You must therefore make up your mind to believe that the earliest Gospel traditions and even that triply attested tradition[19] which is common to the first three Gospels and which runs through the three with a separate character of its own, like a distinguishable stream passed through several phases before they assumed their present shape. In my next letter I shall probably ask you to consider what phases they passed through; but you may perhaps expect me to say something at once about the Fourth Gospel; for to that book many of the previous remarks do not apply. It was much later than the rest; it has little in subject-matter, and nothing at all in style, in common with the rest; it contains scarcely a word of the Common Tradition which pervades the first three Gospels; it probably passed through no phases and suffered few accretions; and it differs from the other Gospels, even from St. Luke’s, in bearing a far more manifest impress of personal authorship. The three synoptic Gospels really agree with their titles in representing the Gospel “according to” their several authors; but the Fourth Gospel (although, like the rest, preceded by “according to”) is a Gospel written “by” whoever wrote it.
The question is, who did write it? If it was written by an Apostle, an eye-witness of the life of Christ, then we have to face—I am not sure we have to accept—your alternative: “Either Jesus worked miracles, or the Apostles lied.” But there is very little evidence (worth calling evidence) for the hypothesis that an Apostle wrote it, and much evidence against that hypothesis. St. John, the reputed author, is said, on the evidence of Justin Martyr, to have written the Apocalypse; which, while it resembles in style what we might have expected from a Galilean fisherman, differs entirely from the style of the Fourth Gospel. Whoever wrote the Gospel, we may be sure that he did not reproduce the words of Jesus, but gave rather what appeared to him to be their latent and spiritual meaning. This can be proved as follows. Suppose three writers—say Boswell, Mrs. Thrale, and Goldsmith—had composed accounts of the life and sayings of Dr. Johnson, widely differing in the subject-matter and style of the narrative, but closely agreeing in the character of Johnson’s thoughts, as reported by them, and very often agreeing in the actual words imputed to Johnson; and suppose a fourth writer, say Burke, had written his reminiscences of Dr. Johnson, which entirely differed in language, in thought, and in subject-matter from the first three: would you not say at once that this was strong proof, that Burke did not report Dr. Johnson’s actual words, and that he had probably tinged them with his own style and thought? But if furthermore Burke reported Dr. Johnson’s words and long discourses _in the same language as he reported Sheridan’s, and in language indistinguishable from his own contextual narrative_, then you would, I am sure, find it difficult to be patient with any one who, through force of prejudice and pleasing associations, obstinately maintained that Burke’s biography was equally faithful and exact with the three other concordant or synoptic biographies. Now this comparison exactly represents the facts. You will find several of the most learned and painstaking commentators differing as to where the introductory words of the author of the Fourth Gospel cease, and where John the Baptist’s words begin; and the style of our Lord’s discourses in the Fourth Gospel is quite indistinguishable from the style of the author himself. As to the immense difference, in respect of style and thought and subject-matter, between the Synoptic Gospels, and the Fourth Gospel, you must have felt it, even as a child, reading them in English.