THE DIEGESIS.

This first or earlier draught of the life and history of Christ, is acknowledged by St. Luke, as the basis of the gospel story, and called the DIEGESIS, or Declaration,* that is, narrative of those things which are most surely believed among us. In the undistinguished manner of representing, his sense in our English text, it escapes observation, that, what is rendered A DECLARATION, &c. really is the title of the work, of which this gospel professes no more than to be "a setting forth in order," or more methodical arrangement.

THE GNOMOLOGUE.

But besides this DIEGESIS, the common basis of the three first gospels, as of many others which many had taken in hand, to reduce and arrange into more consistent order, there existed also a GNOMOLOGUE,† or collection of precepts, parables, and discourses, which were supposed to have been delivered by Christ, at different times, and on different occasions; and this, in addition to the Diegesis, was a common authority to St. Matthew and St. Luke, though it seems to have been unknown to St. Mark.

Proceeding steadily upon our principle avowed in the motto of this work, which binds us to view all pretences to any thing out of nature, as a surrender of all the stress that is laid on so weak an argument; the reader will know at once in what sense he is to understand the bishop's struggle to bar off the conclusions to which he has thus far marshalled our way. Every step which is here supposed, he tells us, is perfectly consistent with the doctrine of inspiration, not indeed of verbal inspiration, but with that sort of inspiration, in which the Holy Ghost watched over the sacred compilers with so suspended a hand, as left them to the guidance of their own faculties, while they kept clear of error; and only interposed, when without this divine assistance, they would have been in danger of falling. "With such an inspiration, (continues this Right Reverend expositor of the divine mysteries,) * Επειδηπερ πολλοι επεχείρησαν ανατάξασθαι ΔΙΗΓΗΣΙΝ περι των πεπληρο. φορημένων εν ημιν πραγματων-εδοξε καμοι.—Luke i. 1. + .

† Such a work seems to be designated under various titles in the Epistles. of Paul, as the Form of Sound Words, the Doctrine, the Words of our Lord Jesus Christ, &c."-1 Tim. vi. 3. The Doctrine According to Godliness, &c.-See Syntagma, p 74.

the opinion that the Evangelists drew a great part of their materials from a written document, is perfectly consistent; for if that document contained any thing erroneous, they had the power of detecting and correcting it." Such is a succinct but accurate view of Bishop Marsh's Dissertation on the Origin and Composition of the Three First Canonical Gospels, of 249 pages, appended to the third volume of his translation of Michaelis's Introduction, Edit. 2, London 1802.

CHAPTER XVII.

OF ST. JOHN'S GOSPEL IN PARTICULAR.

ALL ecclesiastical writers seem to have agreed in representing the gospel according to St. John, as written at some considerable length of time after the publication of the three other gospels, and generally with a view to confute the heresies of the Cerinthians, Sabians, and Gnostics, which had either previously existed, or had risen into a mischievous notoriety, since the publication of those gospels. He had read the three first gospels before he composed his own, and appears, says Bishop Marsh, to have corrected, though in a very delicate manner, the accounts given by his predecessors; which, if his predecessors were under such an inspiration of the holy spirit, as was sufficient to keep them clear of error, must indeed have required the greatest delicacy. The Bishop, however, has merited our forgiveness of this absurdity, by the frankness of his confession, that after all his attempts to reconcile the contradiction of St. John's account of the resurrection of Christ with that of Mark and Luke, "he has not been able to do it, in a manner satisfactory either ⚫ to himself, or to any other impartial inquirer into truth." He concludes with even more than necessary caution, that "if it be true that there are passages in St. John's Gospel, which are at variance with the accounts given by the other Evangelists, we cannot hesitate to give the preference to St. John, who wrote last, and appears to have had an excellent memory. ""* Some persons have need of

excellent memories.

* Vol. 3, p. 315.-Matthew, Mark, and Luke, it seems, had but indifferent memories, even with the Holy Ghost to jog 'em, and John's memory has corrected some of the Holy Ghost's blunders.

O Sant Esprit ! La voila ton ouvrage.

DR. SEMLER'S HYPOTHESIS.

Dr. Semler contends, that St. John wrote before the other three Evangelists, and the weight of his authority, which alone would give respectability to his criticism, seems to be seconded by the historical evidence of the existence of the heretical sects which St. John wrote to refute, long anterior to any date which Christians have ascribed to the three first gospels. An evangelist, who had seen the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke, and wished to second and support their authority, would hardly have committed himself in the egregious and irreconcileable contradictions which this gospel presents, when compared with those and surely, no one can be ignorant that the Platonic and Pythagorean doctrines, which distinguish and characterize this gospel, existed several ages before the birth of Christ. Nor ought the strong arguments which the learned have adduced, in proof that Plato and Pythagoras themselves were both members of the Therapeutan society, or had derived their doctrines from the sacred writings of this sect, to be of little weight with us. The universal delusion of ecclesiastical history consists in ascribing a later date to earlier institutions, in representing that which was the origination, as the corruption of Christianity, and in bringing down the monkish and monastic epocha to any period below the second or third century, in order to keep the clue of the whole labyrinth out of sight, and to evade the clear solution of all the difficulties of the inquiry, which presents itself in the fact that Eusebius has attested, that the Therapeutan monks were Christians, many ages before the period assigned to the birth of Christ; and that the Diegesis and Gnomologue, from which the Evangelists compiled their gospels, were writings which had for ages constituted the sacred scriptures of those Egyptian visionaries.

EVANSON.

The learned Evanson, who, though a Unitarian divine, professes himself to be a firm believer in revelation, and a disciple of Jesus Christ,* marks with triple notes of admiration his astonishment that the orthodox should

* In his Work on the Dissonance of the Four Evangelists, published 1792,

p. 222.

receive gospels which so flatly contradict each other, as each equally true. And of the adorable miracle of turning water into wine, he observes, that coming in so very exceptionable a form, upon the testimony of so very exceptionable an historian, it is altogether as unworthy of belief as the fabulous Roman Catholic legend of St. Nicholas's chickens.

BRETSCHNEIDER.

Since Christian tolerance has endured these pregnant admissions against the claims of divine revelation, the sceptical world has been enriched by the Probabilia of Bretschneider, published at Leipsic 1820, in which that illustrious divine, compatibly with an equally sincere profession of faith in Christianity; and what is in some views a much more important consideration, compatibly with keeping his divinity professorship, and presidency of a Protestant university; has shown that the Jesus depicted in the fourth gospel is wholly out of keeping, and entirely a different sort of character from the Jesus of Matthew, Mark and Luke, and that it is utterly impossible that both descriptions could be true; that this gospel contains no testimony of an independent historian, or of a witness to the things therein related, but is derived solely from some written or unwritten tradition; and that its author was neither an inhabitant of Palestine, nor a Jew.*

This, however, is not more than may, from internal evidence, be argued against the other evangelists, or at least Matthew and Mark, whose writings betray so great an ignorance of the geography, statistics, and even language of Judea, as the most illiterate inhabitants of that country could by no possibility have fallen into—exempli gratia.

FALSEHOOD OF GOSPEL GEOGRAPHY.

1. "He came unto the sea of Galilee, through the midst of the coasts of Decapolis," (Mark vii. 31): when there were no coasts of Decapolis, nor was the name so much as known before the reign of the emperor Nero.

2. "He departed from Galilee, and came into the coasts of

* Jesus, quem depinxit, quartum evangelium, valde diversus est a Jesu in prioribus evangeliis descripto-nec utraque descriptio simul vera esse protest-Evangelista, nec ea quæ facta esse tradidit, ipse videt, sed e traditione aut scripta aut non scripta, hausit-nec Palæstinensis nec Judæus fuit.Bretschneider in Ordine Argumentorum.

Judea, beyond Jordan," (Matt. xix. 1): when the Jordan itself was the eastern boundary of Judea, and there were no coasts of Judea beyond it.*

3. "But when he heard that Archelaus did reign in Judea, in the room of his father Herod, he was afraid to go thither: notwithstanding being warned of God in a dream, he turned aside into the parts of Galilee, and he came and dwelt in a city called Nazareth; that it might be fulfilled, which was spoken by the prophets, he shall be called a Nazarene," (Matt. ii. 22): when-1. It was a son of Herod who reigned in his stead, in Galilee as well as in Judea, so that he could not be securer in one province than in the other; and when2. It was impossible for him to have gone from Egypt to Nazareth, without travelling through the whole extent of Archelaus's kingdom, or making a peregrination through the deserts on the north and east of the Lake Asphaltites, and the country of Moab; and then, either crossing the Jordan into Samaria or the Lake of Gennesareth into Galilee, and from thence going to the city of Nazareth; which is no better geography, than if one should describe a person as turning aside from Cheapside into the parts of Yorkshire; and when-3. There were no prophets whatever, or certainly none that either Jew or Christian would allow to be prophets, who had prophesied that Jesus "should be called a Nazarene ;" and when-4. It is not true (according to the subsequent history) that Jesus was ever called a Nazarene; and when-5. Nazarene was a name derived from any place whatever, but from a sect of Egyptian monks, and was none other than of the same significancy as Essene or Therapeut a fact which throws further light on this monkish legend; and when— 6. Had Jesus been a Jew, and derived his epitheton according to Jewish customs from the place of his birth, he would have been called, not Jesus of Nazareth, but Jesus of Bethlehem.

not

4. After Christ and the Devil had ended their forty days' familiarity in the wilderness, "He departed into Galilee, and leaving Nazareth, he came and dwelt in Capernaum, which is upon the sea-coast in the borders of Zabulon, and Nephthalim, that it might be fulfilled, which was spoken by Esaias the prophet, saying, The land of Zabulon and the land of Nephthalim, by the way of the sea, beyond Jordan, Galilee of the Gentiles," &c. (Matt. iv. 12, 13); when, to Esaias, or any inhabitant of Judea, the country beyond must be the * Evanson, p. 169.