as far as they enter into detail, is anecdotal,-or a selection of particular passages out of a much larger and a more continuous narrative; the effect of which structure is, necessarily, that each particular stands in a great measure by itself, and has little or no connection with either what precedes or what follows it. . . . This anecdotal arrangement is a different thing from the principle of classification. And even this is only so far peculiar to St. Luke, compared with St. Matthew or with St. Mark, that, without altering or disturbing the order of succession, he has communicated to the particulars of his Gospel, in many instances, the most integral and independent shape, the most separate and detached position of any. St. John's Gospel, from its peculiar relation to the rest, could not be otherwise than a digest of remarkable passages, following at great intervals of time, and almost entirely independent of each other. And the great vivacity, minuteness, and circumstantiality of detail with which he has invested all these accounts, are truly wonderful, and among the strongest internal evidences of the inspiration and truth of a Gospel written so long after the events which it records, and so late in the life-time of its Author. Yet, St. Matthew, notwithstanding his characteristic differences in other respects, has defined with more precision than any of the rest, the eras of certain memorable events; as, when Jesus began to preach publicly,-when to teach in parables, when to predict his sufferings and death without disguise,-when the Apostles began to dispute about precedency, and when Judas conceived the design of betraying his master. And this also may be another proof that he wrote early, and as an eye-witness of what he relates; and not late, nor as one who had obtained his information from others.' Vol. I. pp. 185-7. In the process of constructing a Harmony, these characteristic differences naturally force themselves upon the attention of a competent critic; but, in the Harmony or Diatessaron itself, they become obscured or lost. The variations and apparent discrepancies in the several narrations, are there exhibited in a naked and palpable form, while the reason of them is not seen; and the proprieties of the composition are nearly as much violated by the perpetual interpolation of passages from the several Evangelists, as they would be in a work composed of consecutive extracts from three or four authors of different countries. Some further points of difference are adverted to in the following paragraphs. It will scarcely, perhaps, be disputed, that St. Mark was a Jew, and that St. Luke was not..... The internal evidence of the Gospel of St. Mark is altogether in favour of the presumption, that the Writer of this Gospel in particular must have been a Jew; and, whether a Jew of Palestine or not, yet intimately connected with the language, the topography, the idioms of Palestine, and familiar even with the habits and associations of a native Jew. And the argument from this evidence is rendered so much the stronger, because, in all or most of those respects which characterize a native Jew, St. Mark agrees with St. Matthew and St. John, who were unquestionably native Jews, and differs from St. Luke, who was unquestionably not a native Jew..... That St. Mark did not write for Jews, nor for persons previously acquainted with Judea, is not less apparent from the character of his Gospel, compared with St. Matthew's; but that he himself was a Jew, or intimately familiar with Judea, does not admit of a question. ... Not to specify such remarkable passages in this Gospel, as, contrasted with similar passages in St. Matthew's, would prove this to have been expressly written for Gentile believers as such; the frequency of Latin terms or phrases clothed in Greek, (scarcely any of which occur in the Gospel of St. Luke, and not so many in the Gospel of St. Matthew, and still fewer in the Gospel of St. John,) would prove it to have been designed for Roman converts in particular .... It is no objection that a Gospel, though written at Rome, should still have been written in Greek; or, in other words, the hypothesis which supposes St. Mark's Gospel to have been originally published in Latin, is unnecessary as well as untenable. The Epistle to the Romans is a case in point; and yet that was written in Greek; and such was the prevalence of this language almost every where, that even in Gaul, the law proceedings were carried on in Greek; bargains of every kind were indited in Greek; and the Roman Satirist could say, ** "Nunc totus Graias nostrasque habet orbis Athenas, De conducendo loquitur jam rhetore Thule." It is much to be doubted, whether the Latin language, even in the Roman dominions, was ever so generally in use; in which case, both the perpetuity and the utility of a Gospel, though composed at Rome, were best consulted by composing it, not in Latin, but in Greek.' Vol. I. pp. 79; 80, 1; 98, 9. Mr. Greswell, by a series of ingenious deductions, endeavours to establish the strong probability, that St. Mark's Gospel was composed or published at Rome about A.D. 54. To St. Matthew's, he is disposed to assign a date about twelve years earlier. The reasons given for this conjecture are not very satisfactory, although the opinion is sanctioned by ancient authorities, and is in accordance with probability. By the eleventh or twelfth of Nero, at all events, there was no Apostle left in Judea, by whom a 'Hebrew Gospel might have been written: the Hebrew Church ' itself had been, for a time, dispersed; for the Jewish war was 'begun.' Our Author adopts and vindicates the tradition, that St. Matthew's Gospel was written originally in the vernacular language of Palestine, improperly called Hebrew. The disappearance of the genuine Hebrew Gospel is accounted for on the * Several instances of this kind are given. The most decisive, the Author thinks, are the two explanations-λεπτὰ δύο· ὅ ἐστι κοδράντης and, αὐλῆς· ὅ ἐστι πραιτώριον: which are manifestly intended to render something intelligible, as it would seem, to the ideas of Romans; nor does any thing like them occur in the other Gospels.' supposition, that the authority of the translation was known and acknowledged from the first, as equal to that of the original ; which it would be, if rendered into Greek by one of the Apostles. According to Athanasius, it was translated by James the Lord's Brother, while another less credible tradition assigns it to St. John. Mr. Greswell ventures the novel conjecture, that St. Mark translated the Hebrew Gospel of St. Matthew, and wrote his own supplementary to it. The ingenious reasoning by which this supposition is supported, we shall transcribe. No supposition is better calculated to explain whatever there is in St. Mark's Gospel peculiar to that, as compared with St. Matthew's, and yet, what there is in common in both; what it agrees in with his, and what it differs in from his; their verbal coincidences, both in the historical and in the discursive parts, throughout;-the deviation from St. Matthew in the arrangement of some detached facts, with an absolute coincidence in the general outline of the whole;-the circumstantiality of detail in the history of miracles, and the conciseness in the report of discourses, which are the reverse of each other in each ;— the omission of nothing by St. Mark, recorded by St. Luke, which is not also omitted by St. Matthew;-the very supplementary relation of St. Mark's Gospel to St. Matthew's:-all which things are critically characteristic of one Gospel adapted to another,—of St. Mark's Greek adapted to St. Matthew's by a common hand, as the author of the one, and the translator of the other; and forming both together, and always designed to form, neither more nor less than one work. If there is any difference between them in certain proprieties of idiom, confined to either respectively, this may be explained on the principle that, in his own Gospel, St. Mark would write in his natural character; in translating St. Matthew, he would be restricted to that of his original. The same conjecture solves the problem concerning the origin of the Greek Gospel of St. Matthew more satisfactorily than any which has yet been advanced, and brings Irenæus's testimony (respecting its date) as near as possible to the truth.... The Translator must have been some one of equal authority with St. Matthew himself: otherwise his translation could never have superseded the original. The translator of St. Matthew's Gospel, too, not merely from the great variety of Hebrew words and phrases simply clothed in Greek, which the translation exhibits, but from certain isolated expressions more remarkable than others, which may be cited from it, shews plainly that, in translating from Hebrew into Greek, he was translating from a language which was his own, into a language which was not. Thus Matt. v. 22. 'Paxá-Mwg?— both Hebrew words, would not have been suffered to remain in their original form by any but a native Jew, or one fully acquainted with the native language; nor, Matt. xxiii. 15. h ngày have been opposed, by way of discrimination, to T báλacoar, except under the same circumstances. No Greek, translating Hebrew, would have transferred this idiom into his own language, when he might so easily have written TM y. The Latin terms, which occur in this Gospel, (as xodpávrns, μíniov, κήνσος, κουστωδία, πραιτώριον, λεγεών, μόδιος, δηνάριον, ἀσσάριον,) though they are not all peculiar to it, and might have become current where ever the Roman empire had been established, may yet be some presumptive argument that this was translated, as St. Mark's was composed, at Rome. And the coincidence between them in the use of such remarkable words as ἀγγαροῦσαι, φραγελλῶσαι, κολοβῶσαι, and the like, serves equally to render it probable that the translator of the one and the author of the other were the same. Nor is it an improbable conjecture, that this same person, besides being a Jew, and intimately familiar with Judea, might yet be a Roman citizen, or one of the order of Libertini, numbers of whom were resident at Rome. This supposition is in unison with the name of St. Mark, which at least is Roman, and not Jewish.' Vol. I. pp. 122—124. That Mark, the reputed convert of St. Peter,' and the author of the Gospel, was not the same person as John Mark, the nephew of Barnabas, Mr. Greswell regards as decisively certain; in which opinion he differs from Jer. Jones, Lightfoot, Wetstein, and Lardner. Cave, Grotius, Du Pin, and Tillemont are on his side. an Whoever St. Mark was, and whoever was the translator of St. Matthew's Gospel, the verbal agreement between the translated Gospel of St. Matthew and the original composition of St. Mark, can be accounted for only on one of two suppositions; either that St. Mark had seen, and designedly accommodated his own Gospel to that of the former Evangelist, or that both derived their materials in common from some primary document. The latter is the hypothesis embraced by Michaelis and some of the most eminent German critics; and on a former occasion*, opinion was expressed in this Journal, favourable to the general theory. Mr. Greswell maintains, however, that although the verbal coincidences may be accounted for on this hypothesis, it does not account for the supplemental arrangement of facts." St. Matthew's Gospel being taken in conjunction with St. Mark's, there are clearly omissions in the former, which are, he contends, as plainly supplied by the latter. Of this description, he enumerates the following, which our readers will be able to verify and estimate by an examination of the passages referred to. I. Omissions which concern integral facts: e. g. the first instance of our Saviour's teaching after the commencement of his ministry in Galilee, followed by the miracle on the demoniac in the synagogue at Capernaum; the account of a circuit in the neighbourhood of the lake of Galilee; that most important event, the ordination of the twelve apostles +; one additional parable among those which were first de * Ecl. Rev. Vol. I. Third Series. p. 417. Art. Schleimacher on the Gospel of Luke. + This is not omitted by St. Matthew, (See ch. x. 1.) although St. Mark may be thought to be more specific in his account. Mr. Greswell, however, detaches Matt. x. 1. from its connexion, and transposes it as parallel to Mark vi. 7. livered; two miracles performed at Bethsaida in Decapolis; and three personal manifestations of Our Lord after his resurrection: all which things the Harmony will exhibit in their proper places. II. Besides those instances, where a concise account of St. Matthew's is expanded into a circumstantial detail by St. Mark, the latter is frequently so accommodated to the other, as to end where he begins, or, vice versa, to begin where he ends. Mark ix. 33-50. concludes where Matt. xviii. I-35. begins.-Mark vii. 25. takes up Matt. xv. 24. Mark vii. 32-37. comes in exactly between Matt. xv. 29. and xv. 30.—Mark viii. 12. concludes Matt. xvi. 1-4.-Mark viii. 19, 20. follows on Matt. xvi. 10.-And, what is among the most striking instances of all, Mark, xvi. 5—8., in his account of that event, begins precisely where Matthew, xxviii. 6. in his account just before had made an end. III. In such cases, and especially where the one narrative continues or is continued by the other, St. Mark, it is manifest, presupposes St. Matthew, and without that supposition would scarcely be intelligible: of which Mark viii. 12. is a remarkable instance; for it passed altogether in private, after the answer to the demand, as recorded by St. Matthew, xvi. 1-4., had been returned in public. It is clear that the exordium of the narrative at Mark iii. 22. presupposes the fact of a recent dispossession, and, without that, would be utterly inconceivable; yet, this dispossession is related by St. Matthew only, xii. 22. IV. Even in their common accounts, something is often supplied by St. Mark, critically explanatory of something in St. Matthew. Mark iii. 21. serves this purpose for Matt. xii. 46.-Mark iii. 22. and iii. 30, ascertaining the fact of a double blasphemy, one against the Spirit, and one against the Saviour, serve it still more so for Matt. xii. 24. and xii. 31-37., which is directly founded on that distinction.— Mark iv. 10. explains the circumstances under which Matt. xiii. 1823. was delivered. Mark x. 35. compared with Matt. xx. 20., explains Matt. xx. 24., which, without that, would not be so apparent. The same observation would hold good of numerous passages besides, if my limits would permit me now to cite them. V. Closely as St. Mark adheres to St. Matthew, one object is still kept in view by him throughout; to rectify his transpositions, to ascertain what he had left indefinite, and to fill up his numerous circumstantial omissions. No two Gospels, in all these respects, could be more the artícTaxa of each other; while, in the general outline, they are absolutely ἀντίστροφα. -Hac in re scilicet una Multum dissimiles, at cætera pæne gemelli." VI. The very deficiencies in St. Mark, or the consideration of what St. Matthew possesses, which is not to be found in St. Mark, by implying a tacit reference to the Gospel of St. Matthew, confirm, rather than invalidate the same conclusion. There is one such omission relating to their common accounts of the resurrection and of the manifestations of Christ; the account of the manifestation in Galilee, which is almost the only one related by St. Matthew, and must have been in |