a witness.
He declares that he is "the disciple whom Jesus loved," and that he
actually leaned on the bosom of Jesus at the last supper and asked in
a whisper which of them it was that should betray him. Jesus whispered
that he would give a sop to the traitor, and thereupon handed one to
Judas, who ate it and immediately became possessed by the devil. This
is more natural than the other accounts, in which Jesus openly indicates
Judas without eliciting any protest or exciting any comment. It also
implies that Jesus deliberately bewitched Judas in order to bring about
his own betrayal. Later on John claims that Jesus said to Peter "If I
will that John tarry til I come, what is that to thee?"; and John,
with a rather obvious mock modesty, adds that he must not claim to
be immortal, as the disciples concluded; for Christ did not use that
expression, but merely remarked "If I will that he tarry till I come."
No other evangelist claims personal intimacy with Christ, or even
pretends to be his contemporary (there is no ground for identifying
Matthew the publican with Matthew the Evangelist); and John is the only
evangelist whose account of Christ's career and character is hopelessly
irreconcilable with Matthew's. He is almost as bad as Matthew, by the
way, in his repeated explanations of Christ's actions as having no
other purpose than to fulfil the old prophecies. The impression is more
unpleasant, because, as John, unlike Matthew, is educated, subtle, and
obsessed with artificial intellectual mystifications, the discovery
that he is stupid or superficial in so simple a matter strikes one
with distrust and dislike, in spite of his great literary charm, a good
example of which is his transfiguration of the harsh episode of the
Syrophenician woman into the pleasant story of the woman of Samaria.
This perhaps is why his claim to be John the disciple, or to be a
contemporary of Christ or even of any survivor of Christ's generation,
has been disputed, and finally, it seems, disallowed. But I repeat,
I take no note here of the disputes of experts as to the date of the
gospels, not because I am not acquainted with them, but because, as the
earliest codices are Greek manuscripts of the fourth century A.D., and
the Syrian ones are translations from the Greek, the paleographic expert
has no difficulty in arriving at whatever conclusion happens to suit
his beliefs or disbeliefs; and he never succeeds in convincing the other
experts excep