be attributed the loss of so
many of the earlier gospels. It is doubtless for this reason that we
do not possess the Aramaean original of the "Logia" of Matthew, or
the "Memorabilia" of Mark, the companion of Peter,--two works to which
Papias (A. D. 120) alludes as containing authentic reports of the
utterances of Jesus.

These considerations will, we believe, sufficiently explain the curious
circumstance that, while we know the Christ of dogma so intimately,
we know the Jesus of history so slightly. The literature of early
Christianity enables us to trace with tolerable completeness the
progress of opinion concerning the nature of Jesus, from the time of
Paul's early missions to the time of the Nicene Council; but upon the
actual words and deeds of Jesus it throws a very unsteady light. The
dogmatic purpose everywhere obscures the historic basis.

This same dogmatic prepossession which has rendered the data for
a biography of Jesus so scanty and untrustworthy, has also until
comparatively recent times prevented any unbiassed critical examination
of such data as we actually possess. Previous to the eighteenth century
any attempt to deal with the life of Jesus upon purely historical
methods would have been not only contemned as irrational, but
stigmatized as impious. And even in the eighteenth century, those
writers who had become wholly emancipated from ecclesiastic tradition
were so destitute of all historic sympathy and so unskilled in
scientific methods of criticism, that they utterly failed to comprehend
the requirements of the problem. Their aims were in the main polemic,
not historical. They thought more of overthrowing current dogmas than of
impartially examining the earliest Christian literature with a view of
eliciting its historic contents; and, accordingly, they accomplished but
little. Two brilliant exceptions must, however, be noticed. Spinoza, in
the seventeenth century, and Lessing, in the eighteenth, were men far
in advance of their age. They are the fathers of modern historical
criticism; and to Lessing in particular, with his enormous erudition and
incomparable sagacity, belongs the honour of initiating that method of
inquiry which, in the hands of the so-called Tubingen School, has led to
such striking and valuable conclusions concerning, the age and character
of all the New Testament literature. But it was long before any one
could be found fit to bend the bow which Lessing and Spinoza had
wielded.