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

Will in Christ Jesus, are not justified
by ourselves, nor by our own wisdom, or understanding, or godliness,
or works which we have wrought in holiness of heart; but by that
faith through which from the beginning Almighty God has justified
all men." (Ch. xxxii.)

Again:--

"All these the Great Creator and Lord of all has appointed to exist
in peace and harmony; while He does good to all, but most abundantly
to us who have fled for refuge to His compassion through Jesus
Christ our Lord."

And he ends his Epistle with the following prayer:--

"May God, who seeth all things, and Who is the Ruler of all Spirits
and the Lord of all Flesh--Who chose our Lord Jesus, and us through
Him to be a peculiar people--grant to every soul that calleth upon
His glorious and holy Name, faith, fear, peace, patience, long
suffering, self-control, purity and sobriety, to the well pleasing
of His Name through our High Priest and Protector Jesus Christ."
(Ch. lviii.)

But with all this his Christianity seems to have been Ecclesiastical, in the technical sense of the word. He seems to have had a much clearer and firmer hold than Justin had of the truth that Christ instituted, not merely a philosophy or system of teaching, but a mystical body or visible Church, having its gradations of officers corresponding to the officers of the Jewish Ecclesiastical system, and its orderly arrangements of worship. (Ch. xl-xlii.)

Now this is the Christianity of a man who lived at least sixty or seventy years nearer to the fountain head of Christian truth than did Justin Martyr, whose witness to dogmatical or supernatural Christianity we have shown at some length.

It is also gathered out of a comparatively short book, not one sixth of the length of the writings of Justin, and composed solely for an undogmatic purpose.

His views of Christ and His work are precisely the same as those of Justin. By all rule of rationalistic analogy they ought to have been less "ecclesiastical," but in some respects they are more so.

Clement certainly seems to bring out more fully our Lord's Resurrection (taking into consideration, that is, the scope of his one remaining book and its brevity), and the Resurrection of Christ is the crowning miracle which stamps the whole dispensation as supernatural.

So far, then, as the Supernatural is concerned, it makes no difference whatsoever whether Clement used the Gospel according to St. Matthew or the Gospel according to the Hebrews. His Gospel, whatever it was, not only filled his heart with an intense and absorbing love of Christ, and a desire that all men should imitate Him, but it filled his mind with that view of the religion of Christ which we call supernatural and evangelical, but which the author of "Supernatural Religion" calls ecclesiastical.

The question now arises, not so much from whom, but when, did he receive this view of Christ and His system. I do not mean, of course, the more minute features, but the substance. To what period must his reminiscences as a Christian extend? What time must his experiences cover? Irenaeus, in the place I have quoted, speaks of him as the companion of Apostles, Clement of Alexandria as an Apostle, Eusebius and Origen as the fellow-labourer of St. Paul. Now, I will not at present insist upon the more than likelihood that such was the fact. I will, for argument's sake, assume that he was some other Clement; but, whoever he was, one thing respecting him is certain--that the knowledge of Christianity was not poured into him at the moment when he wrote his Epistle, nor did he receive it ten--twenty--thirty years before. St. Peter and St. Paul were martyred in A.D. 68; the rest of the Apostolic College were dispersed long before. This Epistle shows little or no trace of the peculiar Johannean teaching or tradition of the Apostle who survived all the others; so, unless he had received his Christian teaching some years before the Martyrdom of the two Apostles Peter and Paul, that is, some time before A.D. 68, probably many years, I do not see that there can have been the smallest ground even for the tradition of the very next generation after his own that he knew the Apostles. Such a tradition could not possibly have been connected with the name of a man who became a Christian late in the century.

Now, supposing that he was sixty-five years old when he wrote his Epistle, he was born about the time of our Lord's Death: he was consequently a contemporary of the generation that had witnessed the Death and Resurrection of Christ and the founding of the Church. If he had ever been in Jerusalem before its destruction, he must have fallen in with multitudes of surviving Christians of the 5,000 who were converted on and just after the day of Pentecost.

His Christian reminiscences, then, must have extended far into the age of the contemporaries of Christ. A man who was twenty-five years old at the time of the Resurrection of Christ would scarcely be reckoned an old man at the time of the destruction of Jerusalem. Clement consequently might have spent twenty of the best years of his life in the company of persons who were old enough to have seen the Lord in the Flesh. [193:1]

So that his knowledge of the Death and Resurrection of Christ, and the founding of the Church, even if he had never seen St. Paul or any other Apostle, must have been derived from a generation of men, all the older members of which wore Christians of the Pentecostal period.

Now when we come to compare the Epistle of Clement with the only remaining Christian literature of the earliest period, i.e. the earlier Epistles of St. Paul, we find both the account of Christ and the Theology built upon that account, to be the same in the one and in the other.

The supernatural fact respecting Christ to which the earliest Epistles of St. Paul most prominently refer, was His Resurrection as the pledge of ours, and this is the fact respecting Christ which is put most prominently forward by Clement, and for the same purpose. The First Epistle to the Corinthians is referred to by Clement in the words:--

"Take up the Epistle of the Blessed Apostle Paul. What did he write
to you at the time when the Gospel first began to be preached?
Truly, under the inspiration of the Spirit ([Greek: pneumatikôs]) he
wrote to you concerning himself and Cephas and Apollos, because even
then parties had been formed among you." (Ch. xlvii.)

The other reproductions of the language of St. Paul's Epistles are numerous, and I give them in a note. [194:1] The reader will see at a glance that the Theology or Christology of Clement was that of the earliest writings of the Church of which we have any remains, and to these he himself frequently and unmistakably refers.

The earlier Epistles of St. Paul, as those to the Thessalonians, Galatians, Corinthians, and Romans, are acknowledged on all hands, even by advanced German Rationalists, to be the genuine works of the Apostle Paul; indeed one might as well deny that such a man ever existed as question their authenticity. The First Epistle to the Corinthians, which is the longest and most dogmatic of the earlier ones, cannot have been written after the year 58. In a considerable number of chronological tables to which I have referred, the earliest date is the year 52, and the latest 58.

To the First Epistle to the Thessalonians, which is undoubtedly the earliest of all, the earliest date assigned is 47, and the latest 53.

Now it is ever to be remembered that in each of these--the First to the Thessalonians and the First to the Corinthians--we have enunciations of the great crowning supernatural event of Scripture--the Resurrection of Christ and our Resurrection as depending upon it, which are unsurpassed in the rest of Scripture.

So that in the first Christian writing which has come down to us, we have the great fact of Supernatural Religion, which carries with it all the rest.

The fullest enunciation of the evidences of the Resurrection is in a writing whose date cannot be later than 58, and runs thus:--

"Moreover, brethren, I declare unto you the Gospel which I preached
unto you, which also ye have received, and wherein ye stand; by
which also ye are saved, if ye keep in memory what I preached unto
you, unless ye have believed in vain. For I delivered unto you first
of all that which I also received, how that Christ died for our sins
according to the Scriptures; and that He was buried, and that He
rose again the third day according to the Scriptures. And that He
was seen of Cephas, then of the twelve. After that [196:1] He was
seen of above five hundred brethren at once, of whom the greater
part remain unto this present [twenty-five years after the event]
but some are fallen asleep. After that He was seen of James, then of
all the Apostles, and last of all He was seen of me also." (1 Cor.
xv. 1.)

If the reader compares this with the accounts in any one of the Four, he will find that it gives the fullest list of our Lord's appearances which has come down to us, and this, be it remembered, forming part of the most categorical declaration of what the Gospel is, to be found in the New Testament. [196:1]

A man, then, writes in A.D. 57 or earlier, that another, Who had died in A.D. 32 had been seen by a number of persons, and among these, by 500 persons at once, of whom the greater part were alive when he wrote, and implying that the story had been believed ever since, and received by him (the writer) from those who had seen this Jesus, and that the fact was so essential to the religion that it was itself called "the Gospel," a name continually given to the whole system of Christianity, and moreover that he himself, when in company with others, had seen this Jesus at noon-day, and, the history asserts, had been blinded by the sight. Now let the reader recall to his mind any public man who died twenty-five years ago, that is, in 1850, and imagine this man appearing, not as a disembodied spirit, but in his resuscitated body to first one of his friends, then to eleven or twelve, then to another, then to five hundred persons at one time, and a flourishing and aggressive institution founded upon this his appearance, and numbers of persons giving up their property, and breaking with all their friends, and adopting a new religion, and a new course of life of great self-denial, and even encountering bitter persecution and death, simply because they believed this man to be alive from the