20).] One circumstance, moreover, which strongly proves that the discourses given us by the fourth Gospel are not historical, but compositions intended to cover with the authority of Jesus certain doctrines dear to the compiler, is their perfect harmony with the intellectual state of Asia Minor at the time when they were written.

Asia Minor was then the theatre of a strange movement of syncretical philosophy; all the germs of Gnosticism existed there already.

John appears to have drunk deeply from these strange springs.

It may be that, after the crisis of the year 68 (the date of the Apocalypse) and of the year 70 (the destruction of Jerusalem), the old apostle, with an ardent and plastic spirit, disabused of the belief in a near appearance of the Son of Man in the clouds, may have inclined toward the ideas that he found around him, of which several agreed sufficiently well with certain Christian doctrines.

In attributing these new ideas to Jesus, he only followed a very natural tendency.