And this is another: ‘Behold, the hour cometh, yea, is come, that ye shall be scattered, every man to his own, and shall leave me alone’ (xvi. 32).
A later stage of the Apostles’ experience is reflected in the following: ‘Verily, verily, I say unto you, that ye shall weep and lament, but the world shall rejoice: ye shall be sorrowful, but your sorrow shall be turned into joy. A woman when she is in travail hath sorrow, because her hour is come: but when she is delivered of her child, she remembereth no more the anguish, for the joy that a man is born into the world. And ye therefore now have sorrow: but I will see you again, and your heart shall rejoice, and your joy no one taketh away from you’ (xvi. 20-2).
The great salient fact that stood out in the experience of the first disciples was the outpouring of the Holy Spirit and its effect upon themselves. This is vividly reflected in a series of passages:
‘These things have I spoken unto you, while yet abiding with you. But the Comforter, even the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he shall teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all that I said unto you. Peace I leave with you; my peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be fearful’ (xiv. 25-7).
‘But when the Comforter is come, whom I will send unto you from the Father, even the Spirit of truth, which proceedeth from the Father, he shall bear witness of me: and ye also bear witness, because ye have been with me from the beginning’ (xv. 26, 27).
‘Howbeit when he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he shall guide you into all the truth: for he shall not speak from himself; but what things soever he shall hear, these shall he speak: and he shall declare unto you the things that are to come. He shall glorify me: for he shall take of mine, and shall declare it unto you’ (xvi. 13, 14).
It might be said that these passages are a summary sketch of the mental history of the Evangelist from the day of Pentecost onwards. They show him to us looking back upon the eventful time through which he had passed with ever broadening intelligence. They contain the whole secret of the way in which he came to write the ‘spiritual Gospel.’
I am aware that the probative force of the phenomena which I have been reviewing will be differently estimated. I should myself not have laid so much stress upon them if they had stood alone, or if they had occurred in a different class of literature. The novel writers and imaginative biographers of the present day make a point of keeping up the illusion of only allowing the supposed author to use the language appropriate to the exact situation in which he is placed at the time when he is conceived to be writing. But the writers of the first century A.D. were not so scrupulous, and what is natural to us would be very unusual with them. Still I do not deny that a writer whose habit of mind it was to throw himself back into an assumed position, might by the exercise of a special gift have been able to keep up the position so assumed. But in the case before us, we have the instances which I began by quoting where the author claims for himself or others claim for him that he is recording what he had himself heard and seen. This at once puts in our hands a far simpler and easier hypothesis, a hypothesis which really makes no demands upon our constructive powers at all. Whereas it is probable that not one ancient in a thousand, or one in ten thousand, would have written as the writer of the Fourth Gospel has done, if he had not been an eye-witness; it would have been only the natural way for him to write, if he had been an eye-witness. This latter hypothesis therefore seems much preferable to the other. It is confirmed by the really remarkable consistency with which the point of view is carried out, and by another large class of phenomena which will come before us in the next lecture.