of which is introductory to the other. The former ^ch. xiii-xvii) presents to us our Lord in the retirement of private life, in his intercourse with his immediate fol- lowers, to whom he pours out his soul in lovmg counsel, warning, and promise, in the prospect of his departure from them ; and in communion with his heavenly Fa- ther, with whom, as one who had finished the work he had received to do, he intercedes for those whose re- demption from sin and evil is the coveted recompense of his obedience. To this succeeds the account of the Passion, and the api^earances of Christ to his disciples after his resurrection (ch. xviii-xxi), which forms the other part of the second portion of the book. See the minute analysis of Lampe in his Comment., and a briefer one in Westcott, Introd. to Study of the Gospels, p. 281 sq. The greater part of the book is occupied with the dis- courses of our Lord, the plan of the evangelist being ob- viously to bring the reader as much as possible into personal contact with Jesus, and to make the latter his own expositor. Regarding the discourses thus reported, the question has arisen. How far are they to be accept- ed as an exact report of what Jesus uttered? and in re- ply to this, three opinions have been advanced : 1. That both in substance and in form we have them as they came from the lips of Christ; 2. That in substance they present what Christ uttered, but that the form in which they appear is due to the evangelist ; and, 3. That they are not the discourses of Christ in any proper sense, but only speeches put in his mouth by the evangelist to ex- press what the latter conceived to be a just representa- tion of his doctrine. Of these views the last has found adherents only among a few of the sceptical school ; it is without the slightest authority from the book itself, is irreconcilable with the simplicity and earnestness of the writer, is foreign to the habits and notions of the class to wliich the evangelist belongs, and is contradict- ed by the frequent explanations which he introduces of the sense in which he understood what he reports (comp. ■ii, 19, 21 , vii, 38, 39; xii, 32, 33, etc.), by the brief no- tices, which evince an actual reminiscence of the scenes and circumstances amid which the discourse was deliv- ered (e. g. xiv, 31), and by the prophetic announcements of his impending sufferings and death ascribed to the Saviour, which are couched in language such as he might naturally use, such as accounts for those to whom he spoke, even his disciples, not imderstanding his mean- ing, but such as it is utterly incredible that one not de- sirous of reporting his very words should, writing after the fulfilment of these predictions, impute to him (comp. vii, 33-36; viii, 21, 22; x, 17-20; xii, 23-36; xiv, 1-4, 18, 28; xvi, 16, 19, etc.). Some of these considerations are of weight also as against the second of the opinions above stated ; for, if John sought merely to give the substance of the Saviour's teaching in his own words, why clothe predictions, the meaning of which at the time of his writing he perfectly understood, in obscure and difticidt phraseology? Why especially impute to the speaker language of which he feels it necessan,' to give an explanation, instead of at once putting the in- telligible statement in his discourse? Undoubtedly the impression which one gets from the narrative is that John means the discourses he ascribes to Jesus to be re- ceived as faithful reports of what he actually uttered; and this is confirmed when one compares his rejiort of John the Baptist's sayings with those of our Lord, the character of the one being totally different from that of the other. To this view it has been objected that there is such an identity of style in the discourses which John ascribes to Christ with his own style, both in this Gos- pel and in his Epistles, as betrays in the former the hand, not of a faithful reporter, but of one who gives in the manner natiu-al to himself the substance of what his ^Master taught. In this there is some force, which is but partially met by the suggestion that John was so imbued with the very mind' and soul of Christ, so in- formed by his doctrine, and so filled Ijy his spirit, that his own manner of thought and utterance became the
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same as that of Christ, and he insensibly wrote and spoke in the style of his Lord. Eeuss objects to this that on this supposition the style of Jesus "must have been a very miiform and sharply-defined one, and such as excludes the very different style ascribed to him by the synoptists" (Gisch. ckr H. S. des N. T. p. 203). Bu"t the facts here are overstated ; the style of our Lord's discourses in John is by no means perfectly uniform, nor is it much further removed from that ascribed to him by the synoptists than the difference of subject and circum- stance will suffice to account for. As for the objection that it is inconceivable that the evangelist could have retained for so many ji^ears a faithful recollection of dis- courses heard by him only once, we need not, in order to meet it, resort to the foolish suggestion of Bertlioldt that he had taken notes of them at the time for his own behoof; nor need we to lay stress on the assurance of Christ which John records that the Holy Ghost whom tlie Father should send to them would teach them all tilings, and bring aU things to their remembrance what- soever he had said unto them (J(jhn xiv, 26), though to the believer this is a fact of the utmost importance. It will suffice to meet the objection if we suggest that, as the apostle went forth to the world as a witness for Christ, he did not wait till he sat down to ^vrite his Gospel to give forth his recollections of his IMaster's words and deeds. What he narrates here in writing is only what he must have been repeating constantly dur- ing his whole apostolic career. Still, after due allowance has been made for all these considerations, it must yet be admitted that the decided Johannean cast of all these discourses, as compared with oiur Lord's sayings reported in the synoptical Gospels, shows that while the evangel- ist gives the substance and essential form of Christ's public utterances, he nevertheless, to a large degree, moidds them into his own style of phraseology and co- herence. This is especially true of xii, 44-50, which is evidently a summarj' of statements made on perhaps more than one occasion not definitely given. Indeed, it is doubtful if any of the evangelists give us the exact words of our Lord, as they certainly do not tally in this particular any more than they do in the order and con- nection in which these are narrated. (See Tholuck, Glauhwurdigkeit der evanrjelischen Geschichte [2d edit.], p. 314 sq.). See Harmonies.