But what then becomes of the fourth Gospel? It is incredible that the real John should have
falsified the history of his Master; consequently the Gospel which bears his name is a post-apostolic
fiction, a religious poem, or a romance on the theme of the incarnate Logos. It is the Gospel of
Christian Gnosticism, strongly influenced by the Alexandrian philosophy of Philo. Yet it is no fraud
any more than other literary fictions. The unknown author dealt with the historical Jesus of the
Synoptists, as Plato dealt with Socrates, making him simply the base for his own sublime
speculations, and putting speeches into his mouth which he never uttered.
Who was that Christian Plato? No critic can tell, or even conjecture, except Renan, who
revived, as possible at least, the absurd view of the Alogi, that the Gnostic heretic, Cerinthus the
enemy of John, wrote the fourth Gospel^1091 Such a conjecture requires an extraordinary stretch of
imagination and an amazing amount of credulity. The more sober among the critics suppose that
the author was a highly gifted Ephesian disciple of John, who freely reproduced and modified his
oral teaching after he was removed by death. But how could his name be utterly unknown, when
the names of Polycarp and Papias and other disciples of John, far less important, have come down
to as? "The great unknown" is a mystery indeed. Some critics, half in sympathy with Tübingen,
are willing to admit that John himself wrote a part of the book, either the historic narratives or the
discourses, but neither of these compromises will do: the book is a unit, and is either wholly genuine
or wholly a fiction.
Nor are the negative critics agreed as to the time of composition. Under the increasing
pressure of argument and evidence they have been forced to retreat, step by step, from the last
quarter of the second century to the first, even within a few years of John’s death, and within the
lifetime of hundreds of his hearers, when it was impossible for a pseudo-Johannean book to pass
into general currency without the discovery of the fraud. Dr. Baur and Schwegler assigned the
composition to a.d. 170 or 160; Volkmar to 155; Zeller to 150; Scholten to 140; Hilgenfeld to about
130; Renan to about 125; Schenkel to 120 or 115; until Keim (in 1867) went up as high as 110 or
even 100, but having reached such an early date, he felt compelled (1875)^1092 in self-defence to
advance again to 130, and this notwithstanding the conceded testimonies of Justin Martyr and the
early Gnostics. These vacillations of criticism reveal the impossibility of locating the Gospel in the
second century.
If we surrender the fourth Gospel, what shall we gain in its place? Fiction for fact, stone
for bread, a Gnostic dream for the most glorious truth.
Fortunately, the whole anti-Johannean hypothesis breaks down at every point. It suffers
shipwreck on innumerable details which do not fit at all into the supposed dogmatic scheme, but
rest on hard facts of historical recollections.^1093(^1091) "Tout est possible," says Renan (L’Église chrét., p. 54), "à cesépoques ténébreuses; et, si l’Église, en vénérant le quatrième
Évangile comme l’oeuvre de Jean, est dupe de celui qu’elle regarde comme un de ses plus dangereux ennemis, cela n’est pas
en somme plus étrange que tant d’autres malentendus qui composent la trame de l’histoire religieuse de l’humanité. Ce qu’il y
a de sûr, c’est que l’auteur est à la fois le père et l’adversaire du gnosticisme, l’ennemi de ceux qui laissaient s’evaporer dans
un docétisme nuageux l’humanité réelle de Jésus et le complice de ceus qui le reléguaient dans l’abstraction divine." He thinks
it more probable, however (p. 47), that two Ephesian disciples of John (John the Presbyter and Aristion) wrote the Gospel twenty
or thirty years after his death.
(^1092) In the last edition of his abridged Geschichte Jesu.
(^1093) As Weiss (I. 109) admirably expresses it: "Ueberall im Einzelnen wie in der Gesammtgestaltung des Lebens Jesu stossen
wir auf das harte Gestein geschichtlicher Erinnerung, welches dem kritischen Auflösungsprozess, der es in ideelle Bildungen
verwandeln will, unüberwindlichen Widerstand leistet."
A.D. 1-100.