Note 3 — EPILOGUE

On the other hand, no absolute rules can be laid down a priori for the discerning in early Christian or in any other ancient documents of historical fact. But students embarking on a study of Christian origins will do well to lay to heart the aphorism of Renan (Les Apôtres, Introd. xxix), that “one can only ascertain the origin of any particular religion from the narratives or reports of those who believed therein; for it is only the sceptic who writes history ad narrandum.” It is in the very nature of things human that we could not hope to obtain documents more evidential than the Gospels and Acts. It is a lucky chance that time has spared to us the Epistles of Paul as well, and the sparse notices of first-century congregations and personalities preserved in Josephus and in pagan writers. For during the first two or three generations of its existence the Church interested few except itself. In the view of a Josephus, the Jewish converts could only figure as Jews gone astray after a false Messiah, just as the Gentile recruits were mere Judaizers, objects—as he remarks, B. J., II, 18, 2—of equal suspicion to Syrian pagans and Jews alike, an ambiguous, neutral class, spared by the knife of the pagans, yet dreaded by the Jews as at heart aliens to their cause.3 There were no folklorists or comparative religionists in those days watching for new cults to appear; and there could be little or no inclination to sit down and write history among enthusiasts who dreamed that the end of the world was close at hand, and believed themselves to be already living in the last days. For this is the conviction that colours the whole of the New Testament; and that it does so is a signal proof of the antiquity of much that the book contains. If a Christian of the first century ever took up his pen and wrote, it was not to hand down an objective narrative of events to a posterity whose existence he barely contemplated, but, as against unbelieving Jews, to establish from ancient prophecy his belief in Jesus as the promised Messiah, or perhaps as the Word of God made flesh. All Christians were aware that Jews, both in Judæa and of the Dispersion, roundly denied their Christ to have been anything better than an impostor and violator of the Law. They heard the pagans round them echoing the scoffs of their Messiah’s own countrymen. Accordingly, the earliest literature of the Church, so far as it is not merely homiletic and hortative, is controversial, and aims at proving that the Jewish people were mistaken in rejecting Jesus as the Messiah. The Jews neither then nor now have fought with mere shadows; and just in proportion as they bore witness against his Messiahship, they bore witness in favour of his historical reality. It is a pity that the extreme negative school ignore this aspect of his rejection by the Jews.