wishes to convey of the complete voluntariness of Christ's sulli.'rings and death, and of the 'glory' which Mas manifested by His humiliation as well as by His Inumjih over death, might be imimired by incidents w Inch seem to indicate human weak- ness and hesitation ; and, lastly, he omits the Ascension and the descent of the Paraclete, be- cause he does not wish the withdrawal of Christ's bodily presence, and the continuation of the Incar- nation in another more spiritual form, to be asso- ciated with physical portents, or to be assigned to particular days.
There can be no question that these omissions are deliberate, and not the result of ignorance. Those who wish to discredit any of the narratives which appear in the Synoptics, cannot rightly draw any inferences from St. John's silence. Such features of the Christian tradition as the Birth at Bethlehem and the Ascension must have been well known by any well-instructed Christian at the be- ginning of the 2nd cent., and there are no signs that our Evangelist wishes to correct his pre- decessors from tlie standpoint of one who has had access to better information. Not only are in- cidents like the Baptism referred to incidentally (F=), but an attempt is made to provide substitutes for several of the omitted narrati\'es. Instead of tlie Davidic ancestry of Joseph, we have the eternal generation of the tiovoyevi)^ ; instead of the Lord's Prayer, taught to the disciples, we have the High- Priestly prayer of cli. 17, in wliich almost every clause of the Loril's Pi-ayer is represented, tliough in each case, except the last ('Deliver ns from the evil one '), the petition is changed into a statement that the work has been done, the boon conferred. The institution of Bantism is represented by the discourses with Nicoaemus and the Samaritan woman ; that of the Eucharist by the miracle in ch. 6 and the discourse on the Bread of Life which follows it. The Transfiguration is represented by the voice from heaven in 12-''- ^ ; while the pre- ceding verse (which should be printed as a question, ' Shall I say. Father, save me from this hour?') is intended to compensate us for the loss of the Agony in the Garden. Lastly, the words to Thomas in 2029— the ]ast beatitude— more than reconcile us to the loss of any description of the Ascension.
The number of miracles is much reduced ; but those which are given are reiiresentative, and in some cases are more tremendous than those of the Synoptics. The healing of the son of Herod's official (4*"'-) is the only miracle which has the true Synoptic ring ; in the others no ' faith ' is required in those who are to benctit by the sign, and the object seems to be to manifest some aspect of Christ's Person and work. In the marriage at Cana, the feeding of the multitude, the healing of the blind man, and the raising of Lazarus, the Evangelist himself tells us the spiritual meaning of the miracle, in words spoken either by the Lortl Himself or by some one else.
There is, howe\er, a great deal of symbolism in the Gospel which is unexjilained by the author, and unnoticed by the large majority of his readers. The method is strange to us, and we do not look out for allegories which would be at once under- stood by Alexandrians in the 2nd century. A few examples are necessary, to justify the view here taken that symbolism or allegorism pervades the whole Gospel. In 1-' John the Baptist designates Christ 'the Lam)i of God,' with clear reference to the Paschal sacrifice. Tlie prophetic type of the Paschal lamb dominates the whole of the Passion narrative in St. John. Even the date, it would appear, is altered, in order that Christ may die on the day when the Paschal lambs were killed. The change of the ' reed ' of the Synoptics to ' hyssop ' seems to have been made with the same object.
JOHN, GOSPEL OF
JOHN, GOSPEL OF
when we remember the ritual use of hyssop at the Passover. The Gospel ahounds in enigmatic utterances, such as ' Thou hast kept the good wine until now ' (2"") ; ' It is expedient that one man should die for the people' (11*'); 'Judas went immediately out, and it was night' (IS**) ; in wliicli the reader :s plainly meant to see a double meaning. The symbolism is often in three stages. The text presents an apparent sense, which is in figure a second, which in turn points to a third and still deeper signification. Especially in the narrative, a prophetic utterance quoted from the OT is some- times the intermediate stage in this allegorical construction. The type of the Paschal lamb comes as it were between the literal feeding of the 5000 and the idea that Christ gives His life to take away the sin of the world, and that He may be our spiritual food and sustenance. The words quoted from the Psalms, ' the zeal of thy house shall eat me up,' come in like manner between the cleansing of the Temple at Jerusalem and the idea of the glorification of Jesus as the building of the true Temple, the body of Christ, the Church. There are, we might venture to say, three temples in the mind of the Evangelist — the material ti.'iii|.lc built by Herod, the temple of Cliri.-t , naiural Imdy, which was to be destroyed and rai^L'i I up ■ in three days,' and the temple which Ls the s]iiiitual liody of'Clirist — namely, the Church. Similarly, in 7^^ the quotation, ' out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water,' comes, as it were, between the thrust of the lance and the eflusion of the Holy Spirit on the disciples and the Chmch.