of the three, though we perhaps know not which; so is it with the Gospel and Epistles of John.  When a verse is read, we know that it is either from an epistle of John, or else from the Jesus of John; but often we cannot tell which.  On contemplating the marked character of this phenomenon, I saw it infallibly[22] to indicate that John has made both the Baptist and Jesus speak, as John himself would have spoken; and that we cannot trust the historical reality of the discourses in the fourth gospel.

That narrative introduces an entirely new phraseology, with a perpetual discoursing about the Father and the Son; of which there is barely the germ in Matthew:—­and herewith a new doctrine concerning the heaven-descended personality of Jesus.  That the divinity of Christ cannot be proved from the three first gospels, was confessed by the early Church, and is proved by the labouring arguments of the modern Trinitarians.  What then can be dearer, than that John has put into the mouth of Jesus the doctrines of half a century later, which he desired to recommend?

When this conclusion pressed itself first on my mind, the name of Strauss was only beginning to be known in England, and I did not read his great work until years after I had come to a final opinion on this whole subject.  The contemptuous reprobation of Strauss in which it is fashionable for English writers to indulge, makes it a duty to express my high sense of the lucid force with which he unanswerably shows that the fourth gospel (whoever the author was) is no faithful exhibition of the discourses of Jesus.  Before I had discerned this so vividly in all its parts, it had become quite certain to me that the secret colloquy with Nicodemus, and the splendid testimony of the Baptist to the Father and the Son, were wholly modelled out of John’s own imagination.  And no sooner had I felt how severe was the shock to John’s general veracity, than a new and even graver difficulty rose upon me.

The stupendous and public event of Lazarus’s resurrection,—­the circumstantial cross-examination of the man born blind and healed by Jesus,—­made those two miracles, in Dr. Arnold’s view, grand and unassailable bulwarks of Christianity.  The more I considered them, the mightier their superiority seemed to those of the other gospels.  They were wrought at Jerusalem, under the eyes of the rulers, who did their utmost to detect them, and could not; but in frenzied despair, plotted to kill Lazarus.  How different from the frequently vague and wholesale statements of the other gospels concerning events which happened where no enemy was watching to expose delusion! many of them in distant and uncertain localities.