vement,
the Montanistic, which, however, does not rest on a true understanding
of these writings--and indeed partly for the same reason that has
prevented the Pauline theology as a whole from having such an influence.
What is given in these writings is a criticism of the Old Testament as
religion, or the independence of the Christian religion, in virtue of an
accurate knowledge of the Old Testament through development of its
hidden germs. The Old Testament stage of religion is really transcended
and overcome in the Johannine Christianity, just as in Paulinism, and in
the theology of the epistle to the Hebrews. "The circle of disciples who
appropriated this characterisation of Jesus is," says Weizsaecker, "a
revived Christ-party in the higher sense." But this transcending of the
Old Testament religion was the very thing that was unintelligible,
because there were few ripe for such a conception. Moreover, the origin
of the Johannine writings is, from the stand-point of a history of
literature and dogma, the most marvellous enigma which the early history
of Christianity presents: Here we have portrayed a Christ who clothes
the indescribable with words, and proclaims as his own self-testimony
what his disciples have experienced in him, a speaking, acting, Pauline
Christ, walking on the earth, far more human than the Christ of Paul and
yet far more Divine, an abundance of allusions to the historical Jesus,
and at the same time the most sovereign treatment of the history. One
divines that the Gospel can find no loftier expression than John XVII.:
one feels that Christ himself put these words into the mouth of the
disciple, who gives them back to him, but word and thing, history and
doctrine are surrounded by a bright cloud of the suprahistorical. It is
easy to shew that this Gospel could as little have been written without
Hellenism, as Luther's treatise on the freedom of a Christian man could
have been written without the "Deutsche Theologie." But the reference to
Philo and Hellenism is by no means sufficient here, as it does not
satisfactorily explain even one of the external aspects of the problem.
The elements operative in the Johannine theology were not Greek
Theologoumena--even the Logos has little more in common with that of
Philo than the name, and its mention at the beginning of the book is a
mystery, not the solution of one[92]--but the Apostolic testimony
concerning Christ has created from the old faith of Psalmists