“But this is surely astonishing,” said I, “that the author should have so little regard for the words of the Lord as not to make it absolutely and always clear where they end, and where his own comments, or the words of someone else, begin.” “It is astonishing,” said Clemens, “but I am disposed to think that John the Apostle himself may in some cases have left his friends in doubt; and the Elder—or whoever it was that wrote the gospel—may have thought it best to leave the ambiguity as he found it. I pointed out to you above how the differences between the three gospels had this advantage that they forced the reader to think of the spirit rather than the letter of the words of the Lord. But they also had a danger, namely, that men might be puzzling their brains as to the differences of scribes and reporters instead of refreshing their hearts with the Spirit of Christ. Now if the Elder had, so to speak, simply added a fourth parallel column to the three existing parallel columns of the sayings of the Lord, the result might have been to increase that danger. “You may say that if the Elder felt sure that he had received the exactly correct form of the Lord’s words from John the Apostle, he ought to have set them down thus, whatever might be the consequences. But I do not believe that he did feel sure. More probably he knew that it was impossible, from the old man’s reminiscences, to restore the words exactly, as uttered by Jesus, and that it was best not to attempt a restoration, but to prefer paraphrase, giving their spiritual essence. Or else, in cases where the three evangelists differed seriously among themselves, the Elder might think it best to substitute an entirely new tradition on the same subject.”