"Mark, the mouthpiece of Peter, carefully wrote down all he could remember, but he did not write all that Jesus did and said in proper order, for he had not heard or followed the Lord; but at a later period, he had followed Peter, who gave instruction as occasion arose, but did not set forth the Lord's discourses in due order; Mark is therefore not to be blamed for having written down certain things from memory, for he was careful not to omit anything he had heard, and not to introduce any errors. .. Matthew had written down the Lord's speeches (or oracles) in Hebrew, and each one interpreted them as best he could."

In spite of the obvious mediocrity of the writer, these texts are of the utmost importance. They prove, in the first place, that the Mark referred to by the elder who gave this information to Papias was not our Mark, whose Gospel shows no lack of order, but merely one of the sources drawn upon by our Mark; and further, that our Matthew was not the original Matthew, which consisted of the sayings of Jesus recorded in Hebrew, and in a somewhat obscure manner. There is no reason whatever to doubt the good faith of Papias' informant.

18. A careful comparative study of the synoptical writers authorises, I think, the following propositions, as to which, however, critics are not entirely agreed:

a. The passages common to Matthew and Luke, which are absent from Mark, are derived from a Greek translation of the Aramaic collected sayings (in Greek Logia) of Jesus, attributed to Matthew. This collection further included certain narrative passages serving to connect the sayings, but, strangely enough, it did not include the Passion. It is designated by the letter Q (the initial of the German word Quelle, source).

b. Our Mark, the conclusion of which (xvi. 9-20) is an addition made at the end of the first century, and not to be found in the earliest manuscripts, is a compilation, perhaps written in Rome, from two older texts; the first may have been Aramaic, and it is not certain that it described the Passion; the writer of the second, who does describe it, was acquainted with Q; the writer of our Mark was acquainted with Matthew and even with Luke and Paul.

c. Our Matthew is based upon Q, a collection which was enlarged and recast several times, notably by the help of the second version of Mark. The Pauline epistles were not unknown to the writer.

d. Our Luke is perhaps a second and more complete edition, due to the same writer as the first, of a text owned by Marcion in A.D. 150. The Fathers of the Church (Tertullian, Epiphanius, &c.) accused Marcion of having mutilated the text of Luke, and pointed out various passages he had suppressed. In reality, he seems to have possessed the original Luke, compiled from a revised edition of Q, an ancient edition of Mark, and perhaps Paul's First Epistle to the Corinthians, together with other lost documents. Our Luke attests a knowledge of Josephus' Antiquities, published A.D. 93, or at least of some Greek source drawn upon in that work. It is notable that entire passages given by Matthew, but not by Mark (e. g. xvii. 24-7; xx. 1-16) are not to be found in Luke, and that not a single discourse in Matthew is reproduced in Luke.

e. The Church has always called Matthew the First Gospel, and Mark the Second Gospel. As a fact, the basis of Mark is earlier than our Matthew, but the basis of Matthew may be earlier than our Mark.

f. The Fourth Gospel, called that of St. John, is neither the work of St. John nor of a contemporary. The author is inspired by the Alexandrine theosophy of Philo the Jew. He knows the synoptical Gospels, but contradicts them; he adds some historical material of uncertain origin and suspicious quality. But he is not interested in history nor in anecdotes : he is a theologian, justly called ho theologos by the Greek Fathers. St. John's Christ is, from the beginning, God Himself; His miracles are few, but stupendous; He does not cast out devils, as in the Synoptics. St. John knows nothing of the contrast between Jewish law and Christianity; he knows very little about the Jews of former days. The speeches addressed to them are, in reality, for the readers only. The object of the book is the spiritual teaching of Christianity, which is indeed founded upon it. Some later additions to the original text have been recognised; but the question of the sources

and successive editions of the Fourth Gospel remains very obscure.

19. Those who are disquieted by the discrepancies between the three synoptical writers and of their three Gospels with that of John, are generally assured that the "Gospels complete each other." This is not true. Far from completing, they contradict each other, and when they do not contradict, they repeat each other. The Christ of Mark is, however, compatible with the Christ of Matthew and Luke; but the Christ of John is a totally different person. "If there is one thing above others that is obvious, but as to which the most powerful of theological interests has caused a deliberate or unconscious blindness, it is the profound, the irreducible incompatibility of the synoptical Gospels and the Fourth Gospel. If Jesus spoke and acted as He is said to have spoken and acted in the first three Gospels, He did not speak and act as He is reported to have done in the fourth." It is only necessary to have an open mind, and to be able to read, to convince ourselves of this.

1

20. Broadly speaking, our Gospels tell us what different Christian communities believed concerning Jesus between the years 70 and 100 A.D. They reflect a legendary and expository labour carried on for at least forty years in the bosom of the communities. As John has no historic value and Luke comes to us at third hand, there remain the sources of Mark and of Matthew, notably Q, and the basis of Mark. Thus all that may be sound in Mark and Matthew is derived from two lost sources, of whose authority we have no guarantee. It is, indeed, certain that the basis of Mark cannot go back to Peter, an eye-witness, for all that relates to Peter in Mark is vague or hostile. As to the sayings in Q, it is obvious that no one had transcribed them at the moment; at most we can only see in them an echo of the words that the disciples of Jesus repeated long after His death, and that more skilful men, influenced by the preaching of St. Paul, arranged, completed and transcribed. To speak of the authenticity of the Sermon on the Mount (the mountain itself being a fiction, intended to serve as a pendant to Sinaï), is hardly consistent with serious criticism. Nay, more; 1 Loisy, Quelques Lettres (1908), p. 130.

there are words such as those Jesus is supposed to have uttered during the slumber of the Apostles (Matt. xxvi. 39; Mark xiv. 35; Luke xxii. 42), of which it may safely be said that they were neither heard nor put on record by any one. "I should not believe in the Gospel," wrote St. Augustine, "if I had not the authority of the Church for so doing."1 The situation is unchanged, although science has defined it with singular emphasis. The Gospels, stripped of the authority of the Church, are documents which cannot be utilised for a history of the real life of Jesus. They can and should only serve to teach us what the primitive churches thought of Him, and to acquaint us with the origin of the immense influence those opinions exercised on the human race.

21. Collation of our Gospels, and perception of the successive strata which compose them prove that even the legend of Jesus as taught by the Church is not supported in all its details by the texts adduced. The miraculous birth is not mentioned in Mark; it seems to have been deliberately ignored by John, who accepts the Philonian doctrine of the incarnation of the Word, "the first-born God, the second God, the intercessor between God and man," making, however, an essential addition of his own by identifying this "Word" with the Messiah. In Matthew and in Luke the miraculous birth is recorded with conflicting details. Jesus himself never alludes to it, and His parents do not understand Him, when they find Him in the Temple and he speaks of His "Father's business" (Luke ii. 50). The fact that Matthew and Luke give two genealogies (irreconcilable one with another), which trace the descent of Jesus from King David through Joseph, is a sufficient evidence that the idea of the miraculous birth was introduced rather late into the tradition. These genealogies, and no doubt others no longer extant, were composed to confirm the Jewish belief that the Messiah would be of the family of David; the story of the divine birth

1 St. Augustine, Against the epistle entitled: Of the Foundation, § 5 (ed. Vivès, vol. xxv. p. 435). Ego vero Evangelio non crederem, nisi me catholicæ ecclesiæ commoveret auctoritas. Ego me ad eos teneam, quibus præcipientibus

Evangelio credidi.

• Expressions used by Philo.

was, in its turn, introduced when the idea of the divinity of Jesus had become familiar.

22. The Gospels speak with great simplicity of the brothers and sisters of Jesus. According to Matthew (i. 25), He was the eldest of the family. The notion that these brothers and sisters were cousins or children of Joseph by a former marriage is a mere theological subtlety. Belief in the virginity of Mary has forced ecclesiastical writers to explain or rather to eliminate the relationship.1

23. The idea that Jesus was the Messiah and that He was God is clearly formulated in the Fourth Gospel, but in the first three Gospels it appears in embryo only. The essential feature of the preaching of Jesus in the Gospels is the announcement of the reign of God, the speedy coming of which is indicated (Matt. xvi. 28; Mark ix. 1; Luke ix. 27). Jesus calls Himself the Son of Man, which in Hebrew is synonymous with man, and Son of God, which means inspired by God. He forbids His disciples to call Him Messiah (Matt. xvi. 20), and He reproves the scribes for teaching that the Messiah would be a descendant of David (Mark xii. 35), a proof that the Davidic affiliation is no less an excrescence than the supernatural affiliation. In the speech ascribed to St. Peter in the Acts (ii. 22) Jesus is no more than a divine man whom God has raised from the dead. Finally, there is no trace of the Jews having accused Jesus of claiming to be God. "It is only in the Gospel of John that the sayings and the acts of Jesus tend to prove His supernatural mission, His celestial origin and His divinity. This peculiarity indicates the theological and non-historic character of the Fourth Gospel."2

...

24. Jesus did not institute Peter the head of His Church, He did not "found the Papacy." The passage in Matthew (xvi. 18): "Thou art Peter and upon this rock I will build my Church .. and I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven," &c. is obviously an interpolation, made at a period when a Church separated from the Synagogue already existed. In the parallel passages in Mark (viii. 27-32) and in Luke (ix. 18–22) there is not a word of the primacy of Peter, a detail Mark, the Loisy, Quelques Lettres, p. 155. Loisy, Réflexions, p. 69.