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and the Bible, 256-7, he writes: “In his old age St. John at Ephesus has ‘logia,’ sayings of the Lord, and has incidents in the Lord’s story which have not been published in any of the written accounts that were beginning at that time to be handed about. The elders of Ephesus, whom tradition afterwards makes into apostles, fellows of St. John, move him to bestow his treasure on the world. He gives his materials, and the presbytery of Ephesus provides a redaction for them and publishes them. The redaction with its unity of tone, its flowingness and connectedness, is by one single hand; the hand of a man of literary talent, a Greek Christian, whom the Church of Ephesus found proper for such a task. A man of literary talent, a man of soul also, a theologian. A theological lecturer perhaps, as in the Fourth Gospel he so often shows himself, a theological lecturer, an earlier and a nameless Origen, who in this one short composition produced a work outweighing all the folios of all the Fathers, but was content that his name should be written in the Book of Life.” Schiirer and Weizsicker! are both advocates of this theory.
That this is an inviting theory is not to be denied. But, after all, little is gained by it ; and there are grave objections to it. The Jew and the eye-witness appear on every page; so that the utmost that can be allowed is that some younger man may in quite a subordinate function have collaborated with the Apostle. That the Gospel was composed after the Apostle’s death, mainly from reminiscences of his teaching, is a hypothesis which seems at once needless and inadequate.
Object of the Gospel. The object of the writer reflects some light on the nature of his work. In xx. 31 it is said: “these things are written that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing ye might have life in Hisname”. The writer has no intention of composing a full biography of Jesus. He means to select from His life such material as will most readily convince men that He is the Christ, the Son of God. If not a dogmatic treatise [a “lehrschrift’’], it is at any rate a history with a dogmatic purpose. This is always a dangerous form of literature, tempting the author to exaggeration, concealment, misrepresentation. But that this temptation invariably overcomes an author is of course not the case. Acertain limitation, however, nay, a certain amount of distortion, do necessarily attach to a biography which aims at presenting only one aspect of its subject—distortion, not in what is actually presented, but in the implication that this is the whole. Where only a part of
1 Apost. Zeit., 531-538.