"It cannot be denied," says Baur, "that the evangelist wished to give his book the authority of the apostle who wrote the Apocalypse, and so assumed the same intellectual position. There is not merely an outward support in the name of the highly revered apostle, but there are not wanting many internal resemblances between the Gospel and the Apocalypse. In fact, one must admire the deep genial sympathy and the delicate skill, which the writer has shown in finding in the Apocalypse elements which could be developed into the loftier and larger views of the evangelist. He has thus spiritualized the Book of Revelation into a Gospel." The amount of which is, that Baur does not find the Gospel so essentially different from the Apocalypse as Mr. Tayler does.

2. But if we must choose between the Apocalypse and the Gospel as apostolic writings, every thing should lead us to surrender the first. The authorship of the Gospel was never doubted by antiquity; that of the Apocalypse was. At the end of the second century, when the Christian Scriptures were distributed into those which were unquestioned, those which were doubtful, and those which were spurious, the Gospel was placed in the first division, and the Book of Revelation in the second.

One objection urged against the fourth Gospel is its antiJewish tone of thought. Granting this in the main, we yet find such expressions as that used to the Samaritan woman, "We know what we worship; for salvation is from the Jews." But it is thought, that if the apostle wrote the Apocalypse, which is strongly Jewish, he could not so soon after have changed his tone so entirely. But is the writer of the Apocalypse so Jewish, when a part of his object is to announce judgments on Jerusalem? And, again, why may not John have risen above his Jewish tendencies into a universal Christianity, since Paul passed through the same change? It is said, that, if Jesus had really taught as anti-Jewish a gospel as is represented by John, the struggle between Paul and his opponents could never have taken place. But this is to ignore the universal tendency in men and sects to notice only that which is in accord with their own prejudices.

IV.

The history of opinion in regard to this Gospel is as follows. It is supposed to be referred to by Luke and Mark (De Wette). The apostolic fathers do not refer to it directly, but Eusebius tells us that Papias made use of testimonies from the first Epistle of John. Papias had been a hearer of John in his youth, and was an Asiatic bishop in the middle of the second century. Justin Martyr in the middle of the second century, Tatian, and the "Clementine Homilies," contain passages so strikingly like those in the Gospel, that they appear to have been taken from it. Johannic formulas are found in the Gnostic writings, about A.D. 140. The first distinct declaration, however, that the Apostle John was the author of the fourth Gospel, comes from Theophilus of Antioch, about A.D. 180, who quotes the passage, "In the beginning was the Word." After this, it is continually quoted and referred to by all the great writers at the end of the second and beginning of the third century, as Irenæus, Bishop of Lyons, Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian of Carthage, and Origen. None of these scholars express any doubt concerning the authorship of the Gospel; and their quotations from it are so numerous, that, if it were lost, it might almost be reconstructed from their writings.

The first doubts of the authenticity of the Gospel (unless we consider its rejection by the Alogi to be based on critical reasons) come in the seventeenth century, and in England, by some unknown writer, refuted by the great scholar Le Clerc. After this there followed a silence of a hundred years, when the attack was renewed in 1792, by another Englishman, Evanson. Nothing more was heard on the subject, and the replies to these doubts seemed to have satisfied all minds, when Bretschneider, in 1820, renewed the assault in the “Probabilia." He was replied to by a multitude of critics, and afterward retracted his opinion, and admitted that his objections had been fully answered.* No other foe to the authenticity

* Handbuch der Dogmatik, § 34, note.

of the Gospel appeared till 1835, when Dr. Strauss, in his "Life of Jesus," renewed the attack, and was answered by Neander, Tholuck, Hase, Lücke, and others. Dr. Strauss, moved by these replies, retracted his doubts in 1838, but advanced them again in 1840.*

Then arose the famous school of Tübingen, from which all the recent attacks on the Gospel have been derived. Mr. Tayler, and other French and English writers who have taken the negative side, seem only followers of Baur and Zeller. Dr. F. C. Baur, a truly great man, began his immense labors with a work on mythology, published in 1824; and continued them by several new works, published every year, in different departments of theology, until his recent death. His vast learning, great industry, acute insight, and love of truth, make his writings very valuable. The integrity of his mind was such, that, even when carrying on a controversy, he seems more like an inquirer than like a disputant. Even when differing from his conclusions, one derives very valuable suggestions from his views. One characteristic of the criticism of Baur is his doctrine of intention. He ascribes to the New-Testament writers some special aim, which leads them to exaggerate these facts, omit those, and invent others. Everywhere he seeks for an intention, for some private or party purpose which colors the narrative; and in the present instance ascribes to the writer of the fourth Gospel the deliberate purpose of passing himself off as the apostle, in order to impose on the Christian Church his doctrine of the Logos. This attack roused new defenders of the Gospel, among whom the more conspicuous have been Ewald and Tischendorf.

Mr. Tayler differs from Baur, in denying all intent to deceive on the part of the writer of the Gospel, and in maintaining the religious value of the Gospel notwithstanding its want of authenticity. But on these points we think the view of Baur more correct. The Gospel is filled with distinct historic statements of time and place, with minute historic. details, evidently intended to produce a belief in the events

* Reville, Revue des Deux Mondes, May, 1866.

narrated as matters of fact. No Christian in the second century could have put his own opinions in the mouth of his master, unless with the intention of deceiving his fellowChristian; and this no earnest Christian could have done. The fourth Gospel, if not authentic (by which we here mean, if not a true narrative of the life and words of Jesus), is a deliberate deception.

V.

It is a remark of Lord Bacon, that "the harmony of a science, supporting each part the other, is and ought to be the true and brief confutation and suppression of the smaller sorts of objections." This sagacious observation indicates another method of deciding this question. Of these two views, one attributing the Gospel to the Apostle John, the other to an anonymous writer in the middle of the second century, which gives us the most harmonious and consistent story? Let us look at each opinion in reference to this question.

According to the received opinion of the Church, John the Apostle composed this Gospel at Ephesus, in his old age. As years and thought and intense religious life changed Swedenborg, the miner and engineer, into the great visionary and mystic, so years and thought and inward inspiration had changed the Jewish disciple, first into a visionary, and later into a mystic. In his lonely exile at Patmos, his vivid imagination had made a series of pictures, representing symbolically the struggle of Christianity with the Jewish and Roman power, and its ultimate triumph. "Every man," says Coleridge, "is a Shakespeare in his dreams." Day by day these dreams came to John, and he wrote down the visions, and they were collected into the Book of Revelation. When he returned to active life and the service of the Seven Churches of Asia, he came in contact with a new order of thought, for which he had a natural affinity. This was the Platonic and mystic school of Philo, which laid the greatest stress on the distinction between the spirit and the letter, between the hidden and revealed Deity, and between the Logos or reason of God, and the same light shining in the soul

of man. Contact with this school ripened in the mind of the apostle the mystic tendency peculiar to him; for there is a true mysticism as well as a false. The apostle, mystical in the best sense, loved to look on spiritual facts as substantial realities. Hence his fondness for such expressions as truth, life, light, spirit; and his conception of the Messiah as the Son, Well-beloved, and dwelling in the bosom of the Father. All his recollections of Jesus reposed especially on those deeper conversations in which his Master's thought took this direction. These conversations had been more frequent at Jerusalem, where Jesus had encountered minds of a higher culture; therefore John loved to repeat these. Then in his old age, when the oral traditions, which made the staple of apostolic preaching, had taken form in the Synoptic Gospels, the disciples of John begged him to write for them, or dictate to them, these other relations concerning Jesus, with which they had become familiar. So they were repeated, and afterwards collected in a Gospel "according to John;" and its universal reception in the Christian Church, by so many different schools of thought, as early as the middle of the last half of the second century, shows that there could be no doubt of its origin. In its essence it is a true picture of Jesus, seen on one side of his life and doctrine. Some errors of expression, and of collocation of passages, may have occurred; and sometimes the mind of John himself may have colored the teachings of his Master. But in the main it is a true picture, not of John only, but also of Christ.

Let us now look at the other explanation, as proposed by Baur, Albert Reville, and Mr. Tayler.

While the whole body of apostles and early disciples were teaching to the churches that view of Jesus and his doctrine which finally took form in the first three Gospels, another and a wholly different school of opinion was being developed in the Church, independently of the apostles. This school was derived from the Alexandrian philosophy, and yet grew up within the Christian Church. It held firmly to the Logos doctrine of Philo, but needed some point of contact with the

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