The Second Lesson
BY WILSON HARRIS
THERE are few books with contents so familiar and a back- ground so unfamiliar as the New Testament. Use and wont are the reason. We are so much accustomed to read the New Testament and hear it read, as the Second Lesson or otherwise, that it becomes one of the established things in life, about which no questions need to be asked. In fact, numberless questions need to be asked about it. Which were written first—the Gospels or the Epistles ? Why do only four Gospels find a place, when so many more (the Gospel according to St. Peter, the Gospel according to St. Thomas, the Gospel according to the Hebrews and various others) were in existence ? Who wrote the Gospels, and where, and when, and in what language ? Why was no Gospel written till nearly thirty years after the events it records? . Where did the writers get their information 7 What was the gap of time between the writing of the Gospels and the earliest version of them that we possess ?
All those questions are worth asking, and in the light of the answers to them the New Testament acquires far more interest and vitality. The reason why the story of the life and teaching of Christ (Professor Burkitt, of Cambridge, said of one version, Mark's, that it was possibly the first biography ever written ; Renan said of another, Luke's, that it was the most beautiful book ever written) was not told immediately after His death was that the belief of the first disciples in the imminence of the Second Coming and the end of the world was profound ; it was not till two or three decades later that the needs of a new generation who knew of Jesus of Galilee only by hearsay were realised, and memoirs of Him were prepared by several writers. But meanwhile the early Church was growing. Teachers were going out from Jerusalem to Syria and Asia Minor and Greece and even to Rome. Paul, in particular, was founding churches and subsequently writing letters to encoirage or instruct or admonish them.
As a consequence, all St. Paul's Epistles were written before any of the Gospels, for the date usually assigned to St. Mark, the earliest of the four Gospels, is somewhere between A.D. 65 and 70, and St. Paul is commonly supposed to have perished in the Neronian persecutions of 64. The First Epistle to the Thessalonians is regarded by the majority of scholars as the earliest book in the New Testament, though there are some who would put Galatians and the Epistle of St. James (generally assumed to be much later) before it. At any rate, it is to St. Paul that we owe the earliest accounts of the Last Supper (I Cor. xi) and the Resurrection appearances (I Cor. xv). The latter is particularly important, because it mentions two appearances—to James and to "five hundred brethren at once "—of which no record is given in any of the Gospels ; and th,e use of the words "last of all he was seen of me also" suggests at least the possibility that St. Paul (who had never, so far as is known, seen Jesus in the flesh) was treating all the post- Resurrection appearances as similar in nature to his own vision on
the road to Damascus. St. Paul also, it may be recalled, records one saying of Jesus—" It is more blessed to give than to receive "— unknown to the Gospels.
More perhaps is taught about the Gospels in schools today than was the case a generation ago. It is probably generally appreciated that the earliest Gospel was that of St. Mark, and that both the writer of the first Gospel, which no one now attributes to the Apostle Matthew, and St. Luke based their biographies on it, as well as on an earlier collection of sayings of Christ (whose existence can only be inferred, but quite safely inferred), known as Q, from the German Queue, meaning "sources." St. Matthew, as it is convenient to call the first evangelist, was writing primarily for his fellow-Jews, and among other characteristics made a point of citing passages from the Old Testament writers with which they would naturally be familiar. St. Luke, as might be expected of a travel-companion of St. Paul, had other than Jewish writers mainly in view ; and, as might be expected of a man of education like a physician, was much the most accomplished writer of the three synoptists. The fourth Gospel, about whose authorship there is wide divergence of view (the general opinion being that the writer was not the son of Zebedee, but "the Elder John," who had, however, been in close contact with the Apostle) is almost more theological than biographical ; it is perplexing to find the author recording two miracles—the conversion of water into wine and the raising of Lazarus—of which the other three evangelists apparently know nothing. Their silence about the first of all Christ's miracles and about the most arresting of them all is so inexplicable as to raise the question whether the fourth evangelist has not here been trusting hearsay overmuch.
For all the evangelists, writing so long after the events they described, must inevitably have relied to a large extent on oral tradition. That was by no means necessarily untrustworthy. In days when written documents were laborious to produce and com- paratively rare memories were probably more retentive than they are today. Almost certainly the most striking of Christ's sayings would be memorised, as Rabbinical sayings had been for genera- tions. So, no doubt, would the Lord's Prayer be, as it is today. So probably enough would the Beatitudes. In the case of longer discourses, such as those to which St. John gives so much space, it can only be that the writer was paraphrasing in his own words what he remembered or could learn of the teaching of Christ. That was the recognised method of classical writers ; Thucydides goes out of his way to explain that this was the basis of the speeches, like the great funeral oration of Pericles, embodied in his history. But Mark, who was almost certainly the John Mark of the Acts, is generally believed to have drawn much of his information from St. Peter, who was an eye-witness of almost every event recorded in St. Mark's Gospel ; and as that Gospel was relied on so largely by Matthew and Luke, the Gospel history as a whole plainly had solid foundations.
There was, of course, nothing like a New Testament as a whole in the early days of the Church. The Gospels and Epistles were written by different people at different places at different times for different groups of readers, from Jerusalem to Rome. In the first instance there would be only one copy of an Epistle, in the possession of the congregation to which it was addressed. But that original would no doubt be copied for the benefit of other congregations, and the same, of course, with the Gospels. (All such early copies have long since perished. The oldest manuscript versions of the New Testament are the Codex Vaticanus at Rome and the Codex Sinaiticus in the British Museum, both of the fourth century.) But there were, as has been said, more Gospels and also more Epistles and more Apocalypses than are found in our New Testament today. Gradually a line was drawn between the more and the less reliable, till finally,, by about the fifth century, without any formal decree of a Church Council, the selection of Gospels and Epistles, together with the Book of Revelation, became the recognised and accepted New Testament as we know it today. The books about which hesitation was longest and strongest were II Peter (which was written long after St. Peter's death) and Revelation. The study of New Testament origins can be a fascinatinepurSuit The serfons student Will, of course, need some recognised coin- Mentary on each Gospel and Epistle. Most of us probably have ncit the time, nor perhaps the capacity, to delve as deep as that. For those' satisfied with something less, the indispensable v.olume (as I think) is that engrossing work, Hastings' one-volume Dictionary of the Bible (Clark, 32s.). (There is a five-volume edition for minds of that order of spaciousness.) But within the last month have appeared two books either of which provides an admirable basis for the study of New Testament origins and background. The larger of the two, An Introduction to the New Testament, by Richard Heard, the Dean of Peterhouse, Cambridge (Black, 12s. 6d.), is, as its name implies, no more than an introduction, but to many who have been content simply to take their New Testament as they find it it can prove an illuminating guide. To the other and smaller book, The New Testament, A Conspectus, by J. W. Hunkin (Duckworth, 6s.), a melancholy interest attaches, for it appeared within a fortnight of the untimely death of its writer, the late Bishop of Truro. Nothing could better emphasise what the world of Biblical scholarship has lost than this unpretentious volume of 120 pages, into which has been compressed with astonishing brilliance all the generally accepted conclusions of moderate (as opposed to extreme) New Testament scholars. I know nothing of comparable value within the same compass, and it is likely to be long before anything equal or better of the kind is produced. Neither book makes the other superfluous. Mr. Heard's forms an admirable complement to Bishop Hunkin's. The two can with advantage be read together.
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