The Gospel of John and Christian Origins (32 page)

More than once in the course of this book I have observed that despite what seems to be a general consensus among Johannine scholars the fourth evangelist was not a theologian, at least if we understand by this term a person mainly occupied with rational reflection about God. He did not spend most of his time endeavoring to work out a consistent and satisfactory Christology. Nor of course was he a biblical scholar, hunting for sources, either Jewish or Christian, to be used in complementing or supplementing his own ideas. And although he was certainly familiar with at least one of the Synoptic Gospels, so that the
gospel form
(sayings, stories, and a passion narrative) supplied him with a framework for his own composition, and although too he must have inherited many treasured memories of Jesus’ words and deeds, his use of these was incidental rather than systematic.

Like Paul, he had received a revelation, and that revelation, again like Paul’s, concerned Christ. Paul, brought up as a Pharisee, did think theologically; but I have argued at length elsewhere that what was primary for Paul was not theology but religious experience;
^[1]
and the same is surely true of John. In the last chapter I suggested that the evangelist’s thrice-repeated statement concerning Jesus’ exaltation on the cross is better explained as stemming from a visionary experience than as a clever piece of wordplay. And what of the assertion in the Prologue that “we have seen (or gazed upon) his glory”? Rudolf Bultmann actually notes that “Δόξα in the LXX, the NT and in the literature of magic, the mysteries, and related Hellenistic literature, refers to the epiphany and the manifestation of the Godhead.”
^[2]
But then he immediately asserts that “the revelation clearly does not occur, as some might naively wish to imagine, in a divine demonstration, visible to the natural eye of the body or the soul,” and goes on to speak instead of “the vision of faith,”
^[3]
an expression neither argued for nor explained: Bultmann is stating a theological conviction. Would it not have been better, methodologically speaking, to turn for assistance to other statements in the Gospel that refer to the manifestation of Christ’s glory? The difference between John’s portrait of Christ and that of the Synoptists is best accounted for by the
experience
of the glorious Christ, constantly present to him and to his community, that has all but obliterated the memory of a human Jesus subject to the weaknesses of ordinary mortals—so that, above all else, his uncertainty about his own fate and, in his dying moments, his failure of faith, were completely forgotten.

Why is it then, it might reasonably be asked, that there is no mention of this in the commentaries? Why is it that one scholar after another speaks of John’s theology rather than of his religious experience? There are two, complementary, answers to the question. The first answer must be the crushing weight of a tradition that has been piling up ever since the patristic era, when the Greek church gave John the honorable title of
Theologian
—largely because the great doctrines of the Incarnation and Trinity were elaborated mostly on the basis of texts drawn from the Fourth Gospel. In the modern era other great figures emerged—first Friedrich Schleiermacher and then, towering above all the rest, Ferdinand Christian Baur, whose unremitting emphasis on the theological achievement of John paved the way for what was to follow. In the twentieth century no one could match the astonishing learning and insight of the great Bultmann, to whom we owe the clear perception, put forward in the “Bedeutung” article I mentioned earlier,
that the basic theme of the Gospel, its
Grundkonzeption
, was revelation: “Precisely what though,” he asked, “does the Jesus of John’s Gospel reveal? One thing only, though put in different ways:
that
he has been sent as the revealer.”
^[4]

The commentators who succeeded Bultmann, also men of considerable learning, could not but stand in his shadow. In Britain, C. H. Dodd and C. K. Barrett did their best, without admitting it, to confront Bultmann; but they too were equally convinced that the Fourth Gospel was the work of a theologian.

Raymond E. Brown, whose large two-volume Anchor Bible commentary earned him justifiable acclaim, advanced the study of the Gospel by judiciously employing the Dead Sea Scrolls to situate it firmly in the context of Second Temple Judaism. Yet it was J. Louis Martyn, Brown’s friend and fellow American, who made the biggest step forward—with his imaginative reconstruction of the situation of the members of the Johannine group as they confronted the more traditionally minded Jews who worshiped alongside them in the synagogue. Martyn’s study was perhaps the first ever to require some consideration of the
experience
of believers in Jesus as they confronted the hostile questioning of people who, according to the Gospel, called themselves “disciples of Moses.”
^[5]

Critical as I have been of Martyn’s little book, I believe that its novel insights help us to understand the second reason why Johannine scholars had hitherto focused exclusively on what they call the evangelist’s theology instead of on his experience: they had not been venturesome or imaginative enough to try to picture, as Martyn did, the life of the Johannine community in its synagogal setting. Although, in my opinion, he sometimes goes too far, he does not proceed without evidence. His achievement was to furnish a life setting, a
Sitz im Leben
, for the controversies with the Jews that crowd the pages of the Fourth Gospel.

Building on Martyn’s work in my own book,
Understanding the Fourth Gospel
, I was also able to investigate, though briefly, two other areas of the community’s experience: first the quarrel over the truth that prompted John’s riddling discourse, and, second, the revelatory experiences of the risen Jesus that found expression in the
Amen
sayings and the
I-am
sayings, which, if I am right, exemplified the charismatic prophecy that characterized the religious life of the community.
^[6]
Neither the riddles nor these prophetic sayings were the work of a theologian. The riddles, like the controversies, were fashioned by the evangelist while he was busy defending his beliefs in Jesus against hostile questioning on the part of his adversaries; and he also used them to bolster the confidence of the community by suggesting to them that they alone were the privileged possessors of the truth. As for the prophetic sayings, I proposed that they were probably uttered at times of communal worship.

The final question must concern the evangelist’s own revelatory experience. In chapter 6 of this book I systematically dismantled the case I myself had made earlier for the Gospel’s affinity with apocalyptic, while nevertheless maintaining that it is right to call the Gospel an apocalypse in reverse. What the evangelist perceived as a new revelation was, of course, Jesus himself, revealing, as Bultmann put it, that he was the revealer. What Bultmann failed to see was that the revelation was also the gospel story, a truth cryptically expressed in the Prologue, where God’s plan for the world—for humankind—is identified with the person of Jesus Christ, who glorified God in his life, death, and resurrection. It is hard to express this insight without drawing on the actual words of the Gospel—the way, the truth, and the life. How it came to John himself we cannot say with any precision. But like the seer of Revelation and like the great Jewish seers, Ezekiel, Enoch, Ezra, and Baruch, it must have come to him as revealed wisdom.

Both Johns—for despite a long-standing tradition, the authors of the Gospel and of the book of Revelation can hardly have been the same person—were uncompromising in their conviction that the revelation they were recording superseded all that had gone before.

Thus, in his stately, unhurried German prose, Ferdinand Christian Baur concludes a sentence that he had begun by stating what the essence of Christianity
is not
:

Here Baur is summarizing a conviction central to his theology, that Paul’s message concerning the ultimate defeat of sin and of the law is transcended by the Johannine revelation (in the Prologue) of the glory of God, as this is exhibited in the incarnate Christ. (It is important to note that Baur’s sonorous sentence ends with a form of the verb
aufheben
, the Hegelian term for the final synthetic movement that both brings together and transcends two earlier truths [thesis and antithesis] that began in opposition.)

I leave it to others more competent than myself to decide whether Baur is right about the essence of Christianity; but I have reached the surprising conclusion (surprising to me at least) that he was right about John, and consequently that Ernst Käsemann, who learned from him, was right too. Yet Bultmann, whose emphasis on “the Word was made flesh” was what provoked Käsemann in the first place into placing the emphasis instead upon “we have seen his glory,” was no less right in his insistence that the fundamental concept (
Grundkonzeption
) of the Gospel is
revelation
. It is just that his Lutheran prejudice for the preeminence of the word made it impossible for him to realize that the revelation of the Word is equally
a revelation of glory
.

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———. 
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———.
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