from Luke, though he does not name him.^1023 This brings us up to the year 140 or 130. The Gospel
is found in all ancient manuscripts and translations.
The heretical testimony of Marcion from the year 140 is likewise conclusive. It was always
supposed that his Gospel, the only one he recognized, was a mutilation of Luke, and this view is
now confirmed and finally established by the investigations and concessions of the very school
which for a short time had endeavored to reverse the order by making Marcion’s caricature the
original of Luke.^1024 The pseudo-Clementine Homilies and Recognitions quote from Luke. Basilides
and Valentinus and their followers used all the four Gospels, and are reported to have quoted Luke
1:35 for their purpose.
Celsus must have had Luke in view when he referred to the genealogy of Christ as being
traced to Adam.
Credibility.
The credibility of Luke has been assailed on the ground that he shaped the history by his
motive and aim to harmonize the Petrine and Pauline, or the Jewish-Christian and the
Gentile-Christian parties of the church. But the same critics contradict themselves by discovering,
on the other hand, strongly Judaizing and even Ebionitic elements in Luke, and thus make it an
incoherent mosaic or clumsy patchwork of moderate Paulinism and Ebionism, or they arbitrarily
assume different revisions through which it passed without being unified in plan.
Against this misrepresentation we have to say: (1) An irenic spirit, such as we may freely
admit in the writings of Luke, does not imply an alteration or invention of facts. On the contrary,
it is simply an unsectarian, catholic spirit which aims at the truth and nothing but the truth, and
which is the first duty and virtue of an historian. (2) Luke certainly did not invent those marvellous
parables and discourses which have been twisted into subserviency to the tendency hypothesis;
else Luke would have had a creative genius of the highest order, equal to that of Jesus himself,
while he modestly professes to be simply a faithful collector of actual facts. (3) Paul himself did
not invent his type of doctrine, but received it, according to his own solemn asseveration, by
revelation from Jesus Christ, who called him to the apostleship of the Gentiles. (4) It is now generally
admitted that the Tübingen hypothesis of the difference between the two types and parties in the
apostolic church is greatly overstrained and set aside by Paul’s own testimony in the Galatians,
which is as irenic and conciliatory to the pillar-apostles as it is uncompromisingly polemic against
the "false" brethren or the heretical Judaizers. (5) Some of the strongest anti-Jewish and pro-Gentile
testimonies of Christ are found in Matthew and omitted by Luke.^1025(^1023) Freely admitted by Zeller, Davidson (I. 444), and others of that school.
(^1024) Even the author of "Supernatural Religion" was forced at last to surrender to the arguments of Dr. Sanday, in 1875, after
the question had already been settled years before in Germany by Hilgenfeld (1850) and Volkmar (1852). Davidson also (Introd.,
new ed., I. 446) admits: "There is no doubt that Marcion had the Gospel of Luke, which he adapted to his own ideas by arbitrary
treatment. He lived before Justin, about a.d. 140, and is the earliest writer from whom we learn the existence of the Gospel."
(^1025) Davidson still adheres to this exploded Tübingen view in his new edition (I. 467): "Luke wished to bring Judaism [sic!]
and Paulinism together in the sphere of comprehensive Christianity, where the former would merge into the latter. In conformity
with this purpose, he describes the irreconcilable opposition between Jesus and his opponents." As if Matthew and Mark and
John did not precisely the same thing. He even repeats the absurd fiction of Baur, which was refuted long ago, not only by Godet,
but even in part at least by Zeller, Holtzmann, and Keim, that Luke had "the obvious tendency to depreciate the twelve, in
comparison with the seventy" (p. 469). Baur derived the chief proof of an alleged hostility of Luke to Peter from his omission
of the famous passage, "Thou art Rock;" but Mark omits it likewise; and Luke, on the other hand, is the only Evangelist who
records the word of Christ to Peter, Luke 22:32, on which the Romanists base the dogma of papal infallibility.
A.D. 1-100.