He paused, and looked anxiously at me. “In that case,” continued he, “I shall have done you harm. But what say you? After this warning, do you—a Roman with Greek training, a reader of Homer and Thucydides—do you still desire to see this little volume that is neither a true poem nor a true history, a biography that hardly professes to draw the life of Jesus as He was, but only to make us feel that it must be felt, if at all, through ‘a disciple whom Jesus loved’?” I assured him that I greatly desired to read it and thanked him with all my heart for the loan, and for the frankness of his warning. “Farewell,” said he, placing the book in my hand, “my friend, my brother—brother in the search after truth, farewell!” “Your help,” said I, as he turned away from me, “has been more like that of a father.” He stopped and looked round at me for a moment. “Would indeed,” said he, “that it might prove so! Farewell!”
CHAPTER XXXIII
SCAURUS ON THE FOURTH GOSPEL
The sun had set, and the moon was well above the sea, when, after parting from Clemens, I turned towards Nicopolis, with the new gospel in my hand. Unrolling it, I found twilight enough to read the first few lines while I walked slowly for some two or three hundred paces. Then I stood still to read better in the fading light. When it had quite faded, I sat down repeating what I had read.
“In the beginning was the Logos.” Never shall I forget the unexpectedness of those words. I had supposed that the Christians altogether rejected the Logos except as meaning “utterance” or “doctrine.” “In the beginning” was, in some senses, familiar. I had read in Mark, “The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ.” Luke, too, had spoken of “those who were from the beginning eyewitnesses and ministers of the Logos.” But how different was Luke’s “Logos” and Luke’s “beginning” from this!
I read on: “In the beginning was the Logos and the Logos was with God.” What did “with” mean? Was the Logos “at home with God”? Or “conversing with God”? Or “in union with God”? Or did “with” include all these meanings? And what was this Logos? The next words gave the answer: “The Logos was God.”
These words alone, contrasted with Luke’s preface, sufficed to indicate a difference between Luke and John, just such as Clemens had suggested. Luke began with a reference to many inadequate “attempts” to draw up a relation about what he called “the facts”—meaning “facts” as distinct from fancies—“consummated among us.” Then, like a careful compiler, he distinguished his authorities, giving the first place to “eyewitnesses,” the second to accessories, or “ministers.” These were eyewitnesses, he said, “from the beginning”; and he declared that he had followed and traced their evidence from the fountain head. John, like a prophet, went back to a “beginning” of which there could be no “eyewitnesses.” He did not say, as Luke did, “it seemed good to me” to write. He said—as though he had himself been with Him who was from the beginning—“The Logos was God.”
Glancing down the column before folding up the scroll, I could barely read in the fast expiring twilight the words, “And the Logos became flesh and tabernacled among us, and we beheld his glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father.” Clemens had prepared me for such words. As I understood them, the “glory” did not mean any splendour of material light or fire, such as is mentioned sometimes in the theophanies of Greek, Roman, and Hebrew writers, but the glory of God’s constraining love. But I greatly desired to study the words in their context. Repeating them over and over again, as I rolled up the book, I hurried homeward. Star after star came out in the darkness; and with each new star a new suggestion of invisible “glory” shone on me more clearly. “This gospel,” I said, “will grow on me like these visible glories. Night by night, and day by day, its words will become less strange and more wonderful.”
On my arrival, I lit my lamp, and sat down at once, preparing to continue my reading, when my servant entered with a letter. Not recognising the superscription, I put it on one side. The boy waited about in the room, doing nothing that needed doing. I was on the point of dismissing him, when he said, “Sir, I think it is from Tusculum; but the superscription is not in my lord’s handwriting.” Looking again, I saw that it was in the handwriting of Marullus, Scaurus’s secretary. Scaurus usually superscribed his letters to me with his own hand. In alarm about his health, I tore the letter open, and throwing the cover hastily aside, glanced at the beginning. This reassured me. It was from Scaurus, and in his handwriting.