Narratives Peculiar to John.—Of his seven great symbolical, doctrinally interpreted “signs,” John shares three, the cure of the ruler’s son, the multiplication of the loaves, the walking on the waters, with the Synoptists: yet here the first is transformed almost beyond recognition; and the two others only typify and prepare the eucharistic discourse. Of the four purely Johannine signs, two—the cures of the paralytic (v. 1-16), and of the man born blind (ix. 1-34)—are, admittedly, profoundly symbolical. In the first case, the man’s physical and spiritual lethargy are closely interconnected and strongly contrasted with the ever-active God and His Logos. In the second case there is also the closest parallel between physical blindness cured, and spiritual darkness dispelled, by the Logos-Light as described in the accompanying discourse. Both narratives are doubtless based upon actual occurrences—the cures narrated in Mark ii., iii., viii., x. and scenes witnessed by the writer in later times; yet here they do but picture our Lord’s spiritual work in the human soul achieved throughout Christian history. We cannot well claim more than these three kinds of reality for the first and the last signs, the miracle at Cana and the resurrection of Lazarus.
For the marriage-feast sign yields throughout an allegorical meaning. Water stands in this Gospel for what is still but symbol; thus the water-pots serve here the external Jewish ablutions—old bottles which the “new wine” of the Gospel is to burst (Mark ii. 22). Wine is the blood of the new covenant, and He will drink the fruit of the vine new in the Kingdom of God (Mark xiv. 23-25); the vineyard where He Himself is the true Vine (Mark xii. 1; John xv. 1). And “the kingdom of heaven is like to a marriage-feast” (Matt. xxii. 2); Jesus is the Bridegroom (Mark ii. 19); “the marriage of the Lamb has come” (Rev. xix. 7). “They have no wine”: the hopelessness of the old conditions is announced here by the true Israel, the Messiah’s spiritual mother, the same “woman” who in Rev. xii. 2, 5 “brought forth a man-child who was to rule all nations.” Cardinal Newman admits that the latter woman “represents the church, this is the real or direct sense”; yet as her man-child is certainly the Messiah, this church must be the faithful Jewish church. Thus also the “woman” at the wedding and beneath the cross stands primarily for the faithful Old Testament community, corresponding to the beloved disciple, the typical New Testament follower of her Son, the Messiah: in each case the devotional accommodation to His earthly mother is equally ancient and legitimate. He answers her “My hour is not yet come,” i.e. in the symbolic story, the moment for working the miracle; in the symbolized reality, the hour of His death, condition for the spirit’s advent; and “what is there between Me and thee?” i.e. “My motives spring no more from the old religion,” words devoid of difficulty, if spoken thus by the Eternal Logos to the passing Jewish church. The transformation is soon afterwards accomplished, but in symbol only; the “hour” of the full sense is still over three years off. Already Philo says “the Logos is the master of the spiritual drinking-feast,” and “let Melchisedeck”—the Logos—“in lieu of water offer wine to souls and inebriate them” (De somn. ii. 37; Legg. all. iii. 26). But in John this symbolism figures a great historic fact, the joyous freshness of Jesus’ ministerial beginnings, as indicated in the sayings of the Bridegroom and of the new wine, a freshness typical of Jesus’ ceaseless renovation of souls.
The raising of Lazarus, in appearance a massive, definitely localized historical fact, requires a similar interpretation, unless we would, in favour of the direct historicity of a story peculiar to a profoundly allegorical treatise, ruin the historical trustworthiness of the largely historical Synoptists in precisely their most complete and verisimilar part. For especially in Mark, the passing through Jericho, the entry into Jerusalem, the Temple-cleansing and its immediate effect upon the hierarchs, their next day’s interrogatory, “By what authority doest thou these things?” i.e. the cleansing (x. 46-xi. 33), are all closely interdependent and lead at once to His discussions with His Jerusalem opponents (xii. xiii.), and to the anointing, last supper, and passion (xiv. xv). John’s last and greatest symbolic sign replaces those historic motives, since here it is the raising of Lazarus which determines the hierarchs to kill Jesus (xi. 46-52), and occasions the crowds which accompany and meet Him on His entry (xii. 9-19). The intrinsic improbabilities of the narrative, if taken as direct history, are also great: Jesus’ deliberate delay of two days to secure His friend’s dying, and His rejoicing at the death, since thus He can revivify His friend and bring His disciples to believe in Himself as the Life; His deliberate weeping over the death which He has thus let happen, yet His anger at the similar tears of Lazarus’s other friends; and His praying, as He tells the Father in the prayer itself, simply to edify the bystanders: all point to a doctrinal allegory. Indeed the climax of the whole account is already reached in Jesus’ great saying: “I am the Resurrection and the Life; he that believeth in Me ... shall not die for ever,” and in Martha’s answer: “I believe that Thou art the Christ, the Son of God, who hast come into the world” (xi. 26, 27); the sign which follows is but the pictorial representation of this abiding truth. The materials for the allegory will have been certain Old Testament narratives, but especially the Synoptic accounts of Jesus’ raisings of Jairus’s daughter and of the widow’s son (Mark v.; Luke vii.). Mary and Martha are admittedly identical with the sisters in Luke x. 38-42; and already some Greek fathers connect the Lazarus of this allegory with the Lazarus of the parable (Luke xvi. 19-31). In the parable Lazarus returns not to earth, since Abraham foresees that the rich man’s brethren would disbelieve even if one rose from the dead; in the corresponding allegory, Lazarus does actually return to life, and the Jews believe so little as to determine upon killing the very Life Himself.
Special Difficulties and Special Greatness.—The difficulties, limitations and temporary means special to the book are closely connected with its ready appeal and abiding power; let us take both sets of things together, in three couples of interrelated price and gift.
The book’s method and form are pervadingly allegorical; its instinct and aim are profoundly mystical. Now from Philo to Origen we have a long Hellenistic, Jewish and Christian application of that all-embracing allegorism, where one thing stands for another and where no factual details resist resolution into a symbol of religious ideas and forces. Thus Philo had, in his life of Moses, allegorized the Pentateuchal narratives so as to represent him as mediator, saviour, intercessor of his people, the one great organ of revelation, and the soul’s guide from the false lower world into the upper true one. The Fourth Gospel is the noblest instance of this kind of literature, of which the truth depends not on the factual accuracy of the symbolizing appearances but on the truth of the ideas and experiences thus symbolized. And Origen is still full of spontaneous sympathy with its pervading allegorism. But this method has lost its attraction; the Synoptists, with their rarer and slighter pragmatic rearrangements and their greater closeness to our Lord’s actual words, deeds, experiences, environment, now come home to us as indefinitely richer in content and stimulative appeal. Yet mysticism persists, as the intuitive and emotional apprehension of the most specifically religious of all truths, viz. the already full, operative existence of eternal beauty, truth and goodness, of infinite Personality and Spirit independently of our action, and not, as in ethics, the simple possibility and obligation for ourselves to produce such-like things. And of this elemental mode of apprehension and root-truth, the Johannine Gospel is the greatest literary document and incentive extant: its ultimate aim and deepest content retain all their potency.
The book contains an intellectualist, static, determinist, abstractive trend. In Luke x. 25-28, eternal life depends upon loving God and man; here it consists in knowing the one true God and Christ whom He has sent. In the Synoptists, Jesus “grows in favour with God and man,” passes through true human experiences and trials, prays alone on the mountain-side, and dies with a cry of desolation; here the Logos’ watchword is “I am,” He has deliberately to stir up emotion in Himself, never prays for Himself, and in the garden and on the cross shows but power and self-possession. Here we find “ye cannot hear, cannot believe, because ye are not from God, not of My sheep” (viii. 47, x. 26); “the world cannot receive the spirit of truth” (xiv. 17). Yet the ethical current appears here also strongly: “he who doeth the truth, cometh to the light” (iii. 21), “if you love Me, keep My commandments” (xiv. 15). Libertarianism is here: “the light came, but men loved the darkness better than the light,” “ye will not come to Me” (iii. 19, v. 40); hence the appeal “abide in Me”—the branch can cease to be in Him the Vine (xv. 4, 2). Indeed even those first currents stand here for the deepest religious truths, the prevenience of God and man’s affinity to Him. “Not we loved God (first), but He (first) loved us”; “let us love Him, because He first loved us” (1 John iv. 10, 19); “no man can come to Me, unless the Father draw him” (vi. 44), a drawing which effects a hunger and thirst for Christ and God (iv. 14, vi. 35). Thus man’s spirit, ever largely but potential, can respond actively to the historic Jesus, because already touched and made hungry by the all-actual Spirit-God who made that soul akin unto Himself.
The book has an outer protective shell of acutely polemical and exclusive moods and insistences, whilst certain splendid Synoptic breadths and reconciliations are nowhere reached; but this is primarily because it is fighting, more consciously than they, for that inalienable ideal of all deepest religion, unity, even external and corporate, amongst all believers. The “Pneumatic” Gospel comes thus specially to emphasize certain central historical facts; and, the most explicitly institutional and sacramental of the four, to proclaim the most universalistic and developmental of all Biblical sayings. Here indeed Jesus will not pray for the world (xvii. 9); “ye shall die in your sins,” He insists to His opponents (viii. 44, 24); it is the Jews generally who appear throughout as such; nowhere is there a word as to forgiving our enemies; and the commandment of love is designated by Jesus as His, as new, and as binding the disciples to “love one another” within the community to which He gives His “example” (xv. 12, xiii. 34, 15). In the Synoptists, the disciples’ intolerance is rebuked (Mark ix. 38-41); Jesus’ opposition is everywhere restricted to the Pharisees and the worldly Sadducees; He ever longs for the conversion of Jerusalem; the great double commandment of love is proclaimed as already formulated in the Mosaic law (Mark xii. 28-34); the neighbour to be thus loved and served is simply any and every suffering fellow-man; and the pattern for such perfect love is found in a schismatical Samaritan (Luke x. 25-37). Yet the deepest strain here is more serenely universalist even than St Paul, for here Jesus says: “God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should ... have everlasting life” (iii. 16). True, the great prologue passage (i. 9) probably reads “He was the true Light coming into the world, that enlighteneth every man,” so that the writer would everywhere concentrate his mind upon the grace attendant upon explicit knowledge of the incarnate, historic Christ. Yet Christian orthodoxy, which itself has, all but uniformly, understood this passage of the spiritual radiation throughout the world of the Word before His incarnation, has been aided towards such breadth as to the past by the Johannine outlook into the future. For, in contrast to the earliest Synoptic tradition, where the full Christian truth and its first form remain undistinguished, and where its earthly future appears restricted to that generation, in John the Eternal Life conception largely absorbs the attention away from all successiveness; Jesus’ earthly life does not limit the religion’s assimilation of further truth and experience: “I have many things to tell you, but you cannot bear them now,” “the Father will give you another Helper, the spirit of truth, who will abide with you for ever” (xvi. 12, xiv. 15). This universalism is not simply spiritual; the external element, presupposed in the Synoptists as that of the Jewish church within which Jesus’ earthly life was spent, is here that of the now separate Christian community: He has other sheep not of this fold—them also He must bring, there will be one fold, one shepherd; and His seamless tunic, and Peter’s net which, holding every kind of fish, is not rent, are symbols of this visible unity. Ministerial gradations exist in this church; Jesus begins the feet-washing with Peter, who alone speaks and is spoken to; the beloved disciple outruns Peter to Jesus’ monument, yet waits to go in till Peter has done so first; and in the appendix the treble pastoral commission is to Peter alone: a Petrine pre-eminence which but echoes the Synoptists. And sacramentalism informs the great discourses concerning rebirth by water and the spirit, and feeding on the Living Bread, Jesus’ flesh and blood, and the narrative of the issue of blood and water from the dead Jesus’ side. Indeed so severe a stress is laid upon the explicitly Christian life and its specific means, that orthodoxy itself interprets the rebirth by water and spirit, and the eating the flesh and drinking the blood to which entrance into the Kingdom and possession of interior life are here exclusively attached, as often represented by a simple sincere desire and will for spiritual purification and a keen hunger and thirst for God’s aid, together with such cultual acts as such souls can know or find, even without any knowledge of the Christian rites. Thus there is many “a pedagogue to Christ,” and the Christian visible means and expressions are the culmination and measure of what, in various degrees and forms, accompanies every sincerely striving soul throughout all human history.
Origin and Authorship.—The question as to the book’s origin has lost its poignancy through the ever-increasing recognition of the book’s intrinsic character. Thus the recent defenders of the apostolic authorship, the Unitarian James Drummond (1903), the Anglican William Sanday (1905), the Roman Catholic Theodore Calmes (1904), can tell us, the first, that “the evangelist did not aim at an illustrative picture of what was most characteristic of Jesus”; the second, that “the author sank into his own consciousness and at last brought to light what he found there”; the third, that “the Gospel contains an entire theological system,” “history is seen through the intervening dogmatic development,” “the Samaritan woman is ... a personification,” “the behaviour of the Greeks is entirely natural in such a book.” We thus get at cross-purposes with this powerful, profound work. Only some such position as Abbé Loisy’s critical summing up (1903) brings out its specific greatness. “What the author was, his book, in spite of himself, tells us to some extent: a Christian of Judeo-Alexandrine formation; a believer without, apparently, any personal reminiscence of what had actually been the life, preaching and death of Jesus; a theologian far removed from every historical preoccupation, though he retains certain principal facts of tradition without which Christianity would evaporate into pure ideas; and a seer who has lived the Gospel which he propounds.” “To find his book beautiful and true, we need but take it as it is and understand it.” “The church, which has never discussed the literary problem of this Gospel, in nowise erred as to its worth.”
Several traditional positions have indeed been approximately maintained or reconquered against the critics. As to the Gospel’s date, critics have returned from 160-170 (Baur), 150 (Zeller), 130 (Keim), to 110-115 (Renan) and 80-110 (Harnack): since Irenaeus says its author lived into the times of Trajan (90-117), a date somewhere about 105 would satisfy tradition. As to the place, the critics accept proconsular Asia with practical unanimity, thus endorsing Irenaeus’s declaration that the Gospel was published in Ephesus. As to the author’s antecedents, critics have ceased to hold that he could not have been a Jew-Christian (so Bretschneider, 1820), and admit (so Schmiedel, (1901) that he must have been by birth a Jew of the Dispersion, or the son of Christian parents who had been such Jews. And as to the vivid accuracy of many of his topographical and social details, the predominant critical verdict now is that he betrays an eye-witness’s knowledge of the country between Sichem and Jordan and as to Jerusalem; he will have visited these places, say in 90, or may have lived in Jerusalem shortly before its fall. But the reasons against the author being John the Zebedean or any other eyewitness of Jesus’ earthly life have accumulated to a practical demonstration.
As to the external evidence for the book’s early date, we must remember that the Epistle to the Hebrews and the Book of Revelation, though admittedly earlier, are of the same school, and, with the great Pauline Epistles, show many preformations of Johannine phrases and ideas. Other slighter prolusions will have circulated in that Philonian centre Ephesus, before the great Gospel englobed and superseded them. Hence the precariousness of the proofs derived from more or less close parallels to Johannine passages in the apostolic fathers. Justin Martyr (163-167) certainly uses the Gospel; but his conception of Jesus’ life is so strictly Synoptic that he can hardly have accepted it as from an apostolic eyewitness. Papias of Hierapolis, in his Exposition of the Lord’s Sayings (145-160) appears nowhere to have mentioned it, and clearly distinguishes between “what Andrew, Peter, ... John or Matthew or any other of the Lord’s disciples spoke,” and “what Aristion and the presbyter John, the Lord’s disciples, say.” Thus Papias, as Eusebius about 314 insists, knew two Johns, and the apostle was to him a far-away figure; indeed early medieval chroniclers recount that Papias “in the second book of the Lord’s sayings” asserted that both the sons of Zebedee were “slain by Jews,” so that the apostle John would have died before 70. Irenaeus’s testimony is the earliest and admittedly the strongest we possess for the Zebedean authorship; yet, as Calmes admits, “it cannot be considered decisive.” In his work against the Heresies and in his letter to Florinus, about 185-191, he tells how he had himself known Bishop Polycarp of Smyrna, and how Polycarp “used to recount his familiar intercourse with John and the others who had seen the Lord”; and explicitly identifies this John with the Zebedean and the evangelist. But Irenaeus was at most fifteen when thus frequenting Polycarp; writes thirty-five to fifty years later in Lyons, admitting that he noted down nothing at the time; and, since his mistaken description of Papias as “a hearer of John” the Zebedean was certainly reached by mistaking the presbyter for the apostle, his additional words “and a companion of Polycarp” point to this same mistaken identification having also operated in his mind with regard to Polycarp. In any case, the very real and important presbyter is completely unknown to Irenaeus, and his conclusion as to the book’s authorship resulted apparently from a comparison of its contents with Polycarp’s teaching. If the presbyter wrote Revelation and was Polycarp’s master, such a mistake could easily arise. Certainly Polycrates, bishop of Ephesus, made a precisely similar mistake when about 190 he described the Philip “who rests in Hierapolis” as “one of the twelve apostles,” since Eusebius rightly identifies this Philip with the deacon of Acts xxi. A positive testimony for the critical conclusion is derived from the existence of a group of Asia Minor Christians who about 165 rejected the Gospel as not by John but by Cerinthus. The attribution is doubtless mistaken. But could Christians sufficiently numerous to deserve a long discussion by St Epiphanius in 374-377, who upheld the Synoptists, stoutly opposed the Gnostics and Montanists, and had escaped every special designation till the bishop nicknamed them the “Alogoi” (irrational rejectors of the Logos-Gospel), dare, in such a time and country, to hold such views, had the apostolic origin been incontestable? Surely not. The Alexandrian Clement, Tertullian, Origen, Eusebius, Jerome and Augustine only tell of the Zebedean what is traceable to stories told by Papias of others, to passages of Revelation and the Gospel, or to the assured fact of the long-lived Asian presbyter.