_rejection_ of Jesus. Then there arose a generation that did not know
Jesus, the Jesus that had tramped Jerusalem's streets and Galilee's roads.
Some were wondering, possibly, how it was that these gospels are absorbed
in telling of Jesus' _rejection_. There surely was a reason for it if He
was so sweepingly rejected. So John in his old age writes. His chief
thought is to show that from the first Jesus was _accepted by individuals_
as well as _rejected by the nation_. These two things run neck and neck
through his twenty-one chapters, along the pathway he makes of witnessed,
established facts regarding Jesus. The nation--the small, powerfully
entrenched group of men who held the nation's leadership in their
tenacious fingers--the nation rejects. It's true. But the ugly reason is
plain to all, even the Roman who gave final sentence. From the first,
Jesus was accepted by men of all classes, including the most thoughtful
and scholarly.

He is writing to the generation that has grown up since Jesus has gone,
and so to all after generations that knew of Him first by _hearing_ of
Him. He is writing after the Jewish capital has been leveled to the
ground, and the nation utterly destroyed as a nation, and to people away
from Palestine. So he explains Jewish usages and words as well as places
in Palestine, to make the story plain and vivid to all. And the one point
at which he drives constantly is to make it clear to all after
generations that men of every sort of Jesus' own generation believed;
questioned, doubted, examined, weighed, _believed_, with whole-hearted
loving loyalty followed this Jesus.

This decides the order in which, with such rare wisdom, the churchmen
later arranged the four gospels in grouping the New Testament books. The
order is that of the growth of the new faith of the church from the Jewish
outward. Next to the Hebrew pages lies the gap gospel, then the earliest,