Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, "Jevons, Stanley" to "Joint" / Volume 15, Slice 4 Papyras Classics

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Chapter 3

Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, "Jevons, Stanley" to "Joint" (part 3)

After this expression of faith Job’s mind remains calm, though he ends by firmly charging God with perverting his right, and demanding to know the cause of his afflictions (xxvii. 2 seq.; xxxi. 35, where render: “Oh, that I had the indictment which mine adversary has written!”). In answer to this demand the Divine voice answers Job out of the tempest: “Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge?” The word “counsel” intimates to Job that God does not act without a design, large and beyond the comprehension of man; and to impress this is the purpose of the Divine speeches. The speaker does not enter into Job’s particular cause; there is not a word tending to unravel his riddle; his mind is drawn away to the wisdom and majesty of God Himself. His own words and those of his friends are but re-echoed, but it is God Himself who now utters them. Job is in immediate nearness to the majesty of heaven, wise, unfathomable, ironical over the littleness of man, and he is abased; God Himself effects what neither the man’s own thoughts of God nor the representations of his friends could accomplish, though by the same means. The religious insight of the writer sounds here the profoundest deeps of truth.

Integrity.—Doubts whether particular portions of the present book belonged to the original form of it have been raised by many. M. L. De Wette expressed himself as follows: “It appears to us that the present book of Job has not all flowed from one pen. As many books of the Old Testament have been several times written over, so has this also” (Ersch and Gruber, Ency., sect. ii. vol. viii.). The judgment formed by De Wette has been adhered to more or less by most of those who have studied the book. Questions regarding the unity of such books as this are difficult to settle; there is not unanimity among scholars regarding the idea of the book, and consequently they differ as to what parts are in harmony or conflict with unity; and it is dangerous to apply modern ideas of literary composition and artistic unity to the works of antiquity and of the East. The problem raised in the book of Job has certainly received frequent treatment in the Old Testament; and there is no likelihood that all efforts in this direction have been preserved to us. It is probable that the book of Job was but a great effort amidst or after many smaller. It is scarcely to be supposed that one with such poetic and literary power as the author of chap. iii-xxxi., xxxviii.-xli. would embody the work of any other writer in his own. If there be elements in the book which must be pronounced foreign, they have been inserted in the work of the author by a later hand. It is not unlikely that our present book may, in addition to the great work of the original author, contain some fragments of the thoughts of other religious minds upon the same question, and that these, instead of being loosely appended, have been fitted into the mechanism of the first work. Some of these fragments may have originated at first quite independently of our book, while others may be expansions and insertions that never existed separately. At the same time it is scarcely safe to throw out any portion of the book merely because it seems to us out of harmony with the unity of the main part of the poem, or unless several distinct lines of consideration conspire to point it out as an extraneous element.

The arguments against the originality of the prologue—as, that it is written in prose, that the name Yahweh appears in it, that sacrifice is referred to, and that there are inconsistencies between it and the body of the book—are of little weight. There must have been some introduction to the poem explaining the circumstances of Job, otherwise the poetical dispute would have been unintelligible, for it is improbable that the story of Job was so familiar that a poem in which he and his friends figured as they do here would have been understood. And there is no trace of any other prologue or introduction having ever existed. The prologue, too, is an essential element of the work, containing the author’s positive contribution to the doctrine of suffering, for which the discussion in the poem prepares the way. The intermixture of prose and poetry is common in Oriental works containing similar discussions; the reference to sacrifice is to primitive not to Mosaic sacrifice; and the author, while using the name Yahweh freely himself, puts the patriarchal Divine names into the mouth of Job and his friends because he regards them as belonging to the patriarchal age and to a country outside of Israel. That the observance of this rule had a certain awkwardness for the writer appears perhaps from his allowing the name Yahweh to slip in once or twice (xii. 9, cf. xxviii. 28) in familiar phrases in the body of the poem. The discrepancies, such as Job’s references to his children as still alive (xix. 17, the interpretation is doubtful), and to his servants, are trivial, and even if real imply nothing in a book admittedly poetical and not historical. The objections to the epilogue are equally unimportant—as that the Satan is not mentioned in it, and that Job’s restoration is in conflict with the main idea of the poem—that earthly felicity does not follow righteousness. The epilogue confirms the teaching of the poem when it gives the divine sanction to Job’s doctrine regarding God in opposition to that of the friends (xlii. 7). And it is certainly not the intention of the poem to teach that earthly felicity does not follow righteousness; its purpose is to correct the exclusiveness with which the friends of Job maintained that principle. The Satan is introduced in the prologue, exercising his function as minister of God in heaven; but it is to misinterpret wholly the doctrine of evil in the Old Testament to assign to the Satan any such personal importance or independence of power as that he should be called before the curtain to receive the hisses that accompany his own discomfiture. The Satan, though he here appears with the beginnings of a malevolent will of his own, is but the instrument of the sifting providence of God. His work was to try; that done he disappears, his personality being too slight to have any place in the result.

Much graver are the suspicions that attach to the speeches of Elihu. Most of those who have studied the book carefully hold that this part does not belong to the original cast, but has been introduced at a considerably later time. The piece is one of the most interesting parts of the book; both the person and the thoughts of Elihu are marked by a strong individuality. This individuality has indeed been very diversely estimated. The ancients for the most part passed a very severe judgment on Elihu: he is a buffoon, a boastful youth whose shallow intermeddling is only to be explained by the fewness of his years, the incarnation of folly, or even the Satan himself gone a-mumming. Some moderns on the other hand have regarded him as the incarnation of the voice of God or even of God himself. The main objections to the connexion of the episode of Elihu with the original book are: that the prologue and epilogue know nothing of him; that on the cause of Job’s afflictions he occupies virtually the same position as the friends; that his speeches destroy the dramatic effect of the divine manifestation by introducing a lengthened break between Job’s challenge and the answer of God; that the language and style of the piece are marked by an excessive mannerism, too great to have been created by the author of the rest of the poem; that the allusions to the rest of the book are so minute as to betray a reader rather than a hearer; and that the views regarding sin, and especially the scandal given to the author by the irreverence of Job, indicate a religious advance which marks a later age. The position taken by Elihu is almost that of a critic of the book. Regarding the origin of afflictions he is at one with the friends, although he dwells more on the general sinfulness of man than on actual sins, and his reprobation of Job’s position is even greater than theirs. His anger was kindled against Job because he made himself righteous before God, and against his friends because they found no answer to Job. His whole object is to refute Job’s charge of injustice against God. What is novel in Elihu, therefore, is not his position but his arguments. These do not lack cogency, but betray a kind of thought different from that of the friends. Injustice in God, he argues, can only arise from selfishness in Him; but the very existence of creation implies unselfish love on God’s part, for if He thought only of Himself, He would cease actively to uphold creation, and it would fall into death. Again, without justice mere earthly rule is impossible; how then is injustice conceivable in Him who rules over all? It is probable that the original author found his three interlocutors a sufficient medium for expression, and that this new speaker is the creation of another. To a devout and thoughtful reader of the original book, belonging perhaps to a more reverential age, it appeared that the language and bearing of Job had scarcely been sufficiently reprobated by the original speakers, and that the religious reason, apart from any theophany, could suggest arguments sufficient to condemn such demeanour on the part of any man. (For an able though hardly convincing argument for the originality of the discourses of Elihu see Budde’s Commentary.)

It is more difficult to come to a decision in regard to some other portions of the book, particularly ch. xxvii. 7-xxviii. In the latter part of ch. xxvii. Job seems to go over to the camp of his opponents, and expresses sentiments in complete contradiction to his former views. Hence some have thought the passage to be the missing speech of Zophar. Others, as Hitzig, believe that Job is parodying the ideas of the friends; while others, like Ewald, consider that he is recanting his former excesses, and making such a modification as to express correctly his views on evil. None of these opinions is quite satisfactory, though the last probably expresses the view with which the passage was introduced, whether it be original or not. The meaning of ch. xxviii. can only be that “Wisdom,” that is, a theoretical comprehension of providence, is unattainable by man, whose only wisdom is the fear of the Lord or practical piety. But to bring Job to the feeling of this truth was just the purpose of the theophany and the divine speeches; and, if Job had reached it already through his own reflection, the theophany becomes an irrelevancy. It is difficult, therefore, to find a place for these two chapters in the original work. The hymn on Wisdom is a most exquisite poem, which probably originated separately, and was brought into our book with a purpose similar to that which suggested the speeches of Elihu. Objections have also been raised to the descriptions of leviathan and behemoth (ch. xl. 15-xli.). Regarding these it may be enough to say that in meaning these passages are in perfect harmony with other parts of the Divine words, although there is a breadth and detail in the style unlike the sharp, short, ironical touches otherwise characteristic of this part of the poem. (Other longer passages, the originality of which has been called into question, are: xvii. 8 seq.; xxi. 16-18; xxii. 17 seq.; xxiii. 8 seq.; xxiv. 9, 18-24; xxvi. 5-14. On these see the commentaries.)

Date.—The age of such a book as Job, dealing only with principles and having no direct references to historical events can be fixed only approximately. Any conclusion can be reached only by an induction founded on matters which do not afford perfect certainty, such as the comparative development of certain moral ideas in different ages, the pressing claims of certain problems for solution at particular epochs of the history of Israel, and points of contact with other writings of which the age may with some certainty be determined. The Jewish tradition that the book is Mosaic, and the idea that it is a production of the desert, written in another tongue and translated into Hebrew, want even a shadow of probability. The book is a genuine outcome of the religious life and thought of Israel, the product of a religious knowledge and experience that were possible among no other people. That the author lays the scene of the poem outside his own nation and in the patriarchal age is a proceeding common to him with other dramatic writers, who find freer play for their principles in a region removed from the present, where they are not hampered by the obtrusive forms of actual life, but are free to mould occurrences into the moral form that their ideas require.

It is the opinion of some scholars, e.g. Delitzsch, that the book belongs to the age of Solomon. It cannot be earlier than this age, for Job (vii. 17) travesties the ideas of Ps. viii. in a manner which shows that this hymn was well known. To infer the date from a comparison of literary coincidences and allusions is however a very delicate operation. For, first, owing to the unity of thought and language which pervades the Old Testament, in which, regarded merely as a national literature, it differs from all other national literatures, we are apt to be deceived, and to take mere similarities for literary allusions and quotations; and, secondly, even when we are sure that there is dependence, it is often uncommonly difficult to decide which is the original source. The reference to Job in Ezek. xiv. 14 is not to our book, but to the man (a legendary figure) who was afterwards made the hero of it. The affinities on the other hand between Job and Isa. xl.-lv. are very close. The date, however, of this part of Isaiah is uncertain, though it cannot have received its final form, if it be composite, long before the return. Between Job iii. and Jer. xx. 14 seq. there is, again, certainly literary connexion. But the judgment of different minds differs on the question which passage is dependent on the other. The language of Jeremiah, however, has a natural pathos and genuineness of feeling in it, somewhat in contrast with the elaborate poetical finish of Job’s words, which might suggest the originality of the former.

The tendency among recent scholars is to put the book of Job not earlier than the 5th century B.C. There are good reasons for putting it in the 4th century. It stands at the beginning of the era of Jewish philosophical inquiry—its affinities are with Proverbs, Ecclesiasticus, Ecclesiastes, and the Wisdom of Solomon, a body of writings that belongs to the latest period of pre-Christian Jewish literary development (see Wisdom Literature). Its points of connexion with Isa. xl.-lv. relate only to the problem of the suffering of the righteous, and that it is later than the Isaiah passage appears from the fact that this latter is national and ritual in scope, while Job is universal and ethical.

The book of Job is not literal history, though it reposes on historical tradition. To this tradition belong probably the name of Job and his country, and the names of his three friends, and perhaps also many other details impossible to specify particularly. The view that the book is entirely a literary creation with no basis in historical tradition is as old as the Talmud (Baba Bathra, xv. 1), in which a rabbi is cited who says: Job was not, and was not created, but is an allegory. This view is supported by Hengstenberg and others. But pure poetical creations on so extensive a scale are not probable in the East and at so early an age.

Author.—The author of the book is wholly unknown. The religious life of Israel was at certain periods very intense, and at those times the spiritual energy of the nation expressed itself almost impersonally, through men who forgot themselves and were speedily forgotten in name by others. Hitzig conjectures that the author was a native of the north on account of the free criticism of providence which he allows himself. Others, on account of some affinities with the prophet Amos, infer that he belonged to the south of Judah, and this is supposed to account for his intimate acquaintance with the desert. Ewald considers that he belonged to the exile in Egypt, on account of his minute acquaintance with that country. But all these conjectures localize an author whose knowledge was not confined to any locality, who was a true child of the East and familiar with life and nature in every country there, who was at the same time a true Israelite and felt that the earth was the Lord’s and the fullness thereof, and whose sympathies and thought took in all God’s works.

Literature.—Commentaries by Ewald (1854); Renan (1859); Delitzsch (1864); Zöckler in Lange’s Bibelwerk (1872); F. C. Cook in Speaker’s Comm. (1880); A. B. Davidson in Cambridge Bible (1884); Dillmann (1891); K. Budde (1896); Duhm (1897). See also Hoekstra, “Job de Knecht van Jehovah” in Theol. Tijdschr. (1871), and, in reply, A. Kuenen, “Job en de leidende Knecht van Jahveh,” ibid. (1873); C. H. H. Wright in Bib. Essays (1886); G. G. Bradley, Lects. on Job (2nd ed., 1888); Cheyne, Job and Solomon (1887); Dawson, Wisd. Lit. (1893); D. B. Macdonald, “The Original Form of the Legend of Job” in Journ. Bib. Lit. (1895); E. Hatch, Essays in Bib. Gk. (1889); A. Dillmann, in Trans. of Roy. Pruss. Acad. (1890).

(A. B. D., C. H. T.*)


Exceptions must be made in the cases of Esther and the Song of Songs, which do not mention God, and the original writer in Ecclesiastes who is a philosopher.

This remarkable passage reads thus: “But I know that my redeemer liveth, and afterwards he shall arise upon the dust, and after my skin, even this body, is destroyed, without my flesh shall I see God; whom I shall see for myself, and mine eyes shall behold, and not as a stranger; my reins within me are consumed with longing.” The redeemer who liveth and shall arise or stand upon the earth is God whom he shall see with his own eyes, on his side. The course of exegesis was greatly influenced by the translation of Jerome, who, departing from the Itala, rendered: “In novissimo die de terra surrecturus sum ... et rursum circumdabor pelle mea et in carne mea videbo deum meum.” The only point now in question is whether: (a) Job looks for this manifestation of God to him while he is still alive, or (b) after death, and therefore in the sense of a spiritual vision and union with God in another life; that is, whether the words “destroyed” and “without my flesh” are to be taken relatively only, of the extremest effects of his disease upon him, or literally, of the separation of the body in death. A third view which assumes that the words rendered “without my flesh,” which run literally, “out of my flesh,” mean looking out from my flesh, that is, clothed with a new body, and finds the idea of resurrection repeated, perhaps imports more into the language than it will fairly bear. In favour of (b) may be adduced the persistent refusal of Job throughout to entertain the idea of a restoration in this life: the word “afterwards”; and perhaps the analogy of other passages where the same situation appears, as Ps. xlix. and lxxiii., although the actual dénouement of the tragedy supports (a). The difference between the two senses is not important, when the Old Testament view of immortality is considered. To the Hebrew the life beyond was not what it is to us, a freedom from sin and sorrow and admission to an immediate divine fellowship not attainable here. To him the life beyond was at best a prolongation of the life here; all he desired was that his fellowship with God here should not be interrupted in death, and that Sheol, the place into which deceased persons descended and where they remained, cut off from all life with God, might be overleapt. On this account the theory of Ewald, which throws the centre of gravity of the book into this passage in ch. xix., considering its purpose to be to teach that the riddles of this life shall be solved and its inequalities corrected in a future life, appears one-sided. The point of the passage does not lie in any distinction which it draws between this life and a future life; it lies in the assurance which Job expresses that God, who even now knows his innocence, will vindicate it in the future, and that, though estranged now, He will at last take him to His heart.

JOBST, or Jodocus (c. 1350-1411), margrave of Moravia, was a son of John Henry of Luxemburg, margrave of Moravia, and grandson of John, the blind king of Bohemia. He became margrave of Moravia on his father’s death in 1375, and his clever and unscrupulous character enabled him to amass a considerable amount of wealth, while his ambition led him into constant quarrels with his brother Procop, his cousins, the German king Wenceslaus and Sigismund, margrave of Brandenburg, and others. By taking advantage of their difficulties he won considerable power, and the record of his life is one of warfare and treachery, followed by broken promises and transitory reconciliations. In 1385 and 1388 he purchased Brandenburg from Sigismund, and the duchy of Luxemburg from Wenceslaus; and in 1397 he also became possessed of upper and lower Lusatia. For some time he had entertained hopes of the German throne and had negotiated with Wenceslaus and others to this end. When, however, King Rupert died in 1410 he maintained at first that there was no vacancy, as Wenceslaus, who had been deposed in 1400, was still king; but changing his attitude, he was chosen German king at Frankfort on the 1st of October 1410 in opposition to Sigismund, who had been elected a few days previously. Jobst however was never crowned, and his death on the 17th of January 1411 prevented hostilities between the rival kings.

See F. M. Pelzel, Lebensgeschichte des römischen und böhmischen Königs Wenceslaus (1788-1790); J. Heidemann, Die Mark Brandenburg unter Jobst von Mähren (1881); J. Aschbach, Geschichte Kaiser Sigmunds (1838-1845); F. Palacky, Geschichte von Böhmen, iii. (1864-1874); and T. Lindner, Geschichte des Deutschen Reiches vom Ende des 14 Jahrhunderts bis zur Reformation, i. (1875-1880).

JOB’S TEARS, in botany, the popular name for Coix Lachryma-Jobi, a species of grass, of the tribe maydeae, which also includes the maize (see Grasses). The seeds, or properly fruits, are contained singly in a stony involucre or bract, which does not open until the enclosed seed germinates. The young involucre surrounds the female flower and the stalk supporting the spike of male flowers, and when ripe has the appearance of bluish-white porcelain. Being shaped somewhat like a large drop of fluid, the form has suggested the name. The fruits are esculent, but the involucres are the part chiefly used, for making necklaces and other ornaments. The plant is a native of India, but is now widely spread throughout the tropical zone. It grows in marshy places; and is cultivated in China, the fruit having a supposed value as a diuretic and anti-phthisic. It was cultivated by John Gerard, author of the famous Herball, at the end of the 16th century as a tender annual.

JOCASTA, or Iocasta (Ἰοκάστη; in Homer, Ἐπικάστη), in Greek legend, wife of Laïus, mother (afterwards wife) of Oedipus (q.v.), daughter of Menoeceus, sister (or daughter) of Creon. According to Homer (Od. xi. 271) and Sophocles (Oed. Tyr. 1241), on learning that Oedipus was her son she immediately hanged herself; but in Euripides (Phoenissae, 1455) she stabs herself over the bodies of her sons Eteocles and Polynices, who had slain each other in single combat before the walls of Thebes.

JOCKEY, a professional rider of race-horses, now the current usage (see Horse-racing). The word is by origin a diminutive of “Jock,” the Northern or Scots colloquial equivalent of the name “John” (cf. Jack). A familiar instance of the use of the word as a name is in “Jockey of Norfolk” in Shakespeare’s Richard III. v. 3, 304. In the 16th and 17th centuries the word was applied to horse-dealers, postilions, itinerant minstrels and vagabonds, and thus frequently bore the meaning of a cunning trickster, a “sharp,” whence “to jockey,” to outwit, or “do” a person out of something. The current usage is found in John Evelyn’s Diary, 1670, when it was clearly well known. George Borrow’s attempt to derive the word from the gipsy chukni, a heavy whip used by horse-dealing gipsies, has no foundation.

JODELLE, ÉTIENNE, seigneur de Limodin (1532-1573), French dramatist and poet, was born in Paris of a noble family. He attached himself to the poetic circle of the Pléiade (see Daurat) and proceeded to apply the principles of the reformers to dramatic composition. Jodelle aimed at creating a classical drama that should be in every respect different from the moralities and soties that then occupied the French stage. His first play, Cléopâtre captive, was represented before the court at Reims in 1552. Jodelle himself took the title rôle, and the cast included his friends Remy Belleau and Jean de la Péruse. In honour of the play’s success the friends organized a little fête at Arcueil when a goat garlanded with flowers was led in procession and presented to the author—a ceremony exaggerated by the enemies of the Ronsardists into a renewal of the pagan rites of the worship of Bacchus. Jodelle wrote two other plays. Eugène, a comedy satirizing the superior clergy, had less success than it deserved. Its preface poured scorn on Jodelle’s predecessors in comedy, but in reality his own methods are not so very different from theirs. Didon se sacrifiant, a tragedy which follows Virgil’s narrative, appears never to have been represented. Jodelle died in poverty in July 1573. His works were collected the year after his death by Charles de la Mothe. They include a quantity of miscellaneous verse dating chiefly from Jodelle’s youth. The intrinsic value of his tragedies is small. Cléopâtre is lyric rather than dramatic. Throughout the five acts of the piece nothing actually happens. The death of Antony is announced by his ghost in the first act; the story of Cleopatra’s suicide is related, but not represented, in the fifth. Each act is terminated by a chorus which moralizes on such subjects as the inconstancy of fortune and the judgments of heaven on human pride. But the play was the starting-point of French classical tragedy, and was soon followed by the Médée (1553) of Jean de la Péruse and the Aman (1561) of André de Rivaudeau. Jodelle was a rapid worker, but idle and fond of dissipation. His friend Ronsard said that his published poems gave no adequate idea of his powers.

Jodelle’s works are collected (1868) in the Pléiade française of Charles Marty-Laveaux. The prefatory notice gives full information of the sources of Jodelle’s biography, and La Mothe’s criticism is reprinted in its entirety.

JODHPUR, or Marwar, a native state of India, in the Rajputana agency. Area, 34,963 sq. m. Pop. (1901), 1,935,565, showing a decrease of 23% in the decade, due to the results of famine. Estimated revenue, £373,600; tribute, £14,000. The general aspect of the country is that of a sandy plain, divided into two unequal parts by the river Lūni, and dotted with picturesque conical hills, attaining in places an elevation of 3000 ft. The river Lūni is the principal feature in the physical aspects of Jodhpur. One of its head-streams rises in the sacred lake of Pushkar in Ajmere, and the main river flows through Jodhpur in a south-westerly direction till it is finally lost in the marshy ground at the head of the Runn of Cutch. It is fed by numerous tributaries and occasionally overflows its banks, fine crops of wheat and barley being grown on the saturated soil. Its water is, as a rule, saline or brackish, but comparatively sweet water is obtained from wells sunk at a distance of 20 or 30 yds. from the river bank. The famous salt-lake of Sambhar is situated on the borders of Jodhpur and Jaipur, and two smaller lakes of the same description lie within the limits of the state, from which large quantities of salt are extracted. Marble is mined in the north of the state and along the south-east border.

The population consists of Rathor Rājputs (who form the ruling class), Brāhmans, Charans, Bhāts, Mahajans or traders, and Jāts. The Charans, a sacred race, hold large religious grants of land, and enjoy peculiar immunities as traders in local produce. The Bhāts are by profession genealogists, but also engage in trade. Mārwāri traders are an enterprising class to be found throughout the length and breadth of India.

The principal crops are millets and pulses, but wheat and barley are largely produced in the fertile tract watered by the Lūni river. The manufactures comprise leather boxes and brass utensils; and turbans and scarfs and a description of embroidered silk knotted thread are specialities of the country.

The Mahārājā belongs to the Rathor clan of Rājputs. The family chronicles relate that after the downfall of the Rathor dynasty of Kanauj in 1194, Sivajī, the grandson of Jāi Chānd, the last king of Kanauj, entered Mārwār on a pilgrimage to Dwarka, and on halting at the town of Pāli he and his followers settled there to protect the Brāhman community from the constant raids of marauding bands. The Rathor chief thus laid the foundation of the state, but it was not till the time of Rāo Chānda, the tenth in succession from Sivajī, that Mārwār was actually conquered. His grandson Jodha founded the city of Jodhpur, which he made his capital. In 1561 the country was invaded by Akbar, and the chief was forced to submit, and to send his son as a mark of homage to take service under the Mogul emperor. When this son Udāi Singh succeeded to the chiefship, he gave his sister Jodhbāi in marriage to Akbar, and was rewarded by the restoration of most of his former possessions. Udāi Singh’s son, Gaj Singh, held high service under Akbar, and conducted successful expeditions in Gujarat and the Deccan. The bigoted and intolerant Aurangzeb invaded Mārwār in 1679, plundered Jodhpur, sacked all the large towns, and commanded the conversion of the Rathors to Mahommedanism. This cemented all the Rājput clans into a bond of union, and a triple alliance was formed by the three states of Jodhpur, Udāipur and Jaipur, to throw off the Mahommedan yoke. One of the conditions of this alliance was that the chiefs of Jodhpur and Jaipur should regain the privilege of marriage with the Udāipur family, which they had forfeited by contracting alliances with the Mogul emperors, on the understanding that the offspring of Udāipur princesses should succeed to the state in preference to all other children. The quarrels arising from this stipulation lasted through many generations, and led to the invitation of Mahratta help from the rival aspirants to power, and finally to the subjection of all the Rājput states to the Mahrattās. Jodhpur was conquered by Sindhia, who levied a tribute of £60,000, and took from it the fort and town of Ajmere. Internecine disputes and succession wars disturbed the peace of the early years of the century, until in January 1818 Jodhpur was taken under British protection. In 1839 the misgovernment of the rājā led to an insurrection which compelled the interference of the British. In 1843, the chief having died without a son, and without having adopted an heir, the nobles and state officials were left to select a successor from the nearest of kin. Their choice fell upon Rājā Takht Sinh, chief of Ahmednagar. This chief, who did good service during the Mutiny, died in 1873. Mahārajā Jaswant Singh, who died in 1896, was a very enlightened ruler. His brother, Sir Pertab Singh (q.v.), conducted the administration until his nephew, Sardar Singh, came of age in 1898. The imperial service cavalry formed part of the reserve brigade during the Tirah campaign.

The state maintains a railway running to Bikanir, and there is also a branch railway into Sind. Gold, silver and copper money is coined. The state emblems are a jhar or sprig of seven branches and a khanda or sword. Jodhpur practically escaped the plague, but it suffered more severely than any other part of Rajputana from the famine of 1899-1900. In February 1900 more than 110,000 persons were in receipt of famine relief.

The city of Jodhpur is 64 m. by rail N.W. of Mārwār junction, on the Rajputana railway. Pop. (1901), 60,437. It was built by Rāo Jodha in 1459, and from that time has been the seat of government. It is surrounded by a strong wall nearly 6 m. in extent, with seventy gates. The fort, which stands on an isolated rock, contains the mahārājā’s palace, a large and handsome building, completely covering the crest of the hill on which it stands, and overlooking the city, which lies several hundred feet below. The city contains palaces of the mahārājā, and town residences of the thākurs or nobles, besides numerous fine temples and tanks. Building stone is plentiful and close at hand, and the architecture is solid and handsome. Three miles north of Jodhpur are the ruins of Mandor, the site of the ancient capital of the Parihar princes of Mārwār, before its conquest by the Rathors. Mills for grinding flour and crushing grain have been constructed for the imperial service troops. The Jaswant college is affiliated to the B.A. standard of the Allahabad university. To the Hewson hospital a wing for eye diseases was added in 1898, and the Jaswant hospital for women is under an English lady doctor.

JOEL. The second book among the minor prophets in the Bible is entitled The word of Yahweh that came to Joel the son of Pethuel, or, as the Septuagint, Latin, Syriac and other versions read, Bethuel. Nothing is recorded as to the date or occasion of the prophecy. Most Hebrew prophecies contain pointed references to the foreign politics and social relations of the nation at the time. In the book of Joel there are only scanty allusions to Phoenicians, Philistines, Egypt and Edom, couched in terms applicable to very different ages, while the prophet’s own people are exhorted to repentance without specific reference to any of those national sins of which other prophets speak. The occasion of the prophecy, described with great force of rhetoric, is no known historical event, but a plague of locusts, perhaps repeated in successive seasons; and even here there are features in the description which have led many expositors to seek an allegorical interpretation. The most remarkable part of the book is the eschatological picture with which it closes; and the way in which the plague of locusts appears to be taken as foreshadowing the final judgment—the great day or assize of Yahweh, in which Israel’s enemies are destroyed—is so unique as greatly to complicate the exegetical problem. It is not therefore surprising that the most various views are still held as to the date and meaning of the book. Allegorists and literalists still contend over the first and still more over the second chapter, and, while the largest number of recent interpreters accept Credner’s view that the prophecy was written in the reign of Joash of Judah (835-796 B.C.?), a powerful school of critics (including A. B. Davidson) follow the view suggested by Vatke (Bib. Theol. p. 462 seq.), and reckon Joel among the post-exile prophets. Other scholars give yet other dates: see the particulars in the elaborate work of Merx. The followers of Credner are literalists; the opposite school of moderns includes some literalists (as Duhm), while others (like Hilgenfeld, and in a modified sense Merx) adopt the old allegorical interpretation which treats the locusts as a figure for the enemies of Jerusalem.

There are cogent reasons for placing Joel either earlier or later than the great series of prophets extending from the time when Amos first proclaimed the approach of the Assyrian down to the Babylonian exile. In Joel the enemies of Israel are the nations collectively, and among those specified by name neither Assyria nor Chaldaea finds a place. This circumstance might, if it stood alone, be explained by placing Joel with Zephaniah in the brief interval between the decline of the empire of Nineveh and the advance of the Babylonians. But it is further obvious that Joel has no part in the internal struggle between spiritual Yahweh-worship and idolatry which occupied all the prophets from Amos to the captivity. He presupposes a nation of Yahweh-worshippers, whose religion has its centre in the temple and priesthood of Zion, which is indeed conscious of sin, and needs forgiveness and an outpouring of the Spirit, but is not visibly divided, as the kingdom of Judah was between the adherents of spiritual prophecy and a party whose national worship of Yahweh involved for them no fundamental separation from the surrounding nations. The book, therefore, must have been written before the ethico-spiritual and the popular conceptions of Yahweh came into conscious antagonism, or else after the fall of the state and the restoration of the community of Jerusalem to religious rather than political existence had decided the contest in favour of the prophets, and of the Law in which their teaching was ultimately crystallized.

The considerations which have given currency to an early date for Joel are of various kinds. The absence of all mention of one great oppressing world-power seems most natural before the westward march of Assyria involved Israel in the general politics of Asia. The purity of the style is also urged, and a comparison of Amos i. 2, Joel iii. 16 (Heb. iv. 16), and Amos ix. 13, Joel iii. 18 (iv. 18), has been taken as proving that Amos knew our book. The last argument might be inverted with much greater probability, and numerous points of contact between Joel and other parts of the Old Testament (e.g. Joel ii. 2, Exod. x. 14; Joel ii. 3, Ezek. xxxvi. 35; Joel iii. 10, Mic. iv. 3) make it not incredible that the purity of his style—which is rather elegant than original and strongly marked—is in large measure the fruit of literary culture. The absence of allusion to a hostile or oppressing empire may be fairly taken in connexion with the fact that the prophecy gives no indication of political life at Jerusalem. When the whole people is mustered in ch. i., the elders or sheikhs of the municipality and the priests of the temple are the most prominent figures. The king is not mentioned—which on Credner’s view is explained by assuming that the plague fell in the minority of Joash, when the priest Jehoiada held the reins of power—and the princes, councillors and warriors necessary to an independent state, and so often referred to by the prophets before the exile, are altogether lacking. The nation has only a municipal organization with a priestly aristocracy, precisely the state of things that prevailed under the Persian empire. That the Persians do not appear as enemies of Yahweh and his people is perfectly natural. They were hard masters but not invaders, and under them the enemies of the Jews were their neighbours, just as appears in Joel. Those, however, who place our prophet in the minority of King Joash draw a special argument from the mention of Phoenicians, Philistines and Edomites (iii. 4 seq., 19), pointing to the revolt of Edom under Joram (2 Kings viii. 20) and the incursion of the Philistines in the same reign (2 Chron. xxi. 16, xxii. 1). These were recent events in the time of Joash, and in like manner the Phoenician slave trade in Jewish children is carried back to an early date by the reference in Amos i. 9. This argument is rather specious than sound. Edom’s hostility to Judah was incessant, but the feud reached its full intensity only after the time of Deuteronomy (xxiii. 7), when the Edomites joined the Chaldaeans, drew profit from the overthrow of the Jews, whose land they partly occupied, and exercised barbarous cruelty towards the fugitives of Jerusalem (Obad. passim; Mal. i. 2 seq.; Isa. lxiii.). The offence of shedding innocent blood charged on them by Joel is natural after these events, but hardly so in connexion with the revolt against Joram.

As regards the Philistines, it is impossible to lay much weight on the statement of Chronicles, unsupported as it is by the older history, and in Joel the Philistines plainly stand in one category with the Phoenicians, as slave dealers, not as armed foes. Gaza in fact was a slave emporium as early as the time of Amos (i. 6), and continued so till Roman times.

Thus, if any inference as to date can be drawn from ch. iii., it must rest on special features of the trade in slaves, which was always an important part of the commerce of the Levant. In the time of Amos the slaves collected by Philistines and Tyrians were sold en masse to Edom, and presumably went to Egypt or Arabia. Joel complains that they were sold to the Grecians (Javan, Ionians). It is probable that some Hebrew and Syrian slaves were exported to the Mediterranean coasts from a very early date, and Isa. xi. 11 already speaks of Israelites captive in these districts as well as in Egypt, Ethiopia and the East. But the traffic in this direction hardly became extensive till a later date. In Deut. xxviii. 68, Egypt is still the chief goal of the maritime slave trade, and in Ezek. xxvii. 13 Javan exports slaves to Tyre, not conversely. Thus the allusion to Javan in Joel better suits a later date, when Syrian slaves were in special request in Greece. And the name of Javan is not found in any part of the Old Testament certainly older than Ezekiel. In Joel it seems to stand as a general representative of the distant countries reached by the Mediterranean (in contrast with the southern Arabians, Sabaeans, ch. iii. 8), the farthest nation reached by the fleets of the Red Sea. This is precisely the geographical standpoint of the post-exile author of Gen. x. 4, where (assuming that Elishah = Carthage and Tarshish = Tartessus) Javan includes Carthage and Tartessus.

Finally, the allusion to Egypt in Joel iii. 19 must on Credner’s theory be explained of the invasion of Shishak a century before Joash. From this time down to the last period of the Hebrew monarchy Egypt was not the enemy of Judah.

If the arguments chiefly relied on for an early date are so precarious or can even be turned against their inventors, there are others of an unambiguous kind which make for a date in the Persian period. It appears from ch. iii. 1, 2, that Joel wrote after the exile. The phrase “to bring again the captivity” would not alone suffice to prove this, for it is used in a wide sense, and perhaps means rather to “reverse the calamity,” but the dispersion of Israel among the nations, and the allotment of the Holy Land to new occupants, cannot fairly be referred to any calamity less than that of the captivity. With this the whole standpoint of the prophecy agrees. To Joel Judah and the people of Yahweh are synonyms; northern Israel has disappeared. Now it is true that those who take their view of the history from Chronicles, where the kingdom of Ephraim is always treated as a sect outside the true religion, can reconcile this fact with an early date. But in ancient times it was not so; and under Joash, the contemporary of Elisha, such a limitation of the people of Yahweh is wholly inconceivable. The earliest prophetic books have a quite different standpoint; otherwise indeed the books of northern prophets and historians could never have been admitted into the Jewish canon. Again, the significant fact that there is no mention of a king and princes, but only of sheikhs and priests, has a force not to be invalidated by the ingenious reference of the book to the time of Joash’s minority and the supposed regency of Jehoiada. And the assumption that there was a period before the prophetic conflicts of the 8th century B.C. when spiritual prophecy had unchallenged sway, when there was no gross idolatry or superstition, when the priests of Jerusalem, acting in accord with prophets like Joel, held the same place as heads of a pure worship which they occupied after the exile (cf. Ewald, Propheten, i. 89), is not consistent with history. It rests on the old theory of the antiquity of the Levitical legislation, so that in fact all who place that legislation later than Ezekiel are agreed that the book of Joel is also late. In this connexion one point deserves special notice. The religious significance of the plague of drought and locusts is expressed in ch. i. 9 in the observation that the daily meat and drink offering are cut off, and the token of new blessing is the restoration of this service, ch. ii. 14. In other words, the daily offering is the continual symbol of gracious intercourse between Yahweh and his people and the main office of religion. This conception, which finds its parallel in Dan. viii. 11, xi. 31, xii. 11, is quite in accordance with the later law. But under the monarchy the daily oblation was the king’s private offering, and not till Ezra’s reformation did it become the affair of the community and the central act of national worship (Neh. x. 33 seq.). That Joel wrote not only after the exile but after the work of Ezra and Nehemiah may be viewed as confirmed by the allusions to the walls of Jerusalem in ch. ii. 7, 9. Such is the historical basis which we seem to be able to lay for the study of the exegetical problems of the book.

The style of Joel is clear (which hardly favours an early date), and his language presents peculiarities which are evidences of a late origin. But the structure of the book, the symbolism and the connexion of the prophet’s thoughts have given rise to much controversy. It seems safest to start from the fact that the prophecy is divided into two well-marked sections by ch. ii. 18, 19a. According to the Massoretic vocalization, which is in harmony with the most ancient exegetical tradition as contained in the LXX, these words are historical: “Then the Lord was jealous,... and answered and said unto his people, Behold,” &c. Such is the natural meaning of the words as pointed.

Thus the book falls into two parts. In the first the prophet speaks in his own name, addressing himself to the people in a lively description of a present calamity caused by a terrible plague of locusts which threatens the entire destruction of the country, and appears to be the vehicle of a final consuming judgment (the day of Yahweh). There is no hope save in repentance and prayer; and in ch. ii. 12 the prophet, speaking now for the first time in Yahweh’s name, calls the people to a solemn fast at the sanctuary, and invites the intercession of the priests. The calamity is described in the strongest colours of Hebrew hyperbole, and it seems arbitrary to seek too literal an interpretation of details, e.g. to lay weight on the four names of locusts, or to take ch. i. 20 of a conflagration produced by drought, when it appears from ii. 3 that the ravages of the locusts themselves are compared to those of fire. But when due allowance is made for Eastern rhetoric, there is no occasion to seek in this section anything else than literal locusts. Nay, the allegorical interpretation, which takes the locusts to be hostile invaders, breaks through the laws of all reasonable writing; for the poetical hyperbole which compares the invading swarms to an army (ii. 4 seq.) would be inconceivably lame if a literal army was already concealed under the figure of the locusts. Nor could the prophet so far forget himself in his allegory as to speak of a victorious host as entering the conquered city like a thief (ii. 9). The second part of the book is Yahweh’s answer to the people’s prayer. The answer begins with a promise of deliverance from famine, and of fruitful seasons compensating for the ravages of the locusts. In the new prosperity of the land the union of Yahweh and his people shall be sealed anew, and so the Lord will proceed to pour down further and higher blessings. The aspiration of Moses (Num. xi. 29) and the hope of earlier prophets (Isa. xxxii. 15, lix. 21; Jer. xxxi. 33) shall be fully realized in the outpouring of the Spirit on all the Jews and even upon their servants (Isa. lxi. 5 with lvi. 6, 7); and then the great day of judgment, which had seemed to overshadow Jerusalem in the now averted plague, shall draw near with awful tokens of blood and fire and darkness. But the terrors of that day are not for the Jews but for their enemies. The worshippers of Yahweh on Zion shall be delivered (cf. Obad. v. 17, whose words Joel expressly quotes in ch. ii. 32), and it is their heathen enemies, assembled before Jerusalem to war against Yahweh, who shall be mowed down in the valley of Jehoshaphat (“Yahweh judgeth”) by no human arm, but by heavenly warriors. Thus definitively freed from the profane foot of the stranger (Isa. lii. 1), Jerusalem shall abide a holy city for ever. The fertility of the land shall be such as was long ago predicted in Amos ix. 13, and streams issuing from the Temple, as Ezekiel had described in his picture of the restored Jerusalem (Ezek. xlvii.), shall fertilize the barren Wādi of Acacias. Egypt and Edom, on the other hand, shall be desolate, because they have shed the blood of Yahweh’s innocents. Compare the similar predictions against Edom, Isa. xxxiv. 9 seq. (Mal. i. 3), and against Egypt, Isa. xix. 5 seq., Ezek. xxix. Joel’s eschatological picture appears indeed to be largely a combination of elements from older unfulfilled prophecies. Its central feature, the assembling of the nations to judgment, is already found in Zeph. iii. 8, and in Ezekiel’s prophecy concerning Gog and Magog, where the wonders of fire and blood named in Joel ii. 30 are also mentioned (Ezek. xxxviii. 22). The other physical features of the great day, the darkening of the lights of heaven, are a standing figure of the prophets from Amos v. 6, viii. 9, downwards. It is characteristic of the prophetic eschatology that images suggested by one prophet are adopted by his successors, and gradually become part of the permanent scenery of the last times; and it is a proof of the late date of Joel that almost his whole picture is made up of such features. In this respect there is a close parallelism, extending to minor details, between Joel and the last chapters of Zechariah.

That Joel’s delineation of the final deliverance and glory attaches itself directly to the deliverance of the nation from a present calamity is quite in the manner of the so-called prophetic perspective. But the fact that the calamity which bulks so largely is natural and not political is characteristic of the post-exile period. Other prophets of the same age speak much of dearth and failure of crops, which in Palestine then as now were aggravated by bad government, and were far more serious to a small and isolated community than they could ever have been to the old kingdom. It was indeed by no means impossible that Jerusalem might have been altogether undone by the famine caused by the locusts; and so the conception of these visitants as the destroying army, executing Yahweh’s final judgment, is really much more natural than appears to us at first sight, and does not need to be explained away by allegory. The chief argument relied upon by those who still find allegory at least in ch. ii. is the expression haṣṣephōnī, “the northerner” [if this rendering is correct], in ii. 20. In view of the other points of affinity between Joel and Ezekiel, this word inevitably suggests Gog and Magog, and it is difficult to see how a swarm of locusts could receive such a name, or if they came from the north could perish, as the verse puts it, in the desert between the Mediterranean and the Dead Sea. The verse remains a crux interpretum, and no exegesis hitherto given can be deemed thoroughly satisfactory; but the interpretation of the whole book must not be made to hinge on a single word in a verse which might be altogether removed without affecting the general course of the prophet’s argument.

The whole verse is perhaps the addition of an allegorizing glossator. The prediction in v. 19, that the seasons shall henceforth be fruitful, is given after Yahweh has shown his zeal and pity for Israel, not of course by mere words, but by acts, as appears in verses 20, 21, where the verbs are properly perfects recording that Yahweh hath already done great things, and that vegetation has already revived. In other words, the mercy already experienced in the removal of the plague is taken as a pledge of future grace not to stop short till all God’s old promises are fulfilled. In this context v. 20 is out of place. Observe also that in v. 25 the locusts are spoken of in the plain language of chap. i.

See the separate commentaries on Joel by Credner (1831), Wünsche (1872), Merx (1879). The last-named gives an elaborate history of interpretation from the Septuagint down to Calvin, and appends the Ethiopic text edited by Dillmann. Nowack and Marti should also be consulted (see their respective series of commentaries); also G. A. Smith, in The Book of the Twelve Prophets, vol. i. (1896), and S. R. Driver, Joel and Amos (1897). On the language of Joel, see Holzinger, Z. A. T. W. (1889), pp. 89-131. Of older commentaries the most valuable is Pocock’s (Oxford, 1691). Bochart’s Hierozoïcon may also be consulted.

(W. R. S.; T. K. C.)


In the A.V. of ii. 17 it appears that subjection to a foreign power is not a present fact but a thing feared. But the parallelism and v. 19 justify the rendering in margin of R.V. “use a byword against them.”

The hypothesis of an Arabian Javan, applied to Joel iii. 6 by Credner, Hitzig, and others, may be viewed as exploded (see Stade, “Das Volk Javan,” 1880, reprinted in his Akad. Reden u. Abhandlungen, 1899, pp. 123-142). The question, however, has to be re-examined; later interpreters, e.g. the LXX translators, may have misunderstood. The text of the passages has to be critically treated anew. See Cheyne, Traditions and Beliefs of Ancient Israel (on Gen. x. 2).

Compare Movers, Phönizisches Alterthum, iii. i. 70 seq.

See Ewald on Jer. xlviii. 47, Kuenen, Theol. Tijdschrift (1873), p. 519; Schwally, Z. A. T. W., viii. 200, and Briggs on Ps. xiv. 7.

Stade not unreasonably questions whether 2 Kings xii. 1-3 implies the paramount political influence of Jehoiada.

See Wellhausen, Geschichte Israels, p. 78 seq.; Prolegomena zur Gesch. Israels (1883), p. 82 seq.

It has been suggested that Ṣaphon, which is often rather troublesome if rendered “the north,” may be a weakened form of ṣib’ōn, a current popular corruption of shimo’n = Ishmael. In Ezek. xxxviii. 15 it is distinctly said that Gog is to come from the recesses of Ṣāphōn. “Meshech” and “Tubal” are no hindrance to this view, if the names of the so-called “sons of Japheth” are critically examined. For they, too, as well as Ṣāphōn, can be plausibly shown to represent regions of North Arabia. See Cheyne, Traditions and Beliefs of Anc. Israel, on Gen. x. 2-4.

JOEL, MANUEL (1826-1890), Jewish philosopher and preacher. After teaching for several years at the Breslau rabbinical seminary, founded by Z. Frankel, he became the successor of Abraham Geiger in the rabbinate of Breslau. He made important contributions to the history of the school of Aqiba (q.v.) as well as to the history of Jewish philosophy, his essays on Ibn Gabirol and Maimonides being of permanent worth. But his most influential work was connected with the relations between Jewish philosophy and the medieval scholasticism. He showed how Albertus Magnus derived some of his ideas from Maimonides and how Spinoza was indebted to the same writer, as well as to Hasdai Crescas. These essays were collected in two volumes of Beiträge zur Geschichte der Philosophie (1876), while another two volumes of Blicke in die Religionsgeschichte (1880-1883) threw much light on the development of religious thought in the early centuries of the Christian era. Equally renowned were Joel’s pulpit addresses. Though he was no orator, his appeal to the reason was effective, and in their published form his three volumes of Predigten (issued posthumously) have found many readers.

(I. A.)

JOFFRIN, JULES FRANÇOIS ALEXANDRE (1846-1890), French politician, was born at Troyes on the 16th of March 1846. He served in the Franco-German War, was involved in the Commune, and spent eleven years in England as a political exile. He attached himself to the “possibilist” group of the socialist party, the section opposed to the root-and-branch measures of Jules Guesde. He became a member of the municipal council of Paris in 1882, and vice-president in 1888-1889. Violently attacked by the Boulangist organs, L’Intransigeant and La France, he won a suit against them for libel, and in 1889 he contested the 18th arrondissement of Paris with General Boulanger, who obtained a majority of over 2000 votes, but was declared ineligible. Joffrin was only admitted to the Chamber after a heated discussion, and continued to be attacked by the nationalists. He died in Paris on the 17th of September 1890.

JOGUES, ISAAC (1607-1646), French missionary in North America, was born at Orleans on the 10th of January 1607. He entered the Society of Jesus at Rouen in 1624, and in 1636 was ordained and sent, by his own wish, to the Huron mission. In 1639 he went among the Tobacco Nation, and in 1641 journeyed to Sault Sainte Marie, where he preached to the Algonquins. Returning from an expedition to Three Rivers he was captured by Mohawks, who tortured him and kept him as a slave until the summer of 1643, when, aided by some Dutchmen, he escaped to the manor of Rensselaerwyck and thence to New Amsterdam. After a brief visit to France, where he was treated with high honour, he returned to the Mohawk country in May 1646 and ratified a treaty between that tribe and the Canadian government. Working among them as the founder of the Mission of the Martyrs, he incurred their enmity, was tortured as a sorcerer, and finally killed at Ossernenon, near Auriesville, N.Y.

See Parkman, The Jesuits in North America (1898).

JOḤANAN BEN ZACCAI, Palestinian rabbi, contemporary of the Apostles. He was a disciple of Hillel (q.v.), and after the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem by Titus was the main instrument in the preservation of the Jewish religion. During the last decades of the Temple Joḥanan was a member of the Sanhedrin and a skilled controversialist against the Sadducees. He is also reported to have been head of a great school in the capital. In the war with Rome he belonged to the peace party, and finding that the Zealots were resolved on carrying their revolt to its inevitable sequel, Joḥanan had himself conveyed out of Jerusalem in a coffin. In the Roman camp the rabbi was courteously received, and Vespasian (whose future elevation to the imperial dignity Joḥanan, like Josephus, is said to have foretold) agreed to grant him any boon he desired. Joḥanan obtained permission to found a college at Jamnia (Jabneh), which became the centre of Jewish culture. It practically exercised the judicial functions of the Sanhedrin (see Jews, § 40 ad fin.). That chief literary expression of Pharisaism, the Mishnah, was the outcome of the work begun at Jamnia. Joḥanan solaced his disciples on the fall of the Temple by the double thought that charity could replace sacrifice, and that a life devoted to the religious law could form a fitting continuation of the old theocratic state. “Joḥanan felt the fall of his people more deeply than anyone else, but—and in this lies his historical importance—he did more than any one else to prepare the way for Israel to rise again” (Bacher).

See Graetz, History of the Jews (Eng. trans.), vol. ii. ch. xiii.; Weiss, Dor dor ve-doreshav, ii. 36; Bacher, Die Agada der Tannaiten, vol. i. ch. iii.

(I. A.)

JOHANNESBURG, a city of the Transvaal and the centre of the Rand gold-mining industry. It is the most populous city and the commercial capital of South Africa. It is built on the southern slopes of the Witwatersrand in 26° 11′ S. 28° 2′ E., at an elevation of 5764 ft. above the sea. The distances by rail from Johannesburg to the following seaports are: Lourenço Marques, 364 m.; Durban, 483 m.; East London, 659 m.; Port Elizabeth, 714 m.; Cape Town, 957 m. Pretoria is, by rail, 46 m. N. by E.

The town lies immediately north of the central part of the main gold reef. The streets run in straight lines east and west or north and south. The chief open spaces are Market Square in the west and Government Square in the south of the town. Park railway station lies north of the business quarter, and farther north are the Wanderers’ athletic sports ground and Joubert’s Park. The chief business streets, such as Commissioner Street, Market Street, President Street and Pritchard Street, run east and west. In these thoroughfares and in several of the streets which intersect them are the offices of the mining companies, the banks, clubs, newspaper offices, hotels and shops, the majority being handsome stone or brick buildings, while the survival of some wooden shanties and corrugated iron buildings recalls the early character of the town.

Chief Buildings, &c.—In the centre of Market Square are the market buildings, and at its east end the post and telegraph offices, a handsome block of buildings with a façade 200 ft. long and a tower 106 ft. high. The square itself, a quarter of a mile long, is the largest in South Africa. The offices of the Witwatersrand chamber of mines face the market buildings. The stock exchange is in Marshall Square. The telephone exchange is in the centre of the city, in Von Brandis Square. The law courts are in the centre of Government Square. The Transvaal university college is in Plein Square, a little south of Park station. In the vicinity is St Mary’s (Anglican) parish hall (1905-1907), the first portion of a large building planned to take the place of “Old” St Mary’s Church, the “mother” church of the Rand, built in 1887. The chief Jewish synagogue is in the same neighbourhood. In Kerk Street, on the outskirts of central Johannesburg, is the Roman Catholic Church of the Immaculate Conception, the headquarters of the vicar apostolic of the Transvaal. North of Joubert’s Park is the general hospital, and beyond, near the crest of the hills, commanding the town and the road to Pretoria, is a fort built by the Boer government and now used as a gaol. On the hills, some 3 m. E.N.E. of the town, is the observatory, built in 1903. Johannesburg has several theatres and buildings adapted for public meetings. There is a race-course 2 m. south of the town under the control of the Johannesburg Turf Club.

The Suburbs.—North, east and west of the city proper are suburbs, laid out on the same rectangular plan. The most fashionable are to the east and north—Jeppestown, Belgravia, Doornfontein, the Berea, Hillbrow, Parktown, Yeoville and Bellevue. Braamfontein (with a large cemetery) lies north-west and Fordsburg due west of the city. At Fordsburg are the gas and electric light and power works, and north of Doornfontein there is a large reservoir. There are also on the Rand, and dependent on the gold-mining, three towns possessing separate municipalities—Germiston and Boksburg (q.v.), respectively 9 m. and 15 m. E. of Johannesburg, and Krugersdorp (q.v.), 21 m. W.

The Mines and other Industries.—South, east and west of the city are the gold mines, indicated by tall chimneys, battery houses and the compounds of the labourers. The bare veld is dotted with these unsightly buildings for a distance of over fifty miles. The mines are worked on the most scientific lines. Characteristic of the Rand is the fine white dust arising from the crushing of the ore, and, close to the batteries, the incessant din caused by the stamps employed in that operation. The compounds in general, especially those originally made for Chinese labourers, are well built, comfortable, and fulfil every hygienic requirement. Besides the buildings, the compounds include wide stretches of veld. To enter and remain in the district, Kaffirs require a monthly pass for which the employer pays 2s. (For details of gold-mining, see Gold.) A railway traverses the Rand, going westward past Krugersdorp to Klerksdorp and thence to Kimberley, and eastward past Springs to Delagoa Bay. From Springs, 25 m. E. of Johannesburg, is obtained much of the coal used in the Rand mines.

The mines within the municipal area produce nearly half the total gold output of the Transvaal. The other industries of Johannesburg include brewing; printing and bookbinding, timber sawing, flour milling, iron and brass founding, brick making and the manufacture of tobacco.

Health, Education and Social Conditions.—The elevation of Johannesburg makes it, despite its nearness to the tropics, a healthy place for European habitation. Built on open undulating ground, the town is, however, subject to frequent dust storms and to considerable variations in the temperature. The nights in winter are frosty and snow falls occasionally. The average day temperature in winter is 53° F., in summer 75°; the average annual rainfall is 28 in. The death-rate among white inhabitants averages about 17 per thousand. The principal causes of death, both among the white and coloured inhabitants, are diseases of the lungs—including miners’ phthisis and pneumonia—diarrhoea, dysentery and enteric. The death-rate among young children is very high.

Education is provided in primary and secondary schools maintained by the state. In the primary schools education is free but not compulsory. The Transvaal university college, founded in 1904 as the technical institute (the change of title being made in 1906), provides full courses in science, mining, engineering and law. In 1906 Alfred Beit (q.v.) bequeathed £200,000 towards the cost of erecting and equipping university buildings.

In its social life Johannesburg differs widely from Cape Town and Durban. The white population is not only far larger but more cosmopolitan, less stationary and more dependent on a single industry; it has few links with the past, and both city and citizens bear the marks of youth. The cost of living is much higher than in London or New York. House rent, provisions, clothing, are all very dear, and more than counter-balance the lowness of rates. The customary unit of expenditure is the threepenny-bit or “tickey.”

Sanitary and other Services.—There is an ample supply of water to the town and mines, under a water board representing all the Rand municipalities and the mining companies. A water-borne sewerage system began to be introduced in 1906. The general illuminant is electricity, and both electrical and gas services are owned by the municipality. The tramway service, opened in 1891, was taken over by the municipality in 1904. Up to 1906 the trams were horse-drawn; in that year electric cars began running. Rickshaws are also a favourite means of conveyance. The police force is controlled by the government.

Area, Government and Rateable Value.—The city proper covers about 6 sq. m. The municipal boundary extends in every direction some 5 m. from Market Square, encloses about 82 sq. m. and includes several of the largest mines. The local government is carried on by an elected municipal council, the franchise being restricted to white British subjects (men and women) who rent or own property of a certain value. In 1908 the rateable value of the municipality was £36,466,644, the rate 2¼d. in the £, and the town debt £5,500,000.

Population.—In 1887 the population was about 3000. By the beginning of 1890 it had increased to over 25,000. A census taken in July 1896 showed a population within a radius of 3 m. from Market Square of 102,078, of whom 50,907 were whites. At the census of April 1904 the inhabitants of the city proper numbered 99,022, the population within the municipal area being 155,642, of whom 83,363 were whites. Of the white inhabitants, 35% were of British origin, 51,629 were males, and 31,734 females. Of persons aged sixteen or over, the number of males was almost double the number of females. The coloured population included about 7000 British Indians—chiefly small traders. A municipal census taken in August 1908 gave the following result: whites 95,162; natives and coloured 78,781; Asiatics 6780—total 180,687.

History.—Johannesburg owes its existence to the discovery of gold in the Witwatersrand reefs. The town, named after Johannes Rissik, then surveyor-general of the Transvaal, was founded in September 1886, the first buildings being erected on the part of the reef where are now the Ferreira and Wemmer mines. These buildings were found to cover valuable ore, and in December following the Boer government marked out the site of the city proper, and possession of the plots was given to purchasers on the 1st of January 1887. The exploitation of the mines led to a rapid development of the town during the next three years. The year 1890 was one of great depression following the exhaustion of the surface ore, but the provision of better machinery and cheaper coal led to a revival in 1891. By 1892 the leading mines had proved their dividend-earning capacity, and in 1895 there was a great “boom” in the shares of the mining companies. The linking of the town to the seaports by railways during 1892-1895 gave considerable impetus to the gold-mining industry. Material prosperity was accompanied, however, by political, educational and other disadvantages, and the desire of the Johannesburgers—most of whom were foreigners or “Uitlanders”—to remedy the grievances under which they suffered led, in January 1896, to an abortive rising against the Boer government (see Transvaal: History). One result of this movement was a slight advance in municipal self-government. Since 1887 the management of the town had been entrusted to a nominated sanitary board, under the chairmanship of the mining commissioner appointed by the South African Republic. In 1890 elected members had been admitted to this board, but at the end of 1897 an elective stadsraad (town council) was constituted, though its functions were strictly limited. There was a great development in the mining industry during 1897-1898 and 1899, the value of the gold extracted in 1898 exceeding £15,000,000, but the political situation grew worse, and in September 1899, owing to the imminence of war between the Transvaal and Great Britain, the majority of the Uitlanders fled from the city. Between October 1899, when war broke out, and the 31st of May 1900, when the city was taken by the British, the Boer government worked certain mines for their own benefit. After a period of military administration and of government by a nominated town council, an ordinance was passed in June 1903 providing for elective municipal councils, and in December following the first election to the new council took place. In 1905 the town was divided into wards. In that year the number of municipal voters was 23,338. In 1909 the proportional representation system was adopted in the election of town councillors.

During 1901-1903, while the war was still in progress or but recently concluded, the gold output was comparatively slight. The difficulty in obtaining sufficient labour for the mines led to a successful agitation for the importation of coolies from China (see Transvaal: History). During 1904-1906 over 50,000 coolies were brought to the mines, a greatly increased output being the result, the value of the gold extracted in 1905 exceeding £20,000,000. Notwithstanding the increased production of gold, Johannesburg during 1905-1907 passed through a period of severe commercial depression, the result in part of the unsettled political situation. In June 1907 the repatriation of the Chinese coolies began; it was completed in February 1910.

An excellent compilation, entitled Johannesburg Statistics, dealing with almost every phase of the city’s life, is issued monthly (since January 1905) by the town council. See also the Post Office Directory, Transvaal (Johannesburg, annually), which contains specially prepared maps, and the annual reports of the Johannesburg chamber of commerce. For the political history of Johannesburg, see the bibliography under Transvaal.

JOHANNISBERG, a village of Germany, in the Prussian province of Hesse-Nassau, in the Rheingau, on the right bank of the Rhine, 6 m. S. of Rüdesheim by railway. The place is mainly celebrated for the beautiful Schloss which crowns a hill overlooking the Rhine valley, and is surrounded by vineyards yielding the famous Johannisberger wine. The Schloss, built in 1757-1759 by the abbots of Fulda on the site of a Benedictine monastery founded in 1090, was bestowed, in 1807, by Napoleon upon Marshal Kellermann. In 1814 it was given by Francis, emperor of Austria, to Prince Metternich, in whose family it still remains.

JOHN (Heb. יוחנן), Yōḥānān, “Yahweh has been gracious,” Gr. Ἰωάννης, Lat. Joannes, Ital. Giovanni, Span. Juan, Port. João, Fr. Jean, Ger. Johannes, Johann [abbr. Hans], Gael. Ian, Pol. and Czech Jan, Hung. János), a masculine proper name common in all Christian countries, its popularity being due to its having been borne by the “Beloved Disciple” of Christ, St John the Evangelist, and by the forerunner of Christ, St John the Baptist. It has been the name of twenty-two popes—the style of Popes John XXII. and XXIII. being due to an error in the number assumed by John XXI. (q.v.)—and of many sovereigns, princes, &c. The order followed in the biographical notices below is as follows: (1) the Apostle, (2) the Baptist, (3) popes, (4) Roman emperors, (5) kings; John of England first, the rest in the alphabetical order of their countries, (6) other sovereign princes, (7) non-sovereign princes, (8) saints, (9) theologians, chroniclers, &c. These princes who are known by a name in addition to John (John Albert, &c.) will be found after the article John, Gospel of.

JOHN, the Apostle, in the Bible, was the son of Zebedee, a Galilean fisherman, and Salome. It is probable that he was born at Bethsaida, where along with his brother James he followed his father’s occupation. The family appears to have been in easy circumstances; at least we find that Zebedee employed hired servants, and that Salome was among those women who contributed to the maintenance of Jesus (Mark i. 20, xv. 40, 41, xvi. 1). John’s “call” to follow our Lord occurred simultaneously with that addressed to his brother, and shortly after that addressed to the brothers Andrew and Simon Peter (Mark i. 19, 20). John speedily took his place among the twelve apostles, sharing with James the title of Boanerges (“sons of thunder,” perhaps strictly “sons of anger,” i.e. men readily angered), and became a member of that inner circle to which, in addition to his brother, Peter alone belonged (Mark v. 37, ix. 2, xiv. 33). John appears throughout the synoptic record as a zealous, fiery Jew-Christian. It is he who indignantly complains to Jesus, “We saw one casting out devils in Thy name, and he followeth not us,” and tells Him, “We forbade him” for that reason (Mark ix. 38); and who with his brother, when a Samaritan village will not receive Jesus, asks Him, “Wilt thou that we command fire to come down from heaven and consume them?” (Luke ix. 54). The book of Acts confirms this tradition. After the departure of Jesus, John appears as present in Jerusalem with Peter and the other apostles (i. 13); is next to Peter the most prominent among those who bear testimony to the fact of the resurrection (iii. 12-26, iv. 13, 19-22); and is sent with Peter to Samaria, to confirm the newly converted Christians there (viii. 14, 25). St Paul tells us similarly that when, on his second visit to Jerusalem, “James,” the Lord’s brother, “and Cephas and John, who were considered pillars, perceived the grace that was given unto me, they gave to me and Barnabas the right hand of fellowship, that we should go unto the heathen, and they unto the circumcision” (Gal. ii. 9). John thus belonged in 46-47 to the Jewish-Christian school; but we do not know whether to the stricter group of James or to the milder group of Peter (ibid. ii. 11-14).

The subsequent history of the apostle is obscure. Polycrates, bishop of Ephesus (in Euseb., H. E. iii. 31; v. 24), attests in 196 that John “who lay on the bosom of the Lord rests at Ephesus”; but previously in this very sentence he has declared that “Philip one of the twelve apostles rests in Hierapolis,” although Eusebius (doubtless rightly) identifies this Philip not with the apostle but with the deacon-evangelist of Acts xxi. 8. Polycrates also declares that John was a priest wearing the πέταλον (gold plate) that distinguished the high-priestly mitre. Irenaeus in various passages of his works, 181-191, holds a similar tradition. He says that John lived up to the time of Trajan and published his gospel in Ephesus, and identifies the apostle with John the disciple of the Lord, who wrote the Apocalypse under Domitian, whom Irenaeus’s teacher Polycarp had known personally and of whom Polycarp had much to tell. These traditions are accepted and enlarged by later authors, Tertullian adding that John was banished to Patmos after he had miraculously survived the punishment of immersion in burning oil. As it is evident that legend was busy with John as early as the time of Polycrates, the real worth of these traditions requires to be tested by examination of their ultimate source. This inquiry has been pressed upon scholars since the apostolic authorship of the Apocalypse or of the Fourth Gospel, or of both these works, has been disputed. (See John, Gospel of, and Revelation, Book of.) The question has not been strictly one between advanced and conservative criticism, for the Tübingen school recognized the Apocalypse as apostolic, and found in it a confirmation of John’s residence in Ephesus. On the other hand, Lützelberger (1840), Th. Keim (Jesus v. Naz., vol. i., 1867), J. H. Scholten (1872), H. J. Holtzmann (esp. in Einl. in d. N. T., 3rd ed., 1902), and other recent writers, wholly reject the tradition. It has had able defenders in Steitz (Stud. u. Krit., 1868), Hilgenfeld (Einl., 1875) and Lightfoot (Essays on Supernatural Religion, collected 1889). W. Sanday (Criticism of Fourth Gospel, 1905) makes passing admissions eloquent as to the strength of the negative position; whilst amongst Roman Catholic scholars, A. Loisy (Le 4me. Ev., 1903) stands with Holtzmann, and Th. Calmes (Ev. selon S. Jean, 1904, 1906) and L. Duchesne (Hist. anc. de l’Egl., 1906) exhibit, with papal approbation, the inconclusiveness of the conservative arguments.

The opponents of the tradition lay weight on the absence of positive evidence before the latter part of the 2nd century, especially in Papias and in the epistles of Ignatius and of Irenaeus’s authority, Polycarp. They find it necessary to assume that Irenaeus mistook Polycarp; but this is not a difficult task, since already Eusebius (c. 310-313) is compelled to point out that Papias testifies to two Johns, the Apostle and a presbyter, and that Irenaeus is mistaken in identifying those two Johns, and in holding that Papias had seen John the Apostle (H. E. iii. 39, 5, 2). Irenaeus tells us, doubtless correctly, that Papias was “the companion of Polycarp”: this fact alone would suffice, given his two mistakes concerning Papias, to make Irenaeus decide that Polycarp had seen John the Apostle. The chronicler George the Monk (Hamartolus) in the 9th century, and an epitome dating from the 7th or 8th century but probably based on the Chronicle of Philip of Side (c. 430), declare, on the authority of the second book of Papias, that John the Zebedean was killed by Jews (presumably in 60-70). Adolf Harnack, Chron. d. altchr. Litt. (1897), pp. 656-680), rejects the assertion; but the number of scholars who accept it as correct is distinctly on the increase.

(F. v. H.)

JOHN THE BAPTIST, in the Bible, the “forerunner” of Jesus Christ in the Gospel story. By his preaching and teaching he evidently made a great impression upon his contemporaries (cf. Josephus, Ant. xviii., § 5). According to the birth-narrative embodied in Luke i. and ii., he was born in “a city of Judah” in “the hill country” (possibly Hebron) of priestly parentage. His father Zacharias was a priest “of the course of Abijah,” and his mother Elizabeth, who was also of priestly descent, was related to Mary, the mother of Jesus, whose senior John was by six months. This narrative of the Baptist’s birth seems to embody some very primitive features, Hebraic and Palestinian in character, and possibly at one time independent of the Christian tradition. In the apocryphal gospels John is sometimes made the subject of special miraculous experiences (e.g. in the Protevangelium Jacobi, ch. xxii., where Elizabeth fleeing from Herod’s assassins cried: “Mount of God, receive a mother with her child,” and suddenly the mountain was divided and received her).

In his 30th year (15th year of the emperor Tiberius, ? A.D. 25-26) John began his public life in the “wilderness of Judaea,” the wild district that lies between the Kedron and the Dead Sea, and particularly in the neighbourhood of the Jordan, where multitudes were attracted by his eloquence. The central theme of his preaching was, according to the Synoptic Gospels, the nearness of the coming of the Messianic kingdom, and the consequent urgency for preparation by repentance. John was evidently convinced that he himself had received the divine commission to bring to a close and complete the prophetic period, by inaugurating the Messianic age. He identified himself with the “voice” of Isa. xl. 3. Noteworthy features of his preaching were its original and prophetic character, and its high ethical tone, as shown e.g. in its anti-Pharisaic denunciation of trust in mere racial privilege (Matt. iii. 9). Herein also lay, probably, the true import of the baptism which he administered to those who accepted his message and confessed their sins. It was an act symbolizing moral purification (cf. Ezek. xxxvi. 25; Zech. xiii. 1) by way of preparation for the coming “kingdom of heaven,” and implied that the Jew so baptized no longer rested in his privileged position as a child of Abraham. John’s appearance, costume and habits of life, together with the tone of his preaching, all suggest the prophetic character. He was popularly regarded as a prophet, more especially as a second Elijah. His preaching awoke a great popular response, particularly among the masses of the people, “the people of the land.” He had disciples who fasted (Mark ii. 18, &c.), who visited him regularly in prison (Matt. xi. 2, xiv. 12), and to whom he taught special forms of prayer (Luke v. 33, xi. 1). Some of these afterwards became followers of Christ (John i. 37). John’s activity indeed had far-reaching effects. It profoundly influenced the Messianic movement depicted in the Gospels. The preaching of Jesus shows traces of this, and the Fourth Gospel (as well as the Synoptists) displays a marked interest in connecting the Johannine movement with the beginnings of Christianity. The fact that after the lapse of a quarter of a century there were Christians in Ephesus who accepted John’s baptism (Acts xviii. 25, xix. 3) is highly significant. This influence also persisted in later times. Christ’s estimate of John (Matt. xi. 7 seq.) was a very high one. He also pointedly alludes to John’s work and the people’s relation to it, in many sayings and parables (sometimes in a tone of irony). The duration of John’s ministry cannot be determined with certainty: it terminated in his imprisonment in the fortress of Machaerus, to which he had been committed by Herod Antipas, whose incestuous marriage with Herodias, the Baptist had sternly rebuked. His execution cannot with safety be placed later than A.D. 28.

In the church calendar this event is commemorated on the 29th of August. According to tradition he was buried at Samaria (Theodoret, H. E. iii. 3).

(G. H. Bo.)


There is no reason to suppose that Jutta is intended by the πόλις Ἰούδα of Luke i. 39: the tradition which makes ‘Ain Karim, near Jerusalem, the birthplace of the Baptist only dates from the crusading period.

JOHN I., pope from 523 to 526, was a Tuscan by birth, and was consecrated pope on the death of Hormisdas. In 525 he was sent by Theodoric at the head of an embassy to Constantinople to obtain from the emperor Justin toleration for the Arians; but he succeeded so imperfectly in his mission that Theodoric on his return, suspecting that he had acted only half-heartedly, threw him into prison, where he shortly afterwards died, Felix IV. succeeding him. He was enrolled among the martyrs, his day being May 27.

JOHN II., pope from 533 to 535, also named Mercurius, was elevated to the papal chair on the death of Boniface II. During his pontificate a decree against simony was engraven on marble and placed before the altar of St Peter’s. At the instance of the emperor Justinian he adopted the proposition unus de Trinitate passus est in carne as a test of the orthodoxy of certain Scythian monks accused of Nestorian tendencies. He was succeeded by Agapetus I.

JOHN III., pope from 561 to 574, successor to Pelagius, was descended from a noble Roman family. He is said to have been successful in preventing an invasion of Italy by the recall of the deposed exarch Narses, but the Lombards still continued their incursions, and, especially during the pontificate of his successor Benedict I., inflicted great miseries on the province.

JOHN IV., pope from 640 to 642, was a Dalmatian by birth, and succeeded Severinus after the papal chair had been vacant four months. While he adhered to the repudiation of the Monothelitic doctrine by Severinus, he endeavoured to explain away the connexion of Honorius I. with the heresy. His successor was Theodorus I.

JOHN V., pope from 685 to 686, was a Syrian by birth, and on account of his knowledge of Greek had in 680 been named papal legate to the sixth ecumenical council at Constantinople. He was the successor of Benedict II., and after a pontificate of little more than a year, passed chiefly in bed, was followed by Conon.

JOHN VI., pope from 701 to 705, was a native of Greece, and succeeded to the papal chair two months after the death of Sergius I. He assisted the exarch Theophylact, who had been sent into Italy by the emperor Justinian II., and prevented him from using violence against the Romans. Partly by persuasion and partly by means of a bribe, John succeeded in inducing Gisulf, duke of Benevento, to withdraw from the territories of the empire.

JOHN VII., pope from 705 to 707, successor of John VI., was also of Greek nationality. He seems to have acceded to the request of the emperor Justinian II. that he should give his sanction to the decrees of the Quinisext or Trullan council of 692. There are several monuments of John in the church of St Maria Antiqua at the foot of the Palatine hill; others were formerly in the chapel of the Virgin, built by him in the basilica of St Peter. He was succeeded by Sisinnius.

JOHN VIII., pope from 872 to 882, successor of Adrian II., was a Roman by birth. His chief aim during his pontificate was to defend the Roman state and the authority of the Holy See at Rome from the Saracens, and from the nascent feudalism which was represented outside by the dukes of Spoleto and the marquises of Tuscany and within by a party of Roman nobles. Events, however, were so fatally opposed to his designs that no sooner did one of his schemes begin to realize itself in fact than it was shattered by an unlooked-for chance. To obtain an influential alliance against his enemies, he agreed in 875, after death had deprived him of his natural protector, the emperor Louis II., to bestow the imperial crown on Charles the Bald; but that monarch was too much occupied in France to grant him much effectual aid, and about the time of the death of Charles he found it necessary to come to terms with the Saracens, who were only prevented from entering Rome by the promise of an annual tribute. Carloman, the opponent of Charles’s son Louis, soon after invaded northern Italy, and, securing the support of the bishops and counts, demanded from the pope the imperial crown. John attempted to temporize, but Lambert, duke of Spoleto, a partisan of Carloman, whom sickness had recalled to Germany, entered Rome in 878 with an overwhelming force, and for thirty days virtually held John a prisoner in St Peter’s. Lambert was, however, unsuccessful in winning any concession from the pope, who after his withdrawal carried out a previous purpose of going to France. There he presided at the council of Troyes, which promulgated a ban of excommunication against the supporters of Carloman—amongst others Adalbert of Tuscany, Lambert of Spoleto, and Formosus, bishop of Porto, who was afterwards elevated to the papal chair. In 879 John returned to Italy accompanied by Boso, duke of Provence, whom he adopted as his son, and made an unsuccessful attempt to get recognized as king of Italy. In the same year he was compelled to give a promise of his sanction to the claims of Charles the Fat, who received from him the imperial crown in 881. Before this, in order to secure the aid of the Greek emperor against the Saracens, he had agreed to sanction the restoration of Photius to the see of Constantinople, and had withdrawn his consent on finding that he reaped from the concession no substantial benefit. Charles the Fat, partly from unwillingness, partly from natural inability, gave him also no effectual aid, and the last years of John VIII. were spent chiefly in hurling vain anathemas against his various political enemies. According to the annalist of Fulda, he was murdered by members of his household. His successor was Marinus.

JOHN IX., pope from 898 to 900, not only confirmed the judgment of his predecessor Theodore II. in granting Christian burial to Formosus, but at a council held at Ravenna decreed that the records of the synod which had condemned him should be burned. Finding, however, that it was advisable to cement the ties between the empire and the papacy, John gave unhesitating support to Lambert in preference to Arnulf, and also induced the council to determine that henceforth the consecration of the popes should take place only in the presence of the imperial legates. The sudden death of Lambert shattered the hopes which this alliance seemed to promise. John was succeeded by Benedict IV.

JOHN X., pope from 914 to 928, was deacon at Bologna when he attracted the attention of Theodora, the wife of Theophylact, the most powerful noble in Rome, through whose influence he was elevated first to the see of Bologna and then to the archbishopric of Ravenna. In direct opposition to a decree of council, he was also at the instigation of Theodora promoted to the papal chair as the successor of Lando. Like John IX. he endeavoured to secure himself against his temporal enemies through a close alliance with Theophylact and Alberic, marquis of Camerino, then governor of the duchy of Spoleto. In December 915 he granted the imperial crown to Berengar, and with the assistance of the forces of all the princes of the Italian peninsula he took the field in person against the Saracens, over whom he gained a great victory on the banks of the Garigliano. The defeat and death of Berengar through the combination of the Italian princes, again frustrated the hopes of a united Italy, and after witnessing several years of anarchy and confusion John perished through the intrigues of Marozia, daughter of Theodora. His successor was Leo VI.

JOHN XI., pope from 931 to 935, was the son of Marozia and the reputed son of Sergius III. Through the influence of his mother he was chosen to succeed Stephen VII. at the early age of twenty-one. He was the mere exponent of the purposes of his mother, until her son Alberic succeeded in 933 in overthrowing their authority. The pope was kept a virtual prisoner in the Lateran, where he is said to have died in 935, in which year Leo VII. was consecrated his successor.

JOHN XII., pope from 955 to 964, was the son of Alberic, whom he succeeded as patrician of Rome in 954, being then only sixteen years of age. His original name was Octavian, but when he assumed the papal tiara as successor to Agapetus II., he adopted the apostolic name of John, the first example, it is said, of the custom of altering the surname in connexion with elevation to the papal chair. As a temporal ruler John was devoid of the vigour and firmness of his father, and his union of the papal office—which through his scandalous private life he made a byword of reproach—with his civil dignities proved a source of weakness rather than of strength. In order to protect himself against the intrigues in Rome and the power of Berengar II. of Italy, he called to his aid Otto the Great of Germany, to whom he granted the imperial crown in 962. Even before Otto left Rome the pope had, however, repented of his recognition of a power which threatened altogether to overshadow his authority, and had begun to conspire against the new emperor. His intrigues were discovered by Otto, who, after he had defeated and taken prisoner Berengar, returned to Rome and summoned a council which deposed John, who was in hiding in the mountains of Campania, and elected Leo VIII. in his stead. An attempt at an insurrection was made by the inhabitants of Rome even before Otto left the city, and on his departure John returned at the head of a formidable company of friends and retainers, and caused Leo to seek safety in immediate flight. Otto determined to make an effort in support of Leo, but before he reached the city John had died, in what manner is uncertain, and Benedict V. had mounted the papal chair.

JOHN XIII., pope from 965 to 972, was descended from a noble Roman family, and at the time of his election as successor to Leo VIII. was bishop of Narni. He had been somewhat inconsistent in his relations with his predecessor Leo, but his election was confirmed by the emperor Otto, and his submissive attitude towards the imperial power was so distasteful to the Romans that they expelled him from the city. On account of the threatening procedure of Otto, they permitted him shortly afterwards to return, upon which, with the sanction of Otto, he took savage vengeance on those who had formerly opposed him. Shortly after holding a council along with the emperor at Ravenna in 967, he gave the imperial crown to Otto II. at Rome in assurance of his succession to his father; and in 972 he also crowned Theophano as empress immediately before her marriage. On his death in the same year he was followed by Benedict VI.

JOHN XIV., pope from 983 to 984, successor to Benedict VII., was born at Pavia, and before his elevation to the papal chair was imperial chancellor of Otto II. Otto died shortly after his election, when Boniface VII., on the strength of the popular feeling against the new pope, returned from Constantinople and placed John in prison, where he died either by starvation or poison.

JOHN XV., pope from 985 to 996, generally recognized as the successor of Boniface VII., the pope John who was said to have ruled for four months after John XIV., being now omitted by the best authorities. John XV. was the son of Leo, a Roman presbyter. At the time he mounted the papal chair Crescentius was patrician of Rome, but, although his influence was on this account very much hampered, the presence of the empress Theophano in Rome from 989 to 991 restrained also the ambition of Crescentius. On her departure the pope, whose venality and nepotism had made him very unpopular with the citizens, died of fever before the arrival of Otto III., who elevated his own kinsman Bruno to the papal dignity under the name of Gregory V.

JOHN XVI.,, pope or antipope from 997 to 998, was a Calabrian Greek by birth, and a favourite of the empress Theophano, from whom he had received the bishopric of Placentia. His original name was Philagathus. In 995 he was sent by Otto III. on an embassy to Constantinople to negotiate a marriage with a Greek princess. On his way back he either accidentally or at the special request of Crescentius visited Rome. A little before this Gregory V., at the end of 996, had been compelled to flee from the city; and the wily and ambitious Greek had now no scruple in accepting the papal tiara from the hands of Crescentius. The arrival of Otto at Rome in the spring of 998 put a sudden end to the treacherous compact. John sought safety in flight, but was discovered in his place of hiding and brought back to Rome, where after enduring cruel and ignominious tortures he was immured in a dungeon.

JOHN XVII., whose original name was Sicco, succeeded Silvester II. as pope in June 1003, but died less than five months afterwards.

JOHN XVIII., pope from 1003 to 1009, was, during his whole pontificate, the mere creature of the patrician John Crescentius, and ultimately he abdicated and retired to a monastery, where he died shortly afterwards. His successor was Sergius IV.

JOHN XIX., pope from 1024 to 1033, succeeded his brother Benedict VIII., both being members of the powerful house of Tusculum. He merely took orders to enable him to ascend the papal chair, having previously been a consul and senator. He displayed his freedom from ecclesiastical prejudices, if also his utter ignorance of ecclesiastical history, by agreeing, on the payment of a large bribe, to grant to the patriarch of Constantinople the title of an ecumenical bishop, but the general indignation which the proposal excited throughout the church compelled him almost immediately to withdraw from his agreement. On the death of the emperor Henry II. in 1024 he gave his support to Conrad II., who along with his consort was crowned with great pomp at St Peter’s in Easter of 1027. John died in 1033, in the full possession of his dignities. A successor was found for him in his nephew Benedict IX., a boy of only twelve years of age.

(L. D.*)

JOHN XXI. (Pedro Giuliano-Rebulo), pope from the 8th of September 1276 to the 20th of May 1277 (should be named John XX., but there is an error in the reckoning through the insertion of an antipope), a native of Portugal, educated for the church, became archdeacon and then archbishop of Braga, and so ingratiated himself with Gregory X. at the council of Lyons (1274) that he was taken to Rome as cardinal-bishop of Frascati, and succeeded Gregory after an interregnum of twenty days. As pope he excommunicated Alphonso III. of Portugal for interfering with episcopal elections and sent legates to the Great Khan. He was devoted to secular science, and his small affection for the monks awakened the distrust of a large portion of the clergy. His life was brought to a premature close through the fall of the roof in the palace he had built at Viterbo. His successor was Nicholas III.

John XXI. has been identified since the 14th century, most probably correctly, with Petrus Hispanus, a celebrated Portuguese physician and philosopher, author of several medical works—notably the curious Liber de oculo, trans. into German and well edited by A. M. Berger (Munich, 1899), and of a popular textbook in logic, the Summulae logicales. John XXI. is constantly referred to as a magician by ignorant chroniclers.

See Les Registres de Grégoire X. et Jean XXI., published by J. Guiraud and E. Cadier in Bibliothèque des écoles françaises d’Athènes et de Rome (Paris, 1898); A. Potthast, Regesta pontif. Roman., vol. 2 (Berlin, 1875); F. Gregorovius, Rome in the Middle Ages, vol. v., trans. by Mrs G. W. Hamilton (London, 1900-1902); R. Stapper, Papst Johann XXI. (Münster, 1898); J. T. Köhler, Vollständige Nachricht von Papst Johann XXI. (Göttingen, 1760).

(C. H. Ha.)

JOHN XXII., pope from 1316 to 1334, was born at Cahors, France, in 1249. His original name was Jacques Duèse, and he came either of a family of petty nobility or else of well-to-do middle-class parents, and was not, as has been popularly supposed, the son of a shoemaker. He began his education with the Dominicans at Cahors, subsequently studied law at Montpellier, and law and medicine in Paris, and finally taught at Cahors and Toulouse. At Toulouse he became intimate with the bishop Louis, son of Charles II., king of Naples. In 1300 he was elevated to the episcopal see of Fréjus by Pope Boniface VIII. at the instance of the king of Naples, and in 1308 was made chancellor of Naples by Charles, retaining this office under Charles’s successor, Robert of Anjou. In 1310 Pope Clement V. summoned Jacques to Avignon and instructed him to advise upon the affair of the Templars and also upon the question of condemning the memory of Boniface VIII. Jacques decided on the legality of suppressing the order of the Templars, holding that the pope would be serving the best interests of the church by pronouncing its suppression; but he rejected the condemnation of Boniface as a sacrilegious affront to the church and a monstrous abuse of the lay power. On the 23rd of December 1312 Clement appointed him cardinal-bishop of Porto, and it was while cardinal of Porto that he was elected pope, on the 7th of August 1316. Clement had died in April 1314, but the cardinals assembled at Carpentras were unable to agree as to his successor. As the two-thirds majority requisite for an election could not be obtained, the cardinals separated, and it was not until the 28th of June 1316 that they reassembled in the cloister of the Dominicans at Lyons, and then only in deference to the pressure exerted upon them by Philip V. of France. After deliberating for more than a month they elected Robert of Anjou’s candidate, Jacques Duèse, who was crowned on the 5th of September, and on the 2nd of October arrived at Avignon, where he remained for the rest of his life.

More jurist than theologian, John defended the rights of the papacy with rigorous zeal and as rigorous logic. For the restoration of the papacy to its old independence, which had been so gravely compromised under his immediate predecessors, and for the execution of the vast enterprises which the papacy deemed useful for its prestige and for Christendom, considerable sums were required; and to raise the necessary money John burdened Christian Europe with new taxes and a complicated fiscal system, which was fraught with serious consequences. For his personal use, however, he retained but a very small fraction of the sums thus acquired, and at his death his private fortune amounted to scarce a million florins. The essentially practical character of his administration has led many historians to tax him with avarice, but later research on the fiscal system of the papacy of the period, particularly the joint work of Samaran and Mollat, enables us very sensibly to modify the severe judgment passed on John by Gregorovius and others.

John’s pontificate was continually disturbed by his conflict with Louis of Bavaria and by the theological revolt of the Spiritual Franciscans. In October 1314 Louis of Bavaria and Frederick of Austria had each been elected German king by the divided electors. Louis was gradually recognized by the whole of Germany, especially after his victory at Mühldorf (1322), and gained numerous adherents in Italy, where he supported the Visconti, who had been condemned as heretics by the pope. John affected to ignore the successes of Louis, and on the 8th of October 1323 forbade his recognition as king of the Romans. After demanding a respite, Louis abruptly appealed at Nuremberg from the future sentence of the pope to a general council (December 8, 1323). The conflict then assumed a grave doctrinal character. The doctrine of the rights of the lay monarchy sustained by Occam and John of Paris, by Marsilius of Padua, John of Jandun and Leopold of Bamberg, was affirmed by the jurists and theologians, penetrated into the parlements and the universities, and was combated by the upholders of papal absolutism, such as Alvaro Pelayo and Alonzo Trionfo. Excommunicated on the 21st of March 1324, Louis retorted by appealing for a second time to a general council, which was held on the 22nd of May 1324, and accused John of being an enemy to the peace and the law, stigmatizing him as a heretic on the ground that he opposed the principle of evangelical poverty as professed by the strict Franciscans. From this moment Louis appeared in the character of the natural ally and even the protector of the Spirituals against the persecution of the pope. On the 11th of July 1324 the pope laid under an interdict the places where Louis or his adherents resided, but this bull had no effect in Germany. Equally futile was John’s declaration (April 3, 1327) that Louis had forfeited his crown and abetted heresy by granting protection to Marsilius of Padua. Having reconciled himself with Frederick of Austria, Louis penetrated into Italy and seized Rome on the 7th of January 1328, with the help of the Roman Ghibellines led by Sciarra Colonna. After installing himself in the Vatican, Louis got himself crowned by the deputies of the Roman people; instituted proceedings for the deposition of John, whom the Roman people, displeased by the spectacle of the papacy abandoning Rome, declared to have forfeited the pontificate (April 18, 1328); and finally caused a Minorite friar, Pietro Rainalucci da Corvara, to be elected pope under the name of Nicholas V. John preached a platonic crusade against Louis, who burned the pope’s effigy at Pisa and in Amelia. Soon, however, Louis felt his power waning, and quitted Rome and Italy (1329). Incapable of independent action, the antipope was abandoned by the Romans and handed over to John, who forced him to make a solemn submission with a halter round his neck (August 15, 1330). Nicholas was condemned to perpetual imprisonment, and died in obscurity at Avignon; while the Roman people submitted to King Robert, who governed the church through his vicars. In 1317, in execution of a bull of Clement V., the royal vicariate in Italy had been conferred by John on Robert of Anjou, and this appointment was renewed in 1322 and 1324, with threats of excommunication against any one who should seize the vicariate of Italy without the authorization of the pope. One of John’s last acts was his decision to separate Italy from the Empire, but this bull was of no avail and fell into oblivion. After his death, however, the interdict was not removed from Germany, and the resistance of Louis and his theologians continued.

A violent manifestation of this resistance took place in connexion with the accusation of heresy brought against the pope. On the third Sunday in Advent 1329, and afterwards in public consistory, John had preached that the souls of those who have died in a state of grace go into Abraham’s bosom, sub altari Dei, and do not enjoy the beatific vision (visio facie ad faciem) of the Lord until after the Last Judgment and the Resurrection; and he had even instructed a Minorite friar, Gauthier of Dijon, to collect the passages in the Fathers which were in favour of this doctrine. On the 27th of December 1331 a Dominican, Thomas of England, preached against this doctrine at Avignon itself and was thrown into prison. When news of this affair had reached Paris, the pope sent the general of the Minorites, Gerard Odonis, accompanied by a Dominican, to sustain his doctrine in that city, but King Philip VI., perhaps at the instigation of the refugee Spirituals in Paris, referred the question to the faculty of theology, which, on the 2nd of January 1333, declared that the souls of the blessed were elevated to the beatific vision immediately after death; the faculty, nevertheless, were of opinion that the pope should have propounded his erroneous doctrine only “recitando,” and not “determinando, asserendo, seu etiam opinando.” The king notified this decision to the pope, who assembled his consistory in November 1333, and gave a haughty reply. The theologians in Louis’s following who were opposed to papal absolutism already spoke of “the new heretic, Jacques de Cahors,” and reiterated with increasing insistency their demands for the convocation of a general council to try the pope. John appears to have retracted shortly before his death, which occurred on the 4th of December 1334.

John had kindled very keen animosity, not only among the upholders of the independence of the lay power, but also among the upholders of absolute religious poverty, the exalted Franciscans. Clement V., at the council of Vienne, had attempted to bring back the Spirituals to the common rule by concessions; John, on the other hand, in the bull Quorundam exigit (April 13, 1317), adopted an uncompromising and absolute attitude, and by the bull Gloriosam ecclesiam (January 23, 1318) condemned the protests which had been raised against the bull Quorundam by a group of seventy-four Spirituals and conveyed to Avignon by the monk Bernard Délicieux. Shortly afterwards four Spirituals were burned at Marseilles. These were immediately hailed as martyrs, and in the eyes of the exalted Franciscans at Naples and in Sicily and the south of France the pope was regarded as antichrist. In the bull Sancta Romana et universa ecclesia (December 28, 1318) John definitively excommunicated them and condemned their principal book, the Postil (commentary) on the Apocalypse (February 8, 1326). The bull Quia nonnunquam (March 26, 1322) defined the derogations from the rule punished by the pope, and the bull Cum inter nonnullos (November 12, 1323) condemned the proposition which had been admitted at the general chapter of the Franciscans held at Perugia in 1322, according to which Christ and the Apostles were represented as possessing no property, either personal or common. The minister general, Michael of Cesena, though opposed to the exaggerations of the Spirituals, joined with them in protesting against the condemnation of the fundamental principle of evangelical poverty, and the agitation gradually gained ground. The pope, by the bull Quia quorundam (November 10, 1324), cited Michael to appear at Avignon at the same time as Occam and Bonagratia. All three fled to the court of Louis of Bavaria (May 26, 1328), while the majority of the Franciscans made submission and elected a general entirely devoted to the pope. But the resistance, aided by Louis and merged as it now was in the cause sustained by Marsilius of Padua and John of Jandun, became daily bolder. Treatises on poverty appeared on every side; the party of Occam clamoured with increasing imperiousness for the condemnation of John by a general council; and the Spirituals, confounded in the persecution with the Beghards and with Fraticelli of every description, maintained themselves in the south of France in spite of the reign of terror instituted in that region by the Inquisition.

See M. Souchon, Die Papstwahlen von Bonifaz VIII. bis Urban VI. (Brunswick, 1888); Abbé Albe, Autour de Jean XXII. (Rome, 1904); K. Müller, Der Kampf Ludwigs des Bayern mit der Curie (Tübingen, 1879 seq.); W. Preger, “Mémoires sur la lutte entre Jean XXII. et Louis de Bavière” in Abhandl. der bayr. Akad., hist. sec., xv., xvi., xvii.; S. Riezler, Die litterar. Widersacher der Päpste zur Zeit Ludwigs des Baiers (Leipzig, 1874); F. Ehrle, “Die Spiritualen” in Archiv für Litteratur-und Kirchengeschichte des Mittelalters (vols. i. and ii.); C. Samaran and G. Mollat, La Fiscalité pontificale en France au xive siècle (Paris, 1905); A. Coulon and G. Mollat, Lettres secrètes et curiales de Jean XXII. se rapportant à la France (Paris, 1899, seq.).

(P. A.)


On the 29th of January 1336 Pope Benedict XII. pronounced a long judgment on this point of doctrine, a judgment which he declared had been included by John in a bull which death had prevented him from sealing.

JOHN XXIII. (Baldassare Cossa), pope, or rather antipope from 1410 to 1415, was born of a good Neapolitan family, and began by leading the life of a corsair before entering the service of the Church under the pontificate of Boniface IX. His abilities, which were mainly of an administrative and military order, were soon rewarded by the cardinal’s hat and the legation of Bologna. On the 29th of June 1408 he and seven of his colleagues broke away from Gregory XII., and together with six cardinals of the obedience of Avignon, who had in like manner separated from Benedict XIII., they agreed to aim at the assembling of a general council, setting aside the two rival pontiffs, an expedient which they considered would put an end to the great schism of the Western Church, but which resulted in the election of yet a third pope. This act was none the less decisive for Baldassare Cossa’s future. Alexander V., the first pope elected at Pisa, was not perhaps, as has been maintained, merely a man of straw put forward by the ambitious cardinal of Bologna; but he reigned only ten months, and on his death, which happened rather suddenly on the 4th of May 1410, Baldassare Cossa succeeded him. Whether the latter had bought his electors by money and promises, or owed his success to his dominant position in Bologna, and to the support of Florence and of Louis II. of Anjou, he seems to have received the unanimous vote of all the seventeen cardinals gathered together at Bologna (May 17). He took the name of John XXIII., and France, England, and part of Italy and Germany recognized him as head of the Catholic church.

The struggle in which he and Louis II. of Anjou engaged with Ladislaus of Durazzo, king of Sicily, and Gregory XII.’s chief protector in Italy, at first went in John’s favour. After the brilliant victory of Roccasecca (May 19, 1411) he had the satisfaction of dragging the standards of Pope Gregory and King Ladislaus through the streets of Rome. But the dispersion of Louis of Anjou’s troops and his carelessness, together with the lack of success which attended the preaching of a crusade in Germany, France and England, finally decided John XXIII. to abandon the French claimant to the throne of Sicily; he recognized Ladislaus, his former enemy, as king of Naples, and Ladislaus did not fail to salute John XXIII. as pope, abandoning Gregory XII. (June 15, 1412). This was a fatal step: John XXIII. was trusting in a dishonest and insatiable prince; he would have acted more wisely in remaining the ally of the weak but loyal Louis of Anjou. However, it seemed desirable that the reforms announced by the council of Pisa, which the popes set up by this synod seemed in no hurry to carry into effect, should be further discussed in the new council which it had been agreed should be summoned about the spring of 1412. But John was anxious that this council should be held in Rome, a city where he alone was master; the few prelates and ambassadors who very slowly gathered there held only a small number of sessions, in which John again condemned the writings of Wycliffe. John was attacked by the representatives of the various nations and reprimanded even for his private conduct, but endeavoured to extricate himself from this uncomfortable position by gratifying their desires, if not by reforming abuses. It is, however, only fair to add that he took various half-measures and gave many promises which, if they had been put into execution, would have confirmed or completed the reforms inaugurated at Pisa. But on the 3rd of March 1413 John adjourned the council of Rome till December, without even fixing the place where the next session should be held. It was held at Constance in Germany, and John could only have resigned himself to accepting such an uncertain meeting-place because he was forced by distress, isolation and fear to turn towards the head of the empire. Less than a year after the treaty concluded with Ladislaus of Durazzo, the latter forced his way into Rome (June 8, 1413), which he sacked, expelling John, to whom even the Florentines did not dare to throw open their gates for fear of the king of Sicily. Sigismund, king of the Romans, not only extorted, it is said, a sum of 50,000 florins from the pontiff in his extremity, but insisted upon his summoning the council at Constance (December 9). It was in vain that, on the death of Ladislaus, which took place unexpectedly (August 6, 1414), John was inspired with the idea of breaking his compact with Sigismund and returning to Rome, at the same time appealing to Louis of Anjou. It was too late. The cardinals forced him towards Germany by the most direct road, without allowing him to go by way of Avignon as he had projected, in order to make plans with the princes of France.

On the 5th of November 1414 John opened the council of Constance, where, on Christmas Day, he received the homage of the head of the empire, but where his lack of prestige, the defection of his allies, the fury of his adversaries, and the general sense of the necessity for union soon showed only too clearly how small was the chance of his retaining the tiara. He had to take a solemn oath to abdicate if his two rivals would do the same, and this concession, which was not very sincere, gained him for the last time the honour of seeing Sigismund prostrate at his feet (March 2, 1415). But on the night of the 20th-21st of March, having donned the garments of a layman, with a cross-bow slung at his side, he succeeded in making his escape from Constance, accompanied only by a single servant, and took refuge first in the castle of Schaffhausen, then in that of Laufenburg, then at Freiburg-im-Breisgau, and finally at Brisach, whence he hoped to reach Alsace, and doubtless ultimately Avignon, under the protection of an escort sent by the duke of Burgundy. The news of the pope’s escape was received at Constance with an extraordinary outburst of rage, and led to the subversive decrees of the 4th and 5th sessions, which proclaimed the superiority of the council over the pope. Duke Frederick of Austria had hitherto sheltered John’s flight; but, laid under the ban of the empire, attacked by powerful armies, and feeling that he was courting ruin, he preferred to give up the pontiff who had trusted to him. John was brought back to Freiburg (April 27), and there in vain attempted to appease the wrath which he had aroused by more or less vague promises of resignation. His trial, however, was already beginning. The three cardinals whom he charged with his defence hastily declined this compromising task. Seventy-four charges were drawn up, only twenty of which were set aside after the witnesses had been heard. The accusation of having poisoned Alexander V. and his doctor at Bologna was not maintained. But enough deeds of immorality, tyranny, ambition and simony were found proved to justify the severest judgment. He was suspended from his functions as pope on the 14th of May 1415, and deposed on the following 29th of May.

However irregular this sentence may have been from the canonical point of view (for the accusers do not seem to have actually proved the crime of heresy, which was necessary, according to most scholars of the period, to justify the deposition of a sovereign pontiff), the condemned pope was not long in confirming it. Baldassare Cossa, now as humble and resigned as he had before been energetic and tenacious, on his transference to the castle of Rudolfzell admitted the wrong which he had done by his flight, refused to bring forward anything in his defence, acquiesced entirely in the judgment of the council which he declared to be infallible, and finally, as an extreme precaution, ratified motu proprio the sentence of deposition, declaring that he freely and willingly renounced any rights which he might still have in the papacy. This fact has subsequently been often quoted against those who have appealed to the events of 1415 to maintain that a council can depose a pope who is scandalizator ecclesiae.

Cossa kept his word never to appeal against the sentence which stripped him of the pontificate. He was held prisoner for three years in Germany, but in the end bought his liberty from the count palatine. He used this liberty only to go to Florence, in 1419, and throw himself on the mercy of the legitimate pope. Martin V. appointed him cardinal-bishop of Tusculum, a dignity which Cossa only enjoyed for a few months. He died on the 22nd of December 1419, and all visitors to the Baptistery at Florence may admire, under its high baldacchino, the sombre figure sculptured by Donatello of the dethroned pontiff, who had at least the merit of bowing his head under his chastisement, and of contributing by his passive resignation to the extinction of the series of popes which sprang from the council of Pisa.

(N. V.)

JOHN I. (925-976), surnamed Tzimisces, East Roman emperor, was born of a distinguished Cappadocian family. After helping his uncle Nicephorus Phocas (q.v.) to obtain the throne and to restore the empire’s eastern provinces he was deprived of his command by an intrigue, upon which he retaliated by conspiring with Nicephorus’ wife Theophania to assassinate him. Elected ruler in his stead, John proceeded to justify his usurpation by the energy with which he repelled the foreign invaders of the empire. In a series of campaigns against the newly established Russian power (970-973) he drove the enemy out of Thrace, crossed Mt Haemus and besieged the fortress of Dorystolon on the Danube. In several hard-fought battles he broke the strength of the Russians so completely that they left him master of eastern Bulgaria. He further secured his northern frontier by transplanting to Thrace some colonies of Paulicians whom he suspected of sympathising with their Saracen neighbours in the east. In 974 he turned against the Abassid empire and easily recovered the inland parts of Syria and the middle reaches of the Euphrates. He died suddenly in 976 on his return from his second campaign against the Saracens. John’s surname was apparently derived from the Armenian tshemshkik (red boot).

See E. Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. vi. (ed. Bury, 1896); G. Finlay, History of Greece, ii. 334-360 (ed. 1877); G. Schlumberger, L’Épopée Byzantine, i. 1-326 (1896).

JOHN II. (1088-1143), surnamed Comnenus and also Kalojoannes (John the Good), East Roman emperor, was the eldest son of the East Roman emperor Alexius, whom he succeeded in 1118. On account of his mild and just reign he has been called the Byzantine Marcus Aurelius. By the personal purity of his character he effected a notable improvement in the manners of his age, but he displayed little vigour in internal administration or in extirpating the long-standing corruptions of the government. Nor did his various successes against the Hungarians, Servians and Seljuk Turks, whom he pressed hard in Asia Minor and proposed to expel from Jerusalem, add much to the stability of his empire. He was accidentally killed during a wild-boar hunt on Mt Taurus, on the 8th of April 1143.

See E. Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, v. 228 seq. (ed. Bury, 1896).

JOHN III. (1193-1254), surnamed Vatatzes and also Ducas, East Roman emperor, earned for himself such distinction as a soldier that in 1222 he was chosen to succeed his father-in-law Theodore I. Lascaris. He reorganized the remnant of the East Roman empire, and by his administrative skill made it the strongest and richest principality in the Levant. Having secured his eastern frontier by an agreement with the Turks, he set himself to recover the European possessions of his predecessors. While his fleet harassed the Latins in the Aegean Sea and extended his realm to Rhodes, his army, reinforced by Frankish mercenaries, defeated the Latin emperor’s forces in the open field. Though unsuccessful in a siege of Constantinople, which he undertook in concert with the Bulgarians (1235), he obtained supremacy over the despotats of Thessalonica and Epirus. The ultimate recovery of Constantinople by the Rhomaic emperors is chiefly due to his exertions.

See E. Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vi. 431-462 (ed. Bury, 1896); G. Finlay, History of Greece, iii. 196-320 (ed. 1877); A. Meliarakes, Ἱστορία τοῦ Βασιλείου τῆς Νικαίας καὶ τοῦ Δεσποτάτου τῆς Ἠπείρου, pp. 155-421 (1898).

JOHN IV. (c. 1250-c. 1300), surnamed Lascaris, East Roman emperor, son of Theodore II. His father dying in 1258, Michael Palaeologus conspired shortly after to make himself regent, and in 1261 dethroned and blinded the boy monarch, and imprisoned him in a remote castle, where he died a long time after.

See E. Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vi. 459-466 (ed. Bury, 1896); A. Meliarakes, Ἱστορία τοῦ Βασιλείου τῆς Νικαίας (Athens, 1898), pp. 491-528.

JOHN V. or VI. (1332-1391), surnamed Palaeologus, East Roman emperor, was the son of Andronicus III., whom he succeeded in 1341. At first he shared his sovereignty with his father’s friend John Cantacuzene, and after a quarrel with the latter was practically superseded by him for a number of years (1347-1355). His reign was marked by the gradual dissolution of the imperial power through the rebellion of his son Andronicus and by the encroachments of the Ottomans, to whom in 1381 John acknowledged himself tributary, after a vain attempt to secure the help of the popes by submitting to the supremacy of the Roman Church.

See E. Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vi. 495 seq., vii. 38 seq. (ed. Bury, 1896); E. Pears, The Destruction of the Greek Empire, pp. 70-96 (1903).

JOHN VI. or V. (c. 1292-1383), surnamed Cantacuzene, East Roman emperor, was born at Constantinople. Connected with the house of Palaeologus on his mother’s side, on the accession of Andronicus III. (1328) he was entrusted with the supreme administration of affairs. On the death of the emperor in 1341, Cantacuzene was left regent, and guardian of his son John Palaeologus, who was but nine years of age. Being suspected by the empress and opposed by a powerful party at court, he rebelled, and got himself crowned emperor at Didymoteichos in Thrace, while John Palaeologus and his supporters maintained themselves at Constantinople. The civil war which ensued lasted six years, during which the rival parties called in the aid of the Servians and Turks, and engaged mercenaries of every description. It was only by the aid of the Turks, with whom he made a disgraceful bargain, that Cantacuzene brought the war to a termination favourable to himself. In 1347 he entered Constantinople in triumph, and forced his opponents to an arrangement by which he became joint emperor with John Palaeologus and sole administrator during the minority of his colleague. During this period, the empire, already broken up and reduced to the narrowest limits, was assailed on every side. There were wars with the Genoese, who had a colony at Galata and had money transactions with the court; and with the Servians, who were at that time establishing an extensive empire on the north-western frontiers; and there was a hazardous alliance with the Turks, who made their first permanent settlement in Europe, at Callipolis in Thrace, towards the end of the reign (1354). Cantacuzene was far too ready to invoke the aid of foreigners in his European quarrels; and as he had no money to pay them, this gave them a ready pretext for seizing upon a European town. The financial burdens imposed by him had long been displeasing to his subjects, and a strong party had always favoured John Palaeologus. Hence, when the latter entered Constantinople at the end of 1354, his success was easy. Cantacuzene retired to a monastery (where he assumed the name of Joasaph Christodulus) and occupied himself in literary labours. He died in the Peloponnese and was buried by his sons at Mysithra in Laconia. His History in four books deals with the years 1320-1356. Really an apologia for his own actions, it needs to be read with caution; fortunately it can be supplemented and corrected by the work of a contemporary, Nicephorus Gregoras. It possesses the merit of being well arranged and homogeneous, the incidents being grouped round the chief actor in the person of the author, but the information is defective on matters with which he is not directly concerned.

Cantacuzene was also the author of a commentary on the first five books of Aristotle’s Ethics, and of several controversial theological treatises, one of which (Against Mohammedanism) is printed in Migne (Patrologia Graeca, cliv.). History, ed. pr. by J. Pontanus (1603); in Bonn, Corpus scriptorum hist. Byz., by J. Schopen (1828-1832) and Migne, cliii., cliv. See also Val Parisot, Cantacuzène, homme d’état et historien (1845); E. Gibbon, Decline and Fall, ch. lxiii.; and C. Krumbacher, Geschichte der byzantinischen Litteratur (1897).

JOHN VI. or VII. (1390-1448), surnamed Palaeologus, East Roman emperor, son of Manuel II., succeeded to the throne in 1425. To secure protection against the Turks he visited the pope and consented to the union of the Greek and Roman churches, which was ratified at Florence in 1439. The union failed of its purpose, but by his prudent conduct towards the Ottomans he succeeded in holding possession of Constantinople, and in 1432 withstood a siege by Sultan Murad I.

See Turkey: History; and also E. Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vi. 97-107 (ed. Bury, 1896); E. Pears, The Destruction of the Greek Empire, pp. 115-130 (1903).

JOHN (1167-1216), king of England, the youngest son of Henry II. by Eleanor of Aquitaine, was born at Oxford on the 24th of December 1167. He was given at an early age the nickname of Lackland because, unlike his elder brothers, he received no apanage in the continental provinces. But his future was a subject of anxious thought to Henry II. When only five years old John was betrothed (1173) to the heiress of Maurienne and Savoy, a principality which, as dominating the chief routes from France and Burgundy to Italy, enjoyed a consequence out of all proportion to its area. Later, when this plan had fallen through, he was endowed with castles, revenues and lands on both sides of the channel; the vacant earldom of Cornwall was reserved for him (1175); he was betrothed to Isabella the heiress of the earldom of Gloucester (1176); and he was granted the lordship of Ireland with the homage of the Anglo-Irish baronage (1177). Henry II. even provoked a civil war by attempting to transfer the duchy of Aquitaine from the hands of Richard Cœur de Lion to those of John (1183). In spite of the incapacity which he displayed in this war, John was sent a little later to govern Ireland (1185); but he returned in a few months covered with disgrace, having alienated the loyal chiefs by his childish insolence and entirely failed to defend the settlers from the hostile septs. Remaining henceforth at his father’s side he was treated with the utmost indulgence. But he joined with his brother Richard and the French king Philip Augustus in the great conspiracy of 1189, and the discovery of his treason broke the heart of the old king (see Henry II.).

Richard on his accession confirmed John’s existing possessions; married him to Isabella of Gloucester; and gave him, besides other grants, the entire revenues of six English shires; but excluded him from any share in the regency which was appointed to govern England during the third crusade; and only allowed him to live in the kingdom because urged to this concession by their mother. Soon after the king’s departure for the Holy Land it became known that he had designated his nephew, the young Arthur of Brittany, as his successor. John at once began to intrigue against the regents with the aim of securing England for himself. He picked a quarrel with the unpopular chancellor William Longchamp (q.v.), and succeeded, by the help of the barons and the Londoners, in expelling this minister, whose chief fault was that of fidelity to the absent Richard. Not being permitted to succeed Longchamp as the head of the administration, John next turned to Philip Augustus for help. A bargain was struck; and when Richard was captured by Leopold, duke of Austria (December 1192), the allies endeavoured to prevent his release, and planned a partition of his dominions. They were, however, unable to win either English or Norman support and their schemes collapsed with Richard’s return (March 1194). He magnanimously pardoned his brother, and they lived on not unfriendly terms for the next five years. On his deathbed Richard, reversing his former arrangements, caused his barons to swear fealty to John (1199), although the hereditary claim of Arthur was by the law of primogeniture undoubtedly superior.

England and Normandy, after some hesitation, recognized John’s title; the attempt of Anjou and Brittany to assert the rights of Arthur ended disastrously by the capture of the young prince at Mirebeau in Poitou (1202). But there was no part of his dominions in which John inspired personal devotion. Originally accepted as a political necessity, he soon came to be detested by the people as a tyrant and despised by the nobles for his cowardice and sloth. He inherited great difficulties—the feud with France, the dissensions of the continental provinces, the growing indifference of England to foreign conquests, the discontent of all his subjects with a strict executive and severe taxation. But he cannot be acquitted of personal responsibility for his misfortunes. Astute in small matters, he had no breadth of view or foresight; his policy was continually warped by his passions or caprices; he flaunted vices of the most sordid kind with a cynical indifference to public opinion, and shocked an age which was far from tender-hearted by his ferocity to vanquished enemies. He treated his most respectable supporters with base ingratitude, reserved his favour for unscrupulous adventurers, and gave a free rein to the licence of his mercenaries. While possessing considerable gifts of mind and a latent fund of energy, he seldom acted or reflected until the favourable moment had passed. Each of his great humiliations followed as the natural result of crimes or blunders. By his divorce from Isabella of Gloucester he offended the English baronage (1200); by his marriage with Isabella of Angoulême, the betrothed of Hugh of Lusignan, he gave an opportunity to the discontented Poitevins for invoking French assistance and to Philip Augustus for pronouncing against him a sentence of forfeiture. The murder of Arthur (1203) ruined his cause in Normandy and Anjou; the story that the court of the peers of France condemned him for the murder is a fable, but no legal process was needed to convince men of his guilt. In the later quarrel with Innocent III. (1207-1213; see Langton, Stephen) he prejudiced his case by proposing a worthless favourite for the primacy and by plundering those of the clergy who bowed to the pope’s sentences. Threatened with the desertion of his barons he drove all whom he suspected to desperation by his terrible severity towards the Braose family (1210); and by his continued misgovernment irrevocably estranged the lower classes. When submission to Rome had somewhat improved his position he squandered his last resources in a new and unsuccessful war with France (1214), and enraged the feudal classes by new claims for military service and scutages. The barons were consequently able to exact, in Magna Carta (June 1215), much more than the redress of legitimate grievances; and the people allowed the crown to be placed under the control of an oligarchical committee. When once the sovereign power had been thus divided, the natural consequence was civil war and the intervention of the French king, who had long watched for some such opportunity. John’s struggle against the barons and Prince Louis (1216), afterwards King Louis VIII., was the most creditable episode of his career. But the calamitous situation of England at the moment of his death, on the 19th of October 1216, was in the main his work; and while he lived a national reaction in favour of the dynasty was out of the question.

John’s second wife, Isabella of Angoulême (d. 1246), who married her former lover, Hugh of Lusignan, after the English king’s death, bore the king two sons, Henry III. and Richard, earl of Cornwall; and three daughters, Joan (1210-1238), wife of Alexander II., king of Scotland, Isabella (d. 1241), wife of the emperor Frederick II., and Eleanor (d. 1274), wife of William Marshal, earl of Pembroke, and then of Simon de Montfort, earl of Leicester. John had also two illegitimate sons, Richard and Oliver, and a daughter, Joan or Joanna, who married Llewelyn I. ab Iorwerth, prince of North Wales, and who died in 1236 or 1237.

Authorities.—The chief chronicles for the reign are Gervase of Canterbury’s Gesta regum, Ralf of Coggeshall’s Chronicon, Walter of Coventry’s Memoriale, Roger of Wendover’s Flores historiarum, the Annals of Burton, Dunstaple and Margan—all these in the Rolls Series. The French chronicle of the so-called “Anonyme de Béthune” (Bouquet, Recueil des historiens des Gaules et de la France, vol. xxiv.), the Histoire des ducs de Normandie et des rois d’Angleterre (ed. F. Michel, Paris, 1840) and the metrical biography of William the Marshal (Histoire de Guillaume le Maréchal, ed. Paul Meyer, 3 vols., Paris, 1891, &c.) throw valuable light on certain episodes. H. S. Sweetman’s Calendar of Documents relating to Ireland, vol. i. (Rolls Series); W. H. Bliss’s Calendar of Entries in the Papal Registers, vol. i. (Rolls Series); Potthast’s Regesta pontificum, vol. i. (Berlin, 1874); Sir T. D. Hardy’s Rotuli litterarum clausarum (Rec. Commission, 1835) and Rotuli litterarum patentium (Rec. Commission, 1835) and L. Delisle’s Catalogue des actes de Philippe Auguste (Paris, 1856) are the most important guides to the documents. Of modern works W. Stubbs’s Constitutional history, vol. i. (Oxford, 1897); the same writer’s preface to Walter of Coventry, vol. ii. (Rolls Series); Miss K. Norgate’s John Lackland (London, 1902); C. Petit-Dutaillis’ Étude sur la vie et le règne de Louis VIII. (Paris, 1894) and W. S. McKechnie’s Magna Carta (Glasgow, 1905) are among the most useful.

(H. W. C. D.)

JOHN I. (1350-1395), king of Aragon, was the son of Peter IV. and his third wife Eleanor of Sicily. He was born on the 27th of December 1350, and died by a fall from his horse, like his namesake, cousin and contemporary of Castile. He was a man of insignificant character, with a taste for artificial verse.

JOHN II. (1397-1479), king of Aragon, son of Ferdinand I. and of his wife Eleanor of Albuquerque, born on the 29th of June 1397, was one of the most stirring and most unscrupulous kings of the 15th century. In his youth he was one of the infantes (princes) of Aragon who took part in the dissensions of Castile during the minority and reign of John II. Till middle life he was also lieutenant-general in Aragon for his brother and predecessor Alphonso V., whose reign was mainly spent in Italy. In his old age he was engaged in incessant conflicts with his Aragonese and Catalan subjects, with Louis XI. of France, and in preparing the way for the marriage of his son Ferdinand with Isabella of Castile, which brought about the union of the crowns. His troubles with his subjects were closely connected with the tragic dissensions in his own family. John was first married to Blanche of Navarre, of the house of Evreux. By right of Blanche he became king of Navarre, and on her death in 1441 he was left in possession of the kingdom for his life. But a son Charles, called, as heir of Navarre, prince of Viana, had been born of the marriage. John from the first regarded his son with jealousy, which after his second marriage with Joan Henriquez, and under her influence, grew into absolute hatred. He endeavoured to deprive his son of his constitutional right to act as lieutenant-general of Aragon during his father’s absence. The cause of the son was taken up by the Aragonese, and the king’s attempt to join his second wife in the lieutenant-generalship was set aside. There followed a long conflict, with alternations of success and defeat, which was not terminated till the death of the prince of Viana, perhaps by poison given him by his stepmother, in 1461. The Catalans, who had adopted the cause of Charles and who had grievances of their own, called in a succession of foreign pretenders. In conflict with these the last years of King John were spent. He was forced to pawn Rousillon, his possession on the north-east of the Pyrenees, to Louis XI., who refused to part with it. In his old age he was blinded by cataract, but recovered his eyesight by the operation of couching. The Catalan revolt was pacified in 1472, but John had war, in which he was generally unfortunate, with his neighbour the French king till his death on the 20th of January 1479. He was succeeded by Ferdinand, his son by his second marriage, who was already associated with his wife Isabella as joint sovereign of Castile.

For the history, see Rivadeneyra, “Cronicás de los reyes de Castilla,” Biblioteca de antares españoles, vols. lxvi, lxviii (Madrid, 1845, &c.); G. Zurita, Anales de Aragon (Saragossa, 1610). The reign of John II. of Aragon is largely dealt with in W. H. Prescott’s History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella (1854).

JOHN (1296-1346), king of Bohemia, was a son of the emperor Henry VII. by his wife Margaret, daughter of John I., duke of Brabant, and was a member of the family of Luxemburg. Born on the 10th of August 1296, he became count of Luxemburg in 1309, and about the same time was offered the crown of Bohemia, which, after the death of Wenceslas III., the last king of the Premyslides dynasty in 1306, had passed to Henry, duke of Carinthia, under whose weak rule the country was in a very disturbed condition. The emperor accepted this offer on behalf of his son, who married Elizabeth (d. 1330), a sister of Wenceslas, and after Henry’s departure for Italy, John was crowned king of Bohemia at Prague in February 1311. Henry of Carinthia was driven from the land, where a certain measure of order was restored, and Moravia was again united with Bohemia. As imperial vicar John represented his father at the diet of Nuremberg in January 1313, and was leading an army to his assistance in Italy when he heard of the emperor’s death, which took place in August 1313. John was now a candidate for the imperial throne; but, on account of his youth, his claim was not regarded seriously, and he was persuaded to give his support to Louis, duke of Upper Bavaria, afterwards the emperor Louis the Bavarian. At Esslingen and elsewhere he aided Louis in his struggle with Frederick the Fair, duke of Austria, who also claimed the Empire; but his time was mainly passed in quelling disturbances in Bohemia, where his German followers were greatly disliked and where he himself soon became unpopular, especially among the nobles; or in Luxemburg, the borders of which county he was constantly and successfully striving to extend. Restless, adventurous and warlike, John had soon tired of governing his kingdom, and even discussed exchanging it with the emperor Louis for the Palatinate; and while Bohemia was again relapsing into a state of anarchy, her king was winning fame as a warrior in almost every part of Europe. He fought against the citizens of Metz and against his kinsman, John III., duke of Brabant; he led the knights of the Teutonic Order against the heathen in Lithuania and Pomerania and promised Pope John XXII. to head a crusade; and claiming to be king of Poland he attacked the Poles and brought Silesia under his rule. He obtained Tirol by marrying his son, John Henry, to Margaret Maultasch, the heiress of the county, assisted the emperor to defeat and capture Frederick the Fair at the battle of Mühldorf in 1322, and was alternately at peace and at war with the dukes of Austria and with his former foe, Henry of Carinthia. He was a frequent and welcome visitor to France, in which country he had a personal and hereditary interest; and on several occasions his prowess was serviceable to his brother-in-law King Charles IV., and to Charles’s successor Philip VI., whose son John, afterwards King John II., married a daughter of the Bohemian king. Soon after the battle of Mühldorf, the relations between John and the emperor became somewhat strained, partly owing to the king’s growing friendship with the Papacy and with France, and partly owing to territorial disputes. An agreement, however, was concluded, and John undertook his invasion of Italy, which was perhaps the most dazzling of his exploits. Invited by the citizens of Brescia, he crossed the Alps with a meagre following in 1331, quickly received the homage of many of the cities of northern Italy, and soon found himself the ruler of a great part of the peninsula. But his soldiers were few and his enemies were many, and a second invasion of Italy in 1333 was followed by the dissipation of his dreams of making himself king of Lombardy and Tuscany, and even of supplanting Louis on the imperial throne. The fresh trouble between king and emperor, caused by this enterprise, was intensified by a quarrel over the lands left by Henry of Carinthia, and still later by the interference of Louis in Tirol; and with bewildering rapidity John was allying himself with the kings of Hungary and Poland, fighting against the emperor and his Austrian allies, defending Bohemia, governing Luxemburg, visiting France and negotiating with the pope. About 1340 the king was overtaken by blindness, but he continued to lead an active life, successfully resisting the attacks of Louis and his allies, and campaigning in Lithuania. In 1346 he made a decisive move against the emperor. Acting in union with Pope Clement VI. he secured the formal deposition of Louis and the election of his own son Charles, margrave of Moravia, as German king, or king of the Romans, in July 1346. Then journeying to help Philip of France against the English, he fought at the battle of Crécy, where his heroic death on the 26th of August 1346 was a fitting conclusion to his adventurous life.

John was a chivalrous and romantic personage, who enjoyed a great reputation for valour both before and after his death; but as a ruler he was careless and extravagant, interested only in his kingdom when seeking relief from his constant pecuniary embarrassments. After the death of his first wife, who bore him two sons, Charles, afterwards the emperor Charles IV., and John Henry (d. 1375), and who had been separated from her husband for some years, the king married Beatrice (d. 1383), daughter of Louis I., duke of Bourbon, by whom he had a son, Wenceslas (d. 1383). According to Camden the crest or badge of three ostrich feathers, with the motto Ich dien, borne by the prince of Wales was originally that of John of Bohemia and was first assumed by Edward the Black Prince after the battle of Crécy. There is no proof, however, that this badge was ever worn by John—it certainly was not his crest—and its origin must be sought elsewhere.

See J. Schötter, Johann, Graf von Luxemburg and König von Böhmen (Luxemburg, 1865); F. von Weech, Kaiser Ludwig der Bayer und König Johann von Böhmen (Munich, 1860), and U. Chevalier, Répertoire des sources historiques, tome v. (Paris, 1905).

JOHN I. (1358-1390), king of Castile, was the son of Henry II., and of his wife Joan, daughter of John Manuel of Villena, head of a younger branch of the royal house of Castile. In the beginning of his reign he had to contend with the hostility of John of Gaunt, who claimed the crown by right of his wife Constance, daughter of Peter the Cruel. The king of Castile finally bought off the claim of his English competitor by arranging a marriage between his son Henry and Catherine, daughter of John of Gaunt, in 1387. Before this date he had been engaged in hostilities with Portugal which was in alliance with John of Gaunt. His first quarrel with Portugal was settled by his marriage, in 1382, with Beatrix, daughter of the Portuguese king Ferdinand. On the death of his father-in-law in 1383, John endeavoured to enforce the claims of his wife, Ferdinand’s only child, to the crown of Portugal. He was resisted by the national sentiment of the people, and was utterly defeated at the battle of Aljubarrota, on the 14th of August 1385. King John was killed at Alcalá on the 9th of October 1390 by the fall of his horse, while he was riding in a fantasia with some of the light horsemen known as the farfanes, who were mounted and equipped in the Arab style.

JOHN II. (1405-1454), king of Castile, was born on the 6th of March 1405, the son of Henry III. of Castile and of his wife Catherine, daughter of John of Gaunt. He succeeded his father on the 25th of December 1406 at the age of a year and ten months. It was one of the many misfortunes of Castile that the long reign of John II.—forty-nine years—should have been granted to one of the most incapable of her kings. John was amiable, weak and dependent on those about him. He had no taste except for ornament, and no serious interest except in amusements, verse-making, hunting and tournaments. He was entirely under the influence of his favourite, Alvaro de Luna, till his second wife, Isabella of Portugal, obtained control of his feeble will. At her instigation he threw over his faithful and able favourite, a meanness which is said to have caused him well-deserved remorse. He died on the 20th of July 1454 at Valladolid. By his second marriage he was the father of Isabella “the Catholic.”

JOHN I. (b. and d. 1316), king of France, son of Louis X. and Clemence, daughter of Charles Martel, who claimed to be king of Hungary, was born, after his father’s death, on the 15th of November 1316, and only lived seven days. His uncle, afterwards Philip V. has been accused of having caused his death, or of having substituted a dead child in his place; but nothing was ever proved. An impostor calling himself John I., appeared in Provence, in the reign of John II., but he was captured and died in prison.

JOHN II. (1319-1364), surnamed the Good, king of France, son of Philip VI. and Jeanne of Burgundy, succeeded his father in 1350. At the age of 13 he married Bona of Luxemburg, daughter of John, king of Bohemia. His early exploits against the English were failures and revealed in the young prince both avarice and stubborn persistence in projects obviously ill-advised. It was especially the latter quality which brought about his ruin. His first act upon becoming king was to order the execution of the constable, Raoul de Brienne. The reasons for this are unknown, but from the secrecy with which it was carried out and the readiness with which the honour was transferred to the king’s close friend Charles of La Cesda, it has been attributed to the influence and ambition of the latter. John surrounded himself with evil counsellors, Simon de Buci, Robert de Lorris, Nicolas Braque, men of low origin who robbed the treasury and oppressed the people, while the king gave himself up to tournaments and festivities. In imitation of the English order of the Garter, he established the knightly order of the Star, and celebrated its festivals with great display. Raids of the Black Prince in Languedoc led to the states-general of 1355, which readily voted money, but sanctioned the right of resistance against all kinds of pillage—a distinct commentary on the incompetence of the king. In September 1356 John gathered the flower of his chivalry and attacked the Black Prince at Poitiers. The utter defeat of the French was made the more humiliating by the capture of their king, who had bravely led the third line of battle. Taken to England to await ransom, John was at first installed in the Savoy Palace, then at Windsor, Hertford, Somerton, and at last in the Tower. He was granted royal state with his captive companions, made a guest at tournaments, and supplied with luxuries imported by him from France. The treaty of Brétigny (1360), which fixed his ransom at 3,000,000 crowns, enabled him to return to France, but although he married his daughter Isabella to Gian Galeazzo Visconti of Milan, for a gift of 600,000 golden crowns, imposed a heavy feudal “aid” on merchandise, and various other taxes, John was unable to pay more than 400,000 crowns to Edward III. His son Louis of Anjou, who had been left as hostage, escaped from Calais in the summer of 1363, and John, far in arrears in the payments of the ransom, surrendered himself again “to maintain his royal honour which his son had sullied.” He landed in England in January 1364 and was received with great honour, lodged again in the Savoy, and was a frequent guest of Edward at Westminster. He died on the 8th of April, and the body was sent back to France with royal honours.

See Froissart’s Chronicles; Duc d’Aumale, Notes et documents relatifs à Jean, roi de France, et à sa captivité (1856); A. Coville, in Lavisse’s Histoire de France, vol. iv., and authorities cited there.

JOHN (Zapolya) (1487-1540), king of Hungary, was the son of the palatine Stephen Zapolya and the princess Hedwig of Teschen, and was born at the castle of Szepesvár. He began his public career at the famous Rákos diet of 1505, when, on his motion, the assembly decided that after the death of the reigning king, Wladislaus II., no foreign prince should be elected king of Hungary. Henceforth he became the national candidate for the throne, which his family had long coveted. As far back as 1491 his mother had proposed to the sick king that his daughter Anne should be committed to her care in order, subsequently, to be married to her son; but Wladislaus frustrated this project by contracting a matrimonial alliance with the Habsburgs. In 1510 Zapolya sued in person for the hand of the Princess Anne in vain, and his appointment to the voivody of Transylvania (1511) was with the evident intention of removing him far from court. In 1513, after a successful raid in Turkish territory, he hastened to Buda at the head of 1000 horsemen and renewed his suit, which was again rejected. In 1514 he stamped out the dangerous peasant rising under Dozsa (q.v.) and the infernal torments by means of which the rebel leader was slowly done to death were the invention of Zapolya. With the gentry, whose hideous oppression had moved the peasantry to revolt, he was now more than ever popular, and, on the death of Wladislaus II., the second diet of Rákos (1516) appointed him the governor of the infant king Louis II. He now aimed at the dignity of palatine also, but the council of state and the court party combined against him and appointed István Báthory instead (1519). The strife of factions now burnt more fiercely than ever at the very time when the pressure of the Turk demanded the combination of all the national forces against a common danger. It was entirely due to the dilatoriness and dissensions of Zapolya and Báthory that the great fortress of Belgrade was captured in 1521, a loss which really sealed the fate of Hungary. In 1522 the diet would have appointed both Zapolya and Báthory captains-general of the realm, but the court set Zapolya aside and chose Báthory only. At the diets of Hátvan and Rákos in 1522, Zapolya placed himself at the head of a confederation to depose the palatine and the other great officers of state, but the attempt failed. In the following year, however, the revolutionary Hátvan diet drove out all the members of the council of state and made István Verböczy, the great jurist, and a friend of Zapolya, palatine. In the midst of this hopeless anarchy, Suleiman I., the Magnificent, invaded Hungary with a countless army, and the young king perished on the field of Mohács in a vain attempt to stay his progress, the contradictory orders of Louis II. preventing Zapolya from arriving in time to turn the fortunes of the day. The court party accused him of deliberate treachery on this occasion; but the charge must be pronounced groundless. His younger brother George was killed at Mohács, where he was second commander-in-chief. Zapolya was elected king of Hungary at the subsequent diet of Tokaj (Oct. 14), the election was confirmed by the diet of Székesfehérvár (10th of November), and he was crowned on the following day with the holy crown.

A struggle with the rival candidate, the German king Ferdinand I., at once ensued (see Hungary: History) and it was only with the aid of the Turks that king John was able to exhaust his opponent and compel him to come to terms. Finally, in 1538, by the compact of Nagyvárad, Ferdinand recognized John as king of Hungary, but secured the right of succession on his death. Nevertheless John broke the compact by bequeathing the kingdom to his infant son John Sigismund under Turkish protection. John was the last national king of Hungary. His merit, as a statesman, lies in his stout vindication of the national independence, though without the assistance of his great minister György Utiesenovich, better known as “Frater George” (Cardinal Martinuzzi (q.v.)), this would have been impossible. Indirectly he contributed to the subsequent conquest of Hungary by admitting the Turk as a friend.

See Vilmos Fraknoi, Ungarn vor der Schlacht bei Mohács (Budapest, 1886); L. Kupelwieser, Die Kämpfe Ungarns mit den Osmanen bis zur Schlacht bei Mohács (Vienna, 1895); Ignacz Acsády, History of the Hungarian Realm, vol. i. (Hung.) (Budapest, 1902-1904).

JOHN OF BRIENNE (c. 1148-1237), king of Jerusalem and Latin emperor of Constantinople, was a man of sixty years of age before he began to play any considerable part in history. Destined originally for the Church, he had preferred to become a knight, and in forty years of tournaments and fights he had won himself a considerable reputation, when in 1208 envoys came from the Holy Land to ask Philip Augustus, king of France, to select one of his barons as husband to the heiress, and ruler of the kingdom, of Jerusalem. Philip selected John of Brienne, and promised to support him in his new dignity. In 1210 John married the heiress Mary (daughter of Isabella and Conrad of Montferrat), assuming the title of king in right of his wife. In 1211, after some desultory operations, he concluded a six years’ truce with Malik-el-Adil; in 1212 he lost his wife, who left him a daughter, Isabella; soon afterwards he married an Armenian princess. In the fifth crusade (1218-1221) he was a prominent figure. The legate Pelagius, however, claimed the command; and insisting on the advance from Damietta, in spite of the warnings of King John, he refused to accept the favourable terms of the sultan, as the king advised, until it was too late. After the failure of the crusade, King John came to the West to obtain help for his kingdom. In 1223 he met Honorius III. and the emperor Frederick II. at Ferentino, where, in order that he might be connected more closely with the Holy Land, Frederick was betrothed to John’s daughter Isabella, now heiress of the kingdom. After the meeting at Ferentino, John went to France and England, finding little consolation; and thence he travelled to Compostella, where he married a new wife, Berengaria of Castile. After a visit to Germany he returned to Rome (1225). Here he received a demand from Frederick II. (who had now married Isabella) that he should abandon his title and dignity of king, which—so Frederick claimed—had passed to himself along with the heiress of the kingdom. John was now a septuagenarian “king in exile,” but he was still vigorous enough to revenge himself on Frederick, by commanding the papal troops which attacked southern Italy during the emperor’s absence on the sixth crusade (1228-1229). In 1229 John, now eighty years of age, was invited by the barons of the Latin empire of Constantinople to become emperor, on condition that Baldwin of Courtenay should marry his second daughter and succeed him. For nine years he ruled in Constantinople, and in 1235, with a few troops, he repelled a great siege of the city by Vataces of Nicaea and Azen of Bulgaria. After this last feat of arms, which has perhaps been exaggerated by the Latin chroniclers, who compare him to Hector and the Maccabees, John died in the habit of a Franciscan friar. An aged paladin, somewhat uxorious and always penniless, he was a typical knight errant, whose wanderings led him all over Europe, and planted him successively on the thrones of Jerusalem and Constantinople.

The story of John’s career must be sought partly in histories of the kingdom of Jerusalem and of the Latin Empire of the East, partly in monographs. Among these, of which R. Röhricht gives a list (Geschichte des Königreichs Jerusalem, p. 699, n. 3), see especially that of E. de Montcarmet, Un chevalier du temps passé (Limoges, 1876 and 1881).

JOHN III. (Sobieski) (1624-1696), king of Poland, was the eldest son of James Sobieski, castellan of Cracow, and Theofila Danillowiczowna, grand-daughter of the great Hetman Zolkiewski. After being educated at Cracow, he made the grand tour with his brother Mark and returned to Poland in 1648. He served against Chmielnicki and the Cossacks and was present at the battles of Beresteczko (1651) and Batoka (1652), but was one of the first to desert his unhappy country when invaded by the Swedes in 1654, and actually assisted them to conquer the Prussian provinces in 1655. He returned to his lawful allegiance in the following year and assisted Czarniecki in his difficult task of expelling Charles X. of Sweden from the central Polish provinces. For his subsequent services to King John Casimir, especially in the Ukraine against the Tatars and Cossacks, he received the grand bâton of the crown, or commandership-in-chief (1668). He had already (1665) succeeded Czarniecki as acting commander-in-chief. Sobieski had well earned these distinctions by his extraordinary military capacity, but he was now to exhibit a less pleasing side of his character. He was in fact a typical representative of the unscrupulous self-seeking Polish magnates of the 17th century who were always ready to sacrifice everything, their country included, to their own private ambition. At the election diet of 1669 he accepted large bribes from Louis XIV. to support one of the French candidates; after the election of Michael Wisniowiecki (June 19, 1669) he openly conspired, again in the French interest, against his lawful sovereign, and that too at the very time when the Turk was ravaging the southern frontier of the republic. Michael was the feeblest monarch the Poles could have placed upon the throne, and Sobieski deliberately attempted to make government of any kind impossible. He formed a league with the primate Prazmowski and other traitors to dethrone the king; when (1670) the plot was discovered and participation in it repudiated by Louis XIV., the traitors sought the help of the elector of Brandenburg against their own justly indignant countrymen. Two years later the same traitors again conspired against the king, at the very time when the Turks had defeated Sobieski’s unsupported lieutenant, Luzecki, at Czertwertyworska and captured the fortress of Kamieniec (Kamenetz-Podolskiy), the key of south-eastern Poland, while Lemberg was only saved by the valour of Elias Lancki. The unhappy king did the only thing possible in the circumstances. He summoned the tuszenia pospolite, or national armed assembly; but it failed to assemble in time, whereupon Michael was constrained to sign the disgraceful peace of Buczacz (Oct. 17, 1672) whereby Poland ceded to the Porte the whole of the Ukraine with Podolia and Kamieniec. Aroused to duty by a series of disasters for which he himself was primarily responsible, Sobieski now hastened to the frontier, and won four victories in ten days. But he could not recover Kamieniec, and when the tuszenia pospolite met at Golenba and ordered an inquiry into the conduct of Sobieski and his accomplices he frustrated all their efforts by summoning a counter confederation to meet at Szczebrzeszyn. Powerless to oppose a rebel who was at the same time commander-in-chief, both the king and the diet had to give way, and a compromise was come to whereby the peace of Buczacz was repudiated and Sobieski was given a chance of rehabilitating himself, which he did by his brilliant victory over an immense Turkish host at Khotin (Nov. 10, 1673). The same day King Michael died and Sobieski, determined to secure the throne for himself, hastened to the capital, though Tatar bands were swarming over the frontier and the whole situation was acutely perilous. Appearing at the elective diet of 1674 at the head of 6000 veterans he overawed every other competitor, and despite the persistent opposition of the Lithuanians was elected king on the 21st of May. By this time, however, the state of things in the Ukraine was so alarming that the new king had to hasten to the front. Assisted by French diplomacy at the Porte (Louis XIV. desiring to employ Poland against Austria), and his own skilful negotiations with the Tatar khan, John III. now tried to follow the example of Wladislaus IV. by leaving the guardianship of the Ukraine entirely in the hands of the Cossacks, while he assembled as many regulars and militiamen as possible at Lemberg, whence he might hasten with adequate forces to defend whichever of the provinces of the Republic might be in most danger. But the appeal of the king was like the voice of one crying in the wilderness, and not one gentleman in a hundred hastened to the assistance of the fatherland. Even at the end of August Sobieski had but 3000 men at his disposal to oppose to 60,000 Turks. Only his superb strategy and the heroic devotion of his lieutenants—notably the converted Jew, Jan Samuel Chrzanowski, who held the Ottoman army at bay for eleven days behind the walls of Trembowla—enabled the king to remove “the pagan yoke from our shoulders”; and he returned to be crowned at Cracow on the 14th of February 1676. In October 1676, in his entrenched camp at Zaravno, he with 13,000 men withstood 80,000 Turks for three weeks, and recovered by special treaty two-thirds of the Ukraine, but without Kamieniec (treaty of Zaravno, Oct. 16, 1676).

Having now secured peace abroad Sobieski was desirous of strengthening Poland at home by establishing absolute monarchy; but Louis XIV. looked coldly on the project, and from this time forth the old familiar relations between the republic and the French monarchy were strained to breaking point, though the final rupture did not come till 1682 on the arrival of the Austrian minister, Zerowski, at Warsaw. After resisting every attempt of the French court to draw him into the anti-Habsburg league, Sobieski signed the famous treaty of alliance with the emperor Leopold against the Turks (March 31, 1683), which was the prelude to the most glorious episode of his life, the relief of Vienna and the liberation of Hungary from the Ottoman yoke. The epoch-making victory of the 12th of September 1683 was ultimately decided by the charge of the Polish cavalry led by Sobieski in person. Unfortunately Poland profited little or nothing by this great triumph, and now that she had broken the back of the enemy she was left to fight the common enemy in the Ukraine with whatever assistance she could obtain from the unwilling and unready Muscovites. The last twelve years of the reign of John III. were a period of unmitigated humiliation and disaster. He now reaped to the full the harvest of treason and rebellion which he himself had sown so abundantly during the first forty years of his life. A treasonable senate secretly plotting his dethronement, a mutinous diet rejecting the most necessary reforms for fear of “absolutism,” ungrateful allies who profited exclusively by his victories—these were his inseparable companions during the remainder of his life. Nay, at last his evil destiny pursued him to the battlefield and his own home. His last campaign (in 1690) was an utter failure, and the last years of his life were embittered by the violence and the intrigues of his dotingly beloved wife, Marya Kazimiera d’Arquien, by whom he had three sons, James, Alexander and Constantine. He died on the 17th of June 1696, a disillusioned and broken-hearted old man.

See Tadeusz Korzon, Fortunes and Misfortunes of John Sobieski (Pol.) (Cracow, 1898); E. H. R. Tatham, John Sobieski (Oxford, 1881); Kazimierz Waliszewski, Archives of French Foreign Affairs, 1674-1696, v. (Cracow, 1881); Ludwik Piotr Leliwa, John Sobieski and His Times (Pol.) (Cracow, 1882-1885); Kazimierz Waliszewski, Marysienka Queen of Poland (London, 1898); Georg Rieder, Johann Sobieski in Wien (Vienna, 1882).

(R. N. B.)

JOHN I. (1357-1433), king of Portugal, the natural son of Pedro I. (el Justicieiro), was born at Lisbon on the 22nd of April 1357, and in 1364 was created grand-master of Aviz. On the death of his lawful brother Ferdinand I., without male issue, in October 1383, strenuous efforts were made to secure the succession for Beatrice, the only child of Ferdinand I., who as heiress-apparent had been married to John I. of Castile (Spain), but the popular voice declared against an arrangement by which Portugal would virtually have become a Spanish province, and John was after violent tumults proclaimed protector and regent in the following December. In April 1385 he was unanimously chosen king by the estates of the realm at Coimbra. The king of Castile invaded Portugal, but his army was compelled by pestilence to withdraw, and subsequently by the decisive battle of Aljubarrota (Aug. 14, 1385) the stability of John’s throne was permanently secured. Hostilities continued intermittently until John of Castile died, without leaving issue by Beatrice, in 1390. Meanwhile the king of Portugal went on consolidating the power of the crown at home and the influence of the nation abroad. In 1415 Ceuta was taken from the Moors by his sons who had been born to him by his wife Philippa, daughter of John, duke of Lancaster; specially distinguished in the siege was Prince Henry (q.v.) afterwards generally known as “the Navigator.” John I., sometimes surnamed “the Great,” and sometimes “father of his country,” died on the 11th of August 1433, in the forty-eighth year of a reign which had been characterized by great prudence, ability and success; he was succeeded by his son Edward or Duarte, so named out of compliment to Edward III. of England.

See J. P. Oliveira Martins, Os filhos de D. João I. and A vida de Nun’ Alvares (Lisbon, 2nd ed. 1894).

JOHN II. (1455-1495), the Perfect, king of Portugal, succeeded his father, Alphonso V., in August 1481. His first business was to curtail the overgrown power of his aristocracy; noteworthy incidents in the contest were the execution (1483) of the duke of Braganza for correspondence with Castile, and the murder, by the king’s own hand, of the youthful duke of Viseu for conspiracy. This reign was signalized by Bartholomeu Diaz’s discovery of the Cape of Good Hope in 1488. Maritime rivalry led to disputes between Portugal and Castile until their claims were adjusted by the famous treaty of Tordesillas (June 7, 1494). John II. died, without leaving male issue, in October 1495, and was succeeded by his brother-in-law Emmanuel (Manoel) I.

See J. P. Oliveira Martins, O principe perfeito (Lisbon, 1895).

JOHN III. (1502-1557), king of Portugal, was born at Lisbon, on the 6th of June 1502, and ascended the throne as successor of his father Emmanuel I. in December 1521. In 1524 he married Catherine, sister to the Emperor Charles V., who shortly afterwards married the infanta Isabella, John’s sister. Succeeding to the crown at a time when Portugal was at the height of its political power, and Lisbon in a position of commercial importance previously unknown, John III., unfortunately for his dominions, became subservient to the clerical party among his subjects, with disastrous consequences to the commercial and social prosperity of his kingdom. He died of apoplexy on the 6th of June 1557, and was succeeded by his grandson Sebastian, then a child of only three years.

JOHN IV. (1603-1656), the Fortunate, king of Portugal, was born at Villaviciosa in March 1603, succeeded to the dukedom of Braganza in 1630, and married Luisa de Guzman, eldest daughter of the duke of Medina Sidonia, in 1633. By the unanimous voice of the people he was raised to the throne of Portugal (of which he was held to be the legitimate heir) at the revolution effected in December 1640 against the Spanish king, Philip IV. His accession led to a protracted war with Spain, which only ended with the recognition of Portuguese independence in a subsequent reign (1668). He died on the 6th of November 1656, and was succeeded by his son Alphonso VI.

JOHN V. (1689-1750), king of Portugal, was born at Lisbon on the 22nd of October 1689, and succeeded his father Pedro II. in December 1706, being proclaimed on the 1st of January 1707. One of his first acts was to intimate his adherence to the Grand Alliance, which his father had joined in 1703. Accordingly his general Das Minas, along with Lord Galway, advanced into Castile, but sustained the defeat of Almanza (April 14). In October 1708 he married Maria Anna, daughter of Leopold I., thus strengthening the alliance with Austria; the series of unsuccessful campaigns which ensued ultimately terminated in a favourable peace with France in 1713 and with Spain in 1715. The rest of his long reign was characterized by royal subservience to the clergy, the kingdom being administered by ecclesiastical persons and for ecclesiastical objects to an extent that gave him the best of rights to the title “Most Faithful King,” bestowed upon him and his successors by a bull of Pope Benedict XIV. in 1748. John V. died on the 31st of July 1750, and was succeeded by his son Joseph.

JOHN VI. (1769-1826), king of Portugal, was born at Lisbon on the 13th of May 1769, and received the title of prince of Brazil in 1788. In 1792 he assumed the reins of government in name of his mother Queen Mary I., who had become insane. He had been brought up in an ecclesiastical atmosphere, and, being naturally of a somewhat weak and helpless character, was but ill adapted for the responsibilities he was thus called on to undertake. In 1799 he assumed the title of regent, which he retained until his mother’s death in 1816. (For the political history of his regency, see Portugal.) In 1816 he was recognized as king of Portugal but he continued to reside in Brazil; the consequent spread of dissatisfaction resulted in the peaceful revolution of 1820, and the proclamation of a constitutional government, to which he swore fidelity on his return to Portugal in 1822. In the same year, and again in 1823, he had to suppress a rebellion led by his son Dom Miguel, whom he ultimately was compelled to banish in 1824. He died at Lisbon on the 26th of March 1826, and was succeeded by Pedro IV.

JOHN (1801-1873), king of Saxony, son of Prince Maximilian of Saxony and his wife Caroline of Parma (d. 1804), was born at Dresden on the 12th of December 1801. As a boy he took a keen interest in literature and art (also in history, law, and political science), and studied with the greatest ardour classical and German literature (Herder, Schiller, Goethe). He soon began to compose poetry himself, and drew great inspiration from a journey in Italy (1821-1822), the pleasure of which was however darkened by the death of his brother Clemens. In Pavia the prince met with Biagioli’s edition of Dante, and this gave rise to his lifelong and fruitful studies of Dante. The first part of his German translation of Dante was published in 1828, and in 1833 appeared the complete work, with a valuable commentary, which met with a great success. Several new editions appeared under his constant supervision, and he collected a complete library of works on Dante.

On his return from Italy he was betrothed to Princess Amalia of Bavaria, daughter of King Maximilian Joseph. He thus became the brother-in-law of Frederick William IV., king of Prussia, with whom he had a deep and lasting friendship. His wife Amalia died on the 8th of November 1877, having borne him nine children, two of whom, Albert and George, later became kings of Saxony.

On his return to Dresden, John was called in 1822 to the privy board of finance (Geheimes Finanzkollegium) and in 1825 became its vice-president. Under the leadership of the president, Freiherr von Manteuffel, he acquired a thorough knowledge of administration and of political economy, and laid the foundations of that conservatism which he retained throughout life. These new activities did not, however, interrupt his literary and artistic studies. He came into still closer relations with politics and government after his entry into the privy council in 1830. During the revolution in Saxony he helped in the pacification of the country, became commandant of the new national guard, the political tendencies of which he tried to check, and took an exceptionally active part in the organization of the constitution of the 4th of September 1831 and especially in the deliberations of the upper chamber, where he worked with unflagging energy and great ability. Following the example of his father, he taught his children in person, and had a great influence on their education. On the 12th of August 1845, during a stay at Leipzig, the prince was the object of hostile public demonstrations, the people holding him to be the head of an alleged ultramontane party at court, and the revolution of 1848 compelled him to interrupt his activities in the upper chamber. Immediately after the suppression of the revolution he resumed his place and took part chiefly in the discussion of legal questions. He was also interested in the amalgamation of the German historical and archaeological societies. On the death of his brother Frederick Augustus II., John became, on the 9th of August 1854, king of Saxony. As king he soon won great popularity owing to his simplicity, graciousness and increasingly evident knowledge of affairs. In his policy as regards the German confederation he was entirely on the side of Austria. Though not opposed to a reform of the federal constitution, he held that its maintenance under the presidency of Austria was essential. This view he supported at the assembly of princes at Frankfort in August and September 1863. He was unable to uphold his views against Prussia, and in the war of 1866 fought on the side of Austria. It was with difficulty that, on the conclusion of peace, Austrian diplomacy succeeded in enabling the king to retain his crown. After 1866 King John gradually became reconciled to the new state of affairs. He entered the North German confederation, and in the war of 1870-71 with France his troops fought with conspicuous courage. He died at Dresden on the 29th of October 1873.

See J. Petzholdt, “Zur Litteratur des Königs Johann,” Neuer Anzeiger für Bibliographie (1858, 1859, 1871, 1873, 1874); “Aphorismen über unsern König J.,” Bote von Geising (1866-1869); Das Büchlein vom König Johann (Leipzig, 1867); H. v. Treitschke, Preussische Jahrbücher 23 (1869); A. Reumont, “Elogio di Giovanni, Rè di Sassonia,” Dagli Atti della Accademia della Crusca (Florence, 1874); J. P. von Winterstein, Johann, König von Sachsen (Dresden, 1878), and in Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (1881); H. Ermisch, Die Wettiner und die Landesgeschichte (Leipzig, 1902); O. Kaemmel, Sächsische Geschichte (Leipzig, 1899, Sammlung Göschen).

(J. Hn.)

JOHN I. (d. 1294), duke of Brabant and Lorraine, surnamed the Victorious, one of the most gifted and chivalrous princes of his time, was the second son of Duke Henry III. and Aleidis of Burgundy. In 1267 his elder brother Henry, being infirm of mind and body, was deposed in his favour. In 1271 John married Margaret, daughter of Louis IX. of France, and on her death in childbirth he took as his second wife (1273) Margaret of Flanders, daughter of Guy de Dampierre. His sister Marie was espoused in 1275 to Philip III. (the Bold) of France, and during the reign of Philip and his son Philip IV. there were close relations of friendship and alliance between Brabant and France. In 1285 John accompanied Philip III. in his expedition against Peter III., king of Aragon, but the duchy of Limburg was the scene of his chief activity and greatest successes. After the death of Waleran IV. in 1279 the succession to this duchy was disputed. His heiress, Ermengarde, had married Reinald I. count of Gelderland. She died childless, but her husband continued to rule in Limburg, although his rights were disputed by Count Adolph of Berg, nephew to Waleran IV. (see Limburg). Not being strong enough to eject his rival, Adolph sold his rights to John of Brabant, and hostilities broke out in 1283. Harassed by desultory warfare and endless negotiations, and seeing no prospect of holding his own against the powerful duke of Brabant, Reinald made over his rights to Henry III. count of Luxemburg, who was a descendant of Waleran III. of Limburg. Henry III. was sustained by the archbishop of Cologne and other allies, as well as by Reinald of Gelderland. The duke of Brabant at once invaded the Rhineland and laid siege to the castle of Woeringen near Bonn. Here he was attacked by the forces of the confederacy on the 5th of June 1288. After a bloody struggle John of Brabant, though at the head of far inferior numbers, was completely victorious. Limburg was henceforth attached to the duchy of Brabant. John consolidated his conquest by giving his daughter in marriage to Henry of Luxemburg (1291). John the Victorious was a perfect model of a feudal prince in the days of chivalry, brave, adventurous, excelling in every form of active exercise, fond of display, generous in temper. He delighted in tournaments, and was always eager personally to take part in jousts. On the 3rd of May 1294, on the occasion of some marriage festivities at Bar, he was wounded in the arm in an encounter by Pierre de Bausner, and died from the effects of the hurt.

Bibliography.—H. Barlandus, Rerum gestarum a Brabantiae ducibus historia usque in annum 1526 (Louvain, 1566); G. C. van der Berghe, Jean le Victorieux, duc de Brabant (1259-1294), (Louvain, 1857); K. F. Stallaert, Gesch. v. Jan I. van Braband en zijne tijdvak (Brussels, 1861); A. Wauters, Le Duc Jean Ier et le Brabant sous le règne de ce prince (Brussels, 1859).

JOHN, or Hans (1513-1571), margrave of Brandenburg-Cüstrin, was the younger son of Joachim I., elector of Brandenburg, and was born at Tangermünde on the 3rd of August 1513. In spite of the dispositio Achillea which decreed the indivisibility of the electorate, John inherited the new mark of Brandenburg on his father’s death in July 1535. He had been brought up as a strict Catholic, but soon wavered in his allegiance, and in 1538 ranged himself definitely on the side of the Reformers. About the same time he joined the league of Schmalkalden; but before the war broke out between the league and the emperor Charles V. the promises of the emperor had won him over to the imperial side. After the conclusion of the war, the relations between John and Charles became somewhat strained. The margrave opposed the Interim, issued from Augsburg in May 1548; and he was the leader of the princes who formed a league for the defence of the Lutheran doctrines in February 1550. The alliance of these princes, however, with Henry II., king of France, does not appear to have commended itself to him and after some differences of opinion with Maurice, elector of Saxony, he returned to the emperor’s side. His remaining years were mainly spent in the new mark, which he ruled carefully and economically. He added to its extent by the purchase of Beeskow and Storkow, and fortified the towns of Cüstrin and Peitz. He died at Cüstrin on the 13th of January 1571. His wife Catherine was a daughter of Henry II., duke of Brunswick, and as he left no sons the new mark passed on his death to his nephew John George, elector of Brandenburg.

See Berg, Beiträge zur Geschichte des Markgrafen Johann von Küstrin (Landsberg, 1903).

JOHN (1371-1419), called the Fearless (Sans Peur), duke of Burgundy, son of Philip the Bold, duke of Burgundy, and Margaret of Flanders, was born at Dijon on the 28th of May 1371. On the death of his maternal grandfather in 1384 he received the title of count of Nevers, which he bore until his father’s death. Though originally destined to be the husband of Catherine, sister of Charles VI. of France, he married in 1385 Margaret, daughter of Duke Albert of Bavaria, an alliance which consolidated his position in the Netherlands. In the spring of 1396 he took arms for Hungary against the Turks and on the 28th of September was taken prisoner by the Sultan Bayezid I. at the bloody battle of Nicopolis, where he earned his surname of “the Fearless.” He did not recover his liberty until 1397, and then only by paying an enormous ransom. He succeeded his father in 1404, and immediately found himself in conflict with Louis of Orleans, the young brother of Charles VI. The history of the following years is filled with the struggles between these two princes and with their attempts to seize the authority in the name of the demented king. John endeavoured to strengthen his position by marrying his daughter Margaret to the dauphin Louis, and by betrothing his son Philip to a daughter of Charles VI. Like his father, he looked for support to the popular party, to the tradesmen, particularly the powerful gild of the butchers, and also to the university of Paris. In 1405 he opposed in the royal council a scheme of taxation proposed by the duke of Orleans, which was nevertheless adopted. Louis retaliated by refusing to sanction the duke of Burgundy’s projected expedition against Calais, whereupon John quitted the court in chagrin on the pretext of taking up his mother’s heritage. He was, however, called back to the council to find that the duke of Orleans and the queen had carried off the dauphin. John succeeded in bringing back the dauphin to Paris, and open war seemed imminent between the two princes. But an arrangement was effected in October 1405, and in 1406 John was made by royal decree guardian of the dauphin and the king’s children.

The struggle, however, soon revived with increased force. Hostilities had been resumed with England; the duke of Orleans had squandered the money raised for John’s expedition against Calais; and the two rivals broke out into open threats. On the 20th of November 1407 their uncle, the duke of Berry, brought about a solemn reconciliation, but three days later Louis was assassinated by John’s orders in the Rue Barbette, Paris. John at first sought to conceal his share in the murder, but ultimately decided to confess to his uncles, and abruptly left Paris. His vassals, however, showed themselves determined to support him in his struggle against the avengers of the duke of Orleans. The court decided to negotiate, and called upon the duke to return. John entered Paris in triumph, and instructed the Franciscan theologian Jean Petit (d. 1411) to pronounce an apology for the murder. But he was soon called back to his estates by a rising of the people of Liége against his brother-in-law, the bishop of that town. The queen and the Orleans party took every advantage of his absence and had Petit’s discourse solemnly refuted. John’s victory over the Liégeois at Hasbain on the 23rd of September 1408, enabled him to return to Paris, where he was reinstated in his ancient privileges. By the peace of Chartres (March 9, 1409) the king absolved him from the crime, and Valentina Visconti, the widow of the murdered duke, and her children pledged themselves to a reconciliation; while an edict of the 27th of December 1409 gave John the guardianship of the dauphin. Nevertheless, a new league was formed against the duke of Burgundy in the following year, principally at the instance of Bernard, count of Armagnac, from whom the party opposed to the Burgundians took its name. The peace of Bicêtre (Nov. 2, 1410) prevented the outbreak of hostilities, inasmuch as the parties were enjoined by its terms to return to their estates; but in 1411, in consequence of ravages committed by the Armagnacs in the environs of Paris, the duke of Burgundy was called back to Paris. He relied more than ever on the support of the popular party, which then obtained the reforming Ordonnance Cabochienne (so called from Simon Caboche, a prominent member of the gild of the butchers). But the bloodthirsty excesses of the populace brought a change. John was forced to withdraw to Burgundy (August 1413), and the university of Paris and John Gerson once more censured Petit’s propositions, which, but for the lavish bribes of money and wines offered by John to the prelates, would have been solemnly condemned at the council of Constance. John’s attitude was undecided; he negotiated with the court and also with the English, who had just renewed hostilities with France. Although he talked of helping his sovereign, his troops took no part in the battle of Agincourt (1415), where, however, two of his brothers, Anthony, duke of Brabant, and Philip, count of Nevers, fell fighting for France.

In 1417 John made an attack on Paris, which failed through his loitering at Lagny; but on the 30th of May 1418 a traitor, one Perrinet Leclerc, opened the gates of Paris to the Burgundian captain, Villiers de l’Isle Adam. The dauphin, afterwards King Charles VI., fled from the town, and John betook himself to the king, who promised to forget the past. John, however, did nothing to prevent the surrender of Rouen, which had been besieged by the English, and on which the fate of the kingdom seemed to depend; and the town was taken in 1419. The dauphin then decided on a reconciliation, and on the 11th of July the two princes swore peace on the bridge of Pouilly, near Melun. On the ground that peace was not sufficiently assured by the Pouilly meeting, a fresh interview was proposed by the dauphin and took place on the 10th of September 1419 on the bridge of Montereau, when the duke of Burgundy was felled with an axe by Tanneguy du Chastel, one of the dauphin’s companions, and done to death by the other members of the dauphin’s escort. His body was first buried at Montereau and afterwards removed to the Chartreuse of Dijon and placed in a magnificent tomb sculptured by Juan de la Huerta; the tomb was afterwards transferred to the museum in the hôtel de ville.

By his wife, Margaret of Bavaria, he had one son, Philip the Good, who succeeded him; and seven daughters—Margaret, who married in 1404 Louis, son of Charles VI., and in 1423 Arthur, earl of Richmond and afterwards duke of Brittany; Mary, wife of Adolph of Cleves; Catherine, promised in 1410 to a son of Louis of Anjou; Isabella, wife of Olivier de Châtillon, count of Penthièvre; Joanna, who died young; Anne, who married John, duke of Bedford, in 1423; and Agnes, who married Charles I., duke of Bourbon, in 1425.

See A. G. P. Baron de Barante, Histoire des ducs de Bourgogne, (Brussels, 1835-1836); B. Zeller, Louis de France et Jean sans Peur (Paris, 1886); and E. Petit, Itinéraire de Philippe le Hardi et de Jean sans Peur (Paris, 1888).

(R. Po.)


This incident earned for him among the Parisians the contemptuous nickname of “John of Lagny, who does not hurry.”

JOHN (1468-1532), called the Steadfast, elector of Saxony, fourth son of the elector Ernest, was born on the 30th of June 1468. In 1486, when his eldest brother became elector as Frederick III., John received a part of the paternal inheritance and afterwards assisted his kinsman, the German king Maximilian I., in several campaigns. He was an early adherent of Luther, and, becoming elector of Saxony by his brother’s death in May 1525, was soon prominent among the Reformers. Having assisted to suppress the rising led by Thomas Munzer in 1525, he helped Philip, landgrave of Hesse, to found the league of Gotha, formed in 1526 for the protection of the Reformers. He was active at the diet of Spires in 1526, and the “recess” of this diet gave him an opportunity to reform the church in Saxony, where a plan for divine service was drawn up by Luther. The assertions of Otto von Pack that a league had been formed against the elector and his friends induced John to ally himself again with Philip of Hesse in March 1528, but he restrained Philip from making an immediate attack upon their opponents. He signed the protest against the “recess” of the diet of Spires in 1529, being thus one of the original Protestants, and was actively hostile to Charles V. at the diet of Augsburg in 1530. Having signed the confession of Augsburg, he was alone among the electors in objecting to the election of Ferdinand, afterwards the emperor Ferdinand I., as king of the Romans. He was among the first members of the league of Schmalkalden, assented to the religious peace of Nuremberg in 1532, and died at Schweidnitz on the 16th of August 1532. John was twice married and left two sons and two daughters. His elder son, John Frederick, succeeded him as elector, and his younger son was John Ernest (d. 1553). He rendered great services to the Protestant cause in its infancy, but as a Lutheran resolutely refused to come to any understanding with other opponents of the older faith.

See J. Becker, Kurfürst Johann von Sachsen und seine Beziehungen zu Luther (Leipzig, 1890); J. Janssen, History of the German People (English translation), vol. v. (London, 1903); L. von Ranke, Deutsche Geschichte im Zeitalter der Reformation (Leipzig, 1882).

JOHN, DON (1545-1578), of Austria, was the natural son of the emperor Charles V. by Barbara Blomberg, the daughter of an opulent citizen of Regensburg. He was born in that free imperial city on the 24th of February 1545, the anniversary of his father’s birth and coronation and of the battle of Pavia, and was at first confided under the name of Geronimo to foster parents of humble birth, living at a village near Madrid; but in 1554 he was transferred to the charge of Madalena da Ulloa, the wife of Don Luis de Quijada, and was brought up in ignorance of his parentage at Quijada’s castle of Villagarcia not far from Valladolid. Charles V. in a codicil of his will recognized Geronimo as his son, and recommended him to the care of his successor. In September 1559 Philip II. of Spain publicly recognized the boy as a member of the royal family, and he was known at court as Don Juan de Austria. For three years he was educated at Alcalá, and had as school companions his nephews, the infante Don Carlos and Alexander Farnese, prince of Parma. With Don Carlos his relations were especially friendly. It had been Philip’s intention that Don John should become a monk, but he showed a strong inclination for a soldier’s career and the king yielded. In 1568 Don John was appointed to the command of a squadron of 33 galleys, and his first operations were against the Algerian pirates. His next services were (1560-70) against the rebel Moriscos in Granada. In 1571 a nobler field of action was opened to him. The conquest of Cyprus by the Turks had led the Christian powers of the Mediterranean to fear for the safety of the Adriatic. A league between Spain and Venice was effected by the efforts of Pope Pius V. to resist the Turkish advance to the west, and Don John was named admiral in chief of the combined fleets. At the head of 208 galleys, 6 galleasses and a number of smaller craft, Don John encountered the Turkish fleet at Lepanto on the 7th of October 1571, and gained a complete victory. Only forty Turkish vessels effected their escape, and it was computed that 35,000 of their men were slain or captured while 15,000 Christian galley slaves were released. Unfortunately, through divisions and jealousies between the allies, the fruits of one of the most decisive naval victories in history were to a great extent lost.

This great triumph aroused Don John’s ambition and filled his imagination with schemes of personal aggrandizement. He thought of erecting first a principality in Albania and the Morea, and then a kingdom in Tunis. But the conclusion by Venice of a separate peace with the sultan put an end to the league, and though Don John captured Tunis in 1573, it was again speedily lost. The schemes of Don John found no support in Philip II., who refused to entertain them, and even withheld from his half-brother the title of infante of Spain. At last, however, he was appointed (1576) governor-general of the Netherlands, in succession to Luis de Requesens. The administration of the latter had not been successful, the revolt headed by the prince of Orange had spread, and at the time of Don John’s nomination the Pacification of Ghent appeared to have united the whole of the seventeen provinces of the Netherlands in determined opposition to Spanish rule and the policy of Philip II. The magic of Don John’s name, and the great qualities of which he had given proof, were to recover what had been lost. He was, however, now brought into contact with an adversary of a very different calibre from himself. This was William of Orange, whose influence was now supreme throughout the Netherlands. The Pacification of Ghent, which was really a treaty between Holland and Zeeland and the other provinces for the defence of their common interests against Spanish oppression, had been followed by an agreement between the southern provinces, known as the Union of Brussels, which, though maintaining the Catholic religion and the king’s authority, aimed at the expulsion of the Spanish soldiery and officials from the Netherlands. Confronted by the refusal of the states general to accept him as governor unless he assented to the conditions of the Pacification of Ghent, swore to maintain the rights and privileges of the provinces, and to employ only Netherlanders in his service, Don John, after some months of fruitless negotiations, saw himself compelled to give way. At Huey on the 12th of February 1577 he signed a treaty, known as the “Perpetual Edict,” in which he complied with these terms. On the 1st of May he made his entry into Brussels, but he found himself governor-general only in name, and the prince of Orange master of the situation. In July he suddenly betook himself to Namur and withdrew his concessions. William of Orange forthwith took up his residence at Brussels, and gave his support to the archduke Matthias, afterwards emperor, whom the states-general accepted as their sovereign. Meanwhile Philip had sent large reinforcements to Don John under the leadership of his cousin Alexander Farnese. At the head of a powerful force Don John now suddenly attacked the patriot army at Gemblours, where, chiefly by the skill and daring of Farnese, a complete victory was gained on the 31st of January 1578. He could not, however, follow up his success for lack of funds, and was compelled to remain inactive all the summer, chafing with impatience at the cold indifference with which his appeals for the sinews of war were treated by Philip. His health gave way, he was attacked with fever, and on the 1st of October 1578, at the early age of 33, Don John died, heartbroken at the failure of all his soaring ambitions, and at the repeated proofs that he had received of the king his brother’s jealousy and neglect.

See Sir W. Stirling Maxwell, Don John of Austria 1547-1575 (1883) and the bibliography under Philip II. of Spain.

JOHN, DON (1629-1679), of Austria, the younger, recognized as the natural son of Philip IV., king of Spain, his mother, Maria Calderon, or Calderona, being an actress. Scandal accused her of a prodigality of favours which must have rendered the paternity of Don John very dubious. He was, however, recognized by the king, received a princely education at Ocaña, and was amply endowed with commanderies in the military orders, and other forms of income. Don John was sent in 1647 to Naples—then in the throes of the popular rising first led by Masaniello—with a squadron and a military force, to support the viceroy. The restoration of royal authority was due rather to the exhaustion of the insurgents and the follies of their French leader, the duke of Guise, than to the forces of Don John. He was next sent as viceroy to Sicily, whence he was recalled in 1651 to complete the pacification of Catalonia, which had been in revolt since 1640. The excesses of the French, whom the Catalans had called in, had produced a reaction, and Don John had not much more to do than to preside over the final siege of Barcelona and the convention which terminated the revolt in October 1652. On both occasions he had played the peacemaker, and this sympathetic part, combined with his own pleasant manners and handsome person with bright eyes and abundant raven-black hair—a complete contrast to the fair complexions of the Habsburgs—made him a popular favourite. In 1656 he was sent to command in Flanders, in combination with the prince of Condé, then in revolt against his own sovereign. At the storming of the French camp at Valenciennes in 1656, Don John displayed brilliant personal courage at the head of a cavalry charge. When, however, he took a part in the leadership of the army at the Dunes in the battle fought against Turenne and the British forces sent over by Cromwell in 1658, he was completely beaten, in spite of the efforts of Condé, whose advice he neglected, and of the hard fighting of English Royalist exiles. During 1661 and 1662 he commanded against the Portuguese in Estremadura. The Spanish troops were ill-appointed, irregularly paid and untrustworthy, but they were superior in numbers and some successes were gained. If Don John had not suffered from the indolence which Clarendon, who knew him, considered his chief defect, the Portuguese would have been hard pressed. The greater part of the south of Portugal was overrun, but in 1663 the Portuguese were reinforced by a body of English troops, and were put under the command of the Huguenot Schomberg. By him Don John was completely beaten at Estremos. Even now he might not have lost the confidence of his father, if Queen Mariana, mother of the sickly infante Carlos, the only surviving legitimate son of the king, had not regarded the bastard with distrust and dislike. Don John was removed from command and sent to his commandery at Consuegra. After the death of Philip IV. in 1665 Don John became the recognized leader of the opposition to the government of Philip’s widow, the queen regent. She and her favourite, the German Jesuit Nithard, seized and put to death one of his most trusted servants, Don José Malladas. Don John, in return, put himself at the head of a rising of Aragon and Catalonia, which led to the expulsion of Nithard on the 25th of February 1669. Don John was, however, forced to content himself with the viceroyalty of Aragon. In 1677, the queen mother having aroused universal opposition by her shameless favour for Fernando de Valenzuela, Don John was able to drive her from court, and establish himself as prime minister. Great hopes were entertained of his administration, but it proved disappointing and short. Don John died on the 17th of September 1679.

The career of Don John can be followed in J. C. Dunlop’s Memoirs of Spain 1621-1700 (Edin. 1834).

JOHN OF BEVERLEY, ST (d. 721), English bishop, is said to have been born of noble parents at Harpham, in the east riding of Yorkshire. He received his education at Canterbury under Archbishop Theodore, the statement that he was educated at Oxford being of course untrue. He was for a time a member of the Whitby community, under St Hilda, and in 687 he was consecrated bishop of Hexham and in 705 was promoted to the bishopric of York. He resigned the latter see in 718, and retired to a monastery which he had founded at Beverley, where he died on the 7th of May 721. He was canonized in 1037, and his feast is celebrated annually in the Roman Church on the 7th of May. Many miracles of healing are ascribed to John, whose pupils were numerous and devoted to him. He was celebrated for his scholarship as well as for his virtues.

The following works are ascribed to John by J. Bale: Pro Luca exponendo (an exposition of Luke); Homiliae in Evangelia; Epistolae ad Herebaldum, Audenam, et Bertinum; and Epistolae ad Hyldam abbatissam. See life by Folcard, based on Bede, in Acta SS. Bolland.; and J. Raine’s Fasti eboracenses (1863).

JOHN OF THE CROSS, ST (1542-1591), Spanish mystic, was born at Ontiveros (Old Castile) on the 24th of June 1542. He became a professed Carmelite in 1564, and was ordained priest at Salamanca in 1567. He met with much opposition in his efforts to introduce the reforms proposed by St Theresa, and was more than once imprisoned. His real name was Juan de Yepez y Álvarez; in religion he was known as Juan de San Matias till 1568, when he adopted the name of Juan de la Cruz. Broken by persecution, he was sent to the monastery of Ubeda, where he died in 1591; his Obras espirituales were published posthumously in 1618. He was beatified in 1674 and canonized on the 27th of December 1726. The lofty symbolism of his prose is frequently obscure, but his lyrical verses are distinguished for their rapturous ecstasy and beauty of expression.

Some of his poems have been translated with great success by Arthur Symons in Images of Good and Evil; the most convenient edition of his works, which have been frequently reprinted, is that contained in vol. xvi. of the Biblioteca de autores españoles.

JOHN OF ASIA (or of Ephesus), a leader of the Monophysite Syriac-speaking Church in the 6th century, and one of the earliest and most important of Syriac historians. Born at Āmid (Diarbekr) about 505, he was there ordained as a deacon in 529, but in 534 we find him in Palestine, and in 535 he passed to Constantinople. The cause of his leaving Āmid was probably either the great pestilence which broke out there in 534 or the furious persecution directed against the Monophysites by Ephraim (patriarch of Antioch 529-544) and Abraham (bishop of Āmid c. 520-541). In Constantinople he seems to have early won the notice of Justinian, one of the main objects of whose policy was the consolidation of Eastern Christianity as a bulwark against the heathen power of Persia. John is said by Barhebraeus (Chron. eccl. i. 195) to have succeeded Anthimus as Monophysite bishop of Constantinople, but this is probably a mistake. Anyhow he enjoyed the emperor’s favour until the death of the latter in 565 and (as he himself tells us) was entrusted with the administration of the entire revenues of the Monophysite Church. He was also sent, with the rank of bishop, on a mission for the conversion of such heathen as remained in Asia Minor, and informs us that the number of those whom he baptized amounted to 70,000. He also built a large monastery at Tralles on the hills skirting the valley of the Meander, and more than 90 other monasteries. Of the mission to the Nubians which he promoted, though he did not himself visit their country, an interesting account is given in the 4th book of the 3rd part of his History. In 546 the emperor entrusted him with the task of rooting out the secret practice of idolatry in Constantinople and its neighbourhood. But his fortunes changed soon after the accession of Justin II. About 571 Paul of Asia, the orthodox or Chalcedonian patriarch, began (with the sanction of the emperor) a rigorous persecution of the Monophysite Church leaders, and John was among those who suffered most. He gives us a detailed account of his sufferings in prison, his loss of civil rights, &c., in the third part of his History. The latest events recorded are of the date 585, and the author cannot have lived much longer; but of the circumstances of his death nothing is known.

John’s main work was his Ecclesiastical History, which covered more than six centuries, from the time of Julius Caesar to 585. It was composed in three parts, each containing six books. The first part seems to have wholly perished. The second, which extended from Theodosius II. to the 6th or 7th year of Justin II., was (as F. Nau has recently proved) reproduced in full or almost in full, in John’s own words, in the third part of the Chronicle which was till lately attributed to the patriarch Dionysius Telmaharensis, but is really the work of an unknown compiler. Of this second division of John’s History, in which he had probably incorporated the so-called Chronicle of Joshua the Stylite, considerable portions are found in the British Museum MSS. Add. 14647 and 14650, and these have been published in the second volume of Land’s Anecdota Syriaca. But the whole is more completely presented in the Vatican MS. (clxii.), which contains the third part of the Chronicle of pseudo-Dionysius. The third part of John’s history, which is a detailed account of the ecclesiastical events which happened in 571-585, as well as of some earlier occurrences, survives in a fairly complete state in Add. 14640, a British Museum MS. of the 7th century. It forms a contemporary record of great value to the historian. Its somewhat disordered state, the want of chronological arrangement, and the occasional repetition of accounts of the same events are due, as the author himself informs us (ii. 50), to the work being almost entirely composed during the times of persecution. The same cause may account for the somewhat slovenly Syriac style. The writer claims to have treated his subject impartially, and though written from the narrow point of view of one to whom Monophysite “orthodoxy” was all-important, it is evidently a faithful reproduction of events as they occurred. This third part was edited by Cureton (Oxford, 1853), and was translated into English by R. Payne-Smith (Oxford, 1860) and into German by J. M. Schönfelder (Munich, 1862).

John’s other known work was a series of Biographies of Eastern Saints, compiled about 569. These have been edited by Land in Anecdota Syriaca, ii. 1-288, and translated into Latin by Douwen and Land (Amsterdam, 1889). An interesting estimate of John as an ecclesiastic and author was given by the Abbé Duchesne in a memoir read before the five French Academies on the 25th of October 1892.


See Land, Joannes Bischof von Ephesos, pp. 57 seq.

Cf. Land’s Appendix (op. cit. 172-193).

See Bulletin critique, 15th June and 25th Aug. 1896, and 25th Jan. 1897; Journal asiatique, 9th series, vol. viii. (1896) pp. 346 sqq. and vol. ix. (1897) p. 529; also Revue de l’Orient chrétien, Suppl. trimestriel (1897), pp. 41-54, 455-493; and compare Nöldeke in Vienna Oriental Journal (1896), pp. 160 sqq. The facts are briefly stated in Duval’s Littérature syriaque, p. 192. A full analysis of this second part of John’s history has been given by M. Nau.

JOHN OF DAMASCUS (Johannes Damascenus) (d. before 754), an eminent theologian of the Eastern Church, derives his surname from Damascus, where he was born about the close of the 7th century. His Arabic name was Mansur (the victor), and he received the epithet Chrysorrhoas (gold-pouring) on account of his eloquence. The principal account of his life is contained in a narrative of the 10th century, much of which is obviously legendary. His father Sergius was a Christian, but notwithstanding held a high office under the Saracen caliph, in which he was succeeded by his son. John is said to have owed his education in philosophy, mathematics and theology to an Italian monk named Cosmas, whom Sergius had redeemed from a band of captive slaves. About the year 730 he wrote several treatises in defence of image-worship, which the emperor, Leo the Isaurian, was making strenuous efforts to suppress.

Various pieces of evidence go to show that it was shortly after this date that he resolved to forsake the world, divided his fortune among his friends and the poor, and betook himself to the monastery of St Sabas, near Jerusalem, where he spent the rest of his life. After the customary probation he was ordained priest by the patriarch of Jerusalem. In his last years he travelled through Syria contending against the iconoclasts, and in the same cause he visited Constantinople at the imminent risk of his life during the reign of Constantine Copronymus. With him the “mysteries,” the entire ritual, are an integral part of the Orthodox system, and all dogma culminates in image-worship. The date of his death is uncertain; it is probably about 752. John Damascenus is a saint both in the Greek and in the Latin Churches, his festival being observed in the former on the 29th of November and on the 4th of December, and in the latter on the 6th of May.

The works of Damascenus give him a foremost place among the theologians of the early Eastern Church, and, according to Dorner, he “remains in later times the highest authority in the theological literature of the Greeks.” This is not because he is an original thinker but because he compiled into systematic form the scattered teaching of his theological predecessors. Several treatises attributed to him are probably spurious, but his undoubted works are numerous and embrace a wide range. The most important contains three parts under the general title Πηγὴ γνώσεως (“The Fountain of Knowledge”). The first part, entitled Κεφάλαια φιλοσοφικά, is an exposition and application of theology of Aristotle’s Dialectic. The second, entitled Περὶ αίρέσεων (“Of Heresies”), is a reproduction of the earlier work of Epiphanius, with a continuation giving an account of the heresies that arose after the time of that writer. The third part, entitled Ἔκδοσις ἀκριβὴς τῆς ὀρθοδόξου πίστεως (“An Accurate Exposition of the Orthodox Faith”), is much the most important, containing as it does a complete system of theology founded on the teaching of the fathers and church councils, from the 4th to the 7th century. It thus embodies the finished result of the theological thought of the early Greek Church. Through a Latin translation made by Burgundio of Pisa in the 12th century, it was well known to Peter Lombard and Aquinas, and in this way it influenced the scholastic theology of the West. Another well-known work is the Sacra parallela, a collection of biblical passages followed by illustrations drawn from other scriptural sources and from the fathers. There is much merit in his hymns and “canons”; one of the latter is very familiar as the hymn “The Day of Resurrection, Earth tell it out abroad.” John of Damascus has sometimes been called the “Father of Scholasticism,” and the “Lombard of the Greeks,” but these epithets are appropriate only in a limited sense.

The Christological position of John may be summed up in the following description: “He tries to secure the unity of the two natures by relegating to the divine Logos the formative and controlling agency. It is not a human individual that the Logos assumes, nor is it humanity, or human nature in general. It is rather a potential human individual, a nature not yet developed into a person or hypostasis. The hypostasis through which this takes place is the personal Logos through whose union with this potential man, in the womb of Mary, the potential man acquires a concrete reality, an individual existence. He has, therefore, no hypostasis of himself but only in and through the Logos. It is denied that he is non-hypostatic (ἀνυπόστατος); it is affirmed that he is en-hypostatic (ἐνυπόστατος). Two natures may form a unity, as the body and soul in man. So man, both soul and body, is brought into unity with the Logos; there being then one hypostasis for both natures.” There is an interchange of the divine and human attributes, a communication of the former which deifies the receptive and passive human nature. In Christ the human will has become the organ of the divine will. Thus while John is an adherent of Chalcedon and a dyothelite, the drift of his teaching is in the monophysite direction. “The Chalcedonian Definition is victorious, but Apollinaris is not overcome”; what John gives with the one hand he takes away with the other. On the question of the Atonement he regards the death of Christ as a sacrifice offered to God and not a ransom paid to the devil.

Literature.—The Life of John of Damascus was written by John, patriarch of Jerusalem in the 10th century (Migne, Patrol. Graec., xciv. 429-489). The works were edited by Le Quien (2 vols., fol., Paris, 1712) and form vols. 94 to 96 in Migne’s Greek series. A monograph by J. Langen was published in 1879. A. Harnack’s History of Dogma is very full (see especially vols. iii. and iv.; on the image-worship controversy, iv. 322 seq.), and so are the similar works of F. Loofs-Seeberg and A. Dorner. See also O. Bardenhewer’s Patrologie, and other literature cited in F. Kattenbusch’s excellent article in Hauck-Herzog, Realencyklopädie, vol. ix.


G. P. Fisher, Hist. of Chr. Doctrine, 159 seq. More fully in R. L. Ottley, The Doctrine of the Incarnation, ii. 138-146.

JOHN OF HEXHAM (c. 1160-1209), English chronicler, is known to us merely as the author of a work called the Historia XXV. annorum, which continues the Historia regum of Simeon of Durham and contains an account of English events 1130-1153. From the title, as given in the only manuscript, we learn John’s name and the fact that he was prior of Hexham. It must have been between 1160 and 1209 that he held this position; but the date at which he lived and wrote cannot be more accurately determined. Up to the year 1139 he follows closely the history written by his predecessor, Prior Richard; thenceforward he is an independent though not a very valuable authority. He is best informed as to the events of the north country; his want of care, when he ventures farther afield, may be illustrated by the fact that he places in 1145 King Stephen’s siege of Oxford, which really occurred in 1142. Even for northern affairs his chronology is faulty; from 1140 onwards his dates are uniformly one year too late. Prior Richard is not the only author to whom John is indebted; he incorporates in the annal of 1138 two other narratives of the battle of the Standard, one in verse by the monk Serlo, another in prose by Abbot Ailred of Rievaux; and also a poem, by a Glasgow clerk, on the death of Sumerled of the Isles.

The one manuscript of John’s chronicle is a 13th century copy; MS. C. C. C. Cambridge, cxxxix. 8. The best edition is that of T. Arnold in Symeonis monachi opera, vol. ii. (Rolls Series, 1885). There is an English translation in J. Stevenson’s Church Historians of England, vol. iv. (London, 1856).

(H. W. C. D.)

JOHN OF IRELAND (Johannis de Irlandia), (fl. 1480), Scottish writer, perhaps of Lowland origin, was resident for thirty years in Paris and later a professor of theology. He was confessor to James IV. and also to Louis XI. of France, and was rector of Yarrow (de Foresta) when he completed, at Edinburgh, the work on which rests his sole claim as a vernacular writer. This book, preserved in MS. in the Advocates’ Library, Edinburgh (MS. 18, 2, 8), and labelled “Johannis de Irlandia opera theologica,” is a treatise in Scots on the wisdom and discipline necessary to a prince, especially intended for the use of the young James IV. The book is the earliest extant example of original Scots prose. It was still in MS. in 1910, but an edition was promised by the Scottish Text Society. In this book John refers to two other vernacular writings, one “of the commandementis and uthir thingis pretenand to the salvacioune of man,” the other, “of the tabill of confessioune.” No traces of these have been discovered. The author’s name appears on the registers of the university of Paris and on the rolls of the Scottish parliaments, and he is referred to by the Scottish historians, Leslie and Dempster.

See the notices in John Lyden’s Introduction to his edition of the Complaynt of Scotlande (1801), pp. 85 seq.; The Scottish Antiquary, xiii. 111-115 and xv. 1-14. Annotated extracts are given in Gregory Smith’s Specimens of Middle Scots (1902).

JOHN OF RAVENNA. Two distinct persons of this name, formerly confused and identified with a third (anonymous) Ravennese in Petrarch’s letters, lived at the end of the 14th and the beginning of the 15th century.

1. A young Ravennese born about 1347, who in 1364 went to live with Petrarch as secretary. In 1367 he set out to see the world and make a name for himself, returned in a state of destitution, but, growing restless again, left his employer for good in 1368. He is not mentioned again in Petrarch’s correspondence, unless a letter “to a certain wanderer” (vago cuidam), congratulating him on his arrival at Rome in 1373, is addressed to him.

2. Son of Conversanus (Conversinus, Convertinus). He is first heard of (Nov. 17, 1368) as appointed to the professorship of rhetoric at Florence, where he had for some time held the post of notary at the courts of justice. This differentiates him from (1). He entered (c. 1370) the service of the ducal house of Padua, the Carraras, in which he continued at least until 1404, although the whole of that period was not spent in Padua. From 1375 to 1379 he was a schoolmaster at Belluno, and was dismissed as too good for his post and not adapted for teaching boys. On the 22nd of March 1382, he was appointed professor of rhetoric at Padua. During the struggle between the Carraras and Viscontis, he spent five years at Udine (1387-1392). From 1395-1404 he was chancellor of Francis of Carrara, and is heard of for the last time in 1406 as living at Venice. His history of the Carraras, a tasteless production in barbarous Latin, says little for his literary capacity; but as a teacher he enjoyed a great reputation, amongst his pupils being Vittorino da Feltre and Guarino of Verona.

3. Malpaghini (De Malpaghinis), the most important. Born about 1356, he was a pupil of Petrarch from a very early age to 1374. On the 19th of September 1397 he was appointed professor of rhetoric and eloquence at Florence. On the 9th of June 1412, on the re-opening of the studio, which had been shut from 1405 to 1411 owing to the plague, his appointment was renewed for five years, before the expiration of which period he died (May 1417). Although Malpaghini left nothing behind him, he did much to encourage the study of Latin; among his pupils was Poggio Bracciolini.

The local documents and other authorities on the subject will be found in E. T. Klette, Beiträge zur Geschichte und Litteratur der italienischen Gelehrtenrenaissance, vol. i. (1888); see also G. Voigt, Die Wiederbelebung des klassischen Altertums, who, however, identifies (1) and (2).

JOHN OF SALISBURY (c. 1115-1180), English author, diplomatist and bishop, was born at Salisbury between the years 1115 and 1120. Beyond the fact that he was of Saxon, not of Norman race, and applies to himself the cognomen of Parvus, “short,” or “small,” few details are known regarding his early life; but from his own statements it is gathered that he crossed to France about 1136, and began regular studies in Paris under Abelard, who had there for a brief period re-opened his famous school on Mont St Geneviève. After Abelard’s retirement, John carried on his studies under Alberich of Reims and Robert of Melun. From 1138 to 1140 he studied grammar and the classics under William of Conches and Richard l’Evêque, the disciples of Bernard of Chartres, though it is still a matter of controversy whether it was in Chartres or not (cf. A. Clerval, Les Écoles de Chartres au moyen âge, 1895). Bernard’s teaching was distinguished partly by its pronounced Platonic tendency, partly by the stress laid upon literary study of the greater Latin writers; and the influence of the latter feature is noticeable in all John of Salisbury’s works. About 1140 he was at Paris studying theology under Gilbert de la Porrée, then under Robert Pullus and Simon of Poissy. In 1148 he resided at Moûtiers la Celle in the diocese of Troyes, with his friend Peter of Celle. He was present at the council of Reims, presided over by Pope Eugenius III., and was probably presented by Bernard of Clairvaux to Theobald, archbishop of Canterbury, at whose court he settled, probably about 1150. Appointed secretary to Theobald, he was frequently sent on missions to the papal see. During this time he composed his greatest works, published almost certainly in 1159, the Policraticus, sive de nugis curialium et de vestigiis philosophorum and the Metalogicus, writings invaluable as storehouses of information regarding the matter and form of scholastic education, and remarkable for their cultivated style and humanist tendency. After the death of Theobald in 1161, John continued as secretary to Thomas Becket, and took an active part in the long disputes between that primate and his sovereign, Henry II. His letters throw light on the constitutional struggle then agitating the English world. With Becket he withdrew to France during the king’s displeasure; he returned with him in 1170, and was present at his assassination. In the following years, during which he continued in an influential situation in Canterbury, but at what precise date is unknown, he drew up the Life of Thomas Becket. In 1176 he was made bishop of Chartres, where he passed the remainder of his life. In 1179 he took an active part in the council of the Lateran. He died at or near Chartres on the 25th of October 1180.

John’s writings enable us to understand with much completeness the literary and scientific position of the 12th century. His views imply a cultivated intelligence well versed in practical affairs, opposing to the extremes of both nominalism and realism a practical common sense. His doctrine is a kind of utilitarianism, with a strong leaning on the speculative side to the modified literary scepticism of Cicero, for whom he had unbounded admiration. He was a humanist before the Renaissance, surpassing all other representatives of the school of Chartres in his knowledge of the Latin classics, as in the purity of his style, which was evidently moulded on that of Cicero. Of Greek writers he appears to have known nothing at first hand, and very little in translations. The Timaeus of Plato in the Latin version of Chalcidius was known to him as to his contemporaries and predecessors, and probably he had access to translations of the Phaedo and Meno. Of Aristotle he possessed the whole of the Organon in Latin; he is, indeed, the first of the medieval writers of note to whom the whole was known. Of other Aristotelian writings he appears to have known nothing.

The collected editions of the works are by J. A. Giles (5 vols., Oxford, 1848), and by Migne, in the Patrologiae cursus, vol. 199: neither accurate. The Policraticus was edited with notes and introductions by C. C. I. Webb, Ioannis Saresberiensis episcopi Carnotensis Policratici (Oxford, 1909), 2 vols. The most complete study of John of Salisbury is the monograph by C. Schaarschmidt, Johannes Sarisberiensis nach Leben und Studien, Schriften und Philosophie, 1862, which is a model of accurate and complete workmanship. See also the article in the Dict. Nat. Biog.

JOHN (1290-c. 1320), surnamed the Parricide, and called also John of Swabia, was a son of Rudolph II. count of Habsburg and Agnes daughter of Ottakar II. king of Bohemia, and consequently a grandson of the German king Rudolph I. Having passed his early days at the Bohemian court, when he came of age he demanded a portion of the family estates from his uncle, the German king Albert I. His wishes were not gratified, and with three companions he formed a plan to murder the king. On the 1st of May 1308 Albert in crossing the river Reuss at Windisch became separated from his attendants, and was at once attacked and killed by the four conspirators. John escaped the vengeance of Albert’s sons, and was afterwards found in a monastery at Pisa, where in 1313 he is said to have been visited by the emperor Henry VII., who had placed him under the ban. From this time he vanishes from history. The character of John is used by Schiller in his play Wilhelm Tell.

JOHN, THE EPISTLES OF. The so-called epistles of John, in the Bible, are not epistles in the strict sense of the term, for the first is a homily, and encyclical or pastoral (as has been recognized since the days of Bretschneider and Michaelis), while the other two are brief notes or letters. Nor are they John’s, if John means the son of Zebedee. The latter conclusion depends upon the particular hypothesis adopted with regard to the general Johannine problem, yet even when it is held that John the apostle (q.v.) survived to old age in Ephesus, the second and third epistles may be fairly ascribed (with Erasmus, Grotius, Credner, Bretschneider, Reuss, &c.) to John the presbyter, as several circles in the early church held (“Opinio a plerisque tradita,” Jerome: De vir. ill. 18). An apostle indeed might call himself a presbyter (cf. 1 Pet. v. 1). But these notes imply no apostolic claim on the part of the author, and, although their author is anonymous, the likelihood is that their composition by the great Asiatic presbyter John led afterwards to their incorporation in the “instrumentum” of John the apostle’s writings, when the prestige of the latter had obscured the former. All hypotheses as to their pseudonymity or composition by different hands may be dismissed. They would never have floated down the stream of tradition except on the support of some primitive authority. If this was not connected with John the apostle the only feasible alternative is to think of John the presbyter, for Papias refers to the latter in precisely this fashion (Euseb. H. E. iii. 39, 15; καὶ τοῦτο ὁ π. ἔλεγε).

The period of all three lies somewhere within the last decade of the 1st century and the first decade of the 2nd. No evidence is available to determine in what precise order they were written, but it will be convenient to take the two smaller notes before the larger. The so-called Second Epistle of John is one of the excommunicating notes occasionally despatched by early Christian leaders to a community (cf. 2 Cor. v. 9). The presbyter or elder warns a Christian community, figuratively addressed as “the elect lady” (cf. 13 with 1 Pet. i. 1; v, 13; also the plural of 6, 8, 10 and 13), against some itinerant (cf. Didache xi. 1-2) teachers who were promulgating advanced Docetic views (7) upon the person of Christ. The note is merely designed to serve (12) until the writer arrives in person. He sends greetings to his correspondents from some community in which he is residing at present (13), and with which they had evidently some connexion.

The note was familiar to Irenaeus who twice (i. 16, 3, iii. 16, 8) cites 10-11, once quoting it from the first epistle by mistake, but no tradition has preserved the name of the community in question, and all opinions on the matter are guess-work. The reference to “all who know the truth” (ver. 1) is, of course, to be taken relatively (cf. Rev. ii. 23); it does not necessarily imply a centre like Antioch or Rome (Chapman). Whiston thought of Philadelphia, and probably it must have been one of the Asiatic churches.

The so-called Third Epistle of John belongs to the ἐπίστολαι συστάτικαι (2 Cor. iii. 1) of the early church, like Rom. xvi. It is a private note addressed by the presbyter to a certain Gaius, a member of the same community or house-church (9) as that to which 2 John is written. A local errorist, Diotrephes (9-10) had repudiated the authority of the writer and his party, threatening even to excommunicate Gaius and others from the church (cf. Abbott’s Diatessarica, § 2258). With this opponent the writer promises (10) to deal sharply in person before very long. Meantime (14) he despatches the present note, in hearty appreciation of his correspondent’s attitude and character.

The allusion in 9 (ἔγραψα) refers in all likelihood to the “second” epistle (so Ewald, Wolf, Salmon, &c.). In order to avoid the suggestion that it implied a lost epistle, ἂν was inserted at an early stage in the textual history of the note. If ἐκκλήσιας could be read in 12, Demetrius would be a presbyter; in any case, he is not to be identified with Demas (Chapman), nor is there any reason to suppose (with Harnack) that the note of 9 was written to, and suppressed by, him. What the presbyter is afraid of is not so much that his note would not be read (Ewald, Harnack), as that it would not be acted upon.

These notes, written originally on small sheets of papyrus, reveal the anonymous presbyter travelling (so Clem. Alex. Quis dives salv. xlii.) in his circuit or diocese of churches, and writing occasional pastoral letters, in which he speaks not only in his own name but in that of a coterie of like-minded Christians. It is otherwise with the brochure or manifesto known as the “first epistle.” This was written neither at the request of its readers nor to meet any definite local emergency, but on the initiative of its author (i. 4) who was evidently concerned about the effect produced upon the Church in general by certain contemporary phases of semi-gnostic teaching. The polemic is directed against a dualism which developed theoretically into docetic views of Christ’s person (ii. 22, iv. 2, &c.), and practically into libertinism (ii. 4, &c.). It is natural to think, primarily, of the churches in Asia Minor as the circle addressed, but all indications of date or place are absent, except those which may be inferred from its inner connexion with the Fourth Gospel.

The plan of the brochure is unstudied and unpremeditated, resembling a series of variations upon one or two favourite themes rather than a carefully constructed melody. Fellowship (κοινωνία) with God and man is its dominant note. After defining the essence of Christian κοινονία (i. 1-3), the writer passes on to its conditions (i. 5-ii. 17), under the antithesis of light and darkness. These conditions are twofold: (a) a sense of sin, which leads Christians to a sense of forgiveness through Jesus Christ, (b) and obedience to the supreme law of brotherly love (cf. Ignat. Ad Smyrn. 6). If these conditions are unfulfilled, moral darkness is the issue, a darkness which spells ruin to the soul. This prompts the writer to explain the dangers of κοινωνία (ii. 18-29), under the antithesis of truth and falsehood, the immediate peril being a novel heretical view of the person of Christ. The characteristics of the fellowship are then developed (iii. 1-12), as sinlessness and brotherly love, under the antithesis of children of God (cf. ii. 29, “born of Him”) and children of the devil. This brotherly love bulks so largely in the writer’s mind that he proceeds to enlarge upon its main elements of confidence towards God (iii. 13-24), moral discernment (iv. 1-6), and assurance of union with God (iv. 7-21), all these being bound up with a true faith in Jesus as the Christ (v. 1-12). A brief epilogue gives what is for the most part a summary (v. 13-21) of the leading ideas of the homily.

Disjointed as the cause of the argument may seem, a close scrutiny of the context often reveals a subtle connexion between paragraphs which at first sight appear unlinked. Thus the idea of the κόσμος passing away (ii. 17) suggests the following sentences upon the nearness of the παρούσια (ii. 18 seq.), whose signs are carefully noted in order to reassure believers, and whose moral demands are underlined (ii. 28, iii. 3). Within this paragraph even the abrupt mention of the χρίσμα has its genetical place (ii. 20). The heretical ἀντίχριστοι, it is implied, have no χρίσμα from God; Christians have (note the emphasis on ὑμεῖς), owing to their union with the true Χρίστος. Again, the genetic relation of iii. 4 seq. to what precedes becomes evident when we consider that the norm of Christian purity (iii. 3) is the keeping of the divine commandments, or conduct resembling Christ’s on earth (iii. 3-ii. 4-6), so that the Gnostic breach of this law not only puts a man out of touch with Christ (iii. 6 seq.), but defeats the very end of Christ’s work, i.e. the abolition of sin (iii. 8). Thus iii. 7-10 resumes and completes the idea of ii. 29; the Gnostic is shown to be out of touch with the righteous God, partly because he will not share the brotherly love which is the expression of the righteousness, and partly because his claims to sinlessness render God’s righteous forgiveness (i. 9) superfluous. Similarly the mention of the Spirit (iii. 24) opens naturally into a discussion of the decisive test for the false claims of the heretics or gnostic illuminati to spiritual powers and gifts (iv. 1 seq.); and, as this test of the genuine Spirit of God is the confession of Jesus Christ as really human and incarnate, the writer, on returning (in iv. 17 seq.) to his cardinal idea of brotherly love, expresses it in view of the incarnate Son (iv. 9), whose mission furnishes the proof of God’s love as well as the example and the energy of man’s (iv. 10 seq.). The same conception of the real humanity of Jesus Christ as essential to faith’s being and well-being is worked out in the following paragraph (v. 1-12), while the allusion to eternal life (v. 11-12) leads to the closing recapitulation (v. 13-21) of the homily’s leading ideas under this special category.

The curious idea, mentioned by Augustine (Quaest. evang. ii. 39), that the writing was addressed ad Parthos, has been literally taken by several Latin fathers and later writers (e.g. Grotius, Paulus, Hammond), but this title probably was a corruption of ad sparsos (Wetstein, Wegschneider) or of πρὸς παρθένους (Whiston: the Christians addressed as virgin, i.e. free from heresy), if not of παρθένος, as applied in early tradition to John the apostle. The circle for which the homily was meant was probably, in the first instance, that of the Fourth Gospel, but it is impossible to determine whether the epistle preceded or followed the larger treatise. The division of opinion on this point (cf. J. Moffat, Historical New Testament, 1901, p. 534) is serious, but the evidence for either position is purely subjective. There are sufficient peculiarities of style and conception to justify provisionally some hesitation on the matter of the authorship. The epistle may have been written by a different author, or, from a more popular standpoint, by the author of the gospel, possibly (as some critics hold) by the author of John xxi. But res lubrica, opinio incerta.

It is unsafe to lay much stress upon the apparent reminiscence of iv. 2-3 (or of 2 John 7) in Polycarp, ad Phil. 7 reading ἐληλυθότα instead of ἑληλυθέναι), though, if a literary filiation is assumed, the probability is that Polycarp is quoting from the epistle, not vice versa (as Volkmar contends, in his Ursprung d. unseren Evglien 47 seq.). But Papias is said by Eusebius (H. E. iii. 39) to have used ἡ Ἰωάννου προτέρα (= ἡ Ἰωάννου πρώτη, v. 8?), i.e. the anonymous tract, which, by the time of Eusebius, had come to be known as 1 John, and we have no reason to suspect or reject this statement, particularly as Justin Martyr, another Asiatic writer, furnishes clear echoes of the epistle (Dial. 123). The tract must have been in circulation throughout Asia Minor at any rate before the end of the first quarter of the 2nd century. The terminus a quo is approximately the period of the Fourth Gospel’s composition, but there is no valid evidence to indicate the priority of either, even upon the hypothesis that both came from the same pen. The aim of each is too special to warrant the conclusion that the epistle was intended to accompany or to introduce the gospel.

Literature.—The most adequate modern editions of the three epistles are by Westcott (3rd ed., 1892), H. J. Holtzmann (Hand-Commentar zum N. T., 3rd ed., 1908), B. Weiss (in Meyer, 6th ed., 1900), Baljon (1904) and J. E. Belser (Freiburg im Breisgau, 1906). Briefer English notes are furnished by W. Alexander (Speaker’s Commentary, 1881), W. H. Bennett (Century Bible, 1901) and H. P. Forbes (Internat. Handbooks to New Testament, vol. iv. 1907), while Plummer has a concise edition of the Greek text (in The Cambridge Greek Testament, 1886). Huther’s edition (in Meyer, 1880) has been translated into English (Edinburgh, 1882), like Rothe’s (1878) invaluable commentary on the first epistle (cf. Expository Times, vols. iii. v.). Otto Baumgarten’s popular edition in Die Schriften des N. T. (1907) is, like that of Forbes, written from practically the same standpoint as Holtzmann’s. The earlier commentaries of Alford (2nd ed., 1862), C. A. Wolf (2nd ed., 1885), Ewald (Die Joh. Briefe übersetzt und erklaert, Göttingen, 1861-1862), and Lücke (3rd ed., revised by Bertheau, 1856) still repay the reader, and among previous editions those of W. Whiston (Comm. on St John’s Three Catholic Epistles, 1719) and de Wette (1837, &c.) contain material of real exegetical interest. Special editions of the first epistle have been published by John Cotton (London, 1655), Neander (1851; Eng. trans. New York, 1853), E. Haupt (1869; Eng. trans. 1879), Lias (1887) and C. Watson (1891, expository) among others. Special studies by F. H. Kern (De epistolae Joh. consilio, Tübingen, 1830), Erdmann (Primae Joh. epistolae argumentum, nexus et consilium, Berlin, 1855), C. E. Luthardt (De primae Joannis epistolae compositione, 1860), J. Stockmeyer (Die Structur des ersten Joh. Briefes, Basel, 1873) and, most elaborately, by H. J. Holtzmann (Jahrb. für protest. Theologie, 1881, pp. 690 seq.; 1882, pp. 128 seq., 316 seq., 460 seq.). To the monographs already noted in the course of this article may be added the essays by Wiesinger (Studien und Kritiken, 1899, pp. 575 seq.) and Wohlenberg (“Glossen zum ersten Johannisbrief,” Neue Kirchliche Zeitschrift, 1902, pp. 233 seq., 632 seq.). On 2 John there are special commentaries and studies by Ritmeier (De electa domina, 1706), C. A. Kriegele (De κυρία Johannis, 1758), Carpzov (Theolog. exegetica, pp. 105-208), H. G. B. Müller (Comment. in secundam epistolam Joannis, 1783), C. Klug (De authentia, &c., 1823), J. Rendel Harris (Expositor, 6th series, 1901, pp. 194 seq.), W. M. Ramsay (ibid., pp. 354 seq.) and Gibbins (ibid., 1902, pp. 228-236), while, in addition to Hermann’s Comment, in Joan. ep. III. (1778), P. L. Gachon (Authenticité de la deuxième et troisième épîtres de Jean, 1851), Poggel (Der zweite und dritte Briefe d. Apostel Johannis, 1896), and Chapman (Journal of Theological Studies, 1904, “The Historical Setting of the Second and the Third Epistles of St John”), have discussed both of the minor epistles together. General studies of all three are furnished by H. J. Holtzmann in Schenkel’s Bibel-Lexicon, iii. 342-352, Sabatier (Encyclop. des sciences religieuses, vii. 177 seq.), S. Cox (The Private Letters of St Paul and St John, 1867), Farrar (Early Days of Christianity, chs. xxxi., xxxiv. seq.), Gloag (Introduction to Catholic Epistles, 1887, pp. 256-350), S. D. F. Salmond in Hasting’s Dict. Bible (vol. ii), G. H. Gilbert (The First Interpreters of Jesus, 1901, pp. 301-332), and V. Bartlet (The Apostolic Age, 1900, pp. 418 seq.; from a more advanced critical position by Cone (The Gospel and its Earliest Interpretations, 1893, pp. 320-327), P. W. Schmiedel (Ency. Bib., 2556-2562, also in a pamphlet, Evangelium, Briefe, und Offenbarung des Johannes, 1906; Eng. trans. 1908), J. Réville (Le Quatrième Evangile, 1901, pp. 49 seq.) and Pfleiderer (Das Urchristentum, 2nd ed., 1902, pp. 390 seq.). The problem of the epistles is discussed incidentally by many writers on the Fourth Gospel, as well as by writers on New Testament introduction like Zahn, Jacquier, Barth and Belser, on the Conservative side, and Hilgenfeld, Jülicher and von Soden on the Liberal. On the older Syriac version of 2 and 3 John, see Gwynn’s article in Hermathena (1890), pp. 281 seq. On the general reception of the three epistles in the early Church, Zahn’s paragraphs (in his Geschichte d. N. T. Kanons, i. 209 seq., 374 seq., 905 seq.; ii. 48 seq., 88 seq.) are the most adequate.

(J. Mt.)


So Selwyn, Christian Prophets (pp. 133-145), Harnack, Heinrici (Das Urchristenthum, 1902, pp. 129 seq.), and von Soden (History of Early Christian Literature, pp. 445-446), after Renan (L’Église chrétienne, pp. 78 seq.). Von Dobschütz (Christian Life in the Primitive Church, pp. 218 seq.) and R. Knopf (Das nachapost. Zeitalter, 1905, pp. 32 seq., &c.) are among the most recent critics who ascribe all three epistles to the presbyter.

On the early allusions to these brief notes, cf. Gregory: The Canon and Text of the New Testament (1907), pp. 131, 190 seq., Westcott’s Canon of the New Testament, pp. 218 seq., 355, 357, 366, &c., and Leipoldt’s Geschichte d. neut. Kanons (1907), i. pp. 66 seq., 78 seq., 99 seq., 151 seq., 192 seq., 232 seq.

In his ingenious study (Texte und Untersuchungen, xv. 3), whose main contention is adopted by von Dobschütz and Knopf. On this view (for criticism see Belser in the Tübing. Quartalschrift, 1897, pp. 150 seq., Krüger in Zeitschrift für die wiss. Theologie, 1898, pp. 307-311, and Hilgenfeld: ibid. 316-320), Diotrephes was voicing a successful protest of the local monarchical bishops against the older itinerant authorities (cf. Schmiedel, Ency. Bib., 3146-3147). As Wilamowitz-Moellendorf (Hermes, 1898, pp. 529 seq.) points out, there is a close connexion between ver. 11 and ver. 10. The same writer argues that, as the substitution of ἀγαπήτος for φίλτατος (ver. 1) “ist Schönrednerei und nicht vom besten Geschmacke,” the writer adds ὅν ἐγὼ ἀγαπῶ ἐν ἀληθείᾳ.

This is the force of the ἡμεῖς in 3 John 9-10 (cf. 1 John iv. 6, 14) “The truth” (3 John 3-5) seems to mean a life answering to the apostolic standard thus enforced and exemplified.

Several of these traits were reproduced in the teaching of Cerinthus, others may have been directly Jewish or Jewish Christian. The opposition to the Messianic rôle of Jesus had varied adherents. The denial of the Virgin-birth, which also formed part of the system of Cerinthus, was met by anticipation in the stories of Matthew and Luke, which pushed back the reception of the spirit from the baptism to the birth, but the Johannine school evidently preferred to answer this heresy by developing the theory of the Logos, with its implicate of pre-existence.

On the vexed question whether the language of this paragraph is purely spiritual or includes a realistic reference, cf. G. E. Findlay (Expositor, 1893, pp. 97 seq.), and Dr E. A. Abbott’s recent study in Diatessarica, §§ 1615-1620. The writer is controverting the Docetic heresy, and at the same time keeping up the line of communications with the apostolic base.

The universal range (ii. 2) ascribed to the redeeming work of Christ is directed against Gnostic dualism and the Ebionitic narrowing of salvation to Israel; only ἡμεῖς here denotes Christians in general, not Jewish Christians. On the answer to the Gnostic pride of perfectionism (i. 8), cf. Epict. iv. 12, 19. The emphasis on “you all” (ii. 20) hints at the Gnostic aristocratic system of degrees among believers, which naturally tended to break up brotherly love (cf. 1 Cor. viii. 1 seq.). The Gnostics also held that a spiritual seed (cf. iii. 9) was implanted in man, as the germ of his higher development into the divine life; for the Valentinian idea cf. Iren. Adv. Haer. i. 64, and Tertull. De anima, 11 [haeretici] “nescio quod spiritale semen infulciunt animae”. Cf. the general discussions by Häring in Theologische Abhandlungen C. von Weizsäcker gewidmet (1892), pp. 188 seq., and Zahn in Wanderungen durch Schrift u. Geschichte (1892), pp. 3-74.

Cf. Denney, The Death of Christ (1902), pp. 269-281. The polemical reference to Cerinthus is specially clear at this point. The death of Jesus was not that of a phantom, nor was his ministry from the baptism to the crucifixion that of a heavenly aeon which suffered nothing: such is the writer’s contention. “In every case the historical is asserted, but care is taken that it shall not be materialized: a primacy is given to the spiritual.... Except through the historical, there is no Christianity at all, but neither is there any Christianity till the historical has been spiritually comprehended.” The well-known interpolation of the three heavenly witnesses (v. 7) has now been proved by Karl Künstle (Das Comma Johanneum, 1905) to have originally come from the pen of the 4th century Spaniard, Priscillian, who himself denied all distinctions of person in the Godhead.

On the “sin to death” (v. 16) cf. Jubilees xxi. 22, xxvi. 34 with Karl’s Johann. Studien (1898), i. 97 seq. and M. Goguel’s La Notion johannique de l’esprit (1902), pp. 147-153, for the general theology of the epistle. The conceptions of light and life are best handled by Grill in his Untersuchungen über die Entstehung des vierten Evgliums (1902), pp. 301 seq., 312 seq.

In Preuschen’s Zeitschrift für die neutest. Wissenschaft (1907), pp. 1-8, von Dobschütz tries to show that the present text of ii. 28-iii. 12 indicates a revision or rearrangement of an earlier text. Cludius (Uransichten des Christentums, Altona, 1808) had already conjectured that a Gnostic editor must have worked over a Jewish Christian document.

Dr Alois Wurm’s attempt (Die Irrlehrer im ersten Johannesbriefe, 1903) to read the references to errorists solely in the light of Jewish Christianity ignores or underrates several of the data. He is supported on the whole by Clemen, in Preuschen’s Zeitschrift (1905), pp. 271-281. There is certainly an anti-Jewish touch, e.g. in the claim of iii. 1 (note the emphatic ἡμῖν), when one recollects the saying of Aqiba (Aboth iii. 12) and Philo’s remark, καὶ γὰρ εἰ μήπω ἴκανοι θεοῦ παῖδες νομίζεσθαι γεγόναμεν, ἀλλά τοι τῆς ἀειδοῦς εἰκόνος αὐτοῦ, λόγου τοῦ ἱερωτ άτου θεοῦ γὰρ εἰκὼν λόγος ὁ πρεσβύτατος (De conf. ling. 28). But the antithesis of John and Cerinthus, unlike that of Paul and Cerinthus (Epiph. Haer. xxviii.), is too well based in the tradition of the early Church to be dismissed as a later dogmatic reflection, and the internal evidence of this manifesto corroborates it clearly.

“The style is not flowing and articulated; the sentences come like minute-guns, as they would drop from a natural Hebrew. The writer moves, indeed, amidst that order of religious ideas which meets us in the Fourth Gospel, and which was that of the Greek world wherein he found himself. He moves amongst these new ideas, however, not with the practised felicity of the evangelist, but with something of helplessness, although the depth and serene beauty of his spirit give to all he says an infinite impressiveness and charm” (M. Arnold; God and the Bible, ch. vi.).

By the end of the 2nd century it appears to have been fairly well-known, to judge from Origen, Irenaeus (iii. 16, 8), and Clement of Alexandria (Stran. ii. 15, 66). In the Muratorian canon, which mentions two epistles of John, it seems to be reckoned (cf. Kuhn, Das Murat. Fragment, pp. 58 f.) as an appendix or sequel to the Fourth Gospel. The apparent traces of its use in Ignatius (cf. Smyrn. vi. 2 = 1 John iii. 17; Smyrn. vii = 1 John iii. 14, and Eph. xviii. = 1 John v. 6) seem too insecure, of themselves, to warrant any hypothesis of filiation.

JOHN, GOSPEL OF ST, the fourth and latest of the Gospels, in the Bible, and, next to that of St Mark, the shortest. The present article will first describe its general structure and more obvious contents; compare it with the Synoptic Gospels; and draw out its leading characteristics and final object. It will then apply the tests thus gained to the narratives special to this Gospel; and point out the book’s special difficulties and limits, and its abiding appeal and greatness. And it will finally consider the questions of its origin and authorship.

Analysis of Contents.—The book’s chief break is at xiii. 1, the solemn introduction to the feet-washing: all up to here reports Jesus’ signs and apologetic or polemical discourses to the outer world; hence onwards it pictures the manifestation of His glory to the inner circle of His disciples. These two parts contain three sections each.

1. (i.) Introduces the whole work (i. 1-ii. 11). (a) The prologue, i. 1-18. The Logos existed before creation and time; was with the very God and was God; and all things were made through Him. For in this Logos is Life, and this Life is a Light which, though shining in darkness, cannot be suppressed by it. This true Light became flesh and tabernacled amongst us; and we beheld His glory, as of an Only-Begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth. John the Baptist testified concerning Him, the Logos-Light and Logos-Life incarnate; but this Logos alone, who is in the bosom of the Father, hath declared the very God. (b) The four days’ work (i. 19-51). On the first three days John declares that he is not the Christ, proclaims Jesus to be the Christ, and sends his own disciples away to Jesus. On the fourth day, Jesus Himself calls Philip and Nathanael. (c) The seventh day’s first manifestation of the Incarnate Light’s glory (ii. 1-11 ); Jesus at Cana turns water into wine.

(ii.) Records the manifestations of the Light’s and Life’s glory and power to friend and foe (ii. 22-vi. 71). (d) Solemn inauguration of the Messianic ministry (ii. 12-iii. 21): cleansing of the Temple and prophecy of His resurrection; discourse to Nicodemus on baptismal regeneration. (e) Three scenes in Judea, Samaria, Galilee respectively (iii. 32-iv. 54): the Baptist’s second testimony; Jesus’ discourse with the woman at the well concerning the spiritual, universal character of the new religion; and cure of the ruler’s son, the reward of faith in the simple word of Jesus. (f) Manifestation of Jesus as the vivifying Life-Logos and its contradiction in Judea, v.: the paralytic’s cure. (g) Manifestation of Jesus as the heaven-descended living Bread and its contradiction in Galilee, vi.: multiplication of the loaves; walking on the waters; and His discourse on the holy Eucharist.

(iii.) Acute conflict between the New Light and the old darkness (vii.-xii). (h) Self-manifestation of the Logos-Light in the Temple (vii. 1-x. 39). Journey to the feast of tabernacles; invitation to the soul athirst to come to Him (the fountain of Life) and drink, and proclamation of Himself as the Light of the world; cure of the man born blind; allegory of the good shepherd. The allegory continued at the feast of the dedication. They strive to stone or to take Him. (i) The Logos-Life brings Lazarus to life; effects of the act (x. 40-xii. 50). Jesus withdraws beyond Jordan, and then comes to Bethany, His friend Lazarus being buried three days; proclaims Himself the Resurrection and the Life; and calls Lazarus back to life. Some who saw it report the act to the Pharisees; the Sanhedrim meets, Caiaphas declares that one man must die for the people, and henceforward they ceaselessly plan His death. Jesus withdraws to the Judaean desert, but soon returns, six days before Passover, to Bethany; Mary anoints Him, a crowd comes to see Him and Lazarus, and the hierarchs then plan the killing of Lazarus also. Next morning He rides into Jerusalem on an ass’s colt. Certain Greeks desire to see Him: He declares the hour of His glorification to have come: “Now My soul is troubled.... Father, save Me from this hour. But for this have I come unto this hour: Father, glorify Thy Name.” A voice answers, “I have glorified it and will glorify it again”: some think that an angel spoke; but Jesus explains that this voice was not for His sake but for theirs. When lifted up from earth, He will draw all men to Himself; they are to believe in Him, the Light. The writer’s concluding reflection: the small success of Jesus’ activity among the Jews. Once again He cries: “I am come a Light into the world, that whoso believeth in Me should not abide in darkness.”

2. The Logos-Christ’s manifestation of His life and love to His disciples, during the last supper, the passion, the risen life (xiii.-xx.).

(iv.) The Last Supper (xiii.-xvii.) (j) Solemn washing of the disciples’ feet; the beloved disciple; designates the traitor; Judas goes forth, it is night (xiii. 1-30). (k) Last discourses, first series (xiii. 31-xiv. 31): the new commandment, the other helper; “Arise, let us go hence.” Second series (xv. 1-xvi. 33): allegory of the true vine; “Greater love than this hath no man, that he lay down his life for his friend”; the world’s hatred; the spirit of truth shall lead them into all truth; “I came forth from the Father and am come into the world, again I leave the world and go to the Father”; “Be of good cheer, I have overcome the world.” (l) The high-priestly prayer (xvii). “Father, glorify Thy Son ... with the glory which I had with Thee before the world was ... that to as many as Thou hast given Him, He should give eternal life.” “I pray for them, I pray not for the world. I pray also for them that shall believe in Me through their word, that they may be all one, as Thou Father art in Me, and I in Thee.”

(v.) The Passion (xviii.-xix.). (m) In the garden: the Roman soldiers come to apprehend Him, fall back upon the ground at His declaration “I am He.” Peter and Malchus. (n) Before Annas at night and Caiaphas at dawn; Peter’s denials (xviii. 12-27). (o) Before Pilate (xviii. 28-40). Jesus declares, “My kingdom is not of this world. I have come into the world that I may bear witness to the truth: everyone that is of the truth, heareth My voice”; Pilate asks sceptically “What is truth?” and the crowd prefers Barabbas. (p) The true king presented to the people as a mock-king; His rejection by the Jews and abandonment to them (xix. 1-16). (q) Jesus carries His cross to Golgotha, and is crucified there between two others; the cross’s title and Pilate’s refusal to alter it (xix. 17-22). (r) The soldiers cast lots upon His garments and seamless tunic; His mother with two faithful women and the beloved disciple at the cross’s foot; His commendation of His mother and the disciple to each other; His last two sayings in deliberate accomplishment of scripture “I thirst,” “It is accomplished.” He gives up the spirit; His bones remain unbroken; and from His spear-lanced side blood and water issue (xix. 23-37). (s) The two nobles, Joseph of Arimathaea and Nicodemus, bind the dead body in a winding sheet with one hundred pounds of precious spices, and place it in a new monument in a near garden, since the sabbath is at hand.

(vi.) The risen Jesus, Lord and God (xx.). (t) At early dawn on the first day of the week, Mary Magdalen, finding the stone rolled away from the monument, runs to tell Peter and the beloved disciple that the Lord’s body has been removed. Peter and the other disciple run to the grave; the latter, arriving first, enters only after Peter has gone in and noted the empty grave-clothes—enters and believes. After their departure, Mary sees two angels where His body had lain and turning away beholds Jesus standing, yet recognizes Him only when He addresses her. He bids her “Do not touch Me, for I have not yet ascended”; but to tell His brethren “I ascend to My Father and to your Father, to My God and to your God.” And she does so. (u) Second apparition (xx. 19-23). Later on the same day, the doors being shut, Jesus appears amongst His disciples, shows them His (pierced) hands and side, and solemnly commissions and endows them for the apostolate by the words, “As the Father hath sent Me, so I send you,” and by breathing upon them saying “Receive the Holy Spirit: whose sins ye remit, they are remitted to them; whose sins ye retain, they are retained.” (v) Third apparition and culminating saying; conclusion of entire book (xx. 24-31). Thomas, who had been absent, doubts the resurrection; Jesus comes and submits to the doubter’s tests. Thomas exclaims, “My Lord and my God”; but Jesus declares “Blessed are they that have not seen and yet have believed.” “Now Jesus,” concludes the writer, “did many other signs, ... but these are written, that ye may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing ye may have life in His name.”

The above analysis is rough, since even distantly placed sections, indeed the two parts themselves, are interrelated by delicate complex references on and back. And it omits the account of the adulteress (vii. 53-viii. 11): (a valuable report of an actual occurrence which probably belonged to some primitive document otherwise incorporated by the Synoptists), because it is quite un-Johannine in vocabulary, style and character, intercepts the Gospel’s thread wherever placed, and is absent from its best MSS. It also omits xxi. This chapter’s first two stages contain an important early historical document of Synoptic type: Jesus’ apparition to seven disciples by the Lake of Galilee and the miraculous draught of fishes; and Peter’s threefold confession and Jesus’ threefold commission to him. And its third stage, Jesus’ prophecies to Peter and to the beloved disciple concerning their future, and the declaration “This is the disciple who testifies to these things and who has written them, and we know that his testimony is true,” is doubtless written by the redactor of the previous two stages. This writer imitates, but is different from, the great author of the first twenty chapters.

Comparison with the Synoptists.—The following are the most obvious differences between the original book and the Synoptists. John has a metaphysical prologue; Matthew and Luke have historical prologues; and Mark is without any prologue. The earthly scene is here Judea, indeed Jerusalem, with but five breaks (vi. 1-vii. 10) is the only long one; whilst over two-thirds of each Synoptist deal with Galilee or Samaria. The ministry here lasts about three and a half years (it begins some months before the first Passover, ii. 13; the feast of v. 1 is probably a second; the third occurs vi. 4; and on the fourth, xi. 55, He dies): whilst the Synoptists have but the one Passover of His death, after barely a year of ministry. Here Jesus’ teaching contains no parables and but three allegories, the Synoptists present it as parabolic through and through. Here not one exorcism occurs; in the Synoptists the exorcisms are as prominent as the cures and the preaching, John has, besides the passion, seven accounts in common with the Synoptists: the Baptist and Jesus, (i. 19-34); cleansing of the Temple (ii. 13-16); cure of the centurion’s (ruler’s) servant (son) (iv. 46-54); multiplication of the loaves (vi. 1-13); walking upon the water (vi. 16-21); anointing at Bethany, (xii. 1-8); entry into Jerusalem (xii. 12-16): all unique occurrences. In the first, John describes how the Baptist, on Jesus’ approach, cries “Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sins of the world”; and how he says “I saw the spirit descending upon Him, and I bore witness that this is the Son of God.” But the Synoptists, especially Mark, give the slow steps in even the apostles’ realization of Jesus’ Messianic character; only at Caesarea Philippi Simon alone, for the first time, clearly discerns it, Jesus declaring that His Father has revealed it to Him, and yet Simon is still scandalized at the thought of a suffering Messiah (Mark viii. 28-34). Only some two weeks before the end is He proclaimed Messiah at Jericho (x. 46-48); then in Jerusalem, five days before dying for this upon the cross (xi. 1-10, xv. 37). As to the Baptist, in all three Synoptists, he baptizes Jesus, and in Mark i. 10, 11 it is Jesus who sees the Spirit descending upon Himself on His emerging from beneath the water, and it is to Himself that God’s voice is addressed; in John, Jesus’ baptism is ignored, only the Spirit remains hovering above Him, as a sign for the Baptist’s instruction. And in Matt. xi. 2-6, the Baptist, several months after the Jordan scene, sends from his prison to ascertain if Jesus is indeed the Messiah; in John, the Baptist remains at large so as again (iii. 22-36) to proclaim Jesus’ heavenly provenance. The cleansing of the Temple occurs in the Synoptists four days before His death, and instantly determines the hierarchs to seek His destruction (Mark xi. 15-18); John puts it three years back, as an appropriate frontispiece to His complete claims and work.

The passion-narratives reveal the following main differences. John omits, at the last supper, its central point, the great historic act of the holy eucharist, carefully given by the Synoptists and St Paul, having provided a highly doctrinal equivalent in the discourse on the living bread, here spoken by Jesus in Capernaum over a year before the passion (vi. 4), the day after the multiplication of the loaves. This transference is doubtless connected with the change in the relations between the time of the Passover meal and that of His death: in the Synoptists, the Thursday evening’s supper is a true Passover meal, the lamb had been slain that afternoon and Jesus dies some twenty-four hours later; in John, the supper is not a Passover-meal, the Passover is celebrated on Friday, and Jesus, proclaimed here from the first, the Lamb of God, dies whilst the paschal lambs, His prototypes, are being slain. The scene in the garden is without the agony of Gethsemane; a faint echo of this historic anguish appears in the scene with the Greeks four days earlier, and even that peaceful appeal to, and answer of, the Father occurs only for His followers’ sakes. In the garden Jesus here Himself goes forth to meet His captors, and these fall back upon the ground, on His revealing Himself as Jesus of Nazareth. The long scenes with Pilate culminate in the great sayings concerning His kingdom not being of this world and the object of this His coming being to bear witness to the truth, thus explaining how, though affirming kingship (Mark xv. 2) He could be innocent. In John He does not declare Himself Messiah before the Jewish Sanhedrin (Mark xiv. 61) but declares Himself supermundane regal witness to the truth before the Roman governor. The scene on Calvary differs as follows: In the Synoptists the soldiers divide His garments among them, casting lots (Mark xv. 24); in John they make four parts of them and cast lots concerning His seamless tunic, thus fulfilling the text, “They divided My garments among them and upon My vesture they cast lots”: the parallelism of Hebrew poetry, which twice describes one fact, being taken as witnessing to two, and the tunic doubtless symbolizing the unity of the Church, as in Philo the high priest’s seamless robe symbolizes the indivisible unity of the universe, expressive of the Logos (De ebrietate, xxi.). In the Synoptists, of His followers only women—the careful, seemingly exhaustive lists do not include His mother—remain, looking on “from afar” (Mark xv. 40); in John, His mother stands with the two other Marys and the beloved disciple beneath the cross, and “from that hour the disciple took her unto his own (house),” while in the older literature His mother does not appear in Jerusalem till just before Pentecost, and with “His brethren” (Acts i. 14). And John alone tells how the bones of the dead body remained unbroken, fulfilling the ordinance as to the paschal lamb (Exod. xii. 46) and how blood and water flow from His spear-pierced side: thus the Lamb “taketh away the sins of the world” by shedding His blood which “cleanseth us from every sin”; and “He cometh by water and blood,” historically at His baptism and crucifixion, and mystically to each faithful soul in baptism and the eucharist. The story of the risen Christ (xx.) shows dependence on and contrast to the Synoptic accounts. Its two halves have each a negative and a positive scene. The empty grave (1-10) and the apparition to the Magdalen (11-18) together correspond to the message brought by the women (Matt. xxviii. 1-10); and the apparition to the ten joyously believing apostles (19-23) and then to the sadly doubting Thomas (24-29) together correspond to Luke xxiv. 36-43, where the eleven apostles jointly receive one visit from the risen One, and both doubt and believe, mourn and rejoice.

The Johannine discourses reveal differences from the Synoptists so profound as to be admitted by all. Here Jesus, the Baptist and the writer speak so much alike that it is sometimes impossible to say where each speaker begins and ends: e.g. in iii. 27-30, 31-36. The speeches dwell upon Jesus’ person and work, as we shall find, with a didactic directness, philosophical terminology and denunciatory exclusiveness unmatched in the Synoptist sayings. “This is eternal life, that they may know Thee the only true God and Jesus Christ whom Thou hast sent” (xvii. 3), is part of the high-priestly prayer; yet Père Calmes, with the papal censor’s approbation, says, “It seems to us impossible not to admit that we have here dogmatic developments explicable rather by the evangelist’s habits of mind than by the actual words of Jesus.” “I have told you of earthly things and you believe not; how shall ye believe if I tell you of heavenly things?” (iii. 12), and “Ye are from beneath, I am from above” (viii. 23), give us a Plato-(Philo-) like upper, “true” world, and a lower, delusive world. “Ye shall die in your sins” (viii. 21); “ye are from your father the devil” (viii. 44); “I am the door of the sheep, all they that came before Me are thieves and robbers,” (x. 7, 8); “they have no excuse for their sin” (xv. 22)—contrast strongly with the yearning over Jerusalem: “The blood of Abel the just” and “the blood of Zacharias son of Barachias” (Matt. xxiii. 35-37; and “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do” Luke xxiii. 34). And whilst the Synoptist speeches and actions stand in loose and natural relation to each other, the Johannine deeds so closely illustrate the sayings that each set everywhere supplements the other: the history itself here tends to become one long allegory. So with the woman at the well and “the living water”; the multiplication of the loaves and “the living Bread”; “I am the Light of the world” and the blind man’s cure; “I am the Resurrection and the Life” and the raising of Lazarus; indeed even with the Temple-cleansing and the prophecy as to His resurrection, Nicodemus’s night visit and “men loved the darkness rather than the light,” the cure of the inoperative paralytic and “My Father and I work hitherto,” the walking phantom-like upon the waters (John vi. 15-21; Mark vi. 49), and the declaration concerning the eucharist, “the spirit it is that quickeneth” (John vi. 63). Only some sixteen Synoptic sayings reappear here; but we are given some great new sayings full of the Synoptic spirit.

Characteristics and Object.—The book’s character results from the continuous operation of four great tendencies. There is everywhere a readiness to handle traditional, largely historical, materials with a sovereign freedom, controlled and limited by doctrinal convictions and devotional experiences alone. There is everywhere the mystic’s deep love for double, even treble meanings: e.g. the “again” in iii. 2, means, literally, “from the beginning,” to be physically born again; morally, to become as a little child; mystically, “from heaven, God,” to be spiritually renewed. “Judgment” (κρίσις), in the popular sense, condemnation, a future act; in the mystical sense, discrimination, a present fact. There is everywhere the influence of certain central ideas, partly identical with, but largely developments of, those less reflectively operative in the Synoptists. Thus six great terms are characteristic of, or even special to, this Gospel. “The Only-Begotten” is most nearly reached by St Paul’s term “His own Son.” The “Word,” or “Logos,” is a term derived from Heracleitus of Ephesus and the Stoics, through the Alexandrian Jew Philo, but conceived here throughout as definitely personal. “The Light of the World” the Jesus-Logos here proclaims Himself to be; in the Synoptists He only declares His disciples to be such. “The Paraclete,” as in Philo, is a “helper,” “intercessor”; but in Philo he is the intelligible universe, whilst here He is a self-conscious Spirit. “Truth,” “the truth,” “to know,” have here a prominence and significance far beyond their Synoptic or even their Pauline use. And above all stand the uses of “Life,” “Eternal Life.” The living ever-working Father (vi. 57; v. 17) has a Logos in whom is Life (i. 4), an ever-working Son (v. 17), who declares Himself “the living Bread,” “the Resurrection and the Life,” “the Way, the Truth and the Life” (vi. 51; xi. 25; xiv. 16): so that Father and Son quicken whom they will (v. 21); the Father’s commandment is life everlasting, and Jesus’ words are spirit and life (xii. 50; vi. 63, 68). The term, already Synoptic, takes over here most of the connotations of the “Kingdom of God,” the standing Synoptic expression, which appears here only in iii. 3-5; xviii. 36. Note that the term “the Logos” is peculiar to the Apocalypse (xix. 13), and the prologue here; but that, as Light and Life, the Logos-conception is present throughout the book. And thus there is everywhere a striving to contemplate history sub specie aeternitatis and to englobe the successiveness of man in the simultaneity of God.

Narratives Peculiar to John.—Of his seven great symbolical, doctrinally interpreted “signs,” John shares three, the cure of the ruler’s son, the multiplication of the loaves, the walking on the waters, with the Synoptists: yet here the first is transformed almost beyond recognition; and the two others only typify and prepare the eucharistic discourse. Of the four purely Johannine signs, two—the cures of the paralytic (v. 1-16), and of the man born blind (ix. 1-34)—are, admittedly, profoundly symbolical. In the first case, the man’s physical and spiritual lethargy are closely interconnected and strongly contrasted with the ever-active God and His Logos. In the second case there is also the closest parallel between physical blindness cured, and spiritual darkness dispelled, by the Logos-Light as described in the accompanying discourse. Both narratives are doubtless based upon actual occurrences—the cures narrated in Mark ii., iii., viii., x. and scenes witnessed by the writer in later times; yet here they do but picture our Lord’s spiritual work in the human soul achieved throughout Christian history. We cannot well claim more than these three kinds of reality for the first and the last signs, the miracle at Cana and the resurrection of Lazarus.

For the marriage-feast sign yields throughout an allegorical meaning. Water stands in this Gospel for what is still but symbol; thus the water-pots serve here the external Jewish ablutions—old bottles which the “new wine” of the Gospel is to burst (Mark ii. 22). Wine is the blood of the new covenant, and He will drink the fruit of the vine new in the Kingdom of God (Mark xiv. 23-25); the vineyard where He Himself is the true Vine (Mark xii. 1; John xv. 1). And “the kingdom of heaven is like to a marriage-feast” (Matt. xxii. 2); Jesus is the Bridegroom (Mark ii. 19); “the marriage of the Lamb has come” (Rev. xix. 7). “They have no wine”: the hopelessness of the old conditions is announced here by the true Israel, the Messiah’s spiritual mother, the same “woman” who in Rev. xii. 2, 5 “brought forth a man-child who was to rule all nations.” Cardinal Newman admits that the latter woman “represents the church, this is the real or direct sense”; yet as her man-child is certainly the Messiah, this church must be the faithful Jewish church. Thus also the “woman” at the wedding and beneath the cross stands primarily for the faithful Old Testament community, corresponding to the beloved disciple, the typical New Testament follower of her Son, the Messiah: in each case the devotional accommodation to His earthly mother is equally ancient and legitimate. He answers her “My hour is not yet come,” i.e. in the symbolic story, the moment for working the miracle; in the symbolized reality, the hour of His death, condition for the spirit’s advent; and “what is there between Me and thee?” i.e. “My motives spring no more from the old religion,” words devoid of difficulty, if spoken thus by the Eternal Logos to the passing Jewish church. The transformation is soon afterwards accomplished, but in symbol only; the “hour” of the full sense is still over three years off. Already Philo says “the Logos is the master of the spiritual drinking-feast,” and “let Melchisedeck”—the Logos—“in lieu of water offer wine to souls and inebriate them” (De somn. ii. 37; Legg. all. iii. 26). But in John this symbolism figures a great historic fact, the joyous freshness of Jesus’ ministerial beginnings, as indicated in the sayings of the Bridegroom and of the new wine, a freshness typical of Jesus’ ceaseless renovation of souls.

The raising of Lazarus, in appearance a massive, definitely localized historical fact, requires a similar interpretation, unless we would, in favour of the direct historicity of a story peculiar to a profoundly allegorical treatise, ruin the historical trustworthiness of the largely historical Synoptists in precisely their most complete and verisimilar part. For especially in Mark, the passing through Jericho, the entry into Jerusalem, the Temple-cleansing and its immediate effect upon the hierarchs, their next day’s interrogatory, “By what authority doest thou these things?” i.e. the cleansing (x. 46-xi. 33), are all closely interdependent and lead at once to His discussions with His Jerusalem opponents (xii. xiii.), and to the anointing, last supper, and passion (xiv. xv). John’s last and greatest symbolic sign replaces those historic motives, since here it is the raising of Lazarus which determines the hierarchs to kill Jesus (xi. 46-52), and occasions the crowds which accompany and meet Him on His entry (xii. 9-19). The intrinsic improbabilities of the narrative, if taken as direct history, are also great: Jesus’ deliberate delay of two days to secure His friend’s dying, and His rejoicing at the death, since thus He can revivify His friend and bring His disciples to believe in Himself as the Life; His deliberate weeping over the death which He has thus let happen, yet His anger at the similar tears of Lazarus’s other friends; and His praying, as He tells the Father in the prayer itself, simply to edify the bystanders: all point to a doctrinal allegory. Indeed the climax of the whole account is already reached in Jesus’ great saying: “I am the Resurrection and the Life; he that believeth in Me ... shall not die for ever,” and in Martha’s answer: “I believe that Thou art the Christ, the Son of God, who hast come into the world” (xi. 26, 27); the sign which follows is but the pictorial representation of this abiding truth. The materials for the allegory will have been certain Old Testament narratives, but especially the Synoptic accounts of Jesus’ raisings of Jairus’s daughter and of the widow’s son (Mark v.; Luke vii.). Mary and Martha are admittedly identical with the sisters in Luke x. 38-42; and already some Greek fathers connect the Lazarus of this allegory with the Lazarus of the parable (Luke xvi. 19-31). In the parable Lazarus returns not to earth, since Abraham foresees that the rich man’s brethren would disbelieve even if one rose from the dead; in the corresponding allegory, Lazarus does actually return to life, and the Jews believe so little as to determine upon killing the very Life Himself.

Special Difficulties and Special Greatness.—The difficulties, limitations and temporary means special to the book are closely connected with its ready appeal and abiding power; let us take both sets of things together, in three couples of interrelated price and gift.

The book’s method and form are pervadingly allegorical; its instinct and aim are profoundly mystical. Now from Philo to Origen we have a long Hellenistic, Jewish and Christian application of that all-embracing allegorism, where one thing stands for another and where no factual details resist resolution into a symbol of religious ideas and forces. Thus Philo had, in his life of Moses, allegorized the Pentateuchal narratives so as to represent him as mediator, saviour, intercessor of his people, the one great organ of revelation, and the soul’s guide from the false lower world into the upper true one. The Fourth Gospel is the noblest instance of this kind of literature, of which the truth depends not on the factual accuracy of the symbolizing appearances but on the truth of the ideas and experiences thus symbolized. And Origen is still full of spontaneous sympathy with its pervading allegorism. But this method has lost its attraction; the Synoptists, with their rarer and slighter pragmatic rearrangements and their greater closeness to our Lord’s actual words, deeds, experiences, environment, now come home to us as indefinitely richer in content and stimulative appeal. Yet mysticism persists, as the intuitive and emotional apprehension of the most specifically religious of all truths, viz. the already full, operative existence of eternal beauty, truth and goodness, of infinite Personality and Spirit independently of our action, and not, as in ethics, the simple possibility and obligation for ourselves to produce such-like things. And of this elemental mode of apprehension and root-truth, the Johannine Gospel is the greatest literary document and incentive extant: its ultimate aim and deepest content retain all their potency.

The book contains an intellectualist, static, determinist, abstractive trend. In Luke x. 25-28, eternal life depends upon loving God and man; here it consists in knowing the one true God and Christ whom He has sent. In the Synoptists, Jesus “grows in favour with God and man,” passes through true human experiences and trials, prays alone on the mountain-side, and dies with a cry of desolation; here the Logos’ watchword is “I am,” He has deliberately to stir up emotion in Himself, never prays for Himself, and in the garden and on the cross shows but power and self-possession. Here we find “ye cannot hear, cannot believe, because ye are not from God, not of My sheep” (viii. 47, x. 26); “the world cannot receive the spirit of truth” (xiv. 17). Yet the ethical current appears here also strongly: “he who doeth the truth, cometh to the light” (iii. 21), “if you love Me, keep My commandments” (xiv. 15). Libertarianism is here: “the light came, but men loved the darkness better than the light,” “ye will not come to Me” (iii. 19, v. 40); hence the appeal “abide in Me”—the branch can cease to be in Him the Vine (xv. 4, 2). Indeed even those first currents stand here for the deepest religious truths, the prevenience of God and man’s affinity to Him. “Not we loved God (first), but He (first) loved us”; “let us love Him, because He first loved us” (1 John iv. 10, 19); “no man can come to Me, unless the Father draw him” (vi. 44), a drawing which effects a hunger and thirst for Christ and God (iv. 14, vi. 35). Thus man’s spirit, ever largely but potential, can respond actively to the historic Jesus, because already touched and made hungry by the all-actual Spirit-God who made that soul akin unto Himself.

The book has an outer protective shell of acutely polemical and exclusive moods and insistences, whilst certain splendid Synoptic breadths and reconciliations are nowhere reached; but this is primarily because it is fighting, more consciously than they, for that inalienable ideal of all deepest religion, unity, even external and corporate, amongst all believers. The “Pneumatic” Gospel comes thus specially to emphasize certain central historical facts; and, the most explicitly institutional and sacramental of the four, to proclaim the most universalistic and developmental of all Biblical sayings. Here indeed Jesus will not pray for the world (xvii. 9); “ye shall die in your sins,” He insists to His opponents (viii. 44, 24); it is the Jews generally who appear throughout as such; nowhere is there a word as to forgiving our enemies; and the commandment of love is designated by Jesus as His, as new, and as binding the disciples to “love one another” within the community to which He gives His “example” (xv. 12, xiii. 34, 15). In the Synoptists, the disciples’ intolerance is rebuked (Mark ix. 38-41); Jesus’ opposition is everywhere restricted to the Pharisees and the worldly Sadducees; He ever longs for the conversion of Jerusalem; the great double commandment of love is proclaimed as already formulated in the Mosaic law (Mark xii. 28-34); the neighbour to be thus loved and served is simply any and every suffering fellow-man; and the pattern for such perfect love is found in a schismatical Samaritan (Luke x. 25-37). Yet the deepest strain here is more serenely universalist even than St Paul, for here Jesus says: “God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should ... have everlasting life” (iii. 16). True, the great prologue passage (i. 9) probably reads “He was the true Light coming into the world, that enlighteneth every man,” so that the writer would everywhere concentrate his mind upon the grace attendant upon explicit knowledge of the incarnate, historic Christ. Yet Christian orthodoxy, which itself has, all but uniformly, understood this passage of the spiritual radiation throughout the world of the Word before His incarnation, has been aided towards such breadth as to the past by the Johannine outlook into the future. For, in contrast to the earliest Synoptic tradition, where the full Christian truth and its first form remain undistinguished, and where its earthly future appears restricted to that generation, in John the Eternal Life conception largely absorbs the attention away from all successiveness; Jesus’ earthly life does not limit the religion’s assimilation of further truth and experience: “I have many things to tell you, but you cannot bear them now,” “the Father will give you another Helper, the spirit of truth, who will abide with you for ever” (xvi. 12, xiv. 15). This universalism is not simply spiritual; the external element, presupposed in the Synoptists as that of the Jewish church within which Jesus’ earthly life was spent, is here that of the now separate Christian community: He has other sheep not of this fold—them also He must bring, there will be one fold, one shepherd; and His seamless tunic, and Peter’s net which, holding every kind of fish, is not rent, are symbols of this visible unity. Ministerial gradations exist in this church; Jesus begins the feet-washing with Peter, who alone speaks and is spoken to; the beloved disciple outruns Peter to Jesus’ monument, yet waits to go in till Peter has done so first; and in the appendix the treble pastoral commission is to Peter alone: a Petrine pre-eminence which but echoes the Synoptists. And sacramentalism informs the great discourses concerning rebirth by water and the spirit, and feeding on the Living Bread, Jesus’ flesh and blood, and the narrative of the issue of blood and water from the dead Jesus’ side. Indeed so severe a stress is laid upon the explicitly Christian life and its specific means, that orthodoxy itself interprets the rebirth by water and spirit, and the eating the flesh and drinking the blood to which entrance into the Kingdom and possession of interior life are here exclusively attached, as often represented by a simple sincere desire and will for spiritual purification and a keen hunger and thirst for God’s aid, together with such cultual acts as such souls can know or find, even without any knowledge of the Christian rites. Thus there is many “a pedagogue to Christ,” and the Christian visible means and expressions are the culmination and measure of what, in various degrees and forms, accompanies every sincerely striving soul throughout all human history.

Origin and Authorship.—The question as to the book’s origin has lost its poignancy through the ever-increasing recognition of the book’s intrinsic character. Thus the recent defenders of the apostolic authorship, the Unitarian James Drummond (1903), the Anglican William Sanday (1905), the Roman Catholic Theodore Calmes (1904), can tell us, the first, that “the evangelist did not aim at an illustrative picture of what was most characteristic of Jesus”; the second, that “the author sank into his own consciousness and at last brought to light what he found there”; the third, that “the Gospel contains an entire theological system,” “history is seen through the intervening dogmatic development,” “the Samaritan woman is ... a personification,” “the behaviour of the Greeks is entirely natural in such a book.” We thus get at cross-purposes with this powerful, profound work. Only some such position as Abbé Loisy’s critical summing up (1903) brings out its specific greatness. “What the author was, his book, in spite of himself, tells us to some extent: a Christian of Judeo-Alexandrine formation; a believer without, apparently, any personal reminiscence of what had actually been the life, preaching and death of Jesus; a theologian far removed from every historical preoccupation, though he retains certain principal facts of tradition without which Christianity would evaporate into pure ideas; and a seer who has lived the Gospel which he propounds.” “To find his book beautiful and true, we need but take it as it is and understand it.” “The church, which has never discussed the literary problem of this Gospel, in nowise erred as to its worth.”