Those who find no difficulties in the New Testament will be surprised that it should present an enigma to those who have critically considered it. On the other hand those who are interested to know what work has been done on the Synoptic Problem will find it well and concisely dealt with in The Riddle of the New Testament by Sir Edwyn Hoskyns, Bart and Noel Davey. The authors are both Cambridge men, the former is well known as one of the two or three greatest authorities in this country, and the latter is a young graduate. They have collaborated to explain to the layman the present state of New Testament Criticism by giving an outline of the modern critical method of New Testament study, and some of the actual results which the method has established.
Importance Of Historical Criticism
The faith of the Christian rests upon a particular event in history Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judaea. All the superstructure of belief and practice which has been erected upon the history of Jesus of Nazareth collapses if that history as recorded in the New Testament is false. “If Christ hath not been raised from the dead, your faith is vain ; ye are yet in your sins” said Paul. If the historicity of the resurrection of Christ can be proved unreliable Christianity is a myth. Historical investigation is an imperative demand, unless, ostrich like, we choose to hide our heads in the sand. The enemies of the cross of Christ have recognized only too well that Christianity stands or falls with the history of the life of Jesus, hence their attempts to prove that the New Testament is not composed of trustworthy historical documents, or that Jesus was a solar myth, and the miraculous due to an ignorant and credulous priesthood intent on dazzling the common people. We are all familiar with the works of so-called critics who have set out with certain pre-conceived ideas—the New Testament is just like any other book produced by man ; miracles do not happen, and the like. By the simple process of elimination they have reduced the New Testament to their idea of what it should be and then reconstructed it to suit their particular bias. This procedure has made the critics suspect, and the layman looks askance at the mutilated and distorted figure which the New Testament presents after their labours. Amid the babel of critical voices clamoring their “assured results,” which contradict and nullify one another, he feels his inability to choose the right one, even if he felt that it was imperative to do so. His one assured result is that the New Testament is most untrustworthy and may therefore be safely ignored. A scientific method of historical criticism and handling of historical evidence is necessary to save the situation. The authors of this work claim that the method of modern historical criticism when applied vigorously to the New Testament vindicates its claims to be a genuine historical account of the greatest figure of history, the Lord Jesus Christ.
The Relation Between Jesus And The Primitive Church
“There is a riddle in the New Testament, and it is a riddle neither of literary criticism, nor of date and authorship, nor of the historicity of this or that episode. The riddle is a theological riddle, which is insoluble apart from the solution of an historical problem. What was the relation between Jesus of Nazareth and the Primitive Christian Church? That is the riddle.” (p. 14). Since all the New Testament documents emerged from the Primitive Church we have to ask, Did the Life and Death of Jesus of Nazareth produce the faith and piety of the Primitive Church? or on the other hand, Did the Primitive Church imagine the figure of Jesus, or embroider the simple details of His life with their own piety and faith? There is no doubt in our minds that the Primitive Church is founded upon the rock Christ Jesus, but the authors set to work to prove this by the use of the critical methods which have so often been employed in the attempt to disprove it.
The Language Of The New Testament
This is a fascinating chapter and its importance is clear from the statement, “There can be no accurate reconstruction of Primitive Christian thought which does not rest upon an accurate study of the grammar and syntax of the Greek language during the first century A.D., and upon an accurate knowledge of the meaning which the Greek words used by the Christian writers had for their readers.” (p. 19). We have italicised the words “the first century A.D.,” because the rapid changes in the Greek language during the time it was becoming the common language of the civilized world, have in many cases rendered obsolete the meanings common in the Classical period. The nice precision of that age had vanished, to be replaced by a language of human experience, “fitted to the mouths of ordinary men and women, whose logic moved in terms, not of scholarly argument, but of historical metaphor, and whose minds were occupied less with the meaning of life than with the living of it.” (p. 22). The scholar to-day is happy in the possession of contemporary documents, inscriptions and letters,which illustrate “the contemporary use of almost every word in the New Testament.” Words formerly of vague import have become more concrete. “The Prodigal Son did not vaguely ‘gather together’ all his share of his father’s substance : he ‘realised’ it, converted it into ready money. Paul had not heard that some of the Thessalonians were ‘walking disorderly,’ but that they were ‘playing truant,’ not going to work, in expectation of the immediate end of the world.” (p. 24).
There is the further difficulty to be realised that the New Testament is steeped in the ideas of the Old Testament, and that the writers of the New Testament were translating methods of thought alien to the Greeks into their language. This accounts for the importance of the Septuagint version, whose translators had been, faced with the same problem, and for its use by the writers of the New Testament, often in preference to a fresh translation from the original Hebrew.
The word “Ekklesia” is carefully examined and its pedigree in the Old Testament traced out. The word “Aletheia,” rendered into English by Truth, is shown to embrace more than a purely intellectual quality. It is frequently used to mean ‘The Gospel,’ a fact which is very familiar to our readers.
The Text Of The New Testament
Another preliminary enquiry is into the text of the New Testament. For fourteen centuries, before the invention of printing, the copies of the New Testament were hand written by scribes. Hand copying is susceptible to errors which multiply in course of time. Can we trust “the Textus Receptus the text ‘received by all,’ as the printer of the 1633 Elzevir edition boldly announced in his preface”? This text depended’ almost entirely upon a single twelfth-century manuscript. The work of the textual critic has been devoted to an investigation of the reliability of this text in the light of the older manuscripts which have been discovered since Erasmus issued his Greek New Testament. The oldest manuscript known to-day is not earlier than the fourth century, but this is 800 years older than the manuscript used by Erasmus.
“Textual criticism has shown that there was no serious corruption of the text of the New Testament between the fourth century and the invention of printing, and that even the Textus Receptus would not lead the theologian or the historian far astray.” (p. 61).
This is certainly a reassuring conclusion.In fact, the manuscripts which exist of the New Testament are better and more numerous than those of any Greek or Latin work which has survived from classical times.
The History
The authors (having cleared the way), now turn to their main theme, and show that historical events are not recorded in the New Testament for their mere historical importance, but because, they served a purpose, and the claim is made that ‘the purpose produced the events.’ They have not been manipulated or distorted in order to support Christian experience, but they are the outworkings of a purpose which has been declared from the beginning, hence the continual reference to the Old Testament by the writers of the New.
“It is claimed that historical criticism rids the Jesus of history of any supernatural redemptive significance, and in particular rids His death of that peculiar importance which primitive Christian piety attached to it. This set modern writers and modern preachers free to place Jesus in the context of humanitarian idealism or in the context of popular ideas about evolution.” (p. 81).
The authors join issue with this statement and prove clearly that the one great objection to it is the Old Testament background upon which the life of Jesus is portrayed. In the Old Testament we have ‘the particular historical revelation of the Living God.’
“Modern Humanitarian idealism is not only foreign to the Old Testament, but is incompatible with it.” (p. 82).
The fact that God has spoken through the prophets supports and confirms that in these last days He has spoken unto us by His Son.’ The Gospels are penetrated in a two-fold manner, as with warp and woof, by the Old Testament and the miraculous. If their removal is attempted, nothing is left of the life of Jesus.
“The result, then, of an examination of the Gospels as they stand is that they were written with a clear and unmistakable purpose. They were written in order to declare that the Life and Death of Jesus were the fulfillment of the promises made by The Living God through the Prophets of Israel. They were written in order to bear witness to the superseding and fulfillment of the Mosaic Law by the Gospel, and to the emergence of the New Israel by faith in Jesus.” (pp. 99-100).
The Synoptic Problem
This is the heart of the whole work, and it is here that the sympathetic skill of the authors is best seen. The first three Gospels were long recognized as being in some way dependent on each other. They often used exactly the same or very similar wording and order of narration. Modern scholars are almost universally agreed that
“What is common to all three gospels is due to the dependence of Matthew and Luke upon Mark. Matthew and Luke also made use of another document or documents, now lost, which explains the presence in their gospels of almost identical material which is absent from Mark. Lastly, each had access to further material of which the other was apparently unaware.” (p. 103).
It must be clearly understood that this is a theory, and that no documents exist which show that this process of editing actually occurred. This theory, like all theories, is only useful in so far as it serves to explain facts. Granting, however, this critical analysis of the Gospels, have we three contradictory accounts of the Life of Jesus or does the analysis reveal ‘an obvious unity of direction’? The Three Gospels differ greatly in their general plan. Matthew and Luke describe Jesus as a Teacher ; but Mark records very little that He taught, he is more concerned with what Jesus did. When the Three Gospels are compared, we find that Matthew and Luke have ‘expanded and supplemented rather than corrected,’ with the intention of making more obvious the frequent allusions to the Old Testament. For example, ” ‘Blessed are ye poor,’ when translated into Greek becomes simply a crude approval of lack of money. Matthew knows that the Aramaic word, which underlies the Greek word translated ‘poor,’ has other suggestions. It denotes those who are oppressed by the tyrannical power of evil and who long for the intervention of God. The poor are primarily the faithful men and women whose spirits are oppressed by the present order. Hence Matthew adds, and no doubt adds correctly, ‘poor in spirit,’ in order to avoid misunderstanding Matthew did his best to render into Greek a very intractable Jewish idiom.” (pp. 129-130). This may suffice to indicate how the writers of the Gospels have edited the material upon which they worked. The supreme question is, Did Matthew and Luke distort the picture which Mark had already drawn? The answer cannot be doubted for a moment.
“It is quite impossible to set Luke against Matthew or Matthew against Luke, or both of them against Mark.” (p. 143).
A very valuable contribution deals with the title ‘Son of Man’ as used by Jesus Himself. It is seen to hold together the two Comings, ‘the first in humiliation, and the second in glory.’ It is interesting to note that the authors, following the margin of the Revised Version, prefer, “Behold, the kingdom of God is in your midst” (Luke 17, 21), to the misleading rendering of the Authorised Version. The Century Bible, edited by W. F. Adeney, comments, ‘within you’ : or ‘among you.’ The Greek preposition will admit of either meaning. It is used by Xenophon in the phrase ‘among them.’ In one sense it declares the internal, spiritual character of the kingdom ; in the other sense its actual, though invisible, presence. The context seems to favour the latter meaning. Jesus could not say to a Pharisee, ‘the kingdom is within you’ ; he might say, ‘It is among you’ already present, while Pharisees cannot see it.” (Luke p. 252).
The Gospels Are Historically Trustworthy
The conclusion at which, after critical examination, the authors arrive, is that the writers of the Three Gospels have not manipulated “the earlier Tradition in the interests of a remarkable Christology.” “Their records have a clear and conscious purpose. That is obvious. But they extracted their purpose from the traditions they received they did not impose it roughly upon a material unable to bear it. Their editing did not complicate the material but simplified it.” (p. 159).
The authors then divide the material of the Gospels into Miracles, Parables, and Aphoristic Utterances and examine each separately. They conclude once more that they are all firmly rooted in Messianic history and integral with it.
Their chief work is now finished, but the authors go on to examine what they call “The Theologians,” viz.. John, Paul, and the Author of the Epistle to the Hebrews. Again the same results are obtained. Christianity is solidly based upon the history of Jesus, and the overwhelming moral significance of that history is presented by these writers in order that a like moral development may be begun and consummated in their readers. “The purpose of Jesus was to work out in a single human life complete obedience to the will of God to the uttermost, that is, to death.” (p. 250). And this obedience was ‘demanded by the Old Testament Scriptures and foretold by the Prophets.’
The authors conclude on a firm note.
“They cannot pretend to regard their conclusion merely as a tentative guess at a solution The evidence, when critically treated, seems almost to rush to a conclusion The historian can help to clarify the issue, but no more.” (p. 259).
The history thus clarified challenges men and women to accept or reject it. The revelation claims to solve the deepest problems of human life, and the call to decide what we think about it is very urgent. The real question to-day, as ever, is “What think ye of Jesus who is called Christ?”
“The New Testament therefore cannot be left merely to the philosopher or to the poet as though it were a contribution to speculation or to culture ; it records historical facts which demand the consideration and judgment of every man and woman.” (p. 264).
If this book makes those men and women pause, who have lightly accepted the “assured results” of a destructive criticism, and consider carefully the implications of the historicity of the New Testament, it will have done a good work.
To accept the New Testament as a reliable history brings a man at once face to face with Christ ; and when he beholds Him, holy, guileless, undefiled, separated from sinners and made higher than the heavens, he is face to face with the miracle of the sinless life of “the man Christ Jesus.” This challenges comparison with his own life and ideals, and must lead to surrender. “Our wills are ours we know not how, our wills are ours to make them Thine.”
It is clear then that the use of critical methods is justified when conclusions as sane as the above result, the end justifies the means in the present instance. The methods which have so often been used to destroy the historicity of the New Testament have here been used to confirm it.
The volume concludes with an appendix on the authorship and dating of New Testament Documents ; and one consisting of a 20 page bibliography. An index of Scripture references and a synopsis of contents increase the usefulness of the book to the student.
We note that “Holy Ghost” and “Holy Spirit” are used indifferently (pp. 95, 96) ; on p. 97 “He so gave up the ghost” and on p. 237 “He bowed His head, and gave up his (sic) spirit.” It would be better to use spirit in every case. Perhaps it will be corrected in a future edition, as also “his” for “His.” The more studious among our readers, especially those interested in New Testament problems, will find much food for thought in this interesting book, as well as a remarkably clear and concise exposition of the main theme of all the New Testament writers.
Review of “The Early Earth” by John Whitcomb (1972)