John 21:25

25. The world itself could not contain the books The world, in John’s use of the term, perhaps always signifies, not the physical frame of creation, but, the living world. And sometimes he uses it, as used in modern times, in a narrow and conventional sense, when we speak of the literary world the fashionable world. Thus in John 12:19, The world has gone after him. In this passage we understand him as speaking of the book-world, which was then not a very large world, and could not accept or digest many books, or rather, manuscript scrolls. He then declares his own feeling, that if all that Jesus did in word and deed should be written, there would be more than the world-full of books. The book-market would be more than glutted, and the reading public overwhelmed. The world could not compass the big library. With such a hyperbole no one will have any difficulty who remembers that the inspired books were “not only divine books, but intensely human books.” Inspiration does not petrify or congeal the natural expression of human feeling or thought. And on no other subject than the life and work of Jesus were such a hyperbole so graceful, even in an inspired writer.

Stretching these words from their more narrow and indefinite sense to their full infinite capacity of meaning, could a universe of books fully unfold all that Jesus did in the brief work of atonement on the cross? Nothing less than that infinite library can detail the number saved, the eternal death from which they are saved, the eternal life and all its glorious eternal history to which they are saved, all of which were wrought by the earthly life and death of Christ.

And these words very conclusively indicate that the Evangelists profess not to narrate all they knew of the Lord’s words and deeds. It is very irrational for sceptical writers, when one of the Evangelists omits some fact elsewhere narrated, to continually exclaim, “That Evangelist knows nothing about that fact; it is, therefore, of doubtful authority.” Just as if every Evangelist must narrate all, and just as much, as every other Evangelist! Just as if all the writers must square themselves precisely by each other, each narrate the same facts in exactly the same manner. So that if they omit they are ignorant, and if they vary they contradict. Their brief sketches are but slight leaves in the great biography. And well does our Evangelist close the divine four with an attestation of the infinite scope of the Life of the INCARNATE.