THAT some d'slocation in the order of the chapters of
the Fourth Gospel has taken place has long been recognised by scholars and various attempts have been made to restore the original sequence. The hypothesis that the confusion arose from some accident to an early manuscript is an obvious one and has been explored by more than one student. Mr. Hoare has pursued this line of investigation further than any of his predecessors in the field and has supported his theory by elaborate arithmetical calculations of the number of lines on a page. He assumes that the accident happened to the original document, which was written, he believes, on strips .of papyrus of uniform size. This is an important contribution to the study of St. John's Gospel, and the evidence for the truth of Mr. Hoare's conjecture is impressive. He prints at the end of his book Chapters I-XVI in what he holds to be their proper sequence, and a reader may thus easily convince himself of the value of this textual revision for the interpretation of the Gospel.
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