72 GEORGE C. HEIDER is often cited, in which he offers rationales from both nature and revelation as to why the Gospels must be four in number but gives no indication of subordination among the four 10. For his part, Brevard S. Childs argues that “No one Gospel is made the hermeneutical key, as would have happened had John’s Gospel been constructed into an overarching framework [like the ‘Priestly source’ in Genesis] and the three Synoptics inserted into its story” 11. Is John’s Gospel indeed but one of four witnesses to the one gospel, canonically speaking? There are indications to the contrary. John is obviously a qualitatively different sort of Gospel than the Synoptics (as implied by its exclusion from the latter group), differences that Clement of Alexandria explained, in a famous quotation recorded by Eusebius, by calling John the “spiritual Gospel” (πνευματικο.ν v ευαγγέλιον) by contrast with the other Gospels, which dealt with “external facts” (τα. σωματικά, literally, “the things of the body”) 12. As Eduard Lohse notes, “the difference between John and the Synoptics certainly cannot be reduced to the formula somatic-pneumatic, for John also reports ‘somatic’ material, and the Synoptics by no means give up all claim to presenting the ‘spiritual’” 13. Nevertheless, Clement’s description may prove helpful, as it points us toward an indisputable distinction, that in John “from the very beginning Jesus stands before the world as the one sent by God, and before his own as the Son of the Father” 14. But what are the specific external attributes, if any, that suggest parallels in how Deuteronomy and John function within their respective testaments? First, it is worth noting that Deuteronomy shares with John an obvious distinctiveness vis-à-vis the other books in its section of the canon that is not ipso facto a function of its placement among them. We have just rehearsed the early recognition of a qualitative difference between the Synoptics and the Fourth Gospel. Similarly, modern literary critical studies have isolated a “D” source in Deuteronomy that is all but absent from the amalgam of the three “JEP” sources to be found in Genesis through Numbers. 10 Adv. haer. 3.11.8-9. 11 CHILDS, NT as Canon, 235. 12 Hist. eccl. 6.14.7. 13 E. LOHSE, The Formation of the New Testament (Nashville, TN 1981) 169-170. 14 Ibid.