by many parallel cases, of the
origin of the Gospels in the mouths of the people. The tradition was just
such as we should expect under the existing conditions. Of intentional
deceit there is no further question. We cannot expect anything other or
better than what we have, _i.e._ what the people, or the young Christian
community, related about the life of the founder of the new religion,
unless it were a record from the hand of the founder of our religion
himself; for even the apostles are only depicted as men, and their
comprehension is represented as purely human and often very fallible. When
we speak of revelation, the term can only refer to the true revelation of
the eternal truths through Jesus himself, as we find them in the Gospels,
and the verity of which, even where it is somewhat veiled by the
tradition, confers on it the character of revelation. For it is a fact
which we should never forget, that even the best attested revelation, as
it can only reach us in human setting and by human means, does not make
truth, but it is truth, deeply felt truth, which makes revelation. Truth
constitutes revelation, not revelation truth. We therefore lose nothing by
this view, but gain immensely, and are at once relieved from all the
little difficulties which a laborious criticism thinks it discovers by a
comparison of the Gospels with one another. The only difficulty that seems
to remain is this, that the Synoptic Gospels are so often content to put
the Jewish conception of Jesus as the Messiah, as the son of David and
Abraham, and finally as the bodily son of God, in the foreground, and only
hint at the leading and fundamental truth of Christ's teaching. We must
never forget that the apostles were no philosophers, and the Logos idea in
its full significance and historical development demands, for its correct
understanding, a considerable philosophical training.

Here we are helped by the Fourth Gospel, which must decidedly be ascribed
to Christians with more of Greek culture. That Greek ideas had penetrated
into Palestine is best seen in the works of Philo Judaeus, the contemporary
of Jesus. We cannot suppose that he stood alone, and other Jewish thinkers
must like him have accepted the Logos idea as a solution of the riddle of
the universe. Out of soil like this, permeated and fructified with such
ideas, grew the Fourth Gospel. If we ever make it plain to ourselves that
Jews who, like Philo, had adopted the Logos idea with