of time which
agrees with the others, since they all relate that there was darkness
from the sixth to the ninth hour, i.e., there was thick darkness at the
time when, 'according to St. John,' Jesus was exposed. Here our
evangelist is in hopeless conflict with the three. The accounts about
the resurrection are irreconcilable in all the Gospels, and mutually
destructive. It remains to notice, among these discrepancies, one or two
points which did not come in conveniently in the course of the
narrative. During the whole of the fourth Gospel, we find Jesus
constantly arguing for his right to the title of Messiah. Andrew speaks
of him as such (i. 41); the Samaritans acknowledge him (iv. 42); Peter
owns him (vi. 69); the people call him so (vii. 26, 31, 41); Jesus
claims it (viii. 24); it is the subject of a law (ix. 22); Jesus speaks
of it as already claimed by him (x. 24, 25); Martha recognises it (xi.
27). We thus find that, from the very first, this title is openly
claimed by Jesus, and his right to it openly canvassed by the Jews.
But--in the three--the disciples acknowledge him as Christ, and he
charges them to 'tell _no man_ that he was Jesus the Christ" (Matt. xvi.
20; Mark viii. 29, 30; Luke ix. 20, 21); and this in the same year that
he blames the Jews for not owning this Messiahship, since he had told
them who he was 'from the beginning' (ch. viii. 24, 25): so that, if
'John' was right, we fail to see the object of all the mystery about it,
related by the Synoptics. We mark, too, how Peter is, in their account,
praised for confessing him, for flesh and blood had not revealed it to
him, while in the fourth Gospel, 'flesh and blood,' in the person of
Andrew, reveal to Peter that the Christ is found; and there seems little
praise due to Peter for a confession which had been made two or three
years earlier by Andrew, Nathanael, John Baptist, and the Samaritans.
Contradiction can scarcely be more direct. In John vii. Jesus owns that
the Jews know his birthplace (28), and they state (41, 42) that he comes
from Galilee, while Christ should be born at Bethlehem. Matthew and Luke
distinctly say Jesus was born at Bethlehem; but here Jesus confesses the
right knowledge of those who attribute his birthplace to Galilee,
instead of setting their difficulty at rest by explaining that though
brought up at Nazareth he was born in Bethlehem. But our writer was
apparently ignorant of their accounts ("According to St John," by Annie
B