The Books of the New Testament

by Leighton Pullan

We learn from the Gospels that St. John was the son of Zebedee, a Galilean fisherman, and was a follower of the Baptist before he joined our Lord. The Synoptists show that he was one of the most prominent and intimate of our Lord's followers. With St. Peter and St. James he was permitted to witness the raising of Jairus' daughter, and to be present at the Transfiguration, and with them was nearest to Christ at the agony in Gethsemane. With St. Peter he was sent to prepare the last Passover. Like his brother St. James, he shared in the fervour of his mother, Salome, who begged for them a special place of dignity in the kingdom of Christ. They both wished to call down fire on a Samaritan village, and St. John asked Jesus what was to be done with the man whom they found casting out devils in His name. Their fiery temperament caused our Lord to give them the surname of Boanerges ("sons of thunder"). In the fourth Gospel the name of John the son of Zebedee is never mentioned, but there are several references to an apostle whose name is not recorded, but can be intended for no other than St. John. At the crucifixion this apostle was bidden by our Lord to regard Mary as henceforth his mother, and the writer claims to have been an eye-witness of the crucifixion. In the last chapter very similar words are used to assert that the writer is he whom Jesus loved.

In Acts St. John appears with St. Peter as healing the lame {81} man at the Beautiful Gate of the temple, and with St. Peter he goes to Samaria to bestow the Holy Ghost on those whom Philip had baptized. He was revered as one of the pillars of the Church when St. Paul visited Jerusalem in A.D. 49 (Gal. ii. 9). It is remarkable that the Synoptic Gospels, the fourth Gospel, Acts, and Galatians, all show St. John in close connection with St. Peter. St. John's name occurs in the Revelation, which has been attributed to him since the beginning of the 2nd century.

Numerous fragments of tradition concerning St. John are preserved by early Christian writers. Tertullian, about A.D. 200, says that St. John came to Rome, and was miraculously preserved from death when an attempt was made to kill him in a cauldron of boiling oil. Tertullian and Eusebius both say that he was banished to an island, and Eusebius tells us that the island was Patmos, and that the banishment took place in the time of Domitian. On the accession of Nerva, St. John removed from Patmos to Ephesus, where he survived until the time of Trajan, who became emperor in A.D. 98. Polycrates, Bishop of Ephesus, writing about A.D. 190, speaks of St. John's tomb in that city, and says that he wore the petalon, the high priest's mitre used in the Jewish Church. We are told by other writers how he reclaimed a robber, how he played with a tame partridge, how when too old to preach he was carried into church and would repeat again and again, "Little children, love one another." On one occasion a spark of his youthful fire was seen. It was when the old man indignantly refused to stay under the roof of the same public baths as Cerinthus, the heretic who denied that Mary was a virgin when she bore our Lord, and asserted that the Divinity of Jesus was only a power which came upon Him and went from Him.

The residence of St. John at Ephesus is attested by the Revelation. Even if that book were a forgery, no forger at the close of the 1st century would have ventured to place the hero of his book in a neighbourhood where he had not lived. {82} Many threads of evidence lead us back to the statement made by Polycrates about the apostle's tomb. It was not until long after that date that the Christians began to carry the relics of saints from place to place, and churches rivalled one another in producing shrines for the severed members of one body. There is therefore no reason whatever to doubt that the tomb at Ephesus marked the resting-place of the apostle. It was known two hundred years later in the time of Jerome, and visited in 431 by the members of the great Church Council which met at Ephesus. The Emperor Justinian built a sumptuous church on the site, and near a modern Turkish mosque may still be seen the remnants of the church of St. John.

Until the end of the 18th century the authorship of this Gospel was not seriously challenged. The only party which ever denied that it was written by the Apostle St. John was an ignorant and insignificant body of people mentioned by Irenaeus and Epiphanius. They were known as the Alogi, or "unbelievers in the Word." Their views in no wise undermine the tradition of the Catholic Church. For the Alogi asserted that this Gospel was written by Cerinthus, who lived at Ephesus where St. John lived, and was himself a contemporary of St. John. We have sufficient knowledge of the teaching of Cerinthus to be perfectly certain that he could not have written a Gospel which so completely contradicts his own theories. Therefore the opinion of the Alogi is absolutely worthless where it negatives the tradition of the Church, and on the other hand it agrees with that tradition in asserting that the book was written in the apostolic age.

During the last hundred years the men who deny that Jesus Christ was truly "God of God, Light of Light," have strained every nerve to prove that the fourth Gospel was not written by St. John. It is, of course, almost impossible that they should admit that the writer was an apostle and an honest man and continue to deny that the Christ whom he depicts claimed to be the Lord and Maker of all things. During the controversy {83} which has been waged during the last three generations with regard to St. John's Gospel, it has been evident throughout that the Gospel has been rejected for this very reason. The book has driven a wedge into the whole band of New Testament students. The critics who deny that Jesus was God, but are willing to grant that He was the most holy and the most divine of men, have been forced to side with those who are openly Atheists or Agnostics. The clue to their theories was unguardedly exposed by Weizsäcker, who said, with regard to St. John's Gospel, "It is impossible to imagine any power of faith and philosophy so great as thus to obliterate the recollection of the real life, and to substitute for it this marvellous picture of a Divine Being." [1] This remark shows us that the critic approached the Gospel with a prejudice against the doctrine of our Lord's Divinity, and rejected the Gospel mainly because it would not agree with his own prejudice. But the determination to fight to the uttermost against the converging lines of Christian evidence has now driven such critics into a corner. Many have already abandoned the position that the book is a semi-Gnostic forgery written in the middle of the 2nd century, and they are now endeavouring to maintain that it was written about A.D. 100 by a certain John the Presbyter, whom they assert to have been afterwards confounded with the Apostle John.

Of John the Presbyter very little indeed is known. Papias, about A.D. 130, says that he was, like Aristion, "a disciple" of the Lord, and that he had himself made oral inquiries as to his teaching. He seems to have been an elder contemporary of Papias. Dionysius of Alexandria, about A.D. 250, mentions that there were two monuments in Ephesus bearing the name of John, and we may reasonably suppose that one of these was in memory of the presbyter mentioned by Papias. But a little reflection will soon convince us that nothing has been gained by the conjecture that this John wrote the Gospel. If John {84} the Presbyter was personally acquainted with our Lord, as some writers understand Papias to mean, then the sceptics are forced to admit that one who personally knew Jesus, describes Jesus as a more than human Being—as, in fact, the Divine Creator. This is the precise fact which keeps these writers from admitting that an apostle wrote the Gospel. If, on the other hand, they suppose, as some do, that John the Presbyter was very much younger than the apostles, the sceptics are confronted with the following difficulties:—

(a) There is the important external evidence which shows how widely the Gospel was regarded in the early Church as the work of St. John.

(b) There is the minute knowledge displayed of the topography, customs, and opinions of Jerusalem and the Holy Land as they existed in the time of Christ.

(c) There is the impossibility of supposing that Irenaeus, who was probably not born a year later than A.D. 130, would not have known that the Gospel was written by John the Presbyter.