The Gospel of John and Christian Origins (29 page)

I began the preceding chapter by highlighting the enormous differences between the Synoptic and the Johannine portrait of Christ, differences that have never been satisfactorily explained. Not that they have never been noticed: they were observed by F. C. Baur in 1847, in a book that greatly influenced Ernst Käsemann, who refers to it several times in his
Testament of Jesus
(1968).
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For Baur the true essence of the Johannine Christ was divine: he speaks of “the absolute divinity of the person of Jesus.”
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Käsemann, as we noted in the previous chapter, pictures Jesus more imaginatively as “God striding (
schreitend
) over the earth,” remarking that if comparisons between John and the Synoptics are drawn simply in order to demonstrate the closest possible approximation between them, “then the peculiar Johannine accents and stresses are shifted and the interpretation falls under the domination of apologetics.”
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Whatever one may think of Käsemann’s quite extreme position, he was unquestionably correct to stress the singularity of the fourth evangelist’s portrait of Christ. If the Christian church has nevertheless retained a strong memory of the human Jesus, this is due not to John, but to Matthew, Mark, and Luke.

So the puzzling question remains: why are the differences so great? If the question has not yet received a satisfactory answer, it must be partly at least because it ceased to be asked long ago. Käsemann himself paid it scant attention. He promised in the preface to his book to “unfold the complex of theological problems [above all the problem of the glorious Christ] only so far as it can serve as a key for the historical question of the historical situation out of which this Gospel grew.”
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Yet his search for the historical situation is perfunctory at best. He concludes that the evangelist’s doctrine of eternal life sprang from a conviction he shared with Paul’s opponents in Corinth that they were already participating in the resurrection world and eternal life. “It is quite disturbing,” he comments, “that the Evangelist, at the very centre of his proclamation, is dominated by a heritage of enthusiasm against which Paul had already struggled violently in his day and which in the post-apostolic age was branded as heretical.”
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Later on in the same chapter he reflects how important some of his speculations concerning subsequent interchurch struggles might turn out to be “
if
the origin of the Fourth Gospel in such circles of Hellenistic enthusiasm as are opposed both by I Cor. 15 and II Tim. 2.18 should prove to be correct.”
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 Here he sounds rather less confident about the rightness of his theory (advanced earlier with no evidence and little argument).

This of course is the problem that preoccupied Rudolf Bultmann and convinced him of the need to find a single comprehensive answer to the first great riddle of the Gospel: What is the historical origin of the extraordinary conception that pervades and dominates the Gospel, Jesus’ self-presentation of himself as the Revealer? At the beginning of chapter 7, following Wayne Meeks, I explained why the answer that Bultmann himself gave—the Mandaean hypothesis—had to be rejected, and why scholars came to concentrate instead on single strands in the complex christological web of the Fourth Gospel. And in the remainder of that chapter and in the next I pointed to what I prefer to call the three
streams
of Jewish tradition that I myself believe to be the most significant of all: prophet, wisdom, Son of Man.

Yet if we try to trace these streams as they keep surfacing throughout the Gospel, adding to the title of Prophet that of Son, which is also associated with the theme of mission,  we find ourselves obliged to admit that the evangelist himself made little or no attempt to bring them together. One of them, in fact, the incarnation of wisdom, is restricted to the Prologue, and, as I argued, was originally somebody else’s idea (although the story of wisdom is traceable in the body of the Gospel too).
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Son of Man and Son of God (or rather Son) are both prominent in chapter 3, but in adjacent paragraphs—in fact I can think of only one passage where they are inseparably linked: “For as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son also to have life in himself, and has given him authority to execute judgment because he is the Son of Man” (5:26-27).

The conclusion is forced upon us that one consequence of the various shifts of focus that I discussed at the beginning of chapter 7, however significant they may have seemed at the time, was that students of the Gospel failed to realize that the response to Bultmann must be something other than a steady concentration on
narrow
aspects (Meeks’s word) of Johannine Christology. Rather than a narrowing of focus, what is required is a broadening: rather than just a change of direction, we need a U-turn. So in this final chapter I will put forward a new and very different hypothesis, one that, I now see, I have been gradually approaching in the last two years, and which allows me at last to accept an idea that my friend Christopher Rowland has urged upon me more than once, specifically in his foreword to the second edition of
Understanding the Fourth Gospel
—by recognizing that what he calls “the basic theological presuppositions” of the Fourth Gospel “are remarkably similar” to those of the book of Revelation. Even so, having a residual reluctance to think in terms of theological presuppositions, I will propose that we should reflect instead on the
experience
of the two writers.
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In the opening section of the famous article in which he discussed the significance of some newly discovered Mandaean and Manichean sources for the comprehension of the Fourth Gospel, Bultmann briefly surveyed three alternative theories of the nature of the Fourth Gospel. This is the third:

Serenely confident of the rightness of his own view of the Gospel, Bultmann asked these questions only to dismiss them; but I now think that the answer must be yes. True, as he was quick to point out, John has “no mystical names for God, no anthropological dualism, no doctrine of the passage of souls.” But I am less sure about the final item on his list: “no devotion based on experience [
Erlebnisfrömmigkeit
].” For besides the evidence from the Farewell Discourse that Bultmann himself brought up—not mere formulae but immediate reflections by the evangelist of an experience of an intimacy both with God and with his fellow believers—it is arguable that the image of the Shepherd (“I know my own and they know me”) and the allegory of the vine (“I am the vine, you are the branches”) also reflect a sense of union between Jesus and his followers best described as mystical.
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Scholars are inclined to think that the authors they study are no less interested than they themselves in seeking out sources and influences. Many indeed simply assume that the biblical authors had immediate access to any material that was not demonstrably composed after they were dead.
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What is more, even the cautious Meeks devotes most of his fine monograph
The Prophet-King
to scrutinizing writings that were either much later than the Gospel or (as is the case of Philo and his fellow Alexandrian Ezekiel the Tragedian) probably unknown to the evangelist. Bultmann examined his Mandaean documents (centuries later) with scrupulous care, and C. H. Dodd was no less assiduous in his perusal of the (rather earlier)
Hermetica
—even though he was careful not to call them sources. Many scholars today appear to be confident that the fourth evangelist was not only familiar with earlier Christian writings, Paul and the Synoptic Gospels, but eagerly sifted through them in the hope of finding confirmation of his own views of Christ or a stimulus to fresh thinking.

Despite my reservations about these widespread assumptions, I think that it may be nonetheless instructive to take a brief look at material with which we can be reasonably sure that John was acquainted. First of all, obviously, there is the Old Testament (or most of it), which he may have known in Hebrew as well as Greek. Then we have the stories that make up the missionary document generally known as the Signs Source. Third, I suggested earlier that besides the book of Daniel the evangelist had probably read the book of
1 Enoch
also, perhaps in a version that already included the Parables. Another apocalyptic writing in which an angelic figure with a divine name (Yaoel) plays a role vis-à-vis God similar to that of Jesus is the
Apocalypse of Abraham
,
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and it is just possible that this work, now extant only in an Old Slavonic translation, was available to John. If he was a converted Essene, or even if he had ex-Essenes in his community, he may also have had access to certain Qumran documents. He must have known Mark, and he also probably knew an independent passion source. We should allow for the possibility of an indefinite number of Synoptic-type traditions. In any case there may well have been a few members of the Johannine group whose memories reached back to the time of Jesus.

Yet in the very act of compiling a list of possible sources, one becomes uneasily aware how little such a list accounts for the finished Gospel, and especially for the portrait of Christ that I have set out to explain in the present chapter. (On this at least Bultmann was right.) I am reminded of B. H. Streeter’s sardonic comment on the source criticism of the Gospels: “If the sources have undergone anything like the amount of amplification, excision, rearrangement and adaptation which the theory postulates, then the critic’s pretence that he can unravel the procedure is grotesque. As well hope to start with a string of sausages and reconstruct the pig.”
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The same strictures apply to the reverse procedure. Dodd comments, quite rightly, apropos of the Fourth Gospel, that “whatever influences may have been present have been masterfully controlled by a powerful and independent mind.”
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But this is not so much an answer to the problem as an alternative way of stating it.

A more profitable approach is to look for evidence of deliberate alterations to the material that John inherited. This is not hard to find. Two of his miracle stories (the healing of the cripple in chapter 5 and of the blind beggar in chapter 9), were probably based on the missionary document commonly known as the Signs Source. According to this, Jesus was charged by his adversaries with infringing the Sabbath legislation. In both stories this objection is retained, but the evangelist had other things in mind. More important, however, for our purposes, is his deliberate decision to eliminate from his sources any impression they might give of weakness on Jesus’ part or any sense that his adversaries, either Jews or Romans, had control over him. In the presence of the Roman governor Jesus’ behavior is literally majestic. He organizes his own passion. He is not humiliated by being spit upon and stripped, and his death on the cross is seen as an elevation. (On the three occasions when he prophesies his passion he uses the verb ὑψοῦν, “to exalt.”) When he says “I thirst,” it is to fulfill Scripture (19:28), and his only other recorded request for water (4:7) prefaces an assertion that he himself can provide the water or life. Most significantly, for Mark’s cry of desolation, amounting to an accusation that God has abandoned him, John substitutes a cry of triumph: “It is accomplished” (19:30). Earlier, in a scene reminiscent of the agony in the garden, Jesus decides against asking his Father to save him from this hour, knowing that it is for this hour that he has come (12:27).
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Obvious though it is that John has made these changes in order to portray a Jesus free from ordinary human weakness, it is far from obvious why he wished to do so. The changes themselves are a large part of the problem. Käsemann offers the explanation that John has gone the way of the Corinthian “enthusiasts,” being convinced like them that he and his fellow Christians are already enjoying the benefits of the resurrection. He thinks that the passion story was an embarrassment to the evangelist, who made things easier for himself by imprinting the features of Christ’s victory upon it.
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He is right to say that this Gospel “knows Jesus only as the Risen One and the power of the resurrection is the sign [
Merkmal
] of his presence”;
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but we shall see that his is not the only possible explanation.

So let us take a different tack, following the lead of J. Louis Martyn, who advanced Johannine scholarship by inquiring into “the actual circumstances in which John wrote his Gospel.” Martyn recognized how much greater an insight we could gain into the meaning of the Gospel if we could find in its pages evidence of the fraught relationship between the traditionalists in the synagogue and the followers of Jesus. This led him to focus on
controversy
or debate. As narrated in the Gospel, Jesus’ whole public career was dogged by controversy, but we know now, thanks largely to Martyn’s little book, that all the debates recorded in the Gospel must be interpreted in the light of the antagonism between the two opposing parties in the synagogue.
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Yet we must not stop there. Martyn goes on to ask: “How are we to picture daily life in John’s church? Have elements of its peculiar daily experiences left their stamp on the Gospel penned by one of its members?”
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Good questions, but the answer cannot be that the members of the community spent most of their waking hours fending off accusations that they were harboring un-Jewish or even anti-Jewish sentiments. Having quoted on the first page of his book Jesus’ famous assertion that “the truth shall make you free,” Martyn goes on to remark that to single this saying out from its present context in chapter 8 of the Gospel would be to “pick the flowers from among the thorns.” In performing the immense service of drawing our attention to the community’s experience of the hostility of their fellow Jews, he fails to observe that they must have had many other experiences besides. He cannot really be blamed for this, since it was not part of his purpose to give a comprehensive account of the life of the community: he is focusing on
some elements
of its peculiar daily experiences (the thorns rather than the flowers), not on all. Had he wished to do so, he could no doubt have underlined other features of the community’s experience, especially perhaps their sense of the overwhelming revelation of the truth that was Jesus, and all that this implied.