THE FOURTH GOSPEL

New Zealand Listener, Volume 20, Issue 503, 11 February 1949, Page 13

THE FOURTH GOSPEL

THE FOURTH GOSPEL AS HISTORY, By A. C. Headlam, with biographical essay by Agnes Headlam-Morley. Basil Blackwell. English price 7/6. HE Gospel according to St. John is probably the most read part of the world’s best-seller, the Bible. It is not surprising that it should be Proféssor C. H. Dodd’s choice -for a BBC talk in a series on the World’s Greatest Books. Yet the modern reader has sometimes had his doubts. He has become sensible of a difference between John and Mat-thew-Mark-Luke. Each of the latter reads like a historical narrative, while the fourth gospel seems largely made up of long discourses, and therefore the question is sooner or later sure to arise: has. the fourth gospel any historical foundation? The suspicion emerges that it is mainly the creation of the author’s own brain and thus untrustworthy as evidence of the truth of the Christian story. ? The late Dr. Headlam has looked into this question in one of the/most straightforward books on the subject the reviewer has ever come across. For among scholars and critics the problem has received close attention for a long time now, and shelves of books have been written on it. This little volume of on!y 106 pages was worth adding to them, for although its conclusions are not new it has a striking quality about it. A week after he had completed the manuscript the author died, aged .85. He had been long distinguished as an author and a bishop, and at that age cannot have had much interest in anything but getting at the truth of the matter he was discussing, so the strong commonsense of the argument makes this a very good book. Dr. Headlam concludes that the fourth gospel was written by John the son of Zebedee, in his old age towards the end of the first century. He finds evidence all over the gospel that its author must have been present at the incidents he describes, and the only known John who fulfils the requirements is the son of Zebedee. This has the advantage of being the traditional vigw. On the question of the apparent discrepancies in historical details between the first three gospels and the fourth, such as the placing of the "cleansing of the Temple" near the beginning of John but towards the end of the others, Dr. Headlam’s is that this is no reason for regarding. John as historically unreliable. The incidents he records really happened, but he uses them without refetence to the order in which they occurred. His purpose is not to compose a narrative, but to expound a truth, so he uses genuine events as the setting or starting-point for discourses which in turn interpret the Christian significance of the events. There is therefore, the ‘author argues, no real contfadiction of the other gospels.

J. M.

Bates