Read The Gospel of John and Christian Origins Online
Authors: John Ashton
A similar capacity to contemplate Jesus’ suffering in the course of a vision of glory is to be found in an early Christian apocalypse called the
Ascension of Isaiah
(dated by Rowland at the end of the first or the beginning of the second century
ce
).
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Already in the seventh heaven, and seeing there “all the righteous from the time of Adam,” Isaiah asks his accompanying angel why they have not yet received their crowns. The angel replies that they must wait until “
the Beloved
has descended and become like you in form,” when they (unspecified) “will hang him on a tree and will kill him” (9:6-14). Nils Dahl suggests that this apocryphon is taking over earlier traditions concerning Isaiah, one of which is the interpretation of Isaiah’s great vision (in Isaiah 6) as a vision of Christ: Isaiah “saw his glory and spoke of him” (John 12:41). The basic idea in 12:41, adds Dahl, is akin to that of the
Ascension of Isaiah
: “the prophet is supposed to have seen . . . the glory of Christ incarnate and crucified.”
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Paradoxical as it sounds, “the glory of Christ crucified” is an accurate summary of John’s own vision.
Pursuing this theme further, we should take a careful look at the epilogue to the Book of Signs (12:44-50) one of the rare points in the Gospel where the evangelist, like a Victorian novelist, pauses to comment on the significance of his narrative. He has just told us that Jesus had spoken for the very last time to the Jews, after which “he departed and hid himself from them” (12:36). So these additional words, emphasized by the unusual manner of utterance—crying out loud (ἔκραξεν)—demand our particular attention, delivered as they are not to Jesus’ audience but to John’s readers. I cite here the first two verses: “He who believes in me, believes not in me but in him who sent me. And he who sees me sees him who sent me.”
Rudolf Bultmann, who downplays the epilogue by removing it from its proper place at the climactic end of the Book of Signs, says of these two sentences that their content is the same.
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The truth is that the second makes an important advance on the first, which is itself a significant variant of the familiar law of agency, the equivalence or virtual identity of the sender and the sent. Worth noting is one of the earliest occurrences of this principle, where Jesus instructs the twelve by taking a child in his arms, and telling them, “whoever receives one such child in my name receives me; and whoever receives me, receives not me, but him who sent me” (Mark 9:37). Matthew, saying nothing about the child here (though he reworks the same tradition later, 18:1-5), repeats the principle but alters its focus by adding a word about prophets: “He who receives a prophet because he is a prophet shall receive a prophet’s reward” (Matt. 10:40-41). John too repeats the principle word for word (13:20), but only after he had introduced a particularly interesting variant as a lesson to be learned from his washing of his disciples’ feet: “Amen, amen I say to you, a slave is not greater than his master, nor is an agent [ἀπόστολος] greater than the one who sent him” (13:16; cf. Matt. 10:24).
In the opening of his epilogue, the evangelist adds a new twist to the principle by changing the verb from “receive” to “believe.” This enables him to insert into the ending of the first half of the Gospel the lesson of faith with which he concludes the second half. Even more significant, however, is the extra twist in the next verse (“And he who sees me sees him who sent me”). For the new variant adds a vertical dimension to the strong horizontal axis of the original principle of agency. Seeing Jesus in his earthly existence, John suggests, is equivalent to seeing the Father up above. Here again, in an epilogue carefully composed to round off the first part of his Gospel, the evangelist is emphasizing a lesson of particular importance to him, one that he will resume at the beginning of the Farewell Discourse in his reply to Philip: “. . . you do not know me, Philip? He who has seen me has seen the Father” (14:9).
The dominant themes of the Farewell Discourse, which is modeled on the form of a final testament, are departure and return. But there is also a pervasive sense of presence. No longer physically present, Jesus is present to the community in a new way: “You heard me say to you, ‘I go away and I will come to you.’ . . . And now I have told you before it takes place, so that when it does take place, you will believe” (14:28-29). So when he does return his presence will now be a spiritual presence, assured by the gift of the Spirit. Previously I have emphasized that one of the roles of the Spirit was to enable the community to understand properly for the first time the significance of Jesus’ words and deeds. These remained incomprehensible in Jesus’ lifetime. But now the Spirit will lead them into the truth, thus fulfilling the promise of the concluding beatitude: “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe” (20:29).
One of the Paraclete sayings illustrates the experience of the community: “But when the Paraclete comes, whom I shall send to you from the Father, even the Spirit of truth, who proceeds from the Father, he will bear witness to me; and you also are witnesses because you have been with me from the beginning” (15:26-27). “The community’s preaching,” remarks Bultmann, “is to be none other than witness to Jesus”—a comment that must also hold good for its
prophecy
. “Their witness,” Bultmann continues, “is not a historical account of that which was, but—however much it is based on that which was—it is ‘repetition,’ ‘a calling to mind’ [14:26], in the light of their present relationship with him. It is perfectly clear that their witness and that of the Spirit are identical. The Gospel is itself evidence of the kind of witness this is, and of how that which was is taken up again”—and here Bultmann quotes some famous lines spoken by the dying evangelist in Robert Browning’s “A Death in the Desert”:
Since much that at the first, in deed and word,
Lay simply and sufficiently exposed,
Had grown. . .
Of new significance and fresh result
What first were guessed as points, I now knew stars,
And named them in the Gospel I have writ. (lines 169–75).
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Bultmann, of course, did not believe that the Gospel was written by one of Jesus’ disciples. And although the vast majority of researchers into the Gospel have rejected Bultmann’s own account of its origins, almost all of them have shared this disbelief.
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Aware of the huge difference between the stars and the points—the words and deeds of the historical Jesus—they have simply taken for granted that whoever found new significance in earlier memories or records concerning Jesus cannot have been one of his actual followers. But it is worth asking ourselves whether Browning, himself a poet of considerable power, may not have displayed real insight when he attributed the evangelist’s ability to form stars out of points to his poetic and/or his religious genius. For many great poets and writers do just that: looking back on, reimagining, and reliving their experiences, they realize that these have grown “of new significance and fresh result.”
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Let us remain a little longer with the dying evangelist in Browning’s desert. We first see him in a coma, as his few remaining companions are trying to revive him:
“He is not so far gone but he might speak.” One of his followers, called simply “the Boy,” “stung by the splendour of a sudden thought,” fetches “a plate of graven lead” and reads from it, as if proclaiming for the first time, the words “I am the Resurrection and the Life” / “Whereat he opened his eyes wide at once, / And sat up of himself, and looked at us; / And thenceforth nobody pronounced a word.” Nobody, that is, except John himself, who carried on talking for more than five hundred lines, giving Browning the opportunity to exercise his special gift—what a French critic called his
introspection d’autrui
, his knack of getting inside other people’s skins.
This John is far from being an old man rummaging among his memories. He reflects that of all Jesus’ closest disciples he is the only one left:
And I am only he, your brother John,
Who saw and heard, and could remember all:
Remember all! It is not much to say.
What if the truth broke on me from above
As once and oft-times? Such might hap again.
John proceeds by running through all his writings, first Revelation, when the message came to him “in Patmos isle,” where he had to set down all that he was told, “with nothing left to my arbitrament to choose or change,” then the Letters, and finally the Gospel, speaking of it in the famous words already quoted. But he does not stop there: “To me that story,” he reflects, “ay, that Life and Death of which I wrote ‘it was’—to me, it is; —is, here and now: I apprehend nought else.” Going on to consider how his friends and followers might share his vision, he finds a way of enabling them to see the past “reduced to plain historic fact, / diminished into clearness.” But this done, he urges them to “stand before that fact, that Life and Death, / stay there at gaze, till it dispart, dispread, / as though a star should open out, all sides, / grow the world on you, as it is my world.” He himself had known stars, and now his friends too could see the truth—as a single star.
I venture to suggest that Robert Browning, equipped with none of the gleaming tools of scholarly exegesis, and with only his poet’s imagination and a tentative faith to assist him, realized, as scholars have never quite managed to do, that to account for the Fourth Gospel we have to accord to its author a quite exceptional
vision
. For the object of that vision Browning chose the word
stars
. The evangelist’s word was
glory
.
Not incidentally, this was the word selected by Ernst Käsemann. In
The Testament of Jesus
he built on an important article, written as early as 1957, that focused on John 1:14, “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth; and we have beheld [perhaps
gazed upon
] his glory.”
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In this article, Käsemann had placed all the weight on the conclusion of the verse, “and we have beheld his glory.” It should cause us no surprise, then, that when he came to give a more extended discussion of the Gospel he turned for inspiration to John 17, Jesus’ long prayer to the Father at the end of his life. In fact the subtitle of the new book reads, in English,
A Study of the Gospel of John in the Light of Chapter 17.
Scholars who accept the hypothesis that there were at least two editions of the Gospel of John are agreed that chapter 17 belongs to the second edition. The Prologue too belongs to the second edition, so there are no echoes of it in the first; but the prayer that opens John 17 does, I think, hark back to it: “glorify me in your own presence with the glory I had with you before the existence of the world (πρὸ τοῦ τὸν κόσμον εἶναι)” (17:5). And there is another reference toward the end of the prayer, where the disciples are also included: “Father, I desire that these whom you have given me may also be with me where I am, to behold my glory which you have given me in your love for me before the foundation of the world” (17:24). Κäsemann does not actually quote either of these verses, because he is more interested in the glory Christ displayed on earth than his preexistent glory in heaven. What he does say is this: “The beginning of John 17 is dominated by the key word ‘glorification’ of Jesus. With this key word, the message of the whole Gospel is taken up once more in our chapter. The prologue in 1.14 has already summarized the content of the Gospel with ‘We beheld his glory.’”
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Perhaps Κäsemann should rather have said that the phrase “We beheld his glory” summarizes his own interpretation of the Gospel; but in any event it must be admitted that almost from the start of Gospel the figure of Christ is bathed in glory: he manifested his glory at the wedding feast of Cana (2:11), and his glory never left him, even though it was to be manifested more particularly in his death (13:31-32).
Conscious as they were of the continuing presence in their midst of the Glorified One, no wonder the community, or rather the evangelist who was its chief spokesman, smoothed out the rough edges of the traditions of the historical Jesus and expanded the points into stars. Here we have the most likely explanation of the extraordinary difference between his portrait of Jesus and that of the Synoptics. It had nothing to do with a decision to present a docetic Christ, but arose from his constant awareness, which he shared with the members of his community, that they were living in the presence of the Glorified One. So dazzling was this glory that any memory of a less-than-glorious Christ was altogether eclipsed. Here is the true explanation of the transformation of a fully human Christ into one who was virtually divine—not a divine man in the sense of a Greek superman but a man who manifested for those who knew him the glory of God. The Johannine community, and the evangelist in particular, realized that the truth that they prized as the source of their new life was to be identified not with the Jesus of history but with the risen and glorious Christ, and that this was a Christ free from all human weakness. The claims they made for him were at the heart of the new religion that soon came to be called Christianity.