2. The Evangelist not a philosopher.
It is a distinct question in what form we are to conceive of Philo’s teaching as coming before him. The author of the Fourth Gospel was a thinker, but not a professed philosopher. So far as we can judge from the writings of his that have come down to us, we should not be inclined to credit him with much philosophical erudition. The idea that we form to ourselves of the Evangelist is not that of a great reader always poring over books. I find it hard to think of him as sitting down to a deliberate study of the Jewish scholar’s voluminous treatises. The mental habits of the two men are too different. The Evangelist has a shorter and more direct way of getting at the truth. He was more like the old Ionian philosophers, who looked up to the sky and out upon the earth, and set down the thoughts that rose in them in short loosely connected aphorisms. The author of the Fourth Gospel did not look so much without as within: he sank into his own consciousness, and at last brought out to light what he found there. He dwelt upon the past until it became luminous to him; and then he took up the pen.
We will consider presently what sort of hypothesis we may form as to the process by which the Evangelist came to assimilate Philonian ideas, if he did assimilate them. But it may be well, first, to try to realize rather more exactly the extent of the agreement and difference between the two writers.