Note 6 — Chapter XII · FAILURE OF THE LOGIA THEORY

That there were such scattered and floating oracles, indeed, we are not critically entitled to deny. The Judæo-Greek world was indeed familiar with oracles of “the Lord.” The Gospel Jesus is made to predict that there would come after him many saying “I am Christ”; and while the traditionalist must accept this as true prediction, the historian must pronounce that various “Christs” or quasi-Christs did come. We have some of their names and their brief secular history.6 Each of these men would be “the Lord” for his followers; and some of them, surely, propounded some teaching. The Gospel ethic of reciprocity, we know, was put in a saner form by Hillel; did he get it from the Jesuists? Christian scholars do not claim as much.7 There is no Messianic item in the Gospels, apart from the lore of the sacrament, which may not have been in the legend of any “Christ.” As it happens, the best authenticated saying of “the Lord” is one which no Christian now accepts—the fantastic millenarian prediction given by Papias, who had it from “the elders who saw John, the disciple of the Lord,” and textually quoted by Irenæus, who is practically corroborated by Eusebius. The latter, it is true, pronounces Papias very limited in his comprehension;8 but has not the same thing been said many times of the disciples by believers in the gospel Jesus?