Higher Criticism

   A position of leadership in this movement was exercised by a succession of brilliant German scholars whose work began in the latter half of the eighteenth century. These men, however, so far as I can see, had little intention of investigating the origins of Christianity with the object of discovering whether the historical evidence was satisfactory, or in what direction it pointed. They began with the assumption that the traditional views about Christian origins were false, and in particular, that the traditional Christian philosophies were false; they aimed at the creation of such theories as would enable them to substitute their own philosophies, and they were prepared to manipulate the evidence accordingly.

     First, of course, came the common eighteenth-century rationalism, which ruled out miracle and dogma, (man's mental and physical faculties, as then understood, being the measure of all things); and then came the more profound philosophies of Kant and Hegel, to which the story of Christian origins must be assimilated at all costs. It pains me to say so, but there was also a tendency to rule out of consideration the more churchly or sacramental or apostolic elements in the evidence, since they tend to support a catholic estimate of Christian origins. The task of the critic was to reconstruct a pure and undefiled ‘primitive’ Christianity according to his own heart's desire, which would be free from these objectionable features.

     The old Tübingen school of criticism developed a fantastic theoretical reconstruction of Christian origins which was taken seriously for a generation. St. Peter and St. Paul (it was maintained) were the leaders of hostile factions which divided the church in the primitive period; St. Peter supporting a more Jewish and legalistic form of the faith, and St. Paul a more gentile and individualistic form. The early catholic form of Christianity, which was admitted to have been established in the second century, was a synthesis or fusion of these two opposing forces; and many of the New Testament books were fabrications of the late second century, which were written to establish a false picture of an apostolic harmony which had never existed. Only a few epistles of St. Paul, and the Revelation of St. John, were permitted to have existed in the first century.

     This learned perversion of history enjoyed a high reputation among the intellectuals, and exercised a powerful influence at the time, but could not, of course, maintain itself against a genuinely scholarly and critical examination of the historical and literary evidence, under which it completely collapsed; but in spite of that, many of its general principles have passed into the modern Protestant tradition, and in extreme cases what we may call the general pattern of thought reappears without much change.

     To take an example: the labours of the more realistic scholars, have amply vindicated the first-century date and historical character of the Acts of the Apostles, and yet we still find it treated with undue scepticism or even suspicion by the more advanced protestant scholars. In particular the account of the council of apostles and elders in Acts 15, is quite often treated as a falsification of history; and yet there is still no actual evidence to support this hostile attitude; it is a hang-over from the Tübingen period, and is maintained because the chapter in question tends to support a catholic view of Christian origins.

     Learned scholars who have inherited the Tübingen attitude continue to work on the basis of supposed ‘significant’ contradictions between St. Paul in Galatians and St. Luke in the Acts, a theory which can be supplied with apparent support by the expedient of dating the writing of Galatians after the council instead of before it; and further support can be mustered for it by a microscopic examination of the various minor discrepancies in order or emphasis between the two documents, which are magnified into ‘grave’ or ‘significant’ inconsistencies, but are, as a matter of fact, natural occurrences in honest and independent evidence.

     The same irrational persistence of unrealistic theory meets us in the prevailing treatment of the fourth gospel. There are problems in connection with the fourth gospel, of course, but it happens that the external historical evidence for its connection with the apostle John is overwhelmingly strong. But the successors of the Tübingen school, like their predecessors, have little realistic feeling for history or for personalities, and so the excellent historical evidence of Papias and Justin and Irenaeus is not given the consideration which it should rightly have.

     The time has come for a robust protestant criticism to rid itself of the outworn theories which necessitate this rejection or manipulation of solid evidence.