St Luke The Physician
In the midst of what has been called the higher criticism of the Bible
in recent times, one of the long accepted traditions that has been most
strenuously assailed and, indeed, in the minds of many scholars, seemed,
for a time at least, quite discredited, was that St. Luke the
Evangelist, the author of the Third Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles,
was a physician. Distinguished authorities in early Christian
apologeti
s have declared that the pillars of primitive Christian
history are the genuine Epistles of St. Paul, the writings of St. Luke,
and the history of Eusebius. It is quite easy to understand, then, that
the attack upon the authenticity of the writings usually assigned to St.
Luke, which in many minds seemed successful, has been considered of
great importance. In the very recent time there has been a decided
reaction in this matter. This has come, not so much from Roman
Catholics, who have always clung to the traditional view, and whose
great Biblical students have been foremost in the support of the
previously accepted opinion, but from some of the most strenuous of the
German higher critics, who now appreciate that destructive, so-called
higher criticism went too far, and that the traditional view not only
can be maintained, but is the only opinion that will adequately respond
to all the new facts that have been found, and all the recently gathered
information with regard to the relations of events in the olden time.
By far the most important contribution to the discussion in recent
years came not long since from the pen of Professor Adolph Harnack, the
professor of church history in the University of Berlin. Professor
Harnack's name is usually cited as that of one of the most destructive
of the higher critics. His recent book, however, Luke the
Physician,[33] is an entire submission to the old-fashioned viewpoint
that the writer of the Third Gospel and of the Acts of the Apostles was
a Greek fellow-worker of St. Paul, who had been in company for years
with Mark and Philip and James, and who had previously been a physician,
and was evidently well versed in all the medical lore of that time.
Harnack does not merely concede the old position. As might be expected,
his rediscussion of the subject clinches the arguments for the
traditional view, and makes it impossible ever to call it in question
again. It is easy to understand how important are such admissions when
we recall how much this traditional view has been assailed, and how
those who have held it have been accused of old-fogyism and lack of
scholarship, and unwarranted clinging to antiquated notions just because
they thought they were of faith, and how, lacking in true scholarship,
seriously hampering genuine investigation, such conservatism has been
declared to be.
The question of Luke's having been a physician is an extremely valuable
one, and no one in our time is better fitted by early training and long
years of study to elucidate it than Professor Harnack. He began his
excursions into historical writing years ago, as I understand, as an
historian of early Christian medicine. Some of his works on medical
conditions just before and after Christ are quoted confidently by the
distinguished German medical historians. From this department he
graduated into the field of the higher criticism. He is eminently in a
position, therefore, to state the case with regard to St. Luke fully,
and to indicate absolutely the conclusions that should be drawn from the
premises of fact, writings, and traditions that we have. He does so in a
very striking way. Perhaps no better example of his thoroughly lucid and
eminently logical mode of argumentation is to be found than the
paragraph in which he states the question. It might well be recommended
as an example of terse forcefulness and logical sequence that deserves
the emulation of all those who want to write on medical subjects. If we
had more of these characteristic qualities of Harnack's style, our
medical literature, so called, would not need to occupy so many pages of
print as it does--yet would say more. Here it is:
St. Luke, according to St. Paul, was a physician. When a
physician writes a historical work it does not necessarily
follow that his profession shows itself in his writing; yet it
is only natural for one to look for traces of the author's
medical profession in such a work. These traces may be of
different kinds: 1, The whole character of the narrative may
be determined by points of view, aims, and ideals which are
more or less medical (disease and its treatment); 2, marked
preference may be shown for stories concerning the healing of
diseases, which stories may be given in great number and
detail; 3, the language may be colored by the language of
physicians (medical technical terms, metaphors of medical
character, etc.). All these three groups of characteristic
signs are found, as we shall see, in the historical work which
bears the name of St. Luke. Here, however, it may be objected
that the subject matter itself is responsible for these
traits, so that their evidence is not decisive for the medical
calling of the author. Jesus appeared as a great physician and
healer. All the evangelists say this of Him; hence it is not
surprising that one of them has set this phase of His ministry
in the foreground, and has regarded it as the most important.
Our evangelist need not therefore have been a physician,
especially if he were a Greek, seeing that in those days
Greeks with religious interests were disposed to regard
religion mainly under the category of healing and salvation.
This is true, yet such a combination of characteristic signs
will compel us to believe that the author was a physician if,
4, the description of the particular cases of disease shows
distinct traces of medical diagnosis and scientific knowledge;
5, if the language, even where questions of medicine or of
healing are not touched upon, is colored by medical
phraseology; and, 6, if in those passages where the author
speaks as an eye-witness medical traits are especially and
prominently apparent. These three kinds of tokens are also
found in the historical work of our author. It is accordingly
proved that it proceeds from the pen of a physician.
The importance of the concession that Luke was a physician should be
properly appreciated. His whole gospel is written from that standpoint.
For him the Saviour was the healer, the good physician who went about
curing the ills of the body, while ministering to people's souls. He has
more accounts of miracles of healing than any of the other Evangelists.
He has taken certain of the stories of the other Evangelists who were
eye-witnesses, and when they were told in naive and popular language
that obscured the real condition that was present, he has retold the
story from the physician's standpoint, and thus the miracle becomes
clearer than ever. In one case, where Mark has a slur on physicians,
Luke eliminates it. In a number of cases the correction of Mark's
popular language in the description of ailments is made in terms that
could not have been used except by one thoroughly versed in the Greek
medical terminology of the times. As a matter of fact, there seems to be
no doubt now that Luke had been, before he became an Evangelist, a
practising physician in Malta of considerable experience. His testimony,
then, to the miracles is particularly valuable as almost a medical
eye-witness.
In medical science, St. Luke's time was by no means barren of knowledge.
The Alexandrian school of medicine had done some fine work in its time.
It was the first university medical school in the world's history, and
there dissection was first practised regularly and publicly for the sake
of anatomy, and even the vivisection of criminals who were supplied by
the Ptolemei for human physiology, was a part of the school curriculum.
A number of important discoveries in brain anatomy are attributed to
Herophilus, after whom the torcular herophili within the skull is named,
and who invented the term calamus scriptorius for certain appearances
in the fourth ventricle. His colleague, Erasistratus, the co-founder of
this school at Alexandria, did work in pathological anatomy, and laid
the foundation for serious study there. For three centuries there is
some good worker, at or in connection with Alexandria, whose name is
preserved for us in the history of medicine. Other Greek schools of
medicine in the East, as, for instance, that of Pergamos, also did
excellent work. Galen is the great representative of this school, and he
came in the century after St. Luke. A physician educated in Greek
medicine at that time, then, would be in an excellent position to judge
critically of the miracles of healing of the Christ, and it would seem
to have been providential that Luke was called for this purpose.
The evidence for his membership of our profession will doubtless be
interesting to all physicians. Some of the distinctive passages in which
Luke's familiarity with medical terms to such an extent that to express
his meaning he found himself compelled to use them, will appeal at once
to these, for whom such terms are part of everyday speech. The use of
the word hydropikos, which is not to be met with anywhere else in the
New Testament, nor in the non-medical Greek literature of that time,
though the word is of frequent occurrence as a designation for a person
suffering from dropsy (and always, as in Luke, the adjective for the
substantive), in Hippocrates, Dioscorides, and Galen is a typical
example.
Where such vague terms as paralyzed occur Luke does not use the familiar
word, but the medical term that meant stricken with paralysis,
indicating not any inability to use the limbs, but such a one as was due
to a stroke of apoplexy. We who, as physicians, have heard of so many
cures of paralysis from our friends, the Eddyites, are prone to ask, as
the first question, what sort of a paralysis it was. Luke made inquiries
from men who were eye-witnesses, and then has described the scene with
such details as convinced him as a physician of the reality of the
miracle, and his description was meant to carry conviction to the minds
of others.
Occasionally St. Luke uses words which only a physician would be likely
to know at all. That is to say, even a man reasonably familiar with
medical terminology and medical literature would not be likely to know
them unless he had been technically trained. One of these is the word
sphudron, a word which is only medical, and is not to be found even in
such large Greek lexicons of ordinary words as that of Passow. Sphudron
is the anatomical term of the Graeco-Alexandrian school for the condyles
of the femur. Galen and other medical authors use it, and Luke, in
giving the details of the story of the lame man cured, in the third
chapter of the Acts, seventh verse, selects it because it exactly
expresses the meaning he wished to convey. In this story there are a
number of added medical details. These are all evidently arranged so as
to give the full medical significance to the miracle. For instance, the
man had been lame from birth, literally from the womb of his mother.
At this time he was forty years of age, an age at which the spontaneous
cure of such an ailment or, indeed, any cure of it, could scarcely be
expected, if, during the preceding time, there had been no improvement.
In the story of the cure of Saul's blindness Luke says in the Acts that
his blindness fell from him like scales. The figure is a typically
medical one. The word for fall that is used is, as was pointed out by
Hobart (Medical Language of St. Luke, Dublin, 1882), exactly the term
that is used for the falling of scales from the body. The term for
scales is the specific designation of the particles that fall from the
body during certain skin diseases or after certain of the infectious
fevers, as in scarlet fever. Hippocrates and Galen have used it in many
places. It is distinctively a medical word. In the story of the vision
of St. Peter, told also in the Acts, the word ecstasis, from which we
derive our word ecstasy, is used. This is the only word St. Luke uses
for vision and he alone uses it. This term is of constant employment in
a technical sense in the medical writers of St. Luke's time and before
it. When the other evangelists talk of lame people they use the popular
term. This might mean anything or nothing for a physician. Luke uses one
of the terms that is employed by physicians when they wish to indicate
that for some definite reason there is inability to walk.
In the story of the Good Samaritan there are some interesting details
that indicate medical interest on the part of the writer. It is Luke's
characteristic story and a typical medical instance. He employs certain
words in it that are used only by medical writers. The use of oil and
wine in the treatment of the wounds of the stranger traveller was at one
time said to indicate that it could not have been a physician who wrote
the story, since the ancients used oil for external applications in such
cases but not wine. More careful search of the old masters of medicine,
however, has shown that they used oil and wine not only internally but
externally. Hippocrates, for instance, has a number of recommendations
of this combination for wounds. It is rather interesting to realize
this, and especially the wine in addition to the oil, because wine
contains enough alcohol to be rather satisfactorily antiseptic. There
seems no doubt that wounds that had been bathed in wine and then had oil
poured over them would be likely to do better than those which were
treated in other ways. The wine would cleanse and at least inhibit
bacterial growth. The subsequent covering with oil would serve to
protect the wound to some degree from external contamination.
Sometimes there is an application of medical terms to something
extraneous from medicine that makes the phrase employed quite amusing.
For instance, when Luke wants to explain how they strengthened the
vessel in which they were to sail he describes the process by the term
which was used in medical Greek to mean the splinting of a part or at
least the binding of it up in such a way as to enable it to be used. The
word was quite a puzzle to the commentators until it was pointed out
that it was the familiar medical term, and then it was easy to
understand. Occasionally this use of a medical term gives a strikingly
accurate significance to Luke's diction. For instance, where other
evangelists talk of the Lord looking at a patient or turning to them,
Luke uses the expression that was technically employed for a physician's
examination of his patient, as if the Lord carefully looked over the
ailing people to see their physical needs, and then proceeded to cure
them. Manifestly in Luke's mind the most interesting phase of the Lord's
life was His exhibition of curative powers, and the Saviour was for him
the divine healer, the God physician of bodies as well as of souls.
There are many little incidents which he relates that emphasize this.
For instance, where St. Mark talks about the healing of the man with a
withered hand, St. Luke adds the characteristic medical note that it was
the right hand. When he tells of the cutting off of the ear of the
servant of the high priest in the Garden of Olives St. Luke takes the
story from St. Mark, but adds the information that would appeal to a
physician that it was the right ear. Moreover, though all four
evangelists record the cutting off of the ear, only St. Luke adds the
information that the Lord healed it again. It is as if he were defending
the kindly feelings of the Divine Physician and as if it would have been
inexcusable had He not exerted His miraculous powers of healing on this
occasion. It is St. Luke, too, who has constantly distinguished between
natural illnesses and cases of possession. This careful distinction
alone would point to the author of the third gospel and the Acts as
surely a physician. As it is it confirms beyond all doubt the claim that
the writer of these portions of the New Testament was a physician
thoroughly familiar with all the medical writings of the time and
probably a physician who had practised for a long time.
Certain miracles of healing are related only by St. Luke as if he
realized better than any of the other evangelists the evidential value
that such instances would have for future generations as to the divinity
of the personage who worked them. The beautiful story of the raising
from death of the son of the widow of Nain is probably one of the
oftenest quoted passages from St. Luke. It is a charming bit of
literature. While it suggests the writer physician it makes one almost
sure that the other tradition according to which St. Luke was also a
painter must be true. The scene is as picturesque as it can be. The Lord
and His Apostles and the multitudes coming to the gate of the little
city just as in the evening sun the funeral cortege with the widow
burying her only son came out of it. The approach of the Lord to the
weeping mother, His command to the dead son to arise, and the simple
words, and he gave him back to his mother, constitute as charming a
scene as a painter ever tried to visualize. Besides this, Luke alone has
the story of the man suffering with dropsy and the woman suffering from
weakness. The intensely picturesque quality of many of these scenes that
he describes so vividly would indeed seem to place beyond all doubt the
old tradition that he was an artist as well as a physician.
It is interesting to realize that it is to Luke alone that we owe the
account of the well-known message sent by Christ Himself to John the
Baptist when John sent his disciples to inquire as to His mission. After
describing His ministry He said: Go and relate to John what you have
heard and seen: the blind see, the lame walk, the deaf hear, the lepers
are made clean, the dead rise again, to the poor the Gospel is
preached. To no one more than to a physician would that description of
His mission appeal as surely divine.
To those who care to follow the subject still further, and above all, to
read opinions given before the reversal of the verdict of the higher
criticism on the Lucan writings, indeed before ever that trial was
brought, there is much in Horae Lucanae--A Biography of St. Luke, by
Henry Samuel Baynes (Longmans, 1870), that will surely be of interest.
He has some interesting quotations which show how thoroughly previous
centuries realized all the force of modern arguments. For instance, the
following paragraph from Dr. Nathaniel Robinson, a Scotch physician of
the eighteenth century, will illustrate this. Dr. Robinson said:
It is manifest from his Gospel, that Luke was both an acute
observer, and had even given professional attention to all our
Saviour's miracles of healing. Originally, among the
Egyptians, divinity and physic were united in the same order
of men, so that the priest had the care of souls, and was also
the physician. It was much the same under the Jewish economy.
But after physic came to be studied by the Greeks, they
separated the two professions. That a physician should write
the history of our Saviour's life was appropriate, as there
were divers mysterious things to be noticed, concerning which
his education enabled him to form a becoming judgment.
It is even interesting to realize that St. Luke's tendency to use
medical terms has been of definite value in determining the question
whether both the third gospel and the Acts of the Apostles are by the
same man. They have been attributed to St. Luke traditionally, but in
the higher criticism some doubt has been thrown on this and an elaborate
hypothesis of dual authorship set up. It has been asserted that it is
very improbable on extrinsic grounds that they were both written by one
hand and certain intrinsic evidence, changes in the mode of narration,
especially the use of the first personal pronoun in the plural in
certain passages, has been pointed to as making against single
authorship. This tendency to deny old-time traditions of authorship with
regard to many classical writings was a marked characteristic of the
early part of the nineteenth century, but the close of the century saw
practically all of these denials discredited. The nineteenth century
ushered in studies of Homer, with the separatist school perfectly
confident in their assertion that the Iliad and the Odyssey were not by
the same person, and even that the Iliad itself was the work of several
hands.
At the beginning of the twentieth century we are quite as sure that both
the Iliad and Odyssey were written by the same person and that the
separatists were hurried into a contrary decision not a little by the
feeling of the sensation that such a contradiction of previously
accepted ideas would create. This is a determining factor in many a
supposed novel discovery, that it is hard always to discount
sufficiently. A thing may be right even though it is old, and most new
discoveries, it must not be forgotten, that is, most of those announced
with a great blare of trumpets, do not maintain themselves. The simple
argument that the separatists would have to find another poet equal to
Homer to write the other poem has done more than anything else to bring
their opinion into disrepute. It is much easier to explain certain
discrepancies, differences of style, and of treatment of subjects, as
well as other minor variants, than to supply another great poet. Most of
the works of our older literatures have gone through a similar trial
during the over-hasty superficially critical nineteenth century. The
Nibelungenlied has been attributed to two or three writers instead of
one. The Cid, the national epic of Spain, and the Arthur Legends, the
first British epic, have been at least supposed to be amenable to the
same sort of criticism. In every case, scholars have gone back to the
older traditional view of a single author. The phases of literary and
historic criticism with regard to Luke's writings are, then, only a
repetition of what all our great national classics have gone through
from supercilious scholarship during the past hundred years.
It is not surprising, then, that there should be dual or even triple
ascriptions of authorship for various portions of the Scriptures, and
Luke's writings have on this score suffered as much or more even than
others, with the possible exception of Moses. It is now definitely
settled, however, that the similarities of style between the Acts and
the third gospel are too great for them to have come from two different
minds. This is especially true, as pointed out by Harnack, in all that
regards the use of medical terms. The writer of the Acts and the writer
of the third gospel knew Greek from the standpoint of the physician of
that time. Each used terms that we find nowhere else in Greek literature
except among medical writers. What is thus true for one critical attack
on Luke's reputation is also true in another phase of recent higher
criticism. It has been said that certain portions of the Acts which are
called the we portions because the narration changes in them from the
third to the first person were to be attributed to another writer than
the one who wrote the narrative portions. Here, once more, the test of
the medical words employed has decided the case for Luke's sole
authorship. It is evidently an excellent thing to be able to use medical
terms properly if one wants to be recognized with certainty later on in
history for just what one's business was. It has certainly saved the
situation for St. Luke, though there may be some doubt as to the real
force of objections thus easily overthrown.
It is rather interesting to realize that many scholars of the present
generation had allowed themselves to be led away by the German higher
criticism from the old tradition with regard to Luke as a physician and
now will doubtless be led back to former views by the leader of German
biblical critics. It shows how much more distant things may influence
certain people than those nearer home--how the hills are green far away.
Harnack confesses that the best book ever written on the subject of Luke
as a physician, the one that has proved of most value to him, and that
he still recommends everyone to read, was originally written in English.
It is Hobart's Medical Language of St. Luke,[34] written more than a
quarter of a century before Harnack. The Germans generally had rather
despised what the English were doing in the matter of biblical
criticism, and above all in philology. Yet now the acknowledged
coryphaeus of them all, Harnack, not only admits the superiority of an
old-time English book, but confesses that it is the best statement of
the subject up to the present time, including his own. He constantly
quotes from it, and it is evident that it has been the foundation of all
of his arguments. It is not the first time that men have fetched from
afar what they might have got just as well or better at home.
Harnack has made complete the demonstration, then, that the third
gospel and the Acts were written by St. Luke, who had been a practising
physician. In spite of this, however, he finds many objections to the
Luke narratives and considers that they add very little that is valuable
to the contemporary evidence that we have with regard to Christ. He
impairs with one hand the value of what he has so lavishly yielded with
the other. He finds inconsistencies and discrepancies in the narrative
that for him destroy their value as testimony. A lawyer would probably
say that this is that very human element in the writings which
demonstrates their authenticity and adds to their value as evidence,
because it shows clearly the lack of any attempt to do anything more
than tell a direct story as it had come to the narrator. No special
effort was made to avoid critical objections founded on details. It was
the general impression that was looked for.
Sir William Ramsay, in his Luke the Physician and Other Studies in the
History of Religion (New York: Armstrong and Sons, 1908), has answered
Harnack from the side of the professional critic with much force. He
appreciates thoroughly the value of Professor Harnack's book, and above
all the reactionary tendency away from nihilistic so-called higher
criticism which characterized so much of German writing on biblical
themes in the nineteenth century. He says (p. 7): This [book of
Harnack's] alone carries Lukan criticism a long step forwards, and sets
it on a new and higher plane. Never has the unity and character of the
book been demonstrated so convincingly and conclusively. The step is
made and the plane is reached by the method which is practised in other
departments of literary criticism, viz., by dispassionate investigation
of the work and by discarding fashionable a priori theories.
The distinguished English traveller and writer on biblical subjects
points out, however, that in detail many of Harnack's objections to the
Lukan narratives are due to insufficient consideration of the
circumstances in which they were written and the comparative
significance of the details criticised. He says, Harnack lays much
stress on the fact that inconsistencies and inexactnesses occur all
through Acts. Some of these are undeniable; and I have argued that they
are to be regarded in the same light as similar phenomena in the poem of
Lucretius and in other ancient classical writers, viz., as proofs that
the work never received the final form which Luke intended to give it,
but was still incomplete when he died. The evident need for a third book
to complete the work, together with those blemishes in expression, form
the proof.
Ramsay's placing of Harnack's writing in general is interesting in this
connection. (P. 8) Professor Harnack stands on the border between the
nineteenth and twentieth century. His book shows that he is to a certain
degree sensitive of and obedient to the new spirit; but he is only
partially so. The nineteenth century critical method was false, and is
already antiquated....
The first century could find nothing real and true that was not
accompanied by the marvellous and the 'supernatural.' The nineteenth
century could find nothing real and true that was. Which view was right
and which was wrong? Was either complete? Of these two questions, the
second alone is profitable at the present. Both views were right--in a
certain way of contemplating; both views were wrong--in a certain way.
Neither was complete. At present, as we are struggling to throw off the
fetters which impeded thought in the nineteenth century, it is most
important to free ourselves from its prejudices and narrowness.
He adds (pp. 26 and 27): There are clear signs of the unfinished state
in which this chapter was left by Luke; but some of the German scholar's
criticisms show that he has not a right idea of the simplicity of life
and equipment that evidently characterized the jailer's house and the
prison. The details which he blames as inexact and inconsistent are
sometimes most instructive about the circumstances of this provincial
town and Roman colonia.
But it is never safe to lay much stress on small points of inexactness
or inconsistency in any author. One finds such faults even in the works
of modern scholarship if one examines them in the microscopic fashion in
which Luke is studied here. I think I can find them in the author
[Harnack] himself. His point of view sometimes varies in a puzzling
way.
As a matter of fact, Harnack, as pointed out by Ramsay, was evidently
working himself more and more out of the old conclusion as to the lack
of authenticity of the Lucan writings into an opinion ever more and more
favorable to Luke. For instance, in a notice of his own book, published
in the Theologische Literaturzeitung, he speaks far more favorably
about the trustworthiness and credibility of Luke, as being generally in
a position to acquire and transmit reliable information, and as having
proved himself able to take advantage of his position. Harnack was
gradually working his way to a new plane of thought. His later opinion
is more favorable.
Ramsay also points out that Professor Giffert, one of our American
biblical critics, had felt compelled by the geographical and historical
evidence to abandon in part the older unfavorable criticism of Luke and
to admit that the Acts is more trustworthy than previous critics
allowed. Above all, he saw that it was a living piece of literature
written by one author. In a word, Luke is being vindicated in every
regard.
Some of the supposed inaccuracies of Luke vanish when careful
investigation is made. Some of his natural history details, for
instance, have been impugned and the story of the viper that fastened
itself upon St. Paul in Malta has been cited as an example of a story
that would not have been told in that way by a man who knew medicine and
the related sciences in Luke's time. Because the passage illustrates a
number of phases of the discussion with regard to Luke's language I make
a rather long quotation from Ramsay:
Take as a specimen with which to finish off this paper the
passage Acts xxviii, 9 et seq., which is very fully
discussed by Harnack twice. He argues that the true meaning of
the passage was not understood until medical language was
compared, when it was shown that the Greek word by which the
act of the viper to Paul's hand is described, implies bit
and not merely fastened upon. But it is a well-assured fact
that the viper, a poisonous snake, only strikes, fixes the
poison fangs on the flesh for a moment, and withdraws its head
instantly. Its action could never be what is attributed by
Luke the eye witness to this Maltese viper; that it hung from
Paul's hand and was shaken off into the fire by him. On the
other hand, constrictors, which have no poison fangs, cling in
the way described, but as a rule do not bite. Are we, then, to
understand in spite of the medical style and the authority of
Professor Blass (who translates momordit in his edition),
that the viper fastened upon the apostle's hand? Then, the
very name viper is a difficulty. Was Luke mistaken about the
kind of snake which he saw? A trained medical man in ancient
times was usually a good authority about serpents, to which
great respect was paid in ancient medicine and custom.
Mere verbal study is here utterly at fault. We can make no
progress without turning to the realities and facts of Maltese
natural history. A correspondent obligingly informed me some
years ago that Mr. Bryan Hook, of Farnham, Surrey (who, my
correspondent assures me, is a thoroughly good naturalist),
had found in Malta a small snake, Coronella austriaca, which
is rare in England, but common in many parts of Europe. It is
a constrictor, without poison fangs, which would cling to the
hand or arm as Luke describes. It is similar in size to the
viper, and so like in markings and general appearance that Mr.
Hook, when he caught his specimen, thought he was killing a
viper.
My friend, Prof. J.W.H. Trail, of Aberdeen, whom I consulted,
replied that Coronella laevis or austriaca, is known in
Sicily and the adjoining islands; but he can find no evidence
of its existence in Malta. It is known to be rather irritable,
and to fix its small teeth so firmly into the human skin as to
need a little force to pull it off, though the teeth are too
short to do any real injury to the skin. Coronella is at a
glance very much like a viper; and in the flames it would not
be closely examined. While it is not reported as found in
Malta except by Mr. Hook, two species are known there
belonging to the same family and having similar habits
(leopardinus and zamenis (or coluber) gemonensis). The
coloring of Coronella leopardinus would be the most likely
to suggest a viper.
The observations justify Luke entirely. We have here a snake
so closely resembling a viper as to be taken for one by a good
naturalist until he had caught and examined a specimen. It
clings, and yet it also bites without doing harm. That the
Maltese rustics should mistake this harmless snake for a
venomous one is not strange. Many uneducated people have the
idea that all snakes are poisonous in varying degrees, just as
the vulgar often firmly believe that toads are poisonous.
Every detail as related by Luke is natural, and in accordance
with the facts of the country.
In a word, then, the whole question as to Luke's authority as a writer,
as an eye-witness of many things, and as the relator of many others with
regard to which he had obtained the testimony of eye-witnesses is fully
vindicated. Twenty years ago many scholars were prone to doubt this
whole question. Ten years ago most of them were convinced that the Luke
traditions were not justified by recent investigation. Now we have come
back once more to the complete acceptance of the old traditions.
Perhaps the most unfortunate characteristic of much nineteenth-century
criticism in all departments, even those strictly scientific, was the
marked tendency to reject previous opinions for new ones. Somehow men
felt themselves so far ahead of old-time writers and thinkers that they
concluded they must hold opinions different from their ancestors. In
nearly every case the new ideas that they evolved by supposedly newer
methods are not standing the test of time and further study. There had
been a continuous belief in men's minds, having its basis very probably
on a passage in one of St. Peter's Epistles, that the earth would
dissolve by fire. This was openly contradicted all during the nineteenth
century and the time when the earth would freeze up definitely
calculated by our mathematicians. Now after having studied
radioactivity and learned from the physicist that the earth is heating
up and will eventually get too hot for life, we calmly go back to the
old Petrine declaration. Some of the most distinguished of the German
biologists of the present day, such men as Driesch and others, calmly
tell us that the edifice erected by Darwin will have to come down
because of newly discovered evidence, and indeed some of them go so far
as to declare that Darwinism was a crude hypothesis very superficial in
its philosophical aspects and therefore acceptable to a great many
people who, because it was easy to understand and was very different
from what our fathers had believed, hastened to accept it. Nothing shows
the necessity for being conservative in the matter of new views in
science or ethics or religion more than the curious transition state in
which we are with regard to many opinions at the present time, with a
distinct tendency toward reaction to older views that a few years ago
were thought quite untenable. We are rather proud of the advance that we
are supposed to be making along many lines in science and scholarship,
and yet over and over again, after years of work, we prove to have been
following a wrong lead and must come back to where we started. This has
been the way of man from the beginning and doubtless will continue. The
present generation are having this curious regression that follows
supposed progress strongly emphasized for them.