to a far greater extent than Paul himself ventured to carry it,
even condemning the Jews as children of darkness, and by
implication contrasting them unfavourably with the Gentiles; and
it contains a theory of the nature of Jesus which the Ebionitish
Christians, to whom John belonged, rejected to the last.

In his present edition Renan admits the insuperable force of
these objections, and abandons his theory of the apostolic origin
of the fourth gospel. And as this has necessitated the omission
or alteration of all such passages as rested upon the authority
of that gospel, the book is to a considerable extent rewritten,
and the changes are such as greatly to increase its value as a
history of Jesus. Nevertheless, the author has so long been in
the habit of shaping his conceptions of the career of Jesus by
the aid of the fourth gospel, that it has become very difficult
for him to pass freely to another point of view. He still clings
to the hypothesis that there is an element of historic tradition
contained in the book, drawn from memorial writings which had
perhaps been handed down from John, and which were inaccessible
to the synoptists. In a very interesting appendix, he collects
the evidence in favour of this hypothesis, which indeed is not
without plausibility, since there is every reason for supposing
that the gospel was written at Ephesus, which a century before
had been John's place of residence. But even granting most of
Renan's assumptions, it must still follow that the authority of
this gospel is far inferior to that of the synoptics, and can in
no case be very confidently appealed to. The question is one of
the first importance to the historian of early Christianity. In
inquiring into the life of Jesus, the very first thing to do is
to establish firmly in the mind the true relations of the fourth