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

THE HISTORICAL PROOFS OF CHRISTIANITY.
there not be still another apostle? Think of the apostle PauI
sitting down to invent a fictitious history of the Lord Jesus
Christ! And yet the author of the Fourth Gospel is put by
Baur on a level, as regards moral and spiritnal worth, with the
apostle Paul.
There are some other traits of the Fourth Gospel which are
adapted to impress the candid reader with the conviction that
it is the apostle John who writes it.
I. The peculiar mode in which the authorship is indicated.
There is one prominent disciple whose name is not given. He
is referred to by a circumlocution. At the Last Supper there
leaned on the bosom of Jesus "one of his disciples whom Jesus
loved" (xiii. 23). To him, described in the same terms, Jesus
commits his mother (xix. 26). He accompanies Peter to the
tomb of Jesus-" the other disciple whom Jesus loved" (xx. 2).
Once more (xxi. 7) he is designated in the same way. He it is
who is spoken of as "another disciple" and "that other disciple" (xviii. I 5, I6; compare xx. 2, 3, 4, 8). Nor will it be doubted
that he is the "one of the two" whose name is not given
(i. 40), the associate of Andrew. In the appendix to the Gospel
(xxi. 24; compare ver. 20) he is declared to be its author. As
might be expected from the passages just quoted, he refers to
himself in the third person when asserting that he had witnessed
a particular occurrence (xix. 35). That he was one of those
personally conversant with Jesus is left to be inferred from his
use of the first person plural of the pronoun (John i. I4; I. John
i. 2, 3): "We beheld his glory," etc. It was not denied by
Baur, nor is there any reason to doubt, that the author of the
Gospel intends his readers to believe him to be the apostle John.
Now, if it is the apostle himself who, from a certain delicacy of
feeling, prefers to veil himself, as it were, instead of referring to
himself by name, this peculiar manner of indicating the authorship of the book is easily and naturally explained. If it be not
John, what is the alternative? It is not simply that we must
infer that deceit is intended, but it is deceit of a very different
sort from that which has been referred to as belonging to
pseudonymous writings. There is adroit painstaking; there is,
as Weiss observes, an abandonment of the nazvetw which belongs
to the authors of those books, and which is the sole apology
6
8r