Chapter XI · THE LOGIA THEORY AND THE HISTORICAL TEXT
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So much for the “especially remarkable” fact that churches were desecrated in the sack of Rome in 1527, and that Savonarola should in 1496 have predicted such things for his own day. We have seen that his prediction was not a forecast of the event, that he had no idea of the causation of the ultimate sack of Rome, that he really prophesied an early event, and that he was simply announcing speedy divine vengeance after the manner of the Hebrew and many previous Christian prophets. What ground for argument, then, does his case furnish for an inference as to the date of the quasi-prophecy of the fall of Jerusalem in the third Gospel? Blass, despite his “especially remarkable” argument, puts his case pretty low:—
What then were the manner and the matter of the prophecy in Luke? The Messiah expressly grounds his prediction upon the non-acceptance by Jerusalem of him and his mission:—
If thou [Jerusalem] hadst only known in this day the things which belong unto peace! but now they are hid from thine eyes. For the days shall come upon thee when thine enemies shall cast up a bank about thee, and compass thee round, and keep thee in on every side, and shall dash thee to the ground, and thy children within thee; and they shall not leave in thee one stone on another (Luke xix, 42–44).
But when ye see Jerusalem compassed with armies, then know that her desolation is at hand. Then let them that are in Judæa flee unto the mountains.... For these are days of vengeance, that all things which are written may be fulfilled.... And they shall fall by the edge of the sword, and shall be led captive into all the nations, and Jerusalem shall be trodden down of the Gentiles, until the times of the Gentiles be fulfilled. And there shall be signs in sun and moon and stars.... And then shall they see the Son of Man coming in a cloud with power and great glory. But when these things begin to come to pass, look up, and lift up your heads; because your redemption draweth nigh (id. xxi, 20–28).
“I do not think,” says Blass, “that either the former or the latter of these foretellings is very distinct, since there are neither names given nor peculiar circumstances indicated; only the common order of events is described....” That will certainly not hold in respect of the “shall not leave in thee one stone on another,” or the “cast up a bank about thee,” which is a distinct specification of the Roman siege method of 70.
But let us follow up the implication, which is that a Jewish vaticinator, mindful of Daniel, might about the year 30 so predict the events of the year 70, and a world of other events which never happened, without astonishing us more than does Savonarola.
It will be admitted that this is a stirring change from the run of New Testament criticism of the past seventy years. That criticism more or less unconsciously recognized the problem set up by the entire ignorance of gospel teaching revealed in the Pauline and other epistles. Dr. Petrie, following Professor Blass in an unhesitating acceptance of the narrative of the Acts, simply ignores the Pauline problem altogether. He boldly credits the Church with a Gospel before Paul’s conversion, and, like other traditionalists, supplies Paul, the gospel-less, with a physician, Luke, who had collected from the scattered mass of logia more gospel than anybody else!
Two comments here at once suggest themselves. Dr. Petrie’s line of construction might with perfect congruity be employed to yield evidence that the assumed original Teacher was mainly concerned with problems of the law; and (2) the inferred multitude of original floating dicta may with immense gain in plausibility be transmuted into a series of interpolations made by different hands long after the supposed Founder’s death. For what critical right has Dr. Petrie to subsume a store of floating Jesuine dicta which supplied the Church, in its changing circumstances, for three or four decades, with suitable parables and teachings to meet every new problem? If you profess to seek a strictly impersonal principle of selection, why not apply a strictly impersonal principle of inference from the result?