This involved not only a dissatisfaction with the canonical Gospels, on the score of what they contained as well as of what they omitted, but a certain dependence upon them, in several cases. The unknown authors, as Renan neatly puts it, ' font pour les dvangiles canoniques ce que les auteurs des Post-homerica out fait pour Hom^re, ce que les auteurs relativement modernes de Dionysiaques ou d'Argonautiques ont fait pour I'epopee grecque. lis traitent les parties que les canoniques ont avec raison negligees ; ils ajoutent ce qui aurait pu arriver, ce qui paraissait vraisemblable ; ils developpent les situations par des rapprochements artificiels empruntes aux textes sacres.' For a certain class of the uncan- onical Gospels, this is fairly accurate, but others make remarkably little use of the canonical nar- ratives except as points of departure. Renan's subsequent remark also requires modification : ' Comme le catholicisme degener6 des temps modernes, les auteurs d'evangiles apocryphes se rabattent sur les c6t6s puerils du christian- isme, I'Enfant Jesus, la sainte Vierge, saint Joseph. Le Jesus veritable, le J^sus de la vie publique, les depasse et les effraye.' Renan is thinking here of the Gospels of the Infancy.§ But since his day discoveries of papyri and manuscripts have shown that even the Mission and Manhood of Jesus did not entirely escape the notice of the uncanonical Gospels.
This enables us to fix upon a principle of arrangement for these Gospels. It is open to the critic at this point to follow one or other of three paths. One is to group them on a principle which partly estimates their form and partly takes into account their character, viz. Gospels of the Syn-
• Cf. Harnack's Constitution and Law of the Church, 1910, p. 308 f .
t E.g. the Gospels of Nicodemus and of Andrew (p. 4S0), besides tlie later ' Eternal Gospel ' of Abbot Joachim (beg. of loth cent.) based on Rev U*". The Gosi>el of Thaddajus o\ye3 ils existence apparently to a variant reading of 'Mathiio' as ' Matthaji' in the text of the Decrettim Gelasianum (cf. ron Dobschutz's note in TU xxxviii. 4 [1912J p. 293).
J The literary form of 'Gospel 'came to be indistinguishable more tlian once from that of ' Acts ' (cf. the ' Gospel of Mary ') as well as from that of 'Apocalypse.'
5 An admirable account of their motives and characteristics is given by Meyer in Hennecke's Neutest. Apok., pp. 90-105.
GOSPELS (UXCA^sOXICAL)
GOSPELS (U:N'CAN0NICAL) 483
optic type which have some claim to represent early tradition ; Gospels which are Gnostic or heretical ; and Gospels which aim at supplementing tJie gaps in the canonical stories especially of the Birth and Resurrection. This is the usual method since Harnack. Another is (cf. Nicolas, op. cit. p. 17 f.) to divide them into [a) pro-Jewish, i.e. Gospels mainly practical, in which Christianity is presented as the renovation of the OT ; (b) anti- Jewish ; and (c) unsectarian. But there are serious difficulties in carrying out this arrangement, and it is best, upon the whole, to classify them accord- ing to their subject-matter, viz. those devoted to the parents and birth of Jesus, those which cover the course of His life, and those which narrate the Passion and Resurrection. Tischendorf's plan was different : ' Quod ita instituam ut tria liberorum horum evangelicorum genera distinguam, quorum primum comprehendit qui ad parentes Jesu atque ipsius ortum, alteram qui ad infantiam eius, tertium qui ad fata eius ultima spectant.' But materials have accumulated since Tischendorf wrote, which show that the middle part of the life of Jesus was not left untouched by the authors of this literature. It used to be argued, indeed, that the uncanonical Gospels showed next to no interest in the central part of the life of Jesus, between His Baptism and the Passion. Even if this were the case, it would not be quite so remarkable as might appear. Such a concentration of interest upon the beginning and end of the life was natural to the early Church. For example, after finishing an account of the origin of the four Gospels, the author of the Muratorian Canon proceeds : ' Con- sequently, although various elements are taught in the several books of the Gospels, this makes no difference to the faith of believers, inasmuch as by one controlling Spirit all things are announced in all of them with regard to the Nativity, the Passion, the Resurrection, His intercourse with His disciples (conversatione cum discipulis suis), and His two-fold advent.' Here the salient points selected lie outside the central part of the life of Jesus, unless we admit a partial exception in the allusion to intercourse with the disciples. But the uncanonical Gospels do not entirely ignore this section. Even apart from the famous corre- spondence of Jesus * and Abgar (Eus. HE i. 13), or — in the form which it assumes in the Doctrina Addcei — His oral message to that monarch, we possess several Gospels which must have covered the ministry of our Lord, and the Oxyrhynchite fragment (see below, p. 499) now swells their number. Any classification has its own drawbacks, owing to the heterogeneous and fi'agmentary character of the extant materials ; but the triple arrange- ment proposed has, upon the whole, fewer obstacles than either of its rivals. In the following dis- cussion, tlierefore, the uncanonical Gospels will be treated as follows :