Life & Wisdom Quote by Alfred Noyes

Noyes is doing something slyly audacious here: he’s using a narrow textual comparison to smuggle in a big claim about authority. The line comes dressed as modest scholarship - "one or two", "I venture to think" - but that hedging is rhetorical camouflage. By the time he arrives at "can only have been recorded on the authority of St. John", the conclusion has been framed as almost reluctant, the kind of careful inference a reasonable person would hate to overstate. It’s persuasion by restraint.

The context is the long-running tension between the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke) and John: overlapping traditions, different chronology, radically different tone. Modern readers often hear "John" and think theology; "Synoptics" and think history. Noyes, a poet with a Christian imagination, refuses that neat sorting. He’s arguing that when a Synoptic saying suddenly sounds Johannine, the simplest explanation is not later borrowing or theological drift but eyewitness memory crossing textual boundaries. That move defends John without having to litigate every contested passage.

The subtext is cultural, not just biblical: a pushback against modern skepticism and source-criticism by appealing to personality and presence. "Authority of St. John" isn’t mere citation; it’s an invocation of a living witness, a way of re-enchanting the chain of transmission. Noyes wants the reader to feel that behind the documents stands a particular mind that heard, remembered, and insisted on getting certain words down.