The Lost and Hostile Gospels: An Essay on the Toledoth Jeschu, and the Petrine and Pauline Gospels of the First Three Centuries of Which Fragments RemainBaring-Gould, S. (Sabine)
History
The Lost and Hostile Gospels: An Essay on the Toledoth Jeschu, and the Petrine and Pauline Gospels of the First Three Centuries of Which Fragments Remain
Baring-Gould, S. (Sabine)
Apocryphal Gospels
Apollinaris, in the famous controversy about Easter, declared that it was
irreconcilable with the Law that Christ should have suffered on the great
feast‐day, as related by St. Matthew, but that the Gospels disagreed among
themselves on the day upon which he suffered.(289) The great Gerson sought
to remove the difficulties in a “Concordance of the Evangelists,” or
“Monotessaron.”
Such an admission as that the Synoptical Gospels were composed in the
manner I have pointed out, in no way affects their incomparable value.
They exhibit to us as in a mirror what the apostles taught and what their
disciples believed. Faith does not depend on the chronological sequence of
events, but on the verity of those events. “See!” exclaimed St.
Chrysostom, “how through the contradictions in the evangelical history in
minor particulars, the truth of the main facts transpires, and the
trustworthiness of the authors is made manifest!”
In everything, both human and divine, there is an union of infallibility
in that which is of supreme importance, and of fallibility in that which
concerns not salvation. The lenses through which the light of the world
shone to remote ages were human scribes liable to error. Θεῖα πάντα καὶ
ἀνθρώπινα πάντα, was the motto Tholuck inscribed on his copy of the Sacred
Oracles.
Having established the origin of the Gospel of St. Matthew, we are able
now to see our way to establishing that of the Gospel of the Twelve, or
Gospel of the Hebrews.
No doubt it also was a mosaic made out of the same materials as the Gospel
of St. Matthew. There subsisted side by side in Palestine a Greek‐speaking
and an Aramaic‐speaking community of Christians, the one composed of
proselytes from among the Gentiles, the other of converts from among the
Jews. This Gentile Church in Palestine was scarcely influenced by St.
Paul; it was under the rule of St. Peter, and therefore was more united to
the Church at Jerusalem in habits of thought, in religious customs, in
reverence for the Law, than the Churches of “Asia” and Greece. There was
no antagonism between them. There was, on the contrary, close intercourse
and mutual sympathy.
Each community, probably, had its own copies of Apostolic Memorabilia, not
identical, but similar. Some of the “recollections” were perhaps written
only in Aramaic, or only in Greek, so that the collection of one community
may have been more complete in some particulars than the collection of the
other. The necessity to consolidate these Memorabilia into a consecutive
narrative became obvious to both communities, and each composed “in order”
the scraps of record of our Lord’s sayings and doings they possessed and
read in their sacred mysteries. St. Matthew’s “Logia of the Lord” was used
in the compilation of the Hebrew Gospel; one of the translations of it,
which, according to Papias, were numerous, formed the basis also of the
Greek Gospel.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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