13. The Writings Of St. John.

THE WRITINGS OF ST. JOHN.

XLVII.

There is no kind of influence more penetrative and enduring than that which is vouchsafed to the author who writes a book which the world will not let die; “for books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a progeny of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them.... A good book is the precious life-blood of a master-spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life.” When we consider how obscure was the corner in which St. John was born and how humble the calling to which he was bred, we cannot but wonder that it should have been given to him to write books which have already lasted for nearly two thousand years and yet appear to have only commenced their career of usefulness. That St. Paul, when he became a new man, should have served the cause of Christianity with his pen cannot cause any surprise, because he was an educated man: but St. John had never learned. It reminds us of the confession of John Bunyan in the beginning of his autobiography: “For my descent, it was, as is well-known by many, of a low and inconsiderable generation; my father’s house being of that rank which is meanest and most despised of all the families in the land.” Yet—and strange it is to think of it—among all the thousands who have been educated in our universities from century to century none have, in the charm of their style or the value of their matter, surpassed the tinker’s son; of whom a critic of the rank of Coleridge has written: “I know of no book, the Bible excepted, which I, according to my judgment and experience, could so safely recommend, as teaching and enforcing the whole saving truth according to the mind that was in Christ Jesus, as the Pilgrim’s Progress.” The literature of Germany has a marvel somewhat similar to exhibit: Jacob Boehme was all his life nothing better than a working shoemaker, yet three hundred years after his death he can be spoken of as “the greatest of the mystics and the father of German philosophy.” Philosophers like Schelling and Hegel have paid tribute to his genius, the latter calling him “a man of a mighty mind and a living countryman of our own says of his writings: “I wade in and in, to the utmost of my ability, and still there rise up above me and stretch out around me and sink down beneath me vast reaches of revelation and speculation, attainment and experience, before which I can only wonder and worship. . . .Boehme, almost more than any other man whatsoever, is carried up till he moves like a holy angel or a glorified saint among things unseen and eternal. He is of the race of the seers, and he stands out a very prince among them. He is full of eyes, and all his eyes are full of light.”

Examples like these remind us that there is no rank of life so lowly or corner of the world so obscure as to be inaccessible to the light of the glorious mystery of existence. No mind and no lot need be commonplace, if only the heart be, opened to the beauty and the truth with which it is surrounded. Among the poor, if this awakening comes at all, it generally is due to the touch of religion. And, as regards St. John, it was obviously by the influence of Christ that his sensibilities were quickened, and it was by the exigencies of the work of Christ, in which he was engaged, that his slumbering powers were called into exercise. In his writings there are manifest traces of the unlearned man. More than once he betrays his impatience in the use of “paper and ink,” like one unaccustomed to composition. The Greek of his earliest book is decidedly peculiar; and, although his prolonged residence in Ephesus improved his language, he avoids even in his latest writings all the complexities of literary style, having formed for himself a dialect of extreme simplicity. Yet through the imperfections of his language the originality and majesty of his thoughts do not fail to find a way. The ancient Church called him the eagle, meaning that among the writers of the Bible he is the one who soars highest and is able to gaze most steadily upon the sun of truth. They called him also Epistethius, the Recumbent One; meaning that, not only once or twice, but always he was lying on the bosom of Jesus and listening to the beating of His heart To St. John Jesus Christ was the Truth, eternal and absolute, issuing from the Father to be the Light of the world; and in this sunlight John lived continually. But at the same time Christ was the Love, infinite and absolute, in contact with which the apostle’s heart was filled with satisfaction and ever fresh desire. And, as Truth and Love in one, He was to him the Life eternal. It was by this unwearied intuition of Christ and by absorbing love to him that St. John was made a writer; for in writing, as elsewhere, “It is the heart, and not the brain, That to the highest doth attain; And he who followeth love’s behest Far exceedeth all the rest.”

XLVIII. The writings of St. John belong to three species: one is an Apocalypse, one is a Gospel, and three are Letters.

Although the Book of Revelation stands last in the Bible it is undoubtedly the first of St. John’s writings. This is indicated in the book itself, in the beginning of which he gives an account of his call to the work of authorship; and there are many other indications of the same thing. The book exhibits the apostle’s mind at an early stage of development, when it was furnished with materials of which it was subsequently to a large extent displenished. Indeed, so vast is the contrast between the storm and stress with which this book is filled and the serenity of St. John’s later writings that it has been doubted by many whether they can have proceeded from the same mind. But the providential experiences through which St. John lived were of a very revolutionary order, and his was a nature capable of passing from extreme excitement to supreme tranquillity. The mind of the writer of the Book of Revelation is dominated by two events of the most agitating import—the Neronian Persecution and the Fall of Jerusalem. The first heathen persecution of Christianity took place at Rome at the hands of the Emperor Nero, and it was of a terrible description. The Christians were accused of setting fire to the city and thus causing a calamity which had inspired the inhabitants with bewildering terror. Popular feeling was thus let loose against the obscure foreign sect, and the wildest excesses of cruelty were perpetrated. Many were thrown to wild beasts in the amphitheatre, and others were enclosed in sacks full of pitch and, being stuck on poles, were burned to illuminate the gardens opened by the Emperor to appease his excited subjects. Some suppose that St. John was in Rome at the time and witnessed these atrocities; but, whether he was or not, it is easy to understand what an effect they must have produced on his sensitive heart; and the mental excitement into which he was thrown deeply colored his writing in Revelation. The other influence under which he wrote was the emotion caused by the approaching fall of Jerusalem. The Jews had attempted to throw off the yoke of their Roman masters, who thereupon advanced against them with irresistible force, for the purpose of crushing the Jewish state out of existence. From province to province and town to town the destruction swept, till Jerusalem was girdled round with the besieging army; and the city fell after months of suffering, during which scenes of horror and carnage had been enacted such as humanity has hardly ever witnessed elsewhere. This took place in the year 70 A.D., and St. John’s book was probably written a year or two earlier.

It is in form an Apocalypse—a literary form at that time greatly cultivated among the Jews. One book of the Old Testament—the prophecy of Daniel — is written in it; but in the period between the Old Testament and the New many books of this species appeared, the most notable of them being the Book of Enoch, which still survives. As the name implies, an Apocalypse is a disclosure of the secret purposes of God. In the fifth chapter of Revelation a book is seen in heaven sealed with seven seals, which none in heaven or earth can open; but the Lion of the Tribe of Judah prevails to open the book and to loose the seals thereof. This is the Book of fate, or rather of Providence; and, as seal after seal is broken, the secrets of Providence are successively made known. After the seven seals ensues the blowing of seven trumpets, with a similar import, and this is succeeded by the pouring out of seven vials, in the same sense. The disclosures made by the seven seals, the seven trumpets and the seven vials form the body of the book. The whole is extremely obscure, and, as is well-known, no portion of Scripture has given rise to such diversity of interpretation, some interpreting it as referring to the events then happening in St. John’s own experience, others as descriptive of the entire course of human history from that date onwards, and still others as giving information of what will happen at the end of the world.

It is possible that the author was compelled to be obscure; because, if he had expressed his ideas in plain language, he would have exposed both himself and his fellow-Christians to the persecuting rage of the Roman government, which extended also to Ephesus, where he was. If, for instance, the Beast to which he refers as the supreme enemy of the Church be, as many suppose, the Emperor Nero, it is obvious that he could only have referred to him in terms carefully veiled.

Bewilderingly obscure, however, as many chapters of the Revelation are, no book has ever more fully served its purpose. This is to prove that there is a Providence in human affairs which is on the side of righteousness, and, in spite of the opposition of the infernal and bestial elements in the world, will secure the final triumph of Christianity. This great lesson can be read on every page; in periods of persecution the book has always been a consolation to the Church, and it will always have an office to fulfil. Of course there are other passages, such as the Epistles to the Seven Churches, the teaching of which is perfectly plain; and to this book the world is largely indebted for the imagery in which it conceives the Christian heaven.

XLIX. Of St. John’s later writings we do not know for certain which was first, but probably it was his Gospel. A whole generation had intervened between his first book and his second, and in the interval he had greatly changed. The atmosphere of the Gospel is quite different from that of the Revelation. The Fall of Jerusalem had happened in the meantime, and this had created a revolution in the minds of Christians. It proclaimed with the irresistible voice of destiny that the old dispensation, with its temple, rites and limitations, had passed away, and that a new era had dawned upon the world. It cut Jewish Christians loose from a thousand prepossessions and caused them to realize how free and universal a thing Christianity was to be. In the Book of Revelation St. John is still entangled in Jewish imagery, hopes, claims, and modes of thought, but in the Gospel he has moved out into the wide and sunny ocean of humanity.

It is said that in the old age of the apostle the presbyters of Ephesus begged him to commit to writing his recollections of his Master, lest the precious treasures of his memory, by which they had often profited, should be lost. Nothing could be more probable than this, but tradition has added, in its exaggerative way, that he thereupon at once, in an access of inspiration, began to recite the opening verses of his Gospel —“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” This reminds me of a picture of St. John I have seen, from the pencil of one of the old masters, in which he is represented as having just written these words, when he pauses and lays down the pen, gazing awestruck at the characters which express a meaning far beyond his own power of comprehension. The Gospels of St. Matthew, St. Mark, and St. Luke were, of course, by this time in existence, and probably they were well known both to the apostle and his fellow presbyters; but his reminiscences covered different grounds from theirs. This was one reason for which he wrote—to supplement their information. He passes over many things narrated by them, though he takes them for granted, and, indeed, his narrative but seldom runs parallel with theirs. It is from him we learn that the public ministry of Christ lasted for three years, whereas from the Synoptists we should have inferred that it lasted but one. The reason is that they confine themselves, except at the last, to the Lord’s movements in Galilee, whereas St. John narrates in great detail His visits to Jerusalem, which they have omitted. They describe his life in public, his miracles, his parables to the multitude; he commemorates his interviews with individuals. The Synoptists supply the exterior life of Christ, St. John the interior.

There must, in the nature of things, have been a Christ different from the one seen by the multitude, and St. John, by the make of his mind and the course of his experience, was the man to delineate this hidden Christ. He had been with him oftener than any other; he had caught shades of his meaning which others had missed; he treasured his rarest and most private sayings. In St. John Jesus not only draws upon a larger circle of ideas than in the Synoptists, but speaks with a different accent; and the question has often been asked whether He is not made to speak with the Johan- nine accent. Here and there, after reporting a speech of his Master, the evangelist goes on to write down reflections of his own, without indicating where Christ’s words cease and his own begin. Is this an indication that he knows his own ideas to be so completely identical with Christ’s, and due to Christ, that he did not feel the necessity of distinguishing exactly between what he remembered and what he himself had thought? The picture of Socrates presented in the Dialogues of Plato differs from the biography of him given by Xenophon in a manner not unlike the way in which the discourses in St. John differ from those of the Synoptists. Plato idealized his master, being conscious that his own thoughts were a legitimate development from those of Socrates. Perhaps, to some extent, the same may have been the case with St. John; but, if so, the freedom with which he acted was due to the certainty of his own inspiration. In his lifetime Jesus had said: “I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now; nevertheless, when he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he will guide you into all truth.” And St. John was so satisfied that this had been fulfilled in his experience that he could freely give the sense of his Master without painful scrupulosity about its form.

L.

There was probably also another reason for the writing of St. John’s Gospel. It is well known that we owe the most of the writings of St. Paul indirectly to the false teachers with whom he had to contend; because they provoked him by their opposition and false accusations, and he blazed forth against them with fiery and irresistible statements of the truth. At the time the necessity was grievous to him, but the work has reaped from it unspeakable advantage. The discussions and the heresies of St. Paul’s day had been left behind by the time St. John wrote his Gospel, but others had arisen in their stead. From his epistles we learn that his righteous soul, too, was vexed with false teachers, who endeavored to entice his converts away from the truth. These are generally understood to have been the precursors of those who were known later as Gnostics; and the drifts of their speculations was to obscure either the true divinity or the true humanity of Christ, while in practice they warped the plain rules of righteousness and purity.

If St. John wrote his Gospel with such opponents before his eyes, there may have been for him and his first readers in many a verse a peculiar emphasis which is now lost to us. This may especially have been the case with the great verse in which he explains the purpose of his writings: “These are written, that ye might believe that Jesus was the Christ, the Son of God; and that, believing, ye might have life through his name.” His purpose was. to prove, first, that Jesus was the Christ—that is, that he was the Heir and the Fulfiller of the Old Testament. Although St. John was by this time liberated from the Jewish prepossessions, the Old Testament was still for him a divine revelation and the ancient history a preparation for the Messiah. But, in order to sustain the office of Messiah, Jesus had to be far more than those supposed who had on their lips the name of the Messiah they were expecting: to sustain the mighty load of human salvation only one Being in the universe was sufficient; and therefore God “gave his only begotten Son.” The second thing which St. John wrote his Gospel to prove was that Jesus is the Son of God. This truth is not peculiar to him, nor was it first made known in his Gospel. It is the common faith of all the writers of the New Testament. It underlies the testimony of the Synoptists; St. Paul glories in it; the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews states it explicitly. But St. John was able to bear more emphatic and authoritative witness to it than any other figure of the apostolic age; and this he does especially in his Gospel. “We beheld his glory,” he says in the prologue, “the glory of the Only Begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth;” and the whole book is an endeavor to let others see what he had seen. It is a succession of unveilings of the glory of the Only Begotten. He does not make use of all his materials. For example, he only gives seven miracles; but these are chosen as typical and conclusive. The whole book is a cumulative proof that Jesus was the Son of God.

Yet St. John’s aim is not merely theoretical: there is an ulterior object, expressed in the words, “and that, believing, ye might have life through his name.” He meant his readers not only to assent to the demonstration of Christ’s claims, but to receive him as their life. And the whole story is so told as to show how those who received him for what he claimed to be were blessed with eternal life, while those who did not receive him were more and more hardened in their sin, until their guilt culminated in the murder of the Prince of Life.

LI. Of the epistolary species of writing we possess three specimens from the pen of St. John.

Two of these, his second and third Epistles, are simply short private letters, which have fortunately been rescued from oblivion to give a vivid glimpse into the life of that distant age as it was being formed by Christianity.

One of them is addressed to a person styled “the elect lady,” or, as it may be translated, “the lady Electa” or “the elect Kyria.” St. John had met some of her children at the house of a sister of hers, and, finding them to be decided Christians, he writes to the mother a few warm words of congratulation, taking advantage of the opportunity at the same time to warn her against the abuse of her Christian hospitality by wandering teachers who were not genuine servants of Christ. One of the features of early Christianity was the number of refined and high-toned women who found in it satisfaction for the aspirations of the heart. It is easy to understand how an aged “saint with the qualities of St. John should have been a friend and confidant in homes over which such women presided. His interest in the young people is extremely noticeable and characteristic; for he speaks with warmth not only of the children of the lady to whom he writes, but also of the children of her sister, with whom he was staying. The other little note is addressed to a gentleman; and its purpose is to commend to his attention certain evangelists who were about to visit the town in which he resided. It reminds us of St. Paul’s brief Epistle to Philemon; and, like it, supplies a specimen of apostolic courtesy, as well as a glimpse of the changes which Christianity was introducing into the social relationships. The remaining letter, St. John’s first Epistle, is of quite a different character. It is not long, but it is more a short treatise than a letter in the common acceptation of the term. It has not, like St. Paul’s epistles, a superscription designating the writer and the recipients. It has been suggested that it was written at the same time as the Gospel and intended to accompany it as an envoi, and this notion has a great deal to recommend it. For instance, the opening words, “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon and our hands have handled of the Word of life,” are far liker a description of the Gospel than of the contents of the Epistle which follows. The whole composition would serve admirably as a companion-piece to the Gospel, to explain its drift and enforce the practical objects for which it was written.

It exhibits the apostle’s leading ideas more clearly, perhaps, than even the Gospel; at least it does so in a space so narrow that they cannot be overlooked. St. John has not, like St. Paul, long arguments and doctrinal statements, but he has watchwords which he is constantly repeating. Truth, light, life, love—these are to him the priceless possessions. They are all in God. Here we find again and again the statement, “God is love,” the greatest sentence which man ever uttered. All these possessions, however, and God himself, are brought nigh to men in Christ, and it is by abiding in him that we enjoy them. In this blessedness St. John had lived for a lifetime, and the purpose of his writings was that others might have fellowship in the same blessedness.

Perhaps, however, the chief purpose of the Epistle is to be found in the many earnest exhortations it contains in reference to the behavior of those who profess to belong to Christ—not to sin, but to keep his commandments; not to yield to the enticements of the world or to fear its hatred; to love the brethren and take advantage of every opportunity of doing them good. “He that saith he abideth in Him ought himself so to walk even as He walked.”