‘The John who had the encounter with Cerinthus, after what has been said can only be the Presbyter. But in the confusion, “the unconscious” alone can hardly have been involved.’
The dishonesty went beyond the confusion of the two persons. It is also seen in the definite ascription of the Gospel to the Apostle.
‘The twenty-fourth verse of the twenty-first chapter of the Fourth Gospel, about which we have spoken, will always remain a strong indication of the fact that in Ephesus the Fourth Gospel was deliberately put out after the death of its author as a work of the Apostle, and so that the Apostle and the Presbyter were deliberately identified, as Philip the Evangelist was made to change places with Philip the Apostle[[29]].’
Facilis descensus. When once we begin imputing fraudulent actions we may very easily find that we have to go on doing so. It should, however, be remembered that the ground for all this is no assured fact, but only the exigencies of a complicated theory which, quite apart from this, has a load of improbability to contend with.
I will give one further example of a different kind. The tendency of the criticism that has been, and still is largely in vogue, is to give what seems to me quite undue weight to the exceptional, the abnormal, the eccentric, as compared with that which is normal and regular.
In the controversy over the Fourth Gospel one of the questions has been as to the exact degree of importance to be attached to the so-called Alogi, who, about the third quarter of the second century, denied St. John’s authorship of the writings attributed to him, including the Gospel, and by a piece of sheer bravado ascribed it to the heretic Cerinthus.
Harnack’s account of this—coterie perhaps rather than sect—is just. ‘The attack did not spread; it was soon defeated; but the memory of it lingered on, and the policy of the Church, auspiciously begun by Irenaeus, came to be that of teaching the absolute equality in rank and value of the four component parts of the Gospel[[30]].’ But the point to which I wish to call attention is that the Church writers did not allow the existence of these Alogi to prevent them from classing the Gospel among the Homologoumena, or books about the canonicity of which all Christians were agreed. Eusebius uses strong language. He says that both the Gospel and the First Epistle were accepted without dispute by his own contemporaries as well as by the ancients (H. E. iii. 24. 17). And, if it is said that Eusebius was writing a century and a half after the Alogi, when that little side-eddy of opinion had subsided and been forgotten, it is not Eusebius alone who ignores their existence in this manner. Irenaeus is one of those who certainly knew about them; and yet he regards the Four Gospels, our present four, as a sort of divine institution, deeply implanted in the nature of things, directly presided over and inspired by Christ the Word (adv. Haer. iii. 11. 9). A little later Clement of Alexandria speaks of the same Four Gospels as specially handed down among Christians (Strom. iii. 13. 93). And, again, a little later Origen describes them as ‘alone unquestioned in the Church of God under heaven’ (Eus. H. E. vi. 25. 4). Still earlier, a contemporary of the Alogi, Tatian, gave effect to the same belief by composing his Diatessaron. And the Muratorian Fragment also endorses it.
This striking unanimity from all parts of the Christian world serves to reduce the Alogi to their right dimensions. The reason why they have bulked rather larger than they should do is, I believe, because they wielded the pen. It will be remembered that Dr. Salmon was for reducing them to the single person of Caius of Rome. Schwartz also argues that not more than a single writer may be meant. He thinks that in any case Epiphanius had a book before him[[31]]. The Alogi were in any case a very ephemeral phenomenon, chiefly significant in the history of the Canon, as marking the slight element of resistance to the establishment of the group of Four Gospels.