Throughout the whole debate, even in the case of scholars who profess to be loyal to induction, we find that there is a presupposition upon which induction has no effect. Bernhard Weiss, quoting from Holtzmann the profoundly subversive proposition that "Christianity has been 'book-learning' from the beginning," in reply "can only say, God be praised that it is not so." Yet the real effect of his own research is to show us much--to show that there was no oral evangel, that the formula of "the kingdom of heaven" is but a phrase to fill a blank. Even candid inquirers who see the difficulty, like Samuel Davidson, leave it unsolved. Says Davidson:--
When we try to form a correct view of Jesus's utterances regarding this Kingdom of God, we find they have much vagueness and ambiguity. Their differences also in the Synoptic Gospels and the fourth are so apparent that the latter must be left out of account in any attempt to get a proper sketch of Jesus's hopes. His apostles and other early reporters misunderstood some of His sayings, making them crasser. Oral tradition marred their original form. This is specially the case with respect to the enthusiastic hopes about the kingdom He looked for. But as the ideal did not become actual we must rest in the great fact that the Christianity He introduced was the nucleus of a perfect system adapted to universal humanity. [46]
"We must" do no such thing. We "must" draw a licit inference. The alleged great fact is morally a chimera, and historically a hallucination. To admit that all the evidence collapses, and then to posit the visionary gospel with a "must," is to abandon critical principle. The "must" is simply the eternal presupposition. And the choice of the sincere student "must" be between that negation of science and a fresh scientific search, from which the presupposition, as such, is excluded. If it can reappear as a licit conclusion, so be it. But it has never yet so arisen.
A very interesting attempt to bring the synoptic problem to a new critical test has latterly been made by Dr. Flinders Petrie in his work, The Growth of the Gospels as shown by Structural Criticism (1910). His starting point is the likelihood that logia, analogous to the non-canonical fragments discovered in recent years, were the original material from which the Gospels were built up. The hypothesis is prima facie quite legitimate, there being nothing to repel it. As he contends, there is now evidence that writing was in much more common use in some periods of antiquity than scholars had formerly supposed; and scraps of writing by non-scholarly persons, he argues, may have been widely current in the environment with which we are concerned. All the while he is founding on data from the Egypt of the third century for a Palestinian environment of the first; and he is obliged to stress the point that Matthew the tax-gatherer was a "professional scribe," while his argument runs that Matthew used the detached jottings of other people, not his own. But let us follow out his thesis:--