Perhaps it is the same persons, the editors of the Gospel—in any case it is the Presbyters who were closely connected with them—who are charged with another piece of dishonesty. Harnack sees that mere accident will not account for the supposed confusion of John the Presbyter with John the Apostle. He therefore does not shrink from imputing deliberate fraud. ‘The legend _purposely set on foot_ that the author of the Gospel was the son of Zebedee, &c.[27]’ ‘But Papias, through the oral traditions about which he took so much trouble, already stood under the influence of Presbyters, of whom some _perhaps purposely_ started the legend that the Presbyter John was the Apostle[28].’ ‘The John who had the encounter with Cerinthus, after what has been said can only be the Presbyter. But in the confusion, “the unconscious” alone can hardly have been involved.’ The dishonesty went beyond the confusion of the two persons. It is also seen in the definite ascription of the Gospel to the Apostle. ‘The twenty-fourth verse of the twenty-first chapter of the Fourth Gospel, about which we have spoken, will always remain a strong indication of the fact that in Ephesus the Fourth Gospel was deliberately put out after the death of its author as a work of the Apostle, and so that the Apostle and the Presbyter were deliberately identified, as Philip the Evangelist was made to change places with Philip the Apostle[29].’ _Facilis descensus._ When once we begin imputing fraudulent actions we may very easily find that we have to go on doing so. It should, however, be remembered that the ground for all this is no assured fact, but only the exigencies of a complicated theory which, quite apart from this, has a load of improbability to contend with. * * * * * I will give one further example of a different kind. The tendency of the criticism that has been, and still is largely in vogue, is to give what seems to me quite undue weight to the exceptional, the abnormal, the eccentric, as compared with that which is normal and regular. In the controversy over the Fourth Gospel one of the questions has been as to the exact degree of importance to be attached to the so-called Alogi, who, about the third quarter of the second century, denied St. John’s authorship of the writings attributed to him, including the Gospel, and by a piece of sheer bravado ascribed it to the heretic Cerinthus.