and St. John speak of the Word as the Bread of Life; but
Philo explains that bread to be "reason," and St. John makes our Lord to
set it forth as His Flesh, and Justin takes no notice of the idea of
Philo, and reproduces the idea of the fourth Gospel.

And yet we are to be told that Justin "knew nothing" of the Fourth
Gospel, and that his Logos doctrine was "identical" with that of Philo.

SECTION XVIII.

DISCREPANCIES BETWEEN ST. JOHN AND THE SYNOPTICS.

The author of "Supernatural Religion" devotes a large portion of his
second volume to setting forth the discrepancies, real or alleged,
between the Synoptics and the Fourth Gospel.

In many of these remarks he seems to me to betray extraordinary
ignorance of the mere contents of the Fourth Gospel. I shall notice two
or three remarkable misconceptions; but, before doing this, I desire to
call the reader's attention to the only inference respecting the
authorship of this Gospel which can be drawn from these discrepancies.

St. John's Gospel is undoubtedly the last Gospel published; in fact, the
last work of the sacred canon. The more patent, then, the differences
between St. John and the Synoptics, the more difficult it is to believe
that a Gospel, containing subject-matter so different from the works
already accepted as giving a true account of Christ, should have been
accepted by the whole Church at so comparatively recent a date, unless
that Church had every reason for believing that it was the work of the
last surviving Apostle.

Take, for instance, the [apparent] differences between St. John and the
Synoptics respecting the scene of our Lord's ministry, the character of
His discourses, the miracles ascribed to Him, and the day of His
Crucifixion, or rather of His partaking of the Paschal feast. The most
ignorant and unobservant would notice these differences; and the more
labour required to reconcile the statements or representations of the
last Gospel with the three preceding ones, the more certain it is that
none would have ventured to put forth a document containing such
differences except an Apostle who, being the last surviving one, might
be said to inherit the prestige and authority of the whole college.

It would far exceed the limits which I have prescribed to myself to
examine the Fourth Gospel with the view of reconciling the discrepancies
between it and the Synoptics, and also of bringing out the numberless
undesigned coincidences between