CHAPTER XXXI
CLEMENS ON THE FOURTH GOSPEL
“How many things I should have asked him if he could only have stayed!” was my first thought, as Clemens disappeared behind the bushes. My next thought was, “How many new things I already have to think about!” Mechanically I turned homewards and took a few steps on the way to the city. Then I sat down to reflect.
Not many minutes had elapsed before I heard footsteps behind me. Presently, a little on my left, Clemens, without noticing me, passed striding hastily onwards in the direction of Nicopolis. I called to him. He turned and came up to me with an exclamation of joy, “I am thankful to have found you so soon. It has been on my mind that I ought to have at least explained to you why I did not offer to lend you this new gospel.” “I would not have lent it to anyone had I been in your place,” said I. “Yes,” said Clemens, “you would have. Trust me, dear friend, if you believed this gospel, as I do, you would long to lend it to those who did not as yet believe it. But the truth is, I did not wish to lend it to you without a few words of introduction, for which I feared there would be no time. I forgot that the moonlight would suffice to guide me to the end of my journey. Have you leisure and desire for a little more conversation? Without it, I fear this little book might make you stumble, might even repel you. It is entirely different from the other three gospels both in its style and in its language. Whether reporting Christ’s sayings or relating His actions, it almost always differs from the earlier accounts. It is also largely different in the facts related. What say you?”
“I say ‘Thanks,’ with all my heart,” replied I; then, as we sat down together, “May I ask first, who wrote it?” “You not only may, but ought,” he replied. “It is just the question I expected from you, and, alas! just one of the questions that I cannot answer in the usual way by saying ‘A the son of B.’ It seems to hint the authorship in dark expressions. At the end of the book it says, ‘This is the disciple that beareth witness of these things and he that wrote these things’; but the texts vary and it is not quite clear whether the ‘writer’ and the ‘bearer of witness’ are one and the same. Nor does it give any name to the witness or the writer, nor any means of ascertaining the name or names, except that it describes him, a little before, as being ‘the disciple whom Jesus loved, who also leaned on His breast,’ i.e. at the last supper. Also, going back further, I find it written concerning a certain flow of blood and water from the side of the Saviour on the cross, ‘He that hath seen hath borne witness and his witness is true, and he knoweth that he saith true, that ye may believe.’ Going back further still, and comparing the beginning with the end of the gospel, the reader is led indirectly to the conclusion that the disciple that ‘hath borne witness’ is John the son of Zebedee.
“This John is often referred to as one of the chief apostles, in the three gospels; but his name is not so much as once mentioned in the fourth. Whenever ‘John’ occurs in this gospel, it is always John the Baptist, even though ‘Baptist’ is not added. Not till the last chapter does it become clear that the author is one of the ‘sons of Zebedee’.” “But might it not be James?” said I. “It might,” replied Clemens, “but for the following fact. The gospel goes on to say, in effect, that, whereas Peter was to be crucified hereafter, this disciple was to live so long that a report sprang up in the church that he would never die. Now this could not apply to James, as he was beheaded quite early in the history of the church. It follows therefore that the author was John, who, though he became a martyr, or witness, for the Saviour, survived his martyrdom and lived to a great age.”
This seemed to me an unsatisfactory way of writing history, and not quite fair to readers. For ought they not to be partly guided, in their judgment of the historian’s statements, by their knowledge of his character, and of his opportunities for obtaining information? “How much more satisfactory,” said I, “is the honest straightforwardness of the Greek writer, ‘This is the third year of the history that Thucydides compiled’.” “You are right,” replied Clemens, “I cannot deny it. It would have been more satisfactory—if it could have been written with truth—that we should read at the end of this little roll, ‘I John, the son of Zebedee, wrote this work.’ But what if he did not write it yet had a great part in originating it? What if there was some kind of joint production, revision, or correction, of the work, so that it would not have been true to say, ‘I John wrote it’?”
“Is there any evidence of this?” I asked. “A little,” he replied. “It is the only one of the four gospels that contains ‘we’ in its conclusion, thus, ‘We know that his testimony is true.’ I have also heard a tradition that it was revealed to Andrew that John was to write the gospel and that his fellow-disciples and bishops should revise it. But the following is more important evidence: John the son of Zebedee wrote a book called the Apocalypse—have you seen it?” I said that I had glanced at it. “It was written when he was a very old man, after he had been sent to the mines in Patmos by Domitian, and it is written in, I will not say bad Greek, but a dialect of Greek entirely different from that of any of the gospels or epistles. Now the fourth gospel is written in very fair Greek and in a style as different as possible from that of the Apocalypse. It is quite impossible that John, after writing the Apocalypse when he was eighty or ninety, should then write a gospel in a style so absolutely different.”