The Foundations of the Christian Revelation

New Zealand Tablet, Volume LI, Issue 8, 21 February 1924, Page 21

The Foundations of the Christian Revelation

(By Wilfrid Parsons, S.J., in America.)

It seems to be a truth largely lost sight of nowadays that in all matters of religion God’s will is''to be sought, > not man’s. There are innumerable searchers after religious truth who never get any further in their quest than to ask themselves what they need and what they wish. But if religion S is worship and service of a Supreme Being, and that is what it is, then surely that Being is He who ,is to be pleased hi the matter, and not man. This seems to-be a rather obvious trutji; but it bears repeating, for there are not lacking men who seem to look on religion as a Spmewhat vague set of opinions and emotions that may be accepted ‘or not, as each one;, sees fit. Where then are we to religious truth? Reason of course tells us that we / must worship and serve God, but it also tells us that ,if God chooses to give us some definite expression of His will in the matter, beyond what reason lets us know./ of course that is the religion that we are bound to profess; for He is Master, we do but serve Him. Now that God can give some such expression to man is surely not to be doubled by anyone who accepts a real, personal God, infinite and all-powerful. To deny that is to limit God’s power. Man can express his thoughts to man. Are we to deny the same power to God who created man? The search then takes a step forward to this question: \Has God revealed to man the way He wishes to be worshipped? If we find that, then there >i,s nothing, to do but worship Him in that way. It is on the answer to this question that Christianity stands or falls, for it claim’s that God has revealed his way and that it itself is that revelation, unchangeable, and alone valid before God to ■the end of time, though man himself can progress in his knowledge and understanding of it. How then did God express HisMvill ’ In the Person of Christ, who claimed to come from God, and dictated in God’s name certain truths about worshipping and serving God which make up the religion which bears Christ’s name. Hence the Christian who wants to give a reasonable explanation for his "'beliefs, and others who are sincerely looking for religious truth, will first of all take up Christianity as a fact, and inquire what reason there is for stating it as a- fact. In other words they will inquire if there has-been a revelation,, an expression made to man as to how God wills to be worshipped and served. If they find this they will discover a sum of statements which on His authority men are bound to accept. Such are for instance the assertions of Christ’s Divinity, the atonement, resurrection, and so on, ' How then is to be found a reasonable basis for the fact of Christianity as a revelation from God? In the same way that any other historical event is established, by the testimony of eye witnesses, and the documents they left behind them. Now in this case there are just such documents \ purporting to give just such an account of the historic'event we are looking for. These documents are called the Gospels, and bear the names of the authors, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. y' The case then for us so far stands thus: We have to find whether the witnesses really give the account of its origin that Christianity claims for itself. And if we find thaKthey do give such an account, then we have a historical proof, just as for any other fact, and we must accept it as true. But before admitting the truth’ of a fact asserted in documents, it is first necessary to establish an answer to such questions as these: Were the documents really written by eye witnesses? Are the documents in all substantials the same as the originals? Did the eye witnesses tell the truth? These are the ordinary queries asked about any historical document before-it is given credence; if they are answered to the satisfaction of an inquirer, then he is prepared to accept the claims of these documents, ft:; First, then, were the documents really written by men who actually saw and heard what they relate? Naturally if a writer asserts that he was an eye witness and his assertion is supported by neither internal nor external evidence his testimony is rejected. It happens, however, providentially, that the Gospels are exceptionally well supported by such evidence. Take Matthew to begin with. Everything goes to show that it was written by a Jew,

u ' the very first ages of the Church, about 40-50 A.D., ten to twenty years after Christ’s death. His intense reverence for the Old Law, his more than seventy quotations from; it, his ' preoccupation about the Messias and his contempt for the Pharisees, his evident wish to show the prophecies' fulfilled in Jesus, his omission of all explanatory ■ references to Jewish customs and Palestinian geography ,\ such as we find in the other Gospels, all show a Jew writing for Jens before Christianity was definitively cut off from Jewry, \ in the minds of the people. Moreover, this Gospel from the very first ages in the Church was known and quoted as that of Matthew, Apostle and disciple of Christ. The first heretics knew it and quoted it as Matthew s; the very ancient false (apocryphal) Gospels use it; the earliest Christian writers quote it and also refer to it as Matthew’s. Now the witness of these latter is decisive. They presented it as public and. official teaching, they represented and spoke for the entire known Christian world at the time, they themselves were directly connected with the Apostolic age and so had direct access to the truth, and moreover they were guided by the soundest principles of historical science. Out of more than forty-four documents that related facts about Christ and the Apostles, they iejected all but four. No one can accuse them of trying to bolster up a doubtful case. / Mark, disciple of f*jt. Peter, is in the same secure position. His language betrays the Jew, but this time one writing for Gentiles, who did not know Jewish customs -or, geography; he certainly got his facts from eye witnesses,! as his insistence on minutiae of time and circumstance \ shows; moreover his vivid and yet at times unfavorable picture of Peter proves that he was closely connected with that Apostle and under his influence. And once again the same conclusive chorus of ancient writers attributes the Gospel to him. St. Luke also, Greek physician and (mjnpanion of St. Paul, wrote the third Gospel, according same unimpeacable witnesses, and the Gospel itself bears them out. It is in Greek written by one sure of himself in tliat language, and yet shows marked likenesses ,in style and matter to St. Paul’s. Finally, the fourth Gospel, bearing the name of St. John, written about 90100, has had strong influence on early Christian literature, is freely quoted in it as St. John’s, and bears on its face all the evidences of having been written by a Palestinian Jew, personally and intimately acquainted with Jerusalem before its fall thirty years before, and a disciple of Christ, for whom he shows marked personal affection. We are then safe in asserting that these four out of the many other documents rejected for want of evidence, are what * they claim to be, the work of men who saw the events described or at any rate had them from men w-ho saw those events. And indeed the very fact that . written by four different men, they yet show no proved contradictions with each other is of first-rate evidence in any court. Secondly, is the text of the documents as we read them the very same as that of the originals written by these four men? The evidence in this case is of another order, and constitutes one of the neatest demonstrations of the kind ever made. The ‘Greek text we have of them is the text of five manuscripts written out in the years 300-500 A.D. The fourth and fifth centuries knew them as we know them to-day. But we can go further back than that. As early as the second century many translations were made from the Greek into Coptic, Syriac and Latin, and these translations are identical in matter, word for word, with the Greek manuscripts of fourth century, proving the existence of Greek manuscripts from which they were made at the end of the first century. And if w-e recall the' jealous, almost slavish, tenacity with which the first century clung to everything Apostolic, w-e have the final /link That binds our texts to those of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and' John themselves. No change could, taken place in those years without raising a storm of protest and pf this there is not a trace. As a matter of fact the Gospel texts have more evidence for them than any accepted text of • /-profane writers. The earliest manuscripts ■ we have of Demosthenes, Sophocles, Plato, Lucretius, date from more than a thousand to fifteen hundred years after their writers, yet no one dreams of disputing their authorship. In the case of the Gospels, through the manuscripts and ■ the translations, we get back to within at least' 40 years of the

death of St. John. The manuscripts of the classics are numbered by dozens, at most by hundreds; of the Gospels we have more than 12,000 manuscripts, while in the writers of the first three centuries we find over 19,000 quotations, enough to reconstruct almost the whole Gospels, if even the manuscripts did not exist. The third and last question; and the evidence is complete. Are the men who wrote the documents we now have telling the truth? To know this we must again bo assured of three things: Were'these writers in a position to know the facts they relate? Then did they actually know the fact's?.'' And, lastly, wore they men who would tell the 'facts as they saw them? The first question is easy. Matthew ,spent three years with Christ; John was with Him perhaps £ven longer, for he was his cousin and neighbor; Mark . was the intimate of St. Peter, Luke of SS. Paul, Philip, and . James, all contemporaries and eye-witnesses. They saw what they relate, for they were present, as we know from a cloud of witnesses, Christian and profane. Then by every test we can apply they were truthful: the test of self-love they unhesitatingly relate things shameful to themselves, their lowly birth, their stupidity and denseness, their cowardice; impostors do not do that; the test of hero worship ; they 1 present their hero in defeat as we” as in triumph; the test of death; they were ready to die and did die for the truth of their testimony; sincerity can go no further. And after all is there not something inherently ridiculous in the hypothesis of some moderns that these narratives are the work of literary swindlers a hundred years later? This is to suppose that unlettered men, in different circumstances, in different parts of the world, would happen to imagine four stories completely agreeing with one another and accurately descriptive of a foreign and vanished civilisation. Some men have come to this search with their minds made up beforehand that God cannot or does not work miracles; they therefore state that any narrative which relates that He did work miracles is necessarily unhistorical even before they have examined whether it is or not. Such men are not in a position to appreciate the foregoing demonstration. But if they approach it in the truly critical spirit, prepared to accept loyally the facts as they are presented in documents proved worthy of their credence, then if ever they admitted any historical facts, they will have to admit these. They carry with them a mass of textual, historical, and psychological evidence enjoyed by no other documents of antiquity, sacred or profane. If we were to examine into the reasons why we accept the facts narrated by Tacitus, Caesar, Livy, Thucydides, or Herodotus, we will find that we have not half the evidence for believing their histories that we have for believing the Gospels as true statements of historical fact.