Founding the Fathers. Elizabeth A. Clark
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that the Bible is a forgery, Smith argued, “implies a greater miracle than anything recorded in the Book itself.”174 Although scribal errors may have entered in the transcription of manuscripts, even the most faulty manuscripts do not “pervert one article of our faith,” and early biblical manuscripts substantially agree with the received text. Smith found a different, and advantageous, meaning to the German critics’ claim that Christian parties warred against each other soon after Jesus’ death: namely, they kept a “jealous eye” on each other so that no group could alter the sacred text.175
Smith nevertheless admitted that some period of time passed before the New Testament canon was established. Many early Christian writers, he alleged, quote more extensively from the Old Testament than from the New because the latter canon was “still somewhat disputed.” He conceded that only with the heretic Marcion do we find “the first trace of a collection” of New Testament books, namely, the Pauline Epistles and one Gospel.176
Despite Smith’s criticisms of Hegel and the Tübingen School’s narrative of early Christianity, he appears to have adopted their approach on one point. He taught students that in early Christian history there is a movement from thesis to antithesis to synthesis: a Jewish form of Christianity (represented by Peter, the Ebionites, the Nazarenes, and the Pseudo-Clementine literature) met a form influenced by Greco-Roman movements such as Gnosticism. The resolution of these currents in Catholic Christianity, according to Smith, came after the Constantinian settlement. Only then does the Catholic Church emerge, that is, “the Apostolic Church so unfolded as to meet the wants of the Greek and Roman world.”177 Here, Smith sounded more “German.”
PHILIP SCHAFF
Although we identify Philip Schaff chiefly as a church historian, we should recall that he lectured on the Catholic Epistles and the Gospel of John at the University of Berlin,178 taught Bible (as well as several other subjects) at Mercersburg, and held positions in Hebrew Bible and in New Testament at Union Seminary before assuming the Washburn Professorship of Church History.179 His approach to biblical scholarship remained conservative throughout his life.180 His work on the American Committee on Bible Revision (i.e., revision of the King James Version), however, was not the arena in which his conservatism most fully emerged.
Schaff and Biblical Revision. Schaff served as President of the American Committee on Bible Revision in the 1870s and 1880s.181 Joining British scholars, he and his colleagues labored for nearly a decade on this project. Schaff argued that a clear, dignified English translation would be a powerful check on “infidelity among the English-speaking nations.” Had the Roman Catholic Church allowed the Bible to circulate freely, Schaff claimed, it would now be “better fortified against the assaults of skepticism and infidelity.”182
The Revisers assigned to the New Testament began their task in June 1870.183 Schaff’s letters and diaries from the period detail numerous problems: difficult dealings with University Press officers in Britain; questions regarding copyright; strained relations with the British Committee; and, always, concerns about money (whereas the University Presses paid the expenses of the British revisers, the Americans enjoyed no such support). Schaff, as chief organizer of the American Committee, kept the Protestant reading public in America updated through speeches and newspaper articles.184 In 1878, as his Diary charts, he traveled across America to drum up enthusiasm and funds for the project.
In May 1881, the Authorized Revised Version of the New Testament appeared, that of the Old Testament following four years later. Its publication was a media event: two days after the manuscript was received in America, newspapers in Chicago published the entire text that had been transmitted by telegraph from New York—the largest dispatch that had then ever been sent over the wires.185 (The editors assured readers that “there is no change in the plot.”186) On May 20 alone, 200,000 copies were sold in New York;187 in all, almost three million.188
Schaff deemed the Revision “the noblest monument of Christian union and co-operation in this nineteenth century.”189 The American Committee had agreed not to publish for twenty years an American edition that would incorporate the textual changes rejected by their more conservative British colleagues. Schaff hoped (in vain) to live long enough to see the American edition.190 His dedication to the Revision, however, did not lessen his conservative approach to New Testament criticism.
Schaff and Biblical Criticism. Schaff, like Smith, proposed only two categories for assessing biblical books: “genuine” and “fraudulent.”191 “Genuine” meant that the books were written by those whose names stand on them—for the Gospels, the immediate disciples of Jesus. To posit that the Gospels were composed later, by non-apostolic authors, would be to dismiss them as “frauds,” a willful deceit perpetrated on believers. For Schaff (again like Smith), patristic writers’ citation of or allusion to New Testament passages testifies to the “genuineness and integrity of the apostolical writings” and proves that the content of the books is trustworthy.192 Christianity’s “historical foundations” as given in the New Testament are “immovable.”193
Schaff appealed to various factors to claim the Gospels’ “genuineness.” One rests on the claim that Jesus and his first followers knew Greek: hence there is no reason to doubt the apostolic authorship of the Gospels and the veracity of Jesus’ words therein.194 Jesus, Schaff claimed, spoke Greek, “though not exclusively,” and the Apostles “wrote it with naturalness and ease.”195 If Jesus’ disciples, “unlettered fishermen of Galilee,” knew Greek [because they wrote the Gospels], why should not Jesus?196 Greek served the apostolic mission well—like French in our day, Schaff added. To be sure, the Greek of the New Testament was designed for the common people, but this lower style was supremely proper for a “universal religion.” No doubt is cast on the faith, Schaff insisted, because we lack writings by Jesus, although writing was not beneath his dignity: did not God himself write the Two Tables [the Ten Commandments]? “We do not crave a bookwriting Christ, but one of sympathy and love,” he concluded.197 Thus Schaff sought to guarantee the “genuineness” of dominical and apostolic voices.
The “genuineness” of the New Testament books might also be called into question by the relative lateness of the manuscripts on which the received text was based. The oldest manuscripts, Schaff conceded, date only to the fourth century; we lack the Apostles’ “original writings.”198 Schaff offered a piously ingenious explanation for why no “originals” remain: by divine arrangement, the New Testament books were first composed on papyrus (a material of short life-span) so that the loss of “the autographs of the apostles” would stimulate enquiry and prompt “a more thorough search for the spirit and reading of the text.”199 On this explanation, “genuineness” is not cast in doubt.
Affirming all New Testament books as datable to the first century also helped to secure their “genuineness.” Schaff held that Matthew, Mark, Luke, Acts (“the best as well as the first manual of church history”200), James, I Peter, Jude, the Pastorals and (other) epistles of Paul were composed before 70;201 only Revelation and the Gospel and Epistles of John were composed after that date.202 Dating most New Testament books this early allowed Schaff to link them tightly to the inspired apostolic era.203
Schaff considered the Gospels “the inspired biographical memoirs of Jesus Christ”; his disciples’ “reports” recounted “actual facts.”204 The Evangelists, as objective historians, he claimed, refrained from intruding their own views; they “modestly abstained from adding their own impressions to the record of the words and acts of the Master.”205
Yet Schaff admitted that the orthodox theory of verbal inspiration could not account for the discrepancies among the Gospels.206 These he explained as deriving from the Gospels’ status as not “full biographies,” but as “memoirs.” Each Evangelist had selected certain features of Jesus’ life and work “as best suited his purpose and the class of his readers.” John, for example, omits many points (such as an imminent eschatology) that the other Evangelists include: he