Volume - The Clarence Darrow Collection

VICTORY OF THE SCIENTIFIC AND LITERARY METHODS. 385
No less important was the closer research into the New
Testament during the latter part of the nineteenth century.
To go into the subject in detail would be beyond the scope
of this work, but a few of the main truths which it brought
before the world may be here summarized.*
By the new race of Christian scholars it has been clearly
shown that the first three Gospels, which, down to the close
of the last century, were so constantly declared to be three
independent testimonies agreeing as to the events recorded,
are neither independent of each other nor in that sort of
agreement which was formerly asserted. All biblical scholars
of any standing, even the most conservative, have come
to admit that all three took their rise in the same original
sources, growing by the accretions sure to come as time
went on accretions sometimes useful and often beautiful,
but in no inconsiderable degree ideas and even narratives
inherited from older religions : it is also fully acknowledged
that to this growth process are due certain contradictions
which can not otherwise be explained. As to the fourth
Gospel, exquisitely beautiful as large portions of it are, there
has been growing steadily and irresistibly the conviction,
even among the most devout scholars, that it has no right
to the name, and does not really give the ideas of St. John,
but that it represents a mixture of Greek philosophy with
Jewish theology, and that its final form, which one of the
most eminent among recent Christian scholars has charac-
terized as " an unhistorical product of abstract reflection,"
is mainly due to some gifted representative or representa-
Cornell University. As to the more rare editions of Barlaatn andJosaphat, a copy
of the Icelandic translation is to be seen in the remarkable collection of Prof.
Willard Fiske, at Florence. As to the influence of these translations, it may be
noted that when young John Kuncewicz, afterward a Polish archbishop, became a
monk, he took the name of the sainted Prince Josafat ; and, having fallen a victim
to one of the innumerable murderous affrays of the seventeenth century between
different sorts of fanatics Greek, Catholic, and Protestant in Poland, he also
was finally canonized under that name, evidently as a means of annoying the
Russian Government. (See Contieri, Vita di S. Giosafat, Arcivescovo e Martira
Ruteno, Roma, 1867.)
* For a brief but thorough statement of the work of Strauss, Baur, and the earlier
cruder efforts in New Testament exegesis, see Pfleiderer, as already cited, book ii,
chap, i ; and for the later work on Supernatural Religion and Lightfoot's answer,
ibid., book iv, chap, ii,
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