Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 26:101 (Jan 1869)
Article: The Origin Of The First Three Gospels
Author: Anonymous

BSac 26:101 (Jan 1869) p. 1

The Origin Of The First Three Gospels

It is a remark often and appropriately made, that Christianity is a historical religion. Fully understood, the epithet sets forth, not the mere accident, but the very essence of the life of our faith. What God has so wedded together cannot by any course of criticism be separated and either part remain vital. As on the one hand history is without deep meaning and peculiar charm unless the doctrine of a redeeming Christ be the thread on which every one of its bright and dark beads is strung, so on the other, the doctrines and morality of Christianity will avail us little when parted from the historical Jesus, who, in his real character, in the facts of his life, suffering, and death, is the doctrine and the embodiment of the moral law. History is unintelligible without the doctrine of redemption: the doctrine is unreal, is not, without the historical Redeemer.

But this historical religion rests for us, in the main, upon certain books which claim to be histories. No questions are then more intimate to our faith than those which concern these histories, and among such questions surely none is more fundamental than that of their origin. We shall feel this when we have weighed well what would become of our

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faith if it should be proved that our Gospels originated as Strauss and his school claim that they did. If such an origin is proved, the truth must indeed stand, but Christianity as we prize it could not stand also. By a figure most apt the hypothesis of Strauss has been called “a fable-spinning sybil,” who like a vampire sucks all the fresh life-blood out of each narrative of the evangelists one by one, and then tosses them over into “the death-kingdom of abstract thought.” If these books arose as his hypothesis maintains they have lost forever their high value for us. The same in substance may be said of the “tendency “criticism of Baur and his followers. What is so thoroughly true of these hypotheses is more or less true of all views which touch the origin of our Gospels, that their erection or overthrow is of the greatest concern to our faith. And indeed how can it be otherwise? For if one could answer every question about the sources of these writings and the use made of them, he could also tell why there is so much apparent discrepancy in matter and arrangement, and how far, if at all, there is real discrepancy. But these are the puzzling questions of gospel harmony.

Nor is the doctrine of inspiration far removed from the discussion, since to recognize and explore the human element in the compound product is the best preparation for a belief in the divine. And further, this inquiry does not fail to affect somewhat deeply the understanding of each narrative of the ...