‘‘we beheld His glory” (i. 14) need not be pressed, although con sidering the analogous statement of 1 John i. 1, it may very well be maintained that the writer had with his bodily eyes seen the mani- festation of his Lord’s glory. But in xix. 35 we have an explicit claim: ‘‘ He that saw it bare record, and his record is true, and he knoweth that he saith true, that ye might believe”. The words ‘“‘he knoweth that he saith true” could hardly have been inserted by any other hand than that of the eye-witness himself. In xxi. 24 we read: ‘‘ This is the disciple which testifieth of these things, and wrote these things”. Whether this note was added by the writer himself, or by another hand, certainly the intention is to identify the writer with an eye-witness and participator of the events recorded. We are thus confronted with the alternative: either an eye-witness wrote this Gospel, or a forger whose genius for truth and for lying are alike inexplicable. As Renan says (Vie, xxvii.): ‘‘ L’auteur y parle toujours comme témoin oculaire; il veut se faire passer pour l’Apotre Jean. Si donc cet ouvrage n’est pas réellement de Vapdtre, il faut admettre une supercherie que l’auteur s’avouait 4 lui-méme.”
This claim is abundantly confirmed by the character of the Gospel. For we find in it such a multitude of detail as gratuitously invites the detection of error. Not only are individuals named, and so de- scribed that we seem to know them, but frequently there are added specifications of time and place which obviously are the involuntary superfluity of information which flows almost unconsciously from a full memory. Such details are: the hour at which Jesus sat on the well, the number and size of the water-pots at the marriage at Cana, the weight and value of the ointment, the number of fish at the last cast, the hour at which the nobleman’s son began to amend, the hour at which Jesus took the two inquirers into His own lodging.
Circumstantiality can, no doubt, be given to a narrative by a Defoe or a Swift. But among the Jews the writing of fiction was not cultivated ; and besides, the circumstantial detail of this Gospel does not belong to the world of imagination, but attaches to real objects and events, and can in many instances be verified. If in these instances the detail is found to be accurate, the presumption is that accuracy characterises those also which cannot so easily be checked ; and that, therefore, the circumstantiality is due to the fact that the writer was an eye-witness of what he records.
(4) This Palestinian Jew who was himself an eye-witness of the ministry of Jesus was the Apostle John. In xxi. 24 the writer of the Gospel is identified with the disciple whom Jesus loved. This disciple: