important limitation upon which I have always laid so much stress: for John himself did not compose this work quite so directly as Paul did most of his Epistles, but the young friend who wrote it down from his lips, and who, in the later appendix, chapter xxi., comes forward in the most open way, without desiring in the slightest to conceal his separate identity, does his work at other times somewhat freely, in that he never introduces the narrator speaking of himself and his participation in the events with 'I' or 'we' but only indirectly indicates his presence at such events and, towards the end, in preference refers to him, from his altogether peculiar relation to Christ, as 'the disciple whom the Lord loved,' so that, in one passage, in regard to an important historical testimony (xix. 35), he even speaks of him as of a third person." Ewald then maintains that the agreement between the Gospel and the Epistles, and more especially the first, which he affirms, without vouchsafing a word of evidence, to have been written down by a different hand, proves that we have substantially only the Apostle's very peculiar composition, and that his friend as much as possible gave his own words.(1) It is obvious from this elaborate explanation, which we need scarcely say is composed of mere assumptions, that, in order to connect the Apostle John with the Gospel, Ewald is obliged to assign him a very peculiar position in regard to it: he recognizes that some of the characteristics of the work exclude the supposition that the Apostle could himself have written the Gospel, so he represents him as dictating it, and his Secretary as taking considerable liberties with the composition as he writes it {439}