M. Loisy, we all know, occupies a peculiar position. His criticism is radical and destructive, but he believes himself to bring back as faith what his criticism has destroyed. Few recent writers have left less of the Fourth Gospel standing as solid history; but at the same time he is a dutiful son of his Church, and what the Church accepts he also accepts as true. There can hardly be any doubt that the Church, as far back as we can trace its convictions, regarded the Fourth Gospel as strictly historical. If it had not done so, it is very questionable whether the Church itself would have taken the shape it did. There are many in these days who, if they followed M. Loisy as a critic, would find it very hard to follow him as a theologian. They are not a little perplexed to understand how he himself can reconcile the two trains of his thinking. That, however, is his own affair, with which outsiders are not concerned. But they are greatly concerned to know whether or not his criticism is sound. There is no doubt at all that the Fourth Gospel expresses the Evangelist’s ‘theology of the Incarnation.’ It expresses it, but is it the product of it? Has it no more substantial foundation than an idea? Is it history, or is it fiction? That is the great and vital question to which we must address ourselves more directly in the next lecture. Footnote 55: Réville, _La doctrine du Logos_, p. 67. Footnote 56: Grill, p. 218. Footnote 57: Ibid., p. 114. Philo’s word for ‘interpreter,’ however, is not cognate with that used by St. John. Footnote 58: Ibid., pp. 115-26. Footnote 59: Drummond, _Philo Judaeus_, ii. 237-9; Grill, pp. 133-6. Footnote 60: The main passage is _Vit. Mos._ iii. 14. Footnote 61: That accomplished scholar P. Wendland points to the tendency to attach the Stoical idea of the λόγος specially to Hermes and the Egyptian Thoth. He quotes from Cornutus (_temp._ Nero) τυγχάνει δὲ ὁ Ἑρμῆς ὁ λόγος ὤν, ὃν ἀπέστειλαν πρὸς ἡμᾶς ἐξ οὐρανοῦ οἱ θεοί. Hermes is the messenger of the gods, and communicates their will to men; and it is conceivable that the use of the term λόγος in connexion with him may have in some slight degree suggested, or prepared the way for, its use in connexion with the new revelation. See _Christentum u. Hellenismus_ (1902), p. 7. Footnote 62: _Entstehung d. vierten Evang._ i. 4-31, 87 ff. Footnote 63: _Le Quatrième Evangile_, p. 98: ‘Les observations précédentes et tout ce qu’on a remarqué touchant le caractère du quatrième Evangile prouvent suffisamment que la théologie de l’incarnation est la clef du livre tout entier, et qu’elle le domine depuis la première ligne jusqu’à la dernière.’ LECTURE VII The Christology of the Gospel 1. The Gospel not a Biography.