unlearned eye.1 The Gospels were thus brought into the field of actual reality. Other studies naturally followed. Just as Mr. Holman Hunt devoted years of patient labour in the Syrian sunshine that he might realise the temple and its doctors at Jerusalem, or the carpenter's work-bench at Nazareth, so the scholar dived into the great treasury of Jewish lore, and out of the vast collections of the Talmud, out of the histories of Josephus, the varied allusions to Jewish culture in the classical writers, or the philosophical writings of Philo of Alexandria, sought to reconstruct the picture of the social life of the people, delineate their institutions, and describe their worship, their parties, and their It has been already noted that both Ewald and Keim sought to place the founder of Christianity in the closest relation to the circumstances of his age. Their labours were continued in Germany by Hausrath and Schürer. In this country the state of general feeling was reflected in the lives of Jesus by Farrar and Geikie; the most notable contribution being made by Dr. Edersheim, who poured out a rich store of Jewish learning in the pages of his Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah (1883). sects. 1 One of the great impulses to this study in this country was given by Stanley in his delightful work Sinai and Palestine; he found an ally in Mr. (afterwards Sir George) Grove in the excellent geographical articles contributed to Smith's Dict. of the Bible. The general want of historic imagination may be illustrated by a story related thirty years or more ago by the Rev. Barham Zincke, one of the Queen's chaplains. Returning from a visit to Egypt and Syria, he told his gardener that he had been to Jerusalem. 'Jerusalem, Sir!' said the man in great surprise: 'Why I thought that was only a Bible word.' And this after Cook's tours had begun. 2 Lect. V. pp. 273, 381. But after all, this touched only the framework. The scene was there, but that no one had ever doubted. It was much to conceive it more clearly; but it was useless to deny that there were questions beyond. Archæology might reconstruct the stage of the Gospel story, but it could not guarantee the action of the great drama. What, after all, actually happened? The intrinsic significance of Jesus, the whole story of primitive Christianity, depended on something more than a knowledge of the geography of Galilee or Perea, the simple ritual of the synagogue, the determination of the successions of the high-priests, or the settlement of the constitution of the Sanhedrîn. The documents were not proved to be free from party tendencies because they did not misplace Bethlehem, or historically accurate (as a modern historian understands accuracy) because they gave correct details of the city administration of Thessalonica or Philippi. The fact of the differences in the Gospel representations after all remained: and the necessity of testing them historically could not be evaded. The Tübingen criticism had fixed on a particular explanation. The determining factor in the early Church was the struggle between the Jewish and the Gentile parties. The heroes of it had been Peter and Paul; its watchwords the Law' and 'the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.' The first evidence of the conflict had been found in Paul's own letters. But it had lasted long after his death; it continued in the first part of the second century; and only as its vehemence began to die away did the Gospels appear and embody the reconciliation. We have seen already that the general voice of modern criticism, in spite of some conspicuous exceptions, has carried the Gospels back into the age that followed the deaths of the two great apostles. But it cannot be denied that such a struggle did take place. The problem of the relation of the Gentiles to the obligations of the Law was an inevitable one. The opposition to which. Baur pointed did arise. But it neither lasted so long, nor possessed such significance for the development of Christianity, as he supposed. The discovery of such a document as the Teaching of the Twelve Apostles, first published by Archbishop Bryennios, Metropolitan of Nicomedia, in 1883, showed at once what other interests were engaging attention in the Church in an age when Baur had argued that it was absorbed in the antithesis of the Petrine and Pauline tendencies. The age of the book, to be sure, is uncertain like that of so many other items of early Christian literature. Harnack assigns it to the period 131-160 A.D., while other eminent critics place it earlier; Dr. Abbott, for example,' suggesting 80-110. The Logia in a fragment of papyrus found at Oxyrhynchus, though they, too, cannot be dated, supply another link in the general chain of evidence for carrying back the written collections of Jesus' teaching to an earlier period; and this is also the conclusion suggested by the fragments of the Gospel of Peter brought to light at Akhmim. From another point of view also it may be urged that the cleavage on which Baur rested his whole conception was by no means so sharp or fundamental as he supposed.1 On the one hand the Jewish party was by no means homogeneous, and showed many gradations of strictness. The conduct of Peter in eating with the Gentile Christians at Antioch was much less rigid than that of James, the Lord's brother, as described by Hegesippus. Nor did the two leaders divide the churches between them. If there was a party of Paul at Corinth, and another of Peter, there was also one of Apollos, and even one of Christ (1 Cor. 112). And on the other hand, if Peter was a Jew, no less so was Paul. Trained under a distinguished Pharisee, his modes of thought and feeling were those of a Jew. His ideas, his reasonings, had their origin in the Scribal schools. He shares the Palestinian view of time with its transition from this age to the age to come. He divides the world between God and Satan. The seven heavens-into the third of which he had himself been caught up-are filled with a celestial hierarchy; and the spiritual powers of evil are to be brought to nought by the design of God. The entire conception of the Messiahship of the Son of God, his exaltation at the right hand of the Father, his return in glory amid a retinue of angels, the rise 1 Cp. H. Holtzmann, ‘Baur's N. T. Criticism in the Light of the Present, New World, June, 1894. of the dead as the great trumpet pealed across the world, the judgment seat of Christ,-all these belong to the teaching of the Synagogue, and only differ from it in being realised in the person of Jesus. Even the doctrines which have commonly been supposed to be peculiar or original to Paul, of sin, atonement, and justification, are now known to have their affinities and connexions with the moral theology of the Pharisees. They are but branches from a common stock, transformed under the Christian experience of the apostle Moreover, a third order of modifying considerations was recognised in new influences the significance of which Baur only imperfectly appreciated. When the Gospel was carried beyond its native hills, and the Gentiles began to press into the Church, what modes of thought did they bring with them? With what view of the world did they combine their new faith? What habits of mind, what types of moral feeling, did they transfer from the old faith? The antecedents of the Greek were different from those of the Jew and it might be surmised that when the first Christian teachers began to address the cultivated Greek, trained in his own philosophy, some links of common understanding must be first established between them. It was inevitable, therefore, that contact with Hellenic thought should profoundly modify some aspects of Christian doctrine on its Hebrew side. That influence had already begun within the field of Judaism itself, and Philo of Alexandria, who had applied the conceptions of : |