The Gospel of John and Christian Origins (2 page)

Not everybody knows that besides the sublime frescoes of Michelangelo that adorn its ceiling the Sistine Chapel in Rome also contains frescoes painted between 1481 and 1483 by four other great Italian artists, including Domenico Ghirlandaio, to whom Michelangelo was for a time apprenticed, and Sandro Botticelli (not to mention several tapestries by Raphael). The paintings on the middle sections of the two side walls of the chapel portray a series of episodes from the Old Testament, opposite scenes from the New Testament they were thought to have prefigured. Moses, on the left (south) wall, confronts Christ, on the right. The original sequence began on the altar wall itself with the
Finding of Moses
and the
Birth of Christ
(events also associated in Matthew’s Gospel), but both of these paintings were subsequently destroyed to make way for Michelangelo’s
Last Judgment
, painted over a half-century later in the new mannerist style. (The two final paintings on the entrance wall, opposite the altar, deteriorated so badly that they had to be replaced.) The remaining dozen paintings of the sequence, six on each wall, have survived and can still be seen today, starting with two paintings of Perugino, the
Circumcision of the Son of Moses
and the
Baptism of Christ
. Next come two pictures of Botticelli, one depicting the
Temptation
(or
Trial
)
of Moses
in the desert, the other the
Temptation of Christ
, in which the three temptations of Jesus are placed in the upper register of the painting. Then comes Ghirlandaio’s
Crossing of the Red Sea
opposite his
Calling of the Apostles
. After that the
Dispensation of the Ten Commandments
, by Cosimo Roselli, showing the
handing over of the tablets of the law, is paralleled by the
Sermon on the Mount
. (Although Roselli was undoubtedly the weakest of the four, he was still an artist of considerable talent.) Another pair of pictures by Botticelli represents occasions of disarray or rebellion (
conturbatio
): one in the life of Moses, based on the story in Numbers 16 according to which the rebellious Korah ends up being swallowed up into the ground (while his sons, in accordance with Num. 26:11, are shown tucked away in the lower left corner, relieved and somewhat bemused to be still alive); and the other in the life of Christ (with the arch of Constantine in the background). In the last two surviving paintings the
Death of Moses
is shown opposite a painting of the
Last Supper
. Although four different artists were involved, the frescoes are broadly similar in conception: the scale of the figures is the same, and so are the range of colors and the style of the landscapes. Moses, a dignified and authoritative figure who appears in each of the paintings on the south wall (several times in some of them), is depicted throughout wearing a yellow robe and an olive-green cloak. There can be no doubt that the series was conceived from the outset as a unified whole.
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Sixtus’s secretary, Andreas of Trebizond, who probably masterminded the whole series, summed it up as paintings of two legal systems, a summary borne out by the Latin inscriptions above the pictures: for five of the six captions on the south wall include the words
lex scripta
—the written law—and five of the six on the north wall contain the words
evangelica lex
—the law of the gospel. The caption above Roselli’s picture of the Last Supper, for instance, reads, surprisingly,
Replicatio legis evangelicae a Christo
—Christ’s repetition of the law of the gospel. The parallel picture, whose central scene shows Moses reciting the law to the assembled multitude on the eve of his death, bears the caption,
Replicatio legis scriptae a Moise
.
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This makes the other title slightly more comprehensible; but it is still very strange.

It can hardly be doubted that had Martin Luther ever seen the paintings on the walls of this chapel (completed thirty-five years before he posted the famous ninety-five theses on the door of a church in Wittenberg in 1517) he would have been no less offended by the assumption that the gospel was a system of law matching the law of Moses than he was by the sale of indulgences that helped to pay for the paintings. Some justification for this way of looking at the moral teaching of Jesus can be found in the declaration attributed to him in Matthew’s Gospel (5:17) that he had come not to abolish the law and the prophets but to fulfill them (although the Sermon of the Mount is more concerned with ideals and principles than with prescriptive legislation). Luther, of course, was to insist on the absolute opposition between law and gospel; and although he may have exaggerated the extent of Paul’s rejection of the law, Christians of every denomination have accepted the general thrust of his arguments concerning the incompatibility of Christian teaching with the Jewish law. I cannot be alone in my astonishment when I first read the captions above the frescoes decorating the walls of the Sistine Chapel.

Toward the end of the fifteenth century, which was when the walls and ceiling of the Sistine Chapel were painted, the Church of Rome, having recovered from the forty-year schism arising from the squabble of the three popes, was beginning to regain its authority. The prominence given to Moses in these paintings, whose every action in the frescoes on the south wall is positive, and often heroic, shows that Judaism was no longer thought of as a rival to Christianity, but simply as a precursor. In one obvious sense Jesus was now seen (as he had been by Matthew) as a second Moses.

Where does the Gospel of John, I now want to ask, stand in relation to the portrayal of Moses in the Sistine Chapel? It would be a mistake to assume that the positive, generally sympathetic attitude to Moses evident in these frescoes must also have characterized the very earliest Christian movement. Running throughout the present book will be the thesis that before, during, and after the painful break between the advocates of Jesus and their more traditional rivals in the synagogue around the end of the first century
ce
, the opposition between Moses and Jesus was at the heart of the conflict between these two groups. Commentators often speak of the Jesus group in the synagogue as Christians, and although they are not altogether wrong, the easy, anachronistic use of a name that had not yet been coined (or at any rate was not yet current) can be misleading, for it appears to suggest that the new religion had already made its mark even while the struggle for independence was still going on. It is true, I think, that in ousting Moses from his central place as God’s representative in his dealings with his people, the fourth evangelist (along with those on whose behalf he spoke and wrote) was effectively establishing a new religion. But this needs to be demonstrated and should not simply be assumed. In the remainder of this chapter I will appeal to the Gospel itself for evidence that at the same time as promoting Jesus’ new revelation the evangelist was deliberately repudiating traditional Judaism.

Written as it was by someone who worshiped in a Jewish synagogue, the account in John’s Gospel of a complete and comprehensive religious revolution is truly astonishing. Its extraordinary nature is veiled from us largely because, reading the Gospel as a proclamation of the new religion, we are understandably more interested in how its author concluded his religious conversion than in how he began it. Moreover, this is one document of which it can truly be said that its end is its beginning, insofar as the choice of one religion to replace another is tersely announced on its very first page. Since the uncompromising rejection of Moses and the law in favor of the grace and truth brought by Christ is stated in the Prologue, it is hard not to read all that follows in the light of this new revelation. But from the historian’s point of view the Prologue should be seen as a conclusion rather than as a commencement. We should start our inquiry at a point where the evangelist and the group he represents are still “disciples of Moses,” worshiping in the synagogue alongside people convinced that God’s last word had already been uttered in the foundation document of the people of Israel that we call the Torah. Or, even better, we should go back to the source, namely, to a section of the Gospel that was taken over by the evangelist and adapted to form the beginning of his story—the sudden appearance of the man we call John the Baptist, whose dramatic gesture in pointing to the one of whom he said “he ranks before me” has been recorded thousands of times in Christian art.

Accordingly I propose in what follows to discuss the Moses passages in the Gospel in some sort of chronological order, starting from the missionary document generally known as the Signs Source, followed by what I believe to have been a second missionary document directed to the Samaritans. After that I will deal with some passages from the first edition of the Gospel, add a short comment about the Farewell Discourse, and conclude with two texts from the second edition,
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first a few verses from chapter 6 and, second, the Prologue.
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Some of these passages will receive a rather summary treatment here, but I shall be focusing on them more intently later in the book.

It is not easy to stick to this program, because what may plausibly be regarded as the first edition of the Gospel already belongs to a period following the dramatic breakup of the opposing parties in the synagogue. In particular it includes the three great challenges to Jesus that figure prominently in chapters 5, 8, and 10. Not surprisingly, then, the first edition already contains many indications of the radical rejection of the authority of Moses expressed most clearly in the Prologue.

Nevertheless there are two passages in the Gospel that were probably drawn from, or at least based on, missionary manifestos designed to promote faith in Jesus as the Messiah and the prophet like Moses foretold in Deut. 18:15, 18, verses of such importance that they should be quoted here:

The first of these passages (1:19—2:11), the commencement of what is commonly designated “the Signs Source,” begins with a denial on the part of John the Baptist that he was either the Messiah, or Elijah, or “the prophet” (1:20-22). John pointed instead to Jesus, who was soon discovered—by those who became his first disciples—to be both the Messiah and the one “of whom Moses in the law and also the prophets wrote” (1:45). The role of Moses in this early source was simply and solely that of a prophet who predicted the coming of another prophet like himself. So far there is no controversy and no conflict.
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The second passage is the story of the woman at the well. A well is in any case an obvious location for a dialogue about water; but this particular well was selected because it had been given to the Samaritans by none other than the patriarch Jacob: “our father Jacob,” as the woman called him, “who gave us this well, and drank from it himself, and his sons, and his cattle” (4:12). (A site at the foot of Mount Gerizim, the sacred mountain of the Samaritans, is identified to this day as Jacob’s well.) The more immediate ancestor of the Samaritans (as the father of Ephraim and Manasseh) was Jacob’s son Joseph, whom he called “a fruitful bough by a spring” in his final blessing (Gen. 49:22). So the well was ideally situated for a conciliatory conversation between a Samaritan woman and a man she explicitly designated as a Jew (4:9), belonging to the great tribe of Judah (all of whom were descended from Judah, another of Jacob’s sons), the long-standing enemy of the Samaritans.

In reading this chapter we should bear in mind the exceptional importance of the figure of Moses in Samaritan traditions. As Wayne Meeks says, Moses “dominates Samaritan religious literature to an extent scarcely equaled in any circle of Jewish tradition, with the possible exception of Philo.”
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Deuteronomy 18:18, the key text in any explanation of the discovery of Jesus in John 1:45, lies behind the expectation of the Taheb no less than it does behind the Jewish expectation of a future prophet. Commentators are agreed that the woman’s use of the Jewish term
Messiah
when speaking of her own expectation (4:25) must be interpreted as a reference to the Samaritan Taheb,
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not a Davidic Messiah but a Moses-like prophet. Moses, although not actually named in this passage, was considered to be the author of the Samaritan Torah, guaranteeing that their future expectations would be fulfilled.
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Neither of these two missionary documents would have been welcomed or accepted if it did not accord somehow with the hopes of those for whom it was composed. A successful outcome of the mission is explicitly recorded among the Samaritans (4:39-42) and, in the case of the Jews, must be inferred from the subsequent presence in the synagogue of followers of Jesus. So two documents testifying to a calmly positive attitude to Moses have been taken over and included in the Gospel.

There is a further instance in the Gospel of Moses in his role as antitype or precursor, perhaps the most intriguing of all: “And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of man be lifted up” (3:14). The reference is clear and undisputed: “And the Lord said to Moses, ‘Make a fiery serpent, and set it on a pole; and every one who is bitten, when he sees it, shall live.’ So Moses made a bronze serpent, and set it on a pole; and if a serpent bit any man, he would look at the bronze serpent and live” (Num. 21:8-9). But how did the elevation of the bronze serpent by Moses in the desert come to be associated with the elevation of Jesus on the cross? To put the question in this way may seem to imply that the association was suggested by the use of the word
elevation
; but in fact where John uses ὑψοῦν (“exalt”) the Greek version of Numbers uses the simple verb ἱστάναι (“set up”).
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Commentators have had a field day in their search for a verbal connection between the two passages, and many different ambiguous Aramaic words have been proposed as a solution of the puzzle—though as Rudolf Bultmann remarks drily with regard to one such suggestion concerning 12:34 (where the word ὑψοῦν also occurs): “this verse was composed by the evangelist, who wrote Greek.”
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It must be relevant that gazing at the bronze serpent was a guarantee of survival, since John saw the purpose of the lifting up of the Son of Man to be “that whoever believes in him may have eternal life” (3:15). Bultmann thinks that “the Evangelist was probably acquainted with the typological interpretation which the Christian tradition had given to Num. 21.8f, for it also occurs in Barn 12.5-7; Just.
Apol
. I 60;
Dial
. 91, 94, 112.”
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But Barnabas and Justin were second-century writers; and if someone had to be the first to associate the setting-up of a bronze effigy for the purpose of preserving life with the life-giving elevation of Jesus on the cross, why should it not have been the evangelist John? I began this paragraph by referring to Moses as an antetype or precursor, but this is not quite right.
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For the (literally) crucial connection is the actual act of elevation, the lifting up of the pole in one case and of the cross in the other. If we were to push the comparison further we would have to conclude that what Moses actually prefigured was the action of the Roman soldiers in hoisting up the cross, and that Jesus, bizarrely, was being compared with a snake. (And indeed Barnabas and Justin, and, later, Tertullian, do treat the serpent as a type of Christ.) The real link is to be found in the notion of life, but the evangelist is very far from associating life with Moses.