Until the end of the 18th century the authorship of this Gospel was not seriously challenged. The only party which ever denied that it was written by the Apostle St. John was an ignorant and insignificant body of people mentioned by Irenaeus and Epiphanius. They were known as the _Alogi_, or "unbelievers in the Word." Their views in no wise undermine the tradition of the Catholic Church. For the Alogi asserted that this Gospel was written by Cerinthus, who lived at Ephesus where St. John lived, and was himself a contemporary of St. John. We have sufficient knowledge of the teaching of Cerinthus to be perfectly certain that he could not have written a Gospel which so completely contradicts his own theories. Therefore the opinion of the Alogi is absolutely worthless where it negatives the tradition of the Church, and on the other hand it agrees with that tradition in asserting that the book was written in the apostolic age. During the last hundred years the men who deny that Jesus Christ was truly "God of God, Light of Light," have strained every nerve to prove that the fourth Gospel was not written by St. John. It is, of course, almost impossible that they should admit that the writer was an apostle and an honest man and continue to deny that the Christ whom he depicts claimed to be the Lord and Maker of all things. During the controversy {83} which has been waged during the last three generations with regard to St. John's Gospel, it has been evident throughout that the Gospel has been rejected for this very reason. The book has driven a wedge into the whole band of New Testament students. The critics who deny that Jesus was God, but are willing to grant that He was the most holy and the most divine of men, have been forced to side with those who are openly Atheists or Agnostics. The clue to their theories was unguardedly exposed by Weizsäcker, who said, with regard to St. John's Gospel, "It is impossible to imagine any power of faith and philosophy so great as thus to obliterate the recollection of the real life, and to substitute for it this marvellous picture of a Divine Being." [1] This remark shows us that the critic approached the Gospel with a prejudice against the doctrine of our Lord's Divinity, and rejected the Gospel mainly because it would not agree with his own prejudice. But the determination to fight to the uttermost against the converging lines of Christian evidence has now driven such critics into a corner. Many have already abandoned the position that the book is a semi-Gnostic forgery written in the middle of the 2nd century, and they are now endeavouring to maintain that it was written about A.D. 100 by a certain John the Presbyter, whom they assert to have been afterwards confounded with the Apostle John.