vested with completer political and judicial powers than was ever the Sanhedrin. The ethical systems of Jesus and Paul are for mature minds. Undeveloped human life lends itself to tyranny, the weak long for shifted responsibility, the strong eagerly grasp the opportunity for exploitation.

Jesus founded no church and laid no stress on any ritual or sacramentarian system, but Jesus was taken from his followers before the movement compelled organization. Paul and the apostles were faced by conditions that compelled organization, and the ethical system of Paul presupposed an organization sufficiently sanctified and transformed by vital union with the redeeming purpose of God in Christ Jesus to be entrusted with loving fraternal authority, as he felt he could himself be intrusted with the paternal authority, an authority that has as its goal not feeding children always with milk, but developing men and women free in Christ Jesus to do righteousness.

The early Christians, however, were not freemen, they were only freedmen. Paul was not understood,' and his words were wrested by more than the ignorant and unsteadfast. To some the freedom in Christ Jesus meant, in spite of all Paul could do, license and antinomianism; to others his organization was a permanent source of power not for the training of independent spiritual life, but for holding in spiritual subjection, of course for their professed ultimate good, men and women.

In all ages multitudes readily seek refuge from distracting but educative questioning in the dogmatisms of priestly and legal systems. Paul himself had sought peace in such surrender to a hierarchy. It was the last thing his spirit would have desired to establish again another hierarchy as exacting. Yet that is exactly what happened. In the system of Paul are the germs of all that came after. For weal or woe an organization sprang up that would have been an historic impossibility without his activity, which changed the dynamic into status, and gave to the world the hierarchy whose ethical systems it will become later our task to take up.

1II Pet. 3: 16.

III. THE ETHICS OF THE JOHANNINE INTERPRETATION OF JESUS

As time passed the Jewish-Christian danger of narrowness and legalism had seemingly been overcome. Paul's ministry was no longer doubted, and the tragic fate of Jerusalem finally handed the hegemony of the Christian organization over to the Gentile section. At the same time the Jewish world was still the door through which Christianity was passing into the world's history, although it was now the Hellenized cosmopolitan Judaism which was scattered over the whole world, but which we know best through Philo and his following in Alexandria.1 And now the danger was a complicated one. Redemption was the theme of this religious view of the world against which, perhaps rather instinctively than with full consciousness of what it was, Paul and John protest. This redemption from darkness, error, and sin was thought of by the various sects and mysteries as essentially freedom from the body, and this freedom, it was taught, could be gained by initiation into various cults and by learning mystic formulæ in connection with equally mystic rites. Even Judaism began to identify "wisdom" with these formulæ, and to interpret its own primitive ceremonial in terms of the various astronomical and vegetal cycles which gave character to these oriental sects.2

Even Paul's own teaching of the risen Christ, known henceforth not after the flesh, seemed to give a common standing

3

LITERATURE.—The best of the large literature is collected by Schmiedel, P. W., in Cheyne's "Encyclopædia Biblica," and by Reynolds, H. R., in Hastings's "Bible Dictionary"; cf. also Sanday, "Authorship and Historic Characters of the Fourth Gospel"; New York, 1905.-Holtzmann, H. J.: "Johannes-Evangelium," in his "Hand-Commentar zum N. T.," 1890, and Bacon, B. W.: "The Fourth Gospel in Research and Debate," 1910. The more recent discussions are dealt with in the "Theologische Rundschau" for January, 1910.

'Schürer, E.: "Geschichte des jüdischen Volkes," 3d ed., vol. I, pp. 187190; vol. II, pp. 21-67 and 72-175; also English translation.

* One of the best introductions to this world of religious thought and feeling is the work already mentioned, Cumont's "Les Religions Orientales dans le Paganisme Romain," Paris, 1906. 3 κατὰ σάρκα II Cor. 5 : 16.

ground. The historical Jesus could be thrust aside and a divine light-giving principle placed in the foreground and identified with the risen and mystic indwelling Christ of the Pauline Christianity. Yet neither Paul nor John contemplated such a thing, and the Fourth Gospel is one long protest against this very process. This oriental intrusion was almost immediate. Gnostic Judaism was contemporary with Jesus and Paul, and even Paul had to guard his teaching from Gnostic distortion. The Fourth Gospel is a brave protest against an unethical and essentially irreligious explanation of Jesus as a magic appearance that was not really human because humanity as flesh was evil. Jesus, he insists, was actually human, and he calls the witnesses from friend and foe to attest the reality of the man Jesus and to prove his earthly life. He also wishes to demonstrate that this historic figure is identical with the divine Person of the Pauline thought. The Johannine literature is more directly Christological than even Paul. The ethics is not so systematically developed, but a religious ethics is the central interest. The same fundamentally Jewish world of thought is at all points apparent. Ethics is in the last analysis the essential element in the religious life, and in the foreground is Paul's doctrine of the freedom from death and sin and the victory over the grave by love.

From the opening hymn to the final scene after the resurrection, the Fourth Gospel is one long protest against the resolving the historic Christian experience of God in the person of Jesus Christ into a vague metaphysics and a magic sacramental mystery.1

For this reason the Gospel summons the witnesses one after another not only to attest the historical character of Jesus, as over against Doceticism, but also that they may bear witness to what Jesus meant for them. It is Jesus in the actual flesh who has miracle-working power and can raise the dead or turn water

'The treatment of baptism and the omission of the sacrament feast are perhaps noteworthy protests against the substitution of sacramental magic for ethical and religious life in the Hellenic and oriental mystery-worship.

into wine. It is he that has power to lay down his life and to take it up again.1

The surest tests of these oriental pagan fellowships was orthodox repetition of theological formulæ and the right administration of the sacramental mysteries. John felt sure that only those who willed to do the will of the Father would even know of the knowledge or teaching. The essentially unethical 2 magic of sacred places common to all primitive paganism, but elaborated by these oriental sects, the Fourth Gospel attacks in Jesus' talk with the Samaritan woman.3

The way to redemption is not magic or formulæ, but obedience to the Father's will as Jesus obeyed his Father. According to the Fourth Gospel the teaching of Jesus is very simple, and all the speculative elaboration of the oriental cult was simply obstructive. For the Fourth Gospel the actual ethical experience of overcoming the world and sin is bound up, not with some vague, transcendental Logos-principle, but with the actual incarnation of God in an actual human being. The chief office of the Christian is as a witness to this ethically transforming power.

There are those who cannot believe because they are of the world and the world loves its own, but hates the Father," and to them the exhibition of God is only to their condemnation, seeing but not believing the "works." Of course there is the mystery of the pre-existent divine life becoming flesh, but this is attested by the signs and wonders, and "the witness" of those who beheld his glory.

The faith is thus based upon the impression Jesus made upon his generation, for many believed him who were afraid to say so, and upon the words and works Jesus did among men. And all classes and conditions of men are successively described as coming under this influence and accepting the claims of the

1 John 11:1-16; 2:1-11; 10: 18.

'John 4: 20-25.

'John 17 and 15.

'John 7: 17. ' John 3: 12.

John 14: 25-30; 21: 15-18; I John 1: 5-2:6; and many passages. 'John 15: 18-23.

'John 15: 24.

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' John 12:42.

Messianic messenger: John the Baptist, Philip and Nathanael, Andrew and Peter, the Ruler of a wedding feast, Nicodemus, the woman of Samaria, the nobleman of Capernaum, and so on. The content of righteousness is the loving acceptance of this manifestation of God's love as seen in the historic Jesus, and the confession not with the lips only, but in loyal surrender to him that Jesus is the Christ, is the test of discipleship.1

Without doubt we have here a serious transposition of emphasis. Orthodoxy rather than a right attitude of the heart toward the purpose of God is made the standard. As so often happens in trying to bar out the loose intellectualism of vague Neoplatonism and Jewish Gnosticism, the way is prepared for the substitution of formulæ for life. For our author it was almost unthinkable that any one should sincerely repeat the now slowly gathering catchwords of the young ecclesiasticism, and not be devoted, as was the author himself, to those ethical ideals with which he had had communion in sharing the Kingdom purpose of Jesus Christ.

The ethics of the Johannine literature is contained largely in the first letter. The criterion for the Christian life assumes a double aspect. For the author they must be held together. He who believes that Jesus is the Christ is begotten of God, and whosoever loveth him that begat loveth him also that is begotten of him. The ethics flows from this "belief," but this belief is more than an intellectual perception, it is the verdict of the heart. At the same time the formulæ begin to have a place which Jesus never gave them and which Paul never asserted.' However, love is still an essential element of any true "belief," for if we cannot love our brother whom we have seen, we cannot love God whom we have not seen, and out of this fountain of love flow all the real elements of good conduct.

5

7

Ethics consists in overcoming the world by faith and thus possessing here and now eternal life. The man begotten of

'I John 2:23. I John 4 1-6. 'I John 5:4-5.

21 John 5: 1.

'I John 4: 20.

1 John 5:11.

'I John 3: 19–24.

I John 33-12.