What then can be dearer, than that John has put into the mouth of Jesus the doctrines of half a century later, which he desired to recommend?
When this conclusion pressed itself first on my mind, the name of Strauss was only beginning to be known in England, and I did not read his great work until years after I had come to a final opinion on this whole subject.

The contemptuous reprobation of Strauss in which it is fashionable for English writers to indulge, makes it a duty to express my high sense of the lucid force with which he unanswerably shows that the fourth gospel (whoever the author was) is no faithful exhibition of the discourses of Jesus.

Before I had discerned this so vividly in all its parts, it had become quite certain to me that the secret colloquy with Nicodemus, and the splendid testimony of the Baptist to the Father and the Son, were wholly modelled out of John's own imagination.

And no sooner had I felt how severe was the shock to John's general veracity, than a new and even graver difficulty rose upon me.
The stupendous and public event of Lazarus's resurrection,--the circumstantial cross-examination of the man born blind and healed by Jesus,--made those two miracles, in Dr.Arnold's view, grand and unassailable bulwarks of Christianity.

The more I considered them, the mightier their superiority seemed to those of the other gospels.