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:—

It is not quite clear whether Dr. Petrie meant here to claim not only that the so-called Logia Iesou published in 1897 and 1904 are anterior to and independent of the Gospels (though found only in third-century MSS.), but that they are on the same footing of credibility with the Gospels. This, however, seems inevitably to follow from his position, though it appears to suggest to him no difficulty about the general historicity of the Gospel story, which he too takes for granted. Let us then note the problems raised.

A main feature of Dr. Petrie’s inquiry is that, following Professor Blass, he insists on making the predictions of the fall of Jerusalem part of the early documentary matter collected in the “Nucleus” which for him is the equivalent of Weiss’s Primitive Gospel. The argument of Blass2 is drawn from the case of Savonarola, who in 1496 predicted that Rome would be sacked, and that horses would be stabled in the churches, as actually happened in the year 1527. If such a prophecy could be made and fulfilled in one case, urges Blass, it might be in another; hence there can be no rigorous application of the canon, Omne vaticinium post eventum, which has been relied on by the modern school of critical theologians. Dr. Petrie appears to have made no investigation of his own, being content to quote and support Blass; and the point is well worth critical consideration.

Let us premise that scientific criticism, which has no concern with Unitarian predilections, stands quite impartially towards the question of Gospel dates. The modern tendency to carry down those dates, either for the whole or for any parts of the Gospels, towards or into the second century, is originally part of the general “liberal” inclination to put a Man in place of a God, though some believers in the God acquiesce as to the lateness of the act of writing. Those who have carried on the movement have always presupposed the general historicity of the Teacher, and have been concerned, however unconsciously, to find a historical solution which saved that presupposition. The rational critic, making only the naturalist presupposition, is committed to no set of documentary dates. And he is not at all committed to the denial that an inductive historic prediction, as distinguished from a supernaturalist prophecy, may be made and fulfilled. Many have been. Much has been said of the “marvellous prescience” of Burke in predicting that the anarchy of the French Revolution would end in a tyranny. He was in fact merely inferring, as he well might, that what had happened in the history of ancient Rome and in the history of England would happen in France. By a similar historical method several French and other writers in the eighteenth century reached the forecast of the revolt of the American colonies from Britain without getting any credit for divine inspiration. And so, perhaps, might Savonarola at the end of the fifteenth century predict a sack of Rome, and a Jew in the first century a sack of Jerusalem.

But let us see what Savonarola actually did. He was, so to speak, a professional prophet, and while he predicted not only a sack of Rome but his own death by violence, he also, by the admission of sympathetic biographers, put forth many vaticinations of an entirely fantastic character. Here again he might very well have a Jewish prototype. For us the first question is, What did he actually predict in history, and how and why did he predict it? In 1494 he seems to have predicted the French invasion which took place in that year. Villari asserts that he did so in the sermons he preached in Lent, but admits that “it is impossible to ascertain the precise nature” of the sermons in question.3 Father Lucas goes further, and points out that there is no trace in them of the alleged prophecy4 which Savonarola in his Compendium Revelationum (1495) claims to have made but does not date. Villari further admits that the sermons of that year are so badly reported

Villari nevertheless is satisfied of it on internal grounds, and we may accept his estimate. The main allegation is that in 1494 Savonarola, who had for years been preaching that national sin would elicit divine chastisement,

Here there is obvious confusion, apart from the fact that the predicted regeneration and unification of the church never took place. The invader is to do no fighting, and yet so much blood will be shed that everywhere the people of Italy will be thinned. Are we, then, to believe that the “Cyrus” prediction was made at the same time? Is there not ground for suspicion that it was interpolated post eventum, in the Latin report? The only alternative solution seems to be that Villari or the Italian compiler has mixed prophecies of different years. In his sermon of November 1, 1494, Savonarola speaks of the French invasion as the “scourge” he had predicted6—an odd way of speaking of one promised before as “the Lord’s anointed,” even though the French host is said to be “led by the Lord.” In any case his own claim to have predicted of “Cyrus” is unsupported by evidence, and, even if accepted, does not involve a date earlier than 1493–4.7

To predict the invasion of Italy by Charles VIII of France in Lent of 1494, or even late in 1493, was easy enough.8 The invasion had been fully prepared, and was expected, even as was the Armada in the England of 1588. Savonarola was very likely to have inside knowledge of the scheme, and the Pope positively charged him with having helped to engineer it. Florence in effect received Charles as a friend. There had been, further, abundant discussion of the expedition both in France and Italy long before it set out. Guicciardini tells that wise Frenchmen were very apprehensive about it, and that Ferdinand of Naples reckoned that it must fail. Fail it finally did. Savonarola might even predict that the invader would not be resisted, for there was no force ready in Italy to repel that led by Charles, with its great train of artillery. It is an extreme oversight of Villari’s to allege9 that in the autumn, “unexpectedly as a thunderclap from a clear sky, came the news that a flood of foreign soldiery was pouring down from the Alps to the conquest of Italy.... All felt taken unawares.” This assertion is completely exploded by the record of Guicciardini, and no historian will now endorse it. Lodovico Sforza, Duke of Milan, had incited Charles to the invasion; the preparations had been open and extensive; and they had been abundantly discussed both in France and Italy.10 The statement that “the Friar alone had foreseen the future” is absolute myth.

The fact remains that the invasion was not resisted, and that Rome was “captured” in the sense of being entered by Charles, who did no military damage and marched out again. But when Charles proceeded to withdraw from Italy, having effected nothing, a battle was fought and won by him. It was two years later that Savonarola, acting on his standing doctrine that sin in high places must elicit divine vengeance, resumed his predictions of disaster to Rome, whose Pope was his enemy. As it happened, 1496 was again a year of expected invasions. Charles, now the ally of Florence, was announced to be preparing for a second inroad, and the apprehensive Sforza invited and furthered the intervention of the emperor Maximilian as he had before invited Charles. Predictions were again to be expected; at Bologna at least one was actually made; and the prophet, one Raffaele da Firenzuola, was tortured and banished.11 Charles gave up his plan, but Maximilian came, albeit with a small force, and was welcomed by the Pisans.

It was before the coming of Maximilian12 that Savonarola resumed his prophecy of the coming scourge in a series of sermons, in one of which he announces that Italy will be overwhelmed because she is full of sanguinary deeds; that Rome will be besieged and trampled down; and that because her churches have been full of harlots they will be made “stables for horses and swine, the which will be less displeasing to God than seeing them made haunts of prostitutes.... Then, O Italy, trouble after trouble shall befall thee; troubles of war after famine, troubles of pestilence after war.” Again, in another sermon: “There will not be enough men left to bury the dead; nor means enough to dig graves.... The dead will be heaped in carts and on horses; they will be piled up and burnt.... And the people shall be so thinned that few shall remain.”13 At the same time he repeatedly predicted his own death by violence.

On the latter head he had abundant reason for his forecast. On the former it is very certain that he was not thinking of something that was not to happen for thirty years. Again and again he assured his hearers and his correspondents that his predictions were to be fulfilled “in our time.” Towards the end of 1496 he described himself as “The servant of Christ Jesus, sent by him to the city of Florence to announce the great scourge which is to come upon Italy, and especially upon Rome, and which is to extend itself over all the world in our days and quickly.”14 In 1497, in a letter to Lodovico Pittorio, chancellor to d’Este, after speaking of the Lord’s prediction of the fall of Jerusalem, he writes: “Great tribulations are always [i.e. in the Scriptures] predicted many years before they come. Yet I do not say that the tribulations which I have foretold will be so long in coming; nay, they will come soon; indeed I say that the tribulation has already commenced.”15

Yet again, in 1498, he claims in a sermon that “a part has come to pass,” noting that “in Rome one has lost a son”—a reference to the murder of the Duke of Gandia, son of the Pope; and adding that “you have seen who has died here, and I could tell you, an I would, who is in hell”—supposed to be a reference to Bernardo del Nero.16 All this was in terms of Savonarola’s theological and Biblical conception of things, the ruling political philosophy of his age, as of many before. Wickedness and injustice, fraud and oppression, were dominant in high places, and God must of necessity punish, in the fashion in which he was constantly described as doing so in the Sacred Books, from the Deluge downwards. In Savonarola’s view the cup of Rome’s abominations was full, and punishment had been earned by the men then living, in particular by Pope Alexander.

Within two years Savonarola had been put to death, after many tortures; and Alexander died in 1503 (not by poison, as the tradition goes) without having seen the predicted desolation. It was under the more respectable of the two Medicean Popes that Rome was twice sacked in 1527 by the forces of Charles V; and though there had been infinite slaughter and pestilence in Italy, the regeneration and reunion of Christendom predicted by Savonarola did not follow. When no reform whatever had followed on the French invasion he had explained that his prediction in that case was subject to conditions. Yet he announced that his prophecy of the conversion of the Turks was unconditional, declaring at the close of the Compendium Revelationum that it would be fulfilled in fifteen years, and assuring his hearers in 1495 that some of them would live to see the fulfilment.17