If we read between the lines of the most authentic Epp. of St. Paul, St. Peter, or the Ep. of St. James, we see that the message of the apostles had already inaugurated a new philosophy of heaven and eartli, of time and eternity, now conceptions of history and ethics, and new standards of life. The leaven had spread from Jems, to Antioch ; from thence it had spread to Ephesus, Corinth, and Home. All this iiad occurred before the Fourth Gospel had been crystallized into form, or its interpreta- tion of the ballling mystery had been oflerod to mankind. Even if we were robbed of tlio Apoc. and of the spiritual Gospel, or deprived of all conlidence in either, we should still be in inde- feasible possession of a faith which unriddles the universe, which works by love, which overcomes the world. We should, therefore, mistake most obvious facta if we persisted in regarding the Fourth Gospel as the 'acropolis' c» citadel of the faitli.
But although this is freely concedeti, the inestim- able preciousness of the document must still be urged with earnestness. Those who strenuo<isly deny its historicity and repudiate its apostolic character are ready to confess, with Baur, Sclienkel, Thoma, Taylor, that the highest, and essentially the truest, revelation of tlie Son of Man, and interpretation of the mind and will of God, are to be found in this record. Much which it contains has long since been verified by the Christian con- science as fundamentally true, and has permanently enriched the mind of man.
We hail the teaching of the Fourth Go.^pel aa establishing for us the inspiring persuasion that the divine and human are not separated by an impassable chasm, but are in their innermost essence one ; that, in the portraiture of the Logoa made man, humanity at its best is nothing loss than the clearest and most gracious revelation of the Eternal God, and that Divinity at its greatest has been manifested through the human.
A philosophy based on the intrinsic unknowable- ness of God, on the impossibility of converse being held between man and his Creator, is pledged to demonstrate the late origin of the Fourth Gospel, and to find in the Johannine teaching of St. I'aul some of the materials of the pious fraud of tliis falsarius of the 2nd century. Alany have struggled with the attempt to discover Alexandrine philo- sophy in the Fourth Gospel. Etl'orts have been made to show that in the speculations of Cerin- thus, Valentinus, and Basilides we may find the historical antecedents of this Gospel. It was even urged by Volkmar that ' John ' may have used the works of .Justin Martyr, rather than Justin liave
3 noted from 'John,' and a date was pro«sionally etermined for the appearance of the Gospel just anterior to the time wlien, by "oneral admission, it is kno^\'n to have been regarded in Antioch and Lyons, Alexandria, Ephesus, and Rome as one of the four indisputa.ble authorities for the biography of the Lord Jesus.
I. External Evidence for the Early Exist- ence OF FOUR Gospels. — The strength of the argument for the historicity and the credibility oi
JOHN, GOSIEL OF
JOHN, GOSPEL OF
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St. John's Gospel is to be found withio itself: (1) in the proof wliich it explicitly contains of its own authorship ; (2) in the transcendent revelation it gives of an auj^ust Personality iiumeasurably greater than that of the supposed author himself, who did not fully assimilate words or thoughts of his Master which yet, by some psycholo''ic process, he was able to preserve and record for all time ; (3) in the subtle harmonies between ' St. John's ' conception of tlie Son of God and that expressed by the Synoptists and St. Paul ; (4) in the gerniinant force ot the uttered word of Jesus, and in the triumphant response it has found in the conscious- ne.s8, the fears and hopes, of tlie human race. And yet there are discords as well as harmonies. These we shall presently attempt to separate, but lirst we must clearly apprehend what is the material of wliich these things can be said.
There is proof tliat towards the last quarter of the second cent., in every part of the Kouian Empire, four Gospels had been selected and were regarded as authentic, and that these four documents were identical with those whieli are described as 'according to' Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John". Up to that period, ri cCaYyiXiof was a name lor the good message, or acceptable speculation, which Christian or heretical writers were oticriug to their followers. Thus Hippolytus {lii'f. Hwr. vii. 27) speaks of the disciples of liasilides as posses.sing ' a gospel ' which was the knowledge (yv!^ai%) of supra- mundane things; but Theophilus of Antioch apiiiied the name to the four separate Gospels, and we hear henceforward not only of the Gospel, but of rd
(a) The most conspicuous of these testimonies is that of Iren.«:us, Bishop of Lyons in Gaul, who lived between A.D. 14U and 202, and who wrote his treatise lie/uiat ion of Heresies between A.V. ISUand 190. Other fragments of his work, and a letter to Florinus, are preserved by Eusebius [HE v. 20). These are of considerable interest, and show, in combination, that the ' four Gospels ' are, together with the Old Testament, to be regarded as ' the Scriptures.' Irenicus speciliea these four {Htcr. iii. 1), referring them by name to their respective authors. He makes frequent reference to St. John by name, and he gives a mystic reason for there being/our Gospels, neither more nor fewer. Though this is fanciful and carries no theological weight, it shows that tlie canonical ' four ' must have been long in circulation among the Churches of Lyons and Vienne.* Irenaius makes no fewer than 500 citations from the four Gospels, 100 of these being from the Fourth (see Inde.\ of Ante-Nicene Library, Works of Irerueus, ii. 193-197).