XXI

THE JOHANNINE BOOKS

IVE books remain to be considered, a gospel, three epistles and the Revelation. All of them, in our Bible, bear the name of John.

The question of authorship is still under debate, and various opinions find good standing under the names of excellent scholars. Thus some think that all five of these books were written by John the apostle. Some would except the Revelation, holding that while the writer's name was John he was not an apostle but a prophet, (Rev. 22:9) between which orders St. Paul makes a distinction (I Cor. 12:28). Some would except the Second and Third Epistles, which begin in the name of "the elder" i. e. "the presbyter," and may therefore be attributed to John the presbyter, whom Papias mentions as a person of importance in his neighborhood near Ephesus. Some who would assign both the First Epistle and the Gospel to John the apostle are inclined to say of the gospel that it is "according to St. John," as the first gospel is "according to St. Matthew," in the sense of containing much information which was derived from him, but which was gathered and put in writing by another person, a disciple of the apostle, whom we may therefore call John the evangelist.

These questions were of considerable importance when the test of the value of ancient Christian writings turned upon the name of the writer, and a book was declared to be good if it could be proved to have had an apostle for its author. We do not at present stand in this ancient awe of apostles as apostles. We conceive it not unlikely that a book by St. James the Less might be entirely uninteresting, and that St. Simon the Zealot might be led by his zealous spirit to speak unadvisedly with his pen. The test of the value of a book is the book. At the same time, while we say this as to Revelation and the three epistles, about whose authorship we care little, we have a different feeling as to the gospel. It is of much concern to us to know how near we come in this book to the actual presence of Jesus Christ.

I

The earliest evidence as to the authorship of the Fourth Gospel is in the appendix to that book. The gospel ends with the conclusion of the twentieth chapter. "Many other signs truly did Jesus in the presence of his disciples which are not written in this book; but these are written that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing ye might have life through his name." Then a chapter is added, at the close of which, referring to "the disciple whom Jesus loved, who also leaned upon his breast at supper," it is said "this is the disciple which testifieth of these things and wrote these things, and we know that his testimony is true." This may apply only to the

appendix, but it probably applies to the whole book. Who these are whose certificate is thus made we do not know; nor is it absolutely certain, though most likely, that the disciple whom Jesus loved was the apostle John.

The first clear statement is made by Irenæus. He was a disciple of Polycarp, who was a disciple of John the apostle. "You remember," he says in a letter to his fellow-disciple Florinus, "how Polycarp used to tell us what he had been told by John." The connection is so close as to give great value to the assertion of Irenæus, "John, the disciples of the Lord, who leaned upon his breast, published a gospel during his residence at Ephesus in Asia." Irenæus also says that John lived in Ephesus until the reign of Trajan; which began in the year 98.

Over against this clear evidence are several conflicting considerations. One is the statement, attributed to Papias, that John suffered martyrdom, along with James his brother, at the hands of the Jews, in the middle of the first century. This, if it could be verified, would of course settle the matter. In view, however, of the plain testimony of Irenæus, and of the general tradition that John outlived the other apostles, one would like to know more certainly just what Papias said. There is a possibility here of misquotation, or of misunderstanding.

As for the fact that the gospel is written in excellent Greek, and that the prologue seems to show acquaintance with Alexandrian philosophy, and that this is inconsistent with the education of John the fisherman of

Galilee, we may readily make room here for John the evangelist. As we have in the Second Gospel the recollections of St. Peter translated and recorded for us by the evangelist Mark, so in the Fourth Gospel we may have the recollections of St. John brought to us in a like manner. We may have the First Epistle also from the same hand, some unnamed secretary and translator doing for John what Silvanus did for Peter.

As for the surpassing greatness of the book,-one of the supreme treasures not only of religion but of literature, and the contrast which it opposes to everything else which is known about John, it may be said that the same contrast perplexes the scholars who compare the subtilty of Hamlet with the hopelessly commonplace character of almost everything which is known about Shakespeare. The truth is that genius grows up like a rare flower out of most unpromising soil. Moreover this gospel, which has the singular peculiarity of never mentioning the name of the apostle John, may illustrate the illumination of the soul of a man who has not only been with Jesus, but has thereafter spent many years pondering the meaning of that which he saw and heard.

Coming now to the gospel itself, it is evidently different from the other three in its account of the ministry of Jesus. Up to the beginning of the last week, there is hardly anything in John which is to be found in Matthew, Mark or Luke. This difference, however, is not contradictory but supplementary. The Fourth Gospel adds to the other three an account of a ministry in Judea and Jerusalem, as the Third Gospel had already added to the other two an account of a ministry

in Perea, on the other side of Jordan (Mk. 10:1, Lk. 9:51-18:14). If Luke, instead of taking over into his gospel the recollections of Peter and the records of Matthew, had used only the materials which he derived from other sources, we would have had a book which would have differed from the others in almost all of the details of its presentation of the ministry of Jesus. It would have differed from them not only in its scene but in its spirit. It would have been a social gospel. It would have begun with the appearance of the Christmas angels to the simple shepherds of Bethlehem, in contrast with the Epiphany kings of Matthew; it would have included that democratic and revolutionary anthem, the Magnificat; and it would have narrated a series of social parables, such as the Good Samaritan, and the Rich Man and Lazarus. This kind of gospel John has made, using material to which the other evangelists had no access, and producing a book which portrays Jesus under an aspect unlike that of either the Perean or the Galilean ministry. The result is a spiritual gospel.

The difference, however, between the Fourth Gospel and the three consists in much more than addition. Jesus speaks here in a manner quite other than that to which the earlier gospels have accustomed us: in sentences long and mystical. It is the style of St. John's First Epistle. The inference is that the evangelist, following the example of the historians of that time, wrote these discourses himself. This he may well have done on the basis of what Jesus actually said, according to his own memory; directly, if the gospel was written by