important works cannot be prepared without long continued labor and care. The best books grow
gradually and silently like trees.
Conclusion.
We conclude, then, that the Synoptists prepared their Gospels independently, during the
same period (say between a.d. 60 and 69), in different places, chiefly from the living teaching of
Christ and the first disciples, and partly from earlier fragmentary documents. They bear independent
testimony to the truth of the gospel. Their agreement and disagreement are not the result of design,
but of the unity, richness, and variety of the original story as received, understood, digested, and
applied by different minds to different conditions and classes of hearers and readers.^900
The Traditional Order.
There is no good reason to doubt that the canonical arrangement which is supported by the
prevailing oldest tradition, correctly represents the order of composition.^901 Matthew, the apostle,
wrote first in Aramaic and in Palestine, from his personal observation and experience with the aid
of tradition; Mark next, in Rome, faithfully reproducing Peter’s preaching; Luke last, from tradition
and sundry reliable but fragmentary documents. But all wrote under a higher inspiration, and are
equally honest and equally trustworthy; all wrote within the lifetime of many of the primitive
witnesses, before the first generation of Christians had passed away, and before there was any
chance for mythical and legendary accretions. They wrote not too late to insure faithfulness, nor
too early to prevent corruption. They represent not the turbid stream of apocryphal afterthoughts
and fictions, but the pure fountain of historic truth.
The gospel story, being once fixed in this completed shape, remained unchanged for all
time to come. Nothing was lost, nothing added. The earlier sketches or pre-canonical gospel
fragments disappeared, and the four canonical records of the one gospel, no more nor less, sufficient
for all purposes, monopolized the field from which neither apocryphal caricatures nor sceptical
speculations have been able to drive them.
Exoteric and Esoteric Tradition.(^900) In this conclusion (which I stated thirty years ago in the first edition of myHist. of the Ap. Ch.)some of the ablest investigators
of the Synoptic problem independently agree, as Lange, Ebrard (Wissenschaftliche Kritik der ev. Gesch., third ed., pp. 1044
sqq.), Norton, Alford, Godet, Westcott, Farrar. "The Synoptic Gospels," says Alford (in his Proleg. to vol. I., p. 11, 6th ed.),
contain the substance of the Apostles’ testimony, collected principally from their oral teaching current in the church, partly also
from written documents embodying portions of that teaching: there is, however, no reason, from their internal structure, to
believe, but every reason to disbelieve that any one of the three evangelists had access to either of the other two gospels in its
present form." Godet concludes his discussion (Com. on Luke, 2d ed., p. 556, Am. ed.) with these words: " It is impossible to
conceive anything more capricious and less reverential than the part which we make the author of any one whatever of our
Synoptic Gospels play with the history and sayings of Jesus, supposing that he had before him the other two, or one of them.
Such an explanation will only be allowable when we are brought absolutely to despair of finding any other. And even then it
were better still to say, Non liquet. For this explanation involves a moral contradiction. Most of our present critics are so well
aware of this that they have recourse to middle terms."
(^901) Irenaeus, III. 1, 1; Origen in Euseb., H. E., VI. 25; Tertullian, and others. Irenaeus gives this order with the approximate
data: "Matthew issued a written Gospel among the Hebrews in their own dialect, while Peter and Paul were preaching at Rome
and laying the foundations of the church. After their departure, Mark, the disciple and interpreter of Peter, did also hand down
to us in writing what had been preached by Peter. Luke also, the companion of Paul, recorded in a book the gospel preached by
him. Afterwards, John, the disciple of the Lord, who also had leaned upon His breast, did himself publish a Gospel during his
residence at Ephesus in Asia." Clement of Alexandria differs by putting Mark after Matthew and Luke, and yet before the death
of Peter; for he says (in Eus., H. E., VI. 14), that when Peter proclaimed the gospel at Rome, Mark was requested by the hearers
to reduce it to writing, which he did, Peter neither hindering nor encouraging it. According to this view all the Synoptists would
have written before 64.
A.D. 1-100.