UC-NRLF $B 2T3 ^76 ^i«atWii>^^ C^ re- ♦30 S^5P^:/fr we will suppose, few references to it before the year 1800 ; but, at that time, it was universally- attributed to John Milton, an eminent English writer of the seventeenth century. Such had continued to be the general belief during all the subsequent centuries. But this critic, on examination, sees much reason for doubting this conclusion. "I find," he says, "other works, in prose, attributed to this same writer, — works of a violent and bitterly controversial character, and wholly different in spirit from the poem. In these, he is a son of Thunder, ready to call down fire from heaven on the heads of his opponents : in this, he is patient under neg- lect and sorrow. The difference of style also is very great. The prose writings have long, involved, difficult sentences: the verse is lumi- nous, simple, and clear. No person, for exam- ple, unbiassed by prejudice, can read the ' Ani- madversions on the Remonstrant's Defence against Smectymnuus,' and believe the author of this bitter, obscure, and prosaic essay and that of the Pm-adise Lost to be the same person. Take, for example, the following passage, which is a fair specimen of the whole : — "'The peremptory analysis, that you call it, I believe will be so hardy as once more to unpin your spruce, fastid- 1 8 THE PROBLEM OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL ious oratory, to rumple her laces, her frizzles, and her bobbins, though she wince and fling never so peevishly. " * Remotist. — Those verbal exceptions are but light froth, and will sink alone. '■'"'■ Ans. — O rare Subtlety, beyond all that Cardan ever dreamed of! when will light froth sink.? Here, in your phrase, the same day that heavy plummets will swim alone. Trust this man, readers, if you please, whose divinity would reconcile England with Rome, and his phi- losophy make friends nature with the chaos, sine pondere habeiitia p07idus. ^^^Remonst. — That scum may be worth taking off, which follows. ^'*Ans. — Spare your ladle, sir: it will be as the bishop's foot in the broth ; the scum will be found upon your own remonstrance.' "It is evident," our critic might say, "that the man who could write pages of such stuff as this could not be the author of Paradise Lost. Which of these, then, was John Milton ? An- cient writers declare Milton to have been a Puritan, a friend and secretary of Cromwell, a schoolmaster, the writer of a Latin Dictionary and the History of England. When could he have written the Paradise Lost? All tradition agrees that it was not pubHshed till 1667. But then he was already fifty-nine years old ; and he died seven years after, blind and tormented THE PROBLEM OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL 1 9 with the gout. Is it credible that this splendid poem could have been composed at such a time of life and under such circumstances by one who had given all his mature years to politics, sectarian theology, and Latin dictionaries ? "It is true," our thirty-fifth century critic might add, "that the scattering notices of this poem before the nineteenth century do all attrib- ute it to the Puritan John Milton, But it is a suspicious circumstance that one of these writers, named Johnson (who flourished about A.D. 1760), speaks of the 'long obscurity and late reception ' of this poem, ' and that it did not break into open view ' till the Revolution of 1688. It is also remarkable that the most emi- nent contemporaries of this writer do not speak of the poem or know of it. Jeremy Taylor, Baxter, Locke, Newton, Leibnitz, all living at the same time, are ignorant of the existence of Paradise Lost. If such a great poem had then been published, is it possible that they should not have read it ? It is still more singular that the public attention was first called to it forty or fifty years after its supposed date by a writer of periodical papers, named Addison. Before his time, only one eminent man appears to have 20 THE PROBLEM OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL known of it, and that one another poet, named Dryden, who gives it great praise. Now, Dry- den was universally admitted to have been a genius of the first order, and a celebrated poet ; while Milton, as we have seen, was known only as a prose writer, and a very prosaic prose writer. Milton was incapable of writing the Paradise Lost ; for, though some shorter poems seem to have been attributed to him, yet the critic before referred to (Johnson) says that those who pretend to like them ' force their judgment into false approbation of these little pieces, and prevail on themselves to think that admirable which is only singular.' He adds of one that ' its diction is harsh, its rhymes uncertain, and its numbers unpleasing ' ; and of another, ' In this poem there is no nature, for there is no truth.' If, therefore, Milton wrote the shorter poems, he evidently did not write the longer one. Youth is the season of poetry. If, in his youth, he tried to write poetry, and wrote it so badly, is it possible that, old and blind, after spending his life in teaching school, making dictionaries, and writing bitter theological essays, he could suddenly fall heir to the splendid genius which irradiates the Paradise Lost? Milton could not THE PROBLEM OP THE FOURTH GOSPEL 21 have written this poem. But Dryden could. And there was very good reason why Dryden should conceal the fact ; for he had been a Puri- tan, and had become a Catholic. He probably wrote the poem before his change of opinion, and this accounts for the religious views which it contains. He dared not publish it openly under his own name, after becoming a Catholic, and could not bear to suppress it. Nothing re- mained but to publish it under the name of an- other; and he. selected that of Milton, the Puri- tan, as an obscure man, to whom it might easily be attributed. This supposition, and only this, accounts for all the facts in the case." An ingenious critic can always find such argu- ments as these by which to unsettle the authen- ticity of any book, no matter how long or how universally ascribed to a particular author. But which is likely to be right, — the individual critic or the universal opinion ? Shall we trust the common belief of a period near enough to have the means of knowing the truth, yet distant enough to have had time to gather up all the threads of evidence, or the reasonings and judgment of a man living ten or fifteen centuries after ? 22 THE PROBLEM OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL Mr. Tayler himself says, "With Irenaeus and Tertullian, who mark the transition from the second to the third century, the testimony to the apostolic origin and authority of the Fourth Gospel becomes so clear, express, and full, and the verdict of the Catholic Church respecting it so decisive, that it is quite unnecessary to pursue the line of witnesses any farther." Now, Mr. Tayler supposes it to have been forged or in- vented after A.D. 135. In less than sixty-five years, then, this false book is universally re- ceived as the work of a great apostle who could hardly have been dead fifty years when the Gospel was written, and not a hundred when it was thus universally received as his. Wesley has been dead just about as long as the Apostle John had been dead when the Fourth Gospel was universally ascribed to him. » Who can think that a work on religion, essentially differ- ing from Wesley's other teachings, could have been forged a few years after his death, and be now universally accepted in all the Methodist churches of Europe and America as his authen- tic writing ? Yet this is what we are invited to believe concerning the Fourth Gospel. In deciding such questions, too much weight THE PROBLEM OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL 2$ is given to the function of criticism, which only- judges by the letter. The critical faculty in man is an important one, certainly ; but as certainly gives us no knowledge of God or man, of spirit or matter, of law or love. All it can do is to "peep and botanize"; take to pieces the living flower, in order to see how many stamens it has ; "murder, to dissect." All the large movements of man's soul are above its reach. It gropes in the dark, like a mole. A single new experience, one inspired impulse, will set aside its most care- fully built up array of evidence. It can judge of the future only by the past, — and usually by a very narrow past, — and so is very apt to be deceived. The French proverb says, " On pent etre plus fin qu'un autre, mais pas plus fin que tous les autres." We may believe that our critics in the nineteenth century are very acute ; but do they know more about John and his writings than all the Christian churches in the third century together? Possibly there may have been some critical persons there too, and with better means of knowledge than we have. There were Christians f/ien who had the power of trying spirits, to see whether they were of God or not ; 24 THE PROBLEM OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL who could tell if a new Gospel, which was no Gospel, was handed to them, giving an account of their Master wholly different from that which they had been taught by apostolic tradition. According to the critics there was not in all the churches, in the second century, a single man who could look this false John in the face, and tear off his mask, saying, " Jesus I know, Paul I know, Matthew and Mark and Luke I know ; but who are you ? " But there were men in the churches then, as well as before and after, who had been taught acuteness in the keen discus- sions of the Jewish and Greek schools, whose wits had been sharpened by rabbinical debates, and who were quite able to see the difference between the Jesus of Luke and the Christ of John. Why, then, was not a single voice raised, in all the churches, against this intruder? The only possible answer is that he came with such guarantees of his character as silenced all ques- tion. Holtzmann's book contains a full discus- sion of the whole question. All that bears on the authority and authorship of the Fourth Gos- pel has been brought together, and he has not found one writer in the first centuries expressing any doubt of St. John's being the author of the THE PROBLEM OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL 2$ Fourth Gospel. All that is said is in its favor: the only objection is that there is not more. As far as external evidence goes, one should, me- thinks, be satisfied if it is all one way. But critics whose object is to discredit a book or writer can find fault very easily. Not that they mean to be unfair; but they are students in the school of Baur, and would be more than human if they had not caught the habit there of hinting a fault and hesitating dislike. The external evidence, pro and con, may be summed up thus : A// that we have, in regard to the Fourth Gospel in the first two centuries, is in its favor ; and, by the end of the second century, the testimony is so full and plain that even Tubingen critics must admit it to be satisfactory. When one complained that he had not time enough, the reply was not unreasonable, — that he had " all the time there was." To those who want more evidence of the authenticity of the Fourth Gospel, we may in like manner reply that " all the evidence there is, is on that side." The unanimity of the churches at the end of the second century, in receiving this Gospel as the work of the apostle, is such an inexplicable fact, supposing it to have been forged, that the 26 THE PROBLEM OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL defenders of this hypothesis are obliged to take the position that Christians were then so uncrit- ical that they were willing to accept as authentic any writing which seemed edifying, without ex- amination or evidence. But this is a mere as- sumption, contradicted by the facts of the case. Luke, in the preface to his Gospel, already as- sumes the critical position, though he criticises and denies for the sake of affirming. He rejects the false, in order to retain the true. He tells us that, since so many were undertaking to relate the apostolic traditions concerning Jesus, he wrote his Gospel from very accurate knowledge and the best opportunities, so that Theophilus might have ^^ cerfainfy^^ {aG(pdleLav) in his belief. His object was a critical one, — to separate the uncertain and doubtful accounts of Jesus from those well-ascertained and verified. This does not look as if there was no critical judgment in the Church. We know, moreover, that many apocryphal and doubtful Gospels were in circulation at the beginning. They were not hostile to Christ. They err in the opposite direction. They are zealous to exalt him to the utmost, — to heap miracle on miracle ; to paint the lily, and add a THE PROBLEM OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL ^^ perfume to the violet. Why, then, were they rejected ? Love for Christ might have retained them, but the sense of truth rejected them. If, as is assumed, the critical faculty at first was absent, and only blind feeling existed, why were all these well-meant but spurious narratives ex- cluded, one after the other, from the received Scriptures ? What has become of the " Gospel of the Infancy," ascribed to the Apostle Thomas ; the " Protoevangelium," ascribed to James, brother of the Lord ; the " Gospel of the Nativ- ity of Mary," " the Gospel of Nicodemus," and especially the " Gospel to the Hebrews," which once had high authority ? The sense of truth in the churches rejected them, one by one, — that spirit of truth which was just as much an element of primitive Christianity as the spirit of love ; the spirit of truth which Jesus promised should be given his disciples, and which should " take of his, and show to them." Eusebius, writing about the year 325, gives an account of the New Testament canon, distin- guishing between the books universally received, those received by some and rejected by others, and those generally rejected. This threefold division of accepted, disputed, and spurious cer- 28 THE PROBLEM OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL tainly shows that the churches in his time had a critical sense in full operation. But, before his time, three eminent writers, all of whom accept as unquestioned the Gospel of John, had shown an active and acute spirit of investigation. The first is Irenaeus, disciple of Polycarp, Bishop of Lyons (A.D. 177-202), whom Hase calls "a clear-minded, thoughtful man, of philosophic culture, who opposed the Gnostic speculations with the help of reminiscences taken from his youth, which came in contact with the apostolic age." His testimony to John, the apostle, as author of the Fourth Gospel, the critics admit to be positive and unquestionable. So is that of Tertullian, one of the greatest thinkers and writers in the Church, first a heathen orator and lawyer in Rome (about A.D. 190), whose fiery African nature was joined with the acutest intel- lect of his time. And, thirdly, Origen (born A.D. 185), learned in all the knowledge of the Alex- andrian school, an independent thinker and stu- dent. He says that the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, are the " only undisputed ones in the whole Church of God throughout the world." Origen examines critically all the books of the New Testament, marks the difference of (( UNIVEl^SlTY THE PROBLEM OF THE FOURTH\gOSFEL . 20 style between the Epistle to the Hebrews ~ ihSf"' the undisputed writings of the Apostle Paul, and says of it that "who really wrote it God only knows." By the whole Church, then, including all its great thinkers and writers, at the end of the sec- ond century, the authenticity of the Gospel of John is undisputed. Also before that time, as far as it is mentioned at all, it is equally undis- puted, the only question being why it was not more often mentioned. But the apostolic Fathers were not in the habit of quoting the New Testa- ment writers by name or as authority, — they were too near to their own time, — so that their silence is no argument against their belief in the authen- ticity of the Gospel. The external evidence, therefore, concerning the Fourth Gospel, may be thus summed up : — 1. According to Dr. Edwin A. Abbott (Ency- clopaedia Britannica), Papias and the apostolic Fathers quoted and used it. 2. Every Christian writer, in the first three centuries, who has given the name of its author, has attributed it to the Apostle John. 3. The great writers and critics at the end of the second and beginning of the third century — 30 THE PROBLEM OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL Irenaeus, Tertullian, Clement, Origen, and after- ward Eusebius, who carefully divide the Script- ures into " undoubted, doubtful, and spurious " — all put this Gospel among the undoubted apos- tolic writings. 4. No serious opposition to the authenticity of this Gospel has arisen until the present time, and among' a special class of critics ; while others (like Liicke, Godet, Keil, Ewald, De Wette, and Tischendorf) equally acute and free, say that, in regard to external evidence, this Gospel " stands, not in a worse, but in a better position than either the first three Gospels or the writings of Paul."* We may therefore conclude that, were it not for the objections brought against the contents of the Fourth Gospel, no such doubts of its au- thenticity would have arisen as now prevail among some learned and candid writers. Let us therefore examine more carefully the nature of the objections brought on internal grounds. *De Wette, Iniroduction, etc., § 109. THE PROBLEM OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL 3 1 III. The internal evidence against the authenticity of the Fourth Gospel may be distributed under three heads : i. Its difference from the three Syn- optics ; 2. Its difference from the Apocalypse ; 3. Its difference from the writings of Paul. We begin with the most important of these. The divergence from the first three Gospels re- lates to the character of Jesus, the events of his life, and its doctrinal teaching. The first — and, if correct, conclusive — ob- jection against the apostolic origin of the Fourth Gospel is this : It ^ives a view of the character of Jesus so different from that of the Synoptics as to constitute another person. The character of Jesus as represented by the Synoptics and that represented by John are contradictory to each other. M. Albert Reville {Revue des Deux Mondes, liv. de Mai i, 1866) thus describes this difference: In the first three Gospels, Jesus is a teacher of the Truth; but, in the Fourth, he is the Truth itself. In the Synoptics, he appears as a man; in the Fourth Gospel, as the Word of God. He finds in its author a scholar of Philo, who had appropriated his Platonic theory of the Word, as 32 THE PROBLEM OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL the indwelling, unuttered thought of God (?.6yoc hdiadero^), and as the manifested divine reason {loyoq •Kpo' thing should lead us to surrender the first. The authorship of the Gospel was never doubted by antiquity: that of the Apocalypse was. At the end of the second century, when the Christian scriptures were distributed into those which were unquestioned, those which were doubtful, and those which were spurious, the Gospel was placed in the first division, and the Book of Revelation in the second. One objection urged against the Fourth Gos- pel is its anti-Jewish tone of thought. Granting this in the main, we yet find such expressions as that used to the Samaritan woman, — "We know what we worship ; for salvation is from the Jews." But it is thought that, if the apostle wrote the Apocalypse, which is strongly Jewish, 52 THE PROBLEM OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL he could not so soon after have changed his tone so entirely. But is the writer of the Apoca- lypse so Jewish, when a part of his object is to announce judgments on Jerusalem ? And, again, why may not John have risen above his Jewish tendencies into a universal Christianity, since Paul passed through the same change? It is said that, if Jesus had really taught as anti- Jewish a gospel as is represented by John, the struggle between Paul and his opponents could never have taken place. But this is to ignore the universal tendency in men and sects to notice only that which is in accord with their own prejudices. V. We have seen Holtzmann's account of the latest opinions on this question. The earlier history of belief in regard to this Gospel is as follows. It is supposed to be referred to by Luke and Mark (De Wette). The apostoHc Fathers do not refer to it directly, but Eusebius tells us that Papias made use of testimonies from the First Epistle of John. Papias had been a hearer of John in his youth, and was an Asiatic bishop in the middle of the second THE PROBLEM OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL 53 century. Justin Martyr, in the middle of the second century ; Tatian ; and the Clementine Homilies contain passages so strikingly like those in the Gospel that they appear to have been taken from it.* Johannic formulas are found in the Gnostic writings, about A.D. 140, The first distinct declaration, however, that the Apostle John was the author of the Fourth Gos- pel comes about A.D. 180, from Theophilus of Antioch, who quotes the passage, " In the begin- ning was the Word." After this, it is continu- ally quoted and referred to by all the great writers at the end of the second and beginning of the third century, — as Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyons, Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian of Carthage, and Origen. None of these scholars express any doubt concerning the authorship of the Gospel ; and their quotations from it are so numerous that, if it were lost, it might almost be reconstructed from their writings. The first doubts of the authenticity of the Gos- pel (unless we consider its rejection by the Alogi to be based on critical reasons) are brought for- ward in the seventeenth century, in England, by *See Ezra Abbot's Author ship of the Fourth Gospel, in which, after the most thorough critical inquiry, he concludes that it must have been quoted by Justin, and made a part of Tatian's Diatessaron. 54 THE PROBLEM OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL some unknown writer, and were refuted by the great scholar, Le Clerc. After this there fol- lowed a silence of a hundred years, when the attack was renewed in 1792 by another Eng- lishman, — Evanson. Nothing more was heard on the subject; and the replies to these doubts seemed to have satisfied all minds, when Bret- schneider, in 1820, made another assault in the Frobahilia. He was replied to by a multitude of critics, and afterward retracted his opinion, and admitted that his objections had been fully answered.* No other opponent to the authen- ticity of the Gospel appeared till 1835, when Dr. Strauss, in his Life of Jesus, renewed the attack, and was answered by Neander, Tholuck, Hase, Liicke, and others. Dr. Strauss, moved by these replies, retracted his doubts in 1838, but ad- vanced them again in 1840.! Then arose the famous schoo. of Tiibingen, from which all the recent attacks on the Gospel have been derived. Mr. Tayler and other writers, both French and English, who have taken the negative side, seem only followers of Baur and Zeller. Dr. F. C. Baur, a truly great man, began his immense labors with a work on * Handbttck der Dogmatik, § 34, note. t R6ville, Revue des Deux Mondes, May, 1886. THE PROBLEM OF THE FOURTH mythology, published in 1824, and them by several other works, published ev( year, in different departments of theology, until his death. His vast learning, great industry, acute insight, and love of truth make his writings very valuable. The integrity of his mind was such that, even when carrying on a controversy, he seems more like an inquirer than a disputant. Even when differing from his conclusions, one derives very valuable suggestions from his views. One characteristic of the criticism of Baur is his doctrine of intention. He ascribes to the New Testament writers a special aim, which leads them to exaggerate some facts and omit or invent others. Everywhere, he seeks for an intention, for some private or party purpose which colors the narrative, and in the present instance ascribes to the writer of the Fourth Gospel the deliberate purpose of passing himself off as the apostle, in order to impose on the Christian Church his doctrine of the Logos. This attack roused new defenders of the Gospel, among whom the most conspicuous have been Ewald and Tischendorf. Some critics, who reject the apostolic origin of this Gospel, acquit the writer of any purpose of 56 THE PROBLEM OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL deceiving his readers. But if we assume, with Baur, that the Fourth Gospel is a work of fiction, written in the second century, I think we must go further, and agree with him that it was in- tended to appear as coming from the apostle. Else why were so many names of persons and places introduced, well known to the readers of the other evangelists ^ Why were the real facts •of the life of Jesus so skilfully interwoven in the narrative? Why the assertion in regard to its being written by John, " This is the disciple who wrote these things, and testifieth of these things ; and we know that his testimony is true " } The Fourth Gospel, if not an authentic narrative, is the most remarkable and only entirely suc- cessful literary imposition on record. It has deceived the whole Church for eighteen hundred years. VI. It is a remark of Lord Bacon that "the har- mony of a science, supporting each part the other, is and ought to be the true and brief con- futation and suppression of the smaller sorts of objections." This sagacious observation indi- cates another method of deciding this question. THE PROBLEM OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL S7 Of these two views, the one attributing the Gos- pel to the Apostle John, the other to an anony- mous writer in the middle of the second century, — which gives us the most harmonious and con- sistent story? Let us look at each opinion in reference to this question. According to the received opinion of the Church, John, the apostle, composed this Gospel at Ephesus, in his old age. As years and thought and intense religious life changed Swe- denborg, the miner and engineer, into the great visionary and mystic, so years and thought and inward inspiration had changed the Jewish dis- ciple, first into a visionary, and later into a mys- tic. In his lonely exile at Patmos, his vivid imagination had made a series of pictures, rep- resenting symbolically the struggle of Christi- anity with the Jewish and Roman power, and its ultimate triumph. " Every man," says Coleridge, "is a Shakspere in his dreams." Day by day, these dreams came to John ; and he wrote down the visions, and they were collected into the Book of Revelation. When he returned to ac' tive life and the service of the Seven Churches of Asia, he came in contact with a new order of thought, for which he had a natural affinity. SS THE PROBLEM OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL This was the Platonic and Mystic school of Philo, which laid the greatest stress on the distinction between the spirit and the letter, between the hidden and revealed Deity, and between the Logos, or reason of God, and the same light shin- ing in the soul of man. Contact with this school ripened in the mind of the apostle the mystic tendency peculiar to him, — for there is a true mysticism as well as a false. The apostle, mysti- cal, in the best sense, loved to look on spiritual facts as substantial realities. Hence, his fond- ness for such expressions as Truth, Life, Light, Spirit, and his conception of the Messiah as the Son, Well-beloved, and dwelling in the bosom of the Father. His recollections of Jesus reposed especially on those deeper conversations in which his Master's thought took this direction. These conversations had been more frequent at Jeru- salem, where Jesus had encountered minds of a higher culture: therefore, John loved to repeat these. Then, in his old age, when the oral tradi- tions, which made the staple of apostolic preach- ing, had taken form in the Synoptic Gospels, the disciples of John begged him to write for them, or dictate to them, these other relations concern- ing Jesus, with which they had become familiar. THE PROBLEM OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL 59 So they were repeated, and afterward collected in a Gospel "according to John"; and its uni- versal reception in the Christian Church by so many different schools of thought, as early as the middle of the last half of the second cen- tury, shows that there could be no doubt of its origin. In its essence, it is a true picture of Jesus, seen on one side of his life and doctrine. Some errors of expression and of collocation of passages may have occurred; and sometimes the mind of John himself may have colored the teachings of his Master. But in the main it is a true picture, not of John only, but also of Christ. Let us now look at the other explanation, as proposed by Baur, Albert Rdville, and others. This theory assumes that, while the whole body of apostles and early disciples were teaching to the churches that view of Jesus and his doctrine which finally took form in the first three Gospels, another and a wholly different school of opinion was being developed in the Church, indepen- dently of the apostles. This school was derived from the Alexandrian philosophy, and yet grew up within the Christian Church. It held firmly to the Logos doctrine of Philo, but needed some point of contact with the teachings of Christ. 6o THE PROBLEM OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL This led an unknown writer, in the first half of the second century, to write another Gospel, and introduce into it Jesus teaching the doctrines of the Alexandrian school. The narrations peculiar to this Gospel are held to be inventions, — the story of the woman of Samaria, of Nicodemus, of the marriage at Cana, of the man born blind, the raising of Lazams, the washing of the disciples' feet, the wonderful descriptions of the last days of Jesus, of the arrest, trial, crucifixion, and res- urrection. The sublime teachings of this Gospel are due to this unknown writer : the sayings which have helped to change the world were pure inventions. Jesus never said, "God is a spirit, and those who worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth " : our false gospeller put it in his mouth. Jesus never uttered the sub- lime prayer with his disciples, recorded in the seventeenth chapter, — a prayer which has touched the hearts of so many generations. This also was composed in cold blood, in order to make the story more interesting. The tender words from the cross, " Woman, behold thy son ! " and " Behold thy mother ! " are an unau- thorized interpolation in that sacred agony. Mary's recognition of her risen Master by the THE PROBLEM OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL 6l tone in which he spoke her name, and the "Rabboni!" with its untranslatable world of feeling, — these, too, are the adroit fabrications of our apocryphist. And this new Gospel, thus invented, is accepted, without a question, doubt, or hesitation, in every part of the Christian Church. Other books of Scripture they lingered over, doubtful of their right to enter the canon. But this bold-faced forgery all parties, all sects, all schools, all the great theologians and scholars, accepted at once, without a question ; and this, too, when it was written with the express purpose of teaching them what they did not already be- lieve, and which was in direct opposition to their authentic and received Gospels ! Simply to state such a position is to show its weakness. VII. In the passage John v., 17-47, there seems, at first sight, a self-assertion on the part of Jesus not in harmony with his calm, impersonal teach- ing in the Synoptic Gospels. But, if we look below the letter and phrase, we shall find two ideas intertwined throughout, both of which are fully expressed in Matthew, Mark, and Luke. ■ One is the conviction that God is his Father, in 62 THE PROBLEM OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL which conviction he finds pure insight, the sense of divine love, and abiUty to raise mankind into spiritual life. The other is the constantly re- peated declaration that this knowledge, power, and love are continually derived from a higher source ; that he can do nothing of himself ; that he is a son of God only while depending on the Father. He is thus teaching, in another form, exactly what we find declared in the Sermon on the Mount. Throughout that discourse, Jesus speaks with the sa-me irresistible authority of conviction. The difference is that in John he claims for himself what in Matthew he claims for his disciples. He asserts for them that they are children of the Father, that they therefore can and ought to be filled with his spirit, to be perfect as he is perfect, to forgive as he forgives. They are the salt of the earth, the light of the world. They are to love as God loves, and to be a blessing to their enemies as well as their friends. And this will come to them by living in dependence on their Father in heaven, asking and receiving, seeking and find- ing. The self-assertion of Jesus in John is no greater than when (Matt, xi., 28) he declares his power to give rest to all the sorrows of earth, THE PROBLEM OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL 6$ than when (Matt, xxv., 3 1) he represents himself as the judge of mankind, or (Matt, xxviii., 18) as- serts that all power is given to him in heaven and earth. In all cases, it is the expression of the same law, — that entire obedience to divine truth, with perfect dependence on the divine will, gives to the soul a fulness of insight, power, and love. If, then, we see that the central thought in John and the Synoptics is the same, we may willingly admit that the phraseology in the Fourth Gospel is colored by the idiosyncrasy of the writer, and does not wholly represent the transparent clear- ness of the original expressions of Jesus. Such is probably the fact. The thoughts and the life of Jesus sank deep into the soul of John, but were sometimes reproduced in his own language. Some men can remember words more easily than ideas; but, with others, the words pass away while the thoughts remain. If the latter was the characteristic of our apostle's mind, it will largely account for the difference between himself and the Synoptics, in regard to their reports of the teaching of Christ. The deeper thoughts es- caped the apprehension of the latter, but the practical teaching of Jesus they have reported ver- bally. John gives us the profounder thoughts and 64 THE PROBLEM OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL loftier visions of his Master's soul, but often slightly disguised in terminology of his own. He was, like Paul, a faithful minister of the spirit, if not of the letter, of the new covenant. It may be said, " If we have not the very lan- guage of Jesus, how can we know what he himself really taught, and what belongs to his reporter? " This difficulty is not so great as it at first appears. If we have once become acquainted with the mind of Christ, we shall be able to distinguish what is in harmony with it. The Gospel cannot contradict itself. The merely critical understand- ing is like the natural man who receiveth not the things of the spirit of God. They are spiritually discerned. He who has the spirit of his Master judgeth all things. This appears to be the doctrine taught by Jesus himself in his conversation with Nicode- mus. Nicodemus rested his belief in the author- ity of Jesus on his wonderful works, on the signs and miracles. Jesus refused to be accepted on that ground, and declared spiritual insight nec- essary, in order to see the kingdom of God. He intimates that, by such methods of reasoning from outward facts, only an outward and earthly Messiah can be inferred. That which is born THE PROBLEM OF THE FOURTH y^CBt*^' '^5 ">. ({ ^^7v' '"' ''"^^ of the flesh is flesh. Jesus spoke \^o me *^J?^S7yy from a profound spiritual insight, ami^Aefyrf^l^ily^^ ceived not his witness. Except they saw si| and wonders, they would not believe. This re- fusal by Jesus to accept a belief based on mir- acles accords with such sayings in the Synop- tics as that " an evil generation seeketh for a sign." According to Nicodemus, faith in Jesus must rest on his miracles. According to Jesus, the miracles must rest on faith. " He did not many mighty works there, because of their un- belief." Thus, we find, both in John and the Synoptics, a revelation of the mind of Christ in regard to this point. In this conversation with Nicodemus and what follows, it has always been found difficult to discriminate between the sayings of Jesus and that portion which comes from John. The method we suggest is the best way of solving the problem. Find what part of the passage is in harmony with the mind of Christ, and we can- not be far wrong. The conversation with the woman of Samaria carries with it the stamp of reality throughout. As, in the Synoptics, Jesus is called " the friend of publicans and sinners," so here he appears 66 THE PROBLEM OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL again as the friend of a sinner. As, in the Synoptics, he lays the highest stress on that prayer which is not to be seen of man, so here he teaches that those who worship must worj^hip the Father in spirit and truth. As, in the Synop- tics, he is found in kindly and helpful relations with Romans and Phoenicians, so here he makes himself the friend of a Samaritan. Besides the realistic truth of the narrative, we see that its substance is in harmony with the mind of Christ. The strong affection which Jesus felt for his disciples, and his constant habit of identifying himself with them, is apparent in the Synoptic narratives. " He that receiveth you receiveth me; and he that receiveth me receiveth him that sent me." This love reaches its highest ex- pression in John, especially in the last conversa- tions and in the sublimity of the closing prayer. In these final hours, the human affection is glorified in an immortal love. " I in them, and thou in me, that they may be perfectly one." In this, as in other instances, we see that, while the fundamental thought is the same in all the evan- gelists, it reaches its most profound and elevated form in the Fourth Gospel. The Fourth Gospel has been claimed as con- THE PROBLEM OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL 6^ taining the strongest proofs of the divinity of Jesus. Certainly, the spiritual element in the Master is most highly emphasized in this; but it is also certain that his pure humanity and absolute dependence on God are also as strongly pronounced. It is asserted that the supernatu- ral nature of Jesus is plainly taught by John. But Dr. Edwin A. Abbott calls attention to the fact that this Gospel, even more than the others, brings out the purely human element in Jesus; as when (John x., 33) he puts his position as Son of God by the side of that of the Jewish prophets. Dr. Abbott adds that the special privi- lege of pre-existence disappears in the words, " Did this man sin, or his fathers, that he was born blind ? " and says that the works of Jesus are represented by John as conformed to un- changing law, and not as the result of super- natural interposition. Our conclusions in regard to the source of the Fourth Gospel are, therefore, these : — It is very improbable that it should have pro- ceeded from a writer in the second century, out- side of Christian tradition, and importing into it a non-Christian element. Such an apocry- phal Gospel would not have been received with- 68 THE PROBLEM OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL out leaving marked traces of opposition. No such traces exist in history. The apocryphal Gospels which have come down to us show no such creative power, or harmony with the spirit of Jesus, as is found in the Fourth Gospel ; and their speedy rejection indicates that the Church was watchful, and ready to detect any such pre- tenders. It is also improbable that the Fourth Gospel, in the form in which it has come to us, should have been written by John himself. Its diver- gence from the Synoptics, as pointed out above, is evidence of this. The traditions concerning Jesus, contained in this venerable document, must have come from John, since it was received by the churches as "the Gospel according to John." But these communications, made from time to time to his disciples, were perhaps collected after his death, and put in shape by one of them, with the pur- pose of being used as a support for the high spiritual view of Jesus and his teaching, which they had received from John's lips during his life. Our conclusions as to the contents of the Fourth Gospel are as follows : — One part of the contents of this work pro- THE PROBLEM OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL 69 duces, in a slightly different form, the Synoptic traditions. Some of these have been already mentioned. Another part of the Gospel gives traditions concerning the life and teachings of Jesus not contained in the Synoptics. Many of these are of great value, giving a larger, deeper, and higher view of the character of Jesus than can be derived from the other evangelists. John, by his spiritual constitution, was able to appro- priate and retain some of the loftiest elements in the soul of his Master, which escaped the less sensitive susceptibilities of his companions. Another element in this Gospel is that which comes from the mind of John himself. His words are often so blended with those of Jesus that the only distinguishing test is the analogy of faith, or the mind of Christ. What accords with that is from him : whatever is discordant belongs to a lower source. When particles of iron are mixed with sand, if we move them with a magnet, the iron adheres to it, and can thus be separated from the rest. He who has the mind of Christ, he who has become familiar with the spirit of the Master, can often attain a like power of dis- crimination. 70 THE PROBLEM OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL There may finally remain a small residuum, coming from the imperfect insight or memory of those who reported John's teaching. An exam- ple of this is given above, which, if accepted, removes the difficulty of the time of the Pass- over. We do not profess to have reached the final solution of this interesting problem, but we hope that this essay tends in the direction toward such a solution. Space would not allow of stat- ing all the arguments against the Johannine ori- gin of this Gospel. But we have noticed the principal ones, — those based both on external and internal grounds. The result of this exami- nation has brought us to the belief that no his- toric fact of authorship stands on a firmer basis than this, and that the long-received opinion of the Christian Church is not likely to be essen- tially altered. Were it otherwise, it would seem to us one of the greatest misfortunes which could befall Christianity. The Fourth Gospel will be studied more thoroughly and affection- ately, not as a perfectly literal transcript of a divine revelation, but as full of the highest spir- itual life, and as bringing us more closely than any other into communion with the inmost mind and heart of Jesus. UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY BERKELEY Return to desk from which borrowed. This book is DUE on the last date stamped below. nNlar'53Cn m ^ 1953 LU KaiG*D i 'EC YB 27645