multitude of believing followers." The gospel of the beloved disciple Judas made its way quietly into the world, understood by few, even as Jesus Himself had been understood by a few only.
About ten years later, according to Noack, appeared the original form of Luke, which we can reconstruct from what is known of Marcion's Luke. [1] This Evangelist is under Pauline influence, and writes with an apologetic purpose. He desires to refute the calumny that Jesus was "possessed of a devil," and he does this by making Him cast out devils. It was in this way that miracle forced itself into the Gospel hbtory.
But this primitive Luke, as Noack reconstructs it by combining the statements of the Fathers regarding Marcion's Gospel, knows nothing of Jesus' journey to Jerusalem to die. This circumstance is of capital importance to Noack, because in the course of his attempt to bring the topography of the Fourth Gospel into harmony with that of the Synoptics he had arrived at the remarkable result that the Johannine Christ worked in Galilee, not in Judaea. On the basis of the Onomasticonof Eusebius�which Noack, with the aid of topographical traditions derived from the Crusaders and statements of Mohammedan writers, interprets with a recklessness which is nothing short of criminal�Cana and Bethany (Bethabara) were not in the latitude of Jerusalem, but "near the head-waters of the Jordan in the upper part of the Jordan valley before it flows into the lake of Huleh. There, in Coele-Syria, on the southern slope of Hermon, was the scene of John the Baptist's labours; there Jesus began His ministry; thither He returned to die." "It is in the Galilaean district which forms the scene of the Song of Solomon that the reader of this book must be prepared to find the Golgotha of the cross." That is the sentence with which Noack's account of the Life of Jesus opens. This alludes to an idea which had already been worked out in his "Studies on the Song of Solomon," [2] namely, that the mountain country eurrounding the upper Jordan was the pre-exilic Judaea, and that the "city of David" was situated there. The Jews on their return from exile had at first endeavoured to rebuild that Coele-Syrian city of David with the ruins of Solomon's Temple, but had been driven away from it and had then taken the desperate resolution to build the temple of Zerubbabel upon the high plateau lying far to the south of ancient Israel. Ezra the Scribe interpolated the forgery on the ground of which this site began to be accepted as the former city of David. Under the Syrian oppression all remembrance of the ancient city of David entirely disappeared.
This fantastic edifice, in the construction of which the wildest
