The Lost Gospel and Its Contents by Michael F. Sadler (most popular ebook readers TXT) 📖

must recur, however, to the author's first remark, in which he characterizes the discourses of the Synoptics as "purely moral," and those of St. John as "wholly dogmatic." This is by no means true. The discourses in the Synoptics are on moral subjects, but they continually make dogmatic assertions or implications as pronounced as those in the Fourth Gospel. In the Sermon on the Mount, for instance, the preacher authoritatively adds to and modifies the teaching of the very Decalogue itself. "Ye have heard that it was said TO them of old time" (for so [Greek: errhethê tois archaiois] must properly be translated); "but I say unto you." Again, Jesus assumes in the same discourse to be the Object of worship and the Judge of quick and dead, and that His recognition is salvation itself, when He says, "Not every one that saith unto Me Lord, Lord, shall enter," &c. "Many shall say to me in that day, Lord, Lord," &c., "then will I profess unto them, I never knew you, depart from me all ye that work iniquity."

Take the following expressions out of a number of similar ones in St. Matthew:--

"I will make you (ignorant fishermen) fishers of men" (implying, I
will give you power over souls such as no philosopher or leader of
men has had before you). (iv. 21.)

"Blessed are ye when men shall persecute you for My sake." (v. 11.)

"If they have called the master of the house ( i.e. Jesus)
Beelzebub, how much wore shall they call them of His household." (x.
25.)

"He that loveth father or mother more than Me is not worthy of me"
(so that the holiest of human ties are to give way to His personal
demands on the human heart). (x. 37.)

"He that loseth his life for My sake shall find it." (x. 39)

"No man knoweth the Son, but the Father." (xi. 27.)

"In this place is One greater than the temple." (xii. 6.)

"The Son of man is Lord even of the Sabbath Day." (xii. 8.)

"In His (Christ's) Name shall the Gentiles trust." (xii. 21.)

"In the time of harvest I will say to the reapers," i.e. the
angels. (xiii. 30.)

"The Son of man shall send forth his angels." (xiii. 41.)

"I will give unto Thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven." (xvi.
19.)

"Where two or three are gathered together in My Name there am I in
the midst of them." (xviii. 21.)

"He, [God], sent His servants--He sent other servants--Last of all
He sent unto them His Son, saying, they will reverence My Son."
(xxi. 37.)

These places assert, by implication, the highest dogma respecting the Person of Christ. Who is He Who has such power in heaven and earth that He commands the angels in heaven, and gives the keys of the kingdom of God to His servant on earth? What Son is this Whom none but the Father knoweth, and Who alone knoweth the Father, and Who reveals the Father to whomsoever He will? What Son is this compared with Whom such saints as Moses, David, Elijah, Isaiah, and Daniel are "servants?" Those dogmatic assertions of the first Gospel suggest the question; and the Fourth Gospel gives the full and perfect answer--that He is the Word with God, that He is God, and the Only-begotten of the Father. The Epistles assume the answer where one speaks of "Jesus, who, being in the form of God, thought it not a thing to be tenaciously grasped to be equal with God," and another speaks of God's own Son, and another compares Moses the servant with Christ the Son; but the fullest revelation is reserved to the last Gospel. And herein the order of God's dealings is observed, Who gives the lesser revelation to prepare for the fuller and more perfect. The design of the Gospel is to restore men to the image of God by revealing to them God Himself. But, before this can be done, they must be taught what goodness is, their very moral sense must be renewed. Hence the moral discourses of the Synoptics. Till this foundation is laid, first in the world, and then in the soul, the Gospel has nothing to lay hold of and to work upon; so it was laid first in the Sermon on the Mount, which, far beyond all other teaching, stops every mouth and brings in all the world guilty before God; and then the way is prepared for fuller revelations, such as that of the Atonement by the Death of Christ as set forth in the Epistles of St. Peter and St. Paul, and the revelation culminates in the knowledge of the Father and the Son in the Fourth Gospel.

With respect to the assertion of the author of "Supernatural Religion," that the discourses in this Gospel are, as compared with those in the Synoptics, wholly dogmatic, as opposed to moral, the reader may judge of the truth of this by the following sayings of the Fourth Gospel:--

"Every one that doeth evil hateth the light."

"He that doeth truth cometh to the light."

"God is a Spirit, and they who worship Him must worship Him in
spirit and in truth."

"They that have done good [shall come forth] to the Resurrection of
Life."

"How can ye believe who receive honour one of another, and seek not
the honour that cometh of God only?"

"If any man will do His will, he shall know of the doctrine whether
it be of God."

"The truth shall make you free," coupled with

"Whosoever committeth sin is the servant of sin."

"If I your Lord and Master have washed your feet, ye ought also to
wash one another's feet."

"A new commandment I give unto you, that ye love one another as I
have loved you."

"He that hath My commandments and keepeth them, he it is that loveth
Me."

These sayings, the reader will perceive, embody the deepest and highest moral teaching conceivable.

One more point remains to be considered--the impossibility that St. John, taking into account his education and intellect, should have been the author of the Fourth Gospel. This is stated in the following passage:--

"The philosophical statements with which the Gospel commences, it
will be admitted, are anything but characteristic of the son of
thunder, the ignorant and unlearned fisherman of Galilee, who, to a
comparatively late period of life, continued preaching in his native
country to his brethren of the circumcision.... In the Alexandrian
philosophy, everything was prepared for the final application of the
doctrine, and nothing is more clear than the fact that the writer of
the Fourth Gospel was well acquainted with the teaching of the
Alexandrian school, from which he derived his philosophy, and its
elaborate and systematic application to Jesus alone indicates a late
development of Christian doctrine, which, we maintain, could not
have been attained by the Judaistic son of Zebedee." (Vol. ii. p.
415)

Again, in the preceding page:--

"Now, although there is no certain information as to the time when,
if ever, the Apostle removed into Asia Minor, it is pretty certain
that he did not leave Palestine before A.D. 60. ... If we consider
the Apocalypse to be his work, we find positive evidence of such
markedly different thought and language actually existing when the
Apostle must have been at least sixty or seventy years of age, that
it is quite impossible to conceive that he could have subsequently
acquired the language and mental characteristics of the Fourth
Gospel."

This, though written principally with reference to the diction, applies still more to the philosophy of the author of the Fourth Gospel. And, indeed, from his using the words "mental characteristics," we have no doubt that he desires such an application.

Now, what are the facts? We must assume that St. John, though "unlearned and ignorant," compared with the leaders of the Jewish commonwealth, at the commencement of his thirty years' sojourn in the Jewish capital, was a man of average intellect. Here, then, we have a member of a sect more aggressive than any before known in the promulgation of its opinions, taking the lead in the teaching and defence of these opinions in a city to which the Jews of all nationalities resorted periodically to keep the great feasts. If the holding of any position would sharpen a man's natural intellect and give him a power over words, and a mental grasp of ideas to which in youth he had been a stranger, that position would be the leading one he held in the Church of such a city as Jerusalem.

In the course of the thirty years which, according to the author of "Supernatural Religion," he lived there, he must have constantly had intercourse with Alexandrian Jews and Christians. It is as probable as not that during this period he had had converse with Philo himself, for the distance between Jerusalem and Alexandria was comparatively trifling. At Pentecost there were present Jews and proselytes from Egypt and the parts of Libya about Cyrene. There was also a Synagogue of the Alexandrians. Now I assert that a few hours' conversation with any Alexandrian Jew, or with any Christian convert from Alexandrian Judaism, would have, humanly speaking , enabled the Apostle, even if he knew not a word of the doctrine before, to write the four sentences in which are contained the whole Logos expression of the Fourth Gospel.

St. John must have been familiar with the teaching of traditional interpretation respecting the Meymera as contained in the Chaldee paraphrases; indeed, the more "unlearned" and "ignorant" he was, the more he must have relied upon the Chaldee paraphrases for the knowledge of the Old Testament, the Hebrew having been for centuries a dead language. We have a Chaldee paraphrase of great antiquity on so early and familiar a chapter as the third of Genesis, explaining the voice of the Lord God by the voice of the Meymera, or Word of the Lord God (Genesis iii.).

The natural rendering of this word into Greek would be Logos. I repeat, then, that, humanly speaking,