The Gospel of John and Christian Origins (12 page)

In this excursus I want to confront a strong challenge to the concept of the Johannine community as this is found in the work of Raymond E. Brown, J. Louis Martyn, and myself.
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The subject of 
The Sheep of the Fold
, by Edward W. Klink III, is apparent from its subtitle, 
The Audience and Origin of the Gospel of John
.
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Following the lead of his doctoral supervisor, Richard Bauckham,
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Klink altogether rejects the idea of a Johannine community and proposes instead that the Gospel of John, like the other Gospels, was written for a much more general audience.

He begins his discussion with some wide-ranging reflections on the meaning of community; but here I will restrict my comments to his treatment of the Gospel of John, which starts in his third chapter, entitled “Early Christian Gospel: Gospel Genre and a Critique of the Two-Level Reading of the Gospel of John.”

First comes the affirmation that “recent discussions in the Gospel community debate have shown the importance that genre plays in the interpretation of a text’s audience.”
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As I made clear in Excursus I, my own view is that it has no importance whatsoever. Even if the Gospels are correctly classified as Greco-Roman 
bioi
 they owe nothing to previous examples of the genre and are so different from these that nothing at all can be inferred from this “fact” about their intended readership. Klink thinks it “important to define the exact role the literary genre plays in determining the size of their intended readership”
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—to which the answer should be, without further specification, none at all. Harping on, he continues, “If the role of genre is, by definition, to inform the reader of a narrative’s content, and to instruct the reader how to read it, then the 
bios
 genre does just that.”
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 But this remark about “the role of genre” is odd to the point of unintelligibility. Surely it is the other way around?  One has to know the contents of a narrative first before deciding on its genre. And if we know the genre already—perhaps from a publisher’s list—this will tell us nothing about its contents. Equally unintelligible is the assertion that the genre 
instructs
 us how to read a narrative.

The next section of the chapter, headed “John’s two-level drama: a critique,”
 
begins with the question, “how would a first-century audience have appropriated a Gospel text?” There soon follows a long digression—revolving around a theoretical construct named 
the first-century reader
 (fabricated with the help of Hans Frei and Frances Young),
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whose chief characteristic is that he/she is “pre-critical.” Martyn is then rebuked for imposing “a modern (or critical) grid of understanding on the first-century readers of the Fourth Gospel.”
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According to this logic, first-century readers of Virgil’s 
Aeneid
, a story of a mythical hero composed in the preceding century, cannot possibly have understood its many subtle references to contemporary issues, simply because they lived in a pre-critical era and therefore had the misfortune of being pre-critical readers. And what of Pindar (fifth century
bce
), what of Callimachus (third century
bce
) or, for that matter, what of the book of Wisdom, written probably in the first century
ce
? In the light of the subtlety and sophistication of all these writers (and one could name more) the terms 
pre-critical era
 and 
first-century readers
 can be seen to be no more than vapid and thoroughly misleading generalizations.

Klink begins his direct criticism of Martyn’s work by quoting him: “Someone created a literary genre quite without counterpart in the body of the Gospels. We may indeed call it a drama,” and he concludes “that Martyn is claiming that the Fourth Gospel’s genre is different from the genre of the Synoptics.”
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But Martyn is writing here about the construction of a sequence of scenes based on the miracle story of chapter 9, not about the genre of the Gospel as a whole. Such a blatant misreading is not an encouraging start. Nor do things improve when he turns to discuss 9:22, the entry point into the two-level reading, though he is right to regard Martyn’s exegesis of this passage as crucial to his whole enterprise. He also correctly singles out Martyn’s most important observation, which is a comment on 9:28: “You are that man’s disciple [μαθητὴς ἐκείνου], but we are disciples of Moses.”

Klink makes two critical comments on this observation. “We cannot assume,” he says, “that the Jewish-Christian tension being described is anything more than a general reference to Jewish-Christian conflict. . . . Would not any messianic confession be found in almost any ‘Christian’ literature in early Christianity, and would not that be found disagreeable to any non-Christian Jew?”
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But he appears to have forgotten that the conflict portrayed in John 9 is recorded in a Gospel narrative that, on the face of it, is a story about events that occurred in Jesus’ lifetime. There is 
one
 messianic confession recorded in the Synoptic Gospels, namely, the confession of Peter; but there is not the slightest indication that there was any controversy over this title between Jesus and the Pharisees, or between Jesus and any other Jewish group. Indeed, it is safe to say that such a controversy is highly unlikely to have occurred in Jesus’ lifetime.

Second, argues Klink,

But to read the 
already
 as reaching back to Jesus’ lifetime is to beg the question. Once again, there is not the slightest likelihood that the expulsion of Jesus’ disciples from the synagogue began during his lifetime.

Scratching at Martyn’s case in just two paragraphs without even denting it, Klink only succeeds in revealing its strength. But feeble as these two arguments are, they do at least attempt to address the question. We are still left, however, with what is surely Martyn’s most important observation. This concerns the recognition of a rivalry or comparability between the disciples of Jesus and the disciples of Moses. As Martyn says, such a rivalry, implying as it does that the two groups can properly be compared together because they have a similar prestige and importance, is scarcely conceivable in Jesus’ lifetime. How could a few dozen followers of Jesus, all good Jews, ever have been thought to present a challenge to the religious beliefs of the whole Jewish nation? On this point Klink has not a word to say. Halfway through his thesis on the Gospel of John, once he has temporarily abandoned theoretical generalities to deal with the text itself, the weakness of his case becomes all too apparent.

It is appropriate at this point to quote Dwight Moody Smith’s admirable summary of Martyn’s argument:

I turn now to Richard Bauckham’s article “The Audience of the Fourth Gospel.”
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This is divided into a number of different sections. In the first of these Bauckham summarizes the case he had already made that the Gospels were intended to be read by all Christians, already dispersed throughout the Mediterranean.
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After that he embarks on an argument restricted to the Gospel of John, opening with a very fair outline of Martyn’s general position, and then turning to the problems raised by the decision recorded in John 9 to expel professing Christians from the synagogue. He is right to say that “the historical issue of the status of Jewish Christians in the late first century has been much debated, and it is not all clear that what happened to Diaspora-Jewish Christians resembles what happens to the blind man in John 9.”
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Bauckham shrewdly concentrates on the weakest section of Martyn’s book, where he discusses the 
Birkat ha-Minim
, the curse against heretics (which I will consider later in another context). It must be confessed that there is considerable uncertainty surrounding this. But why does he completely ignore Martyn’s strongest argument, that is to say, the virtual impossibility that Jesus’ disciples could have been recognized during his lifetime as rivals of the disciples of Moses? Is it because he failed to recognize its strength, or simply because he had no answer?

Bauckham continues: “More generally, the most damaging criticism of Martyn’s two-level reading strategy is the fact that it has no basis in the literary genre of the Fourth Gospel. The genre of a particular text generally guides readers to the appropriate strategy of interpretation. . . . Recent discussion of the gospel genre strongly favors the view that first-century readers would have recognized all four canonical gospels as a special form of Graeco-Roman biography.”
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I have dealt with this issue in Excursus I. Most first-century readers of the Gospels are unlikely ever to have come across any example of Greco-Roman biography; even so their ignorance of this genre will scarcely have worried them. The 
bios
 genre of the Gospels, if this is indeed a proper designation, is of no value whatever in determining the nature of their audience or in indicating how the works should be read.

In the next section of his article (“A Two-Level Text?”) Bauckham deals with two further issues. First he questions the viability of a (diachronic) reading of the text based on discontinuities or contextual aporias:

It is impossible to deal directly with this airy dismissal of genuine difficulties in the text, some of them first recognized by Julius Wellhausen over a century ago
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and the object of intense debate ever since, because there is nothing specific to aim at. (I will, however, tackle this problem in some depth in Excursus III.)

Next Bauckham questions the significance of apparent tensions that arise because of discontinuities in the text:

Although I am inclined to agree that almost the whole Gospel was the work of a single individual, this is another objection whose vague generality makes it impossible to counter. As I will make clear in the body of this book, I think that the unspecified tensions Bauckham is probably thinking of are caused by additions and alterations the author made to his own text.

The next section of the article (“In-group Language?”) commences strongly: “With this topic we reach the point where it will be possible to turn the tables on those who argue that an isolated Johannine Community was the intended audience of the Fourth Gospel.”
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Bauckham is convinced that the evangelist designed the (so-called) in-group language precisely to introduce it to readers not already familiar with it. Before turning to argue from specific passages, however, Bauckham makes what is, to me, a quite astonishing declaration: “In the modern church’s experience, the Fourth Gospel has been seen as the most accessible of the New Testament books both to Christians with little education in the faith and to complete outsiders who have minimal knowledge of the Christian tradition.”
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I can understand that it may be accessible to Christians (though scarcely those with little education in their faith), because it has been an integral element in Christian teaching for centuries. But where is the evidence “in the modern church’s experience” that this difficult and complex work is readily accessible even to complete outsiders?

When Bauckham at long last turns to the text of the Gospel, he takes his first example from the temple episode in John 2: “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up” (2:19). At the time neither the Jews nor the disciples understood this saying, although the evangelist explains that “he was speaking of the temple of his body” (2:21). The evangelist, suggests Bauckham, “surely intends this to be an illustrative example: he will not always help his readers on later occasions but he has shown them how to figure out what Jesus means.”
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The truth is that help is always at hand, because the evangelist (like most authors) wants his intended readership to understand what he writes. (It would be odd if he did not.) But the most important lesson of this episode concerns not the readers of the Gospel but the disciples, and specifically their delayed understanding: “When therefore he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this; and they believed the scripture and the word which Jesus had spoken” (2:22). When they first heard him talk of the temple of his body, however, speaking in the real temple while he was still on earth, they did not—indeed could not—understand this enigmatic saying, but they would fully understand later, once Jesus had risen, 
at which point they became indistinguishable from the members of the community
, who are reminded of what Jesus said by the Paraclete and are then continually instructed by him. In the Farewell Discourse, where the Paraclete is spoken of for the first time, Jesus is ostensibly addressing his own disciples. But the emphasis on the enduring presence of the Paraclete, who is to be with them forever, shows that the evangelist is also thinking of those to whom he is addressing his Gospel. While it cannot be proved that he has not also a wider audience in mind, the most natural inference is that he is thinking of the people he knows best and among whom he lives. Read properly, therefore, the temple episode is a good indication of the two-level reading that Bauckham rejects.
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