The Gospel of John and Christian Origins (19 page)

How you read the Gospel will depend largely on the importance you attach to the problem spots, or aporias, as scholars call them, from a Greek word meaning “impasse,” points at which the continuity of the Gospel, read carefully, is open to question. Most readers, of course, are blithely unaware of these problem spots and would no doubt endorse the suggestion of David Friedrich Strauss (famous for his skepticism about the historical reliability of the Synoptic Gospels), who wondered whether the Gospel itself might be said to be that seamless robe—
ungenähter Leibrock
, χιτὼν ἄραφος—of which the Gospel itself speaks (John 19:23)
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But once you study the Gospel more closely you notice that at various points there is indeed a lack of continuity, most obviously at the end of chapter 14, where Jesus concludes a long discourse by saying, “Let’s move away from here,” and then carries on talking for a further three chapters. With a little ingenuity all these aporias can be explained, or at least explained away. C. H. Dodd, who insists on reading the Gospel “as it has come down to us,” says about this one that “the movement is a movement of the spirit, an interior act of will, but a real departure nevertheless.”
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But like most of the other difficult conjunctions, the easiest and the best solution to this puzzle is the quite straightforward hypothesis that the author has introduced new material at this point—which means that the Gospel was not composed at a sitting but over a long period of time. This is not a new idea: it is well expounded in a little book by Barnabas Lindars called 
Behind the Fourth Gospel
,
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and also, less systematically, by Martin Hengel in 
The Johannine Question
: “the Gospel was not written down quickly in a few weeks or months, but grew quite slowly, over what period and in how many stages we do not know.”
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Nevertheless the majority of commentators, compelled by the nature of the commentary genre to start at the beginning and carry on to the end, pay no attention to suggestions of this kind; and many, like Dodd, express what amounts to a moral disapproval of any reading that deals honestly with the aporias. So although some of the most perceptive of Johannine scholars (Raymond Brown and Barnabas Lindars among them) have argued persuasively that the Gospel cannot be properly understood as a continuous composition, most scholars nowadays, certainly in the English-speaking world, refuse to allow what is sometimes called a 
diachronic
 (as opposed to a 
synchronic
) approach to the text, and treat the Gospel as if it was a fully coherent piece of writing, structured from the outset with care and deliberation.

In principle there is no contradiction between the synchronic and the diachronic approach. These terms are ultimately derived from a series of lectures by the famous student of linguistics Ferdinand de Saussure, first published in 1916 under the title 
Cours de linguistique générale
. De Saussure recognized that the synchronic study of a language at a particular point in time could not be combined with the (diachronic) study of its historical development, but he acknowledged the validity of both approaches and lectured on each of them separately. It is true that works of literature are more complex than languages in one important respect, because any significant addition to or rearrangement of, say, a novel or a play is bound to affect its meaning. The difficulty is most acute when we have to do with classical writings such as the Bible or the works of Homer, because long tradition has hallowed not just the books themselves but the order in which they have been read over many centuries. The obvious solution, then, is to admit both kinds of reading. Dodd argues for the synchronic reading of John’s Gospel on the grounds that “the present order is not fortuitous, but deliberately devised by somebody—even if he were only a scribe doing his best—and that the author in question (whether the author or another) had some design in mind, and was not necessarily irresponsible or unintelligent.”
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This is a rather lame and halting advocacy of the synchronic approach. Better, surely, to admit the difficulties, and try to account for them. The resulting (diachronic) view of the text, once its implications have been properly recognized, can give way later to a full, synchronic, holistic reading. In this way we have some chance of arriving at an understanding of the aims and methods of the final redactor—who may well be the author himself, not just “a scribe doing his best.” This is the best way of approaching the 
Iliad
;
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and it is how Germanists approach Goethe’s 
Faust
.
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Since my general argument rests on the hypothesis that there were at least two editions (or rather stages)
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of the Gospel, I need to offer some defense of that hypothesis here. (There may have been more than two, but I leave that question aside.) I will argue that the Gospel was not written at a sitting, or in a matter of days, or even (probably) in a matter of months. Like the community within which and for which it was composed, it changed: it had a history. Although I am confident that this thesis can be proved with tolerable certainty, I do not want claim an equal certainty for my own version of the Gospel’s many additions and alterations, which must have been made gradually over several months, possibly years. The evangelist (and I am confident that most of what we now call the Gospel of John was the work of a single individual) did not deliberately plant clues to these changes at various points in his book so as to be sure they would be picked up by clever readers years later, when he was no longer there to help them. On the other hand, he was not concerned to smooth over the difficult junctures consequent upon his alterations and insertions. These clumsy transitions, or aporias, whose very awkwardness makes them evident to an alert reader, are discernible in several places and will form the main stepping-stones of my argument. Like a number of other scholars, I perceive them as standing proud from the surface of the Gospel text; though of course to many others (such as C. K. Barrett) they seem at the very most no more than negligible bumps or blemishes. Disagreements about the relative significance of all or any of them are inevitable. The most significant aporia (if we leave aside the problem of chapter 21 and the puzzle of the end of chapter 14, both of which I have dealt with previously)
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comes between chapters 5 and 6. Since this provides important evidence that the Gospel underwent at least two editions, it requires further comment here.

If the great scholars of previous generations, chief among them Julius Wellhausen,
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Eduard Schwartz,
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and Rudolf Bultmann,
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had been told that the time would come when their successors would dismiss as of no importance or significance the problems they themselves had sweated over for so long, they would probably have responded with incredulity. Some sort of turning point, I think, is marked by the work of C. K. Barrett, who in 1978 published a second, much expanded, edition of his careful and scholarly commentary.
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Barrett, very much aware of the earlier labors of Bultmann, whom he obviously respects, mentions a half-dozen of the most obvious difficulties in a section of his introduction headed “Theories of Displacement and Redaction.” Rightly, I think, he finds Bultmann’s own displacement theory to be unsatisfactory, but instead of attempting an alternative explanation of his own, he concludes, “Neither displacement theories nor redaction theories are needed to explain the present state of the gospel, in which certain roughnesses undoubtedly remain, together with an undoubted impression of a vigorous unity of theme.”
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So what is his explanation of what he calls “roughnesses”? He has none to give. Yet he has just summarized, in a footnote, the excellent suggestion of Barnabas Lindars that the Gospel underwent two editions, a suggestion that involves an astute and, in my view, plausible solution to the problem spots or roughnesses that Barrett himself is content to leave unexplained. He must have looked at Lindars’s work with some care, but having done so he immediately looked away again. Although he discusses each of the difficulties in turn when he comes to them in the body of his commentary,
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he always finds some kind of justification for leaving the text as it has been transmitted, and he ends by opting for the conservative solution.

Worth pointing out is the difference between Barrett’s approach and that of some of his contemporaries, especially Lindars (whom I have just mentioned) and Raymond Brown. Both of these scholars, whose commentaries are among the very finest of a score or more that one could name, recognize that the best explanation of the Gospel’s aporias is that it went through at least two editions. Understandably they shy away from the daunting task of organizing their work (as Bultmann did) in a sequence corresponding to their compositional theories.
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But, unlike Barrett, they acknowledge that commentators should take account of the different stages in their interpretation of the Gospel.

In this respect Lindars and Brown, along with J. Louis Martyn (the importance of whose contribution to Johannnine studies is widely acknowledged) are poles apart from most of their successors. R. Alan Culpepper’s 
Anatomy of the Fourth Gospel
, published in 1983, which can be seen in retrospect to have been the first of a whole fleet of new “literary critical” studies of the Gospel, contains the following pronouncement: “dissection and stratification have no place in the study of the gospel and may confuse one’s view of the text.”
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As we have already noted, C. H. Dodd, in his 
Interpretation of the Fourth Gospel
, had championed a similar, equally intransigent strategy of interpretation thirty years earlier; but Culpepper is the first scholar, as far as I know, to base his opposition to what he terms “dissection and stratification” on literary critical principles. (Richard Bauckham’s appeal to “literary criticism’s sensitivity,” which we noticed in Excursus II, relies for its apparent plausibility on the work of Culpepper and the many studies of the Gospel that followed in its wake.)

Fernando F. Segovia, in a short but illuminating article in which he charts his own changing loyalties to one method after another in the study of the Gospel, distinguishes three different approaches: first, historical criticism (the method of study I myself continue to favor); second, literary criticism (the approach of Culpepper and his successors); and, third, “cultural studies,” a movement he himself had recently joined and whose acceptance by biblical scholars he ascribes to “the influx into the discipline of individuals who had never been part of it before and who were now [he is writing in 1996] making their voices heard for the first time, Western women, non-Western readers and critics, and racial/ethnic minorities in the West.”
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(This movement is one manifestation of what is more generally called postmodernism.)

Commenting on the change from historical to literary criticism, Segovia has this to say:

What puzzles me in these remarks is the way Segovia slips easily from the method of study
 
to the text itself, as if the distinction between these was of no significance. In the text itself there is no shift from textual disruption to textual smoothness or from unintelligibility to coherence: what has changed is not the text but the angle of vision. You can choose to notice what Barrett calls the roughnesses in the text, or you can choose to ignore them; but you cannot simply wish them away. One may question too whether the change of focus from the historical process of composition to the literary process of composition can be carried through as smoothly as Segovia appears to suggest. Two very different and surely irreconcilable ways of explaining the bumps and blemishes in the Gospel text may have to be settled by rational discussion; but advocates of the newer methods often seem reluctant to engage in the kind of argument required to decide who is right and who is wrong in this matter. A discontinuity in the text resulting from an awkward and badly concealed insertion cannot reasonably be explained 
at the same time
 as an example of a carefully planned and executed artistic device. Reflecting on the change in his own understanding of the Gospel, Segovia says this:

Readers who, instead of ignoring the aporias, prefer to look and see what can be learned from them about the composition of the Gospel, will find themselves frustrated by the unsubstantiated assertion that there are simpler ways of explaining them. On the previous page Segovia had accused historical criticism (or tradition history) of being “predisposed towards aporias,” instead of being “oriented towards unity and coherence, or interested in questions of strategies and ‘texts.’ ”
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But it is not so much a matter of being “predisposed” toward aporias, as of a readiness to recognize them for what they are and a reluctance to brush them under the carpet. The truth is that we all start out by looking for unity and do not give up on it without good reason.