Moreover, we may well ask, AVhat is meant by the word 'contemporary'? General Gordon was murdered in the Sudan in 1884. If a man wrote an account to-day of the closing years of Gordon's life, we .should scarcely refuse to give it the title of a contemporary record. J But we are separated from the death of Gordon by a longer period of time than that which elapsed between the conver- sion of St. Paul and his earliest written Ir^timony to the belief and practice of tlic luimiiivc ( ■liurch.§ 16. But, further, in any atteni|. I tc.c^iiin.ite, how- ever briefly, the bearings of ino.irni irituisin, it must not "be forgotten that the Gospels are now placed at a much earlier date than formerly. || * The Higher Criticism, 1905, pp. ix and 32 ; cf, also and esp. Dr. Driver's remarks in his LOT'' p. xi, wlicre the same point is more fully elaborated: 'Viewed in the light of the unique personality of Christ, as depicted both in the common tradi- tion embodied in the Synoptic Gospels and in the personal reminiscences underlying the Fourth Gospel, and also as pre- supposed by the united testimony of the Apostolic writers belonging almost to the same generation, the circumstances are such as to forbid the supposition that the facts of our Lor<is life on which the fundamental truths of Christianity depend can have been the growth of mere tradition, or are "anything else than strictly historical. The same canon of historical criti- cism which authorizes the assumption of tradition in the OT forbids it— except within the narrowest limits, as in some of the divergences apparent between the parallel narrati\e8 of the Gospels— in the case of the NT.'
t This is apparently maintained by Dr. Moffatt, Historical JVT2, p. 66.
X Prebendary Sadler (The Lost Gospel, p. 196), writing in 18T6, well asks if we should refuse to describe an account of the Crimean War (1854-1855) as a contemporary- historv.
5 In this connexion we may recall Kenan's words, 'Jesus is known to us by at least one contemporary piece of evidence, that of St. Paul' (ffisfutre du Peuple dltra'eli, ISST, i. p. xviii). II An excellent summary of data bearing out this in connexion with prominent critics Is given by Lepin, op. cil. p. xxxi. Cf. also Deissmann, ' Evangelium und Urchristentum,' in B'-itrhje zur WeiterentwicUung der Chrisllirhen Keliijimi, 19U5 ; and also Harnack, Chron. i. pp. 654, 655. In this first volume Dr. Har- nack (1897) places the .Synoptic Gospels well within the 1st century, and A.D. 110 is assigned as the furthest limit for the Gosi^el of St. John with the Epistles of St. John and the .Apoca- lypse. In this and in other respects great jubilation was raised
Strauss long ago maintained that the Gospel story would be impregnable if it was certain that it was written by eye-witnesses, or at all events by men who lived close to tlie events. And this hypothesis of Strauss has at least been verified to this extent in our day, by the acknowledgment that all three of the Synoptics rest in no small degree upon genuinely Apostolic sources. Even Jiilicher, wlio places our First Gospel at tlie year 100 or there- abouts, admits that the writer used our Second Gospel and a collection of Lor/ia made by St. Matthew ; and in this Second Gospel he sees the work of John Mark, founded on reminiscences of the Petrine circle. And if, as is generally ad- mitted, the writer of our Third Gospel employed Mark and the Matthtean Logia among his chief means of information, he, too, must have based a great part of his work upon two Apostolic sources.*
The force of St. Paul s contemporary testimony we have already noted, and we are now able to point in addition to the Apostolic sources under- lying our Gospels. And thus we have a twofold guarantee against the alleged process of idealiza- tion which magnified by degrees the deeds and sayings of Jesus, a theory which, as M. Lepin observes, is urged by writers in many respects so far removed from each other as Sclimiedel and Loisy.t
17. And if modern criticism has strengthened the external evidence for the early date of our Gospels, may we not say that it has strengthened the in- ternal evidence also ? If we turn, for example, to the Gospel of St. John, we find a remarkable testimony in Furrer's well-known Leben Jes^i Christi (1905), a testimony the force of which is increased when we remember the writer's close ac- quaintance with the geography of the Holy Land. Thus Furrer speaks of the definite and exact geographical notices which are scattered up and down the pages of the Fourth Gospel, many of which we know only through the author of the Ixiok, and which correspond so thoroughly to the actual conditions.^: The narrator must thus have been a man who was acquainted with the home of Jesus by his own personal observation, so that we have the feeling that we are al)le to realize the scenes as it were with our own bodily eyes. If we consider the picture drawn by the SjTioptists, we are again struck with its vivid reality, its trutlifnl correspondence to the conditions, social and poli- tical, of the country, its acquaintance with the religious parties of the Jews and the Messianic hopes of the people, >vith its curious mixture of a foreign civilization and government with the hereditary customs and judicial procedure of the Jews. But the picture thus presented to us could not have been dra^\■n except by the hands of men contemporary with the events whicli they purport