The Cradle of the Christ: A Study in Primitive Christianity

by Octavius Brooks Frothingham

VII.

THE LAST GOSPEL.

The author of the fourth Gospel is unknown, but it is incredible that this wonderful book, wonderful for finish of literary execution as well as for vigor of intellectual conception, was written by a Galilean fisherman; a man of brooding and morbid disposition, whose intemperate zeal earned for him the title "son of thunder;" who, according to Luke, proposed to call down fire from heaven to consume certain Samaritans that declined to receive the master; who, according to the same authority, rebuked certain others that conjured by the Christ's name, but did not join his company; who, through his mother, asked for one of the best seats in the "kingdom;" a man who was most intimately associated with the James described in a former chapter; a man who late in life, had a reputation for intolerance which started a tradition of him to the effect that being in the public bath, and seeing enter the heretic Cerinthus, he rushed out, calling on all others to follow, if they would not be overwhelmed by the ruin such a blasphemer would pull down on their heads. All the traditions respecting John are to the same purport; his constant association with James and Peter, both disciples of the narrowest creed; his advocacy of chiliasm, the doctrine of the millennial reign of a thousand years, as testified to by Ephesian presbyters on the authority of Irenæus; the description of him, reported by Eusebius, as a "high priest wearing the mitre," standing in the order of succession therefore as a hierarch of the ancient dispensation, a churchman maintaining the ancient symbolical rites.

That such a composition as the fourth Gospel was written by such a man, in his old age too, the laws of literary criticism cannot admit. To the present writer the ungenuineness of the fourth Gospel has for several years seemed as distinctly proved as any point in literary criticism can be. To maintain the Johannean origin of the book, it must be assumed that the apostle lived to an extreme old age, nearly double the full three score years and ten allotted to mankind; that his entire nature changed in the interval between his youth and his senility; that, without studying in the schools, he became a profound adept in speculative philosophy; and that by the same miraculous bestowment, he acquired a skill in letters surpassing that of any in his generation, far surpassing that of Paul, who was an educated man, and completely casting into the shade Philo, the best scholar of a former era. All this, too, must be assumed, for there is not a fragment of the evidence to support the bold presumption of authorship.

The book belongs nearer to the middle than the beginning of the second century, and is the result of an attempt to present the Christ as the incarnate Word of God. The author is not obliged to go far to find his materials; they lie ready shaped to his hand in the writings of Philo and the Gnostics of his century. The thread of Hebrew tradition, has, by this time, become exceedingly thin; vestiges of the popular Jewish conception appear, but faintly, here and there. Nicodemus recognizes the divine character of the Christ by his power to work miracles. The Christ respects the tradition which accorded special privileges to the genuine "children of Abraham;" he declares to the woman of Samaria that "salvation is of the Jews;" he announces that eternal life consists in the knowledge of God, and the acceptance of his Son. Moses is said to have written of the Christ. Father Abraham rejoiced to see his day. Isaiah sang his glory, and spake of him. The brazen serpent is a type of his mission to deliver.

For the rest, the conceptions of deity, of providence, of salvation, of the eternal world, are quite different from the recognized Hebrew conceptions—the title given to God sixty times in the gospel, while the word "God," occurs less than twenty, is "Father," and this term is used, not in the sense of Matthew's "Our Father in Heaven," which describes the Old Testament Jehovah under his more amiable aspect, but rather as designating the abyss of potential being, as the term is employed in the trinitarian formula, in which the Godhead is broken up into three distinctions; the declaration "God is Spirit," or, as the language equally well permits, "Spirit is God," intimates that the individuality of God has disappeared, that the idea of deity has become intellectual. The one hundred and thirty-ninth psalm expresses perhaps as mystical an apprehension of God as the old Hebrew thought admits of, but that psalm retains the divine individuality; the limits are nowhere transgressed; it is a sympathetic, regardful eye that searches the secret place, and an attentive mind that notes the unarticulated thought. The intelligence loses no point of clearness in becoming penetrative. But in the fourth Gospel, the individuality is gone altogether. The Father "loveth," but with an abstract, impersonal sympathy; the Father "draweth," but with an organic, elemental attraction; the Father "hath life in himself," and hath given the Son to "have life in himself;" but neither the possession nor the communication of this power implies the bestowal of a concrete gift. The Father "judgeth no man, but hath given all judgment to the Son"—a phrase intimating that he had gone into retirement, had withdrawn from active interest in human concerns, had sunk into the depths of the Absolute. The expression "God is Spirit," taken alone, conveys no idea that is not contained in the Hebrew conception of the formless Jehovah; but when taken in connection with other expressions, it is seen to convey something more, and something different. The formless God may be strictly local; the "Spirit" is diffused.

In this book, the Christ takes the place of God, as the revealed or manifest God; he is the Logos, the incarnate word. "He was with God in the beginning." "All things were made by him." "In him was life, and the life was the light of men." "He hath life in himself." He is the only begotten son, who came down from heaven; he is in heaven. All judgment is committed to him; in him the divine glory is manifest; apart from him is no spiritual life; he is the vine, the door; he is the intercessor through whom prayer must be transmitted in order to be made availing.

The divine presence is taken out of nature, and transferred to the spiritual world; God is made ecclesiastical and dogmatic. Men are saved, not by natural piety and excellence, but by faith in the Christ as the Logos. The whole sum of Christianity is conveyed in this one position: the manifestation of the Divine Glory in the Only Begotten Son. This manifestation is of itself, the coming of salvation, the gift of God's life to mankind. By this, the Christ overcomes the powers of darkness and evil. He has come a light into the world; by him come grace and truth; to believe in him is a sign of God's working. He that cometh to him shall never hunger; he that believeth on him shall never thirst. It is enough that blind men believe; to die, believing in him, is to live; to live, believing in him, is to be saved from the power of death, and made immortal. To believe in him is the same thing as to believe in the Father. Not to believe in him, is to be consigned to spiritual death with sinners; to believe on the Son is to have everlasting life. This idea recurs with monotonous perseverance, some sixty times.

That this conception of the Christ is not original with our author has already been said many times. It had been in the world two hundred years before his day, and had worked its way into the substance of the later Jewish thought. The personification of the divine reason early occurred to the Jews who had been touched with the passion for speculation in the city of Alexandria. Long ago attention was called by Andrews Norton, among ourselves, to bold personifications of wisdom and the divine reason, in the Apocrypha of the Old Testament. "She is the breath of the power of God, a pure influence proceeding from the glory of the Almighty. She is the brightness of the everlasting light, the unspotted mirror of the power of God, and the image of his goodness." Chapters seven and eight of the Book of Wisdom contain an apotheosis of wisdom as the creative power. In the eighteenth chapter the imagery grows much stronger. "Thine almighty word leaped down from heaven out of thy royal throne, as a fierce man-of-war into the midst of a land of destruction." The twenty-fourth chapter of Ecclesiasticus is devoted to the same theme. The Word is described as a being: the first born of God; the active agent in creation; having its dwelling-place in Israel, its seat in the Law of Moses.

Philo pushes the speculation much further. The Logos is with him a most interesting subject of discourse, tempting him to wonderful feats of imagination. There is scarcely a personifying or exalting epithet that he does not bestow on the divine Reason. He describes it as a distinct being; calls it "A Rock," "The Summit of the Universe," "Before All Things," "First-begotten Son of God," "Eternal Bread from Heaven," "Fountain of Wisdom," "Guide to God," "Substitute for God," "Image of God," "Priest," "Creator of the Worlds," "Second God," "Interpreter of God," "Ambassador of God," "Power of God," "King," "Angel," "Man," "Mediator," "Light," "The Beginning," "The East," "The Name of God," "Intercessor." The curious on this subject may consult Lücke's Introduction to the Fourth Gospel, or Gfrörer's Philo, and he will be more than satisfied that the Logos of the fourth Gospel is the same as Philo's, and has the same origin.