The Historical Proofs of Christianity [pp. 51-84]

THE HISTORICAL PROOFS OF CHRISTIANITY.
ties, and the Epistle to the Colossians. How and when could
this Gospel, if it be spurious, have been brought in, have secured
universal acceptance among the belligerent parties, and been
adopted as an authority by both? Who could have had the
intellectual skill requisite to frame a book of such a character
as to obtain this honor and deference from the champions of
antagonistic types of doctrine? If the work was known to
emanate from an apostle, no explanation is required, since the
Gnostics, Marcion excepted, did not profess to reject the
authority of the apostles. If it was a forged composition, first
appearing decades of years after the death of John, its reception by orthodox and heretic alike must remain an unsolved
enigma.
Leaving the external proofs, we turn to the internal evidence.
Here we meet at once the standing objection that the catholic
tone of the author, and in particular his method of speaking of
"the Jews" as an alien body, are inconsistent with the character
and position of John. The reader must bear in mind, however,
that John was never.the Judaizer whom the Tuibingen critics
have painted him, but was the apostle who gave the right hand
of fellowship to the apostle to the Gentiles (Gal. ii. 9). He is
not writing at the early day when the Jewish Christians kept up
the legal observances in the temple and hoped for a vast influx
of converts from their countrymen. The temple lay in ruins.
The full meaning of the Master, when he said, "In this place is
One greater than the temple" (Matt. xii. 6), had become apparent to his disciples from the lessons of Providence and the
teaching of the Spirit. The rejection of Jesus the Messiah by
the bulk of the Jews, which long before filled the apostle Paul
with grief, was now a fact beyond all question. The Jewish
antagonism to the church had broken forth, as the Jewish war
approached, in acts of violence. At an. earlier day persecution
of the Jewish Christians is referred to by Paul (I. Thess. ii. I4),
and in the Epistle to the Hebrews (x. 32-35). In the year 44,
Herod Aprippa I., a rigid Jew, had seized and killed John's own
brother James. About a score of years later-Hegesippus
places the event just before the siege of Jerusalem by Vespasian-even James the Just, the brother of Jesus, who had
been least of all offensive to Jewish zealots for the old ritual,
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