After some more observations on the difference of style in the Apocalypse and the Gospel, he returned to the criticism of the latter. “Compare,” he said, “the prologue and the conclusion with the rest of this book, and you will see that there is some mystery about its authorship. Under one style it conveys two currents of thought. Sometimes it repeats itself like an old man. Sometimes it is as brief and dark as an oracle. Moreover, some events—such as the expulsion of the tradespeople from the temple—which ought to come at the end—this writer places at the beginning. It has occurred to me that he must have started with the intention of describing nothing but Christ’s acts in Judæa and then changed his mind. Or is it possible that documents arranged Hebrew-fashion—last, first—have been interpreted Greek-fashion and consequently reversed? Allegory is most strangely mixed with fact. There is a wedding in which water is changed into wine. This is allegory. The Bride is the Church. The water of the law is changed into the wine of the gospel. After that, comes a statement that Christ spoke about destroying the temple and building it in three days. This is, according to Mark and Matthew, history. Luke took it as not history and left it out. John took it as history and allegory and put it in. But how differently from Mark and Matthew! Look at the passages. John often does this. I mean, that where Luke differs from Mark, John (who prefers Mark) intervenes to support the latter.”
This general remark (about John’s “preferring Mark”) agreed with what Clemens had said. As for the particular instance, I found that Scaurus was right. Mark and Matthew had mentioned a project to “destroy the temple” as having been imputed to Christ by false witnesses. Luke omitted it. John declared that Christ said to the Jews, “Destroy this temple!” and that Christ “spoke about the temple of his body.”
“If I could believe,” continued Scaurus, “that John the son of Zebedee, the author of the Apocalypse, had any part in the production of this gospel, I should be disposed to say that he must have contributed to it, not as a scribe, but as a prophet or seer. Take, for example, the description, recorded in this gospel alone, of a flow of blood and water from the side of Christ on the cross. I do not believe for a moment that this was invented, any more than Luke’s description of the sweat of blood on the night before the crucifixion. But I should explain the two as resulting from two quite different causes, differing as the authors differ. Luke was not a seer, but a man of literature, a student of documents. He found some narrative based on the expression that it was ‘a night of watching and sweat’—which you know very well means in Greek ‘watching and anxious toil.’ The narrator took this literally. This literal interpretation commended itself to Luke, who desired to connect the death of Christ with the Jewish sacrificial ‘blood of sprinkling’.” I had not noticed in Luke any tradition about “sweat.” But on referring to my copy I found that, though not in the text, words of this kind were written in the margin.
Scaurus went on to shew in detail that John’s tradition was quite different in origin. It was supported by an asseveration, “He that hath seen hath borne witness, and his witness is true; and he knoweth that he saith true that ye also may believe.” As to this, Scaurus said, “Only a little child, a baby Gaius, would use such an asseveration as ‘Gaius knows that Gaius is telling the truth.’ ‘He knoweth’ means ‘HE knoweth,’ i.e. ‘The Lord knoweth.’ HE is often thus used in the epistle that forms a sort of epilogue to this gospel. The prophet, or seer, is appealing to his Lord about the truth of the vision of blood and water, which the Lord has revealed to him. In the Bible ‘he that seeth’ is a common phrase for ‘the seer,’ a man habitually seeing visions. When John came back from Patmos and wrote the Apocalypse, he might naturally be called by preeminence, ‘he that hath seen.’ Or the phrase might apply to this special vision: ‘The seer (he that hath seen) hath borne witness to the vision of the stream of blood and water, and HE (i.e. the Lord) knoweth that his witness is true.’
“I do not deny that the vision is a fulfilment of a prophecy—which you may have read in the book of Zechariah—concerning a certain ‘fountain to cleanse sin and defilement.’ But still I say that it is an honest, genuine, vision, not an invention. That it is not a fact could be proved, if needful. According to the other evangelists, some women were present near the cross, but no men are mentioned. It is extremely doubtful whether two streams of water and blood could issue from the side. If they had issued, and if John had been present, the soldiers would not have let him stand near enough to distinguish them. My copy of Matthew, in a marginal note, has a similar tradition, but before the death, and without any order from Pilate to kill the crucified criminals—as if a soldier would dare to do this at his own pleasure! A book called Acts of John (only recently circulated, Flaccus tells me) contains other visions of John, and, among them, some revealed during the crucifixion. The Acts is not written by the author of this new gospel, and it is very wild and fanciful; but it suggests that visions may have been falsely ascribed to John because he was known to have really seen visions (like laws falsely assigned to Numa because he was supposed to have really made laws). I take it that John the son of Zebedee may have had a vision of this kind about a ‘fountain’ of blood and water. This may have been current among the Christians for some time. My annotator in Matthew seems to have found it in a wildly improbable form. The new gospel gives it less improbably.”
Scaurus then commented on the contrast between what he called the “soaring” thought of the book and its occasionally “pedestrian” or vernacular language, as when John preserves the old traditional “crib” for “bed”—a word abominated by Atticists and avoided by Luke. He also commented on his ambiguities, his subtle plays on words, his variations in the forms of words, and his veiled allusions—utterly unlike anything that might be expected from a fisherman of Galilee—declaring that the writer must have been conversant with the works of Philo as well as with the teaching of the Cynics.
Then he pointed out how Christ in this gospel never uses the word “cross” but always speaks of being “lifted up”—a phrase, he said, current among Jews as well as Roman slaves, to mean “hanged” or “crucified”: and he gave it as an instance of the writer’s irony—and of his recognition that things low in man’s eyes are high in God’s eyes—that a criminal’s death is called by this writer “being exalted,” or “being glorified.” “Have you not”—he said—“heard your servants ever say that Geta has been ‘lifted up,’ or that Syrus has been a rich man and has ‘fed multitudes’—meaning that the poor wretch has been crucified and has fed multitudes of crows with his flesh on the cross?” I had often heard it; and I was astonished that such a phrase could be used in this gospel. Scaurus continued, “He uses this vernacular talk, this unfeeling slavish jest, to represent the very highest truth of Christian doctrine, that the Redeemer is to be ‘exalted’ by suffering on the cross so as to give his flesh and blood to be the food of all the world!”
According to Scaurus, although the style was very different indeed from that of Philo, and although the writer knew (what Philo did not) that the Septuagint was often erroneous, yet there was a great likeness between John and Philo in respect of their symbolism. Of this he gave a great number of instances. And he also quoted allusions to Jewish proverbs or sayings, one of which I will set down here, because it has given rise to an error among some of the brethren at the present day.
John represents the Jews as saying to Jesus, “Thou art not yet fifty years old.” Now, according to Scaurus, this referred to an enactment in the Law that the Levites must serve with laborious service “up to fifty years of age,” after which they are exempt, so that the saying, “Thou art not yet fifty” meant, “Thou art but a junior Levite,” used as a term of reproach. “This enactment,” said Scaurus, “was applied by Philo to inferior spiritual attainment, and, I have no doubt, was used allusively by John. But it might easily give the impression that Christ was about fifty years old and that the Jews meant the saying literally.”
I mention this because I have myself heard the young Irenæus maintain that Christ was actually about fifty years of age. And he not only quoted John in support of this assertion but declared that it was also the opinion of the elders conversant with John. When I heard him, I remembered what Scaurus had said. I have never had any doubt that Scaurus was right. At the same time it seems to me that a Jewish allusion of this kind was extremely liable to be misunderstood, and that the writer of this gospel would not perhaps have set it down if he had not received it from the originator, John the son of Zebedee. This, however, is only my conjecture. The error of Irenæus is a fact. And I could mention another of the brethren, who wrote a commentary on John, and actually altered “fifty” to “forty”—I suppose, to make sense! Both these errors arose from not understanding John’s allusion.