The New Testament

Contents

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Introduction vii

BOOKS OF THE NEW TESTAMENT

Introduction

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Jesus died in a.d. 29 or 30. Within about a century after his death the writings which w r ere collected later on into our New Testament had appeared, and appeared in and for communities of men and women who knew they were living in fellowship with him as their Lord in heaven. Literature rises out of life, and special periods sometimes are a-flower with writings that outlive their setting. Such classical literature implies an intense spirit of life, heightened and vivid; it grows fresh out of a soil of rich traditions, with a keen perception of the present, and an outlook upon the future. So with the New Testament writings. They are the classical literature of early Christianity, springing from the vitality of men who remembered Jesus, who were conscious of living in personal fellowship with him as their Lord, and who expected his return. Memory, faith, and hope were the controlling forces which he inspired in them, especially hope, which included faith and memory; and the atmosphere they breathed was one of love, in which they joined hands for a new fellowship of common aims and interests. The setting of these characteristics changed, as the second generation was succeeded by the third. Hope did not fade, but the element of memory was heightened in the service of faith; the historical basis had to be emphasized as the development went on. The religious movement which Jesus started as a Semitic form of faith outgrew its primitive environment and v iii THE NEW TESTAMENT

expanded into a propaganda for the world at large, translating itself afresh into new forms of expression and appeal, but preserving, amid all its varieties, its inward identity. These developments, with their inevitable elements of strain, are recorded or at least reflected in the pages of this literature; indeed it was owing to the exigencies of the movement, as it became more fully conscious of itself, that these writings came to be composed. In the communities of the faithful, men had to impress upon themselves and upon others what Jesus said and did, for the more convinced they were that he was neither a Jewish pretender nor an unsubstantial deity like one of the deities of the cults, the more urgent it was for them to recall that his words were the rule of their life and that his actions in history had created their position in the world; they had to think out their faith, to state it against outside criticism, and to teach it within their own circle, instead of being content with it as a mere emotion ; they had also to refresh their courage by anticipating the future, which they believed was in the hands of their Lord. Such were the main motives that led to their literary activity. Jesus had made life a new thing for them. Some realized this instinctively. Others did not realize how new it was, wondering if the new was altogether true. Others again were inclined to exaggerate or misconceive the novelty. But the common basis of their life was the conviction that they enjoyed a new relationship with God, for which they were indebted to Jesus. The technical term for this relationship was 'covenant/ and 'covenant' became eventually in their vocabulary 'testament.' Hence the later name for these writings of the church, when gathered into a sacred collection, was 'The New Testament' — New because

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the older relationship of God to his people, which had obtained under Judaism, was superseded by the faith and fellowship which Jesus Christ his Son had inaugurated. It was the consciousness of this that inspired the early Christians to live, and to write about the origin and applications of this new life. Tkey wrote for their own age, without a thought of posterity, and they did not write in unison but in harmony. "No one," says Dr. Denney, "can deny that the New Testament has variety as well as unity. It is the variety which gives interest to the unity. What is it in which these people, differing as widely as they do, are vitally and fundamentally at one, so that through all their differences they form a brotherhood and are conscious of an indissoluble spiritual bond? There can be no doubt that that which unites them is a common relation to Christ — a common faith in Him involving common religious convictions about Him." This is the clue to all that was written then about Jesus, in whatever form, and from whatever angle.

Jesus wrote nothing, and for a time his immediate disciples felt no impulse to write any account of him. A new age and order was expected at any moment; Jesus was to inaugurate this soon and suddenly. Why write a biography of one who was to reappear from heaven ere long? They were living in the brief interval between his earthly life and his return to complete the work of God, which would end the present order. Theirs only to wait, and meantime to bear witness to the resurrection of Jesus, to induce, if possible, the Jewish nation to repent of their sin in murdering God's chosen Servant. Repent and turn to have your sins blotted out, so that a breathing-space may be vouchsafed you, and that the Lord may send Jesus your long-

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decreed Christ, who must be kept in heaven till the period of the great Restoration. These words of Peter to the Jerusalemites express the attitude of the faithful during this initial phase. In days marked by such tense expectation there could be no thought of preserving any literary records of what Jesus had said and done. He had merely been withdrawn into heaven. Presently he would appear again to usher in that reign of God on earth which he had foretold and in a sense initiated.

But he was remembered. Oriental memory is singularly tenacious, and the impression he had made upon his followers was deep and sharp. As time went on, the Palestinian Christians cherished more and more the recollection of outstanding events and sayings in his life. Particularly the incidents of the last tragic week of his career were remembered, for so much depended on his death ; the argument with Jews turned mainly upon his sufferings, which had to be adjusted to their traditional faith in a messiah. The apologetic requirements of the early mission led to the crystallization of memories about him. Also his words were recalled, since they formed the rule and guide of his communities. Remember the words of_ the Lord Jesus, who said, "To give is happier than to get." So Paul told the presbyters of Ephesus, as he bade them farewell. And again he recalled a saying of Jesus, to clinch his argument that Christian ministers should be supported by the communities; the Lord's instructions were that those who proclaim the gospel are to get their living by the gospel. These are incidental allusions, but they are the more telling because they are incidental. They tally with the implicit knowledge of details about the historical life of Jesus in Paul's letters.

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He can presuppose an adequate acquaintance with that life, in his communities, and his arguments are unintelligible apart from an interest in and an acquaintance with the data of the historical Jesus. All this was due to the vivid recollections and traditions of the primitive Palestinian disciples. How soon their materials took written shape, we cannot tell, but at least one written record of them was probably in existence by about a.d. 50. It is in the preservation and compilation of these anecdotes about Jesus that the first phase of literary activity among the primitive Christians lies. Those who had been with him loved to recollect the very words he used, his looks and gestures, his methods of teaching and of healing. And this from no mere pious, sentimental motive. When challenged by the Jews to justify their faith and practice, they had to fall back upon what they remembered of the instructions of their Lord. He had said this about the Law. He had taken this line on the question of the sabbath, or of marriage, or of prayer, or of forgiveness. Where he was born, why he had died, how he had appeared after death — all this and more entered into the common consciousness of the communities which existed in virtue of their faith in him.

But a generation passed without any definite expression of this in literature. During the first thirty or thirty-five years after his death, nothing was composed except a number of letters which were occasional and meant for the practical needs of the present. All that has survived of this primitive literature is the work of one who was not a member of the original group of disciples, a brilliant young Jewish leader called Paul, who became a Christian and travelled far to spread the news of Jesus, founding communities here and xii THE NEW TESTAMENT

there, and, among other exploits, carrying the gospel across the Mediterranean into Europe. With these communities Paul kept in touch by means of letters, advising, inspiring, and controlling them, when he could not be with them. Sometimes they are, in Dryden's phrase, his "absent sermons." One is to a group of Asiatic Christians in Galatia, but the majority are addressed to little churches or circles of the faithful in Macedonia and Greece, at places like Thessalonika, Philippi, and Corinth, all of which he and his coadjutors had founded. Two are sent to churches with which he had no connexion, one to Colossae in Asia Minor, the other to Rome ; but in both cases he hoped to follow up the letter by a visit, and to both churches he was already well known by reputation. One semiprivate note of his has been preserved, to a Christian at Colossae called Philemon. Another, a profound address to some unknown church or group of churches in Asia Minor, was afterwards given the misleading title of 'To the Ephesians/ but there is some doubt as to whether it was written by Paul or in his name by a later disciple.

These letters fall in the latter part of Paul's life, between about a.d. 50 and 65. The earliest is the correspondence with Thessalonika or the letter to Galatia; then follow the correspondence with Corinth, the letter to the Roman Christians, and, from his imprisonment, the later group of letters to the Colossians, Philemon, and Philippians. They were mainly dictated to a scribe or secretary, and sent by the hands of some trusty messenger — for the Roman Empire had no postal service for ordinary people. They were read aloud at worship, and often copied out in order to reach churches in the vicinity. When they were

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eventually collected, possibly by the beginning of the second century at Ephesus, some editorial work was done upon them. Thus a letter of introduction for Phoebe to the church in Ephesus has been incorporated in the last chapter of the epistle to the Romans, and even the earlier part of that epistle suggests that there, had been several editions of it from Paul's hand. The correspondence with the church at Corinth, again, is merely a part of the original, and has been rearranged: only one fragment of Paul's first letter has survived (out of its place, in 2 Cor. vi. 17-vii. 1), and after 1 Corinthians two letters passed, the first of which is extant in an abbreviated form in 2 Cor. x. 1-xiii. 10, the second in 2 Cor. i.-ix. These and other literary problems emerge out of the canonical text. It is also probable that genuine notes of Paul have been worked up by the Paulinist who afterwards wrote 2 Timotheus, Titus, and 1 Timotheus in that order, some time during the next generation.

Paul was the first to think out the meaning of the Christian faith, and this was forced upon him by his mission to Jews and non-Jews alike. Particularly he had to carry the church through its first crisis, past the danger of remaining a Jewish sect. He was an evangelist, an organizer, and also a thinker — not a common combination. He died as a martyr, but not before his great work was done. It is no wonder that for the church in the second century he was the apostle; they looked back to him and up to him as the outstanding figure of his age, and this impression is confirmed, as it is largely made, by his writings. ''The future history of Europe and America for two thousand years," as Dean Inge observes, "perhaps for all time, was determined by his missionary journeys

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and printed writings. It is. impossible to guess what would have become of Christianity if he had never lived." The vitality of these letters, thrown off in the midst of a busy life, is indeed due to the fact that he "understood what most Christians never realize, namely, that the gospel of Christ is not a religion, but religion, itself." He is the one personality in primitive Christianity about whose personal devotion we know something intimate. The intellectual forms in which he expressed his faith were not final at every point; there was a variety of interpretations of the gospel, mainly stirred by his impetus, which appeared in subsequent literature of the period. But his genius is by itself.

Paul was not the pioneer of missions to non-Jews, though he did more for them by travelling and argument than any other early Christian leader; he it was who inspired the emancipation movement which saved the primitive church from a reactionary conservatism. But he was the first man of letters in the early church. Of the original twelve apostles, very few had occasion or ability to follow him along this line. A pastoral letter from Simon Peter to a group of churches mainly in the north of Asia Minor has survived under the title of 'First Peter/ This beautiful piece, evidently written in view of some persecution at the hands of the civil authorities, may be dated in the seventh decade of the first century. Apparently it was dictated to Peter's amanuensis, Silvanus, at Rome, which is called by the mystical, opprobrious name of Babylon, as the new, evil oppressor of God's people. Later on, a gospel, an apocalypse, and a book of Acts were written under Peter's name, none of which succeeded in winning a final place within the New Testa-

INTRODUCTION XV

ment; but a second epistle, probably composed early in the second century, managed after a while to gain a position inside the canon. 'Second Peter' is mainly a denunciation of errorists, and in style, language, and spirit it is inferior to the authentic First Epistle; its Greek is the poorest and most ambitious in the New Testament. Another homily is assigned by some to the apostle James (either the brother of John or the brother of Jesus), but the 'Epistle of James' is one of the enigmas of the collection. It is terse, stringent, and permeated by reminiscences of the Wisdom literature of Judaism. No tradition about its origin has survived; it is addressed to Christians at large, under the figurative, archaic title of 'the twelve tribes in the Dispersion,' and it lacks any epistolary conclusion. The writer is one of the teachers in the early church, keenly alive to the ethical obligations of the faith, individual and social. Those who assign it to the apostle James, the brother of Jesus, date it either before Paul's letters or in the seventh decade of the first century; but if James is merely a Christian teacher, as is most probable, the homily may be placed towards the end of the first or the opening of the second century. It certainly presupposes misconceptions of Paul's teaching about faith.

Another homily by a Christian teacher has survived, under the title of 'Hebrews.' Who wrote it, when it was written, and for whom it was intended, no one knows. When it was edited for its place in the canon, it received, like 'Ephesians,' a misleading title, for 'Hebrews,' either as an equivalent for Jewish Christians or for Hebrew-speaking Jewish Christians, is inapplicable to the circle for whom this remarkable treatise was intended. The author is in closer touch xvi THE NEW TESTAMENT

with his readers than the author of 'James.' He writes to warn them against apostasy from Christianity under stress of suffering, and his homily is not only literary and even artistic in form, but characterized by a profound, mystical philosophy of religion. Much of it is a series of short bible-readings from the Greek pentateuch and psalter; the person and work of Christ are discussed in a unique vein of theological speculation, nearer to that of the Fourth Gospel than anything else; and the author reveals an intimate acquaintance with the spirit and methods of the Alexandrian Jewish theology. Though not Paul, he may have been in touch with the Pauline circle. He writes to what is evidently a small group of Christians, in Rome or elsewhere, but his treatise has no epistolary opening and reads often like a sermon or sermons written out. Various guesses were made about its authorship in the second century, but the author's name had disappeared from knowledge at an early date; he is one of the anonymous figures which prove that the early Christian movement must have been richer in personalities than we sometimes realize. The homily may be placed anywhere between about a.d. 70 and a.d. 90, and either then or later a forcible little homily under the name of 'Judas" came into circulation, written to protest against some heretical movement in local Christianity. This pamphlet was used by the author of 'Second Peter,' so that it must have been written by the beginning of the second century. To whom? The tract does not say, and tradition offers no clue. By whom? The author calls himself "a brother of James," and 'J ames ' ma y mean either the brother of Jesus or the James who was one of the original twelve disciples or some unknown figure in the early church. Our

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Judas does not call himself an apostle; indeed, he speaks of the apostles as an historical authority in the past. A spirit of religious conservatism breathes through his manifesto. Like the writer of James, he is indignant and alarmed at Christians who are misrepresenting Christianity by their conduct and opinions.

These occasional tracts and homilies came into circulation during the period which followed the career of Paul, although none of them exactly represents his theological position and none, except Second Peter, alludes to him. They are literature called out by exigencies of church-life as it developed here and there. Only in two of them, First Peter and Hebrews, is there any distinct appeal to the historical life of Jesus. But the interest in this life was meanwhile beginning to voice itself in literature; the traditions about Jesus, which are presupposed in the epistles, now came to be recorded in writing, and we encounter the historical writings of the New Testament. These are five in number. Four are 'gospels' and one is the sequel to a gospel, which carries on -the story of the primitive church, mainly in connexion with Paul, to the period of his arrest and arrival in Rome, about or shortly after a.d. 60.

Familiarity with the term 'gospels' must not be allowed to blind us to the fact that both in name and in form they were a new departure in literature. The Greek word for gospel meant originally the reward for bringing good news, then the good news itself, and finally the written record of the good hews. The term passed through these three stages. Now, in the New Testament itself gospel always means the second of these, i.e. the gospel-message of salvation, the good news of God's redeeming purpose as brought by or

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realized in Jesus Christ. The third or literary sense is editorial; it arose in the second century of our era, when we find the remarkable fact that the term gospel was being definitely reserved by the church as a title for the books which described the historical life of Jesus. They were thus distinguished from the Old Testament, the real bible of the early church, which was believed to predict the career and mission of our Lord, and from the apostolic epistles and other writings which arose out of that mission. The four gospels were, of course, apostolic productions; indeed, their original name seems to have been 'apostolic memoirs of Jesus,' and it was their connexion with the primitive apostles who had been eye-witnesses of Jesus that authenticated them. But the vital importance of their contents led to their monopoly of the term gospel as a literary title. Strictly speaking, there was only one 'gospel,' the proclamation of God's final revelation in and by Jesus Christ. In fact, the four gospels are technically various reproductions of that good news; what we have is 'The Gospel according to Matthew,' or 'according to Mark/ or 'according to Luke,' or 'according to John,' i.e. gospel still in the second of its meanings. But colloquially, as time went on, gospels came to be used in the third sense also, as written records of the one 'gospel' — a new departure which is not more new than their intrinsic literary form. For there is no exact prototype of the gospels in ancient literature. They are not mere biographies, not even biographies written for edification. For the composition of epistles and letters, even for the production of homilies in epistolary form, the early Christians had certain precedents in Jewish and classical literature. But the exact

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form in which stories and sayings of Jesus were preserved by them is a novelty in ancient literature.

The first three gospels form a group by themselves. They are not independent narratives about Jesus; one has been re-edited by the other two. The first to be composed was evidently not regarded as sacrosanct and final, for, while the two later gospel-writers adhere upon the whole to its outline, they take great liberties with its matter, both in arrangement and in style, toning down, for example, the frank realism which sometimes characterizes Mark, or even altering expressions to suit a slightly different estimate of some incident or saying. Neither of the two later gospels was written to be read alongside of Mark, as is our modern fashion. They were written to supersede it, or at any rate to be read in quarters where it was unknown.

In order to clear up the genesis of these first three gospels, it will be advisable to put what may be regarded as approximately the results of modern investigation into a diagram like this : —

Special sources Petrine traditions Other sources Special sources

By Q we mean the early collection drawn up from oral tradition in the Palestinian communities, mainly a collection of sayings of Jesus. It is conveniently named Q from the first letter of Quelle (= source, in German) ; it forms the basis for most of the non- Marcan material common to Matthew and Luke. Whether Mark used it or not, is uncertain. We should

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always remember that Q and the other sources must have contained sometimes the same material, in varying forms, and that neither the Petrine traditions nor Q exhausted the available material. This material need not have been circulating in written shape ; some of it, in the special contributions preserved by Matthew and Luke, was probably handed down by oral tradition and hearsay. But, with the rise of the three gospels, their written sources, such as they were, disappeared. Q, for example, can only be reconstructed from a critical comparison of the material in Matthew and Luke which is not due to Mark, and no reconstruction is more than tentative.

The first stage was the oral circulation and collection of sayings and stories of Jesus, mainly in the original Aramaic, for the primary purpose of proving that he w r as the real messiah of God's people. Then came the literary stage, when they were put together for the purposes of catechetical instruction and apologetic argument, and possibly at this period there were also small collections of suitable proof-texts or testimonies from the Old Testament, for use especially in controversy with the Jews. Q must have been compiled at an early period. But the first of our four Gospels to be composed was that of Mark, based, as tradition tells us, upon Peter's reminiscences. It is the only survivor of the evangelic literature of the period. A generation was rising which depended for its acquaintance with the actual story of Jesus upon a rapidly diminishing company of eye-witnesses, a generation also which needed that story in Greek, instead of in the vernacular Aramaic, which was unintelligible outside Jewish circles. Mark's gospel is a terse, vivid account of Jesus, from the beginning of his public

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ministry to his death. It is not an artless transcript of oral reminiscences preserved by Peter, but shows signs of earlier written materials having been worked up by the author. Also, it handles the story in an outline which became normal; first the Galilean ministry, then the Judean, closing with a specially detailed account of the passion- week. Unluckily some accident happened to the last page or pages of the book. Either John Mark was prevented from finishing it, or it was mutilated. The story breaks off in the middle of a sentence.

Mark wrote for an audience outside Palestine, for whose benefit he was careful to explain sometimes a Jewish technical term. The next gospel was written by one who was more deeply steeped in Jewish ideas. Matthew's gospel is much more occupied with the proof from Old Testament prophecy, with the connexion between Jesus as the Lord of a world-wide church and the Judaism which he at once completed and superseded. Matthew's aim is larger than Mark's. It is his interest to show, from the life of Jesus, how the ancestral promises and purposes of God had been really fulfilled in the Christian church as God's true people, and how the Jewish opposition to Jesus had meant a tragic misinterpretation of prophecy. The author is a teacher; the arrangement of his material shows that he had an eye to the catechetical as well as to the apologetic requirements of the church. But what characterizes his gospel pre-eminently is the amount of space devoted to the teaching of Jesus as the founder of the new community. The record of stories about Jesus is enriched; but it is the revelation of his personality in his words which renders Matthew's gospel, in Renan's words, "le livre le plus important qui ait xxii THE NEW TESTAMENT

jamais ete ecrit." No wonder later tradition came to put it first among the four.

He rearranged and often rewrote Mark's gospel, omitting a little, altering much, and adding more, from special Palestinian sources. The new material, so far as it embodied sayings, is mainly drawn from Q; indeed it is a fair hypothesis, although not more than a hypothesis, that Q was compiled by Matthew, one of the original disciples of Jesus, and that the entire gospel was associated with the name of Matthew on account of the thoroughness with which this Matthean source (= Q) was for the first time incorporated in a gospel.

But as Mark's gospel did not prevent Matthew's from appearing, neither did even Matthew's meet the full requirements of the church. Attempts at composing gospels seem to have been numerous, and we have a third important effort which was made later by a well-educated Christian physician, a friend of Paul who was called Luke. His gospel opens in literary style with a dedication and short preface to some Christian catechumen called Theophilus, perhaps a man of rank. Luke is not satisfied with his predecessors, including Mark. He claims no special inspiration, merely premising that he has taken pains to be accurate, orderly, and well informed. Unlike Matthew, whose gospel he does not use, he was not a Jew by birth, and he writes for non-Jewish readers, for Christians in the outside empire, exhibiting a literary skill and an historic sense unrivalled by any of his predecessors. He had access to rich traditions about Jesus, especially about his birth, parables, and closing days, traditions unused by Mark or Matthew, some of which had probably never been put into writing. Like Mat-

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thew, he adheres to the general order and outline of Mark, even while he expands and rearranges it at several points. His omissions of what must have lain before him are rarely due to any dogmatic prepossession; they are usually to be explained as the result either of his desire to avoid repetitions and to make room for new material, or of his sense that some of these passages might be irrelevant if not actually misleading to his audience. His additions are for the most part illustrations of the sympathy and power of Jesus, and what he has left out is generally connected with the contemporary opposition and criticism of the Pharisees. Luke lays less stress than Mark and Matthew do upon the local antagonism to Jesus. Such conflicts were to him, as Professor Bruce says, "but the morning mists through which the Sun of Righteousness had to clear his way to meridian splendour," and he has evidently the feeling that these controversies would not appeal directly to the audience he has in view. From a literary point of view, his is the most artistic of the gospels; none of the New Testament writers, except the author of Hebrews, is such a master of idiomatic style and of construction. Even a translation does not entirely obliterate this characteristic.