His knowledge of Jerusalem and of the temple, which we have already noticed, strongly suggests that he knew the city before its destruction in A.D. 70. So far as can be tested, his treatment of the Messianic ideas of the people is exactly accurate, and of a kind which it would have been difficult for a later writer to exhibit. This Gospel represents the people as pervaded by a nationalist notion of the Messiah as of a king who would deliver them from foreign powers (vi. 15, xi. 48; xix. 12), a notion which was dispelled in A.D. 70, and apparently did not revive until the rising of Bar Kocheba in A.D. 135, a date which is now almost universally recognized as too late for this Gospel to have been written. We also find the two contradictory ideas as to the place of the Messiah's origin then current (vii. 27, 42), and the writer distinguishes "the prophet" (i. 21, 25; vi. 14; vii. 40), who was expected to precede Christ, from Christ Himself. At a very early date the Christians identified "the prophet" with Christ, and it is in the highest degree improbable that any but a contemporary of our Lord would have been aware of this change of belief. It is claimed that the author is an eye-witness in i. 14; xix. 35; and xxi. 24. We may add 1 John i. 1, for the author of the Epistle was obviously the author of the Gospel. Numerous details, especially the frequent notes of time, suggest the hand {92} of an eye-witness. And the delicate descriptions of the inner life of the disciples and of Christ Himself point to the same conclusion. The description of the Last Supper and the words spoken at it suggest with overwhelming force that the writer knew the peculiar manner of seating employed at this ceremony. Another Jew would have known where the celebrant sat, but he would scarcely have been able to make the actions of our Lord and Judas, St. John and St. Peter, fit their places at the table with such perfection.[4] The Gospel claims that the disciple who "wrote these things" is the disciple "whom Jesus loved," and who reclined "in Jesus' bosom" at the Supper. It was not Peter, for Peter did not recline "in Jesus' bosom." The presumption therefore is that it was either James or John, these two being with Peter the closest friends of Jesus. It could hardly have been James, who was martyred in A.D. 44, as the whole weight of tradition and external evidence is against this. It must, then, have been John, or a forger who wished to pass for that apostle. And to suppose that an unknown forger, born two generations, or even one generation, later than the apostles, could invent such sublime doctrine, and insert it in so realistic a story, and completely deceive the whole Christian world, including the district where St. John lived and died, is to show a credulity which is without parallel in the history of civilization.[5]