Critic and Commentator
S. JOHN'S GOSPEL: A Commentary. By R. H. Lightfoot. Edited by C. F. Evans. (O.U.P., 30s.) THE FOURTH GOSPEL: An Expositionary Commentary. By J. Alexander Finlay. (Epworth, 12s. 6d.) NOT all academic figures can inspire their pupils as well as teach them, but occasionally one comes across a donnish name that is mentioned with touching gratitude by writers in their prefaces; names like Edward Caird of Balliol, or Lord Keynes of King's. To this list must be added that of Professor R. H. Lightfoot. None of his Oxford pupils are ever likely to forget the effect upon them of the little Dean Ireland Professor of the Exegesis of Holy Scrip- ture. Retiring by nature and sensitive to criticism, he was hardly prepossessing to behold, but he had just that mixture of extreme convention and strange idiosyncrasy which endears a professor to undergraduates. He was abnormally precise—essays were returned with commas changed to colons—and he was extremely cautious in his conclusions: only Lightfoot could have written : 'I must be allowed to say dogmatically that in the Fourth Gospel Judas is probably the Man of Sin.' He was not even particularly original, for much of his work was inspired by German scholars. And yet it would not be too much to say that he founded a new British school of biblical criticism. Lightfoot handled the sacred text with great reverence and with disinterested scholarship, and he was not concerned with prevalent questions, of sources and authorship so much as with the reasons why the New Testament authors wrote what they did. He sought to see each particular passage in the context of the whole, and thereby he uncovered much that earlier scholars had missed because their attention was elsewhere.
Lightfoot did not leave many volumes behind him—he has a better memorial than books—but it was known that he had been engaged for some years before his death in 1953 on a commentary on the Fourth Gospel. This profound, mysterious and baffling work has aptly been called the `Everest of New Testament studies,' and other scholars, like Lightfoot, have died before they have scaled the summit, His old pupil, Mr. C. F. Evans, Chaplain of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, has skilfully put together the surviving manuscript, and has produced as a commentary a worthy successor to Westcott's and Hoskyns's great posthumous works.
Lightfoot believed that the Fourth Gospel was written on a plan in which a `work' or sign of Jesus is usually followed by a 'word' of the Lord explaining and interpreting it. Here most scholars would agree, but he parts company with the majority when he affirms that John knew the synoptic gospels and wrote not to supplement or to supersede but to interpret them. 'The growth and experience of the Church had shown that the Lord's life was not only an event in Jewish history but also in world history'; and John therefore portrays the Lord not so much as the Jewish Messiah as the Word of God, the Saviour of the whole world. Lightfoot sees religious significance everywhere—perhaps too often—and my one criticism concerns the way in which he by-passes historical questions which the Fourth Gospel poses and which demand an answer. Thus he virtually ignores the literary and historical questions which the appendix in Chapter 21 presents, but he deals faithfully with the reasons for its inclusion —the different roles of John and Peter in the early Church.
By contrast with Lightfoot's book, Dr. Finlay's little com- mentary on the Fourth Gospel, although compact, workmanlike and judicious, seems like something 'off the peg' beside a tailor' made suit. Lightfoot's work, like Finlay's, can be read by any interested reader, and the former may well take the place that Temple's Readings in S. John's Gospel have long held in the affections of laymen.
Huott moNTEFlogr
Previous page
