The reader will find this very ably treated in Mr. Sanday’s “Authorship of the Fourth Gospel” (Macmillan).

My object at present is of a far humbler nature, simply to show the utter untrustworthiness of some of the most confidently asserted statements of the writer of “Supernatural Religion.”

I shall take two: 

1.  The difference between Christ’s mode of teaching and the structure of His discourses, as represented by St. John and the Synoptics respectively.

2.  The intellectual impossibility that St. John should have written the Fourth Gospel.

1.  Respecting the difference of Christ’s mode of teaching as recorded in St. John and in the Synoptics, he remarks:—­

“It is impossible that Jesus can have had two such diametrically opposed systems of teaching; one purely moral, the other wholly dogmatic; one expressed in wonderfully terse, clear, brief sayings and parables, the other in long, involved, and diffuse discourses; one clothed in the great language of humanity, the other concealed in obscure, philosophic terminology; and that these should have been kept so distinct as they are in the Synoptics, on the one hand, and the Fourth Gospel on the other.  The tradition of Justin Martyr applies solely to the system of the Synoptics, ’Brief and concise were the sentences uttered by Him:  for He was no Sophist, but His word was the power of God.’” [106:1] (Vol. ii. p. 468)

To take the first of those assertions.  So far from its being “impossible” that Jesus “can have had two such diametrically opposite modes of teaching,” it is not only possible, but we have undeniable proof of the fact in that remarkable saying of Christ recorded by both St. Matthew and St. Luke:  “All things are delivered unto Me of My Father, and no man knoweth the Son, but the Father; neither knoweth any man the Father, save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son will reveal Him.” (Matth. xi. 27).  The author of “Supernatural Religion” has studied the letter of this passage very carefully, for he devotes no less than ten pages to a minute examination of the supposed quotations of it in Justin and other Fathers (vol. i. pp. 402-412); but he does not draw attention to the fact that it is conceived in the spirit and expressed in the terms of the Fourth Gospel, and totally unlike the general style of the discourses in the Synoptics. [107:1] The Fourth Gospel shows us that such words as these, almost unique in the Synoptics, are not the only words uttered in a style so different from the usual teaching of our Lord—­that at times, when He was on the theme of His relations to His Father, He adopted other diction more suited to the nature of the deeper truths He was enunciating.

Then take the second assertion:—­

    “One [system] expressed in wonderfully terse, clear, brief sayings
    and parables, the other in long, involved, and diffuse discourses.”

Again:—­