“The philosophical statements with which the Gospel commences, it will be admitted, are anything but characteristic of the son of thunder, the ignorant and unlearned fisherman of Galilee, who, to a comparatively late period of life, continued preaching in his native country to his brethren of the circumcision....  In the Alexandrian philosophy, everything was prepared for the final application of the doctrine, and nothing is more clear than the fact that the writer of the Fourth Gospel was well acquainted with the teaching of the Alexandrian school, from which he derived his philosophy, and its elaborate and systematic application to Jesus alone indicates a late development of Christian doctrine, which, we maintain, could not have been attained by the Judaistic son of Zebedee.” (Vol. ii. p. 415)

Again, in the preceding page:—­

“Now, although there is no certain information as to the time when, if ever, the Apostle removed into Asia Minor, it is pretty certain that he did not leave Palestine before A.D. 60. ...  If we consider the Apocalypse to be his work, we find positive evidence of such markedly different thought and language actually existing when the Apostle must have been at least sixty or seventy years of age, that it is quite impossible to conceive that he could have subsequently acquired the language and mental characteristics of the Fourth Gospel.”

This, though written principally with reference to the diction, applies still more to the philosophy of the author of the Fourth Gospel.  And, indeed, from his using the words “mental characteristics,” we have no doubt that he desires such an application.

Now, what are the facts?  We must assume that St. John, though “unlearned and ignorant,” compared with the leaders of the Jewish commonwealth, at the commencement of his thirty years’ sojourn in the Jewish capital, was a man of average intellect.  Here, then, we have a member of a sect more aggressive than any before known in the promulgation of its opinions, taking the lead in the teaching and defence of these opinions in a city to which the Jews of all nationalities resorted periodically to keep the great feasts.  If the holding of any position would sharpen a man’s natural intellect and give him a power over words, and a mental grasp of ideas to which in youth he had been a stranger, that position would be the leading one he held in the Church of such a city as Jerusalem.

In the course of the thirty years which, according to the author of “Supernatural Religion,” he lived there, he must have constantly had intercourse with Alexandrian Jews and Christians.  It is as probable as not that during this period he had had converse with Philo himself, for the distance between Jerusalem and Alexandria was comparatively trifling.  At Pentecost there were present Jews and proselytes from Egypt and the parts of Libya about Cyrene.  There was also a Synagogue of the Alexandrians.  Now I assert that a few hours’ conversation with any Alexandrian Jew, or with any Christian convert from Alexandrian Judaism, would have, humanly speaking, enabled the Apostle, even if he knew not a word of the doctrine before, to write the four sentences in which are contained the whole Logos expression of the Fourth Gospel.