One circumstance, moreover, which strongly proves that the discourses given us by the fourth Gospel are not historical, but compositions intended to cover with the authority of Jesus certain doctrines dear to the compiler, is their perfect harmony with the intellectual state of Asia Minor at the time when they were written.  Asia Minor was then the theatre of a strange movement of syncretical philosophy; all the germs of Gnosticism existed there already.  John appears to have drunk deeply from these strange springs.  It may be that, after the crisis of the year 68 (the date of the Apocalypse) and of the year 70 (the destruction of Jerusalem), the old apostle, with an ardent and plastic spirit, disabused of the belief in a near appearance of the Son of Man in the clouds, may have inclined toward the ideas that he found around him, of which several agreed sufficiently well with certain Christian doctrines.  In attributing these new ideas to Jesus, he only followed a very natural tendency.  Our remembrances are transformed with our circumstances; the ideal of a person that we have known changes as we change.[1] Considering Jesus as the incarnation of truth, John could not fail to attribute to him that which he had come to consider as the truth.

[Footnote 1:  It was thus that Napoleon became a liberal in the remembrances of his companions in exile, when these, after their return, found themselves thrown in the midst of the political society of the time.]

If we must speak candidly, we will add that probably John himself had little share in this; that the change was made around him rather than by him.  One is sometimes tempted to believe that precious notes, coming from the apostle, have been employed by his disciples in a very different sense from the primitive Gospel spirit.  In fact, certain portions of the fourth Gospel have been added later; such is the entire twenty-first chapter,[1] in which the author seems to wish to render homage to the apostle Peter after his death, and to reply to the objections which would be drawn, or already had been drawn, from the death of John himself, (ver. 21-23.) Many other places bear the trace of erasures and corrections.[2] It is impossible at this distance to understand these singular problems, and without doubt many surprises would be in store for us, if we were permitted to penetrate the secrets of that mysterious school of Ephesus, which, more than once, appears to have delighted in obscure paths.  But there is a decisive test.  Every one who sets himself to write the Life of Jesus without any predetermined theory as to the relative value of the Gospels, letting himself be guided solely by the sentiment of the subject, will be led in numerous instances to prefer the narration of John to that of the synoptics.  The last months of the life of Jesus especially are explained by John alone; a number of the features of the passion, unintelligible in the synoptics,[3] resume both probability and possibility