The Gospel of John and Christian Origins (3 page)

We now turn to the conclusion of chapter 5, the chapter in which for the first time in the Gospel Jesus is accused by the Jews of claiming equality with God. From this it may be inferred that this chapter must have been composed after the breakup with the synagogue, and so may be expected to exhibit some hostility to the principles of its leaders.

We might conclude from a cursory reading of the first part of this passage (5:31-40), where the key word is
witness
(μαρτυρία), that Jesus is appealing here to a variety of witnesses. He starts by discounting his own witness,
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but then, in rapid succession, he speaks of God (the one who sent him), of John the Baptist, of his own works, of Moses, and finally the Scriptures. A more attentive reading, however, reveals that John’s testimony is rapidly set aside (v. 34: “I do not receive testimony from man”), and that the three witnesses that Jesus does allow, his works (v. 36), the Father (v. 37), and the Scriptures (v. 39), can be reduced to the single witness of the Father, inasmuch as Jesus’ works are performed only in obedience to the one who sent him, and the authority of the Scriptures comes from the God who inspired them.

At this point Jesus speaks to the Jews of the Scriptures as a whole: “You search the scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness to me; yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life” (5:39-40). That Jews looked to find life in the Scriptures is almost a truism.
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Yet Jesus does not enter into an argument here. Instead, almost as an afterthought, he closes his discourse in this chapter by talking of Moses—not, though, to attack him, for at this point he is relying on the authority of Moses to provide him with an argument his adversaries would be forced to accept. So the evangelist takes the opportunity of bringing Moses into the discussion in a sort of
argumentum ad hominem
that conceals a real opposition he is not yet prepared to disclose.

Yet there is no prevarication in his acknowledgment of the
witness
of the Scriptures, in particular of the Torah. Along with all the other writers of the New Testament, the fourth evangelist was fully conscious that the Christian message was not properly intelligible without support from Jewish tradition. So neither here nor at any other point in the long discourse in chapter 5, built out of the controversy surrounding the healing of the cripple, does he target Moses directly. Like all Jews at the time, John had no doubt that Moses was the author of the book of the law. Here, at the end of the chapter, he hits upon the idea of appropriating Moses’ work, or rather of extracting from it the testimony he needed. He knew that he had somehow to separate the man and the book, but to do so openly would have weakened his own position. Hence the remarkable conclusion of this chapter, in which Jesus attempts to drive a wedge between
Moses
and
the Jews
: “it is Moses who accuses you, on whom you set your hope. If you believed Moses you would believe me, for he wrote of me. But if you do not believe his writings, how will you believe my words” (5:45-47). It is an astonishing accusation: the Jews, asserts Jesus, did not truly believe what Moses had written, even though they pretended to put their trust in him. The book of the law on which they relied actually supported his own claim: “Moses wrote of me” (5:46).

We may recall that this was precisely what Philip said to Nathanael after Jesus had summoned him to follow him just after his baptism: “We have found him of whom Moses in the law and also the prophets wrote, Jesus of Nazareth” (1:45). But that was in a context where there was not yet so much as a whisper of controversy. The situation is now one in which Jesus is directly confronting people who have accused him of making himself equal with God. And he introduces the name of Moses simply to score a point. As I have observed, it is an
argumentum ad hominem
.

The Jews might have been expected to respond to the claim that Moses had really written of Jesus by asking, “Where? Can you point to a single passage where he wrote of you?” And they would certainly not have been satisfied with a simple citation of Deut. 18:18. (As we shall see in relation to chapter 9, this was another contentious issue.) One would like to have been able to listen in to a debate between representatives of the two groups on this point, in the manner of Justin’s
Dialogue against Tryphon
. But here, as elsewhere in the Gospel, the Jews speak the words dictated to them by the evangelist, and the chapter ends with a rhetorical question to which Jesus expects no reply: “If you do not believe his writings, how will you believe my words?”

From a structural point of view John 7 is among the most complex in the Gospel.
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The main reason for its complexity is that, although it includes what was originally the direct continuation of chapter 5 (for 7:15 follows on from 5:47),
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the subsequent insertion of chapter 6 compelled the evangelist to make certain alterations.

In the first place, the opening of chapter 7, the story of Jesus’ reluctant decision to go up to the feast (once the commencement of a miracle story) has been adapted and extended to serve as a preface to the controversy material beginning in 7:11. This material, however, is quickly interrupted, as we have just seen, by the Jews’ puzzlement at Jesus’ learning (7:15), expressed in a question that originally furthered the argument that now concludes chapter 5. This question enables both the reintroduction of the motif of personal glory (7:18; see 5:44) and the reversal back to the main theme of chapter 5, Jesus’ claim to be speaking with the authority of God (7:16-17; see 5:19, 30). Then comes Jesus’ sudden question, “Did not Moses give you the law?” (7:19), which takes a different tack by once again introducing the name of Moses in an
argumentum ad hominem
adding to that of the conclusion of chapter 5, which it continues.

In the second place, the other question (in the same verse) that looks so abrupt and out of place in its present context—“Why do you seek to kill me?” (7:19c)—is readily intelligible if we see it as a reference back to the long opening paragraph of chapter 5 that climaxes in the first attempt upon Jesus’ life (5:18). The reference is confirmed by Jesus’ response: “I did one work [ἓν ἔργον], and you all marvel at it” (7:21). Jesus’ one work, the healing of the cripple that caused all the trouble in the first place, is thus contrasted, in a typical rabbinic
qal waḥomer
argument, with the behavior of the Jews in continually infringing on the Sabbath by practicing circumcision on that day.

Bultmann’s concluding comment on this argument is masterly:

We should not infer from this passage that the evangelist himself continues to respect the actual legislation found in the Torah;
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for Jesus clearly dissociates himself from Jewish practice—“Moses gave
you
circumcision,” and “
you
circumcise”—just as elsewhere he refers to “
your
law” (8:17; 10:34; cf. 15:25). Similarly, when Pilate invited the Jews to assume responsibility for Jesus’ fate, what he said was, “Take him yourselves and judge him by
your
law” (18:31). All that was left by way of a law for John and his community was the “new commandment” of mutual love enjoined upon them on the eve of Jesus’ departure (13:34-35). Here in chapter 7, Jesus is simply using arguments that his opponents will find difficult to refute: Lindars comments on the clever use of the issue of circumcision, which “provides a double-edged argument: on the one hand, it gives a precedent for Jesus’ action, which justifies him on the Jews’ own ground; on the other, it adduces an example of the way in which the Jews themselves break the Law, which is Jesus’ accusation in verse 19.”
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Moses is no longer the unchallenged spokesman of God, but simply a name to be conjured with when arguing with traditionally minded Jews.

Passing over John 3:13 (which should arguably have been included here because although Moses is not named in this verse he must have been among those Jewish seers of whom it was denied that they had ascended into heaven),
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we come to the most important passage of all—the angry response to the sarcastic question of the recently healed blind beggar: “Do you too want to become his disciples?” To which the immediate response is: “You are that fellow’s disciple, but we are the disciples of Moses” (9:27-28). I will comment in chapter 7 on the momentous implications of this reply. Here it is enough to say that the man’s immediate expulsion was a signal instance of a more general excommunication that had already been determined. Jesus was now thought of as usurping the place of Moses.

Moses is nowhere named in the second half of the Gospel, but his shadow is perceptibly present throughout the Farewell Discourse, for Jesus’ parting words to his disciples, cast in the form of a testimony, are clearly modeled on Moses’ final address to the whole people of Israel in the book of Deuteronomy. Paradoxically, although Moses is nowhere named in Jesus’ discourse, Jesus is named in that of Moses (at any rate in the Greek version of this, for the Hebrew Joshua is rendered Ἰησοῦς in Greek). Joshua is Moses’ successor, commissioned to lead the people into the promised land after his death. Taking on an analogous role in John’s account is the Paraclete, who, as the Spirit of Truth, is thereby the spirit of Jesus (who has just declared himself to be the truth). In John 16 (which belongs to the second edition of the Gospel) the analogy is extended, for here the promise is made that the Paraclete will lead the disciples “into the truth” (16:12), a richer realm than the promised land.
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“We would dearly love,” remarks Barnabas Lindars in his comment on John 5:46, “to have a specimen of the way in which John understood the OT witness to Christ; fortunately, for the second edition of his work, he has provided precisely such an example in his great interpolation of chapter 6, in which the whole issue is treated at length. We generally think of chapter 6 as the discourse on the Bread of Life, but it is a much more a discourse on the interpretation of Scripture”
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—an observation repeated on the next page of his book, where he says of chapter 6 that

Subsequent commentators have not taken up this suggestion of Lindars; but it provides an astute and satisfying solution to the puzzle of the present position of John 6: “an independent composition, inserted by John into the second edition of his work.”
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Apart from the Prologue, to be considered shortly, this is the only additional occurrence of the name of Moses in what may be thought of as the second edition of the Gospel, and deserves our attention for that very reason.

Early on in their debate with Jesus in John 6, the people who found him on the other side of the lake (not yet called Jews in this chapter) asked him for a sign: “What work do you perform? Our fathers ate the manna in the wilderness; as it is written, ‘He gave them bread from heaven to eat’ ” (6:30-31). Although this is probably a (slightly adapted) quotation from Psalm 78, the underlying text is undoubtedly the manna story in Exodus. And Jesus has the answer: “Truly, truly, I say to you, it was not Moses who gave you the bread from heaven: my Father gives you the true bread from heaven’ (6:32). Peder Borgen has argued that this is a rabbinic-type exegesis of the pattern, “Do not read
that
, but rather read
this
.” That is to say, “Do not read the ‘he’ as Moses, but as the Father, and do not read ‘gave’ but ‘gives,’”
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But this reading gives more prominence to Moses than he is allowed in the text. Jesus might have said (but did not), “Moses gave you manna, but my Father gives the true bread.” What he says instead is a simple denial: “Moses
did not
give you bread from heaven,” or rather, “not [οὐ] Moses gave . . . but [ἀλλά] my Father gives.” As J. Louis Martyn points out, “the emphatic negative by means of which [Jesus] introduces his reply stands immediately before the word ‘Moses.’ And the subject of the second line is changed. The ‘correction’ therefore is, ‘not Moses gave, but my Father gives.’ John is strongly contrasting Moses with God!”
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—and in doing so taking Moses out of the story altogether.  Although there is what looks like a form of midrash at this point, the evangelist is effectively denying Jesus’ interlocutors the right to make any typological comparison between Moses and Jesus. Jesus is about to say, “I am the bread of life” (6:39), and that bread is what God is giving now. Wayne Meeks says of this passage that “the polemical intent is evident: Moses is reduced to a mere mediator of the gift, and the gift itself is derogated in comparison with its Christian counterpart.”
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But the gift of the bread from heaven in the original quotation (6:31) is rapidly interpreted to refer to the true bread of life, a gift stated in such a way that even the name of Moses is deliberately excluded.

Earlier in the chapter, having seen the miracle of the loaves, the people had declared of Jesus: “This is indeed the prophet who is to come into the world” (6:14)—the clearest acknowledgment in the whole Gospel that Jesus had now taken over the role of Moses as
the
prophet of God. So in a story that, among other things, justified Jesus’ claim in the preceding chapter that Moses did indeed write of him, the evangelist pursues his own agenda: to refute the Jewish belief that Moses had the key role in the story of God’s revelation to his people, and to reassign that role to Jesus.
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It might be observed that if those responsible for the theological program behind the decoration of the walls of the Sistine Chapel had remembered the story of John 6 they might well have chosen the scene of the distribution of the manna as a parallel to the Last Supper instead of the end of Moses’ life, where in one part of the picture he is shown handing over his staff to Joshua and in another (the center of this fresco) reading out the law to the people. If the manna scene had been preferred Moses would have figured, as he does in the other pictures on the south wall, as the precursor or antitype of Jesus. But that is not how John read the story.