Kitabı oku: «The Making of the New Testament», sayfa 6

"James" is also a homily exhorting to patient endurance, but there is nothing to suggest its having ever been sent anywhere as a letter, save the brief superscription written in imitation of 1st Pet. i. 1. "James … to the twelve tribes of the Dispersion." Imagine the mode of delivery! Nor is it called forth by any special emergency. There is an allusion to false doctrine. It is the heresy (!) of "justification by faith apart from works." But the writer is no more conscious of contradicting Paul than is Luke in describing Paul's apostleship and gospel. He merely impersonates the 'bishop of bishops' addressing Christendom at large, deprecating the loquacity of the "many teachers," and commending the 'wisdom' of a "good life" instead. There is protest against oppression. But it is only the oppression of the poor by the rich in the Christian brotherhood. He returns to this subject con amore. Evidently the church of his age is characterized by worldliness both of thought and conduct, among clergy and laity. But all colour of region or period is wanting. Take 1st Peter, substitute the head of the Jerusalem succession for the head of the Roman, remove the Pauline doctrine, the traces of Jesus and his gospel of Son ship, remove the special references to local conditions and particular emergencies, leaving only moral generalities, and the result will be not unlike the Epistle of James. The author has heard something of Paulinism, has read Hebrews (Jas. ii. 21-25; v. 10), and imitated 1st Peter (Jas. i. 1, 18, 21; iv. 6 f.; v. 20). Strong arguments have even been advanced to prove that he was not a Christian at all. He probably was, if only from his literary connection with the above-named earlier writings, and the influence exerted by his own on Hermas (Rome, 120-140), and perhaps Clement (Rome, 95). But as for connection with the historic Jesus – "Elijah" is his example of the man of prayer (v. 13-18), and "Job" and "the prophets" his "example of suffering and patience" (v. 10 f.). Hebrews can show more of the influence of Jesus than this (Heb. v. 7 f., xii. 2-4). Like Hermas (who, however, does not even mention the name of Jesus) 'James' thinks of Him simply as "the Lord of glory," without raising the question how He came to be such.

Apart from the superscription, whose object is only to clothe the homily with the authority of a name revered throughout the 'catholic' church, there is nothing to connect James with Syria rather than any other region outside Paul's mission-field. Even Palestine might be its place of origin if the date were late enough to account for the Greek style. At all events it comes first to our knowledge at Rome. There is some reason to think that Clement of Rome (a. d. 95), whose moralizing is of a similar type, has been directly influenced by James. If so we have in James, Clement and Hermas a series illustrative of the decline at Rome of the Pauline gospel of conscious revelation and inspiration toward the hum-drum levels of mere 'catholic' catechetics.

With every allowance for differences among critics as to date and origin of the non-controversial epistles of the sub-apostolic age, it is easy to see that the resistless march of events is taking up and accomplishing Paul's effort and prayer for the unity of the two branches of the Church. One great event of this period, which for us stands out with startling vividness upon the pages of history, is curiously without trace or reflection in this literature. We search the New Testament in vain for the slightest allusion (outside the writings directly or indirectly derived from Palestine itself) to the fall of Jerusalem in a. d. 70, and the consequent cessation of Jewish national life and temple ceremonial. The remoteness of the writers with whom we are dealing both in time and national interest from the affairs of Jerusalem is not the only cause. The fate of the temple had no effect to weaken the types of Judaism with which the church of the sub-apostolic age had to contend. The Pharisaic legalism of the synagogue became only the stronger when the hollow Sadducean priesthood collapsed, and temple ceremonial became simply a ceremonial on paper, the affair no longer of priest and Levite, but of scribe and Pharisee. So also with the denationalized Judaism of the Dispersion, a more insidious danger for early converts from heathenism than the stricter, legalistic type. The crushing of the nationalistic rebellion, the temporary suppression of the war-party, the Zealots, only strengthened and promoted Pharisaism, and the Dispersion was scarcely affected by the losses of the war. When Jerusalem and the temple fell, temple and city had become entirely superfluous factors to both parties in the great strife of church versus synagogue. Hebrews knows of a type of Judaism which is formidable by reason of the appeal of its ordinances of angels and its sacerdotal system written in a book of acknowledged divine authority. But the characteristic point is that in Hebrews, as truly as in Barnabas and Justin Martyr, it is only the prescription and not the practice which is in question. But for the fact that the "new testament" of Heb. ix. 15 is still unwritten, its controversy might properly be described as a battle of books.

On the other hand the pressure of persecution without, combined with the disappearance of creative leadership within, is visibly forcing the independent provinces of Christendom toward organic unity under the principle of apostolic authority. First Peter is the first and greatest evidence of this tendency to union promoted by external pressure. Hebrews and James follow as illustrative of the need felt for maintaining the standards both of doctrine and of morals at their full height. Christianity must not be thought of as on a level with Judaism, it is the final and universal revelation. It must not be practised half-heartedly, with "double-mindedness," nor in vain philosophizing and professions belied by deeds. It must be obeyed as a new and royal law, the mirror of divine perfection.

If, then, we turn from these evidences of general conditions in church and empire to the inward dangers revealed by the writings against heresy, we shall see how this disruptive influence, already distinctly apprehended in Paul's later writings, makes itself more and more strongly felt, and in more and more definite form, with Ephesus and the churches of Asia as its chief breeding-place.

The Pastoral Epistles in their present form cannot be dated much before the time when they begin to be used by Ignatius and Polycarp (110-117). Indeed some phrases (perhaps editorial additions) seem to imply a still later date, as when in 1st Tim. vi. 20, Timothy is warned against the "antitheses of miscalled Gnosis," as if with direct reference to Marcion's system of this title. Their avowed purpose is to counteract the inroads of heresy, and the remedy applied is ecclesiastical authority and discipline. Far more of Paul's inspired gospel of Son ship and liberty, far more of his conception of the redemption in Christ as a triumph over the spiritual world-rulers of this darkness, is found in 1st Peter and Hebrews than here. Nothing appears of Paul's broad horizon, his spirit of missionary conquest, his devotion to the unity of Jew and Gentile in their common access to the Father in one Spirit. There is no trace of the great Pauline doctrines of the conflict of flesh and spirit, the superseding of the dispensation of Law by the dispensation of Grace, the Adoption, the Redemption, the Inheritance. The attention is turned wholly to local conditions, maintenance of the transmitted doctrine and order, resistance to the advance of "vain talk," "Jewish fables," "foolish questionings, genealogies and strifes about the Law," which go hand in hand with moral laxity. In short the outlook and temper are those of the Epistle of James, while the remedy is that of Acts and the Epistles of Ignatius. The Paul who here speaks is not the missionary and mystic, but the shrewd ecclesiastic. There is only too much evidence to show that in the Pauline mission-field the remedy resorted to against the licence in thought and action which threatened decadence and dissolution after apostolic inspiration had died out, was the religion of authority, doctrinal and disciplinary, not the religion of the Spirit. Ecclesiastical appointees take the place as teachers and defenders of the faith of those who had been the inspired apostles and prophets of its extension.

And on the other side are the false teachers. They are of Jewish character in their doctrine, aspiring to be "teachers of the Law" though really ignorant of its meaning. The worst of them are actual Jews (Tit. i. 10), which implies that some were not. Moreover the type of doctrine is still less like the Pharisaism of the synagogue than the "philosophy and vain deceit" rebuked by Paul at Colossæ. There is similar distinction of meats (treated in 2nd Tim. iv. 1-5 as a doctrine of "seducing spirits and demons"), and a prohibition of wine and marriage. There is side by side with this ascetic tendency one equally marked toward libertinism and love of money (2nd Tim. iii. 1-9). Both phases remind us of the "concision" of Paul's later letters. But besides the larger development new features appear of Hellenistic rather than Jewish type. The new doctrine of the resurrection as something "past already" is more closely connected with the Pauline mysticism, the present union of the believer with the life of Christ "hid in God," than with the Jewish idea of return to earth in resuscitated flesh. The Paulinist of the Pastorals is already foreshadowing the great conflict of Ignatius, Justin and Irenæus against those who "denied the resurrection," perverting (as the fathers allege) the meaning of Paul's saying, "flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God" (cf. 2nd Pet. iii. 16). And the Pastorals tend toward the un-Pauline doctrine soon to be formulated in the 'catholic' church: "I believe in the resurrection of the flesh." Again the false doctrine now distinctly avows itself a form of Gnosis. "They profess that they know God, but by their works they deny him, being abominable and disobedient, and unto every good work reprobate." And our Paulinist's remedy is the traditional doctrine, the "pattern of sound words," the "deposit" of the Church teacher, more especially the whole-some words, "even the words of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the doctrine which is according to godliness." Thus even the rich, if they do good, and become "rich in good works" will "lay up in store for themselves a good foundation against the time to come."

We have only to place these pseudo-Pauline writings side by side with the Epistles of John and Ignatius to recognize the advance of the heresy which soon declared itself as Gnostic Doketism, with the Jew Cerinthus at Ephesus as its principal exponent. Moreover this steadily increasing inward danger of the Pauline mission-field, a danger not merely sporadic like the outbursts of persecution, but constant and increasing, is forcing the two great branches of the Christian brotherhood together on the basis of 'catholicity' and the 'apostolic' tradition. Between the churches of the Ægean and that of Rome, where both parties stand on neutral ground, there are exchanged generous and sympathetic assurances of essential unity of doctrine in the great outbreak of persecution in 85-90. Among the Pauline churches themselves there is an irresistible reaction against the vagaries and moral laxity of heretical teaching toward 'apostolic' tradition and ecclesiastical authority. It appears with almost startling vividness in the Pastoral Epistles, and meets its answer from without, perhaps from Rome, perhaps from Syria, in the homily dressed as an encyclical called the Epistle of James. It is not hard to foresee what sort of Christian unity is destined to come about. Nevertheless the creative spirit and genius of Paul was to find expression in one more splendid product of Ephesus before the Roman unity was to be achieved. – But before we take up the writings of the great 'theologian' of Ephesus we must trace the growth in Syria and at Rome of the Literature of the Church Teacher and Prophet.

PART III
THE LITERATURE OF CATECHIST AND PROPHET

CHAPTER VI
THE MATTHÆAN TRADITION OF THE PRECEPTS OF JESUS

As we have seen in our study of the later literature addressed to, or emanating from, the Pauline mission-field, the church teacher and ecclesiastic who there took up the pen after the death of Paul had scarcely any alternative but to follow the literary model of the great founder of Gentile Christianity. Inevitably the typical literary product of this region became the apostolic letter, framed on the model of Paul's, borrowing his phraseology and ideas, when not actually embodying fragments from his pen and covering itself with his name. Homilies are made over into "epistles." Even 'prophecy,' to obtain literary circulation, must have prefixed epistles of "the Spirit" to the churches; and when at last a gospel is produced, this too is accompanied, as we shall see, by three successive layers of enclosing 'epistles.'

At the seat of 'apostolic' Christianity it was equally inevitable that the literary products should follow a different model. Here, from the beginning, the standard of authority had been the commandment of Jesus. Apostleship had meant ability to transmit his teaching, not endowment with insight into the mystery of the divine purpose revealed in his cross and resurrection. "The gospel" was the gospel of Jesus. The letters of Paul, if they circulated at all in Syria and Cilicia at this early time, have had comparatively small effect on writers like Luke and James. At Rome the case was somewhat different. Here Pauline influence had been effectually superimposed upon an originally Jewish-Christian stock. The Roman Gospel of Mark, accordingly, has just the characteristics we should expect from this Petro-Pauline community. Antioch, too, though at the disruption over the question of table-fellowship it took the side of James, Peter, and Barnabas against Paul, had always had a strong Gentile element. But Jerusalem, the church of the apostles and elders, with its caliphate in the family of Jesus, and its zeal for Jewish institutions and the Law, was the pre-eminent seat of traditional authority. No other gospel, oral or written, could for a moment compare in its eyes with its own cherished treasury of the precepts of Jesus. Its own estimate of itself as conservator of orthodoxy, and custodian of the sacred deposit, vividly reflected from the pages of Hegesippus, was increasingly accepted by the other churches. 'James' and 'Jude' were probably not the real names of the writers of these 'general' or 'catholic' epistles; but they show in what direction men looked when there was need to counteract a widespread tendency to moral relaxation and vain disputations, or to demoralizing heresy.

We have also seen how inevitable was the reaction after Paul's death, even among his own churches, toward a historic standard of authority. Even more marked than the disposition to draw together in fraternal sympathy under persecution, is the reliance shown by the Pastoral Epistles on "health-giving words, even the words of our Lord Jesus Christ" (1st Tim. vi. 3), and on a consolidated apostolic succession as a bulwark against the disintegrating advance of heresy. In (proconsular) Asia early in the second century there is an unmistakable and sweeping disposition to "turn to the word handed down to us from the beginning" (Ep. of Polyc., vii.) against those who were "perverting the sayings of the Lord to their own lusts." The ancient "word of prophecy" and the former revelations granted to apostolic seers were also turned to account by men like Papias and the author of 2nd Peter against those who "denied the resurrection and judgment."

This Papias of Hierapolis, the friend and colleague of Polycarp, had undertaken in opposition to "the false teachers, and those who have so very much to say," to write (probably after the utter destruction of the community of 'apostles, elders, and witnesses' at Jerusalem in 135), an Exposition of the Sayings of the Lord. He based the work on authentic tradition of the Jerusalem witnesses, two of whom (Aristion, and John 'the Elder') were still living at the time of his inquiries. In fact, this much debated "John the Elder," clearly distinguished by Papias from John the "disciple of the Lord," may be identified, in our judgment, with the John mentioned by Eusebius and Epiphanius midway in the succession of 'Elders' of the Jerusalem church between a. d. 62 and 135. Epiphanius dates his death in 117. Papias gives us practically all the information we have regarding the beginnings of gospel literature. He may have known all four of our Gospels. He certainly knew Revelation and "vouched for its trustworthiness," doubtless against the deniers of the resurrection and judgment. He "used testimonies" from 1st John, and probably the saying of Jesus of John xiv. 2; but he seems to have based his Exposition on two gospels only, giving what he had been able to learn of their history from travellers who reported to him testimonies of 'the elders.' Papias' two gospels were our Matthew and our Mark, whose differences he reconciled by what the Jerusalem elders had reported as to their origin. Matthew, according to these authorities (?), represented in its Greek form a collection of the Precepts of the Lord which had formerly been current in the original Aramaic, so that its circulation had of course been limited to Palestine. The original compiler had been the Apostle Matthew. Various Greek equivalents of this compilation had taken its place where Aramaic was not current. Thus Papias, in explicit dependence on "the Elder" so far as Mark is concerned, but without special designation of his authority for the statement regarding Matthew. It is even possible that his representation that the primitive Matthew was "in the Hebrew tongue" may be due to rumours whose real starting-point was nothing more than the Gospel of the Nazarenes, a product of c. 110-140 which misled many later fathers, particularly Jerome. We cannot afford, however, to slight the general bearing of testimony borne by one such as Papias regarding the origins of gospel composition, and particularly the two branches into which the tradition was divided. For Papias had made diligent inquiry. Moreover his witness does not stand alone, but has the support of still more ancient reference (e. g. 1st Tim. vi. 3, Acts i. 1) and the internal evidence of the Synoptic Gospels themselves. The motive for his statement is apologetic. Differences between the two Gospels had been pointed out on the score both of words and events. Papias shows that Gospel tradition is not to be held responsible for verbal agreement between the two parallel reports of the Lord's words. The differences are attributable to translation. So, too, regarding events. Exact correspondence of Mark with Matthew (or other gospels) is not to be looked for, especially as regards the order; because Mark had not himself been a disciple, and could not get the true order from Peter, whose anecdotes he reproduced; for when Mark wrote Peter was no longer living. Mark has reproduced faithfully and accurately his recollection of "things either said or done," as related by Peter. But Peter had had no such intention as Matthew of making a systematic compilation (syntagma) of the sayings of the Lord, and had only related his anecdotes "as occasion required." If the tradition regarding Matthew, as well as that regarding Mark, was derived from the Elder, he, too, as well as Papias, knew the Greek Matthew; regarding it as a "translation" of the apostolic Logia, he naturally makes Matthew the standard and accounts as above for the wide divergence of Mark as to order.

The Jerusalem elder who thus differentiates the two great branches of gospel tradition into Matthæan Precepts and Petrine Sayings and Doings, is probably "the Elder John"; for this elder's "traditions" were so copiously cited by Papias as to lead Irenæus, and after him Eusebius, to the unwarranted inference of personal contact. Irenæus even identified the Elder John with the Apostle, thus transporting not only him, but the entire body of "Elders and disciples" from Jerusalem to Asia, a pregnant misapprehension to which we must return later. In the meantime we must note that this fundamental distinction between syntagmas of the Precepts, and narratives of the Sayings and Doings, carries us back as far as it is possible to penetrate into the history of gospel composition. The primitive work of the Apostle Matthew, was probably done in and for Jerusalem and vicinity – certainly so if written in Aramaic. The date, if early tradition may be believed, was "when Peter and Paul were preaching and founding the church at Rome." Oral tradition must have begun the process even earlier.¹⁶ Mark's work was done at Rome, according to internal evidence no less than by the unanimous voice of early tradition. It dates from "after the death of Peter" (64-5) according to ancient tradition. According to the internal evidence it was written certainly not long before, and probably some few years after, the overthrow of Jerusalem and the temple (70). At the time of Papias' writing, then (c. 145), all four gospels were probably known, though only Matthew and Mark were taken as authoritative because (indirectly) apostolic. At the time of prosecution of his inquiries the voice of (Palestinian) tradition was still "living and abiding." If, as tenses and phraseology seem to imply, this means Aristion and the Elder John (ob. 117?) it is reasonable to regard it as extending back over a full generation. The original Matthew was even then (c. 100), and in Palestine itself, a superseded book. It had three successors, if not more, two Greek and one Aramaic, all still retaining their claim to the name and authority of Matthew¹⁷; but all had been re-cast in a narrative frame, which at least in the case of our canonical first Gospel was borrowed from the Roman work of Mark. So far as the remaining fragments of its rivals enable us to judge, the same is true in their case also, though to a less extent. It is quite unmistakably true of Luke, the gospel of Antioch, that its narrative represents the same "memorabilia of Peter"; for so Mark's gospel came to be called. Thus the Petrine story appears almost from the start to have gained undisputed supremacy. But side by side with this remarkable fact as to gospel narrative is the equally notable confirmation of the other statements of 'the Elders' regarding the Precepts. For all modern criticism admits, that besides the material of Mark, which both Matthew and Luke freely incorporate, omitting very little, our first and third evangelists have embodied, in (usually) the same Greek translation but in greatly varied order, large sections from one or more early compilations of the Sayings of Jesus.

It is indispensable to a historical appreciation of the environment out of which any gospel has arisen that we realize that no community ever produced and permanently adopted as its "gospel" a partial presentation of the message of salvation. To its mind the writing must have embodied, for the time at least, the message, the whole message, and nothing but the message. Change of mind as to the essential contents of the message would involve supplementation or alteration of the written gospel employed. No writing of the kind would be produced with tacit reference to some other for another aspect of the truth.

It was not, then, the mere limitation of its language which caused the ancient Matthæan Sayings (the so-called Logia) to be superseded and disappear; nor is mere "translation" the word to describe that which took its place. The growth of Christianity in the Greek-speaking world not only called upon Jerusalem to pour out its treasure of evangelic tradition in the language of the empire, but stimulated a sense of its own increasing need. That which could once be supplied by eye-witnesses, the testimony of Jesus' mighty works, his death and resurrection, was now fast disappearing. And simultaneously the appreciation of its importance was growing. It was impossible to be blind to the conquests made by the gospel about Jesus. Enclosed in it, as part of its substance the gospel of Jesus found its final resting-place, much as the mother church itself was later taken up and incorporated in a catholic Christendom. So it is that in the Elder's time the church of the 'apostles, elders and witnesses' have done more than merely supersede their Aramaic(?) Syntagma of the Precepts by "translations." They had adopted alongside of it from Rome Mark's "Memorabilia of Peter" as to "things either said or done by the Lord." We can see indeed from the apologetic way in which 'the Elder' speaks of Mark's limitations (Peter is not to be held responsible for the lack of order) that Mark's authority is still held quite secondary to Matthew's; but the very fact that his work is given authoritative standing at all, still more the fact that it has become the framework into which the old-time syntagma has been set, marks a great and fundamental change of view as to what constitutes "the gospel."

No mere syntagma of the Precepts of Jesus has ever come down to us, though the papyrus leaves of "Sayings of Jesus" discovered in 1897 at Behneseh in Egypt by Grenfell and Hunt had something of this character.¹⁸ It was impossible that any community outside the most primitive one, where personal "witnesses of the Lord" still survived "until the times of Trajan," could be satisfied with a "gospel" which gave only the precepts of Jesus without so much as an account of his crucifixion and resurrection. And, strange as it may seem, the evidence of Q (i. e. the coincident material in Matthew and Luke not derived from Mark), as judged by nearly all critics, is that no narrative of the kind was given in the early compilation of discourses from which this element was mainly derived. After the "witnesses," apostolic and other, had begun to disappear, a mere syntagma of Jesus' sayings could not suffice. It became inevitable that the precepts should be embodied in the story. And yet we have at least two significant facts to corroborate the intimations of ancient tradition that this combination was long postponed. (18) When it is at last effected, and certainly in the regions of southern Syria,¹⁹ there is even there practically nothing left of authentic narrative material but the Petrine tradition as compiled by Mark at Rome. Our Matthew, a Palestinian Jew, the only writer of the New Testament who consistently uses the Hebrew Bible, makes a theoretical reconstruction of the order of events in the Galilean ministry, but otherwise he just incorporates Mark substantially as it was. What he adds in the way of narrative is so meagre in amount, and so manifestly inferior and apocryphal in character, as to prove the extreme poverty of his resources of oral tradition of this type. Luke has somewhat larger, and (as literary products) better, narrative additions than Matthew's; but the amount is still extremely meagre, and often historically of slight value. Some of it reappears in the surviving fragments of the Preaching of Peter. To sum up, there is outside of Mark no considerable amount of historical material, canonical or uncanonical, for the story of Jesus. This fact would be hard to account for if in the regions where witnesses survived, the first generation really took an interest in perpetuating narrative tradition. (2) The order of even such events as secured perpetuation was already hopelessly lost at a time more remote than the writing of our earliest gospel. This is true not only for Mark, as 'the Elder' frankly confesses, but for Matthew, Luke and every one else. Unchronological as Mark's order often is (and the tradition as to the 'casual anecdotes' agrees with the critical phenomena of the text), it is vastly more historical than Matthew's reconstruction. On the other hand Luke, while expressly undertaking to improve in this special respect upon his predecessors, almost never ventures to depart from the order of Mark, and when he does has never the support of Matthew, and usually not that of real probability. In short, incorrect as they knew the order of Mark to be, it was the best that could be had in the days when evangelists began to go beyond the mere syntagmas, and to write "gospels" as we understand them, or, in their own language, "the things which Jesus began both to do and to teach" (Acts i. 1). From these two great outstanding phenomena of gospel criticism alone it would be apparent that the distinction dimly perceived in the tradition of the Jerusalem elders reported by Papias, and indeed by many later writers, is no illusion, but an important and vital fact.

A third big, unexpected fact looms up as we round the capes of critical analysis, subtracting from Matthew and Luke first the elements peculiar to each, then that derived by each from Mark. It is a fact susceptible, however, of various interpretation. To some it only proves either the futility of criticism, or the worthlessness of ancient tradition. To us it proves simply that the process of transition in Palestine, the home of evangelic tradition, from the primitive syntagma of Precepts, framed on the plan of the Talmudic treatise known as Pirke Aboth, or "Sayings of the Fathers," to the Greek type of narrative gospel, was a longer and more complex one than has commonly been imagined. A cursory statement of the results of critical efforts to reproduce the so-called "second source" of Matthew and Luke (Mark being considered the first), will serve to bring out the fact to which we refer, and at the same time, we hope, to throw light upon the history of gospel development.