The Lost Gospel and Its Contents by Michael F. Sadler (most popular ebook readers TXT) 📖

us, we have not this saying; but in that which is according to the
Egyptians." (Miscellanies, iii. ch. xiii.)

Tertullian writes thus:--

"Of the Apostles, therefore, John and Matthew first instil faith
into us; whilst, of Apostolic men, Luke and Mark renew it
afterwards. These all start with the same principles of the faith,
so far as relates to the one only God the Creator, and His Christ,
how that He was born of the Virgin, and came to fulfil the law and
the prophets. Never mind if there does occur some variation in the
order of their narratives, provided that there be agreement in the
essential matter of the faith in which there is disagreement with
Marcion." (Tertullian against Marcion, iv. c. ii.)

Such are the explicit declarations of these three writers respecting the number and authorship of the Four. I shall give at the conclusion of this section some of the references to be found in these writers to the first two or three chapters in each Gospel.

It is but very little to say that they quote the Four as frequently, and with as firm a belief in their being the Scriptures of God, as any modern divine. They quote them far more copiously, and reproduce the history contained in them far more fully than any modern divine whom I have ever read, who is not writing specifically on the Life of our Lord, or on some part of His teaching contained in the Gospels.

But I have now to consider the question, "To what time, previous to their own day, or rather to the time at which they wrote, does their testimony to such a matter as the general reception of the Four Gospels of necessity reach back?"

Clement wrote in Alexandria, Tertullian in Rome or Africa, Irenaeus in Gaul. They all flourished about A.D. 190. They all speak of the Gospels, not only as well known and received, but as being the only Gospels acknowledged and received by the Church. One of them uses very "uncritical" arguments to prove that the Gospels could only be four in number; but the very absurdity of his analogies is a witness to the universal tradition of his day. To what date before their time must this tradition reach, so that it must be relied upon as exhibiting the true state of things?

Now this tradition is not respecting a matter of opinion, but a matter of fact--the fact being no other than the reading of the Gospels or Memoirs of our Lord in the public service of the Church. The "Memoirs of our Lord," with other books, formed the Lectionary of the Church. So that every Christian, who attended the public assemblies for worship, must know whether he heard the Gospels read there or not.

Now any two men who lived successively to the age of sixty-five would be able to transmit irrefragable testimony, which would cover a hundred years, to the use of the Gospels in the lectionary of the Church.

During the last five years we have had a change in our Lectionary, which change only affects the rearrangement of the portions read each day out of the same Gospels, and every boy and girl of fifteen years old at the time would recognize the alteration when it took place. If it had occurred fifty years ago, any man or woman of sixty-five would perfectly remember the change. If it had occurred within the last hundred years, any person of sixty-five could bear testimony to the fact that, when he first began to be instructed in the nature of the Church Services he was told by his elders that up to a time which they could perfectly recollect certain selections from Scripture had been read in Church, but that at such a period during their lifetime a change had been brought about after certain public debates, and that it received such or such opposition and was not at once universally adopted, which change was the reading in public of the present selection. It is clear then, that if all public documents were destroyed, yet any two men, who could scarcely be called old men, would be able to transmit with perfect certainty the record of any change in the public reading of Scripture during the last one hundred years.

But, supposing that instead of a change in the mere selections from the Gospels, the very Gospels themselves had been changed, could such a thing have occurred unnoticed, and the memory of it be so absolutely forgotten that neither history nor tradition preserved the smallest hint of it at the end of a short century?

Now this, and far more than this, is what the author of "Supernatural Religion" asks his readers to believe throughout his whole work.

We have seen how, before the end of this century, no other authoritative memoirs of Christ were known by the Church, and these were known and recognized as so essential a part of the Christian system, that their very number as four, and only four, was supposed to be prefigured from the very beginning of the world.

Now Justin lived till the year 165 in this century. He was martyred when Irenaeus must have been twenty-five years old. Both Clement and Tertullian must have been born before his martyrdom, perhaps several years, and yet the author of "Supernatural Religion" would have us believe that the books of Christians which were accounted most sacred in the year 190, and used in that year as frequently, and with as firm a belief in their authenticity as they are by any Christians now, were unused by Justin Martyr, and that one of the four was absolutely unknown to him--in all probability forged after his time.

We are persistently told all this, too, in spite of the fact that he reproduces the account of the Birth, Teaching, Death, and Resurrection of Christ exactly as they are contained in the Four, without a single additional circumstance worth speaking of, making only such alterations as would be natural in the reproduction of such an account for those who were without the pale of the Church.

But even this is not the climax of the absurdity which we are told that, if we are reasonable persons, we must accept. It appears that the "Memoirs" which, we are told, Justin heard read every Sunday in the place of assembly in Rome or Ephesus which he frequented, was a Palestinian Gospel, which combined, in one narrative, the accounts of the Birth, Life, Death, and moral Teaching of Jesus, together with the peculiar doctrine and history now only to be found in the Fourth Gospel. Consequently this Gospel was not only far more valuable than any one of our present Evangelists, but, we might almost say, more worthy of preservation than all put together, for it combined the teaching of the four, and no doubt reconciled their seeming discrepancies, thus obviating one of the greatest difficulties connected with their authority and inspiration; a difficulty which, we learn from history, was felt from the first. And yet, within less than twenty years, this Gospel had been supplanted by four others so effectually that it was all but forgotten at the end of the century, and is referred to by the first ecclesiastical historian as one of many apocrypha valued only by a local Church, and has now perished so utterly that not one fragment of it can be proved to be authentic.

But enough of this absurdity.

Taking with us the patent fact, that before the end of the second century, and during the first half of the third, the Four Gospels were accepted by the Church generally, and quoted by every Christian writer as fully as they are at this moment, can there be the shadow of a doubt that when Justin wrote the account of our Lord's Birth, which I have given in page 22, he had before him the first and third Evangelists, and combined these two accounts in one narrative? Whether he does this consciously and of set purpose I leave to the author of "Supernatural Religion," but combine the two accounts he certainly does.

Again, when, in the accounts of the events preceding our Lord's Death, Justin notices that Jesus commanded the disciples to bring forth an ass and its foal (page 33), can any reasonable man doubt but that he owed this to St. Matthew, in whose Gospel alone it appears?

Or when, in the extract I have given in page 20, he notices that our Lord called the sons of Zebedee Boanerges, can there be any reasonable doubt that he derived this from St. Mark, the only Evangelist who records it, whose Gospel (in accordance with universal tradition), he there designates as the "Memoirs of Peter?"

Or again, when, in the extract I have given in page 34, he records that our Lord in His Agony sweat great drops [of blood], can there be a doubt but that he made use of St. Luke, especially since he mentions two or three other matters connected with our Lord's Death, only to be found in St. Luke? Or, again, why should we assume the extreme improbability of a defunct Gospel to account for all the references to, and reminiscences of, St. John's Gospel, which I have given in Sections VIII. and IX. of this work?

So far for Justin Martyr.

We will now turn to references in three or four other writers.

In the Epistle of Vienne and Lyons we find the following:--

"And thus was fulfilled the saying of our Lord: 'The time shall come
in which every one that killeth you shall think that he offereth a
service to God.'"

This seems like a reference to John xvi. 2. The words, with some very slight variation, are to be found there and not to be found elsewhere. The letter of the Churches was written about A.D. 178 "at the earliest," we are told by the author of "Supernatural Religion." Well, we will make him a present of a few years, and suppose that it was written ten or twelve years later, i.e. about A.D. 190. Now we find that Irenaeus had written his great work, "Against Heresies," before this date. Surely, then, the notion of the writer of "Supernatural Religion," that we are to suppose that this was taken from some lost Apocryphal Gospel when Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyons, had actually used a written Gospel which contains it, refutes itself.

We turn to Athenagoras.

We find in his work, "Plea (or Embassy) for the Christians" (ch. x.), the following:--

"But the Son of God is the Logos of the Father in idea and in
operation, for after the pattern of Him and by Him were all things
made, the Father and the Son being one [I and My Father are one],
and the Son being in the Father, and the Father in the Son, in
oneness and power of spirit," &c. (John xiv. 10.)

Again (ch. xii.):--

"Men who reckon the present life of very small worth indeed, and who
are conducted to the future life by this one thing alone, that they
know God and His Logos." [This is life eternal, that they may know