Part II

THE MASTER KEY; NAMELY THAT THE NARRATIVE PARTS OF THE GOSPELS WERE WRITTEN SOON AFTER AND FOR THE MOST PART IMMEDIATELY AFTER THE EVENTS HAPPENED WHICH THEY RELATE ; AND THAT THE REPORTS OF CHRIST'S LONGER ADDRESSES WERE TAKEN DOWN AS THEY WERE SPOKEN.

Chapter I

ANCIENT CIVILIZATION AND THE PRACTICE OF WRITING

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EFORE proceeding with our proofs of the proposition which forms what we have called the Master Key of the problems, it is necessary to say something about the educational and literary conditions of the ancient world. For at the outset we are confronted by a great barrier of prejudice which must be broken through before we can hope to make any headway with our case. That 1900 years ago in Palestine a company of twelve men, several of whom were fishermen, and none of whom appear to have belonged to a high rank of society, should have made a practice of noting down from time to time the events they observed, and sometimes even taken reports of addresses as they were delivered, seems to most people so improbable, not to say absurd, that they will hardly listen to anything that may be said in its support.

D

At that time, it is said, hardly any one could write, and those who could write, unless writing were their special business, only did so on rare occasions, and to make notes from day to day of passing events would be so alien to people's habits that it cannot for one moment be supposed that it was ever done. As to taking down a discourse while it was being spoken, that would require a knowledge of shorthand, and shorthand is quite a modern invention, and certainly could not have been in use among the Jews in the first century of our era. We may not compare that early period in the history of the human race with this present age of light and civilization, or attribute to the simple state of society which existed then the customs and methods of the nineteenth century. With some such sentences as these is the subject liable to be lightly dismissed, and our first duty therefore is to try to remove the misconception from which they spring.

The archæological discoveries of recent years have thrown a new light on the civilizations of the ancient world. It is no longer permitted to us to think of the great nations of antiquity as of peoples in a state of ignorance and barbarism, among whom the art of writing, if in use at all, was a rare accomplishment and practised only by the learned few. It is now proved beyond all doubt that, ages before the time of Christ, writing was general and formed an essential element in the daily life of oriental communities.

The excavations in Egypt and Western Asia, which have been carried on with so much enthusiasm during this century, have disclosed immense stores of ancient documents, which not only record the history but reflect the manners and customs of nations long since extinct and forgotten.

A large proportion of these documents consist of tablets, originally made of soft clay, and for common use generally of the size and shape of a cake of soap. For writing on them a stylus-that is a pencil made of flint, bone or metal, with a sharp point—was used; the tablets were usually inscribed all over, and sometimes to economise space with letters so minute

After use they were

that it requires a glass to read them. allowed to dry and harden, and those of importance were usually baked, thus ensuring the permanence of the record. One of the most valuable deposits of tablets that has as yet been discovered is that which was found in 1885 among the mounds of Tel-el-Amarna in Egypt, and which Professor A. H. Sayce describes thus :-" They consist of clay tablets, inscribed with cuneiform writing of the Babylonian type, and in the Babylonian language. The tablets are copies of letters and dispatches from the Kings and Governors of Babylonia and Assyria, of Syria, Mesopotamia, and Eastern Kappadokia, of Phoenicia and Palestine, and they prove that all over the civilized East, in the Century before the Exodus, active literary intercourse was carried on through the medium of a common literary language, that of Babylonia, and the complicated Babylonian script. It is evident, therefore, that, throughout Western Asia, schools and libraries must have existed, in which clay tablets, inscribed with cuneiform characters, were stored up, and where the language and syllabary of Babylonia were taught and learned. Such a library must have existed in the Canaanitish city of Kirjath-Sepher, or Booktown (Judges i. 11), and, if its site can ever be recovered and excavated, we may expect to find there its collection of books written upon imperishable clay." (Records of the Past: New Series: Vol. 2, p. 58.)

Immense stores of tablets have also been found in the sites where, in ancient times, flourished the cities of Babylonia and Assyria. Great libraries have been opened up, filled with such documents, many of which have been brought to the centres of European learning, there to be patiently interpreted by those who have made it the business of their lives to study and decipher the long-forgotten languages and symbols in which they were written. Thus the world is learning anew the history of nations, some of whose very names had been for ages lost to the memory of man.

These documents, however, are not all of a historic or

official character. A large proportion of them, technically known as demotic, relate to matters of trade and everyday life, and many of them to most trivial transactions. (I have seen, in the collection of a friend, a tablet, dated 30th of the month Adar in the 34th year of Darius Hystaspes (B.C. 486), which is a memorandum of a payment for drink in two instalments of the value of 2/- and 3/6 respectively). It is impossible therefore to doubt that, long before the time of Christ, writing was in civilized countries practised by all classes of society and applied to the purposes of trade and social life just as it is to-day.

Ancient Pabyri

It has been ascertained that the Israelites, during the time they were settled in Palestine, made use principally of papyrus as the material whereon to write. Such manuscripts would long since have perished, and it is to be feared that no great discoveries will ever be made of Israelitish documents written during that period. The unique climate of Egypt however has preserved many ancient papyri, and from some of them an idea may be formed of the extent to which writing was practised, at a date not very distant from the Christian era, among people who were certainly not superior to the Jews in education and culture.

One especially interesting collection is that found at Gurob in the Fayyûm, to the West of the Nile valley, and of which a description is given by Professor Mahaffy in the New Review for November 1892. The greater part of the papers are dated from 260 to 223 B.C., but a few are dated as late as 186 B.C. Among them are not only fragments of literary works and official letters and records, but the correspondence, the business contracts, and the family papers of all sorts and conditions of men. They include, Professor Mahaffy informs us, letters from sons to fathers, letters from stewards giving accounts of their farms to their masters, wills, contracts, accounts -some those of tax-gatherers giving the sums paid to them, some those of contractors for the supply of fodder to horses,

food for drivers, and medicaments for curing hurts or lameness -many more are mere private accounts, generally scrawled on the back of some other document.

What gives this find especial interest for us is the class of people to whom the papers originally belonged. The Fayyûm though situated in Egypt was occupied by a colony of Greek mercenary soldiers who " were a population mixed in a most extraordinary way, being in fact the descendants either in blood or in habit of the soldiers of Alexander, who gathered under his standard all the enterprising spirits of his wide domains. Thus there lived side by side in the Fayyûm, speaking good Greek, and using Greek customs, not only Macedonians, the most privileged of all, but Thessalians, Thracians, Arcadians, Illyrians, Carians, Persians, Lycians, Campanians, Artolians, all remembering and specifying their original homes, which they had permanently abandoned." Professor Mahaffy goes on to remark, "We may say without ear of exaggeration that no settlement of soldiers in the present day would produce anything like so civilized a society -I mean of course of mercenary or professional soldiers, not of those citizen armies where soldiering is but a transitory phase in each man's life. But these veterans were soldiers and nothing else, and yet they show, when surprised in their everyday life, and their ordinary conversation, how widely diffused a thing Hellenistic culture was, and what an engine for civilizing the world."

The foregoing refers to only a small proportion of the vast mass of evidence-evidence which is being added to year by year with the progress of Oriental exploration-that the knowledge and civilization of the ancient world had attained a much higher level than, a few years ago, was deemed possible, and that, as regards the practice of writing, the lands of the East, prior to the time of Christ, were far in advance of European countries in the middle ages or of Oriental countries at the present day.

Discoveries such as these have been a severe blow to the