ANCIENT BREAD 236 THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO JOHN. INTRODUCTION. From the beginning of the third century to near the close of the seventeenth, the Fourth Gospel was by a common and substantially a unanimous consent attributed to the Apostle John. This authorship was then questioned, at first by an English critic by the name of Evanson. The discussion was soon transferred to Germany, where it waxed warm, and whence it was again transferred to England and this country.[1] It may now be regarded as the most hotly contested question in biblical criticism. The controversy has been intensified by prejudices and feeling on both sides. It is indeed impossible to discuss it with cool indifference, as a mere matter of curious literary interest. If this Gospel was written by the Apostle John, we have the testimony of an undoubted eye-witness--not his conclusions but his account of facts in respect to which he could not well be deceived--certainly not, unless we are prepared to believe that Jesus was himself a deliberate deceiver; testimony of an eye-witness whose honesty not even the most resolute skepticism would or could well call in question. This testimony would establish beyond question such facts as the miraculous feeding of the five thousand, the healing of the man born blind, the resurrection of Lazarus, and the death and resurrection of Jesus himself. In other words, it would establish beyond the possibility of reasonable question, the truth of historical Christianity. Accordingly, Renan, who to a certain extent accepts the authenticity of the Fourth Gospel, is compelled to maintain that the pretended resurrection of Lazarus was a pious fraud to which Jesus lent himself because it was necessary to the success of his mission, and because his growing religious enthusiasm justified to his conscience this means, for the sake of the end to be accomplished by it. Moreover, we have in this Gospel a report of words of Jesus, which leave to us no alternative but to accept him as in a peculiar sense the Son of God, or to regard him either as a religious impostor or a religious enthusiast. The synoptics leave some opportunity for discussion as to the place which Jesus assumed to fill. The Fourth Gospel does not. Thus the question of the authorship of this Gospel is not merely a question in literary criticism, but even more one respecting the nature of Christianity. Accordingly we find, on the one hand, the advocates of its apostolic authorship more or less resting their belief upon the inherent beauty of the book, and the opponents more or less declaring the true ground of their opposition to it, viz., that it presents what they call a mythological view of Jesus, and a dogmatic view of his teachings; in other words, that it presents Jesus distinctively as the incarnate Son of God, and represents the central truth in his teaching to have