The Gospel of John and Christian Origins (15 page)

In this chapter, I have two aims in mind. I want to refer back to the Essenes, because I believe that a greater knowledge of this sect will help us to arrive at an understanding of the relationship between John’s Gospel and its author’s Jewish contemporaries. But I will be focusing particularly on the Gospel’s affinity to a manner of thinking, left unmentioned until now, that emerged relatively late in the long history of Judaism but is clearly discernible in the Qumran corpus. This way of thinking, which rests on the conviction succinctly expressed by the prophet Daniel that “there is a God in heaven who reveals mysteries” (2:28), is what we call
apocalyptic
. This word is commonly used to mean something ominous, portentous, or doom-laden. But I use it here, in a sense much closer to the Greek word from which it is derived, to mean
revelatory
: having to do with the disclosure of mysteries. Applied to the thought and writing of Jewish seers and scribes, it refers to their belief that God’s revelation did not cease with the Law and the Prophets or with what more generally was accepted as Scripture (which would have to include the Psalms, and also wisdom writings such as Proverbs and the book of Job). God continued to be “a God who reveals mysteries.”

Accordingly, I propose to take a fresh look at a topic I discussed more than twenty years ago in a chapter of my book
Understanding the Fourth Gospel
entitled “Intimations of Apocalyptic.” I argued in my earlier work that there were notable affinities between the Gospel of John and apocalyptic literature. Since that book was written I have considerably revised my views on this topic; but still believing that the comparison is illuminating, I will discuss it, as I did before, under four headings, starting with the Two Ages
.

The topic can be usefully addressed through the Dead Sea Scrolls, in particular through one very significant text: the Habakkuk pesher. The prophet’s complaint to God, right at the beginning of this little book (consisting of three short chapters), that “the wicked [singular] besets the righteous” (1:4), gives the author of the pesher the immediate opportunity of identifying the wicked as “the Wicked Priest” and the righteous as “the Teacher of Righteousness.” This is the rivalry, or rather enmity, that really concerned him, although it had nothing to do with what the prophet is actually saying. In the following verse, God, through the mouth of the prophet, responds: “I am doing a work in your days that if told you would not believe” (1:5), and goes on (1:6-11) to speak of the Chaldeans, whom he is rousing up to perform acts of terrible violence. The commentator, however, takes these two verses separately, interpreting the Chaldeans, or Neo-Babylonians, the big threat during Habakkuk’s lifetime, around the end of the seventh century
bce
, to mean the Kittim (that is, the Romans, who controlled the whole of the Near East throughout the duration of the Qumran settlement),
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and the incredulous in v. 5 (actually the people the prophet was addressing centuries earlier) to refer to those among the contemporaries of the Teacher of Righteousness who refused to listen to the word received by him from the mouth of God. Underlying and justifying what to a modern reader looks like a blatant disregard for the real meaning of the text is the conviction that the prophet’s message is not for the people of his own time but for what the commentator calls “the final generation,” that is to say his own contemporaries.

The reason for this conviction is clarified later, in a comment on Hab. 2:1-2:

“. . . to whom God made known all the mysteries of his servants the prophets.” A similar boast occurs in one of the
Hodayot
(Songs of Praise), where the author speaks of himself as “a discerning interpreter of marvelous mysteries” (1QH 10:13). It is worth pausing to reflect on the word
mystery
. A mystery (which in Latin may be
mysterium
, but also
secretum
) is a truth that no amount of searching will disclose but  remains hidden until it is revealed. In fact the words
mystery
and
revelation
are correlatives, for it makes no sense to speak of a mystery unless there is at least the theoretical possibility that the truth it hides may at some point become known—as the mysteries of the prophets were made known to the Teacher of Righteousness. To refer to prophecies as mysteries is effectively to regard them as hidden truths whose meaning will be revealed later.
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And it should be observed that this is also how the apocalyptic writers thought of their own dreams and visions. After receiving one of his strange visions, the prophet Daniel was told that the vision was true, but that he should “seal up the vision, for it pertains to many days hence” (8:26; cf. 12:4, 9). Similarly
1 Enoch
: right at the beginning of the book comes the assertion that in recounting his vision of the Holy Ones and of heaven, he is speaking “not for this generation, but concerning one that is distant” (1:2). In Daniel and
1 Enoch
these assertions are easily understood, because the books that bear the names of these two seers were actually written long after they themselves were supposed to have lived. There would be no point in pretending that the relevance of the message was restricted to the time when the events of the story, as it is told, took place. But the instructions or assertions regarding the future relevance of the visions they record correspond so closely to the way the words of the prophets are treated in the Qumran pesharim that it is reasonable to suppose that they directly influenced the author or authors of these commentaries, permitting and indeed promoting their extraordinary conviction that the prophets were speaking not for the people of their own time but for the members of this new community. The number of copies of Daniel and of
1 Enoch
found at Qumran shows that both of these books were especially popular there.
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So we see that notions perfectly appropriate to writings supposedly composed in the distant past, such as Daniel and
1 Enoch
, were transferred to the works of prophets like Habakkuk, who were actually addressing their own contemporaries. And since the lessons of the Torah too, as we have already seen, could not be comprehended without a special revelation reserved to the members of the sect, first and foremost the Teacher of Righteousness, then all Scripture, it is fair to conclude, the Law and the Prophets, was conceived at Qumran as held in reserve until eventually its truths were made known to “the discerning interpreter of marvelous mysteries” and to the community as a whole.

Virtually the same idea is expressed in the concluding doxology of Paul’s letter to Romans: “Now to him who is able to strengthen you according to my gospel and the preaching of Jesus Christ, according to the revelation of the mystery which was kept secret for long ages but has been disclosed and through the prophetic writings made known to all nations, according to the command of the eternal God, to bring about the obedience of faith” (Rom. 16:25-26; cf. 1 Cor. 2:6-9; Col. 1:26; Eph. 3:4-5, 9). Since knowledge of the mystery is transmitted through the writings of the prophets—the Scriptures—it must have been somehow contained in these beforehand.

Paul speaks of a mystery kept secret for long ages. Compressing this, we may speak rather of
two
ages, the age of concealment and the age of disclosure, a fundamental element in the pesher method of interpretation used at Qumran, and an essential feature of what came to be called apocalyptic. So the motif of mystery and disclosure is shared among Paul, the Qumran Essenes, and apocalyptic in general. Yet we should not exaggerate the resemblances. The mystery revealed to Paul did not emerge from his study of the Old Testament: it came to him in a blinding flash. Only later did he realize that this new revelation was already somehow hidden in the Bible. There is no possibility that the Qumran community could have transformed itself, like Christianity, from a new sect to a new religion, for in spite of their new understanding of the prophets that found voice in the pesharim they continued to insist above all on the strict observance of the law. Paul, on the other hand, and (much later) John saw the Christian gospel not as the fulfillment of a prophecy but as the revelation of a mystery. Their appropriation of the essentially apocalyptic concept of the two ages of revelation was not the exception but the norm for Christian believers.

Since this is so, what reason is there for claiming a particular debt to apocalyptic on John’s part? Any early Christian writing, one might say, must either affirm, or at least imply, that the old order has passed, and the new, in some sense the fulfillment of the old, has begun. Some answer is to be found in John’s exceptional emphasis on the significance of Jesus’ death. The other three evangelists, in recording the rending of the temple veil, certainly see Jesus’ death as an event charged with meaning. John, however, is the only one of the four to recognize its full cosmic significance. “Now,” declares Jesus, “is the judgment of this world, now shall the ruler of this world [that is, the devil] be cast out” (12:31; cf. 14:3; 16:11). Unlike his three predecessors, the fourth evangelist does not record any actual encounter between Jesus and the devil during his lifetime—no exorcisms and no temptation narrative. But John’s assurance that Jesus’ death meant a final and absolute judgment upon the ruler of this world must derive, either directly or indirectly, from the dramatic portrayal, in several apocalypses, of the destruction of the forces of evil. The most terrifying of these is to be found in the opening chapter of the oldest apocalypse of all,
1 Enoch:

Here is an example of the kind of properly eschatological prediction that used to be thought of as the hallmark of apocalyptic in general, and by some as actually synonymous with it. Jesus’ statements in the Fourth Gospel concerning the total defeat of the ruler of this world are a clear indication of his debt to the apocalyptic tradition.
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 Elsewhere in Jewish and early Christian literature the prince or ruler of this world is given a variety of names: Satan, of course, but also Shemihazah, Asael or Azazel (
1 Enoch
), Beliar (
Ascension of Isaiah
), Belial (the
War Scroll
), Ornias and Beelzebul (
Testament of Solomon
). In the Gospel of John he is given no name except in the short and sinister remark at the end of the Last Supper, where we are told that
Satan
entered into Judas (13:27); but the message is the same as in the properly apocalyptic writings, no less momentous and impressive for its brevity, and involving a dramatic victory over the forces of evil very different from the usual deployment of the theme of judgment in this Gospel, where people pass judgment upon themselves as they opt for or against the message of Jesus.

Turning now to the second aspect of apocalyptic that I want to discuss in this chapter, I start with a book that, judging from the number of manuscripts of it found there, was, as I have already said, very popular at Qumran. The book of Daniel falls into two parts. The first part shows us Daniel at the court of Nebuchadnezzar and his son Belshazzar, kings of Babylon. Daniel is summoned by these two kings to interpret for them a series of nasty dreams, all of which, in one way or another, concern the future of their kingdom. The tales in which these dreams are recorded are well known and have been handed down in picture, song, and story: the statue with the feet of clay, Daniel in the fiery furnace and (later) in the lions’ den, the writing on the wall. Every instance involves a puzzle, often called a “mystery,” whose solution is hidden from the dreamer and requires an interpreter. The successful interpreter always turns out to be Daniel himself, since the king’s team of hired magicians proves to be not up to the job.  In the second part of the book, from being a skilled interpreter Daniel now emerges as a dreamer, or rather a visionary seer, who has a series of alarming visions of heavenly happenings that he cannot understand without help. In Daniel’s own case, help comes from an angel, sent by God to enable him to understand the significance of what he has just seen. This angel, not always the same, is generally referred to as an
angelus interpres
, an angel interpreter.

Accordingly, whether we have to do with a dream or a vision, every episode in the book involves a puzzle or a mystery told in two stages, the stage of concealment and the stage of disclosure, when the meaning of the dream or vision is revealed. There is a particular Aramaic and/or Hebrew word that is commonly used in the book to denote the act of interpretation or explanation, a word rendered by Theodotion, who translated Daniel into Greek, as ἀναγγέλλειν. At one point, for instance, the angel Gabriel approaches Daniel while he is at prayer, to tell him that as he began his supplications, “a word went forth, and I have come to explain [RSV: tell] it to you; therefore consider the word and understand the vision” (Dan. 9:23).
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A common theme in the Gospels, as everyone knows, is the hostility shown to Jesus by many of his own people. In John’s Gospel, where Jesus’ adversaries are usually referred to simply as the Jews (οἱ ’Ιουδαῖοι), this hostility is particularly marked. In this contrast between insiders and outsiders (as in other respects), the members of the Johannine community are comparable to the Essene sect, which I discussed in my fourth chapter. In fact this sect is a classic example of a breakaway group claiming to represent the true, authentic tradition of the larger, parent body from which it has seceded. Bryan Wilson, in his influential book
Magic and the Millennium
, argues convincingly that the withdrawal of social groups from the world “leads to the establishment of a separate community preoccupied with its own holiness and its means of insulation from the wider society.”
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