It is the common belief respecting the Evangelists that the Spirit of God brought the facts of our Lord’s life to their remembrance. They might have seen them themselves, or heard of them from others, but they did not understand them merely because they saw them or heard of them. They required some light from above to tell them what the facts meant, to bring them into harmony. Till they had this light they were not competent to record them.
This, I say, is our common belief. With it we have connected an opinion, derived from external sources or from passages of the Scripture, that each of the Evangelists was more or less intimately connected with one of the leading Apostles. No one has doubted that St. Luke was the companion of St. Paul. Common tradition, supporting itself by texts which have very considerable weight, connects St. Mark with St. Peter. We have not been wont formally to connect St. Matthew with the writer of any of the Epistles. But ancient and modern critics have agreed in considering him especially the writer for the Hebrew part of the Church. Implicitly, therefore, he is associated in our minds with St. James, the presiding Apostle of the Jerusalem Church, emphatically the Christian Jew.
I do not think people have asked themselves very distinctly how they connect these two sets of facts together. They say vaguely that the Evangelists were inspired to report certain events. Since they find these events differently recorded, they suppose that the inspiration led to these differences; since some events are omitted by one, and recorded by another, they suppose that this must be owing to the same cause. But they are so little in the habit of regarding these events as making up one whole, as having one distinct purpose or object, that they fail to explain to others, and, I think, to themselves, what they mean either by the human helps of eyesight or testimony, which the writers availed themselves of, or the divine guidance and superintendence which was over them.
But is it hopeless to arrive at some reconciliation of these two views? Is any book worth any thing to any human being unless there is some idea or principle in it which binds the different facts in it together? Can a person sit down to write a book which shall last for any time, and convey a living impression to a number of minds, unless there is such an idea or purpose within it? Supposing it to be within it, will not every part of his record be penetrated by it? Will he not see every fact in the light of it? And, so far as he imparts an impression to us, will he not do so by making us see every fact in the same light?
Were this admitted, might we not be able better to understand what is meant by the Spirit bringing to remembrance events which had been before presented to the senses or known by testimony? Would not the operation indicated by such language be precisely this, that all that was previously scattered, disjointed, incoherent in the mind, became a living harmonious whole; each distinct portion brought out in its proper proportions by the light which is diffused over all? Might we not in that way be able to understand why, amidst the number of gospels which we know to have existed in the early Church, and which St. Luke intimates to have been composed in his time, some should have sunk into immediate obscurity, some should have floated for a little while and perished at last, because they were of no living coherency, because the events which they recorded, even if they happened to be true, wanted the sure divine impress, were felt at once not to contain a divine history, but merely the loose fragments of one.
In this way we might understand, I think, how the idea of a Son of God would be stamped upon all the true gospels, while those which were not true would be endeavoring, by various wonderful narratives and startling prodigies, to convey the notion that they had some One very great to tell of, though, with all their efforts, they could never succeed in really presenting Him to the heart and conscience of their readers. But supposing this fundamental idea were given as the common test and sign of all true Evangelists, will there have been no special aspects of that idea which presented itself to each one of them? Would it have been possible that one narrative could convey the whole of such a truth as this? Here I apprehend the opportunity occurs for considering those relations of the Evangelists with different Apostles which we have all, in some measure, taken for granted.
St. Matthew, as we have seen, at least as much as any of the three Evangelists, sets before us a Son of God in his narrative. But under what aspect? I will not now say any thing about the special work of St. James, at which I have hinted, because I shall have hereafter to examine the Epistle of St. James, and see what it tells us of his meaning and object. I will assume only that St. Matthew’s Gospel is what all have called it—the Hebrew Gospel. If so, I think we might expect to find that the prevailing idea of St. Matthew’s mind was that the revelation of the Son of God is the fulfilment of that revelation which we have in the Old Testament, that the new covenant is necessary to complete and substantiate the Old, that the God of Abraham must be a Father, that the kingdom of Abraham must be a fatherly kingdom.
I shall have to speak of St. Peter hereafter; I will not, therefore, enter now into the evidence which his Epistle furnishes respecting the pervading idea or purpose of his mind. I will merely recall his own confession, as given by St. Matthew, “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God.” I turn to St. Mark, and find his first words, “The Gospel of Jesus Christ the Son of God.” I should expect to find that the object of St. Mark’s Gospel was, emphatically, to bring out Christ in His own person and His own acts, as the head and founder of a kingdom and as an object of faith.
I shall have hereafter to go into the investigation of St. Paul’s Epistles, and his position in the Church. I will only assume now that he was the teacher of the Gentiles, and that he looked upon the new dispensation, not merely as completing the old, but as having a foundation deeper than the old, so that Jewish law, and the whole Jewish economy, were grounded upon the revelation of Christ, rather than it upon them. Now I should certainly expect St. Luke’s Gospel to embody this idea, to set forth the Son of God as a giver of the Spirit, and the founder of a spiritual kingdom which had an older and deeper root than Judaism itself.
Whether these expectations answer to the actual records which we find in these three Evangelists it will now be our business, as briefly as we can, to consider.