The Criticism of the Fourth Gospel / Eight Lectures on the Morse Foundation, Delivered in the Union Seminary, New York in October and November 1904

by W. Sanday

5. In contrast with the other Gospels it was recognized as being in a special sense ‘a spiritual Gospel.’

I believe that these data will enable us to understand all the facts, both those which are more favourable to the Gospel and those which are in a sense less favourable.

1. The best of reasons is given for all those marks of an eye-witness which we shall see to be present in great number and strength. They point to a first-hand relation between the author and the facts which he records. If the Gospel is not the work of an eye-witness, then the writer has made a very sustained and extraordinary effort to give the impression that he was one.

2. By throwing the Gospel to the end of the Apostle’s life, a considerable interval is placed between the events and the date of its composition. That means that the facts will have passed through a medium. Unconsciously the mind in which they lay will have brought its own experience to bear upon them; it will have a tendency to mix up the plain statement of what was said and done with an element of interpretation suggested by its own experience. And this will be done in a way that we should call ‘naïve,’ i. e. without any conscious self-analysis. The mingling of objective and subjective will take place spontaneously and without reflection. The details will not be given out exactly as they went in; and yet the writer will not be himself aware that he is setting down anything but what he heard and saw.

3. The relation of the Fourth Gospel to its predecessors accurately corresponds to that described in the tradition. On the one hand their contents are very largely assumed; and on the other hand the author does not hesitate, where he thinks it necessary, to correct them. The relation is easy and natural; it at once accounts for the selection of the incidents narrated. The author evidently felt himself at liberty to select just those incidents which suited his purpose.

4. And that purpose, it is important to remember, was not by any means purely historical. The author was writing a Gospel, not a biography in the modern sense of the word. His object was definitely religious, and not literary. He tells us in set terms what he proposed to do: ‘These things are written, that ye may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that believing ye may have life in His name.’ He did not really aim at a complete narrative of external events or an exhaustive study of a complex human character. He aimed at producing faith; and he sought to produce it by describing at length a few significant incidents, taken out of a much larger whole.

5. The previous writings that came into his hands were also Gospels; and they too were intended to produce faith. But in this direction the author of the Fourth Gospel felt that something more remained to be done. Christendom had its Gospels, but not as yet exactly ‘a spiritual Gospel.’ A ‘spiritual Gospel’ meant one that sought to bring out the divine side of its subject. When St. Paul at the beginning of the Epistle to the Romans draws an antithesis between the Son of David ‘according to the flesh’ and the Son of God ‘according to the spirit of holiness,’ he is anticipating exactly this later contrast between the Gospels of the bodily life and of the spirit. ‘Spiritual’ means ‘indwelt by the Spirit of God.’ And it was that side of the life of Christ in which the Spirit of God was seen living and working in Him that the fourth evangelist undertook specially to describe.

If, then, it is objected that the Gospel is onesided, that it gives undue prominence to this divine side, we begin by asking what is meant by undue, what standard of measurement marks it as undue. Obviously the standard is that which we have just dismissed as altogether beside the mark, the standard of the modern biography. The Gospel does not in the least profess to do what the modern biographer does; but what the writer does profess to do, he was perfectly within his right in doing. He desired to set forth Christ as Divine. If that is to be onesided, of course he is onesided. Clement tells us why he did it. It was because he thought that the physical and external side, the human side of his subject, had had justice done to it already. In this respect the older Gospels were adequate, and he had no special wish to add to them. The one thing he did feel called upon to add, and that he knew he could add, was a fuller delineation of the divine side. He is not to be blamed for doing the very thing which he proposed.

The paragraph in Clement of Alexandria is stated by him to be derived from ‘the early presbyters.’ They were a good authority; probably, if not altogether identical with the group drawn upon by Papias, yet at least in part identical with it. Papias and Irenaeus on the one hand, and Clement of Alexandria on the other, are just two branches of the same tree, or at least two suckers from the same root. That root is often called the School of St. John. It is from the School of St. John that they ultimately derive their information about St. John. What authority could be better?

It is not possible to say how far the language of Clement comes from the Presbyters, and how far it is his own. The phrase ‘a spiritual Gospel’ may be his own coinage, an early effort of descriptive criticism, putting into words what he felt to be the distinctive characteristic of the Gospel. In any case the phrase is a happy one; it just expresses, in the briefest compass, that which really most differentiates the Fourth Gospel from the other three.