The Fourth Gospel

The Fourth Gospel is a study of John’s Gospel by James Freeman Clarke. It belongs to Clarke’s body of biblical and theological writing produced across his long Boston pastorate at the Church of the Disciples from 1841 to 1888.

The Gospel of John occupies an unusual place in Christian biblical scholarship. It differs in narrative shape, in the presentation of Jesus, and in style from the three synoptic Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. The famous prologue about the Word becoming flesh, the long discourses by Jesus that have no synoptic parallel, and the distinctive selection of miracles and signs have all generated centuries of scholarly debate about authorship, date, and theological position.

Clarke approaches John from the liberal Protestant perspective he had developed over decades. He knew the German biblical critical scholarship of the nineteenth century, which had raised hard questions about traditional attributions and dating across all four Gospels. He incorporates that scholarship while still defending the Fourth Gospel as a genuine witness to the historical Jesus rather than treating it as a late theological construction with no historical core.

The Unitarian interest in John has always been awkward. The Gospel contains the strongest New Testament passages that orthodox Christianity has used to support the divinity of Christ, particularly the prologue’s identification of the Word with God and the various I am statements scattered through the body of the text. Unitarian readers have had to develop interpretive strategies that handle these passages without committing to Trinitarian theology, and Clarke’s treatment is one of the careful nineteenth-century American Unitarian engagements with the material.

The book is mostly of interest now to readers of nineteenth-century American Unitarian biblical work and of the longer Christian tradition of interpretation of John. It pairs with Clarke’s other biblical writings and with Andrews Norton’s earlier Harvard work on the Gospels.