expresses the popular apprehension of Daniel's Messianic idea, it presents the Messiah chiefly as 'the Son of Man,' 'the Son of David,' 'the Son of God.' We have here the fulfilment of Old Testament law and prophecy; the realisation of Old Testament life, faith, and hope. Third in point of time is the Gospel by St. Luke, which, passing back another step, gives us not only the history of the birth of Jesus, but also that of John, 'the preparer of the way.' It is Pauline, and addresses itself, or rather, we should say, presents the Person of the Messiah, it may be 'to the Jew first,' but certainly 'also to the Greek.' The term which St. Luke, alone of all Gospel writers, [4 With the sole exception of St. Matt. xii. 18, where the expression is a quotation from the LXX. of Is. xlii. 1.] applies to Jesus, is that of the or 'servant' of God, in the sense in which Isaiah has spoken of the Messiah as the 'Ebhed Jehovah,' 'servant of the Lord.' St. Luke's is, so to speak, the Isaiah-Gospel, presenting the Christ in His bearing on the history of God's Kingdom and of the world, as God's Elect Servant in Whom He delighted. In the Old Testament, to adopt a beautiful figure, [1 First expressed by Delitzsch (Bibl. Comm. u. d. Proph. Jes. p. 414), and then adopted by Oehler (Theol. d. A. Test. vol. ii. pp. 270-272).] the idea of the Servant of the Lord is set before us like a pyramid: at its base it is all Israel, at its central section Israel after the Spirit (the circumcised in heart), represented by David, the man after God's own heart; while at its apex it is the 'Elect' Servant, the Messiah. [2 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 ultimate 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.] And these three 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.
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. [3 The Gnostics, to whom, in the opinion of many, so frequent references are made in the writings of St. John and St. Paul, were only an offspring (rather, as the Germans would term it, an Abart) of Alexandrianism on the one hand, and on the other of Eastern notions, which are so largely embodied in the later Kabbalah.] And so the fourth Gospel became, not the supplement, but the complement, of the other three. [1 A complement, not a supplement, as many critics put it (Ewald, Weizsacker, and even Hengstenberg), least of all a rectification (Godet, Evang. Joh. p. 633).] There is no other Gospel more Palestinian than this in its modes of expression, allusions, and references. Yet we must all feel how thoroughly Hellenistic it also is in its cast, [2 Keim (Leben Jesu von Nazara, i. a, pp. 112-114) fully recognises this; but I entirely differ from the conclusions of his analytical comparison of Philo with the fourth Gospel.] in what it reports and what it omits, in short, in its whole aim; how adapted to Hellenist wants its presentation of deep central truths; how suitably, in the report of His Discourses, even so far as their form is concerned, the promise was here fulfilled, of bringing all things to remembrance whatsoever He had said, [a St. John xiv. 26] It is the true Light which shineth, of which the full meridian-blaze lies on the Hellenist and Hellenic world. There is Alexandrian form of thought not only in the whole conception, but in the Logos, [3 The student who has carefully considered the views expressed by Philo about the Logos, and analysed, as in the Appendix, the passages in the Targumim in which the word Memra occurs, cannot fail to perceive the immense difference in the presentation of the Logos by St. John. Yet M. Renan, in an article in the 'Contemporary Review' for September 1877, with utter disregard of the historical evidence on the question, maintains not only the identity of these three sets of ideas, but actually grounds on it his argument against the authenticity of the fourth Gospel. Considering the importance of the subject, it is not easy to speak with moderation of assertions so bold based on statements so entirely inaccurate.] and in His presentation as the Light, the Life, the Wellspring of the world. [4 Dr. Bucher, whose book, Des Apostels Johannes Lehre vom Logos, deserves careful perusal, tries to trace the reason of these peculiarities as indicated in the Prologue of the fourth Gospel. Bucher differentiates at great length between the Logos of Philo and of the fourth Gospel. He sums up his views by stating that in the Prologue of St. John the Logos is presented as the fulness of Divine Light and Life. This is, so to speak, the theme, while the Gospel history is intended to present the Logos as the giver of this Divine Light and Life. While the other Evangelists ascend from the manifestation to the idea of the Son of God, St. John descends from the idea of the Logos, as expressed in the Prologue, to its concrete realisation in His history. The latest tractate (at the present writing, 1882) on the Gospel of St. John, by Dr. Muller, Die Johann. Frage, gives a good summary of the argument on both sides, and deserves the careful attention of students of the question.] But these forms are filled in the fourth Gospel with quite other substance. God is not afar off, uncognisable by man, without properties, without name. He is the Father. Instead of a nebulous reflection of the Deity we have the Person of the Logos; not a Logos with the two potencies of goodness and power, but full of grace and truth. The Gospel of St. John also begins with a 'Bereshith', but it is the theological, not the cosmic Bereshith, when the Logos was with God and was God. Matter is not pre-existent; far less is it evil. St. John strikes the pen through Alexandrianism when he lays it down as the fundamental fact of New Testament history that 'the Logos was made flesh,' just as St. Paul does when he proclaims the great mystery of'God manifest in the flesh.' Best of all, it is not by a long course of study, nor by wearing discipline, least of all by an inborn good disposition, that the soul attains the new life, but by a birth from above, by the Holy Ghost, and by simple faith which is brought within reach of the
fallen and the lost. [11 cannot agree with Weiss (u. s., p. 122) that the great object of the fourth Gospel was to oppose the rising Gnostic movement, This may have been present to the Apostle's mind, as evidenced in his Epistle, but the object in view could not have been mainly, nor even primarily, negative and controversial.]
Philo had no successor. In him Hellenism had completed its cycle. Its message and its mission were ended. Henceforth it needed, like Apollos, its great representative in the Christian Church, two things: the baptism of John to the knowledge of sin and need, and to have the way of God more perfectly expounded, [a Acts xviii 24-28] On the other hand, Eastern Judaism had entered with Hillel on a new stage. This direction led farther and farther away from that which the New Testament had taken in following up and unfolding the spiritual elements of the Old. That development was incapable of transformation or renovation. It must go on to its final completion, and be either true, or else be swept away and destroyed.
INTRODUCTORY
THE PREPARATION FOR THE GOSPEL: THE JEWISH WORLD IN THE DAYS OF CHRIST
ALEXANDRIA AND ROME, THE JEWISH COMMUNITIES IN THE CAPITALS OF WESTERN CIVILISATION.
CHAPTER V
We have spoken of Alexandria as the capital of the Jewish world in the West. Antioch was, indeed, nearer to Palestine, and its Jewish population, including the floating part of it, as numerous as that of Alexandria. But the wealth, the thought, and the influence of Western Judaism centred in the modern capital of the land of the Pharaohs. In those days Greece was the land of the past, to which the student might resort as the home of beauty and of art, the timehallowed temple of thought and of poetry. But it was also the land of desolateness and of ruins, where fields of corn waved over the remains of classic antiquity. The ancient Greeks had in great measure sunk to a nation of traders, in keen competition with the Jews. Indeed, Roman sway had levelled the ancient world, and buried its national characteristics. It was otherwise in the far East; it was otherwise also in Egypt. Egypt was not a land to be largely inhabited, or to be 'civilised' in the then sense of the term: soil, climate, history, nature forbade it. Still, as now, and even more than now, was it the dream-land of untold attractions to the traveller. The ancient, mysterious Nile still rolled its healing waters out into the blue sea, where (so it was supposed) they changed its
