points, it is obviously necessary
to examine his general system of theological thought. John is
regarded as the writer of the proem to the fourth Gospel, also of
three brief epistles. There are such widely spread doubts of his
being the author of the Apocalypse that it has seemed better to
examine that production separately, leaving each one free to
attribute its doctrine of the last things to whatever person known
or unknown he believes wrote the book. It is true that the
authorship of the fourth Gospel itself is powerfully disputed; but
an investigation of that question would lead us too far and detain
us too long from our real aim, which is not to discuss the
genuineness or the authority of the New Testament documents, but
to show their meaning in what they actually contain and imply
concerning a future life. It is necessary to premise that we think
it certain that John wrote with some reference to the sprouting
philosophy of his time, the Platonic and Oriental speculations so
early engrafted upon the stock of Christian doctrine. For the
peculiar theories which were matured and systematized in the
second and third centuries by the Gnostic sects were floating
about, in crude and fragmentary forms, at the close of the first
century, when the apostle wrote. They immediately awakened
dissension and alarm, cries of heresy and orthodoxy, in the
Church. Some modern writers deny the presence in the New Testament
of any allusion to such views; but the weight of evidence on the
other side internal, from similarity of phrase, and external, from
the testimony of early Fathers is, when accumulated and
appreciated, overwhelming. Among these Gnostic notions the most
distinctive and prominent was the belief that the world was
created and the Jewish dispensation given, not by the true and
infinite God, but by a subordinate and imperfect deity, the
absolute God remaining separate from all created things, unknown
and afar, in the sufficiency of his aboriginal pleroma or fulness.
The Gnostics also maintained that Creative Power, Reason, Life,
Truth, Love, and other kindred realities, were individual beings,
who had emanated from God, and who by their own efficiency
constructed, illuminated, and carried on the various provinces of
creation and races of existence. Many other opinions, fanciful,
absurd, or recondite, which they held, it is not necessary here to
state. The evangelist, without alluding perhaps to any particular
teachers or