mere variance of days and reckoning. Afterwards, however, it began to be seen that, according to Jewish arrangements,' the Passover supper on the 14th could not have coincided with the day of the crucifixion, and that there is an essential discrepancy in this respect between the synoptics and the fourth gospel; that if Jesus, as stated in the former, eat the passover at the appointed time he conld not, as intimated in the fourth gospel, have suffered on the 14th. It thus appeared that Quartodecimanism agreed with the synoptics and contradicted John's Gospel; but then it seemed very remarkable that it was particularly to the authority of John that the Quartodecimans appealed in their justification. Bretschneider shrank from the apprehended consequences of the discovery; but the importance of the subject was increasingly felt; and Neander, in 1823, placed it in a clearer light by referring the difference between the customs to the general difference between Jew and Gentile Christianity, though still without suspecting the deep interests involved or the bearing of the controversy on the gospel. The Jewish Christians, he said, observing the usual Jewish festival on the 14th, translated it into the cotemporaneous Christian celebration of the last supper, commemorating the death by fasting on the day following (i.e. the 15th), the resurrection on the 17th; whereas Gentile usage had no original connection at all with the Passover, it was simply a special anniversary celebration of what was usually celebrated weekly, namely the passion on Fridays and the resurrection on Sundays. This came into conflict with the Asiatic custom not merely on account of the implied Judaism of the latter, but because of the difference of days, and particularly because the Passover supper inappropriately interfered with a week of consecutive fasting. The Easterns contended that

1 The Passover being really eaten not at the commencement, but on the evening of the 14th, so that Jesus could not have eaten the Passover, and also been crucified on that day.

Jesus eat the Passover on the appointed day, appealing to Matthew's Gospel and to general tradition; the West, said Neander, appealed to the fourth gospel to shew that the supper occurred on the 13th-before the Passover.

Neander did not substantiate his view or for the time. pursue the subject farther; but Rettberg, in 1832, went on to argue that the Western church never held a passover supper, and that the Eastern did not, as supposed by Mosheim and Neander, return to fasting after feasting; so that the rupture was not owing to this incongruity, but only to the difference of days occasioned by the Western change of a weekly into an annual festival. The only influence exerted over the West by the Passover was the placing Easter Sunday somewhere about the same time, and the general application of the word "Pascha" to this cotemporaneous commemoration of Christ as Paschal lamb. Even thus the difference seemed only external and unimportant; it was a mere difference of practice, and all that could be urged was an interference with ecclesiastical uniformity, and the incongruity of a partially Jewish rite with a purely Christian one. The relation to the gospel was unperceived; for what mattered it that John acquiesced in a rite not strictly in agreement with historical fact? and so Lücke, in the third edition of his commentary, declared that John might well be aware of the inaccuracy, although allowing and even sanctioning the ordinary practice. Still it would appear odd that the apostle should have practically admitted a custom which his gospel supplied the best grounds for refuting; and a presentiment of impending difficulty now led Neander to withdraw his previous theory as to the Asiatic Passover, and to suggest, with express reference to the fourth gospel, that its intent was not the supper but the crucifixion. So that whereas it had been first conjectured that the supper forming the chief import of the Quartodeciman observance was a figurative anticipa

1 Life of Jesus, sec. 265, p. 425, Bohn's edition,

tion of the crucifixion, Neander now claimed for the Passover the primary significance of the crucifixion, and placed the supper before both.

At this point the Tübingen writers entered the arena; insisting that the difference was not formal merely, but fundamental, arising from absolute contrariety of principles; so that if John, as traditionally asserted, authorised or acquiesced in Quartodecimanism, he could not have been author of the gospel condemning and controverting it. John, argued Schwegler, could not have "accommodated" himself to Asiatic usage while holding in reality with Western, because the two usages implied the whole difference between a continuing Judaism and a new religion; the question at issue was the relation of the new to the old. œconomy; and the gospel bearing the apostle's name supposes an entirely different view from that implied by his acts. And it was especially noticed what anxiety is shewn by the gospel writer to exclude the very inference which John is said to have sanctioned; preferring to suppress altogether any direct mention of the Lord's Supper than allow any obscurity to rest on the import attached by St. Paul to the crucifixion.2 Baur, in his memorable paper in the Jahrbücher for 1844, pursued Schwegler's argument, insisting that the difference was not one of mere ritual, but one of faith and doctrine, in fact the very principle asserted in the passage in Corinthians above referred to; that the Western Church looked not to what Christ did, but to what he suffered; and treating the Passover as fulfilled and ended by his suffering, dropped the day of the old observance, and so passed from the Judaism of the "TηpoÛvτes" to the Christian independence of the " μη τηpоûvτes." The feeling was that which we have already encountered in the Pauline Epistles, namely, that the type ceases by fulfilment, the substance rendering the shadow

66

1 See ch. xiii. 29; xviii. 28; xix. 14, 31.

2 Comp. 1 Cor. v. 7, with John xix. 36.

unnecessary;1 and since after discontinuing the Passover there remained no regulating chronological limit but the usual Sunday festival of the resurrection, the crucifixion became fixed in the new system as an hebdomadal observance on the previous Friday. The more the matter was dwelt on, the more impossible it seemed, considering the extreme importance attached to it at the time, to treat it as a mere trivial difference, or to claim the authority of John for both the parties historically proved to have stood diametrically opposed to each other; and it was in vain that Wieseler exerted his ingenuity in attempting to reinstate the long-abandoned harmony of the gospel accounts, or that Neander, in the 2nd edition of his History of Christianity," embarked in the equally hopeless enterprise of proving, in contradiction to his former argument in 1823, an agreement between the fourth gospel and the Asiatic observance, by denying the latter to have meant the Passover ;3 proceeding to resolve the dispute, whose dogmatical importance had been admitted by himself, into a mere matter of days and dates. was Bleek more fortunate in reviving Lücke's view that John might well have sanctioned or shared a merely Jewish rite, although himself well knowing that Christ as the true Passover, died on the Passover day; for Baur1 retorted that the Quartodeciman rite was not merely Jewish, but also Christian, as incorporating the last supper; so that John must have acted inconsistently; nay, he was inconsistent even as observing a merely Jewish rite if he wrote a gospel in order to express an idea whose essence was the abrogation of that rite. The battle has, of course, been contested with a pertinacity proportioned to the value of

1 Coloss. ii. 17; iii. 10, 11., Heb. viii. 13.

2 Chronologische Synopse, 1843, p. 368, sq.

Nor

3 To do this it was necessary for Neander to deny the authenticity of the fragments of Apollinaris, which, when unconscious of their bearing on the gospel, he had declared to be unimpeachable.

4 Jahrbücher for 1847.

the interests involved; and it is well known how problems clear in themselves are made hopelessly obscure by sophistical advocacy; but the substance of the argument is as above stated those requiring further information may consult the works referred to.1

Inconsistency of the Fourth with the other Gospels.

Looking from external to internal phenomena, we find geographical and other inaccuracies which no native of Palestine, especially one intimately acquainted with the High Priest (ch. xviii. 15), would have been likely to commit; on the other hand, inconsistencies amounting to contradiction to the synoptical gospels, making it impossible to take both as historical. The discrepancy, for instance, as to the scene of the public ministry defies attempts at reconcilement; the three gospels making Galilee the usual residence; the fourth assuming that, but for exceptional and prudential reasons, Jesus would have resided exclusively in Judæa and Jerusalem. And the difference is the more striking because the Evangelist deliberately emphasises it by applying the identical words about "a prophet having no honour in his own country," in a sense contradicting their original meaning, as if

1 Baur, "Die Evangelien," 334, 353, 375. Bemerkungen zur Johanneischen Frage, Tübingen Jahrbücher, vi. p. 89. Christenthum u. Kirche, p. 138, 141, 147. Entgegnung gegen Hrn. Dr. G. E. Steitz. in the Zeitschrift für Wissenschaftliche Theologie, I p. 292. Gieseler, Lehrbuch der Kirchengeschte, 4th ed. vol. i. Bleek, Beiträge zur Evangelienkritik p. 107-155. Weitzel, Die Christliche Passahfeier. Hilgenfeld, der Paschastreit, Theol. Jahrbücher, 1849, p. 209, 281, and "Der Paschastreit der alten Kirche," Halle, 1860. Das neueste Steizianum über den Paschastreit, Zeitschrift f. Wiss. Theol. 4, p, 106, etc, 1861. Der Quartodecimanismus Kleinasiens, ibid., p. 285.

2 The Bethany beyond Jordan (commuted in our Testament into Bethabara), mentioned ch. i. 21, in all probability had no existence. The extraordinary circumstances of the pool of Bethesda are unknown to Josephus, and are evidently fabulous; the distance between Cana and Capernaum does not account for passing a night on the road (ch. iv. 52), especially in the case of a father anxious for his dying son. The allusion to Caiaphas, as "high priest for that year" (xi. 51, xviii. 13) is historically unaccountable.