Note 13 — Chapter XIV · ORTHODOXY AND THE “ORAL” HYPOTHESIS

In any case, the implication that Matthew, the apostle, “had not heard of” what John declares to be the first miracle, or of the raising of Lazarus, is as destructive of every traditionalist assumption as is the implication that John the Apostle had not heard of the Sermon on the Mount, or of the parables of the mystery of the kingdom. Mark and Luke expressly declare that John was present at the raising of Jairus’ daughter; and the fourth Gospel makes no mention of it. It was perhaps to meet cruces of this kind that Mr. Wright makes John and Peter “divide between them” the portions of the ministry; but such a device simply destroys, as we have seen, another main part of his case. Mr. Wright may well reject the thesis of Mr. Halcombe, who, severely condemning “modern criticism,” produces a modern criticism of his own, which makes John’s Gospel the first—another of the hopeless devices of traditionalist critics to escape from the imbroglio of the tradition. Mr. Halcombe gravely reasons that the best Gospel came first; and Mr. Wright pronounces that “such a plan of composition seems unworthy of God and incredible in man.”13 But his own theory presents only a different set of incredibilities. He accepts without a misgiving the most staggering anomalies. “If it were not for a single incidental statement in S. John” (iv, 1, 2), he writes, “we should have concluded confidently that the sacrament of holy baptism was first instituted after the Resurrection.” John’s statement is in fact the sole intimation that Jesus or the disciples ever baptized at all; and it is either a designed or redacted equivoque or a flat contradiction in terms:—