Jewish disciples were accustomed to retain the oral teaching of their masters with extraordinary tenacity and verbal exactness of memor} 7 (Mishna, Abotk, iii. 8 ; Edaioth, i. 3), and so the words of Jesus might for some time be handed down by merely oral tradition. But did the gospel continue to be taught orally alone up to the time when the extant gospels were written ? or must we assume the existence of earlier evangelical writings form ing a link between oral tradition and the narratives we now possess 1 The earliest external evidence on this point is given in the prologue to Luke s gospel, which speaks of many previous essays towards a regularly digested evangelical history on the basis of the tradition (whether exclusively oral or partly written is not expressed) of eye witnesses who had followed the whole course of Christ s ministry. It seems to be implied that if the eye-witnesses wrote at all, they, at least so far as was known to Luke, did not compose a regular narrative but simply threw together a mass of reminiscences. This understanding of the words of the evangelist agrees very well with the uni form tradition of the old church as to the second gospel, viz., that it was composed by Mark from material furnished by Peter. This tradition goes back to Papias of Hierapolis, about 150 A.D., but it is a fair question whether the second gospel as we have it is not an enlarged edition of Mark s original work. On the other hand ecclesiastical tradition recognizes the apostle Matthew as the author of the first gospel, but does so in a way that really bears out the statements of Luke. For the tradition that Matthew wrote the first gospel is always combined with the state ment that he wrote in Hebrew (Aramaic). But from the time of Erasmus the best Greek scholars have been con vinced that the gospel is not a translation. Either, then, the whole traditiDn of a directly apostolic Aramaic gospel is a mistake, caused by the existence among the Judaiziug Christians in Palestine of an apocryphal " Gospel according to the Hebrews," which was by them ascribed to Matthew, but was, iu fact, a corrupt edition of our Greek gospel ; or, on the other hand, what Matthew really wrote in Aramaic was different from the book that now bears his name, and only formed an important part of the material from which it draws. The latter solution is naturally suggested by the oldest form of the tradition ; for what Papias says of Matthew is that he wrote TO. Xoyta, the oracles, an expression which, though much disputed, seems to be most fairly understood not of a complete gospel but of a collection of the words of Christ. And if so, all the earliest external evidence points to the conclusion that the synoptical gospels are non-apostolic digests of spoken and written apostolic tradition, and that the arrangement of the earlier material in orderly form took place only gradually and by many essays. With this the internal evidence agrees. The three first gospels are often in such remarkable accord even in minute and accidental points of expression, that it is certain either that they copied one another or that all have some sources in common. The first explanation is inadequate, both from the nature of the discrepancies that accompany the agreement of the three narratives, and from the impossibility of assigning absolute priority to any one gospel. For example, even if we suppose that the gospel of Mark was used by the other two authors, or conversely that Mark was made up mainly from Matthew and Luke, it is still necessary to postulate one or more earlier sources to explain residuary phenomena. And the longer the problem is studied the more general is the conviction of critics, that these sources cannot possibly have been merely oral.
It appears from what we have already seen, that a considerable portion of the New Testament is made up of writings not directly apostolical, and a main problem of criticism is to determine the relation of these writings, especially of the gospels, to apostolic teaching and tradition. But behind all such questions as the relative priority of Matthew or of Mark, the weight to be assigned to the testimony of Papias, and so forth, lies a series of questions much more radical in character by which the whole theo logical world is at present agitated. Can we say of all the New Testament books that they are either directly apostolic, or at least stand in immediate dependence on genuine apostolic teaching which they honestly represent ? or must Tubingei we hold, with an influential school of modern critics, that a s.-hool. large proportion of ths books are direct forgeries, written in the interest of theological tendencies, to which they sacrifice without hesitation the genuine history and teaching of Christ and his apostles 1 There are, of course, positions intermediate to these two views, and the doctrine of tend encies is not held by many critics even of the Tubingen school in its extreme form. Yet, as a matter of fact, every book in the New Testament, with the exception of the four great epistles of St Paul, is at present more or less the subject of controversy, and interpolations are asserted even in these. The details of such a controversy can only be handled in separate articles, but a few general remarks may be useful here.
genuineness or credibility of New Testament books do not for the most part rely much on external evidence. Except in one or two cases (particularly that of 2d Peter) the external evidence in favour of the books is as strong as one can fairly expect, even where not altogether decisive. We shall see when we come to speak of the canon that, towards the close of the 2d century, the four gospels, the Acts, thirteen epistles of Paul, the first epistles of Peter and John, and the book of Revelation, were received in the most widely separated churches with remarkable unanimity. Before this time the chain of evidence is less complete. All our knowledge of the period that lies between the apostles and the great teachers of the Old Catholic Church towards the close of the 2d century is fragmentary. We possess but scanty remains of the literature, and the same criticism which seeks to bring down many New Testament books into this period questions the genuineness of many of the writings which claim to date from the first half of the 2d century, and so are appealed to by conservative writers. But on the whole, what evidence does exist is of a kind to push back all the more important writings to an early date. The gospel of John, for example, is one of the books which negative critics are most determined in rejecting. Yet the fairest writers of the school (Hilgenfeld, Keim) admit that it was known to Justin Martyr in the middle of the 2d century, though they think that besides our four gospels he had a fifth of apocryphal character. But references of an earlier date can hardly be denied ; and the gospel may be traced almost to the beginning of the century by the aid of fragments of the Gnostic Basilides and of the epistles of Ignatius. The Tiibingen school, indeed, maintain that the fragments -preserved by Hip- polytus are not from Basilides, but from a later writer of his school, and utterly reject the Ignatian epistles. But it cannot be said that they have proved their case beyond dispute. They have at most shown that, if the gospel must on other grounds be taken as spurious, the external evidence may be pushed aside as not absolutely insuperable. On the other hand they try to bring positive proof that certain books were unknown in circles where, if genuine, they must have circulated. But such a negative is in its very nature difficult to prove. Probably the strongest argument of the kind is that brought to show that Papias did not know the gospel of John. But we
know Papias only through Eusebius ; and though the latter
