Chap. |
Volume 1 | Synop. | Page. |
|
| ix. | ||||
| xi. | ||||
| Prologue of the Gospel. | 2 | 1 | ||
I. |
7 | |||
II. |
56 | |||
III. |
THE MINISTRY IN GALILEE. |
108 | ||
i. |
108 | |||
ii. |
134 | |||
| iii. | THE BEGINNINGS OF THE GOSPEL TEACHING. | 147 | ||
| iv. | VARIOUS OPINIONS ABOUT THE WORK OF JESUS. | 161 | ||
| v. | THE PARABLES OF THE KINGDOM OF GOD. | 175 | ||
| vi. | MIRACLES. ENCOUNTER WITH TROUBLESOME DISPOSITIONS. | 192 | ||
| vii. | THE MISSION OF THE APOSTLES AND THE ALARM OF HEROD. | 205 | ||
| viii. | EVENTS PRECEDING THE INSTITUTION OF THE EUCHARIST. | 218 | ||
| IV. | FORMATION OF THE DISCIPLES AND MINISTRY, CHIEFLY OUTSIDE GALILEE. | 236 | ||
| i. | PENTECOST AT JERUSALEM. | 238 | ||
| ii. | THE FORMATION OF THE DISCIPLES. | 243 | ||
| iii. | THE FEAST OF TABERNACLES. | 291 | ||
| Volume 2 | ||||
A few words of explanation are called for by way of introduction to this
translation of Pere Lagrange's Evangile de Jésus Christ.
The author has long looked forward to its appearance.
A number of years ago he expressed to the late Fr. Luke Walker, O.P., his beloved
disciple and friend, the desire that he should undertake the work of presenting
the book to the English people in their own language.
He willingly accepted the task, but his health and duties did not permit of
his carrying out the work alone: a regrettable fact, for no one was more capable
than he of interpreting the mind of his former master.
But under his direction the work of translation was finished for the most part.
Many reasons, however, conspired to delay publication, perhaps the chief among
them being Fr. Walker's scrupulous desire for perfection.
At his lamented death in 1936 he handed on the work to me who had collaborated
with him, expressing the hope that it might one day appear in print.
This hope is now realized, and may the result be such as he would not have
found altogether disappointing!
In the difficult task of revision and correction I have been greatly indebted
to the kind co-operation of my venerable colleague, Fr. Maurice Watson, O.P.,
and I here wish gratefully to acknowledge his help.
But I feel obliged to say that I must assume full responsibility for the translation,
at least in so far as its faults and deficiencies are concerned.
Mine has been the last word in determining how the thoughts of the author shall
be expressed in English.
I cannot conclude without saying how vividly this labour renewed in my mind
the memory of those three happy and fruitful years it was my good fortune to
spend at the feet of Père Lagrange in his Biblical school at Jerusalem.
Reginald Ginns, O.P.
Hawkesyard, January 23, 1938.
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There are admirable lives of Our Lord Jesus Christ already in existance.
Why, then, should yet another book be written on the same subject?
The author of the present work frankly admits that this question was continually
before his mind as he wrote.
He felt obliged to consult the works that had already appeared:
but he had to give up doing this systematically lest he should be discouraged
by seeing the things he wished to say already said, and so well said.
But, after all, is not the gospel unfathomable, and can too much be ever written
about Our Lord Jesus Christ provided that it be of use if only to a few souls?
Nevertheless, I have given up all idea of presenting a Life of Jesusi of the
usual kind, preferring to leave the gospels more opportunity of speaking for
themselves.
They are inadequate as historical documents for writing a history of Jesus
in the way in which a modern author would write the history of Caesar Augustus
or Cardinal de Richelieu;
such is their value as a reflection of Jesus' life and teaching,
such their sincerity and beauty,
that in the presence of their inspired words one despairs of any other attempt
rproduce the life of Christ.
The gospels themselves are the only life of Jesus Christ that can be written.
Nothing remains for us but to understand them as well as we can.
None have penetrated more deeply into the spirit of the gospels than those
who have made them the subject of devout meditation.
The Life of Jesus Christ by Ludolph the Carthusian, formerly a son of St. Dominic,
is a model of this kind.
But not everybody has received his gift.
Many in our days, upset by the numerous attacks on the gospels, have begun
to wonder what their evidence is worth.
To find that out we must study each one separately;
and in my scrupulous care not to explain one by the other I have gone so far
as never to ask while studying them separately, whether they would be found
finally to agree with one another as to the main lines of a Life of Jesus.
St. Matthew, St. Mark, St. Luke, and St. John, each of them has his own genius,
his own special sources of information, his own purpose and method;
to get at their secret we must question each one of them separately.
But when this task had been performed to the best of my ability -
every man
can only play his own instrument, as my old novice-master used to tell us -
the question still remained whether in the end these four gospels were in harmony
or in conflict with one another.
This question, of course, has been asked for a long time,
ever since Tatian in the second century concluded practically as to their agreement
by composing the harmony in which he blended the text of the four gospels into
a single narrative.
This conclusion was premature and too strong,
and it gave rise to a predominating desire to look for harmonization with the
consequent danger of overlooking,
even in our own days, certain appreciable differences.
On the other hand, the independent critics went in just the opposite direction,
dividing, tearing in pieces, reducing the gospels to atoms.
To-day we see that the final result of all their efforts has been to leave
us the gospels reduced to dust, a dust composed of traditions that are either
at variance with one another or dependent one upon another;
and this dust of traditions is far less fortunate than Democritus's atoms,
since it never succeeds in forming a living whole.
Analysis, of course, is legitimate;
it is a delicate operation and sometimes it may have a merely negative result,
as in the case where it ends by recognizing no probability in any recorded
event unless it be completely proved.
That seems to be the opinion of the radical critics, the one of which we hear
most.
There are some critics, indeed, who after an examination of tradition have
come to the conclusion that Jesus never lived.
But that was too much for the more acute school of critics,
who saw that Christianity could never have blazed up in the manner it did without
something to set it alight.
But they failed to see that it was their duty honestly to examine whether or
not tradition, however much they supposed it to be fragmentary in origin or
at variance with itself in regard to the order of events and many of its details,
was at any rate capable of being reduced to vital unity.
On this point we may make appeal to that admirable principle of Heraclutus of Ephesus, surnamed the Obscure Philosopher:
TACIT AGREEMENT IS OF GREATER VALUE THAN EXPLICIT AGREEMENT.
What precisely did he mean?
The philosopher was accustomed to express his thought with such brevity, but
that brevity conceals ideas of a most profound character.
Without any doubt he intends to say that the hidden harmony of the universe,
which Universal Reason produces in the midst of the apparent disorder of the
world,
is of greater power and beauty than such manifest harmony as each man
thinks he can perceive for himself in the external things of the world.
But if this be true of the external world, how much more true is it in the
sphere of ideas!
Two manuscripts have no more than the value of one, if one of them is merely
a copy of the other.
Two authors serve only as a single witness if one follows the other slavishly.
But two manuscripts that sometimes differ imply two different sources,
and their agreement then becomes significant.
Every author who has his own sources of information and disposes it according
to his own peculiar method is a witness who has a claim to be heard;
and if two witnesses, after apparently contradicting one another in their way
of relating an event, are found finally to be in substantial agreement,
then that agreement is more impressive than if they had first come to an arrangement
as to what they should both say.
Two completely open-minded scholars have gone to the root of this question in the following words:
'Agreement that is really decisive is not, as one might suppose, a complete resemblance between two accounts;
it is the meeting of two different accounts that resemble one another only at a few points.
The natural tendency is to think that the more complete is the agreement, the more decisive it is:
but on the contrary we must adopt the paradoxical rule that agreement is the more certain when it is confined to a small number of points.
It is these points of agreement in differing statements that provide us with scientifically established historical facts.'
[Introduction aux Etudes Historiques, Langlois et Seignobos; 8th ed., Paris, 1905, pp.172 ff.]
Only one reservation is required here:
agreement has an importance if a later author, after making enquiries, adheres
to the account given by an earlier author.
But the chief point of importance here is this:
that minor divergences between the witnesses ought not to be alleged against
the truth of an event, if those divergences can be brought into accordance
by making allowance for different points of view.
There is only one reason why the critics will not attempt such a work of synthesis;
they are too much occupied with the work of destruction and look on it as a
foregone conclusion that the ruin they thus wantonly cause is beyond repair.
Possibly Catholic scholars have felt the dogma of inspiration as an embarrassment
in this matter;
the decisions of ecclesiastical authority do not allow of the admission of
real divergences, even though they be but of a secondary character, between
the sacred writers.
But the same does not hold true when it is merely a question of the order of
events.
Indeed it would be impossible to write a Life of Jesus that could stand up
against the objections of the critics if we were obliged to consider the connecting
together of various teachings of Our Lord into one great sermon, or the repeated
use of the formula 'after that,' as formal declarations that such was the real
sequence of events.
The same would be equally true if the different place in the gospel assigned
to certain events by different evangelists, or the slight variations in the
narrative of parables or happenings, obliged us to duplicate the words and
events narrated by the gospels.
But St. Augustine, positive as he was in his conviction regarding the inerrancy
of the sacred writers, has himself laid down the principle that one writer
may have assigned to an earlier time things that another has given later, and
it is with the help of this criterion that he was able to compose his work
on the harmony of the gospels.
He went further in proposing the principles of rational harmonization by admitting
not only that one writer may have omitted what another has set down, but also
that he may have written the same thing in a different way;
thus the reader arrives at a true understanding of the fact narrated by comparing
the different styles of narration.
He lays down these principles in an admirable passage that is rich in its brevity:
'Non enim discrepant rebus, si alius aliquid dicit quod alius tacet, aut alio modo dicit;
magis autem conlata invicem juvant, ut legentis intellectus regatur.'
[Letter CXCIX, 25.]
We must follow the example of this great master of theology and give even wider application to his method.
But there remains another difficulty.
If, according to us, the evangelists have changed the order of events and arranged
the discourses without troubling about chronological sequence, are we not
left with chaos?
Even though not be aware of their divergences, we seem left continually under
the suspicion that they have little regard for chronological order.
It appears to be a case of: 'Guess if you can, and choose if you dare.'
This is precisely the difficulty which has up to the present kept us from complying
with many kind and pressing invitations to write a Life of Jesus in chronological
order.
But we have presumed to make some sort of choice in publishing our Synopsis
of the Gospels, which appeared first in Greek and later, with the co-operation
of the Rev. Père Ceslaus Lavergne, O.P., in French.
[The notes in the French Synopsis are Fr. Lavergne's.
The Synopsis has appeared in English under the title of A
Catholic Harmony of the Four Gospels with introduction and notes by Mgr. John Barton, D.D.,
S.S.Lic.; Burns, Oates & Washbourne, London.]
It was meant to show that St. Luke's order and chiefly St. John's chronology
ought to serve as the basis of a Life of Jesus, inasmuch as such a life can
be written at all.
Since we claimed no more than to present the Gospel in that manner, our present
work is little more than a rapid commentary on the Synopsis along with a few
historical observations, following the more or less certain, more or less probable,
or the merely conjectural order of events.
If it be read in company with the Synopsis it will be found more intelligible,
and its imperfections can thus be corrected in the light furnished by the gospel
text.
I have, however, striven to make it intelligible to those who have only this
book at hand without much time to devote to its study, to those also, I should
like to be able to say, who are engrossed in manual labour.
For that reason the book will no doubt appear to such as are familiar with
the difficulties of the subject to be insufficiently based on plausable arguments.
They may think, and even say openly, that I have skipped the difficulties.
And indeed I make no pretence of having solved all the difficulties;
but I have dealt with such as I was aware of and considered serious in my commentaries
on the separate gospels.
It would be very unreasonable to expect all my readers to study those commentaries
under the pretext that the present work is based on them.
But it did seem to me allowable that, for the sake of those who have entreated
me to spare them even the very appearance of erudition, I might furnish an
explanation of the gospels such as was within their grasp, based upon grounds
that I had elsewhere tried to show were solid.
[I continually refer the reader to my Commentaries, especially
for biographical information and for everything connected with sources.
From time to time I refer to the splendid work of Strack and Billerbeck, Kommentar
zum neuen Testament aus Talmud und Midrasch, of which three volumes have already
appeared and which was not at my disposal previously.]
When agreement between documents is obtained without any forcing of the texts,
we find an additional proof that those texts represent an objective reality.
In cases where the different gospels provide us with their own special information
regarding some event common to them all, I have sometimes included it in the
narrative if it fits easily into the story.
But as a general rule it seemed more obviously indicated to borrow from each
evangelist the passages in which he appeared to have excelled the others.
When St. Matthew, St. Mark, and St. Luke all relate the same event,
I have generally followed St. Mark because he seems to have preserved best
the original style of the Petrine catechesis.
The same is true of St. Matthew, as compared with St. Luke, regarding the narration
of Our Lord's discourses.
While St. John, the friend of Jesus, is the one who has best penetrated the
inmost thoughts of his Master.
As for St. Luke, we have already observed that he excels as an historian.
With this general indication of my method I shall be dispensed from multiplying
references.
The texts of the gospels are sometimes analysed or paraphrased, at other times
and more often quoted word for word.
The figures in brackets after the headings refer to the numbers of the various
sections of the Synopsis.
In view of the special character of this work, the notes are chiefly intended
to emphasize the relation between the different evangelists.
In writing this work I have constantly sought the help of our Blessed Lady,
and I now entreat her to bless it.
I should have liked it to be faultless from the point of view of information
and criticism.
It contains so little in the way of pious considerations that I hardly dare
to say that its purpose is to make Our Lord Jesus Christ better known and loved.
But on the other hand, may we not say that the calm of the evangelists is the
best expression of the god-like calm of the evangelists when brought face to
face with the mystery of redemption?
Love comes afterwards when we meditate on the sacred text which is our light,
our strength, and our life.
It is to this text that we must always come back.
Marie-Joseph Lagrange, O.P.
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