The first condition of any confidence in the Gospels is to ascertain that the writers lived within a reasonable time of the events described; and one hundred and fifty years of biblical scholarship have not succeeded in finding any proof of that. At present the general opinion is that Mark, the oldest Gospel, was written between 65 and 70 A.D.; and Matthew and Luke in the last decade of the first century; and John in the second century. Mark, it will be remembered, knows nothing about the miraculous birth of Christ; the first account of that turns up at least ninety years after the supposed event!
Moreover, the resurrection story and other details are not supposed, and cannot be proved by anybody, to have been in Mark by the year 70. Scholars have come to the conclusion that there existed at first a simple sketch of the life of Jesus which is the groundwork of the first three Gospels (and is best seen in Mark) and a collection of teachings which is most used by Matthew. At what date this sketch was written nobody knows. What precisely was in it nobody knows. You cannot put your finger on a single verse and say that it is part of the original Gospel. And, even if you could, there is not a scrap of evidence that it was written within thirty years of the death of Christ. Remember Ali Mohammed and his miracles!
If a religious reader thinks that he can dismiss all this as “Higher Criticism stuff,” and points out how much these critics have changed their theories and how contradictory they are, let him reflect on his own position. He trusts the Gospels without any evidence whatever; without making the least inquiry into their authority. His preachers dogmatically say that the Gospels were “inspired” – though the opening verses of Luke plainly say the contrary – and he takes their word as simply as a child does.
This “Higher Criticism,” which he hears so much reviled, is a very serious and conscientious effort of Christian divines, sustained now for more than a hundred years, to prove that the Gospels are worthy of ordinary historical credence. It has failed. The miraculous birth, the death on the cross, the resurrection and ascension, and the healing miracles, it is compelled to sacrifice altogether. By great effort it then concludes that some sort of, small Gospel or life of Jesus was in existence thirty years after the death of Christ; but that is too late to be reliable, and no one knows exactly what it said.
Moreover, while there is no evidence at all that the Gospels, our Gospels, existed before the end of the first century, there is very serious evidence that they did not. No Christian writer mentions one of our four Gospels until a hundred years after the death of Christ or makes any clear and certain quotation from any one of them. That is serious, surely. Yes, you may say, if it is true; but it may be another bit of Higher Criticism or of Rationalism. It is not. It is the very serious verdict of a committee of historians and divines appointed to study this question by the Oxford (University) Society of Historical Theology, an ecclesiastical society. They courageously published this disappointing result of their labors in “The New Testament in the Apostolic Fathers” (1905).
Pope St. Clement of Rome, for instance, wrote an important letter, which we have, about 96 A.D.; and a second letter bearing his name, though probably a Christian forgery, was written later. About the same time, or a little earlier, there were the so-called “Epistle of Barnabas” and the first part of the “Teaching of the Apostles.” These never quote from, or refer to, the Gospels. For the first three decades of the second century we have the second part of the “Teaching,” the “Pastor” (supposed to be by “Hermas”), and letters of Bishops Ignatius and Polycarp. Not one of these mentions the Gospels or makes a clear quotation from them. They quote certain words which roughly correspond to words in Matthew, Luke and (at a late date) John; but this proves nothing, as by the second century these sayings of Christ certainly circulated in the Church. We must say the same of the “Sayings of Our Lord” (or “Logia”), a second-century fragment containing seven “sayings,” two of which are in the Gospels. It has no significance whatever, unless it be to discredit the Gospels. The writer clearly knew of no Gospel collections.
It is not until about 140 or 150 A.D. that Christian writers refer to and quote from the Gospels. They are clearly known to Justin, Marcion and Papias. The latter, the Bishop of Herapolis, an ignorant and credulous man who writes a good deal which nobody now believes, is known to us only from quotations in the fourth century historian Eusebius; a man who notoriously held that the use of statements to the Church was more important than their accuracy. This fourth-century quotation of a second-century obscure bishop is the only “serious” evidence for the Gospels! Papias says that he learned from older men that Mark and Matthew really wrote Gospels. That is not evidence that any historian would credit, and, in fact, divines do not believe it.