The Gospel of John and Christian Origins (25 page)

Before inquiring whether the Jesus of John’s Gospel may fairly be called divine (and if so in what sense), let us first ask whether he may fairly be called human. The great majority of scholars, including Rudolf Bultmann, have opted for a human Jesus, but one prominent exception is Bultmann’s pupil, Ernst Käsemann, who answered the question with a resounding no. In an early article on the Prologue of the Gospel
^[1]
he had pictured the Johannine Christ as a God walking, or perhaps ambling (
wandelnd
) over the earth, and in his book
The Testament of Jesus
,
^[2]
toward the end of a chapter entitled “The Glory of Christ,” he attributed to John what he calls “a naïve docetism.” By then his conception of the Johannine Christ had hardened: he was now a “God striding (
schreitend
) over the earth,” after which memorable characterization (weakened in the English translation to “God going about on the earth”), Käsemann went on to discuss the declaration in the Prologue that “the Word was made flesh.” In what sense, he asked, “is he flesh, who walks on the water and through closed doors, who cannot be captured by his enemies, who at the well of Samaria is tired and desires a drink, yet has no need of drink and has food different from that which his disciples seek?”
^[3]
In the third (German) edition of the book, he responded to his critics with an uncompromising rebuttal of the charge that his conception of a docetic Christ was anachronistic.
^[4]
 
(Docetism, the view that Christ may look like a man but underneath is really God is generally classed as a second-century heresy.)

Let me give my own take on the Johannine Jesus, starting with a comparison between the portrait of Jesus painted by the Synoptists (there are of course three, but the differences are relatively small) and the portrait painted by John.

For this composite portrait I drew on material from all over the Gospel; but it fits at almost every point. It is how the author of the Gospel himself saw Jesus. Nearly a century ago, in 1916, in a book on the Fourth Gospel called
Der Sohn Gottes,
^[6]
Gillis Petersson Wetter proposed that the category best suited to the Johannine Christ is that of a divine man, defined later by an authority on the subject as “a man with qualities and abilities far beyond the normal, the darling of the gods, and a kind of mediator between the divinity and human beings, at once their counsellor and their champion.”
^[7]
Writing in the heyday of the history-of-religions movement, Wetter simply assumed a Hellenistic background for the Fourth Gospel. He added two subtitles to his book, indicating that his attempt to identify the theological bias (
Tendenz
) of the Gospel was at the same time (
zugleich
) a contribution to the knowledge of “savior-figures” in antiquity; and he was confident that the Johannine Christ could be characterized as a divine man (θεῖος ἄνθρωπος). His successors used the term θεῖος ἀνήρ instead, but the meaning was the same. “The existence of this
theios aner
,” wrote Johannine scholar Dwight Moody Smith sixty years after Wetter, “is presently regarded as well-established, the only question being at what traditional level this Christology is to be found.”
^[8]

The qualification is important. Wetter himself pretended to offer a full explanation of the Johannine portrait of Jesus, but his explanation was woefully inadequate. As could be inferred from my own summary picture of John’s Jesus, Greek readers might well feel that John’s Jesus was just the sort of
theios anēr
they were familiar with, a superman with superhuman powers. But Wetter’s divine man, having nothing of the rich complexity of the Jesus of John’s Gospel, could not compete with the comprehensive explanation attempted less than a decade later by Rudolf Bultmann. Bultmann, seeking a single source for John’s elaborate Christology, and failing to find one in any of the three main branches of doctrinal development that can be distinguished in the early church (first, Paul; second, Jewish-Hellenistic Christianity as represented by
1 Clement
or the
Shepherd
of Hermas; and, third, the Synoptic Gospels), had opted instead for a non-Christian (Mandaean) source, one steeped in Gnostic mythology. Wetter too had suggested a non-Christian source, the
theios an
ē
r
; but Bultmann wanted a comprehensive explanation and was pleased to find no fewer than twenty-eight parallels between the Gospel and his chosen documents, including the key themes of revelation, mission, and descent/ascent.
^[9]
 Indeed, his Christ was the very embodiment of divine revelation. The Hellenistic
theios anēr
, by contrast, is not a divine being in any metaphysical sense but a superman. As Morton Smith pointed out, it was quite common in the Hellenistic world to describe as divine “any man who excelled in any desirable capacity—beauty, strength, wisdom, prestige, song, fame, skill in speaking, or success in love.”
^[10]
(He might have added the gift of healing possessed by Apollonius and Asclepius.)

Looking back at Wetter’s book nearly a hundred years after it was published, we may be surprised to see how poorly it accounts for the Johannine Christ, especially when compared with Bultmann’s breathtakingly bold hypothesis. The relatively long life of the
theios anthrōpos
may be explained partly, I think, by the fact that the picture it evokes of an exceptional human being, a superman, corresponds quite well to the impression a first-time reader might get of John’s Jesus, and partly by Wetter’s success in obscuring and to some extent bypassing the larger problem that Bultmann had seen so clearly. Bultmann’s fully worked-out Mandaean theory, which had a brief but brilliant career, can now be seen embalmed in the pages of his great commentary, where we may gaze upon it with admiration, and indeed with awe. By contrast, the divine man who stepped out of Wetter’s pages had a long life, with numerous avatars, and did not get his final coup de grâce until 1977 (in a book by Carl Holladay published the year after the essay by Moody Smith quoted above),
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when he found his rightful place in a crowded cemetery alongside numerous other impossible proposals whose frailty (their Achilles’ heel, one might say) had become evident only on the eve of their demise.

What are we to conclude, though, about the question of Jesus’ humanity? Any resemblance of the Johannine Jesus to Hellenistic divine men is not enough to justify a denial of his humanity, for they were not thought of as anything other than exceptional human beings. My own view is that John would have been surprised to be asked whether Jesus was really human. (There may well have been elderly members of his community who knew Jesus personally; anyone sixty years old in 80
ce
would have been a teenager when Jesus was alive and active.) Great attention is paid to Jesus’ death in the Gospel—and gods do not die. It is just that the evangelist was not greatly concerned with Jesus’ human traits: what preoccupied him above all (Käsemann was right about this) was his glory. We shall have to consider this more closely later.

Turning back now to Wetter, I should add that Moody Smith was wrong to speak of the virtual unanimity of Johannine scholars concerning the divine man hypothesis; for Wetter’s divine man theory had already been challenged and, I think, effectively refuted, in a single footnote toward the beginning of Wayne Meeks’s magisterial
Prophet-King
.
^[12]
What is more, in the following year, 1969, Meeks had made a more wide-ranging criticism of the whole divine man theory in a review of Käsemann’s
Testament of Jesus
: “This interpretation,” he remarked, “has in recent years been more often ignored than refuted.”
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Meeks went on to summarize his own solution to the problem, one that he had put forward in his 
Prophet-King
—“that this portrait of Jesus is drawn largely from a quite special form of the 
theios
figure, namely that of the Hellenistic-Jewish (and Samaritan) man of God, a title applied pre-eminently to Moses, but also to the Patriarchs, Enoch, Elijah, and certain of the other prophets.”

Meeks’s proposal has the great advantage of situating the Gospel more or less where it belongs. It shifts our attention from classical Hellenism to Jewish and Samaritan sources and focuses in particular on the central figure of Moses. Yet when we look at the rabbinic and Samaritan sources that he scrutinizes with broad and meticulous scholarship in
The Prophet-King
(ruling out Philo, whose abstruse philosophizing is on a different planet), we find that, with a single exception, the
Exagoge
of Ezekiel the Tragedian, they are all are later than the Gospel itself. And if the evangelist did not know the works of Philo, he is surely equally unlikely to have had access to the curious work of Ezekiel (who like Philo hailed from Alexandria).

There remains one author, however, not cited by Meeks, whose writing was probably available to the members of Johannine community. This was Ben Sira, that passionate advocate of the marvels of the Torah. The Johannine group is likely to have given Ben Sira’s enthusiastic eulogy of the law a cold reception; and when the author of the Prologue referred to the tabernacling of the Logos, as he did in 1:14, he probably did so in conscious opposition to Ben Sira’s tabernacling of the law (Sir. 24:8). In the section of his work beginning, “Let us now praise famous men,” after a chapter devoted to the patriarchs—Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—Ben Sira turned to Moses. This is how he concludes a succinct summary of Moses’ achievements: “He [the Lord] made him hear his voice, and led him into the thick darkness, and gave him the commandments
face to face
, the law of life and knowledge, to teach Jacob the covenant, and Israel his judgments” (45:5).

This specific allusion to a direct encounter with God is an early example of Moses speculation and could indeed have prompted some rejoinder from the evangelist. But it is equally possible that he paid it little attention: compared with the rhapsodizing of the rabbis, and above all of the Samaritan
Memar Marqah
, it is a small thing, easily inferred from the account in Exodus, “the Lord called Moses to the top of the mountain, and Moses went up” (19:20). Meeks, however, concludes his very thorough discussion of the rabbinic Haggadah, by asserting that “it can hardly be doubted that
in New Testament times
Moses was regarded by some Jews as one of the great prototypes of the mystic ascent into heaven. As such he seems to have been viewed as the mediator of heavenly secrets of all kinds, which were delivered to him when he went up from Sinai.”
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In response to this proposal it must first be said that “it can hardly be doubted” is too strong. If Moses was indeed thought of in this way, in New Testament times and in Johannine circles, then of course there would have been a reaction from those who had come to believe that Jesus had superseded Moses as the true intermediary between God and humankind. Coming from their adversaries, this exaltation of Moses would have seemed to the disciples of Jesus a deliberate affront, and could account both for the assertion in the Prologue that “no one has ever seen God” (1:18) and for its qualification, “except him who is from God” (6:46), as well as for the more mysterious saying in 3:13 that “no one has ascended into heaven but he who descended from heaven.” (More on this later.) It may well seem unreasonable to suppose that Samaritans and the rabbis began to speculate about Moses only very much later, in the second, third, or fourth century
ce.
But attractive as it is, and not altogether to be excluded, or placed along with the Hermetica and the Mandaean writings in a box marked
Irrelevant
, this suggestion must be accounted no more than possible. Meeks himself emphatically rejects Käsemann’s assertion that the Johannine Christ is docetic—that is to say, not human, although he may appear so, but divine—and at the end of the preceding chapter we decided that the category of prophet rules out any properly divine attribution, because the prophet sent by God to speak on his behalf is both by nature and by definition subordinate to God. But now we can no longer avoid the question opened up by Meeks’s researches into the Samaritan and rabbinic sources. We must consider the two other sources that fed into John’s Christology: the wisdom tradition and the Danielic Son of Man.