early church to accept it. Doubts
indeed were felt about James, Jude and 2 and 3 John. But these
doubts were of a different kind. Eusebius puts all five epistles into
the class of disputed books (Hist. Eccl. iii. 25) but he adds his own
clear opinion against 2 Peter, whereas he speaks respectfully of James
and in other of his writings quotes it as Scripture. Jude was received
at Rome and Carthage in A.D. 200 : 2 and 3 John were associated with

212 RENASCENCE OF SPIRIT THROUGH LETTER
The soi-disant Simon Peter begins with rather a fine
piece of theological rhetoric interweaving pregnant
phrases from street echoes of the schools. The ladder
of virtues (i. 5-7) provides a good series of texts for
modern exposition, and was worked into his thoughtful
Private Prayers by Lancelot Andrewes (i. 1-11).
Then (in the fashion we have already observed in
Jude and 1 John) he reminds his readers of what they
know, and declares that he, who saw the transfiguration,
will continue thus to rouse their memory till the dawn
of the advent shall rise in their heart ; this last phrase
containing an allusion which leads him to testify to the
inspiration of ancient prophecy and to warn them that
' it is no subject for private interpretation' (i. 12-21).
Then (ii.) Jude is amplified adorned and purified
from rude apocrypha. Agapae 'love-feasts1 becomes
apatae 'deceits,' and the sentence is modelled anew.
All is rounded off with a proverb from Scripture and
another from common talk which would cover the
heretics with shame.
The last chapter begins with a reference to a former
epistle (which must surely mean 1 Peter), and the idea
of this secondary compilation is rather happily ex
pressed : ' This is a second epistle I am now writing to
you, beloved, and in these epistles I am waking up your
ingenuous intelligence by way of remembrance.' He
passes to the delayed, yet certain, advent day, and
among much grandiose language strikes out a thought
which makes us glad that the church of the fourth
century preserved the epistle for us : ' New heavens and
new earth according to his promise do we look for,
wherein dwelleth righteousness ' (iii. 13).
He adds his testimony to the letters of ' our beloved

I John and the doubt about them was noted as a mere caution. But
2 Peter is not heard of (earlier allusions are very doubtful) before
Origen, and can hardly be styled canonical till the fourth century. As
for James we must remember that the question for these early critics
would be whether it was written by James the brother of the Lord ;
the arguments adduced above in its favour would not count.

MARGIN OF INSPIRATION 213
brother Paul,' which are, however, difficult and (like
Old Testament prophecy) need instructed readers.
A farewell encouragement and a doxology to Jesus
Christ the Lord and Saviour close the epistle.
Form, says Plato,1 always follows colour, and as we
read the New Testament from S. Mark to S. John we
see that it illustrates the aphorism. But these two
last epistles, Jude and 2 Peter, go beyond it. There
is rigidity, then weakness : the creative vitality of the
earlier books is gone. Well, at least we gain this from
the melancholy of such a sunset : we learn to recognise
the undetermined margin and the varying intensity of
inspiration. The proper meaning of the canon of
Scripture is the list. In the orderly west it took on
a further meaning of the list of authoritative books.
In the sense generally supposed now of an exclusive
list of books with a unique inspiration only their own
there never has been a canon of the New Testament :
so at least thought Dr. Gregory.2 For some centuries
at any rate 2 Peter, Hebrews, the Apocalypse and
other books were excluded from the Bibles of many
churches, while the epistles of Clement, the Shepherd
of Hermas, the epistle of Barnabas were in some
churches included. ' Read what you like,' said the old
labourer when asked what part of Holy Scripture he
wished to hear, ' it 's all true.1 We feel the beauty of
his faith but the pathos of it too. For all is not
equally true. If the Old Testament is not understood
to record a progressive revelation, not a little of it may
mislead. If we put Mark xvi. 16 on the same level as
1 Cor. xv. 28 we shall not keep the proportion of faith.
And there is more than that. The sentence about
S. Paul's epistles in 2 Peter is just. The glorious
essence of S. PauFs faith is more than hard for average
saints to make their own. Sometimes S. Paul says
1 Meno 75c.
2 See The Canon and Text of the New Testament, by Caspar Rene"
Gregory (T. & T. Clark, 1907), pp. 286 ff.

214 RENASCENCE OF SPIRIT THROUGH LETTER
things which do not belong to that essence and we
obscure the mind of Christ by taking these as infallible
dogma. Sometimes he puzzles, and troubles those
whom he puzzles, by the logical forms into which he
throws his greatest doctrines : his doctrine of atone
ment for instance. This last class of difficulties is what
really embarrasses a willing student. Much may be
cleared up by more patient study. That logic of
• atonement 1 is easier when we realise that S. Paul's
own key-word is ' reconciliation 1 and that the recon
ciliation is of man to God, not of God to man. But
if obscurity remains, let the student turn from Paul
to the Lord himself. ' The Son of man came not to
be ministered unto but to minister, and to give his
life a ransom for many ' : ' Greater love hath no man
than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.1
There is the heart of the atonement, and if the further
explication for the brain confuses any one, let him rest
in, or refresh himself for further effort of thought by
returning to the simplicity of Christ.
Of course few can or ought to shirk renewed effort
of thought : heart-devotion must have definite meaning
if it is to grow and yet be still sincere. And this
thought among others will some time rise : Why should
salvation be only through the cross when our Lord in
his Galilean teaching scarce seems to have said that ?
If a man live according to the sermon on the mount,
and pray and hope according to the Lord's prayer, is
he not a Christian ? The answer surely must be that
he is : he is a Christian of the same kind as many dis
ciples were during our Lord's earthly ministry. To
vindicate a place among their brethren for such elemen
tary believers was part of Dr. DuBose's aim in The
Gospel in the Gospels ; x and the same plea has been very
earnestly made by Mr. Coulton in Christ, St. Francis
and To-day.2 Mr. Coulton was moved to this by the
Christlikeness outside the church which he found among
1 See above, p. 131.
2 Cambridge University Press, 1919.

MORAL TEST AND THEOLOGICAL GROWTH 215
the martyrs of the war. In the war, in its blood and
fire and vapour of smoke God has terribly granted that
fresh outpouring of the Spirit for which we had, with
too little real thought, been praying ; and some such
simplifying of the broad test of membership in the
church was perhaps part of the divine purpose.
And the discerning study of the New Testament,
which spreads from the men of books to the artisans
to-day, confirms the hope. S. Paul's is not the only
form of the doctrine of the cross in the New Testa
ment. However explained, it is still to be pondered
on, that S. James writes a nobly Christian book with
scarcely a word about that doctrine. But more im
portant is this fact — does not discerning study prove it
a fact ? — that the great, if not the only test of church-
manship in the New Testament is the moral test.
When heresies are opposed it is the moral effect of
heresy that seems to matter. Only in the very latest
books do we observe the beginnings of change in this
respect. Yet there is a New Testament beyond the Galilean
Gospels. There is deep doctrine of the cross and of
the person of Christ. That this proceeds from the
living Christ completing what he said in the days of
his flesh is a main lesson of the fourth Gospel. It is
not likely that men endowed with reason will do with
out this all their lives. It is not easy to follow the
example without support from the doctrine. And
troubled consciences make theology. They seek the
Lamb of God that taketh away the sin of the world :
they know that none cometh to the Father but by
the Son.
Only, here again, the 'coloured' truth distributes
itself in various ' form.' And discerning study of the
New Testament compels us to reflect that the Son of
man, the Son of God, the Christ who is all in all
fulfilled, is recognised by some where we have not as
yet been accustomed to suppose it, and that he finds
his brothers, his complement or fulness, in alien hearts

216 RENASCENCE OF SPIRIT THROUGH LETTER
which he knows how to win sooner than his church
does. Of course this has long been in some sort allowed.
The reformation idea of the invisible church was an
attempt to meet the paradox. But how much farther
goes S. John's doctrine of the Word who is the Way
Truth Life. And in his Gospel this fearless concep
tion of the universal Father's house, of which the
boundaries are wholly spiritual, anticipates a unity
which surpasses any unity the church militant has
dared to seek. Yet the church militant is spiritual,
and the Spirit rests not till all is spiritual, and is there
any difference in the New Testament between 'spiritual '
and ' moral ' force ?
In this last chapter we pause and look back upon
our journey. The retrospect already begins to pass
into prospect. If it were not so we should be trifling
with a mere literary exercise. But we may hope we
have not been trifling. Has it not become plain that
the New Testament opens to us the springs of life ? It
is a record, but through the record our minds are
opened to the present working of the Spirit which
inspired it ? The faith of the New Testament is never
ended though it has been once delivered, at one par
ticular and not to be repeated conjunction of events.
We may go back to guard and to correct our body
of doctrine. We may look back to the given model,
the example. But the chief thing is to go forward,
not by imitation, but in the same Spirit. We see that
done within the New Testament itself, through S. Paul,
the epistle to the Hebrews, S. John. The Acts shows
how the whole church, the whole company of ordinary
believers, were associated with the movement. And
we see how surprisingly bold the movement was. Some
times it was felt so at the time: there was strife.
Sometimes developement proceeded naturally and almost
unperceived. But to us, as we look back upon it, the
seeming changes are almost incredible to a freshly
awakened historical imagination : only as we discipline

THE SPIRIT IN SCHOLARSHIP 217
and enlarge imagination by getting it more facts, and
realising that spiritual influences are facts, do we
assimilate the truth, that the faith of the New Testa
ment is directed to a real object, and that it went on,
and will go on for ever, approaching its object more
closely and transforming its vision more exactly into
thought feeling and deed.
And it has gone on since those early days. The
latest books of the New Testament shew decline;
symbolic, it might seem, as though to warn us against
externalising authority in a 'canon.' Presently we
find fresh vigour of faith, not merely exercised in inter
pretation, but moving with the originality of the same
Spirit. Origen and Alexandria ; the many-sided acti
vities of Greek thought which coalesced at last through
the council of Nicaea ; S. Augustine ; the schoolmen ;
the reformation, are milestones in this movement. We
may think ruefully of the loss which these advances
involved. But can we, after due consideration, deny
that there has been movement, that more- of God has
been revealed to man in the course of centuries ? And
secondly, do we not feel the same kind of loss with
gain as we trace the unfolding of faith in the New
Testament itself ? Its date is so far away, its story is
told so reverently, that the loss appears less gross : but
think of S. Paul and the Judaisers, or the denunciations
of S. Jude, and consider again whether appearances
might not have touched us more sharply had we been
nearer. And now notice how in every case, within and
beyond the pale of the New Testament, these move
ments of the Spirit have been connected with attention
to the letter ; as the fourth Gospel is largely an out
come of the study of earlier Gospels, a gathering
together of all the apostolic teaching, a filtering in
of truth that lurked in Hellenistic piety ; as S. Augus
tine was the contemporary and friend of S. Jerome
the textual critic, the translator of the Scriptures ; as
the reformation was coeval with the renascence.

218 RENASCENCE OF SPIRIT THROUGH LETTER
Origen says in his commentary on Romans that as for
the oldness of the letter, there never was a time when
it was new.1 The business of the scholar is to renew
the letter as it wears to deadness, and looking back on
our present study we see how the letter has been
renewed of late.
First think of language. When the Roman empire
of the east was nearing its fall (1453) Greek scholars
began to teach in the west, and in 231"o Erasmus'
Greek Testament was published. For a thousand years
the New Testament had been read in a Latin fcran&'
lation. The opening of the original was a revelation.
That poenitentiam agere ' do penance ' was really meta-
noia ' change of heart ' is a type of this discovery of a
forgotten world. Colet's lectures on S. Paul, the
English Bible, the Cambridge Platonists, followed. A
new idea came into theology, that the original inten
tion of the apostolic doctrine, that the mind of Christ
could be sought and found, and that the dogmas of
Holy Church might be interpreted, her customs even
corrected, thereby.
But quite as new a discovery has been made within
our own memory and is going on still. Lightfoot's
commentaries made New Testament Greek fresh and
precise to men still living. It was delightful for a
young man, trained in the classics, to work through
one of those commentaries, and learn the unexpected
capabilities of a language he had glanced at and sup
posed barbarous. Westcott pressed its niceties almost
too far. Rutherford 2 foresaw its real position in the
wide world of late Greek. And now the papyri have
confirmed his foresight and are illustrating the New
Testament on every page; its leading words such as
' saviour ' ; its ideas such as the sacraments. It is a
1 Kal ^ ira\at6rns Si tou ypi/i/iaros obic l-cnv Sre Kaii>^ fy : see
Journal of Theological Studies (October 1912), where Mr. A. Rams-
botham has edited this document.
2 See his translations of Romans and Corinthians (Macmillan, 1900,
1908) and the preface to the translation of Romans.

REVISED VERSION AND ANCIENT TEXT 219
pity that our Revised Version was made before very
much had been done with the papyri. Yet even so,
that version is very valuable. No other country has
anything like it, except America which is associated
with us in it; and whatever may be objected to its
dignity, rythm and so on — these objections are often
made too hastily — it is a trusty counsellor to scrupu
lous souls. Besides all this new light on the Greek
side there is also the daily advancing study of Pales
tinian Aramaic which carries us beyond the Greek
Gospels to the actual language and therefore the
actual contemporary force of our Lord's own teaching.
Immo ad antiquissimam said Lancelot Andrewes in
the Jacobean controversy with Rome ; ' Do we go
back to antiquity ? No, to the very springs of
antiquity.1 How far more exact a sense has his
rhetoric now.
The indisputable merit of the Revised Version is its
fidelity to the restored Greek text of at least the second
century.1 It may be possible presently to go back
farther still, to disentangle processes of text from
processes of composition in the Gospels, to get the
final answer about the relationship of Alexandrian to
' western , text. But this can hardly mark a new epoch
in the same degree as did the labours of the last century,
culminating in the publication of Westcott and Hort's
Greek Testament in 1881. The New Testament is
unique in spiritual value because it so constantly keeps
above the level of religious ideas which ordinary men
and ordinary ages could imagine for themselves. But
all the changes which were made in the Greek text
during its transmission tended to reduce it to this level,
to render the rare thought commonplace, the daring
safe, the spiritual less unlike the material. Some
examples of this degeneration have been noticed on
earlier pages. Take one more. In Apoc. xxi. 24 we
read that the nations shall walk in the light of the
1 Compare pp. 139 ff, 152, 192.

220 RENASCENCE OF SPIRIT THROUGH LETTER
heavenly city. But the late text fails in faith or
charity — 'the nations of them that are saved.1 But
the difference is not to be measured by collecting
various readings. It will make itself felt as a genera
tion grows up which has been wholly taught from a
pure New Testament.
Then there is the historical criticism of recent years.
This has put the New Testament into a larger setting.
Sixteenth-century scholars began to recover what
seemed the original intention of the apostolic words.
But taken by themselves those words yielded too
obvious a meaning. Men thought they understood as
their fathers had never understood because it was easy
for them to read the simpler faith into them for which
their generation was wearying. Only of late, when a
larger outlook on the past has disclosed its unexpected,
its complex richness, has it become necessary to take
third thoughts about this. The apostles and their
Lord were not peasants, nor unlettered. Paul jour
neyed through a world which was seething with reli
gious aspirations far keener than we ourselves are
accustomed to entertain. He would be rash who
limited the intellectual forces which played upon the
production of the fourth Gospel. Here are but hints
of probabilities many and far-reaching. What they
point to is caution in measuring the profundity of
gospels and epistles by what we think was likely in
early stages of developing theology, or by our own
capacities intellectual or emotional. It is often safe
to allow a far more universal meaning to pregnant
utterances than till of late it has been fashionable to
suppose. This is a change of fashion that is likely to
tell in the future. Some who read this book may
think it too conservative about dates and authorships :
it is reactionary, they will say. But in that respect it
is not altogether out of step with the newer critics.
About dates and authorships we do become less radical.
The newer liberalism is in judging what truth those
authors at that date may have had minds prepared to

DIFFUSION OF SCHOLARSHIP 221
receive. The faith of the New Testament may presently
revive in a renascence of interpretation.
And this liberal interpretation is largely due to our
bringing more philosophy to bear. Few readers or
writers care to claim philosophy. The right to do so
would justly be refused to the writer of this book.
But it is difficult to hit upon another name, and few
thoughtful people are to-day quite without the thing
intended by this use of the name. A chief reason for
hoping for a renascence of Spirit at this time through
renewal of the letter, is the increasing diffusion of
scholarship. In the workrooms of scholarship all
becomes more and more specialised thorough scientific :
superficial work is not tolerated. But many more
classes of people are interested in what the scholars are
searching for ; many more in each class than used to
be are interested; and very many of these are busy
men with a keen sense of reality. Superficial enter
tainment is not what they will accept from the
academic workers. They do not ask for scraps of
information. They want reality as fast as scholars
reach it, and they do not want the tentative pedantries
through which most scholars beat their way to methods
and ideas. These methods and ideas they would learn,
leaving alone the niceties of language criticism etc. :
and here too is a way of knowledge which itself is
scholarly. Scholarship, not popular information is
being diffused to-day. The professed scholars are
improved by this : they are more robust and sensible
than they were, their outlook (as they would themselves
put it) is larger. And the other people are improved
also. And the faith of the New Testament is more
rightly understood.
It is much the same with philosophy. Philo
sophy is a scholarly common sense. A scholar cares
about the best use of words and will not be content
with careless talkers to say ' cynical 1 when he means
' ill-tempered 1 or to say that a result flows, or a reason
causes. A philosopher cares about the reality of life

222 RENASCENCE OF SPIRIT THROUGH LETTER
and tries to find out what does ' cause ' things, and
whether there are truths more true than words and
{(ictures can adequately represent. Few indeed would
ike to call themselves philosophers, but how many
pretend to some acquaintance with natural science;
and (if accounts be true) it is hardly possible to meddle
with the latest developements of science without being
entangled in questions of philosophy. That is one
reason, it would be tedious and not here in place to
enumerate the rest, why the people are philosophic
to-day, and why by wholesome reaction, the philo
sophers are humanists.
Long ago there was a school of New Testament
criticism in Germany which was highly philosophic.
These critics applied their philosophy too much from
outside. They had their philosophic system ready and
shaped their criticism to suit it. Hence they made
mistakes and were at last discredited. To-day we
begin to see that in spite of these mistakes they had
certain ideas which do still and always will help us to
understand the faith of the New Testament. And of
late a newer philosophy, invigorated by diffusion and
reaction, has been brought into criticism. It does not
impose itself, it shapes itself in contact with the
material which it penetrates. History too, psycho
logy, natural science are fused with it. Hort, his
torian and man of science, was a philosopher after this
kind and his Hulsean lectures and commentary on
1 Peter, shew what this philosophy may do for the
interpretation of the New Testament. The Dean of
S. Paul's is a great expositor of S. John and his (more
learned) philosophy makes him so. Dr. Abbott would
call himself — and no one with more right — a scholar,
he would probably refuse to call himself a philosopher :
yet his scholarship is informed by philosophy, and he
too has opened new windows through which to look
upon the broad country of S. John. Dr. Bethune-
Baker is devoted to the study of doctrine, not specially
to the New Testament. But every student of the New

HISTORY AND IDEA 223
Testament will be immensely helped by his philosophic
honesty in The Faith of the Apostles'1 Creed.1
This unprofessional philosophy invades every thought
ful mind and it affects all study of the New Testament.
So it comes that we can take a more lifelike and
consistent view of the course of apostolic theology
from the Galilean Gospel to the epistles of S. Paul
and the Ephesian Gospel according to S. John. So
we are able to accept the apocalyptic exposition of our
Lord's main Galilean teaching and recognise spiritual
opportunity in the historical limitation. We can
recognise again the propriety of the gradual correction
of the primitive apocalyptic tradition as Galilean
'colour' is reduced to universal 'form,' and picture-
language is thought out, is worked out in the school
of life. We can understand this experience being
known, really known, by the apostolic Christians as
the working of the Spirit of the Christ, the Spirit of
Jesus: 'really' known, for it is the very business of
philosophy to prove the Spirit the one reality.
Or this may be put from another point of view.
The earliest Gospels record the earthly life of Jesus of
Nazareth ; facts of history. In the Christ of S. Paul,
the Word of S. John, we have an idea. From the
resurrection onward the New Testament is the record
of the distinguishing between and the reconciling of
this history and this idea. S. Paul, if we may interpret
Galatians by Acts, began his new life with a vivid
apprehension of the Lord Jesus as a person. There is
no sign of his ever losing that vivid apprehension.
Yet we do see the idea of the eternal Christ, the first
born of creation, the Christ that is to be, filling more
and more of his thought. And though it is improbable
that the no longer knowing Christ after the flesh of
2 Cor. v. 16 means ignoring the earthly ministry
of the Lord, it is plain that he very seldom writes
about it. The advent too, in which at first he longs
so passionately to see his Lord, becomes more vague
1 Cambridge University Press, 1918.

224 RENASCENCE OF SPIRIT THROUGH LETTER
in its historical conception, as he serves and sees the
idea working more and more widely in the world, and
strips away the scenic trappings of traditional apoca
lyptic, till at last he reaches the aphtharsia, the
thorough purging of all that is material, in Ephesians.
S. John starts from the idea very absolutely in the
prologue to the Gospel, swiftly transforms it into
history, then into the one person of the incarnate Son
of God. Then he, like his predecessors in Gospel
narrative, tejls the story of historic facts. Yet we feel
in his story, full of humanity as it is, the persistence of
the idea, and in the discourse of the last supper it is
the reality of the idea that makes eternal life, and the
communion of saints, and unity in God, so certain
for us.
This twofold aspect of our faith still presents itself
to us. We are even apt to see it as two, as alternative
ways of believing. Or going still further, some choose
one, some the other, and each denies to each the credit
of belief at all. The empty tomb, or the presence of
Christ in the Spirit; which of these does one or
another of us cherish as the fount of faith ?
It is perhaps hardly possible for any active mind or
warm heart not to lean somewhat to the one side rather
than the other. Attention to the New Testament
itself might justify strong leaning in one or other
direction. It would not justify condemnation of a
brother's partiality, nor allow us to rest content with
our own. For one thing consider this : could you be
content with the idea, if it were not for the whole
church guarding the historic fact for you, which you
can therefore afford not to think about ? And again :
could you rest content with the history, if worship,
brotherhood, work, suffering, did not transmute the
past history into present feeling ? But, besides such
private considerations, the New Testament (as always)
forbids unphilosophic partiality. The problem is
never given up in the New Testament. Whether
Paul or John, Hebrews or Peter or Apocalypse, each

THROUGH MAN TO GOD 225
writer always holds firm to both at once. Sometimes
they seem to feel no difficulty; sometimes they are
consciously attempting to solve it. But the mystery
is always there. It never degenerates into an easy half
view — a heresy. And the greatness of S. John is that
he goes deeper than any other New Testament author
in distinguishing and combining the parts and thereby
enlarging the whole.
This is to be noticed. Both S. Paul and S. John
move towards the synthesis by way of the inclusive
deity of the Christ. We have seen that this doctrine
was derived from the Jewish conception of the Christ.
Our Lord prepared for its developement by his use of
the title Son of man. We but dimly perceive the
implications of that title in the Gospels : the disciples
at the time can hardly have perceived more. But
Paul and John reflect its light and bring it into clear
ness : Paul especially in Ephesians with its Christ all
in all being fulfilled, John especially in the high-priestly
intercession of John xvii. with its vision of unity in
the Father of all believers through the Son. This
developement of the primitive Jewish doctrine has been
made possible by the incarnation. The Jewish doctrine
was simple because it was vague. The sharp distinction
created by the earthly historic life of the Lord Jesus
prepared a new simplicity which will be always
and inexhaustibly mysterious but never vague again :
it is now the clear seen symbol or sacrament of God, of
God not separate from life, but all in all. And while
there is matter here for many branching thoughts, the
immediate practical issue is this : men will realise more
and more that it is through the manhood of Jesus that
the Godhead of Christ must be sought and proved ;
and that it is through man's relations with his brother
men that the presence and power of Christ must be
experienced. Deus est mortali mortalem adiuvare,
' Where shall God be found ? Where mortal helps
mortal.' That old Roman adage has, in fact if not
by authority, been adopted by the church whenever

226 RENASCENCE OF SPIRIT THROUGH LETTER
circumstances have revived its distinctively Christian
instinct. So it was when under stress of trial the epistle to the
Hebrews and the Apocalypse were written. The name
of Jesus echoes through those books like a refrain;
'the Name' with its comfort sweetness compassion,
its ' humanity.' Here begins that cult of Jesus, of
' the Name,' which recurs when men suffer and mortals
need the help of mortals. So it was again for instance
in England in the fifteenth century, after the long
desolation of civil war. Then 'Jesus chapels' were
consecrated : a bishop dedicates a college to the most
Blessed Virgin Mary, Saint John the Evangelist, and
the glorious Virgin Saint Rhadegund, but means it to
be generally known as ' Jesus College ' : a church is
built in a Norfolk country parish, and over the porch
in fine flintwork is set ' Jesus Nazarenus.' And so it
is again to-day. Criticism and scholarship — the
renewing of the letter — had in part prepared for the
recurrence by historical study of the Gospels. Mid-
Victorian impatience with metaphysics ; the revolt of
a ' working class,' who were really suffering and really
thinking, against a faith which seemed to them to give
no daily bread and to desert the example of Jesus ; here
too was preparation. In one group of churchmen,
lovers of medieval devotions and indefatigable in
ministry to the masses of the poor and ' the submerged,'
the cult of the Name was deliberately taught : in close
contact too with the realities of sin these priestly men
were far from doing this in a merely ritual temper;
the compassion and the purity of Jesus was, as they
proved, a power for salvation. And upon all this the
war descended. For five years Jesus the compassionate
high priest was needed sorely. Not only was he needed
for comfort and sympathy in the obvious sufferings
caused by pain and bereavement; even more in the
problem of the morality of war, of the obliteration of
moral boundaries which war in its course was evidently
working, Jesus tempted in all points like men at war,

THE NAME OF JESUS 227
yet without sin, could alone show the way : abstract
ideas, the omnipotence, the absoluteness, the self-limi
tation of God were manipulated in vain.
And now though war has ceased troubles press and
threaten ; all pointing to the necessity of finding God
where mortals help mortals, all compelling us to a cult
of Jesus which shall be no imitation of the past but
original, as the ' sameness ' of the Lord Jesus always is.
In gospel study the last great impulse came through
the opening of the apocalyptic view. That produced
a great deal of controversy which led and still will lead
to more exact criticism, to a brighter renewing of the
letter ; and out of this will come in due time something
more of permanent spiritual worth ; for that is the
inevitable sequence. In the meantime the academic
controversy and experiment is just that part of
scholarship which the new diffused scholarship will let
alone. But there is another part in which clearness
has been already reached, and on this the world is
ready to seize. For, spite of all the evil about us and
within us, the world no longer lies wholly in the evil
one but is not far from the kingdom of God. This
already vital part of the recovered faith is the emphasis
on the sermon on the mount, on the precepts of Jesus,
which had so long been watered down in civilised trans
lation, aRd which apocalyptic criticism translates so
much more literally. A nation must henceforth resolve
to be as good as a good man : so Mr. Clutton Brock saw
early in the war. The only chance of escaping another
war seven times worse than this last war lies in the
nations of Christendom really making peace according
to the principles of their Christian faith : so said Mr.
Lowes Dickinson in 1917. And the good men must
be as unworldly as Jesus commanded them to be, says
the sinister voice of 'Labour1 to-day. ' Labour,1 that
again is an 'idea.1 As a mere idea it has much in it
that is sinister, just as ' liberalism 1 'socialism1 have
much that is timid and ineffective. This generation
has the task of making history to meet and coalesce

228 RENASCENCE OF SPIRIT THROUGH LETTER
with the ideas. And the history must be made after
the example of the historic Jesus, by homely affections,
unrewarded service, real sacrifice. In S. John's Gospel
of ideas the homeliness of love, the sordid side of con
troversy, the ultimate tragedy, are worked out with
more realism than in the unsophisticated history of the
earlier evangelists.
After all ideas cannot be overvalued: the faith
which leans towards the idea is the larger faith. We
cannot reach the idea except through history, but
history is merely chronicle till the idea informs it, till
history itself becomes idea. There is a picture by
Ford Madox Brown which seems to many people of a
certain age a very great picture. It is at any rate
inspired truly by the fourth Gospel. The Lord is
washing S. Peter's feet. It is the moment at which S.
Peter's first indignant wonder passes at the Lord's
answer into wondering trust in the mystery of cleans
ing. S. Peter and his Master, the act of washing, the
words and their effect ; there is the foreground, some
thing that sensibly happened at a particular moment
in past time, yet abides here, a felt reality, present to
all generations. The ten disciples at the table are
removed by some device of perspective from the abiding
scene : they are passing, as we look and think, into the
shadowland of unrealised memory. The disciple whom
Jesus loved, looking over the shoulder of S. Peter,
stands recorder, uniting the unstable past with that
' eternal present ' of his Gospel, transmitting history
by and into idea.
So doubtless he fulfilled the purposes of his Lord
who is the Word in being Jesus of Nazareth. It is one
aspect of the Jesus-cult of these new days that we
yearn to draw, all of us, together in the peace of the
simple Gospel which was preached and understood in
Galilee.1 In one sense and with limiting conditions it
is much to be hoped that we may do so. But the
deeper unity will be the wider also. The ' Greeks who
1 See above, Preface, p. viii.

QUIETISM OF S. JOHN 229
would see Jesus ' needed an interpretation of what they
would see such as S. John presently gave them.
Missionaries at Delhi know that such interpretation is
needed in India still. In our own country there are
many to whom the Gospel history cannot be read
without disturbing their historical imagination : yet if
they may brush details aside and press through Jesus
to the Word they, as much as more concrete minds,
' know' the Father thereby. Many there are who feel
like Martha about the resurrection ; who cannot yield
their reason to the arguments for such a ' personal '
immortality as are proffered in the collection of essays
on Immortality published a year or two ago ; *¦ who are
moved indeed by the passionate rhetoric of S. Paul,
yet cannot yield themselves even to that, still checked
with misgiving at its too frank borrowing from the life
of the senses. And to these the quietism of S. John
brings certainty. An idea which is only abstract so
far as it is freed from unessential details, an austere
simplicity of depth instead of a naive simplicity of
imagination ; that is what many are seeking to-day.
When the confusion of a myriad troubled hearts sub
sides towards the centre, it seems likely that the new
generation will find the teaching it specially requires
in S. John. We are not quite ready for that yet. S.
John has not yet (so to speak) been 'edited' sufficiently.
We are still fluctuating round points of criticism, the
renewing of the letter has to be carried farther. Or
on the other hand will the common sense of faith
complete the process sooner than critical scholars
expect, sweeping aside so many doubts that do not
matter, as the Spirit is reborn and we are content to
' know ' what S. John knew and so to believe ?
Taught by S. John we need not be afraid of losing
what we call to-day the 'concrete.' That is assured
in his central truth, the eternal life of Jesus Christ.
The boundaries of the church, the forms of faith, the
1 Immortality, an essay in discovery, edited by B. H. Streeter
(Macmillan, 1917).
p2

230 RENASCENCE OF SPIRIT THROUGH LETTER
privilege of selfhood, may in our passage (even now
and here) into eternal life be transcended, but while
our life is in him and our faith directed through him
' unto God,' x all must be well.
I have a sin of fear, that when I have spun
My last thread, I shall perish on the shore ;
But swear by Thyself, that at my death Thy Son
Shall shine as he shines now, and heretofore ;
And having done that, Thou hast done ;
I fear no more.
1 See I Pet. i. 21 with Hort's note.

INDEX

Abbott, 2, 16 f., 167.
Abrahams, 174.
Acts, 40 1, 46, 56, 62 ff., 75, 107,
144, 216.
advent, 74, 79, 91, 93, 107, 132,
151.
Alexandria, 126, 177, 217.
Anderson Scott, 146, 199.
Andrewes, Lancelot, 212, 219.
angel, 132.
annunciation, 41.
aphtharsia, 106 f., 224.
apocalypse, 19 ff., 49, 92 f., 121,
161 f., 227.
Apocalypse of John, 119 f., 145 ff.,
163, 185 ; its apocalyptic tradition,
146, 148, 157 ; author, 145 ff. ;
date, 119 ff ., 147 ff. ; encourage
ment to persecuted, 120, 150,
159; letters to churches, 150 f.,
179 ; liturgic character, 152 ff. ;
populous heaven, 158 f . ; sever
ity, 157 f.; style, 146 f., 149;
title, 145, 150.
apocrypha, 212.
apostle, 8, 169 f .
aramaic, 16, 29, 39, 48, 187.
Aristion, 170 f .
Arnold, Matthew, 69, 90.
ascension, 143 f .
Athanasius, 188.
atonement, 89 f., 137 f., 214.
Augustine, 125 f., 199, 217.
Bacon, 43, 167.
baptism, 43, 64, 69, 87, 93, 166,
198.
Barnabas, 55, 70, 84, 127.
Benedictus, 38, 42.
Bengel, 85.
Benson, E. W., 146, 152.
Bethany, 176, 178, 195.
Bethune-Baker, 97 ff., 99, 222 f.
Bigg, 60, 123, 211.

Blaas 65.
blood', 97^ 124, 136 ff., 199, 203.
body of Christ, 104 ff., 112 f ., 162 ;
spiritual, 79, 81, 94, 102, 144.
Bousset, 146, 149.
Box, G. H., 38.
Brooke, A. E,, 167, 189, 193.
Brown, Ford Madox, 228.
Bruce, A. B., 131.
Burkitt, 7, 25, 43, 46, 75, 174, 187.
Burnet, 198.
Caesar-worship, 119, 150.
Cagin, dom, 152.
Cambridge Platonists, 218.
Cana, 184, 188.
canon, 213, 217.
Cerinthus, 170.
Chapman, dom, 171.
charity, 204 f.
Chase, bishop of Ely, 43, 122 f.,
211.
Christ : as Wisdom, 178 ; as Word,
180, 182 f., 188, 196, 201, 223.
body of, 104 ff., 112 f., 162.
deity of, ix, 3, 22, 49, 101 f.,
113 f., 129, 132, 135.
in apocalypses, 21 f., 161.
in Galilean Gospel, 21 ff., 44, 47,
49, 161 f .
in Hebrews, 131 ff., 163.
in John, 165, 175, 178, 191 f.
in Old Testament, 21, 74, 108 f.,
132 225
in Paul, 3, 59 f., 70, 79, 81, 84, "
90 ff., 97, 101 f., 104, 108ff., 162.
inclusive, 109, 112 ff., 162, 165,
187 f., 215, 225.
manhood of, 23 i., 48 f., 125,
133 f., 163, 187, 197, 201.
priesthood of, 131 ff.
church, 216 ; at Jerusalem, 63, 68,
92; Jewish, 110; in John, 201,
216 ; Pastorals, 116 ; Paul, 86, 99,
101, 110 ff. ; ministry of, 59.
231

232

THE FAITH OF THE NEW TESTAMENT

Clement of Alexandria, 5, 126, 177.
Clement of Rome, 126, 152.
Clutton Brock, 227.
Coleridge, 190.
Colet, 218.
Colson, 24.
communion of saints, 158, 196, 224.
confession, 203.
Coulton, 214.
covenant, 138 f.
creed, 1, of S. Paul, 3, 74, 86,
101.
Creed, J. M., 95.
cross, 49, 90, 105, 139, 143, 215.
Cumont, 95.
Cunningham, 145, 190.
Cyrenius, 64.
Dalman, 16, 29.
Daniel, 16, 20, 109, 148, 155.
Dante, 164.
Davidson, 131.
Deissmann, 173.
De Quincey, 172.
Dickinson, Lowes, 227.
Dionysius of Corinth, 145 f., 173.
Domitian, 119, 130, 148, 163.
Donne (hymn to God the Father),
230.
Drummond, 167.
DuBoae, 131, 166 f., 214.
Duckworth, 64.
Enoch, 20.
Ephesus, 76, 155, 164, 170, 177,
206.
Ephraem Syrus, 4.
Erasmus, 218.
Erskine of Linlathen, 197 f.
eternal life, 158, 165, 191 f .
eucharist, 77 f., 93, 166, 198 f.
Eusebius, 5, 23, 28, 44, 56, 127,
146,1701,201,211.
Fkhhier, 145.
five thousand, feeding of, 18, 36,
175, 184.
Field, J. E., 152.
Flaubert, 154.
Foakes Jackson, 71, 94.
Gardner, 166.
Gentile, 52 f., 71 f., 83, 91, 97, 110,'
115, 120, 178.
gnostic, 95, 101, 116, 179.
God-fearers, 71.
Gore, 100.

Gospel = good tidings, 7, 18, 121.
Luke, 6 f., 11, 15 ff., 27 ff., 33 ff.,
42, 56, 63, 65, 174, 193 f .
Mark, 6 f., 11 ff., 15 ff., 42 ff.,
125, 133.
Matthew, 6 ff., 27 f., 41 ff.
of childhood, 36, 38 ff.
oral, 6 f., 23 f.
synoptic, 5, 174 f., 181,187.
teaching in gospels, 6, 27 ff.
See also John.
Gregory, C. R., 213.
Grimm and Thayer, 173.
Gunkel, 146.
Hammond, 191.
harmonies, 4.
Harnack, 25, 62.
Headlam, 48, 55, 62, 86.
Hebrews, epistle to, 57 f., 67, 126
ff., 199; Alexandrine character,
128 ; author, 126 ff . ; date, 130 ;
doctrine of ascension and resur
rection, 143 f . ; of blood, 136 ft. ;
of Christ, 132 ; of covenant, 138 ;
of glory in humiliation, 134 f . ; of
manhood, 134 f., 143; of priest
hood, 133 ff. ; of sacrifice, 136 f.,
139 ; of the will, 131, 139, 141,
145 ; relation to Judaism, 128 f . ;
sacramental principle, 134, 143 ;
style, 127 ff., 132, 142f. ; title, 128.
hell, 91, 157 f.
Hellenist, 68, 70, 128 f., 178 f.
Hemphill, 4.
Hort, 70, 86, 96, 120, 122 f., 140,
147 f., 151, 167, 169, 195, 219,
222, 230.
Hosea, 16, 179.
Idea, 223 ff.
Ignatius, 59.
immortality, 158, 229.
incarnation, 16, 26 f., 201, 205.
Inge, 55, 167, 222.
interpretation, 221 ff.
Irenaeus, 45, 148, 169.
Isaiah, 20.
Jackson, Henry, 167.
Jackson, Latimer, 167.
James, epistle of, 207 ff.
James, Montagu, 209.
Jeremiah, 138, 179.
Jerome, 126, 217.

INDEX

233

Jerusalem, 10 f., 34, 55, 65, 70 f.,
92, 111, 120, 130, 138 f., 148,
156, 162, 174, 184,
Jesus, name of, 125, 133, 152, 160,
226.
John the Baptist, 7 f., 10, 18, 35,
64, 183, 186.
John son of Zebedee :
disciple whom Jesus loved, 178,
228 ; apostle, 168 ff., 172.
elder of Ephesus, 146, 170 ff.
gospel of, 4 f., 33 f., 113, 134,
164 ff.
based on preaching, 164, 172
193, 200.
composed by a disciple, 173
f., 193.
its character, 165 f .
its discourses, 143, 193.
its doctrine of advent, 165,
189 ff.
of the Christ, 176, 187, 223.
of eternal life, 165 f., 191 ff.
of sacraments, 166, 198f., 229.
of Son of God, 165.
of Spirit, 166, 196 ff.
of the Word, 182 f., 196.
its Hellenism, 178 f.
its homeliness, 180 i., 196.
its philosophy, 192 f .
its plan, 188 f .
its prologue, 181 ff.
its signs, 175 f., 184 ff .
its style, 149, 201.
epistles of, 200 f .
first epistle, 201 ff.
its doctrine of charity, 204 ff.
of church, 201.
of propitiation, 206.
of sin and forgiveness,
201 ff.
its relation to Gospel, 201.
See Apocalypse of John.
Johnson, Dr., 197.
Josephus, 64.
Judaism, 17, 83, 97, 100, 111, 120,
128 f.
Judas Iscariot, 11 f., 172, 186, 194.
Jude, epistle of, 20, 209 ff.
judgement, 91, 144, 165.

Kennedy, 95.
Kenyon, 4, 65, 140.
kingdom, 17 ff., 28 f., 121, 161 f.
Knox, A. D., 173.
knowledge, 179.

Labour, 227.
Lake, Kirsopp, 71, 94,
last supper, 174, 193, 228.
Latham, 175.
law, 84, 86.
Lazarus, 176 f., 185.
Leviticus, 137 f .
Lightfoot, 61, 70, 82, 88, 153, 167 ff.,
218
liturgy, 45, 102, 152 f., 198.
Loisy, 25, 95, 168.
Lord's Prayer, 30 f., 89.
Luke, 33 ff., 56, 63 f., 127.
Magnificat, 38, 42, 194.
mansion, 166, 182, 194 f .
Marcion, 57.
Mary, the Virgin, 39, 41, 194.
Mason, 199.
Maurice, F. D., 61, 190.
Mayor, J. B., 209.
M=Neile, 27, 55.
Melohizedek, 136 f.
Menegoz, 131.
Messiah, 19, 21, 32, 108, 174.
Milligan, 173.
miracle, 175 ff .
Moffatt, 2 f., 66, 116.
Moule, bishop of Durham, 210.
Moulton, 173.
Murray, 79, 92, 153, 194.
mystery, 95 f., 101, 109.
mystic, 60, 109, 117, 134 f., 163,
198.
Nero, 118, 148, 162.
Newman, 49, 78, 177.
Nicodemus, 186, 198.
Norden, 75.
Nunc dimittis, 38, 42.
Orioen, 56, 127, 212, 218.
Papias, 23, 28, 44, 171 f .
papyri, 173.
parable, 29 i., 34f.,89.
Parry, 86.
passover, 11, 174, 193.
Pater, 164.
Paul: captivity, 98; companions, 55;
conversion, 69, 162 ; creed, 3 ;
death, 115 f., 118 f., 162.
doctrine, 89 ff. ; of advent, 74 f . ;
79, 93, 162.
of baptism, 69, 87, 93.

234 THE FAITH OF THE NEW TESTAMENT

Paul— continued,.
doctrine of church, 110 ff.
of Christ, 3, 108 f., 162, 223.
of eucharist, 77 f., 97.
of justification, 89 f.
of predestination, 91.
of resurrection, 79.
of Spirit, 3, 64, 84 f., 109 f.,
162.
of spiritual body, 94, 102.
his epistles, 2, 46, 57, 80, 88.
Colossians, 101 ff. ; 1 Corin
thians, 76 ff. ; 2 Corinthians,
80 ff. ; Ephesians, 104 ff.; Gala
tians, 82 ff . ; Laodiceans, 57 ;
Pastorals, 58 ff. , 116 f . ; Phile
mon, 103 f.; Philippians, 99
ff. ; Romans, 85 ff.
his faith, 59, 84; life in Acts,
62 ff . ; in letters, 51 ff. ; mission
ary journeys, 70 ff., 98 ff.; re
lation to apocalypse, 92 ff. ; law,
84 f. ; mystery-religion, 95 ff.
his style, 76 ; the mystic, 93, 109;
the Pharisee, 2, 51, 68, 89, 93 f . ,
162 ; the slave of Jesus Christ,
86, 97, 99.
persecution, 118 ff., 159, 162 f.
personality, 114, 182, 196, 229 f .
Peter, 9, 14, 84, 175, 186, 228.
epistle of, 122 ff., 163, 230.
its authorship, 122.
date, 120, 123; disciplinarian
theology, 60 ; 125.
reminiscence, 125 f.
style, 122.
second epistle of, 211 ff.
Pharisee, 8, 21, 35, 51, 67, 89, 93,
162.
Philo, 191.
philosophy, 25, 32, 178, 222 f .
Pilate, 39.
Plato, 167, 191, 213.
Pliny, 119.
Quivwnque vult, 113 f .
Ramsay, 64, 70, 96, 146.
Ramsbotham, 218.
Rashdall, 90.
reconciliation, 214.
reformation, 217.
Reimarus, 25.
Reitzenstein, 95.
renascenoe, 217.
Rendall, 80.

Rendel Harris, 178.
resurrection, 14, 16, 43, 69, 71, 79,
143 f., 176, 185, 229.
Revised Version, 13, 43, 54, 78,
99, 110, 112, 115, 139 f., 156,
219.
Robinson, J. A., 6, 43, 112, 115,
152.
Rome, 43, 45, 56 f ., 65 ff . , 101, 107,
118, 126, 130, 148, 162.
Ross, 99.
Rushbrooke, 27.
Rutherford, 218.
Sacrament, 134, 143, 153, 164 f.,
185 ff., 225.
sacrifice, 88, 124, 127, 131 ff., 199.
Sadducees, 21.
Sanday, 25, 38, 86, 119.
Satan, 91.
Schmiedel, 167.
Schweitzer, 25 f., 92 f.
Scott Holland, 165.
Septuagint, 128.
sermon on mount, 31 f., 92.
sign, 184 f.
Silvanus, 55, 122 f.
Simcox, 173.
Simon, Richard, 77.
sin : in Hebrews, John, Paul, 201 ff.
slavery, 103 f.
Son of man, 12 ff., 215, 225.
Son of God, 3, 22, 26, 59, 92, 161,
165, 215.
Souter, 140.
Spirit: 7, 64, 112, 161, 177; as
Comforter, 165, 196 f. ; in Acts,
107 ; in John, 165 f., 194 ff.,
200 f., 215 f. ; in Paul, 82 ff., 87,
105 ff., 162 ; of Jesus, 73 f., 223 ;
messianic, 109; outpouring of,
215 ff.
Stanton, 6, 167, 171.
S. Stephen, 68, 110, 169.
Streeter, 29, 199, 229.
Swete, 27, 59, 145 f., 171.
symbol, 1, 187.
synagogue, 7, 129, 208.
Tacitus, 119.
Tatian, 4.
temptation, 31, 121.
Tennyson, 114, 198.
Tertius, 55, 88.
Tertullian, 126, 202.
Tertullus, 98.

INDEX

235

text, 13 ff., 43, 70, 72, 74, 78, 96,
110, 139 f., 152, 192, 219 1 .
Thackeray, St. John, 92.
theology, 83, 126.
Theudas, 64.
S. Thomas, 181, 186, 195.
Timothy, 55, 59; epistles to, 55 f.,
60, 115.
Tischendorf, 27.
Titus, 80 ; epistle to, 55, 59, 80 f .
Tolstoy, 31 i., 193.
Turner, C. H., 118.

Warren 99.
Westcott, 6,'28 f., 45, 56, 112, 131,
166 ff., 190, 203.
Whitaker, 133.
will, dootrine of the, 139 ff., 145.
Windisch, 131, 202.
Wisdom, 178, 208.
Word, 40, 178, 180, 196, 201, 223,
229
Wright, 6, 27.
Zacchaeus, 39,

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