The Gospel of John and Christian Origins (27 page)

Crucial here is the observation that Jesus bases his claim of being able to transmit his knowledge of celestial realities (“we speak of what we know and bear witness to what we have seen”) on
personal experience
, an experience that came not, as is so often asserted, from some sort of heavenly preexistence but from an ascent into heaven that is denied of all others.
^[35]
We have already observed that the Prologue was not added to the Gospel until the second edition. It is therefore a grave mistake to interpret this passage in the light of the Incarnation, or rather of some supposed preexistent vision. These ideas had not yet entered into the thinking of the evangelist.

“No one has ascended into heaven except. . . .” This is not a total denial of all other revelations. After all, the commonest form of divine revelation in the Bible is that of prophecy, where a named person communicates a message that he or she has received either directly from God or through the mediation of an angel. Specifically, 3:13 denies that anyone apart from Jesus has ascended into heaven (so as to be in a position to transmit directly received knowledge). Odeberg saw that it involved “the refutation of current notion of ascent into heaven,” but failed to see that the primary target must have been Moses.

How so, it might be asked, since in the passage in Exodus that describes the reception of the tablets of the law God is said to have descended upon Mount Sinai and to have summoned Moses to meet him (Exod. 19:11, 18-20). Moses is not said to have ascended into heaven. One answer to this question (the one I gave in my Son of Man article) is that in all likelihood the evangelist had in mind a tradition according to which, after climbing Sinai, Moses proceeded to ascend as far as heaven itself. “Not even Moses,” runs a midrash on Ps. 106:2, “who went up to heaven to receive the Torah from God’s hand into his own, could fathom heaven’s depth.” This idea, which is also found several times in Philo, goes back at least as far as the
Exagoge
of Ezekiel the Tragedian, in which Moses, enthroned alongside God, receives the obeisance of the stars as they pass in review before him.
^[36]
So it cannot be later than the early first century
bce
.

If the fourth evangelist knew of this tradition (and it is just possible that he did), then we could infer from 3:13 that he was concerned not only to emphasize the exclusiveness of Jesus’ ascent into heaven but also to deny that any other Jewish seer, first Moses, but also Enoch and Elijah, had either gone up to heaven as an apocalyptic visionary or been translated there at the end of his life.
^[37]
Hidden behind this obscure saying, therefore, could be the beginnings of an attack on the whole Jewish tradition. But in the light of John’s general hostility to “the disciples of Moses,” he probably did not need any prompting to make this veiled attack upon him. Convinced that the new revelation surpassed the old, he was prepared to push it at every opportunity. Not surprisingly he always accuses “the Jews” of intransigence, and puts the blame on them for their hostility to Jesus. But how could they not have been provoked by his repeated assertions of Jesus’ superiority?

For a very long time most scholars were convinced that John derived the descent/ascent motif associated with the Son of Man from Gnosticism. Wayne Meeks, for instance, in his book
The Prophet-King
,
^[38]
expressed the view that this motif still furnished the strongest reason for thinking that the Gospel had a Gnostic background, and this view remained largely unchallenged even after it had been comprehensively demolished by Carsten Colpe in a long article for the
Theologisches Wörterbuch
.
^[39]

The “figure like a man” who is given dominion by the Ancient of Days in Daniel’s first great vision (Daniel 7) was soon to be identified by a title, “
the
Son of Man” (
son of man
being the literal meaning of the Aramaic expression). So much is clear from the eschatological discourses in the Synoptic Gospels, where the reference to “the Son of Man coming in the clouds of heaven” (Mark 13:26) establishes beyond doubt a debt to Daniel’s vision, and from the Parables of Enoch. Precisely who is referred to in the Synoptic Gospels every time Jesus uses the expression “Son of Man” is one of the most contentious and contended problems in New Testament scholarship,
^[40]
but at least in the eschatological discourses and in certain other passages, such as the account of the trial before Caiphas, there can be no doubt that a direct allusion to the Danielic Son of Man is intended. In all of these passages, however, the Son of Man is already located in heaven: there can be no question of an ascent, and still less of a descent.

The difficulty for scholars wishing to explain the descent/ascent theme in John is that it is not found anywhere else, either in Daniel 7, the original source of the Son of Man motif, or in the Parables of Enoch, or in the other three Gospels. (The absence of the motif elsewhere is what accounts for the ill-considered appeal to Gnosticism.) John is unquestionably a powerful and imaginative thinker, so it is not unreasonable to inquire whether he could have come up with the idea himself. But if so how?

I believe that the answer to this question is to be found in an episode of the Gospel that has already occupied our attention more than once: the story of the blind beggar in John 9. Asked where the fourth evangelist places the most significant of his ideas concerning Jesus, most people would probably say that they come in the great controversy scenes in the first half of the Gospel, in the farewell discourse and prayer in the second half, and perhaps too in the great series of I-am sayings. But it is noteworthy how many of these sayings, and other little revelatory gems besides, occur in fragments of dialogue, scattered throughout the book, between Jesus and one or two individual interlocutors—Nathanael (chapter 1), Nicodemus (chapter 3), the Samaritan woman (chapter 4), Martha (chapter 11), Philip and Andrew (chapter 12), Thomas and Philip (chapter 14), and Pilate (chapter 19). In a number of these passages Jesus is seen to be freshly identifying himself, which is precisely what he does at the end of chapter 9, when he goes to look for the man he healed, who has just been thrown out of the synagogue. He questioned him directly, “Do you believe in the Son of Man?” “Who is that?” he asked. “You have seen him,” said Jesus, “and he is speaking to you”; whereupon the man prostrated himself in worship (9:35-38).

In the great majority of the sayings in the other three Gospels the attribution of the title Son of Man, always in the third person, is indirect; and Jesus never actually says, “
I am
the Son of Man.” In those sayings that include a clear or probable reference to the Danielic Son of Man, the usage is proleptic, anticipatory, eschatological, looking forward to a visionary future. In the Fourth Gospel too, for the most part, the evangelist follows the Synoptic convention in using the title indirectly, most notably in the three so-called passion predictions, where in all likelihood there is a direct dependence on the Synoptic sayings. But in this particular passage in chapter 9 he breaks this unwritten rule.

It is an extraordinary passage, prompting several questions, the most obvious of which concerns its connection with the preceding story. How are we to explain Jesus’ deliberate introduction of himself as Son of Man at this point? The answer to this question is to be found in what he says next: “for judgment I have come into this world, that those who do not see may see, and that those who see may become blind” (9:39). This statement involves a dramatic reinterpretation of the original healing miracle. For the original purpose of the story was, first, to portray Jesus as a healer and, second, to show that his ability to heal proved that he was commissioned by God—that he was a prophet. But now, in the concluding paragraph of the chapter, the miracle is portrayed as an act of judgment (deliberately recalling the symbolism of sight and blindness), and judging was essentially the business of the Son of Man. This is stated quite clearly in chapter 5: “the Father . . . has given him [the Son] authority to execute judgment
because he is the Son of Man
” (5:27). So here is a claim far exceeding the authority to perform healing miracles: the claim that precisely
as Son of Man
Jesus was entitled to exercise
on earth
the kind of supreme authority that in Daniel’s vision had been bestowed on the Son of Man
in heaven
. This means (and I cannot emphasize this too much) that
the evangelist himself had concluded that the heavenly figure of the Son of Man had come down to earth in the person of Jesus
.

With this in mind, we are in a position to return to one of the most puzzling sayings in the whole Gospel: “No one has ascended into heaven, but he who descended from heaven, the Son of Man” (3:13). What ascent is Jesus referring to here, when he is still on earth? What was the purpose of this saying? Whom did the evangelist have in his sights when he wrote this sentence? One answer to this last question, as we have already noted, was given long ago by the Swedish scholar Hugo Odeberg, who argued that the saying was directed against widespread Jewish traditions concerning the ascent into heaven of Jewish patriarchs or prophets such as Abraham and Elijah.
^[41]
But it is equally likely that the target was Moses alone. We do not have to suppose that the evangelist had in mind a legend (attested only much later) according to which Moses was thought to have reascended into heaven to report to God that he had successfully carried out the mission he had been given to carry down the tablets of the law to the people of Israel. If that
was
the case, then we would have to see the saying as part of an ongoing polemic between the Jesus group in the synagogue and their conservative opponents, “the disciples of Moses.” But this remains just a supposition.

Jan-Adolf Bühner sheds some additional light. In his conversation with Nicodemus in John 3, Jesus finds it necessary to correct Nicodemus’s misunderstanding of something he had just said. He adds that he speaks of what he knows, including, apparently, heavenly things. What entitles him to speak of heavenly things? Why, his ascent into heaven (which can only mean his ascent as a visionary seer to receive revelations from God). Accordingly, basing his suggestion on a variety of evidence in Jewish sources, Bühner proposed that Jesus too was thought to have made an ascent into heaven to receive divine revelations, and then,
having undergone an angelic transformation
,
to have descended as the Son of Man—the angelic being in Daniel’s vision.
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 It is a bold suggestion, certainly, but it has the merit of providing a plausible solution to the puzzle of 3:13, at the same time suggesting an additional reason for the evangelist’s belief in the descent of the Son of Man. Even more importantly, it enables us to understand how the evangelist thought of Jesus’ career before he had read and digested what another member of his community had written concerning the preexistent Logos, before, that is, he had come to know, to value, and to adapt for his own use what we now call the Prologue to the Gospel.

In the second edition of the Gospel (which is where, as we have seen, chapter 6 belongs) he took the opportunity of correcting one assertion that occurs late in the hymn: “no one has ever seen God” (1:18): “Not that anyone has seen the Father”—no, wrong, there is one exception: “he who is from God: he has seen the Father” (6:46). Perhaps the evangelist was correcting a line that he had written himself (see p. 168n29 above), but when the Jesus whose story he was telling spoke of his own vision of God (as he did in 5:19, and again in 6:46), the evangelist was surely not making him refer to a vision that he was supposed to have had in a preexistent state before the Logos had taken flesh! That, of course, is what most exegetes assume, though without, I suspect, giving the matter much thought.

In the eschatological discourse in Matthew and Mark, where Jesus foretells that the Son of Man will be seen coming in clouds with great power and glory (Mark 13:26), he seems to imply that at the end of time he will assume the authority bestowed on the Son of Man in Daniel’s vision. But here John is making a much stronger claim: that Jesus already had this authority while on earth. The Son of Man is an angelic figure—so Jesus, in the eyes of the fourth evangelist, is an angel!

This is unquestionably a startling, even a shocking conclusion. John may well have read the book of Daniel attentively long before he was converted to the Jesus movement. There is already something shocking about seeing an angelic being enthroned beside God, even as a figure in a visionary dream; and we know that this figure came to seem worrisome and problematic in some rabbinical circles some time later.
^[43]
But John’s direct identification of Jesus as the Son of Man, however bold, was nevertheless limited. J. Louis Martyn says, quite unjustifiably, that there is in the Gospel “an emphasis on confessing Jesus as Son of Man.”
^[44]
Not so! There is nothing in the Gospel to warrant this assertion. The snatch of dialogue between Jesus and the man to whom he has just restored his sight is private, overheard by nobody except the one who tells the story. We are not told that the man born blind went back to the synagogue authorities to confront them with his new-found faith. Nor does Jesus’ self-identification with the Son of Man ever figure among the accusations of blasphemy leveled against him by the Jews. There is no parallel in John’s Gospel to the response given by Jesus in his trial before Caiaphas to the question, “Are you the Messiah, the son of the Blessed?” In Mark’s version of this episode Jesus’ reply is unambiguous: “I am, and you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of Power, and coming with the clouds of heaven” (13:62). It is not the claim to be the Messiah, but the claim to sit at the right hand of Power, as the Son of Man, that provokes the charge of blasphemy. But there is no hint of this in John’s account of Jesus’ interrogation by Annas (19:19-24). Neither here nor anywhere else in the Gospel does Jesus’ claim to be the Son of Man figure among the many confrontations between him and the Jews. Yet it is unquestionably there and must be included in any estimate of the evangelist’s picture of Jesus.