CLEMENS ON THE FOURTH GOSPEL
“How many things I should have asked him if he could only have stayed!”
was my first thought, as Clemens disappeared behind the bushes. My
next thought was, “How many new things I already have to think about!”
Mechanically I turned homewards and took a few steps on the way to the
city. Then I sat down to reflect.
Not many minutes had elapsed before I heard footsteps behind me.
Presently, a little on my left, Clemens, without noticing me, passed
striding hastily onwards in the direction of Nicopolis. I called to him.
He turned and came up to me with an exclamation of joy, “I am thankful to
have found you so soon. It has been on my mind that I ought to have at
least explained to you why I did not offer to lend you this new gospel.”
“I would not have lent it to anyone had I been in your place,” said I.
“Yes,” said Clemens, “you would have. Trust me, dear friend, if you
believed this gospel, as I do, you would long to lend it to those who did
not as yet believe it. But the truth is, I did not wish to lend it to you
without a few words of introduction, for which I feared there would be no
time. I forgot that the moonlight would suffice to guide me to the end of
my journey. Have you leisure and desire for a little more conversation?
Without it, I fear this little book might make you stumble, might even
repel you. It is entirely different from the other three gospels both
in its style and in its language. Whether reporting Christ’s sayings or
relating His actions, it almost always differs from the earlier accounts.
It is also largely different in the facts related. What say you?”
“I say ‘Thanks,’ with all my heart,” replied I; then, as we sat down
together, “May I ask first, who wrote it?” “You not only may, but ought,”
he replied. “It is just the question I expected from you, and, alas! just
one of the questions that I cannot answer in the usual way by saying ‘A
the son of B.’ It seems to hint the authorship in dark expressions. At
the end of the book it says, ‘This is the disciple that beareth witness
of these things and he that wrote these things’; but the texts vary and
it is not quite clear whether the ‘writer’ and the ‘bearer of witness’
are one and the same. Nor does it give any name to the witness or the
writer, nor any means of ascertaining the name or names, except that
it describes him, a little before, as being ‘the disciple whom Jesus
loved, who also leaned on His breast,’ i.e. at the last supper. Also,
going back further, I find it written concerning a certain flow of blood
and water from the side of the Saviour on the cross, ‘He that hath seen
hath borne witness and his witness is true, and he knoweth that he saith
true, that ye may believe.’ Going back further still, and comparing the
beginning with the end of the gospel, the reader is led indirectly to the
conclusion that the disciple that ‘hath borne witness’ is John the son of
Zebedee.
“This John is often referred to as one of the chief apostles, in the
three gospels; but his name is not so much as once mentioned in the
fourth. Whenever ‘John’ occurs in this gospel, it is always John the
Baptist, even though ‘Baptist’ is not added. Not till the last chapter
does it become clear that the author is one of the ‘sons of Zebedee’.”
“But might it not be James?” said I. “It might,” replied Clemens, “but
for the following fact. The gospel goes on to say, in effect, that,
whereas Peter was to be crucified hereafter, this disciple was to live
so long that a report sprang up in the church that he would never die.
Now this could not apply to James, as he was beheaded quite early in the
history of the church. It follows therefore that the author was John,
who, though he became a martyr, or witness, for the Saviour, survived his
martyrdom and lived to a great age.”
This seemed to me an unsatisfactory way of writing history, and not
quite fair to readers. For ought they not to be partly guided, in
their judgment of the historian’s statements, by their knowledge of his
character, and of his opportunities for obtaining information? “How much
more satisfactory,” said I, “is the honest straightforwardness of the
Greek writer, ‘This is the third year of the history that Thucydides
compiled’.” “You are right,” replied Clemens, “I cannot deny it. It
would have been more satisfactory—if it could have been written with
truth—that we should read at the end of this little roll, ‘I John, the
son of Zebedee, wrote this work.’ But what if he did not write it yet
had a great part in originating it? What if there was some kind of joint
production, revision, or correction, of the work, so that it would not
have been true to say, ‘I John wrote it’?”
“Is there any evidence of this?” I asked. “A little,” he replied.
“It is the only one of the four gospels that contains ‘we’ in its
conclusion, thus, ‘_We_ know that his testimony is true.’ I have also
heard a tradition that it was revealed to Andrew that John was to write
the gospel and that his fellow-disciples and bishops should revise it.
But the following is more important evidence: John the son of Zebedee
wrote a book called the Apocalypse—have you seen it?” I said that I had
glanced at it. “It was written when he was a very old man, after he had
been sent to the mines in Patmos by Domitian, and it is written in, I
will not say bad Greek, but a dialect of Greek entirely different from
that of any of the gospels or epistles. Now the fourth gospel is written
in very fair Greek and in a style as different as possible from that
of the Apocalypse. It is quite impossible that John, after writing the
Apocalypse when he was eighty or ninety, should then write a gospel in a
style so absolutely different.”
“Then why,” said I, “should the gospel be called by his name?” “I explain
it thus,” said Clemens. “When John returned from Patmos a very old man,
saved from the fiery trial of the sufferings he had undergone—both before
his condemnation and also afterwards in the mines—it was natural that
every word uttered by him should be treasured up. I have heard it said
that he could hardly be carried into the church, and that, when there,
he repeated nothing but ‘Little children, love one another.’ In time,
the brethren grew weary of this and remonstrated with him. This seems to
have gone on for a long while. For (as I have said above) a report was
current about him that he would ‘never die’ but would wait for the Lord’s
coming. There is no record (known to me) of any time, place, or manner,
of his departure. I infer that, during the period of his decrepitude,
the brethren at Ephesus would collect traditions from him and preach his
gospel for him as far as they could. Afterwards, when it was clear that
he would die, the gospel would be reduced to writing.” “But this,” said
I, “greatly lowers the value of the gospel as history.” “It does,” said
he, “and its historical value may also be lowered by the fact that, even
before the gospel was written, the apostle was a great seer of visions. A
seer is not the best kind of historian. He is liable to mix vision with
fact. Especially might this be done by a seer that had seen Christ both
before and after Christ’s death. But still I greatly value this gospel
because, like the epistles of Paul, it seems to me to go to the root
of the matter. I told you just now that the old man, when he could say
nothing else, repeated over and over again the words ‘Little children,
love one another.’ When they asked him to say something else, he said
‘that was enough.’ And the old man was right. It is ‘enough’—if we can
receive strength to do it.”
“This greatly attracts me,” said I. “But, if your explanation is true, a
great deal depends upon the apostle’s friend, or friends, who wrote down
the substance of his traditions and arranged them as a gospel.” “A great
deal, as you say,” replied Clemens. “I have been informed that there was
a great teacher near Ephesus, who was called preeminently ‘_the Elder_’—a
name given, I believe, by students to their teacher, even in some of the
schools of the Stoics. Has that ever fallen within your experience?”
“Something of the kind,” I replied. “I remember that Epictetus lately
spoke of himself as ‘_the Elder_.’ It seemed to me a modest way of saying
‘I whom you call your Teacher, or your Master, but I merely call myself
your Elder.’ He said we ought to be so superior to the fear of death
that his great business ought to be to keep us from dying too soon,
not to make us fearless of death. ‘This,’ he said, ‘ought to engage the
attention of _the Elder_ sitting in this chair.’ And then he added, ‘This
ought to be the great struggle of _your Teacher_ and _Trainer_, if indeed
you had such a one’—as though Elder and Teacher were much the same thing.”
“That,” said Clemens, “is exactly to the point. Well then, you must know
that John the son of Zebedee is commonly supposed to have written not
only a gospel but also an epistle, or perhaps three epistles. The first
epistle is quite in the style of the gospel, but it mentions not ‘John,’
nor even ‘I,’ at the beginning, but ‘_we_,’ ‘That which _we_ have heard.’
The two other letters, which are very short, begin, ‘_The Elder_ to
so-and-so.’ These two letters are in style similar to that of the first,
but some doubt exists as to their authorship, and I have seen it written,
in connexion with them, that the Wisdom of Solomon was not written by
Solomon but ‘by his friends to do him honour.’ Whoever wrote that, seems
to have believed that ‘_the Elder_’ mentioned in the two epistles was not
John the son of Zebedee but one of his ‘friends’.”
“What was the Elder’s name?” said I. “The two epistles do not mention
it,” replied Clemens. “But the Elder near Ephesus of whom I spoke
above, was called by the same name as the son of Zebedee, ‘John’; and
the tradition that mentions him (along with another teacher named
Aristion) appears to distinguish the two Johns, mentioning both in the
same sentence. I ought to add that I mentioned this same Elder above as
defending Mark on the ground that he was the mere interpreter of Peter.
‘Mark,’ said the Elder, ‘made it his single object to leave out nothing
of the things that he heard and to say nothing that was false therein.’
Now you will find—I think I have already mentioned the fact—that this
new gospel frequently intervenes, where Luke omits, or alters, anything
that is in Mark, so as to explain Mark’s obscurity or set forth Mark’s
tradition in different language. This points to the conclusion that the
writer of the fourth gospel agreed with the Elder called John in his
verdict on Mark, which is, in effect, ‘Not erroneous in fact though
imperfect in expression.’ My own belief is that this tradition about
two persons of the same name is accurate; and that, besides John the
Apostle, there was also the Elder John, residing in or near Ephesus about
the same time.”
“But,” I asked, “might not ‘John the elder’ naturally be taken to mean
‘older in age’ as opposed to ‘John the younger’? And is it not strange
that, in view of the great age of John the Apostle, such a distinctive
appellation should be given to his namesake?” “Perhaps it would be,”
replied Clemens. “But it is not given. Have you not noticed that I did
not speak of ‘_John the Elder_’ but of ‘_the Elder, John_’? The two are
quite different. The former (at least among Christians) would simply mean
‘John the Presbyter or Elder’ as distinct from ‘John the Deacon,’ ‘John
the Bishop,’ and so on. But ‘the Elder, John’—a phrase twice repeated in
my tradition—may imply that the teacher was known during his life among
his pupils as ‘_the Elder_,’ and that, after his death, ‘John’ was added
for the sake of clearness. I believe it was the custom to describe the
elders near Ephesus in this indefinite way.”
The view here taken by Clemens has been somewhat confirmed of late
years by a practice that I have noticed—a bad practice, I think—in the
young Irenæus. In the course of his lectures, when referring to his
authority—instead of mentioning an elder by name, Polycarp, Aristion,
Papias, John, as the case may be—he used such expressions as “He that is
greater than we are,” “The divine old man and herald of the truth,” “He
that is superior to us,” and all these, as far as I could gather, about
elders in the province of Ephesus. Concerning this indefiniteness I am
in the same mind now as I was when I replied to Clemens, “It is very
unfortunate.”
“It is,” said he, “but I believe it is fact. Well then, according to my
view, one particular elder of these Johannine elders—I mean the elders in
the region of Ephesus collected round the aged apostle, John the son of
Zebedee—was so much superior to the rest that he was called preeminently
‘_the_ Elder.’ If ‘the Elder’ preached and wrote for John the Apostle,
and if the Elder’s name was John, there would be an additional reason why
the writer of the gospel would avoid the name John (except in connexion
with John the Baptist) throughout the gospel.
“But my conviction is that the aged apostle, besides preferring oral
tradition to books (as you will see from the last lines of his work),
shrank from putting himself forward as the author by the name of
‘John,’ and insisted that, if he was to be mentioned at all, it was to
be only by the title, ‘the disciple whom Jesus loved.’ John the Elder
may have accepted this condition because he felt it to express a deep
truth—namely, that the Lord Jesus is best known through some one whom He
has loved.
“You know how carefully the Greeks distinguish ‘voice’ or ‘sound’ from
‘word.’ Well, this new gospel introduces John the Baptist as testifying
to Christ and saying that he was a mere voice, ‘I am the _voice_ of one
crying in the wilderness, _Make straight the way of the Lord_.’ To the
inferior and preparatory witness is given a distinctive name ‘John.’ The
superior and perfected witness was also called ‘John’ after the flesh;
but the writer of the gospel preferred that the name after the flesh
should be dropped, yes, and even his distinctive personality merged, as
it were, in the title, ‘the disciple whom Jesus loved’.”
“But you spoke, above, about ‘brethren’ as perhaps preaching John’s
gospel for him during his decrepitude. Now you seem to incline to think
that only one man wrote it?” “Yes,” replied Clemens, “I used ‘brethren’
first, to leave the question open. Then I endeavoured to give reasons
for thinking it was one brother; and this conclusion is supported by
the style. There are some slight differences in this gospel between the
words of the Lord and the words of the evangelist, in respect of style.
That is natural; indeed, one would expect many more. But, taken as a
whole, the gospel does not shew many styles, as Luke’s does, but only one
style—extending to the words of all characters introduced in the book, so
that it is sometimes hard to say where a speaker ceases to speak and the
evangelist begins to comment.”
“But this is surely astonishing,” said I, “that the author should have
so little regard for the words of the Lord as not to make it absolutely
and always clear where they end, and where his own comments, or the words
of someone else, begin.” “It is astonishing,” said Clemens, “but I am
disposed to think that John the Apostle himself may in some cases have
left his friends in doubt; and the Elder—or whoever it was that wrote
the gospel—may have thought it best to leave the ambiguity as he found
it. I pointed out to you above how the differences between the three
gospels had this advantage that they forced the reader to think of the
spirit rather than the letter of the words of the Lord. But they also
had a danger, namely, that men might be puzzling their brains as to the
differences of scribes and reporters instead of refreshing their hearts
with the Spirit of Christ. Now if the Elder had, so to speak, simply
added a fourth parallel column to the three existing parallel columns
of the sayings of the Lord, the result might have been to increase that
danger.
“You may say that if the Elder felt sure that he had received the exactly
correct form of the Lord’s words from John the Apostle, he ought to
have set them down thus, whatever might be the consequences. But I do
not believe that he did feel sure. More probably he knew that it was
impossible, from the old man’s reminiscences, to restore the words
exactly, as uttered by Jesus, and that it was best not to attempt a
restoration, but to prefer paraphrase, giving their spiritual essence.
Or else, in cases where the three evangelists differed seriously among
themselves, the Elder might think it best to substitute an entirely new
tradition on the same subject.”
“Is it not possible,” said I, “that some part of the gospel may have been
written at an earlier date? Are there for example any expressions that
shew the Temple to have been still standing at the time of writing?”
“I have looked through the volume, searching for such evidence,”
replied Clemens, “and can find absolutely nothing except a phrase in a
rather obscure and corrupt passage about the existence of a pool, an
intermittent pool, near Jerusalem. Now of course a pool is not destroyed
even when a neighbouring city is utterly destroyed; and parts of
Jerusalem continued to be inhabited, after its capture by Titus, although
the walls, and a large part of the city, were razed to the ground. The
gospel says, ‘There _is_ in Jerusalem a pool … having five porches.’ I
have not ascertained whether this pool is still used (as the narrative
says it was then) for medicinal purposes, and whether the ‘porches’
still exist. I must also confess my belief that this is one of several
narratives in which perhaps allegory may have modified history. But in
any case the phrase ‘there is a pool’ seems to me to afford no basis,
worth calling such, for a hypothesis of date. It seems to me of little
more importance than if a writer said ‘There _is_ a mountain called the
Mount of Olives’ or ‘There _is_ a brook called Kedron.’ I could, if you
liked, discuss the passage with you more fully.”
“Let me rather ask you,” said I, “about a matter that greatly interests
me. The words of Christ at the last supper—does John give them as Mark
and Matthew do, or as Luke, or as Paul?” “That is a case,” said Clemens,
“where John does not correct but substitutes. He does not give these
words at all. But he inserts a narrative about Christ’s washing the feet
of the disciples, and a precept that the disciples are to do the same.
The ‘washing of feet,’ as I could shew you if time allowed, is connected
with sacrifice, in Leviticus. As to the partaking of the bread and wine,
he says expressly that the Saviour gave some of it to Judas—meaning (I
think) to shew that there was no efficacy for good in the food, apart
from faith and love.”
“And what,” I asked, “as to the words about ‘forsaking’ uttered on the
cross, where Luke again differs from Mark and Matthew?” “Here,” replied
Clemens, “I do not feel sure whether John introduces a new saying
altogether, or gives the substance of the old saying in Mark. Certainly
he does not agree with Luke. And let me add that I have examined a great
number of passages where words of Mark, being obscure or difficult, are
altered or omitted by Luke, and I find that in almost every case John
intervenes to support Mark—only expressing Mark’s meaning more clearly
and spiritually.
“Concerning the ‘forsaking,’ I suggested to you before that it is a
metaphor. If so, the reality may be expressed by other metaphors in the
scriptures, such as ‘I have lost the light of thy countenance,’ ‘I am
cast away from the joy of thy presence,’ ‘My soul is deprived of the
fountain of thy light.’ The Psalms say, ‘O God, my God … my soul is
athirst for thee,’ and again, ‘My soul thirsteth for God, … when shall
I come and appear before God?’ The ‘thirst’ implies absence from God.
It will be satisfied by ‘coming’ to God. Well, John represents Jesus as
saying, ‘I thirst,’ in accomplishment of ‘the scriptures.’ Then (as I
take it) the soldiers misunderstand this thirst as meaning simply literal
thirst. They offer Christ vinegar. Christ ‘took it,’ says the gospel.
Then He said, ‘It is finished’ and ‘rested His head’—that is to say, on
the bosom of the Father, and ‘delivered over His spirit’.”
“‘Rested His head’ is a strange expression,” said I. “It is,” said
Clemens, “but it occurs in Matthew and Luke as follows, ‘The Son of
man hath not where to rest His head,’ meaning ‘He hath no home, no
resting-place, on earth, but only with the Father above.’ One of the
ablest Greek scholars among the brethren assures me that John also uses
the phrase to mean this; and I believe it is not used in Greek in any
other sense. So, too, ‘delivered over His spirit’ signifies that in the
supreme moment the ‘delivering over’ of the Suffering Servant was not
passive but active. He delivered Himself over. But I ought to add that,
in Aramaic, the same verb means (in different forms) ‘finish,’ ‘deliver
over,’ and—the word used here by Mark and Luke—‘expire’.”
Scaurus had said something of this kind concerning the three gospels, and
had argued that it increased the difficulty of ascertaining what Christ
actually said. But I had supposed that it would not extend to a gospel
written in a Greek city like Ephesus and so long after the other gospels,
when Greek traditions might be expected to predominate. I was depressed
by this frank avowal on the part of Clemens, and remained in silence for
a moment or two weighing its consequences.