Christian scholars who admit this have been anxious to break the force of the inference, by allowing the similarity of the conception and then supposing the evangelist to have stated the doctrine that he might stamp it as heresy. But he nowhere does stamp it as heresy. He puts it boldly on the front of his exposition and constructs his whole work in conformity with it. Instead of refuting it or denouncing it, he carries the idea out in all its applications, supplementing it with a completeness that Philo never thought of.
The Logos becomes a man; "is made flesh;" appears as an incarnation; in order that the God whom "no man has seen at any time," may be manifested. He has no parentage; is not born, even supernaturally; he passes through no childish passages; receives no nurture in a home; has no experience of growth or development. The incident of his baptism by John in the sacred river is carefully excluded, that whole episode, so important in the earliest narratives, being dismissed in the phrase, "Upon whom thou shalt see the spirit descending, and remaining on him, the same is he that baptizeth with the Holy Ghost." John says of him: "This is he that, coming after me, is preferred before me, for he existed before me." "I saw the spirit descending from heaven like a dove, and it abode upon him." "I knew him not, but came, baptizing with water, that he might be made manifest to Israel." "I am a voice crying in the desert." Every word negatives the notion that the Logos received consecration at the hands of a prophet of the old dispensation. He is pre-existent; he comes from heaven; he is full of grace and truth; of his fulness all have received, grace upon grace.
The temptation is omitted for the same reason. The divine word cannot, even in form, undergo the experience of moral discipline. The bare suggestion of evil taint is foreign to him. He must not come near enough to evil to repel it. A dramatic scene in Matthew represents the conflict between the Messiah and the Prince of the World; a conflict inconceivable in the case of a divine being who is, by nature, Lord of the entire spiritual universe,—whose mere appearance dispels the night.
Even the story of the transfiguration, which in some respects would seem admirably illustrative of the logos theory, is omitted, probably for the reason that Moses and Elias are the prominent personages in it.
As a thing of course, the agony in the garden of Gethsemane is unmentioned. A suggestion of it occurs in a previous chapter, (XII. 27), but in another connection, and for an opposite purpose, namely, to extort a tribute to the glory of the Logos.
The cross on which the Word is suspended, is transfigured into an elevation of honor. On it the Son of God endures no mortal agony; by it he is "lifted up" that he may "draw all men" unto him. His crucifixion is a consummation, a triumph. He mounts, shows himself, and vanishes away. The suffering is an appearance of suffering. The shame is turned to glory. The tormentors are agents in accomplishing a transformation. The god passes, without a groan or an expression of weakness; clear as ever in his perceptions, seeing his mother and the beloved disciple standing together, he says: "woman, behold thy son; son, behold thy mother." Knowing that all things were now accomplished, that the scripture might be fulfilled, he said "I thirst;" having received the vinegar, he remarked "it is finished," bowed his head, and gave up the ghost. From his dead form issue streams of water and blood, a last sign, as the conversion of water into wine was the first, that the dispensation of Law, symbolized by John's water baptism, and the dispensation of the spirit symbolized by wine and by blood, were both completed in him.
The resurrection of the Christ is not described as the resurrection of a body, but as the apparition of a spiritual form. It is not recognized by Mary through any external resemblance to a former self, but through a spiritual impression; it stands suddenly before her, forbids her touch, is not palpable, and as suddenly disappears; the Logos ascends "to the Father;" returns, bringing the spirit that he had promised; enters the chamber where the disciples are gathered, the door being carefully closed from fear of the Jews, enters without opening the door, is visible for an instant, and is no more seen; re-enters for the purpose of giving palpable demonstration of his reality to the doubting Thomas, who, however does not accept it, receives the skeptic's homage and again disappears.
These apparitions and occultations are frequent in the gospel, the Christ's outward form being only a façade, removable at pleasure. The numerous comings and goings, hidings, disclosures, presences, absences, are accounted for on this supposition, better than on any other. He goes up to the feast at Jerusalem, not openly, but "as it were in secret," veiled, disguised. He comes before the crowd many of whom must have been familiar with his person, but is unrecognized; he discloses himself for a moment, speaks exciting words that raise a tumult, and then, at the height of the turmoil, becomes invisible. "They sought to take him; but no man laid hands on him, for his hour was not yet come." On a subsequent occasion his hearers, intensely aroused by his language, took up stones to cast at him; but he "hid himself, and went out of the temple, going through the midst of them, and so passed by." His enemies sought to take him, but "he escaped out of their hands." Having spoken, he departs, and hides himself; but again, without apparently changing his locality or absenting himself for any period, he is again heard proclaiming his mission.
There is no history in this book. The incarnate Word can have no history. His career being theological, the events in it cannot be other than spectral. He is not in the world of cause and effect. His actions are phenomenal; the passages of his life do not open into one another, do not lead anywhere; nothing follows anything else, nothing moves; there is no progress towards development. The biography is a succession of scenes, a diorama. There are no sequences or consequences. Stones are taken up, but never thrown; hands are uplifted to strike, but no blow is delivered. The movement to arrest is never carried out. The miracles are not deeds of power or mercy, they are signs, thrown out to attract popular attention, demonstrations of the divine presence; sometimes merely symbolical foreshadowings or interpretations of speculative ideas, as in the case of the turning of water into wine at the "marriage feast;" the opening of the blind man's eyes, signifying that he was come a light into the world; the resurrection of Lazarus, a scenic commentary on the text, "I am the resurrection and the life." These are pictures not performances. None of them are mentioned in the earlier traditions, for the probable reason that they never occurred, never were rumored to have occurred. They were designed by the artist of the fourth Gospel, for his private gallery of illustrations. The artist was a Greek Jew who took Hebrew ideals for his models, but he was sometimes obliged to go far to find them. The hint for the conversion of the water into wine, may have come from the legends of Israelite sojourn in Egypt, where Moses, the first deliverer, turned water into blood, the mystical synonym of wine; Elisha may have furnished a study for the elaborate picture of the blind man's cure, and Isaiah may have supplied the motive for it, in his famous prophecy that the eyes of the blind shall be opened. The studies for the grand cartoon of Lazarus were made possibly while the artist mused over the stories of Elijah raising the son of the widow, or of Elisha reviving one already dead by mere contact with his bones.
In the veins of the Logos flows no passionate blood. His language is vehement, but suggests no corresponding emotion; the words are not vascular. Certain superficial peculiarities of these discourses are noticeable at once, their length, their stateliness, their absoluteness, their loud-voiced, declamatory character, their oracular tone. But little scrutiny is required to discover that they are monotones; that their theme is always the same, namely, the claims of the Christ; that they unfold no system of moral or spiritual teaching, proceed in no rational order, arrive at no conclusions; that they contain no arguments, answer no questions, meet no inquiring states of mind; that they resemble orations more than discourses of any other kind, but are unlike orations, in having neither beginning middle nor end, in quite lacking point and application, in proceeding no whither, in simply standing still and reiterating the same sublime abstractions, without regard to logical or rhetorical proprieties.