Alexandrine History

This extreme is illustrated by the impressions that Jean Reville describes,in connexion with the problem of the Fourth Gospel :"Concluding his study of the Prologue of the Fourth Gos-pel, M.Loisy says of the Evangelist: 'He is not writing a history of Jesus but rather a treatise on knowledge of Jesus.' I hold instead that he intended to write a history, but history as an Alexandrian understood history , which is something radically different from what we mean by history....The aim of the Gospel, the aim of the Prologue itself, is historical, that is the fact that must not be lost sight of. However, the Evangelist writes history as all men who were imbued with the Alexandrine spirit in his day wrote history, with a sovereign contempt for concrete material reality, as was the case with Philo or St. Paul. In the view of those great minds, history was not a pragmatic narrative of events, a faithful reproduction of details, a careful chronology, an integral resurrection of the past. The historian's task was to emphasize the moral and spiritual values of facts, their deeper significance, that element of eternal truth which is present in each contingent and ephemeral phenomenon in history.

(from Le quatrieme Evangile by Jean Reville as quoted in The Mind and Society by Vilfredo Pareto)