narrative portion of the Gospel of John may be said to exist for the sake of the verbal teaching. The miracles which in the first three Gospels appear as the beneficent acts of our Lord without ulterior motive, seem in the Fourth Gospel to exist for the sake of the teaching they embody, and the discussions they give rise to. Similarly, the persons introduced, such as Nicodemus, are viewed chiefly as instrumental in eliciting from Jesus certain sayings, and are themselves forgotten in the conversation they have suggested.
In form the teachings recorded in John conspicuously differ from those recorded by the other evangelists. They present our Lord as using three forms of teaching, brief, pregnant apophthegms, parables, and prolonged ethical addresses. In John, it is alleged, the parable has disappeared, the pointed sayings suitable to a popular teacher have also disappeared, and in their place we have prolonged dis- cussions, self-defensive explanations, and stern invectives. As Renan says: “ This fashion of preaching and demonstrating without ceasing, this everlasting argumentation, this artificial get-up, these long dis- cussions following each miracle, these discourses, stiff and awkward, whose tone is so often false and unequal, are intolerable to a man of taste alongside the delicious sentences of the synoptists ”.
Even more marked is the difference in the substance of the dis- courses. From the synoptists we receive the impression that Jesus was a genial ethical teacher who spent His days among the common people exhorting them to unworldliness, to a disregard of wealth, to the humble and patient service of God in love to their fellow-men, exposing the hollowness of much that passed for religion, and seek- ing to inspire all men with firmer trust in God as their Father. In the Gospel of John His own claims are the prominent subject. He is the subject matter taught as well as the teacher. The Kingdom of God no longer holds the place it held in the synoptists: it is the Messiah rather than the Messianic kingdom that is pressed upon the people.
Again it has been urged that the style ascribed to our Lord in this Gospel is so like the style of John himself as to be indistinguishable ; so that it is not always possible to say where the words of Jesus end and the words of John begin (see chap. xii. 44, iii. 18-21). This difficulty may, however, be put aside, and that for more reasons than one. The words of Jesus are translated from the vernacular Aramaic in which He probably uttered them, and it was impossible they should not be coloured by the style of the translator. Besides, there are obvious differences between the style of John and that of Jesus. For example, the Epistle of Joba is singularly abstract and devoid of