J. Gresham Machen Bibliography

THE PRINCETON THEOLOGICAL REVIEW 670 ness. The reader is given new views of certain truths, and cautioned against many popular misinterpretations of these familiar chapters. Princeton. CHARLES R. ERDMAN. THE JOHANNINE WRITINGS. By PAUL W. SCHMIEDEL, Professor of Theology at Zürich. Translated by Maurice A. Canney, M.A. London: Adam and Charles Black. 1908. Pp. xi, 287. (New York: The Macmillan Company. $1.50 net.) This book is a translation of three parts (1. Reihe, 8, 10. u. 12. Heft) of the Religionsgeschichtliche Volksbücher, but incorporates changes and additions that have been made by the author since the booklets originally appeared in 1906. The alterations affect details only; the general character of the work is the same. Though intended not for specialists but for the general public, it is a notable expression of the author’s views with regard to the Fourth Gospel. Part i, comprising pp. 1-166, is devoted to a comparison of the Fourth Gospel with the Synoptics. The author first seeks to establish the irreconcilable difference between the two accounts, and then argues for the absolute rejection of the Johannine account as an historical narrative. Such a line of argument would seem to be impressive by its very simplicity. But, unfortunately, the comparison can often not be made between the Fourth Gospel taken as a whole and the Synoptics taken as a whole, but only between one element in the Fourth Gospel (regarded as the fundamental element) and one element in the Synop- tics (again regarded as the fundamental element). Take as an example the supposed difference in the view held of the person of Jesus. If it could be said that the Synoptics present a human Christ, and John a divine Christ, the matter would be quite simple. As a matter of fact, however, “the Synoptics agree with John in sketching” the picture of Jesus “with a grandeur which raises Jesus to a marked extent above the standard of what is human” (p. 25). On the other hand, the true humanity of Jesus cannot really be eliminated from John. “I thirst” (John xix. 28), and “Jesus wept” (John xi. 35) might seem to preclude the attempt. According to Schmiedel, however, we are not “meant to suppose that Jesus was really thirsty”, for the Evangelist “says ex- pressly that Jesus spoke the word in order that a prophecy of the Old Testament (Ps. xxii. 16) might be fulfilled” (p. 28). This bit of exegesis will repay examination. In the first place, the author men- tions Ps. xxii. 16 as the Old Testament passage referred to, whereas others who regard the thirst as the fulfilment of a definite prophecy think of the much more obvious passage, Ps. lxix. 22. The common view should certainly have been noticed, even (or perhaps especially) in a popular discussion. In the second place, the view of many scholars (including Meyer and Holtzmann) that ἵνα τελειωθῇ ἡ γραφή goes with τετέλεσται rather than with λέγει Διψῶ has been altogether ignored. And finally, quite aside from such details, Schmiedel has arrived at a view RECENT LITERATURE 671 of the passage which needs only to be clearly stated in order to be recognized as absurd. When Jesus said, “I thirst”, he was not really thirsty at all. Therefore the prophecy was not really fulfilled, and the only purpose of Jesus’ words was to make the people suppose that the prophecy had been fulfilled-a prophecy, moreover, the real fulfilment of which would have been prejudicial to the divine dignity of Jesus. Surely such was not the meaning of the Evangelist. As to the other passage, Schmiedel supposes that, in the mind of the Evangelist, Jesus wept, not out of any sympathy for the relatives of Lazarus, “but simply because they did not believe in his power to work miracles”. Schmiedel is particularly offended because Jesus waits two days after the news of Lazarus’ death has arrived. In reality, however, that waiting displays not lack of human sympathy but the same subordination of human sympathy to higher ends which the Jesus of the Synoptists demands with even greater sharpness. “If any man cometh unto me, and hateth not his own father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple”. The modern elimination of what may be called the catastrophic in Christ- ianity, the modern subordination of Christianity to good citizenship, is fully as much opposed to the Synoptics as to John. On the other hand, it is significant that it is John who emphasizes the special love that Jesus felt for definite individuals. In Schmiedel’s refutation of attempts at harmonizing the Fourth Gospel with the Synoptics, the discussions of Matt. xxiii. 37 (Lk. xiii. 34) and of Matt. xi. 27 (Lk. x. 22) perhaps deserve special mention. Matt. xxii. 37 seems to confirm the Johannine account by presupposing several journeys of Jesus to Jerusalem. This conclusion Schmiedel avoids by denying the authenticity of the verse as an utterance of Jesus. “An utterance put into the mouth of the Wisdom of God by a Jewish author has been wrongly regarded as a saying of Jesus” (р. 61). The course of reasoning by which the words are assigned to the “Wisdom of God” cannot here be reviewed. But what gave rise to the first suspicion was the third person occurring where the second might have been expected: “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, that kills the prophets and stones them that are sent unto her”, etc. “Jerusalem is therefore apostrophised only in the second half of the sentence; in the first some- thing is said about the city without the city itself being addressed. No one who has a thought clearly in his mind, and intends to write it down in an equally simple sentence, would express himself in this way” (p. 58). The difficulty is solved, Schmeidel continues, by the hypothesis that our Evangelists or rather their source used a book in which the sentence appeared without any apostrophe, and then introduced the apostrophe “without noticing that, having made this alteration, the sentence should have been made to read differently at the beginning” (p. 59). But perhaps an easier explanation of the linguistic difficulty is sufficient-" Πρὸς αὐτήν for πρός σε is to be explained by the Semitic preference for the third person in attributes and relative clauses which 672 THE PRINCETON THEOLOGICAL REVIEW belong with a vocative" (Wcllhausen, das Evangelium Matthaei, p. 121). And even a transition from exclamation to direct address would not be so harsh as to justify Schmiedel’s far-reaching conclusions. Matt. xi. 27 seems to teach a christology very much like the Johan- nine. Here Schmiedel has recourse to textual criticism (cf. the same author’s fuller discussion in Protestantische Monatshefte, 1900, pp. 1-20). A translation of our Greek manuscripts reads: “All things have been delivered unto me of my Father: and no one knoweth the Son, save the Father; neither doth any know the Father, save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son willeth to reveal him.” But “all ecclesias- tical and heretical writers of the second century, who give us any infor- mation about this passage, entirely or in part support the following version: ‘All things have been delivered to me of my Father, and no one hath known the Father save the Son, neither the Son savc the Father, and he to whomsoever the Son willeth to reveal him” (p. 62). According to Schmiedel, this is the original text. The important vari- ants are ἔγνω for ἐπιγινώσκει (γινώσκει in Luke) and the transposition of the clauses. By the aorist ἔγνω, “a definite point is fixed at which the knowledge first began . . . and since the knowledge spoken of first [i. e. Jesus’ knowledge of the Father] was not gained earlier than during the earthly life of Jesus, we cannot suppose that the knowledge referred to in the second clause belongs to a earlier date” (p. 63). The meaning, Schmiedel concludes, is simply this: that Jesus alone has learned that God is a loving Father; He alone can feel himself to be a Son of God; His sonship is as yet unknown to all save the Father, and He himself must tell others of it. But even if Schmiedel’s text were correct, it is doubtful whether metaphysics would be elim- inated. For if Jesus’ unique knowledge of God as Father is the sum and substance of the passage, whereas His unique position as Son is a mere inference from that, why should the Son rather than the Father appear in the second clause as the subject of the Son’s revela- tion to other men? To suit Schmiedel’s interpretation perfectly the passage should have read simply οὐδεὶς ἔγνω τὸν πατέρα εἰ μὴ ὁ υἱὸς καὶ οἷς ἂν ὁ υἱὸς ἀποκαλύψῃ, which, indeed, is approximately what Wellhausen and Harnack suppose to have been the original form of the saying. This text, however, lacks even such attestation as can be adduced for Schmiedel’s text. And even if it should be adopted, the similarity to the teaching of the Fourth Gospel would still be apparent (cf. Chapman in Journal of Theological Studies, 1909, p. 565). As a matter of fact, however, the reading of all Greek manuscripts (except U) cannot be so easily set aside. The second-century attestation of Schmiedel’s text, even after it has been discounted by the considerations adduced by Chapman (op. cit., pp. 552-566), is very interesting, it is true. But there is also second-century patristic evidence for both peculiarities of our canonical text, and indeed Irenaeus in one passage (despite his inconsistency elsewhere) distinctly expresses his preference for this text and lays the other text to the charge of those who denied the existence of all true knowledge of God before the coming of Christ. Irenaeus may be RECENT LITERATURE 673 correct in saying that that other text was due to dogmatic correction. But more probably the corruption had a more innocent origin. The substitution of the aorist for the present may have been due to the aorist παρεδόθη immediately before: the transposition may have arisen from the feeling that the Father would naturally be mentioned before the Son (Weiss in Meyer’s Kommentar, 9te Aufl., on Matt. xi. 27). It is hardly necessary to have recourse to the hypothesis of an extra-canonical gospel (cf. Bousset, die Evangeliencitate Justins des Märtyrers, pp. 100-103). Schmiedel not only does not regard the Fourth Gospel as a true record of facts, but also does not believe that the author himself was much concerned about reporting facts. In Jn. iii. 22, we are told that Jesus baptized; whereas in iv. 2, we read, “and yet Jesus himself bap- tized not, but his disciples”. From this, the conclusion is deduced that John “is not an author who is anxious to report nothing false; where it suits his purpose, he reports it” (p. 55). But if the author was thus going to add “a touch which, in reality, as he himself knows, does not at all harmonize with the truth”, he would hardly contradict himself expressly and carefully a few lines further down. The apparent self- correction exhibits rather the simplicity and artlessness of the writer, and creates a decided presumption in its favor. Again, Schmiedel is so firmly convinced of the originally symbolic meaning of the miracles of the Fourth Gospel (as of such a Synoptic miracle as the feeding of the five thousand), that he can even argue gravely the question as to whether the miracles were facts for the author himself. Schmiedel regards the author of the Gospel as influenced by Gnos- ticism positively as well as negatively, but what he adduces in proof can hardly be called convincing. The thought that matter is essentially evil is effectually excluded by John i. 14, καὶ ὁ λόγος σάρξ ἐγένετο -a weighty utterance to which Schmiedel has done but scant justice. (p. 152). Schmiedel himself admits that the Gnostic division between God and the world has been softened by the Fourth Gospel. As for the Gnostic ineradicable dualism between the children of God and the children of the devil, that is excluded by the δεῖ ὑμᾶς γεννηθῆναι ἄνωθεν of John iii. 7. The third verse of that chapter cannot exclude the possi- bility that that which is born of the flesh may become spirit (p. 60). For the new birth is such a change. In Part ii (pp. 169-277) the author discusses the “origin and value of the Gospel, Epistles, and Revelation of John”. The Gospel is assigned to the period between 132 (date of Bar Cochba’s insurrection) and 140. Such an extremely late dating can be arrived at only by neglecting the weight of convergent lines of independent testimony. Whether the unknown writer intended to have his book regarded as the work of John the Apostle (in other words, whether the Fourth Gospel is a pseudonymous writing), Schmiedel is unable to say. At any rate, he regards this as a matter of indifference. The First Epistle of John, according to Schmiedel, stands in some- what the same double relation to Gnosticism as does the Gospel. Its 43 674 THE PRINCETON THEOLOGICAL REVIEW main purpose is to oppose the Gnostics, yet it agrees with them to a very large extent, though it stands nearer than the Gospel to the ordinary faith of the Church. By an even more extreme exercise of the same kind of criticism that has set up an opposition between the Fourth Gospel and the Synoptics, Schmiedel concludes that the author of the Epistle was not the same as the author of the Gospel. In the Epistle, the second coming of Christ is expected to take place on a definite day; the death of Christ is represented as His most important redemptive act; the dualism between God and the world is not so extreme as in the Gospel; “the Word of Life” appears instead of the designation “Logos”. In no one of these particulars can an absolute opposition be set up. The coming of Christ, for example, as Schmiedel admits, appears in John v. 28f. clearly as an objective event in the future. To regard this as inconsistent with Christ’s presence in the hearts of believers is to lose sight of one of the deepest and most fruitful ideas of Christianity-the idea, namely, that the Christian already has in principle the blessings that will be fully realized only in heaven. If the difference between the Gospel and the Epistle is one of emphasis merely, surely that is not inconsistent with identity of authorship. The Second and Third Epistles Schmiedel assigns to an unknown writer who probably wished them to be ascribed to John the Presbyter. They were probably earlier than the Gospel and the First Epistle. The most important sections of the Apocalypse are assigned to the years 68-70; the final redaction may not have been far from the date fixed by Irenaeus (95 or 96). Schmiedel does not exclude with abso- lute positiveness the view that it was John the Presbyter who published the work in its completed form. Much of Schmiedel’s book is highly instructive. There are real diffi- culties in the Fourth Gospel, which need to be viewed from many angles. But unfortunately our author’s lack of logical perspective has led him so to confuse the important things with the unimportant, that the ordi- nary reader will hardly gain any very clear idea of the real questions at issue. Schmiedel’s book does not give the impression of any very deep understanding of the Gospel as a whole. The translation is only moderately successful the harsh literalness has not always been combined with perfect accuracy. On p. 215, “Wir brauchen aber nicht einmal dabei stehen zu bleiben dass” is translated “We need not stop to think, as regards this matter, that”-to the serious confusion of the reader. Princeton. J. GRESHAM MACHEN. GESCHICHTE DES NEUTESTAMENTLICHEN KANONS. Von Lic. theol. Dr. phil. JOHANNES LEIPOLDT, Privatdozent an der Universität Halle- Wittenberg. Erster Teil. Die Entstehung. Leipzig. J. C. Hin- richs’sche Buchhandlung. 1907. Pp. viii, 288. Marks 3.60, geb. 4.50. Zweiter Teil. Mittelalter und Neuzeit. 1908. Pp. iv. 181. Mark 2.40, geb. 3.30.