Gospels and the fourth Gospel. He adduces, indeed, several others; but whilst some have already been satisfactorily disposed of, others appear to us subversive of the conclusion which they are brought to establish. The following instance will, we think, sufficiently illustrate our position.

*

The author of Supernatural Religion,' not content with urging the improbability, or, as he is pleased to regard it, the impossibility, of such an act as the cleansing of the outer court of the Temple at the outset of our Lord's career, thinks that he has discovered an additional ground of objection to the account of the transaction as given by the fourth Evangelist, in the fact that our Lord is represented as replying to the demand of the Jews for a sign in the words, Destroy this Temple and in three days I will raise it up.' The Synoptics,' says our author, not only know nothing of this, but represent the saying as the false testimony which the false witnesses bare against Jesus. No such charge is brought against Jesus in the fourth Gospel.' We do not propose to discuss the question whether the cleansing of the Temple took place only once, and in that case whether the chronological order of the incident has been preserved by the Synoptists or by the fourth Evangelist; or whether it took place both at the beginning of our Lord's public ministry, as recorded by St. John, and also at its close, as recorded by the Synoptists. In either case the account given by the fourth Evangelist, as has been shown by Mr. Sanday, exactly corresponds with that which we should expect from one who had been an eye-witness of the circumstances which he relates. The mention of the oxen and the sheep-not noticed by the Synoptists-the position of the changers of money, who are represented as sitting-the making of the scourge, probably out of the ropes which had bound the victims--the driving out of the animals with the scourge thus made, as contrasted with the command to the sellers of doves to take them away--and once more, the pouring out of the changers' money upon the ground-all these minute details, so simply, so naturally, and so graphically related, are exactly what we might expect from the pen of an eye-witness, on whose memory the event had left an indelible impression, whilst they are signally out of accord with the theory of the composition of the narrative by one who was separated by upwards of a century from the facts which he professes to record.

Other considerations confirm the accuracy of the Johannine

Chap. ii. 19.

† Vol. ii. p. 452.

narrative. The forty and six years' during which the rebuilding of the Temple had been going on an unlikely computation for a forger of the second century-bring us, according to the testimony of Josephus,* to the 18th year of Herod the Great, i.e. to the year 28 or 29 A.D. (and more probably, as Mr. Sanday has shown, to the former of these two years), a date which exactly agrees with that given by St. Luke iii. 1, on the supposition that that Evangelist reckons from the joint, not the sole, sovereignty of Tiberius. Other considerations tend to the same conclusion as regards the correctness of the chronological place assigned to this incident in the fourth Gospel. Its parabolical character is admirably adapted to the early portion of our Lord's ministry. The demand for a sign was more natural at the beginning of that ministry than at its close. We find no charge preferred here against those who asked for it, whereas, in reference to those who required a sign at a later period, we find our Lord denouncing them as an evil and adulterous generation,' to which no other sign but that already promised in this place, and described as the sign of the prophet Jonas, should be given. And yet further, there is an incidental allusion to two distinct acts of memory on the part of the disciples which refer unambiguously to two different periods of time. At the time when the words in question were spoken, the disciples re'membered' the saying of the Psalmist, The zeal of Thine "house hath eaten me up;' whereas it was not till after the Resurrection that they remembered,' in the light of that event, the prediction of Christ, In three days I will raise it up. Now had these words been spoken at the time at which the Synoptists place the second cleansing of the Temple, not a week had elapsed between the uttering of the words and their accomplishment, and two days only had passed since the allusion to them of the false witnesses. How improbable, then, that the testimony of false discordant witnesses should be adduced to substantiate a charge of which the priests themselves should have been the witnesses, or that the fact should be recorded that the disciples remembered words which it would have been almost impossible for them, after so short an interval, to have forgotten.

But it is objected by the author of Supernatural Religion' that no such charge is brought against Jesus at all in the 'fourth Gospel.' Now it appears to us that the very fact that the accusation is recorded by the Synoptists, not by the writer

* Antiquities of the Jews, xi. 1.

† P. 65.

of the fourth Gospel, so far from constituting any ground of objection to that Gospel, affords an incidental argument of no small value in its support. Had the accusation of the false witnesses been found in the same Gospel which gives the account of our Lord's words, it would have been open to those who challenge the genuineness and authenticity of the Gospel to allege that the one was designedly invented in order to obtain credence for the other. But it will hardly be alleged that a writer of the second century invented this incident in order to furnish a feasible explanation of that perversion of our Lord's words which we find in the Synoptic Gospels; and we submit that on any other hypothesis than this (which even the author of Supernatural Religion' has not ventured to put forth), the charge of the false witnesses, as recorded by the Synoptists, must be regarded as one of the undesigned coincidences which corroborate the truth both of their Gospels and also of the fourth.

It would carry us far beyond our appointed limits were we to enter at any length upon the exceedingly interesting and important question, how it is that the discourses of our Lord, as reported by the fourth Evangelist, differ so widely in their general character from those which are related by the Synoptists, and how it is that their general style and terminology bear so close a resemblance to those of the Evangelist himself. There are two considerations which have been commonly overlooked by those who have urged this objection to the genuineness of the fourth Gospel: (1) that it is the custom of the fourth Evangelist to insert his own reflections upon the words of Christ in such a manner that it is difficult, if not impossible, to trace the line of demarcation between them; and (2) that the points of agreement between our Lord's words, as recorded by the Synoptists, and as recorded by the fourth Evangelist, are at least as remarkable as are the points of difference. Again, the diversity of style between our Lord's discourses, as related by the Synoptists, and as related by the fourth Evangelist, may be accounted for, to a great extent, by a due consideration of the different persons to whom they were addressed, and the different times and circumstances under which they were delivered; whilst a large amount of resemblance between the style of our Lord's discourses and that of the Evangelist himself may as fairly be accounted for by the two following considerations: (1) that the style of the translator must of necessity give a certain colouring to every original; and (2) that one who lived on terms of close familiarity with Christ may insensibly have learned to conform his own style to

that of his Master. At the same time we freely allow that these considerations do not sufficiently account for the occurrence of all of those peculiarities of thought, of style, and of phraseology which are traced throughout the writings ascribed to St. John, whether speaking in his own person, or relating the discourses of our Lord; and we think that the only satis factory method of accounting for this phenomenon must be found in the supposition that a larger field was allowed to the personal recollections, the personal beliefs, and the personal genius of the writer than has been commonly admitted on the part of the apologists of the fourth Gospel. A difficulty, if such it be, of a similar nature is found in the deviations from the Hebrew original and from the Greek version which occur in citations from the Old Testament, both in the Gospels and in the Epistles.

There is one more objection to the genuineness of the fourth Gospel which we should gladly have discussed at length, because we think it may more fairly be urged as a substantial argument in its favour. We refer to the much vexed controversy whether the Last Supper and the Crucifixion (both of which events, it is important to bear in mind, took place upon the same Jewish day) must be assigned, as the Synoptical Gospels appear to assign them, to the 15th Nisan, or, as the fourth Evangelist appears to do, and, as we believe, does, to the 14th Nisan. We can only briefly indicate the salient points of this question so far as they bear upon the genuineness of the fourth Gospel. We observe then; (1) that whilst we freely allow that the Synoptical Gospels seem to imply that our Lord celebrated the Passover on the legal day, there are very many indications in their narratives that that day was anticipated; (2) that the four Evangelists are agreed in assigning the day of the Crucifixion to the Jewish day of preparation (Tapaσx), and that there are considerable difficulties involved in the supposition that the same word is employed by them in two different senses; (3) that it is in the highest degree improbable that a Greek forger of the second century should, on a point of such notoriety, have contravened the consentient testimony of those who had preceded him; and, lastly, that if the alleged inconsistency between the Synoptical Gospels and the fourth Gospel actually exists, the course adopted by the fourth Evangelist can be explained on no other supposition than one, viz., that he was an eye-witness of the facts which he records, and that he knew that his Gospel would be received as that of an eye-witness by others. We will only add, in answer to the argument against the genuineness of the fourth Gospel which

is derived from the practice of the early Asiatic churches, that even if the event commemorated in their Easter festival was the Institution of the Eucharist, and not the Crucifixion, inasmuch as both events occurred on the same Jewish day, the practice of the Quartodecimans may fairly be alleged as an argument for, rather than against, the chronology which is based upon the fourth Gospel.

We have now considered some of the chief objections which have been made to the Johannine authorship of the fourth Gospel, based upon the alleged discrepancies between it and the Synoptic Gospels; and we have endeavoured to show that these discrepancies in no case assume the form of irreconcilable differences, and that in some instances they must be regarded rather as undesigned coincidences. We must again urge that we should very inadequately estimate the evidential value of these discrepancies were we to regard them solely in the light of difficulties which are capable of a satisfactory solution. On the contrary, when viewed in conjunction with those numerous indications of the eye-witness to some of which we have already referred, and which, if our space allowed, we could almost indefinitely multiply, we contend that the discrepancies in question-whether real or apparent-afford evidence against the late date of the fourth Gospel, which is almost, if not altogether, decisive of the question at issue. The most determined opponents of the Johannine authorship of the fourth Gospel admit its incomparable merits; nay, more, they ascribe to those merits its reputed origin. No parallel, then, can be instituted between the fourth Gospel and the Apocryphal legends which lay claim to apostolical authority. The writer of the fourth Gospel, whoever he may have been, is confessedly one who stood prominent amongst his contemporaries, and who, if a forger, has executed his task with such consummate skill that it has imposed upon the world for at least 1700 years. We ask, then, whether it is probable that such a man, writing in the name of one of the original Disciples of Christ, and professing to record what he had himself seen of his Lord's works and heard of His words, would have composed a book differing so widely-as our opponents say, so fundamentally-from the accounts universally received and regarded as authentic histories at the time at which he wrote ?

The results of an inquiry into the origin of the fourth Gospel may be briefly described as follows. A chain of external evidence, which no modern criticism has been able to break, and of which recent investigations have brought to light some