Page:Lives of the apostles of Jesus Christ (1836).djvu/370

 with the results of a minute examination of almost all parts of it, and gives new force to many passages, by revealing the particular error at which they were aimed. The details of these coincidences cannot be given here, but have been most satisfactorily traced out, at great length, by the labors of the great modern exegetical theologians, who have occupied volumes with the elucidation of these points. The whole gospel indeed, is not so absorbed in the unity of this plan, as to neglect occasions for supplying general historical deficiences in the narratives of the preceding evangelists. An account is thus given of two journeys to Jerusalem, of which no mention had ever been made in former records, while hardly any notice whatever is taken of the incidents of the wanderings in Galilee, which occupy so large a portion of former narratives,—except so far as they are connected with those instructions of Christ which accord with the great object of this gospel. The scene of the great part of John's narrative is laid in Judea, more particularly in and about Jerusalem; and on the parting instructions given by Christ to his disciples, just before his crucifixion, he is very full; yet, even in those, he seizes hold mainly of those things which fall most directly within the scope of his work. But throughout the whole, the grand object is seen to be, the presentation of Jesus as the Messiah, the son of the living, eternal God, containing within himself the Life, the Light, the Only-begotten, the Word, and all the personified excellences, to which the Gnostics had, in their mystic idealism, given a separate existence. It thus differs from all the former gospels, in the circumstance, that its great object and its general character is not historical, but dogmatical,—not universal in its direction and tendency, but aimed at the establishment of particular doctrines, and the subversion of particular errors.

Another class of sectaries, against whose errors John wrote in this gospel, were the Sabians, or disciples of John the Baptist;—for some of those who had followed him during his preaching, did not afterwards turn to the greater Teacher and Prophet, whom he pointed out as the one of whom he was the forerunner; and these disciples of the great Baptizer, after his death, taking the pure doctrines which he taught, as a basis, made up a peculiar religious system, by large additions from the same Oriental mysteries from which the Gnostics had drawn their remarkable principles. They acknowledged Jesus Christ as a being of high order, and designate him in their religious books as the "Disciple of ;" while