Note 64 — Chapter VII · DISCOURSES OF JESUS IN THE FOURTH GOSPEL.

But the relation of the discourses of Jesus in the gospel of John, to the Evangelist’s own style of thinking and writing, is decisive. Here we find a similarity,64 which, as it extends to the discourses of a third party, namely, the Baptist, cannot be explained by supposing that the disciple had formed his style on that of the master,65 but requires us to admit that the Evangelist has lent his own style to the principal characters in his narrative. The latest commentator on John has not only acknowledged this with regard to the colouring of the expression; he even thinks that in the matter itself he can here and there detect the explanatory amplifications of the Evangelist, who, to use his own phrase, has had a hand in the composition of the longer and more difficult discourses.66 But since the Evangelist does not plainly indicate his additions, what is to assure us that they are not throughout interwoven with the ideas of Jesus, nay, that all the discourses which he communicates are not entirely his own productions? The style furnishes no guidance, for this is everywhere the same, and is admitted to be the Evangelist’s own; neither does the sense, for in it also there is no essential difference whether the Evangelist speaks in his own name or in that of Jesus: where then is the guarantee that the discourses of Jesus are not, as the author of the Probabilia maintains, free inventions of the fourth Evangelist?