The Lost Gospel and Its Contents Part 21

And yet there can be no doubt but that the pa.s.sage is open to this insurmountable objection, that if Josephus had written it he would have professed himself a Christian, or a man of incredible inconsistency.

Setting aside the difficulty connected with the acknowledgment of Jesus as the Christ, inasmuch as this name was frequently given to Him by those who did not believe in Him, yet how could Josephus state that His Resurrection was predicted by the prophets of his nation, and continue in appearance an unbeliever?

But, whether genuine or not, this pa.s.sage is decisive as to the impossibility of what is styled an independent testimony to our Lord: "He that is not with Me is against Me." The facts of our Lord's chief miracles and Resurrection were such, that the nearer men lived to the time the more impossible it would have been for them to have suspended their judgment.

So that, instead of having the witness of men who, by their prudent suspension of judgment, betrayed their lurking unbelief, we have the testimony of men who, by their surrender of themselves, soul and body, evinced their undoubting faith in a matter in which there could be really no middle opinion.

SECTION XXV.

DATE OF TESTIMONY.

One point remains--the time to which the testimony to our Lord's miracles reaches back. Can it be reasonably said to reach to within fifty years of His Death, or to within twenty, or even nearer?

The author of "Supernatural Religion" a.s.serts that it was not contemporaneous or anything like it. In fact, one might infer from his book that the miracles of Christ were not heard of till say a century, or three quarters of a century, after His time, for he says, "they were never heard of out of Palestine until long after the events are said to have occurred." [185:1] (P. 192.)

In such a case, "long after" is very indefinite. It may be a century, or three quarters of a century, or perhaps half a century. It cannot be less, for every generation contains a considerable number of persons whose memories reach back for forty or fifty years. In a place of 3,000 inhabitants, in which I am now writing, there are above fifty persons who can perfectly remember all that took place in 1830. There are some whose memories reach to twenty years earlier. Now let the reader try and imagine, if he can, the possibility of ascribing a number of remarkable acts--we will not say miraculous ones--to some one who died in 1830, and a.s.suming also that these events were the basis of a society which had commenced with his death, and was now making way, and that the chief design of the society was to make known or keep up the memory of these events, and that there had been a literature written between the present time and the time of the said man's death, every line of which had been written on the a.s.sumption that the events in question were true, and yet these events had never really taken place. We must also suppose that the person upon whom these acts are attempted to be fastened was regarded with intense dislike by the great majority of his contemporaries, who did all they could to ruin him when alive, and blacken his memory after he had died, and who looked with especial dislike on the idea that he was supposed to have done the acts in question. Let the reader, I say, try and imagine all this, and he will see that, in the case of our Lord, the author's "long after" must be sixty or seventy years at the least; more likely a hundred.

Let us now summon another witness to the supernatural, whose testimony we promised to consider, and this shall be Clement of Rome--the earliest author to whom it has suited the purpose of the author of "Supernatural Religion" to refer.

If we are to rely upon the almost universal consent of ancient authors rather than the mere conjectures of modern critics, he is the person alluded to by St. Paul in the words, "With Clement also, and with other my fellow labourers, whose names are written in the book of life."

(Phil. iv. 3.)

Of this man Eusebius writes:--

"In the twelfth year of the same reign (Domitian's), after Anecletus had been bishop of Rome twelve years, he was succeeded by Clement, whom the Apostle, in his Epistle to the Philippians, shows had been his fellow-labourer in these words: 'With Clement also and the rest of my fellow-labourers, whose names are in the book of life.' Of this Clement there is one Epistle extant, acknowledged as genuine, of considerable length and of great merit, which he wrote in the name of the Church at Rome, to that of Corinth, at the time when there was a dissension in the latter. This we know to have been publicly read for common benefit, in most of the Churches both in former times and in our own." (Eccles. Hist. B. III. xv. xvi.)

Origen confirms this. Clement of Alexandria reproduces several pages from his Epistle, calling him "The Apostle Clement," [187:1] and Irenaeus speaks of him as the companion of the Apostles:--

"This man, as he had seen the blessed Apostles and been conversant with them, might be said to have the preaching of the Apostles still echoing [in his ears], and their traditions before his eyes." (Bk.

III. ch. iii. 3)

Irenaeus, it is to be remembered, died at the end of the second century, and his birth is placed within the first quarter of it, so that, in all probability, he had known numbers of Christians who had conversed with Clement.

According to the author of "Supernatural Religion," the great ma.s.s of critics a.s.sign the Epistle of Clement to between the years A.D. 95-100.

In dealing with this Epistle I shall, for argument's sake, a.s.sume that Clement quoted from an earlier Gospel than any one of our present ones, and that the one he quoted might be the Gospel according to the Hebrews, and I shall ask the same question that I asked respecting Justin Martyr--What views of Christ's Person and work and doctrine did he derive from this Gospel of his?

The Epistle of Clement is one in which we should scarcely expect to find much reference to the Supernatural, for it is written throughout for the one practical purpose of healing the divisions in the Church of Corinth.

These the writer ascribes to envy, and cites a number of Scripture examples of the evil effects of this disposition and the good effects of the contrary one. He adheres to this purpose throughout, and every word he writes bears more or less directly on his subject. Yet in this doc.u.ment, from which, by its design, the subject of the supernatural seems excluded, we have all the leading features of supernatural Christianity. We have the Father sending the Son (ch. xlii.); we have the Son coming of the seed of Jacob according to the Flesh (ch. x.x.xii.); we have the words, "Our Lord Jesus Christ, the sceptre of the Majesty of G.o.d, did not come in the pomp of pride and arrogance, although He might have done so, but in a lowly condition, as the Holy Spirit had declared regarding Him" (ch. xvi.); and at the end of the same we have:--

"If the Lord thus humbled Himself, what shall we do who have through Him come under the yoke of His grace?"

Clement describes Him in the words of the Epistle to the Hebrews as One--

"Who, being the brightness of His [G.o.d's] Majesty, is by so much greater than the angels as He hath by inheritance obtained a more excellent name than they." (Ch. x.x.xvi.)

We have Clement speaking continually of the Death of Jesus as taking place for the highest of supernatural purposes,--the reconciliation of all men to G.o.d. "Let us look," he writes, "steadfastly to the Blood of Christ, and see how precious that Blood is to G.o.d, which, having been shed for our salvation, has set the grace of repentance before the whole world." (Ch. vii.) Again, "And thus they made it manifest that Redemption should flow through the Blood of the Lord to all them that believe and hope in G.o.d." (Ch. xii.) Again, "On account of the love He bore us, Jesus Christ our Lord gave His Blood for us by the will of G.o.d, His Flesh for our flesh, and His Soul for our souls." (Ch. xlix.) His sufferings are apparently said by Clement to be the sufferings of G.o.d.

(Ch. ii.) But, above all, the statement of the truth of our Lord's Resurrection, and of ours through His, is as explicit as possible:--

"Let us consider, beloved, how the Lord continually proves to us that there shall be a future resurrection, of which He has rendered the Lord Jesus the first fruits by raising Him from the dead." (Ch.

xxiv.)

"[The Apostles] having therefore received their orders, and being fully a.s.sured by the Resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ, and established in the Word of G.o.d, with full a.s.surance of the Holy Ghost, they went forth proclaiming that the Kingdom of G.o.d was at hand." (Ch. xlii.)

When we look to Clement's theology, we find it to have been what would now be called, in the truest and best sense of the word, "Evangelical,"

thus:--

"We too, being called by His Will in Christ Jesus, are not justified by ourselves, nor by our own wisdom, or understanding, or G.o.dliness, or works which we have wrought in holiness of heart; but by that faith through which from the beginning Almighty G.o.d has justified all men." (Ch. x.x.xii.)

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 compa.s.sion through Jesus Christ our Lord."

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

"May G.o.d, 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 inst.i.tuted, 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 a.n.a.logy 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, a.s.sume 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 mult.i.tudes 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: pneumatikos]) he wrote to you concerning himself and Cephas and Apollos, because even then parties had been formed among you." (Ch. xlvii.)