I mention this because I have myself heard the young Irenæus maintain that Christ was actually about fifty years of age. And he not only quoted John in support of this assertion but declared that it was also the opinion of the elders conversant with John. When I heard him, I remembered what Scaurus had said. I have never had any doubt that Scaurus was right. At the same time it seems to me that a Jewish allusion of this kind was extremely liable to be misunderstood, and that the writer of this gospel would not perhaps have set it down if he had not received it from the originator, John the son of Zebedee. This, however, is only my conjecture. The error of Irenæus is a fact. And I could mention another of the brethren, who wrote a commentary on John, and actually altered “fifty” to “forty”—I suppose, to make sense! Both these errors arose from not understanding John’s allusion. Then Scaurus passed to the structure of the work which, he said, under appearance of great simplicity, and of an iteration that might sometimes seem almost garrulous or senile, conformed to certain Jewish rules of twofold and threefold attestation. He shewed how the book—describing a new creation of the world—begins and ends with six days. He also shewed how the author takes pleasure in refrains of words, and cycles or repetitions of events. For example, he describes Christ as being baptized at the beginning in one Bethany and anointed at the end in another Bethany. “I could give you,” he said, “other instances of this sort of thing. The book is a poem, not a history.” About this I was not yet able to judge; but I felt that by “poem” he did not mean “mere fiction.” For he had already admitted that the book contained historical as well as spiritual truth. And knowing his deep love of goodness, I was not altogether surprised at what came next: “O my dear Quintus, while reading this extraordinary book I have been more than once tempted to say, ‘Along with a great deal that I do not want, this man almost gives me what I do want—what I have been long desiring.’ I have told you how, years ago, I craved for a city of truth and justice. Well, I knew the Jews were a narrow, bigoted, and uncharitable race. No Jewish philosopher or prophet was likely to be my guide to such a city. But Isaiah was an exception. And somehow I fancied that this Jesus might be a developed Isaiah, and that his new city would have over its gates, ‘Entrance free. Not even Roman patricians excluded.’ But what did I find in some of the earliest gospels? In effect, this, ‘None but the lost sheep of the House of Israel admitted here!’