Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXIMaclaren, Alexander
Religion
Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI
Maclaren, Alexander
Bible. John -- Commentaries
And so I might go on enumerating many remarkable gaps in this Gospel.
Nearly half of it is taken up with the incidents of one week at the end
of His life, and the incidents of and after the Resurrection. Of the
remainder-by far the larger portion consists of several conversations
which are hung upon miracles that seem to be related principally for
the sake of these. The whole of the phenomena show us at once the
fragmentary character of this Gospel as stamped upon the very surface.
And when we turn to the other three, the same thing is true, though
less strikingly so. Why was it that in the Church, after the completion
of the Scriptural canon, there sprang up a whole host of Apocryphal
Gospels, full of childish stories of events which people felt had been
passed over with strange silence, in the teachings of the four
Evangelists: stories of His childhood, for instance, and stories about
what happened between His death and His resurrection? A great many
miracles were added to those that have been told us in Scripture. The
condensed hints of the canonical Gospels received a great expansion,
which indicated how much their silence about certain points had been
felt. What a tiny pamphlet they make! Is it not strange that the
greatest event in the world's history should be told in such brief
outline, and that here, too, the mustard seed, 'less than the least of
all seeds,' should have become such a great tree? Put the four Gospels
down by the side of the two thick octavo volumes, which it is the
regulation thing to write nowadays, as the biography of any man that
has a name at all, and you will feel their incompleteness as
biographies. They are but a pen-and-ink drawing of the Sun! And yet,
although they be so tiny that you might sit down and read them all in
an evening over the fire, is it not strange that they have stamped on
the mind of the world an image so deep and so sharp, of such a
character as the world never saw elsewhere? They are fragments, but
they have left a symmetrical and an unique impression on the
consciousness of the whole world.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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