rest. It proves conclusively that a belief in
the authenticity of this Gospel was so firmly engrained in the
Christian mind that men holding the most opposite opinions appealed to
its authority. It is true that the "irrational" Alogi rejected it, and
that Marcion repudiated it, not because it was not by an apostle, but
because St. Paul was the only apostle whom he admired. But it was used
by the Catholics, the Gnostics, and the Montanists. St. Justin Martyr
was acquainted with it, and before he wrote, Basilides, the great
Gnostic of Alexandria, borrowed from it some materials for his
doctrine. The equally celebrated Gnostic Valentinus used it, and his
followers also revered it. About A.D. 170 Heracleon, an eminent
Valentinian, wrote a commentary upon this Gospel, of which commentary
some fragments still remain. The Montanists arose in Phrygia about
A.D. 157. Montanus, their founder, endeavoured to revive the power of
prophecy, and his followers maintained that "the Paraclete said more
things in Montanus than Christ {87} uttered in the Gospel." It can
easily be proved that their teaching was an attempt to realize some of
the promises of our Lord contained in St. John's Gospel. And the fact
that the Montanists were strongly opposed to the Gnostics makes it all
the more remarkable that both sects regarded this Gospel as so
important. Somewhat before A.D. 170 St. John's Gospel was inserted by
the great Syrian apologist, Tatian, in his _Diatessaron_, or harmony of
the Gospels, and the apocryphal Acts of John composed near the same
date contain unmistakable allusions to this Gospel.

The evidence of Irenaeus is the culminating proof of the genuineness of
the Gospel according to St. John. He became Bishop of Lyons in A.D.
177, and remembered Polycarp, who suffered martyrdom at Smyrna in A.D.
156, at the age of eighty-six. Irenaeus, in writing to his friend
Florinus, says, "I can describe the very place in which the blessed
Polycarp used to sit when he discoursed, and his goings-out and his
comings-in, and his manner of life, and his personal appearance, and
the discourses which he held before the people, and how he would
describe his intercourse with John and the rest who had seen the Lord,
and how he would relate their words. And whatsoever things he had
heard from them about the Lord and about His miracles, Polycarp, as
having received them from eye-witnesses of the life of the Word, would
relate, altogether in