“It is,” said he, “but I believe it is fact. Well then, according to my view, one particular elder of these Johannine elders—I mean the elders in the region of Ephesus collected round the aged apostle, John the son of Zebedee—was so much superior to the rest that he was called preeminently ‘_the_ Elder.’ If ‘the Elder’ preached and wrote for John the Apostle, and if the Elder’s name was John, there would be an additional reason why the writer of the gospel would avoid the name John (except in connexion with John the Baptist) throughout the gospel. “But my conviction is that the aged apostle, besides preferring oral tradition to books (as you will see from the last lines of his work), shrank from putting himself forward as the author by the name of ‘John,’ and insisted that, if he was to be mentioned at all, it was to be only by the title, ‘the disciple whom Jesus loved.’ John the Elder may have accepted this condition because he felt it to express a deep truth—namely, that the Lord Jesus is best known through some one whom He has loved. “You know how carefully the Greeks distinguish ‘voice’ or ‘sound’ from ‘word.’ Well, this new gospel introduces John the Baptist as testifying to Christ and saying that he was a mere voice, ‘I am the _voice_ of one crying in the wilderness, _Make straight the way of the Lord_.’ To the inferior and preparatory witness is given a distinctive name ‘John.’ The superior and perfected witness was also called ‘John’ after the flesh; but the writer of the gospel preferred that the name after the flesh should be dropped, yes, and even his distinctive personality merged, as it were, in the title, ‘the disciple whom Jesus loved’.” “But you spoke, above, about ‘brethren’ as perhaps preaching John’s gospel for him during his decrepitude. Now you seem to incline to think that only one man wrote it?” “Yes,” replied Clemens, “I used ‘brethren’ first, to leave the question open. Then I endeavoured to give reasons for thinking it was one brother; and this conclusion is supported by the style. There are some slight differences in this gospel between the words of the Lord and the words of the evangelist, in respect of style. That is natural; indeed, one would expect many more. But, taken as a whole, the gospel does not shew many styles, as Luke’s does, but only one style—extending to the words of all characters introduced in the book, so that it is sometimes hard to say where a speaker ceases to speak and the evangelist begins to comment.”