Note 9 — Chapter VII · GOSPEL-MAKING

On either view, we must pronounce that the Hebrew gospel, as exhibited in the fragments, has none of the marks of a real biographical record. The items of narrative are wholly supernaturalist; the items of teaching belong to the more advanced Jewish ethic which we find progressively developed from Matthew to Luke. Once more, the critical inference is either (a) that the ethically-minded among the Jesuist “prophets” set out by putting approved doctrines in the mouth of the legendary Saviour-God, whereafter doctrinary episodes were invented for cult purposes, or (b) that the miraculous life was first pieced out in terms of Old Testament prophecies held for Messianic. Having regard to the ethical nullity of the primary evangel posited in the synoptics, the presumption is wholly against any primary manufacture of new logia. If we take the Sermon on the Mount as typical, the matter is all pre-Christian.9 If we pronounce the method of the first canonical gospel to be secondary in relation to that of Mark, the ethical element enters only after the cult has gone a long way, and is then Jewish matter subsumed, as in the Didachê.