It is quite thinkable, of course, that the compilers of the Gospels may have found such quasi-predictions already committed to writing, and merely embodied them. But that admission only carries us back to the problem of authenticity. If any current "scrap of paper" concerning "Jesus" or "the Lord" could thus secure canonicity, what trust is to be put in the canon? It is recorded in the history of Islam that Abu Daoud, who collected some half-a-million traditions concerning Mohammed, rejected all but 4,800, which included "the authentic, those which seem to be authentic, and those which are nearly so." [106] This again, it may be argued, proves that false traditions do not negate the historicity of the personage they concern. And that is clearly true. There may conceivably have been a Teacher in whose mouth many invented sayings were put even in his lifetime. But when we thus come to the historicity problem, there is simply no such basis in the Gospels as we have in the life of the confessedly "Illiterate Prophet." The Gospel life begins and ends in miracle, and it yields no intelligible evangel apart from that ostensibly founded on the sacrificial death--the death, that is, of the God.
Apart from the sacramental rite, the whole body of the Teaching is but a mass of incompatibilities, telling of a dozen standpoints, legalism and anti-legalism, Judaism and Gentilism, Davidism and non-Davidism, asceticism and the contrary, a meek Messiah and one claiming to be greater than Solomon, a Teacher vetoing invective and one freely indulging in it, a popular and unexplained Gospel for the masses who are declared to be purposely excluded from comprehension of that very Gospel, whereof the esoteric explanations yield nothing that could apply to the alleged propaganda.
Even self-contradictions, it may be argued, do not negate the authenticity of a teaching. Carlyle and Buskin abound in them; who escapes them? Many passages in the Koran are contradicted or abrogated by others, 225 verses being cancelled by later ones. [107] Here indeed there is plain ground for critical doubt; and some of us must emphatically decline to accept Muir's verdict, endorsing Von Hammer's, that "we may upon the strongest presumption affirm that every verse in the Koran is the genuine and unaltered composition of Mohammed himself." [108] But even if we are satisfied that Mohammed in his long life deliberately modified his doctrine, there is no room for such an explanation in the case of a teacher who is never once said to avow modification, and whose whole teaching career ostensibly covers but a year in the synoptic record.