the Law through which it was the good pleasure of God to discipline men, while the Fourth Gospel shews us in the Word become flesh the absolute fulfilment of the idea of creation which underlies the whole of the Old Testament.
It is also not without interest that the foundation of the characteristic teaching of the Epistle to the Hebrews on the High-priesthood of Christ is found in the Lord's words preserved by St John more distinctly than in the other Gospels, though the Evangelist himself does not develop the truth. Thus, in the discourse which defines the nature of the new Society in relation to its Head (John 10:1-21), the Lord reveals His victory through death: He shews Himself in a figure as Victim at once and Priest (vv. 17 f.). Elsewhere He proclaims that He will draw all men to Himself when He is lifted up from the earth (12:32 ejk th'" gh'" ), that His removal from the limitations of our present bodily existence is the condition of His spiritual gift (16:7), that He hallows His people in Himself (ch. 17). Compare Matt. 20:28; Luke 22:37.
In these revelations we have the thoughts which are wrought into a concrete whole in the Epistle to the Hebrews under the imagery of the Levitical system. But it will be noticed that the teaching which St John has preserved offers the final form of the Truth. St John's theory (if we may so speak) of the work of Christ is less developed in detail than that which is found in the Epistles of St Paul and in the Epistle to the Hebrews; but his revelation of Christ's Person is more complete. He concentrates our attention, as it were, upon Him, Son of God and Son of man, and leaves us in the contemplation of facts which we can only understand in part.
One further observation must still be made. The style of the Book is characteristically Hellenistic, perhaps we may say, as far as our scanty evidence goes, Alexandrine; but the teaching itself is, like that of St John, characteristically Palestinian. This is shewn not only by the teaching on details, on the heavenly Jerusalem, and the heavenly Sanctuary, on Satan as the king of death, on angels, on the two ages (comp. Riehm,
Lehrbegriff
ss. 248, 652 ff.), but still more by its whole form. The writer holds firmly to the true historical sense of the ancient history and the ancient legislation. Jewish ordinances are not for him, as for Philo, symbols of transcendental ideas, but elements in a preparatory discipline for a divine manifestation upon earth. Christ is High-priest not as the eternal Word, but as the Incarnate Son who has lived and suffered and conquered as true man. At the same time the Apostle teaches us to recognise the divine method in the education of the world. He shews how God has used (and, as we are led to conclude, how He uses still) transitory institutions to awaken, to develop, to chasten, our thoughts of spiritual things. The Epistle is, to sum up all most briefly, the seal of the divine significance of all life. The interpretation, given in its salient points, of the record of the O. T., and of the training of Israel, is a prophetic light for the interpretation of the history of mankind.
XI. HISTORY AND AUTHORSHIP OF THE EPISTLE
In discussing the history of any one of the writings of the New Testament it is necessary to bear in mind the narrow range of the scanty remains of the earliest Christian literature, and the little scope which they offer for definite references to particular Books. It might perhaps have been