Christianity was now on the high-road to a theology. To enter the Hellenistic world and not be forced to develop a theology was simply impossible. The first fruit of this entrance into the intellectual world of the time was the Fourth Gospel or the so-called Gospel according to John. Scholars have begun to interpret this gospel as an attempt to combine the older Christian tradition with the theological speculations of the age. The beginning of the gospel strikes a new note which separates it immediately from the synoptics. "In the beginning was the Word (Logos) and the Word was with God and the Word was God." What is this Word or Logos with which the historical Jesus was identified? For Philo, the Alexandrian Jew who played such an important part in the theological speculation of the time, the Logos was a second God, the reflection of his glory, the only begotten Son, the actual creator of the world, his active agent at work in events. It is not going too far to assert that, without the speculations of Philo, the Fourth Gospel could not have been written. And yet Philo was merely developing and applying to the Old Testament the writings of the stoic philosophy and the {91} teaching of Plato. Does it not follow that, in the Fourth Gospel, we have the more theosophic portions of ancient philosophy attached externally to the life of the Prophet of Nazareth? Under such conditions of origin, how can we begin to separate reason and revelation? Gnosticism, stoicism, platonism, the Old Testament, the stories of the life of Jesus, the broadening of Christianity, all went together to make possible the mystic theology of this gospel. But the more Jesus was transformed into a god, the more he lost his human characteristics. The figure of Jesus becomes elusive and shadowy; he lives among men but is not of them. To make God a man or man a second God was an impossible task. When all is said, the Fourth Gospel performs this task about as well as it could be done, yet Jesus is no longer a Galilean peasant but a mystic being who speaks in riddles.