The indications are not less clear that the writer, whoever he may have been, was not himself a sharer in Jewish prejudices. Jew he may have been; an intolerant Jew he certainly was not. He is familiar with the Pharisees and with the Pharisaic law, but he has no sympathy with the one and no admiration for the other. We can hardly be mistaken in thinking that his native prejudices are adverse rather than favorable to the inhabitants of Judea. More than any of the other Evangelists his language respecting them indicates his aversion to them. He is the Evangelist who reports the mobs in Jerusalem against Jesus, and the secret counsels for his assassination, and the deliberate judgment of Caiaphas that it is better for the rulers to kill the Galilean Rabbi than to hazard their own offices, and the persistent persecution of Jesus; he it is who with delicate sarcasm stigmatizes Caiaphas as high-priest for “that same year;” the very language which he employs in describing the religious festivals of Judea as “feasts of the Jews,” indicates an author not in sympathy with the religious formalism of Judea; the very phraseology with which he characterizes the reluctance of the Jews to enter into Pilate’s judgment-hall, indicates a writer having little sympathy for the formalism which was never a characteristic of the Galilean Jews, and always was a characteristic of the more intense and bigoted Jews of the Syrian province of Judea.[18] Nor can we be mistaken in surmising that the author was, by nature and temperament, ardent, impulsive, vehement. The intensity of his nature has been tamed by age, experience or grace, or the three combined; but the indications of his native character crop out in occasional utterances. The records of Matthew, Mark, and Luke are absolutely colorless. They are without epithets. Their simple and artless narrative is left to produce its own impression. This is less true of the Fourth Gospel than of the other three. The intense indignation which the writer feels against Judas Iscariot, he is at no pains to conceal. He it is who reports Jesus as declaring early in his ministry, One of you is a devil; he it is who characterizes Judas Iscariot as a thief; he who twice declares that Satan entered into Judas Iscariot.[19] These are the most notable exhibitions of his feelings; but one can hardly read through the entire narrative without realizing in its tone and spirit the evidence that the author was a man of intense and passionate earnestness, kept under marvelous self-restraint.