And instead of removing any difficulties it creates greater difficulties in their place. There
are certain contradictions which no ingenuity can solve. If "the great unknown" was the creative
artist of his ideal Christ, and the inventor of those sublime discourses, the like of which were never
heard before or since, he must have been a mightier genius than Dante or Shakespeare, yea greater
than his own hero, that is greater than the greatest: this is a psychological impossibility and a logical
absurdity. Moreover, if he was not John and yet wanted to be known as John, he was a deceiver
and a liar:^1094 this is a moral impossibility. The case of Plato is very different, and his relation to
Socrates is generally understood. The Synoptic Gospels are anonymous, but do not deceive the
reader. Luke and the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews honestly make themselves known as mere
disciples of the apostles. The real parallel would be the apocryphal Gospels and the
pseudo-Clementine productions, where the fraud is unmistakable, but the contents are so far below
the fourth Gospel that a comparison is out of the question. Literary fictions were not uncommon
in the ancient church, but men had common sense and moral sense then as well is now to distinguish
between fact and fiction, truth and lie. It is simply incredible that the ancient church should have
been duped into a unanimous acceptance of such an important book as the work of the beloved
disciple almost from the very date of his death, and that the whole Christian church, Greek, Latin,
Protestant, including an innumerable army of scholars, should have been under a radical delusion
for eighteen hundred years, mistaking a Gnostic dream for the genuine history of the Saviour of
mankind, and drinking the water of life from the muddy source of fraud.^1095
In the meantime the fourth Gospel continues and will continue to shine, like the sun in
heaven, its own best evidence, and will shine all the brighter when the clouds, great and small, shall
have passed away.§ 85. The Acts of the Apostles.
Comp. § 82.- Critical Treatises.
M. Schneckenburger: Zweck der Apostelgeschichte. Bern, 1841.
Schwanbeck: Quellen der Ap. Gesch. Darmstadt, 1847.
Ed. Zeller: Contents and Origin of the Acts of the Apostles. Stuttg., 1854; trsl. by Jos. Dare, 1875–76,
London, 2 vols.
Lekebusch: Composition u. Entstehung der Ap. Gesch. Gotha, 1854.
Klostermann: Vindiciae Lucancae. Göttingen, 1866.
Arthur König (R. C.): Die Aechtheit der Ap. Gesch. Breslau, 1867.
J. R. Oertel: Paulus in der Ap. Gesch. Der histor. Char. dieser Schrift, etc. Halle, 1868.
(^1094) "Als die Dichtung eines halbgnostischen Philosophen aus dem zweiten Jahrhundert ist es [the fourth Gospel] ein trügerisches
Irrlicht, ja in Wahrheit eine grosse Lüge,"Weiss, I. 124. Renan admits the alternative, only in milder terms:"Il y a là un petit
artifice littéraire, du genre de ceux qu’affectionne Platon," l.c., p. 52.
(^1095) This absurdity is strikingly characterized in the lines of the Swabian poet, Gustav Schwab, which he gave me when I was
a student at Tübingen shortly after the appearance of Strauss’s Leben Jesu:
"Hat dieses Buch, das ew’ge Wahrheit ist,
Ein lügenhafter Gnostiker geschrieben,
So hat seit tausend Jahren Jesus Christ
Den Teufel durch Beelzebub vertrieben."
A.D. 1-100.