Strictures on Dr. Jas. Moffatt’s “Introduction to the Literature of the New Testament.”

By Rev. J. R. Mackay.

THESE strictures are not, in the ordinary sense, a review of the book whose title we have given above. It was not sent us with that request. Neither do we call attention to the volume now being here referred to because we reckon it as being, on its own account, epoch-making, or, in a sense, of very great significance at all. If indeed Dr. Moffatt’s conclusions, as put on record in this production of his, were to be generally embraced among us, we should reckon the circumstance disastrous in the extreme. But be the results of the production what they may, this new “Introduction to the Literature of the New Testament” is not marked by any very distinguishing ability. The author, to be sure, has read very extensively indeed in the literature of the subject with which he deals. Nor is the “Introduction” itself void of some stylistic graces. But there is little that is really original about it; neither does the volume appear to us to mark the appearance of a powerful personality among the students of theological science. One misses, for example, from this latest volume of the International Theological Library Series, the special knowledge and the powerful pleadings—albeit for foregone and erroneous conclusions—which marked the volume wherewith, in his “Introduction to the Literature of the Old Testament,” Dr. Driver opened some years ago the Series now in view.

But although the “Introduction” now under consideration is not—if the volume stood unrelated to other interests—of such significance that we would have thought it worth while devoting a special article to it, there are collateral causes which, to our mind, help to lend a significance to the subject which it would not otherwise have, and these causes have weighed much with us, leading us to pen these criticisms. To begin with, the volume is one of a Series on which it may be said the English-speaking theological world has its eye—a Series which, for better or worse, influences not a few of the rising English-speaking ministry. The author, besides, is a minister of the United Free Church of Scotland, who but recently failed of being one of their Divinity Professors only by a few votes. These relative interests will, we fear, help to make Dr. Moffatt’s book an instrument for evil, which of itself it would not avail to be. Hence this notice on our part.

The ends of an “Introduction” to such a Literature as we have in the Old and the New Testaments cannot, of course, be here and now discussed by us. Suffice it to say that theological science finds Introductions of the kind now spoken of quite necessary, and that such Introductions cannot avoid discussing questions pertaining to the circumstances in which every book composing our Bible was written; who the human author, in the case of each book, was; and who the persons were for whom, in the first instance, the several writings were intended. When this is done in a reverent and sober manner—when, under a searching examination, the books themselves are made to tell their own tale—or when the earliest genuine tradition or history bearing upon the composition of the several books is brought up for consideration—the results prove helpful to the Church of God, and help us to read His oracles with a fuller understanding of what their message to us is. We hope, in fact, in the next number of this Magazine to begin to show how studies of this kind help to a better understanding of, for example, the Gospel according to John. But, on the other hand, few things lend themselves more readily to abuse than questions bearing on Introduction. If, for example, questions bearing on the authorship and circumstances of a book’s composition are not brought for determination to the touchstone of the plain sense of the book itself and of reliable collateral history, but to that of the critic’s feelings, antipathies, sympathies, or caprice, the results are sure to be disastrous.

Of the vicious method whereby the caprice of the critic—and he in many cases an infidel—is made the touchstone determining the date, authorship, and sense, it may be, of all-important writings, we have had instances enough within the lifetime of the present generation on the field of Old Testament criticism. So far as the New Testament is concerned, British scholarship, until quite recently, occupied itself with saner methods in the department of Introduction. Westcott’s well-known “Canon,” and Salmon’s equally well-known “Introduction,” are samples of the kind of work in this department which British scholarship favoured, and they are works which made the Church of God in this country so far debtors to the authors. Now, suddenly as a bolt from the blue, comes this production of Dr. Moffatt’s—a production vicious in its methods; regretful, we feel assured, to the Church of the Living God; and disastrous to the rising youth of Scotland, if God’s regenerating grace preserve them not.

How far Moffatt’s results carry us from the common faith may be easily shown. It has been the universal belief of the Christian Church from the very beginning that the books composing our New Testament were written by either (i.) members of the original college of the Twelve Apostles, or (ii.) men who, although not reckoned of the Twelve, were notwithstanding reckoned to be Apostles, or (iii.) men who were companions and fellow-labourers of the Apostles, or (iv.) Paul, an Apostle, according to himself, born out of due time. This fourfold classification of the writers of the New Testament may be followed by us as we contrast Moffatt’s results with the common faith.

I.—Matthew, John, and Peter

Matthew, John, and Peter, who not only sojourned with our Lord Jesus in the days of His flesh, but were reckoned of the Twelve, were, according to the common faith, large and important contributors to our New Testament. Matthew wrote the Gospel which goes by his name. John wrote not only our fourth Gospel, but also three short Epistles, together with the book of Revelation. Peter was the human author of two Epistles which bear his name. Now Moffatt, as against all this, would have us believe that we cannot reckon with certainty on our having a single production from the hand of one of the Twelve. He is willing, to be sure, to concede that the Apostle Matthew may have composed a work in the Aramaic language which is now lost, and which the unknown author of the Gospel according to Matthew, as we now have it, made use of. But that Matthew, the Apostle, composed the Gospel that from the beginning has gone by his name, Moffatt, without any substantial reasons (although the discussion of the grounds is beyond our present scope), stoutly denies. Nor is it the authenticity, that is, the Matthean authorship only, that Moffatt denies; the genuineness, that is, the historical worthiness, of not a little of which we have the record in this first Gospel, is called in question. What, for example, Matthew wrote concerning the virgin-birth, the flight to Egypt, and the weeping in Ramah, are, it would seem from Moffatt, not matters of fact in our sense of the word at all, but “a piece of early Christian midrashic [this is, largely legendary] narrative” (Introduction, page 250). The twenty-fourth chapter of the Gospel according to Matthew “is not,” according to Moffatt, “the record of what Jesus said on this or any other occasion, but a tract of the apocalyptic propaganda” (page 208). Similarly, on grounds which to us are sheer and very perverse caprice, the authority of Jesus for that first clearest enunciation of the truth of the Trinity itself, of which we have the record in Matthew xxviii. 19, is called by our author in question, and we are henceforth taught to regard “the trinitarian form as introduced by the [unknown] author, as a liturgical expansion of the primitive formula of baptism into the name of Jesus” (page 254).

Nor does it fare better—if, indeed, so well—with the Apostle John in this new “Introduction.” As a matter of fact, Moffatt ascribes not a scrap of all that constitutes our New Testament to the Apostle John. On the flimsiest grounds and against all the real evidence in the case, Moffatt would have us believe that the Apostle John was martyred early in life. In that case our fourth Gospel, which was certainly written after the other three, could not have the Apostle John for its author. Moffatt maintains that the author is unknown. He may have had access to some reliable historical traditions, but he was not an eye-witness. Of course that reduces the Gospel, at least largely, to a forgery, for the fourth Gospel, as well as the First Epistle of John—and these Moffatt groups together—professes to be the work of an eye-witness. (See Gospel, xix. 55, and 1 Epistle, i. 1.) Nor is that all. The discourses of Jesus, which constitute so large a portion of the fourth Gospel—the preservation of which we were wont to reckon as owing to the fulfilment of Christ’s promise to His Apostles that the Holy Ghost should bring to their remembrance what He in the days of His flesh had uttered in their hearing—are according to Moffatt, only monologues, in which the unknown author voices “his own or rather the Church’s consciousness, usually upon some aspect of Christology” (page 562). The raising of Lazarus from the dead is to Moffatt a great stumbling-block. He is at a loss what to make of it, but is, upon the whole, inclined to reckon it as a myth which somehow grew out of the parable which Jesus spake concerning the rich man and Lazarus (page 539)!

The book of Revelation, together with Second and Third John, Moffatt places, with some hesitation, to the credit of “John the Presbyter,” but not the son of Zebedee. It is, we may say, at the same time extremely doubtful if a “John the Presbyter” other than John the Apostle had, towards the end of the first century, any existence in Asia Minor as an historic personage. That, we may say by the way, is the judgment of critics so competent as Dr. Theodor Zahn, of Erlangen, and of Sir William M. Ramsay, of Aberdeen.

Second Peter, according to Moffatt, was not written until some eighty years after the Apostle Peter’s death. In that case the Second Epistle of Peter can be regarded only as a forgery, for the Epistle repeatedly claims Simon the son of Jonas as its author. The salutation, for example, is in the name of Simon Peter (i. 1), and the author speaks of himself as having, on the Mount of Transfiguration, heard from the excellent Glory the words, “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased” (i. 17, 18). Whom are we to believe—the author of Second Peter or Moffatt?

Moffatt is willing to allow that Peter did contribute something to the first of the two Epistles usually assigned to that Apostle, but is at a loss to know whether even it assumed its present form before or after the Apostle’s death. First Peter is thus—if not like Second Peter, a mere forgery—still verging on that evil character, and is classified by our author as “semi-pseudonymous.”

II.—James, the Lord’s Brother, and Jude, the Brother of James

James, the Lord’s brother, and Jude, the brother of James, although not of the Twelve, were necessarily eye-witnesses of much of our Lord’s earthly life, and are reckoned as being Apostles. (Gal. i. 19.) They, according to the common faith, were each the author of an Epistle which has found a place in the New Testament Canon. The Epistle of James has generally been reckoned as the very earliest of all the New Testament writings. The Epistle of Jude, his brother, would seem to have been written some twenty-five or thirty years later. Both these Epistles Moffatt looks upon as issued under false and assumed names.

III.—Our Second and Third Gospels

Our second and third Gospels were, according to the common faith, composed by John whose surname was Mark, and by “the beloved physician,” Luke, respectively. To Luke also must be assigned the book of the Acts of the Apostles. Thanks to the illustrious studies of Sir W. M. Ramsay in this department, it is quite the fashion at the present hour to place the third Gospel and the Acts to the credit of Luke. This conclusion Moffatt also in a general way adopts. Yet that does not prevent his regarding considerable characteristic portions of the matter incorporated by Luke into his treatises as legendary in character, and he has the hardihood to make Luke the concoctor of the speeches which are put (say in the Acts) into the mouth of Peter or of Paul, although that does not mean that in every case these speeches should be regarded by our author as having had no historic basis at all.

Not even Mark is left us. This is how Moffatt imagines the process to have occurred by which our second Gospel reached its present form: “Notes of Peter’s reminiscences, written down by Mark, were afterwards edited by a (Roman?) Christian, who [besides Mark’s notes] used also the [so-called] small apocalypse [Mark xiii.] and some other logia [sayings] of Jesus” (page 232).

IV.—The Pauline Epistles

There are in our New Testament thirteen Epistles—First and Second Thessalonians, Galatians, First and Second Corinthians, Romans, Ephesians, Colossians, Philemon, Philippians, First and Second Timothy, Titus—which, in their very text, are said to have been from the Apostle Paul. These accordingly have, with unanimous consent, been regarded from the earliest times as productions from the pen of the great Apostle of the Gentiles. The Epistle to the Hebrews, although commonly ascribed to Paul, does not contain Paul’s name as part of its text, neither is the earliest sub-apostolic testimony to its authorship unambiguous. It is not therefore vital to the faith to determine dogmatically who the human author, in this case, is. The Westminster Divines refrained in fact from doing so. (See Confession, chap. i. 2.) It is certainly an Epistle which is of divine authority; and the proof of its having been composed by a writer contemporaneous with the Apostles is the assured fact that it was known as authoritative to Clement of Rome when he wrote his Epistle to the Corinthians not later than 96 A.D. But as far back as the second century it is the case that whilst some understood that writer to be Paul, others held, with almost more confidence, that he was Barnabas, Paul’s companion.

Scepticism itself can not skill to frame plausible reasons why it should reject all Paul’s Epistles as not any of them his. Moffatt’s attitude to the Pauline writings is this: First and Second Thessalonians, Galatians, First Corinthians, Colossians, Philemon, and Philippians, are authentic. Second Corinthians is made up of Pauline materials, which, according to Moffatt, have suffered much in transmission. He tells us to regard the real Second Corinthians as consisting of only chapters i. to ix. of that Epistle, except that even here the section consisting of vi. 14 to vii. 1, is an interpolation from another Epistle of Paul, which is now lost (1 Cor. v. 9). Second Corinthians x. 1 to xiii. 10 is, we are told, part of a still fourth letter of Paul, which also is otherwise now lost. In the authenticity of Second Corinthians xi. 32, 33, Moffatt is not a believer.

Even in the case of the great Epistle to the Romans we cannot, according to Moffatt, be supposed to have received the letter quite as it left Paul’s hand. “The balance of probability,” says he, “is upon the whole in favour of the hypothesis that Romans i. to xv. represents substantially the original Epistle,”—although we cannot be sure even of the whole of i. to xv. (page 139)—”and that Romans xvi. 1-23 was added when the Pauline Canon was drawn up at Ephesus” (page 142). Ephesians is on a par with Second Peter. “It is not,” says Moffatt, “by Paul, but consists of a set of variations played by a master-hand upon one or two themes suggested by Colossians.” First and Second Timothy, as well as Titus, Moffatt puts down as “pseudonymous compositions [that is, in the vulgar, forgeries] of a Paulinist who wrote during the period of transition into the new Catholic Church of the second century.” Moffatt’s treatment of the Epistle to the Hebrews deserves the criticism which a distinguished English scholar thought well, the other day, to pass on Moffatt’s “Introduction” in its entirety: “A magnificent repository of everyone else’s opinion but the author’s own.”

To reply in an adequate manner to this entirely sceptical attitude towards the books of the New Testament would require not a few pages but a considerable volume, and a reply in the ordinary sense is not here attempted. We content ourselves for the moment with the following remarks:—

(1) Moffatt’s conclusions touching the entire New Testament mean that the Christian Church is left without so much as a single writing which it can regard as the work and testimony of an Apostle or fellow-labourer of Apostles who sojourned with our Lord Jesus in the days of His flesh. Divine authorship, in this case, in the sense of infallibility, is out of the question. Historical truth is even out of the question. Nay, if Moffatt teaches truth, we cannot attribute common honesty to many of the New Testament writers. Moffatt, to be sure, thinks that those unknown authors, who falsely presumed to write as Apostles of the Lord Jesus, acted quite innocently. To the Church of the Living God, which was born of the truth, nurtured on the truth, and whose motto must be, “No lie is of the truth,” the offering of such palliatives must appear but as adding insult to injury. Nor can one help thinking that the person who suggests that another than the Apostle Paul could innocently have written, for example, our present Epistle to the Ephesians, must himself have had his moral sense blunted through his continuing too long to occupy the contradictory positions of a Christian minister and a sceptic.

(2) Moffatt’s attitude towards the New Testament writings is not a something “new under the sun.” Marcion, the notorious second century heretic, for reasons of his own—and they were poor indeed if they were not as good as Moffatt’s—differed in respect of canonicity but little from Moffatt. Indeed, on the question of the authorship of Ephesians, Moffatt out-Marcions Marcion. But Marcion in those good old days would scarcely be reckoned as a Christian at all.

(3) It is not to be thought that Moffatt’s conclusions respecting the New Testament writings are results to which the ripest scholarship is certainly leading mankind. Far from it. Moffatt can, to be sure, quote scholars not a few who hold substantially with him. But few indeed of these are British, and fewer still, we believe, whether British or Continental, are at the same time believers in the resurrection from the dead of our Lord Jesus. The ripest scholarship—I speak of men holding the cardinal truth of our Lord’s resurrection—stands at the present hour for conclusions that are the contradictory of Moffatt’s. Dr. Sanday, for example, of Oxford, has in his article on New Testament Literature in the tenth edition of the “Encyclopædia Britannica,” so recorded the position now. Dr. Theodor Zahn, a man of rare originality, who devoted a long life to studies of this kind, whose “Introduction to the New Testament” was but a few months since translated into English by a group of Chicago scholars, asserts and maintains and defends the authenticity and genuineness of every single book constituting our New Testament. Sir William M. Ramsay, a critic of more than European reputation, has done himself great honour, as well as put the Church of Christ under great obligations, by his protest—recorded in the June, July, and August numbers of the Expositor—against the methods and conclusions of Dr. Moffatt in the volume we are having under consideration.

1. One cannot, notwithstanding the reassuring circumstances now referred to, but fear that Moffatt’s “Introduction” will have very disastrous results. When, something over thirty years ago, Professor Robertson Smith promulgated his unbelieving views regarding the Old Testament Scriptures, there were, we believe, but a small number of the Free Church clergy who really held with Robertson Smith on the main questions, although many were willing that the Professor should not be interfered with. To-day we believe there are comparatively few ministers in the United Free Church of Scotland who do not accept, in the main, Robertson Smith’s conclusions. When, about the same period, Dr. Dods promulgated his views on the Inspiration of the Scriptures, there were, we believe, comparatively few men in the Free Church who just held with Dods on this question, although they were in too many cases willing that the Doctor’s views should be tolerated. To-day, we believe, there are few ministers in the United Free Church of Scotland who do not hold with Dods on the question of Inspiration. If, following a similar process, Dr. Moffatt’s conclusions regarding the New Testament be now tolerated in the United Free Church, and ere long become the commonly-accepted conclusions in that Church, must not every rightly-minded person reckon—we say it with grief—that that Church, so far from being a blessing, has become an unspeakable curse in the land?

2. Act the United Free Church, or any other particular denomination as it may, the Church of the Living God will for ever praise Him because that in a matter so closely affecting our deepest interests, the instruments of whom the Holy Spirit made use to give an account of the revelation which God gave of Himself in the incarnation, life, death, and exaltation of His Son, were not unknown personalities, far removed from the place and time in which our Lord trod this earth. They were all, to use an expression of Tertullian’s, either Apostles or Apostolic men—men who heard, who looked upon, and handled that Eternal Life which was from the beginning, and for our sakes became incarnate. By this means we are brought very nigh the Source; in having fellowship with the New Testament writers we have fellowship with the Father and with the Son. It scarcely requires to be pointed out that this is a circumstance the great significance of which was felt from the beginning. Christ Himself gives expression to its significance in John xv. 27 and xvii. 20. The Apostle Paul (Galatians ii. 2, 9) did not think it beneath the dignity of his Apostleship to compare the Gospel as he preached it with that same Gospel as it was preached by James, Cephas, and John, who had such an intimate personal acquaintance with our Lord in the days of His flesh. The Gospel message, according to Hebrews ii. 3, ought to be held as having additional sanction from the fact that having begun to be spoken by the Lord, “it was confirmed unto us by them that heard Him.” That the significance of this circumstance was felt by the Apostles Peter and John may be shewn by a reference to 1 Peter v. 1, 2 Peter i. 18, 1 John i. 1. Its significance was felt from the first by the Christian Church, as the writings of Irenaeus and Tertullian bear ample witness to. It is a circumstance to the validity of which, in the historical sense, the ripest scholarship of the present hour bears the amplest witness.

J. R. M.

Ireland and the Bible.—In the recent report of the Scottish Association for Irish Missions we cull the following paragraph:—”Outside the Province of Ulster, and two or three of the leading cities of the Southern provinces, there are no facilities given for the circulation of the Scriptures in Ireland, and, as a consequence, the Bible is practically an unknown book to the masses of the Irish people. As we learn from the Government census returns, very nearly all the people can read; but the Word of God is on system kept out of their hands and homes. The deplorable fact in Irish life is this, that amongst a reading population the Bible is an unknown book, and there are tens of thousands of Irish men and women to-day who have never even seen a copy of the Sacred Scriptures. Is it any wonder that darkness broods over the land, and that so many thousands of Irish emigrants plunge into infidelity as soon as they are free from the restraining associations of home?”