the Church, by heretics and apologists, commentat•,rs and cr,pyiste, and by other well- known writer~, of this celebro.te<l document. They even admit that it may have been produced at a df\te when the son of Zebedce was still livin" and undn hiR influenc,• aud sanction, nnd even by bis pen ; but they regard it as a°doctrinal and thcolo"ical treatise in the form of a narrative, as a story expressive of ideas which had be;om0 current in the Church at the bcg:nning of the second century, as a Christolo!!'ical romance, as a philosopheme in the form of a Gospel, makin~ sparin" use of any kn°own or accredited traditions, deliberately clothing in the form of supposed fact current ider.s of the Founder of the new faith, but not i11tendecl even by the author, whether John or another, ,to be taken seriously. Acquainted with the synoptic Gospels, and not intending to snpersede them or clash with them, the writer is supposed to have used and modified their materials to suit his argument. Entering deeply into the spirit of the new religion, and comprehending in one expression the opposing interests and tendencies of the early Church, the author is supposed to have promoted its harmony, and originated some of the most valuable propositions out of which its doctrinal development subsequently sprang; but did not think or intend to convey the idea of the objective rrality or historical validity of the events or the discourses themselves, any more than he meant to intimate that the angel,g, and dragon, and great whore, and grisly combatants, and golden city of the Apocalypse, were objective facts. That since Hermae, the authors of the 'Clementine Recognitions,' of the Books of Henoch or Judith, of the 'Divina Commedia,' or the 'Pilgrim's Progress,' or the 'Paradise Lost,' put into semi-narrative style the ideas which filled their minds at a particular period, so the author of the Fourth Gospel expounded his theory of faith and love along the lines with which we are so familiar. (2) A second group of critics and reproducers of the 'Origines du Christianisme' have gone much further than this. They have endeavoured to dispute every early reference to its known use and recognition, and to find in it many traces of a date later than is ~mpatible with its apostolic authorship. They have credited it with docetic and other Gnostic speculations of the second century. They have discerned in it a powerful anti-Jewish prejudice, and an endeavour to lower the claims of that part of the Church which regarded Peter as the chiefest of the apostles and the Church of Rome as the centre of apostolicity, by giving greater prominence to the Apostle John. They have urged that it nevertheless endeavoured to blend Pauline with Petrina doctrine, and promote the amalgamation of the two tendencies in the Church which had been aggra- vated by the John of the Apocalypse; that it was a theological forgery rather than a pious romance; that it was Gnostic in its origin, but misunderst0od by those who defended Gnostic philosophy. Some have urged that, Alexandrine rather than Pales- tinian in its tendencies, it reveals the spirit and method of Philo rather than Jesus, and even if it records a few genuine traditions of the great Master, it sets itself to under- mine and break up the Jewish-Christian position, and, especially in the Paschal con- troversy, to put the Eastern Church in the wrong, by carefully making it appear that the Lord did not keep the Jewish Passover. Further (say they), by representing the Crucifixion as synchronous with the hour when the national ceremonial was beiug solemnized, the writer intimated that the Passover feast was terminated and that Jesus himself was the Paschal Lamb or Christians. The entire theory turns upon and is mixed up with the speculations of the school of Tiibingen with reference to the con- dition of the Church in the second century, and different authors deviate from each other in a marvellous degree as to the details of their reconstruction. The theory oI Baur and his followers varies in different hands, according as they attribute to the writer this or that theological tendency, and are forced by the exigencies of external evidence to assign an earlier or later date to the composition. We will deal first of all with the objections based on the discrepancies between the synoptic narrative and the Johannine, and then with other characteristics of the won- derful narrative. We shall afterwards be in o. position to treat some of the nnmerou~ hypotheses which have been started to account for the facts which are before us. lx.xxviii INTRODUCTION TO
VIII. THE GENERAL RELATION DETWEEN THE SYNOPTIO GosPELB AND TllE FOURTH GOSPEL.