The Gospel of John and Christian Origins

THE GOSPEL OF JOHN AND CHRISTIAN ORIGINS

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Scripture quotations, apart from the author’s own translations, are from the Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1973 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

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Cover design: Tory Herman

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ashton, John, 1931-

The gospel of John and Christian origins / John Ashton.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-1-4514-7214-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-4514-7982-9 (ebook)

1.  Bible. John–Criticism, interpretation, etc. 2.  Christianity and other religions–Judaism. 3.  Judaism–Relations–Christianity, 4.  Christianity–Origin.  I. Title.

BS2615.52.A83 2014

226.5’06–dc23

2013034858

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences — Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z329.48-1984.

Manufactured in the U.S.A.

This book was produced using
PressBooks.com
.

For Philip and Patricia

First I want to thank Philip Esler for inviting me to St Mary’s University College, Strawberry Hill, where he had recently taken up the post of Principal, for the purpose of giving the short series of lectures on which this book is based. The invitation was especially welcome because an offer to my own university, Oxford, to give the lectures there had recently been turned down.

A similar offer to Judith Lieu in Cambridge met with a similar, though very gracious answer: the lecture syllabus was already full. So I was especially grateful for Philip’s immediate response to the expression of my disappointment, while I was entertaining him to breakfast along with his wife, Patricia, one bright summer morning in my Oxford flat: “Come and give your lectures at St Mary’s, John. What’s more, I’ll pay you.”

Like many storytellers, I have begun at the end. The true beginning was an offer by my very good friends Catrin Williams and Christopher Rowland to organize a colloquium on my work at the University of Bangor. A month before this took place, in July 2010, I had returned to Oxford after a long stay in France, convinced (having recently completed a second edition of my book
Understanding the Fourth Gospel
) that I had nothing left to say on the Gospel of John. But of course I was obliged to introduce the Bangor colloquium, and to write up my piece afterwards for the book that Catrin was editing. A spin-off from this work was an article on the Son of Man, published the following year in
New Testament Studies
. Meanwhile I had been asked to contribute something to a book celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of C. H. Dodd’s   
Historical Tradition in the Fourth Gospel
. What with one thing and another I felt I had accumulated enough material for a short series of lectures, and possibly, after that, for another book. Hence my offer to Oxford, and hence too my gratitude at Philip Esler’s immediate response to my story of its rejection.

I must now name the five friends who have generously and unstintingly given me advice during the composition of this book. I have already mentioned Catrin Williams and Christopher Rowland, but it is to Chris especially that I owe many stimulating suggestions about how my work could be improved. Another old friend and colleague who has given me help is Robert Morgan, and I remember in particular one summer day last year in his Sandford garden, when we were hunting through a decidedly prolix book by F. C. Baur, the great nineteenth-century exegete and theologian whose work he knows so much better than I. The oldest friend of all, Robert Butterworth, has reviewed my work for many years with a clarity of perception and a refusal of fudge that only a true friend could supply. Lastly a newer and much younger friend whose opinion I have come to value, Ben Reynolds, whom I see somehow as picking up the baton of Johannine studies and carrying it for a long time to come.

To all these, and to many other friends who have helped me in different ways, I am very very grateful. And in adding a word of thanks to Fortress Press I want to record my delight and surprise when a submission made by email when the book was almost finished was greeted an hour later with a message from the editor, Neil Elliott, that included the words, “I know your work well.”

                   April, 2013

One day in early August 1942, when a German nun called Sister Benedicta was at prayer in the chapel of the Carmelite convent in the Dutch town of Echt, members of the German SS presented themselves at the convent door. They told the prioress to inform Sister Benedicta, whose original name was Edith Stein, that she had ten minutes to pack all that she needed for a journey to Germany. From Germany she was transported to Auschwitz, in Poland, where she was murdered. She was fifty years old. Ten years earlier she had entered the Carmelite order. Edith Stein was Jewish; but one day in 1921, at the age of thirty, she had picked up and read from cover to cover a copy of the autobiography of St. Teresa of Avila. She had been interested in Christianity for some time, but for her this book was the last step in her long search for truth. On finishing it she said to herself, “Das ist die Wahrheit!”—“That is the truth.” Looking back, she realized that this was the moment both of her decision to become a Catholic and of her vocation to the Carmelite Order. She went to tell her mother, a fervent, practicing Jew, who was horrified, and wept. Edith was very close to her mother, but she had never seen her in tears before. Shortly afterwards, on Yom Kippur, the two women went together to the synagogue. When the rabbi intoned the words, “Höre O Israel, Dein Gott ist ein Einziger” (“Hear, O Israel, your God is One”), Edith’s mother leaned over and whispered to her daughter, “Hörst Du? Dein Gott ist ein Einziger”—“Do you hear? Your God is One, and only One.”

Here is the boundary line: one God. Christianity also proclaims one God, but its two central doctrines, Incarnation and Trinity, sharply differentiate it from the other “religions of the book,” Judaism and Islam. These two doctrines are found in the Gospel of John, the first spelled out explicitly on its first page, the second clearly adumbrated in the part of the Gospel we call the Farewell Discourse (chs. 14–16). They situate it poles apart from Judaism, further away than any other writing in the New Testament, and consequently make it the hardest of all to explain. Even considered in isolation, with no consideration of its relation to Judaism, it is an astonishing, bewildering, mysterious work. So we should not be surprised that the great German scholar Adolf Harnack declared in 1886 that “the origin of the Johannine writings is, from the standpoint of a history of literature and dogma, the most extraordinary enigma which the early history of Christianity presents.”
^[1]
What Harnack actually wrote was “das wundervollste Rätsel,” the most marvelous riddle, or a puzzle full of mysteries. The Gospel of John is indeed “a puzzle full of mysteries.” How are we to explain it?

The Jewish religion as we see it today is far from uniform. But although there are considerable differences between the Ashkenaz and Sephardic traditions, and between the three main groupings, Orthodox, liberal, and Reform, the differences are not great enough to warrant our speaking of a plurality of Judaisms. Similar differences between the two great branches of Islam, the Sunni and the Shia, and between the various regions of the world where Islam has taken hold, are too small to justify our talking of a plurality of Islams.

The differences today between some branches of Christianity are great enough, in my opinion, to make them into different religions. Yet we never hear people speaking of different Christianities any more than we do of different Judaisms or Islams. No branch of Christianity could possibly have emerged from any of the modern varieties of Judaism. Why? Fundamentally because the two religions, though both profess belief in one God, have completely opposed conceptions of God’s definitive revelation to humankind. For Jews this can be summed up as the Torah, the law revealed to Moses. For Christians it is summed up in the very person of Christ.

One of the best summaries of the ineradicable difference between the two religions comes in the Prologue to the Gospel of John: “For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ” (1:17). This statement, bleak, blunt, uncompromising, illustrates more clearly than any other in the whole of the New Testament the incompatibility of Christianity and Judaism. It announces a new religion. Yet whoever wrote it (it comes towards the end of the Prologue of John’s Gospel) had worshiped in a Jewish synagogue. This Gospel tells among other things of the decision of “the Jews” to expel from the synagogue anyone who confessed Jesus to be the Messiah. Yet, unlike the proclamation of a Jewish Messiah (which can only be made
from within
Judaism), the rejection of the law of Moses clearly implied in the statement above amounts to a rejection of Judaism itself. So how are these two related? How could someone who once claimed that Jesus was the long-awaited Jewish Messiah go on to abandon the traditional beliefs without which such a claim could have no meaning? How, within roughly half a century, was the move made from one religion to the other? The answer to this question lies hidden somewhere in the pages of John’s Gospel, and one of my aims in this book is to tease it out. I will be arguing, in fact, that the Gospel represents a deliberate decision to supplant Moses and to replace him with Jesus, thereby substituting one revelation, and indeed one religion, for another.
^[2]

While I was writing this book, it was borne in on me that its central argument rests on three basic propositions, none of which can be taken for granted. My guess is (for I have made no attempt to verify this supposition by combing through the hundreds of books and articles that have been published on the Gospel of John within, say, the last five years) that the great majority of contemporary experts would either reject these propositions outright or feel themselves justified in ignoring them. So I have set out to prove in three excursuses that (1) the Gospels are not to be thought of simply as Lives of Christ; (2) that the Gospel of John was not written as a continuous composition over a short stretch of time but went through at least two editions; and (3) that it was composed by a member of a particular community for the benefit of his fellow members. Introducing a collection of essays published the same year as the second edition of
Understanding the Fourth Gospel
, Richard Bauckham takes issue with what he calls “the dominant approach in Johannine scholarship,” which he associates in particular with Raymond E. Brown, J. Louis Martyn, and myself.
^[3]
(Having seen many more references in the secondary literature to Bauckham’s book than to my own, I rather doubt if my views on John could be said to represent the dominant approach.) Finally, I have added a fourth excursus to defend the proposition that the main theme of the Prologue is not creation (as is generally assumed), but God’s plan for humankind.

Because Moses was so important in the experience of the evangelist, and therefore in his thinking too, I have prefaced my new book with some reflections on his changing role, taking my illustrations not in the order in which they appear in the Gospel as we have it, but in the order in which the evangelist himself came to them. (The first two, I think, were present in sources he took over; the last two were added at a later stage of his work.)

In chapter 2, “Consciousness of Genre,” I argue that the evangelist, fully aware of the problems inherent in the gospel genre that he had chosen for his work, reflected upon them and exploited them for his own purposes. In chapter 3 I attempt to explain the phrase “chief priests and Pharisees” as it is used in the Gospel. Both of these groups have been fully investigated by scholars, but there is no satisfactory short account available either of their history or of their essential nature. Since they both play a significant part in John’s Gospel, a summary description of their history and nature furnishes a useful introduction. A secondary aim of this chapter is to indicate where I believe we should look if we wish to understand the great debates of the Gospel, mostly with “the Jews” but also with the Pharisees—namely, in first-century Palestine (Jamnia). Indirectly, therefore, I am taking issue with the views of two great scholars who have written extensively about the Fourth Gospel. Were we to follow Rudolf Bultmann we would be looking rather to Iraq (where, apparently, the Mandaean writings were composed, no earlier than the eighth century
ce
); and if instead we followed C. H. Dodd we would be looking to Egypt (where the
Hermetica
were written, in the second and third centuries
ce
). A third aim of the chapter is to explain the evangelist’s puzzling use of the term ’Ιουδαῖοι (Jews) to refer to Jesus’ adversaries—puzzling not least because he and his disciples were Jews themselves.

The relevance of the fourth chapter, on the Essenes, is less immediately evident, because this sect is never mentioned in the Gospel (or, for that matter, anywhere else in the New Testament). But in the course of a more general discussion of the history of this sect, and of the scrolls that formed the library of the Qumran community, I shall argue that, besides writings that demonstrate their incontestable allegiance to the Mosaic law, there are others that show a surprising affinity to the Gospel of John.

Some may think that these two chapters (3 and 4) are of only marginal relevance to the book as a whole. But the third chapter anchors the Gospel in its historical setting and thus avoids the risk of allowing it to float free, and the fourth provides some useful and relatively accessible information about a sect that is still little known except to specialists.

In the fifth chapter, taking an historical approach, I inquire into the circumstances of the Gospel’s composition and follow this by offering a radically altered version of a chapter of my earlier book entitled “Intimations of Apocalyptic.”
^[4]
I conclude this by asking in what sense if any the Gospel might be called “an apocalypse in reverse.” The seventh chapter, one of two to deal with the evangelist’s adaptation of Jewish traditions, is concerned with the claim that Jesus fulfilled the prediction of a Moses-like prophet, and the eighth (“Human or Divine?”) deals with two other Jewish traditions, Wisdom and the Son of Man. In the final chapter I attempt to explain the difference between the Johannine portrait of Jesus and the much more readily comprehensible picture of the Synoptic Gospels.