which is called Sychar." It is evident that there was no such place--and apologetic ingenuity is severely taxed to explain the difficulty. The common conjecture has been that the town of Sichem is intended, but this is rightly rejected by Delitzsch,(1) and Ewald.(2) Credner,(3) not unsupported by others, and borne out in particular by the theory of Ewald, conjectures that Sychar is a corruption of Sichem, introduced into the Gospel by a Greek secretary to whom this part of the Gospel was dictated, and who mistook the Apostle's pronunciation of the final syllable. We constantly meet with this elastic explanation of difficulties in the Gospel, but its mere enunciation displays at once the reality of the difficulties and the imaginary nature of the explanation. Hengstenberg adopts the view, and presses it with pious earnestness, that the term is a mere nickname for the city of Sichem, and that, by so slight a change in the pronunciation, the Apostle called the place a city of Lies [------] a lie), a play upon words which he does not consider unworthy.(4) The only support which this latter theory can secure from internal evidence is to be derived from the fact that the whole discourse with the woman is ideal. Hengstenberg(5) conjectures that the five husbands of the woman are typical of the Gods of the five nations with which the King of Assyria peopled Samaria, II. Kings, xvii. 24--41, and which they worshipped instead of the God of Israel, and as the actual God of the Samaritans was not recognized as the true God by the Jews, nor their {424} worship of him on Mount Gerizim held to be valid, he considers that under the name of the City of Sychar, their whole religion, past and present, was denounced as a lie. There can be little doubt that the episode is allegorical, but such a defence of the geographical error, the reality of which is everywhere felt, whilst it is quite insufficient on the one hand, effectually destroys the historical character of the Gospel on the other.(1) The inferences from all of the foregoing examples are strengthened by the fact that, in the quotations from the Old Testament, the fourth Gospel in the main follows the Septuagint version, or shows its influence, and nowhere can be shown directly to translate from the Hebrew. These instances might be multiplied, but we must proceed to examine more closely the indications given in the Gospel as to the identity of its author. We need not point out that the writer nowhere clearly states who he is, nor mentions his name, but expressions are frequently used which evidently show the desire that a particular person should be understood. He generally calls himself "the other disciple," or "the disciple whom Jesus loved."(2) It is universally understood that he {425}