Lost and Hostile Gospels

But what is far more remarkable is to find in Philo, born between thirty and forty years before Christ, the key to most of Paul's theology, – the doctrines of the all-sufficiency of faith, of the worthlessness of good works, of the imputation of righteousness, of grace, mediation, atonement.

But in Philo, these doctrines drift purposeless. Paul took them and applied them to Christ, and at once they fell into their ranks and places. What was in suspension in Philo, crystallized in Paul. What the Baptist was to the Judaean Jews, that Philo was to the Hellenistic Jews; his thoughts, his theories, were —

“In the flecker'd dawning

The glitterance of Christ.”12

The Fathers, perplexed at finding Pauline words, expressions, ideas, in the writings of Philo, and unwilling to admit that Paul had derived them from Philo, invented a myth that the Alexandrine Jew came to Rome and was there converted to the Christian faith. Chronology and a critical examination of the writings of the Jewish Plato have burst that bubble.13

The fact that Paul was deeply saturated with the philosophy of the Alexandrine Jews has given rise also to two obstinate Christian legends, – that Dionysius the Areopagite, author of the Celestial Hierarchy, the Divine Names, &c., was the disciple of St. Paul, and that Seneca the philosopher was also his convert and pupil. Dionysius took Philo's system of the universe and emanations from the Godhead and Christianized them. The influence of Philo on the system of Dionysius saute aux yeux, as the French would say. And Dionysius protests, again and again, in his writings that he learned his doctrine from St. Paul.

From a very early age, the Fathers insisted on Seneca having been a convert of St. Paul; they pointed out the striking analogies in their writings, the similarity in their thoughts. How was this explicable unless one had been the pupil of the other? But Seneca, we know, lived some time in Alexandria with his uncle, Severus, prefect of Egypt; and at that time the young Roman, there can be little question, became acquainted with the writings of Philo.14

Thus St. Paul, by adopting the mode of Biblical interpretation of a rival school to that dominant in Judaea, by absorbing its philosophy, applying it to the person of Christ and the moral governance of the Church, by associating with Asiatic Jews, known to be infected with Greek philosophic heresies, and by his open invocation to the Gentiles to come into and share in all the plenitude of the privileges of the gospel, incurred the suspicion, distrust, dislike of the believers in Jerusalem, who had grown up in the midst of national prejudices which Paul shocked.

3. It has been argued with much plausibility, that because certain of the primitive Fathers were unacquainted with the four Gospels now accounted Canonical, that therefore those Gospels are compositions subsequent to their date, and that therefore also their authority as testimonies to the acts and sayings of Jesus is sensibly weakened, if not wholly overthrown. It is true that there were certain Fathers of the first two centuries who were unacquainted with our Gospels, but the above conclusions drawn from this fact are unsound.

This treatise will, I hope, establish the fact that at the close of the first century almost every Church had its own Gospel, with which alone it was acquainted. But it does not follow that these Gospels were not as trustworthy, as genuine records, as the four which we now alone recognize.

It is possible, from what has been preserved of some of these lost Gospels, to form an estimate of their scope and character. We find that they bore a very close resemblance to the extant Synoptical Gospels, though they were by no means identical with them.

We find that they contained most of what exists in our three first Evangels, in exactly the same words; but that some were fuller, others less complete, than the accepted Synoptics.

If we discover whole paragraphs absolutely identical in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, of the Hebrews, of the Clementines, of the Lord, it goes far to prove that all the Evangelists drew upon a common fund. And if we see that, though using the same material, they arranged it differently, we are forced to the conclusion that this material they incorporated in their biographies existed in anecdota, not in a consecutive narrative.

Some, at least, of the Gospels were in existence at the close of the first century; but the documents of which they were composed were then old and accepted.

And though it is indisputable that in the second century the Four had not acquired that supremacy which brought about the disappearance of the other Gospels, and were therefore not quoted by the Fathers in preference to them, it is also certain that all the material out of which both the extant and the lost Synoptics were composed was then in existence, and was received in the Church as true and canonical.

Admitting fully the force of modern Biblical criticism, I cannot admit all its most sweeping conclusions, for they are often, I think, more sweeping than just.

The material out of which all the Synoptical Gospels, extant or, lost, were composed, was in existence and in circulation in the Churches in the first century. That material is – the sayings of Christ on various occasions, and the incidents in his life. These sayings and doings of the Lord, I see no reason to doubt, were written down from the mouths of apostles and eye-witnesses, in order that the teaching and example of Christ might be read to believers in every Church during the celebration of the Eucharist.

The early Church followed with remarkable fidelity the customs of the Essenes, so faithfully that, as I have shown, Josephus mistook the Nazarenes for members of the Essene sect; and in the third century Eusebius was convinced that the Therapeutae, their Egyptian counterparts, were actually primitive Christians.15

The Essenes assembled on the Sabbath for a solemn feast, in white robes, and, with faces turned to the East, sang antiphonal hymns, broke bread and drank together of the cup of love. During this solemn celebration the president read portions from the sacred Scriptures, and the exhortations of the elders. At the Christian Eucharist the ceremonial was identical;16 Pliny's description of a Christian assembly might be a paragraph from Josephus or Philo describing an Essene or Therapeutic celebration. In place of the record of the wanderings of the Israelites and the wars of their kings being read at their conventions, the president read the journeys of the Lord, his discourses and miracles.

No sooner was a Church founded by an apostle than there rose a demand for this sort of instruction, and it was supplied by the jottings-down of reminiscences of the Lord and his teaching, orally given by those who had companied with him.

Thus there sprang into existence an abundant crop of memorials of the Lord, surrounded by every possible guarantee of their truth. And these fragmentary records passed from one Church to another. The pious zeal of an Antiochian community furnished with the memorials of Peter would borrow of Jerusalem the memorials of James and Matthew. One of the traditions of John found its way into the Hebrew Gospel – that of the visit of Nicodemus; but it never came into the possession of the compiler of the first Gospel or of St. Luke.

After a while, each Church set to work to string the anecdota it possessed into a consecutive story, and thus the Synoptical Gospels came into being.

Of these, some were more complete than others, some were composed of more unique material than the others.

The second Gospel, if we may trust Papias, and I see no reason for doubting his testimony, is the composition of Mark, the disciple of St. Peter, and consists exclusively of the recollections of St. Peter. This Gospel was not co-ordinated probably till late, till long after the disjointed memorabilia were in circulation. It first circulated in Egypt; but in at least one of the Petrine Churches – that of Rhossus – the recollections of St. Peter had already been arranged in a consecutive memoir, and, in A.D. 190, Serapion, Bishop of Antioch, found the Church of Rhossus holding exclusively to this book as a Gospel of traditional authority, received from the prince of the apostles.

The Gospel of St. Matthew, on the other hand, is a diatessaron composed of four independent collections of memorabilia. Its groundwork is a book by Matthew the apostle, a collection of the discourses of the Lord. Whether Matthew wrote also a collection of the acts of the Lord, or contributed disconnected anecdotes of the Lord to Churches of his founding, and these were woven in with his work on the Lord's discourses, is possible, but is conjectural only.

But what is clear is, that into the first Gospel was incorporated much, not all, of the material used by Mark for the construction of his Gospel, viz. the recollections of St. Peter. That the first evangelist did not merely amplify the Mark Gospel appears from his arranging the order of his anecdotes differently; that he did use the same “anecdota” is evidenced by the fact of his using them often word for word.

The Gospel of the Hebrews and the Gospel quoted in the Clementines were composed in precisely the same manner, and of the same materials, but not of all the same.

That the Gospel of St. Matthew, as it stands, was the composition of that apostle, cannot be seriously maintained; yet its authority as a record of facts, not as a record of their chronological sequence, remains undisturbed.

The Gospel of St. Luke went, apparently, through two editions. After the issue of his original Gospel, which, there is reason to believe, is that adopted by Marcion, fresh material came into his hands, and he revised and amplified his book.

That this second edition was not the product of another hand, is shown by the fact that characteristic expressions found in the original text occur also in the additions.

The Pauline character of the Luke Gospel has been frequently commented on. It is curious to observe how much more pronounced this was in the first edition. The third Gospel underwent revision under the influence of the same wave of feeling which moved Luke to write the Christian Odyssey, the Acts, nominally of the Apostles, really of St. Paul. With the imprisonment of Paul the tide turned, and a reconciliatory movement set strongly in. Into this the Apostle of Love threw himself, and he succeeded in directing it.

The Apostolic Church was a well-spring tumultuously gushing forth its superabundance of living waters; there was a clashing of jets, a conflict of ripples; but directly St. John gave to it its definite organization, the flood rushed out between these banks, obedient to a common impulse, the clashing forces produced a resultant, the conflicting ripples blended into rhythmic waves, and the brook became a river, and the river became a sea.

The lost Gospels are no mere literary curiosity, the examination of them no barren study. They furnish us with most precious information on the manner in which all the Gospels were compiled; they enable us in several instances to determine the correct reading in our canonical Matthew and Luke; they even supply us with particulars to fill lacunae which exist, or have been made, in our Synoptics.

The poor stuff that has passed current too long among us as Biblical criticism is altogether unworthy of English scholars and theologians. The great shafts that have been driven into Christian antiquity, the mines that have been opened by the patient labours of German students, have not received sufficient attention at our hands. If some of our commentators timorously venture to their mouths, it is only to shrink back again scared at the gnomes their imagination pictures as haunting those recesses, or at the abysses down which they may be precipitated, that they suppose lie open in those passages.

This spirit is neither courageous nor honest. God's truth is helped by no man's ignorance.

It may be that we are dazzled, bewildered by the light and rush of new ideas exploding around us on every side; but, for all that, a cellar is no safe retreat. The vault will crumble in and bury us.

The new lights that break in on us are not always the lanterns of burglars.

S. Baring-Gould.

East Mersea, Colchester,

November 2nd, 1874.

Part I. The Jewish Anti-Gospels

I. The Silence Of Josephus

It is somewhat remarkable that no contemporary, or even early, account of the life of our Lord exists, except from the pens of Christian writers.

That we have none by Roman or Greek writers is not, perhaps, to be wondered at; but it is singular that neither Philo, Josephus, nor Justus of Tiberias, should have ever alluded to Christ or to primitive Christianity.

The cause of this silence we shall presently investigate. Its existence we must first prove.

Philo was born at Alexandria about twenty years before Christ. In the year A.D. 40, he was sent by the Alexandrine Jews on a mission to Caligula, to entreat the Emperor not to put in force his order that his statue should be erected in the Temple of Jerusalem and in all the synagogues of the Jews.

Philo was a Pharisee. He travelled in Palestine, and speaks of the Essenes he saw there; but he says not a word about Jesus Christ or his followers. It is possible that he may have heard of the new sect, but he probably concluded it was but insignificant, and consisted merely of the disciples, poor and ignorant, of a Galilean Rabbi, whose doctrines he, perhaps, did not stay to inquire into, and supposed that they did not differ fundamentally from the traditional teaching of the rabbis of his day.

Flavius Josephus was born A.D. 37 – consequently only four years after the death of our Lord – at Jerusalem. Till the age of twenty-nine, he lived in Jerusalem, and had, therefore, plenty of opportunity of learning about Christ and early Christianity.

In A.D. 67, Josephus became governor of Galilee, on the occasion of the Jewish insurrection against the Roman domination. After the fall of Jerusalem he passed into the service of Titus, went to Rome, where he rose to honour in the household of Vespasian and of Titus, A.D. 81. The year of his death is not known. He was alive in A.D. 93, for his biography is carried down to that date.

Josephus wrote at Rome his “History of the Jewish War,” in seven books, in his own Aramaic language. This he finished in the year A.D. 75, and then translated it into Greek. On the completion of this work he wrote his “Jewish Antiquities,” a history of the Jews in twenty books, from the beginning of the world to the twelfth year of the reign of Nero, A.D. 66. He completed this work in the year A.D. 93, concluding it with a biography of himself. He also wrote a book against Apion on the antiquity of the Jewish people. A book in praise of the Maccabees has been attributed to him, but without justice. In the first of these works, the larger of the two, the “History of the Jewish War,” he treats of the very period when our Lord lived, and in it he makes no mention of him. But in the shorter work, the “Jewish Antiquities,” in which he goes over briefly the same period of time treated of at length in the other work, we find this passage:

“At this time lived Jesus, a wise man [if indeed he ought to be called a man]; for he performed wonderful works [he was a teacher of men who received the truth with gladness]; and he drew to him many Jews, and also many Greeks. [This was the Christ.] But when Pilate, at the instigation of our chiefs, had condemned him to crucifixion, they who had at first loved him did not cease; [for he appeared to them on the third day again alive; for the divine prophets had foretold this, together with many other wonderful things concerning him], and even to this time the community of Christians, called after him, continues to exist.”17

That this passage is spurious has been almost universally acknowledged. One may be, perhaps, accused of killing dead birds, if one again examines and discredits the passage; but as the silence of Josephus on the subject which we are treating is a point on which it will be necessary to insist, we cannot omit as brief a discussion as possible of this celebrated passage.

The passage is first quoted by Eusebius (fl. A.D. 315) in two places,18 but it was unknown to Justin Martyr (fl. A.D. 140), Clement of Alexandria (fl. A.D. 192), Tertullian (fl. A.D. 193), and Origen (fl. A.D. 230). Such a testimony would certainly have been produced by Justin in his Apology, or in his Controversy with Trypho the Jew, had it existed in the copies of Josephus at his time. The silence of Origen is still more significant. Celsus in his book against Christianity introduces a Jew. Origen attacks the arguments of Celsus and his Jew. He could not have failed to quote the words of Josephus, whose writings he knew, had the passage existed in the genuine text.19

Again, the paragraph interrupts the chain of ideas in the original text. Before this passage comes an account of how Pilate, seeing there was a want of pure drinking water in Jerusalem, conducted a stream into the city from a spring 200 stadia distant, and ordered that the cost should be defrayed out of the treasury of the Temple. This occasioned a riot. Pilate disguised Roman soldiers as Jews, with swords under their cloaks, and sent them among the rabble, with orders to arrest the ringleaders.

This was done. The Jews finding themselves set upon by other Jews, fell into confusion; one Jew attacked another, and the whole company of rioters melted away. “And in this manner,” says Josephus, “was this insurrection suppressed.” Then follows the paragraph about Jesus, beginning, “At this time lived Jesus, a wise man, if indeed one ought to call him a man,” &c.

And the passage is immediately followed by, “About this time another misfortune threw the Jews into disturbance; and in Rome an event happened in the temple of Isis which produced great scandal.” And then he tells an indelicate story of religious deception which need not be repeated here. The misfortune which befel the Jews was, as he afterwards relates, that Tiberius drove them out of Rome. The reason of this was, he says, that a noble Roman lady who had become a proselyte had sent gold and purple to the temple at Jerusalem. But this reason is not sufficient. It is clear from what precedes – a story of sacerdotal fraud – that there was some connection between the incidents in the mind of Josephus. Probably the Jews had been guilty of religious deceptions in Rome, and had made a business of performing cures and expelling demons, with talismans and incantations, and for this had obtained rich payment.20

From the connection that exists between the passage about the “other misfortune that befel the Jews” and the former one about the riot suppressed by Pilate, it appears evident that the whole of the paragraph concerning our Lord is an interpolation.

That Josephus could not have written the passage as it stands, is clear enough, for only a Christian would speak of Jesus in the terms employed. Josephus was a Pharisee and a Jewish priest; he shows in all his writings that he believes in Judaism.

It has been suggested that Josephus may have written about Christ as in the passage quoted, but that the portions within brackets are the interpolations of a Christian copyist. But when these portions within brackets are removed, the passage loses all its interest, and is a dry statement utterly unlike the sort of notice Josephus would have been likely to insert. He gives colour to his narratives, his incidents are always sketched with vigour; this account would be meagre beside those of the riot of the Jews and the rascality of the priests of Isis. Josephus asserts, moreover, that in his time there were four sects among the Jews – the Pharisees, the Sadducees, the Essenes, and the sect of Judas of Gamala. He gives tolerably copious particulars about these sects and their teachings, but of the Christian sect he says not a word. Had he wished to write about it, he would have given full details, likely to interest his readers, and not have dismissed the subject in a couple of lines.

It was perhaps felt by the early Christians that the silence of Josephus – so famous an historian, and a Jew – on the life, miracles and death of the Founder of Christianity, was extremely inconvenient; the fact could not fail to be noticed by their adversaries. Some Christian transcriber may have argued, Either Josephus knew nothing of the miracles performed by Christ, – in which case he is a weighty testimony against them, – or he must have heard of Jesus, but not have deemed his acts, as they were related to him, of sufficient importance to find a place in his History. Arguing thus, the copyist took the opportunity of rectifying the omission, written from the standpoint of a Pharisee, and therefore designating the Lord as merely a wise man.

But there is another explanation of this interpolation, which will hardly seem credible to the reader at this stage of the examination, viz. that it was inserted by a Pharisee after the destruction of Jerusalem; and this is the explanation I am inclined to adopt. At that time there was a mutual tendency to sink their differences, and unite, in the Nazarene Church and the Jews. The cause of this will be given further on; sufficient for our purpose that such a tendency did exist. Both Jew and Nazarene were involved in the same exile, crushed by the same blow, united in the same antipathies. The Pharisees were disposed to regret the part they had taken in putting Jesus to death, and to acknowledge that he had been a good and great Rabbi. The Jewish Nazarenes, on their side, made no exalted claims for the Lord as being the incarnate Son of God, and later even, as we learn from the Clementine Homilies, refused to admit his divinity. The question dividing the Nazarene from the Jew gradually became one of whether Christ was to be recognized as a prophet or not; and the Pharisees, or some of them at least, were disposed to allow as much as this.

It was under this conciliatory feeling that I think it probable the interpolation was made, at first by a Jew, but afterwards it was amplified by a Christian. I think this probable, from the fact of its not being the only interpolation of the sort effected. Suidas has an article on the name “Jesus,” in which he tells us that Josephus mentions him, and says that he sacrificed with the priests in the temple. He quoted from an interpolated copy of Josephus, and this interpolation could not have been made by either a Gentile or a Nazarene Christian: not by a Gentile, for such a statement would have been pointless, purposeless to him; and it could not have been made by a Nazarene, for the Nazarenes, as will presently be shown, were strongly opposed to the sacrificial system in the temple. The interpolation must therefore have been made by a Jew, and by a Jew with a conciliatory purpose.

It is curious to note the use made of the interpolation now found in the text. Eusebius, after quoting it, says, “When such testimony as this is transmitted to us by an historian who sprang from the Hebrews themselves, respecting John the Baptist and the Saviour, what subterfuge can be left them to prevent them from being covered with confusion?”21

There is one other mention of Christ in the “Antiquities” (lib. xx. c. 9):

“Ananus, the younger, of whom I have related that he had obtained the office of high-priest, was of a rash and daring character; he belonged to the sect of the Sadducees, which, as I have already remarked, exhibited especial severity in the discharge of justice. Being of such a character, Ananus thought the time when Festus was dead, and Albinus was yet upon the road, a fit opportunity for calling a council of judges, and for bringing before them James, the brother of him who is called Christ, and some others: he accused them as transgressors of the law, and had them stoned to death. But the most moderate men of the city, who also were reckoned most learned in the law, were offended at this proceeding. They therefore sent privately to the king (Agrippa II.), entreating him to send orders to Ananus not to attempt such a thing again, for he had no right to do it. And some went to meet Albinus, then coming from Alexandria, and put him in mind that Ananus was not justified, without his consent, in assembling a court of justice. Albinus, approving what they said, angrily wrote to Ananus, and threatened him with punishment; and king Agrippa took from him his office of high-priest, and gave it to Jesus, the son of Donnæus.”