The evangelist is conscious of this aim.
To the right are figures of St Peter, St Bartholomew and St Ursula; and to the left, St Paul, St John the Evangelist and St Andrew.
The evangelist's phraseology is indeed affected to some extent by the rhetorical style of the period when he wrote.
Thus the recent defenders of the apostolic authorship, the Unitarian James Drummond (1903), the Anglican William Sanday (1905), the Roman Catholic Theodore Calmes (1904), can tell us, the first, that " the evangelist did not aim at an illustrative picture of what was most characteristic of Jesus "; the second, that " the author sank into his own consciousness and at last brought to light what he found there "; the third, that " the Gospel contains an entire theological system," " history is seen through the intervening dogmatic development," " the Samaritan woman is.
Even if the common beliefs of the apostolic age have not modified the evangelist's reports of Jesus' teaching, it must be remembered that He used the common prophetic phraseology, the literal fulfilment of which is not to be looked for.