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Alexei Khomiakov
[no date specified]
Khomiakov's commission to Palmer * Further proofs of the authenticity of the Gospels
Most Reverend and Dear Sir, —
Some months elapsed, after I received your friendly letter of the fifth of July, before I could give you an answer. My answer was written in the month of September, but as it was with a parcel rather too heavy for the post, I sent it over to Petersburg to one of my friends, as an opportunity was more likely to be found there than anywhere else. I am informed that the parcel has been forwarded to England, but I am as yet quite uncertain whether you have received it. I should be very sorry if it was lost, as some parts of the letter (such as the P.S. about proofs of the authenticity of the Gospels) must have been worthy of your attention, and others, such as the commission which I was bold enough to thrust on your friendship (with a little cheque enclosed with the letter) were of great interest to me. In this uncertainty, I have made enquiries in order to ascertain whether the parcel may not have been lost. It has passed, it seems, through many hands, but at last it must have found its way to the Foreign Office in London, where it is not improbable it may yet be found in a state of quiet uselessness. As this may be the reason for your silence (though there may certainly be many others) I thought I was bound to give you this information, and I hope you will not accuse me of imposing on your attention without necessity. Excuse me if I do so.
I can say but little about myself. My life is going on rather wearily, though not, perhaps, uselessly. I am now seeking after a remedy against the cholera as I have done for other less apparent ills; success or failure in that, as in everything, comes from God. Our duty and perhaps our only true happiness is to seek incessantly after every useful truth. Accept, dearest sir, the assurance of the sincere respect and affection of you most devoted,
Alexei Khomiakov
In the P.S. of my letter, I spoke of the proofs of authenticity of the Gospels of Saint John, Saint Luke, and Saint Mark. In the first of these the proofs seem to me to be unanswerable, clear in the second, though not so evident in the third. I had not spoken of Saint Matthew. Its anteriority seems to be out of the question for any impartial reader. Still, I will add for more sceptical critics that, though the person of the author may be disputed, no reasonable doubt can arise as to the time when this Gospel was written. Any critic endowed with something like common sense can see that it was written in Palestine, and not only before the fall of Jerusalem, but even before the successful preaching of Saint Paul in Greece. The one is proved by the great importance given to prophecies about little towns in Palestine, the other by the ardent attacks on Pharisaism all over the book and more particularly in the 25th chapter. This indicates a violent struggle not against an almost abstract or fallen system, as Pharisaism must have been after the conquest of Jerusalem, nor against a local difficulty which must have lost much of its importance when Christian preaching invaded Greece and Rome, but a deadly struggle against a dangerous enemy and a living power in the centre of its action. I think that those who do not feel the truth of this remark, will be found rather deficient in the rules of enlightened criticism. This seems to me as plain a truth as the one that Saint Mark's Gospel has been written outside Palestine. The explanation of the Jewish customs at their meals (which is not to be found in Saint Matthew) cannot be otherwise accounted for.
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