Читать книгу The Criticism of the Fourth Gospel - W. (William) Sanday - Страница 7

Table of Contents

Where two or more persons are concerned in the composition of a book, the relation between them may be through a written document, or it may be oral. Hitherto we have been going upon the latter assumption: the mediating theories that we have been considering, so far as they were mediating, have treated the writer of the Gospel, whatever his name, as a disciple or associate of St. John the Apostle; and the information derived from him is supposed to have come by way of personal intercourse. But it is quite conceivable that St. John may have set down something on paper, and that some later Christian—disciple or not—took this and worked it up into our present Gospel. Accordingly, various attempts have been made at different times to mark off a Gospel within the Gospel, an original authentic document derived from a first-hand authority—either the Apostle or the Presbyter—and certain added material incorporated in the Gospel as we now have it. Many of these attempts are obsolete and do not need discussion. It has already been mentioned that Delff—without any clear necessity even from his own point of view—cuts out more particularly the Galilean passages and some others with them as interpolations. These additions to the Gospel he regards as the work of the author of chap. xxi^[10]. But the most systematic and important experiments in this direction are those of Dr. Wendt and Dr. Briggs.

After a preliminary sketch of his theory in the first edition of his Lehre Jesu (1886), i. 215-342, Dr. H. H. Wendt brought out in 1900 an elaborate and fully argued analysis of the Gospel, carefully dissecting each section and assigning the parts either to the Apostolic author or to the later redactor. Approximately similar results were obtained independently with a less amount of published argument, by Dr. C. A. Briggs in his General Introduction to the Study of Holy Scripture (1899), p. 327, and in his New Light on the Life of Jesus (1904), pp. 140-58. A like theory has been put forward by Professor Soltau (Zeitschrift f. d. neutest. Wissenschaft, 1901, pp. 140-9).

In my opinion all attempts of this kind are fore-doomed to failure. The underlying motive is to rescue some portion of the Gospel as historical, while others are dismissed as untrustworthy. At the same time it is allowed that the separation can only be made where there is a real break in the connexion. On this Schmiedel pertinently remarks:—

‘There is much reason to fear that distrust of the authenticity of the substance often causes an interruption of the connexion to be imagined where in reality there is none. Many passages of the same sort as others, which give Wendt occasion for the separating process, are left by him untouched, when the result would not be removal of some piece held to be open to exception in respect to its contents; the ground for exception which he actually takes, on the other hand, is often altogether non-existent^[11].’

I look with considerable distrust on many of the attempts that are made to divide up documents on the ground of want of connexion. I suspect that the standard of consecutiveness applied is often too Western and too modern. But the one rock on which it seems to me that any partition theory must be wrecked is the deep-seated unity of structure and composition which is characteristic of the Gospel. Dr. Briggs turns the edge of this argument by referring the unity to the masterful hand of the editor. It is, no doubt, open to him to do so; but we may observe that, if in this way he makes the theory difficult to disprove, he also makes it difficult to prove. I must needs think that both in this case and in Dr. Wendt’s the proof is quite insufficient. I would undertake to show that the distinctive features of the Gospel are just as plentiful in the passages excised as in those that are retained. Perhaps the most tangible point made by the two critics is the attempt to distinguish between the words for ‘miracle’: ‘works’ they would assign to the earlier writer, and ‘signs’ to the later. We remember, however, that the combination of ‘signs’ and ‘wonders’ occurs markedly in St. Paul, e. g. Rom. xv. 19, 2 Cor. xii. 12, and is indeed characteristic of early Christian literature long before the Fourth Gospel was written.

Another very original suggestion of Dr. Briggs’ which would be helpful if we could accept it, is that we are not tied down to the chronological order of the Gospel as we have it, but that this too is due to the later editor, who has arranged the sections of his narrative rather according to subject than to sequence in time. I am prepared to allow that the narrative may not be always strictly in the order in which the events occurred; and it is true that there are some difficulties which the hypothesis would meet. At the same time we cannot but notice that the order is by no means accidental, but that attention is expressly drawn to it in the Gospel itself; see (e. g. ii. 11, iv. 54, xxi. 14). And some incidents seem clearly to hang together which Dr. Briggs has divided^[12] (e. g. i. 29, 35, 43, where the connexion is natural historically, as well as expressly noted by the Evangelist).

I fear that the learned Professor is seeking in a wrong direction for a solution of the problem of the Gospel. But I would be the last to undervalue the vigorous independence and the fearlessness and fertility in experiment that are conspicuous in all his writings.

Perhaps I should be right in saying a few words at this point about Professor B. W. Bacon of Yale. His view is not as yet (I believe) quite sufficiently developed in print for me to be clear how much he would refer to oral transmission and how much to a written source. He distinguishes three hands in the Gospel. I gather that the first would be that of the Apostle, but he as yet stands dimly in the background. Then comes the main body of the Gospel, without the Appendix. This is ascribed to John the Presbyter, whom—rather by a paradox—Professor Bacon would seek in Palestine and not in Asia Minor. Lastly there is the editor who works over the whole.

The two articles lately contributed to the Hibbert Journal (i. 511 ff., ii. 323 ff.)^[13] are highly original, very incisive, and exceedingly clever. My objection to them would be that they are too clever. Professor Bacon has been to Germany, and learnt his lesson there too well. At least I find myself differing profoundly from his whole method of argument. The broad simple arguments that seem to me really of importance (Irenaeus, Heracleon, Polycrates, Tatian, Clement of Alexandria) he puts aside, and then he spends his strength in making bricks with a minimum of straw, and even with no straw at all (the argument from silence).