We are in search of hints and allusions appropriate to the time. The evidence is overwhelming that the author of the Gospel was a Jew, and (as I think) also a Jew of Palestine. The best critics admit this, and it is hardly worth while to stay to prove it; indeed it is incidentally proved by a large proportion of the examples I am giving. But it is of more importance to prove that the author was a contemporary of the events he is describing. Now I will not say that the points I am going to urge exactly prove this. They do, however, I believe, justify us in saying that if the author was really an Apostle, a member of the original Twelve, or closely associated with them, the indications in the Gospel entirely correspond with such a position. If the author was not an Apostle, then he must either have been in a position extremely similar to that of the Apostles, or else he must have taken great pains to convey the impression that he was in such a position. The passages I am about to adduce all reflect with great vividness a state of things like that which must have existed in the time of our Lord. There is just one period in which the Christian Church stood in a relation to Judaism which it never occupied again: that was in its origin. Christianity arose out of the bosom of Judaism. The first disciples reached manhood as Jews; they were witnesses of the process by which Christianity gradually broke loose from Judaism; they themselves underwent a process of conversion; their ideas were modified little by little as they went on, and in the end the new displaced the old. But they had been as familiar with the attitude of their Jewish opponents as they were with their own; they knew the arguments to which the Jews appealed, the prejudices by which they were animated, the language that they used. I repeat, there was one period to which this description applied, and never another in the same degree. The Fourth Gospel is full of instances of this. Let us turn to some of them. The earlier chapters have been drawn upon rather freely in other connexions: we will therefore begin with chap. iv. How perfect is the local colour of the story of the Samaritan woman![50] ‘The Samaritan woman therefore saith unto him, How is it that thou, being a Jew, askest drink of me, which am a Samaritan woman?... The woman saith unto him, Sir, thou hast nothing to draw with, and the well is deep: from whence then hast thou that living water? Art thou greater than our father Jacob, which gave us the well, and drank thereof himself, and his sons, and his cattle?’ (iv. 9, 11, 12). The standing feud between Jews and Samaritans is notorious, and does not need illustrating. ‘The well is deep’ in the most literal sense; the actual depth is about 75 feet. But how appropriate and natural is the appeal to the patriarch Jacob, and the local tradition about him!