First issue of this Edition, March 1906 Reprinted May 1906, March 1907 revised throughout, October 1911

780802

225.5=2

PREFACE

The New Testament of our Lord Jesus Christ contains twenty-seven separate writings by at least ten different authors. They appeared at various times during a course of years. The order of their appearance was not that in which they have been arranged either in the authorized or in the revised English Bible, and in consequence the reader does not approach the New Testament in the same way as did the Christians of the earliest age of the Church. The lack of chronological arrangement does not lessen our knowledge of the historical facts and spiritual forces which lie at the basis of our common Christianity, but it may hinder our perfect sympathy with the first readers. For my own part I have long found it necessary in studying the beginnings of the Christian religion to attempt, with the assistance of modern scholarship, to arrange the writings of the New Testament in the order of their appearance, so far as that can be settled.

The arrangement which I have used privately for very many years has been adopted in this edition. In presenting it to English readers these remarks are necessary :—

(1) In the absence of all exact external evidence for the dates at which the various books of the New Testament were written, the arrangement in chronological order must contain an element of conjecture; it only represents what a consensus of conservative scholarship is inclined to accept as the true

one.

(2) While valid reasons could be given, if space permitted, for the arrangement of twenty-four books, I have to confess frankly that three occupy purely arbitrary places-the Letters of James and of Jude, and the Second Letter of Peter. The first of these appears to me to have come very early, but I am unable to determine its exact relative position; and while I do not accept the late date which many scholars have assigned to the Letter of Jude and to the Second Letter of Peter, I have placed them last simply because I cannot fix their exact place in the order of appearance.