was certainly one of the seven named in xxi. 2, who appear as the actors in the scene there recorded. Of these seven there were three who frequently appear in the other Gospels as the intimates of Jesus. These are Peter, James, and John. But Peter cannot have been the disciple in question, for in this chapter Peter and that disciple are spoken of separately. Neither can James be the person meant, for his early death precludes the idea of his being the author of the Gospel. It remains that John was the disciple whom Jesus loved,! the author of the Fourth Gospel. And however we interpret the intention of John in using this circumlocution to designate himself, it must not be overlooked that its employment is evidence of the Johannine authorship. In the other Gospels John is frequently spoken of by name. In this Gospel John is not once named, although from no Gospel do we gather such vivid descriptions of the Apostles. Certainly it is a most natural and sufficient explana- tion of this fact to suppose that John was the author of the Gospel.
Objections. But to this conclusion many critics demur. Since Bretschneider it has been continually asserted that this does not exhaust the internal evidence, and that there is that in the Fourth Gospel which makes it impossible to refer it to the Apostle John. There are evidences of dependence on the synoptists, inconsistent with the hypothesis that it was written by an Apostle who himself had been an eye-witness ; of a universalism inconsistent with the fact that the Apostle John was a pillar of the Jewish Christian Church ; and of a philosophical colouring which does not favour the idea that the author was a Galilean fisherman.?
The two latter objections are not formidable. Schirer shows with considerable force that up to the time of the Apostolic conven- tion in Jerusalem John was a Jewish Christian and an upholder of the law, whereas the author of this Gospel knows the law only as the law of the Jews. 15 it likely, he asks, that one who during the first twenty years of his ministry maintained the law would in his latter years so entirely repudiate it? “If during this long period the influence of the preaching of Jesus had not made John a liberal, was such a transformation probable at a still later time ?’’ That sucha transformation was very probable will be the answer of those who consider that between the earlier and the later period the Jewish
‘“ There is no trace that in Christian antiquity this title ever suggested any one but John” (Ezra Abbot, Critical Essays, p. 73).
? For a brief but conclusive answer to these objections, see Dale’s Living Christ and the Four Gospels, 149-152.