[108] The relation between St. Paul and St. John seems (in the present writer's judgment) to be of primary importance for the proper comprehension of the New Testament as a whole. What is adumbrated in Paul -- " wherein are some things hard to be understood, which the ignorant and unsteadfast wrest unto their own destruction" .. . is wrought out finally in John's Gospel and his First Epistle to its absolute perfection as a religious expression suited for the ancient mind on the borderland between Greece and the East.

Yet to us in the West it is sometimes necessary to read Paul in order to understand John: often Paul comes nearer to our way of thought than John. Always, however, each must be read in the light of the other. There is a definite evolution of the religious consciousness beginning from St. Paul and culminating in [109] St. John; but it is an evolution towards fuller comprehension of the original teaching of Jesus. It is not the case that the " Church's consciousness" constructed for itself a new religious thought. From first to last both Paul and John were moving within the circle of Christ's thought: they were both interpreting according to their individual nature and experience the true content of His teaching. There seems no reason to regard John's Gospel as specially comprehensible to the Gentiles, though it was written in Asia for Asiatic Hellenes. It is deeply Palestinian in its cast of thought and expression; and the religious atmosphere in which it moves is non-Hellenic to a greater degree than the writings of Paul, which are more strongly tinged with Hellenism. Inasmuch as John wrote in Asia Minor, perhaps at Ephesus, a sort of prepossession has grown up that his work was most easily understood by Greeks. Do early quotations justify the belief that John's Gospel was most popular or most frequently read by the earlier Gentile Christians?

[109] All that is in John is already implicit in Paul; but what lies in the letters of Paul becomes explicit and definite in the Fourth Gospel. John in his Gospel stands and moves always on the plane towards which Paul is struggling, and which he attains in his greatest moods and moments. If we ask how it was that John finally attained, while Paul was only striving towards it with the whole powers of his nature, like a runner pressing onward to the goal and staking his whole energy on gaining the prize, the explanation lies in the Revelation and the circumstances in which it was beheld-I say "beheld" rather than "composed". In that living death to which John was exposed, he was set free from the trammels of the merely human nature to such a degree as no man ever was before or since. 1

FOOTNOTES:

1 In my “Letters to the Seven Churches," chapter VIII, I have attempted to explain this view at some length.