Note 3 — Chapter XII · FAILURE OF THE LOGIA THEORY

It is quite thinkable, of course, that the compilers of the Gospels may have found such quasi-predictions already committed to writing, and merely embodied them. But that admission only carries us back to the problem of authenticity. If any current “scrap of paper” concerning “Jesus” or “the Lord” could thus secure canonicity, what trust is to be put in the canon? It is recorded in the history of Islam that Abu Daoud, who collected some half-a-million traditions concerning Mohammed, rejected all but 4,800, which included “the authentic, those which seem to be authentic, and those which are nearly so.”3 This again, it may be argued, proves that false traditions do not negate the historicity of the personage they concern. And that is clearly true. There may conceivably have been a Teacher in whose mouth many invented sayings were put even in his lifetime. But when we thus come to the historicity problem, there is simply no such basis in the Gospels as we have in the life of the confessedly “Illiterate Prophet.” The Gospel life begins and ends in miracle, and it yields no intelligible evangel apart from that ostensibly founded on the sacrificial death—the death, that is, of the God.