Conjectures as to the Fourth Gospel.

The concentration of attention on the three first gospels during these enquiries naturally left the fourth still enveloped in its old nimbus of supernaturalism. The few attempts made to explain its origin were vague and ineffectual. It was universally allowed to be a genuine apostolic work. Lessing, in the treatise already cited, revived the theory of Clemens Alexandrinus, making it the spiritual or "pneumatic" as opposed to the fleshly gospel. Eichhorn treated it in a similar way, as composed indeed from the same fundamental document, but on a different plan from the others. The "Urevangelium," said Eichhorn, might very possibly be found insufficient for the requirements of Greek culture; John therefore wrote a fourth gospel; and though not intending thereby to supplant the others, he corrected their inaccuracies, and placed many things in a clearer and fuller light. In 1820, Bretschneider, in his "Probabilia," for the first time gave utterance to doubts as to the origin and genuineness of the fourth gospel; and that not only as implying its involuntary corruption through oral transmission, but more or less of intentional fraud in the author. But these doubts were not prosecuted at the time; they remained only another specimen of the prevalent unfruitful guesswork, and to appease the obloquy they provoked were afterwards withdrawn by the author himself. Subsequently Strauss retracted, on very scanty grounds, a similar suspicion. And yet in no direction could enquiry have been more usefully directed than in this; for the peculiar discrepancies of this gospel are eminently suggestive, exhibiting those seeming anomalies which are most calculated to tempt and to reward research. But Bretschneider's theory appeared at

1 "Probabilia de Evang. et Epist. Joannis indole et origine," 1820. Earlier hints in the same direction are however cited by Hilgenfeld, "Der Kanon" p. 136.

a very unfavourable moment. It was broached during the crisis of reaction from rationalistic or argumentative religion to sentimental; when the theological advocates of feeling happened to have adopted the fourth gospel as the unimpeachable apostolic witness, the surest guide in history as well as doctrine. Schleiermacher stepped lightly over the objections of Bretschneider; it was well, he said, that the question had been mooted, in order to be finally set at rest. Meantime implicit deference for the fourth gospel acted as a kind of moral support in applying free criticism to other writings; the lingering partialities of orthodoxy rallied round this last stay, since, as once said by Episcopius, religion might be considered safe so long as a single Scripture book was retained as indisputably genuine, and through this important reservation decent respectability in the eyes of the world might yet be maintained. Schleiermacher accepted De Wette's rule as to the incompatibility of the apocalypse and the gospel; but whereas De Wette doubted which of the two was apostolical, Schleiermacher had no such misgiving. He assumed that one of the gospels at least must be apostolical, and considered that one to be unquestionably John's. "It was proved to be so by its biographical character and connected unity. It recounts dialogues and circumstances which only an eye-witness could possibly have known ; it must be older than the synoptics in their present condition, and therefore cannot be based on them. Even the supplementary twenty-first chapter, although indisputably of later date than the rest, must be assumed to be the apostle's; and generally the narrative has that stamp of immediate authority before which suspicion vanishes; the writer must have told the truth; the highest evidence is the Total-eindruck des Ganzen,'-the general impression of the whole." Credner spoke in a similar strain: "Even were we destitute of testimony as to the author, we should have been led" he says, "by the force of internal evidence,

the vigour and accuracy of the statements, the high wrought idealism and spiritualism, etc., etc., to the inference that the author of such a work can be no other than a Palestinian, an apostle, an eye-witness, in short, that very beloved disciple whom Jesus attached to his person by all the magical fascinations of his teaching!" On such grounds it was thought fair to conclude that in case of narrative variation the fourth gospel must be inevitably in the right, the synoptics always in the wrong; and Eichhorn's hypothesis of free invention as to the speeches was contemptuously rejected, as suggesting too near a parallel to the Greek and Roman historians. who should have invented these, said Schleiermacher, would have invented more, and have done it more harmoniously and consistently.

He

De Wette's irresoluteness was no where more marked than in his treatment of the fourth gospel. In the first edition of his "Einleitung" the reasons for and against were carefully balanced. Vivid description, spiritual doctrine, adaptation to Greek ideas, agree, he thought, with the circumstances of John; still it seems odd that a mere Galilæan fisherman should have become so deeply versed in Greek philosophy; so that we ought to look narrowly to historical or geographical anomalies, singularities in the discourses, especially the important discrepancies in regard to the passover and last supper. In the interval between his first and last editions the gospel had become the subject of a searching criticism in the Tübingen Journal, which De Wette could not entirely overlook; but though its tendency was against the genuineness, it seemed to influence this hitherto irresolute theologian to pronounce more decidedly in its favour. To plain indications of unhistorical character he now more resolutely opposes instinctively apprehended evidences of clearness, originality, divinity, etc.; smooths over obvious difficulties; expatiates on the odium of making the apostolic eye-witness an

impostor; the improbability that the church would have accepted as genuine an account differing so widely and obviously from the other gospels unless for very cogent and sufficient reasons; thus seeking refuge in that very tradition which he had before treated as untrustworthy, and that in regard to a book less supported by traditional evidence than almost any other in the Canon! True, he says, in many points of historical detail opportunities may be found for cavil; but John wrote the gospel in his old age under altered circumstances, when his recollections had become faint, and indeed a minute pragmatical accuracy was inconsistent with the enlarged character of his soul! So that instead of the former plea of originality and clearness, we are now referred to remoteness and faintness; and why, asks De Wette, should not an apostle who was so intimately acquainted with his master's thoughts be allowed a "certain latitude" in expressions, which, though perhaps not actually uttered by Jesus, were in perfect harmony with the spirit of his teaching? Why seek an author in some unknown person, whose great endowments must have been really inconsistent with such an incognito, and after all with no result but to confound this "great unknown" with the nameless apocryphal writers of the second century? It is evident from this style of argument that De Wette was wanting from the first in the strict impartiality of the true critic; and that he held even the balance of belief and doubt only so long as belief appeared to be in no real jeopardy.

Strauss and the Mythical Interpretation.

In this equivocal condition of theology, this helpless guesswork and capricious alternation of concession and retractation, a powerful shock was evidently needed to startle men's minds out of helpless bewilderment, to test the

moral temper of their thoughts, and to force them to the inevitable alternative of uncompromising honesty or unlimited delusion. An Iris or Atropos was wanted to end the long agony, to sever the last hair of expiring superstition. It was by performing this harsh but inevitable operation that Strauss opened a new epoch in Biblical study. Seeing the uselessness of multiplying vague conjectures about the form, priority, or other external circumstances of the New Testament writings, he made it his business to look back to the internal phenomena, freely applying philosophical data in considering their essential character and contents. His object was to draw useful inferences from those very differences or incongruities of statement which others were so anxious to hide;-not to decypher popular prejudice out of a portion of the writings, but to put an instructive interpretation on the whole. This was an important part of the general problen of modern science, the last and hardest labour of scientific history. It has been said1 that one chief employment of a speculative age is to bring to light and exhibit in their true connection the confused trains of thought which occupied men's minds in unenlightened times, to translate them into intelligible language,-to trace the origin, significance, and fluctuations of ancient symbolism. And if the task of ancient culture may be generally described as summed up in that of teaching the great lesson of self-knowledge and self-consciousness, of raising the mind by means of art and ideal speculation out of sensual slavery and apathetic instinct to that absolute freedom and stoical self-reliance of which Christianity, which abandoned the world as Satanic, was an eminent though exaggerated specimen,-the task of modern science and philosophy is to recover the empire of the world before recklessly abdicated, to restore to

1 Stewart's Philosophy of the Mind, chap. ii. p. 67.

2 "Tywol σEAUTOv."-This view is developed at length by Kuno Fischer in the 1st vol. of his History of Modern Philosophy.