The Authenticity of St. John’s Gospel

The Gospel according to St. John differs from the other Gospels in one important respect—namely, in being the only one in which the writer calls attention to his own person, and declares himself to have been one of the immediate disciples of Christ. The Gospels of St. Matthew and St. Mark contain no direct intimation of their authors; it is only the tradition of the Church which has assigned them to the persons whose names they bear. The Gospel of St. Luke also is silent concerning its author, though the opening address to Theophilus enables us to identify the writer with the author of the Acts of the Apostles, and the narrative of the latter work further points him out as one of the companions of St. Paul. But St. John’s Gospel in two passages alludes to the person of its author, and points him out as one of the disciples of Christ. In the 19th chapter he is stated to have been present at the crucifixion of his Master, and to have seen the infliction of the wound which pierced His side; “and he that saw it bore record, and his record is true, and he knoweth that he saith is true, that ye might believe” (John 19:3, 5). And in the 21st chapter he is still further identified with the disciple whom Jesus loved, and of whom He spoke as tarrying till He should come.” This is the disciple which testifieth of these things, and wrote these things; and we know that his testimony is true” (John 21:24).

This distinct ascription of authorship places an inquiry into the genuineness of the Gospel of St. John upon a different footing from a similar inquiry with regard to any other of the Gospels. In other cases it is possible to suppose that the tradition of the Church may be in error, without imparting any fraudulent intention to the writer of the book. The author does not say that he is Matthew or Mark, or Luke; and he is not necessarily responsible if the tradition of the Church is mistaken in this respect. With regard to the Gospel of St. John, such an unintentional error is out of the question. Either the book was (as it professes to have been) written by the disciple whom Jesus loved, or the whole Church has been imposed upon by a willful and deliberate forgery of that disciple’s name.

There have not been wanting, however, both in earlier and in later times, speculators or critics who, on various grounds, have asserted the spuriousness of this Gospel. Irenaeus mentions certain heretics who rejected the Gospel of St. John (Irenaeus 3:11:9); but it is not clear from his language whether they denied the Apostolic authorship, or, like Marcion, maintained that apostolic authorship was no proof of trustworthiness in matters of doctrine. Epiphanus (Hier. 21) more distinctly mentions a sect, to whom he gives the name of “Αλογοι,” who denied both the Gospel and the Apocalypse to be the work of St. John and attributed them to the heretic Cerinthus, but these occasional eccentricities produced no perceptible effect on the general judgment of the Church. In modern times, prior to the rise of the Tübingen School, the most formidable assailant of this Gospel was Bretschneider, who in his Probabilia, published in 1820, endeavored to show, both from the contents of the book itself and from its relation to the other Gospels that it would not be of Apostolic origin. This work called forth several replies, which were so far successful that Bretschneider himself, in a subsequent work, virtually withdrew from his position, maintaining that his objections had only been raised in order to give rise to a fuller discussion of the question, and that this end had been attained. A similar vacillation was shown by Strauss, who, in the first edition of his notorious Life of Jesus, pronounced decidedly against the genuineness of this Gospel, in the third edition declared that his conviction on this point had been at least shaken by the arguments of Neander and De Wette; and finally in the fourth edition, returned more positively than ever to his original denial.

The doubts thus raised were taken up and diligently elaborated by the Tübingen critics, who are united in maintaining that the Gospel, not only is not the work of an Apostle, but was not written earlier than the middle of the second century. If so, it is marvellously unlike any other production of that century, and it is equally marvellous that a man should have lived at that time, capable of producing such a work, of whose very existence, nevertheless, the records of his age have not the slightest trace. It is also marvellous that Irenaeus, whose master Polycarp, was himself a disciple of St. John, should have acknowledged in the very strongest language the genuineness and canonical authority of the book as the work of his own teacher’s teacher (Irenaeus, Adv. 3:11:8. Cf. hidden, Rampton Lectures, p. 315) if that book had really been a forgery composed within the limit of his own lifetime. But, not to dwell for the present on the positive evidences which may be adduced in support of the genuineness of this Gospel, let us pay a passing attention to the force of the arguments which have been brought forward by the Tübingen critics in support of their hypothesis. First we are told that the Gospel cannot be historical, because it is so written as to exhibit throughout a leading idea (Bauer, Kanon Evang., p. 238). No doubt it is so written; and the Evangelist himself tells us what his idea and purpose is. He says, “And many other signs truly did Jesus in the presence of His disciples, which are not written in this book; but these are written that we might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that believing ye might have life through His name” (John 20:30, 31). But what shall we think of the logic which argues that because certain events were selected and confessedly selected, for a particular purpose, therefore the events themselves never really took place. In the next place, mere divergence in St. John’s narrative from that of the Synoptists are perverted into contradictions; for example, the visits of our Lord to Jerusalem before his final entry are to be regarded as unhistorical, because they are not recorded by the Synoptists, though the Synoptists themselves indicate the existence of visits which it did not fall within their purpose to record in full. (Thus the words recorded by St. Matthew, 23:37 and by St. Luke, 13:34, ποσακις ἤθέλησα ἐπισυναγαγεῖν τα τεκνα σου, κ.τ.λ. imply previous visits). That Joseph of Arimathea, a councellor (i.e., one of the Sanhedrin) should be a disciple, seems naturally to imply a previous intercourse of our Lord with the people of Jerusalem and its vicinity, as does also the history of Martha and Mary (Luke 10:38. Cf. Bleek, Einleitung, pp. 178, 179, 301).

Again we are told that various parts of the narrative were invented from such and such motives (Cf. Bauer, pp. 115, 171, 217), and that the discourses attributed to Christ are not historical, because they betray the subjectivity of the Evangelist (Cf. Bauer, p. 292); both of which statements may go for what they are worth according to our estimate of the critics, means of ascertaining the Evangelist’s motive and his “subjectivity.” But we may pass by these criticisms, which even Bauer himself admits do not necessarily prove that St. John cannot have been the author of the Gospel (Cf. Bauer, Evang., p. 327).

Now let us examine the one historical argument, which is regarded by the Tübingen critics and their recent disciples in this country as completely settling the question. This argument was first suggested by Bretschneider (Cf. Schwegler, Montanismus, p. 191), but was fully developed and carried to its conclusion by the Tübingen critics, Schwegler (Montanismus, p. 191; Nachapost. Zeital. II. p. 352, Bauer, in Theol. Jahre. 1844 repeated in his Kanon. Evang., p. 334. Recently in England the argument has been adopted by Taylor, The Fourth Gospel, p. 33, and by Davidson, Introduction to N. T. (1868) II., p. 406). The substance may be briefly stated as follows: In the Paschal controversies of the Second Century between the Churches of Asia Minor and those of the West, the former appealed to the authority of St. John in support of their practice of observing the 14th day of the month on whatever day of the week it might fall, being the day on which the Jews were commanded to kill the paschal lamb. This day, said the Tübingen critics, was observed by the Earlier Churches in commemoration of the day on which our Lord celebrated the Passover with His disciples: and they appealed to the practice of St. John, while he resided at Ephesus, in support of this custorn. (See Eusebius, v. 24, 5, 13). If this be the case, say the critics, it follows that St. John could not have been the writer of the fourth Gospel; for that Gospel distinctly asserts that our Lord suffered on the 14th of Nisan, the day on which the paschal lamb was killed and eaten, and consequently that his own last supper was not on that day, but on the 13th.

The argument at first sight looks formidable; but its whole force depends on the answer given to a priori question. On what account was the 14th day observed by the Asiatic Churches? The Tübingen critics say, in commemoration of our Lord’s last supper; but the language of Eusebius (H. E. V. 23), to which they appeal by no means bears out this interpretation. His words are as follows: τῆς Ασίας ἁπάσης αἱ παροικιαι, ὡς ἄν ἐκ παραδόσεως ἅρχαιοτέρας, σελήνης την τεσαρεσκαιδεκάτην ὤοντο δει`ν ἐπι της τοῦ σωτηριου πάσχα ἑορτῆς παραφυλάττειν,—words which the Tübingen critics and their English followers understand as meaning, “the Churches of all Asia, guided by a remoter tradition, supposed that they ought to keep the 14th day of the moon as the festival of the Passover of salvation” (i.e., of the Lord’s last passover). But surely the words ἐπι της τοῦ σωτήριου πάσχα ἑορτῆς do not mean “as the festival of the Passover of salvation.” According to the usual meaning of the preposition, they ought to be rendered “at the season, or, on the occasion, of the feast of, the Saviour’s Passover. The term πάσχα is used by Christian writers for the entire celebration of our Lord’s death and resurrection, including both the fast in commemoration of the one, and the feast in commemoration of the other. (This is clear from the language of Eusebius in this place. See especially Sec. 2. The term in this extended sense was distinguished into πάσχα σταυρωσιμον and πάσχα άναστασιμον. Cf. Suicer. S. V. πάσχα.) It was at this season that the Asiatic Churches observed the 14th day, making the former part of the day a fast in commemoration of the Lord’s death, and concluding with a communion feast in the evening, to commemorate the accomplishment of the work of man’s redemption. That this is the meaning of the passage is clear from the context. The Asiatic Churches, continues Eusebius, observed the 14th day, ἁς δέον έκπαντος κατα ταύvτην ὁπίᾳ δ᾿ ἄν ἡμέρα τῆς ἑβδομόδος περιτυγχανοι, τας τῶν άσιτίων έπίλυσείς πριει`σθαι, “holding that it was fitting by all means on that day, on whatever day of the week it might happen to fall.” The Western Churches, he continues, promulgated, on the other hand, a decision by letter, ὡς μή ἐν ἄλλῃ ποτε της κυριακῆς ἡμἑρᾳ/τοτης ἐκ νεκρῶν άναστασεως ἐπιτέλοιτο τοῦ κυριου μυστήριον, καί ὅπως ἐν ταυτῃ μόνη τῶν κατά το πασχα νηστειων φὐλαττομεθα τᾶς ἐπιλύσεις, i.e., “that the communion in commemoration of the Lord’s resurrection should be celebrated on no other day than the Lord’s day; and that we on that day alone terminate the fast of the paschal season.” The expression τεν κατα? τό πασχα νηστειῶν clearly shows that the word πάσχα is used for the season of the Lord’s suffering, not for the single day on which He ate the passover Himself. What, then, according to this testimony of Eusebius was the practice of the Asiatic Churches? It appears that, at the season of the Paschal feast, they observed a fast on the 14th day of the month, which they terminated by a communion on the evening of the same day, after which they fasted no longer. What, then, was the purpose of this fast on the 14th day? It was a commemoration, say the Tübingen critics, of our Lord’s last passover on the night before his death. But in that case, the day of our Lord’s death itself was not commemorated by any fast at all; and we are to believe that the Asiatic Churches terminated the fast and commenced a season of festivity on the evening preceding the day of their Lord’s crucifixion. Such an interpretation is neither probable from the nature of the case nor consistent with the grammatical meaning of the language of Eusebius. The fast of the 14th, as described by him, was a commemoration not of the Lord’s last supper but of His death, and thus is entirely in agreement with the narrative of St. John’s Gospel which places the Lord’s death on the same day on which the Paschal Lamb was slain. (See on this subject an excellent article by Dr. Milligan in the Contemporary Review, Vol. VI, p. 101.) The above statement of Eusebius is made as an introduction to his account of that phase of the controversy which occurred in the time of Pope Victor in the last decade of the Second Century, though it also refers back to the earlier stage of the same question in the days of Polycarp and Pope Omicetus. But between these two periods, there was an intermediate controversy on the same subject at Laodicea (about A. D. 170) in which Milito, Bishop of Hierapolis, took part. (This is briefly alluded to by Eusebius, H. E. IV. 26.) Of the latter writer, two fragments have been preserved which throw some further light on the controversy. (See The Fragments in Ronth’s Rel. Sacrae, I., p. 150.) In the first of these Apothimarius says, “There are therefore some persons who through ignorance raise contention about these things, having fallen into a pardonable error, for ignorance does not admit of blame, but needs instruction. And they say that on the 14th the Lord ate the lamb with His disciples, and Himself suffered on the great day of unleavened bread; and they interpret Matthew as saying this according to their apprehension: whence it appears that their notion is at variance with the law; and the Gospels seem according to them to be at variance.” In the other fragments, he says, “The 14th is the true passover of the Lord, the great sacrifice, the Son of God, who was bound in the place of the Lamb; (so the passage is punctuated in Ronth, R. S., p. 150, ὁ αὐτὸ του ἀμνου` παι`ς θειυ` ὁ δεθείς, ὁ δησας του` ἱσχυρον, κ.τ.λ…………. But Ebrard (Gospel History, p. 595, Eng. Tr.) gives the passage with the punctuation, ὁ ἅντἱτου` άμνου` παι`ς θεου` ὁ δεθείς, ὁ δησαςτόν ἰσχυρόν, κ.τ.λ.)... who pierced His holy side, who poured out from His side the two purifying streams, water and blood, word and spirit; and who was buried on the day of the Passover, the stone being placed on His sepulchre.”

It is manifest from these passages that Apollinarius himself held that our Lord suffered on the 14th day of the month, and he cites from the Gospel of St. John in support of his opinion. Bauer (Kanon. Evang., pp. 353, 356) denies that there is any reference to St. John in either of these fragments. (His denial, however, cannot change the obvious references of the pierced side and the water and blood.) The question is, Against whom are his words directed? Who are the persons who, through a venial error, supposed that our Lord celebrated the last supper on the 14th day and suffered on the 15th? The Tübingen critics say that these persons are the Asiatic Churches; that Apollinarius was one who had adopted the views of the Western Church, and who was protesting against the general practice of his fellow Christians in Asia. (See Schwegler, Montaniswvus, p. 193. Bauer, Kanon. Evang., p. 342.) This, however, is scarcely a probable interpretation. In the first place, the words “there are therefore some persons (εισί τοινυν ὄι) are such as would hardly be used to indicate the whole of the Churches of his own province; they naturally point to a small and unimportant sect. In the second place, it is inconceivable that Apollinarius, if he had adopted the Western view, should have laid stress on the 14th day of the month as the true Passover; for the Western Church paid no heed to the day of the month, but regulated its observance by the day of the week, commemorating the crucifixion always on Friday, the Resurrection always on Sunday, on whatever day of the moon these might fall. In the third place, Apollinarius is claimed by Eusebius (iv. 26) with his contemporary Melito of Sardis, and Melito was one of the great authorities in favor of the Asiatic practice (he is cited in the letter of Polynetus, see Eusebius, H. E., v. 24); and it is highly improbable that Apollinarius should have been so highly esteemed by his own Church had he differed from it on a point which it maintained so strenuously. We may therefore conclude that the persons against whom the fragments were written were not the main body of the Asiatic Churches.

Yet on the other hand, there is some difficulty in the opposite supposition, maintained by some recent critics, that the persons in question were an Ebionitish body who observed a Jewish Passover on the anniversary of Christ’s last supper, which they placed on the 14th day. [This view is maintained by Weitzel, Die christ. Passahfeier den drei ersten Jahrhunderts, who is followed by Ebrard, Gospel History, p. 59 (Eng. Tr.); Lechler, Das. Apost. Zeit., p. 513; and others. Cf. Milligan in Contemporary Review, vi., p. 111.] The mild language in which Apollinarius speaks of them as having fallen into a veneal error through ignorance, is not such as would have been used with reference to an heretical sect like the Ebionites. In the second place, the assertions, that the practice of these persons was at variance with the law would not apply to a Jewish passover held on the 14th day of the month, which was strictly in accordance with the law. In the third place, the statement that the “Gospels seem according to them to be at variance” [Bauer attempts to evade the recognition of St. John’s Gospel by understanding the words στασιάζειν δοκεί κατ ᾿ άυτους τα έυαλλέλια not of a conflict between one Gospel and another but of an opposition between the Gospel and the law, Kanon. Evang., p. 353]. This interpretation is forced and unnatural and is rejected even by Straus in his Leben Jesu, revised, (1864), p. 77, would be hardly applicable to a body of Ebionites; who acknowledged our Gospel, and did not trouble themselves about its relation to the others.

We are therefore led to conclude that the persons intended are a small party in the Asiatic Church, who differed from the practice of their brethren, in the single point of observing a passover on the legal day which they supposed to be the day before the Lord’s death, but who in other points did not differ from the teaching and practice of the Catholic Church. Apollinarius, in opposition to this party, urged the argument that the legal day of the Passover was the actual day of our Lord’s death, a point on which both Eastern and Western Churches were agreed, though (Cf. Milligan in Contemp. Review, p. 115) thus founded upon it a diversity of practice, the one keeping the day of the month, the other that of the week.

This seems the natural interpretation of the language of Apollinarius and so interpreted it bears witness to two important points; first, that the Gospel of St. John was at this time recognized as a Canonical book, and secondly, that the mode reconciling the apparent differences between St. John and Synoptists by assuming that our Lord’s last supper was an anticipation by one day of the legal Passover was adopted at that time by Apollinarius and as it would seem by the Church in general.

Eusebius further tells us (Eusebius, H. E., iv. 26:4) that Clement of Alexandria wrote a work on the Passover which he was induced to do by Melito’s work on the above controversy. Two fragments of Clement’s have been preserved (Clem., Pasch., p. 14, ed. Dindorf, 1832) from which it appears that he took the same side as Apollinarius and is apparently writing against the same error. In these two fragments, again, nothing is said as to the persons whom the writer is opposing being Ebionites or heretics at all. Clement merely states that our Lord did not eat His last supper on the legal day of the passover, but on the previous day, the 13th, and suffered on the following, being Himself the Passover. He refers to St. John’s Gospel as his authority; but remarks that all the Gospels are really in agreement on this point. From this it would appear that the Alexandrian Clement agreed with the Asiatic in its mode of reconciling the supposed difference between St. John and the Synoptists.

A very slight addition to our information may perhaps be gained from the remains of Hippolytus (Philosophinomena, viii., 18; Trag., Clem. Pasch., p. 13) who in one passage of his recently recovered work, mentions a sect of persons, in other respects orthodox, but who insisted on the duty of opening the passion on the 14th day of the month, pleading in support of their practice the curse denounced on everyone who did not obey the law, and adducing the example of our Lord, who ate the passover on the 14th day, the evening before His death. Against these persons Hippolytus urges in the one place, that the true passover is the sacrifice of Christ, and that this is not to be kept according to the letter of the Jewish law; and in the other, that our Lord did not, on the night before His death, eat the passover on the legal day, but on the day before. That the persons intended by him could have been the Asiatic Churches in general is manifest from the language in which he speaks of them as τινές φιλόυεικοὶ τῆν φυσιν ἰδιῶται τῆν γνῶσιν, words which no Christian writer would have used with regard to a practice sanctioned by such revered names as those of Poly-carp and Melito, and spoken of in such a different spirit by Hippolytus’ own teacher Irenaeus. The persons in question were probably an obscure party, of whom nothing is known beyond what may be gathered from the above fragments.

The only argument which professes to appeal to historical evidence against the genuineness of St. John’s Gospel having thus failed, there is little need to pay attention to those which rest merely on the personal impressions of the critic. When a man tells us that St. John, by saying “the Word was made flesh,” meant to contradict the Synoptists and to represent our Lord’s birth as merely apparent (Bauer, Kanon. Evang., p. 99) that the miracle of Cana is a figurative representation of the relation between John’s baptism with water and Christ’s baptism with the Holy Ghost and with fire, because spirit, fire and wine are cognate notions (Ibid., p. 126); that the history of the raising of Lazarus was invented by the Evangelist for a parable of the rich man and the beggar Lazarus in St. Luke, because the rich man is represented as requesting that Lazarus may be sent back from the dead (Ibid., p. 249); that the Samaritan woman with her five husbands is a symbolical representation of the heathen world with its plurality of Gods (Ibid., p. 301); that the mention of Annas as well as Caiaphas as having taken part in the condemnation of our Lord was invented in order to convict the Jews of unbelief by their own legal requirements of two witnesses (Ibid., p. 268)—we cannot help feeling that whatever may be said for the fertility of the critic’s imagination, we cannot place much confidence in his judgment, to discriminate between the historical and the fictitious.

It is true, as the Tübingen critics tell us, that the earliest Christian writers who cite St. John’s Gospel by name are Theophilus of Antioch and Irenaeus, whose writings fell within the concluding twenty years of the Second Century. But it must be remembered that Irenaeus was a disciple of Polycarp, and Polycarp was a disciple of St. John himself. Is it credible that Irenaeus if he had never heard from Polycarp of the existence of a Gospel written by St. John, would have received without hesitation as a genuine work of the Apostle a book which was written in his own boyhood? (Cf. Liddon, Bampton Lectures, p. 317). But the evidence does not stop here. The Muratorian fragments (First published by Muratori in 1740 from a MS. in the Ambrosian Library at Milan) which cannot have been written much later than A. D. 170 (see Westcott, On the Canon, p. 184), distinctly mentions St. John as the fourth of the received Gospels, and though the account there given of its composition is probably apocryphal, the mere mention of it thus that it was at that time received by the Roman Church as a canonical book indicates that it therefore cannot have been a work of very recent composition. The two oldest translations of the New Testament, Peschito Syriac and the Old Latin, the latter of which must have been made before A. D. 170, and the former still earlier (see Westcott, On the Canon, pp. 211, 224), both contain this Gospel. Tatian, the pupil of Justin Martyr, composed a Harmony of the Gospels, whose title, το διὰτεσσαρων (Euseb. H. E., iv. 19) shows that four Gospels were then acknowledged as of canonical authority, and a separate testimony distinctly asserts that the Gospel of St. John was one of them. [Bar Salibi in the 12th Century mentions a Commentary of Ephraim Syrus as the Harmony showing that it began with the first of St. John. (See Möller in Herzog, Art. Tatian.) The citations in the Clementine Homilies and Justin Martyr, though not verbally exact, were almost to a certainty quoted by memory from this Gospel, unless we adopt the wild hypothesis of a primitive Gospel of which history affords no trace which contained in one book the germ of passages which now separately appear in the different Canonical Gospels. On one of these instances a new light has been thrown by the recent discovery of the concluding portion of the Clementine Homilies, first published by Dressel in 1853, from a MS. in the Vatican Library. In this newly discovered portion the writer cites the question of the disciples: “Master, who did sin, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” and the Lord’s answer is a form which can hardly have been taken from any other source than the Gospel of St. John. Another recent discovery, that of the work of Hippolytus against heresies, first published in 1851, takes us back further still. The citations made by this writer clearly show that the heretics Basilides and Valentinus, the former of whom must be placed as early as A. D. 120 and the latter only a very few years later, both were unacquainted with this Gospel. (For Basilides, see Hippie, Philos., vii., 22; for Valentinus, Ibid., vi., 35), and refute the perverse theory of those critics who maintain in the teeth of all historical testimony that the author of St. John borrowed from Valentinus or from the current Gnosis of the 2nd Century. (Cf. Bauer, Kanon. Evang., p. 373). The same writer furnishes evidence of citations taken from St. John by the Ophite heretics, whom Irenaeus describes as the first source of the Valentinian school. Irenaeus, I 30. Cf. Westcott, On Canon of N. T., p. 250.

Having thus carried the testimonies to the existence of St. John’s Gospel as high as A. D. 120, we shall have little further to give on this point at least by the decision of the controversy concerning the genuineness of the Ignation Epistle, which would, if genuine, give us an additional witness earlier by a period of four to seven years, according to different computations. Yet, as I believe the evidence on the whole to be decidedly in favor of the genuineness of these Epistles in the shorter Greek recension, I will venture to conclude the above testimonies by pointing out two passages which seem clearly to show that the writer was acquainted with the Gospel of St. John. In the Epistle to the Ephesians (c. 5), Ignatius exhorts his readers to unity with their Bishop, adding the words “if any man be not within the place of offering, he is deprived of the bread of God.” Under this figurative allusion to the shewbread which might only be eaten by the priest, it is implied that the blessing of Christ’s presence is given only to those who are united in the communia of the Church. But the reference to the presence of Christ under the expression “the bread of God” seems clearly to show that the writer had in mind John vi. 33. For the bread of God is he which cometh down from heaven, and giveth life unto the world.” Again, in the Epistle to the Philadelphians (c. 7) we read, “The Spirit is not deceived being from God, for he knoweth whence he cometh and whither he goeth (οἶδεν γαρ πόθεν ἔρχεται καὶ ποῦ ὑπάγει)—words which are clearly suggested by our Lord’s language to Nicodemus, οὐκ οἶδας πόθεν ἔρχεται καὶ ποῦ ὑπάγει. When these testimonies are contrasted with the kind of arguments adduced by the Tübingen critics we may reasonably assert that the fundamental position of that school, upon which its whole view of the Apostolic age depends, namely the hypothesis of the spuriousness and late origin of St. John’s Gospel, must be regarded as utterly untenable, and with the fall of this position, the whole superstructure reared upon it comes to the ground likewise.