CHAPTER XII THE NEW TESTAMENT 333 It is significant that the school of negative criticism requires an extraordinary stretch of imagination and an has produced no learned commentary on John. All amazing amount of credulity. The more sober among the the recent commentators on the fourth Gospel (Lücke, critics suppose that the author was a highly gifted EpheEwald, Lange, Hengstenberg, Luthardt, Meyer, Weiss, sian disciple of John, who freely reproduced and modified Alford, Wordsworth, Godet, Westcott, Milligan , Moul- his oral teaching after he was removed by death. But how ton, Plummer, etc.) favor its genuineness. could his name be utterly unknown, when the names of The Difficulties of the Anti-Johannean Theory. Polycarp and Papias and other disciples of John, far less The prevailing theory of the negative critics is this: important, have come down to as? “The great unknown” They accept the Synoptic Gospels, with the exception of is a mystery indeed. Some critics, half in sympathy with the miracles, as genuine history, but for this very reason Tübingen, are willing to admit that John himself wrote they reject John; and they accept the Apocalypse as the a part of the book, either the historic narratives or the genuine work of the apostle John, who is represented by discourses, but neither of these compromises will do: the the Synoptists as a Son of Thunder, and by Paul (Gal. 2) book is a unit, and is either wholly genuine or wholly a as one of the three pillars of conservative Jewish Christi- fiction. anity, but for this very reason they deny that he can have Nor are the negative critics agreed as to the time of written the Gospel, which in style and spirit differs so composition. Under the increasing pressure of argument widely from the Apocalypse. For this position they ap- and evidence they have been forced to retreat, step by peal to the fact that the Synoptists and the Apocalypse step, from the last quarter of the second century to the are equally well, and even better supported by internal first, even within a few years of John’s death, and withand external evidence, and represent a tradition which is in the lifetime of hundreds of his hearers, when it was at least twenty years older. impossible for a pseudo-Johannean book to pass into But what then becomes of the fourth Gospel? It is general currency without the discovery of the fraud. Dr. incredible that the real John should have falsified the his- Baur and Schwegler assigned the composition to a.d. 170 tory of his Master; consequently the Gospel which bears or 160; Volkmar to 155; Zeller to 150; Scholten to 140; his name is a post-apostolic fiction, a religious poem, or Hilgenfeld to about 130; Renan to about 125; Schenkel to a romance on the theme of the incarnate Logos. It is the 120 or 115; until Keim (in 1867) went up as high as 110 Gospel of Christian Gnosticism, strongly influenced by or even 100, but having reached such an early date, he the Alexandrian philosophy of Philo. Yet it is no fraud felt compelled (1875)1051 in self-defence to advance again any more than other literary fictions. The unknown au- to 130, and this notwithstanding the conceded testimothor dealt with the historical Jesus of the Synoptists, as nies of Justin Martyr and the early Gnostics. These vacPlato dealt with Socrates, making him simply the base illations of criticism reveal the impossibility of locating for his own sublime speculations, and putting speeches the Gospel in the second century. into his mouth which he never uttered. If we surrender the fourth Gospel, what shall we gain Who was that Christian Plato? No critic can tell, or in its place? Fiction for fact, stone for bread, a Gnostic even conjecture, except Renan, who revived, as possible dream for the most glorious truth. at least, the absurd view of the Alogi, that the Gnostic Fortunately, the whole anti-Johannean hypothesis heretic, Cerinthus the enemy of 54), “à cesépoques ténébreuses; et, si l’Église, en vénérant le John, wrote the fourth Gospel1050 Such a conjecture quatrième Évangile comme l’oeuvre de Jean, est dupe de celui to his third and thoroughly revised Commentary on John (Introduction historique et critique, Paris, 1881, 376 pages), and to Dr. Weiss, of Berlin, in his very able Leben Jesu, Berlin, 1882, vol. I. 84-198. In England the battle has been fought chiefly by Bishop Lightfoot, Canon Westcott, Prof. Milligan, and Dr. Sanday. In America, Dr. Ezra Abbot (1880) is equal to any of them in the accurate and effective presentation of the historical argument for the Johannean authorship of the fourth Gospel. His treatise has been reprinted in his Critical Essays, Boston, l888 (pp. 9-107). 1050 “Tout est possible,” says Renan (L’Église chrét., p.
qu’elle regarde comme un de ses plus dangereux ennemis, cela n’est pas en somme plus étrange que tant d’autres malentendus qui composent la trame de l’histoire religieuse de l’humanité. Ce qu’il y a de sûr, c’est que l’auteur est à la fois le père et l’adversaire du gnosticisme, l’ennemi de ceux qui laissaient s’evaporer dans un docétisme nuageux l’humanité réelle de Jésus et le complice de ceus qui le reléguaient dans l’abstraction divine.” He thinks it more probable, however (p. 47), that two Ephesian disciples of John (John the Presbyter and Aristion) wrote the Gospel twenty or thirty years after his death. 1051 In the last edition of his abridged Geschichte Jesu.
