[111] What one might call a certain lack of sympathy, and a consequent incapacity to comprehend the method and manner of the New Testament writers, is painfully apparent in page after page of this book. Without true sympathy the study of literature is valueless, and an Introduction is uninstructive. Examples can hardly be given, because this characteristic is too deeply interwoven in the whole fabric of the work. In truth this Introduction exists in virtue of a certain insensitiveness to the spirit and thought and tone of the New Testament, and could not have come into being in its present form, unless the Author had stood so absolutely apart from the period and the life amid which Christianity originated. Hence a simple example, or a score of examples, must fail to convey any impression of what I gather from the work [112] as a whole. How rare it is to find herein anything that quickens our comprehension, or raises our conception, of a book (or a series of books) to which the character of great literature preeminently belongs.

Still I shall refer to a matter which happens to stand on the page that I open at random, and which concerns a subject that has for a long time deeply interested me.

I take here one very slight example, more of manner and style than of thought, and yet one which to me is of considerable interest. On page 562, we find it stated "as a feature of a later age " that, in the Fourth Gospel, "the dialogues beginning with the introduction of some figure pass over into a disquisition or monologue in which the author voices, through Jesus, his own or rather the Church's consciousness, usually upon some aspect of the Christology which is the dominant theme of the whole book. The original figure is forgotten, . . . and presently the so-called conversation drifts over into a doctrinal meditation upon some aspect of Christ's person."

[113] One marvels, first of all, at the phrase "so-called conversation". Where is it called a "conversation"? Certainly not by John, who thought of it in a very different way. Who calls it a conversation? Solely and simply Dr. Moffatt himself, who has never apprehended the manner, or imagined to himself the purpose and intention, that rule the Fourth Gospel. To him what he calls a "conversation" must be and remain a conversation.

In Chapter IV. of John's Gospel the disciples, when they came back to the well – I take just one of Dr. Moffatt's examples – found Jesus, "and they marvelled that He was talking with a woman: yet no man said 'What seekest Thou ?' or 'Why speakest Thou with her?'" The verbs that are used, {z&eecirc;teiv} and {lalein} are perfectly suitable to the investigation of problems and to formal exposition. The woman herself went to the city and told the men, "Come and see a man which told me all things that ever I did: can this be the Christ?" There is here no word about a conversation. The woman recognized instantly that, following on the request by [114] a traveller for water at a well's mouth (the commonest incident of travel in the East), what might have continued as a conversation in the usual tone between a man and a woman alone at a well became at once a serious discussion about the greatest and gravest things in life; and she drew the inference, " Can this be the Christ?"

Dr. Moffatt, however, can see here only a "so-called conversation," and marvels that it was ever anything else. One can only marvel at his blindness.

We see,. then, that John does not use the term "conversation" or anything corresponding to it: he was interested in these "so-called conversations" for the doctrinal meditation into which they pass. They begin as personal scenes, often marvellously individualized; and they gradually or instantaneously pass into a meditation. But why not? Why should the author be debarred from following out his own bent? He has produced the greatest book in all literature by doing so; but Dr. Moffatt cannot see the greatness and forbids the method.

[115] In the second place, why is this method peculiar to and characteristic of the second century? Why was it impossible in the first century? Dr. Moffatt assumes that it is a "feature of a later age". He offers no evidence for the assumption there is none to offer. He starts with the fixed idea that the book is late, and anything and everything in the book becomes to him forthwith a proof of lateness. He never asks why it should be late, or what marks it as of the second century. He simply assumes.

In the third place, Dr. Moffatt offers in a footnote one single analogy to the method which we find in John; and this analogy is taken from one of the few parts of the New Testament which he admits to have been composed in the first century and at the very beginning of Christian literature, viz. the Epistle to the Galatians II. 15 f. This analogy stands in a footnote, perhaps it is an afterthought; but how can a critic prove his assumption that this method of John's could only be originated in the second century, by a quotation from a first [116] century book? The natural insensitiveness of the Author to historical method, and his natural preference for wire-drawn argument, leads him into this absurd situation.

Dr. Moffatt goes on to say that "this method" in the Fourth Gospel "precludes the idea that the author could have been an eye-witness of these scenes, or that he is reproducing such debates from memory". Why so? What proof does Dr. Moffatt offer? None, except modern opinion and the passage from the epist1e to the Galatians. Now, that passage is autobiographical: Paul relates his own debate with Peter, and gradually "drifts over into a doctrinal disquisition," while" the original figure is forgotten," and we hear no more about Peter and have no "record of his final attitude or the effect which he produced".

It would not be easy to produce a more perfect parallel. Dr. Moffatt knows it, and quotes it, and argues that, inasmuch as this method was used by Paul in the first century, therefore it could not be used by John, but that its occurrence in a work bearing John's name [117] proves that the work was written in a later age. Is this historical reasoning, or literary criticism, or sheer prepossession with a fixed idea that anything and everything observed in the Fourth Gospel is, and must be, a proof of lateness and I"pseudonymous origin "?

In the fourth place, with regard to this method, which Dr. Moffatt unhesitatingly takes as a proof of second century origin without any proof that it is usual in the second century -- simply assuming that such a way of writing be longs to the second century, of which we know next to nothing -- I would venture to maintain that the method is peculiarly characteristic of the first century. It belongs to the period when the facts were still close at hand, and not afar off: it belongs to the period when the lesson and the moral and the principle were still felt to be the most important -- not that I believe the facts ever were regarded as in themselves unimportant, but they were more familiar and assumed as familiar. Finally, it is very characteristic of Paul, who slips so unconsciously from narrative of events to his own inferences from them, that [118] it is hard to tell where narrative ends and hortatory inference takes its place.

So it is in the passage quoted by Dr. Moffatt from Galatians II. 13 ff. So again it is in the passage 1 Corinthians XI. 25 - 34, where I defy any one to detect at what point the narrative passes from a direct simple recital of the words of Jesus, first into what may be a drawing out of the truth involved in the words, then into what must be such an exposition, and finally into a pure hortatory lesson deduced by Paul from what he begins as a narrative. There is in the passage no desire and no intention to paint a picture or describe a scene. There is only the intense and overmastering passion to bring out the bearing of the acts and words on the present situation.

To put the case in a word, the method of John in this respect is the method of Paul. If one belongs to the first century, there is no reason why the other also should not belong to the same century. John was not bent on writing a formal history. He records what in the end of his life remained to him most as a vivid [119] and deep-lying possession, viz., his memory of certain scenes and the lessons they conveyed to him (as he looked back over them) and to others (as he hoped).

The examples of this kind are numberless. Take Luke in Acts I. 16 - 22. Here you have a historical scene, the first filling up of a vacancy in the number of the Twelve Apostles. The situation is opened by a speech of Peter as president (so to say) at the meeting. For certain reasons, on which one need not here enter, the speech of Peter goes off into a brief historical narrative and returns to the main subject. The narrative is partly explanatory, addressed by the historian to the readers How much is explanatory, and how far Peter is regarded as incorporating narrative in his speech, no one can say exactly and confidently. This was the method of the age, when people stood, almost or completely, in the immediate presence of the facts. It belongs to that age. I wait for some proof that it was more characteristic of the second century than of the first. It is, generally [120] speaking, characteristic of an attitude of mind; and it might therefore occur in any age, when the writer's mind was in a certain condition. It is perfectly harmonious with the tone of the first century.