Encyclopaedia Britannica > Volume 3, Athens-BOI

644
BIBLE
is careful to mention all references to disputed books, it
does not appear that it was part of his design to cite
testimony to a book so universally allowed as John’s gospel.
And Papias does give testimony to the first epistle of John,
which is hardly separable from the gospel. On the whole,
then, we repeat that, on the most cardinal points, the
external evidence for the New Testament books is as strong
as can fairly be looked for, though not, of course, strong
enough to convince a man who is sure a 'priori that this or
that book is unhistorical and must be of late date.
The strength of the negative critics lies in internal
evidence. And in this connection they have certainly
directed attention to real difficulties, many of which still
await their explanation. Some of these difficulties are not
properly connected with the Tubingen position. The
genuineness of 2d Peter, which, indeed, is very weakly
attested by external evidence, was suspicious even to
Erasmus and Calvin, and no one will assert that the Pauline
authorship of 1st Timothy is as palpable as that of the
epistle to the Romans. So, again, it is undeniable that
the epistle to the Colossians and the so-called epistle to
the Ephesians differ considerably in language and thought
from other Pauline epistles, and that their relation to one
The Tiibin- another demands explanation. But in the Tubingen school
gen theory. aH minor difficulties, each of which might be solved in detail
without any very radical procedure, are brought together as
phases of a single extremely radical theory of the growth
of the New Testament. The theory has two bases, one
philosophical or dogmatical, the other historical; and it
cannot be pretended that the latter basis is adequate if the
former is struck away. Philosophically the Tubingen
school starts from the position so clearly laid down by
Strauss, that a miraculous interruption of the laws of nature
stamps the narrative in which it occurs as unhistorical, or,
at least, as more cautious writers put the case, hampers the
narrative with such extreme improbability that the positive
evidence in favour of its truth would require to be much
stronger than it is in the case of the New Testament history.
The application of this proposition makes a great part of
the narrative of the Gospels and Acts appear as unhistorical,
and therefore late; and the origin of this late literature is
sought by regarding the New Testament as the monument
of a long struggle, in the course of which an original sharp
antagonism between the gospel of Paul and the Judaizing
gospel of the old apostles was gradually softened down and
harmonized. The analysis of the New Testament is the
resurrection of early parties in the church, each pursuing
its own tendency by the aid of literary fiction. In the
genuine epistles of Paul on the one hand, and in the
Revelation and some parts of Matthew on the other, the
original hostility of ethnic and Jewish Christianity is
sharply defined ; while after a series of intermediate stages
the Johannine writings present the final transition in the
2d century from the contests of primitive Christianity to
the uniformity of the Old Catholic Church. This general
position has been developed in a variety of forms, more or
less drastic, and is supported by a vast mass of speculation
and research; but the turning points of the controversy
may, perhaps, be narrowed to four questions—(1.) Whether
in view of Paul’s undoubted conviction that miraculous
powers were exercised by himself and other Christians (1
Cor. xii. 9,/.; 2 Cor. xii. 12) the miracle criterion of a
secondary narrative can be maintained! (2.) Whether the
book of Acts is radically inconsistent with Paul’s own
account of his relations to the church at Jerusalem, and
whether the antithesis of Peter and Paul is proved from
the epistles of the latter, or postulated in accordance with
the Hegelian law of advance by antagonism! (3.) Whether
the gospel of John is necessarily a late fiction, or does not
rather supply in its ideal delineation of Jesus a necessary
supplement to the synoptical gospels which can only be
understood as resting on true apostolic reminiscence 1 (4.)
Whether the external evidence for the several books and
the known facts of church history leave time for the suc¬
cessive evolution of all the stages of early Christianity
which the theory postulates 1
The Christian Canon of the Old and New Testaments.— Christian
We have already seen that the Apostolic Church continued canon —
to use as sacred the Hebrew Scriptures, whose authority ^ Testa-
derived fresh confirmation from the fulfilment of the pro- ment’
phecies in Christ. The idea that the Old Testament revela¬
tion must now fall back into a secondary position as
compared with inspired apostolic teaching was not for a
moment entertained. Still less could the notion of a body
of New Testament Scriptures, of a collection of Christian
writings, to be read like the Old Testament in public
worship and appealed to as authoritative in matters of
faith, take shape so long as the church was conscious that
she had in her midst a living voice of inspiration. The
first apostolic writings were, as we have seen, occasional,
and it was not even matter of course that every epistle of
an apostle should be carefully preserved, much less that it
should be prized above his oral teaching. Paul certainly
wrote more than two epistles to the Corinthians, and even
Papias is still of opinon, when he collects reminiscences of
apostolic sayings from the mouths of the elders, that what
he reads in books cannot do him so much good as what he
receives “from a living and abiding voice.” Nay, the
very writers who are the first to put Old and New Testa¬
ment books on a precisely similar footing (e.g., Tertullian)
attach equal importance to the tradition of churches which
had been directly taught by apostles, and so were presumed
to possess the “ rule of faith ” in a form free from the
difficulties of exposition that encumber the written word.
In the first instance, then, the authoritative books of the
Christian church were those of the Old Testament; and in
the time of the apostles and their immediate successors it
was the Hebrew canon that was received. But as most
churches had no knowledge of the Old Testament except
through the Greek translation and the Alexandrian canon,
the Apocrypha soon began to be quoted as Scripture. The
feeling of uncertainty as to the proper number of Old
Testament books which prevailed in the 2d century is illus¬
trated by an epistle of Melito of Sardis, who journeyed to
Palestine in quest of light, and brought back the pre¬
sent Hebrew canon, with the omission of the book of
Esther. In the 3d century Origen knew the Hebrew
canon, but accepted the Alexandrian additions, apparently
because he considered that a special providence had
watched over both forms of the collection. Subsequent
teachers in the Eastern Church gradually went back to
the Hebreu» canon (Esther being still excluded from full
canonicity by Athanasius and Gregory of Nazianzus), dis¬
tinguishing the Alexandrian additions as dvayiyvaj<xKo/i.era—
books used for ecclesiastical lessons. In the Western
Church the same distinction was made by scholars like
Jerome, who introduced for merely ecclesiastical books
the somewhat incorrect name of Apocrypha; but a laxer
view was very prevalent and gained ground during the
Middle Ages, till at length, in opposition to the Protestants,
the Council of Trent accepted every book in the Vulgate
translation as canonical.
We turn now to the New Testament collection. The New Testa-
idea of canonicity—the right of a book to be cited as mentcai.on.
Scripture—was closely connected with regular use in public
worship, and so the first step towards a New Testament
canon was doubtless the establishment of a custom of
reading in the churches individual epistles or gospels. The
first beginnings of this custom must have been very early.
The reference to Luke in 1 Tim. v, 18 is disputed, and