The Lost Gospel and Its Contents Part 13

25.)

"He that loveth father or mother more than Me is not worthy of me"

(so that the holiest of human ties are to give way to His personal demands on the human heart). (x. 37.)

"He that loseth his life for My sake shall find it." (x. 39)

"No man knoweth the Son, but the Father." (xi. 27.)

"In this place is One greater than the temple." (xii. 6.)

"The Son of man is Lord even of the Sabbath Day." (xii. 8.)

"In His (Christ's) Name shall the Gentiles trust." (xii. 21.)

"In the time of harvest I will say to the reapers," _i.e._ the angels. (xiii. 30.)

"The Son of man shall send forth his angels." (xiii. 41.)

"I will give unto Thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven." (xvi.

19.)

"Where two or three are gathered together in My Name there am I in the midst of them." (xviii. 21.)

"He, [G.o.d], sent His servants--He sent other servants--Last of all He sent unto them His Son, saying, they will reverence My Son."

(xxi. 37.)

These places a.s.sert, by implication, the highest dogma respecting the Person of Christ. Who is He Who has such power in heaven and earth that He commands the angels in heaven, and gives the keys of the kingdom of G.o.d to His servant on earth? What Son is this Whom none but the Father knoweth, and Who alone knoweth the Father, and Who reveals the Father to whomsoever He will? What Son is this compared with Whom such saints as Moses, David, Elijah, Isaiah, and Daniel are "servants?" Those dogmatic a.s.sertions of the first Gospel suggest the question; and the Fourth Gospel gives the full and perfect answer--that He is the Word with G.o.d, that He is G.o.d, and the Only-begotten of the Father. The Epistles a.s.sume the answer where one speaks of "Jesus, who, being in the form of G.o.d, thought it not a thing to be tenaciously grasped to be equal with G.o.d,"

and another speaks of G.o.d's own Son, and another compares Moses the servant with Christ the Son; but the fullest revelation is reserved to the last Gospel. And herein the order of G.o.d's dealings is observed, Who gives the lesser revelation to prepare for the fuller and more perfect.

The design of the Gospel is to restore men to the image of G.o.d by revealing to them G.o.d Himself. But, before this can be done, they must be taught what goodness is, their very moral sense must be renewed.

Hence the moral discourses of the Synoptics. Till this foundation is laid, first in the world, and then in the soul, the Gospel has nothing to lay hold of and to work upon; so it was laid first in the Sermon on the Mount, which, far beyond all other teaching, stops every mouth and brings in all the world guilty before G.o.d; and then the way is prepared for fuller revelations, such as that of the Atonement by the Death of Christ as set forth in the Epistles of St. Peter and St. Paul, and the revelation culminates in the knowledge of the Father and the Son in the Fourth Gospel.

With respect to the a.s.sertion of the author of "Supernatural Religion,"

that the discourses in this Gospel are, as compared with those in the Synoptics, _wholly_ dogmatic, as opposed to moral, the reader may judge of the truth of this by the following sayings of the Fourth Gospel:--

"Every one that doeth evil hateth the light."

"He that doeth truth cometh to the light."

"G.o.d is a Spirit, and they who worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth."

"They that have done good [shall come forth] to the Resurrection of Life."

"How can ye believe who receive honour one of another, and seek not the honour that cometh of G.o.d only?"

"If any man will do His will, he shall know of the doctrine whether it be of G.o.d."

"The truth shall make you free," coupled with

"Whosoever committeth sin is the servant of sin."

"If I your Lord and Master have washed your feet, ye ought also to wash one another's feet."

"A new commandment I give unto you, that ye love one another as I have loved you."

"He that hath My commandments and keepeth them, he it is that loveth Me."

These sayings, the reader will perceive, embody the deepest and highest moral teaching conceivable.

One more point remains to be considered--the impossibility that St.

John, taking into account his education and intellect, should have been the author of the Fourth Gospel. This is stated in the following pa.s.sage:--

"The philosophical statements with which the Gospel commences, it will be admitted, are anything but characteristic of the son of thunder, the ignorant and unlearned fisherman of Galilee, who, to a comparatively late period of life, continued preaching in his native country to his brethren of the circ.u.mcision.... In the Alexandrian philosophy, everything was prepared for the final application of the doctrine, and nothing is more clear than the fact that the writer of the Fourth Gospel was well acquainted with the teaching of the Alexandrian school, from which he derived his philosophy, and its elaborate and systematic application to Jesus alone indicates a late development of Christian doctrine, which, we maintain, could not have been attained by the Judaistic son of Zebedee." (Vol. ii. p.

415)

Again, in the preceding page:--

"Now, although there is no certain information as to the time when, if ever, the Apostle removed into Asia Minor, it is pretty certain that he did not leave Palestine before A.D. 60. ... If we consider the Apocalypse to be his work, we find positive evidence of such markedly different thought and language actually existing when the Apostle must have been at least sixty or seventy years of age, that it is quite impossible to conceive that he could have subsequently acquired the language and mental characteristics of the Fourth Gospel."

This, though written princ.i.p.ally with reference to the diction, applies still more to the philosophy of the author of the Fourth Gospel. And, indeed, from his using the words "mental characteristics," we have no doubt that he desires such an application.

Now, what are the facts? We must a.s.sume that St. John, though "unlearned and ignorant," compared with the leaders of the Jewish commonwealth, at the commencement of his thirty years' sojourn in the Jewish capital, was a man of average intellect. Here, then, we have a member of a sect more aggressive than any before known in the promulgation of its opinions, taking the lead in the teaching and defence of these opinions in a city to which the Jews of all nationalities resorted periodically to keep the great feasts. If the holding of any position would sharpen a man's natural intellect and give him a power over words, and a mental grasp of ideas to which in youth he had been a stranger, that position would be the leading one he held in the Church of such a city as Jerusalem.

In the course of the thirty years which, according to the author of "Supernatural Religion," he lived there, he must have constantly had intercourse with Alexandrian Jews and Christians. It is as probable as not that during this period he had had converse with Philo himself, for the distance between Jerusalem and Alexandria was comparatively trifling. At Pentecost there were present Jews and proselytes from Egypt and the parts of Libya about Cyrene. There was also a Synagogue of the Alexandrians. Now I a.s.sert that a few hours' conversation with any Alexandrian Jew, or with any Christian convert from Alexandrian Judaism, would have, _humanly speaking_, enabled the Apostle, even if he knew not a word of the doctrine before, to write the four sentences in which are contained the whole Logos expression of the Fourth Gospel.

St. John must have been familiar with the teaching of traditional interpretation respecting the Meymera as contained in the Chaldee paraphrases; indeed, the more "unlearned" and "ignorant" he was, the more he must have relied upon the Chaldee paraphrases for the knowledge of the Old Testament, the Hebrew having been for centuries a dead language. We have a Chaldee paraphrase of great antiquity on so early and familiar a chapter as the third of Genesis, explaining the voice of the Lord G.o.d by the voice of the Meymera, or Word of the Lord G.o.d (Genesis iii.).

The natural rendering of this word into Greek would be Logos. I repeat, then, that, humanly speaking, if he had never entertained the idea before, a very short conversation with an Alexandrian Jew would have furnished him with all the "philosophy" required to make the four statements in which he simply identifies the Logos with the Divine Nature of his Lord.

Of course, I do not for a moment believe that the Apostle was enabled to write the exordium of his Gospel by any such inspiration. There is not a more direct utterance of the Holy Spirit in all Scripture than that which we have in the prelude to the Fourth Gospel.

But in the eyes of a Christian the grace of the Holy Spirit is shown in the power and explicitness, and above all in the simplicity of the a.s.sertions which identify the human conception, if such it can be called, of Platonism, or Judaism, with the highest divine truth.

I believe that if the Apostle wrote those sentences at the time handed down by the Church's tradition, that is, when Cerinthian and other heresies respecting our Lord's nature were beginning to be felt, the power of the Holy Spirit was put forth to restrict him to these few simple utterances, and to restrain his human intellect from overloading them with philosophical or controversial applications of them, which would have marred their simplicity and diminished their power. [117:1]

SECTION XIX.

EXTERNAL PROOFS OF THE AUTHENTICITY OF OUR FOUR GOSPELS.

We have now shown that Justin Martyr, the princ.i.p.al witness brought forward by the author of "Supernatural Religion" to discredit the Four Evangelists, either made use of the very books which we now possess, or books which contain exactly the same information respecting our Lord's miraculous Birth, Death, Resurrection, and moral teaching. We have seen, also, that Justin gives us, along with the teaching of the Synoptics, that peculiar teaching respecting the pre-existent Divine nature of Jesus which, as far as can be ascertained, was to be found only in the Fourth Gospel, and which is consequently called Johannean; and that, besides this, he refers to the history, and adopts the language, and urges the arguments which are to be found only in St. John.

We have also shown that there are no internal considerations whatsoever for supposing that Justin did not make use of the Fourth Gospel.

Instead, for instance, of the doctrine of St. John being a development of that held by Justin Martyr, the facts of the case all point to the contrary.

We must now see whether there is external evidence which makes it not only probable, but as certain as any fact in literary history can be, that Justin must have known and made use of our present Evangelists; that if he was a teacher in such an acknowledged centre of ecclesiastical information or tradition as Rome, and _appears_ to quote our Gospels (with no matter what minor variations and inaccuracies), he did actually quote the same and no other; and if his inaccuracies, and discrepancies, and omissions of what we suppose he ought to have mentioned, were doubled or trebled, it would still be as certain as any fact of such a nature can be, that he quoted the Four Evangelists, because they must have been read and commented on in his day and in his church as the Memoirs of the Apostles, which took their place by the side of the prophets of the Old Testament in the public instruction of the Church. In order to this I shall have to examine the external evidence for the Canon of the New Testament--so far, that is, as the Four Gospels are concerned.