An Introduction to the New Testament. By Adolf Jiilicher. Translated
by Janet Penrose Ward. (Smith, Elder, and Co. 165.) —Professor Adolf Jiilicher's Introduction to the New Testament, translated by Miss Janet Ward, is by no means easy reading, but the painstaking student will find therein much that is of supreme interest. The translation is clearly very well done, for the book reads as though it had been written in English. Professor Jiilicher deals at length with the date, matter, and authorship of each book of the New Testament, and with the gradual formation of the Canon. His criticism is not, upon the whole, destructive. Space forbids us to transcribe his reasons. We must content ourselves with epitomising some of his conclusions, which, by the way, are not always easy to find amid masses of argument. The Gospel of Matthew was written, he thinks, in its present form about the year 100; but it embodies, he believes, a collection of •iogia set down by the Apostle. Mark he ascribes to John Mark, with whom we make acquaintance in Acts, the friend of St. Peter and of the whole Apostolic circle. He gives 70 as its probable date. The much-disputed Johannine Gospel he puts not earlier than the beginning of the second century, and imagines it to have been written (he does not dogmatise on the subject) by a disciple of "the beloved disciple." He sees in it evi- dence of a strong controversial spirit—entirely invisible to the ordinary reader—and thinks the writer made very free use of his material. Nevertheless, he believes that "the Divine Christ, Christ as the Truth, the Way, the Life, the Bread of Life, are ideas which can be traced beyond the actual Evangelist to St. John himself. Of the Pauline Epistles he writes :—" Four of the Epistles of Paul have not been disputed even by the Tubingen school, and only those who lack all critical power have attempted to shake them. They are those to the Romans the Corinthians, and the Galatians. The three Pastoral Epistles are now generally regarded as spurious, but the majority of those who hold this view are in favour of the genuineness of 1 Thessalonians, Philippians, and Philemon. 2 Thessa- lonians and Ephesians are almost universally given up, as well as large parts of Colossians. I do not, however, hold that the objections even to these last three are insuperable." As to the Canon, Professor Jiilicher writes : "To ask when the establish- ment of the Canon was first thought of is to ask when the need for authority, the feeling of dependence on those who went before, outweighed the first fresh consciousness of power." He considers this time began in the second generation after the Apostles. At first the Hebrew dcriptures and the words of Christ, whether written or traditional, were alone considered of binding sanctity. Soon the documents which contained the written words were endowed with a like value, and finally all the writings supposed to be by the Apostles, including St. Paul's Epistles. The later Apocryphal Gospels never, he thinks, attained any great popularity. The taste of the Church as a whole had already rejected them long before there existed any definite Canon from which they could be excluded. The first and im- mediate success obtained by our Four Gospels on their appear- ance in the large communities was the reason why in forty years' time they had become the standard by which all other Gospels were judged. We recommend this book to all who are really interested in the subject. The reader need not be learned, but he must have time to read the whole. It is an impossible book merely to look through.
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