THE. BATTLE OF SCRIPTURES.
The Apocryphal New Testament. Translated by M. R. James. (Clarendon Press. 10s. net.)
BEFORE the tidings of Christ Jesus were announced in Europe the hope of a Messiah, a man literally, completely God, had worked its way into Rome, firing and bewildering the minds of the less conventional and stable citizens. There were multitudes of converts to Judaism ; and Virgil, even, the sweetest and mildest of Romans, uttered a prophecy. The old religion disintegrated and monstrous forms of worship were introduced. Egyptian mysteries and initiations became popular, familiar deities took on strange attributes, there were wild and scandalous new cults. The emperors of Rome, hungry to annex the empire of divinity, believed themselves gods and insisted upon being adored as the Word made flesh.
Into this vague and uncentred expectation came Paul, a Jew, the first Apostle to the Gentiles. He preached, on the authority of his own soul (and except by report and vision he knew nothing), that the Christ. had in truth been born, that He was. Jesus of Nazareth. Apostles followed who spoke as eyewitnesses and testified to the facts. But already men mediated the story through their own temperaments and, where so much was miraculous and revolutionary, mis- interpreted, coloured, perverted, appropriated the news. " The Voice went forth throughout the world and each one heard it according to his capacity ; old men and youths and boys and sucklings and women ; the Voice was to each one as each one had the power to receive it." Narratives of the life of Christ, therefore, were written, to crystallize the gospel and to give, as it were from headquarters, the substrate and central authority of the teaching. Four of these narra- tives we possess complete : two gospels, composed certainly in the first century of our era, possibly earlier than the
canonical gospels, we know in fragments and citations. Luke begins his gospel by stating " Many have attempted to draw up a narrative of the facts which are received with full assurance among us on the authority of those who were from
the beginning eyewitnesses. . " Among these earlier narratives, says Origen, was the Gospel according to the Egyptians. If he is right—we can by no means always trust him—the seed was already sown for radical controversies. " I came to destroy the works of the female," the kingdom shall come " when the two shall be one, and the outside as the inside, and the male with the female neither male nor female," " he showed his disciples that the same person was Father, Son, and Holy Spirit "—all these sayings were dear to heretics. The Gospel according to the Hebrews was orthodox and the " Voice " of the canon speaks through it in different words. From it we have such sayings as " He that wondereth shall reign, and he that reigneth shall rest " and " Never, saith he, be ye joyful, save when ye behold your brother with love." These, the Oxyrhynchus Logia and the Agrapha, traditional sayings, practically exhaust the first springs of Christian teaching outside the New Testament.
But dissensions grew fiercer as Christianity spread. And step by step with Christianity spread Mithraism, its greatest enemy ; for Mithras was a mystical, unsubstantial Christ, logos in the form of man, logos incarnated, the redeeming logos ; but logos unhistorical, non-temporal, ideal. Step by step and inextricably mingled : it would have been impossible apart from nomenclature to say of some men whether they were Mithraists or Christians. And in the early Church nearly all heresies were on the side of blithraism : it was hardly ever doubted that Christ was God, and all argument settled upon the question whether He was also man, also Jesus ; and in what way, in what proportion He was man. As the controversy raged the Scriptures under- went recensions by various schools, each adapting them to its own tenets ; and new Scriptures were fabricated in which the problems were indubitably settled from the very words of Christ or from the incidents of His ministry. So the Ebionites changed John the Baptist's diet from locusts to cakes dipped in honey, being themselves determined vegetarians ; and they made the voice from heaven at the baptism of Jesus declare : " This day have I begotten Thee "—to show that only by His baptism did Jesus become the Christ. The orthodox believers, of course, fabricated as much as any, partly to rebut heresies, partly to give further information. Many of these books, the Preaching of Peter, for example, the Apocalypse of Peter and the Protevangelium, were current for centuries and were widely accepted as authentic.
All of the polemical gospels, acts, epistles and apocalypses written during the second century are of interest themselves and of value as showing what interpretations were put upon the Christian story by the early Church. But the forgeries and inventions of later days (the stream continued in full flood through the next three centuries, trickled through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and has not yet wholly dried up) are of much poorer quality. They contain, often, beautiful or fantastic passages ; they inspired the work of many artists and craftsmen and are rich, therefore, in associa- tions ; but they never give evidence of spiritual impetus, they are never written with profound authority of soul. Since Christian tradition was now firmly established, any attempt to change or divert it was bound to be either foolish or impudent. At any rate, it is remarkable that only one branch of apocryphal literature remained vigorous and illuminating after the second century—the literature of Gnosticism ; and none of this literature is to be classed with the other apocrypha. It is not fiction but parable, not fact but philosophy, and, in especial, not apocalypse but anaca- lypse—it covers again, makes the reader search for the meaning. Indeed, the Gnostics might have applied to their own teaching with unique appositeness the citation from the Gospel according to the Hebrews : " He that wondercth shall reign:,
Dr. James has given with immense learning, immense industry, a complete survey of the New Testament Apocrypha, omitting to consider only this vastly important Gnostic literature. In this he was wise, first because it is really another subject, secondly because he seems entirely unsympathetic to it. Pistis Sophia, he declares, is " barely readable "- as if one should say the Vedanta. Kant, Aristotle are barely readable. His translations are notably well turned and at times worthy of comparison with the Authorized Version. He has made a book universally valuable. Devout Christian, comparative mythologist and sceptic will each find in it what he seeks ; and each, if he seeks diligently, will come away
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