paratively few: Matthew and Luke very many, and these for the most part very weighty and remarkable, insomuch that one wonders how any one undertaking to write a history of Christ’s life could overlook them. Matthew and Luke again, while both giving much prominence to the words of Jesus, differ very widely in their manner of reporting them. The one collects the sayings into masses, apparently out of regard to affinity of thought; the other disperses them over his pages, and assigns to them distinct historical occasions.
3. These resemblances and differences, with many others not referred to, inevitably raise a question as to their cause. This is the synoptical problem, towards the solution of which a countless num- ber of contributions have been made within the last hundred years. Many of these have now only a historical or antiquarian interest, and it would serve no useful purpese to attempt here an exhaustive account of the literature connected with this inquiry. While not in- sensible to the fascination of the subject, even on its curious side, as an interesting problem in literary criticism, yet I must respect the fact that we in this work are directly concerned with επ matter only in so far as it affects exegesis. The statement .Aerefore now to be made must be broad and brief.
4. All attempts at solution admit of being classified under four heads. First may be mentioned the hypothesis of oral tradition. This hypothesis implies that before our Gospels there were no written records of the ministry of Jesus, or at least none of which they made use. Their only source was the ginwritten tradition of the memorabilia of that ministry, having its ultimate origin in the public preaching and teaching of the Apostles, the men who had been with Jesus. The statements made by the Apostles from time to time, repeated and added to as occasion required, caught up by willing ears, and treasured up in faithful memories: behold all that is necessary, according to the patrons of this hypothesis, to account for all the evangelic phenomena of resemblance and difference. The resemblances are explained by the tendency of oral tradition, especially in non-literary epochs and peoples, to become stereotyped in contents and even in phraseology, a tendency much helped by the practice of catechetical instruction, in which the teacher dictates sentences which his pupils are expected to commit to memory.! The differences are accounted for by the original diversity in the memorabilia communicated by different Apostles, by the measure of
1 On the function of catechists as helping to stereotype the evangelic tradition vide Wright, The Composition of the Four Gospels, 1890. Mr. Wright is a thorough believer in the oral tradition.