(b) The close connexion between the extant frag- ments and tiie agraplia renders it necessary to lay down a special t principle of criticism, viz. that wlien the same saying, in slightly diflerent versions, recurs in more than one fragment, three possibili- ties are open to the critic, (i.) The earlj' Christian writer who quotes the saying as part of some Gospel may be quoting loosely from memory, and, either for that reason or for some other, confusing one Gospel with another, (ii.) On the supposition that the quotation is correctly assigned, it may have been preserved in more than one Gospel ; it is unlikely that certain sayings were monopolized by one document. Or, when this possibility is set aside, (iii. ) one Gospel may have borrowed from another. There has been a tendency to ignore the second of these possibilities, in particular. What we know of certain Gospels may be enough to show that a given quotation is incompatible with their idiosyncrasies, but not all quotations possess this characteristic quality, and room should be left for the hypothesis that some allied Gospels con- tained a good deal of common matter.
One illustration of this may be quoted, for the sake of clearness. Take the well-known saying, ' He who seeks shall not cease till he finds, and when he has found he shall wonder, and wondering he shall reign, and reigning he shall rest.' The last two clauses are cited by Clement of Alexandria as part of the Gospel according to the Hebrews (Strom, ii, 9. 45), but elseMhere (Strom, v. 14. 96) he quotes the whole saying, without mentioning its origin, in order to illustrate Plato's aphorism that wonder is the beginning of philosophy. Independ- ently, the entire saying has turned up among the agrapha of the Oxyrhynchite Papyri, apparently as part of a collection of words addressed by Jesus to some disciples, including Thomas. In the later
* Cf . L. Radermacher's Das Jenseits im Mythos der Hellenen, 1903.
t But not, of course, an exceptional one. It bears also upon the criticism of the Synoptic Gospels, particularly in the differ- entiation of Mark and Q. VOL. I. — 31
Acts of Thomas (ed. Bonnet, 1883, p. 243) an echo of the saying also recurs : ' Those who partake worthily of the good things there [i.e. in the treasury of the holy King] rest, and resting they shall reign,' and, as if this were not enough, the problem is fmther complicated by what sounds like an echo in 2 Clem. v. 5 (' know, brothers, that the sojourning of the flesh in this world is little and for a brief time, whereas the promise of Christ is great and wonderful, is rest in the kingdom to come and in eternal life '), and by a very faint echo in the Traditions of Matthias, if we can trust Clement of Alexandria (Strom, ii. 9. 45), who cites from the latter, ' Wonder at what is before you,' to illustrate again the Platonic doctrine of wonder.
Now it is tempting to deduce from this, among otlier indications, that the common source of the Oxyrhynchite Logia and the quotations in 2 Clera. was the Gospel according to the Egyptians, or that this saying is a water-mark of some Thomas Gospel. The former hypothesis would be cor- roborated if the source of the quotations in 2 Clem, could be proved to be the Gospel of the Egyptians, for the echo in 2 Clem, follows close upon one of these quotations (see p. 495), and upon the whole this is the least improbable hypothesis. But the second of the possibilities (ii.) is as feasible as the third (iii.). It is at any rate hasty to assume that such a saying was only accessible in a single document.
(c) It is also fair to remember that some of the early uncanonical Gospels are known to us only in fragments and quotations made usually for the purpose of proving their outr6 character. This easily gives a wrong impression of their contents. Suppose, for example, that all we knew of the canonical Matthew amounted to a few passages like 2^ 5I8-19 76 s^t. i7L'4-a7 1912 ^nd 27^^-53^ sup- pose that Luke's Gospel was preserved in stray quotations of 2^^-49 45 6:0-21 g'" IG^ 18^^ and 24^'-'3 — would our impression of the Gospels in question be very much more misleading than may be the case with Gospels like those of the Hebrews or of the Egyptians or of the Nazarenes ? It is possible that some of the uncanonical Gospels may not have been so eccentric as they seem to us. But, even wlien allowance is made for this possi- bility of an error in our focus, the general character of most of the uncanonical Gospels must be recog- nized (cf. § 1). When Archbishop Magee preached before the Church Congress at Dublin, an Irish bishop is reported to have said that the sermon did not contain enough gospel to save a tom-tit. An evangelical critic might say the same about the uncanonical Gospels, for the most part, and he would not be saying it in haste. It is rare, upon the Avhole, to come across any touches or traditions which even suggest that by their help we can fill out the description of the Synoptic Gospels. As we read Marlowe's Fanstus or Goethe's Faust for reasons quite other than a wish to ascertain the facts about the real Faustus of the 16th cent., so it is with the majority of the un- canonical Gospels. Their interest for us is not in any fresh light which they may be expected to throw upon the character of the central Figure, but in the evidence they yield us for ascertaining the popular religion of the early Christian Churches, the naive play of imagination upon the traditions of the faith, and the fancies which the love of story-telling employed to satisfy the more or less dogmatic or at any rate the pious interests of certain circles in Syria and Egypt especially. The large majority of the uncanonical Gospels belong to Church history rather than to NT criti- cism, and to a period of Church history which is mainly post-apostolic. Their varying background covers several centuries and soils. They were