VOL. 11.-4
Besides Wendt and Resch, mention should be made of the disposition of material in the Greek Synoptieon of A. Wright, who devotes Division 2 of his presentation to material supposedly derived from the Lcgia of Matthew. The arbitrariness of the dealing with the Lukan material is amply demonstrated by the two supplementary divisions which follow. The work is unfortunately affected by inadmissible presuppositions regarding oral tradition.
6. Conclusions. — These may be briefly sum- marized in the following outline : —
(Ij The term logia was applied to the Sayings of Jesus early in the 2nd century by those who held them as Di^•ioe utterances, but not as dis- placing the earlier XJryot.
«2i "The same individuals report a tradition of Palestinian derivation which contrasts the Markan tyi»e of Gosftel with another, of ilatthiean origin, con.sisting of syntagmata of the Sayings.
(3) (Jnr present representative of the Matthjean tradition, disembarrassed of its Markan frame- work, displays this type-form, combining the teaching of Jesus in five agglutinations of Chris- tian precepts corresponding to the five books of the Torah.
(4) Our Third Evangelist presents the disc■our^e- material which he holds in common with Mt. from the historical point of view, and seems to have received it in a collection wherein narrative and discourse were intermingled from the first, the agglutination being effected wich an eye to illus- trate Jesus' mission of grace rather than to form a new Torah 'see art. Wisdom).
(5) If the actual work of the Apostle ilatthew (Matthias t) be not too remote for recovery, it should be sought primarily in, or rather under, the accumulated aggregations of logian material in the five discourse groups of our First Gospel, ^vith secondary comparison of the added groups (chs. 3 f . 11 f. 23 ) which have special affinity by language and content with Lk., together with the rest of the Lukan material. It is not probable that the Matthjean syntagma c:an have been lost in any other way than through superimposition of new material. To extricate it from the mass of super- imix>se<l accretion is a task which stUl challenges the utmost skill of the critic.
LiTEEArrEE. — Besides the worts <d Wendt, Besdi,*aiid B. Weiss, above referred to, the reader shonld consult the exceQenc discussions ot Hawkins, Horce SynoptUa, and in Expos. Tima xiL (190iVl("01; pp. 72 ft. and 471 ff., also ib. siii (190*) p. -20, on 'Some Internal Evidence for the use of the Lc^ia in oar First and Third Gospels,' and ' Use oi Materials in Mt &-9 ' ; also four articles bv C. A- Briggs, tJ. vols. viiL ix. (isa7-ls9s> on ' The Wisdom of Jesus the Mesaab.' Many excellent observa- tions are made by A. Wri^t in bis Sj/nopesU-, 1903u A vahiaUe discussion of the histor>' of the logia onbodied in the Sermon on the Mount win be found in the Extra VoL of Hastings' DB, t. r. ' Sermon on the Mount ' (C. W. Yotaw). For an anal.vsis of this coi^lomeiate, and discos^on of the process of transmission oi this and related principal discourses of Jesos, see the present writer's The Sermon on the Mount — I'fe Literary Structure and Didactic PurpoJse, Macmillan, 1902. On the logian material of Lk. see art. Wisdom. B. Wl^ BaCX)X.
LOGOS. — The c-onception of Christ as the Logos,
or eternal Word, is peculiar to the Fourth frt»spel.
In the Epp. to Colossians and Hebrews (writings j which are likewise touched \<ith the Alexandrian I influence) the Logos theory of Christ's Person is in
some ix>ints implied (cf. Col 1^*"^*, He l-~*i. In I Revelation (19"^) the '"Word of God' is announced I as the new and mysterious name which Christ
bears when He comes forth to execute judgment. I But only in the Fourth Gospel is the conception : deliberately adopted and worked out in its full
significanc-e. j The idea of a Logos, an immanent Divine reason
in the world, is one that meets us under various 1 modifications in many ancient sy.stems of thought,
50
LOGOS
LOGOS
Indian, Egyptian, Persian. In view of the reli- gious syncretism which prevailed in the 1st and 2nd centuries, it is barely possible that these extraneous theologies may have indirectly influ- enced the Evangelist ; but there can be no doubt in regard to the main som-ce from which his Logos doctrine was derived. It had come to him through Philo after its final elaboration in Greek philosophy.
In the 6th cent. B.C. Heraclitus first broke awa.y from the purely physical conceptions of early Greek speculation, by discover- ing a Xoyos, a principle of reason, at work in the cosmic process. From the obscure fragments of this philosopher that have come down to us we gather that he was cliiefly interested in account- ing for the aesthetic order of the visible universe. In tlie arrangement of natural phenomena, in the adaptation of means to ends, he discerned the working of a power analogous to the reasoning power in man. His speculation was still entangled with the physical hypotheses of earlier times, and on this account dropped out of sight, and had little influence on the greater systems of Greek thought. Plato and Aristotle were engaged in the development of the theory of ideas, with its absolute separation of the material world from the world of higher realitj'. Tlieir work w'as of profound significance for the after history of Logos speculation, but belongs itself to a different philosophical movement. It was in the reaction from Platonic dualism that the Logos idea again asserted itself, and was worked out through all its implications in Stoicism.