down my life for you. Stop! stop! Believe, Christ hath sent me." He stopped, threw away his arms, and began to tremble and weep bitterly. The apostle finally led him back to the Church, and he became an example of sincere repentance and genuine conversion. He would meet wherever he went, especially after the destruction of Jerusalem, Ebionites, Jews who professed themselves Christians but could not emancipate themselves from their former opinions, insisting on the continued obligation of the ceremonial law. The Gnostics he encountered both among the Jews and Gentiles. St. Paul had found Judaizing Gnostics, or Essenic Judaists, at Colossæ; see the second chapter of his Epistle to the Colossians. They held that Christ was one of the highest emanations from God; and that, although it was necessary He should appear in fashion as a man, it was impossible He should become a real man. Some held that His human form was a phantom, a mere appearance, without substance or reality, and hence were called Docetæ. Others admitted that He had a real body, but denied that it was material. Others, as the Cerinthians, held that Jesus and Christ were distinct. Cerinthus appeared subsequently to the apostle Paul's day, being contemporary with St. John in his later years. In his views of the validity of the law and the millennial kingdom, he was strongly Judaistic; but in respect to the creation he was a Gnostic, holding that the world was created by some being subordinate to God. In respect to the man Christ Jesus, he held that the heavenly Christ descended upon Him at His baptism, and imparted to Him the power of working miracles and revealing the knowledge of God, but forsook Him when His enemies led Him away to be crucified, to rejoin Him only at His second coming. In the later writings of John allusions are clearly discernible to the errors of this false teacher.1 The friends, associates, and co-labourers of the apostle in Asia Minor were such men as Epaphras, Gaius, Demetrius, Onesimus, and those earliest fathers in the Christian Church, Polycarp, Ignatius of Antioch, and Papias. 11 John ii. 18-23, iv. 1-3; 2 John 7. CHAPTER XII. ST. JOHN WRITES THE FOURTH GOSPEL. DATE, DESIGN, AND CONTENTS. UNANIMOUS TESTIMONY OF ANTIQUITY THAT IT WAS WRITTEN AT EPHESUS A. D. 85 OR 86.-PURITY OF THE GREEK.-WRITTEN AT A DISTANCE FROM JUDEA.-WRITER HAD CEASED TO BE A JEW, AND HAD BECOME COSMOPOLITAN. COMPARED WITH SYNOPTISTS WRITES MORE IN THE HISTORICAL VEIN. ADOPTS THE ROMAN HOROLOGY THROUGHOUT.- ST. JOHN'S AUTHORSHIP NEVER QUESTIONED TILL RECENTLY.-STRAUSS DENIED ITS GENUINENESS. THE TÜBINGEN SCHOOL, ETC.-JOHANNEAN AUTHORSHIP AS STATED BY CANON LIDDON.-NOT A MERE SUPPLEMENT TO THE OTHER THREE GOSPELS.-11S DESIGN TRACED IN THE PARABLES AND MIRACLES IT ADMITS. -ST. JOHN'S PERSONAL KNOWLEDGE OF THE MIRACLES HE NAMES.PRINCIPLE OF SELECTION.DESIGN CLEARLY STATED BY HIMSELF, TO PROVE THAT JESUS WAS THE PROMISED SAVIOUR.-CONTENTS OF THE GOSPEL. ST. JOHN'S OBJECT NOT POLEMICAL.—QUARTERLY REVIEW QUOTED. -THOLUCK. It is the unanimous testimony of antiquity that it was while residing at Ephesus St. John wrote his Gospel, and thus completed and gave new beauty to that picture of the incarnate Son of God, which, in the first three Gospels, was already in possession of the Church. In the purity of the Greek in which it was written it greatly excels the Apocalypse, and approaches more nearly to classical Greek than any other of the Gospels. The conjecture therefore appears to be well founded that it must have been written some score or more of years later than the Apocalypse, i.e. somewhere about A.D. 85 or 86. That it was written out of, at a distance from, Judæa, and considerably after the time the apostle left it, there are some very striking internal proofs. He constantly writes as if he had specially in view, in the people whom he addressed, those who were ignorant of the customs of the Jews; or he speaks as one who had himself ceased to be a Jew, and had become cosmopolitan, and was describing things wholly past, and which had taken place at a distance, under circumstances wholly unlike those of the mass of his readers. Thus he tells them that the Jews have no dealings with the Samaritans; that there was a feast of the Jews (referring to the passover), and Jesus went up to Jerusalem; Chap. iv. 9. 1 Introduction to Tholuck's Comm. no man and, in the same connection, that there is at Jerusalem a pool called in the Hebrew tongue Bethesda; he tells them how Joseph and Nicodemus took the body of Jesus, and prepared it for burial, “ as the manner of the Jews is to bury." He constantly speaks of those who opposed and persecuted Jesus as "the Jews":"therefore did the Jews persecute Jesus; ""therefore the Jews sought the more to kill Him; 113 66 spake openly of Him for fear of the Jews; "4 "the Jews took up stones again to stone Him:" as if he were writing in the presence of the great Gentile community, who could not well be brought to recognise any mere party among the Jews as opposed to Him, when He was rejected by the nation as a whole, represented by their chief priests and rulers. He writes (comparing him with the synoptists, especially Matthew) more in the historical vein; that is, of things as long past and viewed from a distance. He makes no record of our Lord's prediction of the destruction of Jerusalem, as that destruction was already past, and that prediction already fulfilled. He evidently adopts the Roman horology in place of the Jewish. This is commonly admitted in respect to chap. xix. 14, where it is said to have been "about the sixth hour" when Pilate sat down on the judgment seat, at the trial of Jesus, as the best and only satisfactory way of reconciling this passage with Mark xv. 25, where we have it that it was "the third hour" when they crucified Him, and with Matt. xxvii. 45, Mark xv. 33, Luke xxiii. 44, in which Jesus is described as on the cross at the SIXTH hour. The Jews commenced their civil day at sunset, dividing it until sunrise into twelve parts, and from sunrise to sunset into the same number, the hours of course varying in length according to the season of the year. The Romans commenced theirs at midnight, dividing it into twelve hours till noon, and again from noon till midnight, making the day to consist of twenty-four hours of equal length at all seasons of the year. And in the other instances in which John notes the hour of the day (chap. i. 39, "it was about the tenth hour; " iv. 6, "about the sixth hour;" iv. 52, "yesterday at the seventh hour"), it agrees better with the other circumstances recorded to understand him as employing Roman instead of Jewish time; and no good reason can be given why he should use it in one instance and not in the others. He gave the hour according to the Roman division of the day, because he had so long resided among the Gentiles, at a distance from Judæa, whose people were now dispersed, and the Christian Church had come to be so largely composed of Gentiles, and the Jewish element was destined steadily, proportionately, to decrease. Chap. v. 1, 2. 8 Chap. v. 16, 18. AUTHORSHIP OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL. The authorship of the fourth Gospel, as really belonging to St. John, was never seriously questioned until almost within our own times. This Gospel has been made on this question the battle field, as has been well said, of the New Testament. Dr. Strauss, in his first "Life of Jesus," took the position that the fourth Gospel was not the work of the son of Zebedee. The Tübingen school, or its leading writers, Drs. Baur, Schwegler, and Zeller, aspired to supplement the negative theory of Strauss by holding that this Gospel represented a highly developed stage of an orthodox gnosis, requiring at least a century after the apostolic age, and that it was not therefore written before the middle of the second century. Canon Liddon in his Bampton Lectures has briefly but with great clearness and ability set forth the proof in favour of the Johannean authorship of the fourth Gospel. The facts, as he shows, force back its date within the lines of the first century. "And, when this is done, the question of its authenticity is practically decided. It is irrational to suppose that a forgery, claiming the name and authority of the beloved disciple, could have been written and circulated beneath his very eyes, and while the Church was still illuminated by his oral teaching. Arbitrary theories about the time which is thought necessary to develop an idea cannot rightly be held to counterbalance such a solid block of historical evidence as we have been considering. This evidence shows that long before the year 160 St. John's Gospel was received throughout orthodox and heretical Christendom, and that its recognition may be traced up to the apostolic age itself." Ewald (adds Liddon) "shall supply the words with which to close the foregoing considerations. 'Those who, since the first discussion of this question, have been really conversant with it never could have had, and never have had, a moment's doubt. As the attack on St. John has become fiercer and fiercer, the truth during the last ten or twelve years has been more and more solidly established, error has been pursued into its last hiding places, and at this moment the facts before us are such that no man who does not will knowingly to choose error and reject the truth can dare to say that the fourth Gospel is not the work of the apostle John. "'l DESIGN. This Gospel is by no means to be regarded as designed merely to supply what had been omitted by the synoptists. It has a distinct and 1 Bampton Lectures, 1866. Rivingtons, London, etc. Scribner, Welford & Co., New York, 1868, p. 218. See also Essays, etc., by George P. Fisher, Professor Yale College (New York, 1866. Scribner & Co.), in an able article of more than 100 pages. easily defined object. It has a precision of method and progressive development of ideas suited to this object. This may be easily traced in the parables and miracles which the writer admits, as well as in those he omits. Take, for example, the miracles. Only about one third of the number contained in the evangelic history are recorded by him. Of the thirty-three commonly enumerated he has but eight. Of these eight, six are recorded by him alone, to wit: 1. The water made wine; 2. Healing of the nobleman's son; 3. Healing of the impotent man at Bethesda; 4. Restoring sight to a man born blind; 5. The raising of Lazarus; 6. Second miraculous draught of fishes. The other two are the miraculous feeding of the five thousand, and the walking on the sea. The former is recorded by all the evangelists, the latter is found also in Matthew and Mark. It is further worthy of notice that St. John alone records the earliest miracles of Christ, and the last of them : the water made wine, and the cure of the nobleman's son; the miraculous draught of fishes after the resurrection of Christ. It is not easy to suggest a reason why such important miracles as the raising of Lazarus and the healing of the impotent man, for example, are not found in the synoptists; but in regard to the miracles at the marriage in Cana, and the healing of the young man lying sick at Capernaum, it may be said that these were performed before Matthew, the writer of the first Gospel and only apostle save John among the evangelists, was called to the discipleship. St. John, no doubt, had personal knowledge of all the miracles he names; and writing a considerable period of time after the narratives of the others had been in possession of the Church, the omission in theirs of those he exclusively records was a sufficient reason, but still it was not the reason, for their being found in his. It cannot be that it was merely his object to rescue from oblivion the miracles not named by his brother evangelists; for he does not confine himself strictly to them. The evangelists as a body do not profess to give an account of every miracle the Saviour performed. On the contrary, St. John expressly says there were many things which there had been no attempt to record,1 and the others often content themselves by alluding in the general to other "works," or many other "wonderful works" He performed. The reason why the particular miracles found in the fourth Gospel were recorded by its writer, or the principle of selection in regard to them by which he was guided, is to be found in the special purpose which, directed by the Spirit of inspiration, he had in view in writing it. This he clearly states 2 was to set forth the "signs" or proofs that Jesus was the promised Saviour of the world, that, “believing," men "might have life through His name." We find in it not the miracles which Jesus performed "in the presence of His disciples " 1 Chap. xxi. 25. 2 Chap. xx. 30, 31. |