re for its authority
on a matter of fact of no small importance; and that does not permit
us to conceive that he believed the first gospel to be the work of an
authority to whom he ought to defer, let alone that of an apostolic
eye-witness.

The tradition of the Church about the second gospel, which I believe
to be quite worthless, but which is all the evidence there is for
"Mark's" authorship, would have us believe that "Mark" was little more
than the mouthpiece of the apostle Peter. Consequently, we are to
suppose that Peter either did not know, or did not care very much for,
that account of the "essential belief and cardinal teaching" of Jesus
which is contained in the Sermon on the Mount; and, certainly, he
could not have shared Dr. Wace's view of its importance.[69]

I thought that all fairly attentive and intelligent students of the
gospels, to say nothing of theologians of reputation, knew these
things. But how can any one who does know them have the conscience to
ask whether there is "any reasonable doubt" that the Sermon on the
Mount was preached by Jesus of Nazareth? If conjecture is permissible,
where nothing else is possible, the most probable conjecture seems to
be that "Matthew," having a _cento_ of sayings attributed--rightly or
wrongly it is impossible to say--to Jesus among his materials, thought
they were, or might be, records of a continuous discourse, and put
them in at the place he thought likeliest. Ancient historians of the
highest character saw no harm in composing long speeches which never
were spoken, and putting them into the mouths of statesmen and
warriors; and I presume that whoever is represented by "Matthew" would
have been grievously astonished to find that any one objected to his
following the example of the best models accessible to him.

So with the "Lord's Prayer." Absent in our representative of the
oldest tradition, it appears in both "Matthew" and "Luke." There is
reason to believe that every pious Jew, at the commencement of our
era, prayed three times a day, according to a formula which is
embodied in the present "Schmone-Esre"[70] of the Jewish prayer-book.
Jesus, who was assuredly, in all respects, a pious Jew, whatever else
he may have been, doubtless did the same. Whether he modified the
current formula, or whether the so-called "Lord's Prayer" is the
prayer substituted for the "Schmone-Esre" in the congregations of the
Gentiles, is a question which can hardly be answered