IV. THE PUBLIC LANGUAGE OF OUR LORD.

Ir is plainly apparent that of all New Testament literary questions the synoptic problem is easily to the fore. It has been faithfully grappled with by many a brave soldier from Leclerc and J. D. Michaelis down, but its solution appears no nearer than when the essential facts were first discovered, and the Ammonian sections and Eusebian Canons were added to the margins of Greek manuscripts in order to facilitate the comparative study of the Gospels. True, the church has always had what it conceived to be a satisfactory explanation of all the phenomena. It is based on the written evidence of competent witnesses, Luke, the physician, and Papias of Hierapolis, and asserts: 1st. That Matthew wrote down the logia in the Hebrew dialect, and that each one interpreted them as he was able; 2nd. That Mark was the interpreter of Peter, and wrote down accurately, though not in order, such things as he remembered which were said or done by Christ; 3rd. That Luke, who was not an apostle, but had nevertheless traced the course of all things accurately from the first, wrote unto Theophilus in order the essential facts of the gospel narrative; 4th. That last of these, John, even he that was surnamed Son of Thunder, when a very old man, at the time when fearful heresies were springing up, dictated his Gospel to his disciple, Papias of Hierapolis, as a supplement to the words of those who before him had preached the word to the nations in all the earth;1

1 These original documents run as follows:

Ματθαῖος μὲν οὖν ̔Εβραίδι διαλέκτῳ τὰ λόγια συνεγράψατο ἡρμήνευσε δ ̓ αὐτὰ ὡς ἦν δυνατὸς ἕκαστος.

Μάρκος μὲν ἑρμηνευτής Πέτρου γενόμενος, ὅσα ἐμνημόνευσεν, ἀκριβῶς ἔγραψεν, δυ μέντοι τάξει, τὰ ὑπὸ τοῦ Χριστοῦ ἢ λεχθέντα ἢ πραχθέντα.

Ὕστατος γὰρ τούτων Ἰωάννης ὁ τῆς βροντῆς υἱὸς μετακληθείς, πάνυ γηραλέου αὐτοῦ γενομένου, κατ ̓ ἐκεῖνο καιροῦ αἱρέσεων αναψυεισῶν δεινῶν ὑπηγόρευσε τὸ ευαγγέλιον τῷ ἑαυτοῦ μαθητῇ Παπίᾳ εὐβιώτῳ τῷ Ἱεραπολίτη, πρὸς ἀναπλήρωσιν τῶν πρὸ αὐτοῦ κηρυξάντων τὸν λόγον τοῖς ἀνὰ πᾶσαν τὴν οἰκουμένην ἔθνεσιν.

These statements are cited from Patrum Apostolicorum Opera recensuerunt Gebhardt, Harnack, Zahn, editio minor repetita, pages 72-78. The statement about

5th. That Matthew's Gospel in the current Greek is the work of Matthew's own hands; 6th. And that these Gospels in the Greek in which—in their present form-they were originally written are inerrantly inspired of God to be an infallible rule of faith and Luke is the well-known preface to his Gospel. It may be said here that the logia which Matthew compiled need not be his present Gospel, need not be discourses of our Lord, but may be (and the writer would almost say were) Old Testament prophecies relating to the Messiah. For ovverpávaro is a singular word to use of an original composition, and an Aramaic or Hebrew gospel, at all like the Greek Matthew, has never been in evidence; for it is the Greek Matthew of our canon which the ancient witnesses, from Papias to Eusebius and Jerome, accept whenever they mention it as the work of an apostle, and that without any doubt of its genuineness. All the ancients seem to know about a Hebrew or Aramaic Matthew, hark back to the statement of Papias, and the evidence stands or falls with the exegesis of this single line of dubious Greek. Now, Matthew's Gospel contains a catena of fulfilled prophecies, and it is not, therefore, hard to believe that what Matthew did was to draw up this collection of fulfilled prophecies; for his office as public tax-gatherer made him a ready scribe, and the work was much needed. It is no singular thing for the ancient fathers to follow "Indian file" in the tracks of any predecessor at all, without investigation, The student of patristic literature soon learns to be on the watch for that very thing. The legend about the LXX. translators is a case in point; it is a far cry from the simple narrative of Philo to the monstrous and miraculous yarn of Epiphanius. Yet it is the same tale improved and embellished in its transmission.

It was once my fortune to have a class-room dispute with Dr. H. C. Alexander, ὁ μακάριος ἀνὴρ, over the word καθεξής in the preface to Luke's Gospel. The doctor was prejudiced in favor of Gardiner's harmony, which follows, I believe, the order of Mark, and wished so to explain the word as to indicate that Luke's material came, in part at least, from those persons who had first taken in hand the composition of a gospel narrative. Now, I am not prepared to say that xa0s cannot denote succession in time; but the translation "in order" is supported by both English versions, by nearly all the references given in Liddell and Scott, and by, I believe, the usual usage of the LXX. version. What Luke intended on the face of his preface was to make a scientific statement of the facts in regard to Jesus which should be differentiated from the narratives already in circulation by its accuracy, precision, and logical arrangement. From this scientific character, Matthew is excluded by the words và hóɣta, and the evidence of the book itself; and Mark is excluded by the direct testimony of Papias, whose où μévτot τážet should be conclusive. Luke lends itself readily to the construction of a harmony, as can be seen (to cite an easy reference) from the one in the common Oxford Helps. Luke is also the writer whose precision in the Acts of the Apostles commands our admiration; the only writer who furnishes the data whereby to orient the times of the Messiah with the history of the nations, and we therefore should be ready to acquiesce when a precise writer makes precise statement of a precise aim.

practice. With these statements as to the origin and correlation of the four Gospels, sober-minded faith is content, in full assurance that in the wise providence of God the facts which alone could explain the difficulties of the question are totally unknown and irretrievably lost. Their agreement in minute particulars faith believes due to the use by the follower of the work of his predecessor; their discrepancies are the earmarks of independent and faithful witness. The very simplicity of the position is also believed to be a note of its trustworthiness, and devious complexness ever accompanies error.

Beyond these four documents the record does not go. Other writings were in early circulation, but not one scrap of evidence exists to show that these four ever existed in anything but their present shape, that they were ever composed by cutting and tearing, and patching, and making over the cloth of other men's weaving. They have borne the names of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John ever since they became known at all. Only there are those who do not care to rest their case on the evidence of competent witnesses, but must perforce find some middle way by which to escape the church's unpalatable dogmas which inhere in the inspiration of the Greek text; and the noteworthy thing is, that while the traditional view of the matter with all its coherence is rejected, the most wearisome investigation fails to find a substitute which can gain general acquiescence, or outlast the generation that gave it birth. Attempts are thick as lie the leaves in Vallambrosa, but they fail to displace the general explanation offered by the church. Now, it is, by reason of this continual failure, that renewed prominence has recently been given to the language in which our Lord uttered his discourses; for the latest explanation of the synoptic problem is that our Lord used the Aramaic in his public utterances, and that the divergencies in the Gospels are due to mistranslation or misreading of the common Aramaic source.

The hypothesis of an Aramaic vernacular is, of course, not new; but the present form of its application is. Only it must be said at the outset, that the righteous endeavor to solve the synoptic problem has led into the discussion some of that clamant crowd

.(בהדר) "together

whose shibboleth is "Back to Christ," whose delight it is to hear the very accents of the Lord's own voice, while they spurn from them the words of the disciple the Lord sent his Spirit to inspire. For them, however, the establishment of the Semitic source is of no avail; they are in no whit better case; for there remaineth no criterion by which to decide what residual variant represents the very utterance of the Christ; no one to tell us whether the two women were "grinding in the mill" (78) or "grinding But for the orthodox student of the word, there is this to be said, viz.: That the task of New Testament interpretation becomes much more complicated if we have to reconstruct the original Aramaic in order to check our exegesis. We argue from the Greek words as from a document of last resort, beyond which there is no appeal. The case is somewhat different when we come to make allowance for the mistakes Matthew, and Mark, and Luke, and John may have made in the work of translation from this Aramaic original. This, however, we are calmly told must be done before we are in a situation rightly to appreciate the words of Jesus. "Until it has been proved that he spoke Greek, the Greek words of the evangelists must not be quoted as if they were his;" not even on the supposition that these same evangelists were inspired of God thus and so to write! The situation is, therefore, a critical one, and we need great boldness of face to meet it. But the battle is not always to the noisy, and the New Testament has been in the conflict before.

Neither is it the first time in the world that the Lord's vernacular has been the theme of fierce dispute. The revival of letters brought on a discussion which raged for more than a century as to whether the Greek of the New Testament was to be regarded as "good" Greek, or a bastard mongrel of Greek and Hebrew parentage, subject to no laws of language, and irreducible to exact principles of interpretation, in which Desiderius Erasmus, Theodore Beza, Henri Estienne, Heinsius, Gataker, and Leusden are the great names. This discussion was ended only by the interposition of the exact philologic science represented by the many-sided scholar, J. A. Ernesti, to whom the Bible and Greek and Latin classics are alike indebted. Syriac was

brought into play by the publication of the Gospels in Syriac by J. A. Widmanstadt (1555), of which the Maronite, George Amira, believed that they contained the very language of the Christ. In this opinion he was followed by the editors of the Antwerp Polyglot (1569–1571), Arias Montanus, Andreas Masias, Boderianus. Cardinal Bellarmine, Rome's greatest and fairest controversialist, saw whereunto this might grow, and opposed the contention with all the wealth of his keen researches. Joseph Justus Scaliger, however, pointed out that Syriac is to be distinguished from the Aramaic, in which parts of Ezra, and Daniel, and the Targums were written, and in which Jesus would have spoken, if he spake Semitic at all. The publication of the great Chaldee Lexicon of Buxtorf (1639), and the remarks of Grotius, served to keep the distinction in the mind of the public. Brian Walton, who edited the last and greatest of the Polyglots (London, 1657), is found as usual on the right side of the philologic distinction, and decides that the Targums of Onkelos and Jonathan have the first right as the representatives of Christ's vernacular, while Lightfoot decides that the Hebrew had entirely died out in Babylon. Such, also, was the judgment of Huet and Maldonatus, whose commentaries are the authoritative exposition of the Scriptures for Catholics.'

But the Semitic did not gain entire possession of the field. The attack came from the Protestant side, and the discussion became entangled with party polemics. As Richard Simon published his Histoire Critique du Vieux Testament (Rotterdam, 1685), with the express design of shattering the Protestant stronghold, viz.: The integrity of the original texts of Holy Scripture and the therein inherent dogma of inerrant inspiration; so Isaac Voss, in his

I 'Lightfoot's Hora Hebraicæ et Talmudicæ, Cambridge, 1658–1674, is the great thesaurus of such rabbinical and Old Testament material as bears on New Testament interpretation; and scattered references to the use Aramaic might afford in New Testament exegesis are found in the many works of J. D. Michaelis and Eichhorn; but it was the Altona pastor, John Adrian Bolten, who first made any thorough, systematic use of it in consecutive exposition of New Testament books. He put forth a German version of the whole New Testament, accompanied by exegetical notes, the Matthew of which is almost a translation from a presupposed oriental original. And the motive which moved Bolten to invoke its use was exegetical embarrassment as Joseph Addison Alexander has already noticed.