Even Professor Harnack, whose influence is greatest, has not, I venture to think, been quite consistent in the view that he has taken. The Gospel may be assigned to the Presbyter or to some other disciple, and yet have different degrees of value ascribed to it as a historical document. In this respect it seems to me that Dr. Harnack has rather blown hot and cold: in his _Chronologie d. altchristlichen Litteratur_ he blew hot; in his more recent lectures (E. Tr. _What is Christianity?_ p. 19 f.), and, if I am not mistaken, on Monday last he blew cold[9]. A good deal turns on the description of John the Presbyter by Papias. In the text of the extract as it stands both John the Presbyter and Aristion are called ‘disciples of the Lord.’ There is some tendency among critical writers to get rid of these words as a gloss; if they are retained, they may be taken in a stricter or a laxer sense; but if they really cover a relation such as that of the ‘beloved disciple,’ there could not be a better guarantee of authenticity. However this may be—and the subject is one of which I hope to speak in more detail—in any case it must be somewhere within the limits marked out by Delff on the one hand, and Harnack with his allies and followers on the other, or else by means of the theories that I am just about to mention, that an understanding must be reached between the two sides, if that understanding is at all to take the form of compromise. 3. Partition Theories. Where two or more persons are concerned in the composition of a book, the relation between them may be through a written document, or it may be oral. Hitherto we have been going upon the latter assumption: the mediating theories that we have been considering, so far as they were mediating, have treated the writer of the Gospel, whatever his name, as a disciple or associate of St. John the Apostle; and the information derived from him is supposed to have come by way of personal intercourse. But it is quite conceivable that St. John may have set down something on paper, and that some later Christian—disciple or not—took this and worked it up into our present Gospel. Accordingly, various attempts have been made at different times to mark off a Gospel within the Gospel, an original authentic document derived from a first-hand authority—either the Apostle or the Presbyter—and certain added material incorporated in the Gospel as we now have it. Many of these attempts are obsolete and do not need discussion. It has already been mentioned that Delff—without any clear necessity even from his own point of view—cuts out more particularly the Galilean passages and some others with them as interpolations. These additions to the Gospel he regards as the work of the author of chap. xxi[10]. But the most systematic and important experiments in this direction are those of Dr. Wendt and Dr. Briggs.