APPENDIX III. On the Injll
(see v. 49, n. 757)
Just as the Taurat is not the Old Testament, or the Pentateuch, as now
received by the Jews and Christians, so the Injil mentioned in the Quran is certainly
not the New Testament, and it is not the four Gospels as now received by the
Christian Church, but an original Gospel which was promulgated by Jesus, as the
Taurat was promulgated by Moses and the Quran by Muhammad Mustafa.
The New Testament as now received consists of (a) four Gospels with varying
contents {Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John); and other miscellaneous matter; viz.,
(6) the Acts of the Apostles (probably written by Luke and purporting to describe the
progress of the Christian Church under St. Peter and St. Paul from the supposed
Crucifixion of Jesus to about 61 A.D.) ; (c) twenty-one Letters or Epistles (the
majority written by St. Paul to various churches or individuals, but a few written by
other Disciples, and of a general nature) ; and (d) the Book of Revelation or
Apocalypse (ascribed to St. John, and containing mystic visions and prophecies, of
which it is difficult to understand the meaning).
As Prof. F. C Burkitt remarks (Canon of the New Testament), it is an odd
miscellany. "The four biographies of Jesus Christ .... are not all independent of
each other, and neither of them was intended by its writer to form one of a quartet.
But they are all put side by side, unharmonised, one of them being actually
imperfect at the end, and one being only the first volume of a larger work. " All this
body of unmethodical literature was casual in its nature. No wonder, because the
early Christians expected the end of the world very soon. The four canonical
Gospels were only four out of many, and some others besides the four have survived.
Each writer just wrote down some odd sayings of the Master that he recollected.
Among the miracles described there is only one which is described in all the four
Gospels, and others were described and believed in in other Gospels, which are not
mentioned in any of the four canonical Gospels. Some of the Epistles contain
expositions of doctrine, but this has been interpreted differently by different
Churches. There must have been hundreds of such Epistles, and not all the Epistles
now received as canonical were always so received or intended to be so received.
The Apocalypse also was not the only one in the field. There were others. They
were prophecies of "things which must shortly come to pass " ; they could not have
been meant for long preservation, " for the time is at hand. "
When were these four Gospels written ? By the end of the second century
A.D. they were in existence, but it does not follow that they had been selected by
that date to form a canon. They were merely pious productions comparable to Dean
Farrar's Life of Christ. There were other Gospels besides. And further, the writers
of two of them, Mark and Luke, were not among the Twelve Disciples "called" by
Jesus. About the Gospel of St. John there is much controversy as to authorship,
date, and even as to whether it was all written by one person. Clement of Rome
(about 97 A.D.) and Polycarp (about 112 A.D.) quote sayings of Jesus in a form different from those found in the present canonical Gospels. Polycarp (Epistle, vii)
inveighs much against men " who pervert the sayings of the Lord to their own
lusts," and he wants to turn " to the "Word handed down to us from the beginning,"
thus referring to a Book (or a Tradition) much earlier than the four orthodox Gospels.
An Epistle of St. Barnabas and an Apocalypse of St. Peter were recognised by
Presbyter Clement of Alexandria (flourished about 180 A.D.). The Apocalypse of
St. John, which is a part of the present Canon in the West, forms no part of the
Peshitta (Syriac) version of the Eastern Christians, which was produced about 411-433
A.D. and which was used by the Nestorian Christians. It is probable that the
Peshitta was the version (or an Arabic form of it) used by the Christians in Arabia in
the time of the Apostle. The final form of the New Testament canon for the West
was fixed in the fourth century A.D. (say, about 367 A.D.) by Athanasius and the
Nicene creed. The beautiful Codex Sinaiticus which was acquired for the British
Museum in 1934, and is one of the earliest complete manuscripts of the Bible, may
be dated about the fourth century. It is written in the Greek language. Fragments
of unknown Gospels have also been discovered, which do not agree with the received
canonical Gospels.
The lnjil (Greek, Evangel=Gospel) spoken of by the Quran is not the New
Testament. It is not the four Gospels now received as canonical. It is the single
Gospel which, Islam teaches, was revealed to Jesus, and which he taught. Fragments
of it survive in the received canonical Gospels and in some others, of which traces
survive [e.g., the Gospel of Childhood or the Nativity, the Gospel of St. Barnabas,
etc.). Muslims are therefore right in respecting the present Bible (New Testament
and Old Testament), though they reject the peculiar doctrines taught by orthodox
Christianity or Judaism. They claim to be in the true tradition of Abraham, and
therefore all that is of value in the older revelations, it is claimed, is incorporated
in the teaching of the Last of the Prophets.
In v. 85 we are told that nearest in love to the Believers among the People of
the Book are the Christians. I do not agree that this does not apply to modern
Christians " because they are practically atheists or freethinkers. " I think that
Christian thought like the world's thought) has learnt a great deal from the protest
of Islam against priest domination, class domination, and sectarianism, and its
insistence on making this life pure and beautiful while we. are in it. We must
stretch a friendly hand to all who are sincere and in sympathy with our ideals.
Authorities: The first two mentioned for Appendix II, and in addition : Prof. F. C. Burkitt.
on the Cannon of the New Testament, in Religion, June 1034, the Journal of Transactions of the
Society for Promoting the Study of Religions; R. \V. Mackay, Rise and Progress of Christianity;
G. R. S. Mead, The Gospel and the Gospels; B. \V. Bacon, Making of the New Testament, with its
Bibliography ; Sir Frederic Kenyon, The Story of the Bible; R. Hone, The Apocryphal New Testament,
London 1820 ; H. I Bell and T O. Skeat, Fragments of an Unknown Gospel and other Christian Papyri,
published by the British Museum, 1935. See also chapter 15 of Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the
Roman Empire, where the genesis of the earlv churches and sects in» the Roman Empire is briefly
reviewed.
S. VI. )
288
| C. 76.
