FROM EGYPTIAN 
 RUBBISH-HEAPS 
 
 Five Popular Lectures on the 3\[ew Testament, 
 
 with a Sermon, 
 
 delivered at d^prthfield, Massachusetts, 
 in vfugust, 1914 
 
 BY 
 
 JAMES HOPE MOULTON 
 
 PROFESSOR IN MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY 
 
 AND 
 TUTOR AT DIDSBURY WESLEYAN COLLEGE 
 
 7 , 
 
 / / 
 
 Bonbon 
 
 CHARLES H. KELLY 
 25-35 CITY ROAD, AND 26 PATERNOSTER Row, E.C
 
 First Edition. 1916
 
 MR. AND MRS. W. R. MOODY 
 
 IN LOVING MEMORY OF OUR DEAREST 
 
 WHO 
 
 SINCE THOSE DAYS OF HAPPY FELLOWSHIP 
 
 HAVE GONE INTO THE BRIGHT LAND 
 
 TO SING THE NEW SONG
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAP. PAGE 
 I. EGYPTIAN RUBBISH-HEAPS AND THE STUDY 
 
 OF THE NEW TESTAMENT . . .II 
 
 IT. A SHEAF OF OLD LETTERS FROM EGYPT . 31 
 
 III. SOME SIDELIGHTS UPON PAUL . . -50 
 
 IV. HOW WE GOT OUR GOSPELS . . -7% 
 V. THE FULLNESS OF THE TIME . . . 105 
 
 VI. THE NEW SONG 129
 
 PREFACE 
 
 ON July 31, 1914, the ill-fated Lusitania landed at 
 New York after what proved her last peace voyage. 
 A week later two of her passengers proceeded to the 
 Conference at Northfield, where some two thousand 
 Christian people were gathered in sight of the grave 
 of D. L. Moody. It was very hard for us all, 
 doubly hard for Britons, to detach our thoughts 
 even partially from the horrors that were already 
 beginning horrors which will long make it im- 
 possible to name even the best of Germans without 
 a sharp stab of pain. But we were studying the only 
 Book that can ever bring peace and comfort to men 
 in their direst need, and there is no fear that those 
 who know will think we were ' fiddling while Rome 
 burned.' 
 
 There is, however, a very obvious apology due 
 for the publication of this little book. Every 
 scholar will see at once its scrappiness and imper- 
 fection, leaving out so much that seems to call for 
 mention, and recording many personal speculations 
 and theories which my better-qualified fellow- 
 craftsmen will perhaps want to cancel. I can only 
 insist on the implications of the word Popular in 
 
 7
 
 8 Preface 
 
 the sub-title. Popular lectures to audiences deeply 
 interested in the subject, but including few experts, 
 should aim at stimulating further study by freshness 
 of treatment, and presentation of matter which 
 will capture attention, even if not claiming a place 
 in any systematic handbook. I confess there are 
 a good many things in this little book which ought 
 to have seen the light first in technical journals, 
 well provided with proofs and references. I can 
 only plead that I am overloaded just now with the 
 production of technical matter, and must offer these 
 hints to the wider public if they are to appear at all. 
 Both the scholar and the general reader are at least 
 warned. I am correcting the press thousands of 
 miles away from my library, and other shortcomings 
 may well be due to this disadvantage. The lec- 
 tures were originally taken down by a stenographer 
 for the Northfield Record of Christian Work, and 
 freely corrected by myself to make them read 
 better. I had no time to do more, but the time I 
 had to spend suggested the possibility that without 
 further polishing they might interest a larger circle. 
 Hence the kind permission to reprint was sought 
 and readily given. 
 
 Without losing two or three months in writing for 
 leave, I have dedicated the little book to our hosts 
 who made that August week so memorable to us by 
 their lavish and genial hospitality. They and I
 
 Preface 9 
 
 alike have traversed the Valley of the Shadow since 
 then. What we thought were early morn and noon- 
 tide have suddenly shown the sunset glow, and 
 messages of comfort, which in the spoken word were 
 general, have in the Dedication come very near home. 
 I am now for a year alone in a distant land, trying 
 to teach the New Song to some lips of them that are 
 dumb. It is the only music that can permanently 
 solace either the solitary mourner or the nations 
 where wellnigh every house has one dead. And 
 so, in spite of all the changes that have come, I 
 send my song across the sea, and pray that some 
 notes of it may reach those who ' know me not, yet 
 weep with me.' 
 
 J. H. M. 
 
 Y.M.C.A., BYCULLA, BOMBAY, 
 New Year's Day 1916.
 
 I 
 
 EGYPTIAN RUBBISH-HEAPS AND THE 
 STUDY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 
 
 I AM trying to give you some sidelights upon 
 important things in the New Testament, and I am 
 going to give them, not as things which everybody 
 knows already, or as things about which there is no 
 question. They come from recent opinion, and 
 some are speculation. Sometimes speculation may be 
 wrong, but at least it may possibly prove stimulating. 
 The documents about which I am going to speak 
 this morning are documents which have been 
 known to a certain extent for over a hundred 
 years ; but it is a very strange thing to reflect 
 that, although known, although actually published, 
 they were not in the hands of scholars likely to 
 read them, and practically nobody paid any atten- 
 tion to them. Indeed, so far was the opposite 
 true that one of the three greatest biblical scholars 
 England produced in the nineteenth century, 
 Bishop Lightfoot, remarked as early as 1863 that 
 if we could only get hold of a large number _of 
 private letters Jrom individuals who never thought 
 that their writings^ would Jbe read by after ages,
 
 12 Egyptian Rubbish-heaps 
 
 we should have a unique way of learning the 
 meaning of Biblical Greek. And all the time there 
 were two or three volumes of such documents 
 which Lightfoot might have read. If he had only 
 read them, I believe he would have anticipated 
 by fifty years the discovery made in our time. 
 
 I have said that from the sands of Egypt have 
 come to us vast numbers of documents from 
 antiquity. The excavations that have been made 
 in Egypt, especially during the last twenty years 
 or so, have brought these documents to light by 
 the hundred thousand. We have now a large 
 library of books in which these old papers are 
 made available for our study. All nations have 
 co-operated in this fruitful work. Among your 
 own American scholars I would especially mention 
 my friend Professor Goodspeed, of Chicago. In 
 Great Britain the foremost place belongs to those 
 famous Oxford pioneers Drs. Grenfell and Hunt. 
 Then there have been the busy investigators from 
 Paris, Lille, Leipzig, Berlin, and many another 
 place, who have all been at work gathering together 
 these documents from antiquity, reading them, 
 translating them, annotating and indexing them. 
 
 What is the nature of them and where do they 
 come from ? Well, to begin with, they come 
 from rubbish-heaps. It seems to have been the 
 custom in Egypt in the olden days not tojburn
 
 And the Study of the New Testament 13 
 
 waste paper, but to dump it outside of the town, 
 and then let the sand of the desert sweep over it. 
 Egypt, you remember, is the country where it 
 hardly ever rains. 1 It is out of this sand that we 
 get these documents, perfectly fresh after thousands 
 of years. How many thousands of years is best 
 illustrated by the fact that some accounts have 
 been found which belong, they say, to the thirty- 
 sixth century before Christ. 
 
 These documents are written upon the paper 
 of antiquity. Our word paper is, as you know, 
 taken from the word papyrus, which word I shall 
 use during these lectures. I might tell you the 
 way in which this writing material was made. 
 They used the papyrus plant, a plant with a very 
 long straight stem filled with pith. It grew in 
 the marshes of the River Nile. We are all familiar 
 with the word from the story of Moses. The little 
 basket that contained the baby Moses was put 
 among the ' papyri ' in the Nile. These reeds were 
 gathered, cut open, the strips of pith taken out, 
 laid upon a flat table and soaked with clayey water. 
 On top of them another layer of strips was laid 
 crosswise. ^Then it was rolled with a heavy roller, 
 put out in the sun to dry, and the paper was ready 
 to be written upon. 
 
 *I said 'never' in my lecture. Then in October, 1915, I had 
 my first glimpse of Egypt and we landed at Port Said in a shower !
 
 14 Egyptian Rubbish-heaps 
 
 Now this paper when it was done with was,_as 
 I have said, simply thrown away. The sand came^ 
 up and covered it. Another layer of paper_accu- 
 mulated, and the sand coy^red_that__j.lso. The 
 excavators are able to-day to show us where we 
 are most likely to find this paper. Drs. Grenfell 
 and Hunt have been for many winters carrying 
 on researches in some specially favoured spots, 
 where they have been very careful to preserve 
 everything they have found. When documents 
 are found in pieces, these pieces must be carefully 
 put together, so that the investigators can study 
 them. 
 
 These papyri have their characteristic difficulties. 
 Papyrus is very brittle, and a grea^many of these 
 documents are remarkably like the _Irishrrian's 
 coat, of which it was said that it mostly consisted 
 of fresh air. When you have documents consisting 
 mainly of holes when you have a few holes and 
 then a few words and then more holes, it takes 
 a great deal of skill to be able to read them; 
 but it is perfectly marvellous how highly trained 
 observers can read things not there calculate how 
 many letters must be put into a space in order 
 to fill it up, and do it so carefully that there is 
 little danger of a mistake. All this labour goes 
 to the composition of the volumes I am describing ; 
 and when the transcripts are complete there is
 
 And the Study of the New Testament 15 
 
 still the commentary to write and the indispensable 
 toil of the indexing. 
 
 But I must tell you that these documents come 
 from other places as well, and particularly from 
 tombs. The tombs of ancient Egypt are the 
 places from which in all ages men have been recover- 
 ing relics of antiquity. The ancient Egyptians, 
 as you know, had a very strong belief in the con- 
 tinued existence of the soul ; and they thought 
 that when the man was put in the grave it was 
 necessary for him to be provided for in every way. 
 Especially it seems to have been thought necessary 
 that he should have his favourite reading ; so 
 
 they buried with him copies of L^h^J^ks he 
 loved to read. I am afraid we have very unkindly 
 taken away large numbers of these books, which 
 repose in our libraries to-day. On one occasion 
 Drs. Grenfell and Hunt excavated a tomb which 
 gave them a great deal of trouble. What was 
 their disgust when at last they found that a tomb 
 which promised so richly contained only mum- 
 mified crocodiles ! The crocodile was, you remember, 
 a god in ancient Egypt. I rather think that that 
 was politic, for it clearly might be wise to keep 
 such a dangerous beast in good humour by deifying 
 him. When orders were given that the tomb 
 be abandoned, one of the workmen, vexed at so 
 many hours of useless digging, broke with his
 
 16 Egyptian Rubbish-heaps 
 
 spade the back of one of the crocodiles, and behold ! 
 from the interior of the beast there came rolls and 
 rolls of paper. The explorers found this was mostly 
 material written in the third century B.C. ; and the 
 waste paper which came out of the crocodiles in that 
 tomb was enough to make almost two big books full. 
 
 There is one other kind of writing material 
 which you would not think of. The^ajtideji^otteiy^ 
 was generally not glazed, and it took writing very 
 well. That was convenient, for although the pottery 
 was not so nice to look at or to use, at the same 
 time it had advantages. Suppose a piece of it 
 dropped and smashed jntq a_dozen fragments. 
 These fra^eivtsj^re^ajve^andjvhen .the mistress 
 of the house wanted, to send a note to a friend, 
 or when the master wanted to send a receipt, or 
 a bill, or a cheque, a fragment of broken pottery 
 was used for the writing ; and we have to-day 
 multitudes of these ostraca ' treasure ' veritably 
 ' in earthen vessels,' as Paul puts it. Such, then, 
 are the materials about which I am speaking. 
 
 Now what is there written upon them ? Some- 
 times the documents contained in these old papers 
 are literary. We have a very large number of 
 new literary finds. We have classical writings, 
 some that we have had before and some quite 
 new. Not only so, but we have a great many 
 documents bearing directly upon the New Testament.
 
 And the Study of the New Testament 17 
 
 We have, for instance, a precious fragment manu- 
 script of the first page of the Greek New Testament 
 of the third century A.D., a good hundred years 
 older than the oldest manuscript we possess. There 
 is also a manuscript of the fourth century, of the 
 Epistle to the Hebrews. That is a great find for 
 us, because it happens to have some parts complete 
 in that portion of the Epistle where the greatest 
 of all manuscripts, the Vatican manuscript, comes 
 to an end. 
 
 But there is one precious half-sheet of paper, 
 very tattered and torn, which must have given 
 its discoverers a thrill of delight when they 
 read thereon, half a dozen times repeated, the 
 two words : ' Jesus saith.' Some of the sayings 
 thus introduced we have in our Gospels already. 
 There is our Lord's word about the mote and 
 the beam, and (in an expanded form) that 
 about the city set upon the hill. Then there 
 are other sayings not found in our Gospels 
 at all, about which we have no information 
 outside. I myself believe that they are real and 
 genuine fragments from the teachings of Jesus, 
 possibly changed and damaged in the process of 
 transmission, but at the same time beginning 
 from Him. For, when you come to think about 
 it, to invent a saying which anybody could possibly 
 attribute to Him who spake as never man spake, 
 
 B
 
 iS Egyptian Rubbish-heaps 
 
 is an almost impossible task to set even those 
 who have made the closest study of the Great 
 Teacher's style. One of these new sayings runs 
 thus : ' Jesus saith, Wherever there are two, they 
 are not without God ; and where there is one only, 
 I say I am with him. Raise the stone, and there 
 thou shalt find Me ; cleave the wood, and there 
 am I.' There is the characteristic parabolic form ; 
 there is also the surface obscurity which makes 
 one feel that if it had been forged the inventor 
 would have made the meaning of the pregnant 
 aphorism more obvious. The depth of meaning 
 which rewards a little study of it makes it highly 
 probable that the words fell from the Master's lips. 
 I might say more about these discoveries of 
 literary and biblical material, but I want to talk 
 to you of some things that at first sight seem 
 entirely secular and utterly uninteresting. But they 
 prove to be full of valuable information with regard 
 to the language and meaning of the New Testament. 
 In these rubbish-heaps you find all the kinds of 
 writing you wouicf expect to find in sacks of waste 
 paper collected down street nowadays. In one 
 house there is a lawyer's office ; lower down there 
 is a shop ; next door a private house. Farther 
 on we pass a school, a church, a court-house, the 
 government offices, __ __and__so_j3n. Suppose waste 
 paper collected from all these, you can picture
 
 And the Study of the New Testament 19 
 
 the very large variety of documents included, 
 and wilfsee how many characteristics of our modern 
 life they would illustrate, especially if among them 
 there are many private letters, from_peop^e__of_ all 
 ages and Hegrees of culture. Now that is exactly 
 what we have got in these Egyptian rubbish-heaps. 
 We have official documents, some of them very 
 much elaborated. Petitions to officials account 
 for a good many papyri. Procedure in what 
 seem to us decidedly urgent matters was very 
 deliberate in ancient Egypt. Thus before a house- 
 holder could get a burglar arrested he had to address 
 a formal petition to the proper official, setting 
 forth his grievance in detail. 1 The waste paper 
 of a government office accordingly presents us 
 with various pictures of private life in documents 
 of this kind. 
 
 Now let me mention in a word or two what we 
 may get from the more definitely official forms 
 and papers. I want to speak especially of one 
 point. A large number of the papyri are census, 
 papers. You will remember how there has been 
 for many years past serious difficulty about a 
 
 1 I noticed a good illustration of this in a street in Bombay, where 
 a signboard gave a man's calling as ' Authorized Petition-writer.' 
 The sameness of the petitions shows that this calling flourished in 
 ancient Egypt. By the way, those who want to read specimens of 
 these and other papyrus documents should get the excellent selection 
 (in Greek and English) entitled Greek Papyri, by my friend and fellow 
 labourer, Prof. George Milligan (Cambridge University Press).
 
 20 Egyptian Rubbish-heaps 
 
 noteworthy verse in the Gospel of Luke, in the 
 second chapter. That chapter begins, as you 
 know, with the statement that in those days there 
 went forth a decree from Caesar Augustus that 
 all the inhabitants of the world that is, of the 
 Roman Empire should be enrolled in a census. 
 ' This was the first enrolment made when Quirinius 
 was governor of Syria.' Fifty years ago historians 
 who read those words were forced to say 
 that they contained almost as many mistakes as 
 it was possible to get into two lines. Even those 
 who were most unwilling to admit that Luke had 
 made such mistakes found themselves obliged to 
 have recourse to conjectures which, I am afraid, 
 sounded much like special pleading. But the 
 explanation some of us kept hoping for has come, 
 and come mainly through the papyri. First came 
 the proof, from the masses of census papers found 
 among our new sources, that every fourteen years 
 there was a general enrolment. For, fortunately, 
 the papers are dated. This is their normal style : 
 ' In the year so and so of the Emperor so and so ' 
 then would follow the whole string of his titles 
 ' I, A. B., son of C. D., aged x years, with a straight 
 nose, black hair, scar on my right shin, enroll 
 myself, together with E. F., my wife, aged y years,' 
 and so on, with name and description of each 
 person. The census paper would proceed further
 
 And the Study of the New Testament 21 
 
 with a statement of effects. They had twenty 
 sheep, two camels, and their house faced a particular 
 street on the south, and adjoined somebody's 
 garden on the west, and so forth. It is reasonable 
 to assume that as Egypt was under the Imperial 
 Roman Government at that time, there was a 
 similar fourteen years' census taken in other 
 parts of the world. Now we know that there was 
 a census taken in the year A.D. 6. We actually 
 possess a census paper from the census of A.D. 34, 
 and probably one irom A.D. 20. The only thing we 
 have to conjecture and it becomes highly reason- 
 able to conjecture now is that not only was 
 there one in the year A.D. 6, but that there was 
 also one in the year 8 B.C., which on other 
 grounds has become a more and more probable 
 date for the birth of Jesus. 
 
 Now for Luke's second ' blunder,' for there 
 were three chief blunders attributed to him. It 
 was regarded as certain that if there was a census 
 people did not have to go up to any ancestral 
 town for it. Well, but we have now got two or 
 three pages from a Roman official's letter-book, 
 dated A.D. 104, and in it we read a rescript from 
 the prefect of Egypt ordering that all people are 
 to go back to the county in which they live within 
 the next .six weeks in order to be ready for the 
 census. Exit blunder number two !
 
 22 Egyptian Rubbish-heaps 
 
 What about blunder number three ? Quirinius 
 was governor of Syria in the year A.D. 6. We 
 know that, and he carried out the census in that 
 year. Therefore, it is a blunder when Luke tells 
 us that he was looking after a census somewhere 
 about 8 B.C. Moreover, we actually know the 
 name of the man who was governor of Syria in 
 that year, and it is not Quirinius. But about a 
 couple of years ago Sir William Ramsay dug up 
 a stone which shows that Quirinius was in Syria 
 at that time after all. He had been sent there 
 especially, as an extraordinary commissioner, to 
 look after the census, which was a new thing and 
 likely to be unpopular. I suppose it was because 
 he did such good work that he was sent to the job 
 again when the next fourteen years were over. 
 So you see how with the aid of these rubbish-heaps 
 of Egypt and the stones of Asia Minor we can 
 show what an excellent historian Luke was after 
 
 all 
 
 Let me spend the remaining part of this hour 
 in showing you how the non-literary papyri of 
 all sorts help in the interpretation of the New 
 Testament. I proceed to describe a memorable 
 discovery made by a great scholar, a dear personal 
 friend of mine, Adolf Deissmann, of the University 
 of Berlin. I hope many of you have read his 
 books. There is no more absolutely fascinating
 
 And the Study of the New Testament 23 
 
 book than his Light from the Ancient East. 
 Adolf Deissmann, who is still under fifty, made 
 twenty years ago a great discovery. He was 
 only a young pastor when, in a library one day, 
 he saw on the table a book that had just come in, 
 a new section of the Berlin Greek papyri. The 
 Berlin collection now makes four splendid volumes, 
 in which the sheets are lithographed and signed 
 by the scholars who had deciphered them. Deiss- 
 mann picked up this book casually and turned 
 over the pages till he came to the name of a friend 
 of his at the bottom of a page. This stimulated 
 his curiosity. He read the page through, and as 
 he read the thought flashed across his mind : ' Why, 
 this is just like the Greek^of the New Testament.' 
 You may imagine that he immediately began to 
 read other papyri. So it was that in the year 
 1895 there came out a little unpretentious book 
 with the plain title Bible Studies. Two years 
 later there was a sequel, More Bible Studies, and 
 the two books are now put together in an English 
 volume. 
 
 Let me show the precise nature of this discovery. 
 Scholars who have studied the Greek Testament 
 through generations past have always been struck 
 by the strange difference between the Greek of 
 this little Book and all the other Greek, not only 
 of previous ages, but of its own age. It is very
 
 24 Egyptian Rubbish-heaps 
 
 natural that the Greek of the first century A.D. 
 should differ much from the Greek of the Attic 
 period of the fourth or fifth centuries B.C. Why, 
 just think of the difference between the English 
 of Chaucer and the English of to-day. Let me 
 repeat, in the pronunciation of the time, the first 
 few lines from the Prologue of Chaucer's Canterbury 
 Tales : 
 
 Whan that Aprille with hise shoures soote 
 The droghte of March hath perced to the roote, 
 And bathed every veyne in swich licour 
 Of which vertu engendred is the flour ; 
 Whan Zephirus eek with his swete breeth 
 Inspired hath in every holt and heeth 
 The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne 
 Hath in the Ram his halfe cours yronne. 
 
 I daresay few in this audience have known what 
 I was saying. Some might even question whether 
 I was speaking English at all. Yet many of these 
 words are the same now as they were five hundred 
 years ago, except that they were pronounced 
 differently and have different grammar. Well, 
 if this is the case with our language, we can easily 
 understand that it might be the case with the 
 Greek language, and that the Greek of the first 
 century A.D. would be different from the Greek 
 of the fourth or the fifth century B.C. Of course, 
 we have plenty of Greek that comes from that 
 very first century. There is the great Plutarch,
 
 And the Study of the New Testament 25 
 
 whose Lives, translated in a famous Elizabethan 
 version, supplied material for Shakespeare's Julius 
 Caesar and other plays. Plutarch wrote in the 
 same century as the New Testament. But you 
 can come nearer still. Everybody here knows 
 something about Josephus. Josephus was a Jew, 
 a man of the same nationality as Paul and Peter 
 and the rest, and he was a man who wrote Greek 
 just as they wrote it. But if you were to look 
 into Josephus's Greek you would say that it was 
 not the same language as the Greek Testament. 
 The words are the same and the grammar is more 
 or less the same, but there is all the difference in 
 the world. Take two samples of English. One 
 is a full-blooded page from Samuel Johnson, with 
 words half a foot long, and elaborate grammar 
 and style to match. The other is from a letter 
 written home by a schoolboy in the earlier stages 
 of his education. There is an amusing passage 
 I quote from memory in Macaulay's Johnson, 
 in which he calls attention to Johnson's literary 
 pose. In his own private diary he wrote something 
 to this effect : ' When we got in, a dirty fellow 
 jumped up from the bed in which we were to lie.' 
 Then when he put it down in his published book 
 he wrote : ' There emerged from the chamber 
 in which we were to repose a man as black as a 
 Cyclops from the forge.' We need not further
 
 26 Egyptian Rubbish-heaps 
 
 prove that there is a difference between English 
 and English. I can assure you there is a difference 
 between Greek and Greek. There is a difference 
 between Josephus and the New Testament. The 
 New Testament is written in plain, unadorned 
 language which everybody can understand. 
 
 A German theologian a generation or two ago 
 said the Greek Testament was unique because it 
 was written in the ' language of the Holy Ghost.' 
 It was written in a language that never professed 
 to be in common use, fit therefore for a Book so 
 sacred. Yes, it was the language of the Holy 
 Ghost ; there is no mistake about that. But we 
 can give a better reason to-day for that assertion. 
 Deissmann's discovery gives me a thrill which I 
 should like to pass on to you. It proves nothing 
 else than this : that the Book is the only book 
 written in the language of daily life, in the very 
 language in which the people talked at home, in 
 the very language in which they communicated 
 their deepest thought^ one_to another. The Holy 
 Ghost inspiring those who wrote this little volume 
 inspired them with the common sense to avoid 
 the literary, archaic, pld-fashipned, out-of-date 
 language in which the literary men were writing. 
 And, mind you, they are using it still. If you 
 were to read a modern Greek newspaper, you would 
 find it is mostly written allowing for blunders in
 
 And the Study of the New Testament 27 
 
 the language of the fourth or fifth century before 
 Christ. Of course, it is a language nobody would 
 think of talking. But the Greeks still feel that 
 the language of daily life is not good enough for 
 use in writing a book. Now the writers of the 
 New Testament did not care about that. They 
 were not anxious about the literary impression. 
 Paul did not care about having first-class reviews 
 in the daily papers. Mark and John were not 
 in the least degree particular if people were going 
 to pull their style to pieces. You can find all 
 sorts of words and idioms in their writings that 
 are not to be found in the best writers. What 
 did it matter if everybody could understand them ? 
 Does this not show us that the very grammar 
 and dictionary cry out against putting the Bible 
 into any other language than that which will be 
 ' understanded of the common people ' ? 
 
 I will give you a few illustrations in detail. Here ^ 
 is something that gives us light upon the first 
 verse in the eleventh chapter of Hebrews, which 
 tells us what faith is. ' Now faith,' says the Revised 
 Version, ' is the assurance of things hoped for.' 
 The word translated ' assurance ' occurs in a long 
 legal document, the ' Petition of Dionysia.' She 
 was a widow who had had some trouble_with her 
 property, which had been_claimed by _ litigious 
 persons. She writes out a copy of the judgement
 
 28 Egyptian Rubbish-heaps 
 
 delivered in a previous litigation, and a full statement 
 of her claim is sent with this to the prefect of Egypt. 
 In the course of that document there occurs this 
 Greek word hypostasis. Drs. Grenfell and Hunt 
 tell us it was a technical legal word, and meant 
 a collection of papers bearing upon the possession 
 of a piece of property. When anybody bought 
 a piece of land there were always some papers 
 connected with it. There would be old census 
 papers in which the owner and his land were regis- 
 tered, bills of sale, correspondence about it in 
 fact, any sort of thing that might be put in as 
 evidence if any question should arise as to the 
 title of the land. All this was carefully collected 
 in a docket and then put into the public archives 
 office. Each large town had a special keeper of 
 the archives to look after the papers and produce 
 them when demanded in order to help the security 
 of property. In other words, this word may be 
 translated * the title-deeds.' Can we not see what 
 a depth of meaning that puts into the word ? ' Faith 
 is the title-deeds _qf Jthings__hoped for. ' 
 
 Now do not forget what hope means in the New 
 Testament. The ' hope ' of the New Testament 
 means absolute certainty about the future. Things 
 hoped for are things not yet seen, but things which 
 God guarantees to us as something that absolutely 
 belongs to us. Faith is the ' title-deeds of things
 
 And the Study of the New Testament 29 
 
 hoped for.' Suppose I go to a real estate agent 
 and buy a piece of land in Canada. I have not 
 time to go and see it ; but if I buy that land I have 
 certain papers put into my hands, title-deeds 
 of that property. I take these home with me, 
 and if ever I want to realize on that land I can go 
 to an office and say : ' I have some land to sell. 
 Here are the title-deeds.' I present the paper, and 
 that paper is accepted as being the equivalent of 
 the land. Even if I never saw my property, that 
 paper represents it for me. And if you look at 
 the eleventh chapter of Hebrews you will find 
 that this is just what faith is there. Men and 
 women who received a promise from God counted 
 that promise as being the title-deeds to something 
 they could not see yet, but which they were going 
 to see some day. They were so sure of it, because 
 God had promised it to them, that they acted upon 
 the belief, treated it as their estate, as something 
 absolutely theirs. We are told that Abraham 
 so treated the son that was to be born to him, and 
 we remember that the birth of that son was an 
 absurdity, a wild impossibility. But God had 
 said that he should be born, and Abraham behaved 
 as if that child were there in the cradle at home 
 already. That is the nature of faith as described 
 in the eleventh chapter of Hebrews. 
 
 Take another word, this time from Paul. You
 
 30 Egyptian Rubbish-heaps 
 
 will remember a verse which includes the phrase 
 ' us upon whom the ends of the ages are come.' 
 Some years ago in reading papyri I came upon a 
 whole series of wills, and I noticed how frequently 
 this very Greek word came in an obviously technical 
 sense. It is a legal word in documents dealing 
 with property, which has ' come ' to a man from his 
 father. We remember Tennyson's great line : 
 
 We the heirs of all the ages. 
 
 I was speaking with Dr. Rendel Harris about it, 
 and he asked why we should not translate the 
 word ' ends ' toll a meaning it bears elsewhere 
 in the New Testament. That seems to fit the 
 metaphor still better. ' To us the toll of all ages 
 has come as our inheritance.' We are the heirs of the 
 spiritual wealth of all the ages past, the wealth of 
 Greece and Rome and Israel, the wealth of the 
 Middle Ages, the wealth of all times and of all 
 countries, of all the accumulated experience of 
 mankind all this has come down to us to-day in 
 order to teach us the wonderful works of God, and 
 make us realize better than ever before what is 
 the wealth that God has for those who put their 
 trust in Him.
 
 II 
 
 A SHEAF OF OLD LETTERS FROM EGYPT 
 
 YESTERDAY I was talking to you about words. 
 This morning I am going to begin with letters 
 letters, that is, in the way in which they were used 
 among the Greeks. It is a way unfamiliar to us, 
 because we use letters for one purpose only. In 
 counting one, two, three, four, and so on we 
 use a separate set of symbols, the Arabic numerals 
 which enable us to represent these numbers inde- 
 pendently. But the Greeks lacked numerals, so 
 they had to use letters for the purpose, and a very 
 definite and elaborate system theirs was. They had 
 four series of letters : the first, Alpha, Beta, Gamma, 
 Delta, Epsilon, and so on, until the letters ran up to 
 nine ; then they went on, ten, twenty, thirty, forty, 
 and so on, up to ninety ; then on again, one hundred, 
 two hundred, three hundred, and up to nine hundred ; 
 and then they used the first nine of these symbols 
 over again with a little point on the end of the 
 letter in order to represent the thousands. The 
 result was, you see, that any sum up to 9,999 
 could be represented in Greek letters. But that 
 
 31
 
 32 A Sheaf of Old Letters from Egypt 
 
 was not getting very far. So in order to get further 
 they would write a very big M, and in the top 
 angle of that M they repeated the symbols used 
 before. Now they were worth a Myriad, ten 
 thousand times as much as before. By that 
 notation the old Greek could represent any number 
 up to 99,999,999. 
 
 Now, if we add one to 99,999,999 we get 
 100,000,000, otherwise ' ten thousand times ten 
 thousand,' which you will remember in the Book 
 of the Revelation, where it describes ' a multitude 
 which no man can number/ It is one beyond the 
 biggest sum that can be represented by the Greek 
 notation. 
 
 There is another curious and much-discussed 
 passage in the Apocalypse which gets light from this 
 subject of Greek notation. On the walls of Pompeii, 
 when that city, buried by the terrible eruption of 
 Vesuvius in the year A.D. 79, was uncovered, was 
 found a vast number of graffiti, or scribblings, which 
 tell much of the life and customs of that ancient 
 time, when the people of Pompeii going about their 
 daily life were suddenly overwhelmed by the streams 
 of boiling lava. These scribblings give us a picture 
 of the shamelessness of some of the ancient life, 
 such as we shall hardly get from any other place ; 
 yet among them are many things beautiful and 
 deeply interesting.
 
 A Sheaf of Old Letters from Egypt 33 
 
 One runs thus : ' I love her the number of whose 
 honourable name is five hundred. and forty-seven.' 
 Now you see the bearing of that. Since the letters 
 of the Greek alphabet had their numerical value, 
 there was a tendency to add up the number of the 
 letters of one's name. Take, for a simple illustra- 
 tion, the name Ada. A is one, D is four, so that the 
 number of that ' honourable name ' comes to six. 
 Well, the number of some other honourable lady's 
 name totalled up to five hundred and forty-seven. 
 And that lady, going by and seeing this graffito on 
 the wall, mentally adds up her own letters, and 
 should they come to five hundred and forty-seven 
 well, she might find it quite interesting. 
 
 So much for the number of Beauty. Let us turn 
 now to the number of the Beast, which naturally 
 comes in association with it. In the thirteenth 
 chapter of the Book of the Revelation we read : 
 ' Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding 
 count the number of the beast ; for it is the number 
 of a man ; and his number is six hundred and 
 sixteen ' for such probably is the most ancient 
 reading. We must try to find a name that adds 
 up to six hundred and sixteen. People all through 
 the ages have put in answers to the puzzle. Abso- 
 lutely everything has been tried. If anybody has a 
 particular objection to some particular person, he 
 sets to work to fit the number of the beast 
 
 c
 
 34 
 
 to him; and if only he takes fair latitude and is 
 not too particular about the spelling, he usually 
 succeeds. 
 
 If I take another line this morning, it is not 
 because I think we can say positively that this is 
 the right exposition. But I myself am very much 
 helped by what my friend Professor Deissmann has 
 pointed out. He claims that the Greek words 
 Kaisar theos, whose letters add up to 616, represent 
 best the idea that is behind John's enigma. Most 
 Britons to-day would entirely agree that ' Kaiser is 
 divine ' suits the number of the Beast remarkably 
 well ! Possibly such a view is not unknown in 
 America also. Whether Deissmann's theory is 
 right or wrong, there can be no question that the 
 battle-cry of that tremendous conflict, which began 
 at the end of the first century and went on 
 unintermittently until the fourth, was, on the 
 one side, ' Caesar is god,' while on the other side 
 were the people who proclaimed that there was 
 ' another Emperor, one Jesus.' There was the 
 greatest fight that the world has ever seen one 
 in which all the killing was done on one side, and 
 all the dying on the other side, and that was the 
 side that won 1 This strife, which we may recall 
 to-day, had as the watchword on the side of the 
 prince of this world, ' Caesar is god.' 
 
 Then what happened to the number six hundred
 
 35 
 
 and sixteen ? It was altered to the more sym- 
 metrical number ' six hundred and sixty-six,' 
 the reason being, Deissmann suggests, that it is a 
 caricature of another name, the ' name that is 
 above every name ' Jesus. For the Greek letters 
 of the name Jesus come to just eight hundred and 
 eighty-eight, each digit one above the perfect 
 ' seven ' ; and ' six hundred and sixty-six ' Deissmann 
 thinks is the hellish caricature of it. These things 
 may seem very fanciful to you and to me, but they 
 were extremely interesting to people who had to do 
 continuously with letters all of which had a numerical 
 value. 
 
 Yesterday, if I had had time, I was going to take 
 up a few additional words. I will mention one 
 of them now, as it is very closely connected with 
 our subject this morning. Our Lord in speaking of 
 His coming again uses the word parousia, which in 
 the later parts of the New Testament becomes 
 almost a technical term. Now that word so used, 
 denoting ' advent ' or ' presence/ had something 
 very much deeper in its meaning. Egyptian papyri 
 of the third and second centuries B.C. give some 
 allusions which utterly puzzled the first editors. I 
 remember one phrase in which even the acuteness 
 of Grenfell and Hunt seemed to be baffled. Two 
 words came together, stephanoupawusias, which
 
 36 A Sheaf oS Old Letters from Egypt 
 
 we have now learned how to read. The Ptolemies, 
 kings of Egypt after Alexander's time, were not 
 popular, generally speaking, and I must say I do 
 not think they deserved popularity. Our British 
 sovereign, King George, has lately been up in 
 Lancashire, riding all around the country, going into 
 the cottages and talking with the people, and leaving 
 behind him the most gracious memories. That is 
 one sort of a royal visit. But the royal visits of the 
 Ptolemies were quite different. When they came to 
 distant parts of the country there were appropriate 
 manifestations of enthusiasm, but it was all worked 
 up beforehand. The tax-collector came round and 
 extracted from people's pockets money for what 
 was called a ' crown tax.' A free-will offering of a 
 golden crown was made to the king on such occasions, 
 to represent the spontaneous loyalty of the people. 
 That was the type of thing that gives the setting for 
 this word parousia. By getting the meaning of 
 ' royal visit,' unconsciously the word was prepared 
 beforehand for the time when the King of kings 
 came in great humility, and they called His coming 
 the Parousia. And we are relying faithfully upon 
 the promise of another visit, the last and greatest, 
 some day, we know not when. 
 
 But now let me go on to my sheaf of old letters. 
 This first letter, dating from the second or third
 
 A Sheaf of Old Letters from Egypt 37 
 
 century A.D., is written by a schoolboy, and Js 
 
 spelt most atrociously. Both spelling and grammar 
 are, however, highly instructive to us who are 
 concerned with New Testament Greek. I wish we 
 knew more about this young man. He has evidently 
 kept his father and mother in extremely good order. 
 But ' even a worm will turn/ and the father has 
 decided that he will go away and get a holiday 
 from this enfant terrible. He has therefore slipped 
 away to Alexandria, whereupon the young rascal 
 writes his father the scathing letter which I am 
 going to read to you. I will translate it into the 
 English which represents his style most nearly : 
 
 ' Theon to his father : So good of you not to 
 take me with you to town ! If you won't take 
 me with you to Alexandria, I won't write you a 
 letter or speak to you or wish you health no more, 
 and if you go to Alexandria I won't take your hand 
 or greet you back ever again. If you won't take 
 me, that's what's up. And mother said to Arche- 
 laus, " He quite upsets me. Off with him ! " 
 Oh, it was good of you to send me a present ! 
 Such a beauty husks ! ' 
 
 You see the circumstances. He had expected a 
 hamper of good things to eat ; and when he opened 
 it he did not find the cake he liked. So he called 
 it an opprobrious name ' husks 1 '
 
 38 A Sheaf of Old Letters from Egypt 
 
 Then follows some more : 
 
 ' They fooled us there on the I2th when you 
 sailed. But send for me, do ! If you won't send, 
 I won't eat, I won't drink. There now ! I pray 
 you may be well.' 
 
 Now that is a specimen of the vernacular. There 
 is nothing cultivated about that letter, nothing 
 artificial. I can assure you it is not in the Greek 
 of ancient Athens in her prime. But the letter 
 means more for the student of New Testament Greek 
 
 than any other piece of Greek of equal length any- 
 where, not only in jjrammar^ but also in vocabulary. 
 I turn your attention to one of the sentences I read 
 just now. The young rascal declares that there is 
 an excellent reason why he should go to Alexandria 
 with his father. His mother had said : ' He quite 
 upsets me.' Well, if he went to Alexandria he would 
 be out of her way. Now do you remember what 
 is said in the Book of Acts about the visit of 
 Paul and Silas to Thessalonica : ' These that have 
 turned the world upside down are come hither also ' ? 
 It is the same word. 
 
 I might recall to your minds that word as it was 
 used of Wesley's early ministry. It was said that he 
 was turning the world upside down. You know the 
 sermon preached by some of Wesley's men on those 
 words. The main heads of the sermon were :
 
 
 A Sheaf of Old Letters from Egypt 39 
 
 ' First, the world is the wrong way up ; second, it 
 has got to be turned upside down ; third, we's the 
 men to do it.' I am rather inclined to think they 
 were, and that they did their job uncommonly well. 
 Now that is a specimen of the vernacular, which 
 is not brought in merely for a story's sake. I think 
 you will be able to see that that word ' upset ' has, 
 even in English, a popular nuance about it. It is 
 not a refined literary word at all. Nor was it in the 
 Greek. If you turn to the great New Testament 
 Greek dictionary of your countryman J. H. Thayer, 
 you will find this word anastato described as 
 occurring ' nowhere in profane writers.' The sug- 
 gestion is that it is a purely biblical word. Why 
 biblical writers should want to invent a word of that 
 kind is not very obvious. I think the letter I have 
 just read will show you that it is not taken out of 
 this classical literature; that it is just a common, 
 ordinary word from common, ordinary life, and in 
 the letter of this young man we find it just where 
 we should expect it. So there it is, a word out of the 
 popular vocabulary, having just that rough-and- 
 ready vivid touch to it that we like. 
 
 And that is not all we get out of this letter. ' _Off_ 
 with him ! ' Put that into literary English 
 * Away with him ! ' Does not that suggest anything 
 to you ? Why, it is the very phrase that came 
 from those hoarse, savage throats on Good Friday
 
 40 A Sheaf of Old Letters from Egypt 
 
 morning. Here we have it again in the rude school- 
 boy's letter. I think that will illustrate the close 
 contact there is between the language of the New 
 Testament and the language of daily life as we 
 have picked it up from under the sands of Egypt. 
 
 Let me read one or two more of these letters. 
 Here is part of a letter from a husband to his wife. 
 The wife is away on a visit, and has prolonged her 
 stay more than he thinks she should, and he has 
 been trying very hard to get her to come home. 
 Apparently she was not as appreciative of his 
 company as he was of hers. He says, among other 
 things : 
 
 ' I want you to know that since you went away 
 from me I have kept lamenting by night and 
 wailing by day. Since you and I went to the 
 baths together on July 12, I never bathed nor 
 anointed until August 12. And you sent me 
 letters that could shake a stone, so much have 
 you moved me.' 
 
 You will remember what our Lord says about 
 fasting in the Sermon on the Mount. He is 
 speaking of the way in which the hypocrites fast. 
 Note what He says. He does not say that they shall 
 fast ; He does not say that they shall not fast. 
 What He says is, that if they fast they are to take 
 care that it is absolutely sincere, like every other 
 part of their life. Do not be like the hypocrites,
 
 A Sheaf of Old Letters from Egypt 41 
 
 for they parade their fasting that they may be seen 
 of men ; ' but thou, when them fastest, anoint thine 
 head, and wash thy face/ That was just what the 
 hypocrite did not do he did not anoint his head, he 
 did not wash his face. Our Egyptian husband 
 gives us a sample of this kind of ' fasting.' We 
 have another letter in which the writer, who is in 
 great trouble because he has just had the news that 
 his house has been robbed while he was in Alexandria, 
 uses much the same expression : ' I shall not even 
 wash myself until I hear the news.' 
 
 Here is another letter which I will read entire : 
 
 ' Antonius, son of Ptolemaeus, invites you to 
 dine with him at the table of the Lord Sarapis 
 in the house of Claudius Serapion on the i6th at 
 three o'clock.' 
 
 I could comment on that letter for the rest of 
 this hour. Brief though it is, it has a number of 
 points of contact with the New Testament. In the 
 first place, in this invitation to dinner, though it is a 
 normal and ordinary invitation, we have the state- 
 ment that the dinner is to be in a private house, but 
 ' at the table of Lord Sarapis/ the most widely 
 worshipped god of the Egyptians. If the name 
 Sarapis had been left out, one might think this a 
 Christian letter. How well that illustrates what 
 Bishop Lightfoot says in his Historical Essays
 
 42 A Sheaf of Old Letters from Egypt 
 
 in the passage in which he describes ' the intru- 
 siveness, the obtrusiveness, and the ubiquity of 
 Paganism ' ! You can understand how it was that 
 Christians were so unpopular in those early days. 
 For a Christian could not accept an invitation to 
 go out to dinner without compromising his faith. 
 If he went he had to join in the worship. The table 
 at which he sat was the table of a ' Lord ' not 
 Jesus, but another. And for that reason the Chris- 
 tians had to keep out of social intercourse. When 
 they were called ' haters of the human race ' and 
 had all manner of other bad things said about them 
 in those days, we can quite understand it, for the 
 heathen simply saw in them people who, because 
 of religious prejudices, kept away from their kind. 
 
 The next point in the letter is in that word 
 ' house.' You remember that the first reported 
 words of Jesus when found as a boy in the temple, 
 in answer to His mother, who said to Him, ' Don't 
 you know that your father and I have been looking 
 for you with distress ? ' are given in our Authorized 
 Version as : ' How is it that ye sought Me ? Wist 
 ye not that I must be about My Father's business ? ' 
 That is quite a natural translation, but it is abso- 
 lutely wrong. To prove that it is wrong we have 
 to take not a literal rendering of the words, but the 
 rendering of them as it comes from usage. It 
 happens that the phrase in this letter is one among
 
 A Sheaf of Old Letters from Egypt 43 
 
 a good many examples we have of this very idiom 
 in which there is no question whatever that the 
 meaning is ' in the house/ So this document, and 
 those like it, clearly prove that the Revisers were 
 right when they changed the translation to ' in 
 My Father's house.' 
 
 Next, let us notice the time-table. The man, 
 you observe, is invited to dine at three o'clock in the 
 afternoon. If that hour of dining was in vogue in 
 Palestine as well, we are reminded of that parable 
 of our Lord in which He talks about the great 
 ' supper.' The point in question is that it begins in 
 daylight and it ends in the night. The people, 
 you remember, who are invited to it, instead of 
 coming at once, go on with the day's work, and then 
 the king comes in to see his guests in the evening. It 
 must be evening, because the man who had no 
 wedding garment was taken by the hands and feet 
 (so we should read) and thrown out into ' the 
 darkness outside.' 
 
 Now we come to a letter of a prodigal son. It 
 illustrates in some way the matchless parable 
 which we always think of as containing the very 
 marrow of the gospel : 
 
 ' Antonius Longus to Nilous, his mother : Many 
 greetings. I continually pray that you are in 
 good health, and make supplication for you 
 before our Lord Serapis.'
 
 44 A Sheaf of Old Letters from Egypt 
 
 Let me state, in passing, that here we have another 
 example of the formulae of letter-writing. All 
 letters were dominated by formula to a very large 
 extent, just as young people's letters from school 
 are still. The formula with which this letter starts 
 is one that is extremely common. You will notice 
 at once that it is one which the Apostle Paul himself 
 is able to take up. A great many things in Paul's 
 letters are things found in this way in the formulae 
 of the heathen letters. ' Making continuous men- 
 tion of you in my prayers ' is one that you will find 
 in a so-called heathen letter. The god to whom 
 these prayers were made was not by name the 
 same ; but when the prayer was earnest, and when 
 it came from one who knew no better, I fancy that 
 the fact that the address was wrong did not cause 
 the letter to go into the dead-letter office. It was 
 safely delivered in the place where prayer is heard. 
 Then the prodigal goes on : 
 
 ' I would have you know that I never expected 
 you were coming up to the city. This was why 
 I never came into it. But I was ashamed to come 
 up to Karanis, for I am going about in rags.' 
 
 The word ' in rags ' is the word which, if it were 
 classical Greek, would be rottenly. The word in the 
 New Testament Greek has lost that sense. ' Every 
 bad tree brings forth bad fruit.' That does not
 
 A Sheaf of Old Letters from Egypt 45 
 
 mean a rotten tree. The word has the same sort 
 of history as the word ' rotten ' has in English slang. 
 If a schoolboy wants to say that he does not like the 
 food at school, he says it is ' rotten.' 
 But let us get back to our prodigal. 
 
 ' I write to tell you that I have not any clothes. 
 I entreat you, mother, to be reconciled to me. But 
 I know what I have brought on myself. I have been 
 chastised as I have been because I have sinned.' 
 
 It is very interesting to gather together the word 
 sin as it appears in the papyri and similar documents. 
 We have made as complete a collection as we can 
 of it, and it gives us quite a vivid idea of what the 
 people to whom Paul wrote meant by it. This letter 
 particularly shows that it implies a very definite 
 picture of wrong-doing. There are only a few words 
 more of continuous sense, and then the letter 
 relapses into fragments : 
 
 ' I heard from Postumus, who found you in 
 Arsinoe county, and he has unseasonably told you 
 all. Don't you know I would rather become a 
 cripple than know that I owed anybody twopence ? ' 
 
 After that we have only the ends of lines left, with 
 more of this abject entreaty : 
 
 ' . . . come yourself ... I beseech . . . don't 
 fail . . .' and then : ' . . . mother, from her son 
 Antonius Longus.'
 
 46 A Sheaf of Old Letters from Egypt 
 
 Of course, we don't know what the result was, any 
 more than we know whether there was any real 
 penitence behind all this fine show. 
 
 Here is another letter that instructs us very much 
 as to the manners and customs of the times : 
 
 ' To Alis, his sister.' 
 
 Sister here means wife. Even in the New Testa- 
 ment the term meant that sometimes ; you remem- 
 ber Paul said it was his right to lead about a 
 ' sister.' 
 
 ' Let me tell you that we are still in Alexandria. 
 Do not fret even though they do start, and I stay 
 on in Alexandria. I beg and beseech you to look 
 after the child, and as soon as ever we get wages 
 I will send you up something. If you have a 
 child good luck to you ! if it is a boy, let it 
 alone. If it is a girl, throw it away.' 
 
 Now remember that that was one of the great points 
 upon which the early Christians had something to 
 say to the heathen. Justin Martyr, who turned 
 Christian before the middle of the second century 
 A.D., has a scathing paragraph in which he talks 
 about the habits prevailing in the heathen world. 
 When a child was born it was taken and laid at the 
 feet of the father. He, if he desired to keep it,
 
 A Sheaf of Old Letters from Egypt 47 
 
 stepped out and picked it up in his arms. If he did 
 not want to keep it, he let it lie. Then the child 
 was taken away and put in some public place where 
 it would be sure to be seen, and it was picked up by 
 people who made a regular trade of collecting derelict 
 babies. This was a very cheap way of getting 
 slaves, and they were reared often for unspeakable 
 lives. We have a great sheaf of documents from 
 Alexandria, dating very closely around the appearing 
 of Christ, which are contracts with women for acting 
 as nurses of little children picked off the rubbish- 
 heap and kept for slave purposes. And so here this 
 man with absolute hard-heartedness says to his 
 wife : ' If it is a boy, let it alone. If it is a girl, 
 throw it away.' 
 Listen again : 
 
 ' You say, " Do not forget me." How can I 
 forget you ? I beg you not to worry. In the 
 twenty-ninth year of Caesar [i.e. i B.C.], June 17.' 
 
 Next we have a budget of letters from an educated 
 family of Egypt of the middle of the second century 
 B.C. They are evidently a family bound together 
 by very close and affectionate ties. The father 
 is an ' architect/ though in a much wider sense 
 than we use that word. He is in charge of canal 
 works and irrigation. His sons and his wife write
 
 48 A Sheaf of Old Letters from Egypt 
 
 to him, and he writes to them. We have quite 
 a bundle of their letters. Here is one : 
 
 ' Polycrates to his father, greeting : It is good 
 if you are well and everything else is to your mind. 
 We are well ourselves. I have often written to 
 you to introduce me to the King ' 
 
 The word ' introduce ' is the same word that 
 the Apostle Paul uses in 2 Cor. iii. i. 
 
 ' that I may get myself released from the business 
 I am now engaged upon. And now if it is possible, 
 and none of your duties keeps you, try to come 
 up for the Arsinoe festival, for if you do come I am 
 sure I shall easily be introduced to the King. Let 
 me tell you that I have seventy shillings from 
 Philonides, of which I have kept half for necessaries, 
 and paid the rest as an instalment of interest. This 
 is because we don't get our money in a lump sum, 
 but only in small amounts. Write us yourself 
 that we may know how you are and may not worry ; 
 and take care of yourself to keep well and come 
 to us in good health. Yours dutifully, 
 
 ' POLYCRATES.' 
 
 Here is another letter from Polycrates to his 
 father. It begins with the same formulae as the 
 last. He goes on :
 
 49 
 
 ' Let me tell you I have now carried through 
 my religious duties and am now apprenticed at the 
 surveyor's.' 
 
 The word is geometer, for geometry was originally 
 simply land survey. 
 
 ' I have sent into the customs office a report 
 of the site ' 
 
 The word used here for ' customs office ' is the 
 same as ' receipt of custom ' at which the Apostle 
 Matthew was found. 
 
 ' as bearing a house duty of sixteen shillings, that 
 we may pay the five per cent, tax on this assess- 
 ment and not on thirty as heretofore.' 
 
 To us in England who are greatly interested in 
 the taxation of land values that passage suggests 
 the old lesson that there is nothing new under the 
 sun. But it is time to close my mailbag and be 
 gone.
 
 Ill 
 
 SOME SIDELIGHTS UPON PAUL 
 
 IT is a daring thing to announce a lecture upon 
 Paul, whose myriad-sided character and work 
 could not be exhausted in a series of courses by 
 very different students of his personality. I offer 
 only a few stray suggestions, mostly connected 
 more or less with that new field of illustration 
 with which these lectures are specially concerned. 
 An early traditional account of the personal 
 appearance of Paul comes down to us from the 
 apocryphal Acts of Paul and Thecla. Here there 
 is a description which Sir William Ramsay regards 
 as authentic. Perhaps the best thing to be said 
 for it is that it is hardly likely to have been invented ; 
 but this is hardly sufficient attestation should 
 any strong objection arise. The general line of 
 this description is that Paul was a little man, with 
 meeting eyebrows, with a large nose and bald 
 head and bow legs, but strongly built and full of 
 grace. Well, Paul himself tells us that his enemies 
 said he was not much to look at, and he certainly 
 did not mind. The story went on to say that 
 
 50
 
 Some Sidelights Upon Paul 51 
 
 when Paul spoke he looked like an angel. That, at 
 least, is all right. But there are two considerations 
 as to this description of Paul, both of which come 
 out of the Book of Acts. In the first place, you 
 remember that wonderful fourteenth chapter, in 
 which Paul and Barnabas go to the little town 
 of Lycaonia, Lystra. There they performed a 
 miracle, healing a man all his life lame. As soon 
 as the people saw this miracle they were immensely 
 excited, and immediately dropped into their native 
 tongue. They had been listening to Paul in Greek, 
 and Paul did not understand the Lycaonian dialect. 
 The people were saying : ' Gods have come down 
 to us in the likeness of men.' Now it happened 
 that the local legend told how Zeus, the king of 
 the gods, and Hermes, the messenger of the gods, 
 had come down to the earth and people had not 
 recognized them. They sought for lodging, and 
 at last came to the house of an old couple, Philemon 
 and Baucis, who entertained them generously, 
 and received a blessing when they went away. 
 The Lystra folk were determined not to be again 
 caught napping, and when they saw these two 
 deities in their midst they prepared for a sacrifice 
 to them. Now I have just to ask one question : 
 Be it granted that in Lycaonia the conception of 
 these deities would be different from that of people 
 in Athens, yet one always has to remember that
 
 52 Some Sidelights Upon Paul 
 
 these names of the Greek gods were associated 
 with the very highest ideals of beauty. The 
 principle, ' Handsome is that handsome does,' 
 did not always work ; but in all history, so far 
 as outward beauty went, one could never beat 
 the Greek gods. Surely for the Lystrans to call 
 upon the name of Hermes, even if it did carry 
 with it less than it did in Greece, when they saw 
 a little bald, bow-legged man with a big nose, was 
 a most unlikely thing, was it not ? One may 
 say that the magnitude of the miracle overweighted 
 the mere aesthetic consideration. Perhaps, but it 
 may stand just as an initial difficulty. 
 
 I take another part of the Book of Acts. You 
 will remember Paul's thrilling escape from the 
 Jewish mob, when the Roman soldiers came down 
 just in the nick of time and got hold of him when 
 he was being battered to death by the infuriated 
 Jews. When, by main force, the soldiers had 
 dragged him away out of the crowd and got him 
 into the citadel, it appeared that he had only 
 escaped being tortured to death by the mob to 
 be tortured to death in a more systematic way by 
 the Roman soldiers. They began to prepare him 
 to be flogged, and he only got his breath in time 
 to protest. But as soon as he began to speak 
 there was a great difference. It seems that Claudius 
 Lysias, who thought he was the leader of a band
 
 Some Sidelights Upon Paul 53 
 
 of brigands at the head of an army of wild 
 cut-throats, was quite astonished to hear him 
 talking in Greek. Now here again is a difficulty. 
 It is not often we hear of a horde of brigands fol- 
 lowing a little, bald man with bow legs. Must 
 not these two improbabilities combine to put the 
 evidence of the apocryphal Acts out of court ? 
 
 The reason of my bringing in all this is that 
 I want to ask a question which, oddly enough, 
 I have never heard put. What on earth was 
 Claudius Lysias doing when he thought Paul was 
 a brigand leader ? What suggested it ? I think 
 we can get an answer out of the papyri. We have 
 among them a multitude of official papers, con- 
 taining with a man's name his eikon, his personal 
 description. A man writing a census return or 
 other such document describes himself thus : 
 First comes his name and his father's name ; then 
 he will put in such additional points as straight 
 hair, long nose, with a scar on his shin or some 
 other part of him. An extraordinary thing is 
 that in every kind of description that scar seems 
 to be necessitated. If a man has not a convenient 
 kind of a scar somewhere, he has to put to his 
 name the word asemos, ' without distinguishing 
 mark.' (You know where Paul says he is of the 
 city of Tarsus, no mean no ' undistinguished ' 
 city, a city with many marks, though not necessarily
 
 54 Some Sidelights Upon Paul 
 
 scars.) Accordingly, we should expect to find 
 in any personal description the needed scar by 
 which a man might be recognized. Now I fancy 
 that we may be safe in saying that this brigand 
 was badly 'wanted by the police.' All over certain 
 parts of the Roman Empire there were descriptions 
 telling how he might be found. Every Roman 
 governor was looking out for him. It would be 
 worth his while to capture that man, living or 
 dead. It is perfectly clear that Claudius Lysias 
 on this occasion thought he had got hold of the 
 brigand. Why? Why, surely because Paul's 
 appearance answered pretty closely to the circulated 
 description of the brigand. And you may be 
 certain that the scar was very prominent there. 
 What about the scar ? As to the brigand, that 
 is easy. He had been in many a scrimmage, and 
 he had come out with the marks of them like 
 German students with marks of duelling on their 
 faces. We may safely speculate that there was 
 a mark so conspicuous that as soon as Claudius 
 Lysias saw his man he recognized by this the 
 man on whose head there was a price. And prob- 
 ably that is why he took so much trouble to get 
 Paul out of the hands of those wild Jews But 
 how do we know that Paul had a scar anywhere ? 
 Let us go back to that fourteenth chapter. I 
 sometimes think the most splendid thing we hear
 
 Some Sidelights Upon Paul 55 
 
 about him is recorded there. Look at the picture 
 of those fickle Galatians, how they turned right 
 over when the Jews came from the next city and 
 ' persuaded the multitudes ' ; and those very multi- 
 tudes who had been regarding Paul as a deity 
 come down from heaven are now prepared to stone 
 him. Soon the jagged stones are flying, aimed, 
 naturally, at his head, and he lies senseless and 
 bleeding upon the ground. His disciples, of only 
 a few hours' standing, are there around him. How 
 soon, they think, has their discipleship been ter- 
 minated ! And while they sadly look on him where 
 he lies, after the mob has dragged him over the 
 rough ground out of the town, he regains conscious- 
 ness and staggers to his feet. He must have been 
 ' strongly built ' after all to stand such an ordeal ! 
 What does he do then ? Slinks away to hide 
 till he can recover strength again, of course. Not 
 he ! He goes right back, back into the city where 
 he has just been stoned, in order to exhort those 
 new-made disciples to continue steadfast in the 
 faith. And he says, pointing to his face, all covered 
 with ugly wounds, ' Through many tribulations 
 we must enter into the kingdom of God.' 
 
 We have, then, a possible explanation for the 
 scar by which Paul was recognized as a brigand. 
 But does he make any other allusion to it ? Why, 
 yes. He is writing as we believe who hold to
 
 56 Some Sidelights Upon Paul 
 
 the ' South Galatian theory ' to these very people 
 here at Lystra, Derbe, and Iconium the Letter to 
 the Galatians, and he says at the end : ' From 
 henceforth let no man trouble me ; for I bear 
 branded on my body the marks of Jesus.' The 
 marks, as Deissmann puts it, were a talisman 
 which should protect him, surely, in Lystra ! He 
 bears about with him until his dying day the scars 
 which told how he had been a partaker of the 
 afflictions of Christ, how he for that dear Name's 
 sake had come so near to death. They are his 
 identification marks, which will tell the churches 
 wherever he goes how he has fought the battle 
 of his Saviour. 
 
 Naturally, while we are talking about Paul's 
 exterior you will be recalling that problem about 
 his health referred to in his own words at the end of 
 2 Corinthians. You remember those pathetic words 
 about his ' thorn in the flesh, a messenger of Satan 
 to buffet ' him. On this famous problem I have 
 no new suggestions. I cannot choose even between 
 those suggested already. The only thing I want 
 to say is that the Revised Version, going upon 
 the knowledge accessible thirty years ago, put 
 in the margin the suggestion that we ought to 
 read, instead of ' thorn,' the word stake. Now 
 this word skolops in the classical Greek does mean 
 a stake ; and since, in the barbarous East, death
 
 Some Sidelights Upon Paul 57 
 
 by impaling was common, the suggestion of it is 
 that the man has had the stake thrust right through 
 his body. But this suggestion we are now able 
 to deny with confidence, and the margin had better 
 disappear. We have a very illiterate papyrus 
 in which the word most clearly means splinter. 
 In medical writers we find the word used for a 
 tiny lancet. You can see that it must have lost 
 any connexion with size. However, a thorn in 
 the flesh can sometimes be painful enough to destroy 
 one's peace of mind or body, and Paul's description 
 of his ailment as a thorn fits the conditions extremely 
 well. Satan is allowed to inflict on Paul what 
 would never let him rest, something which always 
 reminded him that he was still in the body ; but 
 as he bore it he also realized that He who allowed 
 it to remain was Himself abundant compensation. 
 We hear Paul saying, ' Concerning this thing I 
 besought the Lord thrice, that it might depart 
 from me. And He hath said unto me, My grace 
 is sufficient for thee : for power is made perfect 
 in weakness.' Sometimes I think that one little 
 change ' He hath said ' is one of the gems among 
 the innumerable beauties of the Revised Version, 
 suggesting, as it does, a message realized once for 
 all, but repeating itself daily as the ' thorn ' pricks 
 him, and bringing a new joy with every stab of 
 pain.
 
 58 Some Sidelights Upon Paul 
 
 I pass to something quite different, without 
 attempting to be very orderly. I want now to 
 make a short incursion into the literary criticism 
 of the Pauline letters and get some help out of our 
 papyri. I am not proposing to go over the writings 
 of the Apostle Paul in this New Testament of ours. 
 I can only remind you that in this matter criticism is 
 very favourable indeed to the views which probably 
 most of us here would like to hold. There was a 
 time when only four letters of Paul were allowed 
 by the more advanced critics ; while now there is 
 nobody with a reputation to lose who would dream 
 of allowing us less than eight, and, as to the rest, 
 even they are in a better position than in times past. 
 But there is one of Paul's most precious letters 
 the position of which has raised a great deal ot 
 difficulty, and about which I want to make a 
 suggestion. That is the letter called the Letter 
 to the Ephesians. There is very good reason to 
 believe that this was not a letter especially to the 
 Ephesians. The words ' in Ephesus ' are left 
 out in our very best authorities, and the explanation 
 advanced two hundred years ago by Archbishop 
 Ussher, that the letter was a circular letter addressed 
 to various churches in Roman Asia, holds the 
 field still. That is to say, it was a letter to Ephesus, 
 but it was also a letter to the Laodiceans. In 
 Colossians Paul speaks about a letter sent to the
 
 Some Sidelights Upon Paul 59 
 
 Laodiceans, which would come on to Colossae to 
 be exchanged for that which they have just got. 
 That letter of which he speaks was almost certainly 
 what we call Ephesians. 
 
 But then there comes another question. Was 
 this letter to the Ephesians really written by Paul ? 
 There are a number of difficulties about it. The 
 style is unmistakably different in many ways ; 
 and, though one does not want to lay too much 
 stress upon this fact, it must count for something. 
 A few months ago I was reading a paper at 
 Oxford, and I had a curious experience. I was 
 reading on quite a technical subject, the question 
 of the ' Semitisms ' of New Testament Greek 
 that is, traces of very close translations from 
 Semitic language so that the translation was really 
 not, properly speaking, Greek. I was discussing 
 whether there were really such things as ' Semitisms ' 
 in the language of Paul. I examined two or three 
 idioms which are rather test cases, and was ex- 
 tremely surprised to find that I could say about 
 these particular uses that they were not to be 
 found in Paul except in Ephesians ; two or three 
 instances appeared in that Epistle not to be found 
 elsewhere. 
 
 The question immediately raised, of course, 
 is whether this must be added to the arguments 
 urged against Paul's authorship. I have been
 
 60 Some Sidelights Upon Paul 
 
 thinking about it, and venture a suggestion by 
 which we may conclude this letter to be Paul's 
 in every sense of the word except one, and that 
 is that the actual writing down of it was done by 
 another man. 
 
 Let me try to restore by sheer conjecture the 
 conditions under which Ephesians may have been 
 written. Paul, Timothy, and others have a long 
 and anxious conversation as to the religious condi- 
 tion of the churches in Roman Asia. Paul deter- 
 mines to write to them. He has not time to dictate 
 a letter to every one of them, but arranges to write 
 one letter for them all, to be sent on its way from 
 one church to another. But, then, there are 
 special conditions in the church at Colossae. The 
 church at Colossae is being harassed by perils that 
 need special treatment, and nothing else than the 
 very careful handling of Paul himself could ade- 
 quately meet the situation. So Paul must compose 
 a special letter to Colossae. But he will not leave 
 the other churches without a message. So in 
 a long talk with his companions and friends he 
 goes right over the whole ground ; he tells them 
 what he wants said, and then commissions one 
 shall we say Timothy ? to draft a letter. I suggest 
 Timothy especially because we read of him that 
 ' from a babe ' he was steeped in the sacred writings ; 
 and he is the one of whom we can easily believe
 
 Some Sidelights Upon Paul 61 
 
 biblical phraseology would come naturally from 
 his lips, so that he would easily drop into ' Semi- 
 tisms.' Paul was equally steeped in these sacred 
 writings, but it does not follow that every man 
 who knows his Bible will use biblical phrases 
 in his writings. Paul quoted the Bible, but he 
 did not let it mould his style to any appreciable 
 extent ; while Timothy may well have let biblical 
 phraseology colour his ordinary writing. The 
 letter, then, as we conceive it becomes simply 
 a written report of exhortations which Paul has 
 just been giving orally as if, for example, some- 
 body were here engaged in writing out a report 
 of what was said to us last hour. The thoughts 
 would be those of the speaker ; but the language 
 would tend to be the language of the writer. 
 
 This, then, is what I take it Timothy had to do. 
 He took Paul's thoughts and Paul's words, so far 
 as he could reproduce them, and brought the draft 
 to Paul. Paul then proceeded to amend his letter, 
 striking out a phrase there and putting in a phrase 
 here. He turned it inside out quite freely, and 
 at the end that letter was Paul's absolutely. It 
 started from him and it ended with him ; but 
 there was the trace of another hand in it which, 
 I think, is quite enough to account for those differ- 
 ences of style which have given some people not 
 a little trouble as to the authorship
 
 62 Some Sidelights Upon Paul 
 
 This conjectural account explains, I think, 
 the close resemblances between the letter to the 
 Ephesians, so-called, and that to the Colossians. 
 I have still to illustrate from the papyri, as I prom- 
 ised, the combination of resemblances and differences 
 of style between these two Epistles. I have been 
 assuming, you see, that the reason why Ephesians 
 and Colossians are so much like each other is that 
 they were written at the same time, Colossians 
 by Paul himself, and Ephesians by a friend who 
 reported from memory an oral discourse of the 
 apostle. Now among the papyri we have two 
 letters which I may read, as interesting in them- 
 selves and for the light which they throw upon 
 the New Testament. The situation of the two, 
 and the date, viz. 168 B.C., is identical. A man 
 having a wife and child had been in very serious 
 money difficulties, and, to save himself from further 
 trouble, he promptly went into ' retreat ' in a 
 monastery. Perhaps you may think that the 
 monastery suggests Christianity, but the date is 
 B.C., and monasticism is in fact not a Christian 
 institution at all, but much older. (Some of us 
 think that there is not much Christianity in it at 
 the best of times !) In the Serapeum, the temple 
 of the god Serapis, at Memphis, there used to be 
 from time to time companies of temporary monks, 
 who went there into retreat and stayed for a fixed
 
 Some Sidelights Upon Paul 63 
 
 period. These letters are written after the re- 
 treat has come to an end. Most of the people 
 have gone home, but this man has not. He knows 
 that he will find things uncomfortable at home, 
 and so he determines to be very religious and 
 stay. When his poor wife knew the retreat was 
 over, she wrote this touching letter : 
 
 ' Isias to Hephaestion her brother, greeting : ' 
 Brother here means husband. 
 
 ' If you are well and everything else goes with you 
 reasonably, it would be as I perpetually pray the 
 gods. I myself am in good health, and the child 
 and all in the house.' 
 
 And then the good woman adds words between 
 the lines, ' making mention of you continually.' 
 
 You will find that phrase in Rom. i. 9, in Eph. 
 i. 16, and so on. It was a formula of writing which 
 was used, you see, among the heathen, and which 
 Paul took up. 
 
 And then her letter proceeds : 
 
 ' When I received from Horus your letter in 
 which you explained that you were in retreat 
 in the Serapeum at Memphis, I immediately gave 
 thanks to the gods that you were well, but that 
 you did not return when all the others who were 
 shut up returned distresses me ; for in view of
 
 64 Some Sidelights Upon Paul 
 
 having piloted myself and your child through such a 
 crisis, and having come to the last extremity 
 because of the high price of corn, thinking that now 
 at last your return would give me some relief, you 
 have never even thought of returning nor sparing 
 a look for our helpless state. While you were 
 still at home I went altogether short, not to 
 mention how long time has passed since, and such 
 hard times, and you having sent nothing. But 
 now that Horus ; who has delivered your letter, 
 has told us about your having been set free from 
 the retreat, I am altogether distressed. And your 
 mother, too, is in great trouble about it. I 
 entreat you for her sake and for ours to return to 
 the city, unless, indeed, something most important 
 is keeping you. Remember to take good care 
 of yourself and be in good health. Good-bye. 
 July 24, 168 B.C.' 
 
 This letter was found in the temple. No doubt 
 he left it behind in his hurry when he went home ! 
 From the same place comes this second letter, 
 dated on the same day from his brother. I 
 think you will agree as you hear it that the wife 
 and the brother-in-law had been having a conversa- 
 tion in which they have made up together the pleas 
 they will urge in separate letters. 
 
 ' Dionysius to his brother Hephaestion, greeting : 
 If you are well and other things suit you reasonably,
 
 Some Sidelights Upon Paul 65 
 
 it would be as I perpetually pray to the gods. I 
 myself am well, also Eudaemonis and the children 
 and Isias and your children, and all in the house. 
 When I received your letter explaining that you 
 had been brought safely out of great dangers and 
 were in retreat, I rendered thanks to the gods that 
 you were well, but I wished you had returned and 
 come to town as Conon and all the others who were 
 shut up, that Isias, who when your child had been 
 in the utmost danger had done everything to pull 
 him safely through, and had suffered such hard 
 times in addition, might at last get a little breathing 
 space by seeing you. For it is altogether needless 
 for you to stay in seclusion until you can make 
 something and bring it. Every one when he has 
 pulled safely out of danger tries to get home quickly 
 and greet his wife and his children and his friends. 
 So please try quickly to return, unless something 
 most important is keeping you. Take good care 
 of your bodily health. Good-bye. July 24.' 
 
 The similarity of these letters comes from the 
 same reason as the similarity to compare small 
 things with great of Ephesians and Colossians. 
 
 I am going to say something now about Paul's 
 position as a Greek, and why, incidentally, we can 
 suppose that Paul was really familiar with the 
 Greek life. In the first place, there are his quota- 
 tions from Greek - literature. A few years ago 
 Dr. Rendel Harris discovered a passage in one of 
 
 E
 
 66 Some Sidelights Upon Paul 
 
 his Syriac manuscripts, a passage in which was 
 embedded one of Paul's well-known quotations 
 from classical literature. The passage consisted 
 of four lines which were translated very easily 
 into Greek hexameter verse. They ran thus : 
 
 ' A grave have they fashioned for thee, O Zeus, 
 highest and greatest, the Cretans, always liars, 
 evil beasts, idle gluttons. But thou art not 
 dead, for everlastingly thou livest and standest ; 
 for in thee we live, and move, and have our being.' 
 
 The allusion is to the fact that in Crete there 
 was shown a tomb of Zeus, the supreme deity of 
 the Greeks, a fact which always roused the indig- 
 nation of orthodox Greek religion, where, of course, 
 Zeus was immortal. 
 
 Now you have already recognized the bearing 
 of the striking quotation unearthed for us by Dr. 
 Harris. We begin with learning the reason why 
 the Cretans were called liars, in words which became 
 proverbial. But we have seen the familiar line 
 from Titus brought into close connexion with one 
 much more familiar, which has now to be referred 
 to the same author, traditionally said to be the 
 Cretan poet-philosopher Epimenides, who lived 
 in the sixth century before Christ. There were 
 two contributions from Greek poets, then, in that 
 wonderful speech or, rather, exordium of a speech
 
 Some Sidelights Upon Paul 67 
 
 that Paul addressed to the Areopagites in Athens. 
 Not only ' For we are also His offspring/ but also 
 ' In Him we live, and move, and have our being,' 
 is a gem from Greek thought. How far these 
 quotations prove Paul's reading in Greek literature 
 is not easy to say. If you found an Englishman 
 saying, ' To be or not to be : that is the question,' 
 you could not inevitably prove he had read Hamlet. 
 It might be he got the tag out of a newspaper. 
 If, however, he continued the speech beyond that 
 line, it would be a little better evidence that he 
 knew his Shakespeare. But I think, on the whole, 
 Paul was not unfamiliar with some of the things 
 that had been said about the gods by Greek poets. 
 He was just the sort of a man to search the literature 
 for traces of these higher things. 
 
 We have a striking parallel especially urged 
 by Sir William Ramsay. We know how constantly 
 Paul referred to the Greek games, which, let us 
 not forget, were religious ceremonials. Greek 
 athletics were clean in comparison with some 
 modern sports, and brought out the very best there 
 was in the Greek character. They always seemed 
 to have a great attraction for Paul. ' Whatsoever 
 things are manly, whatsoever things are of good 
 report ' Paul was always very sympathetic towards 
 such things wherever he found them. And if 
 some one had come to him and said, ' These Greek
 
 68 Some Sidelights Upon Paul 
 
 games are in honour of heathen gods/ what would 
 he have said ? ' Yes,' we may hear him reply, 
 ' suppose they are ! Whether you eat or whether 
 you drink, or whatever you do, do it all to the 
 glory of God ; and if you do not know my God, 
 then I have come to tell you about Him. Mean- 
 while, if you know anything about God it is some- 
 thing if you dedicate the best part of life to Him.' 
 I am quite sure Paul's mind was so large and so 
 tolerant that he would not stick at the fact that 
 they were ' heathen ' deities. What he saw was 
 a groping after God, and he saw that men who 
 groped after God had some of them found Him. 
 There was a very beautiful fact brought out 
 by a friend of mine, a great archaeologist, at Cam- 
 bridge. He told me something new about the 
 most famous of all statues ever graven by art or 
 device of man the wonderful ' Olympian Zeus ' 
 of Phidias, which looked down the race-course 
 at Olympia. Phidias was an innovator in a very 
 startling way. His predecessors always portrayed 
 Zeus as majestic and terrible, brandishing the 
 thunderbolt before he hurled it to work havoc 
 among men. The new Zeus had a face of unspeak- 
 able majesty, but the majesty of benevolence and 
 fatherliness. Five centuries before Christ that 
 great sculptor, that deeply religious man, had 
 realized the idea that God was good. I think if
 
 Some Sidelights Upon Paul 69 
 
 Paul ever saw that figure he must have caught 
 its meaning. The glorious figure disappeared some- 
 where during the Dark Ages, but the face lived on. 
 It was actually taken over by the Church to become 
 in Christian art the traditional face of Christ. So 
 true it is, to quote that text that I was explaining 
 in a former lecture, that ' unto us the toll of the 
 ages has come as our inheritance/ 
 
 One other question about Paul I should like to 
 examine before I have done. What was his 
 education and what his social position? No 
 less a scholar than Professor Deissmann has 
 regarded him as a plain, working man, like most 
 of the Twelve. But would an artisan have had 
 a chance to study at the feet of Gamaliel ? Would 
 he have been charged by the priestly aristocracy 
 to carry out that mission in Damascus ? I greatly 
 prefer Ramsay's view that Paul's father was a 
 Roman citizen, and presumably, therefore, a man 
 of wealth and of importance in Tarsus. Moreover, 
 as Ramsay most persuasively argues, there was 
 a time in Paul's life when he was in possession 
 of a good deal of money, which must have come 
 to him by the death of his father. Since men 
 among the Jews did not have wills, when a man 
 died his money descended automatically to his 
 sons, and Paul would thus get money which cer- 
 tainly never would come to him by his father's
 
 70 Some Sidelights Upon Paul 
 
 consent. The father, who gave his brilliant son 
 a costly training under the greatest of the Rabbis, 
 was not likely to take cheerfully his defection to 
 ' the sect of the Nazarenes,' and we might safely 
 assume that he cut him off with, or without, a 
 shilling. I wonder if we can see in Acts xi. 25 a 
 hint that Barnabas had some trouble in finding 
 Paul, who was not at his father's well-known 
 address, but in an obscure corner, living as best he 
 could ? Whether that is so or not, we can at least 
 recognize what new meaning Ramsay's suggestion 
 gives to Paul's own record that for Christ's sake he 
 ' suffered the loss of all things ' (Phil. iii. 8). 
 
 In favour of Paul's lowly origin it is urged that 
 his vocabulary is that of the common people. That 
 is quite true. A German scholar, Dr. Nageli, who 
 has made a very careful study of Paul's vocabulary 
 as far as the first five letters of the alphabet, has 
 shown that Paul's words can all of them be paralleled 
 from quite vernacular sources, and that none of 
 them are out-of-the-way words, but such as the 
 common people could understand. Quite so ; but 
 that does not make us believe that Paul could not 
 have used philosophic and out-of-the-way words 
 if he liked. The reason why he did not use them 
 was because it was of first importance to him to 
 speak so that he could be understood by everybody. 
 If you read John Wesley's sermons, you will find
 
 Some Sidelights Upon Paul 71 
 
 exactly the same thing. John Wesley was a 
 learned man, a man of refinement, a man who could 
 have gone in for polysyllables with the best of 
 them if he had cared to ; but he meant to be under- 
 stood. And so, surely, did Paul ! 
 
 One rather interesting example of this has struck 
 me quite lately. In going over the record of the 
 Greek word Hades, I was rather surprised to find 
 that it occurs only once in the innumerable papyri 
 that Professor Milligan and I have been searching, and 
 that in a document very far from the normal style. 
 What is the reason ? I am satisfied that this word 
 had dropped out of the ordinary vernacular. But, 
 you say, surely the word occurs in the New Testa- 
 ment, and very often in the Greek of the Old. 
 Quite so; but that was, I believe, only because 
 the Septuagint translators found it an exact 
 rendering to represent the Hebrew Sheol. They 
 took it for this purpose from the technical language 
 of Greek religion, but as a word in ordinary life 
 it was apparently no longer in use. We seem to 
 have at once an explanation of what has always 
 rather puzzled me. You will remember that at 
 the end of one of Paul's greatest chapters, the 
 fifteenth chapter of I Corinthians, he brings it 
 into that sublime apostrophe : ' Where, O death, 
 is thy sting? Where, O grave, is thy victory? ' 
 as the Authorized Version has it. That is a
 
 72 Some Sidelights Upon Paul 
 
 quotation from Hosea, and in the original you 
 have both death and Sheol mentioned. And I 
 think we all agree that the phraseology is much 
 more impressive than this that Paul uses. How 
 does Paul quote it ? ' Where, O death, is thy 
 sting ? Where, O death, is thy victory ? ' Why 
 did Paul use the same word twice, and spoil the 
 rhetorical effect from Hosea? The reason was 
 that the word was not in common, ordinary use, 
 and so, even if it were to spoil the literary effect, 
 Paul put the word that everybody knew into the 
 passage. 
 
 While I can only briefly put it before you, I do 
 not want to talk about Paul this morning without 
 mentioning something which has a great deal to do 
 with the whole of the history of his life. Had Paul 
 ever seen the Lord Jesus in the flesh ? Had he 
 seen Him before that great day when, in the clouds 
 outside of Damascus, he saw that wondrous Face 
 which changed his life ? There is a very able dis- 
 cussion by a brilliant German theologian, Johannes 
 Weiss, translated into English in an American 
 series published by Harpers, and called Paul and 
 Jesus. Johannes Weiss argues, I think with con- 
 clusive force, that that text in 2 Corinthians, ' Even 
 if we have known Christ in the flesh, yet now we 
 know Him so no more,' necessarily implies that 
 Paul really had seen Jesus. Now, after all, that
 
 Some Sidelights Upon Paul 73 
 
 is very natural. We know that Paul was in Jerusa- 
 lem before the Passion, when he studied under 
 Gamaliel ; he was there very soon after, for the 
 story of Acts implies it. The ordinary theory 
 assumes that Paul had gone back to Tarsus when 
 Jesus was exercising His ministry. It is at least as 
 easy to believe that Paul never left at all. There are 
 some indications in Paul's language that Paul really 
 was in Jerusalem at the time when the Lord Jesus 
 was there. And the most significant suggestion I 
 find of that kind is in the Passion story as it is 
 written in his friend Luke's writings. There are 
 several places in Luke's story of the Passion not 
 to be found in Mark. There are places where, 
 apparently, Luke has deserted his usual source for 
 a source which he regards as more important still. 
 What can that source be ? W T hy not the personal 
 experience of Paul ? I think we can easily realize 
 why Luke took up that authority. Just let me 
 simply mention some of those traces. 
 
 You remember the question that was addressed 
 to Jesus by a deputation from Jerusalem as to the 
 question of divorce. Have you ever asked the 
 question why it was that they thought they were 
 trapping Him when they asked Him this question ? 
 If He said a man must not divorce his wife, the only 
 thing for them to say was that He agreed with 
 Shammai, one of the greatest Rabbis. If He said he
 
 74 Some Sidelights Upon Paul 
 
 might divorce his wife, why, the only thing for them 
 to say was that He agreed with Hillel, a still greater 
 Rabbi. What did they think they were going 
 to gain by getting Christ to pronounce upon this 
 question ? Professor Burkitt, of Cambridge, has 
 pointed out the relation of all this to the marriage 
 of Herod and Herodias. Where Jesus says that not 
 only must not a man divorce his wife but a woman 
 must not divorce her husband, the critics have some- 
 times raised a great deal of difficulty. What does 
 that mean ? No woman could divorce her husband 
 in those days. No ; but a princess could do what 
 an ordinary woman could not, and it happened that 
 Herodias had done it. Paul has an allusion to that 
 very matter in i Cor. vii., where he does actually 
 raise the question of a woman's divorcing her 
 husband. It came out in that question between 
 the Pharisees and Jesus, and I believe that Paul 
 was on that deputation. You may be very sure if 
 he were in Jerusalem at all he would take care to go 
 down and put in every effort to convict Jesus of 
 unorthodoxy. 
 
 And then there is that expression ' a house made 
 with hands.' That is very significant. In what is 
 described as ' false testimony ' in Jesus's trial, it was 
 alleged that He had said, ' I am able to destroy this 
 house which is made with hands, and in three days 
 raise another, made without hands.' That is
 
 Some Sidelights Upon Paul 75 
 
 described as false testimony ; but the ' lie that is half 
 a truth is ever the blackest of lies.' What I think 
 Jesus said was, ' Destroy this temple, and in three 
 days I will raise another made without hands.' 
 Hence two or three allusions in the Epistles. Then 
 again, ' Render unto Caesar the things that are 
 Caesar's ; and unto God the things that are God's/ 
 The word for tribute in that passage of Mark is a 
 Latin word. In Luke it is a Greek word, and Paul 
 uses the same word in the similar passage, Rom. 
 xiii. 7. I believe Paul was also on that deputation. 
 
 Finally, there is that tremendous saying of Jesus 
 in the Garden, reported by Luke alone. He pro- 
 tested against arrest, telling them He was daily 
 in the temple and they had never laid hands on Him, 
 ' But,' He said, ' this is your hour, and the authority 
 of darkness.' Darkness may enshroud the Prince of 
 the Light, in order that darkness may be expelled 
 for ever from the world which He came to redeem. 
 With that word He relapses into awful silence. We 
 meet with that phrase again in the Epistle to the 
 Colossians, where Paul says, ' Who hath delivered 
 us out of the authority of darkness and translated 
 us into the kingdom of the Son of His love.' 
 
 Here I must leave it, trusting that you will think 
 of other quotations that might have been made. I 
 only remind you that we may say, and with some 
 confidence, that the poet may very likely have been
 
 76 Some Sidelights Upon Paul 
 
 right when he proclaims Paul as having been present 
 to the end. You remember that thrilling stanza 
 in F. W. H. Myers's Saint Paul a better exposi- 
 tion of the apostle than perhaps any commentary 
 has achieved : 
 
 Oh, with what bitter triumph had I seen them, 
 Drops of redemption bleeding from Thy brow 1 
 
 Thieves, and a culprit crucified between them, 
 All men forsaking Him and that was Thou I 
 
 Yes, Paul was there, and what he saw burned itself 
 upon his brain until, at last, the time came when 
 he saw that Face in glory and he knew that He 
 who thus died had died for him. I think we can 
 understand why Paul says so little about the earthly 
 life of Jesus. What he talks about is what he has 
 seen and heard of, and for him the Cross was the 
 central thing, as it could not be for the other disciples, 
 just because it made up the whole of what he knew 
 of Jesus. The Cross was the interpretation ; it was 
 the purpose of everything ; it was the goal to which 
 the Son of Man was going. It was the purpose for 
 which He had come into the world, and for Paul the 
 Cross was just absolutely the beginning and the end 
 of all things. That is why this many-sided man, 
 this wonderful Paul, who might have achieved the 
 highest distinction in absolutely any rank of life, 
 who might have become the most famous of men,
 
 Some Sidelights Upon Paul 77 
 
 that is why he determines to narrow himself, to 
 cut himself off from everything else in the world and 
 say, ' I determined not to know anything at all 
 among you save one thing, Jesus the Messiah, 
 and Him not as a great Teacher, not as a matchless 
 Example, not as winsome Love no, but something 
 more than that and Him as crucified/ as the 
 Sacrifice for the life of the world. Paul lived and 
 died for one purpose. He lived to point men to 
 Calvary ; he, a Hebrew, a Greek, a Roman, a man in 
 whom all the different strands of the knowledge 
 and the life of the day met in so unique a way, 
 he felt that he was raised up to go and point to that 
 title on the Cross where, in letters of Greek and 
 Hebrew and Latin, were written the words, 
 THIS is THE KING.
 
 IV 
 
 HOW WE GOT OUR GOSPELS 
 
 THE title I have given for this talk is almost absurd. 
 I hardly know how I dared to set it down ! It sug- 
 gests a handbook of at least a hundred pages, which 
 might serve for a popular outline of a subject I 
 am now to deal with in something less than fifty 
 minutes ! I propose this morning to be discursive 
 and selective, picking out a few things here and 
 there, that by so doing I may illustrate the salient 
 features of a most important question. 
 
 Let me remark first that though most important 
 for helping us in the face of the world ' to give a 
 reason for our hope/ the question of this morning 
 is not absolutely the first in rank for us. We ask 
 how we got those four pamphlets which tell us what 
 we know of the earthly life of Jesus, the Carpenter 
 of Nazareth, the Son of God. But we have to ask 
 something more vital first. We must begin with 
 the twentieth century and find out what Jesus 
 Christ is doing to-day, and start our Christian 
 evidences from what is seen and heard and known 
 here in our midst now. Till we have done this it is 
 
 78
 
 How We Grot Our Gospels 79 
 
 not proved worth while, except as a mere literary 
 problem, to trace the history of four little books 
 which might be printed in extenso in a single issue 
 of some daily papers. 
 
 For the present we may assume it as proved that 
 the message of the Gospels is still profoundly 
 influencing the world. It is therefore worth our 
 while to test them ; and we may be sure in advance 
 that th'e test will be futile if it does not enable us 
 to understand to some degree the secret of their 
 unique authority ; a test which only comes to nega- 
 tive results is self-condemned. The great Bishop 
 Westcott, a friend and colleague of my father's on 
 the New Testament Revision Company, observed 
 once that when he began the study of the Bible 
 he determined to treat it just like any other book, 
 and that it was in this way that he found it was not 
 like any other book. That is the brave utterance 
 of a man who thought first of Truth, and not of 
 his own favourite presuppositions. If we believe 
 in the Book, we shall not be afraid of anything 
 that is called ' criticism.' The word I have just 
 pronounced is a terrible bugbear to many good 
 people. It has, we may admit, a somewhat un- 
 happy suggestion of a superior person talking 
 down something that is below him. But that is 
 what we put into the word, not what it really 
 means. ' Criticism ' comes from an adjective
 
 8o How We Got Our Gospels 
 
 attached to the Greek word for ' judge ' ; and of 
 all people in creation the judge, if he knows his 
 business, has to be most impartial, most rigid in 
 his reasoning. He must give over all made-up 
 opinions and investigate the evidence himself ; 
 and the truth is the one and only thing he cares 
 about. And this is exactly what the attitude of 
 the ' critic ' ought to be. Critics may form very 
 different conclusions. One comes to conservative 
 results, and one to revolutionary results. So long 
 as the critic is honest, I do not think it matters very 
 much, for the things that matter most in these 
 Gospels are strong enough to survive anything. 
 We may differ about minor issues without en- 
 dangering what is central. 
 
 What I propose to say this morning in an attempt 
 to cover my title will be partly on ' lower ' criticism 
 and partly on ' higher.' ' Higher criticism ' asks the 
 question when and how and where these books 
 were written, who wrote them, and why they were 
 written. ' Lower criticism ' meets the stream lower 
 down, and asks how, after they left their authors' 
 hands, they came down to us, how far we can be 
 sure that we have them in their original form. 
 Beginning, as is natural, high up at the source, 
 I will try to summarize in a sentence or two what is 
 now almost universally held among scholars with 
 regard to the external history of our first three
 
 How We Got Our Gospels Si 
 
 Gospels. It is agreed to-day that our oldest 
 Gospel is the Gospel of Mark. That Gospel was 
 written, according to very early tradition, and a 
 tradition which seems to have everything in its 
 favour, by a man who had had special relation to 
 the Apostle Peter ; and this book was the 
 historical basis of the two later Gospels, called after 
 Matthew and Luke respectively. Since, however, 
 there is a large amount of matter, almost exclusively 
 sayings of Jesus, common to Matthew and Luke, 
 but not found in Mark, we postulate the use of 
 another document, which must have been lost very 
 soon after the evangelists worked up its material. 
 When we have recognized these two sources, we 
 have still to allow for other sources, written or oral, 
 which the authors of Matthew and Luke had to 
 themselves severally, to account for narratives and 
 discourses found in one Gospel alone. 
 
 This is, in a few bald sentences, the view of the 
 beginnings of our Gospels which is held by nearly all 
 scholars to-day, and is likely to remain in possession, 
 with modifications mainly in detail. Before I say 
 anything more about it I want to start with 
 another part of the New Testament, from which 
 we secure evidence that is of vital importance for 
 the history of the Gospels. The Book of Acts con- 
 tains, as you know very well, considerable sections 
 in which the intrusion of the first personal pronoun
 
 82 How We Got Our Gospels 
 
 tells us that we have in our hands the diary of a 
 man who was present himself at the events he 
 records. We call this part of Acts the ' we -sections/ 
 and even the most revolutionary critics allow that 
 they come from a companion of Paul, who set down 
 his experience of travels with the apostle. Here, 
 then, we have firm ground to build upon, for in 
 claiming the presence of an eye-witness at this 
 point of the story we are supported by men who 
 will grant very little of the case we are accustomed 
 to regard as undisputed. You will see why I lay 
 such stress on the ' we-sections ' when I go on to 
 say that of late the unity of these passages with the 
 rest of the Book of the Acts and the Gospel of Luke 
 has been asserted by scholars who are entirely 
 beyond the suspicion of having prejudices on the 
 orthodox side. The famous theologian Professor 
 Harnack, of Berlin, has written four books lately 
 on the Third Gospel and Acts, and has lent the 
 great weight of his authority to a thesis which had 
 been regarded by not a few prominent German 
 scholars as a mere prejudice of old-fashioned ortho- 
 doxy, viz. that the man who wrote the ' w-sections ' 
 wrote also the whole book in which they are em- 
 bedded and its companion volume the Gospel. 
 I confess, as a Briton, to some patriotic satis- 
 faction at tardy justice done to an Irish scholar, 
 Dr. Hobart, who wrote some thirty years since
 
 How We Grot Our Gospels 83 
 
 a most admirable work entitled The Medical Lan- 
 guage of St. Luke, only to meet with quite con- 
 temptuous treatment from an army of critics who 
 never read him. Dr. Hobart's method was to 
 illustrate Luke's language and style from the 
 medical literature of the Greeks. That wonderful 
 people, to whom we owe the foundation of every 
 art and every science, and the earliest masterpieces 
 of literature, include among their triumphs the 
 first beginnings of medicine and surgery. We have, 
 even from the fifth century before Christ, great 
 works on medicine showing marvellous research 
 and true scientific observation. Now Luke was a 
 doctor ; ' Luke the beloved physician ' is mentioned 
 in Paul's Epistle to the Colossians. And according 
 to second-century tradition it was this ' Dr. Lucas ' 
 who wrote the two books which together make up 
 the largest individual contribution to the library 
 of the New Testament. Dr. Hobart put this tradi- 
 tion to the test, and he found in the two books, 
 distributed evenly all through them, a large number 
 of characteristic words and phrases which occur 
 especially or exclusively in medical literature. 
 They include not only words appropriate to the 
 diagnosis of disease and to medical or surgical 
 practice, but also more general terminology which 
 happens to be conspicuous in this medical literature. 
 The cumulative effect of the argument is very
 
 84 How We Got Our Gospels 
 
 strong. It makes it practically certain that the 
 writer not merely of the ' we-sections,' but also of 
 the books as a whole, was a diligent reader of Greek 
 medical \vorks. To postulate another doctor as the 
 author when by a marvellous independent choice 
 tradition has given us the name of ' the beloved 
 physician ' would be simply fatuous. Professor 
 Harnack has endorsed this argument of Hobart's, 
 and he has strengthened the case by his own examina- 
 tion of Luke's phraseology, all tending to emphasize 
 the individuality of the author's style throughout. 
 I may add from some work of my own that the 
 grammar tells the same story. We have, then, the 
 assured result that these two books were written 
 throughout by one man, a doctor, and one who 
 actually travelled with Paul. That his name was 
 really Luke may be regarded as certain. It is a 
 certainty if only because of the complete obscurity 
 of the man. He is only mentioned three times. 
 Why should the Church pitch on that particular 
 name, out of all the names of Paul's companions, 
 and father the book upon him ? 
 
 Let me go on to mention two directions in which 
 fresh light has been cast on Luke. One is the 
 suggestion of Sir William Ramsay that when Paul 
 saw the vision at Troas, and the ' man from Mace- 
 donia ' cried out to him, saying, ' Come over into 
 Macedonia and help us/ it was the vision of his new
 
 How We Grot Our Gospels 85 
 
 friend Luke that he saw. You remember that the 
 author went with Paul from Troa.s to Philippi. 
 and then the ' we ' passages stop. They do not 
 recommence until Paul gets back to Philippi, 
 and then they begin again without any statement 
 on the part of the writer, who is not concerned to 
 talk about himself. Clearly he remained at Philippi, 
 in Macedonia a town named after the famous 
 Philip of Macedon until Paul came through again. 
 It is natural to suppose that this was Luke's home, 
 so that he was a member of the best loved of all 
 Paul's churches. We may suppose that Paul made 
 Luke's acquaintance at Troas, and felt at once that 
 affinity of mind and heart which marked them out as 
 friends. What more natural than that when 
 he went to bed he should dream of his friend, and 
 see him standing by him to utter an entreaty like 
 this ? Then over the morning meal Paul told his 
 dream. We may be sure that Luke was quick to 
 reply, ' That must be a divine admonition. You 
 have been kept out of Bithynia, you have been kept 
 out of Asia and what a field there was in Asia, in 
 Ephesus, and all those crowded cities ! What a 
 chance there seemed to be for you in Bithynia ! 
 But you have been telling us how you were kept 
 out of the Province of Asia, how a vision of Jesus 
 Himself closed Bithynia, how you were forced down 
 to Troas here, where there is nothing to do but look
 
 86 How We Got Our Gospels 
 
 over the Straits to Europe. Surely it means that 
 you must go on to the west over the sea, and take 
 the gospel to the land where my people dwell.' Am 
 
 1 pressing too far the suggestion of that tell-tale 
 ' we ' that comes in here for the first time ? ' When 
 he had seen the vision, we immediately planned to 
 set out for Macedonia, concluding that God had 
 called us to evangelize them.' 
 
 Then just one other point about Luke's personality. 
 Professor Souter, of Aberdeen University, hit upon 
 a point a few years ago which is obvious enough 
 when once suggested. It is simply a matter of 
 translation. If you will turn to 2 Cor. viii. 18 you 
 will find, after a mention of Titus's eagerness to 
 visit Corinth, the statement that Paul had sent 
 with him ' the brother.' So it is read in Authorized 
 and Revised Versions. But Dr. Souter has rightly 
 pointed out that ' his brother ' is a much more 
 natural translation. This applies even more to 
 
 2 Cor. xii. 18, where we should read, ' I exhorted 
 Titus, and sent his brother with him.' What a 
 very strange phrase ' the brother ' is there ! (I 
 might add a further instance in Rom. xvi. 23, 
 ' Erastus the city treasurer, and Quartus his brother.') 
 Who, then, was Titus's brother, ' whose praise 
 in the telling of the Gospel story extends through 
 all the churches ' ? What was this brother's name ? 
 Now it is an old conjecture that the description
 
 How We Grot Our Gospels 87 
 
 just quoted from 2 Cor. viii. 18 was meant for no 
 other than Luke. It is a natural conjecture in 
 itself, but it gains greatly by being associated with 
 the amended rendering. For it gives a key to one 
 of the notable difficulties of the Book of Acts. 
 People have often said, ' We know from Paul's 
 letters that one of the most important of all the 
 early Christians was Titus. What a very strange 
 thing it is that Titus is never mentioned in the 
 Book of Acts ! ' But if Titus was Luke's brother 
 he did not mention him any more than he mentioned 
 himself. It is just a part of a great man's humility, 
 content to shrink into the background. Luke was 
 one of the company of those who wrote the New 
 Testament ; and if you want a motto for the writers 
 of the New Testament yes, of the Old Testament, 
 too it is, ' And they said, Who art thou ? . . . 
 And he said, I am a voice.' Vox et praeterea nihil. 
 In your own Whittier's words : 
 
 What matter I or they ? 
 Mine or another's day, 
 So the right word be said, 
 And life the sweeter made ? 
 
 It does not matter. Those men were not in it for 
 fame. They did not care whether after ages 
 knew that they had written little books which 
 were going to turn the world upside down. The
 
 88 How We Got Our Gospels 
 
 only thing they cared about was how the message 
 of Jesus Christ was to be brought to men's hearts. 
 They thought little about literary form ; less than 
 nothing about writing books that would be admired. 
 They were not out for admiration. They only 
 thought of their story, and rejoiced to know that 
 their names were written in heaven, even though 
 they might never be known on earth. 
 
 How far have we advanced now? We have 
 shown that no impartial person can question the 
 claim made for ' Dr. Lucas ' as author of the two 
 books dedicated to Theophilus, who when the first 
 of them was written was addressed as ' Excellency,' 
 as a member of the Roman public service. We pass 
 now to the older Gospel from which, as every student 
 has long believed, Luke took so much of his narrative. 
 
 How do we know that Mark wrote that Gospel ? 
 There is one reason, I think, which is quite enough 
 by itself. Suppose the Church had set to work 
 to guess which of the early Christians whose names 
 they knew had written this book, which set in 
 rough but wonderfully vivid language the story of 
 Jesus, who do you think is about the last of them 
 they would have thought of ? Why, surely, the 
 man about whom it was recorded in the Book of Acts 
 that he had gone forth as ' attendant ' with Paul 
 and Barnabas, and that as soon as ever they got 
 into a difficult place, when they were just coming
 
 How We Got Our Gospels 89 
 
 up against the high passes of the Taurus Mountains, 
 infested by the robbers of whom Paul tells us, a 
 dangerous place where a strong young man had his 
 chance of service, his heart failed him, and he ran 
 away back to Jerusalem. The man of whom that 
 could be said is not the man whom the Church 
 would have picked out as the man best qualified 
 to write a Gospel. Not a bit of it. You and I could 
 have made many better guesses. The reason why 
 Mark's name is attached to that Gospel is again a 
 very simple reason, like that which helped us to the 
 authorship of the book that stands next to it. Mark 
 wrote the book that is all ! 
 
 Now about Mark we have some traditions. We 
 have one from Papias, one of the very earliest of 
 Christian writers. He was the Bishop of Hierapolis, 
 near Colossae. It is recorded of him by Eusebius, 
 the historian, that he was ' a man of very narrow 
 understanding.' We have quotations from him 
 which entirely bear this out. But even if he was a 
 bit of a fool, his early date he was born before the 
 first century was over gives him an authority that 
 cannot be questioned. The two or three brief 
 sentences we possess from his Expositions as to 
 the Gospel origins have supplied texts for the 
 longest sermons criticism has ever known. One 
 is the story which he gives us of the birth of the 
 Gospel of Mark. I need only refer there to the fact
 
 go How We Got Our Gospels 
 
 that he tells us Mark ' had been the interpreter 
 of Peter.' He had been in special relation with 
 Peter, and therefore he got his Gospel story primarily 
 from Peter. There is only one reason I have ever 
 heard against that, and it is typical of a certain 
 class of criticism. I do not know whether it was 
 invented by Professor Jiilicher, but I am taking it 
 from him. The Church says that Mark was the 
 interpreter of Peter, and that Peter, therefore, 
 stands behind the Second Gospel. This Peter was 
 an eye-witness he was actually a companion of 
 Jesus. But the Second Gospel tells us of many 
 miracles, and ' miracles do not happen.' Therefore 
 you cannot suppose that an eye-witness recorded 
 them, and therefore you must give up Mark's 
 connexion with Peter. ' Q.E.D. ! ' one is supposed 
 to say, after the style of Euclid. 
 
 But I want to come to another question which 
 I have never heard asked. It might be suggestive 
 for our object. What was the purpose for which 
 Mark accompanied Paul and Barnabas, and for 
 which Luke later accompanied Paul and Silas ? 
 We are told that Mark was the ' attendant ' of 
 Paul and Barnabas. What was he there for ? I 
 do not know what you have thought about it. I 
 rather fancy that if I had put my own impressions 
 into words a few years ago I should have said that 
 Mark went with them as a younger man to look
 
 How We Got Our Gospels 91 
 
 after their luggage, to see their passages were got 
 on ships, and to help them in every way he could 
 so as to set the missionaries free to concentrate, on 
 their preaching. I take a very different view 
 now, and I get it from reading again more carefully 
 those four verses which are more important than 
 anything else in the New Testament when you 
 want to ask the question, ' What does Inspiration 
 involve ? ' I mean the first four verses of the 
 Gospel of Luke, that priceless little preface which 
 tells us how an inspired writer set to work how 
 instead of finding inspiration to save him trouble, 
 he found it gave him trouble ! Because he was 
 inspired, and because he had to write about some- 
 thing more important than anything the world 
 had ever seen before, he had to work his subject 
 up and ' trace over again the whole story carefully.' 
 That was the way in which Luke wrote. Now he 
 says he wants to do this in accordance with what 
 he learnt from men who from the beginning were 
 ' eye-witnesses and ministers of the Word.' This 
 word minister or attendant is the word used in Acts 
 xiii. 5, which I was quoting just now. So these 
 men were the ' servants of the Gospel ' let us put 
 ' Gospel ' instead of ' Word.' The Gospel, so to 
 speak, was their business. That was what they 
 had given their lives to. Let us try to use 
 our imagination, and see how this works out.
 
 92 How We Got Our Gospels 
 
 When Paul went to a new place, what was his 
 modus operandi ? We know he went to the syna- 
 gogue first. There he found people who knew 
 the Old Testament. That was the best preparation 
 for the New. In the synagogue there were always 
 a few people whose hearts the Lord had touched, 
 who would recognize instantly that in this Gospel 
 of the newly manifested Messiah they had the key 
 to the Old Testament Scripture that they knew 
 so well. Not many Jews were of this ' honourable ' 
 sort which has made the synagogue at Beroea 
 proverbial. Paul found more opponents than 
 friends, but he was well satisfied if he won a few 
 who were prepared by the study of the Old Testa- 
 ment, and these people he could use in his own way. 
 From the synagogue he would go out into the 
 market-place, just as Socrates had done five hundred 
 years before, and he would soon gather a curious 
 crowd together and make a speech telling them 
 about Jesus of Nazareth. Out of the crowd, when 
 the talk was over, Paul would collect a varying 
 number of inquirers, eager to hear more of this 
 wonderful story. They wanted to hear all about 
 Jesus His parables, His works, His life, and more 
 and ever more about His death. Now if Paul 
 had spent the rest of his time in that place 
 talking to such converts, he never would have 
 had an hour to spare for the unreached masses
 
 How We Got Our Gospels 93 
 
 outside. What did he do ? He had with him a 
 man who had not the same gift of preaching 
 to the unconverted, but who had an excellent 
 memory, and full knowledge of all those great 
 events which were being told among them ; and 
 he turned over the catechumens to this ' attend- 
 ant ' or ' minister.' Mark would take the inquirers 
 aside, and in some quiet place he would begin to 
 tell the story of the Gospel in detail. He would 
 meet them again and again for as long as they were 
 in the place. Necessarily, as he did not know 
 how long he would stay there they might be 
 driven out by the Jews or the mob any time he 
 would tell them the most important things first 
 What would be the first chapter of Mark that 
 would get itself spoken ? Why, of course, the 
 fifteenth, the story of the Death, the death by 
 which men live. That is the start, from which he 
 would work back to tell other things about the 
 life of Jesus. There would be no particular order 
 in these lessons, any more than there is any par- 
 ticular order in the sermons a minister would 
 preach to his congregation to-day. He does not 
 arrange his topics chronologically. Neither does 
 Mark. He learnt, as he told the tale in place 
 after place, which narratives most vividly impressed 
 his audience and drew them into full discipleship. 
 So a selection gradually evolved itself from
 
 94 How We Got Our Gospels 
 
 experience. Meanwhile, as men grew older they felt 
 the need of fixing these stories in writing for use 
 by the churches in after time. So, I take it, when 
 Peter had gone to his reward, and his ' attendant ' 
 or ' interpreter ' was no longer young, Mark wrote 
 out his oral lessons for later ' gospellers ' to use 
 when he was gone. 
 
 I must say a few words about the Gospel that 
 stands first. Papi^s tells us that ' Matthew com- 
 posed the oracles in Hebrew, and every one inter- 
 preted them as best he could.' There is a sentence 
 upon which enormous arguments have been elab- 
 orated. It is the earliest mention of Matthew as 
 an evangelist ; and the name at once reminds us 
 of other authorships which would never have been 
 guessed. Luke was obscure. Mark had been a 
 cowardly deserter. Matthew had been a tax- 
 gatherer. And the tax-gatherers of that age and 
 country were outcasts, and they deserved to be. 
 They were men who entered into the service of 
 the alien, and could only make their living by 
 grinding the faces of the poor. Matthew was the 
 only apostle whose past was shady, and whose 
 record was preserved. Surely he was the very 
 last of the eleven whom the Church would have 
 picked out as the man to write anything like a 
 Gospel. Therefore I come back to the simplest 
 explanation of the choice of Matthew's name.
 
 How We Got Our Gospels 95 
 
 He must really have written what Papias assigns 
 to him. He did not write the Gospel of Matthew 
 as we have it ; but he made the collection of the 
 Sayings of Jesus, and this collection became the 
 principal basis of the important book which is 
 called ' The Gospel according to Matthew.' This 
 book, like so many others in Old Testament and 
 New, comes down to us without any certainty who 
 wrote it. As before, ' Who art thou ? ' ' I am 
 a voice.' 
 
 But I must abruptly leave the higher criticism. 
 There is still much to say about the First Gospel, 
 and everything to say about the Fourth. But it 
 would be absurd to begin such a story in ten minutes. 
 I had better use my remaining time on an easier 
 subject, the transmission of the text of the Gospels 
 what we call lower, or textual, criticism. I want 
 us to realize in this matter that the Gospels are very 
 different indeed from any other books in history. 
 That is not singular ; there are a great many other 
 points in which they differ. The special point I mean 
 is this. Our ordinary books, even in antiquity, 
 have come to us very nearly as they left 
 their authors' hands. This is due to the method 
 of reproduction. The manuscript passed to a 
 scriptorium, or copying establishment maintained 
 by a publisher. In that house there were some 
 hundreds of slaves, slaves well skilled in writing,
 
 96 How We Got Our Gospels 
 
 who spent their whole life copying manuscripts. 
 In that way, since slave labour was inexpensive, 
 it was possible to turn out books very much more 
 cheaply than we should expect when they were all 
 written out in full by hand. All ordinary books 
 were produced in that way. You can see that such a 
 method of production differed from our results 
 achieved by printing, in that there were large possi- 
 bilities of textual error from the very first. If you 
 have ever tried to copy a long passage from a book, 
 and then checked what you have written by com- 
 parison with the printed book, you know what I 
 mean. It is an amazingly difficult thing to keep 
 a passage absolutely as it is written. And one 
 thing that you will notice about it is that the best 
 way to copy exactly is to write mechanically or 
 even unintelligently. There is a story about a com- 
 positor in Sheffield who was a skilful workman, very 
 rapid and very accurate. People suspected that he 
 hardly knew anything of what he had set up. So 
 his mates in the office one day played a trick upon 
 him. They gave him copy which was the account 
 of a most bloodcurdling murder that had been 
 committed on the moors just outside Sheffield, and 
 the murdered person was this man's wife, he him- 
 self being the murderer. A most detailed account 
 of this murder was given. He set it up without 
 turning a hair. Then they struck off one copy of the
 
 How We Got Our Gospels 97 
 
 paper, and said, ' Hello, Bill ! Have you seen this 
 bit in the paper ? ' He read it, and was very much 
 astonished indeed. It never occurred to him that 
 he had set up that copy. But that, I gather, is 
 the best way of doing it. 
 
 Now our manuscripts of the New Testament 
 were hand-copied, of course, but not on this principle. 
 They could not go into the regular publishing 
 houses. Remember that when the New Testament 
 began to be circulated it was copied in times of 
 persecution ; and if that precious book had ever 
 been put into the hands of the regular publishing 
 houses some one would have informed the authorities 
 and every copy of it would have been destroyed, 
 and the publisher would have found himself in dire 
 trouble. The result was that a large proportion 
 of the copies made in the early days were written by 
 amateurs. They were people who knew and loved 
 the book beyond anything else. They knew it too 
 well ! Suppose, for instance, taking the first 
 example that comes into my head, suppose one of 
 these Christians is copying the beginning of the 
 eleventh chapter of Luke. He comes to the Lord's 
 Prayer, and he finds Luke describing that prayer 
 thus : ' Father, hallowed be Thy name. Thy 
 kingdom come. Give us day by day our bread for 
 the coming day ; and forgive us our sins, for we 
 ourselves also forgive every one indebted to us ; 
 
 G
 
 98 How We Got Our Gospels 
 
 and bring us not into temptation.' The ordinary 
 mechanical scribe would copy that down just 
 exactly as it is. But the Christian who said the 
 Lord's Prayer every day in the early liturgical form 
 given in Matthew would say, ' Something is left 
 out.' Then very soon you have got, ' Our Father, 
 who art in heaven.' And there is the additional 
 petition, ' Thy will come to pass,' and the significant 
 note attached to the three first petitions, ' as in 
 heaven, so on earth.' At the end, moreover, came 
 in ' But deliver us from evil.' Similarly, when the 
 scribe was copying the fuller form of Matthew he 
 added the doxology, taken from the Old Testament, 
 ' For Thine is the kingdom and the power and the 
 glory for ever and ever.' Men put in what was 
 familiar to them. I want to insist upon this point 
 because I think it has a great deal to do with the 
 history of our Gospels. The fact is that for some 
 three or four generations the Gospels were not 
 protected by the sort of sanctity that belonged 
 to them afterwards. In the earliest days there were 
 special conditions endangering the exact preserva- 
 tion of the text as the evangelist left it. Into a 
 church which used a copy of a Gospel there might 
 come any day a travelling missionary who could 
 say, ' I remember hearing Peter say so and so/ or, 
 ' I remember one time when I was visiting John, 
 and he told me this.' Now, as a matter of fact, these
 
 How We Got Our Gospels 99 
 
 reminiscences, which came so directly from apostles 
 or eye-witnesses, were not nearly as reliable as the 
 written record. Supposing you say that you 
 remember some great man, whom you saw 
 thirty or forty years or even fifty years ago. 
 Of course you remember seeing him ; you remember 
 that he said something to you. I remember thirty 
 years ago having the privilege of a five-minutes' talk 
 with Gladstone. I remember what the subject was, 
 but I should be very sorry indeed to offer to any 
 biographer of Gladstone my recollections of what he 
 said. It was the man himself that I remember, 
 and that is all I do remember. But people loved 
 these reminiscences, though they were not reliable. 
 When they got hold of them they liked to put them 
 into the margin of their Gospel. The text itself 
 was only precious to them in so far as it preserved a 
 record of the words and deeds of Jesus, and the 
 marginal addition was for them on the same footing 
 as the text. Then there was another possibility of 
 divergence in the existence of different translations 
 made from an Aramaic text, according to that saying 
 of Papias I quoted not long since. The result is that 
 in the second century an extraordinary amount of 
 variation sprang up, as witnessed for us still by the 
 quotations from the Gospel story which we find 
 in the Christian writers of that time. 
 
 What can we say of this ? If you will look in the
 
 ioo How We Grot Our Gospels 
 
 margin of the Revised Version you will find places 
 in the text especially valued by you that are left out. 
 You will read in the margin, ' These words are 
 omitted by the most ancient authorities.' I dare say 
 you may have been resentful, and said, ' So much the 
 worse for the most ancient authorities ! ' That is 
 human nature. But I may safely bid you be quite 
 easy. It is true that you have many passages 
 omitted. Here is one in Matt. xvi. 2, 3, a parable 
 of Jesus about the signs of the weather : ' When it 
 is evening, ye say, It will be fair weather ; for 
 the heaven is red. And in the morning, It will 
 be foul weather to-day ; for the heaven is red 
 and lowering. Ye know how to discern the 
 face of the heaven ; but ye cannot discern 
 the signs of the times.' Then you will see in 
 the margin of the Revised Version that these 
 words were omitted by very important ancient 
 authorities. Quite so ; and, frankly, I feel certain 
 that these words were not contained in the Gospel 
 as it left the author's hands. Where, then, did 
 they come from ? Why, they were floating 
 tradition. We have been hearing this morning 
 in another lecture about traditional sayings of Jesus 
 preserved by Clement of Alexandria. To my mind, 
 the wonder is that we have not got very many more. 
 I was telling you about the sayings of Jesus that 
 were preserved in that half sheet of paper from
 
 How We Got Our Gospels 101 
 
 Oxyrhynchus, such as ' Raise the stone, and there 
 thou shalt find Me; cleave the wood, and there am I.' 
 Our manuscripts have many sayings like that which 
 came into the text at a later time. Let me mention 
 one which I think whether I am right or wrong 
 I do not know ; I am only guessing may 
 suggest some useful ideas. In this passage I am 
 sure that every one who ever picked up the Revised 
 Version must have had a severe shock. In Luke's 
 account of the Crucifixion we have these words how 
 sacred they are ! ' And Jesus said, Father, forgive 
 them ; for they do not know what they are doing.' 
 And then you read in the Revised Version in the 
 margin that these words are omitted by important 
 ancient authorities. You do not like that ? Well, 
 I must rub it in a little. Not only are those words 
 omitted by very ancient authorities, but really, 
 though efforts to explain the omission have come 
 from some very wise people, I am afraid that I 
 cannot myself doubt that they are omitted by 
 ancient authorities because they were not in Luke's 
 Gospel. Luke did not know of them any more 
 than Matthew or Mark did. How, then, did they 
 come there ? Let us try a little imagination. Ask 
 yourself, first, Who heard these words ? Were they 
 shouted so that the crowd might hear ? Was there 
 one single friendly ear there ? For it looks as if the 
 words were said just at that first dreadful moment
 
 102 How We Got Our Gospels 
 
 when His friends were still ' afar off.' Did nobody 
 hear them ? Nobody, except the executioners them- 
 selves the centurion and his four men. They 
 heard them whispered in faint words of utter agony. 
 They heard them. 
 
 Now I have mentioned the centurion. What 
 else do we hear about him ? Why, we hear that 
 when the day was over and the lifeless form hung 
 there upon the cross, this man, having seen and 
 heard all that had happened, said, ' Truly, this man 
 was Son of God.' Son of God ! That was the title 
 which was usurped by the Emperor of Rome, and 
 this man who owed allegiance to the Emperor, 
 having seen what he had seen, said of that poor 
 peasant hanging up there, ' Truly, this man was 
 Son of God.' What had influenced him the 
 earthquake, the portents ? No ; something much 
 more wonderful. If that man heard the words in 
 which the Lord prayed for the men who were 
 driving the nails through His hands, I think that 
 was more likely to influence him than anything else 
 in the world. 
 
 And then I picture that man drafted to military 
 duty at some distant station. In course of time 
 he hears that strange fanatics have come into the 
 place. They are preaching that men should believe 
 in a God such as no one ever thought of before 
 a Galilean who was crucified in the procuratorship
 
 How We Got Our Gospels 103 
 
 of Pontius Pilate. And then he remembers. He 
 thinks of something that had been in his mind all 
 through the intervening time. He goes to their 
 meeting. He listens to what they have to say about 
 this Jesus. ' Jesus ! ' says he. ' Why, I fixed that 
 name in letters of Hebrew and Greek and Latin 
 upon a cross that day ! ' Jesus ! He rises and 
 tells those breathless worshippers what he had seen 
 and heard. And then he said that at the moment 
 when the other victims of that accursed cruelty 
 were shrieking and cursing, this man said, ' Father, 
 forgive them ; for they do not know what they are 
 doing.' Can you fancy what an impression it would 
 make upon the believers in that place ? How 
 quickly the words were written in the margin of 
 their Gospel ! How quickly the first traveller 
 from that church to some distant place would tell 
 the wonderful story ! How very soon it came into 
 all the copies of the Greek Gospel that were to be 
 found everywhere throughout the world ! Yes ; 
 the words are not in Luke's original Gospel, but as 
 the great Professor Hort said in regard to the fact 
 that these words cannot be textually defended, 
 ' Few if any words in all the Gospels bear more 
 intrinsic witness to the truth of what they relate 
 than these.' 
 
 There I must end my effort to sketch some features 
 of the long history of those great little books. Let
 
 104 How We Got Our Gospels 
 
 me end as I began by reminding you of the supreme 
 attestation beside which all merely historical witness 
 must pale. The Gospels about which we have been 
 speaking are the first among many in a great 
 Divine Library. ' There are also many other things 
 that Jesus did, and if these are written every one, 
 I suppose even the world itself will not contain the 
 books written.' They have been written ever since, 
 ' on tables that are hearts of flesh/ and the world 
 is full of them to-day. So to the end of time shall 
 that Library gather more treasures. For, as Mr. 
 Glover says, ' The Gospels are not four but ten 
 thousand times ten thousand, and thousands of 
 thousands, and the last word of every one of them 
 is, " Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end 
 of the world." '
 
 THE FULLNESS OF THE TIME 
 
 THIS concluding talk of mine might be described 
 as a kind of informal sermon on a great passage of 
 Paul's letter to the Galatians. You will remember 
 how the fourth chapter begins with the parable 
 of the child who is heir to a vast estate, but while 
 he is a child is under stewards until the time fixed 
 beforehand by the father. And we dwell on that 
 word, for we remember that it is the Father who 
 chooses the time that is best, best from the point 
 of view of immortal love. Paul goes on to tell 
 of the ages before that fixed period arose, and how 
 at last ' when the fullness of the time came God 
 sent forth His Son.' My object this morning is 
 to illustrate from certain conditions of the first 
 centuries B.C. and A.D. how that was the one time 
 in all human history when the Birth at Bethlehem 
 could take place, that Jesus came into the world 
 just exactly when everything was made ready 
 for Him. 
 
 I want to look at this from three points of view, 
 105
 
 io6 The Fullness of the Time 
 
 speaking successively of language conditions, poli- 
 tical conditions, and religious conditions. I shall 
 try to prove that in all these respects the date 
 Anno Domini is absolutely ideal. 
 
 Firstly, as to language. I need not recapitulate 
 what I have said about the character of Greek 
 as the world language at the time when Jesus came. 
 You realize that Greek was the language of a little 
 country most uniquely dowered, a little country 
 into which there was more intellectuality packed 
 than into any other, large or small, in all the world's 
 history before or since. When we speak of Greece 
 we have to cut down our definition still further ; 
 for even in Greece most parts were ordinary. But 
 there was an extraordinary strain of genius con- 
 centrated particularly in the people of Athens. 
 Though the writers of Greece outside Attica produced 
 some supreme literature, such as Homer and Pindar 
 and Herodotus, the greatest and most varied 
 literary, artistic, and scientific output has to be 
 credited to that one town. Now when we look 
 at the Greek of five hundred years before Christ, 
 we find that in a little country, which could be 
 dumped down several times over in most of 
 your States, there were divisions of dialect which 
 made quite near neighbours almost unintelligible. 
 There were Athens and Thebes, between thirty 
 and forty miles apart, as different as towns
 
 The Fullness of the Time 107 
 
 could be. One was intellectual ; one was stupid. 
 One spoke a language which could be understood 
 by anybody who knows any Greek at all ; the 
 other spoke a language which I might very safely 
 present to a very decent Greek scholar and be 
 almost certain that unless he happened to have 
 worked on this particular line he would make 
 nothing out of it. So different are the words, 
 the pronunciation, the whole genius of speech, 
 that it seems almost another language. Nor was 
 it dialect alone that separated Greek from Greek. 
 The country was divided into tiny commonwealths 
 that were constantly at war with each other. The 
 Greek spirit of freedom ran into individualism 
 gone mad, and the result was what you might 
 expect. When one town in a small country hated 
 another town worse than it hated outsiders, when 
 even within one town one party hated the other 
 party far more than anybody outside, the end 
 was inevitable. Under their powerful and un- 
 scrupulous neighbour, Philip of Macedon, the 
 father of the great Alexander, Greece was subjugated 
 and all the little city States forced to come together 
 under one rule. They never had any real inde- 
 pendence again. Then Alexander took his Greeks 
 away with him into distant lands. He made 
 those wonderful military expeditions of which we 
 read, when he penetrated as far as India. One
 
 loS The Fullness of the Time 
 
 of many by-products of Alexander's short life- 
 work was the unification of Greece and the spread 
 of Hellenism far and wide. Greeks from Athens 
 and Sparta and Thebes had to meet in regular 
 intercourse. As always happens when men with 
 different dialects are thrown together for long, 
 uniformity of speech began to arise. The intel- 
 lectual primacy of Attic Greek, the dialect of 
 Athens, brought it naturally to the top ; and Attic, 
 only shorn of marked peculiarities, became the 
 basis of what is virtually a new language. Classical 
 scholars have been accustomed to talk of Greek 
 as if it came to an end somewhere in the fourth 
 century before Christ. But the Greek language 
 was not dead, she was hardly even sleeping ; and 
 after a brief interval we see her as a world power, 
 risen from the dead with the New Testament in 
 her hand. Greek became the language of commerce, 
 the language of daily intercourse, right over a vast 
 and constantly increasing area. Greek was spoken 
 away in Rome, so much so that the Emperor 
 Marcus Aurelius wrote his private meditations 
 in Greek, that Paul wrote his letter to the Romans 
 in Greek, that the satirist Juvenal says Rome 
 had become practically a Greek city. It was 
 needless to learn Latin even if one were going 
 to settle in Rome itself. As to the extent over 
 which Greek spread, I think one of the most vivid
 
 The Fullness of the Time 109 
 
 illustrations of it has come to light within the 
 last few months. Last October I was startled 
 by a piece of news which w?s given to me by Pro- 
 fessor E. G. Browne, the great Persian scholar of 
 Cambridge University. He told me that he had 
 just had a very interesting present from one of 
 the remote parts of the world. A Kurdish Christian 
 doctor, named Said Khan, had been called to a 
 place away up in the mountains of Persia, a district 
 called Avroman, in order to treat a sick Kurd 
 chief. He responded at the risk of his life, but 
 happily he was successful in his work. I have 
 a letter from him which is written in very indifferent 
 English, but which betrays the language of the 
 heart that every one who loves Christ can under- 
 stand. This good man received, apparently as 
 a part of his reward for his services, something 
 which he instantly saw was of great value. It 
 was just a little clay pot, and in that pot there 
 were some documents of parchment. One was 
 in a language which so far no one has been able 
 to interpret. Presumably it was a local dialect ; 
 but we cannot be quite sure what sort of dialect 
 it was. Two were in Greek, and they were exactly 
 dated. One was 88 B.C., and the other was 22 B.C., 
 and they were title-deeds of a vineyard. Evidently 
 this pot was some sort of a safe in which these 
 title-deeds had been deposited for keeping. Here
 
 no The Fullness of the Time 
 
 you have an example of an astonishing fact. You 
 have Greek right away among the wild mountains 
 of Persia, and dated in the first century before 
 Christ. It is a vivid illustration of that chapter in 
 Acts where Jews ' from every nation under heaven ' 
 uttered their amazement as they heard their native 
 languages being spoken by men of Galilee. ' Par- 
 thians and Medes and Elamites/ coming from the 
 very district where that little pot was found, could 
 talk together in Greek when they met for worship 
 in Jerusalem, just as we see they could write Greek 
 for business purposes far away in the lands where 
 they had made their home. That little stone 
 pot and its parchments tell us how the first Christian 
 missionaries were able so quickly to publish their 
 message everywhere. 
 
 We are not dealing here with the language of 
 books, a language which became more and more 
 archaic, as time went on, in its effort to maintain 
 the purity of the Attic of the fourth and fifth 
 centuries before Christ. We are dealing now with 
 the vernacular, which could be spoken and written 
 by half-educated farmers in Egypt, by the illiterate 
 man away in the wilds of Persia, spoken from 
 Spain to Persia, from Rome down to Alexandria 
 and the cataracts of the Nile. How long had 
 that vernacular been in existence ? Only at most 
 from about the third century before Christ ; and
 
 The Fullness o! the Time in 
 
 even during this period the wide extension of 
 Greek was only characteristic of the later generations. 
 We might safely say that the period during which 
 Greek was at the height of its power, the period 
 during which it was understood intelligently by 
 the largest number of people, was simply the time 
 just before and just after the coming of Christ, 
 the first century before Christ and perhaps the 
 first two centuries A.D., just exactly the time when it 
 could be used for the great purpose of evangelization. 
 You must not forget that these people spoke 
 also their own languages. We have evidence 
 from Acts as to that. We remember how when 
 Paul and Barnabas were at Lystra they preached 
 and the people understood them ; but you will 
 notice that Paul and Barnabas themselves did 
 not understand the language of Lycaonia. It 
 was into this that the people relapsed when they 
 were talking intimately among themselves. I am 
 always illustrating this from something which is 
 very intelligible to us in our country. At my 
 own College we have always some Welsh students. 
 They have to do their work in English at Didsbury 
 College ; but they are being prepared for work in 
 Wales, and the churches to which they go will be 
 churches in which Welsh will be spoken almost 
 entirely. The Welsh people mostly understand 
 English. But at home and at worship they want
 
 ii2 The Fullness of the Time 
 
 to have their own language, for English is always 
 foreign in sound to them. The situation in Wales 
 to-day is almost exactly the situation in Palestine 
 or Lycaonia during the first century A.D. Suppose 
 our Welsh statesman, Mr. Lloyd George, goes 
 down into Wales to make a speech to his constit- 
 uents. He begins his speech in Welsh, because 
 the people love to hear it. Then in a few minutes 
 he will remark that he believes there are some 
 people outside Wales who are wanting to hear 
 what he has to say, and as a concession to their 
 weakness he must relapse into English, which he 
 promptly does. And, of course, the great company 
 gathered together understand English almost as 
 well as they understand Welsh. Now that is 
 exactly what happened to Paul when he was allowed 
 (Acts xxi. 40) to come forward and speak to the 
 people. We are told that when he spoke in the 
 Aramaic language they were ' the more silent.' 
 That is to say, they were listening to him with the 
 expectation that he would speak in Greek. They 
 would have understood him if he had thus spoken, 
 but when they found he was speaking in their 
 own language they were ' the more silent.' This 
 is a very typical instance of what would happen 
 then in any part of the Roman world. I need 
 say little to show how these providential conditions 
 helped Paul's work. Look at our missionary
 
 The Fullness of the Time 113 
 
 conditions to-day. There are thousands of our 
 missionaries labouring in far countries all over 
 the world. Most of them have had to spend the 
 best part of two long years eating their heart out 
 in eagerness to preach to the people, but unable 
 to preach until they have learned enough of the 
 language to be sure that they will not be doing 
 more harm than good. That was not the case 
 in the first century. When Paul went from Pales- 
 tine to speak Greek in Cilicia, he found very little 
 difference, only such difference as there is between 
 the English of England and the English of America. 
 He could travel to Rome, he could travel beyond 
 to Spain, he might have travelled to Egypt or to 
 Persia, and everywhere he could talk that same 
 Greek and be understood at once. There was 
 no time wasted in learning the language. 
 
 And remember that gaining time was really one 
 of the most important conditions of success for the 
 Christian propaganda in the first century. Why 
 was it that the Church had such amazing success 
 in those first generations ? Why, because the mis- 
 sionaries of the Cross lost no time. ' Straightway 
 he that had received the five talents went and 
 traded with the same.' Remember the inner 
 history of that first century. Their clear-sighted 
 enemies, the Jews, warned the Roman authorities 
 that the Christian preachers were doing nothing 
 
 H
 
 ii4 The Fullness of the Time 
 
 less than setting up ' another Emperor, one Jesus.' 
 Wha?t they said was perfectly true, but the Romans 
 did not believe them. The Romans looked down 
 from the perfect security of their position. How 
 could they be afraid of a few fanatics from despised 
 Palestine who went about preaching the divinity 
 of a crucified Galilean carpenter? How could 
 anything of that kind ever disturb their Empire ? 
 And so, as the Book of Acts is constantly telling 
 us, Paul was able to go everywhere, depending upon 
 his Roman citizenship and the protection of the 
 Roman governors. When the Jews tried to accuse 
 him before the Proconsul of Achaia, and said, 
 ' This man is trying to persuade men to worship 
 God contrary to the law/ Gallio simply told them 
 that the matter did not concern him. He brusquely 
 nonsuited the prosecutors and kept to his own 
 business. 
 
 But the time came when the Christians had 
 done their work well, when mostly through the 
 statesmanship and passionate zeal of Paul they 
 had covered the Empire with a network of Christian 
 agencies. Passing along the great Roman roads, 
 Paul planted the Cross in one big town after another, 
 and the men whom he had taught there immediately 
 began to preach in all the country round. The 
 Christians became so numerous that the Romans 
 began to be alarmed, and they started persecution.
 
 The Fullness of the Time 115 
 
 At first the pretext of punishment was that the 
 Christians were criminals. All kinds of revolting 
 crimes were charged against them. But this 
 could not last long. The crisis came when the 
 issue of the fight was simplified, and to accept the 
 name of Christian was made a capital crime. So 
 was thrown down the gage of battle, and the 
 struggle of two and a half centuries began. The 
 First Epistle of Peter helps us to see the transi- 
 tion very clearly. Now if Rome had made 
 ' the Name ' a capital offence thirty or forty 
 years earlier, she could have crushed Christianity 
 utterly by the simple process of putting to death 
 every man, woman, and child believing in Jesus. 
 The methods of Diocletian in the days of Nero 
 could hardly have failed of their object. But 
 God saved His cause by instilling into the minds 
 of those who went forth to work for Him, prepared 
 to preach Him at the risk of their very lives, the 
 thought that the King's business required haste. 
 They must go and do the work instantly ' evange- 
 lize the world in this generation/ for we can see 
 that they anticipated the glorious motto which 
 the Student Volunteer Movement has brought up 
 again in our own time. And not only did they 
 make that their motto, but they attained it. By 
 the time that generation was over there were too 
 many Christians even for the thorough-going
 
 n6 The Fullness of the Time 
 
 methods of Diocletian to kill them out. Christianity 
 was already an imperial power when that long 
 campaign began in which all the killing was on 
 one side and all the dying on the other. And 
 those who could die finally and for ever defeated 
 those who could only kill. 
 
 I pass next to a few political conditions which 
 favoured the growth of Christianity. The first 
 century B.C. was one of the most evil centuries in all 
 the history of the world. It was a century of civil 
 war, and its cruelty was utterly unbelievable. I 
 will mention one fact which gets at one's imagina- 
 tion more vividly than anything else I know. There 
 was one class of slaves in the Roman world who 
 were perhaps more pitiable than any. These were 
 the gladiators, of whom that famous line was written, 
 ' Butchered to make a Roman holiday.' They were 
 brave, strong men, trained to the use of arms, and 
 the only reason for their existence was that on great 
 ceremonial days the bloodthirsty populace expected 
 their officials to give them exhibitions of real fighting. 
 Then the gladiators were thrown into the arena, 
 and there they had to fight, not because they hated 
 one another, or had the slightest grievance against 
 one another, but simply because they were slaves, 
 and as slaves they had to fight. As long as the 
 arena ran red with blood, the thirst of the populace 
 was appeased for the time.
 
 The Fullness of the Time 117 
 
 At last there came a time when these gladiators 
 revolted. They had a strong right arm. They 
 could fight. Why should they not fight for them- 
 selves instead of simply amusing the savage mob ? 
 The only difficulty was to get together. But finally 
 they found a leader, a man of military genius, 
 Spartacus. Presently Italy was in a flame, and 
 the gladiator host was spreading terror every- 
 where. The Romans were at their very wits' end. 
 At last they succeeded in defeating these desperate 
 men, and they took six thousand of them captive. 
 What did they do with them ? The road from 
 Rome to Capua was one hundred and fifty miles 
 long. Along that road, at intervals of fifty yards 
 or so, they set up crosses, and they crucified these 
 six thousand men along that road. All who 
 travelled from Rome to Capua had to pass down that 
 ghastly avenue. I do not think one could imagine 
 a more typical example of the fury and blood-lust 
 and panic of those days. It was out of travail-pains 
 like those that the Gospel came to the birth. 
 
 It reminds me of a beautiful parable that came 
 my way a few weeks ago when I went to talk with 
 a friend who worshipped in our College chapel. He 
 was stricken with what proved to be his last illness, 
 but he talked very cheerfully, and told me some 
 interesting things about his profession. He was a 
 scientific florist, who had been many years supplying
 
 n8 The Fullness of the Time 
 
 the market of Manchester with beautiful cut flowers. 
 He told me how he had tried very hard indeed to 
 produce a particular tulip. He wanted to get this 
 tulip double, and he also wanted to get it pink. He 
 tried all his known methods. He succeeded in 
 getting it double, but the double flower was white, 
 and to get it anything but white seemed to be 
 beyond his power. One day a sudden storm came 
 up. He went quickly around his hothouses to see 
 that nothing should be left that could be whisked 
 up by the wind and break the glass. He picked 
 up all the loose boxes he saw, but he overlooked one, 
 and this one was taken up by the wind and a great 
 gap was made in the glass. The cold, icy blast poured 
 through the greenhouse. When he went to the 
 greenhouse the next morning he found that this new 
 flower upon which he had worked so long was pink ! 
 And I recalled what at the time seemed to me only 
 an interesting piece of horticulture when, a few 
 weeks later, I stood in the darkened room where my 
 friend's big family were gathered together talking 
 about their departed father. I told them what he 
 had said to me, and reminded them that God has 
 His own ways of producing His perfect flowers. 
 Sometimes the icy blast of affliction will do what all 
 other methods fail to do. Even so was it with the 
 world in that first century. Weariness and despair 
 after a hundred years of bloodshed produced the
 
 The Fullness of the Time 119 
 
 conditions under which it was possible for the 
 Gospel to come. May we wistfully hope that out 
 of briefer but still more appalling slaughter to-day 
 may come another preparation for the Gospel of 
 Peace ? 
 
 At last there came one of the most famous men 
 in the history of the world, Julius Caesar. I 
 always grudge him the title of Great, bestowed on 
 him so emphatically by Mommsen, the German 
 historian of Rome. His genius, of course, is beyond 
 question, and his achievements such that the coun- 
 trymen of Treitschke instinctively bow down and 
 worship his image. When we look into the facts 
 about his campaigns against the Gauls taking the 
 information from Caesar's own book we find that 
 their only crime was that of the Belgians to-day. 
 They wanted to keep their country for themselves. 
 For this crime Julius Caesar killed a whole million 
 of them and reduced to slavery two or three millions 
 more. A great man ! Personally I ' prefer to keep 
 the adjective great for men who have performed other 
 services to mankind. But we must pass on. 
 When Julius fell by the daggers of Brutus and 
 Cassius on the Ides of March, 44 B.C., his heir, 
 Octavian better known as Augustus pursued his 
 way to the throne of that exhausted Roman world. 
 He used his power well. He put a stop to all the 
 bloodshed. He reduced the whole of the Roman
 
 120 The Fullness of the Time 
 
 dominions to order ; and against the outside world 
 he established the Pax Romana, the iron peace of 
 overwhelming military power which was so often 
 only the euphemistic name of a desolation, according 
 to the bitter epigram of the British chief in Tacitus. 
 But, however attained, the Roman Peace brought 
 relief to the world. No one was left to stand up 
 against the government of Rome. At last civiliza- 
 tion had its chance. My colleague, Professor 
 Conway, of Manchester, puts the situation in a 
 sentence very well : ' Free communication between 
 different parts of the world was made possible 
 by the new roads, the new postal system, and the 
 complete suppression of war by land and by sea.' 
 All of you who have been in England or on the 
 Continent have seen some of those Roman roads. 
 There they are until to-day. We have a network 
 of them throughout our little island. With the 
 splendid roads go the arrangements of the postal 
 service, and those for travel by sea. Though they 
 had no steam engines and lacked our modern means 
 of travel, travel was nevertheless swift and safe 
 to a surprising degree. 
 
 But as we study it we observe that these fruits 
 of peace and good government were not destined to 
 last. The decline of the Roman Empire began very 
 soon. Indeed, the seeds of decay were there even 
 from the first. But while these blessings lasted
 
 The Fullness of the Time 121 
 
 unimpaired they contributed greatly to the spread 
 of the Gospel. Roman roads, Roman ships, Roman 
 administration of justice, all in their prime during 
 that crucial first century how much they meant 
 to Paul and his comrades in their great work of 
 ' turning the world upside down ' ! 
 
 So we come to the preparation for the Gospel 
 in the field of religion. For most people who know 
 even a little Latin the Augustan age is made 
 familiar by the poetry of Virgil. Virgil entirely 
 deserved the unique position allowed him by mediae- 
 val Christianity, and especially by Dante, his only 
 rival for the primacy among the poets of Italy. 
 Men recognized Virgil as a Christian in soul, a true 
 prophet of Him whom he never knew. He was one 
 who ' uttered nothing base,' a lofty, pure, and 
 beautiful spirit whom even the Middle Ages shrank 
 from calling a heathen. On the very first page of 
 the Eclogues of Virgil we read the words in which the 
 simple shepherd expresses his obligation to the 
 Emperor. ' A god/ he cries, ' made all this peace 
 for me for to me he will always be a god, to him my 
 sacrifice shall ever smoke upon the altar.' Pro- 
 fessor Conway, whom I quoted just now, comments 
 strikingly on the misreading into which the thought- 
 less modern reader falls here. He says that Virgil 
 calls Augustus ' God.' He does not. He calls Him 
 Deus. Are you going to make no allowance for
 
 122 The Fullness of the Time 
 
 all that has been put into the English word by the 
 associations of Christianity? He goes on to show 
 that this deeply religious poet never called Augustus 
 by this title in the way familiar to us from the mere 
 court flatterer Horace and the rest of them. With 
 Virgil, Augustus was Deus only when the poet 
 recalled some beneficence. It is always in connexion 
 with kindness shown to himself, or some great 
 blessing wrought for his country. So here, as in that 
 wonderful statue of Phidias, these ' heathen ' men 
 were truly groping for God. And did they not find 
 Him ? They had attained to the greatest of thoughts 
 about God, that God is good. And their conception 
 of God even if it was embodied in nothing higher 
 than a man, a man who had enthroned himself in the 
 vacant heaven, when no other gods survived whom 
 the people really cared for was one that meant 
 not a little for the world. It was a true preparation 
 for Christianity when the great lesson was taught 
 that a man could be worshipped as divine because 
 of the good that he did to mankind. 
 
 Now I might turn here to dwell upon the dark 
 side of pagan religion. You remember Matthew 
 Arnold's poignant stanza : 
 
 On that sad pagan world disgust 
 And secret loathing fell ; 
 
 Deep weariness and sated lust 
 Made human life a hell.
 
 The Fullness of the Time 123 
 
 Yes ; but I do not think we need to dwell upon that 
 so much this morning. We are in no danger of 
 forgetting the shortcomings of religion in the Roman 
 world, which made men long so earnestly for better 
 things. It is more to our purpose if we look for 
 the other side. Very much of the old religion was 
 dead. The Greek gods were never much more than 
 mythology, with no heart and no soul behind them. 
 Roman gods were never more than abstractions, 
 and could not arouse the real worship of men. 
 Yet in spite of all these things there was a religion 
 in that world, a groping after God. The way in 
 which the Oriental religions ran like wildfire through 
 the Roman Empire showed that. There was the 
 worship of Serapis from Egypt ; there was the cult 
 of Cybele from Phrygia ; and beyond all there was 
 Mithraism, the religion which was destined to 
 make a stern fight with Christianity itself. In 
 Kipling's Puck of Pook's Hill there is a splendid 
 ' Hymn to Mithras/ which helps us to picture to 
 ourselves a religion which became predominant in the 
 Roman army. These religions owed their success 
 to the fact that they met the craving of the human 
 heart for something that had glow and warmth in 
 it, touching the Ireart and not the head of man. 
 
 All this Oriental religion mostly affected the 
 lower classes. Among the educated, religious 
 instinct satisfied itself chiefly through philosophy.
 
 124 The Fullness of the Time 
 
 The philosophy which came nearest to religion was 
 that of the Stoics, who in the dark days of imperial 
 tyranny showed that they had a faith which taught 
 them how to die. However hard and cold their 
 doctrine seems to us, their splendid fortitude must 
 move our admiration. And when we come to 
 the second century we have the meditations of 
 the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, and the discourses 
 of the slave Epictetus, both Stoics, to show us 
 that truly God did not leave Himself without 
 witness in those days. Look again at Greece 
 itself in the first century, and remember that 
 serene and pure-minded thinker Plutarch, whose 
 famous Lives live on in the use Shakespeare 
 made of them. There was much indeed that was 
 beautiful in that time, much that was ready to be 
 touched by the finger of Christ and to become the 
 treasure of the Church. Nor must we forget Seneca, 
 the man who says so many things like Paul. So 
 much is he like Paul that the suggestion was made 
 long ago that Paul taught him. He has given us 
 a number of very beautiful sayings. Let me quote 
 one or two. ' The gods give a hand to men as they 
 climb.' ' Live as if God saw you.' ' He that lives 
 for no man does not live for himself.' ' The gods 
 give many things to the ungrateful.' ' A Holy 
 Spirit dwells within us.' You can get a great many 
 more samples of that kind out of the famous essay
 
 The Fullness of the Time 125 
 
 ' St. Paul and Seneca ' in Bishop Lightfoot's 
 Biblical Essays. Seneca was a very mixed character. 
 You remember that pungent line about our British 
 statesman-philosopher, Francis Bacon, ' the greatest, 
 wisest, meanest of mankind.' It is not inapplicable 
 to Seneca, who had greater difficulties than Bacon in 
 preserving honesty in public life, in proportion as 
 Nero was worse than James the First. No Christian 
 should cast stones at a statesman who, unsupported 
 by Christ's direct teaching, found his principles 
 unequal to the terrific strain of doing right when life 
 was at stake and Nero was on the throne. We have 
 at least Seneca's words, and we thank God for them. 
 But it was not only in the philosopher that we 
 have these lofty thoughts. We have evidence of 
 the appreciation of the common people for teaching 
 of a lofty ethical standard. It comes to us from 
 a curious source, the scoffer Lucian, the great 
 wit of the second century A.D. He described, in 
 what he meant to be scorn, the eagerness of the 
 multitude whenever any religious teacher came 
 around who seemed to have anything of the message 
 they wanted. Then they flocked to hear him. 
 Lucian laughs as he talks of the absurdity of the 
 things these men said, of the self-seeking and 
 unworthiness of the lives of some popular preachers 
 in those days. Well, perhaps they were all this, 
 though I should be sorry to take Lucian's word
 
 126 The Fullness of the Time 
 
 for it, without other witness. But even if they 
 were all that he says they were, it is very pathetic 
 to see these crowds gathered together, so eagerly 
 asking, ' Who will show us any good ? ' Was 
 their quest wholly in vain ? We are not without 
 scattered proofs of the fact that life had God in 
 it even then. Here, for example, is a ' heathen ' 
 epitaph that is eloquent to Christian ears : Bene 
 fac, hoc tecum feres ' Do good ; you will take this 
 with you.' 
 
 That reminds me of an epitaph I came upon the 
 other day. It was in a book full of inscriptions 
 and papyri from Egypt. I had been wandering 
 through page after page of unspeakable dullness ; 
 it was only grammar and lexicography that made 
 the task imperative, a task to which I should have 
 been very sorry to set any one else. But I did 
 get one grain of gold out of all that sand. After 
 pages and pages of monotonous formulae, ' pre- 
 maturely died good man, farewell ' and so on, 
 I came suddenly upon this : ' Taesai lived twenty- 
 eight years. He has gone to the Bright Land.' 
 I think the glory of that Bright Land had begun 
 to shed something of its light even in the darkness 
 of the Graeco-Roman world before Christ came ; 
 for wherever men are eagerly looking for God we 
 have the authority of our Book to tell us that 
 they do find Him.
 
 The Fullness of the Time 127 
 
 In these ways, then, the world was ready. ' The 
 fullness of the time had come.' Others could 
 tell you of many more evidences that the world 
 was ready then as at no other time for the preaching 
 of God's Son. It calls to our thought that glorious 
 passage in Milton's Areopagitica where the great 
 poet applies the old Egyptian fable of Isis gathering 
 the scattered members of the mangled body of 
 Osiris, and tells how men have been seeking all 
 the world over the fragments of the body of Truth. 
 ' We have not found them yet, Lords and Commons, 
 nor shall do till her Master's second coming : He 
 shall bring together every joint and member, and 
 mould them into one immortal feature of loveliness 
 and perfection.' It was our Master's supreme 
 achievement to gather all the rays of truth into 
 one focus, all words of righteousness into one 
 message, all the sights of beauty into one supremely 
 beautiful Face upon which the world might gaze 
 for evermore. And if that day nineteen centuries 
 ago was ' the fullness of the time,' are we to believe 
 that He who reigned then has abdicated now, that 
 some chance governs the world to-day, and that 
 the events of the first century are not rather to 
 be regarded as the glorious parable, the anticipation 
 of events that are coming to pass now ? Christ 
 always comes ' in the fullness of the time.' He 
 came thus to you and to me. He can trace the
 
 128 The Fullness of the Time 
 
 way for Himself in the individual life of each one 
 of us. And as we look back upon those days when 
 first we knew Him we rejoice to think that it was 
 not chance that ordained the first coming of that 
 Light into our soul. He Himself had prepared 
 the way, and He came when everything was ready 
 for Him. Believe, brethren, let us believe that 
 even now He prepares the world for His coming, 
 and that from East to West, even through scenes 
 of bloodshed and terror, He is preparing for the 
 coming of His Kingdom. The day will dawn 
 no one can say how soon when He shall have 
 the nations for His inheritance and the uttermost 
 parts of the earth for His possession.
 
 'THE NEW SONG' 
 
 A SERMON PREACHED AT NORTHFIELD ON 
 SUNDAY, AUGUST 9, 1914 
 
 They sing as it were a new song before the throne, and before 
 the four living creatures and the elders : and no man could learn 
 the song save the hundred and forty and four thousand, even they 
 that had been purchased out of the earth. REV. xiv. 3 (R.V.). 
 
 THE phrase ' a new song ' is one which comes to 
 us from the Old Testament. We know it best in 
 the psalm where the delivered soul cries out to 
 God who has ' put a new song ' in his mouth. Then 
 we read in the great prophecy which begins with 
 the fortieth chapter of Isaiah : ' Sing unto Jehovah 
 a new song, and his praise from the end of the 
 earth.' The special association of it there is that 
 it is ' the new song ' of redemption. It is addressed 
 to a people coming from the thraldom of Babylonian 
 captivity into their own land again. So in Old 
 Testament prophecy it was a song of redemption, 
 and it is still a song of redemption when it comes 
 to us in this last book of the Bible. There it was 
 the song of one little people living in one little 
 corner of the earth, who were redeemed from an 
 earthly captivity and brought home again to serve 
 
 129 i
 
 130 The New Song 
 
 God there. Here it is the song of the Israel of 
 God every people and tribe and kindred and 
 tongue, English and Germans and Russians and 
 Americans and all the other nations, all of them 
 redeemed from something that is worse than any 
 sorrow that ever came into this world redeemed 
 from sin and all that it means. They are bought 
 back into ' the liberty of the glory of the children 
 of God.' 
 
 But we need not speculate about the theme 
 of ' the new song.' We have the words of it in 
 the ninth and tenth verses of the fifth chapter 
 of the Revelation. It is the song of the whole 
 creation singing to the Lamb that was slain, for 
 He has redeemed them unto God. 
 
 Thirty-two years ago Mr. D. L. Moody held 
 perhaps the most memorable mission of his life 
 in Cambridge University, where I had just begun 
 to study. Out of that week was born, I venture 
 to believe, the World Student Christian Movement. 
 One of the most beautiful of the Moody and Sankey 
 hymns which we then learnt to sing begins : 
 
 Tell me the old, old story 
 Of Jesus and His love. 
 
 Yes, it is ' the old, old story.' We think of all 
 the generations that have gone by throughout 
 these nineteen hundred years. There has never
 
 The New Song 131 
 
 been the time when hearts have not been moved 
 by that ' old, old story ' ; there has never been 
 the time when men have not lived and died by the 
 faith of it, when it has not performed its mighty 
 miracles, as it is still doing to-day. We rejoice 
 to think, and it is our greatest joy to think, that 
 here we have entered into the heritage of the ages. 
 Yet though so old, it is ' a new song.' 
 
 There is nothing inconsistent there. All of 
 God's novelties are as old as creation, and all 
 God's ancient things are eternally new. Go to 
 that book with the sad title, the book from which 
 men are inclined to turn away, for they do not 
 like to read Lamentations. But there you find 
 these lovely words : ' It is of the Lord's mercies 
 that we are not consumed, because His compassions 
 fail not. They are new every morning.' ' New 
 every morning/ for the sun never rises in the same 
 place two successive mornings. No two birds 
 ever sing the same note. The loveliness of the 
 earth around us is never the same. It is always 
 changing ; it is always new. God never repeats 
 Himself. And when men talk about ' the good old 
 days,' they forget the infinite resourcefulness of 
 the Creator. The blessings He has for us in store 
 in the future are going to be altogether new ones, 
 as new as everything that comes from that master 
 Hand.
 
 132 The New Song 
 
 And if that is the case with all the blessings of 
 God, most of all is it so with that which is before 
 us here. God does not repeat Himself in the 
 material world. Still less does He repeat Himself 
 in the spiritual world. ' Of His fullness have we 
 all received, and grace for grace.' Yesterday's 
 grace is not good enough for to-day. God does 
 not give us stale gifts. ' If any man is in Christ/ 
 says Paul, ' there is a new creation : the old things 
 are passed away ; behold, they are become new ! ' 
 That does not mean there was one distant day in 
 our experience, a day perhaps twenty, thirty, 
 fifty years ago, when all things suddenly became 
 new, and now it is an old story. That is very much 
 the case with things on this earth. A ' Newcastle ' 
 and a ' New College ' are among the antiquities 
 of our ancient land across the sea. But God's 
 novelties do not get old. When there is a new 
 creation, God takes care that it is recreated 
 every day. Once in Christ, there is a new 
 creation ; ' and though our outward man be 
 decaying, yet our inward man is being renewed 
 every day.' 
 
 ' They sing.' Who sing ? The angels What 
 are the angels ? We do not know. We read a 
 great deal about them in Scripture. W 7 e read that 
 they are ' ministering spirits sent forth to do service 
 for the sake of -them that shall inherit salvation.'
 
 The New Song 133 
 
 But what service they render we do not know. 
 They are spirits. What are spirits ? We do not 
 know. They are not to be seen ; they are not to 
 be heard ; they are not to be felt ; they are not 
 governed by the laws that apply to us. We simply 
 cannot reach them. But the Book tells us of 
 them ; and we, unless we are very conceited, may 
 surely believe that man is not the ultimate climax 
 of evolution or, if you prefer to call it so, of the 
 will of God at His creative work, which is the 
 same thing. There are those who are higher than 
 we. They belong to the same order. They are 
 above us and around us. We cannot see them 
 or hear them, but we are told that they take a 
 very deep interest in us. It is nothing else than 
 the voice of Christ that tells us ' there is joy in 
 the presence of the angels of God over one sinner 
 that repenteth.' 
 
 Think what that means. It means that every 
 time men and women gather together in this 
 hall, the place is filled, not only with human 
 visitors, with people whom we can see and 
 hear, but with heavenly visitors. What are 
 they here for ? They are here listening and 
 looking down upon us. What are they waiting 
 for ? They are waiting until one human heart 
 is touched by the power of ' the old, old story,' 
 until one human soul that has been in rebellion
 
 134 The New Song 
 
 has come back again to the Lord of life ; and 
 when that life is given up, why then, if only we 
 could hear, they break forth into ' a new song.' 
 Of course it is a new song, for it is a new subject. 
 No two human lives are alike. The history of 
 no two human souls is the same. They break 
 forth into the song of praise for one more human 
 life that has been given in God's unspeakable 
 mercy to the service which is perfect freedom. 
 
 ' They sing.' Of course they sing. Christina 
 Rossetti said that heaven is the ' homeland of 
 music.' We remember how long ago men had 
 a lovely fancy that the whole universe was full 
 of music. It was in those days that men thought 
 this little world of ours was the centre of the creation, 
 and all around it were crystal spheres, and as these 
 moved, one within the other, they made celestial 
 music. Some of the most beautiful words even 
 Shakespeare ever wrote are on this theme. You 
 remember that scene where Lorenzo and Jessica 
 are looking up into the sky : 
 
 Look how the floor of heaven 
 Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold : 
 There's not the smallest orb which thou beholdest 
 But in his motion like an angel sings, 
 Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubims ; 
 Such harmony is in immortal souls ; 
 But whilst this muddy vesture of decay 
 Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it.
 
 The New Song 135 
 
 Now there is silence indeed; and yet, after all, we 
 have only come back to the nineteenth Psalm : 
 ' There is no speech nor language ; their voice 
 cannot be heard.' Nevertheless 
 
 In Reason's ear they all rejoice, 
 And utter forth a glorious voice, 
 For ever singing as they shine, 
 ' The hand that made us is divine.' 
 
 ' They sing before the throne ' and that word 
 is enough. A holy reticence keeps back the writer, 
 for the throne is the throne of the great God before 
 whom ' brightest seraphim approach not, but with 
 both wings veil their eyes.' 
 
 And around Him are the ' four living creatures ' 
 and the ' elders.' Who are they ? The Four 
 Living Creatures are simply taken from the Old 
 Testament, like most of the symbols in the Book 
 of Revelation. One has the face of a lion, one 
 has the face of an ox, another has the face of a 
 flying eagle, another has the face of a man ; and 
 they represent between them the manifold sides 
 of creation. They are there in the very immediate 
 presence of God that the Lord may rejoice in His 
 works. 
 
 And what about the ' elders ' ? The elders 
 are the ' general assembly and church of the first- 
 born . . written in heaven.' But their number ?
 
 136 The New Song 
 
 There are twenty-four. What does that mean ? 
 for, like all the numbers in this Book, the number 
 must be symbolic. We could understand twelve. 
 Twelve would have been closely connected with 
 the people of Israel ; but there are twenty-four. 
 It is not a single but a double chorus, and it makes 
 us think at once of the glorious fact that when 
 these words were written there was not only the 
 old Church, the Church of Israel, but there was 
 the new Church, the Church of the Gentiles. They 
 were the new voices making God's wondrous 
 doings known, new voices learning to sing a new 
 song. And so we can say to-day there is not only 
 the Church in the old land, in your country and 
 in mine, where for centuries past there have been 
 numberless hearts raised to God in prayer and 
 praise, but there is the new chorus rising to sing 
 the Saviour's praise far away in Korea, in China, 
 in Japan, in India, in Africa new voices learning 
 to sing ' unto Him that loveth us, and loosed 
 us from our sins by His blood.' And so in 
 antiphon of harmony, from side to side of the 
 mighty choir, ' Worthy is the Lamb ' resounds for 
 evermore. 
 
 And then there comes a word which at first may 
 make us pause : ' No man could learn the song save 
 the hundred and forty and four thousand.' Does 
 this mean that there is a limitation on the mercy
 
 The New Song 137 
 
 of God ? Well, what are the hundred and forty 
 and four thousand ? We go back to the seventh 
 chapter, and there we read : ' I heard the number 
 of them which were sealed, a hundred and forty 
 and four thousand, sealed out of every tribe of 
 the children of Israel.' And then there follows a 
 list of the tribes. Does that mean that we have 
 got back again to the people of Israel ? No ; 
 just notice what has happened. The ' little one 
 has become a thousand,' and every tribe of Israel 
 has become a whole Israel. It has been the exten- 
 sion of the little people into the great, which mighty 
 people combined is the ' Church militant here on 
 earth,' the host of all those who have learned to 
 sing to Christ. 
 
 There follows the description of those who have 
 ' been purchased out of the earth.' This is the song 
 of redemption, and only the redeemed can sing. 
 Now in human music we often find that the words 
 do not count for very much. I have heard singing 
 in which the words were in some foreign language, 
 and I very much doubted whether the audience, 
 or even the singer, understood them. And even 
 if the words are English, sometimes they are so 
 silly you hardly stop to think of them. The ideal, 
 even on earth, is noble music set to noble words. 
 And you may be very sure that in the music of 
 heaven the words count, and it is the perfect linking
 
 138 The New Song 
 
 of the harmony with the words that expresses the 
 music of the heart. For the only music of heaven 
 is that of those who ' sing and make melody in 
 their hearts unto the Lord.' Therefore, it is only 
 those who are redeemed and who know their 
 Redeemer that can sing the New Song. 
 
 We are next told that ' these are they which follow 
 the Lamb.' We come here back to that matchless 
 gem of the Old Testament, the twenty- third Psalm. 
 And we might well say of any one who dared to 
 lay hands on that Psalm that he was trying 
 to paint the lily and adorn the rose. But the 
 seer of the Revelation can make even the Psalm 
 lovelier. It is a great thing to read ' Jehovah 
 is my Shepherd ; I shall not want.' It is a still 
 more glorious thing to read that ' the Lamb ' 
 oh the paradox of it ! ' the Lamb which is in 
 the midst of the throne shall be their Shepherd, 
 and shall guide them unto fountains of waters of 
 life.' Even the twenty-third Psalm is outdone 
 when the revelation is of God in Christ, and we 
 can understand that He who is our Shepherd is 
 not a dimly understood Deity whom no man hath 
 seen, nor can see, but One who has come infinitely 
 near to us in the person of ' God only begotten,' 
 as John has it (i. 18, marg.), ' which is in the bosom 
 of the Father.' He ' hath declared Him,' made 
 Him clear, so that every one of us can understand
 
 The New Song 139 
 
 God as a Being infinitely near to us, One whom 
 we may see and know. 
 
 And, finally, we read that they ' follow the 
 Lamb whithersoever He goeth.' It is easy to follow 
 Him through the ' green pastures ' and beside the 
 ' still waters ' ; but sometimes He takes those 
 who are His own into ' the valley of the shadow 
 of death,' whither He Himself descended. Those 
 who have learned of Him have no fear even there, 
 for He is with them, His rod and His staff comfort 
 them. In the valley of the dreadful shadow His 
 face shines forth with a light that can never be 
 quenched. ' They . . . follow the Lamb whither- 
 soever He goeth,' for they have been ' purchased 
 out of the earth.' But they have been left in the 
 earth to do His work. They are in the world, 
 and yet not of it. They follow Him everywhere, 
 and their one business in life is to do His will. 
 
 I once asked a successful music-teacher whether 
 it was possible for everybody to learn to sing. I 
 reminded him of those who have the great mis- 
 fortune of being unable to sing a note, whose voice 
 hardly seems to rise when the music rises or sink 
 when it sinks. ' Can you teach such people how 
 to sing ? ' I asked. ' Oh yes,' he said, and he told 
 me of a particular clergyman who was greatly 
 depressed because he could not join his people 
 in their singing, and in a few weeks he had taught
 
 140 The New Song 
 
 him so that to his great joy he could join in the 
 music and sing praises to God. And that is a 
 parable of the religion of One of whom it was said 
 centuries before He came that at His coming the 
 tongue of the dumb should sing. 
 
 Now there are some men who seem to sing by 
 nature. One thinks of the words of Tennyson 
 addressed to our great master-singer : 
 
 O mighty-mouthed inventor of harmonies ! 
 O skilled to sing of time and eternity ! 
 God-gifted organ-voice of England, 
 Milton, a name to resound for ages ! 
 
 But the very subject of Milton's supreme poem 
 takes us back to a tale that comes from the begin- 
 ning of English history. It takes us to the weather- 
 beaten cliffs of Whitby on the Yorkshire coast, 
 where still may be seen the battered old abbey 
 around which so many stories cling. The Ven- 
 erable Bede tells us how the swineherd Cadmon 
 was at the banquet one night, where each in turn 
 took up the harp and played and sang. As it 
 came near the swineherd, he fled from the table 
 in shame to his cell, and buried his head in his 
 hands in an agony of weeping. As he wept, an 
 angel presence filled the cell, and a voice said : 
 ' Cadmon, sing.' He said : ' I cannot sing.' Then 
 the voice said : ' Sing to me.' And with those
 
 The New Song 141 
 
 words the fountain of music in his soul was broken 
 up and he sang. He sang of Creation and Redemp- 
 tion and the wonderful works of God. And even 
 so, if we are weeping because our voice is dumb in 
 the midst of a universe that is praising God, we 
 too may see a more glorious Presence than that 
 of an angel, and hear a wondrous Voice saying to 
 us : ' Sing to Me ! ' 
 
 Is there one thing that is more apparent in the 
 study of human music than the fact that beyond 
 all other things practice is necessary ? Some of 
 us have sung in chorus when a great musician has 
 conducted. How soon we learnt that the smallest 
 mistake in time or tune by any one of us would 
 be instantly detected by the keen ear which would 
 never allow our failures to be obscured by hiding 
 in a crowd ! How carefully we had to learn the 
 music to come up to so exacting a standard I But 
 you and I must sing the New Song ' before the 
 Throne.' And yet we think, some of us, it is 
 enough to come down to our churches and practise 
 the New Song once a week for an hour and then 
 go back again into the world and forget all about 
 it until the next time. Can we learn to sing such 
 a Song when we do not practise it more than that ? 
 O brethren, we cannot but agree that the reason 
 why the world is not won for Christianity more 
 rapidly is that Christian people to so large an extent
 
 142 The New Song 
 
 do not practise through the week the New Song they 
 love to sing during the hour of worship. 
 
 We had an annual festival at Cambridge long 
 ago that I used to delight in. There we sang 
 the greatest choral music perhaps that has ever 
 been composed Bach's St. Matthew Passion. We 
 gathered together in little companies and practised 
 the great choruses over and over till we knew them 
 well. Then came a day when we went over to 
 the grand old cathedral at Ely and found a great 
 chorus of three or four hundred. We did our 
 practice separately, but all that we might meet 
 at last in one united choir. 
 
 Brethren, that likewise is a parable. We are 
 gathered together in this country and other coun- 
 tries, hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of 
 little choirs, all of us practising the New Song 
 separately ; and all too often we know nothing 
 about our neighbours who are practising that 
 same music. We are separated from them by all 
 sorts of barriers, and we forget that this Song is 
 being thus practised all the world over. But the 
 time is coming when all these choirs are going to 
 unite, for nothing but the biggest of all choirs can 
 render that music worthily. The climax of Handel's 
 Messiah is the great musician's rendering of the 
 New Song : ' Worthy is the Lamb that was slain.' 
 It needs must have the best and biggest chorus
 
 The New Song 143 
 
 to make it go as it should go. Out of the ' multi- 
 tude which no man can number ' that chorus must 
 be gathered together to sing the Song in the ears 
 of God. 
 
 You and I may put our whole duty in life into 
 this form : that we have to learn to sing that Song 
 in tune, with the harmony of the heart, so as to 
 sing without discord before God ; that we have 
 to learn it by teaching it for that is the best 
 way of learning anything in the world and by 
 practising it day by day and all day long, until 
 at last the time shall come when all our choirs shall 
 meet in the presence of the Almighty Lord above 
 to sing for ever ' unto Him that loveth us, and 
 loosed us from our sins in His blood.'
 
 Printed by the 
 
 Southampton Times Company, Limited, 
 70 Above Bar, Southampton.
 
 THE LIBRARY 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 Santa Barbara 
 
 THIS BOOK IS DUE ON THE LAST DATE 
 STAMPED BELOW. 
 
 oOm-3,'68 (H9242s8 ) 9482
 
 UC SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY 
 
 A 001 024 204 8