CHAPTER XII THE NEW TESTAMENT 313 ther that the apostle sealed his testimony with his blood, The prior existence of a number of fragmentary Gosor that he entered upon new missionary tours East and pels implied in Luke 1:1 need not surprise us; for such West until at last he finished his course after a second a story as that of Jesus of Nazareth must have set many captivity in Rome. I may add that the entire absence of pens in motion at a very early time. “Though the art of any allusion in the Acts to any of Paul’s Epistles can be writing had not existed,” says Lange, “it would have been easily explained by the assumption of a nearly contem- invented for such a theme.” poraneous composition, while it seems almost unacOf more weight is the objection that Luke seems to countable if we assume an interval of ten or twenty years. have shaped the eschatological prophecies of Christ so 3. Luke’s ignorance of Matthew and probably also of as to suit the fulfilment by bringing in the besieging (RoMark points likewise to an early date of composition. A man) army, and by interposing “the times of the Gencareful investigator, like Luke, writing after the year 70, tiles” between the destruction of Jerusalem and the end could hardly have overlooked, among his many written of the world (Luke 19:43, 44; 21:20–24). This would put sources, such an important document as Matthew which the composition after the destruction of Jerusalem, say the best critics put before a.d. 70. between 70 and 80, if not later.991 But such an intentional 4. Clement of Alexandria has preserved a tradition great development of the manifestations of Jesus after the resthat the Gospels containing the genealogies, i.e., Mat- urrection. The inference from all this evidence would be that thew and Luke, were written first. Irenaeus, it is true, puts Luke was not written till about a.d. 80 at earliest. If it could be the third Gospel after. Matthew and Mark and after the further demonstrated that Luke used any Apocryphal book death of Peter and Paul, that is, after 64 (though certainly (Judith, for example), and if it could be shown that the book not after 70). If the Synoptic Gospels were written nearly in question was written after a certain date (Renan suggests simultaneously, we can easily account for these differenc- a.d. 80 for the date of the book of Judith), it might be neces in the tradition. Irenaeus was no better informed on essary to place Luke much later; but no such demonstration has been hitherto produced.” But most of these arguments are dates than Clement, and was evidently mistaken about set aside by the ἡμιν in Luke 1:2, which includes the writer the age of Christ and the date of the Apocalypse. But among those who heard the gospel story from the eye-withe may have had in view the time of publication, which nesses of the life of Christ. It is also evident from the Acts that must not be confounded with the date of composition. the writer, who is identical with the third Evangelist, was an Many books nowadays are withheld from the market intimate companion of Paul, and hence belonged to the first for some reason months or years after they have passed generation of disciples, which includes all the converts of the apostles from the day of Pentecost down to the destruction of through the hands of the printer. The objections raised against such an early date are Jerusalem. 991 Keim (I. 70) thus eloquently magnifies this little difnot well founded.990 990 Dr. Abbott, of London (in “Enc. Brit.,” X. 813, of the ninth ed., 1879), discovers no less than ten reasons for the later date of Luke, eight of them in the preface alone: “(1) the pre-existence and implied failure of many ’attempts’ to set forth continuous narratives of the things ’surely believed;’ (2) the mention of ’tradition’ of the eye-witnesses and ministers of the word as past, not as present (παρεδ̓ οσαν , Luke 1:2); (3) the dedication of the Gospel to a man of rank (fictitious or otherwise), who is supposed to have been ’catechized’ in Christian truth; (4) the attempt at literary style and at improvement of the ’usus ecclesiasticus’ of the common tradition; (5) the composition of something like a commencement of a Christian hymnology; (6) the development of the genealogy and the higher tone of the narrative of the incarnation; (7) the insertion of many passages mentioning our Lord as ὁ κύριος not in address, but in narrative; (8) the distinction, more sharply drawn, between the fall of Jerusalem and the final coming; (9) the detailed prediction of the fall of Jerusalem, implying reminiscences of its fulfilment; (10) the very
ference: “Anders als dem Matthaeus steht diesem Schrifstellen [Lukas] das Wirklichkeitsbild der Katastrophe der heiligen Stadt in seiner ganzen schrecklichen Grösse vor der Seele, die langwierige und kunstvolle Belagerung des Feindes, die Heere, die befestigten Lager, der Ring der Absperrung, die tausend Bedrängnisse, die Blutarbeit des Schwerts, die Gefangenführung des Volkes, der Tempel, die Stadt dem Boden gleich, Alles unter dem ernsten Gesichtspunkt eines Strafgerichtes Gottes für die dung des Gesandten. Ja über die Katastrophe hinaus, die äusserste Perspektive des ersten Evangelisten, dehnt sich dem neuen Geschichtschreiber eine new unbestimmbar grosse Periode der Trümmerlage Jerusalemz unter dem ehernen Tritt der Heiden und heidnischer Weltzeiten, innerhalb deren er selber schreibt. Unter solchen Umständen hat die grosse Zukunftrede Jesu bei aller Sorgfalt, die wesentlichen Züge, sogar die Wiederkunft in diesem ’Geschlect’zu halten die mannigfaltigsten Aenderungen erlitten.” The same argument is urged more soberly by Holtzmann (Syn. Evang., 406 sq.), and even by Güder (in Herzog, IX. 19) and Weiss (in Meyer, 6th ed., p. 243), but they assume that Luke wrote only
