facts concerning Christ's life which he mentions in about 200 passages scattered here and there through his writings are found in one of the four gospels which we possess, and the seven explicit quota- tions which he makes from the "Mem- oirs" are to be found in our gospels. Furthermore, in 170 A. D., Tatian, a disciple of Justin Martyr drew up a harmony of the four gospels, which must have been the "Memoirs" to which his teacher referred. In a fragment of ancient manuscript (called the Muritor- ian fragment) assigned by scholars to 170 A. D., the gospels of Luke and John are mentioned as third and fourth. It is furthermore certain that in 185 A. D. the four gospels which we now possess were circulated in all parts of Christendom, in thousands of copies anú were read at the weekly gatherings of Christians for worship. Going back to much earlier times Valentinus (145 A. D.), though a heret- ical teacher, borrowed his favorite phrases from the opening verses of the Gospel of John and still earlier (125 A. D.) another heretical teacher, Ba- silides specially quotes John's gospel. As far as the external evidence goes it may be safely said that no book of an- cient or modern times is better attested than this. All the evidence is for its genuineness; there is nothing on the other side. But the internal evidence is if possible more conclusive. 2. Internal Evidence. (1) The fa- miliarity of the author of the fourth Gospel with Jewish opinions; the fact that the Old Testament was certainly the source of the religious life of the writer; t h e ' f u r t h er fact that the vocabu- lary, the structure of the sentence, "the symmetry and numerical symbolism of the composition" are Hebraic: all prove conclusively that the author was a Jew. (2) It is also clear that the author was a Palestine Jew of the first century. No Gentile and no Jew of the dispersion or living long after the destruction of Jeru- salem "could have realized as the Evan- gelist has done with vivid unerring ac- curacy the relation of parties and inter- ests which ceased to exist after the fall of Jerusalem" (Westcett). The local knowledge displayed in many places, es- pecially the minute knowledge of Jeru- salem as it was before the year 70 A. D., proves the author to have been a Pales- tinian Jew. The desolation of Jerusa- lem after it fell before Titus was so complete that no genius of the second century, no matter how able and gifted could have reconstructed from the ma- terial then available the lost site. Furth-
ermore, the quotations from the Old Testament show that the writer was not dependent on the LiXX, but was ac- quainted with the original Hebrew. (3) It is clear from a careful and minute study of the Gospel that the writer was an eye witness of many of the scenes which' he describes. The story of an eye witness always differs from that of a mere reporter of what he has heard from others. The marks of the eye witness abound in the Gospel of John (see the writer's lecture on the Internal Evidence for the Resurrection of Christ in his "The Bible and Its Christ.") (4) It is clear that the author was an apostle. ' Some of the scenes which he describes and describes as only an eye witness could (ch. 1:19-24; ch. 4; ch. 6; chps. 7, 9, 11) are scenes that only one of the apostles could have witnessed and described in just this way. He also displays the most intimate knowledge of the feelings of the apostles, such knowledge as only one of the apostles could have possessed. He knows what their thoughts were at the most critical moments (2:11; 17:22; 4:27; ^6:19; 60, etc.; 12:16; 13:22, 28, 21:12). He recalls their words spoken among themselves (4:33; 16:17; 22:25; 21:3, 5). (5) Of all the apostles there is but one that he could have been, John. The book has never been ascribed to any other apostle. The name of John, the Apostle, never appears in the gospel, John the Baptist is always called simply John without the addition of "the bap- tist" as in the three other gospels (John thus sinking himself out of sight more completely), there is only one explicit mention of either John or his brother James in the Gospel and then they are referred to simply as "the sons of Zebi- dee." The position asbigned to them in the list of disciples is much lower than that usual in other Gospels. Salome, John's mother, is nowhere mentioned but in 19:25, and then not by name. The author must have been John or his brother, James, but James.died 44 A. D. (Acts 12:2), and the Gospel could not have been written before the destruc- tion of Jerusalem (A. D. 70). If the Gospel was not written by John, it was written by some one who wished to pass as John. But if some one else than John wrote the book and was trying to palm himself off as John he would have said right out that John was the author and never invented so subtle a -method of making it appear that he was John. Furthermore, if it was not written by John but by one who was masquerading as John, the
Made with FlippingBook - Online Brochure Maker