" has lost its original significance, and become
synonymous with "Son of God." The temptation, the transfiguration, the
scene in Gethsemane, are omitted, and for the latter is substituted a
Philonian prayer. Nevertheless, the author carefully avoids the extremes
of Docetism or ditheism. Not only does he represent the human life
of Jesus as real, and his death as a truly physical death, but he
distinctly asserts the inferiority of the Son to the Father (John xiv.
28). Indeed, as M. Reville well observes, it is part of the very notion
of the Logos that it should be imperfect relatively to the absolute God;
since it is only its relative imperfection which allows it to sustain
relations to the world and to men which are incompatible with absolute
perfection, from the Philonian point of view. The Athanasian doctrine of
the Trinity finds no support in the fourth gospel, any more than in the
earlier books collected in the New Testament.

The fourth gospel completes the speculative revolution by which the
conception of a divine being lowered to humanity was substituted for
that of a human being raised to divinity. We have here travelled a long
distance from the risen Messiah of the genuine Pauline epistles, or
the preacher of righteousness in the first gospel. Yet it does not seem
probable that the Church of the third century was thoroughly aware of
the discrepancy. The authors of the later Christology did not regard
themselves as adding new truths to Christianity, but merely as giving a
fuller and more consistent interpretation to what must have been known
from the outset. They were so completely destitute of the historic
sense, and so strictly confined to the dogmatic point of view, that
they projected their own theories back into the past, and vituperated as
heretics those who adhered to tradition in its earlier and simpler form.
Examples from more recent times are not wanting, which show that we are
dealing here with an inveterate tendency of the human mind. New facts
and new theories are at first condemned as heretical or ridiculous; but
when once firmly established, it is immediately maintained that every
one knew them before. After the Copernican astronomy had won the day,
it was tacitly assumed that the ancient Hebrew astronomy was Copernican,
and the Biblical conception of the universe as a kind of three-story
house was ignored, and has been, except by scholars, quite forgotten.
When the geologic evidence of the earth's