Only in the appendix do we find any deliberate identification with a particular historic person: "this is the disciple who wit nessed to and who wrote these things" (xxi. 24) refers doubtless to the whole previous work and to "the disciple whom Jesus loved," identified here with an unnamed historic personage whose recent death had created a shock, evidently because he was the last of that apostolic generation which had so keenly expected the second coming (18-23). This man was so great that the writer strives to win his authority for this Gospel; and yet this man was not John the Zebedean, else why, now he is dead and gone, not proclaim the fact? If the dead man was John the presbyter—if this John had in youth just seen Jesus and the Zebedean, and in extreme old age had still seen and approved the Gospel—to attribute this Gospel to him, as is done here, would not violate the literary ethics of those times. Thus the heathen philosopher Iamblichus (d. c. 33o) declares : "this was admirable" amongst the Neo-Pythagoreans "that they ascribed everything to Pythagoras; but few of them acknowledge their own works as their own" (de Pythag. vita, 198). And as to Christians, Tertullian about 210 tells how the presbyter who, in proconsular Asia, had "composed the Acts of Paul and Thecla" was convicted and deposed, for how could it be credible that Paul should confer upon women the power to "teach and baptize" as these Acts averred? The attribution as such, then, was not condemned.
The facts of the problem would all appear covered by the hypothesis that John the presbyter, the eleven being all dead, wrote the book of Revelation (its more ancient Christian por tions) say in 69, and died at Ephesus say in oo; that the author of the Gospel wrote the first draft, here, say in 97; that this book, expanded by him, first circulated within a select Ephesian Christian circle; and that the Ephesian church officials added to it the appendix and published it in IIo-12o. But however different or more complicated may have been the actual origins, three points remain certain. The real situation that confronts us is not an unbroken tradition of apostolic eye-witnesses, incapable of re-statement with any hope of ecclesiastical acceptance, except by another apostolic eye-witness. On one side indeed there was the record, underlying the Synoptists, of at least two eye witnesses, and the necessity of its preservation and transmission; but on the other side a profound double change had come over the Christian outlook and requirements. St. Paul's heroic labours (3o-64) had gradually gained full recognition and separate organi zation for the universalist strain in our Lord's teaching; and he who had never seen the earthly Jesus, but only the heavenly Christ, could even declare that Christ "though from the Jewish fathers according to the flesh" had died, "so that henceforth, even if we have known Christ according to the flesh, now we no further know Him thus," "the Lord is the Spirit," and "where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty." And the Jewish church, within which Christianity had first lived and moved, ceased to have a visible centre. Thus a super-spatial and super-temporal interpretation of that first markedly Jewish setting and apprehen sion of the Christian truth became as necessary as the attachment to the original contingencies. The Fourth Gospel, inexplicable without St. Paul and the fall of Jerusalem, is fully understandable with them. The attribution of the book to an eye-witness nowhere resolves, it everywhere increases, the real difficulties; and by insisting upon having history in the same degree and way in John as in the Synoptists, we cease to get it sufficiently anywhere at all. And the Fourth Gospel's true greatness lies well within
the range of this its special character. In character it is pro foundly "pneumatic"; Paul's super-earthly Spirit-Christ here breathes and speaks, and invites a corresponding spiritual corn prehension. And its greatness appears in its inexhaustibly deep teachings concerning Christ's sheep and fold; the Father's draw ing of souls to Christ; the dependence of knowledge as to Christ's doctrine upon the doing of God's will; the fulfilling of the com mandment of love, as the test of true discipleship; eternal life, begun even here and now; and God a Spirit, to be served in spirit and in truth.