Part 22 (1/2)
The other reproductions of the language of St. Paul's Epistles are numerous, and I give them in a note. [194:1] The reader will see at a glance that the Theology or Christology of Clement was that of the earliest writings of the Church of which we have any remains, and to these he himself frequently and unmistakably refers.
The earlier Epistles of St. Paul, as those to the Thessalonians, Galatians, Corinthians, and Romans, are acknowledged on all hands, even by advanced German Rationalists, to be the genuine works of the Apostle Paul; indeed one might as well deny that such a man ever existed as question their authenticity. The First Epistle to the Corinthians, which is the longest and most dogmatic of the earlier ones, cannot have been written after the year 58. In a considerable number of chronological tables to which I have referred, the earliest date is the year 52, and the latest 58.
To the First Epistle to the Thessalonians, which is undoubtedly the earliest of all, the earliest date a.s.signed is 47, and the latest 53.
Now it is ever to be remembered that in each of these--the First to the Thessalonians and the First to the Corinthians--we have enunciations of the great crowning supernatural event of Scripture--the Resurrection of Christ and our Resurrection as depending upon it, which are unsurpa.s.sed in the rest of Scripture.
So that in the first Christian writing which has come down to us, we have the great fact of Supernatural Religion, which carries with it all the rest.
The fullest enunciation of the evidences of the Resurrection is in a writing whose date cannot be later than 58, and runs thus:--
”Moreover, brethren, I declare unto you the Gospel which I preached unto you, which also ye have received, and wherein ye stand; by which also ye are saved, if ye keep in memory what I preached unto you, unless ye have believed in vain. For I delivered unto you first of all that which I also received, how that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures; and that He was buried, and that He rose again the third day according to the Scriptures. And that He was seen of Cephas, then of the twelve. After that [196:1] He was seen of above five hundred brethren at once, of whom the greater part remain unto this present [twenty-five years after the event]
but some are fallen asleep. After that He was seen of James, then of all the Apostles, and last of all He was seen of me also.” (1 Cor.
xv. 1.)
If the reader compares this with the accounts in any one of the Four, he will find that it gives the fullest list of our Lord's appearances which has come down to us, and this, be it remembered, forming part of the most categorical declaration of what the Gospel is, to be found in the New Testament. [196:1]
A man, then, writes in A.D. 57 or earlier, that another, Who had died in A.D. 32 had been seen by a number of persons, and among these, by 500 persons at once, of whom the greater part were alive when he wrote, and implying that the story had been believed ever since, and received by him (the writer) from those who had seen this Jesus, and that the fact was so essential to the religion that it was itself called ”the Gospel,”
a name continually given to the whole system of Christianity, and moreover that he himself, when in company with others, had seen this Jesus at noon-day, and, the history a.s.serts, had been blinded by the sight. Now let the reader recall to his mind any public man who died twenty-five years ago, that is, in 1850, and imagine this man appearing, not as a disembodied spirit, but in his resuscitated body to first one of his friends, then to eleven or twelve, then to another, then to five hundred persons at one time, and a flouris.h.i.+ng and aggressive inst.i.tution founded upon this his appearance, and numbers of persons giving up their property, and breaking with all their friends, and adopting a new religion, and a new course of life of great self-denial, and even encountering bitter persecution and death, simply because they believed this man to be alive from the dead, and moreover some professing to do miracles, and to confer the power of doing miracles in the name and by the power of this risen man.
Let the reader, I say, try to imagine all this, and then he will be able to judge of the credulity with which the author credits his readers when he writes:--
”All history shows how rapidly pious memory exaggerates and idealizes the traditions of the past, and simple actions might readily be transformed into miracles as the narrative circulated, in a period so p.r.o.ne to superst.i.tion, and so characterized by love of the marvellous.” (Vol. ii. p. 209.)
”All history,” the author says; but why does he not give us a few instances out of ”all history,” that we might compare them with this Gospel account, and see if there was anything like it?
Such a story, if false, is not a myth. A myth is the slow growth of falsehood through long ages, and this story of the Resurrection was written circ.u.mstantially within twenty years of its promulgation, by one who had been an unbeliever, and who had conferred with those who must have been the original promoters of the falsehood, if it be one.
To call such a story a myth, is simply to s.h.i.+rk the odium of calling it by its right name, or more probably to avoid having to meet the astounding historical difficulty of supposing that men endured what the Apostles endured for what they must have known to have been a falsehood, and the still more astounding difficulty that One Whom the author of ”Supernatural Religion” allows to have been a Teacher Who ”carried morality to the sublimest point attained or even attainable by humanity,” and Whose ”life, as far as we can estimate it, was uniformly n.o.ble and consistent with his lofty principles,” should have impressed a character of such deep-rooted fraud and falsehood on His most intimate friends.
The author of ”Supernatural Religion” has, however, added another to the many proofs of the truth of the Gospel. In his elaborate book of 1,000 pages of attack on the authenticity of the Evangelists he has shown, with a clearness which, I think, has never been before realized, the great fact that from the first there has been but one account of Jesus Christ. In the writings of heathens, of Jews, of heretics, [199:1] in lost gospels, in contemporary accounts, in the earliest traditions of the Church, there appears but one account, the account called by its first proclaimers the Gospel; and the only explanation of the existence of this Gospel is its truth.
THE END.
[FOOTNOTES]
[3:1] Papias, for instance, actually mentions St. Mark by name as writing a gospel under the influence of St. Peter. The author of ”Supernatural Religion” devotes ten pages to an attempt to prove that this St. Mark's Gospel could not be ours. (Vol. i. pp. 448-459.)
[6:1] I need hardly say that I myself hold the genuineness of the Greek recension. The reader who desires to see the false reasonings and groundless a.s.sumptions of the author of ”Supernatural Religion”
respecting the Ignatian epistles thoroughly exposed should read Professor Lightfoot's article in the ”Contemporary Review” of February, 1875. In pages 341-345 of this article there is an examination of the nature and trustworthiness of the learning displayed in the footnotes of this pretentious book, which is particularly valuable. I am glad to see that the professor has modified, in this article, the expression of his former opinion that the excerpta called the Curetonian recension is to be regarded as the only genuine one. ”Elsewhere,” the professor writes (referring to an essay in his commentary on the Philippians), ”I had acquiesced in the earlier opinion of Lipsius, who ascribed them (_i.e._, the Greek or Vossian recension) to an interpolator writing about A.D.
140. Now, however, I am obliged to confess that I have grave and increasing doubts whether, after all, they are not the genuine utterances of Ignatius himself.”
[10:1] [Greek: Ou gar monon en h.e.l.lesi dia Sokratous hypo logou elenchthe tauta, alla kai en Barbarois hyp' autou tou Logou morphothentos kai anthropou genomenou kai Iesou Christou klethentous.]
[10:2] Such is a perfectly allowable translation of [Greek: kai ton par'
autou hyion elthonta kai didaxanta hemas tauta, kai ton ton allon hepomenon kai exomoioumenon agathon angelon straton, pneuma te to prophetikon sebometha kai proskynoumen.] As there is nothing approaching to angel wors.h.i.+p in Justin, such a rendering seems absolutely necessary.