The Gospel of John and Christian Origins (17 page)

This great vision is the first of several in the book of Daniel that had to be interpreted for the seer as hidden prophecies of the fate of a series of different kingdoms. As he watched, the little horn that had attracted his attention earlier in the course of his rapidly evolving vision “made war with the saints and prevailed over them, until the Ancient of Days came and judgment was given for the saints of the Most High” (7:22). Certain elements in one of the subsequent prophecies make it plain that the little horn is to be identified with the villainous Antiochus Epiphanes, whose decrees prohibiting particular practices enjoined by the Jewish law triggered the Maccabean rebellion.

It is not part of my purpose here to give a detailed exegesis of these later visions. What I want to stress is that, although they are all apocalyptic in the strong sense, they could be accepted without cavil by all of Judaism. Interestingly, Daniel was not placed among the prophets in the Hebrew Bible but among the so-called Writings, after Qohelet (Ecclesiastes) and Esther.
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Nonetheless the book of Daniel was fully integrated into the Hebrew Bible, and his new revelations, mostly historical in character, were not thought at the time to present any challenge, or even to contribute any significant addition, to the Law and the Prophets. This is not the case with the second apocalyptic writing that I propose to consider now, a writing that stands well outside the Hebrew canon.

For a long time the remarkable writing that we now call
1 Enoch
was known simply as
Ethiopic Enoch
, because until the discoveries at Qumran the only extant copies were in this language, the reason for this being that it was recognized as canonical by the Ethiopian church and included in its Bible. Although quoted once in the New Testament (Jude 14-15) and quite often by the Greek and Latin fathers of the church, the book in its entirety was not known in the West until early in the nineteenth century, when a complete copy that had been brought to England in 1773 from what was then Abyssinia was translated into English. Fragments of four of the five parts into which it is now generally divided were found at Qumran. These are all in Aramaic, the language in which it was originally composed. (The Ethiopic text is a translation of a Greek translation of the Aramaic original.) So although the Qumran community represented a particularly severe form of Judaism and lived a life in strict conformity with the Torah, nevertheless it kept and treasured a book that contains revelations very different from those of the Hebrew Bible.
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Even more significant is the fact that these new revelations were conceived as surpassing those of Moses.

While not directly critical of the law, the author of these writings, who identifies himself with the antediluvian Enoch, deflects the attention of his readers from it, because he is much more concerned with his own revelations. In the so-called Animal Vision (chapters 85–90), a figurative and highly compressed version of the history of Israel up to the reign of the Seleucids, the writer is evidently fascinated by the early part of Genesis, which contains his own story, but shows relatively little interest in the patriarchs. Moreover, when he comes to the great events of the book of Exodus he omits any reference to Sinai. From these six chapters alone one might conclude that the author is distancing himself from any tendency to restrict the traditions of Judaism to the law and from attaching too much significance to the figure of Moses. In the even briefer Apocalypse of Weeks, in which the whole of the history of Israel is told in seventeen verses, the author does mention the Sinaitic covenant (“a covenant for all generations”; 93:6); but at the end of the Epistle of Enoch (chapters 92–105), which starts with the Apocalypse of Weeks (93:1-10 91:11-17), he speaks of two mysteries, first “that sinners will alter and copy the words of truth, and pervert many,” and second “that to the righteous and pious and wise
my books
will be given for the joy of righteousness and much wisdom” (104:9-12). The joy of “the righteous and pious and wise” will come not from the words of the law (though these, admittedly, are called “the words of truth”) but from Enoch’s own writings (“my books”), which, having been written ages earlier (even before the Flood), took precedence over the Torah.

Now there is considerable disagreement among scholars on the question whether there was a distinct, Enochian group in Second Temple Judaism that rejected the traditional belief in the overriding importance of the Torah.
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In the passage we have just been considering, the Torah is summed up as “the words of truth”—which shows that even though the writer regarded his own revelations as superior he continued to respect the Torah and to accept its injunctions. But the fact that some modern scholars have inferred from the evidence that there was an ongoing polemic and competition between the Enochic and Mosaic traditions shows that it is possible to read it in this way. The author of the Fourth Gospel may have been among those who saw Enoch as challenging the central position of Moses in the Jewish tradition. If so, it is easier to understand how he himself might have ranged himself against those in his own community who announced themselves to be “disciples of Moses,” and declared allegiance to Jesus instead. (This will be a central topic in the remaining chapters of this book.)

George Nickelsburg, the author of what is now the standard commentary on
1 Enoch
, has pointed out the importance for Enoch of the concept of wisdom, mentioned at key points in the book as a designation for the whole corpus. This is how Enoch addresses his son Methusaleh, in what is really the conclusion to the Book of Watchers (chapters 1–34, the first of the five parts of
1 Enoch
):

At the beginning of the
Community Rule
, in a passage that I have already quoted more than once, the Master is instructed to admit into the community (“the Covenant of Grace”) “all those who have freely devoted themselves to the observance of God’s precepts, that they may be joined to the counsel of God and may live perfectly before him
in accordance with all that has been revealed concerning their appointed times
, and that they may love all the sons of light, each according to his lot in God’s design, and hate all the sons of darkness” (1QS 1:8-10; trans. Vermes). This brutal opposition between light and darkness is equally characteristic of apocalyptic, especially of the so-called Epistle of Enoch, the last of the five books of Enoch. It is also, of course, quite explicit on the very first page of the Fourth Gospel. Yet perhaps the most distinctive image in the Gospel of the gulf separating insiders from outsiders is the opposition between above and below, which is the theme I wish to turn to now.

The fourth and last feature of apocalyptic writings to be investigated is what I have called
correspondence
. Of the four it is the most elusive and intangible, but arguably no less important than the others. One scholar who saw its importance and introduced it into his interpretation of the Fourth Gospel was J. Louis Martyn, who used it to illustrate the two levels, or, as he puts it, the two stages of understanding.  Here is what he says:

Interestingly, what Martyn singles out as “the dicta most basic to the apocalyptic thinker” are ignored altogether in John J. Collins’s widely accepted definition of the apocalyptic genre. [See above, p. 107]. But Martyn is not wrong. He recognizes that one distinctive feature of apocalyptic writing is the subsequent projection down to earth of the heavenly events watched and recounted by dreamers and seers. A good example is what Daniel says about the feet of the statue in Nebuchadnezzar’s first dream. Having interpreted the upper parts of the statue to represent three successive kingdoms, he then turns to the kingdom that interests him most: the fourth. “As you saw the feet and toes,” he tells the king, “partly of potter’s clay and partly of iron, it shall be a divided kingdom; but some of the firmness of iron shall be in it, just as you saw iron mixed with the miry clay . . .” (2:41). And so on: the particular characteristics of the fourth kingdom closely correspond to the detailed composition of the statue’s feet. After his vision of the statue, the king saw “a stone cut by no human hand,” which “smote the image on its feet of iron and clay, and broke them in pieces” (2:34). The interpretation that follows introduces a new, indestructible kingdom, founded by God himself, which “shall break in pieces all these kingdoms and bring them to an end . . . just as you saw that a stone was cut from heaven by no human hand, and that it broke in pieces the iron, the bronze, the clay, the silver, and the gold” (2:44-45). So Martyn’s suggestion that events on the heavenly stage not only correspond to events on the earthly stage but also, as it were, lead them into existence is a perfectly reasonable one. It would be borne out by a close examination of the other dreams and visions recorded in Daniel’s text.

Yet we should not fail to notice that when we apply this analogy to the Gospel the focus shifts quite radically. Martyn is clearly thinking of the relation between the dramatic conflict between Jesus and the Jews portrayed on the story level of the Gospel, and the conflict the evangelist himself had lived through between the Jesus group and the hardliners in the synagogue. What is basically the same conflict, Martyn argues, is resumed at a different time and in a different place. But of course both of these episodes take place on earth, and Martyn nowhere suggests that one of the two stages on which the Johannine drama is enacted is really situated in heaven. The correspondence evident in the apocalyptic literature between the dramatic events in heaven and their counterparts on earth is
spatial
: the temporal element is of secondary importance. In the Gospel, on the other hand, the correspondence is essentially
temporal
. (The confusion is assisted by the ambiguity of the word
stage
, which can be used either of time or of place.) Stereoptic vision (a term that, it should now be clear, must be very loosely understood) may be necessary in both cases, but in an apocalypse we are looking first up to heaven and then down to earth, whereas with the special kind of vision required to appreciate the Gospel we are directed to follow events that happened some time ago and then, with a knowledge of what transpired later, to read them in a new way. So it is now no longer a question of first looking up and then down, but of looking first backwards and then forwards (or, more accurately, of comprehending both past and present in a single vision).

As a consequence of this shift in perspective I have been forced to abandon one more important strand in my argument. Convinced that there must be something in the Gospel to justify a comparison with the correspondence motif that appears in many apocalyptic writings, I struggled to find a similarity that, I am now convinced, is not there. Seduced by the brilliance of Martyn’s reflections on the need for stereoptic vision, I failed to realize the importance of the fact that, whereas in the true apocalypse this meant the realization that the events seen to occur in heaven were mirrored by events occurring later on earth, in the Gospel, very differently, the parallel is between the events of Jesus’ life and the later experiences of the Johannine community.

Up to this point I have been retracing a program set out twenty years ago in a chapter in
Understanding the Fourth Gospel
entitled “Intimations of Apocalyptic,” which was left virtually unchanged in the second edition (2007). But anyone reading what I have written so far in this chapter might reasonably conclude that I have been forced to abandon one by one what I once thought of as four stout planks that could be used to build a platform sturdy enough to support my thesis of a fundamental affinity between the Fourth Gospel and apocalyptic. The motif of the two ages is shared with other early Christian writers, and to some extent with the Qumran community. That of the two stages can equally well be regarded as no more than a reflection of the two levels of understanding, whereby Jesus’ deeds and words came to be properly understood only after the resurrection. The clear opposition between insiders and outsiders, though also prominent in many apocalypses, arises from a conflict perceptible in any society in which the members of a breakaway group are attempting to convince themselves that they alone possess the truth. And the theme of correspondence between heaven and earth is missing altogether.

In fact I never went so far as to suggest that the Gospel is an apocalypse in any ordinary sense of the word. But must I now admit that I was wrong to conclude that “the fourth evangelist conceives his work as an apocalypse—in reverse, upside down, inside out”?
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No, not wrong, because even though I am now obliged to confess that many of the arguments I used to support my thesis were mistaken, or at best misleading, I still believe that I was right to detect in the Gospel a fundamental affinity with apocalyptic that had not previously been observed. Let us take another look at John Collins’s widely accepted definition of
apocalypse
: