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ST. JOHN- '"'* 
 
 AND OTHER NEW TESTAMENT 
 TEACHERS 
 
 BY / 
 
 REV. A. LEWIS HUMPHRIES, M.A. 
 
 PROFESSOR OF NEW TESTAMENT GREEK AND EXEGESIS IN THE 
 HARTLEY PRIMITIVE METHODIST COLLEGE, MANCHESTER 
 
 LONDON 
 
 T. C. ^5* E. C. JACK 
 
 i6 HENRIETTA STREET, W.C. 
 
 AND EDINBURGH 
 
 1910 
 
AUTHOR'S PREFACE 
 
 In sending forth this little book, dealing with a subject 
 on which the literature already existing is so very ex- 
 tensive, the author finds it impossible to make formal 
 acknowledgment of all the writers to whom, in greater 
 or less degree, he has been indebted. He feels bound, 
 however, to break through that silence to the extent 
 of expressing his obligation, so far as the discussion 
 of the Fourth Gospel is concerned, to Professor E. F. 
 Scott, with whose critical conclusions, set forth in his 
 book " The Fourth Gospel," he has found himself in 
 large agreement. He would add a word of regret that, 
 owing to limitations of space, he has been compelled 
 to omit from his treatment of the Fourth Gospel a 
 final section dealing with the permanent value of its 
 message. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 I.— ST. JOHN 
 
 CHA?. 
 
 I. THE FOURTH GOSPEL . 
 
 A. ITS NATURE AND PURPOSE . 
 
 B. THE PERSON OF CHRIST 
 
 C. GOD AND THE HOLY SPIRIT". 
 
 D. THE CHURCH AND THE WORLD 
 
 E. THE WORK OF CHRIST 
 
 F. THE LAST THINGS 
 II. THE EPISTLES OF JOHN 
 
 III. THE BOOK OF THE REVELATION . 
 
 IL— OTHER NEW TESTAMENT 
 TEACHERS 
 
 IV. THE EPISTLE OF JAMES . . . -US 
 
 V. THE EPISTLE TO THE HEBREWS . -132 
 
 VI. THE FIRST EPISTLE OF PETER . . -152 
 
 VII. THE EPISTLES OF JUDE AND SECOND PETER 1 66 
 
 INDEX I7Q 
 
 viii 
 
ST. JOHN AND OTHER NEW 
 TESTAMENT TEACHERS 
 
 I 
 
 ST. JOHN 
 
CHAPTER I 
 
 THE FOURTH GOSPEL 
 
 A.-ITS NATURE AND PURPOSE 
 
 Upon the threshold of any inquiry concerning the teach- 
 ing of the Fourth Gospel there stand two problems, one 
 relating to its authorship and the other to its historicity. 
 The identification of the author is one of the outstand- 
 ing difficulties of criticism. The traditional view, that it 
 was written in extreme old age by John, the son of 
 Zebedee, has many great names, including Godet and 
 Bernhard Weiss on the Continent and Lightfoot and 
 Sanday in England, ranged on its side, and there is 
 much to be urged in its favour. Its opponents, however, 
 are impressive in both number and authority. Some of 
 these, e.g. Schmiedel, Wernle, and Martineau, absolutely 
 reject the traditional theory, whilst others, like Wendt 
 and Weizsacker, occupy a mediating position, and are 
 of opinion that the Gospel is in part made up of material 
 furnished by John, just as the First Gospel is believed 
 to have derived some of its contents from the Logia- 
 
ST. JOHN 
 
 document of Matthew. Wellhausen, again, traces in 
 this Gospel two main sources, differing in both contents 
 and date, and finds in that ingenious theory the solution 
 of some of the apparent inconsistencies in its teaching. 
 Into the discussion of these rival positions it is not 
 necessary to enter. They have but little relevance to 
 an investigation into the teaching of this Gospel, for 
 one thing which criticism has taught us is that the truth 
 of a message does not stand or fall with some particular 
 theory of its authorship, but is determined by the in- 
 trinsic qualities of the message itself. So, though we 
 shall speak of the author as John, it will be understood 
 that we are simply following the convention of tradition, 
 and that we pass by, as not vital to our present discus- 
 sion, the vexed question of the authorship of the Fourth 
 Gospel. 
 
 The problem of its historicity, however, cannot be 
 so summarily dismissed. Even the acceptance of the 
 Johannine authorship would not settle that, for though 
 we could infer that John was able, had he been so 
 minded, to write a fresh account of the actual events of 
 Christ's ministry, we should have to learn from a patient 
 study of the Gospel itself whether this was what he had 
 really chosen to produce. The investigation starts from 
 the Synoptic Gospels, since it is generally conceded that 
 they bring us into substantial contact with fact. But to 
 pass from them to John is like entering a different 
 atmosphere, the difficulty being not so much that the 
 
THE FOURTH GOSPEL 5 
 
 Fourth Gospel contains new incidents and sayings, as 
 that the whole story is told from a fresh standpoint and in 
 a different way. The scene of Christ's ministry is laid 
 largely in Judaea; new characters appear, or familiar 
 characters play a new role^ e.g. John the Baptist, who 
 acts throughout as a witness to the Messianic dignity of 
 Jesus \ the perspective of the history is foreshortened, 
 for whereas in the Synoptists the assertion of His 
 Messiahship by Jesus and the recognition of it by others 
 belong to the closing period of His ministry, in the 
 Fourth Gospel Jesus is recognised as Messiah from the 
 first by both the Baptist and the disciples, and His own 
 dignity and claims are the constant theme of Christ's 
 discourses with " the Jews, " who in this Gospel take, as 
 opponents of Jesus, the place filled by the Pharisees in 
 the Synoptists. Some of these discrepancies are doubt- 
 less less impressive on closer examination, and in the 
 narrative itself we find many vivid touches and pictu- 
 resque details which suggest that the story is being told by 
 a witness of what he records. But the difference under 
 discussion extends to discourses as well as incidents. 
 There is, as between the Fourth Gospel and the other 
 three, a contrast in both form and theme. The pithy, 
 epigrammatic sayings which mark the teaching of Jesus 
 in the Synoptists are replaced by long and somewhat 
 tedious discourses, whilst parables are wholly absent, 
 the allegories of the True Vine and the Good Shepherd 
 being the nearest approach to that mode of instruction. 
 
ST. JOHN 
 
 For this contrast in style, which appears equally whether 
 Jesus is speaking in Galilee, Samaria, or Jerusalem, 
 no satisfactory explanation consonant with absolute 
 historicity is yet forthcoming. Moreover, the same style 
 pervades the entire Gospel, so that whether the speaker 
 be Jesus or the Baptist, or whether the writer is giving 
 to us his own reflections, the same literary forms and 
 vocabulary appear, with the result that it is sometimes 
 extremely difficult, e.g. in the third chapter, to know 
 where the discourse of Jesus ends and the medita- 
 tions of the Evangelist begin. On the theory that 
 the latter is John, critics have been forced to assume 
 that original sayings of Jesus and of others have lain 
 so long in the apostle's mind, and have been the 
 subject of such frequent meditation, that not only has 
 a deepened significance been discovered in them, 
 but primal utterance and subsequent reflection have 
 become fused and indistinguishable, and both of 
 them, cast in the matrix of John's own forms of ex- 
 pression, have been assigned to the days of the historic 
 ministry. 
 
 The subject matter of the discourses is equally perplex- 
 ing. The divergence from the Synoptic record is not 
 simply at the circumference of our Lord's teaching, parti- 
 cular ideas such as Eternal Life or the Second Coming 
 being presented in a new light, but at the very centre. 
 The two ruling ideas of Christ's message in the Synoptists 
 are the Kingdom of God and the Divine Fatherhood — 
 
THE FOURTH GOSPEL 7 
 
 allusion, whether by explicit utterance or by suggestion, 
 to the dignity of our Lord's Person being quite a 
 secondary feature. But in the Fourth Gospel, whereas 
 the Kingdom is only the subject of a few casual sayings, 
 the theme of repeated discourses is the Person of Christ. 
 It is significant that the emphatic " I," which, as used 
 by Jesus, is found in the three Synoptists only 34 
 times altogether, occurs 117 times in John. What this 
 means is that the centre of gravity is shifted. John is 
 writing with a special motifs his object being, as the 
 very language of his introductory Prologue suggests, to 
 exhibit the Jesus of history as the Divine Logos mani- 
 fested in human form and under conditions of time. 
 Even the miracles related of Jesus have ulterior and 
 dogmatic meanings. They are " signs," outward mani- 
 festations of an inner glory, and valuable because of the 
 light which they shed upon Christ's Person. So the 
 broad conclusion which the facts seem to compel, is 
 that John's narrative, whatever be the measure of its 
 correspondence with history, is shaped by dogmatic ends. 
 The author's interest is less in events than in ideas. In 
 so far as he wishes to supplement the Synoptists, it is 
 less by supplying us with new events or sayings in the 
 ministry of Jesus than by taking us behind that earthly 
 life so that we see it in the setting of eternity, and 
 behold external events as but the embodiment of spiritual 
 realities. The truth which is John's objective is truth of 
 belief rather than that of historic fact. Of course many 
 
8 ST. JOHN 
 
 will feel that the belief stands or falls with the 
 history, and on that point it might be shown that 
 the leading ideas of the Fourth Gospel exist either 
 explicitly or implicitly in the Synoptic record. But 
 what we need to apprehend is that John's whole 
 narrative has dogmatic significance, and that it is less 
 a new biography of Jesus than an interpretation of Him 
 which the Evangelist is seeking to give to us. Under 
 his guidance we pass from the outer shrine into the 
 holiest of all. 
 
 This view, however novel it may seem, is really a 
 reversion to a primitive judgment, for among the earliest 
 traditions concerning this Gospel is one assigned by 
 Eusebius to Clement of Alexandria, and to the effect 
 that " John, last, having observed that the bodily things 
 had been set forth in the Gospels, and exhorted thereto 
 by his friends, and inspired by the Spirit, produced a 
 spiritual Gospel." Now " bodily " and " spiritual " in 
 that quotation are technical terms, representing in the 
 school of Alexandria the antithesis of " literal " on the 
 one hand, and " figurative " or " allegorical " on the 
 other. A similar view is attributed to Origen and 
 Epiphanius, and the perception of this may account for 
 the welcome which the Fourth Gospel received from 
 the first. We, therefore, shall best learn what John 
 wishes to teach us if, putting ourselves at his point of 
 view, we cease to ask where in the record the chronicler 
 gives way to the literary artist, and seek pre-eminently, 
 
THE FOURTH GOSPEL 9 
 
 in both narrative and discourse, for the ideas of which 
 he meant them to be the expression. 
 
 What those ideas are the Evangelist himself confesses. 
 "These are written," he says, "that ye may believe that 
 Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God ; and that believing 
 ye may have life in His name" (xx. 31). In other 
 words, this Gospel is intended by its writer to serve certain 
 dogmatic and practical ends. John is a "tendency" 
 writer. His aim is to establish a conception of Jesus 
 as the Messiah of Jewish expectation and the Son of 
 God, and in that way to promote the religious life of his 
 readers. This Gospel, therefore, if not a theology, is at 
 least a contribution towards one, and it is thus that we 
 must interpret it. In doing so we are taken into the 
 heart of an interesting situation. For one assumption 
 which we are justified in making is that the Evangelist 
 was making a direct appeal to the conditions in which 
 he lived. To think of this Gospel as the product of 
 some saintly recluse, or as embodying the devout medi- 
 tations of a soul dwelling apart from men and absorbed 
 in its own reflections, is to make it strangely unlike the 
 rest of Scripture, and to leave unexplained the welcome 
 with which it was received. Its value lay in the fact 
 that it addressed itself to the immediate historic situa- 
 tion. A credible tradition reports Ephesus to have been 
 the birthplace of this book, the date of its composition 
 being put by critics anywhere between the years a.d. 80 
 and 150, though a large mass of opinion inclines to 
 
lo ST. JOHN 
 
 the last decade of the first century or the opening 
 decade of the second. Ephesus was one of the great 
 cities of the ancient world. Famous as the seat of the 
 worship of Diana and as the head of a Roman province, 
 it was one of the gateways of the East; it was not 
 simply a channel for trade, but a meeting-place of the 
 faith and culture of Oriental and Greek. Ephesus 
 was the world in microcosm. To translate the Gospel, 
 therefore, into a speech which seemed appropriate to 
 Ephesus, was to create for it a language meet to be 
 universal. 
 
 It is to a cosmopolitan audience that the Evangelist 
 makes his appeal. Jew though we believe the writer to 
 have been, the fact that he explains Jewish customs and 
 translates Jewish terms shows that lie writes mainly for 
 Grentiles. One of the problems of this Gospel is the 
 way in which the opponents of Jesus are repeatedly 
 referred to as "the Jews," the disciples being put into 
 contrast with them in xiii. 33. Moreover, in such ex- 
 pressions as "your law" (viii. 17), "their law" (xv. 25), 
 Jesus is made to speak like one standing outside the 
 Jewish race. It is difficult to carry this mode of speech 
 back to the earthly ministry, but it becomes perfectly 
 intelligible if taken as reflecting the situation when the 
 Evangelist wrote. Then the rupture between Christianity 
 and Judaism had become complete, and the new society, 
 which at first had been threatened with absorption into 
 Judaism, had emerged not only distinct from it, but 
 
THE FOURTH GOSPEL ii 
 
 finding in Judaism its chief enemy. All hope of a 
 general ingathering of Israel to Christ was past, and 
 hence even Jews like John looked for a new Israel con- 
 stituted by spiritual affinities, from which those whose 
 bond with the great leaders of Israel's past was simply 
 racial would be excluded. Surely this is the point of 
 such sayings as " If ye were Abraham's children, ye 
 would do the works of Abraham," and " If ye believed 
 Moses, ye would believe Me" (viii. 39, v. 46). The 
 " Israelite indeed " was to be found within the shelter 
 of the Christian Church. 
 
 It is claimed, too, that conditions later than those 
 of Christ's ministry are reflected in the controversies 
 between Him and " the Jews." In the Synoptists it is 
 Christ's attitude to the Law and its ritual, and especially 
 His freedom in the observance of the Sabbath, which 
 gave rise to conflict. But in the Fourth Gospel all 
 conflict, save for an echo of the Sabbatic controversy, 
 gathers round the person and claims of Christ. The 
 lowliness of His birth, the fact that He came from 
 Galilee, His failure to win the adherence of the religious 
 leaders of His nation. His betrayal by one of His 
 disciples, and His crucifixion as a malefactor — these 
 were natural objections for Jews to urge against the 
 Messianic claims of Jesus when, after His ascension, they 
 were boldly proclaimed by the Church throughout the 
 Jewish world. They were precisely the objections 
 which (the Talmud and opponents of Christianity such 
 
ST. JOHN 
 
 as Celsus being witness) were the stock-in-trade of 
 Jewish antagonism. More than once, probably, John 
 had had to deal with them in the course of his ministry, 
 and in his Gospel he supplies them with their final 
 refutation. 
 
 The Evangelist writes, therefore, as one who has but 
 small hope of the conversion of his own countrymen. 
 His aim is not so much to win them as to expose them, 
 to set their opposition to Jesus in its true light before 
 the world, and thus vindicate the career of Christ. If 
 there is any softening of his hostility to Jlidaism, it is 
 when he refers to the Baptist, who, is always spoken of 
 wuth respect, though also he is throughout consistently 
 depicted as recognising his inferiority to Jesus. Balden- 
 sperger exaggerates the significance of this feature when 
 he makes it the pivot of the whole narrative. But it 
 had a meaning, and if there still lingered a Baptist party 
 at Ephesus (see Acts xix. 3), it may have been with the 
 hope of securing its fusion with the Christian Church 
 that John was so careful to exhibit the Baptist as 
 inferior in status to Jesus. But if, with that excep- 
 tion, John turns from the Jewish world, it is in the 
 hope of capturing that of the Gentiles. After all, 
 the Fourth Gospel is the least Jewish of the Gospels. 
 Jewish in some measure it was bound to be, for the 
 writer, himself a Jew, had to depict the fundamental 
 ideas of a religion which, however much it transcended 
 Judaism, had therein its roots. But Palestine is but 
 
THE FOURTH GOSPEL 13 
 
 platform and background. Jesus Himself, as John 
 describes Him, belongs to a larger world, and we are 
 only taken back to history that we may see behind and 
 beyond it. Jesus, though apparently moving in time 
 and space, is in reality above such limitations, and it is 
 His universal, because eternal, nature and functions 
 which constitute the essential message of the Fourth 
 Gospel. 
 
 This view of it is sustained by its terminology. The 
 key to the book is to be found in the Prologue, where 
 the Logos or Word of philosophical speculation is 
 identified with the historic Jesus. In that strange term,, 
 placed thus in the very forefront, and by the very 
 abruptness of its introduction proving itself to be a 
 familiar element in the thought-world of those whom 
 John was seeking to address, we have an attempt to 
 launch Christianity into a wider world than it had 
 hitherto reached. Just because he had lost hope of the 
 Jews, the Evangelist turns with wistful eyes to the 
 Gentiles, and he speaks to them in the familiar language 
 of their speculations. For it is to the intellect of the 
 Gentile world that John is eager to find a door of 
 entrance, and so he translates his message into terms of 
 heathen culture, because he felt that in Jesus they found 
 their true realisation. Truth is always greater than its 
 form, and the very vitality of truth lies in the fact that 
 it can adapt itself to new modes of expression. A 
 faith which cannot change its intellectual statement is 
 
14 ST. JOHN 
 
 either dead or dying. The true is also the eternal, for 
 it dies to one mode of expression that it may reappear 
 in another, and of truth, as well as of the redeemed 
 spirit, it holds good that it can take to itself new forms, 
 and that God giveth it a body even as it pleaseth Him. 
 At the same time the philosophical interest of the Evan- 
 gelist is not primary but secondary ; in other words, 
 current philosophy is resorted to more for terms than 
 for ideas. So far as John's debt to the Logos philo- 
 sophy of Philo is concerned, close investigation has 
 shown that there is no very sustained correspondence 
 between the two thinkers. In outstanding ideas and 
 terms they agree, but below the surface they part 
 company, the omissions of John being, as Dr. Drummond 
 has shown, too numerous and significant to suggest 
 abstruse acquaintance on his part with Philo's philo- 
 sophy, or indeed any larger knowledge of it than could 
 be gleaned from personal intercourse and discussion 
 with cultured Jews and Gentiles in Ephesus itself. The 
 Logos idea was in the air much as "evolution" is 
 to-day. And just as we can imagine a man whose prime 
 interest was theology, having but a popular acquaintance 
 with evolution, yet seeking to gain the ear of men with 
 scientific interests by re-uttering the fundamental truths 
 of theology in terms borrowed from evolutionary 
 science, so did John, realising that there were certain 
 basal ideas in which the two disciplines were agreed, 
 declare Christian truth in the language of heathen 
 
THE FOURTH GOSPEL 15 
 
 philosophy. It was a noble and a necessary thing to 
 do. The affinities between Christian thought and 
 Greek culture needed to be recognised, and so yoked to 
 the service of truth as to capture for Christ the best 
 minds of heathendom. 
 
 Moreover, the terms which John employs to set forth 
 the activity of Christ belong to a wider world than 
 Judaism. Jesus comes bringing "light" and "life," 
 and the response which He demands from men is 
 "knowledge" and "faith." In the elaborate use made 
 of these terms in the Gospel, together with its dualism, 
 and notably its conception of the "world," scholars 
 have detected a friendly approach to another product of 
 Gentile culture, viz. the scheme of religious thought 
 which, because of the value placed by it on gnosis or 
 knowledge, is known as Gnosticism. Rooting itself in 
 an assumed antagonism between matter and spirit. 
 Gnosticism elaborated a doctrine of angels and of Divine 
 emanations, of whom Jesus was accepted as one, to 
 serve as intermediaries between God and the world. In 
 so far as Jesus was Himself Divine, it was felt necessary 
 that His assumption of human nature should be docetic 
 rather than actual, the Divine Logos only entering the 
 man Jesus at the Baptism and deserting Him prior to the 
 Cross. Redemption, too, which meant the release of 
 the spirit from bondage to the flesh, was only possible 
 through knowledge of an esoteric type, including such 
 a perception of the Divine nature as could be mediated 
 
i6 ST. JOHN 
 
 only by one who was Himself Divine. To the Gnostic, 
 
 therefore, "knowledge" was initiation into a purely 
 
 intellectual discipline, and was open only to the cultured 
 
 few. What was the attitude of this Gospel to that type 
 
 of thought? That there was some relation between 
 
 them is suggested by the conflicting theories which 
 
 have prevailed, one that the Gospel was a tract against 
 
 Gnosticism, another that it was actually written by 
 
 Cerinthus, a prominent Gnostic whom John is said to 
 
 have opposed. We have evidence from the Epistles of 
 
 John and that to the Colossians, as well as from hints 
 
 in the Apocalypse, that there was even in the first 
 
 century incipient Gnosticism in the Christian Church 
 
 in and near Ephesus. The time came, towards the end 
 
 of the second century, when the Church repudiated 
 
 Gnosticism and all its works, but, when John wrote, its 
 
 ideas, being but partially developed, found a certain 
 
 hospitality within Christian circles. Yet it by no means 
 
 follows that the Fourth Gospel is a Gnostic tract, or, as 
 
 Schmiedel believes, the work of a writer who came to 
 
 Christianity by way of Gnosticism. Why, if the author of 
 
 this Gospel be a Gnostic, is he so silent as to angels ? 
 
 Why is he so careful to note experiences of Jesus which 
 
 point to His possession of a real human nature ? Why 
 
 does he refuse to exclude God from the world, and 
 
 assign creation, not to some angelic demiurge, but to 
 
 the Logos Himself, the immediate representative of 
 
THE FOURTH GOSPEL 17 
 
 God? Why, even when he speaks of knowledge and 
 faith, does he so sedulously avoid the nouns, which were 
 the familiar Gnostic watchwords, and so invariably 
 employ the corresponding verbs? These differences 
 are not accidental. They represent the tolerant 
 temper of a Christi.iu thinker who, recognising some 
 modicum of truth in Gnosticism, sought to harness 
 some of its terms to Christian service, doubtless hoping 
 thereby to gain the ear of men whose Gnostic sym- 
 pathies made them indifferent to Christianity as ordi- 
 narily presented. 
 
 Yet John, with all his willingness to cast Christian 
 thought into new forms, remains firmly loyal to its sub- 
 stance. His faith is born, not of the mists of specula- 
 tion, but of the facts of experience. He is so convinced 
 a theologian simply because he is so great a Christian. 
 He wrote when the generation which had known Jesus 
 in the flesh had almost passed away, and the primal 
 enthusiasm, which had carried the Church forward in 
 its triumphant career, had to some extent spent itself. 
 The Jewish controversy, with the resultant breach 
 between Judaism and the Church, lay behind. More- 
 over, the expectation of Christ's speedy return, though 
 still cherished, was growing fainter with the delay in its 
 fulfilment. Evidently the end was not yet, and the 
 Church, confronting the future, needed to be braced 
 for new tasks and triumphs. So John, reahsing that the 
 
 B 
 
i8 ST. JOHN 
 
 hope of Christianity lay with the Gentiles, and that, in 
 addressing them, the Gospel must appeal not simply to 
 their conscience, but to their thought, translated Christ's 
 message, as he had come to know it, into terms congenial 
 to the Gentile culture of the time. Naturally this view 
 implies that there is in this Gospel a considerable 
 subjective element, but on that point criticism is 
 practically agreed, the only matter of debate being its 
 extent. The Fourth Gospel is " an inner life of Jesus " ; 
 it embodies not only recollection but interpretation, it is 
 Christ's message brought up to date. The Christ who 
 speaks is not simply the Teacher of the earthly ministry, 
 but the eternal Christ, the glorious Figure who walks 
 amid the candlesticks, and, though glorified, speaks still 
 through His servant to the churches. It is that con- 
 viction on the part of the Evangelist which accounts 
 for and justifies the biographical form in which the 
 entire message is presented. The actual writing of this 
 Gospel came at the end of a long and almost unconscious 
 process. The actual words of Jesus, lovingly cherished, 
 had been wrought over by the profound meditation of a 
 mind not sunk in its own abstractions, but stimulated at 
 once by the facts of experience and by the friction of 
 the speculative world in which John lived. More and 
 more had he come to see in Jesus the response to the 
 needs and thoughts of that world, and quite naturally 
 in his lips the Gospel assumed a form in which that fact 
 
THE FOURTH GOSPEL 19 
 
 was expressed. Truthfully does Browning make John 
 say : 
 
 " Much that at first in deed and word 
 Lay simply and sufficiently exposed, 
 Had grown (or else my soul was grown to match, 
 Fed through such years, familiar with such light, 
 Guarded and guided still to see and speak,) 
 Of new significance and fresh result ; 
 What first were guessed as points I now knew stars." 
 
 So, whilst the Synoptists give us the facts of Christ's 
 life, John introduces us to their inner meaning. He 
 gathers up his sense of the worth and work of Jesus into 
 a presentation which, just because it is so intimate and 
 spiritual, appeals to the head not less than to the heart, 
 as the crown of New Testament literature. 
 
 B.— THE PERSON OF CHRIST 
 
 The central place which Jesus occupies in this Gospel 
 makes it fitting that our study of its theology should 
 begin with the doctrine of His Person. If, as seems 
 natural, the Prologue is to be taken as outlining the 
 theme of the Gospel, the purpose of the writer is to 
 identify Jesus with the Logos or Word of philosophic 
 speculation. The Logos is described as eternally exist- 
 ing in the circle of the Divine nature, related to God, 
 yet distinct from Him, and serving as His agent in 
 creation and in the illumination and redemption of men. 
 
20 ST. JOHN 
 
 It is in the saying, " The Word became flesh and dwelt 
 among us," that the transition is made from the Logos 
 of abstract speculation to the Jesus of history, with 
 whom thenceforth the narrative is wholly concerned. 
 Hence, though the term " Logos " does not recur, the 
 conception is always in the background, and the burden 
 of John's effort is to show that all the Logos attributes 
 and functions, notably the mediation of life and light to 
 men, are focussed in the incarnate Jesus, who satisfies, 
 therefore, the rational as well as the religious needs 
 of man. 
 
 The term " Logos," introduced with an abruptness 
 which argues its familiarity to John's readers, was a gift 
 to the Christian vocabulary from Greek philosophy. 
 Having the double meaning of "reason" and "word," 
 it was first used (by Heraclitus of Ephesus) to denote 
 the rational principle which was seen to be exhibited in 
 nature. In that impersonal sense the term was trans- 
 mitted through Stoic philosophy to Philo, a learned Jew 
 who flourished at Alexandria early in the first century. 
 Plato had also used the term in the plural to express the 
 various super-sensible ideas — the thought-models, so to 
 speak — in harmony with which, conceived as separately 
 existing, the actual had been made. On the philosophic 
 side Philo unified these two conceptions, so that to him 
 the Logos was transcendent as well as immanent, this 
 double view being the easier because the term by its 
 twofold meaning suggested reason both as an abstract 
 
THE FOURTH GOSPEL 21 
 
 principle and as expressed in speech. To Philo also, 
 as he was a Jew, the Logos idea brought relief to the 
 religious situation. Under the influence of legalism, 
 Jewish thought had come to construe the holiness of 
 God in terms of materialism, so that the idea had 
 grown up that only by God's utter separation from the 
 world could His purity be secured. Direct contact 
 with the world being thus denied to God, the need was 
 felt for some intermediary to act on His behalf, with 
 the result that in Job and the Book of Proverbs 
 " Wisdom " becomes the Divine agent in creation, whilst 
 late rabbinic exegesis went so far as to substitute the 
 "Word of God" for the Divine name in passages of 
 the Old Testament where direct action is ascribed 
 to God. So in Philo two currents, Greek and Jewish, 
 blended, and the Logos idea was enriched in that it 
 came to denote the entire outgoing of the Divine 
 activity, and hence had a dynamical as well as a 
 rational side. 
 
 With Philo, however, the Logos, even when he speaks 
 of it in personal terms as " Son of God " and " only 
 begotten," never seems to have been more than a vivid 
 personification of the abstract activity of God. It is 
 not so with John. He comes to the idea, not by the 
 path of speculation, but by that of experience. He 
 anchors himself in historic fact, and makes that control 
 his metaphysic. Anxious though he is, therefore, to 
 meet philosophy on its own ground, his starting-point is 
 
22 ST. JOHN 
 
 the historic Jesus. He is a Christian first and a philo- 
 sopher afterwards, with the result that he is no thorough- 
 going Philonist. Fact with him dominates theory, and 
 hence, being convinced that the Jesus of history fulfilled 
 all the functions ascribed by philosophy to the Logos, he 
 does not hesitate to modify the philosophic conception 
 in two directions, viz., he assigns to the Logos a human 
 nature and a living personality. To him the Logos is 
 no abstract rational principle or the personified out- 
 going of the Divine activity, but is a Divine Person 
 manifested under human conditions. In his assertion, 
 " The Word became flesh," the emphasis of his thought 
 is on the predicate. Yet, strange to say, one charge 
 levelled against John is that, in the interests of the 
 Divine nature of Jesus, he obscures the representation 
 of His humanity. The charge is plausible in that the 
 Evangelist omits to relate the Baptism and Temptation 
 of Jesus (though in i. 32 the former event is implied), 
 and is silent as to the agony in Gethsemane and the cry 
 on the Cross. But when these deductions are made, 
 there is left to us One who is wearied and thirsty, weeps 
 at Lazarus' tomb, inquires its whereabouts, and, ere He 
 calls Lazarus forth from it, prays to His Father, doing 
 on that occasion for the bystanders' sake what the words 
 " I know that Thou hearest Me always " prove to have 
 been a regular practice on the part of Jesus. Granting, 
 therefore, that the Synoptists give us a fuller presenta- 
 tion of the humanity of Jesus, suflScient is said in the 
 
THE FOURTH GOSPEL 23 
 
 Fourth Gospel to show that its writer stood at the same 
 point of view. 
 
 He writes, however, in the interests of a larger faith. 
 The titles " Christ " or " Messiah," " Son of Man," and 
 " Son of God," which are applied to Jesus in the Synop- 
 tists, occur also in this Gospel, but in a different propor- 
 tion. As regards the Messianic office, not only does 
 Jesus on one occasion definitely claim it (iv. 26), but 
 the Baptist and the earliest disciples, as well as Peter 
 later on in Christ's ministry (vi. 69), recognise Him as 
 fulfilling it. In controversy with "the Jews" the 
 Messianic dignity of Jesus comes under discussion, and 
 in one passage (vii. 25-52) various objections are urged 
 against the recognition of Jesus as the Messiah, e.g. 
 that there was no mystery about His advent (ver. 27), that 
 He came out of Galilee, and was not known to be of 
 Davidic descent and a native of Bethlehem (vers. 41, 42). 
 It seems somewhat strange, in view of the nativity stories 
 in Matthew and Luke, that neither Jesus nor the 
 Evangelist says anything as to the last objection. The 
 probability, however, is that it was felt to be immaterial. 
 The fact is that the term " Messiah " was never big 
 enough to describe Jesus even as the founder of the 
 Kingdom of God. It was too national, and, in view 
 of its history, too unspiritual, to define Him. Hence, 
 though Jesus adopted it, because He felt that He corre- 
 sponded to a Divine promise and a national hope. He 
 read into it a spiritual content, and on that higher plane 
 
24 ST. JOHN 
 
 conducts the controversy concerning it, making no 
 attempt to answer objections which only had weight 
 on the plane of an external conception of the Messiah 
 and His work. What he points to as His credentials 
 is the consciousness that He had come from God, and 
 that he had in Himself that which would satisfy the 
 higher needs of man. The objections of His critics are 
 not so much refuted as transcended. 
 
 As regards the title " Son of Man," the Synoptic usage 
 is reflected in John in that it occurs consistently as a 
 self-designation on the part of Jesus, and appears, more- 
 ever, in much the same connections, the " Son of Man" 
 being spoken of as lifted up on the Cross, exalted to 
 the throne of God, and appointed to execute judgment. 
 Just, too, as in the Synoptists the " Son of Man " for- 
 gives sin, and seeks the lost, so in John (vi. 27) He 
 bestows eternal life, this gift being mediated by participa- 
 tion in the flesh and blood of the " Son of Man " (ver. 
 58). The meaning and derivation of "Son of Man" 
 are problems of criticism, but the most likely view is 
 that it was a veiled Messianic title recalling the symbolic 
 figure "like unto a son of man," who in the visions of 
 Daniel receives the Kingdom. It lays no emphasis, 
 even in John, upon the humanity of Jesus, but simply 
 asserts that Jesus, in spite of His lowly guise and the 
 humiliation of the Cross, was in function and destiny 
 identical with that glorious being whom prophetic vision 
 had foreseen. Here John and the Synoptists are at one. 
 
THE FOURTH GOSPEL 25 
 
 Not so, however, with the remaining title, *'Son of God." 
 Whether in its full form, or abbreviated as " the Son," 
 it occurs but rarely in the Synoptists, and there, e.g. in 
 the Temptation, means little more than the Messiah 
 viewed as a special object of the Divine favour, or as 
 the antithesis to "Father" (Matt. xi. 27), expresses the 
 ethical oneness between Jesus and God. In its use in 
 the Fourth Gospel the first point to be noted is that it 
 is the distinctive self-designation of Jesus. Nevertheless 
 in some passages it simply recalls the Synoptic meaning. 
 In X. 37, e.g.^ as the context shows, Jesus claims that 
 the title is applicable to Himself because He possesses 
 a Divine commission. There, and again in xi. 4, where 
 the glorifying of the " Son of God " is explained later 
 (ver. 42) as a belief, created by the resurrection of Lazarus, 
 that God had sent Jesus, the title is virtually equivalent 
 to Messiah, as it is also when used by the Baptist and 
 Nathanael (i. 34, 49). In other passages the ethical, as 
 distinct from the official, sonship is expressed, and stress 
 is laid upon the spiritual intimacy and moral union 
 existing between Christ and God. " The Father loveth 
 the Son, and sheweth Him all things that Himself doeth " 
 (v. 20). " If I judge. My judgment is true ; for I am 
 not alone, but I and the Father that sent Me" (viii. 16). 
 So constant and complete is this union of thought and 
 will that it is as if the two personalities had become 
 interfused in a way that only mystical language can 
 express. "Thou, Father, art in Me, and I in Thee" 
 
26 ST. JOHN 
 
 (xvii. 2i). The property of each had become their 
 common possession. " All Mine are Thine, and Thine 
 are Mine" (xvii. lo). This absolute identity on the 
 ethical plane is further declared in the great sayings " I 
 and the Father are one" (x. 30), and "He that hath 
 seen Me hath seen the Father" (xiv. 9). It accords 
 with this view that Jesus uniformly assumes towards 
 God the attitude of dependence. His teaching and 
 works, so He declares, are all derived, not original ; 
 they are given by the Father through the Son. Jesus 
 speaks to men all things that He "has heard of the 
 Father." " The Son can do nothing of Himself, but 
 what He seeth the Father doing" (v. 19). "The words 
 that I say unto you I speak not from Myself, but the 
 Father abiding in Me doeth His works" (xiv. 10). Out 
 of this sense of dependence sprang the confession " My 
 Father is greater than I." Hence it is no surprise to 
 find that Jesus prays to God, identifies Himself, where 
 worship is concerned, with His Jewish brethren (iv. 22), 
 and even pictures Himself as praying to God in His 
 future glory (xiv. 16). The being so far disclosed by 
 the term " Son of God " is one who on the ethical plane 
 had drawn wonderfully near to the heart of God, and 
 was conscious of such absolute devotion to the will of 
 the Father as made Him, though a man, in a unique 
 sense the Son of God's love. 
 
 Yet what we are forced to ask is whether this exhausts 
 the Johannine presentation of the sonship of Jesus. 
 
THE FOURTH GOSPEL 27 
 
 Are we not taught that this ethical sonship was rooted 
 in a deeper oneness of a metaphysical character — in an 
 identity of essence, so to speak, between Jesus and God ? 
 We may begin with the conception of John himself as it 
 is set forth in the Prologue. One undisputed contention 
 is that the Evangelist identifies Jesus with the Logos, 
 who evidently belongs to the Divine order. "In the 
 beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, 
 and the Word was God." Pre-existence, the fellowship 
 with God of One who was Himself an integral part of the 
 Divine nature — these are the positions there affirmed. 
 Hence Jesus, as John views Him, is a being of a new 
 order. The epithet " only-begotten " (i. 14) marks Him 
 as in point of origin, and, therefore, of quality, separate 
 from men, among whom He moves as the source of 
 life and light. Certain affirmations found in the body 
 of the Gospel on the lips of Jesus Himself point in the 
 same direction. Jesus repeatedly speaks of Himself as 
 " sent " by God, or " coming forth " from Him. He 
 has " come down " from heaven, and has yet to ascend 
 "where He was before." He prays for the glory which 
 He had with God " before the world was," and in 
 another striking saying tells His critics : ** Before 
 Abraham was, I am," a declaration which in its very 
 form seems intended to express an eternal existence. 
 Similarly, in the conversation with Nicodemus, Jesus 
 explains His familiarity with heavenly things as due to 
 His previous life in the heavenly places, and the Baptist 
 
28 ST. JOHN 
 
 ascribes Christ's priority over himself to a priority of 
 existence (i. 30). Some of these statements, e.g. those 
 which speak of Christ as " sent " by God or " coming 
 forth " from Him, can be interpreted as merely denoting 
 a Divine commission, but others cannot be thus easily re- 
 solved, nor does the theory of a merely ideal pre-existence 
 naturally fit the language. Beyschlag and Wendt 
 favour this interpretation, and it is quite true that such a 
 conception was not foreign to Judaism. The Temple, 
 Jerusalem, and the Kingdom of God were thought of as 
 existing in heaven prior to their manifestation on earth. 
 In the same way the Messiah, so it is claimed, though 
 actually non-existent, existed as a thought in which God 
 delighted, before Abraham, or even the beginning of 
 creation, and this view is all that the language of the 
 Fourth Gospel requires. But, to take simply one passage, 
 the saying about Abraham was in answer to an objection 
 that Jesus, though not fifty years old, had spoken as if 
 He had seen Abraham, who had lived centuries before. 
 What possible bearing has His answer upon that 
 objection, if Jesus meant that He only existed in those 
 far-off days as an idea ? And why, on that view, were 
 the people who gave Christ's words a literal meaning 
 allowed to go uncorrected ? Hints of pre-existence are 
 not wholly absent from Christ's words in the Synoptists, 
 e.g. He speaks about David's son being also David's 
 Lord. And in the Fourth Gospel the natural interpreta- 
 tion of the sayings under discussion, especially in view 
 
THE FOURTH GOSPEL 29 
 
 of the definite language of the Prologue, is that the 
 earthly life of Jesus is regarded as an interval in a 
 heavenly existence out of which He comes and to which 
 He returns. 
 
 As regards the moral perfection of Jesus the absence 
 of sin is affirmed, e.g. in the challenge, " Which of you 
 convinceth Me of sin?" But far more important than 
 that negative condition is the positive presence of good- 
 ness which, within the range of His moral probation, 
 Jesus exhibited in absolute degree. " I seek not Mine 
 own will," He says, " but the will of Him that sent Me." 
 " I do always the things that are pleasing to Him." 
 Clearly, therefore, it is in the last analysis a being of a 
 unique order which this Gospel presents to us. The 
 human nature which Jesus indubitably possesses only par- 
 tially explains Him. Other men are " children " of God, 
 but He is " the Son " in the absolute sense, and God is 
 " His own Father," the two possessing in the mystery of 
 the Divine nature a bond between them which passes 
 beyond the ethical into the metaphysical. This explains 
 the mysterious aloofness with which Jesus moves among 
 men, as if the light of other days shone in His eyes, and 
 His thoughts dwelt in that other world which was His 
 true home. By such a presentation of Jesus does John 
 fill out and unify the partial conceptions of Jesus which 
 previous thinkers, e.g. Paul and the author of the 
 Epistle to the Hebrews, had furnished. To him more than 
 to any other New Testament writer we owe the doctrine 
 
30 ST. JOHN 
 
 of the divinity of Jesus, so that his Gospel has justly 
 been described as " the Gospel of the Incarnation." It 
 is quite true that John leaves some questions unanswered. 
 He is silent as to the mode in which the Divine and 
 human natures became blended in Christ; he says 
 nothing (save in a doubtful variant of i. 13) concerning 
 the dogma of the supernatural birth, neither does he 
 tell us what limitations the Logos submitted to on His 
 entrance into a human form. All that John does is to 
 put the two natures side by side in Jesus, leaving, sub- 
 sequent reflection to determine the mode and conditions 
 of their coexistence. He does this because he is only 
 incidentally a philosopher, or even a coherent thinker. 
 He approaches Jesus from the side, not of speculation, 
 but of experience. What he knows as a matter of expe- 
 rience is that in Christ God has come nigh to him, and 
 has made upon him so wonderful an impression that 
 only the Divine category seems to befit Jesus. Hence, 
 whilst John summons many witnesses to testify to the 
 greatness of Jesus — the Baptist, the Old Testament, the 
 words and works of Christ — the final witness is the 
 authentication which the Father has given to the Son 
 in the Divine power which has marked the impact of 
 Jesus upon the world. The Christian movement, 
 as it unrolled its wondrous story before the apostle, 
 demanded for its explanation a Christ, as its Founder 
 and Sustainer, who came out of the very bosom of God, 
 and tabernacled among men as God manifest in the flesh. 
 
THE FOURTH GOSPEL 31 
 
 C— GOD AND THE HOLY SPIRIT 
 
 The theory that the Fourth Gospel is simply the 
 grafting of Philo's ideas on to the Christian stock breaks 
 down, when we consider its doctrine of God. On dif- 
 ferent grounds, philosophical in the case of Philo, re- 
 ligious in that of Palestinian Judaism, which regarded 
 holiness as involving separation from matter, the notion 
 of God as transcendent had become prevalent in the 
 first century. But a God wholly transcendent is also 
 unknown, since there are no relations between Him and 
 the world which can become the medium of His self- 
 manifestation. Philo perceived this difficulty, and hence 
 in his philosophy it is the Logos who through patriarch 
 and prophet acts as the sole medium of Divine revela- 
 tion to man. That idea reappears in this Gospel. God 
 is defined as " Spirit," by which term is meant that God 
 is lifted above the limitations of space and time, and, 
 being immaterial in substance and imperceptible to the 
 senses, is most akin to that invisible element in man, 
 the attitude of which to God is the soul of worship 
 (iv. 24). God being thus outside the world known to 
 the senses, no man has ever seen Him, and He can 
 simply be known through the only-begotten Son who 
 has revealed Him. Jesus is " the Way," and only by 
 Him can men come to the Father. 
 
 Now in this claim there may be nothing more than 
 the Synoptists report Jesus as affirming of Himself in 
 
ST. JOHN 
 
 the words, "Neither doth any know the Father, save 
 the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son willeth to 
 reveal Him." It cannot be denied that in Jesus we 
 have a conception of God which is unique, and that the 
 name " Father," as defined by the filial consciousness of 
 Jesus, represents a doctrine which is both new and 
 final. The glory of Jesus among the prophets of man- 
 kind is that He has shown us God as "the Father." 
 Moreover, in so far as we view the Logos as a Divine 
 principle of revelation which, eternally active, simply 
 attained fullest utterance in the historic Jesus, we may 
 regard all truth as mediated by His activity, so that every 
 wortliy conception of God which came to birth in seers 
 and prophets, outside Judaism as well as in it, was but 
 the unrecognised product of "the Spirit of Christ which 
 was in them." But we cannot be sure that John took 
 this comprehensive view. To him Jesus seems to be 
 the sum-total of revelation, so that God can only be 
 known as He is known through Christ. Yet at this 
 point alone has John affinity with the Logos doctrine of 
 Philo. The Father, of whom Jesus becomes the re- 
 vealer, is not simply a transcendent God, aloof and 
 passionless. No ! He loves the world, gives His Son 
 for its redemption, raises the dead and quickens them, 
 draws men to Christ, is immanent in the believer, and, 
 speaking generally, is ceaselessly putting forth energy in 
 a way which justifies a similar activity on the part of the 
 Son. "My Father worketh hitherto and I work." 
 
THE FOURTH GOSPEL 35 
 
 Even the phrase " holy Father," like the cognate ex- 
 pression "righteous Father," only lays stress on the 
 ethical perfection of God. The notion of holiness as- 
 meaning simply separation from the world is absent 
 when the holiness of the Divine Father becomes the 
 plea on which the high-priestly Christ pleads, not for 
 His followers' separation from the world, but for their 
 protection from its evil (xvii. 11, 15). And finally, we 
 see again and again that the controlling element in Gody 
 as John presents Him, is love. But what does that 
 conception imply but the ceaseless forth-going of the 
 Divine to the human, the constant entrance of God into* 
 relations in which His love may find satisfaction as it 
 enriches and saves ? 
 
 The Johannine doctrine of the Holy Spirit requires 
 lengthier examination. Part of the prophetic forecast 
 concerning the Messianic time was, that it would be 
 marked by a great access of the Divine activity described 
 as an " outpouring of the Spirit." The Spirit, moreover, 
 was associated with the Messiah Himself. Both of 
 these ideas find a place in the Johannine doctrine. Ta 
 begin with, though John supplies no account of the 
 Baptism of Jesus, the Baptist is made to refer to it as 
 marked by the descent upon Jesus of the Holy Spirit 
 (i. 33). Evidently that was regarded by the Evangelist 
 as the central element of the rite in its significance for 
 Jesus — the reception by Him of the Divine equipment 
 for His Messianic career. It may have been John's wish 
 
 c 
 
34 ST. JOHN 
 
 to emphasise the spiritual chrism as also the central 
 element in Christian baptism. At all events it is signifi- 
 cant that, whilst entrance into the Kingdom of God is 
 made by Jesus in His talk with Nicodemus to depend 
 on birth " of water and the Spirit " (a phrase which, as 
 most interpreters are agreed, refers to baptism on its 
 two sides, the formal and the symbolical), emphasis is 
 laid on the activity of the Spirit as alone giving worth to 
 the ordinance. Only as the outward rite is attended by 
 the inward reception of the Spirit does it pass from a 
 religious form into a means of grace. So far as Jesus is 
 concerned, the intimate communion of thought and will 
 existing between Him and the Father is frequently re- 
 ferred to, but only once is the Holy Spirit associated 
 with it. In what is clearly one of John's own medita- 
 tions (iii. 31-34), the message of Jesus is described as 
 concerned with " heavenly things," which one who is of 
 the earth, even though he be a prophet, cannot declare 
 save with the limitations which attach to his earthly 
 origin. But Jesus is a native of the sphere to which the 
 heavenly realities belong, and, therefore, is above all 
 other seers and prophets, since He speaks of what He 
 has seen and heard. His moral and intellectual faculties 
 being quickened in this act of communication by the 
 endowment of the Spirit without measure. Thus does 
 John set Jesus apart, and beholds in Him and His 
 teaching a plenary activity of the Holy Spirit. 
 
 And that which belonged to Jesus during His 
 
THE FOURTH GOSPEL 35 
 
 ministry is passed on by Him to His Church. The con- 
 ceptions of this Gospel on this subject are extremely 
 definite. So absolutely restricted at first to Jesus 
 Himself is the Holy Spirit, that a saying about rivers of 
 living water (vii. 39) is interpreted by the Evangelist as 
 referring to the Spirit, which, he says, " they that believed 
 on Him {i.e. Jesus) were to receive : for the Spirit was not 
 yet given, because Jesus was not yet glorified." In perfect 
 accord with this view is the teaching in the Upper 
 Room that the coming of the Holy Spirit was de- 
 pendent on the departure of Jesus. "It is expedient 
 for you that I go away : for if I go not away, the 
 Comforter will not come unto you " (xvi. 7). Not until 
 after the Resurrection, when the process of Christ's 
 separation from the disciples and of His glorification 
 had already begun, does Jesus breathe upon them, and 
 say, "Receive ye the Holy Ghost." When we see 
 that that passage occurs in close connection with a 
 description of what were to be the functions of the 
 Church, viz. the discipline of its members and the 
 mission to the unsaved world, it is not strained exegesis 
 to infer that it is the actual endowment and tasks of the 
 early Church which are there vividly receiving prophetic 
 description. The broad fact remains that the Spirit is 
 regarded as belonging to the Church only after the 
 glorification of Jesus. He takes the place of the absent 
 Christ. In so far as the Spirit was with the disciples 
 during the earthly ministry of Jesus, He was only with 
 
36 ST. JOHN 
 
 them as He was operative in Christ. Such, at any rate, 
 seems to be the meaning compelled by the distinction 
 of both tense and phrasing in the words, " He dwelleth 
 with you, and shall be in you" (xiv. 17). He who even 
 then dwelt with the disciples, because He was present 
 in the Master with whom they lived, was to pass 
 from an external Power embodied in Christ only to an 
 inward Presence existing in all His followers. 
 
 It is upon these two things — the inwardness of the 
 Spirit, and the restriction of His indwellingto the Church 
 — that emphasis is laid. The world cannot receive 
 Him, because it lacks affinity for Him ; " it beholdeth 
 Him not, neither knoweth Him." He belongs simply 
 to the Church because His reception (spoken of some- 
 times as if it were that of the Father and the Son) is 
 morally conditioned ; it is possible only to those who love 
 Christ and keep His words. Action upon the sinful 
 world is contemplated, for He is to bring to it conviction 
 concerning sin and righteousness and judgment, but this 
 action is not from within, but from without ; indeed it is 
 the Holy Spirit present in the Church and fortifying its 
 witness which is thus to convict the world. The Spirit 
 dwelling in Christ was subsequently to have His earthly 
 home in the Church, which thus in its organic form 
 represented a second Incarnation, that final tabernacling 
 of God with men of which it could be said, " He shall 
 abide with you for ever." Taking the place of the 
 departed Christ, the Spirit was to be to the disciples all 
 
THE FOURTH GOSPEL 37 
 
 that Christ had been, " another Comforter " or Paraclete, 
 standing by their side to defend them when imperilled, 
 turning their sorrow into joy, enabling them to do the 
 "greater works " seen in the spiritual transformations of 
 the apostolic age, and guiding them into all truth con- 
 cerning Him whose disciples they had been. Of all the 
 functions of the Spirit the last is viewed as supreme. 
 The Paraclete is *' the Spirit of truth," and His main 
 work is prophetic, viz. the interpretation of Christ. " He 
 shall take of Mine," says Jesus, "and reveal them unto 
 you." Not only was He to bring all things to remem- 
 brance, but the disciples were to see in sayings and 
 deeds of Jesus a meaning which had previously escaped 
 them. And to illumination of the past was to be added 
 foresight of the future, for, said Jesus, "He shall 
 announce to you things that are coming." Yet never is 
 the Spirit an independent witness speaking of Himself, 
 but, for the past. He repeats the message of Jesus, and, 
 for the rest, Jesus now declares from heaven through 
 the Spirit the " many things " which He could not speak 
 on earth, for " all that the Spirit heareth that doth He 
 speak." Hence all new truth concerning Christ and 
 His redeeming purpose into which the Church entered 
 after His ascension was viewed as the gift of the 
 risen Christ, continuing from heaven His earthly 
 ministry. To the Church He who was the theme of 
 its Gospel was also the maker of its theology. 
 
 Such, at any rate, was the view of John, and those who 
 
38 ST. JOHN 
 
 see in the discourses of this Gospel John's own reflec- 
 tions fused with recollections of what Jesus had said, yet 
 all without qualification put into the lips of Jesus, regard 
 that mode of expression as not so much a literary 
 artifice, as a courageous and sincere application of the 
 view that the whole had come from Christ ; it had been 
 spoken to John, either to his ear or in his heart, by Jesus 
 Himself. That brings us to what seems a certain confu- 
 sion of thought in John's presentation of this view. In 
 most of the sayings in the Upper Room the Paraclete 
 is apparently distinct from Jesus. He is "another" 
 Comforter, i.e. another being of the same order as Jesus 
 Himself. Sent by the Father at the entreaty of the Son, 
 He comes to fill the gap caused by the withdrawal of 
 Jesus. Yet, on the other hand, there are certain sayings 
 where the new visitant is identified with Jesus. " I will 
 not leave you orphans," says Jesus, " I will come to 
 you." " We will come to Him," He says once again, 
 there uniting the Father with Himself in the indwelling 
 of the Spirit. In the saying *' I have declared unto 
 them Thy name, and will declare it " (xvii. 26), the 
 natural reference in the future phrase is to the added 
 revelation which the disciples were to receive in the 
 dispensation of the Spirit. How is this apparent incon- 
 sistency of statement, which meets us elsewhere in the 
 New Testament, e.g. in II. Cor. iii. 17, to be explained? 
 We think that the explanation is to be found in the 
 New Testament view of the Spirit as absorbed with the 
 
THE FOURTH GOSPEL 39 
 
 continuation of the work of Jesus. He is not pictured 
 as discharging independent functions. He simply con- 
 tinues the interrupted ministry of Jesus, keeps green the 
 memory of what He said and did, expounding its deeper 
 significance, and at the same time supplementing it in 
 word and deed. The Old Testament idea of the Spirit 
 as the underlying principle of life in man and the 
 universe disappears, or is transferred to the Logos, and 
 the Spirit, withdrawn from the world, moves wholly 
 within the Church, and there is so engaged with the 
 person and history and purpose of Christ that to the 
 consciousness it is as if He were Jesus over again, Jesus 
 hidden from men's eyes that He might enthrone Himself in 
 their hearts. It is in this identity of function that we must 
 seek the explanation of the apparent identity of agent. 
 
 That this identity, however, is more than apparent it 
 would be presumptuous to say. John's language, unless 
 we are to withhold from words their natural meaning, 
 seems to point to distinctions of a personal kind within 
 the Godhead. The Holy Spirit passes from an Influence 
 to a Person, for not only is He represented by the 
 masculine personal pronoun — an unusual usage, which 
 cannot be hastily dismissed as a personification — but 
 the functions of teaching, &c., ascribed to Him are such 
 as fall properly within the sphere of personal activity. 
 Moreover, as we have seen, the Logos, identified with 
 the historic Jesus, is expressly declared to be " God." 
 Hence there is, according to this Gospel, a plurality in 
 
40 ST. JOHN 
 
 God, a threefoldness which, none the less, was felt to 
 be compatible with monotheism, for the Father is re- 
 ferred to as "the only God" and "the only true God.'' 
 How the Evangelist held and harmonised the two con- 
 ceptions he does not say, any more than he speaks con- 
 •cerning the Spirit's relation to the Logos or to the world 
 prior to the Christian era. But if John leaves some of 
 our questions unanswered, the explanation is that, whilst 
 formulating a theology, he is still more declaring an 
 •experience. It is less the philosopher who speaks than 
 the Christian furnishing philosophy with the raw material 
 for the construction of a final synthesis. Starting with 
 his monotheistic faith, the writer feels that the God of 
 his nation had come nigh to men in Christ in a manner 
 so vivid and unique that nothing but a conception of 
 Jesus as Himself Divine seemed to fit the facts ; in Him 
 God Himself, and not simply a Divine messenger, had 
 appeared among men. Nor was this all, for to their ex- 
 perience of God in Christ there had been added another 
 manifestation, subtle, pervasive, so like in power and 
 quality to that which the Church had known in Jesus, 
 that it also demanded to be conceived as personal and 
 Divine. So spake the voice of experience. The Church, 
 worshipping the holy Father, felt that it had been 
 founded by a Divine Son, and was the home and 
 sphere of a Divine Spirit. It was for theology, with 
 philosophy as her handmaid, to work up these facts of 
 experience into a scheme of thought which should 
 
THE FOURTH GOSPEL 41 
 
 possess unity with itself and with the religious history 
 of Israel and the race. A beginning was made towards 
 that synthesis when John identified the Jesus of history 
 with the Logos of philosophy. But the entire problem 
 was too great and complicated to be solved at one stroke. 
 It remained for minds more deeply versed in philosophy 
 than was John to give to his doctrine of God that scientific 
 formulation which, after much controversy, was essayed 
 in the great councils of the Church. But the doctrine 
 itself, founded, as it was, upon experience, was part of 
 the evangelical deposit which the Church received, and, 
 because she could not doubt the experience, she felt no 
 serious disposition to doubt the explanation which John 
 had attached to it. Her business, so she felt, was not 
 to question what she had received, but to expound and 
 defend it. In this way only does post-canonical litera- 
 ture exhibit advance upon the doctrine of God which is 
 furnished in the Fourth Gospel. 
 
 D.— THE CHURCH AND THE WORLD 
 
 To express the blessings of salvation John employs a 
 distinctive terminology the nature of which will be 
 examined later. When we ask whether those blessings 
 are regarded as open to all men, the answer cannot be 
 hastily given. There are sayings in the Fourth Gospel 
 which suggest a universalism as complete as that which 
 we find in the Pauline Epistles, and thought obviously 
 
42 ST. JOHN 
 
 moves in an air freer than that which prevailed when 
 Paul fought his great battle against Jewish exclusiveness. 
 Not only does Jesus without protest seek converts 
 among Samaritans, and rejoice at that ingathering of 
 the Gentiles of which the eagerness of some Greeks to 
 see Him was a prophecy, but He openly declares that 
 He has other sheep, not of the fold of Judaism, and that 
 His intention is to gather them in, so that Jew and 
 Gentile may constitute "one flock" under "one shep- 
 herd." The death of Jesus was intended to effect that 
 consummation (xi. 52). When, again, we are told that 
 God loved the world, and in proof thereof gave Christ 
 ** that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish " 
 (iii. 16), universalism seems unequivocally expressed. 
 But whilst salvation passes obviously beyond all racial 
 limitations, and is not the monopoly of a single nation, 
 the possibility of its realisation by all, which alone can 
 give it real universality, will depend upon how far men 
 are able to meet the conditions on which its bestowal 
 depends. To examine the teaching of the Fourth 
 Gospel on this point is our next task. 
 
 One characteristic of the Johannine writings is that 
 truth is set forth through the medium of contrasts. There 
 runs through them what has been called an " ethical 
 dualism." ''Light" is set over against "darkness," 
 salvation is a passage from "death" to "life," the little 
 community of Christian disciples is sharply distinguished 
 from the " world," " things below " are contrasted with 
 
THE FOURTH GOSPEL 45 
 
 " things above," "flesh" with "spirit." Of these anti- 
 theses the most important for our immediate purpose is 
 that of the Church and the world. There are two Greek 
 words, both rendered by "world" in our English Bible^ 
 and both representing the existing order of things, but 
 doing so from different points of view. One term, re- 
 produced bodily in our word "cosmos," answers to a 
 characteristic Greek conception by which the visible 
 framework of nature, whether embracing the entire uni- 
 verse or simply the earth, was viewed pre-eminently as 
 the embodiment of order. The other expressed the 
 favourite Jewish view, which, surveying reality under the 
 categories of time and spirit, preferred to speak of seons 
 or epochs, the existing order being ethically and tem- 
 porally conceived. The prevalent term for " world " in 
 John is "cosmos," and into it there have been brought 
 limitations of its original usage. In only a few phrases, 
 e.g. " before the world was," or " before the foundation 
 of the world," can it be said to comprehend nature as 
 well as man. In general it follows a restriction, first 
 manifest in Alexandrine Greek, by which it denoted 
 mankind viewed as a society organised on a rational and 
 moral base. Such was the " world " which God loved 
 (iii. 16), and into which the Logos came as its light. 
 But a still more restricted view remains. One of the 
 familiar conceptions of the New Testament is that what 
 we term " the forces of evil " have an organised form. 
 They constitute a kingdom having Satan as its prince. 
 
44 ST. JOHN 
 
 with invisible powers of the air, in various grades and 
 ranks, marshalled under his leadership, and leagued 
 with men on the earth, the peculiar sphere of Satan's 
 activity, through whose hostility to goodness and truth 
 evil finds its supreme manifestation. Hence the *' world " 
 comes ultimately to mean the anti-Christian, and even 
 non-Christian, forces and personalities of the time, and 
 so stands as the natural antithesis of the "Church." 
 Our difficulty in realising this sharp contrast arises 
 mainly because we do not read ourselves back into New 
 Testament conditions. Living, as we are privileged to 
 do, in a society which, even where it is not professedly 
 Christian, pays large homage to Christian ideals, we fail 
 to realise the different conditions which prevailed when 
 every community of Christians was like some outpost in 
 an enemy's country, set in an environment of Jewish 
 hostility or heathen corruption, planted in a society 
 which was either bitterly hostile or contemptuously in- 
 different, and was absolutely alien in faith and practice 
 and ideals. Under such circumstances it was only to 
 be expected that the cleavage between the Church and 
 the " world " should be decisive and complete. 
 
 It is the " world " thus conceived which appears 
 repeatedly in this Gospel, the term occurring eighty 
 times in John, as against only twelve instances in the 
 Synoptists, where, except in one doubtful passage (Matt, 
 xviii. 7), the predominant Johannine meaning is absent. 
 A kindred conception is seen in another Johannine anti- 
 
THE FOURTH GOSPEL 45 
 
 thesis — that of "light" and "darkness." It is under 
 the latter figure that the kingdom of evil is described by 
 Paul as well as John. But this term, too, has an ethical 
 rather than an intellectual connotation. It denotes the 
 realm, not from which the revealing light is withheld, 
 but where it is ineffectual. " The light shineth in the 
 darkness, and the darkness did not lay hold upon it " 
 (John i. 5). Men who assume this attitude to revela- 
 tion abide in darkness, and do the deeds of darkness, 
 and are in league with those whom Paul, in a phrase 
 which combines the two antitheses already referred to, 
 are "rulers of this world of darkness" (Eph. vi. 12), the 
 spiritual personalities which hold sway in the kingdom 
 of evil. It is this darkness of practical unbelief — 
 spoken of sometimes, therefore, under the figure of 
 spiritual "death" — which the Logos came to dispel 
 The "life" which was in Him had revelation as its 
 function; it was "the light of men." Its manifestation 
 was with a view to revelation. Hence John speaks of 
 the historic Jesus as "the true light," the only light that 
 had full correspondence with reality, and of Him he 
 says, in what is probably the correct translation of 
 i. 9, that He " by His coming into the world lighteth 
 every man," just as Jesus, expressing a corresponding 
 idea, is reported as saying, " As long as I am in the 
 world, I am the light of the world." But this does not 
 mean that the Hght actually dispels the darkness. The 
 natural analogy fails at this point, and the picture Johrt 
 
46 ST. JOHN 
 
 gives to us is that of Jesus coming to a world so 
 involved in evil that darkness wraps it in, a darkness 
 which consists not simply of an intellectual blindness, 
 but of a radical perversion of will, with the result that, 
 though the light shines, the darkness rejects it. Hence, 
 in a saying that is probably one of John's own reflec- 
 tions, we are told that "the light is come into the 
 world," and that men, because their deeds were evil, 
 "loved the darkness rather than the light," with the 
 consequence that the coming of the light had for them 
 issues of judgment and condemnation (iii. 19). 
 
 Such, then, as John surveys the situation, was the 
 sharp cleavage running through human society. It has 
 -already been pointed out that we find it difficult to 
 make the gulf between Christian and non-Christian as 
 absolute as he appears to do. The immediate problem, 
 however, is whether he recognises any possibihty of 
 passing from the world to the Church. For one charge 
 levelled against the Fourth Gospel is that it despairs of 
 the world. The charge derives some specious colour 
 from the words found in iii. 20, 21. There we are told 
 that the man who habitually does evil things hates the 
 light, and shrinks from the conviction which approach 
 to it would involve, whilst he who does the truth comes 
 to the light, to find in it the seal of approval upon his 
 past deeds. In these and other words some critics have 
 detected an ethical fatalism. We seem to be taught 
 that Jesus comes to reveal the moral quality of men 
 
THE FOURTH GOSPEL 47 
 
 rather than to change it. A select few are drawn to 
 Christ by spiritual affinities, because already they *'are 
 of the truth," or " hear the truth." They are the sheep 
 who know the Shepherd, and are known of Him, and by 
 a spiritual instinct follow Him. But even their coming, 
 so it is claimed, has in it an arbitrary element. They 
 come to Christ because the Father draws them, or they 
 are the Father's gift to the Son, or the objects of Christ's 
 gracious choice. But are these expressions recessarily 
 fatalistic in meaning ? Need they imply more than that 
 a man's place in Christ's following, instead of being the 
 result of caprice or accident, is in harmony with spiritual 
 law, and is an expression of it ? That in the working 
 of this law there is a mysterious and seemingly arbitrary 
 element will be granted by all who see how far, as 
 regards both original nature and environment, things are 
 ordained for us, so that our very freedom is hedged 
 about with limitations. 
 
 Whether all play of the human will issuing in moral 
 change is excluded, will appear as we proceed. For 
 over against those who "are of the truth" John puts the 
 sinful world which, habitually doing evil, hates the light 
 and refuses to come to it. Between the two classes 
 there seems to be an impassable gulf. The world, 
 alienated from the truth, is so hopeless that Jesus does 
 not even pray for it (xvii. 9). His sole concern is for 
 the elect company who, belonging originally to God, 
 have been granted by Him to Christ (ver. 6). In this 
 
48 ST. JOHN 
 
 presentation we seem far removed from that optimism 
 with which the Jesus of the Synoptists sees good even 
 in the worst, and, because all are recoverable, seeks all, 
 and despairs of none. But is the difference as funda- 
 mental as some have supposed it to be ? Is there not a 
 sense, e.g., in which the judgment for which Jesus comes 
 into the world has redemptive significance? Is not 
 judgment often the beginning of salvation ? It is true 
 that, to those who already love the truth and do it, the 
 presence of Christ means no condemnation, for they 
 move to Him by moral affinity, and receive from Him 
 the deepening of what they already are. But the evil 
 man must first know his sin, ere he will forsake it. He 
 may not come to the light in the sense that he volun- 
 tarily seeks it, but the light comes to him, and, just as 
 the presence of Christ woke up in the heart of Zacchseus 
 a sense of sin, so may judgment be the forerunner of 
 salvation. But though necessary, it is only initial, and 
 it is as meaning that judgment was not Christ's final 
 word, but salvation flowing out of judgment, that we 
 can harmonise the sayings in which He sometimes 
 affirms that judgment was, and again, as compared with 
 salvation, was not, the purpose of His coming. In the 
 presence of Christ men knew themselves for what they 
 were, and thus took the first step towards becoming 
 what they should be. 
 
 Other considerations show that the existing state of 
 men, and even of the " world," was not to be the final 
 
THE FOURTH GOSPEL 49 
 
 one. The very disciples had once belonged to the 
 world, but had passed out of it by the choice of Christ 
 or the gift of God (xv. 19, xvii. 6). A passage from the 
 " world " to the Church had, therefore, once been open, 
 and that it was not yet closed appears in the fact that 
 Jesus speaks of His disciples having a mission to the 
 world akin to His own, and contemplates those who 
 would believe through their word (xvii. 18, 20). It is 
 suggestive also that Jesus, in looking forward to the 
 Cross, sees in it the crowning judgment and defeat of 
 the world. In that consummation of His rejection, the 
 unbelief, which was the world's gravest sin, was to stand 
 so manifest to the world itself that Christ's defeat would 
 really be His victory, since " the prince of this world " 
 would be cast out of his dominion, and the Cross itself, 
 set in the framework of the glory which was to follow, 
 was to multiply indefinitely the influence of Christ. " I," 
 says He, " if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all 
 men unto Myself" (xii. 32). It is as if His glorification 
 through the Cross would, as Jesus viewed it, release the 
 *' world " from the malign power which held it in thrall, 
 and set free in Christ new powers of redemption, so 
 that none would finally resist His attraction. Another 
 consideration pointing to the salvability of the " world " 
 is that the Holy Spirit has a mission to it. He is to bring 
 home to it the sin of its unbelief, to make plain as 
 regards Christ the righteousness which has been sealed 
 by His exaltation to the Father, and to disclose the 
 
 D 
 
50 ST. JOHN 
 
 judgment and overthrow of the world's prince which 
 appear in the death and glorification of Christ. What 
 meaning could such a mission have if it did not con- 
 template redemptive issues ? Surely the thought of Jesus 
 is that conditions were on the eve of being created by the 
 world's own action which would make for its salvation. 
 
 A similar conclusion follows from the antithesis of 
 sons of God and sons of the devil. "Ye," says Jesus 
 to His opponents, " are of your father the devil " 
 (viii. 44). But there is no conflict between this saying 
 and the Synoptic teaching concerning the universal 
 Fatherhood of God. What too many fail to see is that, 
 though God is the Father of all men, all men are not 
 necessarily His sons. Fatherhood and sonship are 
 conceptions which move on the ethical plane ; they are 
 concerned with moral attitude and disposition, and so, 
 whilst God always has the fatherly disposition towards 
 man, man often lacks the filial spirit towards God. 
 Nay, judged by moral affinities, men too often are 
 children of the devil rather than children of God, and 
 the desires of their father they choose to do. But there, 
 again, a passage is open from the one relationship to 
 the other, and the mission of Christ was not simply to 
 tell men what they were ; it was to make men other than 
 they were. Moral affinities can be changed, for even 
 of the spiritually dead Jesus does not despair. Spiritual 
 death can be vanquished by the gift of life which He brings 
 in overflowing measure. " The hour now is," He says 
 
THE FOURTH GOSPEL 51 
 
 with exultation, " when the dead shall hear the voice of 
 the Son of God ; and they that hear shall live " (v. 25). 
 Finally, what is the symbolical teaching contemplated by 
 the stories of the raising of Lazarus and of the healing 
 of the man born blind and of the sufferer at the Pool of 
 Bethesda, if it be not that no sinful man need remain as 
 he is, but that the most desperate state of soul is one for 
 which the Christ of this Gospel has grace and salvation ? 
 
 E.— THE WORK OF CHRIST 
 
 One broad distinction between the Pauline Epistles 
 and the Fourth Gospel is that, whereas to Paul the death 
 of Christ was the very heart of the Gospel, so gathering 
 into itself the purpose of the Incarnation that the public 
 ministry of Jesus receives but meagre attention, John, 
 on the other hand, places no such emphasis on the 
 Cross. Its relation to sin is not absolutely ignored, for 
 the Baptist refers to Jesus as " the Lamb of God which 
 taketh away the sin of the world," whilst some critics 
 have detected a theological motive in John's apparent 
 revision of the Synoptic chronology, as regards the day 
 on which Jesus was crucified, in that the Evangelist 
 wishes to identify Him with the paschal lamb, thus 
 endorsing Paul's words : " Our passover also hath been 
 sacrificed, even Christ " (I. Cor. v. 7). The notion of 
 Christ's death being an atonement for sin is, on that 
 view, not absent from John's thought. Nevertheless he 
 
52 ST. JOHN 
 
 shows no fondness for so depicting it. He prefers, 
 first of all, to put it in line with the previous ministry, 
 and to exhibit it as the culmination of Christ's life. To 
 depict the Cross as the main purpose for which Jesus 
 became incarnate hardly accords with the language 
 ascribed to Jesus on the eve of His passion : " I 
 glorified Thee on the earth, having accomplished the 
 work which Thou gavest Me to do " (xvii. 4). The 
 Cross, as the Fourth Gospel exhibits it, is but Christ's 
 fidelity to His vocation carried to the ultimate. Jesus 
 dying is but the Shepherd laying down His life for the 
 sheep, or the Master giving to His friends the highest 
 manifestation of His love. In so far as the Cross has 
 a distinct meaning, it is, secondly, the glorification of 
 Jesus. With its shame banished to the background, it 
 is the lifting up of Jesus from the earth, the beginning 
 of that exaltation in which, like a spiritual magnet, 
 Jesus would draw all men to Him, and gather into one 
 family the scattered children of God. Like a grain of 
 wheat which perishes but to renew itself in ampler 
 fashion, Christ's death, viewed as the first stage in His 
 withdrawal to the unseen, meant release from the 
 limitations which had beset Him in the incarnate state, 
 and entrance upon unexampled glory and might. 
 
 It may be that John was less disposed to put special 
 emphasis upon the Cross, because to him the whole 
 career of Jesus had such deep significance. To him 
 incarnation is a larger idea than atonement. His 
 
THE FOURTH GOSPEL 53 
 
 normative idea is that of Jesus as the self-revelation of 
 God. Sin, therefore, which is illustrated in this Gospel 
 by the growing estrangement of the Jews from Jesus 
 and their ultimate rejection of Him, is in its gravest and 
 inclusive form unbelief in Christ, Jesus being what He 
 was, the unveiling of God Himself to man, how could 
 there be deeper guilt or greater perverseness than to 
 turn away from perfect truth and holy love, to have God 
 reveal His glory to men, and yet for them to be blind to 
 it or despise it ? Sin became blacker when men sinned 
 against light such as that, and it was the grief of Jesus 
 that the revelation by which He sought to save men 
 only involved some in deeper guilt. "If I had not 
 come and spoken unto them, they had not had sin : but 
 now they have no excuse for their sin " (xv. 22). John's 
 exposition of sin may seem meagre, but the secret is that 
 he is simply concerned with sin as it stood expressed in 
 the world's attitude to Jesus. In the way of revelation 
 He was the best that God could give us; for, unlike 
 prophets and lawgivers who had but spoken in God's 
 name, or the Baptist, who, at the most, had been only 
 a witness to the Light, Jesus was the Light itself; He 
 was " the Truth," the ultimate reality of things brought 
 within human comprehension, God Himself revealed in 
 human flesh. And being the best, He was also the last, 
 for even such further truth as the Spirit would furnish 
 was, as we have seen, simply concerned with the fuller 
 exposition of that historic revelation which had already 
 
54 ST. JOHN 
 
 been given. So the whole theology of this Gospel is 
 Christo-centric, and since its central truth is Jesus the 
 Incarnation of God, all other ideas, sin included, are 
 construed in relation thereto, and the only sin which 
 concerns the writer is the rejection of Christ. To see 
 Him, and yet not believe in Him — that is the sin of sins. 
 We see, therefore, why no special stress is laid upon 
 the death of Christ. Instead of approaching the Cross 
 by way of the Law and sin, as Paul does, John seeks 
 a synthesis which will cover the whole earthly life of 
 Jesus, and this he finds in the notion of incarnation. 
 Jesus was the Divine Son living under human conditions 
 that He might reveal God. Hence the humiliation of 
 that life is lost in the glory which John sees continually 
 breaking through it. It is consonant with this interpre- 
 tation that the two main categories under which the 
 work of Jesus is described are those of light and life. 
 He is the light-bringer and the life-giver. The two ideas 
 are combined in the somewhat difficult saying concern- 
 ing the Logos : " In Him was life, and the life was the 
 light of men," i.e. the activity of the Logos was manifested 
 in the sphere of revelation. But if that be so, is the 
 light which belongs to what we call natural religion 
 included, or is the reference simply to the revelation 
 brought by the Jesus of history .? Tempting as is the 
 former interpretation, two sayings already referred to,, 
 one a saying of Jesus : " As long as I am in the world 
 I am the light of the world," and the other a description 
 
THE FOURTH GOSPEL 55 
 
 of Him as " the true light which by its coming into the 
 world lighteth every man," appear to favour the latter 
 construction. In other words, John is not surveying 
 the whole movement of revelation ; his gaze is restricted 
 to that portion which was mediated by Jesus. That is 
 so perfect and direct that to John nothing else counts. 
 Just as Abraham's joy was in foreseeing Christ's day, so 
 even the Old Testament is valuable only in so far as it 
 testifies of Christ. Contrasted with the Law which was 
 given by Moses, are the "grace and truth " which came 
 by Jesus Christ (i. 17). Hence to John revelation is 
 summed up in Christ. " The only begotten Son, 
 which is in the bosom of the Father, He hath declared 
 Him." 
 
 But whether Jesus calls Himself Light or Truth, what 
 He means is that, where God is concerned, He brings 
 men into touch with reality, He has the power to impart 
 true knowledge. His unique relation to God, and 
 the fact that He is a native of that sphere to which 
 "heavenly things" belong, give Him supreme qualifica- 
 tions to reveal God. And how valuable is the service 
 which Jesus thus renders to men ! Goodness may not 
 in this Gospel be identified with knowledge, but they 
 are closely allied. In the recognition of God as He 
 stands unveiled in Christ, is for John the beginning of 
 new life in the soul. It is by knowing the truth so 
 disclosed that men become free with the freedom be- 
 longing to a son, in contrast to the bondage attaching 
 
56 ST. JOHN 
 
 to a slave (viii. 32). That life of sonship, again, is 
 possible " to them that believe on " Christ's name (i. 12), 
 i.e. yield themselves to all that is implied in the revela- 
 tion which He brings. Most interesting, too, is the 
 power which again and again is assigned to the words 
 of Jesus. They judge the disobedient, cleanse the 
 hearts of the disciples (xv. 3), and are life-giving. ** Life 
 eternal," says Jesus, is " that they should know Thee, 
 the only true God, and Him whom Thou didst send, 
 even Jesus Christ " (xvii. 3). Upon such a saying as this 
 those who see in this Gospel simply an interpretation of 
 the Christian faith in terms of Gnosticism base their con- 
 clusion. To the Gnostic the deliverance of the soul, 
 which was primarily release from bondage to matter and 
 the senses, came simply through a knowledge of itself 
 as divine, such a perception being beyond ordinary men 
 and possible only to an intellectual aristocracy. But 
 John is far removed from this worship of mere intellect. 
 If he borrows Gnostic terms, he puts into them his own 
 meaning. When he represents Jesus as saying, "If a 
 man keep My word, he shall never see death" (viii. 51), 
 much more than mere apprehension of His teaching is 
 implied. He speaks of His words " abiding " in men ; 
 He calls men to " come to " Him, to " believe in " Him 
 — phrases which denote a moral attitude, such an 
 acceptance of both the message and the Messenger as 
 ensures that the truth becomes a conviction by which 
 men live. It is in a knowledge issuing in life and a 
 
THE FOURTH GOSPEL 57 
 
 faith justifying itself by works, and not in the arid in- 
 tellectualism of Gnosticism, that this Gospel grounds our 
 salvation. 
 
 Similarly Jesus is the giver of life. Once again the 
 Evangelist is interpreting Christ in terms of experience. 
 As surely as Jesus had brought to men a new revelation, 
 so had He been to them the source of a new moral 
 energy so marvellous that the Christian experience con- 
 stituted thereby had, in contrast to the previous state, 
 been a passage from death unto life. To describe such 
 an experience the word "life" had already been con- 
 secrated by Hebrew usage. " Life," as the Old Testa- 
 ment employs it, is a rich term, including bodily life, 
 for the concrete thought of the Hebrew did not con- 
 template a disembodied existence for man, but regarded 
 life, whether here or hereafter, as belonging to person- 
 ality in the completeness of body and spirit. But the 
 "life" so expressed was ethically conceived, being 
 supremely the man set in true relations to the living 
 God. How Paul took over this idea and put it to 
 Christian use is seen from the most cursory study of 
 his Epistles. He realised what new powers of service 
 and moral achievement had come to his nature through 
 the impact of Christ upon it. To be a Christian was to 
 enter into "newness of life," to become "alive unto 
 God in Christ Jesus." Even the death and resurrection 
 of Jesus became but symbolical of an experience in 
 which the new humanity constituted by Him died to the 
 
58 ST. JOHN 
 
 sinful principle and rose into the victorious life of 
 righteousness. John takes us to the same goal by a 
 slightly different rout-e. In his Gospel " life " has mainly 
 the rich ethical meaning which was a bequest from 
 Judaism. Some expositors, e.g. Prof. Scott, detect in 
 it, in addition, a quasi-metaphysical element, due to the 
 Evangelist's contact with Greek thought. As the Father 
 had life in Himself, so had He given to the Son to have 
 life in Himself, that He might impart it to man. That 
 this life is in some way different from what men possess 
 by nature is indeed suggested by the fact that it is by a 
 new birth that men enter upon it. But that this implies 
 the communication to man, as by some spiritual magic, 
 of a share in the Divine essence we are by no means 
 persuaded. The freedom and joyousness of true ethical 
 relations — that to the Jew was " life " ; and the language 
 of this Gospel is satisfied if we take " life " to mean the 
 soul abiding in joyous and harmonious fellowship with 
 the living God. 
 
 Of this life the Fourth Gospel knows no source but 
 Christ. He is the central stem upon which the disciples, 
 as branches of the vine, depend. And here, once again, 
 emphasis is laid upon knowledge. To John the first 
 step in religion is to recognise Jesus for what He is — 
 the sent of God and the revelation of God. There are 
 no half-tones in John's picture. He takes no account 
 of the light belonging either to natural religion or to 
 heathen faiths. To him distinctions are sharp and 
 
THE FOURTH GOSPEL 59 
 
 simple. There is the world on the one hand, which 
 does not know God at all (in viii. 55 even the Jewish 
 opponents of Jesus are also declared to be in this state 
 of ignorance), and there is Jesus knowing Him and 
 alone revealing Him to men. He, therefore, who would 
 come into real fellowship with the Father must come 
 through Christ, "the Way, the Truth, and the Life." 
 There was no other path. He was the Door of the 
 sheep. All who had come before Him, purporting to 
 discharge His functions, were "thieves and robbers." 
 A uniqueness in the sphere of revelation so surpassing 
 as to amount to positive loneliness is the element in 
 Christ which, according to John, makes a right view of 
 Him so important. How important it is we may learn 
 from the fact that knowing and believing are used 
 almost indifferently, e.g. in xvii. 3, xx. 31, to express 
 the condition on which " life " is bestowed, or the two 
 notions are conjoined, as in the saying : " They knew " 
 (better as inceptive aorist, " they learnt, apprehended ") 
 " of a truth that I came forth from Thee and they believed 
 that Thou didst send Me " (xvii. 8). It is in harmony 
 with that representation that, as the result of Christ's 
 manifestation of His glory at Cana, " His disciples 
 believed on Him" (ii. 13), and that the miracles gener- 
 ally are presented as " signs," and, instead of being, as 
 in the Synoptists, a response to faith, are creative of it. 
 Even then faith is more than knowledge, if by the latter 
 is meant a bare assent to certain intellectual conceptions. 
 
6o ST. JOHN 
 
 Faith is not only the recognition of reality, but the 
 adoption towards it of an appropriate moral attitude. 
 Notwithstanding the emphasis which John places upon a 
 right view of Christ as the manifestation of God, that is 
 to him only a first and necessary step towards such an 
 attitude of the entire moral personality to Jesus as shall 
 embrace devotion to His person and obedience to His 
 words. Knowing has to find its befitting complement 
 in being and doing. 
 
 One other matter, too important to be ignored, remains 
 to be discussed. In the famous discourse on the Bread 
 of Life, Jesus, in a saying introduced by a solemn 
 "Verily, verily," declares: "Except ye eat the flesh of 
 the Son of Man and drink His blood, ye have not life 
 in yourselves" (vi. 53). The idea conveyed by those 
 words is significant ; indeed its assertion was the main 
 reason why John told once again the story of the Feeding 
 of the multitude. Yet the language suggests that more 
 than that miracle is in view. Criticism leans strongly 
 to the conclusion that the figures of eating Christ's flesh 
 and drinking His blood, which do not naturally spring 
 from the miracle of feeding, have in view the two elements 
 of the Lord's Supper. It has been remarked that John 
 gives us no account of the institution of that sacrament. 
 What he wished the Church, however, to understand by 
 it is supplied here. Briefly, his endeavour is to draw 
 the Church away from the outward form to the inward 
 meaning. What the Lord's Supper was to mean, if it 
 
THE FOURTH GOSPEL 6i 
 
 was to possess any value, was not the mechanical 
 reception of certain emblems, but a mystical appropria- 
 tion of Christ Himself, who, as the author of spiritual 
 life, was also its sustainer. Just as in baptism, as we 
 have seen, John insists that it is the operation of the 
 Holy Spirit attending it which alone gives it efficacy, so 
 it is the appropriation by the believer of Christ, the 
 living Bread, which is the essential thing in the Lord's 
 Supper. How far this teaching was meant to be a 
 correction of unspiritual ideas concerning the Sacraments 
 which had grown up in the Church, we need not stay 
 to discuss. Two things are evident : first, that John 
 vindicates, as against mere formalism, the supreme place 
 of the spiritual as the condition of grace, and next, that 
 Christ is always the vital principle of Christian experi- 
 ence. It is only such a union with Christ as involves 
 the constant nourishment of the human soul with His 
 life that is the source of spiritual vitality. " He that 
 Cometh to Me shall not hunger, and he that believeth on 
 Me shall never thirst " (vi. 35) — there, in terms not so 
 obviously reminiscent of the Lord's Supper, the idea is 
 once again set forth that the mystical union of Christ 
 and the believer mediated by the great surrender of 
 faith is the way of life. For thus to yield ourselves up 
 to Him is to find our nature fed from a Divine source, 
 and so wondrously quickened that it is as if He who 
 is our law without had become our dynamic within. 
 " I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me." 
 
62 ST. JOHN 
 
 F.-THE LAST THINGS 
 
 One fact concerning the eschatology of the Synoptic 
 Gospels is that it fits into a framework which nearly two 
 centuries of Jewish thought had made traditional. The 
 central episode round which the whole drama revolved 
 was the inauguration in glory of the Kingdom of God. 
 Various conditions had led to that event being conceived 
 as happening after an apocalyptic fashion, i.e. the 
 Kingdom was to be suddenly established by the dramatic 
 intervention of God from heaven. According to the 
 Synoptists Jesus taught that He would play an im- 
 portant part in that crisis, for He speaks of the Son of 
 Man " coming on the clouds of heaven," or " coming in 
 His Kingdom " or " glory," — phrases which point to a 
 dramatic reappearance of Jesus from that unseen world 
 to which He had gone. Hence the effective establish- 
 ment of the Kingdom and the Return of Christ are 
 associated events. With them were connected Judgment 
 and Resurrection, for these had relation primarily, not 
 as in our thought, to death and the future life, but 
 to that new age or world-period in which the Kingdom, 
 finally set up by God, was to be an accomplished fact. 
 To it Judgment was a necessary preHminary, since the 
 living needed to be sifted in order to determine who were 
 meet to " inherit the Kingdom," and who, by reason of 
 transgression, deserved to be excluded from it. The 
 dead too, had to be raised — the righteous that they 
 
THE FOURTH GOSPEL 63 
 
 might enjoy the fulfilment of the hopes which death had 
 frustrated, the wicked that they might taste the bitter- 
 ness of exclusion from the new era of bliss. Hence 
 the Synoptists speak of " the day of Judgment," or " that 
 day," or " the last day," by this final phrase being meant 
 the closing day of the existing son, "the end" or 
 *' consummation of the age." 
 
 The Synoptic presentation of the Last Things falls, 
 therefore, into a coherent system, and our first inquiry 
 must be whether this traditional framework reappears 
 in the Fourth Gospel. The answer is that it does. The 
 Return of Christ, Resurrection, Judgment — all are there. 
 In several passages " the last day " is explicitly named 
 as the occasion of both Resurrection and Judgment. 
 Moreover, the difficulty which the last chapter of this 
 Gospel — an appendix due probably to the disciples of 
 John — suggests as existing in the Church because, in 
 spite of what seemed to be a promise by Jesus that the 
 apostle should live to see His return, John had died, or 
 seemed likely to die, before it took place, shows that the 
 belief in the visible return of Jesus still lingered in the 
 Church at the end of the first century. That difficulty 
 proves also, as we may note in passing, that a return of 
 Jesus to the believer at death does not, any more than 
 His return in the Spirit at Pentecost, satisfy His promise 
 to the disciples : "I come again, and will receive you 
 unto Myself." But side by side with the traditional 
 eschatology there is another in which the old terms are 
 
64 ST. JOHN 
 
 used, but with a transformed, because spiritual, meaning. 
 Only rarely does John refer to the Kingdom of God, 
 but it is significant that on the two occasions on which 
 the phrase is ascribed to Jesus, the familiar conception 
 denoted by it is spiritualised. In the conversation with 
 Nicodemus the Kingdom of God is a spiritual order 
 into which admission is procured by a birth from above, 
 whilst before Pilate Jesus disclaims the idea that His 
 Kingdom is "of this world," and, therefore, created and 
 defended by material force. No ! it is a realm over which 
 He is King who, as witness unto "the truth," brings 
 those who hear Him into the sphere of the spiritual and 
 the real (xviii. 36, 37). In this Gospel, therefore, the 
 Kingdom is a spiritual and present reality. _ 
 
 This conclusion is sustained by several converging lines 
 of evidence, one being the frequent use which John makes 
 of the phrase " eternal life." In the Synoptists the 
 experience so defined belongs to the future, " eternal 
 life " being not so much endless existence, though the 
 notion of unending duration lay in the background, but 
 the glorious experience which man would enjoy in the 
 coming age, i.e, in the future and perfected Kingdom of 
 God. Paul modifies that conception only so far as to 
 insist that the Christian already possesses in his present 
 endowment of the Spirit " an earnest of the promised 
 possession," and that the eternal life of the future is the 
 harvest of a man's present sowing to the Spirit. But 
 John carries the conception one step further. To him 
 
THE FOURTH GOSPEL 65 
 
 "eternal life" is an experience to which men are ad- 
 mitted here and now. Not that the Synoptic and Pauline 
 idea is wholly absent. The *' living water " which Jesus 
 gives wells up in the recipient " unto eternal life," i.e. 
 it has *' eternal life" as its final outcome. The reaper 
 gathereth fruit " unto life eternal." *' He that hateth 
 his soul in this world," says Jesus, " shall keep it unto 
 life eternal." But that is not the predominant view. 
 John's startling contribution to Christian theology is that 
 the entire cycle of the Last Things is spiritualised and 
 brought into the present. Christ, instead of having yet 
 to come, was already present in the ministry of the 
 Spirit. Abiding as a spiritual presence in the heart, 
 Jesus still led men into the truth, speaking no longer 
 *'in parables" (xvi. 25), but declaring God so openly 
 that those who had never seen the Lord were not less 
 favoured than they who had. " Blessed," says Jesus, 
 "are they that have not seen, and yet have believed" 
 (xx. 29). If such disciples saw, it was with spiritual 
 vision, for it is such a transference from outward gaze 
 to inner perceptidh which Jesus contemplates when He 
 says, "A little while and ye behold Me no more" — there 
 disappearance from physical sight is denoted, for the 
 verb " behold " denotes gazing as at a spectacle ; " again 
 a little while, and ye shall see Me" — that is the new 
 and spiritual sense of His presence which was to replace 
 the old physical relations (xvi. 16). Professor Scott 
 suggests that the perplexity which, in the context to 
 
 E 
 
66 ST. JOHN 
 
 that passage, is attributed to the disciples is, together 
 with the question of Judas, *' Lord, what is come to 
 pass that Thou wilt manifest Thyself unto us and not 
 unto the world ? " a rhetorical device employed by the 
 Evangelist to voice difficulties on this subject felt by the 
 Church of his time. " The solution of all your diffi- 
 culties," he seems to say, "is to realise that the Return 
 of Christ is spiritual, it is His abode in the hearts of His 
 followers, His activity in the Church. There, in a 
 manifestation unseen, and to Christians universal, is the 
 true Parusia of Jesus." 
 
 One passage, " I come again, and will receive you unto 
 Myself" (xiv. 3), is admittedly difficult to interpret. 
 What is the nature of the coming there described, and 
 of the fellowship with Christ which ensues? Paul's 
 teaching offers no sure clue to the problem, for, whilst 
 in an early epistle (i Thess. iv. 17) meeting the Lord 
 and being ever with Him are connected with Christ's 
 dramatic and visible reappearance, in one of his latest 
 letters (Phil. i. 23) "to be with Christ' is something 
 the apostle hopes to attain through death. It has been 
 pointed out that, in the context of xiv. 3, the way 
 which Jesus is about to take, and in which, therefore, if 
 the disciples would be with Him, they must follow Him, 
 is simply the way to the Father, and hence it has been 
 urged that nothing more is meant by being with Christ than 
 sharing His deep insight into, and fellowship with, God. 
 In that case *' I come again " refers simply to a spiritual 
 
THE FOURTH GOSPEL 67 
 
 Parusia, Christ present in the teaching Spirit. But one 
 is bound to add that such an interpretation of the words 
 does not seem obvious, and it seems preferable to admit 
 that here and in the appendix we have the Synoptic idea 
 of a visible return of Jesus, the notion appearing else- 
 where in this Gospel being that of a return which was 
 invisible and spiritual. At the same time we are not com- 
 pelled to infer, as some scholars do, that the two ideas 
 represent separate layers of tradition, one conservative 
 and the other advanced, but only one of them Johannine. 
 Different as the conceptions are, they are not incom- 
 patible with each other. A spiritual presence of Jesus 
 existing now does not necessarily rule out the notion 
 of a visible return in the future, and one can imagine 
 the two ideas being, when first grasped, regarded as 
 supplementary to, rather than contradictory of, each 
 other, and so being tolerated side by side. It is often by 
 supplementing old truth, rather than by abruptly substi- 
 tuting for it the new, that men gradually pass to a trans- 
 formed conception. So do we find it in the eschatology 
 of this Gospel, and it has been the disappointing delay, 
 more than once referred to in the New Testament, in 
 the visible return of Jesus which has ultimately caused 
 many thoughtful people to substitute for that expectation 
 the notion of a Christ already present through His in- 
 dwelling in the Church. They have learnt to see in 
 that, and not in some spectacular appearing on the 
 clouds of heaven, " the real presence " of their Lord. 
 
6S ST. JOHN 
 
 A similar spiritualising of the other features of 
 eschatology appears in this Gospel. Resurrection, 
 whilst future and bodily, is also present and spiritual. 
 " The hour cometh, and now is, when the dead shall 
 hear the voice of the Son of God ; and they that hear 
 shall live " (v. 25). Jesus even now is " the resurrection 
 and the life" (xi. 25), making dead souls to live with a 
 life which is "eternal," so that they who believe do not 
 come into judgment, but have passed out of death into 
 life (v. 24). Obviously Jesus has in mind in these arid 
 similar sayings more than escape from, or survival of, 
 physical death. The latter idea is included, in the sense 
 that the Christian's existence after death in the fulness 
 of his personality is even now guaranteed. But such an 
 assurance is the corollary of that moral quickening 
 which contact with Christ has given to the entire nature, 
 and in virtue of which the man lives a timeless life, and 
 has been lifted to a realm where death is ineffective. 
 Faith in Christ has so quickened his entire personality 
 that the dissolution of the body has become a negligible 
 incident, and the man can be spoken of as never seeing 
 death (viii. 52, xii. 25). Nothing avails to break the 
 continuity of life. Judgment, again, is present as well 
 as future, every presentation of Christ to men compelling 
 the assumption by them of an attitude in which moral 
 condition is declared. It is with such representations 
 that John supplements the existing eschatology. Doubt 
 
THE FOURTH GOSPEL 69 
 
 may excusably be felt as to whether a consummation 
 with the accessories which apocalyptic pictured, describes 
 fully the way in which the present order of things will 
 move on into the ideal. A visible return of Christ, the 
 resurrection of the body placed in the grave, and a 
 spectacular judgment of the race, are conceptions which, 
 literally interpreted, do not seem so necessary to us as 
 they were to the Jew. But the beliefs to which John 
 lifts us, viz. that man only lives in reality as he lives in 
 fellowship with the will and Spirit of God; that the 
 present joins hands with the future in the sense that our 
 final state will be but the present movement of the 
 personality carried forward to its goal; that judgment 
 even now registers itself in our nature; that the true 
 resurrection is the escape of the soul from the trammels 
 of the flesh and the bonds of materialism into the lofty 
 spiritualities of faith and love — these beliefs represent 
 the ultimate facts of religion, and are " things that cannot 
 be shaken." John, it is true, could not altogether 
 emancipate himself from his inherited conceptions, and 
 so in his writings we have the old view left mechanically 
 side by side with the new, and no real attempt is made 
 to harmonise them. But the fact remains that the new 
 view is there, and that the New Testament itself, there- 
 fore, releases Jesus from the limitations of Judaism, 
 translates Him into the universal sphere, and sets Him 
 before us in the end as a great Captain of Salvation, 
 
70 ST. JOHN 
 
 so far away from us that He embodies the ideal, and yet 
 so near to us in love and grace, and in the mystical 
 intermingling of His Spirit with ours, that even now 
 our feet move towards the ideal, and in what we have 
 and are through Him we have the assuring guarantee of 
 the much more that there finally shall be. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 THE EPISTLES OF JOHN 
 
 So far as these Epistles are concerned, the prablem of 
 their authorship may be very briefly dismissed, because 
 most critics are agreed that they emanated from the 
 same school of thought, and, indeed, from the same 
 writer, as did the Fourth Gospel. This latter view is 
 questioned by such eminent scholars as Pfleiderer, 
 Schmiedel, and Martineau, whilst Wellhausen, who 
 regards the Fourth Gospel as a composite work, has 
 ventured the opinion that John xv.-xvii. and the First 
 Epistle of John came from the same hand. There need, 
 however, be no serious hesitation in subscribing, without 
 Wellhausen's limitation, to the commonly accepted view. 
 The appearance of the same key-words in both Gospel 
 and Epistle ; the resort to antithesis, already seen to be 
 characteristic of the Fourth Gospel, and manifest in the 
 Epistle in such contrasts as Light and Darkness, Love 
 and Hate, Life and Death, the Brotherhood and the 
 World ; the resemblance in literary structure and style, 
 which is too close for one document to have been 
 simply a laboured imitation of the other — these are con- 
 
72 ST. JOHN 
 
 siderations which point to unity of authorship. Indeed 
 the interesting theory has been put forward that the 
 Gospel and the First Epistle were composed and sent 
 out together, the Epistle being a sort of covering letter 
 supplementing the Gospel with such definite and practi- 
 cal injunctions as were demanded by the situation in 
 the Church directly addressed. 
 
 The absence of any opening greeting or closing salu- 
 tation has led some readers hastily to conclude that this 
 Epistle was a treatise issued at large to the Church. 
 But John's appeal to " my little children," his descrip- 
 tion of his contemplated readers, or sections of them, as 
 "beloved," " fathers," and "young men," and his detailed 
 acquaintance with their past history and present dangers, 
 prove that he is writing to a definite community, which, 
 if this letter was written at Ephesus, was in all proba- 
 bility one of the churches of Asia Minor. The danger 
 with which it was threatened was the mischievous in- 
 fluence of certain heretical teachers who had once 
 belonged to the Church, but had gone out from it to 
 " the world," the non-Christian element in society, with 
 which lay their true affinity (ii. 19). They seem to have 
 been fairly numerous, and so poisonous in their influ- 
 ence that John, branding them as anti-Christs, declares 
 that their appearance was in harmony with prediction, 
 and only represented that outbreak of virulent opposition 
 to the Church which was to usher in " the last hour " 
 and the return of Christ. What their tenets were this 
 
THE EPISTLES OF JOHN 73 
 
 Epistle helps us to see. They denied that "Jesus is 
 the Christ" (ii. 22), i.e. they denied the identity of the 
 man Jesus with that Divine emanation which they called 
 Christ; to use a phrase which is probably the true 
 reading in iv. 3, they " annulled " or " dissolved " Jesus, 
 i.e. broke up the unity of His historic manifestation, 
 denying that Jesus Christ had come in the flesh. The 
 heresy referred to belonged to the Docetic type of Gnosti- 
 cism, to which, as well as to Gnosticism as a whole, 
 allusion has already been made (p. 15). Moreover, 
 with error in creed was associated licence in conduct, 
 for the false teachers exhibited also that libertine and 
 antinomian phase of Gnosticism with which we shall 
 make further acquaintance in the pages of Second Peter 
 and Jude. 
 
 The Christians to whom John wrote seem to have 
 been free from this virus. Thanks to their keenness of 
 spiritual perception, due, as the Epistle says, to "an 
 anointing from the Holy One " (ii. 20), they had seen 
 its true malignity, and had thrust it forth. " I have not 
 written unto you," says John, "because ye know not 
 the truth, but because ye know it." Nevertheless pesti- 
 lential falsehood was in the air which they breathed, and 
 might, so insidious was its nature, find fresh access to 
 the Church, so that not only does John advise his 
 readers not to believe " every spirit," but " to prove the 
 spirits," i.e. to keep a critical eye upon men who pro- 
 fessed to be inspired teachers, but, believing that attack 
 
74 ST. JOHN 
 
 is the surest defence, he makes a pronouncement upon 
 the whole situation. And there is significance in his 
 point of departure. He starts from the sure ground of 
 experience. His answer to doubts concerning the 
 reality of the Incarnation was the reafltenation of the 
 apostolic witness. " That which we have heard, that 
 which we have seen with our eyes, that which we beheld 
 and our hands handled " concerning the manifested 
 Word of life " declare we unto you also " (i. 1-3). Faith 
 finds its refreshing at the fountain of the historic facts. 
 But how are they vouched for here ? What is the 
 precise reference of the "we" in the above passage? 
 Obviously it includes more than the writer, for the 
 singular form of the pronoun is found later, e.g. in ii. 7, 
 12, V. 13, where he alone is meant. It must, therefore, 
 be the traditional and collective testimony of the Church, 
 derived in the first instance from those who had lived in 
 closest intimacy with Jesus, to which the quotation refers. 
 More weight, of course, would attach to the declara- 
 tion made therein if the writer himself had been one of 
 the original witnesses, and his use of " we " predisposes 
 us towards that conclusion. But, on the other hand, it 
 does not, as would the singular, absolutely compel it, 
 and it may simply be the well-founded and, " from the 
 beginning," the continuous witness of the Church to the 
 facts of Christ's incarnate life which is here solemnly 
 reaffirmed. John feels that the surest safeguard against 
 speculative error is that we should keep our grip upon 
 
THE EPISTLES OF JOHN 75 
 
 the facts of history. Faith is always imperilled when it 
 drifts from its anchorage in historic fact. 
 
 It was because John discerned this peril that he feels 
 moved to such strength of invective, calling the would- 
 be perverters of Christian truth liars and even anti- 
 christs, direct and deadly antagonists of the faith. 
 Their Docetic doctrine of a human Jesus upon whom 
 the spiritual Christ descended at His baptism, deserting 
 Him subsequently prior to His Passion, he meets by 
 declaring that in the Christian aflHrmation that Jesus 
 was the Son of God, the whole historic Christ was 
 embraced; not simply He that came "by the water," 
 i.e. was, as Docetism allowed, the recipient of the 
 Baptism, but He that came also **by the blood," ue, 
 endured in reality, and not in mere semblance, the death 
 of the Cross (v. 6). Nor was John content with a mere 
 appeal to the facts on which the Christian Church had 
 been built. The facts themselves had had a history ; they 
 had derived fresh momentum from the attestation of that 
 spiritual experience which faith in them had again and 
 again created. That is what is meant by the testimony 
 of the Incarnate life — twofold because it includes the 
 Cross no less than the Baptism — being supplemented 
 by that of the Spirit, who, being the Truth, can only 
 confirm that which is true. It is noteworthy that John's 
 apologetic makes no use of the Resurrection. But, as 
 from his Gospel we might almost expect, its place is 
 taken by the Spirit, whose presence in the heart of be- 
 
76 ST. JOHN 
 
 lievers is adduced as evidence that they are in vital 
 union with the Christ from whom that Spirit has come 
 (iv. 13). The historic Christ, asset forth in apostolic 
 witness, had proved to those who had trusted in Him 
 the power of a new life, with the result that the objective 
 message had found confirmation in a subjective experi- 
 ence. Hence the faith of the Church builds not simply 
 upon the witness of men, but upon the still greater wit- 
 ness of God (v. 9-12). And because attested fact is 
 thus reinforced by inward experience, the apostle will 
 hold no truce with Gnostic speculation. He feels that 
 his own convictions must find a sympathetic echo in every 
 one who " knoweth God " in such a way as to have 
 vital experience of Him, for to " know " with the whole 
 personality in the sense that, after the Hebrew idea, God 
 is appropriated with the affections and the will as well 
 as with the thought, was, in contrast to the cold and 
 barren intellectualism of the Gnostics, John's conception 
 of a true knowledge of God. Of the truth of his own 
 convictions the apostle is so sure that he dares to make 
 affinity with them the touchstone of truth and error, 
 just as he is equally certain that the welcome which 
 Docetic antinomianism found in anti-Christian circles 
 branded its advocates as " of the world." " We," he 
 says in bold contrast, " are of God ; he that knoweth 
 God heareth us ; he who is not of God heareth us not. 
 By this we know the spirit of truth and the spirit of 
 error." 
 
THE EPISTLES OF JOHN 77 
 
 Nor is he less emphatic when from the doctrines of 
 these false teachers he comes to consider their practice. 
 For these " intellectuals " set such store by their gnosis 
 or " knowledge " as to believe that its possession not 
 only constituted salvation, but rendered conduct a 
 matter of indifference. The natural result was that 
 error in thought was attended with shameless laxity in 
 conduct. How corrupt Christianity must speedily have 
 become, if that foul schism between belief and practice 
 had been tolerated, John was quick to see, and he falls 
 upon it with an unsparing vigour. Too much was at 
 stake to permit of smoothness of speech. "If we say 
 that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth 
 is not in us." ^'If we say that we have not sinned" 
 {i.e. since our conversion), "we make God a liar, and 
 His word is not in us." " He that saith, I know Him, 
 and keepeth not His commandments, is a liar, and the 
 truth is not in him" (i. 8, 10, ii. 4). The challenge 
 in those statements is direct and uncompromising. John 
 flings it out in such defiant assurance, because his 
 ethical fervour has its ground in what he has found God 
 to be in Christ. God is Light, and God is Love — those 
 are the two great affirmations on which he takes his 
 stand. Light undimmed by the least admixture of dark- 
 ness symbolises the absolute purity and righteousness 
 which meet in the perfect holiness of God. And if, 
 as is the Father, so must also be His children — a pre- 
 miss which underlies all John's reasoning — Light in God 
 
78 ST. JOHN 
 
 must, negatively, exclude sin from man. Fellowship 
 involved moral affinity. At present that affinity on man's 
 part might be revealed in aspiration more than in 
 achievement, but its perfect realisation awaited the 
 Christian in the future. For when Christ, coming forth 
 again from the unseen, is manifested, '* we," says John, 
 *' shall be like Him ; for we shall see Him even as He 
 is " (iii. 2). But even whilst the Return only gilded the 
 horizon as a gracious hope, Christians were to be moving 
 towards that holy perfection which would then find its 
 consummation. " Every one that hath this hope set on 
 Him purifieth himself, even as He" {i.e. Christ) "is 
 pure." Of great significance in this context is the stress 
 which John lays upon the moral perfection of Jesus. 
 *' Jesus Christ the righteous," "In Him is no sin," 
 — such is the apostle's picture of the Typal Man. For 
 though Paul's conception of Christ as the Second Adam, 
 the Head of a new, because redeemed, humanity, is not 
 formally present in this Epistle, it is there in idea. 
 Christians are described as those who have been " be- 
 gotten of God," with the result that the Divine germ 
 within them is bound to unfold in harmony with type, 
 and that for man is exhibited in Christ, " the first-born 
 among many brethren." In what is at first a startling 
 passage John says, *' Whosoever is begotten of God 
 doeth no sin, because His seed abideth in him ; and he 
 cannot sin, because he is begotten of God" (iii. 9). 
 And again, " Whosoever abideth in Him sinneth not " 
 
THE EPISTLES OF JOHN 79 
 
 (iii. 6), a saying in which we have recalled in idea, 
 though not in terminology, the Pauline doctrine of the 
 mystical union between the believer and his Lord. The 
 teaching of these and similar passages presents difficulty 
 until we see that John is construing Christian conduct 
 in the light of the ideal, and doing so justifiably, because 
 only he can claim to be a Christian who in effort and 
 aspiration is steadily set towards the achievement of 
 that ideal. The tense of the verb " sin " in the original 
 of the sayings quoted is significant, for, being present, 
 it denotes habitual transgression, a life surrendered to 
 sin. That John does not expect absolute freedom from 
 sinful lapse in the saved man, is shown by the provision 
 to which he points for the removal of such sins. He 
 writes, it is true, that his readers may be helped to avoid 
 sin altogether ; but, inasmuch as occasional transgression 
 is sure to occur even in the life of the best, he reminds 
 them that the Christian, when he sins, has the hope of 
 forgiveness, inasmuch as he has in the presence of the 
 Father an Advocate or Paraclete who represents his 
 cause. Christ, who thus acts on behalf of sinners, 
 whether they be in the Church or without, can do so 
 efficaciously, because He is a "propitiation" for sin 
 i.e. He, in virtue of His infinite sacrifice, presents on 
 behalf of the race a claim upon the grace and clemency 
 of God (ii. I, 2). The thought of Christ thus standing 
 on man's behalf in the presence of God is curiously akin 
 to the teaching of the Epistle to the Hebrews, where 
 
8o ST. JOHN 
 
 Jesus, as the great High-priest of humanity, having 
 passed with the blood of His sacrifice into the heavenly 
 sanctuary, appears for us there before God. Thus sin 
 even in the Christian may, on confession, be forgiven, 
 and its defilement cleansed away (i. 9). But though 
 occasional lapse is to be expected, patient tolerance of 
 sin and habitual surrender to it are anathema to John. 
 The man, he says bluntly, who claims to be in fellowship 
 with the Light, and yet is at the same time walking in 
 darkness, lies, and his life is an acted falsehood. Creed 
 must work itself out in life, and spiritual fellowship must 
 have its fruit in the " walk," the characteristic move- 
 ment of a man's ethical activities. *' He that saith he 
 abideth in Him ought himself also to walk even as He 
 walked" (ii. 6), — by the light of that clear principle 
 John exposes and condemns the hypocrisy of a libertine 
 Gnosticism masquerading in the garb of Christianity. 
 
 But God also was Love, and so he who claimed to be 
 abiding in God must prove that his claim is true by 
 himself living in the spirit of love. In this truth John 
 emphasises the positive side of Christian duty. As one 
 who had learnt the great lesson taught by Jesus in His 
 disclosure of the Divine Fatherhood, he declares love 
 to be the very essence of God, and the motive which 
 prompted the manifestation in time of the Incarnate 
 Son. In God's love, of which the gift of Christ is made 
 the ultimate measure, there lies the originating cause of 
 man's love to God, " We love, because He first loved 
 
THE EPISTLES OF JOHN 8i 
 
 us" (iv. 19). And it is not only God we love, but man. 
 Towards God, indeed, love is to grow until it is per- 
 fected, so that we, with all the fear which clings to an 
 imperfect love cleared away, contemplate with unshrink- 
 ing hearts the ordeal of judgment. But man is to be 
 loved too. Indeed John knows no love of God apart 
 from the love of man. The test by which we know 
 that we have passed out of death into life is that " we 
 love the brethren " (iii. 14). Having been the recipients 
 of such a love as God has shown to us in Christ, " we 
 ought also to love one another" (iv. 11). To see our 
 brother in need and, whilst having the power to help him, 
 to be so uncompassionate as to fail to do so, is an atti- 
 tude, says John, with which any real love to God is in- 
 compatible (iii. 17). If we do not love the brother whom 
 we see, we disprove thereby our love to the God whom 
 we cannot see. "This commandment have we from 
 Him, that he who loveth God love his brother also," 
 for to love the God who begat involves that we love 
 also those brethren of ours whom God has begotten 
 (iv. 21, V. i) — thus does John echo the teaching of his 
 Master, and reafifirm the royal law of love. But he 
 does so with limitations, for here, as in the Fourth 
 Gospel, we have no hint that the Christian's love of his 
 fellow is to travel beyond the circle of the Christian 
 brotherhood. The world hates the Christian (iii. 13), 
 and he, on his part, is exhorted to " love not the world, 
 neither the things that are in the world" (ii. 15). By 
 
82 ST. JOHN 
 
 that command John certainly means that the Christian's 
 love is to be turned away from the baubles of material 
 good and the fleeting allurements of sensual gratification, 
 because, being earthly, they "perish where they have 
 their birth," and are no final satisfaction to an immortal 
 spirit. It would, doubtless, be reading too much into 
 the words to take them as meaning that Christians were 
 not to love human beings outside the pale of the Church. 
 But if love to such persons is not forbidden, neither is 
 it enjoined. And if the apostle is so much less than 
 his Master that, so far as explicit statement is concerned, 
 the Christian's love in its human manifestation does not, 
 in this Epistle, pass beyond the "brother" and the 
 " brotherhood," we must take John's repeated insistence 
 upon the necessity of such a love as suggesting that 
 something, possibly the bitterness of religious contro- 
 versy, had disturbed the loving unity of the Church, 
 whilst the implicit exclusion of non-Christians from the 
 circle of love will suggest how closely fenced round the 
 early Christian societies were with an unfriendly world, 
 and in what a hostile environment they had to live. 
 
 One more great term meets us in this Epistle, and 
 that is Life — the word, often qualified by the epithet 
 " eternal," by which John describes the state of salvation. 
 Here again this letter joins hands with the Fourth 
 Gospel in that "eternal hfe" as the gift of God is the 
 Christian's present possession. The figure doubtless 
 appealed to John, partly because the conception of 
 
THE EPISTLES OF JOHN 83 
 
 religion as an inward energy so fitly harmonised with 
 those ethical interests which he was concerned to defend, 
 for, wherever life is, it must yield appropriate manifesta- 
 tions. Sometimes the life of the believer is spoken of as 
 due to the generative act of God, so that Christians are 
 " begotten of God," or are " children of God," the Greek 
 word which John delights to use in expressing this latter 
 idea being not that which, as so often used by Paul, 
 connotes the status and privilege of sonship, but that 
 which suggests a likeness of nature between father and 
 son. Salvation, as John regards it, is even more than a 
 new status; it is a new nature. But in Christ is the 
 germ of this new life, which He so typifies and embodies 
 that sometimes the Christian's possession of it is at- 
 tributed to the mystical appropriation of Him. " God 
 gave unto us eternal life, and this life is in His Son. 
 He that hath the Son hath the life ; he that hath not 
 the Son of God hath not the life" (v. 11, 12). How, 
 then, we may ask, does John conceive the mystical 
 union between Christ and man to be established and 
 the new life begun ? The answer is — by " faith." The 
 principle that enables a man to rise victorious over the 
 "world," i.e. over the forces of evil as they are contained 
 in himself and in the organised antagonism of society to 
 goodness, is his "faith" (v. 4), which brings into the 
 soul the begetting activity of God. As to the content 
 of this faith John hastens to tell us in the next verse 
 that it consists in believing " that Jesus is the Son of 
 
84 ST. JOHN 
 
 God." We are tempted at first to stumble at that de- 
 finition, because it seems to make orthodoxy the con- 
 dition of salvation. But so to narrow John's thought 
 is to degrade and pervert it. To him the supreme value 
 of the title "Son of God," as applied to Jesus, is the 
 meaning and authority which it gives to His whole 
 witness to God. If Christ is ** the Son," then in Him 
 there stands disclosed after an ideal and final form the 
 nature, grace, and will of the Father. To believe, there- 
 fore, in His Sonship is to trust His witness, and to 
 consent, with the will as well as with the mind, to all the 
 obligations of love and obedience to which His witness 
 commits us. Hence faith, thus understood, instead of 
 being the exhibition of a cold orthodoxy, is really the 
 upspringing Godwards of that warm and fruitful devotion 
 which always rises in the soul, when in the face of the 
 Son a man beholds the vision of the Father, and, seeing 
 Christ, knows and loves God. 
 
 Such is in substance the teaching of this First Epistle. 
 
 The Second and Third Epistles demand but brief 
 discussion, though from certain points of view they are 
 extremely interesting documents. They are both written 
 by one person, who styles himself **the elder," a 
 designation which has led some critics to identify him 
 with John the Presbyter of tradition, and to argue, on 
 the ground of thought and style, that if he wrote these 
 
THE EPISTLES OF JOHN 85 
 
 two Epistles, it is to him also, and not to the apostle 
 John, that we must attribute the First Epistle and the 
 Fourth Gospel. But " elder" here, instead of denoting an 
 office, may simply be a mark of age, as it seems to be 
 in I Pet. V. I, where, if office be also contemplated, such 
 a position is intended as evidently was not incompatible 
 with its holder being also an apostle. It is not impos- 
 sible, therefore, that these two letters were written by 
 the apostle John. What is evident is that their writer 
 stood in a relation of authority to a group of churches, 
 one of which is addressed in the Second Epistle. For 
 though that letter is apparently sent to an individual, 
 "the elect lady" named in ver. i, there are critical con- 
 siderations, derived from the Epistle itself, which have 
 led many scholars to conclude that by that cryptic mode 
 of address some Christian community is meant — perhaps, 
 as Findlay suggests, the church at Pergamum. It is 
 noteworthy that when John has got far enough away 
 from his opening greeting to forget the " thou " " thy " 
 and " thee " to which it committed him, he resorts at 
 ver. 6 to the plural **ye," and never recovers himself 
 again till he comes to the formal salutation at the close. 
 But, waiving further discussion of that point, what seems 
 possible is that certain brethren, going forth from Ephesus 
 with John's approval to break up new ground by 
 preaching the Gospel to the heathen, are entrusted with 
 
86 ST. JOHN 
 
 a brief pastoral to some church, into the neighbourhood 
 of which their evangelistic tour is likely to bring them. 
 About the church in question John had reasons for 
 anxiety. It, like all the churches in Asia, was threatened 
 with perversion of doctrine and conduct through the 
 activity of vagrant preachers of those heresies denounced 
 in the First Epistle. The apostle was sure that the 
 bulk of this church was sound, but his qualified' expres- 
 sion, "I have found certain of thy children walking in 
 truth," shows that he had not a like confidence con- 
 cerning the whole. And so he reminds them of the old 
 landmarks of faith, and calls them to Christian obedience 
 and love. He sees the grave peril of all past achieve- 
 ment being undone (either his own or theirs, according 
 to the reading we adopt in ver. 8), and the complete 
 fruition of all their endeavours frustrated. "Look to 
 yourselves " he cries in a warning which has in it the 
 note of urgency. No doubt Gnostic error had appealed 
 to some minds because it masqueraded in the guise of 
 progress ; it posed as " advanced '' thought. But John, 
 probably borrowing the very terms in which this claim 
 had been made, declares that whosoever " advanceth " 
 in a way that means cutting himself loose from the 
 historic Christ, loses thereby his hold upon religion and 
 God. The sort of progress which John understood was 
 that which, as he tells us in his First Epistle (ii. 8), 
 
THE EPISTLES OF JOHN 87 
 
 meant a deeper understanding of the revelation already 
 given, so that an old commandment seemed new when, 
 as the twilight of comprehension passed into the full 
 shining of the day, the old truth was seen to possess 
 larger meaning. But that is progress in truth as distinct 
 from progress out of it, and since the "advanced" 
 thought against which John inveighs seemed to him to 
 belong to the latter type, he sternly forbids this church 
 to give the least welcome or toleration to its evangelists, 
 warning any Christians who might infringe this prohibi- 
 tion, that thereby they would share responsibility for 
 all the evil which might ensue. It is easy to see, as 
 some do, the uncharitableness of a fanatic in this 
 command to boycott the false teachers, but John's 
 intolerance will seem pardonable to those who realise 
 how subversive of both truth and morals was the heresy 
 against which he fought. 
 
 The Third Epistle is undoubtedly personal in character, 
 for it is addressed to Gains, a Christian loyal to truth 
 and apostolic authority, and eminent in the church to 
 which he belonged. In it, however, there was a dis- 
 loyal faction led by one Diotrephes, who probably was 
 the local bishop. He seems in any case to have been 
 fond of self-assertion, and ambitious for place and 
 power. To the church over which he presided John 
 had written a letter, probably the one which we now 
 
88 ST. JOHN 
 
 know as the Second Epistle, but Diotrephes had made its 
 arrival the occasion of an impertinent tirade against the 
 apostle. Moreover, as regards the touring evangelists 
 who brought it, he had not only, simply because they 
 came from John, failed to give them, ere they resumed 
 their journey, the temporary hospitality, the furnishing 
 of which fell most naturally to him as the recognised 
 head of the local church, but he had refused to let 
 any one else supply it. Indeed he carried matters with 
 such a high hand as to proceed to expel from the church 
 those who were disposed to give the itinerant preachers 
 welcome. No excuse for this existed in the evangelists 
 themselves. Demetrius, who was their leader, is referred 
 to as a man respected by all, including John himself, 
 and the apostle expresses his gratification that Gains 
 had extended to the itinerants the hospitality which 
 Diotrephes had withheld. Gaius seems to have been 
 the leader of the loyal party in the church — "the 
 friends " (ver. 14), as John in an arresting phrase de- 
 scribes them, sending to them a greeting from a 
 similar group in his own church at Ephesus. This 
 little letter is most interesting, not only because of the 
 style in which it is composed, but because of the light 
 which it sheds upon the inner life of an early church. 
 Harnack has probably rightly diagnosed the situation 
 when he says that this Epistle belongs to the time at 
 which the monarchical system of church govern- 
 
THE EPISTLES OF JOHN 89 
 
 ment, by which an apostle or elder held authority 
 over a group of churches, was breaking down through 
 the growing eagerness of local churches, doubtless 
 prompted sometimes, as in this case, by some ambitious 
 men within them, to possess freedom from external 
 control, and to enjoy self-government through their own 
 local officers. The issue was ecclesiastical rather than 
 doctrinal, and calls for no further comment 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 THE BOOK OF THE REVELATION 
 
 Dr. South is credited with a saying concerning this 
 Book to the effect that it " either found a man mad or 
 left him so." Certainly, with the exception of a few 
 chapters which have always been precious to devout 
 readers, the Apocalypse, with its swift dramatic transi- 
 tions, and its imagery of beasts and dragons and other 
 bizarre figures, has been a sore perplexity to sober Bible 
 students, whilst, on the other hand, it has proved a 
 veritable treasure-mine to those who have a weakness 
 for fantastic modes of interpretation. The Pope of 
 Rome, Luther, Napoleon, have all, according to one or 
 another exegete of this latter school, been pre-figured 
 in this Book. Happily the scholarship of the last 
 generation has given us release from these vagaries, 
 and though it would be too much to say that all the 
 problems of the Apocalypse are solved, we are much 
 nearer to an intelligent grasp of both its nature and 
 
 its message than we were. One thing which has 
 
 90 
 
BOOK OF THE REVELATION 91 
 
 induced this happy result is that this Book has been 
 linked up with other literature of the same type. It 
 is a type peculiar to the Jew, and though, apart from 
 stray sections in the Gospels, this is the only specimen 
 of it in the New Testament, it claims the Book of Daniel 
 in the Old Testament, as well as portions of the Books 
 of Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Zechariah, and Joel, whilst in the 
 extra-canonical literature it is represented by such writ- 
 ings, among others, as the Book of Enoch and the 
 Assumption of Moses. It was a peculiar product of 
 the three centuries which began with 165 B.C. Its 
 great characteristics are the resort to vision as the pro- 
 fessed mode — it was not necessarily more — by which 
 the message uttered was obtained, and the use of a 
 fantastic symbolism. On this account it has been held 
 that apocalypse represents the decadent stage of pro- 
 phecy, and to some extent it may be true that the vision- 
 form of expression implies an obscuration of that 
 clearness of perception which we find in the prophets. 
 But other explanations are much nearer the truth. A 
 "revelation" in this special sense, or its equivalent 
 "apocalypse," means literally an "unveiling," and it seems 
 at first a curious name for a book which, as we read it, 
 appears to "darken counsel " rather than to illumine it. 
 But that is because we have failed to put ourselves 
 at the proper point of view. An apocalypse, most 
 happily described as "a tract for bad times," was 
 
92 ST. JOHN 
 
 written for a crisis in which the cause of right, owing to 
 the weakness of its human adherents in face of the 
 overwhelming might and pressure of their opponents, 
 was in an abject and parlous state. So dire was the 
 extremity that the only hope of the triumph of good- 
 ness lay in a speedy and dramatic intervention of God 
 Himself, and hence the deus ex niachind^ an abnormal 
 and effectual interposition of God, is an essential feature 
 of an apocalypse. The assurance of such an interven- 
 tion was likely to hearten those loyal souls who, seeing 
 all too plainly the overwhelming odds against them, 
 needed, if they were not to waver and fall, that convic- 
 tion of the Divine reinforcement of their cause, which 
 some seer in their midst was inspired first to see, and 
 then in symbolic form to disclose. That form was in 
 part a necessity of the situation. The seer had things 
 to say which it was dangerous to put into plain speech 
 — John, e.g,^ dared not have said without disguise some 
 of the truths which he wished the Book of the Revela- 
 tion to convey — and so he resorted to symbolic expres- 
 sion, choosing, moreover, images drawn from the 
 fantastic and the unreal, so that not only would a 
 hostile reader, chancing upon the book, unsuspectingly 
 dismiss it as a farrago of nonsense or a grotesque fairy- 
 tale, but the reader contemplated by the seer would 
 through the very grotesqueness of the imagery conclude 
 that it veiled an ulterior meaning. 
 
BOOK OF THE REVELATION 93 
 
 Such, then, was the type of literature to which the 
 Book of the Revelation belongs. One conclusion which 
 immediately flows from the foregoing considerations is 
 that, instead of having reference to remote personages 
 like Luther or Napoleon, it was a message for the hour 
 and for a crisis then impending. The Book itself aids 
 us to reconstruct the situation. It was written to seven 
 Christian churches in Asia which had to sustain a 
 malign pressure common, indeed, to Christians through- 
 out the whole Roman world, but existing in provincial 
 Asia to an aggravated degree. The evil was nothing 
 less than the demand Rome was now making on all her 
 subjects that they should worship the emperors, the 
 living as well as the dead. It is Caesrrism with its 
 claim to Divine worship which is symbolised by the 
 beast with the seven heads bearing "names of blas- 
 phemy" (xiii. i). Christians, under the stress of a 
 changed situation, were being forced to reconsider their 
 attitude to the imperial power. The time had been 
 when Rome was in the main their friend, standing 
 between them and the envenomed antagonism of the 
 Jev/s. The result was that writers like Paul and Peter 
 had counselled loyalty to the existing regime as to powers 
 that were ordained of God. But a change became 
 necessary when Rome itself in the person of Nero turned 
 persecutor, shedding the blood of outstanding leaders 
 such as Peter and Paul, ?.nd when subsequently, as a 
 
94 ST. JOHN 
 
 test of loyalty, she imposed a Caesar- worship which was 
 abhorrent to every one of her Christian subjects. It 
 would appear that in Asia, as compared with some 
 provinces, the cult of the emperor was more elaborately 
 organised, a regular priesthood (the second *' beast" of 
 xiii. II and "the false prophet" of xvi. 13) being asso- 
 ciated with it. Hence Rome, seated on her seven hills, 
 whether typified by " the beast," a fit embodiment of brute 
 force and recalling Csesarism as an object of worship, or 
 symbolised by " the great harlot sitting by many waters " 
 (the imperial authority being there in mind), who made 
 potentates and peoples through a compulsory idolatry 
 commit spiritual fornication (xvii. i), is the foe with 
 which in this Book the Church finds herself in mortal 
 conflict. To have grasped that fact, and to realise that 
 the Apocalypse was written to encourage Christians in 
 unwavering loyalty to their faith by an assurance of 
 their ultimate triumph, is to possess the key which 
 unlocks the mystery. 
 
 The Book of the Revelation is, therefore, not prose 
 but poetry, in the sense at least that it is a work of in- 
 spired imagination expressing in symbol and drama what, 
 as its author felt, was the Divine judgment on the exist- 
 ing situation. One thing which scholarship has made 
 plain is that the writer is not wholly original. He has 
 used over again imagery which we find in Ezekiel, 
 Zechariah, and other writers of apocalypse. Indeed 
 
BOOK OF THE REVELATION 95 
 
 Gunkel, in a most important piece of criticism, went 
 further, and treated this Book as a mass of symbolism 
 having to a great extent its origin in Babylonian myths 
 and folk-lore. But he is open to the objection that, 
 should his theory of the primal source be correct, and 
 apply as extensively as he imagines, the source of 
 imagery is one thing, the meaning with which a Chris- 
 tian, or even a Jewish, writer chooses to employ it may 
 be another. Moreover, for some of the symbolism, e.g. 
 the seal-openings, the woman with child, the outpouring 
 of the bowls, neither Babylonia nor the Old Testament 
 supplies any credible parallels. They are Christian 
 symbols, and the work of an imagination which, while 
 not disdaining to borrow imagery from existing sources, 
 had power to create its own, and to set the whole, both 
 the original and the derived, to Christian use. In 
 addition it is probably true that John has taken over 
 pieces of existing apocalyptic which lay ready to his 
 hand, and has with slight modifications inserted them 
 in his work. Critics are not all agreed as to where we 
 must find these insertions, but one place is probably 
 chap, xi., where in ver. 2 the writer seems to expect that 
 in the destruction of Jerusalem, viewed then as im- 
 pending, the Temple was to suffer no injury beyond the 
 capture and profanation of its outer court — an expecta- 
 tion which must be dated prior to a.d. 70. Chaps, xvii. 
 and xviii. also appear to some critics to present a double 
 
96 ST. JOHN 
 
 picture of Rome's downfall. In some passages it seems 
 attributed to luxury and to the corruption with which 
 Rome had tainted mankind ; in others it is because of 
 her persecution of the saints with whose blood she has 
 become drunk. But to the present writer, if the " forni- 
 cation " charged against Rome be, as the Old Testament 
 would suggest, interpreted primarily in the sense of the 
 idolatrous Caesar- worship which Rome imposed upon the 
 races under her sway, the two pictures present no neces- 
 sary discrepancy. The general contention, however, 
 that John has utilised brief existing apocalypses may be 
 conceded, difficult as critics find it to agree as to the 
 precise sections of this Book which may thus be 
 accounted for, though the eating of the little book re- 
 counted in X. lo suggests that borrowing from a previous 
 source is to be looked for in what immediately follows. 
 On this theory we may account for the presence here 
 and there, e.g. in xii. 15, 16, of fragments of imagery 
 which, though possessing some relevance to the situa- 
 tion for which they were originally written, seem to 
 yield no satisfactory meaning in the crisis for which 
 John writes. Still, these are exceptions. Composite as 
 were its sources, this Book represents the fusion of them 
 into a unity which bears a Christian imprint, and is in- 
 tended to express a Christian message. This does not 
 involve, however, that we must discover a meaning in 
 every detail of the imagery. There are undoubtedly, as 
 
BOOK OF THE REVELATION 97 
 
 in our Lord's parables, minor features which are only- 
 intended to give colouring to the picture, or add vivid- 
 ness to the movement, and which belong to the art of 
 the seer rather than to the substance of his message. 
 
 Earlier as some portions of the Apocalypse have been 
 seen to be, its composition and issue in its present form 
 must, in the judgment of most critics, be assigned to 
 the last decade of the first century, not only because the 
 persecution under Domitian, the then reigning emperor, 
 seems to fit the circumstances which called forth the 
 Book, but because Nero, instead of being thought of as 
 still alive and in hiding in Parthia — a form which the 
 myth concerning his return took for some time after 
 his death, — is pictured as being brought back from 
 hell, a view which cannot be traced till towards the 
 end of the first century. More plainly than any 
 other of the Johannine writings the Apocalypse claims 
 to be written by John, and hence to many the only 
 point to be determined is whether we are to identify 
 the author with John the Apostle, or with that nebulous 
 figure, John the Presbyter. But is not a further conclu- 
 sion possible ? The Fourth Gospel and the Johannine 
 Epistles exhibit a marked unity in thought, style, and 
 language, and may easily have come from one hand. 
 But it is difficult to believe that the same hand wrote the 
 Apocalypse. Phrases and terms, it is true, occur which 
 recall the Johannine terminology, but others equally 
 
98 ST. JOHN 
 
 characteristic are absent, and such sporadic affinities as 
 exist are sufficiently explained, if traced, not to John 
 himself, but to a disciple who had sat at his feet. For 
 the supreme difficulty which seems to demand that solu- 
 tion is that, whereas the Greek of the Gospel and the 
 Epistles, whilst simple, is grammatical and idiomatic, 
 that of the Apocalypse is full of harsh constructions, 
 false concords of gender and case, and imitations of 
 Hebrew structure, so that the style has been not unfit- 
 tingly described as " the broken Greek of a foreigner " 
 who knew but imperfectly the language in which he was 
 writing. That consideration, if no other, makes it prob- 
 able that the writer of this Book was different from 
 the author of the other Johannine literature. And if we 
 assign the latter to John the Apostle, — and it can at least 
 be said that the theory has not been clearly disproved, — 
 the Book of the Revelation, even though it purports to 
 come from John, may be due to some other hand. For 
 one feature of apocalyptic literature is that it is generally 
 pseudonymous, i.e, the real writer hides himself behind 
 the name of some famous man belonging to the past, 
 and sometimes to the near past. Of this pseudonymity 
 the Books of Daniel and Enoch are familiar examples. 
 Because this was a Christian apocalypse, the name of 
 some Christian leader had to be borrowed, and that of 
 John was chosen (he may have died only a little while 
 before), not only because of the influence which his 
 
BOOK OF THE REVELATION 99 
 
 name would carry among the churches addressed, but 
 because the actual writer may have felt, as the result of 
 actual fellowship with John during his lifetime, that 
 he was uttering the convictions of his beloved master. 
 On this question, the discussion of which is here neces- 
 sarily brief, dogmatic assertions are to be deprecated, 
 but it may be claimed that the solution suggested is not 
 unworthy of credence. 
 
 Whoever was the "John" of the Apocalypse, it is 
 evident that he has a lofty conception of the Person of 
 Clirist, for the majestic being, of whom he speaks in 
 ch. i., alive from the dead, bearing at His girdle the keys 
 of death and Hades, and walking with transfigured mien 
 amid the Asian churches, represents One whose only 
 rank is Divine. The seven churches, to whom this Book 
 was addressed, receive each a specific message, mostly 
 of praise commingled with blame. For there is thus 
 disclosed one grave feature of the historic situation, 
 namely, that these Asian Christians were ill prepared to 
 meet the impending crisis. The love of some had grown 
 cold ; worldliness had infected others ; at Thyatira what 
 seems to have been Gnostic libertinism, with its specious 
 initiation into " the deep things of Satan," menaced the 
 purity of the church ; other Christians, e.g. those at 
 Pergamum, "where Satan's throne is'* (ii. 13), felt with 
 special intensity the pressure of the dominant Caesar- 
 worship and the vicious seductions of paganism. So 
 
loo ST. JOHN 
 
 the general call, linked with the promise of fitting reward, 
 was that these churches should recover, or retain, holiness 
 of life, fervour of love, and purity of faith. Only a 
 Church thus armed could stand against the onset of a 
 persecuting world. 
 
 These prefatory messages concluded, the drama of 
 deliverance and judgment begins to unfold. A door is 
 opened in heaven, and mystic voices are heard, and the 
 seer " in the Spirit " beholds wonderful things (iv. i, 2). 
 Since John's aim in this Book is to kindle hope within the 
 Church by reminding her of the unseen and heavenly 
 reinforcements which, contending on her behalf, would 
 in the time of crisis ensure preservation and triumph, 
 he naturally begins with an august picture of the great- 
 ness and all-pervasive sovereignty of God. Seated on 
 a glorious throne, and with the seven spirits and the 
 four cherubim before Him who typify the perfect forth- 
 going of the Divine energy, the Almighty receives, as 
 symbolically presented by the living creatures and elders, 
 the adoring homage of the universe. It is the picture 
 of a God whose writs run everywhere, and whose 
 power, universally acknowledged, is competent to effect 
 the decisions of His will. Thus is the mind of the 
 reader prepared for the drama of destiny which follows. 
 The Lamb, identified by means of other titles with the 
 Jesus of history, receives also, as was fitting for One 
 who was to be God's agent in the accomplishment of 
 
BOOK OF THE REVELATION loi 
 
 judgment, the acclamation and homage of the heavenly 
 court, His present dignity and lordship being traced, as 
 the very title " Lamb " was intended to suggest, to His 
 redemptive sacrifice for man. Christ too is competent 
 for His new task, and able to break the seals of the 
 book of doom. And as each of the seven seals is 
 broken, — the number seven probably denoting judgment 
 perfected, — some phase of the Divine action is manifested, 
 and we see how God is able to bring His chastisements 
 to pass, and usher in the Day of Judgment. Conquest, 
 slaughter, famine, and pestilence — these, depicted by 
 horses of various hue, are declared instruments of the 
 Divine vengeance. When these have passed, the opening 
 of the fifth seal discloses the motive God has for 
 vengeance in the appeal constantly made to Him by the 
 blood of His martyred servants. If He delayed avenging 
 them, it was only because He was waiting until their 
 number was complete, and the cup of their persecutors 
 full to the brim. With the sixth seal the hour is ripe, 
 for, when that seal is broken, the Day of Yahweh, with 
 the dread accompaniments long associated with it in pro- 
 phecy, is ushered in, and the final assize, of which the 
 preceding visitations had been but premonitory, begins. 
 At this point (ch. vii.), and as a counterfoil to the 
 terror of the foes of the Church, when faced with the 
 avenging wrath of God, we have a picture of the security 
 with which Christians, conceived poetically as the true 
 
I02 ST. JOHN 
 
 Israel, pass unscathed through all the foregoing horrors. 
 John has a vision of a redeemed host, representative of 
 many tongues and tribes, constituted by those who 
 " come out of the great tribulation," i.e. the persecution 
 which to the seer was even then in progress. Standing 
 before the throne, they praise God for the achievement 
 of His Messianic salvation, and, with a happiness which 
 no distress or sorrow is permitted to disturb, they find 
 the consummation of their bliss in the vision and service 
 of God. Thus are the antagonisms of earth carried up to 
 their final issue. It might have seemed enough if the 
 Apocalypse had ended here, but it belongs to the art of 
 the writer that he seeks to make his moral effective by 
 giving more than one demonstration of it. Hence the 
 breaking of the seventh seal occasions no new action, 
 but heralds a silence in heaven — a silence of awe-struck 
 expectation — preparatory to a new presentation of the 
 drama of judgment. Seven trumpets replace the seven 
 seals, and, as they are each blown in succession, there 
 are let loose upon the earth various forms of destruction, 
 nature and animals, as well as mankind, receiving the 
 strokes of doom. The destructive agencies are in part 
 suggested by the Old Testament stories of the plagues 
 of Egypt and of the visitation of the locust-swarm in 
 Joel, though the woe heralded by the sixth trumpet is 
 probably a concerted attack upon Rome by the barbaric 
 nations of the East. That the Parthians, dominant 
 
BOOK OF THE REVELATION 103 
 
 among these races, were to be the instrument of God's 
 vengeance upon the Roman power is a theme to which 
 John returns. Meanwhile, after the sixth trumpet, as 
 after the sixth seal, he is diverted by the desire to 
 introduce an episode (xi. 1-13), borrowed, as we have 
 seen, from some earlier writer, but congruous in spirit 
 and, to some extent, in form with the preceding woes. 
 Its insertion paves the way for the sounding of the 
 seventh trumpet, with which " is finished the mystery 
 of God " (x. 7), and the programme of judgment moves 
 to its climax. " Great voices " in heaven announce the 
 subjugation of the cosmos to its rightful Lord, and 
 acclaim the Messiah as He enters upon His eternal 
 reign. 
 
 Here, again, we might expect the Book to draw to its 
 close upon this anthem of victory, yet to our surprise 
 we are at once borne back again to the conflict, and 
 find that it is still in progress. The reason must be 
 that, although John has already conducted his readers 
 through two cycles of judgment to the Divine victory 
 over wrong, he has not yet brought his message into as 
 vivid touch with the historic situation as he desires. 
 Apart from a vague reference to invasion from the East, 
 the instruments of God's vengeance upon Rome have 
 been elementally pictured as war, pestilence, famine, 
 and various scourges of nature. Now he comes closer 
 to the scene, and at the same time widens the lists, so 
 
104 ST. JOHN 
 
 that we see who, in his judgment, are the real combatants, 
 and what are the final issues. Christians are reminded 
 that the foes of the Church are the foes of God, and 
 that their battle against the persecuting might of Rome 
 is but an acute and final phase of the age-long conflict 
 between God and the powers of evil. The order in 
 chap. xii. is a little confusing, because the story of the 
 dragon's persecution of the woman and her child is 
 partly told before we learn how the creature came to 
 be on earth. But if we correct the sequence, what we 
 see is that the present conflict of Right with Wrong 
 is only the perpetuation for a space on earth of the 
 struggle which began with that war in heaven, in which 
 Michael with his angels subdued Satan and his allies. 
 Cast forth from heaven, Satan now has his sphere of 
 malignity in this lower world, and, as the symbolism of 
 xii. 3 shows, is regarded by John as finding his agent 
 in the Caesars of Rome. The object of attack is 
 the Messiah, symbolically depicted as the offspring of the 
 Jewish Church, though, by a transition of thought easy 
 to a Jewish Christian, the " woman " comes also to 
 express the Christian Church viewed as the new Israel, 
 the historic continuation of the old, and Christians are 
 "the rest of her seed " (xii. 17). Detail more obviously 
 applicable to the immediate situation is furnished in 
 chap, xiii., where two beasts appear. One having ten 
 horns and seven heads, the latter bearing blasphemous 
 
BOOK OF THE REVELATION 105 
 
 titles, represents the dynasty of the Caesars, with whom, 
 through their impious claim to Divine worship, the 
 Church was at issue, as also with another "beast," 
 lamb-like in appearance but dragon-like in action, and 
 typifying the priestly orders in the empire who lent 
 themselves in various ways to the spread of the imperial 
 cult. The first beast, however, stands for an individual 
 as well as a dynasty, for it was felt that the anti- 
 Christian venom of the Caesarian line had come to a 
 head in Nero. His death, when it took place amid uni- 
 versal execration in a.d. 68, was believed by many to be 
 a mere ruse, and his return from some place of hiding 
 was hourly expected. Nero, consequently, is that head 
 of the dragon which seemingly had been smitten unto 
 death, but whose death-stroke was healed (xiii. 3), and 
 he it is, regarded as once more possessed of the imperial 
 power, who is foreshadowed in the mystic number 666 
 (ver. 18). Such were the foes of the Church in the 
 impending crisis. 
 
 And what about her friends and helpers ? For answer 
 John takes us to the unseen and heavenly side of things, 
 and we see the hosts of God marshalling themselves in 
 defence of His weak and persecuted people, God Him- 
 self standing within the shadow "keeping watch above 
 His own." In ch. xiv. we are shown the Lamb sur- 
 rounded by His redeemed host, whilst various angels go 
 forth, some of them to urge loyalty to the true faith and 
 
io6 ST. JOHN 
 
 to announce the blessedness " from henceforth " of those 
 who die holding it fast, but most of them to warn men 
 concerning the perils of idolatry, and to proclaim the 
 impending judgment. Then, after a heavenly anthem 
 in which the entire historic process of salvation, which 
 is to have its consummation in the overthrow of Rome, 
 is by partial anticipation celebrated in "the song of 
 Moses " and " the song of the Lamb," the reader is 
 prepared for another description of the cycle of doom. 
 Again the number seven appears, and, as angels pour 
 forth the bowls filled with the wrath of God, the earth 
 becomes afflicted with various plagues and woes, wide- 
 spread in their horror, and all of them premonitory of 
 the near approach of the end. In ch. xvii. the grand 
 denouement begins. To Rome, mystically designated 
 Babylon, and pictured as a foul harlot " sitting by many 
 waters " — a symbol of her extensive sway, — the hour of 
 vengeance has come. The earthly agent of its infliction 
 is the beast which " was and is not, and is about to come 
 out of the abyss," i.e. Nero brought back from the dead 
 and released for a space from hell so as to effect Rome's 
 overthrow. Supported by ten potentates, whom he has 
 hired with the bribe of independent kingship, he 
 marches on the city which towards the end of his reign 
 had scorned and rejected him, and in fire and ravage he 
 takes a bloody revenge. Heaven rejoices in his victory, 
 and declares Rome's destruction the merited reward of 
 
BOOK OF THE REVELATION 107 
 
 her luxury and sin. Still, that is only one stage of the 
 consummation. There would have been no real 
 deliverance for the Church simply in the substitution of 
 a Neronian tyranny for that which already existed. 
 Evil may be permitted to scourge itself by internecine 
 strife, but, if right is to be vindicated, the evil that sur- 
 vives must also be challenged and subdued. Accordingly 
 we have the picture of the heavenly host, singing already 
 the Hallelujah chorus of anticipated triumph (xix. 6), 
 marching forth in dread array, their leader He whose 
 blood-besprinkled robe recalls His atoning sacrifice, 
 just as the sharp sword proceeding from His mouth 
 speaks of judgment. It is a sublime and heart-stirring 
 vision. First the " beast," with his ally, " the false 
 prophet," is taken and cast into the lake of fire; his 
 legions also are exterminated. Then Satan, whose 
 instrument Nero has been, is also assailed, for it is a 
 universe with all the power of evil in it shattered of 
 which this seer dares to dream. Adapting his forecast 
 to a scheme made sacred by previous apocalyptic, John 
 divides Satan's overthrow into two stages. First of all, 
 he is placed in chains in the abyss for a thousand years, 
 during which the Messiah, surrounded by the martyrs 
 who, because of their faithfulness, have been raised from 
 the dead, enjoys the glories of His millennial reign. 
 Then comes an interval during which Satan, released from 
 bondage, once again deceives the nations, and gathers 
 
io8 ST. JOHN 
 
 them together for final battle with the Messiah. In 
 that encounter the power of Satan is utterly broken, and 
 he himself consigned to unending torment, a doom 
 shared, in the second and general resurrection which at 
 once takes place, by all whose names are not found 
 written in " the book of life." 
 
 Thus is the universe purged of wrong and the power 
 of evil broken. But ideal progress consists not simply 
 in the absence of evil, but in the perfect realisation of 
 good. So this vision-prophecy concludes with the 
 picture of transformed heavens and earth, with the sea 
 vanished, which, like Horace's oceanus dissociabiliSy was 
 to the Jew the dread source of peril and estrangement. 
 The inauguration of the perfect reign of God is marked 
 by the descent out of heaven of the holy city which 
 was to be its sphere. It had long been part of Jewish 
 belief that, when the kingdom of God was ushered in, 
 a new Jerusalem — Paul's " Jerusalem from above " — 
 conceived as already existing with God, would descend 
 and take the place of the old city. Under that form, 
 therefore, John gives to us his conception of the ideal 
 future. He pictures a city wonderful in its proportions 
 and matchless in its beauty, with streets of gold and 
 gates of pearl and walls of jasper. Holy in that there 
 enters it nothing which defiles, healthy since its 
 inhabitants know neither sickness nor death, happy 
 
BOOK OF THE REVELATION 109 
 
 seeing that tears are wiped from off all faces and men 
 sorrow no more, the New Jerusalem, needing no sun 
 to lighten it nor temple to localise its worship, is the 
 realisation of all men's ideals, the home of a perfect and 
 redeemed humanity. 
 
 With this sublime picture of the goal of progress the 
 Apocalypse draws to its close. The epilogue consists 
 of a few admonitions and warnings which, seeing that 
 the writer puts them into the mouth of Christ, bespeak 
 John's profound conviction as to the truth of the 
 message which he had felt moved to declare. And 
 can we not feel that in substance his message was right, 
 and stands eternally true? What he says in effect is 
 that, because we live in a universe in which God exists 
 and works, right will finally prove stronger than might, 
 and deliverance come to all who are oppressed. 
 "Greater is He that is in you," he seems to say 
 to the Church, " than he that is in the world." The 
 ultimate victory of progress has its guarantee in the 
 power of God and in the present activity of His Spirit. 
 It may be true that John, as he applied this inspired 
 conviction to the immediate situation, gave a forecast 
 of the movement of history with which actual events 
 failed to agree, but therein he simply betrays the 
 limitations which attach to every true prophet. It is 
 one of the characteristics of prophecy that, in fore- 
 
ST. JOHN 
 
 casting the future, it often errs as to time and mode ; 
 the perspective of history is foreshortened, and the 
 prophet is much more sure as to issues than he is 
 concerning processes. But that is only what we might 
 expect from an inspiration which worked in a vital, 
 as distinct from a mechanical, way. We may feel, too, 
 that the whole notion of apocalyptic was defective in 
 that it isolated man, and left issues and ideals to be 
 realised by the exclusive and dramatic intervention of 
 God. We, with our deeper knowledge of the movement 
 of history and of the relations which bind God and 
 man in holy partnership, have come to see that God 
 -works not so much by revolution as by evolution, and 
 that the New Jerusalem is not simply the gift of God 
 from above but the product of man's striving from 
 beneath. Every book, however, has to be judged by 
 the age in which it is written, and by the immediate 
 situation to which it is addressed. The message of the 
 Apocalypse is not necessarily untrue, because it is not 
 the whole truth. In times of darkness and strain, when 
 the limits of both our strength and wisdom are over- 
 passed, this Book has a special message for us, remind- 
 ing us then that, though we have become so weak and 
 helpless that we can do nothing, there is still left to us 
 a God who can do everything. And in hours less 
 exhausting, when, nevertheless, foes are hot and eager, 
 and the battle for the right is prolonged and hangs with 
 
BOOK OF THE REVELATION iii 
 
 dubious issue, it is well to be reminded of the unseen 
 hosts that are on our side, and, looking through John's 
 eyes into the open heaven, to behold the final triumph 
 of the will of God. A Book which, with unrivalled 
 splendour of imagery, conveys to the travailing Church 
 of Christ such convictions and hopes, was worthy to 
 bring the canon of revelation to a close. 
 
II 
 
 OTHER NEW TESTAMENT 
 TEACHERS 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE EPISTLE OF JAMES 
 
 If we could trust the opening words of this Epistle, the 
 problems of its date and authorship would lie within a 
 narrow compass, since it professes to come from " James, 
 a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ." Three 
 persons bearing the name of James appear on the stage 
 of New Testament history, but of these James the brother 
 of John is speedily removed by martyrdom, whilst James 
 the son of Alphseus is a lay figure, of whom nothing is 
 known beyond his name. The remaining James became 
 in A.D. 44 head of the Christian society at Jerusalem, 
 and from that time forward, as we learn from various 
 sources, was not only influential in the councils of 
 the Church, but commanded also the respect of the 
 general Jewish community. As one of the brethren 
 of Jesus, who believed in Him after His resurrection, 
 this James alone was sufficiently eminent to be known 
 by the name without some added description, so that 
 not only here does he style himself simply " James," 
 but Jude, his brother, when writing his little Epistle^ 
 
ii6 NEW TESTAMENT TEACHERS 
 
 thought it a sufficient introduction to his readers to 
 denote himself as *'Jude, a brother of James." As 
 regards the Epistle now under discussion, it is the 
 general opinion of those who reject, as well as of 
 those who accept, this James as its writer, that the 
 opening salutation is intended to assign its authorship 
 to James of Jerusalem. Those critics, therefore, who 
 regard it as a product of the second century, and 
 simply attributed to James because it accorded with 
 the point of view assigned to him by tradition, are 
 beset with the difficulty that, under those circumstances, 
 a more explicit description than " James " would have 
 been used to denote the alleged author. 
 
 If we turn to the Epistle itself we find much that 
 sustains its traditional authorship. Criticism has justly 
 described it as the least dogmatic of all the New 
 Testament writings. It is concerned supremely with 
 problems of conduct. The teaching of Jesus receives 
 great prominence, whilst His death and resurrection 
 are almost ignored. The quotations, too, in which 
 that teaching is recalled, seem to be cited from memory 
 rather than culled from documents, the inference being 
 that the Gospel story was as yet in the oral stage of 
 transmission. The absence of theological interest is 
 most credibly assigned to that early period in the 
 life of the Church when, though the Gospel facts were 
 proclaimed, the construing of them in terms of a 
 
THE EPISTLE OF JAMES 117 
 
 theology had yet to take place. Moreover, when James 
 wrote, the days of miracle were not past (v. 15), the 
 return of Jesus was shortly expected (v. 9), and the 
 controversy as to the obligation of Christians towards 
 the Mosaic Law had not yet become acute. If, too, 
 we regard Palestine as the home of the writer, — and 
 figures and illustrations in the Epistle which would 
 occur naturally to a Palestinian, lend support to this 
 view, — the social conditions depicted are those of the 
 first century and prior to the fall of Jerusalem. The 
 most significant feature of the Epistle, however, is the 
 intense sympathy of its writer with Judaism. He moves 
 familiarly among the pages of the Old Testament, 
 finding there, and not, as he sometimes might have 
 done, in the life and work of Jesus, illustrations to 
 enforce his appeals. The very faith which, when 
 divorced from works, he denounces, is illustrated by a 
 reference to the Shetna^ that confession of faith recited 
 daily by every pious Jew, and beginning ; " Hear, O 
 Israel; the Lord our God is one Lord." Moreover, 
 not only does James offer no hint as to the existence 
 of Gentile-Christian communities, but the persons to 
 whom he writes worship in the " synagogue '* (ii. 2), 
 and their sufferings, which included in some cases 
 arraignment before ** the judgment- seats " (ii. 6), were 
 such as came, not from their Roman overlords, but 
 from their Jewish brethren. Lastly, yet not least in its 
 
ii8 NEWTESTAMENT TEACHERS 
 
 significance, the Epistle in its formal salutation makes 
 no pretence to be a distinctively Christian document. 
 It is addressed " to the twelve tribes which are of the 
 Dispersion," a phrase which is most naturally interpreted 
 to mean, not an ideal and Christian Israel, but the 
 Jewish community as a whole. It is quite true, the 
 Epistle itself being witness, that James, a Christian 
 himself, has mainly in view Jewish Christians, or such 
 Jews as possessed sympathy with the Christian movement. 
 But the fact that in his salutation he does not segregate 
 these from Judaism and treat them as a distinct entity, 
 points to the time when the Church was not only 
 confined to Judaism, but was regarded as a reform 
 movement within its borders, Christians still using the 
 synagogues and reverencing the traditions of the older 
 faith. The sharp schism, which resulted in the Christian 
 Church being organised as a separate institution, had 
 not yet taken place. For such conditions in the early 
 Church we must look to the time prior to a.d. 50, and 
 that view, therefore, has most to say for itself which 
 dates this Epistle in the immediate neighbourhood of 
 that year. In spite of those eminent critics who would 
 relegate its composition to the second century, we may 
 confidently regard it as the oldest surviving document of 
 apostolic Christianity. 
 
 It is not difficult to see how James came to write this 
 Epistle. Living at Jerusalem, to which Jews of the 
 
THE EPISTLE OF JAMES 119 
 
 Dispersion were constantly resorting, he had unique 
 opportunities of knowing the state of the Jewish world. 
 The "myriads among the Jews" who had believed, 
 and were at the same time " zealous for the law " (Acts 
 xxi. 20), doubtless included many from the Dispersion 
 as well as Jews resident in Palestine ; and of the 
 former many would date their first sympathy with 
 Christianity from some visit to Jerusalem and contact 
 with Jewish Christians of the type of James. Given 
 much to intercession for his nation, and commonly 
 called " the Just " because of his piety, James com- 
 bined in himself the ethical enthusiasm of the old 
 prophets and the mellow wisdom of the later Jewish 
 literature. In language as well as in ideas affinity has 
 been detected between this Epistle and the Books of 
 Wisdom and Ecclesiasticus. But what James derived 
 from these sources was wholly suffused with the teach- 
 ing and spirit of Jesus. This is supremely a Christian 
 document, moving on the high plane of the Sermon on 
 the Mount, much of whose teaching it in spirit or letter 
 reproduces. 
 
 The Epistle is unsystematic in construction, 
 and was intended to hearten its readers in their 
 trials and to correct certain defects in their conduct. 
 Those to whom James spoke were subject to trial. 
 This arose partly from their fellow-countrymen, who, 
 in some instances, lent themselves either to religious 
 
120 NEW TESTAMENT TEACHERS 
 
 persecution or to social injustice. But the main source 
 was the unfriendly atmosphere in which these Jews of 
 the Dispersion lived. The pressure from without was 
 sometimes so severe as to strain their faith almost to 
 breaking-point. Nevertheless James forbids them to 
 yield. He reminds them of the religious value of trial, 
 in that they could glean from it the fruit of patience. 
 The resolute endurance of wrong and hardship — for 
 it is an active rather than a passive grace which James 
 denotes by the term "patience" — was a quality by 
 which this Epistle sets great store. So precious was 
 it, making the man in whom it had ripened to the full 
 " perfect and entire, lacking in nothing," that the mani- 
 fold trials in whose endurance it was gained were to 
 be borne, not with the fortitude of a Stoic, but with 
 the joy of a Christian. 
 
 Such was the message of James to his afflicted 
 brethren. One thing which is very manifest in his 
 Epistle is his sympathy for the poor and his distrust 
 of the rich. Jewish society in the Dispersion had 
 its extremes of poverty and wealth. Apart, however, 
 from the injustice which frequently stained the 
 latter, what stirred the soul of James was that social 
 differences intruded even into religious worship. The 
 picture of the rich man with the gold ring and the fine 
 apparel, who is treated with obsequious deference as 
 he enters the synagogue, whilst the poor man is con- 
 
THE EPISTLE OF JAMES 121 
 
 . — ^ — 
 
 temptuously bidden either to stand or to sit on the 
 floor near to some one's footstool, was doubtless drawn 
 from life. James protests against such invidious dis- 
 tinctions. Accepting the later conceptions of the Old 
 Testament, in which "the poor" and "the quiet in 
 the land " were also the pious, whilst " rich " is 
 frequently synonymous with " wicked," he recalls his 
 readers to the true standard of worth. Men were to be 
 judged not by what they had, but by what they were, and 
 therein the balance dipped against the rich. Not only 
 did rich men, as masters, oppress their labourers, but 
 in religion they were the vindictive persecutors of the 
 righteous, haling them before the synagogue-tribunals, 
 and, in the case of Christians, reviling the holy name 
 which had been called over them in their baptism 
 (ii. 6, 7). To yield special honour to wealth was to 
 forget the beatitude in which Jesus had assigned the 
 Kingdom pre-eminently to the poor (Luke vi. 20). But 
 James' final appeal is to the law of love. To love our 
 neighbour as ourselves was more than an Old Testa- 
 ment injunction ; it was " the royal law " in the sense 
 that, as regards human relations, Jesus had made it 
 the supreme law of the Kingdom of God. The love 
 thereby enjoined made unbrotherly distinctions impos- 
 sible. The argument of James attained special cogency 
 from his conception of the moral law as a unity. We 
 may trace this idea, not so much to Christ's compres- 
 
122 NEW TESTAMENT TEACHERS 
 
 sion of the whole law into the single commandment 
 of love, as to precepts of the rabbis, who, not without 
 occasional extravagances of interpretation, made breach 
 of one commandment the violation of all. Happily 
 James does not linger in this dubious region, for his 
 final word is a command that his readers should speak 
 and act as those who are to be judged by " a law of 
 liberty." Twice in this Epistle does he use that -strik- 
 ing phrase to describe the Christian rule of life. To 
 speak in the same breath of law and liberty seems 
 a contradiction in terms, yet in this instance the con- 
 tradiction is resolved in a higher unity. For when 
 law and nature have become attuned, even law becomes 
 the sphere of freedom, since duty is no longer imposed 
 but chosen, and service is the spontaneous offering of 
 the spirit. When the soul, though under law, no longer 
 knows it as a fetter, religion has become inner and 
 spiritual. In that ideal James and Jesus are one. 
 
 Another point wherein this Epistle bears the mark of 
 Jesus is in the importance which is attached to conduct. 
 In sayings which seem to recall the close of the Sermon 
 on the Mount, James bids his readers be " doers of the 
 word, and not hearers only." Using the figure of a 
 mirror, he compares the mere hearer to a man who gives 
 simply a passing glance at his reflection, with the result 
 that he speedily forgets what he is like. The true 
 hearer, however, keeps a steadfast gaze upon the holy 
 
THE EPISTLE OF JAMES 123 
 
 law {cf. the Psalmist's words : " In His law doth he 
 meditate day and night "), and, in consequence, duty con- 
 templated becomes duty done. In words which seem 
 deliberately to recall legalism with its outward lustrations 
 and ceremonial observances, James affirms that, in the 
 sight of Him who is God and Father, the purest ritual is 
 to show kindness to the afflicted, and to keep the soul 
 free from the stain of sin; in brief, the true "Divine 
 service " is a life of holiness and love. 
 
 Such teaching shows how far James, with all his 
 affinities for Judaism, had passed beyond the merely 
 legalistic temper. His enthusiasm for the practical and 
 ethical appears also in his discussion of the relation 
 between faith and works. Many critics see in this dis- 
 cussion a counter- statement to Paul's teaching that 
 justification is conceded to faith, and not mediated by 
 "works of the law." But a close examination reveals 
 that the two theories move on different planes. In the 
 Epistle to the Romans the faith which justifies has 
 Christ as its object, whilst in its content it is the move- 
 ment of the whole personality — thought, feeling, and 
 will — towards the object of trust. In James, however, 
 faith looks towards God, and has other than the Pauline 
 signification. In two passages, where it is applied to 
 prayer (i. 6, v. 15), it denotes, as in the Gospels, a joyful 
 confidence in the goodness of God. In the section, 
 however, concerned with faith and works it implies 
 
124 NEW TESTAMENT TEACHERS 
 
 simply an intellectual assent to certain truths such as 
 demons exhibit, when they approve the dogma that God 
 is one; it is a cold conviction exerting no pressure 
 upon the springs of action, and is parallel, therefore, to 
 a heartless injunction to the needy to be warmed and 
 filled, whilst their wants are left unsupplied. The re- 
 lation between creed and conduct was one of the prob- 
 lems debated in the rabbinic schools, Abraham, and 
 Rahab being probably stock illustrations adduced in 
 the discussion. The term "justify" came also from 
 the same source. Again, whereas the works of which 
 Paul spoke are definitely called " works of the law," i.e. 
 good deeds done merely under the constraint of external 
 commandment, and so constituting simply a formal or 
 legal righteousness, James speaks of "works," ue. con- 
 duct in general. Paul was concerned about the inner 
 side of the religious life. There he saw that the 
 operative principle was " faith," and he was content to 
 lay upon it the whole burden of the sinner's justifica- 
 tion, not because he was indifferent to conduct, but 
 because the principle, being what it was, could not but 
 express itself in life. Faith was an explosive power, a 
 moral dynamic that worked by love. "Works of the 
 law" there might be, where this faith was absent, but, 
 conceding its presence, appropriate conduct was bound 
 to ensue. But not so with faith as James views it, for, 
 moving as it did, in the chill region of the intellect, it 
 
THE EPISTLE OF JAMES 125 
 
 could conceivably exist apart from works, and when it 
 was thus isolated, it was "dead"; like the body with 
 no indwelling spirit, it lacked the completeness which 
 belongs to life. So what James assails is the divorce 
 of creed from conduct, the schism between profession 
 and practice. 
 
 There are several sins against which James utters a 
 special warning. One is a sin of temper. Some of 
 the churches were rent with faction or honeycombed 
 with jealousy. Men who possessed " wisdom," and so 
 aspired to teach, looked with envy upon others with 
 the same gift. James feels moved to pronounce such 
 "wisdom" demonic in its source, and earthly in the 
 sense that it lacked spiritual illumination. The true 
 wisdom, he says, came from above, — the man who lacked 
 it could obtain it from God for the asking, — and it bore 
 the proof of its source upon it, in that it was pure and 
 gentle and docile, not given to strife or hypocrisy, but 
 full of mercy and good fruits (v. 17). In that teaching 
 we have an echo of Christ's own claim when, after pro- 
 fessing to be the medium of a unique revelation. He 
 bade men come to Him and learn of Him, " for," said 
 He, "I am meek and lowly in heart" (Matt. xi. 29). 
 "Wisdom" has its true setting in a pure and gentle 
 spirit 
 
 Another sin which James rebukes is the uncontrolled 
 use of the tongue. In various ways the tongue yielded 
 
126 NEW TESTAMENT TEACHERS 
 
 to license. The Oriental tendency to strengthen speech 
 by garnishing it with all manner of profane phrases 
 caused James to reiterate our Lord's summons to abso- 
 lute simplicity of statement, whether in affirmation or 
 denial (v. 12). Violence of language often had its root 
 in heat of temper, passion being most easily kindled in 
 religious controversy. Hence we have the exhortation 
 to be swift to hear but slow to speak, slow above all to 
 the anger which was inimical to righteousness, in that 
 it neither commended sound doctrine nor promoted 
 good living (i. 19, 20). Eager aspirants to the office of 
 religious teacher are sobered by a reminder of the solemn 
 responsibility attaching to the use of the tongue, which, 
 as James views it, is the key to man's whole nature 
 (iii. 1,2). Resorting to picturesque figure, he compares 
 the tongue to the bridle in the horse's mouth, or to the 
 tiny helm controlling the course of a great vessel. Its 
 malignity is seen in the mischief which it is capable of 
 doing. Like the little spark which wraps in flame a 
 great plantation, the tongue, itself set on fire by hell, 
 inflames the whole movement of life. In the microcosm 
 of man's personality it corresponds to the sinful world 
 in humanity. It is an untamed beast defying control, 
 or a venomous serpent working destruction. In its 
 subjugation, therefore, lies the task of the Christian. 
 To say nothing of the inconsistency of the same tongue 
 being used both to bless God when He is worshipped, 
 
THE EPISTLE OF JAMES 127 
 
 and to curse men who, being made in God's likeness, 
 deserve blessing too, so that it is as if a fountain from 
 the same orifice sent forth both salt water and sweet, or 
 a fig-tree or vine yielded alien fruit, there can be no 
 religion where the tongue is left unbridled. James sub- 
 mits religion to this solitary test. Does a man not 
 stumble in his speech? Then the same is a perfect 
 man, for his control of his most rebellious faculty argues 
 a similar dominion over the rest. Does a man, whilst 
 thinking himself to be religious, fail to bridle his tongue ? 
 Then, says James with swift precision : " This man's 
 religion is vain." Such is the teaching of this Epistle, 
 and if, as we read James' words, we are tempted to feel 
 that, important as is the due regulation of the tongue, 
 he has attached an exaggerated value to it in the scale 
 of the virtues, we can, on the other hand, infer how 
 great must have been the license which called for such 
 a strong pronouncement. 
 
 The social teaching of this Epistle calls for but brief 
 exposition. The wrongs which some of its readers were 
 suffering, in that their wages were fraudulently withheld 
 by their masters, move James to an indignant denuncia- 
 tion which is quite in the old prophetic strain. It is 
 interesting to observe that in this connection we have 
 James' reference to the Second Coming of our Lord. 
 Not only does he, in harmony with the teaching of Jesus 
 in the Synoptic Gospels, associate with that Coming the 
 
128 NEW TESTAMENT TEACHERS 
 
 drama of judgment, but he looks upon the return of 
 Christ as near at hand. The unjust and grasping rich 
 are bidden, therefore, to " howl for the miseries " which 
 are coming upon them. All their unholy devices to 
 secure wealth will avail them nothing. Already their 
 costly garments are moth-eaten, and the canker of rust 
 has settled on their gold, because, little as they dream 
 of it, it is in the " last days " that they have laid up 
 their treasure (v. 3), and the end of their enjoyment of 
 it is at hand. But if the bitterness of loss and illusion 
 thus awaited the rich, vindication was also impending 
 for those whom the rich had defrauded. He who 
 even now stood at the door was the Judge, and He 
 would execute judgment for all who were oppressed. 
 The poor, therefore, are urged to suffer with patience, 
 stifling even the murmurs against their masters to which 
 they are tempted. " Remember," he says to his readers, 
 " the patience of Job. Recall how in that instance the 
 end displayed the pity and mercy of God. Cultivate 
 the same virtue in your hardships, and in due time you 
 shall reap the same reward." 
 
 Whilst he attacks the wrong which often stained the ac- 
 quisition of wealth, James, like Jesus before him, evinces 
 no hostility to rich men simply on the ground of their 
 riches. What he condemns in them is the unregulated 
 thirst for pleasure which too often was their motive in 
 the quest for riches, and the unspiritual temper which 
 
THE EPISTLE OF JAMES 129 
 
 wealth is apt to engender. In other words, he surveys 
 the social problem from the standpoint, not of economics, 
 but of religion. The fierce competition in the pursuit of 
 gain, issuing, as it did, in such contention and hurt as 
 James can only describe in terms of a battlefield, is 
 attributed by him to an unsatisfied lust for pleasure. 
 So blunted had the moral sense of some aspirants for 
 wealth become that they even made its acquisition a 
 subject of prayer, only to find that the sinful ends for 
 which they coveted it resulted in the frustration of 
 their prayer by God (iv. 3). Moreover, the rich man 
 was constantly haunted by the spectre of materialism 
 threatening the divorce of the soul from God. James 
 pictures the presumptuous spirit in which such a man 
 often announced his plans for business or travel, forget- 
 ting in the pride of his heart that the continued life on 
 which he was so confidently reckoning was wholly de- 
 pendent on the will of God. But to the rich a more 
 subtle peril than even a presumptuous pride was the 
 despiritualising of life. Since God would not tolerate 
 a divided allegiance, devotion to material ends, or, as 
 James calls it, " friendship with the world," meant 
 enmity with God. In a striking phrase James speaks of 
 the Spirit planted by God in man as yearning over him 
 with a jealousy that can brook no rival (iv. 5). The 
 demand made upon the rich man, therefore, is that he 
 shall cultivate a quiet and submissive spirit, resist the 
 
 I 
 
I30 NEW TESTAMENT TEACHERS 
 
 temptations incident to his calling and station, and 
 abide in close fellowship with God, cleansing his hands 
 from evil deeds and his heart from divided loyalties. In 
 such a humbling of soul James bids rich men rejoice, 
 because only thus would they, with a wealth that some- 
 times withered like the flower of the grass before the 
 sirocco's hot breath, have secure possession of a treasure 
 that would not fade away. Thus over the fierce clamour 
 of the world's market-place the clear voice of James, 
 like the muezzin sounding the call to . prayer from the 
 minaret of an Eastern mosque, bids the faithful guard 
 even in their money-making the deep interests of the 
 spirit. 
 
 So what we have in James is a re-publication, with 
 adaptation to existing conditions, of the teaching of 
 Jesus. It is significant that even salvation is defined in 
 terms of truth, for it consists in being begotten " by the 
 word of truth " (i. i8), or in receiving " with meekness the 
 implanted word" (i. 21), i.e. in accepting with humble 
 submission the teaching of Jesus as the rule of life. 
 James betrays throughout this letter the influence of his 
 greater Brother. If we lack teaching about Jesus, we 
 are given the teaching of Jesus. The message that lies 
 at the heart of this letter is that religion is life in fellow- 
 ship with a holy and loving God. James, devout even 
 to asceticism, and bearing about him the air of another 
 world, comes with this clear call to the highest into the 
 
THE EPISTLE OF JAMES 131 
 
 strife of tongues and the din of the world's traffic, 
 and he summons the suffering and the oppressed, the 
 worldling and the scandal-monger, the formalist and 
 " the wise," back to the gracious realities of faith and 
 love. We may be thankful that among early Christian 
 literature there has been preserved for us an Epistle 
 which has so clearly stamped upon it the hall-mark of 
 Jesus. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 THE EPISTLE TO THE HEBREWS - 
 
 The authorship and destination of this Epistle remain 
 among the unsolved and, it is to be feared, insoluble 
 problems of New Testament criticism. As regards its 
 author, the saying attributed to Origen, "Who it was 
 that really wrote the Epistle, God only knows," still 
 describes the situation. The one point on which criti- 
 cism is agreed is that the tradition, which regarded Paul 
 as the author, and which even in the early Church had 
 currency only in Alexandria, is not credible. In default 
 of Paul the authorship of the Epistle has been assigned 
 to various persons — to Apollos because of the affinities 
 with the Alexandrian philosophy which the letter ex- 
 hibits; to Barnabas because of his influence in the 
 Palestinian churches, and because, too, this "word of 
 exhortation " might suitably come from one who was a 
 *' son of exhortation " ; to Philip, assuming that the 
 Epistle was sent from Caesarea to the Judaising section 
 
 of the Church at Jerusalem. But the most interesting 
 
 132 
 
EPISTLE TO THE HEBREWS 133 
 
 view of all, and one to which Harnack gives his adhesion, 
 is that it may have been written by Priscilla or Aquila, 
 and preferably by the former. It has been pointed out 
 that, in the roll-call of the worthies distinguished by 
 faith, women, or deeds wrought by them, receive an 
 honoured place (though the non-mention of Deborah is 
 difficult to explain). The intrusion of a woman into 
 the realm of authorship may have so startled the narrow 
 ecclesiasticism of the primitive Church that the tradition 
 of it was suppressed. Whatever value may attach to 
 these various theories, it is clear that no one of them is 
 sufficiently established to be final. 
 
 The same conclusion applies to the related problem 
 of the destination of the Epistle. One thing of which 
 its study convinces us is that it was not written at large. 
 No other New Testament writing, not excepting even 
 the letters to the Corinthians, takes us more vividly into 
 the heart of a definite historical situation. Whatever 
 pertinence this Epistle may have had to Jewish Chris- 
 tians in general, it was addressed in the first instance to 
 a specific community of that type, for we may dismiss 
 the somewhat curious view that its first readers were 
 Gentile Christians who were in danger of lapsing into 
 irreligion or paganism. A few phrases, such as "to fall 
 away from the living God," seem, when regarded in 
 isolation, to lend plausibility to that view; but over 
 against them must be set the whole drift of the Epistle, 
 
134 NEW TESTAMENT TEACHERS 
 
 which is a many-sided exposure, not of the emptiness of 
 paganism, but of the inferiority of Judaism to Chris- 
 tianity. As regards the home of the Jewish Christians 
 addressed, Alexandria, Jerusalem, Csesarea, and Rome 
 have all, with varying degrees of probability, been 
 suggested. 
 
 But though the locality of the church remains un- 
 determined, the situation within it is clearly portrayed in 
 the Epistle itself. A crisis had arisen in which loyalty 
 to the Christian faith was imperilled. So grave and 
 imminent was the danger that the writer of this letter 
 cannot wait until he was able to visit the church, as 
 he hoped shortly to do, but sends to it forthwith this 
 message of warning and appeal. His whole aim is to 
 save his readers from apostasy. For the existence of this 
 danger two causes were responsible. One was the circum- 
 stances in which these Christians were placed. Con- 
 verted long ago through the preaching of men who had 
 been eye-witnesses of Jesus, and sustaining shortly after 
 that event severe persecution and the spoiling of their 
 goods, — a reference, doubtless, if this community was in 
 Palestine, to the harrying of the Church by Paul before 
 his conversion, — they had lived long enough to see their 
 leaders one by one pass away, whilst the expectation 
 of Christ's visible return still remained unfulfilled. 
 Moreover, their attachment to Christianity earned for 
 them the scorn of their neighbours. Twice does the 
 
EPISTLE TO THE HEBREWS 135 
 
 writer of this Epistle refer to *' the reproach of Christ," by 
 which, as xiii. 13 shows, can only be meant the stigma 
 affixed to these Christians because of their breach with 
 Judaism, and their alienation from the common senti- 
 ment of their nation. What significance this acquires 
 if the scene be Palestine, and the time those troubled 
 years which preceded the fall of the Jewish State ! 
 More and more among orthodox Jews circumstances 
 were bringing to the ascendant the party of fanaticism 
 and violence. An armed struggle with Rome, a renewal 
 of the old battle for independence, was becoming daily 
 more certain. Those who, like the Christians, remained 
 aloof from this movement, were exposed to the reproach 
 of being unpatriotic, for what had they to offer as a 
 counter-policy ? Simply patient waiting for a Messiah, 
 whose return, already long delayed, seemed more and 
 more doubtful. What wonder if, under this external 
 pressure, their older faith, linked as it was with patriotic 
 zeal, drew them back to it, so that they became lax in 
 their attendance at Christian worship (x. 25) and were 
 in danger of drifting from faith in Christ ! 
 
 A faith possessed so long, and yet in peril of being 
 lost, can never have been gripped securely, and that 
 is indeed the complaint which the writer of this letter 
 urges against his readers. He blames them for their 
 spiritual immaturity. Their defect lay in the realm 
 of ideas. They had too feeble, because too superficial, 
 
136 NEW TESTAMENT TEACHERS 
 
 a conception of the Christian faith. They had not 
 reached to its heart and seen its deep spiritual implica- 
 tions. And so in this Epistle they are summoned to 
 leave rudimentary positions and questions, such as the 
 discussion of the mode and virtue of ritual washings 
 and the impositions of hands, or theorisings as to the 
 resurrection and judgment associated with the Messiah's 
 reappearance, and they are urged to press on to 
 "perfection," to that deep and comprehensive view of 
 Christ and His work which alone could keep them 
 from drifting. 
 
 For this writer sees clearly that Christ is the key to 
 Christianity, and that, in order to understand it, we 
 must understand Him. The superiority of Christianity 
 to Judaism, which it is his aim to establish, lies in the 
 unique pre-eminence of Christ and in the consequent 
 perfection and finality of His work. To that as the 
 essential theme of this Epistle we are introduced in its 
 opening sentence. There we have the first of the 
 contrasts which the letter sets forth. Revelation under 
 the old dispensation was given fragmentarily and in 
 a variety of ways, and thus lacked the unity which 
 belonged to God's self-disclosure in Christ. Moreover, 
 in the former case, the agents of the Divine communi- 
 cation had been prophets or, in the case of the Law, 
 angels, in that view being recalled a tradition of later 
 Judaism that Moses had received the Law on Mount 
 
EPISTLE TO THE HEBREWS 137 
 
 Sinai through the ministry of angels. But God had 
 given the Gospel through a Son — a Son, too, who, in 
 addition to being His agent in the creation and main- 
 tenance of the universe, was " the effulgence of His glory 
 and the very image of His substance," and had, in 
 virtue of His redeeming activity, been enthroned at the 
 right hand of the Divine majesty, the angels, who at the 
 best were servants, and not sons, being commanded to 
 do Him homage, and to minister to such as became 
 partakers of the Messianic salvation. As was the 
 relative dignity of Christ and the angels, so must aLso 
 be the relative worth of the revelations which they 
 introduced. And if the injunctions of Judaism were 
 enforced by Divine sanctions, what possible escape from 
 punishment could there be, if men rejected the great 
 salvation vouchsafed by God, confirmed by miracle, 
 and mediated by the Messianic Son. 
 
 The next contrast is between Jesus and Moses as the 
 outstanding figure of the Old Testament and the man 
 to whom, according to tradition, the Law was first 
 communicated. Why was Jesus greater than Moses 
 and so, inferentially, the Gospel superior to the Law? 
 Because, though both were alike faithful in God's house, 
 Moses held the inferior rank of a servant, whilst to 
 Jesus alone belonged the dignity of a Son. Christ too is 
 He who has built the house, the writer having in mind 
 in that assertion mainly the Christian order of things, 
 
138 NEW TESTAMENT TEACHERS 
 
 though his sense of its continuity with the Old 
 Testament system enables him to speak of Moses as 
 related to the same house, but in an inferior way. But 
 to devout Jews the central element of their religion was 
 its sacrificial rites. These provided the writer of this 
 letter with his most elaborate contrast. To think of the 
 Old Testament sacrifices was to be reminded, in the first 
 instance, of the Aaronic priesthood by whom those 
 sacrifices were offered, and, notably, of the high priest 
 who, especially on the great Day of Atonement, 
 summed up in himself, not simply the whole priestly 
 order, but the entire Jewish nation. Over against him 
 there is set " the high priest of our confession, even 
 Jesus," for whom no adequate Old Testament analogy 
 is found but Melchizedek, the shadowy priest-king, 
 coming out of the unknown and passing as swiftly into 
 it, to whom Abraham gave tithes and paid homage on 
 his return from his defeat of the four kings. The 
 child of mystery, with nothing known as to his birth or 
 decease, appearing just for one moment upon the stage 
 of history, and yet in that moment acknowledged by 
 Abraham as his superior, Melchizedek, to one schooled 
 in the Alexandrian modes of exegesis, seemed the pre- 
 figurement of a priesthood, eternally constituted, lifted 
 beyond conditions of time, and as much greater than that 
 embodied in Aaron and his successors, as Melchizedek 
 v/as greater than Abraham from whom Aaron sprang. 
 
EPISTLE TO THE HEBREWS 139 
 
 Thus does the writer of this Epistle exhibit the 
 pre-eminence of Christ's person. His line of argument 
 may seem inconclusive to us, partly because of the 
 curious and semi-allegorical mode of exegesis to which 
 he resorts. There does not appear to us, e.g., to be 
 any necessary relation of type and anti-type between 
 Melchizedek and Christ. Still, even where we question 
 his premisses, we are able to reach by an independent 
 route the same conclusions, and, in passing judgment 
 upon him, we have to remember that he was writing 
 to men who, like the writer himself, regarded the 
 allegorical interpretation of the Old Testament as a 
 valid road to the truth. Even inspiration has to be 
 content to take men as they are, and revelation, 
 because it comes in the first instance to men of parti- 
 cular traditions and culture, has to reflect those mental 
 idiosyncrasies in its modes of expression. Dismissing 
 that subject with this passing reference, we need to 
 go back for one moment, and gather up all that this 
 Epistle affirms concerning the person of Christ. The 
 three contrasts already referred to, set forth His unique 
 and Divine glory. But there is another side to the 
 picture. In one of the exhortations which, true to his 
 practical aim, the author appends to each of his anti- 
 theses, he develops his view of the Incarnation. It is 
 sufficient to say that nowhere in the New Testament are 
 the fulness and the reality of our Lord's identification with 
 
I40 NEW TESTAMENT TEACHERS 
 
 humanity more clearly described. He who was greater 
 than angels, became for a little while lower than they, 
 that He might submit to the suffering of death. He 
 partook of flesh and blood, making Himself one in 
 all save sin with the brethren whom He came to save. 
 By the endurance of moral trial in the shape of suffering 
 and temptation He acquired sympathy and learned 
 obedience, always remaining sinless, yet developing 
 after a human fashion, and in such a way as meant 
 the growing realisation in His nature of the good. 
 As the " leader " of our faith Christ is to us the perfect 
 pattern of fidelity to the will of God. Not only so, 
 but in the holy perfection of Christ's earthly life lies 
 the explanation of His exaltation to glory and of His 
 high-priestly activity within the veil. Because of the 
 fidelity shown in His submission to death He has been 
 crowned with glory and honour, so that it may be said 
 that what was His by nature has become His also by 
 merit; He has won as man what was His as God. 
 In the same way His high-priesthood is not an office 
 which He has arrogated to Himself, but is one to 
 which He has been appointed by virtue of His inherent 
 and indissoluble life. Dignity of function is determined 
 by quality of person. It is because Jesus is "a Son, 
 perfected for evermore," that He has by a Divine oath 
 been appointed to a priesthood abiding and unchange- 
 able. 
 
EPISTLE TO THE HEBREWS 141 
 
 So from the brief humiliation of earth the perfected 
 Son passes to the right hand of God, where, declared 
 heir of all things, worshipped by angels, and invested 
 with full authority over the coming Messianic age, He 
 ministers to the salvation of all who obey Him. But 
 what preceded the Incarnation ? Did that event repre- 
 sent the beginning of the Messiah's career, and had the 
 period of humiHation no state of glory as its background 
 as well as its issue ? This Epistle may not be so 
 explicit on that problem as we could desire, but when 
 we are told that the Son, who is now heir of all things, 
 was He also by whom God made and sustains the world,, 
 and when again, in a quotation from the Psalms, He is 
 declared to have laid the foundations of the earth, such 
 activity demands more than a merely ideal pre-existence 
 of Jesus. It requires a pre-temporal life in which the 
 Son, even then perfectly reflecting the Father's glory 
 and expressing His essence, shared in the life of God. 
 and reposed in His love. That, too, is the point of the 
 comparison of Christ to Melchizedek, who, "having 
 neither beginning of days nor end of life," is "made 
 like unto the Son of God." Subordination of some sort 
 there must have been in that pre-incarnate state, or else 
 how could it be said of the Son that " God, Thy 
 God, hath anointed Thee with the oil of gladness"? 
 But this is a point which the writer of the Epistle simply 
 affirms; he does not linger to explain. What seems. 
 
142 NEW TESTAMENT TEACHERS 
 
 clear is that there appears here the same exalted view of 
 Jesus as existing before all time and sharing eternally in 
 the nature and activities of God, which we find in the 
 Prologue of the Fourth Gospel and in the later teaching 
 of Paul. 
 
 And as is the Worker, so is also His work. That 
 derives its supreme value from the person who achieves 
 it. We come to the very heart of this Epistle when we 
 see how the writer applies this principle to the death of 
 Christ and the subsequent presentation of His offering 
 in heaven before God. For, true to the ritual of the 
 great Day of Atonement, when only the presentation of 
 the blood of the victim in the holy of holies completed 
 the sacrifice, Jesus also consummates the offering of 
 Himself only when He appears in heaven for us. His 
 death and subsequent intercession represent one atoning 
 transaction. Now to the devout Jew the centre of the 
 legal system was its sacrifices. On that — its ceremonial 
 side — our author contemplates the Law, and from that 
 point of view convicts it of being unprofitable and in- 
 effectual. Through the essential externality of its 
 sacrifices it could "make nothing perfect." It moved 
 in the realm of shadow and symbol. What was needed, 
 therefore, was a sacrifice real, effectual, and final, as 
 opposed to a cultus which was simply external, ineffective, 
 and shadowy. It is by showing that Christianity 
 answered that need that the writer of this letter steadies 
 
EPISTLE TO THE HEBREWS 143 
 
 the wavering faith of his readers. Put in one brief 
 sentence his argument is this : Christianity is the final 
 religion because the sacrifice of Christ is ideal. To 
 establish that momentous truth required a series of con- 
 trasts in which the new is set over against the old. To 
 begin with, the priests of Judaism were frail and sinful 
 men, needing themselves, as much as those for whom 
 they acted, the atoning virtue of the sacrifices which they 
 offered. Then their offerings were simply dumb animals, 
 *' the blood of bulls and of goats and the ashes of the 
 heifer," and these, because they were something exter- 
 nal to the offerer, could never avail to purge away his 
 sin. By their constant repetition, which itself was a 
 sign of their ineffectuality, they succeeded in keeping 
 alive the sense of sin, but, so far as the actual cleansing 
 of the conscience was concerned, they were but em- 
 blematic, pointing forward to some sacrifice yet to be 
 disclosed, which should accomplish in fact what they 
 only did in symbol. The Law in its sacrifices was but 
 "a shadow," a dim outline "of the good things to 
 come," and so could not make men perfect. Once 
 more, the Aaronic priest offered in a sanctuary which, 
 because it was of this world, was imperfect, being an 
 inadequate attempt to realise the true sanctuary which 
 was in heaven. Heaven to the Jew was the home of 
 the ideal, in the sense, however, that there the ideal 
 existed not simply in thought but in fact. The concep- 
 
144 NEW TESTAMENT TEACHERS 
 
 tion, as we have seen (p. 28), was applied to many 
 things, and, among them, to the Temple, so that it was 
 after the pattern of the heavenly sanctuary shown to 
 him on the mount that Moses was said to have formed 
 the tabernacle, thus providing for the heavenly reality 
 an imperfect, because earthly, counterpart. Thus did 
 defect stain the system of legal sacrifice. Even the 
 Old Testament itself admitted this, when it spoke 
 through Jeremiah of the new covenant which God 
 would establish with Israel, thus branding as obsolescent 
 that which had been originally constituted by sacrifices 
 at Sinai. Christianity brought in a new and a better 
 order. Its high priest, though chosen from among men, 
 was harmless, undefiled, and separate from sinners, and 
 so had no need to make atonement for Himself. And 
 this ideal priest had an ideal sacrifice, for the offering 
 which He brought was not some brute beast, but His 
 own spotless and holy life offered up in perfect obedience 
 to Him whose will it was His delight to do. Because 
 the offering was ideal, it accomplished a real deliverance 
 from sin, effecting an inward and not merely a ritual 
 cleansing. Moreover, since it was through "an eternal 
 spirit" that Jesus thus offered Himself to God (ix. 14), 
 i,e. in obedience to a spiritual principle which, though 
 it found concrete exhibition in time, was itself timeless 
 in the sense that sacrificial love was eternal in the heart 
 of the Redeemer, His work became valid for all time, 
 
EPISTLE TO THE HEBREWS 145 
 
 not simply having prospective worth, but availing also 
 for those who had transgressed under the first covenant. 
 Perfect thus in scope and quality, it required no repeti- 
 tion. Finally, Christ's offering was presented in the 
 ideal sanctuary, for it was in heaven that He, bearing 
 His own blood, appeared before God. And having 
 entered that home of reality, there He abides. Unlike 
 the Aaronic priest, whose entrance into the holy place 
 once a year spoke more of exclusion from God than of 
 access to Him, Jesus by His continued tarrying in the 
 heavenly sanctuary declares that God has become 
 accessible to sinful men, and that "a new and living 
 way " into His presence is now open. 
 
 It is in this access to God and life in His presence 
 that, according to the thought of this Epistle, man's 
 salvation consists. We are not furnished with anything 
 deserving to be called a theory of atonement. Beyond 
 an appeal to the analogy of the Law, where, " apart from 
 shedding of blood, there is no remission," our author's 
 main plea for the necessity of Christ's death turns upon 
 a verbal refinement. Having argued that Jesus has 
 established a new covenant between man and God, he 
 proceeds, true to Alexandrian modes of exegesis, to 
 take the Greek word for " covenant " in its secondary 
 sense of "will" or "testament," arguing thence that, 
 since a will can only become operative on the death of 
 
146 NEW TESTAMENT TEACHERS 
 
 the testator, the new " testament " associated with Christ 
 could only become effective through His death. This 
 mode of reasoning will carry less weight with us than it 
 did with Jewish Christians of the first century. In any 
 case, that particular appeal is only incidental to the main 
 argument of the Epistle. What is fundamental is the 
 assumption, because to a Jew it would be axiomatic, 
 that sacrifice is necessary for the removal of sin. Build- 
 ing upon that belief, common to him and his readers, the 
 author claims that Cliristiaiiity is the absolute religion, 
 inasmuch as through the sacrifice of Christ it effects in 
 reality and once for all that release from sin which the 
 legal sacrifices only hinted at in prophecy and symbol. 
 Moreover, he keeps to ritual analogies even in defining 
 the nature of salvation, for, unlike Paul, who, true to 
 his strong ethical interest, describes salvation as " justi- 
 fication," he uses consistently the terms "perfect," 
 " cleanse," " sanctify," to define the transformation of 
 the heart accomplished by Christ. What is evident, too, 
 is that the vital element in Christ's offering was the 
 perfect surrender of His will in holy obedience to God. 
 In ways for which we have analogy rather than proof, 
 that act of the Redeemer avails for His brethren, 
 delivering them from the fear of death, and releasing 
 them from that " conscience of sins " which barred their 
 entrance into the Divine fellowship. Now where Christ, 
 
EPISTLE TO THE HEBREWS 147 
 
 our " forerunner," has gone, we may follow. Into the 
 ** Sabbath- rest," unrealised in the occupation of Canaan, 
 Christ, the new Joshua, has Himself entered, and all 
 who believe share even now in its possession. 
 
 That brings us to another interesting feature of this 
 Epistle. From certain phrases it might seem that the 
 realisation of salvation is assigned to the future, for 
 Christians are described as being brought to a " glory " 
 beyond the shores of time, the possession of which is 
 "a better hope" "or the hope set before us." It is 
 also "unto salvation," i.e. unto the perfecting of 
 Christian experience, that Jesus is expected once again 
 to emerge from the unseen. This view is traceable to 
 that Alexandrian philosophy of the author which held 
 that in the supersensible we must find the real, the 
 material and sensible being but shadowy emblems of 
 it. The Christian pilgrims, therefore, "desire a better 
 country, that is, a heavenly " ; they seek, as the fatherland 
 of the soul, " the city which hath the foundations," and 
 "which is to come." But that is only one side of our 
 author's conception. Having declared (x. 39), confident 
 in the strength of his previous argument, that he and his 
 readers are not of them that shrink back into perdition, 
 but are of them that have faith " unto the saving of the 
 soul," i.e, unto the perfect realisation of salvation, he 
 proceeds to show that " faith is the title-deeds " (for so 
 
148 NEW TESTAMENT TEACHERS 
 
 we must translate) " of things hoped for, the conviction 
 of things not seen." It is that activity of the soul which 
 guarantees the reality of the unseen and spiritual, and 
 already in some sense seals them as ours. It was by 
 such a faith that the Old Testament worthies lived, and 
 so ever reached out to more than they had yet grasped ; 
 nay, of such a faith Jesus Himself was the file-leader, for 
 was it not " for the joy set before Him " that He " endured 
 the cross, despising shame " ? Unlike the Pauline con- 
 ception, in which faith is strongly ethical, representing 
 the devout movement Christwards of a man's whole 
 personality, faith in this Epistle is reposed in God, and 
 is that intellectual forth-reaching — akin to hope, save 
 that the grasp of faith is more assured, — by which the 
 unrealised is seized and in measure already made our 
 own. For that reason salvation becomes an experience 
 as well as an expectation. Christians have already 
 tasted " the powers of the age to come " ; the anchor of 
 the soul, "taking sure grip of that which is within the 
 vail," keeps the believer even now secure and safe. 
 
 Such is, in rough outline, the lofty argument of this 
 Epistle. Bold the message undoubtedly was, so that 
 the writer stands in some doubt as to how it will be 
 received by his readers. Destructive it was bound to 
 be, for men who were turning longing eyes back to 
 Judaism could not in their own interests be allowed 
 
EPISTLE TO THE HEBREWS 149 
 
 to entertain any illusion as to its inadequacy and its con- 
 sequent supersession. But the great glory of the Epistle 
 is its constructive side, the sustained argument by which 
 Christ is assigned the supreme place among the religious 
 leaders of mankind, and His sacrificial work becomes 
 God's final word concerning sin and salvation. The 
 exposition of this truth was the surest defence against 
 apostasy. "We needs must love the highest, when we 
 see it," and, loving it, must hold to it. Elements in the 
 liistorical situation, e.g. the delayed return of Christ, and 
 the present sufferings of his readers, our author meets 
 by affirming his own conviction that the return was 
 imminent (x. 25), and by teaching that suffering was but 
 the discipline imposed by God upon His sons for their 
 good, on which grounds he bids those to whom he 
 speaks abandon their lethargy and despair. But his 
 main appeal is that they, instead of reverting to Judaism, 
 should brace themselves to a definite breach with it. 
 Why go back to that which was outworn and super- 
 seded? Such drawing back was "unto perdition," for 
 Judaism had no power of redemption, and, if men who 
 had already felt the renewing power of Christianity 
 turned from it under the vain delusion that Judaism was 
 better, what hope could there be for them, since they 
 had been too blind to know the best when they had it ? 
 Such trampling under foot of the blood of the covenant 
 
I50 NEW TESTAMENT TEACHERS 
 
 meant doing despite unto the Spirit of grace, and falling 
 into the avenging hands of the living God. 
 
 Instead of a reversion that was futile and perilous, 
 the duty of the hour was to go forward by realising the 
 finality and independence of the Christian faith. In 
 a bold figure, suggested by the fact that Jesus had 
 suffered crucifixion outside the gate of Jerusalem, this 
 writer bids his readers go forth unto Christ without 
 the camp, i.e. to break finally with Judaism, sharing 
 cheerfully with their Lord the reproach which such 
 a breach might entail. The two faiths were separate 
 and incompatible. "We have an altar," he says, 
 "whereof they have no right to eat which serve the 
 tabernacle." Sinai, fenced from the approach of man 
 or beast, and shrouded in darkness and tempest, save 
 as it was lighted by the dread glory of the Divine 
 theophany — that was the symbol of the awe and exclusion 
 which belonged to Judaism. But over against Sinai there 
 stood Mount Zion, the symbol of the Christian order. 
 To that, not fenced by any awful barrier, the readers of 
 this Epistle had found access, and in reaching it had 
 come to God and all the holy fellowships which 
 centred there, and to the new covenant sealed by the 
 perfect sacrifice of Christ. There it was their duty 
 to abide. With sacrifices, save those of praise to God 
 and loving service to their fellows, they had finished. 
 
EPISTLE TO THE HEBREWS 151 
 
 Their spiritual well-being was bound up with the new 
 faith, of which, through their defective comprehension 
 of it, they had all too feeble a grasp. So to these 
 wavering Christians came this "word of exhortation," 
 bidding them realise the true inwardness of their faith, 
 and stand fast in the liberty with which it had set them 
 free. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 THE FIRST EPISTLE OF PETER 
 
 The opening salutation of this letter ascribes its 
 authorship to the apostle Peter. To the acceptance 
 of that view, well supported as it is by tradition, 
 there is no insuperable objection. The Greek in which 
 the Epistle is written may be somewhat purer than one 
 would expect from a Galilean fisherman, but a credible 
 explanation of this is that Silvanus (or Silas), who 
 conveyed the letter to the churches addressed in it, 
 had also something to do with its literary form. A 
 more serious objection is the debt which it owes, in 
 phraseology and ideas, to the Pauline Epistles, notably 
 to those to the Romans and Ephesians. But this may 
 be perfectly compatible with Petrine authorship. If 
 this letter was written at Rome, — a city intimately 
 connected with the two Pauline Epistles referred to, 
 since it was the destination of the one and the source of 
 the other, — and if the date of its composition was after 
 
 the death of Paul, but before the full violence of 
 
 152 
 
FIRST EPISTLE OF PETER 153 
 
 Nero's persecution had burst upon the Roman Christians, 
 Peter's affinity with Pauline ideas becomes credible. 
 For if GaUlee and Syria, and perhaps even Asia Minor, 
 had been Peter's special sphere, he had been concerned 
 with Christian communities which, while consisting 
 largely of Jews, contained also a growing admixture of 
 Gentile converts, the problem of whose relation to 
 their Jewish brethren was thus being happily solved. 
 Such a situation, coupled with the success of the 
 Pauline mission, could not fail to have a liberalising 
 effect upon Peter, whose mind, largely practical in its 
 bent, was always sensitive to the logic of events. He 
 was no prejudiced doctrinaire, but a man whose in- 
 stincts, left to themselves, were invariably on the side 
 of liberalism. It must not be forgotten also that the 
 universalism present in the spirit and teaching of Jesus 
 must have left its mark upon so impressionable a disciple 
 as Peter; indeed this letter exhales the influence of 
 Christ's earthly ministry. So, as by a natural affinity, 
 Peter with the lapse of time grew towards Paul, 
 absorbing with minor modifications his point of view, and 
 becoming a man to whose voice the mixed churches 
 of the Dispersion were sure at a time of crisis to listen 
 with respect. 
 
 For though this Epistle is formally addressed to "the 
 elect who are sojourners of the Dispersion," the letter 
 itself is evidence that the churches so addressed cannot 
 
154 NEW TESTAMENT TEACHERS 
 
 have consisted simply of Jewish Christians. Else how- 
 could the apostle have said of his readers that they *' in 
 time past were no people " (ii. lo), that they had formerly 
 "wrought the desire of the Gentiles," walking in sins 
 which were characteristic of the heathen (iv. 3), and 
 that they had been redeemed from the *' vain manner of 
 life" handed down by their fathers (i. 18)? Christians 
 who had once been heathen must be in mind in such 
 sayings, and if, therefore, churches containing this 
 element are referred to by Peter in terms which only 
 seem appropriate to God's ancient people, it is because 
 the apostle has appropriated the Pauline idea that the 
 Christian Church had become the true Israel, because 
 it had given welcome to God's Messiah, whilst the un- 
 believing Jews by rejecting Him had excluded them- 
 selves from the chosen people and the covenant of 
 grace. The wild olive grafted upon the ancient 
 stock had become one with it in privilege and 
 nature. 
 
 The place of authority over mixed churches of this 
 type may, on personal grounds and because of his broad 
 sympathies, have been tacitly assigned to Peter after the 
 death of Paul. For though it is generally agreed that 
 " Babylon," from which this letter purports to be written 
 (v. 13), is a veiled name for Rome, hinting at the bitter 
 hostility which that city had already shown to God's 
 new Israel, not only does Peter make no reference to 
 
FIRST EPISTLE OF PETER 155 
 
 Paul, but some at least of the churches which he ad- 
 dresses here, e.g. those in Galatia and Asia, came so 
 admittedly within Paul's sphere of authority that, whilst 
 he was alive, no other apostle would have ventured to 
 claim their ear. We may assume, therefore, that Paul 
 was dead when this letter was written. It addressed 
 itself to a disturbed situation. Persecution had fallen 
 upon the churches of Asia Minor. A " fiery trial," 
 testing their endurance and loyalty, had come upon 
 them. Not that they stood alone in this, for Peter 
 reminds his readers (v. 9) that the same sufferings were 
 being accomplished in the Christian brotherhood gener- 
 ally, though certain circumstances may have made a 
 steadying message to those Asiatic Christians specially 
 befitting. Their persecution came in part from Jews 
 who, emboldened, doubtless, by their success in com- 
 passing the death of Paul, grew more venomous in 
 their attitude to the Christian faith. Calumny, verbal 
 abuse, scorn of the Christian name which they bore — 
 these were elements in the social persecution which 
 these Christians endured (iii. 16, iv. 4, 14). Doubtless 
 some of them in addition were haled before the local 
 magistrates, who, quick to follow the unsympathetic 
 attitude towards Christians already manifest in Rome, 
 looked with prejudiced eyes upon men who, whether 
 guilty or not of that with which they were charged, 
 belonged to a sect which, by its very aloofness from the 
 
156 NEW TESTAMENT TEACHERS 
 
 rest of the community, seemed disruptive and anti-social 
 in its spirit. 
 
 Such was the situation — one that, notwithstanding 
 opposing critics like Pfleiderer and Harnack, is com- 
 patible with the Petrine authorship of this Epistle and 
 with its being dated about the year a.d. 65. In sub- 
 stance the letter consists of counsels to the persecuted. It 
 at once reminds of privilege and exhorts to duty. So 
 far as present experience is concerned, it was great in 
 its realisations but greater still in its hopes. There was 
 the Messianic salvation, the goal of the Christian's faith, 
 trembling on the horizon, " ready to be revealed in the 
 last time." Unto '* a living hope " of participation 
 therein, due, as none knew better than Peter himself, to 
 the resurrection of Jesus, Christians had been begotten, 
 and so, loving a Christ whom they did not yet see, and 
 undaunted even by their manifold trials, they were able 
 even now to "rejoice greatly with joy unspeakable 
 and full of glory," gladly anticipating a Divine consum- 
 mation which had been the theme of prophets and was 
 the wonder of angels. 
 
 But privilege has its counterpart in duty- One great 
 note of this Epistle is its emphasis on conduct. Holiness 
 in all manner of life in imitation of the holy perfection 
 of God, a wholesome fear, during their time of sojourn- 
 ing, of the Heavenly Father who had redeemed them at 
 such cost, the cultivation of sincere love of the brethren 
 
FIRST EPISTLE OF PETER 157 
 
 — these were graces to which Peter exhorts his readers. 
 He will not even let them take their great hope lightly, 
 for he bids them make conscious effort, "girding up the 
 loins " of their mind, to keep it steadfastly before them. 
 What he longs for is a Church which, with "all wicked- 
 ness and all guile and hypocrisies and envy and all 
 evil speakings" removed from it, is built up, through 
 the moral development of its individual members, into 
 a spiritual house, each Christian a living stone therein, 
 or is constituted a holy priesthood, offering acceptable, 
 because spiritual, sacrifices, the Church thus becoming 
 the true people of God, the peculiar property and glory 
 of Him by whom it has been redeemed and framed. 
 Nor is the apostle content merely with general exhorta- 
 tions to goodness. He pursues his readers into the 
 various relationships of their life, and there bids them 
 exhibit the Christian ideal. Before the heathen Chris- 
 tians were to lead a pure and consistent life, so they 
 might silence slander and even gain converts (ii. 12). 
 To the civil power in its various forms they were to 
 show themselves loyal, recognising that civil authority 
 had Divine sanctions, and was essential for the stability 
 of law and order. Here, again, "by well-doing" they 
 might vindicate themselves from the aspersions of men 
 who in ignorance believed evil of them. Household 
 servants, most of whom would be slaves, were bidden 
 to yield a deferential obedience to their masters — not 
 
158 NEW TESTAMENT TEACHERS 
 
 only to such as were good and considerate, but also to 
 the cruel and unjust. The Divine approval would rest 
 upon such servants as, from a sense of religious duty, 
 submitted patiently to unmerited wrong. It was only 
 when suffering was undeserved that there was any credit 
 in patient submission to it, and such suffering was part 
 of the Christian's fated lot, for therein he was but like 
 his Master, who, not only in the fact of suffering, but in 
 its unmeritedness and the meek and unreviling spirit in 
 which He bore it, left an example for His followers to 
 imitate. Yet again, domestic relationships were to be 
 hallowed by the Christian spirit. Wives are exhorted 
 to act with such submission and godliness towards their 
 husbands that any of the latter who are heathen may 
 be won to faith in Christ. The ornament of "a meek 
 and quiet spirit " was to be more sought after by a wife 
 than attractiveness of dress and outward finery. The 
 husband, too, was to be considerate in recognising the 
 claims of his weaker companion, and in so ordering 
 their mutual relations that, when both persons were 
 Christians, no obstacle might be placed in the path of 
 that religious development to which husband and wife 
 were equally called. Such is Peter's detailed exposition 
 of Christian duty. 
 
 The stress laid therein upon goodness in act and 
 disposition appears also in Peter's admonitions to his 
 readers in reference to their sufferings. His main concern 
 
FIRST EPISTLE OF PETER 159 
 
 is that no Christian shall do anything to deserve them. 
 " Let none of you," he says, *' sufifer as a murderer, or 
 a thief, or an evildoer, or as a meddler in other men's 
 matters" (iv. 15). "It is better," he says again, "if 
 the will of God should so will, that ye suffer for well- 
 doing than for evil-doing " (iii. 17). Prejudice accounted 
 in part for the sufferings which these Asian Christians 
 endured, and that prejudice could best be dispelled by 
 the complete renunciation of all heathen vices, and by 
 the faithful performance, under a sense of religious 
 obligation, of all social duty. The apostle goes so far 
 as to affirm that a man living in that spirit will, under 
 normal conditions, remain unmolested. " Who is he 
 that will harm you, if ye be zealous of that which is 
 good?" (iii. 13). Nevertheless there was the natural 
 antipathy of the world to goodness to be reckoned with, 
 and hence there was the possibility of persecution for 
 righteousness' sake. But such persecution was blessed, 
 though obviously everything depended upon its un- 
 meritedness and upon the spirit in which it was borne. 
 If it was because of the name of Christian which they 
 bore that men were called to suffer, they might glory in the 
 name and rejoice in the suffering, for thereby they came 
 into true fellowship with Christ. It is here that we 
 touch the most interesting feature in Peter's doctrine of 
 suffering. The claim has been made that Peter, had 
 he really been the author of this Epistle, would, with 
 
i6o NEW TESTAMENT TEACHERS 
 
 his non-theological temper, have said little about the 
 death of Jesus in recalling the earthly ministry. But 
 such a view, besides forgetting the significance which, 
 even to a disciple like Peter, the death of Christ had 
 come to assume, ignores the practical situation with 
 which in this letter he was seeking to deal. He was 
 writing to men who were suffering, and what was more 
 natural, therefore, than that, in heartening them, he 
 should recall how their Master also had suffered ? The 
 path which they were treading had been pressed before 
 by His bleeding feet. And what did this fellowship 
 with Christ in suffering mean ? It meant, first of all, 
 cessation from sin, because "he that suffered in the 
 flesh hath ceased from sin " (iv. i). The idea there ex- 
 pressed is somewhat obscure, the sense in which " flesh " 
 is used being a matter of dispute. What seems clear, 
 however, is that it does not stand, as in Paul's teaching, 
 for the whole principle of evil in man, but recalls more 
 particularly man's bodily nature, and the passions and 
 incitements to evil which are incident to existence therein. 
 Peter tells us that " Christ suffered in the flesh " (iv. i), 
 i.e. in His earthly life He endured self-denial and priva- 
 tion and suffering, because these were inseparable from 
 the recoil from sin and the steadfast pursuit of righteous- 
 ness. To natures such as ours pain is bound up with 
 moral achievement. No pains, no gains! But he who 
 will suffer rather than sin has reached such heights of 
 
FIRST EPISTLE OF PETER i6i 
 
 conquest over sin that he has virtually snapped the con- 
 nection between it and him ; sin has become a subjected 
 thing, and he has ** ceased from " it. May we not inter- 
 pret in this way Peter's reference to Christ suffering in 
 the flesh ? When, therefore, he bids us arm ourselves 
 with "the same mind," i.e. face our sufferings with the 
 stern resolve that we will endure anything rather than 
 commit wrong, he tells us that thus we too by God's 
 grace shall find the tyranny of sin within us broken, 
 and the soul led forth into the Hbert>^ of the sons of 
 God. 
 
 One other assurance the apostle gives his readers as 
 an anodyne for their pain, and that is the brevity of 
 its duration. " The end of all things,'' he says, " is at 
 hand." If the devil, their adversary, seemed unwontedly 
 active, prowling like a lion ravening for its prey (v. 8), 
 their resistance of him, though steadfast, would not 
 need to be prolonged. Now was "his hour and the 
 power of darkness." But after Christ's followers had 
 sufifered "a little while," the eternal glory unto which 
 they had been called in Him would be revealed (v. lo), 
 and at Christ's manifestation all His faithful ones 
 would receive the unfading crown. Thus were the 
 very clouds fringed with the radiance of the Christian 
 hope. 
 
 So far as the person and work of Christ generally are 
 
 L 
 
i62 NEW TESTAMENT TEACHERS 
 
 concerned, the teaching of this Epistle is incidental and 
 fragmentary. The new life in man is produced by " the 
 word of God," />. by the message of God's grace 
 proclaimed to men in the Gospel. The crown of this 
 message was evidently the resurrection of Jesus, for Peter 
 speaks of it as begetting " a living hope," and making 
 it possible for men to repose " faith and hope in God " 
 (i. 3, 2i). Faith, which in this Epistle is closely akin 
 to hope, has God, and not Christ, as its object. The 
 redeeming work of Christ, whilst a transaction in time, 
 was the unveiling of an eternal purpose of God, so that 
 the Lamb slain "was foreknown before the foundation 
 of the world, but was manifested at the end of the 
 times" (i. 20). Such testimony, too, as the prophets 
 gave beforehand to the sufferings and glory of Christ 
 was due to the working in them of the Spirit of Christ 
 (i. 11), i.e. either, as Dr. Hort translates, "the Spirit 
 of Messiah," or " the Spirit of which Christ is and was 
 the bestower." The language of these passages is not 
 absolutely decisive, but many exegetes see in it an 
 assertion by Peter of a real, and not merely an ideal, 
 pre-existence of Jesus. But of all the incidental 
 teachings of this Epistle, the most interesting, if also 
 the most perplexing, is that which refers to our Lord 
 preaching to the " spirits in prison " and to "the dead " 
 (iii. 18-20, iv. 6). These sayings have provoked a 
 
FIRST EPISTLE OF PETER 163 
 
 discussion too lengthy even for summary here. One 
 view regards ** the spirits in prison " as the fallen 
 angels of Gen. vi. 2, who for their wrong-doing were 
 cast down to hell (II. Pet. ii. 4), and to whom, after His 
 death, Christ went and proclaimed judgment. But 
 surely the contrast iniii. 20, between "the disobedient" 
 and the eight souls that were saved demands that the 
 former shall belong to the same — i.e. the human — 
 order, and shall refer, therefore, to the men who 
 disregarded the warnings of Noah. Accepting that 
 view, it is still maintained that " the spirits in prison " 
 and " the dead " are those who are now dead, but who 
 when alive, heard Christ " in the Spirit " preaching vicari- 
 ously to them through the lips of Noah. It is enough to 
 say that this exegesis is so unnatural, and so strains the 
 force of the language, that only the wish to avoid an 
 unwelcome dogma can have suggested it. On the 
 whole the interpretation that seems necessary is that 
 Christ ''in the spirit," i.e. in that disembodied state 
 which was His in the interval between His death and 
 resurrection, went and preached in the unseen world to 
 the sinful and disembodied dead, the wicked who 
 perished at the deluge not being His sole hearers, but 
 being mentioned by Peter as typical, partly because 
 their wickedness was so extreme, and partly also because 
 the reference to baptism (iii. 21) which he already had 
 
i64 NEW TESTAMENT TEACHERS 
 
 in his mind, called up by anticipatory analogy the Flood 
 and the sinners of that age. As to the purpose of this 
 preaching to " the dead," it is said to be "that they 
 might be judged according to men in the flesh, but live 
 according to God in the spirit." The meaning of this 
 statement only becomes clear in the light of its context. 
 Peter, anticipating the speedy return of Christ, sees the 
 near approach of the judgment associated therewith. 
 Christ stands " ready to judge the living and the dead." 
 But a common judgment surely, if it is to be equitable, 
 implies common opportunities and privileges ; yet how 
 could men, now dead, belonging to bygone and pre- 
 Christian times, justly sustain the same judgment as the 
 living to whom the Gospel had been proclaimed ? The 
 apostle's answer is that privilege has been equalised. 
 The disembodied and sinful dead have had the Gospel 
 preached to them by Christ Himself, and the object of 
 His preaching has been that "they might be judged 
 according to men in the flesh," i.e. might justly be 
 submitted to the same standard of judgment as was 
 imposed upon men still alive, but might " live according 
 to God in the spirit," i.e. even in their disembodied 
 condition might reach out to realise the new life which 
 was God's gift in Christ. Whence this tradition of 
 Christ's "descent into Hades" was derived, and how 
 far it answers to fact, will be matters of dispute. But 
 
FIRST EPISTLE OF PETER 165 
 
 the principles that shine out in Peter's application of it, 
 viz. that the redemption brought by Christ avails for 
 all worlds and times, and that the judgment which He 
 will direct, will observe an equitable correspondence 
 between demand and privilege, are such as find ready 
 approval in the Christian mind and conscience. 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 THE EPISTLES OF JUDE AND 
 SECOND PETER 
 
 There is not only convenience in discussing these two 
 Epistles together, but, apart from their brevity, justi- 
 fication for so doing. Both had difficulty in gaining 
 admission into the Canon of the New Testament, and 
 both, as we shall see, are akin in their teaching. Indeed 
 the resemblance is so marked in both phrasing and 
 ideas that the conclusion of criticism is that one of 
 these Epistles has been used in the composition of the 
 other. On which side, then, was the borrowing? Is 
 Second Peter an expansion of Jude ? or Jude an abbrevi- 
 ation of Second Peter ? The former view is to be pre- 
 ferred on various grounds, e.g. that the construction of 
 Jude from Second Peter is a literary feat too difficult to 
 be credible; that certain obscurities in Second Peter, 
 the reason for whose existence is intelligible to criticism, 
 are only cleared up when the parallel passage in Jude 
 is consulted. But if Jude*s Epistle has priority, other 
 
 i66 
 
JUDE AND SECOND PETER 167 
 
 conclusions follow. It is impossible to date that Epistle 
 within the traditional lifetime of Peter, for, quite apart 
 from the general situation, which Jude deals with, being 
 more suited to a later date, he speaks of the apostles as 
 a collective body and as belonging to the past, whilst 
 "the last time" of which they had spoken, with the 
 false teachers who were to characterise it, had come 
 (vers. 17, 18). Jude's short letter cannot, therefore, have 
 been composed earlier than a.d. 75 ; some critics relegate 
 it even to the second century. But that means that 
 another Epistle dependent upon it must have been later 
 still, and hence that Second Peter, though it was clearly 
 sent forth in Peter's name, came from some other pen. 
 On other grounds this view is justified. We may con- 
 clude, therefore, that Second Peter is the work of some 
 anonymous author, writing near the middle of the 
 second century, who, wishing to gain for his message 
 the authority of the great apostle, sent it forth in Peter's 
 name, and to churches in Asia Minor that had been 
 addressed in First Peter — to churches, at any rate, which 
 were familiar with that letter. And just because those 
 churches were probably not acquainted with Jude's 
 Epistle, else the author of Second Peter would scarcely 
 have ventured to use it so extensively, we may assume 
 that Jude's letter circulated in a different region — pos- 
 sibly among the churches of Syria or of the adjacent 
 portion of Asia Minor. 
 
i68 NEW TESTAMENT TEACHERS 
 
 We may infer without question that the Epistle of 
 Jude was written by some one bearing that name, for an 
 obscure author, wishing to hide himself behind another's 
 name, would obviously have chosen someone more 
 distinguished than Jude. Unless, therefore, the words 
 " brother of James " in the opening salutation have 
 been added by some copyist, we may identify this writer 
 with the Judas who was brother to both James of 
 Jerusalem and Jesus. Though he does not claim to 
 be an apostle, we can imagine that his relationship to 
 Jesus would give him some authority over the Syrian 
 churches, if he ventured to address them. That he 
 dwells in a somewhat curious and Jewish world is 
 shown by the use he makes (vers. 9, 14), giving them, 
 indeed, a canonical status, of two portions of Jewish 
 apocryphal literature — the Book of Enoch and the 
 Assumption of Moses. Out of this circle of quaint and 
 old-fashioned conceptions — fortified, indeed, by them — 
 Jude addresses himself to the existing situation. He 
 seems to have had in preparation some larger treatise 
 on "the common salvation" (ver. 3), the experience of 
 Divine grace which he shared with his readers, but from 
 this occupation he was diverted by the emergence of a 
 crisis. It was occasioned by the appearance in the 
 churches to which he wrote of false teachings and prac- 
 tices, due to the presence of men who combined a 
 practical antinomianism with the germs of certain Gnostic 
 
JUDE AND SECOND PETER 169 
 
 ideas. They denied, as did the Gnostics, the sole 
 rulership of Christ (ver. 4), whilst another offence laid at 
 their door (ver. 8), is that " they set at nought dominion " 
 (or " lordship ") " and rail at dignities " (or " glories "). 
 The context shows that angels of some sort are referred 
 to in these seemingly technical terms. If good angels, 
 as some suppose, are meant, the point, according to the 
 context, will be, that contemptuous language towards 
 them is extremely unfitting, seeing that when, according 
 to a popular tradition then current, the archangel Michael 
 contended with Satan as to whether he should bury the 
 body of Moses or Satan be allowed to bear it away, the 
 language of Michael even towards his wicked adversary 
 was marked by studious moderation ; and if bad angels 
 were treated thus, how much more entitled to respect 
 are the good? The weakness of that interpretation, 
 however, is that it does not bring the offenders' scorn 
 of " dignities " into any obvious relation with the license 
 ascribed to them. Hence there seems more force in 
 the suggestion that what is hinted at is a conception of 
 angelic hierarchies, good and bad, which, under certain 
 conditions, had "dominion" over men, and could work 
 their weal or woe. The idea of these antinomians was 
 that, at the moment of baptism, they had, as though by 
 some magic rite, passed under the sovereign protection 
 of Christ, so that henceforth, whatever their conduct, 
 the potentates who brought woe upon the sinful were 
 
I70 NEW TESTAMENT TEACHERS 
 
 powerless to harm them, and from within the sheltered 
 defence of their Christian profession could be scorned 
 and defied. If that be the position, the reference to 
 Michael is intended to suggest by contrast the rash folly 
 of these daring libertines. 
 
 For libertines they were, making the grace of God a 
 cloke for license. That is the head and front of their 
 offending. They were " ungodly men, turning the grace 
 of our God into lasciviousness " (ver. 4), " animal, having 
 not the Spirit" (ver. 19). Perverting Paul's teaching 
 concerning the Christian religion as meaning release 
 from legalism, they said that the Christian was lifted 
 above law, so that moral distinctions became meaning- 
 less. The result of such teaching was inevitable. These 
 "emancipated" ones turned Christian liberty into license, 
 and made their profession of discipleship a cloke for 
 vicious indulgence. Many of them evidently posed as 
 teachers, and in that guise craftily insinuated themselves 
 (ver. 4) into churches, upon which they boldly pastured 
 themselves (ver. 12), sowing strife and making "separa- 
 tions," i,e. creating cliques and parties, and, with simply 
 a selfish regard for their own advantage, working serious 
 harm. It is no wonder that Jude, in a wealth of figures 
 drawn from ordinary life and nature, almost exhausts the 
 language of invective in his denunciation of them. He 
 speaks of them as "spots" (this translation is to be 
 preferred to that of "sunken reefs"), or sources of 
 
JUDE AND SECOND PETER 171 
 
 defilement, in the love-feasts, that intimate expression 
 of Christian fellowship in the early Church, for, as we 
 gather from the parallel passage in II. Pet. ii. 14, these 
 libertines turned even the love-feasts to vicious ends ; 
 as clouds that were rainless and autumn trees which 
 were fruitless, mere shams devoid of both profit and 
 goodness ; as wild waves, restless because of the surging 
 up of unholy passion ; as erratic meteors, flashing for a 
 brief moment in the heavens and then quenched in 
 eternal darkness. When he would find parallels to 
 them, Jude turns to the unbelieving Israelites who fell 
 in the wilderness, or to the angels who, through sin, 
 forfeited their proud heritage, or to the vicious cities of 
 the Plain ; or, using vivid speech, he describes them as 
 sharing the sins of Cain and Balaam and the sons of 
 Korah. That men, on whom such strictures could with 
 any semblance of truth be passed, should have been 
 tolerated within the Christian Church, seems almost 
 incredible, until we remember that every successful 
 movement has its camp-followers, that the keen ardour 
 with which high ideals are first pursued is difficult to 
 maintain, and that error is always plausible and seductive, 
 when it links itself with sensual gratification. 
 
 To Jude two things were clear, — the ultimate doom 
 of these false teachers, and the present duty of the 
 Christians whom he addressed. Not content with re- 
 calling the Divine judgments which fell upon analogous 
 
172 NEW TESTAMENT TEACHERS 
 
 transgressors, he specially applies to these antinomians 
 a prediction of the Divine assize which appears in the 
 apocryphal Book of Enoch (vers. 14, 15). Just as their 
 coming had been predicted (ver. 18), their punishment 
 was also certain. The immediate duty of the Church 
 was to counteract their baleful influence by contending 
 earnestly " for the faith which was once for all delivered 
 unto the saints " (ver. 3). It may be noted in passing 
 that the term " faith," as there used, comes as near as 
 it does anywhere in the New Testament, to denoting a 
 scheme of doctrine, a concrete system of ideas — a fact 
 which, even if it stood alone, is sufficient to demand a late 
 date for this Epistle. So far as the false teachers them- 
 selves and those influenced by them were concerned, the 
 duty of loyal Christians was manifold, being regulated 
 by the extent to which a man had committed himself 
 to false teaching and practice. And all the while, as 
 their supreme safeguard, Christians were to look well to 
 their own hearts, building themselves up on the sure 
 foundation of their " most holy faith," cultivating prayer, 
 and keeping themselves within the charmed circle of 
 the Divine love, and, finally, looking with eager expecta- 
 tion towards that mercy which, at the return of Christ, 
 would issue in the boon of eternal life. 
 
 Of Jude's letter the Epistle known as Second Peter is, 
 as we have seen, largely a republication, especially in 
 the second chapter. Detailed reference to that portion of 
 
JUDE AND SECOND PETER 173 
 
 the Epistle is, therefore, unnecessary. An interesting 
 clue as to the date of composition is afforded by the 
 existence, when this Epistle was written, of outspoken 
 scepticism as to the return of Jesus. " Where," men 
 were asking in a tone of scorn, "is the promise of His 
 coming? The 'fathers' of the Church are all dead, 
 and yet the world keeps on its course with no sign of 
 change." Faith in the Parusia was crumbling owing to 
 the long delay in its occurrence. It is significant 
 that our author meets that scepticism, not only by re- 
 affirming the certainty of Christ's return, but by justify- 
 ing its delay. If the expected coming had not yet 
 occurred, it was not because God was slack concerning 
 His promise. Time with Him was not measured by 
 human standards. The delay was merciful in that it 
 was designed to allow men space for repentance before 
 mercy gave place to judgment (an idea which is repeated 
 later, when the long-suffering of God is said to contem- 
 plate man's salvation). But, whether soon or late, 
 Christ would come again, with the unexpectedness of a 
 thief, and His return would witness the violent dissolu- 
 tion of the present order of things, and of the world in 
 which that order had its home, and out of the crumbling 
 ruins would be evolved new heavens and a new earth, 
 the abode of righteousness. In constant readiness for 
 that grave consummation and in earnest longing for it 
 Christians were to pass the days of waiting, for Christ's 
 
174 NEW TESTAMENT TEACHERS 
 
 return, though long delayed, was inevitable and sure. 
 " We did not follow cunningly-devised fables," says our 
 author, " when we made known unto you the power and 
 coming " {i.e. the return) " of our Lord Jesus Christ " 
 (i. 1 6). So the business of his readers was, by growth 
 in Christian virtue, earnestly to respond to God's choice 
 of them, so that, when the eternal Kingdom was in- 
 augurated, they might be furnished with entrance into 
 it (i. lo, ii). 
 
 A novel feature in the teaching of this Epistle is the 
 importance which is attached to knowledge. There in- 
 deed, it has been said, we have its key-word. Yet the 
 author's thought will elude us unless we see that "know- 
 ledge " is used in a twofold sense. In one meaning it 
 stands but slightly removed from faith, though it possesses 
 an added degree of certainty. Faith so soon melts into 
 knowledge, as used in this sense, that Christian experience 
 is traced indifferently to a "precious faith" (i. i) and to 
 the knowledge of Christ (i. 3). Faith leads to "virtue," 
 a rudimentary but comprehensive manifestation of the 
 Christian graces, and that " virtue " leads on to " know- 
 ledge," — that is the path of Christian progress (i. 5). 
 But " knowledge " in this latter sense, just because it is 
 elementary, instead of being a goal, only represents a 
 new starting-point, for, in virtue of its possession, the 
 Christian is enabled to move on to the graces in their 
 more advanced stage, self-restraint being supplemented 
 
JUDE AND SECOND PETER 175 
 
 by patience and godliness, until, when love comes in 
 to complete the circle, — love not simply towards the 
 Christian brotherhood, but towards humanity, — the 
 very moral advance so registered bears fruit in that 
 deeper " knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ " (i. 8), in 
 which the readers of this letter are in a final appeal 
 exhorted to grow (iii. 18). This knowledge is spoken 
 of sometimes as a knowledge of God, and at other times 
 as a knowledge of Christ, but the two phrases are thus 
 interchanged simply because the knowledge in question 
 is that which we have of God through Jesus Christ. 
 Yet it is more than mere intellectualism. Nay, it is 
 to such an intellectualism, barren because divorced 
 from conduct, that the true " knowledge " is opposed, 
 our author's desire probably being to rescue the term 
 from the unethical, and even immoral, associations to 
 which an antinomian Gnosticism had degraded it. 
 Knowledge here, as in the Johannine writings, is not 
 merely intellectual, but ethical and practical. It denotes 
 such a fellowship, not merely with the thought, but with 
 the spirit and will of God, as inevitably finds appropriate 
 expression in character and life. 
 
 Thus does the writer of this letter set the true Gnosis^ 
 or knowledge, over against the false, and test each by 
 its fruits. It is interesting to note that Paul's Epistles 
 are referred to as being perverted by ignorant or wicked 
 interpreters so as to justify misconduct. The very 
 
176 NEW TESTAMENT TEACHERS 
 
 doctrine against which Paul protested so vehemently 
 (Rom. vi.), that the passage from law to grace meant 
 freedom to transgress, became " the error of the wicked " 
 (iii. 17), who thus turned liberty into libertinism. 
 Another reference to Scripture — this time to Old 
 Testament prophecy — presents a problem for exegesis. 
 " Peter " has been arguing that the glory manifested in 
 Christ's person at the Transfiguration was a pledge of 
 His return in glory. " And thus," says he, taking that 
 event as the goal to which all revelation converged, 
 ** we have the prophetic word made more sure — a word 
 to which you do well to take heed, as to a lamp shining 
 in a dark room, until the day of that consummation 
 dawns." But prophecy could not nourish hope unless 
 it was righdy interpreted. And so we are told to 
 recognise, first of all, "that no prophecy of Scripture is 
 of private interpretation," i.e. as most exegetes are dis- 
 posed to explain this difficult saying, " a prophecy is not 
 a puzzle which can be solved according to individual 
 caprice " (a practice of which the false teachers denounced 
 in chap. ii. were guilty) ; " it embodies a definite 
 purpose, in the discovery of which the individual 
 interpreter must be governed by general principles of 
 exegesis, which are approved by the judgment of the 
 Christian community." Individual caprice is thus 
 barred out, because " no prophecy ever came by the will 
 of man " ; not in human volition or effort lay the secret 
 
JUDE AND SECOND PETER 177 
 
 of its utterance ; " but men spake from God, being 
 borne along by the Holy Ghost" (i. 19-21). What 
 therefore, the Holy Ghost has inspired, requires Him 
 also for its interpretation. The view of inspiration thus 
 set forth, implying, as it does, the supersession of the 
 prophet's intellect and will by a superior force, represents 
 it, after the fashion of Philo or Plato, as essentially 
 mechanical in its operation.- And the presence of such 
 a degenerate conception here is a reason, added to 
 others, why scholarship relegates this Epistle to the 
 second century, and regards it as probably in date the 
 latest contribution to the New Testament. 
 
 M 
 
INDEX 
 
 Aaronic priesthood, Jesus and 
 
 the, 138, 143 fr. 
 Angels, Jesus and, 136 
 Apocalypses, Jewish, 91 f. 
 Assumption of Moses, 168 
 
 Baldensperger, 12 
 Barnabas, 132 
 Baptism, 34 
 Beyschlag, 28 
 
 C^SAR-WORSHIP, 93, 96, 99 
 
 Celsus, 12 
 
 Cerinthus, 16 
 
 Christ, Death of, 51, 142 ff. 
 
 Person of, 11, 19 ff., 73, 75, 99, 
 136 ff. 
 
 Work of, 5iff.,i42ff. 
 Church, Holy Spirit and the, 35 ff. 
 Clement of Alexandria, 8 
 Covenant, the new, 144, 145 
 
 Darkness, 45 
 
 Death of Christ, 51, 142 ff. 
 
 Demetrius, 88 
 
 Diotrephes, 87 
 
 Docetic Gnosticism, 73, 75, 86 
 
 Drummond, 14 
 
 Enoch, Book of, 168, 
 Epiphanius, 8 
 
 [72 
 
 Eschatology, Johannine, 62 ff. 
 Eternal Life, 64 f., 82 ff. 
 Eusebius, 8 
 
 Faith, 15, 59, 83 f., 147 f., 172, 
 
 174 
 Faith and works, 117 
 Fatherhood of God, 32 
 Finality of Christianity, 146 ff, , 150 
 Findlay, 85 
 
 Gaius, 87 
 
 Gnosticism, 15 f., 56, 99 
 Docetic type of, 73, 75, 86 
 Antinomian, 76, 86, 99, 168 ff. 
 
 Godet. 3 
 
 Gunkel, 95 
 
 Harnack, 88, 133, 156 
 Hebrews, Epistle to the, 132 ff. 
 
 author, 132 
 
 readers, 133 ff. 
 
 historic situation, 134 f. 
 
 contrasts, 136 ff. 
 
 message, 148 
 High-priesthood of Jesus, 138 ff. 
 Holiness of God, 33, 77 
 Holy Spirit, 33 ff., 49, 177 
 Humanity of Jesus, 22, 139 f. 
 
 I Incarnation, 52 ff. 
 179 
 
i8o 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Inspiration, 176 f. 
 
 James, the apostle, 115, 118 
 James, Epistle of , 115 ff. 
 
 author, 115 
 
 characteristics and date, 116 f. 
 
 readers, 117 ff. 
 
 debt to Jesus, 119, 121, 122 
 
 teaching, 122 ff, 
 
 message, 130 
 Jews in the Fourth Gospel, 10 
 John the Baptist, 5, 12 
 John , First Epistle of, 71 ff. 
 
 author, 71 
 
 readers, 72 
 
 heresy attacked, 73 ff. 
 
 doctrine of Christ, 75, 78 
 
 Light, •j'j ff. 
 
 Love, 80 ff. 
 
 Life, 82 f. 
 John, Second Epistle of, 84 ff. 
 John, Third Epistle of, 87 ff. 
 John, Gospel of, 3 ff . 
 
 authorship, 3f, 
 
 historicity, 4 ff. 
 
 discourses, 5 f . 
 
 a " spiritual" gospel, 8 
 
 purpose, 9 
 
 readers, 10 
 
 terminology, 13 
 
 subjectivity, 18 
 
 teaching, 19 fif. 
 John the Presbyter, 84, 97 
 Jiide, Epistle of 166 ff. 
 
 relationship to Second Peter, 
 166 f. 
 
 author, 168 
 
 heresy attacked, 168 ff. 
 Judgment, 48, 68 
 
 Kingdom of God, 64 
 Knowledge, 15, 55, 59, 76 f., 174 
 
 Last Things, 65 ff. 
 Law of liberty, 122 
 
 of love, 121 
 Life, 15, 57 ff., 82 ff. 
 Light, 15, 45, S3, Tj 
 Logos. See Word 
 Love, 32 f , 80 ff. 
 Lord's Supper, 60-61 
 
 Martineau, 3, 71 
 Melchizedek, 138 
 Messiahship of Jesus, 23 
 Moses, Jesus and, 137 
 
 Nero, 93, 97, 105, io6 
 New Covenant, 144, 145 
 
 Origen, 132 
 
 Parusia. See Return of Jesus 
 Pauline teaching, John and, 41, 
 
 51.57 
 
 James and, 123 
 
 Peter and, 153, 160, 175 
 Perfection of Jesus, 29, 78 
 Person of Christ, 11, 19 ff., 73, 
 
 75,99, 136 ff. 
 Peter, First Epistle of, 152 ff. 
 
 author, 152 
 
 debt to Paul, 153 
 
 readers, 154 
 
 historic situation, 155 
 
 teaching, 157 ff. 
 Peter, Second Epistle of, 166 f., 
 172 ff. 
 
 relation to Jude, 166 f. 
 
 teaching, 173 fif. 
 Persecution, Christians and, 93 f. , 
 
 104, 119, 149, 155 f., 158 f. 
 Pfleiderer, 71, 156 
 Philip, 132 
 Philo, 14, 20 ff. , 31 
 
INDEX 
 
 i8i 
 
 Pre-existence of Jesus, 27 f. , 141 f. 
 
 Priscilla, 133 
 
 Prophecy, Limitations of, 109 ff. 
 
 Resurrection, 68 
 
 Return of Jesus, 17, 62 fF., 127, 
 
 149. 173 
 Revelation, Book of ike, 90 ff. 
 
 characteristics, 91 f. 
 
 historic situation, 93 
 
 originality, 94 ff. 
 
 date and author, 97 ff. 
 
 churches addressed, 99 
 
 exposition of its symbolism, 
 100 ff. 
 
 message, 109 
 
 limitations, 109 ff. 
 Revelation, Jesus and, 31, 45 f., 
 
 53 
 Holy Spirit and, 37 
 Rich and poor, 120?., 127 
 Roman Government, Christians 
 
 and the, 93 f. , 154 
 
 Salvation, universality of, 41 f. , 
 46 ff. 
 nature of, 145, 147 
 Schmiedel, 3, 16, 71 
 Scott, vii, 65 
 
 Second Coming. See Return of 
 
 Jesus 
 Sin, S3, 77, 79 
 
 Social teaching of James, 120, 127 
 Son of God, 25 
 Son of Man, 24 
 Sonship and fatherhood, 50 
 Sonship of Jesus, 25 ff. 
 South, 90 
 Spirit, God a, 31 
 Spirits in prison, 162 ff. 
 Synoptists, the Fourth Gospel and 
 
 the, 4f. , II, 24, 51, 62-63 
 
 Transcendence of God, 32 
 Trinity, 39 ff. 
 
 Universality of salvation , 41 f. , 
 46 ff. 
 
 Weiss, 3 
 Weizsacicer, 3 
 Wellhausen, 4, 71 
 Wendt, 3, 28 
 Wernle, 3 
 Word, 13, 19 ff., 45 
 World, 15, 43 
 
 Church and the, 41 ff. 
 
 Holy Spirit and the, 36, 49 
 
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