The first is that the Fourth Gospel is the work of a Gentile Christian writing in the third century. Confessedly this Gospel purports to be written by an eye and ear witness. Confessedly it was unanimously attributed to the Apostle John in the third century. Confessedly it is without a peer in literature, ancient or modern, sacred or secular, Christian or pagan, in the purity of its doctrine, the moral elevation of its style, and the spirituality of its atmosphere. This hypothesis asks us to believe that it is the work of a deliberate ecclesiastical forger, with so little conscience that he neither hesitated to assume the pen of an Apostle nor to attribute to Jesus fictitious discourses and imaginary miracles, yet with so much conscience that he would not put an Apostle’s name to his composition, but left its authorship to be inferred by a self-deluded public; written too by a forger who was so skillful that he deceived the whole contemporaneous church, all sects and sections, Jewish and Gentile, Greek, Roman, and African, orthodox and heretic, and yet who was such a bungler that the gross discrepancies of his account, contrasted with that of the other three evangelists, make his fraud palpable to the ecclesiastical and literary critics of the nineteenth century. This hypothesis demands so great an exercise of credulity that sober critics of even the rationalistic school are generally abandoning it, or have already done so. This opinion may be already characterized as a thing of the past. The other hypothesis is more plausible and captivating. This is that the Fourth Gospel was written by an amanuensis or a disciple of the Apostle John, that its essential facts were derived from him, that it was written in his old age, that his recollection was already growing dim and his reports of the words of Jesus are unconsciously modified by his philosophy and experience, and that these reports are still further modified by the free pen of the amanuensis or the disciple who perfected the written record; and it is urged that this hypothesis explains both verbal peculiarities and the title given to it from early ages, viz., not the Gospel of John, but the Gospel according to John.[20]