preached unto you ... in what words I preached it
2 Ti 28 ' Remember Jesua Christ, risen from the dead, of the
seed of David, according to my gospel.'
In these instances, certainly in most of them, tlie word 'gospel' means not so much St. Paul's manner or method of presenting the good news of
GOSPELS
GOSPELS
6G5
salvation to liis hearers, as the actual substance of what he said. It is true tliat the substance of what any preacher of the gospel wouUl say would include more than a narrative without comment, sucli as is one of the Synoptic Gospels ; yet St. Paul's gospel evidentlj' ditl contain some merely historical matter. This point will come up for consideration later. Here it is sufficient to say that the above instances of St. Paul's use of the word ' gospel ' as meaning the substance of his evangelic preaching, would naturally suggest the application of the term to a narrative embodying all that it was necessary to know of the life of Jesus Christ as a means of salvation. So much was, no doubt, claimed by their compilers for the short narratives which St. Luke's Gospel was intended to sujiersede ; much more may it be claimed for any one of the four Gospels which have come down to us.
5. An interesting question now arises. What was the content of the Gospel presented hy St. Patd to the Churches which he evangelized? and what was its relation to our existing Gospels, or any of t/iem ? It ought to be unnecessary to remark that in an examination of the Pauline Epistles for the jmrpose of this question, any inference drawn from silence is peculiarly precarious. It is as unreason- able to expect to find Gospel material in St. Paul's letters as it would be to find it in the letters of a pastor or bishop of our own day. Paradoxical as it may at first seem, it is probably none the less true that the Cliurches to wliich St. Paul wrote had a more intimate and living acquaintance with the facts of the Gospel history than is usual witli Cliristians in our own day. Every member of those Churches had been recently converted from either heathenism or Judaism. Consequently the interest they felt in their newl3'-acquired faith was fresh and absorbing ; and the Apostle writes as though the main facts of tlie Gospel history were familiar to his readers. He is able to appeal in the most natural way to their knowledge of the character of Jesus, 'e.g. Ro 15^ ' Christ pleased not himself ' ; 2 Co 8' ' Though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor ' ; and 2 Co 10' ' I . . . mtreat you by the meekness (5ia Trjs irpairTiTos) and gentleness of Christ.' It would doubtless be impossible to prove that St. Paul had in mind re- corded sentiments of Christ similar to, or identical with, ' The Son of Man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister ' (Mt 202») ; ' The Son of Man hath not where to lay his head ' (Mt 8-'», Lk 9^) ; 'I am meek {wpavs) and lowly in heart' (Mt U-"). But it may be safely affirmed that there was in those to whom St. Paul wrote a knowledge of deeds and words of Christ that made the Apostle's appeal intelligible.
Whattlien was the source of St. Paul's knowledge of the Gospel narrative ? To many, perhaps most. Christians this question may appear superfluous, in vieAv of the Apostle's own explicit statements : Gal 1" ' The gospel which was preached by me . . . came to me through revelation of Jesus Christ,' and 1 Co 11» 'I received of the Lord that which also I delivered unto you.' Even if we grant, what is likely enough, that the passage from Galatians refers to St. Paul's favourite doctrines, yet his language to the Corinthians seems to imply that his knowledge of an ob- jective historical circumstance came to him in a miraculous manner. The present writer has no desire to minimize the miraculous element in the NT narrative, or to call in question tlie reality of St. Paul's visions ; but in this case an explanation can be given of the expression * I received of the Lord ' which will both satisfy the requirements of St. Paul's language and also take the matter out of the region of subjective visions, and so render the statement historically intelligible and verifi-
able. Tlie question is, What would one of St. Paul's contemporary fellow-Christians ha\e under- stood by ' I received of the Lord ' '' Tlie answer is supplied by jiarallel phrases in the Book of the Acts, and by what we learn from that book and other sources as to the ministry of prophets in the Apostolic Church. When we read (Ac 13-), ' The Holy Gliost said. Separate me Barnabas and Saul,' etc., and again, (16') 'The Spirit of Jesus suffered them not,' it is natural to ask. How did the Holy Gliost speak? and how did the Spirit of Jesus control the movements of St. Paul and his com- pany? It was through the utterance of an ac- credited projihet, or number of prophets, in either case. This is ) ilaced beyond doubt by an instance gi\en later; (21"), where a prophet, Agabus, begins his prediction with, ' Thus saitli the Holy Ghost ' (of. 20'- 'The Holy Ghost testifieth unto me in every city '). We see, then, that Ac 13= means that the separation of Paul and Barnabas was in conse- quence of an utterance of the prophets, or one of them, who are mentioned in the previous verse ; while in 16' it was an utterance of Silas (see 15^), if not of Paul himself (see Ac 13', 1 Co 14^'), that forbade the missionaries to cro.ss the frontier of Bithynia.