Note 2 — Chapter XI · THE LOGIA THEORY AND THE HISTORICAL TEXT

As we shall see, not only the circumstantial details but the remainder of the prediction completely exclude the idea of fortuitous real vaticination, even if it be argued that prophecies of quite visionary prodigies may conceivably have been made at any date. As to the prophecy of the fall of the temple, which is common to the three synoptics, the Professor leaves it “out of the present discussion,” seeing that the liberal theologians are willing to let it stand as a prophecy ante eventum. Certainly he may well contemn such a critical method. The prophecy as to the temple, and that in Matthew (xxiv, 3–31) and Mark (xiii, 3–27) as to the sequence of war, persecution, dissension, false prophets, evangelization of the whole world, the abomination of desolation in the holy place, false Christs (twice specified), signs and wonders, and the final cosmic catastrophe—all this is certainly on all fours, critically considered, with the presages in Luke. But how shall rational criticism be induced to take the whole mass of quasi-vaticination as the utterance of a wandering thaumaturg of the year 30? It is idle for Professor Blass to explain to us that when Luke makes Jesus say “Jerusalem shall be trodden down of the Gentiles,” with mere reminiscence of the Septuagint Daniel, and Matthew and Mark make him speak with exact reference to Sept. Dan. ix, end, they are citing independently from their original. Their original may just have been the cited passage in Daniel, with no intervening document. “It is self-evident,” says the Professor,2 “that the real speech of Christ must have been longer than we read it now in any Gospel.” That thesis cannot be self-evident of which the subject invites and admits a wholly different explanation; and the “must” is a sample of the Professor’s critical ethic.