m Egypt
and the parts of Libya about Cyrene. There was also a Synagogue of the
Alexandrians. Now I assert that a few hours' conversation with any
Alexandrian Jew, or with any Christian convert from Alexandrian Judaism,
would have, _humanly speaking_, enabled the Apostle, even if he knew not
a word of the doctrine before, to write the four sentences in which are
contained the whole Logos expression of the Fourth Gospel.

St. John must have been familiar with the teaching of traditional
interpretation respecting the Meymera as contained in the Chaldee
paraphrases; indeed, the more "unlearned" and "ignorant" he was, the
more he must have relied upon the Chaldee paraphrases for the knowledge
of the Old Testament, the Hebrew having been for centuries a dead
language. We have a Chaldee paraphrase of great antiquity on so early
and familiar a chapter as the third of Genesis, explaining the voice of
the Lord God by the voice of the Meymera, or Word of the Lord God
(Genesis iii.).

The natural rendering of this word into Greek would be Logos. I repeat,
then, that, humanly speaking, if he had never entertained the idea
before, a very short conversation with an Alexandrian Jew would have
furnished him with all the "philosophy" required to make the four
statements in which he simply identifies the Logos with the Divine
Nature of his Lord.

Of course, I do not for a moment believe that the Apostle was enabled to
write the exordium of his Gospel by any such inspiration. There is not a
more direct utterance of the Holy Spirit in all Scripture than that
which we have in the prelude to the Fourth Gospel.

But in the eyes of a Christian the grace of the Holy Spirit is shown in
the power and explicitness, and above all in the simplicity of the
assertions which identify the human conception, if such it can be
called, of Platonism, or Judaism, with the highest divine truth.

I believe that if the Apostle wrote those sentences at the time handed
down by the Church's tradition, that is, when Cerinthian and other
heresies respecting our Lord's nature were beginning to be felt, the
power of the Holy Spirit was put forth to restrict him to these few
simple utterances, and to restrain his human intellect from overloading
them with philosophical or controversial applications of them, which
would have marred their simplicity and diminished their power. [117:1]

SECTION XIX.

EXTERNAL PROOFS OF THE AUTHENTICITY OF OUR FOUR GOSPELS.