One form of discourse, that we may be sure must have been common, is more fully represented in the Fourth Gospel than in the other three; I mean the dialogue, and in particular the controversial dialogue, growing out of some natural occasion, such as those of which I spoke in the last lecture, the woman of Samaria’s appeal to the patriarch Jacob, the Jews’ demand for a sign like a gift of manna, the practice of circumcising on the sabbath day, the charge of demoniacal possession and the claim of the Jews to be Abraham’s children. Instances like these must be set down to the credit of the Gospel and not against it.
The longer discourses appear to grow out of the aphoristic sayings of which I have spoken. Of these again Dr. Drummond has made an ample collection (pp. 18-20). But it is true that the Evangelist permits himself to dwell on such sayings, to repeat and enforce them by expansions of his own, which keep coming back to the same point. It has often been remarked that we are constantly left in doubt where the words of our Lord end and those of the Evangelist begin. Probably the Evangelist himself did not discriminate, or even try to discriminate. A modern writer, in similar circumstances, would feel obliged to ask himself whether the words which he was setting down were really spoken or not; but there is no reason to suppose that the author of the Gospel would be conscious of any such obligation. He would not pause to put to himself questions, or to exercise conscious self-criticism. He would just go on writing as the spirit moved him. And the consequence is that historical recollections and interpretative reflection, the fruit of thought and experience, have come down to us inextricably blended.
St. Paul was not a historian, or we may be sure that he would have furnished abundant parallels for the sort of procedure that we find in St. John. He is not a historian, but he does for once lapse into history, and he does then furnish a parallel which has always seemed to me very exact and very illuminating. You will remember in Gal. ii. 11 ff. the account of the dispute with St. Peter at Antioch. The first few verses are strictly historical; but suddenly and without a word of warning the Apostle glides into one of his own abstruse doctrinal arguments as to justification by works of law and by faith.
While therefore I quite allow that in any given instance there is need for close scrutiny to determine what belongs to the Master and what to the disciple, I entirely repudiate the inference that St. John cannot have written the Gospel.
Psychologically, the Gospel is more intelligible if one like St. John wrote it, one who drew upon his own memories and was conscious of speaking with authority. It is a mechanical and, I believe, really untenable view to suppose that the author has simply taken over certain Synoptic sayings and adapted them to his own ideas. We form for ourselves a far truer and more adequate conception if we think of these discourses as the product of a single living experience. They are from first to last a part of the author’s self. The recollections on which they are based are his own, and it is his own mind that has insensibly played upon them, and shaped them, and worked up in them the fruits of his own experience.
It is this that really constitutes the value of the Gospel. It is not a mere invention, but it is the result of a strong first-hand impression of a wonderful Personality. It is a blending of fact and interpretation; but the interpretation comes from one who had an unique position and unique advantages for getting at the heart and truth of that which he sought to interpret. It is the mind of Christ, seen through the medium of one of the first and closest of His companions.
IV. The Presentation of the Supernatural.
i. The treatment of Miracle in the Fourth Gospel.
I cannot regard anything that we have hitherto had to deal with as constituting a substantial set-off against the arguments previously urged for the authentic and autoptic character of the Gospel. It is otherwise when we come to its manner of presenting the Supernatural. It must be confessed that the miracles in the Fourth Gospel, while in the main they run parallel to those in the Synoptic Gospels, yet do appear to involve a certain heightening of the effect. The courtier’s servant is healed from a distance; the impotent man had been thirty-and-eight years in his infirmity; the blind man who was sent to wash in the pool of Siloam had been blind from his birth; Lazarus had lain four days in the tomb.
Not only do these details imply an enhancement of the supernatural, but it seems that the author of the Gospel valued them specially for that reason. They fall in entirely with his purpose in writing. He sees in them so many striking illustrations of the glory of the Christ. He had been himself keenly on the watch for the manifestations of that glory, and he delighted to record them in the hope that they might impress his readers as they had impressed him.