Perhaps it should be explained that the enumeration of books and writers does not profess to be exhaustive. In the main I have confined myself to the more recent, and to what may be called ‘living’ literature. Some few things may have dropped out because they did not happen to fall in with the method of treatment adopted. Of these the various writings of Dr. Edwin A. Abbott are the most important that I can remember. To the older works mentioned on pp. [12]-15 there should have been added Archdeacon Watkin’s Bampton Lectures for 1890 as a summary of earlier criticism. The absence of reference to the elaborate work of Dr. Joh. Kreyenbühl (Das Evangelium der Wahrheit, vol. i, 1900; vol. ii, 1905) is due in part to the accidental loss of my copy of the first volume. But it would be wrong to suggest that I should have had patience enough to discover what there is of sanity in its learned but fantastic pages.
It only remains for me to express my heartfelt thanks to those who so kindly invited me to deliver these lectures, and to those who gave me such generous and considerate hospitality, while they were being delivered. My visit to America was deeply interesting to me. I returned home, not only with the feeling that I had made new and valued friends, but also with a greatly strengthened hope and desire that American and English workers may long be found side by side—not as though either of them had already obtained, or were already made perfect, but pressing on, if so be that they may apprehend that for which also they were apprehended by Christ Jesus.
I must also add a word of very sincere thanks to my friends Dr. Lock, who read the whole, and Mr. Ll. J. M. Bebb, who read a part of the proofs of these lectures, and to whose kindness and care I owe it that they are not more faulty than they are.
Oxford. Easter, 1905.
CONTENTS
LECTURE I
Survey of Recent Literature [1]
LECTURE II
Critical Methods. The Oldest Solution of the Problem of the Fourth Gospel [42]
LECTURE III