If, then, it is objected that the Gospel is onesided, that it gives undue prominence to this divine side, we begin by asking what is meant by undue, what standard of measurement marks it as undue. Obviously the standard is that which we have just dismissed as altogether beside the mark, the standard of the modern biography. The Gospel does not in the least profess to do what the modern biographer does; but what the writer does profess to do, he was perfectly within his right in doing. He desired to set forth Christ as Divine. If that is to be onesided, of course he is onesided. Clement tells us why he did it. It was because he thought that the physical and external side, the human side of his subject, had had justice done to it already. In this respect the older Gospels were adequate, and he had no special wish to add to them. The one thing he did feel called upon to add, and that he knew he could add, was a fuller delineation of the divine side. He is not to be blamed for doing the very thing which he proposed. The paragraph in Clement of Alexandria is stated by him to be derived from ‘the early presbyters.’ They were a good authority; probably, if not altogether identical with the group drawn upon by Papias, yet at least in part identical with it. Papias and Irenaeus on the one hand, and Clement of Alexandria on the other, are just two branches of the same tree, or at least two suckers from the same root. That root is often called the School of St. John. It is from the School of St. John that they ultimately derive their information about St. John. What authority could be better? It is not possible to say how far the language of Clement comes from the Presbyters, and how far it is his own. The phrase ‘a spiritual Gospel’ may be his own coinage, an early effort of descriptive criticism, putting into words what he felt to be the distinctive characteristic of the Gospel. In any case the phrase is a happy one; it just expresses, in the briefest compass, that which really most differentiates the Fourth Gospel from the other three. Footnote 22: _Ignatius_, i. 405. Footnote 23: See the story in the Moscow MS. of the _Martyrium Polycarpi_ (Lightfoot, _Ignatius_, iii. 402), which professes to be taken from ‘the writings of Irenaeus.’ Footnote 24: _Character and Authorship_, p. 348. Footnote 25: _Ibid._ p. 213. Footnote 26: _Chronologie_, p. ix. Footnote 27: _Ibid._ p. 678. Footnote 28: _Chronologie_, p. 679. Footnote 29: _Ibid._, p. 680. Footnote 30: _Chronologie_, p. 695. Footnote 31: _Ueber d. Tod_, &c., p. 31. Footnote 32: On this phrase see Hort, _Judaistic Christianity_, pp. 170-3. LECTURE III THE STANDPOINT OF THE AUTHOR I. The Gospel is put forward as the Work of an Eye-witness.