D. 66-70, may
have found themselves in possession of very different traditional
materials. Many circumstances tend to the conclusion that, in Asia
Minor, even the narrative part of the threefold tradition had a
formidable rival; and that, around this second narrative, teaching
traditions of a totally different order from those in the Synoptics,
grouped themselves; and, under the influence of converts imbued more
or less with the philosophical speculations of the time, eventually
took shape in the fourth Gospel and its associated literature.
XII. But it is unnecessary, and it would be out of place, for me to
attempt to do more than indicate the existence of these complex and
difficult questions. My purpose has been to make it clear that the
Synoptic problem must force itself upon every one who studies the
Gospels with attention; that the broad facts of the case, and some of
the consequences deducible from these facts, are just as plain to the
simple English reader as they are to the profoundest scholar.
One of these consequences is that the threefold tradition presents us
with a narrative believed to be historically true, in all its
particulars, by the major part, if not the whole, of the Christian
communities. That narrative is penetrated, from beginning to end, by
the demonological beliefs of which the Gadarene story is a specimen;
and, if the fourth Gospel indicates the existence of another and, in
some respects, irreconcilably divergent narrative, in which the
demonology retires into the background, it is none the less there.
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