“This greatly attracts me,” said I. “But, if your explanation is true, a great deal depends upon the apostle’s friend, or friends, who wrote down the substance of his traditions and arranged them as a gospel.” “A great deal, as you say,” replied Clemens. “I have been informed that there was a great teacher near Ephesus, who was called preeminently ‘_the Elder_’—a name given, I believe, by students to their teacher, even in some of the schools of the Stoics. Has that ever fallen within your experience?” “Something of the kind,” I replied. “I remember that Epictetus lately spoke of himself as ‘_the Elder_.’ It seemed to me a modest way of saying ‘I whom you call your Teacher, or your Master, but I merely call myself your Elder.’ He said we ought to be so superior to the fear of death that his great business ought to be to keep us from dying too soon, not to make us fearless of death. ‘This,’ he said, ‘ought to engage the attention of _the Elder_ sitting in this chair.’ And then he added, ‘This ought to be the great struggle of _your Teacher_ and _Trainer_, if indeed you had such a one’—as though Elder and Teacher were much the same thing.” “That,” said Clemens, “is exactly to the point. Well then, you must know that John the son of Zebedee is commonly supposed to have written not only a gospel but also an epistle, or perhaps three epistles. The first epistle is quite in the style of the gospel, but it mentions not ‘John,’ nor even ‘I,’ at the beginning, but ‘_we_,’ ‘That which _we_ have heard.’ The two other letters, which are very short, begin, ‘_The Elder_ to so-and-so.’ These two letters are in style similar to that of the first, but some doubt exists as to their authorship, and I have seen it written, in connexion with them, that the Wisdom of Solomon was not written by Solomon but ‘by his friends to do him honour.’ Whoever wrote that, seems to have believed that ‘_the Elder_’ mentioned in the two epistles was not John the son of Zebedee but one of his ‘friends’.”