ideas, with their sequences, are presented in the third Gospel as centring in Jesus the Messiah.
By the side of this pyramid is the other: the Son of Man, the Son of David, the Son of God. The
Servant of the Lord of Isaiah and of Luke is the Enlightener, the Consoler, the victorious
Deliverer; the Messiah or Anointed: the Prophet, the Priest, the King.
72. The views of Philo on the Messiah will be presented in another connection.
73. This is not the place to enter on the question of the composition, date, and authorship of the four
Gospels. But as regards the point on which negative criticism has of late spoken strongest, and on
which, indeed (as Weiss rightly remarks) the very existence of `the Tübingen School' depends - that of
the Johannine authorship of the fourth Gospel, I would refer to Weiss, Leben Jesu (1882: vol. i. pp. 84-
139), and to Dr. Salmon's Introd. to the New Test. pp. 266-365.
74. No one not acquainted with this literature can imagine the character of the arguments sometimes
used by a certain class of critics. To say that t hey proceed on the most forced perversion of the natural
and obvious meaning of passages, is but little. But one cannot restrain moral indignation on finding
that to Evangelists and Apostles is imputed, on such grounds, not only systematic falsehood, but
falsehood with the most sinister motives.
75. I do not, of course, mean that the narration of St. Mark was not itself derived chiefly from Apostolic
preaching, especially that of St. Peter. In general, the question of the authorship and source of the
vario us Gospels must be reserved for separate treatment in another place.
76. Comp. Mangold's ed. of Bleek , Einl. in d. N.T. (3te Aufl. 1875), p. 346.
77. With the sole exception of St. Matt. xii. 18, where the expression is a quotation from the LXX. of Is.
xlii. 1.
78. First expressed by Delitzsch (Bibl. Comm. ü. d. Proph. Jes. p. 414), and then adopted by Oehler
(Theol. d. A. Test. vol. ii. pp. 270-272).
79. The two fundamental principles in the history of the Kingdom of God are selection and
development. It is surely remarkable, not strange, that these are also the two fundamental truths in the
history of that other Kingdom of God, Nature, if modern science has read them correctly. These two
substantives would mark the facts as ascertained; the adjectives, which are added to them by a certain
class of students, mark only their inferences from these facts. These facts may be true, even if as yet
incomplete, although the inferences may be false. Theology should not here rashly interfere. But
whatever the ult imate result, these two are certainly the fundamental facts in the history of the Kingdom
of God, and, marking them as such, the devout philosopher may rest contented.
Yet another tendency - shall we say, want? - remained, so to speak, unmet and unsatisfied.
That large world of latest and most promising Jewish thought, whose task it seemed to bridge
over the chasm between heathenism and Judaism - the Western Jewish world, must have the
Christ presented to them. For in every direction is He the Christ. And not only they, but that
larger Greek world, so far as Jewish Hellenism could bring it to the threshold of the Church.
This Hellenistic and Hellenic world now stood in waiting to enter it, though as it were by its
northern porch, and to be baptized at its font. All this must have forced itself on the mind of St.
John, residing in the midst of them at Ephesus, even as St. Paul's Epistles contain almost as
many allusions to Hellenism as to Rabbinism.80 And so the fourth Gospel became, not the
supplement, but the complement, of the other three.81 There is no other Gospel more Palestinian
than this in its modes of expression, allusions, and references. Yet we must all feel how