The Gospel of John and Christian Origins (4 page)

The first mention of Moses in the Gospel as it has come down to us occurs in the Prologue. After the astounding statement in verse 14 that “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth; and we have beheld his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father,” we read (in the RSV): “And from his fullness have we all received, grace upon grace. For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ” (John 1:16-17). The word χάρις (“grace”) comes four times in these two verses. There must be an allusion to the Hebrew coupling חסד ואמת (
ḥesed wĕ’emet
) as found, for instance in Exod. 34:6—“a God abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness,” even though the term חסד is generally translated ἔλεος (“pity, compassion”) in the Septuagint. Raymond Brown renders it as “love”: “And of his fullness we have all had a share—love in place of love. For while the law was a gift though Moses, this enduring love came through Jesus Christ.” Here is a positive view of the role of Moses, much the same as that of Pope Sixtus and of his theological advisers responsible for the design on the walls of his great chapel. But was this how the author of the Prologue saw things? Surely not. “For John,” as C.K. Barrett rightly concludes, “Jesus is certainly not a new Moses.”
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Brown’s translation is skewed by his insertion of the noun “gift” (from the Greek verb “was given”) to define and describe the law. Judaism, unquestionably, saw the law as a gift and a grace bestowed by God on his people.
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But this sentence from the Prologue, with its stark opposition between Moses and Christ, is a denial that the gift was a grace.
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As I pointed out in the introduction, it is the clearest statement in the whole of the New Testament of the stark opposition between Christianity and Judaism. It is my task in the remainder of this book to try to explain it.

The article on Moses in the
Encyclopaedia Judaica
, after a pages-long analysis of all the biblical texts concerning Moses, concludes with a short section headed “Rabbinic View.” This is how it opens:

Yet the “utmost care” and the “strenuous attempts” would hardly have been necessary if the rabbis were not aware of tendencies in Judaism to place Moses too high. I will be looking at some of those tendencies later.

I will argue in Excursus III that if we want to use the Gospel as a historical source, with the aim of reconstructing as far as possible the birth and development of the Johannine community, we have to read it diachronically: we cannot take for granted that the Gospel was composed in the order in which it is printed. Of every passage in the Gospel the historian is entitled to ask what it can tell us about the author and his community—what stage of the history of the community it reflects. If we take this approach (excluded a priori, of course, by the self-styled literary or narrative critics), the Prologue confronts us with an immediate challenge. For we are compelled to recognize that the statement in 1:17 we have just been looking at could not possibly have been written by a believing Jew. In attributing grace and truth to Christ rather than to Moses, the author of this sentence knew—cannot but have known—that he was dissociating himself from Judaism in any of its forms.

What have we learned from this inquiry about the status of Moses in the eyes of the fourth evangelist?

1. In his prophetic role, Moses was the precursor of Jesus, who fulfilled the prediction that Moses would be followed by a prophet like himself.
   
2. Moses wrote of Jesus. In the Pentateuch, the Torah, there were stories that foreshadowed events in the life of Jesus.
   
3. It was through Moses that Israel received the law; but the legal prescriptions of the law, such as the Sabbath and circumcision, no longer had any relevance.
   
4. God’s revelation to Moses, the core and foundation of the Jewish tradition, has been superseded by the revelation of Jesus, and Jesus himself has taken the place of Moses.
   

What are the Gospels?
 This is the title of a book by Richard Burridge in which he sets out “to establish the case positively and finally for the biographical genre of the gospels to
 
become the new scholarly consensus and orthodoxy.”
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Consensus? Orthodoxy? Should the torrent of critical applause that greeted this work, liberally quoted in the second edition,
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be allowed to drown out any misgivings one might have about these grandiloquent claims?

Let us begin by tackling the question of genre: “Genre is at the heart of all attempts to communicate,” declares Burridge.
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Even if we limit ourselves to 
literary
 genres this is patent nonsense, though 
genre
is a category tossed around comfortably and casually by literary critics of all persuasions. Sometimes it may be useful. 
Tragedy
, for instance, is a term applied particularly to three groups of writings, the first composed in fifth-century Athens, the second in Elizabethan and Jacobean England, and the third at or around the court of Louis XIV of France. We have a sufficient number of well-preserved examples of all three of these groups to make comparison straightforward and illuminating. The audience of each of the three groups is well known and well documented, and in spite of some dispute about the origins of the first two groups it is easy to trace probable influences. So here is an example in which the term 
genre
 performs a useful function.

Compare this happy situation with Greek 
bioi
 and Latin 
vitae
, generally classed together as Greco-Roman biographies, written in two different languages over some nine centuries in a wide variety of styles, and with a number of different aims in view. Burridge has selected ten illustrative examples. Five of these predate the Gospels. Isocrates’ 
Evagoras
 is a funeral eulogy of Evagoras, king of Cyprus c. 411–374
bce.
Xenophon’s 
Agesilaus
 gives an account of its subject’s life (king of Sparta 398–360
bce
), followed by a systematic review of his virtues. Satyrus’s 
Euripides
, extant only in fragments, recounted various episodes of the life of the Greek tragedian and concluded with his death. Nepos’s 
Atticus 
tells the story of the political career of Cicero’s famous friend and correspondent; while Philo’s 
Moses—
exceptional among his works, which are otherwise mostly pure allegories—is an apologetic account of the career of Moses, written with a Gentile readership in mind. Three of Burridge’s other examples (Tacitus’s
Agricola
, Plutarch’s 
Cato Minor
, Suetonius’s 
De vita Caesarum
) were composed soon after the Gospels, the final two (Lucian’s 
Demonax
 and Philostratus’s 
Apollonius
) considerably later. (The last named, frequently cited in discussion of the Gospels, will receive further discussion.)

Suppose that we put the Greco-Roman 
bioi
 completely out of our mind: suppose they never existed. Would we then have to conclude that the Gospels could never have existed either, because then there would have been no preexisting genre for them to be slotted into? The form critics brought to light the great variety of forms, or 
Gattungen
, that make up the bulk of the Synoptic Gospels. Add the necessary connective links, plus a passion narrative, and you have a Gospel. Anyone who then wished to speak of a Gospel genre would have to say, as Bultmann did, that the Gospels are 
sui generis
. Burridge objects: “It is hard to imagine how anyone could invent something which is a literary novelty or unique kind of writing,”
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and elsewhere that “the gospels cannot be 
sui generis
, but must be set within the web of literary relationships of their own day”
^[5]
—comments that appear to suggest that the first person to write a Gospel must have had some already existing model in mind. Yet nowhere does he actually claim (how could he?) that the Christian evangelists were influenced by any of the 
bioi
 prior to their own, or that they knew even a single one of them.

Bultmann also saw that the Gospels cannot be classed as biographies in the modern sense of the word, because they show no interest in the 
character
 of Jesus. It is largely because the Greco-Roman 
bioi
 are equally uninterested in the character development of their subjects that the Gospels can plausibly be ranged among them. Burridge concluded of his survey that it “has provided a clear picture of the βίος genre: there is a family resemblance, yet the overall impression is of a diverse and flexible genre, able to cope with variations in any one work.”
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Yet it is worth asking just how much these vastly different works have in common. Two things: they were all written either in Greek or in Latin sometime between 500
bce
and 400
ce
, and they were all concerned with the life and career of a particular individual.

Admitting that the Gospels match these very broad criteria used for detecting Greco-Roman 
bioi
, we can hardly object to giving them the name; but we may still wish to ask whether this is all that can or should be said in reply to the question, What are the Gospels? I think not. I suggest that to call the Gospels 
Lives of Christ
 without further ado is inadequate and misleading, simply because we have not yet taken account of the primary aim of the evangelists, which was to promote faith in Jesus as Messiah and Son of God.

In 1987, five years before the publication of Burridge’s book, David Aune defended the thesis that the Gospels are indeed Lives of Christ. In the first two chapters of his book 
The New Testament in Its Literary Environment
,
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he gives a perfectly adequate defense of this thesis. Burridge was to criticize Aune for defining biography as the portrayal of  “a whole life” (thus ruling out both the Gospels and many ancient biographies), for paying insufficient attention to what he calls 
genre theory
, and for failing to “establish the case positively and finally for the biographical genre of the gospels to become the new scholarly consensus and orthodoxy.”
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Many readers like myself, however, content with Aune’s more concise exposition, will not have needed Burridge’s rather more labored treatment of the same subject to persuade them that, while the Gospels are not biographies in the modern sense of the word, it is reasonable to put them in the same category as Greek and Roman 
bioi
, not because they have borrowed from any individual Greek 
bios
 or Roman 
vita
, but because they meet the not very stringent criteria—they were written at the right time, in the right language, and with the right focus on a single individual. Reasonable, but still misleading, because the kerygmatic purpose of the Gospels is so different from that of the bulk of the writings with which they are thus aligned.

Aune objects to the concentration of many New Testament scholars on the proclamatory aims of the evangelists because this is often theologically motivated, resting on the false supposition that kerygma (proclamation) and history are mutually exclusive. Hellenistic biographers, he argues, “often wrote with rhetorical purposes and techniques,” because they were interested in providing incentives to virtue:
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It is here that, with respect, I part company with Aune, for two reasons. He provides no example of lives “written with rhetorical purposes and techniques”; and as far as I can see the only Hellenistic biographer to fit this description, and to have written, sometimes, “to provide incentives for virtue,” was Plutarch—nobody else.
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More importantly, in urging their readers to believe that Jesus is Messiah and Son of God the evangelists had in mind something quite different from “ideology in narrative form.” This is not the right way to describe the Gospels, which were certainly not written “to provide incentives to virtue.” Rather, as I put it in 
Understanding the Fourth Gospel
, “a Gospel is a narrative of the public career of Jesus, his passion and death, told in order to affirm or confirm the faith of Christian believers in the Risen Lord.”
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Three late 
bioi
 (dating from the third and fourth centuries
ce
) have a closer resemblance to the Gospels than all the others, because they deal with the lives of men who were regarded as gods or sons of gods—Philostratus’s 
Vita Apollonii 
(one of Burridge’s chosen examples), Porphyry’s 
Vita Pythagorae
, and Iamblichus’s 
Vita Pythagorica.
 Patricia Cox says of these that “they exhibit the idealizing and propagandist features of Graeco-Roman biography but with a crucial addition. They were involved in religious controversy and so 
attempted to sway not mere opinion but belief
.”
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She goes on to point out that, although the philosopher sage was a time-honored and traditional paradigm, “in later biographies by such authors as Philostratus, Porphyry . . . and Iamblichus the great wisdom and noble character of the philosopher are augmented, and sometimes overshadowed, by specific qualities and talents linking him to divinity.”
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As characteristic traits of the divine philosopher she names wisdom, insight into human nature, a real sympathy and concern for his fellow human beings, and finally a desire to communicate his wisdom. Moreover, the lives of the “sons of god” are marked first by birth stories that credit them with divine parentage, and, second, by the working of miracles, for they have the power to dominate nature by curing diseases, both mental and physical, and by manipulating natural phenomena.

Other striking resemblances between the Christian Gospels and the 
Lives
 of Philostratus and Iamblichus had already been noticed by the eminent historian of religion Jonathan Z. Smith, in an essay entitled “Good News Is No News: Aretology and Gospel.”
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Of those figures for whom the claim is made that they are sons of god, he argues, their biographies “serve as apologies against outsiders’ charges that they were merely magicians and against their admirers’ sincere misunderstanding that they were merely wonder-workers, divine men or philosophers.” All of these biographies are characterized by a double defense against the charge of magic—“against the calumny of outsiders and the sincere misunderstanding of admirers.”
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“The solution of each group or individual so charged,” he continues, “was the same: to insist on an inward meaning of the suspect activities. The allegedly magical action, properly understood, is a sign. There is both a transparent and a hidden meaning, a literal and a deeper understanding required. At the surface level the biography appears to be an explicit story of a magician or a 
Wundermensch
: at the depth level it is the enigmatic self-disclosure of a son of god.” The various literary devices employed in all these stories (including riddle, aporia, joke, and parable) “depend upon a multivalent expression which is interpreted by admirers and detractors as having univocal meaning and thus invites misunderstanding. The function of the narrative is to play between various levels of understanding and misunderstanding, inviting the reader to assume that both he and the author truly do understand and then cutting the ground out from under this confidence.”
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“What an Apollonius, a Pythagoras, a Jesus,” concludes Smith, “reveals in the narratives concerning them, is their own enigmatic nature, their 
sui generis
 character. What was said by one of these sons of god might have been said by the others: ‘You will seek me and you will not find me, where I am you cannot come’ (Jn 7:34)—a saying which was misunderstood by opponent and disciple alike.”
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Many of the points made in this rich and suggestive essay are, I suspect, intentionally provocative. By and large, New Testament scholars have either deliberately ignored it or simply failed to notice it.
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If they were to pay it the attention it deserves, they would no doubt cavil at not a few of Smith’s comparisons. But he and Cox discuss in some depth the very few Roman 
vitae
 that have a real resemblance to the Gospels, and in doing so show how dim a light the simple classification of the Gospels as ancient 
bioi
 sheds on their real nature.

In an appendix to the second edition of his work (2004), Burridge shifts his attention to the christological aspect of the Gospels, something to which he had already drawn attention in an article written for a collection edited by Richard Bauckham: “The historical, literary, and biographical methods [of Gospel scholarship] combine to show us,” he states, “that the Gospels are nothing less than Christology in narrative form, the story of Jesus.” But if “Christology in narrative form” (only a hair’s breadth away from Aune’s “theology in narrative form”) is an essential element in the definition of the Gospel genre, would not this imply that the Gospels are indeed 
sui generis
? Burridge goes on immediately (in the very next sentence, opening a new paragraph): “The implication of this biographical hypothesis is that the Gospels are about a person, not about theological ideas.”
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But what is Christology if not a branch of theology—a reasoned organization of theological ideas? The purpose of the evangelists, as their name suggests, is not to do theology but to proclaim the good news. (And who thinks of theology as good news?) The Gospels are not theology (Aune, with some hesitation) nor are they Christology (Burridge). And to call them Greco-Roman 
bioi
 without further qualification is, as I have argued, if not wrong, insufficient and misleading.