[130] We have hitherto left wholly out of count Dr. Moffatt's attitude to the First Epistle of Peter, an attitude which is so enigmatic and confusing as to defy definition or comprehension, and to evade all inferences.

Nominally he with much hesitation calls this Epistle the work of St. Peter: practically he assigns it in so great a degree to some one else, that we learn nothing from it about the Apostle's personality. Hence it becomes possible for the Author at once to make Peter the source from which emanated this great Epistle, and yet to maintain a few pages earlier in the same Chapter iii., that the writer whose name the Epistle bears is as a man less known to us than Papias or Hegesippus. Hence, too, he can assert that, after Paul, "a mist lies over [131] the early Church, which is hardly dissipated by the recognition of Luke as the author of the Third Gospel 1 and Acts, or of a John in Asia Minor, with whom some of the 'Johannine' writings may be connected". Hence, finally, he can class the Epistle as first, and presumably as thoroughly characteristic, among "the pastorals and homilies . . . which are obviously sub-Pauline, which must have been composed during the last thirty years of the first century and the opening decades of the second, which can be approximately grouped and in some cases dated, but which elude any attempt to fix them down to a definite author".

What are we to make out of this tissue of contradictions? The obscurity only becomes [132] more dense as we go more minutely into details. The "pastoral" called First Peter is classed among the works composed between A.D. 70 and say 120, first in the class; and yet on page 339 Dr. Moffatt cannot induce himself to abandon "the traditional terminus ad quem of Peter's life," viz. A.D). 67. Now the difference' between a date some short time before 67 and some (short) time after 70 is not a mere question of a few years up or down in a uniform period: it means the choice between two markedly different periods.

To take another example of the obscurity and (one almost says) self-contradiction, we find on page 315 that " the traditions of the next century, such as they are, yield little or no data" to guide us regarding this class of Homilies and Pastorals, and " it is seldom certain whether such traditions are much more than imaginative deductions from the writings themselves". It is open to some critics to use this language about a class of documents in which First Peter is included; but Dr. Moffatt is barred out from it by his own admissions and opinions. "The Epistle," he says, [133] "was familiar to Polycarp." 2 Polycarp died at the age of 86 in 155 or 166 AD.; 3 and his testimony to the Epistle of "Peter, an Apostle of Jesus Christ, to the elect, etc. ," is the evidence of one whose knowledge reached back into the first century. Prof. Harnack is free to set aside this testimony as valueless, because he regards the introductory address as a spurious addition; but Dr. Moffatt disagrees with him, and after some slight hesitation pronounces the address original and genuine; and [134] if that is so, then the testimony must rank as of the very highest character known in ancient literature. Dr. Moffatt must stand by his own opinions, and not hold them in one page only to reject them in another.

So also with the testimony of Papias, who "knew and used the Epistle" (p.337). Why does Dr. Moffatt desert his favourite Papias here? Why not use as evidence for the character of Peter the Epistle which Papias knew and used? Is it because the matter is certain in this case, whereas in regard to John's death the evidence of Papias, to which he attaches such value, depends on the ingenious combination of two uncertain references in two absolutely worthless late writers, who stand convicted of other errors in the same sentences in which they mention Papias? It is a curious fact about some scholarly minds, which I have observed and commented on many years before the name of Dr. Moffatt was known to the world, that they sometimes tend to value evidence not in proportion to its real weight, but in proportion to the ingenuity required to obtain or manu- [135] facture it. Where we know Papias on the indisputable authority of Eusebius, Dr. Moffatt passes him lightly by. Where we know him only on the strength of uncertain interpretation and comparison of obscure words, used by George the Sinful and a late Epitomizer to support the common opinion, Dr. Moffatt regards him with the highest respect as vouching for the contrary opinion.

One might go on citing cases in the Section on First Peter where the supposition rejected on one page is used as an argument in another; but it is needless to continue such ploughing of the sand. The method of the Section is misleading; the reasoning is involved and not unified, and the only cause which I can see is that Dr. Moffatt does not like the conclusion to which he is driven, viz. that the "Petrine origin . . . probably will carry the day" (p.344). This slight, so to say, subconscious dislike appears in such an expression as that on pages 333 - 4: "this or almost any form of the pseudonym-hypothesis is legitimate and indeed deserving of serious consideration in view of the [136] enigmatic data of the writing". This is a noteworthy sentence, revealing a bias of which Dr. Moffatt is probably quite unconscious.

For my own part I should unhesitatingly venture to regard the problem of First Peter as among the simplest in character, the least complicated by varying shades in the "data," the most distinct and certain as regards result, of all the questions regarding the books of the New Testament; and to an unusual degree "the evidence for the existence and authority of the Epistle in the Church," as Dr. Moffatt says, "is both ample and early". Here, if anywhere, the pseudonym-hypothesis is extravagant, unjustifiable, the issue of an unregulated judgment which fails to distinguish clearly between the probable, the improbable, and the impossible.

Hence Dr. Moffatt, so far as he reaches a conclusion, puts it as follows in the least indefinite and most personal expression of opinion that I can find, "This may stamp the Epistle, if one choose to say so, as semi-pseudonymous" (p. 333) -- a quaint and yet characteristic statement, [137] which can be used by the Author to support almost any train of reasoning, but which we cannot use without finding ourselves -- whatever line we take -- in contradiction with something which the Author says on some page or other of his discussion about Peter.

He says that "the dominant note of the Epistle is hope, but it would be unsafe to argue from the tone of a practical Epistle . . . to the character of the writer . . . as if the virtue of hope was specially prominent in his personality". Yet in the next paragraph he goes on to say that "a writing like this reveals a man's personality in several aspects, and one of these aspects is a warm, hopeful spirit" (p. 321). How can it be right to see in the Epistle the revelation of a warm hopeful spirit, and yet to caution the reader against inferring that hope was prominent in the writer's personality? What are we to make of this?

Vain every mesh this Proteus to enthral.

I feel inclined to hazard the conjecture that Dr. Moffatt wrote the. former paragraph under [138] the influence of a critic who was enforcing the sound principle that a letter-writer often laid stress on some topic, not because it was specially characteristic of his own nature, but because it was what his correspondents most needed and lacked; and that he wrote the second paragraph under the influence of another critic who practised the equally right method of using a letter as an indication of character. It requires judgment, good sense, and above all a firm grasp of the personality of the letter-writer, to know when to use one and when the other of two equally sound principles. You cannot attain to a healthy and guiding criticism without exercising common sense. Now in this case Dr. Moffatt on his own showing and declaration lacks one of the needed elements in sound consistent criticism: he has never got hold of the personality of Peter, who is to him little more than a name, or rather a "semipseudonym". Without that firm grasp it is vain to criticize literature, for the criticism must become like "autumn trees without fruit, twice dead, plucked up by the roots, clouds without [139] water carried along by winds” -- unerquicklich wie der Nebelwind.

I must not, however, pass from this subject without adding that there are many interesting and useful remarks about the character and spirit of the Epistle, and that here and elsewhere Dr. Moffatt often shows his remarkable power of introducing apt and pertinent quotations from many writers. lie has read so much and so carefully that his best paragraphs approximate to a cento of striking things quoted from a vast variety of sources.

FOOTNOTES:

1 I find that I have unconsciously altered Dr. Moffatt's usage in regard to capitals in many cases. He spells gospel, apostle, church, etc., always with small initial letters. One might have thought that the distinction between church, a mere building, and church as the idea, was worth observing and that the Gospel of Luke was as deserving of a capital as the Acts of the Apostles. Having begun with this spelling, I may be permitted to continue it to the end.

2 Dr. Moffatt uses the spelling Polykarp and has a strange preference for such anomalous and impossible forms as Illyrikum (p. 144) and Ikonium. it is allowable and right to prefer the Greek spelling Ikonion to the Latin form Iconium, but he must choose one of the two. Ikonium is a hybrid; Illyrikum is worse: the form Illyricum is Latin: Illyris is the proper Greek, used by Ptolemy, and Illyrikon is used only by Greek writers dominated by the Latin form, such as Paul and Dio Cassius. This is pointed out, I think, in my "Histor. Commentary on Galatians"; but I am writing far from books, and cannot verify. Illyrikum is an outcast, rejected by gods and men. Polykarpos is a correct form; but Polykarp, though less unjustifiable than Ikonium, is not pleasing. [See p. 277.]

3 There is evidence against the date 166 to use, disregarded by or unknown to the recent champions of that date.