The Pulpit Commentary — John — Volume 1 — Section 61

lypso. With somo oxtrcmc writers, the Apocaly1,s0 is the ot,ly ccrlninly authcnti,: document of the New Testament, and it is made use of to demolish the genuineness <,f 1ho Fourth Gospel. It would seem with many to be ar.i entirely accepted principl,, tb11t one and the same mind could not at any interval of time, and grantin" any diversity of conditions, h11ve produced what is regarded as the tremendous all~goric m11nifesto of the king<lom of God ngainst the world-powers, and what is believed to be the sacred, tender, mystic, theological romance called the Fourth Gospel. This polemic has been augmented in intensity, nnd further complicated with the purpose, and still more with tho date, of the Apocalyptic vision. 'l'hese pages must not be occupied with any attempt to determine the date of the Apocalypse, which will be amply discussed in its proper place. The arguments for the early and later dates are alike strong, though very diverse and in<lependcnt of each other. It will be admitted on all sides that the external evidence for the later date i3 for stronger than that for the earlier, and that the bulk of the evi<lence for the early date is, on the other hand, strictly speaking, derived from purely internal consiJern- tions, based on the supposition that Jerusalem must be still standing when the visions were seen, and that certain obscure allusions to Roman emperor~, and the interpreta- tion of the beast and his number, as \\'ell as the" false prophet," have one particular application. This is a question of pure exegesis, and will not here be discussed; bnt it is impossible to say that the question is now finally decided. The complicated reasoning on both sides may be seen in Davidson, Moses Stuart, Renan, Farrar, on the one side; and Hengstenberg, Elliott, Li.icke, etc., on the other. It must be admitted that the earlier date reduces the difficulLy of believing that the author of the Apoca- lypse could, in the course of a quarter of a century, have passed into a different phase of mind and manner of expression; that he who in his more fiery youth or early manhood saw the visions and vials, and heard the trumpets a.nd the thunders, of the Apocalypse, might, after many strange experiences, and long pondering the essence of these revela- tions, have, in his mellow age, succeeded in recording his earlier reminiscences, and in a style too of Greek diction far more free from Hebraisms and Judaic allusions than that of the Apocalypse, which reflected the influence upon him of a long residence in Ephesus where much purer Greek than that of his youth had become a second nature to him The style, the artistic touch, the musical taste, the handwriting of a man of fifty, will often materially differ from those which have become natural to him when between eighty and ninety years of age. However great the contrast bet1Veen the styles anli diction of two compositions, an interval of forty years in the life of an author, passed under new conditions, end a profoundly different purpose in view, will almost account for any amount of change. Let the early and latest productions of Thomas Carlyle be compared, and the divereity is unspeakably great, although there may yet remain in both subtle marks of identHy, akin to those which link the two Jobannine books. Milton's 'Comus' and' Paradise Regained,' Dr. Watts's 'Lyric on the Giving of the Law' and his 'Moral Songs,' Burke's 'Essay on the Sublime and Beautiful' and his 'Reflections on the French Revolution' or his 'Speech at Bristol,' present remarkable contrasts of contour, of vocabulary, of sentence-structure, and the like. But it is far from certain that differences of the kind referred to are more due to lapse of time than to utter diversity of mental conditions. Style, ,ocabulary, dialectic tone, are easily adopted, are veritably changed, by a mind that ddiberately puts itself upou o.n entirely different platform, and voluntarily adopts a fresh outlook; e.g. Wordsworth cherished and exercised two entirely different styles of expression, and, though a certain sameness of mannetism may have linked tbem t()gethcr and may be revealed in both styles, the contrast is very pronounced. Ilis peculiarity is that he, by turns, ad.opted both styles throughout hi:! life. The very essence of dramatic power lies in the faculty of looking with different eyes at the same group of ideas, r.nd speaking with differeut tonl!:ues concerning them. The New Testament ot!'ers remarkable illustration of the same kind of variety, though the opponents of tho authenticity of the Fourth Gospel will not admit the .iust.ness of the illustration. Every one concedes great <lilTerence in the style of the Epistle to t.he Galatians and the First Epistle to Timothy, yet the evidence for their common aut.horship grows with every year of study and meditation, aud it is based, not so much upon a period of time that elapsed between them, as on the totally different state of ruiud in which the apostle was when he  lniii INTRODUCTION TO