The Gospel of John.
The Gospel of John.
§ 246. All antiquity gave an outstanding witness to this Gospel. Basil (Homily sup. princ. Johann.): “Every word of the Gospels is deemed more eminent than all the other precepts of the Holy Spirit because in other writings the Lord addressed us through the prophets as His servants, while in the Gospels He does this through Himself. And in the praises of his Gospel, in the breadth of his speaking, in the gravity of his statements, John, ‘the Son of Thunder,’ holds first place.” Chrysostom (prologue to his commentary on John): “John plays more sweetly, more usefully, than any harp, than any musical instrument. His stage is all of heaven, his theater that of the entire world, his spectators the angels and any people who were angels or wished to be angels.” Ambrose (De sacram., bk. 3, c. 2): “John, ahead of the rest, saw the great mysteries, etc. All the holy evangelists, all the apostles except the betrayer, all the saints [did well]; St. John, however, who wrote the Gospel last, as a friend sought out and selected by Christ, poured out mysteries with a greater trumpet. Whatever he said is a mystery.” Cyril, prologue on John: “To be sure, the exposition of dogmas was set forth to them all equally, and they were all carried carefully, as it were, to the same finish line in the racing chariot. Yet they speak in different ways so that, though they all come to one city, it seems to me that one enters a more splendid building than another.” Jerome, introduction to his commentary on Matthew: “The apostle and evangelist John, whom Jesus loved most, reclined upon the bosom of the Lord and drank the purest streams of doctrine. He alone deserved to hear from the cross: ‘Behold, your mother.’ “In Advers. Jovin., bk. 1, he calls him “an apostle, evangelist, and prophet.” Augustine (Epistle 168) calls him “the foremost interpreter of divine secrets.” De civ. Dei, bk. 10, c. 24: “A certain Platonist, as we were accustomed to hear from old St. Simplicianus, who later presided as bishop of the church at Milan, used to say that the beginning of the Holy Gospel that we call ‘according to John’ should be written in letters of gold and should be read in all the churches in the most eminent places.” Treatise 36 on John: “The rest of the evangelists, as if walking on earth with the Lord as a man, said few things about His divinity. But John, as if he were reluctant to walk on the earth, lifted himself not only above the earth and every limit of sky and heaven but also above every host of angels and came to Him by whom all things were made and said, ‘In the beginning was the Word.’ “Treatise 3 on the Epist. Johan.: “Our milk is the humble Christ; our food is the same Christ, equal with the Father. The other evangelists gave us the milk; John offers us solid food.” Peter Damian, De excell. Joh. evang., sermon 1:
The blessed John, with the alternating order of his narrative, now sublimely intones the divinity of Christ, now somehow in clear and humble fashion declares the things that belong to His humanity. He says, “In the beginning was the Word.” Behold, the eagle of the Lord soars sublimely to the summit of heaven. But it is necessary to feed the flesh, so he folds his wings somewhat and descends submissively to the depths. Thus listen to what he adds a little later. He says, “The Word became flesh.” … Then, with his divinely illumined mind, he grasped the supereminent loftiness of divine knowledge as he reclined on the bosom of the Redeemer at the most holy feast of the mystical Supper.
§ 247. The writers of the Church say that John had two reasons in particular for putting together his Gospel account: (1) To refute the blasphemies of Ebion and Cerinthus, who were attacking the divinity of Christ. For this reason, he lifts himself up as an eagle and begins with a declaration and description of the divinity of Christ. Irenaeus, bk. 3, c. 11, p. 184: “John, the disciple of the Lord, wanted by the declaration of his Gospel to remove the error that Cerinthus and, much earlier, those who were called ‘Nicolaitans,’ had planted among people, etc. In order to confound and persuade them that there is one God, who made all things through His Word, etc., and to establish the rule of truth in the Church, [John] began his Gospel in that way.” Jerome, introduction to his commentary on Matthew:
When John was in Asia—where even then the seeds of heretics were sprouting, of Cerinthus, Ebion, and others who deny that Christ came in the flesh, whom he even calls “antichrists” in his Epistle and against whom the apostle Paul frequently lashes out—he was compelled by almost all the bishops of Asia at that time and by the representatives of many churches to write something quite lofty about the divinity of the Savior and to break forth to the very Word of God, so to speak, with not so much bold as blessed rashness. As a result, ecclesiastical history narrates that when the brethren compelled him to write in this way, he responded that he would do this if they would declare a fast and if all in common would pray to God. When this had been done, he was filled with revelation and uttered that introduction that came from heaven: “In the beginning was the Word.”
This agrees with the brief statement he adds to his Gospel account (John 20:31).
(2) After reading the volumes of the other three evangelists, he indeed approved what they had written. He affirmed, however, that they had mentioned the activities of only the one year after the imprisonment of John, the year when Christ also suffered. Eusebius, Hist., bks. 6, 13, from Clement of Alexandria: “Because John, the last, knew that in the rest of the evangelists the bodily activities of Christ were declared, he was invited by his friends and led by the Spirit to provide his spiritual Gospel.” Nazianzen sings of him in this way:
In the sacred book of John, you will find few miracles
But many discourses of Christ the King.
The Gospel of John contains twenty-one chapters, in which he describes the person of Christ, consisting of divine and human nature, and the activities according to the four journeys to Jerusalem that He made.
§ 248. The Valentinians used to accept no Gospel except John’s, according to Irenaeus (bk. 3, c. 11). Bellarmine (De verbo Dei, bk. 1, c. 6, heresy 14), Feuardentius (notes to bk. 3, c. 2 of Irenaeus), and Sandaeus (Thema secular. de deserenda synagog. protest., thesis 22) try to draw our blessed Luther into the company of this latter error because he says in his preface to the New Testament: “We must get rid of that false idea that there are only four Gospels.” Also: “The Gospel of John is the one, beautiful, true, and principal Gospel. It is to be preferred far and wide to the other three.”
We respond. (1) In that preface Luther with clear words did not establish only one historical account of the teaching and deeds of Christ, but he wanted to indicate this alone: that all four of the historical accounts of the evangelists are one and the same Gospel with regard to their theme and purpose. You see, as Chrysostom writes (on Galatians 1): “Even if a thousand men were to write Gospels, yet if they write the same thing, the many are one.” These two ideas are completely different: that there is one evangelist and that there is only one Gospel.
(2) He does not prefer the Gospel of John as if the accounts of the other evangelists were not divinely inspired. Rather, as he makes a comparison of the articles treated therein, he gives the trophy to John’s Gospel because of his brilliant argument of the eternal deity of Christ and the mystery of the incarnation. Therefore, with regard to canonical authority, the writings of all four evangelists are equal, but with regard to the main points of Christian doctrine treated therein, one stands ahead of another. In this way the Epistle to the Romans surpasses the Epistle to Philemon; the Psalter surpasses the Book of Ruth.
(3) The fathers cited in § 246 attribute a certain prominence to John and his Gospel, yet up to this time no one, I say, has charged them with this accusation.
§ 249. Although the orthodox have had no doubt about the entire Gospel account that John wrote, some people nevertheless have held the pericope about the adulteress in John 8 to be of doubtful credibility. Eusebius, Hist., bk. 3, c. 39: “(Papias) adds some account about the adulterous woman whom the Jews accused before the Lord. But we find that parable written in the Gospel that is called ‘according to the Hebrews.’ “Chrysostom (on John, homily 51) omits it. Theophylact does the same. It does not appear in the Syriac paraphrase; Nonnus, likewise, does not paraphrase it. Jerome cites it but admits (Dial. 2 adv. Pelag.): “This account is not contained in all the codices.” However, the oldest and most serious writers among the ancients, Greek as well as Latin, acknowledge it as a genuine part of canonical Scripture. Among these are Ammonius (Monotessar.), Athanasius (Synopsis), Ambrose (bk. 7, Epistle 58), and Augustine (on John, treatise 33). This last, in De adulter. conjug. ad Pollent., bk. 2, thinks: “This account belongs to John, but cruel husbands saw to it that it was taken out so that adulterous wives might be killed.” Robertus Stephanus finds this account in two Greek copies—quite old ones. Bellarmine writes (De verbo Dei, bk. 1, c. 16, § Initium, etc.): “Chrysostom, homily 60 on John, acknowledges this account.” But no such thing appears there in Chrysostom. (Cf. our Disput. 1 ex dicto 1 Johan. 5.)
Chapter 21 of John. Some people think that John did not write it, but that someone else added it to the Gospel account because John added the general conclusion of his account at the end of the preceding chapter. But we have shown in our Harm., “On the Resurrection,” that it is contrary to reason for that final chapter to be torn away from the rest of the corpus of the account, since v. 24 of that chapter is clearly added: “This is that disciple who is bearing witness to these things and who has written these things.” In the same place we showed that the conclusion in c. 20 is not a general one that applies to the entire Gospel account but a specific one that applies primarily and properly to the account of [Jesus’] appearance to the disciples, which happened after His resurrection.
§ 250. These are the four Gospels accepted into the canon by the common consent of the early Church. All the rest, which Gelasius lists in great number ([Jus canonicum,] dist. 15, c. Sancta Romana), the Church rejects from the canon as spurious.
The devout ancients try to prove this number of four evangelists with various types and figures of the Old Testament. Irenaeus, Adv. haeres., bk. 3, c. 11, p. 186: “There are neither more in number than these nor, on the other hand, does it hold fewer Gospels. You see, because there are four regions of the world in which we exist, because there are four principal winds, because the Church has been spread over all the earth but the pillar and firmament of the Church are the Gospel and the Spirit of life, the consequence is that it has four pillars that breathe incorruptibility from each side and give life to men,” etc. In the same place he applies to the four evangelists “the images of the four animals that were presented in the vision of the prophet Ezekiel”: of a man, an ox, a lion, and an eagle (Ezek. 1:[10]; Rev. 4:6[-7]). This is also done by Jerome (Epistle ad Paulin.) and Augustine, in De cons. evangel., bk. 1, c. 7, where he says, “The evangelists are the sacred four-horse chariot on which the Lord is carried as He subdues the people.” (See Schramus’s booklet An evangelium Matthaei sit Matthaei, c. 4, p. 33.) Origen compares the four evangelists to “the four rivers that water Paradise.” As a result, the Church sings about Christ and the four evangelists as follows:
As Paradise is watered by these, it greens and blossoms and bears fruit. It becomes rich and rejoices because of these four rivers. The source is Christ; the evangelists, the rivers. The spring is on high; the evangelists come down to bring a taste of the living Source to the faithful. For those who have become inebriated from the stream of these, the thirst of love increases, so that we are more fully sated from the spring of the Deity. Their instruction draws us from the bilge of vices; thus may it lead us from the depths to divine things above.45
Lyra, at the conclusion of his prologue on Mark, brings out thirteen comparisons from the ancients. He says that the four Gospels were foreshadowed: (1) By the four rivers that flow from Paradise (Gen. 2:10). (2) By the four chief patriarchs, from whom Kiriath-Arba was named where they were buried with their wives (Gen. 49:31). (3) By the four circles or rings for the ark of the covenant, with which rings the ark was carried about as the protection for the tables of the divine Law (Exod. 25:26). (4) By the four feet of the table of the bread of the Presence (Exod. 25:30). (5) By the four horns of the altar of the burnt offerings (Exod. 27:2). (6) By the four rows of stones in the breastplate of judgment (Exod. [28]:17). (7) By the four galleries of the house of Solomon (1 Kings 7:2). (8) By the four winds that revived the dead (Ezek. 37:9). (9) By the four small things on earth that nevertheless surpass the rest in wisdom (Prov. 30:24). (10) By the four men who praise God in the fiery furnace (Dan. 3:25). (11) By the four craftsmen who cast down the horns of heresies (Zech. 1:20). (12) By the four chariots going about the earth (Zech. 6:1). (13) By the four animals with eyes in front and behind (Rev. 4:6). He gives a detailed explanation of his application of all these.
Others compare this number with the four gilded columns of acacia from which the veil hung (Exod. 26:32); with the four extremities of Jacob’s ladder (Gen. 28:12); with the four rings of gold that were placed at the four corners of the table of the bread of the Presence (Exod. 25:26); with the four cups that were on the shaft of the candelabra (Exod. 25:34); with the four corners of the sheet let down from heaven and seen by Peter (Acts 10:11). (Cf. Tertullian, Adv. Marcion., bk. 14; Ambrose, preface to his commentary on Luke, bk. 10, c. 101; Eucherius, on Genesis, bk. 1, c. 14; Jerome, preface to his commentary on Matthew; and Gregory, homily 4 on Ezekiel 16.)
§ 251. The apparent contradiction of the historical narration does not take anything away from the canonical authority of the four evangelists, for Augustine (in his four books De consensu Evangelistarum) and the rest of the interpreters of the harmony of the Gospels have explained this clearly. Chrysostom discusses this subject beautifully at the beginning of his commentary on Matthew:
Were they to agree on the whole and in every detail and were they, because of too much zeal and diligence, to concur equally in their words as to all times and places down to each detail, no enemy ever would have believed anything but that they had gathered together by a common plot to deceive, as if they had founded the Gospel from a human conspiracy. But what seems to be out of harmony in small matters protects them from every suspicion and quite clearly defends our evaluation of those who wrote them.
Especially worth remembering is what Eusebius relates (Histor. eccles., bk. 3, about the middle of c. 21): “When the writings of the three evangelists came to John, he indeed approved them and gave his witness to the truth of them. Yet in their writings, only the narrative of those things Christ did at the beginning of His preaching was missing.” Eusebius continues:
And it is true what is said: One may discern that these three evangelists wrote only the activities of our Savior that occurred during the one year following John’s imprisonment and captivity, something they show in the prefaces of their accounts … Therefore they say that John the apostle, asked for their sakes, handed over in his Gospel the time the earlier evangelists had passed over in silence and what the Savior did in it, namely, the things preceding the imprisonment of the Baptist. To anyone who knows this (Eusebius concludes), the Gospels no longer seemed to disagree among themselves because the Gospel of John contains the earlier activities of Christ, while the others contain the account of His later period until the end.
However, the fact that Mark and Luke are not in the number of the apostles also does not take anything away from their canonical authority. Although they were not apostles, yet they were apostolic men; though their Gospel did not have apostles as their authors, yet they had apostles as their approvers.
§ 252. Therefore by the faith of our hearts and the confession of our mouths we separate ourselves from all those who in any way call the authority of the four evangelists into doubt, either directly or obliquely.
(1) The Manichaean Faustus (in Augustine, Contra Faustum, bk. 32, c. 2; bk. 33, c. 3) thinks that “the Gospels were written neither by the apostles nor by other disciples of the Lord but by some impostors who mixed in much that is false yet have peddled these falsehoods of theirs as apostolic writings.”
(2) The followers of Merinthus or Cerinthus used only the Gospel of Matthew, which they called the “Gospel according to the Hebrews” (Epiphanius, Haeres. 30). Irenaeus attributes this heresy to Ebion also (bk. 1, c. 26, p. 81). In bk. 3, c. 11, p. 186, Irenaeus says that Cerinthus accepted only the Gospel of Mark but disapproved of the rest. Marcion would accept only Luke—and only a mutilated and corrupt version of it (Tertullian, De praescript.; Adv. Marcion., bk. 4). Some would accept the three evangelists Matthew, Mark, and Luke but would reject John as being contrary to the others. Philaster (c. 60), Epiphanius (Haeres. 51), and Augustine (Haeres. 30) call these the “Alogi” or “Alogians” because they were unwilling to acknowledge the Word whom John preaches at the beginning of his Gospel as God. Some of the Photinians stand in their tracks. You see, Petrus Carolinus Pannonius, pastor of the church of Oradea, in his Explicat. doctr. de uno vero Deo, Patre, Filio et Spiritu sancto, p. 16, relates: “The first chapter of the evangelist John as a whole is rejected by some Photinians.” Valentinus, on the other hand, recognized no evangelist but John, as we mentioned earlier (§ 248) from Irenaeus. We must not, however, divide that sacred four-horse chariot of evangelists apart.
(3) There are some who concede that the Gospels were written by holy men of God, yet they argue that the Gospels in many places conflict with one another or with the truth, partly because the apostles at times made mistakes as men, partly because they did not hesitate to adorn zealously the glory of their Master with stories they made up. This is the way the heathen once blasphemed, according to Augustine (Retract., bk. 2, c. 16) as, for example, Julian the Apostate, according to Cyril (In Julian., bk. 10). According to the Damascene, Muhammad does this also (De centum haeresibus, bk. 10, toward the end). He cites this passage from the Qur’an: When Christ had arrived in heaven, God asked Him whether He had said that He was the Son of God, and it makes Him respond thus: “O Lord, have a gentle heart toward me. You know that this was not my prayer and that my service to You does not upset me. Those are the men who charged that I said this contrary to the laws, who came about me with a false accusation, and who erred exceedingly.” Cochlaeus (De Script. et ecclesiae auctoritate., c. 3) and, from him, Bellarmine (De verbo Dei, bk. 1, c. 61) state that Otho Brunfelsius taught the same thing during the last century. But they would have attributed that error more accurately to men of their faith. Albertus Pighius, Hierarch. eccles., bk. 1, c. 2, p. 8, Cologne edition of 1572: “The evangelists Matthew and John could have had a lapse of memory and could have lied.” Page 72: “Who has made you sure that, when the apostles wrote, they never made a mistake, they never fell asleep, as men do? Who has made you sure that only they have shown themselves to be the instruments of the Spirit, who dictated this to them?” Erasmus asserts that “at times the evangelists could have suffered a lapse of memory” (Annot. on Matthew 2 and 27). The Neophotinians especially have made this error their own. Socinus writes (De auctorit. Script., p. 14): “It could have happened among the evangelists that one retained the truth of such matters better than another and perhaps that one wrote a little or even very differently from another.” Page 104: “It can happen that everything that the account affirms about the evangelists and apostles is true, yet it can also be true that at times they erred slightly in this area.”
Against this dangerous error we set forth the following argument. Whoever wrote “as they were moved by the Holy Spirit” and whosesoever writing is “God-breathed,” such men were guilty of no error in the act of writing; otherwise that error would be attributed to the Holy Spirit. But the evangelists, no less than the prophets and apostles, wrote “as they were moved by the Holy Spirit” (2 Pet. 1:21), and their writing, no less than that of the prophets and apostles, is “God-breathed” (2 Tim. 3:16). Therefore they were not guilty of error in the act of writing. Augustine writes correctly: “It is right that the evangelists are free of all falsehood, not only the falsehood produced by lying but also that which comes from forgetfulness” (De cons. evang., bk. 2, c. 12). Epistle 8 ad Hieron.: “Once any lie is admitted into so great a peak of authority, there will remain no particle of these books that cannot be called into doubt.”