THE

CHRISTIAN REFORMER.

No. CXXI.]

JANUARY, 1855.

[VOL. XI.

DR. BUNSEN AND HIS CRITICS.*

It is exactly two years since we gave an account to the readers of the Christian Reformer (Vol. IX. p. 1) of the first edition of the remarkable work of which we now announce a second. If there were any who supposed that no interest existed among us in questions of theological criticism and ecclesiastical history, they must have been surprised at the sale, in six months, of a work respecting a personage hardly known to general readers, and which appeared under the disadvantage of a confused arrangement and not very clear style. From our own humble pages to the aristocratic Quarterly, no literary journal has failed to devote a considerable space to an examination of it. Some of this interest, no doubt, has been excited by the station of the writer. Had Hippolytus, when recalled to life, made his appearance in a less distinguished quarter than the Prussian Embassy, he might have returned to Hades without attracting so much notice. But, besides this, there was a great deal in the book calculated to set the pens of various parties in motion to discuss the questions it suggested. Was it really the work of Hippolytus; what did it disclose to us respecting the state of the Christian Church in the second and third centuries, of which we knew so little? Did it confirm the opinion that the early Christians were Unitarians, or vindicate the orthodoxy of the ante-Nicene Fathers? Was Hippolytus Evangelical or Tractarian in his notions of Regeneration, Apostolical Succession and Sacerdotal functions,-Protestant or Papist in regard to Tradition, the number of the Sacraments, the authority of the Bishop of Rome? These are questions the answers to which bear on topics most earnestly canvassed at the present day in the world at large. There were others more exclusively interesting to scholars. Did he receive the esta

Hippolytus and his Age, or the Beginnings and Prospects of Christianity. By C. C. J. Bunsen, D.D., D.C.L., D.Ph. Second Edition, in two Vols. London. 1854.

St. Hippolytus and the Church of Rome, in the Earlier Part of the Third Century. By Christopher Wordsworth, D.D., Canon of Westminster, and formerly Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge.

The Theological Critic. By the Rev. T. K. Arnold. Vol. II. [Article by the Rev. Robert Scott.]

The Ecclesiastic, Nos. LXVI. and following.

blished canon of the New Testament; did the text he used correspond with ours; was the Gospel of John the recent production of an impostor, or already time-honoured as the work of the apostle whose name it bears; did Hippolytus receive the Apocalypse as proceeding from the same author; did the Epistle to the Hebrews and the Second Epistle of Peter find a place in his list of apostolical writings? Like a stranger arriving from an unknown land, Hippolytus was questioned on all sides. Perhaps none of the questioners received exactly the answer which they expected and desired.

The publication of this second edition is the farewell of the excellent author to the country in which he has so long lived, as to have entered more deeply and thoroughly into the English mind than any foreigner had ever done. While we regret the political events which have led to his resignation of his high office, we must acknowledge that it was inevitable. Had Prussia pursued an honest and public-spirited policy, she could not have had a fitter representative than Bunsen. When her diplomacy became tortuous and selfish, it was no longer fit that it should be carried out by a zealous patriot and an honest man. We look, however, to the leisure which the cessation of public duty will afford him, as the means of his completing several valuable works in history and philology, either already begun or meditated by him.

The present edition has been expanded into seven 8vo volumes, which are sold in separate portions. The two first (to which we confine our present notice) contain, with considerable enlargement, the same matter as the corresponding volumes of the first; but the Aphorisms on the Philosophy of the History of Man are separated, forming the three volumes of the second division, and more than 300 pages precede in this new edition the Letters to Archdeacon Hare, with which the first began. In these introductory pages, the author has not only re-cast his account of the Christian Church in the age succeeding that of the apostles, but has replied to some of the objections made to his former statements, especially by Dr. Wordsworth, in the work whose title we have quoted. We shall follow his example in the notice we propose to take of the controversy which his publication has excited. Dr. Wordsworth, writing after the periodical critics generally, avails himself, with acknowledgment, of anything in their works suitable to his purpose.

It must be admitted that he has occasionally hit a blot in his opponent's tables. Dr. Wordsworth is a first-rate classical scholar, and, as his Athens and Attica and his pamphlet on the Pompeian Inscriptions shew, one of the greatest masters of the art of conjectural emendation that Cambridge has produced since Porson and Dobree. It is not wonderful, therefore, that, in restoring by conjecture a text so very corrupt as that of the

recovered work of Hippolytus, he should appear to greater advantage than the late Prussian ambassador. Occasionally, too, he has detected errors in Bunsen's translation, a remarkable example of which is found in Vol. I. p. 184, where Bunsen has rendered μηδὲ τὸ παλινδρομεῖν διστάσητε, “ doubt not that you will exist again;" on which Dr. Wordsworth remarks: "Mira sane interpretatio; quod quidem viri clarissimi zapópaμa inter alia quibus fere innumeris Bunsenii paginæ scatent, minime commemorassem, nisi eum fundamenta fidei labefactantem et doctissimorum virorum, nominatim venerandorum Antistitum Cestriensis et Menevensis bonam famam dedita opera lædentem non sine magno dolore vidissem." (P. 301.) We do not see why the correction of a wrong rendering should have been suppressed, even if Bunsen had not attacked Bishops Pearson and Bull; but there can be no doubt that it is wrong, and that, as Dr. Wordsworth observes, Hippolytus, being bishop of a seaport town, uses a nautical phrase. Ilaλivopoμeiv is "to put back," and the meaning of his exhortation to the heathens whom he is addressing is, "do not hesitate about retracing your steps." The general tone of Dr. Wordsworth's criticisms, however, is captious and sore. He is a most zealous Protestant; but no Papist was ever more thoroughly imbued with the notion of the infallibility of his Church, and of himself as a member of it. There is nothing good or sound right or left of high Anglican theology. French Protestantism is scarcely less an abomination in his eyes than Romanism. Such is the spirit of his Letters to M. Gondon and his Diary in France. We shall now proceed to notice the principal new points of interest connected with Hippolytus, in the same order as in our former article.

The question of authorship may be regarded as at rest. The great majority of voices assigns the newly-found work to Hippolytus, not to Origen, or Caius the Presbyter. In this, Bunsen and Wordsworth are agreed. Our readers may remember that Bunsen got over in a somewhat violent way the difficulty arising from the treatise which Photius calls a biblidarion, being really a volume containing ten biblia, its not beginning as our Hippolytus begins, nor ending as it ends, and containing something which it does not contain in reference to the celebration of Easter and the authorship of the Epistle to the Hebrews. Dr. Wordsworth advances some reasons for believing that the work of Hippolytus really existed in a smaller and a larger form. In the introduction to the newly-discovered treatise, Hippolytus says, "We expounded the dogmas of the heretics some time ago (áλai) with brevity, not exhibiting them in detail, but refuting them rather in rude generality, not thinking it would be necessary to drag their secrets to the light. But since they have no feeling of regard for our moderation, I am constrained to come forward. and exhibit in detail the dogmas of them all." Further, a diffi

culty had arisen from the circumstance that, according to Photius, the treatise of Hippolytus terminated with Noetus and the Noetians; whereas, in that which we have recently recovered, the author occupies a great part of the ninth book with the heresy of Callistus and of the Elchasaites which sprung from it. Now these were subsequent to the heresy of Noetus, and it was natural that, in reproducing his former work in an enlarged edition, Hippolytus should carry it on by including a heresy which had sprung up, not only in his own day, but under his own eyes, and which he had a principal share in putting down. The first and compendious work was derived from the notes which Hippolytus had taken of the lectures of his master, Irenæus; the second, from his published work, which was finished about A.D. 100, and ended with the Noetians. Bunsen adopts the suggestion which was first brought forward in the Ecclesiastic, and it will probably be received as a satisfactory solution of the difficulty.

On the question of the canon of the New Testament in the days of Hippolytus, we do not perceive that any new light has been thrown by the discussion which Bunsen's publication has excited. He had not only asserted that Hippolytus did not receive the Second Epistle of Peter, but that the ancient churches did not know such a letter. Dr. Wordsworth quotes from a Homily of Origen, who was born somewhat later than Hippolytus, the expression-" Petrus duabus epistolarum personat tubis." This shews that Origen knew of a Second Epistle; but it is an unfair straining of Bunsen's words to understand them as meaning that no individual Christian received it. The Church, as a Church, certainly did not receive it. Eusebius reckons it among the antilegomena, and Jerome admits that its genuineness was generally called in question. The solemn indignation of Dr. Wordsworth is ludicrous: "Since the author of that Epistle claims to be St. Peter himself, and since the Church receives the Epistle as his, M. Bunsen has ventured on an act of irreverence and injustice. He has suborned St. Hippolytus as an accuser of the Christian Church, and charges her through him with reading as canonical the work of an impostor"!

Bunsen himself appears to admit that none of our Gospels existed before the destruction of Jerusalem: "The first decennium after that event," he says, "gave birth to the three Gospels which bear the names of Matthew, Mark and Luke" (I. 35, 2nd ed.). His opponents complain, and not altogether without reason, that his very positive enunciations are sometimes wholly unaccompanied with proof. The time of the publication of the three first Gospels is one of the most disputable points in early Christian history, and the reader will naturally be curious to know how all this obscurity has suddenly vanished, and their appearance been fixed to A.D. 70-80. No evidence whatever is offered; it is only said "that there was a necessity that such