f Satan," etc. (Chap. II.). On the other
hand, the fourth gospel contains nothing millenarian or Judaical; it
carries Pauline universalism to a far greater extent than Paul himself
ventured to carry it, even condemning the Jews as children of darkness,
and by implication contrasting them unfavourably with the Gentiles;
and it contains a theory of the nature of Jesus which the Ebionitish
Christians, to whom John belonged, rejected to the last.

In his present edition Renan admits the insuperable force of these
objections, and abandons his theory of the apostolic origin of the
fourth gospel. And as this has necessitated the omission or alteration
of all such passages as rested upon the authority of that gospel, the
book is to a considerable extent rewritten, and the changes are such as
greatly to increase its value as a history of Jesus. Nevertheless, the
author has so long been in the habit of shaping his conceptions of the
career of Jesus by the aid of the fourth gospel, that it has become
very difficult for him to pass freely to another point of view. He still
clings to the hypothesis that there is an element of historic tradition
contained in the book, drawn from memorial writings which had perhaps
been handed down from John, and which were inaccessible to the
synoptists. In a very interesting appendix, he collects the evidence
in favour of this hypothesis, which indeed is not without plausibility,
since there is every reason for supposing that the gospel was written at
Ephesus, which a century before had been John's place of residence. But
even granting most of Renan's assumptions, it must still follow that the
authority of this gospel is far inferior to that of the synoptics, and
can in no case be very confidently appealed to. The question is one
of the first importance to the historian of early Christianity. In
inquiring into the life of Jesus, the very first thing to do is to
establish firmly in the mind the true relations of the fourth gospel to
the first three. Until this has been done, no one is competent to write
on the subject; and it is because he has done this so imperfectly,
that Renan's work is, from a critical point of view, so imperfectly
successful.

The anonymous work entitled "The Jesus of History," which we have placed
at the head of this article, is in every respect noteworthy as the first
systematic attempt made in England to follow in the footsteps of German
criticism in writing a life of Jesus.