The Historical Jesus: A Survey of PositionsRobertson, J. M. (John Mackinnon)
Religion
The Historical Jesus: A Survey of Positions
Robertson, J. M. (John Mackinnon)
Jesus Christ -- Historicity; Jesus Christ -- Rationalistic interpretations
Of course this is not the true critical solution; the immediate
question is the consistency of Mr. Wright's critical principles. To
the eye of unbiassed criticism the "Come unto me" logion is not a
possible oracle at all; it is an unintelligently inserted liturgical
formula from the mysteries, misplaced and meaningless as a public
teaching. [127] As regards the fair historical inference from the
wide difference between the synoptic Gospels and the fourth, it is
not possible to accept any of Mr. Wright's solutions, tried by his
own tests. To suggest that John had not "heard" of the Virgin Birth
story is for him impossible, unless he post-dates that as he does the
birth-stories in Luke. If he follows that course, what can he make of
the 13th chapter of John, a palpable interpolation or substitution
between the 12th and the 14th, which form a sequence that the 13th
absolutely breaks? [128] If that interpolation be admitted, what
exactly is left to fight for?
In any case, the implication that Matthew, the apostle, "had not heard
of" what John declares to be the first miracle, or of the raising
of Lazarus, is as destructive of every traditionalist assumption as
is the implication that John the Apostle had not heard of the Sermon
on the Mount, or of the parables of the mystery of the kingdom. Mark
and Luke expressly declare that John was present at the raising of
Jairus' daughter; and the fourth Gospel makes no mention of it. It
was perhaps to meet cruces of this kind that Mr. Wright makes John
and Peter "divide between them" the portions of the ministry; but
such a device simply destroys, as we have seen, another main part of
his case. Mr. Wright may well reject the thesis of Mr. Halcombe, who,
severely condemning "modern criticism," produces a modern criticism of
his own, which makes John's Gospel the first--another of the hopeless
devices of traditionalist critics to escape from the imbroglio of the
tradition. Mr. Halcombe gravely reasons that the best Gospel came
first; and Mr. Wright pronounces that "such a plan of composition
seems unworthy of God and incredible in man." [129] But his own theory
presents only a different set of incredibilities. He accepts without
a misgiving the most staggering anomalies. "If it were not for a
single incidental statement in S. John" (iv, 1, 2), he writes, "we
should have concluded confidently that the sacrament of holy baptism
was first instituted after the Resurrection." John's statement is in
fact the sole intimation that Jesus or the disciples ever baptized
at all; and it is either a designed or redacted equivoque or a flat
contradiction in terms:--
When therefore the Lord knew that the Pharisees had heard that
Jesus was making and baptizing more disciples than John (although
Jesus himself baptized not, but his disciples), he left Judæa,
and departed again into Galilee.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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