In the older, as well as in the current, books on church history, and at some points in New Testament introduction, patristics, and the history of doctrine, a certain work is referred to under the name of “Stephanus Gobarus.” The problems arising out of the quotations from this book are of great interest; but we are given virtually no information about the author beyond his name, and the book itself remains a complete mystery. Only the industry of Walch, in Part VIII of his “Entwurf einer vollständigen Historie der Ketzereien” (1778, pp. 877 ff.) has analyzed it, or, rather, made unsatisfactory and incorrect extracts from it, to which he has added a few observations of his own. With this exception, it seems as if ever since the tenth century scholars had entered into a conspiracy to maintain complete silence about this work, or at least to content themselves with a few scanty remarks.

In the following pages I shall endeavor to come closer to the work and its author. I do not undertake to give a commentary, for that would require a book; but shall confine myself to the main points, going into detail only with reference to passages that relate to the literature of the first three centuries.

The title of this article suggests the difference between our oldest gospel and our latest. The importance of the theme lies in the fact that this difference is not one of development, such, for instance, as the difference between the laws of Elizabeth's England and the common law of the United States, but is rather the difference of deep and pervasive contrariety and even of sharp and sweeping antagonisms. To the task of setting forth this fateful difference, which affects our common loyalty to the Master, and on the full recognition of which by the church depends in no small measure the future of our Christian faith, the following study is devoted.

“‘The fashion nowadays is to speak of the God in the heart and the God in the Universe.’ ‘Is it the same God?’ ‘Leave it at that,’ said Peter. ‘We don't know. All the waste and muddle in religion is due to people arguing and asserting that they are the same, that they are different but related, or that they are different but opposed. And so on and so on.’ & But the name of God was to Oswald a name battered out of all value and meaning.” So Mr. H. G. Wells, in “Joan and Peter,” muses over the present floating theology, where everybody talks about God, and nobody knows what anybody else is talking about. Mr. Wells himself has done his share of the battering, too. If scrupulous scholars of today have difficulty in determining the meaning of ‘Messiah’ and ‘Lord’ in the beginnings of Christianity, what will the twenty-fifth-century scholars think of the term ‘God’ as used in the twentieth? It is curious, though, that along with this confusion of meaning — in fact the thing which itself adds most to the confusion — is an assumption that ‘God’ is “a distinct and familiar kind of entity, like a dragon or centaur; its existence alone being problematical” (Perry, “Approach to Philosophy,” pp. 108 f.). As a matter of fact, what is now problematical, every time we read the word ‘God,’ is what that word means to the man who has written it. Of course it is a large concept, vague around the edges, and variable with varying moods; but what is central and constant in it? Supposing one says that God suffers, or that God cannot suffer, one needs to have some fairly clear idea what it primarily is that suffers or cannot suffer. We can argue indefinitely and disagree eternally about what qualities God has, unless at least we can agree on a primary definition of the subject — what we mean by God in the first place. Several such primary definitions are now current: it is our purpose here to suggest that Christian theology at any rate, and probably most of our theism, tends to a use of one of these, and that it would be well to use it more clearly, consciously, and consistently in the future.

Since the time of Griesbach it has been generally recognized that the main problem of textual criticism in the New Testament is due to the existence of three distinct types of text, the Neutral, Western, and Syrian (or Antiochian). The great contributions of Westcott and Hort were the clear delineation of this problem and the establishment in considerable detail of the Neutral text. The Western text they only indicated in outline, and the Antiochian text was left with little further definition than that already provided by the Textus Receptus.