1. The Gospel not a Biography.
Once more we fall back upon our main position. The Evangelist is writing a spiritual Gospel, and his whole procedure is dominated by that one fact. His object is to set forth Christ as Divine, not only as Messiah but as Son of God, as an object of faith which brings life to the believer.
It follows that all criticism which does not take account of this—and how large a part of the strictures upon the Gospel does not take account of it!—is really wide of the mark. M. Loisy, for instance, brings a long indictment against the Gospel for not containing things that it never professed to contain. It never professed to be a complete picture of the Life of the Lord. It never professed to show Him in a variety of human relationships. It never professed to give specimens of His ethical teaching simply as such. It did not profess to illustrate, and it does not illustrate, even the lower side of those activities that might be called specially divine, as (e. g.) the casting out of demons.
The Gospel is written upon the highest plane throughout. It seeks to answer the question who it was that appeared upon earth, and suffered on Calvary, and rose from the dead and left disciples who revered and adored Him. And this Evangelist takes a flight beyond his fellows inasmuch as he asks the question who Christ was in His essential nature: What was the meaning—not merely the local but the cosmical meaning—of this great theophany?
It is not surprising if in the pursuit of this object the Evangelist has laid himself open to the charge of being partial or onesided. Those who use such terms are really, as we have seen, judging by the standard of the modern biography, which is out of place. The Gospel is, admittedly and deliberately, not an attempt to set forth the whole of a life, but just a selection of scenes, a selection made with a view to a limited and sharply-defined purpose. The complaint is made that it is monotonous, and the complaint is not without reason. The monotony was involved, we might say, from the outset in the concentration of aim which the writer himself acknowledges. And in addition to this it is characteristic of the writer that his thought is of the type which revolves more than it progresses. The picture has not that lifelike effect which is given by the setting of a single figure in a variety of circumstances. The variety of circumstance was included among those bodily or external aspects (τὰ σωματικά) which the writer considered to have been sufficiently treated by his predecessors. He described for himself a narrower circle. And it was because he kept within that circle, because he goes on striking the same chord, that we receive the impression of repetition and monotony. Perhaps the intensity of the effect makes up for its want of extension. But at any rate the Evangelist was within his rights in choosing his own programme, and we must not blame him for doing what he undertook to do.
We may blame him, however, if within his self-chosen limits the picture that he has drawn for us is misleading. That is the central point which we must now go on to test. The object of the Gospel would be called in modern technical language to exhibit a Christology. Is that Christology true? Does it satisfy the tests that we are able to apply to it? Can we find a suitable place for it in the total conception that we form of the Apostolic Age? Does it belong to the Apostolic Age at all; or must we, to understand it, come down below the time of the Apostles? To answer these questions we must compare the Christology of the Fourth Gospel with that of the other Apostolic writings, and more particularly with that of the Synoptic Gospels, of St. Paul, and of the Epistle to the Hebrews.
It does not take us long to see that the Christology of the Fourth Gospel has the closest affinity with this group of Epistles—we may say, with the leading Epistles of St. Paul and with that other interesting Epistle of which we know, perhaps, or partly know, the readers but do not know the author. It is worth while to bring in this because the unmistakable quotation from it in Clement of Rome proves it to belong to the Apostolic Age.