06.24. Did the Apostle John Write the Fourth Gospel?

Chapter 23 Did the Apostle John Write the Fourth Gospel? So far as the Gospels are concerned the storm center of the rationalistic criticism gathers around the last of the four. We have shown why this should be the case. John wrote a generation later than the synoptics. He wrote for the Christian church. He was detained on the earth, the last of the twelve apostles, until the close of the first century for that very purpose. As the church grew and developed, questions would come up and heresies arise concerning the deeper and graver problems of the faith, especially those touching the Person and work of our blessed Lord. Was He divine as well as human? What was the real nature of the work He came into the world to do? How was that work to be carried on after His departure out of the world?

Such questions as these are dealt with in no other Gospel as they are in that of John. And they are dealt with not by any philosophizing on John’s part, but by the simple record of doings and discourses of Jesus not found in the synoptics. Did not the writers of the synoptics know of these doings and discourses as well as John? Yes, doubtless, but the time was not ripe for their broadcast publication.

There was an occasion when Jesus himself said to his disciples, “I have many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now;” and there was a sense in which this was true for a while of the early church in the matter of acquainting it with all that “Jesus began to do and to teach until the day in which he was taken up.” John was reserved to say some things about him not said before, and these particular things were calculated to impress the truth of his deity, and the sacrificial character of his death as nothing else had done. The witness of John the Baptist to Christ, recorded only in this Gospel, is one of these things. The raising of Lazarus from the dead is another. The discourses of Jesus on the New Birth (John 3:1-36), on the Living Water (John 4:1-54), on the Bread of Life (John 6:1-71; John 7:1-53), on His own deity (John 5:1-47), and on his departure and return (John 14:1-31; John 15:1-27; John 16:1-33), are another. John’s Gospel is almost entirely new as compared with the synoptics, and the object of the Holy Spirit in its revelation to men cannot be misunderstood. No wonder, therefore, that those who would like to get rid of the supernatural from the Bible, and especially destroy faith in the deity of Jesus Christ, and the necessity of his atonement for a guilty and lost race, should rally all their forces to undermine belief in the genuineness of the fourth Gospel. No wonder they should try to prove that the Apostle never wrote it. No wonder they should seek to discover some other John, a presbyter of the second century say, who had conceived a spurious story and palmed it off upon the church as true! More incredible far is such error than the truth.

Now, how may we be assured that John, the Apostle, wrote the Gospel by his name? In the first place, for the personal history of John, especially in his relation to Jesus, if we desire to refresh our memory about it, let us look at the following Scripture passages: Matthew 17:1; Matthew 26:37; Matthew 27:56; Mark 1:20; Mark 3:17; Mark 5:37; John 19:26-27; Acts 3:4; Acts 3:8; Revelation 1:9-11. For his later history after Patmos, we have nothing but tradition, but that, without deviation, locates him at Ephesus between the final departure thence of Paul and the close of the first century. The evidence that he wrote the fourth Gospel is the same in general terms as that already given for the other books of the New Testament. The mss. of the fourth and the versions of the second century A.D., all contain the Gospel and attribute it to John. This is true of all the early catalogs. Irenaeus, bishop of Lyons, who died A.D. 202, says it was written by “John the disciple of the Lord, who also leaned upon his breast,” and affirms that “he wrote in Ephesus, where he remained till the time of Trajan (A.D. 98-117).” This is the almost unanimous testimony of the Christian writers of the second and third centuries. To quote the Bible Handbook at this place, not literally, but with practical accuracy, “Recent investigations and discoveries prove the use of this gospel by Tatian and Justin Martyn, who were contemporaries of about the period of A.D. 170. Citations are found from it in Valentinus and Basiledes about A.D. 130 or 125; and a familiarity with it is shown in the writings of Ignatius and Polycarp carrying us back to the very time of John himself, the opening of the second and the close of the first century.”

Dr. Plummer, in his “Introduction to the Gospel by John,” in the Cambridge Bible Commentary, puts a pertinent question thus: he says, “Those who deny that St. John wrote the fourth gospel have tried almost every date for it from 110 to 165. Dividing that time in two parts, we have the following dilemma:

1.    “If the gospel was published between 110 and 140, why did not the hundreds of Christians then living who had known John during his later life denounce the forgery?

2.    “If it was not published till between 140 and 165, how did it become universally accepted by 170?”

Reference has been made above to the use of this Gospel by Tatian as early as the date just mentioned in the quotation from Dr. Plummer. There is such an apt and interesting story illustrating its genuineness in connection with his name, that I feel justified in occupying the space to tell it. Tatian was a Christian apologist, that is, a public defender of the faith, during the early period referred to, and put forth among his other works what has been known as his “Diatessaron,” from “dia,” through, and “tessaron,” four, a kind of harmony, in other words, of the four Gospels. All the copies of this work had been lost for centuries and its original existence had been altogether doubted by opponents. The author of Supernatural Religion, a famous work of the rationalistic school, which has passed through many editions since its first publication in 1875, said, very defiantly, “There is no authority for saying that Tatian’s Gospel was a harmony of the four Gospels at all. No one seems to have seen Tatian’s Harmony, probably for the simple reason that there was no such work.”

Now at the very time that this blatant expression appeared, there was lying in the Vatican library at Rome a certain Arabic manuscript numbered XIV. No one seems to have known of it till 1883, when one of the Guild of Writers to the Vatican examined it and found it to be a version of this very Diatessaron! He published an essay on it in Paris at the time. About three years later, however, a Visitor Apostolic to the Copts on a journey to the Vatican, happened to see it and declared that he could obtain a duplicate of it in Egypt, which he did. In 1888 this was translated into Latin in honor of the Pope’s jubilee. It opens with the first words of John’s Gospel and contains practically the whole of it.

It thus proves that a man living in the early part of the second century had the Gospel of John before him, which must have been in circulation and well-known. Of course it is understood that these versions of the Diatessaron thus discovered, are only copies of the original and not the original itself. But these copies, one of them at least, dates from about the middle of the eleventh century, or earlier, while of course their existence proves that of the original. Thus they utterly demolish the hypothesis of the rationalistic critics that the Gospel was not written by the Apostle John but by some unknown individual not earlier than near the close of the second century.

It may be interesting to add that the explanation of the concealment of these written copies of the Diatessaron for so long a time is that they were what are called palimpsests, i.e., a parchment on which one writing covers another. Parchment was expensive material, and when a writing upon it was supposed to have had its day, it was removed by chemicals and another written on the same pages. Sometimes it happened, however, that the removing process was not as thorough or as lasting as was supposed, and the older writing would reappear after a time through the later writing. This appears to have been the case with the writings in question. God has many ways of hiding his witnesses from harm until he is ready to bring them into court.