on Inspiration. The thesis to be proved is “that the great mass of the narrative in the first three Gospels took its shape before the destruction of Jerusalem, {.ε., within less than forty years of the events”.! ‘Was there ever,” asks Dr. Sanday, “an easier problem for a critic to decide whether the sayings and narratives which lie before him came from the one side of this chasm or the other?” Among the instances he cites are such as these: “If, therefore, thou art offering thy gift at the altar, and then rememberest that thy brother hath aught against thee,” etc. “Woe unto you, ye blind guides, which say, whosoever shall swear by the temple, it is nothing,’ etc. ‘See thou tell no man, but go thy way, show thyself to the priest,” etc. That is to say, the altar, the temple, the priesthood are still in existence. This is not decisive as to the date of our Gos- pels, but it is decisive as to much of the material contained in them having assumed fixed shape, either in oral or in written form, before the great crisis of Israel.
13. Historicity, be it finally noted, is not to be confounded with absolute accuracy, or perfect agreement between parallel accounts. Harmonistic is a thing of the past. It was a well-meant discipline, but it took in hand an insoluble problem, and it unduly magnified the importance of a solution, even if it had been possible. Questions as to occasions on which reported words and acts of Jesus were spoken or done, as to the connections between sayings grouped together in one Gospel, dispersed in the pages of another, as to the diverse forms of sayings in parallel reports, are for us now secondary. The broad question we ask as to the words of Jesus is: have we here, in the main, words actually spoken by Jesus, once or twice, now or then, in this connection or in that, in separate aphorisms or in con- nected discourse, in the form reported by this or that evangelist, or in a form not exactly reproduced by any of them, yet conveying a sense sufficiently reflected in all the versions? Is the Lord’s prayer the Lord’s at whatever time given to His disciples? Is the “Sermon on the Mount” made up of real utterances of Jesus, whether all spoken at one time, as Matthew’s report seems to imply, or on various occasions, as we should infer from Luke’s narrative? Did Jesus actually say: ‘1 came not to call the righteous, but sinners,”’ whether with the addition, “to repentance,” as it stands in Luke, or without, as in the genuine text of the same Logion in Matthew and Mark? Did He speak the parable of the lost sheep—whether in Matthew’s form or in Luke’s, or in a form differing verbally from
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