al element
in this Gospel, so that we do not have Jesus's thought in his exact
words, but only in substance."(500)

(500) For the citations given regarding the development of thought in
relation to the fourth gospel, see Crooker, The New Bible and its Uses,
Boston, 1893, pp. 29, 30. For the characterization of St. John's Gospel
above referred to, see Robertson Smith in the Encyc. Brit., 9th edit.,
art. Bible, p. 642. For a very careful and candid summary of the reasons
which are gradually leading the more eminent among the newer scholars to
give up the Johannine authorship ot the fourth Gospel, see Schurer, in
the Contemporary Review for September, 1891. American readers, regarding
this and the whole series of subjects of which this forms a part, may
most profitably study the Rev. Dr. Cone's Gospel Criticism and Historic
Christianity, one of the most lucid and judicial of recent works in this
field.

In 1881 came an event of great importance as regards the development of
a more frank and open dealing with scriptural criticism. In that year
appeared the Revised Version of the New Testament. It was exceedingly
cautious and conservative; but it had the vast merit of being absolutely
conscientious. One thing showed, in a striking way, ethical progress
in theological methods. Although all but one of the English revisers
represented Trinitarian bodies, they rejected the two great proof texts
which had so long been accounted essential bulwarks of Trinitarian
doctrine. Thus disappeared at last from the Epistle of St. John the text
of the Three Witnesses, which had for centuries held its place in spite
of its absence from all the earlier important manuscripts, and of its
rejection in later times by Erasmus, Luther, Isaac Newton, Porson, and
a long line of the greatest biblical scholars. And with this was thrown
out the other like unto it in spurious origin and zealous intent, that
interpolation of the word "God" in the sixteenth verse of the third
chapter of the First Epistle to Timothy, which had for ages served as a
warrant for condemning some of the noblest of Christians, even such men
as Newton and Milton and Locke and Priestley and Channing.

Indeed, so honest were the revisers that they substituted the correct
reading of Luke ii, 33, in place of the time-honoured corruption in the
King James version which had been thought necessary to safeguard the
dogma of the virgin birth of Jesus of Nazareth. Thus came the tr