With the above may be compared Dr. Hort’s comment (ad. loc.) on 1 St. Peter, i. 1, 2, and other Trinitarian passages referred to in illustration: ‘In no passage is there any indication that the writer was independently working out a doctrinal scheme: a recognized belief or idea seems to be everywhere presupposed. How such an idea could arise in the mind of St. Paul or any other apostle without sanction from a Word of the Lord, it is difficult to imagine: and this consideration is a sufficient answer to the doubts which have, by no means unnaturally, been raised whether Matt. xxviii. 19 may not have been added or recast in a later generation.’ Footnote 69: Compare the Fifth of the Oxyrhynchus _Logia_. Footnote 70: _L’Évangile et L’Église_, p. 78 f. Footnote 71: H. J. Holtzmann, for instance, points to Is. xiv. 3; xxviii. 12; lv. 1-3; Jer. vi. 16; xxxi. 2, 25, but especially Ecclus. iii. 6; vi. 24, 25, 28, 29; li. 23-30. Footnote 72: Contrast the treatment of the passage by M. Loisy with the way in which it is singled out by Matthew Arnold (_Literature and Dogma_, p. 214 f.). Indeed the course of the most recent criticism has borne in upon me more and more that, far from being a stumbling-block, it is really the key to any true understanding of the Christ of the Gospels. If we had not had the passage, we should have had to invent one like it! Footnote 73: I do not of course mean to deny all influence of St. Paul upon St. John in the shaping or formulating of Christian ideas. But the ultimate origin of those ideas goes further back than to St. Paul. LECTURE VIII THE EARLY HISTORY OF THE GOSPEL I. Summary of the Internal Evidence. All our discussions have for their object, not the production of rounded and symmetrical theories but the ascertainment of truth. We must take the data as we find them. If they do not as they stand sustain a clear conclusion, we cannot make them do so. And it seems to me far better frankly to confess the fact than to strain the evidence one way or the other. We may state the case with such indications of leaning as we please, but always with the reservation that a slight change in the evidence, the discovery or recovery of a single new fact, might turn the scale. This is, I think, the position of things in regard to some of the outlying parts of the problem of the Fourth Gospel. One broad conclusion seems to stand out from the evidence, internal as well as external. The author was an eye-witness, an Apostolic man—either in the wider sense of the word ‘Apostle’ or in the narrower. So much seems to me to be assured; but round that broad conclusion there arises a cluster of questions to which I cannot give a simple and categorical answer.