My apprehensions were soon banished. He had been ill, he said, but had now recovered after a somewhat severe attack. Then the old war-horse passed on to his favourite battle-field—criticism of Christian gospels. I was in the act of putting the letter down—for I had had enough, for the present, of criticizing the old gospels, and was longing to study the new one—when I caught sight of the words “fourth gospel,” and discovered that he had recently procured the very book I was beginning to read, and that his letter contained a discussion of it. This was not quite welcome—not, at least, at the moment. I wished to read the gospel first, for myself, before looking at Scaurus’s criticism, which (I felt sure) would be destructive. “Yet,” thought I, “I have heard Clemens on the one side; ought I not to hear Scaurus on the other? If Scaurus goes wrong, ought I not to be able to find it out?” Scaurus was always fair and honest, and had helped me hitherto, even when I had not agreed with him. These considerations made me finally decide to read the letter and the gospel together, comparing each criticism with the passage or subject criticized, as I went on.
“Let me begin,” wrote Scaurus, “with the point that will most interest you. I have accused Epictetus of borrowing from the Christians. I now assert that this writer—Flaccus tells me that the Christians say it was John the son of Zebedee; I am sure they are wrong, but for convenience I will call him John—this man John deliberately contradicts Epictetus, using our friend’s language but in a different or opposite sense, or with opposite conclusions.
“For example, Epictetus mocks at Agamemnon for calling himself a shepherd of the people. He dislikes the Homeric language and says ‘Shepherd you are in truth; for you weep, as the shepherds do, when a wolf snatches away one of their sheep.’ John makes Christ distinguish between the good shepherd and the hireling. It is only the hireling that flees and lets the wolf snatch away the sheep. In John, Christ says, ‘I am the good shepherd,’ and ‘The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.’
“Again, Epictetus declares that a good man never weeps. He blames Ulysses in particular for weeping at his separation from Penelope. John represents Christ as shedding tears in sympathy with a woman weeping for her dead brother.
“Epictetus constantly says that self-knowledge is everything—herein (I must admit) going with other philosophers. John represents Christ as saying, ‘This is eternal life, to know thee, the only true God and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent.’ It is impossible that Christ could have uttered the last part of this sentence exactly as it stands. But that does not weaken my argument, which is, that John (alone of the evangelists) insists on other-knowledge, not on self-knowledge, as being the essential thing. And this he does throughout his gospel.”
Then Scaurus came to that cardinal doctrine of Epictetus which had caused Glaucus and me so many searchings of heart. “You know,” he said, “that Epictetus teaches that no good man is ever troubled. It is not John’s custom to contradict what he deems errors in a formal and direct way. But if he had resorted for once to direct methods, he could hardly have contradicted this Epictetian doctrine more effectively than he does in his indirect dramatic fashion. He represents Christ as thrice ‘troubled.’ First—on the same occasion on which he lets fall tears in sympathy with the woman above mentioned—he is said to have ‘troubled himself.’ Secondly, on an occasion when he is (as I take it) preparing for some act of self-sacrifice, he says, ‘Now is my soul troubled.’ On a third occasion, when announcing that he is to be betrayed by one of the Twelve, he is said to have been ‘troubled in spirit.’ I cannot doubt that this description of threefold ‘trouble’ is intended to attack the Stoic doctrine that the wise and good man is to shrink from ‘trouble’.” This convinced me, and it convinces me still.
Scaurus proceeded to say, “Some innocent readers of this gospel might say, ‘Well at all events John agrees with Epictetus in his use of the term Logos.’ And (no doubt) the first three lines of the gospel might suggest this. But read on, and you will find the two are in absolute opposition. The Logos, in John, instead of being the philosophic Logos or reason, is really an unreasonable and hyperbolical sort of love, regarded by him as born from God, and as part of God’s personality, and as constituting unity in God’s nature. This Logos he regards as incarnate as a man for the purpose of uniting mankind to God! This doctrine Epictetus would absolutely reject.
“Later on, in this gospel, you will find Christ saying to the disciples, ‘Ye are clean on account of the Logos that I have spoken to you.’ Now Epictetus also connects cleanness with the Logos. ‘It is impossible,’ he says, ‘that man’s nature should be altogether clean, but the Logos being received into it, as far as possible attempts to make it cleanly.’ Verbally, there is an appearance of agreement. Read the two contexts, however, and you will find that, whereas Epictetus makes ‘cleanness’ consist in right convictions, John makes it consist in a mystical doctrine of sacrifice, or service, typified by the Master’s washing the feet of the disciples.
“I could give you other instances of the way in which John uses other language of philosophers in a non-philosophic sense. But his use of Logos suffices for my purpose. It gives the clue to the whole gospel. This writer adds one more to my list of Christian retiarii. The innocent reader, unrolling the book and reading its first words, prepares himself for a Platonic treatise in which he is to ‘follow the Logos’ in accordance with Socratic precept. Then, step by step, he is lured on into regions of non-logic and sentiment, till the net suddenly descends on him, and he finds himself repeating, ‘the Logos became flesh’.”
What Scaurus said interested me but did not convince me as to John’s motive. Nor did Scaurus himself adhere to it. He did not always use the epithet “retiarian” in a bad sense. As I have said above, I had come to believe that right “feeling,” rather than right “reason,” may be regarded as revealing the nature of God. So I did not feel that John was beguiling his readers. But Scaurus’s criticism helped me to recognise the extreme skill and tact—as well as the terseness, beauty, and solemnity—with which the evangelist introduces the doctrine of the incarnation. And I could not help agreeing with my friend’s next remark, “The man that wrote the Apocalypse—though he, too, was a prophet and a poet in his line—could no more have written this prologue than Ennius could have written the Æneid.”