




                       The Lost and Hostile Gospels

                                 An Essay

 On the Toledoth Jeschu, and the Petrine and Pauline Gospels of the First
                Three Centuries of Which Fragments Remain.

                                    By

                        Rev. S. Baring-Gould, M.A.

Author of "The Origin and Development of Religious Belief," "Legendary
Lives of the Old Testament Characters." Etc.

                           Williams and Norgate

                            London, Edinburgh

                                   1874





CONTENTS


Preface.
Part I. The Jewish Anti-Gospels.
   I. The Silence Of Josephus.
   II. The Cause Of The Silence Of Josephus.
   III. The Jew Of Celsus.
   IV. The Talmud.
   V. The Counter-Gospels.
   VI. The First Toledoth Jeschu.
   VII. The Second Toledoth Jeschu.
Part II. The Lost Petrine Gospels.
   I. The Gospel Of The Hebrews.
      1. The Fragments extant.
      2. Doubtful Fragments.
      3. The Origin of the Gospel of the Hebrews.
   II. The Clementine Gospel.
   III. The Gospel Of St. Peter.
   IV. The Gospel Of The Egyptians.
Part III. The Lost Pauline Gospels.
   I. The Gospel Of The Lord.
   II. The Gospel Of Truth.
   III. The Gospel Of Eve.
   IV. The Gospel Of Perfection.
   V. The Gospel Of St. Philip.
   VI. The Gospel Of Judas.
Footnotes






                               [Cover Art]

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PREFACE.


It is advisable, if not necessary, for me, by way of preface, to explain
certain topics treated of in this book, which do not come under its title,
and which, at first thought, may be taken to have but a remote connection
with the ostensible subject of this treatise. These are:

1. The outbreak of Antinomianism which disfigured and distressed primitive
Christianity.

2. The opposition of the Nazarene Church to St. Paul.

3. The structure and composition of the Synoptical Gospels.

The consideration of these curious and important topics has forced its way
into these pages; for the first two throw great light on the history of
those Gospels which have disappeared, and which it is not possible to
reconstruct without a knowledge of the religious parties to which they
belonged. And these parties were determined by the fundamental question of
Law or No-law, as represented by the Petrine and ultra-Pauline Christians.
And the third of these topics necessarily bound up with the consideration
of the structure and origin of the Lost Gospels, as the reader will see if
he cares to follow me in the critical examination of their extant
fragments.

Upon each of these points a few preliminary words will not, I hope, come
amiss, and may prevent misunderstanding.

1. The history of the Church, as the history of nations, is not to be read
with prejudiced eyes, with penknife in hand to erase facts which fight
against foregone conclusions.

English Churchmen have long gazed with love on the Primitive Church as the
ideal of Christian perfection, the Eden wherein the first fathers of their
faith walked blameless before God, and passionless towards each other. To
doubt, to dissipate in any way this pleasant dream, may shock and pain
certain gentle spirits. Alas! the fruit of the tree of {~GREEK SMALL LETTER GAMMA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER NU~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMEGA WITH PERISPOMENI~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER SIGMA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER IOTA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER FINAL SIGMA~}, if it opens
the eyes, saddens also and shames the heart.

History, whether sacred or profane, hides her teaching from those who
study her through  glasses. She only reveals truth to those who
look through the cold clear medium of passionless inquiry, who seek the
Truth without determining first the masquerade in which alone they will
receive it.

It exhibits a strange, a sad want of faith in Truth thus to constrain
history to turn out facts according to order, to squeeze it through the
sieve of prejudice. And what indeed is Truth in history but the voice of
God instructing the world through the vices, follies, errors of the past?

A calm, patient spirit of inquiry is an attitude of the modern mind alone.
To this mind History has made strange disclosures which she kept locked up
through former ages. The world of Nature lay before the men of the past,
but they could not, would not read it, save from left to right, or right
to left, as their prejudices ran. The wise and learned had to cast aside
their formulae, and sit meekly at the feet of Nature, as little children,
before they learned her laws. Nor will History submit to hectoring. Only
now is she unfolding the hidden truth in her ancient scrolls.

It is too late to go back to conclusions of an uncritical age, though it
was that of our fathers; the time for denying the facts revealed by
careful criticism is passed away as truly as is the time for explaining
the shadows in the moon by the story of the Sabbath-breaker and his <DW19>
of sticks.

And criticism has put a lens to our eyes, and disclosed to us on the
shining, remote face of primitive Christianity rents and craters undreamt
of in our old simplicity.

That there was, in the breast of the new-born Church, an element of
antinomianism, not latent, but in virulent activity, is a fact as capable
of demonstration as any conclusion in a science which is not exact.

In the apostolic canonical writings we see the beginning of the trouble;
the texture of the Gospels is tinged by it; the Epistles of Paul on one
side, of Jude and Peter on the other, show it in energetic operation;
ecclesiastical history reveals it in full flagrance a century later.

Whence came the spark? what material ignited? These are questions that
must be answered. We cannot point to the blaze in the sub-apostolic age,
and protest that it was an instantaneous combustion, with no smouldering
train leading up to it,--to the rank crop of weeds, and argue that they
sprang from no seed. We shall have to look up the stream to the fountains
whence the flood was poured.

The existence of antinomianism in the Churches of Greece and Asia Minor,
synchronizing with their foundation, transpires from the Epistles of St.
Paul. It was an open sore in the life-time of the Twelve; it was a sorrow
weighing daily on the great soul of the Apostle of the Gentiles. It called
forth the indignant thunder of Jude and Peter, and the awful denunciations
in the charges to the Seven Churches.

The apocryphal literature of the sub-apostolic period carries on the sad
story. Under St. John's presiding care, the gross scandals which defiled
Gentile Christianity were purged out, and antinomian Christianity deserted
Asia Minor for Alexandria. There it made head again, as revealed to us by
the controversialists of the third century. And there it disappeared for a
while.

Yet the disease was never eradicated. Its poison still lurked in the veins
of the Church, and again and again throughout the Middle Ages heretics
emerged fitfully, true successors of Nicolas, Cerdo, Marcion and
Valentine, shaking off the trammels of the moral law, and seeking
justification through mystic exaltation or spiritual emotion. The Papacy
trod down these ugly heretics with ruthless heel. But at the Reformation,
when the restraint was removed, the disease broke forth in a multitude of
obscene sects spotting the fair face of Protestantism.

Nor has the virus exhausted itself. Its baleful workings, if indistinct,
are still present and threatening.

But how comes it that Christianity has thus its dark shadow constantly
haunting it? The cause is to be sought in the constitution of man. Man,
moving in his little orbit, has ever a face turned away from the earth and
all that is material, looking out into infinity,--a dark, unknown side,
about whose complexion we may speculate, but which we can never map. It is
a face which must ever remain mysterious, and ever radiate into mystery.
As the eye and ear are bundles of nerves through which the inner man goes
out into, and receives impressions from, the material world, so is the
soul a marvellous tissue of fibres through which man is placed _en
rapport_ with the spiritual world, God and infinity. It is the existence
of this face, these fibres--take which simile you like--which has
constituted mystics in every age all over the world: Schamans in frozen
Siberia, Fakirs in burning India, absorbed Buddhists, ecstatic Saints,
Essenes, Witches, Anchorites, Swedenborgians, modern Spiritualists.

Man, double-faced by nature, is placed by Revelation under a sharp,
precise external rule, controlling his actions and his thoughts.

To this rule spirit and body are summoned to do homage. But the spirit has
an inherent tendency towards the unlimited, by virtue of its nature, which
places it on the confines of the infinite. Consequently it is never easy
under a rule which is imposed on it conjointly with the body; it strains
after emancipation, strives to assert its independence of what is
external, and to establish its claim to obey only the movements in the
spiritual world. It throbs sympathetically with the auroral flashes in
that realm of mystery, like the flake of gold-leaf in the magnetometer.

To be bound to the body, subjected to its laws, is degrading; to be
unbounded, unconditioned, is its aspiration and supreme felicity.

Thus the incessant effort of the spirit is to establish its law in the
inner world of feeling, and remove it from the material world without.

Moreover, inasmuch as the spirit melts into the infinite, cut off from it
by no sharply-defined line, it is disposed to regard itself as a part of
God, a creek of the great Ocean of Divinity, and to suppose that all its
emotions are the pulsations of the tide in the all-embracing Spirit. It
loses the consciousness of its individuality; it deifies itself.

A Suffee fable representing God and the human soul illustrates this well.
"One knocked at the Beloved's door, and a voice from within cried, 'Who is
there?' Then the soul answered, 'It is I.' And the voice of God said,
'This house will not hold me and thee.' So the door remained shut. Then
the soul went away into a wilderness, and after long fasting and prayer it
returned, and knocked once again at the door. And again the voice demanded
'Who is there?' Then he said, 'It is THOU,' and at once the door opened to
him."

Thus the mystic always regards his unregulated wishes as divine
revelations, his random impulses as heavenly inspirations. He has no law
but his own will; and therefore, in mysticism, there, is no curb against
the grossest licence.

The existence of that evil which, knowing the constitution of man, we
should expect to find prevalent in mysticism, the experience of all ages
has shown following, dogging its steps inevitably. So slight is the film
that separates religious from sensual passion, that uncontrolled spiritual
fervour roars readily into a blaze of licentiousness.

It is this which makes revivalism of every description so dangerous. It is
a two-edged weapon that cuts the hand which holds it.

Yet the spiritual, religious element in man is that which is most
beautiful and pure, when passionless. It is like those placid tarns,
crystal clear and icy cold, in Auvergne and the Eifel, which lie in the
sleeping vents of old volcanoes. We love to linger by them, yet never with
security, for we know that a throb, a shock, may at any moment convert
them into boiling geysirs or raging craters.

So well is this fact known in the Roman Church, that a mystic is
inexorably shut up in a convent, or cast out as a heretic.

The more spiritual a religion is, the more apt it is to lurch and let in a
rush of immorality; for its tendency is to substitute an internal for the
external law, and the internal impulse is too often a hidden jog from the
carnal appetite. In a highly spiritual religion, a written revelation is
supplemented or superseded by one which is within.

This was eminently the case with the Anabaptists of the sixteenth century.
When plied with texts by the Lutheran divines, they coldly answered that
they walked not after the letter, but after the spirit; that to those who
are in Christ Jesus, there is an inner illumination directing their
conduct, before which that which is without grew pale and waned. The
horrible licence into which this internal light plunged them is matter of
history.

One lesson history enforces inexorably--that there lies a danger to morals
in placing reliance on the spirit as an independent guide.

The spirit has its proper function and its true security; its function,
the perception of the infinite, the divine; its security, the observance
of the marriage-tie which binds it to the body.

God has joined body and spirit in sacred wedlock, and subjected both to a
revealed external law; in the maintenance of this union, and submission to
this law, man's safety lies. The spirit supreme, the body a bond-maid, is
no marriage; it is a concubinage, bringing with it a train of attendant
evils.

Man stands, so to speak, at the bisection of two circles, the material and
the spiritual, in each of which he has a part, and to the centres of each
of which he feels a gravitation. Absorption in either realm is fatal to
the well-being of the entire man.

And this leads us to the consideration of the marvellous aptitude to human
nature of the Incarnation, welding together into indissoluble union spirit
and matter, the infinite and the finite. The religion which flows from
that source cannot dissociate soul from body. Its law is the marriage of
that which is spiritual to that which is material; the soul cannot shake
off the responsibilities of the body; everything spiritual is clothed, and
every material object is a sacrament conveying a ray of divinity.

There can be no evasion, no abrasion and rupture of the tie by either
party, without lesion of the chain which binds to the Incarnation; and it
is a fact worthy of note, that mysticism has always a tendency to obscure
this fundamental dogma, and that the immoral sects of ancient times and of
the present day hang loosely by, or openly deny, this great verity.

St. Paul had a natural bias towards mysticism. His trances and revelations
betoken a nature branching out into the spiritual realm; and throughout
his letters we see the inevitable consequence--a struggle to displace the
centre of obedience, to transfer it from without and enthrone it within,
to make the internal revelation the governing principle of action, in the
room of submission to an external law.

But, like St. Theresa, who never relinquished her common sense whilst
yielding up her spirit to the most incoherent raptures; like Mohammad,
who, however he might soar in ecstasy above the moon, never lost sight of
the principles which would ensure a very material success; like Ignatius
Loyola, who, in the midst of fantastic visions, elaborated a system of
government full of the maturest judgment,--so St. Paul never surrendered
himself unconditionally to the promptings of his spirit. Like the angel of
the Apocalypse, if he stood with one foot in the vague sea, he kept the
other on the solid land.

That thorn in the flesh, whose presence he deplored, kept him from
forgetting the body and its obligations; the moral disorders breaking out
wherever he preached his gospel, warned him in time not to relax too far
the restraint imposed by the law without. As the revolt of the Anabaptists
checked Luther, so did the excesses of the Gentile Christians arrest Paul.
Both saw and obeyed the warning finger of Providence signalling a retreat.

Divinely inspired St. Paul was. But inspiration never obscures and
obliterates human characteristics. It directs and utilizes them for its
own purpose, leaving free margin beyond that purpose for the exercise of
individual proclivities uncontrolled.

Paul's natural tendency is unmistakable; and we may see evidence of divine
guidance in the fact of his having refused to give the rein to his natural
propensities, and of being prepared to turn all his energies to the
repairing of those <DW18>s against the ocean which in a moment of impatience
he had set his hand to tear down.

As Socrates was by nature prone to become the most vicious of men, so was
Paul naturally disposed to become the most dangerous of heresiarchs. But
the moral sense of Socrates mastered his passions and converted him into a
philosopher; and the guiding spirit of God made of Paul the mystic an
apostle of righteousness.

Christianity, as the religion of the Incarnation, has its external form
and its internal spirit, and it is impossible to dissociate one from the
other without peril. Mere formalism and naked spirituality are alike and
equally pernicious. Formalism, the resolution of religion into ceremonial
acts only, void of spirit, is like the octopus, lacing its thousand
filaments about the soul and drawing it into the abyss; and mysticism,
pure spirituality, like the magnet mountain in Sinbad's voyage, draws the
nails out of the vessel--the rivets of moral law--and the Christian
character goes to pieces.

The history of the Church is the history of her leaning first towards one
side, then towards the other, of advance amid perpetual recoils from
either peril.

2. The alarm caused in Jerusalem amidst the elder apostles and the
Nazarene Church at the immorality which disfigured Pauline Christianity,
was not the only cause of the mistrust wherewith they viewed him and his
teaching. Other causes existed which I have not touched on in my text,
lest I should distract attention from the main points of my argument, but
they are deserving of notice here.

And the first of these was the intense prejudice which existed among the
Jews of Palestine against Greek modes of thought, manners, culture, even
against the Greek language.

The second was the jealousy with which the Palestinian Jews regarded the
Alexandrine Jews, their mode of interpreting Scripture, and their system
of theology.

St. Paul, an accomplished Greek scholar, brought up at Tarsus amidst
Hellenistic Jews, adopted the theology and exegesis in vogue at
Alexandria, and on both these accounts excited the suspicion and dislike
of the national party at Jerusalem. The Nazarenes were imbued with the
prejudices they had acquired in their childhood, in the midst of which
they had grown up, and they could not but regard Paul with alarm when he
turned without disguise to the Greeks, and introduced into the Church the
theological system and scriptural interpretations of a Jewish community
they had always regarded as of questionable orthodoxy.

First let us consider the causes which contributed to the creation of the
prejudice against the Hellenizers. Judaea had served as the battle-field
of the Greek kings of Egypt and Syria. Whether Judaea fell under the
dominion of Syria or Egypt it mattered not; Ptolemies and Seleucides alike
were intolerable oppressors. But it was especially the latter who excited
to its last exasperation the fanaticism of the Jews, and called forth in
their breasts an ineffaceable antipathy towards everything that was Greek.

The temple was pillaged by them, the sanctuary was violated, the high-
priesthood degraded. Antiochus Epiphanes entertained the audacious design
of completely overthrowing the religion of the Jews, of forcibly
Hellenizing them. For this purpose he forbade the celebration of the
Sabbaths and feasts, drenched the sanctuary with blood to pollute it, the
sacrifices were not permitted, circumcision was made illegal. The
sufferings of the Jews, driven into deserts and remote hiding-places in
the mountains, are described in the first book of the Maccabees.

Yet there was a party disposed to acquiesce in this attempt at changing
the whole current of their nation's life, ready to undo the work of Ezra,
break with their past, and fling themselves into the tide of Greek
civilization and philosophic thought. These men set up a gymnasium in
Jerusalem, Graecised their names, openly scoffed at the Law, ignored the
Sabbath, and neglected circumcision.(1) At the head of this party stood
the high-priests Jason and Menelaus. The author of the first book of the
Maccabees styles these conformists to the state policy, "evil men,
seducing many to despise the Law." Josephus designates them as "wicked"
and "impious."(2)

The memory of the miseries endured in the persecution of Antiochus did not
fade out of the Jewish mind, neither did the party disappear which was
disposed to symbolize with Greek culture, and was opposed to Jewish
prejudice. Nor did the abhorrence in which it was held lose its intensity.

From the date of the Antiochian persecution, the names of "Greek" or
"friend of the Greeks" were used as synonymous with "traitor" and
"apostate."

Seventy years before Christ, whilst Hyrcanus was besieging Aristobulus in
Jerusalem, the besiegers furnished the besieged daily with lambs for the
sacrifice. An old Jew, belonging to the anti-national party, warned
Hyrcanus that as long as the city was supplied with animals for the altar,
so long it would hold out. On the morrow, in place of a lamb, a pig was
flung over the walls. The earth shuddered at the impiety, and the heads of
the synagogue solemnly cursed from thenceforth whosoever of their nation
should for the future teach the Greek tongue to his sons.(3) Whether this
incident be true or not, it proves that a century after Antiochus
Epiphanes the Jews entertained a hatred of that Greek culture which they
regarded as a source of incredulity and impiety.

The son of Duma asked his uncle Israel if, after having learned the whole
Law, he might not study the philosophy of the Greeks. " 'The Book of the
Law shall not depart out of thy mouth; but thou shalt meditate therein day
and night.' These are the words of God" (Josh. i. 8), said the old man;
"find me an hour which is neither day nor night, and in that study your
Greek philosophy."(4)

Gamaliel, the teacher of St. Paul, was well versed in Greek literature;
that this caused uneasiness in his day is probable; and indeed the Gemara
labours to explain the fact of his knowledge of Greek, and apologizes for
it.(5) Consequently Saul, the disciple of Gamaliel, also a Greek scholar,
would be likely to incur the same suspicion, as one leaning away from
strict Judaism towards Gentile culture.

The Jews of Palestine viewed the Alexandrine Jews with dislike, and
mistrusted the translation into Greek of their sacred books. They said it
was a day of sin and blasphemy when the version of the Septuagint was
made, equal only in wickedness to that on which their fathers had made the
golden calf.(6)

The loudly-proclaimed intention of Paul to turn to the Gentiles, his
attitude of hostility towards the Law, the abrogation of the Sabbath and
substitution for it of the Lord's-day, his denunciation of circumcision,
his abandonment of his Jewish name for a Gentile one, led to his being
identified by the Jews of Palestine with the abhorred Hellenistic party;
and the Nazarene Christians shared to the full in the national prejudices.

The Jews, at the time of the first spread of Christianity, were dispersed
over the whole world; and in Greece and Asia Minor occupied a quarter, and
exercised influence, in every town. The Seleucides had given the right of
citizenship to these Asiatic Jews, and had extended to them some sort of
protection. The close association of these Jews with Greeks necessarily
led to the adoption of some of their ideas. Since Ezra, the dominant
principle of the Palestinian and Babylonish rabbis had been to create a
"hedge of the Law," to constitute of the legal prescriptions a net lacing
those over whom it was cast with minute yet tough fibres, stifling
spontaneity. Whilst rabbinism was narrowing the Jewish horizon, Greek
philosophy was widening man's range of vision. The tendencies of Jewish
theology and Greek philosophy were radically opposed. The Alexandrine Jews
never submitted to be involved in the meshes of rabbinism. They produced a
school of thinkers, of whom Aristobulus was the first known exponent, and
Philo the last expression, which sought to combine Mosaism with Platonism,
to explain the Pentateuch as the foundation of a philosophic system
closely related to the highest and best theories of the Greeks.

In the Holy Land, routine, the uniform repetition