Augustin (De Consens. Evang., Lib. I., c. 6, in Migne's ed. of the Opera, tom. III., 1046) assigns the lion to Matthew, the man to Mark (whom he wrongly regarded as an abbreviator of Matthew), the ox to Luke, and the eagle to John, because "he soars as an eagle above the clouds of human infirmity, and gazes on the light of immutable truth with most keen and steady eyes of the heart." In another place (Tract. XXXVI. in Joh. Ev., c. 8, § 1) Augustin says: "The other three Evangelists walked as it were on earth with our Lord as man (tamquam cum homine Domino in terra ambulabant) and said but little of his divinity. But John, as if he found it oppressive to walk on earth, opened his treatise, so to speak, with a peal of thunder .... To the sublimity of this beginning all the rest corresponds, and he speaks of our Lord's divinity as no other." He calls the evangelic quaternion "the fourfold car of the Lord, upon which he rides throughout the world and subdues the nations to his easy yoke." Pseudo-Athanasius (Synopsis Script.) assigns the man to Matthew, the ox to Mark, the lion to Luke. These variations in the application of the emblems reveal the defects of the analogy. The man might as well (with Lange) be assigned to Luke's Gospel of humanity as the sacrificial ox. But Jerome's distribution of the symbols prevailed and was represented in poetry by Sedulius in the fifth century.
Among recent divines, Bishop Wordsworth, of Lincoln, who is in full sympathy with the fathers and all their pious exegetical fancies, has thus eloquently reproduced the cherubic symbolism (in his Com. on The New Test., vol. I., p. xli): "The Christian church, looking at the origin of the Four Gospels, and the attributes which God has in rich measure been pleased to bestow upon them by his Holy Spirit, found a prophetic picture of them in the four living cherubim, named from heavenly knowledge, seen by the prophet Ezekiel at the river of Chebar. Like them the Gospels are four in number; like them they are the chariot of God, who sitteth between the cherubim; like them they bear him on a winged throne into all lands; like them they move wherever the Spirit guides them; like them they are marvellously joined together, intertwined with coincidences and differences: wing interwoven with wing, and wheel interwoven with wheel; like them they are full of eyes, and sparkle with heavenly light; like them they sweep from heaven to earth, and from earth to heaven, and fly with lightning's speed and with the noise of many waters. Their sound is gone out into all lands, and the words to the end of the world." Among German divines, Dr. Lange is the most ingenious expounder of this symbolism, but he exchanges the symbols of Matthew and Luke. See his Leben Jesu, I., 156 sqq., and his Bibelkunde (1881), p. 176.
(2.) The pictorial representations of the four Evangelists, from the rude beginnings in the catacombs and the mosaics of the basilicas at Rome and Ravenna to modern times, have been well described by Mrs. Jameson, Sacred and Legendary Art, vol. I, 132-175 (Boston ed., 1865). She distinguishes seven steps in the progress of Christian art: 1st, the mere fact, the four scrolls, or books of the Evangelists; 2d, the idea, the four rivers of salvation flowing from on high to fertilize the whole earth; 3d, the prophetic symbol, the winged cherub of fourfold aspect; 4th, the Christian symbol, the four "beasts" (better, "living creatures") in the Apocalypse, with or without the angel-wings; 5th, the combination of the emblematical animal with the human form; 6th, the human personages, each of venerable or inspired aspect, as becomes the teacher and witness, and each attended by the scriptural emblem--no longer an emblem, but an attribute--marking his individual vocation and character; 7th, the human being only, holding his Gospel, i.e., his version of the teaching and example of Christ.
(3.) Religious poetry gives expression to the same idea. We find it in Juvencus and Sedulius, and in its perfection in Adam of St. Victor, the greatest Latin poet of the middle ages (about 1172). He made the Evangelists the subject of two musical poems: "Plausu chorus laetabundo," and "Jocundare plebs fidelis." Both are found in Gautier's edition (1858), and with a good English translation by Digby S. Wrangham in The Liturgical Poetry of Adam of St. Victor, London, 1881, vol, II., pp. 156-169. The first has been well reproduced in English by Dr. Plumptre (in his Com. on the Synoptists, in Ellicott's series, but with the omission of the first three stanzas). I will quote the third stanza of the first (with Wrangham's version):
"
Circa thema generale,
Habet quisque speciale
Styli privilegium:
Quod praesignat in propheta
Forma pictus sub discreta
Vultus animalium."
"Though one set of facts is statted,
They by each one are related
In a manner all his own:
This the prophet by four creatures,
Each of different form and features,
Pictures for us, one by one."
In the second poem the following stanzas are the best:
Formam viri dant Matthaeo,
Quia scripsit sic de Deo,
Sicut descendit ab eo,
Quem plasmavit, homine.
Lucas bos est in figura
Ut praemonstrat in Scriptura,
Hostiarum tangens jura
Legis sub velamine.
Matthew as the man is treated,
Since 'tis he, who hath related,
How from man, by God created,
God did, as a man, descend.
Luke the ox's semmblance weareth,
Since his Gospel first declareth,
As he thence the Law's veil teareth,
Sacrifice' aim and end.
Marcus, lleo per desertum
Clamans, rugit in apertum:
Iter fiat Deo certum,
Mundum cor a crimine.
Sed Johannes, ala bina
Charitatis, aquilina
Forma, fetur in divinaa
Puriori lumine.
Mark, the lion, his voice upraises,
Crying out in desert places:
"Cleanse your hearts from all sin's traces,
For our God a way prepare!"
John, the eagle's feature having,
Earth on love's twain pinions leaving,
Soars aloft, God's truth perceiving
In light's purer atmosphere.
Ecce forma bestialis
Quam Scriptura prophetalis
Notat, sed materialis
Haec est impositio.
Currunt rotis, volant alis;
Inest sensus spiuritalis;
Rota gressus est aequalis,
Ala contemplatio.
Thus the Thus the forms of brute creation
Prophets in their revelation
Use; but in their application
All their sacred lessons bring.
Mystic meaning underlieth
Wheels that run, or wing that flieth
One consent the first implieth,
Contemplation means the wing.
Quatuor decribunt isti
Quadriformes actus Christi:
Et figurant, ut audisti,
Quisque sua formula.
Natus homo declaratur
Vitulus sacrificatur,
Leo mortem depraedatur,
Et ascendit aquila.
These four writers, in portraying
Christ, his fourfold acts displaying.
Show him - thou hast heard the saying -
Each of them distinctively;
Man - of woman generated;
Ox - in offering dedicated;
Lion - having death defeated;
Eagle - mounting to the sky.
Paradisus lis regature,
Viret, floret, foecundatur,
His abundat, his laetatur
Quatuor fluminibus:
Fons est Christus, hi aunt rivi,
Fons est altus, hi proclivi,
Ut saporem fontis vivi Ministrent fidelibus.
These four streams, through Eden flowing,
Moisture, verdure, still bestowing,
Make the flowers and fruit there growing
In rich plenty kaugh and sing
Christ the cource, these streams forth sending;
High the source, these downward trending;
That they thus a taste transcending
Of life's fount to saints may bring.
Horum rivo debriatis
Sitis crescat caritatis,
Ut de fonte pietatis
Satiemur plenius.
Horum trabat nos doctrina
Vitiorum de sentinâ,
Sicque ducat ad divina
Ab imo superius.
At their stream inebriated,
Be our love's thirst aggravated,
More completely to be sated
At a holier love's full fount!
May the doctrine they provide us
Draw us from sin's slough beside us,
An to things divine thus guide us,
As from earth we upward mount!
II. The Credibility of the Gospels would never have been denied if it were not for the philosophical and dogmatic skepticism which desires to get rid of the supernatural and miraculous at any price. It impresses itself upon men of the highest culture as well as upon the unlearned reader. The striking testimony of Rousseau is well known and need not be repeated. I will quote only from two great writers who were by no means biased in favor of orthodoxy. Dr. W. E. Channing, the distinguished leader of American Unitarianism, says (with reference to the Strauss and Parker skepticism): "I know no histories to be compared with the Gospels in marks of truth, in pregnancy of meaning, in quickening power." ... "As to his [Christ's] biographers, they speak for themselves. Never were more simple and honest ones. They show us that none in connection with Christ would give any aid to his conception, for they do not receive it .... The Gospels are to me their own evidence. They are the simple records of a being who could not have been invented, and the miraculous and more common parts of his life so hang together, are so permeated by the same spirit, are so plainly outgoings of one and the same man, that I see not how we can admit one without the other." See Channing's Memoir by his nephew, tenth ed., Boston, 1874 Vol. II., pp. 431, 434, 436. The testimony of Goethe will have with many still greater weight. He recognized in the Gospels the highest manifestation of the Divine which ever appeared in this world, and the summit of moral culture beyond which the human mind can never rise, however much it may progress in any other direction. "Ich halte die Evangelien," he says, "für durchaus ächt; denn es ist in ihnen der Abglanz einer Hoheit wirksam, die von der Person Christi ausging: die ist qöttlicher Art, wie nur je auf Erden das Göttliche erschienen ist." (Gespräche mit Eckermann, III., 371.) Shortly before his death he said to the same friend: "Wir wissen gar nicht, was wir Luther'n und der Reformation zu danken haben. Mag die geistige Cultur immer Fortschreiten, mögen die Naturwissenschaften in immer breiterer Ausdehnung und Tiefe wachsen und der menschliche Geist sick erweitern wie er will: über die Hoheit und sittliche Cultur des Christenthums, wie es in den Evangelien leuchtet, wird er nicht hinauskommen." And such Gospels Strauss and Renan would fain make us believe to be poetic fictions of illiterate Galilaeans! This would be the most incredible miracle of all.
[871] The Greek word euangelion which passed into the Latin evangelium, and through this into modern languages (French, German, Italian, etc.), means 1st, reward for good news to the messenger (in Homer); 2d, good news, glad tidings; 3d, glad tidings of Christ and his salvation (so in the New Test.); 4th, the record of these glad tidings (so in the headings of the Gospels and in ecclesiastical usage). The Saxon "gospel," i.e., God's spell or good spell (from spellian, to tell), is the nearest idiomatic equivalent for euangelion.
[872] Irenaeus very properly calls them tetramorphon to euangelion, heni pneumati sunechomenon, quadriforme evangelium quod uno spiritu continetur. Adv. Haer. III. 11, § 8.
[873] This is expressly disclaimed in John 20:30; comp. 21:25
[874] Hence Justin Martyr, in his two "Apologies" (written about 146), calls the Gospels "Memoirs" or "Memorabilia" (Apomnemoneumata) of Christ or of the Apostles, in imitation no doubt of the Memorabilia of Socrates by Xenophon. That Justin means no other books but our canonical Gospels by theme "Memoirs," which he says were read in public worship on Sunday, there can be no reasonable doubt. See especially Dr. Abbot's Authorship of the Fourth Gospel, 1880.
[875] John 20:30, 31:tauta de gegraptai hina pisteuete oti Iesous estin Christos , ho huios tou theou, kai hina pisteuontes zeen echete en to onomati autou.
[876] This characterization is very old, and goes back to Gregory Nazianzen, Carmen 33, where he enumerates the books of the New Test., and says; Mattheios men egrapsen Hebraiois thaumata Christou, Markos d Italie, Loukas Achaiidi Pasi d' Ioannes kerux megas , ouranophoites.
[877] See on this subject Fisher's Beginnings of Christianity, ch. XI.: "Water marks of Age in the New Test, Histories," pp. 363 sqq., especially p. 371.