The Criticism of the Fourth Gospel / Eight Lectures on the Morse Foundation, Delivered in the Union Seminary, New York in October and November 1904

by W. Sanday

III. The Nature of the Discourses.

Another of the objections brought against the Fourth Gospel that is not without a certain amount of foundation is that from the nature of the Discourses. It is said with some degree of truth that the discourses put into the mouth of our Lord in this Gospel are different from those in the Synoptics. We notice at once that the parables, which contribute so much to our conception of the outward form and manner of our Lord’s teaching, have dropped out. What St. John calls by that name, although similar, is not exactly the same thing. Many of the discourses are longer; for instance, that which is apparently addressed to Nicodemus in chap. iii, the discourse after the healing of the impotent man in chap. v, the discourse in the synagogue at Capernaum in chap. vi, and the last discourses in chaps. xiv-xvii. And we observe further that the style of many parts of these discourses, while it is not like that which we find in the Synoptic Gospels, corresponds remarkably with the style of St. John’s Epistles.

It is not the case that the speeches in the Fourth Gospel are systematically longer than those in the Synoptics. We perhaps have an impression that they are; but, if so, it is not borne out by the facts. For the proof of this I may refer to the statistics carefully worked out by Dr. Drummond on p. 24. There is no doubt that the speeches of our Lord were, as Justin said, ‘short and concise.’ They had nothing in common with the elaborate compositions and rounded periods of Greek rhetoric. The type on which they were modelled was wholly different. We find the nearest parallel to it in the so-called ‘Sayings of the Jewish Fathers’ (Pirke Aboth). Each saying is a sort of aphorism; and a longer discourse is only a string of aphorisms, unless it takes the form of a simple narrative or description, like the parables in the Synoptic Gospels or allegories, like those of the Good Shepherd and the Vine and its Branches, in the Fourth Gospel.

One form of discourse, that we may be sure must have been common, is more fully represented in the Fourth Gospel than in the other three; I mean the dialogue, and in particular the controversial dialogue, growing out of some natural occasion, such as those of which I spoke in the last lecture, the woman of Samaria’s appeal to the patriarch Jacob, the Jews’ demand for a sign like a gift of manna, the practice of circumcising on the sabbath day, the charge of demoniacal possession and the claim of the Jews to be Abraham’s children. Instances like these must be set down to the credit of the Gospel and not against it.

The longer discourses appear to grow out of the aphoristic sayings of which I have spoken. Of these again Dr. Drummond has made an ample collection (pp. 18-20). But it is true that the Evangelist permits himself to dwell on such sayings, to repeat and enforce them by expansions of his own, which keep coming back to the same point. It has often been remarked that we are constantly left in doubt where the words of our Lord end and those of the Evangelist begin. Probably the Evangelist himself did not discriminate, or even try to discriminate. A modern writer, in similar circumstances, would feel obliged to ask himself whether the words which he was setting down were really spoken or not; but there is no reason to suppose that the author of the Gospel would be conscious of any such obligation. He would not pause to put to himself questions, or to exercise conscious self-criticism. He would just go on writing as the spirit moved him. And the consequence is that historical recollections and interpretative reflection, the fruit of thought and experience, have come down to us inextricably blended.

St. Paul was not a historian, or we may be sure that he would have furnished abundant parallels for the sort of procedure that we find in St. John. He is not a historian, but he does for once lapse into history, and he does then furnish a parallel which has always seemed to me very exact and very illuminating. You will remember in Gal. ii. 11 ff. the account of the dispute with St. Peter at Antioch. The first few verses are strictly historical; but suddenly and without a word of warning the Apostle glides into one of his own abstruse doctrinal arguments as to justification by works of law and by faith.

While therefore I quite allow that in any given instance there is need for close scrutiny to determine what belongs to the Master and what to the disciple, I entirely repudiate the inference that St. John cannot have written the Gospel.

Psychologically, the Gospel is more intelligible if one like St. John wrote it, one who drew upon his own memories and was conscious of speaking with authority. It is a mechanical and, I believe, really untenable view to suppose that the author has simply taken over certain Synoptic sayings and adapted them to his own ideas. We form for ourselves a far truer and more adequate conception if we think of these discourses as the product of a single living experience. They are from first to last a part of the author’s self. The recollections on which they are based are his own, and it is his own mind that has insensibly played upon them, and shaped them, and worked up in them the fruits of his own experience.

It is this that really constitutes the value of the Gospel. It is not a mere invention, but it is the result of a strong first-hand impression of a wonderful Personality. It is a blending of fact and interpretation; but the interpretation comes from one who had an unique position and unique advantages for getting at the heart and truth of that which he sought to interpret. It is the mind of Christ, seen through the medium of one of the first and closest of His companions.

IV. The Presentation of the Supernatural.

i. The treatment of Miracle in the Fourth Gospel.

I cannot regard anything that we have hitherto had to deal with as constituting a substantial set-off against the arguments previously urged for the authentic and autoptic character of the Gospel. It is otherwise when we come to its manner of presenting the Supernatural. It must be confessed that the miracles in the Fourth Gospel, while in the main they run parallel to those in the Synoptic Gospels, yet do appear to involve a certain heightening of the effect. The courtier’s servant is healed from a distance; the impotent man had been thirty-and-eight years in his infirmity; the blind man who was sent to wash in the pool of Siloam had been blind from his birth; Lazarus had lain four days in the tomb.

Not only do these details imply an enhancement of the supernatural, but it seems that the author of the Gospel valued them specially for that reason. They fall in entirely with his purpose in writing. He sees in them so many striking illustrations of the glory of the Christ. He had been himself keenly on the watch for the manifestations of that glory, and he delighted to record them in the hope that they might impress his readers as they had impressed him.

We must not make too much of the details I have just mentioned. There is no real difference of principle. The healing of the centurion’s servant is telepathic like that of the courtier’s son. The woman with the issue of blood had been ill for twelve years, and had spent all her living on physicians. From the way in which blind Bartimaeus describes his sensations we should infer that he too had never had his sight. Death is death; and Jairus’s daughter and the widow’s son at Nain were as dead as Lazarus. Really, on this point, there is little to choose between the Gospels, as there is little to choose between the documents out of which the Synoptics are composed.

A common form of objection is that which lays stress on the isolation of the narrative of the raising of Lazarus. So notable a miracle, it is urged, would have been sure to leave traces of itself in the other Gospels. And I quite allow that the argument from silence has more force here than in many of the other cases in which it is used. And yet even here it is easily, and I feel sure it is often, much exaggerated. The only document of which the author seems to have had the intention of making any sort of collection of miracles was the ground-document of the Synoptics—we may say, our present St. Mark. Neither the Logia nor the special source or sources of St. Luke do more than mention incidentally a very few. But when we think of the way in which St. Mark is said to have composed his Gospel, it is evident that his collection of miracles could not be in the least exhaustive. He was dependent in the main upon the preaching of St. Peter, the object of which was not historical or biographical, but the edification of its hearers. If it is true (and it is as yet hardly proved) that St. Mark had access also to the Logia, that was a collection of sayings rather than of acts. So that there is no one source that we should expect to have anything like a complete enumeration of miracles.

On the other hand, if we turn to what I have called the special source or sources of St. Luke, how vividly do they bring home to us the incompleteness of the whole previous record! St. Mark apparently tried to collect parables as well as miracles; so also did the Logia. And yet neither of these documents has any trace of the Prodigal Son, or the Good Samaritan, or the Pharisee and the Publican, or the Rich Man and Lazarus, or the Rich Man cut off before he could enjoy his wealth, or the Importunate Widow, or the Unrighteous Steward. We should have thought it incredible beforehand that any one who professed to make collections with a view to a Life of Christ at all could have omitted, I will not say all, but any two or three of gems like these. And yet we have two considerable works, both including a collection of parables, and yet in neither of them is there a vestige of any one of the group I have mentioned. Even the conspicuous example of the Raising of Lazarus does not shake me in my distrust of the argument from silence.