,.^ ^ Y'\ '.,
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Turner, Cuthbert H.
The study of the Hew Testament, 1883 and 1920.
Oxford, 1920.

flgipethe/e BiS«kl .

The Study of the
NEW TESTAMENT
1883 and 1920
^n Inaugural Lecture
delivered bifore the Vniversity of Oxford
on October 22 and 29, 1920
BY
CUTHBERT H. TURNER, M.A.
Dean Ireland! s Professor of Exegesis in the
University of Oicford

OXFORD '
AT THE CLARENDON PRESS
1920

ADVERTISEMENT

Introduction 
/. The Second Century and the Canon
II. The Apostolic Fathers
III. The Apostolic Age .
IV. The Epistles
V. The Apocalypse and the Acts
VI. The Gospels ^ .
VII. The Synoptic Problem
VIII. The Text of the New Testament
IX. The Language of the New Testament
X. Patristic Exegesis of the New Testament

P-3
P-7 p. IS
p.ij
p.i8 p.2s p. 32
p. 36
p. 48
p. 63
p.6j

Apology is needed for the delay in the appea ranee of
what has grown under the writer's hands to larger propor
tions than he originally contemplated. The first thirty pages
were delivered [with some omissions) substantially as they
now stand on October 22 : the second part has been subjected
since delivery to a good deal of change, fhe material of some
pages was given on a third occasion, while the last few pages
have been added to avoid obvious incompleteness in the
treatment. Even so, this Lecture does not pretend to do
more than call attention to some not unimportant aspects of
a xery large department of study.

THE STUDY
OF THE NEW TESTAMENT
1883 AND 1920
The first name that would have occurred to me,
of those whom I should most have wished to number
among my audience to-day, is the name of William
Sanday, the fourth holder of the Chair to the succession
of which I have recently been called by the generous
indulgence of the electors. Dean Ireland's Chair is of
comparatively modern foundation : its tradition rests not
on length of years but on the more exacting heritage of
the distinction of the scholars who have adorned it;
Edward Hawkins (1847-1861), to be remembered here
not as the candidate preferred to Keble for the Oriel
Provostship, nor as the head who ejected Newman from
the Oriel tutorship, but as author of the Bampton
Lectures on Tradition, and therein of the v/ell-known'
formula ' The Church to teach, the Bible to prove ' :
Robert Scott (1861-1870), joint-author of the great Lexi
con, and therefore an imperishable name among English
scholars : Henry Parry Liddon (1870-1882), ' whose
polished style and clear-cut features suggested some
pulpit orator of the great age of the Church of France,
while his impassioned zeal and his devoted study of
Scripture recalled rather the most eloquent of all the
expositors of St. Paul, John Chrysostom of the Golden
Mouth : William Sanday, whom to-day we mourn, and
Walter Lock, of whom I may not, here and now, say all
I would, my immediate predecessors, both of them to
me the kindest friends and patrons, to whom, with
William Bright, it is due that I was able to stay on m
Oxford when prospects were not too rosy and I had
A 2

4 THE STUDY OF
almost made up my mind to seek employment in other
studies elsewhere.
This is not the occasion to speak of Dr. Sanday, save
for what he was and did as Ireland Professor during the
twelve and a half years from the beginning of 1883
to the summer of 1895. His Inaugural Lecture was
delivered a few months before I took my degree and
began the more systematic stud}'^ of the history and
theology of the primitive Church. I well remember
how in those early years I read and re-read the Lecture,
and on reading it again I am as sure as ever that my
first reverence and admiration were not misplaced. I
cannot do better to-day than take it for the starting-
point of my own address, as I attempt to estimate some
of the main lines of research, some of the principal
acquisitions of knowledge, some of the new avenues
opened up, that have marked the course of the" work
done on the New Testament, and subjects ancillary to it,
during the last thirty-seven years. Generatio et generatio
laudabit opera Tua.
In studying his Inaugural Lecture in preparation
for my own there is one obvious contrast that is
only too vividly borne in on rtie. He speaks throughout
with high hope, and with unabated confidence of fulfil
ment, about all the methods of teaching and lines of
research to which he intends to give himself: he had
published two books, but he dwells much less on what
he had done than on yvhat he meant to do. At the time
when he delivered the lecture he was still some months
under forty ; I, conscious of sixty years behind me, have
to justify myself more by the past than by the future,
and must be chary of promises to-day. Autumn, what
ever its merits, is not the same as early summer.
When Dr. Sanday returned to Oxford as Ireland
Professor, neither the duties nor the stipend of his
Chair were excessive (the founder having doubtless
anticipated that those who should be successively elected

THENEWTESTAMENl 5
to it would possess some other source of University or
College emolument), and he accepted, and retained
throughout his tenure of the Chair, an official Fellowship
at Exeter College as Tutor in Theology, together
with the theological teaching at Trinity. Nevertheless,
in spite of the duplication of duties, he was able to
develope the work of the Chair on new and important
lines. He had and he maintained, far beyond any of
his predecessors or successors, an astonishingly extensive
knowledge of the work being done on his subject abroad,
both in Germany and in America — he never, I think,
felt the same first-hand interest in French work, and of
course it is true that most of the best French and
Belgian work is being done on subjects outside the
New Testament — and in this respect we who come after
him make but a poor show at best. It would have been
a great loss to English theological scholarship in
general, if it had not had in Dr. Sanday a representative
who could join hands on our behalf across both the
seas. Yet I have not always been able to banish the
suspicion that there would have been some gain in
result, had he been less engrossed in other people's
work and less diffident about his own.
Equally significant was his constant endeavour to
gather younger scholars round him, and attract them to
grapple under his superintendence with some of the
problems which he thought most pressing in the sphere
of New Testament study. The meetings were called
by the German name of 'Seminar', but Dr. Sanday
disclaimed any personal experience of German methods ;
and indeed, when I call to my recollection the elaborate
equipment which the Professor of Mediaeval History at
Munich displayed to me with pardonable pride— a set of
three communicating rooms in the University Buildings,
one for the Professor, one for the joint use of the Pro
fessor and his class, and the third a workshop, so to say,
with reference library, for the students themselves— and

6 THE STUDY OF
contrast ajl this with our informal meetings in the Pro
fessor's dining-room, and the discursiveness of our con
versations (but perhaps for that feature I was responsible
myself), I seem to see an image of the difference between
the English and the German temperament, reflected also
in the difference between English and German output.
But if the Seminar dawdled, and was not businesslike,
and mislaid its notes, and arrived at no final conclusions,
I am sure that younger scholars received stimulus and
inspiration, and Sanday would have held I think that
that was better training for us than to produce cock-sure
theses and print premature dissertations.
I do not know that the far-sightedness of Dr. Sanday's
judgement could be better illustrated than in his choice
of the subject-matter propounded by him for investiga
tion by his two Seminars. I cannot be quite certain
that the selection goes back to the very first institution
of the Seminars : but at any rate from near the beginning
the one applied itself to the Synoptic problem, the other
to the Western text of the New Testament. Yet when
he came back to Oxford the prevailing view among
critics was that Westcott and Hort's Greek Testament
had solved the textual question once for all, and indeed
there are quarters where that superstition lingers still.
And Dr. Foakes-Jackson assures us ^ that men were
told at Cambridge in the nineties that there was no
longer a Synoptic problem to solve. Perhaps Sanday
was inclined to keep too many questions in a state of
suspended animation; but that is better than the risk
of premature burial, and the two subjects which his
prescience singled out more than a quarter of a century
ago are still very much alive indeed.
His lectures during his twelve years as Ireland Pro
fessor were practically concentrated on one single topic.
Occasionally he gave a course on Textual Criticism,
' Constructive Quarterly, June 1920, p. 326.

THE NEW TESTAMENT .7
once at least on the Theology of St. Paul, but regularly,
during not less than two terms in each year, he lectured
on the Epistle to the Romans. Critics might say that
such a limitation is not ideal, either for the Professor
himself or for the Faculty ; but sound as may be the
general principle, no one can regret a line of action that
resulted in the publication of the epoch-making Com
mentary on the Epistle, which Sanday, in conjunction
with our present Regius Professor, Dr. Headlam, con
tributed to the International Critical series. Its publica
tion was exactly contemporaneous with the close of his
connexion with the Chair. When in the summer of
1895 he was transferred to the Lady Margaret founda
tion, he left in the Commentary on Romans an enduring
monument of his tenure of the Ireland Professorship.
I
Dr. Sanday in his Inaugural Lecture puts, after
some preliminary paragraphs, the question what are
the subjects which fall within the province of the Chair
of Exegesis, and finds them so manifold that they
cannot be enumerated under less than seven different
heads. I shall adopt the substance of his definition,
keeping myself free, where it seems advisable, to
rearrange its details on rather simpler lines.
First came the History of the Formation of the Canon
of the New Testament. Obviously we are taken here
out of New Testament times : the conscious formation
of the Canon, and the attempts, even the earliest, at
sketching out a rule for inclusion and exclusion of indi
vidual books, belong only to the second century, not to the
first, and the process was not completed for two centuries
more. But the idea of a New Testament was more or
less fixed by about a.d. 150, and in the age of Irenaeus
and TertuUian and Origen substantial agreement had
been reached about its contents.
In this particular respect, then, the history of the

8 THE STUDY OF
•
Christian Church and of Christian literature down to
about the middle of the third century is a necessary
part of the province of New Testament study. But as
one whose main work has lain in the centuries after
the first, rather than in the first itself, I should like to
make a further plea on behalf of this wider knowledge,
and urge that in the study of the New Testament, as
indeed in every branch of special study, the true scholar
must extend his sphere of knowledge, outwards from
its centre, in some one direction or another. He must
acquire for himself some standard of comparison, he
must be able to set his studies in relation to something
outside themselves, or his work will be unintelligent
and unfruitful. In the case of the New Testament the
student's subordinate research may take the direction
either of the preparation in Judaism, or of the fulfilment
in the Christian Church, or of the background in the
pagan world. Best of all, it goes without saying, if he
make himself master of each : but life is brief, special
studies become more and more absorbing, and the
essential thing is to have some one corrective to the
dangers of a concentrated specialism. For myself, I am
sadly conscious of comparative unfamiliarity with some
of the branches of New Testament study : I can only
hope that it is not without profit to bring the trained
experience of a historian and critic, acquired in a closely
related sphere, to bear upon the problems of the first
Christian century. If there is one principle more than
another which I have proclaimed in season and out of
season, it is that historically you cannot draw an arbitrary
line between the apostolic and the sub-apostolic age,
between the literature that was collected into the New
Testament and the literature of the succeeding genera
tions. The history of the Christian Church began
with Pentecost: after that there is no clear dividing
line between one period and the next till you come to
the Edict of Gallienus in 261 or the Edict of Milan in

THE NEW TESTAMENT 9
313. To write, as even in recent times some eminent
historians have done, the history of the Christian Church
and exclude from it the lives and work of the apostles
is indeed a worse mistake than to write the history of
the apostles without reference to the history of the
churches they founded ; but the latter is a mistake all
the same. History cannot be constructed, like ships,
in water-tight compartments.
No doubt this isolation of the Apostolic Age, which
probably had its ultimate origin in a dogmatic tradition,
had more to be said for it even a generation ago than
could be said to-day. It might at that time have been
urged (though Dr. Sanday's own earliest writings made
large gaps in the argument) that, as we knew a great
deal more of the Christian history of the three-quarters
of a century before a. d. 100 than of the three-quarters
of a century after it, it was lost labour to try and illustrate
the known by the unknown. But now the argument is
out of date : the intervening years have contributed
notably to our wider and more precise knowledge of
the second century,'whether in the fixing of the chrono
logy, or in the vindication or rejection of documents
already known, or in the acquisition of wholly new
material. So much so, that some things even of what
Dr. Sanday then said could no longer be said to-day.
For the chronology of the second century Dr. Sanday
spoke (p. 15) of the date of Polycarp's martyrdom and
the dates of Justin's Apologies and death as 'pivot-
points '. On all of these a definite advance in precision
can be recorded. The Letter of the Church of Smyrna,
which is our authority, as it was the authority of the
church historian Eusebius, for the martyrdom of Poly-
carp, relates that the saint, who had then been a
Christian for eighty-six years, was martyred in the pro-
consulship of Quadratus, on a high sabbath, and on the
2nd of the month Xanthicus. These data were useless
to Eusebius, who placed the martyrdom by conjecture

IO THESTUDYOF
about the year 167 : but they were employed with great
skill by the French epigraphist and statesman, Wad-
dington (1867, 1872), to recommend a much earlier date,
Saturday, February 23, a. d. 155. Waddington's general
results were unimpeachable, but he had given no ex
planation of the ' high ' sabbath ; moreover, we know
that Polycarp visited Rome during the episcopate of
Anicetus, and it was not easy to place Anicetus' acces
sion before this same year 155 at earliest. My own
first contribution to research ^ was the suggestion that
the true date was Saturday, February 22, a. d. 156, and
I think that that suggestion still holds the field.
With regard to Justin, the Acts of his Martyrdom are
now universally regarded as authentic (thej'^ have their
place in von Gebhardt's Acta Martyrum Selecta, 1902,
p. 18), and the date of office of Rusticus, the ' praefectus
Urbi ' mentioned in them, is fixed to a. d. 163 at earliest,
fifteen years after the date proposed by Hort.^ This
gives us the terminus ad quem for his writings : a new
terminus a quo appears to be offered by the discovery
of the date of the prefecture of L. Munatius Felix in
Egypt (see Justin, Apol. i 29) as c. a. d. 151.^ Justin's
writings thus fall later than used to be supposed, and
both Apologies and Dialogue may now be safely placed
in the sixth decade of the second century.
For the contrast of the newer state of our knowledge
with the old is not simply that we have more documents,
though we have, but that more precision has been
attained, and the number of disputable points reduced,
in the use of documents already familiar. Sometimes
this will be by bringing down the supposed or traditional
date: Justin's are not the only writings cited by
Dr. Sanday in this section where the conventional
' In a paper read in Oxford on October 31, 1887, and printed in
Studia Biblica, ii (1890), p. 105.
'' In a paper (referred to by Dr. Sanday, p. 15) in tlie fmti nal of
Classical and Sacred Philology, 1856.
' Oxyrhynchus Papyri, ii (a. D. 1899), no. ccxxxvii, col. 8, U. 18, 20.

THE NEW TESTAMENT ii
ascriptions of early date have had to be curtailed. While
in the main the genuineness and antiquity of the litera
ture have been signally vindicated, some serious qualifi
cation would have to be made in regard both to the
pseudo-Clementine Homilies {^. 8) and to the earliest list
of canonical books called from its discoverer the Mura-
torian fragment (p: 14). Already in 1883 the older date
for the fragment, c. a. d. 170, had been challenged, and
I suppose it is now agreed that it should be assigned to
quite the end of the second century. But with regard
to the Homilies Dr. Sanday could still assume that
proof that they used the Fourth Gospel was proof that
the Fourth Gospel was older than a. d. 170. Since then
the age and the credit of this whole cycle of Clementine
literature has been steadily undermined : it belongs to
the third century, and not necessarily to the early part
of it.
If criticism, however, has thus reduced the bulk of the
remains of the second-century literature, discovery has
been no less busy than criticism, and its results are no
less noteworthy. To the last generation a primitive
literature of Church Orders simply did not exist : now
we have the discovery of a Latin palimpsest at Verona
which has led to the vindication for Hippol5^us and the
beginning of the third century of the so-called Eg3'ptian
Church Order,^ and, most sensational of all recent
trouvailles, the Teaching of the Twelve Apostles,
published by Bryennios^ in the very year of Dr.
Sanday's lecture. In Armenian the lost treatise of
St. Irenaeus e/y kniSn^iv tov diro(7To\iKov K-qpvyjiaTOi
' On the Apostolic Preaching ' was issued, with notes by
' E. Hauler, Didascaliae Apostolorum Fragnienta Verone?isia
Latina, 1900 ; E. Schwartz, Ueber die pseudo-apostolischen Kirchenord-
nungen, 1910 ; R. H. Connolly, The so-called Egyptian Church Order
and Derived Documents {Texts and Studies, viii. 4), 1916; and my
own articles in the Church Quarterly Revienu, 1917, 1918.
' Phiiotheos Bryennios, ^iba\x\ riiv AaSeKa 'ArroaTdXav, vOv irpSoTov
f/cSiSofieiiq, Constantinople, 1883.

12 THESTUDYOF
Harnack and a German translation, in 1907. In Syriac
Rendel Harris has found for us the Odes of Solomon
(1909) and the Apology of Aristides (1891) : the latter is
the earliest extant Christian Apology, and though the
uncomfortable habit of the second-century emperors in
adopting their predecessor's principal name makes it
difficult to decide between the Hadrian and the Hadrian
Antoninus which both occur in the address, it can
hardly be later than a.d. 140 ; the former work, though by
no means so early as some enthusiastic admirers have
supposed, may nevertheless be reasonably placed
within the limits of the second century.
Last in order let me cite what for the illustration of
the canonical writings would be first in importance, the
recovery in Egypt (1892) of substantial fragments of the
Gospel and Apocalypse of Peter, the former as startling
as the latter is dull. A writing is not necessarily inter
esting because it is primitive, nor has a forger neces
sarily much to say because he borrows an apostolic name
to play with. Neither 2 Peter nor the Petrine Apoca
lypse raise our opinion of the intellectual standard of
the circles which produced the more orthodox Christian
pseudepigrapha, the Sunday afternoon literature of the
ancient Church ; the Gospel of Peter arrests our notice
both because the author has a quite definitely heretical
axe to grind — he is a Docetic Gnostic who tries to tell
the story of the Crucifixion and Resurrection of a non-
human Christ — and because his work contains the
earliest known evidence for the existence and circulation
of all four canonical Gospels. For proof that this
pseudo- Petrine writer used each of the Gospels, St.
John included, I must refer to an article of my own in
the Journal of Theological Studies for January 1913, the
argument of which I believe to be as unanswerable- as
it is unanswered. Of course, the significance of this
Diatessaron, if we may so call it, of pseudo-Peter
depends on his date ; Professor Lake puts him 'between

THE NEW TESTAMENT 13
roo and 135 a.d. ' ; I should be content with a somewhat
lower estimate within the limits 1 15-140. Even so, it is
the most crucial bit of evidence for the history of the
Canon that the modern period has produced.

II
So far I have been speaking of the chronology and
literature of the second Christian century as it provides
and warrants the evidence for the use and authority of
the New Testament Scriptures. I pass to the group of
writings which lie themselves on the borderland of the
Canon, the letters of Clement, Ignatius, Polycarp, and
Barnabas, and the Shepherd of Hermas, familiar to us
under the common heading of 'Apostolic Fathers'.
Documents which at least sporadically were ranked
with the New Testament itself — two complete copies
of the New Testament have reached us from the first
five centuries, and one of them, the Codex Alexandrinus,
includes the genuine as well as a spurious epistle of
St. Clement, the other, the Codex Sinaiticus, includes
the epistle of Barnabas and the Shdpherd of Hermas —
could not be wholly left out of view, even if they were
not also the earliest witnesses to the apostolic tradition.
Here the new material, if not sensational in extent
or character, is again considerable. Of the Epistle of
St. Clement to the church of Corinth we have now in
print a Syriac version edited by Bensly (1899), a Latin
version edited by Morin (1894), and an imperfect Coptic
version edited by Carl Schmidt (1908). Of Hermas, on
the other hand, it is our knowledge of the original
Greek that has been reinforced, in one direction by
Prof. Kirsopp Lake's photograph and transcript (Claren
don Press, 1907) of the Athos MS., our only Greek
authority for most of the book, in another by the
publication at Oxford and at Berlin of several papyrus
fragments, too small in bulk to rank as a new witness to

14 THESTUDYOF
the text, yet, owing to their age, of great value for testing
the character of the late and corrupt Athos MS.^
But the outstanding event of the period since 1883 is
bishop Lightfoot's superb edition of Clement, Ignatius,
and Polycarp, contained in five volumes, published three
of them in 1885, the other two (posthumously) in 1890;
the greatest contribution made to patristic learning in
the last two centuries. The Ignatian controversy has
now been set at rest : criticism has done its work, and
the genuineness of the letters can never again be called
in question.
Only on Hermas, among the sub-apostohc writers, is
there crying need for work such as Lightfoot accom
phshed for Hermas' elder and greater fellows— greater,
since no one can claim any intellectual or theological
capacity in the worthy man, elder, since the attempt to
set aside the clear external testimony which fixes the
. date of Hermas in the neighbourhood of a.d. 140 seems
fortunately to have gone out of fashion. Some two
years ago, moved by the appeal of Prof. Grenfell, I
undertook— wisely or unwisely— the task of providing
a new edition. And a new edition of the Greek means,
in the first place, a new edition of the very ancient
Latin version. I wish that I could successfully appeal
to some younger scholar to aid me in the work and, it
may be, to carry it to completion.
The result of this preliminary inquiry has been to
show that the labours of the last generation have
secured for us a body of the Christian literature of the
second century better authenticated, more varied in
character, more precisely fixed in time, than our pre
decessors had at their disposal. This body of literature
' For a list of them see my article on the Shepherd of Hermas and
the Problem of its Text in the Journal of Theological Studies (1920),
p. 202 n. To the Latin MSS enumerated on p. 205 I am now enabled
(by the help of Dom de Bruyne, of Maredsous, who referred me to an
article of J. Warichez in the Revue d' histoire ecclesiastique, 1905, pp.
281 sqq.) to add MSS at Mons, Antwerp, Brussels, and Paris.

THE NEW TESTAMENT 15
is at once the test and the foil of the literature of the
New Testament. Ill
Next after the history of the formation of the Canon
Dr. Sanday placed ' what is commonly called Introduc
tion '. Before, that is to say, we can profitably concen
trate ourselves upon the study of the individual books
or groups of books which make up the New Testament,
there are certain broad avenues of approach which we
ought first to explore. We need not lose ourselves
in ' prolegomena to the prolegomena ' ; but still some
general acquaintance with the New Testament in the
largest sense should precede the minute investigation
of the parts. For this purpose the history of the
Apostolic Age and the chronology of the Apostolic Age '
must be constructed, tentatively no doubt and condition
ally, upon the testimony of the documents as a whole.
We cannot begin by ruhng out part of the evidence :
such assumptions as have to be made will verify or
disprove themselves as we go on and as we find what
elements are really irreconcilable with the rest.
Studies in the sphere of this preparatory discipline
have occupied no small share of my own work in the past.
On the chronology of the NewTestament I wrote at length
in the first volume of Hastings' Dictionary of the Bible
(1898), and, though I might want to make corrections in
detail, I do not think my main conclusions have been
shaken. This is at any rate true, I hope, of the second
half of the article, on the chronology of the Epistles and
the Acts. Only one important addition has, so far as I
know, accrued in recent years ^ to the evidence. Among
the obvious points of contact between St. Paul's mis
sionary journeys and secular history, the proconsulship
' See Wohlenberg, Eine Claudius-Inschrift von Delphi in ihrer
Bedeutungfiir die paulinische Chronologic (\>i&x Kirchliche Zeitschrift,
1912), and the literature there cited. I owe to Dr. Wohlenberg's
liindness a copy of his article.

i6 THESTUDYOF
of Gallio in Achaia is one : and the words ' in Gallio's
proconsulship ' occur in the fragments of a votive in
scription lately found at Delphi. The emperor named
is Claudius : the years of his tribunician power and his
consulship are unfortunately lost, but he was avTOKparmp
<t', that is Imperator XXVI. Now in an inscription
which can be fixed to August i, a. d. 52, Claudius is
named Imperator XXVII, and in another which co
incides with his eleventh year of tribunician power,
January ,25, a. d. 51-January 24, a. d. 52, he was Im
perator XXII (XXIIl) and XXIV. He was therefore
acclaimed Imperator XXV and XXVI somewhere in
the eighteen months between the beginning of a. d. 51
and the middle of 52 ; and as we may reasonably con
clude that -not more than the four acclamations XXII-
XXV should be credited to the single year 51, the 26th
acclamation will almost certainly fall in the first half
of 52. If the inscription implies that Gallio was in office
at the moment, then part of the twelve months of his
proconsulship of Achaia fell in the same half-year. But
as the proconsuls left Rome for their seat of govern
ment in the spring, his term of office may so far have
been either from May 51 to May 52, or from May 52
to May 53, with some balance of probability (since
otherwise both the 26th and 27th acclamations would
fall within three months. May i-August i, 52) in favour
of the first alternative. If, on the other hand, what is
possible, though not likely, Gallio is only referred to on
the inscription as a past proconsul, then the year 51-52
is the latest one possible for his term. My own date
for St. Paul's eighteen months' stay at Corinth was the
autumn of a. d. 50 to the spring of 52.
Chronology is to most of us the driest of the dry
bones of History: but though the dry bones in the
prophet's vision needed sinews and flesh and skin and
breath before they could live, yet after all the dry bones
were the substratum, and I am convinced that the

THE NEW TESTAMENT 17
most necessary equipment for the historian, and espe
cially for the historian of a period when the processes of
developement and growth were so rapid as in the
Apostolic Church, is to begin with a firm grasp of the
chronological framework. With the mind once trained
to be keenly sensitive to this side of history, intuition
can sometimes almost take the place of argument : some
suggestions and combinations even of the most eminent
critics are felt and known to be impossible. I believe
my own experience to be that I think out history in
terms of chronology.
The history of the Early Church, the history of the
Apostolic Age, has occupied during the last two genera
tions the attention of some of the greatest among the
theological scholars of France and Germany. Renan's
seven volumes, Histoire des origines du Christianisme,
Duchesne's Histoire ancienne de V&glise, and more
German works than I have the knowledge to enumerate,
evoke rather humbling thoughts in an English scholar.
The little books we do, I dare say, well enough, and
the little books are badly wanted : but there does not
exist, to my knowledge,^ in our own language, anj'
history of the Christian Church either during the early
centuries in general or during the first century in
particular which can seriously challenge comparison
with what has been done abroad — and yet Englishmen
possess in a larger degree than other nations the politi
cal sense and the sanity of judgement which are among
the best qualifications for the writing of history. At the
back of my mind from a rather distant date has lain, often
dormant but from time to time revived, the ambition to
give my best energies to this task. At least a quarter
of a century ago I accepted the invitation of my kind
friend Septimus Rivington to publish on a modest scale
a history of the ante-Nicene Church. In the intervening
* Dr. NoUoth's Rise of the Christian Religion (1917) is at once less
and more than a History of the Apostolic Age.
B

i8 THE STUDY OF
years the scheme has enlarged itself in my conceptions,
and I seem to see the right articulation of the subject in
a series of volumes, of which the first should bear the
title ' the Catholic Church ', and deal with the evolution
of the Christian society out of a Jewish sect into a
universal communion; the second, under the heading
' the Apostolic Church ', would treat of the process by
which, under pressure from outside and especially from
the rivalry of the various forms of Gnosticism, the
instinct of Christians of the ' Great Church ' as regards
their faith, their sacraments, their scriptures, their
ministry, was explicitly expressed with appeal to the
apostolic tradition ; the next, labelled ' the Holy Church ',
would describe the external growth of the body, and
therewith its more complex relations with the pagan
world and the consequent risk of a lowered standard of
life, till one Puritan schism after another tried to find
the holiness of the Church in its isolation ; and perhaps
a final volume on the triumph of the Church and the
heavy price that was paid for it.
That was my vision of the best service I could aim at
doing to the Church and to learning : it may never be
more than a vision. But at least on the history of the
Apostolic Age I have lectured regularly since my
appointment six years ago as University Lecturer in the
History and Literature of the Early Church, and I
trust, all well, to return to the same subject in my pro
fessorial lectures next term, with the definite hope of
some day developing the lectures into a book.
IV
When we pass to the New Testament documents by
transition from the history of their time, the classifica
tion which imposes itself is that which groups them
according to the date of writing. And if we take the
Apostolic Age to be the period which elapses between
Pentecost and the end of the first century, then the

THE NEW TESTAMENT 19
historical books. Gospels and Acts with Apocalypse,
fall into the later half, the Epistles, with really very
little overlapping, into the earlier half of it ; the years
from the persecution of Nero to the fall of Jerusalem.
A.D. 64-70, forming a sort of debateable land between
the one half and the other.
Perhaps it would be most scientific to begin with the
second half of the period, with the later documents, and
to work back from them to the earlier : but the cojnverse
arrangement is easier to follow, and it is also, as it
happens, more convenient, for it enables us to take a
fixed starting-point in the Pauline Epistles and to work
up to the Gospels, which in turn provide the problems
where the higher or historical and literary criticism is
essentially involved with the lower or textual criticism,
a province in which I hope I may have some contribu
tion to make.
Since Baur reduced the corpus of the Pauline Epistles
to four, there has been a steady and continuous move
ment of rehabilitation. The Dutch professor van
Manen denied indeed the genuineness of all, and there
by of course deprived himself of the most obvious test
for questioning the genuineness of any : but you will
not expect me to detain you in exposing the freaks of
which criticism can be capable. Nine epistles may be
said to rank, with whatever qualifications in detail, as
genuine writings of St. Paul, nor can 1 myself admit
that there is any case against the tenth, the epistle,
so-called, to the Ephesians, once it is realised that that
epistle is a theological pronouncement in the guise of a
circular letter. More doubt hangs over the Pastoral
Epistles, and there is certainly a problem here which
may profitably occupy our serious attention. While we
wait for the commentary which my honoured pre
decessor has had in hand for many years, and which the
opportunity of his present post may we hope enable him
to bring to completion, one may meanwhile emphasise
B 2

20 THESTUDYOF
some general considerations of the sort that are perhaps
liable to be overlooked. Critical acumen alone may so
easily lead astray, if the historical sense is wanting.
Even the evidence of vocabulary, taken by itself, may
acquire disproportionate significance where the docu
ments for comparison are no more than ten letters
spread over some fifteen years. Take the case of St.
Cyprian's correspondence : you have more than seventy
letters, packed into less than nine years, and there are,
besides, fragments of the contemporary correspondence
of Cornelius of Rome and Dionysius of Alexandria : and
contrast then the sparse remains of the Pauline literature
with hardly any other documentary background than a
few chapters of the book of Acts. Would not the won
der rather be if there were no holes to be picked, no
aTTopiai to be raised ?
It may be said that the fewer points of contact, the
more difficult to demonstrate genuineness. Of course :
but it is a fallacy to suppose that no document ought to
be used in evidence until its genuineness is demon
strated. It cannot be too often repeated that the con
verse procedure is the true one to follow : the presump
tion is in favour of any document that does not, under
historical criticism and literary analysis, reveal itself to
be a forgery. It is really not so easy as some people
seem to think to pass off counterfeit literature with per
manent success. The fourth-century author of the
pseudo-Clementine Constitutions and pseudo-Ignatian
letters deceives no one nowadays. Very nearly as
much can be said about the writer of the Second
Epistle of St. Peter.
Now on historical grounds I do not think it is too
much to say that the Pastoral Epistles offer no serious
stumbling-blocks. Even without them there is good
presumption for the release of St. Paul from his first
imprisonment at Rome. Internal organisation, in a
church which had experienced such intensive culture

THE NEW TESTAMENT 21
a,s that of Ephesus, may well have developed as far as
the stage implied in i Timothy. If there are differences
of vocabulary, if there is in the writer a certain stiffness
of mind which is not present in the Paul we know from
the remaining epistles, is this hard to understand in a
man whose nervous energy had had so many calls made
on it and had spent itself in responding freely to them
all ? Read the catalogue of the apostle's experiences in
2 Cor. xi, add to them seven years of increasing age,
anxieties, and infirmity, and you will surely realise that
there might have come a time when even the magnifi
cent vitality of St. Paul showed signs of giving out.
At least you will realise it, I think, as you begin to get
old yourselves.
I do not doubt that these Epistles, being more recent
in date and addressed merely to individuals and not to
churches, were incorporated into the collection of
Pauline Epistles at a later stage than the rest. Their
absence from the Apostolicon of Marcion (c. a. d. 140) I
incline to explain, not by Marcion's having wilfully cut
them out, but by his not possessing them in his own set
of copies. Even as preserved in the Catholic canon, they
may be thought to betray some signs, not so much of
an editor as, of an annotator whose remarks have found
their way into the text: the repetition of the phrase
TVLVTos 6 Xoyos, niarros 0 Xoyos Kal ndaris dTToSoxrjs d^ios,^
which seems extraordinarily alien from the style of any
St. Paul we can picture to ourselves, 1 should like to
attribute to the marginal note of an appreciative reader,
' very true ', * very true, as every one must agree '.
But it is perhaps not so much in any criticism of
documents, or in any commentary— not even in the
great commentary on the Romans of which I have
spoken — that the greatest revolution in our conception
of St. Paul's history has been brought about. It is
sometimes difficult to persuade oneself that Dr. Sanday's
' I Tim. i 15 ; iii I ; iv 9 ; 2 Tim. ii 11 ; Tit. iii 8.

22 THESTUDYOF
entry on office and one's own commencement of study
in theology ante-dated by some ten years the emer
gence of what we call the South-Galatian theory— so
completely has this theory become a commonplace of
our historical criticism. Sir William Ramsay was not
the first scholar to suggest that the Galatians to whom
St. Paul preached, and whose defection caused him
such acute distress and indignation, were not Galatae,
Gauls or Celts of ethnic Galatia, but the converts of the
first missionary journey recorded in the Acts, inhabitants
of Pisidian Antioch, Iconium, Lystra, Derbe, all of them
towns which belonged to Galatia in its wider political
extension : nevertheless it was he who marshalled the
scattered data into a coherent whole, brought up argu
ment after argument in support, and finally swept the
opposing theory from the field.^
To have abolished two putative journeys of the
apostle to northern Galatia, for which room could only
with great difficulty be found in the cadre of Acts, is by
itself an immense simplification of the history: and to
show that St. Luke has described in detail the preaching
to the ' Galatians ' is to raise the credit of St. Luke's
work, from the point of view of proportion, on a very
material issue, since otherwise the historian would have
passed over in silence what cannot have been a mere
episode in St. Paul's career. But I proceed to invite
your attention to the resultant indications of the date of
the Galatian epistle.
The older generation among us were brought up to
believe in four distinct groups of Pauline Epistles, of
which the epistles dealing with the problem of Jewish
and Gentile Christianity made up the second. And
within this group Galatians, which in subject-matter
most resembles Romans, had to be placed next to it-
after the two Corinthian epistles, if before the Roman—
' Church in the Roman Empire, 1893 : and passim since.

THE NEW TESTAMENT 23
and the conclusion was further commended because it
put the epistle in the proper position of posteriority to
the two supposed visits to ' Galatia ' of Acts xvi 6 and
xviii 23. But on the South-Galatian view there were ex
hypothesi much earlier visits to ' Galatian ' churches :
Acts xiii 14 to xiv 20 on the outward half of the first
missionary journey. Acts xiv 21 on the return, Acts xvi
1-4 at the outset of the second journey. The way is
thus open for an earlier dating of the epistle than before :
and an earlier dating has much in its favour. Most
emphatically should I wish to record my dissent from
the assumption that two epistles related in subject
must necessarily be related also in time. If St. Paul had,
at an early stage of his developement, hammered out
certain chains of reasoning in connexion with the claim
for Gentile Christianity of emancipation from the rules of
Judaism, and if this claim was insistently before him during
the greater part of his apostleship, how in the world can
the recurrence in both the Galatian and Roman letters
of the themes Law, Circumcision, the Faith of Abraham,
prove anything more than common authorship ? And,
on the other side, there would be clear gain, where tone
and temper of two documents differ so fundamentally, if
we could allow a somewhat wide interval between them,
an interval as between the heated and one-sided advocacy
of a cause whose fortune lay in the balance, and its tem
perate and judicial exposition when the verdict had been
won and the worst of the struggle lay already in the
past. The date of the Roman epistle is fixed : it was written
from Corinth in the winter of a.d. 55-56: the uncertain
factor is the date of Galatians. What is its relation to
Acts and to the Apostolic Council of a.d. 49? I have
always felt sure that the mission of the ' certain persons
from Judaea ' to Antioch in Acts xv i and the mission
of the ' certain persons from James ' in Gal. ii 12 are one
and the same thing, and that the vacillation of St. Peter

24 THE STUDY OF
preceded the settlement arrived at by the Council. But
I used to suppose, with Zahn and St. Augustine, that
while the visit to Jerusalem of Gal. ii i-io was the visit
to the Council of Acts xv, yet in Gal. ii ii ff. St. Paul,
by a possible, though not the most obvious, interpreta
tion, was harking back to an earlier moment. And I
cannot doubt that if the epistle was written after the
Council, the Council must be the subject of the pre
ceding verses : St. Paul could not ' conceivably have
avoided mentioning it, unless the epistle was written
before the Council And this is what I have come to
suspect may be the true solution. If the mission from
Jerusalem, flushed with its success at Antioch, had gone
on to Galatia and there weaned the Galatian Christians
from their allegiance, we can better understand the
apostle's hot anger against this 'quick-change' per
formance, oiiro) raxewy /leTariSeaOe (Gal. i 6), seeing that
only a few months had passed since he left them. On
this showing the epistle was written early in a.d. 49, and
is the first of aU his extant epistles.
From the Pauline Epistles we pass naturally to the
two documents of the New Testament that are most
nearly connected with them, the one through literary
dependence, the other by external attribution. Both
I Peter and Hebrews date themselves by their innate
fitness for a particular moment. They belong to the
border years between the period of the Pauline Epistles
and the period of the Canonical Gospels, when Nero was
making Christianity for the first time a capital offence,
and the Jewish revolt was bringing the long story of
centralised Judaism to its catastrophic close. No minor
objection, no difficulties of detail, can stand for a moment,
so I am convinced, against the broad historical probabili
ties of the situation. The Apostle Peter splendidly
inaugurated the tale of the literature of the persecutions,
when he sent to the communities of the Christian dis-

THE NEW TESTAMENT 25
persion of Asia Minor his letter of encouragement under
the stress of the first official attack by the Roman
authorities upon the Christian name. Less than a
couple of years liater the author of the Epistle to the
Hebrews calls on the Christians of the Holy City
to jettison their traditions and their patriotism, the
service of the Temple and the polity of the nation,
and to find in Christ and His religion their sole and
supreme satisfaction. To the Jew it was ' my country,
right or wrong' : the Christian was to bear the reproach
of pacifism, to abandon the city and seek Christ ' without
the gate '. As we know, the Christian community of
Jerusalem followed his advice, and by their flight to
Pella opened up a new era in the history of the Church.
V
Another book of the New Testament, the Revelation
of St. John the Divine, was confidently dated by the
scholars of the last generation in the same critical years
of bewilderment and change. Renan's historical sense
did not mislead him when he gave his fourth volume
the title of L'Ante'christ, and saw in the expectation of
Nero's return a central thought of the Apocalypse. But
it is now recognised both that the expectation remained
vivid and active over a number of years, and also that
there are features of the book which suit better a later
developement of the tension between Church and world,
and suggest rather the days of Domitian than of Nero.
With some of these historical relationships I tried to
deal in an article since reprinted in my Studies in Early
Church History.^ But if the Domitianic date (the tradi
tion of which goes back as far as St. Irenaeus) is now by
general consent substituted, criticism has been busy
instead over the internal analysis of the book, and it
' Oxford, 1912, pp. 189-219, ' St. John in Asia Minor : the Apocalypse '
(from the Church Quarterly RevieTv, January 1894).

26 THESTUDYOF
has become the mode to distinguish in it strata or layers
of various age and diverse origin. Apocalyptic literature
in general is peculiarly exposed to successive re-handhng,
and nobody disputes the composite origin, for instance,
of the book of Enoch. It jumps to sight, as the French
say, that the canonical Apocalypse is saturated through
and through with the language of the great prophetic
and apocalyptic writers of the past. Nevertheless,
it is an extraordinarily fascinating piece of literature
(far more so than most of its congeners of the same
type), and-I could not easily beheve that it did not come
red-hot from the imagination of a single writer. I am
the more glad to see that Dr. Charles, whose long looked
for volumes on the Apocalypse have just become avail
able, asserts the substantial unity of the book, because
I confess that I have been sceptical of the success of
the dissecting processes applied by him to other apoca
lyptic writings. But it would not be respectful to so
distinguished a scholar, without a prolonged study and
assimilation of the contents of his Commentary, to do
more here than call attention to its appearance.
In a sense the Apocalypse may be cafled a by-product
of the Apostolic Church. If its canonical rank was
never doubted in the West, it was cold-shouldered by
the Greek Fathers : we cannot tell whether it was ever
contained in the Vatican manuscript, and it never gained
admission into the Syriac New Testament. Critical
questions concerning it are not crucial to the history of
Christian origins, as they are in regard to the one book
of which it remains to speak before we approach the
Gospels. The book of Acts presents perhaps more opportuni
ties for the application to it of literary and historical
tests than any other in the New Testament. Are the
' We * passages, where at three or four points in the
latter half of the book the narrative is suddenly switched
on to the first person plural, the genuine diary of a

THE NEW TESTAMENT 27
travelling-companion of St. Paul, and if so are they from
the same hand as the rest of the book? Do the
numerous references to the political status of different
towns and provinces suggest an accurate observer and
a contemporary, or the reverse ? Is the record of St.
Paul's missionary work as given in Acts borne out, or
no, by the indications of the apostle's own letters ? And
does the picture of the developement of Christianity,
during the early period for which other authorities are
lacking, account sufficiently and reasonably for the
known factors of the case ?
On each and all of these issues the critics of the first
half of the Victorian Age were accustomed to condemn
the writer almost unheard. To the Tubingen school
the book of Acts was the most typical embodiment of
the spirit of reconciliation, at the moment of its triumph
over what they conceived to be the internecine quarrels
of the Apostolic Age. If St. Peter and St. Paul were
never on speaking terms, it was obvious that the com
piler of the Acts described events not as they were, but
as he thought that they ought to have been ; he may
have written as late as the middle of the second century,
when the Catholic synthesis was dominant and had
passed a clean sponge over the memory of all earlier
conflicts. The theory was extraordinarily ingenious, the pre
sentation of it was very able ; but it had regard only to
a small proportion of the facts. Already, before 1883,
Renan had declared for the Lucan authorship, and
for the homogeneity of the 'We' passages with the
rest of the book. Lightfoot had begun, what Ramsay
has ably and persistently carried on, the demonstration
of the historical accuracy of the setting. The redressing
of the balance in favour of the author of Acts, which
Dr. Sanday hoped to undertake, ' extenuating nothing,
but still less setting down aught in malice ' (p. 35), has
been during the last generation steadily pushed forward

28 THE STUDY OF
towards accomplishment. H arnack's whole-hearted con
version represents the new attitude of the German * Left
Centre'. I could not go so far as some conservative
critics are wont to do in asserting the writer's immunity
from mistakes, and for all I know he may have borrowed
from Josephus: but to me it is beyond dispute that
Luke, the disciple and companion of St. Paul, is the one
and only author of the book, ' We ' passages and aU, and
that it was therefore published some time between the
limits A. D. 60 and 100.
Of course this agreement as to authorship carries us
only a certain way. There are many other problems
that remain over for discussion, and with some of them
I hope it may stiU be possible for me to deal. My
earliest New Testament studies were connected with
the book : in the course of an essay submitted (un
successfully) for the Ellerton Prize in 1886 I examined
minutely the language of the first few verses of the first
' We ' passage (Acts xvi 10 ff.) with reference to the
language used by St. Luke elsewhere ; and I think that
that examination may even challenge comparison with
the similar tables made by Harnack in his treatise ' Luke
the Physician '.^ Much later, but still many years a:go, I
was invited to undertake the book for the International
Critical Commentary, and gave a partial assent on con
dition that I might share the task with a colleague. It
must be admitted that the work has languished, but I
hope that it may now receive fresh impetus, should my
colleague, as I anticipate, find in the immediate future
a position of increased leisure and greater opportunity
for research.^ The division of labour between us was to
proceed roughly on the lines that, while of course there
would be mutual counsel and mutual revision through-

^ Lukas der Arzt, 1906, pp. 28-46.
''¦ [The appointment of the Rev. H. N. Bate to a canonry in Carlisle
Cathedral is now officially announced.]

THE NEW TESTAMENT 29
out, my colleague should be responsible for the exegesis
and I myself for the introduction and the text.
On three heads of the subject-matter that would fall
within my share I should like to say something now : on
the date of the book, on its text, and (very briefly) on the
picture of the history presented in the first twelve
chapters. I. Of late years more than one competent scholar has
proposed — so far has the momentum of reaction carried
us — to date the Acts at the moment to which the history
in it is brought down, that is, at the end of two years of
imprisonment of St. Paul at Rome.^ It is thought that
the present close of the book leaves us, on any supposi
tion except that that was the moment of writing, too
much in the air : we want to know what is going to
happen, and whether the apostle was released or no : the
finis lacks dramatic fitness. Now if St. Luke's Gospel
was written after a.d. 70, and the Acts after the Gospel
(and I still regard both of these conclusions as infinitely
more likely than not), what answer can we make to the
objection ? Well, in the first place we might say that
St. Luke intentionally broke off his history before he
arrived at the first commencements of the clash between
the Empire and Christianity: yet if St. Paul was re
leased from this first imprisonment, his release would
have formed a better climax than his two years' im
prisonment to the narrative of pacific relations between
Church and State. Or we might, with more plausibility,
suggest that St. Paul's release, and his subsequent
travels West and East, and his re-arrest, and his martyr
dom, and St. Peter's martyrdom, were to form the
subject-matter of a third historical work, completing the
Lucan trilogy, which for some unknown reason was
never brought to birth : and this suggestion has some
1 R. B. Rackham, ' The Acts of the Apostles : a piea for an early
date ', in /. T. S. i (October 1899), p. 76 ; A. Harnack, Die Apostel-
^eschichte (1908), p. 217.

30 THE STUDY OF
support lent to it by the language in which the Mura-
torian Canon follows up its mention of the Acts with
the mysterious phrase ' sicuti et semote passionem Petri
evidenter declarat sed et profectionem Pauli ab Urbe ad
Spaniam proficiscentis '. But in fact the true explana
tion is, as I beheve, something quite different. I believe
that the Gospel and Acts form the two halves of a simple
and connected scheme, and that in order to understand
it we have only to attach to the two books some such
labels as these : Aoyos a, ' How Jesus the Christ
preached the Good News to the Jews, and how after
His Death and Resurrection He commissioned His
Apostles to preach it to the Gentiles ' : Aoyos ^, ' How
they brought the Good News from Jerusalem to Rome'.
With the two years' unhindered proclamation of the
Kingdom in the capital of the world, the evolution of the
Jewish Christian sect into the Universal Church was
symbolically accomplished.
2. On the problem of New Testament text I am
touching at a later point ; and therefore I wifl say only
one word here in reference to the Bezan recension of the
Acts. I had always wished to grapple with this thorny
question, and Dr. Sanday took it, not many years back,
as the subject for our Seminar : we came, I need not
tell you, to no conclusion, but I am bound to record the
impression received, that there was more to be said than
perhaps we had supposed for the originality of the
readings presented in the Codex Bezae. In regard to
one of them, historically I suppose the most important
of them all, namely the text of the Apostohc Decree in
Acts XV 20, 28, 1 am led for my own part more and more
to the conviction that D (with Irenaeus, Cyprian, &c.)
must be right in omitting the words ' things strangled ',
and in thereby placing the prescriptions of the Council,
' idolatry, bloodshed, unchastity,' on a moral instead of
on a ritual basis.
3. But the storm-centre of present-day criticism of the

THE NEW TESTAMENT 31
Acts is St. Luke's description of the history and deve
lopement of belief and practice in primitive Christianity
down to the time of the Apostohc Council. Had St.
Luke the materials necessary for a truthful picture, and
if he had, did he use them truthfully ? These and the
like questions are being raised and wifl be raised, for
instance, in the comprehensive volumes of which Pro
fessors Lake and Foakes-Jackson have just issued their
first instalment.^ To such questions I take the one and
only adequate answer to be on the principle of solvitur
arnbulando. Try to see what St. Luke really does tell
us of the successive emergence of the problems that
faced the apostohc Church, and of the manner in which
they were met. Does his story satisfactorily bridge the
gap between the first beginnings and St. Paul ? If it
does not, cadit quaestio. If it does, we have solved the
difficulty ambulando. And the strange thing is, I know
of no one who has seriously and successfully set himself
to see how, according to St. Luke's presentation, the
situation developes step by step from the elementary
principles of the infant church of Pentecost, past the
tentative advances of the Seven, to St. Peter's reluctant
action in the case of Cornelius and St. Paul's more
drastic action at Pisidian Antioch, till we reach the final
vindication of Gentile Hberty at the Council of Jerusalem.
I do not say that from the same beginning developement
must have moved by this route and no other to the same
ending: but I do say that St. Luke has given us a
rational, articulated, and satisfactory account, which has
every claim to be regarded as an honest and faithful
attempt to picture things as they really happened.
> The Beginnings of Christianity : Part I. The Acts of the Apostles
Edited by F. J. Foakes-Jackson, D.D., and Kirsopp Lake, D.D. Vol.
f: Prolegomena I, The Jewish, Gentile, and Christian Backgrounds.
Macmillans, 1920.

PART II

VI

An outhne has so far been given of the work that
has been done during the last thirty- seven years, or is
doing now, upon the Christian literature of the second
century, upon Introduction, upon the New Testament
books other than the Gospels : there is left over for
to-day ^ the criticism of the Gospels and the problems
of the New Testament text. But the criticism of the
Gospels might occupy a course by itself, and if I am to
say anything worth saying about parts of the inquiry
I must be very brief and summary in my treatment of
the remainder. In discriminating for this purpose, it
happens that Dr. Sanday, in the latter half of the period
under discussion — indeed, if one takes into account the
comparative suspension of critical activity during the
war, one might almost phrase it 'towards the end of
the period ' — dealt in two successive books with two of
the main topics of investigation, The Criticism of the
Fourth Gospel (1905) and The Life of Christ in Recent
Research (1907), published respectively twenty-two and
twenty-four years after his Inaugural Lecture. And
I shall be content to skim the surface of these two
subjects in a rather hasty review.
If the vindication of the book of Acts represents
the chief achievement for the modern period of con
servative reaction, the Fourth Gospel is undoubtedly
the book, out of the whole New Testament, in regard
' October 29, 1920.

THE NEW TESTAMENT

33

to which during the same epoch criticism has succeeded
in effecting among us the most serious breaches in the
bulwarks of tradition. Not long ago there could have
been at home, whatever was the case abroad, no com
parison between the respective calibre of the batteries
of attack and defence. Sanday's own primitiae, the
Authorship and Historical Character of the Fourth Gospel
(1872) ; Westcott's edition of St. John in the Speaker's
Commentary (1880); Archdeacon Watkins' Bampton
Lectures, Modem Criticism and the Fourth Gospel (1890) ;
Drummond's Character and Authorship of the Fourth
Gospel (1903) ; Stanton's Gospels as Historical Documents
(part i, 1903) — make up between them a firmly knit
catena : and Sanday himself returned to the subject in
the lectures, delivered in America in the autumn of 1904
and repeated in Oxford early in 1905, which he pub
lished under the title The Criticism of the Fourth Gospel.
He was then in the zenith of his powers : we, the
audience, hung on his lips, one might almost say, spell
bound : in some ways I think he never did better, he
certainly never did more characteristic, pieces of work
than in these and in the next published lectures.
Probably he reached at this point the high-water mark
of his cautious conservatism : his searching examination
of the attacks made on the Fourth Gospel by foreign
critics was damaging and (for him) mordant. Yet if it
is quite unjust, it is also not altogether surprising that
a profound religious philosopher of our own day should
single out this very book as an example of confused
thinking,^ for Sanday did not really make up his mind as
between the claims of the Apostle John and of another
John, not the Apostle, to be the author of the Fourth
Gospel. But it was just this reluctance to declare him-
' So too a distinguished Oxford representative of the school of ' liberal '
theology expressed disappointment, on his return from listening to
Sanday's Inaugural Lecture, at its inadequate grasp. Both expected
from Sanday something that he would have disclaimed any intention
of supplying. C

34 THESTUDYOF
self beyond where he saw clearly, that gave him his
unique hold as a critic on people's confidence.
The years which have passed since those lectures
were delivered and published have left their impress
upon English thought, and upon Sanday himself, at no
point more clearly than in the attitude adopted about
the Fourth Gospel. What fifteen years ago was the
predominant view among continental scholars is now
I suppose almost the predominant view at home also.
On what hypothesis Sanday finally fixed himself, or
indeed if he fixed himself on any, I am not sure : but he
had, I think, definitely moved away from belief in the
apostolic authorship, and refused to allow his early book
on the Fourth Gospel to be repubhshed on the ground
that its standpoint no longer commended itself to him.
Nor can I deny that I am myself influenced in a similar
direction — whether by contemporary atmosphere or
contemporary arguments it is not always possible to
say. Nowhere in the problems and moot questions of
the Apostolic Age do external and internal evidence
seem to provide so conflicting a report : and where that
is so, it is wise to avoid the language of dogmatic
decision. On the one hand, I have never faltered in the
conviction that the testimony of an eye-witness lies
behind this Gospel, for I doubt any man's capacity for
inventing such individual details as distinguish St.
Mark's Gospel and St. John's from the other two — and
when we are asked to believe in three or four literary
geniuses among the New Testament writers, all gifted
with this remarkable capacity for clothing their inven
tions in the apparent garb of truth, our common sense
revolts. On the other hand, I feel increasingly the
difficulty of bringing the whole of the Gospel into
relationship with the fisherman of Galilee, and take
refuge provisionally in the hypothesis that John of
Ephesus, the beloved disciple, was a youthful follower
of our Lord at Jerusalem, to whom His Jerusalem

THE NEW TESTAMENT 35
ministry would have been specially familiar,^ whose
house was there, whose acquaintances lay in the circle
of the Sanhedrists and the high priests, and whose
education, however profoundly Jewish, partook of the
wider Greek culture accessible at the capital.
The other book of Dr. Sanday's to which I have
referred, The Life of Christ in Recent Research, appeared
in 1907, and the core of it is contained in the chapters
entitled 'Twenty Years of Research', describing the
history and progress of the interpretation of the Synoptic
Gospels in Germany during the years which had passed
since his return to Oxford as Professor. The out
standing feature of this period was. the rise and rapid
growth in popularity of an apocal3^tic or eschatological
conception of our Lord's teaching ; and the outstanding
book was Von Reimarus zu Wrede (in the English
version. The Quest of the Historical Jesus), 1906, the
summary of a hundred years of Gospel criticism by
a thoroughgoing adherent of the new school, Albert
Schweitzer. These lectures of Sanday's seem to me to reach the
very height and culmination of his special gifts, his wide
reading, his careful delineation, his sympathetic criticism,
with (what is not present in all his writings) a capacity
to draw definite conclusions from the material before
him. Nowhere I think will you find a juster estimate
at once of the real value, and of the dangers and pitfalls,
that belong to the apocalyptic interpretation of the
Gospels : nowhere a judgement more sensitive to the
merits, and at the same time perhaps more alive than in
previous years to the faihngs, of German theological
scholarship. To Sanday's discriminating and penetrating verdict
upon the eschatological school I could whole-heartedly
' The argument for our Lord's ministry at Jerusalem, as implied by
the Synoptic account and necessary to complete it, is forcibly stated in
Dr. Holland's Philosophy of Faith &c. (1920), pp. 128-34, 153-5.
C 2

36 THE STUDY OF
subscribe: so far as my own opinion goes, it said
exactly what was wanted : but I was always conscious
of some reserve with, regard to his over-dependence, as
I thought it, on German criticism and German critics.
With the profoundest admiration for their industry,
their erudition, their courageous grasp of great under
takings, went the feehng that too much of their work
was lacking in certain essential qualities of proportion
and insight and historical sense : one could not wholly
dissociate their activities in the field of theology from
their activities in the field of politics, and if they under
stood no more of the mentality of Jew and Gentile in
the Apostohc Age than they did of that of the peoples
of Europe to-day, the validity of their conceptions would
be at a heavy discount. And there are directions in
which I have always thought that the best English and
the best French work— for I have been an advocate of
the Entente during the last thirty years— have no rivals.
Nevertheless, the danger to-day is that the scales
maybe over-weighted against the other side. Itis the
moment for generosity on the part of English scholars in
their recognition of German work : and the experience
of South Africa has taught us that the ventures of
a generous faith are well and wisely risked. Not only
is learning by its very essence cosmopohtan, but learning
with the contribution of Germany deducted would be
a very shadow of itself. Who can conceive the study
of the Roman Empire without Mommsen,of the origins
of palaeography without Traube, of early Canon Law
without Maassen, or of the literature of Christian anti
quity without Harnack ? VII
The Synoptic problem was given the place of honour
in Dr. Sanday's enumeration of the chief heads that
would demand discussion in any fresh Introduction to
the New Testament : and he devotes eight pages

THE NEW TESTAMENT 37
(pp. 20-8) to a sketch of the history of the problem and
of its position at the time of his Lecture. In 1883
hardly any result of first-class importance had been
made good. He could not at that time venture to say
more than that the labour expended had not been in
vain. But he pointed out the directions in which the
inquiries already carried out seemed to promise most
success ; and if a real measure of agreement upon all
the preliminary stages of the problem has now been
reached, that is due in no small part to Dr. Sanday
himself and to the unremitting zeal of those who worked
under his guidance.
As between the relative importance of oral and docu
mentary tradition in the formation of our Gospels,
Sanday had to admit that, though the documentary
theory had an almost exclusive vogue in Germany, the
oral theory had the greater foUowing in England. He
did not conceal his own leaning to the German view ;
but with characteristic caution he 'doubted whether'
German writers had of late ' quite done justice to its
opposite '. To-day there is not, I suppose, a competent
critic an3rwhere who assigns anything but a quite sub
ordinate part to oral tradition. Possibly Westcott's con
tinued championship of the oral hypothesis may have
been among the things which led Sanday in his address
on Edwin Hatch, a few weeks before his death, to utter
so unusually trenchant an opinion about the Introduction
to the Study of the Gospels. But Sanday not only followed
Holtzmann and Weiss in the conclusion that a close
literary analysis was the only hopeful avenue of approach
to the problem; by a sound instinct he could already
assert with them that this analysis inevitably led up to
the Gospel according to St. Mark as the nearest repre
sentative of the original tradition. Certainly we ought
not to be too harsh in our judgement upon the
Tubingen critics for taking their start from the Gospel
of St, Matthew — the real gravamen is that they were

38 THESTUDYOF
influenced by a priori dogmatic considerations in doing
so — seeing that they were only following the nearly
unbroken custom of seventeen Christian centuries.
But if the ablest critics in Germany and in England had
already in 1883 seen that the relative priority of
St. Mark to the other two Synoptists was quite incon
testable, they were still in bondage, as much as the
oralists, to the idea of a common tradition that lay
behind all existing Gospels, St. Mark as well as the
rest. Sanday himself divined the truth when he wrote
that ' St. Mark supplies the foundation of the Synoptic
literature ' (p. 25) : yet five pages before he had said that
' there is at the present time a general consent that the
resemblances in the Gospels are not due to direct copy
ing or adaptation of each other, but to the employment
in all of some common source or sources'.^ And
Dr. Edwin Abbott, whose Common Tradition of the*
Synoptic Gospels (1884) was my own first introduction to
the scientific study of the problem, said no more about
the alternative of Matthew and Luke copying Mark than
that ' that hypothesis must be dismissed ' (p. vii).
The hypothesis that Matthew and Luke had before
them not our St. Mark but an earher document very
like it— not ' Marcus ' but ' Ur-Marcus ', according to
the convenient terminology of the Germans— is ob
viously a less simple hypothesis than that their source
was just the Mark we know : and so far it would always
have been to my mind less probable. I have an incur
able preference for simple solutions of literary pro
blems ^ : experience seems to teach one that if 99 per
cent, of the evidence points one way, the remaining
' An opposite confusion in expression lies behind his language in
Studies in the Synoptic Probletn, p. 9, where ' the priority of sl. Mark '
is made equivalent to ' our St. Mark actually lay before the authors of
the First and Third Gospels '.
^ So too Sanday, Studies, p. 26 : ' the suggestions made in this essay
are all very simple. It is just their simplicity which has had the chief
attraction for me.'

THE NEW TESTAMENT 39
I per cent, may safely be disregarded — there is some
explanation to be found, even if with the knowledge
yet available we cannot find it. And by slower but of
course more conclusive processes the vast majority of
critics have by now arrived at the result which was
regarded only a generation ago as beyond the pale of
argument. What then were the obstacles which veiled the truth
for so long from the insight of inquirers? In the first
place, there were the so-called doublets in the Second
Gospel. If St. Mark wrote ' It having become late, at
the time when the sun set' (i 32), and if, out of this
double statement, we find one half ' it having become
late ' in the parallel passage in St. Matthew (viii 16), and
the other half ' as the sun was setting ' in the parallel
passage in St. Luke (iv 40), the prima facie explanation
would be that St. Mark was combining into one two
earlier and independent narratives. And so, similarly,
where St. Mark, ten verses later, has 'the leprosy
departed from him and he was cleansed ', Matthew has
only ' his leprosy was cleansed ' (viii 3), and Luke only
' the leprosy departed from him ' (v 13) : or, again,' to-day
in this night' of Mc. xiv 30 is parallel with 'to-day'
of Lc. xxii 34 and 'in this night' of Mt. xxvi 34.
But this prima facie probability quite evaporates when
we find that such duplicate or pleonastic expressions are
throughout characteristic of St. Mark, and that only in
a mere handful of cases will the suggestion that one
limb of the phrase is borrowed from St. Matthew, the
other from St. Luke, account for the facts. For some
times the double phrase is found both in St. Mark and
St. Matthew, not in St. Luke (Mc. iv 5 ; iv 40 ; xiii 28 ;
xiii 29) ; sometimes both in St. Mark and St. Luke, not
in St. Matthew (Mc. ii 20 ; iv 39; vi 36; xiv i) ; some
times in St. Mark alone, St. Matthew and St. Luke
using only one, but that the same, half of the phrase
(Mc. ii 25; iii 26; x 22 ; xii 14; xiv 68). The one

40 THE STUDY OF
feature that is constant throughout is the fondness of
St. Mark for redundancies of expression ; redundancies
which it is quite easy to suppose that the other Synop
tists sometimes accepted, sometimes pruned away.
But a much more serious stumbling-block to the
successful advance of the inquiry was the existence or
supposed existence of agreements of St. Matthew and
St. Luke against St. Mark. There is not much
difficulty in accounting for such agreements so long as
they are only negative, so long (that is) as they are
agreements of St. Matthew and St. Luke in omitting
words or phrases which we find in St. Mark : Sir John
Hawkins [Horae Synopticae^, 1909, pp. 117-52) has drawn
out excellently a dozen reasons which may have moved
the two other Synoptists to omit or alter this or that
peculiar feature of the Gospel that was, as we now
suppose, their exemplar. I should hke to add one
more to his category, because I think even Sir John
Hawkins has failed to divine the inwardness of certain
variations between the Synoptists. A peculiarity of
St. Mark — less likely perhaps to strike a modern reader,
because we should see in such details a natural feature
of first-hand narrative, but somewhat repugnant to the
conception, in a rhetorical age, of the dignity of history
— is his fondness for precision in numbers. On some
twelve occasions, numerals — they range from two to two
thousand— noted by him are omitted by the other
Synoptists; and since this may be called a standing
distinction between them and St. Mark, I demur to the
inclusion of three of such cases in Sir John's list (p. 152)
of the nine instances (he finds no more) cited as possible
evidence of a later editor's hand in our Second Gospel.
It is another thing when these agreements are positive
agreements, that is to say, when Matthew and Luke
not only agree in altering St. Mark's word or phrase,
but agree also in what they substitute for it. The
number of such agreements is at first sight impressive :

THE NEW TESTAMENT 41
and those who assert that for the matter common to all
three Synoptists St. Mark is the source of the other
two, have of course to give some explanation of what
looks like a fatal bar to their claim.
Now the explanation that covers the large majority of
cases is nothing but this. St. Mark's Gospel is a simple
naive and archaic piece of writing, achieving indeed (it
may be said) a very high art by its want of art, but
violating all the then accepted canons of literature : and
when two other writers set themselves to incorporate its
matter while improving its manner, the particular changes
which a sense either of form or of language would
suggest to two contemporary writers could hardly help
being in many cases identical. Thus St. Mark's most
characteristic mannerism is the use of the historic
present, especially in the phrase ' He says ' : the most
obvious correction for evangelists to whom the life of
Christ was already removed by more than a generation
of time was to substitute ' He said ', and on a dozen
occasions Matthew and Luke agree in doings so. But
then there are half a dozen further instances where
Luke also alters to the past tense, but Matthew keeps
the present of Mark; and instances again where both
alter but make different alterations. Another non-
literary habit of St. Mark is to begin his new paragraphs
with the conjunction /cat', while Greek usage regularly
for this purpose prefers Si : in twenty-six cases both the
other Synoptists substitute Si, but Luke again goes
farthert han Matthew. in his revision. And on more
occasions than one might think the same solution
will hold. If two Greek writers find a word or
phrase in their common exemplar repugnant to their
taste, and wish to change without more change than the
necessary minimum, the chance that they may indepen
dently hit upon the same alternative is really not incon
siderable. Remember that we have to relate the number
of agreements between Matthew and Luke where they

42 THESTUDYOF
modify Mark to the total number of their modifications.
Even a dozen agreements have a serious look if set by
themselves : but if there are fifty or a hundred cases, the
fact that in twelve of them the modifications made are
identical ceases to have at all the same importance.
Nevertheless it need not be argued, and I think it
could not be successfully argued, that all agreements
between Matthew and Luke against Mark are accidental.
For there are still other considerations to be offered
which will further reduce the residue of unexplained
agreement : and one in particular should be mentioned
here. It is, of course, well known that there is a good
deal of agreement, some of it exceedingly close, between
Matthew and Luke, in passages which have nothing at
all to correspond in Mark : and for this dual tradition,
as it is called, another common source is postulated
which is conventionally known as Q. The matter
traceable to this source does not extend to the Passion
narrative, and even for the Ministry it is concerned
rather with our Lord's teaching than with His works :
it is a Gospel of the Words of Christ, and therefore
some scholars have not unnaturally connected it with
that 'putting together of the Logia', to, \6yia aweypd-
yjraro, which Papias ascribed to St. Matthew. Now, if
we have two documents about our Lord, even though
one of them was primarily a collection of His discourses,
and the other rather an outline of His pubhc life, it
would in any case be natural that here and there the
matter of the one should overlap the matter of the
other. In such cases of overlapping Matthew and
Luke would have both sources to draw upon, and
under the circumstances it is exactly what we should
expect if, even though their main dependence is on
Mark, they should be liable to modify or amphfy his
account from the account of Q, and that from time to
time their modifications or amplifications should co
incide. And this conclusion is independent of the

THE NEW TESTAMENT 43
answer we give to the question whether or no St. Mark
himself was acquainted with and influenced by Q, a
question on which experts stifl take different sides.
Mr. Streeter and Dr. Sanday answer in the affirmative :
Professor Burkitt, if I understand him rightly, in the
negative.^ If Q came into existence at a quite early
date as a sort of manual for converts of the ethical basis
of Christian life, recollections of it would lie naturally
at the back of St. Mark's mind (or of St. Peter's before
him) in the composition of what was, I do not doubt, the
first Life of our Lord to be written.
The two explanations so far given cover nearly, but
not quite, the whole ground. There is still a residuum
of agreements that cannot all of them, it would seem,
be accounted for ; and in the view both of Dr. Sanday
and of Sir John Hawkins ^ they are numerous enough
and cogent enough to suggest that Matthew and Luke
had before them ' a recension of the text of Mark differ
ent from that from which all the extant MSS of the
[latter] Gospel are derived '.
That is a conclusion to which I should come very
reluctantly. A post-Marcan ' recension ' is open to the
same sort of objections as a pre-Marcan ' Ur-Marcus ' :
in deference to i per cent, of the evidence it intro
duces a new factor, of the existence of which we have,
otherwise, not the slightest indication. I should be
much more inclined to adopt, if it were necessary, the
simplei hypothesis that St. Luke had, at a late stage of
the composition of his own Gospel, come across the
Gospel according to St. Matthew, and had introduced
from it a new touch here and there. But where the
instances cited amount cumulatively to so little — Sir
John Hawkins only puts together (a) nine instances on
p. 152, where the hand of a later editor may perhaps be
' Studies in the Synoptic Problem, pp. 166-78, pp. xvi, xvii ;
Gospel History and its Transmission, p. 64.
' Studies, &c., p. 21 ; Horae Synopiicae', p. 212.

44 THESTUDYOF
traced in St. Mark, and (b) twenty or twenty-one in
stances on pp. 2IO, 211, where the concurrences
between Matthew and Luke seem to be beyond any
possible range of chance^ — they must be rigorously
tested, as Burkitt, for instance, has tested the second
list {Gospel History, pp. 42-58), and in the assay many of
them turn out to be counterfeit coin.
Thus Mark calls Herod Antipas ' King Herod ' (vi 14),
and possibly the title was used by the hangers-on of the
princeling's court : Matthew and Luke both knew that
in law he was no king at all but a tetrarch, and both
substitute the correct term. Mark writes ' O faithless
generation' (ix 19), where both Matthew and Luke
assimilate to a familiar phrase in Deuteronomy ' O
faithless and perverse generation '. And the same ex
planation of independent coincidence may really be valid
even where the agreements seem at first sight too
significant to be accidental."

* But it will be noted that these two sets of instances, if valid at all,
are valid only for two separate recensions : for those in class b are
cited as suggesting a recension of the Second Gospel represented in
the copy used by Mt. and Lc, those in class a to a recension of it not
represented in their copy.
' Let us examine one of the more striking cases in Sir John
Hawkins' list, Mc. vi 32, 33 = Mt. xiv 13, Lc. ix 10, 11, 'and they
went away in the boat into a desert place privately : and many saw
them going and recognised them, and ran on foot from all the cities
to meet there and got ahead of them.' Life-like, but these details
(' pedestrian ' in the strictest sense) were not in the manner of the other
Synoptists, and in particular there are three here of the Marcan
peculiarities most liable to their revising hands ; the plural verb
without subject expressed, the reiterated use of the group i'pxecrSai.
i^ipx^adai ane pxf<rdai, and the fondness for the word noXvs 'much'
or 'many' — in spite of the smaller bulk of his Gospel, Mark
has tpxcrdai and its two compounds as often as Luke and nearly
as often as Matthew, and ttoXvs oftener than Matthew and decidedly
oftener than Luke. Now Matthew and Luke, while in other respects
they manipulate their model quite differently to one another, agree
in four points against Mark. Both turn the impersonal plural into a
personal singular verb : both substitute for the colourless ' went away '
the more accurately descriptive 'withdrew' — though the one has
av£x^P'l''fv, the other vwex^pw^" j both abolish ' many ' in favour of
' the multitudes ' ; and both abbreviate the five words awibpapov cKtl

THE NEW TESTAMENT 45
I have left to the last— because with it we reach the
point of contact with another department of our subject,
that of textual criticism— the vera causa which has of
afl been most steadily overlooked or underestimated,
namely, the influence of readings introduced from the
text of one Gospel into the text of another. It is the
very ABC of the textual history of the Synoptic Gospels
that they were exposed to the danger of this conflation
from the earliest times. Whatever deductions have
been justly made from the universal applicability of the
old maxim brevior lectio potior, it remains beyond dispute
that the copyists of the Christian Gospels were con
tinuously enlarging and supplementing each record by
the help of the others. Eusebius drew up his elaborate
apparatus or harmony in order to equip the reader of
a Gospel manuscript with a check upon its scribe :
Jerome, in his preface Novum opus to the Vulgate
Gospels, emphasises with his accustomed insight this
primary cause of corruption, 'quod in eadem re alius
evangelista plus dixit, in alio, quia minus putaverint,
addiderunt ', and expatiates upon the value of the Fuse-
bian Canons and sections in this respect, with their
system of reference figures in black and red arranged in
the margin from the beginning of each Gospel to its
end, as adopted by him for the manuscripts of his own
translation. St. Mark was, from an early date, the least familiar of
the three Gospels, and therefore his text had, as a rule,
even where it was the fullest, less influence over the
other two than they had on his and on each other's.

(tai 7rporj\6ov avToii into r)Ko\i}i6r)(Tav aira- — and how better could they
give the sense, while refusing to fill their narrative with details that to
them only distracted attention from the central figure ? If Matthew
and Luke had not done this kind of thing elsewhere, such agreements
might have been decisive : but the changes are exactly on the lines
of the changes one or both are making through the whole extent of
the material they take over from St. Mark's Gospel.

46 THESTUDYOF
But the text of Matthew influenced the scribes of Mark
and Luke, the text of Luke the scribes of Mark and
Matthew, to an almost incredible extent. It has been
the business of critical editors from St. Jerome down to
Westcott and Hort to remove, bit by bit, the intrusive
matter. And the process is not yet ended : more than
one of Sir John Hawkins' final list of significant agree
ments between Matthew and Luke turn out, by the
evidence of what is known as the ' Western ' text of the
Gospels, to merit the name in no other sense than that
the scribes of one Gospel had borrowed from the text
of the other. I suspect myself that, if we were to dis
cover better and earher authorities for the Gospel text,
more and more of these supposed agreements would
disappear in turn like the rest. As it is, Burkitt
notes the following points where ' Western ' witnesses
throw doubt on Westcott and Hort's text in one or
other of Sir John's twenty agreements: (i) Mt. xiii ii
for 'the mysteries' of W. H. (= Lc. viii lo) read 'the
mystery' with the Old Latin and the Old Syriac (= Mc.
iv II). (2) Lc. viii 44 for ' the hem ' of W. H. (= Mt. ix
20), omit perhaps with D and good Old Latin manuscripts
(= Mc. V 27). (3) Lc. xviii 30 for ' manifold ' of W. H.
(= Mt. xix 29) read ' sevenfold ' with D, the Old Latin
(including Cyprian), and the margin of the Harclean
Syriac: Mc. x 30 ' a hundredfold '. (4) Lc. xxii 62 for
'he went out and wept bitterly' of W. H. text (= Mt.
xxvi 75) omit with W. H. margin and aU the Old Latin
manuscripts (= Mc. xiv 72).
Critical treatment of the texts is therefore reducing to
a vanishing quantity such agreements of Matthew and
Luke against Mark as have survived our other tests.
Shall I then be thought overbold if I go on to say that
this known cause, the desire of scribes to supplement
one account from a fuller account, has probably been
operating in cases where none of pur extant authorities
enable us to check it? The single really striking

THE NEW TESTAMENT 47
instance of agreement, as Burkitt points out, is the
common addition in Matthew (xxvi 68) and Luke (xxii 64)
of the words ' Who is it that struck thee ? ' after the
simple 'Prophesy' of Mark (xiv 65). Burkitt's own
suggestion is that in St. Matthew the words are ' a mis
taken addition by the Evangelist ' : but I prefer to con
jecture that it is an undetected insertion by scribes, of
the type of dozens of others that we can detect, into the
text of Matthew from the text of Luke— seeing that,
while the question makes sense in St. Luke, where the
covering of our Lord's face has been mentioned, it
makes no sense in St. Matthew, where nothing of the
sort has been indicated.^
I have said this in passing because I want to claim a
legitimate, if modest, place for conjectural emendation in
the text of the New Testament : it was one of Dr. Hort's
great merits that he saw the need and stated it. What
ever Divine providence has watched, according to our
Christian belief, over the inspired scriptures, we have
no sort of right to suppose that it has taken the form of
a guarantee that in some one MS or Version or Father
the original text of apostle or evangelist has been in
each case preserved. But my primary care at this
point is to press the moral that the conclusion to which
our inquiry has directed us, namely, that there is nothing
in the evidence to suggest the existence, anywhere or at
any time, of any other Mark than the Mark we know,
has been materially helped by evidence of the so-called
' Western ' authorities for the Gospel texts. And this
moral will serve as a starting-point for what I want to
say about the text of the New Testament. If in the
higher or literary criticism of the Gospels the one out
standing result of the work of the last generation is the
conviction that Mark, and our Mark, is the source of
' It is curious (I do not know if it is significant) that eight out of
Sir John Hawkins' twenty agreements occur in the two chapters of
the Passion Narrative.

48 THESTUDYOF
the triple tradition, so in the lower or textual criticism
aU the new discoveries, aU the new researches, point in
the one direction of an increased value to be set upon
the ' Western ' text.

VIII
The publication in 1881 of Westcott and Hort's New
Testament in Greek marked in more than one sense an
epoch. When the Greek Testament first appeared in print,
the fact itself, the chaUenge to the secular dominance of
the Vulgate Latin in the Western Church, was so ab
sorbing that editors and scholars thought little of the
possible variations between Greek authorities — and
indeed the materials were hardly then at their disposal.
What in effect they set over against the Vulgate Latin
was the Vulgate Greek : and for a century and a half
all editions foUowed, with only minute variations, in the
steps of Erasmus (1516) and Robert Estienne (I546),
though it is fair to chronicle the beginnings of an
independent text in the beautiful little octavo due to
Simon Colinaeus (Paris 1534) and the beginnings of a
critical apparatus in Estienne's folio of 1550. To our
own Oxford Press belong the real commencements of
the record of divergent evidence at the foot of the page,
in bish9p Fell's modest edition of 1675 and the more
stately volume of MiU in 1707. But again a century
elapsed between the first edition with regular apparatus
and the first edition that threw over the tradition of the
text as received, and reconstructed it in accordance with
the evidence. Griesbach's two editions (1774-1777,
1796-1806), Lachmann (1842-1850), Tregelles (1857-
1872: prolegomena edited by Hort and Streane in
1879), Tischendorf (editio octava critica maior 1869-

THE NEW TESTAMENT 49
1872 : prolegomena by C- R. Gregory,^ 1884-1894), re
present a gradual developement of critical texts that
culminated, in the period just anterior to Dr. Sanday's
return to Oxford, in the great edition of Westcott and
Hort. Whether as based on an ever-growing consensus on
the principles of criticism or as itself, recommended by
the unequalled knowledge and acumen of the principal
editor, it is smaU wonder that this text has exercised
a sway that is even yet hardly undermined over the
world of scholars. And synchronous as it was with the
revision of the Authorised Version of the English
Bible, it is smaU wonder again that it at once brought the
textual problem into the arena of the fiercest pubhc dis
cussion. It is difficult to reahse that barely more than
a generation has passed since Burgon's onslaught on
the Greek text of the revisers, so completely have the
old war-cries been silenced, so wholly has the con
troversy as to the original text of the New Testament
writings moved away on. to fresh ground. So far as
the work of the critical editors and of Hort in particular
was directed to the substitution of the text attested by
the oldest Greek MSS for the text attested by the mass
of mediaeval MSS, the issue has been settled once for
all. The textus receptus is as dead as Queen Anne.
Nevertheless an inquiry into textual origins will do
well to take its starting-point in the Receptus, not merely
because that was historically the text in possession
throughout the Byzantine period and for two centuries
of printed editions, but because its first beginnings can
be fixed with more precision of time and place than any
other ancient form of text. The Antiochene fathers of
the fourth and fifth centuries, chief among them Chry
sostom and Theodoret, witness to this form and to no
* Dr. Gregory, a Frenchman by descent, an American by birth,
a Gennan by long residence, fell in the great war, fighting gallantly as
a septuagenarian on the side of his adopted country.
D

50 THESTUDYOF
other, while, conversely, no attestation can be found for
it earlier than the fourth century. Claim was indeed
made in this sense for the Peshitta or Vulgate Syriac
version : but the origin of the Peshitta is to be sought,
neither in the second century, as Burgon asserted, nor
even in a fourth-century revision, as Hort supposed, but
in the work of the great Rabbula, bishop of Edessa from
411 to 435. ' He translated by the wisdom of God that
was in him the New Testament from Greek into Syriac,
because of its variations, exactly as it was.' Burkitt has
shown that there is before the fifth century no evidence
in extant Syriac literature — in particular none from
St. Ephraem — that points to the use of the Peshitta,^ so
that all the probabihties converge on the suggestion
that the new translation of the bishop of Edessa was
nothing else than the Peshitta itself, recommended by
the prestige of his name and authority to the almost in
stantaneous acceptance of the Syriac-speaking Churches.
The Peshitta, Theodoret, and Chrysostom, are witnesses
who point clearly to the fourth century and to Antioch
as the home and the period of the new Greek text. And
since we have definite testimony from St. Jerome that
the illustrious scholar Lucian of Antioch, martyred in
A.D. 311,^ produced a recension of the Greek Gospels,
characterised by the intrusion of unauthentic matter —
and the Receptus does in fact contain conflate readings
and additions from parallel passages of one Gospel into
another — I think, it unnecessarily cautious on Hort's
part to prefer the title ' Syrian recension ' lo the more
definite ' recension of Lucian '.
In 1883, the alternative texts whose merits were
debated were still only the Received text and the text

' S. Ephraim's Quotations from the Gospel (Texts and Studies,
vii 2), 1901 : Evangelion da-Mepharreshe, 1904.
' There are not so many scholars who were martyrs or martyrs
who were scholars that we can afford to drop his name, as it is now
proposed to do, frora our Prayer Book kalendar.

THE NEW TESTAMENT 51
of the great Greek uncial MSS : it is therefore the
more noticeable that Dr. Sanday in his summary of the
question lets fall (p. 41) the pregnant remark that the Re
ceived text, though 'not demonstrably ancient' itself,
was largely made up of ancient elements. Where
Lucian gives a conflate reading, the two limbs of the
conflation were each of them ex hypothesi in existence
already; and in view of the paucity of Antiochene
evidence (indeed of any Eastern Greek evidence save
Alexandrine) from the second and third centuries, the
texts that are embedded in the Receptus are a source of
knowledge not to be disregarded. Dr. Sanday refers
(p. 44) to collections of material that he had made with
a view of probing farther into the origin and distribution
of varieties of text— it is only since his death that I have
fully understood how extensive his preparations were,
or how many notebooks and folio sheets were fiUed
with elaborately tabulated evidence of the earlier wit
nesses — and these he hoped to reduce ' before very long'
to shape, and offer them as his contribution to the
debate. What in the end he did do can be seen in the
second part (1886) of the series inaugurated under
the auspices of bishop (at that time professor) John
Wordsworth and himself, Old Latin Biblical Texts : and
valuable as is the whole series, the nucleus of it is con
tained in this edition of the precious fragment of the
Gospels as St. Cyprian read them, known as k, and in
Sanday's minute investigation (pp. xlii-clxvi, 95-122) of
its palaeography, its style, its diction, and of the Greek
text that lies behind it. This work on the earliest type
of Latin Gospel MSS was the first-fruits of Sanday's
professorial activity, and it was intended to be followed
by parallel work on the New Testament citations of the
earliest Western Fathers. The first beginnings of the
Novum Testamentum S. Irenaei must go back at least
five and thirty years : I myself ^as employed in revising
for him the apparatus criticiis of Old Latin authorities
D 2

52 THESTUDYOF
before I went to Magdalen in 1889, proofs began to
come in certainl}' as far back as 1894, and it is almost
a full decade since I completed my own share of the
book with a series of ' Notes, Additions, and Corrections
to the text of the Gospels and Acts '. For several years
the book has only been waiting for the preface and
summary of results: Dr. Sanday had made, I think,
several efforts to accomphsh this, but he was anxious to
satisfy his fastidious judgement on the date of the Latin
Irenaeus — about which his two principal collaborators
held divergent views — and his later interests had moved
rather far from textual criticism and patristic literature.
It was worth while waiting for something from his pen :
but now that we may no longer 100k for that, the call
for speedy pubhcation is imperious.
Even more important would be a re-edition of St.
Cj'prian's Testimonia, or 'handbook of Scripture proofs ',
to which our Seminar devoted itself during several
successive years : I have myself collated or re-collated
most of the older MSS, and after the Irenaeus is off
the stocks I look forward to grappling with the com
panion project. There should be no insuperable
difficulties about its accomplishment, for the guiding
principles are as clear to us now as they were obscure
to Hartel when that scholar edited St. Cyprian for the
Vienna Corpus half a century ago.
But the Irenaeus is not the only undertaking which
stands between the Cyprian and immediate publica
tion. To yet another great department of Latin Bible
study Oxford has given of its best ; and we can augur
a happier future and speedier completion of the. edition
of the Vulgate New Testament, now that the partner of
bishop Wordsworth's labours has returned to settle
among us. No one who knows the conditions of the
problem could have reasonably expected that any new
text of the Vulgate should take us back at one stride
from the official Sixtine and Clementine Bibles to the

THE NEW TESTAMENT

53

autographs, of St. Jerome. The editors have recovered
the text as Cassiodorus published it in Southern Italy
in the middle of the sixth century: but there is still
a gap to be bridged between a sixth-century edition,
however carefully executed, and the original work.
Dom Chapman, in his Notes on the Early History of the
Vulgate Gospels (Oxford 1908), began breaking up the
ground : I hope myself to write one chapter of the missing
history by editing the fragments .of a St. Gall MS of
the Vulgate Gospels (not used by Wordsworth and
White), coeval with Cassiodorus in date but representa
tive of a quite different locality. My transcript has
stood in type since 1907 : only in the present summer
was I able to revisit Switzerland in order to finish off
my work with the help of a new method of decipher
ment which I had only found out on my previous visit in
time to apply it to the two later Gospels. Now that I
have done my best with the text, the patience of the
Clarendon Press must be no longer abused, and the
St. Gall book must take precedence of the Testimonia,
In thus describing the study given by Sanday and
others during the last generation to the Latin New
Testament, I am not losing sight of my main purpose in
this section of my lecture. For if the task of Hort and
his immediate predecessors was to establish by irrefrag
able proofs the superiority of the great Greek MSS
to the textus receptus, our task to-day is to inquire how
far exclusive dependence on these few Greek witnesses
should be modified by taking account of other equally
ancient texts attested in the versions. Translation of
the New Testament into the vernacular languages does
not in my own judgement go as far back as most critics
have been inchned to think : Greejc was the sacred
language of the primitive Christians in something of
the same way, though not to the same degree, as
Hebrew was of the Jews. But the origin of the earliest
versions, the Old Latin, the Old Syriac, and the Old

54 THESTUDYOF
Coptic, ante-dates in any case the earliest extant Greek
MSS. Naturally the Old Latin was the first to become
known to Western scholars, and it was to define the
type of text found in Latin MSS and Latin Fathers
that the geographical title 'Western' was invented by
Griesbach. But the name became a mere conventional
label when the monasteries of the East yielded up to
explorers first one and then a second early Gospel text
from the Syriac-speaking church. The Syriac Diates
saron of Tatian may indeed have owed its ' Western '
character to the original Greek MS of the Gospels out
of which Tatian constructed his Harmony at Rome.
But the ' Separate Gospels ' of the church of Edessa
were an indigenous and not an imported product, and
were rendered no doubt into Syriac from the text of the
nearest, or the nearest important, Greek-speaking Church.
So long as the Peshitta was supposed to contain the
primitive form of the Syriac New Testament, that Greek
text would have corresponded roughly to the Receptus.
But we have now in our hands the evidence of an
earlier translation, that stands in the same sort of rela
tion to the Peshitta as the Old Latin to the Vulgate.
In 1858 Cureton published his Remains ofa very antient
Recension of the Four Gospels in Syriac : the ' remains '
were already sufficient to indicate the ' Western ' affini
ties of the recension, and the proof was clenched when
a more complete and purer Old Syriac Gospel text was
detected as the underlying writing of a palimpsest noticed
and photographed by Mrs. Lewis and her sister, Mrs.
Gibson, at Mount Sinai. The preliminary edition in
1894 was foUowed by more than one issue of supple
mentary material, and the evidence of both the Cure-
tonian and the Sinaitic was combined in Burkitt's
Evangelion da-Mepharreshe, 1904. Of all additions, since
the pubhcation of Westcott and Hort, to our knowledge
of the early texts of the Gospels, this Sinai Syriac MS
is the most weighty.

THE NEW TESTAMENT 55
Agreement between the Greek texts represented in
the Old Latin and the Old Syriac respectively must be
extraordinarily significant, unless the sources of the two
versions can be brought so near one another that their
consensus ceases to represent independent lines of
descent. At one time Dr. Sanday had looked to
Antioch and the personnel of the Roman administration
there for the first Latin translators of the New Testa
ment. But it is not only the Latin texts of the Western
Church that are ' Western ' ; we have behind them the
Greek Testament used by Irenaeus and Tatian : and
the presumption in favour of Rome or Africa as the
home of the primitive Latin Bible is overwhelming.
Not so old as the Old Latin or the Old Syriac, but still
not later than the end of the third century, is the Old
Coptic : and of this, too, our knowledge has been
materially enlarged, now that Mr. Horner has followed
up his edition of the relatively unimportant Memphitic
or North-Egyptian version (1898-1905) with the Gospels
(191 1) and Pauline Epistles (1920) in the Thebaic or
Sahidic dialect of Southern Egypt : it is, of course,
what we should expect, that an Egyptian vernacular
version was first wanted in the districts most remote
from the Greek culture of Alexandria. And the Old
Coptic, though not so definitely Western as the Latin
or the Syriac, is not without ' Western ' elements.
The weak point in the external evidence for the
' Western ' text was the comparative absence of support
for it among the Greek uncial MSS. The sohtary ex
ception was the Graeco- Latin Codex Bezae (D), and it
was always possible to urge that not only was the
origin of a bilingual MS to be sought in regions where
Greek was not the dominant language, but also that in
such MSS the text in the Greek page or column was
pecuUarly liable to be adapted, in the course of succes
sive copying, to the text of the vernacular. And in the
case of D it is not easy to resist the suspicion that this

56 THESTUDYOF
tendency has in fact been at work. Within the last few
years, however, a Greek MS of the Four Gospels, written
probably before the end of the fifth century, and there
fore as old as any of our MSS except x and B, has
been purchased (1906) in Egypt by an American collec
tor, Mr. C. L. Freer, and will eventually find its home
in Washington. Most of the letters of the alphabet
having been already annexed for important MSS, the
new discovery will be known as W, a letter which
hitherto had been employed to denominate only some
smaU fragments.^ And W is an Egyptian Gospel-book
of a Western type: it arranges the Gospels in the
Western order, Matthew John Luke Mark, and in one
part of St. Mark's Gospel it corresponds almost -word
for word with the important Old Latin MS e— next to k
the best representative of the African text. When
e gives us in Mc. i 27 ' quaenam esset doctrina haec in-
potentabilis ' and W m ^ SiSax^i Katvrj avr-rj fj i^ovaia-
(TTiKri avTov, the one might seem to have been the actual
model of the other.^
The plain fact is that the ' Neutral ' text (to use Hort's
phrase for the type to which he pinned his faith) has
little or no support outside Egypt and Palestinian
Caesarea, and only a qualified support from the earliest
witnesses of Egypt itself. The one version that is most
fundamentally ' Neutral ' is the Memphitic or Bohairic :
but then that version, of which Hort wrote that 'the
greater part cannot well be later than the second cen-
¦ tury', is now by competent Coptic scholars transferred
to the fifth. The oldest Egyptian father whose works
' I am not sure that I did not myself propose this symbol to Dr.
Gregory at the time when he was corresponding with foreign scholars
(1907 or 1908 ?) about the advantages (or otherwise) of renaming all
our Greek MSS.
' The New Testatnent Manuscripts in. the Freer Collection : Part I,
The Washington MS of the Four Gospels. By Henry A. Sanders,
University of Michigan. 1912. See especially pp. 64 ff. I ought to
say that I am very far from agreeing with the judgements of the
editor on problems of textual criticism : but his work is indispensable.

THE NEW TESTAMENT 57
are extant is Clement of Alexandria : and Clement's
affinities are pow discovered to be not with B and the
Coptic Versions, but with D and the Old Latin.^ It is
true that a papyrus leaf of the third century,'* containing
most of Matt, i 1-20, presents some very striking agree
ments, especially in orthography, with B : but on the
other hand, the two oldest Greek MSS of the Western
type are localised, W certainly, D according to the in
dependent opinion of Prof. A. C. Clark and Dr. E. A.
Lowe, to Egypt. Long ago Griesbach indicated the
probabihty that Origen used an 'Alexandrine' (what
Hort would call a Neutral) text of St. Mark whUe writ
ing his Commentary on St. John, and a Western text of
St. Mark while writing his Commentary on St. Matthew.
It seems clear that both the Western and the Neutral
types of New Testament text existed in Egypt before
the end of the third century : but the earlier of the two",
so far as our extant evidence goes, was the Western,
and if the emergence and popularity of one or the other
was due to a definite recension, that recension must be
what we have before us in n and B. It is very difficult,
in face of a common error shared by nB like Mc. iv 21
' ought not the lamp to be put under the lampstand ? ' —
imo for iwi — to deny the existence of a common strain in
their^near ancestry. It is another matter whether we
can go on with von Soden ^ to identify the author of
this recension with the Hesychius whose work on the
LXX and on the Gospels Jerome mentions side by side
1 Biblical Text of Clement of Alexandria, P. M. Barnard and F. C.
Burkit^ (Texts and Studies v 5, 1899), p. xi.
" Oxyrhynchus Papyri, ed. Grenfell and Hunt, i p. 4 : with B alone
it gives the spellings iapi in w . 3 and oipetnv in 2*. 6 : with B (and D
in St. Luke) ptaBOav in v. 15 : with N B ^ and the Egyptian versions
(therefore rightly) /Sofy in v. 5. Also the correct bayparia-ai in v. 19
with B k Eus.
' The vast edition of Baron Hermann von Soden, Die Schriften des
Neuen Testaments- in ihrer dltesten erreichbaren Textgestalt {\ i, 1902 ;
I ii, 1906; I iii, 1907; I iv, 1910; II, 1913 : in all about 3,150
quarto pages) must be mentioned with all honour : but I find it an
almost impossible book to use with advantage.

58 THESTUDYOF
with Lucian's. For myself I should rather think of
Origen. In any case, the nB recension can hardly be
later than a. d. 250.
What amount of alteration in our critical texts would
follow on a fuller recognition of the claim of the ' West
ern ' witnesses to contribute their quota towards the
restoration of the apostolic autographs? This is the
sum of the whole matter : and of course the argument
from the superior antiquity and universality of the
' Western ' text is inconclusive until it is reinforced by
argument from the superior probability of Western
readings. In textual criticism external and internal
evidence are alike indispensable. Perhaps, therefore,
the best way to point the moral of this and the preced
ing section of my Lecture wiU be to cite a few variants,
both important and unimportant, in St. Mark's Gospel,
where the printed texts should (as I think) be altered in
accordance with the text of some or all of the ' Western '
authorities, and to illustrate further by two or three
examples the occasional employment of the more
drastic remedies of transposition or emendation.^
(a) Mc. i 41 Kal (rTrXayxvicrOeis cKTeii/as ri)V x^'P" "iToO fjyjfaTo (Mt.
viii 3 = Lc. V 13 KOI eKreivas Tr]v X^^P" 'I'^oto avTOv). For <rriKayxvi<T6fls
D affr* Ephraem with W. H. margin read opyiaOeis : rightly, because
if (nrkayxvurBils had Stood in St. Mark's text (i) Matthew and Luke
would not both have omitted it, (ii) it is inconceivable that any scribes
should have changed anXayxviadeis to opyurdels ; whereas if opyurdeis
were original, we can understand both why Mt. and Lc. dropped the
word, and why an early scribe of Mc. altered it.
{b) Mc. iii 7 Kal no\v nXrjdos airo tijs FaKiKaias riKoXovdrjirev Ka\ ano
TTJs 'lovSatas Kal airo 'UpoaoXvpuav . . . Km TTfpi Tvpov kcii Si$ui<S TrX^^or
^ It is not contended that the 'Western' authorities are always,
or even that (unless united) they are generally right, but only that
their evidence can no longer be neglected— as it -was neglected in
the text of Westcott and Hort. Even so, it should not be forgotten
that (i) W. H. were the first editors to follow the ' Western ' tradition in
what they awkwardly called its ' Non-interpolations ', and (2) their
margin goes farther in the recognition of Western readings than their
text.

THE NEW TESTAMENT 59
TToXv iKoiovTts oiTa TTOui riKBov npos avTuv (cf. Mt. xii 15, iv 25: Lc.
VI 17). Here ^/coXoutf^o-ev is omitted by D, two cursives, the Old
Latin, and the Old Syriac : rightly, for (i) the sentence is complete
without it, rjxeov being the verb for the whole sentence, while the
insertion produces an anacoluthon ; (ii) it is inserted by different
authorities at different points, after rnXiXamr (A B L), after 'iovbaias
(N C A 33), after StSi^a (W) ; (iii) some insert ^xoXouft/o-er sing., some
ilKoXoidrio-av plur. ; (iv) the word is found in both parallels in Matthew,
and may have been inserted from them in the hope of easing a long
sentence— if indeed the word was not the natural one to insert without
the authority of any specific parallel.
(c) Mc. iii 31 KOI 'ipxovTat rj pr)Trjp avTov Kal oi dScXcfiol airov. Here
tpxerni is read by X D W, the cursive i, and the best Old Latins : it is
supported by the parallel trapeyeviTo in Lc. viii 19 : and the singular is
exactly in St. Mark's style, i 36 KarcSia^ev airov Sipav Kal ol per' airov
(here it is the K B group which is right), viii 27 €$fjX6ev 6 "lijo-oCy kuI oi
padrfral airov. There was a persistent tendency on the part of scribes
to smooth away such apparently ungrammatical phrases.
(d) Mc. vii 24 an^XBev els ra opta Tvpov Kal SiSoii/ot. The last two
words are omitted by D LWA, Old Latins, Old Syriac, and Origen,
with W. H. margin, rightly > for in fact our Lord was at Tyre and came
back through Sidon (v. 31). St. Matthew, from whose parallel text
(xv 21) the words ' and Sidon ' have come into St. Mark, was not so
much interested in the details of the route, and lumps together the two
references in St. Mark 'to Tyre' 'from Tyre through Sidon' into
the single reference ' to Tyre and Sidon '.
(e) Mc. viii 26 (Textus Receptus) Kal aniaraXfv airov €is roi' oIkov
avTOv Xeyav MtjSc ch rrjv Ka>p.j]v ela-eXBjjs pijSi f otije nvl iv rjj Ktopr/ ; W. H.
omit the last six words with N B 1 and the Sinai Syriac ; k, with nemini
dixeris in castello, omits the previous five words ; D vvaye ds tov oIkov
(TOV Kal pTjbevl eiTrrjs els r^v Kapijv I Other combinations in minor authori
ties of these various elements. Now here two things may be safely
said at once : the reading of T. R. is a conflation of two earlier readings,
that of N B and that of i; and the maye els rbv oIkov a-uv of D, the
Ferrar group, and some Latins, can hardly stand against the earliest
Greek and Latin and Syriac evidence which unite in rejecting it — no
doubt the preceding words ' sent him home ' suggested the addition of
the words 'go home' from Mc. ii 11, v 19. The real question comes
when we compare the two elements which between them make up the
Lucianic reading, and ask which of the two should be preferred, K B
with the Sinai Syriac on the one side, or i (supported here by D, &c.)
on the other. Neither reading can be explained out of the alternative
reading, as they stand. I suspect myself that they are two independent
expansions of a shorter and rougher text, MqSe els rqv Kafoiv without
any verb ; a friend suggests that Mi;5f emris els rr]v <apTjv would also
account for the divergences.

6o THESTUDYOF
if) Mc. X 2 Kal TtpofreXBovres ^apuraiot eTrrjparav nvrbv . . . iretpdCovres
airov. The words jrpoo-fXfldi/Tfr ^apia-atot are omitted by Dabh and>
the Sinai Syriac, and by the margin of W. H. : and a general considera
tion of the position suggests that omission is right. Pharisees are
first mentioned at Capernaum in Mc. ii 16-24 • they are the local
Pharisees of Galilee, and their first attitude is that of questioners, ii 16,
24, though they soon join forces with the Herodians to plot against
. Jesus, iii 6. We do not hear of them again till vii 1-5, and then they
are in company with 'scribes from Jerusalem', but the scene is in
Galilee, probably at Capernaum, still. Once more (viii 11) on the
return to the Lake of Galilee, they ' come out ', presumably from the
town, to dispute with Him and test Him. But their activity is connected
throughout with the neighbourhood of the populous places on the
Lake of Galilee, and we do not expect to find them on the circuitous
road up to Jerusalem which our Lord was now following. The inser
tion was prompted primarily by the parallel in St. Matthew (xix 3), but
also by the persistent connexion of Treipd^eiv with the questions of the
Pharisees, cf. viii 11.
(g) Mc. x 19 pfj djToa-reprjcrrjs. Here we have not a right omission
by Westerns, but a wrong omission (following Mt. and Lc.) by B i and
the Sinai Syriac : on this occasion W. H. throw over B. The word is
necessary somewhere in the Gospels to account for the emphasis laid
on this point in early Christian ethics : see Pliny's Letter to Trajan
' ne furta, ne latrocinia, ne adulteria committerent, ne fidem fallerent,
ne depositum appellati abnegarent ', Hermas Mand. viii 5 n-oXXd iirnv
d<^ S}v del rbv bovXov rov deov iyKpareveaBai' KXippa, yf/evbos, dTroareprjats,
yj/ev8opaprvpia, nXeove^ia ktX. (where the Old Latin version has abne-
gatio for dnoare'prjcris, just as i has ne abnegaveris in Mc. x 19) ; and
compare the inclusion oi/raus among the irremissible sins according
to the Western penitential discipline. And the only passage in the
Gospels to which we can refer it is this passage in St. Mark.
{h) Mc. xvi I Kal biayevopevov rov aa^^drov fj Mapia rj MaybaXr/vi) Kal
Mapla fj rov laxci/Sov Kal iaXwpr) rjyopairav dpwpara. Here D k omit the
names of the holy women (though the evidence of D is discounted by
its omitting also the three preceding words), as I believe rightly. The
clause will then be read closely with what precedes in xv 47 ' And
Mary the Magdalene and Mary the mother of Joses watched to see
where he was laid, and when sabbath was past bought spices to go
and anoint him '- The objections to the ordinary reading are (i) that
it makes the Evangelist describe the second Mary in one verse as
' mother of Joses ' and in the next verse as ' mother of James ', (ii) that
it leaves it absolutely inexplicable why St. Matthew and St. Luke in
copying St. Mark should agree on leaving out here all mention of
Salome. Mc. xv 40 is reproduced in Mt. xxvii 56, Mc. xv 47 in Mt.
xxvii 61 (Lc. gives no names at either of these points, reserving them
for the witness to the empty tomb), but neither Matthew nor Luke

THE NEW TESTAMENT 6i
suggests that Salome was present on Easter Sunday morning— it w.is
' Mary Magdalene and the other Mary' (Mt. xxviii i), ' Mary Magda
lene and Joanna ' and Mary the mother of James ' (Lc. xxiv lo).
One or two suggestions for transposition or emenda
tion may be considered here.
(j) Mc. ix 9-13 ' Kal Kiirafiaivovrav air&v e'K toC opovs bieareiXaro
avrots iva priSevl a eibov biriyfjcravrai, el p.^ orav 6 vlbs rov avBpainov e\
veKpay dvaaTij. '" Kal rbv Xdyov eiipdrrjaav rtpbs eavrovs (TVv^rjToiivres ri
eariv ro ck vcKpav dvaarrjvai ^'^ Kal nas yeypanrai eirl rbv vlbv rov
av6pu>iTov tva ttoXXu ndBji Kal e^ovbevrjSp. '' Kal eirrjparav avrbv Xeyovres
On Xeyovaiv ol ypaptpare'is on 'HXeiav bel eXBetv npmrov ; ^^ 6 be e<f>r]
avrois HXeias pev eXBtov irpStrov dnoKaBicrrdvei mvra' ^' dXXa Xeya vp'iv
OTt Kal aXeias eXfiXvdev Kal eTroir]<Tav avra otra ^deXov, Ka3a>s yeypawrai eir
nirdv. I have printed the text here in the shape that I believe the
Evangelist intended to give it, though all our authorities put the clause
12 b Kal nois - . . e^nvbevt]6rj into Our Lord's mouth as part of His
answer to the disciples' question. That seems to me intolerably
harsh and meaningless. But I do not think that matters. are much
helped by (what has been suggested) the transposition of the words
into the question actually put : I conceive they should be transposed
one stage farther back, so as to become part of the question that was
not put. Our Lord's injunction to keep silence about the Transfigura
tion till after His Resurrection at once reminded the three apostles of
the language He had used to them a few days earlier for the first time
(viii 31) about the ' need ' for His suffering many things and being
rejected and being put to death and after three days rising again.
' It must needs be ' means, as in Lc. xxiv 26, 27, ' the Scriptures truly
interpreted teach', and the disciples followed our Lord's thought
correctly so far as to understand that He was referring them to the
teaching of Scripture: and they discussed with one another two
things, the meaning of ' rising again ' and the scriptural authority for
the suffering of Messiah. They did not venture to question our Lord
directly on these difficulties : they approached the point circuitously,
•and asked about the scriptural authority for the reappearance of
Elijah, and the question they did ask our Lord fully answered.
(k) Mc. iv 29 orav be rtapabol 6 Kapiros. I Cannot think that any
interpretation of these words is satisfactory, and I suggest Kaipos.
The intransitive use of rrapabMvai ' allow ' is practically only found
with nouns of time : L. S. quote from Isocrates owas av oi Kaipol
wapabibSxTtv and from Polybius rrjs &pas irapaSiboiirrjs. And St.
Mark is fond of 6 xaipos absolutely (while Mt. and Lc. always omit
or alter it), xi 13 0 yap Kaipbs ovk ^v iTVKtov, xii 2 diretTreiXev irpbs rovs
' Joanna is, of course, as Dr. Sanday was fond of pointing out,
St. Luke's own special authority.

62 THE STUDY OF
yeapyttis rcf Knipa — in both these cases 6 Kntpds means ' harvest time ' —
xiii 33 OVK o'lbare yap Trdre 6 Kaipds eariv.
(I) Mc. X32 ^(ravbe ivrrj oba dva^aivovres els 'lepoaoXvpa, Kal ^virpodyaiv
avrois 6 'Irjaovs, Kal edap^ovvro, ni be aKoXovBovvres e(t>o0ovvro. There
is a serious difficulty in the exegesis of these verses as they stand. It
is ordinarily supposed that mention is made of our Lord, of the Twelve,
and of a vague mass of followers. But there are two objections, both
of them decisive, to such an interpretation. On the one hand, the
whole story of the ascent to Jerusalem and the arrival there seems to
imply that it was only the few disciples whom He was educating in
closest intimacy who now made up His company : on the other hand,
the verbs npodyeiv and dKoXovBelv are in this Gospel strictly correlative,
as in xi 9 01 rrpodyovres Kal oi dKoXovBovvres , and so xiv 28 (xvi 7) Trpod^co
i^as els rrjv TaXtXaiav means of course ' I will precede ' and you shall
follow. 01 be aKoXovBovvres Can therefore only refer back to npnaymv
airovs and must mean ' Jesus went before them and they (the disciples)
followed '. So far all is clear : but Kal iBap^ovvro is unexplained,
unless we accept asuggestion made some years ago, but never I believe
put into print, and suppose that the Evangelist wrote edappelro. If it
was the Master on whom, in anticipation of Gethsemane (xiv 33), this
shuddering awe fell, we can understand how He wished to be alone,
and how the disciples, as they followed at a little distance, 'were
afraid '. Solve calciamentum pedum tuorwn : locus enim in quo stas
terra sancta est.
The Gospel of St. Mark is no doubt not an average
specimen, as regards the preservation of its text, of the
New Testament books as a whole. For some years it
was the only Life of our Lord in circulation, at a time
when tradition must stiU have been vigorous and the
sacredness of canonical authority was a thing wholly in
the future : and when the longer Lives that were built
up on it took its place, the greater vogue they enjoyed
reacted again upon the text of the now almost superseded
Gospel. We can check, more or less, the intrusion of
Matthaean and Lucan elements during the second and
third centuries into the text of St. Mark : it is more
difficult to check the alterations or corruptions that it
may have undergone in the half century after its com
position. Such changes were mostly no doubt small,
and many of them accidental rather than deliberate.
But it has to be recognised that some books of the New

THE NEW TESTAMENT 63
Testament were, for one reason or another, more ex
posed than others to danger in the course of transcrip
tion during the period before canonical authority
attached to them. In this class would fall the Apoca
lypse, the Pastoral Epistles, probably the Acts, and
certainly the Second Gospel.

IX
The language of thfe New Testament is the natural
pendant lo the text of the New Testament : and if there
has been, of recent years, a certain slackening in the
energy devoted in the previous generation to the
question of text, the study of the language has made an
entirely new Start. A whole field of knowledge has
been opened up by the discovery and publication of the
papyrus documents which archaeological exploration in
Egypt, especially since the commencement in 1882 of
the British occupation, has brought in a never-ceasing
flow within our reach. Papyrus manuscripts are among
the rarities of Western libraries, so ruinous is the effect
of damp upon the frail material on which books were
normally written till the third century of our era. But
the Egyptian climate preserves intact in Egyptian
rubbish heaps the debris not only of the stately rolls of
literary works but of letters, accounts, and miscellaneous
documents, private and public : and fragments of all
sorts and sizes in the various collections now published
(in which work Prof. GrenfeU and Prof. Hunt have re
presented with distinction our nation and University)
bring before us the daily life of the Greek-speaking
population during the three centuries of the govern
ment of the Ptolemies and during twice that length of
the Roman dominion. The first question which most
of us still ask with regard to any new finds is what
hterary texts, classical or theological, known or not
known, are represented in them : and the instinct which

64 TH.E STUDY OF
prompts that question is a sound one. But if the results
are perhaps from that point of view a little bit disappoint
ing (though I StiU cherish hope of a Greek text of
Hermas), the non-literary documents have for the first
time enabled iis to realise what kind of Greek the con
temporaries of the Apostles wrote in familiar and
informal intercourse. And to some scholars it must
have been rather a surprise — so habituated had we
become to explain everything that was not classical in
the New Testament writers as a Hebraism or a Semit-
ism — to find that the Greek- speaking inhabitants of
Egj^pt used the same idioms and developed the language
on the same lines as the Greek-speaking inhabitants of
Palestine. Even the LXX translators have many more
points of contact than we had fancied with their non-
Jewish neighbours in Egypt. Dr. Hatch, in his Essays.
on Biblical Greek (1889), had made some use of inscrip
tions : but to Adolf Deissmann, then a country pastor,
belongs the credit of first applying the new material
from the papyri to the linguistic study of the Bible.^ In
England the conclusions indicated by Deissmann were
accepted and extended from the linguistic to fhe gram
matical sphere in the Prolegomena to a Grammar of
New Testament Greek (1906) by the late Dr. J. H. Moul
ton, whose death is not the least of the losses which the
war inflicted on the cause of learning. And the Vocabu
lary of the Greek Testament, edited by Dr. Moulton and
Dr. Milligan (Part i, 1914 : ii, 1915 : iii, 1919) applies on
a larger scale the method which Deissmann employed
on a number of specimen words.
With this particular developement of the subject I

^ Bibelstudien : Beitrdge, sumeist aus den Papyri u)td Inschriften,
zur Geschlchte der Sprache, des Schrifttums und der Religion des
hellenistischen fudentiims und des tjrchristentums, 1895. Neue
Bibelstudien : sprachgeschichtliche Beitrdge, zumeist aus den Papyri
und hischriften, zur Erkldrung des Neuen Testaments, 1897. Also
translated into English.

THE NEW TESTAMENT 65
cannot claim much first-hand acquaintance. But I have
been for a good number of years, deeply interested in
lexical work, if only because Dr. Sanday and myself
with Dr. Strong, then dean of Christ Church now bishop
of Ripon, were responsible for the adoption in this
University of the plan, concg ived and fostered by the
late Dr. Swete, of a Lexicon of Patristic Greek : and
Patristic Greek has its roots of course in Biblical and
especially in New Testament Greek. This Lexicon is
an undertaking well worth the pains, for it would fill an
obvious gap between Suicer's Thesaurus, which is not
a Lexicon and which is besides two centuries old, and
Sophocles' Lexicon of Byzantine Greek, which has little
contact with theological language or with the fathers as
theologians. But though it is worth the pains, it wiU
not be done without pains : and that means that it will
not be done unless all among us who can wfll contribute
of their special knowledge and their special gifts. I
hope that I shall not be thought to be deserting the
duties of my Chair if I devote some of my energy as
Professor to the furthering of an undertaking for which
I am in part responsible and which is cognate at least
to the study of Biblical Greek.

X
One department at least of Patristic Greek falls
directly under the province of a Professor of Exegesis,
I mean, the commentators on the Bible : and probably the
most laborious piece of work that I myself ever accom
plished was an article on ' Greek Patristic Commentaries
on the Pauhne Epistles ' for the supplement-volume of
Hastings' Dictionary of the Bible (1904). ' It is one of
the traditions of the English Church to pay due regard
to patristic exegesis, and one from which I hope not to
depart ' : the words are not my own, but Dr. Sanday's
(p. 59). Certainly it is remarkable- how much good

66 THE NEW TESTAMENT
work has been done by English scholars in this direc
tion. Chrysostom on St. Matthew, Cyril on St. John,
Chrysostom Theodore and Theodoret on St. Paul, are
read in the editions, produced in the generation before
1883, of Field, Marriott, Pusey, Swete : and smce that
date we have to our credit Robinson's Philocalia (1893),
Burkitt's Rules of Tyconius (1894), Brooke's Origm on
St. John (1896), and Souter's Ambrosiaster, In V. et N. I.
Quaestiones (1908)— the only theological writing edited
from Great Britain in the Vienna Corpus. To the eluci
dation and textual criticism of the catena fragments of
Origen on the Pauline Epistles as re-edited m the
Journal of Theological Studies^ I gave myself what help I
could : and I count myself fortunate to have been able to
assist in any degree in the recovery of what the greatest of
Christian thinkers and scholars wrote in exposition of
the meaning of him who was known in the early Church
by the unique title of ' the Apostle '.
The burden of interpreting adequately the New
Testament writings and of presiding over the whole
domain of New Testament study in the University
would be beyond the powers of any man : much more,
when it has fallen to one who is no theologian but only
a historian and critic, must he entreat for charitable
judgement .if he prove himself in too many ways un
equal to the task.
' Origen on the Ephesians, edited by J. A. F. Gregg (now bishop of
Ossory), iii 233, 398, 554 [1902] : on i Corinthians, edited by C. Jenkins
(ix 231, 353, 500; X 29 [1908] : cf. X 270) : on Romans, edited by
A. Ramsbotham (xiii 209, 35^ xiv 10 [1912]) : and for Origen's Schoha
on the Apocalypse see xiii 295, 386 [1912].

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