“This John is often referred to as one of the chief apostles, in the three gospels; but his name is not so much as once mentioned in the fourth. Whenever ‘John’ occurs in this gospel, it is always John the Baptist, even though ‘Baptist’ is not added. Not till the last chapter does it become clear that the author is one of the ‘sons of Zebedee’.” “But might it not be James?” said I. “It might,” replied Clemens, “but for the following fact. The gospel goes on to say, in effect, that, whereas Peter was to be crucified hereafter, this disciple was to live so long that a report sprang up in the church that he would never die. Now this could not apply to James, as he was beheaded quite early in the history of the church. It follows therefore that the author was John, who, though he became a martyr, or witness, for the Saviour, survived his martyrdom and lived to a great age.” This seemed to me an unsatisfactory way of writing history, and not quite fair to readers. For ought they not to be partly guided, in their judgment of the historian’s statements, by their knowledge of his character, and of his opportunities for obtaining information? “How much more satisfactory,” said I, “is the honest straightforwardness of the Greek writer, ‘This is the third year of the history that Thucydides compiled’.” “You are right,” replied Clemens, “I cannot deny it. It would have been more satisfactory—if it could have been written with truth—that we should read at the end of this little roll, ‘I John, the son of Zebedee, wrote this work.’ But what if he did not write it yet had a great part in originating it? What if there was some kind of joint production, revision, or correction, of the work, so that it would not have been true to say, ‘I John wrote it’?” “Is there any evidence of this?” I asked. “A little,” he replied. “It is the only one of the four gospels that contains ‘we’ in its conclusion, thus, ‘_We_ know that his testimony is true.’ I have also heard a tradition that it was revealed to Andrew that John was to write the gospel and that his fellow-disciples and bishops should revise it. But the following is more important evidence: John the son of Zebedee wrote a book called the Apocalypse—have you seen it?” I said that I had glanced at it. “It was written when he was a very old man, after he had been sent to the mines in Patmos by Domitian, and it is written in, I will not say bad Greek, but a dialect of Greek entirely different from that of any of the gospels or epistles. Now the fourth gospel is written in very fair Greek and in a style as different as possible from that of the Apocalypse. It is quite impossible that John, after writing the Apocalypse when he was eighty or ninety, should then write a gospel in a style so absolutely different.”