St. John's Gospel and the Logos

St. John had a twofold object in his Gospel and his Epistles, -- to prove the divinity, and also the actual human nature and bodily suffering, of Jesus Christ, -- that he was God and Man. The notion that the effusion of blood and water from the Saviour's side was intended to prove the real _death_ of the sufferer originated, I believe, with some modern Germans, and seems to me ridiculous: there is, indeed, a very small quantity of water occasionally in the precordia: but in the pleura, where wounds are not generally mortal, there is a great deal. St. John did not mean, I apprehend, to insinuate that the spear-thrust made the _death_, merely as such, certain or evident, but that the effusion showed the human nature. "I saw it," he would say, "with my own eyes. It was real blood, composed of lymph and crassamentum, and not a mere celestial ichor, as the Phantasmists allege."

I think the verse of the three witnesses (1 John, v. 7.) spurious, not only because the balance of external authority is against it, as Porson seems to have shown; but also, because, in my way of looking at it, it spoils the reasoning.