But

the sanction of the Apostolic College. as it was propagated, it took took up additional items, and though frequent repetition imparted to it a certain coherence of form, on the other hand it naturally led to variations of order and expression. Fragments of such traditions floated indefinitely in the consciousness of the Church; their occasional entry into the written forms of the Gospel may sometimes be traced with the help of textual criticism1; in other cases we know them only from later works, like the saying in Acts 2035, It is more blessed to give than to receive.' 2

The first writer to lay stress on facts of this order was J. C. R. Eckermann in the fifth volume of his Theologische Beiträge, published at Altona in 1796; the transition to written Gospels did not take place, in his view, till the age of Trajan at the end of the first century of our era. The main exposition of this conception, however, was due to J. K. L. Gieseler, afterwards well known as a historian of the Church. In his first work, while he was still Conrector of the Gymnasium at Minden, he sought to explain the common matter of the Gospels by the propagation of a tradition which, unlike the rigid form of a creed imposed by an ecclesiastical Council,

1 See the Revisers' Margin on Luke 956 2233-4, 2334, John 753_811; and the anecdote in D following Luke 65.

2 The most comprehensive collection is to be found in the Agrapha of Dr. Resch, 1889; he supposes them, however, to be derived from lost Gospels. He reckons 74 as genuine, and 103 as apocryphal.

3 Historisch-Kritischer Versuch über die Entstehung und die frühesten Schicksale der schriftlichen Evangelien, Leipzig, 1818.

might vary in different circles and under new influences.1 Matthew preserved many sayings suited only for Jewish Palestinian Christians; in 105-6 or 1521-28 the 'particularist' limitation was obvious Luke on the other hand gave to the Gospel a 'universalist' interpretation; while the Fourth Gospel presupposed the wide diffusion of the narrative cycle practically contained in the Synoptics, and was designed for believers who had received some education in philosophy."

The theory of the origin of the Gospels in tradition has received in modern times the weighty advocacy of Dr. Westcott, who found in it an adequate solution alike of the resemblances and of the variations in the Synoptic records. The oral Gospel was supposed to have been translated into Greek before it was committed to writing; and its two forms, the original in the vernacular Aramaic, and the derived in the language of the Gentile Christians, continued to subsist side by side. When the production of written Gospels began, Mark was the first to assume definite literary shape, then Luke, and thirdly Matthew. In Dr. Westcott's hands the theory seemed somewhat vague; but no one can

1 When the traditions had been translated into Greek, the first recorders might be compared, Gieseler thought, with the Greek logographers before Herodotus.

2 In 1837, Prof. Andrews Norton, of Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, published a treatise on the Evidences of the Genuineness of the Gospels, in which he explained the correspondence of the Synoptists by the prior existence of apostolic traditions, 2nd. ed. London, 1847, vol. i. pp. 284-296.

3 Introduction to the Study of the Gospels, 6th ed. 1881.

charge the able little book of the Rev. A. Wright on The Composition of the Four Gospels (1890) with lack of precision. Mr. Wright conceives that an order of catechists was recognised in the early churches, charged with the duty of giving instruction in the traditions by constant oral repetitions. Of these traditions he recognises three series; the first cycle was due to Peter, and is embodied in our Mark; the second was collected in Matthew's 'logia of the Lord,' and may be traced in Matt. 3-25 after the elimination of the cycle represented by Mark; the third proceeded from a disciple of St. Paul, and survives in the peculiar section Luke 951-1814, when the materials incorporated from the first and second cycles are withdrawn. Mr. Wright places Mark soon after 70 A.D.; Matthew he regards as composed a few years earlier than Luke; and Luke, who had not seen the Marcan Gospel, wrote shortly before 80 A.D. The significance of these dates will be expounded in the next lecture.

Yet a third theory is possible. The very striking resemblances in many passages of the Synoptists early appeared too close to be attributed to so fluctuating an element as tradition. To what, then, could they be ascribed? If they were not due to the actual use of the earlier by the later, or to their mutual dependence on similar groups of oral teaching, they must rest on the employment of common written materials. This was the conception, as we have seen, of Lessing; it had been approached by Johann Salomo Semler in discussing Townson's

theory; but it received its most elaborate justification in Eichhorn's famous essay on the Three First Gospels in 1794. Eichhorn began by dividing their contents into three groups; (1) the passages common in some form to all three; (2) those which recurred in any two; and (3) those peculiar to each. The first group he traced back to the primitive document in its simplest form and the hypothesis of its circulation in different localities with various additions enabled him to explain the cases where two Gospels seemed to have been using a similar source, and further to account even for the matter

belonging only to one. With remarkable courage he addressed himself to the problem of determining the original contents of the antecedent Gospel. They were found, of course, in the passages traceable in the three Synoptists; and he arranged them, from the baptism to the resurrection in forty-two sections. This primitive story he conceived to have been written in the vernacular Aramaic and he strenuously maintained that none of the evangelists had seen the work of the others.

:

The main conception of Eichhorn was enthusiastically adopted by Dr. Herbert Marsh, of Cambridge, in his Dissertation on the Origin and Composition of the First Three Gospels, 1801,3 though

2

1 Published in his Allgemeine Bibliothek der Biblischen Literatur, vol. v., Leipzig, 1794. See further, vol. i. of his Introduction to the N.T., 1804.

2 See ante, Lect. I., p. 14.

3 Appended to his translation of Michaelis' Introd, to the New Testament, vol. iii. pt. ii.

he found it needful to make many modifications of detail. After a minute examination of the passages in which all three agreed, or any two, he supposed their ultimate foundation to lie in a common Hebrew original, designated N. The ancient form of Matthew, also in Hebrew, was simply with additions. Mark and Luke translated into Greek, each employing a form with elements peculiar to itself; but they also used an independent rendering of N into Greek. Lastly, the Hebrew Matthew was also translated into Greek, with the further aid of the Greek sections of Mark and Luke. Our Matthew, therefore, was the latest of the three. It was easy to deride such a theory as impracticably elaborate;' and Marsh's exposition was not always calculated to win assent. But in one form or other it has perpetually tended to reappear. Only ten years have passed since Prof. J. T. Marshall argued with much learning in favour of an original Aramaic Gospel, though his argument hardly survived the criticism of the Rev. Willoughby C. Allen; and with unwearied courage and patience Dr. Edwin A. Abbott developes his

1 See the article 'Gospels' in Smith's Dict. of the Bible, vol. i., 1863, by Dr. Thomson, then Archbishop of York. Much more sympathetic was the earlier criticism of Daniel Veysie, in An Examination of Mr. Marsh's Hypothesis respecting the Origin of our Three First Canonical Gospels, Oxford, 1808; his chief modification was that he broke up the common vernacular original into a number of narratives of detached parts of the history of Jesus, some in Hebrew and others in Greek,' after the manner of Paley before him, and Schleiermacher ten years later.

* In a series of papers in the Expositor, 1891-2.

S Expositor, vol. vii. 1893.