To the open-minded reader it must be already plain that, unless we are to be led into mere chaos, there must at once be added to the statistical test either the proviso that given sayings may for the purposes of certain sections of the Church have been left out in certain Gospels, or that for the purposes of certain sections they may have been invented. And the moment such a concession is made, the primary assumption of necessary authenticity is destroyed. If the anti-Samaritan precept is the utterance of the Founder, the pro-Samaritan parable is not; or else the Founder was literally all things to all men. If either could be foisted on a gospel, anything could be; and the futile historical argument to save the prediction of the fall of Jerusalem--an argument proceeding, as we have seen, on a quite uncritical view of one uninvestigated and loosely described case--becomes doubly irrelevant. Dr. Petrie's Nucleus of triple tradition contains the prophecy:--
The Son of Man shall be betrayed unto the chief priests and unto the scribes, and they shall condemn him to death, and shall deliver him to the Gentiles to mock, and to scourge, and to crucify him; and the third day he shall rise again.
Is that to be salved as historical, on the pretext that Blass has by the case of Savonarola "exploded the dogma" of omne vaticinium post eventum, or is to be salved by the plea that Savonarola, like Lincoln, predicted his own death at the hands of his enemies? And if prudence perforce abandons that course, why was the vaguer prophecy about Jerusalem sought to be salved at all? Why was not the miracle prediction included in the Savonarola argument? Considered as a whole, the other is not at all a bare prediction of the sacking of a city, fortuitously fulfilled forty years after utterance: it is a Messianic judgment, carrying a whole eschatology bound up with it. [104] And the fact that different gospels give it differently is not to be rationally explained by Professor Blass's device of saying that Jesus must have said a great deal more still, and that Luke selected what would appeal to Gentiles, while Matthew and Mark omitted what would give pain to Jews. This conception of evangelists playing fast and loose with the known divine oracles to suit men's susceptibilities ought to be disturbing to any believer's moral sense; while that of a set of propagandists inventing oracles to suit their own religious aim puts the Gospel-makers in a line with the whole succession of Jewish and early Christian framers of supposititious documents, as men of their age, well-meaning, narrow, deluded, devoted.