parables, numerous passages bearing on the Person of Christ, the Church, the Resurrection, the Second Advent, etc. From this questionable honour of becoming “a place of deposit” for new material, as Dr. Estlin Carpenter calls it,) Mark, according to D’Eichthal, was protected by its greater obscurity and inferior authority; hence its modest dimensions and superior reliableness in point of fidelity to actual historic truth.
This theory is plausible, and we are not entitled to say a priori that it has no foundation in fact. Additions to the Gospels might creep in before they became canonical, as they crept in afterwards through the agency of copyists. The sayings about the indestructi- bility of the law (v. 17-19) and the founding of the Church (xvi. 18, 19) might possibly be examples in point. But possibility is one thing, probability another. To prove diversity of hand or successive deposits of evangelic tradition by men living at different times, and acting in the interest of distinct or even opposing tendencies, it is not enough to point to apparently conflicting elements and exclaim: “ Behold a Gospel of contradictions”.? On this topic | may refer readers to what has been already stated in discussing the subject of the historicity of the Gospels. And \ may here add that it would not be difficult to conceive a situation for which the Gospel might have been written by one man, as it now stands. Dr. Weiss, indeed, has successfully done this in his work on the Gospel of Matthew and its parallels in Luke. He conceives the Gospel, substantially as we have it, to have been written shortly after the destruction of Jerusalem and the Jewish State, when the faith of Jewish Christians in the Messiahship of Jesus would be sorely shaken by the events: the promised messianic Kingdom passing away irretrievably from Israel and taking up its abode among Gentiles. The Gospel that was to meet this situation would have to show that Jesus was indeed the Messianic King, in whose history many prophetic oracles found their fulfilment; that He did His utmost to found the kingdom in Israel, but was frustrated by the unbelief of the people, and especially of its rulers; that, there- fore, the kingdom was driven forth from Jewish soil, and was now to be found mainly in the Gentile Church, and there Cad been left to Israel only an inheritance of woe; that though Jesus had pre- dicted this doom He nevertheless loved His people, had loyally and
1 The First Three Gospels, p. 370.
2 Dr. Estlin Carpenter, in the above work, p. 363, remarks: '* Truly has the first Gospel been called a ‘ Gospel of contradictions’ ”’.