Another characteristic is common to the writers of the School of which we are speaking. The complexity of a critical hypothesis very rarely stands in the way of its adoption; but a very little psychological complexity acts as a deterrent. For instance, after quoting from B. Weiss some rather exaggerated language as to the freedom used by the evangelist in reproducing the discourses, Schmiedel goes on thus:

‘As compared with such a line of defence, there is a positive relief from an intolerable burden as soon as the student has made up his mind to give up any such theory as that of the “genuineness” of the Gospel, as also of its authenticity in the sense of its being the work of an eye-witness who meant to record actual history[[17]].’

So far from being an ‘intolerable burden,’ it seems to me that Weiss’ theory is not only in itself perfectly natural, nay inevitable, but that it is also specially helpful as enabling us to account at one and the same time for the elements that are, and those that are not, strictly genuine in the report of the discourses.

Jülicher writes to much the same effect as Schmiedel; and the passage which follows is indeed very characteristic of his habit of mind:

‘The defenders of the “genuineness” of the Gospel indeed for the most part allow that John has carried out a certain idealization with the discourses of Jesus, that in writing he has found himself in a slight condition of ecstasy, in short, that his presentation of his hero is something more than historical. With such mysticism or phraseology science can have no concern; in the Johannean version of Christ’s discourses form and substance cannot be separated, the form to be assigned to the later writer, and the substance to Jesus Himself: sint ut sunt aut non sint!...’

To please Professor Jülicher a picture must be all black or all white; he is intolerant of half-shades that pass from the one into the other. And no doubt there are some problems for the treatment of which such a habit is an advantage, but hardly those which have to do with living human personalities.

The French writers, like the German, have a certain resemblance to each other. To some of these points I shall have to come back in detail later. I will only note for the present that they are both allegorists of an extreme kind. I would just for the present commend to both a passage of Wernle’s:

‘This conception, however, of the Fourth Gospel as a philosophical work, to which the Alexandrines first gave currency, and which is still widely held to-day, is a radically wrong one. John’s main idea, the descent of the Son of Man to reveal the Father, is unphilosophical.... So, too, the Johannine miracles are never intended to be taken in a purely allegorical sense. The fact of their actual occurrence is the irrefragable proof of God’s appearance upon earth[[18]].’

If the miracles of the Fourth Gospel were facts there was some point in the constant appeals that the Gospel makes to them; but there would be no point if these appeals were to a set of didactic fictions.

Within the last few months a monograph has appeared, which from its general tendency may be ranged with the works of which we have been speaking, though in its method it rather stands by itself, E. Schwartz, Ueber den Tod der Söhne Zebedaei (Berlin, 1904). Dr. Schwartz is the editor of Eusebius in the Berlin series, and his point of view is primarily philological. He writes in a disagreeable spirit, at once carping and supercilious. The only generous words in his paper are a few in reference to the Church historian. He exemplifies copiously most of the procedure specially deprecated in these lectures. His monograph has, however, a value of its own, from the precise and careful way in which he has collected and discusses the material bearing upon the history of the Evangelist and of the Gospel in the first and earlier part of the second century.