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Sanday suggests, better reproduce the authoritative associations of

the word.

Especial attention may be called to the 'Text, with Emendations and Illustrations,' published with the Two Lectures, which alone will be sufficient to render this publication as indispensable to the student of the Logia as the editio princeps was in the beginning. In each case where the manuscript is deficient the selected conjecture is embodied in the text, and it and the other conjectural readings are given in the notes. Some of the conjectures are very attractive. But it must be remembered that they are all, as Dr Sanday warns us, only conjectures as yet. It would be assuming too much to regard any of them as certainties. Even those which seem most likely may be in reality quite wide of the mark. The field is, therefore, still open to any one who has anything better to suggest.

Amongst the most striking things that have been written about the Logia are Professor Harnack's comments on what he calls the introduction to the third Saying. They raise visions of discoveries which may yet be before us. "In this introduction," he says, "there is as much to surprise us as there is little in the Saying proper. 'I placed myself (stepped, stood) in the midst of the world, and in the flesh I appeared to them,' &c. At the first glance one is inclined to think (as the editors recognise) of some speech of Jesus which He delivered to His disciples after His Resurrection. Of so-called Gospels, in which Jesus speaks when returned to life, we know quite enough. But on closer examination we are compelled to abandon this suggestion. The transition to the present Tovei, in other words, the declaration that His soul (now, still) labours (suffers) for mankind, is incomprehensible if it is to be the risen Jesus who is speaking. It shows that in these words we must recognise a backward glance upon His work on the part of the still living not the risen Christ. The thought with which it introduced answers to the belief of Paul, of John, and of 1 Timothy iii. 16. Everyone will be reminded of this passage: ἐφανερώθη ἐν σαρκὶ, ὤφθη ἀγγέλοις, ἐπιστεύθη ἐν κόσμῳ, and of John i. 10, 11, 14. But that this confession of faith should be put into the mouth of Jesus, and at the same time in a strongly rhetorical form (otnv èv μéow TоÛ KÓσμoν), goes considerably beyond the old Gospels. John, at any rate, did not venture to put into the mouth of Jesus, so definitely as this, that which he prefixed to his Gospel in the Prologue. In the Gospel Jesus speaks of his pre-existence in allusions. Here, however, Jesus speaks as a Divine Being. The Gospel out of which this saying is taken must really have been a Logos-Gospel, whether the word Logos appeared in it or not. That is to say, it must have been a Gospel to which the characteristic type of John's Gospel must

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have been related as the immediately preceding stage. We learn by a single saying the existence of a Gospel which teaches us that the line, which leads from the Synoptics to John, was carried still further.'

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But, while this is so, Professor Harnack continues, the Sayings show that they proceed from a source which in form and contents stands much closer to the Synoptics than the Fourth Gospel does. Thus we have not to assume a direct succession-Synoptics, John, our Gospel-but a dual development. The Johannine Gospel has emancipated itself from the old tradition far more than the Gospel from which our Sayings are derived. But inasmuch as it does not present Christ describing Himself directly as a Divine Being who has appeared in the flesh, it remains historically more accurate in regard to the decisive and chief question."

If these speculations are correct, Professor Harnack may well add: "How much of the history of theology, how much whose issues are still far from cleared up, lies in this single Logion! In the same breath Jesus all but describes Himself as the supramundane Being manifested in the flesh, and yet speaks, as He does in the Synoptics, of the Toveiv, the weary labour of His soul."

In the second part of his essay, Professor Harnack gives further reason for thinking that the Sayings are extracted from a Gospel, and concludes that the Gospel from which they are taken is the Gospel of the Egyptians.

But Harnack's reasons for believing that the Sayings are taken from the Gospel of the Egyptians are not convincing. The first proof that the Sayings come from a Gospel is derived, as we have seen, from the use of the word Toveiv, which would not have been in place, Professor Harnack thinks, after the Resurrection, and therefore must have been taken from a narrative of the earthly life of Christ. But is this certain?

Professor Lock does not think so. He maintains that the present oveî is quite conceivable for the post-resurrection life, comparing Acts ix. 5, "I am Jesus whom thou persecutest." Compare also Ephes. iv. 30 and Heb. vi. 6. Sanday is of the same opinion, adding that "the most natural interpretation of the aorists ἔστην, ὤφθην, εὗρον, is that they are spoken from the point of view of the period after the Resurrection.”

Professor Harnack's second reason for thinking that the Sayings are extracted directly from a Gospel, is contained in the fourth Saying, which, he says, "shows clearly that it is taken from a

1 "Jesus saith, Wherever there are

and there is one

alone, I

am with him. Raise the stone and there thou shalt find me, cleave the wood and there am I.” ([λέγ]ει [Ἰησοῦς, ὅπ]ον ἐὰν ὦσιν[****]e[***]* * θεοι και [**]σο* e[**]έστιν μόνος[**] τω ἐγώ εἰμι μετ ̓ αὐτ[οῦ]· ἔγει[ρ]ον τὸν λίθον κἀκεῖ εὑρήσεις με, σχίσον τὸ ξύλον κἀγὼ ἐκεῖ εἰμί.)

larger context; for we have to supply the fact that the Lord is here speaking of His disciples" (December Expositor, p. 403). That is to say, he assumes that the reading our elov adeo is the undoubted reading of the MS., and that the nominative to eioiv must be supplied from the preceding context, and he founds his argument on the assumption thus made. But as yet the reading is only conjectural. The conjecture is, no doubt, an obvious and likely one, but at this stage it cannot possibly be accepted as certain, or made the basis of an argument as to the origin of the fragment. It is not the reading preferred by the Oxford professors, who have provisionally adopted another reading, namely, the conjecture of Blass, ὅπου ἐὰν ὦσιν β, &c.

Harnack's theory that the Sayings are taken from the Gospel of the Egyptians seems to be open to another very obvious objection. All the Sayings, as far as we can judge of them, appear to have a well marked parallel structure like the parallelism of Hebrew poetry. The only possible exceptions are the first and last Sayings, both of which are incomplete. Now there is no trace of this parallel construction in any of the eight Sayings of Jesus which Professor Harnack produces as undoubted extracts from the Gospel of the Egyptians. This does not look as if the Sayings in the newly-discovered fragments were part of the same composition which contained the other eight, unless we are to suppose that the form of the Sayings was altered when they were extracted from the Gospel. But this supposition would, of course, be fatal to the argument derived from the missing nominative to cloív. If the form of the Saying was changed in transferring it from the Gospel, it is not likely that the verb would have been left without a subject when the Saying was reconstructed.

But, whether the Sayings are taken from a Gospel or not, Harnack's remarks on their theological character retain their value. The theology of the Sayings is Logos theology, though it may not have been embodied in a Logos Gospel. Here we may quote Professor Sanday, who "cannot think, in spite of all that has been said in various quarters, that the opening words, coτny ev μéow τοῦ κόσμου καὶ ἐν σαρκὶ ὤφθην αὐτοῖς, could ever have come from our Lord. 'To come or appear,' or 'be manifested in the flesh,' is a phrase which belongs to the later Apostolic age-to the Pastoral Epistles, and the Epistles of St John." Dr Lock, however, "inclines rather more than Dr Sanday does to the possibility that some at least of the new Sayings may be genuine, and to the theory which would see in the document a copy of some precanonical collection of our Lord's discourses.” Sanday, again, holds that, though none of the new matter represents, as it stands, a genuine saying of our Lord, the author starts, as a rule, from

genuine sayings, but works them up in a sense of his own, much as he supposes the writer of the Fourth Gospel to have done, but with this difference, that the material of the Logia editor did not rest on the same basis of personal experience.

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Of the remarkable words, " Raise the stone, and there thou shalt find Me; cleave the wood and I am there," Dr Lock offers us the choice of no less than five, really six, different interpretations. But both he and Dr Sanday produce strong reasons for giving the preference to that which first suggests itself, and which appears the simplest and most natural, namely, to take the text as referring to the presence of Christ as the Logos in inanimate nature as well as with the Church, even in its smallest fractions." This meaning, Professor Sanday adds, is peculiar, but not necessarily heterodox. Not necessarily so. But the cautious words of Dr Lock ought to be added: "It does not deny Christ's personality or merge Him in nature, though it must be admitted that it finds its closest analogies in the Gnostic writers whom we have quoted, and whose teaching tended to that issue."

There is another point, too, upon which it looks as if first thoughts were likely to prove best. How to interpret the words 'Jesus says,' Professor Lock considers one of the most difficult points. But he declares his preference for the view that "the present has a mystical force; the past Saying of the Lord still speaks, and speaks with an authoritative tone, somewhat akin to Cowper's line, Jesus speaks and speaks to thee.""

On the whole we may perhaps sum up our conclusions so far in the following propositions :

1. That the contents of the fragment formed part of a collection of Sayings attributed to Jesus.

2. That the Sayings are not all taken from the Canonical Gospels, or founded on them.

3. That some of them are apparently founded on sayings which appear in a simpler form in the Synoptic Gospels.

4. That they appear to belong to a stream of tradition different from the traditions of the Canonical Gospels, different but related. 5. That there is no evidence to show whether they were culled from a Gospel or Gospels, or from any other written composition.1

1 In the remarks which I ventured to make above on Harnack's opinion that the Logia were taken from the Gospel of the Egyptians, I was only dealing with the reasons which he gives for thinking that the Sayings were extracted from the Gospel. I did not attempt to discuss the reasons given by him or by Dr Armitage Robinson for thinking that there may have been a close relation between the Gospel and the Logia. "Whatever we may think," writes Dr Sanday, "about the view that the Sayings are extracted from the Gospel according to the Egyptians, they may well have had their birth in proximity to it."

6. That they have a common literary character, which may have been due to the compiler or editor.

7. That in the present form the Sayings were not spoken by Jesus, and do not belong to the earliest age.

8. That the theology of (some of) the Sayings is like the theology of the Fourth Gospel, while the form and contents generally are more like the Synoptics.

9. That the passage about raising the stone and cleaving the wood is capable of an orthodox interpretation, but that it may also have been written or understood in a pantheistic sense.

JOHN A. CROSS.

The Mysteries Pagan and Christian.

Being the Hulsean Lectures for 1896-97. By S. Cheetham, D.D., F.S.A., Archdeacon and Canon of Rochester, Hon. Fellow of Christ's College, Cambridge; Fellow and Emeritus Professor of King's College, London. London: Macmillan & Co. 1897. Cr. 8vo, pp. xviii. 150. Price, 58.

ARCHDEACON CHEETHAM has selected for his Hulsean Lectures a subject far wider than that of mere antiquarian research. Rightly regarded, and from a modern point of view, the Mysteries seem a strange survival of the old Pagan type of thought passing on into and mingling with the new current of thought brought in by Christianity. There are two errors on the subject in opposite extremes against which the Hulsean lecturer sets his face resolutely. The one type of thought, of which the school of Warburton may be named as the representative, laid the greatest stress on these 'Mysteries,' and pressed them into the service as a kind of lefthanded argument for the Divine Legation of Moses. The other school, of which we may name John Locke as the representative, fell into the opposite extreme, and annulled and extinguished all significance of the Mysteries. "What had the Gospel scheme," it asked, "in common with these mystery men?" "There is nothing secret, it is said, which shall not be revealed," and they rejected with scorn the thought of a religion which contained anything covered or concealed. "We use great plainness of speech," was the boast of this Christianity of common sense.

It is not too late for Archdeacon Cheetham to step in between these opposite extremes and to lay down a theory of the Mysteries which may be described as a mediation theory. Put concisely and in a few sentences, the position taken up by Archdeacon Cheetham is this

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