The Gospel of John and Christian Origins (18 page)

Up to the phrase “eschatological salvation” (which is one way of understanding John’s “eternal life”) it is hard to deny that the Fourth Gospel fits this definition tolerably well. Of course it does not look like an apocalypse: no human seer is recorded to have had a heavenly dream or vision or to have been transported up to heaven to receive one. Nevertheless, Jesus is certainly thought of as an otherworldly being, and his revelations are mediated within a narrative framework. It is only the conclusion that poses problems, for although Jesus does at one point in the Gospel (3:12) claim to have spoken of “heavenly things,” these are nowhere specified, and the evangelist gives no more than the merest hint that Jesus was enabled to speak of these (things that belong to “another supernatural world”) by virtue of an ascent into heaven (3:12-13).
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Yet almost every page of the Gospel deals with mysteries and heavenly truths. Let us take a fresh look at a few of these pages. What are we to make of the Gospel’s frequent allusions to heavenly realities? Toward the beginning of the Gospel, when Nathanael, the “Israelite without guile,” confesses his faith (“You are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel!”), he is promised that he “will see heaven opened, and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man” (1:49-51), a saying that, on the face of it (this is the first mention of the Son of Man in the Gospel), refers to the angelic Son of Man in Daniel’s great vision. And although a moment’s reflection tells us that this immediate response cannot be right, and that the Son of Man in question can be none other than Jesus himself, the saying is nevertheless a baffling one, not least because the promise is left unfulfilled. In the book of Revelation the seer tells us that he looked, “and lo, in heaven, an open door” (4:1). In the Gospel of Mark, after Jesus’ baptism, when he was coming up out of the water, “immediately he saw the heavens split open and the Spirit descending upon him like a dove” (1:10). In the Gospel of John, where Jesus’ baptism is not recorded, there is no open door and no vision of the opening of the heavens—simply the promise of such a vision. It is hard to believe that such a promise, made by Jesus himself, is altogether empty; yet we are left wondering what it can mean and why it was made.

Commentators are agreed that the promise to Nathanael alludes to Jacob’s dream at Bethel (the house of God): Jacob dreamed “that there was a ladder set up in heaven and the top of it reached to heaven; and behold the angels of God were ascending and descending on it (Gen. 28:12). In fact, the Hebrew allows an alternative interpretation, according to which the angels were said to be ascending and descending not upon the ladder but upon Jacob himself! This interpretation, which was adopted by some rabbinic commentators, is the one that lies behind the saying in the Gospel, with the major difference that in the Gospel version of the story the patriarch Jacob—and his ladder—are replaced by the Son of Man. In Genesis, Jacob’s ladder fulfills the function of the Babylonian ziggurat (satirized in the story of the Tower of Babel), which was to establish a link between earth and heaven. In the Gospel this function is taken over by the Son of Man. This being so, we can see that part at least of what Jesus is saying is that he himself, in his role as Son of Man, is the true intermediary between heaven and earth. Kick away the ladder! A little further on in the narrative he asserts that “no one has ascended into heaven but he who descended from heaven, the Son of Man” (3:13): there is no further mention of the angels of Jacob’s dream, and the ascent/descent motif from now on is associated exclusively with the Son of Man.

A little later, concluding his conversation with Nicodemus, Jesus asserts, “we speak of what we know, and bear witness to what we have seen” (3:11). What exactly, though,
did
he see? He claims to have seen “heavenly things” (v. 12), and implicitly, therefore, to be speaking of them. But just as the promise to Nathanael (that he will see the heavens opened) is never fulfilled, neither, apparently, is Jesus’ claim to be speaking of heavenly things. Both of these claims are, in the strong sense,
apocalyptic
. They amount to assertions involving the revelation of heavenly mysteries. But such a revelation never seems to be given. Rudolf Bultmann, time and again, insisted that Jesus’ revelation has no content: all that he reveals is that he is the Revealer—no what, just a naked that. Wayne Meeks, in the same context, speaks of “empty revelation forms.”
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But to leave the matter there seems curiously unsatisfactory. For who can read this Gospel without a pervasive sense that somehow or other heavenly things are spoken of on virtually every page? I believe that the evangelist himself would endorse this comment. The concluding paragraph of chapter 3, which represents the evangelist’s own reflections on the preceding dialogue with Nicodemus,
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insists upon Jesus’ heavenly status:

This is not the first time in this Gospel that something affirmed in one sentence is seemingly contradicted in the next (see 1:12). No one receives the testimony of the one from above; no one listens to what Jesus has to say. No: wrong—at least one person
does
receive his testimony. I take that person to be the evangelist himself. How, though, does he set about stating this message, affirming it in the strongest possible way, by setting his seal to it?  He says first, very simply: God is true. What does he mean? He means that when he himself, the evangelist, records the testimony that he and he alone has accepted from the man from heaven, what he is really recording is the message of God himself;
for he whom God has sent
[namely, Jesus]
utters the words of God
. By adding a comment concerning his own work toward the end of a passage especially rich in theological content, the evangelist is singling it out and drawing his readers’ attention to it, something he does quite rarely. And despite the fact that the whole story is set on earth, the one who delivers the message, the Jesus of the Gospel, does not belong on earth at all. If he did he would speak of earthly things, but the truth is that he belongs to heaven; he “comes from above” and “is above all.”

A further explanation is added: it is not by measure that he gives the Spirit. The subject of this verb, the one who gives the Spirit, is probably God; but the best-attested manuscript reading of this verse leaves open the possibility that the subject is the one who utters the words of God, namely, Jesus. But of course the whole thrust of the passage tells us that this would make no difference: whether sent by God (14:26) or by Jesus (16:7), the Spirit is the one who makes it possible for those who receive the testimony to comprehend it. (Had this passage been properly understood by the future champions of East and West, who were to argue interminably over who sent the Spirit, the church might have been spared centuries of schism and discord.)

I have not space to comment fully on the whole of John 3, one of the richest chapters in the Gospel. But no one reading this passage will wish to leave out heaven altogether. Jesus unquestionably asserts that his message, what he has seen and heard, is a heavenly message. Yet “the heavenly things” of which he spoke earlier in the chapter (3:12)
are nothing more than the record of Jesus’ words and deeds in the Gospel that John is writing
, words and deeds that are poles apart from the kind of heavenly events recounted by visionaries like Daniel and Enoch in the books that bear their names. Yet these words and deeds are no less truly revelations—revelations concerning a human life made by the one that lived it. Conveyed as they are by the evangelist, speaking as a witness of what Jesus said and did in the presence of his disciples before his resurrection, they have been transformed, reshaped, and re-envisioned through the special understanding bestowed by the Paraclete. The Paraclete is also a witness, but his witness is not something added to or separable from the witness of the evangelist and his community. Throughout the Gospel, whoever is doing the witnessing, whether it is John the Baptist, Moses and the Scriptures, the Paraclete, the disciples, and finally the evangelist himself, the object of the witness, what they are witnessing to, is none other than Jesus himself, not in his preexistence or in his eventual abode in heaven, but in his earthly life, recollected and newly conceived. So the new revelation is the Gospel itself, a story set on earth—which is why it may be called an apocalypse in reverse.

Yet in spite of the Gospel’s affinities with the Jewish apocalypses, it would be wrong to ignore the differences. The basic conviction the evangelist shared with the apocalyptic writers who preceded and followed him was that God had further mysteries to reveal above and beyond the Torah. And as in the Jewish apocalypses, these were communicated by one known to be a heavenly being. But unlike the angels of the apocalypses, the Revealer of the Fourth Gospel had descended to earth from heaven. Above all the fourth evangelist differs from his predecessors in insisting that his own new revelation altogether supersedes the earlier revelation given through Moses. Those who accept this new revelation are in possession of a wonderful truth that, it is no exaggeration to say, is the central message of Christianity. The Gospel of John contains this message in its purest form.