02.0000. Introduction

THE EPISTLES OF ST. JOHN

INTRODUCTION

§1

There is a striking letter written by Benjamin Jowett, the Master of Balliol, to Arthur Stanley, Dean of Westminster, when the latter was in his sixty-fifth year, exhorting him to devote the remainder of his life to the production of a serious theological work. The last ten years of a man’s life are, he insists, the most important. He has had his full measure of experience. He has had time to reflect upon it. All the fruit of his knowledge, his experience, and his reflection should be now mature. He should sternly refuse to allow any other occupations to distract him from the task of putting it into shape. This letter expresses an ideal for old age which is apparently very seldom realized in fact. From this point of view old age is mostly disappointing. But I have called attention to it because the ideal was certainly realized in wonderful perfection in the case of John the son of Zebedee, if the traditional account of his life is trustworthy. On this critical matter I shall have more to say directly. But I will begin by reminding my readers of the traditional account derived from the New Testament and the second-century writers.

John, then, is described as one of two brothers, James and John, sons of a master-fisherman of the lake of Galilee named Zebedee. He was not only a Galilean, for, according to the Fourth Gospel, " the disciple whom Jesus loved,’’ who is identified in the tradition with the son of Zebedee, had some special connection with Jerusalem as well as Galilee, He had a home there apparently, and he " was known unto the high priest,’’ so far at least as to be admitted by the servants to the court of the high priest to witness the examination of Jesus, and to be allowed to bring in Peter.’ But he can have had but a simple education. In the eyes of the Jewish leaders he and Peter are reported to be "unlearned" men, who lacked the training in the Jewish schools which qualified for the position of a teacher. In fact, "they had not been to college.”

What sort of man in disposition John was, we can judge in part from the fact that our Lord, who called Simon “Rock-man,” called him and his brother "Sons of Thunder.” The mild, sentimental young man depicted by the artists must be as unlike as possible to the real rugged young fisherman, with his passionate of soul. This man, then, passed through profound experiences in the school of the great prophet, John the Baptist, and thereafter in the deeper school of Jesus of Nazareth. We hear of special experiences which were his, not shared by all the apostles — ’how Peter and James and John constituted a sort of inner circle among the Twelve, how the zeal of the Sons of Thunder in particular was rebuked and their ambition quenched," how John was singled out (if indeed it be he) as “the disciple whom Jesus loved.” Besides he of course shared the common experiences of all the apostles culminating in the death of Jesus on the cross and in His resurrection from the dead and His ascension and His mission of the Spirit. Afterwards John is found prominent among the Twelve in Jerusalem, being mentioned again and again alone with Peter. At a comparatively early point of the narrative of the Acts he passes out of sight; but St. Paul in his Epistle to the Galatians reckons him among “the pillars” of the Church with James, the Lord’s brother, and Peter, at his second visit to Jerusalem there recorded. This would have been about sixteen or twenty years after our Lord’s death and resurrection. By this time John’s brother James had been put to death by the Jews, and some eighteen to twenty years later Peter and Paul were martyred at Rome. Then in a.d. 70 Jerusalem was destroyed, and the old Jewish world, as it had been, centred upon Jerusalem and its temple, ceased to exist. Whether just before this or earlier (for the moment is not specified), the very well supported tradition of the second century assures us that John, with other of the Apostles, passed to Asia Minor, which became the last home of the apostolic company, Philip going ultimately to Hierapolis, but John with Andrew to Ephesus. Here, in wholly new surroundings, we hear of him as venerated and loved. “John, who leaned on the breast of the Lord, who became a priest wearing the ‘petalon’ (the Jewish high-priest’s golden plate — this may be either intended as metaphor or as literal fact), both witness and teacher.”

There probably he suffered persecution for his faith, apparently under Domitian, who began to reign in a.d. 81 and died in 96, for he was the John who from his place of exile at Patmos saw the visions of the Apocalypse. Moreover, from Ephesus as a centre he was active in the organization of the Churches of Asia, ’’ Listen,” says Clement of Alexandria, “ to a legend which is no legend but very history, which has been handed down and preserved about John the Apostle. When on the death of the tyrant he returned from the Isle of Patmos to Ephesus, But Tertullian brings him to Borne to be plunged into a cauldron of boiling oil before the Porta Latina and then banished to Patmos. He used to go away when he was summoned to the neighboring districts as well, in some places to establish bishops, in others to organize whole churches, in others to ordain to the clergy some one of those indicated by the Spirit." And then he tells the touching and familiar story of the zeal and love which St, John showed in the recovery of a lapsed disciple — the young man who had joined a band of robbers and become their chief. Then we hear how zealous he was against heresy, so that he would not stay in the bath-house with Cerinthus, and how zealous he was to the very end to teach the Church he was leaving the lesson of mutual love, Little children, love one another. Finally, we hear how he was persuaded, not without a divine revelation, to commit his Gospel to writing, partly intending to supplement the other Gospels already existing and known, and so wrote the “spiritual Gospel,” as Clement calls it; and thus, having survived even to the time of Trajan, i.e. a.d. 97, when he must have been about ninety years old, he fell asleep at Ephesus, The chronology of this account of St, John’s later activity presents difficulties. It seems to crowd too much into the very last years.

Tradition, we must remember, is hardly ever accurate even when it is substantially true.

But, as a whole, it comes on a basis of secondcentury consent, along manifold lines, which would almost seem indisputable.

Am I not right in saying that if this singularly well-authenticated account of the origin of the Fourth Gospel is true, it, and the accompanying First Epistle, do realize wonderfully the ideal of an old man who devotes himself at the last to writing what shall summarize in the most effective form the experience and meditation of a lifetime? The Gospel enshrines the aged disciple’s memory of his Master, doubtless often put into words, but only now at last into writing, for the express purpose of succoring the faith of the Church already distressed by currents of subversive opinion. The Epistle, which is a sort of commentary on some of the leading ideas of the Gospel, brings out into emphasis the slowly matured fruit of his long experience and deep and constant reflection about human life and its fellowship with the divine in the light of the Incarnation. Truly, so regarded, the Epistle which we are to seek to study remains among the most priceless of human testimonies.

§2 But the value of the witness of our Epistle depends greatly, indeed in its distinctive quality wholly, upon the substantial truth of the tradition of its origin.

Assuredly the idea of the true life for man which is here unfolded — the life lived in the light, utterly unworldly, of unselfish fellowship and pure self-control — does, if we set ourselves to study it, set our heart aglow quite without reference to the author of it. It is so human and simple, yet so rich and satisfying. If men in general would adopt it and live by it, there is no question that it would remedy the diseases of society. Short of this there is no doubt that if there were everywhere in evidence a Christian church, really organized to live the life, even though it were everywhere a small minority, it would have, as the early Christian church had in the heathen world, an infinite force and attractiveness. In the midst of a world permeated by obscuring and corrupting influences, it would stand as ’’a city set on a hill” and as “salt’’ which had not lost its savor. Again, short of this, there can be no doubt that every individual who makes this idea of what a man’s life can be his own and faithfully lives by it, becomes among his fellows a sort of rock amidst shifting sands. But St. John is not merely promulgating an idea, like a philosopher, he is asserting a fact. And there is the rub. This ideal of human life contradicts the selfish and sensual assumptions on which human life is generally based. St. John certainly does not conceal this. But then is it natural? and how is it to be made possible? Here comes in the point of his witness.

St. John’s fundamental assurance is that the life which he would have men live is in the deepest sense natural and true — that is in accordance with fundamental reality — because it is fellowship with the eternal and only enduring life and being, which is the basis of our own, the life and being of God. And he and his fellows have, he claims, through their special experience, been allowed to receive indisputable assurance of this. For they had experience in Jesus of Nazareth of the perfect human life, and on indisputable evidence, as it seemed to them, were led — almost forced —to believe that what was exhibited before their eyes in a man’s life was nothing else than the eternal life of God manifested to men — that Jesus Christ was the only-begotten Son of God, Himself incarnate God. Thus what has been proved to be in accordance with the will and being of God must be both possible and natural.

There have been in other generations and there are in our own agnostics and even atheists who have summoned men to live the true and noble life, though they see in vast nature no signs of moral sympathy and no good evidence of a God of love and righteousness, but only of a world-force which, if not brutal, is unconscious and therefore indifferent. And we must be thankful that they are so noble and so defiant of nature. It is magnificent, but it is, after all, an irrational nobility, a splendid fanaticism. For of what use can it be for a ting portion of the universe to raise the standard of rebellion against a vast whole which must infallibly swallow up and absorb our puny race with its strangely-kindled aspirations?

If the highest life is to have rational ground or hope or goal, there must be behind it something eternal, something which belongs to the whole of which we form a part — an “Eternal not ourselves making for righteousness’’ and love with which we can co-operate. Man can live the good life with good hope only if God is good, and, because God is God, good must be the final goal of all. That is St. John’s conviction, and he can base it on nothing but revelation — God’s own self-disclosure.

We need not exaggerate the gloom of nature. The European philosophers who — apart from any question of revelation — have set their whole mind and devoted their whole life to investigate reality, from Plato and Aristotle and Plotinus down to our own time, have in great measure, and by a great majority, and in the greatest instances, found themselves either authorized or constrained to declare that goodness — the idea or force of good — is at the heart of the universe. And the plain man cannot give up the hope. Nevertheless, the doctrine of the philosophers has been full of hesitations and qualifications and contradictions, and has never succeeded in convincing the plain man, who for his part remains bewildered. After all.

Nature is a sphinx. A confession of ignorance or doubt about the character of the world-force seems to be the most justifiable attitude. Nor in our day can we flee for refuge to a conclusion which in earlier ages has sometimes seemed to men satisfactory — the conclusion that there are two principles in the universe, a good and a bad, in perpetual conflict, and that nature and human nature have fellowship with both. For now we know this at least, that nature is a closely-knit unity, and the force which operates there is one only — one God, if God it can be called. Then the question recurs — of what sort is this force or God? What is its mind and purpose for man and the world, if mind or purpose it have at all?

Surely if there be, or may be, a God, and if the rational mind and conscience of man is capable of fellowship with Him from whom it came, it is natural that He should disclose Himself, not, of course, in contradiction of nature which is His creation, nor of what the brooding mind of man has, on the whole, been able to discover from nature, for our reason is His, but by way of increase of light and confirmation of assurance. Surely in man’s moral conscience, where lie feels that he gets nearest to God, God does everywhere in varying degrees of clearness reveal Himself, not by way of argument, but as a voice from above or from the beyond, guiding, threatening, and cheering. Why should not this self -disclosure of God have gone further? At this point we must recognize that the essence of the Jewish witness was that this self-disclosure of God is a fact. Over hundreds of years prophets had appeared amongst them who, not in virtue of any conclusions which they had reached by reasoning, but because they had actually heard, in whatever way, the voice of God, proclaimed as “ the word of Jehovah ’’ His righteous will for His people, His tremendous justice, and His unalterable goodness.

Jehovah — called “The Lord” in our Bible — was Israel’s God, but more and more clearly had it been proclaimed that He was the one and only God, the creator and sustainer and ruler of all that is. Thus it was that the prophets of Israel became, what in a memorable phrase Athanasius calls them, “the sacred school of the knowledge of God and the spiritual life for all mankind.’’

Now we must recognize that almost every good thing which has diffused itself upon this planet has arisen or been discovered in one spot and has thence spread in a widening area.

Why then, we ask, should not the Jews have been in the matter of religion — what the Romans were in the matter of government or law, and the Greeks in art and intellect — not indeed its sole source, but the source of it in its highest quality, greatest authority, and freest adaptability? And I think any one who reads the sequence of Jewish prophets — ruthlessly leaving out what he finds too obscure to understand, which is generally of secondary importancewill receive a profound impression: will be deeply disposed to believe that they really spoke, as they believed themselves to speak, the word of the Lord.

“St. John,’’ as we perceive in his Gospel, is full of the Jewish faith in the prophetic scriptures.

He knows that salvation was of the Jews. And there is no doubt that He of whom St. John wrote assumed the teaching of the Jewish prophets as the background and basis of all He taught about God. It is of great importance to recognize this. But in his Epistle John makes almost no reference to the Old Testament. His mind is concentrated on Him in whom the old prophetic succession is fulfilled — in whom His disciples recognized One greater than the prophets — in whom they came to believe as the eternal Son of God incarnate. The meaning of this conviction in its bearings on human life is expounded in our Epistle, but its grounds are recorded in the Gospel, in both books by one who claims to be an eye-witness. Was he an eye-witness of what he relates? Did these things really happen? And was the “ beloved disciple ’’ of the Fourth Gospel really John the son of Zebedee? The value of our author’s teaching about human life and its possibilities he makes to depend, and it does really depend, upon the trustworthiness of his plaim to report truly about Jesus of Nazareth.

§3

This, then, is the question: Can we rely upon it that when the writer of our Epistle speaks of what he and his associates have “heard,’’ “seen with their eyes,” “beheld,” and “handled with their hands,” when he asserts that what he declares to us is what they in common have ’’seen and heard,” he is referring to a real objective experience and that he is speaking the truth? Or, again, when he speaks of the mission of the Son of God as something which "we have seen" and of which consequently we can “bear witness.” And, granted that the Epistle proceeds from the same author as the Fourth Gospel, can we assume not only that the experience on which he bases his teaching is the experience related in that Gospel, but that he really relates things as they occurred?

And, finally, can we suppose that “the beloved disciple” who records or professes to record his experience so particularly was John the disciple and apostle of Jesus Christ, the son of Zebedee, as the Church has always supposed?

Now, with regard to all these questions there has been infinite discussion of late years and infinite confusion in the world of criticism.

Books advocating almost every conceivable view have poured and are pouring from the press. In literary Germany the traditional view of St. John’s authorship has almost passed out of sight, except for the one name of Theodor Zahn. And though that is not at all the case in England — for Sanday, Armitage Robinson, Salmond, Strong, Chase, Richmond, Ramsay, Drummond, Holland, and others among our best living or quite recent scholars, assure us that the traditional view is tenable and indeed the most reasonable view — yet the critical world is greatly divided and the problem is often regarded as, if not insoluble, yet far from solution. Plainly then, though I am not writing for scholars, I must say something about it, and this is not an easy task on a subject so blackened with controversy, and when those for whom I am writing cannot, in most cases, go thoroughly into it.

I would say, then, by way of preliminary, that you must not attribute any final authority to the critical fashions of the day. During the last fifty years a student has seen many “accepted results” of criticism pass out of vogue.

Modern historical criticism is a real science to which we owe the greatest additions to our knowledge of what the past history of mankind has really been. It is not too much to say that it has opened to us a new world, or many new worlds. But you reach a point, and sometimes it is soon reached, where what can be strictly called historical science passes into conjecture and into the region where presuppositions and prejudices have free play for lack of positiveevidence. Indeed, there is no history without presuppositions. But the main stream of German criticism, which has been the basis of English criticism, has been “rationalistic”; and this means broadly that, for whatever reasons, it refuses to admit as credible the real incarnation of the Son of God in the sole person of Jesus Christ, or the reality of such “ nature miracles’’ as our Lord’s birth of a virgin mother, or the resurrection of His body from the tomb, or such miracles as are ascribed in the Fourth Gospel with so much precise detail to our Lord — the turning of the water into wine, the feeding of the five thousand, and the raising of Lazarus. Obviously, if it is from the start taken as incredible that these things can have happened, something, even though it be something violent, must be done to dispose of the Fourth Gospel as authentic history. I do not say that there would have been no critical problem, apart from these prejudices, concerning the Fourth Gospel — very far from it. But that the criticism of the last fifty years has, on the whole, had these prejudices among their main motives cannot be denied. Let me quote one of the sanest and wisest of the critics, to whom I am going to refer you again, the Unitarian scholar Dr. Drummond, who is maintaining the (to me) impossible thesis that the author of the Fourth Gospel did not really mean or pretend to be writing literal history, and among his grounds sets this — ’I must frankly add that, on general grounds affecting the whole question of the miraculous, I am unable to believe that such miracles as the turning of water into wine and the raising of Lazarus were really performed.’’ Now, I am writing in the main for those who are without such an invincible prejudice. I hope the bulk of my readers are those who find it credible that, in a world such as ours is known in experience to be, God, if really there be a good and just God, should have taken action for the redemption of the world, and that this redemption, after long preparation, should have been finally effected by God Himself entering into our human life by an incarnation in the person of Jesus Christ, and that such a person, embodying as He did the life-giving will of the Creator for the purposes of recreation, should have been the occasion for divine “powers" to work upon Him and through Him as much above the normal as must have been God’s original acts of creation. If we find this credible, still we should not be credulous. We should not rush into believing anything that is told us; but we should be ready to accept evidence, the whole body of evidence, moral and material. It is this real openness of mind that i& asked of us, and it is this openness of mind that those for whom rationalistic criticism is the last word of wisdom do not possess. At the same time I am most anxious that we should not disparage or ignore historical criticism, as applied to the Bible; and that we should not take refuge in a supposed infallibility in the authority or judgment of the Church in matters of authorship. Historical criticism, where it really remains open-minded, is capable of correcting many mistakes in tradition. Many of the greatest leaders in this new science have been men totally free from rationalism and full of real reason. They have, in my judgment, fairly disproved many traditional authorships in the Old Testament, not only without loss to the faith, but with the result that we have a far more spiritually useful view of the Old Testament literature. And for my own part, seeing no ground for believing that the Church was gifted with infallibility in its critical judgments, I am disposed to admit that a letter — "the second Epistle of Peter" — professing to be by an apostolic eye-witness, was probably in fact written under his name by a much later author. Here the case is very different from the case of the Gospel of St. John. Of the latter “ there was never any doubt in the Church." It was one of the agreed-upon Gospels, which the second-century Church regarded as the indisputable pillars of its spiritual world. Its authority as the authentic work of St. John rests upon the strongest grounds of external and internal evidence, as I shall go on to help you to discover for yourselves. The second Epistle of Peter, by contrast, can claim only the weakest external evidence, and the internal evidence is most ambiguous. After its appearance to flight, late in the second century, it was rejected in part of the Church and seriously doubted by some of the most influential writers who had to do with the formation of the Canon of the New Testament, by Origen and Eusebius, and such serious doubts are recorded by Jerome.

It finally only got into the Canon “by the skin of its teeth" if I may so express it. Nevertheless, it did get in, and, if our suspicions are justified, the Church made a mistake in the matter of authorship. For it would never have got into the Canon except as believed to be by St. Peter. Thus, in approaching the question of the Fourth Gospel, we should approach it with a really open mind, remembering also the debt under which really open-minded criticism has recently laid us in the vindication of our New Testament documents. Has it not recently given us overwhelming assurance that our second and third Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles were really written by the men, John Mark and Luke the physician, who had the best possible opportunities for collecting the most authentic information? Has it not vindicated the simple claims of St. Luke’s preface?

If “St. John’s Gospel” were proved false to history and no work of St. John, still the true figure of Jesus would remain, as it were, photographed in the other Gospels; still we should know how He spoke and much of what He spoke; and still the conclusion, based in the minds of the Twelve upon the experience there recorded, would remain as it stands in the Epistles of St. Paul and St. Peter. And still, to take one step further, the Catholic Creeds would stand justified by these Gospels and Epistles. I do not say that the loss of St. John’s special testimony would not be a portentous loss; but it would not be destructive of the whole fabric. Nevertheless, I am persuaded that no such sacrifice will be required of us by the evidence.

Plainly I cannot attempt to argue the question here. That would require a whole volume, and belongs more properly to a commentary on the Gospel. All that I can do is (1) to seek to advise my readers how to proceed, if they want to instruct themselves in the evidence; (2) to state the conclusions to which I have been led myself.

(1) As to authors to be consulted, I would advise a would-be student, who has only a moderate amount of leisure to give to such matters, to read Dr. Drummond’s book already referred to. Dr. Drummond cannot believe that the Fourth Gospel can be historical in many of its main features, and he cannot believe the full doctrine of Christ’s person, which that Gospel not only asserts but asserts on the authority of Christ Himself. Thus, so far as he has natural prejudices, they would be obviously against attributing the Gospel to St. John. Never-the-less he is a profoundly honest and candid as well as learned man, and after a careful review of all the evidence, and a careful examination of all rival theories, he concludes his book thus, “I give my own judgment in favor of the Johannine authorship.” And it is worth noting that in the course of his argument he says of “those who see in the Gospel nothing but pure history’’ (I think he should have said “those who are prepared to accept the Gospel, including its miracles, as historical), “I do not wonder that they look upon the Johannine authorship as irrefragably established” I think, in fact, that Dr. Drummond underrates the evidence in part, and I do not think lie overrates it any where; and I have recommended the study of his book because the bias of partiality in favor of tradition cannot be ascribed to him.

Next I would recommend the study of Mr. Wilfrid Richmond’s Gospel of the Rejection. The most real obstacle to the acceptance of the traditional account of the Fourth Gospel lies, no doubt, in the differences both in respect of the story of our Lord’s ministry and of the tone of our Lord’s discourses between the Fourth Gospel and the Synoptics. This difficulty has presented itself to me again and again as very grave, though examination in detail always reduces the difficulty to very much smaller proportions.

It is dealt with very ably and in part satisfactorily by Dr. Drummond. But I do not think that there is any book which is more illuminating on the relation of the Fourth Gospel to the other three than Mr. Richmond’s, which has not, I think, received nearly enough attention; and it is written so as to need no student’s apparatus in order to be able to read it intelligently.

Then, for an example of thorough-going scepticism as to the traditional accounts of the Gospel, I would say, read Dr. Latimer Jackson’s Problem of the Fourth Gospel. It is no doubt an able specimen of the kind of destructive criticism which will accept nothing unless it is demonstrated, and can suggest possible doubts as to the strongest pieces of evidence. My own feeling after a careful reading of the book was that it represents an even grotesque exaggeration of the merely critical spirit — ’the capacity for pulling anything to pieces — and that it is destitute of the gift of constructive imagination so necessary for an historian. It ranks, to my mind, with the writings of some, on the other extreme flank of the army of historians, who defend ecclesiastical tradition at all costs. That is to say, it is among the books which produce on the mind of any one who believes that good historical evidence ought to be accepted, though it can never be strictly demonstrative, the opposite impression to that intended.

(2) Now I am going to give the conclusions about the authorship and character of the Fourth Gospel and the Epistle to which I have been led myself.

(a) I cannot entertain any doubt that the Epistle is by the same author as the Gospel. The late Professor James Hope Moulton (and there is no better authority) says of all three Epistles, ’’No one with the faintest instinct of style would detach them from the Gospel.”, I think the most reasonable view is that the first Epistle was written immediately after the Gospel or a sort of commentary on it. About the second and third Epistles I will speak when we come to them.

(b) Equally I cannot doubt that the Gospel is of one piece. (Of course I except the narrative of the woman taken in adultery, which does not seem to belong to this Gospel, though, from internal evidence, I think it may be regarded as certainly historical.) I hold with Dr. Gardner that “ The whole book is of uniform character and is the literary creation of a single author, including the last chapter, which is of the nature of a supplement” The unity of this Gospel seems to me to be as self-evident as the unity — shall I say?— of the Epistle to the Galatians. It is not the work of an editor working upon sources, but the original work of a man inspired by one declared purpose — to confirm faith in Jesus as the Son of God — who believed himself (or represented himself as so believing) that he had within his own memory the materials for his narrative and needed nothing else. When he issued the completed book he was surrounded by a circle of friends (John 21:24), So also he is represented to us in the traditions. And we need not exclude the idea that if one of them was a better Greek scholar than the author he may have corrected the Greek. Dictation to shorthand writers and mere verbal reproduction of what was dictated was a common practice of the Empire. But there is reason to believe that the scribes often did a good deal more than mere transcription.

(c) The author intends, with the utmost human intensity, to convey the impression that the Gospel is true history. He begins his Epistle by stressing the evidence of eye and ear and hand on which his message is based. It is from what he beheld in the human person, Jesus of Nazareth, that he reached the belief that He was more than human. And it seems to me that there is no possibility of mistaking the intense consciousness of the Evangelist that he is recording what he himself saw and heard. This impression is conveyed by particular statements: “We beheld his glory"; He “manifested" it at Cana “and his disciples believed on him.” After His resurrection the disciples “remembered" something that Jesus had actually said. At the death upon the cross, the author was an eye-witness: “He that hath seen hath home witness, and his witness is true.” (John 19:35), And the circle of his friends at the end of the appendix— the cap. 21. — add their testimony, "This is the disciple which beareth witness of these things, and wrote these things: and we know that his witness is true.” (John 21:24)

Moreover, the writer’s mind is to represent other men as well as himself as coming to their belief in Jesus by what they themselves saw and heard. So John the Baptist (John 1:34); so Philip would have it be with Nathanael (John 1:46); so was it with the multitude in Jerusalem (John 2:23) and with the people of Sychar (John 4:42). So Jesus is represented as restoring in His disciples an impression long ago received, not by any words but by going Himself bade to the scene of their original experience, that they might come to find Hun there and that the place might by its associations revive the impression (John 10:40-41).

Some of these expressions could easily be attributed to the skilful literary artist who was representing himself as an eye-witness, without having really been so. And writers in many ages have, for literary purposes, assumed such a character without any intention to deceive.

Moreover, the early Christian centuries produced many “pseudonymous”’ books — books, that is, written in the name of some well-known mall) as a literary device, and perhaps some of them (but not all) without any intention to deceive. But just as we can more or less certainly distinguish among paintings professing to be portraits of real persons those which are mere efforts of imagination and those which (though we do not know the features of the person represented) are obviously, as we say, ’’ the real living man,’“ so I think it is, again more or less, in literature. True, there have been certain supreme geniuses in imaginative biography or history. But certainly such a genius is not likely to have arisen in the first two centuries. The disguise in the existing efforts of this kind belonging to this period is confessedly very thin. On the other hand, the Fourth Gospel conveys, as intensely as any record of experience can convey it, the impression of a man whose senses were extraordinarily keen; who was molded by what he saw; who drew his conclusions from his experiences; who gives an astonishingly vivid impression both of what he saw and heard and of what observations were made upon it by others. AU the way through the narrative I at least receive an irresistible impression that this is the record of an eye-witness. Thus when Dr. Drummond, who cannot on general grounds believe that Jesus really raised Lazarus from the dead, suggests that the author did not seriously intend to represent it as an actual historical occurrence, but only to embody a spiritual impression in such a guise, I believe he is as wrong as it is possible to be. The author of the Fourth Gospel meant, with all the intensity of his nature to convey an impression of what had actually occurred. This is certain, it seems to me, on literary grounds. But for myself I confess, as I have said, that I cannot resist the impression that lie not only meant this, but was justified in meaning it — that he had actually seen what he describes.

I must make a distinction, however, as truth compels me to do, between the incidents and the speeches. I believe St. John gives us wonderfully vivid memorials of what he had seen; and, substantially, in the discourses of the Fourth Gospel, a truthful account of the claim and teaching of Jesus in Jerusalem and in conflict with the Jewish leaders. In each discourse we seem to discern actual phrases of Jesus — so that it is essential that we should add the testimony of these discourses to that of the Synoptic Gospels, if we are to get a fairly full conception of His teaching. Thus I cannot doubt that assertions by our Lord of His own pre-existence, such as are contained in the discourses of the Fourth Gospel, were really made. Indeed, pre-existence is inseparable from the claim of divine sonship as represented in the Synoptics. Also I cannot doubt that our Lord did really speak of Himself as the Bread of Life and of our eating His flesh and drinking His blood, and did really announce the mission of the Holy Spirit and speak of His future function, as is recorded in different parts of the Fourth Gospel. I do not think that the unhesitating beliefs of the apostolic Church could have been what they were without such teaching on the part of the Master Himself, Thus I believe the promise of 14:26 — that the Holy Spirit would quicken the memory of the Twelve and make it faithful — to have been really given and really fulfilled. But this concerns the substance of the discourses. As regards their form I cannot resist the impression that the manner and method of Jesus in teaching is more accurately represented in the Synoptics; and that it is in the discourses of the Fourth Gospel constantly difficult to distinguish between the original speech of Jesus and the form which that utterance had gradually taken in the apostle’s mind. Memory and meditation, we feel, have both combined to produce the result. Psychologically we should judge the apostle to have been a man upon whom visual and tactile experience made an impression which survived distinct and unmodified; but the impressions made through the ear by what he heard from the great Teacher were fused with his later meditations, so that though you can be sure the germ or main substance of the discourse is truly to be ascribed to Jesus, you cannot say the same of its form. But as to the relation of the Fourth Gospel to the other three, both in respect of incident and discourse, I must be content to refer my readers, if they will pursue the subject, to Mr. Eichmond’s book and to Dr. Drummond’s.

{d) Now I want to pass for a moment from the mind of the author of the Fourth Gospel to that of the Church which received it. The second century and the third produced a crop of legendary Gospels and Acts of Apostles which had considerable vogue. And the intention of the Church, which resulted in the establishment of the unique authority of the four Gospels before the middle of the second century, was to distinguish from all spurious productions the genuine writings of the apostles and their companions. They would not have intentionally accepted a pseudonymous work, however edifying. There is an apocryphal book called the Acts of Paul and Thecla, which Sir William Ramsay and other scholars believe to contain some important element of true history; and this writing, or some writing on which it is based, was in vogue at the end of the second century. Thus it is instructive to notice that Tertullian discusses and refuses to accept a certain writing “falsely ascribed to Paul” which made mention of this Thecla, for he would have those who quote this authority know “ that a presbyter in Asia who composed that writing, adding it out of his own to the list of Paul’s, was convicted of his act, and, having confessed that he did it for love of Paul, was deposed from his office.” This, which is quite incidentally mentioned, shows the attitude which the Church took towards “pseudonymous” compositions.

Again, it is really monstrous to suggest, as is frequently done, by critics who surely ought to know better, that when the Alexandrian Clement calls St. John’s Gospel the distinctively “ spiritual ’’ one (by contrast to the others, which were held to give the “bodily” things) he means that St. John’s Gospel is only intended as allegory and not history.. I say this is monstrous because, on the one hand, Clement’s words admit of another perfectly natural interpretation, viz. that the Synoptics are simply concerned to record things as they were seen and heard, and St. John is constantly occupied in supplying as interpretation-the spiritual meaning of the things; and, on the other hand, if Clement does not explain himself, his greater and more famous successor at Alexandria, Origen, does so, with great elaboration. He, as is well known, thinks that though the bulk of what is written in the Bible as history is real history, and the bulk of its precepts intended to be literally obeyed, yet this is not the case with all that is to be found there. There are things there related as history or prescribed as duties which cannot have really occurred or be intended to be practiced literally, both in the Old Testament and in the New — including the Gospels.

These are inserted in order that their falsity, according to the letter, being manifest, may stimulate our minds to rise to the spiritual or allegorical meaning of the Scriptures, of which the Alexandrians made so much. He thus believes that there are in the Bible historicalsounding narratives which are not historically true, but are allegorical But he expressly would have us exclude from this category of "pure spirituals" (as he calls them) "the things written concerning the Savior." "That no one,” he writes, "may suppose us to make the general assertion that there is no true history because some of it is not so; or no legislation which is to be literally observed because there is some which literally is absurd or impossible; or that the things written concerning the Savior are not true in respect of the outward facts; or that his legislation is in no part to be literally observed — (to avoid such a misconception) be it said that it is clearly present to our minds that there is (in the Bible) true history; for there are, in fact, many more things which are historically true than those purely spiritual which are interwoven.” Then he goes on to quote the precepts of the ten commandments, etc, as intended to be literally observed. And in another place he says that certain things in the Gospels “have a spiritual meaning, though the historical truth of them must be first assumed to remain’’ — as, for example, our Lord’s healings, which actually happened and have a spiritual meaning, or His raisings of the dead to life. He both did at a certain time miracles of this kind, as in raising Lazarus and others, and he also continually does it spiritually. On the whole, I believe the truth to be that though spiritual romances were popular (and Clement was fond of quoting them), yet the Church generally sedulously sought to distinguish genuine from spurious, and attached the greatest importance to questions of apostolic authorship; and would not — not even the Alexandrians who carried allegorical interpretation to such an excess — have tolerated the idea of Gospels which were not true in fact.

(e) I find the evidence supplied by the Gospel itself such as ought to convince us that it must have been written (and, therefore, the Epistle also) by a Palestinian Jew, thoroughly acquainted with the whole district and with Jerusalem, thoroughly at home, moreover, in the situation which was utterly and irrecoverably overthrown by the destruction of Jerusalem and its temple in a.d. 70; further, that it must have been really written by one of the most intimate circle of the disciples, and that John the son of Zebedee is, without being named, clearly indicated as the “disciple whom Jesus loved/’ I think the old argument of Godet and Westcott to this effect remains untouched in substance.

(f) I find the external evidence, however often I review it, pointing to John the Apostle as the author of the Gospel, almost overwhelming. I do not think the fabric of Lightfoot’s argument has been the least overthrown. I feel myself, therefore, constrained-none the less really because gladly — to accept the conclusion that the tradition is true. But there is one qualification which I wish to make. A few scholars who believe that the Gospel records a real experience of “the beloved disciple” who wrote it, are attracted by the tradition of there having been two Johns, one the apostle the son of Zebedee, and another called John the Presbyter. This latter John is a most shadowy figure. I am tempted to doubt his having really existed. But these scholars are disposed to identify with him the disciple who wrote the Fourth Gospel. They think he may have been originally (what the author of this Gospel, in their judgment, must have been) a Jew of good position in Jerusalem — possibly the rich young ruler who was offended by the stem counsel of Jesus, but whom Jesus is said to have “loved” (Mark 10:21); they suppose him to have been among the early disciples, and to have returned to allegiance after his temporary alienation. They think he may have been the host at the last supper, and so have occupied the position there ascribed to him in the Gospel, and have passed into the innermost circle of the disciples, so that he could write the Fourth Gospel as a true record of the experience in which he had shared.

Then they accept a late statement made on early authority (but as it seems to me certainly under a misunderstanding) that John the son of Zebedee was, like his brother, slain by the Jews. And they think that the other John, the beloved disciple, passed into his place in tradition, and did and suffered all that is recorded of the apostle at Ephesus, and wrote the Johannine books. This opinion seems to me highly improbable from more than one point of view. I find it difficult even to treat it seriously. But it gives us for our Gospel an author who had the experience and knowledge and intimacy which the Gospel implies, and for our Epistle an author who could truly speak, as John the son of Zebedee could have spoken, of what he had seen and heard and gazed upon and touched, as the basis for the great conclusion which he there, in a measure, develops. Thus I wish to make mention of this theory of the authorship and to recognize that for our purposes it would suffice: it would make the Gospel a true record of a real experience and justify the claim of our Epistle.

Nevertheless I affirm the authorship of St. John the Apostle; and I should like to add that, after all these years of discussion from every point of view, I think the subject is ripe for decision.

§4

There are only two further points which have to be touched upon in this introduction — the first is the character of St. John’s mysticism, and the second is his claim to be called a philosopher. And first as to his mysticism.

(1) By the term “mystics” we describe a class of thinkers who have three special characteristics — first, that they are not content with a surface view of the world or with its external aspect, but (in Wordsworth’s phrase) “see into the life of things”; secondly, that they have an intensely vivid perception of the unity of all things in God — they see God in all things and all things in God, and find in communion with God, aimed at and in part realized here and now, the chief occupation of their lives; thirdly, that their method of arriving at truth is not the method of argument or discursive reasoning, but the method of intuition: they do not arrive at truth by critical inquiry or antagonism to error, but by a sort of positive vision or feeling. Now St. John has all those characteristics to an intense degree. He is thus intensely mystical. But the experiences on which many mystics have depended have been private experiences of their own inward consciousness, or visions which have been shown only to their inward spiritual eye. It is this which has made their affirmations so often unconvincing to other men not endowed with like gifts, and even fantastic or unmeaning. But St. John’s method is exactly the opposite. He had depended upon external historical experiences to quicken and nourish his soul. He had lived by facts, been taught by facts, moulded by facts. His idealism, the fruit of his external experiences. If this is not the case, then he must be pronounced wholly ignorant of himself, and that, as it seems to me, no one who can study and appreciate the Gospel or the Epistle ought to be able to believe.

Thus the “mysticism” of St. John would be rightly set in opposition to any method of presenting religion which is mainly logical or argumentative, or to any presentation of it which is mainly concerned with visible institutions or rites and ceremonies — to what we may call “externalism.” But it is in no way opposed to the emphasis on historical facts. Nay, no one could emphasize them more than St. John does; nor, I may add, is it anyway opposed to sacramentalism, that is to say, the system which sees the principle of the Incarnation — the communication of the divine through what is visible and tangible — ^perpetuated in the visible Church, with its visible and symbolical rites as instruments of the divine action. St. John’s mysticism is the sort of mysticism which requires the historical creeds and which coheres naturally with the idea and authority of the Church and the sacraments. Our “Epistle” — which, as I have said, has few of the characteristics of an epistle, but is rather a commentary on the ideas of the Gospel, embodying in infinitely solemn utterances what St. John believed to be the final outcome of all his experiences — impresses us, like the writings of all the greatest mystics, alike by its simplicity and its profundity. If these utterances about God and about human life — as momentous as they are simple — are indeed trustworthy and true, it makes the whole difference to us. They are to-day just what we want. It is just about these momentous simplicities that the souls of men have been startled and harassed with even agonizing doubts during the horrifying experiences of the past years. Nothing could do us more good to-day than to reflect again on what such a man as wrote this Epistle found, after long years of brooding meditation, to be the final outcome of all his vividly remembered experiences of the life, teaching, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth.

(2) The other question on which I want to say a word is the question whether we must tank the author of the Fourth Gospel and the Epistle which accompanied it as a philosopher. For it has been a frequent objection to St. John’s authorship of the Fourth Gospel that a man such as he was, with such slender education, could never have become such a philosopher as the author of the Fourth Gospel undoubtedly was.

Now if by a philosopher we mean simply a man who loved truth above all things, who thought profoundly and who had by his experiences been provided with adequate matter to think about, of course he was a philosopher. But if it is meant that our author must have been among the academic students of his day, and must have been acquainted with philosophical literature, for example, with Philo or with the unknown contemporary of St. Paul who wrote at Ephesus under the name of the ancient philosopher Heraclitus, I would say there is not the slightest reason to imagine it and every reason to doubt it. It has become more and more evident that all the materials for the prologue to the Fourth Gospel can be found in the Old Testament language about the word of God, coupled with the conception of the divine wisdom in Proverbs and the later Sapiential books. No doubt there were learned men of the academic type in Judea in St. John’s youth, and in Ephesus in St. John’s old age, but he had little or no connection with them. The learned men, first in Judea and then in the larger Greek world, showed themselves either violently opposed to Jesus of Nazareth and His teaching, or for the most part totally indifferent to it. And our Lord had shown Himself strangely indifferent to the alienation of the learned class in Judaea, and even thankful for it. “In that same time," writes St. Luke, "He rejoiced in the Holy Spirit, and said, I thank thee, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that thou didst hide these things from the wise and understanding, and didst reveal them unto babes; yea. Father, for so it was well pleasing in thy sight.” If we begin to think, we can well understand this thankfulness on our Lord’s part, which at first hearing sounds so strange and repugnant. For undoubtedly “the wise and understanding” of the Jewish synagogue would only have been persuaded to welcome a religion so conceived and so expressed as to be profoundly alien both to the mass of mankind and to the learned Greeks of their own time. And a religion so conceived and so expressed — say by St. Paul — as to be welcome to the philosophic Greeks would never have been homely enough to be intelligible to the common people.

It would have been, like Stoicism or Platonism, the religion of a select class. But a catholic faith must be first of all a faith intelligible to the common man, directed to common needs and expressed in common human language. This is what our Lord intended His religion to be. But it is most untrue that our Lord was indifferent to intellect or thought. No teacher ever set himself so deliberately to make the ordinary man think for himself. He was not willing merely to instruct. He would force men to think for themselves. This was His purpose in teaching by parables. Men were to find in their observations of common things, by deep thinking about them, the laws and principles of the kingdom of God. And we may say that no teacher ever succeeded as our Lord succeeded in making common men think. The apostles were scoffed at as unlearned men, without the training which qualifies men to be teachers. But out of this original apostolic circle— in which we are not including St. Paul, who was a more “highly educated” man — proceeded some wonderful documents — the first Epistle of St. Peter, the Epistle of St. James, the Epistles of St. John. These,- indeed, are the writings of men who have asked themselves the great questions — who have been forced up against the great enigmas and have attained the great convictions. They had passed through no learned academy, and had nothing more than the ordinary man’s acquaintance with learned phraseology. But assuredly they had learned to think. In particular there is not, in all history, I venture to say, a greater instance than St. John’s Epistle of a long-continued and momentous experience moulding a simple and observant mind, therein stirring great questions and generating great principles, which, long revolved and brooded upon, are at last produced, for the enrichment of mankind, with a simplicity proportioned to their depth.

Thus there is nothing of the academic philosopher in the author of the first Gospel — nothing that is not drawn from the Old Testament wisdom and the teaching of Jesus Christ and the experience of common human life. It was on this basis only that the principles of a catholic religion must be laid. The wisdom of the schools, whether Rabbinic or Greek, was not to be in the foundations. But when once the foundations had been laid and the Church established on a creed suited to the plain man, a creed of facts and simply religious ideas, it was to show its capacity to develop a philosophy and a theology — a task for which all the learning accessible to the age would be needed. Only this was not the task of the first generation of witnesses. Their task was with the everlasting foundations, with the witness to the facts, and the message about God and man which can never be revised, for it only reads out into common human words what lies plain to observation, when once it is shown us, in the teaching and life, the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.