Under such circumstances it is not surprising that more ample materials for a proper biography of our Lord Jesus are not extant. And yet the scanty materials that have been spared to us suffice to clear up much that is dark and imperfect in that biography, if only they are treated as they ought to have been, as eventually they must be, and as indeed they are happily beginning to be; that is to say, on purely historical grounds, like as the materials for the biography of any other historical personage are treated. Until quite recently scholars abstained from dealing with the life of Jesus after this fashion, owing apparently to the dread lest its sanctity should be violated, as if there was any thing more holy than the truth, or as if the truth could be injured by the most searching investigation. In this sense Père Hyacinthe has well expressed himself in a letter addressed to Père Gratry, whose recent recantation and submission to the Decree of Papal Infallibility is one of the most glaring scandals of the Gallican Church. His words are:- As for me, what I fear most is not the open and candid scepticism of the adversaries of Revelation, but the unconscious scepticism of those who place false authority and false unity above the truth. The former consolidates the sacred edifice by the very assaults that it directs against it from without; the latter silently undermines it from within by shaking the foundations on which it rests-sincerity of faith, and integrity of conscience.'

CHAPTER IV.

ON TRADITIONS AND LEGENDS.

As in the preceding chapter the third and fourth Canonical Gospels have been spoken of as legendary, it is expedient to say a few words, intended for the general reader rather than the scholar, in explanation of the correct meaning of the word

'legend,' as also of 'tradition;' both of which terms are often employed loosely and inaccurately.

A tradition is properly that which has been delivered' orally, or by word of mouth, from one person to another and from one generation to another. It is correctly defined by Dryden in The Hind and Panther' :

"The good old bishops took a simple way;

Each asked but what he heard his father say,
Or how he was instructed in his youth,

And by tradition's force upheld the truth.'

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"And your son shall

Or, as it is pointedly put in D'Israeli's Genius of Judaism,' 'A Caraite, rejecting traditions, tauntingly interrogated Hillel, the greatest of the Rabbins, on what evidence they rested. The sage, pausing for a moment, desired the sceptic would repeat the first three letters of the alphabet. This done, the advocate for traditions in his turn asked, "How do you know how to pronounce those letters in this way and no other? "I learned them from my father," replied the Caraite. learn them from you," rejoined Hillel; " and this is tradition "'*. Though the poor Caraite was posed by the sharp-witted doctor of the law, he was nevertheless not in the wrong. Mr. Alexander J. Ellis and other scholars are demonstrating that the sounds of letters are constantly changing,-that the English language is not pronounced as it was in the time of Chaucer or even later. And what tradition shall help us in determining authoritatively whether Tully's agnomen is to be pronounced Kikero,' Khikhero,' Shishero,' Tshitshero,' Tsitsero,' 'Sisero,' or 'Thithero'?

In fact, it may be laid down as a law that, owing to the imperfection of human nature, nothing whatever can be communicated by one person to another, with the absolute certainty of its being received precisely as it was delivered, or without a moral certainty that it will be repeated incorrectly to a third person.

*This story is repeated in somewhat different terms by Mr. Deutsch in the Quarterly Review,' cxxiii. 441.

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And the oftener a statement is thus transmitted from one to another, the greater will be the certainty of its departing more and more from its original form. We need only recall to mind the story of the three black crows! experience of domestic life to show how rarely it is that a servant delivers the most ordinary message without making a mistake of some sort.

And we may appeal to the

What is here said, however, is properly to be restricted to oral traditions, or sayings delivered from one person to another by word of mouth. The moment a tradition is committed to writing it ceases to be a tradition and becomes a legend, which term is thus sarcastically defined by Horne Tooke:-'Legend, which means "that which ought to be read," is, from the early misapplication of the term by impostors, now used by us as if it meant "that which ought to be laughed at"'*.

It is because the tradition has become developed and distorted before it is committed to writing and so fixed as a legend, that the latter term has received its opprobrious definition and come to be regarded as almost equivalent to fable. Still, when once a tradition is committed to writing, however 'legendary' (in the vulgar sense) it may have previously become, it is now a record, which in itself is immutable; so that persons living many centuries later are just as competent to decide on the merits of a legend as were those who lived at the time when it was reduced to writing, perhaps more so, on account of their living at a time and under circumstances enabling them to have access to sources of information which the recorder of the legend himself was not acquainted with. Nevertheless, the reduction of a tradition to writing, whereby it becomes fixed as a legend, does not prevent the tradition itself from being repeated orally and so transmitted traditionally, receiving some modification at each stage of its transmission, and being, perhaps, from time to time committed to writing under other circumstances, and thus giving rise to other legends of a different character.

Nor is this all; for each of these legends, although in itself * 'Diversions of Purley.'

fixed and immutable, may be repeated orally, and so become in its turn the origin of a separate tradition, or, it may be more correctly said, of various traditions, inasmuch as no two readers of the legend would repeat it in precisely the same terms to their respective auditors; and thus it might go on, as it were, 'ad infinitum.'

Though a legend,―using the term in its literal sense as meaning any written document,-when once it is recorded, is thereby freed from the influences of oral tradition, and becomes in itself immutable, still, when of ancient date, it is rarely handed down to us absolutely in the form in which it was originally committed to writing. For instance, it will not be pretended by any one that the original manuscripts of the Scriptures, either of the Old or of the New Testament, have been preserved. We possess them only in the form of written copies, which themselves are doubtless copies of other copies, the originals having been lost long ago. Hence errors, which scarcely any care could prevent, have unavoidably found their way into the copies now extant, not only of the Gospels but of all the other writings of the New Testament. The Jewish Masorites have done their best to preserve the writings of the Old Testament in their integrity; but, even in this case, their elaborate system of authenticating their written copies was not introduced till long after the text had already experienced many departures from its original purity.

But independently of this source of error, there can be no guarantee against a still more fruitful one, namely, the introduction into the text of manuscripts of the marginal notes and glosses of readers and commentators. These have mostly got accidentally incorporated into the text by copyists; but not unfrequently they have been intentionally interpolated, and so made to appear to be portions of the original text. As an instance of the former may be adduced the doxology at the end of the Lord's Prayer in Matthew vi. 13, 'For thine is the kingdom' &c., which is an adaptation of David's words in 1 Chr. xxix. 11, added to the prayer in its original form, as given in Luke xi. 4,

from its having been said after the prayer, in like manner as in Catholic Churches the doxology Glory be to the Father' &c. is repeated after each of the Psalms of David. And though this latter has not been introduced into the printed copies of the Psalter, we find it in the Book of Common Prayer of the Established Church of England added to the ninety-fifth Psalm in the Morning Service, and to other Psalms and portions of Scripture, without any mark to distinguish it from the context. Now nothing would have been more natural than that the ignorant priests in the early ages of Christianity should have insisted on inserting the Doxology at the end of the Lord's Prayer in the first Gospel, because they so found it in their missals, or elsewhere. And supposing it possible for the Psalter to be lost, and that it had to be reconstructed from the fragments existing in various quarters, there are at the present day many priests of the same calibre, who might contend that the Gloria Patri' should be inserted as forming a portion of the Psalms of David in their original form.

Of the interpolations purposely introduced into the Scriptures of the New Testament, the most notorious and best-established one is perhaps that in the fifth chapter of the First Epistle of John, For there are three that bear record [in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost, and these three are one. And there are three that bear witness in earth,] the spirit, the water, and the blood; and these three agree in one;' where the words between brackets have been introduced by the Romish clergy at a comparatively recent date, they being wanting in all Greek manuscripts and early versions in other languages. So, too, in the concluding portion of the first Gospel, the words attributed to our Lord Jesus, ' Go ye therefore and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost'*, though they appear in all the manuscripts extant, must have been added after the passages in Acts ii. 38, x. 48, xix. 5, &c. were written. For it is not to be imagined that the Apostles would have acted in direct violation of their * Matth. xxviii. 19.