Christianity and Morals by Edward Westermarck

THE thesis that moral judgments are based on retributive emotions may seem to have been a strange introduction to the discussion of the ethics of the New Testament with their doctrine of love and forgiveness. But I maintain that this thesis is nowhere confirmed more strongly than in the teaching of Jesus as recorded in the three synoptic gospels.

While the Gospel of John is of great value for the history of the teaching of the early Catholic Church and the edifice of Catholic doctrines based on it, it is now very generally admitted to be a comparatively late document which does not give us an authoritative account of the work and teaching of Jesus, but represents a tendentious interpretation of the tradition. The synoptic gospels are founded on a tradition about Jesus which had been preached and taught in the Church either orally or else in small collections capable of expansion. Almost all scholars are now agreed that the short Gospel of Mark, which is earlier than its two companions, has been one of their sources; but that they in addition used also another source, now lost, which has been designated Q. As regards the amount of reliable information which the three gospels contain, it has been pointed out that wherever we can observe the methods of the synoptists we see how little they valued strict accuracy in the reproduction of their authorities, and how fully they felt themselves justified in treating the details with literary freedom. There is no doubt that Jesus never uttered the discourses attributed to him, but that they are artificial compositions of which the most which we can hope is that they employ authentic logia. On closer examination these discourses break up into a number of disjointed sayings or, at best, into small groups of sayings, which appear to be for the most part the work of the primitive community or of the gospel redactors.