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226 Peculiarities in Saint John explained.

language, the historical arrangement, the selection from conversations and discourses before unpublished, the few deeply significant miracles, the description of opponents by a generic name-the 'Jews'—which ignores the differences of character, class, and sect among them, and notices them only so far as they are in conflict with the central truth manifested in Jesus, -all contribute. But these very peculiarities of the fourth Gospel subserve its positive devotional and didactic aim even more directly than its controversial one o The false gnosis

• The internal difficulties urged against St. John's Gospel appear to be overborne by the weight of the external testimony, taken in conjunction with the characteristics and necessities of the later Apostolical age. These difficulties may however be very briefly summarized as follows:

1. As to time:

:

(a) The fourth Gospel implies a long Ministry, with festivals for its landmarks.' But the three (Westcott, Study of Gospels, 267) at least allow of a ministry as long as the fourth can require; while reference to the festivals was natural in a narrative, the main scene of which is laid at Jerusalem.

(6) The fourth Gospel appears to place the crucifixion on Nisan 14, the three on Nisan 15.' This real difficulty has been explained by various hypotheses, as

e. g. (1) Of an anticipated passover, kept by our Lord, on Nisan 13.
Westcott, Int. p. 319; Ellicott, Ĥuls. Lect. p. 322, and others.
This is perhaps most satisfactory. The objection drawn from the
observance of Nisan 14, by those churches in the second century
which inherited St. John's traditions, assumes that such observ-
ance was commemorative of the Last Supper, and not, as is prob-
able, of our Lord's Death. Cf. Meyer, Ev. Joh. Einl. p. 18;
Mansel, note on St. Matt. xxvi. in Speaker's Commentary.
(2) Of a passover postponed by the chief priests. St. Chrys.; Estius;
Wordsworth.

(3) Of a difference of computation, as to the true day of the Pass-
over, owing to the variation between the Solar and Lunar
reckonings. Petavius, qu. by Neale, Int. East. Ch. ii. 1054.
(4) Of a possible explanation of St. John's language (xviii. 28, &c.),
which would make it consistent with the date of Nisan 15, as
that of the crucifixion. Dict. of Bible, vol. ii. 720; St. Tho. Sum.
p. iii. q. 46. a. 9.

If none of these explanations be quite unobjectionable, they may fairly warn us against concluding with our present knowledge that the difficulty is by any means insuperable.

2. As to the scene of Christ's teaching -St. John places it chiefly in Judæa; the three in Galilee.' But no Gospel professes to be a complete history of our Lord's actions, and records of a Galilean and of a Judæan ministry respectively leave room for each other. Westcott on the Gospels, p. 265.

3. As to the style of Christ's teaching:-'Si Jésus parlait comme le veut Matthieu, il n'a pu parler comme le veut Jean.' But, the difference of subjects, hearers, and circumstances in the two cases, taken in conjunction

Saint John's depth and simplicity.

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The true is set forth

is refuted by an exhibition of the true. for the sake of Christian souls. These things 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 P.’

We may perhaps have wondered how a Galilean fisherman could have been the author of a subtle and sublime theosophy, how the son of Zebedee could have appropiated the language of Athens and of Alexandria to the service of the Crucified. The answer is that St. John knew from experience the blessed and tremendous truth that his Lord and Friend was a Divine Person. Apart from the guidance of the Blessed Spirit, St. John's mental strength and refinement may be traced to the force of his keen interest in this single fact. Just as a desperate moral or material struggle brings to light forces and resources unused before, so an intense religious conviction fertilizes intellect, and developes speculative talent, not unfrequently in the most unlearned. Every form of thought which comes even into indirect contact with the truth to which the soul clings adoringly, is scanned by it with deep and anxious interest, whether it be the interest of hope or the interest of apprehension. St. John certainly is a theosophic philosopher, but he is only a philosopher because he is a theologian; he is such a master of abstract thought because he is so devoted to the Incarnate God. The fisherman of Galilee could never have written the prologue of the fourth Gospel, or have guided the religious thought of Ephesus, unless he had clung to this sustaining Truth, which makes him at once so popular and so with the differing mental peculiarities of the Apostles who report our Lord's words, will account for the difference of style. The phrases assumed to be peculiar to, and really of frequent occurrence in St. John are by no means unknown to the Synoptists. E. g. The antithesis between Light and darkness.

4. As to the matter of Christ's teaching:-Baur begs the whole question by saying that 'the discourses in St. John could not be historical, since they are essentially nothing more than an explanation of the Logos-idea put forth by that writer." This might be true if the doctrine of the Logos had been the product of Gnostic speculations. But if Jesus was really the Divine Son, manifesting Himself as such to men, such language as that reported by St. John is no more than we should expect Him to use at certain times. St. John never represents our Lord as announcing His Divinity in the terms in which it is announced in the Prologue to the Gospel; he would have done so, had he really been creating a fictitious Jesus designed to illustrate a particular theosophic speculation. This is discussed hereafter, p. 272. See Pressensé, Jésus-Christ, p. 244; Luthardt, das Johanneische Evangelium, pp. 26-35.

P St. John xx. 31.

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Doctrine of the Eternal Word

profound. For St. John is spiritually as simple, as he is intellectually majestic. In this our day he is understood by the religious insight of the unlettered and the poor, while the learned can sometimes see in him only the weary repetition of metaphysical abstractions. The poor understand this sublime revelation of God, the Creator of the world, as pure Light and Truth. They understand the picture of a moral darkness which commits and excuses sin, and which hates the light. They receive gratefully and believingly the Son of God, made Man, and conquering evil by the laying down His Life. They follow, with the experience of their own temptations, or sins, or hopes, or fears, those heart-searching conversations with Nicodemus, with the Samaritan woman, with the Jews. In truth, St. John's language and, above all, the words of Christ in St. John, are as simple as they are profound. They still speak peace and joy to little children; they are still a stumbling-block to, and a condemnation of, the virtual successors of Cerinthus.

II. If there were nothing else to the purpose in the whole of the New Testament, those first fourteen verses of the fourth Gospel would suffice to persuade a believer in Holy Scripture of the truth that Jesus Christ is absolutely GOD. It is a mistake to regard those fourteen verses as a mere prefatory attack upon the gnosis of Cerinthus, having no necessary connexion with the narrative which follows, and representing nothing essential to the integrity of the Apostle's thought. For, as Baur very truly observes, the doctrine of the prologue is the very fundamental idea which underlies the whole 'Johannean theology.' It is not enough to say that between the prologue and the history which follows there exists an intimate organic connexion. The prologue is itself the beginning of the history. It is impossible,' says Baur, 'to deny that "the Word made flesh r" is one and the same subject with the Man Christ Jesus on the one hand, and with the Word Who "was in the beginning, Who was with God, and Who was God," on the others.'

Taking then the prologue of St. John's Gospel in connexion with the verses which immediately succeed it, let us observe that St. John attaches to our Lord's Person two names which together yield a complete revelation of His Divine glory. Our Lord is called the 'Word,' and the 'Only-begotten Son.' It is doubtless true, as Neander observes, that the first of these

a Vorlesungen, p. 351.

r St. John i. 14.

• Baur, ubi sup., St. John i. 1.

in the Prologue of Saint John's Gospel. 229

names was' put prominently forward at Ephesus, ‘in order to lead those who busied themselves with speculations on the Logos as the centre of all theophanies, from a mere religious idealism to a religious realism, to lead them in short to a recognition of God revealed in Christ t.' It has already u been shewn that the Logos of St. John differs materially from the Logos of Platonizing Jews in Alexandria, while it is linked to great lines of teaching in the Old Testament. No reason can be assigned why St. John had recourse to the word Logos at all, unless he was already in possession of the underlying fact to which this word supplied a philosophical form. If the word did express, in a form familiar to the ears of the men of Ephesus, a great truth which they had buried beneath a heap of errors, that truth, as Bruno Bauer admits, must have been held independently and previously by the Apostle V. The direct expression of that truth was St. John's primary motive in using the word; his polemical and corrective action upon the Cerinthian gnosis was a secondary motive.

By the word Logos, then, St. John carries back his history of our Lord to a point at which it has not yet entered into the sphere of sense and time. 'In the four Gospels,' says St. Augustine, 'or rather in the four books of the one Gospel, the Apostle St. John, deservedly compared to an eagle, by reason of his spiritual understanding, has lifted his enunciation of truth to a far higher and sublimer point than the other three, and by this elevation he would fain have our hearts lifted up likewise. For the other three Evangelists walked, so to speak, on earth with our Lord as Man. Of His Godhead they said but a few things. But John, as if he found it oppressive to walk on earth, has opened his treatise as it were with a peal of thunder; he has raised himself not merely above the earth, and the whole compass of the air and heaven, but even above every angel-host, and every order of the invisible powers, and has reached even to Him by Whom all things were made, in that sentence, "In the beginning was the Word x."

Instead of opening his narrative at the Human Birth of our Lord, or at the commencement of His ministry, St. John places himself in thought at the starting-point (as we should conceive

u

+ Neander, Kirchengeschichte, p. 549; quoted by Tholuck, Ev. Johan. kap. 1. p. 69. ✦ Kritik der Evangel. Geschichte des Joh. p. 5;`quoted by Tholuck, ubi St. Aug. tr. 36 in Johan.

supra.

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Doctrine of the Eternal Word

it) of all time v. Nay rather, it would seem that if л' at the beginning of Genesis signifies the initial moment of time itself, év ápxî rises to the absolute conception of that which is anterior to, or rather independent of, time z. Then, when time was not, or at a point to which man cannot apply his finite conception of time, there was-the Logos or Word. When as yet nothing had been made, He was. What was the Logos? Such a term, in a position of such moment, when so much depends on our rightly understanding it, has a moral no less than an intellectual claim upon us, of the highest order. We are bound to try to understand it, just as certainly as we are bound to obey the command to love our enemies. No man who carries his morality into the sphere of religious thought can affect or afford to maintain, that the fundamental idea in the writings of St. John is a scholastic conceit, with which practical Christians need not concern themselves. And indeed St. John's doctrine of the Logos has from the first been scrutinized anxiously by the mind of Christendom. It could not but be felt that the term Logos denotes at the very least something intimately and everlastingly present with God, something as internal to the Being of God as thought is to the soul of man. In truth the Divine Logos is God reflected in His own eternal Thought; in the Logos, God is His own Object. This Infinite Thought, the reflection and counterpart of God, subsisting in God as a Being or Hypostasis, and having a tendency to self-communication, such is the Logos. The Logos is the Thought of God, not intermittent and precarious like human thought, but subsisting with the intensity of a personal

Meyer in loc., note: 'Völlig unexegetisch ist die Fassung der Socinianer (s. Catech. Racov. p. 135, ed. Oeder): èv àpx? heisse in initio evangelii.'

Meyer in loc.: Johannes parallelisirt zwar den Anfang seines Evangel. mit dem Anfange der Genesis; aber er steigert den historischen Begriff , welcher (Gen. i. 1) den Anfangsmoment der Zeit selbst bedeutet, zum absoluten Begriffe der Vorzeitlichkeit.' This might suffice to refute the assertion of a modern writer that St. John does not teach the Eternity of the Divine Word. 'Une des thèses fondamentales de la spéculation ecclésiastique, c'est idée de l'éternité du Verbe. Depuis que le concile de Nicée en a fait une des pierres angulaires de la théologie Catholique, sa décision est restée l'héritage commun de tous les systèmes orthodoxes. Eh bien! les écrits de Jean n'en parlent pas.' Reuss, Théol. Chrét. ii. 438. The author is mistaken in attributing to ev dpx? a merely relative force, and thence arguing that if the Word is eternal, the world is eternal also (Gen. i. 1). Besides, Oeds v 8 Aóyos. How is the Word other than eternal, if He is thus identified with the ever-existing Being? Cf. Döllinger, Christenthum und Kirche in der Zeit der Grundlegung, p. 169.

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