the Synoptics, as they are called, from obvious identity of survey or treatment. It was not, however, till my final relinquishment of clerical duty that I understood in its different bearings the question of the origin, object, and character of this Gospel, its radical divergence from the other three, or its peculiar relation to the Apocalypse. The writings of the Tübingen School-in particular, the masterly treatise of the founder of the School, F. C. Baur-ultimately convinced me that this theosophical Gospel was not the production of the Apostle St. John. The authorship of the Apocalypse, which, with Luther, Neander, and other theologians, I at one time hesitated to assign to the son of Zebedee, appeared to me, in the light of the new criticism, to be better attested than that of any book of the New Testament, and its genuineness scarcely more open to doubt than that of the principal Epistles of St. Paul. The character of the "Son of Thunder," who would have called down fire from heaven, his position as one of the eminent leaders of the oldest type of Christianity at Jerusalem, his reluctant acknowledgment of the apostolic pretensions of St. Paul, are traits which harmonise with the personal prepossessions of the writer of the Apocalypse, who recognises only the Twelve Apostles as the founders of the Church, who commends the Christians of Ephesus (a privileged centre of St. Paul's apostolic labours) for the rejection of those who say they are apostles and are not, who severely reproves Gentile converts for a practice which

St. Paul himself allowed, and who denounces the very sin into which a Pauline Christian at Corinth had fallen.

The fourth Gospel, on the other hand, is distinguished by different and even opposite characteristics. Unlike the narrative of St. Matthew, St. Mark, or St. Luke, that of St. John is conspicuously a spiritual or ideal Gospel. The synoptical story of the nativity of Jesus is superseded in the fourth Evangelist by a formal assertion of his divine pre-existence. The idea of St. Paul, that the Redeemer was the second Adam, the Lord from heaven, is not only accepted, but carried far above the speculative elevation of that Apostle. The history of Jesus is more or less disengaged in it from all the accidents of time. The destruction of the Temple, the siege of Jerusalem, the impending Advent, are no longer prominent topics; the scene of the activity of the Logos-Messiah is Jerusalem, and not Galilee, as in the other Gospels; the sermon on the Mount and the latter-day discourses are omitted, and conversations and soliloquies, often curiously unlike the discourses of the Synoptics, replace them. The singular speculations of the opening chapter take us at once into the Gnostic circle of ideas. Half polemical, half conciliatory, the prologue or introduction at once acknowledges and disavows the antitheses or dualisms of Gnosis. It repeats the Gnostic vocabulary, Father, Word, Beginning, Life, Truth, Grace, Fulness, or Pleroma. It opposes God to the world, light to darkness, the children of God to the children of the

devil. It borrows a Gnostic expression in designating Christ as the Only-begotten. The doctrine of the Paraclete or Comforter is a development of Christian doctrine which recalls the heretical vocabulary of Valentinus or Montanus, and contrasts with the view of the probably earlier Epistle of St. John, which assigns to Jesus, and not the Holy Spirit, the appellation of Paraclete. A lucid indication of the proximate date of composition is found in the remarkable fact that the fourth Gospel makes the death of Jesus take place on the 14th Nisan, while the first three Gospels fix it to the day of the Passover; omits the institution of the Lord's Supper and the final Paschal feast, and records only the celebration of a last meal on the 13th Nisan. Now this divergence is explained by the famous controversy in Asia Minor during the second century. The party of the Jewish Christians held strictly to tradition, and, with the Jews, celebrated the Passover on the 14th Nisan. This party appealed to the Gospel of St. Matthew and the practice of the Apostle St. John. The Pauline Christians, on the other hand, would not hear of a Jewish celebration, arguing that a mere figurative Passover was superfluous, Christ, the true Passover, having been sacrificed for us. In the commencement of this controversy, which towards the end of the second century assumed an altered character, the fourth Gospel must have had its origin. This is intimated by the attempt which it makes to find a counterpoise for the Judeo-Christian observance in a purely Christian feast of the Passover. Accordingly,

the testimony of St. Matthew, and of course the two other Synoptists, is overruled by that of the disciple whom Jesus loved; the Paschal lamb of the Jews loses its significance, for Jesus is the true Paschal Lamb, sacrificed at the same time as the lamb of the Jewish rite; the farewell meal is not the Passover meal, and is not allowed to stand in any relation to it. To justify this mode of celebrating the Passover, an appeal was made by the Jewish Christians to the practice of the Apostle John, precisely the practice which the Gospel of St. John discountenances. The considerations here adduced, with others too numerous to be specified in this place, rendered it impossible for me any longer to attribute the Gospel which bears his name to the Apostle St. John.1

From the discrepant characters of the fourth Gospel and the Apocalypse I pass to a still more momentous discrepancy-the cardinal differences between Ebionite or Petrine and Pauline Christianity. The exclusion of

1 See an article on the fourth Gospel in the Westminster Review, written by me in 1865. The arguments adduced in the masterly treatise of F. C. Baur are in my opinion decisive. The opinion that this Gospel is a production of the second century has been advocated in Germany by Schwegler, Hilgenfeld, Strauss, Zeller, Volkmar, Planck, Köstlin, Lipsius, Weitzsäcker, Bruch, Holsten, Holtzmann, Krenkel, Pfleiderer, Spath, Ziegler, Schmidt, Holtzendorf. In a volume of the Protestanten-Bibel, not long since published for popular perusal in Germany, the non-apostolic origin of the Gospel is maintained. Renan, in the thirteenth edition of his Life of Jesus, has at length accepted the conclusion of Baur. In England, among the advocates of the theory which regards this Gospel as an idealised presentment of the Christian legend, are Dr. S. Davidson, Rev. H. B. Wilson, Rev. James Martineau, the late Rev. J. J. Tayler, Mr. R. W. Mackay, and the author of Supernatural Religion.

Paul in the Apocalypse harmonises with the incessant reclamations of Paul in his Epistles. The Epistle to the Galatians, in particular, "places us in the midst of the great excitement of the critical struggle which had begun between Judaism and Christianity." The question, in fact, had arisen, whether Christianity should exist merely as a form of Judaism, or should be freed from its primitive trammels. For at least fourteen years after the conversion of St. Paul, the elder Apostles had not extended their vision beyond the narrow horizon of Judaism. The Jewish prepossessions of the author of the Apocalypse were, in this earlier period, yet more exclusive. The grand work of emancipation from the bondage of the Mosaic law met with little favour in the eyes of the primitive Apostles. Jesus himself had not broken with the religious institutions of his country. The chosen Twelve, after his death, remained at Jerusalem. James, in the Acts of the Apostles (xxi. 20), a work which remoulds history in the interest of Pauline doctrine, became the consentient president of a Christian community zealous of the law, which regarded the innovator Paul as a traitor to time-honoured laws and ancestral usages. While in Acts xvi. Paul is said to have circumcised a disciple (Timothy) in deference to local Jewish prejudice, though the son of a Greek father, he positively asserts in Galatians ii. that another disciple (Titus) was not compelled to undergo that rite, and that no compliance whatever was shown with the requirements of the faction whose object was the over