the Son, the resultant Commandment of Brotherly Love, the Walking in the Light, the Begetting of God, the Overcoming of the World, etc. ; the antitheses of Life and Death, Light and Darkness, Love and Hate, Truth and Lying, Father and World, God and Devil, Children of God and Children of the Devil.’’ Thus inextricably are the two works intertwined. ‘Our Epistle,” says Rothe, ‘has throughout as its presupposition the peculiar conception of the person and history of the Redeemer, in general the peculiar conception of Christianity, which prevails in the Gospel. Consequently, if the Fourth Gospel is a work of the Apostle John, our Epistle also belongs as indubitably to him ; as in the contrary case our Epistle could be no composition of the Apostle John.”
The common authorship has nevertheless been called in question on the ground of certain alleged divergences which, says Schmiedel, ‘““are explained much more easily on the assumption that the two writings come from different writers though belonging to one and the same school of thought.” The divergences are (1) linguistic, and (2) doctrinal.
(1) The words ἀγγελία, ἐπαγγελία, διάνοια, παρουσία, ἐλπίς, ἀνομία and others occur in the Epistle and not in the Gospel. But what then? A writer need not exhaust his entire vocabulary in a single writing: that would argue extreme barrenness of mind. Does it follow that the Third Gospel and the Book of Acts are by different authors because ἐλπίς never occurs in the former and eight times in the latter, or that the Epistle to the Romans is not St. Paul’s because ἱλαστήριον occurs in it and in no other of his Epistles? The only reasonable inference from the occurrence of words in the Epistle which are absent from the Gospel is that the former is not an imita- tion of the latter.
(2) The following instances of doctrinal divergence are adduced : (a) thacpds in Ep. ii. 2, iv. 10 and nowhere else in the N.T.; whereas, says Martineau, ‘the gospel knows nothing of an atoning or pro- pitiatory efficacy in the blood of Christ”. It is true that the word is not found in the Gospel, but the idea is. Cf. i. 29, x. 11, 15, xi. 49, 52. (b) χρῖσμα (Ep. ii. 20, 27) is another ἅπαξ λεγόμενο. The very idea, however, is found in the Gospel (xiv. 26, xvi. 19). (ο) The Gospel is more spiritual in its eschatology, representing the Judgment not as future but as present (11. 18) and the Coming of Christ as happening in the experience of each believer (xiv. 3); whereas the
1See Holtzmann’s Εἰπί. in das N.T., and his elaborate discussion: Das Prodl,
des erst. johann, Br. in sein. Verhalt. zum Ev. in Fahrb. f. prot. Theol. (1881-82) ; Martineau’s Seat of Auth., p. 509; Schmiedel in Encycl. Bibl., vol. ii., cols. 2556-7.