The Gospel of John and Christian Origins (13 page)

In his next paragraph Bauckham discusses the riddling sayings that so confuse Nicodemus (John 3) and the Samaritan woman (John 4) as if these were no different from the “temple of his body” image in John 2. But Nicodemus, who never arrives at a full understanding, and the Samaritan woman, never seen again after her appearance at the well, are not disciples in the full sense, and they play different roles in the scheme of the Gospel. The “lifted up sayings” used to prophesy the passion are different again, as might be inferred from the varied contexts in which they occur.

On the last page of his article, under the heading, “Universal References,” Bauckham points to the evangelist’s use of the word 
world
 as evidence of a strong universal perspective “quite irreconcilable with the outlook of a community that deliberately set itself apart from the worldwide [
sic
] Christian movement.”
^[25]
But I doubt if Martyn ever envisaged the Johannine community as deliberately distancing itself from other Christian groups
^[26]
—I myself have never done so. The purpose of the insider language cultivated by the community was to strengthen their conviction of their privileged status in having been given a special revelation (
the truth
) that others did not share and that justified their secession from the larger Jewish community. So it has to be read not, as Bauckham supposes, with reference to other Christians but in the context of their recent controversy with more traditional Jewish believers.

There is evidence that at some point the community began to think of “other sheep that are not of this fold” (10:16), an expression that, I think, affords a glimpse of the larger Christian community, the church outside, to which the Johannine group had not yet become affiliated, but which they would now like to see enter into “the one true fold.”
^[27]
Martyn makes a strong case for thinking that the people that the Johannine community now wants to gather into its own fold are not Gentiles but other Jewish Christians.
^[28]

Lastly Bauckham turns to John 21, where, as all agree, the flock that Jesus commissions Peter to tend is the larger church outside. For those scholars (the great majority) who see this chapter as a later addition to the Gospel the chapter is perfectly reconcilable with the thesis that up to that point the Johannine community had been more narrowly confined. This extra chapter suggests that it eventually came to look further afield, to a different Christian community, which, though equally committed to Jesus, owed immediate allegiance not to John but to Peter—hoping that both groups might acknowledge the desirability of mutual recognition and respect. Bauckham ends his article by admitting that “the alternate view, that chapter 21 is an epilogue and an integral feature of the design of the Fourth Gospel, cannot be argued here.”
^[29]

All in all, Bauckham’s conviction that he has turned the tables on those who argue that a relatively isolated Johannine community was the intended audience of the Fourth Gospel is not warranted by the evidence he offers. On the contrary, as I hope to have shown, the theory stands up well to close examination; and I shall not hesitate to rely upon it in the remainder of this book.

The Gospels, as I argued in Excursus I, are not simply Lives of Christ. A Gospel (and by that I mean one of the four Gospels recognized by the Christian church) is a proclamation in narrative form of faith in Jesus as Messiah and Son of God. Ostensibly historical documents, entirely concerned with events that had occurred in the past, they are actually addressed to the evangelists’ own communities and speak to their hopes and fears. Such, at least, is the hypothesis that underlies what is known as redaction criticism, a method of Gospel research characterized by its interest in the particular concerns (sometimes referred to as the
theology
) of the four evangelists.
^[1]
It was widely practiced round about the 1950s and 60s. One might have expected that the redaction critics would show an equal interest in the situation of the communities to which the Gospels were addressed, but this has not always been the case. The exegetical inquiry into the meaning of the Gospels (except occasionally in the case of Matthew) is seldom accompanied by historical research into the circumstances in which they were composed.

Such research is never straightforward, largely because the history of Palestine in the last few decades of the first century
ce
(after the end of the Jewish war) is so poorly documented. Josephus, by far our most important source for the long history of the Second Temple, says virtually nothing about the period that followed; and the many valuable nuggets of early rabbinic sayings are difficult to extract from the complex writings, published long afterward, in which they are embedded. In any case, most students of the Gospels are, quite understandably, more interested in what they say about Jesus than in what they tell us about the time of their composition. Such historical questions as they do put—questions about the historical Jesus—are mostly directed to the stories themselves. Inquiry into the immediate circumstances of the evangelists and their communities, however fundamental this must seem to anyone preoccupied with the puzzle of the rise of Christianity, is less common. Historical research into the Gospel of John in particular has been patchy and episodic. That, however, is our present concern.

The earliest (dating from 1820) and one of the most interesting reflections on the immediate purpose of the Fourth Gospel came from the pen of a German scholar, Karl Gottlieb Bretschneider, who compared it with the writings of the second-century apologist Justin Martyr:

The aspect of Bretschneider’s work that caused most offense was his denial of apostolic authorship.
^[3]
Written in Latin, and therefore inaccessible to the general public, it aroused such a storm of controversy among his fellow scholars (the
eruditi
whom he was addressing) that he felt compelled, some four years later, to publish a retraction in which he declared that he had written his book in the first place in order to provoke the response it received.
^[4]

Bretschneider did not get it all right. His dating (late second century) is too late, and he overstresses the polemical aspect of the Gospel. But his observation that the evangelist uses the term Jews (οἱ ’Ιουδαῖοι) of Jesus’ adversaries, is spot on and raises difficulties that we noticed in chapter 3. Some time later (1861) another scholar, Moriz von Aberle, wrote a long and rambling article on the purpose of the Gospel, in which he brought into the argument for the first time the famous
Birkat ha-Minim
(on which more later), a rabbinic text that was to figure prominently in subsequent debate. Aberle, like Bretschneider, realized that there could be no answer to the question of the purpose of the Gospel without some explanation of the opposition of “the Jews.” But again like Bretschneider, he made no detailed examination of the Gospel text (apart from several pages on the Logos). He concluded his article with these words: “John’s Gospel is the letter of repudiation [
Absagebrief
] addressed to restored [that is,  post-70
ce
] Judaism, which was already beginning to direct against the young Church all the weapons with which it was later to attempt to arrest her victorious march through the centuries.”
^[5]

For the next significant contribution to the debate we are indebted to the much better known William Wrede (whom we have already met). While recognizing that the Gospel was actually addressed to the Christian community, Wrede insisted that “to achieve an historical understanding of the Gospel
we must see it as a writing born out of and written for conflict
[
aus dem Kampfe . . . und
für
den Kampf
].
And further that “what really allows us to discern the true lever of the Gospel is an acknowledgement of its polemical thrust. In a word, from being a timeless meditation, the Gospel becomes a writing that belongs to a particular period, has a particular situation in view, and is written for a particular purpose.”
^[6]
Like Bretschneider and Aberle before him, Wrede highlighted a historical problem that most others ignored, but he too failed to expatiate further on the particular situation of the evangelist and his community.

There followed a period of more than sixty years during which Johannine scholars (with one important exception, which we shall consider in a moment) paid scarcely any attention at all to the kind of questions Wrede had asked. Why so? The answer to this question is not altogether clear. In the early period, at least part of the reason must have been the surprisingly long-lasting obsession with the problem of the authorship of the Gospel. For the later period, the dominance of Rudolf Bultmann meant, I suspect, that other scholars too concentrated mostly on the questions that he had raised. His dominance lasted for some forty years. In 1925, two major articles appeared, laying out the broad lines of Bultmann’s theories concerning the origins of the Gospel and its basic ideas. His magisterial commentary was published in 1941, and his survey article for the third edition of
Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart
in 1959. Meanwhile, the leading British scholars at this time, C. H. Dodd and C. K. Barrett, took no more interest than Bultmann in properly historical questions, Barrett because he thought of the Gospel as a possession for all time, and Dodd because of his conviction that the Gospel should be interpreted in the light of the higher religions of Hellenism.
^[7]
One of the first scholars since Wrede to take an interest in the historical situation out of which the Gospel rose was Raymond E. Brown. In the first volume of his great commentary, which appeared in 1966, he anticipated Martyn by suggesting that the Gospel was written as a response to the expulsion of Christians from the synagogue that was brought about by the publication of the Twelfth Benediction of the
Shemoneh Esre
.
^[8]
According to Dwight Moody Smith, Brown’s work appeared too late to influence Martyn, whose book appeared two years later,
^[9]
but the two men were soon to become friends and colleagues who continued to share an interest in the history of the Johannine community.

In fact, Martyn’s most important discovery had been anticipated more than quarter of a century earlier in a most unexpected quarter. For, surprising as it may seem, it is first of all to Rudolf Bultmann that we owe the most penetrating insight ever made into the immediate circumstances of the Gospel’s composition. Generally speaking, Bultmann was convinced that the main concern of the fourth evangelist was to offer answers to the deep existential questions confronting all mankind, and he usually paid little attention to more mundane difficulties concerning the particular conflict between the Johannine community and “the Jews.” In one striking passage in his great commentary, however, he uncharacteristically remarks on the immediate situation reflected in the two miracle stories in chapters 5 and 9.

And then, sliding smoothly and uninterruptedly from historical conjecture into theological reflection, he continues:

Tucked away as it is on a single page of this big book, it is perhaps not surprising that Bultmann’s acute historical observation escaped the attention of most of his contemporaries, and even, rather later, that of J. Louis Martyn, who reached the same conclusion independently and made it the keystone of his pioneering work,
History and Theology in the Fourth Gospel
(1968).
^[11]
One scholar, however, who did come to realize the importance of Bultmann’s historical aside was C. K. Barrett. It receives no mention in the first edition of his commentary (1955),
^[12]
but in the second edition (1978) he remarks that Bultmann had “cautiously anticipated” almost the whole of Martyn’s theory.
^[13]
The theology alluded to in Martyn’s title, however, has nothing to do with the universal significance attributed by Bultmann to the opposition between the early Christians and their Jewish adversaries. Martyn focuses instead on the history of this conflict, and his book really does strike a new note. His friend and fellow Johannine scholar, Dwight Moody Smith, while acknowledging that “in setting John against a Jewish, rather than a Christian, background, Martyn had predecessors,” continues, “but he rightly gets credit for a sea-change in Johannine studies for somewhat the same reason that the Wright brothers got credit for the airplane. Others may have gotten off the ground, but Martyn—like the Wright brothers—achieved sustained flight.”
^[14]

Because Martyn’s thesis has a direct bearing on my whole argument I need to explain what is new in it. Like Bultmann, Martyn recognized the relationship between the evangelist’s handling of the two healing miracles in chapters 5 and 9; but I will concentrate on his treatment of the story of the cure of the blind beggar in John 9, a story that focuses on the man’s excommunication from the synagogue to which he belonged, and the reason for it. The purpose of the story within the Gospel, like the cure of the lame man in chapter 5, is chiefly, on the face of it, to underline Jesus’ achievement as a miracle-worker. But it is oddly different from the traditional accounts of miracles familiar to us from the other Gospels. At its heart is a report concerning the refusal of the blind man’s parents to confront those who are questioning them concerning the cure of their son: it was “because they feared the Jews, for the Jews had already agreed that if anyone should confess him [Jesus] to be the Messiah, he was to be put out of the synagogue” (9:22). Provided that we are willing to look beyond the occasion of the story in the career of Jesus so as to see here some reference to the situation of the evangelist (as even Bultmann was prepared to do), it takes only a moment’s reflection to recognize the significance of such an agreement on the part of the synagogue authorities. Effectively it means that anyone who refuses to disown Jesus is to be barred from the synagogue forever. Martyn puts it like this: “what had been an inner-synagogue
group of Christian Jews
now became—against its will—a separated
community of Jewish Christians
.”
^[15]

I must emphasize here that this conclusion on Martyn’s part takes us a long way outside the setting of the Gospel story itself: having just left the temple precincts (8:59), Jesus notices a blind beggar by the wayside, and his disciples ask him whether the man’s affliction is a consequence of his own sin or that of his parents. Once healed, he is told to go and wash in the pool of Siloam. The story concerns an event that took place in the Jerusalem of Jesus’ own day, when the temple was still standing. But Martyn is interested in a much later period, the period of the composition of the Gospel, when the temple had been destroyed, and Jews and Christians had already parted and were in continuing conflict. The questions he addresses to the text are those of a historian, and it is instructive to compare his approach with that of Xavier Léon-Dufour, which I discussed in chapter 2. Léon-Dufour also distinguishes two levels (
temps
) of understanding; but whereas for him the second level is that of
the Christian readers of the Gospel
, at any time and in any place, for Martyn the second level is that of
the evangelist himself and his own community
. Martyn states in the introduction to his book that his first task “is to say something as specific as possible about the actual circumstances in which John wrote his Gospel,” and he goes on to ask, “May one sense even in its exalted cadences the voice of a Christian theologian who writes
in response to contemporary events and issues
which concern, or should concern, all members of the Christian community in which he lives?” He follows up this question with the bold suggestion that in seeking to answer it we must “make every effort to take up temporary residence in the Johannine community. . . . We must sense at least some of the crises which helped to shape the lives of some of its members.”
^[16]
 Although, as I have already remarked, he is pursuing the line taken by Bretschneider and Wrede very much earlier, Martyn is advancing beyond them in, to use his own word, specificity. This really is a new question.