which, if accepted as written by the Apostle, would at once exclude all
consideration of the Gospel as his work. There are many circumstances,
however, which seem clearly to indicate that the author of the fourth
Gospel was neither a native of Palestine nor a Jew, and to some of
these we must briefly refer. The philosophical statements with which the
Gospel commences, it will be admitted, are anything but characteristic
of the Son of thunder, the ignorant and unlearned fisherman of Galilee
who, to a comparatively advanced period of life, continued preaching in
his native country to his brethren of the circumcision. Attempts have
been made to trace the Logos doctrine of the fourth Gospel to the purely
Hebraic source of the Old Testament, but every impartial mind must
perceive that here there is no direct and simple transformation of the
theory of Wisdom of the Proverbs and Old Testament Apocrypha, and no
mere development of the later Memra of the Targums, but a very advanced
application to Christianity of Alexandrian philosophy, with which we
have become familiar through the writings of Philo, to which reference
has so frequently been made. It is quite true that a decided step beyond
the doctrine of Philo is made when the Logos is represented as [------]
in the person of Jesus, but this argument is equally applicable to the
Jewish doctrine of Wisdom, and that step had already been taken before
the composition of the Gospel. In the Alexandrian philosophy everything
was prepared for the final application of the doctrine, and nothing is
more clear than the fact that the writer of the fourth Gospel was well
acquainted with the teaching of the Alexandrian school, from which he
derived his philosophy, and its elaborate and systematic application to
Jesus alone indicates a late
{414}
development of Christian doctrine, which we maintain could not have been
attained by the Judaistic son of Zebedec.(1)
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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