simply the fulfilment of Christ's intention, an essential These are the main questions before us-questions much controverted, yet not on that account incapable of yielding satisfactory solutions. But, like other controverted questions, those which concern the Christian ministry have a tendency to run off their own field and get upon territory foreign to themselves in one direction or another. It will therefore Preliminary promote clearness if at the beginning the area of the present discussion is carefully marked out. assump tions. (1) The genuineness records. (1) As an historical inquiry, the investigation of the of the N. T. origines of the Christian ministry involves conclusions as to the date and authorship of a number of documents. In regard to the great majority of these there is no division of opinion which is of serious moment for the present inquiry. But this is not the case with regard to some of the documents contained in the New Testament. The genuineness of the Epistles of St. Peter and St. James and of the Epistle of St. Paul to the Ephesians, still more the historical character of the Evangelical records and of the Acts of the Apostles, and the genuineness of St. Paul's Pastoral Epistles, are questions of vital moment in dealing with the history of the ministry. It is well then, in order to narrow the field of inquiry, to make it plain at starting that the genuineness of these Epistles and the historical character of these records. are here generally assumed. True, a considerable part of the inquiry is not affected by the decision in one sense or another of these critical questions. But in the discussion of the ministry in the apostolic age it has great weight.1 If a certain set of conclusions 1 Thus Professor Harnack (Expositor, May 1887) discussed the origin of the Christian ministry on the assumption that not only the Pastoral Epistles but also the Acts of the Apostles and the Epistle of St. James are second century documents (pp. 334 n.1, 335 n.6), and that the Epistle to the Ephesians was written 'a considerable time after the Apostle's death' (p. 331). As he truly says-when he is proceeding to set forth the chronological data which we possess for the origin and the is here in the main taken for granted, this is not at all because it is desired to exempt the books of Scripture from free criticism. It is done, because no investigation is satisfactory which does not at starting make plain the basis on which it rests, while a discussion of so large a number of critical questions would occupy too much space in preliminaries. It is done, then, to limit the area of inquiry; but, it must be added, with the clearest conviction that the conclusions assumed are those which the facts warrant. There does not seem to the present writer to be good reason on the whole for doubting, for instance, the unity or the genuineness of the Epistles of St. Paul to the Ephesians, to Timothy, and to Titus, The authorship of the Epistle to the Ephesians is guaranteed, not only by the external evidence, not only by its connexion with the more personal Epistles to the Colossians and to Philemon, but also by the lofty power and richness of thought with which it develops and unifies the fundamental conceptions of predestination and of the Church, which St. Paul had already presented in the Epistles to the Romans and the Corinthians. The Pastoral Epistles are linked together by intense coherence of subject and tone; and there is hardly any writing which can be more certainly pronounced genuine by internal evidence than the second Epistle to Timothy.1 When we pass to the Acts of the Apostles, there would seem earliest development of the ecclesiastical constitution'-'This problem would receive the most diverse solutions from those occupying different standpoints regarding the origin of certain New Testament and post-apostolic writings. Any one, for example, who admits the genuineness of the Pastoral Epistles will reach quite different conclusions from one who regards them as non-Pauline, and relegates them to the second century' (p. 322). Harnack himself has now modified very largely his views upon the dates of early Christian documents, and especially upon the Acts; see next page, note *. 1 See Abp. J. H. Bernard's Pastoral Epistles (Cambridge, 1899); Salmon's Introduction to the New Testament (Murray) cap. xx; Mr. Findlay's essay appended to Sabatier's Apostle Paul (Hodder and Stoughton, 1881); G. Wohlenberg Die Pastoralbriefe (in Zahn's Commentar zum Neuen Testament) 1906; W. M. Ramsay Historical Commentary on the First Epistle to Timothy in the Expositor, 1909, 1910. to be scarcely any department of literary controversy in which, within recent years, we have experienced more completely the reassuring effect of thorough inquiry. The remarkably undeveloped Christology of the early chapters: the position assigned to the prophets in the earliest Church: the accurate knowledge, as tested by recent investigations, which the narrative displays of local geography, local sentiment, and the titles of local magistrates: the reiterated evidence which the book affords in its later portions that the author was an eye-witness of what he records 2-all this taken together goes to guarantee the substantial accuracy of the whole record.3 Further, the position assigned to the Apostles in St. Paul's Epistles and in the Acts suggests or presupposes some such dealings of Christ with them in particular as the Gospels record. Once again, then (for this reason and in virtue of all the body of considerations which make for the trustworthiness of the evangelical records), it is here taken for granted without scruple that Jesus Christ did really give in If this was true in 1888 when this volume first appeared, it is conspicuously more true now in 1917. See note 4 below. ⚫ See Bp. Lightfoot's 'Illustrations of the Acts from Recent Discoveries,' Contemp. Review (May 1878), and, especially, Sir William Ramsay's very remarkable testimony in his work The Church in the Roman Empire before A.D. 170 (Hodder and Stoughton, 1893), Part I. Sir W. Ramsay held when he wrote this work that the author of the Acts used for the period of St. Paul's travels a 'travel document' by another hand, written down under the immediate influence of Paul himself, which he dates between ་ 60-70 A.D.' But the evidence of style, etc., seems to show that the eye-witness of the 'we' sections is the author of the whole. And Ramsay himself came to hold that St. Luke is the author of the whole book before he wrote St. Paul the Traveller and the Roman Citizen, 1895. On the subject of the Acts I may refer (1) to Bp. Lightfoot's article in the Dict. of the Bible (ed. 1893), and to his essay 'St. Paul and the Three' (Epistle to the Galatians); (2) to Dr. Salmon's Introd. lecture xviii.; (3) to the remarkable admissions of one of the last critics amongst those who pay honour to the name of Baur-Dr. Pfleiderer, see his Hibbert Lectures, lect. i. ; (4) to Dr. A. C. Headlam's article 'Acts of the Apostles' in Hastings' Dictionary of the Bible (Clark, 1898) and the same writer's contribution to Authority and Archeology (John Murray, 1899) pp. 348 ff.; (5) to Mr. Rackham's Acts (Methuen, 1901). Very remarkable is Harnack's complete volte-face upon the Acts; after dating the book in the second century (see page 3 n.1), he pushed it back in 1897 (Die Chronologie der altchristlichen Litteratur i. 250) to A.D. 80-93; while in his Die Apostelgeschichte (1908: English translation The Acts of the Apostles, 1909) he even leans to a date soon after A.D. 60. substance those instructions and commissions to His Apostles and to His Church, both before and after His Resurrection, which He is recorded to have given in the narratives of St. Matthew, St. Mark, St. Luke, and St. John.1 It is then from no fear of free criticism that the authenticity and trustworthiness of these New Testament documents is here assumed. of the In (2) It will be also taken for granted that the (2) The truth apostolic interpretation of the Person of Christ is the carnation. true one-that He was the Incarnate Son of God. It is important to make this plain, because, though little stress will be laid upon this doctrine, yet our 1 Those who minimize the historical and emphasize the mystical value of the Fourth Gospel must admit that a mystic at the end of the first century conceived of our Lord as having given the definite commission of Jo. xx. 23. But for myself I adhere to the belief that St. John the Apostle is the real author of the Gospel. With reference to a point of some importance for the subject of the ministry in St. Matthew's Gospel-our Lord's commission to St. Peter-Prof. Harnack argued (Contemp. Review, Aug. 1886, 'The Present State of Research in Early Church History,' p. 230) that an earlier version of the narrative is preserved in the text of Tatian's Diatessaron. We have in Armenian St. Ephraem's Commentary on this Harmony of the Gospels. In the Latin translation of this (Evangelii Concordantis Expositio facta a S. Ephraemo, in Lat. trans. a R. P. Aucher, Mechitarista, ed. Moesinger, Venice, 1876, pp. 153, 154) the words run: Beatus es Simon, et portae inferi te non vincent. Afterwards the words Tu es petra are quoted. Here it appears that it is against St. Peter that the gates of death are not to prevail, and nothing is said of the foundation of the Church. But we have not the whole text of the Diatessaron; St. Ephraem only quotes it to comment on it. Nor does he always quote it fully. In this case he gives no hint of the words Tu es petra till afterwards, out of their order. Elsewhere it is manifest that he does not quote the whole text; see his comments on St. John, as incorporated in the Harmony (pp. 145-153); and again (p. 66) on the Sermon on the Mount, where the quoted text of St. Matt. v. 22-32 runs thus: 'Sed ego dico vobis: qui dicit fratri suo, fatue... qui dicit fratri suo, vilis aut stulte.. Audistis quia dictum est: non adulterabis, sed ego dico vobis: quicunque aspicit et concupiscit, adulterat. Si manus tua vel pes tuus scandalizet te . . . St. Ephraem does not by any means quote the whole text; but he refers to more than he quotes. Thus in the passage under discussion, if we reconstruct his text from his commentary (Dominus cum ecclesiam suam aedificaret, etc., p. 154), it must have run to this effect: Blessed art thou, Simon. Thou art Peter, and on this rock I will build My Church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against thee.' The 'thee' may be due simply to the 'it' (αὐτῆς) being referred to πέτρα and not to ἐκκλησία, a reference which Origen in loco discusses. St. Ephraem accepted this reference and, interpreting the rock of St. Peter, glossed arms as equivalent to σou. There are no traces of any such reading as Harnack imagines to have existed in the Greek Mss. or in the Syriac versions (earlier or later) which have our text. See Zahn's Diatessaron pp. 163-4 (in his Forschungen, 1 Th., Erlangen, 1881). Moreover, the Arabic version of the Diatessaron, published by Ciasca in 1888, and rendered into English by Mr. Hamlyn Hill in 1894, gives no support to Harnack's conjecture: like Victor of Capua's Latin version, it records the promise to St. Peter in the ordinary form. See Hill's The Earliest Life of Christ p. 136: Codex Fuldensis, ed. E. Ranke, p. 85. It rational attitude towards the development of Christian institutions depends to a certain extent upon our relation to it. The Incarnation represents necessarily a climax in the divine self-revelation. represents this necessarily, because no closer relation of God to man is conceivable than that involved in the 'Word-Who is God-made flesh' in the historical Person, Christ Jesus, in such sense that 'he who hath seen Him hath seen the Father.' God cannot come any nearer to man, man cannot come any nearer to God, than is effected in Him, in Whom 'dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily.' This is 'the end of the days.' As M. Godet strikingly observes: 'The history of the world (from the Christian point of view) is summarized in its essence in these three words: He is coming: He is come: He is coming again.' 2 The development then of God's revelation of Himself comes to its climax in the Incarnation. Henceforth another sort of development begins. All institutions, all races, all individuals are gradually brought into the light of Christ and judged by their relation to Him. Christ develops Himself as the Second Adam, realizing the capacities of all humanity by bringing it all, age by age, race by race, individual by individual, into relation to Himself, till He can come again,' in the revelation of the glory of the sons of God, as the acknowledged centre and head of humanity and of the universe. It is not here proposed to inquire whether analogies will be found in other departments of evolution to what has taken place in the history of religion. This is a large question, which does not belong to our 1 For example, it seems a grave critical defect in Dr. Hatch's Bampton Lectures, The Organization of the Early Christian Churches, that, as he did not explain his relation to certain most significant New Testament documents, so also he did not make it plain whether he really believed the 'supernatural' character of the Person of Christ. If he did, then his propositions about the merely 'natural' development of Christian institutions surely want correcting (lecture i. p. 18). • Etudes Bibliques, N. T. p. 291. |