W. Sanday

“ He knows well that the author whom he has set himself to criticise is at least a writer of remarkable vigour and ability, and that he cannot lay claim to these qualities; but he has confidence in the power of truth—whatever that truth may be— to assert itself in the end. An open and fair field and full and free criticism are all that is needed to eliminate the effects of individual strength or weakness. 'The opinions of good men are but knowledge in the making'—especially where they are based upon a survey of the original facts. ”

“ All depends upon the truth of the story of this Apostle’s death. It is one of those statements that we can neither wholly trust, nor wholly distrust. There is a real chance that it may be right, and there is an equally real chance that it may be wrong; the evidence, as it seems to me, does not warrant a positive assertion either way. I should be much inclined to think that, if the statement is true, there was but one John at Ephesus, the beloved disciple who was also the Presbyter; and, if the statement is false, there was still but one John, who was both Presbyter and Apostle. ”

“ It is like emerging out of twilight into the broad blaze of day. There is really a greater disproportion than we might expect between the evidence of the end of the century and that which leads up to it. From Justin to Irenaeus the Christian writings are fragmentary and few, but with Irenaeus a whole body of literature seems suddenly to start into being. Irenaeus is succeeded closely by Clement of Alexandria, Clement by Tertullian, Tertullian by Hippolytus and Origen, and the testimony which these writers bear to the Gospel is marvellously abundant and unanimous. ”

“ The Christian miracles, or what in our ignorance we call miracles, will not bear to be torn away from their context. If they are facts we must look at them in strict connection with that Ideal Life to which they seem to form the almost natural accompaniment. The Life itself is the great miracle. When we come to see it as it really is, and to enter, if even in some dim and groping way, into its inner recesses, we feel ourselves abashed and dumb. Yet this self-evidential character is found in portions of the narrative that are quite unmiraculous. ”

“ By far the greater part of the advance that has been made in Theology—and I believe that a great advance has been made in our own country as well as elsewhere—I would again appeal to Hastings’ Dictionary as representing a sort of average—has been due to the stricter application of science; and a great part of this has been German science. Honour must be given where honour is due. We must not hold back the full recognition that at the present time Germany holds the first place in Science, and that its output of scientific work is perhaps as great as that of all the rest of the world besides. ”

“ I should be tempted to say that the almost exclusive and certainly excessive use of arguments derived from the history of dogma was the prime fallacy which lies at the root of the Tübingen criticism. How can it be thought that an Englishman, or a German, trained under and surrounded by the circumstances of the nineteenth century, should be able to thread all the mazes in the mind of a Gnostic or an Ebionite in the second? It is difficult enough for us to lay down a law for the actions of our own immediate neighbours and friends ”

“ I can well understand a nineteenth or twentieth-century reader taking up the Fourth Gospel and saying at once and off-hand, ‘The writer of this cannot have been an eye-witness of the events he describes.’ I have little doubt that it is the same sort of off-hand impression which is really at work in the minds of many of the critics. They acquire the impression in the course of a rapid perusal; or rather it attaches itself to the recollection that they bring with them of what they learnt in their childhood. They do not try to shake it off; it is always there at the back of their minds ”

“ THE EARLY HISTORY OF THE GOSPEL I. Summary of the Internal Evidence. All our discussions have for their object, not the production of rounded and symmetrical theories but the ascertainment of truth. We must take the data as we find them. If they do not as they stand sustain a clear conclusion, we cannot make them do so. And it seems to me far better frankly to confess the fact than to strain the evidence one way or the other. ”

“ He not only drew from the main body of the evangelical tradition, but also from those particular and individual strains which appear in the first and third Synoptics. He has done this in the spirit of a true desultor, passing backwards and forwards first to one and then to the other, inventing no middle links, but merely piecing together the two accounts as best he could. Indeed the preliminary portions of Justin's Gospel read very much like the sort of rough primâ facie harmony which, without any more profound study, most people make for themselves. ”

“ The one main principle in the treatment of miracle that I should like to urge would be the importance of keeping as distinct as we can two things, the attitude of mind in regard to miracles of the contemporaries—those before whom they are said to have happened and on whose testimony they have come down to us—and our own attitude now in the twentieth century. It seems to me that our difficulties are much increased, and that we are prevented from realizing the full strength of the case for miracles, by confusing these two things. ”

“ But the Christian raises himself above the flesh and its lusts, which disturb the faculties of knowledge as well as those of will, to the Spirit and the spiritual service of God, above the ways of darkness to the ways of light; he presses on to faith, and with faith to perfect knowledge, as one born again, who is full of the Spirit of God, in whom God dwells and prophesies, interpreting past and future without being seen or heard ”

“ Clearly here it is permissible to distinguish between the fact itself for which we have this explicit testimony, and the train of speculation to which it gave rise. The speculations are such as in all ages have naturally commended themselves to devout minds. There have always been those who have had so strong a sense of the unity of things, of the ‘pre-established harmony’ between the material and the spiritual, that the ‘outward shows’ of external nature ‘the earth and every common sight,’ have seemed to reflect and symbolize that which is unseen. ”

“ We should hardly endorse the arguments by which Irenaeus proves a priori the necessity of a 'four-fold Gospel,' but there is real weight in the fact that four Gospels and no more were accepted by him and others like him. It is difficult to read without impatience the rough words that are applied to the early Christian writers and to contrast the self-complacency in which our own superior knowledge is surveyed. If there is something in which they are behind us, there is much also in which we are behind them. ”

“ Even in our own much-lettered age, how many a pregnant thought is there that is not caught and fixed in writing! And what sort of record should we have of the thought, say, of America or England for some fifteen years, if the chronicle of it were compressed into a single document of the length of the first twelve chapters of the Acts? ”

“ All the reasons that go to form a judge's decision do not appear in his charge. Yet there we have a select and highly-trained mind working upon matter that presents no very great degree of complexity. When we come to a question so wide, so subtle and complex as Christianity, the individual mind ceases to be competent to sit in judgment upon it. It becomes necessary to appeal to a much more extended tribunal, and the verdict of that tribunal will be given rather by acts than in words. ”

“ It is true that St. John is not what we should call a dramatic writer; his narrative has not rapidity of movement. He is contemplative rather than energetic, and yet he has a quiet intensity of vision that is in its way not less valuable. He must be judged according to his type: we do not (e. g.) apply to a Maeterlinck the same sort of measure as to a Stanley Weyman.
Wrede’s is a specimen of what I consider poor criticism. It is in striking contrast to that which Dr. Drummond has devoted to the same subject. ”

“ It is all but impossible that two minds without concert or connection should have thought of introducing anything of the kind. Nicodemus makes an objection, and Justin by repeating the same objection, and in a form that savours so strongly of platitude, has shown, I think we must say, conclusively, that he was aware that the objection had been made.
Such are some of the chief literary coincidences between Justin and the fourth Gospel; but there are others more profound. Justin undoubtedly has the one cardinal doctrine of the fourth Gospel— the doctrine of the Logos. ”

“ In studying a narrative of this kind we should bear in mind, as well as we can, the whole career of the writer: we should divide it into its successive stages, and we should be constantly asking ourselves which stage of his experience is reflected in the shape that each portion of the narrative takes. If the conception which results as a whole appears to be such as naturally starts from direct contact with the facts, that will supply us with a much easier explanation than any which involves the wholesale use of fiction. ”

“ Existing before the foundation of the world, the Lord of the world, the sender of the prophets, the object of their prophecies, beheld even by Abraham, in the person of Moses himself typified as the only centre of Israel's hopes, and in so far already revealed and glorified in type before his incarnation, he was at last to appear, to dwell among us, to be seen, not as son of David but as Son of God, in the garment of the flesh, by those who could not even endure the light of this world's sun. ”

“ From the moment that we leave behind the shade of obscurity which does just linger over the person of the author, everything seems to me quite consistent and coherent and natural and probable. Can we say as much of the opposition to the Gospel, especially in its extremer form, as represented by Schmiedel or Jean Réville or Loisy? We certainly cannot give the epithets just used to the theory of these writers, because there is really nothing to apply to them; the Gospel is for them a great ignotum, and nothing more. ”

“ It is time that the extreme negative school should justify more completely their canons of criticism. As it is, the laxity of these repels many a thoughtful mind quite as firmly convinced as they can be of the necessity of free enquiry and quite as anxious to reconcile the different sides of knowledge. The question is not one merely of freedom or tradition, but of reason and logic; and until there is more agreement as to what is reasonable and what the laws of logic demand, the arguments are apt to run in parallel lines that never meet [Endnote 348:1] . ”