602 NEW TESTAMENT 



book was written and with what purpose - all these questions are 

 still in litigation. Progress toward a final solution of them can be 

 made only by the slow process of even more careful exegesis, more 

 exhaustive and minute archaeological research, and even more 

 critical weighing of evidence and sifting of hypotheses. Fortunately, 

 in all these lines progress is making, and it is not unreasonable to 

 hope both for new light from archaeological discovery and for progress 

 toward assured results. As in the case of the gospels, so here also the 

 solution of the problem will contribute to the elucidation, not only of 

 the period covered by the narrative of the book, but also of that in 

 which the book arose. 



The Fourth Gospel. If the synoptic problem must still be included 

 among those that are only partially solved, this is still more emphat- 

 ically true of the problem of the Fourth Gospel. Once and again in 

 the last half-century affirmed to be now at length finally settled, 

 sometimes by those who have reaffirmed its strict apostolic author- 

 ship, sometimes by those who have reduced to a minimum its con- 

 nection with the circle of Jesus' disciples, it persists in reappearing 

 among the most difficult and perplexing of all the problems presented 

 to us by the New Testament. For a time indeed there seemed to 

 be an increasingly general recognition that the truth of the matter 

 lies at neither extreme: neither with those who would make the 

 book the naive record of the aged John's recollection of Jesus, nor 

 with those who would assign it to the latter half of the second cen- 

 tury and deny it all connection with the immediate followers of 

 Jesus and to its author all knowledge of his subject. But of late 

 a reaction has set in, and to-day the most diverse opinions are ex- 

 pressed by men who have no reason for disagreeing other than their 

 inability to interpret the facts alike. 



The difficulty of the problem, which is so complex that its elements 

 cannot even be enumerated here, lies largely in the apparently con- 

 trary indications of the evidence. Beneath the surface of a smooth 

 and uniform style there lie, on the one side, strong indications of 

 Jewish authorship and Palestinian origin, and, according at least to 

 their prima facie meaning, both internal evidence and direct asser- 

 tion of close association of the author with Jesus; yet, on the other 

 hand, such divergences from the testimony of the synoptic gospels, 

 not only as respects the chronology of Jesus' ministry and the place 

 of his work, but also as to the manner and substance of his teaching, 

 and such a reflection of the influence of philosophical thought not 

 otherwise associated with Palestine, as suggest an author of quite 

 different characteristics from those which we naturally attribute to 

 John the son of Zebedee. The external evidence is not less perplexing. 

 If, on the one hand, the testimony of Irenseus concerning what he 

 learned from Polycarp, together with his undoubted acceptance 



