reconstruction and destruction of the life of Christ and the apostolic history. The ultimate result
cannot be doubtful. The opponents have been forced gradually to retreat from the year 170 to the
very beginning of the second century, as the time when the fourth Gospel was already known and
used in the church, that is to the lifetime of many pupils and friends of John and other eye-witnesses
of the life of Christ.^1059
I. The External Proof of the Johannean authorship is as strong, yea stronger than that of the
genuineness of any classical writer of antiquity, and goes up to the very beginning of the second
century, within hailing distance of the living John. It includes catholic writers, heretics, and heathen
enemies. There is but one dissenting voice, hardly audible, that of the insignificant sect of the Alogi
who opposed the Johannean doctrine of the Logos (hence their name, with the double meaning of
unreasonable, and anti-Logos heretics) and absurdly ascribed both the Gospel of John and the
Apocalypse to his enemy, the Gnostic Cerinthus.^1060 Let us briefly sum up the chief testimonies.- Catholic testimonies. We begin at the fourth century and gradually rise up to the age of
John. All the ancient Greek manuscripts of the New Testament, including the Sinaitic and the
Vatican, which date from the age of Constantine and are based upon older copies of the second
century, and all the ancient versions, including the Syriac and old Latin from the third and second
centuries, contain without exception the Gospel of John, though the Peshito omits his second and
third Epistles and the Apocalypse. These manuscripts and versions represent the universal voice
of the churches.
Then we have the admitted individual testimonies of all the Greek and Latin fathers up to
the middle of the second century, without a dissenting voice or doubt: Jerome (d. 419) and Eusebius
(d. 340), who had the whole ante-Nicene literature before them; Origen in Egypt (d. 254), the
greatest scholar of his age and a commentator on John; Tertullian of North Africa (about 200), a
Catholic in doctrine, a Montanist in discipline, and a zealous advocate of the dispensation of the
Paraclete announced by John; Clement of Alexandria (about 190), a cultivated philosopher who
had travelled in Greece, Italy, Syria, and Palestine, seeking religious instruction everywhere;
Irenaeus, a native of Asia Minor and from 178 bishop of Lyons, a pupil of Polycarp and a grand-pupil
of John himself, who derived his chief ammunition against the Gnostic heresy from the fourth
Gospel, and represents the four canonical Gospels—no more and no less—as universally accepted
by the churches of his time; Theophilus of Antioch (180), who expressly quotes from the fourth
Gospel under the name of John;^1061 the Muratorian Canon (170), which reports the occasion of the
composition of John’s Gospel by urgent request of his friends and disciples; Tatian of Syria
(155–170), who in his "Address to the Greeks" repeatedly quotes the fourth Gospel, though without
naming the author, and who began his, "Diatessaron"—once widely spread in the church
notwithstanding the somewhat Gnostic leanings of the author, and commented on by Ephraem of
Syria—with the prologue of John.^1062 From him we have but one step to his teacher, Justin Martyr,
(^1059) See the literary notices on p. 405 sqq. To the able vindications of the genuineness of John there mentioned must now be
added the masterly discussion of Dr. Weiss in his Leben Jesu (vol. I., 1882, pp. 84-124), which has just come to hand.
(^1060) Recently renewed in part by Renan (1879). See below.
(^1061) His quotation is considered the earliest by name; but Irenaeus, who wrote between 177 and 192, represents an older tradition,
and proves to his satisfaction that there must be just four Gospels to answer the four cherubim in Ezekiel’s vision. Adv. Haer.,
III. 1, 1; 11, 8; V. 36, 2.
(^1062) The Commentary of Ephraem Syrus on the Diatessaron (375) has recently been discovered and published from an Armenian
translation, at Venice, in 1876. Comp. Zahn, Tatian’s Diatessaron, Erlangen, 1881, and Harnack, Die Ueberlieferung der
griechisch en Apologeten des zweiten Jahrh., Leipzig, 1882, pp. 213 sqq.
A.D. 1-100.