Theologians of the 1800s wrote with a flowing eloquence and style which is foreign to the ears of our present generation. Upham begins chapter three, “The Received Date of the Gospels,” with a rebuke not only against unbelieving skeptics, but also against orthodox religious leaders, who undermine the Gospels not only by their acceptance of late dates, but also by asserting that only educated scholars such as themselves are qualified to assess the dates of the Gospels:
THE infidel assumption, so madly echoed by some of the orthodox divines, that the Apostles never thought of a written Gospel, is made for the purposes of debate.1 Infidel writers see it is needed to open the way for their assumption that the Gospels are later than the days of those who wrote them. They also assume that scholars only can tell whether they are later or not, and that they are the only scholars.
Francis W. Upham, Thoughts on the Holy Gospels: How They Came to Be in Manner and Form as They Are (New York, NY: Phillips & Hunt, 1881), 52.
Brooke Foss Westcott was one of those educated divines who drew the ire of Upham for dismissing the early church as being capable of publishing and distributing Gospel writings and ultimately, of collectively identifying those works which were to be included in the canon:
Were there ready means for writings, thus revered, to reach all the congregations then rapidly forming throughout the Roman world? At this point we again take issue with Westcott. [For] he says, “‘The means of intercourse were slow and precarious.” … [Further] “Its formation was impeded by defective communication.”2
Upham, Thoughts on the Holy Gospels, 57. Upham is evidently citing Brooke Foss Westcott, A General Survey of the History of the Canon of the New Testament, 2nd ed. (London: MacMillan, 1866), xiii, 4.
Upham counters this perspective by appealing to the substantial intercourse of the “apostolic generation,” as evidenced in the book of Acts, in the various letters sent from one region to another, and in the messages sent to the seven churches by John.3 “From Athens, St. Paul wrote to the Thessalonians that their faith had sounded abroad, not only in Achaia and in Macedonia, but in all the world” (1 Thess. 1:7–10).4 Charitable collections for those in Jerusalem were “taken up, not only in these two provinces, but in Galatia,” Ephesus, and Antioch.5 Personal tidings were exchanged between those of the various churches. Indeed, “all classes are moving about. An Asiatic slave, Onesimus, finds his way to Rome, and is sent back to Colosse … Women travel as well as men. Phoebe … bears Paul’s letter to the Romans,” and so on.6
There were congregations at the four centers—Rome, Antioch, Ephesus, and Alexandria. A common government and free-trade made intercourse throughout the empire such, that the Christians in any country could readily send copies of each of the Gospels, in its turn, to any other country. Roman energy had made all the provinces accessible from all the large cities. In the summer-time oar-driven galleys, little dependent on the folly of the winds, swiftly crossed the great mid-land sea, and recrossed from shore to shore. From the milestone, still at the capitol, there were roads to the borders of the Roman world. …
[Correspondingly,] beyond its eastern borders, the multitude of Jews in the Chaldean plain and in the Persian highlands were known by pilgrimages and annual offerings to their countrymen in Jerusalem, until the fall of the city; and long afterward there were constant means of intercourse between the congregations in the East and the Far-East and those in the Roman world, through the channels of … trade.
Upham, Thoughts on the Holy Gospels, 58–60.
Upham also emphasizes that “Many of the Jewish converts had sought their fortunes in foreign lands; they had the education common to the wealthier class of their countrymen; travel had sharpened their wits, and their minds were enlarged with experience of affairs.”7 Further:
In early Christianity, as in all popular movements that have become lasting, there were some aristocrats who brought into it the characteristic forethought of their order. In Jerusalem a great company of the priests, in wealthy Corinth the ruler of the synagogue, and in royal Antioch the foster brother of the Tetrarch of Galilee, who, with the prince, was educated at Rome, “were obedient unto the faith.” In the household of Cesar, that city on the Palatine within the great city, there were Christians before Paul went to Rome. These were Jews in the domestic imperial service; but they were not all Jews. There were Christians in the princely household of the Roman Narcissus as well as in that of Aristobulus, the grandson of Herod.
Upham, Thoughts on the Holy Gospels, 67–68.
Hence, there is little reason to accept the skeptical paradigm of limited intercourse during the apostolic era, which might have limited the publication of the Gospels.
By way of conclusion, we will defer to Upham to summarize, with his unrestrained invective, his view of the skeptics who challenge the dates and authorship of the Gospels:
Many of the skeptical writers of our day and generation are constitutionally given to doubt; their self-conceit mistakes their mental disease for an aptness for finding out truth; and their hallucinations bewilder those who take books for oracles. But in the question as to the date and authorship of the Gospels there is no room for the conceits and subtleties of learning, falsely so called. It may be well to clear up its perversions of the character of the times in which the Gospels were written, and of those by whom, and for whom, they were written; it may be well to free the question of the genuineness and authenticity of the Gospels from side issues that have nothing to do with it, from inquiries that lead nowhere, from facts that are fancies, and from facts of no account; but, really, it ought not to be made a question at all. If it be made such, it is not a question for scholars to settle now, any more than it was such in the beginning. It is not a question where learning is required, but only the common sense that God gives, leaving all free to use it to their own good, or to abuse it to their own peril and harm. And common sense, if it do no violence to itself, cannot but dispose of the question at once, by treating as sheer impertinence the silly assertion that the memory of the ever-existing family of Christ is not the sufficient, the proper, evidence of her own records.
Upham, Thoughts on the Holy Gospels, 74.
- Westcott is one who makes this very claim, that the apostles never thought of a written Gospel: “The first Christian teachers entertained no design of handing down a written record of the Gospel—such a design would have been wholly foreign to their national feeling, for the ‘literature’ of Palestine was essentially traditionary, and the social position of the Apostles offered no advantages for the work.” Brooke Foss Westcott, Introduction to the Study of the Gospels (Boston, MA: Gould and Lincoln, 1862), xx. ↩︎
- Here is the context for the quote from Westcott: “It is almost impossible for any one whose ideas of communication are suggested by the railway and the printing-press to understand how far mere material hinderances must have prevented a speedy and unanimous settlement of the Canon. The multiplication of manuscripts in remote provinces was tedious and costly*. The common meeting point of Christians was destroyed by the fall of Jerusalem, and from that time national Churches grew up around their separate centers, enjoying in a great measure the freedom of individual development, and exhibiting, often in exaggerated forms, peculiar tendencies of doctrine or ritual. As a natural consequence, the circulation of different parts of the New Testament for a while depended, more or less, on their supposed connection with specific forms of Christianity.” Brooke Foss Westcott, A General Survey of the History of the Canon of the New Testament, 2nd ed. (London: MacMillan, 1866), 4–5. ↩︎
- Francis W. Upham, Thoughts on the Holy Gospels: How They Came to Be in Manner and Form as They Are (New York, NY: Phillips & Hunt, 1881), 58. ↩︎
- Upham, Thoughts, 58. ↩︎
- Upham, Thoughts, 58. ↩︎
- Upham, Thoughts, 58. ↩︎
- Upham, Thoughts, 66. ↩︎
