are parallels in the Fourth Gospel, with so much intensity. I can quite allow that Ignatius has so absorbed the teaching that we call St. John’s as it were _in succum et sanguinem_ that the relation cannot be adequately explained by the mere perusal of a book late on in life. There is something more in it than this. Von der Goltz would explain it by the hypothesis that Ignatius had resided for a considerable length of time in a ‘Johannean’ community like the churches of the province of Asia. There is however no hint of anything of the kind in the letters. It is I think Harnack who somewhere remarks that from the opening of the letter of Ignatius to Polycarp we should infer that the latter was a stranger to the writer. It would be more natural to fall back on the tradition that Ignatius was an actual disciple of St. John. But this tradition appears first in the _Martyrium Colbertinum_; in other words there is no evidence for it before the fourth century. Indeed Zahn has sketched in a plausible manner the process by which we may conceive it to have arisen[76]. Still there is ample room in the dark spaces of the lives both of Ignatius and of St. John for some more or less intimate connexion between them. The alternative seems to me to be, either to suppose something of this kind, or else to think that Ignatius had really had access to the Johannean writings years before the date of his journey to Rome, and that he had devoted to them no mere cursory reading but a close and careful study which had the deepest effect upon his mind. If the Fourth Gospel was really the work of St. John, the chronology would leave quite sufficient room for this hypothesis. But in any case the phenomena of the Ignatian letters seem to me to prove the existence, well before the end of the first century, of a compact body of teaching like that which we find in the Fourth Gospel. For even Dr. Schmiedel, I suppose, would hardly wish us to invert the relationship, and to say that the Evangelist took his ideas from Ignatius. But if the substance of the Fourth Gospel existed before the end of the first century, that is surely a considerable step towards the belief that the Gospel existed in writing, and the other reasons that we have for thinking that it had been written are so far confirmed.