7. Lightfoot and the Fourth Gospel
Appendix C
Lightfoot and German Scholarship on John’s Gospel
Martin Hengel was in many ways the perfect person to discuss J. B. Lightfoot at length. On the one hand, like Lightfoot he was a historian, linguist and New Testament scholar, but his output was even more prodigious than Lightfoot’s. On the other hand he was a professor at Tübingen, a far more conservative professor than his predecessors, including F. C. Baur and the school he spawned, whom Lightfoot was constantly debating with and challenging. Hengel, as you will see, was in some ways far more in sympathy with Lightfoot’s reading of John than with his predecessors at Tübingen. We are pleased to present below Martin Hengel’s fine essay, which is no longer in print. (BW3)
Bishop Lightfoot and the Tübingen School on the Gospel of John and the Second Century
by Martin Hengel
1. The Tübingen Shock
In Vladimir Soloviev’s short story about the antichrist, at the beginning of the great ecumenical council, which the antichrist calls in Jerusalem he is given an honorary doctorate from Tübingen University. The German translator, Ludolph Muller, rightly sees an allusion here to David Friedrich Strauss, and the Tübingen school founded by his teacher, Ferdinand Christian Baur, which lay the foundations for modern radical criticism of the New Testament.
In the year 1835, David Friedrich Strauss, then twenty-seven years old and Repetent at the Tübingen Stift published his work The Life of Jesus, which contains a devastating critique of the historical value of the Gospels, and in particular of the Gospel of John. According to the verdict of his most recent biographer, it caused a devastating explosion ‘like a fire-bomb thrown into the tinder-dry pietistic forest of Würrtemburg . . . The Life of Jesus ignited a conflagration which quickly spread throughout the whole of Germany.’
However, this fire did not stop at the German frontier. Its sparks carried over to the whole educated world of Protestantism and European Enlightenment. In France, Ernest Renan could not have written his 1863 Vie de Jesus and the subsequent volumes of his history of early Christianity without the preliminary work of Strauss and the Tübingen scholars. Nor did the Anglo-Saxon world remain uninfluenced by it, though initially the influence was limited, and even now has been only partially investigated. Owen Chadwick comments, ‘English deists seized upon Strauss, and used his name as a scourge.’ The work, nearly 1500 pages long, was not read very much before the English translation, made by the young Marian Evans, who later became famous as George Eliot.
According to an anecdote which came down to me from a reliable oral tradition, significant contemporaries already associated F. C. Baur, Strauss’s teacher and the spiritual father of the Tübingen school, with the Antichrist. Shortly before his death in 1860, it is said: ‘When the head of the Tübingen school came in his lecture to the mysterious number of the Beast, 666, to the exegesis of Revelation 13, he remarked to the student: “And as Hengstenberg (the spokesman of conservative Lutheranism) says in Berlin, that’s me.” ’
However our theme for today is fortunately not the dispute over the radical (or even anti-Christian) views of the Tübingen school of Baur, Strauss and his other pupils, which lasted for a whole generation, but the question whether and to what degree the work of Bishop Lightfoot, which is unique in the nineteenth century, represents an answer to the aggressive theses of the Tübingen scholars. Here I am thinking particularly of his studies of the Apostolic Fathers and the Fourth Gospel.
We have to presuppose that a scholar of Lightfoot’s status, outstanding for his tremendous capacity for work, and his stupendous range of reading, knew the works of the Tübingen school, i.e. not only Baur and Strauss, but above all Zeller, Schwegler, Hilgenfeld, Volkmar, and the young Ritschl, even if he does not quote anywhere near as many modern authors as is the custom today. Nevertheless, he once gave a pupil the advice, ‘If you write a book on a subject, you have to read everything which has been written about it.’ Remarkable times, when this was still possible. Armitage Robinson who tells us this, also adds: ‘His independence of predecessors was starthng. . . . He refused to catalog the interpretations of previous writers, he will not even mention the names of other commentators, unless there is some special reason.’ In Lightfoot’s case, we must always keep in view the tension between these two remarks.
All the other representatives of the Tübingen school were substantially older than Lightfoot: Baur 36 years older, Strauss, 20, Zeller 14, and even Ritschl, who later became the leader of liberal theology in Germany, 6 years older. When Lightfoot entered Trinity College, Cambridge in 1847, at the age of nineteen, the new radical criticism movement had reached its heights, and Miss Evans had just translated the Jesus book by the Schwabian ‘arch-heretic’ Strauss into English. That same year Baur’s ‘Critical Investigations into the Canonical Gospels’ had appeared, in which he declared that none of the Gospels was Apostolic or written by the disciples of the Apostles, and moved their origins into the second century. Baur was most intensively concerned here with the Gospel of John; following his pupil E. Zeller, he put it around 170 A.D., i.e. shortly before Irenaeus’ Adversus haereses (circa 190). ‘In it New Testament theology reached its highest level and most complete form.’ According to Zeller and Baur, Valentinian Gnosticism, Montanism, and the Easter dispute did not presuppose the Fourth Gospel, but on the contrary were to be understood as its historical background. In John the contrast which according to Baur dominates earliest Christianity between particularistic Petrine Jewish Christianity and universalist Pauline Gentile Christianity, is transcended and superceded in the Hegelian sense. He looks down on Judaism and Paulinism as ‘outdated standpoints’ because ‘in free ideality he stands above the oppositions and, adopting the standpoint of the absolute idea, sets himself above the elements of historical mediation.’ The sum of Johannine Christianity becomes identical with Baur’s own theology, stamped by German idealism. This is ‘the elevation of the consciousness into the sphere of pure spirituality in which God is known as Spirit and all that is particular and limiting is taken up and transcended in the universality of the idea of God.’ Here however ‘the invisible being of God is opened up’ by means of the Logos, ‘and goes over into the human consciousness as its absolute content.’ In the Fourth Gospel, the apotheosis of man is completed in the form of the participation of the human consciousness in the absolute divine Spirit.
It is understandable that from this perspective, which almost makes the author of the Gospel a philosopher, and completely subordinates the contingent historical detail to the speculative philosophical overall view, the unknown author of the Fourth Gospel, for Baur a Gentile Christian from the second half of the century, comes very close to Gnostic speculation, and his picture of Christ (which is completely unhistorical), has to be interpreted in docetic terms. The young Baur had already acknowledged the pre-imminence of a philosophical perspective in historical research, and in his very first work he wrote the sentence which was to point the way forward for his whole life’s work ‘without philosophy, for me history remains eternally deaf and dumb.’ This priority of the absolute Spirit in Hegel’s sense, coming to consciousness in history by means of dialectical movement, over contingent historical reality, then also led to his reconstruction of earliest Christianity, which overturned the whole traditional historical picture—though that did not mean that on each occasion he did not begin from specific observation on the text: for example, the tension between the two reports on the council of Jerusalem, Galatians 2 and Acts 15. However these only became fertile when he incorporated them into an overall view of earliest Christian history which was grounded in his philosophical pre-understanding.
According to him, and the pupils who stood closest to him, Zeller and Schwegler, only the four genuine letters of Paul came from the first century—Galatians, Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians. So did the Judaizing Revelation of John, which he believed to have been written by the son of Zebedee. All the other New Testament writings are pseudepigrapha from the second century which convey the split between Paulinism and Judaism, or like the latest (the Pastoral Epistles and the Gospel of John), have already left it behind them. But Baur also declares the writings assigned traditionally to the end of the first or the beginning of the second century, the so-called Apostolic Fathers like 1 Clement, the letters of Ignatius and the letter of Polycarp, to be later forgeries. The interest of Baur and his immediate pupils did not therefore lie in painstaking editing of texts, the thorough philological and theological exegesis of them, and a detailed investigation of their sources, but in the critical analysis of the particular ‘tendency’ of the texts, a presentation of their religious or philosophical doctrinal concepts (‘Lehrbegriff’), and an overall reconstruction of the spiritual awareness bound up with them, along with its development. Baur was interested in understanding the whole history of the church and of dogma and their development down to the battles of the present. Grasping the sources and systematically steeping himself in this enormous amount of material was his strength, but his also too speculative fabrications, coupled with mistakes in detail, often made the whole enterprise questionable. Therefore, Hilgenfeld and Ritschl relatively quickly detached themselves from the school and went their own ways.
2. Lightfoot as Historian and His Work
Lightfoot notes this move very well in the second edition of Ritschl’s Die Entstehung der altkatholischen Kirche, which put Ritschl in more direct antagonism to the Tübingen school, and described the work as ‘very able and suggestive.’ His own way of working and the goal that he strove for were, by contrast completely different; he was a highly gifted philologist and historian, always going by the text, by sources and facts, and antipathetic to any speculation. Before he made general statements, he examined any available detailed evidence with extreme care. Not only did he have a comprehensive knowledge of Graeco-Roman antiquity including archaeology and epigraphy, but he knew the Church Fathers and the languages of the Christian East: Syriac, Coptic, and Armenian. His argument, built up carefully, often took the form of scrupulously constructed lists of items of evidence; here—in complete contrast to his German conservative colleagues like Theodor Zahn—any hair-splitting logic and any forcing of proofs were alien to him.
Shortly after Lightfoot’s death, no less a figure than Adolph Harnack made a unique evaluation of Lightfoot’s method and personality, though he had never met him personally. Let the greatest German theological scholar of that time speak for himself:
Lightfoot was the most learned and worthy representative of the conservative critical school in England. In nineteenth century Germany we have no scholar in the conservative camp who could match him in the extent or accuracy of his knowledge. His editions and commentaries . . . and his critical articles are of lasting worth, and even where one cannot agree with his conclusions, one can never pass over his arguments. His respect for his opponent, which marked him out—I cannot recall a single derogatory remark in any of Lightfoot’s writing; the strongest form on which he commented on a quite untenable argument was to express amazement—brought him the utmost respect of all parties. Anyone who read him had to feel that here not only a scholar but a Christian was speaking, one for whom the supreme principle was ἀληθεύοντες δὲ ἐν ἀγάπῃ. There has never been an apologist who was less of an advocate than Lightfoot; therefore the German apologists were not to his taste. Moreover one would do him an injustice if one were to sum up his whole significance under the title vindex traditionis. He was an independent, free scholar not only by the standards of the official theology of the English church, but also in the absolute sense. He never defended a tradition for tradition’s sake; but how often he rescued the tradition, which previously had not been defended adequately, and therefore risked losing its credibility! In this respect his great work on the Letters of Ignatius is above all to be singled out.
Five years earlier, in a review in The Expositor, Harnack had acknowledged, ‘We may say, without exaggeration that this work is the most learned and careful Patristic monograph which has appeared in the nineteenth century.’
One special feature of Lightfoot’s way of working was the way in which his academic work was based above all on the recovery of the text of early Christian writings, of which the significance and authenticity was disputed, and extensive commentary on them. From his time in Cambridge come the commentaries on Galatians (1865), Philippians (1868), 1 and 2 Clement (1869, with an appendix, 1877), Colossians and Philemon (1875). It was not until as Bishop of Durham that after thirty years’ preliminary work he could finish his edition of the letters of Ignatius and the Letter of Polycarp as ‘the core of the whole’ (1885). The five-volume complete edition of the Apostolic Fathers, which summed up the earlier editions of the text in an expanded form, had to appear posthumously, shortly after his death, in 1889. Seriously ill, Lightfoot was working on the chapter on ‘Peter in Rome’ until three days before he died, and the manuscript broke off in mid-sentence. The extensive excurses, monographs in themselves, discussed not only all the questions of testimonia, textual tradition, and authenticity, which was so disputed, but also historical problems of the second and early third centuries up to Hippolytus of Rome. They also described the relationship between the church and the Roman empire under the Antonines in connection with the relevant texts. Apart from the outsider Hilgenfeld and the less convincing editions of the Pseudo-Clementines and of Eusebius’ ecclesiastical history by Schwegler, the Tübingen School had produced neither substantial editions of the text nor comparable commentaries. In method and substance Lightfoot adopted quite a different way, all his own. In my view, his work was more strictly ‘historical-critical’ in the real sense than the criticism of the Tubingen scholars—which was to a large degree speculative. Within the framework of the historical picture with which they had been provided by Baur, they offered a one-sided investigation of ‘tendencies’ which they claimed to discover in the early Christian writings.
3. Lightfoot’s Argument Against the Tübingen School
But did Lightfoot allow himself to be influenced by the Tübingen scholars, and was the perspective of his research defined by their radical critical results? In the not particularly frequent cases in which people have thought back to this greater scholar who died a hundred years ago, this has often been asserted quite emphatically, but most recently the view has been put in question almost as decisively.
A first reason given is that the works of the Tübingen school found relatively little visible recognition in the sphere of official theology in England between 1850 and 1870, and only among some free-thinkers like Marian Evans alias George Eliot or twenty-seven years later, the author of Supernatural Religion which was published anonymously. However the surprising success of this attack on the New Testament, the ammunition which came not least from Tübingen, shows that the time for such attacks was now ripe, even on this side of the channel, at a point in time when Tübingen’s radicalism had lost the battle in Germany. When Lightfoot began to write against Supernatural Religion in 1874–75, he probably did so not only out of personal concern, because in connection with it close friends were under suspicion and under attack, but also because of the danger arising out of the historically untenable criticism which the work contained. He had seen it coming, and he had incomparable resources for countering it.
The other object[ion] to excessive stress on the Tübingen School lay ‘in the . . . surprising paucity of Lightfoot’s references to Baur, which are far less common than the popular picture of Lightfoot would require.’ But when we reflect that (although he had read everything on the question) Lightfoot goes completely by the sources, quotes other authors relatively seldom and, as Harnack already observed, writes polemic about them even more rarely, it is striking how often and sometimes how sharply on occasion he attacked Baur or the Tübingen School, or, as he could also say, the ‘Tübingen fallacy,’ or ‘a modern school of critics’ and their ‘historical speculations.’ Of all the contemporary authors Baur and the Tübingen scholars e.g. Volkmar, Schwegler, and Hilgenfeld (whose growing distance from his old friends he noted with pleasure) are those whom Lightfoot quotes by far the most often in his works on early Christianity. And when he quotes them, he mostly contradicts them.
So when in the few obituaries on Lightfoot, pupils and friends referred to this point, which in my view was decisive for his life’s work, they were probably reflecting more than a popular picture.
Armitage Robinson, a personal pupil of Lightfoot’s from his group of the Auckland Brotherhood, describes the effect of the Apostolic Fathers with a quotation from Lightfoot himself: ‘He had knocked . . . “the last nail in the coffin of the Tubingen theory.” ’ In the memorial address given on the fiftieth anniversary of Lightfoot’s death, Bishop Eden in retrospect struck up an almost hymnic tone. The battle of the trio Lightfoot, Westcott, and Hort ‘seemed to us humbler students to be a battle of the giants for the citadel of Faith.’
But we do best to let Lightfoot himself speak. In the Preface to his Letters of Ignatius, published in 1885, he ends it by pointing out that friends had criticized him ‘for allowing myself to be diverted from more congenial task of commenting on St. Paul’s Epistles; but the importance of the position seemed to me to justify the expenditure of much time and labor, in ‘repairing a breach’ not indeed in the ‘House of the Lord’ itself, but in the immediately outlying building.’ By directing the force of his concentrated historical argumentation against some, as he pointedly says, ‘academic terrorism’ (a harsh word, but what scholar has not come across this phenomenon?) working with ‘moral intimidation’ he raises at the same time the question: on which side is freedom from the pressure of a tendency greater? He replies: ‘To the disciples of Baur, the rejection of the Ignatian Epistles is an absolutely necessity of their theological position. The ground would otherwise be withdrawn from under them, and their historical reconstruction of early Christian history would fall in ruins on their head.’ By contrast, for the other conservative side, the question of their authenticity was of secondary significance. For them the whole canonical witness of the New Testament had not lost its value. Here it becomes clear that Lightfoot’s thirty-year occupation with Ignatius and the other Apostolic Fathers was motivated not least by the aim of rejecting the destructive theories of the Tübingen scholars on the origin of the writings of the New Testament.
In the Quarterly Review of January 1893 an anonymous writer (he was in fact H. W. Watkins) published the most extensive assessment of the great scholar after his death. Watkins already points to the connection between the editing of the letters of Ignatius and the Tübingen school. By contrast, in his short article in the Dictionary of National Biography, Hort, Lightfoot’s close friend and ally, saw the excurses on James and ‘St. Paul and the Three’ in the Commentary on Galatians as the ‘most important contribution to the Tübingen controversy.’ But his further comment that Lightfoot’s conclusions were ‘not a refutation of conclusions of the Tübingen scholars’ but ‘a rival interpretation and a rival picture’ is his own interpretation—from a later time, and more critical. That Lightfoot himself understood his interpretation rather as a refutation is evident from his remark in the preface to the Galatians commentary: ‘If the primitive Gospel was, as some [compare the Pauline τίνες, Martin Hengel] have represented it, merely one of many phases of Judaism, if those cherished beliefs . . . were afterthoughts, progressive accretions, having no foundation in the Person and Teaching of Christ, then indeed St. Paul’s preaching was vain, and our faith is vain also. I feel very confident that the historical views of the Tübingen school are too extravagant to obtain any wide or lasting hold over the minds of men.’ This prophecy was not fulfilled in that way. The criticism of the Tübingen scholars also had lasting effects behind which we can not go back.
Be that as it may, Lightfoot the exegete wanted to make his contribution to the refutation to the deadly danger presented by the Tübingen scholars, and this contribution was greater than any other in the English-speaking world. The critical references to the Tübingen school and its representatives, in the first place Baur, but also Schwegler, Volkmar, Hitzig, and in the second place Hilgenfeld and Ritschl, permeate his whole work from his first commentaries to the posthumous collection of articles. Despite his restraint, all in all Lightfoot quotes them well over a hundred times; in other words he argued against their theories all through his life. It was not only the results which, in his view, threatened the very foundations of the Christian faith, but the speculatively destruction and constructive methods which keep irritating this exceptional and reticent scholar, and indeed embittered him.
Otherwise, it is hard to explain a remark towards the end of his detailed account of the dispute over the authenticity of the Epistles of Ignatius in his Essays against Supernatural Religion: ‘But even if we set Polycarp aside (as evidence for their authenticity, M. H.) it would hardly be rash to say that the external evidence for at least two-thirds of the remains of classical antiquity was inferior’ (to the evidence for the letters of Ignatius—M. H.). Lightfoot said that as a classical philologist of high standing, who on this point was probably superior to most of his theological contemporaries. He continues: ‘We Christians are constantly told that we must expect to have our records tested by the same standards by which are applied to other writings. This is exactly what we desire and what we do not get. It is easy to imagine what would ensue if the critical principles of the Tübingen school and their admirers were let loose on the classical literature of Greece and Rome.’ In other words he censures the presumptuous criticism of his opponents as being basically unacademic and unprofessional.
An illustration of how the anger of despair over absurd assertions of his opponents could suddenly overcome this scholar notable for his tranquility and self control, when he was discussing just a small point: 1 Clement played only a secondary role in the historical construction of the Tübingen school—in contrast to the letters of Ignatius and the traditions about Polycarp. However, it had to be unauthentic and late so that the Gospels and almost all the other writings of the New Testament could be put back into the second century. Baur was only peripherally occupied with the letter. He was more interested in the person of Clement as allegedly a pupil of Paul or Peter and as the legendary pseudepigraphical author of the Pseudo-Clementines, which he over-estimated to a ridiculous degree and dated much too early. In his view Paul’s letter to the Philippians, which was a forgery, mentions this Clement at 4:3 and identifies him anachronistically with Titus Flavius Clemens, nephew of the Emperor, who was executed by Domitian for Christian leanings. The letters and the Pseudo-Clementines were then attributed to this legendary Clement, supposedly related to the Emperor. In this way 1 Clement appeared in Rome in the first half of the second century as a mediator between Jewish and Gentile Christianity. In two articles Volkmar (following the Heidelberg Old Testament scholar Hitzig who was a supporter of Baur) had claimed that the letter was written at the earliest in the time of Hadrian (117–138), as the book of Judith is mentioned in 1 Clement 55 and reflects in allegorical form Trajan’s unsuccessful expedition to the east (114–117) and the reign of terror in Judaea in 116–117 under his general Lucius Quietus, whom Hadrian had executed when he seized power. 1 Clement must therefore have been written some time later. Baur took up this conjecture of his pupil’s without delay and resorted to it often. Lightfoot spent two and half pages reporting Volkmar’s peculiar theory in detail—he wanted to demonstrate its absurdity for all to see. Then he breaks off: ‘I shall not attempt to dissect this theory in detail for it would be mere waste of time to do so. Those who wish to see it torn into shreds have only to consult the criticisms of Hilgenfeld and of Lipsius’—i.e. Volkmar’s German critics. Nevertheless, additional arguments follow for more than another page, showing his knowledge of rabbinic literature.
Lightfoot ends with a methodological consideration of true and false criticism, which leads into a tempermental attack not on Volkmar but on Baur, the head of the school. ‘Ingenuity often wears the mask of criticism, but is not infrequently the caricature of criticism. Ingenuity is not necessarily divination; it is not wholesome self-restraint, is not the sober weighing of probabilities, is not the careful consideration of evidence. Criticism is all of these, which are wanting to its spurious counterfeit.’ True historical criticism has nothing to do with the critic’s fantasy. So much for Volkmar. But then Lightfoot turns to the chief culprit, who credulously took over the absurd hypotheses of his pupil and from whom this fantastic method of fabrication emanated. First of all he cites the ‘apostate’ Hilgenfeld (‘I have always been amazed that Volkmar’s theory found favor with Baur’). Then comes the verdict: ‘No man has shown himself more ready to adopt the wildest speculations, if they fell in with his own preconceived theories, than Baur, especially in his later days—speculations which in not a few cases have been falsified by direct evidence since discovered. Nothing has exercised a more baneful influence on criticism in the country of critics than the fascination of his name. While he has struck out some lines which have stimulated thought, and thus have not been unfruitful in valuable results’ (Lightfoot’s sense of justice does not let him pass over these valuable promptings, even in his devastating criticism) ‘the glamor of his genius has on the whole exercised a fatal effect on the progress of a sober and discriminating study of the early records of Christianity.’
This completely unexpected and at the same time fundamental attack on Baur in a ‘dissertation’ on 1 Clement while recognizing the stimulus which emerged from his genius, shows how baneful Lightfoot thought the influence of the Tübingen church historians to be. Baur was too ready to neglect the detail of what the text said or to do violence to it (in order to bend it in his direction) in favor of his wider-ranging historical constructions.
Lightfoot’s criticism was supported by a series of sometimes sensational discoveries of patristic texts extending over the whole of the second half of the nineteenth century (see his ‘direct evidence since discovered’). Above all, step by step these showed that it was impossible to put the Fourth Gospel as late as 170. The discoveries included books IV-X of Hippolytus’s Refutatio omnium haersium, discovered in 1842 and first published in 1851 as the work of Origen. This showed that the Gospel of John had already been used by Basilides or his pupils and other early Gnostics. There was also in 1846 the Armenian translation of Ephraem’s commentary on the Diatesseron, from which it became clear that John formed the framework of this earliest Gospel harmony, the complete text of the Pseudo-Clementine Homilies, the previously unknown conclusion of which contained a clear quotation from John 9:3, or the Syriac translation of the seven authentic letters of Ignatius. The list could be continued further.
4. Analogies and Differences
The attempt I shall now venture to make, to arrive at a just definition of the relationship between Baur and Lightfoot, comes up against a number of difficulties, because of the nature of the subject-matter.
1. Despite some analogies, a real comparison is hardly possible, since the analogies are more external and eventually bring out the difference more strongly: firstly, the interest in historical truth—yet attempts to approximate to it in very different ways; secondly, stupendous diligence and comprehensive philological and theological education—but which for the most part lead to such very different results; and thirdly, the link with the church—but which for the Tübingen professor became increasingly weak and for Lightfoot became increasingly dominant. He devoted a large part of his time to his church duties, first of all as a Canon of St. Paul’s in London and then above all as bishop in one of the most important dioceses of England, and in so doing also sacrificed his academic plans. Both the commentary series on the letters of Paul and the Apostolic Fathers remain incomplete; a planned history of the fourth century was never written; the edition of the Pseudo-Clementine Recognitions went through several hands and did not appear until seventy-six years later.
Because of the widespread repudiation of him which increased the more time went on, Baur removed himself increasingly from church duties and also gave up his office as Frühprediger at the Stiftskirche of Tübingen, whereas the Professor in Cambridge and Canon of St. Paul’s, where he was also advisor of the Queen, and even more the Bishop of Durham, who was regarded as one of the best preachers of his time, took these duties increasingly seriously. Even today his sermons are worth reading. Finally, moreover, Baur lived eight years longer than Lightfoot, who had worn himself out prematurely in his twofold profession as bishop and scholar, and the Tübingen scholar could therefore look back on a much more extensive and complete work.
2. Lightfoot faced not just a single adversary but a whole group which emerged with a relatively well-defined programme, ‘a modern school of critics.’ Baur appeared to him only as ‘its most determined and ablest antagonist.’ Lightfoot can therefore—in fact certainly quite wrongly—describe Hilgenfeld ‘as the successor of Baur, and the present representative of the Tübingen School (though it has no longer its head-quarters at Tübingen),’ who nevertheless had generously to bring back the dating of the Gospel of John from A.D. 170 to 150. Sometimes he also simply speaks of ‘German criticism,’ which in addition to the closer and more distant pupils of Baur also included Credner, de Wette, Lipsius, Harnack, etc. So he contradicted Matthew Arnold, who criticized an all too eccentric British author (Samuel Davidson), by pointing out: ‘an extravagance of this sort could never have come from Germany where there is a great force of critical opinion controlling a learned man’s vagaries and keeping him straight,’ since Lightfoot had had quite different experiences: ‘I confess that my experiences of the critical literature of Germany have not been so fortunate. It would be difficult, I think, to find among English scholars any parallel to the mass of absurdities which several intelligent and very learned German critics have conspired to heap upon two simple names in the Philippian Epistle, Euodia and Syntyche.’ First of all he mentioned Baur, who puts the letter near to the Gnostic systems of the second century because of the hymn in 2.6-11 and attaches most importance of all to the mythical person of Clement in 4:3, in whom the Pauline and Petrine churches are combined. Schwegler then made the two ladies allegorical representatives of these two parties and Volkmar and Hilgenfeld had spun out this fable even further. So when the author of Supernatural Religion appeals to such authorities, ‘I have my own opinion of the weight which such names should carry with them.’ On Hitzig, the Old Testament scholar in Heidelberg, he goes on to observe: ‘The learning of this curious pamphlet keeps pace with its absurdity. If the reader is disposed to think that this writer must be laughing in his sleeve at the methods of the modern school to which he belongs (my italics) he is checked by the obviously serious tone of the whole discussion. Indeed it is altogether in keeping with Hitzig’s critical discoveries elsewhere.’ There were limits and when these were exceeded, Lightfoot could react with bitter irony.
3. It is remarkable that, as far as I can see, David Friedrich Strauss, who was the first to draw all eyes to Tübingen as a result of his Life of Jesus, and whose influence in the world of culture far surpassed that of his teacher Baur, is never mentioned in Lightfoot’s published works, not even in his argument with Supernatural Religion, where one would inevitably have expected a reference. This looks more like a deliberate damnatio memoriae. As a student, Lightfoot must have read the Life of Jesus closely. His friend Hort mentions it in 1851, when he was twenty-two, in a letter to the Religious Socialist, Charles Kingsley. First of all he mentions Strauss in the same breath as the philosophers Emerson and Francis Newman, saying that he is afraid that ‘our orthodox Epicurism’ could develop in this direction. However the ‘cold laborical criticism’ of Strauss’s book does not seem to him to be the greatest danger. Unbelief in England must not take on any German form; it does not grow so much through theology as through a failure to take note of ‘questions concerning social relations.’ Here Lightfoot may perhaps have adopted a rather more critical attitude than his contemporary and friend.
Two years later, at twenty-five, shortly after his nomination to be a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, Lightfoot won the Norrisian prize with an essay of sixty handwritten pages. This essay has only recently been rediscovered and published. In it he presents a perspicuous rejection of Strauss’ thesis that the Gospels, and thus earliest Christianity, do not basically go back to the historically unique activity of Jesus i.e. to God’s revelation, but are the fruit of the contemporary world of Jewish culture. Here already we see the mastery of the historian. Neither the incarnation nor atonement by the cross of Jesus—the basic themes of the Fourth Gospel, which Strauss considered to be mythical through and through—can be derived from the Judaism of Palestine and the Diaspora. Christian faith rests on a personal revelation of God in Jesus of Nazareth and cannot be reconciled with an immanent systematic development of the history of mankind. In a last paragraph he argues with Baur’s thesis that the first apostles’ faith was a crude Jewish Christianity under the influence of Ebionitism, and that this shaped the course of church history. Here we already see the basic lines of his later work on the Apostolic Fathers. ‘We have seen how a consciousness of the weakness of their position has induced our adversaries to seek a connecting link between Judaism and Christianity; the same desire too has led to their denial of the authenticity of the Apostolic writings. Some period must elapse, they argue before the full development of the system, but nowhere is this exhibited more perfectly than in some of the St. Paul’s Epistles and St. John’s Gospel—they cannot therefore have been productions of the first century.’ Thus the argument of his opponents. Over against this he sets out the argument, the detailed implementation of which became his life’s work: ‘We have remarked how the remains of the earliest Fathers, the contemporaries of the Apostles, support the existence of teaching either oral or in writing, such as is exhibited by these controverted books; we may also advert to the incongruities, which are presented by the theory of our adversaries, considered independently.’
4. A real comparison between Baur and Lightfoot is most possible where both begin with the authenticity of a text, i.e. in the case of the four letters of Paul which Baur considers to be authentic. Professor Barrett’s comparison of the two scholars’ exegesis of Gal. 2 and Acts 15 shows that there is no absolute opposition here. For despite Lightfoot’s tendency to harmonize the various reports, he does not simply deny some tensions between the earliest Apostles and Paul, and Baur does not consider Acts to be completely unhistorical, despite its tendency towards mediation and its late origin. However, beyond the ‘Pauline island’ the opposition becomes unbridgeable. Therefore, Lightfoot could not but see an essential part of his scholarly work as consisting not least in the refutation of the Tübingen speculations that the writings of the New Testament originated late, in the second century, especially as here a pantheistic understanding of God, wholly shaped by the dominant philosophy of the time, was associated with historical hypotheses which seemed to be too often fantastic and destructive.
5. The Relevance of the Apostolic Fathers for Lightfoot
Towards the end of the 1850s the trio Lightfoot, Westcott, and Hort discussed the editing of a series of commentaries. Lightfoot himself wanted to concentrate on the letters of Paul and therefore yielded to Westcott the Fourth Gospel which he loved so much, whereas Hort, after overcoming certain hesitations arising out of his more marked critical tendencies, was to take over the Synoptic Gospels and Acts.
Basically, here in a decision of which he himself was perhaps not aware, Lightfoot took on those texts in which he could most successfully develop his philological and historical genius specifically over against the Tübingen faction. In the case of the Gospel of John, as with the Synoptics, his historical scope would have been considerably limited by his reluctance to engage in any substantial ‘negative’ criticism in the sphere of the New Testament canon, but in the case of the Epistle to the Galatians, written by the historical Paul, which was decisive for Baur’s assumptions, he could counter, based on the biblical text, the exaggerated Tübingen theses that the earliest Apostles were Judaistic and legalistic and advance a convincing argument for the authenticity of Philippians, Colossians, and Philemon, which even the supporters of moderate criticism like Hilgenfeld, Ritschl, and Davidson in Britain had to acknowledge. It was almost a sixth sense which, as far as his main academic work was concerned, took him out of the sphere of the New Testament canon which fundamentally constricted him, and led him to the Apostolic Fathers. When he said that his edition of the letters of Ignatius was the most important motive of this new task and ‘the core of the whole’ (see above), he was indeed conscious that by the apparent detour he could most surely ward off attacks on the canonical apostolic testimony of the church.
Here, by way of Clement, Ignatius and Polycarp, the post-apostolic writers of the early 2nd century, he could bring relief, above all to the Gospels which were so much under attack and in particular to the Fourth Gospel, which was most severely threatened. There existed a longer recension of twelve letters of Ignatius and a middle recension of seven; in addition there was a short Syriac version published by Cureton in 1845/49 of only three letters. Since the Reformation the authenticity of the letters had often been disputed by Reformed authors, because of their stress on the monarchial episcopate, but defended by Catholics and Anglicans; later the arguments for the authenticity of the middle recension became increasingly strong, but in the decade after their discovery especially the three Syriac Letters propagated by Bunsen were regarded as original. Lightfoot was also initially inclined to follow this hypothesis of the three letters whereas Baur argued against Bunsen that all the letters were forged. By contrast, in 1873 Zahn had defended the authenticity of the middle recension with its seven letters. Zahn’s position was finally corrected and endorsed by Lightfoot and put in a comprehensive and convincing historical context: he dates the martyrdom of Ignatius ‘within a few years of A.D. 110, before or after.’ As Ignatius presupposes a written Gospel, and cites the Gospel of Matthew and also is familiar with the spiritual world of the Johannine Corpus, indeed probably also knew the Gospel, we are given a terminus ad quem for these writings which matches Irenaeus’s information that the evangelist John of Ephesus and the Lord’s disciple lived until the time of Trajan (A.D. 98–117). The figure of Polycarp is of no little significance for this Johannine tradition, as Irenaeus refers to him as the bishop of Smyrna, who died as a martyr at an advanced age, as well as being a pupil of John and the apostles, and reports that he himself had heard him in his youth. The Tübingen scholars and German critics generally had to condemn the letter of Polycarp and the letter of the community of Smyrna with its report of the martyrdom of their bishop along with the letters of Ignatius: ‘It has been reserved for the feverish and restless criticism of our day to impugn its genuiness.’
As the letter of Polycarp to an abundant degree draws on the letters of Paul, but also very clearly at one point on 1 John and other Johannine traditions, for Lightfoot this is a clear indication that there can be no question of a ‘personal antagonism between St. Paul and St. John and an irreconcilable feud between their respective schools,’ as the Tübingen scholars claim. Here too, as with the letters of Ignatius: ‘If therefore the Epistle be accepted as genuine, the position of the Tübingen school must be abandoned.’ In his edition, the gifted historian now succeeds in bringing the disputed texts into the context of the history of the Roman province of Asia, pagan politics towards the Christians and the development of the church in the second century. At the same time he shows that he is a perceptive textual critic and exegete, an expert in Roman history down to the last detail and a master in the description of material, presenting all the essential texts in the original. Thus the five volumes of the Apostolic Fathers became a treasure chamber, the riches of which are inexhaustible even for today’s reader. In his refutation of Supernatural Religion he made good use of this work to combat attacks on the Gospels by demonstrating that in the second century the Gospels are far more widely and better attested than his opponents would concede. That was true not least of the Fourth Gospel also, and as scholarship has advanced it has completely confirmed this picture sketched out by Lightfoot. New texts which Lightfoot could not yet know, like the Gospel of Peter, the Egerton papyrus, Melito’s Homily on the Pascha, Ephraem’s Commentary on the Diatesseron (which has now been discovered in the original Syriac), the Syriac Odes of Solomon, the Epistula Apostolorum, a number of texts from Nag Hammadi and finally three further papyri of John from the second century, attest the age and the significance of the Fourth Gospel in this early period.
Balance was thus restored to the chronology of early Christian writings, and Harnack’s great history of early Christian literature down to Eusebius, which appeared between 1893 and 1904, i.e. a few years after Lightfoot’s premature death, often agreed with Lightfoot in decisive points of chronology. However, we have to add that this agreement was mainly over the extra-canonical literature of the second century.
6. Lightfoot’s Limitations and Merits and the Breakthrough of Historical Criticism in England
Here we come up against a limitation of the great scholar, which could not yet be overcome at that time either in New Testament scholarship in England or with leading conservatives in Germany like Theodor Zahn. This was a conception of the inviolability and authenticity of the canonical scriptures which still did not understand the widespread phenomenon of pseudepigraphy and because of too narrow an understanding of inspiration at this point applied modern moral criteria to the ancient writings. The canonical scriptures of the New Testament had to come from authors associated with them. It will be remembered that around the middle of the last century, when Lightfoot, Westcott, and Hort began their academic work, the possibility of biblical and theological criticism in Great Britain was still very much more limited than in Lutheran Germany. Just a few examples shall illustrate this: In 1836 the appointment of R. D. Hampden, a friend of Matthew Arnold, as professor in Oxford caused great rumor, because he was suspected of being ‘heretical’ and therefore ‘unfit to instruct the youth of Oxford.’ Eleven years later Prof. Hampden became the Bishop of Hereford and a fierce discussion about his orthodoxy broke out anew. A few years later, in 1853, Frederick Denison Maurice lost his chair at King’s College, London, because he ventured to doubt the eternity of the punishments in hell. At the same time the Bishop of Natal designate, Colenso, was reprimanded because he had agreed with Maurice and in 1863 he was subsequently deposed as bishop in South Africa because he had doubted some of the numerical information in the Pentateuch. Against this background we have to call Lightfoot and his friends, with their constant application of the philological-historical method, moderate liberals. Westcott doubted whether he could allow himself to be ordained priest because of the Arnold/Hampden affair, and Hort, an admirer of Maurice, was also deeply disturbed. In 1856 the Old Testament scholar Samuel Davidson had to give up his post at the Congregationalist Lancaster College because he doubted the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch. But in the long run, pressure for more freedom to deal with the biblical texts without the fear of church repression could not be resisted. The dispute over Essays and Reviews, which appeared in February 1860, with the arguments of various respected authors for a more flexible understanding of the doctrine of inspiration and a stronger historical perspective, once again aroused a storm of indignation. Hort was more inclined to see its positive side while Westcott wanted to attack it; Lightfoot wisely held back. He felt that his task lay not so much in excited discussion of general dogmatic problems, like the particularly controversial question of verbal inspiration, as in peaceful historical and philological argumentation. Lightfoot’s own philological work was largely fitting in line with the concept uttered by the Oxford philologist and commentator on St. Paul, B. Jowett: to ‘read the Bible like any other literature’—as to the ‘externals of interpretation.’ By resorting to this in principle he was implicitly avoiding the historical narrowness of an extremely doctrinal orthodoxy and resisting a conception of inspiration which was all too rigid. At the same time he saw very clearly that the progress of New Testament scholarship could not be held back by eternal church measurements; all that counted in this spiritual battle were the arguments arising from the texts themselves, which philologians and historians could see. According to an unpublished lecture manuscript Lightfoot taught students at Cambridge not to fear the application of philological and historical methods to Biblical texts: ‘The timidity which shrinks from the application of modern science or criticism to the interpretation of Holy Scripture, evinces a very unworthy view of its character. If the Scriptures are indeed true, they must be in accordance with every principle of whatever kind. It is against the wrong application of such principles, and against the presumption which pushes them too far, that we must protest. It is not much knowledge, but little knowledge that is the dangerous thing here as elsewhere. From the full light of science in criticism we have nothing to fear: the glimmering light—which rather deserves the name of darkness visible—hides and distorts the truth.’
So it is no wonder that Lightfoot’s relatively free application of philological and historical methods provoked furious attacks by the exponents of the literalist approach to the Bible. The Churchman considered his Commentary on Galatians as ‘a very painful instance of the boldness of unbelief in the present day’ and associated Lightfoot with Thomas Paine, Voltaire and Richard Carlile, and a certain E. B. Elliott, a distinguished Evangelical who was mostly interested in Biblical Prophecy, boldly interpreted the ‘Man of Sin’ in Second Thessalonians in the light of contemporary history. So not only Baur, but also Lightfoot was compared with the Antichrist.
The outcome of the controversies was finally to prove him right; in 1863 there appeared the first monograph by R. W. Mackay, The Tübingen School and its Antecedents, with the sub-title ‘A Review of the History and Present Condition of Modern Theology,’ which combined a sharp attack on the conservatism that prevailed in the Church of England and English theology with the demand ‘that the Tübingen School . . . , as representing the progressive spirit of true Protestantism and of sound learning, must be the basis of all future research in relation to the New Testament.’ In 1867 there followed a critical investigation of the Fourth Gospel and the Johannine corpus by John James Tayler which took its bearings completely from the modernistic Tübingen scholars, and then in 1874 came the anonymous and polemical Supernatural Religion which I have already mentioned several times. This caused Lightfoot to take up his pen to refute with historical critical arguments in the best sense this violent treatment of historical reality by an anonymous author who constantly appealed to the Tübingen scholars and other German writers. The breakthrough of historical criticism could no longer be stopped, or, as Robert Morgan has recently put it: ‘In the 1870s the iron curtain began to be lifted.’
With the support of a Theological Translation Fund fostered by liberal theologians, critical theological literature began to be translated into English and published. Among the first titles, Baur’s book on Paul appeared between 1873 and 1875, and in 1875 his Church History of the First Three Centuries. In 1882 Davidson, now an old man, produced the second edition of his Introduction to the Study of the New Testament in two volumes totaling around 1100 pages of text. ‘In his earlier treatment of the material (1848/49) the author still defended the authenticity of all the New Testament writings, including II Peter.’ Meanwhile he had changed his views radically. Like Supernatural Religion, he worked through the whole of German critical literature and largely followed the moderate criticism of Hilgenfeld. His wholly positive picture of the Tübingen school is significant: ‘Though this School as represented by Baur and Schwegler has carried its speculations too far, the important advance it has made in the criticism of the New Testament cannot be reversed. Modified it may be: but its mark upon early Christian literature is deep and permanent. In correcting its excesses moderation must be carefully preserved, for examples of backwardism are usually weak. A few faults of the ‘Tendenz-Kritik’ leave its basis secure.’ Supernatural Religion, also receives high praise: ‘The learned work furnishes efficient aid to rational inquiry, and deserves to be studied by all lovers of free investigation. The assaults which were made upon minor details leave its main position unharmed.’ The reference here was of course above all to Lightfoot’s attacks in The Contemporary Review. Lightfoot himself is mentioned only six times in the voluminous work; Westcott, who had written his very successful Introduction to the Study of the Gospels in 1851, is mentioned incidentally only once, and Hort not at all. In his refutation of Supernatural Religion Lightfoot mentions Davidson not even once, instead he is referring directly to the Tübingen critics. That despite—indeed perhaps because of—his dependence on German criticism Davidson did not defend his critical stand-point any more convincingly than the Tübingen scholars earlier is evident from his remarks on the attestation and dating of the Fourth Gospel. He follows the approach of Hilgenfeld, for whom he has particular respect, and puts it around 150. The letters of Ignatius are not treated any more graciously: ‘But the so-called Ignatius is not an apostolic father, and the productions bearing his name were not prior to the middle of the second century.’ Although Davidson’s work, in contrast to Supernatural Religion, could not have any great influence, since it was a technical theological textbook, it is important for progress of theological criticism, which after the 1860s was unstoppable in England also. Here reference was still made to the radical results of the Tübingen school whereas in Germany a moderate criticism had long since been established. The importance of Samuel Davidson for the development of critical New Testament scholarship in England is also unknown in Germany.
7. Lightfoot and the Fourth Gospel
In conclusion, one has to say that the continuation of historical research into early Christianity in the last century has proved both the Tübingen School and Lightfoot both right and wrong. The picture of the church and its literature in the second century still largely corresponds with the outhne which the Bishop of Durham drew for us. Moreover we must grant that he, and Irenaeus with him, are right in thinking that the Johannine corpus presumably came into being between the latter part of Domitian’s reign and the early period of the reign of Trajan. However, the question of authorship, which is still disputed hotly (or denied in resignation) is quite another matter. Nowadays only a minority still regards the apostle John, son of Zebedee, as the author and faces the difficult time of reconciling the strangely unreal statements of the Johannine Christ with the Synoptic logia tradition. The only possible expedient here is to assume that the disciple exercised the same creative freedom that Plato exercised in his later days towards his teacher Socrates. The Paraclete gives the disciples the freedom to project the exalted Christ in union with the Father on to the earthly Jesus. This approach was not yet open to Lightfoot, even if sometimes he wants to distinguish between historical event and evangelist’s comment. His unshakeable conviction that this most divine book was indeed the work of “the disciple whom Jesus loved” guaranteed him access to the ipsissima vox Christi, Jesus’ own testimony about his unity with the Father, his Incarnation, and his atoning death on the cross. Or, as Robert Morgan puts it in connection with Lightfoot’s interpretation of John: ‘If Jesus really was the incarnate Son of God, then it was natural to expect that honest historical research (as opposed to a tendentious rationalism which excluded the miraculous as an a priori) would reveal this.’
However, it is necessary to add here that in the first half of the nineteenth century in Germany too, the leading liberal theologians, above all Schleiermacher, argued for the originality of the Fourth Gospel. Schleiermacher’s lecture on the Life of Jesus, completely orientated on the Gospel of John, appeared posthumously in 1864, thirty-two years after they were given and were subjected to devastating criticism by Strauss. But in contrast to Schleiermacher, who as Albert Schweitzer put it, sought ‘not the Jesus of history, . . . but the Jesus Christ of his Glaubenslehre (translated into English as The Christian Faith),’ wisely and with restraint Lightfoot did not write any Life of Jesus or even give lectures on it in the light of what was historically possible. His argument for ‘the internal and external Evidence for the Authenticity and Genuineness of St. John’s Gospel’ posthumously put together from notes is most times convincing in connection with the external attestation to the Gospel in the second century, and the same is true with internal evidence, in so far as it demonstrates that in contrast to prevailing German criticism the author came from Palestine. The linguistic investigations of Schlatter, the parallels of Billerbeck and Odeberg, archaeological results and the discovery of texts—to mention just Qumran here—have endorsed this impression. But here too Lightfoot clearly saw the limitations of an historical argument.
If we are more restrained at this point than Lightfoot in our judgments on access to the historical Jesus and see the discourses of the Johannine Christ primarily as the development of the evangelist’s theory and not, say, the very words of Jesus, this is because of the further development of the historical method and theological reflection. The truth of Christ as the Λόγος θεοῦ revealed to us cannot be bound up with the human work of historical proof.
In a study published immediately after his death in The Expositor (February-March 1890), which goes back to lectures given in 1871, but which was prepared by Lightfoot for publication in 1889, the year in which he died, the great scholar stresses that he understood his argument for the originality and authenticity of the Fourth Gospel as secular historical work: ‘I have treated this as a purely critical question, carefully eschewing any appeal to Christian instincts. As a critical question I wish to take a verdict upon it. But as I could not have you think that I am blind to the theological issues . . . connected with it, I will close with this brief confession of faith.’ And then follow those much-quoted words:
‘I believe from my heart that the truth which this Gospel more especially enshrines—the truth that Jesus Christ is the very Word Incarnate—the manifestation of the Father to mankind is the one lesson which . . . will do more than all our feeble efforts . . . , the one study which can fitly prepare us for a joyful immortality hereafter.’
Here a clear distinction is made between the faith which is the basis of true life and salvation and ‘all our feeble efforts’—and who labored harder for historical truth than Lightfoot did? Over his plain bed in Auckland Castle hung a simple engraving by Durer with the inscription ‘Es ist vollbracht—it is finished.’ Bishop Moule, who tells us this, remarks: ‘To my dear Tutor, deep within the heart of his most noble life, the Incarnate Christ of Atonement and Resurrection was all in all—salvation, desire, motive, life, way, and end.’
Rightly understood, on this basis Joseph Barber Lightfoot, historian and theologian, Christian and bishop, can still become our tutor today.