The Gospel of John and Christian Origins (21 page)

In the preceding six chapters I have been setting the scene for the remaining three. I now want to focus directly on the three strong streams of Jewish tradition that flowed into the Christology of the Fourth Gospel. One of these will be dealt with in this chapter (the mission of the prophet) and two in the next (the Incarnation of Wisdom and the Son of Man). Finally, in the concluding chapter, I will tackle the problem that prompted me to write this book—the problem of John’s switch of allegiance from Judaism to Christianity. But first I need to place my book in the larger context of the questions that have been addressed to the Gospel since Adolf Harnack, in 1886, declared the origin of the Johannine writings to be “the most marvelous enigma [or riddle] that the history of early Christianity presents.”
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Rudolf Bultmann, taking up this riddle in his first major statement on the Gospel, gave it an extra twist by placing the Gospel in an exclusively Christian context. For him the riddle was “where John’s Gospel stands in relation to the development of early Christianity”
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(actually a misleading way of putting the question, because he was already confident that the Gospel did not belong to any of the three main branches of Christian doctrinal development).  First proposed in 1925 and carried through with enormous consistency in his commentary of 1941, the solution he offered (a revelation discourse source) effectively isolated the Gospel from all other (particularly Jewish) sources, except insofar as these had already impacted upon the Gnostic texts he uses.

Four years after the appearance of Bultmann’s commentary came the end of the Second World War, and two years after that the discovery of the first Dead Sea Scrolls, after which, largely due to the pioneering efforts of, among others, Raymond E. Brown, it became impossible to ignore the Jewish origins of the Fourth Gospel. Benefiting from the work of Brown, whose commentary was complete by 1968, I myself added a different twist to Bultmann’s formulation of the problem. In a book published in 1991, exactly fifty years after the appearance of his commentary, I proposed that for Bultmann’s “Christian” we should substitute “Jewish,” asking instead “what is the position of the Gospel in
Jewish thought
.”
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Meanwhile, however, another significant shift of direction had taken place. After the collapse of Bultmann’s Mandaean hypothesis, no one had been bold enough to suggest an equally comprehensive alternative. The reasons for this universal hesitation are laid out clearly and concisely in the introduction to Wayne Meeks’s
Prophet-King
.
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Bultmann had assumed that the key features of John’s Christology (or rather of the Gnostic myth that lies behind it) requires a single large explanation, that of the Gnostic redeemer myth. In a monograph of 1961 proving that this assumption rests on false premises, Carsten Colpe demolished the whole huge hypothesis.
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Colpe’s demolition job, Meeks pointed out in relation to his own work,

Meeks was issuing here what amounted to a scholarly manifesto, calling for a radically new approach to the Gospel; and in fact in the remaining years of the twentieth century many fine monographs were published along the lines Meeks recommended.

Yet we should observe that, however many such studies were published and whatever their quality, they could never altogether compensate for the loss of a comprehensive explanation. Only a single source as wide-ranging as the one Bultmann thought he had found could prove an adequate substitute. Unless, that is, the evangelist himself could plausibly be shown to have deliberately set out to weave together the various strands that might be examined separately in a series of scholarly monographs so as to form a coherent christological pattern consistent enough to persuade at least some of his readers that his Gospel was indeed an indivisible unity. Does it follow, then, that anyone who finds such a suggestion in the highest degree improbable must abandon any attempt to find an answer to Harnack’s great riddle?

Perhaps not. We should first take another look at Bultmann’s solution. Detecting a striking resemblance between the strange documents he had been perusing and the elaborate Christology of John’s Gospel, he was overwhelmed by the conviction that, rightly read, these could account for the combination of seemingly disparate elements in John’s picture of Christ that were otherwise, he thought, impossible to explain. In a certain sense, then, he may be said to have formulated his question to fit the answer he had already discovered.

This means that if we discard Bultmann’s
solution
—as we must—we are not necessarily obliged to accept his
question
, at least not in the way he thought it had to be put. We still have to account for the whole picture (as I will attempt to do in the final chapter), but we should also be prepared to recognize the possibility that the various elements of John’s Christology may have reached him at different times and come to him from different sources. Since this is what I think myself, I propose to tackle one by one what I believe to be the three main streams (streams rather than strands) of Jewish tradition that were the source, or sources, of John’s picture of Christ. The first of these, the Mosaic prophet, was already present hidden deep in the origins of Johannine Christianity. The second, wisdom, reached him indirectly, having first been developed, as I shall show, by someone else, probably a member of his community, before he took it over to form the Prologue to his Gospel. The third source, the Danielic Son of Man, must be considered independently of the other two.

On the assumption that John was eager to work out a comprehensive and coherent theory about Christ, the themes I am about to discuss—the mission of the prophet, the story of wisdom, and the descent of the Son of Man—are often treated under the heading of Christology. It is rather the case that ideas classed by later commentators as theological came to the evangelist (who was not a theologian) mostly in either pastoral or polemical contexts.

This is not quite true, however, of the first of these three traditions. Jesus himself was conscious from the outset of his career that he was sent by God and spoke on God’s behalf. And there can be no doubt that this is how he was perceived by his earliest disciples. The Jesus group in the synagogue took this for granted. Subsequently, however, their conviction that Jesus was a not only
a
prophet but
the
prophet led to the separation of the two parties in the synagogue—seen by the evangelist as an expulsion or excommunication.

The first clear indication of the big disagreement comes at the moment of irreversible breakdown. The point at issue, the acid test, the shibboleth, we are told, was the affirmation on the part of the Jesus group that Jesus was the Messiah (9:22). Here, however, two problems arise that J. Louis Martyn, in his otherwise very perceptive discussion of this passage, fails to recognize. In the first place, right from the beginning it was their belief that in Jesus they had found the Messiah that distinguished the newcomers from the other members of the synagogue. So their confession of faith in Jesus as Messiah cannot have come as a surprise. In the second place, there was nothing blasphemous in proclaiming the advent of a Messiah (for the Messiah was never thought to have been anything other than an exceptional human being—and we know that many putative Messiahs were to arise in the long history of Judaism).
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Because of Nathan’s famous prophecy to King David (2 Samuel 7) the Messiah was called “the son of God.” David himself was given this title, and it was passed on to his descendants. We know from Qumran that in some circles a priestly Messiah was expected too: “. . . until the prophet comes, and the Messiahs of
Aaron
and Israel” (1QS 9:11), but whenever mention is made of the Messiah in the New Testament, certainly in the Gospel of John, it is the Davidic Messiah that is meant: “Has not the scripture said that the Messiah is descended from David, and comes from Bethlehem, the village of David?” (7:42).

Jesus was recognized as the Messiah quite early on in the Christian movement. So much is clear from the Synoptic Gospels. And (as I indicated both in chapter 1 and in Excursus III) I myself favor the view that an early missionary document written to proclaim Jesus’ messiahship was adopted and built upon in the Gospel of John.
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Certain members of the synagogue mentioned in John 9 had accepted Jesus as Messiah long before there had been any open conflict within the synagogue and before such tension as there was had built up to breaking point. When “the disciples of Moses” eventually took the decision to expel any of the members of the synagogue who confessed Jesus as Messiah, they did so either because the title itself had gathered a new and greater significance or, more probably, for other quite different reasons, not made explicit in the text of the Gospel. One of the major aims of Martyn’s little book was to highlight the immense significance of the existence of a cohort of practicing Jews, now self-proclaimed followers of Jesus, who had reached the conviction that he offered a new revelation, one that challenged Moses’ position at the center of the Jewish faith. How did this come about? How did the supporters of Jesus come to see him as much more than the Davidic Messiah that he had been believed to be soon after his death and possibly, as some think, even during his lifetime?

Martyn raises this question in one of his programmatic essays,
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suggesting that some Jews will have responded to the claim that Jesus was the Messiah by submitting it to close midrashic examination, and noting too that the evangelist found it necessary to deny claims made for Moses, such as the claim that he had ascended into heaven on Sinai to receive heavenly secrets. But his earlier book did not touch on this question; and Raymond Brown, aware of a major gap in the argument, attempted to bridge it by stressing the fresh impetus given to the Christian Jews by the accession to their ranks of a largish number of converts from Samaritanism. The special interests of this group will, he thinks, have precipitated a new wave of theological reflection eventually resulting in the high Johannine Christology we know so well. Moreover, according to Brown, “the acceptance of the second group by the majority of the first group is probably what brought upon the whole Johannine community the suspicion and hostility of the synagogue leaders. After the conversion of the Samaritans in chap. 4, the Gospel concentrates on the rejection of Jesus by ‘the Jews.’” Brown goes on to point out that “immediately after chapter 4 we get the picture of a very high christology and sharp conflict with ‘the Jews’ who charge that Jesus is being deified (5:16–18).”
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Against this I argued that it would be straining credulity too far to suppose that the sequence of events recorded in the Gospel directly reflects the catalytic effect Brown attributes to the accession of a number of Samaritan converts to the original group. Nonetheless, we will have to consider very carefully the suggestion that in the synagogue to which the Johannine group belonged speculation about the figure of Moses was rife (though we should not assume that this was confined to the Samaritan converts).

My own first answer to the problem came in the chapter of my book entitled “Son of God.” Postponing (as I do now) consideration of the traditions of preexistent Wisdom and the Son of Man, I confined myself in this chapter to the prophecies concerning the two titles of Messiah and Prophet that are signaled early on in the Gospel at the point where John the Baptist explicitly disavows them both (1:20-21). As we have seen, this disavowal was followed two days later by the delight first of Andrew, who reports to his brother Simon Peter that “we have found the Messiah” (1:41), and, second, of Philip, who tells Nathanael that “we have found him of whom Moses in the law and also the prophets wrote” (1:45).

Some might want to suggest that questions regarding Jesus’ claims to be the Messiah and the Mosaic prophet could have arisen during his lifetime. Well, no! However much Jesus’ own words and actions may have prompted others to see in him much more than a man of God with a mission to heal and to preach the kingdom of God, he did not claim the title of Messiah himself, except just possibly at his trial before the high priest immediately before this death, when it was too late to question him. The various episodes that fill John 7, although easily read on the first level of understanding as part of the
story
of Jesus, reflect controversies that took place much later.

Now the concept of Jesus’ messiahship was not one that fully engaged the evangelist’s own interest. It is true that the word
Messiah
, translated into Greek, gives us
Christos,
the name by which Jesus eventually came to be known by believers and unbelievers alike, the name that now identifies the Christian religion. But at the time the title of Prophet was more important. Two distinct (and incompatible) challenges to the messianic claims of Jesus focus on the tradition of his Galilean origins: the first asserting that “we know where this man comes from; and when the Messiah comes no one will know where he is from” (7:27), and the second asking, “Is the Messiah is to come from Galilee? Has not the scripture said that the Messiah is descended from David, and comes from Bethlehem?” (7:41-42). Neither of these challenges takes us very far; but in reply to the first of them Jesus seizes the opportunity to affirm and emphasize his prophetic status: “You know me, and you know where I am from.
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But I have not come of my own accord; he who sent me really did,
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and you do not know him. I know him, for I come from him, and he sent me” (7:28-29).