disciples’ intolerance is rebuked (Mark ix. 38–41); Jesus’
opposition is everywhere restricted to the Pharisees and the
worldly Sadducees; He ever longs for the conversion of Jerusalem;
the great double commandment of love is proclaimed as already
formulated in the Mosaic law (Mark xii. 28–34); the neighbour
to be thus loved and served is simply any and every suffering
fellow-man; and the pattern for such perfect love is found in a
schismatical Samaritan (Luke x. 25–37). Yet the deepest
strain here is more serenely universalist even than St Paul, for
here Jesus says: “God so loved the world, that He gave His
only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should ...
have everlasting life” (iii. 16). True, the great prologue
passage (i. 9) probably reads “He was the true Light coming
into the world, that enlighteneth every man,” so that the
writer would everywhere concentrate his mind upon the grace
attendant upon explicit knowledge of the incarnate, historic
Christ. Yet Christian orthodoxy, which itself has, all but
uniformly, understood this passage of the spiritual radiation
throughout the world of the Word before His incarnation, has
been aided towards such breadth as to the past by the Johannine
outlook into the future. For, in contrast to the earliest Synoptic
tradition, where the full Christian truth and its first form remain
undistinguished, and where its earthly future appears restricted
to that generation, in John the Eternal Life conception largely
absorbs the attention away from all successiveness; Jesus’
earthly life does not limit the religion’s assimilation of further
truth and experience: “I have many things to tell you, but you
cannot bear them now,” “the Father will give you another
Helper, the spirit of truth, who will abide with you for ever”
(xvi. 12, xiv. 15). This universalism is not simply spiritual;
the external element, presupposed in the Synoptists as that of
the Jewish church within which Jesus’ earthly life was spent,
is here that of the now separate Christian community: He has
other sheep not of this fold—them also He must bring, there
will be one fold, one shepherd; and His seamless tunic, and
Peter’s net which, holding every kind of fish, is not rent, are
symbols of this visible unity. Ministerial gradations exist in
this church; Jesus begins the feet-washing with Peter, who
alone speaks and is spoken to; the beloved disciple outruns
Peter to Jesus’ monument, yet waits to go in till Peter has done
so first; and in the appendix the treble pastoral commission is
to Peter alone: a Petrine pre-eminence which but echoes the
Synoptists. And sacramentalism informs the great discourses
concerning rebirth by water and the spirit, and feeding on the
Living Bread, Jesus’ flesh and blood, and the narrative of the
issue of blood and water from the dead Jesus’ side. Indeed so
severe a stress is laid upon the explicitly Christian life and its
specific means, that orthodoxy itself interprets the rebirth by
water and spirit, and the eating the flesh and drinking the
blood to which entrance into the Kingdom and possession of
interior life are here exclusively attached, as often represented
by a simple sincere desire and will for spiritual purification and
a keen hunger and thirst for God’s aid, together with such cultual
acts as such souls can know or find, even without any knowledge
of the Christian rites. Thus there is many “a pedagogue to
Christ,” and the Christian visible means and expressions are
the culmination and measure of what, in various degrees and
forms, accompanies every sincerely striving soul throughout all
human history.
Origin and Authorship.—The question as to the book’s origin has lost its poignancy through the ever-increasing recognition of the book’s intrinsic character. Thus the recent defenders of the apostolic authorship, the Unitarian James Drummond (1903), the Anglican William Sanday (1905), the Roman Catholic Theodore Calmes (1904), can tell us, the first, that “the evangelist did not aim at an illustrative picture of what was most characteristic of Jesus”; the second, that “the author sank into his own consciousness and at last brought to light what he found there”; the third, that “the Gospel contains an entire theological system,” “history is seen through the intervening dogmatic development,” “the Samaritan woman is ... a personification,” “the behaviour of the Greeks is entirely natural in such a book.” We thus get at cross-purposes with this powerful, profound work. Only some such position as Abbé Loisy’s critical summing up (1903) brings out its specific greatness. “What the author was, his book, in spite of himself, tells us to some extent: a Christian of Judeo-Alexandrine formation; a believer without, apparently, any personal reminiscence of what had actually been the life, preaching and death of Jesus; a theologian far removed from every historical preoccupation, though he retains certain principal facts of tradition without which Christianity would evaporate into pure ideas; and a seer who has lived the Gospel which he propounds.” “To find his book beautiful and true, we need but take it as it is and understand it.” “The church, which has never discussed the literary problem of this Gospel, in nowise erred as to its worth.”
Several traditional positions have indeed been approximately maintained or reconquered against the critics. As to the Gospel’s date, critics have returned from 160–170 (Baur), 150 (Zeller), 130 (Keim), to 110–115 (Renan) and 80–110 (Harnack): since Irenaeus says its author lived into the times of Trajan (90–117), a date somewhere about 105 would satisfy tradition. As to the place, the critics accept proconsular Asia with practical unanimity, thus endorsing Irenaeus’s declaration that the Gospel was published in Ephesus. As to the author’s antecedents, critics have ceased to hold that he could not have been a Jew-Christian (so Bretschneider, 1820), and admit (so Schmiedel, (1901) that he must have been by birth a Jew of the Dispersion, or the son of Christian parents who had been such Jews. And as to the vivid accuracy of many of his topographical and social details, the predominant critical verdict now is that he betrays an eye-witness’s knowledge of the country between Sichem and Jordan and as to Jerusalem; he will have visited these places, say in 90, or may have lived in Jerusalem shortly before its fall. But the reasons against the author being John the Zebedean or any other eyewitness of Jesus’ earthly life have accumulated to a practical demonstration.
As to the external evidence for the book’s early date, we must remember that the Epistle to the Hebrews and the Book of Revelation, though admittedly earlier, are of the same school, and, with the great Pauline Epistles, show many preformations of Johannine phrases and ideas. Other slighter prolusions will have circulated in that Philonian centre Ephesus, before the great Gospel englobed and superseded them. Hence the precariousness of the proofs derived from more or less close parallels to Johannine passages in the apostolic fathers. Justin Martyr (163–167) certainly uses the Gospel; but his conception of Jesus’ life is so strictly Synoptic that he can hardly have accepted it as from an apostolic eyewitness. Papias of Hierapolis, in his Exposition of the Lord’s Sayings (145–160) appears nowhere to have mentioned it, and clearly distinguishes between “what Andrew, Peter, . . . John or Matthew or any other of the Lord’s disciples spoke,” and “what Aristion and the presbyter John, the Lord’s disciples, say.” Thus Papias, as Eusebius about 314 insists, knew two Johns, and the apostle was to him a far-away figure; indeed early medieval chroniclers recount that Papias “in the second book of the Lord’s sayings” asserted that both the sons of Zebedee were “slain by Jews,” so that the apostle John would have died before 70. Irenaeus’s testimony is the earliest and admittedly the strongest we possess for the Zebedean authorship; yet, as Calmes admits, “it cannot be considered decisive.” In his work against the Heresies and in his letter to Florinus, about 185–191, he tells how he had himself known Bishop Polycarp of Smyrna, and how Polycarp “used to recount his familiar intercourse with John and the others who had seen the Lord”; and explicitly identifies this John with the Zebedean and the evangelist. But Irenaeus was at most fifteen when thus frequenting Polycarp; writes thirty-five to fifty years later in Lyons, admitting that he noted down nothing at the time; and, since his mistaken description of Papias as “a hearer of John” the Zebedean was certainly reached by mistaking the presbyter for the apostle, his additional words “and a companion of Polycarp” point to this same mistaken identification having also operated in his mind with regard to Polycarp. In any case,
