This little volume was written in the spring of the year 1913, and is intended as a plea for moderation and good sense in dealing with the writings of early Christianity; just as my earlier volumes entitled Myth, Magic, and Morals and A History of New Testament Criticism were pleas for the free use, in regard to the origins of that religion, of those methods of historical research to which we have learned to subject all records of the past. It provides a middle way between traditionalism on the

Is Mark’s Gospel a religious romance? I can imagine some people arguing that Mark’s Gospel might be a religious novel, of which the scene is laid in Jerusalem and Galilee among Jews; that it was by a literary artifice impregnated with Jewish ideas; that the references to Sadducees and Pharisees were introduced as appropriate to the age and clime; that the old Jewish Scriptures are for the same reason acknowledged by all the actors and interlocutors as holy writ; that demonological beliefs were t

and irreconcilable with ascertained history of Judaism The Gospels, like any other ancient document, have to be accounted for. They did not engender themselves, like a mushroom, nor drop out of heaven ready written. I have admitted as possible, though wild and extravagant, the hypothesis of their being a Messianic romance, which subsequently came to be mistaken for sober history; and there are of course plenty of legendary incidents in their pages. But such a hypothesis need not be discussed. It

Implications of Luke’s exordium In the covering letter which forms a sort of exordium to his Gospel the following are the words in which Luke assures us that others before himself had planned histories of the life of Jesus:— Forasmuch as many have taken in hand to draw up a narrative concerning those matters which have been fully established ( or fulfilled) among us, even as they delivered them unto us which from the beginning were eye-witnesses and ministers of the word, it seemed good to me al

Romans. πεπληρωμένους πάσῃ ἀδικίᾳ, πονηρίᾳ , πλεονεξίᾳ, κακίᾳ, μεστοὺς, φθόνου, φόνου, ἔριδος, δόλου, κακοηθείας, ψιθυριστάς, καταλάλους, θεοστυγεῖς , ὑβριστάς, ὑπερηφάνους, ἀλαζόνας , ἐφευρετὰς κακῶν, γονεῦσιν ἀπειθεῖς, ἀσυνέτους, ἀσυνθέτους, ἀστόργους, ἀνελεημόνας, οἵτινες τὸ δικαίωμα τοῦ θεου ἐπιγνόντες, ὅτι τὰ τοιαῦτα πράσσοντες ἄξιοι θανάτου εἰσίν, οὐ μόνον αὐτὰ ποιοῦσιν, ἀλλὰ καὶ συνευδοκοῦσι τοῖς πράσσουσι . The dependence of Clement’s Epistle on that of Paul’s Letter to the Romans is equ

He then proceeds to quote the text of Origen, Against Celsus , i, 47, giving the reference, but mangling in the most extraordinary manner a text that is clear and consecutive. For Origen begins (ch. xlvii) by saying that Celsus “somehow accepted John as a Baptist who baptized Jesus,” and then adds the following:— In the Eighteenth Book of his Antiquities of the Jews Josephus bears witness to John as having been a Baptist, and as promising purification to those who underwent the rite. Now this wr

We have beautiful examples of such mixed criticism and analysis in the commentaries on the Synoptics of Wellhausen and Loisy, both of them Freethinkers in the best sense of the word. Incapacity of this school to understand evolution of Christian ideas, I have given several minor examples of the obstinacy with which the three writers I am criticizing shut their eyes to the gradual evolution of Christian ideas; they exhibit the same perversity in respect of the great development of Christological

as also of the entire New Testament But Dr. Jensen transcends himself in the New Testament. “The Jesus-saga,” he informs us (p. 933), “as it meets us in the Synoptic Gospels, and equally as it meets us in John’s Gospel, stands out among all the other Gilgamesch Sagas which we have so far ( i.e. , in the Old Testament) expounded, in that it not merely follows up the main body of the Saga with sundry fragments of it, like so many stragglers, but sets before us a long series of bits of it arranged

It amounts, then, to this, that a rule of limited liability is to be observed in the investigation of early Christianity. You may be critical, but not up to the point of calling in question the Virgin Birth or physical resurrection of Christ. The Bishop of Croydon opines that the free discussion of such questions in University circles intimidates young men from taking orders. If he lived in Oxford, he would know that it is the other way about. 2 If Mr. Thompson had been allowed to say what he th

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