Christian party, might, as much as possible, be passed over in silence; and he thinks also that with this is connected the fact, which betrays also the taste of a later period, that Mark lays so much more stress on the narratives, and especially on the miracles, than on the speeches, shortening the latter, lengthening the former by full description and exaggerating them by peculiar features of a miraculous character. Finally. Strauss is quite correct in drawing attention to the points of contact between Mark and John, which prove that one of these writers who, in this case, can only have been John, had the other before his eyes.

It is, of course, impossible in this place to test these views in any degree exhaustively. If, however, I am to express my opinion in brief, I cannot but declare myself as in the main, and with a few modifications in detail, agreeing with the theory here set forth as to the origin and character of our Gospels. In the first place it will be, at the present day, almost universally admitted, and certainly by all those who are competent to decide, that the Evangelical History was propagated, for a considerable period, only in the way of oral tradition. Among the first disciples and worshippers of Jesus, there existed no learned men and no authors: on the contrary, the learned and the literary of his nation had turned from him with hatred and contempt. A society, newly formed, standing in the midst of the most exciting conflicts and the most profound religious excitement, was a soil the least favourable that can be conceived for the writing of history. A society, looking every day for the end of the world, feeling no loftier desire than that for the coming of the Lord in the clouds, could have no motive for representing the image of its earthly life in written descriptions, for a posterity upon which, considering the near approach of

the conclusion of the present course of the world, they could no longer reckon ; but, as far as a wish was excited to learn anything of the speeches, the acts, and the destinies of that Lord, those who felt that wish adhered to the living word, to which, even in the second century, a Papias attributes an incomparably higher value than to the written tradition, inasmuch as its credibility is guaranteed to him by the personality of those who were questioned by him. It was not until the Apostolical generation had gradually died out, not until decades of years had passed since the departure of Jesus, that written memoranda about His life and doctrine were felt to be a desideratum. But at this period, by reason of the nature of all merely oral tradition, not merely unhistorical elements in great numbers might and must have penetrated into the Gospel history, many genuine features have been lost or have slipped into oblivion, but the whole frame of the history must have been loosened, and its natural organism broken up into a disarranged mass of separate narratives. For if, in a general way, it is only the skill of the writer which can form a comprehensive biography, give a connected view of a long historical career, while, on the contrary, on artless remembrance only particulars impress themselves, and in artless tradition only these propagate themselves, much more must this be true of religious tradition, far removed as this is, by its very nature, from all historical pragmatism, from all explanation of sequence in connection with natural causes, and for which that alone has any value from which an express reference to religious life can be gained. What, therefore, oral tradition about Jesus presented, cannot have been a connected representation of His history, but only a number of separate stories and speeches. Among the former we must assume to have been placed,

together with the main facts of the death and the resurrection, principally miraculous histories and those. occurrences which were the occasions of an important saying; among the latter, not prolix developments of doctrine, but, in part, short and pregnant expressions with an epigrammatic point; in part, those parables of an attractive nature and easy to be remembered, which were besides so agreeable to the Jewish taste, and propagated themselves from mouth to mouth. And just for this reason it was impossible that the oral tradition could be the origin of entire biographies, like our Gospels, or of anything more than short and imperfect memoranda, which even Strauss justly considers as the first beginning of Evangelical literature; combinations of speeches and occurrences without any claim to biographical completeness and strict chronology, something after the manner, though far from reaching to the extent, of the Memorabilia of Xenophon; and this is expressly confirmed by the most ancient testimony about the Evangelical writings which we possess, the declaration of Papias, preserved for us by Eusebius in his Church History (iii. 39) in Papias' own words. For, instead of our four Gospels, this ancient bishop knows only two writings, the first of which was attributed to the Apostle Matthew, the other to Mark the companion of Peter: a collection, written in Hebrew, of "Utterances of Christ," and a Greek account "of his speeches and acts." Now if it is certain, with regard to the first of these writings, that it can have been neither the original work of our Matthew, nor a perfect Gospel at all, so also with the accounts which we have of the second, a most inadmissible freedom must be taken, in order to find in it our own Mark, or even a basis in the main corresponding to it. For, in the first place, the speeches

in it appear to have been by far the most important part, as Papias describes its contents, at first indeed as consisting of the speeches and acts of the Lord, but afterwards as of "the speeches" only; and, as it was supposed, to have borrowed these contents from the lectures of Peter, who in his preaching of the Christian doctrine had, at all events, far more occasion to give an account of the doctrinal speeches and parables of his Master than of those miracles with which our Mark is filled, and which a personal disciple and companion of Jesus, however superstitious we may imagine him to have been, could only have narrated to a very small extent. In our Mark, on the contrary, the speech-element, as compared with the occurrences, and especially with the miracles, is kept so strikingly in the back-ground, that even the most zealous champion of his originality could only explain the phenomenon by the groundless assumption that he intentionally passed over most of the speeches, because, anterior to the time of his writing, they had been already noted down by Matthew (but in Aramaic, and consequently not for the Greek readers of Mark); and that, on the other hand, learned Jews eagerly caught up the hypothesis of Mark, in order, by means of it, to support the proposition, does indeed in itself contradict all historical possibility, and destroys all true relation between cause and effect: that Jesus had in his doctrine nothing distinctive or peculiar; was nothing else but a Jew of the Pharisaic party; and did not differ in anything from the heads of it at Jerusalem but in a more defective culture and a greater amount of religious fanaticism. Thus Papias expressly remarks that the sayings and deeds of Christ were told in the Writing of Mark, "not in order," but as he had them from occasional mention in the lectures of Peter; and whether much or little

credit is to be given to the statement, it proves at least thus much, that the writing of Mark, which Papias knew, not only differed from the arrangement of the speeches in the collection of Matthew (which cannot itself have been a biography in progressive chronological order), but that it had not, generally, the form of a regular narrative about the life and teaching of Jesus-that the particular sayings and portions of narrative in it were not strung upon the thread of chronology or any other external thread, but only quite loosely put together. To our Mark, whom his friends praise for the very reason that he, more than any other Evangelist, gives us a picture of the regular series of events, and of the progressive development of an historical career, and who, apart from this exaggeration, does at all events unmistakeably exhibit an intention to give a continuous and regular narrative, and varies from the arrangement of Matthew only in a few and unimportant particulars to this Gospel of Mark of ours, that mentioned by Papias, as regards its form, must have stood in much the same relation as Eckermann's Conversations with Göthe to the biography of him by Lewis.

Who then was the first to compile a complete representation of the Evangelical History from these and other similar memoranda, and from parallel oral tradition continually developing itself? This we are unable to say. But it cannot be assumed that it was one of our four Evangelists. Not merely because Luke, probably the second of them in point of antiquity, expressly makes mention of "many" Gospels which were in existence in his time; because, moreover, it may be proved that Justin made use of at least one Gospel-writing besides our Matthew and Luke; because we also know, from other sources, of a whole series of Gospels apart from our own,