It does not follow that I would deny all connexion between the Philonian Logos and St. John’s. My doubt is whether this connexion can have been literary. I find it difficult to picture to myself the Evangelist sitting down to master the diffuse tomes of Philo. Where is the interest that would impel him to do this? Philo is a student and a philosopher. He is a philosopher who operates with a sacred text, and therefore has unlimited opportunity for applying and expounding his philosophy. But the Evangelist is interested in none of his theorems for their own sake. There is only one thing that he seeks. He wants a formula to express the cosmical significance of the Person of Christ. When he has got that, he is satisfied. For the purpose of filling up his formula and working out its meaning, he goes not to Philo but to the Old Testament. There, and in his own experience, he finds all the data that he needs. I believe that there is a connexion between Greek, or Hellenistic, speculation and the Fourth Gospel. But I can conceive of this best through the medium of personal intercourse and controversy. How did St. Paul get his first knowledge of Christianity? Doubtless through his own vehement attacks upon Christians, which he found so calmly and steadfastly resisted; or, it may be, through the disputations in the synagogues and in the law courts, of which he was the witness. We may well believe that St. John extended his knowledge in the same way. Partly he would learn from foe, and partly from friend. In a place like Ephesus he would from time to time hold controversy with philosophers of the stamp of Justin. But, apart from this, in the Christian community itself he would find germs of teaching such as had been planted by the Alexandrian Jew Apollos. We are left to conjecture; and we have so few positive data to go upon, that our conjectures are of necessity vague. The Evangelist need not have waited for his arrival in Ephesus to come in contact with the idea of the Logos, not perhaps in its full Philonian form but in a form that might lead up to the Philonian. Philo (as we have seen) drew largely from the Stoics; and there were Stoics in the cities of Decapolis[61]. At a centre like Antioch they would be found in greater numbers; and at such a centre it would be quite possible to fall in with a wandering disciple or disciples of Philo. I have long thought that it would facilitate our reconstruction of the history of early Christian thought, if we could assume an anticipatory stage of Johannean teaching, localized somewhere in Syria, before the Apostle reached his final home at Ephesus. This would account more easily than any other hypothesis for the traces of this kind of teaching in the _Didaché_, and in Ignatius, as well as in some of the earliest Gnostic systems.