J. Gresham Machen

Background

John Gresham Machen (1881–1937) was an American Reformed New Testament scholar. Trained at Princeton Theological Seminary and in Germany — where he studied under leading liberal teachers and felt the full force of their case — he taught New Testament at Princeton until the fundamentalist-modernist controversy split the institution; he then founded Westminster Theological Seminary (1929) and, near the end of his life, the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. His scholarship is confessional in aim but evidential in method: he engages Bousset, Heitmüller, and the history-of-religions school on their own philological terrain.

The Origin of Paul's Religion (1921) is this corpus's strongest early-twentieth-century statement of the argument now known as "minimal facts": start from the universally conceded Pauline epistles — "The testimony of Paul... forms a fixed starting-point in all controversy" (Machen 1921, p.4) — and show that no naturalistic reconstruction survives the earliness of the tradition Paul received.

Positions held in this wiki

• The Resurrection of Jesus — Historicity — the corpus anchor for the minimal-facts view: against hallucination, "there are limitations to what is possible in experiences of that sort, especially where numbers of persons are affected and at different times" (Machen 1921, p.35).
• The Pre-Pauline Creed in 1 Cor 15:3-8 — 1 Cor 15:3-8 (bib) as the Jerusalem tradition received from Peter during the fifteen days of Gal 1:18 (bib): "The vast majority of modern investigators, of all shades of opinion, find in these verses a summary of the Jerusalem tradition" (Machen 1921, p.76-77).
• The Empty Tomb: Arguments and Critiques — the burial clause of 1 Cor 15:4 (bib) plus the physicalism of Luke-Acts tie the empty tomb to the earliest stratum (Machen 1921, p.35-36).
• Isaiah 53: Christian vs Jewish Readings — evidentialist use: the absence of a pre-Christian suffering-Messiah doctrine shows Paul's gospel of the cross was not derivable from his environment (Machen 1921, pp.196-197).

Key works in our corpus

• The Origin of Paul's Religion (1921) — in corpus, full body text; the load-bearing Machen source across four debate articles.
• Christianity and Liberalism (1923) — in corpus; his programmatic argument that liberal Protestantism is a different religion from Christianity, not a variant of it.

Principal critics

• Adolf von Harnack — the liberal construction Machen wrote against; their exchange over Luke-Acts and the Easter message is joined in The Empty Tomb: Arguments and Critiques.
• David Friedrich Strauss — the mythical school whose modern descendants (via Bousset and Heitmüller, whom Machen reports and answers at Machen 1921, p.29-30, 77) are his principal targets.
• Ernest Renan — the visionary-origin paradigm answered by Machen's psychological objection.

See also

• Gary Habermas — the contemporary heir of Machen's evidential architecture.
• N. T. Wright — the maximalist historical case a generation further on.
• James Orr — fellow anti-liberal evidentialist of the preceding generation (in corpus).