The Gospel of John and Christian Origins (14 page)

What is more, the way he chooses to search for answers to this question is not just novel but extraordinarily imaginative. He suggests that each of the various players in this little drama “is actually a pair of actors playing two parts simultaneously.” So there are really two stages: the lower stage, which is where the story we are reading is taking place, and the higher stage, on which is portrayed the dramatic interaction between the synagogue and the Johannine group within it. “To observe the sequence of scenes,” adds Martyn, “one needs only to be aware of the two-level stage.”
^[17]
 But in his search for specificity Martyn goes even further: the beggar, he suggests, is a Christian convert; the Sanhedrin, the local Jewish city council (for which he employs the Greek term
gerousia
). Jesus himself represents a latter-day prophet speaking in Jesus’
name. What takes place on the upper stage, of course, is told indirectly, and to have any chance of seeing it we have to replay for ourselves Martyn’s imaginative projection.

Now it may be objected that not one person in a hundred, not one person in a thousand, is likely to read the Gospel in this way. With a little nudging we might be persuaded to accept Léon-Dufour’s two levels of understanding, for while the evangelist is recording actions and discourses that took place a half-century earlier, he himself is addressing readers in his own present. (In this respect he is no different from most historians.) But what is all this nonsense about a latter-day prophet? There is not a shred of evidence that such a person ever existed. The Gospel is telling us about Jesus, nobody else. Martyn attempts to stave off any possible objection to what he calls the
doubling
of Jesus with an early Christian preacher by the aid of a subtle exegesis of 9:4: “It is necessary for
us
to work the works of him who sent
me
while it is day.” “Immediately surrounding this verse,” he points out, “is the original healing story in which Jesus works the works of God (vss. 1-7). But this occurrence is not terminated in Jesus’ earthly lifetime, as the expansion of the simple healing narrative in verses 8-41 makes clear.. . . The Risen Lord,” he concludes, “continues his earthly ministry in the work of his servant, the Christian preacher.”
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No doubt Martyn would add that we should use our imagination to picture the dramatic events that led to the bitter divorce toward the end of the first century between the traditional believers within the synagogue and those of its members who professed belief in Jesus. For he is also picturing the response of John’s first readers, all members of his own community, as they applaud the beggar’s crushing response to the Pharisees—just the sort of people they have encountered many times, people whom they think of as blind and bigoted—as he says to them, “I was blind and now I see,” and as they deplore, however sympathetically, the refusal of the man’s parents to stand up to those same people because of their fear of being ostracized themselves. Martyn points out that the word ἀποσυνάγωγος employed by John really means a person excommunicated from the synagogue, adding that the same word occurs also in two other contexts. One of these is the Farewell Discourse, where Jesus predicts to his disciples that “they [that is, the Jews] will cause you to be excommunicated from the synagogue” (16:2). The other is a passage in which Jesus, speaking of the rulers (ἄρχοντες), says that many of them believed in him, “but on account of the Pharisees made it a practice not to confess him, lest they be excluded from the synagogue” (12:42). This is Martyn’s conclusion:

So much for the evidence from the Gospel itself. I confess that I am not fully persuaded that Martyn is right in every detail. For his picture of what happens in the upper stage to be fully coherent he needs to posit a second blind beggar in John’s own day, cured of his blindness by the latter-day prophet—surely a rather unlikely supposition. But such reservations as I have do not extend to his general argument that most of the story is directly relevant to the controversies between two groups in the synagogue toward the end of the first century. Conclusive for this position, as he himself observes, is the contemptuous dismissal of the man born blind in 9:28: “You are that man’s disciple [μαθητὴς ἐκείνου], but we are disciples of Moses,” a statement that, as he says, “is scarcely conceivable in Jesus’ lifetime, since it recognizes discipleship to Jesus not only as antithetical, but also as somehow comparable, to discipleship to Moses. It is, on the other hand, easily understood under circumstances in which the synagogue views the Christian movement as an essential and more or less clearly distinguishable rival.”
^[20]
This point deserves to be underlined. Moses is by far the most important single figure for Judaism, as Jesus is for Christianity and Muhammad for Islam. When the earliest followers of Muhammad ranked him ahead of Jesus, whom they continued to honor as a prophet, they were setting up a new religion. The same is true of those who ranked Jesus ahead of Moses, although the fourth evangelist, at least, leaves less of a place for Moses than Muhammad did for Jesus.

So in this first part of his argument, headed “Exclusion from the Synagogue according to the Fourth Gospel,” Martyn has already made his case.
^[21]
But there is a second and longer part to his argument too, entitled “Exclusion from the Synagogue according to Other Sources.” In this part (already anticipated in the reference to “an authoritative body within Judaism”) Martyn argued that the expulsion from the synagogue testified to in the Gospel should be understood in the light of the euphemistically named “Benediction of the Heretics” (
Birkat ha-Minim
), a reformulation—turning a blessing into a curse—of the twelfth of eighteen benedictions recited as a prayer (
Amidah
) in early synagogue worship. This argument aroused a storm of controversy, but Martyn has never retracted his view that the
Birkat ha-Minim
was issued under Gamaliel II, who, in Martyn’s opinion headed the Jamnia Academy from about 80 to about 115
ce.
While admitting that some objections of Wayne Meeks to his arguments in the first edition had a certain cogency, he nevertheless reiterated his opinion that the
Birkat ha-Minim
“is in some way reflected in John 9:22.”
^[22]
The most that can be said for this position is that it cannot be conclusively disproved; but since I would endorse Meeks’s observation that the
Birkat ha-Minim
“has become a kind of red herring in Johannine research,”
^[23]
I will say no more about it here. There is already enough to justify the widespread support Martyn received for his main thesis.

Before proceeding, I wish to stress two features of the passage in the Gospel we have been considering: its complexity and its urgency. The trouble is that the complexity may well veil the urgency, because this is not immediately evident to us as we read the Gospel nearly two millennia after it was composed: the urgency has somehow to be teased out from the text. I have compared the evangelist’s approach with that of Giuseppe Verdi in his early opera
Nabucco
(a.k.a. Nebuchadnezzar), which tells of the suffering of the exiled Jews in Babylon. Was he aware, I have sometimes wondered, that the prophet Daniel had preceded him in deliberately telling two stories at the same time? The book of Daniel purports to tell of the iniquities (and horrifying punishment) of the Babylonian Nebuchadnezzar, whereas the subtext refers to the crimes (and, hopefully, the subsequent punishment) of the tyrant Antiochus Epiphanes, who had provoked the Maccabees into armed resistance some four centuries after the Babylonian exile. Similarly, the anger and the hope that ring out in the chorus of the Hebrew slaves may be thought of as projecting the anger and hope of the Italians, as they looked forward to finally ridding themselves of their Austrian oppressors. The fear and anger of the Johannine community, as they see themselves exiled from the synagogue by those they call the Jews, is similarly projected back upon the life of Jesus. But they had a burning conviction that they had been given the truth (led into all truth) and that through this truth they would come to enjoy a freedom that would release them from the constraints to which they were subjected by their fellow Jews: “the truth will set you free.”

In the next chapter I will be considering the nature of this new truth and inquiring into the source of the evangelists’ ideas concerning it.