The Gospel of John and Christian Origins (30 page)

Besides the abundant evidence of controversy we must recognize two further elements of the community’s experience that find expression in the pages of the Gospel. Both of these, in fact, are illustrated by Jesus’ assertion that “the truth shall make you free.” “We are descendants of Abraham,” respond the Jews, “and have never been in bondage to anyone. How is it that you say, ‘You will be made free?’” (8:33). Rightly understood, as it would have been by the members of the community, the word
truth
indicates the new revelation that, having replaced the Torah, was God’s special gift to them. But to the Jews it was not a revelation but a
riddle
. As Jesus goes on to say to them in this very passage, “Why do you not understand what I say? It is because you cannot bear to hear my word. . . . If I tell the truth, why do you not believe me? He who is of God hears the words of God; the reason why you do not hear them is that you are not of God” (8:43, 46-47). Here, then, contained somehow in this single saying, are two other kinds of discourse, riddling and revelatory, that have to be noticed if we are to do justice to the literary riches of the Gospel.

We observed in chapter 2 the importance of the distinction between enigmatic and plain speech (ἐν παροιμίαις and παρρησίᾳ) in the understanding of the disciples of Jesus before and after the resurrection. This was one function of riddling discourse in the Gospel. A second function, equally important, was to erect a cognitive barrier between the members of the community and their adversaries, “the Jews,” thus enhancing their sense of privilege vis-à-vis those who were incapable of comprehending the truth, and fostering a conviction that they, not the traditionalists whom they had left behind, were in the right—that they were the ones who had the truth. (As social theorists have shown, this is a regular response on the part of any group that has become isolated from the parent body. We have already seen an example of just such a response from the Essenes at Qumran.) In certain passages in the Gospel the claim to possess the truth is exploited to good effect by making the word
truth
itself into a riddle. As we have just noticed, when he said to the Jews, “the truth will set you free” (8:32), they failed to understand. How could they, when a condition of understanding was to “remain in his word” and to become his disciples? Instead they rejected the one who is the truth, and he responded by drawing further and further away from them. In fact, another example of the Gospel’s riddling language is the actual word
withdraw
(ὑπάγειν), misunderstood by the Jews to mean simply “depart,” when in its special sense it signified the whole process whereby Jesus was to leave the world, to which he did not really belong, and rejoin his Father in heaven. So the use of riddling language contributes to the strangeness of the portrait of Jesus given in the Gospel.

Commenting, in
Understanding the Fourth Gospel
, on the fact that three literary styles or modes of discourse are to be found in John’s Gospel—revelation, riddle, and debate—I laid particular emphasis on the first of these, remarking that even the few scholars who do acknowledge the presence of prophecy in the Gospel do not seek examples in the text of the Gospel itself. Yet if Jesus himself did not actually pronounce more than a small faction of the words attributed to him in the Gospel, it is fair to ask who did. There is no obvious answer available unless we are prepared to recognize that the Johannine community was a prophetic community in the Pauline sense—by which I mean the kind of community we know of through Paul’s correspondence with the Corinthians. The Gospel is full of individual sayings and also of extended discourses that deserve to be called prophetic in the broad sense of the term. Paul leaves us in no doubt how high a value he attached to the gift of prophecy, a gift that enabled certain members of the community, as Paul puts it, to speak to the others for their upbuilding, or as some translations quaintly put it, for their edification (1 Cor. 8:1, 10; 10:23; 14:4, 17).
^[20]
Just as the Old Testament tells us of many men, and women too, who spoke with the voice of God, there were some in the Johannine community who spoke with the voice of Jesus.
^[21]

When they did so speak, they testified to the continuing presence of the risen Jesus among them. Nowhere does the sense of his presence and of the new kind of life that he brought with him find more eloquent expression than in the
I-am
sayings. In the Gospel all of these are put in the mouth of Jesus, but since he cannot have uttered them in his earthly existence, we may reasonably ask who did. The obvious answer is the Johannine prophet, but one passage in the Gospel suggests that more than one person was involved. Chapter 10 records two
I-am
sayings in quick succession: “I am the door” and “I am the shepherd” (10:9, 14). These two claims are clearly incompatible: no one individual could perform both roles at the same time. Various explanations have been offered, but the most plausible is that they were made by two different voices in a prophetic gathering, responding antiphonally to one another.
^[22]
Likewise, we cannot simply assume of all the other sayings that they proceeded from a single source. If they too were uttered in a prophetic gathering, anyone with the gift might feel inspired to use it. Here is the Spirit in action, taking what belongs to Jesus and proclaiming it (see 16:14).

All of the
I-am
sayings contain a promise of life, and they all allude to the source of life, Jesus himself. They are either followed or preceded by an explanation or justification, stating directly or indirectly the purpose of his coming—that they may have life (10:10).  All the sayings are miniature Gospels, inasmuch as they affirm simply and graphically the purpose for which the Gospel was written—that you may believe, and believing, have life in his name (20:31). In the most succinct examples of this affirmation—“I am the resurrection and the life” (11:25), “I am the way, the truth, and the life” (14:6)—both the purpose and the consequence of Jesus’ coming are drawn back into his self-proclamation—self-proclamation because all these sayings come from members of the community with the gift of prophecy speaking with his voice.
^[23]
Among these sayings we find what is perhaps the fullest expression of what Jesus came to mean to his followers: “Abide in me and I in you. . . . I am the vine, you are the branches. He who abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing” (15:4-5), words crying out, as we can now see, for gender-inclusive language. The vine is indistinguishable from its branches, so in their harmonious intertwining the members of the community
are
Jesus: he lives anew in and through his followers, most of whom never knew him in person.
Pace
Bultmann (see n. 9  above) the best explanation of this and similar phrases, no doubt spoken in the context of a prophetic gathering, is that it expressed the mystical intimacy between Jesus and his followers that was explicitly promised in terms of dwelling or abiding. It is no doubt largely through the imaginative power of this and other sayings attributed to Jesus in this Gospel that many other Christians in the centuries that followed have come to enjoy the same sense of close intimacy.

Although we have come some way to answering our question we have not yet got to the heart of it. From the first page of this book I have argued that resonating through the Gospel, and most emphatically in the Prologue, is the insistence that the truth, the real revelation of God, is not the law but the self-revelation of Jesus, who represents in his own person God’s plan for his people, and indeed for all humankind. For he now replaces both the law and the great figure of Moses through whom the law was given.

If, accordingly, we ask for the best explanation of this dramatic change, we may look for clues, as Wayne Meeks did, in the Samaritan and rabbinic traditions concerning the exaltation of Moses. These might well have led, as Meeks suggests, to counter-speculations on the part of the evangelist, causing him to promote the figure of Jesus ahead of Moses. Such counter- speculations, which cannot but have alarmed the Jewish establishment, will have fully accounted for the eventual breakup of the opposing parties in the synagogue. In this way, by combining the insights of two great American scholars, Meeks and Martyn, we could get behind the scenes of the synagogue disputes and so arrive at some understanding of John’s shift in allegiance from Judaism to Christianity.

Alternatively, however, as Christopher Rowland has suggested to me, the speculations may actually have begun among the followers of Jesus. If he was more than the Messiah, more even than the awaited Moses-like prophet, if his new revelation was possible only because he had ascended into heaven and had been enabled to convey “heavenly things” as a consequence of his ascent, then he would somehow have shouldered past Moses into an intimacy with God beyond anything that the Bible claimed for Moses. The later Samaritan and rabbinic speculations could then be explained as a reaction to the claims made on behalf of Jesus, and not the other way around. Such an explanation would relieve the interpreter of the need to assume that traditions first evidenced in sources dating from the second and third centuries
ce
(and in the case of the Samaritans as late as the fourth century) must have originated long before, in sources now lost. Similar assumptions had proved an embarrassment to the theories of both Bultmann (the Mandaeans) and Dodd (the
Hermetica
).

This fresh perspective opens the way for a new interpretation not only of the puzzling 3:13, with its challenge to claims made on behalf of a number of Jewish seers,
^[24]
but also of the occasional references in the Gospel to Jesus’ vision of God. Many if not most interpreters of the Prologue assume an exception in the final verse, reading “no one has ever seen God” as “no one except the Logos” or “no one except the (preexistent) Son.” I have suggested that, although there is no reason to read the Prologue in this way, the evangelist corrects it later: “Not that anyone has seen God [as was said in 1:18]
except
him who is from God; he has seen the Father” (6:46). But “he who is from God” is not the preexistent Son but the one who is addressing these words to the Jews who have just challenged him. Earlier in the Gospel Jesus had confronted his adversaries directly. After asserting that he himself was the object of the Father’s witness, he went on: “His voice you have never heard, his form you have never seen” (5:37), echoing but going beyond Moses’ own confession in Deut. 4:12, that when God spoke to the Israelites from the midst of the fire “you heard the sound of words, but saw no form; there was only a voice.” When he states that he does “only what he sees the Father doing” (5:19) he is referring to the miracle he has just performed. This is undoubtedly difficult, but to my mind not nearly as difficult as the idea of a preexistent vision that was somehow recalled by Jesus when on earth. For we should remember that there is nothing in the body of the Gospel (except in chapter 17, added later) to suggest that Jesus had some kind of earlier existence before he was born as a son to Joseph—whose father and mother were known to the Jews (6:42).

We have already observed that in his narration of the passion the evangelist elides all the humiliating aspects (spitting and stripping) and any suggestion that Jesus is not in control of the action throughout. He tackles the predictions of the passion in a similar way, for he portrays Jesus’ approaching crucifixion as a raising-up or an elevation. His chosen word ὑψοῦν has often been commented upon. Meeks, for instance, speaks of an “ironic pun” and “a jarring bit of gallows humor,”
^[25]
but there is no joke intended here. We should ask ourselves how John imagined the crucifixion. If he had ever actually witnessed a man dying in agony on the cross, one might suppose that a memory of this appalling torture would lead him to picture a scene something like, to take a well-known example, the terrifying portrayal of the crucifixion by Mathias Grünewald. This tormented image would surely have blocked out altogether any awareness of a man raised up, exalted, ascending up to heaven. The deliberate choice of a word meaning “exalt” (reinforced by an avoidance of the words
cross
and
crucifixion
,
suffering
,
death,
and
dying
) is surely something other than a clever verbal device. The third passion prediction exhibits an even more remarkable modulation, when Jesus declares that “the hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified” (12:23). Although the predictions in all four Gospels refer to the same event, the contrast between John and, say, Mark, is striking. Where Mark’s Jesus, in the first prediction (8:31), speaks of suffering and death, John’s Jesus (3:14) speaks of lifting up or exaltation; and where in the third prediction Mark’s Jesus (10:34) says that he is about to be mocked, spat upon, and scourged, John’s Jesus talks of glorification! The crowd’s response to this prediction is “How can you say that the Son of Man must be lifted up?” (12:34), interpreting what Jesus has just said about glorification as a reference to the exaltation (on the cross) of the Son of Man. Lifting up or exaltation, on the one hand, and glorification, on the other, are alternative ways of speaking of the same event. The evangelist is inviting his readers to
see past
their own memory or knowledge of Jesus’ agonizing death to his triumph over the forces of evil: “Now is the judgment of this world, now shall the ruler of this world be cast out” (12:31), words spoken in the context of the third and last passion prediction—an invitation that can best be accounted for if we suppose that John himself had a vision overwhelming enough to eliminate the painful and humiliating aspects of Jesus’ passion and to replace them with signs of exaltation and glory, so as to compress the events of Good Friday and Easter Sunday unto a single momentous happening, the defeat of the prince of this world and the victory of Christ.