Evidence of their Respective Authenticity examined.1 The comparative study of the Gospels was then in its infancy, and Evanson worked as a pioneer. 'Unconnected for above fifteen years with any religious sect or party whatsoever' (so he wrote in his preface), 'disdaining the office of teacher of so plain a thing as Christianity considered as a lucrative occupation, and too far advanced in life to have any temporal interest in view, the author trusts his mind. has been perfectly unbiassed and impartial in its investigations.' The results were sufficiently startling. The Fourth Gospel and the Apocalypse could not proceed from the same author. And the contrasts between John and Matthew concerning the representations of the Baptist and the first disciples, or between John and Luke in the account of the last Supper, were highly unfavourable to the assumption of apostolic authorship. No less so was the emphatic recognition of the Messianic character of Jesus from the outset of his ministry; while it was curiously argued from the use of the Latin word flagellum barbarously written in Greek characters' (phragellion, scourge,' John 215,) that the writer could not have lived till after the beginning of the second century. Soon after 1800, voices of doubt began

1 The author had been prosecuted for heresy in 1771,-the prosecution failed on technical grounds in 1775-but the principal inhabitants of Tewkesbury subscribed to pay their vicar's costs. He afterwards resigned his living in 1778.

2 Into this period there also fell Matthew and Mark (Luke alone being saved as authentic history), the Pauline letters to the Romans, Ephesians, and Colossians, Hebrews, and the Catholic Epistles, James, Peter, John, and Jude.

to be raised in Germany,' which reached their fullest expression in the famous Probabilia of Dr. Bretschneider in 1820.2 In spite of the fact that two years later he declared in the preface to the second edition of his Dogmatik that he himself adhered to the Johannine origin of the Gospel, and had only stated the case against it to secure a more vigorous defence," his book proved the starting-point of all subsequent investigation. It supplied a basis for Strauss. The great argument of Baur was wrought out with his usual independence, but Bretschneider had prepared the way. Nearly a quarter of a century later Keim" modified the extreme Tübingen position by carrying the Gospel back into the reign of Trajan, and placing it between the years 100 and 117 A.D. Yet he would have no compromise with intermediate views like that which Weizsäcker had announced three years before, in ascribing it to a redaction by a disciple founded on memories of apostolic teaching at Ephesus. The spell of Baur's analysis was too potent. So radical a transformation of the life and teaching of Jesus could not be attributed even in a secondary sense to a companion of the Teacher from Nazareth.

1 Cp. Reuss, History of the Sacred Scriptures of the New Testament, transl. Houghton, 1884.

2 See ante, Lect. V., p. 267.

3 Encycl. Brit. vol. iv. (1875), p. 262.

4 See ante, Lect. V., p. 268.

5 In the first vol. of his Geschichte Jesu, 1867: Engl. transl., vol. i., pp. 141-232.

6 Untersuchungen, 1864; see his later position in the Apostolic Age, vol ii.

2

The Tübingen criticism at first attracted little attention in this country. A few students here and there had, indeed, been powerfully affected by it. The main principles of its conception of the early development of Christianity had been expounded by the Rev. James Martineau in an article on Hippolytus; and it lay at the back of his criticism of Renan's Life of Jesus in 1863. But it was his colleague, the Rev. John James Tayler, who opened the serious discussion of the whole Johannine question to English readers in 1867 by the publication of his Attempt to ascertain the Character of the Fourth Gospel, especially in its Relation to the Three First. Mr. Tayler dwelt on the discrepancies between the Gospel and the book of Revelation, which could not, he urged, proceed from the same hand. But the attestation of antiquity was much stronger for the Apocalypse than for the Gospel; the martyr Justin, for example, expressly attributing the first to the apostle, and never naming the second. The contrast between the main conceptions of the Synoptic writers and those of 'John' proved that the latter must be long posterior in date. The doctrine of the Logos or 'Word' was unknown to Paul, and the controversies in which the Apostle had pleaded the cause of the Gentiles were all hushed to rest. The access of non-Jews to the saving knowledge was welcomed, and in the vehement repudiation of the law and the

1 'Creed and Heresies of Early Christianity,' 1853, reprinted in Studies of Christianity, 1858.

2 Principal of Manchester New College, London.

prophets' all that ever came before me are thieves and robbers '-there were signs of a final and decisive breach with Judaism. For this no period seemed so fitting as the cruel persecution of Christians by Jews under Bar-Kochba, from which they were delivered by the collapse of his revolt and the second destruction of Jerusalem, A.D. 135. To the decades following that year, therefore, between 135 and 160, the Gospel might be probably assigned. In guarded language Mr. Tayler finally pointed to the Second and Third Letters, both of which were written in the name not of an Apostle but of a Presbyter or 'Elder.' Of such a Presbyter John there were traditions in the church at Ephesus.1 Eusebius had even asked whether the Apocalypse might not have proceeded from him. There was another alternative. The Presbyter John might have written the Gospel.2

Thus was the Tübingen criticism fairly launched in this country. No student of the history of the discussion will fail to recognise (with Bishop Lightfoot) the transparent sincerity of the investigation just summarised. Recent enquiry has, indeed, moved away from its results, though some of them do not lack active champions at the present day; Dr. Abbott still pleading that the Fourth Gospel was not known to Justin (145-149 A.D.), and Schmiedel

1 See the testimony of Papias below.

2 This suggestion made some years before by M. Nicolas, was fiercely condemned by Keim, Jesus of Nazara, i. 227. It has been recently defended by Harnack; see below.

43

and Pfleiderer finding in John 5-if another shall come in his own name, him ye will receive'— a probable allusion to Bar-Kochba's claim to be Messiah.1 For a time, however, there seemed little alternative between the recognition of apostolic authorship on the one hand, and a date verging towards the middle of the second century on the other. The first was advocated by the great Anglican scholars Dr. Lightfoot and Dr. Westcott,3 to whose representative position Dr. Sanday by right succeeds. The counter view found its advocates in Dr. Samuel Davidson, the author of Supernatural Religion, Matthew Arnold-who thought it possible by pure literary judgments to isolate specific sayings as undoubtedly authentic," a method which severer critics do not sanction,-and Dr Martineau. How does the controversy stand to-day? Is it possible in a few paragraphs to indicate its leading aspects? An attempt must at least be made to display to the general reader the nature of the evidence on which different judgments rest.

At the outset it may be noted that there is a practically unanimous consent that the author of the

1 Schmiedel in Encycl. Bibl. ii. 2551; Pfleiderer, Urchristenthum, 2nd ed. 1902, vol. ii., p. 440. Pfleiderer adds 1148 and 162 as probable references to the situation created by the second Jewish war.

2 See the lectures from 1871 onwards collected in Biblical Essays, 1893. 3 The Gospel according to St. John in the Speaker's Commentary, 1881.

Authorship and Historical Character of the Fourth Gospel, 1872; Inspiration, 1893; and various essays and articles since.

God and the Bible, chaps. v. and vi.

6 The Seat of Authority in Religion, 1890, pp. 189-242.