BRIEF SUMMARY OF CRITICISMS

and expressions of St. John. On the one side there is the alluring hypothesis that we have discovered the missing link from which the Fourth Gospel The Gospel of John itself depends; on the other side, the Odes are by invisible links dependent from the feet of St. John. Rarely has so much variety of opinion been provoked by the publication of a new document from the lost library of the Early Church: even the Teaching of the Apostles Also known as the Didache, an early Christian treatise rediscovered in the 19th century did not evoke so many nor so varied suggestions. Indeed, on looking over what has been said on the subject, up to the time of the preparation of this second edition, there does not seem to be anything about which everyone seems agreed unless it should be that the Odes are of singular beauty and of high spiritual value, and that they are probably of Syro-Palestinian origin. Well! that is something gained, for it means that we are moving still further away from the old belief that the origins of the Fourth Gospel are to be sought in Alexandria and that every presentation of the doctrine of the Logos The "Word" or Divine Reason; a central concept in Johannine theology must have passed through the moulding hands of Philo Philo of Alexandria, a Jewish philosopher who sought to harmonize the Torah with Greek philosophy.

Let us then see what has been said on the subject of the Odes by recent writers. We begin, both chronologically and for other reasons, with Dr. Harnack: he was almost the first in the field¹, and for most of us who are engaged in historical and critical investigations into Christian origins and history, he is the master of those who know original: "il maestro di color che sanno"; a reference to Dante's description of Aristotle. Harnack's book betrays in its preface the thesis that he means to defend, that the Odes of Solomon are a Jewish Psalm-book composed near the beginning of the Christian era and worked over again at no very distant date by a Christian hand. That is, Harnack accepts most of my arguments that there is little or nothing in many of the Odes that is so distinctly Christian as not to be equally well described as Jewish, and in those cases where the Christian hand must be recognised it is the hand of an interpolator A later scribe who inserts new material into an existing text. Without conceding the absolute unity of the collection, for we both agree that this unity may be broken in one or two cases by possible later intrusions, Harnack affirms that the general and obvious unity of style, by which the compositions are characterised, must be qualified by regarding the Odes as emanating from one hand or school, and passing

¹ He was partly anticipated by Diettrich, the first of whose remarkable articles in The Reformation original: "Die Reformation" was written and published before Harnack's work saw the light. We shall attend to these articles later on.