illustration. James abounds in figure, and so does Paul; but in John’s epistles not a single simile or metaphor occurs. Is it credible that their writer was the author of the richly figurative teachings in the tenth and fifteenth chapters of the Gospel [the sheepfold and the vine] 2
But turning to the real differences which exist between the reports of the first three and the Fourth Gospel, several thoughts occur which at least take off the edge of the criticism and show us that on a point of this kind it is easy to be hasty and extreme. For, in the first place, it is to be considered that if John had had nothing new to tell, no fresh aspect of Christ or His teaching to present, he would not have written at all. No doubt each of the synoptists goes over ground already traversed by his fellow-synoptist, but it has yet to be proved that they knew one another’s work. John did know of their Gospels, and the very fact that he added a fourth prepares us to expect that it will be different ; not only in omitting scenes from the life of Christ with which already the previous Gospels had made men familiar, but by presenting some new aspect of Christ’s person and teaching. That there was another aspect essential to the complete- ness of the figure was, as the present Bishop of Derry has pointed out, also to be surmised. The synoptists enable us to conceive how Jesus addressed the peasantry and how He dealt with the scribes of Capernaum ; but, after all, was it not also of the utmost importance to know how He was received by the authorities of Jerusalem and how He met their difficulties about His claims? Had there been no record of those defences of His position, must we not still have supposed them and supplied them in imagination ?
That we have here, then, a different aspect of Christ’s teaching need not surprise us, but is it not even inconsistent with that already given by the synoptists ? The universal Christian consciousness has long since answered that question. The faith which has found its resting-place in the Christ of the synoptists is not unsettled or per- plexed by anything it finds in John. They are not two Christs but one which the four Gospels depict: diverse as the profile and front face, but‘one another’s complement rather than contradiction. A critical examination of the Gospels reaches the same conclusion. For while the self-assertiveness of Christ is more apparent in the Fourth Gospel, it is implicit in them all. Can any claim be greater than that which our Lord urges in the Sermon on the Mount to be the supreme lawgiver and judge of men? Or than that which is implied in His assertion that He only knows the Father and that only through Him can others know Him; or can we conceive any