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 fro