Note 6 — Chapter XI · THE LOGIA THEORY AND THE HISTORICAL TEXT

Thus has the pendulum swung back to the furthest extreme from that at which men carried down the Gospel dates to accommodate the data. As to chronology, Dr. Petrie is practically at the orthodox standpoint of Professor Salmon.6 An objective and ostensibly scientific method, involving no element of personal bias or preference, is employed to make a selection from the Gospels which shall present as it were mathematically or statistically the earliest elements in the synoptics. On that selection, however, there is brought to bear no further critical principle whatever. It is assumed that it must all come from the traditional founder, a mass of whose utterances must have been committed by auditors to writing as they were delivered (the power to write being held to be common in Galilee and Judea in the first century because it was common in Egypt in the third); and a nucleus collection of these separate documents must have been made soon after the crucifixion, and there and then wound up. At any rate, such a collection is yielded by selecting the groups or blocks of matter which occur in all three synoptics in the same order; and this must have been made about the year 30, because it is mainly occupied with the problems of the law, and very little with “the Gentile problems” which so soon began to come to the front. The history of the Acts is here taken as unassailable ground, like the main Gospel record.