W. Sanday

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is not surprising if in the pursuit of this object the Evangelist has laid himself open to the charge of being partial or onesided. Those who use such terms are really, as we have seen, judging by the standard of the modern biography, which is out of place. The Gospel is, admittedly and deliberately, not an attempt to set forth the whole of a life, but just a selection of scenes, a selection made with a view to a limited and sharply-defined purpose. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The New Testament is scattered with hints, which are not more than hints, arrow-heads as it were pointing back to Christ. These are a profitable subject of study—none more profitable. If we pay attention to these hints, and if we look for the roots of St. Paul’s teaching, I do not think we shall say that Christianity—the Christianity of nineteen centuries—was his invention, and that St. John did but follow in his train. ”

“ The Use of the Word ‘Believe.’ I have long suspected that one of the reasons for the apparent want of progressive development in the Fourth Gospel has been the ambiguity of its use of the word ‘believe.’ We are told from the first that disciples and others ‘believed,’ and it is natural enough that we should take the word in the full sense of complete conversion and acceptance of Jesus as the Messiah. But there can be little doubt that to do so is to read into the word a great deal more than the writer intended. We do not make sufficient allowance for the extreme simplicity of his vocabulary. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ There is just one period in which the Christian Church stood in a relation to Judaism which it never occupied again: that was in its origin. Christianity arose out of the bosom of Judaism. The first disciples reached manhood as Jews; they were witnesses of the process by which Christianity gradually broke loose from Judaism; they themselves underwent a process of conversion; their ideas were modified little by little as they went on, and in the end the new displaced the old. But they had been as familiar with the attitude of their Jewish opponents as they were with their own ”

“ I console myself by thinking that German criticism with which I have had to break a lance more often than with any other, has a wonderful faculty for correcting itself. Only in the last few years we have had, first the discussions started by Wellhausen about the title Son of Man, and then those set on foot by Wrede in his book Das Messiasgeheimnis in den Evangelien, and in each case criticism seems to be working its way through to a view that is really right and reasonable. ”

“ A tradition of this kind, so wide-spread and so deep-rooted, could not have arisen if it had not had a very substantial ground. Suppose we allow for a moment that it is something in itself a little short of absolutely decisive, there comes in to reinforce it what we have just been speaking of as the result of internal criticism, that the Gospel is the work of an eye-witness, a member of the circle which immediately surrounded our Lord. ”

“ We may think of the Apostle as a youth, only just out of boyhood, and with something of the fidelity of a dog for his master, who does not like to be long out of his sight. ‘Sicut oculi servorum in manibus dominorum suorum, sicut oculi ancillae in manibus dominae suae‘: we may picture to ourselves this gentle youth seated a pace or two away, and not wishing to obtrude his presence, but eagerly drinking in all that passed. ”

“ But the Evangelist is interested in none of his theorems for their own sake. There is only one thing that he seeks. He wants a formula to express the cosmical significance of the Person of Christ. When he has got that, he is satisfied. For the purpose of filling up his formula and working out its meaning, he goes not to Philo but to the Old Testament. There, and in his own experience, he finds all the data that he needs.
I believe that there is a connexion between Greek, or Hellenistic, speculation and the Fourth Gospel. ”

“ It should never be forgotten that human nature is a very subtle and complex thing—usually far more subtle and complex than any picture of it that we are likely to form for ourselves. Hence it is improbable that the enumeration of motives by the critical historian will really exhaust the possibilities of the case. Many seeming inconsistencies, whether of character or of statement, are really less than they seem, and quite capable of conjunction in the same person. ”

“ The Evangelist has a shorter and more direct way of getting at the truth. He was more like the old Ionian philosophers, who looked up to the sky and out upon the earth, and set down the thoughts that rose in them in short loosely connected aphorisms. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ At least it is my belief that too much use is made of the argument, and that too much weight is attached to it. There are two main objections to the way in which the argument is often handled. (1) The critic does not ask himself what is silent—what extent of material does the argument cover? Often this extent is so small that, on the doctrine of chances, no inference can rightly be drawn from it. And (2) experience shows that the argument is often most fallacious. Dr. Drummond’s examples of this will I hope become classical [20] . ”

“ Such a theory would mean that quite a half, and the most important half, of the fundamental theses of historical Christianity, were a mere human invention which those who have had the wit to discover them to be a human invention may go on to treat as nothing better,—to bestow on them perhaps a certain amount of praise in relation to their time, but to regard them as something that the world has outgrown. ”

“ Paul and the Epistle to the Hebrews had substantially arrived at a Logos doctrine before any extant writing has mentioned the name, seems to throw light on the order of thought by which the Fourth Evangelist himself arrived at his doctrine of the Logos. It is the coping-stone of the whole edifice, not the foundation-stone. It is a comprehensive synthesis which unites under one head a number of scattered ideas. ”

“ But here, as in so many other places, we can follow it far more easily, if we take as our starting-point some actual phrase which the Evangelist had heard and which had lodged in his mind, than if we are compelled to regard it as pure invention. We may well ask what conceivable train of thought could put it into the head of a second-century writer to introduce so strange and remote a thought at a point in his narrative with which it seems to have no natural connexion. ”

“ 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? ”

“ When we argue upwards from the analogy of the known to the unknown, we must always leave a large margin for the interval between the point at which our common experience, and even higher extraordinary experience, ends, and the point at which this highest of all human experiences begins. Even a strictly scientific method should be conscious of its own limitations; when it has done all that it can do, it should be aware that its ladders are still too short to scale the height that has to be scaled ”

“ Baur and his school had thought themselves compelled, in order to give an intelligible account of the rise of Christianity, to throw over both the statements in the writings themselves and those of tradition about them, and to post-date their composition by several decades. They were driven to do this by mistaken premises. Starting with the assumption that all these writings were composed with a definite purpose, to commend some sectional view of Christianity, they were constantly on the watch for traces of that purpose, and they found them in the most unexpected places. ”

“ The argument is therefore a fortiori. The disciple is not above his master, or the servant above his lord. All these subordinate manifestations, though we have in some ways better evidence for them, do but point back to the one supreme manifestation, the Incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ. We must never forget that behind the alleged miracles of the Gospels we have the absolutely greatest spiritual force that the world has ever known. ”

“ It will have been observed that the reason for thinking that the affinity of thought between Ignatius and St. John is not to be explained by the use of a book, is not because of its slightness but because it is really too deep to be accounted for in that way. It is true that the affinity goes very deep. I had occasion a few years ago to study rather closely the Ignatian letters, and I was so much impressed by it as even to doubt whether there is any other instance of resemblance between a biblical and patristic book, that is really so close. ”

“ Hence they are too ready to assume that all the rest of the world will do the same, that if an important piece of evidence is omitted in an argument it can only be because it was not known, that carelessness and oversights and inconsistencies are things that need not be reckoned with. And there is also too great a tendency to argue as though men were all made upon one pattern. There is a want of elasticity of conception. ”

“ Both Father and Son are a principle of life which takes possession at once of soul and body, which imparts alike ethical and spiritual vitality to the disciple of Christ on earth, and that eternal life which is not something distinct from this but really the continuation of it in the world to come. ”