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?”
[303]
“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[304] 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,[305] 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[306] 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[307] that, besides John the Apostle, there was also the Elder John, residing in or near Ephesus about the same time.”
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CHAPTER XXX SILANUS CONVERSES WITH CLEMENS
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