1 it out to be the first written tradition, and not merely the first written tradition which happens to become known to us, we cannot perceive. So again he says that 'both the Acts and the Gospel of St. Luke were probably coming together in the note-books of the beloved physician ever since the death of Paul (circ. 68), and in all likelihood some time before.' And again: Those four verses ("the Lord Jesus in the same night in which He was betrayed took bread," &c.) just show us what were the sort of materials out of which the Gospels came to be framed. Floating fragments of oral tradition learnt off; little written slips; bunches of sentences on parchments or "libelli" handed about with "acta" (doings) and "logia" (words) of Jesus.'2 These words of Paul, he proceeds to say, were reproduced and woven into three of the Gospels; and though this origin of the Eucharistic narratives appears to us most unlikely, and we do not in the least believe it, yet the suggestion stands good to show that our Gospels may be founded to quite an unmeasured extent upon previous writings. These considerations suffice to prove how completely unreasonable it is to talk as if the correctness of the Gospel record were left as much at the mercy of the infirmities of human memory and imagination, or the interests of doctrinal assumption, as events of the first year of Queen Victoria would be if never written down till her jubilee. And these considerations we must beg leave to apply when we find Mr. Haweis representing St. Matthew as 'neither Jew nor Christian, insisting on separation from the law, yet clinging to the law '3. as if St. Matthew's record were his own invention; when he asks how St. John's talk about our Lord would be likely to come out when translated into the scholastic dialect of the eager young Greeks by whom he was surrounded; or when he imagines the same Apostle correcting a number of mistakes as to Jewish customs and geography made by the redactor who after the Apostle's death wrote the Gospel which passes by his name5 (none of them being cases in which there is any probability of mistake at all); or when he attributes to us a power to sift and condense the Gospel narrative by separating in it according to our good pleasure the transitory from the historical." But, after all, we shall be reminded, there are such differences in the Gospel records of the same events and sayings 1 The Story of the Four, 128. 2 The Picture of Jesus, 212. that we cannot believe the memories which retained them or the process by which they were recorded to have been completely secured from error. There are, as Mr. Haweis reminds us with his usual moderation, 'various readings, discrepancies, inaccuracies, fragmentary utterances, or even contradiction to be found in the four Gospels, which not even a rabid orthodoxy can altogether reconcile or ignore.' The statement is itself somewhat rabid, but in substance we accept it. We are not adherents of the theory of verbal inspiration any more than Mr. Haweis himself. It is impossible to ascribe accuracy to two varying statements of the same thing. And when this character has been clearly observed in cases where we possess a double record of the same thing, we are bound to apply it also to cases where but one narrative exists, and to acknowledge that there also we are precluded from assuming perfect accuracy. And how far the inaccuracy extends we confess ourselves unable exactly to say. But the facts of the case compel us to deny that it extends to the general character of the narratives or touches any essential point of the faith. That is what we should expect from the considerations which we have laid down as to the preservation of the record, and that is what we find when we compare narrative with narrative. The inscription on the Cross, and the words of the institution of the Eucharist, are variously recorded; but the essential meaning is the same. And there is no article of the Catholic Creed which depends on the acceptance of one sacred writer's testimony in opposition to that of another, or of the same in another passage. For instance, we find nothing in the facts of the case to justify Mr. Haweis's treatment of the narrative of our Lord's birth. According to him the genealogies in St. Matthew and St. Luke 'record the early stage of opinion-i.e. the view that Christ was the Son of Joseph.' And they both announce the later stage of opinion as well-i.e. that Jesus was of divine parentage by the Holy Ghost, in which case, of course, Joseph and his genealogy become alike meaningless.' 2 He thinks that the doctrine of the divine parentage established itself just in proportion as Christianity became through Paul's ascendency the religion of the (polytheistic) heathen.3 We entirely differ from him as to the relevancy of the genealogy of Joseph, upon supposition of the miraculous conception. Such an event plainly disturbs the usual course and meaning of a genealogical tree, and that under such circum2 Ibid. 51. 1 The Picture of Jesus, 49. (See ibid. 7.) stances the genealogy of the man who was husband of the woman of whom this holy Being was born, and from whom, as was supposed, He descended, is not as relevant as the genealogy of the mother herself, is an assumption on Mr. Haweis's part from which, with great reason, the evangelists dissent. But apart from this futile and idle talk about an earlier stage of opinion being marked in the genealogies, we would beg our readers to recall what we have said and what they know from their Bibles about the apostolic Church, and say whether it seems to them to have been a body so unfixed in doctrine and so indifferent to historic truth that an 'opinion' upon such a point as the Incarnation was likely to be developed without original facts on which to found itself, and that this opinion could manufacture for itself a foundation in the life of our Lord and procure acceptance for these imaginary incidents at the hands of the Church at large. It may, indeed, seem strange to us that the miraculous birth should be related by only two of the evangelists. But for one thing, our surprise at omissions in the Gospel record is only the result of our incurable habit of assuming that the knowledge of the early Christian depended upon the written word and not upon the living voice of the Church. And, moreover, a much more astonishing thing than this omission would be the fact that the other New Testament writers, not knowing of the miracle, should not record something inconsistent with it. There is, as we all know, an intense desire to know something of the parentage and early life of great men, and if those writers of the New Testament who do not record the Lord's birth had supposed it to have been as that of other men, what could have been more natural than that some of them should have given an account of His family or of some events in His childhood or after life, or of some doctrine connected with His relations to mankind, which should have been in contradiction to the fact that He had no earthly father? This is so far from being the case that the wondrous fact forms the appropriate expression and explanation of their whole doctrine concerning His person and relations to man. For they teach with one voice a union of the divine nature with the human in the person of the Lord. Mr. Haweis lays down with the most perfect truth that a post-natal transfusion of God into human nature is no whit less miraculous than the pre-natal transfusion.' Indeed, the post-natal transfusion would seem to us far the more wonderful of the two: for it is the union of God with a human being who has 1 The Picture of Jesus, 13. already commenced a life in unassisted humanity instead of a human life united in its first spring and commencement to God. Mr. Haweis, however, leaves us to choose between the two transfusions. But if we prefer the post-natal, what proofs, what facts, does he give us on which to build our belief in any such transfusion? None whatever. A human life begins as all human lives do; and we are to think that at some point after birth this life becomes a perfect representation (to use Mr. Haweis's meaningless phraseology) of the human side of God. What is the point at which this mighty change takes place, and what is the fact on which we can depend to mark and prove the change? There is none. When we consider the utter vagueness of belief in which, we do not say Mr. Haweis, but any one in thorough earnest about belief and its expression, would be landed by such a theory, we come to conceive the use, if we may not say the absolute necessity, of the miraculous birth to the doctrine of the Incarnation. It is a fact which brings the great doctrine before the mind and a tangible phenomenal basis on which to rest it. Instead of being an additional difficulty, it is something which, on the supposition of the transfusion of God into man, is required in order to reveal this transfusion to us. And if miraculous birth has been imagined by men in the case of the supposed incarnations of heathen religions, perhaps we see in that only the proof of a sense on the part of mankind of what is needed to enable it to receive such a doctrine. Mr. Haweis, with very little knowledge of the use of the Greek article, reproaches the translators of St. Mark with fearing to render the anarthrous vioû Toû Oɛoû in the first verse of St. Mark by a Son, instead of the Son, of God. Even if he were right, the correction would have no significance when Σù si o viós pov stands in verse eleven of the same chapter. We, on the other hand, are convinced that although these opening words of St. Mark, and St. John's The Word was made flesh,' and St. Paul's 'made of a woman' be of themselves incapable of proving to us the doctrine of the miraculous birth, yet to the writers, and to the Church amidst which they were first read, they expressed the great miracle which formed part of the Church's deposit and creed. This subject naturally leads us on to the question, How, in the view of Mr. Haweis, is God revealed in Christ? The following passages may serve to answer this question: 'What is that necessity which changes not, even as He changes not? It is the belief in a God of love; it is a conviction that He has revealed Himself through human nature; it is the belief in a God-communion. . . . The world's heart was grown cold and heaven silent. Christ filled both. He made men feel that in the immense unknown something there was which cared for man and palpitated for him. . . . He professed Himself as so filled with this incarnate side of God's love to usward as to stand in our presence as the Godman—the chosen and divine instrument of exhibiting to man what God was, what God meant, as far as was possible for us to lay hold effectively of Him and to conceive of His human side at all.'1 'The certainty that in the divine and human mind oopía wisdom, Aóyos divine utterance and manifestation-in other words, that goodness, truth, justice, mercy-meant the same thing in heaven as on earth, that there was a common language, a common sympathy between God the Creator and man the created, is further emphasized in the words "I and my Father are one;" "He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father." The absolute moral unity of divine and moral ideas is here for ever proclaimed and impersonated.' 2 'Whether, with Mark, you know nothing of the miraculous conception, and simply believe the Divine Nature of Jesus to have been a spiritual influence transfusing His humanity; or whether you hold with Luke that the Divine Nature of Jesus was due to a miraculous operation at the time of conception; yet with Jewish and Gentile Christians of the first century-with Mark and Luke, with Peter and Paul-you equally hold that in Jesus and through Mary, God was "manifest in the flesh." That is the spiritual and permanent element in the doctrine of the Incarnation. You ask me to define further: I will not define. . . . You ask me to explain as far as I can what I mean by the Divinity of Christ. . . . I believe that in Jesus a special use was made of human nature for the purpose of revealing to man as much as could be revealed of God under the limitations of humanity. Whether the theory of prenatal transfusion by the Deity, as we are at liberty to infer from Mark and Luke, or the theory of postnatal transfusion of Deity to which Mark inclines, be accepted as the method of the Incarnation, seems to me a matter of comparative unimportance. The postnatal theory will perhaps commend itself to some as the more reverent of the two; but the same style of theology which has for centuries perceived nothing inhuman or derogatory to the Divine Being in the doctrine of everlasting punishment, has also found nothing degrading to the Deity in the prenatal transfusion theory. To me all spiritual inhabitation, however accomplished, is in the highest degree mystic and miraculous, and I, who believe that God was in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself, hold that the postnatal transfusion of Himself into human nature is no whit less miraculous than the prenatal transfusion, and to some, I repeat, the postnatal theory may seem the more reverent belief of the two. One side of God, the only side intelligible to man-His humanity— that which had moral and spiritual as well as fleshly affinity with us, came forth and was bonâ fide expressed in the Person of Jesus. You ask me whether all God was in Jesus. I say, No; Jesus says, No. 2 Ibid. 112, 113. 1 The Story of the Four 88, 89. |