The Gospel of John and Christian Origins (5 page)

I find some support for this argument in an unexpected quarter. Martin Hengel begins a lecture called “The Four Gospels and the One Gospel of Jesus Christ” (summarizing a book of the same title) with a zealous defense of the view that the Gospels are biographies. Aware, however, that this is not enough, he adds, with reference to Mark, that it is a “
kerygmatic 
biography.” “Because ‘biography’ and ‘proclamation’ are fused in his work,” he continues, “Mark can call his narrative about Jesus ‘[a] saving message,’ that is an account of Jesus’ activity which brings about faith and thus salvation.”
^[21]
Leaving aside the tendentious translation of εὐαγγήλιον as “saving message,” I might point out that the addition of the word 
kerygmatic 
effectively guards against the misleading implications of the simple term 
life
 or 
biography
 if this is used without qualification. For 
kerygma
 is the traditional term for the early promulgation of the Christian message that was subsequently expanded in the Gospels. It should no doubt be said that all the Gospels have much more in them than kerygma—the moral teaching in the Synoptics, for instance, and the bitter controversies in John. Yet the stated purpose of John, writing “that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God” (20:31), indicates that none of this extra material affects the main thrust of his work.

It seems that some of the most ardent champions of the hypothesis that the Gospels are Greco-Roman 
bioi
 feel compelled to add a word such as
theology
(Aune),
Christology
(Burridge), or
kerygma
(Hengel) to specify them further. It is my contention, therefore, that to call the Gospels biographies without more ado is radically mistaken: we should think of them primarily in terms of the stated purpose of John, and of the implicit purpose of Mark (since his word, εὐαγγέλιον, gospel—good news, is equivalent to a statement of intent).

Such was the impact of the life and teaching of Jesus of Nazareth, and of the stories told about him after his death, that soon afterwards, in the religiously combustible regions of Palestine and the Jewish Diaspora, a new religion was kindled into flame. Bright little fires of faith in Jesus began to burn, and within a hundred years or so these had coalesced into the single blaze of Christianity. We associate these little fires with the leading writers of the New Testament, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—and of course Paul, the first Christian writer. At least three of these, Paul, Matthew, and John, were Jewish, and they all confront us, in different ways, with the puzzle of how Christianity emerged from Judaism. This book is concerned with one of these figures, John, with the Gospel he wrote, and with the community to which he belonged.

We continue our own inquiry by reflecting on the gospel genre, best conceived, as I have just argued in Excursus I, not as a biography or life, but as a proclamatory narrative.

Like other works of literature, the Gospels may be approached either from the inside or from the outside. The approach from the inside, the attempt to understand the meaning of the text, is what we call interpretation, or, particularly where the Bible is concerned, exegesis. (Literary criticism is too broad a category.) The approach from the outside, the attempt to find out how any particular text came to be written, is the one taken by historians. In practice the two approaches are often combined; but from a formal point of view they are different and must be held apart. In the bulk of this book I shall be asking historical questions about the origins of the Gospel of John; but in the present chapter, starting from the text of the Gospel itself, I want to ask how it presents itself. I will be arguing that its author, who had a very clear idea of what he was doing, has found ways of informing his readers about the nature of the gospel genre and of how he himself conceived it. The title of this chapter, however, “Consciousness of Genre,” requires some explanation.

All four Christian Gospels tell the story of the brief public career of Jesus of Nazareth, of his arrest, trial, and execution at the hands of the Roman authorities, and of his resurrection from the dead. Yet these stories, designed to show that he is really the long-awaited Jewish Messiah and also the Son of God in a special sense that renders him unique, have an inbuilt contradiction that has to be recognized and acknowledged if we are to have any real understanding of what makes the gospel genre so different from the many biographies of great Greeks or Romans—emperors, generals, politicians, writers—who lived around the turn of the era. For the earliest Christian writers saw, right from the start, that Jesus could not be recognized for who he truly was until after he had risen from the dead.

“Let all the house of Israel know assuredly that God has made him both Lord and Messiah, this Jesus whom you crucified.” So says Peter in his Pentecost speech in Acts (2:34), just after his extraordinary proclamation that Jesus had been raised up from the dead and exalted at God’s right hand; and Paul, quoting an even older statement of Christian belief, asserts in Rom. 1:4 that it was at his resurrection that Jesus was
designated
Son of God. In both of these passages there is a clear affirmation of a change in status. Not until he had risen from the dead could Jesus properly be called Messiah, Lord, or Son of God. Viewed retrospectively, numerous recollections—oral traditions—of his life and teaching could be seen to support the claims that came to be made on his behalf—what is sometimes called the
kerygma
. The evangelists’ central purpose, one might say, was to piece together these fragmentary traditions in a story designed to corroborate their claim that he was truly the Messiah, the Son of God, and thus prove that Christian believers were right to worship him as their risen Lord. But they had a problem. On the one hand, they knew that the key element in the story they had to tell was the resurrection; on the other hand, this story was all about the Jesus’ life
before
the resurrection.

The great German scholar William Wrede was the first to highlight this problem, in a book called
Das Messiasgeheimnis
(
The Messianic Secret
), which is how the problem has been referred to ever since this book was published, in 1901. Wrede cited the passages from Acts and Romans mentioned in the preceding paragraph, but for him the key to Mark’s own understanding of his Gospel is the Jesus’ injunction to Peter, James, and John on their descent from the mountain of the Transfiguration “to tell no one what they had seen until the Son of man should have risen from the dead. So they kept the matter to themselves,” the passage continues, “questioning what the rising from the dead meant” (9:9–10; cf. 8: 30).
^[1]
Mark frequently exhibits his awareness that, except for this brief glimpse of Jesus’ future glory (which the three disciples did not comprehend at the time), his real identity remained hidden during his lifetime. Only when Jesus had risen did it dawn on them who he really was—when, as Wrede put it, “the scales fall from their eyes.”
^[2]

Matthew and Luke skate over this difficulty by including early in their Gospels stories designed to show that Jesus was truly divine from his very conception. (And Wrede, writing about their work in a chapter entitled, “The Later Gospels: Matthew and Luke,” shows that although they retain some traces of Mark’s secrecy motif it has lost most of its significance for them.) But the other two evangelists, Mark and John, have no infancy narrative in their Gospels, and they both fully recognize the difficulty caused by Jesus’ change of status at his resurrection.

In the Gospel of John, Jesus’ glory, already announced in the Prologue (1:14), was manifested to his disciples at the wedding-feast of Cana, right at the start of his public career (2:11). This was not just a fleeting glimpse, as it was for Peter, James, and John at the Transfiguration (an episode not recorded by John); so the problem presents itself differently. John too has a double purpose, first to tell the story of Jesus and, second, to persuade his readers that he is Messiah and Son of God. But he is fully aware that there could be no full understanding of who Jesus was, or indeed of any of his words and actions, until after the resurrection. (The similarity between Mark and John in this respect was clearly seen by Wrede, who devoted a whole chapter to the Fourth Gospel in his book on the Messianic Secret.)
^[3]

We may start our examination with the story of Jesus’ very first confrontation with “the Jews” in the second half of chapter 2, where the evangelist seizes the chance to suggest that the whole of Jesus’ public career will be lived out under the shadow of the cross.
^[4]
The Jews have just demanded an explanation (a sign) of his action in ejecting the sellers from the Temple:

Wrede cites the concluding verse of this passage (it is in fact the first of several quotations from the Gospel in his chapter on John) but does not comment on it at any length. Yet there is a lot here that requires discussion.

It should first be pointed out that when Jesus makes his prediction it is hardly surprising that neither the Jews nor the disciples understand him. Just after he has expelled first the sellers of sheep and oxen and then the money-changers from the temple precincts, he goes on to speak of “this temple,” saying that after its destruction he would raise it up again. But how could any of his listeners, watching and hearing him speak within the temple precincts, be expected to know that he was really speaking of the temple of his body? The word for “raise,” ἐγείρειν, was commonly used to refer to the erection of a building, and this would have added to their confusion. No doubt any Christian reader with some knowledge of Greek would think immediately of resurrection; but that is part of the evangelist’s purpose, underlining the difference in perception between his own readers and the characters in the story. The evangelist would not have expected
Jesus’ listeners
to realize that he was talking about himself; but he would certainly have expected
his own readers
to understand. Precisely this point was made by Xavier Léon-Dufour in an article entitled “Le signe du Temple selon saint Jean,” summing up his insight in the phrase “deux temps de l’intelligence.”
^[5]
This is unquestionably a correct observation, for a distinction certainly has to be drawn between the time in which the story of Jesus took place and the time in which the Gospel was composed and first read. (We shall be considering some of the implications of this difference of time in the next chapter.) But it has to be said that it is not the point that the evangelist himself is making. He is concerned here with the difference between what was understood (or rather misunderstood) in Jesus’ lifetime, and what was understood after his resurrection. The distinction he is drawing is not between Jesus’ listeners and the Gospel’s readers, but between
two different stages of the experience of the disciples within the story
. Right up to the resurrection they are in the dark. Afterwards, like Thomas, who believes as soon as he sees the risen Jesus, they are finally in a position to understand.
^[6]

Also in this story we have the very first of the riddling sayings that crop up frequently in the first half of the Gospel. The term ναός (“temple”), it should be emphasized, is not a metaphor but a riddle, and its ambiguity is not removed but reinforced when it is made the object of the verb ἐγείρειν (“raise, erect”), a perfectly ordinary word, as we have seen, to use of the erection of a building.

In fact, the riddle is one of the literary devices employed by the evangelist to underline the habitual misunderstanding of Jesus’ words by the other characters in the story. The incomprehension both of the disciples and of the Jews, friends and foes, is
predetermined
, proceeding as it does not from any information at the disposal of the evangelist that Jesus’ hearers did not grasp what was said to them at the time, but from an authorial decision on his part to portray them in this way. The underlying logic, however, is very different in the two cases. The Jews are regarded as constitutionally incapable of accepting the message of Jesus, and indeed this incapacity is their essential characteristic: it is what makes them what they are. This is made all too plain in a later question addressed to the Jews:

This is far from being the case with the disciples. In the present instance, on hearing Jesus’ rebuke to those he had thrown out of the temple, “You shall not make my Father’s house a house of trade,” they had been reminded of a verse in Psalm 69: “Zeal for thy house will consume me.” So some of Jesus’ sayings did make sense to them. Yet they too failed to grasp the significance of the prophecy that the temple, once destroyed, would be rebuilt in three days. In their case, however, this failure was only temporary; for “
when he was raised from the dead
they remembered that he had said this; and they believed the scripture and the word which Jesus had spoken” (2:22).
^[7]

In two incidents in the Gospel, both of them discussed by Wrede, we see that the disciples were baffled by Jesus’ actions just as much as by his words. One of these incidents is the washing of the feet, where Jesus tells Peter: “What I am doing now you do not know now [οὐκ οἶδας ἄρτι] but afterwards you will come to know [γνώσῃ]” (13:7).
^[8]
Wrede suggests that the secret meaning veiled from Peter at the time is the purificatory function of water in the rite of baptism, a function indicated by the words of Jesus: “He who has bathed does not need to wash, but is clean all over” (13:10).
^[9]
But this verse, which continues, “you are clean, but not every one of you,” is picked up further on, in 15:3: “You are already made clean by the word which I have spoken to you,” where the word καθαρός involves a punning allusion to the preceding καθαίρειν (normally “cleanse,” but here “prune”). So if 15:3 is a comment on 13:10 the evangelist is reading the washing of the feet as a symbolic anticipation of the full founding of the community outlined in the allegory of the vine.

The other incident, which took place a few days earlier, is the occasion of Jesus’ final entry into Jerusalem. “Jesus found a young ass and sat upon it; as it is written, ‘Fear not, daughter of Zion; behold thy king is coming, sitting on an ass’s colt!’ His disciples did not understand [οὐκ ἔγνωσαν] this at first; but when Jesus was glorified, then they remembered that this had been written of him and had been done to him” (12:14-16). As Wrede points out, the solemn entry of Jesus and the homage of the crowd that accompanies it “stand in a relationship to the glorification or resurrection of Jesus that is
no more special
than any other significant event in his life or any important pronouncement. Here manifestly there lies behind the material
the general idea
that certain facts of his history remained obscure to begin with, even to the disciples, but after his victory over death became clear and transparent.”
^[10]

The Farewell Discourse (chapters 14‒16) serves many purposes, but, most importantly, it offers an explanation of the new situation that the disciples (that is, the Johannine community) are about to find themselves in after Jesus’ departure. Far from being utterly bereft once Jesus has left them, they are in some respects better off, because, with the assistance of the Paraclete, they are now at last in a position to understand fully all that he said while he was still on earth. So the sayings concerning the Paraclete or the Spirit of Truth embedded in these chapters are of vital importance in helping us to understand the evangelist’s own understanding of the gospel genre.