as he received.  Still the issue is not inconsiderable:  for, upon the second hypothesis, if the editor of our present Gospel made use of that which was in the possession of Marcion, his date may be—­though it does not follow that it certainly would be—­thrown into the middle of the second century, or even beyond, if the other external evidence would permit; whereas, upon the first hypothesis, the Synoptic Gospel would be proved to be current as early as 140 A.D.; and there will be room for considerations which may tend to date it much earlier.  There will still be the third possibility that Marcion’s Gospel may be altogether independent of our present Synoptic, and that it may represent a parallel recension of the evangelical tradition.  This would leave the date of the canonical Gospel undetermined.

It is a fact worth noting that the controversy, at least in its later and more important stages, had been fought, and, to all appearance, fought out, within the Tuebingen school itself.  Olshausen and Hahn, the two orthodox critics who were most prominently engaged in it, after a time retired and left the field entirely to the Tuebingen writers.

The earlier critics who impugned the traditional view appear to have leaned rather to the theory that Marcion’s Gospel and the canonical Luke are, more or less, independent offshoots from the common ground-stock of the evangelical narratives.  Ritschl, and after him Baur and Schwegler, adopted more decidedly the view that the canonical Gospel was constructed out of Marcion’s by interpolations directed against that heretic’s teaching.  The reaction came from a quarter whence it would not quite naturally have been expected—­from one whose name we have already seen associated with some daring theories, Volkmar, Professor of Theology at Zuerich.  With him was allied the more sober-minded, laborious investigator, Hilgenfeld.  Both these writers returned to the charge once and again.  Volkmar’s original paper was supplemented by an elaborate volume in 1852, and Hilgenfeld, in like manner, has reasserted his conclusions.  Baur and Ritschl professed themselves convinced by the arguments brought forward, and retracted or greatly modified their views.  So far as I am aware, Schwegler is the only writer whose opinion still stands as it was at first expressed; but for some years before his death, which occurred in 1857, he had left the theological field.

Without at all prejudging the question on this score, it is difficult not to feel a certain presumption in favour of a conclusion which has been reached after such elaborate argument, especially where, as here, there could be no suspicion of a merely apologetic tendency on either side.  Are we, then, to think that our English critic has shown cause for reopening the discussion?  There is room to doubt whether he would quite maintain as much as this himself.  He has gone over the old ground, and reproduced the old arguments; but these arguments already lay before Hilgenfeld and Volkmar in their elaborate researches, and simply as a matter of scale the chapter in ‘Supernatural Religion’ can hardly profess to compete with these.