life of Christ would be, in some shape, current among the Church as the common property of all, as soon as the Apostles began to proclaim the Gospel. Probably it was not, for some time, reduced to writing. Among the Jews the Old Testament was spoken of as Writing or Scripture; but their most revered and sacred comments on it were retained in oral tradition: and hence all through the New Testament you will find that "Scripture" refers to the Old Testament, and that no mention is made of the doctrine about Christ except as "tradition" or "teaching." What therefore would probably at first be current in the Church, perhaps for thirty or forty years after Christ's death, would be simply a number of "traditions" or oral versions of the Gospel, current perhaps in different shapes at the great ecclesiastical centres, such as Jerusalem, Antioch, Ephesus, Alexandria, Rome, yet presenting a general affinity, and all claiming to represent "the Memoirs of the Apostles" or to be "the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ."
It ought not to seem strange to you that the Church could exist, and the Good Tidings be preached for some years without the aid of written Gospels. Did not St. Paul preach the Gospel in his letters? Surely he preached it very effectually: yet his letters do not contain a single quotation from any written Gospel.[1] The same may be said of the letters attributed to St. Peter, St. James, and St. John: not one quotes a single saying of Christ, or contains a phrase that can be said, with certainty, to be borrowed from our Gospels. The book of the Acts of the Apostles, the earliest summary of Church history, contains many speeches by Apostles, one by St. James, some by St. Peter and several by St. Paul: in all these speeches only one saying of our Lord is quoted; and
- ↑ If 1 Tim. v. 18 were an exception, it would shew that that letter, quoting a Gospel as "Scripture," was later than St. Paul. But it is possibly not an exception.
