8. Johann Gottlieb Fichte im Verhältniss zu Kirche und Staat. Von Ado'f Lasson. 8vo. pp. 244. Berlin: Herz; London: Williams and Norgate. 1863. Among the numerous recent publications on Fichte and his philosophy, we deem the above worthy of especial notice and commendation. The discussion of the relation of Fichte to the church (to Christianity would have been a better and truer expression) fills over 130 pages of the work, and is exceedingly interesting to every one who knows anything of the intimate relation of German philosophy to the latest developments of German theology. The author has made most thorough preliminary studies; he seems as familiar with every sentence of Fichte's writings as with the alphabet, and yet knows how to discriminate in his judgment of a master whom he evidently reveres. The production is of more than ephemeral value.

9. Die Geschichte des Pietismus von Heinrich Schmid, Dr. and Professor der Theologie in Erlangen. 8vo. pp. vi and 507. Nördlingen: 1863. Hossbach's "Life and Times of Spener," having portrayed the history of "Pietism," in too favorable a light to suit the strict Lutherans, and the work proving so able and popular as to attain to its third edition in 1861, it became necessary to set a more ecclesiastical pen in motion, and to attempt a history of this remarkable and salutary movement from the point of view of high Lutheranism. The result is before us. The author has had but few new materials, and does not display any great skill in historical composition. The work has a certain interest arising from its polemic aim, and from the reflex light which it throws upon the party to which its author belongs. It will be valued more as a criticism of Pietism than as its history. He substantially agrees with two of the latest Lutheran writers upon the subject, Max Goebel and Kliefoth, in the assertion, that the real origin of the pictistic controversies was the attempt to transplant essentially Reformed ideas and appliances into the Lutheran church. He affects great candor in his treatment of Spener and the other distinguished leaders of the movement, but is often not even just, where he claims to be generous. He denies, with Rudelbach, that Pietism was a re-action against evils which originated in the Lutheran church in the course of the seventeenth century; affirming, on the other hand, that the evils of which it complai: ed were long standing, dating, in fact, from the Reformation, and attributable to the imperfection of the constitution of the Lutheran church. The Introduction, filling forty-two pages, gives a very interesting picture of the deplorable state of the church in the century mentioned, partly from clergymen of the time, and partly from the more varied testimony which Tholuck has recently collected and brought to light in his Vorgeschichte des Rationalismus.

THE

BIBLIOTHECA SACRA,

No. LXXXII.

APRIL, 1864.

ARTICLE I.

THE GENUINENESS OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL.1

BY PROF. GEORGE P. FISHER, YALE college.

THE Gospel that bears the name of John is one of the main pillars of historical Christianity. Christianity would indeed remain were the apostolic authorship and the credibility of this Gospel disproved; for before it was written, Jesus and the resurrection had been preached by faithful witnesses over a large part of the Roman world. Christianity would remain; but our conception of Christianity and of Christ would be materially altered. The profoundest minds in the church, from Clement of Alexandria to Luther, and from Luther to Niebuhr, have expressed their sense of the singular charm and surpassing value of this Gospel. In recent times, however, the genuineness of the fourth Gospel has been impugned. It was denied to be the work of John by individual sceptics at the close of the last century; but their attack was not of a nature either to excite or to merit much attention. Not until Bretschneider published (in 1820) his Probabilia did the question become the subject of seri

'Bleek's Einleitung in das N. T., 1862. Meyer's Com. über das Evang. des Johannes, 3 A., 1856. Schneider's Aechtheit des Johann. Evang., 1854. Mayer's Aechtheit des Evang. nach Johann., 1854. Ewald's Jahrb. III. s. 146 seq., v. s. 178 seq., x. s. 83 seq.

ous discussion. But the assault, which has been renewed by the critics of the Tübingen school, with Baur at their head, has more lately given rise to a most earnest and important controversy. The rejection of John's Gospel by these critics is a part of their attempted reconstruction of early Christian history. Starting with the assertion of a radical difference and hostility between the Jewish and the Gentile types of Christianity,-between the party of the church that adhered to Peter and the original disciples, and the party that adhered to Paul and his doctrine,—they ascribe several books of the New Testament to the effort, made at a later day, to bridge over this gulf. The Acts of the Apostles proceeds from this motive, and is a designed distortion and misrepresentation of events connected with the conflict about the rights of the Gentile converts. And the fourth Gospel is a product of the same pacifying tendency. It was written, they say, about the middle of the second century by a Christian of Gentile birth, who assumed the name of John in order to give an apostolic sanction to his higher theological platform, in which love takes the place of faith, and the Jewish system is shown to be fulfilled, and so abolished, by the offering of Christ, the true paschal Lamb. We hold that the fundamental proposition, which affirms a radical hostility between Pauline and Petrine Christianity, can be proved to be false, even by the documents which are. acknowledged by the Tübingen school to be genuine and trustworthy; and that the superstructure which is reared upon this foundation, can be proved, in all its main timbers, to be equally unsubstantial. In the present Article, however, we shall take up the single subject of the authorship of the fourth Gospel, and shall make it a part of our plan to refute the arguments which are brought forward by the sceptical critics on this question -- the most important critical question connected with the New Testament canon. while we propose fairly to consider these arguments, we have no doubt that the attack upon the genuineness of John, has its root in a determined unwillingness to admit the

But

historical reality of the miracles which that Gospel records. This feeling, which sways the mind of the critics of whom we speak, is the ultimate and real ground of their refusal to believe that this narrative proceeds from an eyewitness of the life of Jesus. And were there nothing in Christianity to remove this natural incredulity, and to overturn the presumption against the occurrence of miracles, the ground taken by the Tübingen critics in reference to this question might be reasonable. It is right to observe that behind all their reasoning there lies this deep-seated, and, in our opinion, unwarrantable prejudice.

We have recorded the titles of some of the more recent defences of the Johannean authorship: Bleek's Intro-, duction, in which the author discusses the question at length, with his wonted clearness and golden candor; Meyer's Introduction to his Commentary on John, which contains a brief, condensed exhibition of the principal points of argument; Schneider's little tract, which handles with ability certain parts of the external evidence, but falls far short of being a complete view; Ewald's Essays, which contribute. fresh and original thoughts upon the subject, but are not without faults in opinion as well as temper; Mayer's copious treatise, in which the external testimonies are ably considered, though too much in the temper of a controversialist, and with occasional passages not adapted to convince any save members of the Roman Catholic church, of which the author is one. We intend to present our readers with a summary of the arguments, most of which are touched upon in one or another of these writers; although we lay claim at least to independence in weighing, verifying, and combining the various considerations which we have to bring forward.

That the apostle John spent the latter part of his life in Proconsular Asia, in particular at Ephesus, is attested by all the ecclesiastical writers after the middle of the second century. At the conference of Paul with the other apostles in Jerusalem (Gal. ii. 1 seq.; Acts xv.), which occurred

about twenty years after the death of Christ, John is mentioned, in connection with Peter and James, as one of the pillars of the Jerusalem church. Whether he was in Jerusalem on the occasion of Paul's last visit, we are not informed. It is in the highest degree probable that John's residence at Ephesus began after the period of Paul's activity there, and either after or not long before the destruction of Jerusalem. Among the witnesses to the fact of his living at Ephesus in the latter part of the second century, Polycrates and Irenaeus are of especial importance. Polycrates was himself a bishop of Ephesus near the end of the third century, and of a family seven of whose members had previously been bishops or presbyters in the same church. In his letter to Victor, he expressly says that John died and was buried at Ephesus.1 Irenaeus, who was born in Asia, says of the old presbyters, immediate disciples of the apostles, whom he had known, that they had been personally conversant with John, and that he had remained among them up to the times of Trajan (whose reign was from the year 98 to 117). Some of them, he says, had not only seen John, but other apostles also. Whether the ancient stories be true or not, of his fleeing from the bath on seeing there the heretic Cerinthus, of his recovering the young man who joined a company of robbers, or the more probable story found in Jerome, of his being carried in his old age into the Christian assemblies, to which he addressd the simple exhortation: "Love one another," they show a general knowledge of the fact of his residing at Ephesus, and of his living to an extreme old age. His Gospel, also, according to the testimony of Irenaeus, Clement, and others, and the general belief, was the last written of the four, and the tradition places its composition near the close of his life.

THE EXTERNAL EVIDENCE.

Mayer begins his argument by an appeal to Jerome and Eusebius; the one writing in the latter, and the other

1 Euseb., Lib. III. 31.